From Billie Eilish to Cardi B: Hassan Hajjaj on the stars who stepped into his colourful world

France24 - Oct 1, 2026

Moroccan-British artist and photographer Hassan Hajjaj has photographed some of the biggest names in music and pop culture – from Madonna, Billie Eilish and Alicia Keys to Cardi B and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Now, 40 of his vibrant "Rock Stars" are on show at Paris's Philharmonie. Hajjaj tells us how he creates his instantly recognisable portraits, blends Moroccan heritage with London street culture – and what happens when a global superstar steps in front of his camera.

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Pilot stabs fellow pilot on flight to Israel before passengers intervene to stop attack
Oct 1, 2026
Pilot stabs fellow pilot on flight to Israel before passengers intervene to stop attack

TEL AVIV, Israel — A copilot stabbed a captain in an apparent attempt to crash a jetliner as it was flying 174 people to Israel on Wednesday. But passengers burst into the cockpit and wrestled with the attacker even as the plane descended sharply, witnesses and Israel’s government said. The plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. The shaken passengers from the FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv landed Wednesday evening in Israel on another flight, as onlookers cheered. Israel's emergency services said they treated three passengers with minor injuries. It was not clear what motivated the attack, which led Israel to scramble warplanes amid concerns about a possible hijacking . In a CNN interview aired on Wednesday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attacker was an Omani national and was being interrogated in Saudi Arabia, where he was arrested. Aviation experts were surprised the plane did not crash after a descent so extreme that most of the rudder was ripped off the tail. “We’re going to die,” passenger Naama Bershadski recalled thinking as

Second judge blocks Trump's $100,000 fee for new H-1B worker visas
Oct 1, 2026
Second judge blocks Trump's $100,000 fee for new H-1B worker visas

A second federal judge on Wednesday blocked an unprecedented $100,000 fee that US President Donald Trump has imposed on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers. US District Judge Haywood Gilliam in Oakland, California, ruled that US Citizenship and Immigration Services and the State Department failed to follow necessary rule-making processes before implementing Trump's fee. Gilliam, appointed by then-President Barack Obama, a Democrat, granted a request by a coalition of unions, employers and nonprofits to block the agencies from implementing Trump's fee pending the outcome of a lawsuit they filed in October. The fee was temporarily blocked in June by a federal judge in Boston, ruling in a separate case brought by 20 states. A Boston-based appeals court in July declined to pause that decision. The Department of Homeland Security in August moved to adopt a permanent fee of about $103,000 that, when finalized, will likely be challenged in court. But that will involve different legal issues than lawsuits over the fee set by Trump. These suits have focused on the president's power

Google announces Gemini 4 flagship AI model after months of delays
Oct 1, 2026
Google announces Gemini 4 flagship AI model after months of delays

SAN FRANCISCO — Alphabet's Google on Wednesday announced a new top-tier artificial intelligence model to anchor its Gemini 4 generation of models in a fresh bid to catch up to rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the AI race. The new model, "Argon", is larger in size than Google's previous line of advanced "Pro" models, a company spokesperson said. "It's our most performant model yet built for complex workloads, and we see it comparable to frontier models like (OpenAI's) Astra and (Anthropic's) Opus on key coding and cyber benchmarks," the spokesperson said. Google said it was providing the model to select cybersecurity partners and was participating in the Trump administration's voluntary process for pre-release model access. It did not provide a timeline for the model's public release. The model posted better marks than Astra and Opus in terms of self-reported performance on several industry benchmarks, per a company press release. Still, Argon remained behind on certain other metrics, including two of the four coding-related benchmarks Google included in the release. Google no longer plans

Nearly 1,000 children were abused at three Massachusetts dioceses, state probe finds
Oct 1, 2026
Nearly 1,000 children were abused at three Massachusetts dioceses, state probe finds

BOSTON — More than 270 Catholic clerics sexually abused nearly 1,000 children across three Massachusetts dioceses over decades, according to an investigative report the state's attorney general released on Wednesday. The report provided what Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell called the first full public accounting of the abuse and institutional failures that allowed it to proliferate for more than half a century at the Catholic dioceses of Fall River, Springfield and Worcester. Most of the abuse detailed in the report occurred before 2002, the year the clergy sex abuse scandal burst onto the international stage due to a Pulitzer Prize-winning report by the Boston Globe on how officials at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston routinely covered up sex abuse by priests. The state attorney general's investigation documented years of similar issues at the three dioceses in other parts of Massachusetts, which Campbell said knew children were being abused by priests and other clerics. "Too often they protected the reputation of the church rather than protecting children,"

N. Korea's Kim vows to bring bilateral ties to 'new strategic level' in letter to Xi
Oct 1, 2026
N. Korea's Kim vows to bring bilateral ties to 'new strategic level' in letter to Xi

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Thursday reaffirms his commitment to lifting bilateral relations with China to a "new strategic level" in a letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping marking China's National Day, Pyongyang's state media reported. In the letter for the 77th anniversary of the country's founding, Kim extended "the warmest congratulations and best wishes" to Xi and the Chinese people, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said. Kim noted the two countries marked the 65th anniversary of their friendship treaty this year and are promoting exchanges "in all fields." "The history of the DPRK-China friendship, which was forged at the cost of blood and has been carried forward with genuine comradely friendship, can never be shaken no matter how the international situation may change," he wrote. DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the North's official name. It is his country's "steadfast will" to "steadily develop the traditional relations of unity and cooperation" with China, he added. He also referred to his two recent summits with Xi. "I had meaningful meetin

Tennessee governor halts executions after Christa Gail Pike survives lethal injection attempt
Oct 1, 2026
Tennessee governor halts executions after Christa Gail Pike survives lethal injection attempt

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death Wednesday for a 1995 murder after administering two doses of a lethal drug. A death penalty expert said it was an unprecedented failure, and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee halted the one remaining execution for the rest of the year. Pike, 50, was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said. She was being treated at a hospital, but they said they hadn’t been told about her condition. She had been scheduled for execution at 10 a.m. Wednesday for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. An appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start and hours later the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that stay. Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday. Gov. Bill Lee said in a statement that he has ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and t

Iran's Revolutionary Guards kill six 'terrorists' in restive region, IRNA news agency reports
Oct 1, 2026
Iran's Revolutionary Guards kill six 'terrorists' in restive region, IRNA news agency reports

Iran's Revolutionary Guards killed six members of a "terrorist" group on Thursday, the IRNA state news agency reported, in a region often hit by clashes between the security forces and armed groups, including Sunni militants and separatists. The killings occurred in Zahedan, capital of the impoverished Sistan-Baluchistan province in southeastern Iran, which borders Pakistan and Afghanistan and is a major drug trafficking route. The IRNA report said security forces had discovered and confiscated explosive packages. It did not identify the six people killed and gave no further information on the incident. Tehran accuses some armed groups of ties to foreign powers and involvement in cross-border smuggling. Human rights group Haalvsh, which monitors Sistan-Baluchistan, said fighting between military and security forces and armed individuals had started on Thursday morning. Separately, the sound of an explosion was heard on Wednesday in Zahedan without causing any damage, Fars news agency reported, citing the city's administrative office. The reports came as Tehran weighs a U.S. response to its

Netanyahu says Flydubai co-pilot underwent Islamist radical indoctrination
Oct 1, 2026
Netanyahu says Flydubai co-pilot underwent Islamist radical indoctrination

WASHINGTON — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that the co-pilot who tried to crash a passenger jet on its way to Israel had undergone Islamist radicalization. "We know that he underwent Islamist radical indoctrination," Netanyahu said in an interview with Fox News. No motive has been determined for Wednesday's harrowing near-disaster on Wednesday's Flydubai flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv, when passengers were able to subdue the attacker and a reserve crew aboard landed the plane in Saudi Arabia. Netanyahu told "Fox & Friends" he would be able to say within a matter of days whether the flydubai co-pilot had connections to Iran. "I think it's too early to say whether he had any connections with Iran or with any anyone else," he said. Netanyahu said it was clear that the co-pilot was suicidal. "If you couple that with the what I just told you about the Islamist tendencies, that radicalization that are found in his background, I think that's — that'll give us the a pretty good clue," he said. "But again, I don't make final conclusions yet. But that's the ind

Breturn? Wary EU waits for actions, not words from UK
Oct 1, 2026
Breturn? Wary EU waits for actions, not words from UK

BRUSSELS — British Prime Minister Andy Burnham may have shifted the dial by floating a return for his country to the European Union. But after a rollercoaster decade since the Brexit vote, the U.K. rejoining is only a distant prospect and Brussels is waiting first to see what London wants next. "It's positive. It improves the tone," one EU official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP. "But we're not going to change our approach because there's nice music in the background." Burnham — who took power in July — this week broke a taboo for a British premier by opening the door to the U.K.'s possible return to the fold. Smashing through red lines set by his cautious predecessor Keir Starmer, the former mayor of Manchester said potential options might include staying as is, joining the EU's customs union or single market, or eventually going "all the way." The positive vibes from the new UK leader drew a warm response from several of his European counterparts. "Welcome back," quipped French President Emmanuel Macron in English. "If the British want to come back and if the prime min

Behind the scenes of Céline Dion's high-tech gig - Tech 24
Oct 1, 2026
Behind the scenes of Céline Dion's high-tech gig - Tech 24

#CélineDion is making her great comeback with a 16-day residency in #France after years of illness. To keep her stage quiet and her voice crisp, her team is using both AI and high-tech sound systems. #FRANCE24's Peter O'Brien went behind the scenes at the invitation of French audio company L-Acoustics ☝️

Flydubai incident: Captain Smit Machchhar stabbed, Israel-bound flight diverted to Saudi Arabia—what happened? Timeline
Oct 1, 2026
Flydubai incident: Captain Smit Machchhar stabbed, Israel-bound flight diverted to Saudi Arabia—what happened? Timeline

An Omani co-pilot allegedly stabbed the captain and attempted to crash a Flydubai flight, forcing an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. Investigations are ongoing. Captain Smit Machchhar, wounded, managed to assist in restraining the attacker.

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