Steps star Ian ‘H' Watkins forced to change name of latest project after he's SUED by festival giant Coachella
Read on to find out the hilarious new name for the star's festival in Wales
STEPS TOO FAR Steps star Ian 'H' Watkins forced to change name of latest project after he's SUED by festival giant Coachella
FORMER Steps star Ian 'H' Watkins was forced to change the name of his festival Cowchella — because it was too similar to Coachella.
Watkins organised a small event including a Harry Styles tribute act and actress Claire Sweeney.
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Cowchella has now been renamed Moo-La-La Festival after the American festival complained
Credit: WNS
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The former Steps star was stunned to get a complaint from Coachella, the famous festival in California with 250,000 fans
But he was stunned to get a complaint about the name from Coachella, the famous festival in California with 250,000 fans.
Watkins' show at his home town of Cowbridge in the Vale of Glamorgan is now called the Moo-La-La Festival.
The Welshman, 49, said: 'I'm taking it as a massive compliment that they feel that our little festival is a little bit of a threat to their ginormous, juggernaut of a machine.
'It's a little bit mindblowing. What we're doing is very, very different to what they do.
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'We don't have Beyonce performing.
"We have a Steps tribute act and also they don't have myself, Claire Sweeney and Owain Wyn Evans hosting, which in my book is much better than Beyonce.'
He added: 'We've spent a lot of money on marketing and flyers and posters and banners that are all visible around the town.
'So yes, those will have to go in the bin but let's just do that, rather than have any more people knocking on our door.'
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Former Steps star Ian 'H' Watkins was forced to change the name of his festival Cowchella — because it was too similar to the huge US event
Credit: Shutterstock Editorial
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New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
How Donald Trump plunged America into a blind war
Photo by Daniel Torok/The White House via Getty Images One minute after midnight on 21 June, a small group of US B-2 Spirit bombers took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri heading west across the Pacific. They were picked up shortly afterwards by flight tracking accounts on social media, prompting breaking news alerts that multiple American bombers capable of carrying the type of heavy ordinance that would be needed to destroy Iran's nuclear sites were airborne as journalists frantically traced their trajectory. In fact, this was a decoy. The real strike group was flying east across the Atlantic, with seven B-2 bombers joined by US fighter jets as they reached the Middle East, which escorted them into Iranian airspace. In the early hours of 22 June local time, they dropped a total of 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs), 30,000-pound guided bombs known as 'bunker busters', on Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordo and Natanz. A US Navy submarine fired more than two dozen Tomahawk missiles at a third site in Isfahan as part of what the Pentagon called 'Operation Midnight Hammer'. By now, most people will have seen Donald Trump's address to the nation in the hours that followed, flanked by his distinctly uncomfortable-looking vice-president JD Vance along with secretary-of-state-turned-national-security-adviser Marco Rubio and defence secretary Pete Hegseth. Trump, predictably, pronounced the whole operation a 'spectacular military success', declaring that Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities had been 'completely and totally obliterated', which he could not possibly have known at the time and has yet to be confirmed. 'Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,' Trump intoned. 'If they do not, future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier.' Appearing to veer from his script towards the end, he added, 'I want to just say, we love you, God.' In the best-case scenario for those who support these strikes, Trump has acted decisively, ordering the use of military force where successive previous presidents had equivocated, and setting back the Iranian nuclear programme for years, perhaps even for good. He has finally neutered a regime that has long been defined by its rallying cry, 'Death to America', and delivered Israel from the existential threat that would have been posed by a nuclear-armed Iran, which one former Iranian president is said to have described as a 'one-bomb country'. According to this rendering, Trump has taken advantage of a moment of profound weakness for Tehran, whose most notorious proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, have been eviscerated by the Israeli military campaign over the last 18 months, and whose most senior military commanders and nuclear scientists have been assassinated. 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Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Ayatollah Khamenei, who is 86 and said to be in faltering health, is reportedly sheltering in a bunker, according to the New York Times, avoiding electronic devices for fear of revealing his location and communicating only through a trusted aide, where he has listed several clerics who could replace him if he is killed, along with substitutes for the military chain of command. We do not yet know how Khamenei will respond to these attacks and whether he will assess – as many commentators have insisted – that he must now retaliate in some meaningful form if he hopes to restore Iran's deterrence and remain in power. We do not know whether Tehran can be induced to resume negotiations on a nuclear deal with Washington, as many European leaders have now urged. We do know, however, that Iran had previously negotiated a nuclear deal – known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – with the United States, the UK, France, China, Russia, and the EU in 2015, which Trump abandoned during his first term in 2018. It is not clear that any Iranian government would entrust its future to a new deal that could be similarly torn up by the next US administration. (Trump has also launched trade wars against Canada, Mexico and China since returning to power despite signing much-hyped trade deals with them during his previous term.) Meanwhile, the example of the Kim dynasty in North Korea, which has pursued nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them despite the significant costs, and is not currently being bombed by the US, might well suggest to the Iranian regime that the surer course for survival would have been to race for a bomb while it still could, and, if it has the opportunity, to try again. We also know that despite the repeated messaging via US backchannels in the hours after the strike that this was a 'one-and-done' operation – a limited campaign to target the nuclear facilities and nothing more, certainly not the prelude to regime change – Trump and Netanyahu have delivered starkly contradictory signals. Netanyahu openly urged the Iranian people to 'stand up' against the regime after launching the Israeli military campaign on 13 June. Trump has demanded 'UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER' from Iran on social media and threatened to kill Khamenei. 'It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change???' Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on the evening of 22 June. 'MIGA!!!' Given these statements, it is not hard to see why the Iranian government might conclude that the US and Israel have, in fact, launched a war that aims to overthrow them, and, therefore, that this is not merely a negotiating ploy that could yet end in a new nuclear deal, but an existential fight that justifies any means. Then there are the unknown unknowns. We do not know, for instance, whether there could be other Iranian nuclear facilities that had not yet been identified, and what steps the regime might have taken to ensure the survival of key personnel, equipment and material. We do not know how secure the regime's grip on power is and whether Khamenei could yet be sidelined, or simply replaced, by hardliners from within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or former high-ranking officials. 'Tehran is now full of such plots,' one anonymous source, who claimed to be part of a plan to replace the ageing supreme leader, told The Atlantic after the strikes. 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With the Russian military tied down in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is unlikely to offer much in the way of meaningful help in the short term, but he will certainly capitalise on what appears to be a flagrant breach of international law and what he will present as yet more evidence of American hypocrisy. (Putin, too, claims to have attacked Ukraine in part to stop the country developing nuclear weapons and threatening Russia's national security.) Moscow also stands to benefit from a rise in the price of oil if Iran threatens the Strait of Hormuz or targets other oil-producing facilities in the region. Beijing has strongly condemned the US attack, which the foreign ministry said, 'seriously violate the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and international law'. China is Iran's largest trading partner, which supplied around 15 percent of the oil the country imported last year, and will not welcome the prospect of a massive spike in oil prices if the conflict escalates at a time when the Chinese economy is already slowing. But the prospect of the US getting drawn into another interminable war in the Middle East and deferring, yet again, the mythical 'pivot to Asia', with its focus on deterring a Chinese assault on Taiwan, offers other potential benefits to Beijing. The reverberations of Trump's gamble will be felt far beyond the borders of Iran. Flanked by Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth as he delivered his speech in the hours after the attack, the impression was less a show of unity than a president who is keenly aware of the domestic political risk this involves – and the vehement opposition already emanating from parts of his Maga base – and determined to show that his top lieutenants were all on board. Perhaps that was why Vance in particular, who has built his political brand on his opposition to US military intervention overseas, looked so perturbed. Trump has plunged the US into a war with Iran, with no apparent strategy, and objectives that appear to be evolving, in real time, on social media. Maybe the best-case scenario will yet transpire, and the Middle East will emerge from this conflict more stable and prosperous, but recent history cautions against too much optimism. [See also: The British left will not follow Trump into war] Related
The Herald Scotland
an hour ago
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It's not clear what exact damage was done in Iran. The White House says U.S. bombers decimated three uranium enrichment facilities. What comes next is also far from certain: additional U.S. strikes, Iran's retaliation, a resumption of diplomacy, even? Is this the start of the collapse of Iran's clerical regime? Is it a historical moment akin to the breakup of the Soviet Union? What's indisputable is that one pull factor for the U.S. is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's long, complicated relationship with recent American presidents. The U.S. bombing of Iran is also the culmination of a process that traces at least as far back to the 1990s when Netanyahu, then a young lawmaker, predicted the Islamic Republic, Israel's sworn enemy, would one day either acquire, or be on the cusp of acquiring, a nuclear weapon and Israel would be forced to act - ideally with U.S. help. "Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb," Netanyahu said in 1992. His prediction was later repeated in his 1995 book, "Fighting Terrorism." Netanyahu's constant refrain: bomb Iran Netanyahu is the longest-serving Israeli prime minister in the Jewish state's history. He's occupied the role on and off for more than 17 years. In every one of those years he's sought to convince American presidents to bomb Iran's nuclear program, which Tehran insists is for civilian energy purposes only. Netanyahu has appeared at the United Nations with elaborate maps and cartoon-style drawings of bombs. He worked hard to scupper the 2015 nuclear accord between Iran and world powers that Trump exited because he said Iranian officials could not be trusted. In 2002, Netanyahu told a U.S. congressional committee that both Iraq and Iran would soon have a nuclear bomb. A year later the U.S. invaded Iraq. 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He has also clashed with former Presidents Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. Netanyahu has even annoyed Trump, although their relationship trends toward mutual lavish praise. But no American president - until now - has gone along with Netanyahu's war plans for Iran, fearing the U.S. could be dragged into a wider Middle East war. The experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan still haunt U.S. presidents. "The president more than anybody is worried about protracted military conflicts and that is not what we are getting ourselves involved in," U.S. Vice President JD Vance said on ABC's "This Week" program on June 22. Vance said the Trump administration is also not trying to force regime change in Iran. Reading Trump's Iran tea leaves Trump may also not be as risk averse to military actions as is sometimes portrayed, including by himself. In his first term, he ordered a missile attack in Syria to punish then-Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons; a raid to kill ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; and a drone attack that killed Qasem Soleimani, a senior Iranian military commander much beloved in Iran whose death led to Iranian reprisals on U.S. bases in Iraq. Also in the background: The IAEA, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, and former U.S. officials such as Dan Shapiro, U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration, say Iran's nuclear capabilities have advanced since Trump exited the nuclear deal. "Iran cannot be left with an enrichment capability, able to produce a nuclear weapon at a time of its choosing," Shapiro wrote in a recent blog post. Trump has made various comments for years that reflect that sentiment. 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"Congratulations, President Trump, your bold decision to target Iran's nuclear facilities with the awesome and righteous might of the United States will change history," Netanyahu said in a statement as he addressed the world on June 22 to update them on the war's latest development. He spoke in English, not Hebrew. In his own address, to the American people, Trump said, "I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before, and we've gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel." Not mentioned: U.S. intelligence agencies assessed earlier this year that they did not think Iran was close to building a nuclear bomb. Contributing: Francesca Chambers, Tom Vanden Brook
The Herald Scotland
an hour ago
- The Herald Scotland
Steve Bannon concerned Trump's 'open ended' position on striking Iran
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