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France’s National Front leader Marine Le Pen has said yes to an offer from US pop icon Madonna to “sit down and have a drink”. The pair famously fell out when one of Madonna’s videos featured an image of Le Pen complete with a swastika on her forehead

Madonna has always said you should “Express Yourself” and that’s exactly what the 56-year-old singer has been doing while in France this week.

She first hit the French newspapers last week after comparing France and Europe to Nazi Germany – leaving some to question her authority on the matter considering she was born in the US in 1958.

On Monday, she made headlines in France again after inviting the leader of the National Front for a meeting over a ‘demi’ bière or two.

“I think I would like to sit down and have a drink with Marine Le Pen,” Madonna said on the Grand Journal TV programme. “I want to understand where she’s coming from.”

It certainly sounded like a prayer for the Material Girl – and that prayer was answered on Tuesday afternoon.

After initially telling RTL radio that she wouldn’t be meeting the diva, Le Pen did an about turn later in the day.

“I accept Madonna’s invitation with pleasure,” she told the AFP news agency.

“I appreciate people who make overtures in good faith.”

The relationship between the two women has a rocky foundation.

In 2012, the American kicked off her world tour with a show featuring a video montage of Le Pen with a swastika on her forehead. The footage was followed by another photomontage of Hitler and Le Pen.

The French political party threatened legal action over what they called an “odious comparison”, and Madonna cut the montage from her show.

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The Local

Madonna parties the night away at the Russian night club Raspoutine with DJ Diplo in the Champs Elysees area in Paris, France on March 2, 2015. (GC Images/Vintage Images UK/Splash News/FameFlynet)

We apologize for the lack of updates yesterday and this morning. Some of us had an unexpected last minute trip to Le Grand Journal in Paris, and an even more unexpected ending to the day: a meet & greet with M and our photo taken with her.

Full story and of course the picture coming soon!

The first pictures of the meet & greet at Le Grand Journal yesterday. This is the presentor and the team pictured with M

Madonna & Me. #rebelheart @ Milano. Ora. Applausi.

— Luca Dondoni (@lucadondoni) 1 maart 2015

From the Sunday edition (today)

When Madonna sings on the title track of her latest album, Rebel Heart (***1/2 out of four; out March 10), that she has “outgrown my past and I’ve shed my skin,” she is both protesting too much and engaging in understatement.

Our most durable pop star has indeed reinvented elements of her look and sound repeatedly over the past 30 years, but Madonna has retained the same essence: that of a woman who champions and demands love, in every sense of that loaded word. No single artist has been more crucial in shaping our modern view of celebrities as people who need people — and attention.

As that view has metastasized into an expectation that artists share ever more of their personal and creative lives, fame’s double-edged sword has grown a bit sharper. Madonna felt it last December, when two batches of early recordings from the Heartsessions — essentially, an album in progress — were leaked online. Her immediate response was to quickly polish remixes of the first bunch, and make them available to those who pre-ordered the album.

Rebel Heart includes those six songs and 13 more, and they present Madonna at her most determined and spiritually unplugged. The sound — crafted with such hip-hop, pop and EDM names as Kanye West, Toby Gad, Avicii and Diplo — is not so much raw as purposefully lean and piercingly direct, as are the lyrics, which mine emotions from righteous anger and pain to resolute joy.

Ghosttown mixes a disarmingly earnest sweetness with a stark, chilly arrangement, while on Heartbreak City, Madonna lashes out at a former lover over a shuffling hip-hop groove. The defiant exuberance of first single Living For Love gives way to the deceptively gentle, powerfully infectious Body Shop, with its tinkering rhythms and sly innuendo.

There are more graphic references to sex, and two song titles include a mild an expletive. A disciple, Nicki Minaj, pops up on the frisky B—ch I’m Madonna, in which the titular star chants, “You’re gonna love this. … You can’t touch this.” Madonna could be parodying followers — some of whom have absorbed her through Minaj and other younger stars — who have been inspired by her confidence and marketing savvy but are often less intuitive about things like desire and pain, be it their own or others’.

Madonna asserts both her enduring indomitability and her vulnerability, even getting self-referential a few times. On Veni Vidi Vici, she charts the past via song titles — “I saw a Ray of Light/Music saved my life” — then passes the mic to Nas, who recalls his own rise, rather more flamboyantly.

Nas raps playfully at the end, “Madonna on the track/Nas in the back.” But each is a survivor, and Rebel Heart celebrates that increasingly rare bird with a bittersweet vengeance.

Download: HeartBreak City, Body Shop, Veni Vidi Vici, Ghosttown.

USA TODAY

Madonna appears in a very special episode of The Jonathan Ross Show, which will air in mid-March, talking for the first time about her fall at the recent Brit Awards and her thoughts on her children taking drugs. The Jonathan Ross Show Madonna Special will broadcast on ITV on Saturday March 14. The next episode (Saturday February 28) features Sigourney Weaver, Thierry Henry, Martin Clunes, Kanye West and Tracey Emin, airing at 9.40pm on ITV1. Dave Hogan/Hotsauce/REX Photos

Ari Lederman faces five years in prison for computer trespassing, prohibited secret monitoring, copyright infringement and obstructing investigation

According to court documents, Lederman was able to steal the demo versions of Madonna’s Rebel Heart tracks by infiltrating the private cloud accounts of Madonna associates Sara Zambreno, engineer Angie Teo and musical director Kevin Antunes as well as an e-mail account belonging to Madonna’s manager Guy Oseary. Lederman had allegedly compromised Zambreno’s cloud going back to 2012, with court documents accusing the hacker of also stealing MDMA‘s “Give Me All Your Luvin’.” That song leaked out after Lederman sold the file to an unspecified person.

Lederman’s hack wasn’t an especially profitable endeavor, as court documents show that he was only compensated from “tens of dollars to a thousand dollars” for what he grabbed off the cloud accounts, which he then sold to two accomplices. Lederman’s obstruction of the investigation charge comes after he advised an accomplice to erase all of their correspondence after Lederman became suspicious that authorities were on his trail. If found guilty of all counts, Lederman faces up to five years in prison.

“I am profoundly grateful to the FBI, the Israeli Police investigators and anyone else who helped lead to the arrest of this hacker,” Madonna said in a Facebook message at the time of Lederman’s arrest. “I deeply appreciate my fans who have provided us with pertinent information and continue to do so regarding leaks of my music. Like any citizen, I have the right to privacy. This invasion into my life – creatively, professionally, and personally remains a deeply devastating and hurtful experience, as it must be for all artists who are victims of this type of crime.”

Read more: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/madonna-rebel-heart-hacker-indicted-on-four-counts-20150227#ixzz3T2DPTpNV
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