CUBA TO LIFT TELEVISION EMBARGO

Cuba’s state-run television broadcaster will launch a 24-hour channel with mostly foreign content to provide Cuban audiences with more variety, the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT) announced Wednesday. The announcement was made at a conference of the Cuban writers and artists guild, where intellectuals have criticized the lack of television programming in the socialist state.

The addition of foreign content on television is one of several changes made by new Cuban President Raul Castro, who succeeded his ailing brother, Fidel Castro, in February. Since becoming Cuba’s first new leader in almost half a century, Raul Castro’s government has lifted many of what he has called “excessive prohibitions,” allowing Cubans to buy cellular phones, DVD players, and computers, and stay in tourist hotels once reserved strictly for foreigners.

Many Cubans watch satellite television, such as DIRECTV, on illegal dishes that allow them to see Spanish-language channels in Miami.

Staff Reporter of the Sun

LINCOLN LETTER ADDRESSING SLAVERY SELLS AT SOTHEBY’S

Abraham Lincoln’s heartfelt reply to a group of youngsters who asked him to free America’s “little slave children” has sold for $3.4 million.

Sotheby’s auction house said yesterday that the 1864 letter set a record for a Lincoln manuscript, as well as for any presidential and American manuscript.

It was purchased by an American private collector bidding over the telephone.

Lincoln’s hand-penned reply is contained in a letter to a woman who mailed the children’s petition from Concord, Mass.

In it, Lincoln says: “Please tell these little people I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy.”

Associated Press

UBS STANDS BEHIND LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

A day after posting a first-quarter loss of 12 billion Swiss francs ($11.9 billion), UBS AG, Europe’s biggest bank by assets, defended its sponsorship of the London Symphony Orchestra, which runs until 2010.

“To pull out at a time like this would be terribly easy, but I would say that if we did that, our reputation would be shot,” said Richard Hardie, non-executive vice chairman of UBS Ltd., and the bank’s sponsorship adviser in London, at a joint presentation with the LSO Wednesday.

Given “all the claims that we’ve been making and all the aspirational statements,” Mr. Hardie said, cutting off the LSO “would be madness to even contemplate.” He said UBS has stopped backing the Verbier Festival Orchestra in Switzerland, and will end sponsorship of the Festival itself in 2010. Earlier this week, UBS made the biggest writedowns from the collapse of the American subprime mortgage market, and said chairman Marcel Ospel is resigning.

UBS backs nearly two dozen orchestras and festivals across Europe and America, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In the visual arts, it supports Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach; the Montreux Jazz Festival, and Tate Modern’s permanent collection, which is regularly rehung.

Bloomberg News

NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK REUNITE FOR ALBUM, TOUR

They may be pushing 40, but the New Kids are returning to the block.

The boy band New Kids on the Block, which sold 70 million albums in the 1980s and early ’90s, has reunited and plans to release a new album and go on tour. The reunion comes 20 years after the release of the group’s multiplatinum album, “Hanging Tough.”

“The fan response to this has been incredible,” band member Donnie Wahlberg told the Boston Herald. Mr. Wahlberg said he was persuaded to get back together with his former bandmates — Joey McIntyre, brothers Jordan and Jonathan Knight, and Danny Wood — when they decided to record new music. Mr. Wahlberg said he wrote 80% of the new material with Messrs. McIntyre and Jordan Knight.

“I had no interest going out on a nostalgia tour and singing the same material,” said Mr. Wahlberg, 38. But he added: “We absolutely will do the old songs for sure.”

At the height of their popularity, New Kids sold out world tours, marketed millions of dollars in merchandise, and spawned a Saturday morning cartoon. The group disbanded in 1994. Mr. Wahlberg has acted on television and in movies, while Jordan Knight, Mr. McIntyre, and Mr. Wood released solo albums. Jonathan Knight became a real estate developer.

Associated Press