Venice played host to Oasis stars Noel and Liam Gallagher on the red carpet, while Europe achieved a major space breakthrough as Isar Aerospace launched its unmanned Spectrum rocket into orbit from the Andøya Spaceport, highlighting a busy international weekend of culture, entertainment, and technology.
Oasis Shines on the Venice Red Carpet
Film festival crowds in Italy caught a glimpse of Britpop history this weekend as Noel Gallagher and Liam Gallagher attended the red carpet event for the screening of Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger
at the Venice film festival, according to the Guardian. Directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, the documentary was captured during the band’s high-profile 2025 reunion tour.
The appearance brings cinematic focus back to the legendary group’s return to the stage. While the Gallagher brothers turned heads in Venice, pop culture celebrations echoed elsewhere in Europe; in Montreux, Switzerland, fans gathered to honor what would have been the 80th birthday of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, leaving flowers, messages, and balloons around a resort town statue where the late singer lived from the late 1980s until shortly before his death in 1991.
Isar Aerospace Scores a European Space Milestone
Moving far beyond the red carpets of Italy, European technological ambitions reached a significant milestone in Norway. The German startup Isar Aerospace successfully launched its unmanned Spectrum rocket into orbit, marking a crucial step for the continent’s space program.
Saturday’s launch from the Andøya Spaceport represents a major breakthrough for Europe as the region attempts to send satellites into space independently, thereby reducing its reliance on the United States amid a shifting global order, according to reporting from the Guardian.
Pop Culture Conventions and Global Cultural Snapshots
Exhibition halls and convention centers also drew massive crowds over the weekend. In London, the Big London Tattoo show returned for its fifth year at the ExCel centre, bringing together more than 500 international tattoo artists for competitions and a fire show, as documented by Getty Images photography. Across the Atlantic in San Diego, the first day of Anime San Diego 2026 featured cosplayers at the city’s convention centre, including a fan dressed as Garrett “The Garbageman” Garrison—the larger-than-life character played by Jason Momoa in last year’s A Minecraft Movie
.
Farther afield, cultural and seasonal traditions played out across diverse landscapes. In South Africa, Zulu women gathered outside the royal palace in the south-east KwaZulu-Natal province for the annual uMkhosi woMhlanga ceremony. Meanwhile, agricultural communities in China balanced modern spectacle with heavy labor, as tourists in Fujin City rode sightseeing vehicles past elaborate rice field paintings at the 10,000-Mu Rice Park, while combine harvesters unloaded corn kernels into trucks in the Xinjiang region’s Hutubi area to aid the autumn harvest.
