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On the money

Charity’s no act for Michael Sheen

Michael Sheen at a press event in 2019. Frederick M Brown/Getty Images

🎭 💰 🧙🏼‍♂️ Michael Sheen has turned himself into a “not-for-profit actor”, he tells The Big Issue. The 52-year-old got the idea while helping to organise the Homeless World Cup in Cardiff in 2019, when funding for the £2m event fell through at the last minute. He put everything he had into keeping it going, “all my money” – he sold two houses, one in the UK and one in the US, and moved back to his native Wales. “It was incredibly scary and stressful”, he says, “and I’ll be paying for it for a long time.” But there was something “liberating” as well – “I realised I could do this kind of thing, and if I can keep earning money it’s not going to ruin me.”

The ultimate tomb raider

Michael Steinhardt and his wife, Judy, in 2016. Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images

🧐 🗿 👮🏻 US hedge-fund billionaire Michael Steinhardt has been forced to surrender 180 looted and illegally smuggled relics worth $70m and handed a first-of-its-kind lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities. The 81-year-old displayed a “rapacious appetite for plundered artefacts”, said New York district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr, who found “compelling evidence” that Steinhardt’s collection had been “stolen” from 11 countries. What’s more, 171 of the 180 items had been trafficked illegally. One treasure was the “Stag’s Head Rhyton”, a ceremonial drinking vessel shaped like a stag’s head that dates to 400BC. Valued at $3.5m, it mysteriously appeared in Steinhardt’s collection following looting in Milas, Turkey.

Pay while u chat

🤳🏻 💸 📲 WhatsApp is now allowing users to send and receive money within chats using a cryptocurrency called Pax, which is pegged to the dollar. According to Novi, the digital wallet wing of WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, sending a payment is just like sending an attachment such as a photo or gif. The pilot scheme, available to users in the US, has its roots in Libra, Facebook’s much-delayed cryptocurrency project.