Aurelia Butler

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    Travis Scott Is Accused of Assaulting a Security Guard in Paris

    The rapper, who was in France for the Olympics, was taken into police custody at the George V hotel, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.The star rapper Travis Scott was detained on Friday in Paris, where he was visiting for the Summer Olympics, after a conflict with a security guard at a luxury hotel, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.The prosecutor’s office said Mr. Scott, 33, whose real name is Jacques Bermon Webster II, had assaulted a security guard at the George V hotel, in the city’s Eighth Arrondissement.“The security guard had intervened to separate the rapper from his bodyguard,” the office said in a statement.There are no known charges against Mr. Scott. It was unclear later Friday whether he was still in custody. The Paris prosecutor’s office said it had referred the case to the judicial police.Representatives for Mr. Scott said in a statement, “We are in direct communication with the local Parisian authorities to swiftly resolve this matter and will provide updates when appropriate.”Mr. Scott, a multiplatinum artist in the United States with a string of No. 1 albums, was arrested this summer in Miami Beach, Fla., after what the police called a disturbance on a yacht. He was charged with trespassing and disorderly intoxication. His lawyer said at the time that he had been “briefly detained due to a misunderstanding.”On Thursday night, Mr. Scott had posted on Instagram from the crowd of the men’s basketball game between the United States and Serbia, snapping photos of the American stars LeBron James and Stephen Curry.In 2021, 10 fans died as a result of a crowd crush at Mr. Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston, his hometown. A grand jury declined to indict Mr. Scott and others who oversaw the festival, and settlements have been reached in the lawsuits over the deaths.Aurelien Breeden More

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    3rd Teenager Arrested Over Planned Attack on Taylor Swift’s Vienna Concerts

    The authorities said the 18-year-old was connected to the main suspect and had recently sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.The authorities in Vienna have arrested a third teenager in connection with a foiled terrorist attack on a Taylor Swift concert in the city this week. They say they believe that the man, an 18-year-old connected to the main suspect, was not part of the plan but had been in touch with the plotters and had recently sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.Ms. Swift was scheduled to stage three concerts in Vienna starting Thursday through Saturday, but all three performances were canceled after the authorities arrested two teenagers over a plan to attack the sold-out, 50,000-seat stadium. Chancellor Karl Nehammer of Austria said the plot had been designed to leave a “trail of blood.”Since arresting two other teenagers on Wednesday, the authorities have been racing to investigate the planned attack, although after what the police said was a full confession by the main suspect, they said there was no longer an imminent danger.The police are looking into a network of people around the main suspect, a 19-year-old Austrian citizen of North Macedonian descent who they said had radicalized himself online and sworn allegiance to the Islamic State. Citing privacy rules, the authorities have declined to publicly name the suspects, but they said that both teenagers arrested on Wednesday were born in Austria and held Austrian citizenship.During a raid on the main suspect’s house on Wednesday, the police said, officers found chemicals used to make bombs, as well as explosives, timers, machetes, knives and a functioning police siren, which investigators believe he planned to use to gain access to or move around the area around the stadium.The concert cancellations affected about 200,000 Taylor Swift fans, some of whom had traveled to Europe from other continents to see her perform as part of her Eras Tour. Ms. Swift has not commented publicly on the cancellations.A 15-year-old boy who was held for questioning on Wednesday about the plot has been released and is being treated as a witness, the police said. They said that they had determined he was not part of the plot but that he knew many of its details and had helped corroborate some key elements of the main suspect’s confession. More

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    ‘Sugarcane’ Is a Stunning, Sobering Look at the Mistreatment of Indigenous Communities

    “Sugarcane” follows survivors and investigators after the horrifying treatment of Indigenous Canadians was discovered at residential schools.When it comes to stories that hold the potential to slide from sensitive to sensational, documentarians can take several approaches. There’s the talking-head driven journalistic approach, in which the story and its analysis are laid out, beat by beat. There’s also the more lurid approach that films about cults and crime can employ, with re-enactments and ominous musical cues.But a third way — and the one that Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat take in “Sugarcane” (in theaters), to their great credit — is to invite the audience to dwell alongside those affected by the story, letting their experiences and emotions guide the film. This one tells a horrifying story: In 2021 and 2022 in a series of cascading discoveries, unmarked graves were found on the grounds of a number of Indigenous Canadian residential schools. On investigation, they revealed horrifying mistreatment of Indigenous communities, where parents were virtually forced to send their children to the schools as part of the government’s quest to “solve the Indian problem.”The film’s jumping-off point is the graves discovered at St. Joseph’s Mission, a residential school in British Columbia, near the Sugarcane Reserve of Williams Lake. NoiseCat’s father and grandmother were survivors of St. Joseph’s, and his journey to learn their immensely painful stories is one strand of the documentary.There are others, too. Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing are two investigators working with the Williams Lake First Nation to uncover the truth about what happened at St. Joseph’s, and their determination helps fill in many of the disturbing details that were covered up at the time of the abuse. Rick Gilbert, a former chief of Williams Lake First Nation, was also educated at St. Joseph’s but is a faithful Catholic and reluctant to acknowledge the full extent of the atrocity — even when DNA tests appear to confirm that his father was one of the priests. He is summoned to the Vatican as part of an audience with Pope Francis regarding the discoveries. But his own story takes a long time to come out.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    6 Books Like ‘It Ends With Us’ by Colleen Hoover to Read Next

    Whether the Blake Lively movie brought you to the Colleen Hoover universe or you’re a longtime CoHo fan looking for more emotional, spicy stories, these novels are for you.In the past few years, no writer has dominated the best-seller list quite like Colleen Hoover. The prolific author was one of the breakout stars of the self-publishing boom over a decade ago, and her global following has only grown with BookTok’s embrace of her novels. Now Hoover — CoHo to her fans — is setting her sights on the silver screen, with the release of “It Ends With Us,” the first film adaptation of one of her books; the movie, starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, opens in theaters Aug. 9.Hoover’s fans adore her books for their emotional intensity: The stories often revolve around themes of trauma, resilience and hope, and the characters’ tragic histories and passionate struggles provide a catharsis that readers describe as not merely heartbreaking, but heart-stomping-into-smithereens. While she is commonly billed as a romance writer, Hoover also mixes in Y.A., thriller and horror, always with plenty of spice and drama. You can see her influence in the ample selection of new books that aim to walk a similar line — or by glancing around your local bookstore, where you can spot many covers that have gotten the “CoHo treatment.”Whether you’re new to Hoover’s work and looking to see what all the fuss is about, or yearning for some more high drama and emotional intensity while you wait for her next book, all of these options will keep you reading way past your bedtime.Book vs. movie, let me be the judgeIt Ends With Us, by Colleen HooverIf you’ve heard of one of Hoover’s book, it’s probably this one, which has spent a whopping 165 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Lily, a florist, is initially dazzled by Ryle, an enigmatic neurosurgeon. But painful moments from Lily’s childhood begin to echo into her present as she slowly realizes that Ryle’s charm belies an explosive temper — and when Atlas, her first love and her last tie to a life she’d left behind, reappears.Take me deeper into the CoHo universeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How ‘Head Hunters’ Shook Up Jazz (and Herbie Hancock’s World)

    Herbie Hancock still vividly recalls the night, 51 years ago, when the Pointer Sisters skated circles around him.“We came up and played our weird stuff, and when they came out, they were wearing roller skates,” he said in a video interview in June, recalling a show at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. “The audience went insane.”That humbling experience in the spring of 1973 sparked a major change in Hancock’s thinking. After establishing himself as one of the leading jazz pianists of the ’60s, he had embraced electric keyboards and homed in on the so-called weird stuff with the Mwandishi band, a sextet that was both fearlessly exploratory and largely oblivious to the tastes of the average listener.“We need to learn from them,” he remembered thinking of the Pointers. “Maybe there’s something that can emerge from us that would work for a young audience.”By the early fall, he had disbanded Mwandishi and was busy writing and recording with a new quintet, informed as much by contemporary funk leaders like Sly and the Family Stone as cutting-edge jazz. When the group ventured to clubs around the Bay Area to test out its in-progress material, “People went nuts,” Hancock said, beaming at the memory. “They were all dancing, and they loved it, and it just blew our minds.”The resulting album, “Head Hunters,” released in October 1973, would be pivotal both for Hancock and for jazz. Peaking at No. 13 on the Billboard 200, it later went platinum, yielded a Top 20 R&B hit in the monstrously grooving “Chameleon” and leveled up Hancock’s concerts into arenas, proving definitively that jazz could make a significant impact on the modern pop mainstream. No instrumental jazz release since has made a bigger bang.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘It Ends With Us’ Review: For Blake Lively, Love Hurts and Even Bruises

    Blake Lively plays Lily Bloom, a flower lover with a thorny personal garden, in this gauzy adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel.Buried under the gauzy romanticism of “It Ends With Us” — under the softly diffused visuals, the endless montage sequences, the sensitive mewling on the soundtrack and the luxuriously coifed thickets of Blake Lively’s sunset-on-Malibu-Beach dyed-red hair — is a tough little movie about women, bad choices, worse men and decisions that doesn’t fit into a tidy box.Lively stars as the improbably named Lily Blossom Bloom, a beauty with a traumatic history, a soulful ex and a passion for gardening. Over the course of the movie, she falls in love with a neurosurgeon who looks like he stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad. She also befriends a wisecracking sidekick, opens a whimsical floral shop, endures heartache and, after much reflection and many plot complications, finds herself. It’s hard going, but Lily takes whatever life throws at her with her meticulously styled head up and a neo-bohemian influencer vibe. She’s a dream of a woman, an aspirational ideal, an Instagram-era Mildred Pierce.You may know Mildred from Turner Classic Movies as the pie-baking survivor played by Joan Crawford in the 1945 noir “Mildred Pierce.” Mildred walks into that classic wearing a mink coat with linebacker shoulder-pads and the kind of stricken look that clouds a woman’s face when she discovers that her no-good second husband is sleeping with her no-good teenage daughter, and the brat has just offed the creep. It’s no wonder that when Mildred stares into the nighttime waters of the Pacific, she seems to be mulling her equally dark past and future, much as Lily does one evening on a Boston rooftop early on in “It Ends With Us.”Lily doesn’t have long to consider her existential options because her rooftop reveries are soon interrupted by the neurosurgeon, Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who directed the movie). A brooding hunk with soft eyes, hard muscles and miraculously unchanging three-day stubble, Ryle has a touch of menace and a gift for cornball lines, and before long he and Lily are flirtatiously circling each other. Love buds and, yes, blooms, and Lily settles down with Ryle. He seems like a ready-made catch (Baldoni gives himself plenty of close-ups), although anyone at all familiar with the conventions of romantic fiction will wonder about the intensity of his attentions. A picture-perfect guy doesn’t necessarily make a picture-perfect life, dig?Adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best seller by Christy Hall, “It Ends With Us” is fitfully diverting, at times touching, often ridiculous and, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost offensively long. It’s visually and narratively overbusy, stuffed with flashbacks of Lily as an adolescent (Isabela Ferrer) that create two parallel lines of action. As the adult Lily moves forward with Ryle and opens her store — she gets help from a nattering assistant, Allysa (Jenny Slate), who enters with her luxury bag swinging and motormouth running — images of the past fill in Lily’s history and her high-school romance with another student, Atlas. (Alex Neustaedter plays him as a teen, while Brandon Sklenar steps into the grown-up role.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    2 Teenagers Planned Attacks on Taylor Swift’s Vienna Concerts, Authorities Say

    A suspect confessed to a plot using explosives and other weapons to kill as many attendees as possible, security officials said. The singer’s three-concert Vienna run was canceled.Less than 24 hours after the arrest of two teenagers who the Austrian authorities say planned to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, security officials outlined a picture of an Islamic State-inspired assault designed to kill as many people as possible.Barracuda Music, the promoter for the singer’s three-concert Vienna run, canceled the gigs on Wednesday night. The events, which were scheduled to start Thursday, had been expected to draw more than 200,000 fans from across the world.The main suspect is a 19-year-old man who was radicalized online and swore an oath of allegiance to the Islamic State, Franz Ruf, the head of public safety in Austria, told a news conference on Thursday. Mr. Ruf said the suspect had confessed to the plans shortly after being arrested, giving the police a detailed insight into his intended acts, which included using explosives and weapons to kill as many concert attendees as possible.Searching the man’s home, where he lived with his parents, the police found explosives, timers, machetes and knives, Mr. Ruf said.A 17-year-old suspected of being an accomplice was known to the police and had recently started a job for a events service provider that was working at the Ernst Happel Stadium, where Ms. Swift was scheduled to play. He was arrested on Wednesday at the stadium, Mr. Ruf said.A 15-year-old boy who was also brought in for questioning confirmed many details of the main suspect’s confession, Mr. Ruf said, adding that the police believed that the boy was not an active participant in the plot, but knew of its details.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Instigators’ Review: A Star-Studded Boston Heist Movie

    Casey Affleck and Matt Damon star in a Boston heist that goes sideways.The best joke in “The Instigators” is a crack about the public school curriculum in Quincy, the suburb just south of Boston that outsiders never pronounce correctly. (It’s closer to a “z” than an “s.”) It feels like an inside joke, as do later affectionate jabs at other Greater Boston locales, lingo and corrupt politicians. This is sort of a heist movie, but it is first and foremost a Boston movie, full of Boston guys and Boston accents and (South) Boston places and Boston humor. Heck, “The Instigators” is practically Boston: The Immersive Experience.It will surprise no one to learn that it’s produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and co-stars Damon alongside the movie’s co-writer, Casey Affleck. Its other writer is Chuck MacLean, the creator and executive producer of “City on a Hill,” the three-season Showtime drama about, you guessed it, Boston.The director of “The Instigators,” Doug Liman, is a born and raised New Yorker. But both he and Damon found collaborative success in 2002 with “The Bourne Identity.” This is their first project together since that hit, and it’s studded with stars: Alongside Affleck and Damon, there’s Hong Chau, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, Paul Walter Hauser, Toby Jones, Ron Perlman and the rapper Jack Harlow (in his second feature film role).Somehow, in 2024, all that wattage still only merits a one-week limited theatrical release in the August dead zone and a quick hop to streaming. Given a few weeks in theaters to pick up steam, I can imagine it doing well, mostly because it’s so easygoing. “The Instigators” starts out like an “Ocean’s 11” riff, with a group of petty thieves gathered by a stormy crime boss, Mr. Besegai (Stuhlbarg), to pull off a big job and then never speak of it again. It seems the sitting governor (Perlman, ideally cast) is a crook, which all but guarantees his re-election — and the cash bribes that will be brought to his victory ball make it an ideal job.Some of the group, like Rory (Damon), really need the money; he’s depressed and desperate and late on his child support, and his therapist (Chau) is worried about him. Others, like Cobby (Casey Affleck) and Scalvo (Harlow), are just the kind of guys who do this kind of thing. But Mr. Besegai is not Mr. Ocean, having snagged none of his breezy luck. Everything goes wrong right from the start, and Cobby and Rory find themselves thrown together in a comedy of blunders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More