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      in Music

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

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      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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      in Television

      Arrest Warrant Issued for ‘Power Rangers’ Actor Hector David Rivera

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      Mr. Rivera, whose stage name is Hector David Jr., was charged with battery in Idaho after a video showed him pushing an older man who used a walker, the police said.An arrest warrant was issued on Wednesday for an actor who appeared for years as the Green Ranger in “Power Rangers” films and television shows, after a video showed him pushing a man in his 60s who used a walker, the police in Idaho said.The actor, Hector David Rivera, 35, was charged with misdemeanor battery in Idaho after video surfaced on Friday showing him in a dispute with the older man, said Carmen Boeger, a spokeswoman for the Nampa Police Department. Nampa is a city west of Boise with over 100,000 people.The video, captured on Friday on a bystander’s dashboard camera, begins with a dispute over a parking spot between a man wearing a New England Patriots jersey and another who is using a walker. It ends with the first man shoving the other one to the ground before climbing into a black truck. He later drove away, the department said.The 14-second video has no audio and does not show the full interaction. But the truck appears to be parked in a space for people with disabilities, and Ms. Boeger said that the dispute began over a parking spot.Video released by the Nampa Police Department in Nampa, Idaho, showed Hector David Rivera, an actor in the “Power Rangers” franchise, pushing an older man to the ground in a parking lot.Nampa Police DepartmentThe Nampa police identified Mr. Rivera by posting the video on the department’s social media pages and asking the public for assistance, Ms. Boeger said. An arrest warrant was issued on Wednesday, and the victim’s name was not released.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

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Maestro Accused of Striking Singer Won’t Return to His Ensembles

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      John Eliot Gardiner is stepping down from three renowned period groups he founded, after he was accused of hitting a singer last year.John Eliot Gardiner, an eminent conductor who was accused of striking a singer in France last year, will not be returning to three renowned period ensembles he founded, the board overseeing them announced Wednesday.Gardiner, 81, who is one of the world’s most celebrated conductors, will no longer lead the three groups: the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.The board of the Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, the nonprofit that oversees all three ensembles, said Wednesday that it had decided that Gardiner, who had been on leave since the incident in France last summer, “will not be returning to the organization.”“The M.C.O. takes seriously its obligations to protect victims of abuse and assault and preventing any recurrence remains a priority for the organization,” the group said in a statement.Gardiner sought to frame the decision as his own, saying in a later statement on Wednesday that it came after “a great deal of soul-searching since the deeply regrettable incident” in France.He drew widespread criticism after he was accused of striking the singer, William Thomas, a rising bass from England, on the face last summer after a performance of the first two acts of Berlioz’s opera “Les Troyens” at the Festival Berlioz in La Côte-Saint-André. Gardiner was apparently upset that Thomas had headed the wrong way off the podium at the concert, people at the festival said at the time.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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      in Music

      My Working Relationship With Diddy in the Music Industry

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      A thing happened between Sean Combs and me. Unlike what he has been accused of over the last eight months, what occurred between us was not sexual. It was professional — demonstrative of the way dynamic and domineering men moved in our heyday. Combs and I worked together a lot. Competed, in our way. So often I thought I came out on top. I was mistaken. I had reason to fear for my life. What happened was insidious. It broke my brain. I forgot the worst of it for 27 years.It was July 1997. In the fading smoke of the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., I was named editor in chief of a music magazine called Vibe. Started by Quincy Jones and Time Inc. in 1992, the magazine chronicled Black music and culture with rigor and beauty, 10 issues a year, for an audience that was relentlessly underserved. When I took over, we thought hip-hop might have died with our heroes, and we were determined not only to keep it alive but also to give it the cultural credit it was due.Hip-hop was both in mourning and in marketing meetings. Combs, Biggie’s creative partner and label boss, was the personification of this dichotomy. His Bad Boy Records was having a $100 million year — much due to the work of Biggie and Mase, as well as Combs’s own debut album, “No Way Out,” which was anchored by the blockbuster Biggie tribute “I’ll Be Missing You” featuring Faith Evans. Other singles, “It’s All About the Benjamins” and “Been Around the World,” functioned as a score for hip-hop’s megawatt moment — its commercial evolution and international expansion. (“No Way Out” would go on to sell over seven million copies.) So I wanted Combs on the cover of Vibe’s December 1997/January 1998 double issue. And I wanted him to wear white feathered wings.Faith Evans and Sean Combs filming the 1997 video for “I’ll Be Missing You,” in memory of the Notorious B.I.G., Evans’s husband. Mychal Watts/Associated PressMy point of reference was the poster for “Heaven Can Wait,” a 1978 film starring Warren Beatty. The movie is about a quarterback who dies before his time and is reincarnated as an idiosyncratic and callous billionaire. Vibe’s working cover line for Sacha Jenkins’s article was “The Good, the Bad and the Puffy.” Not so elegant, but it would work if the fashion director Emil Wilbekin and I got Combs (then known as Puffy, or Puff Daddy) to put on the angel wings. And if we also got a shot that looked even slightly mischievous, we could do a split run of the cover — one with heavenly signifiers and another with hellish ones. Possible cover line: “Bad Boy, Bad Boy, Whatcha Gonna Do?”The photo shoot took place in Manhattan in September 1997. I had probably said hello to Combs at an event, but the shoot was the first time I was around him for an extended period. Either it was a crowded set or I just felt claustrophobic. I wore yoga pants and an oversize T-shirt. I remember wanting to minimize my bust more than my bra was already doing. I remember cajoling. And I remember knowing that as a Black woman, I was in a no-win situation: to fail was to live up to my male bosses’ low expectations, and to succeed was to invite their resentment. That day, Combs was begrudgingly compliant. We finally got him to shrug on the white feathered wings.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

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Will Smith Taps Nostalgia as He Attempts a Post-Slap Comeback

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      “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the latest entry in a nearly three-decade- old franchise, will be Smith’s first wide-release film since he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars in 2022.During the Latin pop star J Balvin’s set at Coachella in April, a surprise guest star suddenly appeared onstage: Will Smith, wearing a familiar black suit and sunglasses, launched into the title song of “Men in Black,” his 1997 Hollywood blockbuster.It was the beginning of a frenetic spring for Smith as he carefully re-enters the public eye to promote “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” his first wide-release movie since he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars in 2022, a move that threatened to derail his career.Smith has been back walking red carpets, bantering on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” and eating spicy chicken until his eyes watered on “Hot Ones,” the popular YouTube show. He told Fallon his publicity tour had taken him to eight cities in 12 days, with stops in Dubai and in Riyadh for what he described as the first Hollywood premiere in Saudi Arabia.“Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the latest entry in a nearly three-decade old franchise, is opening nationwide on Friday. The film industry will be closely watching how it does to see whether the moviegoing public is ready to welcome Smith back after an event so shocking and ignominious that it achieved proper-noun status: the Slap.Whether by accident or agreement, the Slap has not come up much in Smith’s prerelease publicity blitz. But the film itself seems to refer to it, archly, as several critics have noted: In it, Smith gets slapped by his co-star, Martin Lawrence, and called a “bad boy.”Lawrence appeared on “The Tonight Show” with Smith and praised him effusively. “He is one of the most professional actors out there, most talented actors out there, he has a brilliant mind, he’s a genius and he’s upstanding,” he said.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

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Gérard Depardieu Punches the ‘King of Paparazzi’ Outside Rome Cafe

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      Mr. Depardieu, 75, was seen striking the 79-year-old photographer Rino Barillari on the Via Veneto.The French film star Gérard Depardieu repeatedly punched Rino Barillari, known as the “king of paparazzi,” on Tuesday at Harry’s Bar on the Via Veneto, the grand hotel and cafe-lined avenue that was a lively haunt for celebrity-hunting paparazzi decades ago, according to the photographer and a journalist who witnessed the altercation.It could have been a scene straight out of “La Dolce Vita,” Federico Fellini’s early 1960s film that introduced the character of an annoying and eccentric photographer who hounded the movie stars that swelled the casts of Cinecittà film studios when Rome was known as “Hollywood on the Tiber.”Seeing Mr. Depardieu, 75, and Mr. Barillari, 79, on the Via Veneto was like “a time machine,” said Gianni Riotta, a columnist for the newspaper La Repubblica who said he saw the attack while he was having coffee at Harry’s Bar.Mr. Riotta said that Mr. Barillari had repeatedly been asked to stop taking photographs, and that when he turned to leave he was followed into the street by a shouting woman who had been sitting with Mr. Depardieu. The actor reached the photographer “and hit him, hit him, hit him,” Mr. Riotta recalled, speaking in Italian.“There was a lot of blood,” he said.Mr. Riotta said he gave a witness statement to the police when they arrived on the scene. It was unclear whether Mr. Barillari, who was taken by ambulance to a downtown hospital, would press charges.Lawyers for Mr. Depardieu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Delphine Meillet, a lawyer for the woman who had been sitting with Mr. Depardieu, Magda Vavrusova, said in a statement that Mr. Barillari had “violently pushed” her, touching her chest with his arm. She said that when Mr. Depardieu intervened, he had “fallen and slid onto” the photographer. Ms. Vavrusova was taken to a hospital and planned to sue Mr. Barillari, the lawyer said.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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Video Shows Sean Combs Assaulting Cassie in a Hotel in 2016

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      The footage published by CNN shows Mr. Combs striking and kicking the singer when she was his girlfriend. They settled a lawsuit last year after she accused him of abuse.Hotel surveillance footage published by CNN on Friday showed Sean Combs physically assaulting and kicking Casandra Ventura, his former girlfriend, in a manner consistent with allegations she made against him in a lawsuit that she filed and settled last year.The video shows Mr. Combs, a hip-hop mogul known as Puff Daddy and Diddy, wearing a towel and confronting Ms. Ventura while she waits for an elevator. It shows him grabbing her and throwing her to the ground, kicking her twice, grabbing some of her possessions, and beginning to drag her down the hallway by her sweatshirt.Mr. Combs is also seen grabbing an object off a table and throwing it.A lawyer representing Ms. Ventura, Douglas H. Wigdor, confirmed that the woman being assaulted in the video is his client.“The gut-wrenching video has only further confirmed the disturbing and predatory behavior of Mr. Combs,” he said in a statement. “Words cannot express the courage and fortitude that Ms. Ventura has shown in coming forward to bring this to light.”A representative for Mr. Combs, who has not been criminally charged, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In Ms. Ventura’s lawsuit, she described an incident from 2016 at an InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in which Mr. Combs became “extremely intoxicated and punched Ms. Ventura in the face, giving her a black eye.” The lawsuit said that after Mr. Combs fell asleep, Ms. Ventura tried to leave the hotel room, but Mr. Combs woke up and followed her into the hallway.“He grabbed at her, and then took glass vases in the hallway and threw them at her, causing glass to crash around them as she ran to the elevator to escape,” the lawsuit said.Mr. Wigdor confirmed that the video footage corresponds to those allegations.Mr. Combs settled the suit with Ms. Ventura — an R&B singer known as Cassie, who had been signed to Mr. Combs’s record label — in one day in November, and denied any wrongdoing. Three suits by other women, each alleging rape, followed in quick succession, and in February a male music producer filed suit accusing Mr. Combs of unwanted sexual contact.Mr. Combs is facing a federal investigation, which officials said was at least in part a human trafficking inquiry. In March, federal agents raided his homes in Los Angeles and Miami Beach, Fla., and stopped him at a Miami-area airport, confiscating his electronic devices. Mr. Combs has vehemently denied the accusations in the civil suits, calling them “sickening allegations” from people looking for “a quick payday.” His lawyers have sharply criticized how the raids — which involved agents from Homeland Security Investigations brandishing guns — were carried out, calling them a “gross overuse of military-level force.” More

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      in Theater

      Michael Stuhlbarg Is Attacked in Central Park Before ‘Patriots’ Debut

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      The actor was walking on the Upper East Side on Sunday when a man threw a rock at him, striking the back of his neck, the police said. He is set to appear on Broadway on Monday evening.One day after he was struck with a rock in a random attack on the Upper East Side, the actor Michael Stuhlbarg will appear in Monday’s first preview of the Broadway play “Patriots,” in which he stars as a Russian oligarch who helped facilitate Vladimir V. Putin’s rise.Stuhlbarg, best known for his role as a gangster in the series “Boardwalk Empire,” was walking in Central Park on Sunday evening when a man threw a rock, hitting him in the back of the neck, the police said.Stuhlbarg chased the man, Xavier Israel, 27, out of the park, where he was taken into custody and charged with assault. The location where the man was arrested on East 91st Street is the address for the Russian consulate.The police said Stuhlbarg declined medical attention.Stuhlbarg “feels fine” and will appear onstage on Monday for his debut in “Patriots,” the show said in a news release. He plays Boris A. Berezovsky, a Russian business tycoon who reigned in post-Soviet Russia and helped install Putin as president, but then had a bitter falling out with the Kremlin and died in exile.The play, written by Peter Morgan, the creator of the British royalty drama “The Crown,” and directed by Rupert Goold, opens on April 22. It was first staged in 2022 in London, where Tom Hollander played Berezovsky.Stuhlbarg, 55, had his breakthrough lead performance in the Coen brothers film “A Serious Man,” going on to numerous onscreen roles, including as Dr. Richard Sackler, the prescription opioid magnate, in the limited series “Dopesick,” for which he was nominated for an Emmy.A fixture of New York’s theater scene in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuhlbarg last appeared on Broadway in 2005, when he received a Tony nomination for starring in Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman.” More