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    A Play About Segregation Tries to ‘Ride a Fine Line’ in Florida

    A production partly aimed at students that highlights Tampa’s history in the civil rights movement lands at a time when the state is changing what schools teach about race and history.Given the chance, Arthenia Joyner would have ordered a bacon and egg sandwich with a glass of orange juice. Instead, workers inside an F.W. Woolworth store in Tampa, Fla., declared their lunch counter closed to her and other high school students 65 years ago.The students refused to leave without being served. The protests did not carry the national prominence of the Greensboro sit-ins, Montgomery boycotts or Selma marches. “What I found out is damn near nobody knows what happened,” Joyner, 82, said recently. But the acts of resistance produced results. Within months, Tampa’s counters were desegregated. Other public areas like beaches and movie theaters followed.Joyner hopes more people will learn of Florida’s contributions to the civil rights movement through “When the Righteous Triumph,” a play that dramatizes the 1960 protests. After a small debut in 2023, the play will be performed at the Jaeb Theater inside Tampa’s David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts over the next two weekends, with its audiences including students from around 40 local schools.The play arrives at a moment when arts and educational offerings are frequently in dispute nationally, and regional arts venues are left navigating shifting terrain.Several arts organizations sued the National Endowment for the Arts this week over a new mandate that says grant applicants must comply with the Trump administration’s executive orders barring the promotion of “gender ideology.” President Trump recently signed an executive order withholding funding from schools that teach that the United States is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.”Clay Christopher and Von Shay in the production, which depicts an oft-overlooked moment in the civil rights era.Octavio Jones for The New York TimesWe 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 the Sean Combs Case, Echoes of the Tack Taken Against Other Powerful Men

    Federal authorities are prosecuting Mr. Combs under sex trafficking and racketeering laws, which were used to successfully prosecute R. Kelly and Keith Raniere in earlier abuse cases.Though graphic and startling in its details, the indictment of Sean Combs reflects a familiar playbook for federal prosecutions against high-profile men accused of a long-running history of abuse against women.The Combs indictment, which was unsealed on Tuesday, resembles the prosecution strategy employed in two other major sexual abuse cases brought by federal investigators in recent years against Keith Raniere, the Nxivm sex cult leader, and R. Kelly, the R&B singer.Both of those men were convicted on some of the same sex trafficking and racketeering charges now facing Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty.Racketeering charges are attractive to prosecutors pursuing powerful defendants because they are designed to present an “enterprise,” a complex web of individuals who helped the defendants carry out alleged crimes that can date back many years. In Mr. Combs’s case, for example, prosecutors have assembled their racketeering conspiracy charge by accusing him of crimes dating as far back as 2008, including arson, kidnapping, bribery and narcotics distribution.In some instances, the federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges allow prosecutors to cite crimes for which a state’s statute of limitations has expired.And the federal laws carry stiff punishments: The most severe sex trafficking law that Mr. Combs has been charged under carries a 15-year mandatory minimum prison sentence. The racketeering conspiracy charge, which accuses defendants of carrying out crimes as part of an “enterprise,” carries up to life in prison.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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    Nonprofit Theaters Are in Trouble. Lawmakers Are Proposing Help.

    Proposed legislation would allocate $1 billion annually for an industry coping with rising expenses and smaller audiences.The financial crisis facing nonprofit theaters in America has captured the attention of Congress, where a group of Democratic lawmakers is introducing legislation that would direct $1 billion annually to the struggling industry for five years.That money could be used for payroll and workforce development, as well as other expenses like rent, set-building and marketing. But the legislation, which lawmakers introduced on Tuesday, faces long odds at a time when a divided Congress — where Republicans control the House and Democrats lead the Senate — has had trouble agreeing on anything.Nonprofit theaters around the country have reduced their programming and laid off workers to cope with rising expenses and smaller audiences since the coronavirus pandemic began. There are exceptions — some nonprofit theaters say they are thriving — but several companies, including New Repertory Theater in suburban Boston, Southern Rep Theater in New Orleans, and Book-It Repertory Theater in Seattle, have ceased or suspended operations in response to the crisis.“It hasn’t been a recovery for the nonprofits — they’re really lagging compared to many other sectors in the economy, and it’s for a lot of reasons,” Senator Peter Welch of Vermont, one of the legislation’s sponsors, said in an interview. “So they do need help.”Mr. Welch argued that the organizations merit government assistance because they strengthen communities and benefit local economies.The legislation, which is called the Supporting Theater and the Arts to Galvanize the Economy (STAGE) Act of 2024, is also being sponsored by Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon is sponsoring it in the House.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who is the majority leader and who led the fight to win government aid for performing arts organizations during the pandemic, is supportive of the proposed legislation and is also open to other ways to assist nonprofit theaters, according to a spokesman.The pandemic aid package that Mr. Schumer championed serves as a precedent: In 2020, Congress passed the Save Our Stages Act, which led to a $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program that made money available to a wide array of commercial and nonprofit performing arts organizations.Mr. Welch said the earlier aid program succeeded despite initial skepticism.“With everything else that was going on, the expectation was this would die on the vine, but it didn’t — as this started getting momentum, there was excitement about being about to do something concrete,” he said.The new legislation is narrower, benefiting only professional nonprofit theaters, and only those that have either seen a decline in revenues or that primarily serve historically underserved communities.“This is a beginning,” Mr. Welch said. “There are obstacles, but let the effort begin.” More

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    A Georgia Town Basks in Bountiful Filming. The State Pays.

    When movies are made in Thomasville, Ga., it welcomes celebrities and an infusion of cash. But the financial incentives that attract studios have cost the state billions.It is no wonder that moviemakers saw potential in Thomasville, Ga., as a stand-in for Main Street U.S.A. Cobblestone streets and mom-and-pop stores speckle the downtown of this city of 18,000 that is caked in red clay soil and nestled among rolling hills.Just as attractive to some of those producers are Georgia’s lavish filming incentives, which have made Thomasville a cost-effective place to make modest pictures with major stars. Dustin Hoffman came for the rom-com “Sam & Kate.” A children’s book adaptation, “The Tiger Rising,” brought Dennis Quaid and Queen Latifah to town.But what is good on the ground for local economies — Thomasville says each of the six movies filmed there has provided an economic boost of about $1 million — can simultaneously be a drain on state coffers.Some Georgia lawmakers wondered whether it might be wise to put some limits on an uncapped tax incentive program that has given billions of dollars to Hollywood studios, scrambling this week in hopes of passing a bill that would modify the program. More

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    Fake Explicit Taylor Swift Images Swamp Social Media

    Fans of the star and lawmakers condemned the images, probably generated by artificial intelligence, after they were shared with millions of social media users.Fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift likely generated by artificial intelligence spread rapidly across social media platforms this week, disturbing fans who saw them and reigniting calls from lawmakers to protect women and crack down on the platforms and technology that spread such images.One image shared by a user on X, formerly Twitter, was viewed 47 million times before the account was suspended on Thursday. X suspended several accounts that posted the faked images of Ms. Swift, but the images were shared on other social media platforms and continued to spread despite those companies’ efforts to remove them.While X said it was working to remove the images, fans of the pop superstar flooded the platform in protest. They posted related keywords, along with the sentence “Protect Taylor Swift,” in an effort to drown out the explicit images and make them more difficult to find.Reality Defender, a cybersecurity company focused on detecting A.I., determined with 90 percent confidence that the images were created using a diffusion model, an A.I.-driven technology accessible through more than 100,000 apps and publicly available models, said Ben Colman, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.As the A.I. industry has boomed, companies have raced to release tools that enable users to create images, videos, text and audio recordings with simple prompts. The A.I. tools are wildly popular but have made it easier and cheaper than ever to create so-called deepfakes, which portray people doing or saying things they have never done.Researchers now fear that deepfakes are becoming a powerful disinformation force, enabling everyday internet users to create nonconsensual nude images or embarrassing portrayals of political candidates. Artificial intelligence was used to create fake robocalls of President Biden during the New Hampshire primary, and Ms. Swift was featured this month in deepfake ads hawking cookware.“It’s always been a dark undercurrent of the internet, nonconsensual pornography of various sorts,” said Oren Etzioni, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who works on deepfake detection. “Now it’s a new strain of it that’s particularly noxious.”“We are going to see a tsunami of these A.I.-generated explicit images. The people who generated this see this as a success,” Mr. Etzioni said.X said it had a zero-tolerance policy toward the content. “Our teams are actively removing all identified images and taking appropriate actions against the accounts responsible for posting them,” a representative said in a statement. “We’re closely monitoring the situation to ensure that any further violations are immediately addressed, and the content is removed.”X has seen an increase in problematic content including harassment, disinformation and hate speech since Elon Musk bought the service in 2022. He has loosened the website’s content rules and fired, laid off or accepted the resignations of staff members who worked to remove such content. The platform also reinstated accounts that had been previously banned for violating rules.Although many of the companies that produce generative A.I. tools ban their users from creating explicit imagery, people find ways to break the rules. “It’s an arms race, and it seems that whenever somebody comes up with a guardrail, someone else figures out how to jailbreak,” Mr. Etzioni said.The images originated in a channel on the messaging app Telegram that is dedicated to producing such images, according to 404 Media, a technology news site. But the deepfakes garnered broad attention after being posted on X and other social media services, where they spread rapidly.Some states have restricted pornographic and political deepfakes. But the restrictions have not had a strong impact, and there are no federal regulations of such deepfakes, Mr. Colman said. Platforms have tried to address deepfakes by asking users to report them, but that method has not worked, he added. By the time they are flagged, millions of users have already seen them.“The toothpaste is already out of the tube,” he said.Ms. Swift’s publicist, Tree Paine, did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Thursday.The deepfakes of Ms. Swift prompted renewed calls for action from lawmakers. Representative Joe Morelle, a Democrat from New York who introduced a bill last year that would make sharing such images a federal crime, said on X that the spread of the images was “appalling,” adding: “It’s happening to women everywhere, every day.”“I’ve repeatedly warned that AI could be used to generate non-consensual intimate imagery,” Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the images on X. “This is a deplorable situation.”Representative Yvette D. Clarke, a Democrat from New York, said that advancements in artificial intelligence had made creating deepfakes easier and cheaper.“What’s happened to Taylor Swift is nothing new,” she said. More

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    How a Show Forced Britain’s Devastating Post Office Scandal Into the Light

    After years of delays, victims of one of the U.K.’s worst miscarriages of justice are finally being exonerated — thanks to a TV drama.More than 700 people convicted of a crime they didn’t commit. At least four suicides. A woman sent to jail while pregnant. Bankruptcies. Marriages broken, lives ruined.The shocking details of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history have been reported for years yet somehow stayed below the radar for most of the public, despite intense efforts by campaigners and investigative journalists.Until last week. A gripping ITV drama series, “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,” which began airing on Jan. 1, achieved something that eluded politicians for a decade, cutting through a morass of bureaucratic and legal delays and forcing government action.The show dramatizes the fate of hundreds of people who ran branches of the Post Office across Britain, and who were wrongly accused of theft after a faulty IT system called Horizon created false shortfalls in their accounting.Between 1999 and 2015, they were pursued relentlessly in the courts by the Post Office for financial losses that never occurred. Some were jailed, most were driven into financial hardship, many suffered mental health issues and some took their lives.Under pressure, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday promised a new law to exonerate and compensate all known victims, a sweeping intervention that aims to finally bring justice after years of glacial progress.And the police suddenly said last week that they would investigate whether Post Office officials — who refused for years to admit that the IT they forced managers to use was at fault — should face charges. Meanwhile one of its former bosses, Paula Vennells, has handed back an honor bestowed by the queen in 2019, after more than a million people signed a petition demanding she be stripped of it.All this has left an intriguing question: how has a TV show achieved in one week more than investigative journalists and politicians in more than a decade?“However brilliant the journalism is, it maybe appeals to your intellect, to your head,” said Gwyneth Hughes, the writer of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.” “Whereas drama is designed to appeal to your heart — that’s what it has been doing for thousands of years.”Paula Vennells, the former chief executive of the Post Office, in 2012. She said she would hand back an honor bestowed by the queen in 2019 after a public outcry this week.Anthony Devlin/PA Images, via Getty ImagesMattias Frey, a media professor at City, University of London, argued that the drama shows the continuing power of terrestrial TV to change public perceptions and generate “one of those old fashioned water cooler moments” that fuels broader public debate.Even the show’s executive producer, Patrick Spence, was surprised by the scale of the reaction. Before the show was broadcast, he told his team that they shouldn’t be downhearted if ratings were modest, given the competition for eyeballs.The day after the series began he was informed by a colleague that more than 3.5 million people had watched the first episode. “I thought I had misheard her,” Mr. Spence said. Nine million people have now seen the series, according to ITV.He believes the show has inadvertently become a state-of-the-nation drama, articulating “a bigger truth, which is that we don’t feel heard, and we don’t trust the people who are supposed to have our backs.”The case is all the more shocking because the Post Office is an institution woven into the fabric of British life, more used to being portrayed in a benign role as in the popular TV show for children, “Postman Pat.”An official inquiry into the scandal was established in 2020, and more than £148 million, or more than $188 million, has already been distributed to victims from compensation programs. In 2019, 555 branch managers successfully challenged the Post Office in the High Court.Despite that, of the 700 criminal convictions, only 93 have so far been overturned, a sluggish pace that fueled campaigners’ anger.Former post office branch managers celebrating outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London in 2021, after a court ruling cleared them of theft and false accounting.Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSince ITV’s drama aired, more victims have come forward, but dozens of other people died before they could receive compensation. When Horizon declared branch accounts were in deficit, managers were contractually obliged to make up shortfalls.Some paid from their own savings to avoid prosecution, even though they were sure they had done nothing wrong. Others pleaded guilty to lesser crimes to avoid jail although they were innocent.One victim, Lee Castleton, whose plight was featured in the drama, told the BBC that his Horizon account would swing abruptly from profit to loss and that more than 90 calls to a help line proved useless. The Post Office, he said, was “absolutely hellbent” on not assisting him.As news of his supposed wrongdoing filtered into the community, Mr. Castleton and his family were accused of theft in the street, his daughter was bullied at school and she developed an eating disorder. Forced to travel far afield to seek work, he slept in his car.Such stories provide the beating heart of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,” which is the result of three years of work. The truth of what happened was “unbelievable,” said Ms. Hughes, the show’s writer. “If I wrote those things fictionally, nobody would believe me, people would switch off.”The heroic Mr. Bates, played by Toby Jones, is portrayed as an even tempered and indefatigable character who — like other victims — was told by the Post Office that he was the only person to report problems with Horizon.The actor Toby Jones in character as Alan Bates, a man who is “a terrier; he’s wise, he’s clever, he’s very good at forward planning,” said Gwyneth Hughes, the writer of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.”ITVHe found others, formed a group of victims, and pursued their cases with meager resources, battling a succession of setbacks to achieve an extraordinary victory in the courts.“Everyone likes an underdog, and we had underdogs in spades,” said Ms. Hughes, adding that Mr. Bates might look like a mild-mannered bearded fan of real ale but is also “a terrier; he’s wise, he’s clever, he’s very good at forward planning.”“He is, in a way, a gift as a character, he has a complexity: cometh the hour, cometh the man,” she said. “He’s led this long march of the misunderstood and unheard, and kept his sense of humor.”A few politicians were allies in the victims’ cause, notably James Arbuthnot, a Conservative lawmaker (now in the House of Lords) who fought on behalf of a constituent wrongly accused of stealing £36,000.There is also a cameo role for another Conservative lawmaker, Nadhim Zahawi, who played himself in the drama, questioning Ms. Vennells, the former Post Office boss, during a parliamentary committee hearing.To viewers Ms. Vennells emerges as the obdurate face of the Post Office, someone determined to defend its reputation rather than engage with its victims, a stance all the more surprising because she is an ordained Anglican priest (although she stepped back from any major role in the church in 2021).Fujitsu, the Japanese company that developed the Horizon system, is also under increasing pressure, with politicians hoping to recover some of the costs of compensating victims from the firm, which still has billions of pounds’ worth of contracts with the British government.Professor Frey worries viewers may have seen a “simple David and Goliath story” whereas lawyers and politicians must grapple with something more complicated. He sees a risk that “the pressure that should be brought to bear on politicians in order to clean this mess up maybe comes in a way that is undifferentiated.”Ms. Hughes has concerns about that too. “I hope they do right by all our lovely sub postmasters, but I also hope they find a way to do so that isn’t going to cause further problems down the line,” she said. “Thank God that’s not my job.” More

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    Senate Introduces Long-Awaited Bill Promising Changes for Ticket Buying

    The Fans First Act would require disclosures about fees and the location of tickets, strengthen a law banning bots and set stiff penalties for violations.The United States Senate introduced a long-awaited bill on Friday promising consumer protections for tickets to live entertainment events, after more than a year of complaints about high fees, out-of-control prices and deceptive selling practices in the entertainment world.The bill, called the Fans First Act, would require sellers to disclose the full price of a ticket, including all fees; indicate what seat or section a customer is gaining access to; and say whether a ticket is being offered by its original or “primary” seller, as opposed to a reseller or broker.The bill, introduced by John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, along with four others, would also strengthen an existing law banning the use of computer bots, a tactic frequently used by scalpers; require ticket sellers to offer full refunds when an event is canceled; set thousands of dollars in penalties for abuse; and require the Government Accountability Office to study the ticketing market and make recommendations.The proposed law comes as ticketing has become a hot-button issue for voters and lawmakers, with prices at record highs and the selling practices of both primary ticketing companies — like Ticketmaster, which tends to represent artists and venue box offices — and resale marketplaces like StubHub and Vivid Seats having come under fire.At a Judiciary Committee hearing in January, two months after Ticketmaster’s system crashed during a Taylor Swift presale, senators from both parties pilloried an executive from Live Nation — which owns Ticketmaster — and called the company a monopoly that harms consumers. Separately, the Justice Department has been conducting an antitrust investigation of Live Nation.At his State of the Union address in February, President Biden said, “We can stop service fees on tickets to concerts and sporting events and make companies disclose all the fees upfront.” And in June, under pressure from the White House, ticket sellers including Ticketmaster and SeatGeek agreed to introduce “all-in pricing” for tickets.That scrutiny has developed as the concert industry had its biggest year ever, with the trade publication Pollstar saying that gross ticket sales for the Top 100 worldwide tours were $9.17 billion in 2023, up 46 percent from the year before, and 65 percent from 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the industry.The new Senate bill proposes steep civil penalties for violations, to be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general. According to the bill, those penalties could include $15,000 per day during which a violation occurs, along with $1,000 per event ticket advertised or sold; those fines could amount to as much as five times the listed cost of a ticket.“The current ticketing system is riddled with problems and doesn’t serve the needs of fans, teams, artists or venues,” Mr. Cornyn said in a statement. “This legislation would rebuild trust in the ticketing system by cracking down on bots and others who take advantage of consumers through price gouging and other predatory practices and increase price transparency for ticket purchasers.”Ms. Klobuchar added, “From ensuring fans get refunds for canceled shows to banning speculative ticket sales, this bipartisan legislation will improve the ticketing experience.”In addition to Mr. Cornyn and Ms. Klobuchar, the cosponsors of the bill include two additional Republicans (Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Roger Wicker of Mississippi) and two Democrats (Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Peter Welch of Vermont).The new bill joins a number of other proposed laws in both houses of Congress, which would need to be reconciled for any to become law. In July, the Ticket Act, requiring the upfront disclosure of the full price of a ticket, passed the Commerce Committee. In the House of Representatives this week, another bill calling for transparency in ticket prices passed the Energy and Commerce Committee.The new Senate bill has been in negotiations for months, and some activists have privately complained about its compromises. The bill bans “speculative” selling, in which resale brokers list tickets for sale without actually having them in hand, betting that they can fulfill the order later. But it still allows “concierge” services in which brokers charge fans to wait in a digital line for them, a process that consumer advocates say puts ordinary customers at a disadvantage.Still, the bill has broad support throughout the music industry, including from venue and artist groups; the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammy Awards; and Fix the Tix, a coalition of many talent and industry groups.Live Nation, which has called for government action to reform the ticket market, also said it supports the bill, saying, “We believe it’s critical Congress acts to protect fans and artists from predatory resale practices, and have long supported a federal all-in pricing mandate, banning speculative ticketing and deceptive websites, as well as other measures.” More

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    City in Mexico Bans Performances of Songs With Misogynistic Lyrics

    The city of Chihuahua said it would impose hefty fines on bands that perform songs with lyrics that “promote violence against women.”Fed up with persistent violence, officials in the city of Chihuahua in northern Mexico approved a ban last week forbidding musical acts from performing songs with lyrics that degrade women.Mayor Marco Bonilla of Chihuahua said in an video update last week that the law banned the performance of songs that “promote violence against women” or encourage their discrimination, marginalization or exclusion.Mr. Bonilla said that those who violate the ban could face fines ranging from 674,000 pesos to 1.2 million pesos, or between about $39,000 and $71,000.The City Council approved the ban unanimously on Wednesday amid a rise in killings of women across Mexico in recent years, and as Chihuahua, a city of about 940,000 residents, is struggling with its own cases of violence against women. Recently, Mr. Bonilla said, about seven out of 10 calls to 911 in Chihuahua have involved cases of domestic violence, particularly against women.“Violence against women has reached levels that we could consider like a pandemic,” he said. “We can’t allow this to happen, and we also can’t allow this to be normalized.”It was unclear from his message who would impose the fines or how the ban on misogynistic lyrics would be enforced. Money raised from the fines will be channeled to a women’s institute in Chihuahua and a confidential women’s shelter, said Blanca Patricia Ulate Bernal, a Chihuahua city councilwoman who proposed the ban.Ms. Ulate Bernal said in a post on Facebook last week that the law will apply to concerts and events in the city that require a municipal permit. She added that the ban would help ensure that women have the right “to enjoy a life free of violence.”Mr. Bonilla, Ms. Ulate Bernal and other council members did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The lyrics ban was passed about a month after Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, criticized songs known as corridos tumbados, or trap ballads, whose lyrics glorify drug smugglers and violence.“We’re never going to censor anyone,” Mr. López Obrador said at a news conference in June. “They can sing what they want, but we’re not going to stay quiet.”The approval of the ban is not the first time the city of Chihuahua has taken a strong stance against the performance of certain songs. Citing high levels of drug violence, Chihuahua banned the long-running band Los Tigres del Norte in 2012 after a concert during which the group performed three songs known as narcocorridos, which celebrate the exploits of drug traffickers. The city also fined the concert organizers 20,000 pesos, or about $1,600, at the time. More