A miniature poodle named Sage won the top prize Tuesday night at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, in what veteran handler Kaz Hosaka said would be his final time at the United States' most prestigious canine event. After 45 years of competing and two best in show dogs, he plans to retire.

Sage notched the 11th triumph for poodles of various sizes at Westminster; only wire fox terriers have won more. The last miniature poodle to take the trophy was Spice, with Hosaka, in 2002.

“No words,” he said in the ring to describe his reaction to Sage’s win before supplying a few: “So happy — exciting.”

Striding briskly and proudly around the ring, the inky-black poodle “gave a great performance for me,” Hosaka added.

Sage bested six other finalists to take best in show. Second went to Mercedes, a German shepherd whose handler, Kent Boyles, also has shepherded a best in show winner before.

Others in the final round included Comet, a shih tzu who won the big American Kennel Club National Championship last year; Monty, a giant schnauzer who arrived at Westminster as the nation’s top-ranked dog and was a Westminster finalist last year; Louis, an Afghan hound; Micah, a black cocker spaniel; and Frankie, a colored bull terrier.

While Sage was going around the ring, a protester carrying a sign urging people to “boycott breeders” tried to climb in and was quickly intercepted by security personnel. Police and the animal rights group PETA said three demonstrators were arrested. Charges have not yet been decided.

In an event where all competitors are champions in dog showing's point system, winning can depend on subtleties and a standout turn at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, home of the U.S. Open tennis tournament.

The final lineup was “excellent, glorious,” best in show judge Rosalind Kramer said.

To Monty’s handler and co-owner, Katie Bernardin, "just to be in the ring with everyone else is an honor.”

“We all love our dogs. We’re trying our best," she said in the ring after Monty's semifinal win. “A stallion” of a dog, he's solid, powerful and “very spirited," said Bernardin of Chaplin, Connecticut.

So spirited that while Bernardin was pregnant, she did obedience and other dog sports with Monty because he needed the stimulation.

Dogs first compete against others of their breed. Then the winner of each breed goes up against others in its “group.” The seven group winners meet in the final round.

The best in show winner gets a trophy and a place in dog-world history, but no cash prize.

Besides the winners, there were other dogs that were hits with the crowd. A lagotto Romagnolo named Harry earned a chuckle from the stadium audience by sitting up and begging for a treat from his handler, and a vizsla named Fletcher charmed spectators by jumping up on its handler after finishing a spin around the ring.

There were big cheers, too, for a playful great Pyrenees called Sebastian and a Doberman pinscher named Emilio.

Other dogs that vied in vain for a spot in the finals included Stache, a Sealyham terrier. He won the National Dog Show that was televised on Thanksgiving and took top prize at a big terrier show in Pennsylvania last fall.

Stache showcases a rare breed that’s considered vulnerable to extinction even in its native Britain.

“They’re a little-known treasure,” said Stache’s co-owner, co-breeder and handler, Margery Good of Cochranville, Pennsylvania, who has bred “Sealys” for half a century. Originally developed in Wales to hunt badgers and other burrowing game, the terriers with a “fall” of hair over their eyes are courageous but comedic — Good dubs them “silly hams.”

Westminster can feel like a study in canine contrasts. Just walking around, a visitor could see a Chihuahua peering out of a carrying bag at a stocky Neapolitan mastiff, a ring full of honey-colored golden retrievers beside a lineup of stark-black giant schnauzers, and handlers with dogs far larger than themselves.

Shane Jichetti was one of them. Ralphie, the 175-pound (34-kg) great Dane she co-owns, outweighs her by a lot. It takes considerable experience to show so big an animal, but “if you have a bond with your dog, and you just go with it, it works out,” she said.

Plus Ralphie, for all his size, is “so chill,” said Jichetti. Playful at home on New York's Staten Island, he's spot-on — just like his harlequin-pattern coat — when it's time to go in the ring.

“He's just an honest dog,” Jichetti said.

The Westminster show, which dates to 1877, centers on the traditional purebred judging that leads to the best in show prize. But over the last decade, the club has added agility and obedience events open to mixed-breed dogs.

And this year, the agility competition counted its first non-purebred winner, a border collie-papillon mix named Nimble.

And Kramer, the best in show judge, made a point of thanking "every dog, whether it’s a house dog or a show dog.

“Because you make our lives whole.”

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Associated Press photographer Julia Nikhinson contributed.

Pulaski County Sheriff Eric Higgins defended the decision to allow the series, “Unlocked: A Jail Experiment” to be filmed at the county jail. The eight-episode series, which premiered last month, highlights a program giving some inmates more freedom at the Little Rock facility.

The decision has prompted scrutiny from local and state officials, who said they weren't aware of the series until shortly before its premiere. The series focuses on a six-week experiment that gave inmates in one cellblock more freedom by unlocking their cell doors. Higgins said he did not approach Netflix or Lucky 8, the production company that filmed it, about the series.

“I took action to ensure that we have a reentry program to help those who are booked into our facility to come out and be better individuals,” Higgins told members of the Joint Performance Review Committee.

Republican Sen. Jonathan Dismang said he doesn't have a problem with the sheriff's reentry program or trying something new to address recidivism. But he said he was concerned with it being the focus of a show, and questioned how it could be considered an experiment if it was being filmed.

“I think it's an exploitation of your prisoners that you allowed a film crew to come in,” Dismang said.

Another Republican lawmaker said he was worried about what the show would do to the state's reputation, comparing it to a 1994 HBO documentary about gangs in Little Rock.

“For most of the people that watched this docuseries, this is the first time they've ever been exposed to Pulaski County, or perhaps to the state of Arkansas," Rep. David Ray said. “I worry about the brand damage that our state sustains from this being the first perception of our state to other people.”

Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde — the county's top elected administrator — said he wasn't aware of the series until he saw a trailer before its premiere. Hyde has said that the agreement between the sheriff and the production company was illegal because Hyde didn't sign it. The county has since returned a $60,000 check from the production company that filmed the series.

Higgins, a Democrat who was first elected in 2018 and is the county's first Black sheriff, has had the backing of some community members. The Little Rock chapter of the NAACP has supported Higgins' decision, and supporters of the sheriff filled a committee room for Tuesday's hearing.

Democratic Sen. Linda Chesterfield said Higgins' supporters are looking for “someone to provide humane treatment for people who have been treated inhumanely."

“We are viewing this through different lenses, and it's important we respect the lenses through which we view it,” Chesterfield said.

Messi, the dog from the film “Anatomy of a Fall,” walked up and down the Cannes carpet on Tuesday ahead of the opening ceremony. Lines of tuxedo-clad photographers called out “Messi! Messi” while the border collie strolled past and climbed the stairs to the Palais des Festivals. There, he sat and held his front paws up in the air, like a movie star waving to the crowd.

For some 20 minutes, Messi had Cannes' complete attention while frolicking on the carpet. His bark echoed down the Croisette. The red carpet went unsoiled.

For Messi, it was a kind of return to the scene of the crime. Justine Triet's murder mystery “Anatomy of a Fall” last year premiered in Cannes where it went on to win the festival's top award, the Palme d'Or. Messi — Snoop in the film — won the Palm Dog, a journalist-created prize for the festival's top dog.

And as “Anatomy of a Fall,” in which the dog's perspective holds certain keys to the whodunit, continued through awards season, Messi emerged as Hollywood's favorite new pooch and a particularly cuddly Oscar campaign prop. He attended both the academy luncheon of nominees and the Oscar ceremony. “Anatomy of a Fall” won best original screenplay.

Messi isn't in Cannes just for an encore bow/bone. The festival is shooting daily one-minute videos of Messi for French television that will be collected for a TikTok video. On Tuesday, he carried a camera stick in his teeth.

And yet, the usual cavalcade of celebrities and filmmakers from around the world are descending upon the French Riviera over the course of two weeks. And so is The Associated Press. This year, we're keeping a running diary of life at — and in — Cannes. Follow along for an insider's view from the festival.

TUESDAY, MAY 14

Opening day in Cannes is relatively calm and straightforward, as far as Cannes days go. Just one movie premieres. Under gloomy skies, Cannes kicked off with “The Second Act,” a French comedy about a group of actors filming a movie directed by artificial intelligence. Meryl Streep was given an honorary Palme d'Or. And the jury headed by Greta Gerwig was introduced.

— Cannes opening ceremonies are brief but singularly surreal. After a clip reel, Gerwig was serenaded with David Bowie's “Modern Love” by Zaho de Sagazan, an homage to Gerwig's “Frances Ha.” As the singer made her way from the audience to the stage, Gerwig seemed to be choking back both laughter and tears.

— Last year’s Cannes is talked about with hushed tones because of how good it was — for the terrific lineup and for the post-Cannes success of some films. That made Messi, the dog from last year's Palme winner “Anatomy of a Fall," an especially welcome presence on the red carpet. The border collie, who's been enlisted to shoot daily videos for French TV, frolicked up and down the carpet ahead of the opening ceremony. Cannes has strict rules about formal attire — women without heels were once turned away. But Messi went bare paws.

— It's been just over two months since the Oscars, but Gerwig wasn't the only one stepping back into the spotlight. A fellow juror is best actress nomineeLily Gladstone, who said of the Cannes invite: "I thought I just got over my imposter syndrome last year."

NOTABLE NUMBER: Zero. The amount of times Messi soiled the red carpet.

LA CITATION DU JOUR: “My mother, who is usually right about everything, said to me: ‘Meryl, my darling, you’ll see. It all goes so fast. So fast.’ And it has, and it does. Except for my speech, which is too long.” — Meryl Streep

The Côte d’Azur festival, which kicked off Tuesday, is a 10-day ballet of spectacle and film where even the photographers wear tuxedos, standing ovations are timed with stopwatches and movies tend to be referred to by the names of their directors — “the Almodóvar,” “the Malick,” “the Coppola.”

From the outside, it can seem mad. From the inside, it can be hardly less disorienting. But grasping some of Cannes' quirks and traditions can help you understand just what is unspooling in the south of France and what, exactly, a Palm Dog is.

WHY DOES CANNES MATTER?

The short answer is that Cannes is the largest and arguably most significant film festival, and few care more deeply about the art of cinema than the French. This is where cinema was born and it’s where it’s most closely guarded. It’s not a coincidence that to enter the Palais des Festivals, the central hub, you must climb 24 red-carpeted steps, as if you’re ascending into some movie nirvana.

Cannes is also singularly global, attracting filmmakers, producers and journalists from around the world. It’s a little like an Olympics for film; countries set up their own tents in an international village. Because Cannes is also the largest film market in the world, many who come here are trying to sell their movies or looking to buy up rights. Deal-making, though not quite the frenzy it once was, happens in hotel rooms along the Croisette, aboard yachts docked in the harbor and, yes, on Zoom calls.

But aside from being a beacon to filmmakers and executives, Cannes is a draw for its shimmering French Riviera glamour. Since the days of stars like Grace Kelly and Brigitte Bardot, Cannes has been renown as a sun-kissed center stage for fashion.

HOW OLD IS CANNES?

Originally called the International Film Festival, Cannes was born in the lead-up to World War II. Venice had launched the first major film festival in 1932, but in 1938, fascist influence on Venice was pervasive. The French government in 1939 chose the tourist destination of Cannes as the place for a new festival — though because of the war, the first edition wasn’t held until 1946. This year’s festival is the 77th edition.

WHAT IS IT LIKE ON THE GROUND?

The hive of activity is the Palais, a massive complex by the sea full of cinemas with names like Buñuel, Bazin and, the granddaddy, the Grand Théâtre Lumière. This is where the red carpet runs in Cannes, nightly hosting two or three world premieres beneath a glass canopy flanked by rows of photographers. Festival cars ferry stars and directors who are ushered down the carpet and up the steps. Unlike most movie premieres, there are no reporters on the carpet.

Filmmakers and casts instead face questions from the media the day after their premieres, at a press conference preceded by a photo call. The press conferences can be atypically newsy, too; after Danish director Lars von Trier declared “I am a Nazi” at a Cannes press conference in 2011, he was named “persona non grata” by the festival for years.

Interpreters translate live for headphone-wearing reporters. Inside the Palais, bleary-eyed attendees are treated to gratis espresso.

Down the Croisette, the oceanside, palm tree-lined promenade of Cannes, there are regal old hotels like the Carlton and the Martinez from where festival attendees flow in and out, interviews might be happening on balconies as autograph-seeking fans gather outside in throngs. After-parties are typically held in clubs across the Croisette, by the beach.

WHO ATTENDS?

Unlike public festivals like Toronto or SXSW, Cannes is industry-only and largely out of reach for most moviegoers. That doesn’t stop the desperate, tuxedo-clad ticket seekers who hold signs outside the Palais on the chance someone has an extra, or the photo-takers who stand on small ladders near the red carpet.

Cannes is rigorously hierarchical, with a system of color-coded badges regulating access. If you hear about a film being booed at Cannes — even Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” was famously jeered before winning the Palme d’Or — it's usually at a press screening.

The premieres, largely attended by industry professionals, are where the prolonged standing ovations take place. But this, like many things at Cannes, is a bit of stagecraft to boost the mythology. After the credits role, a cameraman rushes in, with his footage fed live to the screen. He goes down the aisles, giving the audience a chance to applaud for the director and each star. No one is just cheering for a dark movie screen.

WHAT DOES ‘IN COMPETITION’ MEAN?

Cannes hierarchy is in the lineup, too. Attention focuses most on the films “in competition”: usually around 20 movies competing for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top award. Past winners include “Apocalypse Now,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “Parasite.” Last year, it went to Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall.” Winners are chosen by a jury of nine that changes every year. This year’s is presided over by Greta Gerwig.

Competition is only one section, though. Many high-profile films might play out of competition, as “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” is this year. Un Certain Regard gathers a lineup of original or daring films. First and second films play in the sidebar Critics’ Week. There are also midnight selections and the recently launched Premiere sidebar, which also takes some overflow for films that didn’t fit into competition. Restorations and documentaries play in Cannes Classics.

And down the Croisette, separate from the official selection, is the Directors' Fortnight or the Quinzaine, a parallel showcase launched in 1969 by a group of French filmmakers after the 1968 Cannes was canceled.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PALM DOG?

There are many other prizes, too, even an unofficial one created by journalists called the Palm Dog (sadly, not the Palme D'Og), for the best canine in Cannes. Last year, that honor went to Messi, the “Anatomy of a Fall” pooch.

Created in 2001, the annual award and its spinoff categories is decided by a jury of reporters. Past winners have included Uggie from “The Artist” (2011) and Sayuri, who played the heroic pit bull in “Once Upon A Time ... In Hollywood” (2019).

As for the reigning champ, Messi captivated the carpet on opening day this year, in town again as a correspawndent of sorts for French television.

But purebreds won every year — until Saturday, when a border collie-papillion mix aptly named Nimble outran and outmaneuvered 50 other finalists to seize the trophy and plant a flag for blended-breed dogs everywhere.

“She just tries hard, and she's a wonderful dog,” handler Cynthia Hornor told The Associated Press this week.

Just about a foot (30.5 cm) tall, Nimble powered through an obstacle course of jumps, tunnels, ramps and other features like a furry, black-and-white, well-targeted torpedo to cheers from the crowd in the agility finals.

Victory goes to the fastest canine, with penalties for any goofs in clearing the obstacles. Handlers run alongside to signal their dogs where to go. A time under 30 seconds is notable.

Nimble had a flawless run in 28.76 seconds, over a second ahead of her closest competitor, a border collie called Vanish. Border collies have dominated in prior years, and no dog as small as Nimble had ever won before.

"I wasn't sure it was possible," said Hornor, an agility trainer from Ellicott City, Maryland, who won the agility contest last year with a border collie named Truant. Truant also competed this year, but Hornor thinks he wasn't jealous of Nimble's win: “Truant loves her.”

Nimble was deliberately bred from two breeds that are known for their agility chops. The sport's devotees even have a term for the mix: “border paps.”

Still, her win amplifies Westminster's pledge to celebrate all dogs.

“We were thrilled” to see what the show world calls an “all-American” winner, club President Donald Sturz said.

The Westminster show, which dates to 1877, included a few mixed-breeds in its early days but soon became a purebred-only event. It centers on breed-by-breed judging that leads to the coveted best in show award.

In adding agility in 2014, the club embraced a fast-growing sport — and a way to broaden its tent, attract a bigger audience of dog lovers and provide something of a retort to longstanding criticism from animal-rights activists who view Westminster as a wrongheaded canine beauty contest for the pedigreed set. The agility contest includes a special prize for the top mixed-breed competitor.

As for Nimble, she might be a special speedster mix, but she's also a regular dog that loves swimming, hiking and just hanging out, Hornor said.

“She's a great dog to live with,” she said. “She's calm — until she goes out there.”

A spokesperson for publisher Penguin Random House Canada said Munro, winner of the Nobel literary prize in 2013, died Monday at home in Port Hope, Ontario. Munro had been in frail health for years and often spoke of retirement, a decision that proved final after the author's 2012 collection, "Dear Life."

Often ranked with Anton Chekhov, John Cheever and a handful of other short story writers, Munro achieved stature rare for an art form traditionally placed beneath the novel. She was the first lifelong Canadian to win the Nobel and the first recipient cited exclusively for short fiction. Echoing the judgment of so many before, the Swedish academy pronounced her a "master of the contemporary short story” who could “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages.”

Munro, little known beyond Canada until her late 30s, also became one of the few short story writers to enjoy ongoing commercial success. Sales in North America alone exceeded 1 million copies and the Nobel announcement raised "Dear Life" to the high end of The New York Times' bestseller list for paperback fiction. Other popular books included "Too Much Happiness," "The View from Castle Rock" and "The Love of a Good Woman.”

Over a half century of writing, Munro perfected one of the greatest tricks of any art form: illuminating the universal through the particular, creating stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away. She produced no single definitive work, but dozens of classics that were showcases of wisdom, technique and talent — her inspired plot twists and artful shifts of time and perspective; her subtle, sometimes cutting humor; her summation of lives in broad dimension and fine detail; her insights into people across age or background, her genius for sketching a character, like the adulterous woman introduced as “short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony.”

Her best known fiction included "The Beggar Maid," a courtship between an insecure young woman and an officious rich boy who becomes her husband; "Corrie," in which a wealthy young woman has an affair with an architect "equipped with a wife and young family"; and "The Moons of Jupiter," about a middle-aged writer who visits her ailing father in a Toronto hospital and shares memories of different parts of their lives.

"I think any life can be interesting," Munro said during a 2013 post-prize interview for the Nobel Foundation. "I think any surroundings can be interesting."

Disliking Munro, as a writer or as a person, seemed almost heretical. The wide and welcoming smile captured in her author photographs was complemented by a down-to-earth manner and eyes of acute alertness, fitting for a woman who seemed to pull stories out of the air the way songwriters discovered melodies. She was admired without apparent envy, placed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick at the very top of the pantheon. Munro's daughter, Sheila Munro, wrote a memoir in which she confided that "so unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel as though I'm living inside an Alice Munro story." Fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood called her a pioneer for women, and for Canadians.

"Back in the 1950s and 60s, when Munro began, there was a feeling that not only female writers but Canadians were thought to be both trespassing and transgressing," Atwood wrote in a 2013 tribute published in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel. "The road to the Nobel wasn't an easy one for Munro: the odds that a literary star would emerge from her time and place would once have been zero."

Although not overtly political, Munro witnessed and participated in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and '70s and permitted her characters to do the same. She was a farmer's daughter who married young, then left her husband in the 1970s and took to "wearing miniskirts and prancing around," as she recalled during a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. Many of her stories contrasted the generation of Munro's parents with the more open-ended lives of their children, departing from the years when housewives daydreamed “between the walls that the husband was paying for.”

Moviegoers would become familiar with "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," the improbably seamless tale of a married woman with memory loss who has an affair with a fellow nursing home patient, a story further complicated by her husband's many past infidelities. "The Bear" was adapted by Sarah Polley into the 2006 feature film "Away from Her," which brought an Academy Award nomination for Julie Christie. In 2014, Kristen Wiig starred in “Hateship, Loveship,” an adaptation of the story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," in which a housekeeper leaves her job and travels to a distant rural town to meet up with a man she believes is in love with her — unaware the romantic letters she has received were concocted by his daughter and a friend.

Even before the Nobel, Munro received honors from around the English-language world, including Britain's Man Booker International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award in the U.S., where the American Academy of Arts and Letters voted her in as an honorary member. In Canada, she was a three-time winner of the Governor's General Award and a two-time winner of the Giller Prize.

Munro was a short story writer by choice, and, apparently, by design. Judith Jones, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf who worked with Updike and Anne Tyler, did not want to publish "Lives of Girls & Women," her only novel, writing in an internal memo that "there's no question the lady can write but it's also clear she is primarily a short story writer."

Munro would acknowledge that she didn't think like a novelist.

"I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people's lives," she told the AP. “That was one of the problems, why I couldn't write novels. I never saw things hanging together too well.”

Alice Ann Laidlaw was born in Wingham, Ontario, in 1931, and spent much of her childhood there, a time and place she often used in her fiction, including the four autobiographical pieces that concluded “Dear Life.” Her father was a fox farmer, her mother a teacher and the family’s fortunes shifted between middle class and working poor, giving the future author a special sensitivity to money and class. Young Alice was often absorbed in literature, starting with the first time she was read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” She was a compulsive inventor of stories and the “sort of child who reads walking upstairs and props a book in front of her when she does the dishes.”

A top student in high school, she received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism as a “cover-up” for her pursuit of literature. She was still an undergraduate when she sold a story about a lonely teacher, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” to CBC Radio. She was also publishing work in her school’s literary journal.

One fellow student read “Dimensions” and wrote to the then-Laidlaw, telling her the story reminded him of Chekhov. The student, Gerald Fremlin, would become her second husband. Another fellow student, James Munro, was her first husband. They married in 1951, when she was only 20, and had four children, one of whom died soon after birth.

Settling with her family in British Columbia, Alice Munro wrote between trips to school, housework and helping her husband at the bookstore that they co-owned and would turn up in some of her stories. She wrote one book in the laundry room of her house, her typewriter placed near the washer and dryer. Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and other writers from the American South inspired her, through their sense of place and their understanding of the strange and absurd.

Isolated from the literary center of Toronto, she did manage to get published in several literary magazines and to attract the attention of an editor at Ryerson Press (later bought out by McGraw Hill). Her debut collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was released in 1968 with a first printing of just under 2,700 copies. A year later it won the Governor’s General Award and made Munro a national celebrity — and curiosity. “Literary Fame Catches City Mother Unprepared,” read one newspaper headline.

“When the book first came they sent me a half dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t tell my husband they had come, because I couldn’t bear it. I was afraid it was terrible,” Munro told the AP. “And one night, he was away, and I forced myself to sit down and read it all the way through, and I didn’t think it was too bad. And I felt I could acknowledge it and it would be OK.”

By the early ’70s, she had left her husband, later observing that she was not “prepared to be a submissive wife.” Her changing life was best illustrated by her response to the annual Canadian census. For years, she had written down her occupation as “housewife.” In 1971, she switched to “writer.”

Over the next 40 years, her reputation and readership only grew, with many of her stories first appearing in The New Yorker. Her prose style was straightforward, her tone matter of fact, but her plots revealed unending disruption and disappointments: broken marriages, violent deaths, madness and dreams unfulfilled, or never even attempted. “Canadian Gothic” was one way she described the community of her childhood, a world she returned to when, in middle age, she and her second husband relocated to nearby Clinton.

“Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters,” Atwood wrote, “just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that.”

She had the kind of curiosity that would have made her an ideal companion on a long train ride, imagining the lives of the other passengers. Munro wrote the story “Friend of My Youth,” in which a man has an affair with his fiancee’s sister and ends up living with both women, after an acquaintance told her about some neighbors who belonged to a religion that forbade card games. The author wanted to know more — about the religion, about the neighbors.

Even as a child, Munro had regarded the world as an adventure and mystery and herself as an observer, walking around Wingham and taking in the homes as if she were a tourist. In “The Peace of Utrecht,” an autobiographical story written in the late 1960s, a woman discovers an old high school notebook and remembers a dance she once attended with an intensity that would envelop her whole existence.

“And now an experience which seemed not at all memorable at the time,” Munro wrote, “had been transformed into something curiously meaningful for me, and complete; it took in more than the girls dancing and the single street, it spread over the whole town, its rudimentary pattern of streets and its bare trees and muddy yards just free of the snow, over the dirt roads where the lights of cars appeared, jolting toward the town, under an immense pale wash of sky.”

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This story has been updated to correct the title of “The Beggar Maid.”

While in college in the late '80s, Hanna signed up for a writers' workshop led by her hero, the postmodern novelist Kathy Acker. The author asked Hanna why she wanted to write. Hanna responded, “Because no one has listened to me my whole life and I really want to be heard.”

Acker's feedback? “You should start a band.”

“Who gets gifted this? Sometimes I’m like, is life a stimulation and am I in a weird video game?,” Hanna jokes over the phone from her home in Pasadena, California. “I kind of always knew I was going to write this, especially because weird s—- kept happening to me, and the universe kept giving me stories with a beginning, middle and end.”

In “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk,” Hanna — known for her bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and the Julie Ruin, whose songs chastised abusers and celebrated girls, and as a force of the riot grrrlmovement, which brought third-wave feminism to an underground generation and was later commodified into girl-power marketing — accesses new levels of candor.

Out Tuesday, the bulk of the book concerns “'90s Kathleen,” as she describes it.

“At some point I was like, ‘I need to write all this down so I can move on,'" she says.

Across the memoir, Hanna writes with the same spirit of her bands, but without the exorcism-like delivery of her music, it can weigh heavy on the soul. There are moments of male violence and creative triumph. She details a childhood plagued by an alcoholic father that placed her an “the incest continuum," as she'd learn while volunteering at a domestic violence shelter, and a mother who struggled but supported her creative ambitions — an uncomfortable and riveting inside look at an artist who, for many music fans, is viewed at a super-heroic distance.

“I’ve always kind of hated the ‘you’re a badass woman’ thing,” she says.

“I’m a dirty napkin as much as I am a rebel girl, people!” she laughs. In conversation as in her book, Hanna moves effortlessly from wicked humor to disturbing truth-telling.

“It’s a very strange sensation to have the public viewpoint be, ‘You’re this, you know, badass woman on stage, superhero, feminist,’ and one of your best friends f——— raped you. And you don’t tell anybody. And you’re still getting up on stage, you go on tour literally next day, and you play all these shows, and for years you don’t even tell your own band who knows this person.”

“Rebel Girl” was initially 600 pages long, nearly double what it is now. Gone are stories that don't work on the page — and other accounts of abuse, including another rape and kidnapping.

“It was too much," she says. "But I still left a lot of it in, and the reason was: Millions of people have too much.”

While writing the book, Hanna was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress syndrome and entered therapy for trauma.

“I’ve had moments of a kind of terror flash through me and they have to do with those things of, like, not being believed or someone coming after me who’s mentioned,” she says.

But if they didn't believe her? “I’d be a pretty good writer if I could make this s—- up.”

Elsewhere, there are stories that fans of Hanna will know well, finally presented in her own words: Like how she gave Kurt Cobain the title “Smells like Teen Spirit," which would become Nirvana's biggest hit, or how the name “Bikini Kill” came from indie musician Lois Maffeo — a reference to the swimsuit design named after Bikini Atoll, where the U.S. government tested 23 nuclear weapons after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the images of Rita Hayworth that were taped to the side of the weapons, eventually dubbing her a “bombshell.”

Or the time Courtney Love punched her in the face at Lollapalooza in 1995. “People don’t see musicians, sometimes, as human. And so, they’re like, ’Oh, hahaha, that’s like two cartoons fighting,'" she says. "No, it was one woman walking up and physically assaulting another for no reason.”

And there are other anecdotes she works to reclaim and course-correct: She's open about a lack of diversity in early riot grrrl meetings; she grapples with a tension between her public perception and personal pain.

In the latter sections of the book, Hanna details her long-time, life-threatening battle with Lyme Disease and other previously private revelations: heart-warming descriptions of her marriage to Beastie Boys ' Adam Horovitz, a miscarriage, the adoption of her son, Julius, and the fact that she and Bikini Kill's Tobi Vail also wonder, like their fans do, what role their band and the riot grrrl movement might've played in modern identity politics — not as progenitors, but influencers.

“When we see a ‘girl power’ shirt at Target, we're like, ‘What do we have to do with that?’” she muses that there is a line between what is progressive and what is punitive, and it is often obscured.

Despite those complications, the memoir ends with Hanna's bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre reuniting, and glorious, joyous depictions of motherhood — of her son, and her mother, and her friend's children — and, in some ways, the next era of feminist punks she inspired, like the teenage band the Linda Lindas.

“She's not afraid to speak the truth," says Eloise Wong of the Linda Lindas. "I'm really lucky to have had access to her music from a young age, you know? So, I had these feminist ideas growing up.”

Wong says the reason many of the ideas Hanna's work has espoused continue to connect with young people is that “sadly, a lot of the things that she talks about are still relevant today."

She pauses.

“The idea of amplifying your own voice and making yourself heard if no one’s going to listen is just, like, so cool, you know?”

A study from Austin-based travel company Upgraded Points calculated the most and least expensive cities for a weekend trip to see a concert. The study, released Tuesday, measured concert costs in the 50 largest US cities.

Concert ticket prices ranked highest in Austin at $279.03 on average, according to the study. Average tickets in Las Vegas, San Francisco and New York followed at $260.52, $244.33 and $231.06, respectively.

But the cost of concert tickets was just one part of the study. Austin also ranked among the most expensive cities to travel to for a concert when flight, meal, rideshare and other costs were totaled.

On average, it costs $1,331.73 per person for a weekend trip to Austin for a concert.

The study calculated the total costs based on eight cost factors: concert ticket cost, airfare cost, Airbnb nightly price for two nights, rideshare costs for two rides, cost of beers inside the venue, cost of alcohol outside the venue, meal costs for five meals and the close of a tour t-shirt.

Austin also ranked as the city with the third most expensive parking costs behind San Francisco and Los Angeles. Parking passes were about $66 on average.

Here are the top 10 most expensive cities for a weekend concert trip, according to the study:

• New York, New York: $1,792.94
• San Francisco, California: $1,691.80
• Los Angeles, California: $1,516.37
• Boston, Massachusetts: $1,453.77
• Seattle, Washington: $1,406.86
• San Diego, California: $1,364.86
• Washington, DC: $1,351.38
• Virginia Beach, Virginia: $1,348.94
• Chicago, Illinois: $1,334.06
• Austin, Texas: $1,331.73

These are the least expensive cities on the list:

• Lexington, Kentucky: $1,037.05
• Cleveland, Ohio: $1,073.19
• Cincinnati, Ohio: $1,096.84
• Memphis, Tennessee: $1,123.31
• Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: $1,127.82
• Baltimore, Maryland: $1,129
• Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: $1,139.66
• St. Louis, Missouri: $1,140.02
• Louisville, Kentucky: $1,140.79
• Orlando, Florida: $1,141.11

The full study with a cost breakdown is available online.

A defense attorney filed the shortly worded appeal notice as Hannah Gutierrez-Reed serves an 18-month sentence at a New Mexico penitentiary for women. Her attorneys have 30 days to submit detailed arguments.

Prosecutors blame Gutierrez-Reed for unwittingly bringing live ammunition onto the set of “Rust,” where it was expressly prohibited, and for failing to follow basic gun-safety protocols. A jury convicted her in state court in March.

Baldwin, the lead actor and co-producer of the film, was pointing a gun at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins during a rehearsal when the gun went off, killing her and wounding director Joel Souza.

Baldwin has pleaded not guilty to a charge of involuntary manslaughter and says he pulled back the hammer — but not the trigger — and the gun fired. His trial is scheduled for July.

Gutierrez-Reed was acquitted of an evidence tampering charge at trial, and still confronts separate court proceedings on allegations she carried a firearm into a bar in downtown Santa Fe.

A New Mexico judge last month found that Gutierrez-Reed’s recklessness on the “Rust” set amounted to a serious violent offense, noting few indications of genuine remorse in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

Gutierrez-Reed said at a sentencing hearing she had tried to do her best on the set despite not having “proper time, resources and staffing,” and that she was not the monster that people have made her out to be. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer said the maximum sentence was appropriate.

A spokesperson confirmed that Sanborn died Sunday in Tarrytown, New York. The cause was complications from prostate cancer.

“The news of the loss of David Sanborn to the music world has deeply saddened me,” pianist Bob James, who collaborated with Sanborn on the Grammy-winning “Double Vision” album, wrote on Facebook. “I was so privileged to share major highlights of my career in partnership with him. His legacy will live on through the recordings. Every note he played came straight from his heart, with a passionate intensity that could make an ordinary tune extraordinary.”

Equally versatile and prolific, Sanborn enjoyed rare fame and popularity for a saxophone player. He released eight gold albums and one platinum album; sat in frequently with the “Late Night With David Letterman” band led by Paul Shaffer; and even co-hosted a show, “Night Music,” that included appearances by Miles Davis, Eric Clapton, Lou Reed and many others.

“Jazz has always transformed and absorbed what's around it,” he told DownBeat magazine in 2017. “Real musicians don't have any time to spend thinking about limited categories.”

A native of Tampa, Florida, whose family moved to Kirkwood, Missouri, Sanborn took up the saxophone as a boy after recovering from a severe bout with polio and being advised by a doctor to strengthen his lungs. By his mid-teens, he had performed with blues greats Albert King and Little Milton, and he would soon join the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, their shows including a set at the Woodstock festival in 1969.

From the 1970s and after, Sanborn was among the busiest musicians in the business. He was a session player for dozens of top artists, from Bowie and Taylor to the Rolling Stones and Stevie Wonder, and made more than 20 solo albums, including the Grammy winners “Straight to the Heart” and “Double Vision.” He continued to tour frequently even after his cancer diagnosis in 2018 and had already planned shows for next year.

The industry newsletter Publishers Lunch on Tuesday released “Buzz Books 2024: Fall/Winter,” which includes previews from dozens of fiction, nonfiction, young adult and debut books.

Featured novels include Attenberg's “A Reason to See You Again,” Fiona Davis' “The Stolen Queen,” Betsy Lerner's “Shred Sisters” and the debut work “The Undercurrent” by Sarah Sawyer. Sobel's new book is “The Element of Marie Curie,” while the speaker and podcast host Molly Fletcher offers personal and professional advice in “Dynamic Drive.”

Young adult books include Mbalia's fantasy novel “Jax Freeman and the Phantom Shriek,” Beatty's adventure story “Sylvia Doe and the 100-Year Flood" and Judy I. Lin's horror tale “The Dark Becomes Her.”

The 59th ACM Awards, hosted by Reba McEntire, will take place Thursday at the Ford Center at The Star in Frisco, Texas, just north of Dallas.

Across his career, Keith took home 14 ACM Awards, twice winning the top prize of entertainer of the year. He died in February at age 62, following a stomach cancer diagnosis.

“I’ve been a fan of his since the beginning and his songs are some of the first songs I played back in clubs early in my career, including the one I’ll be performing on the show," Aldean said in a statement. "I was lucky enough to share the stage with Toby in Oklahoma this last year, and it means a lot to be able to honor him and properly celebrate his iconic career and legacy. He was one of a kind.”

Having Aldean, the most recent artist of the decade recipient, honor Keith made sense, ACM CEO Damon Whiteside said in a statement.

“The popularity, influence, and love for Toby Keith is infinite since his passing earlier this year," Whiteside said, adding that the academy was looking forward to welcoming Keith's family.

Luke Combs leads the 2024 nominations with eight nods. For a fifth year in a row, he’s up for both male artist of the year and entertainer of the year.

Megan Moroney and Morgan Wallen follow with six each, while Cody Johnson, Chris Stapleton and Lainey Wilson are tied with five.

Kane Brown, Jelly Roll, Cody Johnson, Miranda Lambert, Thomas Rhett, Post Malone, Parker McCollum, McEntire, Wilson and Stapleton will perform during the telecast. Fans can expect a few interesting collaborations as well — Kelsea Ballerini with Noah Kahan; Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani and Nate Smith with Avril Lavigne.

Among the presenters are Alabama, BRELAND,Carin León, Little Big Town, Randy Travis.

The awards will stream on Prime Video and the Amazon Music channel on Twitch Live at 8 p.m. Eastern. The red carpet feed will begin at 7 p.m.

Harrah's Resort SoCal officially welcomed the comedian and actor as the city's newest mayor on Monday. Decked out in his signature purple suit and bow tie, the "Only Murders in the Building" star took the oath of office in front of Funner residents.

During his induction ceremony, Short emphasized his enthusiasm for the opportunity to lead Funner and outlined his vision for the city's future, alongside emcee and friend Jane Lynch.

"I am proud to be mayor, and I will do everything I can to make Funner even more fun," Short told Nexstar's KSWB.

Before you question the position, just know it's only promotional for Harrah's.

Located between San Diego and Los Angeles, Funner is home to a Harrah's resort, a mini waterpark, a brewery and restaurants of all kinds, including California’s first and only Hell’s Kitchen by Gordon Ramsay.

Short, affectionately called "Mayor Marty," promised to continue making Funner a destination "known for its fun-filled experiences, bringing laughter and joy to all who visit."

Mayor Marty's reign begins with several changes to Funner, like food, cocktails, and hotel and spa packages. He also joked that he wants to bring in paint swatches to change the color of the exterior of Harrah's Resort, if they let him of course.

"Martin Short represents the essence of Funner," said Jill Barrett, senior vice president and general manager of Harrah's Resort SoCal. "His renowned humor and dedication to entertainment make him an ideal leader for guiding Funner into a new era."

For more information on Harrah's Resort SoCal and Funner, California, visit harrahssocal.com and harrahssocal.com/visit-funner.

KSWB/KUSI's Heather Lake contributed to this report.

Wagner, who turns 46 on May 21 and is a great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner, became co-head of the festival in September 2008, along with her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier. Katharina then took over as sole head in 2015.

The festival announced an agreement with government officials in which a manager will be hired to run business operations, leaving the festival director to make artistic decisions within the budget set by the shareholders.

The German and Bavarian governments, and the Society of Friends of Bayreuth each have a 29% share in the festival, and the city of Bayreuth a 13% share.

“I am very pleased that together we have found a way to strengthen artistic autonomy," Wagner said in a statement. "My entire focus can now be purely on my creative work."

Launched by Richard Wagner in 1876 at an opera house built to his specifications, the Bayreuth festival is devoted to the composer's last 10 operas. This year's festival runs from July 25 to Aug. 27.

Luxury Italian fashion house Gucci hosted its star-studded cruise collection catwalk at the Thames-side modern art museum Monday, showing a series of delicate sheer outfits, relaxed denim and daywear, all adorned with the brand's coveted leather bags and other accessories with the double-G logo.

Singers Dua Lipa and Solange Knowles were on the front row with supermodel Kate Moss and her daughter Lila, along with actors Demi Moore, Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott. Also in attendance were Salma Hayek and her husband, Francois-Henri Pinault, who is chair and CEO of Kering, Gucci’s parent company.

It was a big-budget event and the first cruise collection by Sabato De Sarno, who was named Gucci's creative director last year and debuted his womenswear designs in September.

Gucci normally stages its shows in Milan, but like other fashion powerhouses it chooses locations around the world to show off its cruise, or resort, collections — the shows in between the main spring and autumn displays. Last year's destination was the Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, South Korea.

On Monday, models meandered down a runway that wound its way around hundreds of ferns, overhanging plants and mossy paths, the mass of green a contrast to the grey, industrial show space. De Sarno said that contrast extends to his latest designs, which paired luxurious evening looks and floral embroidery with casual jackets and slouchy denim.

And what of the footwear? Comfort comes first, with all outfits, even the most glamorous evening gowns, paired with Mary Jane shoes, ballet flats or platform loafers worn with little white socks.

“Rigor and extravagance, strength in delicacy, Englishness with an Italian accent,” the show notes read.

De Sarno featured a few checked jackets in a nod to British style, though some other designs were a much more subtle tribute. Dresses and coats covered with squares made of a shimmering bead fringe were a reference to Scottish plaids.

Titled “We'll always have London," the show was partly a love letter to the British capital, which the brand says plays a key role in its founding story more than a century ago. Its founder, Guccio Gucci, traveled to London as a teenager and had a stint working as a bellhop in the Savoy, the luxury London hotel.

The brand says Guccio took inspiration from that experience when he opened his first store in Florence in 1921 to sell luggage. The rest, as they say, is history.

The roughly 700-page volume, titled “Freiheit” ("Freedom"), will be published on Nov. 26, publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch announced Monday. Merkel co-wrote the book with her longtime assistant and adviser, Beate Baumann.

Merkel, a former scientist who grew up in communist East Germany, became Germany’s first female chancellor on Nov. 22, 2005. The 69-year-old steered Germany through a succession of crises including the global financial crisis, Europe's debt and migration crises and the coronavirus pandemic.

The publisher quoted Merkel in a statement as saying that “for me, freedom is not stopping learning, not having to stand still but being able to go further, even after leaving politics.” The company said the book will appear “worldwide in over 30 countries” but didn't elaborate.

Merkel has generally kept a low profile since handing over to current Chancellor Olaf Scholz in December 2021. She has stayed out of the political fray and away from events of her center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union.

Merkel was named “The World’s Most Powerful Woman” by Forbes magazine for 10 years in a row, and was seen as a powerful defender of liberal values in the West and a role model for girls.

But her record has faced criticism as well since she stepped down, notably her approach to Ukraine and Russia.

Merkel has defended her actions, saying months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion that a much-criticized 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine bought Kyiv precious time and she won’t apologize for her diplomatic efforts. She also has defended her government’s decisions to buy large quantities of natural gas from Russia, which cut off supplies in 2022.

Lise Davidsen has become classical music’s biggest draw, attracting crowds to the Paris Opéra for her first performances in the title role of Strauss’ “Salome” during the same week Swift filled La Défense Arena across town for the start of her Eras Tour’s European leg.

“It’s a voice of the century,” said American director Lydia Steier, who staged the sex-and-alcohol-fueled “Salome” at the Bastille. “It's an insane intensity acoustically. I think its electric.”

Andreas Homoki, director general of the Zurich Opera, gave Davidsen her first major role in 2016 as Agathe in Weber’s “Der Freischütz.”

“Somebody said she’s the new Nina Stemme. I disagree. She’s the new Nilsson,” he said in a comparison with Birgit Nilsson, regarded as one of the greatest Wagnerian sopranos of the 20th century.

Davidsen is in the midst of a landmark season that included her first staged performances in the title role of Janáček’s “Jenůfa” in Chicago last November and her role debut as Leonora in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” in February. She climbed another big step in the ladder of the leading dramatic soprano repertoire with her Salome debut Thursday.

“I feel very, very lucky that I have this job and that I get to do this as a career,” she said. “It’s an unbelievably privileged job, but it’s also an unbelievably hard job. I think it’s important to remember that it’s a gift to be able to do this because in the hard days, I wonder if I should just quit and never sing again. But then when you get to the end of a run or end of a show even or a good rehearsal, you think what a gift it is to do this.”

Davidsen starts this “Salome” in a back room of the brutalist set where Herod's orgy is taking place, wearing a white raincoat, her black hair stringy in a Goth look. She wanders onto a staircase as three attendants in yellow hazmat suits dispose of bodies.

Steier replaces the dance of the seven veils with a gang rape. In another iconic scene, a Salome body double holds the severed head of Jochanaan (John the Baptist), while Davidsen sings the final portion of her 15-minute solo in a cage. She’s with Johan Reuter, who portrayed Jochanaan, and they rise toward the rafters in an apparent hallucination before Herod orders her death.

The audience whooped after the final note of Sunday's matinee, the second of seven performances through May 28.

“She makes it sound easy. She makes it sound effortless,” conductor Mark Wigglesworth said of her voice. “It’s big, but she never shouts. It’s got a beauty to it. That means you’re not conscious of quantity, you’re just focused on the quality.”

Davidsen called Steier’s controversial staging “unbelievably new and modern.”

"As long as it makes sense, as long as there is reason, I really enjoy doing it,” she said.

At the Met on Feb. 26, Davidsen was so overwhelmed by the audience response after her big fourth-act aria, “Pace, pace, mio dio!” that she broke character, bowing her head and putting a hand over her heart.

“Relief that it went well and I was happy about it,” she explained a few days later.

Davidsen has been home of late only for brief stretches between singing engagements. She and her fiance have a house in London and are building one in Norway.

On the days of performances, Davidsen has a mundane routine that includes walks, laundry, naps and yoga. She gets to the opera house about 2 1/2 hours before curtain to warm up and go for hair and makeup.

Nervous energy on opening nights doesn’t dissipate until the wee hours.

“I pass out in a way rather than sort of fall asleep properly,” she said.

Now 37, the 6-foot-2 Norwegian debuted at the Vienna State Opera in 2017 in the title role of Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos,” at London’s Royal Opera in 2018 as Freia in Wagner’s “Das Rheingold,” at the Bayreuth Festival in 2019 as Elisabeth in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” and at the Met in 2019 as Lisa in Tchaikovsky’s “Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades).”

Even with a string of accolades, Davidsen approaches each role with trepidation.

“Am I good enough?” she said. “It surprises me every time how nervous I get.”

She is to sing Act 2 of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” for the first time in concert with conductor Simon Rattle and tenor Stuart Skelton with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in concert on Nov. 1 and 3 in Munich, then sings “Tosca” at the Met starting Nov. 12 and Leonore in Beethoven’s “Fidelio” there opening on March 4.

"I really wanted to do the ‘Fidelio’ here and, of course, when I was asked to do 'Tosca’ that was a very clear yes for me,” she said in New York before heading to Europe.

Opera aficionados await her first full Isolde and Brünnhilde,

“The Verdi has now been a very big thing for me to get to do ‘Don Carlo’ and then ’Forza’ and I would like to do a 'Un Ballo in Maschera,'" she said. “And then of course Tosca, it’s a really big thing for me next season. And then ever further away, maybe the bigger Wagner roles. I hope that the Verdi, Puccini, Strauss world can be my plan for some more years.”

The story was first published on InTouch Weekly's website on April 10 under the headline “Inside Judge Judy's Quest to Save the Menendez Brothers Nearly 35 Years After Their Parents' Murder,” according to the lawsuit, filed in circuit court in Collier County, Florida.

A version of the story later appeared in the National Enquirer, a sister publication to InTouch Weekly also owned by Accelerate360 Media. The 1989 Menendez murders in Beverly Hills, California, was a case of some tabloid renown.

Sheindlin said she's had nothing to say about the case. Her lawsuit speculated that the news outlets used statements in a Fox Nation docuseries made by “Judi Ramos,” a woman identified as an alternate juror in the first Menendez trial, and misattributed them to the television judge.

There was no immediate comment from Accelerate360, whose attempt to sell the National Enquirer last year fell through.

Sheindlin does not ask for a specific amount of damages, but made clear it wouldn't be cheap.

“When you fabricate stories about me in order to make money for yourselves with no regard for the truth or the reputation I've spent a lifetime cultivating, it's going to cost you,” she said in a statement. “When you've done it multiple times, it's unconscionable and will be expensive. It has to be expensive so that you will stop.”

Sheindlin, who hosted the syndicated “Judge Judy” through 2021 and now hosts “Judy Justice,” has had run-ins with the Enquirer in the past.

In 2017, the newspaper retracted and apologized for stories that falsely claimed she suffered from Alzheimer's disease and depression and had cheated on her husband.

Wecht's death was announced by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, which did not disclose a cause or place of death, saying only that he “passed away peacefully.”

Wecht's almost meteoric rise to fame began in 1964, three years after he reentered civilian life after serving a brief stint at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. At the time, Wecht was serving as an assistant district attorney in Allegheny County and a pathologist in a Pittsburgh hospital.

The request came from a group of forensic scientists: Review the Warren Commission's report that concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated Kennedy. And Wecht, with his usual thoroughness, did just that — the beginning of what became a lifelong obsession to prove his theory that there was more than one shooter involved in the killing.

After reviewing the autopsy documents, discovering the president's brain had gone missing, and viewing an amateur video of the assassination, Wecht concluded the commission's findings that there was a single bullet involved in the attack that killed Kennedy and injured Texas Gov. John Connally was "absolute nonsense."

Wecht's lecture circuit demonstration detailing his theory that it was impossible for one bullet to cause the damage it did on that November day in Dallas made its way into Oliver Stone's movie "JFK" after the director consulted with him. It became the famous courtroom scene showing the path of the “magic bullet.”

Attorney F. Lee Bailey called Wecht the "single most important spearhead of challenge" to the Warren report. Wecht's verbal sparring with Sen. Arlen Specter, a staffer on the commission, also became well known, culminating in an accusation in his book "Cause of Death" that the politician's support of the single-bullet theory was "an asinine, pseudoscientific sham at best."

Yet, somehow, Wecht and Specter overcame their differences and developed something of a friendship, with the senator coming to the pathologist's defense during a grueling, five-year legal battle that sapped him of much of his life's savings and ended in 2009.

In the end, Wecht emerged victorious in that, as well when a series of legal maneuvers and judicial decisions forced prosecutors to drop all fraud and theft charges against him in a case that revolved around accusations that he had used his public post as Allegheny County medical examiner to further his multimillion-dollar private practice.

Wecht's outspokenness on the Kennedy assassination, and the publicity he generated, later made him a go-to pathologist on dozens of other high-profile cases ranging from Elvis Presley to JonBenet Ramsey, the child beauty queen whose death remains unsolved.

At the homicide trial of school head Jean Harris, accused of murdering “Scarsdale Diet” Dr. Herman Tarnower, Wecht testified unsuccessfully for the defense. His testimony at the trial of Claus von Bulow may have helped acquit Von Bulow of charges he tried to kill his heir wife, Sunny.

After studying Elvis' autopsy report, Wecht concluded, and shared his findings on national television, that the King of Rock had likely died of an overdose, not heart disease. His findings spurred Tennessee officials to reopen the case in 1994, though, in the end, the official cause of death remained unchanged.

In the months preceding the O.J. Simpson homicide trial in 1994, Wecht was a frequent talk show guest, conjecturing on the "Today" show and "Good Morning America" about the significance of blood samples and other evidence.

When Michael Jackson died in 2009, Wecht again took to the airwaves, discussing the deadly mix of drugs and sedatives that killed the King of Pop.

Though he spent more than five decades dealing with death on an almost daily basis, Wecht managed to remain generally upbeat, his hearty laugh rumbling from deep within his gut, often humoring himself with his own, sometimes insulting and caustic, jokes.

Still, in a series of interviews with The Associated Press in 2009, Wecht was circumspect, dwelling on the possibility of his own death. His biggest fear, he noted at the time, was suffering or becoming dependent on others on friends and family.

"I want to be alive when I die. Think about that," Wecht said. “I mean, OK, what is life?”

It's key, he said, to die recognizing those you love, because when you die, they won't be there anymore.

"I will be separated from my wife and my children and my grandchildren and, someday, my great-grandchildren. That's what death means to me," Wecht said.

"I'd like to have it go on forever."

Always the realist, however, Wecht took the time to detail many of his cases in six books. In "Cause of Death" — a book authored by Wecht, his son Benjamin, and Mark Curriden, formerly a writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Dallas Morning News — attorney Alan Dershowitz praised the pathologist as the "Sherlock Holmes of forensic sciences."

The son of a grocer, Wecht attended undergraduate school at the University of Pittsburgh and later received medical and law degrees from the same school. He served two stints as Allegheny County's coroner, ending his second in 2006, when he resigned after being indicted with fraud and theft charges.

His first term, from 1970 to 1980, was also fraught. Then, too, he was accused of using county morgue facilities for his private forensic business while coroner. He paid $200,000 in restitution following a lengthy legal fight. He also served a four-year term as an Allegheny County commissioner.

A run for U.S. Senate against John Heinz III in 1982 was unsuccessful.

Survivors include his wife, Sigrid, and their four children, David, a Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice; Daniel, a clinical professor in the Neurosurgery Department at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; Benjamin, a freelance writer and teacher; Ingrid, a doctor specializing in obstetrics and gynecology; and 11 grandchildren.

Early Monday, Glover posted on X that “ATAVISTA” had hit streaming platforms — and that the record is actually “the finished version” of an album he released in 2020, “3.15.20.”

On March 15, 2020, a number of new Childish Gambino songs dropped on DonaldGloverPresents.com, but were quickly removed. A week later, “3.15.20” was officially released with guest appearances including Ariana Grande, 21 Savage and others. It, too, was eventually removed from streaming platforms.

Monday's full-length release includes two brand new tracks, “Atavista” and “Human Sacrifice," according to a press release. Young Nudy and Summer Walker have new guest spots on the album.

To celebrate “Atavista,” Glover dropped a music video for “Little Foot Big Foot,” directed by Hiro Murai (his longtime collaborator also known for work on the television shows "Barry" and “Station Eleven”) and starring Quinta Brunson, Rob Bynes, Monyett Crump and others.

Glover has also announced “The New World Tour,” his first tour since 2019. His run begins on Aug. 11 in Oklahoma City and will hit many major North American cities before heading to Europe, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.

The tour ends on Feb. 11, 2025 in Perth, Australia.

Openers include WILLOW ( Willow Smith's musical moniker) and Amaarae. Tickets go on sale Friday.

“I arrived in Europe a few days ago after a long and complicated journey,” Rasoulof said in a statement dated Sunday and distributed by press agents Monday.

Last week, Rasoulof's lawyer told The Associated Press that the director had been sentenced to eight years in prison, flogging and confiscation of property by the Islamic Republic. Rasoulof's attorney, Babak Paknia, said the filmmaker was being punished for making films and signing statements.

Iranian authorities haven’t yet acknowledged Rasoulof's sentence and there was no immediate comment on his departure. Rasoulof and other artists had co-signed a letter urging authorities to put down their weapons amid demonstrations over a 2022 building collapse that killed at least 29 people in the southwestern city of Abadan.

Rasoulof, 51, is the latest artist targeted in a widening crackdown on all dissent in Iran following years of mass protests, including over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini. His 2020 film “There Is No Evil” won the Golden Bear prize at Berlin in 2020.

Rasoulof said the prison sentence came before he revealed his latest film, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” That film premieres in competition in Cannes on May 24.

“Knowing that the news of my new film would be revealed very soon, I knew that without a doubt, a new sentence would be added to these eight years,” said Rasoulof. “I didn’t have much time to make a decision. I had to choose between prison and leaving Iran. With a heavy heart, I chose exile. The Islamic Republic confiscated my passport in September 2017. Therefore, I had to leave Iran secretly.”

Rasoulof said he strongly objected to his ruling but noted many others have been handed death sentences in the crackdown.

“The scope and intensity of repression has reached a point of brutality where people expect news of another heinous government crime every day,” said Rasoulof. “The criminal machine of the Islamic Republic is continuously and systematically violating human rights.”

Rasoulof is currently in an undisclosed location. It's unclear if he will attend the Cannes premiere of his film.

“We are very happy and much relieved that Mohammad has safely arrived in Europe after a dangerous journey,” said Jean-Christophe Simon, chief executive of Films Boutique and Parallel45. "We hope he will be able to attend the Cannes premiere of ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ in spite of all attempts to prevent him from being there in person.”

Shortly before the release of Rasoulof's statement, Thierry Fremaux, Cannes' artistic director, said “the real question is about his presence” when asked about the “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” in a pre-festival press conference Monday.

“The festival speaks through films,” said Fremaux. He described “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” as about “how insidiously the Iranian dictatorship creeps into families."

Rasoulof also detailed the pressure put on his collaborators on the film. Some actors left Iran before wider awareness of the production, he said. Others have been interrogated and had their families summoned for questioning. Rasoulof said his cinematographer's offices was raided.

“Many people helped to make this film,” he said. "My thoughts are with all of them, and I fear for their safety and well-being.”

Clooney will play legendary TV journalist Edward R. Murrow in a stage adaptation of the 2005 movie that earned him directing and writing Oscar nominations and was among the best picture contenders.

“I am honored, after all these years, to be coming back to the stage and especially, to Broadway, the art form and the venue that every actor aspires to,” Clooney said in a statement.

The play “Good Night, and Good Luck” — with David Cromer directing — will premiere on Broadway in spring 2025 at a Shubert Theatre to be announced. It will be again co-written by Clooney and Grant Heslov.

The 90-minute black-and-white film starred David Strathairn as Murrow and is a natural to be turned into a play: The dialogue-heavy action unfolds on handful of sets. The title comes from Murrow's signoff on the TV series “See It Now.”

A key part of Clooney’s film portrayed Murrow’s struggle to maintain support from CBS executives for critical reporting on Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy, known for accusing government employees of disloyalty. Murrow, who died in 1965, is considered one of the architects of U.S. broadcast news.

“Edward R. Murrow operated from a kind of moral clarity that feels vanishingly rare in today’s media landscape. There was an immediacy in those early live television broadcasts that today can only be effectively captured on stage, in front of a live audience,” Cromer said in a statement.

The Clooneys are boosters of journalism. Clooney’s father, Nick Clooney, worked as a TV news anchor and host in a variety of cities including Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. He also wrote a newspaper column in Cincinnati and taught journalism students at American University.

At the time the movie came out, Clooney said his family took pride in how journalists held the government accountable during the paranoia of the 1950s communist threat. Clooney said he wanted to make a movie to let people hear some “really well-written words about the fourth estate again.”

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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

Donald Glover -- whose stage name is Childish Gambino -- surprise released "ATAVISTA" early Monday, and tour dates for "The New World Tour" were announced on venue websites and ticketmaster shortly thereafter.

The rapper will play the Moody Center in Austin on Sept. 10 with special guest Willow Smith, who uses the stage name Willow. Presale for tickets starts Thursday at 10 a.m.

Both artists released new albums this month, with Glover's being a re-release of an album demo previously called 3.15.20.

Glover said on X late Sunday night the new release is a "finished version" of 3.15.20, which he originally released in March 2020. It has features from various artists, including Ariana Grande and 21 Savage. Glover also teased an "all new Childish Gambino" album to be released in the summer.

Willow, who is famously the child of actors Will and Jada Smith, and known for her 2011 hit "Whip My Hair," recently released her sixth studio album "empathogen" on May 3. She was also recently featured on NPR's Tiny Desk.

Austin is one of two Texas stops on the tour. The other is a Dallas show at the American Airlines Center on Sept. 11.

Joost Klein had failed to perform at two dress rehearsals on Friday and the organizer, the European Broadcasting Union said that police were investigating a complaint by "a female member of the production crew” at the competition in the Swedish city of Malmo.

Police spokesman Jimmy Modin told The Associated Press their investigation into the incident was over and that a decision on the charges should come “within a few weeks.” He did not elaborate on the nature of the threats that the Dutch performer is accused of making.

The contest in Malmo followed a turbulent year for the pan-continental pop contest that saw large street protests against the participation of Israel that tipped the feelgood musical celebration into a chaotic pressure cooker overshadowed by the war in Gaza.

Details of what happened backstage are unknown.

The tabloid Aftonbladet said, citing an unnamed source, that Klein at one point became stressed by all the photographers and asked them to stop filming. When one photographer got close, he raised his arm with a fist and lunged at the photographer, the paper said.

The Sydsvenska daily, a Malmo newspaper, said that the crime of making threats usually leads to fines upon conviction.

“We expect there will probably be a prosecution,” Emil Andersson, the police officer in charge of the case, told Swedish broadcaster SVT. He also said that a legal process of "accelerated prosecution” will likely be involved as the altercation did not involve a more serious crime.

The average time for an investigation in cases of accelerated prosecution is six to eight weeks.

The last-minute disqualification was unprecedented in the 68-year history of Eurovision. The 26-year-old Dutch singer and rapper had been a bookies’ favorite, as well as a fan favorite, with his song “Europapa,” an upbeat Euro-techno ode to the continents diversity that is also a tribute to Klein’s parents, who died when he was a child.

Klein reportedly has already left Sweden.

The 68th edition of the contest was won by Switzerland's Nemo.

The couple, invited to the West African nation by its military, were treated to different bouts of dancing, starting from the Lagos airport where a troupe's acrobatic moves left both applauding and grinning. One of the dancers, who looked younger than 5 years old, exchanged salutes with Harry from high up in the air, standing on firm shoulders.

Going with Meghan’s white top was the traditional Nigerian aso oke, a patterned handwoven fabric wrapped around the waist and often reserved for special occasions. It was a gift from a group of women a day earlier.

The couple visited a local charity – Giants of Africa — which uses basketball to empower young people. There, they were treated to another round of dancing before unveiling a partnership between the organization and their Archewell Foundation.

“What you guys are doing here at Giants of Africa is truly amazing,” Harry said of the group. “The power of sport can change lives. It brings people together and creates community and there are no barriers, which is the most important thing.”

Masai Ujiri, the charity’s president and an ex-NBA star, wished Meghan a happy Mother’s Day and acknowledged how hard it can be “for us to be away from our kids and family to make things like this happen.”

“To do so shows dedication (and) we truly appreciate it,” he told the couple.

Meghan and Harry later attended a fundraiser for Nigeria’s soldiers wounded in the country’s fight against Islamic extremists and other armed groups in the country’s conflict-battered north. The event was related to Harry's Invictus Games, which Nigeria is seeking to host in the future.

The couple were also hosted at the Lagos State Government House, where Meghan received another handwoven Nigerian fabric.

“We’ve extended an additional invitation to them that they can always come back when they want to,” Lagos Gov. Babajide Sanwo-Olu told reporters.

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Asadu reported from Abuja, Nigeria.

The 66-year-old star of “Fargo” and “Boardwalk Empire” was assaulted late Wednesday morning in Manhattan and taken to a nearby hospital with bruising, swelling and bleeding to his left eye.

“Steve Buscemi was assaulted in Mid-Town Manhattan, another victim of a random act of violence in the city,” according to a statement Sunday from his publicist. “He is ok and appreciates everyone’s well wishes."

The assault was first reported by the New York Post.

The New York Police Department put out a nameless statement on the assault Wednesday. Buscemi’s representative confirmed Sunday that the unidentified assault victim in the police statement was the actor.

The police department said there were no arrests and the investigation was continuing.

Buscemi's “Boardwalk Empire” co-star Michael Stuhlbarg was hit in the back of the neck with a rock while walking in Manhattan's Central Park on March 31. Stuhlbarg chased his attacker, who was taken into custody outside the park.

The film from 20th Century Studios and Disney that built on the rebooted “Apes” trilogy of the 2010s had the third highest opening of the year, after the $81.5 million debut of “Dune: Part Two” in early March and the $58.3 million domestic opening of “Kung Fu Panda 4” a week later.

The strong performance for “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” — it played even better internationally with a global total of $129 million — comes a week after a tepid start for Ryan Gosling's “The Fall Guy” signaled that the summer of 2024 is likely to see a major drop-off after the “Barbenheimer” magic of 2023.

“Planet of the Apes” easily made more than the rest of the top 10 combined.

“The Fall Guy” fell to No. 2 with a $13.7 million weekend and a two-week total of $49.7 million for Universal Pictures.

Zendaya's “Challengers” was third with $4.7 million and has earned $38 million in three weeks for Amazon MGM studios.

The opening for “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” helmed by “Maze Runner” director Wes Ball, was the second best in the series, after the $72 million opening weekend of 2014’s “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.”

It's the 10th movie in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise that began in 1968 with the Charlton Heston original with a twist ending.

“This franchise has never been allowed to lose its momentum,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “There are very few franchises that have this kind of longevity.”

And it really is the property itself. The new film shares no central actors or characters with its predecessors.

“There’s just this love for the way it melds sci-fi with social commentary and straight-up popcorn entertainment,” Dergarabedian said.

“Kingdom” came with strong reviews and positive buzz (80% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and a "B" CinemaScore). It was especially praised for its visual effects and the way its CGI has caught up with its primates-on-horseback aesthetic even since the last film, 2017's “War for the Planet of the Apes.”

Mark Kennedy of The Associated Press called it “thrilling” and “visually stunning."

The shot in the arm is welcome for the movie business, but there is little certainty in the forthcoming summer.

The year so far, lacking an early Marvel movie like 2023's “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” is running 21% last year's mid-May total.

While there are potential blockbusters that feel like safe bets including “Despicable Me 4” and “Deadpool & Wolverine” in July, others like “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” later this month and “Twisters” later in the summer feel like they could break either way.

Pixar once brought almost guaranteed hits, but June's “Inside Out 2” may not thrive like the 2015 original.

“There used to be sure bets we cannot necessarily bank on anymore,” Dergarabedian said. ”It is going to be a bit of a hit-or-miss slate.”

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” $56.5 million.

2. "The Fall Guy,” $13.7 million.

3. “Challengers,” $4.7 million.

4. “Tarot,” $3.45 million.

5. “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” $2.5 million.

6. “Unsung Hero,” $ 2.25 million.

7. “Kung Fu Panda 4,” $2 million.

8. “Civil War,” $1.8 million.

9. “Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace,” $1.5 million.

10. “Abigail,” $1.1 million.

Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group’s Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy said Thursday that Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the Oscar-winning team behind the “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” trilogies, will produce and Serkis will direct.

“Yesssss, Precious,” Serkis said in a statement. “The time has come once more to venture into the unknown with my dear friends, the extraordinary and incomparable guardians of Middle Earth Peter, Fran and Philippa…It’s just too delicious.”

The working title is “Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum" and Walsh and Boyens are co-writing the screenplay. The collaboration between Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema is expected to be released in 2026.

The “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” films have made nearly $6 billion combined at the box office. “The Return of the King” won a record 11 Oscars, including best director and best picture, tying “Titanic” and “Ben-Hur” for most won.

De Luca and Abdy said in a statement that this team represents their commitment to excellence in further contributing to the cinematic history of the “Lord of the Rings.”

Jackson, Walsh and Boyens, who consider themselves lifetime scholars of J.R.R. Tolkien's worlds, added that they were looking forward to traveling back to Middle-earth with Serkis, “who has unfinished business with that Stinker - Gollum!”

The studio also has the animated fantasy “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” arriving in theaters in December.

The singer, who is Swiss but currently lives in Berlin, was to land in Zurich on Sunday night, national broadcaster SRF said.

Switzerland’s contestant beat Croatian rocker Baby Lasagna to the title by winning the most points from a combination of national juries and viewers around the world.

Nemo, 24, is the first nonbinary winner of the contest that has long been embraced as a safe haven by the LGBTQ community. Nemo is also the first Swiss winner since 1988, when Canadian chanteuse Celine Dion competed under the Swiss flag.

At a post-victory news conference, Nemo expressed pride in accepting the trophy for “people that are daring to be themselves and people that need to be heard and need to be understood. We need more compassion, we need more empathy.”

Nemo's hometown of Biel congratulated the newly-crowned star online and said the residents were ready to celebrate them.

“Congratulations! The city of Biel is extremely proud and says: Bravo and Merci Nemo for the fantastic song and performance and also for carrying the colors of Biel out into the world!,” the town said on its website. “Your city will celebrate and welcome you.”

Biel, with a population of around 60,000, is located around 100 kilometers (60 miles) southwest of Basel on Lake Biel. The town is bilingual, German and French, and is considered the watchmaking capital of Switzerland.

"Nemo creates and moves freely between classical, alternative and popular culture," the town's culture official, Glenda Gonzalez Bassi, said. “A wonderful example of the dynamic and inclusive culture that we are proud of in Biel.”

Nemo — full name Nemo Mettler — bested finalists from 24 other countries, who all performed in front of a live audience of thousands and an estimated 180 million viewers around the world. Each contestant had three minutes to meld catchy tunes and eye-popping spectacle into performances capable of winning the hearts of viewers. Musical styles ranged across rock, disco, techno and rap — sometimes a mashup of more than one.

Across Switzerland, people were already starting to think ahead to next year, when the country will host the next Eurovision contest. Traditionally the county of the winner hosts the music competition the following year.

The cities of Geneva, Basel and St. Gallen have already positioned themselves to compete as hosts for the next contest, SRF reported.

“It is a great artistic and touristic opportunity to show the world what Switzerland is all about, and it is now up to us to take up this challenge together,” Gilles Marchand, Director General of the SRG media company, an association of many different Swiss media organizations.

As for Berlin — their adopted, second hometown — Nemo told German news agency dpa before the Eurovision contest that “I love Berlin so much because it’s such a creative city that is constantly changing. It's a fun city."

In the Croatian capital of Zagreb, thousands gathered at the main square to welcome second-placed Baby Lasagna on his return home. Chanting “We love you,” the crowd cheered as the singer performed his “Rim Tim Tagi Dim” rollicking rock number that tackles the issue of young Croatians leaving the country in search of a better life.

Croats had hoped for a victory and Baby Lasagna burst into tears when he came on stage, saying he didn't expect such a big reception. “We did our best, I hope you are happy," he said.

Croatia’s Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic was also in the crowd, saying, “We are proud to have had such a result, which is the best since Croatia became independent” from the former Yugoslavia in 1991.

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Associated Press writer Jovana Gec in Belgrade, Serbia contributed to this report.

The European Broadcasting Union, which organizes Eurovision, said that Swedish police were investigating “a complaint made by a female member of the production crew” about Joost Klein, and it wouldn't be appropriate for him to participate while the legal process was underway.

Klein had failed to perform at two dress rehearsals on Friday in the Swedish city of Malmo, and organizers had said they were investigating an “incident.” Though rumors had been flying that the incident was connected to Israel’s delegation, organizers said it “did not involve any other performer or delegation member.”

The EBU said that Klein won't receive any points from national juries or from Eurovision viewers, who help pick the winner, and the Netherlands won't appear on the contest scoreboard. Dutch viewers will still be able to vote in the contest, since viewers in Eurovision member countries aren't allowed to vote for their own nation's act.

It was unclear whether Klein was still in Malmo on Saturday.

Such a last-minute disqualification is unprecedented in the 68-year history of Eurovision, although countries have boycotted the event and in some cases been expelled — including Russia, kicked out after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS, one of dozens of public broadcasters that collectively fund and broadcast the contest, said it was “shocked by the decision.”

Later it issued a statement saying that as Klein came offstage after Thursday’s semifinal he was filmed without his consent and in turn made a “threatening movement” toward the camera.

The broadcaster said Klein did not touch the camera or the camerawoman, and called his expulsion a “very heavy and disproportionate” punishment.

“We are very disappointed and upset for the millions of fans who were so excited for tonight,” it said. “What Joost brought to the Netherlands and Europe shouldn’t have ended this way.”

The 26-year-old Dutch singer and rapper had been a bookies’ favorite, as well as a fan favorite, with his song “Europapa,” an upbeat Euro-techno ode to the continent's diversity that is also a tribute to Klein’s parents, who died when he was a child.

Dave Adams, a British fan dressed as Klein in a blue suit with pointy shoulder pads, said he was a “bit gutted” by the disqualification.

“It’s just a bit depressing isn’t it?” he said. “(We’ll) see how it goes today. I’m sure there’ll be a good winner — hopefully anyway.”

The competition that pits nations against one another for pop music glory has already been marked by division over the inclusion of Israel. It has attracted large protests from Palestinians and their supporters, who say Israel should be excluded because of its conduct of the war in Gaza.

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This story has been corrected to show that the spelling of the Dutch broadcaster is AVROTROS, not AVROTOS.

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Associated Press writers Kwiyeon Ha and Hilary Fox in Malmo contributed to this story.

Acts from more than two dozen countries will take the stage in Malmo, Sweden, on Saturday to compete for the continent's pop music crown. Millions of people across Europe and beyond will be watching and voting for their favorites.

Here's how to join them.

WHAT TIME DOES EUROVISION START?

In Europe, the final round begins at 9 p.m. Central European Summer Time. In Britain, it airs at 8 p.m.

In the United States and Canada, the finale begins airing at 3 p.m. EDT.

HOW CAN I WATCH EUROVISION?

The competition will be aired by national broadcasters in participating nations — the Eurovision website includes a list of broadcasters on its website. In some territories, it'll be watchable on Eurovision's YouTube channel.

In the U.S., Eurovision will stream live on Peacock.

HOW CAN I VOTE IN EUROVISION?

Voting is open for 24 hours before the final starts for viewers in the U.S. and other nonparticipating countries, who can vote online or using the Eurovision app. Viewers in participating countries can vote during the competition by website app, phone or text message, but can't vote for their own nation's entry.

Countries are awarded points based on both viewers' votes and rankings from juries of music industry professionals. These are combined into a total score — the country with the highest score wins.

EUROVISION IS NEW TO ME. WHAT DO I NEED TO KNOW?

Eurovision is an international pop music competition in which acts from countries across Europe, and a few beyond it, vie live on television to be crowned champion.

Launched in 1956 to foster unity after World War II and test new live-broadcast technology, Eurovision has become a campy, feel-good celebration of pop music with an audience of hundreds of millions around the world. It has grown from seven countries to almost 40, including non-European nations such as Israel and Australia.

It’s known for songs that range from anthemic to extremely silly, often paired with elaborate costumes and spectacular staging.

It's also been the launching pad for many mainstream artists' careers, including ABBA, Canadian chanteuse Celine Dion (who competed for Switzerland in 1988) and the Italian rock band Måneskin in 2021. Last year's winner, Swedish diva Loreen, is one of only two people who have won the contest twice.

Eurovision winners are notoriously hard to predict. This year's favorites include Nemo from Switzerland and Croatian singer Baby Lasagna.

Israeli singer Eden Golan has also surged in betting odds in recent days. Israel's participation has attracted large protests in Malmo by Palestinians and their supporters over a week of Eurovision events.

The legal move is the latest piece of pushback from the 54-year-old hip-hop mogul and his legal team after he was subjected to several similar lawsuits and a subsequent criminal sex-trafficking investigation.

“Mr. Combs and his companies categorically deny Plaintiff’s decades-old tale against them, which has caused incalculable damage to their reputations and business standing before any evidence has been presented,” says the filing, which also names Combs-owned corporations as defendants. “Plaintiff cannot allege what day or time of year the alleged incident occurred, but miraculously remembers other salacious details, despite her alleged incapacitated condition.”

The lawsuit was filed in December and amended in March by the woman who now lives in Canada whose name wasn’t disclosed in the court filing. She said she was in 11th grade at a high school in a Detroit suburb in 2003, when Harve Pierre, then the president of Combs' Bad Boy Entertainment record label, flew her to New York on a private jet and took her to a recording studio, where she was given drugs and alcohol until she was incapable of consenting to sex. Then, the lawsuit said, Pierre, Combs and a man she didn't know took turns raping her.

The lawsuit included photographs of the woman sitting on Combs’ lap that she said were taken on the night in question.

The defense filing asks that the case be “dismissed now, with prejudice” — meaning it cannot be refiled — “to protect the Combs Defendants from further reputational injury and before more party and judicial resources are squandered.”

One of the plaintiff’s attorneys, Michael J. Willemin, said in a statement in response to the filing: “At this point, no one should take anything ‘diddy’ or his lawyers say seriously. Today’s motion is just a desperate attempt by Combs to avoid accountability for Ms. Doe’s allegations of gang rape and sexual assault. It won’t work.”

At this early stage in the lawsuit, the arguments are procedural rather than on the facts of the case.

Some of the lawsuits filed against Combs involve decades-old allegations and are among the more than 3,700 legal claims filed under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which temporarily suspended certain legal deadlines to give sexual assault victims a last opportunity to sue over abuse that happened years or even decades ago.

The new deadlines established by that law expired, but the suit Combs filed the motion against Friday was brought under a different law, New York City’s Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law. That city law also allows accusers to file civil complaints involving sexual assault claims after the statute of limitations has run out.

But Combs’ motion argues that suit was filed too late, because the city law is preempted by the state law, whose provisions mean the lawsuit needed to be filed by August of 2021 to be timely.

"New York state law trumps New York City law, without exception,' the filing says.

The amended version of the lawsuit filed in March sought to address some of these issues, but Combs’ attorneys argue that it didn’t go far enough.

The judge has ruled the woman will need to reveal her name if the lawsuit moves forward after this challenge.

The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused, unless they come forward publicly, as some of Combs' accusers have done.

Friday's defense filing also criticizes the suit for including “a bolded, legally irrelevant ‘trigger warning’ calculated to focus attention on its salacious and depraved allegations.”

The public airing of allegations against Combs began with a November lawsuit by the singer Cassie, his former protege and girlfriend, containing allegations of beatings, rape and other abuse between 2005 and 2018. The complaint, filed by the same attorneys who brought the suit being challenged Friday, was settled the day after it was filed. Combs denied the allegations through his lawyer before the settlement.

More lawsuits against Combs were filed in the following months. Then on March 25, Homeland Security Investigations served search warrants on his homes in Los Angeles and Miami in a sex-trafficking investigation. His lawyer called it “a gross use of military-level force." The investigation is continuing. Combs has not been charged.

Last month, Combs filed a motion to dismiss a suit filed by Joi Dickerson, who said she was a 19-year-old college student when Combs drugged her and sexually assaulted her.

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Associated Press Entertainment Writer Jonathan Landrum contributed to this report.

The station announced that he died unexpectedly on Friday. No cause was released.

Rubin joined the station's morning news team in 1991. He conducted upbeat live interviews with actors and musicians from behind the anchor desk and was a mainstay at premiere red carpets and movie junkets. His final interview was with Jane Seymour on Thursday.

Seymour joined Tom Hanks, Viola Davis, Ben Stiller, Guillermo del Toro, Kiefer Sutherland, Octavia Spencer and other Hollywood figures in mourning Rubin on social media.

“Even if I was on my 85th interview that day, I was always happy to see Sam. Even if HE was on his 85th interview that day, he always brought genuine kindness, curiosity and an outside the box question,” Ryan Reynolds posted on X.

“There was no one more enthusiastic about his job than Sam Rubin. I’ve known Sam for most of my career, and he had a light in his eyes every early morning as he started his daily work,” Jamie Lee Curtis wrote on Instagram.

Born in San Diego, Rubin graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles. He earned multiple honors from local news journalism groups, including a lifetime achievement award from the Southern California Broadcasters Association.

Rubin is survived by his wife, Leslie, and four children.

The resignations leave the longstanding pageant group without its top two titleholders for the first time in 72 years, shining a spotlight on its practices. The resignations have drawn calls for more transparency into Miss USA and its parent organization, both of which have faced controversy and scrutiny in the past.

Voigt, crowned in September 2023, was the first Venezuelan American to win her title.

The title was a “childhood dream" and stepping down was a “very tough decision,” the former Miss Utah and University of Alabama student said in an Instagram post on Monday.

“My hope is that I continue to inspire others to remain steadfast, prioritize your mental health, advocate for yourself and others by using your voice,” the 24-year-old wrote.

Alongside the statement, Voigt added a caption that read, “I realize this may come as a large shock to many. Never compromise your physical and mental well-being.” She then thanked fans for their “unwavering support.”

In its own statement, the Miss USA Organization thanked Voigt for her service and wished her “the best in this next chapter.”

“We respect and support Noelia’s decision to step down from her duties. The well-being of our titleholders is a top priority, and we understand her need to prioritize herself at this time," the statement read. “We are currently reviewing plans for the transition of responsibilities to a successor, and we will soon announce the crowning of the new Miss USA.”

Srivastava, who was also crowned last September, announced her resignation in her own post on Instagram on Wednesday.

“I find that my personal values no longer fully align with the direction of the organization,” the former Miss New Jersey Teen USA wrote.

The 17-year-old thanked her family and fans, said she was glad to represent her state as a first-generation Mexican Indian American and noted she was eager to apply to colleges and work on her multi-lingual children’s book.

A caption accompanying the statement said “this was certainly not how I saw my reign coming to a close” but called the experience a privilege.

A Miss Teen USA spokesperson could not be reached for comment on Srivastava's announcement. The Miss Universe Organization, which runs the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants, could not be reached for comment.

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Associated Press writer Mark Kennedy contributed to this report.

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Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate solutions reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.

The judge on Thursday appointed two longtime Wilson representatives, publicist Jean Sievers and manager LeeAnn Hard, as his conservators. There were no significant objections raised.

Wilson, 81, is the latest celebrity to be involved in a conservatorship case. Others include Amanda Bynes, the young actor who was placed under her parents' control for nine years, and Casey Kasem, the radio and TV personality whose conservatorship became part of a fierce fight between his wife and adult children before his death in 2014. Music legend Joni Mitchell was put under a temporary conservatorship after a 2015 brain aneurysm, before she made a strong recovery.

Most famous was the controversial conservatorship of Britney Spears, which ended in 2021 after nearly 14 years. The #FreeBritney campaign helped garner national attention amid the popstar's attempts to regain control over her finances and livelihood. She alleged that she had been mistreated by her father, who was her conservator. James Spears and his attorneys argued that she was especially susceptible to people who want to take advantage of her fame and fortune.

Here’s a look at how conservatorships operate, what led to Wilson's case, and the #FreeBritney impact:

WHAT DOES CONSERVATORSHIP MEAN?

When a person is considered to have a severely diminished mental capacity, a court can step in and grant others the power to make financial decisions and major life choices for them, sometimes without their consent. They most often involve people with developmental or intellectual disabilities, or those with age-related issues such as dementia.

California law says a conservatorship, called a guardianship in some states, is justified for a “person who is unable to provide properly for his or her personal needs for physical health, food, clothing, or shelter,” or for someone who is “substantially unable to manage his or her own financial resources or resist fraud or undue influence.”

The conservator may be a family member, a close friend or a court-appointed professional. They may control either a person's life decisions, their financial decisions, or both.

Although Spears' case brought attention — much of it negative — to conservatorships, Wilson’s is closer to the typical use of a conservatorship, which very often are installed for older people going through irreversible mental decline.

Although conservatorship can always be dissolved by the court, it’s rare that a person achieves their own release from one — as Spears essentially did.

In another high-profile case, Cher is asking the court put one of her sons into a conservatorship controlling his money. The award-winning singer and actor argued in a petition that 47-year-old Elijah Blue Allman’s large payments from the trust of his late father, rocker Gregg Allman, are putting him in danger because of his struggles with mental health and substance abuse.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Jessica A. Uzcategui was not convinced that a conservatorship was urgently needed and in January declined the petition for a temporary one. She is still considering a larger, long-term conservatorship and will hear more arguments at a hearing in June, but she indicated that she isn't inclined to side with Cher.

WHAT LED TO WILSON'S CONSERVATORSHIP?

Wilson, whom many have lauded as a musical genius and who wrote or cowrote many of the Beach Boys' biggest hits, including “Good Vibrations” and “God Only Knows,” struggled with mental health and substance abuse issues that upended his career in the 1960s.

He met his future wife, Melinda Wilson, when he was a customer at a car dealership where she worked in the mid-1980s. At the time, Wilson had for years been under the close supervision of psychologist Dr. Eugene Landy. Melinda and others believed Landy was exploiting and mistreating Wilson, and they feuded with Landy for years before he was barred in 1992 from any contact with Wilson. The couple married in 1995.

Melinda Wilson died unexpectedly early this year. Wilson has credited her with stabilizing his famously troubled life, and she had managed his daily life in recent years.

“Our five children and I are just in tears. We are lost,” Brian Wilson wrote on his website. “Melinda was more than my wife. She was my savior.”

His mental decline and her death led Brian Wilson’s management team to petition the court in February to place him under a conservatorship. The loss of a spouse in such circumstances is a common trigger for such legal arrangements. The petition sought only a conservatorship of Wilson's person, saying he doesn't need a conservator over his finances because his assets are in a trust, with manager Hard as a trustee.

A doctor’s declaration said Wilson has a “major neurocognitive disorder,” is taking medication for dementia, and “is unable to properly provide for his own personal needs for physical health, food, clothing, or shelter.”

Wilson can move around with help from a walker and the caregiver, court-appointed attorney Robert Frank Cipriano wrote in a report. He said Wilson has a good sense of who he is, where he is, and when it is, but could not name his children beyond the two who live with him.

In approving the petition, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Gus T. May said the evidence shows that Wilson consented to the arrangement and lacks the capacity to make health care decisions.

WHAT IMPACT DID THE #FREEBRITNEY MOVEMENT HAVE ON CONSERVATORSHIPS?

Some fans objected to Spears' conservatorship soon after it began. But the movement and the #FreeBritney hashtag truly took off in early 2019, when some believed she was being forced into a psychiatric hospital against her will.

The fans pored over her social media posts to extract clues about her wellbeing and protested outside the courthouse at every hearing. Spears’ father and others had long dismissed these fans as conspiracy theorists, but their influence on Spears' case was undeniable in the end and she credited them for her success.

In 2022, California lawmakers revised the state's statute to require judges to document all alternatives to a conservatorship before granting one. The update, which took effect last year, gained traction amid the #FreeBritney movement. Advocacy groups contended that people like Spears can become trapped in a system that strips them of their civil rights and the ability to advocate for themselves.

Several other states, including New Jersey, New Mexico and Oregon, have used the attention that Spears and her followers brought to the issue to alter their own conservatorship laws.

The 20-year-old Israeli singer is surrounded by security as she travels between hotel and the contest venue in the city of Malmo. According to Israel’s public broadcaster, she practiced singing while being booed to prepare for her performance in the pan-continental song competition.

Golan has become a focus for protests by pro-Palestinian demonstrators who want Israel kicked out of Eurovision over the war with Hamas, which has killed almost 35,000 people in Gaza. The war began with Hamas’ surprise attack into southern Israel in October, in which the militant group killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 250 others hostage.

A crowd estimated by police at more than 10,000 marched through the southern Swedish city on Thursday to chants of “Free Palestine” and “Israel is a terror state.” Banners accused Eurovision of being complicit in genocide and called for a boycott of the competition.

Another protest march is planned for Saturday, hours before Golan competes in the live Eurovision final against acts from 25 other countries.

The participation of one of those 25, the Netherlands’ Joost Klein, was in doubt after he failed to perform at a dress rehearsal on Friday where he was slotted to appear just before Israel. Contest organizer the European Broadcasting Union gave no explanation but said it was “currently investigating an incident that was reported to us involving the Dutch artist. He will not be rehearsing until further notice.” It was unclear whether his absence was related to Israel's participation.

The EBU later said the investigation was "still ongoing" and Klein would not perform at Friday's second dress rehearsal, which is used by juries in all Eurovision countries to award scores. It said he would be judged on his performance from Thursday's semifinal instead.

Israel is allowed to compete in Eurovision, even though it's not in Europe, because its national broadcaster belongs to the European Broadcasting Union, whose membership extends beyond the continent.

Golan has largely stayed out of sight in Malmo, apart from rehearsals and performances at the Malmo Arena. While other performers have taken the stage for fans in a Eurovision park in the city, Golan has not.

She was one of 10 acts who made it through Thursday’s semifinal, which was decided by votes from Eurovision viewers around the world. Golan has been greeted with a smattering of boos, as well as applause, from spectators in the arena. Bookmakers say she is likely to finish in the top half of the final competition, decided by a mix of public votes and national music-industry juries.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Golan for performing despite “contending with an ugly wave of antisemitism.”

“So be blessed, and know that when they boo you, we are cheering you on,” he said.

Golan’s song is a powerful ballad titled “Hurricane” — but that wasn't its original name. The song was first called “October Rain,” an apparent reference to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. That fell foul of contest rules banning “political” content.

The retitled song contains less specific lyrics about going through a tough time, and asserts that “love will never die.”

Born in Israel to parents from the former Soviet Union, Golan spent much of her childhood in Russia and performed on televised talent shows there before moving back to Israel. She cites Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Whitney Houston and Justin Timberlake among her inspirations.

She has avoided direct political statements, but said it was “such an honor to represent my country, especially in these times.”

Speaking after the semifinal, Golan said she was “overwhelmed with emotions.”

“I’m just super excited to go on stage once more and share a bit of my love with everyone,” she said.

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Yesica Fisch contributed to this story from Jerusalem.

Before Ross died in 1995 from cancer, he had completed seven paintings to use in season 32 of “The Joy of Painting."

“He was so sick, but he was still working on his next series because he wanted to be able to keep going,” said Joan Kowalski, president of Bob Ross Inc. Her parents, Annette and Walt Kowalski, co-founded the company with Ross.

Those works were stored away for almost three decades. Certified Bob Ross instructor Nicholas Hankins has studied those seven paintings and paints them from scratch on camera in “The Joy of Painting with Nicholas Hankins: Bob Ross’ Unfinished Season,” which started airing this spring in some markets on American Public Television. Some episodes are available on PBS' website.

The opportunity to “take these paintings and do what Bob ultimately wanted done with them, (to) have them out in the world making people happy is gratifying" said Hankins recently over Zoom. He teaches at the Bob Ross Art Workshop and Gallery about 15 miles from Daytona Beach, Florida, and oversees instructor certification. Hankins also uses six of his own paintings in this new “Joy of Painting," which was filmed and produced at WDSC-TV Daytona State College.

“I think that Bob would be incredibly proud of how we’re doing this,” said Kowalski. "There aren’t really many things that come our way where we have to wonder, what should we do? Bob was very specific in how he wanted this whole thing to go into the future.”

Hankins is a familiar face to Ross devotees. His own teaching videos posted to the Bob Ross YouTube channel drew upwards of 300,000 views before the idea of TV was ever mentioned.

Kowalski is fascinated by the online response to Hankin's videos. “People notice that Nick is not at all trying to be Bob, and he's delivering naturally as himself and yet there’s still that same sort of feeling you get watching Bob.”

A surge of interest in all things Bob Ross came out of the pandemic, when people were staying home and looking for ways to pass time. Now, with so many distractions, it can seem like there aren't enough hours in a day to unwind and rest. If viewers don't tune in for a painting lesson, Hankins hopes his 30-minute “Joy of Painting” episodes helps people to relax in the same spirit as the originals.

“I hope I can carry that part of the legacy on," he said. “I want to genuinely create an environment where people are going to come in, take half an hour and just turn off the world. Right now is a time we need it.”

Kowalski says people used to sheepishly tell Ross “all the time” that they would fall asleep to his episodes, but he didn't mind. “He said, ‘I love hearing that you’ve never watched a full episode of me.’”

If you want to paint along, Hankins said you need basic materials like oil colors, an easel, canvas, and brushes. “But if they’re just watching all they need is a tall glass of iced tea. ”That was Bob’s thing," he said, "get some iced tea and kick back and watch.”

Noseda, conducting Wagner’s epic for the first time just after his 60th birthday, was drenched in sweat as if emerging from a swimming pool when he invited the entire Philharmonic Zurich on stage to join the cast for curtain calls on Thursday night.

Wagner has been dominated by regietheater since Patrice Chéreau’s seminal staging for the 1976 Bayreuth Festival recast the story of gods, humans, giants and dwarfs through the lens of the Industrial Revolution. While avoiding a strict adherence to Wagner’s original instructions, Homoki used relatively minimal if dull scenery to allow a psychological focus without distraction. His Wotan is a self-loathing head god who collapses, his entire body shaking, realizing the disasters are of his own doing.

“For me this Ring here is one of the most intelligent Rings because we tell the story, and the story is really not that stupid like the modern directors think,” said bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny, who has sung Wotan in 20 different productions.

Noseda committed to the Ring with Homoki in 2018 as part of an agreement to succeed Fabio Luisi as music director. Noseda studied in 2020 during the pandemic for five hours daily in segments, at 3 a.m. and 2 p.m.

“The world of the Ring is an ocean. It’s not even a Mediterranean Sea,” Noseda said. “You have to be able to dive, to get up and to swim and to feel yourself at ease.”

Noseda took advantage of the venue, an 1,100-seat house less than half the size of other major theaters, to create an eloquent environment in which Wagnerians used to belting for the rafters could sing softly at each other. He used two harps instead of six for “Das Rheingold,” the opening night of “Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung),” and four double basses rather than eight.

“You don’t need more in this hall,” Noseda said. “The pit is not hugely big, so you can fit a certain number of musicians. In a way, it makes the flavor of the experience more intimate.”

The second of the two cycles will be streamed live for free on the Zurich Opera’s website from May 18-26 and then be available for replay, with additional distribution on the Medici streaming service and a DVD release.

Homoki was met with only one or two boos during curtain calls in an age when a sizeable segment of the audience often jeers Wagner directors. He had spent three or four hours on Skype daily with dramaturg Werner Hintze in early 2020 discussing ideas.

“We understood this piece as being just a story about human nature, about society, about us,” Homoki said. “I don’t want to be misunderstood as somebody who is trying to object to contemporary, interpretations. I think a contemporary interpretation is this. It just has to work.”

Collaborating with set and costume designer Christian Schmidt and lighting designer Franck Evin, Homoki placed all four nights on a turntable shifting from forest to a Valhalla mansion. Whimsical elements included Valkyries with horses' heads as helmets and Rhinemaidens in pajamas with Marilyn Monroe platinum wigs.

They configured the gods Froh (Omer Kobiljak) and Donner (Xiameng Zhang) as toffs in boating blazers with cricket bats, and Gibichung twins Gutrune (soprano Lauren Fagen) and Gunther (baritone Daniel Schmutzhard) in groovy red jackets that would have fit in Austin Powers’ movies. Loge (tenor Matthew Klink) could have been a body double for Johnny Depp.

“It’s just space as if you are in heaven, where there’s not time,” Homoki said. “The piece is conceived for a stage esthetic of 170 years ago. You don’t want to see any of those performances that people saw at the time. You have to see it from today’s eye. Sometimes you have to just clear away the rubbish and then people say, oh no, it was just the rubbish that we loved so much. OK, then too bad.”

Wotan is on stage for the opening of “Die Walküre,” an act earlier than Wagner wrote, making sure Siegmund and Sieglinde meet in the forest, then handing mead to her to give to her brother and future lover. For the Immolation Scene that ends “Götterdämmerung (The Twlight of the Gods),” Brünnhilde imagines Siegfried coming back to life and accompanying her to his funeral pyre.

“This was a big gift, that I don’t have to do crazy things but only the things that fit to my character,” said tenor Klaus Florian Vogt, who sang a robust Siegfried.

Konieczny was a commanding Wotan and soprano Camilla Nylund an endearing Brünnhilde (this production was her role debut). Soprano Daniela Köhler was a vocally gripping Sieglinde and bass-baritone Christopher Purves a menacing Alberich, their acting and singing riveting in the compact space. Bass David Leigh (Hagen) showed to be a top emerging talent.

Siena Licht Miller (Flosshilde) and her fellow Rhinemaidens added comic touch. She appreciated Homoki eschewing gimmicks.

“He’s really interested in every person in the audience understanding the piece and in particular with the text in a German-speaking country,” she said. “Eurotrash — we make fun of it, and we watch in school. There are moments where you can see that it really works, but if it’s just trying to help the audience be more entertained, it’s a cop out."

At Thursday night's show at the La Défense Arena in Paris, fans were treated to the inclusion of new songs from the record-breaking album released in April.

According to fan videos and news outlets, Swift performed “But Daddy I Love Him,” “So High School,” “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me,” “Down Bad,” “Fortnight,” “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart,” all from the new release, dressed in black and white to match her 11th studio album’s visuals.

The billion-dollar Eras Tour is meant to be a career retrospective, with Swift performing more than 40 tracks reflecting 17 years of recorded music. “The Tortured Poets Department” was her first brand-new release since the tour's start.

The Paris show included several new costumes, and some edits to make room for the new material. Her “Folklore” and “Evermore” sections were woven into one, Billboard reported.

The sextet began as a local band in Texas' Rio Grande Valley, playing events like quinceañeras — a hobby for its members who held very different jobs: wedding photographer, car dealership manager, gate repairer and so on. Then, viral fame arrived in 2022 when their spirited cover of “No Se Va” by the Colombian pop-rock band Morat made the rounds on TikTok and later, the Billboard Hot 100.

Eventually, they quit their jobs, and the hits — and accolades — kept coming. They linked up with superstar producer Édgar Barrera, who hails from their corner of Texas and worked on both their albums. Last year, Grupo Frontera released their biggest track to date, “Un x100to,” a collaboration with Puerto Rican reggaetón superstar Bad Bunny, peaked at No. 5 on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100. That song earned them a Latin Grammy.

They've sold out arenas and by the time their debut album, “El Comienzo," was released last August, they'd already established themselves one of the most exciting new voices in Latin music.

On the 12-track “Jugando Que No Pasa Nada,” they've continued to push boundaries.

“Every album, every song that we release, is like ‘Man, we gotta make a song better than the last one,’” says Julian Peña Jr., the band's percussionist and hype man. “We have a lot of things that we’re exploring with, and we know a lot of people are going to like it.”

“We're trying to pressure ourselves into expanding our horizons a little bit,” adds bassist Brian Ortega. “We have a little bit of everything."

Ortega hopes that people connect with the diversity of sounds. And there is a lot to dig into.

Songs move from electronic music to R&B to bachata to George Strait-inspired country, with Grupo Frontera's characteristic cumbias norteñas still very much at the center of all that they do, amplified by the difference in tastes across this band. Singer Adelaido Solís III, whom they call “Payo," is the youngest, and loves tumbados. Older members love cumbia, a style of dance music from Colombia, says Juan Javier Cantu, accordion player and vocalist.

“It's a mixture of modern and old school. So we're, like, in between," he says. "That's why you have a lot of versatility on the album.”

That makes for an interesting mix, as does the collaborators they brought forth. Featured are Maluma and Morat — a full circle moment if there ever was one — from Colombia. There's also Christian Nodal from Mexico and a particularly wild cut featuring Nicki Nicole from Argentina.

On the club-ready “Desquite" with Nicole, Grupo Frontera found inspiration in late '00s, early '10s music, specifically the Mexican pop DJ group 3BallMTY. Cantu says they wanted to bring back that sound — but “make it fresh with the music we're doing," he says, and with “the lyrics of today.”

Thematically, “Jugando Que No Pasa Nada” is a romantic journey: From the kiss-off opener “F——— Amor,” which Peña Jr. describes as being from the perspective of, well, someone fed up with love — to “Ibiza,” which “tells you the story about a guy saying, ‘You know what? I already bought all the cars that I want. I bought my mom a house. I got everything I want, but I also got enough for you. So come on over,'” he says.

In cultural conversation, Grupo Frontera is often viewed as frontrunners of the growing global interest in regional Mexican music — a catchall term that encompasses mariachi, banda, corridos, norteño, sierreño and other genres — alongside their friends and collaborators Peso Pluma, Fuerza Regida, Carín León and so on. And they are. But it's not only because they play music true to their geography — it is because they've modernized their genres, often weaving into other musical styles. And because people all over the world are listening.

“We are regional Mexicans because our instruments are traditional and the vibe we give,” says Cantu.

“It's regional to us, but the people made it global,” Peña Jr. jumps in. “We're playing our music, but now it's global. And it's an amazing feeling.”

That exchanging of ideas and cultures is at the heart of “Jugando Que No Pasa Nada."

“This album is kind of like a buffet,” jokes Ortega. “There's the pizza, there's the fish sticks, there's the chicken wings. But you know what? It's a little bit of everything. ... But what ties it all together is that we don't leave the essence of the cumbia."

For a band that's managed to take deeply beloved music, modernize it and present it to the world — what's next? They say they'd love to tour in Europe, headline Coachella and Madison Square Garden, go to the “gringo Grammys,” says Cantu.

But more than that, they want their fans to listen to this album and “feel their emotions, the instruments,” he says.

Tokyo-based Sega Sammy Holdings, the company behind the “Sonic the Hedgehog” video games, said it will sell all its shares in Phoenix Resort Co., which operates Seagaia in Miyazaki, southwestern Japan.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The move, approved by the Sega Sammy board of directors, will result in a gain of about 8.5 billion yen ($55 million) in extraordinary income for the fiscal year through March 2025.

New York-based Fortress was chosen, Sega Sammy said in a statement, because of its experience since the company has acquired 176 hotels since 2011.

Sega Sammy will continue to work with Phoenix, acquiring 20% of voting rights through newly issued shares after the ownership sale is completed.

Also Friday, Sega Sammy reported its profit fell in the fiscal year that ended in March, to 33 billion yen ($212 million), from 45.9 billion yen the year before. Its sales rose 20% to 467.8 billion yen ($3 billion).

Sega Sammy has various entertainment operations, including video games like “Persona 3 Reload,” which recorded 1 million downloads in the first week after its launch in February, and the older but still popular “Angry Birds” and “Like a Dragon.”

It also makes toys and pachinko and so-called “pachislot” machines, and owns intellectual property in animation works.

The company is banking on its Sonic licensing revenue through games and movies, a sector that has grown 10-fold in the last five years.

Although Sega Sammy's resort operations recently returned to profitability, they suffered during the pandemic, when travel to Japan and within the country was disrupted.

By turning over management of Seagaia to Fortress, Sega Sammy intends to better focus on its core strengths like video games.

Fortress is majority owned by Japanese telecoms and technology company SoftBank Group Corp., though the Abu Dhabi investment fund Mubadala announced in May 2023 that it would buy a majority stake in Fortress Investment from SoftBank. The deal has yet to be finalized due to regulatory requirements.

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Yuri Kageyama is on X: https://twitter.com/yurikageyama

Also among the streaming offerings worth your time as selected by The Associated Press’ entertainment journalists: Colombian musician Ryan Castro's new album “El Cantante Del Ghetto,” the series “Pretty Little Liars” returns on Max and a new documentary details the Indigo Girls’ rise and subsequent marginalization.

NEW MOVIES TO STREAM

— Whether or not you know anything about the tragedies that befell the Von Erich family wrestling dynasty, “The Iron Claw” is well worth a watch. Zac Efron stars as one of the brothers, Kevin, in an ensemble cast that includes Harris Dickinson and Jeremy Allen White as his brothers, Lily James as his wife, and Holt McCallany and Maura Tierney as his parents. In her AP review, Jocelyn Noveck wrote that “Efron, with his rock-hard physique and ’70s mullet, turns in some of the most affecting work of his career. White, too, is excellent if more inscrutable as Kerry, initially the golden boy until his own brush with disaster sends him into a downward spiral.” It’s available on MAX on Friday.

— Brooke Shields is the titular mother of the bride in a new romantic comedy coming to Netflix on Thursday. The conceit here is that her daughter (Miranda Cosgrove) is getting married and she doesn’t find out until she arrives at the island resort where it’s happening that the groom is the son of the guy who broke her heart in college, played by Benjamin Bratt. “Mother of the Bride” was directed by Mark Waters (“Mean Girls” and “Just Like Heaven”). ( Read AP's review here.)

— “The Idea of You” is good fun and Anne Hathaway looks incredible in it, but it’s on the lighter side. If you want to continue a Hatha-thon with something dark and moody, look no further than William Oldroyd’s “Eileen,” coming to Hulu on Friday. Hathaway is otherworldly as the glamourous, martini-swilling Rebecca Saint John, an endlessly quotable Hitchcock blonde with a doctorate from Harvard, in this stylish adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel. She becomes an object of fascination for Thomasin McKenzie’s mousy Eileen when she glides into the dreary juvenile detention center where they both work one winter, in Massachusetts 1964. The deranged, noir cousin to “The Idea of You,” there is also some flirting and dancing and drinking in “Eileen,” but with a shocking twist looming.

— AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr

NEW MUSIC TO STREAM

— One of the best alternative albums of the year may very well be the soundtrack to the A24 thriller about two teenagers watching a mysterious late-night television show, “I Saw the TV Glow.” The official trailer for the film arrived with a spooky rendition of the Broken Social Scene track “Anthems of a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” as performed by Yeule — the perfect introduction to an ambitious compilation. Other highlights that may not get their shine next to big names like Boygenius' Phoebe Bridgers and Caroline Polacheck but very much deserve the nod: Philly twangy-emo greats Sadurn, the ascendent power indie-pop of Jay Som, and the experimental compositions of L’rain.

— Colombian musician Ryan Castro might not be a household name yet — chances are, you’ve heard his “Mujeriego” on TikTok — but tastemakers would be wise to pay attention now. On the title track to his forthcoming album, “El Cantante Del Ghetto,” Castro pays homage to Puerto Rican salsa icon Héctor Lavoe, a.k.a. “El Cantante,” with his own spin — a rap break that manages to weave flawlessly into the classic production. (For those keeping track: Lavoe's song entered the National Recording Registry earlier this month.) Elsewhere, Castro delivers a reggaetón hit with some help from regional Mexican starPeso Pluma on “Quema” and trap on “Rich Rappers” with Rich the Kid.

— It is the end of an era: ska punk, reggae rock heroes Sublime with Rome are officially calling it quits. They’re currently embarked on a farewell tour and a self-titled final album arrives Friday. It’s not all bad news: The group is calling it a day because Sublime (...without Rome) has reunited with late singer Bradley Nowell’s son Jakob fronting the band, but that means saying goodbye to singer Rome Ramirez. The album is a fitting coda. It's all sunshine, California, and upstrokes on the downbeat.

— With work well-beyond a perfect sync in the “Barbie” blockbuster, where Margot Robbie’s Barbie and Ryan Gosling’s Ken scream-sing along to their hit “Closer to Fine” while exiting the paradise that is “Barbieland,” Indigo Girls have long been ahead of their time. “Indigo Girls: It’s Only Life After All” is a new documentary detailing the duo’s rise and subsequent marginalization by the press as a political group of queer performers. This doc, available via video on demand on Tuesday, tells their story in new, critical detail.

— In a new Paramount+ documentary produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, titled “Kiss the Future,” director and co-writer Nenad Cicin-Sain closely examines Sarajevo during the Bosnian War — particularly the ways in which music and art communities flourished as places of resilience and safety, and later, the role Irish band U2 played in drawing attention to the conflict in their concerts. It’s not a music documentary in the traditional sense — it is much larger.

— AP Music Writer Maria Sherman

NEW SHOWS TO STREAM

— Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly star in the new limited series “Dark Matter.” Edgerton plays Jason, an unfulfilled physics teacher who is attacked one night by a masked man who also drugs him. When he comes to, Jason finds himself in an alternate timeline of his life where he’s a world-famous physicist. Jason’s wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and son don’t exist in this alternate version, and he fights to return to them. “Dark Matter” is based on the book by Blake Crouch. It premiered Wednesday.

— The nearly unbelievable true crime story of freelancers looking for their big break in Hollywood who get duped by a long con is the subject of a new docuseries for Apple TV+. Dubbed the “Hollywood Con Queen” in an article for The Hollywood Reporter and a book by Scott C. Johnson, the three-part series of the same name details both his and an investigator’s work on the case, interviews victims, and features the actual con artist. It debuted Wednesday.

— “A People’s History of Black Twitter” examines both the rise and influence of Black Twitter on both culture and politics. It also addresses backlash to its prominent voices and commentary. The series is inspired by a three-part article for WIRED by Jason Parham. “Black Twitter” streams on Hulu.

— Sparks fly between two students at an elite school in “Maxton Hall: The World Between Us.” Ruby comes from a working-class family while James is wealthy, entitled with a big ego. The story is based on a YA German book series called “Save Me” by Mona Kasten. The series will be available in German with English subtitles or dubbed in English. All episodes dropped Thursday on Prime Video.

— If you’re counting down the days until school’s out for summer, the new “Pretty Little Liars” is now on Max. The teen slasher series picks up at the beginning of summer vacation where our five final girls have to attend summer school for falling behind while they were being targeted by a serial killer. The “Liars” do find time for summer jobs and summer romances. New cast members include Antonio Cipriano (“National Treasure: Edge of History”) as a love interest for Bailee Madison’s Imogen.

— In Netflix’s “Bodkin,” a podcaster, a journalist and her researcher team up to solve a decades-old murder in a small town in Ireland. Each has their own reason for needing to crack the case. As they get closer to the truth, the trio learns some people prefer to keep secrets buried in the past. The dark comedic mystery series is the first narrative project from the Obamas' production company, Higher Ground.

— Fire up the TARDIS, Ncuti Gatwa is the 15th Doctor Who when the series makes its Disney+ debut Friday. Gatwa’s Doctor is accompanied on his time-traveling adventures with companion Ruby Sunday, portrayed by Millie Gibson.

— After bringing the world of Anne Rice to television with season one of “Interview with the Vampire” (and later, “Mayfair Witches.”) on AMC, the series returns Sunday. It’s about Louis de Pointe du Lac, who sits down for a second interview with a veteran journalist named Daniel, played by Eric Bogosian. Louis says he’s a vampire and had years prior given Daniel an interview that was off-the-record. Louis claims he was seduced and turned into a vampire in the early 1900s by Lestat de Lioncourt. Season two begins with Daniel viewing Louis as an unreliable narrator because his details from the two interviews don’t match. It also explores the love affair of Louis and vampire Armand, played by new cast member Assad Zaman, and how the vampire Lestat still has a hold on Louis. “Interview with the Vampire” also streams on AMC+.

— Alicia Rancilio

NEW VIDEO GAMES TO PLAY

— Video Games 101 teaches us that if you have to go underground, you’re going to be attacked by all sorts of ghastly beasts. Animal Well, from indie publisher Bigmode, takes a different approach. This cave has some creatures you might not expect, like flamingos and kangaroos, and some of them are helpful rather than hostile. “It’s not that you’re not welcome,” says solo designer Billy Basso. “It’s just that they were here first.” The result is a combat-free but still tricky labyrinth with more than 250 puzzle-filled rooms. The graphics are refreshingly weird, coloring old-fashioned pixel art with an eerie bioluminescence, and the soundtrack is filled with spooky echoes. Start spelunking on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and PC.

— Lou Kesten

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Catch up on AP’s entertainment coverage here: https://apnews.com/entertainment.

“What you do to those men in the cave, will it shorten the war by a week, by a day, by an hour?” he pleads to a Japanese officer. ”How many must die before (we) are satisfied?"

For the show's host and writer, Rod Serling, World War II was a trauma he would re-imagine often.

Serling, born 100 years ago this December, served in the 11th Airborne Division in the Philippines and received a Bronze Star for bravery and a Purple Heart for being wounded. He left the war with lasting physical and emotional scars and, like such fellow veterans as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, with a will to find words for what had happened. He wrote war-related scripts for “Playhouse 90” and other early television drama series and for at least two other “Twilight Zone” stories, including one in which an Army lieutenant can predict who will die next by looking into his soldiers' faces.

Serling's “First Squad, First Platoon,” a fictionalized take on the war that he worked on and set aside while attending Antioch College, has now been published for the first time. It appears this week in the new edition of The Strand Magazine, which has unearthed pieces by Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and many others. “First Squad, First Platoon” is broken into five vignettes, each dedicated to a fallen peer.

"Serling wrote this story in his early twenties, yet it carries a maturity beyond his years," Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli writes. “It’s a powerful, unvarnished look at war in all its brutality — an unforgettable study of ordinary people in an extraordinarily hellish situation."

Nicholas Parisi, author of the 2018 biography "Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination," helped edit the story. Daughters Jodi Serling and Anne Serling each contributed brief forewords. Jodi Serling wrote that the war “opened up dark horizons of terror" for her father and left him “gut-wrenching memories” that influenced his writing and awakened him at night, “sweating and screaming inconsolably.” Anne Serling told The Associated Press that “First Squad, First Platoon” reminded her of his innocence when he joined the military.

"My reaction was particularly painful because when I read the story, I was writing a memoir about my dad and reading the letters he wrote from training camp before he was sent to the Pacific," she said. “He was just barely 18 when he enlisted and sounded like a kid at summer camp in his letters to his parents. He was asking for gum, candy, underwear (because he didn’t like the GI ones). Like all of the kids we send into the horror of war — he didn’t know what was waiting on the other side.”

Amy Boyle Johnston, author of the 2015 book “Unknown Serling,” found the story while looking through Serling's papers at the University of Wisconsin. Serling, who died in 1975, had yet to start a family when he wrote “First Squad, First Platoon.” But he was already thinking about the next generation, including a dedication to his yet-unborn children urging them to remember “a semblance of the feeling of a torn limb, a burnt patch of flesh" and “the hopeless emptiness of fatigue” were as much part of war as “uniforms and flags, honor and patriotism.”

Parasi says that “First Squad, First Platoon" was an early sign of Serling's ironic touch. One soldier is shot dead as he admires a wooden statuette of Jesus, and another — a true story — is killed by a food relief package.

In the opening section of “First Squad,” Cpl. Melvin Levy is introduced as the squad's resident comedian, whose usual barrage of jokes had been silenced by the ongoing starvation that threatened to kill them all. But as Levy slept weakly in the mud, dreaming of pastrami and other treats back home, he is startled by the sound of motors — airplanes clearly marked as American. Levy shouts with delight as more than 100 heavy boxes of K-rations fall from on high, fatally unaware that one will land right on him.

"The heavy crates were smashing into the earth close to their holes. Men started shouting in alarm," Serling writes. “Levy just stood where he was, waving his arms and shouting. Sergeant Etherson pulled at him from behind, trying to get him down in a hole. But Levy was oblivious to all around him except the food which poured down.”

“'It’s raining chow, boys . . . it’s raining chow,'” his shrill voice pierced the air."

Best known as one-half of the country super-duo Florida Georgia Line, Kelley will release a solo album, “Tennessee Truth," on Friday. It is a collection of 12 anthemic country songs ripe for a road trip and tailgate in equal measure.

For “Tennessee Truth,” produced by Dann Huff, Kelley says he aimed to “dive into the music I grew up on — obviously the music I love and themes of just country living, rural living, hard work, good times, outdoors, love,” he told The Associated Press from his home in Nashville.

Good songwriting, Kelley says, is a lot like fishing — you need patience. “I wrote probably over 100 songs for this record."

Eight of the 12 songs on the album were written by Kelley, and he worked with whomever he could on others, trying to get outside his comfort zone. “Every song gets you to the next song," he says.

“I think it's a fun record,” he says, adding that the creative process was dependent on these tracks translating live.

Geography still plays a prominent role in the music Kelley makes. Throughout “Tennessee Truth” are beaches in Florida, farms in Nashville, his wife's family farm in Georgia. Hunting, sitting on the porch drinking sweet tea and eating peanuts, conversations with loved ones — that's the kind of life he hopes comes across on the album. “Just being free,” he says.

Fans looking for more coastal country from Kelley — like what was found on his pandemic album, “Sunshine State of Mind,” released in 2020 — will want to skip over to “10 O'Clock On The Dock.”

“It was a passion project,” he says of “Sunshine State of Mind.” “It was supposed to just be its own little thing.”

Kelley says he also made that record with the thought that he would record solo and with Florida Georgia Line. “I made it with a sonic respect to what we were, what we had done and what we had built. So, I didn’t want to tread on anything even close to that, out of respect, you know?”

He says he considers “Tennessee Truth” his true solo debut.

In 2022, Florida Georgia Line embarked on an indefinite hiatus. At that point, the duo of Kelley and Tyler Hubbard had been together more than a decade, and whether you were a fan of their bro country sound or not, their music ( “Cruise,” “Meant to Be,” “Round Here”) set the tone for a generation of country fans. The following year, Hubbard released a self-titled debut solo record.

“I’m thankful that (Brian) had the courage to step into this new space and to make that decision that ultimately kind of pushed me to make the same decision and lead me to where I’m at now,” Hubbard told AP at the time. “I had quite a few people tell me that it couldn’t be done and that I should definitely continue with FGL, and it sort of lit a spark in me, a fire.”

The closing song on “Tennessee Truth" is the feisty “Kiss My Boots," which features Kelley delivering vinegary lyrics like: “Want the world to know that you did me wrong / I don’t know how you act sweet, after how you did me / Here’s a middle finger to you through a song.” Some fans theorize it is a direct message to Hubbard.

“I've read some of that, too,” Kelley says, adding that he understands people might make associations in order to find meaning in the song.

“But at the end of the day,” he says, the song means a lot of different things for his collaborators, “And it really means a lot of different things for me.

“I really put that song out because I wanted people to know that I’m a real human, and I’m not just some face on social media or some somebody that’s had some success," he adds. "You know, I’ve been through hard times in my life.”

But could there be a reunion on the horizon?

“The old saying is, ‘Tell God your plans and he’ll laugh,'” he says. “So, I have no idea. I really don't know what the future holds. I know that I’m really focused on what I’m doing now, and I’m really proud of ... the work that I put in.”

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This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Dann Huff’s first name and the song title of “10 O’Clock On The Dock.”

A representative for Hailey Bieber confirmed to The Associated Press on Thursday that the model is just over six months pregnant.

The couple announced the news on their respective Instagram pages with corresponding posts. Both begin with a short, romantic video clip of the couple kissing. Hailey Bieber is draped in white lace; baby bump prominent in the sheer, form-fitting fabric. It is followed up with a photo shoot of Justin Bieber photographing his wife. In each caption, they've tagged one another.

In a press release, fashion house Yves Saint Laurent says the video and photoshoot are from the Biebers' vow renewal ceremony on Thursday in Hawaii.

In 2018, the Biebers confirmed their long-rumored marriage on Instagram, when the musician posted a picture of the pair holding hands and captioned it, “My wife is awesome.” Hailey changed her username from “Baldwin” to “Bieber” at the same time. They were engaged in the Bahamas earlier that year, after about a month of dating.

In addition to modeling, Hailey Bieber is the founder of a skincare line, Rhode. Justin Bieber, who rose to fame as a teenager, is a Grammy winner with eight No. 1 songs under his belt, including “Sorry,” “Love Yourself,” “What Do You Mean?” and “Despacito,” featuring Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee. His last album, “Justice,” was released in 2021.

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AP journalist Mallika Sen contributed reporting.

At a hearing, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Gus T. May approved the petition filed by the 81-year-old Wilson's family and inner circle after the death in January of his wife, Melinda Ledbetter Wilson, who handled most of his tasks and affairs.

“I find from clear and convincing evidence that a conservatorship of the person is necessary,” May said at the brief hearing. The judge said that evidence shows that Wilson consents to the arrangement and lacks the capacity to make health care decisions.

May appointed two longtime Wilson representatives, publicist Jean Sievers and manager LeeAnn Hard, as his conservators.

There were no significant objections raised.

Two of Wilson's seven children, Carnie and Wendy Wilson from singing group Wilson Phillips, asked through their attorney that all the children be added to a group text chain about their father, and that all be consulted on medical decisions. The judge granted the stipulations.

The two daughters had asked for a delay in the process at an April 30 hearing while issues were worked out, but it was clear at the hearing that consensus had been reached.

A doctor’s declaration filed with the petition in February said Wilson has a “major neurocognitive disorder,” is taking medication for dementia, and “is unable to properly provide for his own personal needs for physical health, food, clothing, or shelter.”

Sievers and Hard have had a close relationship with Wilson and his wife for many years. In a report, Robert Frank Cipriano, an attorney appointed by the court to represent Wilson’s interests, said Wilson acknowledged the need for the conservatorship, and said he trusts the judgement of the two women.

Cipriano's report to the court said he visited Wilson at his “impeccably well maintained residence in Beverly Hills,” where he lives with two daughters and a long-term live-in caregiver.

Wilson can move around with help from a walker and the caregiver, Cipriano said, and he has a good sense of who he is, where he is, and when it is, but could not name his children beyond the two that live with him.

He said Wilson was “mostly difficult to understand and gave very short responses to questions and comments."

Cipriano said he approved of the conservatorship, mostly because of Wilson’s general consent.

Wilson credited Ledbetter with stabilizing his famously troubled life after they met in the mid-1980s and married in 1995.

Wilson, his seven children, his caregiver, and his doctors consulted before the petition was filed, according to a family statement at the time. It said the decision was to ensure “there will be no extreme changes” and that “Brian will be able to enjoy all of his family and friends and continue to work on current projects."

Judges in California can appoint a conservator for a person, their finances — referred to as the estate — or both, as was the case with Britney Spears. Spears' case brought attention — much of it negative — to conservatorships, known in some states as guardianships, and prompted legislative changes. Wilson's case is closer to the typical traditional use of a conservatorship, which very often is installed for an older person in irreversible mental decline.

The Wilson petition did not seek a conservator of the estate because his assets are in a trust, with Hard as a trustee.

Deeply revered and acclaimed as a co-founder, producer, arranger and chief songwriter of the Beach Boys and a masterful innovator of vocal harmony, Wilson struggled with mental health and substance abuse issues that upended his career in the 1960s.

He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 along with his bandmates, including his brothers Carl and Dennis and his cousin Mike Love.

Danson and Harrelson have signed up for “Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson (Sometimes),” which will be launched June 12 by SiriusXM.

The title, of course, is a reference to their years together on the NBC sitcom “Cheers,” and to the fact that Harrelson’s participation is more limited. He’ll be on with Danson “when he can find him,” SiriusXM said.

The podcast will consist of their conversations with the likes of Will Arnett, Kristen Bell, Laura Dern, Jane Fonda, Conan O'Brien, Nick Offerman and others.

Stewart, who returned to Comedy Central's “The Daily Show” earlier this year to host once a week, will do a podcast called “The Weekly Show,” according to Comedy Central. It is expected to launch in early June.

The podcast sounds like an extension of the television show, with guests and deeper dives into issues, according to a description by MTV Entertainment Studios & Paramount Media Networks.

“After much reflection, meditation and prayer, I have decided to extend my work week to two days,” Stewart said.

Buell died Monday in Sunnyvale, California, after battling pneumonia, his daughter Barbara Buell said in an email. His final two months were spent with her and her husband, and he died in their home with his daughter at his side.

"He was a great father, friend, mentor, and driver of important transitions in visual media during his long AP career," Barbara Buell said. “When asked by the numerous doctors, PT, and medical personnel he met over the last six months what he had done during his working life, he always said the same thing: ‘I had the greatest job in the whole world.’”

Colleagues described Buell as a visionary who encouraged photographers to try new ways of covering hard news. As the editor in charge of AP's photo operations from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, he supervised a staff that won 10 Pulitzers on his watch and he worked in 33 countries, with legendary AP photographers including Eddie Adams, Horst Faas and Nick Ut.

“Hal pushed us an extra step,” Adams said in an internal AP newsletter at the time of Buell's retirement in 1997. “The AP had always been cautious, or seemed to be, about covering hard news. But that was the very thing Buell encouraged."

Buell made the crucial decision in 1972 to run Ut's photo of a naked young girl fleeing her burning village after napalm was dropped on it by South Vietnamese Air Force aircraft. The image of Kim Phuc became one of the most haunting images of the Vietnam War and came to define for many all that was misguided about the war.

After the image was transmitted from Saigon to AP headquarters in New York, Buell examined it closely and discussed it with other editors for about 10 minutes before deciding to run it.

“We didn’t have any objection to the picture because it was not prurient. Yes, nudity but not prurient in any sense of the word,” Buell said in a 2016 interview. “It was the horror of war. It was innocence caught in the crossfire, and it went right out, and of course it became a lasting icon of that war, of any war, of all wars.”

Ut was just 20 when he made the iconic photo that won him the Pulitzer Prize. Without Buell’s support, he said, the photo might never had become a symbol of the war.

“He thought it was powerful, and he wanted to get it out right away,” Ut said by phone Tuesday.

He said he last spoke several weeks ago with Buell, who he called a mentor and a great friend.

“Hal was the best boss I ever had," Ut said. “He was very supportive of me.”

Santiago Lyon, a former vice president and director of photography at AP, called Buell “a giant in the field of news agency photojournalism.”

“A generous, warm, and affable man, he always made time for photographers,” Lyon said.

David Ake, who recently retired as AP’s director of photography, said Buell set the standard for that role.

“I can’t tell you the number of times I would get a pearl of ‘Hal wisdom’ from one staffer or another,” Ake said. “He will be missed both in the AP and by the entire photojournalism community.”

Buell joined the AP in the Tokyo bureau on a part-time basis after graduating from Northwestern University in 1954 with bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism. He was serving with the Army at the time, working on the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

Out of the Army two years later, he joined AP's Chicago bureau as a radio writer, and a year later, in 1957, was promoted to the photo desk in AP's New York office.

Buell returned to Tokyo at the end of the decade to be supervisory photo editor for Asia and came back to New York in 1963 to be AP's photo projects editor. He became executive news photo editor in 1968 and in 1977 he was named assistant general manager for news photos.

During his decades with AP, technology in news photography took astonishing leaps, going from six hours to six minutes to snap, process and transmit a color photo. Buell implemented the transition from a chemical darkroom where film was developed to digital transmission and digital news cameras. He also helped create AP’s digital photo archive in 1997.

“In the '80s, when we went from black-and-white to all color, we were doing a good job to send two or three color pictures a day. Now we send 300,” Buell said in the 1997 AP newsletter.

Former AP CEO Lou Boccardi said in a statement that Buell drove this remarkable period of innovation and transition, but he never forgot, nor did he let his staff forget, that capturing “the” image that told the story was where it all had to start.

“Fortunately for us, and for news photography, his vision and energy empowered and inspired AP Photos for decades,” Boccardi said.

After retiring in 1997, Buell wrote books about photography, including “From Hell to Hollywood: The Incredible Journey of AP Photographer Nick Ut;" “Uncommon Valor, Common Virtue: Iwo Jima and the Photograph That Captured America;” and “The Kennedy Brothers: A Legacy in Photographs." He was the author of more than a dozen other books, produced film documentaries for the History Channel and lectured across the United States.

“He instilled in me a belief in the critical role of the fourth estate, a curiosity, and the desire to go for a result,” Barbara Buell said. “He was a driver but a forgiving one — always urging a second shot. Although I miss him, he lived a long life and the life he wanted.”

Buell is survived by his daughter and her husband, Thomas Radcliffe, as well as two grandchildren and a great-grandson. His wife, Angela, died in 2000, and his longtime partner, Claudia DiMartino, died in October.

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This story has been updated to correct the number of photo Pulitzers AP won during Buell's time leading the photo staff. It was 10, not 12.

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Associated Press writers Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida, Lisa Baumann in Bellingham, Washington, and the AP Corporate Archives contributed to this report.

According to the announcement on the Walt Disney Company’s website, the services will be offered together this summer, providing an “unprecedented selection of content” from ABC, CNN, DC, Discovery, Disney, Food Network, FX, HBO, HGTV, Hulu, Marvel, Pixar, Searchlight, Warner Bros. and many more.

People will be able to get the bundle from any of the three platform’s websites. While pricing hasn’t yet been announced, it will come in ad-supported and ad-free tiers.

Disney has already had success with its own Disney+ and Hulu bundle. Adding Max to the mix will give viewers access to a wide range of TV shows and movies from several different studios.

“This incredible new partnership puts subscribers first, giving them access to blockbuster films, originals, and three massive libraries featuring the very best brands and entertainment in streaming today,” said Joe Earley, president, direct to consumer, at Disney Entertainment.

“This new offering delivers for consumers the greatest collection of entertainment for the best value in streaming and will help drive incremental subscribers and much stronger retention,” said JB Perrette, CEO and president, global streaming and games, at Warner Bros. Discovery.

The companies said more details about the bundle, including availability and pricing, will be announced in the “coming months.”