ABC on Friday apologized to its viewers for Nicki Minaj’s wardrobe slipup that exposed the singer’s bare breast during her summer concert performance on morning news show Good Morning America.
Usually known for her outlandish outfits and offbeat fashion, the 28-year-old rapper and R ’n’ B singer’s crop top slipped down while she was rocking the stage at Central Park’s Rumsey Playfield during the live broadcast.
The costuming snafu brought immediate complaints from some viewers and prompted ABC to apologize and remove the images from later, time-delayed broadcasts of the show.
“Although we had a five-second delay in place for the Nicki Minaj concert on GMA, the live East Coast feed of the concert regrettably included certain fleeting images of the performer that were taken out of later feeds of the broadcast in other time zones. We are sorry that this occurred,” ABC said in its statement.
For Minaj, the show went on, as she continued her music set with her hit songs Moment for Life and Super Bass.
Across the broad Atlantic, former Beatle Paul McCartney said on Thursday that he appears to be part of the newspaper phone hacking scandal in Britain and will be talking to police when he finishes a US tour. “I don’t know much about it because they won’t tell anyone except the person themselves,” says the singer-songwriter, whose ex-wife model Heather Mills told the BBC earlier this week that a journalist working for a British newspaper had confronted her with details of a message left by McCartney on her phone in early 2001.
The News Corp hacking scandal, which McCartney calls a “horrendous violation of privacy,” has resulted in an ongoing investigation regarding claims of journalists and private detectives illegally intercepting voicemail messages on phones of people ranging from celebrities and politicians to murder victims and families of soldiers.
No amount of media digging has produced answers for whether singer and actress Jennifer Lopez will continue to judge on American Idol. Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly said on Friday that he had no headline-making announcements — “maybe like confirm Jennifer Lopez or something. No luck there.”
Lopez’s role on American Idol has been unconfirmed since she said earlier this summer that she was undecided about doing a second year. Both Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and record producer Randy Jackson are already confirmed as judges for the singing contest when it returns for its 11th season on Fox in January.
Meanwhile, former Idol judge Simon Cowell has pronounced a death sentence for the nation’s most-watched TV show.
Brash and confident as ever, he said on Friday that his upcoming The X Factor would strip American Idol of its ratings crown. Cowell, who quit his job as Idol’s most abrasive and popular judge in 2010, is now both executive producer and judge on the US version of The X Factor.
He called the singing contest a “game changer” and said it was “completely different” in style and content from his old vehicle American Idol.
“We don’t enter something for the silver medal,” the British producer said. “You do it because you want to be No. 1, and for the next few months we are going to throw everything at this to try and make it the best show on TV.”
Fox, which broadcasts both talent shows, said it believed X Factor would reverse the network’s historically “patchy” ratings in the fall TV season. “If X Factor can do half of what we hope it will do in the fall, Fox is going to be really difficult for the other guys to reckon with,” president Reilly said.
The new show will reunite Cowell with his old Idol sparring partner Paul Abdul. Asked how it felt to be working again with Cowell, Abdul told reporters, “It’s nice to be back in a demented relationship. It’s like home.” “I think it’s more like The Exorcist 2,” retorted Cowell.
Meanwhile, rapper Lil Wayne has been slapped with a US$15 million lawsuit by a Georgia company that claims he stole the song BedRock, according to a lawsuit filed in New York.
Georgia-based production company Done Deal Enterprises accuses the rapper, whose real name is Dwayne Carter, of copyright infringement for the song that Done Deal claims it created in 2009.
The lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York on July 29, also names Universal Music Group, Cash Money Records and Young Money Entertainment as defendants.
BedRock also features singers Drake, Nicki Minaj and Lloyd, and it reached No. 2 on Billboard’s charts last year.
Lil Wayne, who was released from jail in November last year after serving time on a gun possession charge, has been ordered to appear in court on Oct. 12.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located