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.
Feb. 17 to Feb. 23 “Japanese city is bombed,” screamed the banner in bold capital letters spanning the front page of the US daily New Castle News on Feb. 24, 1938. This was big news across the globe, as Japan had not been bombarded since Western forces attacked Shimonoseki in 1864. “Numerous Japanese citizens were killed and injured today when eight Chinese planes bombed Taihoku, capital of Formosa, and other nearby cities in the first Chinese air raid anywhere in the Japanese empire,” the subhead clarified. The target was the Matsuyama Airfield (today’s Songshan Airport in Taipei), which
China has begun recruiting for a planetary defense force after risk assessments determined that an asteroid could conceivably hit Earth in 2032. Job ads posted online by China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, sought young loyal graduates focused on aerospace engineering, international cooperation and asteroid detection. The recruitment drive comes amid increasing focus on an asteroid with a low — but growing — likelihood of hitting earth in seven years. The 2024 YR4 asteroid is at the top of the European and US space agencies’ risk lists, and last week analysts increased their probability
For decades, Taiwan Railway trains were built and serviced at the Taipei Railway Workshop, originally built on a flat piece of land far from the city center. As the city grew up around it, however, space became limited, flooding became more commonplace and the noise and air pollution from the workshop started to affect more and more people. Between 2011 and 2013, the workshop was moved to Taoyuan and the Taipei location was retired. Work on preserving this cultural asset began immediately and we now have a unique opportunity to see the birth of a museum. The Preparatory Office of National
On Jan. 17, Beijing announced that it would allow residents of Shanghai and Fujian Province to visit Taiwan. The two sides are still working out the details. President William Lai (賴清德) has been promoting cross-strait tourism, perhaps to soften the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) attitudes, perhaps as a sop to international and local opinion leaders. Likely the latter, since many observers understand that the twin drivers of cross-strait tourism — the belief that Chinese tourists will bring money into Taiwan, and the belief that tourism will create better relations — are both false. CHINESE TOURISM PIPE DREAM Back in July