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    Lil Durk Is Accused of Conspiring to Kill a Rival. What We Know About the Case.

    The rapper Lil Durk was arrested at the airport in Miami this week after he had been booked on flights to three international destinations, federal prosecutors said.The Grammy-winning rapper Lil Durk was arrested on a federal charge near Miami International Airport on Thursday over accusations that he conspired to kill a rap rival, resulting in the fatal shooting of another person.Lil Durk put out a bounty on the life of another rapper, identified only as T.B. by prosecutors, as retaliation for the 2020 killing of the rapper King Von, a member of the hip-hop collective Only the Family, which Lil Durk founded, according to the federal criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.An F.B.I. affidavit also says that Lil Durk had been booked on at least three international flights that were leaving on Thursday — to Italy, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates — in an attempt to flee the United States.Lil Durk, 32, whose legal name is Durk Banks, appeared in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on Friday. He remained in federal custody and was expected to be arraigned in Los Angeles in the coming weeks, according to prosecutors. He was charged with conspiracy to use interstate facilities to commit murder for hire resulting in death.The news of his arrest comes weeks before the scheduled release of his new album, “Deep Thoughts,” on Nov. 22. Earlier this year, he won a Grammy Award for Best Melodic Rap Performance for his song “All My Life,” featuring J. Cole.Representatives for Lil Durk had not responded to a request for comment.Here’s what we know about the case so far:Lil Durk is alleged to have co-conspirators.Lil Durk’s arrest comes on the heels of a recently unveiled federal indictment in Los Angeles charging five other men affiliated with Only the Family, or O.T.F., with the murder-for-hire plot, alleging that they conspired to “track, stalk, and attempt to kill” a rapper identified as T.B. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Beyoncé brings star power to Harris rally in Texas with abortion law in the spotlight

    Beyoncé on Friday lent her star power to Kamala Harris at a high-octane rally in her native Texas, declaring that the country was on the “brink of history” as the vice-president warned the state’s near-total abortion ban could become the law of the land if Donald Trump is elected.“For all the men and women in this room, and watching around the country, we need you,” Beyoncé told a crowd of 30,000 people at the open-air Shell Energy stadium in Houston.With the presidential race effectively deadlocked, Harris detoured from her frenetic race across the seven battleground states to appear in reliably Republican Texas, where she sought to highlight the state’s abortion restrictions for voters who have yet to make up their minds or cast a ballot.“Let us be clear: If Donald Trump wins again, he will ban abortion nationwide,” Harris told the audience, her largest to date. Harris walked on to the stage, as she has ever since she became the presumptive nominee roughly 100 days ago, to Beyoncé’s hard-charging anthem, Freedom.Harris has centered her campaign on the theme of freedom. In the closing days of the campaign, she has painted Trump as posing a threat to hard-won progress, eroding access to reproductive care, seeking to walk back LGBTQ rights and targeting American democracy itself. Earlier this week, Harris agreed that Trump was a “fascist”.Harris spoke to an exuberant crowd, thousands of whom had waited hours in the sticky Houston heat to attend. Rally-goers were given flashing wristbands in all different colors. They danced and sang as a DJ spun pop ballads before the event began.But the message Harris came to deliver was sobering. She listed the sprawling impacts of abortion bans like the one in Texas, which she called “ground zero for the right for reproductive freedom.”“All that to say, elections matter,” Harris said.View image in fullscreenDespite the speculation, the megastar did not perform. “I’m here as a mother,” Beyoncé said. “We are at the precipice of an incredible shift, the brink of history,” Beyoncé told the roaring crowd.In the final days before the election, the Harris campaign is tapping the star power of the party’s most popular figures and celebrity supporters. On Friday night, Willie Nelson, the country music star and Texas resident, performed his best-known songs, including On the Road Again and actor Jessica Alba urged women to vote. Beyoncé was joined by her mother, Tina Knowles, and her former bandmate Kelly Rowland.“We are grabbing back the pen from those who are trying to write an American story that would deny the right for women to make our own decisions about our bodies,” Rowland said. “Today that means grabbing that pen and casting my vote for Kamala Harris.”The night before, Harris held her first campaign event with Barack Obama. They were joined onstage in Atlanta by rocker Bruce Springsteen, who played a three-song set and branded Trump an “American tyrant.” On Saturday, Harris will rally with Michelle Obama in Michigan.Harris does not expect to win Texas. But Democrats here are suddenly hopeful after polls suggest an unexpectedly close senate race between the Republican incumbent, Ted Cruz, and the Democrat, Dallas-area congressman Colin Allred.Democrats face a daunting senate map this cycle. With a loss in West Virginia all but certain, and Montana slipping out of reach, their hopes of maintaining narrow-control of the Senate may rest on an upset in the Lone Star state.“Everything is bigger in Texas,” Allred said on Friday night. “But Ted Cruz is too small for Texas.”The emotional heart of the evening was the personal stories of Texas women who had nearly died from pregnancy-related complications because they did not receive proper care.Ondrea, a Texas woman who appeared in a new Harris campaign, became emotional as she shared her harrowing experience after a miscarriage at 16 weeks and needing an emergency abortion that she was denied under the state’s law. A video played before her remarks showed her with a wound and scars that stretched down her body, from her breast to her pelvis, after a six-hour surgery in which she said doctors had to cut open her torso in order to save her life.Texas residents Amanda and Josh Zurawski, who have become powerful surrogates for Harris on the campaign trail, also shared their story. At 18 weeks pregnant, Amanda Zurawski began to suffer complications and needed an abortion. There was no chance the foetus would survive, but doctors refused to terminate the pregnancy until she eventually developed sepsis, days later.“I was finally close enough to death to deserve healthcare in Texas,” Amanda Zurawski said.Todd Ivey, a reproductive health specialist in Houston, addressed the crowd surrounded by a team of doctors and medical professionals in white lab coats. He emphasized the challenges of administering care to patients when it could mean risking arrest. Since the Texas law took effect the state’s infant mortality has risen.“This is a healthcare crisis,” he said. This is unacceptable and it is cruel.”Among those in the crowd was Sara Gonzales, 32, of Splendora, Texas, who drove to the stadium straight from an early-morning shift at Starbucks. Gonzales said she considers herself an independent and in 2020, wrote in a candidate for president. But the political stakes changed, Gonzales said, the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, and Texas enacted its near-total ban on abortion.“Being a woman in Texas right now, it’s not OK,” she said. “I should have freedom over my own body.” More

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    Phil Lesh’s Life in Pictures

    Phil Lesh, the bassist and a charter member of the Grateful Dead who was 84 when he died on Friday, will be remembered as a versatile musician and a pioneer for his instrument of choice.Lesh co-wrote songs and was an occasional lead vocalist across his 30-year career with the rock band. But his skill at soaring improvisation and his chemistry with the band’s lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, ensured that Lesh would also be seen as a main character.Here are some snapshots from Lesh’s life and career.Paul Ryan/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesPhil Lesh, Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia in 1965 as the Warlocks before they became the Grateful Dead.Ron Rakow/Retro Photo ArchiveLesh on Ashbury Street in 1968.Associated PressThe Grateful Dead with reporters in San Francisco in 1967.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFrom left, Bill Kreutzmann on drums, Lesh and Weir at the Cafe Au Go Go in New York in 1967.Leni Sinclair/Getty ImagesFrom left, Garcia, Lesh and Weir in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1967.Malcolm Lubliner/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesSan Francisco, 1968.Chris Walter/WireImage, via Getty ImagesThe Dead in 1970, clockwise from top left: Weir, Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Ron McKernan, Mickey Hart and Garcia.Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesSan Francisco, 1970.Bettman/Getty ImagesThe Dead in the late ’60s.Ed Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty ImagesFrom left, Garcia, Weir and Lesh in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 1975.Ron Rakow/Retro Photo ArchiveLesh at Hollywood Bowl, 1974.Mark Sullivan/Getty ImagesLesh, at right, with David Crosby, left, and Ned Lagin, who both played briefly with the Dead.Ed Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty ImagesSan Francisco, 1978Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis and VCG, via Getty ImagesWeir and Lesh.Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis and VCG, via Getty ImagesWeir and Lesh at a recording studio in San Rafael, Calif.Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis and VCG, via Getty ImagesThe Dead in 1982, from left: Brent Mydland, Lesh, Kruetzmann, Weir, Garcia and Hart.Tim Mosenfelder/Getty ImagesRed Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado in 1987.Thearon W. Henderson/Getty ImagesHart, Wier and Lesh with the mascot of the San Francisco Giants in 2011.Jason Henry for The New York TimesLesh at Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, Calif.Associated PressThe Dead at Soldier Field in Chicago in 2015.Jason Henry for The New York TimesLesh at Terrapin Crossroads in 2015.Astrida Valigorsky/Getty ImagesAt the Great South Bay Music Festival in Patchogue, N.Y., last year. More

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    Beyoncé to appear with Kamala Harris in Houston to highlight abortion rights – reports

    Beyoncé will appear with Kamala Harris in Houston on Friday, according to media reports.The star turn will confirm that, following Harris’s endorsement by Taylor Swift last month, the Democratic vice-president and US presidential candidate has the support of the two most popular musicians in the world – a potentially invaluable asset for galvanising young voters.Harris is rallying in Texas, a Republican stronghold, to highlight abortion rights and support Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred, who trails Republican Ted Cruz in opinion polls.Beyoncé, 43, will appear in her home city along with her mother, Tina Knowles, and 91-year-old country music giant Willie Nelson, according to sources cited by the Washington Post newspaper.The event presents an opportunity for Beyoncé to give a live performance of Freedom, a song from her 2016 album Lemonade, which the vice-president has been using as walk-on music at rallies while making freedom a central theme of her campaign.Beyoncé, who has hundreds of millions of followers on social media, sang a cover of Etta James’s At Last at one of President Barack Obama’s inaugural balls in 2009, before singing the national anthem at Obama’s second inauguration ceremony in 2013.She performed Formation at a rally for Democrat Hillary Clinton three days before the presidential election in 2016 and told the crowd: “I want my daughter to grow up seeing a woman leading the country. That’s why I’m with her.”Her backing of Harris is therefore no surprise and fed fevered speculation – and inaccurate reporting – that she would make a dramatic entrance at this summer’s Democratic national convention in Philadelphia.Beyoncé becomes the latest celebrity to bring star power to the Harris campaign. On Thursday, the Democrat is holding a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, with musician Bruce Springsteen, film director Spike Lee, actor Samuel L Jackson and actor and filmmaker Tyler Perry as well as Obama.Other musicians supporting the Democrat include Eminem, Cher, Billie Eilish, Barbra Streisand, Carole King, John Legend and Stevie Wonder. Trump has the backing of Jason Aldean, Lee Greenwood, Kanye West and Kid Rock, while the Republican national convention was shown a video featuring rapper Forgiato Blow and reality TV star Amber Rose. More

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    From Salzburg to Paris, Dancing Bach’s St. John Passion

    From Salzburg to Dijon to Paris, a German choreographer adds striking dance to the sacred oratorio.The first thing we hear in Sasha Waltz’s production of the “St. John Passion” (“Johannes-Passion”) is not the mournful opening notes of the sacred oratorio, written by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1724, but rather the whir of sewing machines.Eleven dancers bend over a long table as they mechanically stitch together modest frocks. The chorus enters, with lacerating cries of “Herr, unser Herrscher” (“Lord, our Sovereign”), while the dancers slowly carry the billowy white garments that they have just made downstage, their naked bodies bathed in a golden glow. In a recent phone interview, Waltz referred to these frocks as “the shift of life, the cloth that represents, in a way, your own life, from birth to death.”Over the next two hours, the dancers repeatedly don these white gowns, slip into other, colorful garments, or perform in the nude as they bring Bach’s magisterial music to life, their movements enhanced by shimmering nocturnal lighting. For the most part, the set remains bare throughout the performance; the few props include wooden poles, blocks and planks, rope and mirrors.After springtime performances at the Salzburg Easter Festival in Austria and the Opéra de Dijon in France, the production is to arrive at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in early November. Waltz, 61, is perhaps Germany’s best-known living choreographer, and the latest director of many who have been drawn to Bach’s two surviving passions — grand musical settings of the crucifixion of Jesus.“I think it’s very, very theatrical,” Waltz said of the “St. John Passion.” “It’s maybe the oratorio where Bach comes the closest to opera, I would say. And I love the rhythmicality of the turba choirs,” she added, referring to the highly charged crowd scenes.She was speaking days after receiving this year’s German Dance Award. The jury statement praised her “artistically unique and disciplinary-bursting oeuvre,” which has ranged from works staged in museums to operas, such as Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘There’s vomit on my sweater already!’ Barack Obama raps Eminem’s Lose Yourself at Detroit rally

    Barack Obama rapped Eminem’s signature hit Lose Yourself to a crowd in Detroit during a campaign rally for Kamala Harris.He was preceded by Eminem himself, who told the crowd in his home city: “It’s important to use your voice, I’m encouraging everyone to get out and vote, please … I don’t think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution of what people will do if you make your opinion known. I think vice-president Harris supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld.”Obama opened his ensuing speech by saying: “I gotta say, I have done a lot of rallies, so I don’t usually get nervous, but I was feeling some kind of way following Eminem,” before segueing into Lose Yourself’s opening lines: “I notice my palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, vomit on my sweater already, mom’s spaghetti, I’m nervous but on the surface I look calm and ready to drop bombs but I keep on forgetting …”He joked that he thought Eminem would be performing and he would be a guest star, adding: “Love me some Eminem.”The former president is an avowed music fan, sharing his favourite songs twice a year in official posts on his social media. Summer 2024’s selections included songs by contemporary pop names such as Beyoncé, Tyla and Rema alongside older tracks by Nick Drake, the Supremes and cosmic jazz musician Pharoah Sanders.Obama went on to excoriate Donald Trump in his speech, recalling how Trump expressed doubt about the election results in 2020. “Because Donald Trump was willing to spread lies about voter fraud in Michigan, protesters came down, banged on the windows, shouting, ‘Let us in. Stop the count.’ Poll workers inside being intimidated … all because Donald Trump couldn’t accept losing … there is absolutely no evidence that this man thinks about anybody but himself.”He questioned Trump’s mental fitness for the role of president, saying: “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this. But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”He also made reference to Trump’s stunt earlier this week, where he worked in a McDonald’s kitchen and drive-thru counter that was closed to the public. Harris, he said, “worked at McDonald’s when in college to pay her expenses. She did not pretend to work at McDonald’s when it was closed.”Tim Walz, also speaking at the rally, decried the stunt as “cosplaying … Fake orders for fake customers”. He also appealed to freedom of speech, saying Trump was “talking about sending the military against people who don’t support him. He’s naming names.” More

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    Kris Kristofferson’s brave anti-war song | Brief letters

    One important song appears to have been overlooked in the eulogies for Kris Kristofferson (Obituary, 30 September). Don’t Let the Bastards (Get You Down) is a brave song for a country singer with a military background in the Reagan era. It remains very relevant today: the opening line is “They’re killing babies in the name of freedom.”Peter TaylorTynemouth, Tyne and Wear Steve Vanstone’s nomination of Bob Dylan as a great songwriter but a bad singer (Letters, 3 October) brings to mind another candidate for the greatest songwriter: Franz Schubert. Maria Wagner, who often heard Schubert sing in her family’s home in Vienna, said she had heard all the famous Schubert singers, “but no one sang as Schubert did, and that without a voice”.Susan TomesEdinburgh My family would just like to reassure Bob Dylan that, contrary to Steve Vanstone’s claim, they have heard us both and Bob is definitely not the worst singer of all time.Andrew KeanRainham, London Is the greatest songwriter debate a boys’ club? Joni Mitchell has not only written wonderful lyrics, her melodies are better and her arrangements more imaginative. And as for her voice…Orlando GooddenWhatley, Somerset The seafaring Anglo-Saxons would not have given a hoot where in Europe the oak for their boats came from, so why should the reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo burial ship be made of English wood (‘They must be somewhere’: appeal for British oak to recreate Sutton Hoo ship, 4 October)?Bill Britnell Shrewsbury, Shropshire More

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    Bruce Springsteen endorses Kamala Harris for president while criticising ‘dangerous’ Trump

    Bruce Springsteen has officially thrown his support behind Kamala Harris, endorsing her for president and simultaneously opposing Donald Trump, calling him “the most dangerous candidate for president in my lifetime”.The Born to Run singer made the announcement in a video posted to his Instagram on Thursday evening (US time) in which he described the upcoming election as “one of the most consequential elections in our nation’s history”.“Perhaps not since the Civil War has this great country felt as politically, spiritually and emotionally divided as it does at this moment. It doesn’t have to be this way.”Springsteen, who was a vocal supporter of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in their respective presidential campaigns, is the latest high-profile endorsement for Harris, joining Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey and Barbra Streisand.In the video, he praised Harris and Walz’s commitment to “a vision of this country that respects and includes everyone, regardless of class, religion, race, your political point of view or sexual identity, and they want to grow our economy in a way that benefits all, not just a few like me on top”.“That’s the vision of America I’ve been consistently writing about for 55 years.”Trump, by contrast, “doesn’t understand the meaning of this country, its history or what it means to be deeply American”, the singer said.“His disdain for the sanctity of our constitution, the sanctity of democracy, the sanctity of the rule of law and the sanctity of the peaceful transfer of power should disqualify him from the office of president ever again.”Concluding, Springsteen said: “Now, everybody sees things different, and I respect your choice as a fellow citizen. But like you, I’ve only got one vote, and it’s one of the most precious possessions that I have. That’s why come November 5 I’ll be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Thanks for listening.” More