Month: June 2017

The cost of last year’s Rio Olympics has risen to 43.3 billion reais ($13.2 billion), around 14.5 billion reais more than originally planned, according to figures published by the federal agency for Olympic legacy (AGLO) on Wednesday.

The original budget when Brazil won the right to host the Games in 2009 was around 28.8 billion reais.

The total announced on Wednesday could still rise further, but it was in keeping with expectations that had been revised during the countdown to South America’s first Olympics.

The cost is below the 8.92 billion pounds ($14.3 billion) spent on London 2012, but still more than twice the $5.2 billion average cost of hosting the Summer Games, according to a 2015 study by the University of Oxford and Said Business School.

Some 7.23 billion reais was spent on venues, AGLO said.

The Globo sports website reported that the cost of infrastructure projects rose to 26.7 billion reais and another 9.2 billion reais was spent on operating costs.

Rio de Janeiro, which hosted the Olympics in August and the Paralympics in September, has been criticized for a lack of legacy planning, with some of the venues abandoned soon after the closing ceremony.

Other infrastructure projects, including a new metro line that does not extend all the way to the main Olympic Park, have had their effectiveness questioned.

Officials said that legacy planning was a major challenge but that they intended to hold an average of three events a month at the Olympic venues starting this June, a number they hope will increase to 10 events a month by December.

“It’s not easy to manage the legacy,” AGLO president Paulo Marcio Dias Mello told reporters. “London, for example, took two years to deliver the legacy and even today there is public investment in that legacy.”

“Even if it doesn’t meet everyone’s expectations, it will be a relief that what we have here will not be white elephants.”
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They’re homeless, but a group of men and women from Texas has made it to Carnegie Hall.

The storied New York City concert hall is the venue Wednesday evening for a performance by the Dallas Street Choir, all singers recruited from urban streets and homeless shelters that has been performing since 2015.

About 20 members of the choir were to be joined by 17 residents of a Manhattan homeless shelter.

The singers include Michael Brown, who lives under a bridge in Dallas when it rains and on a hilltop in sunny weather.

“We may be homeless, but we’re not voiceless,” he said at a rehearsal Tuesday, “so let’s use our effort to remind people that we still have hope and it will never die.”

Dallas Street Choir conductor Jonathan Palant has also brought in some world-class luminaries for the performance: mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, soprano Harolyn Blackwell, composer Jake Heggie and composer Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the Broadway hits “Godspell,” “Pippin” and “Wicked.”

Palant said he got the idea for the choir a few years ago while volunteering with a homeless services organization. It started out as a Christmas event – a big meal at a homeless shelter with entertainment by a group of singers that rehearsed with Palant for just a few hours. But that inspired Palant to start a weekly musical session open to anyone who wanted to sing.

Members of the choir come and go frequently. They don’t always produce perfect sounds, and there are moments of slight cacophony, “but our members sing with heart like no other choir I’ve ever worked with,” said Palant.

Never in its 126-year history has a musical ensemble of homeless performers appeared at Carnegie, said the hall’s archivist, Gino Francesconi.

Brown got his first shower and haircut in weeks for the tour. Normally, he survives going to soup kitchens, and aims to get a job as a waiter.

He’s an energetic, bright-eyed choir member, while some others are physically frail; one woman relies on a walker, another uses a cane.

In Dallas, they rehearse each Wednesday morning, learning melodies by rote, with printed lyrics. They leave with snacks and a public transportation voucher.

The evening at Carnegie Hall, starting at 8 p.m., is titled “Imagine a World – Music for Humanity.”

Von Stade will premiere Heggie’s new setting of Hub Miller’s “Spinning Song,” with Heggie at the piano.

With the choir, Schwartz will perform “For Good” from “Wicked,” along with Blackwell and von Stade. Rounding out the evening will be the homeless choir offering Broadway songs, capped by personal stories.

Tickets are $25 for any Carnegie seat, with proceeds going to organizations that support the homeless.

The New York City Department of Homeless Services has donated some tickets so members of the homeless community can attend.

The choir is also performing Thursday at Washington National Cathedral in Washington D.C.

About $200,000 needed for the New York and Washington trips came from previous concerts in Texas, plus a private grant. Carnegie’s Weill Music Institute pulled in the homeless singers from Manhattan. The New Yorkers are members of a community choir and will sing two numbers on the program.

At least while they’re in New York, the singers have a roof over their heads – a hotel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side near the Valley Lodge shelter where the local performers live.

“This is serious, man – Carnegie Hall in New York City,” says Brown. “We have to show people that we didn’t come from Texas for no reason.”
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Soccer megastar Cristiano Ronaldo has been accused of tax evasion.

Prosecutors in Spain allege the Real Madrid player defrauded the government of about $16 million in taxes from 2011 to 2014. Specifically, Spanish authorities say Ronaldo “took advantage of a business structure created in 2010 to hide from fiscal authorities income generated in Spain from image rights.”

Authorities say Ronaldo used a shell company in the Virgin Islands to “create a screen in order to hide his total income from Spain’s Tax Office.”

In the past, the world’s highest paid athlete denied any wrongdoing, and he maintains is innocence on the most recent allegations.

Before the Champions League final on June 3, Ronaldo told El Chiringuito TV that he was not worried.

“I am very relaxed about it — the truth is I’m very, very relaxed,” Ronaldo said. “I know that these things can be resolved with the best decisions. So I am good. I can say [that] from the depth of my heart, looking straight into the camera.

Ronaldo reportedly earned $93 million last year in salary, endorsements and other bonuses.

The latest tax evasion news comes in the wake of a similar situation involving Ronaldo’s rival Lionel Messi of Barcelona, who was found guilty of tax evasion last summer and given a 21-month suspended sentence.
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Pennsylvania jury on Tuesday was set to enter its first full day of deliberating whether Bill Cosby sexually assaulted a female friend who had come to him for career advice in his home in the Philadelphia suburbs in 2004.

Cosby, best known for his role as the dad in the 1980s hit family TV comedy “The Cosby Show,” was charged in late 2015 with sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, just days before the statute of limitations on the alleged crime was to run out.

Constand is one of dozens of women to have accused Cosby of sex abuse — often after plying them with drugs — in a series of incidents dating to the 1960s. The allegation by the now 44-year-old former staffer at Cosby’s alma mater, Temple University, is the only one not too old to be the subject of criminal prosecution.

Constand was the prosecution’s star witness in the weeklong trial in the Philadelphia suburb of Norristown, testifying that Cosby gave her pills that left her unable to respond when he sexually assaulted her. Another witness, Kelly Johnson, testified that she was the victim of a similar attack by the entertainer in 1996.

Cosby, 79, whose long career was based on a family-friendly comedy style, did not testify. He has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and described his encounters with Constand as consensual.

In his closing argument on Monday, Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele said Cosby’s words incriminated him, noting that the defendant had given multiple depositions and police statements on the incident including saying he had not had sexual contact with Constand “asleep or awake.”

Sex with an unconscious person cannot be consensual, Steele noted.

Defense attorney Brian McMonagle in his closing statement said Cosby was guilty of adultery, which is not a crime, but not sex assault. Among those listening was Cosby’s 73-year-old wife of half a century and business manager, Camille, who came to the courtroom for the first time on Monday.

The defense strategy focused on highlighting inconsistencies in Constand’s past statements about the timing of the alleged assault and pointing out that she remained in contact with Cosby for weeks after the night in question.

Cosby’s attorneys sought to portray Constand as a woman whose allegations were motivated by money. She settled a 2005 civil lawsuit against Cosby for an undisclosed sum, though jurors did not hear about that case.

Cosby still faces multiple civil lawsuits by other accusers.

The jurors in the trial are Pittsbugh-area residents, who have been brought to the Norristown courthouse at the order of Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas Judge Steven O’Neill.

They began deliberations on Monday and have been sequestered at a hotel for the trial’s duration, a relatively rare occurrence in the U.S. criminal justice system.
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The Golden State Warriors won their second National Basketball Association championship in three years Monday night with a 129-120 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Warriors forward Kevin Durant scored 39 points in Game 5 of the best-of-7 series on his way to being named NBA Finals most valuable player.

The championship is the first for Durant, a 10-year veteran who spent the first nine years of his career in Oklahoma City before signing with the Warriors before this season.

Golden State’s Stephen Curry scored 34 points and 10 assists Monday, while Andre Iguodala added 20 points.

Cleveland’s LeBron James, last year’s Finals MVP, had 41 points, 13 rebounds and 8 assists in the loss.
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In recent years, China has become an increasingly attractive market for Hollywood producers, despite tight state controls. Chinese investors also have been looking at opportunities in the U.S. film and entertainment industry. While some people express concern over these growing ties, others say they are mutually beneficial. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from Los Angeles.
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They came for the music, the mind-bending drugs, to resist the Vietnam War and 1960s American orthodoxy, or simply to escape summer boredom. And they left an enduring legacy.

This season marks the 50th anniversary of that legendary “Summer of Love,” when throngs of American youth descended on San Francisco to join a cultural revolution.

Thinking back on 1967, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead recalls a creative explosion that sprouted from fissures in American society. That summer marked a pivot point in rock-and-roll history, he says, but it was about much more than the music.

“There was a spirit in the air,” said Weir, who dropped out of high school and then helped form the Grateful Dead in 1965. “We figured that if enough of us got together and put our hearts and minds to it, we could make anything happen.”

San Francisco, now a hub of technology and unrecognizable from its grittier, more freewheeling former self, is taking the anniversary seriously. Hoping for another invasion of visitors – this time with tourist dollars – the city is celebrating with museum exhibits, music and film festivals, Summer of Love-inspired dance parties and lecture panels. Hotels are offering discount packages that include “psychedelic cocktails,” “Love Bus” tours, tie-dyed tote bags and bubble wands.

The city’s travel bureau, which is coordinating the effort, calls it an “exhilarating celebration of the most iconic cultural event in San Francisco history.”

One thing the anniversary makes clear is that what happened here in the 1960s could never happen in San Francisco today, simply because struggling artists can’t afford the city anymore. In the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, which was ground zero for the counterculture, two-bedroom apartments now rent for $5,000 a month. San Francisco remains a magnet for young people, but even those earning six-figure Silicon Valley salaries complain about the cost of living.

In the mid-1960s, rent in Haight-Ashbury was extremely cheap, Weir, now 69, told The Associated Press.

“That attracted artists and bohemians in general because the bohemian community tended to move in where they could afford it,” he said.

During those years, the Grateful Dead shared a spacious Victorian on Ashbury Street. Janis Joplin lived down the street. Across from her was Joe McDonald, of the psychedelic rock band Country Joe and the Fish.

Jefferson Airplane eventually bought a house a few blocks away on Fulton Street, where they hosted legendary, wild parties.

“The music is what everyone seems to remember, but it was a lot more than that,” said David Freiberg, 75, a singer and bassist for Quicksilver Messenger Service who later joined Jefferson Airplane. “It was artists, poets, musicians, all the beautiful shops of clothes and hippie food stores. It was a whole community.”

The bands dropped by each other’s houses and played music nearby, often in free outdoor concerts at Golden Gate Park and its eastward extension known as the Panhandle. Their exciting new breed of folk, jazz and blues-inspired electrical music became known as the San Francisco Sound. Several of its most influential local acts – the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, which launched Joplin’s career – shot to fame during the summer’s three-day Monterey Pop Festival.

“Every fantasy about the summer of ’67 that was ever created – peace, joy, love, nonviolence, wear flowers in your hair and fantastic music – was real at Monterey. It was bliss,” said Dennis McNally, the Grateful Dead’s longtime publicist and official biographer who has curated an exhibit at the California Historical Society that runs through Sept. 10.

The exhibit, “On the Road to the Summer of Love,” explains how that epic summer came about and why San Francisco was its inevitable home. McNally uncovered 100 photographs, some never seen publicly, that trace San Francisco’s contrarian roots to the Beat poets of the 1950s, followed by civil rights demonstrations and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1960s.

The national media paid little attention to San Francisco’s psychedelic community until January 1967, when poets and bands joined forces for the “Human Be-In,” a Golden Gate Park gathering that unexpectedly drew about 50,000 people, McNally said. It was there that psychologist and LSD-advocate Timothy Leary stood on stage and delivered his famous mantra: “Turn on. Tune In. Drop out.”

“After the media got hold, it just exploded,” McNally said. “Suddenly, a flood descends on Haight Street. Every bored high school kid – and that’s all of them – is saying, `How do I get to San Francisco?”’

An exhaustive exhibit at San Francisco’s de Young museum, “The Summer of Love Experience,” offers a feel-good trip back in time. There’s a psychedelic light show, a 1960s soundtrack and galleries with iconic concert posters, classic photographs and hippie chic fashions worn by Joplin, Jerry Garcia and others. It runs through Aug. 20.

But that summer’s invasion carried a dark cloud. Tens of thousands of youths looking for free love and drugs flooded into San Francisco, living in the streets, begging for food. Parents journeyed to the city in search of their young runaways. An epidemic of toxic psychedelics and harder drugs hit the streets.

“Every loose nut and bolt in America rattled out here to San Francisco, and it got pretty messy,” Weir said. 

The longtimers saw it as the end of an era, but one that shaped history.

“We created a mindset that became intrinsic to the fabric of America today,” said Country Joe McDonald, now 75. “Every single thing we did was adapted, folded into America – gender attitudes, ecological attitudes, the invention of rock and roll.”

Half a century later, McDonald, who lives in Berkeley, feels the rumblings of history repeating itself.

UC Berkeley is again at the center of a free speech debate, albeit of a different nature. Discontent with the U.S. government and President Donald Trump has stirred the largest protests he’s seen since the Vietnam War. In the women’s marches across America, he felt echoes of the Summer of Love.

“I think there’s a similarity,” McDonald said, drawing a parallel to the massive anti-Trump turnout marked by nonviolence, playful pink protest hats, creative signs and a determination to change the country’s political course. “Both were about saying goodbye to the past and hello to the future.”
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A museum that tells the stories of the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks will reopen Tuesday in a new space, a little farther from the World Trade Center memorial but with triple the exhibition space of the temporary quarters it occupied for a decade.

The 9/11 Tribute Museum was originally founded in 2006 as a temporary shrine to the victims in the years that the larger, better known National September 11 Memorial and Museum was under construction and even after it opened in 2011. 

The Tribute Museum offered daily guided tours of the rebuilt World Trade Center site led by people with close personal connections to the tragedy, including attack survivors, first responders, recovery workers and relatives of the dead.

More than 4 million people have visited the museum, originally called the Tribute Center and co-founded by CEO Jennifer Adams-Webb and the September 11th Families’ Association, causing it to outgrow its original home in a space formerly occupied by a delicatessen.

The new space, a few blocks away, is 36,000-square-feet, about half of which is exhibition space. It is located on the ground and second floors of a high-rise building.

“Originally, when we started, we weren’t sure where we were going,” said Lee Ielpi, whose firefighter son, Jonathan, died in the attacks. “We realized, as the years went on, that we are making an impact.”

Artifacts on display at the museum include “missing persons” posters that were hung throughout the city in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, when families still held hope that their loved ones would be found alive. Other items on display include a death certificate, a boarding pass for someone who was on one of the flights, and a section of window from one of the hijacked planes.

On a tour of the space last week, Ielpi, a retired firefighter, stopped before one display that left him in tears: his son’s helmet and fire department jacket.

“It is crucial that we pass on the understanding of 9/11 to future generations and the tremendous spirit of resilience and service that arose after the attacks,” said Ielpi, who helped carry his son’s body from the rubble.

Ielpi had nothing but praise for the much larger National September 11 Memorial and Museum, which serves as the country’s principal institution that tells the 9/11 story through interactive technology, archives and filmed narratives. He said the institutions “complement each other,” with the Tribute Museum able to truly personalize the experience of the day through the volunteer guides.

The new space cost $8.7 million. Private and public funds for it include donations from American Express, Zurich North America and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the Trade Center site.

The museum also offers programs for visiting schoolchildren who were not even alive on Sept. 11, 2001.

Lee Skolnick, whose firm designed the exhibit layout, said the Tribute Museum’s power comes from the survivors, relatives and recovery workers who lead the tours and who have agreed to share their personal stories.

“The fact that survivors, responders and citizens discovered the `seeds of service’ growing out of unimaginable tragedy is a testament to the power of the human spirit and an amazing life lesson for us all,” said Skolnick. “What can you do for others, for the world?”
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James Taylor might just be the happiest road warrior touring today, so what makes him happier?

 

Bringing on old friend Bonnie Raitt this summer for concerts that include the ultimate in Americana, some of the country’s most storied baseball parks.

 

“I’ve loved her music and her for a long, long time,” Taylor told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “I’ve interacted with Bonnie, and happily so, at numerous benefits for numerous causes — environmental, social, political causes — over the years. We’re very much in sync in that way. She’s an incredible giver.”

 

Among their stops will be Boston’s Fenway Park, where Taylor’s home-state team, the Red Sox, live and where Raitt last joined him on the road in 2015. And the first time? Well, that was back in 1970, when he invited the Harvard junior and budding blues singer, guitar player and songwriter onstage for a campus gig at Sanders Theatre after the two met through a mutual friend.

 

“I was nervous to play because I hadn’t really broken my chops in for concerts that much,” Raitt said by phone from Toronto while on a swing through Canada. “But I was so excited. It was an honor to be both at my school and opening for him. He couldn’t have been warmer and more friendly. It was intimidating to meet one of my heroes but he was just so down to earth.”

 

Raitt got her first recording contract and dropped out of school around that time. Though she was based on the West Coast and Taylor on the East, the two stayed in touch over the decades.

 

“The affection between us is so clear and so palpable. Our two bands love each other. James and I are both social activists and we’re really proud that a dollar of every ticket will be donated to various causes,” Raitt said.

 

The two haven’t worked up their sets yet but Raitt just may include Taylor’s 1968 “Rainy Day Man,” from his debut album and one of her all-time Taylor favorites, written by him and Zach Wiesner. It’s old-school Taylor, desperate and lonely, focused on making a dope connection soon after he tried opiates for the first time in real life, setting him on a 20-year path of addiction.

 

Raitt covered the song in 1974 on her “Streetlights” album.

 

“What good is that happy lie/All you wanted from the start was to cry/It looks like another fall/Your good friends they don’t seem to help at all/When you’re feeling kind of cold and small/Just look up your rainy day man.”

 

“It’s so complex and deep as a point of view, especially for someone as young as James when he wrote it,” Raitt said. “He was so insightful and so deeply in touch with the inner workings and the darker side of the human soul and relationships, and so much of that point of view was so beautifully expressed in his music. That song just speaks to me and always has.”

 

The summer tour has the two working together for six weeks, kicking off July 6 at Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, and winding up at Fenway, Taylor’s third turn there, on Aug. 11. Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., Wrigley Field in Chicago and AT&T Park in San Francisco are among their other ballpark stops.

 

Taylor, 69, and Raitt, 67, will play hour sets, guesting for each other as well. Come fall, Taylor will come off the road, where he’s averaged about half of each year for the last three years, to begin work on a new studio album, this one a look back at his musical influences.

 

“I don’t have a release date. We haven’t started recording yet. Past experience has shown me that if you set a deadline you’re just setting yourself up for a fall. I’m not writing these songs. I’m looking at the songs that basically were the source for my musical education. The way I want to record them is just my guitar arrangements,” he said.

 

His last album of original material was in 2015, “Before This World,” some of which explored his road to recovery. The album didn’t come easy. He left the family, including twin teen boys, to hole up in Newport, Rhode Island, following a 13-year gap for release of new songs.

 

Raitt put out a studio album last year called “Dig in Deep” and generally works in five-year cycles for recording,

 

“It’s a lot more fun to be out here on the road playing than it is looking for ideas for a new record,” she said. “Some people enjoy writing and it’s always satisfying, but really the payoff for me is being able to travel around and make people happy every night, including me.”
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