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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The fate of comedian Bill Cosby is now in the hands of the jury after both sides wrapped up their cases Monday in his sexual assault trial near Philadelphia.

The 79-year-old Cosby is charged with drugging and assaulting Andrea Constand, a former director of operations of the Temple University women’s basketball team.

He allegedly gave her pills that paralyzed her and left her unable to resist when he started touching her in his Philadelphia home.

Constand had gone to Cosby’s house for dinner and to get advice about her career.

Cosby’s lawyers used their closing arguments to say Constand lied on the witness stand about her relationship with the comic. They pointed out that she telephoned Cosby more than 50 times after the alleged attack, but told police she had no contact with him.

“It’s not a fib. It’s not a mistake, It’s a stone cold lie,” Brian McMonagle told the jury.

Constand said the calls were just business and that Cosby, as a Temple alumnus, could help the basketball team.

“This isn’t talking to a trustee. This is talking to a lover,” McMonagle said, accusing Constand of trying to use Cosby’s name for financial gain.

The prosecution relied heavily on parts of the deposition Cosby gave to police in a 2005 civil suit brought by Constand.

In it, Cosby admitted getting a prescription to a sedative called Quaaludes back in the 1970s and giving the drug to women he wanted to sleep with.

District Attorney Kevin Steele told the jury these words prove Cosby knew exactly what he was doing when he allegedly gave pills to Constand, telling her they were herbal relaxants.

“Drugging somebody and putting them in a position where you can do what you want with them is not romantic. It’s criminal.”

Steele said no amount of “fancy lawyering” will save Cosby from his own words.

“Ladies and gentlemen, he has told you what he has done,” Steele said to the jurors. “It is about as straightforward as you are ever going to see in a sex crimes case.”

If found guilty, Cosby could go to prison for the rest of his life.

More than 50 women claim Cosby sexually assaulted them in incidents dating back to the 1960s, when he emerged as a major comedy star. Most of the alleged incidents occurred too long ago to be prosecuted now.

Constand’s complaint is the only one that has come to trial. Cosby has denied all the charges.

Cosby won fame for stand-up comedy routines focusing on his Philadelphia childhood and growing up in a middle class black family.

He played a wise and genial doctor in his 1980s television comedy series, The Cosby Show. It was the country’s most popular TV show for much of its eight-year run.
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Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” is playing to sold-out houses in a star-filled revival in London, and Peter Eotvos’ operatic version premiered Saturday in  New York at City Opera. A response to the AIDS epidemic and the lack of U.S. government action, the work still resonates in an era of polarized politics.

 

“The play in English has lasted now for 25 years, which is not long compared to ‘Oedipus,’ but it’s pretty long for a contemporary play to still be able to generate excitement, and it’s taught everywhere in colleges,” Kushner said. “All of my stuff does best during Republican administrations because I hate them so much, and there is an anger in the plays that I think really speaks in times of political mischief of a high order.”

 

Formally titled “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” the two-part play runs for nearly seven hours, not including intermissions. “Millennium Approaches” premiered in San Francisco in 1991 and “Perestroika” the following year in Los Angeles, Both parts won Tony Awards, and “Millennium Approaches” earned the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

 

An HBO miniseries in 2003 directed by Mike Nichols starred Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. When Paris’ Theatre du Chatalet was seeking to commission a new work from Eotvos, a composer friend recommended “Angels.”

 

“He asked me if I would prepare a libretto. And I said no. I said I don’t quite understand how a 6 1/2 hour-long play can be turned into a libretto that’s anything shorter than the Ring Cycle,” Kushner said. “But I said that he was welcome to try.”

 

Eotvos’ wife, Mari Mezei, took about a year to condense “Angels” to an opera of just over 2 hours. They traveled to New York, attended “Rent,” “Cabaret” and other Broadway shows to get a feel for the city.

 

“I went out to Central Park at night and listened to the sounds,” the 73-year-old composer said through a translator. “There were remote sounds of city in the background. There was actually a guitar playing, and that’s where this guitar solo is actually coming from.”

 

“Angels” centers on Prior Walter, who has AIDS, the people in his life and controversial lawyer Roy Cohn. Central is Prior’s vision of an angel, who declares him a prophet.

 

“The idea of the angel and the hallucinations was musical inspiration,” Eotvos said. “Everything that is abstract can be put into the music.”

 

The opera version shifts the emphasis.

 

“Politics is not the territory of music,” Eotvos remembered telling Kushner. “The names of politicians are gone in a certain amount of time, so they’re not interesting anymore. It was much more important to emphasize this human condition.”

 

A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Eotvos composed “Angels” with speech morphing into song, syncopating percussion and electronic keyboards.

 

The opera was given its world premiere at the Chatalet in 2004 with Barbara Hendricks and Julia Migenes. It has since appeared in Hamburg, Germany; Amsterdam; Boston; Fort Worth, Texas; Frankfurt, Germany; London; Wroclaw, Poland; and Los Angeles.

 

Michael Capasso, who brought New York City Opera out of bankruptcy last year, decided to cap the first full season of the company’s return with four performances of “Angels” running through June 16, the first installment of a LGBT Pride Initiative that will include Charles Wuorinen’s “Brokeback Mountain” next June.

 

And while the opera makes its New York premiere, Marianne Elliott’s acclaimed staging starring Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane is running until Aug. 19 at London’s National Theatre. Kushner says it likely will transfer to Broadway next season.

 

“It feels to me like I can stop worrying about it once and for all. I think it’s going to last,” said Kushner, who turns 61 next month. “I don’t know if the human race is going to last. But I think that the play is.”
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The New Hampshire Political Library doesn’t include any books about President Donald Trump, but even he likely would agree its new collection of presidential biographies, memoirs and monographs is huge.

 

Arthur Young of Manchester spent 25 years collecting 2,744 books on the presidency, the founding fathers and other people and events related to the nation’s highest office.

 

He donated them to the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College, where staff spent the last six months cataloguing them and building custom glass-front display cabinets to hold them.

 

The collection spans from George Washington to Barack Obama, and includes scholarly tomes as well as what Young considers fun works, such as a book about Teddy Roosevelt written by his valet.

 

“A book itself is an object of art, from its binding to its font,” Young said at a dedication ceremony Friday. “Important ideas and skillful writing are enduring treasures of our culture.”

Young, 76, is a former director of libraries at the University of Rhode Island, University of South Carolina and Northern Illinois University. He said he grew up in a home with thousands of books and has spent his life dedicated to the care, preservation and dissemination of books.

 

He acknowledged he hasn’t read all of the presidential collection, but said he hopes they will be useful to students.

 

The collection shows how perceptions of presidents have changed over time. For example, the earliest book about Washington was written in 1931; the latest in 2009. The most recent addition is a 1,400-word book about Obama that covers his life until just before he became president.

 

“Washington is a good example — the first president continues to be cited as a model of decorum and honesty and all of those good virtues going back a couple hundred years,” Young said. “You learn how the presidency and its meaning changes over time.”

 

Neil Levesque, director of the institute, said the donation reinforces the facility’s value to scholars, journalists and the public and will provide rich research opportunities for students.

 

“The students here are going to use this for many, many years to come,” he said.

 

Until now, the library has mainly been devoted to campaign memorabilia and other items related to New Hampshire’s tradition of holding the first-in-the-nation presidential primary every four years.

 

The small room that is now lined with glass-front bookcases filled with Young’s donated books had been used as a meeting space and reading room but had few actual books. Young, who has seen many libraries, called it “beyond splendid.”

 

“I don’t have to make any exaggeration to say this is the best setting for books I have ever been in, and that’s not just because they used to be mine,” he said.
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