A person had a medical emergency while driving on Sunday, causing a multi-car collision in the popular tourist area of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, that left one person dead and six others injured, officials said.
The IRS is sending an average of nearly $3,000 to eligible taxpayers. As tax season arrives and the IRS gives refunds to taxpayers who overpaid in 2024, most recipients will get a payment of about $2,945 in their bank accounts. According to the agency, taxpayers can use the IRS’ “Where’s My Refund” portal to find out when they will get a payment.
Who is eligible to get a refund from the IRS?
Per The U.S. Sun, taxpayers may be eligible for a refund if they filed their federal income tax returns between mid-April and May and if they paid back more than they owe. Taxpayers can use the online portal to find out when their return is received, approved or sent. The IRS asks taxpayers to provide their Social Security or individual taxpayer ID number, as well as their filing status and refund amount.
What could cause a delay in getting a refund?
Several factors may cause a delay in taxpayers getting their payments. Some of those factors include how the person filed their taxes or how they want to be paid. In some cases, operational issues can cause delays. Additionally, the recent cuts that have impacted staffing and the IRS budget may cause issues with the system.
People who file a paper tax return as opposed to online are more likely to see delays because the filings are manually checked by IRS agents. Online users normally get their refund processed quickly.
Rihanna is grieving the loss of her father Ronald Fenty, who has died at age 70 after a brief illness.
Fenty died in Los Angeles on Saturday, according to Starcom Network, but the official cause of his death is unknown. Rihanna was present with her father when he died, sources told Starcom.
According to TMZ, obtained photos that showed Rihanna’s brother, Rajad Fenty, arriving at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Wednesday. Rihanna was also in the car when the family went to the hospital, the outlet reported.
What are the details known about Rihanna’s relationship with her father?
According to TMZ, Rihanna had a “rocky” relationship with her father for a while, but the pair appeared to resolve their issues in recent years. In 2023, Ronald told TMZ that he is excited for Rihanna and A$AP Rocky as they’re expecting another child.
Ronald and his ex-wife Monica Braithwaite raised their three children—Rihanna, Rajad, and Rorrey. The pair split in 2002.
When did Rihanna announce that she’s expecting a third child?
While she is grieving the loss of her father, Rihanna is also expecting to soon welcome her third baby. The 37-year-old Fenty Beauty founder announced her pregnancy earlier this month at the Met Gala in New York City.
“I feel a lot better that I don’t have to suck my stomach in anymore,” Rihanna told Access Hollywood at the time.
@accesshollywood #Rihanna knew fans were onto something 🔍 #metgala #awardseason ♬ original sound – Access Hollywood
A source who also spoke to People said Rihanna always wanted a big family and she couldn’t be more excited.
“Rihanna and Rocky are thrilled to be growing their family and they can’t wait to give their boys another sibling,” the source told People. “They wanted to have their children close together in age, so that they could grow up together and share a close bond. They feel so blessed and are so grateful for this next chapter in their lives. It’s a very special time.”
Hannah Cobb, a white woman suspected in the fatal shooting of her Black boyfriend Telvin Osborne, won’t face any charges. On May 23, District Attorney Jared Williams told WRDW that Burke County’s grand jury voted to decline indicting Cobb for involuntary manslaughter regarding Osborne’s death. They returned a “no true bill,” which means they didn’t believe there was sufficient evidence to charge someone with a crime, per Legal Dictionary. At the time, Cobb was out on bail after her case was approved with a $25,000 bond earlier in May. Stipulations of her bond included surveillance and required her to turn in her guns to the local authorities.
Local authorities warn North Carolina residents about protesting after Hannah Cobb isn’t indicted
The Burke County Sheriff’s Office shared a Facebook post warning that anyone who disagrees with the decision should not resort to violence, as they will face consequences.
“We are aware of rumors circulating on social media regarding potential rioting in Waynesboro tonight following the grand jury’s decision to issue a ‘no bill’ in the case involving Hannah Cobb and the death of Telvin Osborne,” the statement read via WRDW. “It is important to understand that the grand jury is a legal body tasked with hearing all evidence presented in a case before reaching a decision. While we recognize that this outcome may be upsetting or unpopular to some, we strongly urge everyone to refrain from actions that could further harm our community.”
What happened to Telvin Osborne?
The shooting took place in the early morning of Feb. 23, 2025, following the couple’s night out on the town. According to police, the shooting occurred at Cobb’s house. Officers arrived after she called 911 to report the shooting, though Osborne later died from his injuries at the hospital.
Initially, Cobb told the public safety telecommunicator that she was “clearing or cleaning” her 9 mm pistol when it accidentally discharged a shot that struck the 30-year-old victim in his chest. She said she thought the safety was on as she has a gun-cleaning routine. Shortly after the shooting, Sheriff Alfonzo Williams stated there was no proof anyone had been cleaning a gun before the shooting. Additionally, he noted alcohol was involved and said the incident wouldn’t be classified as accidental.
During the March court hearing, new details about the night emerged. Cobb explained that she confronted Osborne about another woman. The inquiry led to an argument at the end of the night that she claimed turned physical. She shared a recording from her Ring camera as evidence to support her story. It caught them in a heated exchange, showing her demanding that Osborne leave. Prosecutors referenced a series of text messages reportedly sent to Cobb after Osborne left, including one that read, “You’d better hide.” According to their account, Cobb escaped his grip and retreated to the bathroom. She allegedly made threats to hurt herself, but when Osborne forced his way in, she fired a single shot in his direction.
According to WRDW, charges can still be filed in the future despite this ruling, but the D.A. will likely fall in line with the grand jury’s decision since he mentioned in a statement that they have “spoken” and “the case is closed.”
Newly obtained court documents have revealed that R&B singer Jaheim was arrested earlier in May and charged with animal cruelty. According to NBC News, court documents stated that six of Jaheim’s dogs did not have “adequate food, water, sanitary conditions and ventilation.” Jaheim, who was charged with six counts of animal cruelty, was released on a $35,000 bond a day later.
How did authorities learn about Jaheim’s alleged animal cruelty?
Animal control officers first met Jaheim on April 27 when they responded to a call about a dog that appeared to be malnourished, as it was seen in a shopping mall parking lot. After the officers spotted the dog tied up to an RV and left alone, Jaheim walked up to the scene and told them they were on private property, Atlanta News First reported.
The animal control officers left the scene without any confrontation, but then returned to the RV with police a day later and once again found Jaheim, who said the officials are harassing him. The R&B star told the officers that his dog is not malnourished but rather young and skinny. Officers, however, determined the dog was “severely emaciated,” and its ribs could be seen. After they decided to return later for the investigation, officers received another report on the next day about another one of the singer’s dogs.
When they went back to Jaheim’s RV with a search warrant, officers found three 10-week-old puppies and an 11-month-old brown hound, along with a 5-year-old pit bull and a brown French bulldog.
What was the condition of the animals in Jaheim’s RV?
The arrest affidavit stated that Jaheim kept the dogs in kennels riddled with urine and feces. Additionally, the dogs were struggling to get air and they had overgrown nails, the document stated. Three of the dogs were severely underweight, officers said. All the dogs are now taken to an animal shelter. Jaheim is scheduled to appear in court on Monday, per Fox 5. The singer’s latest run-in with trouble comes four years after he was charged with third-degree animal cruelty.
Patti LuPone has issued an apology after hundreds of members of the Broadway community condemned her recent remarks disparaging fellow actresses Kecia Lewis and Audra McDonald.
“For as long as I have worked in the theatre, I have spoken my mind and never apologized. That is changing today,” LuPone wrote in the opening of a statement released via Instagram on Saturday (May 31).
“I am deeply sorry for the words I used during The New Yorker interview, particularly about Kecia Lewis, which were demeaning and disrespectful. I regret my flippant and emotional responses during this interview, which were inappropriate, and I am devastated that my behavior has offended others and has run counter to what we hold dear in this community. I hope to have the chance to speak to Audra and Kecia personally to offer my sincere apologies,” said LuPone.
Trending on Billboard
LuPone’s response arrived the day after after an open letter directed at her — and signed by more than 500 individuals in the Broadway world — was published in outcry to comments from the actress perceived to be “degrading and misogynistic,” as well as a “blatant act of racialized disrespect.” The letter was also aimed at “a culture, a pattern” in the Broadway industry: “a persistent failure to hold people accountable for violent, disrespectful, or harmful behavior — especially when they are powerful or well-known.”
In Saturday’s statement, LuPone acknowledged the message of the letter and expressed regret over what she said about her peers.
“I wholeheartedly agree with everything that was written in the open letter shared yesterday,” she wrote. “From middle school drama clubs to professional stages, theatre has always been about lifting each other up and welcoming those who feel they don’t belong anywhere else. I made a mistake, I take full responsibility for it, and I am committed to making this right. Our entire theatre community deserves better.”
The New Yorker ran a profile on LuPone earlier this week that quoted hercalling Lewis — who’s in the Alicia Keys-created Broadway musical Hell’s Kitchen, which was performed next door to the LuPone-starring The Roommate in 2024 — a “b—-” for considering herself a stage “veteran.”
The piece had LuPone recounting complaints she’d made to Shubert Organization head Robert Wankel that sound from Lewis’ Hell’s Kitchen could be heard during her stage time in The Roommate. (Lewis had responded to LuPone’s complaints on Instagram at the time, and deemed them “bullying,” “racially microaggressive” and “rooted in privilege” for calling “a Black show loud.”)
“She calls herself a veteran?” LuPone said in The New Yorker article dated May 26. “Let’s find out how many Broadway shows Kecia Lewis has done, because she doesn’t know what the f— she’s talking about. Don’t call yourself a vet, b—-.”
LuPone also remarked that she had a “rift” with McDonald, who’d shown support for Lewis: “That’s typical of Audra. She’s not a friend,” LuPone told The New Yorker; McDonald later said she was unaware of the rift.
LuPone, a three-time Tony Award and two-time Grammy Award winner, in 2024 starred as Robyn opposite Mia Farrow’s Sharon in The Roommate for the dark comedy’s four-month engagement on Broadway at the Booth Theatre. She just wrapped a series of concert dates that ran across select U.S. cities from late January through late May, with a couple festival appearances slated for this summer.
Lewis won her first Tony, for best featured actress in a musical, for her work as Miss Liza Jane in Hell’s Kitchen, the Broadway production whose performers were also awarded the Grammy for best musical theater album in 2024. Hell’s Kitchen is currently still on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre.
As he made an appearance at the White House on Friday for the final time as a special government employee, Elon Musk explained why he has a black eye. The Tesla CEO told reporters that it was his 5-year-old son X who gave him the black eye.
“I was just horsing around with little X, and I said, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face,’ and he did,” Musk told reporters, per the The New York Times.
While it looked to be a painful punch, Musk said it didn’t hurt much when his child hit him.
“I didn’t really feel much at the time,” he said. “But then I guess it bruises up.”
Sitting at his desk next to Musk, Donald Trump chimed in with his own thoughts on the black eye.
“X could do it,” he said. “If you knew X, he could do it.”
Elon Musk jokes about black eye and Emmanuel Macron
As he joked about his black eye, Musk also took the opportunity to take a jab at French President Emmanuel Macron, who was caught on video this week as he appeared to be getting punched by his wife, Brigitte Macron. Per the Independent, Musk told reporters that he “wasn’t anywhere near France.”
Elon Musk responds to drug use allegations
On the same day he showed up with a black eye, a New York Times report indicated that Musk has been regularly using powerful drugs such as ketamine, ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms and Adderall. When asked about the allegations on Friday, Musk lashed out at the Times.
Why is Elon Musk leaving the White House?
Musk’s exit comes after he criticized Trump earlier this week, saying the President’s “big beautiful bill” diminished the work of DOGE. Trump, however, credited Musk’s DOGE department for helping the government save “extra waste.”
“We’ll remember you as we announce billions of dollars of extra waste, fraud and abuse,” Trump said at Friday’s press conference, per the Independent. “DOGE has installed geniuses with an engineering mindset and unbelievably talented people on computers. I actually asked Elon one time, ‘What’s their primary thing?’ And they have a lot of primary things all having to do with being smart.”
Netflix has confirmed Lady Gaga will appear in season two of Wednesday, the hit series starring Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams. Gaga will be “playing the mysterious and enigmatic Rosaline Rotwood, a legendary Nevermore teacher who crosses paths with Wednesday,” […]
Next year things might look a bit different for Miley Cyrus, who says in a conversation with The New York Times that she’s looking forward to a “rebirth of how I look at my career.”
When asked about her relationship with mainstream success, Cyrus, who just released her ninth studio album, Something Beautiful, spoke of what she sees next for herself as an artist.
“I think it’s winding down, my attachment to mainstream success,” Cyrus said in the video interview, published on Saturday, May 31. (A shortened version of the full interview was published on the outlet’s website.)
Trending on Billboard
“I kind of feel like this album, it’s definitely not a ‘last lap’ — I’m definitely not going 180 in my career necessarily right now — but I think it’s potentially the last time I’ll do it exactly this way,” she noted.
The singer announced Something Beautiful in March, when she gave fans a first listen to album track “Prelude” and the set’s title track. She’s since released two more singles, “End of the World” and “More to Lose,” and just before the album’s release held a private concert hosted by TikTok at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. Still to come is a visual component to the project, a film set to show in theaters for one night only on June 12 in the United States and Canada, and internationally on June 27.
Cyrus — whose previous full-length release, 2023’s Endless Summer Vacation, reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200 — said, “I’m taking a big bet on this one [Something Beautiful]. I’m all in. But I don’t think I’ll put myself in a position that I add this much pressure to myself again.”
“A lot of things are going to change about that for me, towards the end [of this year] and the beginning of next year. That’s really kind of my focus, of using this year to kind of wind that idea I’ve had of myself down. There’s a song on the album called ‘Reborn’ and it’s kind of about this. I feel like next year for me is gonna be kind of this rebirth of how I do things and how I look at my career,” said Cyrus.
The conversation clocked in at nearly an hour, between Cyrus’ in-person sit-down with the publication and a follow-up call. Among the many topics discussed with candor: her present-day relationship with each parent (Tish and Billy Ray Cyrus), whether she’s interested in being a parent one day, what happened when she did E.M.D.R. therapy, growing up as a child star and why finally winning her first Grammy (for “Flowers,” in 2024) was so significant, and — when interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro brought up Cyrus’ peers in the industry — her rapport with other female pop stars.
“I find the relationship between female pop stars to be really interesting and often very fraught,” Garcia-Navarro suggested, to which Cyrus joked: “Divas.”
“Is that what you think is happening?” she asked Cyrus.
“I mean, probably on my end,” the singer said, and then clarified, “I don’t mind the word diva. Maybe I’m a little diva.”
Cyrus added, “It’s kind of cool. It’s a fantasy. You don’t have to be famous to be a diva — just be a diva. Diva does not mean difficult for no reason.” When asked whether she thinks she’s difficult, she quipped: “I’m difficult, but not for no reason.”
The interviewer followed up by prompting, “You have said you don’t feel part of the cohort of singers of your generation and age group … You’ve held yourself apart in a certain way.” She asked Cyrus why.
“I don’t think it’s so much of a conscious choice,” Cyrus said. “I think for me, my persona — the public’s idea of me — is ‘on,’ in some way, but in my own time, I’m very off. I like no makeup, my hair up messy. I don’t even look in the mirror in my own time.”
“It’s not that I haven’t found it,” she said. “I haven’t looked very hard. I’m sure girls in my community are going like, ‘Well, that’s me too and you haven’t reached out.’ No, I haven’t … I like doing my two worlds.”
Cyrus related her real life to that of her teenaged Hannah Montana persona.
“Maybe it’s something subconsciously from the show, like from Hannah Montana where I think my famous person has one life and then as a regular person I have another life,” she explained. “I think maybe subconsciously it programmed me — not even joking — to think who I am at home and who I am as a performer are kind of like two separate identities, and actually they are.”
Elsewhere in the conversation the former Disney star talked about the younger generation of pop singers, including Sabrina Carpenter, whom she’s met and sometimes worries about due to the hectic schedule the “Espresso” hitmaker keeps. “Every time I see her I have the urge to ask her if she’s OK. I’ll see she’s performing in Ireland, and then the next day she’s doing a show in Kansas. And I’m like, ‘I don’t know how that could be physically OK,’ because I was in that situation. I know what it feels like to fry yourself, and I don’t want anyone else to get fried. But I like all the new girls. I think they’re all unique and are very found,” Cyrus said.
See her full interview with the New York Times in the video below.
Alf Clausen, the Emmy-winning composer whose music provided essential accompaniment for the animated antics of The Simpsons for 27 years, has died.
His daughter Kaarin Clausen told The Associated Press that Alf Clausen died Thursday (May 29) at his home in Los Angeles after struggling with Parkinson’s disease for about a decade. He was 84.
Clausen, who also scored TV series including Moonlighting and Alf (“no relation,” he used to joke) was nominated for 30 Emmy Awards, 21 of them for The Simpsons, winning twice.
Al Jean, an early Simpsons writer who was one of the key creative figures on the show in the 1990s, said in a post on X Friday that “Clausen was an incredibly talented man who did so much for The Simpsons.”
Trending on Billboard
While Danny Elfman wrote the show’s theme song, Clausen joined the Fox animated series created by Matt Groening in 1990 and provided essentially all of its music until 2017, composing nearly 600 scores and conducting the 35-piece orchestra that played it in the studio.
His colleagues said his music was a key component of the show’s comedy, but Clausen believed the best way to back up the gags of Homer, Marge Bart and Lisa was by making the music as straight as possible.
“This is a dream job for a composer,” Clausen told Variety, which first reported his death, in 1998. “Matt Groening said to me very early on, ‘We’re not a cartoon. We’re a drama where the characters are drawn. I want you to score it like a drama.’ I score the emotions of the characters as opposed to specific action hits on the screen.”Groening, in a 1996 interview, called him “one of the unacknowledged treasures of the show.”Clausen was born in Minneapolis and raised in Jamestown, North Dakota. He graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 1966, and moved to Los Angeles seeking a career in music.In the 1970s he was a musical director on several TV variety shows including Donny & Marie.
Clausen worked as an orchestrator for composer Lee Holdridge in his scores for 1980s films including Splash and The Beastmaster.
It was Holdridge who first got the composing job on Moonlighting, the late-’80s ABC rom-com detective series starring Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd, but he handed the gig off to Clausen, who would get six Emmy nominations for his music on it.
Clausen won his Emmys for The Simpsons in 1997 and 1998 and also won five Annie Awards, which honor work in animation in film and television.
He was fired from The Simpsons in a cost-cutting move in 2017, to the outrage of his collaborators and fans. He sued over his dismissal.
Clausen is survived by his wife, Sally; children Kaarin, Scott and Kyle; stepchildren Josh and Emily, and 11 grandchildren.
Stay up to date on exciting projects and upcoming events from the Black Promoters Collective.
©2024 Black Promoters Collective (BPC) All Rights Reserved.
