Latest news with #Presents:
Newsweek
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
50 Cent Repeatedly Mocks Diddy: 'Should Have Took the Plea Offer'
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Sean 'Diddy' Combs' is being trolled about his sex trafficking trial by long-time adversary 50 Cent, who has mocked Combs on social media for not accepting a plea deal. Combs was arrested in September and denies multiple charges in what is one of the most high-profile celebrity trials in recent memory. Newsweek has reached out to representatives for 50 Cent and Combs via email for comment. Why It Matters A five-count indictment consisting of racketeering conspiracy, two charges of sex trafficking and two charges of transportation to engage in prostitution has been brought against Combs by federal prosecutors. The charges in the indictment stem from alleged crimes spanning from 2004 to 2024. If convicted, Combs faces life in prison. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all criminal counts and denies any wrongdoing. L: 50 Cent performs onstage during Nicki Minaj Presents: Pink Friday 2 World Tour at Madison Square Garden on March 30, 2024 in New York City, R: Sean "Diddy" Combs attends Day 1 of 2023... L: 50 Cent performs onstage during Nicki Minaj Presents: Pink Friday 2 World Tour at Madison Square Garden on March 30, 2024 in New York City, R: Sean "Diddy" Combs attends Day 1 of 2023 Invest Fest at Georgia World Congress Center on August 26, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia. More byfor Live Nation/Combs and 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis James Jackson III, have been engaged in a feud since the early 2000s, and Jackson has regularly shared his thoughts on Combs arrest and trial. What To Know In an Instagram post on Tuesday, Jackson shared a photo of himself, which appears as though it was AI-generated, wearing a suit on the street in New York City. "Down on your luck, not feeling good today? Well look at the bright side you could be Diddy," he wrote in the caption. The post has been liked over 315,000 times as of reporting. On Wednesday, Jackson shared another post to Instagram, saying: "After listening to today's testimony, I think the diddler should have took [sic] the plea offer. The s*** they are saying is beyond me, so what do ya think?" On May 1st, 2025, Combs formally rejected the US government's offer to plead guilty. Asked by the judge Arun Subramanian if he rejected the plea deal from the prosecution, he replied, "Yes, I do, your honor." In another post, shared on Tuesday, Jackson commented on the accusations shared by Cassie Venture, Combs' ex-girlfriend. Ventura, who is testifying in the trial, recalled the alleged abuse she faced at the hands of Combs during her first day of testifying as a witness. At one point during the testimony she gave, Ventura alleged that Combs had forced her to climb into an inflatable pool filled with baby oil. Jackson addressed this in his Instagram post. He shared a screenshot of an article from People magazine, which reported on Ventura's allegations. He wrote "This s*** crazier than regular crazy." What People Are Saying Combs' lawyers, in a statement to CBS News New York last month: "These are not new allegations or new accusers. These are the same individuals, former long-term girlfriends, who were involved in consensual relationships. This was their private sex life, defined by consent, not coercion." What's Next The trial is expected to last between eight and ten weeks.
Washington Post
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Something about John Mulaney's Netflix talk show isn't working
I won't disclose how many times I've rewatched a wild TV moment that aired during the third episode of 'John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's in L.A.,' the six-day live talk show John Mulaney hosted for Netflix last May. But it clarified for me why 'Everybody's Live with John Mulaney,' the 12-episode weekly sequel airing now, feels distinct — in good ways and bad — from the show's friendlier and messier first draft. Mulaney's show was proudly unpredictable from its inception, a retro-punk version of late-night sheared of all the tiresome beaming. In lieu of prebaked segments in which celebrities promote projects, Mulaney gathered people together to riff on a particular theme. The show was (and remains) live and mostly unscripted, save for the monologue, some preplanned bits and a smattering of funny and bizarre taped segments. When it debuted, Mulaney's experiment came across as niche and unpolished but also communal, warmly defying expectations (it doesn't even live up the 'late' part of 'late-night'; it airs at 7 p.m. Pacific time). It's fun to watch how a brilliant comedian who's a few years into a tricky public pivot handles himself in real time. In his 2023 special 'Baby J,' Mulaney, who cultivated an 'open and vulnerable' stage persona in his earlier stand-up, thematized his effort to break free of the 'likability' jail that public figures deal with by showing audiences his uglier, meaner side. On 'Everybody's Live,' both stage versions — the pushover and the schemer — are present, but they oscillate more than they integrate. I've thought often of Mulaney's account (to podcast host Theo Von) of how a psychiatrist summed him up when he was 17: 'Half of you is this really nice guy who wants to, you know, do the right thing and be a good person, and the other half of you is a gorilla whose sole purpose in life is to destroy the first half.' Sometimes, as in the 'Everybody's in L.A.' segment I kept rewinding, that tension produces delightful results. Both Mulaney's original show and this newer, weekly version tend to feature one 'expert' on the theme of each episode. For the 'Helicopters' installment I'm talking about, Mulaney smuggled in two. The first was Zoey Tur, the helicopter pilot who became the first to broadcast O.J. Simpson's attempt to flee in the white Bronco. Tur and comedians Nate Bargatze and Earthquake were eventually joined on the big, brown leather couch by Marcia Clark, who famously prosecuted Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Clark's presence — and area of expertise — soon established not only that the episode's secret subtheme was the O.J. Simpson trial, but that Mulaney was seizing his chance to revisit a quintessentially L.A. story from a fresh angle. The first inkling of how much Mulaney was relishing this encounter between two major players in that case came when he asked, a little too innocently, whether they'd met. They hadn't. 'Oh,' Mulaney said, an impish gleam in his eye, 'so this is the first time.' Tur greeted Clark by saying, 'I caught your criminal.' 'I really wish you had, you know, but never mind,' Clark replied, grinning. It was a terrific little beat. Both women were perfectly genial. But as seasoned veterans of a particularly vicious version of L.A. media, they were also squaring off. It's easy to imagine the pleasure with which Mulaney booked these guests. 'Well,' he said, back in decorous host mode. 'It's water under the bridge.' The juicier exchange came later, when Mulaney asked Clark how she felt about journalists like Tur, and Tur whether she ever got a scoop 'that might have blown a case or an investigation?' Tur replied with an explosive anecdote about a predawn call she received from a cop at the crime scene. The anecdote directly challenged a narrative Marcia Clark had advanced as prosecutor. The tone was cordial, but the air was charged. Marcia opened her mouth to reply. I leaned forward, eagerly. Then Mulaney said, 'Nate Bargatze, YOU love candy,' followed by a noise that sounded like 'eurgh.' It was perfect television. The theme (helicopters) blended perfectly with the obnoxious, seedy L.A.-ness of this chapter in true crime, all of it heightened by the brewing tension between the two women on the couch. The subject was meaty, the context rich. There was lore to unpack. And then Mulaney, playing a well-meaning Goody Two-shoes, deflated the moment he'd instigated and trollishly spoiled the fun. Even Bargatze was so absorbed in the moment that he fumbled Mulaney's invitation to redirect. 'Yeah,' he replied before objecting: 'I was listening to this whole thing!' 'I know, but we're trying to cover a lot of different topics. I thought it was a good pivot,' Mulaney said. The exchange stuck with me, in hindsight, because it practically overflowed with two elements I've found myself missing in the show's newer iteration: shared curiosity and genuine tension. It also demonstrates how nimbly (and frequently!) Mulaney flips between the conflict-avoidant, vaguely transatlantic host persona and the savagely observant, gossipy, judgmental chaos agent. It's like witnessing a tennis match where one guy plays both parts. There's Wily, Acerbic, Kind of Mean John (heretofore known as WAKOM), who gleefully set up the awkward first meeting. Nice Host John sails in to dispel the awkwardness. WAKOM asks a question aimed at pitting Clark against Tur. Nice John acts like the answer is an emergency he must defuse rather than a conflict he directly elicited. It's virtuosic, the perfect way for Mulaney to use his two personas. But in the new season, Mulaney sometimes forgets how to aim the gorilla. That John Mulaney has long wanted to do a talk show is basically the closer for his 2023 special, 'Baby J,' which chronicles his struggles with addiction and culminates with the comic reading excerpts from an interview he gave while high. 'I always wanted to do a talk show where the guest is always someone from a job that I don't understand,' Mulaney said (to GQ's Frazier Tharpe) shortly before going to rehab. 'What is that like? How do you feel about yourself?' he imagines himself asking a dogcatcher. 'I'm not judging, but I am a little. How do you feel rounding up dogs and taking them to the pound?' I'd love to watch that show, and 'Everybody's in L.A.' sometimes approached it. Mulaney, who doesn't fake curiosity well, is genuinely fascinated by Tur's work, for example, even if he also asks pointed questions about its ethically dubious side. It's fun to watch him explore L.A.'s coyotes and palm trees with folks and experts who (mostly) seem game to play along, and it's fun in a different way when they resist. Mulaney's musical numbers for 'Saturday Night Live' about New York, such as 'Diner Lobster' and 'La Guardia,' prove how good he is at skewering cities he loves. With L.A. as his new canvas, Mulaney built a show stuffed with deep cuts (comedically speaking) that was also (mostly) convivial and collaborative. It capitalized on his gift for inviting others into whatever game he's playing — here, the project of defining the city's whole deal. When the show returned as 'Everybody's Live,' Mulaney claimed they dropped the Los Angeles part of the show because it tested poorly. But the failure to swap something else in might have been a mistake. Excluding the city as an umbrella category has by default left Mulaney (and his interests) as the show's focal point. And he's trickier for guests to rally around than L.A., for all the reasons I enumerated above. Mulaney's flexible identity has become part of his charm. As he said in his 2018 special, 'Kid Gorgeous': 'Fourteen years ago, I smoked cocaine the night before my college graduation. Now I'm afraid to get a flu shot. People change.' (In 'Baby J,' he revealed that he, in fact, routinely got unnecessary flu shots from a shady doctor who supplied him with drugs.) Part of the fun of that Clark-Tur segment was the delight Mulaney took in the encounter and in the multiple identities he got to occupy while arranging (and later, neutralizing) a conflict. That sense of mischief has been lacking in the talk show segments. Not even Mulaney can muster much interest in some of the subjects he chose, or in the experts discussing them. Some (like cruises) feel phoned-in. And his obvious anxiety over whether an exchange will pay off sometimes trumps his interest in any particular contribution; he frequently truncates conversations that were just getting going. It doesn't help that there's so much amiable agreement between Mulaney and his guests. Absent some fiddly onstage dynamic he can provoke and stage-manage, WAKOM Mulaney — who needs something to do, especially when things are too friendly — turns all that surplus energy (and vitriol) on the poor callers. There's a sense, then, that where 'Everybody's in LA' joyfully invited folks in, 'Everybody's Live' kicks them out. The eccentricity that makes Mulaney's stand-up so good is precisely what makes it hard for many guests and callers to chime in. His dinosaur bit, for instance, is so genuinely weird that no guest managed to really join him in that headspace. Conan O'Brien tried hard. So did Tina Fey (before she reverted to uncomfortably defending science). When an actual world-class expert (paleontologist Jack Horner) called in and tried to play along, Mulaney — who seemed not to know who he was — hung up on him. Some guests, like Molly Shannon and Robby Hoffman, come to the show prepared, armed with research and ready to play on their own terms. But most default toward mirroring Mulaney's energy as best they can — which often means more joking about the callers, which creates a feedback loop that tilts the balance toward Wily, Acerbic, Kind of Mean John. Acerbic John can be fun. It's instructive to watch Mulaney's snap judgments in action, as when he hung up on a caller in the 'Cruises' episode because his anecdote sounded too rehearsed: 'You've added little tags, it's become a yarn and we don't have time,' he said. But his gorilla side needs more absorbing work. (Maybe the key is inviting two experts instead of one and setting them up to disagree?) As it stands, the speed with which Mulaney flips from one persona to another, which so impressed me in that delicious Clark-Tur segment, has started to seem more arbitrary than skillful. Half the suspense in 'Everybody's Live' is whether a caller is going to get Nice Host John or WAKOM John. At present, WAKOM is winning. That's fine, I guess, but it feels a little too easy. I wish he'd go back to using those powers on the city. Or his guests. Everybody's Live with John Mulaney airs Wednesdays on Netflix.
Leader Live
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Leader Live
Christiane Amanpour's podcast to ‘pull back curtain' on world events
Amanpour, the chief international anchor at CNN, is best known for presenting her flagship programmes including The Amanpour Hour and PBS's Amanpour & Company, and on Tuesday launched her new podcast with Global titled Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files with Jamie Rubin. The series explores the biggest issues of the day with Rubin, her ex-husband and former US diplomat and assistant secretary of state, while going behind the scenes of old and emerging world events from a government and journalism perspective. A post shared by Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files (@amanpourpod) 'I thought that people with opposing views can barely get into the same room, whether it's around the Christmas table or the Thanksgiving table or in politics or whatever. 'I figured if two exes – we've been divorced seven years, we were married 20 years – if we can talk about what we're talking about, then surely anybody can. 'Hopefully, it's a model for getting people to be able to have conversations even across things that look like insurmountable divides, like political differences, religious differences, ethnic differences, all of that kind of stuff as modelled by two exes. 'So from 1990 to now, 35 years in which he was on the government side and I was on the journalism side. 'I was in the field. He was in the bureaucracy, in the government, and talking about the back story, and pulling back the curtain on a lot of the episodes that we sort of shared, but from completely different perspectives.' A post shared by Christiane Amanpour (@camanpour) Amanpour first joined the foreign desk at CNN in 1983 and went on to become a field reporter and interviewer, leading her to cover the likes of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the Bosnian War to being the last person to interview Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi before he was killed. Meanwhile, Rubin worked as assistant secretary of state for public affairs and chief spokesman for then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright while also working for the Biden administration up until December 2024. Speaking about the new podcast, Amanpour made clear that this was not a move away from legacy media but rather an opportunity to experiment with the medium and a chance for her to be more personal, offering her perspective and views on the events that have shaped and continue to change the world. She added: 'I'm not ready to give up on legacy media, CNN, for instance, which I've been at for 41 and a half years, but I most certainly wanted to be part of the current media conversation. I find this one really, really interesting. 'I decided that I would like to experiment with having a bit more freedom in my own personal views, opinions, emotions, because I clearly keep that out of what I do on CNN. 'I really want to get much more behind the scenes, try to pull back the curtain, do the back story of how various crises emerge, or how diplomacy works to get out of various crises, what different leadership means in these very fraught times, and we live in very fraught times right now. 'We are in a completely different world order. I call it no-world order, especially since Donald Trump was elected, because he has a completely different view of the presidency and the power of the presidency and how it should be used and deployed. 'So for us, it's a lot of raw material to deal with and to explore, examine, follow, and eventually, come down in judgment on one way or the other. 'Yeah, it's all about news and all about foreign affairs, but it has a much deeper human dynamic and much deeper and more personal dynamic from me as a journalist and Jamie my ex as a former government official.' Despite the ever-changing digital landscape within journalism, Amanpour remains firm on the importance of field reporting. She said: 'There is no substitute for reporters in the field. I mean, there just isn't, bots can't go out there. 'It's not an analyst job to tell us what's happening on the front line, or what's happening in a city under siege … it's reporters, it's those of us who are willing, ready and able to be everybody else's eyes and ears on the ground. 'That's our job, and we have to take that incredibly seriously. 'We can't allow it to strangle our space or to completely suffocate our space, because our space is the only legitimate place where people get the reality and get the real news. 'So I am a person who believes strongly in the enduring mandate of a reporter, the enduring mandate of the television or camera crews, or whoever goes out there to get the news and comes back and puts it together for the audience.' The Ex Files is Amanpour's first original podcast series with Global with episodes released once a week on Tuesdays and bonus episodes out on Thursdays. Listen to the first episode of Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files with Jamie Rubin on Global Player.
