Anastasia Tsioulcas

Embattled R&B singer R. Kelly pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of sexual assault and abuse at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse in Chicago on Thursday morning.

R. Kelly has been a hero, an icon, a demon and a punchline — all at the same time. There is no neat narrative arc of ascendance, fall and perhaps eventual redemption: This is an R&B singer who was feted as an American idol, performing at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, on the same day that Chicago police revealed that they were investigating him for child pornography.

After more than 20 years, the Rolling Stones and The Verve have resolved a sour dispute over the authorship of the song "Bitter Sweet Symphony." The Verve's frontman and co-founder, Richard Ashcroft, announced on Wednesday that the situation has finally been laid to rest.

When the Queen of Soul died last August, family and lawyers said publicly that they believed that Aretha Franklin did not have a will. On Monday, however, three handwritten wills that had been found in her Detroit-area home — one from 2014 and two dated 2010 — were filed in probate court in Oakland County, Mich.

One of the jazz world's most enduring artists, the influential 87-year-old guitarist and composer Kenny Burrell, is facing financial ruin and homelessness.

On Monday, the New York Supreme Court ruled that the former investors in the Woodstock 50 music festival, a company called Dentsu Aegis and its subsidiary, Amplifi Live, did not have the right to cancel the event, as Dentsu announced last month on April 29. The decision means that the Woodstock 50 promoters, led by Michael Lang — a co-founder of the original Woodstock in 1969 — have the right to continue to prepare to stage a festival in August, as originally planned.

In an open letter published Thursday, a group of over 30 Palestinian cultural centers and organizations from Gaza called for a global boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest, the enduringly popular international singing competition that will be held May 14 to 18 in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Acrimony continues to grow between the promoters and the former investors of Woodstock 50. Whether the music festival, planned for this summer to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the original Woodstock, will even happen remains in question — but in the meantime, the event's main showrunner has lobbed serious claims against his onetime financial partners.

The longstanding and widely beloved Mexican band Café Tacvba was robbed of its instruments, consoles and gear on Thursday morning on a highway in Mexico.

Updated April 30 at 12:00 p.m. ET

Woodstock 50, a wide-ranging festival that many hoped would bring the spirit of 1969 to a new generation this August, has been canceled. Tim O'Hearn, the administrator for Schuyler County, N.Y., where the event was to take place, confirmed the cancellation to NPR; he said he had been contacted by Dentsu Aegis Network, which had been bankrolling the planned festival.

The singer Kate Smith's recording of "God Bless America" has been a cherished part of sports tradition in the U.S. for decades. But in the aftermath of a discovery that the singer also recorded at least two songs with racist content in the 1930s, two major American sports teams, baseball's New York Yankees and ice hockey's Philadelphia Flyers, have announced that they will stop playing Smith's rendition of the Irving Berlin patriotic classic. On Sunday, the Flyers also took down a statue of Smith that had stood in front of their stadium since 1987.

In January 2018, the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest was widely criticized for staging the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess — whose story wrestles with racism, drug abuse and poverty — with a predominantly white cast, despite the fact that the Gershwin estate requires performances to feature an all-black cast.

Now, the Hungarian production is back for another series of performances of Porgy this month — and its nearly all-white cast was reportedly asked to sign testimonials saying that they were African-American.

On Thursday, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office charged 29-year-old Eric Ronald Holder Jr. with killing Nipsey Hussle, born Ermias Asghedom, on March 31.

Updated at 5:35 p.m. ET

On Tuesday afternoon, the LAPD announced that it has arrested Eric Holder, a 29-year-old Los Angeles man whom authorities have identified as the suspect in the Sunday killing of rapper and entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle on Sunday afternoon.

The suspect was first arrested by police in the city of Bellflower in Los Angeles County, the LAPD confirmed to NPR.

On Tuesday, a New York State Supreme Court judge dismissed most of conductor James Levine's claims in a defamation suit the former music director of the Metropolitan Opera filed against his former employer and its general manager, Peter Gelb.

Updated March 28 at 11:30 a.m. ET

Dick Dale, the surf rock pioneer who took reverb to new levels, died on Saturday night. He was 81. The guitarist's health had declined over the past 20 years due to a number of illnesses, including diabetes, kidney disease and rectal cancer. The news was confirmed to NPR by Dusty Watson, a drummer who worked and toured with Dale between 1995 and 2006, who says he spoke with Dale's wife, Lana Dale. No cause was given.

Updated March 7 at 11:21 a.m. ET

R&B star R. Kelly was taken into custody on Wednesday for failure to pay more than $160,000 in child support to his ex-wife and their three children.

Kelly was detained by the Cook County sheriff in Illinois and transported to the county jail on Wednesday evening, sheriff's department spokesperson Sophia Ansari told NPR.

The 52-year-old singer will remain in custody, Ansari added, until he pays what he owes — $161,633. His next court date in the matter is set for March 13.

Updated on March 15 at 1 p.m. ET

The two-part documentary Leaving Neverland, which began airing on HBO on Sunday night, tells the story of two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who accuse Michael Jackson of having sexually abused them for years, beginning when they were respectively about seven and 10 years old.