2 arrested for planning terror plot at Taylor Swift show in Vienna: Police
(VIENNA, Austria) — Security measures have been increased for Taylor Swift’s concerts in Vienna, Austria, this week after two suspects were arrested for allegedly plotting a terror attack, authorities said.
A 19-year-old Austrian citizen was arrested Wednesday morning and a second suspect was arrested in the afternoon, according to Franz Ruf, director-general for public safety in the Ministry of the Interior.
The suspects allegedly radicalized themselves online, Ruf said at a press conference. The 19-year-old suspect allegedly pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State in the beginning of July, Ruf said.
Vienna was a target of their planned attack and the 19-year-old suspect had a particular focus on Swift’s Vienna concert, Ruf said.
The pop star has concerts in Vienna this Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The shows are expected to draw 65,000 concertgoers per day, with an additional 10,000 to 15,000 fans outside of the area, police said.
Swift kicked off the massively successful “Eras Tour” in Glendale, Arizona, on March 18, 2023.
In October 2023, the pop star released a concert film chronicling the record-breaking tour, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” that went on to break records of its own and earn a Golden Globe nomination.
At the 100th stop of the tour this summer in Liverpool, England, the 14-time Grammy winner told the audience the tour “has definitely been the most exhausting, all-encompassing, but most joyful, most rewarding, most wonderful thing that has ever happened in my life thus far.”
The “Eras Tour” will end in Vancouver, Canada, on Dec. 8.
ABC News’ Carson Blackwelder contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — When the United States’ prisoner exchange with Russia, the largest since the Cold War, happened in early August, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s harshest critics became a free man. Vladimir Kara-Murza had been sentenced to 25 years in prison on treason charges after speaking out about the war in Ukraine.
Kara-Murza spent two and a half years locked up in different Russian prison colonies, spending 11 months of that time in solitary confinement. On Aug. 1, in a multi-country prisoner swap, the Russian-born Kara-Murza was freed along with Americans Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva — all of whom were sentenced on espionage charges and for allegedly spreading false information.
On Monday, in his first interview with ABC News since being released, Kara-Murza spoke to ABC News Live anchor Diane Macedo about how he is adjusting to a life of freedom.
“It still feels very unreal … just a few weeks ago, I was so confident that I would end my life in Putin’s Siberian prison,” he said. “And now I’m at home with my family, so it’s … something out of the books.”
That choice of words was appropriate, given Kara-Murza’s education as a historian and his study of the Soviet dissident movement. He highlighted President Joe Biden’s role in the exchange and what it tells us about the reality of politicians’ work versus the public perception.
“Only four American presidents in history — two Republicans, Ford and Reagan, and two Democrats, Carter and now Biden — have negotiated such prisoner releases, prisoner exchanges, to help save prisoners of conscience from the Soviet or Russian gulag,” he said.
“In this day and age, when there is a sort of cynical stereotype that all politics is about expediency and realpolitik, and that there’s no room for principle or value anymore, I think it is important to sort of pause and note that sometimes the leaders of Western democracy don’t just pay lip service to protecting human rights, but actually do it in practice too,” he added.
Kara-Murza may be free, but he noted that adjusting to that reality has been challenging — especially since he spent nearly 11 months straight in solitary confinement.
“By international law, by the United Nations, a minimum standard rules on the treatment of prisoners, solitary confinement longer than 15 days is officially considered to be a form of torture — degrading and inhumane treatment — because [the philosopher] Aristotle said that human beings are social animals,” he said. “We need human interaction just as much as we need oxygen to breath or food to eat or water to drink.”
He was also forbidden from calling his wife and three children, or going to church, he said. He compared the experience to the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, where a character is trapped and forced to repeat the same day over and over.
“It’s endless, meaningless and exactly the same. Wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning … you attach your bunk to the wall. And then essentially, you just sit in your small cell,” he said of this period of confinement.
Kara-Murza said he was allowed out for 90 minutes for a “small so-called walk” around a covered prison courtyard that wasn’t much bigger than his cell, he noted. Beyond that, he told ABC he was given a pen and paper for only 90 minutes each day — the only window of time he had to prepare for court hearings, read and write letters to family, friends and journalists.
Even though he was fortunate enough to be part of the prisoner exchange, Kara-Murza noted that hundreds remain in Russian prisons for “publicly opposing Putin’s dictatorship and his aggressive war against Ukraine” along with thousands of Ukrainian prisoners of war.
Kara-Murza highlighted the fact that this August marks the 25th anniversary of Putin being appointed as Russia’s acting prime minister by then-President Boris Yeltsin.
“So there’s an entire generation of people in my country, in Russia, that have grown up not knowing any other political reality,” he said. “And … we know what it entails to be in opposition to Vladimir Putin’s regime.”
Kara-Murza said he was poisoned twice by agents of Russia’s FSB (Federal Security Service), prior to being sentenced to 25 years in prison.
“I care about my country. I love my country,” he said. “And I think Russia deserves a much better future than to be in the hands of an authoritarian, aggressive, murderous, illegitimate dictatorship.”
(LONDON) — Every summer, a total of 256 men and women — a group of the best tennis player’s this world has to offer — make their way to the London postcode of SW19 and onto the courts of Wimbledon to battle it out in an attempt to be the last person standing and a potential claim to be the best in the world at the sport.
The prize? A few moments on the world stage with Gentlemen’s Singles Challenge Cup for the winning man or the Ladies’ Singles Challenge Plate — more commonly known at the Venus Rosewater Dish — something only a few dozen people in the world have ever done in the history of the 157-year-old tournament.
“I think why these trophies are so iconic and special is because they are so consistent, truly historic, and I think they really sort of parallel what Wimbledon is about,” Eleanor Thomas, the Collections Manager at the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum, told ABC News during a visit during the middle Sunday of the 2024 Championships. “They have remained true to Wimbledon’s roots since the beginning.”
The Gentleman’s Singles Trophy, officially known as the Challenge Cup, is perhaps the most storied prize in all of tennis.
“This trophy has a history that dates back to 1887, crafted by Elkington & Co. in Birmingham,” explains Thomas, who added that the company’s expertise in metalwork at that time made them a perfect choice for crafting a trophy meant to symbolize excellence and perseverance in tennis.
Before Wimbledon formally started in 1877, the winners of the Championships received a trophy known as the Field Cup. It was agreed back then that anyone who won The Championships three years in a row should keep the trophy. William Renshaw managed this from 1881 to 1883 — so he kept it and a new trophy had to be made. The Field Cup was subsequently replaced with a new Challenge Cup but William Renshaw won three times in a row – again — from 1884 to 1886 and kept this too.
It was then that the club decided to create a “perpetual” trophy in 1887 and the Challenge Cup, which is the current iteration of the men’s singles trophy, was introduced with the intent to last indefinitely.
It has since carried the names of every single champion dating back to the first Wimbledon tournament in 1877 until 2009, when they officially ran out of space for any more engravings.
“We ran out of space on the trophy for all the winners,” Thomas laughed as she explained the dilemma. “So it was decided that adding a plinth to the existing trophy was the best way of preserving all those names and that has been arguably the biggest change to the trophy since its inception.”
One of the more distinctive features of the Gentleman’s Singles Trophy is the fact that there is a pineapple adorning the very top of it.
“So the pineapple, to be honest, we don’t actually have an exact reason as to why it’s there,” Thomas told ABC News. “The pineapple was a symbol of luxury and hospitality in the Victorian era, something only the wealthy could afford. Historically, it was a popular motif at the time, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with Wimbledon or tennis. It does now, obviously.”
The Gentleman’s Singles Trophy stands in stark contrast to what the women receive when they win the Wimbledon women’s singles title — the Venus Rosewater Dish.
“Unlike the men’s trophy, the Venus Rosewater Dish reflects a tradition of awarding more decorative prizes to women,” Thomas explains. “Early women’s prizes included flower baskets and bracelets, but the dish has since transcended these to become a symbol of achievement in its own right.”
Introduced in 1886, the dish’s design draws heavily on Renaissance art and features a central figure of Temperance surrounded by representations of the four elements — air, water, earth, and fire. The outer rim is adorned with plaques representing the Seven Liberal Arts – grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry and astrology — each overseen by the goddess Minerva, the intricate iconography intended to showcase the intellectual and artistic aspirations of the late 19th century.
Champions’ names have been engraved on the dish since its inception, initially on the front but moving to the back when the trophy ran out of room and, much like the men’s trophy in 2009, the names are now engraved on a plinth that was added in 2016 once the trophy ran out of space on the back.
However, just like the gentleman’s singles trophy, winners do not actually get to take the original home, or even a full-sized replica. They spend time with the award on the court after the tournament when they celebrate and at the Wimbledon champions’ dinner on the last night. That’s it.
What winners will receive, however, is a three-quarter-sized replica, meticulously engraved with their names on it, exactly like the real thing only smaller.
The engravings — both on the replicas and the real trophy — are almost instantaneous, something Wimbledon does deliberately and takes a great amount of pride in. Thomas, along with her colleague, Malin Lundin, oversees this meticulous process.
“We manage about 84 engravings during the championships, including the main trophies and the replicas given to the players,” said Thomas.
The second the winning point is scored, a team of expert engravers gets right down to work so that the trophies are ready for the victors almost immediately. This doesn’t just happen for the men’s and women’s singles champions, the practice extends to include every single winner in each of the events held at Wimbledon, including doubles, mixed doubles, and wheelchair events, ensuring that every winner’s achievement is immortalized from the moment of victory.
Once the trophies are handed out and then given back to the All England Club in exchange for their replicas, Thomas will turn to her work of preserving these historical artifacts through rigorous conservation efforts.
“We have a dedicated team of conservators who clean and polish the trophies annually. This ensures they remain in pristine condition despite their age and the wear from being handled by champions,” Thomas explained, adding that these trophies not only honor the achievements of the world’s best players, but also serve as a reminder of Wimbledon’s unwavering commitment to its heritage.
As the final ball is struck and The Championships come to a close for another year, Wimbledon’s trophies are deliberately designed to endure for decades and centuries to come, the iconic awards meticulously preserved, intricately engraved and always embodying the rich history and traditions of The Championships.
“These are probably some of the most famous trophies in the world,” said Thomas. “It’s a big deal.”
(ROME) — A 183-foot sailboat carrying 22 people sank early on Monday off the coast of the Italian island of Sicily following stormy weather in the area, killing at least one passenger, according to Italian officials.
Members of the coast guard have rescued 15 passengers, but six are still missing, according to the coast guard and a local port authority. At least one American is believed to be among those still missing, with British and Canadian citizens also unaccounted for, the coast guard said in a statement. Of those recovered, eight have been transported to local hospitals, officials said.
The U.K.-flagged vessel — named the Bayesian — sank off Porticello, near the coastal city of Palermo, the statement said. The ship is currently located at a depth of around 164 feet, with firefighter divers now attempting to reach it, the statement said.
One body was recovered and six people were missing, an authority from the Palermo Port Authorities told ABC News. Divers reached the hull of the ship early on Monday and were still searching the water, the official said.
The port official was unable to confirm whether any Americans were among the missing, as the coast guard’s statement had said, but added that authorities were still working to verify the nationalities of those who had been on board. The official said the initial investigation into the passenger list appeared to show it was incomplete.
Four coast guard vessels, one helicopter and a team of fire brigade divers are involved in the search, which is being coordinated by the Palermo Coast Guard, the statement said.
Fabio La Bianca, who owns the local BAIA Santa Nicolicchia restaurant, told ABC News that he noticed the moored vessel had disappeared when he went to check on storm damage to his business.
“After half an hour with the other guys we realized that it was no longer there and immediately the rescuers were going around to look for the missing, they had also launched two distress rockets in the air before,” La Bianca said.
Local Mayor Giuseppe D’Agostino wrote on Facebook that the “tragedy that struck our community is unparalleled in history.”
“The administration has activated all channels with the police and is taking care of the people recovered alive so far,” D’Agostino said, adding that local authorities are gathering clothes and finding accommodation for the survivors.
“The search continues at sea and all we can do is pray and hope to find someone alive.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
ABC News’ Joe Simonetti contributed to this report.