When two pizza lovers fall in love, you know the wedding is going to be one saucy soiree.
Below, we’ve gathered 14 wedding ideas for couples who are just as obsessed with pizza as they are with each other.
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J Balvin and Nicky Jam have practically become reggaetón royalty in recent years, but they don’t view their brand of reggaetón to be on par with what filled the airwaves in the early 2000s.
Both artists sat down with Billboard recently to discuss their journey to becoming global phenomenons, including why they wanted to change the idea that reggaetón is a misogynist genre for the sake of the many women and children who follow their music.
During a joint conversation with the magazine, ahead of the 2107 Latin Billboard Music Awards on April 27, journalist Leila Cobo mentioned that both artists had “largely avoided objectifying women in lyrics and video, which is common in reggaetón.”
In response, the 36-year-old Nicky Jam explained that given their broad audience, they need to make videos “where women look beautiful and conservative and are treated with respect, because the videos are seen by kids and adults.” He added that other reggaetón artists are targeting “one audience,” though he didn’t specify which, and didn’t have the same responsibility.
J Balvin, 31, added that he felt the need to change the notion that the genre objectifies women because of the women in his own life.
“Plus, we both have mothers, sisters, relatives,” J Balvin said. “Part of what we did is change that misconception that reggaetón is machista and misogynist. On the contrary, women are our biggest fans, and they inspire us.”
Some examples of their portrayal of women in lyrics and music videos include J Balvin’s hit “Ay Vamos,” a song about a couple who fights each other but loves each other in the end. In the video, the artist and his supposed girlfriend try to out prank each other.
Nicky Jam’s single “Hasta el Amanecer” has lyrics that do seem to have sexual undertones with verses that talk about wanting to be with a woman he just met until dawn. But the music video for the hit features the artist simply meeting a young woman at a laundry mat, trying to get her attention with his dance moves.
J Balvin and Nicky Jam, who is Puerto Rican but rebuilt his career in Medellín, are both the product of a boom of reggaetón stars coming out of Colombia. The two artists were friends long before their individual success, and continue to support each other as they go head to head in both the music charts and award nominations.
In a conversation with The Huffington Post, Nicky Jam explained what he feels set Colombian reggaetón apart.
“I just think the music is more catchy, and the lyrics are more cotidianos (day-to-day),” Nicky Jam said in Sept. 2016. “It talks about things that happen on a daily basis. Reggaeton from Puerto Rico is more about dancing music, reggaeton specifically. Now Puerto Ricans are starting to [focus more on lyrics], because they have the ability to do it.”
For J Balvin, it’s always been important to be both a leader in the genre and represent his native Colombia as an urban artist.
“There’s vallenato, there’s pop, there’s rock [in Colombia] but we need the urban part and thankfully we’ve been able to do it little by little,” the artist told HuffPost in 2014, after the success of his single ‘6 AM.’ “Obviously we’re still in the process of growth, but there’s been a clear vision for the public that there’s good Urban music coming from Colombia for the world.”
Read Nicky Jam and J Balvin’s entire conversation with Billboard here.
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The U.S.-Israeli dual citizen accused of making dozens of threats to Jewish community centers was slapped with several federal charges, the Justice Department announced Friday.
Michael Ron David Kadar, 18, was charged with making threats, conveying false information to police and cyberstalking, according to a DOJ press release.
He was arrested in Israel in March after a joint investigation by the FBI and Israeli police. It wasn’t immediately clear which country he was in as of Friday, and, if he were still in Israel, whether he’d be extradited to the U.S. The DOJ declined to comment.
Since the new year, more than 80 Jewish community centers in the U.S. and Canada and 10 Jewish day schools received more than 120 threats. The Anti-Defamation League was also targeted. The threats, spread across dozens of states and several countries, prompted many evacuations, but none resulted in an attack.
Interestingly, Kadar was charged with “multiple threats” made only in Florida, despite the FBI noting in March that the suspect in custody had made the “bulk of the calls.” It’s unclear whether that means the DOJ could only provide enough evidence to pin the Florida calls on him at the moment, or if there’s another suspect still on the loose. The DOJ and FBI both declined to comment further. The press release states that an investigation continues, as well as a probe into possible hate crime charges.
“Today’s charges into these violent threats to Jewish Community Centers and others represent this department’s commitment to fighting all forms of violent crime,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said. “These threats of violence instilled terror in Jewish and other communities across this country and our investigation into these acts as possible hate crimes continues.”
A large chunk of the threats made in the U.S. since January came in waves, and many of the calls came from a similar robotic voice. Authorities said the caller was using technology to disguise his voice, and Israeli police reportedly found computers, an antenna and other equipment in Kadar’s home that would allow him to make calls that are difficult to detect.
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Justice Neil Gorsuch made a difference Thursday in his first 5-4 vote on the Supreme Court, siding with his fellow conservatives to deny a petition from eight Arkansas inmates who sought to stop back-to-back-to-back executions.
Gorsuch’s vote on one of several 11th-hour petitions, in effect, allowed the state of Arkansas to carry out its first execution in nearly 12 years.
Ledell Lee was killed just before midnight Thursday, despite his legal team’s herculean effort to persuade the high court to put off his execution so that he could pursue a potential innocence claim and demonstrate that he was intellectually disabled. Lee was still waging these legal battles because of what one lawyer described as the “abysmal representation” he’d received throughout most of the post-conviction process.
The execution was Arkansas’ first victory, if one can call it that, following a chaotic week of legal moves during which the inmates and several pharmaceutical companies tried to put a stop to the state’s plan. But Arkansas was determined to keep to its killing schedule because some of its supply of lethal injection drugs is close to expiring.
“Arkansas set out to execute eight people over the course of 11 days. Why these eight? Why now?” wrote Justice Stephen Breyer, dissenting from his colleagues’ decision to let the state go forward. Breyer would have agreed to halt the executions and add the case to the Supreme Court’s docket to explore whether the “compressed execution schedule” constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
In a separate dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned the court’s 2015 decision in Glossip v. Gross, in which the conservative majority essentially required death row prisoners to pick their own poison when challenging a lethal injection cocktail.
“I continue to harbor significant doubts about the wisdom of imposing the perverse requirement that inmates offer alternative methods for their own executions,” Sotomayor wrote.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan also would have halted all eight executions.
Gorsuch didn’t individually express his views in any of the long string of orders against Lee and the other inmates that the Supreme Court issued late Thursday and after midnight on Friday. But his vote at least suggests that he’s solidly conservative when it comes to the death penalty. On his first opportunity, he also chose not to cast a “courtesy” fifth vote ― something that other justices have occasionally done when four of their colleagues believe that a capital case is so egregious that it merits more attention.
There’s a lot we don’t know about Gorsuch’s views on the death penalty, as The Intercept’s Liliana Segura noted. Much of it remained unexplored during his confirmation hearings. But the subject is generally a tough one for the justices.
The last time the Supreme Court gave a full hearing to a death penalty dispute in Glossip, sparks flew during oral arguments. And when the court announced its ruling, four justices spoke about the case from the bench. The late Justice Antonin Scalia held nothing back, delivering a bizarre screed against Breyer.
Over time, the failings and arbitrariness of the capital punishment system come to weigh heavily on the justices, until some give up on it entirely. Others, like Breyer, begin to look for cases that would allow a deeper dive into the death penalty’s dysfunctions and even call into question its constitutionality.
Still other justices hold firm that the death penalty is constitutional and that courts should defer to states on the nitty-gritty of executing people. If Thursday’s rebuff of the Arkansas inmates is any indication, that’s where Gorsuch falls.
Harvard law professor Ronald Sullivan filed an amicus brief on Thursday urging the Supreme Court to halt Lee’s execution and go the extra step of ending the “failed experiment” of capital punishment once and for all. In a later statement to The Huffington Post, he deplored the justices’ failure to act in the face of Arkansas’ brazenness.
“The Court’s role is to vigorously police overzealous exercises of government power,” Sullivan said. “When execution after execution involves not the most culpable people, but those with the most severe impairments and the worst lawyers, the failure to intervene to affirm the basic human dignity that every person deserves becomes culpable.”
Arkansas’ execution schedule resumes Monday with two planned executions. Four other inmates have won temporary reprieves in state and federal court.
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