L’Wren Scott, fashion designer and girlfriend of Mick Jagger, dead in apparent NY suicide
NEW YORK — L’Wren Scott, who left her small-town Utah home as a teenager to become a model in Paris, then a top Hollywood stylist and finally a high-end fashion designer best known as the longtime girlfriend of Mick Jagger, has died in what was being investigated as an apparent suicide.
Scott was found dead in her Manhattan apartment at 10 a.m. Monday; no note was found and there was no sign of foul play, police said. The designer had texted her assistant 90 minutes earlier and asked her to come to her apartment but didn’t say why. She was found kneeling with a scarf wrapped around her neck that had been tied to the handle of a French door, police said.
Her spokesperson requested privacy for her family and friends. Just last month Scott, who was believed to be 49 but had not disclosed her precise age, canceled her London Fashion Week show, due to reported production delays.
Jagger’s representative said the singer was “completely shocked and devastated by the news” of her death.
Scott, whose elegant designs in lush fabrics were favored by celebrities like Madonna, Nicole Kidman, Oprah Winfrey, Penelope Cruz and first lady Michelle Obama, was a fixture on Jagger’s arm since she met the Rolling Stones frontman in 2001. On red carpets, the striking 6-foot-3 designer towered over her famous 5-foot-10 boyfriend.
American news appetites crave serious as well as entertaining, draw from varied media sources
WASHINGTON — Americans of all ages still pay heed to serious news even as they seek out the lighter stuff, choosing their own way across a media landscape that no longer relies on front pages and evening newscasts to dictate what’s worth knowing, according to a new study from the Media Insight Project.
The findings burst the myth of the media “bubble” — the idea that no one pays attention to anything beyond a limited sphere of interest, like celebrities or college hoops or Facebook posts.
“This idea that somehow we’re all going down narrow paths of interest and that many people are just sort of amusing themselves to death and not interested in the news and the world around them? That is not the case,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, which teamed with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research on the project.
People today are nibbling from a news buffet spread across 24-hour television, websites, radio, newspapers and magazines, and social networks.
Three-fourths of Americans see or hear news daily, including 6 of 10 adults under age 30, the study found. Nearly everyone — about 9 in 10 people — said they enjoy keeping up with the news. And more than 6 in 10 say that wherever they find the news, they prefer it to come directly from a news organization.
NYC mayor skips St. Pat’s parade amid tension over gays; Ireland official promotes ‘Irishness’
NEW YORK — A weekend of St. Patrick’s Day revelry and tensions over the exclusion of gays in some of the celebrations culminated Monday in New York, where the world’s largest parade celebrating Irish heritage stepped off without the city’s new mayor and Guinness beer amid a dispute over whether participants can carry pro-gay signs.
The parade of kilted Irish-Americans and bagpipers set off on a cold, gray morning. Hundreds of thousands of spectators lined Fifth Avenue, but the shivering, bundled up crowd was only about half as thick as in previous years.
Revelers also gathered elsewhere for green-themed celebrations, including some 400,000 locals and tourists in Dublin, where gay rights groups took part in the festivities.
De Blasio held New York’s traditional St. Patrick’s Day breakfast at Gracie Mansion with the Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, but boycotted the parade because organizers said marchers were not allowed to carry gay-friendly signs or identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
By wire sources