Country singer George Strait just smashed another record in his chart-topping musical career.

On Saturday, the Texas native played the largest ticketed concert in U.S. history before a crowd of 110,905 fans, according to Billboard.

The performance at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field in College Station beat out the previous record held by the Grateful Dead, which jammed before 107,019 attendees during a 1977 show at Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey.

Though Strait nabbed the record for the largest ticketed musical performance, there have been bigger crowds at some music festivals and free concerts held in the U.S., such as the 1986 performance by the New York Philharmonic in Central Park that drew an estimated 800,000 people.

And according to American Songwriter, perhaps the largest audience for a concert in history goes to the reputed 3.5 million fans who crammed onto Brazil’s Copacabana Beach in 1994 to hear Rod Stewart perform.

Strait is no stranger to setting records. The singer has the most No. 1 singles of any artist in any genre and is the only artist to boast a top 10 hit every year for three decades, Billboard reported.

According to Strait’s website, the country music star also holds more than 20 attendance records at music venues across the U.S.

Strait, whose new album Cowboys and Dreamers drops in September, will perform in Salt Lake City later this month, followed by concerts in Detroit and Chicago in July.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dissolved the war cabinet he set up in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack following the resignation of two of its five members.

The body, headed by Netanyahu, has overseen Israel’s war in Gaza for the past eight months. However, its dissolution had been expected since the resignations last week of Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, two centrist politicians who joined Netanyahu’s coalition at the start of the war.

Following their departures, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich — ultranationalists whose positions have frequently drawn fierce criticism from Israel’s allies, including the US — had demanded to be admitted to the war cabinet.

But according to Israeli officials, Netanyahu will instead now hold meetings in smaller forums to discuss sensitive matters. The wider security cabinet, which includes Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, will also continue to deal with matters relating to the war, officials said.

Gantz and Eisenkot demanded the establishment of the war cabinet, which also included defence minister Yoav Gallant and strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer, as a condition of joining Netanyahu’s emergency government last year.

The arrangement was designed to sideline Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who have repeatedly demanded a more aggressive approach to the war in Gaza as well as the re-establishment of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian enclave.

They have also opposed concessions that would have allowed a deal to free the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.

While the entry of Gantz — a longtime rival of Netanyahu — into the war cabinet briefly brought a veneer of unity to Israeli politics, in recent months, he and Eisenkot have become increasingly critical of Netanyahu’s conduct of the war.

Gantz has accused the Israeli prime minister, who depends on Ben-Gvir’s and Smotrich’s parties for his majority in parliament, of allowing decisions relating to the war to be affected by narrow political calculations.

The tensions came to a head earlier this month when Gantz pulled his National Unity alliance out of the emergency government and resigned from the war cabinet after Netanyahu ignored his demands for a series of policy shifts, including drawing up a plan for the aftermath of the war.

Eisenkot said he and Gantz left the government after the war cabinet was “infiltrated” by “ulterior motives and political considerations”, and described Ben-Gvir as “the alternate prime minister”.

Netanyahu’s office on Saturday accused the pair of lying, insisting the prime minister made decisions based only on Israel’s national security needs.

CNN
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American journalist Evan Gershkovich will stand trial behind closed doors in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg starting on June 26, state-run news agency TASS reported Monday, citing the court’s press service.

Gershkovich, 32, has been imprisoned since he was arrested while on a reporting trip in March last year by the FSB, Russia’s federal security service, which accused him of trying to obtain state secrets. Gershkovich, the US government and his employer, the Wall Street Journal, have vehemently denied the charges against him.

The Russian Prosecutor General’s office said last Thursday it had approved the indictment and referred Gershkovich’s case to a trial court. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

The case will be heard in the Sverdlovsk Regional Court, TASS reported Monday.

For more than a year since his arrest, Gershkovich has been imprisoned in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison, and his pre-trial detention period had been extended numerous times. The trial venue of Yekaterinburg is more than 1,100 miles east of the capital.

Last week, Russian prosecutors said the FSB had “established and documented” that Gershkovich was acting on CIA instructions in the month he was arrested, alleging he had “collected secret information” about a Russian tank factory.

“Gershkovich carried out the illegal actions using painstaking conspiratorial methods,” it said in a statement.

Gershkovich’s detention has been a source of tension between Washington and Moscow, whose relations were already deeply strained due to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

The White House has previously alleged the Kremlin is using Gershkovich, the first American reporter detained in Russia on allegations of spying since the Cold War, as a geopolitical hostage.

On Thursday, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the allegations against Gershkovich have “absolutely zero credibility.”

“We have been clear from the start that Evan has done nothing wrong. He should never have been arrested in the first place. Journalism is not a crime. The charges against him are false, and the Russian government knows that they’re false. He should be released immediately,” Miller said at a State Department briefing.

Gershkovich is among a number of Americans being held in Russia, including former Marine Paul Whelan, whom the US State Department has also declared as wrongfully detained.

The US has repeatedly warned American citizens not to travel to Russia.