NEW YORK (AP) — It’s one sweet day for Lil Nas X: The breakthrough rapper’s viral “Old Town Road” has broken the Billboard record set by Mariah Carey’s “One Sweet Day” for most weeks at No. 1.

Lil Nas X accomplishes the feat this week as his country-trap song spends its 17th week on top of the Hot 100 chart. Carey and Boyz II Men’s duet set the record in 1996, and the only song to come close to breaking it was the ubiquitous international hit “Despacito,” which tied the 16-week record in 2017.

“YEEE TF HAWWW,” Lil Nas X tweeted Monday.

Hours later he posted a video thanking his fans for helping his song set a new record.

“I’m on the toilet right now, but I want to say thank you to every single person who has made this moment possible for me. We just broke the record for the longest-running No. 1 song of all-time,” said Lil Nas X, sporting a cowboy hat as he played “Old Town Road” in the background. “Let’s go!”

“Old Town Road,” which has achieved most of its success through audio streaming, was originally a solo song but 20-year-old Lil Nas X added Billy Ray Cyrus to the track. The song also has remix versions featuring Diplo, Young Thug, Mason Ramsey and BTS, and Billboard counts the original song and its remixes as one when calculating chart position, thus helping “Old Town Road” stay on top.

“17 is my new favorite number,” Cyrus said in a statement Monday, also referring to his debut album “Some Gave All,” which spent 17 weeks at No. 1 in 1992. “My goal was always to make music that would touch people’s lives around the world.”

“Old Town Road” initially was in a bit of controversy in March when Billboard removed it from its country charts, deeming it not country enough (it peaked at No. 19 on the country charts). But the drama didn’t hurt the song; it only propelled it.

Songs have come close to displacing “Old Town Road” from the top spot — including Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” and a pair of Taylor Swift singles — but ultimately were unsuccessful.

Swift was successful in 2017 when her song “Look What You Made Me Do” stopped Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber’s “Despacito” from reaching a 17th week at No. 1. Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” ended Carey and Boyz II Men’s epic run in 1996.

VISAGINAS, Lithuania (AP) — An HBO miniseries featuring Soviet-era nuclear nightmares has sparked global interest in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and boosted tourism in Lithuania.

The Baltic country, which served as the filming location for “Chernobyl,” has become a destination of so-called atomic tourism since the program aired earlier this year.

At Ignalina nuclear power plant, Mikhail Nefedyev was staring grimly at the row of blinking green lights on a control panel when another group of curious visitors poured into his realm. The 64 year-old engineer explained to them what exactly happened when a similar reactor exploded in Chernobyl, Ukraine, 33 years ago.

The Ignalina plant is of the same prototype as the one in Chernobyl. It has similar blueprints and the same water-cooled graphite-moderated reactors with a capacity of 1,500 megawatts of power. Ignalina was shut down a decade ago. Closing and decommissioning it were key conditions of Lithuania’s entry to the European Union in 2004.

In 1986, Lithuania, then part of the Soviet empire, was one of the republics affected by the nuclear disaster. Thousands were sent to clean up the mess in Chernobyl. Many of them are dead.

Today, the nuclear disaster is helping Lithuania grow as a tourist destination.

“Chernobyl,” a highly-rated miniseries, continues to send curious watchers to the filming locations in the capital Vilnius and at Ignalina, where glowing uranium rods cool in concrete pools. The plant, which is still open for tourists, drew 2,240 visitors in 2018. By July, 1,630 had visited the plant. And demand is growing, plant officials said.

“They have made a good movie, I guess. But what happened long ago does not bother us now. I think looking backward is not good,” Nefedyev said, after explaining how the RBMK-type reactor blew up.

Tourists who come to this Baltic coastal country of 3 million to see the HBO filming locations first visit the KGB museum in downtown Vilnius where interrogation scenes were shot. They are taken to a Soviet-era district of gray condos built in the mid-1980s that look somewhat like Pripyat, a nuclear city that served the Chernobyl plant.

“People come to see these places that we never used to promote. This is very new and unusual to see them not in the Old Town taking photos of Baroque churches, but sporting selfies here,” said Inga Romanovskiene, general manager at Go Vilnius agency.

Already a popular movie-making destination, Lithuania has benefited economically from the HBO miniseries. The amount of foreign capital spent on filming reached 45.5 million euros ($50.6 million) last year.

After locations in Vilnius, atomic tourists may opt to travel 160 kilometers (100 miles) north and join a three-hour tour of the nuclear plant. They are given dosimeters, plastic helmets, white clothes and shoes before venturing through a maze of long, poorly lit corridors, reactor halls, turbine hangars and the control center with the red button which was pushed just before the explosion. Cellphones, cameras, eating, drinking and smoking are strictly off limits.

The plant tour costs 67 euros (75 dollars) per person and tickets are sold until Christmas, said Natalija Survila, spokeswoman for Ignalina power plant.

Lynn Adams, a 49-year-old psychotherapist, came from the United Kingdom to see the whole thing with her own eyes.

“It feels like you are stepping back into one of the scenes actually. It’s very, very authentic. And I remember seeing about Chernobyl on the news, but I’m so much more interested in what happened and the events having seen the drama series. So I think it has kind of ignited an interest that I wasn’t aware of at the time,” Adams said after the visit to a Soviet-era district, used by HBO as a filming location for Pripyat.

Antanas Turcinas was among those sent to Chernobyl weeks after the disaster. He hopes the buzz from the miniseries leads to better care for survivors.

“This movie has brought back old memories. Emotions are very strong, because in 1986 we did not understand what we faced. I am happy to be still alive,” he said.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — The celebrity ancestry show “Finding Your Roots” has a message to counter divisive political rhetoric, said its host, educator Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The PBS series demonstrates that “we’re all descended from immigrants,” whether they came to America willingly or as slaves, and all share a common origin, Gates told a TV critics meeting Monday.

“People want that reassurance that we’re all the same,” he said, especially as some seek to divide the nation and distinguish between who does and doesn’t have the right to be an American and live in America.

It was an apparent reference to President Donald Trump’s call for four Democratic House members of color to “go back” to their countries, although all are U.S. citizens and all but one was born in the United States.

“Guess what, we’re all home. This is our home. And our ancestors came here and fought for the right to make this our home. … and we all have an equal purchase on the rights guaranteed by the Declaration (of Independence) and the Constitution,” Gates said.

“And I’m going to go down swinging against anybody who tries to divide us because of our apparent ethnic differences or gender differences or sexual preference differences,” he said.

“Finding Your Roots,” which is produced by Harvard professor Gates, returns this fall with guests including Melissa McCarthy, Jordan Peele, Issa Rae, Diane von Furstenberg and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Genealogy research and DNA tests help uncover the celebrities’ ancestral backgrounds.

Asked if he’d consider having Trump as a guest, Gates said PBS rules prevent candidates from appearing. Would he consider the president if that wasn’t the case?

“I don’t pick people by their ideology to be on the show,” Gates said. That’s been shown with previous guests, including Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and the late Sen. John McCain, he said.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A jury’s verdict that Katy Perry’s 2013 hit “Dark Horse” improperly copied a 2009 Christian rap song represents a rare takedown of a pop superstar and her elite producer by a relatively unknown artist, and sets up a battle over damages that will begin Tuesday.

Monday’s unanimous verdict by a nine-member federal jury in a Los Angeles courtroom came five years after Marcus Gray and two co-authors, first sued in 2014 alleging “Dark Horse” stole from “Joyful Noise,” a song Gray released under the stage name Flame.

The penalty phase is scheduled begin Tuesday with opening arguments, and will ultimately determine how much Perry and other defendants owe for copyright infringement. Testimony will give jurors a peek into the finances behind “Dark Horse,” a hit single that earned Perry a Grammy nomination and was the second song in her elaborate 2015 Super Bowl halftime performance.

Questions from the jury during two days of deliberations had suggested that they might find only some of the defendants liable for copyright infringement. The case focused on the notes and beats of the song, not its lyrics or recording, and the questions suggested that Perry might be off the hook.

But in a decision that left many in the courtroom surprised, jurors found all six songwriters and all four corporations that released and distributed the songs were liable, including Perry and Sarah Hudson, who wrote only the song’s words, and Juicy J, who only wrote the rap he provided for the song. Perry was not present when the verdict was read.

Other defendants found liable were Capitol Records as well as Perry’s producers: Dr. Luke, Max Martin and Cirkut, who came up with the song’s beat.

Gray’s attorneys argued that the beat and instrumental line featured through nearly half of “Dark Horse” are substantially similar to those of “Joyful Noise.” Gray wrote the song with his co-plaintiffs Emanuel Lambert and Chike Ojukwu.

“Dark Horse,” a hybrid of pop, trap and hip-hop sounds that was the third single of Perry’s 2013 album “Prism,” spent four weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 in early 2014.

Her attorneys argued that the song sections in question represent the kind of simple musical elements that if found to be subject to copyright would hurt music and all songwriters.

“They’re trying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone,” Perry’s lawyer Christine Lepera said during closing arguments Thursday.

The defendants’ musical expert testified that the musical patterns in dispute were as simple as “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

But the jury of six women and three men disagreed, finding that the bumping beat and riff at the center of “Joyful Noise” were original enough to be copyrighted.

Perry and the song’s co-authors testified during the seven-day trial that none of them had heard the song or heard of Gray before the lawsuit, nor did they listen to Christian music.

Gray’s attorneys had only to demonstrate, however, that “Joyful Noise” had wide dissemination and could have been heard by Perry and her co-authors. They provided as evidence that it had millions of plays on YouTube and Spotify, and that the album it’s included on was nominated for a Grammy.

“They’re trying to shove Mr. Gray into some gospel music alleyway that no one ever visits,” said plaintiffs’ attorney Michael A. Kahn during closing arguments, when he also pointed out that Perry had begun her career as a Christian artist.

Jurors agreed, finding that the song was distributed widely enough that the “Dark Horse” writers may well have heard it.

Kahn and Gray declined comment but smiled as they left the courtroom after the verdict.

Lepera and other defense attorneys also declined comment outside court. Perry’s publicist did not immediately return an email message seeking comment Monday evening.

Perry, a 34-year-old pop superstar and “American Idol” judge, brought laughs to the proceedings when she testified during its second day when her lawyers were having technical troubles getting “Dark Horse” to play in the courtroom.

“I could perform it live,” Perry said.

No performance was necessary after the audio issues were fixed. Jurors heard both songs played back-to-back in their entirety at the end of closing arguments last week.