The top-paid iPhone apps on the App Store for the one-week period that ended Monday:

The top-paid iPhone apps on the App Store for the one-week period that ended Monday:

v “Cut the Rope 2”: ZeptoLab UK Limited

v “Heads Up!”: Warner Bros.

v “Minecraft — Pocket Edition”: Mojang

v “Grand Theft Auto — San Andreas”: Rockstar Games

v “Afterlight”: Simon Filip

“Nikita” (9 p.m., The CW): The series finale of “Nikita” has a fitting title: “Canceled.” In the episode, our wispy butt-kicker (Maggie Q) seeks deadly revenge against MDK. But Michael (Shane West) urges her to surrender before the military guns her down.

“What We Wasted Our Year On” (9 p.m., NBC): Willie Geist (“Morning Joe,” “Today”) looks back at the year’s most notorious events with a crew of relatively unknown comics.

TV listings, B6

entertainment news

Drummer for stars dies of aneurism

LONG BEACH, Calif.

Studio drummer Ricky Lawson, a collaborator with musicians including Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins and Whitney Houston, has died at a suburban Los Angeles hospital after a brain aneurism. He was 59.

Lawson’s uncle, Paul Riser of Detroit, said Tuesday that Lawson was removed from life support 10 days after the aneurism diagnosis and died around 7 p.m. Monday.

The Detroit native learned to play drums at age 16 and jumped into the music business even before graduating from Cooley High School, developing into one of the nation’s top studio musicians in the 1980s. His work appears on Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You.” He also performed with Al Jarreau, George Benson, Bette Midler, Quincy Jones and many others.

Lawson won a Grammy Award in 1986 for R&B instrumental performance for the song “And You Know That” by his group, Yellowjackets.

Actors protest

JERUSALEM

A trio of Israeli stage actors is refusing to perform in an acclaimed play before a theater in a West Bank Jewish settlement, part of a burgeoning domestic movement against the government’s settlement policies.

The protest mirrors a global movement against the settlements that has put Israel’s government in an increasingly difficult situation as the current round of peace talks with the Palestinians continues.

In a joint statement, the Cameri and Beit Lessin theaters said that three cast members in their production of “Best Friends” had asked to be excused from performing at the cultural center in Ariel, a settlement built deep inside the West Bank.

Combined dispatches