(WASHINGTON) — After playing coy on the subject, GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is planning to appoint Republicans to the select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Republican sources familiar with his plans tell ABC News.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced last week that Democrats would move forward with creating the select committee after Senate Republicans blocked a proposal for an independent, bipartisan commission.
McCarthy — who will get five appointments to the committee — hadn’t initially decided whether he would appoint anyone at all and reportedly privately threatened Republicans who would accept an appointment by Pelosi.
When asked at a press conference last week about his intentions he said: “When I have news on that, I’ll give it to you.”
A senior GOP aide familiar with the process said there are ongoing efforts to decide which members to appoint, with some likely being allies of former President Donald Trump who have attempted to downplay the rioting and attack at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Some Republicans expect McCarthy to use the appointments to undermine what they see as the key aim of Pelosi in creating the commission — to politically damage Trump and other allies who objected to certifying President Joe Biden’s election victory.
However, McCarthy is also getting pressure from some in the party to appoint more moderate Republican lawmakers. The timing of an announcement is unclear, but is likely to happen within the next two weeks, sources say.
Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., one of the Democrats Pelosi has already tapped for the committee, told on CNN on Thursday that Republicans “have an obligation to put in a good-faith effort to get all the facts.”
“We’re going to start with having law enforcement officers testify to share their experiences that day,” she said when asked whether Trump would be called to testify.
Pressed whether McCarthy himself could be called to testify, as it’s known that he and Trump shared a phone call while rioters stormed the building, Murphy didn’t rule it out.
“I think that members of congress could be and will be probably called to testify under oath about their different perspectives on that day,” she said.
Pelosi last month introduced the measure to from the committee comprising 13 members after a bipartisan 9/11-style commission failed to pass the Senate. Eight committee members are to be selected by Pelosi and the other five chosen by McCarthy must be picked in consultation with the House speaker, the measure dictates.
Pelosi announced last week her selections for the committee, with much of the spotlight on Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, an outspoken critic of Trump who was stripped of her No. 3 GOP leadership role earlier this year.
Pelsoi also said House Homeland Security Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., will chair the committee, which will include Murphy and Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Adam Schiff, Pete Aguilar, Jamie Raskin and Elaine Luria.
Following Pelosi’s press conference, McCarthy denied reports that he threatened GOP members with taking away committee assignments if they were to accept a select committee position but took the chance to question Cheney’s place in the Republican Party.
“I was shocked that she would accept something from Speaker Pelosi. It would seem to me, since I didn’t hear from her, maybe she’s closer to her than us,” McCarthy said.
The resolution to form the House committee to investigate the attack passed last month mostly along party lines — other than Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., who broke from Republicans to vote for its passage.
Twenty One Pilots have premiered the video for “Saturday,” a track off their new album, Scaled and Icy
The clip finds Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun performing a concert for a party inside a submarine when their underwater vessel is attacked by a giant sea creature that looks a lot like the dragon on the Scaled and Icycover.
Ever the professionals, the duo keeps playing even as the sub fills up with water, before they eventually swimg to the surface.
You can watch the “Saturday” video streaming now on YouTube.
Scaled and Icy, the follow-up to 2018’s Trench, was released in May. It also includes the lead single “Shy Away.”
Kelsea Ballerini at the 2021 CMT Awards; Erika Goldring/2021 CMT Awards/Getty Images for CMT
The CMT Music Awards show is going through changes in 2022.
Varietyreports that the show will broadcast on April 3, 2022, which is a departure from its usual June airing. The announcement comes just a couple weeks after Viacom revealed that the annual country music awards show is moving from its original home of CMT to CBS, the former’s much larger sister broadcast network.
Of course, April is the month that CBS formerly aired another country music awards show: The ACM Awards. The ACMs most recently aired on CBS in April 2021, but the network and the Academy subsequently parted ways after failing to agree on terms for a deal renewal.
There’s no word yet on whether the ACMs will keep its usual April broadcast slot or move to another time of year in order to avoid competition with the rescheduled spring CMT Awards. It is also not yet known where the ACMs will air next year, though per Variety, the Academy has reportedly been in negotiations with NBC.
Meanwhile, the CMT Awards are riding the momentum of the success of their 2021 show, which saw a ten-percent increase in total viewership on CBS and was the top social program of the night across TV.
ViacomCBS has also announced a string of special programming, dubbed “Country Music Week,” to surround the next CMT Awards.
(WASHINGTON) — The Democratic National Committee is investing an additional $25 million in its voting rights initiative, Vice President Kamala Harris is set to announce Wednesday, underscoring the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to a cause that has become a rallying cry for the party.
“This campaign is grounded in the firm belief that everyone’s vote matters. That your vote matters,” Harris plans to say, according to excerpts of her prepared remarks shared with ABC News. “I want to make clear that this is about all voters. It doesn’t matter to us if you are a Democrat or not. We want to help you vote, and we want to help make sure your vote is counted. Why? Well, because our democracy is strongest when everyone participates, and it is weaker when people are left out.”
DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison previously announced a $20 million initial commitment to the initiative, called “I Will Vote.” Priorities USA, one of the largest Democratic super PACs that litigated over 15 voting-centric cases, has also committed $20 million to fighting efforts to curtail access to the ballot box.
Harris will announce the investment when she gives remarks at Howard University in Washington at 1 p.m. President Joe Biden and Harris are also meeting with civil rights leaders at the White House at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday and will discuss this issue and the effort to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Representatives from the NAACP, National Urban League and National Action Network, among others, will attend.
The $25 million will be used to fund voter education and protection efforts, targeted voter registration and technology to increase voting accessibility and combat “Republicans’ unprecedented voter suppression efforts,” according to the DNC.
“Republicans know that their policies are unpopular — and that the only way for them to hold on to power is to attack the constitutional right to vote, held by the people they swore to serve. That’s why the Republican Party has made unprecedented efforts to keep people from voting,” Harrison said in a statement. “I’ve said time and again that the ‘D’ in Democrat stands for deliver, and today we are delivering innovative and historic resources to protect this fundamental part of our democracy.”
The investment comes amid a nationwide Republican effort to pass what they call “election integrity” laws that often tighten voting restrictions and restrict access to the ballot box. Republicans endorsing these bills often point to the diminished trust among voters in U.S. elections but fail to address former President Donald Trump’s repeated attempts to undermine the 2020 election by falsely claiming there was mass voter fraud and that he actually won in November.
In the 2021 legislative sessions alone, state lawmakers across the country introduced nearly 400 bills that include restrictive voting provisions, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice’s analysis. At least 17, mostly GOP-led states, have enacted 28 new laws this year that at least in part restrict voter access.
2021 is definitely a comeback year for Jazmine Sullivan, who in January released her first project in six years, Heaux Tales.
The vulnerable EP features transparently explores the singer’s personal experience with heartbreak and love, which landed Sullivan a spot on Rolling Stone’s 2021 Hot List.
“In my music, I feel like I can talk about things that I wouldn’t normally have talked about and just be proud of who I am, and own who I am,” Sullivan tells Rolling Stone. “When I’m making music and I’m in a studio, it really feels so personal.”
“I’m just literally telling my story, and it’s for me,” she explains. “I know people are going to hear it, but it’s just me getting out these thoughts and these feelings that are inside of me.”
Heaux Tales features duets with fellow R&B vocalists Ari Lennox, H.E.R. and Anderson .Paak. The EP is also intertwined with interludes from Lennox and other women expressing their needs and wants in regards to love sex and taking control of one’s body. But Sullivan says her favorite ‘heaux tale’ on the EP is “The Other Side.”
“It was refreshing to write that story,” Sullivan says. “It’s very different from who I am, and my perspective. I feel like people were able to look at what they would consider a gold digger through a different lens after that.”
Sullivan promises not to make fans wait another six years before she releases the follow-up to Heaux Tales, the way she made fans wait following her 2015 album, Reality Show. “Life is not promised. So I just want to be able to do as much as I can but in my healthiest state,” she adds.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson just revealed on Instagram that his much-anticipated action comedy Red Notice will drop on Netflix on November 12.
“I’m officially serving you your notice,” Johnson told his 252 million followers, capping it with the “siren” emoji.
In Red Notice, Johnso plays “the FBI’s top profiler,” on the hunt for Gal Gadot‘s character, “the world’s most wanted art thief,” with Ryan Reynolds playing, “the greatest conman the world has ever seen.”
Johnson previously starred with Gadot in the fifth Fast & Furious installment, and with Reynolds in the Fast spin-off Hobbs & Shaw.
Star and co-producer Johnson shouted out his pals, saying, “Thank you to my insanely talented (and highly unattractive) costars @gal_gadot & @vancityreynolds [Reynolds] for our globetrotting heist,” revealing a photo of the movie’s stars. Wonder Woman star Gadot looks stunning in a red gown, flanked by Reynolds in a white dinner jacket, and Rock in a black tuxedo.
For his part, Reynolds tweeted, “True story. They made my entire tuxedo out of one of @TheRock’s socks.”
Ryan added, “last piece of gossip: @GalGadot is wonderful.”
Johnson also thanked “205 million+ Netflix subscribers who are already making #RedNotice the most highly anticipated movie on the platform in 2021.” He added, “This is my career first streaming film and I wanted to make it big and special for all the fans worldwide.”
Red Notice was supposed to debut in theaters for Universal Pictures, but Netflix scooped up distribution rights in 2019. The film’s title refers to INTERPOL’s alert for the world’s most wanted fugitives.
The hard-rocking film — which features Papa Roach‘s Jacoby Shaddix in his film acting debut, as well as appearances by artists including Mötley Crüe‘s Tommy Lee and members of Five Finger Death Punch — will make its debut at London’s FrightFest, taking place August 26-30.
The Retaliators, which was first announced in 2020, follows a mild-mannered pastor who’s thrust into a world of violence as he tries to solve the mystery of his daughter’s murder. It’s being produced by Better Noise Films, an offshoot of the Better Noise Music record label.
Other artists appearing in The Retaliators include members of The Hu, Ice Nine Kills and Escape the Fate. Those bands also appear on the film’s soundtrack, as do Papa Roach, Five Finger Death Punch, From Ashes to New and Cory Marks.
(NEW YORK) — Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones was offered tenure at the journalism school of her alma mater, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, but she won’t be taking it.
Instead, she will go to Howard University after her tenure was initially blocked for months at North Carolina. The school’s board of trustees declined to vote twice in November and January on her tenure but finally voted in favor of it just last week.
Hannah-Jones would’ve been the first Black Knight Chair at the school and the first not to have been granted tenure.
“I think it showed that there was not a respect for what Black faculty go through on campus. We know that the University of North Carolina lost some recruits over this, other Black faculty are considering leaving the university,” she told ABC News Wednesday. “If they were able to do this to me — I work at the New York Times. I have a huge megaphone, I have a huge platform — what do they think they could get away with when it came to lesser-known scholars?”
Reports swirled in May that her application for tenure had been blocked at the last minute by several politically conservative trustees.
Those who publicly voiced their disapproval at her tenure included a donor for whom the university’s school of journalism is named. However, the donor, Walter Hussman, insists he “never pressured anybody.”
Hussman has spoken out against Hannah-Jones’ landmark work with the New York Times, “The 1619 Project,” for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. The project examines the role of slavery in the birth of the United States. Critics, including prominent historians, took issue with the portrayal of the American Revolution and requested corrections be made.
The project was backed by support from the New York Times’ executive editor, publisher and magazine editor. She said in a statement her tenure controversy was tied to “the political firestorm that has dogged me since The 1619 Project published” two years ago.
“Tenure matters for exactly the reason that I didn’t initially receive it. …oftentimes, academics are doing research and producing work that could be seen as controversial, or that challenges the status quo, and this protects the ability to pursue work that may not be popular with people who are politically powerful,” Hannah-Jones told ABC News. “The fact that initially I was denied tenure, largely because of the nature of my works, specifically around conservative objections to The 1619 Project speaks to why I could not come to the university without it.”
UNC Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz said he is “disappointed” that Hannah-Jones won’t be joining the faculty.
“We wish her the best,” he said in a statement. “I remain committed to recruiting and retaining the world-class faculty that our students deserve at Carolina. Members of my leadership team and I are actively engaged with student, faculty and staff leaders to continue working together toward a more inclusive and equitable campus living, learning and working environment where everyone knows they belong.”
Hannah-Jones admonished Guskiewicz and other leaders at the school for not addressing the deadlock of her tenure.
“The Board of Trustees not voting was one thing. But to also have the chancellor and the provost of the university fail to speak out publicly, fail to say that the board of trustees should’ve treated me like every other professor who came in under the Knight Chair, I think that sent the message to other faculty on campus that they would not have the protection and the support of the administration if it came down to a fight with political appointees,” she said.
Hannah-Jones will be the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at Howard University, a historically Black institution of higher education (HBCU). The Knight Foundation’s $5 million investment in the university includes $500,000 for the Knight Chair to help strengthen journalism teaching across HBCUs.
“Instead of fighting to prove I belong at an institution that until 1955 prohibited Black Americans from attending, I am instead going to work in the legacy of a university not built by the enslaved but for those who once were,” she said in her statement.
Hannah-Jones said she was approached by the dean of UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, Susan King, to become the school’s Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Reporting. Hannah-Jones said the request came during last year’s racial reckoning, and she saw a need for “journalists to have the knowledge, training, historical understanding and depth of reporting to cover the changing country and its challenges.”
She said she accepted, underwent a rigorous tenure process, and passed two votes, first by all professors, then the Promotion and Tenure Committee, which both overwhelmingly approved her tenure.
UNC’s Board of Trustees were meant to vote in November for her start in January 2021.
Then, “we learned that my tenure application had been pulled but received no explanation as to why. The same thing happened again in January,” Hannah-Jones said. “Both the university’s Chancellor and its Provost refused to fully explain why my tenure package had failed twice to come to a vote, or exactly what transpired.”
She said she was told they would not consider her tenure at that time, and offered her a five-year contract for tenure consideration at a later, unspecified date. She reluctantly agreed, becoming both the first Black Knight Chair at the school, and the first not to have been granted tenure.
After a report from NC Policy Watch about her tenure process and ensuing student protests, the board of trustees finally voted on Hannah-Jones’ tenure, and approved it in a split vote.
“I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me, who used his wealth to influence the hires and ideology of the journalism school, who ignored my 20 years of journalism experience, all of my credentials, all of my work, because he believed a project that centered Black Americans equaled denigration of white Americans,” she said of Hussman. “Nor can I work at an institution whose leadership permitted this conduct and has done nothing to disavow it.”
Hussman told Poynter this week that he hoped to meet with Hannah-Jones and Dean Susan King, but the meeting never came together. After reading The 1619 Project, Hussman said he voiced concerns about his belief that the report exaggerated the role of slavery as a possible cause for the American Revolution, and insisted his objections were with the scholarship, not Hannah-Jones.
“I don’t have any judgment about her (personally) — I’ve never met her,” Hussman told Poynter. “I feel certain I did what I should appropriately have done. I didn’t lobby against her appointment.” He added that he had no objection to the latest UNC vote to offer Hannah-Jones tenure.
She said she still has not received answers about what happened in her tenure process. She called on UNC to provide transparency, apologize to student protestors, and address demands for recruiting, supporting and retaining Black faculty.
Hannah-Jones told ABC News the lack of Black tenured faculty in schools across the country can be traced back to a system where previously-tenured professors, often white, offer tenure to others and can be “self-replicating.” Also, she said Black scholars are studying issues of inequality and race, which are “not often valued as other types of scholarship.”
“I hope that other universities who might find it easy to point at the board of trustees in North Carolina and say ‘They’re just backwards,’ will do some real, internal introspection on the way that they are also blocking so many other talented Black faculty who dedicated their life to academia.”
If you were around in the ’90s, there were two big questions you probably asked yourself: “How many more times can I see Titanic?” and “How the heck did Adam Duritz of Counting Crowsend up datingJennifer Aniston?” Well, now we know the answer to the latter question.
Entertainment Tonightgot a sneak peek of VICE TV’s new special Dark Side of the ’90s, one part of which focuses on LA’s celebrity hot spot of that time, The Viper Room. In the special, Adam, who was then at the height of his Counting Crows fame, says he “lived at The Viper Room, night in and night out.”
“I met Jennifer Aniston there,” he adds. “A bunch of my friends lied to me and told me she had a crush on me. Those same friends lied to her and told her I had a crush on her. I honestly had no idea who she was, I had been on the road during all of Friends. I had never seen it, I don’t think.”
However, Adam recalls that Aniston was “really nice, really funny, really pretty,” adding, “And also, she liked me.” The two dated in 1995, and Adam says, “It didn’t last very long, but she’s a nice girl.”
Adam also reportedly dated Aniston’s co-star, Courteney Cox, who appeared in the Counting Crows’ video for “A Long December.” Asked about this in 2014, Adam said, “They were nice girls and I went out with them and that was that.”
Adam and Counting Crows recently released an EP called Butter Miracle, Suite One. Aniston, of course, went on to marry and divorce Brad Pitt and Justin Theroux. Cox married and divorced David Arquette and is now dating Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid, whom she met through her pal Ed Sheeran.
Fans might know Luke Bryan best as the country superstar onstage at his annual Farm Tour, but there’s another side of the singer that his audience doesn’t see as often: The guy who wakes up at sunrise and heads out to tend to his own plot of Tennessee land.
Now, viewers can get a look at life on Luke’s farm in his new mini-video series, a collection of approximately 25 one-minute long videos that will air twice a week through the summer. The series is a partnership with agriculture equipment maker Fendt, and features Luke’s Fendt 724 Gen6 tractor.
Topics for the videos range from serious to silly. In one, Luke ranks the farming skills of fellow country star Blake Shelton, while another finds him reflecting on the significance of farmers both in a national context and in his personal life.
The series is called Rise Before Sunrise with Luke Bryan, and true to its name, you’ll have to wake up on farming time to catch the clips right when they air: Each one goes up at 6 a.m. ET.
Luke’s video series lasts until September, which is also when his 2021 Farm Tour starts. The trek launches September 9 at Statz Bros. Farm in Wisconsin, followed by stops in Iowa, Indiana, Illinois and Ohio. The Farm Tour wraps at Kubiak Family Farmsin Michigan on September 18.
In the meantime, fans can catch Luke on his Proud to Be Right Here tour, which begins in July.
