Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for NYFW: The Shows
Megan Thee Stallion joins Jennifer Lopez in the new Coach spring 2022 “That’s My Ride” fashion campaign which was unveiled Tuesday.
The “Hot Girl Summer” stars in a 30-second commercial modeling Coach designs as she has fun riding bumper cars at a seaside amusement park to the music of Patrice Rushen‘s 1982 Grammy nominated track, “Forget Me Nots.”
“THEE main attraction. Riding with @coach’s iconic Horse and Carriage print for Spring 2022,” Megan commented on Instagram. “What’s your ride hotties?”
Coach is one of several endorsements for the three-time Grammy winner. She will also appear in a Super Bowl commercial for Frito-Lay. In a comical teaser she posted this week, as Meg walks toward her trailer and attempts to enter, she is shocked to see the long arm of an animal reach out the door, knock her name plate on the ground, and lock the door from inside.
Last year, the Glamour Woman of the Year honoree became a partner with the Popeye’s chicken franchise, and signed a production deal with Netflix. In 2020, the “Body” rapper was named a Revlon global ambassador.
In March, Thee Stallion will join the Dupa Lipa “Future Nostalgia” tour, and in April, she will perform at the Coachella Festival.
Mutton chops, “mad farmers who can’t get to their fields” and “me trying to be GQ”: Tim McGraw takes a walk down music video memory lane in a new reaction video the singer posted to his YouTube channel.
The singer looks back at three videos — 1994’s “Down on the Farm,” 2003’s “She’s My Kind of Rain” and 2016’s “Humble and Kind” — in the clip. He takes plenty of cracks at his fashion sense and youthful sensibilities throughout the video, but Tim has some sentimental stories to share, too, like how Oprah Winfrey helped inspire the music video for “Humble and Kind.”
“I knew that when we did the video, we had to figure out some way to make it special,” he remembers.
He got inspired after watching the trailer for Oprah’s Belief documentary series, which featured footage of people across the world, from a variety of different cultures.
“I thought, ‘Boy, that’s the way I want this video to look,’” Tim explains. So he sent the song to [producer, director and actor] Tyler Perry, a partner in Oprah’s OWN network, asking if it would be possible to use some of the footage from Belief for his video.
“I sent him the song, and he called me back, and he was crying on the phone about how wonderful the song is,” the singer recounts. “And he said, ‘I just sent it to Oprah, I hope you don’t mind, and she said you can have any of the footage that you want.’”
Tim concludes, “I just think it’s one of the most beautiful videos that we’ve ever shot.”
“Humble and Kind” won several awards, including Video of the Year at the 2016 CMT Music Awards.
Coldplay frontman Chris Martin is a big fan of his band’s “My Universe” collaboration with BTS and, in a new interview, he joked the stylish septet has a “bizarre” effect on his group. According to the British singer, BTS makes Coldplay look like a gang of awkward older men.
“It’s quite a bizarre,” he laughed on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Wednesday as he pointed to a photo of them all posing together. “We look like their gym teachers.” Still, Chris has nothing but nice things to say about the Grammy nominees.
“I genuinely love these people,” he stated. “It was cool to see how their life is. It’s a very different kind of band to us. And it’s much more disciplined in a certain way.” Chris added that Coldplay might not adapt very well to their strict schedule, but said he enjoyed being a part of their world when they spent time in Korea to work on “My Universe.”
He revealed how Coldplay and BTS’ worlds collided, saying the septet “asked [us] to do a song with them,” and Chris wondered, given their different sounds and styles, “How are we going to fit these two things together?”
“Then the idea started to seem really attractive in its weirdness, and then one day the right song arrived,” he continued. “It felt really natural.”
“My Universe” went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the British group’s first chart topper since 2008’s “Viva La Vida.”
Looking ahead to Coldplay’s future, Chris confirmed the band has three more albums in them — and one will be a musical — and they’ll all be out by 2025. “I think that’s what feels right, to us,” he clarified, adding they’ll still go on tours together, but, “the story of our albums ends then.”
Billie Eilish is giving her artsy fans something to talk about — she’s hosting an art contest where one lucky winner will have their artwork predominantly displayed during her tour.
Taking to her Instagram stories on Wednesday, the “bad guy” hitmaker announced, “I’m going on tour this year and designing merch right now and I know how creative all of you guys are, so I wanted to see if you guys would like to be involved!”
The Grammy winner excitedly continued, “I am going to pick out my favorite piece of fanart to be on one piece of official merch on my tour.” She added she “cannot wait” to start judging submissions because “I know it’s gonna be amazing.”
Billie has teamed with the art program, Adobe, for her ongoing contest that aims to find the perfect design for her tour t-shirt. “Your creativity could be on display in the merch booth and onstage before her show,” the Billie Eilish X Adobe disclaimer adds.
In addition, the grand prize winner will be hooked up with $10,000 and will be flown to one of Billie’s shows, where they can bring a friend to enjoy the concert. Plus, for all you artsy folk, the big winner will also cash in on a full-year free subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, which grants full access to their numerous apps.
There will be 10 runners-up, who will be awarded $1,000 each and also be able to fly to one of Billie’s upcoming tour dates with a friend. Those who make the cut will also be able to see their artwork up on the stage.
To enter, designs must be made using an Adobe app and be posted to Instagram using the two hashtags “#BillieXAdobe” and “#Contest.” The deadline is February 15.
(NEW YORK) — A segment of a SpaceX rocket that launched seven years ago is currently on course to crash into the moon.
The booster was part of the Falcon 9 rocket that lifted off from SpaceX’s Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida in February 2015 as part of a mission to send a space-weather satellite more than a million miles from Earth.
However, after a long burn to release the satellite at a specific position in space, the booster didn’t have enough fuel to return to Earth’s atmosphere, meteorologist Eric Berger explained in Ars Technica.
Additionally, its orbit was not high enough to escape the gravity pull between Earth and the moon, leaving the booster in a “chaotic orbit.”
Bill Gray, creator of Project Pluto, which supplies astronomical software that tracks objects near Earth to amateur and professional astronomers, wrote in a blog post that he’s calculated the impact likely will occur on the far side of the moon on March 4 around 7:25 a.m. ET.
“It’s been up there — just an inert piece of space junk — for the past seven years,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told ABC News. “Because of its orbit, it keeps coming somewhat close to the moon and that changes its orbit unpredictably, and so the moon keeps tugging on it and changes it orbit.”
He explained that the “last tug” the booster got from the moon in January set it on a path that it will come back near the Earth in early February, go beyond the moon in late February and then start falling back toward it in early March, causing the crash.
It’s not clear exactly where the booster will hit because sunlight can “push” it to slightly change course, but the four-ton segment is going to crash at 5,600 mph, likely creating a crater with a diameter several feet wide.
However, McDowell, who publishes a regularspace report, said the collision is nothing to worry about.
“This is not the the first time that we’ve smashed rocket stages into the moon,” he said. “We used to do it deliberately back in the days of Project Apollo to actually do scientific experiments to basically ring the moon like a bell and look for the interior structure with seismometers — sort of an artificial earthquake if you like — and that didn’t do any damage to the moon.”
Additionally, in 2009, NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft purposely slammed into the moon to collect data about the impact.
The impending crash also should have positive implications for science — it will offer researchers a rare opportunity to study and observe how craters are formed on the moon.
“The advantage you have of smashing a rocket into the moon and creating an artificial crater, instead of letting nature throw a rock at the moon and making an actual one, is that you know exactly what you’re throwing at the moon, you know what it’s made of and how heavy it is,” McDowell said. “If you know a four-ton aluminum rocket stage makes this big a crater, then that gives you a sense of how big a rock must have made this other crater.”
He added that the new crater created by the booster may uncover material and give a better idea of the composition of that part of the moon.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
After Kanye West said that he personally delivered a second sex tape to his estranged wife, Kim Kardashian, Kim claims that the video does not contains any sexual content.
The first video, titled Kim Kardashian, Superstar, featuring Ray J, was recorded in 2002 while Ray and Kim were celebrating her 23rd birthday in Mexico. It was released in 2007 by Vivid Entertainment. Kardashian filed a lawsuit against the company, then later dropped the suit and settled for a reported $5 million. Last year, Ray’s former manager, Wack 100, claimed in September he had possession of a second sex video that “was more graphic and better than the first one.”
Kanye said in an interview with Hollywood Unlocked with Jason Lee Uncensored that he retrieved a second sex tape and gave it to Kim. “I went and got the laptop from Ray J myself,” West said. “Got on the red-eye and met this man at the airport, then got on the red-eye, came back, delivered it to her at 8 a.m. in the morning.”
“She cried when she saw it,” Yeezy continued. “You know why she cried when she seen the laptop? It represents how much she’s been used. It represents how much people didn’t love her and they just saw her as a commodity.”
“After review, there was nothing sexual unseen, only footage on the plane on the way to Mexico and footage at a club and restaurant on the same trip,” Kardashian’s representative tells Entertainment Tonight. “Kim remains firm in her belief that there is no new second tape that exists. After 20 years, she truly wishes to move on from this chapter with focus instead on the positive things she continues to do as a mother, entrepreneur and advocate for justice reform.”
Fans can go behind the scenes on a late 2021 stop on Old Dominion’s We Are Old Dominion Tour, thanks to a new episode of CMT’s digital series, On the Road.
The cameras follow along as Old Dominion heads to St. Augustine, Florida for back-to-back sold-out shows. The concerts took place last December, and were the last two stops on the band’s tour.
In the episode, Old Dominion share what goes on when they’re not onstage, too: Viewers can watch the band mates golfing, riding motorcycles and spending time with their road family.
It’s the return of CMT’s On the Road series, which pivoted to an Off the Road spinoff during the COVID-19 pandemic. Normally, the show follows artists for a day in the life on tour, but amid pandemic-related shutdowns, it showed how touring artists were navigating the pandemic and life at home.
Old Dominion’s On the Road episode airs Wednesday at 5 p.m. ET. You can watch it on CMT’s social channels. Before it airs, check out the trailer on Facebook.
Madonna has always been a big supporter of Britney Spears, and now she’s floated the idea of the two actually touring together, — despite the fact that Britney has said she’s not interested in performing.
During an Instagram Live session on Tuesday, Madonna is told by someone off camera that fans are asking if she’ll ever do a world tour again. “Hell yeah! Got to! Stadium, baby!” she responds.
“Me and Britney, what about that?” she continues. “Yeah, I’m not sure she’d be into it, but it’d be really cool. We could re-enact, like, the original kiss.”
Madonna was referring to the controversial smooch she planted on Britney during the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards while performing Madonna’s song “Hollywood.” Madonna also kissed Christina Aguilera during that performance, but nobody seems to remember that part.
Two months after that, Madonna and Britney released their collaboration “Me Against the Music.” In 2008, Britney joined Madonna onstage for “Human Nature” during the Queen of Pop’s Sticky & Sweet tour.
In November, a source told Page Six that Madonna had been in contact with Britney “multiple times” as Britney fought to end her conservatorship.
In other Britney news, she’s shared an Instagram post in which she claims that during her conservatorship, she was forced to “wear two layers of tights every night” while performing in Las Vegas, and was “never allowed to go to the spa,” or even drink coffee or tea.
“My friends from home would show up, going to the spas, drinking champagne, no lie, and I was the loser working and entertaining them at night,” she adds. “Doesn’t sound like a good deal to me either…I’m here to remind them all that being treated like an equal individual doesn’t require much … just RESPECT.”
(WASHINGTON) — Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the most senior member of the U.S. Supreme Court’s liberal wing and staunch defender of a nonpartisan judiciary, is retiring from the bench, fulfilling the wish of Democrats who lobbied for his exit and clearing the way for President Joe Biden’s first high court appointment.
Breyer, the court’s oldest member at 83, will step down despite apparent good health, deep passion for the job and active involvement in cases. This term he authored major opinions upholding the Affordable Care Act, affirming free speech rights of students off-campus and resolving a multi-billion dollar copyright dispute between two titans of American technology, Google and Oracle.
“He has been operating at the peak of his powers,” said Jeffrey Rosen, law professor and president of the National Constitution Center. “It was so inspiring that this term his pragmatic vision of compromise and moderation were ascendant and all of the unanimous decisions were a moving tribute to his inspiring legacy.”
While Breyer has disavowed political considerations, many will see them in his decision to leave now. Stepping down early in the Biden presidency and while Democrats retain a razor-thin majority in the U.S. Senate will help ensure his seat is filled with someone who shares his judicial philosophy.
“It’s a highly personal decision,” Breyer told ABC News of retirement in a 2015 interview.
Progressive activists had imposed unprecedented public pressure on Breyer, who was nominated in 1994 by President Bill Clinton, to retire quickly. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said in June that the GOP may block a Democratic appointment to the court if the party retakes control of the Senate next year and a vacancy occurs in 2023 or 2024.
Many Democrats remain haunted by Republican obstruction of President Barack Obama’s nominee to the court in 2016 and the rushed confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett last year, just weeks before the 2020 election and after the sudden death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In the lead up to his retirement, Breyer distanced himself from partisan politics.
“It is wrong to think of the court as another political institution,” he said in an April speech at Harvard Law School. “And it is doubly wrong to think of its members as junior league politicians.”
He added, justices “are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.”
“He’s very savvy,” said Rosen. “He understands that democracy is fragile and people in the past have not obeyed the court and the court doesn’t have any ability to enforce its decisions. That’s why being attentive to its legitimacy is so important to him.”
The vacancy now clears the way for Biden to nominate an African American woman to the court, a historic first and something he promised during the 2020 campaign.
There have been five female justices in Supreme Court history; three are currently serving — Justices Barrett, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the first and only woman of color confirmed to the high court.
U.S. Appeals Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former Breyer clerk, public defender and Biden appointee who won three Senate Republican votes in confirmation, is considered a top contender for nomination along with Judge Leondra Kruger of the California Supreme Court, a former deputy solicitor general in the Obama administration who has argued a dozen cases before the high court.
“We are putting together a list of a group of African American women who are qualified and have the experience to be on the court,” Biden said in June 2020. “I am not going to release that until we go further down the line in vetting them.”
While Breyer never enjoyed the rock-star status held by Ginsburg, he has long been revered and celebrated as a consensus-seeker and happy warrior throughout his 27 years on the court.
“He is not a dogmatist, generating rules from some high-level theory. He is in search of workable results,” former federal appeals court Judge Richard Posner said of Breyer in the Yale Law Journal.
As a devout institutionalist, Breyer has passionately defended the Supreme Court’s reputation as an impartial and apolitical branch of American government. Later this year, he will publish a book on the subject, “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics.”
“A judge has to do his best not to have an opinion on a political matter,” he told ABC News in 2015. “And if I have an opinion, I might talk to my wife about it but I’m not going to talk to you.”
He has described differences among the justices as contrasts in “philosophical outlook” rather than differences of politics and chaffed at the labeling of justices as “liberal” or “conservative.”
“Politics to me is who’s got the votes. Are you Republican or Democrat? I don’t find any of that here,” he told ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl.
Breyer has been one of the few justices to be a regular attendee at State of the Union addresses before a joint session of Congress.
“I think it is very, very, very, important — very important — for us to show up at that State of the Union,” the justice told Fox News in 2010. “Because people today, as you know, are more and more visual … and I would like them to see the judges too, because federal judges are also part of that government.”
In recent years, as the court was repeatedly thrust into an uncomfortable spotlight during the Donald Trump presidency, Breyer joined with Chief Justice John Roberts to help steer the institution away from the headlines.
“The more the political fray is hot and intense, the more we stay out of it,” Breyer explained during a 2020 interview with the Kennedy Institute.
The nine justices have handed down more unanimous opinions in 2021 than any time in at least the last seven years. Court analysts credit a narrow focus on common ground rather than sweeping, more divisive pronouncements. Some see a vindication of Breyer’s longtime approach in the results.
During oral arguments, Breyer is frequently one to lean in, animatedly challenging lawyers on both sides of a debate to address the real life consequences of a case. He has earned the moniker “king of hypotheticals” for his creative use of the technique.
“You have to have the imagination to understand how those words will affect those lives,” Breyer said in a 2017 interview with NYU School of Law. “That means you understand something about the lives of other people.”
Breyer has cultivated a reputation for pragmatism and compromise in his opinions, which have been praised for their colloquial language and avoidance of jargon.
“My job … is to write opinions,” Breyer told Fox News Sunday in 2010. “The job of 307 million Americans is to criticize those opinions. And what they say is up to them. And the words I write are carrying out my job under the law as best I see it.”
In 2014, Breyer wrote for an unanimous court to limit the scope of a president’s power to make recess appointments.
“Pro forma sessions (of Congress) count as sessions, not as periods of recess,” he said, dealing a rebuke to Obama who had tried to force appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. “The Senate is in session when it says it is.”
He has twice authored significant majority opinions on the issue of abortion.
In 2000, Breyer wrote a 5-4 decision striking down a Nebraska law criminalizing “partial-birth abortions” as “an undue burden upon a woman’s right to make an abortion decision.” Two decades later, his opinion in June Medical Services v. Russo cast a Louisiana law requiring hospital admitting privileges for abortion doctors as a “substantial obstacle” to women that violates the Constitution.
On the First Amendment, Breyer was the pivotal vote in a pair of 5-4 decisions in 2005 involving public displays of the Ten Commandments. He voted to uphold a longstanding monument at the Texas state capitol, while opposing placement of framed copies of the commandments inside Kentucky courthouses. He was the only justice to agree with both decisions.
“The government must avoid excessive interference with, or promotion of, religion. But the Establishment Clause does not compel the government to purge from the public sphere all that in any way partakes of the religious,” Breyer wrote in a concurring opinion in the Texas case. “Such absolutism is not only inconsistent with our national traditions, but would also tend to promote the kind of social conflict the Establishment Clause seeks to avoid.”
Breyer frequently championed “six basic tools” that judges should use when deciding a case — text, history, tradition, purpose, precedent and consequences. He has also urged consideration of international law.
“When you’re talking about the Constitution, different judges emphasize different ones of those,” he said in a 2017 interview, “but nobody leaves any of those out completely.”
When Breyer’s analysis put him at odds with his colleagues, he frequently wrote in dissent, defending the use of race as a factor in school admissions; pushing for deference to legislatures on gun control laws; and, opposing partisan gerrymandering.
“The use of purely political considerations in drawing district boundaries is not a necessary evil that, for lack of judicially manageable standards, the Constitution inevitably must tolerate,” Breyer wrote in a 2004 case.
In the hotly contested 2000 election, Breyer lamented the court’s decision to get involved in the dispute between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
“The Court was wrong to take this case. It was wrong to grant a stay,” he wrote at the time. “We do risk a self-inflicted wound — a wound that may harm not just the Court, but the Nation.”
Breyer has been a staunch critic of the death penalty and what he sees as unacceptably lengthy delays between sentences and executions.
In a famous 40-page dissent in 2015, Breyer urged the court to reconsider whether capital punishment violates the Eighth Amendment.
“Lack of reliability, the arbitrary application of a serious and irreversible punishment, individual suffering caused by long delays, and lack of penological purpose are quintessentially judicial matters,” he wrote.
“They concern the infliction — indeed the unfair, cruel, and unusual infliction — of a serious punishment upon an individual,” he continued. “The Eighth Amendment sets forth the relevant law, and we must interpret that law.”
Breyer’s career on the high court caps a lifetime of public service.
He grew up in San Francisco, where he attended public schools and earned the rank of Eagle Scout. In 1957, Breyer joined the U.S. Army Reserves and served a tour of active duty in the Army Strategic Intelligence during his six-year career.
He studied philosophy at Stanford University and became a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University. In 1964, he earned his law degree from Harvard University and went on to clerk for justice Arthur Goldberg on the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I’m sure they wanted me to be a lawyer,” Breyer said of his parents in a 2017 oral history. “I thought, well I’d like to be a lawyer. I sort of always knew I would be.”
After a short stint in the Justice Department antitrust division, Breyer joined the faculty at Harvard Law School in 1967, specializing in administrative law. That same year he married Joanna Hare, a member of the British aristocracy and a pediatric psychologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
In the mid-1970s, he cut his teeth in politics, serving as an assistant special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation and later as special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee working alongside Sen. Ted Kennedy.
“A few lessons I learned from Kennedy. One of them: the best is the enemy of the good,” Breyer said in 2017. “If you could get an inch, it’s much better to get that inch then to complain about not getting a mile.”
He was first appointed to the federal bench in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter, going on to serve 13 years as an appellate judge until Clinton elevated him to replace Justice Harry Blackmun on the Supreme Court in 1994. The Senate confirmed Breyer 87-9.
Asked in 2017 how he would like to be remembered, Breyer told an interviewer: “You play the hand you’re dealt. You’re dealt one. And you do the best with what you have. If people say yes, he did, he tried, he did his best and was a decent person, good.”
Lady Gaga is further breaking down House of Gucci and how she channeled PatriziaReggiani, the woman who was famously convicted of arranging the murder of her ex-husband, Italian fashion heir Maurizio Gucci. The “Applause” singer also revealed why she turned to acting in the first place, saying it allowed her to escape a traumatic childhood.
Speaking to Jake Gyllenhaal for Variety’s “Actors on Actors” segment, Gaga admitted she wanted to become an actress long before she wanted to pursue singing. “Since I was a little girl, I was so mercilessly bullied, and I had a really strict upbringing. So acting for me was a way to totally escape who I was,” she revealed. “And I think I’ve done it my whole career with taking on the artistic persona of whatever music I’m writing and living inside my art. And for films, it’s different, but it’s not.”
Part of that escape, she says, is becoming the characters she plays. The Oscar winner revealed new information about how she transformed into Patrizia, saying she studied animals.
“I studied a house cat for the beginning of the film. And then at the funeral, when she sees Al Pacino’s character, she suddenly turns into a fox because she’s hunting now,” she described. “I watched foxes hunt and they’re really funny, because they hunt mice in the snow and they leap up and they burrow. I actually did exercises in my hotel room where I would be the animal.”
The Grammy winner studied one more animal to complete Patrizia’s transformation — the panther. “It was because the panther moves slowly, but then when it kills its prey, it is really violent and it’s really ugly, and then after, it cries,” she revealed.
“I chose these animals as a way to map the physicality of the character,” said Gaga.
