While her sister and musical partner, Halle Bailey, just wrapped up filming Disney’s The Little Mermaid in Paris, Chloe Bailey is busy flexing at home on Instagram.
“Flex Park,” Chloe wrote in the caption of a series photos she posted Tuesday that show her posing in orange swimsuits from Beyoncé‘s latest Ivy Park collection. Chloe got all dolled up with hair and makeup to model a bustier one-piece in the bathroom mirror and a long-sleeve two-piece on a balcony.
Snoah Aalegra, Lala Anthony and more fans left dozens of heart-eye emojis and orange hearts in the post’s comments. Yet most were left drooling over Chloe’s sculpted abs, toned legs and glowing skin.
“Orange is your color queen,” wrote one fan, while another said, “My wife only allow[s] me to like Chloe, [Rihanna] and Beyoncé pics.”
Meanwhile, others were calling for Chloe to drop her highly anticipated solo single “Have Mercy.” Since her birthday earlier this month, the 23-year-old has been dropping teasers of the song, which has yet to be released. She recently approved the song’s dance challenge, which was created by Tik Tok star Charles Niko.
“Finally learned @thecharlesniko dance to ‘Have Mercy.’ How did I do?” Chloe wrote on Instagram yesterday, along with a video showing her grooving to a segment of the tune. “Tag me in your best dance videos, reposting my favs #havemercychallenge.”
It’s unclear when “Have Mercy” will be released, but the upbeat track definitely sounds like it’s worth the wait.
Guardians of the Galaxy star Karen Gillan knows a thing or two about action movies, but usually she’s surrounded by a bunch of guys. In her latest film, Netflix’s Gunpowder Milkshake, out Wednesday, she plays an assassin for hire who teams up and kicks butt with a bunch of women, which she tells ABC Audio was awesome.
“I mean, truly, that was just the best experience ever,” Gillan gushes. “I never realized how rare it is to actually have that many women in the main cast. And so we just had so much fun.”
“I mean, we were having girls nights and wine and laughing. And it was just like, oh, this is just brilliant. I want to do this all the time,” she laughs.
Angela Bassett and Carla Gugino, who kick butt alongside Gillan in the action-packed film, echoed the same sentiment.
Gugino says, “There is no doubt something about a female energy that with that many women around that was super organic and peaceful.”
“Collaborative, supportive,” Bassett adds. The actress also shares that she left filming with “a little tweak” in her ankle that serves as “a little reminder of the good time I had in Berlin.”
“To this day [it] still clicks and clicks and clacks a little bit as I walk or when I’m accelerating driving,” she reveals.
If it already wasn’t obvious by the name, Gunpowder Milkshake features a lot of gunplay but when it comes to the film glorifying guns or gun violence, Gillan says, “I certainly don’t want to be promoting that in any sense, but at the same time, like it was authentic to the characters. And it is a movie and it’s not a realistic movie.”
“It’s extremely like heightened, stylized,” she adds.
Valerie Lemercier, director and star of Celine Dion-inspired film “Aline;” Lionel Hahn/Getty Images
Aline, a new movie that just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, is based on Celine Dion‘s life. And even though Varietydescribed it as “kooky” and predicted Celine herself would be both “flattered” and “horrified” by it, the film received a standing ovation at the legendary festival.
Aline is directed by and stars French comedian Valerie Lemercier as a musical sensation named Aline Dieu, who’s based on Celine. Lemercier, who’s 57, plays Aline from youth to adulthood.
The outlines of Aline’s life closely follow that of Celine’s: She becomes famous, marries her manager, does a Las Vegas residency and has three children after struggles with infertility. But some details have been changed “to be more cinematic and romantic,” says Lemercier.
Throughout, Aline lip-syncs to Celine’s songs — including “My Heart Will Go On” — but they’re actually being sung by a soundalike named Victoria Sio.
According to Variety, when the film ended, the audience at the premiere gave it a standing ovation that lasted for a full five minutes; one woman in the audience told Variety, “I was actually crying.”
But is Celine herself O.K. with this movie? Lemercier tells Variety, “The first thing I did was give the script to her French manager. She read it and said it’s good for Celine; she said it doesn’t mock her. She could see how much I loved her.”
Lemercier adds, “That was the first thing I did, but Celine didn’t want to read anything. She didn’t see the movie.”
Lemercier, who’s never met Celine and has only seen her live once, then notes, “If I was Celine, I’m not sure I’d run to watch it. I hope she will recognize something [of herself in the film], but she should do what she wants.”
Tai Verdes broke through on TikTok with his viral hit “Stuck in the Middle.” Now the 25-year-old California native has tens of millions of streams, a record deal and a radio hit with “A-O-K.” Tai says it all happened because he decided to challenge himself.
“I went in knowing that I wanted to make my TikTok a promotional app — I just didn’t know for what,” explains Tai. “When I saw Curtis Waters do a dance to his song [‘Stunnin’] and it went viral, I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that dance. But I still think I can make myself go viral with a song, by just putting out content and promoting it.'”
So, after honing his vocal skills for several months, Tai posted “Stuck in the Middle” on TikTok last year, and, yes, it went viral. That led to a deal with Arista Records, and his debut album, TV.,
“[ It’s] kind of awesome that I just tried something and it worked…it all came to fruition,” says Tai.
As for “A-O-K,” it’s about keeping a positive outlook, and treating each day as though it could be your last.
“You have to be like, ‘If this is going to be the last day, I might as well think that this is a great day,’ because that’s way more fun,” he explains.
Later this month, Tai’s playing Lollapalooza; in September, he’ll tour with Chelsea Cutler and Quinn XCII, before headlining his own tour in November. But right now, Tai feels like he hasn’t seen any actual proof that he’s, y’know, famous.
“Everything that’s happened to me is imaginary — these numbers are imaginary,” he laughs. “When I go to Chipotle now, the workers smile because they know who I am. So that’s probably it!”
A casual listen to Thomas Rhett‘s “Country Again” might lead you to wonder if the former ACM Entertainer of the Year had begun to doubt his authenticity amid his massive success. But it’s quite the opposite for the second-generation country star: the title track of his latest album is more of a reflection on what he learned during the pandemic.
“For me, the word country means simple,” TR explains. “That would be my favorite synonym for the word, and I think that ‘Country Again’ is that in a nutshell.”
“With the year that we had in 2020,” he continues, “I think a lot of us were forced to not do what we do for a living and forced to slow down and really forced to recognize, like, what are your blessings in life and what are you grateful for?”
For Thomas Rhett, the answers are close to home.
“For me, that was my family, and for me, that was the outdoors: that was getting outside again, going fishing again, going hunting again, going out west and hiking with my family,” he says. “Those are the things that I used to love to do so much, and then life just kind of got in the way.”
The second single from Country Again: Side A is a reminder for us all to not lose sight of the “simple” things.
“I think a lot of us have just been grinding without realizing how hard we’re actually working,” TR points out. “And hard work is great, but I do think every now and then you can slow down and just smell the roses for a second.”
“And that’s what last year was for me,” he adds, “which is kind of where the inspiration for ‘Country Again’ kinda came from.”
Tom DeLonge will make his directorial debut with the upcoming film Monsters of California, and he doesn’t plan on stopping there.
Speaking with NME, the Angels & Airwaves frontman reveals he has “scripts for another five films in the works.”
“Those ones are much more ambitious,” DeLonge says. “Going forward, my goal is to make big, fun, crazy and thoughtful movies.”
Monsters of California is currently in post-production. DeLonge describes the film as “if [Steven] Spielberg went back and made an R-rated indie paranormal film.”
“It’s a John Hughes coming of age film with d*** jokes,” he adds.
Elsewhere in the interview, DeLonge speaks about the upcoming new AVA album, Lifeforms, due out September 24, and the possibility about touring again with Box Car Racer, his side project with former Blink-182 band mate Travis Barker.
“We have talked about…what it would be like to play shows, but everyone’s so busy!” DeLonge says. “It’s just how do you do that? Travis has a million things going on, I have a million things going on.”
“It’s just not the priority,” he adds. “It’s an awesome, nostalgic thing but nostalgic things don’t run your life, you have to fit them in.”
Andy Summers recently announced that he’ll be publishing his first book of short stories, Fretted and Moaning, in August. The Police guitarist has now revealed that he’ll also be releasing a new solo album in the coming months.
Summers tells ABC Audio that the album is a collection of “beautiful” instrumentals called Harmonics of the Night that he’s planning to release in October.
“[A]ctually, I’ve had this around for a while,” the 78-year-old Rock & Hall of Famer notes. “I made this record actually about 18 months ago. Everything got so crazy [because of the pandemic], we couldn’t get it out. Anyway, I’ve got a lot of help now, so it is coming out.”
In addition, Summers says he will be doing “a big photography show,” also called “Harmonics of the Night,” at the Leica Gallery in London.
“[T]he idea is that [all] the pictures in the show…sort of reflect the album,” he explains. “So, everything is going along nicely together…So, you know, lots of energy there.”
Back in 2019, Summers did a multimedia show called “A Certain Strangeness” that featured him playing guitar to accompany a presentation of photos he took that appeared in his 2019 photography book of the same name.
Andy tells ABC Audio that he’d like to do more shows like that once he’s able to tour again.
“That show [was] just me on stage…with my sophisticated guitar equipment that makes all sorts of amazing sounds,” he points out. “And we project on a…full-sized cinema screen…various photographic sequences. It’s all very exotic and lovely.”
As previously reported, Fretted and Moaning will be released on August 19. You can pre-order three different editions of the book now at Rocket88Books.com and AndySummersBook.com.
Avengers star Karen Gillan knows a thing or two about action movies, but usually she’s surrounded by a bunch of guys. In her latest film, Netflix’s Gunpowder Milkshake, out Wednesday, she plays an assassin for hire who teams up and kicks butt with a bunch of women, which she tells ABC Audio was awesome.
“I mean, truly, that was just the best experience ever,” Gillan gushes. “I never realized how rare it is to actually have that many women in the main cast. And so we just had so much fun.”
“I mean, we were having girls nights and wine and laughing. And it was just like, oh, this is just brilliant. I want to do this all the time,” she laughs.
Angela Bassett and Carla Gugina, who kick butt alongside Gillan in the action-packed film, echoed the same sentiment about the vibe on set.
Gugino says, “There is no doubt something about a female energy that with that many women around that was super organic and peaceful.”
“Collaborative, supportive,” Bassett adds. The actress, also shares that she left filming with “a little tweak” in her ankle that serves as “a little reminder of the good time I had in Berlin.”
“To this day [it] still clicks and clicks and clacks a little bit as I walk or when I’m accelerating driving,” she reveals.
If it already wasn’t obvious by the name, Gunpowder Milkshake utilizes guns in the film but when it comes to glorifying guns or gun violence, Gillan says, “I certainly don’t want to be promoting that in any sense, but at the same time, like it was authentic to the characters. And it is a movie and it’s not a realistic movie.”
“It’s extremely like heightened, stylized,” she adds.
(WASHINGTON) — As more people return to the skies, the number of unruly passenger incidents onboard planes continues to skyrocket.
Last week alone, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported an increase of 150 unruly passenger cases, making it the worst weekly report of the summer.
The FAA said on Tuesday that it has received over 3,400 reports of unruly behavior from passengers since the beginning of the year. Of those incidents, 75% involved passengers who refused to wear face coverings.
In one of the most recent cases, a woman from Florida was arrested after allegedly refusing to wear a mask on a Delta Air Lines flight.
Video of the incident appears to show the woman argue with police officers on board the aircraft as they ask her to deplane. She was then restrained and escorted off.
Adelaide Schrowang is facing several charges and remains in police custody on a $56,000 bond.
The FAA is still enforcing its zero-tolerance policy for in-flight disruptions which could lead to fines as high as $52,500 and up to 20 years in prison. The agency has looked into more than 550 potential violations of federal law this year — the highest number since 1995.
Last month, a coalition of airline lobbying groups and unions called on the Justice Department to go a step further and prosecute unruly passengers “to the fullest extent of the law.”
“The federal government should send a strong and consistent message through criminal enforcement that compliance with federal law and upholding aviation safety are of paramount importance,” the letter said.
Flight attendants are often the first responders during these in-flight confrontations, and they have seen them become more volatile.
An unruly passenger allegedly punched a Southwest Airlines flight attendant in the face last month, knocking her two front teeth out.
“It tops the chart of the most egregious things I’ve ever heard of,” Lyn Montgomery, a spokesperson for the union that represents Southwest flight attendants, told ABC News. “It’s unbelievable and really hard to understand the level of aggression that has been exhibited towards our flight crews. It just seems that when people get on board an aircraft they’re feeling more angry than they used to feel.”
The spike in unruly passenger reports prompted the TSA to resume crew member self-defense training this month.
The voluntary training program, which was put on hold due to the pandemic, provides flight crew members with techniques “for responding against an attacker in a commercial passenger or cargo aircraft,” including self-defense measures and ways to identify and deter potential threats.
“It should be a recurring training so that we can create that muscle memory that you need to be able to respond at a moment’s notice,” Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, told ABC News. “But even taking the course one time changed my attitude, gave me a better understanding about how to stand, how to hold myself, how to protect myself if someone is coming at me.”
(JACKSON, Miss.) — As the delta variant spreads rapidly across the country, Mississippi officials are warning that a dozen children are hospitalized throughout the state with severe cases of COVID-19.
Of the 12 children currently in the intensive care unit due to COVID-19, 10 are on ventilators, according to State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs.
“Delta Surge – be careful,” Dobbs said in a terse tweet Tuesday, while sharing the updates on the latest hospitalizations.
Children are less likely than adults to have serious COVID-19 infections. Most have mild symptoms, if any, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though in rare instances, they have developed severe cases that led to hospitalization or death.
It is not clear what the ages of the 12 children are, if they were eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine or if any have underlying health conditions that would put them at greater risk for severe illness from COVID-19. ABC News has reached out to the Mississippi Department of Health for more information on the cases.
Dr. Alan Jones, associate vice chancellor for clinical affairs at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, told ABC affiliate WAPT in Jackson, Mississippi, that his facility is currently treating four pediatric COVID-19 patients, two of whom are on ventilators.
“We have had more pediatric admissions than we had early in the pandemic,” Jones told the station.
The state has been seeing a “pretty alarming” increase in the number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, Dobbs said during a press briefing last Friday, as the highly contagious delta variant, which was initially identified in India, has quickly become the dominant variant in the state.
“We have seen pretty much an entire takeover of the delta variant for our transmission,” Dobbs said during the briefing, noting that the current cases in the state are “pretty much all delta.”
Hospital systems are not currently overwhelmed, but Dobbs said there are “concerns about it going forward, as has been seen in other states” due to delta, which has become the dominant variant nationwide.
Mississippi’s daily COVID-19 case average has more than doubled in the last three weeks. Less than three weeks ago, there were under 100 patients receiving care for COVID-19 in Mississippi. As of July 11, there were nearly 200. Hospital admissions have also increased by 26.7% in the last week.
The state has seen an increase in COVID-19 outbreaks as well, particularly among youth, in summer activities and nursing homes, Dobbs said.
The delta variant is surging as Mississippi has the second-lowest vaccination rate in the country, with approximately one-third of the state’s total population fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. The “vast majority” of cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the state now are in unvaccinated people, Dobbs said.
Due to the low vaccination rate, the state health department advised Friday that those who are ages 65 and older or have chronic medical conditions avoid mass indoor gatherings for several weeks.
“Our collective under-vaccination in the state has put us all at risk, especially the most vulnerable,” Dobbs said.
