Russell Dickerson has dropped his new summer EP, Three Months Two Streets Down.
The project features Russell as a writer on four of its five songs. Tyler Hubbard and Dan + Shay‘s Shay Mooney also contribute as writers on “Down on the Beach” and “Ride The Wave,” respectively.
“I’ve had these songs for awhile and wanted to do something cool with them – releasing a summer EP just seemed like the perfect fit,” shares Russell. “I like how there’s a track on there for everyone – whether it’s one that makes you nostalgic or more of a feel-good song to blast in your car. So glad I can officially share these tracks with the RD Fam!”
Three Months Two Streets Down is out wherever you listen to music.
To get tickets to Russell’s upcoming Big Wheels & Back Roads Tour this fall, visit his website.
Here’s the Three Months Two Streets Down track list:
“Ride The Wave”
“Down on the Beach”
“Steal My Summer”
“Beauty and the Beach”
“SMR LV”
ZZ Top’s BillyGibbons is giving fans an update on the band’s next album and says the late Dusty Hill will be represented on the record.
Gibbons tells Classic Rock that the band is “currently reviewing the tracks that deserve completion” for the next record, noting that both Dusty, who passed away in 2021, and his replacement, Elwood Francis, are on it.
“What’s fascinating is that we have three or four tracks with them both, they’re trading off,” he says. “The only tell-tale difference is that Dusty, playing with his fingers, sounds a little warmer.“
Gibbons says they “hope” to have the album out sometime this year, but notes, “We’ve got lots of road work ahead,” referring to ZZ Top’s upcoming Sharped Dressed Simple Man Tour with Lynyrd Skynyrd. The trek kicks off July 21 in West Palm Beach, Florida. A complete list of dates can be found at zztop.com.
In the same article, Gibbons also reveals he has an unfinished song with the late Jeff Beck, inspired by Beck’s love of chocolate and the time he mistook a box of chocolate malt balls for chocolate meatballs.
“We had a big laugh, and I suggested we write a song called ‘Chocolate Meatballs,'” he explains. “We got a half of it done. You’ve reminded me that it needs to be finished.”
Universal and Blumhouse, the studios behind horror blockbusters like M3GAN, have released a full trailer to Five Nights At Freddy’s, an adaptation of the PC and mobile game that has scared the pants off of kids since its launch in 2014.
Since then, the game has spawned various versions, to date selling just short of 4.75 million units.
In this version, Hunger Games veteran Josh Hutcherson plays a new nighttime security guard tasked with watching over an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese-like pizza place called Freddy Fazbear’s. Just like in the game, however, the five-night gig goes sideways fast, as the restaurant’s animatronic animals come alive and start stalking him.
If the concept sounds a lot like a 2021 Nicolas Cage movie called Willy’s Wonderland, you’re not alone: When the film came out, its writer, G.O. Parsons, and director, Kevin Lewis, weathered criticism for it, ultimately claiming the plot similarities to the hit survival game were a coincidence.
As for Five Nights, the trailer is stuffed with references to the game, like its black-and-white monitors, off-putting carnival music, jump scares and of course the creepy characters who inspired nightmares in many players who were likely way too young to be playing: Bonnie the bunny, Chica the chicken, Foxy the fox and the “host” of the restaurant, Freddy Fazbear.
The movie opens in theaters and streams on Peacock October 27.
If you didn’t get a chance to see Aqua playing Irving Plaza in New York City on Monday, June 26, there’s another way to feel like a Barbie girl in a Barbie world.
That is to say, Ken is willing to put you up in a real-life version of his remodel of Barbie’s Malibu DreamHouse, thanks to the folks at Airbnb. The lifesize, pink pad is naturally located in Malibu, California.
Two lucky guests can “take a spin through Ken’s awesome wardrobe to find their best beach fit,” channel “their inner cowboy and [learn] a line dance or two on Ken’s outdoor disco dance floor” or shred a few licks on Ken’s guitar.
Of course, like Ryan Gosling and the other Kens will do in the Barbie movie, you can also challenge your fellow guest to a beach-off by “sunbathing and chillaxing by the infinity pool.”
What’s more, those who stay will also get a custom pair of yellow-and-pink Impala rollerblades and surfboards to remember their trip.
(WASHINGTON) — The federal government squandered more than $200 billion in potential fraud in its aggressive rush to prop up small businesses as the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to shatter the U.S. economy, according to a report published Tuesday by the inspector general of the Small Business Administration.
The hefty sum, which amounts to approximately 17% of the $1.2 trillion dispersed by SBA, updates previous estimates from the inspector general, Hannibal “Mike” Ware, as investigators from several federal agencies continue to trace and recover millions of dollars lost to fraud, waste and other abuses that occurred during the pandemic.
So far, nearly $30 billion of those fraudulent funds — about 15% of the fraud that’s been calculated as of May — has been reclaimed through collaboration between the inspector general’s office, the SBA, the U.S. Secret Service and other federal agencies, the report said.
Officials said the government watchdog report represents the first comprehensive estimate of fraud to date.
The report focuses on two programs created at the advent of the pandemic to support small businesses, both under the SBA’s purview: the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL).
According to the report, there was a higher potential fraud in the EIDL program, which was a low-interest disaster loan that would later require repayment. The inspector general’s office estimated there was $136 billion of potential fraud in the EIDL program, representing 33% of the total funds dispersed to businesses.
For PPP, which gave money to businesses that would later be forgiven — similar to a grant — the estimate of potential fraud was lower: around $64 billion, representing 8% of the total funds sent out.
The programs flooded businesses with easy access to cash that likely rescued the economy, experts say. But for all the jobs they helped rescue, these programs’ legacies may be tarnished by unprecedented amounts of fraud — a turn of events that experts fear may impair efforts to pass future emergency relief programs.
All government programs suffer some amount of fraud, experts have said. But emergency programs are even more susceptible, due to the inherent tension between the pressure to approve loans quickly and the need to screen applications and maintain other fraud-prevention measures that may prolong the process.
In an October 2020 report, Ware’s office found that “to expedite the process, SBA ‘lowered the guardrails’ or relaxed internal controls, which significantly increased the risk of program fraud.”
“A decision was made at the outset of the pandemic: speed was the key,” Michael Horowitz, the chairman of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), a federal watchdog charged with tracking how much money was defrauded from the government during the pandemic, told ABC News in an interview on March 22. “It was a bad choice. It was the wrong choice. It never should have happened.”
Ware predicted in a 2021 interview with ABC News that, “in terms of the monetary value, the amount of fraud in these COVID relief programs is going to be larger than any government program that came before it.”
The latest estimate — $200 billion in fraudulent funds — puts the PPP and EIDL programs on track for such a record.
But the SBA, in a response included in the report, pushed back on that sum, saying that it welcomed the review but thought the report “contains serious flaws that significantly overestimate fraud and unintentionally mislead the public to believe that the work we did together had no significant impact in protecting against fraud.”
The inspector general’s review allowed for “a high percentage of false positives,” or potential fraud cases that, upon further inspection, were not fraud, Bailey DeVries, Acting Associate Administrator of the SBA, said in the response.
The administration used its own investigation of fraud, which landed on a much lower estimate of fraud, as evidence: The SBA’s own review, DeVries said, found over $400 billion “worthy of further investigation,” but further review “revealed that the body of loans likely to be fraudulent is approximately $36 billion across PPP and COVID-EIDL.”
DeVries also said the watchdog report “only minimally acknowledges a critical aspect of SBA’s fraud controls — the material fact that SBA’s fraud controls improved dramatically over time.”
“SBA acknowledges the prior administration made decisions to prioritize speed and unnecessarily deflated the control environment for PPP and COVID-EIDL for the first several months of the programs. However, SBA introduced additional fraud controls over time and implemented a strengthened anti-fraud control framework in 2021,” DeVries wrote.
For its part, the inspector general’s office said it holds firm in its estimate of $200 billion.
Ware will appear before Congress in July to discuss his findings under oath. Pandemic relief fraud has attracted attention from lawmakers across the political spectrum.
Many of those who defrauded the pandemic relief programs also victimized individual Americans in the process. Thousands of fraudsters who applied for funds used social security numbers stolen from innocent people, according to the PRAC. The committee wrote in a recent report that nearly 70,000 potentially suspect Social Security numbers were used to successfully apply for EIDL or Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds.
Both the SBA and the White House have pledged to offer better assistance to victims in the future, and to improve fraud reporting systems by using multi-factor authentication and a new process to pause billing once someone has reported identity theft, SBA spokesperson Christina Carr said in a statement earlier this year.
Many of those reforms will be guided by an expected executive order from President Joe Biden, who pledged over a year ago to sign an order in the “coming weeks” that would direct “new actions to support the victims of identity fraud.”
Administration officials told ABC News that the action is still expected to come soon, though they didn’t provide concrete timing.
All told, the government has doled out an estimated $5 trillion in relief funds since the beginning of the pandemic, across several programs. The Justice Department has brought charges against more than 2,230 defendants for pandemic-related fraud crimes, the Associated Press recently reported, and the inspector general’s report specifies that at least 1,011 of those charges have been for EIDL and PPP fraud, as of May 2023.
Of those charges, there have been 803 arrests and 539 convictions, the inspector general’s report said.
Greta Van Fleet has shared a new song called “The Falling Sky,” a track off the band’s upcoming album Starcatcher.
“An unwavering warrior carrying on the endless, eternal, and impossible battle for salvation; these were the elements of symbolism associated with this particular track,” says guitarist Jake Kiszka. “In essence our fate is sealed, alike the stars that fall from the almighty heavens to the earth. This philosophy is carried through in the story of a bluesman, at the crossroads of the universe.”
You can listen to “The Falling Sky” now via digital outlets.
Starcatcher, the follow-up to 2021’s The Battle at Garden’s Gate, arrives July 21. It also includes the previously released songs “Meeting the Master,” “Sacred the Thread” and “Farewell for Now.”
Greta Van Fleet will launch a U.S. tour in support of Starcatcher July 24 in Nashville. KALEO will also be on the bill for select dates.
Ryan Seacrest is replacing Pat Sajak as the host of Wheel of Fortune.
Seacrest, who also currently hosts American Idol, will take over hosting duties from Sajak beginning in 2024. Sajak recently announced he was stepping down from the position after the show’s upcoming 41st season.
“I’m truly humbled to be stepping into the footsteps of the legendary Pat Sajak,” Seacrest, 48, wrote in a statement posted to Instagram on Tuesday, June 27. “I can say, along with the rest of America, that it’s been a privilege and pure joy to watch Pat and Vanna [White] on our television screens for an unprecedented 40 years, making us smile every night and feel right at home with them.”
“Pat, I love the way you’ve always celebrated the contestants and made viewers at home feel at ease,” he continued. “I look forward to learning everything I can from you during this transition.”
Seacrest, who said he is “grateful” for the opportunity,” went on to talk about how the move feels “full circle” for him as he reflected on one of his “first jobs”: hosting Merv Griffin‘s short-lived game show “Click” from 1997 to 1999. Griffin is a TV legend, having created of both Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.
“I can’t wait to continue the tradition of spinning the wheel and working alongside the great Vanna White,” Seacrest concluded.
This news comes a few months after Seacrest left Live following six years as Kelly Ripa‘s co-host to focus on hosting American Idol.
Sajak announced his upcoming departure from Wheel of Fortune earlier this month, saying in a statement that his decades in the position have “been a wonderful ride.”
Taylor Swift is giving her fans more of a chance to see her on her wildly successful Eras Tour.
A week after she announced she was bringing the tour to Australia, Europe, Japan, Singapore and the U.K. in 2024, Taylor Nation announced that Swift has added nine show dates.
“Another 9 #TSTheErasTour shows go up in lights like diamonds in the sky,” Taylor Nation captioned their announcement Instagram post — a reference to lyrics from Swift’s Red (Taylor’s Version) cut “The Lucky One.”
One of the dates will be in Los Angeles on August 7, 2023, while the others will spread throughout Europe and the U.K. across all of 2024.
Sabrina Carpenter is the special opening act for all of the European and U.K. shows, while HAIM and Gracie Abrams will perform before the new Los Angeles show.
(WASHINGTON) — Yevgeny Prigozhin used a false pretext to lead his Wagner Group forces in an armed insurrection against the Russian state, according to a senior U.S. official.
Prigozhin had been plotting ways to reverse his fortunes in the face of waning power and came up with a plan to claim his forces had been bombed, which he would then use to justify actions against Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Russian defense leaders, the senior official said.
The precipitating factor for Prigozhin’s military march was the directive that his forces be increasingly incorporated into the Russian military, the official said. Prigozhin did not know for certain whether it was Shoigu or President Vladimir Putin behind it but felt he was being leveraged and undermined, leaving him angry and determined, according to the official.
The plan came to fruition on Friday when Prigozhin said in a video that Wagner fighters had been killed by Russian missile strikes and vowed to punish Shoigu and Russia’s chief of general staff. The claim was “basically a hoax,” according to the senior official.
“There are 25,000 of us and we are coming to sort things out … Those who want to join us, it’s time to finish with this mess,” Prigozhin said.
His forces moved rapidly north in what he termed a “march of justice,” cutting through inexperienced Russian troops and units hollowed out by the war in Ukraine. The senior official said the convoy made it further than widely reported, coming within about 100 miles of Moscow.
“We will destroy anyone who stands in our way,” Prigozhin said on social media Saturday.
As the mercenaries got closer, Putin was deeply worried about his ability to stop Prigozhin, according to the official. But then key agencies like the ministry of interior and federal security service came out in support of the Russian president, making clear to Prigozhin that the battle for Moscow would be brutal. This led him to accept the idea of exile in Belarus when President Alexander Lukashenko urged him to give up the fight, the official said.
On Tuesday, Lukashenko confirmed Prigozhin had arrived in Belarus, though the senior official does not believe he will stay long.
Despite the Kremlin closing its criminal mutiny case against him, and despite still wielding a body of supporters, Prigozhin’s fate is unclear.
“His long-term survivability is hard to calculate,” the official said.
Putin’s position has also become more precarious, his aura of invincibility pierced and the weakness of his internal security made apparent. The official says the United States expects to see Putin try to bolster his strength in the coming weeks, noting that he is “quite vulnerable” after Prigozhin’s rebellious display.
Putin’s war effort might also suffer as front-line soldiers fighting in Ukraine learn what happened back home. Ukraine has also taken note of Russia’s internal scuffle, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying Saturday that Russia appeared to be suffering “full-scale weakness.”
“How do you motivate these guys who don’t want to be the last guy to die for a losing cause?” the senior U.S. official said.
The annual Academy of Country Music Honors is returning to the Ryman Auditorium on August 23, with Carly Pearce serving as the night’s host.
This year’s ACM Special Awards honorees include Tim McGraw (ACM Icon Award), Chris Stapleton (ACM Triple Crown Award), Kane Brown (ACM International Award), BRELAND (ACM Lift Every Voice Award) and HARDY (ACM Artist-Songwriter of the Year), among others.
“The Academy of Country Music has played such a crucial role in the rise of my career in the last several years, giving me opportunities to expand my artistry with hosting,” shares Carly, who’s also a four-time ACM winner. “To be able to come back as the host of the ACM Honors for the third year in a row, I feel so grateful and excited for what I know will be such a special night!”
Tickets for ACM Honors will be available from Friday, June 30, at axs.com. Academy members and subscribers of the ACM’s A-List newsletter will get access to presale tickets on Thursday, June 29.
For more information on the 16th Annual ACM Honors and to view the full list of honorees, visit acmcountry.com.
