Blondie‘s Debbie Harry is revisiting her 1981 debut solo album, KooKoo, with a brand new reissue.
The 2023 deluxe edition of the album will be released May 5 on double 180g crystal clear vinyl, and will include a bonus 12-inch disc with extended versions and remixes of tunes. Only 6,000 copies of the reissue will be available worldwide, and they will include a reproduction Chris Stein art print and will come in a special lenticular-effect sleeve.
KooKoo, produced by Chic’s Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards, was originally released July 27, 1981. It peaked at 25 on the Billboard 200 Album chart and was certified Gold by the RIAA.
The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, released the finalists for their 2023 Video Game Hall of Fame Wednesday morning, and the apocalyptic action-adventure game is on the list.
This follows the game’s spike in popularity after HBO adapted it into a series starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. The Strong National Museum of Play said of the game, “Released by Naughty Dog and Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2013, TheLast of Us jumped into an oversaturated field of post-apocalyptic zombie games and quickly stood out among the rest with its in-depth storytelling, intimate exploration of humanity, thrilling game jumps and cutscenes, and its memorable characters.”
Other finalists include Age of Empire, Angry Birds, Barbie Fashion Designer, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Computer Space, FIFA International Soccer, GoldenEye 007, NBA 2K, Wii Sports, Quake and Wizardry. Past inductees include Pac-Man, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Super Mario Bros.
The museum chooses which games to include by taking nominations from the public, and determining which are the most influential on popular culture and the gaming industry. They display the Video Game Hall of Fame with other exhibits that capture the history of the act of play; for example, the eGameRevolution exhibit allows people from all generations to play games that span decades, from pinball machines to PlayStation 3.
The Strong Museum of Play usually announces inductees in May.
(PORTLAND, Ore.) — Two people are dead after a shooting at a hotel in Portland, Oregon, police said.
Port of Portland responded to a shooting at the Embassy Suites Portland Airport Hotel around 2 a.m. local time Wednesday. A man and woman were confirmed dead, police said. Their identities have not been confirmed.
“There is no ongoing threat to the PDX airport or the surrounding area at this time,” Port of Portland Police said in a statement.
The incident is under investigation.
Guests at the hotel told Portland ABC affiliate KATU that they heard nearly a dozen gunshots and saw blood on the floor as police escorted them out of the building.
Amid the police response, yellow crime scene tape could be seen at the entrance to the hotel, which is located near Portland International Airport. Officers could also be seen interviewing guests wrapped in blankets.
Seven Henrico County Sheriff’s deputies have been arrested and charged with second-degree murder in connection to the death of Irvo Otieno, who died in Central State Hospital in Dinwiddie, Va., while in police custody. From top left, Bradley Disse, Dwayne Bramble, Jermaine Branch, Randy Boyer; bottom from left, Tabitha Levere, Brandon Rodgers, Kaiyell Sanders. — Meherrin River Regional Jail
(HENRICO COUNTY, Va.) — Seven sheriff’s deputies from Henrico County, Virginia, have been arrested and charged with second-degree murder in the death of inmate Irvo Otieno. Otieno died while in police custody earlier this month.
Otieno, 28, was being transferred to a hospital on March 6 when he became “combative” during the intake process, according to state police. He was then physically restrained and died, according to Richmond ABC affiliate WRIC.
The deputies were arrested on Tuesday and are scheduled to appear before a grand jury on March 21, according to state records.
The seven deputies have been placed on administrative leave, pending the outcome of the cases filed against them.
The Henrico County Sheriff’s Office is also conducting an independent review of the incident and said it is fully cooperating another investigation by Virginia State Police.
“Public safety is what we stand for as a Sheriff’s Office. We will continue to maintain the highest professional standards in how we serve and protect those in our custody, the community at-large and our staff,” Henrico County Sheriff Alisa Gregory said in a statement.
The seven deputies arrested were Randy Joseph Boyer, 57; Dwayne Alan Bramble, 37; Jermaine Lavar Branch, 45; Bradley Thomas Disse, 43; Tabitha Renee Levere, 50; Brandon Edwards Rodgers, 48; and Kaiyell Dajour Sanders, 30, according to WRIC.
All seven deputies were taken to Meherrin River Regional Jail, where they are being held without bond, according to WRIC.
Foo Fighters have added another music festival to their 2023 schedule. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famers are set to headline the Louder Than Life festival, set for September 21 to 24 in Louisville, Kentucky.
Other artists on the four-day bill include GreenDay, Queens of the Stone Age, Megadeth, Weezer, Pantera, Tool, Rancid, Limp Bizkit and more.
This is just one of many festivals Foo Fighters have booked for 2023, which will be their first shows since last year’s death of drummer Taylor Hawkins. Their first confirmed show is happening May 24 in Gilford, New Hampshire, followed by Massachusetts’ Boston Calling Music Festival on May 26. They are also playing Bonnaroo, Outside Lands and Sonic Temple.
Bret Michaels turned 60 on Wednesday, and considering his health struggles over the years, he’s embracing the milestone.
“I am grateful to be on this crazy roller coaster ride and to be here with some of my good decisions and some of my less-than-reputable decisions,” the Poison frontman told USA Todaywhen asked if he’s bummed about turning 60. “But I’ve got to be honest. When people ask I say, No. 1, what is my alternative? The alternative is not good. And two, I get no choice in the matter. My choice will be how I deal with it.”
He adds, “No one says, ‘Man, I want to be old.’ I feel blessed that I got to get old because I know so many of my friends never got the chance. I live also for them.”
And Michaels hasn’t had it easy over the years. He’s lived with Type 1 diabetes since he was a child, suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2010, and also underwent heart and kidney surgery. But he says he’s learned to “adapt and change with what my body can do.”
“There is no magic pill,” he adds. “I am like a true muscle car – still fast, still fun to ride, but I just need a little more maintenance.”
While Ryan Reynolds is a Hollywood star, he also moonlights as an entrepreneur, and he now has another mogul-sized deal under his Deadpool belt.
The Ka’ena Corporation, the parent company of Reynolds’ Mint Mobile, has just been acquired by giant T-Mobile, in a deal worth $1.35 billion in cash and stock.
Reynolds, both a minority share owner and pitchman for the company, took to social media with T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert in a hysterical announcement video.
Sievert tells the star he’s “so happy to have you and the whole Mint team join the T-Mobile family,” to which Ryan laughs, deadpanning, “Well, I wouldn’t call it a family, Mike. A family is a place for misdirected hopes and dreams. I’m hoping this will be much better than that.”
To prove T-Mobile won’t sway from Mint’s trademark “incredibly improvised, borderline reckless” marketing, Ryan rapid-fires about the deal: “I’m certain that I’m finally gonna fill whatever hole that I have inside my soul which possesses me to emphasize external success over quieting an inner child futilely craving some sort of illusory acknowledgement from my now deceased father.”
A surprised Sievert asks Reynolds if he’s OK and offers him a hug, which prompts Reynolds to add, “It’s nice
to have a new dad.”
Reynolds also joked in a statement, “We are so happy T-Mobile beat out an aggressive last-minute bid from my mom Tammy Reynolds as we believe the excellence of their 5G network will provide a better strategic fit than my mom’s slightly-above-average mahjong skills.”
In 2020, spirits company Diageo purchased Reynolds’ Aviation American Gin in a more than $600 million deal.
(NEW YORK) — In the wake of last year’s collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, the collapse this week of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — representing the second and third largest bank failures in U.S. history — has renewed lingering questions about what role cryptocurrency is playing in financial sector failures.
Signature Bank, which is known for dealing in cryptocurrency, came under fire last year during the collapse of FTX and crypto hedge fund Alameda Research. At Silicon Valley Bank, which is known for serving the tech and startup industries since its founding 40 years ago, the withdrawal of large cryptocurrency deposits added to the fear fueling the bank run that ended in the bank’s collapse Friday.
However, experts told ABC News that cryptocurrency did not play a leading role in the banks’ failures — although the collapses will have ramifications in the cryptocurrency sector.
“I don’t think crypto has much of a role,” said David Yermack, professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “Crypto is more or less a bystander in all of this, just like all the other companies who had deposited money.”
Yermack, who teaches a course on cryptocurrency and blockchains, said that while the situation remains fluid, two main factors appear to have contributed to the failures: The banks that failed were too concentrated in one industry, and the deregulation of banking over the last five or six years has weakened regulations.
“In the case of Silicon Valley Bank, [the concentration] would be the West Coast technology industry,” Yermack told ABC News. “And if you’ve got a group of customers who can’t pay back their loans, and they’re all correlated with each other, suddenly they all can’t pay you back together — that makes those loans a lot less valuable.”
Boston College law professor Patricia McCoy said the bank’s collapse was hastened by its large holdings of the cryptocurrency USDC, which is managed by the financial technology company Circle Internet Financial.
“At Silicon Valley Bank, really, the only role that the crypto industry played was this big deposit by Circle, which was very prone to run risk,” McCoy said. “When Circle became nervous that Silicon Valley Bank was in trouble, its natural response would be to immediately withdraw that entire very large deposit.”
“Silicon Valley Bank did not have the money — the cash — to pay all the withdrawal requests,” said McCoy. “So, the fact that Circle had such a large deposit, and it was a type of client that was prone to panic, intensified the bank run at Silicon Valley Bank.”
On the recent deregulation of banking, Yermack pointed to the banks’ investment of large amounts of capital into Treasury bonds, which are typically very safe. However, said Yermack, “because interest rates changed a lot in the last year or so, those bonds lost value — and under the accounting rules, the banks could still count them at 100 cents on the dollar.”
Simply put, Yermack said, the banks did not have to account for the depreciation in the value of the bonds, which made them look much safer than they really were.
“This gets right to the heart of the issue about how banks are supervised and regulated — that they really should have had to write those bonds down to value in real time, and make the problems more apparent much earlier,” he said.
“As somebody who deals with financial data every day, I think everything should be marked to market value,” said Yermack. “And to the extent it’s not, you run the risk of misleading people, and it seems in this case it was the banking regulators who were misled, and they just said, ‘Oh, those are government bonds. Those are the safest assets.'”
“But government bonds can lose value just like anything else,” Yermack said. “And I think … the regulators were sort of caught off guard and unawares by this.”
(AMARILLO, Texas) — A ruling is expected to come down from a federal judge in Texas Wednesday that could see an abortion medication being taken off the market in the United States.
The lawsuit, filed by Alliance Defending Freedom – a Christian conservative legal advocacy group – has asked Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas to reverse the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone.
If the judge rules in favor of the plaintiffs, there would be a nationwide injunction on mifepristone, affecting even states where the procedure is legal.
Another drug used in combination with mifepristone for abortions, called misoprostol, would still be available, but it’s not approved by the FDA to be used for abortions on its own.
According to a transcript of a closed-door meeting, Kacsmaryk told trial lawyers that he planned to wait until late Tuesday to make public the logistics of the hearing to avoid protests.
“This is not a gag order but just a request for courtesy given the death threats and harassing phone calls and voicemails that this division has received,” Kacsmaryk told attorneys in the case. “We want a fluid hearing with all parties being heard. I think less advertisement of this hearing is better.”
Organizers from the Women’s March said they intend to stage a “kangaroo court” outside the courthouse, where protestors will be dressed in costume to suggest the case is based entirely on fraudulent claims.
Kacsmaryk “says he doesn’t want a ‘circus-like’ atmosphere, all while behaving like a clown who treats our lives like a political game,” the organizers of the Women’s March wrote. “So, we will bring the circus to him. Come in your clown makeup, and we will show the world what the Federal Court is all about here in Amarillo, a kangaroo court!”
If Kacsmaryk rules in favor of ADF, mifepristone would, at least temporarily, be taken off the market. All states where abortion is legal would only be able to offer in-clinic procedures.
This means patients will not be able to access telehealth services to get abortion pills and clinics already experiencing a surge of patients from states where abortion is illegal could be even more inundated.
ABC News’ Anne Flaherty contributed to this report.
Bobby Caldwell, best known for his classic tune “What You Won’t Do for Love,” passed away Tuesday at the age of 71.
“Bobby passed away here at home. I held him tight in my arms as he left us. I am forever heartbroken,” his wife, Mary Caldwell, shared on his official Twitter page. “Thanks to all of you for your many prayers over the years.”
Mary said Bobby “had been ‘FLOXED,'” referring to a toxic reaction to antibiotics, noting “it took his health over the last 6 years and 2 months.”
Caldwell released his signature tune “What You Won’t Do for Love” in 1978, and it peaked at nine on the Billboard Hot 100. It has since been covered by several artists, including Michael Bolton and Boyz II Men, and was sampled by Tupac Shakur for the 1997 posthumous track “Do For Love.”
And that isn’t the only Caldwell hit to be sampled by other artists. The Notorious B.I.G. sampled Caldwell’s track “My Flame” for 1997’s “Sky’s The Limit,” featuring 112, while the 1980 track “Open Your Eyes” was sampled by J Dilla on Common’s 2000 track “The Light.” And in 2019, Lil Nas X was sued for using Caldwell’s track “Carry On” on his 2018 mixtape Nasaratti without first getting permission
In addition to his own music, Caldwell wrote songs for other artists, like Neil Diamond, Chicago and Roberta Flack, including the Amy Grant and Peter Cetera number one single “The Next Time I Fall.”
