After revealing that they plan to continue on as a band following the 2022 death of drummer Taylor Hawkins, Foo Fighters have announced their first show of 2023.
Dave Grohl and company will headline this year’s Boston Calling festival, taking place May 26-28 at Beantown’s Harvard Athletic Complex.
There’s no word yet on who will be playing drums with the Foos for the show. During their two tribute concerts to Hawkins last September, the “Everlong” rockers were joined by a number of guest drummers, including Blink-182‘s Travis Barker, Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers, prolific session drummer Josh Freese and Hawkins’ teenage son, Shane.
In a statement posted New Year’s Eve, Foo Fighters wrote, “Without Taylor, we never would have become the band that we were — and without Taylor, we know that we’re going to be a different band going forward.”
The 2023 Boston Calling bill also includes Paramore, Queens of the Stone Age, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Lumineers, Alanis Morissette, The National, Bleachers, The Linda Lindas and The Flaming Lips. Presale begins this Thursday, January 12, at 10 a.m. ET.
Photography by Keith Getter (all rights reserved)/Getty Images
With more than 10,000 residents of Montecito, California ordered to evacuate their homes for fear of mudslides, Ellen DeGeneres is urging folks to “stay safe.”
As winter storms brought flooding rains, the former chat show host was one of the stars who evacuated the area in Santa Barbara County, which is also home to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few.
On Monday, more than eight inches of rain pounded the area in less than 12 hours, with more expected.
With a muddy, storm-swollen creek thundering behind her, Ellen tweeted Monday evening, “So, Montecito is under complete evacuation. The entire town. This is the five-year anniversary from the fire and mudslides that killed so many people and people lost their homes and lives.”
Mudslides then killed nearly two dozen people and flattened more than 100 homes.
Ellen added, “This is crazy that on the five year anniversary we are having unprecedented rain. This creek next to our house never flows ever.” DeGeneres said the creek has swelled “about nine feet up,” with two more feet expected. “We need to be nicer to Mother Nature: Mother Nature is not happy with us,” she said. “Stay safe everybody.”
It came out in 2011 and was never released as a single, but now Lady Gaga‘s Born This Way track “Bloody Mary” has officially hit the Billboard chart — thanks to Wednesday.
The hit Netflix Addams Family spin-off series Wednesday features a viral moment where Wednesday, played by Jenna Ortega, does a unique dance to the 1981 song “Goo Goo Muck” by psychobilly band The Cramps. But when TikTok users began recreating the dance, they started using a sped-up version of “Bloody Mary” as the soundtrack in place of “Goo Goo Muck.”
Even Gaga got in on the trend, and all that TikTok activity has led to increased streaming of the song, followed by radio play and, now, a chart entry.
The song enters the Billboard Hot 100 at #68, marking Gaga’s first time back on that tally since last year’s Top Gun: Maverick song “Hold My Hand,” which peaked at #49. On Billboard‘s Pop Airplay chart, it’s at #32 and rising.
Though “Bloody Mary” wasn’t released as a single from Born This Way, the album spun off five hits, including the title track, “Judas,” “The Edge of Glory” and “You and I.”
Elvis Costello is ready to celebrate his decades long collaboration with the legendary Burt Bacharach.
The Songs of Bacharach & Costello is a new box set Costello has personally compiled of every published song the pair has written together. Dropping March 3, the set features 45 songs, including the pair’s 1998 album Painted From Memory, which has been remastered by Bob Ludwig from the original tapes.
The set also includes the new collection, Taken From Life, which includes mostly unreleased songs from the proposed Painting From Memory musical, with three newly recorded songs. There are also two discs of rare and unreleased live performances, as well as a disc of Bacharach and Hal David songs Costello has performed and recorded over the years, and more. It also includes “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” the song the pair performed in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.
In addition to the music, the box comes with a 20-page booklet of photography, early drafts of lyrics, studio notes and more, including a brand new 10,000-word essay by Costello which delves into his and Bacharach’s three-decade long friendship and musical partnership.
And to give fans a taste of the set, Costello has released three rare and unreleased live performances: “In the Darkest Place,” recorded with Elvis’ The Imposters bandmate Steve Nieve on tour in Australia, “Painted From Memory,” recorded in Stockholm, Sweden with Nieve and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and a version of the 1963 Dionne Warwick track “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” recorded by Costello and Bacharach at London’s Royal Festival Hall.
(NEW YORK) — Mega Millions ticket holders will be watching Tuesday’s 11 p.m. drawing closely as the numbers for the third-largest prize in the game’s history are revealed.
The jackpot has climbed to $1.1 billion with no winner since Oct. 14. The cash option is $568.7 million.
While it’s the third-largest prize in Mega Millions history, it is the fifth-largest in U.S. lottery history. The largest prize in lottery history came in November 2022, when a single Powerball winner took home $2.04 billion.
The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are 1 in 302.5 million.
The lucky winner can opt for either an annuity or the cash option.
The Mega Millions annuity is paid out as one immediate payment, followed by 29 yearly payments with each payment growing by 5%.
“This helps protect winners’ lifestyle and purchasing power in periods of inflation,” according to the Mega Millions website.
Or, the winner can opt for the cash option: a one-time, lump-sum payment of the cash in the Mega Millions jackpot prize pool.
(NEW YORK) — Near-historic price increases for basics like food and gas have drawn scrutiny to a question at the heart of the economy: How much money must a worker make to stay afloat?
The price of eggs has risen nearly 50% over the last year; while the cost of milk and bread have each jumped about 15%. Even after falling from a summer peak, gas prices remain 10% higher than a year ago.
While price increases have slowed in recent months, they continue to hover near a 40-year high.
For some, a pay hike has softened the blow. Nearly half of U.S. states raised their minimum wages at the outset of 2023. Meanwhile, some major companies have recently upped their entry-level pay. Target, for instance, hiked its base wage to $24 an hour last year.
As cost increases persist and workers try to keep up, buzzwords like “poverty wage,” “minimum wage” and “living wage” are coming back into the lexicon, shaping conversations about what it means to make enough and who decides where to draw the line.
But the definitions and implications of these terms can get overlooked, muddying a centuries-old issue that affects workers and employees alike.
“Ultimately, this boils down to a philosophical question of what the bare necessities really are,” Steve Allen, an economist at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management, told ABC News.
Here are the differences between a poverty wage, a minimum wage and a living wage; and why they matter:
Poverty wage
A poverty wage is a level of pay that would put a full-time worker below the U.S. poverty line, an income threshold set by the federal government each year.
The government began to measure the threshold in the mid-1960s, soon after then-President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty.” Mollie Orshanksy, an employee at the Social Security Administration, developed the measure by multiplying the cost of food by three, since at the time many economists believed that food costs should make up a third of a household’s budget.
“Lyndon Johnson needed a way to demonstrate what people needed to live on,” Amy Glasmeier, a professor of economic geography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the creator of a living wage calculator, told ABC News.
The method of calculating the poverty line has remained the same over the ensuing decades, but officials have updated the measure each year to adjust it for inflation. The poverty line is a uniform measure for all 48 states in the continental U.S. and Washington D.C., but the federal government has developed separate measures for Hawaii and Alaska.
Many economists regard the poverty line as antiquated since it extrapolates overall financial circumstances from a single category of costs and remains uniform regardless of cost-of-living differences between regions, Glasmeier said.
“National data puts New York together with Tupelo, Mississippi,” she said. “That’s about the difference between Mars and America.”
The poverty line is used to determine whether people qualify for a host of federal benefit programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which is commonly referred to as food stamps; as well as assistance for school lunch.
Last year, the poverty line for a one-person household was $13,900, which when spread over the number of hours a full-time employee works in a given year, comes out to about $6.80 per hour.
Health and Human Services, a federal agency, will release the 2023 poverty line later this month.
Minimum wage
The minimum wage is the lowest legal pay rate that a company can offer its employees. Crucially, the minimum wage does not derive from a calculation of the subsistence level for a given region or household size, but rather is set by elected officials within a federal, state or local government.
“When employers are saying, ‘How much do I have to pay?’” Glasmeier said. “That’s the minimum wage.”
The U.S. set its first federal minimum wage at $0.25 in 1938, amid the depression, when jobs were scarce and workers lacked leverage.
The federal minimum wage, which was last raised in 2009, stands at $7.25 an hour. When adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum wage last summer reached its lowest level since 1956, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found.
Thirty states have raised their minimum wage above the pay rate guaranteed by the federal government, including 23 states that imposed a price hike at the start of this year. Washington is the state with the highest minimum wage, offering workers $15.74 per hour.
In addition, 27 cities and counties raised their minimum wage at the outset of this year, stretching from San Diego, California, to Portland, Maine. The city with the highest minimum wage, SeaTac, Washington, raised its base pay to $19.06.
The nationwide push for minimum wage hikes intensified a decade ago, when fast food workers launched a campaign, called Fight for $15, aiming to raise wages and unionize the fast food sector.
Living wage
A living wage is a pay rate that would allow a given worker or household to afford its basic needs, such as housing, food, health care and transportation.
Unlike the poverty line, which extrapolates a national baseline subsistence based on food costs, a living wage typically derives from a more complicated calculation that takes into account additional expenses as well as cost-of-living differences across regions.
A living wage usually exceeds the poverty wage, since it takes a more expansive view of household expenses, including the need for savings in the event of a financial emergency, Allen said.
“It takes into account a broader set of expenditures that they feel are the bare necessities,” he said. “It includes enough that the household can be in a position to save something.”
There is no single, authoritative living wage measure. A popular example is the Living Wage Calculator at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Glasmeier created.
The calculator first asks users to input their location, such as a city or metro area, allowing the metric to incorporate specific regional costs. The metric also offers multiple figures that correlate with the number of adults and children within a given household.
In New York City, for instance, the living wage for a household with one adult and no children stands at about $22.70. In Montana, a living wage for the same household stands at about $16.30.
Living-wage metrics help Americans understand how much money it takes to afford basic necessities, Glasmeier said.
“As a nation, we’re only as good as the conditions of our people,” Glasmeier said. “This information should be a reflection of what is needed, because otherwise it’s arbitrary – and there are always losers.”
Monday marked the one-year anniversary of comedian Bob Saget‘s death, and one of his closest friends, John Mayer, took to Instagram to pay tribute to the former Full House star.
“One year ago today, we lost Bob Saget. I loved that guy. I love saying ‘I loved that guy.’ Soon after he left us, I couldn’t finish those three words without falling apart, but now I say it with all the simplicity and complexity that love itself entails,” John wrote next to a photo of a smiling Saget on an airport tarmac.
“I knew he was otherworldly while he was here,” John continued. “Every moment we spent together was the stuff of Old Hollywood Magic, of dinners and drinks and stories and laughs and memories you knew were cutting deep grooves into your soul as the lathe was turning.”
He concluded, “I miss him all the time, but those memories? They’re solid objects. And today we’ll take them out and hold them and trade them and remember how much Bob Saget meant to us.”
Saget’s widow Kelly Rizzo responded in the comments, “Man, did he love you. And he always will. I mean look at his face… that sheer happiness is the look of ‘yay I get to fly home with John!’ – so happy you captured that.”
Saget died in his Florida hotel room on January 9, 2022. The cause of death was determined to be head trauma; drugs and alcohol weren’t involved. After Saget died, John paid for a private plane to transport his body back to California and later served as a pallbearer at his funeral.
(NEW YORK) — Student loan borrowers could soon pay less money back on their loans and be on the hook for a shorter amount of time, should a new Biden administration rule take effect later this year.
The Department of Education on Tuesday began the regulatory process to bring the new loan repayment program into effect — but the exact timing for when student borrowers could take advantage of the new system wasn’t clear.
The process could take any number of months, though it will likely not be finalized before springtime at the earliest, a source familiar with the discussions said.
Under the new plan, the lowest-income borrowers would see their payments fall by about $0.83 per each dollar they owe, the Department of Education estimated. The highest-income borrowers would see their payments per dollar fall by about $0.05.
It would revise a payment program in which roughly eight million Americans are enrolled in, known as the income-driven repayment plan. It ties the amount borrowers owe each month to the amount they make in income.
“Today, we’re making a new promise to today’s borrowers and to generations to come: your student loan payments will be affordable. You won’t be buried under an avalanche of student interest. And you won’t be saddled with a lifetime of debt,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said on a call with reporters.
At their core, the revisions to the program are intended to allow Americans to pay back less in loans over time.
“It means money in the pockets of hard-working Americans,” Cardona said.
It will require smaller minimum payments from borrowers, including $0 in payments from low-income Americans. It will also keep interest accrual more at bay and allow debts to be forgiven sooner — between 10 and 20 years after they were taken out.
Department of Education Undersecretary James Kvaal called it the first “true student loan safety net in this country.”
The new plan was first announced alongside President Joe Biden’s student debt relief policy, which has since been bruised by court challenges. Temporarily halted, its fate will be decided by the Supreme Court by the summer.
But Cardona on Tuesday called the revisions to the loan repayment program the most influential part of the Biden administration’s plan.
Exactly who does this impact, and how?
The new plan would prevent single low-income Americans from having to make any monthly payments if they make less than the annual equivalent of $15 an hour, which is around $30,600 a year. For a married couple with two kids, that would rise to $62,400.
“Workers getting by on $15 an hour often struggle to pay for their housing, food and other basic needs, let alone student loan payments,” Kvaal said.
The new repayment plan would mean they aren’t required to.
It would also cut down the amount that borrowers have to make on their monthly payments by half — from 10% of their discretionary income to 5%, which would protect more of peoples’ incomes from being put toward loan payments.
The new plan also prevents interest accrual, one of the largest issues borrowers face, by forgiving unpaid interest so long as borrowers make their monthly payments on the loan itself.
“As you make your payments, your balance won’t grow. In other words, you won’t go deeper into debt because interest is more than you can afford,” Kvaal said.
The timeline for some debt forgiveness will also be shortened under the new plan, especially for community college students.
After 10 years, the new plan would relieve outstanding debts for people who took out less than $12,000 in loans initially — commonly students who attend less expensive, shorter programs like community college.
The Department of Education estimated that 85% of community college students would be debt-free within 10 years, if they enrolled in the new plan.
And, as is already the rule with the income-driven repayment program, all borrowers with outstanding debt after 20 years of payments would have their debt relieved. (For graduate students, the timeline is slightly longer — 25 years).
How much will the program cost?
The department estimated that the new plan will cost a net total of $137.9 billion over the next 10 years.
That cost increase comes after Congress has already decided to keep the budget flat for the Office of Federal Student Aid during the upcoming year — potentially putting programs on thin ice.
Asked if the Department of Education could still afford the reforms to the IDR plan, a senior administration official said they were still working through the “full impact” but that it was their goal.
“It’s true that we were very disappointed with the level of funding we received from Congress for Federal Student Aid, and that’s going to make it a challenge for us to carry out a number of our policy initiatives,” the senior administration official said.
“We’re currently working through the full impact of the funding level that we received from Congress. And again, our goal is to implement this IDR plan in 2023,” the official said.
Critics of the new plan argue that it could cost even more if it incentivizes more people to take out student loans by changing the rules in borrowers’ favor.
“The changes mean that most undergraduate borrowers will expect to only repay a fraction of the amount they borrow, turning student loans partially into grants,” Adam Looney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, wrote in September, when the plan was first announced.
“It’s a plan to reduce the cost of college, not by reducing tuition paid, but by offering students loans and then allowing them not to pay them back,” he said.
But a senior administration official pushed back on that criticism.
“Almost every time there is a change in student loans to make the terms more generous for students, people talk about moral hazards and potential abuse of the program and there’s just, you know, there’s just no evidence that those predictions have ever come to pass,” the official said.
The department was attempting to change the repayment system because Americans are taking on higher debts than ever before, the official said.
“And the result has been that student debt makes it difficult, even for college graduates, to climb into the middle class, buy a home, start a family, and that many students are left worse off because of their student debt than if they had never gone to college at all,” the official said.
“So our goals are to address those challenges, which are very real,” the official added.
In a clip of the upcoming Jan. 26 episode ofThe Jennifer Hudson Show, the actor shared that he’s expecting his first child, who also happens to be due on a very special day.
“I’m Shemar Moore, 52-and-a-half years old. My mother is in heaven, right now it’ll be the three-year anniversary on February 8,” he shared. “And on February 8, I’m going to make one of her dreams come true because, in real life, Shemar Moore is about to be a daddy.”
Hudson immediately congratulated the S.W.A.T. star and said his mother was “smiling down on him from heaven” as the audience erupted into applause and cheers.
“I’m so excited. I’m sorry she can’t be here. I was worried for a while that it was a ‘that ship has sailed,’ kind of thing, but God had my back and things lined up,” Moore continued. “It’s going to be the best part of — my life is already pretty grand, but I know whenever God does call my name, once I get this experience, I’ll be able to go to heaven whole.”
Photography by Keith Getter (all rights reserved)/Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Dangerously stormy weather continues to wallop California, drenching the drought-stricken state with a sudden and near constant onslaught of rain and snow, leaving a trail of destruction.
The National Weather Service has warned of a “relentless parade of atmospheric rivers” in the West Coast over the coming week. President Joe Biden has issued an emergency declaration for California, ordering federal assistance to supplement state and local response efforts.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Jan 10, 8:03 AM EST
Over 224,000 customers without power in California
More than 224,000 customers were without power across California early Tuesday, as storms unabatedly battered the Golden State.
As of 4:56 a.m. PT, there were 224,470 Californian customers without power, according to data collected by the website PowerOutage.us. A majority of those — 64,057 customers — were located in Santa Clara County.
Jan 10, 7:56 AM EST
California sees record rain, snow
Storms have dumped copious amounts of rain over California in recent days.
Santa Barbara received a record 4.12 inches of rainfall on Monday alone.
In the past two days, Ventura County counted 16.34 inches, Santa Barbara County 16.05 inches, Los Angeles County 7.12 inches and Monterey County up to 10.71 inches.
Meanwhile, the highest wind gust in the last 24 hours — up to 88 miles per hour — was recorded in the mountains near Santa Clarita.
Another 5 to 10 inches of rainfall is expected across California through the weekend, with the possibility of more flooding. An additional 4 to 6 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountain range is also in the forecast.
Jan 10, 7:47 AM EST
The latest forecast for California
An unusually long and powerful jet stream is bringing tropical moisture all the way from Southeast Asia to California. It’s been parked over the Pacific Ocean for weeks, with no end in sight.
The latest forecast shows parts of these Pacific storms moving into the Rocky Mountains on Tuesday, with heavy snowfall and gusty winds.
The next storm is already arriving in the San Francisco Bay Area on Tuesday morning and will last through the day. Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California will also get more rain with this new storm, according to the forecast.
California will have some respite on Tuesday night before a new storm arrives in the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday morning.
This pattern of stormy weather will not end there. The forecast shows yet another system arriving at the end of the week and lasting through the weekend, bringing even more rain from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Jan 10, 7:12 AM EST
Tornado warnings for parts of Central California
The National Weather Service issued two tornado warnings for parts of Central California early Tuesday morning.
The first lasts until 4 a.m. PT and includes the areas of Rancho Calaveras, Valley Springs and San Andreas. The second lasts until 4:15 a.m. PT and includes the areas of Modesto, Ceres and Riverbank.
Jan 10, 6:47 AM EST
Over 192,000 customers without power in California
More than 192,000 customers were without power across California early Tuesday, as storms unabatedly battered the Golden State.
As of 3:37 a.m. PT, there were 192,426 Californian customers without power, according to data collected by the website PowerOutage.us. A majority of those — 85,314 customers — were located in Santa Clara County.
