Nita Strauss has premiered a new solo song called “Summer Storm.”
The track finds the guitarist returning to her instrumental roots following her 2021 single “Dead Inside,” which features guest vocals by Disturbed‘s David Draiman. Strauss’ debut solo album, 2018’s Controlled Chaos, is all instrumental.
You can listen to “Summer Storm” now via digital outlets. Its accompanying video, which features live footage from Strauss’ recent solo tour, is streaming now on YouTube.
Strauss is currently playing guitar in Demi Lovato‘s live band in support of the pop star’s new, rock-driven album, Holy F***. News of Strauss’ collaboration with Lovato came after she’d announced she wouldn’t be joining Alice Cooper on his fall tour after eight years playing in the shock-rocker’s band.
With The Who gearing up to launch the second North American leg of their 2022 The Who Hits Back! tour in the fall, the band has just added two more shows to the trek.
The new dates are scheduled for October 24 at the SAP Center, San Jose, California, and October 30 at Ak-Chin Pavilion in Phoenix, Arizona. Founding Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell and his current band, The Dirty Knobs, will open for The Who at both concerts. Campbell and The Dirty Knobs had previously been announced as The Who’s support act for the British rock legends’ upcoming shows from October 14 through November 1.
Tickets for the San Jose and Phoenix concerts will go on sale to the general public this Thursday, September 1, at 10 a.m. local time, while presale tickets are available now. Visit TheWho.com for more information.
The upcoming leg of The Who Hits Back! tour, which now features a total of 16 concerts, kicks off on October 2 in Toronto and is plotted out through a November 4-5 engagement in Las Vegas.
Ex-Barenaked Ladies frontman Steven Page will open for The Who from October 2 through October 12, while contemporary British rock band The Wild Things will be the support act at the tour’s two-show finale in Las Vegas.
(NEW YORK) — At least two people have died amid severe storms in the Midwest.
In Michigan, a 14-year-old girl was electrocuted and killed on Monday when an electrical line fell during a thunderstorm, according to the Monroe Public Safety Department. She was walking with a friend in her backyard and reached for what she thought was a stick, but it was the charged electrical line, authorities said.
And in Toledo, Ohio, a woman was killed when a tree fell on her, fire officials said, according to ABC affiliate WTVG-TV.
More than 250,000 customers were without power across Michigan, Illinois and Indiana as the storms rolled through Monday.
That cold front is now moving to the East Coast on Tuesday, bringing strong storms from Virginia to Maine. Damaging winds will be the biggest threat.
Arctic Monkeys have premiered a new song called “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball,” the first preview of the band’s much-anticipated upcoming album, The Car.
Sonically, the track follows in the lounge-y direction of 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, though is lyrically more grounded than its science fiction-themed predecessor. “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball” also gives The Car its title with the lyric, “If you wanna walk me to the car.”
You can listen to “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball” now via digital outlets and watch its accompanying video streaming now on YouTube.
The Car, the seventh Arctic Monkeys album, is due out October 21.
The suspects accused of robbing Mariah Carey‘s home in Atlanta while she was on vacation were part of a larger effort to use social media and TV to target wealthy people and celebrities, according to a 220-count indictment handed up last week in Fulton County, Georgia.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis announced at a news conference that 26 alleged members of the Drug Rich gang carried out home invasions and burglaries over the past year. Of the 26 people charged in the racketeering case, 18 are in custody.
According to Willis, Mariah was only one of a number of celebrities targeted. Others included Real Housewives of Atlanta star Marlo Hampton, Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Calvin Ridley, Atlanta United goalkeeper Brad Guzan and a woman who has a child with rapper Future.
“What they did was target people who showed their wealth on social media,” Willis said, then warned stars and influencers to avoid showing off online.
In Mariah’s case, she had posted on Instagram that she was on vacation, so authorities believe the gang targeted her because they knew she wasn’t in Atlanta.
(NEW YORK) — Uber is rolling out new safety features that will allow users to talk to a live safety agent and text 911 operators in the case of emergency.
Rebeca Payne, the lead project manager on Uber’s safety team, told ABC News about how, according to the popular ride-sharing platform, some of the features can help riders feel more comfortable and can give more access to emergency services. One feature, which Uber says will be rolled out to more than half of the country, including New York City and California, will allow users to text 911 operators for immediate emergency response.
Payne said about 55% of the U.S. will be able to use it.
“Text-to-911 is something that we started testing in 2019 in the counties that allowed for texting to their 911 call centers,” Payne said. “And so with this announcement, we are now expanding that to all of the counties that have this technology available now.”
When riders use the text-to-911 feature in the app, it will generate a prewritten message including information about the trip, such as the vehicle information and location. Payne said it’s a good way for users to “discreetly” get emergency help.
Another new feature, called “live help,” will let riders, drivers and couriers speak to a safety agent through a partnership with the security company ADT. Riders can send a message through the Uber app and receive a call or text with a trained safety agent, according to Uber. Users can then stay on the phone with that agent until they feel comfortable or until their ride ends.
“They can use that for any situation that isn’t yet escalating to the need of getting police or other emergency services like fire department or ambulance, but they may feel unsafe or uncomfortable and need someone to talk them through a situation,” Payne said.
She said that user response to the feature, which was piloted in nine U.S. cities at the end of last year, has been “overwhelmingly positive.”
The features have been added to the app’s safety toolkit, which was introduced in 2018.
In Uber’s most recent safety report, the company reported that 99.9% of the average of nearly three million rides per day had no reports of safety incidents, including car accidents, physical assaults or sexual assaults.
But the report also found that in 2019 and 2020, the company reported 3,824 sexual assault incidents. Uber reported similar rates of such incidents in previous years.
For access to the new safety features, users need to update their Uber apps. Payne said she recommends users also explore the safety toolkit in the app.
A first look at season 2 of Hulu’s The Kardashians debuted on Monday. The clip features glimpses of Kim‘s “season of independence” following her split with Kanye West; Khloé welcoming her second baby with Tristan Thompson via surrogate amid reports of his cheating; Kourtney trying on her wedding dress ahead of her nuptials to Blink-182 rocker Travis Barker; Kylie Jenner welcoming her second child with Travis Scott earlier this year; Kendall Jenner complaining about Kylie’s professional absences; and Kris Jenner getting emotional over a mystery surgery. The Kardashians season 2 kicks off September 22…
The Dropout star Naveen Andrews has been tapped for a series regular role in season 2 of The Cleaning Lady on Fox, according to Variety. The series follows Élodie Yung as a Cambodian doctor who comes to the U.S. to receive medical treatment for her ailing son, but is forced into hiding when the system fails her. She becomes an on-call cleaning lady for the mob, while keeping secrets from her undocumented Filipina sister-in-law — played by Ginger Gonzaga — and dodging the FBI. The Cleaning Lady returns for its second season on September 19…
Jesse Lee Soffer will exit Chicago P.D. following the NBC drama’s upcoming 10th season, according to Variety. Soffer, who has played Detective Jay Halstead since the NBC series’ debut in 2014, will reportedly be leaving sometime in the fall. “I want to thank the incredible fans for their unwavering support during the past 10 years and want to express my deepest gratitude to Dick Wolf and everyone at Wolf Entertainment…NBC, Universal Television, my fellow castmates and our incredible crew,” he said in a statement obtained by the outlet. “To create this hour drama week after week has been a labor of love by everyone who touches the show. I will always be proud of my time as Det. Jay Halstead.” Chicago P.D.‘s 10th season premieres on NBC Wednesday, September 21…
The trailer for season 2 of HBO’s acclaimed true-crime docuseries, The Vow, debuted on Monday. The series follows Keith Raniere, the leader of NXIVM, who went to prison for sex trafficking, forced labor conspiracy and racketeering after the group was revealed to be a sex cult and Ponzi scheme. The trailer for the upcoming episodes features co-founder Nancy Salzman, who pleaded guilty to multiple charges of conspiracy for her involvement in the organization. She speaks out on camera for the first time since her arrest. It also shows footage of NXIVM supporters standing outside the prison where Raniere was held while he awaited trial. The Vow Part Two launches October 17 on HBO and HBO Max, with new episodes debuting weekly on Mondays…
Following his infamous Oscar night slap at the hands of Will Smith, Chris Rock told the crowd during his show at the Arizona Financial Theatre in downtown Phoenix on Sunday night that he was asked to host next year’s award ceremony, but refused.
According to AZCentral, the 57-year-old comedian joked that returning to the Oscars would be like returning to the scene of a crime, referencing the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, whose ex-wife’s killing began with her leaving a pair of eyeglasses at an Italian restaurant.
Rock compared returning to the award ceremony to asking Nicole Brown Simpson “to go back to the restaurant.”
When Rock brought up the slap, wondering how a person could get famous for being a victim, someone in the crowd shouted, “Talk about it.”
The Saturday Night Live alum said the slap hurt him; in the past, he’d mentioned it took some time for his hearing to return to his left ear.
Noting that Smith had played the boxer Muhammad Ali in a movie, Rock quipped Sunday night, “He’s bigger than me. The state of Nevada would not sanction a fight between me and Will Smith.”
(WASHINGTON) — As some federal student loan borrowers across the country prepare to see their loans wiped out following President Joe Biden’s debt cancellation plan, some borrowers may be wondering if the effort holds up legally.
The legality of Biden’s plan largely depends on who you ask. However, the Biden administration has vehemently defended canceling student loan debt for 20 million people and that the move is legally justified.
For the remaining 55%, Biden’s plan will offer more relaxed terms for loan repayment, according to the Biden administration. Those terms include cutting the amount that borrowers have to pay each month in half — from 10% to 5% of discretionary income — as well as covering borrowers’ unpaid monthly interest, among other efforts.
“The Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel and the general counsel’s office of the Department of Education have looked at the text of the statute and belief that the action that the Secretary took, the administration took here is legally justified,” National Economic Council Deputy Director Bharat Ramamurti said during a press briefing Friday.
“The president was clear from the beginning that he did not want to move forward on this unless it was clear that it was legally available to him,” Ramamurti said. “… One of the first things that he did when he came to office was ask for that legal opinion.”
The Department of Education, alongside the Department of Justice, released a legal opinion last Tuesday in defense of the groundbreaking administrative move, citing the HEROES Act.
The act provides the Secretary of Education broad authority to grant relief from student loan requirements during specific periods — such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic — for particular purposes, like addressing financial harms of wars or national emergencies.
“The Secretary of Education has used this authority, under both this and every prior administration since the Act’s passage, to provide relief to borrowers in connection with a war, other military operation, or national emergency, including the ongoing moratorium on student loan payments and interest,” the opinion reads.
The White House has repeatedly faced questions concerning the future of Biden’s plan in court, during a Friday press conference where officials said they expect legal challenges.
A June decision against the Environmental Protection Agency from the Supreme Court cited the “major questions doctrine,” which requires Congress to clearly and explicitly grant agencies the authority to employ extraordinary actions. He says this strategy may be used to jeopardize Biden’s plan.
“Recent rulings from the Supreme Court suggest that at least some of the justices on the current court could view sweeping executive action like this as running afoul of congressional intent,” Adam S. Minsky, a student loan attorney, told ABC News. “But this is not necessarily the same type of case that was recently decided.”
“It’s going to be up to the courts to decide whether those are valid claims or not, but we believe that we’re on very strong legal grounds,” Ramamurti said.
Jed Shugerman, a professor at Fordham Law, said he doesn’t see the order “surviving a legal challenge.”
“My bottom line is that if the Biden administration wants to prevail in an inevitable legal challenge, it needs to switch to the more appropriate statute as the legal basis for this policy (under the Higher Education Act of 1965) or significantly narrow its policy for specific COVID relief claims (and even then, it would be vulnerable),” Shugerman told ABC News.
Minksy said this is uncharted territory, adding that both Biden and former President Donald Trump have used the HEROES Act to pause federal loan payments, interest, and collection since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden’s plan will erase at least $10,000 in federal student loan debt for Americans who made less than $125,000 per year in the 2020 or 2021 tax year, or less than $250,000 as a household.
For Americans under that same income bracket who took out Pell grants to pay for college, it would erase up to $20,000.
It is unclear when borrowers will see a change in their account balance. The White House says the applications for student debt relief will be launched by early October, with relief beginning to reach borrowers by early to mid-November.
(WASHINGTON) — In Colorado, supporters of Donald Trump seeking evidence of 2020 election fraud have flooded some county offices with so many records requests that officials say they have been unable to perform their primary duties.
In Nevada, some election workers have been followed to their cars and harassed with threats.
And in Philadelphia, concerns about the potential for violence around Election Day have prompted officials to install bulletproof glass at their ballot-processing center.
With 10 weeks to go until the 2022 midterms, dozens of state and local officials across the country tell ABC News that preparations for the election are being hampered by onerous public information requests, ongoing threats against election workers and dangerous misinformation campaigns being waged by activists still intent on contesting the 2020 presidential election.
The efforts, many of which are being coordinated at both the national and local level, range from confronting election officials at local government meetings to training volunteers to challenge the vote-counting process on Election Day, according to election officials.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told ABC News he’s concerned that the efforts are a reflection of the prevailing attitude among 2020 election deniers that “the folks running elections in this county or this city are up to no good.”
‘A weaponized tool’
Election officials said that records requests, which are designed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to make the vote-tallying process transparent to the public, have increasingly been used by election deniers to disrupt the system.
At the “Moment of Truth Summit,” a two-day meeting of election deniers hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell last week in Springfield, Missouri, activists instructed attendees on how to request election-related records, and pointed them to templates to make it easier to submit the forms.
“Save your county! Get your cast vote records now!” was one of the calls to action, urging supporters to request ballot logs containing information on each ballot cast. One speaker boasted about his efforts, saying, “I have one of the best groups of followers in the world … and I basically set them out to start making public records requests everywhere for this information. And lo and behold, over time and working together, they managed to get hundreds and hundreds of these records.”
In Wisconsin, Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell told ABC News that just days after the summit, a Wisconsin activist filed one of those very requests — a lengthy inquiry that not only sought specific and detailed information, but offered guidance on how local officials should retrieve the data. McDonell said he’s received as many as 50 of these kinds of requests over a two-day period.
Elizabeth Howard, senior counsel in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks election rules, said it smacks of a coordinated effort.
“Election officials are clearly getting, like, a copy-and paste-job of a FOIA request from some centralized entity,” she said. “They can see in the FOIA request because it’ll be bracket, insert county here, close bracket — and the requestor doesn’t insert the name of the county.”
Election officials said many of the onerous requests seek ballot records, information on voting machines, and even the personal information of election workers — which election offices will not provide.
“They have become a weaponized tool against us to keep us from being able to do our job,” said Trudy Hancock, president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.
Marc Early, the supervisor of elections in the state of Florida, said that all the requests are making it harder to prepare the state for the upcoming midterms.
“We are under obligation to respond to these records requests in a very proactive way — but the volume and the nature of these requests are such that it’s difficult to just keep track of it all,” Early said. “And it’s become a big problem, because we have elections to conduct but we also have our obligations … to take these requests seriously. And we are, but it’s a difficult environment to live under.”
In Michigan, election officials have found themselves facing accusations from a one-time state officeholder. The clerk for Michigan’s Canton Township told ABC News that former state Sen. Patrick Colbeck has inundated the township with so many records requests that the clerk invited Colbeck to his office to let him see the township’s election management system in action, in the hope that Colbeck’s concerns about voter fraud would be assuaged.
“We have spent hours with him,” clerk Michael Siegrist said of Colbeck.
But the visit didn’t satisfy Colbeck, who Siegrist said is now asking the Michigan township to release the election management system’s programming files — something officials say they can’t do.
Such files are “not subject to public disclosure under the FOIA laws in Michigan, because they are both proprietary and a blueprint for election programming, and if they were distributed could result in individuals having a resource to hack future elections,” said Siegrist.
Colbeck, however, told ABC News the information he is seeking is not programming data, but timestamp information associated with cast vote records already provided by the township.
“This timestamp data would be very useful in an analysis of cast vote data,” he said, adding that “the election results database and associated log files created by the Dominion Election Management System software are not examples of source code any more than a MS Word document created by the MS Word application is source code.”
Colbeck called the disagreement “but one example of concerted statewide obstruction regarding FOIA requests.”
The township said it was still working through its backlog of records requests — eight of which have come from Colbeck alone.
‘Let your voices be heard’
Officials in Washoe County, Nevada, have also been flooded with records and information requests that they describe as “numerous” and “onerous.” But their election workers have also been the targets of threats and harassment.
Election workers have been followed to their cars and threatened with rhetoric like “Traitors are dealt with,” county spokesperson Bethany Drysdale told ABC News.
By mid-June, shortly after the Nevada primaries, Drysdale says the harassment had become so severe that the Washoe County voter registrar resigned their position, prompting the Washoe County Commission to propose a support plan to help county employees that “are unfairly publicly attacked, harassed, or disparaged by members of the public or by political organizations.”
That effort was assailed by members of the Republican Women of Reno, who in an online post asked, “Is it 1984 in Washoe County?” The organization, which has been leading local election challenge efforts and training poll watchers, urged others to “show up and let your voices be heard” at county commission meetings.
In Pennsylvania, Philadelphia officials are so concerned that they have installed bulletproof glass at their ballot-processing center ahead of the midterm elections.
In Otero County, New Mexico, David Clements, a former college professor who gained national prominence for pushing baseless claims of voter fraud, has been attending town hall meetings and confronting officials about the 2020 election.
“We want to let you know that this issue isn’t going to go away,” Clements said at a county commissioner meeting last week. “In fact, I’ll be here every two weeks, no matter how futile you think this exercise is.”
Clements, who was suspended last year from New Mexico State University, has traveled across the country to advocate for audits of the 2020 election. A week after speaking at Lindell’s “Moment of Truth Summit,” he was back in New Mexico, where he was escorted out of a Doña Ana County commission meeting after pressing the commissioners to investigate election-related claims.
“This has been brought up multiple times and there’s just no fact to it,” a commissioner told Clements.
At the Doña Ana meeting, Clements also publicly asked for the resignation of county clerk Amanda Lopez Askin.
“It was almost a joke to me,” Askin told ABC News. “I’m serving my community, and then you have 50,000 people that voted for me. All he does is feed my determination.”
Askin has had to report several death threats to the FBI, and she said the vitriol she’s receiving from election denial groups is becoming the new normal.
“It’s disheartening, and the thing that they don’t realize is, I’m a fellow New Mexican,” she said. “I was born and raised here, and I’m more against voter fraud than anyone.”
“It’s unfortunate he’s harassing public forums and public officials with baseless lies,” Alex Curtas, director of communications for the New Mexico secretary of state, said of Clements.
Contacted by ABC News for comment, Clements replied with a list of poll results from the conservative polling company Rasmussen Reports showing the percentage of likely voters who believe cheating affected the results of the 2020 election, and other related statistics.
‘A different level of intensity’
Back in Washoe County, Nevada, officials say election deniers have also spread dangerous misinformation — such as when one activist posted a clip from the election office’s livestream and questioned what an election worker was doing with their computer.
“When they posted the video, they said, ‘What is he doing? Look at him, he looks shifty. Look at him, he must be up to something,'” said Drysdale, the county spokesperson. “And that kind of caught fire.”
The employee was actually just shutting down a computer at the end of the day, Drysdale said.
“Misinformation yields threats against election officials that make it a lot more difficult to do our job, whether those threats be violent in form or whether they be harassment,” said Michigan Secretary of State Joselyn Benson.
In Maine, a local election denier transformed a former movie theater into a “Constitutional Hall” to hold so-called “election integrity” events and poll watcher trainings. The events have resulted in an increase in “requests for information about things that don’t exist,” according to the Maine secretary of state.
“To the election deniers who are hosting phony training, filling our citizenry with misinformation and disinformation, I would say our elections are free, fair, and secure,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told ABC News.
Officials in other states, including Missouri, Indiana, Colorado and Kansas, told ABC News they were concerned about election deniers being trained as poll workers.
“This is a different level of intensity that I was not expecting,” said a Johnson County, Kansas, election commissioner.
A report released two weeks ago by the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee said election officials are facing unprecedented challenges.
“These new pressures on election officials make their core job of running elections far more difficult by draining already scarce resources and undermining public confidence in election processes,” the report said.
