ARMY, it’s your lucky day. Today is Disney+ Day on the streaming platform, and as a special surprise, a BTS concert is now available.
BTS: Permission to Dance On Stage — LA, the concerts the group did at L.A.’s SoFi Stadium last November and December, has been turned into a concert film. It includes performances of the group’s smash hits “Butter,” “Permission to Dance” and “Dynamite,” as well as “Boy with Luv,” “ON” and “IDOL.”
The Permission to Dance On Stage shows — marking the first post-COVID in-person concerts from the K-pop superstars — were also performed in Las Vegas and Seoul last year.
Growing up isn’t easy these days, given the state of the world and the pressures of social media. But there’s still hope: just watch Disney+’s new docuseries Growing Up.
It follows the stories of 11 “heroes,” aged 18 to 22, focusing on how they’ve been able to thrive despite obstacles like disability, struggles with sexual and gender identity, racism, homelessness and body-shaming. Executive producer and Captain Marvel star Brie Larson tells ABC Audio about the challenges of making Growing Up.
“It was a pretty long process in terms of narrowing it down to these 10 stories and 11 heroes, and part of that was because these are young people and we need to protect them at all costs,” Larson explains.
The Oscar winner notes, “You’re going through and making sure that they were ready to do this, ready to tell their story, ready to be on the public stage. And so that was a really important process, so that everybody felt safe and ready all the way through.”
Larson directed the only episode to feature two “heroes”: Clare and Isabel, best friends who successfully lobbied the Pennsylvania state government to provide free menstrual products to schools statewide. Larson was drawn to that episode because, she reveals, “The inception of the series began with my own shames. One of them was around menstruation and my fears around menstruation.”
Grown-ish star Yara Shahidi directs the episode about Sofia, a young Black woman who struggles with imposter syndrome as a self-proclaimed “math and science nerd.”
Shahidi tells ABC Audio that she identified with Sofia’s story, so the topic “came out of that so naturally — imposter syndrome and discussing the importance of underrepresented voices in these spaces that are led by dominant culture and how much we have to offer the world.”
(NEW YORK) — Steve Bannon, a onetime political adviser to former President Donald Trump, surrendered Thursday to authorities in New York to face felony charges linked to his role in “We Build the Wall,” an online fundraising campaign for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The indictment charges Bannon and “We Build the Wall” itself with two counts of money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of five to 15 years in prison. There are additional felony counts of conspiracy and scheme to defraud along with one misdemeanor count of conspiracy to defraud.
The state charges, brought by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, resemble federal charges for which Bannon received a pardon by Trump and allege Bannon and “We Build the Wall” defrauded 430 Manhattan-based donors out of $33,600. Across New York state, there were more than 11,000 donors defrauded out of more than $730,000, according to the indictment.
The Television Academy has announced its first group of presenters for Monday’s 74th annual Primetime Emmy Awards.
They include Will Arnett, Angela Bassett, Vanessa Bayer, Kelly Clarkson, Ariana DeBose, Taye Diggs, Hannah Einbinder, Selena Gomez, Mariska Hargitay, Squid Game’s Jung Ho-yeon & Lee Jung-jae, Jimmy Kimmel, Diego Luna, Christopher Meloni, Seth Meyers, Amy Poehler, Molly Shannon, Jean Smart, Kerry Washington and Natalie Zea.
The ceremony, hosted by Saturday Night Live‘s Kenan Thompson, will air live from the Microsoft Theater in downtown Los Angeles September 12 on NBC…
(WASHINGTON) — A federal grand jury investigating the activities leading up the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the push by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the result of the 2020 election has expanded its probe to include seeking information about Trump’s leadership PAC, Save America, sources with direct knowledge tell ABC News.
The interest in the fundraising arm came to light as part of grand jury subpoenas seeking documents, records and testimony from potential witnesses, the sources said.
The subpoenas, sent to several individuals in recent weeks, are specifically seeking to understand the timeline of Save America’s formation, the organization’s fundraising activities, and how money is both received and spent by the Trump-aligned PAC.
Neither a spokesperson for Trump nor an official with the Justice Department immediately responded to ABC News’ request for comment.
Trump and his allies have consistently pushed supporters to donate to the PAC, often using false claims about the 2020 election and soliciting donations to rebuke the multiple investigations into the former president, his business dealings, and his actions on Jan. 6.
After the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last month, Save America PAC sent out a fundraising email in which Trump urged supporters to “rush in a donation IMMEDIATELY to publicly stand with me against this NEVERENDING WITCH HUNT.”
According to Save America’s statement of organization filed to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the committee was established just days after the 2020 election. At the time, the filing said the new committee is affiliated with the Trump campaign and the Trump Make America Great Committee, a small-dollar focused, joint-fundraising committee between the president’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, which has been sending out donor solicitation emails for Save America.
Similar to regular political action committees, leadership PACs can only accept up to $5,000 per donor, far less than the upwards of $800,000 donations that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party’s high-dollar joint fundraising committee, Trump Victory, had previously raised.
Since its inception, Save America PAC has brought in more than $135 million, including transfers from affiliated committees, according to disclosure records. As of the end of July, the PAC reported having just under $100 million in cash on hand.
Netflix is bringing back Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po — a.k.a. the Teletubbies — in November, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The reboot of the popular kids TV show from the 1990s and early 2000s will feature the four Teletubbies interacting and discovering their world, and will be narrated by Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star Tituss Burgess. Teletubbies originated on the BBC in 1997 and first aired in the United States on PBS a year later. A 2014 reboot aired on Nick Jr. Episodes of the original currently stream on Pluto TV…
Pitch Perfect star Anna Kendrick will make her directorial debut with the true-life thriller The Dating Game, based on the true story of Cheryl Bradshaw, a contestant on the titular 1970s dating series, according to Entertainment Weekly. Kendrick will also produce and star as Bradshaw, who appeared on the show and chose bachelor number one, Rodney Alcala — dubbed “the Dating Game Killer” after it was discovered he was a serial killer. Bradshaw, it turns out, backed out of her date with Alcala, whom she later described as “creepy”…
Kate Walsh is set to reprise her Grey’s Anatomy character, Dr. Addison Montgomery, in a recurring role for the show’s upcoming 19th season, according to Variety. She appeared on Grey’s last season in a multi-episode arc, in which Addison returned to Grey Sloan Memorial in order to perform a uterine transplant on a patient, who later miscarried. Addison’s first appearance will be in the third episode of the new season…
(MEMPHIS, Tenn.) — A young man who went on an hourslong shooting rampage around Memphis, Tennessee, gunning down at least four people, was arrested on Wednesday night, police said.
Ezekiel Dejuan Kelly, 19, was taken into custody without incident in the Memphis neighborhood of Whitehaven at around 9 p.m. local time after a high-speed chase, according to Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis.
The deadly rampage began early Wednesday at 12:56 a.m. and continued to about 8:30 p.m. In total, at least four people were killed and three others were wounded in seven shootings across the city, Davis said.
After the shootings, the suspect carjacked a driver at gunpoint Southaven, Mississippi, just south of Memphis, speeding off in the victim’s Dodge Challenger and leaving behind an SUV stolen from a woman he had shot to death earlier that night, according to the police chief. The carjacking victim was uninjured, Davis said.
“The homicide division and other investigative units are actively working these crime scenes now, and numerous felony charges are pending,” Davis told reporters at a press conference early Thursday.
“It’s at least eight [crime scenes],” he added. ” We are still in the throes of the investigation. There could potentially be other locations. There could potentially be other damage in other places.”
Court records obtained by Memphis ABC affiliate WATN-TV indicate that an arrest warrant on the charge of first-degree murder was issued for Kelly on Wednesday, before the shooting spree happened.
The police chief said Kelly recorded at least some of his actions on Facebook Live, including when he opened fire inside a store on Jackson Avenue just before 6 p.m. A spokesperson for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, told ABC News that the content was identified and removed prior to the Memphis Police Department’s initial public alert about the incident. Meta was also “in direct touch with the Memphis Police Department shortly after they issued their initial public alert,” the spokesperson said.
Police had launched a citywide search for the suspect and advised members of the public to shelter in place, according to Davis.
“We extend our sincere condolences to all the victims who have been affected in this sequence of violent acts today,” the police chief said. “We want to express our sincere appreciation to our citizens who provided numerous tips throughout this ordeal.”
As the gunman terrorized the city, the Memphis Area Transit Authority temporarily suspended trolley and bus services out of “an abundance of caution and care for the safety of its drivers and riders.”
Police did not discuss a possible motive or release the identities of the victims. It was also unclear how the suspect obtained the guns.
The rampage was the latest in a string of violence to hit Memphis in recent days and weeks, including the killing of a woman who was abducted last Friday while she was on a pre-dawn jog.
“This has been a horrific week for the city of Memphis and the Memphis Police Department,” Davis told reporters.
Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner added: “I want to assure the public that we’re all going to be working together to try to curb this senseless violence here in Memphis and Shelby County.”
In February 2020, Kelly, who was 17 at the time, was charged as an adult with attempted first-degree murder, aggravated assault, using a firearm to commit a dangerous felony and reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon, according to court records. He pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and was sentenced in April 2021 to three years behind bars. He was released from prison 11 months later, in March, according to Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland.
“I want to I want to first express my deepest sympathy and condolences to the victims and their families who are suffering from this senseless murder rampage,” Strickland told reporters. “I am angry for them. And I’m angry for our citizens who had to shelter in place for their own safety until this suspect was caught. This is no way for us to live and it is not acceptable.”
(LONDON) — Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II is “under medical supervision,” Buckingham Palace announced Thursday.
“Following further evaluation this morning, The Queen’s doctors are concerned for Her Majesty’s health and have recommended she remain under medical supervision,” the palace said. “The Queen remains comfortable and at Balmoral.”
Fans may know Lizzo as, well, Lizzo, but that’s not what her boyfriend calls her.
The “About Damn Time” singer, whose birth name is Melissa Viviane Jefferson, is currently dating Myke Wright, and she revealed the sweet nickname he has for her.
“Well, I am in love,” she shared during a September 7 appearance on Audacy Check In. “He has his own name for me. He calls me Melly.”
Lizzo added that Myke is the first man to call her Melly.
The “Truth Hurts” singer and her beau first sparked romance rumors about a year ago after they were spotted having dinner in Los Angeles. However, it wasn’t until April that she confirmed their relationship.
(NEW YORK) — Social media companies have deliberately manipulated the desires and fears of its users to drive their engagement metrics which has created an addiction, according to an author.
In his new book, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, New York Times reporter Max Fisher explores how the major social media and technology companies have managed to gain so much power at the expense of their users.
He spoke with “ABC News Prime” about the dilemmas he explores in his book, conversations with industry insiders about the products they’ve helped to create, and whether or not he’d let his child use social media.
PRIME:Congratulations, Max, and thanks so much for joining us.
FISHER: Thank you for having me.
PRIME: So you talk about how social media platforms have really spent a lot of time focusing on making sure that we stay wired and connected in an effort to make sure they keep making a lot of money. Explain the algorithm basically behind that.
FISHER: So when you open up a social media platform, what you think you’re seeing are posts, thoughts and sentiment from people in your community, from your friends, and you think when you interact with them, when you post something and get a response, what you’re seeing is the feedback from your community and what they like and don’t like. And that is not the case.
What you are actually seeing, what you actually are experiencing are emotions and sentiments and interactions that have been predetermined and pre-selected, often personalized just for you, by these incredibly sophisticated artificial intelligence systems that govern the platforms that have determined the precise sorts of emotions, interactions and sequence of sentiments that will get you not just to spend more time browsing and scrolling on social platforms, what will get you engaged yourself and will solicit specific reactions from you. Because we’re talking about billions of people, the overwhelming majority of Americans, for instance, that has profound consequences for the way our society works and for our politics.
PRIME: You use the word consequences a few times there. I’m really curious what you see as social media’s real-world consequences.
FISHER: There’s this one experiment that I write about in the book where these researchers took two really big groups of people over four weeks, and half of them they said “just live your life as normal,” and half of them they said, “deactivate your Facebook account, take it off your phone.” And the consequences were staggering. One thing they found is that people who deactivated Facebook reported higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction, equivalent to about a third the effect of going to therapy…it’s certainly a lot cheaper than going to therapy.
It’s also a suggestion that people weren’t using social media because it makes them happy, in fact, they were using it because they are addicted to it and had a hard time turning it off and needed this experiment to force them to turn it off. And another change they found was that people who deactivated it became significantly less polarized [in] the way that they saw the news, [in] the way that they saw other people in their community.
PRIME: Do you have a social media account?
FISHER:You know this is the thing that is tough about social media. It is so dominant in our world, in the way that we consume information, in the way that we interact with people in our lives and our family and friends, that you kind of have to be on it. You probably have to have a smartphone, you probably have to be on social media to some extent. But the number one thing I think you can do is to understand what it’s doing to you, understand its effects, understand the way that it distorts what it shows you and the way that people in your community seem to be acting.
It’s designed to be engaging but the types of interactions that are engaging, that really activate certain chemicals in your brain and make you want to spend more time on it, are: fear, moral outrage is by far the most engaging sentiment, and also any sense of hostility towards people that are not in your social in-group.
PRIME:I just want to take a look at the subtitle because you say “The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.” Is that accurate? Has social media really rewired our brains?
FISHER:They have indeed found that your actual brain chemistry is changed as a result of social media use. There are a lot of things in our lives that change our brain chemistry, and they’re called drugs. And that can be caffeine, that might be alcohol, it may be recreational drugs, it might be cigarettes. Social media functions in very much the same way. The reason that it’s designed like that and it’s explicitly designed like that, the people who designed the platforms knowingly used slot machines, dopamine delivery, these addictive, physically addictive features, to get people to spend more time on there, is that it also changes your behavior and changes the way that you think in all sorts of ways that were not intentional on the part of the platforms but are certainly consequential.
PRIME: You also talk about the 2020 election, Jan. 6 insurrection, that there was so much misinformation out there and that social media companies did very little to try to tamp that down. Do you feel like the genie is out of the bottle at this point, or are they able to control misinformation?
FISHER:So, it’s funny. There a lot of people who work at the big social media companies whose job is to reduce misinformation, reduce extremism on platforms, reduce recruitment for extremist far right terrorist groups, but they are fighting a losing and in many senses, unwinnable battle. Not because there’s something about social media that means that misinformation and hate are going to always be on there but because these platforms are deliberately designed to ramp up engagement in the most ruthless possible ways these companies can come up with.
So it’s out of the bottle in the sense that you can’t clean it up as long as the companies are doing that but it’s also, at least in theory, relatively easy to fix because all the companies have to do is turn off these engagement-maximizing features, and a lot of this problem goes away. But they’re not going to do that.
PRIME: Based on the people that you interviewed who are both still inside the system and who’ve left, is there a sense that you can kind of turn this around and use social media as a force for good?
FISHER:So yeah, a lot of these people who I’ve talked, some some of them are dissidents in Silicon Valley or people who were whistleblowers, some of the researchers who were outside of Silicon Valley, a lot of them are still true believers in the theoretical potential of a more neutral social media that does not have these engagement-maximizing features is something that can be and sometimes really is a really dramatic and major force for good in the world. But the problem is just these engagement-maximizing features are just overpowering that good and creating a lot of harm in the world.
PRIME:Last quick, quick question. Would you let a child of yours have social media?
FISHER: Oh, my God. No, I wouldn’t let myself have social media if I could get myself off of it. The thing is that it’s not just that there’s a lot of harmful things in social media, but young kids and adolescents especially have a very exaggerated social need and that means they spend a lot more time on social media. They are some of the best customers of these platforms, in fact. And it means that the effects, the things that affect you and me, affect them much more drastically.
PRIME: Max Fisher, we thank you so much. And to our viewers, you can purchase “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World” anywhere books are sold.
