Football season is here and the Black Eyed Peas are helping students wave their colors at a Super Bowl-like halftime show at the East L.A. Classic match between rival high schools.
Los Angeles Timesreports the “I Gotta Feeling” singers will take over the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on October 21, when Theodore Roosevelt High takes on Garfield High School, for a halftime performance.
will.i.am has a commitment to Roosevelt, as he grew up in Boyle Heights and strives to give back to his community via his i.am Angel Foundation. The musician has several projects going to inspire students, including his I.am.College Track program, which encourages them to reach for their dreams by obtaining a higher education. He also helped found a robotics program at the school.
Garfield football coach Lorenzo Hernandez is happy to welcome BEP to the Classic, an annual event since 1925, noting attendance has significantly shrunk over the past few years from an estimated 25,000 people to 10,000.
“This is going to be the biggest ever meeting with two teams playing well, an historic venue and the Black Eyed Peas halftime show,” he said, stressing the affordable ticket price. “All for $15.”
Tickets are on sale on Ticketmaster; students who take advantage of a presale will pay $12.
The junior varsity match kicks off at 3:30 p.m. while the varsity game takes place at 7:30 p.m.
R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic guest on a new single from rising Cuban rock artist Hector Tellez Jr.
The track is called “Silver Blue Jellyfish” and is available now via digital outlets.
“‘Silver Blue Jellyfish’ is a song about hope and how powerful your life can be when you listen to the call of your deepest purpose and how you can inspire others to pursue their desire to lead a life of freedom, love and happiness,” Tellez says.
The collaboration came together after Tellez’s demo found its way to producer Barrett Martin, who played drums in Screaming Trees and the grunge supergroup Mad Season. Upon inviting Tellez to Seattle to record an album, Martin also recruited a few friends, including Buck and Novoselic, to take part, too.
Buck joined Tellez to perform “Silver Blue Jellyfish” during this year’s Hispanic Heritage Awards, which will air Friday on PBS.
Novoselic, meanwhile, performed at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert in Los Angeles earlier this week, joining his Nirvana bandmate Dave Grohl, members of Soundgarden and The Pretty Reckless‘ Taylor Momsen to play two Soundgarden songs.
Grammy winners Jazmine Sullivan and DernstD’Mile Emilehave submitted their original new song “Stand Up,” from the upcoming Till biopic, to the Academy Awards for Best Original Song consideration.
Varietyreports the song, which will release October 7, will be featured during the end credits of the true-story film of Mamie Till Mobley, the mother of EmmettTill, the young boy brutally lynched in Mississippi in 1955.
Sullivan, who performed the new song, says she understands how vital it is to tell the story.
“I’m honored to be able to contribute to such a powerful film about such a historic and tragic moment in American history,” Sullivan said. “I believe that part of my purpose is to give space for stories that are often ignored and silenced; the Black experience in particular. So I’m glad that the story of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till, is being told so generations old and young can be educated and inspired to make a change. I hope that after people see this film they’ll be moved to stand up against the racism we are still facing today.”
Fresh off her two Grammy wins, including Best R&B album for Heaux Tales, Sullivan has always used her art to uplift and encourage Black women and the Black community.
“The project became so much more than just my own kind of catharsis for the things that I was going through, it became a really a safe place for Black women,” Sullivan told reporters at the 2022 Grammy Awards. “This project has just done so much for us to kind of come together and just share our stories and not be ashamed about the things that we went through.”
Greg Doherty/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
AJ McLean says he recently made many positive changes in his life, which he credits to becoming more involved in drag.
The Backstreet Boys memberopened up to Peopleabout marking one year of sobriety and getting cosmetic surgery. He credits competing on VH1’s RuPaul’s Secret Celebrity Drag Raceas Poppy Love for sparking the change.
“I am a completely different person, and it really all started [with] this show,” he says. “This was by far the most liberating thing I thing I’ve ever done.”
The Dancing with the Stars alum says doing drag “changed” him by improving his confidence and self-love.
“Hands down the biggest thing I took away from this amazing experience was to love the body that you’re in,” says AJ. “That’s something I’ve long struggled [with] and this proved to be the catalyst for me to really look inwards, and do the emotional work to embody the person I am and really just love myself.”
AJ says he decided to commit to sobriety last September after struggling “with drugs and alcohol issues for 25 years.” The singer admits, “It’s still a daily struggle still but it allowed me to finally dive into me.” He saluted the cast, saying they “kept me on track.”
AJ also reveals he has opted for FaceTite, a cosmetic procedure that helps remove sagging skin on the lower half of the face. “Look, I have no shame in saying this: I went and got lipo on my neck,” he remarks, adding he’s always been “insecure” about his neck lines.
Overall, AJ says he feels “like a new human,” adding he was also inspired to exercise more and change his diet. He lost 35 pounds and says he’s now in the best shape of his life.
Sammy Hagar and current band The Circle‘s new studio album, Crazy Times, has just been released on CD and via digital formats.
The 10-song collection was recorded in Nashville with Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb, best known for his work with a variety of major country artists.
Cobb interviewed Hagar about the album for an episode of his Southern Accents Radio program, which will premiere October 1 at 7 p.m. ET on Apple Music.
Cobb enthused about getting to work with Hagar and The Circle’s members — drummer Jason Bonham, longtime Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony and virtuoso guitarist Vic Johnson.
“Going into the studio, watching you guys play was so intimidating because I’m looking at heroes up there, but not only that, but just the fire that you guys have,” Cobb said. “When you sing, there’s a fire that very few people have and it was just so impressive to see the whole thing go down live. I’ll never forget it.”
Hagar responded by noting, “You got to admit, there is great chemistry in this band and as many bands as you’ve produced and dealt with, you can have the best musicians in the world, and without chemistry, it don’t work.”
The two also discussed the Crazy Times track “Father Time,” which Cobb said is the best song Hagar has ever written.
Sammy agreed, saying, “To me, it’s the best song of the album. Best song I’ve ever written. Maybe my best vocal performance … I’m happy with the whole record, but if I said, ‘Listen to one song on this record,’ I’d say listen to that song.”
Meanwhile, vinyl versions of Crazy Times will be released on October 28.
Sigourney Weaver has battled everything from aliens to ghosts over the course of her long and storied career, but in her newest film The Good House, she’s fighting her character’s own inner demons.
Weaver stars as Hildy Good, a New England real estate agent who struggles with alcoholism and the curveballs that life continues to throw her way. She tells ABC Audio that the film doesn’t shy away from how hard it is to realize that the thing you love is bad for you.
“[Hildy] says, ‘It takes me three drinks before I really start to feel like myself,’” Weaver says. “To give that up is hard.”
While Hildy seems to have everybody else figured out, Weaver asserts that same sort of awareness doesn’t apply to herself.
“Hildy knows everybody in this town. That’s the irony,” Weaver says. “There’s a rumor around town that she’s a witch – she’s a descendant of Sarah Good, one of the Salem witches – and there is something witchy about Hildy because she is so perceptive about people. Except about herself.”
Even still, Weaver says the film causes the audience to have great empathy for Hildy. She credits that compassion to the technique of having Hildy speak directly to the audience.
“She comes home, kicks off her shoes, lies back on her sofa and opens a bottle of forbidden Pinot Noir. And it’s when she turns to us – the audience – breaks that fourth wall, and says, ‘Well, this is what’s really going on, can I just tell you from my point of view what’s really happening here,’ she’s very good company,” Weaver says. “I think the more you know Hildy, the more you root for Hildy.”
(WASHINGTON) — On Thursday, the Department of Education scaled back President Joe Biden’s federal student loan cancellation program to protect against legal challenges by six states, with new guidelines that excluded at least hundreds of thousands of borrowers initially told they qualified for the program.
The move excludes people who took out federal loans that, while they were guaranteed by the government, were technically handled by private banks.
ABC News’ Senior National Policy Reporter Anne Flaherty spoke with “Start Here” Friday about the surprise move, what prompted it and how it will affect Americans with student loan debt.
START HERE: Anne, is it possible that the government pulls like a take-backsy? What is going on here?
ANNE FLAHERTY: You were asking if the president can do this and he can — up until a point where a judge tells him he can’t. So this is pretty much the story of every presidency. Two things we need to know. One, what he did was absolutely unprecedented. The student loan program has been ramping up since the Lyndon B. Johnson days. Basically, no president ever has looked at students and said, “Wait no, never mind. Let’s just go ahead and not have you pay back this money. In a sense, a judge could look at this and say, “Hey wait, what are you doing?”
The other thing is he’s relying on a lot of what was enacted after 9/11. This was a law that said the president can reduce or erase student loan debt during a national emergency. But he’s also the same president who went on national television recently and said the pandemic is over. That’s the Republican argument on this.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that on the same day Republicans filed this lawsuit we also have the Education Department pull back on aspects of this plan. I think this is legal maneuvering to try and make this stick [and] try to make this work, because we’ve got an election coming up [and] he wants to keep this.
START HERE: So let’s talk about these lawsuits first. I was asking everyone “Can Biden do this?” and everyone said, “Yeah, the Education Department has broad authority.” Who is exactly filing the lawsuits and what are they challenging?
FLAHERTY: We’ve got six states that have filed their case in a federal court in St. Louis. All red states, all conservative, say, “Look, the president is saying the pandemic is over. What’s the emergency here? You can’t erase these loans.” At the same time when you read this complaint in court, it reads like a political statement. It talks about the economy [and] how miserable it is. Why is the president giving a giant stimulus check only to people who went to college?
They say it’s patently unfair. The White House is pushing back. They say we’re going to fight this. They gave me a statement that said Republicans are working against the interests of middle-class and working-class families. So the next move is by the court.
START HERE: At this moment Anne, who is about to get their loans forgiven and who might not?
FLAHERTY: So everybody was supposed to get loan forgiveness up to a certain point. What’s changed here is that we’re talking about these federally backed loans that were guaranteed by the federal government but handled by private banks. So Republicans were saying people can be hurt by this move. It’s the student loan servicers, servicers that are going to be put at a disadvantage.
START HERE: Private businesses essentially.
FLAHERTY: Right. And so the Education Department quietly changes the language on its website. Before they had said, well, if you can consolidate all these loans that are handled by private banks into these federal direct loans — is what they call them — that will qualify for relief. So then they change the website to say, if you have consolidated these loans by Sept. 29 into federal direct loans, then they will qualify.
START HERE: Wait, that was yesterday. They said, like, if you’ve done it by yesterday?
FLAHERTY: Yes, exactly. So it’s a little bit of a wait, what? People are going to be waking up to that and saying, if you have those types of loans. So, you know, overall, the loan relief program is still there. A judge has not blocked it. People should keep moving forward, asking the government for relief on this. They should not stop. We don’t know where this is going next. So TBD.
(WASHINGTON) — New York Attorney General Letitia James wants to accelerate her $250 million fraud lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, his children, his company, and two of its executives.
James, in a letter to the state’s chief administrative judge, signaled her intention to push for a trial before 2024 and asked him to keep the civil case before Judge Arthur Engoron, who had presided over disputes between the attorney general and the Trump legal team during the investigation.
The Office of the Attorney General “intends to seek an expedited preliminary conference to set a trial date before the end of 2023,” James’ letter said. “Allowing for an expedited trial schedule on an enforcement proceeding after extensive litigation over subpoena enforcement is precisely the circumstance that warrants keeping this case before Justice Engoron in the interests of judicial economy.”
Trump had asked for the case to be assigned to someone other than Engoron, who earlier held him in contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena during the probe.
Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, accused the attorney general’s office of trying to keep the case before a friendly judge.
“OAG’s actions appear to be nothing less than a deliberate attempt to circumvent the rules of the Individual Assignment System and to ‘judge shop,'” Habba said in a letter asking for the case to be reassigned to the Commercial Division of New York State Supreme Court. The AG, in contrast, argues that Engoron is already familiar with the material so for expediency’s sake the case should stay with him.
James has accused Trump of “staggering” fraud and alleges that the former president, with the help of his three eldest children and two corporate executives, “grossly inflated” his net worth by billions of dollars.
The lawsuit accuses them of preparing hundreds of fraudulent and misleading financial statements that overstated the values of nearly every major property in the Trump portfolio, thereby convincing banks and insurers to giving Trump better terms than he otherwise would have received.
(WASHINGTON) — With Hurricane Ian lashing the southeast U.S. after leaving a path of destruction in Florida, President Joe Biden provided a detailed update Friday on his administration’s response to the devastating storm, calling it now “an American crisis.”
Hurricane Ian made landfall in Florida as a Category 4 storm on Wednesday, breaking rainfall and storm surge records as it left Fort Myers, Naples and other coastal cities underwater. Ian on Friday made landfall in South Carolina as a Category 1 storm just after 2:00 p.m.
“I’ve directed that every possible action be taken to save lives and get help for the survivors,” Biden said as he spoke from the White House Roosevelt Room. “Every single minute counts. It’s not just a crisis for Florida. It’s an American crisis. We’re all in this together.”
The president said he continued his talks with Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday morning, reiterating the federal government’s commitment to help his state recover from the storm.
“We’re just beginning to see the scale of that destruction,” Biden said. “It is likely to rank among the worst in the nation’s history. You have all seen on television, homes and property wiped out. It is going to take months, years to rebuild.”
Biden didn’t paint as grim a picture on the death toll as he did on Thursday, when he said early reports indicated “substantial loss of life” and said Hurricane Ian could be the “deadliest hurricane in Florida’s history.”
DeSantis said Friday morning the number of dead from Ian is at least 21, and that it’s expected to grow. For now, the governor said 20 of those deaths are unconfirmed because they were spotted during search and rescue operations and crews were told to prioritize those found alive and still trapped.
Biden emphasized the work of search and rescue teams, stating he deployed the largest team in recent history along with the U.S. Coast Guard’s six fixed-wing aircrafts, 18 rescue boats and 16 rescue helicopters.
“Working with the Defense Department, National Guard, state and local first responders, they’ve rescued 117 people in southwest Florida coast, in Fort Myers and Naples so far,” Biden said.
Among the missions, Biden said, was rescuing a 94-year-old woman who was hoisted up into a helicopter. The rescue teams also reported saving a 1-month-old baby.
Four more Florida counties will be covered by disaster assistance to cover 100% of the cost to clear the debris left by the hurricane, bringing the total number of counties receiving the aid to 13.
Biden also spoke about the effort to restore power to the millions of Floridians still without electricity on Friday morning. He said 44,000 utility workers and restoration personnel from 33 states are “working around the clock to help get power back on.”
Biden also spoke with South Carolina GOP Gov. Henry McMaster as the storm approached, again offering support as Ian brings potentially “life-threatening” storm surge to the state. Biden approved an emergency declaration for South Carolina late Thursday evening.
During his update Friday, Biden spoke about the need for unity when responding to these extreme weather events.
Biden and DeSantis have appeared to bury the hatchet as they’ve coordinated this week to respond to Hurricane Ian. The two leaders are political opponents on a number of issues, most recently sparring over DeSantis’ migrant flights.
“At times like these, Americans come together, they put aside politics, they put aside division and we come together to help each other,” Biden said.
(WASHINGTON) — In September 2017, Hurricane Irma swept across the southern tip of Florida, swamping what was then the state’s 26th Congressional District. The following July, that district’s Republican representative, Carlos Curbelo, introduced a bill that would tax greenhouse-gas emissions to help reduce the impact of climate change on his hurricane-prone constituency. Curbelo’s party affiliation raised eyebrows at the time, but for him, the threat of recurrent disasters sent political partisanship out the window. “This is not an academic discussion for those of us who live in South Florida. This is a local issue,” he told Audubon magazine in 2018.
And he’s not alone. Today, although some one-quarter of elected officials walking the halls of Congress don’t believe human-caused climate change is even real, research suggests that politicians can be persuaded to take action on climate change and other environmental issues. Unfortunately, it might take a headline-grabbing hurricane to do it. In the past decade, several studies have suggested that lawmakers are more likely to take action on climate change when they — and their constituents — have had to deal with the disastrous consequences of previously doing nothing.
From the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency to the 1990 Oil Pollution Act that was born out of a series of oil spills, most notably from the Exxon Valdez, a long history of environmental disasters have inspired improvements in environmental policy, said M. Daniele Paserman, an economist at Boston University.
“Disasters make environmental problems more salient,” he said. Paserman’s research has found that, between 1989 and 2014, congresspeople from districts hit by a hurricane were more likely to sponsor or co-sponsor environmental regulatory bills in the following year. And he’s not the only one who has noticed similar correlations. According to another study, which looked at abnormal temperature and precipitation trends between 2004 and 2011, members of Congress whose home states were experiencing weird weather were more likely to vote for all kinds of environmental legislation. More broadly, international research from 34 countries found that nuclear disasters increased the number of renewable-energy policies implemented for as long as seven years after the event.
This line of research is relatively new and the number of studies relatively thin. But all of this builds on a larger question that has been studied more in depth: how personally experiencing the effects of climate change shape belief and behavior in the general public.
A 2021 review of existing literature discovered ample evidence that living through a natural disaster is associated with higher levels of self-reported belief that climate change is a problem and a greater concern about what this might do to you and your family. Our own polling with Ipsos earlier this month showed something similar. Even among Republicans, nearly half of those who had experienced an extreme weather event in the past five years told us they were worried about climate change, compared with only 17 percent who hadn’t experienced a natural disaster.
But there are limits to the ability of a disaster to prevent future calamities. For one thing, the same review paper that showed increased belief in climate change didn’t find a corresponding increase in behaviors that would deal with that issue. And changes in belief are still heavily moderated by what people already think. For example, in a 2019 survey of people who experienced severe flooding in the United Kingdom during the winter of 2013-14, the ones who walked away with the highest levels of concern about climate change were those who had already attributed floods to global warming.
So, it probably shouldn’t be a shock that the much smaller number of papers looking at how politicians might change their behavior in the face of climate change comes with its own set of caveats and complications. Studies have indicated that only countries with strong democracies see an increase in climate policy following climate disasters. And Paserman’s study found that the effects were tightly linked to proximity to the disaster. Even lawmakers who served in the same state where a hurricane occurred but whose districts were unaffected weren’t as likely to step up for political change.
And while that paper found that politicians who experienced climate disasters were more likely to push for climate policies regardless of party, a different study — the one that showed abnormal temperature and precipitation trends were correlated with representatives’ environmental votes — found that party did matter. Moderate Democrats made the biggest shift toward more environmental-policy support, said Erich Muehlegger, an economist at the University of California, Davis, and an author on that paper. “We didn’t find much of a result for Republicans, nor did we find much of a result for the more strident Democrats, though that might be due to the fact that they were always voting for environmental regulations,” he said. “You can’t become more pro-environment if you were already on top of all those issues.”
It’s going to take a lot more research to fully understand why politicians sometimes change their policy in the face of climate disaster and sometimes don’t. Meanwhile, just because lawmakers are responding to natural disasters with environmental votes doesn’t mean they aren’t seeing other, seedier kinds of legislative opportunities from the same event. Ethan Kaplan, an economist at University of Maryland, College Park, and his colleagues found that politicians are likely to use the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster to push through votes favoring the concerns of special-interest donors when nobody is paying attention. That’s not a contradiction to the idea that disaster could prompt politicians to take action on climate change. Instead, Kaplan said, the two things can run parallel. A disaster can create a distraction for donors’ goals in the short term, even as it prompts greater environmental policies in the long run.
