If you thought you were paying a lot for your mortgage, just wait until you hear how much Adele is paying!
According to documents obtained by The New York Post, the singer took out a $37.7 million mortgage for the Beverly Hills mansion she bought for $58 million earlier this year. She has the standard 30 years to repay the loan, the deed says. That means she’d be paying an estimated $227,000 per month, including property taxes and interest.
The estate was previously owned by Sylvester Stallone. It sits on 3.5 acres and measures a sprawling 18,500 square feet. It boasts eight bedrooms and 11 bathrooms, and includes a ton of amenities like a screening room, gym, cigar room, infinity pool, spa, eight-car garage and art studio.
Back in May, Adele posted a photo of her and boyfriend Rich Paul standing in front of the home with the keys, hinting that the two had moved in together.
Adele is set to kick off her rescheduled Las Vegas residency this November.
As promised, Drake has rescheduled the highly anticipated Young Money reunion show. The rapper, who was forced to cancel the initial concert following his COVID-19 diagnosis, has set the new date for Saturday, August 5.
“Negative test…positive outcome…,” Drake wrote on Instagram alongside an updated advertisement. “this was the only date available until the fall and because the family is so solid everybody is flying back in to make it happen for you all…SEE YOU SATURDAY…young moulaaa.”
The Young Money concert was originally slated to take place on August 1, the third day of his OVO Fest. After a successful start to the weekend, Drake tested positive and regretfully canceled the show, promising to reschedule to “the SOONEST date possible.”
The “Sticky” rapper has since kept his word; he’ll reunite onstage with Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne this weekend.
Forget “She’s Kerosene”: on The Interrupters‘ new album, In the Wild, frontwoman Aimee Interrupter declares, “I’m Kerosene.”
As Aimee tells ABC Audio, In the Wild is a personal, first-person reflection of her “life story.”
“I’d never done that before for The Interrupters,” Aimee explains. “Any songs that I’d written before for The Interrupters about my life, I always wrote about somebody else.”
“I would say, like, ‘She did it,’ ‘That person’s story,'” she adds. “But this time, I wrote in first-person, like, ‘This is actually my story.'”
Aimee’s lyrical vulnerability on In the Wild then allowed the rest of the band — made up of guitarist Kevin Bivona and his twin brothers, bassist Justin and drummer Jesse Bivona — to experiment with and broaden their sound.
“We’re just trying to make each song be exactly what it wants to be,” Kevin shares. “That brought us into terrain we hadn’t necessarily been in before, but felt so authentically us.”
In the Wild features the lead single “In the Mirror,” which is among the most personal songs on the record. Aimee had the beginnings of what would become the track for some time — much longer than the “Took me two years to write this song” lyric would have you believe — but realized she needed to “come clean with myself and with others about my ugly truths” to finish it.
“I used to drink a lot, and I haven’t drank alcohol for seven years,” Aimee says. “But it took me a long time of being sober and taking my personal inventory, and looking at my life and looking at myself in the mirror, and finally making peace with who I saw in the mirror in order for me to share that with someone else.”
ABC Audio; Christie Goodwin/Redferns via Getty Images
About three years ago, Kinks guitarist Dave Davies told ABC Audio that he and his brother and band mate Ray had spent time working on material for a possible new album project, although none of that music has been released yet.
In a new ABC Audio interview, Dave says he feels there’s still a good chance that he and Ray will finish and release some new collaborative, songs and perhaps perform together as well.
“It’s possible,” Dave offers. “[I]t’d be nice, you know? I don’t know if it will [happen], but I’m hopeful that we’ll get together, and see where we can go.”
As for the possibility of performing again with his brother, Dave says, “[O]bviously, we’ll have to meet with Ray and think what sort of shows we can do and what makes sense…[We] can’t do elaborate rock shows like we did decades ago, but, you know, we should be able to do something fun.”
The only time Davies brothers have performed together in public since the final Kinks tour ended in 1996 was at a December 2015 solo show that Dave played in London, where Ray came out at the end of the concert and sang “You Really Got Me.”
Meanwhile, Dave candidly discusses his often-contentious relationship with Ray in his new memoir, Living on a Thin Line, which was published in digital formats globally last month and will be released in physically in the U.S. in January 2023.
“I tried to be as honest but as fair as possible, and I hope I achieved it,” Dave says with regard to writing about Ray. “I don’t want to be mean spirited. I want to make sure that he’s covered in a respectful, honest and inspiring way. And I hope that’s in there.”
The Apple TV+ film hits the streamer Friday, and Jane Fonda stars as a dragon who is one of the creatures who controls all the luck in the world. While the premise seems simple enough, Fonda tells ABC Audio the film has a strong message.
“Good luck makes no sense without bad luck. The two, in a way, go together symbiotically, they’re the opposite sides of the same coin,” she explains. “Don’t reject bad luck. You can learn from it. It can turn into good luck if you’re willing to learn the lessons from it.”
Fonda adds, “You know, there’s a there’s an expression that I love – God doesn’t come into us through our successes and our awards…God comes into us through our wounds.”
So can you actually control your own luck?
“I think that if during your lifetime you are intentional about the way you live that you are creating your own luck,” the Academy Award winner shares, adding that wisdom doesn’t come from experiences alone, but from reflecting on those experiences.
Whoopi Goldberg also lends her voice to the film as a character who works at the place in the universe where all the luck is made and distributed. She believes luck isn’t permanently good or bad, it ebbs and flows.
“I think we sometimes just assume things are going to continue on the way that they are. You know, whether it’s bad or good. And you find yourself going, is the moon in retrograde? Is this ever going to get better? And then suddenly you wake up and you think, wait a minute, this is a pretty good day. Hey, this is all right. You know, and you live in that for a while.”
Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — With over 6,000 cases of monkeypox confirmed in the United States, including five children, the demand for the monkeypox vaccine is high.
And while the current vaccine, JYNNEOS, is approved only for adults ages 18 and older, it has been administered to children in the U.S. on a case-by-case basis, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA confirmed to ABC News that “numerous” children have been granted access to the vaccine through a special permission process.
If a doctor decides a person under 18 was exposed to monkeypox and the benefit of the vaccine is greater than any potential risk, they can submit a request to the FDA. Only children with direct exposure are granted access, and even then access is decided on a case-by-case basis
The FDA declined to state exactly how many children have received the vaccine to date through this special permission process.
The JYNNEOS vaccine, delivered in a two-dose regimen, has not been tested through clinical trials in children.
There have been no “adverse events to date” in delivering the vaccine to children in the U.S., and similar vaccines have been tested in children without serious safety concerns, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“JYNNEOS contains a non-replicating Vaccinia virus. While JYNNEOS has not been studied specifically for children or adolescents, the same non-replicating Vaccinia virus in the JYNNEOS vaccine has been used in studies as part of vaccines against other diseases including tuberculosis, measles, and Ebola,” the CDC said in a statement. “These studies included children as young as 5 months old, and no serious safety concerns were reported.”
Given the case-by-case basis of administering the monkeypox vaccine, there is no availability for mass vaccination of children at this time.
Children under the age of 8 are among those the CDC considers at “increased risk” for developing more severe illness if infected with monkeypox, along with pregnant people, people who are immunocompromised and those who have a history of atopic dermatitis or eczema.
Experts are not sure why children are at increased risk for severe illness, but it may be due to their immune systems and the fact that “younger children are sometimes more susceptible to some viral infections,” Dr. Richard Malley, senior physician in pediatrics, division of infectious diseases, at Boston Children’s Hospital and a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, told ABC News.
Monkeypox, also known as MPX, is spread primarily through direct, skin-to-skin contact between someone who has the virus and someone who does not, according to the CDC.
Typically, the disease begins with a fever, headache, fatigue, chills and muscle aches. The disease is similar to smallpox, however, monkeypox also causes swollen lymph nodes.
Within one to three days of initial symptoms, those infected typically develop a rash either on their face or other parts of the body, according to the CDC.
Per the World Health Organization, the lesions — or rash — start out as dark spots on the skin before progressing to bumps that fill with fluid.
Antiviral medications such as Tecovirimat, which is available for children, are currently being used for treatment of monkeypox.
Officials in the U.S. and around the world have expressed concern that there are not enough monkeypox vaccines to address the emerging crisis. With demand increasing, U.S. health officials have reported that 1.1 million doses of the JYNNEOS vaccine will be allocated to states and jurisdictions across the country.
Moderna, the maker of a COVID-19 vaccine, said Wednesday they have initiated a research program to consider whether the company could create a monkeypox vaccine with mRNA technology.
Any new vaccine would still need to go through the regulatory authorization process, which can take weeks to months, even in special circumstances.
Now that the Biden administration has declared the current monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency, the FDA could move to issue an emergency use authorization for the JYNNEOS vaccine for children under 18.
The FDA told ABC News it would still need to go through a process to evaluate if it would want to authorize the vaccine for a younger population.
ABC News’ Eric Strauss, Arielle Mitropoulos and Ivan Pereira contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Meta said it is focused on continuing to disrupt emerging cybersecurity threats, including “perception hacking” efforts that could attempt to create unjustified fears about the security of U.S. elections.
In its new “Quarterly Adversarial Threat Report” released Thursday, Meta details how it took action on two cyberespionage operations and removed three networks that were engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) — campaigns that seek to manipulate public debate.
Since 2017, the company says it has been able to disrupt the activities of coordinated networks aimed at manipulating users with fake accounts using coordinated inauthentic behavior. The efforts have been successful at driving these networks off of Facebook and have made it harder for other entities to maintain access on the social media platform, Meta says.
Meta says in the report that cyberespionage actors tend to target individuals across the internet in an effort “to collect intelligence manipulate them into revealing information and compromise their devices and accounts.”
Meta’s Facebook took action on two separate cyberespionage operations from South Asia this past quarter, both of which used malware to infect users’ devices. One of the operations was from the hacker group known as Bitter APT, the report says.
The hacker group targeted users with malware in New Zealand, India, Pakistan and the United Kingdom, Meta’s report says.
The report also revealed the company had removed networks promoting misinformation and harassment in India, Indonesia, Greece and South Africa.
Additionally, Facebook removed three networks engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior, including one network linked to an Israeli public relations firm and two troll farms from Malaysia and Russia.
The Russian operation, the self-proclaimed CyberFront Z, focused on targeting global discourse on the war in Ukraine, the report says.
The pro-Russia operation attempted to mirror the anti-war communities defending Ukraine through the use of fake accounts run by paid posters, the report says. Despite the effort, pro-Ukraine and anti-war comments typically outnumbered the pro-Russia group’s comments.
Ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, a spokesperson for Meta told reporters the company has not seen any coordinated inauthentic behavior operations specifically targeting the November elections.
But the company warns of the idea of perception hacking — capitalizing on the public’s fear of influence operations by trying to create the false perception of widespread manipulation, even if there is no evidence.
David Agranovich, Meta’s director of threat disruption, told ABC News, “as we go into the midterm elections, I think the thing we’re particularly working to make sure we’re ready for is these perception hacking offers where the operations go anywhere where they tried to get eyeballs and amplification from other people talking about how effective they were.”
Agranovich said its important to counter these efforts.
“Make sure people understand that they’re just sometimes not that effective,” he said. “And yet, we’ll still be on high alert. We haven’t seen the CIB’s yet but we’re gonna keep watching.”
(DALLAS) — The annual Conservative Political Action Conference got underway Thursday in Dallas, Texas, one of the largest gatherings of conservatives and, since its inception in 1974, a crucial campaign stop for Republican hopefuls.
This year, organizers are hoping to galvanize a growing base of voters ahead of the upcoming midterm cycle with the aim of bringing a crashing “red wave” of GOP elected officials to Congress.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Fox News Anchor and GOP firebrand and Fox News host Sean Hannity kicked off the conference, focusing on migration, the weakness of Democrats, and big business. There was little mention of the issue of abortion despite the recent shift to a post-Roe America.
Headlining the three-day convention on Saturday night is Donald Trump who has teased running again president in 2024. The former president last spoke in late July at America First Policy Institute and Turning Point USA events in Washington where he focused primarily on promoting a harsh criminal justice agenda.
He’ll speak ahead of CPAC on Friday in Waukesha, Wisconsin, at a rally in support of Tim Michels, a Republican candidate for governor.
Abbott, who was absent from last year’s Dallas convention, was the first high-profile speaker on Thursday, joining a panel titled, “Texas: The Start of the Big Red Wave.”
He touted his friendship with Texas’ new business resident, Elon Musk of Tesla, addressed his busing of illegal immigrants to Washington and signified a growing trend of Latinos leaning toward Republican politicians.
“Texas believes in freedom Texas believes in the power of the individual. We want to have safe communities, a secure border. We want to cut your property taxes here in the Lone Star State because we know that is your money,” Abbott said to a cheering crowd on the panel with CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp and CPAC Senior Fellow Mercedes Schlapp.
“Keep Texas red. Fire Nancy Pelosi, impeach Mayorkas and put America on the right track.”
Speculation of a potential 2024 presidential bid has long followed Abbott, who energized the crowd talking about the potential economic growth in the Lone Star State.
“It was just in May this year that Texas became home to more Fortune 500 company headquarters than any other state in the United States of America,” he lauded.
He also took jabs at California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, who has recently targeted with Republican peers like Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis while chatter swirls about his own ambitions for a 2024 the Democratic presidential nomination.
Newsom has swung at the Texas governor by modeling a new California gun restriction law after Texas’ “heartbeat act,” which prohibits abortions after as early as six weeks into pregnancy. The California governor has also run full-page ads in the Austin American-Statesman, Houston Chronicle and El Paso Times to criticize Abbott’s stances on abortion rights and gun laws.
“The number one state Texans are moving to is California. Why would someone from Texas move to California? It’s because they like the Gavin Newsom type of liberalism,” Abbott said. “We have an exchange program going on,” he joked. “We’re getting the [Californian] conservatives, we’re sending them our liberals.”
Several other Texas conservatives are scheduled to speak at CPAC, including Sen. Ted Cruz on Friday morning, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Friday evening. Recently elected Rep. Mayra Flores is also slated to speak. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick spoke on Thursday afternoon.
Along with Abbott on Thursday, in a speech titled “How We Fight,” was Orban — fresh off of meeting with Trump at the former president’s Bedminster, New Jersey, Golf Club. He repeated some of his most controversial views, railing against LGBTQ issues and migration and a decline in Christianity across the Western world.
“Our values save us from repeating history’s mistakes. The horrors of Nazis and Communists happened because Western states in Continental Europe abandoned their Christian values. And today’s progressives are planning to do the same. They want to give up on Western values,” he said.
“The globalists can all go to hell, I have gone to Texas,” Orban said as he closed his remarks.
Hannity then delivered a fiery speech, beginning with comments about “election integrity” in the ongoing vote counting in Arizona’s GOP gubernatorial primary on Tuesday.
“We still don’t know if Kari Lake won that race for governor. Why not? How do we expect to have integrity in our elections if they can’t count the votes in 24 hours?” he said.
Hannity also rallied the crowd about GOP chances in the coming midterm elections.
“We’ll get America back on track. And then we’ll win and 2024 and then we’ll be back in the ballgame. And we will be that that beautiful city on a hill that Reagan spoke about. Let’s make that our goal. Let’s make that our dream. Let’s make that our prayer. In Jesus name. You can say Jesus, this is CPAC,” he said.
Abbott and Orban, Patrick and Hannity’s appearances will also be joined by and other high-profile Republican figures, including former vice presidential candidate and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.
Trump-endorsed Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake is also slated to speak. The former local Fox News anchor is currently awaiting official results from the state’s Republican primary, though she has already declared victory on multiple occasions and has indicated that she would not concede if the results weren’t favorable to her campaign.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is also in the lineup as the keynote speaker at CPAC’s Saturday night Cattleman’s Ball, a week after he was found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to to cooperate with investigations into the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
CPAC will also feature its famed straw poll, a historically popular contest for gauging how popular Republican leaders are within the party.
This year will notably feature two separate straw polls — one with and another without Trump, who has won every one of the contests since 2019.
The CPAC main ballot will include Trump, DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Cruz, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Also on the ballot are former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
The 2024 straw poll without Trump will instead feature Donald Trump Jr., along with all the aforementioned potential hopefuls.
DeSantis emerged from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference held in Orlando, Florida, in February as the potential GOP presidential candidate most competitive with former President Donald Trump, coming in second at 28% and far more favored than other GOP prospects, including other CPAC speakers Pompeo, Noem and Cruz, who all got less than 2%.
(NEW YORK) — Two questions — “What is college for and who pays for it?” — form the foundation of a new book that explores a variety of systemic issues facing America’s higher education system.
Will Bunch, author of “After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics – and How to Fix It,” spoke to ABC News Live about the history of the student loan crisis and the future of the higher education system in America.
Bunch said the issues stem back to World War II. After the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the G.I. Bill, which provided veterans with funds for college education, among other benefits.
As a result, it made higher education a public good for millions of veterans and middle-class Americans, Bunch said. “The question we’ve been trying to resolve for the last 75 years, which is two questions: What is college for and who pays for it?”
As tuition steadily rose over the course of nearly a century, soon 1 out of 5 adults couldn’t attend college without borrowing money, according to Bunch. Now, as inflation rises and a recession looms, 1 in 5 Americans are holding on to student loan debt that has accrued to a national federal debt of over $1.7 trillion, according to data from the Federal Reserve.
“The thing is, to really succeed in this economy, most job recruiters are looking for that credential, a college diploma,” said Bunch, who shared the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. “And so people feel they have no choice. They have to make this gamble of borrowing the money for college or the alternative could be worse.”
In his book, Bunch spoke to a variety of people, including college graduates who are struggling to manage six-figure loans and people who chose other alternatives to college.
Bunch said that people often believe what he says is an incorrect assumption that college is “available to all people,” and so it’s assumed that those who do not have a degree within the system are seen as “deficient.”
“We believe in the value that education is available to all people, but it’s up to you to make the most out of that opportunity,” said Bunch. “[Those who do not have a degree] are being told that… they have failed in life somehow by not getting this degree.”
Bunch said a viable solution would be to invest in other educational experiences, in lieu of a college degree.
“Education after age 18.. it doesn’t have to be in a university classroom. It could be a trade school, it could be an internship, it could be a gap year,” he said. “But I think these opportunities for our young people should be public good.”
(WASHINGTON) — While WNBA star Brittney Griner’s sentencing in Russia dominates headlines, members of Congress are urging the White House to do more to free yet another prominent figure — Paul Rusesabagina, who inspired the acclaimed 2004 film “Hotel Rwanda.”
In a letter shared exclusively with ABC News on Thursday, Reps. Joaquin Castro and Young Kim asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken to “use all the diplomatic means at your disposal to ensure Mr. Rusesabagina’s safe return to the United States.” They implored the secretary to push Rwanda’s president for Rusesabagina’s “immediate release” during Blinken’s visit next week to the East African nation, where Rusesabagina has been held for nearly two years.
Rusesabagina, a lawful U.S. permanent resident, was the manager of the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when divisions between Rwanda’s two main ethnic groups came to a head. The Rwandan government, controlled by extremist members of the Hutu ethnic majority, launched a systemic campaign with its allied Hutu militias to wipe out the Tutsi ethnic minority, slaughtering over the course of 100 days more than 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis and the moderate Hutus who tried to protect them, according to estimates from the United Nations.
More than 1,200 people took shelter in the Hotel des Mille Collines during what is often described as the darkest chapter of Rwanda’s history. Rusesabagina, who is of both Hutu and Tutsi descent, said he used his job and connections with the Hutu elite to protect the hotel’s guests from massacre. The events were later immortalized in “Hotel Rwanda,” with American actor Don Cheadle’s portrayal of Rusesabagina earning an Academy Award nomination for best actor in 2005.
Rusesabagina, who fled Rwanda with his family in 1996 and later settled in San Antonio, Texas, rose to fame and was lauded as a hero after the movie’s release. In 2005, he was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor given by the American president. He also wrote a book, gave paid speeches, and became an outspoken critic of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who has been in office for the last two decades.
In August 2020, Rusesabagina traveled to Dubai to meet up with a Burundi-born pastor who Rusesabagina alleges had invited him to speak at churches in Burundi about his experience during the Rwandan genocide. The pair hopped on a private jet that Rusesabagina believed would take them to Burundi’s capital, according to Rusesabagina’s international legal team.
Rusesabagina did not know that the pastor was working as an informant for the Rwanda Investigation Bureau and had tricked him into boarding a chartered flight to Kigali. He was subsequently arrested and tried on a slew of terrorism-related charges, with Rwandan prosecutors alleging that Rusesabagina wanted to go to Burundi to coordinate with rebel groups based there and in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Last September, Rusesabagina, who has maintained his innocence, was convicted on eight of nine terrorism-related charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison. In May, the U.S. Department of State determined that Rusesabagina has been “wrongfully detained.” In June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution calling on the Biden administration to demand Rusesabagina’s release on humanitarian grounds.
In their letter to Blinken, Castro and Kim warned that if the U.S. does not take a firm stance on Rusesabagina’s detention, others may be at risk.
“Failure to address the actions of the Rwandan government will only embolden it to continue to target U.S. citizens and U.S. residents,” they wrote.
According to the State Department, Blinken intends to discuss Rusesabagina’s case during his upcoming visit to Rwanda. Speaking to ABC News on Thursday, a senior U.S. official declined to say whether Blinken would communicate any consequences for the Rwandan government if it fails to release Rusesabagina, but insisted that the Biden administration has been “very clear with the government of Rwanda about our concerns about his case, his trial, and his conviction, particularly the lack of fair trial guarantees.”
Castro and Kim said the Biden administration must move as a quickly as possible to secure Rusesabagina’s freedom due to his age and failing health.
“We also ask that you visit Mr. Rusesabagina, who is imprisoned under unsafe conditions and suffering from health issues that jeopardize his life,” they wrote in their letter. “Paul Rusesabagina is a 68-year-old cancer and stroke survivor who remains in poor health. He has been imprisoned for over 700 days without proper medical care.”
In a statement to ABC News on Thursday, Rusesabagina’s family expressed their gratitude that his case “is receiving attention from senior levels within the [Biden] administration and across Capitol Hill.”
“We appreciate in particular Secretary Blinken’s dedicated visit and hope his direct engagement will help bring our family nightmare to an end,” said Rusesabagina’s daughter, Anaise Kanimba.
“Rwanda is not an adversary country like Russia, China or Iran; it is a country that significantly benefits from U.S. taxpayer money and judicial cooperation,” she added. “If the administration can bring back other wrongfully detained [citizens] from Russia, it can certainly leverage its relationship with Rwanda.”
