Lauren Alaina has signed a deal with Big Loud Records.
The music video for Kane Brown‘s new song, “Grand,” will premiere Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET.
Kacey Musgraves has teamed up with Mexican American singer-songwriters Cuco and Adriel Favela on a new song, “Sitting in the Corner.”
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(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump did not want to call for the prosecution of Jan. 6 rioters after the Capitol attack, according to a video released Monday by the House select committee investigating the riot.
In a video tweeted by Virginia Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria, a member of the panel who led last week’s hearing, the committee showed what appeared to be a draft of Trump’s Jan. 7, 2021, remarks to the country — with several proposed lines crossed out.
The new video cites previously unreleased witness testimony and a copy of a document titled “Remarks on National Healing” that showed Trump was reluctant to give a speech rebuking his supporters who attacked the Capitol and calling for the Justice Department to prosecute them.
“It took more than 24 hours for President Trump to address the nation again after his Rose Garden video on January 6th in which he affectionately told his followers to go home in peace,” Luria wrote in her message posting the video. “There were more things he was unwilling to say.”
The nearly four-minute video includes clips of depositions from Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, discussing how the Jan. 7 remarks came together.
“We felt like it was important to further call for de-escalation,” said Kushner, who like Ivanka Trump was a senior White House aide.
Ivanka Trump told the committee that she could identify her father’s handwriting in the copy of the Jan. 7 speech included in the video while Kushner repeatedly said “I don’t know” when asked why the president had crossed out lines that read “legal consequences must be swift and firm” and “you do not represent me, you do not represent our movement.”
Key Trump aide John McEntee told investigators in his own deposition that he was told by other aides to “nudge” the speech along if President Trump asked his opinion on it — which he took as a sign that Trump didn’t want to deliver the remarks as initially written.
In the speech he eventually delivered at the White House on Jan. 7, Trump accused the rioters of defiling “the seat of American democracy” and said, “You do not represent our country.”
Cassidy Hutchinson, a committee witness who worked as a top aide to Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told the committee that Trump’s advisers pushed him to deliver remarks after the riot both to protect his legacy and to address concerns about how senators might respond if his Cabinet tried to remove him from office via the 25th Amendment.
“There was a large concern of the 25th Amendment potentially being invoked, and concerns about what would happen in the Senate,” Hutchinson said in the new video. “So the primary reason that I had heard other than, you know, ‘We did not do enough on the 6th’ … was, ‘Think about what might happen in the final 15 days of your presidency if we don’t do this. There’s already talk about the 25th Amendment. You might need this as cover.'”
Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday’s video from the committee.
He has repeatedly said he did nothing wrong regarding Jan. 6 and has cast the House investigation as politically motivated and one-sided.
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Keke Palmer addressed a tweet over the weekend that compared her to fellow actress Zendaya, and ignited a discussion over her career and popularity.
On Saturday, Aiyana N. Ishmael, an editorial assistant at Teen Vogue, tweeted her confusion over remarks about Palmer’s “breakout” success in Nope, Jordan Peele‘s latest directorial venture.
“It’s so interesting seeing the conversation around Keke Palmer having her breakout or superstar moment and it’s wild we live in different worlds because in my household Keke been a star for forever,” Ishmael wrote. “Akeelah & The Bee was my dad’s favorite movie it went triple platinum in my home.”
Another Twitter user then quoted Ishmael’s tweet, writing, “I’d like someone to do a deep-drive [sic] on the similarities and differences between Keke Palmer and Zendaya’s careers. This may be one of the clearest examples of how colorism plays out in Hollywood. They were both child-stars, but their mainstream popularity is very different.”
On Sunday, Palmer addressed the latter tweet on Twitter.
Without mentioning Euphoria and Spider-Man star Zendaya, Palmer gave a brief summary of her own numerous film credits and career achievements, adding that she had “been a leading lady” since childhood.
“A great example of colorism is to believe I can be compared to anyone,” she wrote. “I’m the youngest talk show host ever. The first Black woman to star in her own show on Nickelodeon, & the youngest & first Black Cinderella on broadway. I’m an incomparable talent. Baby, THIS, is Keke Palmer.”
“I’ve been a leading lady since I was 11 years old,” she continued. “I have 100+ credits, and currently starring in an original screenplay that’s the number one film at the box office #NOPE. I’ve had a blessed career thus far, I couldn’t ask for more but God continues to surprise me.”
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Lupita Nyong’o opened up about the grief she experienced while making Black Panther: Wakanda Forever without the king himself, Chadwick Boseman.
The Oscar winner told The Hollywood Reporter that the Marvel sequel pays tribute to Boseman, who died after a battle with colon cancer in August 2020.
“For us as a cast, having lost our king, Chadwick Boseman, that was a lot to process, and in many ways, we’re still processing it. When you lose someone, I don’t know when you stop missing them,” Nyong’o said. “We felt it so much, making this film without him.”
That was not the only challenge in making the film. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic brought along its own set of hardships, Nyong’o said, but noted that the cast and crew all came together to make it work.
“To make this film against all odds is a powerful statement unto itself, and I am very proud that we did it,” Nyong’o said. “It was very therapeutic. It restored a sense of hope for me in making it, and I think we’ve expanded the world of Wakanda in ways that will blow people’s minds.”
Speaking of which – when the official teaser trailer for the film dropped at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend, fans were left with a huge question. Who is the person donning the Black Panther suit? Nyong’o remained tight-lipped on the subject.
“Don’t you just love a good secret,” she said.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever releases in theaters on November 11.
Marvel is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News.
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(WASHINGTON) — At a House subcommittee hearing last week on the economic impact of mass shootings on local communities, Mayor of Buffalo, New York, Byron Brown, testified about the aftermath of the shooting at a supermarket in May that killed 10 people and left three injured.
Since the shooting, the city has spent more than $500,000 on “police, fire, sanitation [and] other municipal services,” Brown told ABC News, in addition to the financial impact on businesses, families of the victims and survivors, and other unexpected costs. Last month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a $50 million investment earmarked for East Buffalo, where the shooting occurred.
Brown spoke with ABC News about the emotional and financial impact of the shooting in Buffalo, which he says has not received any federal support yet, the reopening of Tops supermarket and how the community has responded in the wake of what law enforcement authorities called racially-motivated violence.
GMA3: Welcome back to GMA3, everybody. Buffalo, New York, Texas, an elementary school there, a Fourth of July parade in Illinois. You know what I’m talking about here. We’re talking about the series of mass shootings we’ve seen. They continue, it seems, in this country, and it profoundly affects the communities in which they occur. And last week, a congressional subcommittee hearing addressed not only the devastating loss of life from these events, but the long-term economic impact these communities often suffer. Want to bring in now somebody who testified at the hearing, Buffalo, New York, Mayor Byron Brown. Mr. Mayor, thank you so much for being here. And I know that some numbers we can get into, statistics and whatnot, but I just want to start with you speaking from the heart for a second. Just how is your community doing?
BROWN: You know, it has been very painful for our community. People are in trauma. We are healing, wrapping our arms around each other and doing everything that we can to get through this most painful time in our community.
GMA3: Mr. Mayor, can you tell me, I saw that you spent almost half a million dollars that you didn’t expect to spend in the immediate weeks after the shooting. That just has to do with vital services that were needed, overtime for many of your folks in the community, your police officers, your fire department. Are you getting what you need? I know the federal government often promises and wants to be there to help, but are you getting those types of resources and financial resources that you need in your community right now?
BROWN: We’re having those conversations. We haven’t gotten any financial resources from the federal government at this point. I’ve sent the message that I believe strongly that communities that experienced mass shootings there should be federal financial support; in this case an act of domestic terrorism fueled by racism and white supremacy. The impact has been very devastating to this community financially. May 14, when the shooting occurred and in the two weeks thereafter, the city spent over half a million dollars – police, fire, sanitation, other municipal services. And that price tag has continued to grow ever since.
And so the economic impact is a significant one, not only on the municipality un-budgeted costs, but on the families, on the survivors, on the surrounding community, and on businesses in the community around the Tops supermarket.
GMA3: Mr. Mayor, have you gotten a commitment that that money is coming?
BROWN: The federal government has been very responsive. President Biden has been here in Buffalo. Vice President Harris has been here. The Attorney General, Merrick Garland, has been to Buffalo. We’ve had several meetings in Washington.
And it is my hope that the federal government will step up, will see the pressing need in this community and financially will support the needs of residents, families of victims, survivors of the shooting and the city itself.
GMA3: We talked about [the fact] that the Tops grocery store, the supermarket, was such a vital part of the community. It was one of a few grocery stores that serve so many people in that area. And the subcommittee did hear testimony about property values going down and business activity going down in cities in areas where there have been mass shootings. How has that community begun to recover in that aspect? Is it back to being a place that is bustling? I know the supermarket has reopened.
BROWN: The supermarket reopened July 15. Every day since the supermarket has reopened, the parking lot has been full. A strong message that hate will not win, that the love in the community will conquer hate. People are showing that they want the supermarket to be open, that they need the supermarket and that they’re willing to come back to the supermarket.
Obviously, some people [feel] uncomfortable to come back to that location because of the horrible tragedy. Ten people killed, three wounded. We’ve partnered with a company called Instacart to expand at-home delivery from the supermarket and to expand grocery pick-up at the supermarket. So we are doing everything that we can to not let those alarming statistics of the horrible impacts of mass shootings take hold in the Buffalo community.
As I said, people are rallying around each other. There have been food distributions, concerts, marches, rallies, everything that we can think of to keep the community together and send a message to the nation and to the world that evil will not win, that hate will not win, and that white supremacy will not win.
GMA3: Mr. Mayor, you said two things there that jumped out at me. Keep the community together, and they’ve been rallying around each other. But how can you take this moment and again, when you talk about unity in moments like this, I know you’re tired of hearing it, but Buffalo has historically been for a long time one of the most racially segregated cities in this country. And there are brown and Black communities there that have long suffered. How can you take this moment now and do something? And how can you do something to bridge that divide and division in your community? Because a lot will argue that your community was targeted in the first place because of that segregation. The shooter actually looked up a place where there was a high percentage of African-Americans. It ended up in your community.
BROWN: The shooter attacked Black Buffalo. But many people that we’ve heard from all across the country feel like this was an attack on Black America because the goal of this racist white supremacist shooter was to kill as many Black people as possible. And so this could have occurred anywhere in the country, anywhere in the state where there was a high concentration of Black people.
So we have to focus on defeating white supremacy, making it impossible for white supremacy to proliferate. But our goal now is to build back East Buffalo, the Black community of Buffalo, the city of Buffalo, better and stronger than ever before, to hopefully get resources from the federal government, from our state government.
Gov. Kathy Hochul has already committed over $50 million to East Buffalo. And so we will use those resources and work with the community to invest heavily to make this community better, stronger and more united than it has been previously.
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Bob Rafelson, the director, producer and writer best known for co-creating The Monkees TV series and helming the 1970 film Five Easy Pieces, “died peacefully, surrounded by his family” Saturday evening at his home in Aspen, Colorado, his former personal assistant, Jolene Wolff, tells Variety.
In 1965, Rafelson teamed up with fellow aspiring filmmaker Bert Schneider — who died in 2011 — to form the Raybert Productions company, whose first project was a comedy show that followed a fabricated rock group seemingly modeled on The Beatles. The series, which ran from 1966 to 1968, was initially a huge success, as were several of the albums that the band created for the show released.
In 1968, Rafelson directed and co-wrote, with Jack Nicholson, the movie Head, which starred The Monkees. Raybert Productions also produced the classic 1969 counterculture film Easy Rider.
Rafelson directed, co-wrote and co-produced Five Easy Pieces, which starred Nicholson and scored four Oscar nominations.
Rafelson also co-wrote and/or directed a number of other films starring Nicholson, including 1972’s The King of Marvin Gardens and 1981’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.
In addition, he directed the music video for Lionel Richie‘s 1983 hit “All Night Long (All Night).”
Monkees member Micky Dolenz paid homage to Rafelson in a Facebook post that reads in part, “One day in the spring of 1966, I cut my classes in architecture at LA Trade Tech to take an audition for a new TV show called, The Monkees … Needless-to-say, I got the part and it completely altered my life…Regrettably, Bob passed away last night after a long illness but I did get a chance to send him a message telling him how eternally grateful I was that he saw something in me.”
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Eddie Vedder‘s Ohana Encore, the companion weekend to the Pearl Jam frontman’s Ohana Festival, has been canceled.
No official announcement was made, but the Ohana website no longer lists the Encore event. Additionally, the festival’s FAQ section states that tickets that have been purchased for Ohana Encore will be automatically refunded.
According to Spin.com, ticketholders received an email saying that Ohana Encore was canceled due to “circumstances beyond our control.”
Ohana Encore was set to take place October 8-9 in Dana Point, California, and was to have featured headlining performances by Vedder and Alanis Morissette on the first day, and The Black Keys and HAIM on the second.
Ohana Festival, meanwhile, will be held in Dana Point from September 30 to October 2, and will include performances by Vedder, Stevie Nicks, Pink, founding Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell and his current group The Dirty Knobs, Jack White, St. Vincent and Brittany Howard.
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(WASHINGTON) — The former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence appeared last week before a federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Marc Short was caught by an ABC News camera departing D.C. District Court on Friday alongside his attorney, Emmet Flood.
Short appeared under subpoena, sources said.
Short would be the highest-ranking Trump White House official known to have appeared before the grand jury.
Short declined to comment to ABC News. His attorney did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office also declined to comment.
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The late night show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee has been canceled at TBS after seven seasons.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Emmy-winning series won’t be coming back after wrapping its last episode on June 23.
“Bee made television history in the late night space, paving the way for female voices in what has traditionally been, and continues to be a male dominated landscape,” Bee’s reps said in a statement obtained by THR. “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee consistently broke barriers with Sam and her team boldly using political satire to entertain, inform and empower viewers, while embracing critically underrepresented stories, particularly about women.”
Full Frontal is the latest casualty on the TNets – TBS, TNT and TruTV – following the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery.
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(NEW YORK) — Pope Francis offered a long-sought apology to the Indigenous community in Canada on Monday over the Catholic church’s role in the generational abuse they suffered at Indigenous residential schools for nearly 150 years.
The schools were operated for decades by churches and the federal government of Canada to force assimilation.
“I am here because the first step of my penitential pilgrimage among you is that of again asking forgiveness, of telling you once more that I am deeply sorry,” Francis said. “Sorry for the ways in which, regrettably, many Christians supported the colonizing mentality of the powers that oppressed the Indigenous peoples.”
“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” he added.
Beginning in the 1800s, thousands of Indigenous children from Canada were taken from their homes and families and placed into so-called residential schools aimed at ridding the children from ties to their Native communities, language and culture. Some of the schools were run by the Catholic church, where missionaries participated in the policies of forced assimilation and abuse.
Upon his arrival in Edmonton, the capital city of the Canadian province of Alberta, Pope Francis was greeted on Sunday at the airport by First Nations, Metis and Inuit leaders, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mary Simon, who is Canada’s first Indigenous governor general.
Francis met with residential school survivors on Monday near the site of a former residential school in Maskwacis in central Alberta.
Francis said that an apology is only a “starting point” and acknowledged that some in the Indigenous community have called for further action to address the injustice of the boarding school legacy.
“Dear brothers and sisters, many of you and your representatives have stated that begging pardon is not the end of the matter. I fully agree: that is only the first step, the starting point,” Francis said. “An important part of this process will be to conduct a serious investigation into the facts of what took place in the past and to assist the survivors of the residential schools to experience healing from the traumas they suffered.”
Chief Tony Alexis of the Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation, who had called for Pope Francis to deliver an in-person apology on behalf of the church, told ABC News’ Marcus Moore that Francis’ visit is “a validation of what has happened with the church and how they’ve hurt and abused our people.”
Ahead of his historic seven-day trip to Canada, Pope Francis asked for prayers to accompany him on what he called a “penitential pilgrimage” and offered an apology to Native communities for the Catholic church’s role in the abuse.
“Unfortunately, in Canada, many Christians, including some members of religious institutions, contributed to the policies of cultural assimilation, that, in the past, gravely damaged, in various ways, the Native communities,” Francis said in a July 17 address delivered from the Apostolic Palace to the public in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, according to The Associated Press.
“For this reason, recently, at the Vatican, I received several groups, representatives of Indigenous peoples, to whom I manifested by sorrow and my solidarity for the evil they have suffered,″ Francis added.
According to a 2015 report released by Canada’s National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, Indigenous residential schools were an integral part of the Canadian government’s “conscious policy of cultural genocide,” where children were disconnected from their families, punished for speaking their Native languages and some faced physical and sexual abuse.
“The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources. If every Aboriginal person had been ‘absorbed into the body politic,’ there would be no reserves, no Treaties, and no Aboriginal rights,” according to the report.
Reflecting on the generational trauma that was inflicted on Indigenous communities, Alexis recalled a conversation with a survivor who told him, “The only thing I learned in the residential school was how to hate myself.”
The pope’s visit comes a year after nearly 1,000 sets of human remains were found at the cemetery of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan in western Canada and at the former St. Eugene’s Mission School for Indigenous children in Aqam, a community in British Colombia. It is unclear how many total students died at residential boarding schools and what their causes of death were.
After the graves were discovered in Canada, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland — the first Native American to hold a Cabinet position — launched a probe in June 2021 into the U.S. government’s own role in funding Indian boarding schools as part of an effort to dispossess Indigenous people of their land to expand the United States.
The probe’s initial findings were outlined in a May report that found more than 500 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died over the course of 150 years in Indigenous boarding schools run by the American government and churches.
Native Nations scholars estimate that almost 40,000 children have died at Indigenous boarding schools. According to the federal report, the Interior Department “expects that continued investigation will reveal the approximate number of Indian children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”
Haaland, whose grandparents attended Indian boarding schools, now oversees the government agency that historically played a major role in the forced relocation and oppression of Indigenous people and said that her work is a chance to bring some healing to the community.
“I have a great obligation, but I was taught by my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother that when you are asked to do something for your people that you step up,” Haaland told “Nightline” in an interview earlier this year.
ABC News’ Christine Theodorou, Kiara Alfonseca and Tenzin Shakya contributed to this report.
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