The first installment, is titled Live from The Summit, Houston, TX, 1977, and features footage from a two-night stand that the rock legends played at the Houston venue in June ’77 during their Draw the Line Tour. The film, which has been digitized from the original analog tape and remastered in HD, will be viewable for one week after its premiere.
As previously reported, the five-part series will offer a new archival “official bootleg” concert film featuring never-before-seen footage debut weekly for five weeks. Each flick captures Aerosmith during a different decade and features shows filmed by multiple cameras.
One day after each film premieres, highlight clips from the respective movies also will be added to Aerosmith’s YouTube channel.
In conjunction with the 50 Years Live! series, Aerosmith has launched a contest at Tunespeak.com offering fans who watch the films each week a chance to win two tickets to the band’s 50th anniversary concert at Boston’s Fenway Park on September 8. Those who enter also will have the opportunity to win an Aerosmith t-shirt.
Here’s the complete schedule of the 50 Years Live!: From the Aerosmith Vaults series:
7/29 — Live from the Summit, Houston, TX, 1977 (Draw the Line Tour)
8/5 — Live from the Capital Centre, Landover, MD, 1989 (Pump Tour)
8/12 — Live from the Coca-Cola Star Lake Amphitheatre, Pittsburgh, PA, 1993 (Get a Grip Tour)
8/19 — Live from Comerica Park, Detroit, MI, 2003 (Rocksimus Maximus Tour)
8/26 — Live from Arena Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico City, 2016 (Rock ‘n’ Roll Rumble Tour)
(NEW YORK) — At least 16 people have been killed amid devastating flooding in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear said Friday, and he expects that number to “get a lot higher.”
Among those killed was an 81-year-old woman, according to the governor.
On Thursday, Beshear called it “one of the worst, most devastating” floods in the state’s history, and said he anticipates this will be one of the deadliest floods in Kentucky in “a very long time.”
A flash flood emergency was issued in Kentucky late Wednesday as 2 to 5 inches of rain pounded the Bluegrass State.
As of Friday morning, central and eastern Kentucky remain under a flood watch, according to Beshear. An additional 2 to 4 inches of rain is expected in eastern Kentucky through Monday.
For some areas, the water will not crest until Saturday, the governor said.
“While rain totals are not expected to be as high, flooding still remains a concern due to saturated grounds,” the governor tweeted.
The state is combating washed out roads, destroyed homes and flooded schools, according to Beshear.
“Hundreds” have been rescued by boat and many people remain stranded, Beshear said Friday.
Hundreds of residents are expected to lose their homes and it’ll likely take families years to recover and rebuild, he said.
Three of Kentucky’s state parks are being opened to people who have lost their homes, according to the governor.
President Joe Biden on Friday approved a disaster declaration for Kentucky.
Craig Hudson for The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Despite Wednesday’s news of a potential billion-dollar Senate climate deal, environmental activists still appeared at Thursday night’s annual Congressional Baseball Game in the hope that President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats will follow through on their climate promises, though at a much smaller scale than anticipated.
U.S. Capitol Police and Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department said earlier this week that they were aware of potentially hundreds of protesters and would have an increased presence in the area of Nationals Park, where the century-old charity event is taking place.
The climate activists want Democrats to immediately pass the newly announced energy investments — brokered, per a late Wednesday announcement, between West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as part of another spending bill via reconciliation — and for Biden to declare a climate emergency.
The protest was planned as anger mounted against Manchin, one of the most conservative Democrats in the 50-50 Senate who earlier this month seemingly closed the door on climate negotiations in the next spending package, saying he could not support the environmental provisions of Democrats’ bill because of historic inflation.
“Hopeful that both actions can be taken swiftly, activists will continue pushing until Democrats’ climate promises are signed, sealed, and delivered,” Now Or Never, the group of climate organizations organizing Thursday’s protest, said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, a Now Or Never member, said the group was “very surprised” at the successful climate negotiations.
“We didn’t anticipate that announcement to happen at that hour,” Quentin Scott told ABC News. “We’re very encouraged by what the Senate and President Biden announced last night, and we support those negotiations. And so far, the text looks pretty solid, but not perfect.”
Scott and Chesapeake Climate Action Network decided a few hours before the baseball game that they would not be protesting. Another Now Or Never spokesperson said the demonstration would be “significantly different” after the announcement of climate provisions advancing in the spending bill.
On Wednesday, more than 300 people had registered to attend the protest. Upwards of 75 were seen gathered after the start of the game.
“We have decided not to protest tonight’s Congressional Baseball Game. Congressional leaders have declared they intend to meet many of our climate and justice demands, so we’ll be attending the game tonight just to urge Congress to seal the deal and to ask Joe Biden to still declare a climate emergency,” Chesapeake Climate Action Network Director Mike Tidwell said in a statement.
If passed, the Manchin and Schumer agreement, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, would be perhaps the largest clean energy package in U.S. history. Senate Democrats hope to approve it before the August recess begins next week — a daunting time-crunch, given other pressures.
The climate bill, which also includes major health care and corporate tax provisions, would spend about $370 billion for climate and energy programs over the next 10 years, such as using tax credits to incentivize consumers to buy electric cars, fund the domestic manufacturing of batteries and solar panels and allocate spending for other environmental initiatives.
“We’re really happy with this $60 billion in environmental justice priorities. We’re really happy with the $9 billion … rebates for homes. And we’re also very happy with the tax credits for used and new electric vehicles,” said Scott, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network spokesperson. “But,” he added, “we also recognize the things that are not perfect about the deal, we’re going to continue to fight.”
Thursday’s event organizers had warned that if Congress did not act on climate legislation by Sept. 30, they were planning a separate, “highly disruptive, mass direct action that fundamentally disrupts business-as-usual in D.C.”
“If Congress passes the deal that they announced yesterday, then it’s very unlikely that we will go ahead with a future action. But we also reserve the right to come back if somehow this deal falls apart and actually carry through those escalated actions,” Scott told ABC news.
District police said in a statement they were aware of potential protests and would have an increased presence in the area “to ensure the safety and security of the event.”
U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger wrote on Twitter on Wednesday that his officers had a “robust security plan in place” for the game.
“We are aware that demonstrators are planning to protest political issues at the Congressional Baseball Game for Charity. Our mission is to protect the Members of Congress during this family event, so we have a robust security plan in place,” Manger wrote.
“We urge anyone who is thinking about causing trouble at the charity game to stay home,” he wrote. “We will not tolerate violence or any unlawful behavior during this family event.”
Thursday’s demonstration also comes after the arrest of six congressional staff members for sitting in the office of Senate Majority Leader Schumer, urging him to keep negotiating on the climate provisions that were later revived with Manchin.
“Our first demand was to reopen climate negotiations which were considered dead for July — and they did!” he said. “So it is a big big win, now we need to fight to improve the policy and fight to pass it.”
The Congressional Baseball Game is a bipartisan tradition dating back to 1909, with proceeds supporting D.C.-area charities. The annual game has been under threat before. In 2017, at a practice for Republican lawmakers, then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., and Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner were shot.
(LAS VEGAS) — Flash flood warnings are in effect Friday in Las Vegas after strong winds, lightning and heavy downpours struck overnight, flooding roads across Sin City.
Some people were seen getting rescued from their cars.
This flooding comes during the heart of monsoon season. Sometimes desert areas in the Southwest can see all of their annual rain in just a few days.
But Las Vegas has been even drier than usual, leaving the parched soil to act like concrete during a night of heavy rainfall.
Jimmie Allen is reminding his followers that you can’t always gauge someone’s mental health by what they post online.
On Twitter, the singer posted a PSA explaining the importance of reaching out to the people they love. “Check in on your friends,” he wrote. “Social media is not a way to find out how people are doing. People are really struggling, it has just gotten easier to hide it.”
Jimmie has long been open about his own mental health challenges, sharing that he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 13 and that he also struggles with anxiety. His latest album, Tulip Drive, contains a song called “Settle On Back” that describes his experience with bipolar disorder and also shares memories of his dad.
“When my dad was alive, he was the person that could always pull me back,” Jimmie shared when his album came out. “A lot of people with mental issues has one person in their life that they have the strong connection with.”
Jimmie also recently participated in ACM Lifting Lives’ mental health series, The Check-In.
(LONDON) — When Roe v. Wade was overturned in June, Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician who has made a reputation for providing abortion services overseas in countries that restrict reproductive rights, saw a huge increase in emails from the U.S.
“When the draft of the decision leaked, we already saw a huge increase in the amount of requests for the service indicating that people were really scared and panicking,” she told ABC News. “But I think what is more important is what I feel is that the enormous fear that we hear in the voices of the women or the parents.”
Though she is licensed in Austria, in 2018 Gomperts founded Aid Access, a team of doctors and advocates that work with counterparts in the U.S. to provide abortion medication and information, and has continued to work despite a Food and Drug Administration request to cease their activity. Medication abortions done at home involve patients taking a regimen of two drugs — mifepristone and misoprostol — which are approved by the FDA to end pregnancy up to 10 weeks.
Before Roe v. Wade was overturned, Aid Access would receive around 400 emails per day from the U.S. On June 24 — the day the landmark ruling was struck down in the Supreme Court — they received 4,000 emails, a record for the organization, and now comfortably see 1,000 emails per day, two-and-a-half times more interest than before the draft leak, Gomperts said.
“I’ve been working in this field like creating different possibilities with different laws for more than 20 years,” Gomperts told ABC News. “But this service specifically, it’s under my Austrian doctors license and in Austria it’s allowed to provide abortion services or to write prescriptions for medication abortion up till 14 weeks of pregnancy. The conditions under which I do it are also allowed. Which is telemedicine.”
The legal position of such services in states that have banned abortion is unclear. In December of last year, the FDA permanently lifted restrictions allowing mifepristone to be delivered by mail.
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, part of the confusion lies in states passing multiple laws that have overlapped, but states could go further in criminalizing people who obtain abortion pills in online pharmacies. The confusion, Gomperts said, has already led to cases where the authorities have misapplied the law.
Already providing for women in states with restrictive laws, Aid Access has also been used by those who cannot afford in-clinic care. One study from the University of Texas found that requests increased ten-fold after the legislature banned abortion after six weeks. But while data is still being collected on telemedical services post-Roe, all the indications are that requests for the service will be significantly higher.
Telehealth services such as Aid Access, operating in part outside of the jurisdiction of states where abortion is banned, could now be one of the few ways to end pregnancies in post-Roe America.
One trend that Gomperts has noticed is the uncertainty surrounding the laws themselves, with women fearful that they, rather than providers and those who aid them, could be liable for prosecution.
Aid Access has explored a way to potentially circumvent the strict laws in parts of the U.S. by administering abortion medication for future use — essentially as a preventative measure for women who can access the pills when they need it from their own medicine cabinets.
“Time and time again, medication abortion has been scientifically proven to be a safe and effective method to terminate a pregnancy,” Nimra Chowdhry, senior state legislative counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights Abortion, told ABC News. “Abortion restrictions flagrantly disregard people’s health and put people and providers at risk of punishment just for accessing and providing essential health care. We have started to see more and more states target the use of medication abortion because they recognize that medication abortion is safe, effective, and in-demand. People should not have to live in a state of fear when obtaining or providing abortion care including medication abortion.”
One U.S. study into the safety and effectiveness of self-managed medication abortions provided by Aid Access found that 96% of people self-reported they were able to end their pregnancies using the pills alone after consulting with online telemedicine. These are numbers, according to one of the study’s authors, Abigail Aiken, that are on par with what can be expected in a clinical setting.
In her work, Gomperts has found that obstacles to abortion services, and not abortions themselves, have proved most traumatic. One of the fundamental misconceptions about abortion, she said, is that it is treated as an “exception,” rather than one “part of our reproductive lives.”
“The discourse around trauma is something that is created by society,” she said. “It’s not based on our experience of the stories of women. They experience the trauma because their access to the abortion has been taken away and restricted.”
(WASHINGTON) — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for the first time publicly addressed critics of his landmark opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, using a speech in Italy to make light of Britain’s Prince Harry and other foreign figures who have lamented the rollback of U.S. protections for abortion.
“What really wounded me, what really wounded me, was when the Duke of Sussex addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare the decision — whose name may not be spoken — with the Russian attack on Ukraine,” Alito said in a sarcastic tone. The decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, was released last month.
Prince Harry had referenced “the rolling back of constitutional rights here in the U.S.” as well as war in Ukraine as examples of why 2022 is “a painful year in a painful decade,” during a speech July 18 in New York.
Alito also made light of commentary from outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“I had the honor this term of writing I think the only Supreme Court decision in the history of that institution that has been lambasted by a whole string of foreign leaders who felt perfectly fine commenting on American law,” he said. “One of these was former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but he paid the price.”
Alito appeared to reference Johnson’s recent resignation after a series of scandals in office.
The justice’s comments came during a speech July 21 in Rome at a conference on religious liberty hosted by the University of Notre Dame Law School. The appearance was not previously announced by the Court; video of the speech was posted online Thursday.
“It is hard to convince people that religious liberty is worth defending if they don’t think that religion is a good thing that deserves protection,” Alito told the audience. “The challenge for those who want to protect religious liberty in the United States, Europe, and other similar places is to convince people who are not religious that religious liberty is worth special protection. That will not be easy to do.”
The Court’s conservative majority delivered significant victories for religious liberty in the most recent term, affirming the right of a public school football coach to pray among students at the 50-yard line; allow a civic group to raise a Christian flag on Boston City Hall flag pole; and permit Maine families to utilize taxpayer-funded tuition credits for religious schools.
Those decisions, along with major rulings on gun rights, climate policy and immigration, thrust the justices to the center of a divisive and highly-partisan public debate.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the most senior liberal and third woman justice, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the most junior conservative and 5th woman justice, held a rare public conversation Thursday night in what appeared to be at least partly a bid toward lowering the temperature of debate.
“We like each other. We really do,” Barrett said of her relationship with Sotomayor and her other colleagues. “As is often joked, this is like a marriage. We have life tenure and we get along.”
“Fundamentally, they are good people,” Sotomayor said of her colleagues.
The pair, appearing together for the first time, spoke as part of the Reagan Institute’s Summit on Education in a session moderated by Yale Law professor Akhil Reed Amar. The theme of the event was “An Educated Citizenry.”
“To the extent we can maintain a tone,” Barrett said, “I think that in itself has an educative function on civics.”
Neither addressed any of the decisions of the past term, even obliquely; but they did lament public misunderstanding of the court and demonization of its members.
“For me, democracy means an informed group of people,” Sotomayor said, “because without being informed, you really can’t know how to shape, how to live with others.”
Organizers of the event said the conversation was pre-taped several weeks ago but aired Thursday for the first time.
A woman who accused Bob Dylan of sexually abusing her when she was a minor dropped her lawsuit on Thursday, following accusations that she destroyed key evidence.
The lawsuit alleged that Dylan — born Robert Allen Zimmerman — abused the woman over a six-week period in 1965 when she was 12 years old, saying the legendary singer-songwriter left her “emotionally scarred and psychologically damaged.” Dylan’s lawyers dismissed the accusations as “false, malicious, reckless and defamatory” and a “brazen shakedown masquerading as a lawsuit,” according to Billboard.
At a hearing on Thursday, however, the plaintiff — identified only as J.C. — suddenly asked the federal judge overseeing the case to dismiss it “with prejudice,” meaning the suit cannot cannot be refiled, Billboard reports. The move came after the plaintiff was accused of deleting text messages and emails and was threatened with monetary sanctions.
“This case is over. It is outrageous that it was ever brought in the first place,” Dylan’s lead attorney, Orin Snyder, said in a statement obtained by Billboard. “We are pleased that the plaintiff has dropped this lawyer-driven sham and that the case has been dismissed with prejudice.”
(NEW YORK) — At least 15 people have been killed amid devastating flooding in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear said Friday, and he said he expects the death toll to “more than double.”
The fatalities will likely include children, the governor said on CNN.
Among those killed was an 81-year-old woman, according to the governor.
On Thursday, Beshear called it “one of the worst, most devastating” floods in the state’s history, and said he anticipates this will be one of the deadliest floods in Kentucky in “a very long time.”
A flash flood emergency was issued in Kentucky late Wednesday as 2 to 5 inches of rain pounded the Bluegrass State.
As of Friday morning, central and eastern Kentucky remain under a flood watch, according to Beshear. An additional 2 to 4 inches of rain is expected in eastern Kentucky through Monday.
For some areas, the water will not crest until Saturday, the governor said.
“While rain totals are not expected to be as high, flooding still remains a concern due to saturated grounds,” the governor tweeted.
The state is combating washed out roads, destroyed homes and flooded schools, according to Beshear.
“Hundreds” have been rescued by boat and many people remain stranded, Beshear said Friday.
Hundreds of residents are expected to lose their homes and it’ll likely take families years to recover and rebuild, he said.
Three of Kentucky’s state parks are being opened to people who have lost their homes, according to the governor.
President Joe Biden on Friday approved a disaster declaration for Kentucky.
ABC News’ Alexandra Faul, Kenton Gewecke and Morgan Winsor contributed to this report.
Selena Gomez is feeling super thankful in the wake of her 30th birthday.
The Only Murders in the Building star, who hit the milestone birthday on July 22, shared a video on TikTok on Thursday to say “thank you to every person that wished me a happy birthday.”
“I got to see some of your messages,” she continued. “I don’t read a lot of comments, but the few that I read were really, really sweet and I just want you to know that I don’t take that for granted.”
The pop star also showed gratitude for those who donated to the Rare Impact Fund, a charitable organization that aims to “to increase access to mental health services in educational settings,” according to its site.
Selena closed out the minute-long clip with continued thanks as tears welled in her eyes, telling fans, “And I just wanted to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for being in my life, for growing up with me — for putting up with me.”
