National Geographic and Disney+ have announced that the fourth installment of its Emmy-nominated series Genius will tell the story of the iconic civil-rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and MalcolmX.
The announcement names A Different World writer Reggie Rock Bythewood and his wife, Gina Prince-Bythewood, as the show’s executive producers, and they say in a join statement, “Malcolm and Martin are staggering icons, and we have been eager to explore the genius of these two very real men in a way that has not yet been seen. We are excited to team up with Imagine Entertainment and 20th Television to reflect their amazing lives and contributions to civil rights and the urgency of today.”
In a first for the franchise, the new season will focus on both leaders’ pioneering accomplishments, their formative years, their contributions during the civil rights era and each of their different, yet necessary, approaches to the fight for the advancement for Black people in America.
Nat Geo premiered the series’ first installment, Genius: Einstein starring Geoffrey Rush, in 2017. That was followed by Genius: Picasso, featuring Antonio Banderas‘ portrayal of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. The third installment, Genius: Aretha, starred Cynthia Erivo as Aretha Franklin, and its premiere was the most-watched telecast for National Geographic in two years.
The fourth installment, Genius: MLK/X, and subsequent seasons,will move from Nat Geo to the series’ new home on Disney+.
Earlier this month, Police drummer Stewart Copeland was honored with a Grammy for Best New Age Album for Divine Tides, a 2021 collaborative project he recorded with Indian-music composer Ricky Kej.
It was Copeland’s sixth career Grammy, but his first for a recording project not involving his famous band.
“I am the boss of New Age!” the 69-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Famer jokingly boasts to ABC Audio.
“I can finally tick that box,” he declares. “I mean, how many rock drummers…in fact, technically, it could be argued that I am a punk rock drummer, since that story started out in ’77…[So,] punk rock drummer wins New Age Grammy…That’s cool.”
Copeland notes that he’d first worked with Kej a few years ago on another project, and Ricky then reached out and asked if he’d like to play percussion on his new album.
“[H]e started sending me these…tracks that he was…assembling,” Stewart recalls. “And I just was immediately inflamed by the beauty of his melodies and the mix that he was creating, so I started miking up all my crotales, timbales, whatchamacallits and thingamajigs, and started aggressing upon inanimate objects here [in my studio]…and kind of created a rhythmic envelope for all of the beautiful melodies that he was assembling.”
Divine Tides is just one of Copeland’s many recent non-rock projects. This Saturday, Satan’s Fall, an oratorio Stewart composed based on John Milton‘s Paradise Lost that first debuted in 2020, will get its West Coast premiere at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.
A Satan’s Fall also is scheduled for May 8 in Minneapolis with VocalEssence, which, Copeland notes, are “one of the premier choirs in the nation.”
Visit StewartCopeland.net to check out what else is on Copeland’s upcoming schedule.
The new Starz series Gaslit, debuting Sunday, hopes to shine a lot more light on the lives of the major players in the Watergate scandal. Series creator Robbie Pickering tells ABC Audio he wanted to explore the humanity, and motivations, of those who were involved in the break-in that brought down Richard Nixon.
“The villains were a lot more relatable and warm and kind of bumbling than you think. And the heroes were also, they were more complex and bumbling and selfish than they’ve been portrayed,” says Pickerling. “And I really wasn’t interested in telling a story about the events of Watergate, as much as the emotional messes that went into this scandal and that actually go into all these scandals.”
Gaslit‘s cast of characters include Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell and his wife Martha, played respectively by Sean Penn and Julia Roberts. British actor Dan Stevens plays former White House lawyer John Dean and tells ABC Audio he learned a lot from the series.
“I didn’t know who Martha Mitchell was, didn’t know much about [Dean’s wife Mo], didn’t know much about Frank Wills, the guard to who uncovered it all,” he admits. “And so a lot of these characters are given the chance to shine in this version. And yeah, it was a real education.”
The Downton Abbey star says even though the film deals with something that happened 50 years ago, the massage still rings true today.
“This kind of level of corruption on any scale and the spectrum of personality types that are kind of drawn to this kind of misdemeanor in an effort to gain power, to stay with power, you know, to creep ever closer to the inner circle kind of applies to any administration in any era,” he explains.
(NEW YORK) — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” into neighboring Ukraine began on Feb. 24, with Russian forces invading from Belarus, to the north, and Russia, to the east. Ukrainian troops have offered “stiff resistance,” according to U.S. officials.
Russian forces have since retreated from northern Ukraine, leaving behind a trail of death and destruction. The United States and many European countries accused Russia of committing war crimes after graphic images emerged of dead civilians in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv. The Russian military has now launched a full-scale ground offensive in eastern Ukraine’s disputed Donbas region, as it attempts to capture the strategic port city of Mariupol and secure a coastal corridor to the Moscow-annexed Crimean Peninsula.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Apr 21, 5:13 am
Putin cancels Mariupol plant attack, orders site blocked off
Russian President Vladimir Putin canceled his military’s attack on a Mariupol steel plant, one of the last areas in the port city held by Ukrainian forces, ordering his troops to instead seal all exit routes from the sprawling plant.
“I consider the proposed assault on the industrial zone impractical,” Putin told Sergei Shoigu, his defense minister, during a meeting televised on Thursday by Russian state media, according to a translation of the Kremlin’s official transcript.
The Mariupol city council claimed Tuesday that there are at least 1,000 civilians, mostly women with children and the elderly, seeking shelter in the Azovstal Steel and Iron Works plant. It was unclear how many Ukrainian troops were defending the site.
Putin in the televised meeting ordered his troops to “block” the industrial zone. He repeated the claim that Moscow would let troops leave unharmed if they lay down their weapons and surrender.
“There is no need to climb into these catacombs and crawl underground on these industrial facilities,” Putin said. “Block this industrial area so that the fly does not fly.”
Apr 20, 4:37 pm
Delegations walk out on Russian official
During a G20 meeting of economic and finance ministers on Wednesday, delegations from several countries, including U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, walked out of the room while Russia’s delegate began his remarks, the White House confirmed.
Canada’s Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland, tweeted a photo of several officials, including herself, Yellen, U.S. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde, outside of the meeting room, standing in solidarity with Ukrainian Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko.
“It’s an indication of the fact that President Putin and Russia has become a pariah on the global stage,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.
The Treasury also unveiled new sanctions Wednesday against dozens of Russian and Belarusian people and institutions, including a key commercial bank and a virtual currency mining company.
“This is part of our stepped-up effort to crack down on those attempting to evade our unprecedented sanctions,” Psaki said.
The State Department has also imposed visa restrictions on over 600 Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainian separatists backed by the Kremlin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.
Apr 20, 3:59 pm
UN chief seeks peace talks with Putin, Zelenskyy
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres wrote separate letters to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday asking to meet “to discuss urgent steps to bring about peace in Ukraine,” a UN spokesperson said on Wednesday.
Mykhailo Podoliak, adviser to the head of the president’s office, tweeted that Ukraine is ready to hold a special round of negotiations in Mariupol.
Apr 20, 3:25 pm
Thousands more Russians enter Donbas: US official
Four more Russian battalions, each made up of roughly 800 to 1,000 troops, have crossed into Ukraine over the last 24 hours, a senior U.S. defense official said Wednesday. Three of those battalions — or up to 3,000 troops — moved to the disputed Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, the official said.
Four flights carrying military aid, including artillery, from the Biden administration’s most recent $800 million package arrived in Ukraine over the last 24 hours, the official said. More supplies are set to arrive over the next day, the official said.
When ABC News asked why the U.S. decided to send artillery, the official responded: “We’re mindful of the importance of artillery in the fight that they’re in right now and in the fighting in the days to come because of the terrain, and because of what we think they’re going to be up against with Russian forces.”
Another reason was “the fact that it wouldn’t require an onerous amount of training for the Ukrainians to know how to use them” and the ability to ship them quickly, according to the official.
Apr 20, 2:12 pm
Humanitarian corridor from Mariupol didn’t work as planned Wednesday
Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Wednesday’s humanitarian corridor from Mariupol didn’t work as planned but evacuation efforts will continue Thursday morning.
“Due to the lack of control over their own military on the ground, the occupiers were unable to ensure a proper ceasefire,” Vereshchuk said in a statement.
There also wasn’t “timely transportation of people to the point where dozens of our buses and ambulances were waiting,” Vereshchuk said.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Wednesday’s sports events:
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
INTERLEAGUE
Tampa Bay 8, Chi Cubs 2
AMERICAN LEAGUE
Cleveland 11, Chi White Sox 1
Cleveland 2, Chi White Sox 1
Baltimore 1, Oakland 0
NY Yankees 5, Detroit 3
LA Angels 6, Houston 0
Toronto 6, Boston 1
Kansas City 2, Minnesota 0
Seattle 4, Texas 2
NATIONAL LEAGUE
Milwaukee 4, Pittsburgh 2
LA Dodgers 5, Atlanta 1
Philadelphia 9, Colorado 6
San Diego 6, Cincinnati 0
St. Louis 2, Miami 0
Arizona 11, Washington 2
San Francisco 5, NY Mets 2
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION PLAYOFFS
Boston 114, Brooklyn 107
Philadelphia 104, Toronto 101 (OT)
Chi 114, Milwaukee 110
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE
Edmonton 5, Dallas 2
Seattle 3, Colorado 2
Chi 4, Arizona 3 (OT)
Vegas 4, Washington 3 (OT)
(NEW YORK) — Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Dwayne Haskins was walking on a Florida highway to get gas before he was fatally struck by a dump truck earlier this month, his wife apparently told a dispatcher in newly released 911 calls.
Haskins, 24, was walking on the westbound side of Interstate 595 in Fort Lauderdale on the morning of April 9 when he collided with an oncoming dump truck, according to Florida Highway Patrol. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday released the 911 calls regarding the incident, including from a caller who said she was his wife, Kalabrya Haskins.
“I’m calling because my husband is stuck on the side of the highway,” his wife told the dispatcher. “He had to go walking to get gas and he said he was returning to the car on the highway.”
She said she was in Pittsburgh and had been unable to get ahold of her husband so was asking to see if someone could go check on him.
“That’s just not like him, for him not to call me back,” she said, after giving the dispatcher his approximate location.
The dispatcher responded, “I don’t want you to panic, but I’m going to be honest with you — we do have an incident on the highway, but I can’t confirm if that’s your husband or not.”
The dispatcher said there was an accident and that rescue and state troopers were currently there. She took down his wife’s contact information and told her to stay by her phone for a possible update.
Authorities also released 911 calls made by several distraught witnesses who said they saw a man get hit by a dump truck on I-595. Other callers reported seeing a body on the highway. Several callers said they were coming from the nearby Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
Haskins was walking on the westbound side of I-595 and entered the travel lanes into the path of the dump truck in the center lane of the highway, according to the Florida Highway Patrol’s final accident report on the incident.
A second driver tried to avoid him, but the second car also came in contact with Haskins, according to the report, which was released Wednesday.
There were no distractions or vision issues on the part of the two drivers, the report stated.
A witness told authorities a third car may have been involved, but no information was provided beyond the color of the vehicle.
Haskins was in Florida training with other Steelers players at the time, according to ESPN.
A “public celebration of life” is planned for Haskins in Pittsburgh on Friday, his family announced.
“I want to thank everyone for their continuous outpour of kindness and love for my husband during this extremely difficult time,” Kalabrya Haskins said in a statement on the plans.
During the service at the Allegheny Center Alliance Church in Pittsburgh, “his legacy will be honored with stories told from teammates, coaches, friends, family and loved ones,” she said.
(CHICAGO) — Chicago’s top prosecutor announced Wednesday that her office completed its Cannabis Expungement Project with over 15,000 cannabis convictions removed from the record.
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said that her office has complied with Illinois’ new cannabis rules that took effect two years ago after the substance was legalized.
Foxx said in a statement that the expunges have brought relief to thousands of people.
“Felony charges can affect every aspect of a person’s life, from jobs to housing, long after the debt to society has been paid,” she said in a statement.
Foxx filed her first 100 motions to vacate cannabis related offenses in December 2019 and has presented more motions since.
On Friday, she will present 214 additional cannabis expungement requests, bringing the total to 15,191, according to her office.
There are 588 remaining cannabis cases in the system that date back as far as 1965, however, the state attorney’s office said it will require additional time for research and data to expunge those records.
(NEW YORK) — Growing concerns over cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the United States are prompting record investments from firms to protect critical industries.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said last month that intelligence officials were “concerned” about the possibility of Russian cyberattacks against critical U.S. infrastructure in the wake of Russia’s war with Ukraine.
“The reason we’re concerned about it is not just based on our longstanding understanding of how the Russians operate, but it’s actually the product of specific investigative work and surveillance work that we’ve been doing all together,” Wray told an audience at the Detroit Economic Club in March.
Wray’s comments came a few weeks before Tuesday’s announcement that Goldman Sachs planned to expand its reach in supply chain cybersecurity, investing $125 million in a strategic partnership with a company that serves energy, government and aerospace and defense accounts.
Nikhil Gupta, a professor with New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, who is affiliated with the NYU Center for Cyber Security, told ABC News the investment was part of a growing trend.
Over the past year, several private investment firms have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in cybersecurity. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital spent $525 million to acquire mobile security vendor Zimperium last month; Turn/River Capital acquired security policy management firm Tufin for $570 million earlier this month; and software security giant McAfee sold its Enterprise business to Symphony Technology Group for $4 billion dollars in March 2021.
Gupta noted that “more than 70% of manufacturing is conducted by actually small and medium-sized companies, and these companies don’t have resources to invest in upgrading their computers or, or implementing cybersecurity solutions.”
He added, “A lot of times they are manufacturing companies and they just don’t have expertise to even understand the value of electronic files which are transmitted to them.”
Goldman Sachs billed its $125 million investment as part of a new strategic venture with Fortress Information Security, a company responsible for securing 40% of the U.S. power grid, as well as assets in critical manufacturing and the nation’s defense industries.
Fortress is seen by industry insiders as one of the nation’s leading cybersecurity providers for critical infrastructure organizations with digitized assets. The company says its platform is focused on allowing customers to manage their outside vendors, assets and software as a part of their supply chains. The firm also maintains a central repository of security information shared by utility companies across the country.
“The depth and breadth of the Fortress platform are unmatched and we believe there is a meaningful opportunity to accelerate,” Will Chen, a managing director for asset management at Goldman Sachs, said in a statement about the new venture.
Chen noted Goldman Sachs’ investment will allow Fortress to expand its platform into “product adjacencies, including software and hardware bill of materials, workflow orchestration, and additional analytics and reporting capabilities.”
Gupta, the NYU professor, said the hefty investment was a start and “this investment should not be just one time.”
“No amount of investment is enough, and you can look at the attacks that’s happening and the targets that you have to save like nuclear power plants, and the supply chain for other kinds of manufacturing goods, which goes into billions of dollars,” he said.
Fortress Chief Operating Officer Betsy Soehren Jones told ABC News that the company’s “biggest risk right now is with small and midsize companies in the United States because they don’t think about cyber the same way that they think about a CPA or hiring a law firm or HR or anything else.”
“This can’t not be part of what they spend money on, but they don’t and so they become the biggest targets because of the information that they have,” she added.
Retired Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, a senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told ABC News “the big issue is that we are vulnerable.”
“We know we’re going to be compromised. The question is, can we mitigate the impact of it and recover from it rapidly? That’s where investments are needed. That’s why investments like this one contribute to improve cybersecurity,” Montgomery said.
In recent years, the number of cyberattacks — specifically ransomware attacks — against the government and private companies have increased, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last year at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event.
One of the biggest vulnerabilities is linked to a commonly used piece of software called Log4j, a utility that runs in the background of many commonly used software applications, according to Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Log4j is widely used across the internet — from cell phones to e-commerce to internet-connected devices in homes and offices.
“This vulnerability, which is being widely exploited by a growing set of threat actors, presents an urgent challenge to network defenders given its broad use,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said in a statement in December.
Soehren Jones says the Goldman Sachs investment will allow them to address these types of vulnerabilities faster.
“The speed at which you answer these things is so critical. That’s what this is going to do…it’s going to be able to put us on warp speed when it comes to a response,” Soehren Jones said.
With the investment, Fortress said it plans to double in size in a year, growing to 400 employees.
(ORLANDO) — The Florida Department of Health has released new guidance reaffirming its stance against gender-affirming care for transgender youth, following similar efforts by several other Republican-led states across the country.
The agency slammed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which recently stated its commitment to “supporting and protecting” transgender youth, their families and caretakers.
“The federal government’s medical establishment releasing guidance failing at the most basic level of academic rigor shows that this was never about health care,” said Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.
He claimed the HHS’ move to protect gender-affirming care was about “injecting political ideology into the health of our children.”
Sarah Lovenheim, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, slammed the decision.
“HHS stands with transgender and gender non-conforming youth and their families — and the significant majority of expert medical association — in unequivocally stating that gender-affirming care for minors, when medically appropriate and necessary, improves their physical and mental health,” she said in a statement.
In March, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra announced actions the department was taking to protect the decisions of families with LGBTQ youth following a move from Texas leaders that declared gender-affirming care “child abuse.”
“At HHS, we listen to medical experts and doctors, and they agree with us, that access to affirming care for transgender youth is essential and can be life-saving,” Becerra said in a statement.
HHS issued guidance that gender-affirming care for minors, when medically appropriate and necessary, improves their physical and mental health.
“Attempts to restrict, challenge, or falsely characterize this potentially lifesaving care as abuse is dangerous,” the HHS stated in its guidance.
It continued, “Such attempts block parents from making critical health care decisions for their children, create a chilling effect on health care providers who are necessary to provide care for these youth, and ultimately negatively impact the health and well-being of transgender and gender-nonconforming.”
The Florida DOH says social gender transition should not be an option for children or adolescents and people under 18 should not be prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy.
It also says gender reassignment surgery should not be a treatment option for children or adolescents.
Instead, the department recommends social support and counseling for transgender students.
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
The state agency argued that the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments can cause a lapse in brain development or cause cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, infertility, increased cancer risk and thrombosis.
This argument has been debunked by several physicians who spoke to ABC News, who say these potential side effects only present real risks after puberty has already occurred and are not a risk to youth taking puberty blockers.
They also assert that adolescents are not being given physical gender reassignment surgeries.
LGBTQ advocates quickly denounced Florida’s move.
“Decades of evidence demonstrates that affirming transgender and nonbinary youth in their identities contributes to positive mental health outcomes and can reduce the risk for suicide,” said Sam Ames, the director of advocacy and government affairs at LGBTQ suicide prevention organization The Trevor Project.
“This is appalling. Governor DeSantis and the Florida Department of Health should be doing everything they can to support all kids, rather than playing politics with their lives,” LGBTQ media advocacy organization GLAAD said in a statement. “All major medical associations support gender-affirming care for trans youth. Denying kids live-saving, medically necessary, gender-affirming care is downright dangerous.”
Fans of Britney Spears will be forever grateful to Mathew Rosengart for helping Britney extricate herself from her conservatorship last year. But other celebrities also appreciate Rosengart’s work on their behalf, and on Wednesday, one of them gave him an award at a ceremony in Beverly Hills.
Rosengart’s longtime client Sean Penn presented Rosengart with Variety‘s Power of Law Award, and in his speech, Penn specifically highlighted the attorney’s work for Britney, which resulted in her being freed from her the restrictions placed on her for 13 years.
“By extracting a young woman named Britney Spears from a disturbingly antiquated conservatorship, he did much more than inspire the memes of fans in finding justice for this high-profile client,” Penn said, adding, “For those of us who have Matt on our side, we all feel we were the only fight on his card. He’s extraordinary.”
In his acceptance speech, Rosengart said it was when a friend praised him for his work with Britney — telling him, “You have changed somebody’s life at a time when law is under siege” — that he realized being a lawyer “really is a high calling,” adding, “It’s an honor to do the job.”
Penn’s ex-wife Madonna also happens to be a big Britney supporter, even suggesting earlier this year that she’d like to do a joint stadium tour with the younger star.
![The Police’s Stewart Copeland says he thinks it’s cool that a “punk rock drummer [won a] New Age Grammy”](https://s3.amazonaws.com/syndication.abcaudio.com/files/2022-04-20/Getty_StewartCopeland630_atGrammy_042022.jpg "The Police’s Stewart Copeland says he thinks it’s cool that a “punk rock drummer [won a] New Age Grammy”")
