As previously reported, this year’s Commonwealth Games will run from July 28 to August 8 in Birmingham, U.K, UB40’s hometown. The group collaborated with local rappers Dapz on the Map and Gilly G on the song, whichmarks the debut of the group’s new frontman, Matt Doyle. The track also features a horn line from founding UB40 sax player Brian Travers, who died of cancer last year.
The “Champion” video was directed by award-winning filmmaker and Birmingham native Daniel Alexander. The clip features footage of UB40 and the guest rappers performing on a Birmingham rooftop, mixed with scenes of athletes competing in various sports. The song boasts an inspiring message encouraging people to strive to always do their best.
“Champion” also celebrates the Commonwealth Games being held in England for the first time in 20 years. The event is an international multiple-sport competition, held every four years, that features athletes from countries that are part of the Commonwealth of Nations.
“We are proud to be representing the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games with the official anthem ‘Champion,'” says UB40 guitarist Robin Campbell. “Birmingham represents the best of global Britain and it’s our pleasure to showcase this to the world. Birmingham is a city of champions!”
The song is the first single from UB40’s forthcoming studio album, UB45, which is due out in early 2023 and will feature new original songs as well as updated versions of some of the group’s classic hits and fan favorites.
Meanwhile, the band kicks off a new U.S. tour on August 18 in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Emmy and Oscar winner Kate Winslet is staying with her Mare of Easttown studio, HBO, for a limited series called The Palace.
The show “tells the story of one year within the walls of the palace of an authoritarian regime as it begins to unravel,” according to the network.
Interestingly, HBO points out that Winslet and fellow Brit Stephen Frears, her director on the project, have never worked together until now. Frears recently called the shots on the acclaimed A Very British Scandal and directed films like Dangerous Liasons and High Fidelity.
Winslet has a strong working relationship with the network; As reported, she’s also starring in and executive producing the limited series Trust, based on Hernan Diaz‘s novel of the same name.
Here’s wishing a very Happy Birthday to Mick Jagger, who still has us rocking at age 79.
In celebration of Jagger’s big day, his bandmates Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood both posted birthday messages to him on their social media sites.
In his post, Richards wrote, “Dear Mick, what a trip!! Happy Birthday! Love, Keith” and accompanied the note with two photos of him and Jagger together — one from the 1960s and the other, a recent pic of them onstage.
Wood, meanwhile, simply wrote, “Happy birthday @MickJagger!” followed by several birthday-appropriate emojis. Ronnie also posted photos of him with Mick as well as pics of two portraits he painted of the singer.
The Rolling Stones’ official Twitter feed also features a message for the frontman that reads, “Join us in wishing the one and only @mickjagger a very happy birthday today! Happy birthday Mick!” along with a vintage black-and-white pic of Jagger onstage as confetti falls down around him.
The Rolling Stones have three shows left on their current European tour leg, with the next concert taking place tomorrow, July 27 in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.
Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford says that he felt “a bit pissed” about the band’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the Musical Excellence Award instead of in the main Performers category.
In an interview with the Arizona Republic, Halford admits that he goes back and forth regarding whether the distinction“matters.”
“Some days, I go, ‘No, it doesn’t matter. We’re in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Be grateful. Shut the hell up,'” the metal icon says. “Then there are other days where I’m like…’Why did they give us the Musical Excellence Award?'”
“I’m like, ‘Yeah, but I want to be with that bunch of musicians over there that have got the performance or whatever it is that they’ve got,'” he continues. “I don’t know why they gave us the Musical Excellence Award. I have no clue.”
The Musical Excellence Award, which has been given out since 2000, is gifted to musicians, songwriters and producers in recognition of their “originality and influence creating music have had a dramatic impact on music.” Meanwhile, the Performer category, which often makes the headlines, honors artists who’ve “created music whose originality, impact, and influence has changed the course of rock & roll.”
Halford notes that when Black Sabbath was inducted into the Rock Hall in 2006, the group went in as Performers.
“Why do they put these tags on the damn thing?” Halford wonders. “Why don’t they go, ‘Welcome. You’re in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’ and leave it at that.”
Speaking to ABC Audio earlier this year, Halford said he “quite like[d] the idea of the ‘musical excellence.'” Meanwhile, Rock Hall president and CEO Greg Harris told ABC Audio that all inductees — Performer, Musical Excellence or otherwise — are “equal.”
(NEW YORK) — There are now at least 3,846 monkeypox cases confirmed in the U.S., according to updated numbers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The virus is firmly on the radar of American health officials after the World Health Organization declared it a global health emergency over the weekend.
Most positive cases have been among men having sex with men, but there are women among the infected, and a few children, as well.
Andy Slavitt, the former senior adviser of the Biden administration’s coronavirus response team, told ABC News’ “START HERE” that he is concerned the outbreak is being dismissed as a “gay disease.”
Slavitt reiterated that monkeypox is spread by skin-to-skin contact and limiting one’s conception of who can get the disease leads to unfair discrimination.
“It would be wrong to assume that we’re going to contain this by telling people to have less sex. I don’t think that’s going to work,” he told “START HERE.”
Jonathan Araujo, of Miami, contracted the virus this month and spoke with “START HERE” Tuesday. Araujo spoke about his symptoms and the stigma he faced when he told his friends and family about his diagnosis.
START HERE: Jonathan, first of all, how are you feeling?
JONATHAN ARAUJO: Right now, I’m way better. I did like a full 360. I was really having a really tough time battling monkeypox in the beginning. It was really like mentally taxing just as much as physically.
There were kind of all just like open wounds at one point. And I had so many of them, you know, I had at least I want to say, at least 30 of them on me at one time. So, it was painful.
START HERE: Can you walk me through what it was like? Like do you know when you got it?
ARAUJO: On July 4, I was working normal. Everything was fine. And I was going out clubbing with my friends, you know, celebrating July Fourth weekend. And I went out to this club, which is where I believe I got it. [There were] the little hairs in the back of my neck just telling me that night something was not right.
The very next day, I got a fever, and then I had the fever for two days. Then I got chills, and then the chills and the third day went away. By the fourth day, I was breaking out on my forehead and on my back really bad. I had all these little pimples. That’s what they looked like to me. They were like very small little pimples at first. The fifth day, which was now July 7 or July 8, I had one on my lip.
START HERE: Like it’s spreading.
ARAUJO: Yeah. I’m not just breaking out. I’m not just sick with a random fever for two days, and now I have chills and I have headaches and body pains. It just didn’t make sense, and I knew something was wrong.
So I went to the clinic and I thought, OK, maybe I have an STD or something’s wrong. And so I went to the clinic, and when I went to go get tested and treated, the doctor immediately looked at me and he was like, “I don’t think you have an STD, I’m not saying you don’t have any, but by looking at you, I think you have monkeypox.” And I was just like, “What? I think monkeypox. I was like, ‘Are you sure?'”
START HERE: Had you heard of it before that? Like, do you know what that was at that point?
ARAUJO: I was very ignorant to the situation. I’m going to be honest with you, I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t think that I would get it, and I didn’t really pay too much [attention] to it .
I knew what it was and [that] it was going around, but I was just like, it will not happen to me. And yeah, boom, it sure did happen to me.
The lesions and the sores, they weren’t huge. They got really big and they progressed rapidly. They turned into these big zits, but you couldn’t pop them, they wouldn’t burst, even if I tried to squeeze them.
They would sting randomly, like they would feel like jolts of pain. They would be dull for the most part, but then out of nowhere I would get a strike in one of them or in some of them, and then they would burn or itch. If I mess with them, or if I touch them, or if I laid the wrong way, it really felt like someone took a match and was setting fire to my skin at some point.
I had some on my elbows, so every time I move my arm it would burn or I would itch. The one I have on my hand currently itches a lot.
START HERE: You have one right now that’s still itching?
ARAUJO: Yeah. It’s on the palm of my hand. So it flexes and it’s constantly like being touched by something.
START HERE: Does the pain continue on for like days, for weeks? Do you feel like you’re sort of past the worst of the symptoms?
ARAUJO: Yeah, I’m definitely past the worst of the symptoms. In the beginning, the pain was, on a one to 10 [scale], it was like at to eight or nine half the time.
After I left the clinic, I went to the emergency room because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t have a PCP. So I went to emergency room and then I told them, “I think I have monkeypox.” And when they looked at me, they were like in shock that I had monkeypox. Like, they didn’t even know.
START HERE: You’re like the first guy they’ve been dealing with to say this?
ARAUJO: Yeah, they were like, “You think you have monkeypox?” And she pulled out this paper and she was looking at the paper and looking at me. When I looked over like desk to see what she was looking at she was looking at pictures of what monkeypox looked like to see if it matched because she didn’t know. And so they put me into an emergency room I think within maybe 10 minutes. That is the fastest I’ve ever been put into an emergency room ever.
START HERE: And if that’s the reaction from doctors, what’s it like from other people around you?
ARAUJO: A lot of people were very like surprised. They were like, this is real. It was a shock. It was it was like a reality check to a lot of people. Even a lot of people in my family, they were like, “You have what?”
I even had some people would be like, “What is that?” They were like, “I didn’t even know this was a thing.”
I don’t want to segregate groups, but it was predominantly straight people, heterosexuals, that didn’t know what monkeypox was. I hate that it was that way because it was like, you can, anyone can get this.
START HERE: Which is concerning, right, if you’ve got people treating this like an STD passed between people in sexual situations, and it’s not necessarily that.
ARAUJO: No, absolutely not. I didn’t get it from having sex. I got it from going out, and partying and doing normal day-to-day things. I didn’t get it from having sex. I got all my test results back with all my other studies, and I came back negative for everything.
I didn’t have sex for maybe a month or three weeks, almost a month before I got sick. So, I definitely didn’t get it from having sex.
I’m sure it’s possible that you can get it from having sex, but that is not the only way to get it, and that’s where the stigma lies, is that people think it’s just an STD. No, you can get it if you touch one of my sores and then touch your face, it passes just like that because of the infection.
START HERE: Yeah really alarming when you see, not just how quickly it’s spreading, but that it’s spreading kind of faster than people are being educated about it, which is why you’re now shouting from the rooftops. We should note though that [there are] no American deaths from monkeypox yet. Thanks a lot for sharing your experience Jonathan.
(MARIPOSA COUNTY, Calif.) — A bone-dry environment combined with scorching temperatures and ample fuel — all consequences of climate change — is what allowed the Oak Fire to spread so rapidly from the moment of ignition, scientists tell ABC News.
The Oak Fire spread to more than 15,000 acres within two days of it sparking in Mariposa County near Yosemite National Park in California, destroying structures and prompting evacuations of nearby residents. After the weekend, the wildfire unfurled at a less rapid pace — accumulating to more than 18,000 acres by Tuesday afternoon.
But the conditions that allowed the fire to detonate at such swift speeds remain, and are just a spark away from wreaking more havoc on the region.
A heat wave that brought triple-digit temperatures for multiple days in succession combined with extremely low humidity contributed to extremely dry fuels, consisting of dead leaves and trees, that accumulated on the ground and allowed the Oak Fire to advance, Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science at Stanford University, told ABC News.
“Right as [the Oak Fire] started, there was a period of very, very low relative humidity levels in California,” Burke said. “And I think that really contributed to drying out fuels and making this just a combustible scenario in which fires are gonna spread quickly.”
The humidity hovered between 5% and 10% at the time the Oak Fire gained traction, according to Cal Fire. The dry fuel, leftover from a mass tree fatality event from 2012 to 2016, as well as insect damage to the remaining trees, helped take the Oak Fire from “seasonal levels” to “astronomical levels,” John Abatzoglou, a climate scientist and associate professor of the management of complex systems at the University of California at Merced, told ABC News.
In addition, the rugged terrain is making it difficult for the firefighters to access the land to create fire breaks, Kristina Dahl, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ABC News.
When the fire began, it “grew in all directions” and unusually, without the help of a high wind event, Burke said. While fires tend to grow uphill, this Oak Fire spread both uphill and downhill, making it less predictable and harder to contain, Dahl said.
Ironically, the growth of the Oak Fire began to slow on Monday as it started to run into fire scars from previous large fires, including the Ferguson Fire, which burned in the same region in 2018, Burke said.
That slowdown is further proof that fire management, including the prescribed burns that were put out of practice for more than a century, are integral to preventing large wildfires from occurring — especially as climate change conditions continue to warm the planet and create scenarios for devastating wildfires to wreak havoc on communities and nature, Dahl said.
“This ecosystem, which really is a fire-dependent ecosystem, hasn’t been able to experience these lower-intensity burns that would have cleared out some of the smaller vegetation,” Dahl said. “So we have this buildup of fuel, and we have these drought conditions that really dry out that vegetation. So that’s enabling this fire behavior to get much more extreme.”
The current atmospheric conditions exacerbated the effects of a 22-year megadrought that is continuing to intensify in the West and is beginning to spread eastward. California saw the driest start to the calendar year in recorded history, since 1895, Abatzoglou said.
“When you combine those things, that creates this set of conditions in which really rapid growth of fires is favored,” Dahl said.
The wildfire caused California Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency for Mariposa County.
The Oak Fire sparked as the National Park Service planned to reopen the southern entrance of Yosemite as firefighters gained traction on containing the Washburn Fire — the wildfire that had been threatening the park’s iconic grove of giant sequoia trees in the weeks prior.
Thousands of firefighters had contained 26% of the Oak Fire by Tuesday morning, according to Cal Fire. An expected increase in humidity should also help to temper the wildfire.
California had a “benign” month of fire activity in June that turned into a “scorcher” in July, Abatzoglou said. Because of the relatively low fire activity, the state had the resources to devote to the Oak Fire to get it under control as quickly as possible, he added.
Climate change is expected to make wildfires worse around California and the globe, Dahl said.
“We know that climate change is increasing the area that burns during fires. It’s increasing the length of fire season. It’s contributing to extreme drought conditions out here in the West that then cause the vegetation to dry out so that it’s really just a tinderbox out here,” Dal said. “So as climate change progresses, we anticipate fires like this one to continue to happen with greater frequency and burn larger areas.”
ABC News’ Meredith Deliso and Bill Hutchinson contributed to this report.
On Tuesday, A24 Films tweeted a first look at a nearly unrecognizable Brendan Fraser as the main character in Requiem for a Dream director Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale.
The adaptation of the award-winning Samuel D. Hunter play has the former Mummy series star playing a morbidly obese teacher who tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter.
To Newsweek last year, Fraser teased the project is “gonna be like something you haven’t seen before. That’s really all I can tell you.”
He added of his appearance, which has been enhanced with prosthetics, “The wardrobe and costume was extensive, seamless, cumbersome.”
“I do know it’s going to make a lasting impression,” he expressed.
Fraser has been on the comeback trail of late, with a role as the baddie in the upcoming Batgirl movie and a role in Steven Soderbergh‘s No Sudden Move.
The career change comes after years of self-imposed exile following a divorce and the sexual abuse he told GQ he suffered in 2003 at the hands of former Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Philip Berk. Berk denied the accusations.
For their part, Fraser’s fans are all about the comeback. “Get that man an Oscar now!” one replied to The Whale photo.
Former President Barack Obama has unveiled the 2022 edition of his annual summer playlist.
Among the songs by veteran artists that made in onto the 44-track list are Obama pal Bruce Springsteen‘s “Dancing in the Dark,” Joe Cocker‘s “Feelin’ Alright” and Dr. John‘s “More Than You Know.
“Every year, I get excited to share my summer playlist because I learn about so many new artists from your replies,” Obama says in a post on his social media sites. “It’s an example of how music really can bring us all together.”
The eclectic playlist also includes songs by Prince, Jack White, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Miles Davis, Beyoncé, Lyle Lovett, The Spinners, Drake with Rihanna, Nina Simone, Dave Brubeck, Fatboy Slim, Kendrick Lamar, Kacey Musgraves, Harry Styles and Maren Morris.
Former President Barack Obama has unveiled the 2022 edition of his annual summer playlist.
Among the 44 songs that made the cut are Obama pal Bruce Springsteen‘s “Dancing in the Dark” as well as tunes by several other veteran artists, including Prince‘s “Let’s Go Crazy,” Otis Redding‘s “I’ve Been Loving You,” Joe Cocker‘s “Feelin’ Alright” and The Spinners‘ “Mighty Love.”
“Every year, I get excited to share my summer playlist because I learn about so many new artists from your replies,” Obama says in a post on his social media sites. “It’s an example of how music really can bring us all together.”
The eclectic playlist also includes songs by Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Dr. John, Miles Davis, Beyoncé, Lyle Lovett, Drake with Rihanna, Jack White, Nina Simone, Dave Brubeck, Kendrick Lamar, Kacey Musgraves, Harry Styles and Maren Morris.
L-R: Marvel Studios’ Victoria Alonso, Destin Daniel Cretton, Kevin Feige/Marvel Studios
ABC Audio has confirmed that Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed the Marvel Studios hit Shang-Chi: The Legend of the Ten Rings, will take the reins on the just-announced Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.
The film, destined to be the first part of a two-part saga, was announced by Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige as part of the studio’s presentation at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday.
Cretton, who was also backing a Wonder Man series bound for Disney+, will now get behind the camera for the first Kang film, set for a theatrical debut on May 2, 2025.
The second film, which Variety says won’t be shot back-to-back in the way Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame were — will be released Nov. 7, 2025.
Kang is a classic villain from the pages of Marvel Comics, debuting back in Avengers #8 in 1964.
More recently, a version of the baddie appeared in Loki, played by Jonathan Majors, who will reprise the role — albeit a different version of him because of the Multiverse — in 2023’s Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.
Marvel Studios is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News.
