L-R – Foster, Reis — ABC/Randy Holmes — Robert Smith/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
HBO has announced the Emmy-winning series True Detective is returning for a fourth frame as True Detective: Night Country, with Jodie Foster starring and producing.
Acclaimed newcomer Kali Reis — who is a motivational speaker and advocate for Indigenous women — will co-star with the two-time Oscar winner for the series, which will be shot in Iceland.
The network teases, “When the long winter night falls in Ennis, Alaska, the six men that operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station vanish without a trace. To solve the case, Detectives Liz Danvers [Foster] and Evangeline Navarro [Reis] will have to confront the darkness they carry in themselves, and dig into the haunted truths that lie buried under the eternal ice.”
Mexican producer, writer and film director Issa López will be the show’s writer-director and showrunner, in addition to executive producer alongside Foster.
Lizzo credits the one and only Beyoncé for inspiring her to become the artist she is now.
The Grammy winner was the latest guest on The Late Late Show with James Cordenand joined him for some “Carpool Karaoke.” Between the two belting out Lizzo’s “Juice,” “About Damn Time,” “Good as Hell,” “Truth Hurts,” and “Special,” Corden got the singer to open up about her origins.
Lizzo wasn’t shy about her feelings for Beyoncé, whose infamous alter ego inspired the name of her flute: “Sasha Floot.” “When I was shyer, when I didn’t think I was cool and when I was getting picked on, I would listen to Beyoncé in my bedroom and it would transport me. I would feel something. Feel like my life was going to be better…Like there’s hope for me,” Lizzo explained.
“When I dropped out of college and I was really depressed, I listened to B’Day on repeat and I would just sing B’Day all the time. And I was like, ‘I’m gonna be a singer,'” she revealed. “The way she makes people feel is how I wanna make people feel with music. She’s been my North Star.”
Lizzo has yet to meet her icon in person, which prompted Corden to play a prank on her that almost made her cry. The British host pretended he had Beyoncé’s number and offered to call her.
“You almost got me, you b****,” Lizzo remarked while fanning away her tears. The two then threw themselves into a performance of Bey’s “Crazy in Love.”
Just three episodes into the first season of its new Jeff Bridges-led thriller series, The Old Man, FX has announced it wants more.
Based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Thomas Perry, The Old Man has Oscar winner Bridges playingDan Chase, a former CIA operative who emerges from a life off the grid when an assassin comes to kill him.
The series also stars Emmy winner John Lithgow as Harper, an FBI chief determined to bring Chase down, and NYPD Blue vet Amy Brenneman as Zoe, a woman whose present becomes tangled with the hunted man’s past.
The drama became the most-watched cable series premiere on premium and basic cable when it launched on June 16 and was also the most-watched FX series debut on Hulu in its opening weekend.
In its announcement, Karey Burke, president of 20th Television, noted, “This terrific series has had a long journey to the air, which makes the reaction from critics and audiences these past few weeks all the sweeter…”
The seven-episode first season continues Thursday at 10 p.m. ET on FX and streams the following day on Hulu.
Maren Morris‘ pre-show routine is packed with fun activities!
The superstar took to TikTok to give fans an inside look at what life is like on the road, particularly what her day looks like before the takes the stage. Maren begins the day with a peaceful yoga session with her crew “to get our bodies moving,” she says in a voice-over.
While the crew sets up the stage, she heads into soundcheck while 2-year-old son Hayes plays in a kiddie pool beside the stage.
But perhaps the most unique activity on the road is that of pickleball, which Maren confesses they’re all “obsessed” with. The video includes footage of her playing with the paddle and ball while her friend dons a terrycloth outfit and whistle.
Saturday nights are when the real party starts: the team indulges in vodka and gin martinis, putting together special blends titled “the classic bi***” for gin and “the basic bi***” for vodka, along with some glasses of rosé.
Before she hits the stage, Maren and the band do a spirited chant, ending the night by signing autographs for fans out by the bus.
“Pre-show life is almost as fun as the show out here…,” Maren says in the caption.
“The Bones” singer continues on her Humble Quest Tour through the end of October, with a closing date at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena on December 2.
Pearl Jam has announced the Tour Edition of the band’s latest album, Gigaton.
The expanded set includes a bonus disc featuring live versions of nearly every song off the original album, recorded during PJ’s festival shows in 2021.
Gigaton (Tour Edition) will be released July 8 and is available to preorder now.
The original Gigaton was released in March 2020 and marked the first Pearl Jam album in seven years. The band’s planned headlining tour, which was postponed from 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, finally launched this year, though the U.S. leg was cut short after both drummer Matt Cameron and bassist Jeff Ament tested positive for COVID-19.
Pearl Jam is currently on tour in Europe and will return to North America for a round of U.S. and Canadian dates in September.
The EP will be made available for the first-time ever as a standalone CD, and also will be released on cassette and as a vinyl picture disc. Chronic Town‘s co-producer, Mitch Easter, has written new liner notes for the reissue.
Released on August 24, 1982, Chronic Town arrived about a year after R.E.M.’s debut single, “Radio Free Europe,” and preceded the band’s classic 1983 debut studio album, Murmur.
“One might fancifully say that Chronic Town was the sound of an expedition, ready for anything, setting forth,” says Easter about the EP. “If R.E.M. ‘Radio Free Europe’ single was a signpost, the Chronic Town EP was the atlas.”
The EP included the early gems “Wolves, Lower,” “Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars)” and “1,000,000,” and features singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry coming together to create the jangly “College Rock” sound that has influenced so many other artists over the years.
You can preorder the Chronic Town reissue now. Here’s the full track list:
“Wolves, Lower”
“Gardening at Night”
“Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars)”
“1,000,000”
“Stumble”
The official teaser trailer for Hocus Pocus 2 is out now.
Fans get a glimpse of Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy and Bette Midler back in action as the Sanderson sisters in the preview for the upcoming live-action comedy.
Hocus Pocus 2 follows three girls who, “accidentally bring the Sanderson Sisters back to modern-day Salem and must figure out how to stop the child-hungry witches from wreaking a new kind of havoc on the world.”
The famous trio of witches appears near the end of the trailer as Midler’s famous character, Winifred Sanderson, yells, “Lock up your children! Yes, Salem, we’re back!”
Fans got a first look at Parker, Najimy and Midler reprising their roles for the upcoming film last November.
After teasing that her new song, “Hot S***,” is coming on Friday, Cardi B revealed she’s enlisted two collaborators on the track.
The song will feature Lil Durk and Kanye West, Cardi shared in a social media post Monday night.
She also unveiled what appeared to be the single’s cover art, featuring her lounging in the back of a car wearing chrome shades with matching metallic bra and stiletto heels.
The announcement comes ahead of Cardi’s long-awaited sophomore album, the follow up to 2018’s Invasion of Privacy. She’s since released a string of collaborations including 2020’s Megan Thee Stallion-assisted “WAP,” a verse on Lizzo‘s “Rumors,” and the remix to Summer Walker and SZA‘s “No Love.”
John Wreford/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
(CAIRO, Egypt) — Ekhlas Helmy, 88, has spent decades waking up every morning to the scenery of the Nile flowing seamlessly beneath her houseboat, a stationary house moored to the banks of the famous river in Cairo.
But the aging woman, who inherited her house ages ago, now faces eviction after the Egyptian government gave her what she and other houseboat owners described as a short-notice order to evacuate, citing failure to pay license fees and several other reasons.
The Nile houseboats are entrenched in Cairo’s history. Some date back to the early 20th century and hold significant historic value.
“How can we simply wipe out our history?” Helmy told ABC News, her voice cracking. “I was born in the Nile and I lived my entire life here.”
Government officials say the houseboats are dilapidated and cause pollution, reasons which the owners believe are a mere pretext to take them down and make room for other commercial buildings, such as restaurants and cafes, which already straddle big chunks of the river.
More than two dozen houseboats stationed on the banks of the Nile in the working-class neighborhood of Imbaba, a Greater Cairo district, face the imminent threat of being demolished. Five of the 29 houseboats, which are situated opposite the upscale island of Zamalek, were towed away on Monday.
The rest are expected to face the same fate on July 5, as the government presses ahead with a “restructuring plan,” the details of which it has not specified.
Ayman Nour, the head of the General Administration for Nile Protection in Greater Cairo — a government body responsible for removing any encroachments on the river — told MBC, a Saudi-owned television channel, that a government decision was made in 2020 to ban the registration of any residential houseboats.
If owners would like to stay put, they will have to turn their licenses into commercial ones, according to Nour, and thus pay far higher fees.
Owners said obstacles had been thrown their way in recent years, including a decision to increase the fees they pay 20-fold and the “inexplicable” refusal of authorities to accept money from them. While the houseboats are private properties, owners have to pay rental fees for the land and the docks to which they are tied up.
“When I married, I moved with my husband to an apartment in Zamalek. But when he died, I sold it and returned to my houseboat 30 years ago,” Helmy said. “I couldn’t live on my own in Zamalek. In the houseboat, there are people around you. There is warmth.”
Historic value
The wooden structures are featured in many classic black-and-white movies. In one famous novel, “Adrift on the Nile,” written by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz in 1966, a group of people gather every night in a houseboat to smoke hash — symbolizing the deterioration of society during the era of President Gamal Abdel-Nasser. It was adapted into a 1971 film Chitchat on the Nile.
A houseboat owned by late Egyptian actress and dancer Hekmat Fahmy housed two German Nazi spies in the early 1940s and another hosted government meetings during the reign of King Farouk I, from 1936 to 1952.
The houseboats used to number in the hundreds, but had sharply dwindled to a few dozens when they were moved from the Zamalek island to Imbaba in the mid-1960s. It was not until then that the residential houseboats were legalized.
“They never let us know that a decision had already been made [to evacuate us] two years ago,” award-winning novelist Ahdaf Soueif, who is one of the owners, told ABC News. “They didn’t give us a proper chance to argue and get any result. Even if we hadn’t got one, we would have at least been given a decent amount of notice to change our lives.”
“The presence of those houseboats is something beautiful for people passing by. We can have an open day where people can be let into the decks to experience life on a houseboat for one day,” she added, vowing to fight on.
Activists accuse the government of disregarding any historic and architectural heritage when it embarks on urban development. The government says it’s keen on preserving the material fabric of Egypt’s past and that such projects are necessary to accommodate the ever-growing population.
“Where would I go at this age?” Helmy, the 88-year-old woman, said. “This houseboat is my entire life. I’m an old woman who walks on crutches, where would I go?”
(NEW YORK) — A new study finds that as the coronavirus continues to evolve, each new omicron subvariant is increasingly likely to lead to reinfection or breakthrough infection. However, researchers say current vaccines are still doing a good job of protecting people against severe illness.
Meanwhile, vaccine makers are working on new and improved boosters that will hopefully be a better match against omicron and its subvariants. Food and Drug Administration advisers are slated to meet on June 28 to discuss the new booster shots.
The new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, echoes prior studies, and the finding is consistent with what we’re seeing in the real world. Working in a laboratory, researchers measured neutralizing antibody response against the original Wuhan variant, compared to the new omicron variant and many of its sub variants.
Antibody levels are one measure of immune response, and often used as a rough indication of a variant’s ability cause reinfection or breakthrough infection. Other parts of your immune system, like T-cells, are harder to measure but are a much better indicator of how well protected you are against severe disease.
Researchers found neutralizing antibody levels were six-fold lower against the original omicron variant, fourteen-fold lower against BA.2.12.1, and twenty-fold lower against BA.4/BA.5.
The BA.2.12.1 sub variant is currently dominant in the U.S., but the BA.4/BA.5 sub variants have been growing proportionally and now account for more than a third of estimated cases.
“It’s essentially an arms race,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, author on the recent study and director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “As the population becomes more immune, the virus becomes more and more immune evasive.”
The good news, said Barouch, is current vaccines are still working to dramatically reduce the risk of severe disease. “That’s the most important goal of vaccination.”
