The breezy bop references Yeti coolers, Ray-Bans and tiki bars, while paying tribute to the person in one’s life who puts all their worries at ease. “You put the blue back up in my sky/I’m the beach/You’re the breeze/Yeah you put me in my summer state of mind,” Lady A sings in the chorus.
Hillary Scott co-wrote the track with band mate Dave Haywood, along with Laura Veltz and Sam Ellis, in anticipation of summer. The trio debuted it during CMA Fest when they performed at Nissan Stadium, and can be heard when the CMA Fest special airs on ABC on August 3.
“When we got together and wrote this song a few months ago it almost started writing itself. We were all looking ahead to the warmer months and those easygoing moments that we enjoy most,” Hillary shares in a statement. “When we had a chance to perform the song for the first time during CMA Fest, the fans really got in the spirit. It was the perfect way to kick off the summer.”
Lady A’s Request Line Tour launches on August 13 with two shows at the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.
The long-defunct band has reunited after a 10-year hiatus to release a new song called “Blacklight Shine.”
In a statement, vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala describes “Blacklight Shine” as a reflection of “a wave of rolling blackouts washing memories onto shore, a heartbeat that still remembers everything.”
You can listen to “Blacklight Shine” now via digital outlets. The song is accompanied by an 11-minute short film, which is streaming now on YouTube.
“Blacklight Shine” arrives after The Mars Volta directed fans to a mysterious cube in Los Angeles’ Grand Park over the weekend, which allowed fans to hear a preview of the new song. A digital version of the instillation will be unveiled on July 1.
Along with the new music, The Mars Volta has announced a U.S. headlining tour, running from September 23 in Dallas to October 21 in Los Angeles. Tickets go on sale this Friday, June 24 at 10 a.m. local time.
Forget “Beverly Hills,” Broadway is where Weezer wants to be.
Rivers Cuomo and company have booked a five-date residency at New York City’s Broadway Theatre, taking place from September 13-18.
Each of the first four shows will be based on an installment of Weezer’s ongoing SZNZ project, a series of four, seasonally-themed EPs. The fifth and final show will then feature a set of songs from across all four SZNZ EPs, along with “Weezer fan favorites from the previous four nights,” a press release says.
Tickets go on sale this Friday, June 24 at 10 a.m. ET via the Broadway ticketing platform Telecharge.com.
The Broadway residency announcement coincides with Tuesday’s release of the second SZNZ EP, SZNZ: Summer, which, not coincidentally, arrives on the first day of summer. Weezer previewed the seven-track collection with a performance of the single “Records” on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! Monday night as part of their “seasonal residency” with the show.
You can listen to SZNZ: Summer now via digital outlets. SZNZ: Spring was released in March, while Autumn and Winter will drop on the first days of their respective seasons later this year.
It’s not only the Beyhive who’s patiently awaiting new music from Beyoncé!
The superstar’s mom, Tina Knowles-Lawson,is also looking forward to rocking out to her daughter’s new album, Renaissance.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, Knowles-Lawson, 68, raved about the project and teased what fans can expect come the album’s release on July 29.
“She put two years of love into this. Many, many nights [she spent] all night working,” she said of the rumored dance and country multipart album. “I can’t wait for the world to hear it.”
“I’m a fan too. I’m very, very excited,” Knowles-Lawson said. “I just posted recently that I really miss her singing, and I do. I’m as excited as everybody else. I can’t wait for you guys to hear it.”
Fans got a sample of what’s to come on the album when Beyoncé dropped the first single, “Break My Soul,” early Tuesday morning. News of the new song arrived a day prior on Monday when the Grammy-winning singer changed her Instagram and Twitter bios to reflect the single’s release date.
Renaissance will serve as Beyoncé’s seventh studio project and first solo album since Lemonade, six years ago in April 2016. Shortly after the news of the album broke last week, British Vogueshared photos of the star’s July cover issue, written by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Edward Enninful.
Detailing his experience listening to the album ahead of its release, Enninful describes it as, “Music that makes you rise, that turns your mind to cultures and subcultures, to our people past and present, music that will unite so many on the dance floor, music that touches your soul.”
(NEW YORK) — As millions of U.S. children prepare to go off to summer camp, a shooting at one in Texas last week has left some parents like Janill Briones-Lopez with concerns that go far deeper than the normal bumps and bruises kids experience during what has traditionally been a fun-filled respite from the classroom.
While hoping her 7-year-old son will have a safe experience at the free Summer Rising camp run by the New York City Department of Education, Briones-Lopez told ABC News she plans to question camp organizers about staff training on active shooter protocols.
With recent mass shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24 that left 19 students and two teachers dead and an attack on the summer youth camp in Duncanville, Texas, in which an armed suspect was killed in a gunfight with police as campers hid, Briones-Lopez said she can’t help but worry that summer camps “may become targets for these types of attacks.”
“I will be bringing it up at the orientation,” said Briones-Lopez, adding that money-conscious couples like her and her husband depend on the city-run summer camp to provide free care for their children while they are working.
The mother said she has spent the past two-and-a-half years worried about her son contracting COVID-19 and that just as the virus vaccine has allayed some of her worries, the rising epidemic of gun violence across the country has given her something else to be anxious about.
“I am worried about guns and gun violence, but I don’t let myself worry about it on a daily basis because at what point do we shutter ourselves away and become too afraid to go outside?” Briones-Lopez said. “We still have to live our lives.”
‘I was so scared’
One of the country’s top camp directors, Tom Rosenberg, president and CEO of the American Camp Association, which advises and trains camp staffs nationwide on procedures and protocols for running safe and educational programs, said the shooting last week at the Duncanville Fieldhouse summer camp in Texas left him and others in his nonprofit organization “taken aback.”
Rosenberg told ABC News that in his nearly 30 years as a camp professional, he couldn’t recall a shooting or violent attack occurring at a summer camp in the United States.
In July 2011, self-professed white supremacist Anders Behring Breivik carried out a mass shooting at a summer youth camp in Norway on the tranquil, wooded island of Utoya, northwest of Oslo, killing 69 campers and staff. Breivik attacked the camp on the same day he detonated a car bomb at a government building in Oslo, killing eight people.
He was found guilty of mass murder, causing a fatal explosion and terrorism charges in July 2012 and sentenced to the maximum civilian criminal penalty in Norway of 21 years in prison, with the possibility of extending his sentence for as long as he is deemed a danger to society. In February, a Norwegian court rejected Breivik’s latest bid for parole, finding he still has no remorse for the attack and remains a risk to society.
“This is not unknown, but what happened in Norway hasn’t happened quite like that in our country that I’m aware of in recent times. But when we see our fellow educators in the school system dealing with this now so much, we’ve been preparing for some time around active shooter training,” Rosenberg said.
He added, “I don’t think we can say that any environment today is immune. But all places where our children are being supervised today outside of our homes really need to be prepared for all types of emergencies, period. End of story.”
On June 13, an armed 42-year-old man entered the Duncanville Fieldhouse in the Dallas suburb, where roughly 250 children ranging in age from 4 to 14 were participating in a summer camp, police said. Duncanville police officers rapidly responded to calls of a man with a handgun at the athletic complex as quick-thinking camp staffers ushered the children to safety, authorities said.
Police said the suspect, Brandon Keith Ned, confronted an employee in the facility’s lobby and fired two shots, including one at a classroom full of children he couldn’t get into because the door was locked.
Authorities said officers arrived at the facility within 10 minutes of getting the first call, engaged the suspect in a gunfight and killed him.
A motive for the shooting remains under investigation.
Ned had a felony record, having pleaded guilty to intoxication manslaughter in 2011 and sentenced to two years in prison, according to court records. His wife, LaQuitha Ned, told ABC affiliate station WFAA in Dallas that he was bipolar and that the handgun he allegedly used in the episode belonged to her.
“I didn’t know he had the gun at that time,” LaQuitha Ned said. “He’s not supposed to own a gun. I own a gun. It stays in a lock box with the key hidden.”
The shooting came less than a month after a gunman wielding an AR-15 style rifle he legally purchased after turning 18, killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
While no children were injured in the episode in Duncanville, campers like 8-year-old Trenia Summerville said the incident was terrifying.
“There was gun shooting. I was so scared,” Trenia told WFAA.
‘Summer of resilience’
Rosenberg said a positive outcome of the Duncanville incident is that camp staffers did exactly as they have been trained.
“This is an example of how this program at Duncanville Fieldhouse really did a fine job of executing their plan,” Rosenberg said. “But no one wants to see all that training have to be used in a terrible situation like this. It’s really hard to understand what motivates a person to cause that kind of terror.”
Rosenberg said the American Camp Association has advised directors at the more than 15,000 day and overnight camps expected to operate this summer on active shooter drills and procedures for other emergencies that might arise, including COVID outbreaks and wildfires, for an estimated 26 million campers and 1.2 million employees.
“We work hard to train directors and staff of all these different kinds of camps to think about security concerns and think about medical concerns, think about safety concerns around how programs operate so that everyone can be focused on making sure that everyone is safe, so everyone feels safe at camp and is physically safe at camp,” Rosenberg said.
“Typically, for example, camps have emergency action plans, which have been developed in concert with law enforcement, fire department, EMS and other consultants,” he said. “So, those kinds of things are things that they train on during staff training practice just like how do we manage the health care of all the campers? How do we deal with emotional supports that kids and staffers need during the summer?”
He said this summer is expected to be one of the most important summers “in the history of camp in America.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic shut down summer camps almost entirely in 2020 and severely limited capacity in 2021, Rosenberg said camp directors are ready to open at almost full capacity this summer.
“Hopefully, as many children as possible will have an opportunity to experience more freedom than they’ve had in the past two-and-a-half years, opportunities to be more curious to try new things, to learn new things, make friends. Learn to have conversations in person, face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball, heart-to-heart with their buddies,” Rosenberg said.
“I think of this as a summer of resilience for our whole country, where in spite of COVID, in spite of gun violence, in spite of all the challenges that we have, that we can use this summer as a time for healing, a time for learning, a time for fun and a time for community. And that’s what camp is really all about,” Rosenberg said. “There’s no question everyone’s anxieties are up as a result of what happened in Duncanville and what’s happened in Uvalde and historically. But because of this summer and all the work that we’re going to do at camp, we’re going to see more resilient children as a result.”
He encouraged parents who are hesitant to send their children to camp to question camp directors about safety precautions they’ve taken to make camps safe from intruders, adding that many programs have security guards.
“Camp directors really welcome that. They want to help you understand how they do what they do; all the aspects of how they run their camp. And you should develop a relationship with them just like you develop a relationship with teachers,” Rosenberg said.
Rosenberg said his message to parents is that safety precautions taken to prevent gun violence “is not going to get in the way of summer camps.”
Gun violence is now leading cause of death among children
Patrick Bresette, executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund-Texas, told ABC News he hopes the shooting in Duncanville will not prompt a hardening of camps to the point of militarizing them like some schools. Ohio lawmakers passed a bill on June 1 that would allow teachers and other school staff to carry guns in school safety zones, with little training.
“We’ve spent billions on that kind of approach and not spent enough time making sure people who do harm don’t have access to guns,” Bresette said. “It just doesn’t work. There’s no stat that shows hardening schools is doing nothing more than militarizing them to be honest with you. And I certainly don’t want to see that same thing happen in camps.”
Bresette said he fears while taking precautions and planning for the worst is necessary, he doesn’t want to see camp counselors spending more time training on active shooting drills than on how to provide fun, educational programs for young campers.
“Having been a camp counselor in my high school years, that’s not what I want to focus on,” Bresette said. “I’m there to provide an amazing experience for children and that’s what we should be making sure we’re training the staff for. This is not their job. Their job is to call 911.”
In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report in The New England Journal of Medicine showing that gun violence surpassed automobile accidents as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents ages 1 to 19. The report found that between 2019 and 2020 there was a nearly 30% increase in gun deaths among children.
“But there are multiples of that trauma, who were in that room,” Bresette said of the children who witnessed or heard the gunfire in the incidents in Duncanville and Uvalde. “And I think we’re living with a generation of children, unfortunately, because of the easy access to guns that are meant to kill people, who are traumatized and go to places fearful in the ways they should not be. I think that’s very saddening and the solution to that is to get more control of the guns that are just proliferating in our society.”
In the aftermath of the mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo, New York, where 10 Black people were on May 14 killed in what authorities alleged was a racially motivated attack at a supermarket carried out by a suspect wielding an AR-15 style rifle he also purchased after he turned 18, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators began working on proposals to curb gun violence.
But negotiations apparently stalled after the group announced last week that they had reached an agreement on the framework for gun legislation, including bolstering red flag laws all across the country that allow courts and police departments to temporarily seize firearms from people who present a danger to themselves or to others, and closing the so-called boyfriend loophole, which allows men convicted of assaulting their girlfriends to continue to buy weapons.
The proposals, however, have been met with resistance from gun rights advocates. Over the weekend, the Texas Republican Party formally “rebuked” multiple GOP senators, including one of their own, Sen. John Cornyn, for helping lead the bipartisan negotiations.
“For our organization, we need solutions that control guns,” Bresette said. “Not more security. I mean, in this (Duncanville) case it appears the counselors did what they were trained to do, got kids safe, law enforcement was called and they got there and, thank God, no child was injured in any way. But no one should be able to just pick up a handgun and walk into a summer camp. So, the measure we really want to see are things that control access to guns. I think that that’s the bottom line.”
(NEW YORK) — As a heat wave slams the U.S. this week, it’s important to remember the dangers of leaving children in hot cars.
A child died in Harris County, Texas, on Monday after being left in a hot car for several hours, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. This marked the fifth child to die in a hot car this year, according to national nonprofit KidsAndCars.org.
A record 54 children died in hot cars in 2018, followed by 53 fatalities in 2019, according to KidsAndCars.org.
It’s especially important to be mindful of hot car safety as more parents return to the office and their routines, KidsAndCars.org director Amber Rollins said. A change in routine can often prompt an accidental hot-car death, she explained.
Rollins said she’s also worried about parents who return to work with a hybrid schedule (working at home some days and in the office other days.)
“When your routine is shifting all over the place … that’s one of the most serious risk factors,” she said.
The science behind hot cars
Children’s bodies heat up much faster than adults’ do, according to the nonprofit National Safety Council.
Children’s internal organs begin to shut down once their core body temperature reaches 104 degrees, and it takes very little time for a car to get too hot for children, according to a report published by the council in 2018.
On an 86-degree day, for example, it would take only about 10 minutes for the inside of a car to reach a dangerous 105 degrees, researchers said.
What you can do
Rollins offers these tips for drivers:
— Always keep cars locked even if you don’t have children.
— Always keep keys out of children’s reach.
— Place an item you can’t start the day without in the back seat.
— If a child goes missing, check the inside and trunk of all cars in the area immediately.
— Teach children to honk the horn if they get stuck.
— If you spot a child or pet alone inside a car, “do something,” Rollins said. “If they are in distress, you need to get them out immediately and begin to cool them.”
Korea Aerospace Research Institute via Getty Images
(SEOUL, South Korea) — South Korea successfully launched and put its homegrown space rocket into orbit Tuesday, becoming the seventh nation capable of launching practical satellites using a self-developed propulsion system.
“The Nuri rocket launch was a success,” Lee Sang-ryul, director of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute told the press after the launch. “After the launch, Nuri’s flight process proceeded according to the planned flight sequence.”
KARI set off its 200-ton homegrown space rocket from the Naro Space Center in the Southern coastal village of Goheung. The launch was delayed from the original test date last Thursday due to weather conditions and a technical glitch.
Loaded with a 162.5-kilogram (358-pound) performance-verification satellite — as well as four cube satellites for academic research and a 1.3-ton dummy satellite — Nuri reached its target orbit of 700 kilometers (435 miles) above the Earth. All three stages of its engine were combusted according to plan, separating the mounted satellites at the arranged moment.
With Tuesday’s launch, South Korea joined the U.S., Russia, France, China, Japan and India in its self-developed propulsion capabilities, according to officials.
“The launch opens up a new era for South Korea’s space program and science technology,” Aerospace Engineering professor Cho Donghyun of Pusan National University told ABC News.
The Nuri Development Project, also known as the Korean Launch Vehicle project, commenced in 2010. The completion of its three-stage launch vehicle system technology enabled the team to test-fire South Korea’s first homemade rocket last October.
Back then, the rocket made it to the target altitude of 700 kilometers but failed to put a dummy satellite into orbit, making the launch a half-success. The rocket launched on Tuesday stably settled the performance-verification satellite into orbit.
“The Nuri spacecraft is fired up by not just one engine but a clustering of four 75-ton grade liquid engines. This gives potential to build larger projectiles with more engines in the future,” Cho said.
A latecomer in the aerospace industry, South Korea’s rocket-launch journey began in 2013 when it blasted its first carrier rocket, Naro-1, to achieve orbit. The aircraft was a collaborative project with Russia’s Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center and KARI.
In the 12 years since that collaboration, South Korea developed its very own space rocket. South Korea invested $616 million on space research in 2021, according to South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT, a figure considerably less than the $48 billion the U.S. spent in the same period.
“We have set the stage for us to travel to space whenever we’d like, without having to rent a launchpad or a projectile from another country,” Minister of Science and ICT Lee Jong Ho said. “The South Korean government plans to enhance the technical reliability of the Nuri rocket through four additional launches until 2027.”
(NEW YORK) — Kellogg has announced that it will separate into three different companies to create “greater strategic, operational, and financial focus” for each of the new firms that will be named at a later date.
Under the plans announced on Tuesday, Kellogg will separate its North American cereal and plant-based foods business — which represent an estimated 20% of Kellogg’s net sales in 2021 — from its global snacking brands, cereal and noodle brands and frozen breakfast brands.
“Kellogg has been on a successful journey of transformation to enhance performance and increase long-term shareowner value,” said Steve Cahillane, Kellogg Company’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer in a statement announcing the company’s plans. “This has included re-shaping our portfolio, and today’s announcement is the next step in that transformation.”
“These businesses all have significant standalone potential, and an enhanced focus will enable them to better direct their resources toward their distinct strategic priorities,” Cahillane continued. “In turn, each business is expected to create more value for all stakeholders, and each is well positioned to build a new era of innovation and growth.”
Kellogg expects these moves to be completed by 2023 and the headquarters for the three companies set to focus on their global snacking brands, their cereal brands and their plant-based food brands will remain unchanged.
Said Kellogg: “After several years of transformation and improving results, the Company believes it is the right time to separate these businesses so they may pursue their particular strategic priorities.”
After the announcement, Kellogg rose more than 6% in pre-market trading on Tuesday.
The global snacking company, which earned $11.4 billion in revenue last year, will be made up of well-known brands such as Pringles, Cheez-It, Pop-Tarts, Kellogg’s Rice Krispies Treats, the Kellogg said. Sales at the snacking company last year also came from some cereal brands as well as frozen breakfast brands and the Eggo brand, the company added.
The cereal company accounted for $2.4 billion in sales last year through business in the U.S., Canada, and Caribbean, Kellog said. The cereal company sells brands such as Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Mini-Wheats, and Special K.
The plant-based company, which earned $340 million in revenue in 2021, will be anchored by the MorningStar Farms brand, which features an array of plant-based items such as chicken nuggets and sausage links, Kellogg said.
The cereal company and plant-based company will both remain headquartered in Battle Creek, Michigan, Kellogg said. The global snacking company will maintain dual campuses in Battle Creek and Chicago, Illinois, with its corporate headquarters located in Chicago.
(WASHINGTON) — The House Jan. 6 committee’s Tuesday hearing will focus on what it says was then-President Donald Trump’s “unprecedented” effort to push key state officials to reject the election results and his central role in the plot to create “fake” slates of electors to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
Trump “drove a pressure campaign bases on lies” about the election, an aide told reporters on a briefing call Monday, and was “warned that his actions risked inciting violence” but “did it anyway.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., will lead the 1 p.m. ET hearing that the aide said will reveal new information obtained by the committee, including evidence it says shows Trump’s role in the effort to get states to submit “fake” pro-Trump electors to Congress to overturn Biden’s win.
“We’ll show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme. We’ll also again show evidence about what his own lawyers came to think about this scheme,” Schiff said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday.
Schiff also told the Los Angeles Times that then-Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows appeared at a Georgia election meeting and also offered auditors autographed “Make America Great Again” hats.
While the hearing will feature live witness testimony from Arizona and Georgia officials, the committee will describe the “breadth” of Trump’s pressure efforts, which also included Michigan and Pennsylvania, the committee said.
The pressure campaign was part of what the committee says is a discredited theory presented by Trump election attorney John Eastman that then-Vice President Pence could unilaterally block Congress’ certification of Biden as president.
An aide said the committee would also spotlight “the heroes in this story” who “remained true to their oaths” and rejected the overtures of Trump and his allies to reject their state’s results or send pro-Trump electors to Congress to further the election challenge.
The committee will also show, an aide said, how the threats facing election workers are “real” and “ongoing” heading into the midterms and 2024 presidential election.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who beat a Trump-backed challenger in his GOP primary race for secretary of state last week, will testify on Tuesday, along with his blunt-spoken deputy, Gabe Sterling. Both were on that infamous phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Trump told Raffensperger he needed to “find” 11,780 votes in Georgia — just one vote over the margin by which he trailed President-elect Joe Biden — so he could be declared the winner of an election that three separate counts in the state confirmed he lost.
Joining them will be Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who was pressured by Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to decertify Biden’s victory in the state, according to emails reviewed by ABC News. Bowers previously described to The Arizona Republic that Rudy Giuliani also called him after the election to pressure him to involve the state legislature to manipulate results in his state.
A spokesperson for the Arizona House of Representatives confirmed to ABC News that Bowers is set to testify in Tuesday’s committee hearing in response to a committee subpoena.
On a second panel, former Fulton County election worker “Shaye” Moss will be the sole live witness. Moss and her mother were falsely accused by Giuliani and other Republicans of election fraud and smuggling “suitcases” of illegal ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta on election night. She’s said she was subject to harassment and threats online even after Georgia election officials debunked the allegations.
Both Bowers and Moss received the 2022 JFK Profile in Courage Award “for their courage to protect and defend democracy in the United States.” (Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., also was a recipient.)
In public remarks in Nashville on Friday, Trump compared lawmakers on the Jan. 6 committee to “con artists” as he continues to push the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, part of what the committee argues is a conspiracy that led directly led to the attack on the Capitol.
A majority of Americans appears to agree with the committee, which has interviewed 1,000 people and reviewed more than 140,000 documents in an 11-month-long investigation it says is still ongoing.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted last week after the committee held its third of seven public hearings scheduled for June found that nearly 6 in 10 Americans believe Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the incident. In the poll, 58% of Americans said Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the attack — up slightly from late April, before the hearings began, when an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 52% of Americans thought the former president should be charged.
Cheney previewed Tuesday’s hearing last week, saying the committee will examine “the Trump team’s determination to transmit material false electoral slates from multiple states to officials of the executive and legislative branches of our government” as well as “the pressures put on state legislators … to reverse lawful election results.”
“An honorable man receiving the information and advice that Mr. Trump received from his campaign experts and his staff, a man who loved his country more than himself would have conceded this election,” she told the hearing room. “Indeed, we know that a number of President Trump’s closest aides urged him to do so.”
A second hearing this week is scheduled for Thursday and will focus on the pressure placed on Justice Department officials, members said.
It comes as the Justice Department sent a letter last week telling the committee’s chief investigator it is “critical” members “provide us with copies of the transcripts of all its witness interviews” — which the committee has declined to do. The request suggests there are matters DOJ is investigating beyond the violence on the ground on Jan. 6 it is already investigating, specifically, alternate or fake electors.
The House select committee has argued that Trump was repeatedly told the plot to overturn the election was illegal but continued anyway.
ABC News’ Katherine Faulders and Ali Dukakis contributed to this report.
Monday would have been the night the theater building at Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C. was officially named in honor of one of the school’s most famous graduates: Dave Chappelle. However, the controversial comedian decided against it.
Instead, Chappelle announced it would be called the Theater for Artistic Expression, according to the Washington Post.
Chappelle, who has been at the center of a controversy over comments in his Netflix special, The Closer, perceived to be transphobic, went on to speak about how his work has been characterized and analyzed.
“I saw in the newspaper that a man who was dressed in women’s clothing threw a pie at the Mona Lisa and tried to deface it,” said Chappelle, comparing the incident to The Closer, which he claimed was unfairly portrayed in the press.
“You cannot report on an artist’s work and remove artistic nuance,” he insisted.
The comedian compared it to reporting the news that a large rabbit shot a man in the face, but failing to also report that the work being described was a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
“When you say I can’t say something, the more urgent is it for me to say it,” Chappelle continued. “It has nothing to do with what you are saying I can’t say. It has everything to do with my freedom of artistic expression.”
Chappelle also faced backlash from students at his former high school following his jokes about the transgender community.
