In an Instagram post, Vin Diesel revealed he got his “dream” actor to play his character Dom Torreto’s grandmother in Fast X: Rita Moreno.
Diesel took to social media alongside the EGOT-winning legend and co-star Michelle Rodriguez.
“It’s been my dream forever to work with Rita Moreno, and the fact that she’s here playing my grandmother makes my soul smile,” the actor and producer said, adding, “I’m so blessed.”
Moreno added, “You know what … I think my old age was waiting for you to invite me. Isn’t that nice?”
Diesel growled a sweet, “Awww!” in response.
Rodriguez added an enthusiastic, “Rita Moreno in the house, baby!”
Runaway June‘s Jennifer Wayne had a very special guest join her at the Grand Ole Opry.
Jennifer and her husband, Austin Moody, welcomed their first child, daughter Lily, in April, and she recently made her Opry debut. During Runaway June’s Opry performance over the weekend, Jennifer brought Lily to the show, holding the slumbering baby in her arms as she posed for photos with bandmates Natalie Stovall and newest member, Stevie Woodward, along with Lauren Alaina.
Another picture shows Opry star Connie Smith holding the 1-month-old in a group photo with Runaway June, Lauren and fellow country legend Jeannie Seely. But Lily wasn’t asleep the entire time, as proven in one adorable photo where her eyes are open while donning a pair of pink noise-cancelling headphones. Another snap shows her parents posing in front of the Opry sign while Lily is strapped into a carrier.
“What an epic night at the @opry !! Stevie and Lily made their debut,” Jennifer writes with a series of heart emojis. “So much love and joy!”
Fozzy has announced a fall North American headlining tour.
The outing will kick off September 8 in Columbus, Ohio, and will wrap up October 10 in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Tickets go on sale this Friday, May 27, at 10 a.m. ET.
For the full list of dates and all ticket info, visit FozzyRock.com.
Fozzy will be touring in support of their new album, Boombox, which was released earlier this month. The follow-up to 2017’s Judas features the singles “I Still Burn,” “Sane” and “Nowhere to Run.”
The Scorpions have released “The Language of My Heart” as their latest single, a bonus track from the French version of their new studio album Rock Believer.
The track is available now as a digital download and via streaming services, while a lyric video has premiered at the veteran German rockers’ official YouTube channel.
The touching ballad is a celebration of Paris, inspired by the brutal terrorist attacks that took place at the historic Bataclan theater and other parts of the city in November 2015 and left 130 people dead and hundreds more wounded.
“It’s a tribute to France, with its wonderful culture and our fantastic fans,” says Scorpions frontman Klaus Meine.
The Scorpions were the first band to stage a concert in Paris following the attacks, just 10 days later, when they played the AccorHotels Arena for a crowd of 20,000.
Last week, the band gave “The Language of My Heart” its live debut during a new concert at the Paris venue. The show kicked off a European tour in support of Rock Believer that runs through a July 18 concert in Lisbon, Portugal. The Scorpions recently announced dates for a North American leg that also will feature Whitesnake and that gets underway on August 21 in Toronto.
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Elton John AIDS Foundation
It seems that Liam Payne‘s indiscretions have torpedoed his engagement to Maya Henry. For the second time in three years, the couple has broken up, E! News confirms.
The breakup comes after Maya expressed her anger at seeing photos of Liam with someone else. A fan page had posted a shot of Liam and a woman embracing, and mistakenly identified the two as Liam and Maya. But Maya commented, “Please stop sending me these pictures of my fiancé wrapped around another woman. This is not me and it’s hard enough knowing this has happened without seeing it. Enough now.”
Liam and Maya started dating in 2019, and became engaged in 2020. They split up in June of 2021, with an insider blaming the breakup on “busy schedules” and poor communication. During that time, Liam said on a podcast, ” I’ve just not been very good at relationships.”
However, later that year, they got re-engaged. In March, Liam told People that Maya was “still my fiancée,” adding, “We’re very, very happy at the moment. Probably the happiest we’ve been.”
Liam is also the father of five-year-old son Bear, who he shares with his ex, Cheryl Cole, whom he dated from 2015 to 2018.
(NEW YORK) — Police have identified a suspect in connection with the unprovoked fatal shooting of 48-year-old Daniel Enriquez on a Q train in New York City on Sunday, according to police sources.
The sources identified the wanted suspect as Andrew Abdullah, a 25-year-old man from Brooklyn with about 20 prior arrests, including an outstanding gun charge from last year. He also has prior arrests for assault, robbery, menacing and grand larceny, sources said.
Abdullah has three cases that are still pending, including an April arrest for fourth-degree criminal possession of stolen property for allegedly being found with a stolen motorcycle, as well as a June 2021 arrest for violating a protective order and March 2021 arrest for assault.
Detectives have also recovered the gun used in the shooting.
It is believed the suspect handed the gun to a homeless man as he fled the Canal Street station. The homeless man then apparently sold the gun for $10 to a third person, who reported it to police, the sources said.
The New York Police Department released surveillance photos Monday of the suspect believed to have shot Enriquez taken shortly after he exited the subway.
The motive for the shooting is still unknown.
In January 2020, Abdullah was arrested as part of a gun-related case and in May 2017 he was charged with second-degree attempted murder as part of an 83-count federal indictment of the Harlem-based street gangs Fast Money and Nine Block. Abdullah was sentenced to three years in federal prison, but served just four months before being released in 2019.
Witnesses say the suspect, alleged to be Abdullah, was pacing back and forth in the last car of a Manhattan-bound train around 11:45 a.m. when he pulled out a gun and fired it at Enriquez unprovoked, according to NYPD Chief of Department Kenneth Corey.
The shooting comes a little over a month after a Brooklyn subway rider opened fire on a train car, wounding 10 people. The suspect in that shooting, Frank James, was arrested one day later in lower Manhattan.
Transit crime is up 62.5% in the city year-to-date from 2021, according to NYPD statistics.
The rapper and designer, who was previously briefly suspended from the social media platform, returned on Monday with a post teasing his latest business venture.
Alongside an image of his upcoming redesign of McDonald’s packaging, which looks like a burger in the shape of a box with the famous Golden Arches on top, reads the caption, “Ye teams up with legendary Muji industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa to reimagine McDonald’s packaging.”
The burger post comes just after Ye shared the same image in an Instagram Story and wrote underneath, “Next week it’s the fries.”
No further information yet about the collaboration or when it’s expected to launch.
Instagram in March suspended Kanye’s account for 24 hours for posting questionable content about his estranged wife, Kim Kardashian, and her boyfriend, Pete Davidson.
Katy Perry and Rihanna are friendly, so it’s no surprise that Katy would be thrilled that the “Work” singer has welcomed her first child.
Speaking to E! News, Katy said she didn’t have any advice for Rih, who welcomed a baby boy with her boyfriend A$AP Rocky on May 19. However, she did have plenty of well wishes.
“I’m so happy for her and congratulations. I know that this time is so precious and it’s just like a gorgeous, cozy time. It’s a beautiful, magical time, so soak it all in,” Katy told E!
Katy has previously said that becoming a mom to daughter Daisy Dove with fiancé Orlando Bloom was the best decision she ever made.
“I feel so fulfilled doing this job, being able to really give all of my experience and knowledge to these kids and give them a real, true lottery ticket, like a life change,” she shared. “This is such an incredible opportunity. It’s a show that is really changing people’s lives.”
Katy also commented on performing with country superstar Thomas Rhett on the American Idol finale. While she and Orlando have been living in Kentucky, where he’s filming a movie, she told E! she’s not sure she’ll be going all-in on the country lifestyle.
“I don’t know if I can do all that,” she joked. “I mean, if I do get the overalls, they will be Balenciaga.”
(NEW YORK) — A baby formula shortage has escalated in recent months from a product recall to a national crisis, prompting emergency responses from business leaders and White House officials.
As of early May, 43% of U.S. baby formula was out of stock, according to the data firm Datasembly.
To help make up for the shortfall, the Biden administration on Sunday began flying in tens of thousands of pounds of baby formula from abroad in what it calls “Operation Fly Formula.” A day before, an apology in a Washington Post op-ed was issued by Robert Ford, the CEO of Abbott Nutrition, the nation’s largest baby formula producer.
The emergency has come on the heels of the voluntary shutdown in February of an Abbott factory in Sturgis, Michigan, where the company produces major brands of powdered formula like Similac and EleCare. The shutdown went into effect when four babies fell sick from bacterial disease after ingesting formula produced at the facility and two of the infants died. It remains unclear whether the bacteria that made the children ill came from the baby formula produced at the Michigan factory, but a Food and Drug Administration inspection of the facility found it fell short of adequate sanitation.
The root causes of the desperate situation stretch well beyond the last few months, supply chain experts told ABC News. Pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions led to barren store shelves, rigid international trade barriers impeded imports and market concentration left few alternate suppliers, they said.
“The scenario where you have a manufacturing problem that occurred at an Abbott facility in Michigan, those kinds of things happen all the time,” Nada Sanders, a professor of supply chain management at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business, told ABC News. “Ultimately, we have very, very weak supply chains.”
Many families rely on baby formula for some portion of sustenance early in a child’s life. Almost 20% of babies consume infant formula before they reach two days of age, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a 2020 report. More than half of infants receive supplementary nutrition in addition to breastfeeding over their first three months, the report said. Some babies require formula to meet specific nutritional needs.
As with a host of products — from computer chips to lumber — the pandemic has snarled the supply chain for baby formula. Shortages of labor and raw materials have slowed production and hampered distribution, Sanders said. The disruption weakens the supply chain’s responsiveness to the sudden ups and downs of customer demand, she added.
“All of this is ultimately related to the COVID pandemic, and really two-and-a-half years of supply chain disruptions and backlogs of every kind possible,” Sanders said.
Even amid the widespread supply chain disruptions brought about by the coronavirus, few products have faced the crisis-level shortages observed with baby formula in recent weeks, said Sanders and Scott Lincicome, an economist at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute.
One reason why the baby formula market has proven especially susceptible to shortages is the trade barriers and public health regulations that prevent major inflow of the products from abroad, Lincicome said. The U.S. imposes steep tariffs on baby formula. Plus, the FDA requires foreign manufacturers to abide by nutritional and labeling requirements.
In turn, 98% of baby formula consumed in the U.S. is produced domestically. When the Abbott factory shut down, the market lacked an international supply to fill the gap. Last week, the FDA announced “increased flexibilities” for the importation of baby formula in an effort to alleviate the shortage.
But the supply problems aren’t confined to overseas producers, Sanders and Lincicome said. They pointed to a key problem that hinders the responsiveness of the domestic baby formula industry: business concentration. Abbott, the top producer, accounts for about 48% of the U.S. formula market. In all, four companies — Abbott, Nestle USA, Perrigo and Mead Johnson Nutrition — control roughly 90% of the market.
Some critics, including Lincicome, have attributed the small number of market players largely to a federal nutrition program for women, infants and children, known as WIC, which helps low-income families purchase baby formula. Roughly half of the baby formula bought in the U.S. goes through WIC, with about 1.2 million infants getting ahold of formula through the program. That scale grants WIC considerable power in the marketplace, Lincicome said.
WIC uses a system in which each state chooses a single company to be the sole provider of baby formula for all residents enrolled in the program. That approach reduces the price that WIC pays for baby formula, cutting the cost for taxpayers, Lincicome said. But the large size of each statewide contract prevents small companies from winning a bid and gaining a foothold, he added.
In response to the crisis, President Joe Biden signed a measure on Saturday that allows families enrolled in WIC to buy formula beyond what the program normally allows in emergency situations.
“Combine the trade wall with domestic concentration,” Lincicome said. “You have a situation where you end up having a few players in a closed market and when one of those players goes down, the other handful of players left can’t fill the gaps.”
He added: “And you lack access to global markets which might be able to fill that gap in the short term.”
Last week, Abbott and the FDA reached an agreement for the company to reopen the Michigan factory, which should eventually return U.S. baby formula supply back to normal, Sanders said. She predicted it would take three months to fully alleviate the shortage; Lincicome estimated eight weeks.
“Hopefully Abbott will be able to get their production out and get everything smoothly running and what’s taken by customers is replenished at the right cadence,” Sanders said. “Meaning no bumps.”
In a new video interview with GQ, Mike Myers runs through some of his biggest hits, from Wayne’s World to Austin Powers, to the 2001 animated film Shrek.
While Wayne’s World had something in common with Austin Powers — in that Myers didn’t think anybody except he and his family would like either of them — Shrek especially resonated with the former Saturday Night Live actor.
“There’s an emotional center there,” Myers recalled of making the original film, which he saw as a “dramatic role.”
He adds, “You know the old joke: ‘I wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member.’ I have always felt that way. The concept of going from a self-loathing ogre to a self-accepting ogre was meaningful to me.”
“I love playing Shrek,” Myers continues. “If I had to do one Shrek a year I’d be thrilled.”
The original Shrek went on to be a blockbuster, winning the first Best Animated Film Oscar and spawning three massively-earning sequels.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the newest film set in the ogre’s universe, will debut in December.
Myers latest effort, the secret society comedy series The Pentaverate, is now streaming on Netflix.
