As Blink-182‘s Mark Hoppus continues to recover from a difficult year of chemotherapy to combat cancer, he’s rediscovered a briefly forgotten joy of his life: songwriting.
In a recent tweet, Hoppus writes, “Just want to say that I’m very grateful to be back in the mindset of ‘Oh! That’s a cool idea for a song lyric, I should write that down.'”
“I haven’t felt that in eight months,” he adds, alongside a “prayer hands” emoji.
Hoppus revealed his cancer diagnosis in June 2021, sharing that he’d been undergoing chemotherapy for the previous three months. Last September, he announced he was “cancer free.”
Blink-182 had been working on new music ahead Hoppus’ diagnosis — they released the topical song “Quarantine” in August 2020. The trio’s most recent album is 2019’s Nine.
Hoppus played his first post-cancer performance last October during band mate Travis Barker‘s Halloween streaming event.
Remember when Sarah McLachlan made us all cry with those ASPCA commercials? Remember how she spoofed them for a Super Bowl ad in 2014? Well, she’s doing it again, in a new commercial created by fellow Canadian Ryan Reynolds’ digital marketing company Maximum Effort.
In the spot, Sarah says — in her best “won’t you please help?” voice — “Every day, 70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned at the checkout page…victims of a cruel and exhausting checkout process.” Cue forlorn images of actual shopping carts filled with items, sitting out alone in the wilderness.
Sarah explains that when most people try to buy stuff online, the checkout process is so complicated — what with entering addresses, credit card numbers and CVV numbers — that they just forget the whole thing and leave the stuff in their online cart.
The solution? Bolt.com, a company that offers a one-click shopping experience, no matter which website you go to. You enter your information once, and that’s it.
The spot ends with a guy singing, “Go to Bolt.com…come on, we got Sarah f***ing McLachlan!”
In recognition of Sarah’s special talent for drawing attention to pitiful, abandoned things, Bolt has made a $50,000 donation to the ASPCA and in addition, it’s launched Bolt.com/carts, where you can buy “Rescue Cart“ merch. Every item is under a dollar using discount code “ABANDONEDCARTS,” and for each item purchased, Bolt will donate $10 to the ASPCA, up to an additional $50,000.
This isn’t the first time Sarah and Ryan Reynolds have teamed up for an ad — sort of. In 2018, in an spot for his Aviation brand of gin, Reynolds claimed that “every bottle of Aviation is ordained by the Unitarian Church of Fresno, California and then…serenaded with the healing music of Sarah McLachlan.”
Last week, Ella Mai released her first new single since 2020, “DFMU,” from her upcoming second solo album. The Grammy winner recorded songs for the project with the legendary artist/producer Pharrell Williams, as well as with her favorite rapper, J. Cole.
The British artist says she’s looking forward to working again with the “Happy” singer.
“I definitely hope in the future that we can get back in and make some more stuff, because he’s super fun to work with, and super down-to-earth,” Ella tells Billboard.
The 27-year-old artist also bonded with Cole, and said she enjoyed sharing her experience attending his 2013 What Dreams May Come Tour in London.
“I cut college class that day and I stood outside. I was 19th in line. I know, because they give you this wristband — so you can leave but you still get your spot. It was freezing cold, but I didn’t care, and I was super front row,” Mai recalled. “I was telling him all my stories. But also as a person, Cole is very inspirational. It’s amazing to be around somebody who is what they portray [to be].”
She says recording with Williams and Cole in the same week was magical.
“I thought this was everything I ever dreamed of. Working with people that inspire me — and it’s weird when I think [about how] people I’m super fans of, are fans of me as well. It’s still a weird feeling for me and I think it always will be,” the “Boo’d Up” singer commented. “I’m just super appreciative that I’m even able to be in these rooms and experience everyone else’s process, as well as putting my process in there too. That was an amazing week for me.”
In 2019, an eclectic group of music stars took part in a U.S. tour celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Beatles‘ The White Album, and now, a similar-themed trek has been announced for this March with a lineup that includes some of the same artists.
The 2022 “It Was Fifty Years Ago Today: A Tribute to The Beatles” tour will feature Todd Rundgren, Christopher Cross, founding Moody Blues and Wings member Denny Laine, Badfinger‘s Joey Molland, former Chicago singer/bassist Jason Scheff and Rascal Flatts‘ Jay DeMarcus performing songs from two classic Fab Four albums — 1965’s Rubber Soul and 1966’s Revolver.
The artists also will showcase tunes from their own respective bands or solo careers.
The trek gets underway on March 1 in Montclair, New Jersey, and currently is plotted out through a March 27 show in Kansas City, Missouri. Additional performances will be announced soon.
“This time we thought: Wouldn’t it be great if we played the best songs The Beatles ever recorded for a change?” notes Rundgren, who also took part in the 2019 tour, as did Cross, Molland and Scheff. “Rubber Soul and Revolver are the boys peaking in front of our eyes and redefining what pop music would be for the foreseeable future. This is going to be fun.”
Adds Cross, “It’s always a pleasure playing these classic songs with great artists and friends.”
Laine, meanwhile, says, “The Moody Blues met The BEATLES in the early ’60s and were invited to join them on their second British tour. The thought of performing some of their classic songs with such a revered cast on this tour will bring back not only those moments in time but also fond memories as a member of Wings.”
Check out a full list of confirmed tour dates at GlassOnyonPR.com.
Football fans, listen up! Here’s the game plan for getting through the Super Bowl without blowing your diet:
First: Put the high calorie snacks in small bowls. Research shows that serving foods in small containers decreases consumption by 40%! That’s because we estimate the appropriate serving size based on the volume of the original container. In other words, one handful of chips from a small bowl seems like plenty but from a larger bowl, 2 handfuls feels more like a normal serving.
Our 2nd Super Bowl party tip: Use black plates. A study in the journal Appetite shows that people eat and drink less when using black dishes. The researchers think we subconsciously relate the color black with danger, death and mold.
So, how can you cut down on liquid calories? Use tall glasses. When longtime food researcher Dr. Brian Wansink asked volunteers to pour the same amount of liquid into differently shaped glasses, people poured 25 percent more into short ones. And, that held true even when the volunteers were professional bartenders. Why because we focus our attention on the height of the liquid, and don’t compensate for the width of the glass.
So, use black plates, tall glasses, and smaller bowls for high-calorie items. That way, no matter which team wins the Super Bowl, your waistline will be a winner, too.
(NEW YORK) — After managing to avoid the same level of scrutiny as fellow tech giants such as Twitter and Facebook for years, streaming service Spotify has now found itself at the center of a scandal involving the platform it gives to those disseminating misinformation about COVID-19.
The saga stems from episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, which critics said peddled dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines to his millions of listeners. Spotify made headlines back in 2020 for reportedly licensing a $100 million deal to exclusively host Rogan’s often controversial namesake podcast.
Following immense backlash that included artist Neil Young yanking his music from the platform and a petition demanding action from Spotify signed by hundreds of doctors, scientists and public health professionals, Spotify responded late Sunday by saying it will add a “content advisory” label to any podcast episode that includes a discussion about COVID-19 and directs listeners to its “COVID-19 Hub” for up-to-date information on the virus as shared by public health authorities.
The streaming service, however, stopped short of removing any podcast episodes that have been criticized for spreading misinformation about the virus. A contrite Rogan said he supports Spotify’s decision in a 10-minute video posted to Instagram on Sunday, and he promised to add more guests with “differing opinions.”
While experts say Spotify’s actions are a good starting point, many say they remain skeptical of how effective these advisory labels will ultimately be at undoing or curbing the real-world damage caused by virus misinformation online.
“What we know is that it’s not going to have a strong effect in terms of changing people’s minds,” Ellen Goodman, a professor at Rutgers Law School whose research focuses on information policy law, free speech and media policy, told ABC News of adding fact-checking labels to misinformation. Goodman stressed that most of the research on this topic, however, looks at traditional social media platforms versus streaming services like Spotify.
Goodman said that existing research on this topic has shown that it is unlikely people’s opinions are going to be changed by something like a fact-checking label, especially for content on “something as polarizing as vaccines.”
“The evidence shows that it probably doesn’t do a huge amount to dissuade people from their priors,” she added. “But, also, the evidence shows that if they’re not coming into it with a prior, like they’re not in one camp or the other — it’s hard to imagine that there are people like on the fence about this issue — but if there are such people, then disclaimers can be effective.”
In a company blog post on Sunday announcing the updates, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said, “Personally, there are plenty of individuals and views on Spotify that I disagree with strongly.”
“We know we have a critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users,” Ek added. “In that role, it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.”
Goodman, meanwhile, told ABC News that she thinks it’s “nonsense to say that they don’t want to censor.”
“It’s not censorship, it’s making choices,” she said. “They are exercising editorial control when they decide what to put on their platforms and whatnot, and what to promote, and obviously this was a huge business deal for Spotify.”
“They are making their choices; they have a right to make those choices,” Goodman added, saying that having decided to host Rogan’s podcast, the company likely knew the kind of content moderation challenges this could present, adding, “but those are the kinds of editorial decisions that media platforms make all the time.”
Another problem many platforms have had with the labeling approach to misinformation is that it can open a whole can of worms for companies then deciding what rises to the level of meriting a label and what doesn’t, Goodman added, saying navigating these tripwires has proven especially difficult for social media giants in recent years.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology similarly warned on a 2020 study that putting warning labels on fake news can carry a catch of making people more readily believe other false stories that aren’t tagged, and that there is no way fact-checkers can keep up with the stream of misinformation to combat this so-called “implied truth effect” caused by the addition of just some labeling.
Epidemiologist Dr. John Brownstein, the chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor, was one of the signatories of the headline-grabbing petition from scientists and doctors slamming an episode of Rogan’s podcast that featured a doctor who has been banned from Twitter for COVID-19 misinformation.
“It’s a good starting point,” Brownstein said of Spotify’s response, but he expressed frustration at how rapidly a public health campaign can be “undermined by a very, very small minority.”
“We’ve seen this movie play out before, where you can undo massive amounts of public health advance through even the smallest amount of objection,” he added. “We saw this with the linkage between vaccination and autism, where even though that research in itself was debunked, that that false linkage still persists today.”
“Regardless of a warning, I think people will ultimately still listen,” Brownstein said of content advisory labels. “A warning won’t necessarily have a major impact necessarily on how people absorb the information.”
He said he believes tech platforms bear a “massive responsibility” in figuring out “how not to provide equal footing” to false information about science and in quelling its spread, especially during a public health crisis.
“They need to find ways to not perpetuate rumors or misinformation about vaccines that ultimately cost lives,” Brownstein said. “There’s a responsibility, because these are not just sort of online chats, this is information that translates to someone’s decision about getting a vaccine.”
Def Leppard has reached a new deal with Primary Wave Music that pours some sugar on the original agreement that the British rockers struck with the music publishing company back in 2009.
The deal, which was announced on Monday, expands Def Leppard’s partnership with Primary Wave, as the company has acquired a bigger stake in the Rock & Roll Hall of Famers’ music publishing catalog, as well as in the income stream involving their master royalties.
The new agreement involves many of the group’s classic songs, including “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” “Rock of Ages” and “Photograph.” Def Leppard’s catalog features two albums that have sold over 10 million copies in the U.S. — 1983’s Pyromania and 1987’s Hysteria — and the band is one of only five rock groups that have achieved this milestone.
Def Leppard’s 2009 deal with Primary Wave involved the company marketing and administering the band’s song catalog.
“With Def Leppard celebrating 45 years as a band this year, we at Primary Wave are beyond excited on further partnering with them in a more meaningful way,” says Primary Wave executive Rob Dippold. “We are thrilled to continue building and elevating not only the band’s musical body of work but their impact in pop culture and the industry in general.”
(NEW YORK) — A U.S. District Court judge rejected on Monday a plea deal that would have allowed the white Georgia man and his father convicted in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery to serve a large part of their sentences in federal prison.
Judge Lisa Godbey Wood’s decision to turn down Travis McMichael and Gregory McMichael’s plea agreements with federal prosecutors came after Arbery’s parents and two aunts gave emotional statements asking the judge to reject the deal and proceed with a federal trial next week.
“All they would have to do is stand up and say that they were motivated by hate and then this court will concede to their preferred conditions of confinement,” Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, told the judge. “I do not need to hear them say they were motivated by hate. That does me no good. It does my family no good.”
She added, “It is not fair to take away this victory that I prayed and I fought for. It is not right. It is not just. It is wrong. Please listen to me. Granting these men their preferred conditions of confinement would defeat me. It gives them one last chance to spit in my face after murdering my son.”
Following Travis McMichael’s hearing on Monday, a second hearing was to schedule on the plea deal the government’s attorneys negotiated with 66-year-old Gregory McMichael. However, Godbey Wood said her decision would be the same in the case of the elder McMichael, whose attorney agreed to cancel the hearing.
Both men and their neighbor, 52-year-old William “Roddie” Bryan, were convicted on state murder charges in Arbery’s 2020 death. They were sentenced to life in prison. Travis and Gregory McMichael were sentenced without the possibility of parole.
A federal prosecutor told the judge during Monday’s hearing that the agreement called for the men to immediately be turned over the Federal Bureau of Prisons to serve 30 years in a federal penitentiary before being returned to the Georgia Department of Corrections to serve the remainder of their sentence.
Godbey Wood gave both men the option to go forward with their guilty pleas and risk her giving them a harsher sentence than what they agreed to, or to withdraw their pleas and go to trial starting on Monday.
The judge gave them until Friday to decide.
Prior to the judge’s decision, federal prosecutor Tara Lyons touted the plea deal as one that “powerfully advances the larger interest of justice.”
“Through this resolution, the defendants will accept responsibility for the full nature of their crime, admitting publicly in front of the nation that this offense was racially motivated,” Lyons said.
Federal prosecutors filed notices of plea agreements for Travis McMichael, 35, and Gregory McMichael, on Sunday in U.S. District Court in Brunswick, Georgia, and requested Monday’s hearing for Godbey Wood to review the deal.
No plea agreement was announced for Bryan.
In announcing her decision, Godbey Wood said the plea agreement would lock her into a sentence of 30 years or 360 months.
“Here in this relatively early stage in the case, I can’t say that 360 months is the precise, fair sentence in this case,” Gobey Wood said. “It could be more, it could be less, it could be that. But given the unique circumstances of this case and my desire to hear from all concerned regarding sentencing before I pronounce sentence, I am not comfortable accepting the terms of the plea agreement.”
Prior to Monday’s hearing, Arbery’s relatives slammed the plea deal, alleging it was done behind their backs. But Lyons said her office was in frequent communication with attorneys for Arbery’s family and that they assured prosecutors the family would not oppose the plea arrangement.
“We respect the court’s decision to not accept the sentencing terms of the proposed plea and to continue the hearing until Friday,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement. “The Justice Department takes seriously its obligation to confer with the Arbery family and their lawyers both pursuant to the Crime Victim Rights Act and out of respect for the victim.”
Clarke added, “Before signing the proposed agreement reflecting the defendants’ confessions to federal hate crimes charges, the Civil Rights Division consulted with the victims’ attorneys. The Justice Department entered the plea agreement only after the victims’ attorneys informed me that the family was not opposed to it.”
Arbery was out for a jog on Feb. 23, 2020, in the Satilla shores neighborhood near Brunswick, Georgia, when the McMichaels assumed he was a burglar, armed themselves and chased him in their pickup truck. Bryan joined the five-minute pursuit, blocking Arbery’s path with his truck and recorded video on cellphone of Travis McMichael fatally shooting Arbery with a shotgun during a struggle.
Arbery’s parents, Cooper-Jones and Marcus Arbery, asked the federal court to be allowed to assert their right under federal law to oppose the plea deal directly before the court.
“The DOJ has gone behind my back to offer the men who murdered my son a deal to make their time in prison easier for them to serve,” Cooper-Jones said in a statement before Monday’s hearing. “I have made it clear at every possible moment that I do not agree to offer these men a plea deal of any kind. I have been completely betrayed by the DOJ lawyers.”
When Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted on state charges of murdering George Floyd, reached a plea agreement on federal charges that he violated Floyd’s civil rights, he asked to be sent to federal prison even though he is expected to serve more time than the 22 years he was sentenced to in state court.
In response to Chauvin’s plea deal, legal experts told ABC News that federal penitentiaries run by the Bureau of Prisons tend to better than state prisons. The experts said federal prisons have fewer overcrowding issues, more comfortable bunks and even better food and educational resources than often cash-strapped state prisons. High-profile inmates, especially former law enforcement officers like Chauvin and Gregory McMichael, tend to also get greater protection in federal prison, the experts said.
The federal Bureau of Prisons estimated that the annual cost of housing an inmate in a federal facility in 2020 was a little over $39,000.
The annual cost of housing an inmate in a Georgia state prison is roughly $20,000, according to a 2015 study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research and policy organization.
“Federal prison is going to be a lighter sentence for these men,” Lee Merritt, an attorney for Cooper-Jones said during a news conference prior to the Monday’s hearing.
Merritt also cited an ongoing investigation by the Department of Justice into conditions at Georgia state prisons that was launched in September.
The DOJ said in a statement that the investigation is primarily focused on whether Georgia provides inmates reasonable protection from physical harm at the hands of other prisoners and staff.
Cooper-Jones said at Monday’s news conference that she found the plea deal “disrespectful.”
MORE: Travis McMichael testifies in his own defense in Ahmaud Arbery case
She said she learned of the deal on Sunday and has had discussions with DOJ attorneys since.
“I told them very, very adamantly I wanted them to go to state prison and do their time,” Cooper-Jones said.
In a separate news conference, Marcus Arbery said that finding out about the deal made him “mad as hell.”
He said his son’s death was a racially-motivated murder and “we want 100% justice, not half justice.”
He added, “I don’t want no chance of trying to make their lives easy.”
ABC News’ Janice McDonald and Alexander Mallin contributed to this report.
It will be a battle of veteran male crooners when Musiq Soulchild and Anthony Hamilton face off for a special Verzuz event for lovers on the day after Valentine’s Day…Tuesday, February 15.
Verzuz founders Swizz Beatz and Timbaland announced Monday that Musiq and Hamilton will perform for a live audience at Avalon Hollywood in Los Angeles. Tickets for the show are now available at VERZUZTV.com.
The performance also will be streamed on the website and the Verzuz Instagram page beginning at 5:30 p.m. PT/8:30 p.m. ET.
After releasing his first album in five years, Love Is the New Black, in September, Hamilton was nominated two weeks ago for three NAACP Image Awards. The Grammy winner is up for Outstanding Male Artist, and has two nods for Outstanding Duo or Group Collaboration: “Superstar” featuring Jennifer Hudson from the album is nominated, as is the “Complicated” remix with Leela James.
Musiq Soulchild is a 13-time Grammy nominee whose recording career began in 2000 with his hit single, “Just Friends.” The singer from Philadelphia has released nine solo albums, with his latest album, Feel the Real, dropping in 2017.
(NEW YORK) — As the COVID-19 pandemic has swept the globe, more than 5.6 million people have died from the disease worldwide, including over 885,000 Americans, according to real-time data compiled by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
About 63.8% of the population in the United States is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Latest headlines:
-Only 5 states reporting jump in cases
-Moderna gets full FDA approval for vaccine
-Prime Minister Trudeau tests positive
-‘Partygate’ report finds ‘failures of leadership and judgement’ by UK leaders
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern.
Jan 31, 5:00 pm
Pediatric cases drop for 1st time since Thanksgiving
New COVID-19 cases among children dropped last week for the first time since Thanksgiving, according to a new report by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association. About 808,000 children tested positive last week, down from a peak of 1,150,000 cases reported the week ending Jan. 20.
However, the organizations warn that pediatric cases remain “extremely high,” still triple the peak level of the delta surge in the summer of 2021.
AAP and CHA noted there is an “urgent” need to collect more age-specific data to assess the severity of illness related to new variants as well as potential longer-term effects. The two organizations note in their report that a small percentage of pediatric cases have resulted in hospitalization and death.
More than 28 million eligible children remain completely unvaccinated, according to federal and census data.
ABC News’ Arielle Mitropoulos
Jan 31, 3:30 pm
Novavax asks FDA for emergency use authorization for its vaccine
Novavax on Monday submitted a request to the FDA for emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine.
Novavax uses a more traditional protein-based vaccine platform, which is different from Pfizer and Modena’s mRNA technology and Johnson & Johnson’s viral vector technology.
Novavax’s vaccine exposes a person to a lab-based piece of coronavirus to build immunity.
Novavax’s studies — conducted before the omicron variant — showed an approximately 90% efficacy.
Novavax was one of the early contenders for a COVID-19 vaccine; Operation Warp Speed allocated $1.6 billion for 100 million doses if the vaccine was authorized by the FDA.
ABC News’ Eric M. Strauss
Jan 31, 12:00 pm
Only 5 states reporting jump in cases
After weeks of surging cases, many U.S. states continue to see impressive declines in their national case averages.
The U.S. is reporting an average of about 543,000 new cases per day, down by about 32.2% in the last two weeks, according to federal data. Two weeks ago the nation was reporting more than 800,000 new cases every day.
Only five states are seeing at least a 10% increase in new cases: Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, Montana and Washington.
But case levels still remain much higher than the nation’s previous surges. Experts point out that many Americans who are taking at-home tests are not submitting their results, and thus, case totals may be higher than reported.
Alaska now leads the nation in new cases per capita followed by Washington state, Kentucky and Oklahoma, according to federal data.
ABC News’ Arielle Mitropoulos
Jan 31, 11:30 am
Moderna gets full FDA approval for vaccine
Moderna has now received full FDA approval for its COVID-19 vaccine, the second vaccine maker to be granted full approval, after Pfizer.
All three vaccines currently available in the U.S. were granted emergency authorization based on large clinical studies and at least two months of safety data.
Moderna said the full approval was “based on a comprehensive submission package including efficacy and safety data approximately six months after second dose.”
