The album is dedicated to Terence “Astro” Wilson, who died in November 2021 at age 64 after a short illness. Ali Campbell was UB40’s original lead singer and was a member of the popular U.K. reggae band until 2008. Astro, a vocalist, percussionist and trumpet player, joined UB40 in 1979 and left the group in 2013.
Campbell and Astro, along with fellow UB40 alum Mickey Virtue, then formed their own incarnation of the band.
Unprecedented, which you can pre-order now, will be available on CD, as a two-LP set pressed on either standard black black vinyl or limited-edition white vinyl, as a limited-edition cassette, and digitally.
In advance of Unprecedented‘s arrival, UB40 Featuring Ali Campbell & Astro has released a cover of “Sufferer,” a 1970 song by the Jamaican reggae vocal group The Kingstonians, as the lead single.
“‘Sufferer’ is a song that Astro and I have always loved, from the brilliant Kingstonians,” says Ali. “Astro was so proud of our version of this song, as am I…This song is more poignant and special than I ever realized after Astro heartbreakingly passed away after recording this album. We want to keep his memory alive through his music and this song and album.”
Now known as UB40 Featuring Ali Campbell, the band will be playing three U.S. shows next month — on May 14 in Las Vegas, May 15 in Redondo Beach, California, and May 16 in San Diego. Check out their full tour schedule at UB40.org.
Here’s the Unprecedented track list:
“Caught You in a Lie”
“Do Yourself a Favour”
“Emperors Wore No Clothes”
“Happy Includes Everyone”
“Heaven in Her Eyes”
“Lean on Me” (In Aid of NHS Charities Together)
“Lean on Me”
“Mellow”
“Stay Another Day”
“Sufferer”
“Sunday Morning Coming Down”
“Unprecedented”
“We’ll Never Find Another Love”
“What Have I Done”
(NEW YORK) — The Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency use authorization for a COVID-19 test that uses breath samples — the first of its kind to get the agency’s green light. The device, called the InspectIR Covid-19 Breathalyzer, is “about the size of a piece of carry-on luggage,” and can accurately detect coronavirus on the breath within just a few minutes, the company and FDA said.
While other COVID-19 testing methods have used nasal swab or saliva samples to detect viral particles, this test uses a technique called gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to separate and identify chemical mixtures and rapidly screen for five compounds associated with a COVID-19 infection in a person’s exhaled breath.
A positive result with this device is still considered “presumptive,” however, and should still be confirmed with a PCR test, the so-called “gold standard” in COVID-19 screening, the FDA said. The agency warned negative results “should be considered in the context of a patient’s recent exposures, history and the presence of clinical signs and symptoms consistent with COVID-19, as they do not rule out SARS-CoV-2 infection and should not be used as the sole basis for treatment or patient management decisions.”
While it comes with caveats, the company views its product as a potential game-changer in the large-scale COVID-19 screening arena.
“We spent a lot of time and a lot of effort on the science and the technology,” company co-founder Luke Kaiser said. “We are very focused on having a great product and a true product that can go anywhere, and test accurately.”
While this test offers rapid results — promised in under three minutes — this is not the same kind of rapid test available for purchase at local pharmacies. It is not aimed at being an “at-home” screening method — rather, it is meant for what InspectIR Systems COO John Redmond described to ABC News as a “volume play.”
InspectIR Systems aims to produce roughly 100 test devices per week, with 10 made so far, Kaiser told ABC News. In the next month, they expect to have roughly 250 test devices ready to go and say they will be making “as many as the line can hold.”
The company anticipates leasing test devices to companies and within industries ideal for en masse screening, as would be appropriate within the health care industry, such as nursing homes, prisons and the travel and hospitality industry, such as cruise lines, and perhaps schools. Redmond said the company expects leasing agreements to cost between $25,000 and $30,000 per month, which is why this would be most appropriate for that “volume play” setting.
Though that dollar figure sounds large, the idea is to get the cost per test down to an average of $10 to $12 each, Redmond said, which is in line with and perhaps even cheaper than commercially available at-home rapid tests. Baked into that leasing price would be a supply of individually wrapped paper straws, an air filter for the test kit and other necessary components.
With a single-use sanitary paper straw people blow their breath sample, about the amount it takes “to inflate a small balloon,” into the system, the company said, which looks for the chemistry and compounds associated with COVID-19.
The test must be done with supervision from a health care professional at doctor’s offices, hospitals, mobile testing sites or other venues with qualified staff on hand.
Each device can each be used to evaluate approximately 160 samples per day. At this level of production, testing capacity using the InspectIR COVID-19 Breathalyzer is expected to increase by approximately 64,000 samples per month.
“Today’s authorization is yet another example of the rapid innovation occurring with diagnostic tests for COVID-19,” Dr. Jeff Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a statement. “The FDA continues to support the development of novel COVID-19 tests with the goal of advancing technologies that can help address the current pandemic and better position the U.S. for the next public health emergency.”
ABC News’ Eric M. Strauss contributed to this report.
When you heard the new Red Hot Chili Peppers single “Black Summer,” your first thought might’ve been, “Yay, new Red Hot Chili Peppers music!” Your second thought might’ve been, “Wait, why is Anthony Kiedis singing like that?”
Fans were quick to point out Kiedis’ unusual annunciation on certain words throughout the song, which made it sound like he was singing with an accent somewhere between Irish and trying out to play The Mandarin in Iron Man 3. Now, Kiedis has offered an explanation behind his unusual vocal styling.
During an online listening party for the new RHCP album Unlimited Love, which features “Black Summer” as the lead single, Kiedis wrote, “My adopted accent on this one is a tribute to Cate Le Bon,” referring to the Welsh musician.
Whatever you may think about Kiedis’ “Black Summer” accent, the song is doing just fine. “Black Summer” currently sits at number one on Billboard‘s Alternative Airplay chart and number two on the Mainstream Rock Airplay tally, while Unlimited Love debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, with the biggest week for a rock album in over a year.
Two years and one pandemic later, Birthday Candles, starring Debra Messing, finally makes its Broadway debut — and if it’s good old-fashioned life perspective you’re searching for, bring all the issues and some tissues, too.
Written by Noah Haidle, the production is a time-trip: Spanning 90 years in one woman’s life…and the highs and sometimes crushing lows that go along with the journey.
“It’s the most challenging thing I have ever been a part of bar-none,” the Will & Grace star tells ABC Audio. “Not ever leaving the stage, aging 90 years and having to gently transform throughout the play.”
From carefree teenager to midlife and the inevitable senior years, Messing’s character, Ernestine, marks her passage of time by celebrating a birthday every year — no matter what the circumstances are. And with every birthday come the inevitable questions.
“’Have I wasted my life?’ That is a question we ask ourselves at every stage of life,” Messing says. “That’s our greatest fear.”
Messing says the collective experience of the last few years makes the production “more relevant and more prescient” than ever. “It’s about connection,” she says. “We lost connection during the pandemic and connection is the thing that is most fragile in a family dynamic.”
Her co-star, Enrico Colantoni, echoes the sentiment. “My favorite line in the play is ‘notice what we have left.’ I don’t think that would have affected me the way it did if not for COVID,” he tells ABC Audio. “Little things are important now. Time spent with your family. I think that’s why it resonates with so many people now having gone through the two years. Everyone’s life is beautiful.”
Birthday Candles is now playing through May 29 at The American Airlines Theater.
(GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.) — The family of a man fatally shot by a police officer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, earlier this month is demanding that the officer be fired and prosecuted.
“It is an unjustifiable use of deadly force because police escalated a traffic stop into an execution,” civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Patrick Lyoya’s family, said during a press conference Thursday.
Lyoya’s mother, Dorcas Lyoya, who cried throughout the press conference, says she left her home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo “to escape war” and thought her son would be safe here, but is now heartbroken.
“As a parent, I was thinking maybe it was my son who was going to bury me, he will assist at my funeral, but what is so astonishing, I am the one burying my son,” Dorcas Lyoya said through the help of a translator.
Patrick Lyoya’s father, Peter Lyoya, compared his son’s death to crimes seen in other countries.
“I didn’t believe that in this country, that there was a genocide in this country, I didn’t know,” Peter Lyoya said through a translator.
Video of their son’s death on April 4 was recorded on an officer’s body camera, dashcam video, security cameras and a bystander’s cellphone. Police released the footage Wednesday amid community pressure.
The footage shows a white police officer, whose name has not yet been released, struggling with the 26-year-old after chasing him on foot following a traffic stop. The officer eventually forces Lyoya to the ground and is heard shouting, “stop resisting,” “let go” and “drop the Taser,” before shooting him in the head.
While many residents have expressed shock over the incident, Cle Jackson, the president of the Grand Rapids NAACP, says it was a matter of time before such an incident happened.
“We’ve been trying to bring reform for decades here. Some folks here have said, ‘a George Floyd will never happen in Grand Rapids. This would never happen in the city of Grand Rapids’. Now I always have to remind them it’s not if this is gonna happen, it’s just when it’s going to happen. And today is our real day,” Jackson told ABC News.
Jackson says issues involving police officers in the city have been going on for years. In 2018, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights opened an investigation after several complaints against the Grand Rapids police by Black residents, he said.
The department held public hearings where several people voiced concerns, but declined to set a timeline for when the investigation would be completed.
Jackson says the NAACP is intrigued to see if changes will come with the police department’s new chief, Eric Winstrom. The NAACP is joining with the family and Crump in calling for the officer to be fired, he says.
The Grand Rapids Police Officers Association did not immediately respond Thursday to ABC News’ request for comment regarding calls for the officer to be fired.
“I think [Winstrom] has an opportunity to come to Grand Rapids and do the type of cleanup work that needs to happen in this department…the number one metric or the initial metric that we will be able to determine if he is committed to improving community police relations for the city of Grand Rapids is to do the right thing and fire the officer,” Jackson said.
Winstrom said Wednesday that Grand Rapids Police and Michigan State Police are conducting an ongoing investigation and he would not comment further or take any action until after the investigation is completed.
He said the officer is a seven-year veteran of the department who is currently on paid leave and “stripped of all police powers” amid the investigation.
“I view it as a tragedy…It was a progression of sadness for me,” Winstrom said about the shooting.
Justin Bieber isn’t scheduled to perform at Coachella — or is he?
According to TMZ, the Grammy winner will be crashing his “Peaches” collaborator Daniel Caesar‘s opening night set as a special guest. According to the outlet’s spies, Justin will take the stage to perform a rendition of their smash hit.
That begs to question if their third collaborator, Giveon, will also make an entrance. So far, no word if that will happen.
Either way, Justin does have a gap in his schedule that would allow him to fly out to California and sneak into the music festival. The singer is currently on his Justice World Tour and is resting up after performing in Miami on Wednesday night. He isn’t scheduled to hit the road again until Tuesday, where he’ll resume his tour in Cincinnati.
Should he show up, this won’t be the first time Justin unexpectedly crashes Coachella. He previously joined “One More Time” singer Ariana Grande on stage in 2019 following the cancellation of his tour at the time.
Coachella, which tapped Harry Styles, The Weeknd, Swedish House Mafia and Billie Eilish as its headliners, kicks off tonight. The festival runs Friday through Sunday on both the weekends of April 15 through April 17, and again on April 22 and April 24.
The children of Metallica are hitting the road together.
Bastardane, featuring James Hetfield‘s son Castor Hetfield on drums, and OTTTO, featuring Robert Trujillo‘s son Tye Trujillo on bass, have announced a co-headlining tour, making stops in a number of California cities in May and June.
Both Bastardane and OTTTO are also playing the Bottle Rock Napa Valley festival over Memorial Day Weekend, which Metallica is headlining.
By the way, Hetfield and Trujillo aren’t the only Metallica members with kids following in their dads’ rocker footsteps. Lars Ulrich‘s children Myles and Layne Ulrich also have a band, Taipei Houston.
Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for NYFW ShopsLA presented by Afterpay
GAYLE‘s current tour takes her to San Francisco tonight, and in a few weeks, she’ll join AJR on their tour as an opening act. It’s her first major tour, but “abcdefu” singer says the inspiration for her live show didn’t come from watching another artist’s concert — it came from watching a movie.
“I was watching this movie…a couple of months into quarantine…it was Almost Famous,” GAYLE tells ABC Audio, referring to the acclaimed 2000 Cameron Crowe film about a teen journalist who goes on the road with a fictional rock band to profile them for Rolling Stone.
“It was right when they were on tour and [the writer] was seeing the first show that this rock band was doing,” recalls GAYLE. “And I remember, there’s even a specific moment where the main performer was like, ‘I want to look at the one person who’s not enjoying the show and make them enjoy the show.'”
But, says GAYLE, that was her “aha” moment when it came to imagining what kind of live performer she wants to be.
“I was like, ‘That is what I want to do,'” she remembers. “I just saw this…room just packed with sweaty people ready to have a good time and all ready to rock out together. And I literally was like, ‘That’s what I want to do…that is what I want my live show to be.'”
“And then everything I’ve done has been trying to take that energy and put it into my show,” she says.
GAYLE’s live shows include the songs on her debut EP, some older tunes, some unreleased tracks and a cover of Joan Jett‘s “Bad Reputation.”
(NEW YORK) — Dozens of people were injured, including 10 by gunfire, in a mass shooting on a rush-hour subway train in Brooklyn, New York, on Tuesday morning, triggering a manhunt for the gunman.
More than 24 hours later, authorities announced they had apprehended a suspect in the shooting — 62-year-old Frank James of Philadelphia — and that federal prosecutors had charged him with a terror-related offense.
In the hours since the incident, hundreds of New York Police Department detectives have been on the case, scouring surveillance footage, interviewing witnesses and tracking leads from evidence left behind at the scene to plot out how the attack unfolded.
APRIL 6
Around 2 p.m., James rented a U-Haul in Philadelphia that was later recovered near a subway station in Brooklyn, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Department of Justice. The key to the van and a credit card, which law enforcement sources told ABC News was used to rent the U-Haul, were among the gunman’s possessions recovered from the scene of the shooting.
APRIL 11
James picked up the U-Haul from U-Haul Moving & Storage of Allegheny West at 2:03 p.m., sources said.
Around 6:17 p.m., James visited a storage facility in Philadelphia, according to the complaint. A receipt for the unit was found in a jacket that James discarded on the subway platform, authorities said.
While executing a search warrant on the unit on April 12, law enforcement agents said they had recovered gun parts and ammo, including “9mm ammunition, a threaded 9mm pistol barrel that allows for a silencer or suppresser to be attached, targets and .223 caliber ammunition, which is used with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle,” the complaint stated.
Agents found more gun parts during a search of James’ apartment, on April 12, according to the complaint, including “an empty magazine for a Glock handgun, a taser, a high-capacity rifle magazine and a blue smoke canister.”
APRIL 12
The U-Haul was captured by surveillance footage driving over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn just after 4 a.m., after crossing state lines from Pennsylvania to New Jersey and then to New York, according to the complaint.
Security cameras captured an individual wearing a yellow hard hat and “orange working jacket” toting a backpack and rolling bag leaving the U-Haul at approximately 6:12 a.m. at West 7th Street and Kings Highway in Brooklyn, according to the complaint. Police ultimately found the U-Haul nearby on Kings Highway, about three blocks from an N subway stop where James entered the subway system, authorities said. He entered the Kings Highway station at around 8 a.m., sources said.
The shooting unfolded shortly before 8:30 a.m., just as a Manhattan-bound N train approached the 36th Street station in Sunset Park. A man mumbling to himself on the train donned a gas mask and detonated a smoke canister before pulling out a handgun and firing 33 bullets, police said. Ten people, including three teenagers, were shot, authorities said. The hard hat and orange jacket were found at the scene, police said.
James eluded law enforcement by boarding an R train that pulled into the station and traveled one stop before exiting at the 25th Street station, according to NYPD Chief of Detectives James Essig. A surveillance camera recorded a man matching James’ driver’s license photograph exiting the 25th Street station at approximately 8:40 a.m., according to the complaint.
James was seen again that day at a Park Slope subway stop at 9:15 a.m., Essig said. He bought a new mask and entered the Seventh Avenue subway station, sources said.
James made it into Manhattan and, sometime that night, checked into the Chelsea International Hostel on West 20th Street, sources said.
Police named James as a person of interest in the investigation later that day.
APRIL 13
Social media posts circulated appearing to show James, now a suspect in the shooting, walking around Manhattan.
Multiple sightings began at around 10:30 a.m., when he was spotted sitting outside Dimes, a restaurant in Chinatown, sources said. Witnesses took pictures of him sitting, apparently using a Link NYC hub to charge his phone, and posted to social media, tagging police, sources said.
A few hours later, James was spotted getting lunch at Katz’s on the Lower East Side, sources said.
The NYPD received a tip saying the suspect was in Manhattan’s East Village, in a McDonald’s at Sixth Street and First Avenue, police said. After reviewing the 911 call, investigators believe James may have called the police on himself, an NYPD official told ABC News. James reportedly said: “I think you’re looking for me. I’m seeing my picture all over the news and I’ll be around this McDonald’s.”
Frank Robert James had nowhere else to run or hide — and is now in NYPD custody. The work of our detectives is second to none and the dedication of our patrol officers is never ending. pic.twitter.com/uOXliUvoJ7
Responding officers didn’t see James in the McDonald’s. A good Samaritan spotted him nearby on St. Mark’s Place and First Avenue and flagged down police, sources said. James was taken into custody without incident at 1:42 p.m.
James was transferred into federal custody after his arrest and charged by federal prosecutors with a terror-related offense for an attack on mass transit, officials said.
APRIL 14
James made his first court appearance and didn’t enter a plea. He was ordered held without bail. His defense attorney, Mia Eisner-Grynberg, called the shooting a tragedy but said that initial information can often be wrong. She also lauded James for turning himself in.
ABC News’ Aaron Katersky, Mark Crudele, Luke Barr and Emily Shapiro contributed to this report.
Raising children while also managing a busy country music career is no joke.
Fortunately, Mickey Guyton’s got a strong support system that “absolutely” includes fellow moms like Carrie Underwood and Maren Morris, the “Black Like Me” star tells People.
“I talk to my friend Maren about it, Carrie Underwood about it,” Mickey explains. “It’s just interesting. Once you become a mom, the moms find you. Moms really rally around you because they get it.”
Having that support system is crucial. “You need that support because none of this is easy. It’s the greatest, hardest thing you’ll ever do,” Mickey adds.
Mickey and her husband, Grant Savoy, are parents to 14-month-old Grayson, and the birth of her son has shifted her perspective entirely.
“I saw kids [and thought], ‘Oh, they’re cute. Move on.’ Now, I’m like, ‘That’s somebody’s child.’ There’s a mom on the other end of that, or dad or two moms on the other end that are important…I just have a whole different respect for mothers.”
