Are you ready for some Journey? The Rock and Roll Hall of Famers have been tapped to perform at a special concert this summer that will help celebrate the 2022 inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Journey will headline the 2022 Concert for Legends, taking place August 6 at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio, one of the events being held in conjunction with Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement Week.
An as-yet-unannounced guest artist will open the concert and will be revealed in the coming weeks.
The 2022 Enshrinement Week will see over 100 Pro Football Hall of Famers visiting Canton to participate in a variety of planned festivities at Hall of Fame Village, where the Hall of Fame museum and stadium are located.
Journey currently is in the middle of their spring Freedom Tour 2022 of North America with Toto. The trek is mapped out through a May 16 show in Quebec City, Canada. The band also will release a new studio album called Freedom later in the year.
(WASHINGTON) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday announced that the State Department has made a formal assessment that Russian forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine.
“Based on information currently available, the U.S. government assesses that members of Russia’s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine. Our assessment is based on a careful review of available information from public and intelligence sources,” Blinken said in a statement.
The assessment does not come with any new U.S. sanctions, but it backs a global push for accountability for Russia’s artillery and airstrikes on civilians and civilian infrastructure.
President Joe Biden has said he believes Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a “war criminal,” an accusation that the Russian government said threatened diplomatic relations between the two countries, already strained to their breaking point over Putin’s war against Ukraine.
But whether the war crimes assessment means Putin himself is a war criminal will depend on an individual court of law, according to U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack.
“There are doctrines under international law and domestic law that are able to reach all the way up the chain of command,” she told reporters Wednesday, but whether that includes the Russian leader “would depend on a court that has jurisdiction,” she said.
Van Schaack wouldn’t say how the U.S. will push for accountability for what it has now deemed war crimes, adding, “Everything’s on the table. We’re considering all the various options for accountability.”
That includes the International Criminal Court, which has opened an investigation into potential war crimes, and domestic courts, including in neighboring countries who may gain custody of Russian service members or conduct trials in absentia.
But the U.S. legal system is ill-equipped to handle cases, Van Schaack said, because the U.S. War Crimes Act limits prosecutions to U.S. citizens who are perpetrators or victims. Congress is considering amending that law, she said.
Because the U.S. is not a party to the ICC, she said they have no “affirmative cooperation duties,” but left open the possibility for cooperating with it.
Russia and Ukraine are also not parties to the ICC, but Ukraine reached an agreement with the court to grant it jurisdiction to investigate potential war crimes dating back to Russia’s first invasion in 2014 when it seized the Crimean Peninsula and sparked the separatist war in eastern provinces known as the Donbas.
Van Schaack declined to speak to individual attacks that backed up the new U.S. assessment, but she and Blinken pointed to Russia directly targeting sites that were clearly marked for civilian use.
“Russia’s forces have destroyed apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure, civilian vehicles, shopping centers, and ambulances, leaving thousands of innocent civilians killed or wounded. Many of the sites Russia’s forces have hit have been clearly identifiable as in-use by civilians,” Blinken said in his statement.
This includes the Mariupol maternity hospital and “a strike that hit a Mariupol theater, clearly marked with the word ‘дети’ — Russian for ‘children’ — in huge letters visible from the sky. Putin’s forces used these same tactics in Grozny, Chechnya, and Aleppo, Syria, where they intensified their bombardment of cities to break the will of the people,” Blinken added.
Van Schaack said individual Russian service members who conducted these attacks could be prosecuted, but so too could their commanders who were responsible for them and were either complicit in the attacks or even just because they didn’t stop their forces from conducting them.
The State Department will continue to compile evidence of war crimes and share them with the appropriate bodies, including Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office, which has said it’s recorded over 2,400 “crimes of aggression and war crimes” in the month-long war and identified 127 suspects, prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova told the AFP.
That evidence includes not just video, photos, and other publicly available information, but U.S. intelligence, including intercepted communications between Russian service members, according to Van Schaack, who said all of it is being preserved for future trials.
“We don’t want to lose that evidence. We don’t want that evidence to be tampered with. So it’s extremely important that it be collected now and preserved with an eye towards future accountability,” she told reporters.
For weeks, U.S. officials, up to and including Biden, hinted that the U.S. was seeing evidence that Russia was committing war crimes, but deferred to a formal assessment from Van Schack’s office, the State Department’s office of global criminal justice.
Still, Biden told reporters last week he believed Putin is a “war criminal” — a comment that the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned U.S. ambassador John Sullivan over, warning it put U.S.-Russian relations “on the brink of collapse.”
There’s nothing wrong with a little throwback tune, even if it might not ever be a big hit.
Parker McCollumhopped on social media this week to play an unreleased song for fans, with the caveat that they might not ever see it on a studio album.
“I’ve done everything that I can/ It don’t matter where it lands / Ain’t a damn thing I can do/ Heads you win, tails I lose,” Parker sings, strumming his acoustic guitar along to the mournful ballad.
It’s a sad tune that sounds like it’s from another era, but the singer says he won’t ever stop writing throwback ballads.
“I still try all the time to write songs that sound like the ones I grew up loving. Just sad old country songs,” he muses in a note that accompanies the video. “Wade Bowen and the Warren Brothers stopped [by] the house yesterday and we messed around with this one. Probably won’t ever make it on an album but I still love it.”
Next up, Parker’s got plans to join Thomas Rhett on his Bring the Bar Tour this summer. In personal news, he and his fiancée, Hallie Ray Light, will tie the knot this month.
Anthony Mackie, known for his role as Falcon in the Marvel films, has purchased 20 acres of land that he plans to utilize for a film and television studio.
Nola.com reports the 43-year-old actor closed on the deal earlier this month, on the Interstate 10 Service Road at Read Boulevard in New Orleans, Louisiana, the actor’s hometown.
New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell expressed her excitement for the development — and for the influx of jobs that’ll come as a result — in a tweet saying, “The New Orleans East is making a comeback, bam.”
The scope of the plan is not clear as of yet, Nola.com states.
Sum 41 has announced a new album called Heaven and Hell.
The project is a double record consisting of two halves: Heaven, which will be made up of pop-punk songs the “Fat Lip” rockers are known for, and Hell, which will be all metal.
Speaking to Rolling Stone about the two-part album, frontman Deryck Whibley explains that Heaven reflects the “young and innocent and free” feeling of pop-punk, while the darker Hell “comes with a lot of anger for people who have stolen from me and hurt me in the past.”
A release date for Heaven and Hell has yet to be announced. It’ll be the follow-up to 2019’s Order in Decline.
In the meantime, you can buy tickets for Sum 41’s Blame Canada tour with fellow north-of-the-border band Simple Plan, which launches on April 29 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Mariah Carey & Morgan Carey in 1990; Barry King/WireImage
Mariah Carey‘s brother is currently suing her for defamation, but now Mariah has hit back with her own counterclaim, the New York Post reports.
Morgan Carey sued Mariah last year, accusing her of making false claims about him in her best-selling memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey. Now, the Post reports that, according to papers filed on Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court, Mariah is seeking to have her brother pay her legal fees.
In the papers, Mariah says she’s likely to win the case because, according to the filing, the parts of the book that Morgan claims are libelous are “true or substantially true.” What’s more, whatever Mariah said about Morgan wasn’t published “with actual malice” — a legal standard that has to be met to prove defamation.
The Post notes that last month, a judge tossed out the majority of Morgan’s claims, finding that most of what Mariah wrote about him was “opinion and exaggeration,” which doesn’t count as defamation. The remaining claims concern Mariah writing that Morgan, 62, was a drunk who sold drugs, assaulted their mother, and once hired a hitman.
The Oscars are this Sunday night! Here’s a look at the leading contenders for Best Supporting Actor and Actress.
This category seems to be the easiest to predict this year: CODA’s Troy Kotsur and West Side Story’s Ariana DeBose have the most momentum going into Sunday’s ceremony.
Kotsur and the cast of CODA were both winners at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and Kotsur also won the BAFTA for his role as the deaf father of a hearing teenage daughter. If Kotsur wins the Oscar, he’ll be the first deaf male actor to do so.
In the role of Anita, Ariana DeBose sang and danced her way through Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. She’s already won the Screen Actor’s Guild Award, the BAFTA and the Golden Globe for her performance.
But of course, with the Oscars, you never know.
Besides Kotsur, the field for Best Supporting Actor includes Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee, both for The Power of the Dog, J.K. Simmons for Being the Ricardos, and Ciarán Hinds for Belfast.
In the Best Supporting Actress category, the other nominees are Jessie Buckley for The Lost Daughter, Kirsten Dunst for The Power of the Dog, Judi Dench for Belfast and Aunjanue Ellis for King Richard.
Tune into the 94th Annual Academy Awards March 27 on ABC to see whether the predictions come true.
(WASHINGTON) — Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of state, died Wednesday from cancer at age 84, according to her family.
She was nominated for secretary of state by President Bill Clinton and served in the role from 1997 to 2001.
In a State Department briefing Wednesday, spokesperson Ned Price said President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have been notified of her death.
“The impact that Secretary Albright … had on this building is felt every single day in just about every single corridor,” Price said.
Price said Albright was a mentor to Blinken, his deputy Wendy Sherman and many others.
“A tireless champion of democracy and human rights, she was at the time of her death a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, chair of Albright Stonebridge Group, part of Dentons Global Advisors, chair of Albright Capital Management, president of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, chair of the National Democratic Institute, chair of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and an author,” her family said in a statement.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
ABC News’ Conor Finnegan contributed to this report.
Justin Bieber is getting to bring his own style to his favorite hockey team.
The Canadian singer, along with his clothing company drew house, has teamed up with the Toronto Maple Leafs to design a special jersey in honor of the NHL team’s annual Next Gen game on Wednesday.
“My love for the Maple Leafs has always been a big part of who I am, and my passion for the team, and the passion of millions of fans, is stitched into this Next Gen sweater,” Bieber said in a statement. “I’m grateful to the Leafs for the chance to team up again to create something so authentic for the team and its fans.”
The reversible jersey features a blue-and-black motif on one side with a maple leaf logo in the middle and the Toronto skyline stitched into the bands on the sleeves. The other side is black and yellow with a maple leaf in the center that incorporates the drew house logo.
The Leafs will be wearing the blue-and-black version of the jersey during today’s game against the New Jersey Devils. It’s also available for fans to buy at NHLShop.com.
In 2021, Justin showed his love for the Leafs by dedicating a video for his song “Hold On” to the team.
Lykke Li has released a new song called “No Hotel.”
“There’s no hotel no cigarettes and you’re still in love with someone else,” the “Get Some” artist says of the track, quoting its opening lines. You can download and stream the song now via digital outlets.
“No Hotel” follows Li’s 2018 album so sad so sexy. Last year, she released a reissue of her 2011 album Wounded Rhymes in honor of its 10th anniversary.
