Tom Morello is helping add a bit more rage to Olivia Rodrigo‘s sound.
The Rage Against the Machine guitarist has posted a video on his Instagram showing him shredding an original solo over Rodrigo’s song “good 4 u.” Is there a wah-wah pedal involved? You’d better believe it!
Morello captioned the video “Freestyle jamming to the hits pt. 1,” suggesting we may be getting more Pop Against the Machine solos in the future.
“good 4 u” is one of several hits off Rodrigo’s 2021 smash album SOUR. The track credits Hayley Williams as a co-writer due to its similarity to Paramore‘s “Misery Business.”
In related Morello news, the guitar icon recently auctioned off the axe he played alongside grandson on The Tonight Show last month to raise money in support of Kellog’s workers on strike. The funds were used to provide hot meals to those on holding the picket line in cold weather.
Trey Songz is reportedly being sued for sexual assault, and his accuser is demanding $20 million.
Jahuara Jeffries is suing the “Can’t Be Friends” singer, birth name Tremaine Aldon Neverson, claiming that he assaulted her on January 1, 2018 at the E11EVEN nightclub in Miami, according to The Jasmine Brand.
They attended an earlier party hosted by Diddy, then she claims that Songz invited here and her friends to the club.
The lawsuit reads: “While Plaintiff was dancing on the couch, she noticed Defendant Songz standing on the floor next to her. She then felt fingers being inserted into her vagina, turned around, and saw Defendant Songz pulling his hand away from her bottom.”
“[The plaintiff] suffered negligent infliction of emotional distress and resulting pain and suffering, disability,” the document continued.
As previously reported, Songz is being investigated for a separate alleged incident in Las Vegas. Las Vegas Metro Police say that on November 28, they “received a report of a sexual assault incident alleged to have occurred at a hotel in the 3700 block of South Las Vegas Boulevard” involving the 37-year-old singer.
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(NEW YORK) — An at-home treatment for COVID-19 that can prevent serious illness was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday, offering a note of optimism for the future of the pandemic as the world faces the omicron variant.
When taken early, Pfizer’s pill was 89% effective at reducing the risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19, according to the company, and was effective against omicron.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla estimated that 1,200 deaths and 6,000 hospitalizations would be prevented for every 100,000 COVID-19 patients who take the pills.
The FDA said the pill, Paxlovid, was authorized for the treatment of mild-to-moderate coronavirus disease in anyone 12 years and older who weighs at least about 88 pounds. Patients must test positive and be at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death.
Paxlovid will be available by prescription only and should be started as soon as possible, ideally within five days of symptom onset, the FDA said.
“This authorization provides a new tool to combat COVID-19 at a crucial time in the pandemic as new variants emerge and promises to make antiviral treatment more accessible to patients who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19,” Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a press release.
The treatment course requires taking several pills, twice per day, for five days.
The government has ordered 10 million pills of Pfizer’s Paxlovid and another treatment pill, Merck’s Molnupiravir, which has yet to be authorized.
The order will come in as it’s produced, with some doses available upon FDA authorization, White House COVID coordinator Jeff Zients told governors on a call Tuesday.
The federal government has already contracted with Pfizer to purchase the pills at $530 a course, or $5.3 billion.
There is not expected to be any direct cost to patients.
The pills offer hope, particularly as the omicron variant spreads rapidly across the U.S.
Vaccination and booster shots are the best defense against omicron, offering up to 80% protection by some estimates, and unvaccinated Americans will be hit hardest by the surge. But there will also be more breakthrough infections among vaccinated people because of omicron’s mutations.
“While not a replacement for vaccines, the emergence of new variants has highlighted the need for new therapeutic lines of defense,” said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and ABC News contributor.
“The combination of low friction access and high efficacy means that we finally have a therapy that can make a real impact on the trajectory of this pandemic,” he said.
Public health experts and the pharmaceutical companies who make the pills also have been firm that the treatments alleviate illness — they do not prevent it. Vaccines do, and they’re still the safest, most effective option to stay out of the hospital.
“I want to emphasize that no one should use the existence of the pill as an excuse to avoid vaccination,” Bourla, Pfizer’s CEO, said.
The U.S. will also likely face some hurdles in the initial rollout — another reason they shouldn’t be relied upon as an alternative to vaccination.
One concern is that the pills need to be taken early, which means patients will need a positive test and a doctor’s appointment very soon after they get sick. Testing delays and overburdened hospital systems could make that more challenging.
They are most effective “before a person becomes critically ill,” said Dr. Paul Currier, director of the Respiratory Acute Care Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Once a patient becomes critically ill, the virus has already caused a lot of inflammation in the body that likely cannot be stopped by medicines that only target the virus itself.”
But pharmaceutical executives are optimistic that the pills will make a significant dent in the pandemic.
Pfizer’s pill has the “potential to save the lives of patients around the world,” Bourla said.
ABC News’ Dr. Navjot Kaur Sobti contributed to this report.
Before they became parents, Tyler Hubbard and his wife, Hayley, also figured they’d spank their kids occasionally. After all, that’s how both of them were raised, the couple explain during a new episode of the Meaning Full Living podcast, which Haley co-hosts.
The couple are parents to three young children now, and they haven’t yet used spanking as a form of discipline. That’s simply because they realize it’s not the best way to communicate with their kids’ particular, individual personalities, Tyler explains. For example, he remembers one time when he raised his voice to his oldest daughter, three-year-old Liv.
“She got scared, and she got upset. I thought, ‘Man, that’s terrible,’” the singer recounts. Rather than keep leaning into that stern, disciplinarian side, Tyler says he apologized to his daughter for raising his voice.
“I was able to come to her level and say, ‘Daddy is really sorry. I should not have talked to you that way,’” he continues. “Haley and I want compliant kids, but we also want kids who trust us and want to talk to us about things.”
Don’t worry, fans: There’s no trouble in paradise, as far as Nick Jonas and his wife Priyanka Chopra Jonas are concerned.
Some fans got concerned when Priyanka, whose Instagram handle used to be Priyanka Chopra Jonas, dropped the “Jonas” from the feed’s name. But according to the actress, who appears in the new Matrix film, she was just trying to be consistent with her social media.
Asked why she made the change, Priyanka told ETimes, the entertainment website of The Times of India, “I don’t know. I wanted the username to match my Twitter, I guess.”
She added, “I just find it really amusing that everything becomes such a huge deal to people. It’s social media, guys. Just chill out!”
In his first in-depth interview in nearly four years, James Franco is addressing the sexual misconduct allegations brought against him in 2018.
The actor sat down with Sirius XM’s Jess Cagle and opened up about why he hasn’t spoken out sooner.
“At that moment I just thought I’m gonna be quiet,” he says. “I’m gonna pause. Did not seem like the right time to say anything. There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen.”
Franco says over the past four years he went to work on himself. He says that after getting sober from alcohol at age 17, he realized his addiction had turned to sex.
The actor admits to cheating on everyone he had been with until his current girlfriend, Isabel Pakzad, and says he slept with students at his former acting school, Playhouse West Studio 4, though stresses he didn’t start the school for that purpose.
“I didn’t want to hurt people,” he says. “…And the behavior spun out to a point where it was like I was hurting everybody.”
Over the summer, Franco reached a settlement with two of his former acting students who filed a sexual misconduct lawsuit against him in 2019.
Franco’s full interview with Jess Cagle airs Thursday.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
Beyoncé and Jay-Z could become the first married couple in history to compete against each other for an Oscar.
Queen Bey’s “Be Alive,” from King Richard, and Jay’s “Guns Go Bang” with Kid Cudi, from The Harder They Fall, are among the 15 songs on the Academy Awards shortlist for Best Original Song. Five will be nominated. Neither of the two superstars have been nominated for an Academy Award in the past.
Cudi has a second song on the list, “Just Look Up,” with Ariana Grande, from the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up.
H.E.R., who won an Oscar this year for “Fight for Youm” from Judas and the Black Messiah, is on the list with “Automatic Woman,” from Halle Berry’s latest film, Bruised. The four-time Grammy winner composed the song with Berry’s boyfriend, Van Hunt.
Jennifer Hudson, who also is a previous Oscar winner, made the list with “Here I Am (Singing My Way Home)” from the Aretha Franklin biopic, Respect. Hudson won her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Dreamgirls in 2007.
The nominations for the 94th Academy Awards will be announced on February 8. The Oscars will air on ABC March 27.
(WASHINGTON) — As Afghanistan spirals further toward a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, the international community is allowing greater exemptions to aid groups to try to alleviate the suffering.
The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution Wednesday to grant humanitarian exemptions to their sanctions on the Taliban, which seized control of Afghanistan this summer after nearly two decades of war with the U.S.-backed government.
In addition, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it has expanded its general licenses to more explicitly allow aid groups to work in Afghanistan, including to support civil society, human rights, and education.
But while both steps were welcomed, many aid groups, U.N. agencies, and U.S. lawmakers, including Democrats, say it is not enough, as more than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million people face acute hunger.
“While this move will enable an essential increase in humanitarian aid, this alone is not sufficient to stave off economic collapse and humanitarian unraveling,” David Miliband, president and CEO of the aid group International Rescue Committee, said after the U.N. vote.
The Biden administration has defended U.S. sanctions against the Taliban — designated by the Treasury as a terrorist organization — and instead blamed Afghanistan’s economic woes on decades of dependence on humanitarian aid, an ongoing drought and COVID-19, and the militant group’s takeover of the country.
A senior administration official said the U.S. was working to mitigate the crisis, but said it is on the Taliban to govern now, address the country’s economic challenges, and meet its commitments if it wants international aid, including on securing women’s and girl’s rights, halting reprisal killings, and countering terrorism.
The Taliban have said international sanctions must be lifted, calling them “punishment of the common people,” in the words of Suhail Shaheen — a longtime spokesperson who the Taliban have cast as their U.N. ambassador, although the group’s government is not recognized.
Afghanistan’s economy has contracted by 40 percent, according to some estimates, with inflation now putting everyday items out of reach for many. Foreign aid, which accounted for some 75 percent of the collapsed former government’s funding and 40 percent of the country’s GDP, has been halted and the government accounts, frozen. Banks have shut down or limited access to funds, with many global financial institutions afraid to run afoul of U.S. and U.N. sanctions. That means salaries, especially for public sector employees like teachers, have not been paid for months, and unemployment has skyrocketed.
With this economic collapse comes real suffering. The U.N. has warned as many as 90 percent of Afghans could be in poverty by next year, and as many as one million children could die this winter from starvation.
Among them could be Mohammed, who at two-years old weighs just 11 pounds — the bones in his face visible as he struggles to eat in a Kabul hospital. His mother unable to afford the medicine he needs, he is one boy among the many Afghans struggling across the country.
“The previous government was bad, but this government is even worse because they have cut our food. Nobody has mercy on us,” a former shopkeeper waiting in line to access food aid told ABC News last week.
That government has done little to deal with U.S. and international concerns about its violent tactics, repression of women and other minorities, and even its ability to govern.
But it’s also clear that U.S. and U.N. sanctions have slowed cash flowing into the country, including the former government’s funds at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Last week, the U.S. and others facilitated a deal to transfer $280 million from the World Bank’s funds to UNICEF and the World Health Organization to provide humanitarian aid — the first of its kind transfer that could set an example for future transactions, but a drop in the bucket compared to the need, per aid groups.
“To ensure that humanitarian work can continue to scale, it is critical that sanction regimes do not hold back operations. Transactions on which humanitarian activities depend must be safeguarded,” the U.N.’s relief chief Martin Griffiths tweeted Wednesday.
Democratic lawmakers have joined those criticisms, with over three dozen urging the Biden administration in a letter Monday to reverse policies that “could cause more civilian deaths in the coming year than were lost in 20 years of war.” They called for the U.S. to provide Afghanistan’s central bank access to the $9.8 billion of Afghanistan’s currency reserves held in the U.S. and “more explicit reassurances” to give aid groups space to operate.
But so far, Biden’s team has shown no interest in doing so. The senior administration official told reporters the U.S. will maintain financial pressure on the Taliban and its leadership, as it seeks to ensure money gets to the Afghan people instead.
ABC News’s Ian Pannell contributed to this report from Kabul.
As their incredible 2021 comes to an end, the boys of BTS — JHope, Jimin, Jin, Jungkook, Suga, RM and V— individually sat down for a series of tell-all interviews Vogue Korea recently and reflected on the past year.
V admitted he became more of an introvert this year, adding, he used to be an extrovert but a recent MBTI personality test revealed he became more withdrawn. “I don’t think these changes are a bad thing,” he shared. V also discussed BTS’ “My Universe” collaboration with Coldplay and revealed that, after the band heard him sing, they told him “I was like the second Chris Martin.”
Suga said he is “happier” than he was before because of the success he’s enjoyed in 2021 and, when asked about his future, remarked, “I’ll always be a member of BTS.” He noted some people pushed him to give producing a try and cracked, “I’m not responsible enough to take responsibility for anyone.”
As for RM, he’s thinking of a different future. The singer recently had “a eureka moment” when looking at Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh‘s paintings and became “envious” they were able to communicate “directly with a boy from Korea” hundreds of years after they died. RM says he’s “fascinated by art” now and is strying art history to learn the “longevity of painters.”
Jimin reflected on the stress of the pandemic, and confided, “It felt like my whole life’s work was being negated.” He admits that feeling made him focus on keeping BTS’ momentum going.
As for Jin, he admits he’s learned to appreciate his lazy days and declared, “I think that resting should be entirely selfish.”
As for Jungkook and J-Hope, the two expressed hope and excitement for the future.
Recently, Brett Eldredge had to postpone a couple of the shows on his Glow Live Tour after testing positive for COVID-19. However, quarantine’s not stopping him from bringing the holiday spirit to fans.
This week, he got all dressed up and performed a half-hour livestream concert of Christmas classics from his living room. Complete with a bow tie, microphone and lit-up tree in the background, Brett delivered a quarantine version of his Christmas tour set list, livestreaming the event on his social channels.
“Yes, I am in quarantine,” Brett joked. “I am healing up nicely. I’m feeling really great.”
Not only was he feeling well enough to perform, but the show was a refreshing pace from Brett’s normal quarantine activities, the singer went on to say.
“Just being able to sing beats the heck out of watching Netflix. I did go sledding down the stairs the other day,” he added. “My dog was just staring at me like I’m a weirdo.”
Brett’s Glow Live Tour isn’t quite done yet. He rescheduled the dates he had to cancel — a pair of shows in Chicago — to December 29 and 30.
