for KING & COUNTRY recently announced their first arena tour in two years, and now they’re adding on to it with a Christmas tour.
The “Amen” duo’s A Drummer Boy Christmas Tour will kick off November 27 in Grand Rapids, MI, before wrapping up in Nashville, TN with a livestream concert event from that city’s iconic Grand Ole Opry House. Tickets go on sale to the general public Friday at 10 a.m. local time.
The holiday tour will feature Joel and Luke Smallbone performing their album A Drummer Boy Christmas live in concert for the first time. That album, which features a guest appearance by Gabby Barrett, came out last October.
In a statement, the Australian duo says, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year…. and one of our favorite shows to perform! We’re thrilled to be bringing A Drummer Boy Christmas to you, in person and indoors for the very first time.”
“We’ll be bringing the lights, the stage, and all the holiday cheer,” they add. “And in the spirit of giving, we’ll be supporting our friends at The Salvation Army to help families in need throughout the tour. Looking forward to ringing in this Christmas season with you!”
(NEW YORK) — Investing platform Robinhood officially became a publicly-listed company Thursday, making its Wall Street debut on the Nasdaq under the trading ticker $HOOD.
Robinhood co-founders Vlad Tenev (the current chief executive officer) and Baiju Bhatt (the chief creative officer) rang the Nasdaq’s opening bell in Times Square on Thursday morning, surrounded by colleagues and family members. Tenev carried his young daughter on his hip as his company made its initial public offering.
Trading opened to the public at $38 per share, giving it a valuation of some $32 billion. By mid-day the stock fell slightly, trading at around $35 per share.
Robinhood exploded in popularity amid the COVID-19 pandemic as swaths of retail investors turned to its commission-free trading services. It became embroiled in controversy amid the GameStop short-squeeze, when an army of retail investors attempted to take on Wall Street firms that were betting against the video game retailer.
As individual investors pushed the price of GameStop shares up, Robinhood and other trading platforms abruptly halted trading of the stock — leading to allegations they were doing so at the urging of hedge funds and short sellers. The company has denied this, saying the temporary halt was due to clearinghouse-mandated deposit requirements that skyrocketed amid the volatility.
Still, Robinhood’s Tenev was called to testify before lawmakers and the fallout of the GameStop saga left Wall Street reeling for months.
Robinhood has repeatedly said its mission is to “democratize finance for all.” The firm on Thursday celebrated what it saw as bringing its Main Street clientele to Wall Street via its Nasdaq listing. Some 50% of Robinhood users are first-time investors.
“The U.S. stock market is one of the world’s greatest sources of wealth creation. But for generations, it was out of reach for most people,” Tenev and Bhatt said in a joint statement Thursday celebrating the IPO. “Robinhood changed that — we’ve built investing products for everyday people, to put them in control of their financial futures.”
“Our listing day is a celebration of our customers — Generation Robinhood,” the statement added. “Through Robinhood, millions of everyday people have started investing in the stock market for the first time.”
Tenev and Bhatt said these new everyday investors are “making their voices heard through the markets, transforming our financial system in the process.”
Angels & Airwaves have released a new song called “Losing My Mind,” a track off the band’s upcoming album, Lifeforms.
“I wanted to write a song about a totally insane idea that would never happen, like, what if our own country was being torn apart by racists, a pandemic, and domestic terrorism, but all at the same time,” frontman Tom DeLonge says. “You know, just normal made up s*** that would never happen.”
The track, which is available now for digital download, is accompanied by a video that stars DeLonge alongside TikTok dancer Rampage. DeLonge plays Disco, who’s apparently the brother of the former Blink-182 guitarist’s character, Boomer, from the “First Date” video.
You can watch the “Losing My Mind” video, which DeLonge also directed, streaming now on YouTube.
Lifeforms, the sixth AVA album, is due out September 24. It also includes the previously released singles “Euphoria,” “Kiss & Tell,” “Restless Souls” and “Rebel Girl.”
Angels & Airwaves are performing this weekend at Lollapalooza. They’ll launch a headlining tour in support of Lifeforms in September.
Live concert series “Front and Center” will return to public television for its 10th season this August, giving viewers a front-row seat to intimate shows from the likes of Lady A, Brantley Gilbert, Maddie & Tae and many more.
The season kicks off with a new twist on the show’s usual format, presenting an archival concert from the late Glen Campbell, which was recorded in 2008 at storied West Hollywood venue the Troubadour. This month, that show also came out as a live album titled Glen Campbell: Live from the Troubadour.
Next up, the series will spotlight exclusive performances from a wide variety of country hitmakers and acclaimed singer-songwriters, featuring Dustin Lynch, John Hiatt with special guests Jerry Douglas and Tommy Emmanuel, Old Dominion, and operatic vocalist Sangeeta Kaur with Jon Anderson and Jake Shimabukuro.
The performances took place at Analog at Hutton Hotel, an intimate Nashville venue, and were filmed either pre-pandemic or with COVID-19 safety protocols in place.
The series kicks off August 1 and runs through September 19. The episodes will be distributed nationally by American Public Television; you can also watch them on “Front and Center”’s YouTube channel.
Nas has announced the sequel to his Grammy-winning album, King’s Disease,which he released last August.
“We’re back in business! King’s Disease II. 8/6,” the legendary rapper wrote on Instagram, sharing the album cover art of himself against an orange background.
Though little detail has been shared about the forthcoming project in the post, Nas did tag his label, Mass Appeal, Records and Hit-Boy, who produced the entirety of King’s Disease II.
“Run it back,” wrote Hit-Boy sharing the cover art on his Instagram.
Nas’ picked up his first-ever Grammy for his 13th studio album, King’s Disease, which won Best Rap Album. It features guest appearances from Charlie Wilson, Lil Durk, Anderson .Paak, Fivio Foreign, A$AP Ferg, Big Sean, Don Toliver and more, including an outro by the legendary Dr. Dre.
King’s Disease logs Hit-Boy’s fourth Grammy win, but his first for Album of the Year. He won Best Rap Song for Kanye West and Jay-Z‘s “N**** in Paris” in 2012 and again for Nipsey Hussle‘s “Racks in the Middle,” with Roddy Ricch, in 2020.
On Wednesday, Camila Cabello used boyfriend Shawn Mendes to create a hilarious TikTok video depicting the honeymoon phase of a relationship, “when you can’t fart or Poo or be a human.”
In the clip, Camila waves goodbye to Shawn, and as soon as he leaves the room, she lets one loose. Now Shawn has commented on Camila’s real-life gas-passing habits.
When Camila posted the video to her Instagram, Shawn wrote in the comments, “But u do fart tho.” Fans, of course, found this hilarious, but some took him to task for “exposing” Camila. “You threw her under the bus,” admonished one fan, while another added, “Poor Camila,” and a third wrote, “shut up Shawn girls don’t fart.”
Of course, Shawn may have just been paying Camila back for a TikTok she made earlier this month in which she trolled him for a super-awkward video he made. In his original TikTok, Shawn couldn’t quite get the hang of editing, and ended up with abrupt jump cuts and scenes where he’s just staring at the camera. Camila filmed herself lip-syncing to Shawn’s clip, and mimicking his stares and weird edits.
(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal workers could set the groundwork for more private sector organizations to follow along. But it also is likely to trigger an avalanche of lawsuits from those who say required vaccinations infringe on the civil liberties of Americans.
President Joe Biden is expected to announce on Thursday a plan requiring all federal workers to be vaccinated or comply with “stringent COVID-19 protocols like mandatory mask wearing — even in communities not with high or substantial spread — and regular testing.”
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says that employers can require their employees to be vaccinated with exceptions being granted for religious and medical reasons.
Federal law does not bar organizations from mandating coronavirus vaccines even as the publicly available vaccines have yet to receive full authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, according to a Justice Department memo.
But some legal scholars say that full approval from the FDA would give companies increased legal cover from employees who refuse to comply with a vaccine mandate.
“There are many companies that are worried about pushback litigation and are waiting for full FDA approval,” said Larry Gostin, a professor of global health law at the Georgetown University Law Center and director of the World Health Organization Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights.
Full FDA vaccine approval is expected in September, according to a federal official. Normally, full approval takes up to a year following the submission of all required data.
Gostin added that employers also have the right to terminate employees who do not comply with their company’s vaccine mandate.
“A worker doesn’t have a legal or ethical entitlement to go unvaccinated or unmasked in a crowded workplace,” he said. “They can make decisions for their own health and well-being, but they can’t pose risk to others. Somebody who is unvaccinated and isn’t tested and unmasked poses a very substantial risk of transferring a very dangerous, if not deadly, disease.”
Similar to the legal arguments over state mask mandates, the debate surrounding vaccine mandates is an issue widely expected to end up in court.
“America is a very litigious society and there will be lawsuits,” said Gostin. “But employers and particularly hospitals are on very firm legal grounding and will win those lawsuits.”
While the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal workers could inspire similar moves from large employers to local governments, some states are taking offensive measures.
Several states including Arkansas, Tennessee, Utah, and Montana have already passed legislation banning COVID-19 vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy.
And with return to school quickly approaching for millions of U.S. students, some legislatures have even sought to prohibit required COVID-19 vaccines for school attendance.
The Federal Law Enforcement Officer’s Association, which consists of FBI agents and U.S. Marshalls, however, sees the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal employees as an attack on civil liberties.
“Forcing people to undertake a medical procedure is not the American way and is a clear civil rights violation no matter how proponents may seek to justify it,” said Larry Cosme, the association’s president, in a statement.
The idea of employer vaccine mandates is something that many public health experts increasingly agree on. A large number of companies are still allowing employees back to the office based entirely on voluntary employee disclosure of vaccination status as opposed to requiring actual proof of vaccination.
“An honor system can work in a situation where you don’t have an epidemic,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. “We need to realize that we are in an emergency, and we have to do everything possible to ensure that the vast majority of people get vaccinated.”
Google, Apple and Facebook all postponed their return to office plans for mid-October as the delta variant continues to drive a dramatic rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations nationwide.
Google’s decision to require staff in their offices to be vaccinated comes after similar announcements impacting government workers in New York and California to curb the spread of the delta variant.
“The timing for these vaccine mandates is right and it’s actually a bit long overdue,” said El-Sadr.
Move over, tattooed Joker: Jared Leto‘s latest film role might be his most unrecognizable look yet.
The Thirty Seconds to Mars frontman and Oscar-winning actor shared the character poster for his part in the upcoming film House of Gucci, which details the assassination of real-life fashion mogul Maurizio Gucci.
For his role as Paulo Gucci, Maurizio’s cousin, Leto appears covered in prosthetics to make him look him older and heavier, complete with a bushy mustache and, perhaps most surprisingly, a bald head surrounded by hair on the sides.
Naturally, the photo has been receiving quite the reaction, causing Leto to trend on Twitter on Thursday afternoon. One commenter compared Leto’s look to Jeffrey Tambor, while another quipped, “Clearly, Jared Leto visited the beach that makes you old” — a reference to the new M. Night Shyamalan film, Old.
Along with the poster, Leto tweeted, “Stasera” — Italian for “tonight” — suggesting the House of Gucci trailer might be dropping before the day is over.
House of Gucci, directed by Ridley Scott, is due out on November 24. It also stars Adam Driver as Maurizio, and Lady Gaga as Gucci’s ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani, who was convicted of arranging his killing.
(NEW YORK) — With the country in the midst of a new nationwide resurgence of coronavirus infections and hospitalizations, misinformation about the effectiveness of the vaccines has been proliferating on social media, with increased attention falling on the rare number of vaccinated people ending up in the intensive care unit (ICU). However, according to dozens of hospitals across the nation surveyed by ABC News, very few fully vaccinated people are actually ending up severely ill and in the ICU with COVID-19.
And experts say that those that do, tend to be frail or have conditions that interfere with the vaccine’s effectiveness at producing protection.
ABC News contacted 50 hospitals in 17 states, and asked them to share data on their ICU wards’ current COVID-19 patients, including their vaccination status. In the surveyed hospitals, ABC News found that the overwhelming majority of COVID-19 patients currently being treated in ICUs were unvaccinated.
Of the 271 total COVID patients in the surveyed ICUs, 255 patients, or approximately 94%, were unvaccinated against COVID-19 in ABC News’ snapshot in time.
Further, of the 16 vaccinated individuals receiving care in the ICU, almost all suffered from comorbidities and other health problems, such as cancer or weakened immune systems. ABC News only heard of one otherwise healthy and fully vaccinated individual, with no reported underlying conditions, who was in the ICU.
According to the CDC, “vaccine breakthrough cases are expected,” and, as a result, “there will be a small percentage of fully vaccinated people who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from COVID-19.” But data about ICU patients’ vaccination status is not regularly reported or readily available on the federal or state level.
“The current surge of COVID-19 is driven by those who have elected not to be immunized. We will continue to see the lopsided impact of COVID among the unvaccinated, as they represent the vast majority of severe illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths,” said ABC News contributor Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital.
The hospital sampling also appears to be reflective of a national trend. According to the White House COVID-19 Task Force, severe breakthrough infections remain uncommon, and nearly all of the patients who are currently hospitalized with COVID-19 — 97% — are unvaccinated.
Dr. Lew Kaplan, past president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine and professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, said that the ABC News survey data “provides crystal clear guidance regarding the SARS-CoV-2 delta variant — that vaccines work.”
Furthermore, said Kaplan, the very fact that “the overwhelming majority of hospitalized critically ill patients with this viral variant are unvaccinated, should drive our nation to relentlessly pursue vaccination of every eligible individual.”
“It is our duty and our privilege to save lives,” Kaplan said. “The COVID-19 vaccine is staggeringly effective in helping us keep people at home and alive.”
Front-line workers support the numbers
ABC News’ findings are also supported by local data. In Springfield, Missouri, county health officials reported this week that since vaccines became available, 96.5% of those who have died of COVID in the community were not fully vaccinated.
Mercy Hospital nurse Emily McMichael said the county’s findings are supported by what she’s been seeing.
“These patients are a lot sicker and a lot younger than what we saw the last go around, so it’s just really sad to see,” McMichael said. “And a lot of the population is unvaccinated.”
In Alabama, which has the lowest vaccination rate in the country, 94% of current COVID-19 hospitalized patients are unvaccinated according to state statistics — and hospital admissions are six times higher than they were just a month ago, as health care workers report an influx of COVID-positive patients in need of care.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital has seen “an explosion of cases,” with the number increasing tenfold in the last three weeks, according to Dr. Kierstin Kennedy, chief of hospital medicine.
The patients who are currently hospitalized, Kennedy said, are younger than those who were hospitalized during the last surge — but unfortunately, they are just as sick. The vast majority of those patients are unvaccinated, she said.
Similarly, in Florida, state statistics show virus-related hospitalizations are nearly at their highest point since the onset of the pandemic, with more than 1,200 COVID-19 patients being admitted to the hospital every day.
“This is heartbreaking because all this could have been avoided; this is unnecessary human suffering that we are witnessing right now,” said Dr. Seetha Lakshmi, medical director of the Global Emerging Diseases Institute at Tampa General Hospital, where she said “almost all” patients are currently unvaccinated.
Another Florida physician said he believes low vaccination rates are one of the driving factors behind the state’s significant increase in COVID-19 patients.
“The vaccine is really protective in terms of being hospitalized or in terms of dying, and the people we’re seeing that are sick, ending up on ventilators and ending up hospitalized, are unvaccinated patients,” Dr. David Wein, emergency room physician at Tampa General, told ABC News.
ABC News’ Sony Salzman, Eric Strauss, Alexis Carrington, Chidimma Acholonu, Odelia Lewis, Priscilla Hanudel, and Dr. Jay Bhatt contributed to this report.
It pays to have rich friends like Ray J, who gifted Soulja Boy a McLaren worth at least $200,000 for his 31st birthday on Wednesday.
According to TMZ, Soulja pulled up late to his birthday party in Los Angeles in a yellow McLaren, but the party was over before it really began. His friend and rapper OG 3Three hosted the party, which was shut down by local police, who reportedly received numerous noise complaints.
To celebrate his 31st trip around the sun, Soulja also released his new album, Big Draco, featuring Omarion, Tadoe and his Verzuz competitor Bow Wow. Almost every song is under three minutes, with the exception of the track “Trappin So Hard,” featuring Desiigner, which is nearly four minutes. On “I Was the First Rapper,” Soulja declares himself as the first rapper to go viral on YouTube.
