(LOS ANGELES) — The heat emanating from the dozens of wildfires ravaging the West is creating thunderstorms without rain in regions desperate for moisture.
The pyrocumulus clouds, or fire-driven thunderstorm clouds, are created as large pockets of heat and smoke from the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon rise and meet a relatively cool atmosphere.
The thunderstorms typically don’t contain rain because any moisture that forms usually evaporates on the way down. Vegetation parched by the megadrought is more likely to burn if struck by lightning, and gusty winds from the storms can spread fires more rapidly.
This year’s dry season, exacerbated by the megadrought and climate change, has created a tinderbox, with the relative humidity often as low as 10%.
At least 87 large wildfires are burning in 13 states, with more than 2.5 million acres burned so far this year.
The Bootleg Fire has burned through 388,360 acres and is 32% contained. The fire is threatening about 5,000 homes and has caused thousands of households in Lake County, Oregon, to evacuate.
Evacuations also are occurring near Lake Tahoe due to the Tamarack Fire, which had burned through nearly 40,000 acres by Wednesday morning and was 0% contained.
The Dixie Fire in Butte County, California, has scorched more than 85,000 acres and was 15% contained.
The haze from the smoke-filled skies even traveled east, causing air quality alerts in several East Coast cities, including New York, which marked its poorest air quality in several years.
More than 750,000 acres have burned in 2021 than at the same time last year, and fire season is far from over. The wet season typically begins in October.
Anthony Mackie and Jahi Di’Allo Winston have been tapped to star in Netflix’s upcoming family adventure We Have a Ghost, Variety has learned.
They join Tig Notaro, Jennifer Coolidge and Black Widow star David Harbour who have also been cast. Written and directed by Christopher Landon, the film will be an adaption of Geoff Managuh’s short story Ernest, which follows a young man whose family finds a ghost named Ernest haunting their new home. The film will also star Erica Ash, Isabella Russo, Niles Fitch, Faith Ford and Steve Coulter. A release date for We Have a Ghost has yet to be announced.
In other news, HBO has announced a three-part documentary on former president Barack Obama. Titled Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union, the new doc will tell of Obama’s early beginnings including “his political rise to become a historic figure as the U.S. continues to grapple with its racially divisive history.” Released as a three part event, Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union, will debut on HBO on August 3, with subsequent installments airing the following two nights.
Finally, a teaser for Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s new animated Netflix film Vivo has been released. The film follows Miranda as Vivo, a musically gifted kinkajou, aka a rainforest honey bear, who goes on a journey to deliver a song to his cherished owner’s long-lost love. The film also stars Zoe Saldana, Juan de Marcos, Brian Tyree Henry, Michael Rooker, Nicole Byer and Gloria Estefan among others. Vivohits Netflix on August 6.
(WASHINGTON) — America’s top general on Wednesday spoke publicly for the first time about whether he feared then-President Donald Trump would try to involve the military in the aftermath of the 2020 election, as reported in a newly-released book.
While Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, at a rare Pentagon news conference, declined to comment on specific claims made in the book, he and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Wednesday were emphatic that the military is and ought to remain a strictly “apolitical” institution.
“I, the other members of the Joint Chiefs, and all of us in uniform, we take an oath, an oath to a document, an oath to the Constitution of the United States, and not one time do we violate that,” Milley told reporters asking about the book excerpts. “The entire time, from time of commissioning to today, I can say with certainty that every one of us maintained our oath of allegiance to that document, the Constitution, everything that’s contained within it,” he said, referring to the Joint Chiefs.
“I want you to know, and I want everyone to know, I want America to know, that the United States military is an apolitical institution — we were then, we are now — and our oath is to the Constitution, not to any individual at all,” he said. “And the military did not and will not and should not ever get involved in domestic politics. We don’t arbitrate elections. That’s the job of the judiciary and the legislature and the American people. It is not the job of the U.S. military. We stayed out of politics, we’re an apolitical institution.”
Austin went out of his way to defend Milley.
“We fought together, we served a couple of times in the same units,” Austin said. “I’m not guessing at his character — he doesn’t have political bone in his body.”
Before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Milley saw ominous parallels between the political turmoil in the United States and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, according to “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Final Catastrophic Year,” by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig.
“He had earlier described to aides that he kept having a stomach-churning feeling that some of the worrisome early stages of 20th-century fascism in Germany were replaying in 21st-century America. He saw parallels between Trump’s rhetoric about election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s insistence to his followers at the Nuremberg rallies that he was both a victim and their savior. ‘This is a Reichstag moment,’ Milley told aides. ‘The gospel of the Führer,'” Rucker and Leonnig wrote.
The authors say that Milley believed Trump was stoking unrest after the election, and decried what he called “brownshirts in the streets,” although an official told ABC News the comment was in reference to the radical members of the Oath Keepers and so-called “boogaloo boys,” not Trump supporters in general.
An early sign of unease between Trump and Milley came last July amid Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., when Milley apologized for taking part in Trump’s controversial walk from the White House to St. John’s Church, though he peeled off before the president’s notorious photo opportunity.
“I should not have been there,” Milley said in a prerecorded video commencement address to National Defense University. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”
In August 2020, Milley told Congress there is no role for the U.S. military in elections.
Then in January 2021, after the Capitol riot, Milley and the seven other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed an internal memo to service members saying “the violent riot in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 was a direct assault on the U.S. Capitol building, and our Constitutional process,” warning them that any act to disrupt the constitutional process is against the law.
Milley said Wednesday that he and the other members of the Joint Chiefs always gave the “best military professional advice” to Trump and any other president they’ve served under.
“We always adhered to providing best professional military advice, bar none. It was candid, honest, in every single occasion. We do that all the time every time,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — Thirty years ago Engracia Figueroa, 51, was hit by a Bay Area Rapid Transit train that left her with a spinal cord injury and amputated leg. She now calls her wheelchair an “extension of her body” — granting her freedom and independence.
But last week Figueroa says she was “re-disabled” when her $30,000 wheelchair was mangled in the cargo hold of a United flight.
“I was heartbroken,” she said when she first saw what she described as her “completely contorted” chair after her flight to Los Angeles. “I just thought, all of the independence that I fought and strived for and successfully survived for soon to be 30 years by the minute, it’s stripped away, and I was completely disabled and traumatized, as well as hurt and exhausted.”
Airlines are obligated to fix or replace damaged or lost wheelchairs under the Air Carrier Access Act.
“They’re attempting to fix it,” Figueroa told ABC News, but “there’s nothing to fix.”
“The chair is a total loss and to get a new wheelchair, it takes two months,” she said.
(Courtesy Engracia Figuero) Disability rights activist Engracia Figuero says United Airlines damaged her $30,000 custom-made electric wheelchair on a flight from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles, July 14, 2021.
A United spokesperson said the company apologized to Figueroa and is “actively working with the repair company to reach a resolution to this issue as quickly as possible.”
She is currently using a loaner chair that she says only allows her to move in her apartment.
“There is no regard or respect of the extension of the human that’s in the plane,” she said. “When they see a mobility device they should respect it, as if it is a person, because that’s what it is — an extension of their person. And we’re trusting them with the rest of our body.”
Figueroa says this is the fourth time her wheelchair has been damaged in-flight. She blames a lack of training on how to break down and load the devices.
Near the end of 2018, U.S. carriers had to start reporting the number of wheelchairs and scooters that were mishandled.
In a little more than two and a half years, airlines damaged or lost 15,749 wheelchairs and scooters, according to data from the Department of Transportation. In 2019, they mishandled 10,548 mobility devices, amounting to roughly 29 a day.
Earlier this month, model Bri Scalesse called out Delta Air Lines in a now-viral Tik Tok for breaking the frame of her wheelchair. According to Scalesse, the repair company told her the chair could not be fixed and that “it was going to take a really long time to replace.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to live my life,” Scalesse said in the video, which is now viewed more than two million times.
In a statement to ABC News, Delta said they “work closely with the customer to make things right at their direction including personal apologies about their experience with us.”
Videos like Scalesse’s have generated more interest in accessibility issues than Michele Erwin, the founder and president of disability rights group All Wheels Up, has seen in more than a decade.
“I don’t think I know of one person who uses a wheelchair who hasn’t had a travel horror story,” Erwin said.
And advocates say airlines are losing potential customers.
“Eighty percent of the wheelchair community isn’t flying,” she said, “and it’s not just about the one person whose wheelchair is damaged, times it by four, because now that person’s family isn’t traveling.”
According to Erwin, in 2016, one major U.S. carrier told her they spent $2.6 million on wheelchairs repairs and replacements. Eight years prior, they had only spent $1.6 million.
“Another eight years from now, that number is going to double again,” Erwin said, “and that’s why I believe they are interested in having the conversation of what can All Wheels Up do to improve accessible air travel.”
She said she’s had meetings with representatives at major U.S. airlines and manufacturers to come up with solutions.
“If they invested that money into the actual research on trying to implement a wheelchair spot on airplanes, we could save them millions of dollars, as well as bad press,” she said.
All Wheels Up is currently funding and conducting crash-test studies in an attempt to get the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval for a wheelchair spot on planes.
“Every person that uses a mobility device has traveling anxiety,” Figueroa said. “You worry you’re going to lose your independence and become re-disabled again. I’m always saying in the back of my mind — not this time, not this time.”
Eric Clapton has threatened to cancel performances at U.K. venues that require audience members to be vaccinated to attend his concerts.
Clapton’s message, which was posted on the Telegram page of Robin Monotti, who identifies as a pro-vaccine-safety advocate, was in response to U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson‘s recent announcement that COVID-19 vaccine passes would be required to attend events at nightclubs and other venues.
“Following the PM’s announcement on Monday…I feel honour bound to make an announcement of my own,” Slowhand writes. “I will not perform on any stage where there is a discriminated audience present. Unless there is provision made for all people to attend, I reserve the right to cancel the show.”
Accompanying the message is a link to Clapton’s rendition of the 2020 Van Morrison song “Stand and Deliver,” which criticizes the U.K. government’s pandemic-related restrictions on live performances.
In May, another message from Clapton was posted on Monotti’s Telegram page in which he revealed he experienced a severe reaction after receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine.
“[M]y hands and feet were either frozen, numb or burning, and pretty much useless for two weeks, I feared I would never play again,” Eric wrote. “[I] should never have gone near the needle.”
In a statement to Rolling Stone in May, a spokesperson for the U.K. government agency overseeing the vaccine maintained that “over 56 million doses of vaccines against COVID-19 have now been administered in the UK, saving thousands of lives through the biggest vaccination programme that has ever taken place in this country.”
The rep added, “Our advice remains that the benefits of the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca outweigh the risks in the majority of people.”
Clapton’s next U.K. concerts are scheduled for May 2022. He begins a run of U.S. dates in September 2021.
Alec Tabak/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
(NOTE CONTENT) Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has been indicted on five counts of sexually assaulting five women in California over the course of a decade, according to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón.
“Anyone who abuses their power and influence to prey upon others will be brought to justice,” Gascón said.
Weinstein, 69, appeared in court Wednesday after being extradited from New York. He pleaded not guilty to four counts each of forcible rape and forcible oral copulation, two counts of sexual battery by restraint and one count of sexual penetration by use of force, the district attorney’s office said.
A grand jury returned the indictment on March 15 for the charges for the sexual assaults, which allegedly occurred at hotels between 2004 to 2013. The indictment was unsealed Wednesday.
Weinstein is scheduled to return to court for a hearing on July 29.
The former producer is already serving a 23-year prison sentence for rape and sexual assault stemming from charges in Manhattan; he has been serving his time at New York’s Wende Correctional Facility.
Back in the early 2000s, the idea would have been sheer lunacy, but now, Backstreet Boys say they’re open to doing a joint tour with *NSYNC one day.
Speaking to PEOPLE (The TV Show!), Backstreet’s Nick Carter said of the proposed pairing, “I think it would just be good for the nostalgic side of it, for the fans, if we did something like that.” AJ McLean chimed in, “The fans would lose their mind[s].”
Nick explains, “What’s happening now is that we are realizing that we’re the only ones that have gone through what we have together, and we relate to one another. It was a place in time, and our lives were very parallel. So, all this unity and coming together and all this love, it’s really cool.”
The comments come after AJ teamed with *NSYNC’s Lance Bass and Joey Fatone for a charity event last month, and after Joey, AJ and Nick — along with Boyz II Men‘s Wanya Morris — announced a four-night engagement in Las Vegas.
Around the time of the charity event last month, AJ told People that the two groups’ supposed “feud” had been “fabricated,” and added, “Just to be able to do something like this together hopefully squashes all that crap that was never true in the first place.”
As previously reported, Backstreet have scheduled a 12-night Very Backstreet Christmas Party residency show in Las Vegas later this year.
Kentucky rapper EST Gee is making headlines with his latest mixtape, Bigger Than Life or Death, which features Yo Gotti, Lil Durk, Future, Young Thug, and more.
Fans on social media are enjoying the 15-song project, including Gee’s previously released songs, “Lick Back,” Capital 1,” and the title track, “Bigger Than Life or Death.”
“Six songs deep in this new EST Gee and it ain’t got no skips,” tweeted one fan, while another said, “EST Gee is such a breath of fresh air. His sound is exactly what I’ve been wanting to hear.”
Some fans hinted that the Louisville rapper should have been placed on XXL‘s 2021 Freshman class list for emerging artists. Meanwhile, many were impressed with Gee’s track “5500 Degrees” with Rylo Rodriguez, 42 Dugg, and Lil Baby.
Baby closes out the track, whichflips Juvenile‘s 1998 Cash Money classic “400 Degreez,” by declaring himself the “Lil Wayne of this new generation.”
“I’m going too crazy I’m the Wayne of this new generation / [Rappers] fugazi, they can’t f*** with us no types of ways/ these [rappers] too lazy / I’m cut from a different cloth, I don’t know who raised em,'” Baby raps.
(NOTE CONTENT) Andy Cohen has already proven skilled at getting people to spill the tea on his Bravo show Watch What Happens Live!, but now he’s doing the same when it comes to former flames, on his upcoming dating show Ex-Rated.
The occasionally NSFW trailer for the upcoming Peacock series just dropped, and it reveals the show’s premise: people are put on the hot seat by their exes, who judge their former partners on everything from their kissing and cuddling techniques to more intimate activities.
Joining Andy to try to smooth things over is sexpert and author Shan Boodram, who gives tips on how people — and the viewers at home — could potentially boost their numbers.
The dating show also lets guests give a potential ex another shot.
Peacock says Ex-Rated, “challenges adult singles of all ages and backgrounds to face raw, candid feedback on everything from their personality to sexual prowess and relationship skills in order to find out where they went wrong and how they can improve.”
The series debuts August 12. (VIDEO CONTAINS ADULT LANGUAGE)
A new collection of Slash signature Epiphone guitars was released Tuesday, featuring multiple acoustic and electric models, as part of a partnership between Epiphone and the Gibson company.
The Epiphone Slash Collection features guitars inspired by Gibson models that the Guns N’ Roses legend has played throughout his career. The electric models are the Epiphone Slash Les Paul Standard finished in Appetite Burst, November Burst, Anaconda Burst and Vermillion Burst, and the Slash “Victoria” Les Paul Standard Goldtop, which is gold. The collection’s acoustic model is called the Epiphone Slash J-45, which is available in Vermillion Burst and November Burst finish.
All of the guitars in Epiphone Slash Collection feature Slash’s “Skully” signature drawing on the back of the headstock, the guitarist’s signature on the truss rod cover, and a hardshell case that also includes the “Skully” logo.
Speaking about his signature collection in a new Epiphone promo video, Slash notes, “It’s a huge honor to be able to have a guitar that’s got your name on it…representing you…These are really well put together, all the best materials, all the best components. Everything I could want in an electric guitar is all in this. And so for…a reasonable amount of money, you can get a really great guitar that will last your whole career.”
All of the new Slash Epiphone models are available at a list price of $899. For more information about the instruments, visit Epiphone.com.
The Epiphone models were inspired by the pricier guitars released last year as part of the Gibson Slash Collection.
