Drake and Meek Mill beefed for several years, but now they are at peace, and Drizzy is promoting the Philly MC’s new album, Expensive Pain.
“PAIN GETS EXPENSIVE AT MIDNIGHT,” Drake wrote on his Instagram story. “@meekmill proud of u boy since the Bahamas cook up we were plotting on the next chapter time to eat.”
The feud between Drake and Meek Mill sparked in 2015, when Meek stated that the Champagne Papi used a ghostwriter to write his lyrics. Mill says that feud led to his worst year in music four years later.
“2019, I think my slowest year, me and Drake was beefing. I was at a disadvantage,” he told Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, as reported by HotNewHipHop. “He was winning, in the eyes of the people. I still walked my way through that, went through prison, I had to go through something. Once I bounced back out, Championships. We had a pandemic, two years go by, few people fading away.
“We in 2021, I’m going to stand on Expensive Pain,” Meek continued. “I’m going to stand on my talent, and I’m going to remain confident and hope that people pay attention to what’s going on because they got a long way to go. I’m trying to keep pushing.”
Expensive Pain is Mill’s fifth studio album, following Championships in 2018. It features Lil Baby, Kehlani, Lil Uzi Vert, Moneybagg Yo, Young Thug, Lil Durk, A$AP Ferg, Brent Faiyaz, Giggs and Vory.
Mill also announced a star-studded “Expensive Pain: Meek Mill & Friends” album playback concert on October 23 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. He’ll perform the new project in its entirety alongside several special guests.
(NEW YORK) — The pot of cash up for grabs continues to grow. According to lottery officials, the Powerball jackpot for Monday night’s drawing soared to $685 million.
The cash value of the grand prize is $485.5 million, Powerball officials said.
The jackpot was last hit on June 5, and since then there have been 40 consecutive drawings without a Grand Prize winner, a new record for the Powerball jackpot, according to officials.
The lottery is available in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
In August, it went from two drawings a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, to three drawings a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.
Even though there hasn’t been a jackpot winner in months, several Powerball players have earned smaller cash prizes.
“In Saturday’s drawing alone, more than 2.8 million tickets won prizes ranging from $4 to $1 million,” Powerball officials said in a news release.
The largest Powerball jackpot prize money was $1.586 billion in 2016, which was shared by winners in California, Florida and Tennessee, officials said.
Monday’s drawing is scheduled for 10:59 p.m. ET. The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million, according to Powerball officials.
(WASHINGTON) — Stephanie Grisham, one of former President Donald Trump’s most senior and longest-serving advisers, says she is “terrified” that her former boss may run for office again.
“I am terrified of him running in 2024,” Grisham, who served as both Trump’s press secretary and first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff, told “Nightline” co-anchor Juju Chang in a wide-ranging exclusive interview on the eve of the publication of Grisham’s new book.
“I don’t think he is fit for the job,” Grisham said. “I think that he is erratic. I think that he can be delusional. I think that he is a narcissist and cares about himself first and foremost. And I do not want him to be our president again.”
Asked by Chang what scares her the most, Grisham painted a grim picture of what could happen if Trump ends up running again in 2024.
“I think he would foment more violence,” she said. “He won’t have consequences. He won’t need to be reelected again.”
“I think he will line his pockets,” she added. “I think his family will line their pockets. I believe that he wanted to help the country in the beginning; I believe he wants to help himself now.”
In her new book, titled “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” out this Tuesday, Grisham describes a White House in perpetual chaos, where she says “casual dishonesty” flowed through the air “as if it were in the air conditioning system.” The book is filled with accusations about the former president, and includes a host of alleged wrongdoings that range from downplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus to making sexual comments about a young female White House staffer.
But amid all the turmoil laid out in the book, Grisham remained by the former president’s side for nearly his entire four-year term in the White House, before resigning after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
“How did you go from one of the loyalist loyals to one of their fiercest critics, seemingly overnight?” Chang asked Grisham, who responded, “Definitely not overnight. It’s kind of a journey.”
Grisham, who is perhaps best known for never holding a televised press briefing during her time as White House press secretary, has faced a barrage of criticism for speaking out now, nearly a year after leaving the White House.
The former president and his family have forcefully responded to the latest tell-all book by a former close ally, with Melania Trump’s office saying in a statement, “The author is desperately trying to rehabilitate her tarnished reputation by manipulating and distorting the truth about Mrs. Trump. Ms. Grisham is a deceitful and troubled individual who doesn’t deserve anyone’s trust.
“Stephanie didn’t have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning,” former President Trump said in a statement. “Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”
Grisham has also received harsh pushback from some former colleagues, including former Trump White House Director of Communications Alyssa Farah, who responded to the book live during her guest-host appearance on “The View” Monday.
“First and foremost, I don’t believe in profiting off of public service. I had a chance to write my White House tell-all and declined. The American people, the taxpayers paid my salary. I’m not going to go write a book and cash in,” said Farah, who resigned from the White House in December following the election.
“Reading some of the reviews, some of the critics are saying, you know, if you’re admitting to lying then, what makes us think that you’re not lying now?” Chang asked Grisham about her role as press secretary.
“Well, I don’t think I’m admitting to lying at all,” Grisham responded. “I tried to give the press the most honest answers I could, and there were oftentimes I was given information that I knew to be true that perhaps wasn’t true.”
But Chang pushed back, pointing out that Grisham had already admitted that a 2019 tweet she posted targeting former Chief of Staff John Kelly had been untrue.
“To be fair, you did say that the John Kelly tweet was not sincere,” Chang said to Grisham, who acknowledged, “That was not sincere,” and added, “And I regret and apologize for so much.”
“But you said that, ‘I never lied?'” Chang followed up. “Oh no,” Grisham said. “I would s– I– I just would say I– I tried my best.”
Beyond not holding a press briefing, Grisham writes in the book that she was once tasked by the former president with figuring out how to completely ban members of the media from the White House grounds. “I researched different places we could put them other than the press briefing room. Each time the president asked me about my progress on the matter, I let him know I was still working on options,” she writes.
“Should the American public believe what you’re saying now when you, in many ways, were non-responsive and not communicating transparently or honestly during — by your own admission?” Chang asked.
“Fair question — the fact is, the president never wanted me to do a briefing,” said Grisham who added that “I was glad that that was something he didn’t want from me, because I didn’t want to have to go out there and say something dishonest.”
Farah, however, pushed back on Grisham’s claim that Trump told her not to hold press briefings.
“That would surprise me,” Farah said. “When I worked for him, it was, ‘Go get out on TV, Alyssa. Kayleigh, go give a briefing.’ He wanted people out.”
“She could have done backgrounders in her office,” Farah said of Grisham. “But it seemed like she was largely MIA on the job.”
Grisham also claims in the book that she observed the former president, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 18 women, develop an “unusual interest” and behave “inappropriately” toward a young female staffer during his time as president, including during one trip where he summoned the unnamed aide to his cabin on Air Force One, allegedly telling other staffers, “Let’s bring her up here and look at her ass.”
“What I do know is that he behaved inappropriately. And since the woman worked for me, I tried to protect her and keep his unusual interest in her under wraps,” Grisham writes. “If the president didn’t see her with the press corps, he would ask me where she was. He would ask me if she were coming with us on foreign trips. When she did come along on trips, he often asked me to bring her to his office cabin in the aircraft, which he’d rarely done with anyone else.”
“I wouldn’t leave her in the cabin with him. I always sat there,” Grisham told Chang. “And he would just talk to her about, you know, ‘Did you see my speech? What did you think?’ You know, I think have her compliment him.”
But Chang challenged Grisham, asking, “And yet in many ways were you helping in some ways normalizing his other inappropriate behavior and enabling in some way this behavior?”
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Grisham replied. “At the White House, it’s not like there’s a human resources office that you can go to say, ‘Hey, the president of the United States is acting inappropriately.'”
Grisham’s claims about the staffer were corroborated by Farah, who said on “The View” that “I was aware of the situation and of the female and I did report it to the chief of staff.”
“It was a challenging situation I don’t know if anything was done,” she said.
“What were you worried that might happen?” Chang asked Grisham.
“I was worried that a young, impressionable girl would be put into a situation that made her uncomfortable,” said Grisham, who also admitted that she now believes “most” of the women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, including former porn star Stormy Daniels. “I was worried he would sexually harass her.”
As the first lady’s chief of staff, Grisham had an up-close look at the woman she says Secret Service agents referred to as “Rapunzel.” Regarding the #FreeMelania hashtag that became a rallying cry for those who theorized online that the first lady didn’t want to be in the White House, Grisham said that idea was misguided.
“The #FreeMelania hashtag I think was people hoping that she wanted to leave,” Grisham said. “The truth is, she liked it there. I think there was a rumor for years that she had a whole separate house somewhere, which was not true. We would laugh about the #FreeMelania hashtag all the time.”
Grisham also described what it was like to be the person to inform the first lady that her husband was being accused of an extramarital affair and was being sued by Daniels.
“That was tough. As a woman, I’ve been cheated on before, so that was painful for me,” Grisham recalled. “It was very, very awkward. I’ve never had to do anything like that before.”
Grisham also claimed that staffers had a secret nickname for the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, who both held senior positions in the White House, referring to the pair as “the interns.”
“We called them the interns because as interns usually are, they come into places and think they know everything,” Grisham said.
In the book, which publisher HarperCollins calls “the most frank and intimate portrait of the Trump White House yet,” Grisham also claims Trump had an infatuation with dictators and writes how the former president allegedly sought to cozy up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin during an overseas trip for the Group of 20 summit in Osaka in 2019. Grisham alleges that during a private meeting before the press was brought into the room, Trump told Putin, “Okay, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave we’ll talk. You understand.”
“Putin was coughing. He kept coughing, kept clearing his throat, and I did find it odd that he wouldn’t just take a drink of water … and he knows ways to get in someone’s head,” Grisham told Chang.
As one of Trump’s longest-serving political aides, Grisham’s time working for the former president dates back to his 2016 campaign when she served as a press wrangler before moving deeper into the Trumps’ inner circle. As other top aides resigned or were forced out — with some even speaking out against Trump while he was still in office — Grisham continued to stand by the president.
Grisham told Chang that one of her biggest regrets was not doing more from inside the White House during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when, as she alleges, Trump was thinking more about getting reelected than how to get the virus under control.
“It was about having him look presidential for reelection. I wish I would have told him he needs to wear a mask. I wish I could’ve been louder with that,” she said.
“Do you think that misinformation or dishonesty cost lives?” Chang asked about the White House’s response to the pandemic.
“Yes,” Grisham replied. “I will always think that, and I don’t know that I — you can ever forgive yourself fully for being a part of that.”
In a full-circle moment, Cold War-era comic Yakov Smirnoff, who was a punchline in Deadpool, has teamed up with that film’s star, Ryan Reynolds, to help promote Reynolds’ Aviation American Gin brand.
And it’s all in connection with National Vodka Day, which is celebrated today.
Despite his last name, which he naturally shares with a popular vodka brand, Smirnoff announces in the ad that he’s officially changed his name to Yakov Aviation American Gin.
“People assume I must love vodka, but the truth is I never have,” the artist formerly known as Yakov Smirnoff notes in the commercial.
“And that’s hard for a Russian. Vodka is like bread in Russia, except it’s cheaper and we never run out of it,” he riffs. “I’m actually a gin man.”
Reynolds then explains in a voice-over that the comic “made it official, by legally changing his name” in the ad, which shows the comic holding up a name-change certificate.
“America continues to amaze me,” says the comedian, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1978. “The only qualification you need to own a liquor brand is to be on TV. What a country!”
“TV and movies,” Reynolds corrects. “TV and movies.”
This isn’t the first booze brand Yakov has promoted. In his 1985 heyday, the Moscow on the Hudson co-star did ads for Miller Lite.
(TUSCON, Ariz.) — One Drug Enforcement Administration agent was killed and two other officers were injured in a shooting on an Amtrak train that was stopped in Tucson, Arizona, authorities said.
Officers boarded the train Monday morning to perform a routine check for illegal guns, money and drugs and encountered two people on the second level of the double-decker Amtrak car, Tucson police said.
One individual was detained, but a second person revealed a handgun and opened fire, police said.
One DEA agent was killed and another DEA agent is in critical condition, police said.
A Tucson police officer who was on the platform heard the gunfire and ran onto the train, at which point he was shot, police said. That officer is in stable condition, police said.
After exchanging rounds with police, the suspected gunman barricaded himself in a lower-level bathroom, authorities said. It was later determined that the suspected gunman died, though it is not clear how he died, police said.
There were no reports of injuries to the 137 passengers or 11 crew members, Amtrak said.
The train was en route from Los Angeles to New Orleans and arrived in Tucson at 7:40 a.m. local time, Amtrak said.
ABC News’ Nicholas Kerr contributed to this report.
This Friday, Justin Bieber: Our World, a documentary about the making of Justin’s New Year’s Eve concert in December 2020, will hit Amazon Prime Video. Speaking to People, Justin said the hardest part of the show, which took place at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in front of a small group of invited guests, was simply putting it together in the middle of a pandemic.
“It was difficult…all of the checks and balances that went along with putting together this show, from the COVID tests, to some people actually getting COVID during the process and having to wait in quarantine for 15 days or however long it took for it to pass,” Justin explains.
In the documentary, you’ll definitely see the panic that ensues when one key member of Justin’s creative team gets COVID-19. “There was just hurdles, and it’s already hard enough to put on a show of this level,” Justin adds. “But to do it during a pandemic…”
Of course, the fact that it was Justin’s first concert in three years also didn’t make it any easier.
“I definitely felt the nerves leading up to it,” Justin tells People. But as he points out, “I think sometimes nerves are coming from a good place, because you care.”
Justin also admits that “there’s a lot of moments that I messed up” during the show — but you can’t really tell from watching the doc, which features the star performing all his biggest hits, including “Intentions,” “Baby,” “Love Yourself,” “Lonely,” and “Holy.”
However, Justin allows, “You want to get better at something, you gotta be willing to make mistakes. I heard this saying like, ‘You miss all the shots you don’t take.’ So you take the shot. If you miss, you miss, but at least you tried.”
Dylan Scott is living his best life, as he’s set to embark on the Livin’ My Best Life Tour early next year.
The headlining tour takes the “My Girl” hit maker across the country, beginning on February 24 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and with stops at the famous Joe’s Live in Illinois, the Tabernacle in Atlanta, and at the House of Blues in Boston, Anaheim and Cleveland. The tour concludes on April 29 at The Fillmore in Silver Spring, Maryland.
The singer, whose other hits include “Hooked” and “Nobody,” recently wrapped up a stint as an opening act on Luke Bryan‘s Farm Tour, and continues out on the road with the American Idol judge’s Proud to Be Right Here Tour.
“I’m excited to finally headline in front of my fans. Hopefully we’ve gained a lot of new ones over the past few months while being on tour with Luke,” Dylan shares in a statement, adding that newcomer Dylan Marlowe will serve as the opening act. “Ready to live my best life on the ‘Livin’ My Best Life Tour.'”
Dave Grohl will be an upcoming guest onBedtime Stories, a kids TV program on the BBC’s CBeebies pre-school channel.
On the first of two episodes, premiering October 8, the Foo Fighters frontman will read from Octopus’s Garden, a children’s book written by Ringo Starr based on the1969 Beatles song of the same name.
“As a proud father of three, I’ve always enjoyed reading stories to my children,” Grohl says. “It was a pleasure to read these stories for CBeebies.”
If you’re looking for more Dave Grohl stories, look no further than The Storyteller, the iconic musician’s first ever memoir. The book will be released tomorrow, October 5.
Grohl is currently on a book tour in support of The Storyteller, which continues Tuesday in New York City.
It appears that hip hop heavyweights Big Daddy Kane and KRS-One will battle in the next Verzuz.
Their silhouettes appear in a Verzuz Instagram post that reads, “WANNA PLAY? We got a new VERZUZ on the way Sunday, October 17th, brought to you by the killer new series, #Chucky. Who do y’all think it is!? Drop your guesses in the comments below and we’ll pick an entry at random to get a pair of tix!”
Snoop Dogg, who was announced as one of the Super Bowl halftime performers on Friday, quickly figured out the answer.
“Big Daddy Kane. V. K. R. S1,” The Doggfather wrote.
DJ Premier from Gang Starr commented, “I can tell by the silhouette.”
Kane is celebrating 35 years in hip hop after launching his career in 1986 as a member of The Juice Crew. His many classics include “Ain’t No Half Steppin'” from 1986. Big Daddy performs a tribute to his late friend, BizMarkie, on the BET Hip Hop Awards, airing Tuesday night.
KRS-One also began his career in the ‘80s in New York City. He was a member of Boogie Down Productions, and began the Stop the Violence movement after his partner, Scott La Rock, was shot and killed in 1987. Tupac and Eminem are among the many rappers who praised him as one of their strongest influences.
Fat Joe and Ja Rule starred in the previous Verzuz held on September 14 at Madison Square Garden in NYC, where Nelly, Ashanti and Remy Ma were among the featured performers,
Today the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the showbiz union representing tens of thousands of behind-the-scenes workers, has voted to authorize a nationwide strike — the first time in IATSE’s 128-year history that members have done so.
The vote was nearly unanimous: with 90% of the eligible union voters casting ballots, 98% voted in support of a strike authorization.
Union members say they’re seeking adequate compensation and safe working conditions in an industry that pushes work days far longer than most realize. The boon in production from streaming services has compounded the overwork problem, union members say.
“The members have spoken loud and clear,” said IATSE International President Matthew Loeb in a statement. “This vote is about the quality of life as well as the health and safety of those who work in the film and television industry. Our people have basic human needs like time for meal breaks, adequate sleep, and a weekend. For those at the bottom of the pay scale, they deserve nothing less than a living wage.”
Loeb continued, “I hope that the studios will see and understand the resolve of our members. The ball is in their court. If they want to avoid a strike, they will return to the bargaining table and make us a reasonable offer.”
For its part, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the entertainment industry’s official collective bargaining representatives, responded by saying in part, “We deeply value our IATSE crew members and are committed to working with them to avoid shutting down the industry…particularly since the industry is still recovering from the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.”
