Eddie Murphy reportedly will be teaming up with Jonah Hill for a new comedy that will be directed by black-ish veteran Kenya Barris.
The Hollywood Reporter notes that the three very funny guys will collaborate on an as-yet-untitled project that the trade described as an “incisive examination of modern love and family dynamics and how clashing cultures, societal expectations and generational differences shape and affect relationships.”
Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall vet Hill, who of late has been exploring his more dramatic side on screen, also co-wrote the upcoming film with Barris, who co-wrote the hit sequel Coming 2 America for Murphy.
Kenya also will be making his feature film directorial debut on the film, the trade says.
Disney+ has unveiled the first trailer for Doogie Kamealoha M.D., the Hawaii-set reboot of the Neil Patrick Harris medical dramedy Doogie Howser, M.D.
The sneak peek kicks off with Andi Mack veteran Peyton Elizabeth Lee as the title character, saving a man’s life on an O’ahu beach, with the help of a sunbather’s hair pin.
The original show even gets name-dropped in the trailer, with people calling the 16-year-old doctor as “a real-life Doogie Howser.”
The trailer shows how the series will see the young doctor will be “juggling a budding medical career and life as a teenager,” including using the scientific method to deduce whether a guy likes her, in-between her rounds at the hospital.
The series, which also stars a diverse cast including Kathleen Rose Perkins, Jason Scott Lee, Matthew Sato, Wes Tian, Emma Meisel and Ronny Chieng, debuts on Disney+ on September 8.
The original Doogie Howser, M.D. ran for four seasons on ABC, from September 19, 1989, to March 24, 1993.
(WASHINGTON) — U.S. intelligence agencies remain “divided on the most likely origins of COVID-19,” after President Joe Biden’s 90-day push for his intel community to “redouble their efforts” to find a more definitive conclusion regarding the source of the virus.
In a declassified summary released late Friday afternoon, the agencies said that two hypotheses for the virus’ origin remain possible: either natural exposure to an infected animal, or an accidental lab leak.
Four elements of the U.S. intelligence community said with “low confidence” that COVID-19 was initially spread from an animal to a human, while one element assessed with “moderate confidence” that the first human infection was the result of a “laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” and pointing to the “inherently risky nature of work on Coronaviruses.”
The agencies, however, generally agreed that the virus was most likely not developed as a biological weapon, and that China’s leaders did not know about the virus before the start of the global pandemic.
Barring new information, said the report, a more definitive explanation will not be possible without Beijing’s cooperation.
Biden, responding to the report, said that efforts to identify the cause of the virus will continue.
“While this review has concluded, our efforts to understand the origins of this pandemic will not rest,” Biden said. “We will do everything we can to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world, so that we can take every necessary precaution to prevent it from happening again.”
Referring to China, the president said, “Responsible nations do not shirk these kinds of responsibilities to the rest of the world. Pandemics do not respect international borders, and we all must better understand how COVID-19 came to be in order to prevent further pandemics.”
But international scientists tasked with studying the virus’ origins warned Wednesday that a crucial window is “closing fast”: the shrinking opportunity for any thorough scientific study to be completed. As time wears on, potential evidence wanes, and tracing back biologic breadcrumbs will yield diminishing returns, said more than ten of the authors of a World Health Organization-led report that is urging action to “fast-track the follow-up scientific work required” for better answers by the WHO.
Assessing the intelligence and raw data available this spring, it became apparent to Biden and his top officials that a large cache of information had yet to be fully analyzed, officials told ABC News — including potential evidence that could hold clues to the virus that has now claimed more than four million lives worldwide.
Consensus among top officials in the Biden administration has been that the pandemic originated in one of two ways: The virus emerged from human contact with an infected animal, or from a laboratory accident.
But with no “smoking gun” and limited access to raw data, discussion of the science has played out in a haze of circumstantial evidence.
Following Biden’s call for clarity in May, intelligence agencies have spent the last three months poring over an untapped trove of information, and have amassed classified records and communications, genomic fingerprints of the virus, and early signals as to where and when the virus may have flared up first.
Biden’s August deadline marks zero hour for the next phase of a larger international quest: to trace back the virus in order to hold the responsible parties to account, and to understand its inception in order to prevent the next one.
Any emerging answers, however, come amid a roiling geopolitical debate, as COVID-19’s origins have become a contentious wedge issue at home — while abroad, the Chinese government vehemently denies the virus could have come from one of its labs.
“What the U.S. cares about is not facts and truth, but how to consume and malign China,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Wednesday ahead of the U.S. report, claiming that China had welcomed collaborative research which “laid the foundation for the next-phase global origins tracing work.”
The Chinese government rejected the World Health Organization’s proposed audits of Wuhan’s labs in July, part of the UN agency’s recommended phase two study — saying they could not accept needless “repetitive research” when “clear conclusions” had already been reached.
But there have been no definitive conclusions as to where COVID-19 came from. The joint WHO-led team presented a range of options in their March report, calling a lab leak “extremely unlikely,” but offering pathways for further investigation. Team members have voiced frustration with the lack of cooperation from the Chinese government — echoed in international criticism that politics had stymied science.
Since then, the WHO has become increasingly receptive to the possibility that the virus resulted from a lab leak. In July, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged that ruling out a lab leak theory was “premature” and recommended audits of the Wuhan labs in further studies. China’s subsequent rebuff left the WHO to proceed without them.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has underscored that the U.S. will continue the “diplomatic spadework” of rallying support for the WHO-led study — while warning that the administration will not accept Beijing’s stonewalling.
“Either they will allow, in a responsible way, investigators in to do the real work of figuring out where [COVID-19] came from, or they will face isolation in the international community,” Sullivan told Fox News in June.
A group of bipartisan lawmakers urged Biden not to let this month’s deadline hamstring a thorough investigation.
“If the 90-day effort you have announced does not yield conclusions in which the United States has a high degree of confidence, we urge you to direct the intelligence community to continue prioritizing this inquiry until such conclusions are possible,” Sens. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Jim Risch (R-Idaho) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote in a late July letter to the president.
Asked about the report’s release, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said it would take “several days” for an unclassified and collated version to come together, but that agencies were working “expeditiously to prepare that.”
With no definitive proof of the virus’ origin, scientists and policymakers alike have been left to speculate. Some of the first COVID-19 clusters occurred around Wuhan’s wet markets, where exotic wild fare was sold in close quarters, offering ample opportunity for the virus to jump from animals to humans, as in past epidemics.
No direct animal host for COVID-19 has been identified, and if there is one, it could take years to find, experts say. While environmental samples from the Wuhan markets tested positive, animal samples that were tested did not. Transmission earlier on and within the wider community would suggest the market was not the original source of the pandemic, experts say.
In late summer and early autumn of 2019, satellite imagery shared exclusively with ABC showed dramatic spikes in auto traffic around major Wuhan hospitals — suggesting the virus may have been spreading long before the world was alerted. U.S. intelligence officials had already been warning that a contagion was sweeping through the region as far back as late November 2019, changing patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the populations, according to sources briefed on the matter.
Proponents of the lab-leak theory point to gain-of-function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a controversial study that amplifies a virus’ potency to understand how to neutralize it better. They also point to concerns over biosafety at the WIV’s facilities, where researchers had worked with bat coronavirus samples 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2 — as well as workers at the lab who were hospitalized with “symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses” in November 2019.
Advocates of zoonotic origin, however, emphasize that the 4% discrepancy means a world of genetic difference — and WIV lead researcher Shi Zhengli insists that she tested all her workers for COVID-19 antibodies, and all tests came back negative.
Despite pressure to approach the “high degree of confidence” desired by the public and requested in the lawmakers’ July letter, such certainty remains elusive — something presaged by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in an interview with Yahoo News earlier this summer.
“We’re hoping to find a smoking gun,” Haines said. “It’s challenging to do that.”
-ABC News’ Josh Margolin, Karson Yiu, James Gordon Meek, Eric M. Strauss, Ben Gittleson and Molly Nagle contributed to this report.
On Friday, rapper Nelly did something he’s been hoping to do for about 16 or 17 years: He released a country-flavored album.
That’s his new project Heartland, a collaborations-packed collection of songs that the singer says he’s been wanting to make ever since he first dabbled in the country genre, releasing his 2004 duet with Tim McGraw.
“The idea of the project has been ever since ‘Over and Over’ — so since 2004, 2005, after seeing that success,” Nelly tells Billboard. “But the only reason I even thought that I could have success with ‘Over and Over’ was because, even when we dropped Country Grammar, we were getting so much love from this community.”
Released in 2000, Country Grammar is Nelly’s full-length studio debut. Though it was a hip hop album, the singer realized from the very start that his music was resonating with a country fan base, too.
But it took him a while to get around to formally venturing into country music, in part because he was “doing my homework,” Nelly explains. “To get more familiar with Nashville and everything. It became a lot easier to know how to navigate and create this project, to bring it to fruition.”
Heartland features duets with the likes of Kane Brown, Florida Georgia Line, Darius Rucker and Jimmie Allen. It’s leading single is Nelly’s FGL duet, “Lil Bit.”
The latest episode of Queen‘s weekly YouTube video series Queen The Greatest premiered today, and it features profile a profile of the band’s memorable hit 1981 duet with David Bowie, “Under Pressure.”
The installment tells the story of how the track came together using interview footage with Bowie; Queen members Freddie Mercury, Brian May and Roger Taylor; and producer Reinhold Mack.
The episode begins by explaining how after Queen had purchased Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland, the band was working on new music there in 1981 when engineer David Richards made an impromptu phone call to Bowie.
Bowie notes in an archival interview clip, “[Richards] knew that I was in town, and phoned me up and asked me if I’d…like to go down and see what was happening. So I went down and…suddenly you’re writing something together and it was totally spontaneous. It certainly wasn’t planned.”
Taylor remembers that the band and Bowie were drunk and jamming on “all sorts of old songs,” and then David said, “Look, hang on a minute, why don’t we write one of our own?”
A separate interview clips, Taylor, May and Mack recalled how Queen bassist John Deacon came up with the catchy bass riff that really got the track going.
Roger added that it was Bowie idea to put in various clicks and claps, and the track just grew from there.
“Under Pressure” was released in October of 1981 and became Queen’s second #1 hit in the U.K., after “Bohemian Rhapsody,” while peaking at #22 in the U.S. on the Billboard Hot 100.
After Mercury’s death in 1991, Bowie famously teamed up with Eurythmics‘ Annie Lennox and Queen’s surviving members to perform “Under Pressure” at the historic 1992 tribute concert for Freddie at London’s Wembley Stadium.
Starz has renewed its hit comedy series Run the World for a second season.
Along with the renewal announcement, the network shared that Rachelle Williams will serve as the season two showrunner. She’ll executive-produce alongside Yvette Lee Bowser and series creator Leigh Davenport. As previously reported, the series, starring Amber Stevens West, Andrea Bordeaux, Bresha Webb and Corbin Reid, follows a group of successful thirty-something Black women who work, live and hang out in Harlem. A season two premiere date for Run the World has yet to be announced.
In other news, Deadline has learned that In the Heights star Corey Hawkins has signed to Warner Bros. upcoming feature adaptation of the Broadway musical The Color Purple. Deadline reports that Hawkins will play Harpo in the film, which will be adapted from a screenplay based on Alice Walker‘s 1982 novel of the same name. WB’s The Color Purple, directed by Blitz Bazawule, is scheduled to hit theaters December 21, 2023.
Finally, ABC has shared a new trailer for The Wonder Years, a reboot to the original ’90s ABC family comedy. As previously reported, the new iteration focuses on a Black middle-class family in Montgomery, Alabama during the 1960s. It follows preteen Dean Williams, played by Elisha “EJ” Williams, in the central role, with Don Cheadle taking on the adult voice of the character and narrating the show. The Wonder Years premieres Wednesday, September 22, at 8:30 p.m. ET. Meanwhile, the network also released an extended trailer for Queens, the upcoming comedy about a group of four women in their 40s trying to relive their days of hip-hop fame. Starring Brandy, Eve, Naturi Naughton, and Nadine Velazquez , Queens will premiere Tuesday, October 19, at 10:00 p.m. ET.
Weezer has premiered a new live video for for “All My Favorite Songs,” filmed on the band’s ongoing Hella Mega tour with Green Day and Fall Out Boy.
The clip begins with a shot of Rivers Cuomo strumming a Flying V guitar and sporting a Billy-in-Stranger-Things mullet, suggesting that the live version is a bit different from the original, which appears on Weezer’s new, orchestral-driven album, OK Human. Indeed, the onstage rendition is much more guitar heavy than the studio recording, and would probably fit right in on Weezer’s other new album, the shredding Van Weezer.
You can watch the live “All My Favorite Songs” video streaming now on YouTube.
The Hella Mega tour continues Friday in San Francisco.
(ETHIOPIA) — As chaos envelops Kabul after Afghanistan’s government collapsed and the Taliban seized control, horrific stories and heartbreaking images also pour out of Ethiopia. Some in the U.S. with a connection to the African country are feeling a call to action.
In Washington, D.C., home to the largest concentration of Ethiopians in the U.S. and the largest Ethiopian population outside Africa, there’s an intense debate over the war and who’s at fault.
“Tigray is part of Ethiopia. Tigrayans are Ethiopians until they decide otherwise. So any war, any suffering in Ethiopia, should be a pain to everybody,” Assefa Fisseha, a man who fled the country 20 years to begin a new life in America, told ABC News.
In Fisseha’s homeland, within the northern region of Tigray, millions are caught in the middle of civil war between Tigrayan defense forces and the Ethiopian government.
Each side has been accused of atrocities throughout the conflict, with systemic rape and starvation used as weapons of war, according to the United Nations, senior U.S. officials and monitoring groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Roads, bridges, hospitals and farms have been destroyed, exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe, according to aid groups.
But information can be hard to come by. Internet outages by the Ethiopian government have disconnected families inside and outside the country for days, weeks or even months at a time, according to Internet monitor NetBlocks.
With over 110 million people, Ethiopia is the second-most populous country in Africa. The conflict has left thousands dead and displaced roughly two million people in Tigray, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
“On the ground, what I’m really seeing is just hungry people there, people are extremely paranoid and protective,” Leoh Hailu-Ghermy, who made a two-day trek to the region to deliver supplies and aid to refugees, told ABC News.
Hailu-Ghermy is one of the voices in the movement to end the war many activists call a modern-day genocide.
Earlier this month, more apparent victims of the atrocities in the brutal, 10-monthlong civil war washed up on a riverbank in neighboring Sudan. Fifty bodies were believed to be Tigrayans from a nearby village, according to The Associated Press.
There have been reports of massacres, ethnic cleansing and widespread sexual assault by Ethiopian government troops, according to Amnesty International.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said the U.S. has seen “acts of ethnic cleansing,” but stopped short of calling the atrocities genocide — a specific legal term in international law. The Ethiopian government has fiercely denied such accusations.
“It’s really heartbreaking to see that people’s livelihoods can be stripped away from them in such an unfair way and that the world wouldn’t care because of the geography of that place or because of the race of those people,” Hailu-Ghermy said.
Just last week, the Biden administration called out the Ethiopian government for obstructing humanitarian aid, including convoys, saying aid workers will run out of food this week.
In May, President Joe Biden issued a lengthy statement, calling for a ceasefire, negotiations to halt the conflict and an end to human rights abuses, including the widespread sexual violence.
The Biden administration also tapped a special envoy for the region to push for a diplomatic solution — and fired a warning shot at the Ethiopian government, a critical U.S. partner, by imposing limited sanctions.
In May, the State Department said it imposed visa bans on officials from Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea — whose military crossed the border to fight Tigrayan forces. Because visas are confidential by law, it did not say who was impacted but the U.S. Treasury slapped financial sanctions on Monday on General Filipos Woldeyohannes, the chief of staff of the Eritrean Defense Forces, accusing his forces of massacres, looting, rape, torture and extrajudicial killings of civilians.
Hailu-Ghermy and other advocates say they are looking for more action.
Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed was once seen as a popular reformer when he came into power in 2018, even winning the Nobel Peace Prize for ending a decades-long war with neighboring Eritrea. His election unseated the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, which dominated Ethiopia politics prior to his administration, and tensions between his federal government and their regional leaders exploded into conflict last November.
“Now that the conflict has been ongoing for several months, it produces its own logic. And so every atrocity, every retaliation begets another retaliation and unfortunately, another atrocity,” Aly Verjee, a senior adviser to the Africa program at the U.S. Institute of Peace, told ABC News.
Tigrayans celebrated when Abiy declared a ceasefire in June, but now their forces are on the offensive and Abiy responded with a call for all capable citizens to take up arms and join the fight to show patriotism.
“Ethiopians at home and abroad, your motherland calls upon you. History has shown that there is no force that can stand in our way when we say no more,” he said in a statement.
Analysts fear the conflict will spiral further out of control, putting hundreds of thousands on the brink of famine and potentially spilling over borders to Ethiopia’s neighbors.
“Let’s not forget that the reason the majority of Ethiopian Americans are in the United States is because, at one time or another, there was conflict in Ethiopia. Let’s not see another generation of Ethiopians feel that they have to leave the country because of conflict,” Verjee said.
ABC News Conor Finnegan contributed to this report.
(TOKYO) — In his second consecutive Paralympic Games, Egypt’s table tennis player and amputee Ibrahim Hamadtou continues to produce jaw-dropping shots using only his mouth.
The 48-year-old lost to South Korea’s Park Hongkyu and China’s Chen Chao in the men’s singles contest at the Tokyo Paralympics, but the significance of his participation goes well beyond the results.
After losing both of his arms in a train accident at the age of 10 back in 1983, Hamadtou embarked on an inspirational table tennis career after being stirred up by a negative comment from a friend.
“I was in the club where I was officiating a match between two of my friends. They disagreed on a point, when I counted the point in favor of one of them the other player told me, do not interfere as you will never be able to play,” Hamadtou said in an interview with the International Table Tennis Federation’s website last year.
“It was that statement that fired me up to decide to play table tennis.”
Astonishing images of Hamadtou holding the paddle in his mouth and striking back at opponents went viral in 2014 when he made an appearance at the World Team Championships as a guest of honor, lining up against the world’s finest.
Two years later, he made his Paralympic debut at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, once again displaying his unique skills.
When serving, Hamadtou flicks the ball up with his right foot and hits it powerfully with the racket, which he holds between his teeth. It’s a spectacular technique that he seems to be perfecting.
“It took me nearly a year of practice to get used to holding the racket with [my] mouth and making the serve; with practice and playing regularly this skill was improved,” he added.
A father of three, Hamadtou was born in 1973 in Damietta, Egypt.
H.E.R. is hitting the road this fall with her eight-city ‘Back of My Mind’ tour.
‘”Shows are back and better than ever,” she posted on Instagram with the tour dates and a photo of her performing in concert. “You coming to see me?”
The Oscar and Grammy winner will kick off the tour October 10 in Franklin, TN, and wrap up October 28 in Detroit. Tone Stith will be her opening act. This will be the “Come Through” singer’s third headlining tour, following the “Lights on Tour” in 2017, and the “I Used to Know Her Tour” in 2018.
H.E.R is also hosting her annual “Lights On Festival” with two-day events in Concord, California and Brooklyn, New York. The Concord festival on September 18-19 features Erykah Badu, Bryson Tiller, Ari Lennox, Keyshia Cole and more. Maxwell, SWV and Skip Marley are among the artists performing at the festival on October 21-22 in Brooklyn.
