Michelle and Barack Obama are teaming up with Netflix’s Fatherhood producers for a new film and TV event called Blackout.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Blackout is “being adapted from six different love stories, each penned by a different writer.” This means the project is being developed concurrently as a TV series and film adaptation and some of the six stories could wind up in the film, while others are in the TV show. Blackout centers on twelve teens perspective during a New York city power outage during the summer. A premiere date for the project has yet to be announced.
In other news, a limited series is being developed about Effa Manley, the first and, to date, only woman to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, Deadline has learned. Based on baseball historian James Overmyer’s non-fiction novel Queen of the Negro Leagues: Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles, the limited series will chronicle the “dramatic efforts by tenacious civil rights activist Effa Manley and her husband Abe as they embark upon a risky business venture [of] starting their own ball club” in the Negro Baseball Leagues. No casting details have been announced.
Finally, Emmy nominations were announced on Tuesday, with some groundbreaking nods. Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett, of the recently-canceled Lovecraft Country, made history as the first two Black leads to be nominated from the same series. Meanwhile, Pose‘s Mj Rodriguez made history as the first trans actress to be nominated in any major Emmy category. And for the first time, the lead drama actor category, which included This Is Us‘ Sterling K. Brown, Lovecraft Country‘s Jonathan Majors, Bridgerton‘s Regé-Jean Page, and Pose’s Billy Porter, was led by people of color.
(NOTE LANGUAGE)While Amazon’s skewed-view superhero show The Boys may have been a natural fit for Emmys’ visual effects categories, its nominations Tuesday morning in the Best Drama category turned some heads.
Based on Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson‘s very graphic graphic novel series, the show centers on an Avengers-like group of superheroes known as The Seven — and unlike their Marvel counterparts, most of them are anything but heroic. Opposing them are The Boys: Karl Urban as Billy Butcher and Jack Quaid as Hughie, and their pals — who all have various scores to settle with the not-so-super super people.
For Antony Starr, who plays the megalomaniacal Homelander, the positive reaction from fans and critics to the second season is gratifying. “I got to be honest, it was like pulling teeth through the season,” he tells ABC Audio.
“It was because it was all really new stuff, you know: Homelander parenting and doing all these bizarre things — and also having that character on the back foot was really very weird. And then also any sort of romantic involvement that he gets up to was all really new. And I was like, ‘How do we do that?!'”
Starr allows, “But the end result…has been looked at favorably, which is really nice.”
“We work our a**es off, so it’s great to have some positivity around,” he noted. (AUDIO IS ABC 1-ON-1)
(LOS ANGELES) — Health officials in Los Angeles County are warning that the delta variant’s spread among unvaccinated people is driving a spike in new COVID-19 infections in the county.
On Monday, the health department reported 1,059 new COVID-19 cases, a significant increase since June, when the department was consistently reporting a few hundred new infections each day. Officials are currently investigating 55 ongoing outbreaks, up 25% from the 44 outbreaks they were investigating last month.
Nearly all new cases are among people who haven’t gotten a COVID-19 vaccine, according to officials.
“Over 99% of the COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths we are seeing are among unvaccinated individuals,” Barbara Ferrer, Los Angeles County’s director of public health, said in a statement Monday.
Young people are also contributing to the infection spike, according to Ferrer. “Of the cases reported today, nearly 87% were under 50 years old,” she said.
“The COVID-19 vaccines are the most effective and important tool to reduce COVID-19 transmission and the spread of variants like the highly transmissible delta variant,” she said. “Getting fully vaccinated is the way we protect you, your family and our community from COVID-19 and the delta variant.”
As a state, California’s vaccination rate is better than the national average. As of Monday, 63% of residents had received at least one dose, and 51% were fully vaccinated, compared with 56% of all Americans who’ve gotten at least one shot and 48% who are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Los Angeles County, 70% of residents 16 and older have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the health department. Nationally, 68% of Americans 18 and older have gotten at least one dose.
The delta variant, which was first detected in India and now has made up 51.7% of infections in the United States for the two weeks ending July 3, according to the CDC, is more transmissible than the original version of the virus and is especially dangerous for people who are unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, experts say.
In part because of fears over the variant, Los Angeles officials made waves when they reversed their guidance on masks less than a month after Gov. Gavin Newsom lifted COVID-19 restrictions in the state.
According to a statement issued by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health on June 28, the department “strongly recommends everyone, regardless of vaccination status, wear masks indoors in public places as a precautionary measure.” The department acknowledged that “fully vaccinated people appear to be well protected from infections with delta variants.”
Disney+ has released the trailer to Behind the Attraction, a 10-part peek behind the scenes at Disney Parks that features Jungle Cruise star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
Johnson serves as your tour guide as the series takes you from “It’s a Small World” to “Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge” and everywhere in between, with never-before-seen archival footage and photos, and interviews with the Imagineers who bring the attractions to life.
Brian Volk-Weiss co-produced the project. He explains, “I don’t know if you remember the scene in The Matrix, where they’re in The Matrix and they’re on the roof and Trinity is like, ‘Yo, I need to fly a helicopter,’ then the guy’s like, ‘boop, boop, boop’ and then she can fly a helicopter? That’s what we try to do for people that have been to the park a billion times and people that have never been to the park.”
He continues, “They can be like, ‘Oh, my God, now I know how Jungle Cruise is related to the castles and how it’s related to Haunted Mansion’…So that’s what we tried to do, but in a fun way.”
Volk-Weiss first met The Rock after the superstar posted to Instagram that he’d been watching Brian’s Toys That Made Us series.
“He is so awesome,” the producer says sincerely. “I’ve worked with a lot of famous people over my career. There’s usually like an inch of daylight to 50,000 miles of daylight between their public persona and who they really are. There is zero daylight with Dwayne. I mean, what you see is what you get. He is the hard-working guy he claims to be. He is the nice guy he claims to be.”
Behind the Attraction drops on July 21 on Disney+.
(NEW YORK) — With his sentencing hearing just days away, the man convicted of murdering Mollie Tibbetts is asking for a new trial, claiming he was unwittingly framed by the real killer who he claims confessed to the crime.
Attorneys for Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a Mexican national, filed a motion asking that the jury verdict in the case be set aside based on the new evidence they received from prosecutors following the trial.
The 26-year-old Bahena Rivera is scheduled to be sentenced on Thursday and is expected to receive a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole.
But he claims the real killer confessed to at least two people that he and a sex trafficker fatally stabbed the 20-year-old University of Iowa student.
Bahena Rivera’s attorneys, husband-and-wife team Chad and Jennifer Frese, wrote in a motion filed on Friday that two people, unbeknownst to each other, came forward on May 26 — the day Bahena Rivera testified in his own defense — and identified by name a man they claim confessed to them on separate occasions that he participated in Tibbetts’ 2018 slaying.
“That Mexican shouldn’t be in jail for killing Mollie Tibbett, because I raped her and killed her,” the man, whose name has not been released, allegedly told one of the two witnesses, according to documents filed in the Poweshiek County, Iowa, district court.
Prosecutors from the Iowa Attorney General’s Office, according to the defense motion, informed Bahena Rivera’s attorneys about the alleged confessions after prosecturors received word from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation that an inmate had come to a chaplain and later an assistant warden claiming that another inmate, whose name has not been released, told him he and a 50-year-old sex trafficker killed Tibbetts after her disappearance garnered national attention.
The inmate purportedly claimed he first saw Tibbetts bound and gagged at a sex-trafficking “trap house” owned by his alleged accomplice. He claimed, according to the defense motion, his alleged accomplice grew worried after federal authorities searching for Tibbetts showed up at a house next door to his.
The inmate allegedly claimed his accomplice devised a plan for them to stab Tibbetts and “dump her body near a Hispanic male in order to make it appear that the Hispanic male committed the crime.”
“It was reported that this Department of Corrections inmate was coming forward at this time because he had heard the testimony of Cristhian Bahena Rivera on television, and it was at that point, he realized that the information given him by this other individual was likely true,” the defense’s motion for a new trial reads.
A second individual contacted the Mahaska County, Iowa, Sheriff’s Office with a similar story involving the same inmate who reportedly confessed, but deputies said the witness appeared to be under the influence and dismissed the story as not being credible.
In his testimony during the trial, Bahena Rivera claimed he was kidnapped at his home near Brooklyn, Iowa, by two armed masked men, who ordered him to drive to where Tibbetts was expected to be jogging. He claimed that when they found Tibbetts, one of the men stabbed her to death, put her body in the trunk of Bahena Rivera’s car and made him drive to a cornfield, where the young woman’s badly decomposed remains were discovered a month after she went missing.
Bahena Rivera said that while he placed Tibbetts’ body in the cornfield, he did not kill her.
His stint on the witness stand came after homicide investigators testified that Bahena Rivera confessed to killing Tibbetts after he spotted her jogging and she rebuffed his advances. Prosecutors also presented surveillance video evidence showing Bahena Rivera’s black Chevrolet Malibu circling the area Tibbetts was jogging in around the time she went missing on July 18, 2018.
In his closing argument, prosecutor Scott Brown dismissed Bahena Rivera’s testimony as a “figment of his imagination.”
Bahena Rivera claimed during his testimony that he didn’t tell investigators about the masked men because they threatened to harm his former girlfriend, the mother of his daughter, if he did
The jury in the case deliberated for seven hours over two days before unanimously finding Bahena Rivera guilty of first-degree murder.
A spokesperson for the Iowa Attorney General’s Office declined to comment Tuesday but told ABC News that prosecutors plan to file a response to the defense’s motion for a new trial either Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday.
Bahena Rivera’s defense attorneys also filed court papers asking that an inmate at Iowa’s Mount Pleasant Correctional Facility be brought to the Poweshiek County courthouse on the day of Bahena Rivera’s sentencing hearing. The document does not say if the inmate is one of the people who came forward with the new claims.
(WASHINGTON) — Five members of the same Texas family were arrested Tuesday and charged for their alleged participation in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to newly-unsealed charging documents.
Kristi Munn, Tom Munn, Dawn Munn, Josh Munn and Kayli Munn — described by prosecutors as a nuclear family from Borger, Texas — are now each facing four federal charges over their alleged illegal entry and alleged disorderly conduct in the Capitol, according to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday afternoon.
A 34-page affidavit for their arrest details their movements while inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, based on surveillance and social media posts.
The affidavit also indicates that the family brought an unidentified minor child into the building with them, who is not being charged.
While there have previously been arrests of family members including fathers and sons, mothers and sons, and husbands and wives, the Munn family is thus far the largest single family unit out of the more than 530 arrests made so far from the Justice Department’s investigation of the Capitol riot.
FBI officials say they first received a tip that Kristi Munn participated in the Capitol riot just three days after the insurrection, from a tipster who captured screenshots of Munn’s Facebook and Snapchat accounts. Investigators then combed through public Facebook posts from Munn’s family members to track their journey from Texas to D.C. as they amplified calls for a march on Congress on Jan. 6.
“We made it to our hotel just outside D.C.,” Tom Munn allegedly wrote in one post on Jan. 5. “1,600 miles in 24 hrs!”
After the riot, investigators found posts from the family where they discussed joining in the insurrection.
“The only damage to the capital building was several windows and sets of doors,” Tom Munn wrote on Facebook. “Nothing inside the capital was damaged. I can tell you, patriots NEVER made it to the chamber. There was no violence in the capital building, the crowd was NOT out of control … they were ANGRY!!!”
Prosecutors have said in recent court filings that the riot caused at least $1.5 million in damage to the U.S. Capitol, including damage from those who made it into the Senate chamber. At least 140 law enforcement officers suffered injuries from the riot and more than 100 people have been charged so far with direct assaults on police, according to the DOJ.
After gathering screenshots showing the five members of the Munn family inside the Capitol, investigators say they further confirmed the family members’ identities through interviews with three people familiar with the family in Texas — including two employees at a local Borger high school “who had taught multiple Munn children,” and an employee at a college who taught two of the Munn children.
None of the members of the family have entered pleas in their case, and attorney information was not immediately available for them as of Tuesday afternoon.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden stepped up the fight for voting rights on Tuesday, speaking in the nation’s birthplace of Philadelphia and invoking history, saying, “We the People began as a story that’s neither simple nor straightforward.
“But some things in America should be simple and straightforward. Perhaps the most important of those things, the most fundamental of those things is the right to vote, the right to vote freely,” he said in a high-profile speech at the National Constitution Center.
He wasted no time taking a shot at former President Donald Trump and his supporters, homing in on the 2020 election as the “most scrutinized election in American history.
“More than 80 judges, including those appointed by my predecessor heard the arguments. In every case, neither cause nor evidence was found to undermine the national achievement of administering the historic election,” he said.
“The big lie is just that — a big lie!” he declared.
“In America, if you lose, accept the results. Follow the Constitution. Try again. You don’t call facts fake and try to bring down the American experiment just because you’re unhappy,” he continued. “That’s not statesmanship — that’s selfishness.”
He called passing national voting legislation “a national imperative.”
“Republicans opposed even debating, even considering the For the People Act. Senate Democrats stood united to protect our democracy and the sanctity of the vote. We must pass the For the People Act,” Biden said to applause.
Biden also raised the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as a dangerous and unprecedented consequence of Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election.
“Because of the extraordinary courage of elections officials, many of them Republicans, our court system, those brave Capitol Police officers — because of them — democracy held. Look how close it came,” he continued. “We’re going to face another test in 2022 new wave of voter suppression and raw and sustained election subversion. We have to prepare now.”
He later said the even Confederate soldiers didn’t breach the Capitol and that “we’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.”
“So, hear me clearly: There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today, an attempt to express and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections. An assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are as Americans,” he said.
His use of the bully pulpit comes as his administration wades more aggressively into the fight over ballot access at the urging of civil rights groups and Democrats as Republican-led legislatures advance new voting restrictions in places like Texas and Congress remains deadlocked over proposed legislation.
It also comes as Democrats in the Texas State Legislature have fled their state for Washington, D.C., the second such effort in recent weeks in an attempt to prevent a vote on legislation they say will roll back voting rights in the state.
The state lawmakers said in a press conference earlier Tuesday outside the Capitol that they’re there to pressure Congress to pass federal voting rights legislation and call for an exception to the Senate’s filibuster rule blocking Democrats from moving forward with a measure, they say, would stop GOP-led efforts to restrict voting in Texas and nationwide.
In March, House Democrats advanced the For the People Act, an expansive package that would transform federal elections, voting and congressional redistricting — but it has stalled in the Senate after failing to advance in a procedural vote late last month, over opposition from all Republicans.
In light of the GOP opposition, Democrats have pushed for the Senate to reform the legislative filibuster, with House Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., a key Biden ally and endorser during the 2020 Democratic primary, suggesting Democrats create an exception to the 60-vote threshold for election reform and other constitutional issues. Because of their opposition to ending the filibuster, Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona play a pivotal role in the ongoing congressional negotiations over a national voting rights bill.
Biden did not directly mention Manchin, Sinema or the filibuster in his remarks Tuesday.
Sixteen states have enacted 28 laws that would restrict voting access, out of hundreds that have been introduced throughout the country, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
ABC News’ Alisa Wiersema and Libby Cathey contributed to this report.
JMEnternational/JMEnternational for BRIT Awards/Getty Images
Olivia Rodrigo may be one of the biggest pop stars on the planet right now, but it may be a while before you see her on tour.
Industry sources tell Billboard that Olivia’s TV commitments on the Disney+ series High School Musical: The Musical: The Series are preventing her from hitting the road and performing her songs live. The show is currently in its second season and could potentially be renewed for a third.
While Olivia could conceivably sell out arenas as this point in her career, promoters are reportedly holding spring 2022 tour dates in 3,000-to-5,000-seat venues for her, so she can get some live experience before she graduates to bigger ones. She’s only had two major live performances so far: at the BRIT Awards and on Saturday Night Live, both this past May.
Insiders say tickets for those 2022 tour dates could go on sale this fall.
Reps for Disney and Olivia’s record company declined to comment to Billboard.
Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album continues to be one of the highest-performing albums of 2021 thus far, in any genre, despite the controversy that has surrounded the singer for most of the year.
According to MRC Data’s 2021 Mid-Year Report, Morgan’s album outpaced every other country release so far this year by a wide margin, netting 2,108,000 equivalent album units sold. By comparison, the number-two album was Luke Combs’ What You See Is What You Get, clocking in with 740,000 — less than half of the equivalent album units that Dangerous returned.
Also in the top five country albums from this year so far is Taylor Swift’s Fearless (Taylor’s Version), which earned 560,000 equivalent album units.
Thanks in part to sweepingly successful projects by artists like Morgan and Taylor, MRC Data reports a 13.5% uptick in overall music consumption during the first six months of 2021. Across all genres, music has seen an increase in audio streaming as well as vinyl LP sales growth.
Other artists who’ve contributed significantly to the rise in consumption include Olivia Rodrigo, the singer-songwriter and actor who blazed into the pop world this year with her massive debut single, “Drivers License.”
2021 XXL Freshman Coi Leroy, Lakeyah, Morray and DDG sat down with XXL for their first roundtable interview to reflect on their rise to fame as emerging artists.
Coi says Billboard hits and platinum records are cool, but “I just think I’m not satisfied.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what [it’s] going to take for me to be satisfied, but I have to keep going. I’m appreciative, but I want more,” the “No More Parties” rapper says.
Coi Leray’s success took off after her Billboard Hot 100 single, “No More Parties,” was certified Platinum by the RIAA in May. A month before, Quality Control signee Lakeyah dropped her second mixtape, In Due Time, to follow her Time’s Up debut. Quality Control is also the home label to fellow rappers Lil Baby, Lil Yachty, City Girls and more.
Meanwhile, North Carolina native Morray closed out 2020 with a major co-sign from fellow North Carolina rapper J. Cole over his debut single, “Quicksand.” For his part, 23-year-old DDG leveraged his social media following to launch a successful music career and release his platinum “Moonwalking in Calabasas Remix,” featuring Blueface. XXL dubbed the song one of the best hip-hop remixes of the last five years.
Other rising artists on the 2021 XXL Freshman list include Flo Milli, Toosi, 42 Dugg, Blxst, Rubi Rose, Iann Dior,and Pooh Shiesty.
