Month: July 2022

Donald Trump is lashing out following reports that Rudy Giuliani, Lindsay Graham, and other members of the former president’s top circle have been subpoenaed by the grand jury in the Georgia election meddling probe. In the now infamous phone call, Trump is heard asking Georgia officials to “find” him votes to flip the 2020 presidential election in his favor. However, Trump didn’t know he was being recorded, resulting in a full fledged investigation in Fulton County that’s already targeting the upper echelon of MAGA world. There have also been reports that Trump himself may be next to be subpoenaed.

In an on-brand move, Trump has pushed back on his social media platform, Truth Social, where he defended his calls to Georgia election officials as “PERFECT.” Trump also claimed that he was vindicated by a retraction in the Washington Post. Via Mediaite:

BOTH of my phone calls to Georgia were PERFECT. I had an absolute right to make them &, in fact, the story on the one call was given a retraction, or apology, by the Washington Post because they were given terribly false information about it, & when they heard the actual call, they realized that their story was wrong. Thank you to the W.P. I, as does anyone else (just look at the Democrats!), have the absolute right to challenge the results of an Election. This one, CORRUPT, RIGGED, & STOLEN!

As for the retraction that Trump is touting, it was originally reported that the former president told Georgia’s lead election investigator, Frances Watson, that she’d be a “national hero” if she could “find the fraud.” Those weren’t his actual words, according to the correction from the Washington Post, but the initial quote wasn’t far off.

“Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there,” the retraction stated. “He also told her that she had ‘the most important job in the country right now.’”

(Via Mediaite)

As my 20-minute chat with Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton approached its conclusion, one in which I inquired about his dietary progression, training habits, playmaking, and scoring maturation, Haliburton suddenly decided to swap roles between interviewee and interviewer.

“Jackson, I have a tweet of yours from June 18, 2020,” he says. “Can I read it to you?”

Since joining Twitter in February 2019, Haliburton only owns 832 tweets to his name. He does, however, find the app resourceful — “there’s certain people that I follow on Twitter that do a really good job of breaking guys down,” he says — and maintains a watchful eye. His pinned tweet from Dec. 29, 2020, after he began his NBA career 8-of-16 beyond the arc, conveys the tabs he keeps on his Twitter naysayers.

“I like to be able to prove people the wrong way,” he says.

Evidently, I am among those who Haliburton likes being able to prove wrong. He’s ready to wrap up our discussion with some lighthearted roasting of my faulty pre-draft evaluation — a roast that’s well-deserved, given how rapidly Haliburton has announced himself as a potential star since entering the league a year and a half ago.

“I got two tweets to read you,” he says, laughter peaking through his words. “First one is, ‘I think many people are intrigued by Haliburton as a top-7 pick b/c of his perceived versatility playing on or off-ball. But the issue for me is he can’t really play on the ball & needs multiple guys to create advantages for him, which most teams drafting that highly don’t have.’ ”

At that point, one of Haliburton’s reps chimes in: “Tyrese, this is the wrong interview. This isn’t Jimmy Kimmel Mean Tweets.”

This is all in good fun, though. I welcome Haliburton giving me the Old Tweets Exposed treatment. I was incorrect and he’s rightfully reminding me, reading one more tweet before we head our separate ways.

“I have these in my bookmarks. I got a lot of stuff saved up,” he says. “I was like, ‘Man, one day I’m gonna get to talk to Jackson Frank and I’m gonna read these to him. But it’s OK, because now you show me love.”

Showing Haliburton’s game love is easy as can be these days. He resembles that of a soon-to-be star and is the linchpin of Indiana’s rebuild. Over the past 4.5 months, the Pacers dealt a pair of former veteran cornerstones in Domantas Sabonis and Malcolm Brogdon. Myles Turner is reportedly also being shopped. The franchise seems to be pivoting toward a new dawn and is banking on Haliburton to lead the next prosperous era of Indiana hoops.

In preparing for those responsibilities, he’s spending much of the summer training with Drew Hanlen in Los Angeles. His offseason schedule is rather packed ahead of his first full year as a Pacer. He logs two, sometimes three, workouts every day.

Among his feathery passing, evolving pull-up jumper aptitude and constant, year-to-year strides, Haliburton is one of the NBA’s premier 22-and-under talents, despite being selected just 12th overall back in the 2020 Draft. In 26 contests with Indiana last season, he averaged 17.5 points, 9.6 assists, 4.3 rebounds and 1.8 steals on 62.9 percent true shooting — his gaudiest points and assists averages across any NBA or collegiate context. He anticipates his scoring duties to swell again next year. Growing more comfortable in that need for aggression continues to be an emphasis of his training habits.

“I’m not gonna lie to you to tell you it’s easy,” Haliburton admits. “I’ve never had to be a scorer in my life. … It’s a challenge, but one that I’m up for, and one that I’m really excited about. It’s not often that you have to tell somebody to shoot more.”

He says his sophomore year at Iowa State was the first time he “was really asked to score” throughout his basketball journey. Prior to that, he either scored selectively or was simply good enough to do so with ease, often in transition via steals and dunks. Honing his creation arsenal hardly entered the training regimen.

Last summer, one-on-one battles with Terence Davis — who Haliburton says would “torment” him — Davion Mitchell, Buddy Hield and De’Aaron Fox fostered his blossoming. During Haliburton’s year and half with the Sacramento Kings, Director of Player Development Rico Hines emulated a smattering of game-like reps, incorporating varying defensive coverages and looks to amplify his half-court creation.

With Indiana, assistants like Ron Nored and Jannero Pargo do the same. Everything is designed to prime him for any possible scheme he faces, be equipped with counters of his own and avoid bouts of passivity.

“Trust me, the growth period, it never looks amazing. Truthfully, it looks ugly sometimes. There’s days where I leave the gym, even today, even this last week. I’m like, ‘I look sloppy, like it doesn’t look right,’” Haliburton says. “But that’s OK. Because it’s kind of just part of the growth of it all. Somebody else is gonna make an adjustment, I gotta make an adjustment towards that.”

Learning how to optimally masquerade and operate as a natural-born scorer requires years of specialized work because Haliburton’s long been a maestro of a selfless passer. He’ll fit dimes through slender keyholes, unlock passing windows by shifting defenders with optical trickery and contort himself to wiggle around defenders for simpler deliveries. Few facilitators around the league approach his degree of ingenuity.

No singular player or pass sparked the origin of his distinct creativity. He considers himself a devout hoops connoisseur who pores over film from all sects of the basketball sphere: NBA, college, high school, youth levels, AND-1 circuits, mixtapes. If there is information and inspiration to be gleaned from the tape, Haliburton will entertain its merits.

He revels in opportunities to embed flair in his passes. Effectiveness is not always the lone priority. Basketball is a joyous sport, so he proudly graces the stage to merge his high feel nature with an artistic vision.

“I’ve always liked the oohs and ahhs, there’s nothing better than that to me. As a kid, you can’t dunk, so you got to figure out something,” he says. “I think that’s kind of the best part, is being able to put your own twist on things. … Sometimes, that stuff is necessary, having to deceit guys with the eyes or whatever the case may be. But sometimes, it’s just having fun and putting a little showmanship on it.”

Newfound attention on individual scoring is accompanied by amendments in his dietary habits. Following his rookie season, he “bit the bullet” and hired a full-time chef, who’s widely expanded his palette, targets healthier foods, and includes more fruits, vegetables, and green juices into his meals as well. The source of this added focus stemmed from a knee injury that sidelined for the final two weeks of 2020-21, along with “nagging” aches and pains he aimed to address.

“I just realized that, really, the best ability is availability, just being on the floor,” he says. “I was doing everything I could to do that.”

Both developments taught him to take better care of his body, honing on his diet and recovery patterns. Among those altered dietary choices is consuming Cheribundi, a brand of cherry juice introduced to him by Sacramento’s training staff early on last season, which facilitated this interview.

Roughly nine months later, he drinks three bottles every day, swears by its impact, and, recently, requested they be delivered to his place in Los Angeles while he trains there this summer. As he begins lifting regularly and immersing himself in multiple, daily on-court workouts, Cheribundi accelerates the wide-ranging components of recovery.

It helps alleviate muscle soreness, reduces inflammation and, after his trade from Sacramento to Indiana, aided his assimilation to an East Coast sleep schedule after spending the outset of his NBA tenure on the West Coast.

“When I was on the Kings, I slept so much easier because it’s timing and things like that. Like, sports get done later and the day starts later than it does being on the other side of the country,” he says. “But now, I got traded to the East Coast. I’ll get way less sleep because I was staying up watching the West Coast games and then getting up early to go to the gym. So, for me Cheribundi was huge in that sense, helping me get to sleep better.”

The present-tense manner in which Haliburton explains his NBA growth curve indicates he’s still acclimating himself at every turn. Year One ended prematurely because of a knee injury, which informed him that he must go to greater lengths with his diet and recovery tendencies.

Year Two jettisoned him across the country, brought about a radically different timezone and team environment, where he must reshape his professional routine. Year Three resides as an unknown. He expects opponents to defend him differently and a new cast of teammates will present other hurdles to navigate.

Yet problem-solving and adaptability are core tenets of Haliburton’s on- and off-court rise. Nothing suggests that’s changing anytime soon.

“It’s all chess at the end of the day,” he says. “Just one move after another.”

As my 20-minute chat with Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton approached its conclusion, one in which I inquired about his dietary progression, training habits, playmaking, and scoring maturation, Haliburton suddenly decided to swap roles between interviewee and interviewer.

“Jackson, I have a tweet of yours from June 18, 2020,” he says. “Can I read it to you?”

Since joining Twitter in February 2019, Haliburton only owns 832 tweets to his name. He does, however, find the app resourceful — “there’s certain people that I follow on Twitter that do a really good job of breaking guys down,” he says — and maintains a watchful eye. His pinned tweet from Dec. 29, 2020, after he began his NBA career 8-of-16 beyond the arc, conveys the tabs he keeps on his Twitter naysayers.

“I like to be able to prove people the wrong way,” he says.

Evidently, I am among those who Haliburton likes being able to prove wrong. He’s ready to wrap up our discussion with some lighthearted roasting of my faulty pre-draft evaluation — a roast that’s well-deserved, given how rapidly Haliburton has announced himself as a potential star since entering the league a year and a half ago.

“I got two tweets to read you,” he says, laughter peaking through his words. “First one is, ‘I think many people are intrigued by Haliburton as a top-7 pick b/c of his perceived versatility playing on or off-ball. But the issue for me is he can’t really play on the ball & needs multiple guys to create advantages for him, which most teams drafting that highly don’t have.’ ”

At that point, one of Haliburton’s reps chimes in: “Tyrese, this is the wrong interview. This isn’t Jimmy Kimmel Mean Tweets.”

This is all in good fun, though. I welcome Haliburton giving me the Old Tweets Exposed treatment. I was incorrect and he’s rightfully reminding me, reading one more tweet before we head our separate ways.

“I have these in my bookmarks. I got a lot of stuff saved up,” he says. “I was like, ‘Man, one day I’m gonna get to talk to Jackson Frank and I’m gonna read these to him. But it’s OK, because now you show me love.”

Showing Haliburton’s game love is easy as can be these days. He resembles that of a soon-to-be star and is the linchpin of Indiana’s rebuild. Over the past 4.5 months, the Pacers dealt a pair of former veteran cornerstones in Domantas Sabonis and Malcolm Brogdon. Myles Turner is reportedly also being shopped. The franchise seems to be pivoting toward a new dawn and is banking on Haliburton to lead the next prosperous era of Indiana hoops.

In preparing for those responsibilities, he’s spending much of the summer training with Drew Hanlen in Los Angeles. His offseason schedule is rather packed ahead of his first full year as a Pacer. He logs two, sometimes three, workouts every day.

Among his feathery passing, evolving pull-up jumper aptitude and constant, year-to-year strides, Haliburton is one of the NBA’s premier 22-and-under talents, despite being selected just 12th overall back in the 2020 Draft. In 26 contests with Indiana last season, he averaged 17.5 points, 9.6 assists, 4.3 rebounds and 1.8 steals on 62.9 percent true shooting — his gaudiest points and assists averages across any NBA or collegiate context. He anticipates his scoring duties to swell again next year. Growing more comfortable in that need for aggression continues to be an emphasis of his training habits.

“I’m not gonna lie to you to tell you it’s easy,” Haliburton admits. “I’ve never had to be a scorer in my life. … It’s a challenge, but one that I’m up for, and one that I’m really excited about. It’s not often that you have to tell somebody to shoot more.”

He says his sophomore year at Iowa State was the first time he “was really asked to score” throughout his basketball journey. Prior to that, he either scored selectively or was simply good enough to do so with ease, often in transition via steals and dunks. Honing his creation arsenal hardly entered the training regimen.

Last summer, one-on-one battles with Terence Davis — who Haliburton says would “torment” him — Davion Mitchell, Buddy Hield and De’Aaron Fox fostered his blossoming. During Haliburton’s year and half with the Sacramento Kings, Director of Player Development Rico Hines emulated a smattering of game-like reps, incorporating varying defensive coverages and looks to amplify his half-court creation.

With Indiana, assistants like Ron Nored and Jannero Pargo do the same. Everything is designed to prime him for any possible scheme he faces, be equipped with counters of his own and avoid bouts of passivity.

“Trust me, the growth period, it never looks amazing. Truthfully, it looks ugly sometimes. There’s days where I leave the gym, even today, even this last week. I’m like, ‘I look sloppy, like it doesn’t look right,’” Haliburton says. “But that’s OK. Because it’s kind of just part of the growth of it all. Somebody else is gonna make an adjustment, I gotta make an adjustment towards that.”

Learning how to optimally masquerade and operate as a natural-born scorer requires years of specialized work because Haliburton’s long been a maestro of a selfless passer. He’ll fit dimes through slender keyholes, unlock passing windows by shifting defenders with optical trickery and contort himself to wiggle around defenders for simpler deliveries. Few facilitators around the league approach his degree of ingenuity.

No singular player or pass sparked the origin of his distinct creativity. He considers himself a devout hoops connoisseur who pores over film from all sects of the basketball sphere: NBA, college, high school, youth levels, AND-1 circuits, mixtapes. If there is information and inspiration to be gleaned from the tape, Haliburton will entertain its merits.

He revels in opportunities to embed flair in his passes. Effectiveness is not always the lone priority. Basketball is a joyous sport, so he proudly graces the stage to merge his high feel nature with an artistic vision.

“I’ve always liked the oohs and ahhs, there’s nothing better than that to me. As a kid, you can’t dunk, so you got to figure out something,” he says. “I think that’s kind of the best part, is being able to put your own twist on things. … Sometimes, that stuff is necessary, having to deceit guys with the eyes or whatever the case may be. But sometimes, it’s just having fun and putting a little showmanship on it.”

Newfound attention on individual scoring is accompanied by amendments in his dietary habits. Following his rookie season, he “bit the bullet” and hired a full-time chef, who’s widely expanded his palette, targets healthier foods, and includes more fruits, vegetables, and green juices into his meals as well. The source of this added focus stemmed from a knee injury that sidelined for the final two weeks of 2020-21, along with “nagging” aches and pains he aimed to address.

“I just realized that, really, the best ability is availability, just being on the floor,” he says. “I was doing everything I could to do that.”

Both developments taught him to take better care of his body, honing on his diet and recovery patterns. Among those altered dietary choices is consuming Cheribundi, a brand of cherry juice introduced to him by Sacramento’s training staff early on last season, which facilitated this interview.

Roughly nine months later, he drinks three bottles every day, swears by its impact, and, recently, requested they be delivered to his place in Los Angeles while he trains there this summer. As he begins lifting regularly and immersing himself in multiple, daily on-court workouts, Cheribundi accelerates the wide-ranging components of recovery.

It helps alleviate muscle soreness, reduces inflammation and, after his trade from Sacramento to Indiana, aided his assimilation to an East Coast sleep schedule after spending the outset of his NBA tenure on the West Coast.

“When I was on the Kings, I slept so much easier because it’s timing and things like that. Like, sports get done later and the day starts later than it does being on the other side of the country,” he says. “But now, I got traded to the East Coast. I’ll get way less sleep because I was staying up watching the West Coast games and then getting up early to go to the gym. So, for me Cheribundi was huge in that sense, helping me get to sleep better.”

The present-tense manner in which Haliburton explains his NBA growth curve indicates he’s still acclimating himself at every turn. Year One ended prematurely because of a knee injury, which informed him that he must go to greater lengths with his diet and recovery tendencies.

Year Two jettisoned him across the country, brought about a radically different timezone and team environment, where he must reshape his professional routine. Year Three resides as an unknown. He expects opponents to defend him differently and a new cast of teammates will present other hurdles to navigate.

Yet problem-solving and adaptability are core tenets of Haliburton’s on- and off-court rise. Nothing suggests that’s changing anytime soon.

“It’s all chess at the end of the day,” he says. “Just one move after another.”

Kenneth Petty, Nicki Minaj’s husband since 2019, has been sentenced to a year of house arrest for failling to register as a sex offender in California, according to CBS Los Angeles. In addition, he must pay pay a $55,000 fine and complete three years of probation. Petty pled guilty to failing to register as a sex offender in September last year after being arrested in November of 2019 during a traffic stop.

Petty was convicted of first-degree attempted rape in New York in 1995. Despite completing his four-year sentence and registering as a sex offender in New York, he did not update his address with authorities upon the couple’s move to Los Angeles in 2019. He originally pled not guilty to failing to register, but considering a conviction could cost him up to ten years in prison with a lifetime of supervised release, he apparently changed his mind, taking the plea for a lesser sentence.

The alleged victim from his original conviction, Jennifer Hough, sued both Petty and Minaj in 2021, claiming that they or their representatives have been harassing her to recant her initial testimony. Nicki and her lawyer have called the lawsuit an attempt to shake her down for money and called for Hough’s lawyer to be “severely punished” for making certain claims in his filings saying Nicki was part of a New York street gang.

Julien Baker had one of last year’s best-received albums with Little Oblivions, a critically beloved LP that found itself at or near the top of several Billboard charts. Now, today brings good news for fans who can’t get enough of the album: Baker has announced B-Sides, a collection of songs recorded during the Oblivions era.

The announcement comes with the new song “Guthrie,” a song that hardcore Baker fans know as it was previously included as a bonus track on the Japanese edition of Oblivions. While much of that album has a more fleshed-out sound that Baker’s earlier work, “Guthrie” is a tender stylistic callback to her more simply arranged musical origins.

While the song doesn’t specifically mention singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, Baker has made her admiration of him clear: She has a tattoo of the Guthrie quote “Wake up and fight,” and the “This machine kills sadness” sticker on her guitar is a reference to Guthrie’s famous “This machine kills fascists” slogan.

Meanwhile, Baker recently contributed a song called “Milkman Of Human Kindness” to a charity compilation album and in a couple weeks, she will kick off her joint tour with Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten.

Listen to “Guthrie” above.

B-Sides is out 7/21 via Matador. Pre-order it here.

Like a lot of people who watch and like movies, these days I have mixed feelings about Marvel. Yeah, sure, there were people who hated it from the start, and that’s fine. Or the people who warned us that, soon, we’d be saturated by these stories – you know, what’s pretty much happening now – and, yeah, they weren’t necessarily wrong. Though, not to get too into how economics work (my college degree finally coming in handy), there’s really no way to just purge consumer demand. Disney is a company that wants to make money and as long as people like this product, they are going to keep making more and more of it.

Anyway, back to my original point: my mixed feelings. It’s weird, because when I watch a new entry in the MCU, I still find myself enjoying that specific entry in the moment (though, lately, then forgetting about it pretty quickly). For instance, Thor: Love and Thunder seems to be a breaking point for a lot of critics, but, while watching, I had some laughs and, for the most part, had a pleasant enough time. But when I think of the MCU overall right now, yeah, I feel somewhat overwhelmed. In its current state, with multiple movies, the Disney+ shows, and even whatever it is Sony is trying to do with its MCU adjacent universe, it’s … a lot. (I’m sure there’s a grand plan, but it also does kind of feel like, since the MCU has lost some of its most popular actors lately (both by design and also tragically), there is some flooding the market here to see what works and what doesn’t. To the point I’m wondering if viewers are starting to pick and choose.

Which brings us to Ms. Marvel, which just aired its fifth show on Disney+ and for the last couple weeks has seen a lot of “lowest watched MCU show” headlines. So here’s the thing about Ms. Marvel: this is not the one to skip.

There are probably a thousand reasons for the viewership issue. A lot of people on Twitter have pointed out that it’s the first of the MCU shows to not feature either an already established character or, like with Moon Knight, feature a famous actor as the lead. Speaking of Moon Knight, I do think Ms. Marvel following so closely behind didn’t help things. Look, I liked Moon Knight because it was trying to do something different. But I also totally get why everyone wouldn’t be into it. And it did suffer a bit from “doing something different for the sake of doing something different.” I respected that the attempt was being made, but it was clear the attitude was clearly to make something weird. Ms. Marvel is more organically something different. It’s not trying to be different, it’s just different.

I also think some people got it in their heads this show is only for teens. And, to be fair, it was pretty much marketed that way. And the first couple episodes, which I enjoyed, but they also made me feel a little old. But I chalked this up to being a feature. Ms. Marvel, at least at first, is there to cultivate “the youths,” because look at the issues Star Wars is having in that department. This whole “people love the Prequels now” phenomenon is because between 1999 and 2005, George Lucas made three movies that spoke to kids. (I am not a “Star Wars was always for kids,” person. Yes, kids loved the Original Trilogy – I speak from experience – but so did everyone else, including Oscar voters who nominated the first movie for Best Picture.) And my friends who have kids, I hear it over and over, “Yeah they just aren’t into Star Wars like we used to be.”

But starting with the third episode of Ms. Marvel – and especially the fourth, when Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani, who is terrific and plays this role with the confidence of someone who has been plying this character for a decade) and her family travel to Pakistan – there’s a noticeable tonal shit in the series. It’s no longer so much about another day at high school, it now becomes about geopolitical ramifications of the British rule of India and then the subsequent Partition of India and Pakistan. Ms. Marvel provides a history lesson in the way Gandhi does. (A movie I just watched recently when I watched every Best Picture winner and, you know, is pretty good.) In the latest episode, Kamala is whisked through time to the events of Partition, which involved her great grandparents and then very young grandmother. It’s a stark departure from how this series started and kind of bucks the trend of these series starting strong, then just becoming energy beam battles. Ms. Marvel is gaining momentum as she heads toward her finish line.

So, look, I’m not here to scold you for not watching Ms. Marvel. After the initial two episodes I got sent as screeners, I thought the characters were a lot of fun and the show, overall, was fine. Then once they started streaming I fell behind a couple weeks (I think this had to do with Obi-Wan Kenobi overlapping, this hadn’t happened before with Star Wars and the MCU). Anyway, last week I decided to catch up with Ms. Marvel and, my goodness, I’m glad I did. The episode that aired this week, week five, was absolutely incredible. I was missing out. And there’s a good chance you are, too.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Jerry Harris, who in early 2020 became a household name as the breakout star of Netflix’s reality series Cheer, was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison on Wednesday after pleading guilty to receiving child pornography and engaging in interstate travel for the purpose of engaging in illicit sexual conduct with a minor under the age of 15 earlier this year.

Allegations against Harris first came to light in September 2020, when he was arrested on child pornography charges. In February, per USA Today, Harris pleaded guilty “to two charges for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old in the bathroom during a cheer competition and paying a 17-year-old to send him sexually explicit photos and videos via Snapchat.” Harris also admitted to engaging in similar behaviors with other minors, but those charges were dismissed as part of an overall plea agreement.

Charlie and Sam, twin brothers from Texas, were the first to speak out publicly against Harris’ crimes after they claim he began harassing them when they were just 13 years old and he was 19. Both brothers, who are now 16, told the court about the lasting impact of Harris’ abuse, and the anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder they’ve endured.

As Charlie explained: “I knew in my heart and soul that what Jerry was doing to me and Sam was bad, but everyone was telling me that is just the way Jerry is and that if I were to ever to report him that EVERYONE would turn their back on me because I would have ruined the life of such an amazing person that everyone loved.”

In early 2020, Cheer—which followed a competitive cheerleading squad from their home base of Navarro College, a junior college in tiny Corsicana, Texas, to the National Cheerleading Championship in Daytona Beach, Florida—premiered on Netflix. The six-episode reality series became a surprise hit for the streamer, and made instant stars of its cheerleaders, with Harris in particular becoming its breakout star. Following the show’s first season, Harris ended up hosting the Oscars red carpet for The Ellen DeGeneres Show and had inked deals with Starbucks, Walmart, and other major brands.

Harris issued a statement in which he said that “I regret my decisions and I am deeply sorry. All I can do going forward is to try to do better and be a better person. I do not deserve forgiveness, but I do pray that one day you might find it in your hearts.”

Attorneys for Harris pointed to their client’s own traumatic childhood—he himself was a victim of sexual abuse—in order to make a case for a lesser sentence. But in her sentencing memo, USA Today writes that while assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Guzman acknowledged the trauma of Harris’ upbringing, but wrote that prior abuse was “not a blank check to commit sex offenses against minors.” She further claimed that “Harris used his celebrity and wealth to continue his exploitation of children, expanding the tools available to him to manipulate them into gratifying his seemingly insatiable sexual desires.”

(Via USA Today)

The new Luck trailer is here, and it’s offering a deeper dive into the magical Land of Luck ahead of its upcoming premiere on Apple TV+. Luck is the first film from the newly formed Skydance Animation and was one of two films snatched up by Apple as it sought to make expand its original animated film content.

The film centers around Sam (Eva Noblezada), an unusually unlucky woman, who finds herself navigating the Land of Luck thanks to the help of a black cat named Bob (Simon Pegg). While searching for a lucky coin after instantly losing hers down a train, Sam will encounter all kinds of creatures in the magical world including a dragon voiced by none other than Jane Fonda. The View‘s Whoopi Goldberg is also in the cast along with Lil Rey Howery and Cheers/Pixar alum John Ratzenberger.

Here’s the official synopsis:

From Apple Original Films and Skydance Animation, Luck is a story about Sam Greenfield: the unluckiest person in the world. Suddenly finding herself in the never-before-seen Land of Luck, she must unite with the magical creatures there to turn her luck around. The film stars Eva Noblezada, Simon Pegg, Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Flula Borg, Lil Rel Howery, Colin O’Donoghue, John Ratzenberger, and Adelynn Spoon.

Luck starts streaming August 5 on Apple TV+.

Clairo was set to perform at Lisbon’s NOS Alive, but sadly the “Bags” singer wasn’t able to make it. Luckily, The Strokes swooped in with their set at the festival and covered her song “Sofia,” from her critically-acclaimed 2019 LP Immunity. Juliana Casablancas’ voice was drenched in Auto-Tune, and the guitars are so Strokes-y that it sounds like their song.

Just a couple of days ago, Clairo was joined by Phoebe Bridgers on the stage in Milan, Italy at the Carroponte for her song “Bags.” Before the release of her new album Sling, she said in an interview, “This record has changed everything for me, because I was fully going to quit music.” She added: “I was pissed off. I was pissed off that that’s a part of this, and that I’m just supposed to accept the fact that that’s a part of it. I have moments where I wonder if it even matters what I write. I put in so much effort, but is it going to get to a point where I’m just overly sexualized again? You’re so desperate for someone to hear you out that you just let them do it.”

Watch The Strokes perform Clairo’s “Sofia” above.

The Better Call Saul season six premiere was the first time that the show didn’t start with a black and white flash-forward to Gene Takovic, Omaha’s most famous Cinnabon manager. No offense to the other Cinnabon managers living in Nebraska’s largest city. We haven’t seen the last of Gene — but we have seen the last of the actor who played Jeff, the taxi driver who recognized Saul Goodman in the season five premiere.

TVLine reports that “the role of Jeff has been recast, with Pat Healy taking over for Don Harvey.” Harvey has made two appearances on the Breaking Bad prequel, in “Smoke” and “Magic Man,” but he “recently appeared in the HBO drama We Own This City and couldn’t return to reprise his Saul role due to ‘contract obligations’ on that show.”

Healy made his debut in the ominous teaser trailer above.

“I know who you are. You know who you are. Just say it. Come on. Come on, man. Say it!” the taxi driver demands of his passenger, who sighs, “Better call Saul.” The Albuquerque Isotopes air freshener is a nice touch. It’s a small part, but an important one: Saul is so rattled by being spotted by Jeff that he calls Ed “The Extractor” Galbraith (played by the late Robert Forster) for help before deciding that “I’m gonna fix it myself.”

The final season of Better Call Saul continues on July 11.