Category: Worldwide

Caris LeVert was a man in demand earlier this week, with the now-former Brooklyn Nets guard getting moved to the Houston Rockets in the James Harden deal before getting flipped to the Indiana Pacers. He’s a fascinating fit in the Pacers’ backcourt, but we’ll have to wait to see how he pairs with Malcolm Brogdon in Nap Town.

Indiana announced on Saturday evening that LeVert, while undergoing a physical upon his arrival with team, is going to be out indefinitely after a “small mass” was discovered on his left kidney. There is no word on specifics, but the team announced that he will undergo further testing to determine what is going on.

“On behalf of my family and myself, we want to thank the Indiana Pacers for their support and guidance,” LeVert said in a statement. “We are grateful for their extreme thoroughness during the physical process and I am looking forward to joining the team and being part of this great organization as soon as possible.”

Hopefully any and all testing reveals that this is nothing particularly worrisome and LeVert is able to stay happy and healthy moving forward. The 26-year-old averaged 18.5 points and a career-high six assists in 12 games with the Nets prior to his trade.

Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo are trying their best to have fun with their time on CNN despite the new news being, well, troubling in recent weeks. The co-hosts are at the helm of the network’s late night coverage of all things political, and lately that’s meant Donald Trump inciting a coup attempt and lots of nonsense about the election.

But on Friday, they couldn’t help but make reference to a bit of viral news Lemon himself was part of. Though it didn’t take long before team fell into laughter. On Friday, a media report about CNN’s coverage of the election made a bizarre reference to Lemon as “openly Black.” He is, of course, a Black man, but it’s a weird phrasing to equate being Black to, say, a sexual orientation or religious belief.

As Lemon’s name and the phrase “openly Black” trended on Twitter, he couldn’t help but notice and make it clear the incident would be mentioned on the show on Saturday.

And sure enough, Lemon said he had an “announcement” to make on the show on Friday.

It’s the very impressed “wow” from Cuomo that breaks Lemon, and the rest of the segment is filled with laughter. Cuomo is really the perfect comedic foil here, starting with the assurance that whatever he says on live national television would be “just between us” and the “I don’t know what to say” to carry the moment while Lemon composes himself.

Later on Twitter, Lemon certainly had his fun with the hashtag #openlyblack as well.

All jokes aside, though, it does seem like Lemon has something more he wants to say about the incident and plans to do so after the weekend.

James Harden won’t have to wait to get a chance for a first impression with the Brooklyn Nets. Prior to the team’s game against the Orlando Magic on Saturday evening, the Nets announced that Harden, who was acquired earlier this week in a four-way deal that saw his time with the Houston Rockets come to an end, will be available to suit up.

On Friday, Nets coach Steve Nash said that Harden will be inserted into the starting lineup as soon as he is able to play, and prior to the game against Orlando, he confirmed that will be the case. As Malika Andrews of ESPN noted, it will be the first action of any kind that Harden has with his new teammates, as he was unable to practice with the team prior to Saturday’s game.

It will not be the fully-formed version of the Nets, as Kyrie Irving still will not be able to take the floor due to his extended leave of absence, but at the very least, this should afford the opportunity to see what Harden looks like alongside Kevin Durant. We’ll have to wait for Irving’s return to see what the team looks like at its theoretical best, and in the meantime, Harden will get to get the rust off alongside his old Oklahoma City Thunder teammate.

This week the co-founder of CD Projekt, Marcin Iwiński, posted a video apology on Twitter. The apology was in relation to the absolute disaster that was Cyberpunk 2077‘s release in December, and the subsequent fallout in recent weeks. The story of Cyberpunk is well told by now. The game was delayed multiple times, finally released, only to meet immediate fan backlash due to the game feeling largely unfinished. Bugs existed throughout the game, some comedic, some game-breaking, and it felt almost unplayable on the last gen PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.

Playing the game on the PlayStation 5 and XboxSeries X/S was better, but as Iwiński explains in the apology video the version of the game optimized for next-gen consoles won’t arrive until the latter half of 2021. That’s because, of course, CD Projekt Red will be busy fixing the game that’s already out. Of course, if you’re a PlayStation owner, good luck finding the game because Sony has yet to make it available for purchase, ever since they removed it from their digital store in December.

Cyberpunk in many ways is a great example of what happens when the development of a game is rushed and poorly planned, but many haven’t given CD Projekt that excuse, because the game has theoretically been in development since 2012. That was when the game was first teased, but a recent article from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier broke down how the game didn’t actually enter development until 2016. Not only that, the game was plagued with internal issues that really never gave Cyberpunk a chance to succeed.

Part of the fans’ disappointment is proportional to the amount of time they spent waiting for the game. Although Cyberpunk was announced in 2012, the company was then still mainly focused on its last title and full development didn’t start until late 2016, employees said. That was when CD Projekt essentially hit the reset button, according to people familiar with the project.

In Schreier’s article, he gives damning details about the development of the game itself, including that the engine the game runs on was largely being built while the game itself was developed. The game’s initial demo at E3 demo that was largely faked, and massive bugs plagued the game all the way up to CD Projekt’s infamous “Going Gold” announcement, which is traditionally when a game is “finished.”

Why all this happened is likely a topic of significant debate over at CD Projekt right now, but you can’t say that many at the company didn’t see this coming. There was reportedly a clear disconnect between developers and those in charge when it came to how ready this game was throughout development. So much so that those making the game were apparently making memes about its delay before it actually happened.

The overtime didn’t make the development of the game any faster. At E3 in June 2019, CD Projekt announced that the game would come out on April 16, 2020. Fans were elated, but internally, some members of the team could only scratch their heads, wondering how they could possibly finish the game by then. One person said they thought the date was a joke. Based on the team’s progress, they expected the game to be ready in 2022. Developers created memes about the game getting delayed, making bets on when it would happen.

The developers of the game were correct to meme delays, but it goes to show just how bleak things were internally. Even now you can still find people posting that infamous yellow background when a delay of any kind occurs across all industries.

Hindsight is 20/20, but when you look at everything we know about the game now and everything we’ve learned over the last week it makes the fate of Cyberpunk blatantly clear in retrospect. This was a game destined to fail for a variety of reasons. It’s just a shame those with the power to prevent that at CD Projekt didn’t do anything in time.

[via Bloomberg]

Stormzy is one of the most commercially successful rappers in the UK, thanks in part to his 2019 album Heavy Is The Head. But that’s only made him more susceptible to attacks from others in the field. He got into a tussle with grime rapper Wiley, and now he’s in a full-on war with fellow UK act Chip. The latest episode in their beef came when Chip shared his diss track “10 Commandments” on Friday night. It’s a scathing effort from the artist formerly known as Chipmunk, and it arrived hours after Stormzy lined up some shots towards him on his Ghetts collaboration “Skengman.”

Throughout “10 Commandments,” Chip goes on the attack with lines like “Yo, one minute you’re on home invasions / Next minute you’re at strangers, paintin’” and “One minute it’s ‘F*ck the government, f*ck Boris’ / Next minute you’re tellin’ people ‘vote.’” Chip paints his adversary as contradictory and untrustworthy, one that doesn’t deserve his success. No doubt Stormzy will have a response.

The song is the fourth diss track he’s sent Stomrzy’s way. The first two arrived in October, with “Killer MC” and “Flowers.” A statement from Chip’s manager revealed that Stormzy stood outside the rapper’s apartment and shouted for him to come out, but Chip was not home at the time. Stormzy then preceded to enter the apartment before police officers were called and he was escorted from the scene. Prior to that, Chip and Stormzy appeared to exchange shots on “Waze” and “I Dunno,” respectively.

You can listen to the diss track above.

Ted Cruz is in a bit of sticky wicket: His political future is in jeopardy, all because of his continued support of Donald Trump. The Texan senator is among the Republican lawmakers accused of helping foment the angry mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6. He has not apologized. He has not backed down. He’s gotten into Twitter fights with AOC. And now he has some more critics: former staffers, who used to idolize the politician who risked it all to help the man who once called his wife “ugly” and said his father had killed JFK.

Intelligencer reached out to more a half dozen of Cruz’s former employees, discovering that, as one person put it, most of Cruzworld is pretty disgusted.” He has, they say, become unrecognizable, and his actions, particularly since Trump lost re-election in November, has them questioning their longtime idolatry:

They have asked themselves and each other how the candidate who began his political career as an unwavering “constitutional conservBacative” could allow himself to fall in line with Trump’s fraudulent and delusional election challenge; how the man they once viewed as deeply principled has been so willing to behave so cravenly. When Cruz first ran for the Senate in 2011, he boasted about fighting against the Bush administration in court as Texas’s solicitor general to make clear his willingness to stand up to politicians from either party when they violated the Constitution.

“Personally, it’s painful. It sucks,” that former Cruz aide told Intelligencer. “We’ve always backed him because the country deserves principled conservative leadership … I’d say he got unlucky the Capitol was stormed by a mob, but in reality he placed himself at the political mercy of others.”

Back in 2016, Cruz was, like a lot of higher-ups in the GOP, a major critic of Trump, and not just because they were running for the same gig. At the Republican National Convention that summer, he even told the crowd to “vote their conscience.” That, one former staffer postulates, may be the moment Cruz pivoted Trump-wards. Cruz was heckled by the crowd, who interpreted it as a slam of the future 45th president:

That’s when things started to get wobbly,” said the former Cruz aide. At that point, one former aide said, “I think blind ambition started to get the better of him after coming so close in 2016 then having to endure Trumpism’s takeover of the party. Psychologically, after he lost in ’16, he must have watched Trump’s messaging to his core base and concluded that maybe this group of voters he needed were going to be more receptive to a message like that.”

Cruz belatedly endorsed Trump in September of that year and hasn’t looked back. Even as former critics who cozied up to him, such as Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, Cruz has held firm, spreading misinformation about voter fraud and, two weeks ago, stoking up the mob of supporters whose descent upon the Capitol led to five deaths. But while some staffers mourn that he’s changed, others don’t think he has. As the Intelligencer eloquently put it, “Others suggested that his character hasn’t changed but that it has simply been revealed.”

(Via Intelligencer)

LeBron James and the folks at SpringHill Entertainment have done a good job keeping the details about Space Jam: A New Legacy close to the vest, giving out little bits of information over the last few years. We know what the uniforms will look like, some of the names that will appear alongside James, and that the film is going to come out a little bit later in 2021.

Now, we have an idea of what exactly one second of the film will look like when it drops on July 16. A video from Warner Bros. Pictures that includes a number of same day releases that we can expect to see on HBO Go in the coming year, and nestled early on in the video is the following Space Jam teaser:

The extent of what we can tell about the film from this is that it certainly has LeBron James and Bugs Bunny in it and, uh, well, that’s about it. It’s very unclear who they watched get sucked up into what appears to be a hole in the space-time continuum, and we can probably make educated guesses about which Looney Tunes are suiting up alongside LeBron, but otherwise, this is especially vague, which has been the point of basically every bit of Space Jam information.

The one thing that we can take away from this clip is that LeBron seems to at least try to be an actor in this, which both is not a surprise because he is quite good at that and immediately makes him an improvement on the performance we saw from Michael Jordan in the original. As for every other major question, those are still up in the air, but as long as it’s fun and the soundtrack is outstanding, it’s hard to imagine too many people being upset with this movie.

After moving to 29-0 back in October, Khabib Nurmagomedov abruptly retired from the UFC following the death of his father earlier in 2020. While he stepped away from the fight game, the UFC hadn’t formally acknowledged Nurmagomedov’s decision, leaving the door open for his return and a shot at the coveted 30-0 record.

On Friday, UFC president Dana White met with Nurmagomedov and promised to announce how that meeting would affect next weekend’s Conor McGregor vs. Dustin Poirier main event. On Saturday, White did just that, announcing Nurmagomedov wants to be impressed by next weekend’s card, leaving the door open to his return.

McGregor hasn’t fought since he TKO’d Donald Cerrone in 40 seconds in January. With no opportunity to make good on his promise to fight three times in 2020, he settled for a rematch against Poirier seven years in the making at UFC 257 next Saturday. McGregor’s last fight against Poirier ended with “Notorious” earning a first-round knockout. McGregor has been angling for another shot at Nurmagomedov after their explosive 2018 showdown.

In the co-main event, Dan Hooker will face off with UFC newcomer Michael Chandler. White acknowledged during his interview on UFC Fight Night on Saturday that any four of the lightweight contenders next weekend could earn Nurmagomedov’s attention in addition to Charles Olivera, who demolished Tony Ferguson in December.

By just about any objective measure, Deshaun Watson is one of the best quarterbacks in the world. The issue is that the Houston Texans are in the midst of major turmoil right now — the team went 4-12 this year, fired head coach Bill O’Brien, and seems to have absolutely zero idea how to move forward despite the fact that it has an MVP-caliber signal caller.

This has led to some speculation that Watson is unhappy about a number of things, with rumblings making the rounds that suggest he could want out. In fact, a new report from Greg Bishop and Jenny Vrentas of Sports Illustrated indicates that Watson’s teammates are ready to get behind him, no matter what the future might hold, with one particular moment from after the team’s final game looming large.

As he and Watt, two of the most respected players in the NFL, walked off the field following the 41–38 Week 17 loss to the Titans, the final indignity in a 4–12 season, Inside the NFL cameras caught a dejected Watt telling the quarterback, “I’m sorry, we wasted one of your years.” Many players, according to the same sources, felt the same way as Watt—and support Watson’s doing what’s best for himself moving forward.

The reporting goes on to indicate that Watson may be ready to move on altogether, citing a recent incident in which Texans legend Andre Johnson made it clear that the best thing for him is his new team.

On Tuesday, Johnson, the lone member of the franchise’s Ring of Honor, posted on Twitter that Watson should stand his ground, writing that “nothing good has happened” since Easterby’s hire. When Watson saw the tweet, the first for a person of Johnson’s significance to name Easterby directly, he laughed. Asked why he might find a tweet that heavy in sentiment funny, one of the people close to Watson says, “He just wants out.” Then Watson watched the Houston Rockets play Tuesday night—when he posed for a photo with Johnson, which Johnson posted to his Instagram page, reiterating the “stand your ground” message from hours earlier. Only this time, Watson was in the frame.

Watson and the Texans inked a four-year, $160 million contract last September, and while that would be a major financial load for any team to shoulder, 25-year-old Pro Bowl quarterbacks do not become available all the time. Last year, Watson led the NFL in passing, throwing for a league-best 4,823 yards.

It hasn’t been hard for the FBI to locate and arrest the thousands of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol last week: Many of them gleefully posted clear evidence of them committing illegal acts over social media. Among them was “Baked Alaska,” aka Anthime Joseph Gionet, a former BuzzFeed staffer-turned-far-right personality. Now, according to AP News, Gionet become one of the many involved who have been nabbed by the feds.

Gionet livestreamed himself inside the trashed office of Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, among other places inside the federal building. He was ecstatic about the mayhem, which ultimately resulted in five deaths. “We’ve got over 10,000 people live, watching, let’s go!” he said during the video. “Hit that follow button — I appreciate you guys.” A week-and-a-half later, Gionet was arrested by FBI agents in Houston.

In a piece for The New York Times published last week, former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith recounted his experiences working with Gionet. He arrived in 2015, and he quickly made a name for himself making eye-catching Vines, the short-form videos that enjoyed a brief popularity before being destroyed by Instagram and SnapChat in 2017. Smith says Gionet’s politics took a sharp turn rightward in 2016, and by the end of the year he had gone to work as the “tour manager” for the soon-to-be dethroned far right instigator Milo Yiannopoulos.

But Smith argues that Gionet’s real beliefs may not be sincere, that it could stem from his combative nature, or even just an addiction to clicks and online interatction. “Still, it’s not clear what Mr. Gionet actually believes, if anything,” Smith writes. “And really, I’m not sure I care.”

(Via AP News and NYT)