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Alex Jones is having a day in court after claiming that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. Alas, things are not going well for the sweaty, perpetually coughing on the witness stand Infowars host.

Scratch that. Things are going so terribly wrong for Jones that some are comparing his trial to an episode of Law & Order. The whole mess started when Jones, who is being sued for $150 million in damages by parents of the children killed in the 2012 massacre, began perjuring himself on the stand, claiming his business was bankrupt, that he couldn’t provide any emails or texts he sent about Sandy Hook because there were none and that he didn’t defame both the presiding judge and the jury in the case on his televised show. And the reason we know Jones was lying about all of this — besides that taping of Infowars where he shared an image of Judge Maya Guerra Gamble on fire and claimed the jury was rigged — is because his lawyers “accidentally” sent a digital copy of the entire content of Jones’ cell phone to the lawyers representing the Sandy Hook victims’ families.

Here’s the moment it happened in court.

That’s right. Either Jones — a man reportedly worth millions despite his claims of being broke — hired the most incompetent legal representation he could find or the guys representing him just really hate his guts. Not only did the lawyers hand over years’ worth of unredacted texts and emails, but they also did so without marking them as privileged which means the team representing the Sandy Hook side has been using the Infowars host’s own words against him all day in court. Even worse, Jones’ lawyers made the error 12 days ago, which means they’ve allowed their client to lie on the stand for nearly two weeks before copping to their mistake.

Obviously, this is a devastating turn of events for Jones who has now lied about everything from how much money Infowars was making from his Sandy Hook conspiracy theories — sometimes 800K a day — to having one of his producers harass Sandy Hook officials during the height of his media blitz against the school. But, for everyone hoping this scumbag, who profited off the death of innocent children for a decade, finally gets what’s coming to him … well, they’re having a hell of a time over on Twitter.

QAnon cultists have been disappointed a handful of times when they’ve predicted that John F. Kennedy Jr. will somehow rise from the dead (or never have been dead at all) and reappoint Donald Trump to his rightful place as president. Or that the two will somehow run on a ticket together. In the meantime, these kooky conspiracy theorists have been running in local elections to snatch the seats of power across the country. And they’re faring about as well as that JFK Jr. revival.

Case in point: Ron Watkins, one of the main leaders of QAnon, who some people believe to be Q himself. As Mediaite reports, Watkins was one of the many individuals who was determined to face off against Democratic incumbent Tom O’Halleran in Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District. He faced a humiliating defeat.

While Watkins was always considered an underdog, he somehow managed to out-fundraise many of his competitors, leading some (probably terrified) individuals to believe that he had a real shot at pulling off a surprise win. Instead, he received less than 4 percent of the vote.

Zoinks!

Watkins was thought to be an underdog as his fundraising was outpaced by his many rivals, and the results from InMaricopa.com show that Crane took 33.5 percent of the vote on Tuesday. Blackman was next with approximately 25 percent of the vote, followed by Deluzo, Yates, Moore, Ksystofiak, and then Watkins with 3.8 percent.

As Mediaite reported:

The election follows a shaky performance from Watkins, who was called out by his rivals for botching the facts during the district’s primary debates. Watkins’ tenuous relationship with facts coincides with his involvement with QAnon, the right-wing movement claiming that a secret cabal of globalists, child sex traffickers and deep state Satan-worshipers conspire to oppose Donald Trump and bring the United States under their control.

Doesn’t look like Watkins is their man. There’s still time to hold out hope for JFK Jr. though.

(Via Mediaite)

Sara Quin of Tegan And Sara is currently caring for a couple of babies. One is the duo’s upcoming album Crybaby, which they announced last month, when they also shared a new single, “Yellow,” along with a video. The second baby is more literal: Yesterday, Sara took to the band’s social media accounts to share a photo of her with her new baby, writing, “My #crybaby.” The photo is of her holding the child, whose back faces the camera.

The comments section of the Instagram post is full of loving comments from people including Phoebe Robinson, Cobie Smulders, and others.

While that post could have just been about Sara holding any old baby to make a joke about the new album title, Tegan did confirm it is in fact Sara’s kid in a tweet calling out an article that uses a photo of her instead of Sara, writing, “My favourite part of this article about Sara announcing she has a new baby on IG is that they used a photo of me performing at the top of it. So Sara has a baby, whatever. I have a microphone. Take that Sara.”

Crybaby is out 10/21 via Mom+Pop Music. Pre-save it here.

The story in the AFC East for much of the last 20-plus years has been the New England Patriots run things, everyone else is trying to play catch-up, and ultimately, they come up short while the Patriots make a run at a Super Bowl. That’s no longer the case — yes, three teams are still playing catch-up, but now, the Buffalo Bills appear to be the clear-cut best team in the division, and have legitimate hopes of bringing the Lombardi Trophy to Western New York for the first time in history.

Still, each team in the division is interesting to one extent or another. Today, we’re going to look at the AFC East and try to answer the biggest question that face each of them as we prepare for the 2022 NFL season.

Buffalo Bills: Can they actually win a Super Bowl?

“The Buffalo Bills are the favorites to win the Super Bowl” is a very weird sentence that is also 100 percent accurate. After losing in the AFC Championship Game two seasons ago and the AFC Divisional Round last year — both times traveling to Kansas City and falling to the Chiefs — Buffalo went out and appeared to address a number of the biggest issues that existed on their already loaded roster. Most prominently, the Bills’ defensive line got an overhaul, as Von Miller brings a pass rushing threat they did not have and a trio of battle-tested defensive tackles (DaQuan Jones, Jordan Phillips, Tim Settle) should add some heft up the middle. Their skill position players around Josh Allen were bolstered, both in free agency (Jamison Crowder, O.J. Howard, Duke Johnson) and in the draft (James Cook), while Rodger Saffold brings Pro Bowl pedigree to the offensive line. Basically all the pieces are here for the Bills to make a serious run at the Super Bowl, especially if Allen can take another step forward. Perhaps the biggest hurdle they’ll need to clear is the decades of bad luck that is synonymous with the franchise.

New England Patriots: How will the offensive play-calling work?

No seriously, the Patriots don’t have offensive or defensive coordinators. That might not be a huge concern on the defensive side of the ball — the team hasn’t had a recognized defensive coordinator since 2017, which is probably something you can get away with when Bill Belichick is your head coach — but in the aftermath of Josh McDaniels leaving to become the head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, the team does not have a coordinator on the offensive side, either. Belichick was recently quoted as saying, “We’re not really big on titles and all that. It’s important that we all work together and create a good final product. That’s what we’re going to try to do. That’s what we’ve always done.” It seems like some combination of offensive line coach Matt Patricia (whose background is as a defensive coach), QB coach Joe Judge (whose background is as a special teams coach), Belichick, and second-year QB Mac Jones will have input on how the offense works. It seems risky, but maybe it’ll work — the Patriots are masters of figuring things out.

Miami Dolphins: Can a new head coach unlock Tua?

Tua Tagovailoa is on the short list of the best college quarterbacks to ever live. Despite that, things just haven’t really worked in the NFL. It hasn’t all been on him — offensive line issues and a less-than-stellar group of skill position players have hampered things considerably — but compared to the guy who tore defenses apart as the signal caller in a high-flying Alabama offense, Tagovailoa has looked tentative and unsure of himself.

Now, former San Francisco 49ers run game coordinator and offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel is here and will presumably bring an offense heavily influenced by the years he’s spent around the Shanahan family. McDaniel and OC Frank Smith are tasked with figuring out how to best take advantage of Tagovailoa’s accuracy and ability to make anticipatory throws, and with a pass catching duo of Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle that should be able to burn opposing corners, perhaps they’ll be able to figure that out. If not, Miami might be in for a rough year with major questions that need answering heading into 2023.

New York Jets: Can they take any serious steps forward in year two of Robert Saleh?

The Jets were bad last year, going 4-13 and generally looking like a team that had a first-time head coach and a rookie quarterback. Progress doesn’t happen overnight — or, more accurately, in one offseason — so New York probably shouldn’t make plans for a ticker-tape parade to celebrate a Jets Super Bowl or anything like that. Having said that, the team is going to look for just about anything it can get in 2022 as it looks to build something. Can Zach Wilson go from a rookie who struggled mightily to a guy who shows glimpses of being a franchise signal caller? Can the team’s highly-regarded 2022 NFL Draft class — led by first-round picks Sauce Gardner, Garrett Wilson, and Jermaine Johnson — be part of a foundation that brings better days to East Rutherford?

Can the free agent signings they brought in on both side of the ball with their copious amounts of cap space prove to be smart investments that immediately raise the team’s floor? This is a big rebuilding job, and this is a year to show that the team is building towards something other than what the status quo has been in New York.

Love spreader Jason Momoa will return to theaters as Aquaman in March 2023, but before that happens, he’s gone home. At least, that’s what he was doing on a flight where he acted as a stand-in flight attendant on the way to his native Hawaii. It’s wild to think about how, nearly three years ago, Momoa faux-threatened to boycott Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom filming while protesting construction on a sacred Hawaiian mountain. A lot has happened since then, but it’s all coming full circle.

Momoa’s also sticking to his steadfast promise to use as few plastics as possible, and he’s always done the most (including filming a shirtless video, with armpit scrubbing and everything, for Earth Day), and he’s brought that sensibility to his Mananalu water brand. Here he is promoting the brand by handing out water (while also admitting to feeling nervous to make an in-flight announcement) to delighted travelers. (Page Six noted that he got dubbed as “Aguaman” in the process.)

“My idea to create @Mananalu.water came to me while on a flight,” Momoa wrote on Instagram regarding his partnership with Hawaiian airlines. “We’re on a mission to end single-use plastic. Drink one, remove one – For every bottle of Mananalu sold, we remove one plastic bottle from the ocean. We have removed 3 MILLION plastic bottles from the ocean this year. Don’t stop making waves to save our beautiful planet. aloha j.”

In related news, Lenny Kravitz (and fellow ex-spouse to Lisa Bonet) recently sent out a birthday message to his ride or die. No one can ever break up these dudes.

Sharp-eared fans who pressed play on Beyonce’s new album Renaissance today may have noticed that a couple of the songs sound slightly different than they did on Friday when it dropped. On one song, “Heated,” a line has been changed to replace a word described as a slur by disability activists, following up on similar actions taken by fellow star Lizzo when the same concerns were raised over her song “Grrrls.”

The other subtle but big change to Renaissance appears in the song “Energy.” Prior to the album’s release, “Milkshake” singer Kelis posted a video raising concerns with the song, which she had been informed would include a sample of one of her songs. Kelis believed that she was not credited and also felt that she deserved a heads-up call from either Beyonce or the song’s producers. It later turned out that while “Energy” does include interpolation of Kelis’ hit “Milkshake,” the songwriting was properly credited to Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, aka The Neptunes, who wrote and produced the original.

However, that didn’t stop fans from debating whether or not there was an uncredited sample of Kelis singing in “Energy,” so Beyonce apparently updated the song on DSPs to remove a vocal clip toward the end of the track. Industry veteran Naima Cochran, whom Uproxx interviewed about the dispute, believes that Beyonce did so to remove a distraction from the larger discussion she hoped to spark with Renaissance about the breadth and history of Black music, which includes pioneering dance music styles like house and techno in addition to hip-hop and R&B.

So, technically, Beyonce did NOT remove a sample of Kelis from “Energy” because there never was one in the first place. However, she did remove disputed vocals that some fans thought were similar enough to cause confusion. The interpolation of drums from Kelis’ single “Milkshake” remains, but it was properly credited to its original songwriters, The Neptunes. For more information, you can check out our interview with Naima, who brings 20+ years of music business experience with multiple music labels to her expert perspective.

Ahead of their upcoming album, Being Funny In A Foreign Language, The 1975 have premiered a new single. On the groovy, instrument-driven “Happiness,” the band’s lead vocalist, Matty Healy, fondly remembers a young woman who showed him “what love is.”

Over the course of the five-minute track, it’s easy to get lost in the song’s plucky guitar strings and thumping drums. But a jazzy saxaphone in the song’s bridge makes the song feel all the more transcendent.

The 1975’s upcoming album comes amid rumors of a potential break-up of the band, which Healy seemingly confirmed around the time of their last album Notes On A Conditional Form. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone UK, Healy revealed that he doesn’t believe a split will happen at any point.

“There’s always been a lot of ‘will they, won’t they’ with my band,” Healy said “‘Will they split up? Will they not? Will I get over drugs in order…?’ And I’ve always leaned into that because I like that. I love the drama of it. And I think that now I’ve realized, not in a non-sexy way, but The 1975 aren’t going to split up. What happens with The 1975 could be a myriad of things, but splitting up is not really going to happen.”

Check out “Happiness” above.

Being Funny In A Foreign Language is out 10/14 via Dirty Hit. Pre-order it here.

On the heels of rumors of a falling out between comedy duo Desus Nice and The Kid Mero, Showtime officially confirmed that their Desus & Mero show was abruptly calling it quits as the two “pursued separate career endeavors moving forward.” However, The Kid Mero is finally setting the record straight that the whole thing was not as dramatic as it seemed.

In a new interview with the Basic! podcast, Mero revealed that he and Desus had hashed out pursuing their own projects well in advance. “The intent was to go our separate ways in a way that is supportive of each other,” Mero said. “It’s not like I’m breaking up with my girlfriend on the phone. It was a strategy and one that we all agreed on.”

According to Mero, the plan to move on had been in place for a while. Via Deadline:

“Desus and I had discussed pursuing separate interests over a year prior to the show coming to an end and that conversation solidified us in signing overall agreements that recognized our intent to operate independent of one another. As far back as June of last year, we were both pitching or looking to join existing projects as individuals.”

With the Showtime series over, Mero plans to focus more on writing. “[I want to] dig a lot more into that, features, series, books, I want to get into all of that.” He’s also content with Desus & Mero coming to a close because the last thing he wanted was to overstay their welcome.

“At the end of the day, when things are winding down you got to recognize that they are winding down and not supermax Patrick Ewing when he has two [knee pads] and his career is coming to a close,” Mero said.

(Via Deadline)

Jennifer Coolidge‘s first credited on-screen role was on a little show called Seinfeld. Pretty good! She continued to work throughout the mid-1990s — usually as characters with reductive names like “Hottie Cop” and “Woman at Football Game” — before her breakout performance in 1999’s American Pie as Stifler’s mom, who famously has got it going on. A year later, Coolidge made her Christopher Guest movie debut in Best in Show, leading to future scene-stealing parts in A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration, and a year after that came Legally Blonde. She was also nominated for her first Emmy this year for playing a distraught vacationer on The White Lotus.

But to many, she’s still cinema’s second most “MILF” (Mrs. Robinson is obviously number one), a designation that Coolidge seems to enjoy. “I got a lot of play at being a MILF and I got a lot of sexual action from American Pie. There were so many benefits to doing that movie. I mean, there would be like 200 people that I would have never have slept with, she told Variety.

You probably know this already, but it’s worth repeating: Jennifer Coolidge is the best.

Coolidge also told Variety about the “one thing” she’s done “really right” in her life. “I’ve picked great friends. If [The White Lotus creator Mike White] was never successful, and we just did White Lotus as a play in a little theater where everyone paid 10 bucks to see it, it would still be one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. Because it was a killer job that no one else thought I could do,” she said.

The White Lotus season two premieres in October.

(Via Variety)

When the Supreme Court and other conservative lawmakers decided to overturn Roe v. Wade, they seemed to have failed to take into account — or just temporarily forgotten — that the vast majority of Americans support an individual’s right to bodily autonomy. While there are plenty of polls that prove it, one really need look no further than the very conservative state of Kansas, which on Tuesday voted to keep abortion legal. As The Daily Beast’s Matt Taylor reported:

Voters in Kansas on Tuesday rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the GOP-dominated legislature to ban abortion, a stunning victory for reproductive-rights advocates in a region where the procedure was already nearly impossible to access.

Backers of the amendment — a campaign largely largely funded by the Catholic Church in the state — took pains to argue it was not in and of itself a ban on abortion. Some experts and advocates disagreed, and both local officials and outside observers said turnout appeared to be far higher than expected in a typical primary-day contest, a reflection of the high stakes.

Both voters and onlookers claimed that there seemed to be an extra large turnout for the vote, which, while it may be state-based, sets up a much larger precedent for conservative groups and lawmakers around the country.

The language of the law made it an especially tricky challenge. “You could read it and think you were voting to eliminate state funding of abortion when there is no state funding to abortion,” political scientist Neal Allen told Vox. “And there is language that refers to exceptions to preserve the health of the mother, and for rape and incest, but there’s nothing about the amendment itself that would create those exceptions.”

Adding to the confusion, according to The Daily Beast, is a last-minute mass text message that attempted to convince voters that voting “yes” to the amendment would give women the right to choose. (This is where you’d insert the Ron Howard voiceover to say: “It would not give women the right to choose.”)

The victory could turn out to be a huge win for other states planning similar laws, amendments, and votes. “Despite Republican control in the Kansas legislature,” Taylor writes, “the result complicates the path ahead for anti-abortion types in a state where the procedure is legal up to 22 weeks of pregnancy — and was sure to resonate in capitols across the country.”

(Via The Daily Beast)