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The conflict between Ukraine and Russia finally escalated tonight. Reports that Russia has launched a “full-scale invasion” of Ukraine broke, and American celebrities are already being confronted with the need to speak out about the political event. Yesterday, Cardi B noted that she sides with the “citizens” who are impacted by the violence, but also understands how the sanctions that Biden has imposed, and the ramifications of the conflict, are going to further fracture the already damaged global economy.

The breaking news has also had an impact on another artist’s plans. After celebrating his birthday just a few days ago, The Weeknd has been teasing a big new announcement that was slated to come tomorrow, but after seeing the reports he’s decided to postpone on sharing his own news while the world focuses on something slightly more serious. “Unfortunately I’m just now seeing what’s happening with the conflict and will pause on tomorrow’s announcement,” he wrote on Twitter tonight. “I pray for everyone’s safety.”

Though fans don’t know what Abel had in store for them, speculation was rampant about either a tour, or a final third album for this new “trilogy” of releases. But postponing while such a tragic circumstance is unfolding feels like the right move, so we’ll just have to wait and see what Abel has up his sleeve.

February has been an active month for Snoop Dogg. He released his 19th album, BODR (Bacc On Death Row), and he joined Dr. Dre, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige, and Anderson .Paak at the Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show. Before either of these events, Snoop acquired Death Row Records, a label that he was previously signed to and which was founded back in 1991 by a group that included Dr. Dre and Suge Knight. After the deal, Snoop shared his plans to make Death Row an NFT record label.

However, it seems there are more aspects of the acquisition that still need to be finalized. According to Billboard, it appears that albums by Tupac and Dr. Dre won’t be included in the deal. A pair of Tupac’s Death Row albums, All Eyez On Me and The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, are “no longer on the label,” which means Snoop does not have access to them. Additionally, Dre’s 1992 debut album The Chronic, which was also released on Death Row, would not be returned to him until 2023. According to the report from Billboard, the specifics of the deal are still under negotiation, so until things are finalized, Death Row’s previous owners (MNRK Music Group and investment firm Blackstone) still have the rights to the label’s catalog entries.

“It feels good to have ownership of the label I was part of at the beginning of my career and as one of the founding members,” Snoop said after acquiring the label. “This is an extremely meaningful moment for me.”

Late last month, Slim Jxmmi, who with Swae Lee makes up the rap duo Rae Sremmurd, was arrested for battery after a fight with his girlfriend in Miami. According to TMZ, the rapper allegedly attacked his girlfriend, with whom he has a child, and pulled out her hair extensions. The incident began after Slim Jxmmi, born Aaquil Brown, was confronted by his girlfriend about a woman he was following on Instagram. Brown is also accused of throwing his girlfriend’s phone over a balcony. Now, almost a month after he was arrested for battery, the charges against him have been dropped.

According to Billboard, Miami prosecutors will not pursue charges against Brown. Court proceedings in the case were closed on Tuesday due to an order from Judge Betsy Alvarez-Zane. While a spokeswoman for the Miami-Dade County Attorney’s Office did not return Billboard’s request for comment, Brown’s attorney Bradley Horenstein said prosecutors told the judge on Tuesday that the charges were dropped due to a lack of evidence. Prosecutors reportedly said that the rapper’s girlfriend recanted her initial police statement and that she also refused to cooperate with them.

Slim Jxmmi’s focus will likely return to music and his Rae Sremmurd duo has not dropped an album since 2018’s SR3MM. The duo teased the release of SremmLife 4 back in 2020, but nothing from that project has yet been released. They also made an appearance in season two of Lil Dicky’s FX show Dave.

When news broke that Bob Saget had suddenly died in early January, investigators were quick to rule out drugs or alcohol as contributing factors. But it was another month until more details were made known. Earlier this month, it was revealed an autopsy had ruled that his death was the result of severe head trauma. One doctor said it was “something I find with someone with a baseball bat to the head, or who has fallen from 20 or 30 feet.”

Now, as per People, there’s a clearer picture of what may have happened to Saget on that fateful night. The actor, comedian, and filmmaker was doing a show in Orlando. Afterwards he went back to his hotel, where he seemed animated and excited, chatting with the staff. Between when he went to his hotel room and when he was found the next morning, lifeless in his bed, remains murky. But investigators have now pieced together semblance of what may have happened:

Authorities checked the marble end tables and counters in the bathroom, but found no traces of blood or hair. Now, they believe that Saget lost consciousness in the bathroom and fell backward onto the marble floor, striking his head.

Police believe that a groggy Saget regained consciousness and stumbled into bed, where he again lost consciousness and died. His time of death was estimated to be around 4:00 am, approximately 12 hours before his body was found.

It’s not known how Saget lost consciousness; that may remain a mystery. But now there’s more closure on what happened than there was before.

Saget’s death prompted widespread shock and mourning. Family, friends, and well-wishers offered tributes that stayed true to someone who was known as both a kindly patriarchal TV figure and a hilariously blue comic. It was his longtime Full House costar John Stamos who pointed out that, even after death, he managed to slip in “one last d*ck joke.”

(Via People)

You know what they say: When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. For Ben Stiller, those lemons were the box office returns for Zoolander 2, his 2016 sequel to his sleeper hit about a dingbat male model he made 15 years prior. And in a new Esquire profile (in a bit teased out by The AV Club), the actor and filmmaker discusses the lemonade he made from that critical and commercial disaster.

The lemonade, if you can excuse the dodgy metaphor, came in the form of two TV shows: Escape at Dannemora and Severance. The first is the Emmy-gobbling thriller with Patricia Arquette and Benicio Del Toro that aired two years after Zoolander 2 croaked. The second, a sci-fi thriller about a disturbing workplace, is one of the most hyped shows of the new year. (Its run on Apple TV+ began last week.) Neither are comedies, though they can be funny. But both were directed (in the latter’s case, mostly) by Stiller, who was nominated for an Emmy and won a DGA award for his work.

Perhaps this is not the path Stiller’s had taken had a certain aforementioned sequel not tanked. “If Zoolander 2 had been a huge hit, and then people were saying ‘Zoolander 3! Do this movie! That movie!’” he said. “[T]hat might have taken me off the road of having the space to work on developing Dannemora.”

He imagines what could have happened otherwise. “I might have gotten distracted by other bright shiny objects, but instead it opened a path where I could just do what I’d honestly wanted to do for years and years, which was: just direct something!” Stiller said. “To say, I’m just going to work on this project that I want to work on, because it takes a little time to get these things going, and if you don’t stick with it you don’t get there.”

Stiller has done plenty of serious work before. Indeed, his big screen directorial debut, Reality Bites, is a drama-comedy-romance that was also one of Hollywood’s first looks at then-still-young Gen X. But people still seem surprised that he’s not exclusively cranking out comedies in which intellectually impaired guys set themselves ablaze.

“People do ask me, ‘Why were you drawn to this? You’re not a guy who does these kinds of things,’” Stiller told Esquire. “I get asked that about Severance, I heard it a lot about Dannemora. ‘You’re funny. Be funny.’ I get it. But I don’t analyze it. In my mind, it made total sense.”

Severance drops new episodes every Friday through April 8 on Apple TV+.

(Via Esquire and The AV Club)

For quite some time, Britney Spears has used her Instagram account to air grievances. She’s used it to discuss her former conservatorship, which lasted 13 years, as well as her relationship with her sister Jamie Lynn. It’s become a diary of sorts for the singer, and in a recent post, she used her account to go after her former business management firm Tri Star Sports & Entertainment and her former business managers Lou Taylor and Robin Greenhill.

In an Instagram post she shared on Wednesday, Britney said that before “they sent me away” to a treatment facility, Tri Star brought her into their offices. “The swanky suited up b*tches … SO NICE with their ‘We are here to make you feel SPECIAL’ [thumbs up emoji],” she wrote, before specifically calling out her former business managers. “I had lunch with Lou Taylor and Robin Greenhill … they said ‘Britney, look at your picture on the wall!’ With a huge black and white framed picture in the hall of their office !!!!! Kate Beckinsale was there too !!!!! They sucked up to me and ‘made me feel special’ … RIGHT …. Ha those same b*tches killed me a week later !!!!”

Britney added that her father Jamie Spears “worshipped” Taylor and Greenhill and claimed he “would have done anything they asked of him.” She concluded, “Nobody else would have lived through what they did to me !!! I lived through all of if and I remember all of it !!!! I will sue the sh*t out of Tri Star !!!! Psss they got away with all of it and I’m here to warn them every day of my precious life !!!!”

Britney’s post comes after she reportedly signed one of the biggest book deals ever.

The anti-vax trucker protests that plagued parts of Canada over the last month are currently winding down, though they did more than clog cities like Ottawa. They also inspired copycats in France. But a MAGA-themed version, which was set to “choke” D.C. on Wednesday, stumbled right out of the gate.

As per The Daily Beast, MAGA trucker Bob Bolus had hyped up a convoy of 10 to 20 trucks that would march from Scranton to D.C., which it would treat like the Canadian truckers did Ottawa. Their purpose? To protest vaccine mandates. He later added other grievances, including immigration, the death of Jan. 6 protester Ashli Babbit, and, of course, Critical Race Theory.

“I’ll give you an analogy of that of a giant boa constrictor,” Bobus boasted. The threat was so real that the Pentagon approved of nearly 700 National Guards personnel to assist local authorities should multiple convoys create gridlock.

But no such constricting was to happen. Why? Because no one showed up. That’s not true. Bolus showed up with his 18-wheeler, though he was late to arrive because he got two flat tires. Reuters reporter Julio-César Chávez, who traveled alongside the much diminished convoy, counted five pick-up trucks, one SUV, and one Sedan, for a total of eight vehicles of varying sizes, most of them quite small.

“We’re not putting a chokehold on D.C. today,” Bobus told The Daily Beast by noon, when he and the massive convoy that never materialized was originally supposed to have D.C. at its knees. “Not to say that it wouldn’t happen in the very near future. It’s just going to be an idea of what’s to come.”

For now, though, whatever shape the American version of the Canadian convoys takes on in the future, it at least had a start that was even more disastrous than the first day of Trump’s new Twitter clone.

(Via The Daily Beast)

The Rich sisters are unusual for their shared basketball skills. All four of them—senior Mackenzie, junior Courtney, sophomore Avery and eighth-grader Dakota—play for the top-ranked New London-Spicer High School basketball team in New London, Minnesota. But according to a report by KARE 11, the fact that four sisters all play for the same high school team at the same time isn’t the most interesting part of their story.

The Wildcats are ranked No. 1 in the state and are coached by Mike Dreier, who has been coaching the team for 43 seasons. One of the reasons Coach Dreier has been there for so long? The Rich girls’ dad, Earl.

Earl Rich attended New London-Spicer High School himself and played sports, like his daughters. He was also a foster kid who caught the eye and heart of caring coach Mike Dreier.

Earl’s mother became unable to care for him due to illness when he was in second grade. His biological father wasn’t in the picture, and Earl ended up living in five different foster homes.

When Dreier found out that Earl was going to be transferred to a different school his sophomore year because his fifth foster family was giving him up, the coach made a quick decision.

“I was in the lunchroom one day,” Dreier told KARE, “and the music teacher was saying, ‘Aww, Earl’s gonna have to move to Willmar.’ Listened to him and I said, ‘Well he can come live with me.’”

Earl knew Dreier, having been coached by him in seventh grade football, but he was still shocked to find out he was offering to take him in.

But they got the paperwork completed, and Earl lived with Dreier from his sophomore year until he graduated high school. What’s more, Dreier served as a father figure for Earl—something he hadn’t experienced up until then.

“I never spent three years at one place,” Earl says. “He just gave me every aspect of a dad that I never had.”

Earl went off to college at Southwest Minnesota State University, where he played football and baseball. Then he returned to New London to start his own real estate business.

Dreier, now 69, had planned to stop coaching by now, but Earl implored him to stick around so that he could coach his daughters.

“You gotta keep coaching, you’ve got to coach my kids,” Dreier recalls Earl saying. “I just said, ‘I can’t. I don’t think I’ll be hanging on that long, Earl.’”

Earl told his girls, “If there’s any coach I want you to play for, it would be him.”

Dreier decided to stick it out. Now, he coaches the four daughters of the man he helped raise through his teen years. And his team, with the four Rich girls playing on it, is undefeated.

Not a bad legacy to leave on all fronts, Coach Dreier.

Nearly two years after the incident that left her shot in the foot, Tory Lanez and Megan The Stallion’s felony assault case had a pre-trial hearing today. Tory is accused of shooting the rapper back in the summer of 2020 and he faces felony charges for assault with a semi-automatic firearm and carrying a loaded and unregistered firearm in his vehicle. Before the hearing began today, things took a turn when DJ Akademiks tweeted that Tory Lanez’s “DNA WAS NOT found on the weapon” that was used in the alleged crime. This sparked a war of words between the two, while Megan pointed out that the hearing had not begun at the time of Akademiks’ tweet.

Things cooled down for a bit, but picked back up after Tory Lanez himself jumped into the mix. Megan shared a screenshot of Tory apologizing to her the morning after he allegedly shot her. In response to the screenshot, Tory tweeted, “Good D*ick had me f*cking 2 best friends …. and I got caught [shrug emoji] … that’s what I apologized 4 . … it’s sick how u Spun it tho.” This sparked a brief back and forth between Tory and rapper and Megan’s boyfriend Pardi who wrote, “put the phone dwn let’s link .. you n me .. ain’t nothin to talk about.” Megan also responded to Tory’s tweet. “F*cking two best friends… n**** you SHOT ME YOU KNOW WHATS WHAT YOU WERE APOLOGIZING FOR,” she wrote on her Instagram Story. “YOU KEEP PUTTING A NARRATIVE OUT THAT ME AND MY FRIEND FELL OUT ABT YOU AND THATS NOT TRUE! WHY ARE YOU SKIPPING OVER THE SHOOTING JUST ADMIT YOU SHOT ME! BC SHE DEFINITELY AINT DO IT AND I AINT SHOOT MY DAMN SELF.”

Megan continued, “YOU THINK ITS OKAY TO SHOOT ME THEN HARASS ME ONLINE AND MAKE IT LIKE THIS WAS SOME WEIRD CAT FIGHT WHAT THE ACTUAL F*CK IS WRONG WITH YOU.” She also took a moment to address Akademik’s response after she called him at for falsely reporting things. “Big AKKKK??? LITTLE
Boy please,” she wrote on her Instagram Story. “Why would you post there was no DNA FOUND but now saying it’s inconclusive ?? How are YOU Specifically able to see documents before they come out in court?”

Akademiks jumped in with a message of his own on Twitter. “Aye.. i dont give a f*ck bout what u got with tory,” he wrote. “Yall can play yall PR games.. we kno what u n roc nation is doing. i dont care. Just dont try to bring in my brand in there. U literally a Peon in the game. 1501 OWNS u and u beg them everytime to drop a song.” He continued, “U so bothered over my TWEETING out FACTS about tory case. GO ASK THE DA… DNA RESULTS WAS SUBMITTED in discovery… why u care so much what the internet says? OH i know.. U been living off a narrative and its sad u made it where if tory dont go to jail u dont win.”

“WHERE ALL MY HOT GIRLS AT?????” Akademiks continued in another tweet. “Meg.. idc what u n tory had. but dont address big ak unless u talking what the DNA report said. Holla at the DA and figure out what they said and if i Lied. If i Lied.. File the lawsuit babe.”

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

There has been an expectation for some time that Troy Aikman will be leaving Fox, with reports that he was being strongly pursued by Amazon to join Al Michaels in their Thursday Night Football booth (although Michaels has, likewise, yet to ink an official deal.

Aikman was not shy about making his frustrations felt when it came to Fox’s draw of games during the playoffs, and it certainly seemed as if he had taken the filter off for the end of his tenure at Fox. Amazon had long been rumored to want to spend big for its Thursday Night booth and poach some big names to give their broadcast some star power, but it appears they aren’t the only ones who had big plans for 2022.

According to Andrew Marchand of the New York Post, ESPN has swooped in on Aikman and is expected to hire the Hall of Famer to take over in the Monday Night Football booth, finally landing the big name they’ve been desperately seeking since the departure of the since disgraced Jon Gruden.

ESPN is deep in negotiations with Fox Sports’ Troy Aikman to make him its lead analyst on “Monday Night Football,” The Post has learned.

Aikman’s deal is not completed yet, but there is an expectation that it will be finalized. Aikman has also been courted by Amazon.

The exact figures of Aikman’s deal are not yet fully finalized, but for him to leave Fox it is expected to be comparable to or exceed Tony Romo’s 10-year $180 million with CBS.

What is arguably more interesting than ESPN landing Aikman is what it could do for them in terms of a play-by-play hire to go next to him. Michaels has been targeted by ESPN in the past but is picky about his color commentator and wouldn’t jump ship without a big name by his side — ESPN wanted a Michaels-Manning booth a couple years ago — but Aikman was on his list for Amazon and that could swing him away from the streaming giant and give ESPN the star-filled booth they’ve been dreaming of since acquiring Monday Night Football. Marchand also notes that Joe Buck has a strong relationship with Aikman and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that ESPN could try to poach him as well, although he has so many roles at Fox, including as their lead on baseball, that the network would surely fight hard to keep him.