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This article originally appeared on 08.17.16

A group of 105 homeless people gathered at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Each of them was given a disposable camera and told to take pictures that represent “my London.”

Photo by Richard Fletcher/MyLondon Photography Contest. All photos used with permission.

The photos were entered in an annual contest run by London-based nonprofit Cafe Art, which gives homeless artists the chance to have their work displayed around the city and, for some of the photographers who participate in the yearly challenge, in a print calendar.

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“Some people have had experience, and others have never picked up a camera before,” said Paul Ryan, co-director of Cafe Art.

The program, Ryan explained, includes mentorship and training from professional volunteers at the Royal Photographic Society, including winners of the contest from previous years, many of whom are ultimately inducted into the society.

The goal of the challenge is to help participants gain the confidence to get back on the job market, search for housing, re-engage with their social circles, or even activate dormant skills.

“I really enjoyed it. And I started to get involved in my art again, which I’d left for years,” a 2015 participant said in a video for the organization’s Kickstarter campaign.

These are 11 of the top vote-getters from this year’s contest:

1. Ella Sullivan — “Heart Bike Rack”

2. Alana Del Valle — “London Bus with Sculpture”

3. Beatrice — “Out of the Blue”

4. Laz Ozerden — “What Now?”

5. Leo Shaul — “The Coffee Roaster”

6. Christopher McTavish — “St. Paul’s in Reflection”

7. Hugh Gary — “London Calling”

8. Keith Norris — “Watching Mannequin”

9. Siliana — “After the Rain”

10. Saffron Saidi — “Graffiti Area”

11. Jackie Cook — “Underground Exit”

Ryan, who has been developing the program for seven years, said that while there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for individuals who are homeless, for some who are too used to being “knocked back,” the experience of seeing their work on display or in print — and of success — can be invaluable.

“Everyone is helped in a different way, to get up to the next step in whatever way they need to.”

As we mark the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6th insurrection on Capitol Hill, new anecdotes from high-level Trump aides are shedding light on the former president’s reaction to the attempted coup he instigated.

One such person is Stephanie Grisham, former press secretary and the First Lady’s Chief of Staff. Grisham recently wrote a tell-all in which she recounted Melania Trump’s mishandling of the insurrection, sharing how the former First Lady refused to condemn the attacks until days after the uprising had been squashed. Now, in an interview with CNN, Grisham is revealing how Trump took in the deadly scene on Capitol Hill.

“He was in the dining room, gleefully watching on his TV as he often did, [saying] ‘Look at all the people fighting for me,’ hitting rewind, watching it again, that’s all that I know,” Grisham shared.

Grisham also blasted Trump for abandoning his MAGA supporters once the insurrection failed.

“He cares about no one but himself,” she continued. “The people who have been rightfully punished for their role in the insurrection … you know, where is he? All I know is he’s sitting at Mar-A-Lago, apparently getting his legal bills paid by the RNC. This man is a master manipulator. He gets people to do his bidding.”

The one-time Trump supporter then revealed that as many as 15 former aides and top advisors to the ex-president plan to meet next week to discuss ways to stop Trump from running for office again and prevent him from attempting to “manipulate people and divide our country” with his Big Lie.

“There were a few of us who have been sitting back, watching him continue to manipulate and harm our country,” Grisham explained. “He continues to divide our country because he has a fragile ego. We’re going to talk about how we can formally do some things to stop him.”

Watch the full interview below:

(Via The Daily Beast)

First-week sales of a new album is a metric that most major artists place a lot of value on; Having a big debut is good for a project’s chart prospects and moving a lot of copies of an album early gives some major bragging rights. That doesn’t matter to The Weeknd, though, as he declared in a reply to a Twitter thread suggesting that the first-week sales of Dawn FM will be negatively impacted because no physical editions of the album will be available upon its release. (The Weeknd’s online store notes that CD editions of Dawn FM are set to ship on January 28, while vinyl and cassette versions will ship on April 29.)

The thread in question reads, “No physical copies (vinyls, CDs, cassettes) for @theweeknd’s ‘Dawn FM’ will be available in store during release week. Furthermore, no physical copies will be shipped the first week. This will obviously impact first week figures. The reason is likely that The Weeknd pushed the release up. Therefore, physicals aren’t ready for distribution.”

It then points to The Weeknd’s New Year’s Day Instagram post to back up its claim about the supposedly advanced release date. In that post, The Weeknd wrote, “Music can heal and that feels more important than another album rollout. Let’s just drop the whole thing and enjoy it with the people.”

The Weeknd caught wind of this thread and noted in response, “this doesn’t matter to me. what matters is getting to experience the album together with the fans during these times.”

All of that said, Dawn FM shouldn’t have a problem being the biggest new album of the week, as its primary competition for that title may be Gunna’s Drip Season 4.

Dawn FM is out 1/7 via Republic. Pre-order it here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Of all the faces and fashions seen smashing their way through the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the image of Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. the QAnon Shaman, is undoubtedly the most memorable. With his David Puddy-like face paint, horned fur hat, and spear in hand, the 34-year-old Arizonian seemed to go out of his way to take center stage in every damning video and photo taken during the January 6th attacks, but now he’s blaming the media for making him the poster boy for the MAGA coup (just as his lawyer blamed Americans in general for making Chansley the way he is).

But on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the events of January 6, Chansley is blaming everyone and everything that isn’t his satanic Davy Crockett hat for turning him into “the face” of the Capitol insurrection. Speaking from an Oklahoma federal prison, where he’s currently serving a 41-month sentence for the part he played in the attacks, Chansley got on the horn with Inside Edition’s Lisa Guerrero, with help from his mom, who had him on speakerphone (awwww).

When asked whether he had any regrets about his actions on that infamous day, Chansley claimed that he actually tried to calm down the crowd on more than one occasion:

“In retrospect, one thing I can say that I regret is not working to ensure that there was far more peace on that day. Had I known what was going to happen, I would have stepped in before any barricades were breached. I actually tried to, on more than one occasion, calm the crowd. But it just didn’t work.”

Since the bulk of the footage we have seen of Chansley involves him howling, and we know that he left a threatening message to Mike Pence on the Senate dais, the idea of him actually trying to quell the storm of sedition doesn’t quite fit. Even Guerrero challenged him on this, noting: “You’re a grown man. You chose to go to the Capitol that day. Many people look at you as the face of Jan. 6 and are appalled. What is your response to those people?”

Yet again, Chansley wasn’t ready to take the blame, telling Guerrero: “As far as being ‘the face,’ that’s something that the media made me. I didn’t make myself anything.” He did, however, choose to dress like a feral animal and illegally thrash through the halls of one of our most government’s most sacred institutions.

But what does Chansley’s mom think? She claims that then-president Donald Trump invited everyone to the Capitol, and feels “really passionate about how wrong I think it is that he is even doing any time at all.”

While more than 700 people have been arrested for their actions on January 6th, the FBI claims there are still approximately 350 additional suspects they are trying to find to face prosecution. None, however, is likely to look as familiar as Chansley.

(Via Inside Edition)

After President Joe Biden addressed the nation on the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack, Donald Trump didn’t waste any time firing back at the speech that clearly put the blame for the attempted coup on his shoulders for refusing to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election. In fact, Trump proved Biden’s point by once again trotting out “The Big Lie” that the election was stolen from him, which is a heck of a thing to do on the anniversary of an insurrectionist attack based entirely on that false premise.

In Biden’s speech, he ripped Trump for calling his supporters true patriots. “Is that what you thought when you looked at the mob ransacking the Capitol, destroying property, literally defecating in the hallways?” Biden said in the fiery address, in which he also called Trump “a defeated former president.”

Considering Trump canceled his Jan. 6 press conference and is still banned from Twitter, the former president was forced to respond to Biden via an email to his MAGA enthusiasts. Via Mediaite:

This political theater is all just a distraction for the fact Biden has completely and totally failed. Our Country no longer has Borders, has totally and completely lost control of Covid (record numbers!), is no longer Energy Independent, Inflation is rampant, our Military is in chaos, and our exit, or surrender, from Afghanistan was perhaps the most embarrassing day in the long and distinguished history of the United States—and so much more. Why is it that the Unselect Committee of totally partisan political hacks, whose judgment has long ago been made, not discussing the rigged Presidential Election of 2020? It’s because they don’t have the answers or justifications for what happened. They got away with something, and it is leading to our Country’s destruction.

Trump ended his rant by saying the Democrats now “own” January 6. “I say, let them have it because America sees through theirs lies and polarizations.” Again, another weird thing to say concerning the riot literally happened during Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally after he told the crowd to “fight like hell.” There wouldn’t even be a January 6 without him, but sure, the Democrats own it now.

You can see excerpts of Biden calling out Trump below:

(Via Mediaite & The Recount)

Richard Grenell served in the Trump administration as acting Director of National Intelligence and the United States Ambassador to Germany. He still has his former-boss’ back, even though he no longer has to study the complete discography of Rammstein, or whatever the United States Ambassador to Germany does.

Grenell appeared on Newsmax on Thursday to discuss the events of January 6, 2020 (you can watch the video here). “These democrats and their media allies see something. They’re dramatizing this whole January 6th, because they want to seize elections forever,” he said to three other stern-faced men before grumbling about mail-in ballots.

Later, Grenell returned to the attack on the Capitol Building one year ago today, but rather than call it what it was (a failed coup, an insurrection, a day dark in American history, etc.), he complained about Trump getting booted off Twitter. “Let me finish with this, January 6th was a terrible day because it’s the day Big Tech and the media kicked President Trump off Twitter and silenced his voice,” he said to approving nods. “That was the day that was an attack on our democracy.”

Grenell conveniently left out the part where Trump wasn’t “silenced” on the 6th. He didn’t get locked out of his Twitter account until the next day, followed by a permanent suspension on the 8th “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

At least Grenell didn’t get tricked into thanking a war criminal… again.

(Via Mediaite)

We have about a month and a half until the basketball world heads to Cleveland for the 2022 NBA All-Star Game. On Thursday afternoon, we got our first glimpse of which players the fans want to participate in the game, with a pair of former teammates leading the vote getting in the respective conferences.

The NBA announced that four players — Giannis Antetokounmpo, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and LeBron James — have each eclipsed the two million vote mark. Of that quartet, Durant sits atop the Eastern Conference with more than 2.3 million votes, while Curry has more votes than anyone else in the league, as the Golden State Warriors guard has just a hair below 2.6 million.

Both Curry and Durant have been captains in the All-Star Game in the past, but the former teammates have never gone head-to-head as captains — should these results hold, it would mark the first time since the NBA adopted its current All-Star format that James is not representing one of the conferences as a captain.

In total, 12 players from each conference will earn the distinction of being an All-Star. The honor is not just determined by fan vote, as current players and members of the media both get a say in who makes it. Fan voting makes up 50 percent of the vote, while players and the media each get 25 percent.

Glenn Consor, the Washington Wizards broadcaster who made a comment on Wednesday night about Houston Rockets guard Kevin Porter Jr. that drew the ire of basketball fans, has issued up an apology. Porter hit a jumper in the waning moments of the game to secure a 114-111 win for the Rockets, which led to Consor saying that he “pulled that trigger right at the right time” like his father.

It has been pointed out that Porter’s late father spent time in jail after pleading guilty to first-degree manslaughter before he was born, which led to LeBron James speaking out and saying there’s no place in the NBA for Consor.

As Cavs forward Kevin Love said (still prior to the apology), there was nuance in the discussion.

In his apology, Consor claims this was a misunderstanding on his end. He was not referring to Porter’s father, and instead, Consor claims that he did not do his homework and was of the belief that former NBA guard Kevin Porter was his dad — Porter spent a decade in the league and had a few stints with Washington when the team was known as the Bullets.

Of course, one can argue pretty easily that Consor is not exactly saving face here by admitting he did not do the proper research in the lead-up to the game and assuming that the two NBA players were related. Regardless, we will see if Porter has anything to say about this the next time he speaks to the media.

(SPOILERS for And Just Like That… will be found below.)

HBO Max’s Sex And The City revival, And Just Like That…, hit choppy waters on a few fronts regarding Chris Noth and his character, Mr. Big. On a very serious note, two women came forward to accuse the actor of sexual assault (encounters that he insists were consensual). Following these allegations, Noth lost his agent, got booted from The Equalizer, and lost a multi-million dollar deal for his tequila brand. Collateral damage fell onto a lesser pocket of rough water, the Peloton ad (which also got yanked) that meant to smooth over how Mr. Big bit the dust after a ride.

All of this added up to one, uh, big problem. After stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis all expressed sadness over the sexual assault allegations, the revival has reportedly axed a cameo appearance that the late Mr. Big was set to make. TV Line reports that the cameo won’t see the light of day, and here’s what was on tap:

In And Just Like That…’s Feb. 3 season ender (WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD), Carrie ventures to Paris’ Pont des Arts bridge to scatter Big’s ashes into the Seine river. The sequence was slated to include a fantasy element in which Big — who was killed off in And Just Like That…’s premiere episode — appears to Carrie. (As Sex acolytes are well aware, Carrie and Big have a long history with the iconic pedestrian overpass.)

The scene sounds like a direct callback to Big going to “get” Carrie from Paris when she was miserably following Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Russian artist around while wearing ballroom dresses. Alas, the cameo was not meant to be, as the show’s creatives reportedly decided that it was good enough for “Carrie [to be] finding closure via the spreading of Big’s ashes.” It’s an unenviable position for the show, for sure, and hopefully, Carrie can be freed from that reappearing Peloton, too.

(Via TV Line)

For their recent album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, Halsey reached across genre lines and tapped Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to help them write song for the album that veered into the alternative music category. But for their next project, Halsey is starting to think about trying out yet another genre of music. They teased the possibility of a joint single with none other than Latin reggaeton star Bad Bunny and fans could not be more excited.

News of the possible collaboration came in the form of a reply to a fan’s tweet, in which a listener begged Halsey (in Spanish) to write a song with Bad Bunny. “honestly? It has been discussed,” they replied.

Does this mean Halsey would sing in Spanish? Possibly. Halsey teased the joint Bad Bunny single right after they flexed their Spanish-speaking skills when talking about which foods they craved while pregnant. They said they once crushed up tortilla chips into tiny pieces, topped it with Tapatío sauce, and ate it “with a spoon out of a bowl like dry spicy cereal.” But Halsey then clarified (in Spanish) that this food combination isn’t the same thing as chilaquiles.

Halsey followed-up by saying they took years of both Spanish and French in school, but their Spanish abilities have improved in the last few years.