San Diego Comic-Con 2022 kicked off with a trailer for the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and it… actually looks promising? The upcoming film has an all-star cast with Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page and Hugh Grant, and blends action, fantasy, comedy and some of D&D’s most iconic monsters.
“A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers undertake an epic heist to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry when they run afoul of the wrong people,” the description reads. “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves brings the rich world and playful spirit of the legendary roleplaying game to the big screen in a hilarious and action-packed adventure.”
The trailer delivers the dragons you’d expect, including possibly an acid-breathing Ancient Black Dragon and a Red Dragon. We also see a Mimic disguised as a treasure chest, a Displacer Beast, a Gelatinous Cube and an Owlbear — a beast that goes back to the original D&D game. As for realms and spells, there’s what looks like the Underdark, a Heat Metal spell, Dimension Door spell and others.
The film is being produced and distributed by Paramount and Hasbro, which controls the rights of the game and recently acquired the popular digital game-playing toolset D&D Beyond. Hasbro is also working on other film and TV adaptations for its toys including Transformers and My Little Pony.
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The festival made the announcement on Sunday afternoon, sharing that Kid Cudi would take Ye’s place. “Due to circumstances outside of our control, Ye will no longer be performing at Rolling Loud Miami 2022. Please welcome @KiDCuDi!” the tweet said. Cudi also confirmed the news, writing, “Rager boy incoming!” on Twitter.
Rolling Loud co-founders Tariq Cherif and Matt Zingler also issued a statement regarding the news, telling Complex over email, “We were looking forward to Ye headlining Rolling Loud Miami 2022. We spent months working with him and his team on the performance. Unfortunately, Ye has decided that he will no longer be performing. This is the first time a headliner has ever pulled off our show and though we don’t take it lightly, we wish him the best. We look forward to welcoming Kid Cudi as a headliner in Miami and we can’t wait to see what he has in store.”
It was revealed back in March that Kanye would headline the Miami event alongside Future and Kendrick Lamar at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens from July 22-24.
In April, Kanye also dropped out of Coachella as a headliner for the festival’s two weekends. He seemingly canceled due to personal reasons, after having been in the public eye, feuding with Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson.
The last time Ye played was in Miami in February, to perform another Donda experience. Complex’s Eric Skelton attended the event, writing, “Throughout all of these Donda listening events, Kanye has shown his work, presenting his material in a warts-and-all manner that’s very raw and transparent. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes it’s dark. Often, it’s twisted. But it’ll always make the music world stop and pay attention.”
Vice President Harris said Monday that she “never believed” the Senate testimony of Supreme Court Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch, in which they stressed the importance of legal precedent in cases like Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion.
“I never believed them. I didn’t believe them. That’s why I voted against them,” Harris told CNN in an interview.
Days after the high court overturned the 1973 ruling, clearing the way for states to drastically reduce access to abortion or ban it outright, Harris would not say whether she thought the justices deliberately misled the public and Congress during their confirmation processes.
“Listen, it was clear to me when I was sitting in that chair as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that they were … very likely to do what they just did. That was my perspective. That was my opinion,” she added. “And that’s why I voted like I did.”
Harris also addressed Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion, in which he called on the Supreme Court to reexamine cases on LGBTQ rights and contraception. “I definitely believe this is not over. I do. I think he just said the quiet part out loud,” Harris said of Thomas.
What conservative justices said about Roe at their confirmation hearings
Kavanaugh, nominated by President Donald Trump and confirmed in 2018 by a 50-to-48 Senate vote, testified that Roe was an “important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times.”
However, during oral arguments in the case that led to Roe’s undoing, he indicated he would be open to overturning “settled law,” citing a list of “seriously wrong” Supreme Court decisions that were later reversed.
In Gorsuch’s 2017 confirmation hearing, he testified that Roe was “a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court” and said he “would have walked out the door” if Trump had asked him to overturn it because “that’s not what judges do.”
Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) have said the two justices misrepresented their views on Roe in their testimonies and in private assurances during their nomination processes. Collins said she felt misled after she voted to confirm the justices, two of three Trump nominees who gave the court a 6-to-3 conservative majority.
Susan Collins says testimony by Gorsuch, Kavanaugh ‘inconsistent’ with ruling
Harris said Friday’s decision to overturn Roe left her “shocked” after she learned about it while flying to Illinois for an event on maternal health.
“I couldn’t believe it, because they actually did it,” she said. “The court actually took a constitutional right that has been recognized for half a century and took it from the women of America — that’s shocking when you think about it.”
As the first female vice president, Harris said the news affected her as a woman, a mother, an aunt and a godmother, and she urged all Americans to reflect on the court’s decision. “When we think about it, everyone has something at risk on this,” she added.
LGBTQ community braces for rollback of rights after abortion ruling
Although Harris did not mention Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the interview, she was present at Barrett’s confirmation hearings in 2020.
There, Barrett was also asked about Roe and testified that she was committed to obeying “all the rules of stare decisis,” the principle of respecting legal precedent when making decisions. “I promise to do that for any issue that comes up, abortion or anything else,” she added.
Collins told reporters at the time of their confirmation hearings that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh had assured her that Roe was “settled as precedent.”
Meanwhile, Manchin said in a statement: “I trusted Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh when they testified under oath that they also believed Roe v. Wade was settled legal precedent and I am alarmed they chose to reject the stability the ruling has provided for two generations of Americans.”
Lawmakers like Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and more spoke on June 26 about the overturning of Roe. (Video: Allie Caren/The Washington Post)
As for Thomas, he wrote, that “in future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell.”
The 2015 Obergefell decision guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marriage, and the 2003 Lawrence decision overturned a Texas law that criminalized sex between gay people. The 1965 Griswold decision barred states from denying contraceptives to married couples.
“We have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents,” Thomas said.
Harris said the court’s decisions had been driven by politics. “I think that is why we all must really understand the significance of what just happened. This is profound.”
President Biden has called the court’s ruling a “tragic error” and implored voters to turn out in November to elect members of Congress willing to write abortion protections into law.
Several liberal lawmakers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have floated the possibility that Biden could expand access to abortion on federal lands in states that ban it.
But Harris did not entertain the idea long during her conversation with CNN’s Dana Bash: “It’s not [something] right now that we are discussing.”
Instead, she reiterated the importance of electing Democrats during the midterms, listing the Senate races in Georgia, North Carolina and Colorado as opportunities for her party to pick up seats.
“We need to change the balance and have pro-choice legislators who have the power to make decisions about whether this constitutional right will be in law,” she said.
Harris, who as vice president presides over the Senate, did not mention the possibility of eliminating the filibuster to codify abortion rights.
She said the administration will protect women’s ability to travel to other states for abortions, saying that the issue is likely to go to the courts and that the administration would also “do everything” to ensure that women retain access topills for medication abortions.
Travis Scott is being sued for allegedly encouraging a stampede during his Rolling Loud Miami festival appearance in 2019.
According to documents obtained by Rolling Stone, an amended complaint filed on May 10 by Marchelle Love accuses Scott of “verbally and physically [inciting] the crowd to engage in a mosh pit and other hazardous activities”.
Scott’s alleged actions are claimed to have followed police orders to end his set “due to the crowd becoming dangerous and uncontrollable”. The rapper did end his performance, however, the claimant alleges that he continued to egg-on the crowd.
A representative for Scott denied the allegations to Rolling Stone. “This is another blatant, cynical attempt to attack Travis. As even the complaint makes clear, this incident was related to a false report of a shooting mid-show, completely unrelated to Travis’s performance… This cheap opportunism is based on a blatant lie that’s easy to detect.”
In the lawsuit, it’s claimed that Scott’s alleged encouragements caused the crowd to panic and “multiple stampedes” continued. “Despite the fact that Travis Scott was aware of and could clearly see concertgoers being injured, suffocating, losing consciousness, fighting and being trampled, he continued his performance while authorities were forced to attempt to render aid to these injured concertgoers,” documents read.
Travis Scott at Astroworld 2021. Credit: Rick Kern/Getty Images
Love claims Scott should have known his actions would “result in foreseeable injury” and that he was negligent. According to the complaint, Love, who also filed the suit on behalf of a minor child and guardian identified as U.M, suffered unspecified “severe injuries” that are “permanent in nature”.
These alleged injuries include: “bodily injury and resulting pain and suffering, disability, disfigurement, loss of capacity for the enjoyment of life, expense of hospitalisation, medical and nursing care treatment, loss of earnings, loss of ability to earn money, and aggravation of a previously existing condition.”
Sequel Tour Solutions, LLC and SLS Consulting and LLC are also named as defendants alongside Scott in the suit. It seeks a jury trial and damages exceeding the jurisdictional amount of $30,000 (£23,837) as well as taxable cost and other relief. Representatives for Sequel Tour Solutions and SLS did not immediately respond to RS‘ request for comment.
The news comes as Scott continues to face multiple lawsuits pertaining to the crowd crush at the rapper’s annual festival Astroworld. 10 people died and hundreds were injured last November at the event held in Houston, Texas.
Scott was named in most of the nearly 300 suits filed in Harris County last year. He has denied all the allegations set against him in 11 different lawsuits. In December, he filed requests to be dismissed from multiple lawsuits levelled against him in the wake of the tragedy. His representative said that he will likely file more dismissal requests.
A memorial set up for Astroworld victims. Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Live Nation and its subsidiary ScoreMore, Astroworld’s promoters, also denied in filed documents all the allegations against them.
The rapper has since admitted that he has a “responsibility to figure out what happened”.
Earlier this month Scott made his first major public appearance since the Astroworld tragedy at the Billboard Music Awards 2022.
Meteorites are turning up in Mississippi following a fireball over the state on April 27.
Linda Welzenbach-Fries was among the people on the ground who spotted the rocks originating from a small body in space, while accompanying her husband Marc Fries, a meteorite expert at NASA Johnson Space Center’s astromaterials branch.
“Marc and I, along with a host of scientists from around the country, will be studying these rocks over the next months,” Welzenbach-Fries, a science writer at Rice University in Texas, told Space.com by email. The husband-wife duo made the first two official finds of at least three confirmed in the region.
The pair started their hunt along Highway 84, where many of the meteorites appear to have fell based on radar data. While the short grass was filled with “road gators” kicked up by cars, Welzenbach-Fries found a likely candidate and her “whoops” of excitement brought over her husband, who confirmed the find.
“There is no mistaking a meteorite when you do finally spot one,” she said. Fries found his own space rock a couple of hours later, not too far from the first. Both finds were made on Saturday (April 30) and Welzenbach-Fries shared photos with NASA, which has been tracking the aftermath of the event.
NASA has asked any meteorite hunters in the region to ask permission of landowners before undertaking a search, and not to send in any samples to the space agency for confirmation. (In general, local natural history museums or scientists may be able to assist, depending on the region.)
The agency said finds have been confirmed “east of Natchez,” but said it would disclose no further details on where those were tracked down.
“Existing law states that any meteorites belong to the owner of the property on which they fell; out of respect for the privacy of those in the area, we will not disclose the locations of these finds,” NASA’s Meteor Watch group stated on Facebook.
An image of the fireball on April 27, 2022, snapped by the GLM instrument on GOES 16. (Image credit: NOAA)
Bill Cooke, lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office, said the bright flash was so vivid that it was “one of the better signals” spotted on the Geostationary Lightning Mapper on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-17 weather satellite, which monitors Western Hemisphere storms from space.
The daylight fireball unfortunately generated relatively few eyewitness reports and no known footage, making it difficult to track down the originating space body’s mass or orbit, Cooke told Space.com.
“We don’t have enough data at this time to nail down a precise trajectory that’s good enough to derive an orbit, but that may change in the future,” he said. “Whenever you have a meteorite fall, a lot of people like scrounging up as much data as possible.”
While scientists haven’t yet got their hands on the samples, Cooke said the pictures show it appears to be an ordinary chondrite meteorite. Confirmation based on lab tests generally takes several weeks at least to achieve.
This is the fifth confirmed meteorite fall in Mississippi, according to a database maintained by The Meteoritical Society, Cooke said.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.
Onlookers watched as a ball of fire streaked across southeastern skies Wednesday (April 27).
Around 9:03 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) Wednesday morning, over 30 people from Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi reported looking up and seeing a fireball in the sky. Soon after, people across southern Mississippi reported hearing a loud “boom.”
The explosive sound came from a fiery meteor barreling through Earth’s atmosphere at 55,000 mph (88,500 kph) generating an energy equivalent of 3 tons of TNT as it broke apart, creating shock waves that reached the ground and made a loud sonic “boom,” according to a statement from NASA.
Related: Asteroid spotted just before hitting Earth’s atmosphere wows astronomers
The location of witnesses to a fireball on April 27, 2022. (Image credit: NASA/American Meteor Society)
Scientists think that the object was an asteroid measuring about 1 foot (0.3 meters) across that disintegrated roughly 34 miles (55 km) above a swampy region of Louisiana, north of the town Minorca.
At its peak,the bolide, or extremely bright meteor, was likely over 10 times brighter than a full moon, according to the same NASA statement. But, despite its incredible brightness, not too many people reported seeing it in the sky.
“What struck me as unusual was how few eyewitness reports we had, given the skies were so clear,” Bill Cooke, lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said in the same statement. “More people heard it than saw it.”
An image of the fireball on April 27, 2022 snapped by the GLM instrument on GOES 16. (Image credit: NOAA)
While people on the ground mostly just heard the meteor making its way to Earth, satellites in orbit managed to see the event.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instrument aboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) 16 and 17 spotted a number of bright flashes that scientists think were caused by the meteor’s breaking up in the atmosphere, according to the statement.
“This is one of the nicer events I have seen in the GLM data,” Cooke said.
The object was first spotted by the satellites 54 miles (87 km) above the Mississippi River near the town of Alcorn in the state.
Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
Rolling Loud has expanded quickly in less than a decade, going from a single day festival in Miami to a three-day experience as one of the biggest hip-hop festivals in the world, with events expanding to California, New York and Portugal. Today (March 2), they drop their highly anticipated Miami lineup. The festival is scheduled to take place from July 22-24 at the festival’s longtime Hard Rock Stadium home.
In addition to some of the brightest names coming out of hip-hop, Kanye West (billed as Ye), Future and Kendrick Lamar are set to headline. This announcement follows West’s recent partnership with the festival to present the live listening part of his most recent album Donda 2, executive produced by Future. Kendrick Lamar has also recently announced that his next album will be his last with his longtime label Top Dawg Entertainment, so there’s a possibility Rolling Loud could see some new material. There will also be exciting performances by Playboi Carti, Lil Durk, Gunna, Gucci Mane, A$AP Ferg and more.
Tickets for the festival go on sale at 12 p.m. ET on Monday, March 7. You can purchase tickets here.
Below, check out the complete Rolling Loud Miami lineup and revisit our exclusive portraits from Rolling Loud New York here.
Despite only being available for just over a year, Sony’s PlayStation 5 has outsold the Wii U.
The PS5 sold in 17.3 million units as of December 31st, 2021. It launched in November 2020. The Wii U, which launched in 2012, has sold 13.56 million as of December 31st, 2019.
None of this will be particularly shocking to anyone who has followed the fortunes of both machines – the Wii U is one of Nintendo’s most notable flops, while the PS5 is selling like hotcakes – but it’s still remarkable that Sony’s machine has managed to outsell Nintendo’s (and then some) in just over a year.
However, it’s worth noting that 20.2 million PlayStation 4 consoles were sold in the same timeframe and that the PS5 has been held back by the ongoing chip shortage.
We’re not sure anyone at Nintendo will be losing sleep over this news, however. The Wii U isn’t Nintendo’s current system – that’s the Switch, which was 2021’s best-selling console in Japan, North America and Europe.
Officials from the National Weather Service believe that a meteor exploded in the Pittsburgh area on New Year’s Day after residents reported feeling the ground shaking and hearing a massive boom.
Allegheny County officials tweeted Saturday that county 911 officials had received reports from South Hills and other areas about the disturbance.
NWS could not confirm for certain that a meteor was the case, but data showed a flash in the area that wasn’t lightning around 11:26 a.m. — around the time residents reported the loud noise and ground trembling.
Residents around suburban Pittsburgh reported feeling their homes shaking and rattling while a loud noise rang out in the region. Jill Tarasi, 42, said she was sitting on her couch in Hampton when the boom hit.
“It sounded like a house was exploding,” Tarasi, 42 told TribLive. “I have friends from all over saying they heard it, too.”
The loud explosion heard over SW PA earlier may have been a meteor explosion. This GOES-16 GLM Total Optical Energy product shows a flash that was not associated with lightning. No confirmation, but this is the most likely explanation at this time. pic.twitter.com/ArtHCEA1RT
— NWS Pittsburgh (@NWSPittsburgh) January 1, 2022
The NWS called exploding space rocks “the most likely explanation at this time,” in a tweet Saturday.
Shannon Hefferan, a meteorologist with the service in Moon Township, told TribLive that a similar event was reported Sept. 17 in Hardy County, West Virginia.
Men and people who speak at louder volumes more easily spread COVID-19, according to researchers at Colorado State University (CSU).
In a November study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, a multidisciplinary team at the school examined respiratory aerosol emissions from a panel of healthy individuals of varying age and gender while talking and singing in a controlled laboratory setting.
The group measured particle number concentrations between 0.25 and 33 micrometers from 63 participants ages 12-61 years old, and voice volume and exhaled CO2 (carbon dioxide) levels were monitored.
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Measurements were taken while subjects were both masked and unmasked inside the lab of professor and study co-author John Volckens.
Researchers concluded that singing produced 77% more aerosol than talking, adults produced 62% more aerosol than minors and males produced 34% more aerosol than females.
However, after accounting for participant voice volume and exhaled CO2 measurements in linear models, the age and sex differences were “attenuated and no longer statistically significant.”
Results from wind instrument-playing experiments are pending further data analysis and peer review. The study was originally developed early on during the COVID-19 pandemic in an effort to determine what people in performing arts can do to safely return to the stage.
“Is singing worse than talking when it comes to how many particles are being emitted? Yes, according to the study. And, the louder one talks or sings, the worse the emissions,” the university said in a news post on its website, detailing the study.
“If there were significant differences after accounting for CO2 between males and females and kids, then you’d have to know how many males, females, and minors were in a room to estimate transmission risks,” Volckens said in a statement. “Our data suggest that you don’t need to know that if you just measure CO2 and noise levels, because those measures are an equalizer for these demographic differences.”
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Limitations include that controlled study designs – including the laboratory environment – may “lack generalizability” to real-world situations, other types of vocal activities were not considered, the group did not quantify respiratory disease transmission risk and that additional observation and research is necessary to characterize respiratory aerosol emissions during early childhood development.
Dan Goble, director of the CSU School of Music, Theatre and Dance, and colleagues raised nearly $100,000 in support of the study.
Goble said that working with the CSU engineers helped his team to better understand how visual and performing arts could reimplement their programming.
After going virtual in spring 2020, current performing arts protocols at CSU include the use of masks, restrictions on occupancy venue times, physical distancing of at least six feet for voice lessons and extra time between classes for performance rooms to undergo sufficient air exchanges between rehearsals.
The availability of COVID-19 vaccines – CSU has a 90% vaccination rate – has “changed the game,” according to Goble.
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“We are so fortunate to have experts like (Volckens) who gave us some really wonderful information to help us make decisions about what we can and can’t do in the (University Center for the Arts),” he said.
These results, study authors noted, support further investigation of voice volume and CO2 as indicators of infection risk indoors.
