List of All Articles with Tag 'ties'

TikTok sensation and student gymnast Olivia Dunne has spoken about the impact fame has had on her everyday life, saying that it’s no longer safe for her to attend university classes. The viral star from Louisiana State University (LSU) has taken TikTok by storm over recent years, but it’s not always been easy for her to prioritise her safety. Dunne has been competing as a gymnast since 2014. She became a member of the US National Gymnastics Team in 2017. However, she has now revealed that she can no longer attend her LSU classes in person due to potential threats. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Speaking to Elle, Dunne said: “There were some scares in the past, and I just want to be as careful as possible. I don’t want people to know my daily schedule and where I am.” It’s not the first time concerns have been raised. Dunne faced a rowdy mob of young men while competing at the University of Utah earlier this year. Sources said the group of young men disrupted the competition, screaming “put Livvy in” to the point that security had to be called, according to Slate. The crazed fans made enough of an impact that LSU’s head coach, Jay Clark, said they’d be adding “security detail” when the team goes on the road. "We will be working to create a perimeter around where we get on the bus, where we load," Clark said according to TMZ. "I take our team's safety and security very seriously." Dunne took to Twitter on 8 January asking fans to "be respectful of the other gymnasts and the gymnastics community." “I will always appreciate and love the support from you guys, but if you come to a meet, I want to ask you to please be respectful of the other gymnasts and the gymnastics community as we are just doing our job,” she wrote. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Nostalgic internet users have been left divided over whether fitness icon Richard Simmons wore a headband back in his heyday. Sometimes, the way we remember things from our younger days which turn out to be completely different from how they actually were, and people are finding that their memory of Simmons always wearing a headband is totally wrong. Simmons was well-known for his aerobics videos back in the 80s and was often styled in legwarmers, short shorts and vest tops. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter But, debate has erupted online about whether he wore a headband or not, after image searches of the fitness guru consistently show him without one despite people's differing memory. Did Simmons wear a headband? The debate was recently sparked by TikToker Kelly Manno who posted a now-viral video responding to a fan who said: “What until she finds out Richard Simmons never wore a headband.” Initially, Manno suggested the statement was ridiculous before revealing that every picture she found of Simmons showed him without one. She joked: “What do they think they did? Went through the whole internet and scrubbed every photo of Richard Simmons ever wearing a headband?” @kellymanno They’re trying to make #GenX look like we are crazy. And its gonna work!!! #genx #boomer #millennial #mandellaeffect #richardsimmons #headband #conspiracytherory #80skid #90skid On TikTok, one baffled user commented: “He definitely had a headband! The wrist bands and all!” Another said: “HE WORE A HEADBAND!! I’m positive!!!” But, it would appear that Google Images does not return a single image with Simmons himself sporting a headband. On Reddit, someone referred to the phenomenon as a case of the Mandela effect – this describes when a large part of the population people believes that an event happened when it didn’t. They wrote: “I'm 100 per cent sure Richard Simons wore a headband. You cannot find even ONE picture of him wearing one on Google Images. This one is the most powerful Mandela effects I've ever experienced.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Margot Robbie is being heaped with praise after a resurfaced clip of her signing to a deaf fan went viral online. The Barbie star was at a premiere for Amsterdam last year, when the fan began signing at her. Surprisingly, Robbie, who hasn't previously disclosed her ability to sign, then gestured back that she was 'happy to meet' the fan. "As if we couldn't love her anymore!", one supporter tweeted, while others chimed in that it should be 'essential' for everybody to know the basics. Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter

Barbieheimer is dominating the world right now. After a record-breaking opening weekend for both Barbie and Oppenheimer, the idea of the two films colliding could potentially be a reality in the future. Barbie, which is said to have racked in $337 million (£293m) on the opening weekend, marks this year's biggest debut so far. And while the likes of Ben Shapiro wasn't a fan, Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy wants in on the action. Speaking to Cinéfilos, Cillian Murphy said, "Would I play a Ken in Barbie 2? Sure." The star continued: "Let's read the script and let's have a conversation." Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter "I can't wait to see it," he added about Barbie. "Can't wait to see the movie. I think it's great for cinema. You know, you've got all these great movies happening this summer." The two films performed so well, that Vue Cinemas reported their best weekend for UK cinema since Covid, selling out 4,000 viewings across the country for both films. Tim Richards, chief executive and founder of Vue International, said: "Vue saw its highest weekend admissions since Avengers: Endgame in 2019 with the release of Barbie and Oppenheimer, proving that when the movies are there our customers will come to watch them on the big screen. "Barbie is tracking to become the biggest film of 2023 and has a good chance of getting into the Top 10 highest grossing films of all time. "It is an incredibly exciting moment for the industry, and we expect this trend to continue for the coming weeks." Odeon also shared that more than 200,000 advance tickets had been bought and more than 10,000 guests were expected to see both films during the opening weekend. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Rapper Offset has teased new music with a hilarious spoof skit featuring the actress Jamie Lee Curtis. Offset made the announcement of new music with a viral clip posted across his social media pages, that featured Curtis playing the role of a news presenter and himself parodying a musical legend. It appears the rapper took inspiration from the funk performer James Brown and his infamous 1988 CNN interview after he was released on bail for alleged assault on his wife. Curtis, as the news reporter, could be heard asking Offset: “Your fans are saying that there's a lot of drama between you and your beautiful wife, Cardi B.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Offset simply laughed in response, and Curtis’ reporter character replied: “You’re not going to answer my f**king question, are you?” Curtis continued, saying, “She seems upset, Offset”. Offset ended the video, stating, “Let’s talk about some music” before the words “July 28th” appeared on the screen. The video parodied the Brown interview in which reporter Sonya Friedman attempted to ask the singer about his relationship and the charges, but Brown evaded the question by laughing, singing and veering the conversation to his tour. On Twitter, the clip has been viewed 2.5 million times and people have commented on the creativity of the announcement. “The James Brown reference got me cackling!!!” one person said. Someone else wrote: “I wanna know what the call to Jamie was like for this one.” “Got queen Jamie Lee Curtis to help re-enact one of the greatest interviews of all time. This is art,” wrote another Twitter user. Someone else said: “Amazing promo.” The hilarious promo comes after Cardi B publicly warned her husband Offset amid cheating accusations. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

The always outspoken Piers Morgan has given his two cents on the Barbie movie, and he is not a fan. Writing in the New York Post, the journalist slammed the Greta Gerwig hit for encouraging "feminazis" and even went as far as to suggest people would want him "executed" if he had made a similar flick. Misunderstanding inherent power imbalances between men and women, he wrote: "If I made a movie mocking women as useless dunderheads, constantly attacking 'the matriarchy,' and depicting all things feminist as toxic bulls–t, I wouldn’t just be canceled, I’d be executed!" Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Elsewhere in the review, Morgan said the film had "a ridiculous misandrist message that is being rammed down the throats of literally tens of millions of people". He also called it "preachy and irritating", and we'll leave the obvious irony of that statement for you to work out, thus joining the waves of men to voice their annoyance with the film. And yet despite Morgan's upset, the film has done pretty well by all accounts. It dominated box office sales in its opening weekend and has already broken records. Morgan just doesn't have the Kenergy to deal with it. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

The Kansas City Chiefs will be without a key weapon during training camp, but some upside to the injury timeline ices the sting.The Kansas City Chiefs are kicking off training camp, hopeful it's the first step in a lengthy pursuit to defend their Super Bowl victory from February.Back in...

FIFA 23 84+ x10 Upgrade SBC is now live during FUTTIES. Here's how to complete the SBC and if it's worth it.

The 13-year-old had been used in an undercover operation to help catch a man she met on a dating app.

X most certainly marks the spot for the world’s most headline-grabbing billionaire. Elon Musk announced on Sunday that he would be giving Twitter a major makeover: changing its name to “X” and doing away with its famous bird logo. He tweeted (or should that be X-ed?): “Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” And, he said: “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow. To embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique.” Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It’s all part of his overarching plan to transform X into an “everything app”, much like China’s WeChat, which handles everything from payments to messaging to micro-blogging. Posting a beaming photo of himself with his arms raised in a cross, Musk added: “Not sure what subtle clues gave it away, but I like the letter X.” So where does his love of the letter come from? And where else has he used it? Here, indy100 takes a look at the SpaceX founder’s somewhat unorthodoX obsession. X.com When it comes to letters of the alphabet, X is certainly the most associated with euphemism – anything branded X-rated is bound to raise an eyebrow or two. And this is quite possibly one of the reasons the proud provocateur liked it so much to begin with. According to Ashlee Vance, author of the 2015 biography ‘Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future’, his fascination with the letter began with one of his earliest ventures. Musk, one of the world's richest men, co-founded the online banking service X.com in 1999, but, Vance said, not everyone was enthusiastic about the name. "Everyone tried to talk him out of naming the company that back then because of the sexual innuendos, but he really liked it and stuck with it," he revealed. However, the critics were soon able to breathe a sigh of relief: X.com merged with competitor Confinity Inc., in 2000 and the name was changed to the family-friendly PayPal. And yet, Musk clearly wasn’t able to let go of his brainchild. So, in 2017, he bought the url "X.com" back off PayPal, tweeting that the domain "has great sentimental value,” as NPR notes. Now, if you type “X.com” into your web browser, you will be directed to the Twitter – soon to be X – homepage. SpaceX After making his first fortune with the sale of his tech company Zip2 for $307 million (around £240 million) in 1999, and PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion (around £1.32 billion), the universe was the limit for Musk. The same year he sold PayPal, he founded his space flight company Space Exploration Technologies Corp. However, the name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so it was abbreviated to SpaceX. The Tesla ‘X’ While Musk opted for three alternative consonants in the name of his electric car company (which he started in 2003), he eventually couldn’t resist adding a touch of X. In 2015, the father-of-six unveiled Tesla’s third model: an e-car lovingly named… you guessed it. Tim Higgins, author of ‘Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century’, explained that Musk had cheeky intentions when choosing the names of his models. The idea was that, combined, they would spell out the word “sexy," Higgins said. However, another car company – Ford – threw a spanner in the works thanks to its ownership of the rights to the “E” model. Musk, therefore, had to settle on calling his second model “3” – a "kind of a backwards E," as Higgins pointed out – to semi-achieve his desired acronym. But yes, there are now S, 3, X and Y models of the cars. Baby names In 2020, Musk and his then-partner, Grimes, welcomed a baby boy, calling him X Æ A-12. However, the couple were forced to alter the spelling of the name to X AE A-XII, after being notified that it breached legal conventions. California law dictates that names on birth certificates must employ “the 26 alphabetical letters of the English language,” although apostrophes and dashes are allowed, NME reports. Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, explained via tweet that the X part of her son’s name refers to the “unknown variable” in algebra. Meanwhile, the Æ refers to the “elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence)," and the A-12 at the end is apparently a nod to the Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft — the couple’s “favourite” plane. Despite all of this, the pair – who are now separated – refer to their child simply as “Little X”, Boucher admitted in an interview with Bloomberg shortly after his birth. Two years later, the then-couple announced that they’d had a baby girl via surrogate, naming her Exa Dark Sideræl. However, earlier this year, Boucher confirmed that they’d changed her name to “Y” – yet again proving that single letters at the bottom of the alphabet really are Musk’s thing. xAI On 12 July this year, the 52-year-old announced the formation of a new company called xAI. It's goal is simple, according to its website: "To understand the true nature of the universe." The new startup, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has hired a group of top AI researchers who formerly worked at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Tesla. But we don't know much more about it than that. Musk was a co-founder and early funder of the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI. However, he's grown increasingly critical of the company as it’s gained global prominence and commercial success with last year’s release of ChatGPT. In April, the billionaire criticised ChatGPT in an interview with Tucker Carlson, telling the then-Fox News host that the chatbot had a liberal bias and that he planned an alternative that would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” And... voilà xAI. What neXt? It’s time for the renaissance of X.com, but with a grand new purpose. Weeks before forking out the $44 billion (around £34 million) to buy Twitter in October, Musk tweeted that the eye-watering purchase was simply “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app". "He wants to create an app similar to how WeChat is used in China, where it's part of the fabric of day-to-day life,” the billionaire’s biographer Vance explained to NPR. “You use it to communicate, to consume news, to buy things, to pay your rent, to book appointments with your doctor and even to pay fines.” Hinting at the financial difficulties that have plagued Twitter both historically and since Musk’s acquisition, Vance pointed out: "The company clearly needs a new, bigger business if it's to make the type of money that would justify his investment and satisfy his ambition.” Indeed, the world-famous entrepreneur is doing everything he can to build the hype around his company’s new facelift. On Monday (24 July), he retweeted a message from his newly-appointed Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, which read: “It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square." She continued: “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.” So… why X? Musk suggested that he’d chosen “X” to replace Twitter because he wanted something that “embod[ies] the imperfections in us all that make us unique”. The letter has a number of different spiritual, cultural and mathematical meanings – any, or all, of which may have informed his lifelong fascination with the letter. As Boucher noted in her baby name explanation, X connotes the “unknown variable” in algebra. It is, of course, also the symbol for multiplication, and in linguistics, it’s what’s known a “phonetic chameleon” – meaning that it’s used to replicate a number of different sounds. It is also known as signifying the end of something – or death – think the X in a skull and crossbones emblem or the crosses drawn on the eyes of the dead in cartoons. It also signifies an error or cancellation, or that which is negative, and has long been recognised as an occult symbol for Satan. In other words, it has become the most “nihilistic” of letters, as psychologist Leon F Seltzer pointed out in a piece for Psychology Today. This all goes to suggest that Musk appreciates X’s malleability – how it can be birth and death, cancellation and multiplication, nothing and everything. X.com is dead. Long live X.com. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Opponents call it a "plot on democracy" and say the referendum result should be annulled.

Country music singer Jason Aldeon is facing an intense wave of backlash after his song, “Try That In A Small Town”, went viral online, prompting many people to accuse him of dog-whistle racism. The song sets footage of Black Lives Matter protests alongside lyrics like: “Try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road / Around here, we take care of our own.” The song continues: “Cuss out a cop, spit in his face / Stomp on the flag and light it up / Yeah, ya think you’re tough.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The BLM protests were a direct reaction to the murder of African-American man George Floyd by a white police officer. The clips in the music video, which also include an attempted convenience store robbery and other apparent crimes, alternate with shots of Aldean and his band performing in the public square of Columbia, Tennessee. To make things worse, the video is shot in front of the Maury County Courthouse, which at times appears to be on fire with images of burning US flags projected onto it. It’s the same building where a mob hanged 18-year-old African-American Henry Choate from the balcony in 1927. Columbia is also the site of an infamous 1946 race riot that nearly resulted in the lynching of future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. Another lyric goes: “Got a gun that my granddad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up / Well that s--- might fly in the city / Good luck.” Country Music Television (CMT) confirmed Tuesday that it had pulled the video from rotation. Social media has been ablaze with the controversy for much of the last week. Democrat state representative for Tenessee, Justin Jones, called the song "heinous", and a "shameful vision of gun extremism and vigilantism". One user said that if Lil Durk, a black American rapper, made a response to Aldean's video called "Try That On The South Side of Chicago", it would likely be denounced as violent. Others shared videos explaining exactly why people are interpreting the song as dog-whistle racism. Aldean has stood by the song, saying: “There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it – and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage – and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music – this one goes too far.” Needless to say, the people defending him are all the ones you might expect. Top Republicans have jumped to Aldean’s aid, including former president Donald Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis. “Jason Aldean is a fantastic guy who just came out with a great new song. Support Jason all the way. MAGA!!!” Trump posted on his Truth Social account. The conservative influencer Ben Shapiro posted a video to his YouTube channel titled “Jason Aldean REFUSES To Get Cancelled”, in which he discusses the controversy and takes Aldean’s side. Most recently, Aldean has been filmed at a concert over the weekend defending the song further. He said: “What I am is a proud American.” “I love our country. I want to see it restored to what it once was before all this bulls*** started happening to us.” “I love my country, I love my family, and I will do anything to protect that. I can tell you that.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.