Category: Security

Looks like Adele has been sober for several months.

While interacting with some crowd members at one of her recent Las Vegas residency shows, the “I Drink Wine” singer recently revealed that she quit drinking.

Adele made her revelation while she poked fun at a concertgoer for drinking “a pint of whiskey sour,” an X video showed.

“I stopped drinking — it feels like forever — maybe, like three-and-a-half months,” she said after teasing the whiskey sour drinker. “It’s boring. Oh my God, it’s boring.”

“I mean, I was literally borderline alcoholic for quite a lot of my 20s,” she said later. “I miss it so much … so enjoy your whiskey sour. I’m very, very jealous.”

The “Easy on Me” vocalist has frequently talked about her relationship to alcohol.

In a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone, she said that she gave up drinking for six months following her 2019 divorce from Simon Konecki. She said she was tired of feeling constant “hangxiety.”

“I’ve always had a very close relationship with alcohol. I was always very fascinated by alcohol. It’s what kept my dad from me. So I always wanted to know what was so great about it,” the 35-year-old songwriter told Vogue in 2021.

While talking with Oprah Winfrey for the 2021 TV special “One Night Only,” Adele said she “stopped drinking.” She later noted, “That’s one great way of really sort of getting to know yourself, is just drinking water and being sober as anything.”

That wasn’t the case in February when Lizzo said that she and Adele got drunk together while attending the 2023 Grammys.

“I was so drunk. Me and Adele were drinking so much that we didn’t even really know what the categories were at this point,” Lizzo told the “Elvis Duran and the Morning Show” in February. “We were like, ‘Wait. Did they do best new artist?’ We didn’t even know when it was time and they would just call out names so we were like, ‘Smile, smile.’”

Earlier this year, the “Water Under the Bridge” artist told a Las Vegas crowd that she was drinking heavily during the early days of COVID.

“I remember when I came here in COVID, in lockdown, it was 11 a.m. and I was definitely like four bottles of wine in — like we all were,” she said at a March show. “I said in 2020 that I wanted to put my album out. And we were all at home just drunk basically.”

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© 2023 Los Angeles Times

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

A group of former detainees said Georgia’s largest immigrant jail broke federal anti-slavery laws by forcing them to work against their will. Their 2018 lawsuit against CoreCivic, the private prison company that operates South Georgia’s Stewart Detention Center, ended with a settlement this week.

Plaintiffs had alleged that threats of punishment — and a need to earn money to buy food to supplement the center’s spartan diet — led them to take prison jobs that paid between $1 and $4 per day.

Their lawyers argued that Stewart administrators had abused the prison’s work program because the facility was understaffed and had an “utter dependence on detained workers” to keep it operational. Jobs included kitchen and maintenance tasks, among others.

The settlement requires CoreCivic to provide every detained migrant who chooses to participate in the program with a document outlining their rights, including their ability to refuse to work at any time. The settlement also provides additional, confidential benefits to individual plaintiffs.

“The declaration of rights is a call to action to those in immigration jails to keep fighting for justice, and it makes clear that they should not face the abuses that I suffered at Stewart,” said plaintiff Wilhen Hill Barrientos.

Barrientos, a Guatemalan asylum seeker, was detained at Stewart intermittently from July 2015 to June 2018. In a declaration submitted to the court, he said he was not asked whether he wanted to work upon arriving at Stewart but was instead told that failure to do so would result in solitary confinement. He said he worked in the kitchen, regularly putting in 8- to 9-hour shifts, seven days a week — a workload in excess of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) guidelines under its Voluntary Work Program.

In a statement, CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd said that plaintiffs’ accusations “are baseless and remain unproven.”

“Throughout these proceedings, CoreCivic has repeatedly demonstrated that our voluntary work program is appropriately designed and administrated, and we admitted no fault or wrongdoing as part of the settlement.”

Todd noted that the stipulations of the settlement are not new, but simply restate practices already in place at Stewart and other CoreCivic detention facilities.

Last year, plaintiffs had sought class certification on behalf of over 30,000 detained migrants who allegedly were also forced to work under threat of punishment. That effort failed, with a federal judge in Georgia denying that request earlier this year, noting in his decision that most Stewart detainees do not participate in the work program.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are other forced labor complaints against ICE private prison operators across the country.

The Georgia settlement “is the result of the bravery of the Plaintiffs who, after surviving horrendous conditions and treatment at Stewart, were determined to fight for change so that no other detained person would have to suffer the same experience,” said Meredith Stewart, senior supervising attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project.

As of Sept. 18, Stewart held a daily average of 1,224 detainees, the second-most of any immigrant detention centers in the U.S., according to federal data compiled by the Transaction Record Analysis Center.

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© 2023 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

A convict doing time in a Maine federal prison for a gun arrest has now been charged with murder for a caught-on-camera shooting at an East Harlem liquor store last year, police said Wednesday.

Camby Wilson was extradited to New York City Tuesday and charged with murder and gun possession for allegedly killing Shaquell Gainey, 25, the night of Feb. 25, 2022.

Wilson, 24, had been convicted of federal firearm charges in Bangor, Maine, and was sentenced to 24 months in prison in May, federal officials said.

Gainey had just stepped out of I.C. Liquors Inc. on First Ave. near E. 115th St. when a man dressed in all black spotted him, pulled out a gun and opened fire, cops said at the time.

Gainey retreated back into the store, followed by the gunman, who quickly ran back out.

Ninety seconds later, Gainey walked out of the store, his blood-stained yellow hoodie revealing where he was shot, the video shows. He dropped his jacket on the floor, walked into the deli next door and collapsed near the glass door.

For the next 90 seconds, Gainey sipped from a jug of water he found. While one customer retrieved Gainey’s jacket, no one tried to administer aid.

One man, carrying a small child, is seen on video stepping over Gainey. Medics rushed Gainey to Harlem Hospital but he could not be saved.

Gainey was just a block from his home in the Jefferson Houses when he was shot.

The gunman was with three other men when he spotted Gainey. The shooter kept walking, then doubled back and shot Gainey.

Police said there is a gang element to the shooting but did not have further details Wednesday.

Wilson was paroled in April 2021 after serving more than a year in state prison for a Manhattan weapon conviction, records show.

A few weeks after allegedly shooting Gainey, Wilson was a passenger in a car that cops in Augusta, Maine, pulled over.

Wilson gave the officers a false name as cops asked him to step out of the car. When the officers asked if he had any weapons on him, he ran off but was captured after a brief foot chase.

Officers found a loaded .380 caliber pistol in his jacket pocket, federal officials said. His weapon possession conviction in New York barred him from carrying a firearm.

NYPD detectives found Wilson in a Maine federal prison, where he was serving a two year sentence for the firearms arrest in Bangor, federal officials said.

Gainey had several arrests on his record, police said, including for robbery and weapon possession.

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© 2023 New York Daily News

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

An Upper Peninsula electronics company plans to build a $51 million factory that will onshore a critical technology used by the aerospace and defense industries.

The project from Calumet Electronics won state support Tuesday, Oct. 24, when the Michigan Strategic Fund approved a $7.5 million grant and a tax break valued at $758,877.

Calumet Electronics, founded in 1968, is constructing a 60,000-square-foot factory that will produce organic substrates for the Department of Defense and other manufacturers. It is also partnering with Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense technology company, on the project.

“The company is diversifying to overall meet the needs of our nation’s defense,” said Vicki Schwab, the Michigan Economic Development Corp.’s managing director, regional prosperity in the Upper Peninsula.

The organic substrates, base materials, are integral for semiconductors, satellite technologies, power grids and smartwatches. There are no other major suppliers of advanced organic substrates in the United States.

“We therefore are squandering potentially $52 billion in CHIPS and Science money if we can’t have organic substrates onshore because our chips that we are developing here will have to go over to the Pacific Rim to be assembled,” said Meredith LeBeau, Calumet Electronics chief technology officer. “This creates a national and economic security issue, and we must address these challenges.”

With the development, Calumet Electronics will shift its focus to producing organic substrates. This marks a “sea-change” in Michigan manufacturing, a project memo said, and would create a “first-of-its-kind” facility in the United States. Calumet Electronics will be the only domestic source of these substrates for military and aerospace use.

LeBeau said the facility will “put Michigan on the map” as a “linchpin” for the semiconductor industry.

“It will likely be the only state to have this capability at capacity, creating a bold statement that yes it can be done in the United States and done by Yoopers nonetheless,” she said. “Being the only state to demonstrate organic substrate production will be a beacon of hope for the DoD and innovation that’s not previously available.”

The project will retain 269 jobs in Houghton County and upskill up to 40 positions.

Calumet Electronics is applying for Title III Defense Production Act contracts to support the new substrate factory. It’s competing with companies in New Hampshire and New York for the funding. The state grant will be used to match the defense department dollars.

If the contracts are secured, Calumet Electronics will become the first Department of Defense “trusted foundry” in Michigan. This program was designed to create a secure supply chain for vendors providing information technology to the military.

There are 81 trusted foundries in the United States.

“As a nation, we’ve learned very quickly that the U.S. is ill-positioned from the perspective of semiconductors manufacturing. We’ve seen that in commercial markets and consumer markets, but it goes much deeper and impacts our national security and defense sector overall,” said Mark Ignash, executive director of the Michigan Defense Center.

Calumet Electronics expects to begin construction on the new factory later this year with completion by summer 2024.

The Michigan Strategic Fund Tuesday also approved a $103 million tax credit for a Grand Rapids housing development. The Factory Yards project will redevelop a vacant warehouse into 467 apartments, commercial space, a food hall and more.

Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine received a $3.4 million grant from the board to construct a three-story building in downtown Flint. The project will split an existing Flint Journal Building parcel, and the new building will be erected on a parking lot.

Denso, a global auto parts manufacturer, also won state support for its $63 million investment at its Battle Creek facility. The state board approved a 15-year tax break valued at $1.4 million to back Denso’s investment in a new electric vehicle product line.

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© 2023 Advance Local Media LLC

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

An unprecedented surge in the nationwide construction of new housing — mostly apartments — may finally be making a dent in fast-rising rents that have been making life harder for tenants.

More than 1.65 million housing units were under construction last year, the highest annual number since federal record-keeping started in 1969. This year, the number was even higher — almost 1.7 million in September.

Meanwhile, the typical annual rent increase nationally fell to zero in June for the first time since the pandemic began, after peaking at 17.8% in 2021, according to Apartment List, a rent information aggregator and research firm. In September, rents fell 1.2%.

Vacancy rates are rising, said Alexander Hermann, a research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

“You’ve had this huge rush to build apartments in the last couple of years, and projects are bigger and bigger. It’s more common now to be building 50 or more units,” he said. “You can start to see where new supply is coming online, you see starker and stronger rent decreases.”

Federal statistics, which don’t track active construction below the regional level, show that construction hasn’t been higher in the Northeast since 1987 or in the Midwest since 2005, and it’s at all-time highs in both the West and South. A growing share of the country’s housing construction is in the South, up from 40% in 2017 to 46% in 2022.

In some places, rents are falling back a little, but they’re still plenty high compared with just a few years ago. In Texas, Austin has seen rents drop more than 6% for the fiscal year ending in September to $1,734 for a two-bedroom — but that’s still up almost 20% from 2020, according to Apartment List.

Austin’s rent decreases are the most in the Sun Belt, according to Apartment List, while its surrounding metro area is issuing more housing permits than any other large metro — “signaling the important role construction plays in managing long-term affordability.”

Travis County, which includes Austin, increased its housing units by more than a third between 2012 and 2022, creating 169,700 new units in that time as its population swelled by almost 230,000, according to a Stateline analysis of census estimates.

Among the arrivals to Austin in the past decade is K.N., a single father who asked to be identified only by his initials because he doesn’t want his children’s schoolmates to hear about his problems. K.N., a tech programmer who moved from San Francisco a decade ago, said his increasingly high rent may force him to move.

The landlord for his two-bedroom townhouse has asked for annual $100 rent increases in recent years, and just asked for another $200, K.N. said, upping his monthly housing costs with utilities to around $2,500.

“It would reduce my disposable income to basically zero, and that’s not wise with all the extras kids need in school,” K.N. said. “I’d have to pinch pennies to the point that it would cause anxiety. Being housing poor is something I’m trying to avoid.”

Despite a good income, K.N. said, he might have to move farther from his children’s school, which now is within walking distance. He moved to Texas in the first place partly to save money on rent in hopes of buying a house. But he says he sees apartment construction everywhere in Austin.

His observations match reality: Last year, Austin built 24 million square feet of apartment buildings alongside 8.7 million square feet of single-family housing, according to city records.

It’s a similar story nationally, with nearly 1 million apartments under construction as of September. By comparison, there were 914,500 apartments under construction in 2022 and 736,900 in 2021.

The number of single-family homes being built is also high, though the pace has slowed in the past two years. There were about 694,000 homes under construction in September, down from about 736,000 at the end of 2022 and 750,500 at the end of 2021. The last time construction was so high was in 2006, when about 748,000 single-family homes were under construction during the housing bubble before the Great Recession.

The new supply is already having an effect.

Rents dropped in 71 of the nation’s 100 largest cities in the year ending in September. That eclipses the most recent large decrease, in June 2020, when 65 cities had year-over-year declines, according to Apartment List. In early 2022, rents were rising year over year in all 100 cities.

Apartment List said in an October report that construction is one reason vacancies are rising, combined with a decline in remote work as more companies call employees back to the office, which has led to fewer renters in “Zoom towns” in states such as Arizona, Idaho and Nevada.

Other areas with big recent drops in rents are also mostly in the South and West, where construction is at all-time highs. The Austin metro area dropped 6%; Portland, Oregon, dropped 5%; and Atlanta, Las Vegas, Orlando, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and San Francisco all dropped by 4% in the past year as of September.

Some of those areas are, like Austin, just beginning to see modest drops in average rents but remain much pricier than just a few years ago. The Miami metro area, for instance, has had the nation’s biggest jump in rents since 2020, at 40%. Orlando, Florida, rose 32% over the same time, according to Apartment List.

In the past six months, rents dwindled just 1% in each city.

“Recent gains in housing supply have helped to slow rental prices and housing costs, although I would be cautious about calling rent decreases of 1% very significant,” said Randy Deshazo, director of economic development and research at the South Florida Regional Planning Council. Soaring prices are particularly painful in the region, he said, because affordability, in terms of housing costs compared with income, is the worst in the country.

In some parts of the Northeast and Midwest, where the construction boom hasn’t been quite as robust, rents have continued to rise in the past six months as of September. Rents were up by 7% in Providence, Rhode Island, for example. During the same period, the increase was 5% in Boston, New York City and Hartford, Connecticut.

Estimates of the nation’s housing shortage, which many experts blame for high rents, vary. Fannie Mae last year estimated that there were 4.4 million too few units in large metro areas, and Realtor.com this year pegged the shortage at 2.3 million units. About 1.4 million units were finished in 2022, the most since 2007, and another nearly 947,000 were finished in 2023 through August, according to a U.S. Census Bureau construction survey.

Permits issued from mid-2022 to August 2023 point to likely large increases in housing in Utah, Idaho, Florida, Texas, South Dakota, North Carolina, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee, Georgia and Colorado.

Those states could all see housing stock grow by about 2% above census estimates for mid-2022, the latest available, according to a Stateline analysis.

Nationwide, the number of permits issued in 2023 is down compared with a peak in late 2021 and early 2022, even as the numbers remain high in some states. That’s one reason most analysts expect some kind of slowdown from the recent torrid pace of building, said Hermann, of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

South Dakota’s building permits have fallen back from a 48% surge in 2020 followed by a 24.8% increase in 2022. This year they dropped 37% in the second quarter.

Even so, South Dakota had one of the highest rates of new building permits between mid-2022 and August 2023 — more than 2% of its existing units, or almost 9,000 new housing units, if they all get built.

The initial pandemic boom was “likely induced by more work-from-home options and increased demand for space and land, of which South Dakota has an abundance,” said Aaron Scholl, an assistant economics professor at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota, who worked on a Dakota Institute report on real estate in September.

The recent decline likely points to stagnation in the state’s housing market and eventually its whole economy, Scholl said.

“Building permits are often a leading indicator for not only housing market demand, but the overall economic landscape,” Scholl said. “As the housing market cools, I’d expect the economy to do so as well.”

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© 2023 States Newsroom

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

California and other states on Tuesday sued Facebook parent company Meta over allegations that it “designed and deployed harmful features” on the main social network and its platform Instagram.

“Our bipartisan investigation has arrived at a solemn conclusion: Meta has been harming our children and teens, cultivating addiction to boost corporate profits,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. “With today’s lawsuit, we are drawing the line. We must protect our children and we will not back down from this fight.”

The 233-page lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Northern California, alleges the social media giant violated consumer protection laws and a federal law aimed at safeguarding the privacy of children under 13 years old. Bonta co-led a bipartisan coalition of 33 attorneys general filing the federal lawsuit against Meta. Eight attorneys general are also filing lawsuits against Meta on Tuesday in state courts, according to Bonta’s office.

In 2021, a bipartisan group of state attorneys general, including from California, Tennessee and Nebraska, announced they were investigating Meta’s promotion of its social media app Instagram to children and young people. Advocacy groups, lawmakers and even parents have criticized Meta, alleging the platform hasn’t done enough to combat content about eating disorders, suicide and other potential harms.

As part of the investigation, the state attorneys general looked at Meta’s strategies for compelling young people to spend more time on its platform. The lawsuit alleges that Meta failed to address the platform’s harmful impact to young people.

Meta said it’s committed to keeping teens safe, noting it rolled out more than 30 tools to support young people and families.

“We’re disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.

Scrutiny over Meta’s potential damage to the mental health of young people intensified in 2021 after Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, disclosed tens of thousands of internal company documents. Some of those documents included research that showed Facebook is “toxic for teen girls,” worsening body image issues and suicidal thoughts, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2021. Meta said its research was “mischaracterized,” and teens also reported Instagram made them feel better about other issues such as loneliness and sadness.

That year, executives from the social media company including Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri testified before Congress. Instagram then paused its development of a kids’ version of the app and rolled out more controls so parents could limit the amount of time teens spend on it. Social media apps like Instagram require users to be at least 13 years old, but children have lied about their age to access the platform.

The photo- and video-sharing app Instagram is popular among U.S. teens, according to a Pew Research Center survey released this year. About 62% of teens reported using Instagram in 2022. Google-owned YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat are also commonly used by teens.

The amount of time teens spend on social media has been a growing concern especially as platforms use algorithms to recommend content it thinks users like to view. In 2022, attorneys general across the country started investigating TikTok’s potential harm to young people as well.

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© 2023 Los Angeles Times

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Wearing a green construction helmet, William Long smiled broadly as he watched workers replace the roof of his Harvey home Thursday morning.

As thankful as he was to the workers, Long said he was also glad the forecast rain seemed to be holding off.

“I’m really grateful and really thankful. I couldn’t find nobody else to help me, so I’m really happy,” Long said.

Long, 66, said he grew up in Talladega, Alabama, and joined the U.S. Navy when he was 17. Long was in the U.S. Navy for 20 years, he said, and then worked as a truck driver until his retirement.

His mother grew up in Chicago, so he’s had family ties to the area, Long said.

In 2010, Long said he moved to Harvey to help his great uncle, a World War II veteran who developed alzheimer’s and dementia. Long said he lived with his uncle while caring for him.

When his uncle passed in 2015, Long said his great uncle’s children said he could keep the house in the 100 block of West 158th Place.

Long said the deed for the home shows the house is more than 100 years old. For about four years, Long said the roof leaked in the backroom, a bedroom and the middle of the house. The roof had also started sinking, he said, and he had additional stresses about mold.

“I had a gentleman go up there, but he couldn’t find out where the leak was at,” Long said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do to be honest with you.”

Over the summer, Long said he had a kidney operation. His daughter, Kimberly Long, came in from Virginia to help take care of him after the surgery, she said in a phone interview, and realized she had to help her father out.

“I came inside and realized all the repairs and work that needed to be done,” she said. “I wanted him to live in better conditions.”

His daughter said she reached out to Habitat for Humanity in June to see if the organization could help repair the roof. She’s pleased the work began so soon, especially with the winter months around the corner.

“I am overjoyed,” she said. “I’m very appreciative.”

Habitat for Humanity reached out to Owens Corning through its roof deployment project, and workers there reached out to TTLC Roofing, Siding & Gutters to complete the roof work, said TTLC claims and review specialist Jason Weeks.

Once construction is completed, Weeks said the company will come back to repair the gutters because they will likely see some damage during the roof repairs. Weeks, who is a Marines veteran, said he’s proud to give back to a fellow veteran.

“Anything we can do to help the community is always a positive,” Weeks said.

Long said he’s thankful for all the work everyone put in to replace his roof because, since his retirement and surgery, he doesn’t believe he would’ve been able to afford to it.

“They came through,” Long said. “It was a blessing, I tell you.”

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© 2023 Chicago Tribune

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Bob Seger made a surprise appearance in Nashville on Sunday, performing as part of Patty Loveless’ induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Seger, playing live for the first time since 2019, covered the 1996 Loveless track “She Drew a Broken Heart.” The 78-year-old Michigan rocker’s appearance drew a standing ovation from the crowd, according to a report from the Tennessean.

Seger and Loveless, 66, previously teamed up on “The Answer’s in the Question,” a track from Seger’s 2006 album “Face the Promise.”

Loveless was inducted into the Hall by Vince Gill, who also performed a track of Loveless’ during the ceremony. Also performing in her honor was bluegrass foursome Sister Sadie.

Tanya Tucker and songwriter Bob McDill, who has penned 30 No. 1 country hits (including Ronnie Milsap’s “Nobody Likes Sad Songs” and Alan Jackson’s “Gone Country”), were also inducted during the ceremony, which was held at Nashville’s CMA Theater.

Seger’s last live performance was in November 2019 at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, the closing date of his Roll Me Away: The Final Tour outing. That tour included six shows at the then-DTE Energy Music Theatre in June 2019.

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© 2023 www.detroitnews.com

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The Rock or Mr. Clean? That’s what a newly revealed wax figure at the Grévin Museum in Paris has fans of Dwayne Johnson pondering.

When the Grévin unveiled its latest wax star last week, netizens quickly began roasting the figure, which seemingly lacked Johnson’s skin tone. In the comments, Instagram users noticed that The Rock statue was “missing melanin” and overlooked his mixed Black and Samoan heritage.

Comedian James Jefferson joked that Johnson look like he’s “about to be part of the royal family,” and took shots at the team behind the wax figure. “I don’t want you on Sims building a character. No arts and crafts,” he said in a video posted Saturday.

He added: “It don’t look like him no more.”

The actor-entrepreneur re-shared Jefferson’s clip on Instagram, admitting that he “legit belly laughed” at “The Circle” comedian’s jokes. Then he told fans that he’s taking matters into his own large, brown hands.

“I’m going to have my team reach out to our friends at Grevin Museum, in Paris France so we can work at ‘updating’ my wax figure here with some important details and improvements- starting with my skin color,” the “Black Adam” star wrote Sunday.

A representative for the Grévin did not immediately respond Monday to The Times’ request for comment.

Paris’ Grévin Museum announced its Rock wax figure earlier this month. Leading up to the grand reveal, the museum gave followers a glimpse of what went into its latest display — including Johnson’s signature tattoos.

In a video, the museum said it took artists 10 days to re-create the details of Johnson’s intricate body art. The video’s caption reads: “So much research was necessary to match The Rock’s (tattoos) perfectly!” It seems as if something else should have gotten the same amount of research.

Johnson is the latest celebrity to get a wonky wax figure of themselves. Last year, Madame Tussauds caught heat for its Zendaya wax figure, which had fans thinking it was anyone else but the “Euphoria” star. In 2017, Tussauds botched its Beyoncé figure only to reveal a better one in 2019 after outcry.

In recent years Rihanna and Nicki Minaj have had wax figures made in their likeness — for better or worse. “Black Panther” star Angela Bassett and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker are also among the lucky handful to have scarily accurate lifelike figures of their own.

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© 2023 Los Angeles Times

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.