(L-R) Charli xcx, Trew Mullen in ‘The Moment’ (Courtesy of A24)
Tickets for Charli XCX‘s new film The Moment are apparently a hotter commodity than tickets to her Sweat tour.
The movie, which screens in New York and LA on Jan. 30, has become studio A24’s fastest-selling film in a limited release, with over 50 screenings selling out nationwide, according to the studio.
In addition, a screening that includes a Q&A with Charli and director Aidan Zamiri —which will be livestreamed across Alamo Drafthouse venues — has nearly sold out. In fact, much like concert tickets, tickets for that special screening are now changing hands online in resale marketplaces such as Reddit.
The Moment, which arrives in theaters nationwide on Feb. 6, is a fictionalized version of Charli’s experiences during “Brat summer,” when her Brat album took over the pop culture narrative. In addition to Charli, it features Rosanna Arquette, Kylie Jenner, Alexander Skarsgård, Kate Berlant and Rachel Sennott.
Promo art for new Netflix series, ‘Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model.’ (Netflix)
Tyra Banks is pulling back the curtain on America’s Next Top Model.
Netflix released a trailer on Monday for a new docuseries called Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, which features exclusive interviews with Banks, Jay Alexander, Nigel Barker, Jay Manuel and more about the hit reality competition series.
The trailer features some of the show’s most controversial moments, including a photo shoot where models had to switch ethnicities. There’s also a clip where Banks says, “I knew I went too far.”
Another clip shows Manuel saying, “We were showing the behind-the-scenes of what the fashion world was.”
He adds, “I realized Tyra could do anything for the success of her show.”
More clips from the trailer include interviews with some of the former models: Whitney Thompson (cycle 10, 2008), Dani Evans (cycle 6, 2006) and Giselle Samson (cycle 1, 2003). America’s Next Top Model ran for 24 seasons from 2003 to 2018.
The docuseries, directed by Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, “features unprecedented access to former contestants, judges and producers.”
Furthermore, the docuseries will explore “the chaos in front and behind the camera.”
Each week, contestants on America’s Next Top Model would be judged on their appearance, participation in challenges and that week’s photo shoot. One contestant would be eliminated each week.
Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model will be available to stream on Netflix on Feb. 16.
We now know when The Handmaid’s Tale spinoff series The Testaments will premiere. Hulu has announced that the new series, which is based on Margaret Atwood‘s eponymous novel, premieres its first three episodes on April 8. This dramatic coming-of-age story follows young teens living in Gilead who attend a preparatory school for future wives, where obedience is brutally instilled. Ann Dowd, Chase Infiniti, Lucy Halliday, Mabel Li and Rowan Blanchard star in the upcoming series, which is executive produced by Elisabeth Moss …
The upcoming limited series based on the whirlwind romance between one of the 20th century’s most iconic couples has a release date. Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette will premiere to FX and Hulu on Feb. 12. Its first three episodes will debut at that time, while one new episode of the nine-episode series will air weekly after the premiere. Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon star as the titular couple, while Grace Gummer, Naomi Watts and Alessandro Nivola co-star …
The ceremony date for Broadway’s biggest night has been announced. The 79th annual Tony Awards will take place on June 6. CBS will broadcast the awards show live from Radio City Hall. It will also be available to stream on Paramount+. Nominations for this year’s Tony Awards will be announced on May 5 …
A North Korea Scud-B missile (R) is displayed at the Korea War Memorial Museum on July 4, 2017 in Seoul, South Korea. (Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)
(SEOUL and LONDON) — North Korea test-launched two short-range ballistic missiles on Tuesday afternoon, South Korean and Japanese officials said.
The missile launch took place just hours after Elbridge Colby, the U.S. under secretary of defense for policy, wrapped up his visit to South Korea early Tuesday morning and arrived in Japan.
Seoul and Pyongyang have been on edge over North Korea’s accusation that South Korea intruded its airspace with drones in January and last September.
The launches amounted to a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and posed “a serious issue concerning the safety of the Japanese people,” the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement.
“Japan has lodged a strong protest against North Korea and strongly condemned them,” the statement said in Japanese, which was translated by ABC News.
The missiles were fired from the Pyongyang area at about 4 p.m. and both traveled almost 350 kilometers, or about 217 miles, before splashing down into the Sea of Japan, Japanese and Korean officials said.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in its own statement that Seoul’s intelligence authorities tracked the launch and shared info with both Japan and the United States.
“Under a robust South Korea–U.S. combined defense posture, the South Korean military is closely monitoring various developments by North Korea and maintaining the capabilities and readiness to respond overwhelmingly to any provocation,” South Korea’s military said in a statement.
Japanese officials said the missiles were thought to have landed near the North Korean coast in the Sea of Japan, which is also known as the East Sea.
“The government has provided information to aircraft and ships sailing in the area, but at this time no reports of damage have been confirmed,” Japan said in a statement in Japanese, which was translated by ABC News.
In this U.S. Coast Guard handout, the Coast Guard investigates aircraft wreckage on the Potomac River on January 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Petty Officer 1st Class Brandon Giles/ U.S. Coast Guard via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Ahead of Tuesday’s National Transportation Safety Board hearing into last year’s deadly mid-air collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Chair Jennifer Homendy said she fears some of the agency’s safety recommendations, which will be issued at the conclusion of the hearing, may once again go unimplemented.
“Of course I’m concerned. We have 300 aviation recommendations that still haven’t been implemented. Those recommendations were issued because somebody died or was injured, and they have not been implemented yet. So here we are again,” Homendy told ABC News.
“So yes, at the end of this, I am concerned that we’re going to issue recommendations and that they won’t be implemented,” Homendy said. “I can tell you, and anyone who knows me knows I vigorously advocate for the implementation of our recommendations. I don’t care when it is. Could be 50 years later, as I did with positive train control, and I will not hold back on these.”
At Tuesday’s hearing, NTSB investigators will present their investigative findings to board members and the public. NTSB board members, including Homendy, will then question investigators and the parties to the investigation.
At the end of the hearing, the board members will vote on the probable cause of the crash and the agency’s safety recommendations. The NTSB can only make recommendations and does not have the authority to enforce them, therefore they are not always adopted.
Though a formal final report will be released two weeks after the hearing, this hearing will mark the end of what Homendy described as “one of the most complex investigations” conducted by the agency, which they had aimed to conclude by the first anniversary of the mid-air collision.
Homendy told ABC News the investigation “was not easy and it was definitely not straightforward.”
“We will start in one direction and then take it in a different direction, depending on what we’re finding, and then we’ll exclude things that didn’t have anything to do with the investigation. But we have to do our due diligence to make sure that we’re tracking all of that down, all that evidence to support that it wasn’t a factor, while also looking at the issues that were,” Homendy said.
Homendy said the helicopter altimeter discrepancy is what surprised her the most in this investigation.
“The altimeters I did not see coming, that we would have some problems with how the altimeters were reading,” Homendy said.
During last year’s three-day investigative hearing, investigators said they found discrepancies in the altitude data shown on radio and barometric altimeters on Army helicopters after conducting test flights following January’s accident.
It is likely that the helicopter crew did not know their true altitude due to notoriously faulty altimeters inside this series of Black Hawks, according to the investigation. At their closest points, helicopters and planes flew within 75 feet of each other near DCA, an astonishingly close number. During the hearings, the NTSB was told Army Black Hawks can often have wrong readings and a margin of error of +-200 feet.
Another key focus of Tuesday’s hearing is the close proximity of the helicopter route to the runways at Reagan National Airport. According to the NTSB, which cited FAA surveillance data, there were over 15,000 close-proximity events between helicopters and commercial aircraft at DCA between October 2021 and December 2024.
Homendy said warnings about the close proximity were raised by people, but they were ignored.
“Years ago, that hot spot was identified and [people] repeatedly tried to say that the helicopter route needed to be moved, and nobody listened. It was like the ultimate in government bureaucracy,” Homendy said.
“They were completely ignored. Told it couldn’t be done, not responded to, said it would probably be too political. Those are quotes from our interviews, but they went nowhere.”
At last year’s hearing, FAA officials cited “bureaucratic process” as a deterrent to addressing these issues.
Other topics expected to be discussed include the approval of helicopter routes near DCA, the experience level of the air traffic controllers working in the tower at the time of the crash, the visibility study, and the testing of the barometric altimeters.
When asked what stays with her from this investigation, Homendy pointed to a personal item recovered with the wreckage.
“In the hangar, we had the Black Hawk laid out. We had the wreckage laid out for 5342 and on the side next to 5342 there were some personal effects, and a lot of people mentioned different things, but every time I passed, there was a brown teddy bear, just eight inches maybe, and it was muddy and dried mud, dried water, and I just kept looking at the teddy bear, and that’s the thing that sticks with me,” Homendy said.
A giant banner depicting a U.S. aircraft carrier and the American flag was displayed at Enqelab (Revolution) Square in Tehran, Iran amid rising tensions between the United States and Iran on January 25, 2026. (Fatemeh Bahrami/Anado
(LONDON) — As the internet blackout in Iran appears to be easing after weeks of protests across the country, the scale of the Islamic Republic regime’s bloodiest crackdown in decades is now being made public, according to activist groups.
More than 5,700 protesters have been killed since Jan. 8, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, an Iran-focused activist group based in the U.S.
More than 17,000 other related death cases are still under review, the group said. That U.S.-based group relies on a network of activists in Iran for its reporting and has been known to be accurate during previous unrest. While ABC News cannot confirm the number independently, the true toll might be even higher, according to other sources.
What began in Tehran late December in response to the collapse in currency and economic conditions quickly took on a political character — with crowds on the streets openly calling for regime change.
In response, the Iranian authorities launched a brutal crackdown on protests, according to observers.
Those protests intensified on Jan. 8 after a public call for protests from exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the U.S.-based son of the former shah of Iran.
Internet and telephone access across Iran was cut on Jan. 8, and the country went through its longest digital blackout in its history, isolating protesters from the rest of the world. NetBlocks, an independent tracking company, said on Sunday that the general outages had stretched past 400 hours. The company said service had been intermittently restored for some users in recent days.
With the partial restoration of internet access, people inside the country and others who have left in recent days shared videos and stories with ABC News that shows the horrific nature of the regime’s suppression of the protests.
Eyewitnesses from other cities also described what they had seen as a “war situation,” with some using terms such as “massacre,” “bloodbath” and “apocalypse,” in accounts shared with ABC News.
Saman, who asked ABC News not to use his full name for fear of his safety, was in Rasht — the largest city on Iran’s Caspian Sea coast — when the major protests formed.
As tens of thousands of protesters were taking over streets of the city on Jan. 8, the regime’s forces set the iconic bazaar of the city on fire after shop owners refused to end their strikes and had joined protesters, Saman told ABC News in a telephone interview.
While many protesters and non-protesters were still inside the bazaar area, the flames spread, he said. As people fled, government forces closed off the main exits of the market toward the street and directly shot at people trying to flee the flames, Saman said.
“There was smoke everywhere, a huge fire was there,” Saman said. “As people were going to leave, they shot them all. Maybe some of them were not even protesters. And some were normal people who had raised their hands up.”
Satellite images reviewed by ABC News show visible fire damage at the site of Rasht’s bazaar after Jan 8.
Saman said some of the wounded who were hospitalized, including one of his friends who was shot in his calf, were then taken into custody by the regime’s forces. It’s unclear where they’re being held or whether they’re still alive, he said.
While the deadly crackdown appeared to have quelled the protests and the streets now appear to have been emptied of people, families of the dead and missing, as well as families of the injured protesters, have been left in a state of confusion — scouring morgues, hospitals and prisons in a desperate attempt to find their loved ones, according to people who’ve spoken with ABC News.
Some of the people who were protesting on Jan. 8 have not returned, Saman said.
The regime’s forces “are very strict in returning corpses,” Saman told ABC News. “Some people have really disappeared.”
Saman said the regime’s forces gunned down two of his friend’s sons. He said his friend described an unimaginable scene when he went to collect the bodies from a street corner of the city’s cemetery.
The regime’s forces “had loaded bodies in freight trucks,” Saman said. “Corpses all stripped, corpses of all the girls and boys had been dumped at one corner of Rasht’s Bagh-e Rezvan [the city’s cemetery] where bodies were handed over to the families.”
Martial law remains in force across Iran, according to people ABC News spoke with. Families of victims have told ABC News they have been warned by the regime’s authorities not to hold funerals for their loved ones because those events have proved to be lightning rods for further protests in the past.
“Everyone has either lost someone in their circle, or knows someone who has,” Hadi, who also did not want to use his full name for security concerns, told ABC News. He said he left the country on Wednesday.
“There is fear and pain in the air,” he said. “Anti-riot vehicles at the junctions and anti-riot police in all streets.”
With journalists and international observers denied access to Iran during the wave of protests, the reported estimates of the death toll have varied. But the numbers have been steadily climbing as a network of international nongovernmental organizations has worked to verify the scale of the crackdown. The regime’s forces “are very strict in returning corpses,” Saman told ABC News. “Some people have really disappeared.” Some families have reportedly been asked to pay for their loved ones’ bodies when they’ve attempted to retrieve them from the morgue.
Though Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, described on Friday the protests as a “terrorist operation,” saying the death toll amounted to 3,117 civilians, 2,427 members of the security forces and 690 “terrorists.”
The Iranian regime has been accusing American and Israeli agents of killing protestors and warned the U.S. of any intervention.
However, President Donald Trump said the United States has an aircraft carrier “armada” heading toward Iran, adding that he hopes he would not need to use it. His remarks come after he had warned the Iranian regime not to kill protestors.
“Iran’s message to President Trump is clear: The U.S. has tried every conceivable hostile act, from sanctions and cyber assaults to outright military attack — and, most recently, it clearly fanned a major terrorist operation — all of which failed,” Araghchi said on social media. “It is time to think differently. Try respect.”
Amid the rising tensions between the political authorities of the two countries, many Iranians express on their social media that they feel there is no option left for them to get free from the brutality of the autocratic regime except for foreign intervention. They openly say the only way out of the deadlock is a U.S. military intervention to take the regime down.
However, still some others doubt the idea, saying foreign intervention might push the country towards more chaos in long term.
“For the Iranian government, confronting an external enemy is far easier than confronting its own people,” Omid Memarian, a journalist and analyst, wrote in The Atlantic. “Domestic protests threaten internal cohesion; war produces unity.”
Memarian added that, if Trump “follows through” with his threats “but still fails to fracture Iran’s machinery of repression, then he should expect to perversely strengthen the regime’s base, which will believe it is justified in even greater violence against the country’s civilians.”
Regardless of one’s stance on foreign intervention, most Iranians are still reeling from the terror and despair they have experienced since late December.
“It was a war,” Saman said. “The regime’s war against its own people. People were unarmed, but they came with their machine guns.”
