Samsung Galaxy S20 and Galaxy A72 June 2022 Android update is now rolling out in select markets, as per multiple reports. While users of Galaxy S20, Galaxy S20+, and Galaxy S20 Ultra in some European markets, including Switzerland, are getting the update, Galaxy A72 users in Malaysia are getting the new software. Samsung has upped their game with regular software updates. It has already rolled out June Android updates for the Galaxy S21 series and the Galaxy S22 series last week.
Samsung says that the maintenance release for major flagship models as a part of the monthly Security Maintenance Release (SMR) process includes patches from Google and Samsung.
As per a report by SamMobile, both LTE and 5G variants of the Galaxy S20, Galaxy S20+, and Galaxy S20 Ultra are getting the June 2022 update with firmware version number G98xxXXSEFVE6. The Galaxy S20 FE has been left out and it is tipped to join the other phones in the series soon. The update brings along the latest security fixes related to Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and QR scanner functionality. Five critical vulnerabilities have been fixed, in addition to 60 vulnerabilities of varying severity. There are no new features or non-security-related improvements for the phones.
The development of the Galaxy A72 June 2022 update is also reported by SamMobile. The software update comes with firmware version A725FXXU4BVE3, and the security patch fixes over 66 vulnerabilities related to user privacy and data security. It also brings along general bug fixes and device stability improvements.
If you own any of the abovementioned smartphones, and haven’t got any notifications to download and install the update, you can go to Settings > Software update > Download and Install to manually update your handset.
Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation have formed a $100 million fund to help support the growth of nonfungible token (NFT), blockchain gaming and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects in South Korea.
In addition to supporting projects built on Solana (SOL), the fund will help keep some Terra-based projects afloat following the collapse of that ecosystem last month.
The Solana Foundation believes the developers from Terra should not be held responsible for what happened on the blockchain network. In an interview reported by Bloomberg on June 8, general manager for games at the Solana Foundation Johnny B. Lee said:
“The developers did nothing really wrong, but they’re left in the lurch.”
The new fund helps solidify Solana’s aim to become an ideal blockchain for gaming. Solana Ventures launched a similar $100 million gaming fund with crypto exchange FTX and Lightspeed Ventures last November. It also has a $150 million fund with game-focused firms Forte and Griffin Gaming Partners.
South Korea is expected to become a hotbed of NFT and Metaverse development this decade with the government pledging $187 million to build its own metaverse ecosystem. The Korean metaverse will mainly focus on the growth of digital content and digital corporations within the country.
The Solana Foundation is banking on interest in gaming finance (GameFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi) to increase in the country as companies begin to vie for grant money.
Competition to build the best platforms quickly is underway with several South Korean platforms already offering NFTs or access to DeFi, such as the Klaytn layer-1 blockchain and Upbit exchange.
Klaytn’s biggest DeFi platform is KlaySwap which has $274 million in total value locked (TVL) according to DeFi ecosystem tracker DeFi Llama. Upbit, the country’s largest exchange, has its own NFT marketplace.
However it may be difficult for domestic companies to launch their blockchain-based games in South Korea.
The law currently prohibits games from giving monetary rewards, including crypto. This law led Korean officials to demand Apple and Google remove play-to-earn (P2E) games from their Korean stores last December.
NFT trading and DeFi activity on Solana have been on the rise in recent months. Solana’s top NFT marketplace Magic Eden is the second largest in the world with 35,526 daily traders and $7.31 million in daily volume behind OpenSea according to decentralized app (Dapp) tracker DappRadar.
By providing funding for ecosystem growth, Solana may also be able to address the infrequent network instability that has halted operations on the network since last year.
SOL price is currently flat, only down 0.5% over the past 24 hours trading at $39.05 according to data from CoinGecko.
Progressive overreach has its price. Even for progressives.
What’s going on in San Francisco is happening nationwide, and not just in matters of criminal justice and urban governance. In one area after another, the left is being mugged by reality, to borrow Irving Kristol’s famous phrase. Consider a few examples:
Inflation. For over a decade, progressives insisted that inflation was a right-wing chimera, ignoring the huge increase in asset prices. Then, last year, they insisted inflation was temporary — a “red herring,” to quote the economist Joseph Stiglitz. Later, as it became clear that inflation was sticking, some took a bolder tack: Inflation is good. As a piece in The Intercept put it last November, “Inflation is bad for the 1 percent but helps out almost everyone else.”
Really? Usually, it’s the 1 percent who can afford to shield their wealth through inflation-protected assets — a rare violin, a vacation house — while the less fortunate struggle with triple-digit grocery bills. The left’s combination of nonchalance about inflation (it will erase debts!), along with a reluctance to tackle it forcefully, is why the left so often ends up losing working-class voters to the right.
Energy.It wasn’t long ago that progressives bemoaned low gas prices, on the theory that deterring driving would help the climate. Maybe House Democrats should try running on $7 a gallon as an environmental good and see what happens to their majority. Maybe, too, the Biden administration should tell the Saudis where they can stuff their oil, as opposed to beseeching them to pump more.
Or maybe not. The one form of nature progressives reliably fail to understand is human nature. If they ever wonder why their climate fervor hasn’t translated into more policy victories, they should grapple with the fact that the rapid decarbonization of the economy is not something for which most people are prepared to pay a high price, at least from their own pocketbooks.
How about working on a different message, one that is measured, adaptive and meliorative, rather than draconian, grim and doomsaying?
The culture. How did progressives come out on the losing end of the culture wars? How did they become the butt of jokes for our era’s sharpest comedians, from Bill Maher to Dave Chappelle? Why are lifelong liberals at universities, newspapers and publishing houses constantly whispering under their breath about the rank Maoism of their younger colleagues?
Simple: Progressives went from being all about liberation to being all about imposition. When a trans collegiate swimmer such as Lia Thomas identifies as a woman, that’s liberation — a decision that surely required courage and is worthy of respect.
But when Thomas is allowed to compete in women’s races, that’s a blatantly unfair act that has given Thomas one victory after another while diminishing the legacy of female athletes. That it has become difficult to even say this out loud merely underscores the point.
That comforting prediction is failing because members of minority groups don’t necessarily like being stuffed into the back end of progressive acronyms like BIPOC or being stymied by progressive policies, such as efforts to do away with entrance exams for selective public schools, or neglecting law-and-order priorities in poorer communities that often need them most, including those on the southern border.
The world. Progressives (aided by isolationist Republicans) spent a decade demanding that America disentangle itself from faraway military commitments, particularly in Afghanistan, so that we could do more nation-building at home. Joe Biden made the mistake of believing it, and his presidency hasn’t recovered from the strategic and moral debacle of withdrawal.
Nor has the world. The perception of American diffidence and incompetence, which the administration has labored so hard to counteract in Ukraine, is part of what tempted the Kremlin to invade in the first place.
The list goes on, but the message is the same. When Kristol talked about liberals getting mugged by reality, he said it turned them into neoconservatives. It will be enough if today’s progressives, in the second mugging, find their way back to liberalism.
It is hard to imagine two Democrats more ideologically divergent than Jumaane D. Williams and Thomas R. Suozzi. But for an hour Tuesday night, they set all that aside in favor of a shared mission: Shoving Gov. Kathy Hochul off an apparent glide path to a full term as governor.
With three weeks until Primary Day, the two Democrats threw everything they could at Ms. Hochul. They blamed her for doing too little to confront elevated crime rates and street violence, accused her of selling out taxpayers in a sweetheart stadium deal for her hometown Buffalo Bills and compared her to her disgraced predecessor, Andrew M. Cuomo.
“She pledged to make it the most ethical, the most transparent government in the history of New York State,” said Mr. Suozzi, a centrist congressman from Long Island. “And that simply hasn’t happened.”
Both candidates repeatedly accused Ms. Hochul of being beholden to special interests, from Delaware North, the hospitality and gaming company that employs her husband, to the National Rifle Association, which once endorsed her in a race for Congress.
“We asked for $1 billion to be put in for gun violence,” said Mr. Williams, New York City’s left-leaning public advocate. “What we got was $1 billion for building the stadium that hired her husband.”
The result was a disjointed debate — the first major contest featuring the three Democratic candidates for governor — in which personal confrontation often obscured the candidates’ competing visions for New York.
With a commanding lead in the polls and a firm grip on the powers of the governor’s office, Ms. Hochul tried to avoid the fracas. She was determined to deny oxygen to her opponents’ attacks and cast herself as a guardian of liberal values at a time when some rights, and Democratic hold on power, appear under threat nationally.
She spoke enthusiastically about a package of gun bills that she signed into law on Monday in response to a spate of mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, Texas, and elsewhere, and promised to make New York a national leader for abortion rights if the Supreme Court strikes down the federal protections in Roe v. Wade this month, as expected.
“No governor has done more in less time to address gun violence,” she said, adding later: “We led the nation.”
But Ms. Hochul, who took office less than a year ago after her predecessor resigned, still spent much of the night on the defensive, trying to explain past positions and actions taken by her young administration on guns, crime and her ethical record.
A Guide to New York’s 2022 Primary Elections
As prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.
She said that the return on the $600 million the state has agreed to contribute to the new Buffalo Bills stadium would “far exceed the investment,” which she called a priority for Western New York. Ms. Hochul also said her husband had nothing to do with the deal, and defended his ethical record.
“They literally sell beer and hot dogs at the games,” she said, referring to Delaware North, which provides concessions at the Bills stadium.
She did not try to duck her past support from the N.R.A., but when repeatedly challenged by Mr. Suozzi — “Only one of us up here has ever been endorsed by the N.R.A.,” he said — she suggested that her record in recent weeks proved that her views have evolved.
“Judge me on what I’ve done,” she said. “A lot of people have evolved since I took that position. You know what we need? More people to evolve.”
She acknowledged that the indictment of her handpicked lieutenant governor, Brian A. Benjamin, had been a “disappointment” and a setback for her efforts to restore confidence in Albany after years of corruption charges and Mr. Cuomo’s resignation in the face of mounting sexual harassment allegations.
And she stood by the modest changes included in this year’s $220 billion state budget to strengthen bail restrictions and tighten rules for repeat offenders.
Mr. Suozzi, again, has pilloried the governor for not going farther at a time of heightened fear about crime in New York City, by allowing judges to consider the “dangerousness” of a defendant when determining bail.
“The governor says she cares about crime, she wants to address crime, but she does nothing to fix bail reform,” he said Tuesday night, stressing that combating gun violence and cutting taxes would be his top priorities.
But Ms. Hochul did not yield.
“What we gave the judges is better than this vague term that sometimes can be subjective and used against an individual because of the color of their skin,” she said.
Amid the personal barbs, there were clear differences on policy visions, particularly between Mr. Williams, 46, a New York City progressive, and Ms. Hochul, 63, and Mr. Suozzi, 59, more moderate lawmakers with roots in the suburbs.
Mr. Williams said he would be in favor of extending voting rights to green card holders in cities across the state, as New York City recently did. Mr. Suozzi and Ms. Hochul said no.
Mr. Williams also repeatedly pushed for the state to take a more aggressive approach to combating climate change. He said he would immediately implement a congestion pricing plan in New York City championed by environmental activists, which Mr. Suozzi and Ms. Hochul said must be delayed.
“Climate change was an abysmal failure in this legislature,” Mr. Williams, pointing out that lawmakers and the governor had failed to provide additional money to meet the state’s ambitious climate goals.
The debate was a major test for Ms. Hochul, who despite her clear lead, has yet to generate the kind of enthusiasm with voters that would ensure her victory in the June 28 primary and in this fall’s general election.
A new poll released earlier on Tuesday by Spectrum News NY1 and Siena College found that only 35 percent of New York City residents view Ms. Hochul as doing an “excellent” or “good” job, compared to 36 percent who rated her performance “fair” and 18 percent who said it was “poor.”
Still, with just 21 days to go, the primary race remains Ms. Hochul’s to lose. The state’s powerful Democratic establishment has coalesced around the governor’s campaign, bolstering it with endorsements and five-figure checks so that she enters the final stretch with an unrivaled stockpile of cash, $18.6 million at last count.
The debate did offer some moments of levity and even the supernatural.
At one point, Mr. Suozzi, who is fond of speed-dialing reporters and supporters alike, said he could not live without his cellphone, and Mr. Williams professed a love of theater.
Asked whether they would support former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign for a New York City House seat, all three candidates smirked. Not a chance.
But the candidates were more receptive to talking about their communications with the afterlife when one of the moderators, Maurice DuBois from WCBS-TV, asked if they believed in ghosts.
“No. I believe in spirits, though,” Mr. Suozzi said. “Yes, I guess I do.”
Mr. Williams said he believed in an afterlife, and the current governor said she found strength in the great beyond, too.
“I speak to my mother all the time,” she said. “So yes, I do communicate with someone who is no longer with us.”
Four Republicans vying for their party’s nomination for governor will debate for the first time next week. They include Representative Lee Zeldin, Andrew Giuliani, Harry Wilson and Rob Astorino.
Content warning: This story discusses sexual assault.
Thirty years later, Gabrielle Union is continuing to navigate life after a traumatic event.
The Cheaper by the Dozen actress offered a glimpse into some of her personal struggles in an Instagram post on June 7, explaining how posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety affect her day-to-day life in the spotlight after she was raped at age 19.
“As a rape survivor, I have battled PTSD for 30 years,” she began in her post. “Living with anxiety and panic attacks all these years has never been easy. There’s times the anxiety is so bad it shrinks my life.”
Union said that leaving her house or even making an unprotected left turn at a traffic signal can “fill me with terror.” Her anxiety can also turn her excitement about going to a party, such as the Met Gala, into “pure agony.”
“When we tell y’all what we are experiencing, please believe us the 1st time we mention it,” she wrote. “No, it’s not like being nervous and everyone experiences and deals with anxiety differently, and that’s OK.”
Jack and Kristina Wagner have suffered an unimaginable tragedy.
The former couple’s son, Harrison Wagner, has died at the age of 27, according to online records obtained by E! News from the Los Angeles Medical Examiner’s Office. A spokesperson for the department confirmed to E! News that Harrison was found dead around 5 a.m. on June 6 in a parking lot located in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles.
A cause of death has not been determined and is deferred pending additional investigation.
Police, who were dispatched to the scene in response to a call about a medical emergency, do not suspect foul play at this time, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department told E! News on June 7.
Harrison was the youngest son of Jack and Kristina, who co-starred on General Hospital during the ’80s and ’90s. The soap stars are also parents to 31-year-old son Peter Wagner, while Jack is dad to an adult daughter named Kerry, who reunited with the actor in 2011 after her biological mother gave her up for adoption when she was born.
At the end of the month, world leaders, youth, entrepreneurs, and civil society will gather in Lisbon, Portugal, for the second UN Ocean Conference, to mobilize action and jumpstart science-based innovative solutions aimed at starting a new chapter of global ocean action.
Co-hosted by Portugal and Kenya, the event will be a platform to effectively address the challenges that the ocean is now facing.
Ambassador Ana Paula Zacarias, Permanent Representative of Portugal to the United Nations, and Ambassador Martin Kimani, Kenya’s Permanent Representative to the UN, share a passion for the ocean and the mission ensure the conservation and sustainable use of the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development for all.
Before heading to Portugal, they sat down with UN News in New York, to speak at length about the Conference and what the event – and its outcome – means for their countries and the world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
UN News: What does the UN Ocean Conference represent for both Kenya and Portugal – and what are the main expectations for it?
Ana Paula Zacarias: This is a fundamental conference for Portugal. The ocean is overly connected with our history, with our culture, with our physical landscape, with our economy. There is also a connection with our commitment to strengthening multilateralism and to advance on the Ocean agenda, as well as on the questions concerning climate change.
We hope to have around 12,000 participants from all over the world. And we have already received the confirmation of 15 Heads of State and Government, as well as many non-governmental organizations, civil society participants, people from academia, from youth organizations, and from local communities. Even some celebrities – [US Special Envoy for Climate] John Kerry, and the famous Aquaman, [actor and environmentalist] Jason Momoa, will be in Lisbon, which is particularly important to give strength to the youth’s voice.
Martin Kimani: The Conference indeed represents an important opportunity and responsibility. An opportunity for sustainable economic development, improved food security, and jobs for young people all over the world. And responsibility because we must ensure that oceans are protected from pollution and the effects of climate change. As co-hosts, Kenya and Portugal are keen for a bold and positive global ocean agenda to emerge from the conference.
There is an increasing recognition that we must reverse the decline in ocean health and achieve Sustainable Development Goal 14. To build on this, Kenya, and Portugal, together with the United Nations, are setting a stage for decisions that will scale up ocean action based on science and innovation.
UN News: Oceans are providers – the coastal population in rural areas in Kenya engages primary in fisheries and agriculture for their livelihoods; and Portugal with its long coast has also a strong and fruitful relationship with the ocean. How can we ensure that we protect coastal communities and their livelihoods?
Martin Kimani: Kenya’s coastline is endowed with rich natural resources which include mangrove forests, coral reefs, terrestrial forests, sandy beaches, and seagrass beds. These generate high biodiversity and productive waters which in turn support economies and livelihoods.
Working closely with coastal communities, the Government has prioritized enhancing the welfare of coastline communities in terms of economic opportunities, social protection, ensuring resilience to natural disasters and impact of climate change, and reducing the risk of over exploitation and risky methods of use of ocean resources.
For instance, the Mikoko Pamoja project which means ‘mangroves together’ in Kiswahili is a community-based blue carbon credit project in Kwale County on Kenya’s South Coast. With technical support from the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI) and other partners, the coastal communities work to replant, manage and restore degraded mangroves, which have been proved to fight climate change through capture and storage of carbon.
Mikoko Pamoja has been trading in mangrove carbon credits since 2013. Revenue generated is used to support community projects in water and sanitation, education, and environmental conservation.
In real terms, this means the local people have been empowered to make democratic spending and investment decisions such as purchase of new schoolbooks, furniture, and provision of water points. At least 73 per cent of the six thousand residents in Gazi and Makongeni villages rely on water points provided by the project.
And this innovative carbon offset project is now being replicated and expanded in neighboring mangroves of Vanga in Kwale County, and other mangrove areas in Africa.
Ana Paula Zacarias: That [project] highlights a fundamental question at the centre of this Conference. We need to show and prove with data that there is a connection between oceans and climate, especially because both elements are fundamental for what we want to achieve with the local communities, who often feel threatened by the combined situation of climate change and the raise of the water. Their involvement in finding solutions is essential.
And those solutions must be sustainable and need to consider their livelihoods. We need to establish a strong dialogue with stakeholders but also with local and regional governments, because they also have a say in what we can do. That’s why we are organizing a special event during the conference. That event, Localizing Action for the Ocean: Local and Regional Governments focuses on how we can interact with the local communities, bring their knowledge to the table and discuss with them ways of becoming more sustainable, having more sustainable fisheries, and more sustainable coastal tourism.
UNCTAD
Coastal and marine ecosystems provide food, livelihoods, and coastal protection to more than a billion people worldwide.
UN News: How are your countries working towards a blue economy, and how will the Conference contribute to that goal?
Ana Paula Zacarias: The oceans are fundamental for life on earth, they are providers of food, but also of so many other important elements of our life. We can use the oceans for enjoyment, for tourism, for sport, for maritime transport, and there are so many ways in which the oceans are providers of sustainability for the life of communities.
I really hope this Conference will boost this. We will hold an interactive dialogue on sustainable blue economy – when we talk about sustainable blue economy, we have to think about fisheries, biodiversity, as well as all the richness that is on the bottom of the sea.
The ocean provides a huge richness that we can all profit from, but we need to be very careful, very careful not to interfere with the delicate ecosystems. We need to consider the issues of pollution and make sure that we receive with open hands all that richness, and at the same time we deliver all the care that the oceans need.
Martin Kimani: Kenya has prioritized the sustainable use of ocean and blue economy resources as an enabler of our Vision 2030. [Kenya is] an emerging economic frontier, and the blue economy is expected to contribute to our economic development through food and nutrition security, coastal and rural development and income earnings along aqua value chains, maritime transport, and tourism.
Besides the national efforts, Kenya remains a willing partner in the regional and international community to develop a common position on how to tackle ocean related threats and challenges. Two-thirds of the global waters lie in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction of Exclusive Economic Zones [EEZ]. This necessitates, of course, all of us working together for coordinated knowledge and data sharing and development financing.
UN News: The role of youth will be central in Lisbon, with young entrepreneurs, working on innovative, science-based solutions to critical problems, an important part of the dialogue. How do you see the youth participation and involvement in saving our ocean?
Martin Kimani: Recognizing the role of youth, we will also be organizing the Ocean Youth Forum, a special event on the margins of the Conference that will provide a platform for ocean-action and implementing youth-led solutions at scale to address SDG14. We must provide space for youth to participate and contribute to the rapidly growing blue economy sector.
Unemployment, particularly along Kenya’s coast, predisposes the youth to crime, drugs, and radicalization into violent extremism conducive to terrorism.
Beach Management Units (BMUs), which work at the community level recruiting youth with formal and informal education backgrounds, provide them with conservation training and create modest social enterprise opportunities and steady incomes in aquaculture.
The Kenya Government has also committed to educating and motivating the youth in the maritime domain to enhance commercial benefits of the ocean resources.
Ana Paula Zacarias: We have seen the relevance of youth participation in all that pertains to climate action. I think the young generation has a very clear understanding of the challenge that this represents for their life, for their future and for the life of their children.
So, it is absolutely fundamental to involve young people also in the conversation about the sustainable use of oceans. And as Ambassador Kimani mentioned, the Youth Forum will be used as an innovation forum, where we aim to bring all the young people from different areas of knowledge and action and give them the capacity to think in an innovative way about the oceans and their relevance.
It is really very important [to have] young entrepreneurs and young climate and ocean activists. They can bring a huge contribution to this agenda. So, we hope that by their involvement in this forum they can bring solutions that can be used not only by governments, but at the UN level as well.
UN Photo/Mark Garten
Ambassadors Martin Kimani of Kenya and Ana Paula Zacarias of Portugal, co-hosts of the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon.
UN News: This year’s Conference will also determine the level of ambition for the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. What are the next steps, to ensure that we continue working towards a healthy ocean, after Lisbon?
Martin Kimani: The science tells us that the oceans are critical for the future of humanity and that human activities are the greatest threat to the wellbeing of the ocean. We continue to put the ocean systems under immense stress which compromises the vast opportunities and potential of the ocean resources we often refer to.
Nations need to commit to an urgent global mechanism and a time-bound implementation framework that is backed by scientific evidence that would compel countries to strike the balance between conservation and exploitation holding them accountable for their actions.
We also need investments in science research that contributes to global food and nutrition security, maritime spatial planning, and climate change management.
As I have said, the Ocean Conference will gauge our level of ambition to deliver transformative change. The world badly needs good news to offer hope to populations groaning under the burdens of a pandemic, wars, and the effects of climate change. They must see our meeting in Lisbon as a torch lighting the way to effective and impactful multilateral action. We will do our utmost, as Kenya, to ensure that this happens.
Ana Paula Zacarias: This is indeed, for us and for our friends of Kenya, a major endeavor as we host this Conference. At a time when the tide is rising, as we are often reminded, this is the moment to discuss the oceans and to discuss all these elements in the context of climate, sustainable development, migration, and security.
For example, when we look at the situation in several Pacific Islands, we see the difficulties that people face, and the possibilities of increasing conflict due to the challenges they face, having less resources.
This Conference is the second big event that has been organized on this matter, and we hope that at least there will be another one, and a third conference should be organized in the context of the UN Decade of Ocean Science.
Moreover, in the framework of the climate change biodiversity negotiations, both the [UN climate conference] and the Biodiversity Convention will have meetings now, so we need to bring all these elements together and be able to continue working not in silos but in a holistic manner, so that all these agendas can work at the same time. This is fundamental if we want to have a better world, a safer world, a more sustainable world for future generations.
This Instagram post will definitely make you crack a smile.
Cole Sprouse shared a selfie to his Instagram on June 7 that gave fans a good look at his face—and his bare butt. The Riverdale actor captioned the picture with the message, “Good morning to my publicity team.”
Naturally, the photoshopped snap—which was seemingly enhanced to give Cole a rounder tush—sent the internet into a frenzy, and followers of the actor did not hold back when it came to making Cole the butt of all jokes.
Cole’s girlfriend, Ari Fournier, gave her honest thoughts in the comment section by writing, “how long until this gets taken down.” Meanwhile, Cole’s Moonshot co-star Mason Gooding also chimed in, writing, “Hate to see you go, love to watch u leave.”
And the cheeky comments did not stop there. One user dubbed the photo, “Cole and the giant peach.”
His Moonshot co-star Lana Condorgave a simple yet strong response to Cole’s post by writing, “No.”
Leonard Fournette took a free agent visit to New England earlier this offseason, but it seems Tom Brady was able to scare him away from the Patriots.
One of the more surprising moments of the offseason came when it was announced that Tampa Bay Buccaneers running back Leonard Fournette was heading north for a free agent visit with the New England Patriots. The Pats were stacked at running back, and it didn’t make a ton of sense for Fournette to defect away from Tom Brady and the Bucs.
Fournette ended up re-signing with the Buccaneers on a three-year, $21 million deal that Bill Belichick and New England were almost certainly not willing to offer. While money was probably a deciding factor, it turns out that Brady may have played a role in Fournette opting to return to Tampa.
Tom Brady may have scared Leonard Fournette into re-signing with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers
As we all know, Brady was New England’s longtime quarterback for two decades, and there have been some inklings that he and the Patriots aren’t on the best of terms nowadays. When he found out Fournette was visiting New England, Brady quickly reached out Fournette and asked what he was doing there:
Fournette said before he re-signed with Bucs as he visited the Patriots, Brady reached out to him and said “What’s your ass doing up there?”
Brady may have been more concerned with one of his top playmakers potentially leaving, but this could also be seen as a diss on New England. The Brady/Belichick rivalry has been the subject of much debate since Brady left the Pats, so maybe he didn’t want Belichick to get another good player on his roster for the upcoming season.
It’s more likely that the latter isn’t true, and Brady just wanted his top running back on board since he eventually decided to return for yet another season. Fournette, of course, has revived his career in Tampa after getting released by the Jacksonville Jaguars, and he was one of the top options in the passing game for Brady and a decimated Bucs offense.
While it didn’t really seem like New England needed a running back, which made Fournette’s visit so confusing, they eventually addressed the position in the draft with third-day picks Pierre Strong and Kevin Harris. But it’s clear that Fournette would have been an immediate upgrade over either of these two guys.
Tampa Bay has certainly loaded up as they look to make another Super Bowl run with Brady back on board. But with his history in New England, Fournette’s comment today is certainly going to catch some attention, and for good reason. It seemed like the Brady/Belichick rivalry was over earlier this offseason, but it appears to be back in full force yet again for the 2022 NFL season.
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Believe it or not, Father’s Day will be here before you know it. It’s never too early to start shopping for gifts, right? If you really want to go all out for your dad, stepdad, grandfather, husband, or another special guy in your life, you don’t have to spend a ton of money. You just need to shop smartly. There are so many affordable finds and great deals just in time for the holiday.
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