‘Notorious’ Florida gang leader arrested; wiretap reveals thousands of criminal conduct communications
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A notorious gang leader who allegedly led a large-scale operation in Florida has been arrested, along with 11 others, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said at a news conference Monday detailing the bust.
It was part of a multi-agency, year-long gang racketeering investigation.
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Hernando Thompson Jr., 40, is the head of the “Sex, Money, Murder” gang in Florida, Judd said.
Through a wiretap, Judd said law enforcement was able to intercept 4,787 communications that talked about criminal conduct, including murder, Judd said.
The goal was to take down the gang’s hierarchy.
In all, there were:
- 12 arrests
- 6 search warrants
- $1.5M seized in drugs
- 18 firearms seized
- ballistic armor seized
Judd said in one case, a gun was pointed at an 8-year-old and a 3-month-old baby.
Thompson has a lengthy criminal record with dozens of convictions.
David Byrne honors teenage melodrama with “Drivers License” cover
The former Talking Head shared a cover of Oliva Rodrigo’s debut single for its fifth anniversary.
It’s been five years since Olivia Rodrigo became a major pop star practically overnight with the release of her debut single “Drivers License.” The song is sung from the POV of a presumably teenage girl (Rodrigo was 17 when it debuted) who just got her driver’s license and is now driving around reminiscing about her ex and all the plans they had made for their future. The song was a huge hit in part because it was an experience people recognized, even if their days of being 17 were far behind them. Case in point: the 73-year-old musician and former Talking Head David Byrne just put his own spin on the track for its fifth anniversary.
Byrne’s arrangement of the song is a departure from the production of Rodrigo’s more stripped-back, piano-forward original. The cover features syncopated, hiccuped vocals from a choir during the first verse before widening to support his melody. Byrne kicks up the tempo a bit, giving the recording a kinetic quality reminiscent of his recently reimagined work on the Who Is The Sky? Tour.
Byrne and Rodrigo previously performed together at Gov Ball in New York in 2025, where he joined her set to perform “Burning Down The House” with her. Rodrigo shared on Instagram today that there’ll be more covers coming “from some of my favorite artists ever” to celebrate the anniversary of her debut album Sour. As for Byrne, his album Who Is The Sky? debuted last September, and he’s scheduled to spend the next six months performing across Europe and North America.
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Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin, founding guitarist of black midi, dead at 26
The guitarist appeared on the band’s acclaimed 2019 debut Schlagenheim before stepping away in 2021 due to mental health struggles.
Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin, the founding guitarist of English rock group black midi, has died at the age of 26. The news was confirmed Monday via a statement from his family shared by the band’s label, Rough Trade Records, which said his death followed “a long battle with his mental health.”
Kwasniewski-Kelvin co-founded black midi in 2017 attending London’s BRIT School alongside Geordie Greep, Cameron Picton, and Morgan Simpson. His jagged, volatile guitar style was central to the band’s early reputation, honed during their ferocious residencies at the Windmill in Brixton and captured on their Dan Carey-produced 2019 debut album, Schlagenheim, which helped define a new wave of British experimental rock and established the group as a defining force in the South London scene.
In early 2021, Kwasniewski-Kelvin announced that he was stepping back from the band to focus on his mental health, writing that he had been “mentally unwell” and hoped to return. He did not appear on black midi’s subsequent albums, Cavalcade or Hellfire. The band later announced an indefinite hiatus in 2024.
In their statement, Kwasniewski-Kelvin’s family wrote: “A talented musician and a kind, loving man finally succumbed; despite all efforts. Matt was 26 years old. He will always be loved. Please take a moment to check in with your loved ones so we can stop this happening to our young men.”
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R.I.P. Bob Weir: Grateful Dead co-founder dead at 78
“He transitioned peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, after courageously beating cancer as only Bobby could,” Weir’s daughter Chloe wrote on Instagram.
Photo by Ken Friedman/Wolfgang’s
Per his daughter Chloe on Instagram, Bob Weir, guitarist, vocalist, and co-founder of the Grateful Dead, has passed away at age 78. “It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Bobby Weir,” she wrote. “He transitioned peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, after courageously beating cancer as only Bobby could. Unfortunately, he succumbed to underlying lung issues.” Chloe said that her father’s “final months reflected the same spirit that defined his life. Diagnosed in July, he began treatment only weeks before returning to his hometown stage for a three-night celebration of 60 years of music at Golden Gate Park. Those performances, emotional, soulful, and full of light, were not farewells, but gifts. Another act of resilience.”
Born on the Bay in October 1947, Weir began playing guitar at age 13 after failing to figure out the piano and trumpet. His dyslexia got him kicked out of every school he attended, until he wound up at Fountain Valley in Colorado, where he’d meet future Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. When Weir was 16, he and a buddy caught a whiff of banjo music in a Palo Alto back alley on New Year’s Eve. They followed the trail all the way to Dana Morgan’s Music Store, where a 21-year-old music teacher named Jerry Garcia was picking. He and Weir spent the night jamming together and struck up a group together, which Weir likened to the Beatles if they were a jug band. “What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive,” he said. “I couldn’t think of anything else more worth doing.” They called themselves Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions and then, later, the Warlocks. Eventually they sorted the name out: the Grateful Dead.
Weir played rhythm guitar and sang lead on many Dead tunes. He ran point on a few of my favorites, like “Playing in the Band,” “Estimated Prophet,” and “Sugar Magnolia,” one of the best songs in the English language. Weir’s guitar playing wasn’t strong at first, but by the time drummer Mickey Hart left the band temporarily in 1971, he was one of the best around. His voicings were clearer than ever. “I found myself astonished, delighted, and excited beyond measure at what Bobby was doing,” bassist Phil Lesh, who later called Weir’s style “quirky, whimsical, and goofy,” commented. He would tinker with slide guitar in the ‘70s, picking up ideas from hard bop pianist McCoy Tyner and gospel players like Rev. Gary Davis. Weir was also a catalyst in a couple other bands, including Kingfish, RatDog, Scraping the Children, Further, Bobby and the Midnites, the Bob Weir Band, and, most notably (alongside Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, and John Mayer), Dead & Company. Weir made his solo record, Ace, in 1972, and his last solo record, Blue Mountain, in 2016.
Weir marks the third Dead member to die since 2024, joining the late Phil Lesh and Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay across the bridge. May the four winds blow you safely home, Bob. Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings.
Listen to Bob Weir sing some Grateful Dead tunes below.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=qu8g0_8eujw%3Fsi%3D9KUiyDoi3ZmScYLO%26nbsp%3Bhttps%3A
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Kennedy Center insists it broke up with opera, not the other way around
A classic case of “It’s not you, it’s miiiiiiiiiiiiiii”
Photo: Heather Diehl/Getty Images
Hey, look: The Kennedy Center would like everybody to know that it broke up with the Washington National Opera, and not the other way around. The Kennedy Center—sorry, that’s The Donald J. Trump And The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts, obviously—is doing just fine with this latest split. It’s sorry for the Opera, really; it’d been trying to kick out those long-singing, Viking helmet-wearing weirdos for months, and the announcement yesterday that the opera company would be departing its long-time home at the Center should in no way be understood as part of a larger trend of artists distancing themselves from what was once one of the nation’s most prestigious cultural centers. in the aftermath of Trump taking control and stamping his name all over it.
This is per Variety, reporting on social media posts from routinely apoplectic Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell, who was typically un-calm over circulating reports that the 70-year-old institution—formally designated the National Opera Company by an act of Congress in 2000—had decided to cut ties with the Center. Explaining that his Twitter/X account had apparently been hacked, delaying his ability to be publicly mad for several key “online screaming” hours, Grenell took to social media to post excerpts from emails that did seem to show that he was the one who initiated conversations about ending the long-standing agreement between the opera company and the Center late last year.
Of course, it also feels worth noting that the Washington National Opera managed to navigate all of this with some measure of decorum, avoiding partisan language and framing things as a mutual split when it announced the departure on Friday. Whereas Grenell, once he’d gotten his account back from The Hackers, made sure to claim that the WNO was losing money, and nobody liked it, and who even wants a national opera, anyway? (Or, to quote him directly: “We have spent millions of dollars to support the Washington Opera’s exclusivity, and yet they were still millions of dollars in the hole—and getting worse. Having an exclusive Opera was just not financially smart. And our patrons clearly wanted a refresh.”)
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Twitter now suing every major music publisher over monopoly allegations
The Musk-owned social media site is claiming music publishers are using “monopoly power” to negotiate music licensing fees.
By William Hughes | January 9, 2026 | 6:35pm
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The question of who gets paid what when folks on social media post copyrighted music is a long and tangled one—albeit one that’s mostly been resolved by this point, via the generation of a whole bunch of licensing deals between the major social media platforms, the various big-name music publishers, and the National Music Publishers’ Association, the trade organization that usually takes the lead when said publishers want to throw their collective weight around. The collective nature of said weight, though, has now become the subject of a new lawsuit that’s just been launched against basically every music publisher in America—including the biggies, Warner Bros., Universal, and Sony—by X/Twitter, which is claiming it’s being strong-armed into signing licensing deals using “monopoly power.”
This is per Variety, which has been reporting for a few years now on Twitter’s drawn-out legal fight with the music business. See, the Elon Musk-owned social media company is the one major social media platform that doesn’t have an NMPA licensing deal, a fact that was, among other things, the subject of a separate lawsuit from the group two years ago. The various organizations entered into negotiations last year, setting aside the lawsuit for a time, but those talks seem to have broken down. Today, the social media service launched an antitrust suit of its own against the NMPA and its various members, claiming they’re trying to “coerce X into taking licenses to musical works from the industry as a whole, denying X the benefit of competition between music publishers.” Essentially, the suit argues, by negotiating as a group, the NMPA members have formed a multi-company monopoly, and denied X the ability to strike individual license agreements with its members.
The lawsuit says Twitter is seeking the ability to bargain with publishers individually, as well as some unspecified damages. The NMPA—which has been aggressive in going after social media platforms in recent years, leading to the creation of all those aforementioned deals—has already fired back, calling the lawsuit a “bad faith effort to distract from publishers’ and songwriters’ legitimate right to enforce against X’s illegal use of their songs.”
