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Larry King remembered by celebrities, politicians: 'A newsman who interviewed the newsmakers'

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Rodin Eckeroth/Getty ImagesBy EMILY SHAPIRO, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — Tributes are pouring in for iconic TV host Larry King, who died Saturday morning at age 87.

Former President Bill Clinton tweeted, “I enjoyed my 20+ interviews with Larry King over the years. He had a great sense of humor and a genuine interest in people. He gave a direct line to the American people and worked hard to get the truth for them, with questions that were direct but fair. Farewell, my friend.”

 

Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, tweeted, “I mourn the passing of Larry King whom I have known for nearly 40 years. He was a great interviewer – sensitivity, humorous and witty. And he actually let you talk! An all around mensch. Millions around the world shall miss him, including myself.”

CNN founder Ted Turner said in a statement, “Larry was one of my closest and dearest friends and, in my opinion, the world’s greatest broadcast journalist of all time. If anyone asked me what are my greatest career achievements in life; one is the creation of CNN, and the other is hiring Larry King. Like so many who worked with and knew Larry, he was a consummate professional, an amazing mentor to many and a good friend to all. The world has lost a true legend.”

CNN President Jeff Zucker said in a statement, “We mourn the passing of our colleague Larry King. The scrappy young man from Brooklyn had a history-making career spanning radio and television. His curiosity about the world propelled his award-winning career in broadcasting, but it was his generosity of spirit that drew the world to him.”

“We are so proud of the 25 years he spent with CNN, where his newsmaker interviews truly put the network on the international stage,” Zucker said. “From our CNN family to Larry’s, we send our thoughts and prayers, and a promise to carry on his curiosity for the world in our work.”

Here are more tributes to King:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Person in Michigan wins Mega Millions' $1 billion jackpot, 2nd-largest total ever

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Alec051/iStockBy EMILY SHAPIRO and ROSA SANCHEZ, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — One lucky person is taking home the Mega Millions jackpot cash.

At around 1 a.m. ET Saturday, the list of lottery winners was announced. A person in Michigan won the jackpot, estimated at $1 billion or $739.6 million as a lump-sum, before taxes.

The winning ticket was sold at a Kroger located in Novi, a northern suburb of Detroit — about a 30-minute drive from the city — the state lottery website confirmed. The winning numbers were 4-26-42-50-60 with a Mega Ball number of 24.

The winner’s identity has not been revealed, but, per state lottery rules, they must come forward to claim their winnings.

The winner will have two options to collect the record prize, the lottery said in a statement: “The first is an escalating annuity that offers an initial payment, then annual payments for 29 years. The player also may select a one-time cash payment of about $739 million. If a player selects the cash option, they will receive about $530 million after tax withholdings.”

The Mega Millions jackpot increased to $1 billion for Friday night’s drawing.

It is the second-largest jackpot in Mega Millions history and the third-largest in U.S. lottery history, Mega Millions lottery officials said. The $1.537 billion won by a person in South Carolina on Oct. 23, 2018 is still the world’s largest lotto prize ever awarded on a single ticket.

This is the 18th Mega Millions jackpot won in Michigan, according to a lottery press release. The last winner in the state shared the prize with a Rhode Island winner on Oct. 13, 2017. Until Friday night’s win, the largest lottery prize ever won by a Michigan player was a $337 million Powerball jackpot. Donald Lawson, of Lapeer, won it on Aug. 15, 2012. On April 22, 2005, Port Huron couple Ralph and Mary Stebbins, won $208 million playing Mega Millions — it was the largest Mega Millions prize ever won in the state.

Michigan is one of the original founding members of Mega Millions.

“About 97 cents of every dollar spent on Lottery tickets is returned to the state in the form of contributions to the state School Aid Fund, prizes to players and commissions to vendors and retailers,” the state lottery said in a statement. “In the 2019 fiscal year, the Lottery provided more than $1 billion for Michigan’s public schools, its fifth record contribution in a row. Since it began in 1972, the Lottery has contributed more than $23 billion to support public education in Michigan.”

The Match 5 winners were two people in Florida, one in Maryland, one in Missouri, one in New Jersey, one in New York and two in Pennsylvania. Each will take home $1 million. Also, two people — one in North Carolina and one in Virginia — won the Match 5 + Megaplier. Each will take home $2 million.

On Wednesday, a winning Powerball ticket worth $731.1 million was sold in Allegany County, Maryland. The ticket was the fourth-largest in Powerball history and the sixth-largest in U.S. lottery history. Lottery winners in Maryland have the right to remain anonymous.

The previous jackpot, which was worth $120 million, was won by a person in Wisconsin on Sept. 15, 2020.

Powerball’s jackpot is resetting to $20 million for Saturday’s drawing. The next drawing is on Tuesday, Jan. 26.

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Legendary talk show host Larry King dies at age 87

• No Comments • Entertainment News

Jordan Strauss/Getty Images(LOS ANGELES) — Legendary talk show host Larry King, whose career took him from local to syndicated radio to global TV stardom, has died at age 87.

A statement from King’s production company, Ora Media, posted on King’s official Twitter announced his death “with profound sadness,” saying King “passed away this morning at age 87 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.”  A spokesperson for King’s family also confirmed his death to ABC News.

On January 2, King was hospitalized for COVID-19 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, a source close to the King family told ABC News then.

King overcame several health challenges over the years, including a heart attack that led to bypass surgery and ultimately encouraged King to quit smoking. King also survived lung cancer and underwent surgery at Cedars-Sinai in 2017, and was treated for prostate cancer in 1999.

In 2019, King suffered a stroke that left him unable to walk on his left foot, and he was sometimes seen using a wheelchair afterward.” I never thought I’d be 86,” King told Page Six at the time. “My father died when he was 43, 44. I thought I would die too.”  “I have no complaints. Everything that’s happened to me, I’m grateful for,” he added. “Maybe that sounds cliché, but I’m really, really grateful.”

The award-winning newsman, whose lengthy career earned him the nickname “The Iron Horse of Broadcasting,” was known for his gravelly baritone, signature suspenders and straightforward questions, a style honed over the course of tens of thousands of interviews on the radio and television.

Born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger, the Brooklyn native wanted to be on the radio from a young age. After graduating high school, he got his first radio job in Florida in the 1950s. He got his first break on-air in Miami, where he became known by the moniker Larry King, which he ultimately made his legal name.

In 1978, King began hosting the nationally-syndicated The Larry King Show on the Mutual Broadcasting System, which he hosted for 16 years before stepping down in 1994.  During that time, he also made the move to TV, and hosted the CNN program Larry King Live from 1985 to 2010. Oprah Winfrey notably endorsed Barack Obama on the show during the 2008 presidential campaign.

In recent years, King hosted Larry King Now on Hulu, RT American and Ora TV, the latter a production company King co-founded with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim in 2012. King was also hosting the show Politicking with Larry King on the channels until his death.

King didn’t escape controversy over his decades-long career. Most recently, in 2019, he unknowingly filmed a Chinese propaganda infomercial in a fake interview with a Russian journalist, as reported by ProPublica. “I never should have done it, obviously,” King told the publication then.

King was recognized with two Peabody Awards and one Emmy Award, among other honors. He was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1989 and the Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 1992.

King has also authored several books, did voice work in TV shows and movies, including Shrek 2 and Bee Movie, and made cameos in TV shows and films, including Ghostbusters.

In 1988, a year after he survived a heart attack, the newsman founded the Larry King Cardiac Foundation to help those with heart disease pay for their medical treatment. 

A lifelong Dodgers fan, from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, King was often seen behind home plate at Dodgers Stadium.

King was married eight times to seven women and had five children. In August, 2020, he revealed that two of his children had died within weeks of each other. Andy, 65, died of a heart attack on July 28, 2020, and Chaia, 51, passed away on August 20 shortly after a lung cancer diagnosis.

King is survived by his sons, Larry, Chance and Cannon, as well as nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

By Meredith Deliso
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

States trying to ramp up vaccinations frustrated by shortages

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Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesBy STEPHANIE EBBS and CHEYENNE HASLETT, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — Governors and state health officials are facing a frustrating reality as they try to make more people eligible to get the COVID-19 vaccine: They can vaccinate only as many people as there are doses and the supply is falling short of demand.

“We can’t give you a vaccine shot if we don’t have the vaccines can we? We just can’t,” West Virginia GOP Gov. Jim Justice said Thursday, calling the situation “unacceptable.”

Health experts say speeding up vaccinations is critical to stopping the rapid spread of the virus, especially before new variants make the crisis worse.

“The amount of vaccine that comes into the state and is available to put into people’s arms is solely a federal solution,” Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said.

“It’s my hope that the president does everything in his power to increase production,” he said. “If we want to do this as quickly as possible, we need to have more.”

But even as the Biden administration pledges to amp up production of materials to administer vaccines — such as syringes — by using the Defense Production Act, it’s unclear how much faster vaccine doses can be made.

The two types of vaccines available now – made by Pfizer and Moderna –have never before been manufactured on such a massive scale. And while production is expected to increase this spring – Moderna has promised 100 million doses by the end of March with April considered the month the general public will be offered shots – the vaccine makers do not publicize weekly or monthly estimates.

“I don’t think by late February we’re going to have vaccine in every pharmacy in this country,” Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told NBC “Today” Show this week.

Meanwhile, almost 60% of older Americans say they don’t know how or when they can get the vaccine, according to a poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and only 3 in 10 adults in the poll gave the federal government positive marks on the vaccine rollout.

Until more people can be vaccinated with the limited supply, state and local leaders are left urging residents to be patient.

“There’s a natural bottleneck for vaccine production, you know. We’re not going to see a doubling of vaccine availability anytime soon. So I do want to temper expectations that it’s going to take a little while, almost certainly, to really see much increase in our vaccine supply,” Mississippi State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs said.

The federal government anticipated that there would be challenges supplying enough vaccine for all Americans even with Operation Warp Speed’s efforts with vaccine companies to start producing doses even before any vaccines were authorized by the FDA.

Expecting a short supply initially, the CDC recommended that only specific groups of essential frontline workers or older Americans would be eligible during “phases” of distribution, helping to limit the demand to smaller populations at a time.

But in the final days of the Trump administration, the federal government called on states to expand eligibility so as to stop new cases and boost vaccination numbers

The directive sparked criticism of backlogs in states, but states said they were out of doses to give. Governors accused the Trump administration of creating the false expectations by promising to release a reserve of vaccine that had been released weeks ago.

“When they said they were opening it up to 65 plus, they also said they were going to increase supply and production, right. That’s when they said they were going to free up their reserves because they had more reserves and they were going to increase production. That never happened either, which made it worse,” New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a briefing Friday.

Cuomo said the state will use all of the doses allocated to them in the first five weeks as of Friday and will now only have one week’s supply of vaccine at a time. The state and New York City have had to cancel some vaccine appointments as the supply fluctuated but Cuomo urged providers not to book people for appointments until they know the amount of vaccine they’ll receive.

The CDC’s vaccine tracker shows states have vastly improved their ability to get vaccines out and into the arms of people who qualify — boosting arguments by governors who say they’ve worked out the kinks in distribution and are just looking for more supply.

As of Friday, nearly every state in the country had reported administering vaccines to more than 4,000 people per 100,000, a per capita measurement that shows the speed of vaccine injections regardless of how big or small a state’s population is.

Aside from Nevada and Alabama, every state has reported administering at this level, per the tracker, while some states, including Connecticut, Oklahoma and Colorado, have begun vaccinating more.

The Biden administration, just two days in, now holds the responsibility for muddling through the confusion, which they so far haven’t been able to answer for.

“What we’ve really got to do is go into the trenches, and I’ve said this so many times, and figure out, what is it that’s the cause of what we’re hearing, that sometimes doses are not being given and they’re hanging around, and another state is saying, we need more doses,” Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, said on CNN on Friday.

Asked how the public is supposed to understand the dysfunction in the system if Fauci doesn’t, he told CNN that he honestly doesn’t know.

“I have to tell you honestly, I don’t know right now. We have to go back and figure out what that is. And the important thing is to fix it,” Fauci said.

Governors are now working directly with the Biden administration to better understand their plans and push for changes to the process like notifying states further in advance how much vaccine they will receive each week.

“We would welcome the federal government coming in and setting up mass sites, but only if it means more vaccine is coming to Ohio,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said in a letter to Biden reported by the Dayton Daily News.

And governors like Justice say they’ll be pushing the administration to do anything they can to protect more people in their state.

“It is one thing and one thing alone is today, today right now if they send us vaccines we’ll put them in somebody’s arm. And as soon as we put them in somebody’s arm it’s going to be saving somebody’s life,” he said.

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Disney moves 'The King's Man', 'Bob's Burgers' film, as COVID-19 shut-downs continue

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“The King’s Man” – 20th Century Films(LOS ANGELES) — Disney has followed Sony’s suit, and on Friday steered a slew of big releases away from theaters, many of which are still shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The titles, from Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight, include the thrice-bumped Kingsman prequel The King’s Man; that film, due out last year and delayed to try to avoid the pandemic, will now move from March 12 to August 20, Variety notes. 

A big-screen bow of Fox’s hit animated show Bob’s Burgers was to open April 9, but now has been removed entirely from the 2021 schedule. 

Other titles include the animated Ron’s Gone Wrong, which went from April 23 to October 22, the thriller Antlers, and the Jessica Chastain-led biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye; the former title will now open October 29, while the latter is set for September 24. 

The elephant in the room, however wasn’t mentioned: Marvel’s Black Widow. The standalone adventure of Scarlett Johansson’s titular Avenger and super-spy was to open May 1, 2020, before it was bumped to November of last year, and then into 2021; so far, its latest release date is still slated for May 7, 2021.

Other big Disney releases that haven’t yet changed include other 2020 refugees like Free Guy with Ryan Reynolds on May 21; Cruella with Emma Stone on May 28; Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on July 9, and Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt’s Jungle Cruise on July 30.

Disney is the parent company of ABC News.

By Stephen Iervolino
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.