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Day: March 2, 2026
Reading Time: 3 minutes
As you very likely know by now, Eric Dane died last month at the age of 53.
As you also likely know at this point, the veteran actor — best known for roles in Grey’s Anatomy and Euphoria — had been diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
According to the star’s official death certificate, meanwhile, we can now confirm that Dane died from respiratory failure… with ALS listed as an underlying cause of death.
Dane is survived by his wife, Rebecca Gayheart, and their two kids: Billie Beatrice, 15, and Georgia Geraldine, 13.
Dane’s family previously confirmed the actor’s death on February 19.
“With heavy hearts, we share that Eric Dane passed on Thursday afternoon following a courageous battle with ALS,” his family wrote at the time.
“He spent his final days surrounded by dear friends, his devoted wife and his two beautiful daughters, Billie and Georgia, who were the center of his world. Throughout his journey with ALS, Eric became a passionate advocate for awareness and research, determined to make a difference for others facing the same fight.
“He will be deeply missed and lovingly remembered always. Eric adored his fans and is forever grateful for the outpouring of love and support he’s received.
“The family has asked for privacy as they navigate this impossible time.”
Also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS is a progressive degenerative disease that affects the nerve cells, leading to eventual paralysis of the muscles, according to the Mayo Clinic. There is no cure.
Toward the end of his life, Dane had basically lost the ability to speak.
“I have been diagnosed with ALS,” Dane said in April 2025. “I am grateful to have my loving family by my side as we navigate this next chapter.
“I feel fortunate that I am able to continue working and am looking forward to returning to set of Euphoria next week. I kindly ask that you give my family and I privacy during this time.”
Since Dane’s passing, a number of celebrities have posted messages of sympathy and sorrow on social media.
“I have no reason to be in a good spirit at any time, on any given day, I don’t think anybody would blame me if I went upstairs in my bedroom, crawled under the sheets, and spent the next two weeks crying,” Dane said in a virtual panel featuring I AM ALS and Synapticure co-founders Brian Wallach and Sandra Abrevaya for Giving Tuesday on December 2.
“I was a little bit pleasantly surprised when I realized that I wasn’t built like that, because I thought for sure that was gonna be me…
“It’s imperative that I share my journey with as many people as I can because I don’t feel like my life is about me anymore.”
Eric Dane’s Official Cause of Death Revealed, So Very Tragic was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.
The Hollywood Gossip
You know spring is in the air when season-appropriate foods hit store shelves. This returning Costco cake could make a nice addition to someone’s Easter menu.
Mashed – Fast Food, Celebrity Chefs, Grocery, Reviews
Categories
Signs You’re At A Bad Pizzeria
Unfortunately, not all pizzerias are created equal. If you know what to look for, however, a shop’s flaws are visible long before the first bite.
Food Republic – Restaurants, Reviews, Recipes, Cooking Tips
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We have tragic news to report from the world of reality television today.
Todd Meadows — a cast member on the popular Discovery reality show Deadliest Catch — has passed away.
He was just 25 years old.
News of Meadows’ passing comes courtesy of a social media post from another of the show’s stars, Captain Rick Shelford.
According to Shelford, Meadows died Wednesday aboard the Aleutian Lady on the Bering Sea.
“February 25, 2026 was the most tragic day in the history of the Aleutian Lady on the Bering Sea,” Shelford’s post reads.
“We lost our brother, Todd Meadows. Todd was the newest member of our crew, he quickly became family. His love for fishing and his strong work ethic earned everyone’s respect right away,” Shelford continued, adding:
Though little is known about Meadows’ personal life, Shelford revealed that he was a father:
“His smile was contagious, and the sound of his laughter coming up the wheelhouse stairs or over the deck hailer is something we will carry with us always,” Shelford wrote.
“Todd’s love for his children, his family, and his life was evident in everything he did. He worked hard, loved deeply, and brought joy to those around him,” he continued, adding:
“Right now, our hearts are broken in a way that words can’t fully express. We ask that you lift Todd’s children and family in prayer and keep them in your thoughts as they face the days ahead without him.
“Todd will forever be part of this boat, this crew, and this brotherhood. Though we lost him far too soon, his legacy will live on through his children and in every memory we carry of him. Rest easy brother, till we meet again.”
A GoFundMe page launched in Todd’s memory has already raised more than $12,000.
Our thoughts are with Todd Meadows’ family as they begin to try and process this terrible tragedy.
Todd Meadows Cause of Death: ‘Deadliest Catch’ Deckhand Was 25 was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.
The Hollywood Gossip
Dylan Marlowe and his wife Natalie have officially welcomed their twin boys into the world, marking the start of a brand-new chapter together as first-time parents.
The couple shared the exciting news on Monday afternoon (March 2), revealing the names of their baby boys: Case and Huck Marlowe. In a joint Instagram post, fans got a glimpse of the adorable hospital moments, with the twins snug in onesies embroidered with their names. The final photo captured a sweet at-home introduction, as the boys met their two furry siblings, Banks, a Boykin Spaniel, and Bailey, a Golden Retriever.
Their caption read, “Everybody meet Case and Huck Marlowe!!! Thank you Lord for this double blessing, our hearts and laps are full❤️🥹”
Fans first found out about their pregnancy in October, when they revealed they would soon be turning into a family of four. Shortly after they announced the gender of their twins, with a bit of help from their pups.
The gender reveal was captured on video and documented their raw reactions to finding out that two little boys would be joining their family. They called out to their two dogs, who ran over with a pair of blue balloons tied to them, causing Dylan and Naralie to express a mix of shock, joy and excitement.
From behind the camera, another voice delivered even more surprising news: their boys would be identical twins.
They wrote, “MARLOWE TWINS ARE …. thank you Jesus for little IDENTICAL boys !!!!! 🩵😭 I’m still not over it.”
After sharing that they had been struggling with infertility for nearly two years, the couple was especially overjoyed to reveal they weren’t just expecting one baby, but two. In December, Natalie shared on Instagram her gratitude for the incredible blessing of expecting twins after such a challenging journey.
“Last December I planned on announcing we were pregnant to my friends on my birthday. And our family on Christmas. It seemed like everyone else was. I just knew we would be pregnant by then. It would be a gift from God Himself on my birthday. But He had other plans,” she recalled. “If only I had known then what I know now. But that’s not how faith works. Faith is believing in a God who we will never see this side of Heaven. Several months later He answered our prayers in a double portion. Only God.”
The couple first crossed paths at a private Luke Combs and Brett Young concert, held during a birthday party in the backyard of one of Dylan Marlowe’s friends. At the time, Dylan admits that Natalie “did not want anything to do with me,” but he still managed to find a way to spark up a conversation and eventually exchanged numbers. Clearly, the plan worked because in May of 2023, they tied the knot in a beautiful ceremony in Nashville.
In between their preparations to welcome their babies home, Dylan Marlowe revealed he has also been working hard to create new music for his fans.
“Never been more excited about music in my life,” he teased in a recent post.
Has already released several songs that capture the sentiment and emotions surrounding this chapter of life, including “Picture Perfect,” “Coming Home Tomorrow,” and “Barefoot and Pregnant.”
Throughout the year, fans can catch Dylan Marlowe supporting select dates of Ella Langley’s The Dandelion Tour, beginning in May.
The post Dylan Marlowe and Wife Natalie Celebrate Arrival of Twin Boys, Case and Huck appeared first on Country Now.
Country Now
If you’re gearing up for a traditional feast, Irish soda bread should be at the top of your list. Here are the best ways to serve it alongside other favorites.
Mashed – Fast Food, Celebrity Chefs, Grocery, Reviews
Reading Time: 3 minutes
He’s been keeping a secret.
On social media, Jelly Roll and Bunnie Xo revealed that he has been in a terrible ATV accident.
(He has the X-rays to show that this was a bone-breaking mishap.)
Is he okay? Apparently so. And this mishap may explain a PR blunder from around the same time.
Oh no!
In January, just days before the Grammy Awards, Jason Bradley DeFord — whom we all know as Jelly Roll — suffered a terrible accident.
The controversial singer flipped his ATV.
The result was a broken collarbone.
If you’re only just hearing about this now, you’re not alone.
He kept it a secret until this past weekend.
Taking to his Instagram page, DeFord showed off his repaired ATV and shared a bit of recent history.
“Y’all just took this thing out for the first time since I flipped it,” he revealed.
“I broke my collarbone,” he announced.
Pacing around the vehicle, he confessed: “I was so scared to get back on this thing.”
DeFord reasoned: “I just knew if I didn’t get back on it sooner than later, I was just going to be more and more afraid of it.”
‘I thought I was gonna cry’
He had believed that he had “totaled” the vehicle. He credited one of his brothers for restoring the ATV to “brand new” condition.
As for why he chose this moment to share, he explained that it was the result of reflecting.
“I was just thinking, I was out there running all over the Grammys with a broken collarbone,” he recalled.
“Every time I hugged somebody that week, I wanted to scream,” DeFord admitted.
He added: “I just didn’t say it, but every time somebody squeezed me, dude, I thought I was gonna cry.”
Bunnie Xo also shared footage of her husband’s hospital visit.
“This happened in January, worst phone call to ever get,” she captioned on her Instagram post on Sunday.
“But we got thru it thank goodness,” she remarked.
And, Xo continued: “He’s healed completely.”
That is remarkable! Bone injuries, even particularly nasty bone bruises, can often take many months to heal.
Is this why he didn’t make good on his promise?
At the 2026 Grammy Awards, many award winners used their platforms to speak out against ICE’s ongoing campaign of terror in Minnesota and beyond.
DeFord essentially asked for a rain check, vowing to address ICE violence later that week.
He did not. It was odd to delay a statement already, whether or not he portrayed himself as too “dumb” to make a statement on the spot. It’s even weirder to skip the self-imposed deadline.
It’s possible that he simply asked for a delay because he was out of his mind with pain and didn’t feel up to saying anything coherent. (Many of us have been there, albeit with much smaller platforms.)
Still, it would be good (or possibly very bad) if he were to speak out now. We can all oppose fascist violence in our streets and in our neighbor’s homes.
Jelly Roll Reveals ‘Secret’ Hospitalization, Snapped Collarbone was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.
The Hollywood Gossip
United States midfielder Weston McKennie had his contract at Juventus extended on Monday so that he can spend a decade with the Turin club. The new deal expires in 2030 — 10 years after McKennie signed with Juventus. The extension was announced by Juventus and comes three months before a home World Cup for McKennie. It also comes with a reported salary increase from 2.5 million euros ($3 million) to 4 million euros ($4.7 million) per season, according to the Gazzetta dello Sport. The 27-year-old McKennie has 26 goals and provided 26 assists in 220 appearances for Juventus. He has also become a favorite of new Juventus coach Luciano Spalletti, who appreciates McKennie’s versatility — even fielding him at striker recently. McKennie has eight goals since Spalletti was hired in October — more than any other player in the squad. Reporting by The Associated Press.Latest Sports News from FOX Sports
Shortly after the opening salvo of U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, 2026 – with missiles targeting cities across the country, some of which killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – President Donald Trump declared the objective was to destroy Iran’s military capabilities and give rise to a change in government.
Framing the operation as a war of liberation, Trump called on Iranians to “take over your government.”
In the first days alone, Israel dropped over 2,000 bombs on Iranian targets, equal to half the tonnage of the 12-day Israel-Iran conflict in June 2025. Heavy U.S. bombing, meanwhile, has targeted Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as well as ballistic missile and aerial defense sites.
The destruction is real. But, as an international relations scholar, I know that destruction is not the same as political success. And the historical record of U.S. bombing campaigns aimed at regime change shows that the gap between the two – the point at which Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya campaigns all stalled – is where wars go to die.
Destruction is not strategy
Decades of scholarship dating back to World War I on using air power to force political change has established a consistent finding: Bombing can degrade military capacity and destroy infrastructure, but it does not produce governments more cooperative with the attacker.
Political outcomes require political processes – negotiation, institution-building, legitimate transitions of power.
Bombs cannot create any of these. Instead, what they reliably create is destruction, and destruction generates its own dynamics: rallying among the population, power vacuums, radicalization and cycles of retaliation.
The American record confirms this. In 2003, the George W. Bush administration launched “Shock and Awe” in Iraq with the explicit aim of regime change. The military objective was achieved in weeks. The political objective was never achieved at all.
The U.S. decision to disband the Iraqi army created a vacuum filled not by democratic reformers but by sectarian militias and eventually ISIS. The regime that eventually emerged was not friendly to American interests. It was deeply influenced by Iran.
In 2011, the Obama administration led a NATO air campaign in Libya that quickly expanded from civilian protection into regime change. Dictator Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown and killed.
But there was no plan for political transition. Chaos and political instability have endured since. Asked what his “worst mistake” was as president, Barack Obama said, “Probably failing to plan for the day after, what I think was the right thing to do, in intervening in Libya.” Libya remains a failed state today.
The intervention also sent a powerful signal to countries pursuing nuclear weapons: Gaddhafi had dismantled his nuclear program in 2003. Eight years later, NATO destroyed his regime.
Even Kosovo, often cited as the success story of coercive air power, undermines the case. Seventy-eight days of NATO bombing did not, by themselves, compel Slobodan Milosevic, president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to withdraw.
What changed was the credible threat of a ground invasion combined with Russia’s withdrawal of diplomatic support. The political outcome – contested statehood, ongoing ethnic tensions – is hardly the stable governance that air power advocates promise.
The pattern is consistent: The United States repeatedly confuses its unmatched capacity to destroy from the air with the ability to dictate political outcomes.
Why this war?
The recent U.S. attacks on Iran raise a fundamental question: Why is the United States fighting this war at all?
The administration has declared regime change as its objective, justifying the campaign on the grounds of Iran’s nuclear program and missile capabilities.
But that nuclear program was being actively negotiated in Geneva days before the strikes. And Iran’s foreign minister told NBC the two sides were close to a deal. Then the bombs fell.
Iran did not attack America. And it currently does not have the capability to threaten the American homeland. What Iran challenges is Israel’s regional military dominance, and I believe it is Israel’s objective of neutralizing a rival that is driving this operation.
Israel targeted 30 senior Iranian leaders in the opening strikes. Israeli officials described it as a preemptive attack to “remove threats to the State of Israel.” I see the strategic logic for these killings as Israel’s, and Americans are absorbing the costs.
U.S. military bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have taken Iranian missile fire. American service members are in harm’s way – three have already been killed – not because Iran attacked them, but I believe because their president committed them to someone else’s war without a clear endgame.
AFP via Getty Images
Each coercive step in this conflict – from the 2018 withdrawal from the nuclear deal, to the 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander, to the June 2025 strikes – was framed as restoring leverage.
Each produced the opposite, eliminating diplomatic off-ramps, accelerating the very threats it aimed to contain.
The regime is not one man
Decapitation strikes assume that removing a leader removes the obstacle to political change. But Iran’s political system is institutional — the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts and the Revolutionary Guard have survived for four decades.
The system has succession mechanisms, but they were designed for orderly transitions, not for active bombardment. The group most likely to fill the vacuum is the Revolutionary Guard, whose institutional interest lies in escalation, not accommodation.
There is a deeper irony. The largest protests since 1979 swept Iran just weeks ago. A genuine domestic opposition was growing. The strikes have almost certainly destroyed that movement’s prospects.
Decades of research on rally-around-the-flag effects – the tendency of populations to unite behind their government when attacked by a foreign power – confirms that external attacks fuse regime and nation, even when citizens despise their leaders.
Iranians who were chanting “death to the dictator” are now watching foreign bombs fall on their cities during Ramadan, hearing reports of over 100 children killed in a strike on a girls school in Minab.
Trump’s call for Iranians to “seize control of your destiny” echoes a familiar pattern. In 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister in the name of freedom.
That produced the Shah, the Shah’s brutal reign led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the revolution produced the Islamic Republic now being bombed.
What comes next? And what guarantee is there that whatever emerges will be any friendlier to Israel or the United States?
What does success look like?
This is the question no one in Washington has answered. If the objective is regime change, who governs 92 million people after?
If the objective is stability, why are American bases across the Middle East absorbing missile fire?
There is no American theory of political endgame in Iran — only a theory of destruction. That theory has been tested in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – and Iran itself over the preceding eight months. It has failed every time, not because of poor execution, but because the premise is flawed.
Air power can raze a government’s infrastructure. It cannot build the political order that must replace it. Iran, with its sophisticated military, near-nuclear capability, proxy networks spanning the region and a regime now martyred by foreign attack, will likely not be the exception.
U.S. law prohibits the assassination of foreign leaders, and instead Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader while American warplanes filled the skies overhead. Washington has called the result freedom at hand, but it has not answered the only question that matters: What comes next?
Farah N. Jan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Politics + Society – The Conversation