Cardi B may have teamed with Megan Thee Stallion, DJ Khaled, Latto and a few other mainstream stars, but being a big-name artist isn’t a requirement if you want to collab with the Bronx rapper.
While addressing fans’ desire for her to “do big collabs,” Cardi explained how she decides to jump on a song with an artist.
“I’m not gonna be collaborating because I feel like y’all constantly ask me to do big collabs. I’m not gonna be collabing with everybody that’s big. I’m gonna be collabing with people that make my f****** ears jump and make me happy,” she said during a recent Instagram Live.
The rapper noted fans are constantly requesting she feature on songs that are charting but said her decision to hop on a track is based on whether she’s a fan of the record. “If I like it, I’m gonna get on it even if it doesn’t make sense,” Cardi told viewers, adding she’s “at a comfortable space for her to do so.”
Cardi went on to express that her “confidence is all the way up” and she doesn’t care what others think when it comes to her decisions in music. “[People] start shaking when they hear I’m gonna drop something,” the rapper said, noting that’s regardless of whether the song is big or small.
Cardi B recently hopped on Latto’s “Put It On Da Floor Again,” which dropped earlier this month. The song has since debuted at #13 on the Billboard Hot 100.
(NEW YORK) — Ways to lose weight have been trending with the rising popularity and success stories of certain drugs that help with weight loss, such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, and more people turning to supplements like berberine, deemed “nature’s Ozempic.”
Still, many people who have obesity report struggling to sustain weight loss.
Now, new research shows that it’s not just about willpower to lose weight and keep it off: Experts say how your brain responds to food may make a big difference.
A recent study published in Nature Metabolism found that the brain responds to nutrients differently in people who have obesity, even after meaningful weight loss.
Researchers studied 60 participants over 40 years old; half had a diagnosis of obesity and half did not.
To understand how the brain responds to food in these two groups, different solutions containing glucose, lipids or water alone were directly infused into participants’ stomachs on separate days. Brain responses were then measured with functional MRI scans for about 30 minutes post-infusion, and researchers also measured hormonal levels in the blood and participant-reported hunger scores.
The results showed that the group of participants without obesity had appropriate activation of reward centers in the brain in response to the nutrients.
Conversely, these same areas of the brain were not activated on the scan for participants with obesity.
This finding did not change after repeating the scan three months later in participants with obesity who experienced 10% diet-driven weight loss.
Experts say this lack of reward response could lead to overeating and make it difficult to change eating habits that can contribute to weight gain.
“This study really, really proves the biological and brain causes are contributions for overweight and obesity are really a real thing,” said Dr. Jennifer Ashton, ABC News chief medical correspondent and board-certified obesity medicine specialist.
While these findings further support what experts know to be true, that there’s more behind weight loss than willpower, researchers in the study caution there are important limitations.
It was only done in a relatively few number of adults over 40 years old, so it may not be generalizable to younger populations. And the study used a feeding tube to give the nutrients that doesn’t mimic how most people really eat or account for food choices, so these differences in the brain may not hold true in all circumstances.
Experts also emphasize that these findings do not guarantee someone with obesity can’t lose weight and keep that weight off even in the setting of these changes. Ashton adds that she hopes studies like this one fuel more targeted treatments for people who are overweight or have obesity, and add to evidence supporting why medications that are used for weight loss, like Wegovy, are proving to work so well for some people.
“I think it represents a possibility for target and intervention starting in the brain with those hormonal signals of hunger and satiety, and that’s what a lot of these FDA-approved weight loss drugs are doing,” Ashton said.
Dr. Jade A Cobern, M.D., M.P.H., board-eligible in pediatrics and resident in General Preventive Medicine at Johns Hopkins, is a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.
The singer released her new single, “Attention,” on Friday, June 16. It’s the lead single off her untitled, upcoming fourth studio album, which she has been teasing for weeks with The Scarlet Letter-themed references over on Twitter.
Early Friday morning, she tweeted “scarlet is here” in upside down text that follows a blood drip emoji as a way to announce the song had dropped.
“Show you how to touch it, hold it like it’s precious/ It don’t need your lovin’, it just needs attention,” she sings on the track.
Doja Cat also released a music video with the song, which features the singer driving a car through hordes of screaming fans, before strutting down a city street at night.
“Attention” also includes a reference to Nicki Minaj.
“Why she think she Nicki M? She think she hot s***/ Huh, I never gave an F, go stir the pot b****,” Doja Cat raps.
The singer’s upcoming album will serve as the follow-up to her wildly successful breakthrough 2021 project, Planet Her, which spawned hits like “Need to Know” and “Woman.”
(DES MOINES, Iowa) — The Iowa Supreme Court prevented a six-week abortion ban that was signed into law several years ago from going into effect.
The court was split in a 3-3 decision Friday on the case, meaning abortion remains legal in Iowa.
The 2018 bill, which was signed into law by Gov. Kim Reynolds, prevents abortions from being performed once cardiac activity can be detected, which typically occurs around six weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they’re pregnant.
However, the law was struck down by a district court in January 2019, which ruled that the law violated the Iowa Constitution and that there was no state interest in banning abortions so early in pregnancy.
In that ruling, Polk County District Judge Michael Huppert referenced a 2018 Iowa Supreme Court decision in regard to a different bill that attempted to restrict abortion, in which the justices had written “a woman’s right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy is a fundamental right under the Iowa Constitution.”
Currently, abortion is banned in the state after 22 weeks, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group focusing on sexual and reproductive health.
Patients who want an abortion in Iowa must have one in-person counseling sessions and then return at least 24 hours later for the abortion.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, Iowa’s highest court in June 2022 reversed the 2018 decision and concluded that abortion is not protected by the state constitution.
Since the 2018 decision, the composition of the state Supreme Court had shifted with Reynolds, a Republican, appointing four of the seven justices.
But the court disagreed that it could revive a law that had been struck down years prior.
“The State appealed [the January 2019 ruling], and now asks our court to do something that has never happened in Iowa history: to simultaneously bypass the legislature and change the law, to adopt rational basis review, and then to dissolve an injunction to put a statute into effect for the first time in the same case in which that very enactment was declared unconstitutional years earlier,” Justice Thomas Waterman wrote in the court’s decision Friday.
The justice added, “In our view, it is legislating from the bench to take a statute that was moribund when it was enacted and has been enjoined for four years and then to put it into effect.”
If the court had decided in favor of the ban, Iowa would have joined several others states that have passed so-called “heartbeat bills” in the past including Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota and Texas.
Ohio and South Carolina have also passed six-week abortion bans, but both are currently facing legal challenges.
Abortion rights groups, including Planned Parenthood Advocates of Iowa, praised the decision. The group wrote on Twitter, “The Iowa Supreme Court just preserved abortion access in Iowa by blocking a near-total abortion ban from taking effect. This is a resounding victory for Iowans and reproductive freedom. #BansOffOurBodies”
Reynolds criticized the court, saying it failed to exercise its authority.
“To say that today’s lack of action by the Iowa Supreme Court is a disappointment is an understatement,” she wrote in a statement. “Not only does it disregard Iowa voters who elected representatives willing to stand up for the rights of unborn children, but it has sided with a single judge in a single county who struck down Iowa’s legislation based on principles that now have been flat-out rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. There is no fundamental right to abortion and any law restricting it should be reviewed on a rational basis standard — a fact acknowledged today by three of the justices. Still, without an affirmative decision, there is no justice for the unborn.”
Since Roe was overturned, providers in states like Iowa are struggling with worker shortages and other barriers to keeping their doors open. In data provided exclusively to FiveThirtyEight by #WeCount — a national research project led by the Society of Family Planning, a nonprofit that supports research on abortion and contraception — of the eight remaining clinics in Iowa and Nebraska, four had no available appointments, three had wait times between four and five weeks and one had an appointment available in one to two weeks in April.
The data also indicated that there were 24,290 fewer legal abortions between July 2022 and March 2023, compared to a pre-Dobbs baseline.
Queen is back with episode 21 of their weekly YouTube series, Queen The Greatest Live, and this week they are delving into what it takes to adapt their studio creations for the stage, turning them into live classics.
“I think there’s various processes. Sometimes you’re in the middle of writing a song in the studio and you think, ‘How would that be live?’ And it actually informs your recording process because you’ve fashioned it towards being a sort of live-feeling kind of track,” Brian May shares. “Other songs not.”
For example, May discusses the process of rearranging the difficult piano ballad “Love Of My Life” into an acoustic number for the stage, which has become a highlight of Queen’s live show. He also reveals how the classic “We Will Rock You” transformed when performed live.
May notes that while the song doesn’t have any drums on the album, live it has “become a drum extravaganza.”
“The stamping and clapping thing has evolved into a completely incomprehensible situation because some people will go ‘bump bump punch,’ some people go ‘boom, boom, punch,’” he says. “But it doesn’t matter, because the physicality is there and they sing it, and obviously it’s a staple — it’s always going to be with us, same with ‘Champions.’”
He adds, “So yeah, it’s moments of discovery. I love waking up in the middle of the night and thinking, ‘Oh, we can do this. We could do this.’ And you go in, ‘Can we try this?’ And then you go, ‘Actually, yeah, that could work, that can pretty much work.’”
(PITTSBURGH) — A verdict has been reached in the federal death penalty trial of Robert Bowers, who is accused of killing 11 worshippers in a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
Bowers allegedly stormed the Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018, gunning down 11 people in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. Bowers allegedly told investigators after his arrest that he wanted to kill Jewish people, according to a criminal complaint.
Prosecutors said Bowers, armed with a semi-automatic assault-style rifle and three handguns, moved “methodically” through the synagogue and shot many of his victims at close range.
In opening statements in May, defense attorney Judy Clarke admitted that Bowers was the shooter and said he “shot every person he saw … and injured first responders who came to their rescue.”
“There will be no question that this was a planned act and that he killed 11 people,” Clarke said, but she asked the jurors to “scrutinize his intent.”
Bowers faces 63 charges, including 11 counts of hate crimes resulting in death. Bowers offered to plead guilty if the death penalty was taken off the table, but prosecutors turned him down.
The jury, comprised of 11 women and seven men, includes an intensive care nurse, a new father and a veteran.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(MINNEAPOLIS) — The Minneapolis Police Department for years engaged in a pattern of discriminatory law enforcement practices against Black and Native American people, using unnecessary excessive force and violating the rights of protesters expressing their First Amendment rights, a more than two-year investigation by the Justice Department released Friday found.
The results of the sweeping ‘pattern-or-practice’ investigation, prompted in part because of the police killing of George Floyd that sparked racial justice protests across the country in 2020, show that “the systemic problems in MPD made what happened to [Floyd] possible,” the department said in its final report.
The systemic problems continued despite reform efforts, the report said.
Attorney General Merrick Garland traveled to Minneapolis Friday to announce the findings.
“As I told George Floyd’s family this morning, his death has had an irrevocable impact on the Minneapolis Community, and our country and on the world. His loss is still felt deeply by those who loved and knew him and by many who did not. George Floyd should be alive today,” Garland said.
“We observed many MPD officers who did their difficult work with professionalism, courage, and respect. But the patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible,” he said. “As one city leader told us, ‘These systemic issues didn’t just occur on May 25, 2020. There were instances like that, that we’re being reported by the community long before that.'”
“We also found that MPD officers routinely disregard the safety of people in their custody. Our review found numerous incidents in which MPD officers responded to a person saying that they could not breathe with a version of, ‘You can breathe, you’re talking right now,'” Garland said.
In vivid detail during his remarks, Garland described some of the disturbing conduct investigators found.
In 2017 an MPD officer “shot and killed an unarmed woman who he said had “spooked him” when she approached his squad car,” Garland said.
“The woman had called 911 to report a possible sexual assault in a nearby alley,” he said.
The report also outlines how MPD officers stop, search and use force against people who are Black and Native American at disproportionate rates.
“The data showed, for example, that MPD stopped black and Native American people nearly six times more often than white people in situations that did not result in arrest or citation,” Garland said.
At times, officers reported for racist conduct or remarks were not held accountable until there was public outcry, he said.
In one stop of a car full of four Somali American teens, one officer told them, “Do you remember what happened in Black Hawk Down when we killed a bunch of your folk? I’m proud of that. We didn’t finish the job over there. If we had you guys wouldn’t be over here.”
“Such conduct is deeply disturbing, and it erodes the community’s trust in law enforcement,” Garland said.
Investigators found the MPD used unjustified deadly force in encounters with suspects, engaged in unreasonable use of force in encounters with young suspects and at times failed to give proper medical aid to people they had taken into custody.
After Floyd’s murder at the hands of Officer Derek Chauvin and as the MPD’s policing practices fell under increased scrutiny, officers suddenly stopped reporting the race and gender of suspects they encountered in law enforcement actions, the report showed, with the percentage of recorded race data dropping from around 71% of encounters to about 35% afterwards through the next two years.
In 2021, Chauvin was convicted of state murder and manslaughter charges and later pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges both for Floyd’s murder and for holding a 14-year-old teen by the throat and beating him in 2017. A federal jury found three other officers involved in the encounter with Floyd guilty of federal civil rights offenses for failing to save him.
A separate state investigation into MPD resulted in a consent decree returned in March that required the department to implement widespread changes after disturbing findings of race discrimination and excessive force by police.
The DOJ report examines the MPD’s use of neck restraints, like the one used by Chauvin against Floyd, and found “numerous incidents” where officers used them even in situations that did not result in an arrest or where they were otherwise unjustified. Of nearly 200 encounters between 2016 and 2022 where neck restraints were used against suspects, officers did not make an arrest in 44 of them, the report shows.
And although in June 2020 the MPD banned the use of all neck restraints and chokeholds, the policy met “considerable resistance” from officers in the force and the DOJ investigation found MPD officers continued to use neck restraints since the ban was implemented, including against racial justice protesters.
The report also paints a concerning portrait of MPD’s abilities to repair its strained relationship with the broader public, pointing to instances where officers found to have committed misconduct were never disciplined and complaints from members of the public went disregarded.
One officer told DOJ investigators that morale in the department is “at an all time low,” which is reflected in the increasingly depleted ranks of MPD. As of May 2023, there were 585 sworn MPD officers, the report says, down from 892 in 2018.
The more than two-year investigation included interviews with more than 2000 community members and local organizations, the report says, including family members of people killed by MPD officers. Investigators also interviewed dozens of MPD officers, reviewed thousands of documents detailing police encounters and participated in more than 50 ride-alongs.
Friday’s report includes several disturbing details of racist comments by MPD officers that were described to investigators or captured on video.
In one protest in May 2020 following Floyd’s murder, a lieutenant was caught on camera saying, “I’d love to scatter ’em but it’s time to fu—-‘ put people in jail and just prove the mayor wrong about his white supremacists from out of state,” the officer is heard saying. “Although, this group probably is predominantly white, ‘cuz there’s not looting and fires.”
At times, officers would invoke racist stereotypes in their encounters with suspects, with one officer purportedly telling an arrestee, “we’ll get you Popeyes in a minute.”
One Black officer said he regularly heard his white colleagues making racist remarks, calling Black people “ghetto,” saying “Black people don’t work,” and “you don’t have to worry about Black people during the day ‘cuz they haven’t woken up — crime starts at night.”
Garland previously traveled to Louisville just last March to announce a disturbing series of findings out of the DOJ’s investigation into the Louisville Metro Police Department, that found police engaged in a pattern of violating citizens’ civil rights by conducting unlawful searches and discriminating against residents based on race.
David Bowie released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The album featured such future Bowie classics as “Starman” and “Suffragette City.”
The tale of a bisexual alien rock star sent to save mankind initially received mixed reviews, but was later hailed as one of the greatest, most influential albums of all time.
Bowie remained in character as Ziggy for his Ziggy Stardust Tour, with his final performance in character taking place July 3, 1973, at London’s Odeon Theater.
To mark the 50th anniversary of that final performance, a special world premiere screening of a restored version of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture is set to happen July 3 at London’s Eventim Apollo Hammersmith, which was formerly the Odeon. The event will be livestreamed in theaters in the U.K. and Europe, with worldwide screenings planned throughout July.
(NEW YORK) — “Lottery lawyer” Jason Kurland promised his clients protection from swindlers but he ended up swindling them himself, a federal judge said Thursday as he sentenced Kurland to 13 years in federal prison for defrauding clients out of more than $107 million.
“They were lucky winners, but when they got Mr. Kurland, they were losers,” Judge Nicholas Garaufis said before handing down a sentence that was higher than what prosecutors sought.
“When they won the lottery, they were very vulnerable,” Assistant United States Attorney Olga Zverovitch said. “They needed guidance and they needed help. Instead, he exploited his clients’ trust.”
Kurland was convicted last July of fraud, conspiracy and unlawful monetary transactions. He steered his clients, winners of some of the biggest lottery jackpots ever in the U.S., into investments in companies that, unbeknownst to them, he owned or were owned by co-conspirators in the scheme, who siphoned money for themselves and paid Kurland secret kickbacks.
When risky investment strategies involving jewelry deals resulted in big losses, Kurland doubled down, convincing clients to invest in COVID-19 personal protective equipment deals, at least two of which were brokered by one of his co-defendants.
The victims were not identified by name, but prosecutors said they included the winners of a then-record $1.5 billion Mega Millions jackpot, a $245 million Powerball jackpot and a $150 million Powerball jackpot.
“I am so deeply sorry,” Kurland said through tears. “I stand here before the court deeply regretful.”
The 13-year prison sentence “far exceeds what’s necessary,” the defense said.
“The numbers are gargantuan,” defense attorney Tim Kasulis said. “We ask for whatever mercy we can.”
Kurland must report to prison no later than Oct. 18.
