The R&B icon, who shares six-year-old son Eissa with ex-husband Wissam Al Mana, couldn’t help but gush when asked about how motherhood is treating her.
“He’s great. I love it,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “I love it. I absolutely love it. I wish I had two more babies! I’m just thankful God gave me Eissa. I’m very fortunate.”
Another thing Jackson feels fortunate to have is her lengthy career. This year marks the “Rhythm Nation” singer’s 50th year in the music industry.
“This one’s special,” she said. “I started young, but it means a great deal to me to still have God allow me to do what it is that I do. I’m so appreciative. And for the people to still be interested to come and see what it is that that I do, that we do. I’m very, very fortunate and very appreciative.”
Jackson, who is currently on her Together Again tour, also shared that she loves seeing the “different generations” at her shows.
“I meet some of the fans backstage after the show. And they’ll say, ‘You know, I first saw you when I was such and such age, and my mother took me and now my daughter and my son, and I’m bringing them to the show and they watch your videos.’ So it’s always nice to have the different generations,” she expressed.
(MILAN) — A parked van exploded in a busy section of central Milan in Italy on Thursday morning.
The carabinieri — or Italian police — said that it was not clear what caused the van to explode in the Porta Romana neighborhood of the city and that no further details are currently available.
The explosion left several other nearby vehicles on fire as black smoke billowed into the sky in the downtown area.
(NEW YORK) — Former President Donald Trump sat down for a prime-time town hall on CNN on Wednesday, a day after he was found liable for battery and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll civil case.
A New York jury awarded Carroll a total of $5 million in the lawsuit, finding that they found Trump did not rape Carroll but sexually abused her. When directly asked Wednesday night about the verdict by moderator Kaitlan Collins, CNN This Morning anchor and former CNN chief White House correspondent, Trump continued to deny knowing Carroll, at one point declaring “I swear on my children.”
In the exchange with Collins, Trump also mocked the version of the sexual assault incident that Carroll’s lawyers told jurors.
The live town hall was held in New Hampshire, home to the first-in-the-nation GOP primary. The audience at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown was made up of Republicans and undeclared voters — those who are not registered as Democrats or Republicans — who plan to vote in the state’s 2024 GOP presidential primary, CNN said. No questions were off the table, Collins said Wednesday night.
In addition to the Carroll case, myriad legal issues loom over the twice-impeached former president’s third White House bid. Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury last month, becoming the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges. He pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Trump additionally faces multiple investigations, including into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
During the roughly hour-long town hall, Collins asked Trump if he still has any classified documents in his possession.
“I don’t have any,” Trump responded. “I have no classified documents.”
Trump, the current GOP primary front-runner, is the first candidate CNN provided a town hall setting to as part of a series of such forums during the 2024 presidential cycle. It marks the first time Trump appeared on CNN since the 2016 presidential campaign.
Critics of CNN said it should not be giving Trump a live, prime-time platform — normalizing him as just another presidential candidate — while CNN has stated it was only giving Trump the same platform it would be giving other 2024 presidential hopefuls.
President Joe Biden took to social media following the town hall to campaign for his re-election bid, tweeting: “It’s simple, folks. Do you want four more years of that? If you don’t, pitch in to our campaign.”
(NEW YORK) — Uber will soon allow customers to book plane tickets directly through its app.
The new feature powered by online travel agent Hopper will roll out for users in the United Kingdom this summer. Customers can enter their destination and travel dates, select their desired flights and then pay directly on the Uber app. The company said users will also be able to choose their seat assignments in the app on flights with major carriers.
U.K. users can already book cars, buses, trains and boat transportation through the app.
Uber would not say if the program will be launched in the U.S.
“For now, we’re focused on piloting this ticketing feature in the U.K. and we’ll be closely monitoring customer engagement before we commit to a timeline to expand the feature to other markets,” a spokesperson from Uber told ABC News.
(NEW YORK) — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is taking drastic measures to limit pollutants coming from industries that cause the most environmental harm in an effort to bring the country closer to its climate goals.
The EPA plans to announce Thursday new regulation to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, which are currently unregulated despite being the second-largest source of emissions in the country.
The new rule will apply to some, but not all, existing natural gas power plants. It will also apply to any new natural gas plants as well as facilities that burn coal or oil, according to the EPA.
“The proposed limits and guidelines would require ambitious reductions in carbon pollution based on proven and cost-effective control technologies that can be applied directly to power plants,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a briefing with reporters on Wednesday.
The power sector produced 25% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2021. The rule, which is expected to go into effect in 2030, allows power plants to use carbon capture to reduce their emissions while continuing to burn fossil fuels.
The administration says tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act will help reduce the cost of carbon capture technology, which up to this point has been seen as too expensive for wide-scale deployment.
The rule will prevent up to 617 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions through 2042, the equivalent of reducing the emissions of half the cars in the U.S., the EPA said. It would also generate an estimated $85 billion in net benefits to the climate and health benefits from reducing other types of pollution.
The power sector has reduced its emissions 35% since 2005, according to the EPA.
The federal rule is another push toward making the country’s power sector completely carbon-free, Brian Murray, director of Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability at Duke University, told reporters on Wednesday.
“I think this is going to lead to over the next two decades, fossil units that are still around are going to be they’re going to have adopted some technology to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” Murray added.
This is not the first time the federal government has attempted to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants but there are no current regulations in place. The centerpiece proposal from the Obama administration, the Clean Power Plan, never went into effect.
The Supreme Court ruled last year that law went too far and exceeded EPA’s authority by telling utilities they had to shift power generation away from fossil fuels.
Under the Biden Administration, the EPA is taking a more straightforward approach by saying that power plants must reduce their emissions but leaving the decision of how to do that up to companies. EPA projects that some coal power plants will retire as a result of this rule but those decisions will be made by the companies, not the government.
That decision forced EPA to focus on more traditional approaches to controlling pollution, Jay Duffy, litigation director for Clean Air Task Force, told ABC News.
“EPA has authority under the Clean Air Act to reduce emissions commensurate with the best technologies that are available,” Duffy said. “That’s the end of its authority.”
The EPA expects a negligible impact on energy prices as a result of this rule, Regan said.
Even though the benefits from the proposal are described as through 2042, Regan and National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi said they’re confident it will help the country reach the climate commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement — and set by President Joe Biden — to reduce emissions 50% to 52% by 2030.
The proposal reinforces the country’s ability to meet the goal in a critical sector of the economy, the power sector, Zaidi said.
“Every action that we take that reinforces that trajectory, firms up our footing, firms up our path to achieve that goal and increases the odds that we will unlock the full economic upside and public health gains associated with meeting that target,” Zaidi said on a call with reporters.
(CHICAGO) — Four teenagers, including a 16-year-old, have been charged in the murder of a beloved 24-year-old Chicago police officer, authorities announced Wednesday.
Officer Aréanah Preston had just finished her shift and was still in uniform when she was shot and killed at about 1:42 a.m. Saturday, according to Chicago police.
The four suspects — ages 19, 19, 18 and 16 — “were out looking for victims” that night and are believed to be connected to multiple robberies and a car theft in the hours leading up to Preston’s murder, interim Chicago Police Superintendent Eric Carter said at a news conference.
As Preston was returning home, the teens pulled up in a stolen car, and at least two of the teens allegedly fired at her, according to police.
Preston returned fire, but the teens continued to shoot, and they allegedly stole Preston’s gun before fleeing, Carter said.
Preston’s gun has not yet been recovered, police said.
Police identified three of the four suspects Wednesday as Trevell Breeland, 19; Joseph Brooks, 19, Jakwon Buchanan, 18. The 16-year-old was not named.
The four suspects were all charged with first-degree murder and face other charges, including armed robbery and arson, police said. The 16-year-old will be charged as an adult, police said.
Carter said Preston was a “beloved, daughter, sister and friend who wanted to make a difference in this world” and “create a better future for Chicago.”
Police Officer Aréanah M. Preston
End of Watch: May 6, 2023
We join Officer Preston’s family and loved ones in mourning the loss of our fallen hero. Our hearts are heavy, but through our grief, we will carry on her legacy of service to Chicago and its people. pic.twitter.com/cZOTrGKZzS
(DENVER) — Denver Police Department officials said they’re investigating a shooting that left five people injured, including one critically.
The shooting was reported on East Girard Avenue, a mostly residential street southeast of central Denver, officials said on Twitter Wednesday night.
Four men and a woman were injured, police said. The circumstances behind the shooting and information about the suspect are under investigation, authorities said.
“It is possible that the suspect(s) are among those injured,” police said.
Ever since Taylor Swift kicked off her Eras Tour, a huge portion of her catalog has re-entered the Billboard 200 album chart — she currently has six albums in the Top 25. But it seems all Taylor needs to do to pump up her streaming numbers even more is to open her mouth.
Billboard reports that according to Luminate, the company that provides it with sales data, Taylor’s announcement on Friday, May 5 that she was releasing Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) immediately sent fans to their computers to stream the original album.
Luminate says that the 17 tracks on Speak Now were streamed 6.7 million times — an increase of 137% — on May 6, the day after the announcement. Among the album’s tracks that more than doubled in streams included “Mine” — which increased by 175% — and “Back to December,” which increased by 124%.
Streams for the songs “Mean” and “Better than Revenge” also increased, as did “Enchanted,” the one Speak Now song that Taylor has played at every Eras Tour show.
And because everything associated with Taylor apparently turns to gold, streams for the British band The 1975 increased by 14% last Thursday. That was the day after those rumors that lead singer Matty Healy and Taylor were dating began. Healy also showed up at one of Taylor’s Nashville shows, performing with her opening act, Phoebe Bridgers.
August marks the 50th anniversary of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s debut album, (Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd), and now a new coffee table book is looking at the band’s early history through photos.
Pronounced: A Photographic History of Lynyrd Skynyrd from 1973 to 1977 will be released by Rufus Publications this fall. Compiled by legendary photographer and longtime Skynyrd fan Ross Halfin, the book “is a true celebration of the band’s classic period.”
The book features more than 340 pages, with hundreds of rare and unseen images from photographers like Michael Zagaris, Tom Hill, Dick Polak, Barry Plummer and others, along with written contributions from Halfin, music journalist Pete Makowski and Sounds editor Geoff Barton.
The book will be released in three different formats, including a standard edition and a deluxe collectors edition. Only 450 numbered copies will be available, each personally signed by Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington before his March 5 death. There’s also a leather and metal edition, limited to only 50 copies and also signed by Rossington, which is supersized, bound in recycled leather and enclosed in a metal slipcase.
Presales of Pronounced begin May 12, with the copies set to ship in October.
The FBI and artificial intelligence (AI) are at the center of the new FX on Hulu drama series Class of ’09, which debuted Wednesday. It follows a class of FBI agents at several different decades in their lives and careers — an idea creator Tom Rob Smith tells ABC Audio he came up with after listening to a true crime podcast that featured interviews with FBI agents.
“I came out of those podcasts realizing that the agents themselves were really interesting people and the way they spoke about their work was really interesting,” he explains. “They were much more varied and quirky than I think I’d expected. And so I thought, I want to do a show about them rather than necessarily the crime. And that was the spark.”
Adds Kate Mara, one of the stars, “The show follows a group of FBI agents before they become agents, and then ten years later sort of seeing where they are in their lives then as agents, and then another ten or more years later seeing where they are then sort of in the future, when AI has taken over a lot of the law enforcement and all those things.”
The 40-yer-old actress plays one of the FBI agents, and says she came out of the show a little more suspicious than before.
“Even just noticing, you know, when you’re driving, noticing what cars are behind you. All of these things that just make you more aware. Not going for a jog with like both headphones in, that would be really, most of our advisors would say that’s a really, really stupid idea,” she shares.
Class of ’09 also stars Brian Tyree Henry, Sepideh Moafi, Brian J. Smith, Jon Jon Briones, Brooke Smith, Jake McDorman and Rosalind Eleazar.
