Barrett Strong, known for writing some of Motown’s biggest hits, passed away in Detroit Sunday at the age of 81, the Detroit Free Pressreports.
Strong is best known for co-writing and singing the Motown classic “Money (That’s What I Want),” which would be the label’s first hit. It went on to sell a million copies and was covered by the likes of The Beatles and others.
As a songwriter, Strong and producer Norman Whitfiled co-wrote some of Motown’s most classic tunes, many with The Temptations, including “Cloud Nine,” Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me),” “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” and others. He also co-wrote “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” for Gladys Knight and the Pips, “War” for Edwin Starr and more.
“Barrett was not only a great singer and piano player, but he, along with his writing partner Norman Whitfield, created an incredible body of work, primarily with the Temptations,” Motown founder Berry Gordy shared in a statement. “Their hit songs were revolutionary in sound and captured the spirit of the times like ‘Cloud Nine’ and the still relevant ‘Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World is Today).”
He adds, “My heartfelt condolences go out to his family and friends. Barrett is an original member of the Motown family and will be missed by all of us.”
(NEW YORK) — New Yorkers won’t be walking in a winter wonderland any time soon. Multiple records are about to be broken in the Big Apple due to the lack of measurable snow this winter season.
The first of those records — the latest first snow ever recorded during a winter in New York City — was broken Monday with the city going snowless through Jan. 30 and counting. Previously, the latest New Yorkers had seen snowfall in the 154 years of record-keeping was when it took until Jan. 29, 1973, during the 1972-73 winter, according to the National Weather Service.
In addition, New York City is approaching its longest streak without measurable snow. The previous record is 332 days, which occurred from Jan. 19, 2020 to Dec. 15, 2020.
The last time there was measurable snow in New York City was on March 9 of last year, when .4 inches was measured in Central Park. If the city remains snow-free by Feb. 5, that record will be broken.
Current forecasts are not showing measurable snow in the city over the next week.
Storm systems moving into the Northeast last Wednesday brought along a chance of measurable snow in New York City, but the precipitation changed to rain after only a trace of snow had fallen, according to the NWS.
While brief flurries and snow showers have fallen occasionally this winter in New York City, accumulation of at least 0.1 inches must be recorded for it to be considered measurable snowfall by the NWS.
January has been relatively mild in New York City this year — normally a time when it should be racking up the coldest temperatures. As temperatures remain far above freezing, any precipitation will fall as rain.
Other major cities east of the Colorado Rockies are also experiencing record or near-record warmth. The least amount of snow in 16 years has fallen in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which is experiencing its warmest year on record.
Measurable snow has not fallen in Philadelphia, which is experiencing its second-warmest winter on record. Baltimore is also experiencing a snow drought this winter, its warmest on record.
The same can’t be said for Empire State residents in upstate New York.
Record-breaking amounts of snow fell just before the Christmas weekend, killing dozens of people.
The storm, described as the “blizzard of the century” by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, led to nearly 52 inches of snowfall and 39 deaths.
ABC News’ Melissa Griffin and Max Golembo contributed to this report.
Marie Kondo has been rethinking what sparks joy in her life, and has discovered what millions of parents already know: Kids are really messy.
The decluttering guru first rose to fame when her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was published in the U.S. in 2014. Her handiwork was later spun off into a Netflix show, 2019’s Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.
However, she recently talked about how she has been prioritizing her three children over the worries of constantly tidying up.
“My home is messy, but the way I am spending my time is the right way for me at this time at this stage of my life,” Kondo said, via an interpreter, at a recent event, as reported by the Washington Post.
“Up until now, I was a professional tidier, so I did my best to keep my home tidy at all times,” she also said. “I have kind of given up on that in a good way for me. Now I realize what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home.”
Kondo, 38, and husband Takumi Kawaharawelcomed their third child, a son, in 2021. The couple, who married in 2012, also share two daughters.
Britney Spears is reassuring fans that she’s doing just fine following her reported police wellness check.
Taking to Twitter on Saturday, Britney shared a short clip of her posing in front of a gym mirror and wrote, “Yep that’s me … I’m alive and well.”
“But not really convinced on these health juices, I mean there are SO MANY !!! Yoga and chest call me in. I do it inside, outside, wherever I fancy … this is me at a gym living my best life,” she continued.
The pop star, 41, also addressed her absence from Instagram in the thread, explaining, “I shut down my Instagram because there were too many people saying I looked like an idiot dancing and that I looked crazy.”
Britney added that she’s a “sensitive” person and the comments “hurt [her] feelings.” She also expressed that she was surprised fans were so worried about her due to her break from the social media app.
“I’m shocked as hell that when I took my Instagram down fans got worried and sent the cops to my house … it really was uncalled for,” the “Circus” singer tweeted. “l adore my fans but for those who did that aren’t real fans and I honestly felt like it was a way to make me look bad !!!”
“l’m alive, fine, healthy, and ready to start a new day – a new morning anew !!! To my real fans, God bless you,” she said.
Britney’s posts come just days after she issued a statement on how police were called to her home. Sources from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department previously told ABC News that deputies responded to the singer’s home Tuesday, January 24, for a “check the wellbeing” call.
It also comes shortly after Britney had deactivated her Instagram, which she has done many times before.
Meghan Trainor’s been talking about having another baby since she and husband Daryl Sabara became parents to son Riley in 2021. Well, now her dream has come true: She’s expecting another child.
“What a blessing,” Meghan tells People. “I’m just so grateful I can get pregnant. And I’m like, ‘I’m crushing it. This is amazing. This is my dreams.’ I’m halfway there — I want four kids!”
Meghan is four months along and she says compared to her first pregnancy, “This one was a ride. It was a rocky ride, but luckily it was during the holidays, so I could just chill and lay down. I pee every 20 minutes, and I’m fully out of breath just from talking. It’s great.” She’s also craving — yes — pickles.
On Instagram, Meghan posted a photo of herself posing with the sonogram, and captioned it, “BABY #2 COMING THIS SUMMER.”
But that’s not all: The “Made You Look” singer is also publishing her first book in April. It’s called Dear Future Mama: A TMI Guide to Pregnancy, Birth, and New Motherhood from Your Bestie.
“I spent my entire pregnancy trying to get all the information I could possibly get…as the first of my friends to be pregnant, nobody around me but my mom, my aunts, and strangers on the internet knew what I was going through,” Meghan says in a statement.
“After feeling so overwhelmed and alone in my first pregnancy, I was inspired to write this book to make sure no other future mama ever felt like that,” she continues. “I want to give future mamas permission to find the right path for them —without the judgment of others. I want this book to feel like a hug from a bestie.”
The first trailer for 20th Century Studios’ adaptation of Stephen King‘s short story The Boogeyman dropped on Sunday. The horror-thriller follows a high school student and her younger sister who are mourning the recent death of their mother, with little support from their father, a therapist who’s dealing with his own pain. When one of his patients pays a surprise visit to their home, he leaves behind a supernatural being that preys on the suffering of people. Sophie Thatcher and Chris Messina star, alongside Vivien Lyra Blair, Marin Ireland, Madison Hu, LisaGay Hamilton and David Dastmalchian. The Boogeyman opens June 2, 2023, exclusively in theaters nationwide…
Phoebe Waller-Bridge is prepping an Amazon TV series based on the popular video game-turned-action movie franchise Tomb Raider. Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the Fleabag creator and star is attached to write the scripts for Tomb Raider. Waller-Bridge does not plan to star in the TV adaptation. Tomb Raider is Waller-Bridge’s latest project in the works at Amazon. She’s also developing an adaptation of Claudia Lux’s book Sign Here…
Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston are the next a-list stars set to team up for a new film. Variety reports the two actresses will star in an upcoming feature comedy from Palm Springs filmmaker Max Barbakowwill that will see the two actresses swapping bodies. No further details are available at this time. The film follows the surprise success of other star-driven comedies, including Ticket to Paradise with Roberts and George Clooney, and The Lost City starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum…
Annie Wersching, the actress best known for her roles as Renee Walker in the Fox TV drama 24, and Julia Brasher on Amazon’s studios’ Bosch, died from cancer on Sunday morning in Los Angeles, a rep for the actress told The Hollywood Reporter. She was 45. Wersching, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2020, most recently had a series of recurring roles on Star Trek: Picard, where she played the Borg Queen, as well as The Rookie, where she appeared as Rosalind Dyer, a murderer who escapes prison. Wershing’s other roles included Leslie Dean, the mother of alien superhero Karolina on Marvel’s Runaways, as well as television producer Amelia Joffe in 80 episodes of the daytime soap General Hospital and multi-episode arcs on The CW’s The Vampire Diaries and NBC’s Timeless…
Lisa Loring, the actress who played Wednesday Addams in ABC’s live-action TV adaptation of The Addams Family, died Saturday night at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank of complications from a stroke caused by high blood pressure, her daughter Vanessa Foumberg told The Hollywood Reporter. She was 64. Loring began work on the half-hour The Addams Family comedy series at age 5-and-a-half, able to memorize her lines even before she could read. The Addams Family ran for two seasons, a total of 64 episodes from 1964-66. Almost all of the original cast was reunited in 1977 for the NBC television movie Halloween with the New Addams Family. With Loring’s death, John Astin, who played Gomez Addams, is the last surviving member of the original cast…
Avatar: The Way of Water continued its reign at #1 at the domestic box office for a seventh consecutive week with an estimated $15.7 million haul. The sequel has collected $2.117 billion globally, moving it into the 4th all-time spot at the worldwide box office, passing Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens’ 2.071 billion-dollar gross.
James Cameron has now directed three of the top four highest-grossing films of all time — The first Avatar at #1, Titanic in third, and now Avatar: The Way of Water in fourth. Second place currently belongs to Avengers: Endgame.
Avatar: The Way of Water is a 20th Century film, which is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish held steady in second place, adding an estimated $10.6 million and bringing its North America gross to $140.8 million.
A Man Called Otto grabbed third place, delivering an estimated $6.8 million, followed by M3GAN in fourth place with an estimated $6.4 million.
Rounding out the top five is the action thriller from India, Pathaan, opening with an estimated $6 million.
The weekend’s only other new major release, the sci-fi thriller Infinity Pool, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Cleopatra Coleman, debuted in eighth place, delivering an estimated $2.7 million.
(NEW YORK) — Layoffs have battered the tech industry in 2023, carrying over a series of job cuts that began last year. In all, about 50,000 people have lost their positions this month.
Tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon have led the sector in the size of their cuts. While a slew of smaller companies like Spotify, Vox Media and IBM have imposed layoffs too.
Sales at top tech firms have retreated from the blistering pace attained during the pandemic, when billions across the world were forced into isolation.
Company officials have often cited economic uncertainty and recession fears in their layoff announcements.
While the large-scale job cuts sound economic alarm, they mark a more immediate, intimate rupture for the workers who suffer them. ABC News spoke with three laid-off workers about what the experience was like and how they’re coping with it.
Nneoma Ajiwe, Spotify
What started as a normal morning turned into a surprise for 29-year-old Nneoma Ajiwe.
Around 5:14 am, Ajiwe says she received a calendar invite requesting her attendance in a one-on-one meeting with someone on Spotify’s HR team.
“It’s funny because the night before I was texting my coworker Tiktoks that we were laughing at and she’s like ‘I don’t mean to alarm you’ and sent this Bloomberg article about Spotify doing layoffs as early as this week,” Ajiwe said. “I told her that we’re probably okay.”
Little did she know, she’d be one of the 6% of employees, roughly around 600, to be slashed from Spotify’s workforce this year.
About an hour after Ajiwe received her calendar invite, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek sent out an email to employees breaking the news.
“I was literally driving on my way to the gym,” Ajiwe said.
The Houston native is a 2016 graduate from the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s degree in public relations. She’d worked for a plethora of companies in the industry such as Billboard, Genius, Sirius XM and XXL Magazine but always saw her career at Spotify as “unattainable.”
Ajiwe had applied five times before she was granted the job of social marketing manager for Spotify for Artists and Spotify Charts in May 2022.
Having been laid off from a different employer before, Ajiwe shared that she felt many different emotions this time around but the one that she felt just days after the Monday layoff was “annoyed.”
“This sucks because I particularly loved this team. I just got there. I loved my job,” Ajiwe said. “I’m still shocked and just trying to sort through feelings and think about what I need to do.”
In response to a request for comment, Spotify provided the memo about the layoffs that Ek sent to employees.
“Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us,” Ek said. “In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth.”
Although layoffs can cause an immediate bout of financial trouble, Ajiwe works as a photographer on the side and calls herself a “good saver.”
Because of this, she figures she will take a month or so to figure out her next move.
“I wasn’t devastated by the fact that I may not have any money coming in for three months, because I know I have stuff that I do on the side. But it does suck because this was the highest I was making. It was my career,” she said.
“I just think that with every opportunity that has closed for me, something better has always happened. I firmly believe that God is going to put me in a better place,” Ajiwe said.
Jonathan Bellack, Google
Jonathan Bellack, 50, who worked at Google for nearly 15 years, said he knew his tenure was nearly over — and he wanted it that way. Two months ago, he told the company he sought to leave early in 2023.
When he made the request, Bellack had expected Google to work with him on a plan for handing off his duties and saying goodbye. Instead, he didn’t hear much, he said.
“I had an inkling that something was up,” said Bellack, who lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
A self-described “workaholic,” Bellack had climbed the ranks at Google, becoming a senior director of product management who oversaw a team of about 45 employees devoted to developing systems that protect users from phishing schemes and other attacks.
Over time, he says he came to enjoy the mentorship and relationships more than other parts of the job, he said.
Bellack says he woke up at about 5 a.m. on Jan. 20 and found an email telling him “‘the company no longer has a position for you,'” he said.
His access to work email remained long enough for him to see another message announcing company-wide layoffs. Within minutes, he was locked out, he said.
In all, Google slashed 12,000 jobs or about 6% of its workforce. Having watched the onslaught of layoffs in the tech industry, Bellack wasn’t surprised.
“It seemed like the thing all the cool kids were doing in Silicon Valley,” he said of the layoffs.
Google did not respond to a request for comment. In an email to employees last Friday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said: “This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with.”
The layoffs left Bellack “very torn,” he said. The forced exit clarified his status, allowing him to move on; but he felt badly for colleagues who hadn’t expected it.
“A lot of people had no idea that this was happening or that they might be involved,” he said. “For them, it’s obviously a shock.”
Bellack is not worried about his financial outlook, he said, characterizing his previous job as “aggressively compensated.” Further, he praised the severance package provided by the company, which gave departing employees a 16-week base compensation with an extra two weeks for every year of employment.
A new project already awaits, Bellack said. He has launched a consulting service that advises start-ups and other companies on how to grow.
The father of two sons, aged 9 and 14, Bellack looks forward to lunches with his wife and time with his kids, he said. Their first big move: Getting a dog.
“If you put that in the article, my 9-year-old will be excited,” he said. “It’ll mean I’ve firmly committed.”
Phoebe Gavin, Vox
Phoebe Gavin, 37, the former executive director of talent and development at digital news outlet Vox, was laid off by the company last week. But she had been preparing for something like this ever since a “very scary situation” nearly a decade ago, she said.
In 2014, Gavin lost her job at a different media company. Lacking any savings, she had to “put everything on my credit card to get to my next job,” she said. Since then, she said, she began placing 10% of every paycheck into savings and later cultivated a side gig as a career coach.
Last Friday, Gavin had a previously scheduled meeting with her boss, who told her she was being let go and that she should take the rest of the day off, she said. Vox Media, the parent company of Vox, laid off 130 workers, which amounts to 7% of its staff.
Gavin, who worked at Vox for a little more than a year, oversaw the internal experience of employees, so she understood what her manager could and couldn’t say about the decision. “I wouldn’t have expected her to tell me more,” she said.
The news surprised Gavin, but she knew she worked in a tumultuous business.
“It was a little bit of shock and a little bit of ‘well, I work in the media industry,'” she said.
Vox Media declined comment about the layoffs. In a memo to employees last Friday, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff cited “the challenging economic environment impacting our business and industry.”
After years of planning for a possible career setback, Gavin isn’t worried about her finances, she said. In fact, she’s ready to turn her side gig into a full-time job, having turned away clients from her career coaching business over the past six months.
“I’ve had to strike a balance of making sure the side hustle fit into side-hustle time — I don’t have to do that anymore,” she said. “Instead of 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., I’ll work on it from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.”
Gavin, who is Black, said her commitment to protecting her career owes in part to her knowledge that widespread job losses disproportionately affect people of color and women.
“That’s something that as a society we clearly have to take strong steps to address,” she said. “The system is not going to improve fast enough to keep us safe as individuals.”
To weather the mental health challenges of job flux, Gavin says she will draw on therapy that has helped her assemble an “emotional toolbox,” she said, noting that a more flexible schedule will help her do stress-relieving activities.
“I’m mostly focused on being able to go to the gym in the middle of the day when it’s empty,” she said. “One of the things that helps is picking up heavy things and putting them down.”
(WASHINGTON) — Seven U.S. senators are renewing calls for the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into the marketing of assault-style rifles after the unveiling of the JR-15, a long rifle the manufacturer advertises as a smaller AR-15 geared towards younger users.
Illinois-based WEE 1 Tactical unveiled the JR-15 in early 2022, advertising the weapon as a .22 caliber long rifle with the look and feel of an AR-15. The website for WEE1 Tactical advertises the gun as an ideal weapon to “teach a younger enthusiast.”
After originally writing a letter to the FTC in May 2022, a group of Senators held a press conference Thursday doubling down on their demand for intervention from the FTC.
“The last thing we need to be doing is shrinking deadly weapons of war and marketing them to young children,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said at the press conference.
An AR-15 is a type of semi-automatic rifle, Variants of the weapon have been linked to several high-profile mass shootings, including the recent massacres in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.
“What we have here is a scaled-down 20% scaled down 22 long rifle that looks and feels and operates just like mom or dad’s gun,” said Eric Schmid, the owner of Schmid Tool & Eng. Corp, the manufacturer of the JR-15, in an interview with organizers of The Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade Show in 2022.
The ammunition and safety features of the JR-15 also differ from the AR-15. While the AR-15 generally uses .223 Remington and 5.56 NATO ammunition, the JR-15 uses .22 caliber ammunition, according to gun experts.
According to Sam Sang, the co-owner of Equilibrium Firearms in Mineola, New York, the .22 ammunition generally has less recoil than .223 or 5.56 and is easier to control while shooting, however, he said it’s still lethal.
WEE 1 Tactical also advertises the gun as having a unique “tamper resistant safety” mechanism, which it claims requires the strength and dexterity of an adult to disengage.
“Parents and guardians wanting to pass on this American tradition have been purchasing small caliber, lighter youth training rifles for decades,” WEE 1 Tactical said in a statement to ABC News. “The JR-15 incorporates a patented safety mechanism that provides an added level of safety available on no other rifle in production.”
A group of 11 Democratic U.S. Senators initially penned a letter in May 2022 to Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, requesting the commission open an investigation into “the marketing of highly lethal firearms, including assault-style rifles, to impressionable young people.”
The letter took aim at WEE 1 Tactical for its “JR-15” marketing materials showing children shooting the gun and its former logo, depicting a skull and crossbones with a pacifier.
Since its initial launch, the branding of the weapon on WEE1 Tactical’s website does not include the original skull and crossbones logo; instead, their website prominently shows an image of a child aiming the rifle with the assistance of an adult.
In their letter, the senators accused WEE1 Tactical of being “just a single actor in a long line of unscrupulous gun manufacturers that have worked for years to market their products to a young audience.” They asked the FTC to take action against WEE1’s “unfair” marketing that could lead to harm or death.
The Federal Trade Commission declined ABC News’ request for comment.
Mark Olivia, the managing director of public affairs for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, disputed that the rifle is being targeted to minors, adding that the rifle would have to be purchased by an adult who undergoes an FBI background check.
“It’s a misnomer that this product is being targeted and advertised to children,” he said. “Children can’t buy it.”
The senators said even if WEE1’s marketing did not contain any false statements, they could still result in harm, referring to the litigation between Remington Company and the parents of victims of the deadly Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 that killed 26 people. In that lawsuit, relatives of nine victims alleged that Remington targeted troubled young men in their marketing materials.
Those parents ended up settling with Remington for $73 million after a nearly-decade-long legal battle in Connecticut court.
Less than a year after initially writing their letter, the senators renewed their calls for FTC action this week, reiterating that while the JR-15 is a particularly egregious example, the shift towards marketing to children is an “industry-wide practice.”
“This is an open and shut case. This particular company is obviously marketing to kids. That’s the entire intention of the gun,” Sen. Chis Murphy, D-Conn., whose district includes Sandy Hook, said at the press conference. “But let’s just be clear, makers of AR-15s that are being sold today that we think of as being marketed primarily to adults are also being marketed to kids.”
The senators claim the JR-15 is marketing “weapons of war” to children and might yield another mass shooting. According to the Gun Violence Archive, America has had more mass shootings than days in 2023.
The senators’ renewed calls come days after multiple shootings involving semi-automatic pistols including two deadly mass shootings in California and weeks after a 6-year-old student in Virginia brought a gun to school and allegedly shot a first-grade teacher.
“Because every minute that we let parasitic companies like this try to trick our babies into buying lethal weapons, we risk witnessing another classroom turning into a massacre,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., said on Thursday at the press conference.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill added that the marketing bears similarity to the tobacco industry’s marketing to the youth. He said the Senate Judiciary Committee would look into the matter.
WEE 1 Tactical claims on its website that the JR-15 adds “a level of safety found on no other firearm of any size.” The company is currently taking orders for the JR-15 from gun dealers.
It also advertises a connection to Project Child Safe, a National Shooting Sports Foundation program aimed at “promoting genuine firearms safety through the distribution of safety education messages and free firearm safety kits to communities across the U.S.”
Federal law requires that any handgun legally purchased in the United States from a licensed dealer would be sold with a lock. As a trade association, NSSF provides gun locks through law enforcement on behalf of the entire gun industry, according to Olivia.
“Any firearm, period, misused negligently or criminally can certainly be capable of lethal damage,” Olivia said. “And that’s why it is so important for any youth that is going to be learning the shooting sports to be under the close and direct supervision of an adult.”
(ISLAMABAD) — A suicide bomber detonated explosives inside a mosque in northwestern Pakistan on Monday, killing and wounding dozens of worshippers, officials said.
The blast occurred at a mosque near police offices in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, not far from the country’s border with Afghanistan. More than 150 people were reportedly were praying when the suicide bomber struck. An eyewitness told ABC News that the roof collapsed from the impact.
Security and government officials confirmed the explosion was from a suicide bomber, though no one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
At least 17 people were killed and more than 60 others were wounded, a local hospital spokesperson told ABC News. Those numbers were expected to rise.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
