Country stars like Luke Bryan, Reba McEntire, Keith Urban and Alan Jackson are getting in the holiday spirit for a good cause.
Those artists and many more have contributed themed, decorated Christmas trees to Gaylord Opryland Resort’s Parade of Trees as part of their 2022 A Country Christmas celebration.
Lots of the trees are themed around the artists’ recent releases: For example, Reba’s classic, gold-and-red-colored tree decor is a nod to her new Ultimate Christmas Collection package, while Maddie & Tae‘s tree design centered around their new song, “Every Night Every Morning.” Luke’s holiday decor is inspired by his single “Country On.”
It wouldn’t be Christmas without special holiday gifts to put under the tree, and these artists have gotten that aspect of the season covered, too: They’re offering “Once in a Lifetime” VIP experiences, including flyaways, VIP concert packages, exclusive merch and more.
The festivities are a benefit for the First Responders Children’s Foundation, raising money for scholarships and mental health services for kids who have lost a parent in the line of duty.
The Parade of Trees will be on display through January 10, 2023, and bidding for the “Once in a Lifetime” experiences is open through the same day. Visit the bidding site to check out all the packages on offer, and to place your bids in support of the cause.
Bravo’s Real Housewives of New York City reboot hasn’t aired yet, but they’ve already lost a cast member in Lizzy Savetsky.
Taking to Instagram Wednesday, Lizzy announced, “I will not be continuing on the Real Housewives of NYC,” before revealing the reasoning behind her decision.
“As a proud orthodox Jewish woman, I though participating in this series would be a great chance to represent people like me and share my experience,” she wrote. “Unfortunately, from the time of my announcement in the cast, I was on the receiving end of a torrent of antisemitic attacks. As this continued, I realized that this path was no longer right for me and my family.”
Lizzy, who runs Bashert, a matchmaking service to help Jewish singles find love, then thanked fans for their support and said she’s looking forward to her “next chapter.”
The announcement comes less than a month after the new cast of RHONYC was announced at BravoCon in October. The remaining cast members are Sai De Silva, Ubah Hassan, Erin Dana Lichy, Jenna Lyons, Jessel Taank and Brynn Whitfield.
Season 14 of RHONYC is currently filming and is expected to premiere in 2023.
Deadline reports Joseph Quinn, who played the Dungeons & Dragons-loving metalhead Eddie Munson in the latest season of Stranger Things, is in talks to join Lupita Nyong’o in A Quiet Place: Day One. The film, based on an idea from John Krasinski, who directed and starred in the first two films, is said to be a spinoff, rather than a sequel, aimed at setting up a potential Quiet Place universe. Specific details of the film, set to open March 8, 2024, have yet to be revealed…
Keanu Reeves is attached to star in, and Jonah Hill is attached to co-write and direct, an upcoming film titled Outcome, according to Deadline. Plot details are being kept under wraps. Hill previously directed the 2018 coming of age dramedy Mid90s and Stutz, a documentary revolving around his therapist Dr. Phil Stutz and their discussions on mental health, streaming now on Netflix. Reeves next will be seen in John Wick: Chapter 4, set to open in the spring…
Robert Clary, the French actor, singer and Holocaust survivor best known for playing Corporal LeBeau on the World War II-set sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, died Wednesday morning at his home in Los Angeles, his granddaughter Kim Wright told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 96. Born Robert Max Widerman, Clary was the last surviving member principal cast member of the show that starred Bob Crane as Colonel Robert E. Hogan, an American who led an international group of Allied prisoners of war in a convert operation to defeat the Nazis from inside the Luft Stalag 13 camp. Clary also appeared in a number of films and on Broadway…
(BETHLEHEM, Pa.) — Hundreds of homes are being evacuated and the American Red Cross is responding after a gasoline tanker overturned early Thursday morning spilling thousands of gallons of fuel.
The American Red Cross Greater Pennsylvania Region confirms they are responding to a “significant fuel oil spill affecting hundreds of homes” in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
“At the request of Northampton EMA, we are responding to the area of Paul Ave & West Union Blvd in Bethlehem (PA) following a significant fuel oil spill affecting hundreds of homes,” the American Red Cross said in a tweet regarding the incident on social media. “Currently, we are providing canteen services to responders, mobilizing shelter teams to support the evacuation site, and coordinating with local officials to determine community needs and next steps. This response (& spill) is still active.”
A local middle school campus is being used as a shelter for displaced families and are operating on a two-hour delay to opening as a result.
“Due to a fuel spill on the west side of Bethlehem, our school is being used as a shelter for displaced families,” according to a statement posted on the Bethlehem Area School District’s website. “We will delay the opening of school for two hours to ensure that our building is ready to function normally for students and staff while also serving our community’s needs.”
(NEW YORK) — After travel came to a halt during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, travelers are once again on the move and new data shows there’s no sign of demand slowing during the upcoming season.
Tripadvisor has released its Seasonal Travel Index, which surveyed an array of travelers from the U.S., U.K., Singapore, Japan and Australia to get a snapshot of winter travel plans and trends from December 2022 through February 2023.
The seasonal travel report found that nearly 6 in 10 Americans, around 59%, are planning a vacation this winter. Some 93% of U.S. travelers said they will travel the same amount or more than they did last winter, which was a higher percentage than any other country surveyed.
Sixty-seven percent of global travelers surveyed by the travel platform indicated upcoming trips with more than half of respondents noting that they expect to spend more money on upcoming trips compared to last year.
With inflation weighing on consumer spending, Tripadvisor found that a third of respondents will “likely travel less or for shorter lengths than previously planned” and that 30% of people plan to vacation closer to home than before.
Cost and affordability were nearly twice as important to respondents as other factors, such as trip length and trip type for vacations, which Tripadvisor said was consistent with previous index findings.
“The majority of global travelers (57%) plan to travel domestically this upcoming season, however, the propensity to take international trips has increased (from 40% to 43%) since the previous Seasonal Travel Index,” TripAdvisor stated in a press release. “With winter on the horizon in the northern hemisphere, the most popular global destinations feature a mix of major global cities like Paris, London and New York, along with winter sun favorites such as Cancun, Dubai and Punta Cana.”
American respondents also showed a 3% higher propensity for foreign trips compared to the previous report.
When it comes to new global destinations with the largest year-over-year growth, Tripadvisor found that Asia-Pacific countries landed in the top 10 spots as a result of many reopening to international travelers or loosening restrictions over the past 12 months.
Alice Jong, research and insights senior analyst at Tripadvisor, explained that the recovery out of the pandemic has pointed to more positive signs “with traveler intent data showing strong demand for long-haul and international travel.”
While the majority of U.S. travelers reported plans for one to two trips, 6% plan to travel six or more times from December through February.
Seventy-eight percent of Americans have domestic travel plans with a majority of those planning to return to a destination they have already visited, and 22% will travel internationally.
Top 10 domestic travel destinations for December through February
Florida has proven to be particularly popular this time of year with four cities landing in the top 10 destinations for American travelers:
1. New York City
2. Orlando
3. Las Vegas
4. Honolulu
5. Key West
6. Lahaina
7. Miami Beach
8. New Orleans
9. Fort Lauderdale
10. Anaheim
Top 10 international travel destinations for December through February
Four major cities in Mexico and four destinations in the Caribbean are particularly popular during this time period:
1. Cancun, Mexico
2. Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
3. Punta Cana, Caribbean
4. Playa del Carmen, Mexico
5. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
6. Paris, France
7. Palm – Eagle Beach, Caribbean
8. Bavaro, Caribbean
9. Montego Bay, Caribbean
10. London, U.K.
The data for the index was gathered by a Tripadvisor Consumer Sentiment Survey, drawn from an online pool of over 2,100 consumers across six countries in partnership with Qualtrics. Additionally, Tripadvisor gathered behavioral data sourced from its first-party traffic on the platform from October 2022 with searches made by travelers in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Japan and Singapore for travel between Dec. 1, 2022 through Feb. 28, 2023.
(UVALDE, Texas) — The Uvalde school board on Wednesday unanimously approved the hiring of an interim school district chief of police, Josh Gutierrez, to fill the gap left after the August ousting of the then-chief of police, Pete Arredondo.
“This is our first step in taking to rebuild our school district police force with baby steps, with very careful consideration of who comes into the department — people with integrity and professionalism,” said Uvalde Interim Superintendent Gary Patterson, during his first school board meeting in his new role.
Since Oct. 7, the entire district police force present during the May 24 massacre that saw 19 children and two teachers killed has been on suspension. Gutierrez will start in his new role Thursday.
Gutierrez most recently served as the director of Bexar County Learning Center, a school located inside a juvenile correction center in San Antonio.
Patterson said he has known Gutierrez for more than a decade and has worked with him in previous school districts. In addition to being a police officer, Gutierrez has served in several instructional and administrative roles in various Texas schools.
Gutierrez declined to answer questions after his approval.
Patterson also revealed that the Uvalde school district will forge a partnership with East Central School District because it has been declared an official certified training site for active shooter training, emergency operations training, school resource officer training, and gun and rifle training.
“We will have a close working relationship with them so we can get the training right away,” Patterson said about the new police force.
Additionally, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE) contributed a blueprint to Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District — written by retired and active police chiefs around the state — on how to build a police force for a school.
“My observation as an outsider is that many times we’ve seen this room filled with a lack of trust, anger and frustration,” Patterson said at the start of the meeting. “My hope is that we can all work to make that better.”
The theme of rebuilding lasted throughout the school board meeting Wednesday.
The board also unanimously approved a plan to build a new $50 million school two miles from the site of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, ensuring the demolition of the building where 21 lives were taken.
The new building concept, which was first presented to the community on Monday, plans to break ground next summer, opening its doors to hundreds of elementary school students in the fall of 2024.
The board approved the motion for site selection of the new elementary school, as well as the spaces and conceptual design.
The plan was one that involved dozens of Uvaldeans. Since mid-August, a community advisory committee has met six times to discuss the building, what it should look like and who it should serve. Members traveled to other communities to survey the options. The proposed concept derived from their discussions, said Natalia Arias, co-chair of the committee.
“With this evening’s approval of the site and conceptual design by the UCISD school board, we now move to the schematic design phase of the project,” Tim Miller, executive director of the Uvalde CISD Moving Forward Foundation, said.
(NEW YORK) — Home births in the United States reached the highest level in three decades during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
The report’s findings show the nationwide number of pregnant people giving birth at home rose from 1.26% in 2020 to 1.41% in 2021 — an increase of 12% and the highest level since at least 1990. That followed a 22% increase from 2019 to 2020.
The percentage peaked in January 2021 at 1.51%, according to the report.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of U.S. births still happen at a hospital or birthing center. Prior to the pandemic, the country’s rate of home births hovered around 1%.
The report noted that interest in home births increased due to COVID-19 and “concerns about giving birth in a hospital.”
The rise in U.S. home births from 2020 to 2021 was sharpest among Black women, with an increase of 21%. That followed a 36% increase from 2019 to 2020, according to the report.
For Hispanic women, home births increased 15% from 2020 to 2021, following a 30% increase from 2019 to 2020. For white women, home births increased 10% from 2020 to 2021, following a 21% increase from 2019 to 2020, according to the report.
From 2020 to 2021, the percentage of home births was on the rise in 30 U.S. states, with increases ranging from 8% for Florida to 49% for West Virginia. That followed increases in home births in 40 states from 2019 to 2020, the report said.
Medical associations like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists assert that every individual should have the right and opportunity to choose how they want to give birth. But they also say that hospitals and birthing centers are the safest places to give birth because trained professionals can intervene quickly if something goes wrong.
(CHICAGO) — An 8-year-old boy was not properly harnessed to a safety rope when he fell 24 feet off a climbing wall at Chicago’s Navy Pier this summer, suffering severe injuries, his parents allege in a new lawsuit.
Erin and Gideon Brewer took their three children to Navy Pier on July 27 while visiting the city from Grand Rapids, Michigan.
When their son George went up the climbing wall, he made it to the top before plunging 24 feet to the ground, according to the family. The fall was caught on camera by his mother, who said she was unaware he was not properly harnessed.
“It felt like a nightmare,” his mother, Erin Brewer, said during a press briefing Wednesday.
There was no cushion at the bottom of the climbing wall when George slammed into the concrete, his family said. As a result, he suffered “severe injuries” all over his body and has undergone multiple surgeries, according to the complaint.
“We thought he was dead when he fell,” his father, Gideon Brewer, told reporters. “His little brothers saw him too, saw the whole thing, and were asking us, ‘Is George dead? Is George dead?'”
As a result of the fall, George broke his tibia, pelvis and chin, shattered his femur, had a concussion and sustained damage to his growth plate, Erin Brewer said.
“Hearing your child asking if he’s going to die. I mean, he’s an 8-year-old boy,” Erin Brewer said. “It’s like his innocence was taken from him.”
George has needed four surgeries so far, and has another surgery scheduled for the end of January, his parents said. Due to the severity of his injuries, he had to start the school year in a wheelchair, his mother said.
“It’s infuriating because this was 100% preventable. This should never have happened ever,” Erin Brewer said.
A spokesperson for Navy Pier said they have not seen the lawsuit.
“It is our standard practice not to comment on litigation,” the spokesperson said.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the Circuit Court of Cook County on George’s behalf, alleges negligence and willful and wanton conduct by the defendants, including the two operators of the climb wall. The family is suing for George’s medical and hospital expenses, among other damages.
(WASHINGTON) — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter to Joe Biden on Wednesday urging the president to, as Abbott described it, carry out his constitutional obligations to protect the country from what Abbott called an “invasion” of migrants at the southern border.
Abbott slammed the president’s policies, contending that Biden’s “inaction has led to catastrophic consequences” for Texas communities. The governor, a major Republican critic of Biden’s, has increasingly focused on the issue of immigration, facing backlash from migrants’ advocates and the Biden administration as a result.
“You must reinstate the policies that you eliminated, or craft and implement new policies, in order to fulfill your constitutional duty to enforce federal immigration laws and protect the States against invasion,” Abbott wrote.
His letter reflects his push to ramp up his rhetoric about what he has called the Biden administration’s “open-border policies.”
On Tuesday, Abott tweeted that he had “invoked the Invasion Clauses of the U.S. & Texas Constitutions to fully authorize Texas to take unprecedented measures to defend our state against an invasion.”
In the tweet, the governor included a list of actions he said he had constitutional authority to take, including deploying gun boats to parts of the border, deploying Department of Public Safety officers to arrest immigrants who have crossed illegally into the United States and building parts of the border wall.
That announcement sparked a series of misleading headlines that Abbott had officially declared an “invasion” at the southern border, a move that would give him added authority to activate local state law enforcement agencies to deport migrants.
Abbott’s budget director, Sarah Hicks, was asked Tuesday about the tweet during her testimony before the state’s Senate Committee on Border Security and she reassured the panel of Texas legislators that the governor was not announcing a new strategy, but was rather reiterating some of the actions he has already taken to stem illegal immigration.
“I don’t think it is a change in overall tactic as much as it is a reminder to all of us, to Congress and to the members working the issue that this is serious and it demands a full and serious response,” Hicks said.
Since Biden took office last year, Abbott has issued a series of executive orders aimed at curtailing immigration. In July, he authorized state law enforcement to return migrants suspected of entering the country illegally to ports of entry. That move has been criticized by immigration advocates and rights organizations who say it endangers migrants and may leave people who are lawfully hoping to claim asylum susceptible to racial profiling.
On Wednesday, the governor sent another letter to the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Military Department urging them to “expand their unprecedented efforts to combat the growing illegal immigration along the Texas-Mexico border.”
“You have an essential assignment: Use every available tool and strategy to fight back against the unprecedented invasion that Texas is seeing at our border. Until Congress acts or the Biden Administration does its constitutionally required job, Texas Guardsmen and Troopers must bear the burden of securing the border. You must continue to keep Texans and Americans safe and protect against an invasion of the southern border. I order you to use all resources and tools available to repel immigrants from attempting to cross illegally, arrest those who cross illegally and return them to the border, and arrest criminals who violate Texas law,” the governor wrote.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told ABC News that Abbott may be overstepping his authority by saying he can declare an invasion at the border.
“The reality is that no governor can unilaterally declare that they’re being invaded by migrants to take over basic immigration enforcement practices. The U.S. Constitution does not authorize governors to usurp federal immigration authority and no matter how you look at it, migrants seeking asylum are not invading,” he said.
Abbott’s office did not respond to a request for comment; neither did the White House.
Reichlin-Melnick said he believes Abbott’s use of the word “invasion” is especially dangerous because Texas is home to one of the deadliest attacks on Latinos: the 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart that killed 23 people. Investigators have said the El Paso gunman wrote a screed posted online saying the massacre was in response to an “invasion” of Hispanics coming across the southern border.
“I think we have seen the dangers of harsh rhetoric against migrants,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “The El Paso shooting is the best example of that. It occurred in his own state and it involved a person who believes that the state is being invaded by Latinos, killing dozens of people. Rhetoric about invasions inflames the issue, it doesn’t promote compromise.”
(WASHINGTON) — California Rep. Karen Bass is projected to win her campaign to become Los Angeles’ mayor, ABC News reports.
Bass will be the first woman and second Black person, after Tom Bradley, to hold the office. She had appeared to be in a close race against the billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso, a former registered Republican who campaigned as an outsider better able to address the city’s pressing issues, including public safety and homelessness.
But Bass, a former state Assembly speaker with endorsements from national Democrats including Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden, who had also considered picking Bass to be his No. 2, bet on a winning coalition from L.A., the country’s second-largest city and the center of the largest Democratic state in the country.
“We are in a fight for the soul of our city,” Bass said on election night. “We will win because we are going to build a new Los Angeles.”
With 76% of the expected vote reporting as of Wednesday, Bass leads with 53% of the vote compared to Caruso with 47%. As more mail votes have been counted, Bass’ lead has grown after she and Caruso were essentially tied during the initial returns last week.
Bass is finishing out her sixth term in Congress and is a member of the House Foreign Affairs and House Judiciary committees. She was also the author of a major piece of House legislation to change policing laws in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Caruso, by contrast, had mounted a competitive campaign as the more centrist option.
He drew a slew of notable celebrity endorsements — from Snoop Dogg to Katy Perry — as well as support from local groups like the L.A. police union.
“The wonderful thing I never knew as a candidate, when you’re running for mayor, is that you develop a larger family alongside the people that you would never have met in communities, because we’ve all come together for a cause,” he said last week.
Bass will succeed L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, taking over as the city is tested by a number of issues — from political scandals related to the city council to concerns about crime and the homeless.
