Lance Bass, like many supporters of Britney Spears, understands where the pop star was coming from when she revealed she will “probably never perform again.”
Speaking toRolling Stone, the NSYNC member said he supports Britney no matter what she decides, saying, “I want her to do whatever she feels comfortable with for sure.”
Britney’s 13-year conservatorship was terminated last year and in the months since the singer has made alarming claims about the abuse she allegedly suffered while under the care of her father, Jamie Spears. The Grammy winner said she doesn’t want to perform because she’s been traumatized by the ordeal.
“I’m sure she’s not thinking about performing and being on set anywhere,” Lance explained, “but I know Britney, and she loves performing. She loves being an entertainer, and I see her back on that stage at some point.”
While Lance doesn’t know when Britney will return to the stage, he said, “We all want her to make new music.”
Noting her new single “Hold Me Closer” with the legendary Elton John, Lance continued, “We got a little tease with Elton John, so we want a full album. If she tours with it or not doesn’t matter. We just want the music … We’re all supporting her.”
Lance shared an update on the “Lucky” singer and said she is “doing great” now that’s she’s surrounding herself with friends — and that includes him.
“She seems super happy,” he explained. “She’s just dealing with coming down from this traumatic experience the last 10 years of her life, and I think that takes a lot of getting used to … She’s got a lot of trauma to deal with.”
(WEST PALM BEACH, FL) — Seventh-grade Spanish class was the first time Alex Del Dago sat down with the intention of learning his father’s native language. Although simplistic, this class served as the gateway for meaningful communication with his grandma, whom he calls abuela, who only speaks Spanish.
His abuela tells him that she’s glad he learned the language and that his ability to speak Spanish has improved their relationship.
“I knew that if I didn’t put in the work or put in the practice to learn it, I may never be, never be able to actually have like a real substantial conversation with her,” Del Dago said.
According to the Pew Research Center, “Hispanic identity fades across generations,” with less and less people with Hispanic heritage identifying as being Hispanic. Similarly, the more generations a family has been in the United States, the less likely they are to teach their children Spanish. But some Gen-Z Latino-Americans are reclaiming their culture via language, learning it later on in life, such as Del Dago.
From 7th grade through college, Del Dago studied Spanish through courses at school. His dad was born in Cuba and immigrated to the United States when he was 4 years old, along with his younger brother and parents. The family left Cuba during the Freedom Flights of the late 60s and early 70s.
Del Dago’s dad had a difficult time learning English without a program for non-native speakers and he didn’t feel like his son fit in with the other students in class, which influenced his decision to speak to Del Dago exclusively in English.
“At the time [my parents] decided it would be better just to raise me speaking English because they thought it would be easier for me to fit in and adjust and make friends quickly,” Del Dago said.
This isn’t unusual either. With each generation, the number of Hispanic heritage parents who speak to their children in Spanish decreases. Seventy-one percent of U.S.- born second-generation Latino parents speak to their children in Spanish and fewer than half of all third- or higher-generation Latino parents do, according to the Pew Research Center.
“One of the main proponents of allowing children or creating more dual language programs is Dr. Kim Potoski, and she has found no evidence that just growing up in these bilingual settings will take away from your ability to speak English. On the contrary — It helps you,” Anel Brandl, a professor at Florida State University who teaches Spanish to students with Hispanic heritage, said.
Mia Hernandez is a former student of Brandl’s and has a similar upbringing to Del Dago. Her dad is also from Cuba. Growing up, her parents worried that teaching her Spanish would hinder her ability to speak English, although Brandl says that recent research has disproven that.
Hernandez recently graduated from Florida State University with a minor in Spanish. Now she’s fluent in a language she barely spoke growing up.
“I feel a lot closer to my Cuban heritage now that I speak Spanish than before when I almost completely rejected it in favor of learning English so that I could fit in with my English-speaking American friends,” Hernandez said.
Just like Del Dago, learning Spanish transformed her relationships with her family members.
“I think the difference has just been getting to know my grandmother a lot more and about her life growing up in Cuba,” Hernandez said.
She emphasizes that you don’t need to speak Spanish in order to feel connected to your culture.
“I don’t think that it’s something that there should be any guilt or shame around not learning, but I think it’s also up to us to figure out how to move forward, as Cuban Americans, deciding how we want to raise our children, and so whether we want to teach our children Spanish, we want to teach them about maybe the culture and the food,” she said.
Now, Hernandez is training to teach Spanish speakers abroad English, and Del Dago is getting his Ph.D. in art history, focusing on queer Latin artists. Both have worked to connect to their familial heritage through the power of language.
If you’re wondering whether Blake Shelton’s lost his fiery competitive spirit as a coach on The Voice now that he’s married to one of his fellow coaches, Gwen Stefani, the answer is … well, maybe.
Blake, Gwen and the rest of the Voice gang sat down with E! Insider ahead of the season premiere, and when asked whether he’s gone soft, Blake explained that he’s got to think twice now before coming after other coaches.
“You start to lose a little bit of your edge because she’s your weakness,” coach John Legend told Blake during the conversation, also saying that Gwen — who doesn’t claim to be that competitive of a person — is getting fierier in the new season.
But Blake has a different perspective: He’s actually less cautious about not offending Gwen now that they’re married, he says.
“I think it’s more competitive now because it’s a lot harder to break up when you’re married,” Blake points out. “We could have a huge fight about something that happens on The Voice, and be like, ‘Alright, we’re not gonna get divorced over this.’”
The next season of The Voice premieres September 19 on NBC at 8 p.m. ET.
Ingrid Andress lends her voice to a new version of Zac Brown Band’s “Any Day Now,” reconfigured as a duet for the band’s deluxe version of their The Comeback album.
ZBB has been rolling out new duet versions of their songs for the revamped version of their album, which originally came out in late 2021.
The group has selected a diverse roster of artists from throughout the country genre — and beyond — as duet partners on their new project. Blake Shelton, Marcus King, Jamey Johnson and James Taylor are among the acts who’ve appeared on previously-released duet tunes for the deluxe version of The Comeback.
The version of “Any Day Now” featuring Ingrid is out now. The Comeback deluxe project drops in full on September 30.
(NEW YORK) — After two years, Kanye West is prematurely planning to cut ties between his Yeezy brand and Gap.
The Grammy-winning artists’ attorneys notified Gap Thursday that YEEZY LLC would be ending its partnership in a letter that accused the fashion retailer of not abiding by an initial agreement to release Yeezy apparel and open planned stores dedicated to the brand, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The letter also claimed that Gap was required to sell 40% of the YEEZY Gap line to brick-and-mortar stores throughout the second half of 2021. However, West’s attorney Nicholas Gravante Jr. is claiming the company has not opened one dedicated location to date.
“It was always a dream of mine to be at the Gap and to bring the best product possible,” Ye told CNBC’s “Closing Bell” on Thursday. “Obviously there’s always struggles and back and forth when you’re trying to build something new and integrate teams.”
West also said he wasn’t given the opportunity to set prices or approve color selections on his products.
“It was very frustrating. It was very disheartening because I just put everything I had. I put all of my top relationships,” West told CNBC. “Our agenda, it wasn’t aligned.”
He later added, “Everyone knows that I’m the leader, I’m the king. … A king can’t live in someone else’s castle. A king has to make his own castle.”
West’s Yeezy partnership with Gap was announced in 2020 and launched the following year. The line included elevated-based basics for men, women and children.
“We are excited to welcome Kanye back to the Gap family as a creative visionary, building on the aesthetic and success of his Yeezy brand and together defining a next-level retail partnership,” Mark Breitbard, global head of Gap Brands, said in a statement at the time.
The partnership between both brands was slated to last for 10 years, with the option to renew after five years.
ABC News reached out to Gap and Yeezy for comment but has not received a response.
The 1975 will be offering another preview of the band’s upcoming album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language, next week.
The latest cut is titled “All I Need to Hear,” and will premiere Wednesday, September 21.
“All I Need to Hear” will be the fourth track to be released from Being Funny in a Foreign Language, following “Part of the Band,” “Happiness” and “I’m in Love with You.”
Being Funny in a Foreign Language is the follow-up to 2020’s Notes on a Conditional Form. It’s due out October 14.
To optimize protection ahead of another pandemic winter, White House COVID coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said Friday people should consider getting the newly-updated COVID-19 booster before Halloween.
The sooner the better, Jha said, urging people to get a booster between mid-September and mid-October, “but no later than the end of October for maximum protection” ahead of the holidays, he said in an interview with ABC News following his own vaccination.
For people who have recently had COVID, Jha suggested following the guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and waiting at least 90 days, or three months, before getting the updated vaccine. Other experts have suggested that waiting four to six months will allow people to mount a stronger immune response to the vaccine.
Waiting longer, Jha said, increases the chance of getting reinfected — and ultimately, “it’s very hard to time the market,” he said.
Jha, who got his updated shot on Friday morning at a clinic in Washington, D.C., alongside second gentleman Doug Emhoff, described the new vaccine as a vital lever in the forecast for this winter’s COVID spread.
While some modeling shows a potential for a large surge this winter, Jha said, others show only a “modest bump” — and the difference could be determined by how many people get an updated vaccine ahead of the colder winter months, a time when the virus has ticked up the past two years.
“If you go get these vaccines, you actually can influence what happens,” Jha said.
“There is nothing fated about what’s going to happen. If a large proportion of Americans go out and get these vaccines, it will have a significant beneficial effect on keeping infections low.”
So far, the government has made 30 million vaccines available to states for distribution, out of an overall order of around 170 million vaccines between both companies Pfizer and Moderna.
Twenty-five million vaccines have shipped out as of Friday, according to the White House, and Jha said he’s been pleased to see that states are already submitting reorders.
But the latest numbers on just how many people have actually rolled up their sleeves for a shot aren’t expected until next week, Jha said. And while the booster campaign is expected to ramp up over the coming weeks, past metrics show Americans are booster fatigued: slightly less than half of vaccinated people have gotten a first booster shot, while one-third of people over 50 have gotten a second booster shot after becoming eligible this past spring.
The newest shot, which targets both the most dominant variant, BA.4/BA.5, and the original COVID strain, carries the potential of being the only shot Americans need this year, similar to an annual flu shot, and offering greater protection against COVID because it matches the virus that’s circulating now.
While experts caution that another new variant could always buck the plan, introducing new factors like heightened spread or evasion of immune protection, Jha said the country is already in a position of giving young, healthy people one shot a year and doesn’t think even a new variant would change that.
For people under the age of 50, they last became eligible for boosters in the fall of 2021, just as omicron was gaining steam. Those people have only just become eligible for another booster shot with the introduction of the updated bivalent booster this fall — one year later.
“I feel very confident based on everything we have that for the average-risk person, even an Omicron-like variant is unlikely to lead us to suggest that [young, healthy] people are going to benefit from a second shot within a year,” Jha said. “I think that is both unrealistic and not necessary.”
That said, older people may see a faster waning of protection from their vaccines, as has been the case throughout the pandemic, warranting another shot to re-up protection sometime in the spring, Jha said.
Though there isn’t evidence from a large-scale clinical trial yet to demonstrate just how much better protection will be from the bivalent boosters, Jha said he believed there was “strong consensus” that they would be better.
He pointed to evidence on safety and efficacy about the millions of vaccines that have already been distributed, as well as a clinical trial on bivalent vaccines that targeted BA.1, an earlier omicron subvariant, which vaccine companies later forgoed in favor of the newer strains, BA.4 and BA.5.
“If you look at the totality of the evidence, everything we know about the initial shots, if you look at the way the BA.1 bivalent clinical trials, what they showed us about how it generates immune response, everything suggests that BA.5 bivalents should provide a much higher degree of protection,” Jha said.
The CDC signed off on bivalent booster shots at the beginning of September and the rollout began in earnest after Labor Day weekend. Pfizer bivalent booster are available to everyone over 12, while the Moderna bivalent booster is available to everyone over 18.
Shots for people under 12 are expected this fall, though vaccine companies must first submit data on the younger age groups to the Food and Drug Administration, which will then review the data for authorization and eventual recommendation from the CDC.
(CHARLESTON, WV) — West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice on Friday signed a bill that bans nearly all abortions in the state, days after legislators approved the ban. This makes West Virginia the second state to pass an abortion ban after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
“I said from the beginning that if WV legislators brought me a bill that protected life and included reasonable and logical exceptions I would sign it, and that’s what I did today,” Justice said in a tweet.
Known as HB 302, the bill approved by state legislators on Tuesday prohibits the procedure at virtually every stage of pregnancy.
There are exceptions to the ban; one is an ectopic pregnancy, which is when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside of the uterus.
Physicians who perform unlawful abortions could lose their license to practice medicine and face criminal charges.
Additionally, the bill states that miscarriages and stillbirths are not considered abortions.
The Women’s Health Center of West Virginia had already halted abortion services after the bill was passed by the state legislature.
The bill passed both chambers last week, but returned to the House for a vote after an amendment by the Senate stripped a section of the bill that would see doctors imprisoned for up to 10 years if they perform abortions outside of the exceptions.
The Senate also changed the bill’s exceptions for rape and incest. In the House-backed version, rape and incest were excluded from the ban until about 14 weeks’ gestation and as long as a report is filed with a “qualified law enforcement officer.” In the Senate, the exceptions are until eight weeks’ gestation.
The bill passed by legislators requires physicians to report any abortions they perform to the commissioner of the state’s Bureau for Public Health within 15 days, including a justification for why the care was provided.
On July 25, the state legislature was initially called into a special session to consider Justice’s proposal to reduce personal income tax rates.
But that morning, as lawmakers were gaveling in, Justice amended the call and said he would also be asking lawmakers “to clarify and modernize the abortion-related laws currently existing as part of the West Virginia Code.”
“From the moment the Supreme Court announced their decision in Dobbs, I said that I would not hesitate to call a Special Session once I heard from our Legislative leaders that they had done their due diligence and were ready to act,” Justice said in a statement. “As I have said many times, I very proudly stand for life, and I believe that every human life is a miracle worth protecting.”
Guitar legend Carlos Santana and his wife, drummer Cindy Blackman Santana, have lent their talents to a new song called “It’s My Body” by the duo 2TSpark!
The song, which was written as a rallying cry for women’s reproductive rights, will be released as a digital single on Saturday, September 17. You can check out a companion video now on 2TSpark!’s official YouTube channel. The tune was co-written and sung by the duo of singer/songwriter/musicians Tracy Blackman and Tina “Bean” Blaine.
“We all hope that this video and song will help raise awareness around the globe and raise funds for organizations that are dedicated to supporting women’s rights and their reproductive freedom,” says Tracy. “After Bean and I recorded the song … my sister Cindy heard it and said she’d put down drum parts. Then my brother-in-law Carlos heard the song. He loved it, couldn’t stop playing it. Then he said he wanted to play on it, and the project took off from there.”
Adds Bean, “We wrote ‘It’s My Body’ during a marimba jam in response to the Texas abortion ban that passed in September 2021. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, we felt an urgency to share this message.”
Proceeds from the track will be donated to several organizations that support reproductive rights, including Planned Parenthood and National Organization of Women.
The video features a montage of photos and footage from pro-choice protests through the years, as well as images of women of various ages and ethnicities.
Sean Kanan has finally made it back to the Valley. The actor, known for playing the villainous Mike Barnes in The Karate Kid III, reprised the role in season 5 of Netflix’s hit series Cobra Kai. He told ABC Audio that when he got the call to return, he wasn’t surprised at all.
“I was relieved,” Kanan said. “I was thinking to myself, ‘Alright, this is season 5 here, it’s getting a little late in the game. Come on, guys, we’re in the fourth quarter here, how about putting me in!’”
While he was eager to play the character again, Kanan said he made sure he wasn’t giving a repeat performance.
“I just wanted to be sure that we brought some different colors and some different dimensions to the character, because Mike Barnes was very much a one-dimensional bad guy in the film,” Kanan said. “I wanted to make sure that I was going to come up with something that was going to be interesting on different levels.”
This thought process aligns closely with Kanan’s view of the show as a whole. He says that the Cobra Kai cast and crew “have done their level-best to make sure that what they’re doing is in no way derivative or redundant of the original films.”
All that being said, Kanan acknowledges the role nostalgia has played in the show’s success.
“You’ve got the guys my age who like it for the nostalgic factor, and then you’ve got the younger kids who like it for what’s going on with the younger kids, and, effectively, the show has become a magnet,” Kanan said. “It attracts both generations and it’s something that they can do together.”
