Lizzo dishes all about her best friendships in her new single “Grrrls,” which dropped Friday.
In the new track, the rapper and singer gushes about female friendships and how they have each other’s backs, singing in the pre-chorus, “‘Cause that’s my girl, we codependent / If she with it, then I’m with it.”
“Yeah, we tussle, mind your business,” she continues. “That’s my girl, we CEOs / And dancin’ like a C-E-ho.”
Prior to the release, Lizzo teased the track, twerking in an Instagram video while dressed in lavender set from her shapewear line Yitty.
“Pre save Special to hear the whole song Fridayyyyy,” she geo-tagged the snippet.
“Grrrls” is the second single to be released ahead of Lizzo’s upcoming fourth studio album, Special, which is due out July 15. The first single “About Damn Time” dropped April 14.
(WASHINGTON) — Inflation reaccelerated in May, rising at the highest level seen in four decades, according to data released by the federal government on Friday.
The consumer price index, or CPI, stood at 8.6% year over year in May, a significant increase from 8.3% the month prior, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is the largest 12-month increase since the period ending December 1981.
On a monthly basis, the consumer price index rose 1% in May, far outpacing the 0.3% rise seen in April, according to the bureau.
Energy, food and housing costs contributed to the surge in prices. The new data arrives a day after the nationwide average price for a gallon of gas reached $5, according to GasBuddy.
The core consumer price index, which strips out food and energy costs, rose 0.6% on a monthly basis in May, the same increase that it saw in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Angelina Jolie will write, direct and produce the indie film Without Blood, starring Salma Hayek Pinault and Demián Bichir, according to Variety. The film, set in the aftermath of an unidentified conflict, is based on the international-bestselling novel by Italian writer Alessandro Baricco, is being billed as exploring “universal truths about war, trauma, memory and healing,” according to the trade. Principal photography has begun in the Puglia and Basilicata regions of southern Italy, as well as in Rome…
Jodie Comer is Broadway bound. Deadline reports the Killing Eve actress will make her Broadway debut next spring in Prima Facie. In the play, Comer plays Tessa, “a young, brilliant barrister who has worked her way up from working class origins to be at the top of her game, defending, cross-examining and winning,” per the outlet. “An unexpected event forces her to confront the lines where the patriarchal power of the law, burden of proof and morals diverge.” The play is currently in production on the West End, where it is in its final two weeks of a sold-out run…
Under the Banner of Heaven star Sam Worthington, The Offer‘s Burn Gorman, and Jacob Batalon, star of the Spider-Man films are set to join Kevin Hart in the Netflix feature Lift, according to Deadline. Jean Reno, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Vincent D’Onofrio, Billy Magnussen, Úrsula Corberó, Yun Jee Kim, Viveik Kalra and Paul Anderson also star. Hart will play “a master thief who is wooed by his ex-girlfriend and the FBI to pull off an impossible heist with his international crew on a 777 flying from London to Zurich”…
(BUCHA, Ukraine) — Bucha, Ukraine is getting back to normal, but residents are still living with trauma from the war.
ABC News correspondents returned to Bucha to witness its rebirth.
In April, it took over two hours for the ABC News team to travel from Kyiv to Bucha, with bombed out bridges and checkpoints slowing their momentum. Now, the trip has returned to its swift 45-minute length.
Where charred tanks and burned out trucks littered Bucha’s streets a few weeks ago, flowers now color the city, and thick grass replaces mine-planted meadows.
The ABC News team headed to an apartment block that they remembered as bleak and frozen in April. There, they reunited with Mykola Pavlyuk, who had shared his story with ABC News in April. He had shown where he had buried his three friends in his backyard.
After being forced out of his home by Russian troops, Pavlyuk had lived underground with the other residents in his building.
One of his friends was killed by a grenade, and Pavlyuk had been in charge of picking up the pieces of his ruined body so that they could be buried.
Pavlyuk told ABC News that he left Bucha for a while after the April visit to live with his sister. Since then, doctors in the family have prescribed him medication and he has found help through his church.
“Eventually I had to get up and move on,” he said. “Thankfully I got a new job. I’m glad I have a job. I only just started. So life goes on. I try to think about the bad times as little as possible. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work out. Everything reminds me of the past.”
Despite hearing about the power Pavlyuk’s April interview had over people all over the world, Pavlyuk is still struggling with what he has endured.
“I don’t feel great,” Pavlyuk said. “I start remembering. And it’s hard. I try to calm myself down. I saw my friends, my family but I feel bad.”
Outside, standing by the homemade grave of his friends, Pavlyuk acknowledges the regrowth around him.
“It helps that it’s summer,” he said. “All the destruction is hidden by the greenery. It’s hiding the terrors of Bucha.”
Like many of Bucha’s residents, Pavlyuk can’t forget the mass graves, torture, execution and alleged human rights abuses that have now defined the city.
A mass grave site has reclaimed a churchyard in the city. Small memorials are the only markings seen, and dried flowers wrapped in Ukrainian colors sit sadly at its base.
Pavlyuk doubts there will be an investigation into the atrocities.
Bucha is not the only place which has had to endure alleged war crimes inflicted by Russian troops.
Last month, a 21-year-old Russian soldier pleaded guilty to killing an unarmed civilian in another town. It was the first war crimes trial since the war started.
As the war continues in Ukraine, citizens have no time to grieve. With Russian forces persevering in Donbas, the flowers of Bucha look frail.
(NEW YORK) — A fossil from a a carnivorous dinosaur that lived about 98 million years ago was unearthed by an Egyptian-led team of researchers in the country’s Western desert.
The well-preserved neck vertebra, discovered during a 2016 expedition to Bahariya Oasis in the vast desert, belongs to an Abelisaurid theropod, a species that lived during the Cretaceous period (about 145 to 66 million years ago), according to researchers.
The species were more common in parts of Europe and modern Southern Hemisphere continents, such as Africa and South America, in addition to the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar.
It’s the first time that remains of Abelisaurid, named after Argentinean Roberto Abel — who first discovered remains of the species decades ago — were found in Egypt. It is the oldest known fossil of the species in northeastern Africa.
In the early 20th century, fossils of other famous dinosaurs were discovered in the region, including Spinosaurus, but the samples were destroyed during the bombing in Munich during World War II.
The study was conducted by members of the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center (MUVP), Egypt’s Environmental Affairs Agency and U.S. researchers. The results were published in the scientific journal Royal Society Open Science.
Hesham Sallam, the founding director of the MUVP and a member of the research team, told ABC News that a meticulous operation was carried out to remove iron and sand from the vertebra’s surface.
“It’s the first time we discover here a meat-eating dinosaur in over a century… teams from Pennsylvania previously found fossils of plant-eating dinosaurs in the same area,” Sallam added.
“We found other things but we are not making further announcements for the time being,” he said.
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh describes Abelisaurid as a “kind of bulldog-faced, small-toothed, tiny-armed theropod that is estimated to have been roughly six meters (20 feet) in body length.”
“It has a big skull that resembles the shape of a bulldog … Its teeth look like knife blades, which enable it to grip its prey and tear off its flesh,” Belal Salem, a member of the MUVP and a graduate student at Ohio University who led the study, told ABC News.
In 2018, fossils of a plant-eating Cretaceous Period dinosaur were also uncovered in another oasis in western Egypt while remains of a 43-million-year-old semiaquatic whale were unearthed in the Fayoum province, south of Cairo, last year.
(WASHINGTON) — In a prime-time hearing, the House select committee on Thursday began laying out the findings of its ongoing investigation, placing former President Donald Trump at the center of what it called the “culmination of an attempted coup” and “multistep conspiracy aimed at overturning the presidential election.”
From a packed room in the Cannon House Office Building, the panel spent almost two hours unearthing new details of what members have learned behind closed doors over the course of their 11-month investigation — gathering more than 140,000 documents and 1,000 witness interviews to piece together details from, and leading up to, the Capitol attack on Jan. 6.
The hearing, the first of several this month, included never-before-seen footage of the attack and distress calls from law enforcement that left some in the room in tears.
Taped depositions with Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, son-in-law Jared Kushner and other members of Trump’s inner circle were also aired before the committee heard live testimony from two people on the ground that day: Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards and documentarian Nick Quested.
In the audience were law enforcement members who pushed back against rioters as well as widows of officers who died in the aftermath.
“Tonight and over the next few weeks, we are going to remind you of the reality of what happened that day,” Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in his opening statement. “But our work must do much more than just look backwards, because our democracy is in danger. The conspiracy to defraud the will of the people is not over.”
Here are some key takeaways:
Committee places Trump at center of ‘attempted coup’
In his opening statement, Thompson — looking directly at the camera and reading from a teleprompter — called Jan. 6 “the culmination of an attempted coup” and illustrative of “President Trump’s last stand — his most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.”
“He lost in the courts, just as he did at the ballot box. And in this country, that’s the end of the line,” he said. “But for Donald Trump, that was only the beginning of what became a sprawling, multi-step conspiracy aimed at overturning the presidential election.”
Thompson laid out how every president in American history has carried out the peaceful transfer of power — until Trump — and previewed how the committee would use testimony from Trump’s own allies to show he directly encouraged his supporters to stop lawmakers from certifying election results.
“Trump was at the center of this conspiracy, and ultimately, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy,” Thompson said.
Vice-Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said Trump “coordinated a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”
Cheney also built a case against fellow Republican officeholders, addressing them directly: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone. But your dishonor will remain.”
Key players offer first-hand insight into Trump’s thinking
Using recorded testimony from Trump officials including former Attorney General Bill Barr, former Trump spokesman Jason Miller, campaign attorney Alex Cannon and some of Trump’s closest family members, Cheney argued that Trump was “well aware” both that he lost the election and of ongoing violence at the Capitol yet still moved forward with a plot to stay in power.
In a video clip from an interview with Barr, Trump’s attorney general said he “repeatedly told the president, in no uncertain terms, that I did not see evidence of fraud and — you know, that would have affected the outcome of the election.”
Ivanka Trump, in another clip, was asked about Barr’s statement that the Justice Department found no fraud sufficient to overturn the election.
“It affected my perspective,” she said of Barr’s assessment. “I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying.”
Cheney also showed a tape of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner telling the committee that he dismissed White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s “multiple” threats to resign in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot.
“I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you,” Kushner said.
“Whining,” Cheney recounted to the hearing room. “There is a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the Constitution… And that oath must mean something.”
Further laying out what the committee learned in its interviews, Cheney said the American people will soon hear testimony from former White House staff about Trump’s reaction to rioters threatening violence against then-Vice President Mike Pence.
“You will hear testimony that ‘the president didn’t really want to put anything out calling off the riot or asking his supporters to leave,'” Cheney said in her opening statement. “You will hear that President Trump was yelling and ‘really angry at advisers who told him he needed to be doing something more.'”
“And, aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the president responded with this sentiment: ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea,'” she recounted. “Mike Pence ‘deserves’ it.”
Capitol Police officer recounts disbelief as ‘war scene’ unfolded
Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after rioters knocked her to the ground, painted a dire picture of what took place that day, describing it as “an absolute war zone” with “hours of hand-to-hand combat.”
“I can just remember my breath catching in my throat because I — what I saw was just a war scene,” Edwards testified. “It was something like I’d seen out of the movies. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“There were officers on the ground. You know, they were bleeding. They were throwing up. You know, they had, I mean, I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell,” she said.
“It was carnage,” she continued. “It was chaos. I can’t even describe what I saw, never in my wildest dreams did I think as a police officer, as a law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle.”
Edwards was knocked unconscious during an altercation with rioters — a moment captured on video that aired during the hearing — but returned to duty at the Capitol’s west terrace. She was also later hit with pepper spray and tear gas.
Teasing what’s to come
The House select committee will hold five more hearings this month. The next one is Monday at 10 a.m.
That hearing, Cheney said, will focus on how Trump and his team knew he had lost the election but continued to spread false claims about fraud and unsuccessfully litigated the matter in court.
At the third hearing, slated for June 15, the committee plans to argue that Trump planned to replace Barr so the Department of Justice could act on his false election claims. Cheney said he even went so far as to offer Jeff Clark, an environmental lawyer at the DOJ, the role of acting attorney general.
The fourth hearing is expected to focus on Trump’s pressure campaign to get Pence not to certify the 2020 election. Pence refused and has repeatedly said he never had the authority to do so, despite Trump’s claim.
Trump’s efforts to halt the counting of electoral votes at the state level will be the focus of the fifth hearing.
(WASHINGTON) — A filmmaker who witnessed firsthand the clashes between pro-Trump rioters and police officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6 said former President Donald Trump had “enormous power” over the rioters and could have prevented the violence that day.
“I believe he had enormous power over that crowd,” documentarian Nick Quested said in an interview with ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl ahead of his testimony before the House Jan. 6 select committee Thursday night.
“I think that there’s a high probability that things would have been a lot calmer if he’d have asked people to stop,” he said.
Quested, a veteran filmmaker who has covered conflicts around the world, has spent his career documenting other people living through dangerous and difficult situations.
A producer of visceral documentaries Restrepo and Korengal, he followed U.S. service members through a deployment to a remote region of Afghanistan.
Quested has also covered the rise of ISIS in Syria and the dangerous journey of migrants through Central America.
But he said his experience following the Proud Boys and other pro-Trump rioters to the Capitol and their combat with police officers on Jan. 6 was one of the most violent situations he’s ever faced.
“I’m astounded that people say it wasn’t violent, because I’ve been in a lot of violent situations in my life, and I don’t think I’ve seen something that’s been that persistently violent for such a long period of time,” he said.
War zone firefights “don’t last very long,” he said. “There’s moments of panic and then hours of boredom.”
“This is hours of panic,” he said of the experience on Jan. 6.
Quested was so close to the action on Jan. 6 that he was initially considered a suspect by the FBI.
“For the first few weeks I was a subject of investigation,” he said. “They couldn’t figure out how I wasn’t part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government.”
His camera was rolling as a rioter was pushed off the balcony outside the Capitol, and as others used flag poles and makeshift weapons to attack Capitol Police officers and break into the building.
“For anyone that really didn’t think that there was extreme violence in that day, I filmed it. I saw it and was subject to it. The violence was real. And it was exceptionally powerful,” Quested said.
“When you see two people die on one day, you know… it’s not normal political discourse,” he said.
The footage, which was shared with the select committee and played during the public hearing Thursday night, showed rioters attacking Capitol Police officers with flag poles and other makeshift weapons, and pacing through the halls of Congress.
One member of Quested’s team filmed rioters screaming out for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., as they entered her offices, just minutes before she was evacuated from the Capitol by her security detail.
Quested, who spent weeks with members of the Proud Boys and former leader Enrique Tarrio, followed Tarrio to an underground parking garage in Washington on Jan. 5, where he met with Stuart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia also linked to the Capitol attack.
Quested and his crew did not capture any audio of the exchange between the two far-right leaders.
“I don’t know whether it’s a smoking gun or not, the optics of having a meeting with Stewart Rhodes the day before the events of January 6 is terrible,” he said.
Tarrio, Rhodes and members of both groups have been charged with seditious conspiracy in connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Quested said it was “unnerving” to be in front of the camera before the committee’s investigation.
“I’m usually the fly on the wall. I’m not the fly on the wall anymore,” he said.
Quested said he agreed to cooperate and testify publicly because “the truth is important.”
“If my testimony can help establish … a basis of truthfulness about what really happened on that day, then I’ve done my job as a journalist,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — Federal prosecutors in Manhattan, New York have started a criminal investigation into Wells Fargo to determine whether the nation’s third largest bank’s hiring practices broke the law, a source briefed on the investigation confirmed to ABC News.
The criminal investigation follows a report last month in The New York Times, in which current and former employees said they were told by superiors to interview women and people of color even though the hiring decision had already been made.
The allegation is similar to that of Brian Flores and other black football coaches who have accused the NFL of conducting sham interviews to satisfy diversity requirements with no intention of actually hiring someone of color. The NFL has defended its hiring practices.
The investigation into Wells Fargo is in its early stages and no charging decisions have been made, the source said, adding that the investigation is being led by a recently created civil rights unit within the office.
A spokesman for Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, declined to comment.
The New York Times based its story, in part, on former Wells Fargo employee Joe Bruno who said bank managers interviewed applicants considered diverse for jobs already promised to others. The Times reported Bruno was fired after speaking out.
In the United States, Wells Fargo employs more than 235,000 people, 13% of whom are Black, according to 2020 company statistics. Another 17% are Latino and 55% are white.
“No one should be put through an interview without a real chance of receiving an offer, period. The diverse slate guidelines we put in place are meant to increase diverse representation across the company and we can see meaningful results in our hiring data since 2020,” Wells Fargo said in a statement provided to ABC News that did not directly address the reported opening of a federal criminal investigation.
“At the same time, it’s important that implementation of our guidelines is consistent. Earlier this week, the company temporarily paused the use of its diverse slate guidelines. During this pause, the company is conducting a review so that hiring managers, senior leaders and recruiters fully understand how the guidelines should be implemented – and so we can have confidence that our guidelines live up to their promise,” the statement continued.
(NEW YORK) — As summer travel booms and prices for gas, hotel rooms and flights skyrocket, taking to the sea this summer season could save travelers big bucks.
Despite rising prices in most sectors, Chris Gray Faust, the managing editor of online industry publication The Cruise Critic, says prices for cruises “are some of the lowest that we’ve seen in a very long time.”
Right now, a five-day cruise around the Caribbean costs approximately $500 per person, Gray Faust said. Some experts says that’s a great way to get big bang for your buck.
“That works out to about $100 per day, including lodging, meals and entertainment,” Gray Faust told ABC News. “And with the way that land vacations have been … [with] airfares more expensive, you’re really hard pressed to find a vacation for a similar price on land.”
Some of the best deals right now include a three-day Carnival cruise from Miami to the Bahamas, for just $118 per person; a four-night Royal Caribbean cruise from Miami to the Bahamas starting at $198 per person; and a seven-day Holland America cruise in Alaska at $399 per person.
Gray Faust also recommended checking for additional deals that could make a cruise an even better buy.
“Not only are the fares low, but a lot of the cruise lines are putting in a lot of extra value type of things — like, they’re throwing in free gratuities, free Wi-Fi, free drink packages, things like that,” Gray Faust said.
Compared to skyrocketing prices for hotels and airfare, cruises are, for the time being, a steal. According to Hopper, an online travel booking platform, hotels are currently averaging $204 a night, up from $150 per night in 2021.
On top of that, Hopper estimates the average price of a round-trip domestic flight at around $397 and more than $1,000 for a round-trip international flight.
As pandemic-related restrictions relax, cruise lines are looking to fill their cabins and sail more of their ships, which lowers costs as well.
“What that means for [people] looking for a good vacation this summer is that there’s plenty of room on these cruise ships because there’s more ships back, there’s more rooms available and the prices are lower,” Gray Faust said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed its risk assessment of cruise ship travel in late March of 2022, but still advises travelers to be aware of a particular ship’s risk designations and stay up to date with their vaccinations. The agency has also recommended purchasing travel insurance before a trip and has advised travelers to continue masking up indoors.
Though pandemic protocols have eased on board most ships, passengers should still check with their cruise line ahead of time to see whether there are specific vaccine or testing requirements.
Anyone with COVID-19 symptoms, or those awaiting COVID-19 test results, should not travel, according to the CDC.
Travelers hoping to snag a good deal should move soon. According to Gray Faust, prices will begin to increase as the holiday season approaches this fall.
“Summer is a good time for a value vacation like this, partially because of hurricane season,” Gray Faust said, adding that “we should see these prices last until October” and that “now is that time to go.”
