Saturday Night Live closed out its 47th season this weekend by saying goodbye to cast members Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Pete Davidson and Kyle Mooney, who each got their own sendoff.
Saturday’s show opened with McKinnon reprising her alien abductee Ms. Rafferty, leaving Earth permanently aboard her abductors’ spaceship.
“Well, Earth. I love you, thanks for letting me stay awhile,” McKinnon’s Rafferty said, fighting tears, before delivering the sketch comedy show’s familiar opening line, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”
During the show’s “Weekend Update” segment, Davidson, who announced his departure ahead of the finale, delivered a heartfelt message of gratitude to the show, particularly to executive producer Lorne Michaels.
“I appreciate Saturday Night Live always having my back,” he said. “Thank you, Lorne, for never giving up on me or judging me, even when everyone else was, and for believing in me and allowing me to have a place that I could call home, with memories that will last a lifetime. So thank you, guys.”
In another “Weekend Update” skit, Bryant and Bowen Yang reprised their flamboyant ‘trend forecasters’ characters, which ended with Bryant announcing that “My best guys kissing me” is in, after which Yang and Update co-anchor Michael Che gave her a kiss and a shout-out, along with a bouquet of flowers.
Mooney’s sendoff was a bit more subtle. A 9 to 5 parody, also featuring SNL alum Fred Armisen, saw their characters jumping out of the window of an office building.
Russian Doll star Natasha Leone hosted, along with musical guest Japanese Breakfast.
(NEW YORK) — When the war in Ukraine broke out in February, Trevor Reed said he believed it meant he likely would never come home.
The American former Marine by that time had been imprisoned in Russia for nearly three years, held hostage after being convicted on trumped up charges. For 985 days, Reed was held in a series of Russian prisons, thrown in isolation cells as small as a closet for 23 hours a day, placed in a psychiatric ward and sent to a forced labor camp he described as looking and feeling like something “out of medieval times.”
But within two months, Reed was home in the United States, freed on April 27 as part of a prisoner swap agreed between the Biden administration and the Kremlin. Reed was freed in exchange for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot from Russia who was sentenced in 2011 to 20 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the United States.
Now back in America and with his family for the first time, Reed is trying to adjust to normal life.
“I’ve been hanging out with the family a lot, been trying to get used to being free again,” the former U.S. Marine told ABC News in one of his first interviews since being released. “That takes a little bit of time, that process. But I feel better every day.”
For more of the ABC News interview with Trevor Reed, watch the full interview on ABC News Live at 8:30 p.m. ET.
He said that when he was arrested in Moscow in the summer of 2019, he was a healthy 175-pound student majoring in international security studies. When he was released, he said his weight had dropped to 131 pounds, he was ill, coughing up blood and feared he had contracted tuberculosis.
“He looked terrible. He looked really thin and he had dark circles under his eyes, and he just didn’t look like the Trevor that left for Russia,” Reed’s mother, Paula Reed, told ABC News. “So, that was hard to see him looking that way.”
Long ordeal began with 2019 arrest
The 30-year-old Texas native’s ordeal started in 2019 when he was visiting his Russian girlfriend, a recent law graduate, in Moscow. Reed, who had been studying Russian, was coming to the end of his time in the country and attended a party with his girlfriend’s friends, where plied with vodka shots he became drunk.
On the drive home, Reed became unmanageable, according to his girlfriend, Alina Tsybulnik, and jumped out of the car. Unable to get him back in and fearing for his safety, Tsybulnik and her friends said they called the police to ask them to take Reed to a drunk tank to sober up.
Two police officers agreed and after taking Reed to the station told his girlfriend to come pick him up in the morning. Reed, who says the last thing he remembers was being in the park, said when he woke up in the lobby of the police station the next morning initially he was free to leave.
But as he waited for his girlfriend to arrive to pick him up, a shift change occurred and the police brass on the next shift decided to hold him. Then, he said, agents from Russia’s powerful domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service or FSB, arrived and interrogated him.
“I pretty much knew as soon as I saw FSB agents where this case was was headed,” said Reed.
“The main thing that they wanted to know was about my military service,” Reed added. “They didn’t ask me at all, not one question about if I had committed a crime, if I had done something wrong. They did not ask me anything related to that at all. They wanted to know about my military service primarily.”
After the agents’ arrival, the police abruptly accused Reed of assaulting the police officers who had taken him the night before, charging him with endangering their lives.
He was arrested on the spot.
‘Kangaroo court’
Reed was put on trial, in what he described as a “kangaroo court” and which the U.S. embassy denounced as absurd. At a hearing attended by ABC News, the two police officers Reed was alleged to have assaulted struggled to remember the incident and repeatedly contradicted themselves, at one point becoming so confused that the judge laughed at them.
Reed told ABC News that during an interrogation with the two officers, they admitted to him they had been ordered to make the false allegations against him.
“I asked, you know, one of those officers, I said, ‘Why are you guys doing this? Why did you write this, like, false, you know, accusation against me?’ And he looked around at the door to make sure that there was no one there, and he looked at the other police officer, and he said, “We didn’t want to write this. They told us to write this.'” Reed said.
Despite believing the trial was predetermined, Reed battled to prove his innocence, repeatedly appealing rulings. He accused Russian authorities of trying to pressure him into dropping his resistance, including, at one point, sending him to a psychiatric treatment facility to “scare me.”
“That was pretty terrible. You know, blood on the walls. There’s a hole in the floor for the toilet,” said Reed, adding that human feces were all over the floor of a cramped cell he shared with four other prisoners, who suffered from serious psychological conditions.
“I thought maybe they had sent me there to chemically disable me, to give me sedatives or whatever and make me unable to fight,” Reed said.
After over a year in a pre-trial detention center that he described as “extremely dirty” and infested with rats, in mid-2020 Reed was convicted and sentenced to nine years in a prison camp. He was transported to a prison in Mordovia, around 300 miles of Moscow, a former Gulag camp built just after World War II.
But there, Reed said he refused to work or kowtow to prison rules.
“Ethically, I thought that would be wrong to work for a government who was kidnapping Americans and using them as political hostages,” Reed said. “I couldn’t justify that with myself.”
As punishment, he said he was placed in solitary confinement for 15-day stretches at a time, sleeping in the cold cell at night on the floor, trying to stay warm by huddling next to a hot-water pipe.
“I mean, it was difficult, but I wasn’t going to let that change my actions,” Reed said.
Won prisoners’ respect
Reed said that even as the guards in the camp “hated him” for not complying with their orders to work, his resistance attracted the admiration of fellow prisoners.
“I was consistently fighting and resisting the government there,” he said. “The prisoners inside of the Russian prison, the criminal element there, they respected that.”
He said he survived by maintaining his battle for justice while at the same time refusing to allow himself to hope he would ever go home.
Watch the ABC News Live special “985 Days: The Trevor Reed Interview” on Monday, May 23, at 8:30 pm ET/9:30 pm PT
Meanwhile, Reed’s parents continued to battle for his freedom. His father, Joey Reed, flew to Russia, spending over a year alone there to be at his son’s court hearings and lobby U.S. diplomats in Moscow. Stateside, he and his wife and daughter mounted an intensive campaign of government leaders on both sides of the political aisle to take up his cause.
Joey and Paula Reed took their fight all the way to the White House, eventually obtaining a meeting with President Biden which they credit as being decisive in persuading his administration to finally make the trade.
“My parents and my girlfriend, Alina, did everything,” Trevor Reed said. “They gave up their whole lives to help me.”
Prisoner trade
Reed said on the day he was traded, he was loaded onto a plane by 20 FSB agents but told nothing of the destination. But as the plane headed south and he saw he was flying over water, Reed said he realized it must be the Black Sea and he must be headed for Turkey. The aging Russian government plane was so dilapidated though, Reed said, that he feared they might crash before they made it to any swap.
On the tarmac in Turkey, he walked past Yaroshenko, he said.
“I remember looking at him and he looked over at me. I think both of us probably had that same feeling, that same thought of like, ‘that’s what that guy looks like,'” Reed said.
Treated by doctors on the plane back, Reed said he struggled to shake a new found anxiety around flying.
“Mostly I was hoping that the plane did not crash at that moment before I saw my family,” he said.
Wages fight for other hostages
Reed said that when he initially landed in the United States, his parents were there to meet him, but he said he couldn’t hug or touch them until he underwent a full medical examination to ensure he did not have tuberculosis or any other communicable diseases.
Since being medically cleared, he said he has tried to adjust to normal life, even having to remember some English, after speaking Russian for the past three years.
But Reed said he cannot stop thinking about the other former Marine held hostage in Russia, Paul Whelan, who was left behind. Whelan, who was seized in 2018 while attending a wedding in Moscow, is held on espionage charges that the U.S. government says were also fabricated to take him as a bargaining chip. Whelan is in a prison camp also in Mordovia, sentenced to 16 years.
Russia had previously floated trading Whelan for Yaroshenko and other Russians held in the United States and at one time it had been thought Reed and Whelan might be traded as a pair.
“I had a really strong feeling of guilt that I was free and that Paul Whelan was still in prison. I thought when I found out that it was an exchange that was happening, that they had probably exchanged Paul Whelan, as well. And I expected him to be coming home with me. And he — he didn’t,” Reed said.
“I thought that that was wrong, that they got me out and not Paul,” Reed said, choking up. “I knew that as soon as I was able to, that I would fight for him to get out and that I would do everything I could to get him outta there.”
Reed said he also feared for the WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was seized on drugs smuggling charges in February after Russian authorities alleged they had found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. The State Department has designated Griner as wrongfully detained.
Russia has also floated the idea of trading the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout for Whelan and Griner. Bout, nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” is serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States, convicted on narco-terrorism charges.
Reed said the United States should trade Bout without hesitation to free Whelan and Griner.
“I think that they need to do that. If that’s for Viktor Bout, I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s 100 Victor Bouts. They have to get our guys out,” Reed said.
“You’re getting two Americans who are going to have, you know, a huge amount of time left on their sentences for a guy who is getting out soon — who has already been in prison for 15 years,” he said.
He said if the freedom of the other American hostages means more prisoner exchanges, then the U.S. government shouldn’t balk at taking that path again.
When told that some have countered that prisoner exchanges only encourage countries to take more hostages, Reed scoffed at that notion.
“I would like to say that that’s completely inaccurate,” Reed said. “That’s not a concern at all because countries like Russia, China, Venezuela, Rwanda, Iran, Syria and places like that need absolutely no incentive to kidnap Americans.”
(NEW YORK) — The head of one of the country’s largest manufacturers of baby formula expressed remorse at his company’s role in the nationwide shortage — and announced a multimillion-dollar fund to help families that have suffered during the crisis — in an op-ed published over the weekend.
“The past few months have distressed us as they have you, and so I want to say: We’re sorry to every family we’ve let down since our voluntary recall exacerbated our nation’s baby formula shortage,” Abbott CEO Robert Ford wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “I have high expectations of this company, and we fell short of them.”
Abbott recalled formula and closed its manufacturing plant in Sturgis, Michigan, in February over concerns about bacterial contamination after four infants fell ill. That compounded coronavirus-related supply chain issues already fueling a baby formula shortage.
Ford reiterated a two-week timeline for when Abbott’s shuttered Sturgis plant will reopen — saying he expects the company will be able to restart the facility “by the first week in June.”
Once that facility is back at full capacity, Ford said that Abbott plans to “more than double” its current domestic production.
“By the end of June, we will be supplying more formula to Americans than we were in January before the recall,” Ford wrote, adding that Abbott will be “making significant investments to ensure this never happens again.”
Once the plant restarts production, it will take six to eight weeks before product is available on shelves, according to Ford.
Abbott’s specialized formula, EleCare, was included in its recall, leaving families with limited nutrition options particularly scrambling to find formula. There have been reports of several children hospitalized due to the lack of EleCare.
In his op-ed, Ford said the company will “invest in upgrading our safety and quality processes and equipment” and “create the redundancy we need to never have to stop production of critical products” like the specialized formulas for children who can’t digest other formulas and milks.
Ford called the hospitalizations due to a lack of EleCare “tragic and heartbreaking” and added that Abbott is “working to identify ways” to get sick kids across the country what they need.
Once manufacturing resumes, Abbott will “prioritize EleCare … and get that out the door first,” Ford wrote.
As the company further works to help ease the shortage, Abbott’s Ohio plant’s lines have also been converted from adult nutrition products to make more ready-to-feed infant formula, and the company is airfreighting in more powdered formula from its Ireland facility, Ford noted.
While families wait for formula to hit shelves, Ford announced in his op-ed that Abbott is establishing a $5 million fund “to help these families with medical and living expenses as they weather this storm.”
“These steps we’re taking won’t end the struggles of families today,” Ford wrote. “Some solutions will take weeks, others will take longer, but we will not rest until it is done. I will not rest. I want everyone to trust us to do what is right, and I know that must be earned back.”
In response to the crisis, this week President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to get ingredients to manufacturers to help speed up production. He also directed Department of Defense commercial aircraft to pick up infant formula overseas to get on U.S. shelves faster while U.S. manufacturers ramp up production.
The first batch of imported baby formula arrived Sunday in the United States.
The shipment includes hypoallergenic formulas for children with cow’s milk protein allergies.
(NEW YORK) — In long-awaited data, Pfizer said its 3-dose vaccine was 80% effective against symptomatic omicron COVID-19 infection among children 6 months to under 5 years old.
The company cautioned that estimate was preliminary and could be adjusted as more data is collected. The trial wasn’t big enough to estimate protection against severe disease, which experts expect to be higher.
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For all age groups, vaccine efficacy against more mild breakthrough infections waned in the face of the highly transmissible omicron variant, but efficacy against severe disease and death remained high for most age groups.
Pfizer announced in December that it would not move forward with a two-dose vaccine after disappointing data, instead opting to study three doses for this age group. The company will submit the new data as part of its ongoing “rolling” submission to the FDA.
For anxious parents, the Pfizer news offers reassurance that the vaccine help protect young children currently not eligible for vaccination.
The news doesn’t change the overall timeline for when vaccines for this age group could be available. For the youngest Americans, vaccines from both Pfizer and Moderna are expected to be authorized in June or July, likely as a two-dose vaccine for Pfizer and a three-dose vaccine for Moderna, though Moderna is also studying a third dose.
Pfizer also said its vaccine was safe, with a similar safely profile as placebo shots. If authorized, this vaccine would be 3 shots of 3 micrograms each. Each dose is one-tenth the adult dose.
“We are pleased that our formulation for the youngest children, which we carefully selected to be one-tenth of the dose strength for adults, was well tolerated and produced a strong immune response,” said Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive officer, in prepared remarks.
Moderna, meanwhile, asked the FDA for authorization on April 28 for a two-dose vaccine for this age range. Moderna’s preliminary analysis found its two-dose pediatric vaccine was 51% effective against symptomatic COVID-19 among children 6 months to under 2 years old, and 27% among children 2 to 5 years old — roughly the same efficacy seen in adults during the omicron surge. Protection against serious disease and death was higher.
“I anticipate a lot of parents will be asking whether they should choose a two-dose Moderna vaccine or the three-dose Pfizer vaccine,” said Dr. Alok Patel, pediatric hospitalist at Stanford Children’s health and an ABC News contributor. “I would recommend that parents pay attention to the FDA and CDC’s guidance and what final analysis reveals for both vaccines.”
Experts caution that vaccine efficacy against symptomatic infection is a high bar, and experts expect these vaccines will offer excellent protection against severe illness, just as they do for adults.
This development means Pfizer is one step closer to submitting its vaccine for an emergency use authorization. It will likely be reviewed by the FDA’s advisers at meetings on June 21 and 22, and if authorized, be available sometime in early July.
It’s possible that the FDA’s advisers could review Moderna’s data even earlier — on June 8 — but no agenda has been released. It also depends on the time it takes FDA to sift through Moderna’s application, which includes a request to authorize its vaccine not only for the youngest kids, but also kids 6 to 17.
Though the FDA’s leaders have repeatedly said they would not unnecessarily hold up Moderna’s authorization, it’s possible that the FDA’s panel of independent experts call for authorizing Moderna and Pfizer side-by-side.
Because they’re both for the same general age group but are different vaccines with different levels of protection, some experts believe it will be easier to authorize them together and allow parents to choose which vaccine to give their kids with all of the information available.
But many parents and pediatricians want the vaccine that’s available soonest, after two grueling years of waiting.
Though children under five is the last remaining age group that’s yet to be vaccinated, polls indicate there could be sluggish uptake.
A recent survey from KFF found that just under 1 in 5 parents are eager to get their children under five vaccinated right away.
However, the KFF poll more than half of parents said that they feel they do not have enough information about the vaccines’ safety and efficacy for children under age 5 — which could change after the public FDA advisory meetings to discuss the pediatric data.
“Parents should also be aware that this preliminary data will be supplemented by additional data in June, which will then be thoroughly reviewed by both the FDA and the CDC,” Patel said.
The U.S. Marshals Service shared this image of homicide suspect Kaitlin Armstrong. – U.S. Marshals Service
(AUSTIN, Texas) — A manhunt is underway for a Texas woman wanted in connection with the fatal shooting of a professional cyclist who authorities say was once romantically linked to the suspect’s boyfriend.
Austin police issued a homicide warrant on Tuesday for Kaitlin Marie Armstrong, 35, in the killing of 25-year-old Anna Moriah Wilson, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.
Wilson was in Austin last week for a race when she was found bleeding and unconscious with multiple gunshot wounds at a friend’s home the night of May 11, police said. First responders performed life-saving measures, but she was pronounced dead. An autopsy determined the manner of death to be a homicide. Austin police said at the time that they had a person of interest in the incident and that the “shooting does not appear to be a random act.”
U.S. Marshals said they are currently seeking Armstrong, of Austin, who they said is a suspect in the fatal shooting.
“Members of the Lone Star Fugitive Task Force are actively conducting a fugitive investigation and pursuing leads on the whereabouts of Armstrong,” the U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement Friday.
According to the affidavit in the warrant for Armstrong’s arrest on a first-degree murder charge, Wilson was visiting Austin from San Francisco for a cycling race when her friend came home and found Wilson alone lying on the bathroom floor covered in blood. Armstrong’s 2012 Jeep Cherokee was captured on surveillance footage from a neighboring residence stopping outside the residence the night of the homicide, according to the affidavit.
Earlier that evening, Wilson had met with Colin Strickland, an Austin professional cyclist, to go swimming, the friend told police, the affidavit stated.
When interviewed by police on May 12, Strickland, 35, confirmed that he had gone swimming with Wilson, according to the affidavit. Strickland told police that he and Armstrong live together and have been dating for about three years, the affidavit stated. During a brief break in their relationship in October 2021, he had a “romantic relationship” with Wilson, before resuming dating Armstrong, according to the affidavit.
Since then, Strickland told police he has had to change Wilson’s name in his phone and delete text messages “to prevent Armstrong from finding them,” the affidavit stated. Text messages from the night Wilson was killed showed that Strickland lied to Armstrong about his whereabouts “to hide he was with Wilson throughout the evening,” the affidavit stated.
A friend of Wilson’s who wanted to remain anonymous told police that Wilson and Strickland had an “on-again, off-again” relationship, according to the affidavit. Another anonymous caller said Armstrong had discovered in January that Strickland and Wilson were having a romantic relationship, at which point Armstrong “became furious and was shaking in anger,” the affidavit stated. “Armstrong told the caller Armstrong was so angry Armstrong wanted to kill Wilson,” the affidavit stated.
When police interviewed Armstrong on May 12, she was “confronted with video evidence of her vehicle” but “she had no explanation as to why it was in the area and did not make any denials surrounding the statements,” the affidavit stated. After further questioning Armstrong requested to leave, according to the affidavit.
Armstrong has since deleted her social media accounts and “has not been seen or heard from since this time,” according to the affidavit. Strickland told police he last saw her on May 13, the affidavit stated.
Two firearms that Strickland told police he had bought for himself and Armstrong were recovered at his and Armstrong’s home in the wake of the shooting, according to the affidavit. Based on the shell casings found at the scene, the potential that one of the guns was involved in the homicide “is significant,” the affidavit stated.
In a statement to ABC News Austin affiliate KVUE, Strickland said he has “cooperated fully with investigators” and expressed “torture about my proximity to this horrible crime.”
He said he had a “brief romantic relationship” with Wilson from late October-early November 2021, and that shortly after he “reconciled and resumed” his relationship with Armstrong while keeping a “platonic and professional” relationship with Wilson.
Wilson’s death shocked the cycling community. The athlete had won several gravel and mountain bike races in the past two seasons and had recently quit her job to focus on racing, according to VeloNews, who interviewed Wilson days before she was set to compete in the 157-mile Gravel Locos in Hico, Texas on May 14.
Wilson, known as “Mo” to friends and family, is survived by her parents and brother. Her family said in a statement to ABC News that they are “devastated by the loss of our beautiful daughter and sister.”
“There are no words that can express the pain and suffering we are experiencing due to this senseless, tragic loss. Moriah was a talented, kind, and caring young woman,” her family said. “Her life was taken from her before she had the opportunity to achieve everything she dreamed of. Our family, and all those who loved her, will forever miss her.”
Her family also wished to clarify that at the time of her death, Wilson was not involved with anyone romantically.
Wilson’s family hopes to establish a foundation in her memory to “share Moriah’s life story and legacy to inspire and enrich the lives of others.”
“With her visibility and presence in the cycling world, she wanted to empower young women athletes, encourage people of all walks of life to find joy and meaning through sport and community, and inspire all to chase their dreams,” they said.
ABC News’ Lisa Sivertsen contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — In the coming weeks, thousands of graduates will walk across a stage to receive their college diploma.
When they leave the stage, they will have not only a degree but also, in most cases, a mountain of bills, joining the more than 40 million Americans who owe a collective $1.76 trillion in student debt, according to the Education Data Initiative, a nonprofit organization.
Corazon Eaton of Columbus, Ohio, is among that group. The 35-year-old graduated with a master’s degree in public health in 2014, earning a diploma that cost her more than $100,000 in student loans.
“The only thing that I was really taught as an immigrant in the United States is the importance of an education and that I needed to obtain that in order to further and advance my professional and personal life,” Eaton, who was born in Kenya, told Good Morning America. “And so, that’s what I did.”
Over the next decade, Eaton said interest on her loans grew, eventually accruing $30,000 on top of what she owed at graduation.
“Thinking through the long-term impact of this was not something that I was aware of when I took out all these student loans,” she said. “Maybe I would have done things differently.”
In less than two decades, student debt in the United States has increased by 144%, growing from just over $640 billion in 2007 to more than $1.5 trillion today, according to a report released last year by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
The rise, experts say, is attributable to many factors, including policy decisions that made student loans both easier to obtain and harder to pay back, economic recessions and the shift in payment burden to families.
Another factor is the rising cost of college — a 103% increase over the past three decades — compared to a much slower increase in household income, which increased by only 14% in that same time period, according to the American Association of University Women, a nonprofit focused on advancing gender equity.
“We have seen a shift in who is paying for college,” Fenaba R. Addo, associate professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who studies student debt and wealth inequality, told GMA. “That burden has shifted to families who are facing stagnant wages and income over time, and loans became the solution.”
Student debt burden falls on women from the start
The bulk of student loan debt in the U.S. has fallen on women, who today hold nearly two-thirds of all outstanding student debt, an amount that totals more than $900 billion, according to the American Association of University Women.
More female undergraduates take on student loans upon entering college than men. Upon graduation, a female graduate owes, on average, nearly $22,000 in debt, while a male graduate owes, on average, around $18,000, the group found.
“It is a significant burden on women when it comes to the ways in which it impacts every aspect of their careers and their lives moving forward,” Gloria Blackwell, the group’s CEO, told GMA.
One reason for the divide is that, on top of taking out more student loans, women outpace men when it comes to earning both their four-year college degrees and their graduate degrees, according to the Pew Research Center and the National Center for Education Statistics.
“If you take on a student loan for your bachelor’s degree, and you take on a student loan for your graduate degree, the compilation of those two is going to put you in a space where you’re going to owe more,” said Nicole Smith, research professor and chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “So women are disproportionately holders of more education and therefore more likely to hold higher amounts of debt associated with having achieved that.”
Experts also pointed to for-profit colleges as a cause of rising student debt for women, who make up 63% of the for-profit student population, according to the Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment.
For-profit colleges are designed with flexibility in mind, and also have higher fees and tuition than both community colleges and public universities, according to the organization.
“The way that they’re modeled, the flexibility in being able to work and also go to school, has overwhelmingly attracted women, especially Black women who did not complete their degrees the first time or did not go straight from high school or are looking to change careers,” Addo said. “They’re a vehicle for women not only to return to college and get their degrees, but also to do so at a high cost.”
Women are also more impacted by student debt if they have children, as they may borrow more to ease the burden of other household costs, such as child care. Women with children may also lack the ability to work while attending school, and having a child may also extend the length of time they’re in college, Blackwell said.
A disproportionate burden on Black women
Black women are the most likely of any gender group to have student loans. According to the Census Bureau, around 1 in 4 Black women report having some student debt.
Black women graduate with an average of $37,558 in student debt, according to research by the American Association of University Women research.
“Black women take on more debt than anyone, and so they graduate with more student loan debt than any other category,” Blackwell said. “That’s a combination of racism and sexism and those intersecting pieces that put a disproportionate burden on Black women.”
As Black women and other minority women enter college, they often are forced to take on more student loans due to what Blackwell calls the racial wealth gap. They are also more often to be first-generation college students, which may mean having less knowledge of the financial aid system than their peers.
“Knowing that the typical white family has at least eight times the wealth of a Black family and five times that of a Latino family, it really shows that the student debt crisis is really about the racial wealth gap,” said Blackwell. “They have less support from their families. There is no generational wealth that is there to pick up whatever the gap is.”
Kristin McGuire, 40, who is Black, said she had to borrow more than $20,000 to attend a four-year public college in California. In the years since, she said her debt was compounded by forbearance programs that increased the amount of money she would have to repay to over $50,000.
“After college, I was not completely sure how to go into repayment,” McGuire told GMA. “I think one of the larger problems with our student debt system is we allow 18-year-olds to take out these loans and not really have a clear understanding on how to repay them.”
Systemic barriers to paying off debt
While women graduate, on average, with around $4,000 more in student loan debt than men, the burden for women grows dramatically in the years after college, as they try to repay it, experts say.
According to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), a policy-focused organization focused on gender justice, women across all races are also paid approximately 83 cents to every dollar paid to men across the same groups. With less income, they are unable to pay as much debt off each month, which leads to higher interest and increased debt.
For women of color, the pay gap is even worse, with Black women earning 64 cents on the dollar, and Latinas earning just 57 cents. Among Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women, the gap varies according to group, with some making as little as 52 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.
That loss of pay adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a career, the National Women’s Law Center said.
As women, particularly Black women, make less money in their careers, they have less money to pay back their student loans, a confluence Smith described as a “perfect storm.”
“They make less money. They need to borrow more. They struggle significantly with repayment. You have the gender wage gap,” Smith told GMA. “You really have a perfect storm where the experience of Black women with student loans is that they, at the end of the day, end up with the highest proportion of student loan debt, eight years after, 10 years after graduation.”
In addition to the gender pay gap, many women are also impacted by the caregiving gap, often taking lesser-paying jobs that allow flexibility to care for children or other family members. On average, women who are mothers make 70 cents for every dollar paid to fathers, according to the American Association of University Women.
Smith said women are also disproportionately in careers that require high levels of education, like teaching and nursing, but that are not high-paying, making loan repayment even more tricky.
When women spend decades of their lives paying off loans, they are less likely to be able to save for retirement and less likely to have a stake in things like home ownership, car ownership and investments, according to Blackwell.
For McGuire, the student loan debt that has followed her throughout her adult life has meant that she and her husband had to delay purchasing their first home and haven’t been able to fully contribute to their savings for themselves and their two children.
“[…] Not contributing to 401(k)s because we’re trying to pay off student debt. These are the things that will impact us later on that maybe we’re not seeing right now,” McGuire said. “That $500 a month payment for my student loan could have been something that would help me prepare for myself in older age, as well as my husband and as well as all Americans who are making these decisions.”
The burden of student loans may also impact more personal choices for women, like where they live, whether they can expand their family and whether or not they stay in a marriage.
Marquita Prinzing, of Renton, Washington, still owes around $100,000 in student loans more than a decade after finishing her master’s degree in education. She said it was only during the past two years of the coronavirus pandemic — during which student loan repayments were paused — that she was able to leave her marriage and buy her first home on her own.
Still, Prinzing, a 38-year-old mother of two, said she continues to feel the weight of her student loans as Aug. 31, the date federal student loan payments are set to restart, approaches.
Having to once again deal with the loan payments then “means I can’t really think of a different or bigger future,” she told GMA in April, when President Joe Biden extended the repayment pause.
Women feel squeezed amid student debt debate
Over the past two years of the pandemic, Perla Ortiz of Fabens, Texas, saw her college career upended, even as her student loans loomed.
In the spring of 2021, Ortiz, a first-generation college student, lost her work-study job on campus at St. Edward’s University in Austin when classes switched to a virtual format. She then moved back home and had to take a break from school to work and save money.
Though she is not currently attending school and does not yet have her college diploma, Ortiz will owe tens of thousands of dollars when student loan repayments resume in August.
“Sometimes, because of my financial situation, it’s hard to go to sleep with peace of mind knowing that when I wake up, I’m going to have to work really hard in order to pay that money back,” she said.
Biden pledged to approve $10,000 in student loan forgiveness for every federal borrower during his presidential campaign, but he has yet to do so, and has expanded parts of existing loan forgiveness programs instead.
In the meantime, as borrowers wait to see what, if anything, will happen before the repayment pause ends in August, women’s advocates are calling for broader changes to what they describe as systemic inequalities that negatively impact women.
“We have been pushing for quite a long time to pass legislation around eliminating the pay gap, like the Paycheck Fairness Act, and closing some of the loopholes that exist and are why the pay gap issues are perpetuated,” Blackwell said. “If you’re not going to push forward with loan forgiveness, at least give women an opportunity to really step into their full earning path.”
For Eaton, it was not until she got a new job last year that nearly doubled her income that she said she was able to make a significant dent in her student loans. With repayments paused, and no accumulating interest, Eaton said she saved more than $130,000 in 14 months and paid off her remaining loan balance.
“The average person spends 20 years of their life paying their student loan debt, and I just didn’t want to be imprisoned with that,” she said. “So it felt such a relief to be able to do it.”
(GOSHEN, Ind.) — Two people are dead and three injured after what appears to have been a targeted shooting at a home in northern Indiana, police said.
The incident occurred Saturday around 3:20 p.m., when an emergency call reported that five people had been “severely injured” in a shooting, the Goshen Police Department said on Facebook.
One man was pronounced dead at the scene, while a second man died after transported to a hospital in Goshen, police said.
Three additional shooting victims have been transported to area hospitals. Two women were airlifted to a trauma hospital in Fort Wayne, while a third woman was taken to a trauma hospital in South Bend, police said.
“Although the investigation is on-going, preliminary information indicates that the shooting was targeted, not gang related, and there does not appear to be any further threat of danger to the community at this time,” the Goshen Police Department said.
The Elkhart County Homicide Unit is leading the investigation into the shooting, police said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Sunday’s sports events:
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
INTERLEAGUE
Cincinnati 3, Toronto 2
AMERICAN LEAGUE
Detroit 4, Cleveland 2
Boston 8, Seattle 4
Houston 5, Texas 2
Minnesota 7, Kansas City 6
Baltimore 7, Tampa Bay 6
Chi White Sox 3, N.Y. Yankees 1
LA Angels 4, Oakland 1
Chi White Sox 5, NY Yankees 0
NATIONAL LEAGUE
St. Louis 18, Pittsburgh 4
Miami 4, Atlanta 3
Chi Cubs 5, Arizona 4
Philadelphia 4, LA Dodgers 3
Washington 8, Milwaukee 2
NY. Mets 2, Colorado 0
San Diego 10, San Francisco 1
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION PLAYOFFS
Golden State 109, Dallas 100 (Golden State leads 3-0)
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE PLAYOFFS
Tampa Bay 5, Florida 1 (Tampa Bay leads 3-0)
NY Rangers 3, Carolina 1 Carolina leads 2-1)
Edmonton 4, Calgary 1 (Edmonton leads 2-1)
WOMEN’S NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
Connecticut 92, Indiana 70
Chicago 82, Washington 73
MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER
Real Salt Lake 2, CF Montreal 1
Charlotte FC 2, Vancouver 1
New York City FC 1, Chicago 0
Final Miami 2, New York 0
Final Minnesota 2, FC Dallas 1
Sporting Kansas City 1 San Jose 1 (Tie)
Orlando City 2, Austin FC 2 (Tie)
Colorado 1, Seattle 0
Houston 3, LA Galaxy 0
Philadelphia 2, Portland 0
Tim McGraw and Faith Hill both wholeheartedly embraced the 19th century pioneering lifestyle as co-stars in the Yellowstone prequel 1883, but Tim just might have gotten a little too comfortable in character.
“There were a few times that my wife forced me to take a shower while we were shooting, because I wanted to stay in character as best I could,” he says in a recent installment of Variety’s Just for Variety podcast.
“She’s like, ‘I don’t care about Method. You stink!’” Tim continues.
Playing the role of James Dutton on the show also caused Tim to temporarily change up his appearance a little bit, which posed its own set of challenges. “When I grow my beard out, it’s completely white,” he reveals. “So the hardest part was keeping that thing dyed.”
That meant he was rocking a different look at his shows, which he played whenever he got breaks from set.
“So showing up and doing a [concert] and having this big old beard on, and I’d put on like 10 pounds during the filming of the show just to look more like the part,” he says. “To show up and put on these tight jeans and have this big, dark, dyed beard, and have the script in my head and trying to remember words, I just didn’t feel comfortable at all. It was a tough thing to do.”
But Tim was fully committed to embracing the world of 1883. He’s previously detailed other things he did to prep his character work, including going to “cowboy camp” with the rest of the cast.
The winner of American Idol season 20 is Noah Thompson!
The reveal came Sunday night during the three-hour finale, but not before some final challenges and star-studded performances.
The show opened with Flo Rida performing his hit “Good Feeling” with an assist from both current and past contestants. Then, it was time to get down to business with the first round challenging the Top 3 — HunterGirl, Noah Thompson, and Leah Marlene — to take on a song from the prolific catalog of Bruce Springsteen. Leah expertly executed “Born in the U.S.A.”, HungterGirl smashed “Dancing in the Dark,” and Noah hit a home run with the classic “I’m on Fire.”
Round two was the singles round, where the final three performed their own songs. Leah’s track was titled “Flowers,” Noah’s “One Day Tonight,” and HunterGirl’s was “Red Bird.”
After their performances, it was time to eliminate the person with the least votes, which ended up being Leah.
The celebrations continued as the moment to crown the season’s winner drew near, with acts from the Top 10 and talented legends like Earth, Wind, and Fire, Deana Carter, Ben Platt, Idol alum Gabby Barrett, Sara Bareilles, Thomas Rhett, Michael Bublé, judges Katy Perry, Luke Bryan, and Lionel Richie, and more.
For the last round of competition, the final two contestants delivered an encore of a song they’d previously performed on the show. Noah showed growth with Rihanna‘s “Stay” and HunterGirl did the same with Rascal Flatts “Riot.”
Afterward, Noah was crowned the winner, and took a victory lap by again performing his single, “One Day Tonight.”
