(BEIJING) — When the Olympic athletes take the field during the 2022 Games opening ceremony in Beijing, there will be one group that won’t show off their national pride.
Russian athletes are only able to compete under the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) flag due to an ongoing ban over the country’s previous doping violations.
Doping regulators contend this punishment is justified, given the country’s cover-up.
There are 204 Russian athletes competing in the 2022 Winter Games as “neutrals” under the moniker ROC as part of ongoing sanctions imposed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Russia cannot officially send any athlete to an international sports competition until December 2022.
While WADA’s ban on the country was severe, the agency and International Olympic Committee have made special arrangements for athletes who have proven to be clean.
Under the IOC’s rules, Russian athletes are prohibited in any form from showing any representation of the country, including its flag or national anthem.
“All public displays of the organization’s participant name should use the acronym ‘ROC,’ not the full name ‘Russian Olympic Committee,'” the IOC rules state.
In any event where a ROC athlete is awarded a medal, a Tchaikovsky song piece is played instead of the Russian national anthem, and the ROC flag, which features the Olympic rings and red, blue and white stripes, will be flown.
This is the third Olympics in a row where the country’s athletes couldn’t officially represent Russia.
The Russians were banned from competing in the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, however, athletes that passed doping screenings were allowed to compete under the Olympic Athletes from Russia (OAR) delegation.
Russian athletes competed as the ROC during last summer’s Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo.
The punishments date back to 2015, after athletes came forward to WADA and provided evidence of a decade of state-sponsored doping. The Russian government has denied any involvement and has blamed several coaches.
However, in 2016, whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory in Moscow, provided evidence that he, other lab officials and Russia’s FSB security service worked to hide hundreds of positive doping tests.
While the Russians appealed WADA’s sanction, the agency found more evidence of doping cover-ups. A WADA compliance report in late November 2019 said it had found that hundreds of likely positive doping tests had been deleted from a database of results held by Russia’s anti-doping lab given to the agency that year.
In December 2019, WADA’s executive committee voted unanimously to ban Russia from fielding any athletes at international sporting events, including the 2020 summer Olympics in Tokyo and the 2022 winter Olympics in Beijing.
“Russia was afforded every opportunity to get its house in order and re-join the global anti-doping community for the good of its athletes and of the integrity of sport, but it chose instead to continue in its stance of deception and denial,” Sir Craig Reedie, WADA’s then-president, said in 2019.
WADA’s ban, which was reduced from four years to two years, also prohibits Russia from officially participating in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
Other nations have been banned from competing in past Olympics. The IOC banned Afghanistan from the 2000 summer Olympic Games in Sydney because of the Taliban’s discrimination against women.
In 2016, Kuwait was banned from officially sending athletes to the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio due to a national law that conflicted with the Olympic Movement. Athletes from that country took part in the 2016 games under the moniker “athletes from Kuwait.”
Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images
(LONDON) — U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is apologizing again after initial findings of an investigation found that he and his staff showed “failures of leadership and judgment” for allegedly hosting parties during lockdown.
Johnson and his staff have been under fire in recent weeks for holding a number of parties last year — including a Christmas gathering as the country was sent back into lockdown — in alleged breaches of his own government’s lockdown rules.
The extent to which the report would lay blame at the feet of Johnson had been the subject of intense speculation, with the prime minister facing down a barrage of calls to resign from opposition lawmakers and even disgruntled members of his own party.
In a statement following the publication of the report, authored by Sue Gray, a civil servant appointed to lead the investigation, Johnson said he “accepted the general findings in full.” He apologized “for the things we simply didn’t get right… [and] the way this matter has been handled.”
Responding to criticisms in the report about accountability measures in different government departments, Johnson said, “I get it, and I will fix it,” prompting jeers from opposition lawmakers in the House of Commons.
The scandal has dominated British politics in recent weeks. The intervention of the Metropolitan Police, which is now carrying out a criminal investigation into at least eight of the gatherings, meant the report has not been published in full, which some critics have said granted the prime minister a short-term reprieve.
Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, who has called for the prime minister to resign since the beginning of the crisis, described the interim report as “damning.”
Gray said she was only able to “make minimal reference” to the gatherings under police investigation. At the time of these alleged get-togethers, breaches of lockdown rules were punishable by fixed penalty fines. Restrictions were also in place at the time on hospital and care home visits and funerals, prompting fury from victims and the bereaved, represented by organizations such as the COVID Bereaved Families for Justice.
Johnson apologized in the House of Commons earlier this month but denied breaching any rules. At a gathering in the Downing Street gardens in May of last year, which Johnson himself attended and over 100 staffers were invited to despite social distancing rules, Johnson said he believed it was a “work event.”
While the interim report is lacking in detail over what exactly took place at the gatherings in question — which reports in the U.K. media said included leaving parties for departing staff — the update was critical of numerous “failures of leadership” at various levels of the government.
“Some of the events should not have been allowed to take place,” Gray wrote. “Other events should not have been allowed to develop as they did.”
Meanwhile, Gray said “steps needed to be taken” to ensure that government departments had clearer policies covering the drinking of alcohol.
“The excessive consumption of alcohol is not appropriate in a professional workplace at any time,” she said in the report.“Against the backdrop of the pandemic, when the government was asking citizens to accept far-reaching restrictions on their lives, some of the behavior surrounding these gatherings is difficult to justify.”
The full report may not be published until after the Metropolitan Police have completed their investigation.
Senate pages carry the Electoral College ballot boxes on Jan. 7, 2021 at the Capitol, in Washington. – Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — With voting rights legislation all but dead in the Senate, and the former president now openly suggesting he tried to use a vaguely-worded 19th-century law to try to manipulate the last presidential election, a growing group of bipartisan lawmakers is backing the idea of changing how Congress tallies presidential election results by reforming the 1887 Electoral Count Act.
The law was intended to set up a peaceful transfer of power after an election dispute, but it’s one former President Donald Trump and his allies sought to exploit in a scheme to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump made his clearest statement yet this week that he believed Pence could and should have simply overturned the results himself, responding to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who was asked about efforts to reform the law on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos.
He said, “…how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election?”
“Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power. He could have overturned the Election!” Trump falsely claimed in a statement late Sunday.
By pressing then-Vice President Mike Pence to interfere with the ceremonial counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, as well as outlining how states could — and several would — send conflicting slates of electors to Congress, and urging lawmakers to object to results, to which 147 Republicans followed, Trump took advantage of ambiguities in the law’s language.
Republican leaders have signaled an openness to amending the text, but Democrats argue the effort, while potentially bipartisan, does not address what they call state voter suppression tactics they say will be felt in the midterms and could be a distraction from larger voting reform.
Addressing reforms to the law, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the White House has “been open to and a part of conversations about the Electoral Count Act,” but that it shouldn’t be a “replacement” for larger voting reforms. She also called attention to Trump’s statement as representing a “unique and existential threat to our democracy.”
Some scholars warn that if lawmakers don’t join together to reform the process, it will be weaponized again.
“There’s enough focus now on the ambiguities of this statute that if it isn’t Donald Trump in 2024, you could easily imagine a number of other actors taking a page from his playbook,” Rebecca Green, co-director of the election law program at William and Mary Law School, told ABC News. “But the ECA is not just specific to one presidential election or one person. It’s just become a more apparent problem to address after Jan 6.”
Here’s a look at the Electoral Count Act and why people are calling for it to be reformed:
What is the Electoral Count Act?
The Electoral Count Act is the law that governs how Congress counts electoral votes following a presidential election.
It essentially sets up a timetable for when different parts of the counting process must take place and sets up a dispute resolution process for how Congress will resolve irregularities in accepting electoral slates from states.
How did the law come about?
The law was crafted in response to a contested presidential election in 1876, when several states under the control of Reconstruction governments sent multiple slates of electors to Congress post-Civil War.
Samuel Tilden, a Democrat, had won the popular vote, but after Congress created an ad hoc commission to deal with the dispute, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was ultimately declared the winner.
Democrats refused to accept the results until the Compromise of 1877, which called for an end to Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops from former Confederate states. A decade later, Congress passed a law that lawmakers hoped would prevent a future process from being upended.
But it has presented problems.
What problems does it present?
While there are several proposals for ways to reform the law, such as changing the timeline for “safe harbor” status — when electoral votes are considered “conclusive” — or resolving questions around judicial review following election disputes, there are two glaring areas that Green told ABC News lawmakers need to address.
The role of the vice president is unclear
The vice president’s role in what usually is a ministerial proceeding — simply counting and announcing the votes — is extremely unclear.
The Constitution dictates that the president of the Senate, or the vice president, open the certificates of electoral votes from each state. Additionally, under the current Electoral Count Act, the president of the Senate carries over the proceedings and calls for objections.
The act says, in long, convoluted language, the each state’s slates or “all such returns and papers shall be opened by him” — the vice president, or president of the Senate — “in the presence of the two houses when met as aforesaid, and read by the tellers, and all such returns and papers shall thereupon be submitted to the judgment and decision…”
“Does this run-on sentence mean that Mike Pence shall open only the ballots that he wants? Or does he have to open if there’s more than one slate from a state — how does he know which ones to open?” Green posed. “None of those questions are answered by the face of the statute.”
She added, “Those vagaries produced the mischief that we saw in the 2020 election,” she added.
ABC News Senior Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl reported in his book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show that then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows emailed to Pence’s top aide a detailed plan penned by Trump’s campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis outlining how Pence was to send back the electoral votes from six battleground states that Trump falsely claimed he had won.
Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa also revealed in their book, Peril, a memo written by John Eastman, whom Trump introduced at the Jan. 6 rally as “one of the most brilliant lawyers in the country,” outlined another plan for how Pence would hand the election back to Trump on Jan. 6.
According to their reporting, Eastman instructed Pence to say, at the conclusion of counting, “because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States.” Then, Pence “gavels President Trump as reelected.”
Pence would have declared the seven states that submitted the alternate slates of electors as being in dispute, and ultimately hand the election to Trump in the alleged plot. However, Pence rejected the pressure to do so, sticking to his strictly ceremonial role, and the National Archives never accepted the uncertified documents for congressional counting.
Despite all the manipulation, scholars argue it isn’t reasonable to suggest the vice president would have been granted such interference.
“There has never been the kind of pressure that Mike Pence experienced on Jan. 6, 2021, before,” Green said, “but it would be extremely illogical for the system to instill that much power in sitting vice presidents, particularly since sitting vice presidents are so regularly on the presidential ballot.”
Additionally, the Justice Department and lawmakers on the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 are looking into those individuals who falsely signed on as alternate electors to declare Trump the winner in states he actually lost to Biden.
It’s ‘too easy’ for lawmakers to object to a state’s slate.
The law allows one congressman paired with one senator to object to the results submitted by each state — which last year, made way for a long, drawn-out process as Republican after Republican, including several freshmen, contested results. Eight senators and 139 representatives, all Republicans, voted to sustain one or both objections to electoral votes in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
If a congressman finds a senator to join in their objection, both the House and Senate chambers are forced back to their chambers for two hours of debate and a vote, which some argue is an invitation for political grandstanding.
The objection tool was used only once in its first 100 years. In all three recent cases, the attempts have failed.
In 2001 and 2017, no senator would join with a representative to object. (Biden, then serving as vice president, was the one to gavel out a handful of Democrats’ challenging Trump’s electors.) In 2005, a representative and a senator objected to counting Ohio’s electoral votes cast for George W. Bush, but the challenge was not successful.
Some lawmakers are now coalescing around the idea of raising the threshold for objections beyond just a single senator and representative — or to creating a list of valid ground for objecting results.
One proposal raises that at least one-third of each chamber would be needed for an objection to be heard — or more than 30 senators and 140 House members.
“The idea is that the current process is too easy and that perhaps it should be made a little bit harder to object, so that there’s more consensus required and a couple of people can’t kind of gum up the works as easily,” Green said.
Collins, who is leading discussions with a group of 16 senators to reform the law, said she’s hopeful it can be done on an “overwhelming” bipartisan basis.
“I’m hopeful that we can come up with a bipartisan bill that will make very clear that the vice president’s role is simply ministerial, that he has no ability to halt the count, and that we’ll raise the threshold from one House member, one senator, for triggering a challenge to a vote count submitted by the states,” she told ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos. “This is no small thing. I think it is really important that we do this reform.”
Why act now?
Earlier this month, a Democratic-led committee released a 31-page report on potential reforms to the Electoral Count Act.
“As the events leading up to the violent attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, demonstrated, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 is in dire need of reform. It is antiquated, incomplete, vague, and open to exploitation,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., chairperson of the Committee on House Administration. “But to be clear — reforming the Electoral Count Act, necessary as it is, would not restrain the erosion of democracy or the dishonest efforts across the nation to diminish and impede the equal freedom to vote.”
Key Republicans including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have expressed a willingness to back reforms, but Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has argued the reforms don’t go far enough in addressing threats to democracy and restrictions to the vote in elections beyond the race for president.
As the movement gains new bipartisan traction, election experts are calling for lawmakers to keep the momentum up.
“If these disputes aren’t resolved, then partisan actors are going to act a certain way and try to exploit ambiguities to their favor whereas if you sort of close those gaps prior to the election, then you’re more likely to have a fair process that produces an outcome without dispute that it’s legitimate,” Green said.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Monday’s sports events:
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
Indiana 122, LA Clippers 116
Cleveland 93, New Orleans 90
Philadelphia 122 Memphis 119 (OT)
Boston 122, Miami 92
Toronto 106, Atlanta 100
New York 116, Sacramento 96
Oklahoma City 98, Portland 81
Golden State 122, Houston 108
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE
Florida 8, Columbus 4
Vancouver 3, Chicago 1
Detroit 2, Anaheim 1 (OT)
Toronto 6, New Jersey 4
Ottawa 3 Edmonton 2 (OT)
TOP-25 COLLEGE BASKETBALL
Baylor 81, West Virginia 77
Duke 57, Notre Dame 43
Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — After months of tensions over Russia’s massive troop buildup on Ukraine’s borders, the United Nations Security Council met Monday to discuss the situation for the first time — adjourning after over two hours of open debate.
The meeting didn’t yield any action or even a joint statement, but ambassadors from the U.S. and Russia sparred in dueling remarks, trading blame for escalating the crisis.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin has amassed over 100,000 troops and heavy equipment and weaponry on three sides of Ukraine, including in Russian-annexed Crimea and in Belarus, Kyiv’s northern neighbor and a close Kremlin ally.
At first, Russia, backed by China, tried to block the session from moving forward by calling a vote among Security Council’s 15 member states. Russia and China opposed it, three countries abstained, but ten voted to move ahead with it.
“You heard from our Russian colleagues that we’re calling for this meeting to make you all feel uncomfortable. Imagine how uncomfortable you would be if you had 100,000 troops sitting on your border in the way that these troops are sitting on the border with Ukraine,” said U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield. “This is not about antics. It’s not about rhetoric. It’s not about ‘U.S. and Russia.’ What this is about is the peace and security of one of our member states.”
In her remarks, she accused Russia of “the largest — hear me clearly — mobilization of troops in Europe in decades” and threatening military action should its concerns about Ukraine joining NATO and NATO’s troop deployments in Eastern European member states not be addressed.
“If Russia further invades Ukraine, none of us will be able to say we didn’t see it coming, and the consequences will be horrific,” she added.
But Russia’s envoy again denied that the Kremlin is planning to attack its neighbor, a former Soviet state and now a growing democracy — telling the Security Council there is “no proof confirming such a serious accusation whatsoever,” defending troop movements within Russia’s borders as a domestic issue, and then denying there are 100,000 as U.S. and other Western officials have said.
“They themselves are whipping up tensions and rhetoric and are provoking escalation,” Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said of the U.S. and its NATO allies. “The discussions about a threat of war is provocative in and of itself. You are almost calling for this. You want it to happen. You’re waiting for it to happen.”
Thomas-Greenfield requested to speak again to respond, saying, “I cannot let the false equivalency go unchecked, so I feel I must respond. … The threats of aggression on the border of Ukraine — yes on its border — is provocative. Our recognition of the facts on the ground is not provocative.”
Ukraine — which is not a member of the Security Council, but was invited to participate — urged Russia to respect its “sovereign right” to choose which countries it partners with.
“Ukraine will not bow to threats aimed at weakening Ukraine, undermining its economic and financial stability, and inciting public frustration. This will not happen. And the Kremlin must remember that Ukraine is ready to defend itself,” Ukrainian Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya told the council.
In a sign of their increasing alignment, China was the only country to back Russia’s effort to squash the public meeting. Its ambassador Zhang Jun said they oppose “microphone diplomacy of public confrontation” and believed the open discussion of the issue would add “fuel to the tension.”
While the session didn’t yield any results, it marks the start of another week of diplomacy between Russia and the U.S. and its allies over Ukraine.
“Russia heard clearly a united position from the vast majority of the council, and I hope that that will lead to a diplomatic solution,” Thomas-Greenfield, a member of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, told reporters after the meeting.
Biden himself hailed the meeting as “a critical step in rallying the world to speak out in one voice: rejecting the use of force, calling for military de-escalation, supporting diplomacy as the best path forward.”
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will speak with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the State Department and Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed Monday — the first conversation after the U.S. responding in writing last week to Russia’s demands about Ukraine and NATO.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to speak to Putin this week, days after the U.K. said it could deploy troops to protect NATO allies if Russia invaded Ukraine. Biden announced a similar position last week, putting 8,500 U.S. troops on “heightened alert” and adding Friday he could do so in the “near” future.
In a potential positive sign for diplomacy, Russia said some of its forces had pulled back from the border areas after a “preparedness check,” according to the Russian Armed Forces’ Southern Military District.
But it’s not yet clear if the U.S. had confirmed any troops were withdrawn from the border region, and Thomas-Greenfield warned the U.S. has evidence Russia intends to expand its presence in Belarus to more than 30,000 troops — putting them less than two hours north of Kyiv. Those deployments include short-range ballistic missiles, special forces, and anti-aircraft batteries, she added — all of which Russia and Belarus have said are for military exercises.
Shrimp-gate boiled over into Monday’s episode of The Bachelor, which opened with Clayton pulling Shanae and Elizabeth aside in hopes of settling their dispute.
Unfortunately, the meeting ended in frustration when the dispute, which started over cooked shrimp, turned into a heated argument.
The other women were solidly in Elizabeth’s corner, but Clayton saw things differently and, at the rose ceremony, sent her packing, along with Kira and Melina.
Then, for the first time in two years, Clayton and the girls set off on an international journey to find love, starting in Houston, Texas.
However, any hope of leaving the drama behind quickly vanished when Shanae overheard the others plotting to get her sent home. A group date saw Shanae and the ladies playing a high stakes game of football, with the winners spending time with Clayton and the losers — which included Shanae — going home. Refusing to stand idly by and let the others carry out their plan, she crashed the party.
That led to an explosive confrontation between Shanae and the women, particularly Genevieve and Siera.
How will Clayton deal with this latest dispute? We’ll have to wait to find out, although a peak at next week’s show points to a two-on-one date with Shanae and Genevieve.
Elsewhere, Rachel joined Clayton for a drama-free one-on-one date that featured horseback riding and a down-home Texas-style family barbecue, followed by a surprise musical performance from country band Restless Road and Rachel picking up the date rose.
As Dierks Bentley continues working through his upcoming album, he reveals it took a few tries to get it right.
The hit singer has been working on the project for two years, and after a few failed attempts, he is confident in the direction the album is going.
“I’ve gone in to record it a few times and it felt good, but I didn’t feel great. So I decided to keep writing, and it just feels so great,” Dierks explains of his process. “This is my 10th album and all the pressure is coming from me. I want it to be great….[L]ike any album you’re making, [I want it] to draw off [of] what you’re interested in. I love the songs I have, love the feel of it. A lot of great country songs, a lot of great instrumentation.”
Dierks also hints that he’s uniting the past and present on the upcoming project, which follows his acclaimed 2018 album, The Mountain. He says the new music will sound different than his recently released hits, but will still fit into the modern cannon of country music.
“It’s going to sound pretty different than the current songs I’ve had out, ‘Gone’ and ‘Beers on Me,'” Dierks explains. “[I’m] trying to draw on some stuff I’ve done in the past, albums like Modern Day Drifter, but still give it a contemporary feel.”
He adds, “It’s gonna be a while before the album comes out, but it feels really good. I’m really excited about it. I feel the way you should feel when you’re making an album, and I hadn’t felt that way in the previous attempts, but this time around…a great band and great songs and really feeling good about the direction.”
“Beers on Me” featuring Breland and Hardy is currently inside the top 20 on country radio.
As Blink-182‘s Mark Hoppus continues to recover from a difficult year of chemotherapy to combat cancer, he’s rediscovered a briefly forgotten joy of his life: songwriting.
In a recent tweet, Hoppus writes, “Just want to say that I’m very grateful to be back in the mindset of ‘Oh! That’s a cool idea for a song lyric, I should write that down.'”
“I haven’t felt that in eight months,” he adds, alongside a “prayer hands” emoji.
Hoppus revealed his cancer diagnosis in June 2021, sharing that he’d been undergoing chemotherapy for the previous three months. Last September, he announced he was “cancer free.”
Blink-182 had been working on new music ahead Hoppus’ diagnosis — they released the topical song “Quarantine” in August 2020. The trio’s most recent album is 2019’s Nine.
Hoppus played his first post-cancer performance last October during band mate Travis Barker‘s Halloween streaming event.
Remember when Sarah McLachlan made us all cry with those ASPCA commercials? Remember how she spoofed them for a Super Bowl ad in 2014? Well, she’s doing it again, in a new commercial created by fellow Canadian Ryan Reynolds’ digital marketing company Maximum Effort.
In the spot, Sarah says — in her best “won’t you please help?” voice — “Every day, 70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned at the checkout page…victims of a cruel and exhausting checkout process.” Cue forlorn images of actual shopping carts filled with items, sitting out alone in the wilderness.
Sarah explains that when most people try to buy stuff online, the checkout process is so complicated — what with entering addresses, credit card numbers and CVV numbers — that they just forget the whole thing and leave the stuff in their online cart.
The solution? Bolt.com, a company that offers a one-click shopping experience, no matter which website you go to. You enter your information once, and that’s it.
The spot ends with a guy singing, “Go to Bolt.com…come on, we got Sarah f***ing McLachlan!”
In recognition of Sarah’s special talent for drawing attention to pitiful, abandoned things, Bolt has made a $50,000 donation to the ASPCA and in addition, it’s launched Bolt.com/carts, where you can buy “Rescue Cart“ merch. Every item is under a dollar using discount code “ABANDONEDCARTS,” and for each item purchased, Bolt will donate $10 to the ASPCA, up to an additional $50,000.
This isn’t the first time Sarah and Ryan Reynolds have teamed up for an ad — sort of. In 2018, in an spot for his Aviation brand of gin, Reynolds claimed that “every bottle of Aviation is ordained by the Unitarian Church of Fresno, California and then…serenaded with the healing music of Sarah McLachlan.”
Last week, Ella Mai released her first new single since 2020, “DFMU,” from her upcoming second solo album. The Grammy winner recorded songs for the project with the legendary artist/producer Pharrell Williams, as well as with her favorite rapper, J. Cole.
The British artist says she’s looking forward to working again with the “Happy” singer.
“I definitely hope in the future that we can get back in and make some more stuff, because he’s super fun to work with, and super down-to-earth,” Ella tells Billboard.
The 27-year-old artist also bonded with Cole, and said she enjoyed sharing her experience attending his 2013 What Dreams May Come Tour in London.
“I cut college class that day and I stood outside. I was 19th in line. I know, because they give you this wristband — so you can leave but you still get your spot. It was freezing cold, but I didn’t care, and I was super front row,” Mai recalled. “I was telling him all my stories. But also as a person, Cole is very inspirational. It’s amazing to be around somebody who is what they portray [to be].”
She says recording with Williams and Cole in the same week was magical.
“I thought this was everything I ever dreamed of. Working with people that inspire me — and it’s weird when I think [about how] people I’m super fans of, are fans of me as well. It’s still a weird feeling for me and I think it always will be,” the “Boo’d Up” singer commented. “I’m just super appreciative that I’m even able to be in these rooms and experience everyone else’s process, as well as putting my process in there too. That was an amazing week for me.”
