(PHILADELPHIA) — Philadelphia has become the first major U.S. city to reinstate its indoor mask mandate, following an increase in COVID-19 infections, in recent weeks.
Beginning April 18, masks will be required in all indoor public spaces, including schools, child care settings, businesses, restaurants and government buildings.
“I sincerely wish we didn’t have to do this again. I wish this pandemic was over just as much as any of you, but I am very worried about our vulnerable neighbors and loved ones. My hope that our actions today will slow the spread of COVID and help us avoid seeing our ERs, once again, gets so crowded, that people can’t get timely care when they need it,” Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said during a press conference on Monday.
The city will implement a one-week “education period” to ensure that all residents are made aware of the change in protocols. For now, however, there is no vaccine or testing requirement for establishments that serve food or beverages.
Over the last week, new cases per capita have increased by more than 50%, and daily case rates have risen past 100, according to city data. However, overall, COVID-19 related hospitalizations remain low.
“We hope that by having folks masks up whenever they’re in public indoor spaces, we can get ahead of the wave and keep it from reaching a peak like we saw in January with the omicron variant. If we could do that we can literally save the lives of vulnerable Philadelphians,” Bettigole said.
Bettigole said that at this time, there is no reason to “panic or to avoid activities.” She stressed that the city remains open, but wearing masks will allow those activities to continue, while keeping all residents safe.
“If we start to see a different pattern than that of previous waves of the virus, we’ll review our metrics to see if there are opportunities to be less restrictive,” Bettigole added.
Several colleges and universities have also moved to reinstate masking requirements, given the increasing number of students and staff testing positive on-campus.
On Sunday, Columbia University in New York City announced it would require masks again in classrooms — a policy that is expected to last through the end of the semester.
“Continued caution in certain situations remains extremely important, particularly in indoor social settings when the vaccination status of attendees is unknown or uncertain,” Donna Lynne, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, said in a statement.
Between Apr. 4 and Apr. 10, 133 students have tested positive — the highest weekly total since mid-January, according to university data.
Last week, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., temporarily reinstated an indoor mask requirement for its main and medical campuses, after seeing a “significant increase” in COVID-19 cases on-campus.
“This increase is partly due to the impact of the BA.2 Omicron subvariant. BA.2 is now the dominant strain in the United States, including in DC and on our campuses,” school officials wrote in a statement last week. “These circumstances present a challenge, but we have learned to adjust our mitigation measures to respond to changing conditions throughout the pandemic. Another adjustment is needed now to curb transmission on campus.”
In recent weeks, a flurry of positive COVID-19 infections has disrupted life in Washington, D.C., as many top officials and politicians have tested positive for the virus.
American University, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, have all also issued similar masking requirements.
However, school officials reported that there have been no known cases of serious illness.
Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant and acclaimed country-bluegrass artist Alison Krauss have announced plans to mount a second 2022 U.S. tour leg in support their latest album, Raise the Roof, that will run from mid-August to early September.
The new series of shows features 13 dates and will visit cities in the western half of the U.S., running from an August 15 concert in San Diego through a September 4 performance in Austin, Texas.
Tickets for the newly added shows go on sale to the general public this Friday, April 15, at 10 a.m. local time, while pre-sale tickets will be available starting Tuesday, April 12, at 10 a.m. local time. Visit PlantKrauss.com/#tour for a full list of concerts.
Plant and Krauss’ “Raising the Roof” trek will begin with a 11-date stateside leg that will make stops at venues in the eastern half of the country, plotted out from a June 1 show in Canandaigua, New York, through a June 17 appearance at the Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tennessee.
The U.S. tour legs will sandwich a series of European concerts that’s mapped out from a June 24 performance at the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival through a July 20 date in Berlin.
The shows will feature Plant and Krauss, accompanied by a backing band, performing songs from Raise the Roof, as well as from the duo’s Grammy-winning 2007 collaboration, Raising Sand.
Released in November 2021, Raise the Roof peaked at #7 on the Billboard 200 chart.
Is Britney Spears pregnant? Fans were sent into a tizzy Monday when she shared a post that seems to indicate that she’s expecting.
Taking to Instagram, Britney explained she “lost so much weight to go on my Maui trip only to gain it back … I thought ‘Geez … what happened to my stomach ???'”
Again referring to fiancé Sam Asghari as her “husband” — the same as she did in an Instagram post last week — Britney said he believed she was “food pregnant,” but she felt it might be more than that.
“So I got a pregnancy test … and uhhhhh well … I am having a baby,” Britney declared. “4 days later I got a little more food pregnant. It’s growing !!! If 2 are in there … I might just [sic] loose it.”
Britney also announced she “won’t be going out as much” to avoid any paparazzi hoping to score a “money shot” of her.
Britney also opened up about her struggles when she was expecting sons Sean and Jayden, who are now 16 and 15, respectively.
“It’s hard because when I was pregnant I had perinatal depression … I have to say it is absolutely horrible,” Britney revealed. This marks the first time she’s spoken publicly about experiencing pregnancy-related depression.
“Women didn’t talk about it back then … some people considered it dangerous if a woman complained like that with a baby inside her … but now women talk about it everyday,” Britney added. “Thank Jesus we don’t have to keep that pain a reserved proper secret.”
The National Institute of Mental Health says perinatal depression occurs during or after a pregnancy and can cause extreme sadness and fatigue, as well as other mental and emotional difficulties.
Last year, Britney told a judge that one of the things she most wanted to do was have another baby, but claimed that her conservators had prevented her from doing so.
ABC News has reached out to Britney’s team for comment.
(NEW YORK) — During the past two years of the coronavirus pandemic, during which federal student loan payments were put on pause, Marquita Prinzing, of Renton, Washington, said she went through a divorce and bought a home on her own.
Those are two things Prinzing, a mom of two who works full-time, said would have been difficult or impossible to do had she had to pay hundreds of dollars of student loan payments each month to pay down her approximately $100,000 remaining debt.
Now, as Prinzing looks to her future, she said she feels like her life is on hold as she waits to learn whether her loan will be forgiven or whether she’ll have to continue to repay her loans starting in the fall, when the current pause is scheduled to end.
“It means I can’t really think of a different or bigger future,” Prinzing, 38, a first-generation college graduate, told Good Morning America. “It means I am where I’m at, stable right now, because I have to deal with the loan payments and all of what’s going to come back.”
Ameshia Cross, 34, of Washington, D.C., said she, too, is living in flux during the payment pause as her family’s primary provider.
A first-generation college student who adopted her siblings after their mother died, Cross said she has the thought of payments resuming on her six-figure student debt looming over her as she tries to make decisions like whether to move her grandmother to a better care facility or how to care for her brother, who has a developmental disability.
“That this process has been kind of a stopgap measure and not knowing when it might end completely is a very scary place to be,” Cross, assistant director of communications for The Education Trust, a nonprofit focused on student equity, told GMA. “Because you don’t control the family issues or the family situation or the economic situation you’re born into, you do the best with what you have.”
The Education Trust released a report earlier this month, “How Black Women Experience Debt”, that found Black women receive little help when it comes to repaying their student loans. According to the report, 12 years after starting college, Black women owe 13% more than they borrowed, while white men, on average, have paid off 44% of their debt.
Brittani Williams, a senior policy analyst in higher education at The Education Trust and a co-author of the report, is a mother of three who said she currently owes tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, a number that will continue to grow as she is pursuing her doctorate degree.
“There is great anxiety around how will we repay these student loans back, majorly because I am a parenting student,” Williams, 32, of Washington, D.C., told GMA. “While maybe a non-parenting student may have ‘discretionary income,’ I don’t necessarily see that … so sometimes it comes down to what bills are going to be paid.”
On April 6th, President Joe Biden announced another extension in the pause in federal student loan payments — until Aug. 31 — marking the sixth extension to the program in the two years of the pandemic. It comes less than a month before payments were scheduled to restart on May 1, potentially affecting millions of borrowers who have not been making payments.
Bank surprises single mom by paying off $150K in student loans
“If loan payments were to resume on schedule in May, analysis of recent data from the Federal Reserve suggests that millions of student loan borrowers would face significant economic hardship, and delinquencies and defaults could threaten Americans’ financial stability,” said Biden, who faced pressure from top congressional Democrats to extend the pause or cancel student loan debt altogether, a position that has divided the party.
Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, progressive icons Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and many others in their party have been calling on Biden to use executive authority to cancel $50,000 in student debt for all borrowers, though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said the president lacks the authority to cancel this debt. Biden pledged to approve $10,000 in student loan forgiveness for every federal borrower during his campaign, but he has yet to do so, expanding parts of existing loan forgiveness programs instead.
Why Black women are so impacted by student debt
As the political debate over student loans continues and the pause remains extended, it is Black women like Prinzing, Williams and Cross who remain disproportionately impacted, data shows.
In the United States, women hold nearly two-thirds of all outstanding loans, according to an analysis by the American Association of University Women.
And Black women are the most likely of any gender group to have student loans, with around one in four Black women having student debt, according to the Census Bureau.
According to the Association of University Women’s analysis, Black women have the highest average total of student debt, at $41,466 for undergraduate and $75,085 for graduate school one year after graduating.
Why Black women are so impacted by student debt is attributable to several factors, including the change decades ago when financing for college began to fall more on individual families, according to Laura Hamilton, professor of sociology at University of California, Merced, and co-author of a report on student debt cancellation.
“When you think about shifting the burden of financing higher education to families, black families in the U.S. have historically had less access to wealth and income, so they haven’t been as able to finance their students’ education because of structural racism and historical discrimination,” Hamilton told “GMA.” “And now Black women are really leading the way in attending college, but they’re doing it without having as much family support because of those structural barriers.”
Many Black women are also first-general college students, which means they may have less knowledge of applying for financial aid and less knowledge of the ins and outs of repayment, experts said. That is what happened to Prinzing, who said she accumulated the majority of loans while getting her master’s degree in education.
“I’m a first-generation college graduate, so I had no idea about college. I had no idea about applying for anything,” Prinzing said. “I had no idea after graduating what consolidation was. I had no idea about loan forgiveness. I had no idea how to navigate the system to work in my favor.”
Once Black women graduate college, they face both a gender and racial wage gap that sees them typically being paid 63 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, according to the National Women’s Law Center, a policy-focused organization that fights for gender justice.
As a result of the wage gap, Black women, on average, lose $2,009 each month, $24,110 annually, and $964,400 over the course of a 40-year career, according to the law center.
“Black women are borrowing more because they lack family wealth and they are paid less to do the same jobs at the same educational level as white men and other people other genders and races,” said Victoria Jackson, co-author of the report with Williams and assistant director of higher education policy at The Education Trust. “Those things are coming together to create this crisis for Black women.”
Williams and Jackson said they applaud the Biden administration for extending the payment pause, and would like to see him continue to extend it through the end of the year. Ideally they said they would like to see student loans forgiven, which would give an advantage to Black women, who are so disproportionately impacted.
“If federal policymakers don’t figure out a way to end this, this student debt crisis, I’m afraid we’re going to end up right back in the same situation that we were in right before we received the pause,” Williams said.
According to Hamilton’s research, released by the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, forgiving student loans could, “play a critical role in addressing the racial wealth gap and building the Black middle class.”
“The people who would really benefit are upwardly mobile, Black and Latinx people who are in the 50th to 98th income percentiles,” Hamilton said. “These are folks that are seriously striving, facing lots of barriers, attempting to be secure, but are being really held back by these enormous debts.”
Jamie Walker-Sallis, of Davenport, Iowa, made her final student loan payment this year, at age 50. She said the burden of student loans loomed over her entire adult life, impacting decisions she had to make, like not pursuing a doctorate degree for a fear of more loans to not having a choice to stay home while her two children were young.
Walker-Sallis said her nearly $100,000 remaining debt was forgiven after the Biden administration expanded eligibility guidance during the pandemic for a student loan forgiveness program for public service workers. She said student loan debt was not even “really a conversation” when she started college over three decades ago.
“It’s first and foremost now because it’s such a hindrance and it can change your trajectory,” Walker-Sallis said. “I hear kids saying now they don’t want to go to college because they don’t want student loan debt.”
“No one wants this burden,” she continued. “It is a true burden.”
ABC News’ Trish Turner, Molly Nagle and Rebecca Gelpi contributed to this report.
If fans attending Chris Rock‘s comedy shows lately are hoping to hear what the comedian might say about being slapped by Will Smith at the Oscars, they’re in for disappointment.
Those in attendance of his Friday show in Indio, California, were the latest group to be let down, after the 57-year-old entertainer told them right out of the gate that he wasn’t going to talk about the incident.
“I’m OK, I have a whole show and I’m not talking about that until I get paid,” Rock joked, according to the Palm Springs Desert Sun. “Life is good. I got my hearing back,” he added.
While it’s unclear what kind of compensation Rock is seeking, he did decide not to press charges against Smith, who stormed the Oscar stage on March 27 and slapped Rock across the face, after the latter made a joke referencing the movie G.I. Jane and Jada Pinkett Smith‘s bald head. Oscar producer Will Packer told ABC News’ TJ Holmes later that LAPD officers told Rock during the Oscars, “This is battery,” and that he could move forward with pressing charges against Smith, but Rock was “dismissive” of those options and insisted that he was “fine.”
Rock’s first public appearance following the slap was at his sold-out show in Boston the Wednesday following the Oscars. Upon receiving a standing ovation and a warm welcome he told fans he wasn’t prepared to talk about the event and “still processing what went down.”
“I don’t have a bunch of s*** about what happened, so if you came to hear that, I have a whole show I wrote before this weekend,” he said then.
(NEW YORK) — A major spring storm hits the western U.S. Monday with snow, high winds and blizzard conditions.
The storm will move into the central U.S. on Tuesday and Wednesday, bringing a multi-day severe weather outbreak to millions.
Another storm system in the mid-South will bring the first round of severe weather Monday night, before the more widespread severe weather moves in.
Residents located in areas from Texas to southern Illinois, including major cities like Dallas, Little Rock and Memphis, can expect to see damaging winds, scattered hail and a few tornadoes Monday. Little Rock has the highest chance for very large hail and a strong tornado or two.
By Tuesday night major cities such as Dallas, Kansas City and Des Moines can expect to see strong tornadoes and huge hail.
The highest threat for tornadoes on Tuesday will likely be areas north of Kansas City and across much of Iowa.
On Wednesday, a severe threat will move east, heading into the Great Lakes, Ohio, Tennessee Valleys and the Gulf Coast.
Major cities such as Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Nashville, Little Rock and Jackson will be in the bull’s-eye for strong tornadoes, huge hail and damaging winds.
Severe weather will extend all the way to the Gulf Coast, including New Orleans, through Wednesday night.
After a weekend of heat waves in the West, a new storm is expected to bring in heavy snow and strong winds. Some areas throughout the West could see more than 2 feet of snow and wind gusts up to 80 mph. In addition, blizzard warnings extend from Montana to the Dakotas this week.
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney — Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
Ryan Coogler has been tapped as the executive producer of Ironheart, the upcoming Marvel Studios series bound for Disney+, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
As previously reported, the show will center on Riri Williams, a brilliant student who creates her own Iron Man suit in her MIT dorm.
Coogler’s involvement is a logical bit of synergy, as Dominique Thorne will reportedly make her debut as the character in his upcoming sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which takes place after the death of Robert Downey Jr.‘s Tony Stark/Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame.
Ironheart does not yet have an official premiere date, but could debut later this year. Black Panther: Wakanda Foreveris set to hit theaters on July 8, 2022.
Marvel is owned by Disney, parent company of ABC News.
Marvel movie star Chris Pratt told his 36.5 million Instagram followers that he is “blown away” by his “little film that could,” the “incredible documentary” Alaskan Nets.
The documentary is set in the remote Alaskan island town of Metlakatla. For more than a century, two sacred traditions have defined the home of Alaska’s last remaining native reserve, producers tease: fishing and basketball.
The “proud” executive producer gushed that the film, about the Metlakatla Chiefs, the local high school’s home team, “is more than just a basketball movie,” adding, “[I]t’s a story of hope during tough times, and we all need stories like that.”
Pratt explained that there have been 1,100 schools across the U.S. and Canada participating in a Movie Night tour boosting the film. The events helped pad the bottom lines of the schools’ concession stands — many of which were forced to shut down during the pandemic — and those stands help fund the schools’ teams.
The actor also urged people to stream the “empowering, beautiful” story, which “brings people together and can inspire us to keep going.”
The movie was the Audience Choice Award winner at last year’s Santa Barbara film festival.
The Who will return to late-night TV when they make an appearance this Friday, April 15, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which airs at 11:35 p.m. ET on CBS.
The British rock legends will be performing in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Teen Cancer America charity, which Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend co-founded in 2012. The organization raises money to fund programs and create designated social and recreational areas in U.S. hospitals geared specifically toward adolescents and young adults with cancer.
In conjunction with the anniversary, Teen Cancer America has launched a campaign encouraging people to donate $10 to the cause to mark the milestone. Visit GiveButter.com/TCA10for10 if you’d like to contribute.
The Who’s Late Show appearance is scheduled to take place one week before the band kicks off its The Who Hits Back! 2022 North American tour with an April 22 concert in Hollywood, Florida. Check out the group’s full schedule at TheWho.com.
Lorde leads the lineup for the 2022 All Things Go Music Festival, taking place October 1 at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland.
The bill also includes Bleachers — fronted by Lorde’s frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff — as well as Mitski, King Princess, Hippo Campus, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, among others.
Tickets go on sale this Friday, April 15, at 10 a.m. local time. For the full lineup and all ticket info, visit AllThingsGoFestival.com.
Lorde is currently on tour in support of her new album Solar Power. The outing continues Tuesday in Boston.
