Kiefer Sutherland commands a Black Ops team in the new film The Contractor, which features Chris Pine and Ben Foster as members of his covert ranks.
Their assignment takes Pine’s Sergeant James Harper deep undercover on a mission involving a potentially lethal virus…an all-too familiar scenario, even though it was filmed pre-pandemic.
“The signs were coming,” Sutherland tells ABC Audio. “We had been warned about a virus for the last 15 years. I think it’s very sad when writers using their imagination, taking current events and kind of going, ‘Well, this is the worst circumstance/scenario that could possibly happen so I’ll write it in that direction,’ and then having it come true.”
The movie also shines a light on conditions facing soldiers returning home from battle. Pine’s character is damaged, suffering both the physical and mental traumas of war.
“Regardless of how strong these people are, how well trained they are, they become emotionally, incredibly vulnerable,” Sutherland says, adding that more work needs to be done to help veterans.
“This has been an ongoing discussion since World War I,” Sutherland adds. “As a society, we need to do more for our veterans to deal with PTSD and all of the shell shock, all of the different kind of nomenclatures that we have for…these issues. We need to try and do better.”
(WASHINGTON) — U.S. employers added 431,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, the latest figures released Friday by the Labor Department show.
The biggest increases in employment in March occurred in leisure and hospitality (112,000) followed by professional and business services (102,000), retail trade (49,000) and manufacturing (38,000), according to the Labor Department.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate dropped slightly from 3.8% in February to 3.6% in March.
(NEW YORK) — As many of us continue to spring into a new season, retailers such as Bloomingdale’s have continued to give us more reasons to refresh our wardrobes.
The department store has kicked off its Friends & Family sale, allowing shoppers to save up to 25% on marked items.
Whether you are in the market for a new dress or you’re looking to add some new denim to your wardrobe, now is the time to do it — at a fraction of the cost.
Any item labeled “FRIENDS & FAMILY: 25% OFF DISCOUNT APPLIED IN BAG” is eligible for the store’s sales event, which runs through April 3.
Get ready, Little Monsters, because Lady Gaga is going to take over the Grammy stage.
Varietyreports that Mother Monster is the latest artist to join an already jam-packed, star-studded performance lineup on music’s biggest night this Sunday.
It’s already a big night for Gaga, because she’s been nominated for five awards: Album of the Year and Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album for her Tony Bennett collaborative work Love for Sale, as well as Record of the Year, Best Pop/Duo Performance, and Best Music Video for their song “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
While it’s unknown if Bennett will join Gaga on the Grammy stage because of his health, the two previously took it over in 2014 to perform “Cheek to Cheek.” The legendary crooner is battling Alzheimer’s Disease and last performed with Gaga at Radio City Music Hall over the summer. That concert aired on CBS, titled One Last Time: An Evening with Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga.
Aside from the “Applause” singer, other artists slated to perform at the upcoming Grammys are Olivia Rodrigo, Silk Sonic, John Legend, Carrie Underwood and many others.
The 64th Annual Grammy Awards, hosted by Trevor Noah, air Sunday night starting at 8 p.m. ET on CBS.
Actress Taraji P. Henson and NBA player Chris Paul are among those that President Bidenannounced on Wednesday as members of the newly formed HBCU President’s Board of Advisors.
The members of the board will work alongside Biden on the initiative’s mission to “increase the capacity of HBCUs to provide the highest-quality education to its students and continue serving as engines of opportunity.”
Henson, who attended the Washington, D.C. HBCU Howard University, shared the news on Instagram with an old photo of her younger self in a Howard baseball cap.
“I am excited to announce that President Biden has appointed me to serve on his HBCU Board of Advisors,” the Empire star said. “Since taking office, the President and Vice President Harris have invested $5.8 Billion in HBCUs and I look forward to working with them to continue efforts to support these important institutions.”
The Biden-Harris administration launched the HBCU initiative, formally titled the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity through Historically Black Colleges and Universities, in September of last year. According to the White House, its aim is to “promote a variety of modern solutions for HBCUs, recognizing that HBCUs are not a monolith, and that the opportunities and challenges relevant to HBCUs are as diverse as the institutions themselves and the communities they serve.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black, first woman and first person of South Asian heritage to ascend to the role, graduated from Howard University in 1986. She is also a member of the Black Greek organization Alpha Kappa Alpha.
Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ new album Unlimited Love is here, and so is the cinematic video for their new single “These Are the Ways.”
In the clip, singer Anthony Kiedis plays a man who’s shoplifting food to feed his pregnant wife. When a cop spots him, he runs out the door, jumps in his car and leads the cops on a chase. After ditching the car, he escapes on foot.
The rest of the clip shows the cops chasing Kiedis through a variety of houses, motel rooms and apartments, past the residents who are engaged in everyday activities like vacuuming, having dinner, having sex and having a party. Meanwhile, the band is shown playing the song in a motel room.
At the end, Anthony manages to slow the cops down with an overturned laundry cart, and seemingly escapes to shoplift another day. “These are the ways when you come from America,” he sings.
Unlimited Love features guitarist John Frusciante back on board and, for the first time in years, production by Rick Rubin, who was behind the board for Blood Sugar Sex Magik, One Hot Minute, Californication and many other albums.
Speaking of the Chili Peppers’ continued relevance, Kiedis tells the Los Angeles Times, “It’s nice not to feel like the world has passed you by. I love it when my son’s friends put on their playlists and we’re on there with Kid Cudi or someone.”
(NEW YORK) — Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their families over a span of 150 years, made to live in boarding schools across the U.S. that were run by the federal government and churches in an effort to force assimilation.
“It was a national policy to take Indian children, to beat their native language out of them, to remove them from their families so they wouldn’t have that cultural teaching,” U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland told ABC News’ Nightline.
“Native kids are born into not just their mother’s arms, but into the arms of their entire communities … when you are born into that nurturing community and all of a sudden [you’re] ripped away from that – imagine how much trauma that would have on a child,” she continued.
According to Denise Lajimodiere, a Native American scholar and the author of Stringing Rosaries, the purpose of these residential schools was “total assimilation into white European culture.” Native American children were forced to cut their hair and wear uniforms to conform.
“I think they just saw these kids that they weren’t even human. They saw them as savages,” she told Nightline.
Once they were at the schools, the children were forced to work without getting paid and some children never made it home.
Scholars estimate that tens of thousands of children died at the schools from abuse or disease and, in some instances, their remains were buried in unmarked graves in school cemeteries. Some children died while working on what was called an “outing,” where children from the boarding schools were hired out to work for families.
“The corporal punishment was pretty horrendous. Boarding school survivors tell of kids being taken away and disappearing and never being seen again,” Lajimodiere said.
A legacy of generational trauma
For more than a century, Native Americans have urged the government to acknowledge and address the generational trauma and lasting impact from the boarding school era, which spanned from 1869 through the 1960s.
After nearly 1,000 unmarked graves of Indigenous children were unearthed in June 2021 at Indigenous boarding schools in Canada, Haaland, who is the first Native American to hold a Cabinet position, launched a federal boarding school initiative to investigate the United States’ role in implementing these policies.
“Families deserve to know what happened. And so we are working to compile decades and decades of information so that we can hopefully give them some answers,” she said.
Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo Tribe, oversees the government agency that historically played a major role in the forced relocation and oppression of Indigenous people. Haaland’s great grandfather was taken to the United States Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which was open from 1879 to 1918.
Lajimodiere, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa or Ojibwe, said that the painful legacy of these boarding schools has impacted every Native American family.
Her father attended the Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon, from 1925 to 1929 when he was 9 years old.
“He was stolen,” she said.
At Chemawa, Marsha F. Small is on a mission to locate human remains of Indigenous children who were buried on school grounds.
“People don’t like to learn the ugly America. They want the America the beautiful,” Small, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe and a doctoral student at Montana State University-Bozeman, told Nightline.
“Without this healing, I don’t think that America itself can heal,” she added.
Small and her team use ground penetrating radar technology to look for graves. So far, she says they have found about 222 graves, with some dating back to 1885.
“When I go into cemeteries …I talk to the children and I, and I tell them, you know, that those that want to go home may have a possibility of going home. You’re not forgotten,” she said.
A journey of healing
The boarding school era lasted for more than 150 years. By the late 1970s, many schools had closed, but others like Chemawa remained open.
Today, Chemawa’s mission is to honor “unique tribal cultures.”
The number of boarding schools that were run by the U.S. government is unknown, so Lajimodiere launched her own efforts to locate as many boarding schools as she could.
Rita Means, a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, attended St. Francis Indian Mission School — a school operated by Jesuits from 1886 until 1972 — from the sixth grade until the 12th grade.
“In my time, I don’t think anybody was forcibly taken, but I know that feeling of separation from your family,” she said.
“Any place that you can’t leave is a prison. We were definitely locked in until we, you know, had to go to church at six in the morning,” she added.
Her daughter, Shelley Means, said that two generations of her family were disconnected from their children, who attended Indigenous boarding schools.
“[They] didn’t learn parenting skills the way traditionally we would have taken care of each other,” she told Nightline, adding that she had to work hard at learning how to emotionally support her own daughter, Shylee Brave.
For Brave, her grandmother is a “survivor” and she is doing her own part to bring healing to her community.
As part of the Sicangu Youth Council in Rosebud, South Dakota, Brave traveled in July 2015 to the school in Carlisle, where more than 150 children from over 40 tribes were buried, including nine from the Rosebud Sioux tribe.
“The thing that really sparked this whole movement was asking, why are our kids still there?” she said.
“It like, really hit, like, wow, this could be my cousin, this could be my uncle, this could be my relative. What if I didn’t get to go home? It just really like sunk in, like, what if this was me?” she added.
After sharing her experience with her grandmother, the Sicangu Youth Council launched an effort to bring the remains of the children of the Rosebud Sioux tribe at Carlisle back home.
They had to request the remains from the U.S. Army, which owns the school, and on July 2021 the remains of six children were finally brought back home and were escorted by Brave and members of the the youth council.
The children are now buried in the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Veterans Cemetery in South Dakota. Their names are Maude Littlegirl, Lucy Take the Tail, Alvin Braveroaster or One that Kills Seven Horses, Dennis Strikesfirst, Warren Painter and Rose Long Face.
“It was a really hard, long journey. I mean, we really had to fight,” Brave said.
“They didn’t get to grow up. They didn’t get to have a family,” she added, as she visited the cemetery. “I’m really happy that they’re home, but at the same time it’s like this shouldn’t have happened.”
Haaland, whose great grandfather attended Carlisle, told Chief White House Correspondent Cecilia Vega that she is “grateful” to have an opportunity to address this painful past.
“I have a great obligation, but I was taught by my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother that when you are asked to do something for your people that you step up,” she said.
For Lajimodiere, Haaland’s efforts are part of her journey of “healing.”
“I just wept,” she said, recalling Haaland’s announcement.
“It’s like, finally, finally, after a decade of working toward this moment, here it is. And it took a native female head of the Department of Interior to make this moment happen and to start the healing journey for so many survivors,” Lajimodiere added.
(NEW YORK) — David Berry and Morgan Helquist grew up in Rochester, New York, without knowing they were each other’s half-siblings.
It was only when Berry, now 37 and living in Miami, took a DNA test several years ago that he began to unravel his biological history.
He said he learned his father was not his biological father. He also learned he had half-siblings, including Helquist, whom he reached out to and then met in-person.
“We were just talking, I grabbed his face, I just looked and I was like, ‘Why is your face on my face?'” Helquist, 36, told ABC News of one of their initial meetings. “I just couldn’t understand. It was the craziest experience I’ve ever had.”
Helquist, who still lives in the Rochester area, and Berry, would go on to find more half-siblings, as first reported by The New York Times.
“There was five of us and we were all the same age — and 6 and then 7 — and it started to feel like, well, if there’s seven, there might be 20 and if there’s 20, there might be a hundred,” said Helquist. “And I started to feel terrified.”
Helquist and Berry said their half-siblings’ mothers used artificial insemination using the same fertility doctor: Dr. Morris Wortman.
When a biological daughter of Wortman’s agreed to take a DNA test, Berry said her DNA matched his and Helquist’s and their half-siblings.
Both Helquist and Berry’s mothers said Wortman told them he was using sperm from an anonymous medical student, not on his own.
“He had my permission to use a donor, specifically a medical student,” Karen Berry told ABC News. “He did not have my permission to use his own sperm for a donation.”
David Berry said of the revelation, “I’m the product of something that should have never happened with a an unconscionable violation of ethics at a minimum.”
“I can’t escape because his DNA is in me. His DNA is in my son,” he said. “I wrestle with that.”
Describing how she told her mother the news, Helquist said, “When we found out there wasn’t any need to tell her. I was screaming and sobbing at the top of my lungs.”
Helquist said Wortman had been her gynecologist for the past decade. “He knew the whole time who he was, and I didn’t. He took away that choice for me.”
She filed a lawsuit against Wortman in September, alleging, among other things, that he committed medical malpractice by treating her when he likely knew he was her biological father.
Wortman has denied the charges through his legal team.
Only seven states in the U.S. specifically penalize physicians for fertility fraud. Other states, like New York, only have laws pending.
Helquist is the only one of her half-siblings who may have a legal cause of action, which she said rests on Wortman’s past role as her gynecologist.
“I do not have a fertility fraud case,” she said. “I have a case because he touched my body without my consent.”
Oscars 2022 producer Will Packer is opening up about what happened behind the scenes on Hollywood’s biggest night, after actor Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock on stage.
In an exclusive interview with ABC News’ TJ Holmes, airing Friday on Good Morning America, Packer said the Los Angeles Police Department was ready to arrest Smith at the 94th Academy Awards on Sunday night after he got up from his seat, walked on stage and slapped Rock for telling a joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
“That is an absolute fact,” Packer said. “The LAPD made it clear: ‘We will do whatever you want us to do, and one of the options is that we will go and arrest him right now.'”
Packer said Rock was “dismissive” of the options police presented, insisting he was “fine.” While Packer didn’t speak to Smith, his co-producer, Shayla Cowan, informed him that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences was about to remove Smith from the ceremony. The Academy said in a statement Wednesday that they had asked Smith to leave, but he refused.
Packer said, “I immediately went to the Academy leadership that was on site and I said: ‘Chris Rock doesn’t want that,’ I said: ‘Rock has made it clear that he does not want to make a bad situation worse.'”
Packer said that because Rock was not retaliatory, aggressive or angry following the incident, he was willing to advocate for whatever the comedian wanted in that moment, which was to not kick out Smith.
The following day, Smith formally apologized to Rock and the Academy for his actions in an Instagram post. Smith reportedly also apologized to the other Oscars producers in a six-minute Zoom call on Tuesday.
The Academy’s Board of Governors announced Wednesday that they are beginning disciplinary procedures against the actor.
CBS has renewed all of three of its NCIS dramas for the 2022-2023 broadcast season, the network announced on Thursday. With the pickups, NCIS will return for its 20th season, while spinoffs NCIS: Hawaii and NCIS: Los Angeles will return for their second and 14th seasons, respectively. “NCIS, one of the most popular and enduring series in the world, and fan favorite NCIS: Los Angeles have been hugely successful on the CBS schedule for years,” Kelly Kahl, president of CBS Entertainment, said in a statement. “With the strong new addition of NCIS: Hawaii, we are able to expand the strength of this formidable franchise across our schedule. We couldn’t be more excited to have all three talented casts and creative teams back to bring more compelling NCIS stories to viewers in the U.S. and around the globe”…
Eddie Murphy is in early talks to star in and produce an upcoming biopic about Parliament-Funkadelic leader George Clinton, according to Deadline. Clinton is widely known as a funk music pioneer, along with James Brown and Sly Stone. The film will chronicle Clinton’s rise from humble beginnings in North Carolina in the 1940s to the formation of his groundbreaking bands Parliament and Funkadelic and major influence on artists of the hip-hop generation, including Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Outkast and Wu-Tang Clan, among many others. Clinton was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, alongside 15 other members of Parliament-Funkadelic. In 2019, he and those members were given Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards…
Sunday’s CODA‘s history-making Oscar best picture win has given Apple TV+ a big boost, according to Variety. The streaming service’s viewership increased by 25% and raised the film’s viewership from the week before. CODA won in all three categories in which it was nominated, including best supporting actor for Troy Kotsur, and best adapted screenplay for director Siân Heder — making it the first film on a streaming service win the top Oscar prize…
