Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
She already has seven Grammys at home, and Billie Eilish is coming back for more. Variety reports that she’s just been announced as one of the performers on the Grammys telecast April 3.
Billie has seven nominations this year, including Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album, all for Happier Than Ever and its title track.
In addition, Olivia Rodrigo, who also has seven nods, will perform on the show, along with fellow nominees singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile, K-pop superstars BTS, Lil Nas X with Jack Harlow and country duo Brothers Osborne.
The Grammys, hosted by Trevor Noah, are taking place in Las Vegas on April 3. They’ll air at 8 p.m. ET on CBS and will stream on Paramount+.
BTS, Olivia Rodrigo, Lil Nas X with Jack Harlow and Billie Eilish have just been announced as the first group of artists who’ll be performing on the Grammy telecast.
They’ll all take the stage next month, along with country duo Brothers Osborne and singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile, according to Variety.
BTS is up for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for “Butter,” while Billie and Olivia each have seven nominations, including Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album. Olivia is also up for Best New Artist. Billie’s already won seven Grammys in her young career.
Lil Nas X, who already has two Grammys at home, has five nods, including Record of the Year, Album of the Year and Song of the Year. Jack Harlow’s two nods come from his work on Nas’s Montero album.
The Grammys, hosted by Trevor Noah, are taking place in Las Vegas on April 3. They’ll air at 8 p.m. ET on CBS and will stream on Paramount+.
Will Smith is setting the record straight when it comes to the “entanglement” his wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith, had with singer August Alsina.
The 53-year-old actor told CBS Sunday Morning, “There’s never been infidelity in our marriage. Never.”
“Jada and I talk about everything and we have never surprised one another with anything, ever,” he added.
The statement comes nearly two years after Jada, 50, revealed on Red Table Talk that she and the King Richard star had briefly split in 2016 and she then became involved in an “entanglement” with Alsina, 29.
The admission caused a lot of chatter about the couple’s marriage. So, how does Will deal with it all?
“I have decided that chatter about my life can be of benefit to people,” he shared. “I think that chatter is the first stage to having a real conversation and being able to truly explore if some of the things in your heart are loving or poisonous.”
The NBC medical drama New Amsterdam will end with its previously announced fifth season, according to Deadline. The series stars Ryan Eggold as Dr. Max Goodwin, who juggles a cancer diagnosis with his new role as the medical director of the oldest public hospital in America. Since being renewed for its third, fourth, and fifth seasons in 2020, the show has seen its ratings steadily decline. NewAmsterdam airs Tuesdays on NBC. The season four finale is slated to air May 24…
CODA star Marlee Matlin will make her directorial debut with Fox’s upcoming anthology crime drama Accused. The Oscar-winning actress will helm an episode about “a deaf woman who becomes a surrogate and commits a crime of advocacy and protection,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I could not be more excited for the opportunity to direct, and to work on a project with such esteemed, talented, and skilled producers, writers, cast and crew,” says Matlin. “I’ve never shied away from challenges and having the opportunity to be one of the first female, Deaf directors in television is one I am looking forward to”…
Salma Hayek is set to reprise the role of Kitty Softpaws in the upcoming Puss in Boots sequel The Last Wish, according to Deadline. Antonio Banderas will also return as the titular cat, joined this time by newcomers Harvey Guillén, Florence Pugh, Olivia Colman, Wagner Moura, Ray Winstone, John Mulaney, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Anthony Mendez and Samson Kayo. The Last Wish follows the daring outlaw Puss in Boots as he discovers that his passion for peril and disregard for safety have taken their toll, per Deadline. The original 2011 film — a spinoff of Shrek — followed Puss’ adventures prior to his debut appearance in Shrek 2. The film earned more than $149 million stateside and close to $555 million worldwide…
(NEW YORK) — Russian forces are continuing their attempted push through Ukraine from multiple directions, while Ukrainians, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, are putting up “stiff resistance,” according to U.S. officials.
The attack began Feb. 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation.”
Russian forces moving from neighboring Belarus toward Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, have advanced closer to the city center in recent days despite the resistance, coming within about 9 miles as of Friday.
Russia has been met by sanctions from the United States, Canada and countries throughout Europe, targeting the Russian economy as well as Putin himself.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Mar 15, 7:51 am
Two killed in strike on Kyiv neighborhood
Two people were killed on Tuesday morning after Russian forces shelled residential areas in Kyiv, officials said.
The sound of large explosions echoed across Kyiv before dawn from what Ukrainian authorities said were artillery strikes. The shelling ignited a huge fire and a frantic rescue effort in the Svyatoshyn neighborhood.
Shockwaves from an explosion also damaged the entry to a downtown subway station that has been used as a bomb shelter. City authorities tweeted an image of the blown-out facade, saying trains would no longer stop at the station.
Mar 15, 5:51 am
Residents protest in Russian-occupied cities: UK military
Residents of Kherson, Melitopol and Berdyansk, cities occupied by Russian forces, have held “multiple” demonstrations protesting the occupation, the U.K. Defence Ministry said on Tuesday.
Protests in Kherson came as Russia may be making plans for a “referendum” to legitimize the region as a Russian-backed “breakaway republic,” similar to Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea, the Ministry said.
“Further protests were reported in the city yesterday with Russian forces reportedly firing warning shots in an attempt to disperse peaceful protesters,” the Ministry said.
Russia is likely to “make further attempts to subvert Ukrainian democracy,” the update said.
“Russia has reportedly installed its own mayor in Melitopol following the alleged abduction of his predecessor on Friday 11 March,” the update said. “Subsequently, the Mayor of Dniprorudne has also reportedly been abducted by Russian forces.”
Mar 14, 9:56 pm
Latest talks with Russia went ‘pretty good,’ will continue tomorrow, Zelenskyy says
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy updated the status of negotiations with Russia in his latest address Monday, saying the latest talks went “pretty good” and will continue tomorrow.
Zelenskyy also addressed Russian troops, telling them they would be treated “decently” should they surrender.
“On behalf of the Ukrainian people, I give you a chance — chance to survive,” Zelenskyy said. “You surrender to our forces, we will treat you the way people are supposed to be treated. As people, decently.”
Zelenskyy also thanked the producer at a Russian state news channel who appeared on camera behind an anchor and held up an anti-war sign. She was later arrested.
“I am grateful to those Russians who do not stop trying to convey the truth,” he said. “To those who fight disinformation and tell the truth, real facts to their friends and loved ones. And personally to the woman who entered the studio of Channel One with a poster against the war.”
(NEW YORK) — With targets on the backs of her and her husband and from an undisclosed safe place, Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska sent out a desperate two-word plea to America and the world: “STOP WAR.”
In an exchange of written messages with ABC News, Zelenska described the blitz of Russian missiles raining on Ukraine and the deaths of civilians, including at least 71 children, as “genocide.”
“I guess my message is very similar to the one the whole world delivers. Only two simple words: STOP WAR,” the 44-year-old Zelenska wrote, unable to speak by phone or in-person due to high-security risks.
‘Help us stop Russian atrocity’
After her husband of 18 years, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was elected president of Ukraine in 2019, Zelenska launched an initiative as the first lady to improve the quality and nutrition of food in schools. But on Feb. 24, her priorities were dramatically altered when Russian tanks and troops invaded her country, leaving crisscrossed trails of destruction and death and prompting a diaspora of refugees, now topping 2.8 million.
Zelenska has become an inspiration to women across her war-torn land and the world, an outspoken mother of two beseeching the West to “help us to stop Russian atrocity in Ukraine.”
To reflect the stark realities of war, she has frequently posted images and videos on social media of hospital wards full of wounded citizens. She has also called Putin out for disingenuously describing the invasion as a “special operation.”
“When Russia says that it is ‘not waging war against civilians,’ I call out the names of these murdered children first,” she wrote in a 1,000-word “testimony” she publicly released last week.
‘I fear for my husband’
In her exchange with ABC News on Sunday, day 18 of the war, Zelenska said one of her greatest concerns is the well-being of her husband, who Ukrainian officials claim has been the target of several assassination attempts.
“As every woman in Ukraine, now I fear for my husband,” Zelenska wrote. “Every morning before I call him, I pray everything goes well. I also know how strong and enduring he is. He is able to withstand anything, especially when he defends people and things that he loves.”
Referring to Putin and his supporters in the Kremlin, she expressed doubt as to “whether they have ordinary and sincere human feelings.”
“Ask yourself these questions and you will understand the difference of views on this war,” she wrote.
‘It is genocide’
While imploring the West to help Ukraine, she has not shied away from criticizing Western leaders for being silent in response to Putin’s crackdown on the rights of his own citizens and his previous encroachments of her country’s borders.
“Today, our country and our civilians pay a very high price for the silence and hesitation regarding this issue. Yesterday, it was innocent women and children in the maternity hospital in Mariupol. We have lost more than 71 children because of the Russian war — it is genocide of the Ukrainian people,” Zelenska wrote to ABC News.
She added, “Moreover millions of people are suffering in Mariupol, Kharkiv, Irpin, Sumy and other cities. They don’t have water, food and medicine. Russian soldiers are blocking humanitarian aid. We need to stop it. By saying ‘we,’ I mean the whole world.”
Zelenska asked “citizens of America, Europe and the whole world” to hold their leaders accountable for “silently observing for decades while the regime, where you cannot express your opinion, where the nation has been turned into slaves, grew and strengthened.”
“Leaders have lost their chance for respect. But you haven’t yet!” Zelenska said. “Today, the key life decisions are made in the offices of people who YOU elected as leaders in your countries. These are YOU who gave and keep giving the right to act on your behalf. And when they do not act, when they let our kids die — these are YOU who give them this right.”
She said it “is essential” for the West to understand that Ukraine “is now protecting Europe and our shared values.”
“Every day of our fight increases the price that Ukraine pays for securing these values,” Zelenska wrote. “Surely, in this fight as a nation, we become stronger and tougher. I wish the sanctions against Russia from the U.S. and E.U. become the same: stronger and tougher.”
She repeated her husband’s call for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, a request that has been rejected by the White House and the international community for fears it could start World War III if a Russian military jet is shot down in a confrontation with U.S. and NATO aircraft enforcing such a zone.
“We ask NATO to close our sky on behalf of all the people of Ukraine, or at least provide us with aircraft so we can defend our sky by ourselves,” Zelenska wrote.
‘You are giving life in the bomb shelters’
Zelenska directed a special message to Ukrainian women.
“You are giving life in the bomb shelters, calming children with lullabies, while Russian aviation keeps destroying our peaceful Ukrainian cities,” she wrote. “I admire your power. The power that becomes tougher than a hammer.”
She also directed a message specifically to American women.
“I appeal to you, women in America, and ask to support Ukrainian women and children who escaped from war and are looking for a shelter in your country,” she said. “These days every act of kindness and humanism is vital while we are bravely fighting for freedom for Ukraine, for Europe, for the whole world.”
It’s official! Coi Leray and Nicki Minaj‘s collaboration is on the way.
Taking to Instagram Monday, the rappers announced that the new single, titled “Blick Blick,” will drop Friday, March 18. Both artists shared a snapshot of the song’s artwork, which features the artists back to back, holding pastel-colored weapons in front of a vibrantly colored background.
“TRENDSETTERS LOADING….. My new single “Blick Blick” w| The QUEEN @Nickiminaj drops this FRIDAY 3/18,” Coi captioned the post.
Nicki also shared the release date in her Instagram, writing, “F R I D A Y 3.18.22.”
“I did pull it,” she admitted. “But the label hit me going hard. But rlly I had a private convo w|coi & that’s what changed my mind. Not the label.”
“I just felt bad that she was robbed of telling the world in her own way @ her own time. But that’s water under the bridge now. Good vibes all 2022,” she concluded.
(NEW YORK) — By the end of International Women’s Day this year, a Twitter account that sent out hundreds of tweets calling out companies for their gender pay gap had gone viral.
The Twitter account, @PayGapApp, is the brainchild of Francesca Lawson and her partner, Ali Fensome, of Manchester, England, who said they wanted to see companies pay up, literally, to the women they were celebrating.
“It came from a place of frustration of seeing all these lovely messages of empowerment and celebration and inspiration, but without actually knowing whether they were true or not,” Lawson, a 27-year-old copywriter and social media manager, told ABC News’ Good Morning America. “If companies are so keen to promote themselves as celebrating women and equality, then that really needs to come through in their actions as well.”
Lawson and Fensome, a software developer, built their pay gap bot using public data thanks to a pay transparency law in place in the United Kingdom since 2017. The U.K. government requires that companies with over 250 employees submit annual reports on their gender pay gaps based on payroll data.
Fensome said the fact that tweets from the @PayGapApp went viral, shows that people want more transparency when it comes to pay.
“It shows that there’s such a demand for data, for transparency, for accountability,” Fensome, adding that she hopes other similar efforts are started around the world, told GMA. “What we want is for the data to make a difference, and the way that’s going to happen is if it stays in the public eye and people maintain pressure.”
There is no such federal law in the United States calling for pay transparency from companies, although a growing number of cities and states have enacted regulations.
As the country marks Equal Pay Day and as women remain far behind in the workforce amid the coronavirus pandemic, pay transparency is being called upon as a leading solution to close the gender pay gap.
“One of the problems with challenging pay discrimination right now is that it is really easy to be paid less than your male counterpart for years and have no idea that that is the case because most employers keep pay secret,” said Emily Martin, vice president for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), a policy organization that fights for gender justice. “What pay transparency means, fundamentally, is dismantling the secrecy of pay.”
On average, women working full time, year-round are paid 83 cents for every dollar paid to men, according to the NWLC. That makes Equal Pay Day, March 15, the day that women had to work into 2022 to make what white, non-Hispanic men earned in 2020 alone.
The numbers are even starker for women of color, with Latinas typically earning only 57 cents for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men, and Black women typically making 61 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, according to the NWLC.
When Victoria Walker, a freelance travel reporter, quit her New York City-based job in February as a writer for a travel website, she said she wanted to make sure the person coming in after her made what they deserved.
Because her job salary was not listed publicly, Walker, 29, tweeted her salary advice when she announced her job move on Twitter.
“Before I forget — if you apply for my old job as Senior Travel Reporter, you should ask for no less than 115k, a signing bonus & a relocation bonus if you’re moving to NYC,” she wrote in a tweet that went viral. “In full transparency, I was at 107k.”
Walker said she sent the tweet in hopes that people who applied for the job would not “inadvertently lowball themselves” when it came to their pay. She said she was really surprised by the viral response to the tweet.
“A lot of people who weren’t even applying for the job were like, ‘Wait, this is what travel reporters can make,'” said Walker. “They told me they found they’ve been underpaid and undervalued, and a lot of people didn’t know about signing bonuses and relocations.”
Starting in May in New York City, employers, like Walker’s former company, will be required to include a minimum and maximum salary with job listings under a bill passed in December by the New York City Council.
At least eight states, including Colorado, California, Maryland, Washington and Nevada, and cities already have laws in place that implement some degree of pay transparency, according to Martin.
“The laws vary from state to state, but they all are building on that idea of the importance of giving people who are applying for jobs more transparency, more information about the salary for the job,” said Martin. “And sort of shifting the power dynamics around who controls that information in a way that they can really make a difference.”
Many of the state laws already in effect also have another bonus for women in that they prohibit employers from setting a person’s salary based on their salary in their previous job, according to Martin.
“Those salary history prohibitions are important for ensuring that pay discrimination doesn’t follow someone from job to job through their career,” she said. “When you put these things together, it has the effect of giving the job applicant more power over information and ensuring that the employer doesn’t hold all the cards.”
Because pay transparency laws have been in effect in various states, enough real-world data exists to show that it makes a difference in lowering the wage gap, according to Martin. Public sector employees, like at federal agencies, have also for decades been following a formal grade and steps system that makes salary ranges and information public.
One 2019 study from PayScale, a compensation data and software firm, found that among companies whose female employees described a transparent pay process, women were estimated to earn between $1 and $1.01 for every dollar earned by men.
Tips for women when asking for pay
Katie Donovan, a pay equity expert, has been leading the fight for equal pay for women since 2011, when, while out to dinner, a friend revealed she was being paid $30,000 less than a male colleague whom she had trained.
Donovan, the founder of Equal Pay Negotiations, a pay equality consultancy, said she immediately thought of being underpaid as a woman herself and remembers thinking at the time, “I don’t want my nieces 20 years from now having the same, exact conversation.”
“At the end of the day, our jobs are a financial decision for 99.9% of us that decides every other financial decision, like can we rent, can we buy a house, can we get a car,” she said. “And it’s the financial decision that we have the blinders on, and that’s by design, and that exhausts me.”
Donovan went on to lead the movement to ban employers from asking about salary history in job interviews. She said she sees the next fight in the equal pay battle as making sure that companies offer salaries that are not the median, which incorporates women’s already low pay, but above, which incorporates what white men are getting paid.
“If we really want to finally get a chance of achieving closing the pay gaps, we need to start with changing the data we’ve looked at,” she said. “If we’re aiming for the median of everyone, it’s mathematically less than the median of white men.”
Here are four tips for women from Donovan and Martin:
1. Do your research on salaries beforehand: “In part because of the internet and in part because of these policy changes, we are living in a moment where you can find more information about pay in particular roles and particular companies than you could 10 or 15 years ago, and that is a source of power for workers,” said Martin.
“It always of course is a good idea to do your research in these situations and to learn as much as you can about what is publicly available or what the law requires an employer to provide in terms of pay information,” she said.
2. Be comfortable asking about salary: “There’s a little bit of culture shift happening with employers where there is more of an understanding that posting a salary range is a good equity practice, so we’re seeing more employers do it even where the law doesn’t require it,” Martin said. “That in turn means that it is a more reasonable question for job applicants to ask of employers, even if employer hasn’t posted it, to ask whether that information is available.”
3. In most cases, you’re protected against giving your salary history: “Under the Federal Equal Pay Act, a lot of courts have held that salary history isn’t legal justification for paying a woman less than a man in the same role, so you do actually have some protection against pay discrimination based on salary history,” Martin said.
“That’s one reason why if I were in that position, I would try to gently deflect an interviewer by saying something like, ‘It sounds like what you really want to understand is the salary that I’m looking for in this job, and this is what it is,'” she said. “And hopefully that is informed by some data that you’ve been able to find in the world through sites like Glassdoor and the like about what the market rate is for the position.”
4. Ask for more than the median salary range: “As a candidate, when you’re given a job offer, you say, ‘I’m not accepting median. That’s low,'” said Donovan. “You aim for 75 percentile or higher, because that’s where the white guys are hanging.”
(NEW YORK) — When the coronavirus receded across much of the globe last month and the omicron surge declined, many Americans were hopeful that was perhaps the signal that the United States was entering a new phase of the pandemic.
However, new data indicators, domestically and internationally, suggest that the virus continues to spread.
Although official counts of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations are still declining, new wastewater data updated this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the United States may be seeing the beginnings of an uptick in COVID-19 infections.
Between Feb. 24 and March 10, 37% of wastewater sites that are monitored by the CDC have seen an increase of 100% or more in the presence of the COVID-19 virus in their wastewater. Approximately 30% of these sites have seen an increase of 1,000% or more.
“It is likely we will see a new rise in cases across the United States as our wastewater data is showing a concerning signal,” said Rebecca Weintraub, assistant professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Now is a key moment to communicate why we need to accelerate the uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine, remind communities why boosters are needed, secure an ongoing supply of tests and N95 to communities — especially the red zones.”
Throughout the pandemic, wastewater surveillance has been a tool used as a preliminary indicator of COVID-19 trends in the U.S.
Because asymptomatic patients can shed the virus, wastewater surveillance can capture infections that may not have been identified in official counts. In addition, many Americans are taking at-home COVID-19 tests and are not reporting their results to officials, and thus, experts say, infection totals are likely undercounted.
Wastewater data is sparse across the country, but indicators show some sites in the Northeast, including in New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, as well as across Ohio, have seen notable increases in the presence of COVID-19 in local wastewater.
In New York City, some sites saw a 50% increase in the presence of COVID-19 in the city’s wastewater.
COVID-19 trouble brewing overseas
The uptick in the presence of COVID-19 in U.S. wastewater sites comes as other countries in Europe and in Asia are seeing significant viral resurgences.
Across some parts of Asia, COVID-19 has been surging to unprecedented levels. In Hong Kong, the number of virus-positive residents requiring hospitalization has been pushing health care facilities to the edge.
In China, more than 50 million people in the northeastern province of Jilin and the southern cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan, are heading into lockdown after a viral resurgence.
In Europe, COVID-19 cases have steadily been rising after many countries have moved to end COVID-19 restrictions.
Since the beginning of the month, new cases per capita in the United Kingdom have grown by 32% and hospitalizations are also up by 5% in the last week. In Germany, infections are up by 45%, while in Italy, daily cases have increased by 26%.
“Across Europe and in the U.K., we are seeing COVID-19 cases go up in countries just exiting from an Omicron BA.1 surge,” Dr. Sam Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation and a member of its Pandemic Prevention Institute, told ABC News. “Since the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what’s happened in Europe has happened around the globe. … We can’t afford to sit around and let this early warning from Europe again go unheeded.”
Many health experts have been raising the alarm about the global increase in infections and hospitalizations, suggesting that Americans should be prepared for the U.S. to follow a similar viral trend.
“The next wave in Europe has begun,” Dr. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, said in a tweet and a blog post on Saturday. “Any proclamation that the pandemic is over ignores the potential recrudescence of a new variant with high transmission and immune escape.”
Presence of omicron subvariant BA.2 steadily growing
What is behind this latest COVID-19 resurgence is still unclear. However, experts say it is likely a confluence of factors.
“While we know from genome sequences that the BA.2 omicron subvariant is what’s infecting people, we still don’t know what’s causing the resurgence,” Scarpino said. “Is it the increased transmissibility of BA.2, more vaccine breakthroughs, relaxing of non-pharmaceutical interventions, waning immunity, or all of the above?”
Last month, U.S. officials from the CDC unveiled a new plan for determining COVID-19 risk in communities and updated its recommendations for use of face coverings, allowing nearly all of the country to go mask-free under the new guidelines.
Across the pond, in the U.K., Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently declared an end to the country’s COVID-19 mitigation measures. Similarly, countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands have already ended restrictions, while in France, most COVID-19 limitations were lifted on Monday, just weeks before the presidential elections.
The presence of BA.2, a subvariant of omicron, has also been growing rapidly across the globe.
“BA.2 is itself highly transmissible, and both BA.1 and BA.2 appear to generate comparatively short-lived protection against reinfection. So it is likely that the combination of higher inherent transmissibility and higher rates of interaction as restrictions ease are combining to generate this resurgence,” Matthew Ferrari, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Pennsylvania State University, told ABC News.
In the U.S., the presence of BA.2 has been nearly doubling every week, according to federal data. Estimates indicate that the omicron subvariant now comprises an estimated nearly 11% of new cases in the U.S. as of March 5.
“We’ve been watching it closely, of course,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a White House press briefing on Monday, pointing to the fact that BA.2 appears to be more transmissible. “We currently have about 35,000 cases in this country. We expect some fluctuation, especially at this relatively low level, and certainly that to increase.”
Experts say how significant a COVID-19 resurgence could be is still unclear, given how many Americans were infected in the nation’s omicron surge.
“I am hopeful that the large U.S. omicron wave will dampen a new surge, but I am concerned that we will see a resurgence as restrictions are eased,” Ferrari said. “Dropping masks and other restrictions will necessarily result in an increase in risk. How big that increase will be remains to be seen.”
U.S. Navy photograph by Mass Communications Specialist 1st Class Justin Yarborough
(NEW YORK) — Amid growing tensions and changing geopolitics in the Arctic, the U.S. Navy kicked off Ice Exercise (ICEX) 2022, a three-week exercise focusing on research, testing and evaluation of operational capabilities in the region.
Despite the temperatures at the Arctic being below freezing, the region is one of the fastest warming places on the planet as a result of global warming. The melting ice makes the region more accessible, putting Russian nuclear and conventional naval forces even closer to the U.S. border.
To test submarine systems and research initiatives in the region, the Navy established a temporary ice camp, known as Ice Camp Queenfish, on top of an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean.
“The Arctic region can be unforgiving and challenging like no other place on Earth,” Rear Adm. Richard Seif, ranking officer of ICEX 2022, said in a press release.
“ICEX 2022 provides the Navy an opportunity to increase capability and readiness in this unique environment, and to continue establishing best practices we can share with partners and allies who share the U.S.’s goal of a free and peaceful Arctic,” he said.
The camp consists of shelters, a command center and infrastructure to house over 60 personnel, according to the press release.
Under the ice and amid freezing temperatures, Navy divers and two American submarines, the USS Pasadena and USS Illinois, train in launching torpedoes as well as finding and evading enemy submarines.
When the torpedoes are shot, the search and recovery team go under the ice to find them. Once located, a hole is drilled over the ice, and the team begins to recover the torpedo.
The USS Pasadena, a Los Angeles class fast attack submarine with a steel reinforced sail, allows it to punch up through Arctic ice as thick as 5 feet or more. The Pasadena can be equipped with up to 20 torpedoes.
Vice Adm. William Houston said the exercises ensure the submarine force is ready just in case any threat arises.
“I’m not concerned about really any threat. We are ready as a submarine force. We’ve all executed orders as directed by our civilian leadership” he told ABC News. “And we are postured and ready as always.”
“We continue to watch [Russia] every single day. We are on the frontlines. We are unseen,” Houston added. “And that’s a good thing. Because the adversary, any adversary, doesn’t know where we’re at. And that’s the key about the Submarine Force. It is the ultimate silent service. We’re exceptionally stealthy, and we’re watching all the time.”
As temperatures rise, scientists will travel to the far northern region to work in conjunction with the Navy in studying the cracking and melting Arctic ice.
“It’s more important than ever that as a scientific community we take this data and we start to really understand the whys of how it’s happening, so that we can feed that back to the broader scientific community and eventually policymakers,” Houston said.
The camp, located 160 miles away from land, honors the first Sturgeon-class submarine to operate under ice — the USS Queenfish (SSN-651).
With ICEX 2022 underway, the Navy is confident it is ready for any potential threat.
“We have the largest nuclear submarine force in the world,” Houston said. “You have unprecedented mobility where you don’t need to come to the surface and you can stay submerged for as long as you want. Any adversary doesn’t know where we’re at. We’re exceptionally stealthy, and we’re watching all the time.”
