As she looks toward the follow-up album to her smash hit debut, Goldmine, Gabby Barrett says she’s grateful for all the international recognition she’s received so far.
“Wherever the Lord leads it, I’m just here for the ride,” she tells Billboard. Gabby captured the attention of pop fans with her crossover sensation “I Hope,” thanks in part to a 2020 remix of the song featuring Charlie Puth.
“I would love to eventually sell out Madison Square Garden someday. That’s a big goal,” she continues, but adds that the most important thing to her is her young family, including husband Cade Foehner and the couple’s baby daughter, Baylah. “My role first and foremost is being a good mother to my daughter and raising her correctly and to love the Lord.”
Plus, she’ll never stray too far from her roots. “I do know that I’m a country gal at heart, and that’s definitely always the kind of music I’m going to make,” she continues.
Gabby’s traditional country influences will be on full display at next month’s ACM Awards, when she co-hosts the show with Jimmie Allen as well as living legend Dolly Parton.
Fellow Oscar winners Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway star and executive-produce AppleTV+’s limited series WeCrashed, a trailer for which just dropped.
Based on the hit Wondery podcast WeCrashed: The Rise and Fall of WeWork, Leto plays Israeli entrepreneur Adam Neumann, who turned the office sharing company WeWork into a $47 billion empire — until its equally dramatic fall.
Hathaway plays Neumann’s wife, Rebekah, who helped him create his kingdom. “She helps him manifest things,” one character says in the trailer. Together, the power couple enjoy the trappings of their company’s fortune — lavish parties, private jets — and struggle as it eventually comes crashing down.
“You have to let them see…you’re a supernova,” Rebekah tells Adam.
“You’re afraid that he outshines you,” says America Ferrera as one of Rebekah’s friends. “Because he does.”
The streaming service teases, “WeCrashed is inspired by actual events — and the love story at the center of it all. WeWork grew from a single coworking space into a global brand worth $47 billion in under a decade. Then, in less than a year, its value plummeted. What happened?”
The first three episodes of WeCrashed: The Rise and Fall of WeWork, premiere on Apple TV+ on March 18, with new weekly installments of the eight-episode show dropping each Friday through April 22.
Dave Grohl has shared a tribute to late Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan, who passed away earlier this week at age 57.
Speaking with the U.K.’s The Independent, the Foo Fighters leader recalls when he first met Lanegan. He had just joined Nirvana, which was about to explode in the Seattle grunge scene that Screaming Trees, a fellow Washington State band, had helped pioneer.
“When I first joined Nirvana I was living with Kurt [Cobain] in our tiny apartment,” Grohl shares. “One weekend he said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go up to Seattle for the weekend and hang out with a friend, do you want to come?'”
“We went up to stay with his friend…and we went to a show,” he continues. “I passed out on the couch and woke up in the morning and opened my eyes and Mark Lanegan was sitting in a chair right across from me.”
Lanegan’s first words to Grohl? “Who the f*** are you?”
Grohl adds that he thinks Lanegan’s first solo album, 1990’s The Winding Sheet, is a “masterpiece,” and calls it one of the “most influential records” on him.
“It was so pure and so real,” Grohl says of Lanegan’s music. “If he sang about pain, you believed it and if he sang about love, you believed it.”
“There was nobody like him,” Grohl adds. “In Seattle he was much loved.”
(WASHINGTON) — After weeks of warning of “severe” sanctions if Russia invaded Ukraine, President Joe Biden was set to deliver remarks from the White House Thursday in what’s unfolding as a defining moment in his presidency as President Vladimir Putin continued a large-scale attack.
Expected to announce additional sanctions on Russia, Biden will lay out “further consequences the United States and our Allies and partners will impose on Russia for its unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine,” according to a White House official.
But it’s still unclear how much further those sanctions will go — and whether they would make any difference in what Putin claimed overnight would be a “special military operation” in eastern Ukraine, but is proving to be much more widespread.
“To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside, if you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history,” Putin warned the world.
While it was also still unclear just how far Putin would go beyond eastern Ukraine, Russian forces attacked near the capital city Kyiv — raising new fears he would try to topple Ukraine’s government.
Will Biden sanction Putin personally?
The Biden administration has threatened further sanctions on major Russian financial institutions and banks, to take steps to restrict Russian access to technology, to cut Russia off from SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) — which would hinder Russia’s participation in global markets, and to directly sanction Putin’s inner circle — or the Russian president himself.
Biden told reporters late last month that he would consider personally sanctioning Putin if Russia invaded Ukraine — a day after 8,500 American forces were put on “heightened alert” in the region — but those efforts did not appear to deter the Russian leader, nor did economic sanctions imposed this week by the U.S. and European allies, including halting the certification of Nord Stream 2, a major natural gas pipeline running from Russia to Germany.
The Biden administration has already begun to roll out a “first tranche” of sanctions, related to Russian banks, oligarchs and the natural gas pipeline Nord Stream 2, as some lawmakers have criticized Biden of not going far enough on sanctions, which haven’t resulted in Russia reversing course.
As of Thursday morning, Russian forces had advanced from three directions — from the south heading north, from Belarus heading south to Kyiv and from northeast of Ukraine heading to the south — as Ukrainian woke up to a nation at war.
US military assessment, diplomatic moves
U.S. intelligence believes these three axes were “designed to take key population centers,” a senior defense official said Thursday.
The White House has said the sanctions will be “united and decisive,” but it remains to be seen how the West can punish Putin, who seems intent on moving ahead with his plans, despite weeks of attempted diplomacy from the international community and a set of sanctions already imposed.
With the U.S. condemning what’s it calling an “unprovoked and unjustified” attack on Ukraine, Biden met with his National Security Council in the Situation Room early Thursday ahead of a virtual video call with G-7 leaders to discuss a united response to the Russian attack.
Earlier this morning, President Biden convened a meeting of the National Security Council in the White House Situation Room to discuss the unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/QcZ5N2fcAa
Notably, Russia was a part of the G-7 until its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 — where it is now closing in further on Ukrainian borders.
Biden was at the White House overnight as the attack unfolded.
Within minutes, Biden was on the phone with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had reached out to him after receiving “silence,” he said, on a phone call to Putin. Russia has two tactical goals in Ukraine, according to Zelenskyy’s office: seizing territory and toppling Ukrainian leadership.
Consequences — for Americans
After their call, Biden released a statement saying that Putin “has chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering.”
“The prayers of the world are with the people of Ukraine tonight as they suffer an unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces,” Biden said.
The American president has acknowledged that there will be “consequences at home” — particularly at the gas pump and in energy prices — as a result of the Russian invasion and subsequent sanctions but has vowed to mitigate those costs.
However, ahead of his Thursday remarks, U.S. crude oil prices topped $100 a barrel, sending gasoline prices to an average of $3.54 a gallon, according to the American Automobile Association. At least three states had average gas prices of $4 or higher. Meanwhile, U.S. stock and dow futures also plunged.
Still, Biden has reminded Americans that the U.S. has a responsibility to defend its NATO allies — and democracy around the world.
“Because this is about more than just Russia and Ukraine,” he said in remarks last week. “It’s about standing for what we believe in, for the future that we want for our world, for liberty, for liberty, the right of countless countries to choose their own destiny. And the right of people to determine their own futures — or the principle that a country can’t change its neighbor’s borders by force.”
ABC News’ Luis Martinez and Patrick Reevell contributed to this report.
Billie Eilishappeared calm and collected when she attended and performed on the Academy Awards and appeared twice on Saturday Night Live, but that may have been all an act.
“I’ve never been more nervous in my life. SNL and the Oscars are like the scariest things I’ve ever experienced because they are not people that I really know,” Billie said during her Wednesday interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers. She specifically said the Oscars were the “coolest, scariest thing ever.”
“It’s actors and actors are so much more eloquent than musicians. Musicians are weird and gross and smelly,” Billie joked. “It was intimidating.”
The Grammy winner revealed there’s one actor she was intimidated by — Daniel Craig. “When I met him I was like, ‘Whoa,'” she said of being blown away by his intense blue eyes. “You literally would not believe them.”
Billie then explained why she is so proud of her James Bond theme, “No Time to Die,” which is up for Best Original Song — her first Oscar nod ever. Billie detailed, “We made the song in October of 2019… [I was] 17 when I made it. I’m now 20.”
She continued, “It was a very long strategic process. It wasn’t like ‘You got the job! Here it is!’ We were auditioning pretty much. So it was not like an ego thing. It was really, ‘It’s got to be perfect. We got to do it right.'”
Billie said she and her brother, FINNEAS, “Worked really hard” to earn the opportunity and, later, were provided a “bit of the script, just the opening.” That snippet, she said, “Was literally what wrote the song” because it gave them “a little taste of the movie.”
Maynard James Keenan and company had the highest grossing tour to start off the year, raking in more than $13 million over the course of 10 reported shows in January.
Elton John was second, with just over $10 million from five shows, followed by country stars Reba McEntire, Kane Brown and Eric Church.
Billboard notes that January is traditionally a slow month for concert ticket sales, adding that the Omicron surge of late 2021 and early 2022 postponed a number of high-profile shows, including Adele‘s much-hyped Las Vegas residency, paving the way for Tool to take the top spot.
Tool is currently on tour in support of the band’s 2019 comeback album, Fear Inoculum. Their show in Washington, D.C. earlier this week was briefly halted due to a fan in the crowd experiencing a medical situation. Rock Feed obtained footage of Keenan pausing the show and instructing the audience to make way for EMTs. The show continued after the situation was addressed.
Jason Aldean has sold 90 percent of his catalog of recorded music to independent publishing company Spirit Music Group. Variety reports that the sale yielded upward of $100 million.
Included in the sale are Jason’s first nine albums, beginning with his self-titled debut from 2005 and encompassing every release through 2019’s 9. The singer, who retains income interest on the music, says he’s excited to place his music with a publishing company where it’ll be well cared for.
“It’s something really important to me, so I’m glad it’ll be looked after,” he notes.
Notably, Jason’s 10th studio album, the double project Macon, Georgia, isn’t included in the Spirit Music Group acquisition. The first half of that album, Macon, dropped last November, with Georgia set to follow in April.
(WASHINGTON) — The White House has begun a sweeping overhaul of its COVID strategy that will signal the nation is moving past crisis mode and into a more manageable phase in the pandemic, ABC News has learned.
The new strategy was expected to acknowledge that the virus — which has killed at least 936,162 Americans in the past two years — is less of an urgent threat to most Americans because of widespread access to vaccines, booster shots, and testing, as well as increasing availability of therapeutics.
At the same time, the White House on Wednesday began working behind the scenes with some of the nation’s most prominent pandemic experts to game out the various paths the virus could take to ensure the government is prepared.
In a private online meeting, Jeff Zients, the White House coordinator on the federal COVID response, led the group in discussing potential trajectories in the pandemic — from the best case scenario that the virus evolves into a mild flu-like illness, to the worst case that an aggressive new variant could evade effectiveness of the vaccine.
The overall consensus was that COVID has fundamentally altered U.S. public health.
“There’s no scenario where we say, ‘oh my gosh, let’s go back to normal,'” said one person involved in the effort.
The White House described Wednesday’s online meeting as part of a series of outreach efforts with governors and business leaders to discuss the pandemic. Included in Wednesday’s discussion were several former advisers to President Joe Biden during his transition after the election, but who had more recently called on the administration to shift gears and tackle COVID as part of the nation’s “new normal.”
Among those in attendance included Zients; David Kessler, Biden’s chief scientific adviser; Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and medical ethicist with the University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Centers for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota; Dr. Luciana Borio, a former senior official at the National Security Council and former acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration now with the Council on Foreign Relations; and David Michaels, an epidemiologist and former head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration now with George Washington University’s School of Public Health.
The meeting was confirmed by several people familiar with the effort, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on private White House meetings. Among the issues discussed were what resources the U.S. might need to ensure access to life-saving therapeutics and shoring up any vulnerabilities in the supply chain.
“We’ve seen things come down before only to be surprised,” one person said, describing the meetings as helping the administration to prepare for next steps.
Timing of the White House announcement of its updated COVID strategy was unclear as the Ukraine crisis escalated Thursday with Russia’s invasion. Biden had been expected to address aspects of the new COVID approach in his State of the Union address on March 1.
In a separate effort, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing new guidance intended to help local officials decide when it’s safe to pull back on restrictions, such as indoor masking mandates. Those updated recommendations, expected within the week, were expected to emphasize local hospital capacity and focus less on case counts when measuring a community’s ability to withstand increased COVID transmission.
“We must consider hospital capacity as an additional important barometer. Our hospitals need to be able to take care of people with heart attacks and strokes,” Walensky told reporters last week.
The shift comes as Biden and Democratic governors are under increasing pressure by voters fed up with restrictions due to the virus. Several states have moved preemptively to lift restrictions, even as the CDC continues to recommend indoor masking, particularly in schools.
According to a recent Gallup poll, more Americans disapproved of Biden’s handling of the virus — 52% — than those who approve. In recent weeks, Democratic strategists have advised party officials to shift their focus away from COVID and focus on curbing inflation instead.
Zients hinted at the upcoming shift in federal COVID strategy at a press briefing last week.
“We’re moving toward a time when COVID isn’t a crisis but is something we can protect against and treat,” Zients told reporters on Feb. 16.
Biden officials say the administration is still keenly aware of the balancing act involved. COVID-related hospitalizations are now nearing the lowest level since before the omicron surge — a positive sign that the nation has turned a corner in the two-year pandemic.
At the same time, concerns of another variant remain, as well as the lack of a vaccine available to children ages 4 and under. Data on a Pfizer pediatric vaccine for the population isn’t expected until April. Meanwhile, hospitalization rates for that age group are at its highest throughout the pandemic.
“We definitely are heading into a new phase of the pandemic,” said Julie Morita, executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation who has previously advised Biden on COVID.
But, “I think we’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that it was over prematurely in the past, and it’s just hurt us,” she added.
ABC News Sony Salzman, Cheyenne Haslett, Sasha Pezenik and Arielle Mitropoulos contributed to this report.
(SPOILER ALERT) If you’ve used social media, like ever, you’ve probably seen a popular meme of two cartoon Spider-Men pointing at each other.
The meme is such a fan favorite, in fact, that once director Jon Watts had access to not only two, but three Spider-Men in No Way Home, he mimicked it onscreen, twice.
And if you needed more proof, Sony Pictures just posted a behind-the-scenes photo of Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire, and Andrew Garfield, all in their respective Spidey suits, pointing at each other; the caption: “of course, we got THE meme.”
The post was also to remind folks that Spider-Man: No Way Homeswings home on digital March 22 and on 4K UHD & Blu-ray on April 12. Not that fans needed it: The picture was liked nearly 300,000 times on Twitter, and more than 1.9 million times on Instagram, in just 24 hours.
According to the institute’s survey of known abortion providers in the U.S., 54% of abortions in 2020 were done by medication abortion, a process that involves taking two pills. The number marks a significant increase from the last survey, done in 2017, when medication abortions made up 39% of all abortions.
The increase in medication abortion comes as access to abortion in the U.S. has the potential to be dramatically altered this year. The Supreme Court is expected to rule this spring on a case that has the potential to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark case that made abortion a federally protected right in the U.S.
If Roe is overturned, more than half of the nation’s 50 states are prepared to ban abortion, according to a Guttmacher Institute report released last year.
At the same time, many states are already enacting restrictions on abortion access, including medication abortion.
More than one dozen state legislatures have introduced bans or restrictions on medication abortion so far this year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Seven states have legislation pending that would ban the use of medication abortion, while five states are considering laws to prohibit the mailing of abortion pills and eight states are considering barring the use of telehealth to provide medication, according to Guttmacher.
Texas, which last year implemented an unprecedented six-week abortion ban, has already enacted a law restricting access to medication abortion, including banning the mailing of abortion-inducing drugs and narrowing the window in which physicians are allowed to give the medication to seven weeks.
Medication abortions were first approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2000. FDA guidelines advise that abortion-inducing pills are safe to use up to 70 days, or 10 weeks, after conception, though evidence shows it can be safe even later in pregnancy, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).
In most cases in a medication abortion, mifepristone is taken first to stop the pregnancy from growing. Then, a second pill, misoprostol, is then taken to empty the uterus.
Of the two medications, mifepristone is more restricted by the FDA. Since 2011, the agency had applied a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS) to mifepristone, preventing it from being distributed at pharmacies or delivered by mail like other prescription drugs.
In December, under the Biden administration, the FDA permanently lifted its restriction on mifepristone that required providers to dispense the drug in person, allowing it to be delivered by mail.
In its updated guidance online, the FDA cited the need to “reduce burden on patient access and the health care delivery system.”
Women still must obtain the pill through a certified health care provider though and the FDA’s decision is subject to state laws that can criminalize the practice.
Telemedicine for medication abortion is effectively banned in 19 states, which require a provider to be physically present when administering the pill, according Guttmacher.
Complications from at-home medication abortions are rare, happening in less than 1% of cases in one study of nearly 20,000 medication abortions, according to ACOG, which says medication abortion “can be provided safely and effectively by telemedicine.”
Proponents of the FDA’s decision to lift its restriction on mifepristone say that allowing greater access to medication abortion, including via telemedicine, gives more options to the people who need them the most.
Around 75% of abortion patients are low-income residents, and nearly 60% of U.S. women of reproductive age live in states where access to abortion is restricted, according to Guttmacher.
ABC News’ Anne Flaherty contributed to this report.
