Ariana Grande is once again channeling Jennifer Garner in 13 Going on 30.
After paying homage to the 2004 rom-com in her music video for “thank u, next,” the singer sported one of the signature looks from the film during last night’s live episode of The Voice.
Ari wore the colorful Versace dress Garner’s character Jenna Rink wore in the movie’s famous “Thriller” dance scene. She even accessorized with similar dangling earrings and did her hair in an updo matching the character’s.
Garner previously commented on Ari’s “thank u, next” video tribute back in 2018, prompting the singer to gush over what 13 Going on 30 means to her.
“NooooooooOoOOoOo I’m crying,” Ariana wrote at the time. “I watched this movie every night before bed growing up (and I still do sometimes, especially when I’m sad). I adore you! Thank you for all the inspiration and joy you’ve brought to my life. I’m screaming bye and by sometimes I literally mean every night still.”
Greta Van Fleet has announced a full U.S. headlining tour for 2022.
The outing, dubbed the Dreams in Gold tour, is set to kick off March 10 with a home state show in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and will wrap up April 2 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Rival Sons and The Velveteers will provide support.
Tickets go on sale to the general public this Friday, November 12, at 10 a.m. local time, with various pre-sales throughout the week. For the full list of dates and all ticket info, visit Greta Van Fleet’s website, TheBattleatGardensGate.com.
The Battle at Garden’s Gate, of course, is the name of Greta Van Fleet’s latest album, which was released this past April. The record, the sophomore follow-up to 2018’s Anthem of the Peaceful Army, includes the singles “My Way, Soon,” “Heat Above” and “Built By Nations.”
Over the years, Lady Gaga has been known to turn more than a few heads with her outlandish looks. In addition to gracing the cover of December’s British Vogue, the House of Gucci star revisits some of her iconic looks, one of which featured her arriving inside of an egg at the 2011 Grammy Awards.
“We would call this an outfit,” Gaga said. “Everyone calls this the egg but it’s actually a vessel that was designed by Hussein Chalayan.”
Gaga then revealed that she “was in the egg for three days,” before explaining, “To be honest, at award shows, especially during this time, I didn’t like to talk to people. I always felt that it threw me off with my performance, so this in a lot of ways is really representative of my devotion to my craft, in that I really wanted to be with myself.”
Gaga also shared that she changed the outfits of those who carried her into the awards ceremony just one night before the show, because “I was very particular about the way the fashion looked for this performance…I said, ‘The fashion’s wrong, we don’t have it. We need it to be latex. We need nude latex.’”
“And if you know anything about looking for latex, years ago it was very difficult to find latex anywhere other than a sex shop,” she recalled. “Where we found this latex was, a bus company had latex that they were using to cover the seats of their buses and we found the latex and we asked if we could buy it from them. So everybody’s fashion that’s made here was made from the fabric from seats for a bus.”
Kanye West used his Sunday Service to offer his support to those affected by the tragedy at Travis Scott‘s Astroworld Festival last Friday.
On Sunday, the 44-year-old rapper dedicated his Sunday Service, which was livestreamed on YouTube, to “the loved ones at Astroworld.”
The livestream’s description also read, “Let’s get back to a peaceful state of mind with this service dedicated to the lost lives at Travis Scott’s Astroworld.”
West did not attend his service, according to TMZ.
Eight people died and hundreds were injured when the crowd of 50,000 rushed the stage during Scott’s performance last week.
Reese Witherspoon flirted with billionaire status when she sold her production company, Hello Sunshine, for a whopping $900 million in August.
Speaking to InStyle, the 45-year-old actress explained that selling her company was not a decision she made lightly.
“It was two, maybe three months of negotiations on the phone all day. Calls at one o’clock in the morning,” said Witherspoon, who added, “I didn’t know a lot about private equity. I’d never sold a company in my life. I learned so much.”
The Legally Blonde star said it was very bittersweet to say goodbye to Hello Sunshine.
“I cried. I cried, and I thought about my grandma, and I cried more. I thought about all of the women who haven’t gotten these opportunities, and I just feel really lucky that I’m standing in a path that other women created for me,” Witherspoon recalled.
Hello Sunshine was more than her baby, she adds. The company helped her smash the stereotype that stories about women – and told by women — aren’t profitable or interesting.
The company has produced successful movies and television shows including Gone Girl, Big Little Lies, The Morning Show, and Little Fires Everywhere, which all put women front and center.
So, when negotiating the final sale of her company, Witherspoon says, “I was really clear about what women’s stories mean in a marketplace. So it had to be a number that signified that it’s big business because women are big business. Female audiences are big business. Female filmmakers are big business. You can’t ignore half of the population of the world and say that they don’t economically matter; they do.”
Witherspoon will still oversee day-to-day operations of Hello Sunshine, along with CEO Sarah Harden, and they both will remain significant equity holders.
(NEW YORK) — Trevor Reed, the 30-year-old former Marine who has been detained on what his family says are trumped up charges in Russia for over two years, has gone on hunger strike, his family confirmed Monday.
It marks a dramatic escalation in Reed’s battle to secure his freedom, with his family expressing growing frustration with the Biden administration for not doing enough, they said.
“While we are immensely proud of our son’s strength of character, we are also extremely worried about his health,” his parents Joey and Paula and sister Taylor said in a statement Monday.
Reed’s Russian girlfriend told ABC News that he started his hunger strike last Thursday, Nov. 4. His family confirmed the news through his Russian attorney, saying in a statement Monday that he is protesting “his arbitrary detention and Russian authorities’ numerous and flagrant violations of his basic human rights and his rights under Russian law.”
Reed has been in solitary confinement for nearly three months now, and he has not been able to contact his family in nearly four months. The former Marine presidential guard has been in Russian custody since August 2019, sentenced to nine years last July for assaulting two police officers. The U.S. embassy in Moscow has called the trial absurd, as the two officers struggled to recall the alleged incident in court hearings and contradicted themselves repeatedly.
In a labor camp in the remote Mordovia region for months now, Reed has been confined to a small cell that doesn’t include a toilet, and items that U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan brought for him when he visited in September have not been given to him by prison guards, according to his family.
“Our concern is magnified by Russian authorities’ decision to hold Trevor incommunicado which makes it impossible for us or the Embassy to monitor his health,” they said.
After President Joe Biden met Russian leader Vladimir Putin in June, there was hope for and speculation about a prisoner swap, especially because Biden said he raised his case and that of Paul Whelan, another U.S. citizen detained by Russia.
But there was no deal reached in the weeks and months that followed, and a family representative told ABC News that they are not aware of any talks ongoing right now to free Reed.
In their statement, the Reed family urged the Biden administration to exchange one of the two Russians whose names have been floated publicly by Russian state media and senior Russian officials as a possible exchange. Viktor Bout, known as the “Merchant of Death” because of his notorious work as a prolific arms dealer, is serving a 25-year sentence in U.S. federal prison, while Konstantin Yaroshenko is serving a 20-year sentence for attempting to smuggle cocaine and other illicit drugs to the U.S. as a pilot.
While Reed’s family members note they have been “patient,” it’s clear they are getting increasingly frustrated and anguished. They said Monday they hope Biden and his national security adviser Jake Sullivan “will find the time to see us” when they next visit Washington and “find the political will to bring our son home.”
But while they said they “look forward to our son receiving” the administration’s attention for his hunger strike, the State Department was succinct on the subject. Spokesperson Ned Price said Monday that the agency is aware of reports of Reed’s hunger strike, but declined to comment further, citing privacy concerns.
Ambassador Sullivan last visited Reed in prison camp on Sept. 22 and will try to visit him again this month, Price added, as well as Whelan.
Britney Spears told fans in a new update that she’s praying hard that, by week’s end, she will be released from her controversial 13-year conservatorship.
“This week is gonna be very interesting for me,” Britney posted to Instagram Monday. “I haven’t prayed for something more in my life.”
The singer’s next court hearing is set for November 12, where Judge Brenda J. Penny will consider terminating the conservatorship.
Britney also admitted to feeling overwhelmed by her ongoing legal battle, saying that complicated emotions may have gotten the best of her on several occasions.
“I know I’ve said some things on my Insta out of anger and I’m sorry but I’m only human … and I believe you’d feel the same way if you were me,” she wrote.
While she didn’t directly reference some of her past controversial statements, she did make headlines last week when, in a since-deleted Instagram post, she accused her mom Lynne Spears of masterminding the conservatorship and, in the process, “secretly ruining my life.”
Britney also admitted in her post, “I can’t say I’m never going to complain again… cuz who knows,” then added she’s focusing on the “new day” ahead.
Last month, Ed Sheeran revealed that he and Elton John were teaming up for a Christmas single, and during an appearance on The Tonight Show on Monday, Sheeran shared some more details about the song.
The “Shivers” singer told host Jimmy Fallon that Elton called him up last December to wish him a Merry Christmas and extended an invitation to join him on another holiday song, because his classic “Step Into Christmas” had returned to the British top 10.
“So, he rung me on Christmas day and said, ‘I want to do another Christmas song do you want to do with it me?'” Sheeran recalls. “So I said to Elton, I was like, “I don’t really want to do Christmas song unless we’re going in unless it’s like…sleigh bells, ding dong — it needs to be a proper Christmas song. So I wrote a chorus, and then I went to go and stay with him and we wrote three and one of them was this one called ‘Merry Christmas.'”
“I’m like, “We’re gonna have to change that title ’cause there’s probably loads of songs called ‘Merry Christmas,'” he continued.
However, to Ed’s surprise, “I went on Spotify and I typed in ‘Merry Christmas.’ Nothing. There’s ‘Merry Christmas, everyone,’ there’s ‘Happy Xmas.’ There’s ‘Merry Xmas (War Is Over)’… There’s not a song called ‘Merry Christmas.’ And then I went on YouTube and checked it out; it baffled me…it’s kind of like this glitch in a video game where no one saw.”
A release date for “Merry Christmas” has yet to be announced.
(NEW YORK) — Vaccine mandates have been yet another controversial move in the deeply divisive COVID-19 pandemic, sparking lawsuits, protests and warnings of reductions in service.
But data and experts suggest that they are working.
In fact, some organizations saw their employee vaccination rates jump from less than half to over 90%.
James Colgrove, a professor of public health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health told ABC News that he’s not surprised with this outcome and predicted that similar workplace orders will follow the same story.
“In general, vaccine mandates work,” he said.
While vaccine opponents may appear vocal, medical experts say most are not dead set against the vaccination and need that push brought up by a mandate.
Although Colgrove and other medical experts say the country is in “uncharted territory” when it comes to vaccine mandates for adults, since such orders are rare outside of the health care industry, the signs are pointing to the directives greatly moving the needle in the country’s vaccinations efforts.
Jumps in vaccinations after mandates issued
Colgrove said the country has seen the effectiveness of vaccine mandates in our schools, which for decades have mandated inoculations against measles, mumps and other ailments. Mandates for hospital workers have also been shown to prevent outbreaks and mass worker shortages from illness, he noted.
COVID-19’s persistence in the U.S. and the resulting worker shortages from sick and hospitalized employees virus has forced many organizations in the country to consider mandates, according to Colgrove.
When the delta variant caused a jump in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths among the unvaccinated in the summer, more mandates and mandate-like programs were announced.
Some private companies started to issue vaccine mandates in the summer for their in-person based employees including Google, Tyson Foods, United Airlines and the Walt Disney Company, which is the parent company of ABC News. All of the companies allow exemptions for religious reasons and give deadlines for the fall.
The results from some of those mandates were strong, according to data shared by some companies.
When Tyson announced its mandate on Aug. 3, it said that less than half of its nearly 140,000 employees were vaccinated. When the deadline for the mandate came at the end of October, the food processing company said over 60,000 of its members got their shots and 96% of its staff was vaccinated.
“Has this made a difference in the health and safety of our team members? Absolutely. We’ve seen a significant decline in the number of active cases companywide,” Tyson Food president and CEO Donnie King said in a statement.
United Airlines said 48 hours after it announced its mandate, the number of unvaccinated staffers fell from 593 to 320. As of Oct. 27, 99.7% of the airline’s 67,000 employees had complied with the mandate, according to United.
“Our vaccine policy continues to prove requirements work,” the company said in a statement.
Dr. Sarah Goff, an associate professor of health promotion and policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told ABC News that organizations are aiming to get their workplaces back in person and have been more willing to issue the mandates.
She also cited the 1905 Supreme Court case Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which ruled that states have the right to issue a public health mandate, and the ruling Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel has strong factors behind the mandates.
“There is precedence for vaccines to be legally acceptable, but it’s up to the states and the companies,” Goff said.
In the public sector, a handful of states announced mandates for their state and local agencies in the summer and fall including Washington State.
Officials from Washington state’s health department told ABC News that the percentage of public employees who were vaccinated jumped from 49% on Sept. 6, a month after Gov. Jay Inslee announced the mandate, to 96% on Oct. 18, the mandate’s deadline.
New York City shows progress despite protests
New York City came under the spotlight for its vaccine mandate policies. At first, it allowed unvaccinated public employees who weren’t in health care or the Department of Education, but on Oct. 20 Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the rest of the city workforce needed to get one dose by Oct. 29 or be placed on unpaid leave. The city allowed for religious exemptions city employees who recently received an mRNA vaccine must show proof of their second dose within 45 days of their first shot.
At the time of the announcement, 84% of the city’s workforce had one shot, but several agencies, including the FDNY, NYPD and Sanitation Department recorded less than 75% of their staff, vaccinated, according to data from the mayor’s office.
Unions representing the FDNY and NYPD tried to take the matter to court but were denied injunctions before the deadline. Still, the Uniformed Firefighters Association led rallies against the mayor and the mandate contending that vaccinations should be the personal choice of their members.
By the time the mandate deadline came on Oct. 29, vaccination rates among the lagging agencies greatly increased. As of Nov. 7, 86% of NYPD members, 91% of city EMS personnel and 82% of firefighters have had one shot, according to data from the mayor’s office.
The FDNY said that some firehouses were understaffed the Monday after the deadline, which Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said was from a higher number of firefighters calling out sick. Nigro chastised any firefighters who used their sick days to protest the mandate.
In the end, only 34 police officers were placed on unpaid leave on Nov. 2 and all of the FDNY firehouses were operational on Nov. 5, according to the mayor’s office.
Not willing to take the risk
Goff said at the end of the day most people hesitant about getting the vaccine, even those who make a lot of noise about it, would not jeopardize their careers or families.
“You lose your job and it impacts people’s livelihood and while there may be some who say they’re willing to risk that, they don’t,” she said.
Goff and other medical experts added that the mandates also reach a wider group of people who aren’t completely dead set against the vaccination.
Colgrove said the increases in worker vaccinations after a mandate tracks with the data on vaccine hesitancy in the country.
While he said there is certainly a group that is completely against getting the vaccine, there are more unvaccinated people who are simply on the fence and haven’t had either a strong motivation or good enough messaging to go forward with it.
A survey released on Oct. 28 by the Kaiser Family Foundation said 8% of all adult respondents revealed they would ask for an exemption if presented with such a mandate, and 1% of adult respondents lost a job because of a mandate.
A KFF survey released a month earlier found that two-thirds of unvaccinated workers would not get a shot if their job demanded it.
“When you look at vaccine resistance, the people who are the most opposed often make a very large amount of noise that is at odds with the actual numbers who are against vaccination,” Colgrove said.
A strong nudge and a change in messaging
Dr. Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine and economics at Stanford University School of Medicine and Graduate School of Business, told ABC News, said the mandates positive effect on changing the messaging of vaccines.
Schulman, who has written articles in medical publications on the need for better marketing of the COVID-19 vaccine, said companies have been using their vaccine mandate orders to emphasize their effectiveness more directly with their employees.
For example, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby and President Brett Hart told their employees that they had a responsibility to their employees to remain safe and prevent flight cancellations.
“It ends up being a story about how do we protect ourselves and how do we get up and flying again,” Schulman said. “It sticks with the apathetic population.”
Schulman said that company incentives, such as one-time salary bonuses, also helped sway the holdouts.
“Seeing other people around them get the vaccine, and tolerating it and going about their lives will help those groups,” Schulman said.
More company mandates likely
Last week, President Joe Biden announced a vaccine employment requirement through a new regulation from the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Companies that have 100 or more employees must require unvaccinated members to test weekly or face federal fines starting Jan. 4. Over 100 million employees are affected by this order.
Twenty-six states are suing the administration over the order and a judge in Louisiana issued an injunction on Saturday.
The health experts say the court battle over Biden’s plan won’t deter organizations from issuing their own mandates, including ones that go further than OSHA’s rules and place unvaccinated members on leave.
Colgrove said the need for a strong and healthy workplace and the increased examples of mandates working will compel those organizations to improve their vaccine rates one way or another.
“The more normalized it comes, the more people someone knows someone else who is vaccinated, the more people will comply,” Colgrove said. “With any vaccine the longer it’s been around the more people get with it.”
(NOTE LANGUAGE) Kirsten Dunst is opening up about her struggle with depression and her decision to have a second child.
During an interview with The Sunday Times, the 39-year-old actress recalled becoming depressed in her 20s before seeking treatment at a rehabilitation facility in Utah.
“I feel like most people around 27, the s*** hits the fan,” the Bring It On alum said. “Whatever is working in your brain, you can’t live like that any more mentally.”
She continued, “I feel like I was angry. You don’t know that you are repressing all this anger, it wasn’t a conscious thing.”
Dunst added that medication aided in helping her work through the depression, telling the newspaper, “It’s hard to talk about such a personal thing, but it is important to share, too. All I’ll say is that medication is a great thing and can really help you come out of something. I was afraid to take something and so I sat in it for too long. I would recommend getting help when you need it.”
These days, Dunst is in a different chapter of her life. She and actor Jesse Plemons share two sons: Ennis, three,and James Robert, whom they welcomed over the summer.
Dunst revealed that the pandemic was a factor in the two deciding to have another child. While in New Zealand, where The Power of the Dog was filmed, Dunst recalled, “We would go to the grocery store and take off our clothes and wipe down afterwards. No one knew anything, it was terrifying, and at the time I smoked so I was like, ‘Oh my God, if I get this I am gonna die.’”
“I was like, as soon as we are done with this movie, let’s try and have another baby,” she said.
