(NEW YORK) — A woman from New York is suing The Kellogg Company for $5 million because she says the company’s Frosted Strawberry Pop-Tarts product doesn’t have enough strawberries in its filling.
Elizabeth Russett filed a class-action lawsuit on Oct. 19 with lawyer Spencer Sheehan against Kellogg’s for falsely advertising the contents of its pastry.
“The strawberry representations are misleading because the Product has less strawberries than consumers expect based on the labeling,” the lawsuit says.
“The amount of strawberry ingredients is insufficient not merely to provide the nutrient benefits of strawberries but to provide a strawberry taste.”
The lawsuit asks for $5 million in damages under the Class Action Fairness Act and a jury trial, claiming that customers wouldn’t have purchased the treats repeatedly had they known it had fewer strawberries than expected. Russett is joined by three other plaintiffs — Illinois’ Stacy Chiappetta and Anita Harris and New York’s Kelvin Brown — who are also represented by Sheehan.
Despite its name, the Whole Grain Frosted Strawberry Pop-Tarts’ box states the pastries have less than 2% of pears, apples and strawberries with dried pears and dried apples listed before dried strawberries. The product is described on the company’s website as having “sweet frosting decorated with rainbow sprinkles and filled with strawberry-flavored goodness.”
“The Product’s common or usual name of ‘ Whole Grain Frosted Strawberry Toaster Pastries,’ is false, deceptive, and misleading, because it contains mostly non-strawberry fruit ingredients,” Russett’s lawsuit says.
The plaintiff also takes issue with the absence of information regarding artificial flavoring and added coloring on the front label and marketing materials.
Kellogg’s said in a statement to ABC News: “While we don’t comment on pending litigation, we can tell you the ingredients in and labeling of all of our Pop-Tart products fully comply with all legal requirements.”
(NEW YORK) — As the COVID-19 pandemic has swept the globe, more than 4.9 million people have died from the disease worldwide, including over 740,000 Americans, according to real-time data compiled by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
Just 67.3% of Americans ages 12 and up are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Oct 27, 6:43 pm
New York City braces for possible mandate-related reduction in fire, EMS service
New York City Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said Wednesday he’s preparing to make major operational changes next week as significant portion of the city’s firefighters and EMS personnel haven’t complied with the city’s vaccine mandate.
“We will use all means at our disposal, including mandatory overtime, mutual aid from other EMS providers, and significant changes to the schedules of our members,” he said in a statement.
The mandate for all New York City public employees will go into effect at the end of day Friday. The FDNY said that 65% of its members were vaccinated as of Wednesday.
An FDNY official told ABC News that by Monday fire and ambulance services could be reduced by as much as 20%.
FDNY leadership has held virtual meetings with uniformed staff explaining the vaccine mandate and imploring them to comply, and will continue doing so throughout the week, the official said.
Oct 27, 3:29 pm
CDC advisers to vote Nov. 2 on pediatric vaccines
The CDC’s independent advisors plan to discuss and hold a non-binding vote on the recommendations for the pediatric vaccine on Nov. 2.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky will likely endorse those recommendations for 5 to 11-year-olds following the vote that day.
Vaccinations can start as soon as Walensky sends out final recommendations.
Meanwhile, the FDA’s decision to authorize the pediatric vaccine is expected in the coming days.
Oct 27, 10:22 am
Nearly two-thirds of Americans have had at least 1 vaccine dose
Nearly two-thirds of all Americans — 220 million people — have had at least one vaccine dose, according to federal data.
But 111 million Americans remain completely unvaccinated, including about 48 million children under the age of 12, who are not yet eligible to get the shot.
National metrics continue to fall, according to federal data. About 51,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, down from 104,000 patients at the end of August
Deaths are are trending down, though numbers remain quite high at over 1,100 fatalities each day.
(WASHINGTON) — A proposal to levy a new tax code on America’s ultra-wealthy has sent shockwaves through the nation’s capital and beyond on Wednesday, as lawmakers struggle to reach an agreement over how to pay for President Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar Build Back Better initiative.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., on Wednesday morning unveiled a scheme dubbed the “Billionaires Income Tax,” which would tax capital gains on the unsold assets of billionaires — such as stocks — and significantly impact some of the nation’s wealthiest people, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk, whose net worth is currently $287 billion per Bloomberg’s real-time data on billionaires, signaled on Twitter that he opposes the proposal.
“Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you,” Musk wrote in response to a tweet featuring a templated letter opponents can send to their congressperson. The letter says that although holdings in 401(k) plans are excluded, the proposal takes tax hikes “a step closer to imposing unrealized capital gains tax on the average investor.”
As the wealthiest man in the world, however, Musk is far from the average investor, and has seen his net worth increase by some $117 billion in 2021 alone, per Bloomberg’s count.
While the proposal has garnered backing from the White House, it has already divided Washington, with some critics calling it unconstitutional, convoluted or unfairly targeting a specific group of people who have contributed to America’s economic growth.
Wyden and proponents, meanwhile, say it will help ensure the billionaires pay their fair share of taxes after reports that some of the richest 1% of Americans have legally avoided paying taxes on their wealth gains despite their net worths increasing dramatically — and at a time of massive wealth inequality in the U.S. that experts have said is exacerbated by America’s tax codes being tilted in favor of the wealthy.
Though it currently faces an uphill battle in implementation, here is what to know about the proposed billionaires’ income tax.
Who would be hit with the new tax?
The new tax would apply to roughly 700 taxpayers, according to a statement from Wyden’s office, or those with more than $100 million in annual income or more than $1 billion in assets for three consecutive years. With a population of 328 million, this means the new tax would impact less than 0.001% of Americans.
The wealth of billionaires tends to be more tied up in stocks compared to working-class Americans. The wealthiest 1% of households in the U.S. own more than half of all the publicly traded stock in the market, according to Federal Reserve data, and the bottom 50% own less than 1%.
Recent investigative reports, including a bombshell leak of tax documents to the nonprofit news organization ProPublica earlier this year, have found that the ultra-wealthy use legal loopholes to avoid paying taxes on their wealth gains — such as keeping their reported income, and thus income taxes, to just a fraction of what their net worth actually is. Musk, for example, earned a base salary of $0 at Tesla in 2020, according to SEC filings.
The ProPublica report found that while the median American household paid 14% of their income in federal taxes, the wealthiest 25 Americans had an average so-called “true tax rate” of 3.4% of the amount their wealth grew each year between 2014 and 2018.
Wyden alluded to this divide, saying that the Billionaires Income Tax would ensure “billionaires pay tax every year, just like working Americans.”
“There are two tax codes in America,” Wyden said in a statement accompanying his proposal on Wednesday. “The first is mandatory for workers who pay taxes out of every pay check. The second is voluntary for billionaires who defer paying taxes for years, if not indefinitely.”
How does it work?
Under current tax codes, if the value of stocks rises it can lead to swift, multimillion dollar gains in the net worth of the nation’s wealthiest individuals — but they don’t have to pay taxes on these wealth gains unless they sell the stocks.
Wyden’s proposal would ask billionaires to pay an annual tax on gains or take deductions for losses whether they sell the stocks or not.
“The way the system works today is that if you make a profit on assets that you hold, they’re worth more at the end of the year than the beginning. You don’t pay tax unless you sell those assets,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told ABC News on Wednesday.
“There are trillions of dollars in increased value of assets that simply go untaxed,” Gleckman added. “And that is one big reason for the income inequality, and the fact that the rich have gotten so much richer.”
Non-tradable assets like real estate or business interests would not be taxed annually, but when billionaires sell or transfer these non-tradable assets, they would pay a capital gains tax in addition to an interest charge that Wyden’s office labels as akin to interest charged on deferred tax.
The interest charge — or “deferral recapture amount,” as Wyden is calling it, would be the amount of interest that would be due on tax owed if the asset had been marked to market each year and the tax had been deferred until sale. The interest rate applied would be 1.22%, per Wyden’s office, or the applicable federal short term rate (currently 0.22%) plus one percentage point.
The proposal contains rules to help smooth the transition, such as being able to treat up to $1 billion of tradable stock in a single corporation as a non-tradable asset. It would also let billionaires elect to pay tax over five years the first time the billionaires’ tradable assets are marked to market.
The full, 107-page text of the tax proposal can be found here.
Gleckman said he sees potential issues arising if a major asset goes down in value and are calculated as losses by billionaires, and because of the potential for confusion over the valuation of privately held, non-tradable assets.
“The bottom line, the 30,000-foot level, this is a very interesting idea but it is very hard to administer,” Gleckman said. “This is not a wealth tax, but it has some of the common administrative problems of a wealth tax — the biggest being it’s hard to value the assets of rich people.”
Is it constitutional?
A legal challenge likely looms if the proposal is enacted, and critics have already questioned the constitutionality of taxing unrealized or unsold capital gains.
Under current law, the government has the power to tax “income” due to the 16th Amendment, but new wealth gains are only classified as income when they are realized or sold, not simply held. The Supreme Court in 1920 ruled that stock dividends did not become taxable as income until they were sold or converted.
This definition of income has benefits to working- and middle-class Americans, as they do not have to pay taxes on retirement savings such as their 401(k)s when they increase in value until they cash out.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki, however, signaled that they believe the new tax has legal footing.
When asked about the questionable constitutionality of the tax, Psaki said, “We’re not going to support anything we don’t think is legal.”
“The president supports the billionaire tax,” she added. “He looks forward to working with Congress and Chairman Wyden to make sure the highest income Americans pay their fair share.”
In a statement to ABC News, Wyden defended his proposal from critics, saying, “Entire sections of the tax code are unconstitutional if this is unconstitutional.”
“I can’t imagine the Supreme Court wants to give the wealthiest people on earth billions in tax cuts, particularly at a time when so many Americans are losing faith in the Supreme Court,” he added.
Reba McEntire‘s boyfriend, actor Rex Linn, may be her Young Sheldon co-star who plays the high school principal, but he’s also a huge cut-up who’s an enormous fan of Halloween.
“Last year, he ordered from Costco a seven foot werewolf, [with] a motion sensor in it, and he put it in my bathroom,” Reba recalls. “And then when I walked in there, it moved and growled at me and I was very upset.”
“I said, ‘Everybody who had anything to do with it, you’re all fired!'” she jokes. “Then I started giggling. Then I was pretty flattered that he’d went to all that trouble to scare me.”
“Then we took it to every place we could to scare everybody else,” she adds. “We had a blast with it.”
Old Dominion‘s Matthew Ramsey takes things even further for Halloween, though it was something of an accident.
“This happened probably four years ago, when I couldn’t take my kids on a fall break vacation,” OD’s lead singer explains. “So I took them to Home Depot and bought every Halloween decoration that I could possibly find, and we tricked out the woods… like a haunted woods. And so I set a tradition that I didn’t mean to set.”
“Now I spend about $1000 a year on new Halloween decorations,” Matthew continues. “And I don’t have the woods anymore because we moved, but now I told them… we have a little cabin — that I would make a whole haunted cabin for Halloween.”
“It’s like a whole art project,” he confesses. “I spend three days on decking out this whole house.”
All Hallows’ Eve is Sunday, so be sure to check out the socials of stars like Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean, who typically don’t disappoint when it comes to their costumes.
Bad Wolves‘ new album Dear Monsters marks their first with new lead singer Daniel “DL” Laskiewicz. On his debut record with the band, DL hopes you’ll join him in “penning a letter to your personal demons.”
“Whether it’s waking up in the morning and dreading going to work because you hate your boss, or you are going to a doctor’s appointment for a follow-up and finding out if you have some kind of illness or not, everybody has some kind of demon, personal monster,” DL tells ABC Audio of the album’s message.
It’s a universal theme, to be sure, but DL, who joined Bad Wolves earlier this year in place of former frontman Tommy Vext, found himself relating to Dear Monsters on a individual level.
“It’s a big change for me,” DL says of his new gig. “Not touring for 10-plus years, having loved ones, wife, kids, it’s just very different. I’m not an 18 year old dude in a metal band anymore.”
“I had to even confront my own personal monsters coming into this role,” he adds.
Much of what would become Dear Monsters was written before DL’s arrival, but his voice allowed him to put his own personal stamp on the record. He also contributed to the writing process with songs such as “Springfield Summer,” which refers to the name of his Massachusetts hometown.
“That song in particular touches loosely on my role coming into this band,” DL says. “It just ties into everything going on in my head walking into this role.”
“With all the things going on, it’s just been a crazy ride so far, for sure,” he says.
Dear Monsters, which features the lead single “Lifeline,” is out this Friday.
Doors guitarist Robby Krieger has been quite busy since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only did the 75-year-old Rock & Roll Hall of Famer finish and recently publish a new memoir, Set the Night on Fire, he tells ABC Audio that he’s also completed two album projects.
“Since the pandemic, that’s all I’ve been doing is recording,” Robby reports. “I’ve got two records ready to come out, both instrumental.”
The first is a reggae-flavored covers album titled Rocks Meets Dub that he says will include renditions of The Bee Gees‘ “Stayin’ Alive” and songs by Bob Dylan and The Beatles.
Krieger says he played a lot of slide guitar on the album, which he recorded with bassist Phil Chen, who for many years was a member of the bands that Robby co-led with late Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek.
“[Phil’s] been down with mesothelioma lately, so we wanted to do something that would make him happy,” Krieger explains. “And it just turned out really good.”
Keyboardist Ed Roth, who’s collaborated with Krieger frequently in recent years, also contributed to the album.
As for the other album, Krieger recorded that with his side project The New Experience, and is planning to release it after Rocks Meets Dub.
That group features Roth, as well as longtime Aretha Franklin bassist Kevin “Brandino” Brandon and drummer Franklin Vanderbilt, who also plays with Lenny Kravitz.
“[W]e don’t have a name for [that album] yet, but these guys are just amazing players,” Robby notes, adding that “it’s jazz, but it’s R&B as well.”
Krieger’s most recent album was another instrumental project, The Ritual Begins at Sundown, which was released in August 2020.
Supermassive Games, the mastermind behind the indie horror survival games Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology, released their newest installment, House of Ashes, which stars Ashley Tisdale.
Tisdale plays CIA officer Rachel King, who is trapped underground and must escape a hoard of bloodthirsty vampire-like creatures. Rachel’s survival is dependent on the decisions players make during gameplay.
Tisdale, who is not a “huge horror film person,” tells ABC Audio what interested her in starring in a game meant to scare people.
“It looks like a cinematic movie. It’s beautiful,” she raved, adding she wanted to give it a shot because it was “something different and fun. And it was wild!”
Part of Supermassive’s charm is modeling the characters and their mannerisms off the voice actors, but Ashley explained she didn’t put on the motion capture suit or physically act out a scene in order to bring Rachel to life.
“It’s weirdly like a voiceover,” the High School Musical star described, saying it reminded her of working in animation. “If you were acting in a movie, you would be in the scene. You would see those things [you need to interact with,] but you don’t see those things. You are reacting in a studio… You have this camera on your face and you have to pretend everything is around you.”
Now that Tisdale has cut her teeth on her first scary project, it begs to question if she will consider starring in future thrillers.
“I love scary movies around Halloween, but I’ve never had this feeling of like, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to act in a scary movie!’ So probably not,” she laughed. “I don’t know if I’ll keep going in that area.”
House of Ashes is available to play on Windows, PlayStation and Xbox devices.
WALK THE MOON has premiered a new song called “Rise Up,” a track off the band’s upcoming album, HEIGHTS.
“‘Rise Up’ arose partly out of a long sleepless night alone in the studio, stacking vocals on vocals until the track sounded like something off of Queen‘s A Day at the Races,” says vocalist Nicholas Petricca. “The song is about how nobody’s perfect and perseverance is universal, and I guess I needed a thousand singing voices to really get that across.”
You can download “Rise Up” now via digital outlets. It’s also accompanied by a video WTM filmed while on tour in Santa Clara, California, which you can watch now on YouTube.
HEIGHTS, the follow-up to 2017’s What If Nothing, arrives November 12. It also includes the lead single “Can You Handle My Love??”
Elvis Costello will greet 2022 with a new studio album that he recorded with his longtime backing group The Imposters called The Boy Named If.
The 13-track collection, which will be released on January 14, is described in a press statement as an album “of urgent, immediate songs with bright melodies, guitar solos that sting and a quick step to the rhythm.”
Costello explains about the project, “The full title of this record is The Boy Named If (And Other Children’s Stories). ‘IF’ is a nickname for your imaginary friend; your secret self, the one who knows everything you deny, the one you blame for the shattered crockery and the hearts you break, even your own.”
The Boy Named If will be available on vinyl, CD, cassette and digital formats. There also will be “an 88-page hardback storybook edition,” each copy of which will be signed and numbered by Elvis.
The storybook edition features 13 illustrated short stories that have the same titles as the album’s songs and relate to the corresponding tunes in some way. The stories feature the lyrics of the songs, and the illustrations were created by artist Eamon Singer.
In advance of The Boy Named If, one of the tracks, “Magnificent Hurt,” has been released as a digital single.
Costello has been quite busy since the start of the pandemic. He released his last studio album, Hey Clockface, in October of 2020, followed in March 2021 by La Face de Pendule à Coucou, an EP featuring French-language versions of six songs from Hey Clockface sung by Iggy Pop, actress Isabelle Adjani and others.
In September, Elvis released Spanish Model, a Spanish-language version of his 1978 album This Year’s Model showcasing various guest singers.
Here’s The Boy Named If‘s full track list:
“Farewell, OK”
“The Boy Named If”
“Penelope Halfpenny”
“The Difference”
“What If I Can’t Give You Anything but Love?”
“Paint the Red Rose Blue”
“Mistook Me for a Friend”
“My Most Beautiful Mistake” (guest vocal by Nicole Atkins)
“Magnificent Hurt”
“The Man You Love to Hate”
“The Death of Magic Thinking”
“Trick Out the Truth”
“Mr. Crescent”
ABBA‘s comeback album Voyage comes out next week, but even though the group is involved with the staging of its upcoming virtual concert experience in London, don’t expect any more new music from them.
That’s the word from the group’s main men, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. Speaking to the British paper The Guardian, they explain that they wrote two songs that didn’t make it onto the Voyage album, but they didn’t finish them, and so they won’t be released. “This is it,” Benny says. “It’s got to be, you know.”
Referring to the group’s breakup nearly 40 years ago, Benny adds, “I didn’t actually say that ‘this is it’ in 1982. I never said myself that ABBA was never going to happen again. But I can tell you now: this is it.” Bjorn agrees, saying, “Yeah.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean no more ABBA, period. The virtual show will play in London starting next spring and The Guardian notes that the lease on the purpose-built theater is for four-and-a-half years. In addition, the paper reports that there are “vague plans to build other theaters in other cities” so people outside the U.K. can see it more easily.
The four members of ABBA — Bjorn, Benny, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog — spent hours being motion-captured to create the show, which will feature de-aged digital “avatars” performing their hits, backed by a live 10-piece band and other effects. Asked if it’s weird to see themselves digitally de-aged, Bjorn says no.
“You have to realize that we are confronted by our younger selves all the time on television, in pictures and all of that….It’s completely natural,” he says. “Everyone should have their own avatar.”
