After reports that their marriage was on the rocks, it’s official: Superstar music manager Scooter Braun has filed for divorce from his wife, Yael Cohen.
Scooter guides the careers of Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato and The Kid LAROI, among others, and is also the co-CEO of HYBE America, a branch of the company that’s home to K-pop supergroup BTS. However, he’s perhaps best known for his very public feud with Taylor Swift, who’s accused him of bullying her and preventing her from owning her master recordings.
The legal papers, obtained by ABC News, cite “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for the split, and also reveal that the couple has a pre-nup in place.
Braun and Cohen, the founder of the charity F– Cancer, married in July 2014 and have three children: sons Jagger, 6, and Levi, 4, and 2½-year-old daughter Hart. He’s requested joint custody.
Earlier this month, Scooter posted a tribute to Yael on Instagram, writing, “If just for the kids you have given me everything. But thanks to you I have grown, I have been pushed to be the best version of myself and to continue growing and learning. That all happened because you came in to
After getting married earlier this month, Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani are as smitten as ever. Fans recently got a first-hand account of the wedded bliss from Gwen, who said in an interview with the Tell Me About It podcast that the couple was enjoying “total honeymoon vibes right now.”
“It was literally one of the greatest moments of my life, obviously,” the pop superstar explained. “It was beyond what I thought it was gonna be.”
Over the course of their relationship, many have jokingly wondered what the pair see in each other: Between Gwen’s high-fashion sophistication and Blake’s dressed-down, rural sensibilities, they don’t seem to have a whole lot in common off the bat. Their odd couple status was even the subject of a hilarious T Mobile Super Bowl ad earlier this year.
But in all seriousness, Gwen explains, it’s Blake’s authenticity that made her fall in love. She also thinks that’s why he’s such a big success, both in music and as a coach on The Voice.
“The successful people are the genuine people, because that man is the same guy you see, no matter who he’s with, what he’s doing,” Gwen reflects. “I look at him sleeping, and he’s the same guy.”
She adds, “He’s very real and consistent and genuine. It’s what is so attractive and why people love him so much.”
Blake and Gwen tied the knot on July 3 in a ceremony on Blake’s Oklahoma ranch.
Demi Lovato has debuted the new trailer for their upcoming Roku Channel talk show, The Demi Lovato Show.
In the clip, we see Demi interviewing a rotating group of guests from diverse backgrounds, including actress Lucy Hale, actress and activist Jameela Jamil, trans YouTube star Nikita Dragun, rapper YG and two of Demi’s closest friends, Sirah and Matthew Scott Montgomery.
The topics range from sex positivity to police brutality to gender identity. We also see Demi’s friends discussing how they felt when they learned of Demi’s near-fatal overdose. The singer tearfully apologizes to them.
The 10-minute episodes of the talk show begin streaming on Roku Channel July 30.
Joni Mitchell, Bette Midler and Motown founder Berry Gordy are among the notables from the arts and entertainment world who will be saluted at the 44th edition of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors gala. The star-studded ceremony will be held December 5 at the Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington, D.C.
This year’s other Kennedy Center honorees are Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels and Puerto Rican opera singer Justino Díaz.
The awards are presented annually by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to people who have made lasting contributions to American culture through the performing arts.
A TV special documenting this year’s event will be broadcast during the 2021-2022 television season on CBS, and will be streamed live and on demand on Paramount+.
“I’m grateful to the Kennedy Center for bestowing this honor on my work and I look forward to being a part of this prestigious celebration of the arts,” Mitchell says in a statement. “I wish my mother and father were alive to see this. It’s a long way from Saskatoon [Canada].”
Midler gushes, “I am profoundly touched by this honor, in fact, I am stunned and grateful beyond words. For many years I have watched this broadcast celebrating the best talent in the performing arts that America has to offer, and I truly never imagined that I would find myself among these swans.”
Gordy declares in his own statement, “The Arts not only give voice to the voiceless, but connect us, transform us, and soothe our souls. The Kennedy Center Honors epitomizes the recognition and value of both the Arts, and the Artist. I am thrilled to become a part of this prestigious American legacy.”
(TARRANT, Al.) — An Alabama city council member is facing calls to resign after he used a racist slur while pointing toward a Black colleague during a meeting Monday night.
John “Tommy” Bryant stood up and pointed at Black council member Veronica Freeman and said, “Do we have a house N-word in here? Would she please stand up?” during the council meeting.
Video of the meeting was shared on the Tarrant, Alabama, Facebook page. The clip shows audience members at the council meeting audibly gasping in response to his use of the slur.
Freeman was later seen sobbing with her head in her hands before stepping out.
Bryant said that his use of the slur was to reflect something Tarrant Mayor Wayman Newton, who is Black, allegedly said during an earlier private meeting.
“He doesn’t need to use that term in front of everybody, and I thought the city ought to know the kind of terminology the mayor uses, and I didn’t want him to get away with it. So that’s the reason I made that comment,” Bryant said in a Tuesday interview with local news station WVTM-TV.
“He said it in a derogatory manner, I said it so people would know what the mayor said,” Bryant added. “The mayor was being derogatory toward Veronica Freeman when he said that.”
When asked if he was racist, Bryant said, “It’s according to what your definition of the word racist is. What a lot of the public’s definition is, I might be a racist. But according to what the true definition of a racist is, absolutely not.”
Bryant and Freeman did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Newton, who was sworn in as mayor in November, did not respond to ABC News’ request but told Alabama Local News on Tuesday, “The video speaks for itself.”
Newton denied ever using the racial slur in reference to Freeman on Wednesday, telling ALN, “They are trying to expose me for saying something I did not say. All of that was a political stunt that they did not do very well.”
Alabama Democrats demanded Bryant resign after the outburst, saying in a statement, “He is racist and unfit to serve.”
“Alabama still has a long way to go when it comes to race, but cozying up to the KKK and using the N-word should make you unfit to serve. These racists belong in the history books with Bull Connor and George Wallace, not on the taxpayer’s payroll,” the statement added.
Alabama Republican Party Chairman John Wahl said Bryant’s behavior “is completely unacceptable in any setting,” but didn’t mention if he believed he should resign.
“The Alabama Republican Party is deeply troubled by the racially charged outburst and disrespect shown by Councilman Tommy Bryant. Such language is completely unacceptable in any setting, and even more concerning coming from an elected official,” Wahl said to ALN.
(WASHINGTON) — Senate Democrats on Wednesday lost a key test vote to allow a bipartisan infrastructure deal to advance — after Republicans involved in the talks say they needed more time to finalize details before helping Democrats meet the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to start debate on the bill.
While Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s effort failed — handing him and President Joe Biden at least a temporary political loss on a top priority — the White House earlier Wednesday the president was “extremely supportive” of Schumer’s strategy aimed at jump starting negotiations on the measure that would spend $1.2 trillion on “traditional infrastructure.”
The partisan defeat, by a vote of 49 to 51, belied the comity behind the scenes as a bipartisan group of 11 senators works feverishly behind the scenes to finalize the terms of their package to fund major public works projects, from bridges and highways to public transit and broadband.
“This vote is not a deadline to have every final detail worked out. It is not an attempt to jam anyone,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Wednesday morning.
“According to the negotiators, spurred on by this vote this afternoon –- they are close to finalizing their product,” he argued. “Even Republicans have agreed that the deadline has moved them forward more quickly. We all want the same thing here – to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill. But in order to finish the bill, we first need to start.”
Key Republican negotiators in the bipartisan group of senators who have been trying to work out the deal say they believe they can finalize it by Monday.
“We are making tremendous progress, and I hope that the majority leader will reconsider and just delay the vote until Monday. That’s not a big ask of him,” GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told reporters Monday morning.
The group huddled over Mexican food and wine behind closed doors for over two hours late Tuesday night, but left without squaring all of their differences on how to pay for package.
Schumer, the Republicans say, is well-aware of their position that waiting until next week to hold a vote would heighten the chances of success.
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told reporters Wednesday afternoon that 10 Republicans have signed a letter to Schumer indicating that they are prepared to support taking up the bill on Monday.
He said it was his understanding that “Leader Schumer wanted to understand if there were ten Republicans in favor of getting on the bill, and we’ve indicated, Yeah, there are ten. Probably more.”
Negotiators said Tuesday that there are about six remaining issues with the bipartisan bill, the thorniest of which is how to structure spending on public transit systems.
At the same time, the senior lawmaker expects the legislation to be finalized by Monday, and that includes the nonpartisan analyses by various agencies breaking down all of the financing options, how much revenue would be produced, and a final price tag.
Republicans, in particular, will be looking to show that the $579 billion in new spending is fully paid for.
If the vote seems certain to fail, Schumer could switch his vote to the losing side at the last minute, enabling him as majority leader, under Senate rules, to call up the vote again for reconsideration.
The Wednesday vote is to start debate on a shell bill because there is no final bill from the negotiators. It would serve as a placeholder should negotiators strike a final deal.
The measure is separate from a much larger bill Biden and Democrats are pushing that would spend $3.5 trillion on so-called “human infrastructure” such as child care.
Democrats plan to push that through the Senate with no Republican votes, using a budget tool called “reconciliation.”
(LOS ANGELES) — The heat emanating from the dozens of wildfires ravaging the West is creating thunderstorms without rain in regions desperate for moisture.
The pyrocumulus clouds, or fire-driven thunderstorm clouds, are created as large pockets of heat and smoke from the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon rise and meet a relatively cool atmosphere.
The thunderstorms typically don’t contain rain because any moisture that forms usually evaporates on the way down. Vegetation parched by the megadrought is more likely to burn if struck by lightning, and gusty winds from the storms can spread fires more rapidly.
This year’s dry season, exacerbated by the megadrought and climate change, has created a tinderbox, with the relative humidity often as low as 10%.
At least 87 large wildfires are burning in 13 states, with more than 2.5 million acres burned so far this year.
The Bootleg Fire has burned through 388,360 acres and is 32% contained. The fire is threatening about 5,000 homes and has caused thousands of households in Lake County, Oregon, to evacuate.
Evacuations also are occurring near Lake Tahoe due to the Tamarack Fire, which had burned through nearly 40,000 acres by Wednesday morning and was 0% contained.
The Dixie Fire in Butte County, California, has scorched more than 85,000 acres and was 15% contained.
The haze from the smoke-filled skies even traveled east, causing air quality alerts in several East Coast cities, including New York, which marked its poorest air quality in several years.
More than 750,000 acres have burned in 2021 than at the same time last year, and fire season is far from over. The wet season typically begins in October.
Anthony Mackie and Jahi Di’Allo Winston have been tapped to star in Netflix’s upcoming family adventure We Have a Ghost, Variety has learned.
They join Tig Notaro, Jennifer Coolidge and Black Widow star David Harbour who have also been cast. Written and directed by Christopher Landon, the film will be an adaption of Geoff Managuh’s short story Ernest, which follows a young man whose family finds a ghost named Ernest haunting their new home. The film will also star Erica Ash, Isabella Russo, Niles Fitch, Faith Ford and Steve Coulter. A release date for We Have a Ghost has yet to be announced.
In other news, HBO has announced a three-part documentary on former president Barack Obama. Titled Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union, the new doc will tell of Obama’s early beginnings including “his political rise to become a historic figure as the U.S. continues to grapple with its racially divisive history.” Released as a three part event, Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union, will debut on HBO on August 3, with subsequent installments airing the following two nights.
Finally, a teaser for Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s new animated Netflix film Vivo has been released. The film follows Miranda as Vivo, a musically gifted kinkajou, aka a rainforest honey bear, who goes on a journey to deliver a song to his cherished owner’s long-lost love. The film also stars Zoe Saldana, Juan de Marcos, Brian Tyree Henry, Michael Rooker, Nicole Byer and Gloria Estefan among others. Vivohits Netflix on August 6.
(WASHINGTON) — America’s top general on Wednesday spoke publicly for the first time about whether he feared then-President Donald Trump would try to involve the military in the aftermath of the 2020 election, as reported in a newly-released book.
While Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, at a rare Pentagon news conference, declined to comment on specific claims made in the book, he and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Wednesday were emphatic that the military is and ought to remain a strictly “apolitical” institution.
“I, the other members of the Joint Chiefs, and all of us in uniform, we take an oath, an oath to a document, an oath to the Constitution of the United States, and not one time do we violate that,” Milley told reporters asking about the book excerpts. “The entire time, from time of commissioning to today, I can say with certainty that every one of us maintained our oath of allegiance to that document, the Constitution, everything that’s contained within it,” he said, referring to the Joint Chiefs.
“I want you to know, and I want everyone to know, I want America to know, that the United States military is an apolitical institution — we were then, we are now — and our oath is to the Constitution, not to any individual at all,” he said. “And the military did not and will not and should not ever get involved in domestic politics. We don’t arbitrate elections. That’s the job of the judiciary and the legislature and the American people. It is not the job of the U.S. military. We stayed out of politics, we’re an apolitical institution.”
Austin went out of his way to defend Milley.
“We fought together, we served a couple of times in the same units,” Austin said. “I’m not guessing at his character — he doesn’t have political bone in his body.”
Before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Milley saw ominous parallels between the political turmoil in the United States and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, according to “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Final Catastrophic Year,” by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig.
“He had earlier described to aides that he kept having a stomach-churning feeling that some of the worrisome early stages of 20th-century fascism in Germany were replaying in 21st-century America. He saw parallels between Trump’s rhetoric about election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s insistence to his followers at the Nuremberg rallies that he was both a victim and their savior. ‘This is a Reichstag moment,’ Milley told aides. ‘The gospel of the Führer,'” Rucker and Leonnig wrote.
The authors say that Milley believed Trump was stoking unrest after the election, and decried what he called “brownshirts in the streets,” although an official told ABC News the comment was in reference to the radical members of the Oath Keepers and so-called “boogaloo boys,” not Trump supporters in general.
An early sign of unease between Trump and Milley came last July amid Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., when Milley apologized for taking part in Trump’s controversial walk from the White House to St. John’s Church, though he peeled off before the president’s notorious photo opportunity.
“I should not have been there,” Milley said in a prerecorded video commencement address to National Defense University. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”
In August 2020, Milley told Congress there is no role for the U.S. military in elections.
Then in January 2021, after the Capitol riot, Milley and the seven other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed an internal memo to service members saying “the violent riot in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 was a direct assault on the U.S. Capitol building, and our Constitutional process,” warning them that any act to disrupt the constitutional process is against the law.
Milley said Wednesday that he and the other members of the Joint Chiefs always gave the “best military professional advice” to Trump and any other president they’ve served under.
“We always adhered to providing best professional military advice, bar none. It was candid, honest, in every single occasion. We do that all the time every time,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — Thirty years ago Engracia Figueroa, 51, was hit by a Bay Area Rapid Transit train that left her with a spinal cord injury and amputated leg. She now calls her wheelchair an “extension of her body” — granting her freedom and independence.
But last week Figueroa says she was “re-disabled” when her $30,000 wheelchair was mangled in the cargo hold of a United flight.
“I was heartbroken,” she said when she first saw what she described as her “completely contorted” chair after her flight to Los Angeles. “I just thought, all of the independence that I fought and strived for and successfully survived for soon to be 30 years by the minute, it’s stripped away, and I was completely disabled and traumatized, as well as hurt and exhausted.”
Airlines are obligated to fix or replace damaged or lost wheelchairs under the Air Carrier Access Act.
“They’re attempting to fix it,” Figueroa told ABC News, but “there’s nothing to fix.”
“The chair is a total loss and to get a new wheelchair, it takes two months,” she said.
(Courtesy Engracia Figuero) Disability rights activist Engracia Figuero says United Airlines damaged her $30,000 custom-made electric wheelchair on a flight from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles, July 14, 2021.
A United spokesperson said the company apologized to Figueroa and is “actively working with the repair company to reach a resolution to this issue as quickly as possible.”
She is currently using a loaner chair that she says only allows her to move in her apartment.
“There is no regard or respect of the extension of the human that’s in the plane,” she said. “When they see a mobility device they should respect it, as if it is a person, because that’s what it is — an extension of their person. And we’re trusting them with the rest of our body.”
Figueroa says this is the fourth time her wheelchair has been damaged in-flight. She blames a lack of training on how to break down and load the devices.
Near the end of 2018, U.S. carriers had to start reporting the number of wheelchairs and scooters that were mishandled.
In a little more than two and a half years, airlines damaged or lost 15,749 wheelchairs and scooters, according to data from the Department of Transportation. In 2019, they mishandled 10,548 mobility devices, amounting to roughly 29 a day.
Earlier this month, model Bri Scalesse called out Delta Air Lines in a now-viral Tik Tok for breaking the frame of her wheelchair. According to Scalesse, the repair company told her the chair could not be fixed and that “it was going to take a really long time to replace.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to live my life,” Scalesse said in the video, which is now viewed more than two million times.
In a statement to ABC News, Delta said they “work closely with the customer to make things right at their direction including personal apologies about their experience with us.”
Videos like Scalesse’s have generated more interest in accessibility issues than Michele Erwin, the founder and president of disability rights group All Wheels Up, has seen in more than a decade.
“I don’t think I know of one person who uses a wheelchair who hasn’t had a travel horror story,” Erwin said.
And advocates say airlines are losing potential customers.
“Eighty percent of the wheelchair community isn’t flying,” she said, “and it’s not just about the one person whose wheelchair is damaged, times it by four, because now that person’s family isn’t traveling.”
According to Erwin, in 2016, one major U.S. carrier told her they spent $2.6 million on wheelchairs repairs and replacements. Eight years prior, they had only spent $1.6 million.
“Another eight years from now, that number is going to double again,” Erwin said, “and that’s why I believe they are interested in having the conversation of what can All Wheels Up do to improve accessible air travel.”
She said she’s had meetings with representatives at major U.S. airlines and manufacturers to come up with solutions.
“If they invested that money into the actual research on trying to implement a wheelchair spot on airplanes, we could save them millions of dollars, as well as bad press,” she said.
All Wheels Up is currently funding and conducting crash-test studies in an attempt to get the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval for a wheelchair spot on planes.
“Every person that uses a mobility device has traveling anxiety,” Figueroa said. “You worry you’re going to lose your independence and become re-disabled again. I’m always saying in the back of my mind — not this time, not this time.”
