When he’s not ruthlessly killing off our favorite A Song of Ice and Fire characters off left right and center, George R. R. Martin spends his time being one of the most adorable fanboys around.
The distance between expectation and reality makes fools of us all, but it made the well-heeled attendees of an exclusive music festival in the Bahamas look particularly moronic late Thursday night. For tickets that started at $1,200 and went as high as $250,000, the young and rich signed up for passage to the doomed…
We can’t all be puppies—or even capybaras, for that matter. There’s a whole world of critters whose inner beauty goes unnoticed. Perfectly snuggly critters like naked mole rats have been mocked and called things like “the stuff of nightmares” or “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen.”
Amazon may have split opinion this week with Echo Look, which encourages Alexa to watch you getting dressed, but it seems it’s not letting that slow the roll-out of new smart assistants. Echo Look is the fourth product on Amazon’s virtual shelves to use Alexa, following the original Echo smart speaker, the Tap portable Bluetooth version, and the compact and … Continue reading
Ellen DeGeneres sat down with Oprah Winfrey and Laura Dern on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” to remember that journey they took together two decades ago when they filmed “The Puppy Episode” ― an iconic moment in television history in which DeGeneres’ character, Ellen Morgan, famously came out as gay.
In an episode set to air on Friday, the three of them remembered how much blowback they dealt with as a result of participating in the episode. Winfrey said she received hate mail calling her her the N-word and telling her to “Go back to Africa.”
“I misread that everybody was like us, that they were open-minded and that they were receptive and that they wanted people to just be who they are,” Winfrey admitted.
DeGeneres herself dealt with professional consequences that took years to recover from. “It was called ‘The Puppy Episode’ because we wanted to keep it a secret until it aired and because ‘Ellen Throws Her Career Away’ seemed too on the nose,” DeGeneres joked.
Laura Dern, who played Morgan’s romantic interest in the episode, has said in the past that she had trouble getting work for more than a year after the episode. But 20 years later, she says it was worth it.
“There’s no greater gift than being the person that was with you and looking in your eyes as you said those words [‘I am gay’],” she said.
Twenty years on, DeGeneres also is able to offer a message of hope to all her viewers. “Obviously, we have come a long way in the past 20 years. Even when this show started, the network was very uncomfortable with me even talking about my sexuality or my relationship,” she said.
“Now, we’re here and I’ve done a whole show about the fact that I’m gay, so we have come a long way. But we still have a long way to go to make sure everybody has the right to be who they are.”
She then added, “And one way we can start, and I say it every single day, is to be kind to one another.”
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Chip Gaines, star of the HGTV series “Fixer Upper,” is being sued for over a million dollars by his former partners in Magnolia Realty, KWTX reports.
Lawyers John L. Lewis and Richard L. Clark filed a lawsuit against Gaines for fraud, according to documents filed in state district court in Waco, Texas, obtained by KWTX. Aside from Gaines, Magnolia Realty, Scripps Networks (which owns HGTV) and High Noon Productions (which produces “Fixer Upper”) are listed as defendants in the suit.
Lewis and Clark are claiming Gaines bought them out of their shares in Magnolia Realty without telling them about HGTV’s decision to air “Fixer Upper.” The lawyers allege Gaines forced them to take cheap buyouts ― the reality star reportedly bought their shares for $2,500 a piece ― so he would remain sole owner of the company.
The two are seeking more than $1 million in damages and non-monetary relief, KWTX reports, and claim they were pressured to sell their shares before they were aware of how much “Fixer Upper” would increase Magnolia’s value.
Gaines’ attorney Jordan Mayfield told KWTX, “We are confident that these claims will be found to be meritless, and it is disappointing to see people try to take advantage of the hard work and success of Chip and Joanna Gaines.”
HuffPost has reached out to representatives for Gaines and Magnolia as well as HGTV, and will update this post accordingly.
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<span class="articleLocation”>Southwest Airlines said on Thursday it would stop overbooking its flights, a decision that comes in the wake of a worldwide backlash against larger rival United Airlines for dragging a passenger out of the plane earlier this month.
“Soon, we will no longer book a flight over capacity as part of the selling process,” a Southwest spokesman told Reuters.
Southwest, the No.4 airline by passenger traffic, had the highest forced bumping rate among large U.S. carriers, taking nearly 15,000 passengers off flights last year, or 9.9 per 100,000 passengers, down slightly from 2015.
The carrier paid an average of $874 per bumped passenger, according to Transportation Department data.
In comparison, United was in the middle of the pack in terms of the rate at which it forces people to give up seats. It bumped 4.3 out of every 100,000 passengers, and paid an average of $559 each per bumped passenger.
Chief Executive Gary Kelly told CNBC that the airline would be discontinuing the practice “very shortly”.
“I have made the decision, the company’s made the decision, that we will cease to overbook going forward. We’ve been taking steps over the last several years to prepare ourselves anyway,” Kelly told CNBC.
(Reporting by Arunima Banerjee and Ankit Ajmera in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
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Ever since Megyn Kelly announced she was leaving her post at Fox News after a dozen years, many have eagerly anticipated how she would differentiate herself on her new network, NBC.
The vision for Kelly’s show, which is set to debut in June, got a little bit clearer this week: She will reportedly welcome a large contingent of the Kardashian family as her first guests.
Kelly was spotted during filming of the family’s long-running reality show, “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” on Thursday. But, according to TMZ, the meet-up was actually part of her plan to sit down with Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, Kylie, Kendall and Kris for an in-depth interview. Rob Kardashian and Caitlyn Jenner will reportedly not be in attendance.
The interview will take up most of the premiere of Kelly’s currently untitled Sunday night show, the outlet reports.
Welcoming the Kardashian family as the show’s first guests comes as a bit of a surprise after speculation that Kelly and NBC had been working to land a major interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Kardashians, apparently, were next on the list.
In January, Kelly was freed from her contract with Fox News and reportedly signed a deal estimated at $18 million with NBC. In addition to anchoring a news hour on Sunday nights, Kelly will also be allotted a daytime hour in the “Today” morning lineup.
The Huffington Post has reached out to Kelly’s representatives and will update this post accordingly.
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French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen temporarily stepped down as leader of the far-right National Front this week, in what has been widely viewed as a strategic political move ahead of the election to distance herself from the party’s controversial past.
But controversy was close behind: Jean-François Jalkh, her party’s newly appointed interim leader, lasted less than a week on the job. He stepped down suddenly on Friday as reports emerged that he once called the use of Nazi gas chambers during World War II “impossible” ― delivering yet another devastating setback to Le Pen’s election bid and her sweeping efforts to “de-demonize” the Front.
The criminal issue of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial is one that has plagued Le Pen’s party for years: her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, National Front founder and leader for nearly four decades, was convicted and fined multiple times for repeatedly dismissing the Holocaust as just “a detail” of history. Le Pen kicked him out of the party in 2015, after she had taken over.
But Jalkh’s newly surfaced comments have countered Le Pen’s painstaking work to recast the party’s image, and stirred memories of her father’s infamous remarks. In an interview in 2000, Jalkh was recorded questioning the events that led to the Nazi massacre of millions of Jews using the deadly gas, Zyklon B.
“Me, I consider that from a technical point of view it’s impossible, I say impossible to use it in … mass exterminations,” he said, according to a transcript.
Jalkh initially denied making such comments. Now, Front party member Steeve Briois will replace him as leader, but Jalkh’s ousting comes at a particularly disastrous time for Le Pen and her populist platform: On May 7, she will face off in France’s final round of elections against centrist En Marche! party leader Emmanuel Macron, who is leading in the polls.
The Front’s most recent downfall is just the latest in a series of events that have seen the race for the presidency become increasingly fraught with scandal.
Macron, a political novice who married his high school teacher, has been accused of favoritism and of having an extramarital affair with a man.
Eliminated candidate François Fillon, who was knocked out in the first round of elections earlier this month, has also been embroiled in controversy. The conservative Republican party leader was investigated over allegations of embezzlement and paying his wife and children for fake jobs he created.
And on Thursday, the European Parliament accused Le Pen of defrauding it of around 5 million euros (US$ 5.4 million). Le Pen has denied the allegations, but an investigation is underway.
Le Pen has also raised questions surrounding the events of the Holocaust, declaring this month that France was not responsible for the Vel d’Hiv Roundup in 1942, when French police arrested thousands of Jewish people in Paris and deported them to death camps.
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When Target started selling a “Strong Like Mom” T-shirt earlier this year, moms responded with overwhelming support for the message.
The #stronglikemom hashtag on Instagram now includes thousands of photos of kids wearing the shirt, and I saw members of my mom groups trading tips on where to find the tee, even offering to mail them to moms whose local Target didn’t have them.
Since then, Target has introduced even more T-shirts in celebration of moms and other strong women, including new designs reading “Strong Like Mom” in addition to the ones they were already carrying.
Here are a selection of favorites below.
They’ve also added more designs for kids:
And some shirts for moms and kids.
Including an option that nods to the fact that moms are known for their love of Target.
Shop the whole collection here.
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