ABC/Image Group LAAhead of the October release of her holiday album, A Holly Dolly Christmas, Dolly Parton has shared the project’s tender final track.
“Mary, Did You Know?” is an intimate conversation with Jesus’ mother, centered around the faith-based aspect of the holiday season. It’s a poignant topic for Dolly, who felt particularly touched by this song during the album-making process.
“‘Mary, Did You Know?’ is one of the greatest, sweetest, [most] well-written songs I’ve ever had a chance to sing on,” she says. “When I was recording it, I got very emotional. It is to me what Christmas is about and I’m proud to be able to sing it for my upcoming album.”
Faith-filled music has been a particular focus of Dolly’s for the last several months. She scored a Grammy-winning hit with “God Only Knows,” a collaboration with Christian act For King & Country, in 2019. She then teamed up with another faith-based artist, Zach Williams, to drop “There Was Jesus,” which became her first Top 10 single on Christian Airplay charts.
Elsewhere on A Holly Dolly Christmas, Dolly explores festive originals and timeless seasonal classics, teaming up with all-star acts like Willie Nelson, Jimmy Fallon and more.
Kuzma/iStockBy AARON KATERSKY and KATE HODGSON, ABC News
(BOSTON) — Fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli was sentenced Friday to five months in prison for his role in what the judge called “a breathtaking crime on the nation’s higher education system.”
Giannulli and his wife, Full House actress Lori Loughlin, paid $500,000 to scheme mastermind Rick Singer to get their two daughters into the University of Southern California as crew recruits, even though neither of them rowed. Loughlin will be sentenced later on Friday.
“There is no mystery about the outcome,” Judge Nathaniel Gorton said, noting the defense made no attempt to argue with the government’s recommended sentence of five months in prison, two years of supervised release, 250 hours of community service and a $250,000 fine.
Of the two parents, prosecutors portrayed Giannulli as more active in the scheme.
“Giannulli’s conduct in this case evidenced a complete disregard from right and wrong,” Assistant US Attorney Kristen Kearney. “He went ahead with this scheme not once, but twice.”
Giannulli, 57, “exposed his daughters to the scheme and allowed them to become complicit in it,” Kearney said, noting how Olivia Jade and Isabella Rose Giannulli were photographed on a rowing machine as part of phony coxswain profiles and encouraged to keep their admission to USC “hush, hush.”
“This was not simply overzealous parenting,” Kearney said. “It is criminal and deserving of the proposed five months imprisonment.”
Giannulli, appearing by video conference, addressed the judge briefly:
“I deeply regret the harm that my actions have caused my daughters, my wife and others. I take full responsibility for my conduct.”
The judge scolded Giannulli for a crime “motivated by hubris.”
“You’re an informed, smart, successful businessman,” Gorton said. “You were not stealing bread to feed your family. You have no excuse.”
No argument from the defense.
“It’s an appropriate sentence when you balance Mr. Giannulli’s life with the crime he has been convicted of,” defense attorney Sean Berkowitz said. “He sits here today humbled.”
Berkowitz cast Giannulli as a “good man” who made mistakes.
“He regrets deeply bringing his wife into the scheme. His children have been bullied both on social media and in person in a way disproportionate to other children in this scheme,” Berkowitz said. “His family has been the face of the scandal and the crisis.”
In handing down the sentence, Judge Gorton said the crime caused “no specific, calculable loss to USC.” However, the judge said there was “certainly a loss to the overall education system of this country.”
(NEW YORK) — Ten people were shot, at least one fatally, in Philadelphia this week, underscoring a spike in gun violence in some of the nation’s largest cities, including New York and Chicago.
At the same time, Americans are engaged in a gun-buying boom. Firearm sales have spiked during the pandemic, with an estimated 2.1 million excess weapons purchased between March and May compared with typical sales figures, according to data from the FBI’s background check system.
Now, researchers believe the two phenomena might be linked.
Researchers at the University of California, Davis and the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center analyzed fatal and non-fatal firearm injury data from 48 states and Washington, D.C., from January 2018 through May 2020, and compared it with the 2.1 million extra firearms purchased earlier in 2020.
The result? Fatal and non-fatal gun injuries increased significantly. Excess firearm purchases during the pandemic were associated with 776 more shootings than might not have occurred otherwise, researchers found. (Note: The research is preliminary, meaning that it has not yet published in a scientific journal, nor has it been peer-reviewed.)
“We find that short-term surges in firearm purchasing associated with the coronavirus pandemic are associated with significant increases in interpersonal firearm violence,” the researchers note. “Our findings are consistent with an extensive literature that documents a link between firearm access and greater risk of firearm violence.”
A correlation between gun buying and gun violence is not the same as causation, explained Dr. Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist and dean at the Boston University School of Public Health, who was not involved in the research. Galea, who has published numerous studies on gun violence, called the findings “reasonable and plausible.”
“I think it’s a fair analysis and good to communicate,” he added.
Dr. Regan Bergmark, an instructor at Harvard Medical School, noted that the research tracked with previous gun violence literature. “There’s a lot of research showing that the more guns there are, the more likely that you are going to have a gun-related event,” said Bergmark, who had no connection to the research.
“Gun violence tends to go up when there’s desperation, poverty, economic downturn, social unrest,” she said. “We’ve seen all of those things.”
“In the most basic sense, the more desperate people feel, the more tempers are going to flair. It’s not like people are home on vacation with extra money,” Bergmark added.
Gun violence in the U.S. was a significant public health issue before the pandemic.
A study published this week, in the American Journal of Medicine, estimated that before the pandemic, the risk of dying from a firearm in the United States was 1 in 100. Black boys had a 1 in 40 chance of dying by firearms. Rates also varied by state — people in Mississippi or Wyoming were more likely to die from firearms than residents of Rhode Island or Massachusetts.
The majority of the 40,000 firearm-related deaths each year aren’t homicides or accidental shootings like the violence seen in Philadelphia this week. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two-thirds are suicides.
With millions of new guns added to U.S. households in recent months, as many Americans, many isolated from loved ones, are grappling with emotional and financial strain, public health experts are worried.
“Even if they are buying that gun because they want to protect their loved ones, significantly more people now have access to that weapon, while depression and suicide risk are on the rise,” Kelly Posner Gerstenhaber, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, previously told ABC News.
Freeform(NEW YORK) — You don’t get more timely than this. Love in the Time of Corona, a new scripted Freeform series about the search for love and connection during COVID-19-mandated social distancing, debuts this weekend with a special two-night event.
Real-life spousesLeslie Odom Jr. and Nicolette Robinson play married couple James and Sade in the limited series and shot their scenes in their own home while in quarantine. They say the show serves as a time capsule for 2020.
“When we first got asked to do it and we were talking about it, we were like, this is such a unique moment,” Robinson tells ABC Audio. “[H]opefully we’ll never have this same moment again. But while there is so much positive and negative at the same time happening, we were like, this is really worth remembering.”
Odom adds, “I think…our only responsibility really, after this is all said and done is to emerge, rearranged. To emerge, somehow changed. And so, yeah, then it becomes a mark on the timeline. [H]opefully it’s a time in our whole society when we can look at, you know, before COVID and after COVID: here’s how we changed for the better.”
Not only does the show depict the pandemic, but it also tackles racism and police brutality. Odom says portraying these issues in real time was cathartic.
“Nic and I, we’re artists and so that’s part of how we process our trauma,” he says. “So the best part about it for us was the fact that we got to make some work about it.”
Love in the Time of Corona premieres in a two-night event, airing Saturday, August 22 and Sunday, August 23 at 8 p.m. ET on Freeform.
ABC/Image Group LAJust four weeks before Florida Georgia Line’s Tyler Hubbard and his wife, Hayley, are expecting to welcome their third child, the singer has been sidelined by an injury. He updated fans on his condition Friday morning.
“My world has drastically slowed down over the last two days,” he explained. “I was at the track riding my dirt bike a couple days ago, over-jumped a jump, landed flat and blew out my ankle.”
Tyler then showed off his boot to the camera, going on to say that he suffered an Achilles tendon rupture as well as a broken ankle bone.
“Unfortunately I have to get surgery next week, and then we’ll start the journey to recovery,” he said, adding that what makes his injury even more frustrating is that his wife is currently in her last few weeks of pregnancy, and he can’t be helpful around the house. Plus, he might not be fully recovered by the time the baby’s born.
“Doc said his goal was to have me walking in five weeks. Hayley and I said, ‘Make it four weeks because that’s when baby number three gets here,’” Tyler said.
Despite his injury and the additional stress of the last weeks of his wife’s pregnancy, the singer said that he was trying to focus on the positive.
“I’m gonna work on my mental game, and apparently some upper body,” he added with a smile.
ABC/Image Group LAAhead of the October release of her holiday album, A Holly Dolly Christmas, Dolly Parton has shared the project’s tender final track.
