Month: February 2023

Rihanna made her return to live performing on Sunday during the Super Bowl LVII Halftime show, treating fans to a medley of a dozen of her best-known songs at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.  The superstar also revealed another surprise; a baby bump.  Following Rihanna’s performance, a rep for the artist confirmed that she is pregnant with her second child.

Wearing a red jumpsuit over a tight-fitting latex bandeau, Rihanna opened the show with her 2015 song “[____] Better Have My Money” as she was lowered down to the stage on one of several floating platforms that she and her backup dancers used throughout the show. At the ground-level stage, Rihanna was accompanied by dozens of dancers dressed in all-white jumpsuits. Other hit songs followed, including with “Where Have You Been?,” “Only Girl in the World,” “We Found Love,” “Rude Boy,” “Work,” “Wild Thoughts,” “Pour It Up” and “All of the Lights,” and a band joined the performance during the final three songs of the night — “Run This Town,” “Umbrella” and “Diamonds, ” as fireworks erupted from the stadium.

Despite speculation, Rihanna had no surprise guests join her on stage – unlike other recent Super Bowl halftime performances. Prior to the show, Rihanna was tight-lipped about her performance, telling reporters: “It’s a lot of preparation. This is the week that everything is being tested. Everyone is just tightening up. Everybody’s dialing in. Everybody’s tuning up … It’s literally like 300 to 400 people breaking the stage down, building it up and getting out in 8 minutes. It’s incredible. It’s almost impossible.”

Editorial credit: Fred Duval / Shutterstock.com

Yahoo announced on Thursday that it will lay off more than 20% of its staff by the end of the year, including cutting 1,000 positions this week. The company is seeking to streamline operations in its advertising unit, which has not been profitable.

In an interview with Axios, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone said that the company is seeking to prioritize other areas. Lanzone added that these layoffs are not a result of economic issues, but rather, they are intentional changes to strengthen the unprofitable Yahoo for Business advertising unit. As a whole, Yahoo is profitable, earning around $8 billion in yearly revenue.  Yahoo will shut down its advertising business and instead focus on its new partnership with Taboola to sell native advertising, said Lanzone. A Yahoo spokesperson added: “These decisions are never easy, but we believe these changes will simplify and strengthen our advertising business for the long run, while enabling Yahoo to deliver better value to our customers and partners.”

In 2021, private-equity firm Apollo acquired Yahoo and AOL for $5 billion. In November 2022, Yahoo took an almost 25% stake in Taboola in a 30-year commercial agreement.  A Yahoo spokesperson said in a statement:  “Over several years, the strategy of our ads business was to compete in the ad tech industry by offering a ‘unified stack’ consisting of our Demand Side Platform (DSP), Supply Side Platform (SSP) and Native platforms. Despite many years of effort and investment, this strategy was not profitable and struggled to live up to our high standards across the entire stack.”

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Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., was attacked Thursday morning in the elevator of her Washington, D.C., apartment building. Her office said in a statement: “Rep. Craig defended herself from the attacker and suffered bruising, but is otherwise physically okay.”  Chief of staff Nick Coe said the assailant then fled, and there was no evidence the attack was politically motivated.

A Metropolitan Police Department report detailing the attack said that Craig first spotted the suspect in her building’s lobby, “acting erratic as if he was under the influence of an unknown substance.” The suspect then entered the elevator with Craig and began doing pushups before punching her in the chin and grabbing her neck, police said. According to the police report, Craig threw her cup of hot coffee at him, after which he escaped. In a statement later Thursday, the U.S. Capitol Police said it is also investigating the attack, but that “there is no indication that the congresswoman was targeted because of her position.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in a statement Thursday that his caucus was horrified by the attack on Craig. “We are all very grateful that she is safe and recovering, but appalled that this terrifying assault took place,” adding that he asked the House Sergeant at Arms and the U.S. Capitol Police to “work with Angie, [her wife] Cheryl [Greene] and their sons to ensure that Angie and her family are safe while in our nation’s capital and at home in Minnesota.”

Craig was elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 after defeating Republican Rep. Jason Lewis. She is the first openly LGBTQ member of Congress from Minnesota; and in the 118th Congress, she serves as a co-chairwoman of the Congressional Equality Caucus.

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