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They are hurting but managing to find hope in 'tomorrow' - the victims of the LA fires
Why Lucy Hale Is Our Casual Friday Denim Jeans Queen
Lucy Hale has a strong record of fabulous denim.
Hale, 35, showed off her effortlessly chic street style while strolling through Los Angeles on Thursday, January 9. For her laid-back outing, Hale rocked a gray crewneck and rolled her sleeves up while carrying her phone, a coffee and a green juice.
The piece de resistance was her baggy blue jeans featuring a high-waist and strategic rips. Hale further dressed up her look with a silver ring, layered gold bracelets, a number of hoop earrings and a dainty necklace. Hale tied her low-key look together with a woven leather purse and a blue baseball cap. In true Lucy Hale fashion, she wore her go-to Adidas Sambas.
Matching her chill outfit aesthetic with her glam, Hale donned a fresh face and tied her hair into a bun.
Recreate Lucy Hale's Flattering Wide Leg Jeans Look for $40!
This is hardly the first time Hale has commanded attention for her low-key denim while roaming through Los Angeles. In July 2024, she gave Us major French girl vibes while rocking blue straight jeans that hugged her in all the right places. Hale’s hair, which was cut into a chic bob at the time, was blown out and bounced off her shoulders as she accessorized with gold hoop earrings.
Hale again looked timeless in a denim jacket while out and about in March 2024. She styled the cropped piece with a burnt orange hoodie underneath and a white tank. Hale kept her look cozy to walk in with black leggings, white socks and running shoes.
The Pretty Little Liars alum perfectly elevated her look with round brown sunglasses and a leather crossbody bag. Hale completed her look by twisting her hair into a messy bun with her curtain bangs framing her face.
See Lucy Hale’s Fabulous Fashion Evolution: Photos
When she’s not showing off her street style, Hale can be seen looking gorgeous on the red carpet. Most recently, she stunned in a little red Markarian dress at the Friendly House Humanitarian Awards in September 2024. The trendy number featured a flowy silhouette and a scarf that she tossed over her shoulders. Hale matched the piece to her pointed-toe leather heels.
RHONJ's Jennifer Aydin Reacts to Andy Cohen's Take on Jersey Mike's Drama
Jennifer Aydin is weighing in on Andy Cohen calling her Jersey Mike’s drama a “self-inflicted wound.”
“I did not see it. Somebody told me about it. I did not hear that,” the Real Housewives of New Jersey star, 47, exclusively told Us Weekly on Wednesday, January 8. “But you know what? I would say that’s accurate.”
Aydin made headlines earlier this month for her unexpected feud with multiple Jersey Mike’s employees. The Bravo personality posted a video on her social media page claiming she waited for “what felt like forever” for service from the sandwich shop. An employee who was there subsequently fired back at Aydin via TikTok.
Cohen, 56, later took to his radio show to call the moment an “a self-inflicted wound.”
RHONJ's Jennifer Aydin Clarifies Jersey Mike's Drama: 'Hindsight Is 20/20'
“She melted down. And you know what, before you hit send on the post, take a beat and say, ‘How is this gonna land?’” Cohen said during the Monday, January 6, episode of his SiriusXM show Radio Andy. “How are you going to cause so much trouble for yourself? … You’re at the airport, you’re getting a sandwich. … It’s just, how is this gonna land?”
Upon further reflection, Aydin acknowledged she should not have posted the video of her interaction with several fast food workers.
“I have to realize that me posting it is, in fact, a self-inflicted wound. I did not think it was going to go down that way,” she explained on Wednesday. “I thought that people would see the video and be like, ‘How rude was this guy to you?’ And he doesn’t even know you, so it’s fine. It’s all good. Lesson learned.”
While sitting down with Us, Aydin gave us her recollection of what happened. According to the reality star, the incident happened while traveling with husband Bill Aydin, their five kids and additional family members over the holidays.
“[Bill] took all the kids, went to another stand that had a table, ordered food. It was about 5:30 in the morning,” Jennifer said. “Jersey Mike’s did not open until 5:30, and my cousin and I got on the line pretty much around 5:45 a.m. and there were not that many people on the line. Again, it was a little slow-moving, but we weren’t going to complain.”
When Jennifer did place her order, Bill was not with her. When he later joined her, Bill shared that one of their kids ended up wanting a sandwich and Jennifer tried to add the item after already placing her order. The employee allegedly told Jennifer if she wanted another sandwich she would have to get in line again or ask the man who was next in line if it was OK if she went to the counter to order another item.
‘RHONJ' Star Danielle Cabral Reacts to Jen Aydin’s Jersey Mike’s Drama
“In the video, they were still working on my sandwich. It’s not like I had paid. I didn’t check out,” she claimed. “So for them to tell me to wait to the end of the line or that I had to ask this guy’s permission — that just really started an altercation. They shouldn’t have done that and that’s just customer service. I’m realizing now that I can’t say, ‘I’m a celebrity.’ People are very angry. … I will no longer say I’m a celebrity since people are so angry about it. But, obviously, this wouldn’t have gone so viral as it did if I wasn’t a public figure.”
After Jennifer’s social media blow-up went viral, the fallout included her being dropped from an upcoming reality stars cruise. In addition to the firing, the RHONJ cast’s future remains up in the air after the show was put on pause following season 14. While the show’s direction is in limbo, Jennifer has faith that everything will work out and says she has “respect” no matter what Bravo decides.
“I feel like by the time they’ve regrouped to even consider who they’re going to recast or if they’re going to recast, this will be such water under the bridge. So I don’t really think that’s a thing,” she told Us. “Plus, by the time they reconfigure who’s going to be on the staff, I don’t know where I’m going to be at that point in my life. I am a big believer in that God protects me and my blessings are in the proof of my lifestyle in the good that I do. I always constantly pay it forward.”
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
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The most horrific wildfires in recent US history have one key feature in common
- The Los Angeles fires share a key feature with wildfires that burned down Lahaina, Hawaii and Paradise, California
- Powerful winds met flash-dried landscapes full of vegetation to fuel the flames.
- The climate crisis is increasing the odds of events like these.
The Los Angeles firestorms of the past week share a crucial feature with two of the most horrific wildfires in recent American memory.
The Palisades and Eaton fires may be unprecedented in some ways, but they share a common root cause with the 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 people in Paradise, California, and the 2023 fire that destroyed Lahaina in Hawaii.
In Paradise, Lahaina, and now Los Angeles, the blazes grew to monster fires because powerful winds met a parched, overgrown landscape.
Scientists expect to see more of that in the future.
"There's definitely a trend that increases this kind of situation," Louis Gritzo, the chief science officer at the commercial property insurance company FM, told Business Insider.
In all three cases, sudden drought had sucked the moisture out of local vegetation, creating abundant kindling for fire to feed on. Then strong winds picked up the embers and carried them into residential areas.
"When we look at the recent really bad fires — the Camp Fire, the fires in Hawaii — they all have that thing in common," Gritzo said. "They have a wet period, dry period, heavy winds, very rapid fire spread, a lot of ember transport."
The winds were bad luck, but flash-dried vegetation is happening more often as global temperatures rise.
How the climate crisis creates more fire fuel
In Paradise and Los Angeles, the dry months followed unusually wet seasons that fed an explosion of plant growth.
Last winter, heavy rains in Southern California led to about double the average amount of grasses and shrubs, according to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
This winter has not been so generous. The past few months have seen almost no rainfall, shriveling up all those grasses and shrubs.
Swain has coined the term "hydroclimate whiplash" — or simply "weather whiplash" — for these drastic swings between extreme wet and extreme dry conditions. He has observed it across the planet in recent years, from various regions in the US and Europe to the Middle East and China.
Globally, whiplash has already increased by 33% to 66% since the mid-twentieth century, Swain and his colleagues found in a new paper, published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment on Thursday.
That's because warmer air holds more moisture. As global temperatures rise, the ceiling on how much water our atmosphere can hold is also rising.
That thirsty atmosphere sucks more moisture out of the ground sometimes and, at other times, dumps more rain. Hence, greater extremes of flood and drought — and more wildfire fuel.
The effect of the climate crisis on wildfires "has been slow to emerge, but it is very clearly emerging, unfortunately," Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a Friday press briefing announcing that 2024 was the hottest year on record.
The scientific organization World Weather Attribution has discovered a clear link between the climate crisis and specific instances of extreme fire weather in Brazil, Chile, Australia, and Canada.
The climate signal is "so large" now that it's clear in the global and continental data, but also "you're seeing it at the local scale, you're seeing it in local weather," Schmidt said.
The transition from wildfire to urban fire
So climate change is seeding fire fuel in forests and grasslands.
However, once wild blazes enter dense residential areas like Lahaina or the Pacific Palisades, they burn wood fences, ornamental yard plants, mulch landscapes, and leaves built up in roof gutters — then grow to consume homes.
"The natural fuels may be showering us with embers, but what's burning our homes down and forcing us to run and evacuate is human fuels," Pat Durland, a wildfire-mitigation specialist and instructor for the National Fire Protection Association with 30 years of federal wildfire management experience, told Business Insider.
As the climate crisis loads the dice toward extreme wildfires, he says it's important for city governments and residents to manage those urban fuels by reducing them and spacing them apart.
"I think just about anybody could be next under the right circumstances," Durland said. "It depends on the fuel and the climate."
Intel still dreams of modular PCs — it brought a tablet laptop gaming handheld to CES
At CES 2025, Intel let journalists into its private “Innovation Showcase,” where we saw things like prototype next-gen laptops and giant stereo 3D handheld gaming PCs.
While I was there, I also spotted a heavy metal handheld on a table that didn’t seem fully... attached to its screen. When I lifted the screen, it came away easily.
It felt suspiciously light to be a rea tablet, so I flipped it over and saw three connectors underneath:
Above it, on a shelf, was a laptop with a suspiciously sized chunk of plastic on the bottom that looked like a perfect match. A minute later, Intel gaming evangelist Colin Helms confirmed I was looking at a prototype modular PC.
That module contains a complete Intel Lunar Lake computer, the entire guts of a PC. It’s basically a reboot of Intel’s abandoned Compute Card idea, except it's not all Intel’s doing and you shouldn't ever expect it to ship.
It’s a concept from Quanta, a company whose name you don’t typically see on the laptops and tablets they create, because Quanta is an ODM (like Compal, Pegatron, Wistron, and Apple’s better known iPhone supplier Foxconn) that designs and manufactures hardware on behalf of brand names.
Quanta’s calling the whole modular system the “AI8A,” and the aforementioned module at its heart is the “Detachable AI Core.” Helms told me it plugs into other concept computers as well, including an all-in-one desktop that Intel didn’t have to show off. And presumably, like the Compute Card idea, you could upgrade your computer just by putting a new new module into it.
The modular laptop has lots of concept-y bells and whistles too, so many that Intel’s CES staff hadn’t even worked them all out yet.
For starts, the laptop has a motorized hinge, so you can tell it to open and close its own lid; it also claims to offer eye-tracking that lets you sling around multitasking windows just by looking at where you’d like them to be. It apparently comes with a mouse integrated into a ring that you could wear.
The most mundane: a built-in Qi wireless charging pad in the palmrest, with indicator lights to show your battery’s remaining capacity.
I couldn’t try any of it working, unfortunately, nor did I manage to ask what “AI8A” means, because I mistakenly thought it said Aiba until I checked my photos closely just now. Nor could we hotswap the module between the handheld and laptop, since the module apparently doesn't have a battery inside.
Again, this is a cool computing concept car: it’s not likely that this computer will ever ship, even in a more practical / less gadgety form. Thankfully, we have begun to see some real, practical modularity in the laptop space since the death of Intel's Compute Card. Framework just celebrated its fifth anniversary this week, and Dell took a smaller step forward at CES with its first modular repairable USB-C port.
Photos by Sean Hollister / The Verge
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Rachel Lindsay Reveals What ‘Bothered' Her 'Most’ in Bryan Abasolo Divorce
Rachel Lindsay has broken her silence days after finalizing her divorce from Bryan Abasolo.
“I’m divorced. Thank you, God,” Lindsay, 39, said during the Friday, January 10 episode of her “Higher Learning” podcast. “Give me some freedom music. Some freedom music.”
After joking around for a minute, Lindsay became serious explaining to cohost Van Lathan that it’s “a very weird feeling” to actually be divorced.
“From the moment he finally left the house, after being here for seven months post-separation, I felt divorced,” she continued. “I’ll be honest, there’s a lot I want to say.”
Lindsay noted that “from the beginning” she has wanted to share her side of the story — but not quite yet.
“I haven’t talked, but I will and I’m just figuring all that out,” she continued. “There [are] so many things that I want to address.”
Rachel Lindsay Felt 'Shame' Amid Bryan Abasolo Divorce
Elsewhere in the episode, Lindsay revealed what “bothered” her “the most” about how Abasolo was acting.
“On his end, there were certain things that were said to play into certain stereotypes that really were hurtful or bothered me. … Saying things that particularly play into the stereotype of me being an angry Black female,” she said, claiming that “a narrative” played out in which she “placed a career” over the relationship and kids.
“Those things are emphatically so not true,” Lindsay said. “To see people run with that because it’s the low-hanging fruit and it fits a certain stereotype, were really hurtful.”
Lindsay and Abasolo, 44, met and got engaged during season 13 of The Bachelorette, which aired in 2017. He filed for divorce from Lindsay in January 2024 after more than four years of marriage. After a messy back and forth, which included details of their finances and the pair continuing to live together, their divorce was finalized on Tuesday, January 7. (They did not have a prenuptial agreement.)
Us confirmed in July 2024 that Lindsay was ordered to pay Abasolo $13,257 a month in temporary spousal support along with $20,000 in attorney’s fees and forensic expert expenses. Their divorce documents, obtained by Us on Tuesday, share that Abasolo “waives, discharges and releases” Lindsay from “any and all” future payments. (She still owes him $460,229.)
Rachel Lindsay Owes Ex-Husband Bryan Abasolo More Than $400,000: Docs
Lindsay did not address any specifics of their split during Friday’s podcast episode but did say that there was a point she had to become “the bigger person” in their divorce.
“When someone is fighting you in this way and willing to die on every hill and not willing to compromise at all for whatever reason they have — and [I’ll] talk about that later,” she said. “You have to at one point let go and just be the bigger person and prioritize what is most important to you.”
Lindsay explained that she got to the point where she was “trying to move on” and “had to make concessions that I didn’t necessarily want to do.”
“My peace of mind is priceless at the end of the day, and I really want to start rebuilding, and I want to move forward,” she added. “I’m able to do that now. And that feels really, really good.”
She concluded that she “wouldn’t get married without a prenup again,” adding: “It’s, like, changed my whole perspective on everything. I don’t even know if I would get married again. I can’t even fathom that.”
Chrisley Family Drama Through the Years: Legal Trouble, Feuds and More
Let the cameras roll. Chrisley Knows Best is certainly not without drama, but its stars have been at the center of more controversies than a single reality show can handle.
Fans met Todd Chrisley, Julie Chrisley and their kids — Chase, Savannah and Grayson — when the series premiered on USA Network in March 2014. The businessman’s children from his first marriage to Teresa Terry — Lindsie and Kyle — also appeared on early seasons of the show.
However, the former real estate tycoon’s relationships with his older kids broke down as the family became more high-profile. The feuds soon became public knowledge and often played out for the world to see.
When Todd revealed in April 2020 that he was hospitalized after testing positive for COVID-19, a social media user sent Lindsie a DM, which she shared via her Instagram Story. “Hi Lindsie!” the note read. “Did you see your Dad has Covid? I guess the good guys really do win in the end.”
The “Coffee Convos” podcast cohost fired back at the negative sentiment. “The audacity of some people blows my mind,” she retorted. “This is disgusting. My inbox is flooding with similar messages & I’m not here for it. Get right or get off my page.”
Lindsie took her reaction one step further, exclusively telling Us Weekly at the time, “I don’t want anything bad to happen to my father.”
Her attorney, meanwhile, added that the reality star “was very saddened to hear that her father was diagnosed with COVID. She does not feel happy he has the virus.” Todd, for his part, eventually recovered.
Although Lindsie wished her father well when he was sick, their relationship was not mended. Kyle, on the other hand, revealed in August 2019 that he and Todd had reconciled after years of tension.
“My mom [Julie] and dad raised me,” Kyle wrote via Instagram. “I haven’t been the best dad to [daughter] Chloe, I’ve had a problem with drugs, I’ve acted completely ridiculously, and through all that, they have stood by my side. Nine months ago, I went to my dad with an apology. His words were ‘I love you always, and you are forgiven’ and just like that, I was welcomed back into his life with open arms. I will be forever grateful for his love [and] graciousness.”
The Chrisleys’ drama only got more intense in June 2022, when Todd and Julie were convicted of tax evasion, bank fraud and conspiracy. Though the Chrisley family patriarch denied the allegations three years prior — claiming that an ex-employee set them up — Todd and Julie were later sentenced to 12 years in prison and seven years in federal prison, respectively.
Scroll through the gallery below to revisit all of the scandals the Chrisleys have been involved in during their time in the spotlight.
The Traitors’ New Players: Meet Wes Bergmann and Derrick Levasseur
Fans of The Traitors were shocked on Thursday, January 9, when the first three episodes of the show’s third season were released and two unexpected players dropped in — literally.
The announced cast, which Peacock shared last June, arrived at their second mission to find three new players suspended above them in cages. One was Rob “Boston Rob” Mariano, who they elected not to invite into the game during the premiere episode.
The other two were entirely unexpected reality TV titans: Three-time winner of The Challenge, Wes Bergmann, and Big Brother 16 winner Derrick Levasseur.
Those who recognized Wes and Derrick, both 40, reacted with a predictable mix of excitement and apprehension at unleashing two masterminds into the game, while others clearly had no idea what either was capable of.
All the ‘Survivor’ Connections on ‘The Traitors’ Season 3
Both new players will begin as faithfuls, while Boston Rob will try to exact his revenge on those who didn’t invite him to enter the game by joining the traitors’ side.
Learn more about Wes and Derrick below.
Wes Bergmann
Not many people have more reality TV experience than Wes, who first appeared on The Real World: Austin in 2005. Since then, he’s played 14 seasons of The Challenge, two seasons of The Challenge: Champs vs. Stars, one season of The Challenge: All-Stars, one season of The Challenge: USA and played in The Challenge: World Championship. He was also runner-up on House of Villains season 2.
Known as a master strategist and relentless competitor, Wes’ scheming has been both a blessing and a curse in his reality history. On The Challenge, It landed him in hot water and forced him into plenty of eliminations. But he also owns the franchise’s record for consecutive elimination wins with eight.
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Wes has combined his physical prowess with a fearlessness that has continued to help him land roles across the reality competition universe. Two Challenge alumni (Chris “CT” Tamburello and Trishelle Cannatella) won season 2 of The Traitors and Wes can match up with either of them.
Derrick Levasseur
Widely considered one of the greatest Big Brother players of all-time, the Big Brother 16 winner has the social ability to be a mastermind without ever appearing to be a threat. On Big Brother, he is both credited for his strategy and derided by some for “ruining” the game by showing future players how to dominate from start to finish.
On his season of Big Brother, Derrick formed a majority alliance early on with big competition threats, ensuring his side was almost always in power. As a result, he was never up for eviction and coasted to victory. Some argue Derrick had an easy path to his win because of the relatively low skill level of his competitors, but the season also included two future winners — former The Traitors contestant Cody Califiore and Nicole Franzel — as well as Frankie Grande, who some consider one of the most underrated players ever.
Another key for Derrick, both on Big Brother and The Traitors: He is a former undercover police officer. He kept this from his housemates on BB16, but with him already knowing several players on The Traitors, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the cast catches wind of his ability to deceive, read and react.