Luke Combs is asking fans to help him track down a rare one-of-one card of himself that he signed years ago. Continue reading…The Boot – Country Music News, Music Videos and Songs
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We’ll remember this the next time that miracle baby rumors circulate.
When Gwen Stefani was in her mid-forties, she gave birth to her third son.
According to the singer, she experienced a spiritual and religious awakening as a Catholic ahead of conceiving him.
Now, she brands her third son as her “first miracle.”
How did she have a baby in her mid-40s?
If you’ve seen Stefani lately, it was probably in an ad for the Hallow prayer app. More on her involvement in that controversial prayer app in a moment.
She did a recent interview with Hallow: Prayer & Meditation, describing a spiritual epiphany that she experienced.
According to Stefani, she was working with a man who was an atheist and was ethnically Jewish.
“He was studying the Torah, and he had this big epiphany awakening,” she recalled.
“And,” Stefani shared, “he starts talking to me about the Torah.”
At the same time, Stefani and her erstwhile husband, Gavin Rossdale, were apparently hoping for a third child.
“I was desperate at this point during all this,” Stefani admitted.
“I really wanted to have another baby,” she expressed. “I really did.”
Stefani explained: “I couldn’t, and I was old.” She was in her 40s, an age when pregnancy is unusual and considered geriatric.
However, she explained that her conversations with her former-atheist Jewish colleague were “waking me up.”
‘And that was the first miracle’
According to Stefani, her eldest son, Kingston, hoped for another sibling. Now 19, he would have been but a wee lad back in 2013.
She’d told him that “mommy is too old” for another baby. But she says that she heard him praying for a sibling.
“It was like, four weeks later, and I was pregnant with Apollo,” Stefani marveled.
“I had him at 44 years old, naturally,” she proclaimed, calling him a “full-on gift. And that was the first miracle.”
Just a few years later, she and Rossdale split. It was widely reported that she found evidence on a tablet device that he was boning the children’s nanny.
Kingston is now 19. Zuma is now 17. And Apollo is now 12.
Many people believe in miraculous occurrences, usually due to the supernatural intervention of one or more deities.
In Stefani’s case, she is Catholic.
Some in her shoes might feel leery of discussing a baby whose conception and birth they believe to be miraculous, out of sensitivity to others who pray for — but do not have — a child.
But Stefani is doing an interview with the polarizing Hallow app. With that in mind, it makes sense for her to make statements that might otherwise be insensitive.
Many people are confused by her involvement with the Hallow app
Stefani is best known for her music career. Following that, it’s probably for her role as a coach on The Voice.
Her getting involved with a conservative prayer app that received funding from infamous billionaire Peter Thiel took some by surprise.
(The existence of a “prayer app” at all is also controversial, particularly among the faithful. What role does an app play in prayer? What role should it play?)
Truth be told, this app and her involvement with it was probably always who Stefani was.
It’s just that, these days, the lyrics to “Just A Girl” feel less sarcastic. Now it feels like she’d prefer that no one allow her to drive late at night.
Gwen Stefani Gushes Over Her ‘Miracle’ Baby in New Interview was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.
The Hollywood Gossip
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The automotive giant has issued another major recall. Continue reading…Country Music News – Taste of Country
The automotive giant has issued another major recall. Continue reading…The Boot – Country Music News, Music Videos and Songs
Spring Creek Correctional Center is seen in an undated photo. (Photo courtesy of Alaska Department of Corrections)
The Dunleavy administration has proposed a $523 million budget for the Alaska Department of Corrections for the next fiscal year, which House lawmakers with a finance subcommittee advanced without substantial changes last week.
It’s the largest corrections budget proposal to date, according to state data. It includes just over $514 million requested in state funding, $475.5 million of which is unrestricted general funds for the agency’s 13 state prisons and jails and estimated 2,127 employees. DOC officials expect an additional $9.3 million in federal funding for inmates held on federal charges.
The Department of Corrections has become one of the state’s most expensive departments in recent years. This year the Department of Health, which has requested $1.1 billion in unrestricted general funds, and the Department of Education and Early Development, which has requested $1.4 billion, would spend more. The Permanent Fund dividend could also be a bigger expense — if the state pays out a $1,000 dividend like last year, it would cost the state $660 million.
While the number of people in Alaska’s prisons and jails has remained relatively consistent, costs are soaring. Last year, DOC officials reported that state corrections booked nearly 26,000 people and just over 16,000 unique individuals, so roughly 9,000 people were repeat offenders. DOC also held nearly 450 people in involuntary commitments, which is for those who are deemed a danger to themself or others, or gravely disabled as a result of mental illness. The state cost for incarcerating an individual is an average of $223 per day.
Initially, corrections officials submitted a $500 million budget request, but later added an additional request for $20 million for staffing and inmate transportation, and $3.3 million for healthcare and medical staffing.
The proposed budget breaks down to roughly 60% for state prison institutions, lawmakers heard on Feb. 24. Roughly 20% is for health and rehabilitation, 10% for pretrial, probation and parole, 4% for administration, 3% for maintenance and operations and just 0.4% to administer the Board of Parole.
Costs to staffing Alaska’s prisons have ballooned in recent years, along with healthcare costs for an aging inmate population and increasing health needs, DOC officials told members of a House finance subcommittee for corrections.
“Staffing being the first, and then the second being our medical costs,” Jen Winkelman, corrections commissioner, told lawmakers. “The fees for medical in Alaska is through the roof, and every single individual that’s coming to us — that we don’t know we’re going to be getting — have significant medical issues.”
DOC has a 11.5% staff vacancy rate statewide, according to a spokesperson in February. DOC officials told lawmakers that recruitment and retention is an ongoing challenge, especially because prisons must be staffed 24/7.
DOC reports staffing and decade of ‘policy changes’ as major cost drivers
April Wilkerson, deputy commissioner for the department, told lawmakers in a presentation on Feb. 24 that DOC officials analyzed the budget over the last ten years, and saw a total increase of an estimated $182 million for operational costs in that time. She said roughly one third of cost increases since fiscal year 2016 were driven by employee contracts, salary and benefit increases.
“Collective bargaining agreements, salary adjustments and health insurance changes — that makes up over 30% of the growth of the general funds within the department’s budget, which is outside of the department’s control,” Wilkerson said.
Wilkerson said an estimated 40% of cost increases have been due to “policy changes” from the Legislature. She pointed to the repeal of Senate Bill 91 enacted in 2020, when lawmakers increased prison sentences for most felonies and misdemeanors, and increased penalties for violating conditions of release. She also pointed to the state’s increased contributions to employees’ retirement benefits in 2022.
Lawmakers asked DOC officials for policy recommendations to curb costs across the department. Rep. Donna Mears, D-Anchorage, also asked the commissioner to address the problem of the department spending over its allocated budget.
“Funds allocated to DOC last year included cuts that the department just said, ‘Nope, we can’t do that.’ I think on a larger basis, there needs to be more discussions about that,” Mears said. “There’s this tension between the executive branch and requests for the department to make cuts, and that’s not happening.”
DOC officials reported all 13 state prisons spending over budget for the fiscal year ending in June, resulting in the department requesting an additional $20 million from the legislature to cover personnel costs, plus an estimated $3 million to cover health care costs.
Winkelman said the department had to partially make up for legislative cuts in their budget last year. A department spokesperson confirmed the supplemental budget request makes up for a $13.8 million reduction made by lawmakers last year.
Winkelman told lawmakers the department has not been able to fill its vacancies, which has resulted in high overtime costs. She said DOC has had to manage a legislative directive to cut costs by closing a housing unit at Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward. “We were tasked with closing a housing unit, and we did that, and it is not achieving the savings, and as a matter of fact, it’s bottlenecked some of our population management,” she said.
Winkelman also pointed to unexpected health care costs for inmates as a driver of the department’s increased budget need. “We just recently had an inmate leave us that was with us for a year, that cost us over a million dollars in medical. We didn’t plan for that. We didn’t know that she was going to have that much of a cost associated. So going back to your question, and not being able to achieve some of these,” she said, referring to state budget allocations. “Because we don’t know what’s going to come through the back door.”
Winkelman recommended the creation of a new task force to tackle the question of how to curtail and manage the corrections budget.
“We were going to need some sort of a task force with other agencies, with the legislature, with law enforcement,” Winkelman said. “Some sort of a group to take a look at the broader system to figure out which policy changes are going to make that difference in order for us to be able to stay within our means.”
Rep. Ky Holland, D-Anchorage, said he found the proposal concerning: “If a task force is needed, why aren’t all the folks that are doing these jobs coming together and doing the work of a task force? Why do we have to somehow create that and then fund it?”
Holland said it was difficult for him to see that lawmakers are required to pay increasing budgets for DOC because of legal staffing requirements and said he wished the state’s education system had the same safeguards. “I wish we could tell our teachers that they had a maximum class size of the number of students that they had in a classroom because we had a standards council that had the force of law,” he said.
Winkelman said DOC officials are trying to address the budget challenges. “We are constantly at the table trying to figure out how to solve this, if you will,” she said.
She then walked back the task force idea, and said hiring a consultant could be another option. “I think our recommendation is to maybe hire a consultant, hire an expert in this world, to kind of take all the pieces together,” she said.
Winkelman acknowledged Holland’s concerns about the state’s financial pressure with competing budget priorities, and said she understands the corrections budget is eating into funding for schools.
“Right now, above working for the Department of Corrections for 25 years and fighting this battle, I’m a mom with two kids in school, and that’s most important,” she said. “I’m fighting this battle every day of how expensive Corrections is, and I know it is taking from our school systems.”
House members with the finance subcommittee for corrections heard several weeks of presentations about the department’s budget and asked questions of DOC officials. Rep. Mike Prax, R-North Pole, introduced several amendments to the budget, proposing millions in cuts until the department could provide further explanation on how the items would be spent and fulfill the department’s goals. But the committee voted them down before advancing the budget proposal without changes.
The corrections budget now moves to the full House Finance Committee for further consideration.
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Back in the summer of 2025, Jenelle Evans sent her teenage son Jace back to North Carolina to live with his grandmother.
Jenelle remained in Las Vegas, where she allegedly blocked Jace on social media — a real Mother of the Year moment.
These days, Jenelle is back with her abusive ex, David Eason, and it seems that she was so upset by Jace’s reaction to the news that she had him committed.
According to a new report from The Ashley’s Reality Roundup, Jace was “infuriated to find out that Jenelle was back with David.”
“Jace was very upset, and Barbara called Jenelle about it and told her. That’s when cops were called and Jace was taken to a local hospital,” The Ashley’s source continued.
Jace’s reaction is entirely reasonable, of course.
David has been charged with misdemeanor child abuse and felony assault by strangulation in connection with incidents involving Jace.
And in requesting a restraining order against her ex, Jenelle told the authorities that she and her children were terrified of David’s violent tendencies.
And now Jace is reportedly being punished for getting upset at the news that his mother has welcomed the family’s alleged abuser back into their lives.
“Jenelle asked that Jace be committed to a facility long-term,” the source claims.
“She wants Jace to be institutionalized. She is also, as an alternative if long-term commitment can’t happen, trying to get the court to allow her male friend in North Carolina to get Jace. It makes absolutely no sense.”
Yes, Jenelle allegedly wants Jace to be long-term institutionalized for the crime of being angry that his mother is endangering herself and her children.
“All this time, Jenelle is portraying that she is just giving Jace ‘his privacy’ and acting involved in his life, but in reality she put him in the hospital and doesn’t want him speaking out,” says the source.
“He had every right to get upset that his mom is back with the man she promised Jace and the other kids she’d never go back to,” the insider continued. adding:
“While Jace was in the hospital, she was out with David in Vegas, going out to eat, having him take her OnlyFans photos and enjoying life, while the child that gave her fame and everything is suffering. He’s furious and rightfully so.”
The insider says that Jenelle might be seeking to discredit Jace, who is reportedly set to testify in David’s upcoming trial.
“Now that Jenelle is back with David she doesn’t want him to end up convicted of the crimes,” the source said.
Across social media, Jenelle is receiving an avalanche of justified criticism, including some harsh words from her estranged sister, Ashleigh, who accused Jenelle of selling her version of Jace’s story to TMZ.
“I’m at the point right now where I don’t give 2F’s. I’m sick and tired of my sister selling stories with her lowlife friends for cash making lies about my family especially the children drama everyone’s so tired of her. She needs a real reality check… there’s no arguing w/an evil POS sister,” Ashleigh wrote (via The Ashley’s Reality Roundup), adding:
“My nephew wants nothing to do with my sister Jenelle because of what his mother has done to him and betrayed him.
“Jenelle canceled his medical insurance last year abandoned him refused to do medical treatment for him while [he was] living with my mom. Other family has medical insurance for him because Jenelle refuses to step up and be a mom. She abandoned him such a shame.”
Jenelle said she was moving to Vegas in part to escape the drama of her checkered past.
Unfortunately, she’ll still be herself no matter where she resides.
Jenelle Evans Sent Son Jace to Psychiatric Hospital After He Learned She Was Back With … was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.
The Hollywood Gossip
When popping a lid is all the effort you can muster, don’t settle for bland salsa. There’s an incredibly easy trick to liven up any jarred variety.
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