Kane Brown’s daughter Kingsley is 19 months old now, and he says he’s amazed at all the changes he sees in her.
“She’s getting a personality on her,” Kane tells “People.” “She’s about to be 2 so she’s just running around the place.”
Kane adds that he and wife Katelyn are just “waiting for [Kingsley] to talk,” but she’s getting there. He notes, “She said ‘wow’ today or ‘woah.’ She says ‘Dada,’ perfectly.”
Source: People
The 2021 CMT Music Awards are in the books, with Carrie Underwood once again walking away with the top award, Video of the Year, for her John Legend collaboration “Hallelujah.” The win is Carrie’s ninth in the category, and her third in a row. It also extends her record as the most awarded artist in CMT history with 23 wins.
The night was also a very good one for the show’s two hosts, Kane Brown and Kelsea Ballerini. Kane won two awards, Male Video of the Year for “Worship You” and Collaborative Video of the Year for his Chris Young collab “Famous Friends.” Meanwhile, Kelsea won CMT Performance of the Year for her 2020 CMT Music Awards performance of “The Other Girl” with Halsey. She used her acceptance speech to call out haters who criticized the performance as not being country enough noting the win shows fans know “where my roots are.”
Other winners include: Gabby Barrett, Female Video of the Year for “The Good Ones,” Little Big Town, Duo/Group Video of the Year for “Wine, Beer, Whiskey” and Dylan Scott, Breakthrough Video of the Year for “Nobody.” Taylor Swift even won an award for Best Family Feature for her video for “The Best Day (Taylor’s Version),” tweeting “I Love You Mom” after her win.
As usual, the CMT Music Awards were filled with a whole bunch of great performances, which once again took place at various locations across Nashville. Performances included:
2021 CMT MUSIC AWARDS WINNERS LIST
VIDEO OF THE YEAR
FEMALE VIDEO OF THE YEAR
MALE VIDEO OF THE YEAR
DUO/GROUP VIDEO OF THE YEAR
BREAKTHROUGH VIDEO OF THE YEAR
COLLABORATIVE VIDEO OF THE YEAR
CMT PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR
BEST FAMILY FEATURE
By JONATHAN LEMIRE and AAMER MADHANI
WASHINGTON (AP) — Embarking on the first overseas trip of his term, President Joe Biden is eager to reassert the United States on the world stage, steadying European allies deeply shaken by his predecessor and pushing democracy as the only bulwark to rising forces of authoritarianism.
Biden has set the stakes for his eight-day trip in sweeping terms, believing the West must publicly demonstrate it can compete economically with China as the world emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.
Before boarding Air Force One for Wednesday’s flight, Biden told reporters the trip is about making clear to the leaders of China and Russia that the United States and Europe “are tight.”
Building toward his trip-ending summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden will aim to reassure European capitals that the United States can once again be counted on as a dependable partner to thwart Moscow’s aggression both on their eastern front and their internet battlefields.
The trip will be far more about messaging than specific actions or deals. And the paramount priority for Biden is to convince the world that his Democratic administration is not just a fleeting deviation in the trajectory of an American foreign policy that many allies fear irrevocably drifted toward a more transactional outlook under former President Donald Trump.
“The trip, at its core, will advance the fundamental thrust of Joe Biden’s foreign policy,” said national security adviser Jake Sullivan, “to rally the world’s democracies to tackle the great challenges of our time.”
Biden’s to-do list is ambitious.
In their face-to-face sit-down in Geneva, Biden wants to privately pressure Putin to end myriad provocations, including cybersecurity attacks on American businesses by Russian-based hackers, the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and repeated overt and covert efforts by the Kremlin to interfere in U.S. elections.
Biden is also looking to rally allies on their COVID-19 response and to urge them to coalesce around a strategy to check emerging economic and national security competitor China even as the U.S. expresses concern about Europe’s economic links to Moscow. Biden also wants to nudge outlying allies, including Australia, to make more aggressive commitments to the worldwide effort to curb global warming.
The week-plus journey is a big moment for Biden, who traveled the world for decades as vice president and as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and will now step off Air Force One onto international soil as commander in chief. He will face world leaders still grappling with the virus and rattled by four years of Trump’s inward-looking foreign policy and moves that strained longtime alliances as the Republican former president made overtures to strongmen.
“In this moment of global uncertainty, as the world still grapples with a once-in-a-century pandemic,” Biden wrote in a Washington Post op-ed previewing his diplomatic efforts, “this trip is about realizing America’s renewed commitment to our allies and partners, and demonstrating the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age.”
The president first travels to Britain for a summit of the Group of Seven leaders and then Brussels for a NATO summit and a meeting with the heads of the European Union. It comes at a moment when Europeans have diminished expectations for what they can expect of U.S. leadership on the foreign stage.
Central and Eastern Europeans are desperately hoping to bind the U.S. more tightly to their security. Germany is looking to see the U.S. troop presence maintained there so it doesn’t need to build up its own. France, meanwhile, has taken the tack that the U.S. can’t be trusted as it once was and that the European Union must pursue greater strategic autonomy going forward.
“I think the concern is real that the Trumpian tendencies in the U.S. could return full bore in the midterms or in the next presidential election,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. diplomat and once deputy secretary general of NATO.
The sequencing of the trip is deliberate: Biden consulting with Western European allies for much of a week as a show of unity before his summit with Putin.
His first stop late Wednesday will be an address to U.S. troops stationed in Britain, and the next day he sits down with British Prime Minster Boris Johnson. The two men will meet a day ahead of the G-7 summit to be held above the craggy cliffs of Cornwall overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
The most tactile of politicians, Biden has grown frustrated by the diplomacy-via-Zoom dynamics of the pandemic and has relished the ability to again have face-to-face meetings that allow him to size up and connect with world leaders. While Biden himself is a veteran statesman, many of the world leaders he will see in England, including Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron, took office after Biden left the vice presidency. Another, Germany’s Angela Merkel, will leave office later this year.
There are several potential areas of tension. On climate change, the U.S. is aiming to regain its credibility after Trump pulled the country back from the fight against global warming. Biden could also feel pressure on trade, an issue to which he’s yet to give much attention. And with the United States well supplied with COVID-19 vaccines yet struggling to persuade some of its own citizens to use it, leaders whose inoculation campaigns have been slower will surely pressure Biden to share more surplus around the globe.
Another central focus will be China. Biden and the other G-7 leaders will announce an infrastructure financing program for developing countries that is meant to compete directly with Beijing’s Belt-and-Road Initiative. But not every European power has viewed China in as harsh a light as Biden, who has painted the rivalry with the techno-security state as the defining competition for the 21st century.
The European Union has avoided taking as strong a stance on Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s democracy movement or treatment of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province as the Biden administration may like. But there are signs that Europe is willing to put greater scrutiny on Beijing.
The EU in March announced sanctions targeting four Chinese officials involved with human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Beijing, in turn, responded by imposing sanctions on several members of the European Parliament and other Europeans critical of the Chinese Communist Party.
Biden is also scheduled to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while in Brussels, a face-to-face meeting between two leaders who have had many fraught moments in their relationship over the years.
Biden waited until April to call Erdogan for the first time as president. In that call, he informed the Turkish leader that he would formally recognize that the systematic killings and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces in the early 20th century were “genocide” — using a term for the atrocities that his White House predecessors had avoided for decades over concerns of alienating Turkey.
The trip finale will be Biden’s meeting with Putin.
Biden has taken a very different approach to Russia than Trump’s friendly outreach. Their sole summit, held in July 2018 in Helsinki, was marked by Trump’s refusal to side with U.S. intelligence agencies over Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the election two years earlier.
Biden could well be challenged by unrest at home as Russia looks to exploit the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and the debate over voting rights to undermine the U.S. position as a global role model. The American president, in turn, is expected to push Russia to quell its global meddling.
“By and large, these are not meetings on outcomes, these are ‘get to know you again’ meetings for the U.S. and Europe,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s about delivering a message to Putin, to reviving old alliances and to demonstrate again that the U.S. is back on the right course.”
The Oskaloosa Public Library is holding a double celebration Wednesday (6/9). One part is an official unveiling of a historical building marker for the library. Ann Brouwer of Oskaloosa’s Historical Building Marker Steering Committee says the marker has actually been in place for over a year.
“This is our ninth of the historical building markers to be placed in Oskaloosa. And we actually installed this one on the library in March. And due to COVID, we did not have a ceremony.”
Oskaloosa’s public library opened in 1903 and was built with money donated by businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The second thing that will be unveiled is the Kim (Gigi) Blackwell Memorial Makerspace. Brouwer says a Makerspace is a place to make things.
“Anything from learning how to operate a sewing machine to doing robotics and there’s a green screen for video…of cricut. Things that I don’t have a clue of how to operate.”
The Oskaloosa Public Library’s celebration starts at 6pm Wednesday at the library’s Reading Garden.
Oskaloosa School Superintendent Paula Wright has received a one year contract extension. The Oskaloosa School Board voted Tuesday (6/8) to extend her contract through the 2023-24 school year. Wright will receive an annual salary of $212,500.
Cargill and a German company are teaming up to build a chemical plant in Eddyville that will allow them to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Jon Veldhouse is Cargill’s business development manager for the project.
“Cargill and Helm have formed a joint venture investing up to $300 million in this new facility in Eddyville to produce BDO from corn.”
You’re probably wondering what BDO is. Veldhouse says it’s used to make something you might be wearing right now.
“Things like spandex is really a common one. When you think of spandex as a generic term, but we also think of where it’s used as elastic in our shirts or in our socks or around the legs of a diaper, for example.”
Veldhouse says the new technology Cargill and Helm will be using will drastically reduce greenhouse gases.
“Instead of making BDO from things like petroleum or coal, now we’re going to be making it through corn sugars. With that, we’re able to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and CO2 production from those processes by up to 93 percent.”
Cargill says construction on the new Eddyville facility will begin later this year and should be up and running in 2024. Veldhouse says around 40 employees will be needed to operate the plant, with some new employees and others moved from Eddyville’s current Cargill plant.
This week’s H & S Feed & Country Store Pet of the Week is “Annie”, a declawed, spayed 9 year old cat who enjoys attention and is looking for her forever home.
If you’d like to set up an appointment to meet Annie or any of the pets at Stephen Memorial Animal Shelter, visit https://www.stephenmemorial.org/ and fill out an adoption application.
Check out our visit about Annie with Terry Gott from Stephen Memorial Animal Shelter here:
The 2021 CMT Music Awards go down tonight in Nashville, and it’s bound to be a great night of music.
The show, hosted by Kelsea Ballerini and Kane Brown, will feature solo performances by Luke Combs, Luke Bryan and Thomas Rhett, along with a whole host of collaborations, including Chris Stapleton and H.E.R., Brothers Osborne with Dierks Bentley, Breland and Mickey Guyton, Chris Young and Kane Brown, Kelsea Ballerini and Paul Klein from LANY, Lady A and Carly Pearce, Lauren Alaina and Jon Pardi, Carrie Underwood and NEEDTOBREATHE, Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram, and Jon Randall, and Ingrid Andress and JP Saxe.
The show will also once again highlight rising stars on the Ram Truck Stage. Artists confirmed include Blanco Brown, making his first performance since his motorcycle accident, Dylan Scott, Hailey Whitters, Lainey Wilson, Niko Moon and Tenille Arts.
The 2021 CMT Awards kick of at 8 pm. Check out the nominees below:
2021 CMT MUSIC AWARD NOMINEES
VIDEO OF THE YEAR
FEMALE VIDEO OF THE YEAR
MALE VIDEO OF THE YEAR
DUO/GROUP VIDEO OF THE YEAR
BREAKTHROUGH VIDEO OF THE YEAR
COLLABORATIVE VIDEO OF THE YEAR
CMT PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR
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