Love was in the air for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce during this year’s Super Bowl – but they’re not the only couple who are head over heels.
Usher and his partner Jenn Goicoechea got married in Las Vegas just hours after the R&B superstar’s headline appearance at the Super Bowl half-time show.
According to their marriage certificate, which was released publicly on Monday, the couple tied the knot at Vegas Weddings with Usher’s mother Jonnetta Patton being one of the witnesses.
Image: Usher during his Super Bowl half-time show. Pic: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports/Reuters
Image: Vegas Weddings, where Usher and Ms Goicoechea married on Sunday. Pic: AP
Rev Ronald Joseph Polrywka – who usually dresses up as Elvis Presley – carried out the ceremony.
Usher, 45, and Ms Goicoechea, 40, have been together since 2019 and have two young daughters.
The singer divorced his first wife, Tameka Foster, in 2009 after two years together, and he received custody of their two sons.
In December 2018, the singer filed for divorce after three years with his second wife and former manager, Grace Miguel.
Usher’s representative did not immediately respond to questions including whether the service was carried out in the chapel or in the drive-thru lane.
Lynn Marie Goya, Clark County clerk and head of the county’s marriage licence bureau, confirmed her office issued a licence to the couple last week.
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“Naturally they got married in Las Vegas,” she said. “What better place than the Wedding Capital of the World?”
Melody Willis-Williams, the owner of the Vegas Weddings Chapel, said: “Congratulations to the newlyweds! We were beyond thrilled to host this epic day for Usher and his new wife.”
The statement added: “As much as we love love, this is the couple’s news to share any further details on. We’ll always be fans of Usher! Yeah!”
Usher’s Super Bowl half-time performance at Allegiant Stadium on Sunday included guest appearances by stars including Alicia Keys, HER, Jermaine Dupri, Lil Jon and Ludacris.
Image: Usher and Alicia Keys. Pic: Mark J Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports/Reuters
Image: Usher and Lil John perform together. Pic: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports/Reuters
The singer recently ended a two-year Las Vegas Strip residency where he performed Usher: My Way at the Park MGM.
He has also just released his first solo album in eight years, and is scheduled to kick off a 24-city US tour titled Past Present Future in August.
Alan Yentob, the former BBC presenter and executive, has died aged 78.
A statement from his family, shared by the BBC, said Yentob died on Saturday.
His wife Philippa Walker said: “For Jacob, Bella and I, every day with Alan held the promise of something unexpected. Our life was exciting, he was exciting.
“He was curious, funny, annoying, late, and creative in every cell of his body. But more than that, he was the kindest of men and a profoundly moral man. He leaves in his wake a trail of love a mile wide.”
Yentob joined the BBC as a trainee in 1968 and held a number of positions – including controller of BBC One and BBC Two, director of television, and head of music and art.
He was also the director of BBC drama, entertainment, and children’s TV.
Yentob launched CBBC and CBeebies, and his drama commissions included Pride And Prejudice and Middlemarch.
Image: Alan Yentob (left) with former BBC director general Tony Hall in 2012. Pic: Reuters.
The TV executive was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by the King in 2024 for services to the arts and media.
In a tribute, the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie said: “Alan Yentob was a towering figure in British broadcasting and the arts. A creative force and a cultural visionary, he shaped decades of programming at the BBC and beyond, with a passion for storytelling and public service that leave a lasting legacy.
“Above all, Alan was a true original. His passion wasn’t performative – it was personal. He believed in the power of culture to enrich, challenge and connect us.”
BBC Radio 4 presenter Amol Rajan described him on Instagram as “such a unique and kind man: an improbable impresario from unlikely origins who became a towering figure in the culture of post-war Britain.
Gillian Anderson has warned homelessness is a growing problem in the UK – one that will only get worse if we enter a recession.
The award-winning actress, who is playing a woman facing homelessness along with her husband in her latest film, The Salt Path, told Sky News: “It’s interesting because I feel like it’s even changed in the UK in the last little while.”
Born in Chicago, and now living in London, she explained: “I’m used to seeing it so much in Vancouver and California and other areas that I spent time. You don’t often see it as much in the UK.”
Her co-star in the film, White Lotus actor Jason Isaacs, chips in: “You do now.”
“It’s now becoming more and more prevalent since COVID,” said Anderson, “and the current financial situation in the country and around the world.
“It’s a topic that I think will be more and more in the forefront of people’s minds, particularly if we end up going into a recession.”
Image: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs in The Salt Path. Pic: Steve Tanner/Black Bear
The film is based on Raynor Winn’s 2018 memoir, which depicts her and her husband’s 630-mile trek along the Cornish, Devon and Dorset coastline, walking from Minehead, Somerset to Land’s End.
Written from her notes on the journey, The Salt Path went on to sell over a million copies worldwide and spent nearly two years in The Sunday Times bestseller list. Winn’s since written two more memoirs.
Isaacs, who plays her husband Moth Winn in the movie, told Sky News that Winn told him she “hopes [the film] makes people look at homeless people when they walk by in a different light, give them a second look and maybe talk to them”.
With record levels of homelessness in the UK, with a recent Financial Times analysis showing one in every 200 households in the UK is experiencing homelessness, the cost of living crisis is worsening an already serious problem.
Image: Pic: Steve Tanner/Black Bear
The film sees Ray and Winn let down by the system, first by the court which evicts them from their home, then by the council which tells them despite a terminal diagnosis they don’t qualify for emergency housing.
Following the loss of their family farm shortly after Moth’s shock terminal diagnosis with rare neurological condition Corticobasal Degeneration (CBD), the couple find solace in nature.
They set off with just a tent and two backpacks to walk the coastal path.
Isaacs says living in a transient way comes naturally to actors, admitting like his character, he too “lives out of a suitcase” and is “away on jobs often”.
Shot in 2023 across Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Wales, Anderson says as a city-dweller, the locations had an impact on her.
Anderson reveals: “As I’ve gotten older, I have become more aware of nature than […] when I was younger, and certainly in filming this film and being outside and so much of nature being a third character, it did shift my thinking around it.”
Meanwhile, Isaacs says he discovered a “third character” leading the film just the day before our interview, when speaking to Winn on the phone.
Isaacs says the author told him: “I feel like there’s three characters in the film,” going on, “I thought she was going to say nature, but she said, ‘No, that path'”.
Isaacs elaborates: “Not just nature, but that path where the various biblical landscapes you get and the animals, they matter.
“The things that happen on that path were a huge part of their own personal story and hopefully the audience’s journey as well.”
The Salt Path comes to UK cinemas on Friday 30 May.
A weapons supervisor who was jailed for involuntary manslaughter over the fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins on the set of the Alec Baldwin movie, Rust, has been freed.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was released on parole from the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility in Grants on Friday, after serving her 18-month sentence, NBC News, Sky’s US partner said, quoting New Mexico Corrections Department spokesperson, Brittany Roembach.
Gutierrez-Reed was released to return home to Bullhead City, Arizona, where she will be on parole for a year for the manslaughter case.
Image: Hannah Gutierrez-Reed in court as she was jailed for 18 months for involuntary manslaughter. Pic: Rex/Shutterstock
Image: Halyna Hutchins pictured in 2017. Pic: Rex/Shutterstock
She was in charge of weapons during the production of the Western film in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in October 2021, when a prop gun held by star and co-producer Alec Baldwin went off during a rehearsal.
Cinematographer Hutchins died following the incident, while director Joel Souza was injured.
Gutierrez-Reed was acquitted of charges of tampering with evidence in the investigation, but will be on probation over a separate conviction for unlawfully carrying a gun into a Santa Fe bar where firearms are banned weeks before Rust began filming.
Image: Alec Baldwin reacts after the judge threw out the involuntary manslaughter case against him. Pic: AP
Involuntary manslaughter means causing someone’s death due to negligence, without intending to.
At her 10-day trial in New Mexico in March last year, prosecutors blamed Gutierrez-Reed for unwittingly bringing live ammunition onto the set of Rust and for failing to follow basic gun safety protocols.
The 18-month sentence she was given was the maximum available for the offence.
Baldwin, 67, was also charged with involuntary manslaughter, but the case was dramatically dismissed by the judge during his trial last July over mistakes made by police and prosecutors, including allegations of withholding ammunition evidence from the defence.
The actor had always denied the charge, maintaining he did not pull the gun’s trigger and that others on the set were responsible for safety checks on the weapon.
Rust was finished in Montana and released earlier this month, minus the scene they were working on when Hutchins was shot, Souza, speaking at November’s premiere in Poland, said.
Rust is billed as the story of a 13-year-old boy who, left to fend for himself and his younger brother following their parents’ deaths in 1880s Wyoming, goes on the run with his long-estranged grandfather after being sentenced to hang for the accidental killing of a local rancher.