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Michelle Obama Announces the Launch of Her Global Girls Alliance on International Day of the Girl


Michelle Obama is officially back with a new initiative post-White House, and true to form, she’s using her platform to stand up for girls globally.

To kick off International Day of the Girl on Thursday, the former First Lady announced her first major project from the Obama Foundation on the TODAY Show: The Global Girls Alliance. Their mission is right in line with much of the work Obama did during her time in Washington D.C.—to empower adolescent girls around the world through education, giving them the tools to support their families, communities, and countries. According to program, 98 million girls are not in school. But with the alliance, and some help from community, Obama intends to change that alarmingly high number.

“The stats show when you educate a girl, you educate a family, a community, a country,” Obama said in front of a live audience filled with young women. “It makes no sense that girls and women are not getting educated, that they’re not in school. If we care about climate change, if we care about poverty, if we care about maternal child health, then we have to care about education.”

“Think about our daughters, with all their promise, with all that they have in them,” she told TODAY hosts (and moms to daughters) Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie. “You know even now at this young age that there is something burning in them that is dying to get out. Well, that is true for millions of girls around the country and they are battling through misperceptions, violence, stigma to get their way into a classroom. And many of them don’t have access to a classroom so we want to play a role in building an alliance of young people who are out there doing the work on the ground. And we want to give them an opportunity to network with one another because working on these issues out in the world can be lonely.

And all this as she gears up for the launch of her much-anticipated new book, Becoming, which documents Obama’s own experiences growing up in Chicago and her road to the White House with former President Barack Obama.

News of Obama’s latest project to support girls isn’t surprising: One of her signature initiatives during her husband’s presidency was “Let Girls Learn”, which she and President Obama launched in 2015. The program focused on recruiting government agencies, corporations, and nonprofit organizations to invest in adolescent girls’ education around the globe. (The Trump administration chose not to continue “Let Girls Learn” as a standalone program, though they say they are continuing some aspects of its work.)

And then, of course, there was Obama’s #62MillionGirls campaign which launched under the “Let Girls Learn” umbrella in 2015. With 62 million girls not attending school around the world, the social media campaign asked celebrities (like Kerry Washington) and supporters to share their education stories using the hashtag. In a video announcement at the time, Obama said, “I see myself in these girls. I see my daughters in these girls. These girls are our girls, and I simply can’t walk away from them. So for me, this is truly a moral issue.”

That same year, Obama participated in Glamour‘s “The Power of an Educated Girl” panel with former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gallard, Sophia Bush, and Charlize Theron.

“For me, this is personal,” Obama said during the panel. “When I think about the 62 million girls not in school, I think of myself and my daughters—all my girls, all our girls. I think about where I would be in my life if I didn’t work hard in school and had the opportunity to go to college and law school. I wouldn’t be here. It’s imperative—and it’s my passion and my mission—that every girl on the planet has the same opportunity that I have and my daughters have.”

This new alliance will leverage Obama’s massive platform and popularity to give support and raise awareness of organizations already doing amazing work in this space. To that end, the Global Girls Alliance’s goals include driving public awareness and action, bringing together grass-roots leaders who don’t have necessary funding, fundraising, and engaging people in the United States and around the world. “The world is a sadly dangerous place for women and girls, and we see that again and again,” Obama said on TODAY. “I think young women are tired of it. They’re tired of being undervalued. They’re tired of being disregarded. They’re tired of their voices not being invested in and heard. And it’s not just around the world, it’s happening right here in this country. And if we’re going to change that, we have to give them the tools and the skills through education to be able to lift those voices up.”

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There are going to be a lot of different ways to get involved and engage with the Global Girls Alliance. Grass-roots groups will be able to access a Facebook network where they can share research, resources, and helpful best practices. Global Girls Alliance is also partnering with GoFundMe to create a fundraising platform that will vet specific programs and enable people to give directly to the project of their choice. The Alliance will also work to inspire and challenge young people to learn about important issues and will offer toolkits that girls can take back to their own schools and communities to affect change.

We can’t wait to see what’s next; we all know the power of girls and women can be a massive force for change when we work together.

For more information on the Global Girls Alliance, click here or here.

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Meghan Markle Casually Flew to Canada for a Girls Weekend, and No One Knew About It


Just what has Meghan Markle been up to this August? We now know. One day after the royal made her first public appearance since her August 4th birthday, a new report sheds light on how the actress turned Duchess of Sussex has been spending her hiatus. Get this: Markle is so low-key that she reportedly managed to travel across international waters undetected.

The former Suits star and humanitarian apparently flew to Canada on a commercial airplane, no less, in mid-August to visit her best friend and current stylist, Jessica Mulroney. (She was reportedly responsible for Markle’s tuxedo dress from yesterday.) Her BFF’s name also will ring a bell for close observers of the royal wedding, where Mulroney’s three children adorably served as bridal party members. Royal commentator Omid Scobie confirmed Markle’s trip on Good Morning America and on Twitter, writing, “Duchess Meghan quietly traveled to Toronto last Tuesday for a three-day stay at the family home of close friends Jessica and Ben Mulroney.”

The two friends did totally normal things together in Canada, where Markle lived while filming Suits, like spending time with Mulroney’s family. “Meghan and Jessica spent their days catching up, lounging poolside and playing with children Ivy, Brian and John, who, adds a source, ‘love seeing their Auntie Meg,'” Scobie tweeted. “There was also an evening out with friends.”

Considering the timing of the trip—during August 19—their night out may have been documented by Mulroney, who shared a photo on that day of her and her children dressed up in all white. “Another day, another jumpsuit,” she wrote on Instagram, without giving the slightest hint that she was with Markle. “That Brian face though.”

Scobie called it “the perfect trip ahead of a very busy (and engagement-packed!) fall,” referencing Markle and Prince Harry’s Royal Foundation work engagements and, down the road, their reported upcoming U.S. tour.

The most fascinating part of Markle’s Canada trip, though, is the fact that she got onto a regular plane like any other regular person—and still managed to go mostly undetected. There were reports, however, that surfaced on August 19, with Express UK noting Kensington Palace allegedly requested that Air Canada prevent any other passengers from snapping Markle’s picture. At the time, the headline highlighted the fact that Markle was traveling without Prince Harry.

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Makeup for Melanin Girls Isn't Just Making Products for Women of Color. It's Listening to Them.


While Instagram accounts for makeup are endless, it still often feels like a rare find to stumble across a platform for women of color that isn’t a personal blogger or influencer. Which is why Makeup for Melanin Girls (or MFMG) has become a destination for more than 171,000 women looking to discuss everything from the best nude lipsticks for dark skin tones to colorism in the beauty industry. The passion project began for founder Tomi Gbeleyi in 2016 when she was in college, and has since grown from a hashtag to multiple social media platforms to an indie beauty line that now sells eyeshadows and lipsticks.

Gbeleyi used to model on the side, but says she would always do her own makeup before going to set. “What would happen to me a lot of the time is that I would just be ‘casket ready’ at shoots because they didn’t know how to match my face,” Gbeleyi, now 27, tells Glamour. As frustrating as it can be to have your makeup done by a professional artist who didn’t come prepared with your foundation shade (something nearly every black girl—model or not—has likely encountered at some point), Gbeleyi refused to let it stand in her way. “At that time, my strategy was to figure out how to do my own makeup, so if the makeup artist [messed it up], I could go change it later.” She started seeking out tutorials for women of color on YouTube and it quickly became her favorite pastime.

What she soon came to realize is that there was a vast network of black women sharing tips and hacks online, but the problem was that the conversations were often focused on individual bloggers’ comment sections or discussed in hard-to discover web forums. What the community lacked was one mainstream platform for women with deep skin to come together to talk about favorite foundation brands and brow shaping hacks that suited their needs. On top of that, at the time, it was still rare for brands to showcase bloggers of color using their products.

So she decided to take matters in her own hand, and Makeup for Melanin Girls was born—first as a blog and Instagram, then with accounts on Twitter and Facebook so women of color could unite. With the creation of MFMG, Gbeleyi quickly saw how much a platform like this was needed and how many women related to her frustration. “I was trying to fulfill a need in my own life,” says Gbeleyi, who currently lives in Toronto. “I didn’t realize just how many people it would resonate with. I started sharing a few pictures. And before I knew it, there were 20,000 women following the page.”

After two years of manning the accounts as a hobby—and working at a tech company where she was the only black team member—she decided to take a leap of faith and work on MFMG full-time. Given the success of the account and the fact that she knew exactly what women of color wanted in a makeup line, she took the brand even further and launched the MFMG Glitter Makeup Palette. Every aspect of it was based entirely on feedback from her channels.

It’s that deep dedication that’s earned so much loyalty from her followers. “Makeup For Melanin Girls helped create a space in the industry to celebrate women of color like myself who are often overlooked,” says Gbemi Abiola, a 23-year-old fan from Buffalo, New York. “Because of [the account], I’m more comfortable in my own skin and love myself even more. Melanin is a beautiful thing and it needs to be embraced; not excluded.”

“MFMG understands their customers,” adds Simone Henry-Utecht, 44, who ordered the Glitter Palette because she wanted to feel good before going in for a stem-cell transplant. When she was notified the shipment was running late, she reached out and heard back directly from Gbeleyi. She was blown away by the gesture. “They know that we come in many shades and undertones, but still want to have fun with our looks without looking clownish or dead, which can happen when companies don’t understand how the colors of our skin work,” she says. “That’s why their Glitter Palette is always sold out. It’s the bomb! But for me, one of the most important things about MFMG is Tomi and her customer service, which is something that can be lost in this day and age.”

After a doing a recent survey of roughly 5,500 women Gbeleyi found that 80 percent said—shocker—they’re still having a difficult time finding the right foundation shade. “I knew there was a problem, obviously,” she says. “A lot of our conversations on Makeup for Melanin Girls are about a lack of products. But if you think about how many brands are out there, if 80 percent out of over 5,000 are still saying, ‘I cannot find a foundation for me,’ that’s a huge problem.”

Gbeleyi and her team are currently working tirelessly on foundations scheduled to release in Fall 2019. And while Fenty Beauty may have spearheaded the trend of 40 inclusive foundation shade launches, Gbeleyiis choosing to kick off with 20 shades that will be created from skin scans of real women. You can bet the deep and dark shades won’t go unnoticed. “Some of the default catalogs are very insufficient for darker skin,” she says. “So we want to actually make our foundation based on the skin tones of our own database of women of color.”

“I keep asking people, ‘What do you want?’ Beauty brands [typically] focus on what the brand tells you what you want. That’s dying out,” she adds. “The future of beauty is where people are co-creating brands and making things that people are asking for. The days of, ‘OK we make a product, we spend a ton on advertising and we’re like, ‘Yay, this is great for you,’ is changing.”

Gbeleyi also recently launched a collection of four chocolate-scented nude lipsticks called Skin, with the shade names Desnudo, Flesh (her bestseller), Birthday Suit, and Naked, in collaboration with beauty blogger Ronke Raji, who closely aligns with the brands’ focus. Many women flocked to the lipsticks because they filled a void, that they had been searching for quite some time now.

For the names, Gbeleyi wanted to stay far away from trends she saw her competitors using. “If you see any color that’s called Flesh or Birthday Suit, whether it’s for a cheek or a lip product, it’s likely not going to be a good fit for women of color, period. That’s just the facts,” she says. “So instead of making some fun quirky name, naming it Flesh and having it be a brown color is really much more in sync with what we’re trying to do.”

The bottom line with Makeup for Melanin Girls, she says: “We’re trying to show is that the status quo is insufficient.”

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A Fan Discovered She Took a Picture With 11-Year-Old Blake Lively at a Spice Girls Concert


Like pretty much all of us, Blake Lively was a massive Spice Girls wannabe back in the day. In fact, her fandom was so intense that she actually dressed up as Baby Spice while attending a concert back in 1997—a moment the Internet blessed us with a glimpse of this week when a Twitter user uploaded a picture of herself posing with a very young Lively at the show. As if that adorable-ness wasn’t amazing enough, the real Baby Spice actually commented on the photo, causing Lively to have a very appropriate Spice Girls-related freakout.

On Saturday, Twitter user @briamadrid posted a photo of herself with a young girl rocking the full Baby Spice look—the necklace, the pigtails, the gigantic platform shoes—and said she’d just realized the costumed fan was actually Lively. “Found a picture when I was 5 at my first concert. #SpiceGirls and took a picture with a girl dressed up as Baby Spice who I just realized now was @blakelively,” she wrote.

Lively re-posted the photo on her Instagram, writing, “Pretending to be someone else… since 1997 (Thanks @briaaamadrid for the photo of us at the Spice Girls concert. Sorry -not sorry- I tricked you into thinking I was @emmaleebunton).”

That whole interaction on its own is adorable, but it got even wilder when Emma Lee Bunton, a.k.a. Baby Spice, chimed in to compliment Lively. “So cute, you’re rocking those pigtails @blakelively,” she wrote.

Getting a thumbs-up from Baby Spice was almost too much for Lively, who tweeted a bunch of skull emojis and replied, “Forever bowing down to you. I cannot believe you know who I am. This will never be normal.”

Rumors have been circulating for a while now that the Spice Girls are planning a reunion tour soon, and Mel B recently seemed to confirm as much on the Today show.

If the reunion shows do happen, maybe Lively will have a chance to reprise her Baby Spice role—and we’d be so here for that.

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We've Seen Pictures of Undocumented Boys in Government Facilities. Where Are the Girls?


A two-story house sits on a quiet residential street in San Diego County.

A bottle of light brown nail polish bakes in the sun beside the mailbox, with the words Color Craze printed in a fun, swirly font. Four small cartons of unopened Suncup juices—orange, grape, and apple—also lie in the dirt.

Nine signs alert passersby to stay away with messages like “Warning: Security Cameras In Use” and “No Trespassing.” It’s July 4, just before 4:00 in the afternoon, and two white minivans pull into the driveway and drop off at least six girls, who appear to range in age from 7 to 14, all wearing red shirts. The vans park in front of a side door and the girls quickly stream into the house.

“¡Gracias!” one calls to a chaperone, who declines to comment except to confirm that she had taken the girls on a field trip to celebrate Independence Day. She refers questions to Southwest Key, the same nonprofit that runs the Walmart turned migrant detention facility in Brownsville, Texas, for about 1,500 boys.

I couldn’t help wondering what the girls were told about the holiday, commemorating our country’s adoption of the Declaration of Independence stating that “all men are created equal.” As the Trump administration seeks to deter Central Americans from coming to the U.S. with his immigration crackdown, I’m curious to hear the girls’ thoughts about the holiday and how it felt to celebrate the day with a field trip.

But I can’t ask them any questions.

Inside that two-story house, where the white vans are parked, are the girls—among the ones the nation has been wondering about since the hashtag #WhereAreTheGirls spread across social media. As the Trump administration scrambles to comply with a court order to reunite nearly 3,000 migrant children with their parents by the end of the month, officials have kept the whereabouts of female migrant children shrouded in mystery, allowing journalists to view only the boys’ facilities.

When asked about the location of the girls at a press conference, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said simply, “I don’t know.” She then added that she knew they were in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, to whom Homeland Security transfers most children within 72 hours.

This beige-colored house stands in stark contrast to some of the tent cities and cages where Central American children are kept in Texas. Yellow butterflies flit along a slope of sea figs leading up to the driveway. Mourning doves coo in the trees. A Zillow listing for the five-bedroom, three-bathroom house estimates the value of the property at nearly $900,000. Since 2006, the facility has been operated by Southwest Key. Critics have noted that the nonprofit has made $458 million in profit from detaining children.

Southwest Key declined to comment on the girls’ shelter or to let me inside. I found the house by cross-referencing publicly available documents and interviewing Southwest Key employees who spoke on condition of anonymity. Before it housed migrant children, the site was a group home for abused or neglected boys.

How many of the girls who are staying here were separated from their parents? Southwest Key has said that about 10 percent of the children at its 27 facilities in Arizona, California, and Texas fit that profile. The rest arrived at the border alone, classified as “unaccompanied.” Children who arrived with their parents but were separated from them at the border are now considered to fall under the same umbrella.

The Department of Health and Human Services has attributed its secrecy regarding its facilities for migrant minors to a need to “safeguard the privacy” of the children in its custody. But the girls’ three-level backyard—with lounge furniture, a swing set, a slide, and a basketball court—is clearly visible from the backyard of several neighbors. Both male and female residents of the neighborhood said they could see the girls playing games and doing exercises in the backyard.

Does this make the girls uncomfortable? Or are they just glad to have a view of the neighborhood, and of the sky? I don’t know. I can’t ask them.

Several neighbors have “No Parking” signs in front of their homes. Hollis Barber, 82, said he placed a “Tow-Away Zone” sign on his chain link fence because Border Patrol and unmarked vehicles visiting the girls often fill up the street and block his driveway.

“They take the girls somewhere, somewhere in the mornings,” he said. “And they come back in the evenings.”

Any of the girls who were separated from their parents must be reunited with them by the end of July. They will either need to be released or placed in family detention centers. If the latter option unfolds, they could be facing a downgrade in their living conditions. The Trump administration is planning to house families together in camps on military bases—a far cry from this large house.

I imagine that for a girl who misses her parents, such a downgrade might not be a downgrade at all. Perhaps the hardest part of all of this is being apart from mom and dad.

But I don’t know. I can’t speak to any of the girls.

Jean Guerrero is the Fronteras reporter for KPBS and the author of Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir.



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Now Mel B Says a Spice Girls Reunion Is Actually Happening


The world may finally be getting what it wants (what it really, really wants): a Spice Girls reunion. The long-awaited and oft-rumored reunion officially got confirmation from an actual Spice Girl this week. Mel B (a.k.a Scary Spice) sat down with Hoda Kotb on Wednesday’s episode of the Today show to spill all the details on the ultimate ’90s reunion.

“I’m the only one that keeps on saying we’re going to be performing, which, we are gonna be performing,” she said. “Finally, they’ve got it together. Yes.” And before you ask, Mel B will not stand for Victoria Beckham’s claims that the tour is never going to happen. “She’s always saying that. Stop it,” she said when Kotb brought up Posh Spice’s potential obstacle. “We are touring. Should I have really said that out loud? Yes, we are going to be doing performances together for sure.”

Take this news with a grain of salt, though, since Mel B has previously gotten our hopes up for a reunion tour that never came true. Last year, she heavily hinted that the group would be performing at the royal wedding, but those plans never materialized. “I got divorced and I had to go to court,” she told Kotb this week in an explanation as to why the performance didn’t happen. “Real-life problems.”

Watch her explain this for yourself, below:

In addition to fanning the reunion tour rumor flames, Mel B also shared some pretty special Spice Girls history tidbits with Today‘s viewers, including the squad’s origin story. Apparently, the five women met on the audition circuit and eventually decided to band together — literally. “We all knew each other from the scene, and we were all kind of friends and we’re all so different, we just blended, just like a jigsaw puzzle that just worked,” Mel B said. After struggling to hit the big time as a band, they finally struck gold with 1996’s “Wannabe,” after Mel B wrote the song’s iconic rap verse while she was “in the loo.” “Maybe I did a little tinkle while I was writing,” she joked.

And as for where the Baby, Posh, Scary, Sporty, and Ginger Spice monikers came from? “We never decided the names ourselves, probably it was a lazy journalist who couldn’t remember our names,” said Mel B.



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