In The Dark marked as the first solo single of Selena Gomez in nearly two years. But some fans, however, focused on the alleged cosmetic surgery of the pop icon.

Amid intense scrutiny, Grims throws her weight behind the musician. In a post on X, she writes, “I’ve been on the internet for, like, 48 hours, and despite minor benefits, I might have to leave.”

She continues, “Watched this Selena Gomez video; besides a few weird derp shots that people were able to clip and super misrepresent how she looks, she looks extremely beautiful and is probably one of the most beautiful girls.”

“Imagine what it would feel like if people talked about you this way. Try to imagine the mental fortitude she presumably has,” the 37-year-old writes.

“How do we not utterly morally castigate someone who has a post like this blow up and chooses to keep the clout at the expense of everybody’s mental health? How do you think little girls feel reading stuff like this about another woman?” she adds.

The discourse, Grimes concludes, is “unhealthy as **c**—not just for Selena or the writer but everyone who sees this and engages with this level of dehumanisation.”

• Chinese official says “preliminary consensus” reached.
• US official expects China to delay rare earths curbs for a year.
• Donald Trump optimistic about deal when he meets Xi Jinping.
  

Top Chinese and US economic officials on Sunday hashed out the framework of a trade deal for US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to decide on later this week that would pause steeper American tariffs and Chinese rare earths export controls, US officials said.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that talks on the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur had eliminated the threat of Trump’s 100% tariffs on Chinese imports starting November 1.

Bessent also said that he expects China to delay implementation of its rare earth minerals and magnets licencing regime by a year while the policy is reconsidered.

Chinese officials were more circumspect about the talks and offered no details about the outcome of the meetings.

Trump and Xi are due to meet on Thursday on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Gyeongju, South Korea, to sign off on the terms. While the White House has officially announced the highly anticipated Trump-Xi talks, China has yet to confirm that the two leaders will meet.

“I think we have a very successful framework for the leaders to discuss on Thursday,” Bessent told reporters after he and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer met with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng and top trade negotiator Li Chenggang for their fifth round of in-person discussions since May.

Bessent said he anticipates that a tariff truce with China will be extended beyond its November 10 expiration date, and that China will revive substantial purchases of US soybeans after buying none in September while favouring soybeans from Brazil and Argentina.

US soybean farmers “will feel very good about what’s going on both for this season and the coming seasons for several years” once the deal’s terms are announced, Bessent told the ABC programme “This Week.”

Greer told the “Fox News Sunday” programme that both sides agreed to pause some punitive actions and found “a path forward where we can have more access to rare earths from China, we can try to balance out our trade deficit with sales from the United States.”

Trump expects a deal, Chinese suggest caution

China’s Li Chenggang said the two sides reached a “preliminary consensus” and will next go through their respective internal approval processes.

“The US position has been tough, whereas China has been firm in defending its own interests and rights,” Li said through an interpreter. “We have experienced very intense consultations and engaged in constructive exchanges in exploring solutions and arrangements to address these concerns.”

Trump arrived in Malaysia on Sunday for a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, his first stop in a five-day Asia tour that is expected to culminate in Thursday’s face-to-face with Xi in South Korea.

After the weekend talks, Trump struck a positive tone, saying: “I think we’re going to have a deal with China”.

Trump had threatened new 100% tariffs on Chinese goods and other trade curbs starting on November 1, in retaliation for China’s expanded export controls on rare earth magnets and minerals.

China controls more than 90% of the world’s supply for the materials, which are essential for high-tech manufacturing from electric vehicles to semiconductors and missiles. The export controls and Trump’s threatened retaliation would disrupt a delicate six-month truce under which China and the US reduced tariffs that had quickly escalated to triple-digit rates on each side.

The US and Chinese officials said that, in addition to rare earths, they discussed trade expansion, the US fentanyl crisis, US port entrance fees, and the transfer of TikTok to US ownership control.

Bessent told NBC’s “Meet the Press” programme that the two sides have to iron out details of the TikTok deal, allowing Trump and Xi to “consummate the transaction” in South Korea.

Talking points with Xi include soybeans, Taiwan

On the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit, Trump hinted at possible meetings with Xi in China and the United States.

“We’ve agreed to meet. We’re going to meet them later in China, and we’re going to meet in the US, in either Washington or at Mar-a-Lago,” Trump said.

Among Trump’s talking points with Xi are Chinese purchases of US soybeans, concerns around Taiwan, which China views as its own territory, and the release of jailed Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai.

Trump also said he will seek China’s help in US dealings with Moscow, as Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds on.

Tensions between the world’s two largest economies flared in the past few weeks as a delicate trade truce, reached after a first round of trade talks in Geneva in May and extended in August, failed to prevent the United States and China from hitting each other with more sanctions, export curbs, and threats of stronger retaliatory measures.

China’s expanded controls of rare earths exports have caused a global shortage. That has prompted the United States to consider a block on software-powered exports to China, from laptops to jet engines, according to a Reuters report.

Just as the sun was going down in the heart of old Key West, Florida, a self-described pirate rode his rust-ravaged bike to the Blue Heaven restaurant to meet a friend – a friend we just happened to be in the middle of interviewing. “She said come in!” David Wegman laughed, as he joined Kenny Chesney.

But that’s the thing about Chesney – down here, he’s not really a country music superstar. He’s just another laid-back local. “We know a lot of the same people,” Chesney laughed.

He collects characters like seashells – he met Wegman at Ivan’s Stress-Free Bar down in the British Virgin Islands. “Above the bar was written in shells: ‘No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem,'” Wegman recalled.

That 2002 song, “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems,” helped make Chesney one of the biggest touring acts around. Almost every summer he turns stadiums into beach parties. Among his many accolades: the Academy of Country Music’s Entertainer of the Year Award, which he won four years in a row. And just last week, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame – a career-topping accomplishment that he credits to taking that tropical turn in his career.

“You know what’s crazy?” he said. “I had an 18-song Greatest Hits album, and nobody knew who I was. They knew the songs, but I wasn’t comfortable in my skin yet. I didn’t know who I was supposed to be as an artist yet. I would go do shows and they would go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the guy that sings that song.’ And then, ‘That’s the guy that sings that song.’ When I started being my true, authentic self, that’s when everything changed.”

He could have taken us to some Tiki bar down in the Keys to keep up his tropical brand. But instead, he wanted to show us the room where Ernest Hemingway worked on “To Have and Have Not” and “Green Hills of Africa.”

I said, “The space, it’s almost like sacred place.”

“Yeah, do you feel it? I feel it,” Chesney said. “I spent so much, almost two weeks straight on the bow of my boat in the Virgin Islands reading those books.”

Which might explain why he came down here to work on his first book, out next month: “Heart Life Music.” “This book forced me to pause,” he said.

For all of his love of the islands, he writes it was his own mom who first realized that he may have drifted too far from his East Tennessee roots. “She wanted her 12-year-old boy back in ways, and he was gone. Gone gone gone,” he said.

“She had a hard time finding you, kind of had a hard time reaching you?” I asked.

“It hit me a little bit, but I was so already so addicted to seeking an adventure and all of it, and all these new things happening in my life that I dismissed it.”

He kept going, kept touring, kept writing, until a concert in Indianapolis back in 2009, which he describes as hitting a wall, and crying on stage. “In that moment I was so exhausted and numb to all of it, that it wasn’t making me happy,” he said. “I wasn’t creating the same way.  I wasn’t connecting to the audience. It just hit me.  It took sports to get me out of that funk.”

He grew up playing baseball and football – loving every inning, every down. So, when a song called “The Boys of Fall” crossed his path, he didn’t only record it; he began interviewing coaches and players about sports and life, and turned it into a documentary for ESPN, “Boys of Fall.” “I needed Joe Namath, I needed Bill Parcells,” he said. “I sat in Bobby Bowden’s living room and he talked to me like a deacon in a Baptist church! I woke up one day, and I went, I’m back.”

Now he’s the one doing pre-game pep talks backstage, like at Sphere in Las Vegas. Many on his team have been with him for decades. There’s confidence in familiarity. “If I had to sit on the bus and think about what I’m getting ready to go do, it would – yeah, I don’t do well with that,” he said.

He put on the kind of show his fans expect – a kaleidoscope of sand, sunsets and songs.

When me met him the next morning, he was still buzzing about performing in Sphere. “The first couple of nights, I caught myself singing a song and I was like, Well, this is so cool!  And then, I forgot the words to a song that I actually wrote!”

On stage with him this night was Grace Potter, the singer-songwriter he recruited for a duet, even though country really wasn’t her thing. The two are now lifelong friends.

“There’s people who have always seen him as just the iconic, you know, Statue of David of country music,” she said.

“I’m gonna go to Florence and stand beside it!” he laughed.

“But there’s just so much more underneath it that’s more interesting than the sculpture itself,” Potter added.

Indeed, the off-stage Kenny Chesney is a more complicated guy, a more thoughtful guy, even a little shy if you can believe it. That’s the East Tennessee part that will always remain even as he’s chasing sunsets.

Chesney said, “It takes a certain amount of ego to be up there on stage and to do what I do, right? But I try really hard to leave that person up there. I can’t live that person every day. And I don’t want that person in my life every day, but I’m really glad to meet him when I go back up there.”

READ AN EXCERPT: “Heart Life Music” by Kenny Chesney with Holly Gleason

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Extended interview – Kenny Chesney (Video)

     
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Story produced by Aria Shavelson. Editor: Remington Korper. 

      
See also: 

Kenny Chesney spreads the love to Boston bombing victims (“Sunday Morning”)