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2016-08-24 00:00:00

2016

8.0

24

Alberto Riva

Earthquake flattens towns near Rome, killing dozens

This is a developing story. Check back for updates. A 6.0 magnitude earthquake that struck central Italy early Wednesday has killed dozens of people, flattened much of the town of Amatrice near Rome, and shook the peninsula in a radius of hundreds of miles. Prime minister Matteo Renzi said 120 people are dead, and according to Italian news agency ANSA, hundreds more may still be under the rubble. The first of three major shocks hit at 3:36am local time, about one mile (two kilometers) outside of the small town of Accumoli, in a mountainous area about 100 miles (150 km) northeast of Rome. The quake was felt as far south as Naples and as far north as Bologna, more than 200 miles (300 km) from its epicenter. "Half of my town is gone," Sergio Pirozzi, the mayor of Amatrice, told broadcaster Rai. Local news site Rieti Life quoted him in a tweet as saying that "tens of people are dead" in the town of 2,500. This is a developing story. Check back for updates. A 6.0 magnitude earthquake that struck central Italy early Wednesday has killed dozens of people, flattened much of the town of Amatrice near Rome, and shook the peninsula in a radius of hundreds of miles. Prime minister Matteo Renzi said 120 people are dead, and according to Italian news agency ANSA, hundreds more may still be under the rubble. The first of three major shocks hit at 3:36am local time, about one mile (two kilometers) outside of the small town of Accumoli, in a mountainous area about 100 miles (150 km) northeast of Rome. The quake was felt as far south as Naples and as far north as Bologna, more than 200 miles (300 km) from its epicenter. "Half of my town is gone," Sergio Pirozzi, the mayor of Amatrice, told broadcaster Rai. Local news site Rieti Life quoted him in a tweet as saying that "tens of people are dead" in the town of 2,500. "We fear the death toll will climb," Immacolata Postiglione, the head of emergency services for the Italian Civil Protection agency, said. Thousands of people across the affected region are homeless, according to the agency. Rescue efforts are complicated by the region's rugged geography. Many of the towns that have been hit the hardest are in hard-to-reach mountainous areas; several villages near Amatrice are situated at altitudes up to 3,000 feet (1,000 m) at the end of winding, narrow roads. The town of Accumoli, the quake's epicenter, is in the Appennine Mountains northeast of Rome. "Not a single house is habitable," the mayor of Accumoli, Stefano Petrucci, told ANSA. "We'll have to put everybody in tents." The quake struck near L'Aquila, where an April 2009 earthquake devastated the city, killing 309 people. While the shocks were felt strongly in Rome, there are no reports yet of damage to the city's infrastructure or to its artistic heritage. The Culture Ministry said it was verifying the structural integrity of sites including the Colosseum. Prime minister Matteo Renzi said in a press conference that he plans to visit Amatrice on Wednesday afternoon. VICE News Italy contributed reporting for this story.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/ywjjd5/earthquake-flattens-towns-near-rome-killing-dozens

Vice News

2016-11-09 05:16:20

2016

11.0

9

Dara Lind

How exit polls work: when they're released, which states they cover, and what they mean

The American public will find out whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump has won the 2016 presidential election long before the last vote is counted. Or rather, we’ll think we know. Because as polls are closing across America, media outlets are releasing exit poll results — predicting who will win a state, and providing more information about who really turned out to vote and why. The exit polls will shape the story of the election — they’ll provide the record that people will refer to in the future when they talk about what issues mattered and how our 45th president built a successful coalition. But to understand how accurate the exit polls really are — and whether you should trust their predictions about who’s going to win — you have to understand how the exit polls are conducted, and why. If you’re a critical consumer of exit poll data, you’re less likely to be duped by bad information on election night, and more likely to understand whether the exit polls are really telling the story of the 2016 election. Every November election, exit polls are conducted by a group of media outlets called the National Election Pool: NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, CNN, and the Associated Press. They hire a pollster to conduct the exit poll, but they're the ones that own the information — and that get to be the first to report the results. The actual polling happens in two parts. The most visible part of the poll happens in person on Election Day. An army of thousands of interviewers are sent to hundreds of polling places around the country. Interviewers approach a certain number of voters who are leaving the polling place — the exact fraction surveyed is secret — and ask them to fill out the written exit poll survey. Pollsters estimate they’ll interview about 85,000 people on Election Day. But part of the exit poll has already happened before Election Day. As early voting has become more popular, it's gotten harder to predict vote totals just by talking to people who vote on Election Day. So for the past several elections, exit pollsters have started calling people and asking if they voted early or absentee — then conducting exit poll interviews by phone. (In 2016, pollsters estimated they’d contact about 16,000 voters this way.) The primary purpose of the exit poll is to allow TV networks and the AP to project who's won races as soon after the polls close as possible. That means that in 2016, only 28 states are going to have state exit poll results published. That includes obvious presidential battlegrounds (Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin), states with key Senate races (Indiana, Missouri), and states that are just really big (New York, California). If a state is clearly a safe state for either Democrats or Republicans — Massachusetts or Tennessee, for example — exit pollsters still send people to do interviews there, for the purpose of the national poll. But they don’t collect enough interviews to publish reliable poll results. The exit poll pool cut back its efforts since 2012, when 31 states were surveyed in depth. That could lead to some surprises. Alaska, for example, isn’t being surveyed this year but has been surprisingly tight in presidential polling. But it’s hard to imagine either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump paving a path to 270 electoral votes without the exit poll identifying the winner. But the exit poll isn’t just about whom people voted for — that’s why there are interviewers even in safe states. Voters are asked to provide basic demographic information like gender, age, and ethnicity. Furthermore, they're asked some questions about their personal viewpoints and behaviors — like their religion and churchgoing habits — and questions about major issues facing the country. That means the exit poll data is actually more detailed, in some ways, than the official US Census vote tallies that come out several weeks after the election. It can offer the first hints — and often the most important ones — to what voters thought this election was about. That's very important to pundits as they try to interpret what it means. In 2004, for example, post-election chatter focused on "values voters." Voters who attended religious services regularly had overwhelmingly voted for George W. Bush. That narrative came out of the exit poll data. Of course, what voters say is important to them is partly what campaigns have told voters is important — there's political science research suggesting that when a campaign hammers particular issues, those are the issues that the candidate's supporters say are most important to them. But the exit poll is still the best opportunity the national media has, in some ways, to figure out who voted, why, and how. The media outlets running the exit poll want to be able to describe who's voting, and whom they're voting for, to the public as early as possible. But they don't want to have any influence on who ends up voting — they don't want anyone deciding not to vote because they've already seen what the exit polls say and they don't think their vote will matter. (There's some evidence that this happened back in 1980, when some outlets projected that Ronald Reagan would win the presidential election before polls closed on the West Coast.) In some countries, like the United Kingdom, it's actually illegal for any media outlet to report exit poll results before the polls close. In the US, it's not illegal, but there's a binding agreement among the media outlets that run the exit poll that none of them are allowed to leak any results before the polls have closed. Sometimes, networks slip up. In 2014, for example, Fox News showed early exit poll results in New Hampshire before polls had closed there in a tight Senate race. The network argued that it hadn’t broken the exit poll rules because it technically didn’t show how many respondents had voted for Jeanne Shaheen or Scott Brown — it showed how many people said they would vote for each candidate if the race came down to a runoff. (Other outlets disagreed, but Fox wasn’t kicked out of the consortium that uses the exit poll.) In 2016, some media outlets are trying to find their way around that agreement: Slate, for example, is using its own election data tool to share turnout projections in real time. But it’s not using the official exit poll results. Reporters are allowed to see some of the exit poll results as they're being compiled throughout the day, but they're under super-strict security — we're talking no-phones-allowed-in-the-room-where-the-results-are-kept levels of security. And there's a strictly regimented schedule for when exit poll results can get released. Around 5 pm ET, media outlets are allowed to start reporting what the exit poll says about who turned out to vote — the racial, age, or party breakdown of voters. But these are preliminary results, and they're going to be skewed toward people who voted early in the day. So groups who tend to vote later in the day — like young voters — might be underrepresented in the stats that first get announced. As soon as polls close in a particular state, media outlets are allowed to project who's going to win elections there, based on the exit poll results. In deep blue or deep red states, where the outcome of the election isn't really in doubt, media outlets don't waste any time projecting winners. So the minute 7 pm hits on the East Coast, for example, you can expect to see CNN and the AP make a bunch of projections at once. In states with closer races, media outlets will often wait to get the final exit poll results (including people who voted right before the polls closed), or wait to see how actual vote tallies stack up when precincts start reporting official vote totals. There has never been an actual leaked exit poll in the US. But there have been plenty of hoaxes. If you see anyone on Facebook sharing "LEAKED EXIT POLL RESULTS" while the polls are still open, be very, very skeptical. This will be a little tricky in 2016, because Slate’s real-time Votecastr project might confuse people into thinking that exit poll results are being leaked or released throughout the day. As long as you understand what those results really are — estimates of who will win based on turnout projections — you’ll be fine, but don’t mistake them for “leaked” exit poll results. And definitely don't decide not to vote just because you saw something in a leaked exit poll. No. In fact, there are some particular challenges that exit polls have faced for the past several elections that they still haven't found a way to work out: Early voters. The phone poll for early voters is a relatively new addition to the exit poll— and it’s still a relatively minor one, compared with in-person polling. Early voting itself, meanwhile, has gotten very popular very quickly. In key states like Nevada and Florida, it’s estimated that fewer people will show up to vote on Election Day than showed up during early voting. The exit poll understands the huge role early voters will play — pollsters estimated to Pew that 35 to 40 percent of all voting will happen early this year — but it’s not clear that their polling can accurately capture who those people are. It runs into the problems any phone poll has — namely, that it's difficult to poll people who only have mobile phones. And because this year saw such a huge surge in early voting, it’s hard to use past years to predict how representative a sample is. It’s unlikely that any state is going to get called the wrong way because the exit polls didn’t include enough early voters there. Networks are aware of the early voting data, and if, say, the exit polls suggest Donald Trump will eke out a narrow victory in Nevada, networks will probably wait until some of the votes are counted to see whether Trump was really able to surmount Hillary Clinton’s early voting lead there. But the demographic and other data the exit poll provides might be skewed in favor of people who voted in person — who might not be the voters who decided this election. Small groups. Like any poll, the smaller a sample size is, the less likely it is to be representative. So the exit poll is pretty reliable when it comes to large demographics (men, women, Democrats, Republicans) but less reliable when it gets to small demographics (young voters, Jewish voters). Voters of color. In addition to the general problems with smaller voting demographics, analysts believe the exit poll has a tendency to oversample a particular kind of voter of color — the kind who lives in majority-white areas. Here's the logic. Even though the public doesn't know exactly how the exit poll chooses where to go, it's possible to make some educated guesses. The exit poll is trying to predict the margin of victory for one candidate over another across the state. So when it decides which polling places to put interviewers outside of, it's reasonable to assume that it's choosing lots of swing precincts — precincts that are harder to predict and likely to affect the outcome. Those are going to be largely white precincts. Alternatively, says Matt Barreto of Latino Decisions, exit pollsters might choose a precinct as a benchmark based on the last cycle. For example, if a precinct voted for the Democratic senator 70 percent to 30 percent in 2008, the pollster might choose to put an exit poll interviewer at that precinct to see if the Democrat is getting less than 70 percent of the vote this time around. But pollsters are not necessarily paying attention to the racial makeup of those precincts. Here's why this is a problem: The voters of color pollsters run into in majority-white precincts might not be representative of the voters of color across the state. In particular, according to Latino Decisions, voters of color living among whites are "more assimilated, better educated, higher income, and more conservative than other minority voters." Check out the difference in the percentage of nonwhite voters who had a college degree in 2010, according to the US Census versus the exit poll: And the problem is even worse for Latino voters, because exit polls are almost never offered in Spanish — even though more than a quarter of Latino voters prefer Spanish to English. So the exit polls oversample English-speaking Latinos. All these issues together mean that the exit polls sometimes think Latino voters are much more favorable to Republicans than they actually are. In 2010, for example, Harry Reid won reelection to the Senate by turning out Latinos to vote against his Republican challenger, Sharron Angle, who was running as a hardcore immigration hawk. But according to the exit polls, 30 percent of Nevada Latinos voted for Angle — many more than voted for John McCain for president in 2008. (When the official vote tallies came out, it became clear that more than 90 percent of Latinos had voted for Reid.) Nope! As a matter of fact, even with the issues listed above, exit polls have historically been biased toward Democrats more often than they've been biased toward Republicans. In 2004, for example, the exit polls overestimated John Kerry's share of the vote (by "more than one standard error") in 26 states; it overestimated George W. Bush's share in only four states. The reason for the error? Bush voters were more likely than Kerry voters to refuse to answer a pollster's questions after they left the voting booth. Traditionally, the exit polls don’t get the outcome wrong that often. The errors in exit polls aren't enough to get the outcome of the race wrong — they just might misstate how much the victor won by, or who supported him/her the most. Admittedly, this is not a typical election, and it’s possible the electorate won’t be typical either. The data from early voting suggests that pollsters might have underestimated the Latino vote and (perhaps) misjudged how many of them would vote for Hillary Clinton. That’s the sort of error the exit polls would also be liable to make. On the other side, Republican champions of Donald Trump suggest he’ll be able to turn out unexpected numbers of white voters without college degrees — who are liable to live in deep red areas where the exit pollsters won’t be either. But these are reasons to be cautious of the demographics that the exit polls present in their detailed data. Exit polls aren’t the only reason a state gets called. By the time exit polls can be released, networks have a day’s worth of information about how an election has gone in a particular state — and if they think that information shows the exit poll might be wrong, they’ll wait to call the state for Trump or Clinton. If the polls close on Election Day and CNN immediately projects that your preferred presidential candidate will lose your state, don't hold your breath for an eventual victory. But if the exit polls project your candidate will win and he or she ends up losing, it’s the fault of the exit poll, not proof of a rigged election.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/8/13563308/exit-polls-2016-time-election-results

Vox

2018-05-02 00:00:00

2018

5.0

2

Guess Who This Pigtail Princess Turned Into!

Before this blue-eyed beauty was playin' games with Hollywood's elite, she was just another cool kid with braids growing up in Northampton, United Kingdom. Can you guess who she is?!

https://www.tmz.com/2018/05/02/guess-who-this-pigtail-princess-turned-into/

TMZ

2017-10-24 00:00:00

2017

10.0

24

Khalid Says Crotch-Grabs Aren't Cool at Concerts

Warning to Khalid fans: don't go grabbin' the R&B star's junk if you're ever in the front row at one of his concerts, because he thinks it's hella disrespectful. We got Khalid at LAX Monday and asked him what he thought about a fan copping a feel of Harry Styles' privates mid-performance over the weekend. Khalid thinks the fan crossed the line since being a pop star and getting felt up onstage don't go hand in hand ... at least not anymore. Khalid says he doesn't mind getting touchy-feely with fans but dude's got his boundaries.

https://www.tmz.com/2017/10/24/khalid-crotch-grabs-off-limits-concerts/

TMZ

2018-03-04 00:00:00

2018

3.0

4

Florida Senate rejects ban on assault weapons, votes to arm teachers

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (Reuters) - The Florida Senate rejected a proposal to ban assault weapons, and voted for a measure to arm some teachers, weeks after 17 people were killed in the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history. An amendment that would have banned assault weapons attached to a wider bill failed on Saturday in a largely party-line vote, in response to the Feb. 14 killing of 14 students and three faculty at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Parkland. The vote was 20-17 against the assault weapon ban, with two Republicans joining all of the senate’s 15 Democrats in support of the proposal, the Miami Herald reported. The full bill, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, is expected to pass the state Senate on Monday, then go to the Florida House. After the Senate rejected the ban, Stoneman Douglas student Jaclyn Corin tweeted, “This breaks my heart, but we will NOT let this ruin our movement. This is for the kids.” Fellow classmate David Hogg, who has become one of the school’s leading activists on gun safety, tweeted, “Elections are going to be fun!” Also, an amendment to remove a provision to train and arm some teachers failed. The bill raises the minimum age to buy a rifle or a shotgun to 21 from 18 and bans the use, sale or possession of bump stocks, which were used in the Oct. 1 shooting deaths of 58 people in Las Vegas. The device effectively turns semi-automatic weapons into automatics. The bill includes $400 million in funding for schools to address mental health issues, the Herald reported. Nikolas Cruz, the accused 19-year-old killer who was expelled from Stoneman Douglas, had a history of run-ins with the law and school officials. The Broward County school system and sheriff’s department have been criticized for not acting on red flags on Cruz’s mental health problems and potentially violent behavior. Reporting by Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-guns-florida/florida-senate-rejects-ban-on-assault-weapons-votes-to-arm-teachers-idUSKBN1GG0QT

U.S.

Reuters

2019-06-29 00:00:00

2019

6.0

29

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and top deputy ordered to stand trial in 2020

LOS ANGELES, June 28 (Reuters) - Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her former second-in-command at the Silicon Valley blood-testing startup were ordered on Friday to stand trial next year on fraud charges stemming from their claims about the company’s technology, court documents show. During a hearing in federal court in San Jose, California, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila set jury selection to begin in the trial of Holmes, 35, and former Theranos President Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, on July 28, 2020, according to minutes of the proceedings. Both have pleaded not guilty. Davila ordered the trial itself, which was expected to last three months, to begin in August 2020. Prosecutors have said Holmes and Balwani used advertising and solicitations to encourage doctors and patients to use its blood testing laboratory services, despite knowing the company could not produce accurate and reliable results consistently. The criminal charges came after Holmes settled civil fraud charges brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under which she was barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years. (Reporting by Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Editing by Tom Brown)

https://www.reuters.com/article/crime-theranos/theranos-founder-elizabeth-holmes-and-top-deputy-ordered-to-stand-trial-in-2020-idUSL2N240010

Technology, Media and Telecommunications

Reuters

2016-06-25 18:15:00

2016

6.0

25

Elisabeth O'Leary

Trump plays down post-Brexit market losses

ABERDEEN, Scotland (Reuters) - U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump played down market turmoil in the wake of Britain's decision to leave the European Union on a visit to his Trump International golf course in Aberdeen on Saturday. Wearing an open-necked shirt, a suit and a white baseball cap with his slogan "Make America great again", Trump was asked if he was worried about the volatility in financial markets following Britain's vote to leave the EU on Thursday. "There's always turmoil no matter where you go, no matter what you do," he said. Global stock markets lost about $2 trillion in value on Friday after the vote, while sterling fell to a 31-year low. Trump, whose mother was Scottish, was greeted by around a dozen protesters at the course waving Mexican flags, rainbow flags for Gay Pride day and signs that read "Donald stop the hating" and "Shame on you for ruining a beautiful landscape." Trump last year proposed a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States as a response to Islamist attacks in Paris and California, causing a furor in Europe. In an article in a Scottish newspaper earlier this year, Trump pointed to his determination to overcome local opposition to his golf course projects as an example of the leadership skills that Americans would get if he were to become president. He also met with News Corporation media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his wife Jerry Hall, giving them a tour of the course in a golf cart. (Reporting by Gerhard Mey and Carlo Allegri; writing by Elisabeth O'Leary. Editing by Jane Merriman)

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-plays-down-post-brexit-market-losses-2016-6

Business Insider

2017-10-26 15:20:01

2017

10.0

26

Caroline Framke

Watch: Comedian Julio Torres has some useless but hilarious Halloween costume ideas for you

One of the best things about watching Julio Torres do comedy is listening to the audience try to figure out what, exactly, he’s doing. The Saturday Night Live writer responsible for sharp and offbeat sketches like “Wells for Boys” and “Papyrus,” Torres and his jokes never quite go where you might expect them to — a rule of thumb that held hilariously true Wednesday night when he dropped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to share a few Halloween costume ideas. “If you’re struggling for a costume, why not something easy?” Torres began. “Like, the Lost City of Atlantis?” Fallon’s studio audience, unsure of how to respond to the suggestion, laughed nervously as a benign Torres blinked out at them. But as he continued, his dry delivery of increasingly strange costume ideas got everyone — including a barely contained Fallon — on board. Julio Torres (@juliothesquare) offers some ideas for Halloween costumes, such as "A Raccoon, Foolishly Wearing All The Diamonds He Stole" pic.twitter.com/fulx4gLArG Torres continued: “How about a Ferrero Rocher chocolate? Or an email forward from your dad? Or a raccoon, foolishly wearing all the diamonds he stole?” Whenever Fallon asked him to come up with something “simpler,” Torres shrugged and suggested yet more existential options like, “Turtle who just told off another turtle and now has to turn away and storm off very slowly.” For his own costume, Torres revealed, he’s stuck between “being a secret or a rumor.” I could continue to list the punchlines, but trust me: There’s no substitute for watching Torres deliver them himself, in his unflappable deadpan. No matter what, if you do end up going out for Halloween dressed as a “Tooth fairy who’s like, ‘Dear god, I can’t afford to buy more teeth, what do I even do with these?!’” for Halloween this year, just make sure to give him credit. You can watch the full clip embedded above, and Julio Torres’s recent half-hour standup special on Comedy Central’s website.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/10/26/16552678/julio-torres-jimmy-fallon-halloween-costume-ideas

Vox

2016-03-30 15:45:00

2016

3.0

30

Beckett Mufson

Kevin Spacey as Richard Nixon Meets Michael Shannon as Elvis

Two of the most easily-impersonated figures of the 20th century, Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon, are going to be portrayed by two of the greatest actors of our time, Kevin Spacey and Michael Shannon, in a new movie called Elvis and Nixon. The film, directed by Liza Johnson, is based on the true and documented story of the time Elvis approached the President of the United States about becoming an undercover narcotics agent. He really wanted a badge. They took a photograph together that became the most requested image in the National Archives, and the seed of the new film, which—if you didn't think it could get any more ridiculous—also stars Johnny Knoxville, Colin Hanks, Evan Peters, and Sky Ferreira.  In the featurette below, watch Spacey talk about how realistic his Nixon impression is, Shannon describe what it's like being inside Elvis' head, and Knoxville belly laughing about the uproariousness of the whole situation. Learn more about Elvis and Nixon on the official website. Related: National Portrait Gallery Hangs House of Cards'Frank Underwood Meet the Man Who Made Elvis' Signature Gold Suit This Is American History on Steroids

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gvwnax/kevin-spacey-richard-nixon-michael-shannon-elvis-presley

Entertainment

Vice

2019-06-13 00:00:00

2019

6.0

13

Sinéad Carew

Oil surges on tanker attacks; stocks rise on Fed rate cut expectations

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil futures rose on Thursday after attacks on two tankers off the coast of Iran, while the U.S. Treasury yield curve steepened and stocks rose following economic data seen as strengthening the case for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates this year. Wall Street’s major stock indexes closed higher after falling for two days as investors regained their appetite for risk assets. The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week, potentially adding to concerns about the U.S. labor market after May job growth slowed. Other data showed import prices fell by the most in five months in May in the latest indication of muted inflation pressures, adding to expectations the Fed will cut rates this year. “There are still concerns over geopolitical risk,” said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial in Newark, New Jersey. “The market is waiting to hear from the Fed ... and whether they will deviate at all from their latest stance, and I call it an active dovish position, to see if they continue to lay the groundwork for a rate cut perhaps later in the summer.” The S&P pared gains slightly after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, without offering concrete evidence, the United States believed Iran was responsible for tanker attacks in the Gulf of Oman. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 101.94 points, or 0.39%, to 26,106.77, the S&P 500 gained 11.8 points, or 0.41%, to 2,891.64 and the Nasdaq Composite added 44.41 points, or 0.57%, to 7,837.13. The pan-European STOXX 600 index rose 0.16% and MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe gained 0.06%. After falling hard on Wednesday, oil futures rebounded sharply on the news of the tanker attacks near Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, a key passage for seaborne oil cargoes. U.S. crude settled up 2.23% at $52.28 while Brent rose $1.14 to $61.31. Increased expectations of Fed rate cuts pulled short-dated U.S. Treasury yields lower on Thursday, steepening the yield curve ahead of Friday’s retail sales data and the Fed’s meeting next week. Benchmark 10-year notes last rose 9/32 in price to yield 2.0979%, from 2.127% late on Wednesday. In currencies, the U.S. dollar was little changed against the euro as investors were slow to take large positions before the Fed meeting and the G20 summit later in June when U.S. and China leaders are expected to discuss trade. The dollar index, which tracks the greenback against six major currencies, rose 0.05%, with the euro down 0.12% to $1.1273. The Japanese yen strengthened 0.11% versus the greenback, to 108.40 per dollar, while sterling was last trading at $1.2675, down 0.09% on the day. Gold prices edged higher on expectations for a U.S. rate cut after the soft inflation data, although the uptick in equities capped gains. Spot gold added 0.6% to $1,341.37 an ounce. (Graphic: Fed Funds rate projections link: tmsnrt.rs/2XgZ7Jj). (Graphic: Position of evacuated tankers in Gulf of Oman link: tmsnrt.rs/2X6nIQF). Reporting by Sinead Carew; Additional reporting by Karen Brettell and Kate Duguid in New York, Marc Jones and Tommy Wilkes in London, Hideyuki Sano in Tokyo; Editing by Leslie Adler and Tom Brown

https://www.reuters.com/article/global-markets/global-markets-oil-surges-on-tanker-attacks-stocks-rise-on-fed-rate-cut-expectations-idUSL2N23K1FO

Business News

Reuters

2017-01-31 00:00:00

2017

1.0

31

Alexa Liautaud

Boy Scouts decide to allow transgender youth in their ranks

Boy Scouts decide to allow transgender youth in their ranks Boy Scouts decide to allow transgender youth in their ranks The Boy Scouts of America will now allow transgender youth to join its ranks, overturning a 100-plus-years-old position on gender identity, the group said in a statement Monday. The Boy Scouts will accept registration based on the gender identity individuals put on their applications, regardless of whether it matches their birth certificate. “After weeks of significant conversations at all levels of our organization, we realized that referring to birth certificates as the reference point is no longer sufficient,” said Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh in a video announcement that accompanied the statement. In December, a New Jersey boy named Joe Maldonado, who just turned 9, was kicked out of the Cub Scouts after the organization realized he was born physically as a girl. His mother, Kristie Maldonado, told the Associated Press she was “so grateful” for the decision but still had reservations. “It’s a big change for everybody that all are accepted now … I’m so delighted that they finally called and they did say this, but I’m still angry.” Maldonado, told the Associated Press. The Boy Scouts of America will now allow transgender youth to join its ranks, overturning a 100-plus-years-old position on gender identity, the group said in a statement Monday. The Boy Scouts will accept registration based on the gender identity individuals put on their applications, regardless of whether it matches their birth certificate. “After weeks of significant conversations at all levels of our organization, we realized that referring to birth certificates as the reference point is no longer sufficient,” said Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh in a video announcement that accompanied the statement. In December, a New Jersey boy named Joe Maldonado, who just turned 9, was kicked out of the Cub Scouts after the organization realized he was born physically as a girl. His mother, Kristie Maldonado, told the Associated Press she was “so grateful” for the decision but still had reservations. “It’s a big change for everybody that all are accepted now … I’m so delighted that they finally called and they did say this, but I’m still angry.” Maldonado, told the Associated Press. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, was the national president of BSA from 2010 to 2012 and remains on the board today. Tillerson “led the charge” on gay rights, Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council told the Christian Post. The move reflects a broader trend toward being more inclusive of the LGBT community. In 2013, the Boy Scouts of America voted to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. “No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone,” it said in a statement. In 2015, the organization lifted the ban on having gay scout leaders. LGBT activists heralded the move, while emphasizing there was still much more to do. “While this trend is very encouraging, take heed: It is also likely to bring up outrage, resentment, and fear,” transgender activist and author Lee Schubert said in an email. “But parents, don’t give up. You are your child’s prime advocate, and you can help them as they begin this journey.”

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/wjzmkq/boy-scouts-decide-to-allow-transgender-youth-in-their-ranks

Vice News

2016-10-07 07:00:00

2016

10.0

7

Annabel Gat

Daily Horoscope: October 07, 2016

The Moon in Sagittarius connects with Uranus in Aries at 2:26 AM, creating some sparks early this morning—did any genius ideas or surprising messages come your way? Chatty Mercury enters Libra at 3:56 AM, creating a social, cooperative vibe. The Sun in Libra clashes with the lord of the underworld, Pluto, in Capricorn at 3:31 PM: Watch out for obsessive thoughts, manipulators, and shady people. The Moon enters no-bullshit Capricorn at 4:40 PM, then clashes with Mercury at 6:40 PM: Clarity in communication will be key this evening. All times EST. The Moon enters materially minded Earth sign Capricorn and lights up the fame and fortune sector of your chart! Reflect on your professional goals today. Communication in relationships is improving, thanks to Mercury in diplomatic Libra. The Moon enters fellow Earth sign Capricorn today, sending you good vibes! Some stress around work, school, and your commute will pop up today, so give yourself extra time. Your ruling planet, Mercury, changes signs today, entering fellow Air sign Libra. Connecting with others is going to be way easier than it has been! You're in an emotional mood today, so surround yourself with loving people. The Moon enters Capricorn today, the sign opposite from you on the zodiac wheel, which means your attention is now on relationships. Stressful conversations may come up, but people are willing get along thanks to Mercury in lovely Libra. Inspiring dreams came last night, as did some surprising text messages. Chatty Mercury enters Libra today, lighting up the communication sector of your chart—watch out for news! But be careful about who you share information with today. The Moon enters fellow Earth sign Capricorn today, lighting up the sector of your chart that rules parties, romance, and creativity. People think of Capricorn as being an uptight energy; however, this sea-goat is devilish as hell. Excitement is on the way. Logical Mercury enters your sign today, making you even smarter than you were to begin with! Some intense stuff will come up, especially concerning your home and family. Be clear about your boundaries. Your intuition is stronger than usual now that Mercury is in Air sign Libra! But your gut instinct isn't all you're relying on—you're smart as hell, thanks to the Moon in Capricorn lighting up the part of your chart that rules the mind. No one will be able to get anything past you! Mercury enters charming Air sign Libra today and lights up the friendship sector of your chart. This is a wonderful time to network and make new friends! The Moon enters Capricorn today: You're feeling serious, especially about money. The Moon enters your sign today, Capricorn! This is a wonderful time to reflect on your emotions. Are you feeling safe? Supported? Loved? Lots of talk around career and your reputation will begin happening, too, now that Mercury is in Libra. Give yourself a break, Aquarius! You're in the mood to fly off and have adventures now that Mercury is in fellow Air sign Libra (where it's lighting up the travel and learning sector of your chart). However, the Moon enters grounded Capricorn today, insisting you take it slow and unwind. The Moon enters Capricorn today and lights up the friendship sector of your chart, while Mercury enters Libra, encouraging you to look beneath the surface of your relationships. What's in the stars for you in October? Read your monthly horoscope here. Want these horoscopes sent straight to your inbox? Click here to sign up for the newsletter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjgdjq/daily-horoscope-october-07-2016

Astro Guide

Vice

2016-06-01 20:14:12

2016

6.0

1

Noah Kulwin

Sheryl Sandberg: Peter Thiel isn't using Facebook resources to destroy Gawker, so it's not our problem

Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who is attempting to destroy Gawker Media by funding lawsuits against it, has long served on the Facebook board of directors. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, onstage at the Code Conference with CTO Mike Schroepfer, told Kara Swisher that because Thiel isn't using Facebook resources to go after Gawker, it's not Facebook's problem. "Issues of independence in media are key to democracy," Sandberg said. "Peter did what he did on his own. Not as a board member — and you should talk to him." There's some recent precedent here. Back in February, when Facebook board member Marc Andreessen made an offensive tweet toward Indians in the aftermath of Facebook's Free Basics mess, Mark Zuckerberg quickly distanced the company from Andreessen's remarks. Sandberg says the Thiel thing is different. "It almost looked like [Andreessen] was speaking for Facebook," she explained. "There's been no implication that [Thiel] was speaking for Facebook." In response to an audience question from ex-Vox Media editor Joshua Topolsky, Sandberg added that "these are hard issues, and no one's going to pretend it's easy for the companies." "Peter did what he did as an independent person and he didn't get any Facebook resources," Sandberg argued. "Gawker Media is a partner, they’re in our program ... this was something done independently with no Facebook resources." Nick Denton, the CEO of Gawker Media, will be onstage at the Code Conference tomorrow. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11833666/sheryl-sandberg-peter-thiel-gawker

Vox

2018-08-08 00:00:00

2018

8.0

8

Pete Schroeder

Trump administration cuts staff at financial markets watchdog: source

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration moved on Wednesday to shrink a government agency tasked with identifying looming financial risks, notifying around 40 staff members they would be laid off, according to a person familiar with the changes. The employees at the Office of Financial Research (OFR) were formally told on Wednesday they will lose their jobs as part of a broader reorganization of the agency that was created in the wake of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis, the source said. The overhaul forms part of a broader push by the Trump administration to reduce government bureaucracy by slashing government jobs and cutting regulations. Staff at the OFR, an independent bureau within the U.S. Treasury that analyzes market trends to spot financial risks, were told in January that jobs would be eliminated as the administration sought to cut the OFR’s budget by 25 percent to around $76 million, the person said. Some staff have left voluntarily up until this point, this person said. They added that the OFR is also working with the Treasury to find new roles for other OFR employees. “We are working to make OFR a more efficient organization with a stronger workforce and culture to better execute on the mission,” a spokesman for the Treasury said in an email statement. “The plan to reshape the workforce was announced to OFR employees in January, and the headcount reduction is an important step toward streamlining operations and reducing costs,” he added. In its 2018 budget request, the OFR said its financial year 2016 full-time headcount was 208 but that it aimed to reduce that to around 139. The headcount target remains at approximately 140, roughly 65 percent of the agency’s peak 217 staff, the source said. The OFR has for years been under attack from congressional Republicans and other critics who claim the agency is unproductive, unnecessary and another form of intrusive government bureaucracy. Consumer advocates say the bureau provides a critical function by gathering data on areas such as banking, lending and trading from the country’s complex web of federal and state regulators to provide a bird’s-eye view of system-wide risks. The OFR is one of several financial regulators being overhauled under President Donald Trump, including the Financial Stability Oversight Council, also housed within the Treasury, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. These watchdogs have frozen or are rolling back rules introduced following the financial crisis, such as curbs on predatory lenders and the designation of some firms as systemically risky. The OFR’s original head, Richard Berner, left at the end of 2017. Ken Phelan, a Treasury official, has served as its acting director since then. The administration has nominated Dino Falaschetti, an economist for congressional Republicans, to fill the role on a full-time basis. His nomination is pending before the U.S. Senate. Reporting by Michelle Price; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Tom Brown

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-ofr-cuts/trump-administration-cuts-staff-at-financial-markets-watchdog-source-idUSKBN1KT23O

Politics

Reuters

2016-09-09 00:00:00

2016

9.0

9

Nayland Blake

What Can't Be Seen

Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads  

https://hyperallergic.com/321891/what-cant-be-seen/

Hyperallergic

2019-01-28 00:00:00

2019

1.0

28

Tisha Campbell-Martin Accuses Duane Martin of Physical Abuse

Tisha Campbell-Martin claims her estranged husband has been abusive for years ... alleging he flew into a violent rage as recently as last month. The "Martin" star filed for a restraining order against Duane Martin ... alleging he once punched her in the chest with a closed fist. In the docs, she says in December, Duane "grabbed me by my arm to try to get me in the bedroom." She claims she filed a police report in January about multiple alleged physical altercations. According to the docs, obtained by TMZ, Duane started physically, emotionally and mentally abusing Tisha at the start of their marriage in 1996. She says he berated her about her weight and inability to land roles because of it. As for why she's speaking now ... Tisha says, "I can no longer live in fear of retaliation ... the need [to] press criminal charges for his acts overshadows the embarrassment of making his crimes against me public through this report." A judge has now granted Tisha the temporary restraining order, which requires Duane to stay at least 100 yards away from her. As you know ... Tisha and Duane are in the middle of a bitter divorce.

https://www.tmz.com/2019/01/28/tisha-campbell-martin-accuses-duane-martin-abuse-restraining-order/

TMZ

2019-03-18 00:00:00

2019

3.0

18

Miley Cyrus Breaks Down in Tears at Janice Freeman's Memorial

Miley Cyrus was so overcome with emotion at the memorial service for one of her favorite 'Voice' contestants ... she couldn't fight back the tears. Miley attended the Celebration of Life for Janice Freeman Monday at Mariners Church in Irvine ... where she poured her heart out and honored the former 'Voice' singer. You see Miley break down but she still manages to get a laugh when she says, "I was never her coach, ever. She was always mine." Before surrendering the stage to her dad, Billy Ray, who led a rousing rendition of "Amazing Grace" ... Miley had some touching words for Janice, whom Miley was paired up with during season 13 of "The Voice." Miley said, "I've learned more from her than anyone that I've ever gotten the honor to be in the room with, not just vocally, I should've gotten more lessons than I did, but she taught me everything that I know about love." She went on to say, "And, to be here, and I had planned on singing a song for her, but just losing her is just too much for me. So ... my dad's gonna take care of this for me. But, I'll always be your sister, I'm here for you, and I'm here for your family, and Janice I'll miss you more than I could ever say." Miley joined her dad in song. We broke the story ... Janice died from a blood clot in her lungs. She had been battling a combination of bronchitis and lupus. Janice was 33.

https://www.tmz.com/2019/03/18/miley-cyrus-breaks-down-tears-janice-freeman-memorial-the-voice/

TMZ

2019-06-17 21:20:00

2019

6.0

17

Dylan Scott

Trump’s new health care plan, health reimbursement accounts, explained

President Trump long ago gave up on his promise to deliver “health care for everybody,” but his administration does have something else in mind: health reimbursement arrangements. The Trump administration finalized some new regulations late last week for those tax-preferred accounts. In short, employers can pay money into their employees’ health reimbursement accounts, and then the workers can take that money and use it to buy insurance on the individual market. Companies can alternatively pay into a different kind of HRA that their workers can then use to pay directly for health care or for a “short-term limited duration” insurance plan that does not have to comply with Obamacare’s rules about preexisting conditions. The regulations do put some important standards in place. For example, employers can’t pick and choose individual workers to provide HRA money to, and they cannot offer the same employees both a traditional employer-sponsored insurance plan and an HRA. But health care policy experts still expect a negative effect on the individual markets set up by the Affordable Care Act. That’s because employers in states where individual coverage is currently available relatively cheaply will have a stronger incentive, particularly if they have a sicker workforce, to offer HRAs. They can spend less on an HRA than they would on offering insurance plans. But if those companies funnel their sicker workers into the ACA markets, then premiums for the Obamacare coverage are going to increase. “Potential disadvantages, as always with insurance, involve the potential for gaming,” Katherine Hempstead, senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told me. “If employers are able to use this to dump expensive employees in the individual market, they would save money but the individual market could become unaffordable.” I exchanged emails with Hempstead about the Trump administration’s new HRA regulations. Our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length. What the heck is an HRA? Is this like an HSA, a health savings account, something people might already be familiar with? HRA stands for health reimbursement arrangement, and it is one of a number of tax-preferred health benefits. HRAs are employer-funded and reimburse employees for making certain health expenses, which under this new rule would now include premium payments in the individual market. HSAs are savings accounts to which both employers and individuals can contribute. So what are the potential advantages for employers and their workers? Employers could make contributions to employees’ health insurance without actually having to administer a group health plan. Employees could gain more choice and potentially get a plan that better suited their preferences. The individual market as a whole could improve if there was more enrollment coming from group, and that could result in more options and/or better affordability. What are the potential disadvantages? Potential disadvantages, as always with insurance, involve the potential for gaming. If employers are able to use this to dump expensive employees in the individual market, they would save money, but the individual market could become more expensive. Employees may or may not like the individual market options as much as they liked their group plan, and if they don’t, their employers will hear about it. Why would the Trump administration be interested in HRAs? How does it fit with their broader approach to health care? In some ways it is incongruous because the administration has taken a number of actions and advocated for others which most people would construe as being designed to undermine the ACA in general and the individual market in particular. Yet the success of this new rule depends on a well-functioning individual market. If you can get past that inconsistency, this probably appeals to a desire to increase flexibility for small employers, who will probably be most interested in this opportunity, at least initially. What are the implications for the health insurance market? Looking at the medium to longer run, the only way the individual market will really grow is if there is migration from group. So in that sense, this is potentially a big deal. But even under the best-case scenario, it will be a multi-year process. The timeline to 2020 is extremely tight, and implementation will be very challenging in the short run. Employers are cautious with benefits, so I wouldn’t expect a huge acceleration of this right out of the gate. But the longer-term implications could be significant, because many people like the idea of a direct-to-consumer market for health insurance, and directionally, this is the kind of thing that needs to happen to bring that to scale. This story appears in VoxCare, a newsletter from Vox on the latest twists and turns in America’s health care debate. Sign up to get VoxCare in your inbox along with more health care stats and news. Are you interested in more discussions around health care policy? Join our Facebook community for conversation and updates.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/17/18682453/trump-new-health-care-plan-health-reimbursement-arrangements

Vox

2019-02-03 00:00:00

2019

2.0

3

'L&HH' Star Yandy Pepper Sprayed Protesting NYC Prison Conditions

4:05 PM PT -- Lights have reportedly begun to come back on inside MDC, which got crowds still outside to cheer. 'Love & Hip Hop' star Yandy Smith-Harris was on the front lines of protests taking place in NYC over inhumane prison conditions -- and she got pepper sprayed in the process. The reality TV star -- whose husband, Mendeecees Harris, is currently locked up in the New York prison system -- led a rally Sunday outside of Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center ... where inmates have reportedly been without electricity and heat for days now. It's a remarkable scene. Yandy uses a speaker system to ask prisoners if they've been given blankets or if their toilets work yet, to which they respond no by banging on the windows. Later, you see Yandy and other protesters rush the building, demanding to see their loved ones ... only to be driven out by pepper spray from the guards inside. It’s gotten dark outside of MDC Brooklyn Detention Center and it’s evident there’s no electricity. People are waving flashlights out of dark windows. #UntilThereIsHeat pic.twitter.com/cuorEZNsTo Protests have been going on since at least Saturday, if not earlier, as families of prisoners have flooded the streets near MDC, demanding supplies be sent and that the power system quickly be restored. Prisoners have been using flashlights to signal for help at night. The Federal Bureau of Prisons says a fire destroyed an electrical panel inside and prevented access to backup generators. It's unclear when power and heat is set to be back on. New York City is sending trucks with hundreds of blankets and hand warmers to the Metropolitan Detention Center NOW and generators are being readied for transport. We've told the Federal Bureau of Prisons the supplies are coming – whether they like it or not. The civil unrest did not go unnoticed on a city level. Mayor Bill de Blasio said Saturday that blankets and hand warmers were being sent to the prison, no matter what. As to how bad conditions inside really are, law enforcement sources directly connected to MDC tell us inmates have been peeing in water bottles and using those for warmth. We're told prison officials have been hesitant to let prisoners out of their cells out of fear for potential riots. Originally Published -- 1:10 PM PST

https://www.tmz.com/2019/02/03/love-and-hip-hop-star-yandy-pepper-sprayed-protest-mdc-brooklyn-prison-conditions/

TMZ

2017-11-20 15:32:08

2017

11.0

20

Laura McGann

New York Times’ Glenn Thrush has a history of bad judgment with young female reporters

Sexual harassment claims against yet another powerful man in media inspired New York Times White House correspondent Glenn Thrush to post an impassioned note on his Facebook page in October, calling on his fellow journalists to stand by women entering the field. In the post, which linked to an article about the latest accusations against political journalist Mark Halperin, Thrush wrote, “Young people who come into a newsroom deserve to be taught our trade, given our support and enlisted in our calling — not betrayed by little men who believe they are bigger than the mission.” It was a noble statement — but some Washington journalists I spoke to say it rings hollow, given Thrush’s own behavior with young women in the industry. “He kept saying he’s an advocate for women and women journalists,” a 23-year-old woman told me, recounting an incident with Thrush from this past June. “That’s how he presented himself to me. He tried to make himself seem like an ally and a mentor.” She paused. “Kind of ironic now.” Thrush, 50, is one of the New York Times’s star White House reporters whose chronicles of the Trump administration recently earned him and his frequent writing partner Maggie Haberman a major book deal. Thrush and the young woman met at her colleague’s going-away party at a bar near the Politico newsroom, she told me, and shared a few rounds of drinks in a booth. The night, she said, ended on a Washington street corner, where Thrush left her in tears after she resisted his advances. The encounter was troubling enough to the woman that her friend Bianca Padró Ocasio, also 23 and a journalist, confronted Thrush about his behavior via text message the next day. “I want to make sure you don’t lure young women aspiring journalists into those situations ever again,” she texted. “So help me out here. How can I do that?” Thrush was apologetic but defensive. “I don’t lure anybody ever,” he wrote, according to screenshots provided by Padró Ocasio. “I got drunk because I got some shitty health news. And I am acutely aware of the hurdles that young women face in this business and have spent the better part of 20 years advocating for women journalists.” If Thrush is acutely aware of what young women face in the business of political journalism, he should also know it’s because he himself is one of the problems women face. Five years ago, when Thrush and I were colleagues at Politico, I was in the same bar as Padró Ocasio’s friend — perhaps the same booth — when he caught me off guard, put his hand on my thigh, and suddenly started kissing me. Thrush says that he recalls the incident differently. Three young women I interviewed, including the young woman who met Thrush in June, described to me a range of similar experiences, from unwanted groping and kissing to wet kisses out of nowhere to hazy sexual encounters that played out under the influence of alcohol. Each woman described feeling differently about these experiences: scared, violated, ashamed, weirded out. I was — and am — angry. Details of their stories suggest a pattern. All of the women were in their 20s at the time. They were relatively early in their careers compared to Thrush, who was the kind of seasoned journalist who would be good to know. At an event with alcohol, he made advances. Afterward, they (as I did) thought it best to stay on good terms with Thrush, whatever their feelings. “I apologize to any woman who felt uncomfortable in my presence, and for any situation where I behaved inappropriately. Any behavior that makes a woman feel disrespected or uncomfortable is unacceptable,” Thrush said in a statement emailed to me on November 19. In interviews with about 40 people in and around media who know Thrush, I got a picture of a reporter whose title doesn’t capture his power and stature. People who’ve worked with him say he can get a writer’s name in front of the right editor, if he wants. Newsroom leaders care what he thinks. Some reporters said Thrush had used his connections to help them land jobs or develop new sources. The downfall of Hollywood titan Weinstein has been a catalyst for a movement to stamp out workplace harassment, particularly the variety that pits powerful men against much less powerful women. They are facing consequences for their behavior like never before, including men in media. Halperin lost a coveted book deal. NPR news chief Michael Oreskes resigned. Leon Wieseltier lost funding for his new magazine. And Lockhart Steele, the editorial director of Vox Media, Vox’s parent company, was fired for misconduct. Thrush wasn’t my boss at Politico. He was a reporter and I was an editor. We were on different teams and hardly crossed each other’s paths. But he was an incredibly influential person in the newsroom and in political journalism, a world I was still trying to break into in a meaningful way at the time. It wasn’t that Thrush was offering young women a quid pro quo deal, such as sex in exchange for mentorship. Thrush, just by his stature, put women in a position of feeling they had to suck up and move on from an uncomfortable encounter. On that night five years ago, I joined Thrush and a handful of other reporters for a few rounds at the Continental, a Politico hangout in Rosslyn, Virginia. At first, nothing seemed strange, until the crowd had dwindled down to Thrush, me, and one other female colleague. Thrush tossed a $20 bill at her and told her to take a cab and leave us, “the grown-ups,” alone. He slid into my side of the booth, blocking me in. I was wearing a skirt, and he put his hand on my thigh. He started kissing me. I pulled myself together and got out of there, shoving him on my way out. In the morning, Thrush sent me an apologetic email. I didn’t save it, but I recall it as similar to the one he would later send to Padró Ocasio’s friend in June. He said he was sorry, but he didn’t say for what, exactly. A few hours later, I saw him in deep conversation with a number of men I worked with. My gut told me something was up. I worried he was covering his tracks by spreading a rosy version of the night. As many people told me in the course of reporting this story, Thrush is a talker — or, as many put it, “a bullshitter.” He likes to hear gossip, and he likes to spread it. Gradually, things in the office started to change for me. Certain men in the newsroom, I thought, started to look at me differently. Some of their comments seemed a bit too familiar or were outright offensive. I had a nagging sense that I just wasn’t as respected as I used to be. I started to think maybe I shouldn’t be in journalism if I couldn’t hang in a tough newsroom. I found myself on edge, nervous and anxious all the time. I started to believe I had brought this all on myself. In the course of reporting this story, I was told by a male reporter who’d worked at Politico at the time that my instinct was right. He said that the day after that night at the bar, Thrush told him about the incident, except with the roles reversed. I had come onto him, the reporter said Thrush told him, and he had gently shut it down. In a statement, Thrush denied that he disparaged me to colleagues at Politico. He said that “the encounter described [in this story] was consensual, brief, and ended by me.” The source said that Thrush frequently told versions of this story with different young women as the subject. He would talk up a night out drinking with a young attractive woman, usually a journalist. Then he’d claim that she came onto him. In his version of these stories, Thrush was the responsible grown-up who made sure nothing happened. There was no conventional HR office at Politico at the time (a VP of human resources position was created there in 2016). So I brought my concern about the night to an experienced colleague right after the incident. When I believed rumors were damaging my standing in the office a few months later, I told a very senior editor. I was under the impression that nothing could be done. A spokesperson for POLITICO Brad Dayspring emphasized that no formal complaint ever reached the general counsel’s desk and that both the colleague and senior editor in question had left POLITICO years ago. One former Politico staffer told me that she’d become worried about her reputation after an encounter with Thrush sometime in the winter of 2012-’13. The scene was, again, a Politico going-away party. She said she and Thrush spoke most of the night, until they ended up the last two of the party left in the bar. She says she’d had a lot to drink and Thrush offered her a ride home. Her recollection of the details is fuzzy, but one way or another, he ended up in her place. “I had alcohol blur,” she says. But Thrush was far from being the grown-up who prevented things from going too far; instead, she says, she was the one to raise objections. “I remember stopping him at one point and saying, ‘Wait, you’re married.’” After that, she says, he left almost immediately. “I remember that by the time he left, I didn’t have much clothes on.” The woman says she was struggling at Politico at the time, and she wondered if gossip might have made her situation worse. “I don’t know if he told other male reporters or editors. Did that shade their opinion of me? There’s no way to know.” She says she doesn’t believe she was pressured or that she’s a victim. But she also says she wants others to know about what happened. “The only regret I have is not telling more women. I told two. What if I had told five?” One of the two women she told at the time shared with me her recollection of the conversation. “I remember she kept reemphasizing that they were both really drunk, that it was consensual,” the friend said. “And she did not believe it was an assault. But I do remember she was very rattled and upset and ashamed of what she saw as her role in it.” Another woman described to me a 2013 Politico party that she attended in her early 20s. She said she was standing alone, Thrush came up to talk to her, and suddenly he leaned in and landed a wet kiss on her ear. “It all happened very quickly. And he leaned in very quickly,” she said. “At the time, I remember thinking … adults sometimes kiss each other on the cheek. Then sometimes they miss and slobber on your ear. It was my way of thinking this wasn't as weird as I thought.” A 21-year-old woman arrived in Washington last year to intern in a journalism organization. She heard from people who don’t even work with Thrush to be careful. An employee at the Washington Post told her about him when she first arrived. A few months later, she says, a reporter at Roll Call warned her about him, too. She passed on the intel to four other female interns. Multiple young women journalists I spoke to said that they’d heard serious warnings about Thrush from friends. The word among women just starting in Washington, they said, is to be careful if you meet him at an event with alcohol, or if he sends you a direct message on Twitter. (Thrush suspended his Twitter account in September, saying it was too much of a distraction.) There’s something endearing and inspiring about interns who self-organized to guard themselves and each other against advances offered under guise of praise and professional advice — but there’s also something sad about a world in which the savvy move is to teach a young woman not to trust an older man who has something nice to say about her work. And whispers don’t fix everything. When Bianca Padró Ocasio’s friend found herself at the bar with Thrush in June, with him asking her to leave and go to another bar with him, she went to the bathroom and texted Padró Ocasio and another female friend, both of whom were also in journalism. “I’m drunk,” she texted, as saved screenshots of the messages show. “I’m nervous about this Glenn situation.” The friends urged her to call an Uber. “I am,” she responded. “I need to go home.” “Who else is there??” one friend asked. “Is there a woman you can uber home with?” Instead, the woman ended up leaving the bar with Thrush, who suggested they walk off some of their drinking — get some fresh air. He repeatedly tried to take her hand as they walked, she recalls, but she kept pulling it away. They crossed the Key Bridge from the Virginia neighborhood where Politico’s office is located into Georgetown. He led her down an incline to a dimly lit path along the old C&O Canal bed. He kissed her, she says, and she panicked. Then her phone rang, jolting her. It was Padró Ocasio. “I felt very protective of her,” Padró Ocasio said, describing the call. “I thought, she’s drunk right now. If I don’t do something, I’m not going to forgive myself.” The young woman ordered an Uber — the receipt shows it was about 11 pm — and says she planned to call Padró Ocasio back once inside the car. In the few minutes she waited, she said, Thrush walked back over to her and started to kiss her again. She began to cry. When Thrush saw, he abruptly walked off, waving his hand flippantly, and left her alone to wait for her ride, she said. Padró Ocasio’s friend received an email from Thrush the next morning with the subject line, “Nice meeting you!” followed by, “(And apologies?).” She responded congenially. “It was nice meeting you too! (And no worries haha).” She also met him a few weeks later at a tea shop near the White House, a meeting they’d discussed the night at the bar. Thrush sent her a few critiques of her stories. She said she feels that despite her misgivings, she has to stay on good terms with him since he is connected. “I hate feeling obligated to make him think I think everything is fine,” she said. “It’s been this thing hanging over me. I feel like I have to be nice to this person just because he knows people.” In his emailed statement, Thrush said that the night in June with the young woman was the last time he’s had a drink. He wrote: The June incident [described above] was a life-changing event [for me]. The woman involved was upset by my actions and for that I am deeply sorry. Over the past several years, I have responded to a succession of personal and health crises by drinking heavily. During that period, I have done things that I am ashamed of, actions that have brought great hurt to my family and friends. I have not taken a drink since June 15, 2017, have resumed counseling and will soon begin out-patient treatment for alcoholism. I am working hard to repair the damage I have done. In the course of his text dialogue with Padró Ocasio about the incident with her friend, Thrush wrote, “I feel really strongly about not creating a toxic environment.” Back at Politico years ago, Thrush’s behavior contributed to a toxic environment I experienced. Dozens of people told me that Politico has changed dramatically since Carrie Budoff Brown took over a year ago as the publication’s editor. Multiple men and women who work for her say her standards are high and she has no time for the kind of behavior I described. Budoff Brown was at the going-away party in June where Thrush was in the booth with the 23-year-old woman. She told me she noticed them talking but, like other attendees I talked to, she didn’t know that anything happened afterward. “I was disappointed in Glenn but had no reason to think that anything would progress beyond the bar that night,” she said. “And I am saddened to learn in the course of your reporting that it did.” “Great journalism and great business require a great workplace. My colleagues and I have worked hard to nurture a newsroom where people are supportive, good to each other, and where mutual respect is the way of life. We have zero tolerance for anything else.” By the time of the June incident, Thrush was gone from Politico anyway — off to the New York Times, which has hired many of Politico’s top reporters over the years. But now he will be on hiatus pending a Times investigation that was sparked by my reporting for this story. "The behavior attributed to Glenn in this Vox story is very concerning and not in keeping with the standards and values of The New York Times,” said Eileen Murphy, the senior vice president of communications for the New York Times, in a written statement. “We intend to fully investigate and while we do, Glenn will be suspended. We support his decision to enter a substance abuse program. In the meantime, we will not be commenting further.” It’s the Times itself, of course, that has done so much to spark the current conversation around harassment with its exposés on Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K. There’s probably no loftier perch in all of political journalism from which one could teach the trade and enlist young women into the calling — or, as the case may be, betray them.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/20/16678094/glenn-thrush-new-york-times

Vox

2016-10-01 00:05:00

2016

10.0

1

Andrea Reusing

Charred Broccoli with Anchovy and Mustard Croutons Recipe

Servings: 4Prep: 10 minutesTotal: 45 minutes Ingredients for the mustard breadcrumbs:1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted2 teaspoons malt vinegar1 teaspoon Coleman's mustard powder1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper1 teaspoon kosher salt2 cups torn country loaf, crust removed and torn into bite-sized pieces for the charred broccoli:2 small bunches broccolini (about 1 pound)kosher salt, to taste2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for serving1 tablespoon minced parsley2 teaspoons chile flakes6 oil-packed anchovy filets, minced2 garlic cloves, mashed into a pastezest of 1 lemon Directions 1. Make the breadcrumbs: Heat the oven to 350°F. Combine the butter, vinegar, mustard powder, pepper, and salt in a bowl. Add the bread and toss to coat. Transfer to a baking sheet and bake until golden and brown, about 20 minutes. Set aside. 2. Light a grill. If the broccoli is large, quarter. Otherwise, leave whole or halved lengthwise. 3. Bring a pot of generously salted water to a boil and cook the broccoli for 10 seconds, then transfer to a medium bowl and toss with 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Grill the broccoli until charred all over, 12 to 15 minutes. 4. Meanwhile, mix the parsley, chile flakes, anchovies, garlic, and lemon zest in a bowl. Add the grilled broccoli and croutons, to taste, and toss well to combine. Serve on a warm platter with olive oil to drizzle at the table.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/aeapy8/charred-broccoli-with-anchovy-and-mustard-croutons

Food by VICE

Vice

2018-12-07 21:22:00

2018

12.0

7

Syreeta McFadden

In Life and After Her Death, Sandra Bland Taught Others About Activism

In the months prior to her death, Sandra Bland began making short videos speaking her truth to power and sharing them directly to Facebook. “I’m here to change to history,” Bland declared in her first recording in early January 2015. Here, the audience sees Bland up close and unvarnished, yet confident and resolute-looking directly at you, “This thing I’m holding in my hand, this telephone, this camera, is quite powerful.” In the new HBO Original Documentary, Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland, which premiered on Monday, audiences are re-introduced to Sandra Bland in her own voice, using archival video from her personal activist project “Sandy Speaks.” Bland’s own voice frames her story in the hands of filmmakers Kate Davis and David Heilbroner who juxtapose it against the larger mystery surrounding her death in a Waller County, Texas jail—and a local justice system bent on absolving itself of all responsibility for the placing her there in the first place. On July 10, 2015, Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic violation (failure to signal a lane change) by then Texas Department of Safety Trooper Brian T. Encinia. Dashcam video presented a tense exchange between Bland and Encinia. An audibly irritated Bland asked questions regarding the cause for the stop as an even more irritable, then aggressive, Encinia escalated the encounter, forcing Bland out of her car, then pushing her head to the ground. In a separate video recorded by a bystander, we see Bland in handcuffs thanking the cameraperson as she is escorted into a squad car that would take her to a Waller County jail. It is the last instance we would hear Bland’s voice. Three days later, Bland was found dead in her holding cell. She was 28 years old. We think we know her story. For Bland’s sisters, Sharon Cooper and Shanté Needham, the documentary successfully renders a complete portrait of their sister, a woman who had always had a voice and had honed that voice growing up in a household of five sisters—women—who are all outspoken. “This documentary humanizes her,” said Needham to Broadly in a recent phone interview. “That she was a person. She was loved. She was my mother’s daughter. She was a sister. She was aunt. She was a cousin. She was just loved by very nice church family… along with several different friend and people who were following her before we knew they were following her ‘Sandy Speaks’ videos.” Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland now joins a canon of documentaries released over the last three years that center local stories of the most visible cases in the movement for Black lives. This feature-length documentary is the first of these narratives that centers on an African American woman’s death at the hands of police. These victims, whose names are recited in protests like rosaries, serve as proxies in the long struggle to reform policies of policing and criminal justice writ large. However, notably African American women, who coined the term that became a movement—Black Lives Matter—and often are on the front lines of protest and civic action in confronting state violence against Black communities, are too often invisible (or worse, ignored) when they themselves are victims from national attention and fervor of protests. In early 2015, the African American Policy Forum launched a social media campaign, #SayHerName and released a report drawing attention to the acute experiences of state violence by Black women. The greater impact of documentaries like these aims to correct the narrative, to humanize the beloved, whose image and very personhood has been distorted in the public imagination. Davis and Heilbroner attempt to reconstruct a clear line of events leading up Bland’s death and its aftermath while balancing the story of two Blands—the Sandy her family knew against a version that Waller County officials constructed. County Sheriff R. Glenn Smith and District Attorney Elton Mathis, in interviews, methodically recount a tale of a woman unrecognizable to her family and friends, of a woman who was terrified, abandoned by her family, aggravated, and unstable whom they believed took her own life. Yet, details presented in the film complicate their neat explanation. Bland had been in touch with her family to secure bail. Bland recently secured a job with her alma mater Prairie View A&M University. And there is still the matter of her modest activist project, “Sandy Speaks” which show an energized woman offering insight to all within earshot. Still, national media from the onset, abstracted Bland, readily consuming Texas official accounts at face value. The film underscores the problem that families face in their quest for answers in these tragedies—that they are constantly racing against the law enforcement’s account, fighting to preserve the humanity of their lives in the public record. “I think that whether or not it was their intent, I think they did an excellent job of showing their inability to do their role effectively,” Cooper said of Waller County officials in a phone interview with Broadly. “I think that they validated the doubt that was cast upon the information they were sharing with us. I just think that they presented themselves in a way that was inconsistent with things that were shared with us previously.” County officials, in the family’s view, were duplicitous and not transparent. County officials neglected to contact Bland’s mother, Geneva Reed-Veal, listed as her next of kin. She learned of her youngest daughter’s death through a phone call by a relative. At one moment, viewers recognize the startling symmetries between Reed-Veal, a Black mother from Chicago bringing back the body of her dead child from some small southern town as Mamie Till did sixty years ago. “I think that why people will resonate with the film is that they will very much see themselves in Sandy. Specifically, Black women,” Cooper said. “They will see their mother or their aunt or their sister or their sister-friend, who they’ve had conversations with.” With “Sandy Speaks," Bland had quietly built a following through her social media. Activated by the movement for Black lives—where in the year preceding she witnessed sustained activism and mounting political pressure nationwide— Bland wanted to confront what felt like a pandemic of deaths of unarmed African American civilians at the hands of police. In the summer of 2014, the high-profile killings of John Crawford III in Ohio, Eric Garner in New York City, and teen Michael Brown in Missouri brought the issue of police brutality to a bubbling forefront. There were protests and demands for accountability, if not punishment, for police officers who killed. Yet, for Bland, her intention in generating video posts were to speak directly to people traumatized by racialized violence between communities of color and police. As part of her own re-education on matters of police reform and social justice, Bland researched these issues, presented to her church’s pastor in Chicago with a two-and-half-inch binder containing that research on police brutality. She said she had found her calling. “She had a way of giving you a blueprint on how to dig yourself out of it and how to turn that rage into something that is purposeful and impactful,” Cooper said. While no one would be held criminally liable for Bland’s death, Encinia and Waller County Sheriff’s officials made a settlement with Bland’s family for $1.9 million in a civil suit. In 2017, the Texas State legislature passed the Sandra Bland Act, a mental health mandate for treatment and bond provisions, that called for an independent investigation of jail deaths of the mentally ill. But the law eliminated many key provisions, namely the most important condition for the family, which was statewide de-escalation training for law enforcement officers. Cooper, in 2017, called the deletions “gut-wrenching.” “What’s a bill with her name attached to it, if the very thing [that's not addressed] is the reason she is no longer here,” Needham said. To this end, the family plans to continue to work with local activists to advocate for a new state law to include training. For the family, the answer regarding Bland’s death remains unsettled. For Needham, it is a condition she is resigned to accept, “I think, unfortunately, we have to move past that because we will never get those answers unless some good ol’ old person, by time, gets close to 90 [years old and] decides that they don’t want to go on with this truth that they’ve been holding in since 2015.” Her answer echoes the resignation of surviving family members of lynchings, who wait in vain in many instances for truth or consciousness of white people to reveal that had been known and hidden from view. What remains clear is that Sandra Bland likely would be alive today, had she not been pulled over in the first place, and further, if Encinia had not escalated the stop and issued a warning instead. Bland’s arrest, incarceration, and death are all ensnared in an interconnected justice system where too many actors still harbor implicit biases. This fact is underscored in the film as activist, Hannah Brommer, reaches her—and by extension viewers—logical conclusion, “Therefore, racism killed Sandra Bland.”

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nepqyk/sandra-bland-documentary-hbo

Identity

Vice

2017-04-24 00:00:00

2017

4.0

24

Serena Williams Writes Touching Message to Baby

Serena Williams is opening up about her pregnancy -- with an emotional message to her unborn child describing how the experience is changing her life. "My Dearest Baby, You gave me the strength I didn’t know I had," Williams writes. "You taught me the true meaning of serenity and peace. I can't wait to meet you." She also mentions the fact she's moved back to #1 on the newest WTA rankings -- a ranking list that happened to be released on her fiancee's birthday. "I can't wait for you to join the players box next year. But most importantly, I am so happy to share being number one in the world with you.... once again today. On [Alexis Ohanian's] bday. from the world's oldest number one to the world's youngest number one. -Your Mommy."

https://www.tmz.com/2017/04/24/serena-williams-pregnant-message-baby/

TMZ

2019-06-06 00:00:00

2019

6.0

6

Caroline Copley

Will Europe's clampdown on faulty medical devices hurt patients?

BERLIN (Reuters) - When a Californian company founded by a U.S. veteran wounded in Afghanistan sought to register a new medical device this year, it turned to Europe before the United States. The European approvals system had long been quicker, the company said, but the introduction of new rules is changing all that. “Now it has flipped,” said Bill Colone, CEO of San Clemente-based Spinal Singularity, which hopes to launch a ‘smart’ catheter for men with spinal injuries or disease early next year after squeezing in its application under the old European rules. Colone is part of a chorus of industry voices warning that a switch to stricter European rules governing medical devices, due to come into force a year from now, will slow or even halt the release of products in Europe that could transform patients’ lives. Defenders of the regulations say they will not significantly complicate the process and are vital to prevent problems like rupturing silicone breast implants and debris from all-metal hip implants damaging tissue and bones. Many patient advocates say the new rules do not go far enough to reform a European system in which a top U.S. official suggested in 2011 patients may be "guinea pigs" here. The comment drew a sharp response from the European Union, which still firmly rejects that characterization. That transatlantic spat, and the subsequent evolution of medical device certification around the world, are part of a wider global struggle by governments to attract businesses seeking light-touch regulation without scaring off their voters. The new medical devices rules agreed by the European Union in 2017 will tighten control of devices before they come to market, improve transparency and strengthen surveillance by national authorities, a European Commission spokesperson said. The new system changes less than some proposals - which envisaged regulation by a public body, along U.S. lines, replacing the existing practice of certification by profit-making private firms. But players in medical technology - which ranges from surgical implants to scans - say it is too burdensome and is being built too slowly, risking not only hampering innovation but also harming patients by interrupting supplies. “Immediate action is needed now to avoid severe disruption of product supply to patients and hospitals,” seven European Associations said in a joint statement last week. All 55,000 devices certified under the old directives have to be re-certified along with other products such as reusable scalpels, nasal saline sprays and dental imaging software. The industry says there are not enough Notified Bodies - the private firms charged with certifying the safety of devices ranging from bandages to pacemakers, and that manufacturers may have to take products off the market or delay new launches. The situation is further complicated by Brexit, with Britain’s BSI one of just two notified bodies to have got the go-ahead to certify devices under the new Medical Devices Regulation (MDR). If Britain leaves the EU in October without a deal, certificates issued by British bodies would be invalid. Germany, home to Europe’s biggest medtech sector, is pressing the European Commission to smooth the transition, suggesting three solutions to overcome any Brexit-related supply problems in a March 27 letter to the Commission seen by Reuters. These include giving firms 12 more months to sell products in the EU in the case of a disorderly Brexit, as long as they plan how to regain compliance, the letter from German Health Minister Jens Spahn said. Trade groups have suggested delaying implementation of the rules beyond May 2020 or faster designation of notified bodies. The European Commission rejects the need for contingency plans and said it was focusing on a timely implementation of the regulation, which includes requirements for manufacturers to monitor product safety once devices are on the market. More than 20 notified bodies could be accredited by the end of the year, it said. This is around a third of the number of firms currently certified to assess medical products. “That is a massive reduction in capacity when adding a considerable volume of work,” said Gary Slack, senior vice president for global medical devices at the notified body BSI. To hedge against any Brexit risk, BSI has set up a subsidiary in Amsterdam and has transferred most of its clients’ certificates there, but is still waiting for its Dutch body to be certified under the MDR. For Medtech conglomerates with thousands of devices, the bill to meet the new regulations could stretch into the millions of dollars - especially for those that make riskier devices. Smith and Nephew, which manufacturers hip and knee implants, put its MDR compliance costs at $15-$20 million for 2018 and around $60 million this year. As a result of the regulation, more than 55 percent of those surveyed by Germany industry association ZVEI said they would reduce the number of products on offer. The Commission said many products are eligible for a so-called ‘grace period’ which means they can be sold under the old rules until May 2024 at the latest if certificates are reissued, something BSI said many firms are rushing to do. But the other certified body, Germany’s Tuev-Sued, said many manufacturers had yet to catch on to the regulatory changes. “We are definitely expecting chaotic years,” said Bassil Akra, Tuev-Sued’s vice president in charge of medtech. The medical technology industry is worth $129 billion and employs 675,000 people in Europe, according to MedTech Europe. Experts agree that many new devices are invaluable to patients, but the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists said in November that faulty ones were linked to 1.7 million injuries and nearly 83,000 deaths over the past decade. A key part of the new regulation is how much access doctors and patients will have to the pan-European Eudamed database, to strengthen surveillance and prevent repeated adverse incidents. A Commission spokesperson said discussions were ongoing with authorities, patient groups and other stakeholders. While medtech giants like Siemens Healthineers and Germany’s Fresenius have the regulatory staff to navigate the new rules, most firms are much smaller and will struggle, said MedTech Europe CEO Serge Bernasconi. Spinal Singularity said it had managed to apply under the old system by hiring contractors to help it submit all the paperwork to a notified body by May 27 - two months before it had planned. It is hoping for certification by the end of the year, but is dreading renewing it in four years’ time because of what he said were many “incredibly burdensome” new requirements. German surgical instrument maker Asanus said it plans to take around five highly-innovative surgical products off the market and will discontinue several hundred minimally-invasive devices, as well as stop new development in this area. “If the paperwork costs for the product are five times the amount you can achieve in sales, you simply won’t do it anymore,” said Chief Executive Armin Schorer, who expects many smaller makers of lower risk devices to shut up shop. Bernasconi and Colone said start-ups are now looking to launch their products in other markets, like the United States or China first, denying European patients access to innovations. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal body that approves medical devices, is toughening up its own approval process after faulty medical devices harmed patients there too. But Colone noted that was only for some products. His firm plans to file for U.S. approval this autumn. “Because of the pending new EU MDR, overall the FDA process may even be slightly easier,” he said. Kurt Racke, a medical ethics expert at Bonn University, said he did not think Europe’s new regulations would make it harder to win approvals than in the United States. “I think Europe has the most lax market for medical devices,” he said. “I don’t think so much will change there in principle.” The European Commission rejects suggestions its rules are not tough enough. “The Commission takes patient safety very seriously,” a spokesperson said, “and has led various regulatory reforms to ensure the highest possible quality, safety and reliability of medical devices on the EU market.” Reporting by Caroline Copley; editing by Philippa Fletcher

https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-medical-devices/insight-will-europes-clampdown-on-faulty-medical-devices-hurt-patients-idUSL5N2302OB

Health News

Reuters

2017-05-16 15:11:15

2017

5.0

16

Julia Belluz

Minnesota is fighting its largest measles outbreak in nearly 30 years. Blame vaccine deniers.

Anti-vaccine groups have helped fuel Minnesota’s largest outbreak of measles in nearly 30 years, with 58 confirmed cases since the outbreak was identified in April. Most of the cases are occurring among unvaccinated Somali-American children in Minneapolis, whose parents have been the targets of anti-vaccine propagandists, according to the state health department. One of the most noteworthy fearmongerers is Andrew Wakefield, the discredited doctor who introduced the bogus idea that vaccines and autism are linked in a paper in a 1998 The Lancet study. (Since then, the paper has been retracted, Wakefield has lost his medical license, and studies in thousands of children have shown the vaccine is safe.) Along with other vaccine deniers, Wakefield has continued to spread fears about the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine through public lectures and outreach campaigns in Minnesota over the past several years, according to reports in the Star Tribune. He also defended his fearmongering in the Washington Post by saying he’s just giving concerned parents information they want. Because measles is one of the most infectious diseases known to man, health officials are bracing for more cases. Here are seven facts to know about the virus. If you were born before 1960, you might have come down with a measles infection. In the US, before a vaccine was introduced in 1963, there were 4 million measles cases with 48,000 hospitalizations and 500 deaths every year. That's just a massive burden of illness. By 2000, because of widespread vaccination, the virus was declared eliminated in the United States: Enough people were immunized that outbreaks were uncommon, and deaths from measles were scarcely heard of. Since then, however, public health officials have documented several measles outbreaks — a trend that that seems to be tied to some parents opting out of vaccines for their kids because of safety fears. In 2014, US health officials recorded more than 660 cases of measles — the largest outbreak of the past decade — many of them linked to a community of Amish people in Ohio who were refusing vaccines. In 2015, an outbreak originating at Disneyland in California helped spark nearly 150 cases — another widespread outbreak linked to vaccine denialism. Now, there’s the outbreak in Minnesota. About 10 years ago, fears among Somali Americans that autism seemed to be disproportionately striking their children led to a University of Minnesota project on autism prevalence in the community. The researchers found that kids of Somali descent weren’t more likely than white children to have the disorder — but the concerns about autism were enough to open the door to anti-vaccine views. Since 2008, the vaccination rate among Somali-American children has plummeted while remaining stable among non-Somali kids. Health officials haven’t yet identified patient zero in the current outbreak, though measles outbreaks in the US often originate with an infected traveler who brings the virus to an unvaccinated community. Meanwhile, Somalia has been stricken with its own measles outbreaks and low rates of vaccination — but these trends are being driven by a lack of vaccine access because of famine and drought. There is some irony in the fact that immigrants and their families in the US are being persuaded not to take advantage of life-saving immunizations that their relatives back home may not be able to access. Large-scale studies involving thousands of participants in several countries have failed to establish a link between the MMR vaccine and the mental developmental disorder. A study in the journal JAMA looked at nearly 100,000 children who got the shot and their family histories of autism. The researchers found the MMR vaccine was not associated with an increased risk of autism, even with children who had older siblings with the disorder. "These findings indicate no harmful association between MMR vaccine receipt and ASD even among children already at higher risk for ASD," the researchers concluded. In another of the most thorough studies to date, nearly half a million kids who got the vaccine were compared with some 100,000 who didn't, and there were no differences in the autism rates between the two groups. "This study provides strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism," the authors wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. Studies published in The Lancet, The Journal of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, PLOS One, and The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, among others, have also found no association between the vaccine and autism. After an incubation period of 10 to 12 days, measles comes on as a fever, cough, stuffy nose, and bloodshot and watery eyes. Loss of appetite and malaise are common, too. Several days after these initial symptoms, an uncomfortable spotty, rash begins to spread all over the body, starting on the face and neck, and moving downward. The rash usually lasts for three to five days and then fades away. In uncomplicated cases, people who get measles start to recover as soon as the rash appears and feel back to normal in about two to three weeks. But up to 40 percent of patients have complications from the virus. These usually occur in the very young (children under five), in adults over 20, and in anybody else who is undernourished or otherwise immunocompromised. Children under five have the highest probability of death. The most common complication from the measles is pneumonia, which accounts for most measles-related deaths. Less frequently, measles can lead to blindness, croup, mouth ulcers, ear infections, or severe diarrhea. Some children develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain), which can lead to convulsions, loss of hearing, and mental retardation. Again, these complications mostly arise in people whose immune systems are already weakened because of their age, preexisting diseases, or malnutrition. According to the CDC, the horrible mathematics of measles looks like this: One out of every 20 children with measles gets pneumonia; one in 1,000 will develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain); one or two in 1,000 children will die. Doctors can help patients avoid the more severe complications (blindness, pneumonia) by making sure patients have good nutrition and enough fluids. For eye and ear infections that can arise, doctors can prescribe antibiotics. And because measles depletes its victims' vitamin A levels, doctors usually give patients two doses of vitamin A supplements. Measles is prevented through the combination MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) shot. The CDC recommends that children get two doses: Immunity from the vaccine lasts for decades, but you should ask your health provider about booster shots if you’re an adult. The vaccine is known to be extremely safe and very effective: it contains a live but weakened version of the virus, and it causes your immune system to produce antibodies against the virus. Should you be exposed to actual measles, those antibodies will then fire up to protect against the disease. Again, side effects are rare and mostly very mild. According to the CDC, for example, fevers after the MMR vaccine occur in one out of six people, and mild rashes, in one in 20. More severe problems are virtually nonexistent: serious allergic reactions happen in fewer than one in a million cases. Deafness, long-term seizures, and permanent brain damage are "so rare that it is hard to tell whether they are caused by the vaccine." So the benefits of the vaccine — the protection of children and the communities they live in — vastly outweigh the harms. If you’re not vaccinated, it’s extremely easy to get measles. In an unimmunized population, one person with measles can infect 12 to 18 others. That's way higher than other scary viruses like Ebola, HIV or SARS. (With Ebola, one case usually leads to two others. With HIV and SARS, one case leads to another four.) Measles is an airborne virus, transmitted by respiratory droplets from the nose, mouth, or throat of an infected person, it’s usually shared through coughing or sneezing. Small particle aerosols from someone with measles can stay suspended in the air for long periods of time after they’ve left a room, and the virus can live on surfaces for up to two hours. So a person with measles can cough in a room, leave, and hours later, someone else could catch the virus from the droplets in the air (unless they were vaccinated). No other virus can do that. What worries health officials is that the measles virus can spread in a person four days before the onset of the telltale rash. So people with the virus start being contagious before they’d ever know they had measles. (They stop being contagious about four days after the rash appears.) In exceptionally rare cases, even if you are vaccinated, you can still get measles. In fewer than five percent of vaccinated people, their immune systems just don't kick in even with the shots. Researchers aren't sure why. Getting only one dose of the vaccine instead of the recommended two also seems to increase people's chances of getting measles if they're ever exposed. Let’s be clear about something up front: Most American children still get their shots. More than 90 percent of kids receive vaccines for polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, and chickenpox, though the coverage rates are slightly lower for other routine vaccines. Most American parents also say they support school-based vaccine requirements. States started to mandate that school children get inoculated against diseases because we need vaccination rates to remain high to sustain what’s called “herd immunity.” For any vaccine to be effective and prevent outbreaks, a certain (high) percentage of people in a population need to be immunized. This keeps diseases from spreading easily and keeps vulnerable groups that can't be vaccinated protected (such as very young babies or people with allergies to vaccines). And yet, since vaccination was invented more than 200 years ago, anti-vaxxers have been organizing. So how great is their influence? And is it growing stronger? In the past couple of years, there haven’t been any new peer-reviewed studies on national trends in vaccine refusal. But the latest evidence we have from individual states, in combination with older studies on vaccine coverage rates and recent surveys of doctors, suggest there’s a growing problem in several parts of the country. The main way to measure how many kids aren’t getting vaccinated by choice is finding out which proportion of kids get exempted from school vaccine requirements for nonmedical — that is, personal belief or religious — reasons. Since immunization laws are state-based, there’s variation across the country when it comes to the requirements. As of August 2016, all 50 states have legislation requiring vaccines for students — but almost every state allows exemptions for people with religious beliefs against immunizations, and 18 states grant philosophical exemptions for those opposed to vaccines because of personal or moral beliefs (with the exception of Mississippi, California, and West Virginia, which have the strictest vaccine laws in the nation). Leah Samuel of Stat News crunched the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data on nonmedical exemptions from 2009 to 2016. (Her numbers weren’t peer-reviewed, however, like some of the other studies I’ll describe next.) She found that the volume of people seeking exemptions was greater in 2016 than at any other point since 2009 in 11 states: Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Virginia. She also found the national average for nonmedical exemptions was down in 2016 from a 2009 spike — a fact she attributes to California and Vermont’s 2015 cancellation of their personal belief exemptions. Some of the best peer-reviewed evidence for an increase in the number of people refusing or delaying vaccines comes from Emory researcher Saad Omer. In one 2009 New England Journal of Medicine paper, Omer looked at the state-level rates of nonmedical exemptions. He found that between 1991 and 2004, those rates increased from less than 0.98 percent to about 1.5 percent. Again, this uptick was not spread evenly across the US, and even varied within states. Generally, though, states that allowed only religious exemptions had a steady opt-out rate of about 1 percent during the period (1991 to 2004). But in states that were more lax — allowing philosophical or personal belief exemptions as well as religious and medical exemptions — the mean exemption rate increased from 0.99 to 2.54 percent. In a 2012 follow-up to that paper, also published in NEJM, Omer found — once again — that “non-medical exemptions have continued to increase, and the rate of increase has accelerated.” Doctors are also reporting that they’re meeting more and more parents who are skeptical of vaccines. The American Academy of Pediatrics periodically surveys its members and identified a rise in pediatricians reporting that they had patients who refused a vaccine — from 75 percent in 2006 to 87 percent in 2013. As for state-level analyses, Baylor researcher Peter Hotez looked at the rate of nonmedical exemptions over the past 13 years in his home state of Texas. He found that in 2016, there were almost 45,000 children who refused vaccines — about double the number of exemptions in 2010 and a 19-fold increase compared with 2003. Texas is one of those lax states that allow parents to get both religious and philosophical vaccine exemptions. And other studies have shown that people who live in places that make it easy to opt out of vaccines tend to have higher rates of exemptions. One paper found that states that allowed parents to refuse vaccines for philosophical or personal reasons had exemption rates that were 2.54 times as high as states that only permitted religious exemptions. Another older study, looking at data between 1991 and 2004, found an increase in exemption rates only in states that allowed philosophical exemptions.

https://www.vox.com/2017/5/8/15577316/minnesota-measles-outbreak-explained

Vox

2018-06-08 00:00:00

2018

6.0

8

Floyd Mayweather Hits Pause On MMA, 'Not Thinking About Fighting Right Now'

Bad news for Conor McGregor ... Floyd Mayweather's changed his mind about an MMA fight -- telling TMZ Sports he's way too busy to take a fight in the Octagon any time soon. "I'm not thinking about fighting right now," Floyd told us while shopping with his crew in Beverly Hills. Remember, Floyd was flirting with the idea of taking an MMA fight in 2018 -- with his eyes on McGregor -- and even reached out to UFC champ Tyron Woodley to set up a training program. But Floyd says life has gotten in the way ... and he's been spending way too much time focusing on his family and growing his real estate business. In fact, Floyd says he's a MAJOR investor in One Vanderbilt -- which he says will be the tallest skyscraper in New York. Floyd says he's got more than $100,000,000 invested in NYC real estate projects -- and that's more important to him right now than learning a new combat sport. The good news ... Floyd isn't completely closing the door on MMA, and insists he's keeping himself in shape just in case. Stay tuned ...

https://www.tmz.com/2018/06/08/floyd-mayweather-mma-one-vanderbilt-conor-mcgregor/

TMZ

2016-12-20 00:00:00

2016

12.0

20

Allison Meier

The Challenge of Making a Permanent Exhibit About Mercurial New York

The Museum of the City of New York opens its first permanent exhibition, an ambitious multimedia journey through 400 years of the city’s turbulent history. In New York at Its Core at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), an 18th-century ankle cuff unearthed in Manhattan’s Hanover Square is installed alongside a glimmering 1770 silver coffeepot. Not everyone arrived in New York City by choice, nor did they necessarily arrive at all. Nearby is a 17th-century Lenape war club, newly returned to the city after centuries in Sweden. New York at Its Core opened November 18, filling 8,000 square feet of the MCNY first floor. It’s the first permanent exhibition at the museum, and the culmination of five years of research, as well as a decade-long $100 million renovation project. While the institution on the northeastern corner of Central Park is not geographically on the beaten tourist path, nor that of many New Yorkers, New York at Its Core is an ambitious experience that aims to be an accessible introduction to the inner core of the Big Apple. There is in fact an apple corer, a gargantuan early 20th-century metal device on loan from the collection of the Russ & Daughters appetizing store, as immigrant entrepreneur Joel Russ featured apples in his herring salad. Each of the roughly 450 artifacts on view, dating from Henry Hudson’s voyage in 1609 to Hurricane Sandy in 2012, is a fragment of a greater personal timeline in New York. “Each object is an entry point into a whole thread that relates to the city’s history, and all of these threads together add up to a whole that begins to capture what New York is about,” Sarah Henry, deputy director and chief curator at MCNY, told Hyperallergic. “We believe New York is too multifaceted to ingest in a quick 20 minute run through an exhibition. We wanted to create something that would reward multiple visits, but still be appreciated with a single visit. Our goal is for people to come away having better understood New York.” Part of that understanding isn’t just about the past, but what’s to come. The biggest of the exhibition’s three galleries is a flexible space called the Future City Lab, concentrating on the next 50 years of the city. A huge digital map, touchscreens, and an interactive streetscape-augmenting game fill the Lab, with the gallery design allowing for new data on population, climate change, and urban planning to update and alter the displays. In the two galleries devoted to history, you can also find these multimedia aspects. A parade of silhouettes, and freestanding totems, introduce visitors to 75 individuals that influenced the city, including artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, anarchist Emma Goldman, writer and activist Wong Chin Foo, Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner, founding father Alexander Hamilton, poet Walt Whitman, hip-hop artist Jay Z, and a beaver, whose fur made for a very significant industry in the colonial era. “It was a humbling and daunting and exciting task to think about how to instill the story of New York into our space, although obviously the complexity of New York is something you could spend a lifetime delving into and not get to the bottom of it,” Henry said. “For us, it was important to have a point of view and a lens through which to look at this story. Our question is what makes New York New York, and we boil it down to four words: money, density, diversity, and creativity.” And all of these people and moments are basically presented on the same plane, even calamities like the September 11 attacks or the AIDS crisis, while addressed and explored, are not enshrined. Instead every broader event is distilled through a component of a human story. For example, rather than a didactic explanation of Boss Tweed’s catastrophic corruption, you can gaze at the glimmer of his T-shaped diamond cufflinks, bought with city money. Calvert Vaux’s 1865 field drafting set, used to design landscapes like Central Park, is positioned by fragments of glass, pottery, and a button exhumed from the remains of Seneca Village, the African-American enclave displaced by the Manhattan greenspace. A small Halvah tin from the Sahadi family recalls the Little Syria neighborhood that thrived in the future site of the World Trade Center. There are no generic objects, each is specific to a person in the place that is New York City. And each emphasizes how there is no single story of New York, yet it’s that diversity, whether religious, ethnic, or economic, that makes the fertile seeds of a city that continues to grow. New York at Its Core is now open at the Museum of the City of New York (1220 Fifth Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan).

https://hyperallergic.com/341643/the-challenge-of-making-a-permanent-exhibit-about-mercurial-new-york/

Hyperallergic

2017-08-28 18:45:01

2017

8.0

28

Kelly Swanson

Report: Brexit strategist to help GOP with 2018 midterm election strategy

One of the minds behind the Brexit campaign is reportedly helping Republicans strategize for the 2018 midterm elections. Back in 2015, the pro-Brexit group Leave.EU hired American PR strategist Gerry Gunster to help lead the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union. Now, per Politico’s reporting, Gunster is “in discussions” with GOP leaders on how to tackle the 2018 midterm elections: Spearheading the discussions is Republican strategist Gerry Gunster, a referendum expert who helped to lead the successful 2016, populist-infused campaign for Britain's exit from the European Union. Gunster — who visited then-president-elect Trump in New York City along with Brexit leader Nigel Farage after the November election — has spoken about the ballot initiative concept with top administration aides, including political director Bill Stepien and Nick Ayers, the chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence and a veteran GOP operative. Gerry Gunster, who runs the US advocacy firm Goddard Gunster, was a top strategist in the campaign to convince British voters to approve leaving the European Union. Ultimately, 51.9 percent of British voters voted to leave the EU. The Brexit campaign has been criticized for its use of false statistics about the financial cost of Britain staying in the EU, which many say helped its victory. An article by the Telegraph identified several of the statistics pushed by the Brexit campaign as misleading and downright false. For example, the “Leave” camp claimed that the UK lost 350 million pounds (about $450 million) per week as a result of being in the EU, and pledged to invest that money in Britain’s health care system if the UK left. This was doubly wrong: The 350 million figure didn’t take into account money the EU paid back to Britain in subsidies, and the Brexit side quickly abandoned its promise to spend the 350 million on health care after they won the vote. Nonetheless, the GOP seems keen to draw on Gunster’s insights. Despite extensive gerrymandering that favors Republican victories around the country in 2018, the GOP has cause for concern for its incumbents’ and candidates’ prospects, including: Trump’s recent attacks on GOP leaders, the failed recent attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare that have reflected poorly on the party, and 2017 special elections results showing the Democratic Party closing its gap behind the GOP.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/28/16215666/brexit-strategist-republicans-2018-midterm-election-strategy

Vox

2017-07-24 16:30:00

2017

7.0

24

Kelsey Mulvey

Save $50 on Bose's Bluetooth headphones — and more of today's best deals from around the web

The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships, so we get a share of the revenue from your purchase. Since you don't have all day to scour the web for noteworthy sales and discounts, we rounded up the best bargains for you to shop in one convenient place. 1. Take $50 off the Amazon Echo Amazon's surprise one-day Echo discount brings our favorite smart speaker down to its lowest price since Prime Day. Today's your chance to get it for $50 cheaper. Amazon Echo, $129.99 (originally $179.99) [$50 off] 2. Save on thousands of items at Nordstrom's huge anniversary sale Nordstrom is giving back to its customers with its Anniversary Sale. Through August 6, you can score amazing discounts on its selection of clothes, accessories, and much more. Check out Nordstrom's huge Anniversary Sale here >> 3. Take up to 75% off your favorite high-end watches brands Every man should own an attractive watch and there's no better time to buy one. Jomashop's "Christmas in July" sale includes your favorite brands like Rolex, Omega, Breitling, Timex, Invicta and more — all at prices that are just as good as, if not better than, Black Friday. Seiko Men's Chronograph Black Dial Men's Watch, $79.99 ($240) [67% off] 4. Save 40% on shorts, button-downs, and more at Bonobos Anyone looking to revamp their summer wardrobe should head over to Bonobos. Now through July 27, you can take 40% off final sale items when you enter the code "DOGDAYS" at checkout. Check out Bonobos' latest sale here >> 5. Enroll in thousands of online courses for $10 each You can enroll in thousands of online courses for $10 each when you enter the code "JULY30310" at checkout. Whether you want to learn how to write the perfect cold email or ace an upcoming interview, there's a class that can help you better yourself and bolster your résumé. Here are a few classes that might pique your interest: An Entire MBA in 1 Course:Award Winning Business School Professor, $10 (originally $200) [95% off with code "JULY30310"] The Web Developer Bootcamp, $10 (originally $200) [95% off with code "JULY30310"] Leadership, Management and Entrepreneurship in the 21 Century, $10 (originally $75) [87% off with code "JULY30310"]

https://www.businessinsider.com/deal-of-the-day-bose-bluetooth-headphone-amazon-deal-2017-7

Business Insider

2016-09-27 14:34:00

2016

9.0

27

Andrew Prokop

Early polls and focus groups suggest Hillary Clinton won the debate

It will be a few more days before we get methodologically rigorous polls measuring how the electorate felt about the first presidential debate. The indicators we have so far are necessarily incomplete and limited — they’re focus groups of tiny, hand-picked samples of undecided voters, polls of people who watched the debate rather than the electorate at large, and plain punditry. Still, what we have so far points toward a Hillary Clinton victory. We’ve got: Furthermore, and potentially even more important, pundits in the media are converging on the narrative that Clinton won and Trump lost. This initial evidence will confirm those spot judgments, and that could matter. As I wrote earlier this month, political science research indicates that media judgments about who "won" a debate could help influence voters’ perceptions of who won. Hillary Clinton has been sliding in the polls over the past few weeks, and the race has grown uncomfortably close for Democrats who were expecting a landslide just over a month ago. So it’s certainly possible that Clinton will gain a few points in the polls from her debate performance, if the broader electorate agrees (or becomes convinced) that she won. After all, that’s what appeared to happen with Mitt Romney, who got a bump of a few points in public polling after he was judged to have won the first debate in 2012. But there are a few reasons to be cautious about assuming this will be the case. First of all, voters are perfectly able to conclude that one candidate "won" the debate without necessarily being won over to his or her side. That’s just common sense. After all, many supporters of Barack Obama concluded that he lost that debate with Romney, but they didn’t abandon him in droves — Romney just got a few points closer. Second, as John Sides has written, the vast majority of people who watch these debates have already made up their minds. "The debates tend to attract viewers who have an abiding interest in politics and are mostly party loyalists," Sides wrote. So it’s not clear what conclusions lower-information swing voters, who are less likely to have watched, will reach about what happened. Third, polls after certain events can be affected by a phenomenon called differential non-response rates, as Jeff Stein explained earlier this year. What this means, essentially, is that some voters may be more likely to even answer polls when they think things are going well for their preferred candidate. This means some Clinton supporters, because they got the sense that she won and feel excited, might be overrepresented in polls of the next few days. Conversely, some Trump supporters might not be in the mood to answer polls because they aren’t happy with how the debate went. Still, the initial indicators we have look good for Clinton, who was itching for some good news for her campaign. So we’ll see if more methodologically rigorous polls that come in later this week find that there was a serious impact on where the race stands.

https://www.vox.com/2016/9/27/13069088/hillary-clinton-won-first-presidential-debate

Vox

2019-06-19 00:00:00

2019

6.0

19

Evan McMorris-Santoro

Marianne Williamson: Yes, Trump’s ICE Raids Are Exactly Like Nazi Germany

Democrats and Republicans debated this week just how to describe the massive immigration raids President Trump promised in a tweet this week. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fired up Republicans when she called ICE detention centers “concentration camps” Tuesday. She refused demands that she apologize for the comment, leading to another round of Republican recriminations the next day. It was another episode of the classic American political game show “Who Said ‘Nazi?” It’s the IRL version of Godwin’s Law — the longer and more embittered a political fight in the U.S., the more likely someone will try to compare their opponents to the Nazis. Political professionals generally frown on these kind of comparisons. Invoking the Third Reich is tends to distract from the subject at hand, they say, and gives opponents something to be outraged about instead of responding to what people are actually discussing. But this is not a time when a lot of people running for office follow political rules. Marianne Williamson, the spiritual teacher and bestselling author running for the Democratic presidential nomination, invoked the Holocaust when talking about Trump’s promised immigration action at n event in New Hampsire Tuesday, and did it more strongly when asked about it afterwards. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m a Jew,” Williamson told a small crowd on the campus of Southern New Hampshire University. “And we are raised to say ‘never again.’ It’s happening again.” The crowd applauded. “There are some people who would say to me, ‘now Ms. Williamson, I think this Jewish analogy, you’ve really gone too far there. This is not the same situation at all,’” she went on, doing an impression of a tut-tutting critic. “But ladies and gentlemen some of those people will be deported to places so dangerous that it actually is no different.” In an interview after the rally, Williamson added some nuance, but mostly doubled down. “[Trump is] announcing it, he’s celebrating it like it’s something to be proud of,” she said of Trump’s tweet. “I don’t know about you, but I have visited the Anne Frank House. I’ve been to those places where people hid Jews in the basement. When I think of the fear that some people are going through right now after the president made that announcement, you know, where are they going to go?” “‘Never again’ is never supposed to mean ‘never again to us.’ It’s supposed to mean ‘never again, period,’” Williamson continued. “Some people would say ‘well, Marianne, that’s a false analogy because yes there might be mass arrests, yes there might be mass deportations, but they’re not being sent to the gas chambers.’ Yes, that is true. However, when we really allow ourselves to consider where they are going, to some of them they will be returned to almost certain violence and deep injustice.” WATCH: Donate to a presidential campaign, get harassed Cover: Democratic presidential candidate and self-help author Marianne Williamson speaks at the Iowa Democratic Party's Hall of Fame Dinner on June 9, 2019 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/j5wnjd/marianne-williamson-yes-trumps-ice-raids-are-exactly-like-nazi-germany

Vice News

2019-06-19 00:00:00

2019

6.0

19

PRESS DIGEST-New York Times business news - June 19

June 19 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories on the New York Times business pages. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he and President Xi Jinping of China had spoken by phone and would have an "extended" meeting at the Group of 20 meeting next week in Osaka, Japan. Trump's comments were the first confirmation that the two leaders would actually meet after trade talks between the United States and China stalled in May. nyti.ms/2IRgSpc - Facebook Inc on Tuesday unveiled a plan to create an alternative financial system that relies on a cryptocurrency that the company has been secretly working on for more than a year. The cryptocurrency, called Libra, which was announced with 27 partners as diverse as Mastercard Inc and Uber Technologies Inc, will have to overcome concern that Facebook does not effectively protect the private information of its users. nyti.ms/2IUIWrz - Alphabet Inc's Google said it has pledged to invest $1 billion to ease Bay Area Housing Crisis and plans to repurpose at least $750 million worth of commercially zoned land it owns over the next 10 years. Google would work with local governments to allow developers to lease the land to build homes. nyti.ms/2IToFCT - Canada will move forward with a pipeline project that has set the country's provinces against one another, opened rifts among its Indigenous communities and prompted major protests. The project, which will expand the Trans Mountain pipeline that links Alberta's oil sands to British Columbia, is a critical component of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's longstanding position that Canada needs to maintain a strong energy industry to support its efforts to combat climate change. nyti.ms/2ITq4JF Compiled by Bengaluru newsroom

https://www.reuters.com/article/press-digest-nyt/press-digest-new-york-times-business-news-june-19-idUSL4N23Q188

Market News

Reuters

2017-04-07 13:30:02

2017

4.0

7

Constance Grady

What Joan Didion’s new book, South and West, explains about her sensibility

The standard critique of Joan Didion — insofar as there is a standard critique of the legend, one of America’s greatest prose stylists and a pioneer of new journalism, she of the inscrutable cigarette-dangling photograph — is that she is a cold and self-centered writer. That her exquisitely polished and balanced sentences concern only herself, and never her ostensible subjects. Didion, says Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in her famous 1980 takedown, reports almost exclusively on “Didion’s sensibility,” noting that in the author’s essays, said sensibility “assumes more importance than, say, the existence of the electric chair.” For Harrison, this aesthetic focus seems vaguely immoral. She argues that Didion is always writing about her own taste, which is the taste of an educated upper-class West Coast white woman: minimalist, but expensively so. When she writes about the working classes or the nouveau riche, it is almost always with a faint sense of distaste for their poor taste, and rarely with an eye toward the systemic inequalities that separates her world from theirs. In the parlance of 2017, Harrison thinks Didion needs to check her privilege. As I read Didion’s new/old book — South and West: From a Notebook, which is a newly released reproduction of Didion’s notes for two unfinished essays, one from 1970 and the other from 1976 — Harrison’s critique kept popping into my mind. Didion’s notes are overwhelmingly focused on her own aesthetic sensibility, just as Harrison charged, but they are not amoral. It’s just that Didion’s morality is aesthetic. South and West is split into two sections. “Notes on the South” sees Didion traveling through the Gulf South states in order, she writes, to understand California and America more clearly. It’s an amorphous idea, one that Didion never seems to have articulated to her satisfaction, and the notes mostly consist of quick, impressionistic sketches of each state and long transcriptions of her conversations there. “California Notes,” much slighter, is a series of notes Didion took in preparation for covering the Patty Hearst trial. “I thought the trial had some meaning for me,” Didion writes, “because I was from California. This didn’t turn out to be true.” Her observations are all about California and how class functions there, specifically the upper-upper classes, to which both Didion and Hearst belong. They are, in other words, notes about Didion trying to understand herself and her home and her class by placing them all in opposition to something other: the South, which is antithetical to her aesthetically and culturally, and Patty Hearst, whom Didion seems to think of as the epitome of her own personal type of Californian wealth, and who was so rapidly undone after her kidnapping. “I am trying to place myself in history,” Didion writes in “California Notes,” continuing: “In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.” Didion’s notes repeatedly circle this idea: She sees the South as a place enamored of the past, as opposed to California’s obsession with the future, and intuits that the South and its nostalgia are the key to America’s future, not California’s utopian visions. Much has been made of her prescience in this regard, and how this line of thought anticipated the culture split of the 2016 presidential election, but for Didion, what seems to be most unsettling about the South and its rising influence is that it upsets her sense of aesthetics. She’s trying to make her aesthetic unease the basis for her argument that the South is troubling, and perhaps the reason the essay remains unfinished is that she wasn’t quite able to make that rhetorical leap. Didion seems troubled by the idea that the ground feels more unstable in the South; that it is wet and porous, without any solid boundaries; that it is simultaneously fecund and rotting. “The wilderness is sensed as very near,” she writes, “not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from civilization and its discontents but as a mortal threat to a community precarious and colonial in its deepest aspect.” She quotes, with a faint sense of menace, the famous naturalist John James Audubon on “the dangerous nature of the ground, its oozing, spongy, and miry disposition.” For Didion, the very land of the South is in opposition to her crisply defined Californian aesthetic. Didion is writing about her own sensibility — as Harrison argued she always does — but she is not doing so apolitically or amorally. South and West reminds me of Elif Batuman’s new novel, The Idiot, in which the narrator is charged with seeing the world through strictly aesthetic terms, an idea the character finds hard to grasp: It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic. “Ethics” meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That’s why it was called “golden,” like the golden ratio. “Isn’t that why you don’t cheat or steal — because it’s ugly?” I said. Like the narrator of The Idiot, Didion’s morality and her politics are both aesthetic. She finds the South both beautiful and aesthetically threatening, and that aesthetic menace becomes an ontological menace through a process she cannot quite render into a coherent argument. She thinks the California class system is not quite in good taste and hence might be immoral, but she cannot translate her aesthetic outrage into moral outrage. Perhaps the most telling passage in South and West comes as Didion is traveling from New Orleans to Mississippi, when she buys a beach towel printed with the Confederate flag. “It is ragged and gray now,” she writes, “and sits in my linen closet in California amid thick and delicately colored Fieldcrest beach towels, and my child prefers it to the good ones.” For Didion, the Confederate flag–printed towel is offensive in primarily aesthetic and classed terms: It is cheap and of poor quality, and its colors faded quickly; it is a lower-class and ugly object that doesn’t integrate well with Didion’s carefully selected, high-quality, expensive towels. In South and West, the aesthetic underpinnings of Didion’s intellectual ideology all become clear: When Didion wants to disavow something, she does not make a moral argument. She argues that it is ugly. Conversely, when something pleases her, she argues that it is beautiful. South and West is an unfinished book, but it’s worth reading as a peek under the hood at Didion’s extraordinarily lucid arguments: It shows you the beginnings of her thought process, as she’s just beginning to translate aesthetic judgment into rhetorical logic. If you like Didion, you can glory in the beauty of her sentence fragments and analyze the beginnings of her process; if you don’t like her, you can feel vindicated in knowing that her reporting notes really are quite self-centered. South and West does not succeed in creating a coherent argument about America or California or the South, but for insight into Didion herself, it’s invaluable.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/7/15161314/joan-didions-south-west-review

Vox

2019-03-18 00:00:00

2019

3.0

18

Kenneth Li

Warner Bros CEO Kevin Tsujihara resigns as AT&T probes 'mistakes'

(Reuters) - Kevin Tsujihara has resigned as the head of Warner Bros as one of Hollywood’s most powerful studios investigates a report that he improperly helped an actress obtain roles at the studio. He is the latest in a line of executives to lose their jobs in the media business following accusations of improper conduct or sexual harassment. “It is in the best interest of WarnerMedia, Warner Bros, our employees and our partners for Kevin to step down as Chairman and CEO of Warner Bros,” WarnerMedia Chief Executive John Stankey said in a statement on Monday. Tsujihara’s departure from the AT&T Inc-owned studio follows a March 6 article in the Hollywood Reporter that said an actress had sought his help in landing roles after they had sex. The report included text messages between Tsujihara and the actress that appeared to reveal they had sex. Tsujihara has not directly addressed his relationship with the actress, whether they had sex, nor his involvement in helping her career. “Kevin acknowledges that his mistakes are inconsistent with the company’s leadership expectations and could impact the company’s ability to execute going forward,” Stankey said in his statement. Stankey did not specify what mistakes Tsujihara made. Only two days before the Hollywood Reporter published its story, Tsujihara was given an expanded, more powerful role as part of a restructuring of AT&T’s WarnerMedia. “It has become clear that my continued leadership could be a distraction and an obstacle to the company’s continued success,” Tsujihara said in an email to employees on Monday, which was seen by Reuters. “The hard work of everyone within our organization is truly admirable, and I won’t let media attention on my past detract from all the great work the team is doing.” Tsujihara did not address why he was leaving in the email. Earlier this month, following the Hollywood Reporter story, Tsujihara’s attorney said the executive did not have a direct role in the hiring of the actress in any movie. AT&T is continuing to work with an outside law firm to complete its investigation into the matter, Stankey said. That would be the third investigation, two sources familiar with the situation told Reuters, and was sparked by the Hollywood Reporter article, which included text messages between the executive, the actress and two business partners. Tsujihara was cleared in two previous internal investigations related to the matter since late 2017, the sources said. The first, conducted by Time Warner, was initiated at Tsujihara’s request, the sources said, and the second was conducted by AT&T. AT&T shares rose 0.4 percent and closed at $30.80. Reporting by Kenneth Li; Editing by Bill Rigby

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-att-warner-media-tsujihara/warner-bros-ceo-kevin-tsujihara-resigns-as-att-probes-mistakes-idUSKCN1QZ26Q

Entertainment News

Reuters

2018-02-07 00:00:00

2018

2.0

7

Social Democrat mayor of Hamburg to become German Finance Minister: report

BERLIN (Reuters) - Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat (SPD) who is mayor of Hamburg, is set to become German Finance Minister in a new coalition government with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, German news agency DPA reported on Wednesday. The SPD tends to favor spending over austerity, suggesting there will be a move away from the firm fiscal policies championed by former conservative Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. Reporting by Michelle Martin; Editing by Joseph Nasr

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-politics-minister/social-democrat-mayor-of-hamburg-to-become-german-finance-minister-report-idUSKBN1FR199

World News

Reuters

2017-06-13 00:00:00

2017

6.0

13

John Goodrich

Figures Formed from the Primal Energies of Paint

Janice Nowinski’s paintings, currently on view at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, possess a kind of brute grace. Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads HUDSON, NY — Beneath their crude surfaces, Janice Nowinski’s paintings harbor a wealth of expression In her third show at John Davis Gallery, Nowinski continues to combine a distinctly “low,” unpolished approach with high ambitions for painting. The artist’s fairly conventional motifs — figures posed in landscapes and interiors — conceal a sophisticated orchestration of line and color. Despite her inelegant attack, with its coarse brushwork, abbreviated forms, and predilection for darkish, grayed green-blues, the paintings possess a kind of brute grace. In the strongest of them, the effect is truly striking: a straitened virtuosity that could arise only from a keen sensibility, a blunt honesty, and an impatience with the superficial. The rough cement walls of John Davis’s carriage house gallery provide an apt backdrop for Nowinski’s 18 paintings. Together, these small pieces suggest, with refreshing directness, the routine behind an artist’s calling. Nude models pose in interior scenes, while clothed figures stand casually in landscapes or gather sociably at a table. Poses seemingly inspired by Courbet and Watteau, as well as a study after a Masolino baptism, suggest an artist restocking her stores of inspiration. Connecting the paintings is a subtle — delicate, even — sense of color and its power to locate forms in light. When a figure stands in the midst of a landscape, or extends a limb through space, the gesture convinces, weighted by the shifting energies of colors. For instance, “Reclining Nude” (2017) recounts, with luscious felicity, each event of a figure lengthening just below the onlooker’s point of view. The muted gray-brown of a lower leg turns abruptly into the brilliant beige-pink of an illuminated thigh. The slightly subdued glow of belly leads to the dimmer pinkish-brown of an arm — equally absorptive and reflective of light — that cradles the darkest note of all, the shadowed orb of the head. The facial features are little more than scribbles and the hand a crude mitt, but the figure unfolds across the small canvas with the gravity of mountains under a low sun. Alongside “Reclining Nude” hangs “Figure Revealed” (2016), capturing a very different but no less intricate scenario of light. Here, a seated model’s head and arms occupy a zone of luminous shadow between a lifted piece of fabric — radiantly lit — and legs in deep shade below. The tangibly descending light animates each element, turning the dots of the model’s eyes into a human presence peering at us from the depths. Other notable paintings include the image of a head framed by a pillow, its weight and volume captured in broad gestures of color, and a landscape titled “Opening a Bottle” (2016), in which the dramatically contrasting horizontals of a deep space silhouette a lone, shadowy figure. Not every painting is quite as vivid, but every work in the installation reveals a determination to forge a semblance out of primal energies of paint. By the standards of a traditional academy, with its prioritizing of taste and finish, such works might seem naively inarticulate. But they are eloquent, often complexly so, as expressions of form and color — arguably, painting’s most unique claim to shaping the real. Janice Nowinski: Paintings continues at John Davis Gallery (362 1/2 Warren Street, Hudson, New York) through June 18.

https://hyperallergic.com/384974/figures-formed-from-the-primal-energies-of-paint/

Hyperallergic

2018-03-23 23:17:10

2018

3.0

23

Eric Johnson

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: What just happened?

Public trust in Facebook has taken several beatings in the past 18 months, and the social networking giant was done no favors by the recent revelation that a political data firm called Cambridge Analytica had smuggled millions of users’ data out of the site, exploiting a loophole in Facebook’s platform. On the latest episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask, Recode’s Kurt Wagner explained how that happened and what might happen next, along with The Verge’s Lauren Goode and Recode’s Kara Swisher. The podcast was recorded on Wednesday night, very shortly after Wagner and Swisher finished interviewing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “A lot of people do know what Facebook does with your data,” Wagner said. “What caught people off guard here is that, one, some 50 million users found their data in the hands of someone that they did not give permission to have it. Two, we find out that Facebook knew about this three years ago and never said anything publicly. I think there’s this betrayal of trust right now.” Part of the problem is that, back in the days when Facebook was a scrappy startup fighting its way to the top, privacy was not a moneymaker — but plugging users’ data into a plethora of outsiders’ apps was. That’s also why, Wagner explained, it’s wrong to call the Cambridge Analytica affair a “breach,” because at no point was the data obtained through hacking or other illegal tactics. “When you’re a venture-backed business that’s trying to rapidly scale and add as many new users as possible, if you’re the profile — if I’m downloading 10 new apps a month and I’m using my Facebook identity to log into all 10 of those — I’m probably not leaving Facebook,” he said. “There’s a huge value to them in doing that.” You can listen to the new podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. On the new podcast, Swisher and Wagner noted that they were both pleased by Zuckerberg’s willingness to answer all the questions they asked directly — you can read the full transcript of their interview here. But one of the lingering questions was, why did it take so long for Zuckerberg to surface at all? Wagner said it may tie back to the CEO’s widely publicized claim, after the 2016 election, that it was “crazy” that “fake news” on Facebook might have influenced the outcome. “Do you know how many times people pointed to that interview and said, ‘Hey, remember that time Mark Zuckerberg said it was crazy and now look?’” Wagner said. “He looked super naive. In this scenario, I think they remembered that interview and said, ‘Before we get all the facts, the last thing we want is to put Mark out there in front of the press to say something that we’re going to backtrack later on.’ That is my hunch.” Swisher took issue with Zuckerberg’s reluctance to be the arbiter of content on the platform — that’s a requirement of the job, she said. “They have to take responsibility. That’s what adults do. This is their company, they’ve made billions of dollars off of it, they decimated industries — they really control the online advertising market,” Swisher said. “They need to be responsible and make choices.” “Making choices means you piss people off, making choices means you have to give up some things,” she added. “They can’t have everything. They can’t have the world’s biggest platform and not be responsible for it. If they don’t want to do it, then get out of the way.” Have questions about Facebook, Cambridge Analytica or anything else that you want us to address in a future episode? Tweet them to @Recode with the hashtag #TooEmbarrassed, or email them to [email protected]. Be sure to follow @LaurenGoode, @KaraSwisher and @Recode to be alerted when we’re looking for questions about a specific topic. If you like this show, you should also check out our other podcasts: If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on Apple Podcasts — and if you don’t, just tweet-strafe Kara and Lauren. Tune in next Friday for another episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask! This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2018/3/23/17153368/facebook-cambridge-analytica-mark-zuckerberg-lauren-goode-kara-swisher-kurt-wagner-recode-podcast

Vox

2017-12-28 00:00:00

2017

12.0

28

Hyonhee Shin

South Korea 'humbly accepts' there is no proof border park cash funded North's weapons

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea said on Thursday it “humbly accepts” there is no evidence North Korea diverted wages paid to its workers by South Korean firms in a now-closed border industrial park to bankroll its weapons programs as the previous government asserted. The South’s unification ministry was responding to the findings of a panel which contradicted claims of money being transferred by North Korea as it pursues its nuclear and missile programs in defiance of U.N. sanctions. It said would take follow-up steps to boost transparency and public trust in its policy towards the North. South Korea said last year that most of the cash that flowed into the jointly run Kaesong complex was being diverted. It made the claim when it pulled out of the joint venture in response to the North’s launch of a long-range missile. In July, two months after liberal President Moon Jae-in was elected, a South Korean government official said there was no hard evidence to back up the assertion. The decision to suspend the Kaesong project was “unilaterally and verbally” made by Moon’s predecessor, ousted president Park Geun-hye, a day after the missile test and without any formal discussions within the administration, the panel, appointed by the unification ministry, said. “The presidential office inserted the wage-diversion argument as major grounds, yet without concrete information, sufficient evidence and consultations with related agencies, mainly citing defector testimonies that lack objectivity and credibility,” Kim Jong-soo, a priest who heads the panel, told a news conference. “This impairs the decision’s legitimacy and could constrain our ground over a future restart of the complex, while hampering the companies’ rights to protect their assets due to the hasty pullout process.” About 120 South Korean companies paid about double the $70 a month minimum wage in North Korea for each of the 55,000 workers hired in Kaesong. The project resulted from the first inter-Korean summit meeting in 2000, when leaders of the two Koreas vowed reconciliation and cooperation. It was the last remaining symbol of inter-Korean rapprochement amid frosty cross-border ties. Moon has pledged to reopen the industrial park if there is progress on the North’s denuclearization, but political tensions and the North’s aloofness have tied the president’s hands. Reclusive North Korea and the rich, democratic South are technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. The North regularly threatens to destroy the South and its main ally, the United States. A group of South Korean businessmen who own factories in Kaesong demanded a formal apology. The companies together suffered losses of 250 billion won ($200 million) due to the closure, aside from equipment and raw materials left behind, the group said in February. “Now that the wage-diversion claim has proved groundless, the government must apologize for abusing state power to suspend the complex and make utmost efforts to reopen it,” the group said in a statement after the conference. North Korea’s state-run web sites said in October the country had restarted some operations in Kaesong on its own, saying it was “nobody’s business what we do in an industrial complex where our nation’s sovereignty is exercised”. Reporting by Hyonhee Shin; Editing by Nick Macfie

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles/south-korea-humbly-accepts-there-is-no-proof-border-park-cash-funded-norths-weapons-idUSKBN1EM064

World News

Reuters

2017-07-10 13:50:02

2017

7.0

10

Alex Abad-Santos

Spider-Man: Homecoming had a huge opening weekend at the box office

Spider-Man has found his home sweet home. Spider-Man: Homecoming opened with an estimated $117 million at the domestic box office this weekend. It’s a confidence boost for a film studio that has struggled to achieve success in bringing the legendary Marvel character to the big screen. After Sony’s Tobey Maguire-starring Spider-Man films fizzled out, ending with 2007’s Spider-Man 3, the studio wasted little time in rebooting them. The Amazing Spider-Man, starring Andrew Garfield, launched in 2012; it opened to $62 million domestically, going on to gross $262 domestically and nearly $758 million worldwide. Its sequel, 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, opened to $91.6 million domestically, going on to gross $202.8 million domestically and nearly $709 million worldwide. But even though The Amazing Spider-Man 2 had a bigger opening weekend than its predecessor, Sony considered the film a disappointment because of its lower worldwide total. Sequels are generally expected to make more money than the original. That disappointment not only caused Sony to cancel its plans for an Amazing Spider-Man 3, but to seek out a new actor to play the web-slinger. The studio also struck a landmark deal with Marvel Studios that would allow Spider-Man to appear in a Marvel film, even though Sony owns the film rights to the character. Spider-Man: Homecoming — a co-production between Sony and Marvel, starring Tom Holland as Spidey — is the result. And Homecoming’s $117 million opening weekend seems to indicate that partnering with Marvel and casting Holland were both excellent decisions on Sony’s part, decisions that might finally get Spider-Man’s cinematic legacy back on track.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/7/10/15944066/spider-man-homecoming-box-office-opening-weekend-117-million

Vox

2016-11-01 15:00:03

2016

11.0

1

Sam Ellis

How Donald Trump thinks about foreign policy, explained in 7 minutes

Donald Trump’s coziness with Vladimir Putin, casual talk of taking Iraq’s oil and abandoning NATO, and muddled messaging on whether he'd deploy American troops to battle ISIS makes it easy to assume that the GOP nominee's foreign policy is a jumbled mishmash of ideas lacking any coherent philosophy. That couldn't be more wrong. In fact, a close look at Trump’s public comments leads to a very different conclusion: Trump has a distinct worldview that knits together many of his specific proposals. We can sum it up in a word: transactional. To the mogul, all of foreign policy is motivated by assessments of what's better, financially, for the US. Washington should have few if any fixed alliances, allegiances, or even adversaries. Instead, Trump believes that everything comes down to the art of the transaction, with countries that spend their money the way he wants them to getting more than countries that don't. That sound appealing on the surface; what American wouldn't want to believe that his or her government is doing all it can to benefit them in a material way while leaving other nations to defend themselves rather than relying on the US. That's particularly true given that the risks of bad foreign policy choices (the costly and seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance) are easier to spot than the gains (stability on the Korean Peninsula, for instance). The problem is that foreign policy can't be reduced to a question of dollars and cents, and attempts to do so — even in the form of Trump's bombastic campaign rhetoric — can do lasting damage. Telling Moscow that the US would only defend NATO allies from a Russian invasion if the countries had spent more on their militaries risks pushing away Eastern European allies while emboldening Vladimir Putin. Openly talking of taking Iraq’s oil complicates Washington's relationship with Baghdad and feeds into widespread conspiracy theories in the Arab world about why the US continues to intervene in the Middle East. And casually telling Japan and South Korea that they should develop their own nuclear weapons could trigger a dangerous new arms race in one of the world's most tumultuous regions. With polls tightening in the waning days of the election, it’s more important than ever to take Trump seriously and examine his actual ideas in details. In this video, we try to do exactly that.

https://www.vox.com/world/2016/11/1/13481594/donald-trump-explained-foreign-policy

Vox

2019-04-05 19:40:00

2019

4.0

5

Aaron Rupar

Trump made two remarkably authoritarian remarks in one day

President Donald Trump made two remarkably authoritarian comments on Friday, first urging Congress to “get rid of judges” — specifically, immigration judges — and later demeaning the entire media as the “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” But in a sign of how normalized the behavior of this president has become, neither remark amounted to much more than a blip on the news radar. Trump made his comment about immigration judges during a question-and-answer session with reporters before departing the White House for a photo opportunity along the southern border in California. “Congress has to act,” Trump said. “They have to get rid of catch and release, chain migration, visa lottery, they have to get rid of the whole asylum system because it doesn’t work, and frankly, we should get rid of judges. You can’t have a court case every time somebody steps foot on our ground.” Trump calls on Congress to "get rid of the whole asylum system" because "it doesn't work.""Frankly, we should get rid of judges," he adds. pic.twitter.com/5s8kI9mbHR Trump’s comments marked the second time this week he has urged Congress “to get rid of judges” — a proposal that, thankfully, for those of us who value checks and balances, has little chance of gaining traction now that Democrats control the House. The president, however, is not even trying to hide the fact he’d like to have the power to summarily deport migrants and asylum seekers, and has already demonstrated a willingness to try and seize emergency powers toward that end. Later, while Air Force One was on its way to California, Trump posted a tweet in which he characterized the entire “press” as “truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” The press is doing everything within their power to fight the magnificence of the phrase, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! They can’t stand the fact that this Administration has done more than virtually any other Administration in its first 2yrs. They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! Trump’s tweet represented an escalation of his anti-press rhetoric. In the past, Trump had been careful to qualify his “enemy of the people” attacks as applying to “THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA,” the “Fake News,” or only pertaining to “much of the Media.” White House officials cited Trump’s hedging in his defense. After a Trump fan sent package bombs to a number of prominent Trump critics in the media and politics last fall, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders defended Trump’s “enemy of the people” tweets by saying, “the president’s not referencing all media. He’s talking about the growing amount of fake news in the country. The president’s calling that out.” But last month, Trump went a step further and called “The Mainstream Media” “the Enemy of the People.” Now, he’s using that attack against the entire press. The president says a lot of ugly stuff, and much of it can safely be tuned out. Still, Trump’s comments on Friday highlight how unprecedented the current state of affairs is for our country. The president aspires to being an authoritarian ruler and isn’t really trying to hide it. Regardless of whether you take Trump’s comments literally or merely seriously, they are disturbing. Judges are a vital part of the rule of law, and the free press is important in any democracy. Those values were mostly taken for granted in this country, but should not be any longer. The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

https://www.vox.com/2019/4/5/18297113/trump-authoritarian-comments-immigration-judges-media

Vox

2016-09-18 19:00:00

2016

9.0

18

Becky Ferreira

Hubble Captures the Best View of a Disintegrating Comet Yet

We tend to think of the Sun as the essential life-giver, what with all of its contributions to fostering ecosystems on Earth. But our star can also be a stone cold comet killer, as demonstrated by new imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope showing Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami being brutally flayed and broken apart by solar radiation. These images were snapped over the course of three days beginning on January 26, 2016, when the 1,600-foot-long comet was 150 million miles from Sun, around the same distance as the orbit of Mars. The comet itself is the brightest object, on the left, while the sparkly points moving towards the right of the frame are chunks of debris that were blasted away from the main body after a 2015 outburst. This trail of icy detritus stretches for 3,000 miles behind the comet. All of the objects pictured brighten whenever their iciest, most reflective patches are angled toward the Sun. According to new research about the observations published on Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the images offer the most comprehensive view of comet disintegration ever recorded. "We know that comets sometimes disintegrate, but we don't know much about why or how they come apart," said lead author David Jewitt, an astronomer based at UCLA, in a statement. "The trouble is that it happens quickly and without warning, and so we don't have much chance to get useful data," he continued. "With Hubble's fantastic resolution, not only do we see really tiny, faint bits of the comet, but we can watch them change from day to day. And that has allowed us to make the best measurements ever obtained on such an object." At 4.5 billion years old, Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami is nearly as ancient as the solar system itself. For most of its lifespan, it was happy to soar around with its comet buddies in the frozen Kuiper Belt surrounding the solar system. But then, one day, it had a run-in with Neptune that gravitationally slingshotted it into the realm of the planets, and toward the unforgiving heat of the Sun. It was in this altered trajectory that the comet was first discovered, in 2010. NASA footage of Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami after it was discovered in 2010. As exposure to the Sun's intense rays warms the comet, powerful jets blast large building-sized pieces off its body. These explosive outbursts act like "rocket engines," according to NASA, accelerating the spin of the comet to dizzying rotation speeds. An observer on the surface of Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami would see the Sun rise and set within an hour. Talk about a recipe for a puke-a-thon. At this rate, the comet probably only has 150 years left to live. Of course, that still means it will probably outlive you or I. But considering that the object has been knocking around since before the birth of life on Earth, "it's the blink of an eye, astronomically speaking," according to Jewitt. "In Comet 332P we may be seeing a comet fragmenting itself into oblivion," he added. "The trip to the inner solar system has doomed it."

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/53dkxq/hubble-captures-the-best-view-of-a-disintegrating-comet-yet

Tech by VICE

Vice

2018-08-20 00:00:00

2018

8.0

20

Anshuman Daga

Exclusive: U.S. energy group Hess Corp's SE Asia assets attract bid interest - sources

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The Southeast Asian offshore natural gas assets of U.S. oil and gas producer Hess Corp (HES.N), estimated to be worth as much as $5 billion, have attracted takeover interest from firms including Thailand’s PTTEP PCL (PTTEP.BK) and Austrian energy group OMV AG (OMVV.VI), people familiar with the matter said. Hess, which has a collection of gas fields in North Malay Basin in offshore Malaysia and in the Malaysia-Thailand Joint Development Area (JDA) with 50 percent equal partner Petronas, has not yet decided whether to sell the assets, according to financial and industry sources. Their estimated market value would be about $4 billion to $5 billion, the sources said. They declined to be identified because the takeover interest had not previously been made public. The interest in Hess’ assets, among the few long-term and sizeable projects in the region, comes as cashed-up firms such as PTTEP are buying overseas assets, while the likes of OMV and Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company have been scouring for acquisitions in Asia.. Hess, which hasn’t reported a profit since 2014, has been under pressure from investors to make money. It posted a smaller-than-expected loss in April-June, but many of its peers have turned profitable after the oil price crash two years ago, fuelling questions as to why Hess has not followed suit. The firm is developing large offshore oil projects in South America and U.S. shale oil. In 2014, it sold its Thai assets to PTTEP for $1 billion and also sold its Indonesian assets. “We don’t comment on rumours but we continue to believe that our Malaysia assets are an important part of our portfolio and our value creation strategy,” Hess spokeswoman Lorrie Hecker said in a statement. “JDA and North Malay Basin are significant long-term, low-cost cash generators, producing stable production and free cash flows, which provide funding for our compelling, long-term opportunities in Guyana and the Bakken (in the United States).” “A number of parties have looked (at the Hess assets) and have teams working on this,” said one financial source. “Increasing numbers of companies believe a sale is probable,” said the person, adding that Hess’ project would also appeal to private-equity backed players and mid-sized energy firms. He said PTTEP was working with a financial advisor for its interest in the assets. Another source said some parties had done preliminary work on the assets and were waiting to see if Hess would start a sale process. OMV and Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company declined to comment. This month, OMV won regulatory approval to buy Royal Dutch Shell’s (RDSa.L) upstream assets in New Zealand for $578 million. OMV said in March that the acquisition was a key step to develop Australasia into a core region in line with its new strategy. Petronas declined comment while PTTEP said it was focused on expanding in Southeast Asia. “PTTEP is interested in M&A deals with particular focus on assets located in PTTEP’s region of experience such as South East Asia, which is PTTEP’s areas of expertise and the operating risk is moderately low,” the Thai company told Reuters, declining to comment specifically on Hess assets. The industry’s prospects have brightened as oil LCOc1 and natural gas LNG-AS prices have more than doubled since early 2016, with demand for oil in Asia - the world’s biggest consumer - also growing strongly even as production is falling faster than anywhere else. Hess’ nine gas fields in the North Malay Basin have an estimated gross recoverable resource of more than 1.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and over 20 million barrels of condensate. Production started in July 2017. The company has a 50 percent working interest in the Southeast Asian blocks with Petronas Carigali, a fully-owned subsidiary of Petronas. Hess signed a production-sharing contract with Petronas in 2012 and has a contract with the oil major till 2029. “Hess is pursuing divestments globally, high grading its portfolio centered around its Guyana and U.S. Bakken (shale) interests,” said Saul Kavonic, director of Asia/Pacific markets and head of energy research in Australia at Credit Suisse. Reporting by Anshuman Daga; Additional reporting by Henning Gloystein in SINGAPORE, Ernest Scheyder in HOUSTON, Chayut Setboonsarng in BANGKOK, A. Ananthalakshmi in KUALA LUMPUR, Kirsti Knolle in VIENNA and Hadeel Al Sayegh in DUBAI; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hess-m-a/exclusive-u-s-energy-group-hess-corps-se-asia-assets-attract-bid-interest-sources-idUSKCN1L50CP

Deals

Reuters

2019-07-03 00:00:00

2019

7.0

3

Chris Pratt, Katherine Schwarzenegger Show PDA on Hawaii Honeymoon

Chris Pratt and Katherine Schwarzenegger are packing on some serious PDA in paradise. Newlyweds, right? The couple was honeymooning on the Hawaiian island of Lanai 2 weeks after tying the knot, and seemed to get a little handsy while chilling in the pool at their resort. We're told they kept to themselves -- enjoying each other's company, and avoiding chit chat with other vacationers. In other words ... a honeymoon. You can feel the newlywed love ... as they played around in the water. We're told Chris also took some time out for fitness, getting in some laps. When they weren't in the pool, they played cards and did some reading. Sounds pretty ... honeymoon-like. As we reported ... Chris and Katherine tied the knot on June 8 in front of a celeb-packed crowd. Heck ... the wedding rehearsal was held at Rob Lowe's home. Seems Chris and Katherine haven't stopped smiling since.

https://www.tmz.com/2019/07/02/chris-pratt-katherine-schwarzenegger-hawaii-honeymoon-pda/

TMZ

2018-12-07 00:00:00

2018

12.0

7

Huawei denies it poses security threat after EU warning

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Chinese tech giant Huawei [HWT.UL] denied on Friday that it posed a security risk, saying that it had never been told by any government to obtain covert access through so-called “backdoors”. The comments came after EU tech commissioner Andrus Ansip said the EU should be worried about the company. Huawei said it was surprised and disappointed by Ansip’s comments. “We categorically reject any allegation that we might pose a security threat,” Huawei said in a statement. “Huawei has never been asked by any government to build any backdoors or interrupt any networks, and we would never tolerate such behavior by any of our staff.” Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; editing by Francesco Guarascio

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-china-huawei-dialogue/huawei-denies-it-poses-security-threat-after-eu-warning-idUSKBN1O61RN

Business News

Reuters

2017-12-14 00:00:00

2017

12.0

14

Factbox: Disney's global footprint post-Fox deal

(Reuters) - Walt Disney Co (DIS.N) has struck a deal to buy film, television and international businesses from Rupert Murdoch’s Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (FOXA.O), seeking even greater scale as it battles digital rivals Netflix Inc (NFLX.O) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O). Following is an outline of the resources and assets the world’s biggest entertainment company, with a current market value of about $166 billion, will hold if the deal is completed. - Under the deal, Disney is acquiring Fox’s FX and National Geographic cable channels, its movie studio, India’s main network Star and a stake in European pay-TV provider Sky Plc SKYB.L. - Taken together, Fox and Disney generated a total of $16.3 billion in advertising revenue in the 2017 financial year. - The two companies’ studio businesses generated $16.6 billion in total revenue in fiscal 2017. - Disney’s ESPN sports channels have about 88 million U.S. subscribers and 146 million internationally. - Data from film industry website Box Office Mojo gives Fox and Disney together about 30 percent of an estimated $10 billion in box office taken by U.S. cinemas so far this year, which would make the combined company the single largest player, ahead of Time Warner Inc’s TWX.N Warner Bros with 20 percent. - British bank Barclays said Hulu, Sky, and India’s Tata Sky together give Disney 46 million streaming or cable subscriptions in the United States, Western Europe and India, compared to Netflix’s global figure of 109 million customers. - Barclays analysts also calculated that the combined movie and TV libraries of Fox Studio and Disney’s Buena Vista studios, which includes Pixar Animations and “Star Wars” producer Lucasfilm, has more titles than Netflix. - Disney plans to pull its first-run movies from Netflix starting in 2019. If it did the same with Fox programming, Netflix would lose “The Simpsons,” the “Star Wars” franchise and all Marvel superhero films. - The deal would give Disney access to franchises and characters including “X-Men,” “Wolverine,” “Deadpool” and “Fantastic Four” and reunite them with the rest of the Marvel comic universe under one roof. - Disney’s library of kids’ content dwarfs Netflix’s, with over 700 titles compared to around 400, according to Barclays. - Disney will be able to distribute its programming on Star India, operator of 69 channels in eight languages in the world’s fastest-growing subscription TV market, as well as Star’s popular Hotstar streaming service. Sources: company filings, industry data, analyst reports Reporting by Munsif Vengattil and Laharee Chatterjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli and Bill Rigby

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fox-m-a-disney-factbox/factbox-disneys-global-footprint-post-fox-deal-idUSKBN1E82GU

Business News

Reuters

2017-12-07 08:35:50

2017

12.0

7

Will Martin

IMF report warns on China debt risks to global financial system

International Monetary Fund warns that China's ever-growing debt problem poses global financial stability challenges."Credit growth has outpaced GDP growth, leading to a large credit overhang."Fund identifies three areas of "tensions" within the country's financial sector.

https://www.businessinsider.com/imf-report-china-debt-risk-global-financial-system-2017-12

Business Insider

2018-10-26 00:00:00

2018

10.0

26

Suge Knight Transferred to California State Prison to Begin Manslaughter Sentence

Suge Knight is now at the California state prison he could call home for the remainder of his 28-year sentence ... TMZ has learned. Suge arrived Tuesday at Wasco State Prison ... and based on his super sad mug shot, it doesn't look like the former Death Row Records exec is thrilled with his new digs. The prison is basically in the middle of nowhere in Kern County, and has 400 beds. It's a far cry from the lavish lifestyle Suge enjoyed when he was at his peak, partying in Hollywood with Tupac, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. He'll undergo a battery of exams -- physical and mental -- and review his records before determining his permanent "home." He could stay at Wasco or be shipped off to a different state pen. TMZ broke the story ... Suge struck a plea deal last month, and got a 28-year prison sentence. He got credit for time served and, due to prison overcrowding, could be out in a little over 10 years. The last time we saw Suge ... he was flashing a menacing glare in court immediately following sentencing. As we reported ... Knight ran over Terry Carter back in January 2015 in the Tam's Burgers parking lot in Compton. TMZ obtained surveillance video from Tam's showing Knight putting his truck in reverse, knocking over one man, then driving forward over Terry ... killing him. He was arrested and charged with murder, but pled guilty to manslaughter.

https://www.tmz.com/2018/10/26/suge-knight-wasco-state-prison-transfer-manslaughter/

TMZ

2019-04-30 00:00:00

2019

4.0

30

Explainer: Will opposition leader Guaido topple Venezuela's President Maduro?

(Reuters) - Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido appeared alongside armed, uniformed men on Tuesday in his strongest call yet to the military to abandon President Nicolas Maduro, a day before planned mass protests aimed at toppling the socialist leader. In the more than three months since Guaido invoked the constitution to assume an interim presidency, citing fraudulent elections, Maduro has so far kept a grip on the levers of power including the military and security forces. Guaido says Maduro must step aside for a transitional government to organize new elections. Maduro has resisted calls for an early vote or that he leave power early before his six-year second term ends in 2025. Below are some of the factors that could decide who prevails: Venezuela has a long history of military rebellions and coups, notably the 1958 overthrow of dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez, and the failed attempt by Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, to take office by force in a 1992 army coup. After being elected to office, Chavez himself survived a putsch a decade later. Now Guaido is seeking a widespread army uprising against Maduro, who has overseen a 50 percent collapse in the economy and shortages of food and medicine that have led more than 3 million Venezuelans to leave the country since he took office in 2013. Although the young opposition leader was accompanied at a rally in Caracas on Tuesday by several dozen armed troops, it did not immediately appear that he had won much support from the country’s 200,000-strong armed forces, and 25 of the soldiers with him later sought refuge in the Brazilian embassy. Since declaring himself interim president in January, Guaido has repeatedly made overtures to the military, offering an amnesty from prosecutions if they join him, with only marginal success. Several hundred soldiers have defected and left the country for Brazil or Colombia in recent weeks but not in numbers high enough to threaten Maduro’s grip. One risk is that a military split leads to prolonged violence among different armed factions. Maduro’s offer of negotiations with Guaido, moderated by the Vatican, Mexico or Uruguay, has been rejected by the opposition, which says previous rounds of talks allowed the government to stall for time without making any real concessions. While some 50 nations, including the United States, have declared support for Guaido, Maduro still has powerful backers, notably Russia and China. Others allies include Cuba, Iran and Turkey. U.S. national security advisor John Bolton has called on Russia to drop its support for Maduro, which includes military advisers. While some believe Moscow could negotiate an exit and safe passage out of Venezuela for the president, there are few signs Putin is willing to give up on the government that gives him most geo-political clout in the Americas. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNN on Tuesday that Maduro was prepared to leave Venezuela on Tuesday morning but reversed his plan after Russia said he should stay. Bolton said on Tuesday the opposition had won commitments from leading members of Maduro’s administration that the president had to go, but there was no public sign of high-level splits within the government that could lead to a transition. U.S.-BACKED MILITARY OPS Erik Prince - the founder of private security firm Blackwater and a supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump - has been pushing a plan to deploy a private army to help topple Maduro, sources told Reuters. Prince’s pitch will only add to speculation that the United States, while unlikely to invade Venezuela to bring down Maduro, might resort to irregular military action, such as the kind of intelligence service-backed covert operations used by Washington a number of times in 20th-century Latin America. A person familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking said the White House would not support such a plan. Although some former Venezuelan security officials opposed to Maduro are now based in Colombia and have claimed involvement in a drone attack on the president last year, there is little evidence that such operations are being prepared at the moment. Reporting by Luc Cohen, Vivian Sequera, Angus Berwick in Caracas; Additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick, Aram Roston, Eric Beech and Jonathan Landay in Washington; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Peter Cooney

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-maduro-explainer/explainer-will-opposition-leader-guaido-topple-venezuelas-president-maduro-idUSKCN1S62UG

World News

Reuters

2019-06-25 00:00:00

2019

6.0

25

John Miller

Fund supermarket Allfunds bulks up with Credit Suisse deal

ZURICH (Reuters) - Spain’s Allfunds Group is buying Credit Suisse’s business-to-business investment fund platform InvestLab for an undisclosed sum as the investment services industry consolidates to reap the benefits of scale. Credit Suisse will take a stake of up to 18% in the combined business, the two companies said on Tuesday. It will also receive an undisclosed cash payment. The Swiss bank said the transaction would result in a 0.5% increase in return on tangible equity (RoTE) this year, which Zuercher Kantonalbank analysts said suggested the sale price “had to be relatively high”. Even so, the analysts said the deal to combine what essentially are digital fund supermarkets would have little impact on the operating business at Credit Suisse. “This transaction is really a sideshow” for Credit Suisse, Zuercher Kantonalbank’s Javier Lodeiro said, adding the gross margin for the combined Allfunds-Investlab business from assets under custody was probably “extremely thin”. Allfunds calls itself the world’s largest institutional fund distribution network and said the combination with Credit Suisse InvestLab would offer 78,000 investment products to financial institutions across more than 45 countries, with assets under management topping 500 billion euros ($570 billion). Credit Suisse is exiting control amid consolidation in a technology-driven business area where scale has grown more important, creating opportunities for Allfunds to bulk up. Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and private equity investor Hellman & Friedman bought Allfunds in 2017 from Intesa Sanpaolo Group, Santander Group, General Atlantic and Warburg Pincus. “Going forward, Credit Suisse will utilize the combined business platform to distribute mutual funds and ETFs (exchange traded funds),” the Swiss bank said in a statement. InvestLab has about two dozen employees, who will retain their jobs with the transaction, a spokesman said. “The combination will allow Allfunds to accelerate and expand its investment into the development of new services and solutions to the benefit of the funds eco-system, comprising of asset managers, fund distributors and other intermediaries,” Allfunds said. “With this arrangement, Allfunds continues its global expansion into new territories while consolidating business ambitions in Asia and Central Europe,” Allfunds added, saying Switzerland would become a key business hub following the deal, which is due to close in early 2020. InvestLab offers distributors access to over 46,000 products from more than 170 providers worldwide, with assets under management topping 140 billion Swiss francs ($144 billion). Reporting by John Miller and Oliver Hirt, Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips and Mark Potter

https://www.reuters.com/article/credit-suisse-gp-allfunds/update-2-fund-supermarket-allfunds-bulks-up-with-credit-suisse-deal-idUSL8N23W0IX

Business News

Reuters

2019-02-15 21:49:00

2019

2.0

15

Harry Cheadle

Trump's Phony Emergency Pushed America a Little Closer Toward a Real Crisis

Or maybe right-wingers are leery of Trump going down this path because it's clear where it leads. If the situation on the border is a "crisis" at a time when unauthorized crossings are relatively low, literally anything can be a crisis. And the politics of constant crisis will mean even more gamesmanship, more partisan aggression, more rule-bending and norm-breaking, and—in a worst-case scenario—fewer guardrails on the country sliding into actual authoritarianism. Trump's declaration sparked an uproar from the intellectual branch of the conservative movement, which—at least since the George W. Bush era—has often despaired at the expansion of presidential power. Several writers fretted that Democrats will quickly use this emerging precedent to aggressively pursue their own priorities once they retake the White House. Noah Rothman called it the "crossing of the Rubicon," while Jonah Goldberg predicted it would be a "long-term gift to progressives." Both noted that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already mused about declaring a state of emergency over gun violence. The darkest right-wing fantasy probably involves something like President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declaring unilaterally in 2030 that airplanes are now banned as part of the Green New Deal Five-Year Plan. But concern over executive branch overreach seems largely confined to the pundit class. In practice, presidents of both parties, including Barack Obama and Bush, have expanded the powers of the office whenever they could, and Congress has largely let that happen as its own power eroded. Trump's declaration of emergency isn't a break from tradition but the continuation of a long, downward slide into who knows what. There's always the risk of sounding hyperbolic when talking about that slide. Trump's state of emergency will face a legal challenge, and even if he triumphs there, it doesn't create an easy path for Comrade Ocasio-Cortez to snap her fingers Thanos-like and usher in a new socialist age. The $8 billion Trump is looking to divert from other sources toward a wall is peanuts compared to the $32 trillion Bernie Sanders's Medicare for all proposal might cost over a decade, or the even heftier price tag some have put on the Green New Deal The problem isn't the nuts and bolts of the declaration, but the rationale behind it. Trump's entire presidential campaign, from the primaries to his eventual razor-thin win, was aflame with apocalyptic rhetoric and drastic, often patently unconstitutional proposals. He called for a ban on Muslims entering the US, gleefully embraced calls to jail his opponent, and praised torture. He hasn't acted on all those impulses (though his "travel ban" clearly grew out of his Islamophobic rhetoric), but he remains fond of extremism in defense of just about anything—on Friday, during his announcement of the state of emergency, he went into a tangent praising China using the death penalty for drug dealers. Those statements are shocking because normal politicians aren't so crude, but in truth Republicans have for decades been campaigning and governing—and sometimes shutting down the government—as if the end of the world were just around the corner. Trump's declaration of emergency is a natural outgrowth of the philosophy that every lever of power can be used with no limit and that the ends always justify the means—even when the end is a hideous monument to racism. The GOP has treated politics as an emergency for decades, and in an emergency, glass gets broken, rules are ignored, any evil can be excused as necessary. Conservative Republicans spent the Obama years derailing compromises on immigration, attempting to block the Affordable Care Act rather than working in good faith with Democrats, and doing whatever they could to obstruct the president's agenda, up to and including denying him a Supreme Court appointment. After Trump's election, they refused to include Democrats in conversations around repealing the ACA and rushed through an error-ridden tax cut bill. Meanwhile, Republicans have benefitted from gerrymandering, struck down key portions of the Voting Rights Act, and moved to consolidate their power in states like North Carolina in extremely aggressive, sometimes legally dubious, ways. This encourages a counter-reaction from Democrats. If Trump's priorities are emergencies, his opposition has to use similar language or risk looking complacent, disinterested, or just bland. He's created a space where the Democratic base is talking about packing the Supreme Court, adding new states to elect Democratic senators, and abolishing the filibuster rules that make it impossible to pass laws without 60 seats in the Senate. If Democrats retake power in 2020, what arguments will their leadership have not to consider those moves, especially with climate change posing a far greater threat than illegal immigration? You can imagine a kind of whipsaw effect that essentially ends American democracy as we know it: Democrats, in response to Trump, use extreme measures to advance their priorities. Then Republicans win an election and embrace even more extreme measures, and on and on until one party or the other decides to institute laws that make it impossible for the opposition to retake power. That's the who-knows-what that is at the very bottom of the slide we seem to be heading toward. As political scientist Yascha Mounk just wrote in Slate, "Trump lacks the vision or the discipline of most of the authoritarian populists who have successfully bent their countries’ institutions to their will." The danger may not be the current president but who comes after him. The way out of this bind is trickier to envision. Neither party's base seems to like compromise much in a hyper-ideological era with no unifying sources of facts. But without compromise you can't pass legislation (at least in this current system), giving rise to a situation where the president makes policy and the judiciary doesn't do much besides occasionally tell them "no." The silver lining, if there is one, is that as Trump just demonstrated, whether we're in an emergency is largely a matter of terminology. It's easy to use the language of crisis, to say that swarms of refugees are swamping the southern border or that America is on the brink of socialism or sliding into the sea or teetering on the edge of a never-before-seen catastrophe. It's harder to identify which one of those things are real, urgent problems and solve them through a regular political process that inevitably involves some compromise. Unfortunately, the president always takes the easy way out. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily. Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjmgp4/trumps-phony-emergency-pushed-america-a-little-closer-toward-a-real-crisis

Views My Own

Vice

2017-02-22 22:55:53

2017

2.0

22

Johana Bhuiyan

Tesla may be building three more Gigafactories

As Tesla’s orders increase, the electric car company may be building up to three more of its “Gigafactories,” CEO Elon Musk wrote today in a letter to shareholders (pdf), published in conjunction with the company’s fourth-quarter results. That could bring the company’s number of factories up to a total of five. “Later this year, we expect to finalize locations for Gigafactories 3, 4 and possibly 5 (Gigafactory 2 is the Tesla solar plant in New York),” Musk wrote. Tesla needs to increase its factory capacity to handle both battery and car manufacturing. The company received close to 400,000 preorders after unveiling its mass-market Model 3 vehicle last March, and fourth-quarter orders for its existing Model S and X vehicles increased 49 percent year over year, Musk wrote. Tesla plans to invest $2 billion to $2.5 billion in capital expenditures before Model 3 production begins in July. Meanwhile, Tesla missed yet another production goal in 2016. The company expected to deliver 80,000 to 90,000 cars by the end of the year, but only delivered 76,230. Tesla attributed its miss to shifting to a new set of “2.0” sensors for its self-driving Autopilot feature. The company still produced 77 percent more cars in the fourth quarter of 2016 than in Q4 2015. This was Tesla’s first earnings report since its merger with SolarCity — an all-stock exchange valued at $2.8 billion — closed in November. Between the deal close on Nov. 21 and the end of the quarter, solar operations added $77 million in cash but $85 million in operating expenses. Yet Musk maintained the company is on track to generate $500 million in cash from its energy generation and storage business by 2019. That includes both its solar business in addition to revenue from Powerwall, its battery for homes, and Powerpack, its energy-storage product for businesses. Overall, Tesla beat Wall Street estimates for revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016, generating $2.28 billion in revenue, up 88 percent year over year, versus expectations of $2.16 billion. Shares increased about 2 percent in after-hours trading. On the call with analysts and reporters, Musk also announced that the company’s CFO was stepping down after a little more than a year. The company’s former CFO, Deepak Ahuja, will be coming out of retirement to replace him. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2017/2/22/14702690/tesla-fourth-quarter-2016-earnings-solar-city

Vox

2016-08-06 18:00:00

2016

8.0

6

Leif Johnson

Playing Early Copies of 'No Man's Sky' Is a Waste of Time

All across the internet, players are managing to get their hands on early copies of the ridiculously hyped space exploration game No Man's Sky and posting videos of what they've seen. For many, as should only be natural for a game that's been burdened with so many expectations, the final product hasn't lived up to the dream. But in that regard, the damage has been done (and the fact that Sony is forcing news sites to remove footage via DMCA requests isn't exactly helping). But if one of those early copies manages to make its way to your door, you might be better off just waiting to play it with everyone else on the proper release date of August 9. If you're of a sentimental bent, consider the plea of poor Hello Games chief Sean Murray, who sent out a tragic tweet on July 29 after Reddit user Daymeeuhn posted over 30 minutes of footage on DailyMotion. He really, really doesn't want you to play it (or watch footage), you guys. "We've spent years filling No Man's Sky with surprises," Murray said then. "You've spent years waiting. Please don't spoil it for yourself :(" Yet there's a reason beyond pure spoilers. As Murray said in another tweet just last night: "If you are reviewing/playing our game without our update, on a leaked copy, then please don't. It's not what players will experience." Murray appears to be referring a Day One patch that could change much about the footage we've seen so far. Much of the uproar over Daymeeuhn's footage focused on the embarrassing number of bugs and glitches he showed or reported, such as sea creatures spawning vertically in the ground, missing or glitched upgrades, or the simple fact that Daymeeuhn was able to reach the center of the universe in only a couple days' time. Murray earlier told GameSpot it would take players "hundreds of hours" to reach that point if they did nothing else. Murray tweeted last Tuesday that he and his team were still at the office working on the patch at 5:00 a.m. after a month of preparing a patch that will bring "Lots of new features, balancing and content." What that means isn't exactly clear, but it'll almost certainly contain a decent amount of bug fixes. But here's the biggie: No Man's Sky is chiefly about exploration, about finding one in a "quintillion" planets and naming it all your own for other players to see while investigating their sometimes unique flora and fauna. Any planets you name so far are going away on Sunday, as Hello Games' Harry Denholm tweeted yesterday after Kotaku informed its readers that there was a planet named for it out there among the procedurally generated nebulae. It's a good thing, too, as for a few hours No Man's Sky's launch should live up to that Star Trek-inspired dream of going where no one has gone before. "Where no one has gone before except for some unscrupulous YouTubers" just doesn't have the same bang.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vv7z9y/no-mans-sky-early-copies

Tech by VICE

Vice

2019-06-21 00:00:00

2019

6.0

21

Erwin Seba, Jessica Resnick-Ault

Explainer: Philadelphia refinery blast puts new spotlight on toxic chemical

(Reuters) - Massive explosions that engulfed a Philadelphia refinery in flames on Friday have renewed concerns about the oil industry’s use of a highly toxic chemical to make high-octane gasoline at plants in densely populated areas. Aerial video of the scene at Philadelphia Energy Solutions Inc’s refinery, the largest in the northeast, on local television showed significant damage and the massive complex nearly engulfed in flames. One of the explosions took place in a hydrofluoric acid alkylation unit - a chemical processing unit that has been involved in three near-misses of releases into cities in California, Texas and Wisconsin, according to safety officials. Hydrofluoric acid (HF) can form a toxic cloud at room temperature while exposure can lead to severe health problems and even death. Around the Philadelphia refinery, air quality had not yet been cited as a problem. There are about 300,000 people who live within three miles (5 km) of the facility. There have been campaigns by residents who live near refineries, environmental groups and the country’s largest industrial labor union to end the use of HF in units that produce octane-boosting components for gasoline. Fifty, or more than a third, of 135 U.S. refineries operate HF alkylation units, according to the Chemical Safety Board (CSB), which investigates industrial fires and explosions. In April, the CSB called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to revisit a study on HF’s use and the potential to replace it with another process after hearing from worried residents during its probe of a 2018 refinery fire. “Refinery workers and surrounding community residents are rightly concerned about the adequacy of the risk management for the use of hazardous chemicals like HF,” the board said in that letter, which grew out of the CSB’s probes of fires at refineries in Wisconsin, California and Texas. The United Steelworkers union (USW), whose members work at major refineries, launched a campaign in 2010 to end the oil industry’s use of HF. In 2013, the USW found 26 million people in the United States were at risk of HF exposure from a refinery accident. “We would like the industry to invest in finding intrinsically safer alternatives,” said Michael Wright, the USW’s director of health, safety and environment. The oil industry has rejected calls to convert HF alkylation units to sulfuric acid, which does not form a low-hanging cloud that can drift into neighborhoods, saying the cost would be too high and alternatives not well developed. HF has been used for about 70 years in refinery operations, according to Diana Cronan, spokeswoman for the trade group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. About 2% of the HF used in the United States goes toward refining, she said. “Typically, refiners with limited land availability have hydrofluoric acid” units, she said. Sulfuric acid reactors can be two to three times as large as HF, Cronan added, making them less attractive to manufacturers. But HF is risky because it forms dense vapor clouds low to the ground that can easily move into the communities around refineries. Since it destroys nerve tissue, burns may be initially painless. It can also cause cardiac arrest in higher concentrations. Most of the 27,000 residents of Superior, Wisconsin, were evacuated in 2018 due to the risk of a release of HF following an explosion at Husky Energy Inc’s refinery, according to news reports at the time. Husky has said it expects to resume partial operations at the site in late 2020. A 2015 explosion at a Los Angeles-area refinery, then owned by Exxon Mobil Corp, raised the risk that a storage tank containing HF could have been ruptured, according to the CSB. The USW campaign began following a 2009 explosion on an HF alkylation unit at the Citgo Petroleum Corp refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, that the CSB found likely released up to 4,000 lbs (1,814 kg) of HF. Much more than that was contained by water spray cannons around the burning unit. Before the Corpus Christi fire burned out, the water supply system was nearly exhausted and hoses bringing additional supplies ruptured but were quickly replaced or repaired, the CSB found. Reporting by Erwin Seba in Houston and Jessica Resnick-Ault in New York; editing by Marguerita Choy and G Crosse

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-refinery-blast-acid-explainer/explainer-philadelphia-refinery-blast-puts-new-spotlight-on-toxic-chemical-idUSKCN1TM279

Commodities

Reuters

2016-11-18 17:11:34

2016

11.0

18

Kurt Wagner

DraftKings and FanDuel used to hate each other. What happened?

Rival fantasy sports sites DraftKings and FanDuel announced a long-expected merger on Friday. It’s a deal that makes a lot of sense on paper: The two companies offer near-identical products, are fighting the same regulatory battles and can now spend time and resources building one business together instead of trying to tear each other’s businesses apart. But it’s not a secret in the industry that DraftKings CEO Jason Robins and FanDuel CEO Nigel Eccles — not to mention their investors — don’t get along either publicly or privately. At least, they didn’t get along for the better part of the past two years. Now Robins is CEO of the new joint entity and Eccles is chairman, which means the two will be working together closely. Is this relationship going to work? “I think what I’ve said publicly about Jason is probably no worse than what I’ve said about my fantasy football buddies,” Eccles joked to Recode Friday in a joint interview with Robins. “We’re both entrepreneurs, we’ve both had visions of transforming this industry, so I think often when you’re a competitor you lose sight of that.” Okay. Robins? “To steal a sports analogy, you might have two players on opposite sides of the field that are very much friends and know each other well off the field,” Robins said. “I think Nigel and I always got along. We felt like we could always go grab a beer together, go grab dinner, and we’ve done that many many times.” Sounds like the hatchet has been buried, at least publicly. But while Robins has long called for a merger between the two sites, Eccles repeatedly said publicly that he wasn’t interested. He told my colleague Peter Kafka twice this year, as recently as May, that he didn’t see the need for a tie-up. Ultimately, the two companies realized they were actually fighting the same opponent: Regulators labeling their pay-to-play fantasy businesses as illegal gambling sites. “We pretty quickly realized that the biggest threats to our respective companies came from outside the industry,” Eccles said of his change of heart. “That allowed us to spend time together and [we] started to talk about the future of the industry and where we wanted to take our companies. What we realized was we had really shared visions.” A few logistical updates on the merger: This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2016/11/18/13677620/draftkings-fanduel-merger-jason-robins-nigel-eccles

Vox

2016-12-03 00:00:00

2016

12.0

3

Allison Meier

Harvard Adds the Blackest Black to Its Historical Pigment Collection

Harvard Art Museums acquired a sample of Vantablack, a material that absorbs almost 100% of light. Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads The Forbes Pigment Collection at the Harvard Art Museums is an evolving archive of synthetic and natural pigments — each year brings additions representing innovations in color. One of the newest acquisitions is a sample of Vantablack, a superblack material which absorbs 99.965% of light. Senior Conservation Scientist Narayan Khandekar discusses the sample in the video above from Harvard University. Back in 2014, when Hyperallergic reported on the opening of the Straus Center for Conservation at the Harvard Art Museums, which made the pigment library freshly visible through glass, Khandekar said that the collection “was put together by Edward Forbes in an attempt to understand the material nature of works of art, and that approach to understanding art had not been taken before.” He added that it “was the beginning of the scientific approach for conservation in the United States.” Colleen Walsh at the Harvard Gazette reported that the Harvard sample of Vantablack is on a piece of crumpled aluminum, yet when seen through a protective box, the black appears like a flat void. It’s important to point out that while Vantablack is part of the Forbes Pigment Collection, it’s not accurate to call it a pigment. Its developer, Surrey NanoSystems, describes it as a “super-black coating that holds the world record as the darkest man-made substance,” noting that it was initially created for “satellite-borne blackbody calibration systems.” Claims have been made about even blacker materials, but it’s pretty darn dark, composed of vertical tubes that trap and deflect light and must be grown in situ. And it may have a role in art — although at this moment, the role is limited. Earlier this year, Claire Voon reported for Hyperallergic that Anish Kapoor had acquired the rights to Vantablack’s exclusive usage in art. Sadly, he has not chosen to coat his mirrored “Cloud Gate” with it in order to reflect the dystopic national mood (that was just an April Fool’s joke). Now at Harvard, nestled among the roughly 2,500 rare and historic colors like lapis lazuli and arsenic-based greens, Vantablack will at least be on hand for students who want to research this darkest of synthetic materials. Perhaps in some future setting, they will consider its influence on art.

https://hyperallergic.com/342566/vantablack-harvard-art-museums/

Hyperallergic

2018-04-18 00:00:00

2018

4.0

18

Timothy Gardner

EPA's Pruitt under spending probe; senators urge his ouster

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House budget office said on Wednesday it was probing whether a $43,000 soundproof phone booth installed for Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt violated the law, while dozens of Democratic senators called for him to resign over allegations of ethics lapses. Pruitt has been under fire for potential ethics lapses, including flying first class, excessive spending on security, and the rental of a room in a Washington condominium owned by the wife of an energy lobbyist. The Office of Management and Budget is reviewing whether spending on the booth installed in Pruitt’s office broke a law prohibiting federal agencies from incurring expenses in excess of available funds, known as the Anti-Deficiency Act. “We take the anti-deficiency statue very, very seriously and if (it’s) been broken, we’ll follow the rules,” Mick Mulvaney, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, told lawmakers in a House hearing. “We will enforce the law, and we’ll do so in a transparent fashion.” An OMB spokeswoman said the probe had already begun and her agency was working with the EPA on it. The EPA’s approval of the phone booth violated both the anti-deficiency law and another requiring agencies to notify Congress when they obligate more than $5,000 in federal funds to make improvements in an office of a presidential appointee, the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog, said on Monday. Pruitt has said the phone booth is necessary for him to conduct official business. When asked about the OMB’s probe, Jahan Wilcox, an EPA spokesman, said his agency disagreed that spending on the booth required notification to Congress and said the agency is addressing the GAO’s concern. President Donald Trump said this month that Pruitt, who has carried out his policy of slashing regulations on the fossil fuel industry, “has done a fantastic job.” Trump added that he will look into the allegations of ethical lapses. Mulvaney said the anti-deficiency law is technically a criminal statute, but he did not know if anybody had ever been charged criminally with violating it. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have criticized Pruitt over the allegations. On Wednesday, 38 Democratic U.S. senators and an independent who votes with them in the 100- member chamber introduced a resolution calling for Pruitt to resign. Pruitt has “completely violated the trust of the American people and the standards of his office, with a list of ethical transgressions that grows longer by the day,” Senator Tom Udall said. The Senate is controlled by Pruitt’s fellow Republicans. Although Republicans can defeat the resolution, it is symbolically important because it represents the most senators ever to call for a cabinet member’s ouster in such a petition, its sponsors said. More than 130 U.S. representatives signed a companion resolution in the 435-seat House of Representatives. Reporting by Timothy Gardner; additional reporting by Roberta Rampton; editing by Leslie Adler and Cynthia Osterman

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-epa-congress/epas-pruitt-under-spending-probe-senators-urge-his-ouster-idUSKBN1HP2UN

Politics

Reuters

2019-06-28 00:00:00

2019

6.0

28

EDF to curb Bugey nuclear reactor output as Rhone river flow slows

PARIS (Reuters) - French utility EDF said on Friday that power generation at its 3,600 megawatt (MW) Bugey nuclear power plant in eastern France could be curbed from Tuesday July 2 due to a lower flow rate of the Rhone river. The plant near the Swiss border has four 900 MW reactors and uses water from the river for cooling. EDF’s use of water from rivers as coolant is regulated by law to protect plant and animal life. It is obliged to reduce output during hot weather when water temperatures rise, or when river levels and the flow rate are low. France saw new all-time record temperatures about 45 degrees Celsius in the south of the country on Friday afternoon as a sweltering heatwave engulfed much of southern and central Europe. Reporting by Bate Felix; Editing by Geert De Clercq

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-weather-nuclearpower/edf-to-curb-bugey-nuclear-reactor-output-as-rhone-river-flow-slows-idUSKCN1TT2AI

Commodities

Reuters

2017-09-22 00:00:00

2017

9.0

22

Kardashian's DASH Store, Woman with Gun, Knife Arrested

The woman who pointed a gun at the cashier at the Kardashian's DASH store has been arrested. Cops were able to use surveillance video to track down the woman seen here brandishing a knife. She's 35-year-old Maricia Medrano. Cops went to her home Thursday night, executed a search warrant and found 2 airsoft guns ... similar to the one used by the perp in the first assault. TMZ broke the story, the person who entered the store knocked down merch, left, and then came back wielding a knife, and that's when she was caught on surveillance video. Medrano's been booked for assault and criminal threats. She's being held on $50,000 bail. The video of her ranting with the knife is insane -- as is the fact news photogs didn't budge!

https://www.tmz.com/2017/09/22/kardashians-dash-store-arrest-gun-rob/

TMZ

2018-07-04 00:00:00

2018

7.0

4

Wendy Xu

One Poem by Shane McCrae

Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected one poem by Shane McCrae for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers. Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads     Never was good with women     I mean I Had a few woman friends     at the factory But that was work     and sometimes I think they Were nice to me because they had to be   Nice to the men     even the men beneath them And me I died just like I started     down But nobody     has to be nice in Heaven Nobody has to smile     God is a wom-   an for some folks     in Heaven and God is a man for others and for some Folks God is both and neither one     for some folks God Is neither one and nothing in-between   I see folks’     Gods whenever I see their faces But God don’t look like anybody here For me     God is a woman     and Her face is Black as a bright black stone     I’ve walked with Her   On the flat stone path between the apple orchard And the garden     where first the harvest flowers       *    *   * Shane McCrae’s most recent books are The Gilded Auction Block (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), and In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry, was a finalist for the National Book Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award, and has been nominated for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

https://hyperallergic.com/449888/one-poem-by-shane-mccrae/

Hyperallergic

2016-08-03 15:00:00

2016

8.0

3

Libby Nelson

The first modern Olympic Games included one winner who'd never tried his sport before

As the Olympics are about to get underway with the opening ceremony on Friday night, it's worth remembering how much they've changed. The first modern Olympic Games — which started 120 years ago —included something more commonly associated with entitled children than ancient Greeks: a participation trophy. All 250 participants went home with a bronze medal. That's not the only way the first modern Olympics, which revived a 1,500-year-old ancient Greek tradition, differed from today's glitzy, highly produced, occasionally corruption-soaked spectacle. Although the first modern Olympics were unrecognizable in many ways — there were no women, no national teams, and only nine sporting events — the story of the runup to the first modern Olympics sounds awfully familiar: The host country was in political turmoil, and hosting the event turned out to be much, much more expensive than anyone had anticipated. And just like today, some of the athletes had some incredible stories. In 1896, the American participants were a thrown-together group. There were no trials, very little time to prepare, and a team chosen based on, essentially, who could afford to get there. The first American Olympians were 14 men, mostly from the Boston area and from Princeton. The mother of one of the Princeton athletes paid for their travel. Two athletes had to drop out of Harvard in order to compete, because they weren't given permission to miss class in order for the Olympics. But the Americans ended up dominating the competition, winning 11 first-place honors — which were silver medals, because gold medals wouldn't be given out for another eight years. The Greeks had the second most victories. Athletes competed in 43 events in nine sports: swimming, gymnastics, track, cycling, wrestling, weightlifting, fencing, shooting, and tennis Robert Garrett, who won the discus event, had never used a real discus until he started participating in the competition. He'd had a blacksmith make him a practice version based on ancient Greek records; it turned out to be a foot wide and 30 pounds in weight, making it impossible to throw and more than 25 pounds heavier than the real thing. Garrett didn't find out what a discus really was until he got to Greece and saw the 8-inch, 4.4-pound discs the Greek athletes were practicing with. But he entered the competition anyway, and stunned the spectators and the other athletes — all of them Greek — by winning. Thomas Custis, one of the American athletes, described the win in 1924 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review: His first two attempts… were laughable, as the discus, instead of sailing parallel to the ground, turned over and over and narrowly missed hitting some of the audience. Both foreigners and Americans laughed at his efforts, he, himself, joining in the general merriment. "On his third and last throw, however, he succeeded in getting the discus away perfectly and, to the chagrin of the Greek champion who had made three perfect throws in the most graceful manner possible, it was found that Garrett's throw exceeded by some two feet the best throw of any other man. I think no one was more surprised than Robert Garrett himself. But the Greeks got their own dramatic moment at the marathon, an event created for the 1896 Olympics (although distances weren't as precise). According to Custis, 30 athletes started but only seven finished — and the winner, in two hours and 58 minutes, was a Greek water carrier named Spyridon "Spyros" Louis: All contests then in progress were temporarily stopped to await the arrival of the winner. In the course of a few minutes a tremendous cheering was heard outside the gate of the Stadium, and a man in the dress of a Greek peasant ran up the steps and onto the track, making his way towards the King's throne, in front of which had been placed the finish line. His appearance showed the tremendous effort that he had made, and the fearful ordeal he had undergone. He was covered with dust and grime, the sandals that he wore on his feet were in rags, and his drawn face showed the strain he had suffered. His name was "Loues"" and he was a Greek donkey driver from the little town of Marousi. As soon as the people were able to recognize him, the cheering and clapping of hands that broke forth was deafening. Hundreds of pigeons which had been kept concealed until then were set free, with Greek flags tied to their feet, hats were thrown in the air, the Crown Prince walked onto the track and congratulated Loues, and all the pent up enthusiasm that the Greeks had been saving up during the past six months for this very event, broke loose with a vengeance. Louis became a national hero and will soon be featured on a Greek €2 coin — an even bigger deal than the honor for most modern Olympic champions, a Wheaties box.

https://www.vox.com/2016/4/6/11372204/first-modern-olympic-games

Vox

2016-05-21 00:00:00

2016

5.0

21

Austin Rivers: Pumped About 'Ninja Turtles' Cameo ... Gunning For 'Space Jam 2'

When in L.A. ... you get in the movies -- just like Clippers star Austin Rivers, who locked up a pretty sweet cameo in the new 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' movie! We spoke with Austin -- who's still recovering from that gnarly eye injury he suffered earlier in the NBA playoff -- and he told us he was super stoked to get a role in a scene shot at Madison Square Garden. So, what's next ... "SPACE JAM 2" -- that is, if producers hit him up for a role. C'mon LeBron, you can pull some strings, right?

https://www.tmz.com/2016/05/21/austin-rivers-ninja-turtles-cameo-space-jam/

TMZ

2019-06-25 00:00:00

2019

6.0

25

Karthika Suresh Namboothiri, Diptendu Lahiri

PRECIOUS-Gold retraces from 6-year peak after comments from U.S. Fed officials

* Gold set to gain for sixth straight session * Dollar gains after dipping to 3-month low * Fed “insulated from short-term political pressures”- Powell * Fed’s Bullard does not see need for half-point rate cut (Ads analyst comments, market details, updates prices) By Karthika Suresh Namboothiri and Diptendu Lahiri June 25 (Reuters) - Gold prices retreated from a six-year high on Tuesday after comments from U.S. Federal Reserve officials trimmed expectations that the central bank will lower interest rates by half a percentage point next month. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the U.S. central bank is “insulated from short-term political pressures,” as policymakers wrestle with whether to cut rates. The comments came after St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President James Bullard said he does not think the U.S. central bank needs to cut interest rates by a half-percentage point at its next meeting in July. Spot gold was up 0.3% at $1,423.26 per ounce as of 2:36 p.m. EDT (1836 GMT). Prices had touched a high of $1,438.63 in the session, a level last seen in May 2013, and were set for a sixth straight sessions of gains. U.S. gold futures were little changed on settlement at $1,418.7. “The whole gold move (higher) was on the back of the Fed’s signal to cut rates by 50 basis points in the last FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) meeting,” said Bob Haberkorn, senior market strategist at RJO Futures. “Now, Bullard and Powell’s comments are going against that and Trump’s wishes. It is probable that gold might continue paring gains to until the G20 meeting.” The comments lifted the dollar and pressured gold, prompting bullion to turn negative briefly, after it had rallied more than 1% earlier in the session on the back of expectations of monetary easing by the Fed and a subdued dollar. Lower interest rates reduce the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding bullion, and gold had gained nearly $100 in value since the Fed’s statement last week that hinted at monetary easing. Meanwhile, tensions between Iran and the United States lifted demand for safe-haven gold. Investors also watched for further cues on trade negotiations between Washington and China at the G20 summit. “People have been buying what they feel could be an additional haven on more upcoming volatility caused by global economic pullback, the tinder box of the Middle East with Iran, and the G20, which may not bring the (trade) deal with China that everybody is expecting,” said George Gero, managing director at RBC Wealth Management. Indicating investor interest in gold, holdings of SPDR Gold Trust, the world’s largest gold-backed exchange-traded fund, rose 0.37% on Monday, after posting their biggest percentage gain in nearly 11 years on Friday. Among other precious metals, platinum declined 0.71% to $804.25 per ounce, while silver dipped 0.5% to $15.36. Palladium slipped 0.5% to $1,527.01 after hitting its highest level since March 26 at $1,551, earlier in the session. Reporting by Karthika Suresh Namboothiri and Diptendu Lahiri in Bengaluru Editing by Will Dunham and Matthew Lewis

https://www.reuters.com/article/global-precious/precious-gold-retraces-from-6-year-peak-after-comments-from-us-fed-officials-idUSL4N23W39E

Market News

Reuters

2016-03-10 16:09:00

2016

3.0

10

VICE Sports

CM Punk Is Training for a Real Fight

Phil Brooks was once known as CM Punk – the longest-reigning WWE champion of the modern era. Now retired as a wrestler, he's onto his second career as a fighter – you know, the "real" kind – in the UFC, currently working his way back from injury for his first MMA match. He's got some help from friend, trainer and UFC Hall of Famer Forrest Griffin. We spent some time with the duo at the New Jersey Devils training facility at the Prudential Center as they hit the weights and reflected on CM's unlikely journey.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/53x7eb/cm-punk-is-training-for-a-real-fight

Sports

Vice

2019-06-28 00:00:00

2019

6.0

28

Daniel Newhauser

Kamala to Biden: “I Do Not Believe You’re a Racist” But…

MIAMI — Sen. Kamala Harris rebuked former Vice President Joe Biden for his history opposing student busing, telling him that if he had had his way, she wouldn’t be where she is today. Harris, the only African American candidate on the debate stage Thursday, told Biden on that she was personally offended by his recent comments reminiscing about working with a pair of segregationist senators in the 1970s — not just because of their views, but because of the content of the work. “You also worked with them to oppose busing,” Harris said. “There was a young girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.” Biden’s record of opposing federal efforts to use busing to integrate schools has drawn scrutiny after he reminisced to a group of donors about working with a pair of segregationist senators when he was a senator representing Delaware. Harris’ attack drew sustained applause in the debate hall, and Biden’s prior comments drew sustained criticism in the media. But on the ground, particularly in South Carolina, where six in ten Democratic primary voters are black, Biden’s support has not taken a hit. Whether that will change after Harris took him to task remains to be seen. MIAMI — Sen. Kamala Harris rebuked former Vice President Joe Biden for his history opposing student busing, telling him that if he had had his way, she wouldn’t be where she is today. Harris, the only African American candidate on the debate stage Thursday, told Biden on that she was personally offended by his recent comments reminiscing about working with a pair of segregationist senators in the 1970s — not just because of their views, but because of the content of the work. “You also worked with them to oppose busing,” Harris said. “There was a young girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.” Biden’s record of opposing federal efforts to use busing to integrate schools has drawn scrutiny after he reminisced to a group of donors about working with a pair of segregationist senators when he was a senator representing Delaware. Harris’ attack drew sustained applause in the debate hall, and Biden’s prior comments drew sustained criticism in the media. But on the ground, particularly in South Carolina, where six in ten Democratic primary voters are black, Biden’s support has not taken a hit. Whether that will change after Harris took him to task remains to be seen. “Do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America?” Harris asked Biden point blank. “I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed was busing ordered by the Department of Education,” Biden said. He added that Harris would have been allowed to be bused to school because Berkeley, Calif., the decision was made by the city council. Biden further defended his record, noting that unlike Harris, who has drawn criticism from progressives for her tough-on-crime record as a prosecutor, Biden became a public defender, influenced into public service by the civil rights movement. He also noted that he helped shepherd the Voting Rights Act through Congress. “You mischaracterized my position across the board. I did not praise racist. That is not true,” he said. “Everything I've done in my career, I ran because of civil rights, I continue to think we have to make fundamental changes in civil rights.” Cover: Sen. Kamala Harris (R) (D-CA) and former Vice President Joe Biden (L) speak as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) looks on during the second night of the first Democratic presidential debate on June 27, 2019 in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/evy9gk/kamala-to-biden-i-dont-think-youre-a-racist-but

Vice News

2018-12-18 12:00:03

2018

12.0

18

Sarah Kliff

Emergency room bills: what I learned from reading 1,182 ER bills

For the past 15 months, I’ve asked Vox readers to submit emergency room bills to our database. I’ve read lots of those medical bills — 1,182 of them, to be exact. My initial goal was to get a sense of how unpredictable and costly ER billing is across the country. There are millions of emergency room visits every year, making it one of the more frequent ways we interact with our health care system — and a good window into the health costs squeezing consumers today. I started my project focused on one specific charge: the facility fee. I found this charge for walking through an emergency room’s doors could be as low as $533 or well over $3,000, depending on which hospital a patient visited and how severe her case was. I also learned that the price of this charge had skyrocketed in recent years, increasing much faster than other medical prices for no clear reason. But given the volume and diversity of bills I received, I’ve learned so much more. I’ve read emergency room bills from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. I’ve looked at bills from big cities and from rural areas, from patients who are babies and patients who are elderly. I’ve even submitted one of my own emergency room bills for an unexpected visit this past summer. Some of the patients I read about come in for the reasons you’d expect: a car accident, pains that could indicate appendicitis or a heart attack, or because the ER was the only place open that night or weekend. Some come in for reasons you’d never expect. Like the little girl who swallowed a coin to hide it from her sister, the 12-year-old boy who was hit by a home run ball at a professional baseball game (who, incidentally, was given a $60 ibuprofen at the local children’s hospital), and the adult who ate an entire bag of chocolate candy … without realizing it was edible marijuana. Rest assured, they are all fine! In so many ways, patients find themselves in a vulnerable position during these encounters with the health care system. The result is often high — and unpredictable — bills. Hospitals are not transparent about the cost of their services, their prices vary wildly from one ER to another, and it’s hard to tell which doctors are covered by insurance (even if the hospital itself is covered). In many cases, patients can’t be certain what they owe until they receive a bill in the mail, sometimes weeks or months later. I’ve also learned that there is a lot of interest in fixing these types of situations. Since we started this project, multiple senators have introduced bills to prevent surprise emergency room bills — including one directly inspired by our project. I’ll stop collecting emergency room bills on December 31. But before I do that, I wanted to share the five key things I’ve learned in my year-long stint as a medical bills collector. One bill that left an impression on me came from a woman seen in the emergency room the day after her wedding. Her eye was irritated from the fake eyelashes she’d worn the night before, and she worried that her cornea might have been scratched. The providers checked out her eye, squeezed in some eyedrops, and sent her home. She later got a bill that charged $238 for those eyedrops, a generic drug called ofloxacin. According to GoodRX, a website that tracks drug prices, an entire vial of this drug can be purchased at a retail pharmacy for between $15 and $50. This is something that I saw over and over again reading emergency room bills: high prices for items that a patient could have picked up at a drugstore. I see this a lot, for example, with pregnancy tests. They happen in emergency rooms for good reason: Doctors often need to know whether a woman is pregnant to determine her course of care. But the prices I’ve seen for pregnancy tests are really high. The bills in our database include a $236 pregnancy test delivered in Texas, a $147 pregnancy test in Illinois, and a $111 test in California. The highest price I saw? A $465 pregnancy test at a Georgia emergency room. For that amount, you could buy 84 First Response tests on Amazon. Or look at the price of a common antibiotic ointment called bacitracin (you might know it better by its brand name, Neosporin). The bills in our database show that one hospital in Tennessee charged a patient a pretty reasonable $1 for bacitracin — while another hospital in Seattle charged $76 for the exact same ointment. Since prices aren’t made public, it was impossible for these (or any) patients to know whether they were at a hospital that charges $1 for a squirt of antibiotic ointment or one that charges 76 times that amount. These bills submitted to our database were in situations where there was not a life-threatening emergency, where a provider presumably could have sent the patient to a place where their drug is available cheaper, often over the counter. But that doesn’t seem to happen. Perhaps emergency room providers don’t know the price of the care they provide, either. Instead, patients are getting drugstore items in the emergency room at a significant markup — and paying higher bills as a result. On January 28, 34-year-old Scott Kohan woke up in an emergency room in downtown Austin, Texas, with his jaw broken in two places, the result of a violent attack the night before. Witnesses called 911, which dispatched an ambulance that brought him to the hospital while he was unconscious. Kohan, who submitted his bill to our database, ended up needing emergency jaw surgery. The hospital where he was seen was in network; he Googled this on his phone right after regaining consciousness. But the jaw surgeon who saw him wasn’t. Kohan ended up with a $7,924 bill from the surgeon, which was only reversed after I wrote about his bill in May. Kohan’s case is something I see regularly in our database: patients who end up with big bills because they went to an in-network hospital but were seen by an out-of-network doctor. Here’s how that happens: When doctors and hospitals join a given health insurance plan’s network, they agree to specific rates for their services, including everything from a routine physical to a complex surgery. Doctors typically end up out of network when they can’t come to that agreement — when they think the insurance plan is offering rates that are too low but the insurer argues that the doctor’s prices are simply too high. Unless states have laws regulating out-of-network billing — and most don’t — patients often end up stuck in the middle of these contract disputes. Academic research has shown that most of these types of bills actually originate from a small number of hospitals. These bills “aren’t randomly sprinkled throughout the nation’s hospitals,” one New York Times article from July 2017 noted. “They come mostly from a select group of E.R. doctors at particular hospitals. At about 15 percent of the hospitals, out-of-network rates were over 80 percent, the study found.” These surprise bills appear to be especially common in Texas, where Kohan lives. As many as 34 percent of emergency room visits lead to out-of-network bills in Texas — way above the national average of 20 percent. And, much like the bills with high prices, these bills are really hard to prevent. Out-of-network doctors won’t often mention that they don’t accept the patient’s insurance; they might not even know. And patients often have little choice about where to receive their care — like Kohan, who needed emergency jaw surgery due to his attack. Before I started reporting this project, I knew from my decade as a health care reporter that America has sky-high medical prices. But what I didn’t know was that patients can face steep bills even if they don’t see a doctor or have their ailment treated. They can decline treatment and still end up with a hefty fee. I learned about this from a bill sent to me by Jessica Pell. She told me about going to an emergency room in New Jersey after she fell and cut her ear. She was given an ice pack but no other treatment. She never received a diagnosis. But she did get a bill for $5,751. “It’s for the ice pack and the bandage,” Pell said of the fee. “That is the only tangible thing they could bill me for.” After I saw Pell’s bill, I started looking through our database and finding similar bills from other patients. They all ended up with significant medical bills, in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. These fees were often on top of additional fees from another health care provider where they ultimately did receive treatment. This is all due to the key fee I’ve been investigating this year: the ER facility fee. This is the fee that ERs charge for walking in the door and seeking care, something akin to a cover charge at a bar. Hospital executives often argue that these fees help them keep the lights on and doors open for whatever emergency might come in, anything from a stubbed toe to a stroke patient. But experts who study emergency billing question how these fees are set and charged, noting that they are seemingly arbitrary, varying widely from one hospital to another. A Vox analysis of these fees, published last year, shows that the prices rose 89 percent between 2009 and 2015 — rising twice as fast as overall health care prices. “It is having a dramatic effect on what people spend in a hospital setting,” says Niall Brennan, the executive director of the Health Care Cost Institute, which provided the data for that analysis. “And as we know, that has a trickle-down effect on premiums and benefits.” Since I started working on this project, one of the questions I get most frequently is: How do I avoid a surprise ER bill? Or how can I get my ER bill lowered? I wish I had a good answer, but I don’t. Patients are usually at the mercy of the hospital when it comes to ER billing. I have talked to some patients who have successfully negotiated down their emergency room bills. Most of those people applied for financial aid, requested a prompt pay discount, or found an error on their bill. Some especially savvy patients have even had luck arguing that their facility fee charge was coded incorrectly — that the hospital used a billing code that should be reserved for really intense, complex visits when their visit was actually pretty simple. I’ve noticed that these patients tend to have a doctor in their family who can help them make this type of argument. Most patients who have successfully negotiated down a bill tell me it wasn’t easy. Erin Floyd from Florida told me about her experience reducing two of her daughter’s bills — one by 90 percent and one by 45 percent — through a combination of financial aid and prompt care discounts. On the one hand, she was happy to have the bills lowered. In total, she ended up saving $4,369. On the other hand, the whole process was exhausting. There were lots of phone calls and faxes involved. “I spent at least three hours on the phone working on this,” she says. “I was scanning, faxing, emailing, all while I was at work.” Over email, she described it as an “incredibly stressful and long process.” And then there are, as Slate has noted, patients who have had their bills reversed after journalists wrote about them. Our project, for example, has resulted in $45,107 in medical bills being reversed after Vox began inquiring about those charges. But for all of investigative journalism’s merits, reporters writing about medical bills isn’t a great solution for the health care system’s woes. What stands out to me is that in all these cases, it’s essentially the hospital that gets to decide whether it wants to negotiate or reverse a bill. And if a hospital says no? If it won’t change the facility fee code, or doesn’t offer a prompt payment discount? The patient is essentially stuck. The hospital has the trump card: It can send the bill to a collection agency, a move that could devastate a patient’s credit. In those situations, there isn’t anything a patient can do to stop them. As more journalists write about ER bills, there is a growing outcry on Capitol Hill — and more senators on both sides of the aisle who want to do something about it. There are now two proposals in Congress that would make the types of bills I write about a thing of the past. One comes from Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and another from a bipartisan group of senators including Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO). While the two bills aim to do the same thing (prevent surprise bills in the emergency room), they take different policy approaches. The Cassidy-McCaskill proposal essentially bars out-of-network providers from billing patients directly. Instead, they would have to seek payment from the health insurer, who would be required to pay a price similar to local market rates. (I’ve written in greater detail about how this works.) Will either of these bills become law? It’s hard to tell. On the one hand, the safest bet with Congress is often inaction. But this issue seems to be gaining momentum. Just this week, for example, a large coalition of health plans and consumer advocates put out a statement supporting federal action on the issue. What’s more, there is bipartisan interest in working on this — making it the rare issue that just might bring Democrats and Republicans together on health care. Are you interested in more discussions around health care policy? Join our Facebook community for conversation and updates.

https://www.vox.com/health-care/2018/12/18/18134825/emergency-room-bills-health-care-costs-america

Vox

2017-10-10 00:00:00

2017

10.0

10

Two U.S. B-1 bombers conduct training mission in vicinity of Sea of Japan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two U.S. B-1 bombers carried out a training exercise on Tuesday with Japanese and South Korean military aircraft in the vicinity of the Sea of Japan, the U.S. military said, amid growing tension over North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs. It was first time U.S. Pacific Command B-1B Lancers have conducted combined training with Japanese and South Korean fighter aircraft at night, the U.S. military said in a statement. Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Eric Walsh

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-usa/two-u-s-b-1-bombers-conduct-training-mission-in-vicinity-of-sea-of-japan-idUSKBN1CF376

World News

Reuters

2019-04-02 00:00:00

2019

4.0

2

Brexit becoming 'soft to the point of disintegration', says Johnson

LONDON (Reuters) - Boris Johnson, who was a leading figure in the campaign to take Britain out of the EU, said Brexit was becoming “soft to the point of disintegration” after Prime Minister Theresa May asked to work with the opposition Labour party to secure an exit deal. Johnson, who quit as Britain’s foreign minister over May’s handling of Brexit, said he was bitterly disappointed with her move on Tuesday and said the country was now likely to remain in a customs union with the European Union, a much softer form of Brexit. “I think it’s very disappointing that the Brexit process has now been entrusted to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party, and I think that the result will almost certainly be, if Corbyn gets his way, that we remain in the customs union,” he told Sky News. “Brexit is becoming soft to the point of disintegration.” Reporting by Kate Holton and Alastair Smout; editing by Costas Pitas

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-johnson-soft/brexit-becoming-soft-to-the-point-of-disintegration-says-johnson-idUSKCN1RE28T

World News

Reuters

2017-10-26 19:08:00

2017

10.0

26

Francisco Alvarado

Is a Serial Killer on the Loose in Tampa?

Around 8 PM last Thursday, a loud pop pierced the quiet streets of Southeast Seminole Heights, a suburban neighborhood in Tampa, Florida. Police officers who heard the gunfire descended on North 15th Street and East Wilder Avenue, where, about 200 yards away from a bus stop, cops found the body of Anthony Taino Naiboa on the sidewalk. A week later, Tampa Police officials don't have any serious leads or a clear motive in Naiboa's killing. But they believe the person who shot the 20-year-old autistic man also murdered 22-year-old Benjamin Mitchell and 32-year-old Monica Hoffa, two people who lost their lives earlier this month in the same vicinity. Mitchell was shot on October 9 around 9 PM while waiting for a bus. Hoffa's body was found four days later in a vacant lot about half a mile from where the two men were killed, after she disappeared two nights earlier. "When you look at the time frame, the proximity, that there is no apparent motive, that the victims are alone at the time, it's clear to me that they are all linked," interim Tampa police chief Brian Dugan told reporters in a press conference last Friday. The three homicides have fueled speculation that a serial killer might be prowling for victims in Southeast Seminole Heights, prompting police to provide escorts for children and the distribution of light bulbs to illuminate front porches in the neighborhood. The red beret–wearing Guardian Angels are even patrolling sidewalks. Still, at the same press conference, Dugan was cryptic when asked if the murders were the work of a serial killer. "We can call it what we want," he said. "If that brings attention to it, that's fine." Three days later, at a community meeting attended by 400 people, Tampa mayor Bob Buckhorn promised the perpetrator would be caught, but stopped short of using the term "serial killer." "We need you to call us and let us know what's going on," Buckhorn said. "That's how we're gonna catch this guy. And we will hunt this son of a bitch down until we find him!" Sherry Genovar-Simons, a Southeast Seminole Heights homeowner for 25 years, said there is a heightened sense of awareness in her neighborhood. Still, she's not exactly terrified. "Obviously, we are not dumb enough to go out at night by ourselves," she said. "I am not going to walk down the streets with my dogs at eight o'clock or nine o'clock in the evening like I usually do. But I am also not going to sit in my house and quake." Florida certainly has a long and sordid history with serial killers. In January 1978, Ted Bundy—who by then was responsible for dozens of murders in at least six states—broke into a Florida State University sorority house, where he attacked four young women, bludgeoning two of them to death. A few weeks later, Bundy abducted his final target, a 12-year-old girl named Kimberly Leach, whom he raped and beat to death. Soon after, Bundy was arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced to death for the three Florida murders. He was executed in January 1989. Eleven months later, Aileen Wournos began a year-long campaign of terror across the Sunshine State during which she murdered at least six men. She was arrested in January 1991 and subsequently confessed to the killings, which were allegedly targeted at men who sexually assaulted her. She was executed by lethal injection in 2002, ten years after her conviction. Historically, though, Southeast Seminole Heights has not been a magnet for violent crimes, according to Genovar-Simmons, who served as president of the neighborhood civic association four years ago. "Most of the crime that I am aware of are crimes of opportunity like people breaking into cars or an unlocked home," she said. "We have never had any big crime sprees. I could go out to my car at two o'clock in the morning and never had any fear." Homicide experts canvassed by VICE said the three murders in Southeast Seminole Heights this month do bear some characteristics pointing to a serial killer. But they suggested the perp might be more accurately described as a spree killer—the distinction being that the latter snuffs out two or more victims at multiple locations with almost no break between the crimes. Most fundamentally, Scott Bonn, a criminology professor at Drew University who authored the 2014 book, Why We Love Serial Killers, said the fact Naiboa, Mitchell and Hoffa rode the bus and were killed within a one-mile radius of each other amounted to a "rather uncanny pattern." "This may be a mission killer," Bonn said, adding, "He or she could be trying to terrorize the community. That may the goal. It could be an individual who feels disenfranchised in some way and is sending out a message that says, 'The world will recognize me,' by committing these murders." Nelson Andreu, who worked six serial-murder cases during 20-plus years as a Miami Police homicide detective, wondered if Tampa cops had concluded the bullets used in the three Seminole Heights murders came from the same gun. "If they have recovered projectiles or casings that match, then the police can say without any doubt that it is the same killer," Andreu said. "Some killers want you to know that they are serial in nature." Andreu, who is now chief of the West Miami Police Department, believes the Tampa Police Department has done a good job of informing the public about the danger posed to the community. "They are using a lot of manpower and community outreach to thwart this suspect before he or she strikes again,' he told me. Rather than notorious serial killers like Bundy, Bonn, and Andreu both cited the Washington, DC, sniper attacks of 2002 when trying to make sense of the Tampa situation. Over a period of about three weeks, John Allen Muhammad and teenager Lee Boyd Malvo killed ten people and critically injured three others across Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. "It has the earmarks of a spree killing," Bonn offered of the Tampa saga. "It is happening in a very short time frame, and there is no cooling off period between the murders. Serial killers tend to have protracted cooling-off periods." Andreu suggested serial killings usually have some sort of sexual undertone to them. "There is a deviancy of some sort at play," he told me. "In Tampa, that is missing. The killer is just walking up and shooting people. It reminds me of the two guys who were just picking off people in DC." As the New York Times reported, some other experts think the days in between these incidents amount to enough of a cooling-off period to apply the serial killer label, assuming the three killings were the work of the same person. During the community meeting on Monday, Tampa's Chief Dugan told the standing-room only crowd at Edison Elementary School that they had to dispel any preconceived notions of what a serial killer might look or act like. "When I think of a serial killer, I think of Ted Bundy," Dugan said. "But here is the problem. It may not be a white person and it may not be a male. How do we know there is not two step brothers living in a house and they are doing it together? Let's not let labels and stereotypes box in our vision and miss what is right in front of us." Mayor Buckhorn has been a bit less careful with his language. "Bring his head to me, all right?" he ordered police officers Wednesday in a video aired by NBC News. "Let's go get it done." On Thursday, police released a new video showing what they described as a person of interest (rather than a suspect) brandishing what appeared to be a phone and, later, running in the area on the night Mitchell was shot. For her part, Genovar-Simons said she didn't want to speculate about whether the suspect is indeed a serial killer. "The police seem to think it might be," she said. "Usually, we don't have murders, especially three so close at one time. There is definitely something strange about it." Follow Francisco Alvarado on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmz4xw/is-a-serial-killer-on-the-loose-in-tampa

true crime

Vice

2016-08-12 12:25:00

2016

8.0

12

Bob Bryan

Retail sales July

Retail sales growth for July is to came in at 0.0% over the prior month, against expectations of 0.4%. Excluding autos, sales fell -0.3%, verusus expectations are for a 0.1% rise. Excluding autos and gasoline sales fell -0.1%, also short of an expected rise of 0.3% Last month, retail sales rose 0.6%, better than the 0.1% expected by economists. According to Bespoke Investment Group, sales from non-store retailers, a proxy for online retailers such as Amazon, rose 1.3% from the prior month and now make up 10.4% of all sales. "The July retail sales report was a disappointment," said Michael Feroli at JPMorgan. "These disappointing July figures came after a strong run for the data over the prior three months. There were some modest upward revisions to prior months. For July, most retail categories were weak, excepting autos and the internet-heavy nonstore category."

https://www.businessinsider.com/retail-sales-july-2016-8

Business Insider

2019-01-04 00:00:00

2019

1.0

4

Alexis Ren Gets Cheeky in Tiny Bikini on Beach in Mexico

Alexis Ren's got a wide variety of looks for the camera, but in these shots of the model's sexy sea romp there's a constant ... her itty bitty black bikini. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2018 Rookie of the Year is kicking off 2019 down in Mexico at the Casa Malca Tulum resort, and recruited a lucky guy Thursday to snap some sultry shots of her splashing around. Alexis was mostly all smiles for the mystery photog, but the cheekiness led to her flipping him the bird at one point. Not sure what he did ... but Alexis didn't seem to hold it against him too long. Earlier in the day, Alexis tweeted out a cryptic message -- "If you're reading this, I miss you" -- which fans believe is directed at her former "Dancing with the Stars" partner, Alan Bersten. She didn't confirm, but if Alan sees these photos ... it's safe to assume he misses her too.

https://www.tmz.com/2019/01/04/alexis-ren-splashes-around-tiny-bikini-beach-mexico/

TMZ

2017-01-20 21:00:02

2017

1.0

20

Zack Beauchamp

Trump’s inaugural address showed that he’s serious about his radical foreign policy

Anyone expecting Donald Trump to give a conciliatory, open-minded inaugural address was sorely disappointed. America’s 45th president began his term with a dark, fire-breathing speech assailing America’s governing elite and pledging to rededicate Washington to “the people.” His rhetoric about the rest of the world was equally, if not more, aggressive: Trump questioned America’s historical commitment to free trade and argued that defending longstanding allies wasn’t necessarily in the best interests of the US. “For many decades, we've enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military,” he said. “From this day forward, it's going to be only America first.” This vision is, as Trump himself said, a break with a decades-old bipartisan consensus on how Washington should interact with the rest of the world. It’s also exactly what he promised on the campaign trail. Trump has a bit of a reputation as a flip-flopper. But he’s been remarkably consistent on his core view of the world — that all of international relations is transactional and should be motivated solely by assessments of what's better, financially, for the US. That has led to some of his more controversial policy pronouncements, from threatening to withdraw US troops from Japan and South Korea unless the countries pay more the costs of those deployments to hinting that he’d ignore the NATO treaty and only defend members of the alliance who’d spent more on their militaries. Trump may not act on his ideas; his picks for the Pentagon, State Department, United Nations, and CIA are notably more hawkish and committed to NATO and other traditional alliances. Still, this speech, and everything Trump has said before, is a declaration of intent to radically revise America’s role in the world. Throughout the campaign, Trump came back to the same two-word description for his foreign policy view: America first. “America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration,” he said in a foreign policy address way back in April. Trump repeated this phrase, almost ritually, during his inaugural address. It’s a handy mantra for the way he sees the world. The phrase has its origins in a 1930s-vintage pressure group of the same name that opposed America’s entry into World War II. The America Firsters were isolationists, whose overarching belief was that America needed to disconnect from the world in order to preserve its independence and prosperity. Some prominent members, like aviator Charles Lindbergh, actively sympathized with Nazism — a stance that soon discredited the group entirely. Trump has told reporters that he knows this history and that his use of the phrase isn’t intended to signify any connection to the discredited slogan and movement. Still, his basic, overarching vision of US foreign policy idea is strikingly similar to that of many of the America Firsters of yore: He thinks that America’s current close ties to the rest of the world, particularly Europe, are at best a distraction from, and at worst a threat to, the interests of the American public. “Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families,” he said in the inauguration speech — implying that’s not what happened prior to 2017. This is most obvious when it comes to Trump’s view of trade. In his mind, America’s current economic ties to foreign countries like China and Mexico are harming US workers. He gave a whole speech on this theme back in June. So he made backing away from free trade, and moving toward protectionism, a major part of his inaugural address. “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs,” he said. “Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.” You see a similar “America first” theme when it comes to Washington’s military alliances. Throughout the campaign, Trump argued that the United States was doing too much to protect allies capable of defending themselves and openly wondering whether the US gets enough from countries like Japan and South Korea to bother keeping tens of thousands of troops there to defend them. He jarred European allies back in July, meanwhile, by openly speculating that the US might not defend NATO members that Trump felt had “not fulfilled their obligations to us.” Here, Trump’s notion of “America first” becomes clearer. He doesn’t believe, as many international relations scholars do, that these alliances more than pay for themselves by promoting peace and increasing American leverage over other countries. What matters isn’t long-term stability outside the US; it’s whether the United States is being paid enough, in a very clear pecuniary sense, for its military deployments and security commitments. The world is a zero-sum game; the prospect that the US and its allies could both lose doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind. The inaugural address was more of the same. When Trump talked about America’s global commitments, it wasn’t about the vital role America plays in promoting peace and prosperity. It was the amount of money the US wasted on its allies and foreign wars, which he thinks trades off with more important work at home (like keeping out immigrants from Mexico). “We've defended other nations' borders while refusing to defend our own, and spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America's infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay,” Trump said. “We've made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon.” These ideas were, unsurprisingly, immensely controversial during the campaign. Since World War II, the United States helped build a global order centered, in large part, on both free and open trade and a series of defensive alliances aimed at preserving peace. Trump has promised to, if not upset this order entirely, at least chip away at it significantly — throwing the globe into truly uncharted waters. This inauguration speech shows that this wasn’t an act or some grand con. This what Trump (and whoever wrote his speech) actually thinks. But a speech is just that: a speech. The trick with Trump, as my colleague Matt Yglesias notes, is not just to listen to what he says — it’s to see what he actually does. And the truth is that, intentions aside, extricating the United States from trade and alliance commitments it set up is a lot more complicated in practice than it sounds on paper. Tearing up free trade agreements like the US pacts with China could very well slow economic growth or even trigger a recession. America’s national security establishment will lobby vigorously against any attempt to weaken NATO or other US military alliances to them. So will some key members of Trump’s own team, like soon-to-be-confirmed Defense Secretary James Mattis. Indeed, you already saw a little bit of walkback from “America first” policies in Trump’s inaugural. At one point, Trump nodded at the vital nature of America’s existing alliances, a clear sign that his team is worried about the heat he’s drawn for his positions on NATO, Japan, and the rest. “We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones,” Trump vowed in the inaugural, a near direct contradiction with his broadside against “[defending] other nations' borders” earlier in the speech. What’s more, Trump has set up some impossible expectations for his radical new foreign policy approach. He promised, among other things, to eliminate jihadism entirely: “[We will] unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate from the face of the Earth.” I don’t want to spoil anything, but Trump won’t in fact get rid of every militant terrorist group on Earth. He may weaken them more than Obama or Bush did (though I have my doubts on that point), but it is literally impossible for him to destroy each and every single militant Islamist group, or even just all of the major ones. Yet these are the metrics that Trump is setting up for himself. He’s promising a radical revision to American foreign policy and to accomplish all sorts of extraordinary things by doing it. The people who wanted a more toned-down Trump might be disappointed, but the ones who have long liked what they’ve seen from him — who felt like his angry populism is just what America needs — doubtless loved what they heard. Yet they may not love what they eventually see.

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/20/14337956/donald-trump-inaugural-address-transcript-foreign-policy

Vox

2018-05-03 17:20:02

2018

5.0

3

Tara Golshan

2018 midterm polls: Republican voters prioritize national security over the economy

Americans tend to vote first and foremost on the economy — except this year, Republicans have a different top priority: national security. A recent poll from Morning Consult surveying more than 275,000 registered voters across the country from February through April of this year, shows 35 percent of Republican voters see security as their top policy issue going into the 2018 midterm election cycle, closely followed by the economy, which 29 percent of Republican voters listed as their top policy issue. “Senior’s issues,” likely including Social Security and Medicare, as well as health care issues follow. Democrats and independent voters, however, largely still identify the economy as their highest priority when picking their candidate. Notably, security and health care are the second and third priorities for independent voters, while for Democrats, health care is almost as important as the economy (24 percent and 22 percent). Security is fourth behind senior’s issues for Democrats. Here’s the breakdown from Morning Consult: The poll shows a slight divergence from the narrative around the 2016 election, after which many pundits on the right and left wing of the Democratic Party attributed President Donald Trump’s ascension to economic anxiety. But even in the presidential election, security issues were important. According to a report from the Pew Research Center, 90 percent of Trump supporters said the economy was “very important” to their vote in 2016. Eighty-nine percent of Trump voters said the same of the issue of terrorism. But that Republican voters this year are most concerned about security issues, even more so than jobs, is a notable development — especially as the national Republican Party continues to put its new tax law front and center. Trump, too, has claimed credit for the stability of the economy. (As Vox’s Matt Yglesias explained, the economy is not too different from the end of the Obama era. The main difference is that Trump now says it’s good.) His administration’s national and foreign security record is less steady; recent staffing shake-ups did away with traditional Republican figures in favor of more hawkish voices on the right, with appointments like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. Meanwhile, Democrats have prioritized health care in 2018 campaigns and attacked Republicans for giving corporations and the wealthy a massive tax break.

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/3/17314664/2018-midterm-polls-policy-priority-voters

Vox

2019-06-26 00:00:00

2019

6.0

26

More than half Chinese consumers shun U.S. goods due to trade war: survey

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - More than half Chinese consumers have avoided buying anything made in the United States in support of their country in an escalating trade war, a survey suggests, posing a “significant” risk to U.S. companies. The poll, conducted by London-based advisory firm Brunswick which surveyed 1,000 Chinese consumers, said 56% of respondents had said they had avoided U.S. products, while 68% said their opinion of American firms had become more negative. “This poses a significant bottom line risk to U.S. companies as three in four Chinese consumers say they often buy products from American businesses,” Brunswick said on Wednesday. The world’s two largest economies have been caught up in a bruising trade war which has seen both sides slap tit-for-tat tariffs on each other’s exports, hurting businesses and stoking concerns among firms that they could be caught up in the cross-fire. U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, are set to meet for the first time in seven months at this weekend’s G20 summit in Japan, but prospects for progress in the trade talks look slim. Brunswick also surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers for their opinions on China. It said that American opinions of Chinese companies were worsening and that 60% of respondents had noticed price increases on household goods since tariffs were increased. Reporting by Brenda Goh; Editing by Nick Macfie

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-trade-china-survey/more-than-half-chinese-consumers-shun-us-goods-due-to-trade-war-survey-idUSL4N23X2ME

Business News

Reuters

2019-01-11 22:10:09

2019

1.0

11

Aditi Shrikant

Uber and Lyft are not as popular in rural America as they are in cities

When Uber and Lyft released their subscription services last year, each said that its program was a step toward moving America away from being a car-dependent society. “We’ll own cars the way we own horses,” author of The Membership Economy Robbie Kellman Baxter told me. “It’s a folly, it’s a fun thing, but it’s not the way we get around.” Of course, ride-hailing services are fully behind the elimination of car ownership, as that would improve their bottom line, but some gig economy and transportation experts, like Baxter, also believe that eventually all mobility will be subscription-based. Cornell University infrastructure policy program director Richard Geddes has said that trading in car ownership for a subscription model would be more economically viable for many Americans and is probably the way the automotive industry is going. “Car ownership is so inefficient,” he says. “Families are not good at owning cars. They are not good at buying them, not good at selling them, and not good at maintaining them.” However, a Pew Research Center report shows that there is an urban-rural divide among Americans regarding ride-hailing usage. According to Pew’s findings, 19 percent of Americans living in rural America use ride-hailing apps, while in urban and suburban America, those numbers are 45 and 40 percent, respectively. In urban areas, 19 percent of users take Ubers weekly, while in rural areas it’s just 5 percent. The theory is that ride-hailing is a gateway to subscription-based mobility, which, paired with self-driving cars, is supposed to be the transportation of the future. A report by Research and Markets stated that now until 2022, the subscription-based car model will experience a compound annual growth rate of 71.38 percent. This could including booking a car for a specific amount of time, but also plans like Uber’s and Lyft’s. Eventually, perhaps, no one will own a car and AVs will be picking us up at the push of a button. But does the theory still hold up with such dismal user numbers in rural areas, which make up one-fifth of the country’s population? According to a 2015 Verge article, Uber covers about 75 percent of the US, but getting to 100 would mean infiltrating smaller towns and rural areas. In 2017, the Los Angeles Times wrote that Uber has near-statewide coverage in 13 states, and Lyft, in order to fill in the spots that its competitor doesn’t cover, announced that it was now available in 40 states and 94 percent of Americans could access it. However, the LA Times found this wasn’t wholly true. On a Wednesday night in New York’s Finger Lakes region, few cars appeared on the map. And in Corning, New York, the closest Lyft ride was 74 miles away and showed no estimated time of pickup. Technological infrastructure is one of the biggest challenges in rural areas. Uber and Lyft both depend on good cell service, something that can be spotty in small towns. In a 2018 study investigating the rural-urban ride-hailing divide in Pennsylvania, author Rhoda C. Joseph says that expansion of cellular and broadband technology “may have the most significant impact” when it comes to reaching smaller towns. The study also noted that the possession of a credit or debit card is a requirement of all drivers, which could also deter Americans who only use cash. Baxter also says this could be a big reason why rides-hailing apps aren’t thriving in rural areas. “In my work with other apps, when targeting rural areas I saw how unreliable rural broadband is,” she wrote via email. She adds that the routes drivers take in rural areas also don’t foster a need for Uber or Lyft. “Rideshares are most economical when the distance is short and the parking fees high,” she says. “Not likely to be the case for a rural ride.” Uber message boards frequently discuss how small town driving is much less lucrative. One driver in Davis, California, wrote that she earned $18 for more than two hours of work. So not only is expanding to rural areas fiscally precarious for Uber and Lyft, it also may not reap much reward for drivers. Rural-friendly ride-hailing alternatives have emerged in the gaps Lyft and Uber leave. One Nebraska-based ride-hailing service named Liberty Mobility Now tried to satisfy the needs of rural cities in Ohio, Texas, and Nebraska where Uber and Lyft were not yet available. It operated differently than Uber and Lyft: The service had a call center so those who didn’t have access to smart devices could still hail a car. According to NPR, drivers were also encouraged to form relationships with their clients, something that often doesn’t happen in Ubers or Lyfts. In Athens, Ohio, Liberty was the first ride-hailing service the city had. However, the company declared bankruptcy after being sued by an investor for supposedly misrepresenting finances. Suzanne Ashe was once the only Uber driver in Haines, Alaska — population 1,374 — and said she kept getting kicked off the platform because there weren’t enough people asking for rides. She also found that some places weren’t on Uber’s maps, so clients couldn’t enter their destination, and internet could be spotty. For these reasons, Ashe quit Uber and started her own ride-hailing business called Red Cab, named for her 2010 Red Chevy HHR, the only car in her “company.” She charges a flat rate of $10 per ride and $30 per hour. “In order to cater to rural areas, especially areas where there isn’t a saturation of network, then a cab company makes a lot more sense,” she told Chilkat Valley News. Despite the many obstacles, Geddes believes that autonomous, on-demand rides will eventually replace personal car ownership, and says the discrepancy between urban and rural usage mostly has to do with market penetration. “What you’re seeing in the data looks like some symptomatic differentiation, but it’s really just the fact that these services were first introduced in markets that would yield the most profit to the company,” he says. In other words, it’s not the regional differences in credit card and internet access that’s holding back Uber and Lyft in rural areas; it’s the simple fact that ride-hailing apps aren’t available. The aforementioned 2018 study also found that rural areas could be lucrative for Uber and Lyft. In the study, Joseph determined how ready each county in Pennsylvania was to adopt ride-hailing by assigning each one an RSI (ride-sharing index). RSIs were calculated using four variables: median income, population density, unemployment, and licensed drivers. The study proposes that when all these variables are high, a country is more likely to embrace ride-hailing. The study shows that 75 percent of Pennsylvania counties are equipped to support a ride-hailing economy. With 72 percent of Pennsylvania being rural, the data suggests that there is untapped potential in rural areas. However, with shoddy internet and small payouts for drivers, it may be hard for rural communities to embrace ride-hailing the way cities do. Want more stories from The Goods by Vox? Sign up for our newsletter here. Correction: A previous version of this article misstated why Uber wasn’t in Ithaca, New York.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/11/18179036/uber-lyft-rural-areas-subscription-model

Vox

2016-07-23 00:00:00

2016

7.0

23

Lea Michele -- I'm the Comic Bomb at Comic-Con (PHOTO)

Actress Lea Michele got a rise out of the nerds during Comic-Con. The "Scream Queens" star signed autographs and just let people star during Day 2 of the San Diego convention. Day 3 has promise.

https://www.tmz.com/2016/07/23/lea-michele-comic-con-boobs/

TMZ

2016-04-24 00:00:00

2016

4.0

24

Tess Owen

Qamishli Ceasefire Gives Kurds More Territory in Northern Syria – VICE News

Both Kurdish and Syrian government forces agreed to a ceasefire after a three-day eruption of heavy fighting left more than 26 civilians dead. According to the truce document, Kurdish forces can keep the territory they captured in Qamishli during those days of violence. Both sides will release prisoners taken during the clashes. The fighting which erupted last week between Kurdish and Syrian forces was reportedly the biggest since the Syrian uprisings and subsequent civil war began in 2011. During the clashes, Kurdish security forces seized control of a number of key government controlled positions in Qamishli, including its main prison. Canaan Barakat, Syria's Kurdish regional interior minister, announced the terms of the truce on Sunday, and said that 17 civilians and 10 Kurdish military personnel were killed last week. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that 22 members of Syrian government forces died and 80 were taken prisoner. SOHR also reported that 23 civilians died during government shelling of Kurdish-controlled areas. Both Kurdish and Syrian government forces agreed to a ceasefire after a three-day eruption of heavy fighting left more than 26 civilians dead. According to the truce document, Kurdish forces can keep the territory they captured in Qamishli during those days of violence. Both sides will release prisoners taken during the clashes. The fighting which erupted last week between Kurdish and Syrian forces was reportedly the biggest since the Syrian uprisings and subsequent civil war began in 2011. During the clashes, Kurdish security forces seized control of a number of key government controlled positions in Qamishli, including its main prison. Canaan Barakat, Syria's Kurdish regional interior minister, announced the terms of the truce on Sunday, and said that 17 civilians and 10 Kurdish military personnel were killed last week. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that 22 members of Syrian government forces died and 80 were taken prisoner. SOHR also reported that 23 civilians died during government shelling of Kurdish-controlled areas. A copy of the truce agreement seen by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said "each side will keep the territory under its control." Kurdish authorities and media said this meant territory taken from government control would not be returned. Related: Kurds Battle Assad's Forces for Second Day in Syria's Qamishli The agreement said that employees of the Syrian state must not be threatened, deprived of their salaries or recruited into joining "local protection units that belong to the regime". Damascus maintains a strong administrative presence and still pays government employee salaries in Qamishli, one of the largest cities in Hasaka province in Syria's far northeast corner adjoining Turkey and Iraq. The agreement said the structure of pro-government forces stationed in Qamishli would be reviewed and Damascus would no longer interfere in local society, but provided no further information elaborating on these measures. Compensation would be paid to civilians who lost relatives or suffered material damage in government shelling, it added. Qamishli sits near Syria's border with Turkey and at the base of Turkey's Taurus Mountains, a great chain that extends cuts through southern Turkey. It is mostly controlled by Kurdish security forces. Pro-Assad government forces still maintain control over a few areas in the city's center, including its airport. But Syrian Kurdish forces dominate wide areas of northern Syria, and have set up their own government there. Syria has become a patchwork of areas controlled by the government, an array of rebel groups, Islamic State militants, and Kurdish militia. Meanwhile, mediators are struggling to keep a nationwide truce in effect. All warring factions are mired in distrust, and suspect one another of breaking the cessation of hostilities deal, which was brokered on February 27. On Friday, Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy for Syria, estimated that about 400,000 people had been killed over the last five years of civil war. Mistura urged key players in the war to help salvage the crumbling ceasefire agreement. Mistura added that the death toll was his own estimate, not an official UN statistic. The envoy said he would continue to hold peace talks next week, regardless of "the worrisome trends on the ground." Reuters Contributed to This Report.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/pa44bm/syrian-kurds-will-keep-the-territory-they-seized-from-pro-assad-forces-under-qamishli-ceasefire

Vice News

2017-05-04 20:10:00

2017

5.0

4

Callie Beusman

After Passing 'Cruel and Deadly' Healthcare Bill, the GOP Celebrates with Beer

The bill, which has been called "cruel" and "horrific," would threaten the coverage of over 24 million Americans, eviscerate protections for people with pre-existing conditions, decimate Medicaid expansions, and defund Planned Parenthood. It's now headed to the Senate, where "it awaits an uncertain fate," according to Politico. Many of the provisions of the replacement healthcare bill threaten women's access to basic healthcare, with low-income women and women from marginalized populations particularly burdened. In addition to stripping Planned Parenthood of federal funding, the new healthcare bill would eliminate guaranteed coverage of essential health benefits like maternity and newborn care and mental health care, and allow insurance companies to charge patients higher premiums based on their medical history—which would be particularly harmful to women, as rape, domestic violence, and C-sections are all considered preexisting conditions. Eleanor Smeal, the president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, called the bill "cruel and deadly" in a statement. "If this bill is signed into law, the suffering will be widespread, needless, and cruel: hospitals will close... families will go bankrupt paying healthcare costs, and women will be charged more than men for coverage that doesn't even guarantee maternity care," she said. Advocates from reproductive rights groups decried the legislation as part of a larger, politically-motivated attack on reproductive health, noting that Trump also signed an executive order today that would allow employers to deny contraception coverage to their employees under the guise of religious freedom. "I am terrified for my patients and for the health of this country," said Dr. Diane Horvath-Cosper, an advocacy fellow at Physicians for Reproductive Health. "As a physician, I know that patients and families suffer when they are unable to obtain comprehensive, compassionate health care. Congress should be ashamed to pass legislation that puts health care out of reach for millions of Americans." Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, cited the House vote as a particularly egregious example of the GOP's "commitment to punishing and burdening women." "When they undermine and take away the healthcare we need as women, they're clearly saying that women and our ability to plan and care for our families are not their priority," she said in a statement. "Giving money to their rich friends is." According to accounts from reporters in D.C., it seems that Republicans will celebrate the passage of the bill by drinking cartloads of beer.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvdkvq/after-passing-cruel-and-deadly-healthcare-bill-the-gop-celebrates-with-beer

Identity

Vice

2018-05-30 00:00:00

2018

5.0

30

Eileen G'Sell

Bruce LaBruce Misfires with an Awkward Marriage of Punk and Camp

The provocative auteur’s latest, The Misandrists, attempts a tongue-in-cheek critique of radical feminism. Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads “Sisters, we must tell the world to wake up and smell the estrogen!” So says Big Mother (Susanne Sachsse) in an Isabella Rossellini drawl to her dutiful Female Liberation Army acolytes, a ragtag platoon of punks, preps, and pig-tailed femmes training in the Bavarian outback in Bruce LaBruce’s latest film, The Misandrists. Though the movie is (somewhat incongruously) set in 1999, the credo feels very timely. At first glance, the film resembles a rompish battle cry against the crimes of patriarchy, a B-movie bacchanal for the lesbian separatist, and a shameless parody whose excesses are intrinsic to its charm. The problem? Though LaBruce fancies himself a feminist, his vision of radical separatism often feels equal parts Born in Flames and Girls Gone Wild. Calling his latest feature “a critique of any extremist kind of movement — both on the left and right,” the director feigns a take-no-prisoners mindset while kowtowing to cis-gender male visions of non-stop sapphic snogging (his cinematographer, tellingly, is also male). However it critiques ideological extremes, the film’s half-hearted embrace of opposing aesthetic and affective poles convolutes more than it calls to arms. The movie launches promisingly enough, its Pepto-Bismol font curling across the credits in the spirit of Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled (a film to which LaBruce’s bears striking plot similarities, if you swap the white-gowned maidens for surly lesbians in matching knee-high socks). Accompanying a piano refrain uncannily reminiscent of Jewel’s “Foolish Games”, the cursive opening titles set against the sight of a secluded country estate suggest a tongue planted firmly in cheek (though it is planted upon a great range of orifices over the course of the film). For its first 20 minutes, the film seems a risible — if predictable — send-up of essentialist feminism; the FLA gals close their dinner prayer with “A-(wo)men” and shun all things male with stilted disgust. But as contempt for the patriarchy fills every utterance, the spoof gets as platitudinous as the rhetoric it intends to mock — maybe even more so, as there’s something about the intensity of Shulamith Firestone and Valerie Solanas that is pretty darn enjoyable. “Equal rights. Equal to whom? To the patrimonial male ruling class who has relegated us to the dustbin of history?” As Big Mother drones on at the dinner table, her subjects (including performance artist Kembra Pfahler) seem just as listless as we are. “Are we satisfied now with an equal distribution of injustices? To be granted equality only by agreeing to be equally as exploitative, extraordinate, and corrupt? Equal participation in an iniquitous society is incommensurate with womancipation.” If LaBruce’s point is how monotonous radical feminism can be, I can’t help but wonder if we — in 2018 — really need a 90-minute film to show us that? Tedium can be a productive means of cinematic deviance, but after a soft-lit, slow-motion pillow fight goes on for three full minutes, do we really need a similarly filtered orgy in a later scene? It’s not that none of this is entertaining at first; it’s that it’s only entertaining at first. The Misandrists misfires not because it lampoons grave subject matter, but in how lazily and unevenly it does so. We first learn that the girls of the FLA are “victims of sexual abuse” during a humorous speech from Big Mother (costumed as a nun, no less) to a police officer inquiring about the missing male renegade (Til Schindler) hidden in their cellar. But when hornball Helga (Lina Bembe) presses comrade Isolde (Kita Updike) for dirt about one of their schoolmates, her deadpan explanation of each girl’s history of exploitation is hardly played for laughs. Rather, a close-up of each stares blankly at the camera as we learn of their rapes, assaults, traumatic pregnancies, and sex work. Is this camp or a PSA? Perhaps LaBruce can’t tell the difference. Filmed outside Berlin and funded largely by a Kickstarter campaign, The Misandrists may turn out to be another low-budget cult classic, with LaBruce following the tradition of John Waters, Todd Solondz, and Gregg Araki before him. But in 2018, this supposedly punk-rock take on New Queer Cinema just doesn’t feel that punk, or that new. Where others have deftly mixed their cocktail of camp, cruelty, and crass humor, LaBruce’s tonic feels flat and undershaken. Where art thou, Dawn Wiener, the transcendent Divine, or arguably any character with a pulse? The New York Times’s Teo Bugbee said of the film, “[H]ere is queer cinema: confrontational, pansexual, gender-fluid, racially inclusive, angry and surprisingly romantic.” Granted, its racial (and trans) inclusivity is laudable. But with its nubile, shaven, itty-bitty-tittied female cast, the movie’s portrayal of lesbian desire looms perilously close to hetero-centric schoolgirl porn. Moreover, the movie’s rancor and romance never seem sincere enough to leave a mark. When at last its end credits appear onscreen — black-and-white photos chronicling a history of all-female protest movements, from turn-of-the century suffragettes to Black UCLA alumnae in the 1960s  — the leap in tone feels the cinematic equivalent of trying to spoon after an interminable hand job. For all its money shots and graphic violence, the only thing truly shocking about The Misandrists is how ultimately boring it becomes. The Misandrists is currently playing at the Village East Cinema (181-189 Second Avenue, East Village, Manhattan) in New York City and opens on June 1 at Landmark’s Nuart Theatre (11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, California).

https://hyperallergic.com/445157/bruce-labruce-the-misandrists-film-review/

Hyperallergic

2017-12-09 14:30:00

2017

12.0

9

Lewis Gordon

Björk’s Beautiful 'Utopia' Is Hopeful in the Face of Decay

In a 2003 documentary, there’s a moment where Björk Guðmundsdóttir describes her early memories of singing and songwriting. Björk tells the interviewer that, walking to and from school in Iceland—sometimes in blizzards, sometimes in howling winds—she would map out melodies to the landscape. “You could be all quiet and whispery and sneak down next to the moss and sing a verse,” she said. “And then you could stand up and run to a hill and sing a chorus. You had to do that quite loudly because the weather was strong.” Björk’s work has always worked in conjunction with the nature of a place, never against it. But Utopia, her latest album, might be the first time she has attempted to create an entirely new ecology, a new system of connections. It is both fiercely political and intimately personal. The timing couldn’t be more pertinent. On the November 13, more than 15,000 scientists signed a document simply titled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice,” detailing how deforestation, agricultural production, and the burning of fossil fuels are all continuing to contribute to the irreversible devastation of the biosphere. Another recent report asserted that carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere at record speed last year, while the sixth mass extinction event is already underway. The population groups of billions of species will be wiped out in the process. Collectively, these processes are beginning to be recognized by scientists as the Anthropocene, a newly formulated geological epoch in which the detritus of humanity is observable in the makeup of the world. These processes display, at best, a disinterest in the natural world and, at worst, contempt for anything non-human. Now, though, Björk has returned with a window into a possible future, one where the writing isn’t yet scratched indelibly into the wall. Utopia opens with gentle birdsong and an unwinding synth scrawl that sounds like an animal darting from the speakers. Björk sings “and just that kiss was all there is” before the song erupts into a soupy, primordial ecstasy. She’s called Utopia her “Tinder album,” a response to her previous record, 2015’s Vulnicura, documenting her break-up with long-term partner, Matthew Barney. This isn’t inner-city Tinder, though—awkward dates, casual sex and painful small talk—this is Björk Tinder, an emotional openness with everything. The first track, “Arisen My Senses,” sounds like the artist emerging from a particularly long, painful period in her life. Lead single “The Gate” begins with the sound of wind, water, and the cooing of the strange, floating life forms in its video before she sing-song chants, “I care for you, care for you.” That Björk has infused ecological concerns with such emotion, twinning it with her own rediscovered openness, shouldn’t be surprising. She’s never used nature as window dressing. On her 1997 single “Jóga,” she bellows “emotional landscapes” amidst deep, windswept cellos and beats that threaten to crack open the earth’s crust. It’s a love song but the relationship is as fractious and beautiful as the Icelandic landscape itself. 2001’s Vespertine, meanwhile, took the clicks of pointillist micro-rhythms—delicate, cellular creations—as the starting point to delve into her own interior, a counterpoint to the expansive, outward-looking Homogenic released four years prior. On the surface, it’s Biophilia that appears closest to Utopia in outlook. On the former, Björk paired elements of music with naturally occurring phenomena, like arpeggios with lightning or chords with tectonic plates. Ten apps—one for each track and simple enough for children to use—were released, designed to explore each facet of the natural and musical world. It was informed by a deep research period including her attendance at the National Geographic Explorer Convention in 2009. Accompanying videos even included the narration of the twentieth and twenty-first century’s great environmentalist hero, David Attenborough. Then, in the accompanying press shots, she appeared to inhabit the entire cosmos, draped with constellations and clutching the deep past of crystalline rock formations. With Utopia, though, Björk seems less interested in a grand universalism and more content with forging living, breathing connections. The pristine masks, designed by James Merry, that have adorned Björk’s face throughout Utopia’s promotional phase might be the physical manifestation of the album’s concerns. Appearing less like masks and more like biological fusions between herself and other organisms—part plantlife, part anemone—they’re unsettling creations channeling something verging on body horror. The album cover itself takes the transformation further. Her skin and face have changed texture and color—protrusions grow out of her forehead and around the nose—highly sexual (not sexy) armor readied for battle. Tucked in the ribbing of her neck is a sleeping baby animal—impossibly cute. It’s an unflinching declaration of love—a willingness to cleave off part of her own identity for another and, in the process, create something new. Her 2015 collaboration with eco-philosopher, Timothy Morton—a series of letters—hinted at these ideas. Morton’s work has long advocated a fundamental reevaluation of our relationship to the natural world (indeed, for Morton there is no natural world, only the world). Kicking back against the apocalyptic doom-mongering of mainstream media, his looping, dense prose methodically argues for a state of coexistence with all ecology. In one letter to Björk, he says, “I think that there is a connection in your work between self-care and care for other beings” while in another, trying to figure out an appropriate-ism for Björk (at her request), he sheepishly ventures “pan-eroticisim,” a gleeful mirror to the seedling masks and album artwork. The single from 1997’s Homogenic, “All Is Full Love,” is a precursor to much of this thinking, a song of almost impossible generosity. Just as techno-futurism courses through that video, so too does it pump through her and Morton’s work. Their response to ecological crisis isn’t a retreat into primitivism but instead an unflinching, wholesale embrace of technologies. “You think ecologically tuned life means being all efficient and pure,” reads Morton’s 2016 pinned tweet on Twitter. “Wrong. It means you can have a disco in every room of your house.” Björk pins part of her outlook on Iceland’s distinct, historical development. She says the country missed much of the industrialization the rest of Europe experienced and instead careened from its 1944 independence into the full blown “green techno internet age.” Björk already appears to be done with that era, though. The cybernetic naturalism of previous records has given way to Utopia’s eco-fantasia and it’s telling what she’s decided to take with her. The chirping of Venezuelan and Icelandic birds will be audible in this future, even if they might not make it much longer in the present. Their inclusion feels aggressively defiant. There’s space, too, for an all-female twelve-piece flute orchestra who give Utopia its air-light feel and sonic openness. Researching the record, Björk delved into the mythological stories of Africa, South America, Indonesia, and Iceland. In each of those regions she found stories of women who had fled hardship with their children, some of them nabbing flutes in the process. Usually, they’d meet a sticky end at the hands of their male oppressors but this time around, Björk has changed the ending. On the final track she sings, “Imagine a future…. Feel this incredible nurture, soak it in… Watch me form new nests, we’ve made a matriarchal dome.” It might seem like the corniest thing in the world but Björk holds true to the idea that we can only care for the earth by caring about each other. In the early noughties she said, “I’ve always been 1000% certain that I was an atheist and I’m slowly starting to realise that perhaps I have a religion and it’s nature.” Like other religions, the grace of the natural world touches every aspect of her life—Björk’s ecological concerns find expression in her personal interior. On “Body Memory”, she transcends the grief of her dissolved relationship, partly through finding solace in the environment. “The moss that I’m made of, I redeem myself,” she sings, awakening from the break-up and isolation of Vulnicura. The openness and love she’s discovered isn’t just confined to humanity, it extends like a mantra into the future. In Björk’s world, there’s no room for the apocalypse or eco-fatalism, just the shimmering promise of something better. It is colossally hopeful. Follow Lewis Gordon on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwvypq/bjorks-beautiful-utopia-is-hopeful-in-the-face-of-decay

Noisey

Vice

2018-09-06 00:00:00

2018

9.0

6

Emma Ockerman

Trump’s inauguration photos were doctored to make the crowd look bigger, report says

The official Trump-inauguration photos were edited to make the crowd size look bigger, according to a new report. After Donald Trump himself intervened just a day into his presidency, a government photographer cropped out the empty space where the crowd ended in some pictures of the inauguration, according to public documents obtained by The Guardian. The president was apparently angered by a photo circulating on Twitter that showed his audience was smaller than the crowd Barack Obama drew in 2009. The photo comparison was shared by the official National Park Service Twitter account. A crowd scientist said the Trump inauguration drew roughly one-third the attendees at Obama’s. Trump’s anger sent NPS staffers scrambling on Jan. 21, 2017, to meet his demands, following phone calls from both Trump and Spicer asking for better representation of the crowd’s size. It’s not clear whether the original photos were released publicly, or which photographs were edited. The acting NPS director, Michael Reynolds, called an NPS communications official to say that Trump wanted different pictures from the inauguration. The communications official noted that the images released so far depicted “a lot of empty areas” and said she had the “impression that President Trump wanted to see pictures that appeared to depict more spectators in the crowd.” She added that she “assumed” the photos needed to be cropped, although Reynolds didn’t request that specifically. She contacted an NPS photographer, who later told investigators that he was asked for “any photographs that showed the inauguration crowd size.” He said he was asked to go back to his office and “edit a few more.” “He said he edited the inauguration photographs to make them look more symmetrical by cropping out the sky and cropping out the bottom where the crowd ended,” investigators for the inspector general said, according to the documents obtained by the Guardian, adding, “He said he did so to show that there had been more of a crowd.” In the administration’s first-ever press briefing following Trump’s inauguration, then-press secretary Sean Spicer angrily referenced blown-up crowd pictures on the screens behind him, claiming the event drew “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration — period” after members of the media reported otherwise. Cover: Guests gather on the National Mall to witness Donald J. Trump be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States on the West Front of the Capitol, January 20, 2017. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call) (CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vbj5a9/trumps-inauguration-photos-were-doctored-to-make-the-crowd-look-bigger-report-says

Vice News

2016-06-07 00:00:00

2016

6.0

7

VICE News

More Families Sue Sperm Bank That Allegedly Said Mentally Ill Ex-Con Donor Was a Genius

More Canadian families are suing a US sperm bank they allege misled them about the attributes of a donor who was billed to be a genius, but they say turned out to be a convicted felon who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The latest lawsuits were filed in British Columbia by two Vancouver families who conceived children by artificially inseminating the sperm of "Donor 9623" from the Atlanta-based sperm bank Xytex Corp. The lawsuit also targets Genesis Fertility Centre Inc., in Vancouver, according to Postmedia. In April, three families in Ontario sued Xytex, and the Aurora, Ont. based Outreach Health Services, alleging wrongful birth, failure to investigate and fraud. They claim that the companies advertised and sold the sperm of Donor 9623 even after they were alerted to the fact that his donor profile didn't match who he actually was. Donor 9623 — who was later revealed to be 39-year-old James Christian Aggeles — is believed to have helped conceive 36 children in Canada, the US, and in the UK. The Ontario families are demanding $15.4-million in damages, according to the Toronto Star. None of the allegations have been proven in court. More Canadian families are suing a US sperm bank they allege misled them about the attributes of a donor who was billed to be a genius, but they say turned out to be a convicted felon who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The latest lawsuits were filed in British Columbia by two Vancouver families who conceived children by artificially inseminating the sperm of "Donor 9623" from the Atlanta-based sperm bank Xytex Corp. The lawsuit also targets Genesis Fertility Centre Inc., in Vancouver, according to Postmedia. In April, three families in Ontario sued Xytex, and the Aurora, Ont. based Outreach Health Services, alleging wrongful birth, failure to investigate and fraud. They claim that the companies advertised and sold the sperm of Donor 9623 even after they were alerted to the fact that his donor profile didn't match who he actually was. Donor 9623 — who was later revealed to be 39-year-old James Christian Aggeles — is believed to have helped conceive 36 children in Canada, the US, and in the UK. The Ontario families are demanding $15.4-million in damages, according to the Toronto Star. None of the allegations have been proven in court. Related: Lawsuit Alleges Sperm Bank's Genius Donor Was Actually a Schizophrenic Ex-Con Aggeles' real identity was discovered when Xytex accidentally disclosed his email address to families using his sperm. According to court documents reported on by Postmedia, they then went on to discover that the man who had been billed as having an IQ of 160, with various degrees and working toward a PhD in neuroscience engineering, actually had been diagnosed in 2000 with schizophrenia, narcissistic personality disorder, a drug-induced psychotic disorder and significant grandiose delusions. He had also been hospitalized for mental health reasons and arrested several times while he was a donor, according to published reports. His IQ was actually 130, and he had only recently graduated with a bachelor's degree. The lawsuit alleges that Xytex did not properly screen Aggeles. "Xytex had a commercial motive to sell Aggeles's sperm, and it pursued that motive by promoting and selling the sperm of Donor #9623 irrespective of whether or not he was a suitable sperm donor," the lawsuit says, according to Postmedia. In one of the Vancouver cases, the couple claimed they turned to Genesis, which gave them the option of receiving sperm from three companies, one of which was Xytex, according to Postmedia. They had their first child in 2008, and their second and third were born in 2011. Another Vancouver woman claims her child was also born with the same donor. Responding to the Ontario lawsuits in April, Xytex lawyer Ted Lavender told VICE News that the company looked forward to successfully defending itself. "Pursuing claims in a court of law requires actual evidence and proof," he said. "Making unfounded allegations in the court of public opinion requires no actual proof at all, but merely the word of the very lawyers and litigants who already failed in a court of law."Xytex is an industry leader and complies with all industry standards in how they safely and carefully help provide the gift of children to families who are otherwise unable have them without this assistance."

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/gy93z7/more-families-are-suing-a-sperm-bank-after-genius-donor-was-allegedly-a-schizophrenic-ex-con

Vice News

2017-08-21 23:45:02

2017

8.0

21

Kurt Wagner

A new study says more teens than expected are leaving Facebook for Instagram and Snapchat

Teens are leaving Facebook faster than expected, according to a new study from research firm eMarketer. The study estimates that Facebook’s user base among 12- to 17-year-olds in the U.S. will shrink by 3.4 percent in 2017, the first time eMarketer has predicted a decline in Facebook usage for any age group. The company said that it “reduced its usage estimates” for Facebook, but didn’t originally include what the previous estimates were and did not immediately reply to a request for clarification. The firm also said its estimates for usage among users 18- to 24-years-old “will grow more slowly than previously forecast, too.” Regardless of what they were, a revised slowdown is obviously bad news for Facebook. Update: An eMarketer spokesperson sent along prior growth estimates from Q1. The firm originally expected Facebook’s 12- to 17-year-old audience to grow by 0.7 percent this year. It predicted Facebook’s 18- to 24-year-old user base would grow by 0.8 percent. The good news? Lots of the teens leaving or forgoing Facebook are turning to Instagram instead, which Facebook owns. Snapchat, too, is stealing some of Facebook’s teen audience. In fact, eMarketer believes that Snapchat will be bigger than both Facebook and Instagram in the 12- to 17-year-old and 18- to 24-year-old categories by the end of the year. That would be a first. “Both [Instagram and Snapchat] have found success with this demographic since they are more aligned with how they communicate — that is, using visual content,” eMarketer analyst Oscar Orozco was quoted on the company’s blog. Snapchat will grow by 19.2 percent this year in the 18- to 24-year-old demographic, eMarketer estimates. Instagram is expected to grow its 12- to 17-year-old audience by 8.8 percent. This is not the first time Facebook has been saddled with a “teen problem.” It has been almost four years since Facebook first hinted on a company earnings call that the social giant’s teen audience was decreasing. The news sent its stock down after an otherwise positive earnings report, and people spent years wondering if Facebook had a problem retaining its young users. That whole exercise proved a bit exaggerated. Since those comments were made, Facebook has added more than 800 million monthly users, and its stock has more than tripled. But the concern, of course, is that Facebook will lose out on the next generation of internet users, and with them, a lot of valuable eyeballs for advertisers. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/21/16181348/teenagers-millennials-users-facebook-instagram-snapchat-emarketer

Vox

2017-11-06 00:00:00

2017

11.0

6

Pete Schroeder

Head of U.S. government financial agency to resign

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of a U.S. government agency created to monitor financial markets after the 2007-2009 financial crisis will resign from the post at the end of this year. Richard Berner, director of the Office of Financial Research (OFR), will be leaving that agency on Dec. 31, the Treasury Department announced on Monday. Berner helped create the agency as a Treasury official under President Barack Obama, and has led it since its creation in 2013. The Treasury did not say who would replace Berner, but his exit gives President Donald Trump another opportunity to shift government watchdogs in a more industry-friendly direction. Berner helped establish the agency as a Treasury Department official before becoming its first and only director. He is leaving roughly one year before his current term expires in January 2019. “After six years of commuting between Washington, D.C., and my home in New York, I have decided that it is time for me to go home to my wife and enjoy time with our grandchildren who have graced our family since I came to D.C.,” Berner said in a statement. A full-time replacement would need to be nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Senate. The agency, created as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, was charged with gathering data and analyzing trends across financial markets, in an effort to help sniff out looming threats before they jeopardize the economy. Housed within the Treasury Department, it lends its expertise to regulators tasked with guarding against such sweeping risks. But the agency has come under pressure from Republicans, who have argued it is redundant and should not be allowed to compel financial institutions to hand over data for analysis. A sweeping rewrite of financial rules passed by the House earlier would have eliminated the agency, but it is not expected to pass the Senate and become law. And the Trump administration proposed in May slashing its budget by 25 percent and urging a “staffing streamlining ... for maximum efficiency.” Before Berner’s exit, existing openings across financial regulators already lingered. The Senate has been slow to advance, and Trump slow to nominate, new officials to fill some roles occupied by Obama officials, suggesting it could be some time before a new full-time OFR chief is in place. Before joining the Obama administration, Berner had spent several years as a Wall Street economist, working as the co-head of global economics at Morgan Stanley, and chief economist at Mellon Bank. He previously worked on the research staff at the Federal Reserve. Reporting by Pete Schroeder; Editing by Frances Kerry and Susan Thomas

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-banks-risk/head-of-u-s-government-financial-agency-to-resign-idUSKBN1D624T

Business News

Reuters

2016-10-20 00:00:00

2016

10.0

20

David Gilbert

Nintendo's new console is like if Game Boy and Wii U had a baby

The new Switch is a cross between a traditional console and a Game Boy The new Switch is a cross between a traditional console and a Game Boy A decade ago, Nintendo got legions of people up off their couches to play video games when it introduced the groundbreaking Wii console. The company sold 100 million units of the gaming console over six years, but the sequel, the Wii U, was a major flop, selling just 13 million units since it debuted in 2012. Now Nintendo is launching another radically different gaming console, called Switch. And this time, the idea is to sit, but sit anywhere — on a couch, on a plane, in a park, at a party. That’s the message conveyed in the first video showing off the new device. The Nintendo Switch console is a tablet that sits in a dock and works just like a traditional console at home. But when you want to move, you simply pick up the tablet, attach the unique Joy-Con controllers, and take it with you. Think of it as a cross between a traditional console and a Game Boy, an approach that seems promising considering the Game Boy and the DS handhelds have sold in excess of 100 million units each. But the company will need to work hard to explain to gamers how the system works, something it completely failed to do with the Wii U, which had multiple screens that caused confusion. The success of the Switch will depend on Nintendo’s “ability to market a clear use case message to the audience,” Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst with IHS, told VICE News. “Nintendo failed to do this with the Wii U and paid the price.” A decade ago, Nintendo got legions of people up off their couches to play video games when it introduced the groundbreaking Wii console. The company sold 100 million units of the gaming console over six years, but the sequel, the Wii U, was a major flop, selling just 13 million units since it debuted in 2012. Now Nintendo is launching another radically different gaming console, called Switch. And this time, the idea is to sit, but sit anywhere — on a couch, on a plane, in a park, at a party. That’s the message conveyed in the first video showing off the new device. The Nintendo Switch console is a tablet that sits in a dock and works just like a traditional console at home. But when you want to move, you simply pick up the tablet, attach the unique Joy-Con controllers, and take it with you. Think of it as a cross between a traditional console and a Game Boy, an approach that seems promising considering the Game Boy and the DS handhelds have sold in excess of 100 million units each. But the company will need to work hard to explain to gamers how the system works, something it completely failed to do with the Wii U, which had multiple screens that caused confusion. The success of the Switch will depend on Nintendo’s “ability to market a clear use case message to the audience,” Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst with IHS, told VICE News. “Nintendo failed to do this with the Wii U and paid the price.” The new console won’t go on sale until March, and we don’t yet know how much it will cost or what what games will launch with it (though we do know that Mario and Zelda are coming). And we know that Nintendo really needs the Switch to be a hit. While the success of the Pokemon Go mobile game is giving Nintendo at least the perception of relevance (the game is actually owned by Niantic Labs), the Wii U flop allowed its console gaming business to be destroyed by Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox, which have sold 50 million and 30 million units, respectively. It will be interesting to see market reaction to Nintendo’s announcement, but the Tokyo Stock Market was already closed at publication time, so we’ll have to wait until Friday morning to get a full response. On Thursday’s news that Nintendo was going to unveil the Switch, the company’s share price jump as much as 4.5 percent before closing up 3.3 percent at the closing bell. The failure of the Wii U led the company to reassess its business model, and for the first time ever it has started creating games for smartphones. Following the launch of the social game Miitomo, the company and analysts expect big success with the launch of Mario December (20 million people have already signed up for the game before it is even available). It has signed a deal with Japanese mobile gaming company DeNA to produce another three games based on Nintendo characters. However, if the Switch console fails to compete with the PlayStation and the Xbox, the company will have to reassess again. “Another flop in launching new hardware should be a sign that Nintendo is better off providing its rich game-title franchises to smartphones, Sony, and Microsoft,” Serkan Toto, a Tokyo-based game consultant, told the Wall Street Journal.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/xw4qew/nintendos-new-console-is-like-if-game-boy-and-wii-u-had-a-baby

Vice News

2018-08-14 00:00:00

2018

8.0

14

A look at Tesla's nine-member board

(Reuters) - Tesla Inc’s board has named a special committee of three directors to negotiate with Chief Executive Elon Musk on taking the electric car maker private, although it said it was yet to see a firm offer from him. The committee, made up of Tesla directors Brad Buss, Robyn Denholm and Linda Johnson Rice, will wade into a deal that has puzzled Wall Street since a surprise announcement by Musk on Twitter last week. The following is a snapshot of the nine members on Tesla’s board. Member Background Member since Elon Musk 2004 Tesla’s Chief Executive Officer and co-founder. Owns a roughly 20 percent stake in Tesla. Also serves as CEO of SpaceX. Brad Buss 2009 Served as chief financial officer of solar panel installer SolarCity for two years before retiring in 2016. Tesla bought SolarCity that year. Buss was also CFO of Cypress Semiconductor. Ira 2007 Founder and managing partner of Ehrenpreis venture capital firm DBL Partners, which is an investor in Tesla, according to its website. Ehrenpreis bagged the first Model 3 car, having been the first to put down a deposit, but later gifted it to Musk. Antonio 2007 Lead independent director at Tesla Gracias since 2010. Founder and chief executive officer of Valor Equity Partners. In May this year, influential proxy adviser ISS recommended that investors vote against his election to the board and called him a non-independent director. Robyn 2014 The first woman to join Tesla’s board, Denholm Denholm is chief operations officer of telecom firm Telstra and the ex-CFO of network gear maker Juniper Networks. James 2017 The CEO of Twenty-First Century Fox Murdoch and chairman of Sky Plc. ISS in May recommended that investors vote against his election to the board as he is “overboarded” - serving on several other boards. ISS also called him a non-independent director, despite Tesla considering him an independent member. Steve 2009 Co-founder of Silicon Valley venture Jurvetson capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He resigned from DFJ in November 2017, following allegations of sexual harassment against him. He is on a leave of absence from Tesla’s board since then. Kimbal 2004 Elon Musk’s brother and co-founder of Musk restaurant chain The Kitchen. Kimbal, according to media reports, has been criticized for his lack of experience in the auto industry, as well as his role as an independent director at burrito chain Chipotle, which has faced major health and food safety issues. Linda Rice 2017 First African-American and second woman to join Tesla’s board. Current chairman of Johnson Publishing Co, which previously owned Ebony and Jet magazines. (This version of the story corrects last item to say Johnson Publishing previously owned Ebony and Jet magazines) Reporting by Vibhuti Sharma and Arjun Panchadar in Bengaluru; Editing by Sai Sachin Ravikumar

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-board-factbox/a-look-at-teslas-nine-member-board-idUSKBN1KZ1SG

Business News

Reuters

2018-09-28 17:30:02

2018

9.0

28

Vesla Mae Weaver

The Brett Kavanaugh hearings show who we afford a second chance and who we don’t

First-person essays and interviews with unique perspectives on complicated issues. “I do not understand why the loutish drunken behavior of a 17-year-old high school boy has anything to tell us about the character of a 53-year-old judge,” said conservative commentator Rod Dreher. “He was an immature high schooler. So were we all,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). “I wouldn’t disqualify anyone from higher office because of anything they had done as a minor,” said Washington Post opinion writer Megan McArdle. These are arguments of a chorus of voices suggesting that even if the charges of three women who claim that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted or harassed them have merit, they should still not derail his appointment to the nation’s highest legal and moral authority. (Kavanaugh denies the allegations.) We are a nation of second chances, for some more than others. This is a topic I’ve researched as a scholar of criminal justice, racial inequality, and American democracy. Consider how our system approaches youthful delinquency. If the accusations against Kavanaugh are true, they provide an extreme example of someone ascending to the peak of their professional career, having evaded punishment for serious criminal offenses and predatory behavior toward women. But the extreme example actually rests on a more pervasive phenomenon — namely, the under-enforcement of the criminal law against some groups of offenders. We tend to think the criminal justice system contains few errors of this sort, that those who engage in a pattern of serious lawbreaking come to heel. But there is a large share of Americans who break the law and instead encounter “maximum tolerance.” Studies document that while affluent white youth are just as likely to possess and use drugs as their poorer counterparts, they are much less likely to be locked up. They enjoy not just freedom from police interference of minor transgressions, but what I would term a kind of super freedom — the rational expectation of no adjudication even when they commit serious, violent, assaultive behavior. They live in spaces, attend schools, and play on streets largely walled off from police. Simply put: White affluent youth experience less accountability for criminal offenses compared to their black and brown counterparts and poorer non-whites, and the lessons both groups learn at this formative age carry on into their adult lives. A 2014 study of a New York suburb of affluent whites found that just shy of two-thirds of youth committed an offense that should have triggered an arrest. Yet very few — just 22 percent — were picked up by police, and only a small share of those have experienced formal adjudication for their crimes. In my own forthcoming study using representative longitudinal data of youths, I found that non-Hispanic white youths who committed offenses, ranging from breaking and entering to vehicular theft, to destruction of property and selling drugs, had a very low probability of arrest. In this study, we found that 5 percent of white youth admitted to committing a violent assault; of these, they had better than a coin toss’s odds of not being charged with an offense. Fewer still were convicted or jailed. Conditional on crime, white youth offenders have diminished risk of contact with police, courts, and jails relative to youth of color, and they needed to commit more offenses to get caught up in the system. When it comes to everyday interactions with police, young people of color have it far worse. Due largely to the reach of police into everyday spaces that deal with youth, particularly schools (more than a quarter of which employ uniformed police), following the law offers little protection against police contact or arrest for black and brown teens. Unlike their white counterparts, they are considered suspicious for mundane, noncriminal behaviors — their style of hair or dress, teeth too gold, pants too low. Michael Brown, who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, was violating a “manner of walking” law in the municipal code. In a large nationally representative study, 45 percent of black boys reported being stopped by police by early adulthood (compared to 23 percent of all kids). The findings of a big black/white gulf were “robust to controls for peer and family circumstances.” Under-enforcement conveys a powerful lesson to youth in their formative years: Even as assailants, white youth they know they are viewed and regarded as upstanding, law-abiding, and good boys who just had a little fun. They imbibe the lesson that our legal system and culture is willing to give them a pass. And because most youth “age out” of criminal offending, this group has probably avoided punishment and adjudication for the rest of their lives. Without criminal or arrest records, they will go on to enjoy entrance to college, obtain promising employment, and earn access to credit all without the worry of being encumbered by their past. The rhetoric on the right around the Kavanaugh allegations represents a large group whose crimes are disconnected from punishment. These “false negatives” say much about our system of justice, especially when paired with the other side of the coin — those who have done nothing wrong but are especially likely to experience being stopped by police, being convicted of an offense, or be jailed. Qualitative accounts of policing black and brown youth underscore that these early encounters give a lasting memory of the state’s potential for violence against your person or community. These youths learn that government sees them as potential assailants deserving of oversight, not kids being kids. As one Los Angeles man recounted in our study of police experiences: The first time the police stopped me I was 11 years old and they stopped me ‘cause I was playing water balloon fights, with my friends, during the summer. And, um, they handcuffed all of us, they paraded us in front of the community, they had the helicopter on us, and this was like a group of 11 year olds. Like, nobody was older than 13. And, like, they had guns on us, like they pointed a gun to my head, and they threatened our lives … afterwards, even though we were kids, like, the entire communities [sic] thought that we were up to something bad. Second chances are less likely too. Those who were arrested were much less likely to be diverted from criminal punishment than white kids, and they faced steeper sanction for identical offense patterns. In contrast to white spaces, police are thoroughly entrenched in the lives of youths of color and the institutional fabric of their neighborhoods. It’s also the case that police and the general public do not see black kids as kids. One study shows that police evaluate black boys as four years older on average than they actually are. Additionally, political leaders often do not see youth as having parents capable of effective discipline. I once sat next to a mainstream criminal justice expert who unblinkingly told me that the US polices black kids more heavily than white ones even though drug offending was similar in both places because “we can’t trust the parents to handle those kids.” It is fascinating to observe how easily we deploy arguments about second chances, regrettable choices that shouldn’t get in the way of one’s ambitions, and formal statutes of limitations in confronting serious criminal offending among a certain class of kids. But when the youth in question are of darker hue and lesser means, we slide into claims of personal responsibility and accountability, term them “superpredators,” and lock them away. Police encounters with young adolescents do not separate the bad from the good; they distinguish the kids growing up without resources and in areas of high surveillance from the rest. Delinquent kids in more affluent places do not avoid police because they are law-abiding, but because our system does not target them. The rhetoric we now see from the mostly white, mostly male GOP leadership is consistent with the lesson that our legal system unofficially but powerfully imparts: that their presumptive innocence will be a shield to them even when they are guilty of grave harm. It’s a refusal to abide by the very rules they set for other populations. We’ve known this for some time and have done little to counteract it. It’s time to call it out. Vesla Mae Weaver is the Bloomberg distinguished associate professor of political science and sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the co-author of Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control; Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics; and The Young Can Remake Race in America. First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at [email protected].

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/9/28/17913708/brett-kavanaugh-hearing-police-race-teens

Vox

2019-06-30 00:00:00

2019

6.0

30

FOREX-Yen sags, yuan soars after U.S-China trade truce

* Yen, Swiss franc sag after Trump, Xi agree to resume talks * Offshore yuan at highest levels since early May * Graphic: World FX rates in 2019 tmsnrt.rs/2egbfVh TOKYO, July 1 (Reuters) - The yen sagged and the yuan rose in early Monday trade after the United States and China agreed to restart trade talks as U.S. President Donald Trump offered concessions on new tariffs and restrictions on tech company Huawei. The dollar rose 0.4% to 108.37 yen, extending its recovery from near six-month low of 106.78 set last Tuesday. The Swiss franc, another safe-haven currency, fell 0.3% to 0.97915 franc to the dollar. The offshore Chinese yuan gained 0.6% to 6.828 per dollar , its highest levels since May 10, just days after Trump threatened additional tariffs on China. After meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday on the sideline of Group of 20 summit, Trump said he would hold back on tariffs and that China will buy more farm products. Trump also said the U.S. Commerce Department would study in the next few days whether to take Huawei off the list of firms banned from buying components and technology from U.S. companies without government approval. Other major currencies were little moved in early trade, with the euro steady at $1.1367 and the Australian dollar also flat at $0.7026. (Reporting by Hideyuki Sano; Editing by Sandra Maler)

https://www.reuters.com/article/global-forex/forex-yen-sags-yuan-soars-after-us-china-trade-truce-idUSL4N2410Q0

Market News

Reuters

2018-07-26 02:26:16

2018

7.0

26

Umair Irfan

Wildfires have killed more than 70 in Greece and ignited in the Arctic

It’s so hot, even parts of the Arctic are on fire. Temperatures this month reached 86 degrees Fahrenheit well inside the Arctic Circle in Sweden, where the worst fires the country has seen in decades are now burning. More than 50 fires have ignited across the country, forcing evacuations. Finland and Norway are also fighting flames. “This is a serious situation and the risk for forest fires is extremely high in the whole country,” Jakob Wernerman, operative head of the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, told the Associated Press. So far, no deaths from wildfires have been reported in Scandinavia, but Greece hasn’t been so fortunate. The country has declared a state of emergency as raging forest fires have killed at least 81 people and injured more than 190. “There are no words to describe the feelings of all of us, these times,” said Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras during a televised address Tuesday. “The country is going through a tragedy.” The government suspects arsonists may be behind the fires. But there’s also been intense heat across Europe this summer, and climate scientists say we can expect more of this extreme weather with global warming. #NOAA20 satellite captured the devastating fires around #Athens #Greece last night which have already caused significant loss of life and severe damage to the area. Winds over 50 mph contributed to the rapid spread of the deadly fires. pic.twitter.com/otHw6Wzt6L High temperatures forced the Acropolis to close for several hours this week. The Greek government can close public attractions when temperatures reach 96.8°F, according to the Associated Press. Greece’s intense heat has helped dry out shrubs and trees, making them more likely to ignite. The heat and drought pattern is similar to that playing out much further north in Latvia and Sweden. Parts of Italy are also on fire. Earlier this year, enormous fires scorched Siberia. Sweden is facing forest fires.We have helped mobilise two firefighting planes from Italy and two from France via #EUCivProThis is solidarity in a Europe that protects. #rescEU #EUProtectsFootage by @emergenzavvf pic.twitter.com/uzfGnEpene Across Europe, fire risks remain high in the coming weeks, according to the European Forest Fire Information System: While warm temperatures and dry conditions crop up sporadically throughout Europe during the summer, it’s highly unusual that so many places are experiencing such hot, dry conditions for so long at the same time: The big difference between the heatwaves of 1976 and 2018.June 1976: the UK was one of the warmest places relative to normal across the globe, with most areas cooler than average.June 2018: the UK was just another warm blob in a mostly warmer than normal world.#GlobalHeatwave. pic.twitter.com/eIsj7glEiE A corollary is that summers also spark wildfires in Europe on a regular basis, but rarely in so many places at the same time. As for the rest of the world, heat this summer has already proved deadly in countries including Japan, Pakistan, and Canada. Despite thousands of miles and an ocean in-between, many of the same trends behind the ongoing wildfires in Colorado, Oregon, and California are at play in Europe. As in the United States, Europeans are also building in increasingly fire-prone regions. Humans are also igniting most of these conflagrations. As the climate changes, the fire season is getting longer, now stretching from June through October in Europe. We saw this play out late last year as Hurricane Ophelia sent stiff winds through Portugal and Spain, driving wildfires that killed more than 100 people. The European Environment Agency reported that “an expansion of the fire-prone area and longer fire seasons are projected across Europe.” Very saddened by the tragic forest fires in Greece. Europe will stand by our Greek friends in these difficult times. Help is on its way from several EU countries. Several European countries are now chipping in to help put out the fires. Sweden is getting assistance from France, Germany, Lithuania, Norway, Portugal, and Italy, who are contributing fire trucks, firefighters, soldiers, and water-bombing aircraft. The European Union is also mobilizing support staff and equipment to fight fires in Greece under the EU Civil Protection Mechanism.

https://www.vox.com/2018/7/24/17607722/wildfires-greece-sweden-arctic-circle-heat-wave

Vox

2019-07-05 00:00:00

2019

7.0

5

Guards commander says Iran should seize UK oil tanker if Iranian vessel not released: Tweet

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran should seize a British oil tanker if an Iranian tanker detained off Gibraltar earlier this week is not released immediately, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander said in a tweet on Friday. British Royal Marines seized the supertanker Grace 1 on Thursday for trying to take oil to Syria in violation of EU sanctions, a dramatic step that drew Tehran’s fury and could escalate its confrontation with the West. “If Britain does not release the Iranian oil tanker, it is the authorities duty to seize a British oil tanker,” said Revolutionary Guards Major General Mohsen Rezai, who is also secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council, a powerful state body. “Islamic Iran in its 40-year history has never initiated hostilities in any battles but has also never hesitated in responding to bullies,” Rezai said on his Twitter account. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said on Thursday that the Iranian oil tanker was carrying crude oil from Iran, according to the state news agency IRNA. The Grace 1 was impounded off Gibraltar, a British territory on the southern tip of Spain, after sailing around Africa, the long route from the Middle East to the mouth of the Mediterranean. While the European Union has banned oil shipments to war-torn Syria, a close ally of Iran, since 2011, it had never seized a tanker at sea. Unlike the United States, Europe does not have broad sanctions against Iran. Writing by Parisa Hafezi; Editing by Mark Heinrich

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-iran-tanker-commander/guards-commander-says-iran-should-seize-uk-oil-tanker-if-iranian-vessel-not-released-tweet-idUSKCN1U00VZ

World News

Reuters

2019-07-02 00:00:00

2019

7.0

2

Trump announces nominees to fill two vacant Fed seats

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday the names of two nominees to fill vacant posts on the Federal Reserve Board, after two of his earlier choices withdrew from consideration in the face of criticism. Trump said on Twitter he intends to nominate Christopher Waller, an executive vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and Judy Shelton, the U.S. director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Both nominees must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Before joining the Fed Bank in St. Louis as research director in 2009, Waller was an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame. Shelton, who served as an economic adviser to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, has advocated a return to the gold standard. Trump has been critical of the Fed, and Chairman Jerome Powell in particular, for raising interest rates. Trump says he wants lower rates to better compete with China and has accused Powell, whom he appointed to lead the central bank in early 2018, of doing a “bad job.” Trump’s earlier choices for the Fed seats, economic commentator Stephen Moore and businessman Herman Cain, withdrew from consideration. Cain pulled out in mid-April after lawmakers expressed discomfort with the sexual harassment allegations that cut short his presidential bid in 2012. Cain has denied those allegations. Moore withdrew from consideration in May after weeks of criticism about his political partisanship, shifting views on interest rate policy, and sexist comments about women. Neither Cain nor Moore had been formally nominated. Reporting by Eric Beech; editing by Mohammad Zargham and Peter Cooney

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-fed-waller/update-2-trump-announces-nominees-to-fill-two-vacant-fed-seats-idUSL2N2431JX

Politics

Reuters

2016-05-02 02:03:31

2016

5.0

2

Jason Del Rey

Amazon looks unstoppable. Here are five things that could slow it down.

Amazon just pulled off its biggest quarterly profit in company history — for the second quarter in a row — and more people should be talking about it. Amazon is on its longest profitability streak in four years. And it’s doing so while its core retail business in North America is still growing more than twice as fast as the U.S. e-commerce industry on the whole. Translation: It is eating up a ton of market share and increasingly looking pretty much unstoppable along the way. Which leaves us with a question: Who or what can slow the company down? Here are five ideas. The $99 membership program is the single most important piece of Amazon today. Prime members shop more frequently and spend more than non-Prime members do, and also price-compare less. There are currently at least 46 million Prime members worldwide and possibly a lot more. Paid membership totals grew 51 percent last year, which is still fast. But, for the first time, Amazon has added a monthly payment option for Prime, hinting that it sees a need to reach new members in the U.S. not willing or able to pay $99 a year upfront. On last week’s earnings call, an Amazon executive called the upfront $99 fee “a hurdle for many people,” and said the monthly option is meant in part to appeal to new “demographic groups.” Still, growth is currently strong and Amazon has not yet launched the service in new markets like India and Mexico. Plus, it keeps adding value to what started out as just a shipping program: Music streaming, video streaming and same-day delivery options are some of the additional perks included in Prime memberships. Amazon only launched in India in 2013, but it is already challenging homegrown competitor Flipkart, which is nine years old, as the top destination for online shopping. Jeff Bezos has promised to invest billions into the company’s operations in India to make sure it succeeds in what will someday be one of the world’s biggest e-commerce markets. And it better. Amazon has underperformed in the only nation more populous than India: China. So if it wants to be a global power for decades to come, it has to get India right. It won’t be easy; federal regulations prohibit Amazon from storing and selling its own inventory in the country, meaning it has to operate much differently in India from how it does in the U.S. and several other countries. Amazon’s cloud computing unit will soon be a $10 billion business and has recorded operating profit margins that most analysts didn’t think were possible. But the unit has had to engage in pricing battles with competitors before and may face them again. Microsoft continues to invest big in cloud services; Google’s hire of VMware co-founder Diane Greene should re-energize the search giants’ efforts. While Prime is the most critical part of Amazon today, AWS may hold that spot in a distant tomorrow. Amazon has to continue to protect this future. The Amazon Echo has been the surprise consumer electronics hit of the last few years, but the real star is the Alexa AI-powered personal assistant behind it. That technology has made it clear that the idea of “voice search” is a big one, and Amazon is currently set up to be a key gatekeeper to that new world. Others will vie for that role, however. Apple, Google and Microsoft are all making big plays in the area, so Amazon will have its work cut out not to squander its early lead. One thread of negative news that Amazon can’t shake is that it is a grueling place to work. From stories about warehouse workers collapsing on the job and dying to office workers crying at their desks, the Amazon workplace does not give off warm and cuddly vibes. Eventually, you would think these narratives would have an effect on recruiting, but there are no obvious signs of that yet. You might also think shoppers would rebel at some point, too. And yet, Amazon grows in popularity among shoppers every year. Amazon customers may cringe when they read one of these articles, but few stop shopping there as a result. What would need to happen to change that? Apparently something much, much worse. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/1/11634164/amazon-unbeatable-prime-india

Vox

2017-02-16 00:00:00

2017

2.0

16

Matt Stromberg

An Exhibition Examines the Executive Order that Interned Thousands of Japanese Americans

Instructions to All Persons at the Japanese American National Museum looks back at Executive Order 9066, which was signed by President Roosevelt 75 years ago. Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads The policy of detaining or expelling groups of residents because of their background or nationality is both a shameful historical memory and a frighteningly realistic possibility for this country’s future. Instructions to All Persons: Reflections on Executive Order 9066 at the Japanese American National Museum is an exhibition that looks back at Executive Order 9066 which was signed by President Roosevelt 75 years ago and led to the deportation and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans. The exhibition features historical documents — including pages from the original executive order — photographs and documentary films, as well as contemporary artworks by Wendy Maruyama and Mike Saijo. Produced in conjunction with the theater East West Players, a series of performances exploring institutional discrimination will take place in the galleries throughout the show’s run as well. And, beginning on March 24, the public artwork “Moving Day” will feature 80 exclusionary orders projected onto the museum’s facade nightly from sunset to midnight. When: Opens Saturday, February 18, 11am–5pm Where: Japanese American National Museum (100 North Central Avenue, Downtown, Los Angeles) More info here.

https://hyperallergic.com/359342/an-exhibition-examines-the-executive-order-that-interned-thousands-of-japanese-americans/

Hyperallergic

2018-03-21 12:00:00

2018

3.0

21

Jennifer Billock

I Worry That Everything I Eat Is Going to Give Me Food Poisoning

In my mid-twenties, I had a spectacular case of food poisoning. I was coming home late from work one night and picked up a salad at Wendy’s for dinner. In the midst of an otherwise delicious meal, I bit into an absolutely foul cherry tomato. I spent the next ten minutes spitting and rinsing my mouth of the rancid juice, with a glimmer of a thought about how I might get sick. The next day was a nightmare. By 10 am, I was curled into the fetal position on the bathroom floor at work, crying, and vomiting nonstop. It continued into the next morning, when I was finally able to stomach some crackers without getting violently ill. I can’t remember another time I was quite so sick—and both my body and my brain decided to remember it too. From that episode of food poisoning emerged a vast and severe anxiety of being sick after I eat. In my efforts to avoid it, I’ve become paranoid about every piece of food I see. I examine berries one by one to make sure they aren’t soft or dented. If they are, they’re thrown away. Bananas with brown spots will rot on the shelf because I’m afraid to eat them. If something tastes weird from a new ingredient, I instantly assume something in the dish was spoiled and I’m going to be sick. I sometimes even trick myself into feeling ill the next day. I even count the hours between when I ate and when I feel like I’ll be alright—because I know it was 15 hours between that tomato and that illness. So if I make it past those 15, I should be good to go. I refuse to eat leftovers older than 48 hours. I’ve become so obsessed that it’s even cost me jobs. Once, I called in sick so often—because I thought I was about to be ill from food—that my employers decided I had a condition and let me go. I didn’t realize it was an issue. I thought I was just doing right by myself, aiming to stay on the good side of healthy consumption. My husband was the first to help me realize I might have an actual problem. We got closer when we started living together, and in his continual efforts to support me, he pointed out a few things: I’ve been throwing a lot away. I’m convinced I’m sick after every meal. I’m irrationally controlling over when leftovers get eaten. More from Tonic: Before this, I never thought about it much. I assumed it was normal behavior—the type I’d seen growing up with a dad who is often paranoid about food safety. It’s never been uncommon to hear, “Put that away or it’ll grow bacteria!” after just an hour of food being on the counter. “There is a clear correlation of increased diagnoses of anxiety, OCD, and eating disorders in children if a parent is showing symptoms,” says Edie Stark, a New York-based psychotherapist who specializes in treating eating disorders. “The environment we grow up [in?] absolutely has an effect on how we cope.” This is not to say my dad caused the problem—even if I had a bit of a head start from childhood. Things didn’t escalate to their current level until I’d moved out on my own, and they exploded into a full-blown phobia after that bout with the rotten cherry tomato. Six months ago, I began therapy for my food issues, and I have an official diagnosis: control-based anxiety and borderline OCD specific to food quality. And I’m now working on how to navigate this. I’ve since learned that OCD tendencies can be inherited through genetics, which my own therapist says is likely the case with me, compounded by a few bad experiences that interacted with my anxiety about being unable to control when exactly food will spoil. We’re working on retraining my brain to be concerned at a rational level rather than assuming anything and everything is spoiled and will turn my life into the bathroom scene from Bridesmaids. In one way, that means eating food that looks a bit off to me by consuming it in a different way, like throwing soft blueberries into a smoothie instead of discarding them. It also means pushing my personal boundaries of how long leftovers can last—I’m slowly moving from two days maximum to up to five days. And if I feel nauseous after eating, I need to sit and think about the actual reason I’m feeling sick instead of pinning it on food poisoning right away. Maybe I ate too much? Maybe the combination of foods just didn’t go well together? Maybe I didn’t eat enough? It’s a lot of introspection and a healthy dose of going outside my comfort zone, and it appears to be working so far. It’s also an anxiety-producing nightmare; I have to force myself to do these things because my body physically tries to resist. But last week I ate something turned a funny orange color by an unusual spice, and I was totally fine. Before, I wouldn’t have eaten at all. “So if you have to wash your hands and your utensils before eating and have to eat off of a certain plate with only meals that came from McDonalds, we would start by stopping you from washing your hands right before eating,” she says. “Maybe we’d start with you washing them three minutes before eating. Or five. Or ten. Once fears subside, we’d move up the hierarchy to something else scary.” She adds that while it may sound terrifying, and it is anxiety provoking, it’s controlled to prevent anxiety from spiraling out of control. “We’d never actually poison you...and you should be afraid of people who would be willing to poison you. The goal is to relegate the fear to normal proportions.” But even though I know my diagnosis now, and I’m undergoing treatment, the guilt I feel at the hands of this problem is nearly insurmountable. So many people in the world are starving and here I am, throwing out an ugly strawberry because I feel like it looked at me wrong. It’s the definition of privilege. I spend more than I should on groceries because it’s okay for me to just toss away something with a dent. Every ounce of me is screaming, “JUST EAT IT. People are broke. People are hungry. You aren’t. What’s your problem?!” But my brain tells me to throw everything out. It makes me so angry with myself. Fitzpatrick notes that even though I’m feeling this guilt, it’s important to remind myself that a mental illness is causing my suffering—it’s not me being fussy or spoiled. “This isn’t simply, ‘Oooh, that looks like a wonky mushroom, I’ll push it to the side,’” she says, “or ‘I’ll throw out the milk since it smells a little off,’ but is really like a five alarm fire going off under what are really everyday, necessary situations.” I do try to mitigate the guilt and self-hate in a few different ways. It starts at home; if I know my husband or someone in my family will eat whatever I don’t want, I pass it on to them. With my husband and brothers, it’s easiest. I just tell them I won’t eat something and to take it if they want it. With my parents, it’s a bit more complicated. I haven’t figured out why it’s harder for me to share my diagnosis or stress with them. But it seems like our homes are a never-ending revolving door of Tupperware. I bring food over and quietly leave it in their fridge in hopes that someone will eat it. If they do, I get the washed container back the next time I’m there. Nothing said when I drop it off, nothing asked when I get the Tupperware back. Outside my family, I try to compensate for my problems with food-focused charity work. If I’m checking out at a store and am prompted to donate a buck or two to starving children (or even pets), I always say yes. I feel like it’s the least I can do, since in my mind, I’m part of the problem. But, inevitably, I’m always left with the same inner conflict. I’m helping these charities out of a feeling of both disgust for myself and an attempt to make myself feel better. Does it still count as altruistic if it’s self-serving? And that brings on the guilt all over again. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of Tonic delivered to your inbox weekly.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d35z3x/food-poisoning-anxiety

Health

Vice

2019-07-05 00:00:00

2019

7.0

5

Russia's VTB increases stake in housebuilder PIK to 23.05%

MOSCOW, July 5 (Reuters) - VTB has increased its stake in Russia’s biggest housebuilder PIK Group to 23.05% from 7.57%, Russia’s second largest lender said on Friday. PIK did not reply to a Reuters request for immediate comment. VTB did not provide any additional information. Reporting by Maxim Rodionov; editing by Jason Neely

https://www.reuters.com/article/russia-vtb-pik-group/russias-vtb-increases-stake-in-housebuilder-pik-to-2305-idUSL8N24615U

Financials

Reuters

2017-09-18 15:59:00

2017

9.0

18

Tanza Loudenback

How to use Sallie Krawcheck's Ellevest investing platform for women

Investing — when done right — is one of the best ways to make your money work for you, and it's critical for retiring comfortably. But the uncertainty and risk that comes with the markets is very often a major deterrent, especially for women, who invest at a much lower rate than men in the US. To combat this, former Wall Street executive Sallie Krawcheck launched Ellevest in 2016, a digital investing platform that puts female investors' money in low-cost ETFs based on a pick-and-choose set of goals, like starting a business, buying a home, having children, and retiring comfortably. This week, the startup announced a new $34.6 million round of funding, led by Rethink Impact, the largest US venture capital impact fund with a gender focus. Jenny Abramson, the VC firm's founder and managing partner, will join Ellevest's board. Tennis superstar Venus Williams, who is a champion of equal pay and opportunity for women both on and off the court, was among Ellevest's first investors. Women tend to be less concerned with beating the market — the focus of much of the modern investment industry — and more interested in assuring that their money won't disappear completely, according to Sallie Krawcheck, who is also the founder of Ellevate, a global network for professional women. Just 28% of women are willing to take on high risk to get a good return on their investment, compared to 45% of men, according to a 2015 report by BlackRock. Beyond helping women prioritize financial goals, Ellevest takes into account the established facts of how women's financial experiences differ from men's: longer lifespans, different salary arcs, and the possibility of extended time off from work. This specificity alone differentiates the platform from an emerging crop of startup robo-advisors, including Betterment and Wealthfront. Business Insider took a test drive of Ellevest's new software. Below, check out the simple (and surprisingly fun) process of setting up an account and creating an investment plan via Ellevest's website (the platform is currently available on mobile devices, but not yet in the app store). (Note: Business Insider used a hypothetical situation and figures for this demonstration.) Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Step one: After creating an account using an email address and password, we're directed to the onboarding form. It's like mad libs — you fill in the basics like age, education, job, and salary. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Step two: Choosing "goals" for yourself. This is the heart of Ellevest's goals-based investment plans. You can choose as many or as few as you see fit. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Ellevest offers a brief explainer and some compelling statistics for each of the seven goals — personal investment, retirement, buying a home, having kids, starting a business, building an emergency fund, and splurging. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. If you choose "once-in-a-lifetime splurge" you'll be prompted to enter an amount and timeline for reaching that goal, since it's different for everyone. For this example, we entered $10,000 and five years. Perhaps we'd like to save up for a month-long excursion through Europe. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Step three: Here, we ranked our chosen goals from most important to least important using the prioritization tool — a simple drag and drop. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Step four: This helps Ellevest to know where we stand financially by entering the status of our accounts, from 401(k) and IRA to checking and savings. Again, the example here is a hypothetical situation. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Step five: Given all the information entered, Ellevest estimates how much we'll need to achieve our goals, taking into account our current savings contributions, inflation, taxes, salary growth projections, and other variables. Read more about how Ellevest predicts target goals here. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Here's our profile with Ellevest's estimates for how much money is needed to achieve each of the goals we chose. At any time, you can place a goal "on hold" or exchange it for a different one. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. For this example, we made our No. 1 goal buying a home. Ellevest offers advice to accomplish this, but edits can be made to both the cost and timeline at any point. In this scenario, we would need to deposit about $283 monthly into our Ellevest account to reach our target goal in six years. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. You can toggle through each goal and take a closer look at the portfolio of investments. The "transactions" tab will populate with deposits and withdraws once accounts are linked to Ellevest. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. In the graph under the "portfolio" tab, you'll see a projection for each goal, including the Ellevest standard, which is a 70% likelihood of reaching our goal, the more typical 50% likelihood, and the 99% likelihood. Read more on Ellevest's 70% likelihood here. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Also under the "portfolio" tab, Ellevest provides a breakdown of what investments will be made with our money. There are 21 asset classes available. Ellevest's investments get more conservative the closer you get to achieving a goal to reduce loss. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Ellevest says we're on track for our goal for retirement. Since the funds for retirement are held outside the platform in a 401(k), Ellevest simply offers monthly deposit and portfolio suggestions. We could also transfer over an IRA account. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. The targets for each goal are based on Ellevest's algorithm, but rest assured they can be edited and updated at any time. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. "Once-in-a-lifetime splurge" was also a chosen goal, but since it wasn't top priority, Ellevest suggests holding off until we make more progress elsewhere. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Ellevest's management fee is just .50% and there's no minimum balance. Suppose we start by investing $15,000. Our annual fee would be about $75, plus the small annual fees charged by ETFs in our portfolio. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. After you've created a plan, the final step is to fund your account. Overall, the platform is user-friendly and intuitive. While it can take as little as 15 minutes to set up an investment plan, the extensive customization options can be fun to toggle through and encourages users to make it as personal as possible. This is an update of an earlier post. Learn more: Top 15 Best Robo Advisors Robo Advisor Pros and Cons BI's Robo Investing ReviewsWho Uses Robo Advisors? Top Robo Advisor Conferences There are 3 things to understand about investing if you want to make money in the stock market

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-use-sallie-krawchecks-ellevest-investing-platform-for-women-2017-1

Business Insider

2019-06-15 00:00:00

2019

6.0

15

Gregory Volk

Ragnar Kjartansson’s Panorama of Love and Death

The artist’s Death Is Elsewhere conveys an understanding that humans — relatively recent additions to a 4.5-billion-year-old planet — will come and go. The planet will remain. Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-channel video installation The Visitors (2012), drew throngs of rapt viewers during its extended run at Luhring Augustine Gallery in 2013. Many viewers took in the entire 64 minutes of the work; that’s most unusual for such a lengthy video. Quite a number (I was one of them) did so repeatedly. I visited five times, and extolled the work in an Art in America review. After my text was written and sent, I visited again. I took one step into the gallery and burst into tears. That was surprising. I’ve since learned that something similar happened with very many others. The Visitors is, to put things simply, one of the best and most moving contemporary artworks that I’ve encountered anywhere, at any time, in any medium. This is art that really, really matters. It can make you feel at once joyful and mournful and leave you shaken and changed. Now Kjartansson’s new seven-channel, 77-minute long video installation Death Is Elsewhere (2019) is having its world premiere at the Metropolitan Museum, as part of the Met’s escalating focus on contemporary art. While there are some similarities with The Visitors — notably, musician friends performing the same song in a lengthy video shot in one take — this new work is not at all a sequel. It is set in a very different location, namely Iceland, and has different themes. For me, this is one of the most compelling, do-not-miss-it artworks in New York of the season. In the court of the Met’s Robert Lehman Wing, seven large video screens are arranged in a circle with gaps between them. You can hear the work from afar, and you are lured by its music. (Before he became an art star, Kjartansson was the front man in the Icelandic electro-pop, post-punk band Trabant, which makes his deep engagement with music and musicians a natural fit.) The video features two sets of identical twins: Kristín Anna and Gyða Valtýsdóttir, both founding members of the seminal, atmospheric Icelandic band múm, and both riveting performers and singers in The Visitors (Gyða on cello, the ethereal Kristín Anna on accordion and acoustic guitar) and Aaron and Bryce Dessner of the renowned alt-rock band The National. The Dessner twins have collaborated with Kjartansson before. In his A Lot of Sorrow (2013-14), a concert at MoMA PS1 that was later turned into a video, The National played their tremendous song “Sorrow” over and over, for six hours in a row, 108 times in total. Sorrow was pervasive. It was in the honey; it was in the milk (if you know the song). So too were joy and exhilaration. Death Is Elsewhere was shot at 2am in South Iceland around the time of the summer solstice. It’s set on a grassy field, adjacent to a looming lava escarpment. Kristín Anna has paired off with Bryce, and Gyða with Aaron, slowly parading in a circle, singing in absolutely beautiful voices as the men strum acoustic guitars. With the two couples on opposite sides of the circle (and on opposite sides of the installation), Kjartansson films them as a slow, minimalist carousel far out in nature, going around and around, not getting anywhere in particular. Seven video cameras, all facing outward, were used to create, in effect, a panoramic view. Each camera was accompanied by three microphones, capturing the sound as it traveled. It’s hypnotic to watch them move from screen to screen: troubadours on the loose, minstrel poets wandering through the landscape, couples in love strolling through a meadow. The two couples become mirror images of each other; that they are two sets of identical twins makes things even more mirrored. The repetitive song, essentially a love song (although it has a dire refrain) with lyrics culled from several sources, including Alexander Dumbadze’s book Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere (2013), which tells the story an artist lost at sea, is entrancing. It seems timeless or unstuck in time, a contemporary song that could be from, say, 600 years ago, and it insinuates itself deeply into your psyche. You may find yourself singing and humming it for hours and days after. Here is an excerpt: In the dark In the dark My love My love By the stream By the stream My love My love Death is elsewhere Very effective is how the seven screens function as landscape “paintings” — moving, sonic paintings sans paint. The landscape displayed on each screen is stark yet lush, with the dark volcanic mountain, thick, swaying grass, and an eventful, cloudy sky glowing orange and yellow on the horizon. The images recall Dutch and Flemish 17th-century paintings, and in a happy coincidence Dutch painter Jacob van Ruisdael’s “Wheat Field” (ca. 1670), showing a flat, tawny and soft green landscape, is nearby, in the Met’s exhibition In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at the Met. Kjartansson’s video images also recall various 19th-century Romantic paintings, for instance by John Constable and Caspar David Friedrich. There are, however, no 17th-century Icelandic landscape paintings, and no 19th-century Icelandic Romantic paintings either. The country was too poor and remote, and too hobbled by Danish colonial rule and oppression, to develop its own visual art. Now, centuries later, using video, Kjartansson has slyly insinuated Iceland into the history of painting; he’s made 21st-century, new media, Icelandic versions that evoke famous art historical genres. And Iceland is at the core of this work. The landscape frames the walking singers; their elemental song — with its lyrics evoking the wind, and the dark, and the stream, and sleep — responds to the elemental surroundings. But that’s when things get surprising. Judging by the sky and the light, you may well think that these singing couples are ambling about at dusk or just a bit after dawn. Actually, they are walking in the middle of the night, in Iceland’s extreme summer conditions when it never gets dark. That looming, dark, and powerful lava escarpment in the video is quintessentially Icelandic, as anyone who has been to this part of the country readily knows. It is actually the remnant of the Laki volcanic fissure eruption of 1783-84 that destroyed nearby villages, contaminated the soil far and wide, and decimated crops, leading to a famine that eventually killed 25 percent of Iceland’s human population and more than 50 percent of its livestock. That eruption also wreaked havoc elsewhere, as far away as Syria and the Sahara, spreading poisonous haze and drastically affecting the global climate. Thousands died in England. There was famine in France, which led to social and political upheaval; it is likely that the eruption in Iceland was at least partly responsible for the French Revolution. The “death is elsewhere” refrain in the song suddenly assumes dramatic historical connotations. Kjartansson’s work is also especially relevant right now, given climate change and environmental mayhem. Death Is Elsewhere, like many of Kjartansson’s works, is frankly romantic and emotional, but also ironic and quite comical. These thoughtful, sensitive couples in their lovely Icelandic landscape are taking an absurd walk in a small, circumscribed circle, and doing so for a very long time. They are also frolicking at the epicenter of what was once a whopping ecological disaster, one which not only could, but at some point will, happen again. It is best to absorb the video for its whole duration, despite its length; surrender to the flow and let it work its slow magic. As the singing couples move around and around, you notice ever-changing details: the distinctive movements and gestures of the performers, the emotions that play over their faces; the complex, unscripted and unspoken, communication occurring between them, registered by touches and gazes, glances and smiles; the slight alterations of the song over time, as the performers change their intonations and emphasis. This is all mesmerizing. At the end of the video there is a breathtaking moment. All four singers just disappear, as if they have faded into the ether, dissolved into the vastness of the world and time. In their startling absence you hear the wind and the rustling grass, and you see the grass swaying. You see and absorb the landscape, minus humans. You are alone with Iceland, or rather with a video of it. We are left with the understanding that humans — relatively recent additions to a 4.5-billion-year-old planet — will come and go; the planet will remain. Then the singers reappear and their song commences and the cycle renews: life into death and death into life, in humankind and in nature. While working on Death Is Elsewhere, and no doubt many other projects as well, the much-in-demand Kjartansson was also developing his Reykjavik-based record label with the hilarious title Bel-Air Glamour Records — hilarious because for most of its 1,100-plus-year history, the remote, rugged, often poverty-stricken, staggeringly beautiful country of Iceland had nothing whatsoever to do with glamour. This record label seems to be not at all a normal one, as you divine here. While Bel-Air Glamour has released work by the musical genius Kjartan Sveinsson (formerly a member of the Icelandic mega-band Sigur Rós, and a performer, on piano, bass, and vocals in The Visitors) and by Kjartansson himself, a driving purpose behind the label, as Kjartansson revealed to me in an email, was to produce the first solo album with instruments and vocals by one of the twins in Death Is Elsewhere, Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir (previously Bel-Air released her experimental a cappella album Howl). That album, I Must Be the Devil, is out now. It is thrilling and transportive and includes songs from 2005 to 2017 — private reflections, really — involving crisis, hope, whimsy, desolation, acceptance, and joy (among other emotions) in response to a life that can be messy and turbulent but also full of grace. But first, I have a confession: I am not a music critic and there are many, including many Hyperallergic readers, who are much more versed in contemporary music than I am. So I will write not as an expert but as an avid listener, and really as an ardent fan. Ever since I first encountered Kristín Anna years ago when she played with múm, (going by the stage name Kría Brekkan) I have been enthralled by her total musicianship: her rugged-crystal, high-pitched voice, at times wispy and at times fierce, quickly moving from a whisper to a shriek; the delightful, sometimes tumultuous sounds of her instrumentation; the potent (yet often mysterious) emotions that she ushers not just into her songs, but into a single word in the song, and oftentimes a single note. For me, Kristín Anna has long been not entertainment, but nutrition. I go to her music (and I do this a lot) for strange wisdom. This is a brilliant, soulful artist bringing complex life into complex music and frankly I am grateful. The nine songs on the album are piano-based ballads fleshed out by an all-star, mostly Icelandic cast: Gyða Valtýsdóttir on cello; Kjartan Sveinsson on bass and other instruments, including glockenspiel and vibraphone; María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, Hildur Ársælsdóttir, and Edda Rún Ólafsdóttir (all three from the wonderful band amiina) on violin and viola; acclaimed composer Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson on guitar. Enormous talent is operating here. The songs (in English) are confessional and intimate, but strangely large, almost mythic. You sense that they arose from deeply felt experiences of longing and loss, homesickness, wounded friendship, love, and alienation. Nature is a constant: ocean waves and forest trees, the moon and wind, the sky and lightning. Each song doesn’t really tell a story, but instead hints at one obliquely, often through inventive language (“sky above a palace joy/we beneath in un-ballast loving”). “Forever Love” is an impassioned plea for a lasting love, but also, one suspects, an ironic acknowledgement that it often doesn’t. Together with director Allan Sigurðsson, Kjartansson made the music video, which alternates between Kristín Anna at home, in some shots visibly pregnant, and also outdoors, torching a rickety construction in a stunning setting next to a glacial river. “Girl,” the last song on the album, an amazing nine-minute meditation on a fractured friendship, encapsulates a world of feeling: passion, regret, sadness, curiosity, respect. The entire album is polished and exquisite but also charged through and through with raw, honest feeling. The music can be orchestral and full, or airy and ambient, frequently in the same song. It is often melancholic, but seeded with buoyant passages and, at times, ecstatic flourishes. Kristín Anna’s piano is intoxicating. It’s as if she’s using it to summon invisible spirits of the earth and air while exploring the intricate nuances of her thoughts and emotions. And then there is her remarkable voice, so fresh and distinctive, but also somehow ancient, as if from a thousand years ago. Ragnar Kjartansson’s exhibition at the Met opened on a Thursday. On the following Sunday at The Kitchen, there was a concert by Kristín Anna on piano and vocals, accompanied by her sister Gyða on cello; the concert celebrated the release of I Must Be the Devil, which was performed in full. Kjartansson was the hilarious MC and opening act, on vocals and acoustic guitar. To counteract, as he told the audience, the devil in the title of Kristín Anna’s album, he sang three Christian country songs by the Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira, including “The Christian Life,” pointing out that the Christianity-promoting Ira was a hard drinking, brawling, despicable person prone to vicious bar fights and domestic abuse. Kjartansson also disclosed that performing in The Kitchen had been his impossible dream back in art school in Reykjavik years ago. Now that he was in The Kitchen, he wanted to take full advantage of the opportunity, and so performed a ludicrous, yet again hilarious, piece of body art by stripping off his shirt and rhythmically flapping his slightly flabby male breasts. The audience went nuts. Then the two sisters came on stage, in their glittering gold gowns. It’s great to hear Kristín Anna’s songs on the album, but a different matter altogether to experience them live. She doesn’t just sing her songs, she lives them. She doesn’t just sing with her voice but with her whole body, from her larynx to her sinews, veins, and nerves, and especially from her heart. Each song felt like a voyage filled with cascading, layered emotions. Each was utterly transfixing. It’s easy to see the connection between Kjartansson and Kristín Anna. For all his irony and antics, Kjartansson uncommonly and unabashedly deals in core human matters, in “heartly matters,” which is the title of one of Kristín Anna’s songs. Among these are love, friendship, sorrow, hopefulness, pain, joy, death, and our relationship with nature and the cosmos. Kristín Anna does too, in droves; it’s what helps make her music so meaningful and exceptional. Here are the lovely opening lines to the first song on her album, also the opening lines to what was a magical concert: the oceanwave rocks my kneeshells that is why i am laughing i do find leaving sad…. And you can listen to the song here. Ragnar Kjartansson: Death Is Elsewhere continues at the Metropolitan Museum (1000 5th Ave, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through September 2. Kristín Anna: I Must Be the Devil is released by Bel-Air Glamour Records.

https://hyperallergic.com/505314/ragnar-kjartanssons-panorama-of-love-and-death/

Hyperallergic

2019-02-16 00:00:00

2019

2.0

16

China-U.S. trade talks 'making a final sprint': state media

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Chinese state media on Saturday expressed cautious optimism over trade talks between the United States and China, a day after President Xi Jinping said a week of discussions had produced “step-by-step” progress. Xi made the comments at a meeting on Friday with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in Beijing, after a week of senior- and deputy-level talks. The People’s Daily, the official paper of the ruling Communist Party, said in a commentary that Xi’s meeting with U.S. negotiators had affirmed progress made in previous talks and “injected new impetus into the next stage of the development of Sino-U.S. trade relations.” The talks “have made important progress” for the next round of negotiations in Washington next week, the paper said in its domestic edition. “It is hoped that the two sides will maintain the good momentum of the current consultations and strive to reach an agreement within the set time limit,” it said. U.S. duties on $200 billion in imports from China are set to rise to 25 percent from 10 percent if there is no deal by March 1 to address U.S. demands that China curb forced technology transfers and better enforce intellectual property rights. In its overseas edition, the People’s Daily said “zero-sum thinking and games where you lose and I win can only create losses for both. Only on a basis of mutual respect and equal treatment, through dialogue and consultation, can we find a solution acceptable to both sides.” An English-language editorial in the Global Times, which is published by the People’s Daily, said news that China had consulted on the text of a memorandum of understanding “shows the two sides have made unprecedented progress.” “The MOU and next week’s talks both show that the seemingly endless China-U.S. trade negotiations, like a marathon, are making a final sprint,” it said. The newspapers cautioned that any agreement would have to be in the interests of both the United States and China. “There are still obstacles to be overcome, and no one should underestimate how daunting a task the two sides face trying to resolve all the differences that have long existed between them in one clean sweep,” the official English-language China Daily said in an editorial. Reporting by Andrew Galbraith; editing by Darren Schuettler

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-media/china-u-s-trade-talks-making-a-final-sprint-state-media-idUSKCN1Q5042

World News

Reuters

2018-05-31 21:00:01

2018

5.0

31

Rani Molla

Naveen Jain wants to send people to the moon, cure chronic illness

Naveen Jain has a number of moonshot projects — including helping people live on the moon. At Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Jain told the audience about the far-out missions of the two companies he founded. At Moon Express, a startup that wants to mine the moon for natural resources, Jain is tackling the problem of living on the moon. That could include modifying our genes to use radiation as energy. His other company, Viome, a nutritional services startup, has only a slightly less extraordinary goal: It aims to “make chronic illness optional” by studying the relationship between your diet and your gut. Watch him explain his moonshots in the video above. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/31/17390158/naveen-jain-moonshot-code-2018-space-travel-business-video

Vox

2019-05-13 00:00:00

2019

5.0

13

Trump says U.S. farmers to get $15 billion in aid amid China trade war

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Monday that his administration was planning to provide about $15 billion in aid to help U.S. farmers whose products may be targeted with tariffs by China in a deepening trade war. “We’re going to take the highest year, the biggest purchase that China has ever made with our farmers, which is about $15 billion, and do something reciprocal to our farmers so our farmers can do well,” Trump told reporters at the White House. He did not provide more details on what kind of an aid package it would be. American farmers, a key constituency of Trump, have been among the hardest hit in the trade war. Soybeans are the most valuable U.S. farm export, and shipments to China dropped to a 16-year low in 2018. Sales of U.S. soybeans elsewhere failed to make up for the loss. U.S. soybean futures fell to their lowest in a decade on Monday. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said on Friday that Trump had asked him to create a plan to help American farmers cope with the heavy impact of the U.S.-China trade war on agriculture. A new aid program would be the second round of assistance for farmers, after the Department of Agriculture’s $12 billion plan last year to compensate for lower prices for farm goods and lost sales stemming from trade disputes with China and other nations. “Out of the billions of dollars that we’re taking (in on tariffs on Chinese imports), a small portion of that will be going to our farmers, because China will be retaliating, probably to a certain extent, against our farmers,” Trump said. The tariffs are not paid by the Chinese government or by firms located in China. They are paid by importers of Chinese goods, usually American companies or the U.S.-registered units of foreign companies. On Monday, China said it would impose higher tariffs on a range of U.S. goods, including frozen vegetables and liquefied natural gas, striking back in its trade war with Washington after Trump warned it not to. Last year, Beijing imposed tariffs on imports of U.S. agricultural goods, including soybeans, grain sorghum and pork as retribution for U.S. levies. While farmers have largely remained supportive of Trump, many have called for an imminent end to the trade dispute, which propelled farm debt to the highest levels in decades and worsened credit conditions for the rural economy. Trump’s pledge on Friday to buy American farm products that China normally imports and distribute them to poor countries drew criticism from Canada. “Dumping products in developing countries is not the way we do things,” Canadian Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau told reporters on a conference call from the G20 meeting in Japan, adding such efforts required multilateral coordination. “It seems easy, but it is complicated to do it the right way,” Bibeau said. “Obviously, it may create some distortion in the market and this is what we want to avoid.” Reporting by Jeff Mason; Additional reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba; Writing by Tim Ahmann and Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Peter Cooney

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-agriculture/trump-says-u-s-farmers-to-get-15-billion-in-aid-amid-china-trade-war-idUSKCN1SJ22Z

Business News

Reuters