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2019-02-18

Is there any more daunting animal to study than the great white shark? Just you try attaching a radio transmitter or drawing a tube of blood from a two-ton, razor-toothed, meat-seeking missile. But scientific understanding of these iconic apex predators has been limited by technical challenges as much as human bias for studying species that reside on closer branches of the taxonomic tree. Sharks evolved from the rest of the animal kingdom 400 million years ago—before the first adventurous amphibians left the oceans for dry land. What could the great white possibly teach 21st century humans? A lot actually, according to the scientists who have spent years painfully decoding its DNA. Today, they reported their efforts mapping the first great white shark genome in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The major scientific milestone is a boon for conservation biologists seeking to better understand population dynamics of the great white and other shark species, nearly all of which are in steep decline. And the massive genome—great whites, it turns out, have 41 pairs of chromosomes compared to our 23—also holds clues to how these ancient animals have for so long ruled Earth’s oceans. These clues could one day help our own evolutionarily infantile species live longer, less disease-ridden lives. (Provided of course we don’t burn the planet down first.) “Getting money for shark genomics is really difficult,” says Michael Stanhope, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University, who co-led the genome-mapping project with his friend Mahmood Shivji, a conservation biologist at Nova Southeastern University’s Guy Harvey Research Institute. Despite the falling cost of DNA sequencing, it was still a massive undertaking, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, most of which was funded by the Save Our Seas Shark Research Center. “Historically, there’s been a lot more interest in sequencing other vertebrates, like livestock and primates,” says Stanhope. “But sharks have some fascinating biology going on that really warranted more investigation.” For one thing, sharks are super-healers. Fishermen and marine biologists have for decades swapped tales of bitten, gashed sharks turning up completely healed from those serious external injuries just a few months later. A recent study of blacktip reef sharks found them remarkably resilient to physical traumas—recovering from wounds in a matter of weeks, sometimes days. The new genome map reveals how the great white achieves this legendary red potion-style health boost. Millions of years of competing in the dangerous waters of the world’s oceans fine-tuned a set of genes involved in several key processes of wound healing. These include DNA sequences that code for supercharged blood-clotting agents and scaffolding proteins responsible for laying down the foundational units of new flesh. Besides possessing uniquely adapted versions of these genes, great white sharks also appear to have more of them than any other vertebrate. “They’ve devoted a significant proportion of their genome to wound healing,” says Stanhope, which suggests the species’ reign at the top of the food chain is only a fairly recent development, in evolutionary time. With no natural predators, great white sharks routinely live up to 75 years. Given their massive size and long life spans—both recipes for racking up loads of mutations—they should be mathematically more likely to develop cancer. But, more and more, researchers are realizing that long-lived, large-bodied species, including elephants and whales, do not get cancer more than humans. (Biologists call this Peto’s Paradox.) Sequencing studies suggest these superior cancer-fighting abilities come from clusters of genes that serve to protect the integrity of the genetic code itself, a trait known collectively as genome stability. Stanhope and Shivji’s new map reveals that great white sharks also possess huge chunks of code for these genome-stabilizing DNA repair mechanisms and for tumor suppression. Because sharks evolved so long ago, and so far away from humans on the tree of life, it’s possible that these genes represent totally novel anti-cancer defenses. The incidence of cancer in wild sharks is poorly understood, so the scientists plan to test the hypothesis in the lab. By splicing genome-stabilizing shark genes into transgenic mice and then exposing the rodents to well-known carcinogens, they hope to measure the protective powers of shark DNA. “Understanding how these genes might be inoculating these animals from cancer could be a huge benefit to humans,” says Stanhope. But he stresses that it will take years of work to translate these discoveries into potential cancer drugs or new methods for healing human wounds. Consuming shark products will not confer any of their superpowers. “You’re no more likely to get protected from cancer by eating shark than you are likely to develop the ability to swim faster,” says Stanhope. But people peddling this false belief prop up an illegal fishing industry that butchers an estimated 100 million sharks every year, hacking off their fins and throwing them back into the sea to thrash desperately to their deaths beneath the waves. Stanhope and Shivji hope their work helps to illuminate how remarkable these creatures are, to inspire people to conserve rather than consume them. Of the more than 500 species of sharks that swim the Earth’s waters, the great white is only the second one to have its genome sequenced. Who knows how many more mysteries lurk below the surface, in strings of DNA just waiting to be decoded. 02/18/19 8:30pm EST This story has been updated to correct the average weight of an adult great white shark.

2019-11-11 11:00:20

By interviewing people who live around a forest in Vietnam, scientists captured visual evidence that silver-backed chevrotains still exist. The illegal wildlife trade in Vietnam has depleted some forests so drastically that scientists call the result “empty forest syndrome,” where almost nothing sings or crawls or rustles the branches. “There’s a beautiful, vibrant tropical forest around you, but no animals in it,” said Andrew Tilker, a scientist with Global Wildlife Conservation and doctoral student at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin. “It’s an eerie feeling.” Within this emptiness, Mr. Tilker and a team of researchers went looking for a small, deer-like mammal called the silver-backed chevrotain, which scientists hadn’t seen any evidence of in nearly 30 years. But, the team reported Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution, there’s at least one pocket of forest where the mammal is alive and well, for now. With its Search for Lost Species initiative, Global Wildlife Conservation aims to highlight species, like the silver-backed chevrotain, that are “lost” to science, but not necessarily extinct. Scientists have only recorded five silver-backed chevrotain specimens. All of them were already dead. The first four appeared in 1910, and the final specimen, killed by a hunter, turned up in 1990. Researchers had no reason to think the silver-backed chevrotain had gone extinct. But the researchers also had no idea where to find the animal. In March 2017, members of the research team brainstormed about where to look for the silver-backed chevrotain. They focused on dry coastal forest in the southern part of Vietnam, near where the first specimens turned up more than a century earlier. It’s a very different habitat from the wet evergreen forests that are common across the country, Mr. Tilker says, but other research in those forests hadn’t turned up any silver-backed chevrotains. “We thought, hey, why don’t we go somewhere different?” Next, Vietnamese team members interviewed local residents about whether they had seen any silver-backed chevrotains in the forest. It was a delicate question, Mr. Tilker said, because the wire-snare hunting that has emptied Vietnamese forests is illegal. Most of it supplies a thriving illegal wildlife trade, with much of the meat ending up in restaurants. Some of the people who could best answer the scientists’ questions were hunters and traders. An Nguyen, also a Global Wildlife Conservation scientist and a Leibniz Institute doctoral student, led the interviews. Researchers started with simple questions about people’s lives to get them comfortable, Mr. Nguyen said, and then asked about wildlife in the forest. Had they seen the little deer-like animal with a pointed face, tawny fur and a grizzled back? Everyone interviewed said that chevrotain populations (including the silver-backed as well as another species, the lesser chevrotain) had plummeted in recent years from hunting. But at least nine of the 35 people interviewed said they had seen a silver-backed chevrotain. One person walked researchers into the forest and showed scientists the exact location. The team used the information to set up camera traps, or motion-activated cameras that snap a burst of photos whenever something walks by. A few months later, the researchers collected the cameras they had left in the forest and combed through the pictures. In photograph after photograph, there it was: the silver-backed chevrotain. It appeared in daytime, usually alone. The cameras had captured the species on 208 separate occasions. Mr. Nguyen says that after walking through the camera trap sites and seeing footprints and other evidence of mammal life, the pictures didn’t surprise him. Still, they’re the first known photos of silver-backed chevrotains alive, and the first scientific evidence of the creature in almost three decades. The silver-backed chevrotain is one of many species unique to the Annamite Mountains of Vietnam and Laos. Tran Van Bang, a co-author of the study and scientist with the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology’s Southern Institute of Ecology, said that learning more about these species is important for drawing attention and resources to these threatened forests. To keep the silver-backed chevrotain safe in the immediate future, though, the authors aren’t saying exactly where they put their cameras. But they may have said too much already, said Diana Bell, a professor of conservation biology at the University of East Anglia whose research team has also worked with elusive wildlife in Vietnam. “I think the most important point it raises is whether authors should in fact be publicizing the rediscovery of a critically endangered species.” Even though the scientists have hidden the silver-backed chevrotain’s exact location, Dr. Bell worries that the publication could increase demand for the animal by hunters. “It is deeply depressing that conservation biologists should now be placed in this dilemma,” she added. Mr. Tilker agreed that hunting is the most imminent danger to species like the silver-backed chevrotain. Even if the animals remaining in the Vietnamese forests avoid extinction from hunting, they will still face other threats including climate change and habitat destruction. But knowing where some animals are still hiding out is a first step toward keeping them alive. “Until we find the species and start learning something about it, it’s not possible to do any sort of conservation,” Mr. Tilker said. “It’s hard to protect a species if you don’t know if it still exists.”

2018-09-11 00:00:00

LONDON (Reuters) - British workers’ pay excluding bonuses picked up faster than expected during the three months to July to a rate that has not been beaten in three years, as businesses found it harder to hire staff, official figures showed on Tuesday. The Bank of England has long forecast that a tighter labor market will lead to faster pay growth — albeit not at the rates seen before the financial crisis — and the latest data are likely to strengthen its focus on domestic inflation pressures. Both average weekly earnings excluding bonuses — the measure preferred by the BoE — and total pay grew at the top end of economists’ forecasts in a Reuters poll. Earnings excluding bonuses were 2.9 percent up on the year in the three months to July versus 2.7 percent in June, matching a peak seen in March. Pay has not risen faster since July 2015. Total earnings growth picked up to 2.6 percent from 2.4 percent. Sterling rallied on the news and British government bond prices fell, though analysts do not expect the central bank to signal any acceleration of its rate hike plans at this week’s meeting. The meeting comes barely a month after it raised rates for only the second time since the financial crisis. “While the Bank of England are almost certainly set to stand pat and leave rates unchanged this Thursday, there remains plenty to suggest further tightening going forward as long as there’s not a large adverse Brexit-related shock,” said David Cheetham, a market analyst at currency brokers XTB. The faster pay growth will comfort to British consumers, whose household incomes have been squeezed by a spike in inflation after June 2016’s Brexit vote. The ONS said pay had been growing faster than inflation for several months now. The BoE keeps a close eye on wage growth for signs of inflation pressure, and last week Governor Mark Carney told legislators that pay growth had slowly risen since 2015 without much accompanying improvement in productivity growth. That increased employers’ labor costs, which were now growing at a rate that pointed to inflation at around 2 percent and required the BoE to raise interest rates at a “limited and gradual” pace, he said. The BoE has raised interest rates twice in the past year, and after last month’s rise, Carney said market expectations of a further 25 basis point rate rise at least once a year for the next few years was a reasonable rule of thumb. Tuesday’s data showed businesses faced growing difficulties hiring, echoing a common message in private-sector surveys of firms. The economy added just 3,000 jobs in the three months to July — the smallest increase since a fall in the three months to October — taking the number of people in work to 32.397 million. That was less than the net hiring of 28,000 forecast by economists, and the number of job vacancies rose to a fresh record high The jobless rate held steady at 4.0 percent, its joint-lowest since 1975, as forecast. “The labor market remains robust, with the number of people working still at historically high levels,” ONS statistician David Freeman said. Reporting by David Milliken, editing by Larry King

2019-02-05

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Tuesday that the Vatican would be willing to mediate in Venezuela if both sides asked, but preliminary steps to try to bring them closer together should be taken first. Francis, speaking to reporters aboard his plane returning from a visit to Abu Dhabi, also confirmed that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro had written a letter to him but that he had not yet read it. (Reporting By Philip Pullella Editing by Gareth Jones)

2017-04-27

April 27 (Reuters) - Dupont: * Sets quarterly dividend of $0.38 per share Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:

2016-10-10 00:00:00

Speaking to attendees at a deep learning conference in London last month, there was one particularly noteworthy recurring theme: humility, or at least, the need for it. While companies like Google are confidently pronouncing that we live in an "AI-first age," with machine learning breaking new ground in areas like speech and image recognition, those at the front lines of AI research are keen to point out that there’s still a lot of work to be done. Just because we have digital assistants that sound like the talking computers in movies doesn’t mean we’re much closer to creating true artificial intelligence. Problems include the need for vast amounts of data to power deep learning systems; our inability to create AI that is good at more than one task; and the lack of insight we have into how these systems work in the first place. Machine learning in 2016 is creating brilliant tools, but they can be hard to explain, costly to train, and often mysterious even to their creators. Let’s take a look at these challenges in more detail: We all know that artificial intelligence needs data to learn about the world, but we often overlook how much data is involved. These systems don’t just require more information than humans to understand concepts or recognize features, they require hundreds of thousands times more, says Neil Lawrence, a professor of machine learning at the University of Sheffield and part of Amazon’s AI team. "And if you look at all the applications domains were deep learning is successful you’ll see they’re domains where we can acquire a lot of data," says Lawrence, giving the example of speech and image recognition. Here, big tech firms like Google and Facebook have access to mountains of data (for example, your voice searches on Android), making it much easier to create useful tools. Right now, says Lawrence, data is like coal was in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. He gives the example of Thomas Newcomen — an Englishman who, in 1712, invented a primitive version of the steam engine that ran on coal, about 60 years before James Watt did. Newcomen’s invention wasn’t very good: compared to Watt’s machine, it was inefficient and costly to run. That meant it was put to work only in coalfields — where the fuel was plentiful enough to overcome the machine’s handicaps. Lawrence suggests that all around the world there are hundreds of Newcomens working on their own machine learning models. They might be revolutionary, but without the data to make them work, we’ll never know. Big tech firms like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are today’s coal mines. They have abundant data and so can afford to run inefficient machine learning systems, and improve them. Smaller startups might have good ideas, but they won’t be able to follow through without data. "it's considered unethical to force people to become sick to acquire data." The problem is even bigger when you look at areas where data is difficult to get your hands on. Take health care, for example, where AI is being used for machine vision tasks like recognizing tumors in X-ray scans, but where digitized data can be sparse. As Lawrence points out, the tricky bit here is that it’s "generally considered unethical to force people to become sick to acquire data." (That’s what makes deals like that struck between Google and the National Health Service in the UK so significant.) The problem, says Lawrence, is not really about finding ways to distribute data, but about making our deep learning systems more efficient and able to work with less data. And just like Watt’s improvements, that might take another 60 years. There’s another key problem with deep learning: the fact that all our current systems are, essentially, idiot savants. Once they’ve been trained, they can be incredibly efficient at tasks like recognizing cats or playing Atari games, says Google DeepMind research scientist Raia Hadsell. But "there is no neural network in the world, and no method right now that can be trained to identify objects and images, play Space Invaders, and listen to music." (Neural networks are the building blocks of deep learning systems.) "we can’t even learn multiple games." The problem is even worse than that, though. When Google’s DeepMind announced in February last year that it’d built a system that could beat 49 Atari games, it was certainly a massive achievement, but each time it beat a game the system needed to be retrained to beat the next one. As Hadsell points out, you can’t try to learn all the different games at once, as the rules end up interfering with one another. You can learn them one at a time — but you end up forgetting whatever you knew about previous games. "To get to artificial general intelligence we need something that can learn multiple tasks," says Hadsell. "But we can’t even learn multiple games." A solution to this might be something called progressive neural networks — this means connecting separate deep learning systems together so that they can pass on certain bits of information. In a paper published on this topic in June, Hadsell and her team showed how their progressive neural nets were able to adapt to games of Pong that varied in small ways (in one version the colors were inverted; in another the controls were flipped) much faster than a normal neural net, which had to learn each game from scratch. It’s a promising method, and in more recent experiments it’s even been applied to robotic arms — speeding up their learning process from a matter of weeks to just a single day. However, there are significant limitations, with Hadsell noting that progressive neural networks can’t simply keep on adding new tasks to their memory. If you keep chaining systems together, sooner or later you end up with a model that is "too large to be tractable," she says. And that’s when the different tasks being managed are essentially similar — creating a human-level intelligence that can write a poem, solve differential equations, and design a chair is something else altogether. Another major challenge is understanding how artificial intelligence reaches its conclusions in the first place. Neural networks are usually inscrutable to observers. Although we know how they’re put together and the information that goes in them, the reasons why they come to certain decisions usually goes unexplained. AI looks for curtains on the floor — not on the windows A good demonstration of this problem comes from an experiment at Virginia Tech. Researchers created what is essentially an eye-tracking system for a neural network, which records which pixels the computer looks at first. The researchers showed the neural net pictures of a bedroom and asked the AI: "What is covering the windows?" They found that instead of looking at the windows, the AI looked at the floor. Then, if it found a bed, it gave the answer "there are curtains covering the windows." This happened to be right, but only because of the limited data the network had been trained on. Based on the pictures it had been shown, the neural net had deduced that if it was in a bedroom there would be curtains on the windows. So when it saw a bed, it stopped looking — it had, in its eyes, seen curtains. Logical, of course, but also daft. A lot of bedrooms don’t have curtains! Eye-tracking is one way of shining some light on the inner workings, but another might be to build more coherence into deep learning systems from the get-go. One way of doing this is revisiting an old, unfashionable strand of artificial intelligence known as symbolic AI or Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI), says Murray Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London (and also the scientific advisor on Ex Machina). This is based on the hypothesis that what goes on in the mind can be reduced to basic logic, where the world is defined by a complex dictionary of symbols. By combining these symbols — which represent actions, events, objects, etc. — you can basically synthesize thinking. (If creating an AI this way sounds like a monstrous, unthinkable task, just imagine trying it on computers that still run on magnetic tape.) Shanahan’s proposal is that we take the symbolic descriptions of GOFAI and combine them with deep learning. These would provide the systems with a starting point for understanding the world, rather than just feeding them data and waiting for them to notice patterns. This, he says, might not only solve the transparency problem of AI, but also the problem of transfer learning outlined by Hadsell. "It’s all very well to say that Breakout is similar to Pong because they’ve both got paddles and balls, but human level cognition makes these types of connections on a much more dramatic scale," says Shanahan. "Like the connection between the structure of the atom and the structure of the solar system." Shanahan and his team at Imperial are working on the new method (which they call deep symbolic reinforcement learning) and have published some small experiments. It’s still in its infancy, and finding out whether it will scale up to larger systems and different types of data will be telling. However, there’s every chance it could develop into something more. After all, deep learning itself was an unloved department of AI until researchers began to plug in the cheap data and abundant processing power made available in recent years. Maybe it’s time for another blast from AI’s past to try its skills in a new environment.

2017-07-25

U.S. retailer Michael Kors has agreed to buy luxury shoemaker Jimmy Choo for $1.2 billion, snapping up a British brand launched in the east end of London and made famous by celebrity fans including Princess Diana. Founded in the 1990s by bespoke shoemaker Jimmy Choo, the brand is known for its stiletto heals and accessories and sells in cities from London to Paris, New York and Tokyo. It put itself up for sale in April after its majority owner JAB signaled its intention to focus on consumer goods. At 230 pence in cash per share, the group is receiving a premium of 36.5 percent to its share price before the sale process was announced. Michael Kors, once the hottest name in affordable luxury with a hugely popular handbag range, has been struggling in recent quarters with declining same-store sales as fewer people visit its shops. In response, it has expanded into dresses and menswear, and invested in its online business. It said Jimmy Choo would continue to operate as it does today, under its existing management team. "Jimmy Choo is an iconic premier luxury brand that offers distinctive footwear, handbags and other accessories," said Michael Kors, honorary chairman and chief creative officer. "We admire the glamorous style and trend-setting nature of Jimmy Choo designs." Jimmy Choo floated on the London Stock Exchange at 140 pence in 2014 It closed on Monday at 195 pence.

2019-11-11 00:00:00

At 7:30 A.M. on a frosty March Saturday in downtown Cincinnati, the director Todd Haynes was on the sixteenth floor of the corporate law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, and he was already, as he puts it, “in the weeds, dealing with every little piece in every shot in every scene.” The firm’s lawyers and secretaries had been banished for the weekend, and the maze of cubicles and passageways was cluttered with cameras, cables, extras, and a drowsy crew. Haynes, a trim, boyish fifty-eight, with dishevelled brindle hair, was standing at the epicenter of his newest drama: a small corner office, whose west-facing windows looked out on skyscrapers and a sliver of the Ohio River. It was from here, in 1999, that Robert Bilott, a partner in the firm and a specialist in helping corporations negotiate environmental regulations, switched sides and sued DuPont, a chemical leviathan, whose plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, was thirty-five times larger than the Pentagon. In what became a class-action suit on behalf of seventy thousand residents of West Virginia and Ohio, Bilott pursued the company for having knowingly dumped in those states more than seven thousand tons of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a toxic, nonbiodegradable chemical used in making Teflon—thereby poisoning hundreds of acres of land, deforming and killing hundreds of animals, contaminating the water supply, and doing long-term, irreversible damage to the health of the community. Bilott’s fight pitted him not just against DuPont but against his own firm; he was the legal insider turned outsider, a poacher turned gamekeeper. A herculean, eighteen-year legal struggle followed. In 2017, Bilott won a six-hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar settlement for thirty-five hundred of the people who had filed claims relating to illnesses linked to the PFOA in their drinking water. (Additional personal-injury claims against the company are still in progress.) For Haynes’s eighth feature film, “Dark Waters,” Bilott’s battle had been broken down into a two-hundred-and-forty-six-scene jigsaw puzzle that the director was now painstakingly piecing together. Haynes, in T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, sat down on the office sofa to discuss the morning’s scene with his stars: the towering Tim Robbins, who plays Bilott’s boss, Tom Terp, the head of the firm’s environmental group, and the shortish, stocky Mark Ruffalo , as Bilott, the saga’s unlikely hero. Ruffalo was not only the film’s marquee attraction; he was its lead producer, and he had initially sought out Haynes to direct and deepen the screenplay, by Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan, which was inspired by Nathaniel Rich’s 2016 exposé on the subject in the New York Times Magazine , and which Ruffalo felt had been written too strictly as a procedural thriller. “You’re trying to find the balance between character and story,” Ruffalo told me. “If you go heavy on the plot, you lose character.” He added, “I love the inner space of Todd’s work with actors and characters. I always feel he’s interested equally, if not more, in what’s happening below the lines.” Haynes, who is a gifted screenwriter—he was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay for his movie “Far from Heaven” (2002)—made sure that Bilott’s wife and his family relationships were given a real presence in the shooting script. As a student at Brown University, in the mid-eighties, Haynes studied painting and semiotics in a program that, he said, “kind of combined Freud, Marx, and feminism.” He emerged, as he wrote in the introduction to an edition of three of his screenplays, with “a strong interest in popular form, combined with a strong desire to invert it.” In earlier films, he played on the bio-pic (“Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” 1988), the horror movie and the tabloid documentary (“Poison,” 1991), the “disease of the week” film (“Safe,” 1995), the melodrama (“Far from Heaven” and “ Carol ,” 2015), and even the silent film (“Wonderstruck,” 2017). “Dark Waters” subverts by taking the legal thriller—a form that traditionally concludes with the triumph of good over evil—into areas of psychological complexity and ambiguity. All investigative stories, he told me, when we met in Los Angeles in June, have the burden of revealing a truth. “What I love so much about the genre,” he explained, “is the cost of revealing the truth. The drama of that, and what it does to people. That is the part that kills you.” On the set, the camera perched on the threshold of Bilott’s office, and a scrum of technicians outside formed a second barricade, so I watched the filming from a conference room, where a large monitor had been installed for the production staff. “I have no actual time beyond the shoot itself—every day is a mortal trial,” Haynes had warned me before I flew in to watch him work, but I had no idea then just how fiercely he inhabited his imagined worlds. “He’s got himself in a bubble,” one of the film’s producers, Christine Vachon , said of the laser-like focus that he exhibited on the monitor. A co-founder, in 1995, of Killer Films, Vachon is the doyenne of independent producers; she and Haynes met at Brown, where she, too, studied semiotics, and she has produced all his feature films. She sat across from me, working the phone, in her customary getup—black T-shirt, pants, hoodie, and combat boots (which gained some notoriety when she wore them on the red carpet at Cannes for the première of “Carol”). “He’s always very passionate,” she added. “He’s not good at juggling a lot of balls in the air.” I was thinking of myself, sadly, as one of those balls when Haynes’s director’s assistant, Lucas Omar, suddenly materialized with a large black leather portfolio. “Todd wanted you to see the Image Book,” he said, and disappeared. The incident was proof of Haynes’s attention to detail; even in the early-morning hubbub, he’d kept my presence on the set in mind. Haynes is renowned in the business for his preparation: rigorous shot lists, hundred-page editing notes, and his Image Books, which remain close at hand throughout his shoots. These books are key, Haynes has said, to his “psychic process.” Before beginning each film, he distributes a magazine-size version to the head of each department, to insure that all his collaborators have a sense of the film’s emotional terrain. The “Dark Waters” Image Book consisted of forty-six laminated pages that followed the linear and thematic trajectory of Bilott’s crusade, a sort of map of Haynes’s ideas for the movie’s visual language. The images, many of which were shot with foreboding lighting or from unsettling angles, included derelict West Virginia landscapes, DuPont billboards, and screen grabs from other movies (“Silkwood,” “The Insider,” “The Parallax View,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and “All the President’s Men”—a primer for the postures of fear and frustration in Bilott’s battle against corporate corruption). Into this visual stew, Haynes had mixed photographs of Bilott as a boy, and of his family (his grandmother lived in West Virginia, not far from DuPont’s most toxic dumping site); a wall of boxes holding the hundreds of thousands of pages of relevant correspondence and documentation that Bilott had extracted from DuPont; the worn faces of West Virginia farmers; the severed head of a wild-eyed contaminated cow; polluted streams. The album also included a list of the painters and photographers Haynes had chosen to inform the film’s palette and perspective, among them Gerhard Richter, Gordon Parks, Andreas Gursky, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz. Haynes’s visual challenge in “Dark Waters” was to elevate the legal offices, storage rooms, and middle-class homes where most of the drama of the movie takes place to an expressive backdrop for Bilott’s internal struggle, which, he said, was infused “with anxiety, dread, futility, and despair.” Around noon, while Robbins and Ruffalo were horsing around between takes—Robbins: “You were horrible.” Ruffalo: “Wait till I’m off camera. I’m gonna be horrible to you”—a slight middle-aged man, in a plaid shirt and jeans, slipped into the conference room and took a seat against the back wall. It was Rob Bilott. I introduced myself. Ruffalo, in his round-shouldered, restrained performance, seemed to have uncannily captured Bilott’s trout-lipped solitude, a standoffishness that made him seem permanently braced. The one physical quality that no actor could capture was his sunken, forlorn eyes. Bilott said that he was nervous about the next scene on the schedule. I asked why. “Neurological issues,” he said. Cartoon by Roz Chast In the scene in question, which takes place thirteen years into Bilott’s legal battle, Bilott’s boss tells him that he has to wrap up the suit and take a pay cut. “Tom, that’s my fourth. I’m down a third now,” Bilott replies quietly. Terp says, “You don’t have any clients. No one will take your calls. What am I supposed to do here? Now, I’m on your side, but, Rob . . .” At this point in the script, Bilott starts to stand up, his legs give out, he grabs at the desk and collapses. Haynes went to work on the choreography of the fall. During the next four hours, with the three-page scene in hand, Haynes kept popping out from where he was crouching behind the door, to explain the motivation of the moment. “You think he’s going to get up,” he said to Robbins at one point, then, turning to Ruffalo, “You’re fighting waves of nausea.” They explored the scene’s dynamics, then, satisfied, moved on to the next beat. Systematically, Haynes ramped up Bilott’s tension: his blinking eyes, his twitching hands, his juddering feet, his fumbling for the chair, and his flailing spasms on the floor. By the fifth take, Ruffalo’s portrayal of Bilott’s psychological struggle to contain his collapse had become as sensational as the physical one. Afterward, in the conference room, I turned to the real Bilott, who had been joined by his wife, Sarah (played by Anne Hathaway in the film), to ask what he thought of it. “Hard for me. Disturbing,” he said, adding, “I’m not being very articulate.” He scratched his forehead, searching for more words. “Never realized I didn’t smile,” he said. The caravan of lights and cameras moved down the partitioned corridors to the next location. The dark passageways, the contrasting bright sources of light, and the outside vistas with no direct horizon all served Haynes’s effort to create a landscape of obfuscation and menace. “Barrier upon barrier upon barrier. It’s so smart,” Ruffalo said later of what he calls Haynes’s “geometrics,” as he waited to be filmed from another disconcerting angle, below a stairwell. “He’s laid the music down, and I’m the piano player. I can move within the structure. It’s a complex game. He’s challenging you, and he won’t walk away until it’s impeccable.” The first of three children, Haynes was born in 1961 to Allen and Sherry Haynes, who had married at nineteen. Haynes grew up amid the suburban buoyancy and abundance of Encino, California, just a few miles from Hollywood, during one of the industry’s most vital periods. At three, ravished by the movie “Mary Poppins,” he fell into what he called “a total imaginative rapture”: he didn’t just want to rewatch the movie; he wanted to enter the story through “a fanatical, creative, obsessional response where I had to replicate the experience,” he said. He drew hundreds of pictures of Poppins, performed the “Poppins” songs, even persuaded his mother to dress up as Poppins. (“You gotta put the flower hat on, Mom.”) “I had to satisfy the hysteria I felt for this experience creatively,” he said. In “Dottie Gets Spanked” (1993), Haynes’s remarkable thirty-minute map of his boyhood inner world, he depicted his spellbound self, sitting cross-legged in a bathrobe in front of the TV with a pad and colored pencils in hand. In the background, his parents contend sotto voce with his fixation. “I could feel my parents behind me, worrying about what this might mean, or worrying whether they should be worried, and I always felt defiant of their concerns,” he said. Haynes was a kind of prodigy, who was lucky enough to have been born into a cultured and progressive extended family, presided over by his liberal-thinking maternal grandfather, Arnold Semler, “the Almighty Bompi,” as Haynes called him, and his charismatic, artistic wife, Blessing, with whom Haynes sometimes painted. Sherry, whose own ambitions were deferred until her later years, when she studied theatre with prominent teachers, including Salome Jens at the Stella Adler Studio, encouraged all her son’s art-making. Within the family, Haynes’s constant engagement with creativity turned him into a “child of God,” according to his father. (In “Dottie Gets Spanked,” the boy is depicted as a little king, complete with paper crown, ruling over his imaginative domain with his superpowers.) “We’d come home from a movie and my wife and I’d be fixing dinner, and he’d be sitting at the piano and playing one finger, one finger, one finger,” Allen told me. “Forty-five minutes later, we’d come in and he’d be playing the whole melody from the movie. Now, where that came from I don’t know. I mean, he was a little scary to me. I was awed by the multitalents that were part of his everyday being.” When Haynes was seven, his grandfather, who had been the head of set construction at Warner Bros.—until the late forties, when the HUAC investigations and the blacklisting of his friends made the position untenable—arranged for him to meet his TV idol, Lucille Ball, and watch her rehearse. (That event became the erotically charged inciting incident of “Dottie Gets Spanked,” in which the boy sees the aloof, no-nonsense Ball preparing offscreen for a scene in which her ditzy, caterwauling alter ego is spanked by her husband.) In addition to taking Haynes to concerts, plays, and museums, his grandparents took him, at age nine, to New York and to Washington, D.C., and, at fourteen, to Asia. Their support extended into adulthood. Bompi invested more than a hundred thousand dollars in “Poison,” Haynes’s first feature. In 1968, the seven-year-old Haynes appeared on “The Art Linkletter Show.” In response to the inevitable question “What do you want to be when you grow up?,” he replied, “An actor and an artist.” The same year, his parents took him to see Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation of “ Romeo and Juliet .” It was a seismic experience that “absolutely changed my life,” Haynes said. At nine, he made his first movie: a fifteen-minute Super-8 version of “Romeo and Juliet” in which he played almost all the parts. “I made the tunics out of towels, tied a rope around the middle, got tights,” Haynes said. “My dad would run the camera, and hold the sword offscreen when I was playing Mercutio. And then we’d do the other side and I’d dress in Tybalt’s outfit.” Haynes drew the backdrop for the Capulet ball with crayons on a big piece of butcher paper. The Nurse was played by his six-year-old sister, Wendy, who also performed in the after-dinner plays that Haynes regularly conceived and staged. When Wendy was very young, he would drape a blanket over her bedroom table and light the space with a reading lamp, creating a mini-amphitheatre in which he acted out melodramatic tales with her toy horses. “She was my audience,” he said. “I remember just loving to make her cry.” Wendy Haynes, now a therapist as well as the lead singer of the glam-rock band Sophe Lux & the Mystic, was charmed by her brother’s mind. “Who was this creature?” she said. “What’s going on in there? It wasn’t stopping. It was a train. It left the station when he was born. It’s a beautiful thing to see someone who knows his destiny.” For a decade, Haynes attended weekend classes at Virginia Rothman’s Art School, in Studio City, and he used his art to make contact with the show-biz icons he adored. When he drew a picture of Diana Ross with six arms, according to his father, he managed to deliver it to her backstage at the Universal Amphitheatre. When he was in high school, his mother drove him to Joni Mitchell’s home in Bel Air so that he could give her his illustrations of some of her lyrics. “I knocked on the door, and a sort of Joni clone came to the door, in a bikini with long blond hair,” Haynes told me. “And she said, ‘Oh, that’s so sweet. Thank you. I’ll give them to her.’ ” The actress Elizabeth McGovern, who was Haynes’s best friend at the progressive Oakwood School, in North Hollywood, remembered him being indignant that Mitchell never responded. She added, “He had that sense of himself—to think that it was rude of her. He was just a high-school kid.” “Eyes should be seen not hid” are the first words spoken in “Dottie Gets Spanked,” and the phrase seems to hold a clue to Haynes’s obsessive art-making. “I know that I enjoyed being seen—performing and putting on shows for the family, impressing people with my drawings and paintings,” he said. “But there may have been something beyond that, where what I was really interested in was replaying my own pleasure in seeing: returning to that moment of seeing ‘Mary Poppins’ on film, seeing ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ The rapture was in the process of re-creating it, over and over.” Other films, including “The Miracle Worker,” “Anne of the Thousand Days,” and, especially, “The Graduate,” fed his excitement at how a lens could tell a story. “I remember feeling stimulated through my entire body. I would walk around looking at the world literally through frames,” he said. From the outset, Haynes was a sort of escape artist, compulsively immersing himself in art. But to escape to is also to escape from . Haynes was, in part, fleeing his parents’ “absolutely terrifying” arguments, which left him in “a constant anxiety that the family unit was imperilled.” One brouhaha spilled into Haynes’s bedroom while he was asleep. “She was pulling her ring off, and she threw it into the yard from my upstairs window,” he said. “I remember them looking through the ivy the next day on hands and knees. Never found it.” Sherry, whose public manner was genteel, “knew how to get what she wanted,” Haynes said. Allen could be moody and had a temper. Haynes’s relationship with his father as a child, he said, was sometimes “distant and competitive,” but these days he refers to him as a “mensch.” The transformative event was a nearly fatal aortic rupture that Allen suffered when he was in his forties and Haynes was in his twenties. For a month, Haynes and his brother, Sean, slept on the floor of their father’s hospital room. “He wanted me there more than anybody. More than my mom—he wanted me there,” Haynes said. Haynes’s immersion in art was also the result of a kind of apprehension of his own otherness, an undertow of estrangement that he felt long before he understood it. Sherry was a perfectionist, both in her personal style—“She always had perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect, perfect, perfect,” McGovern recalled—and in the clean lines, white walls, and spotless, plastic-covered furniture of her home. “My mother would literally pour Clorox bleach on the kitchen tiles each night,” Haynes said. He, on the other hand, “desired contamination. I wanted it.” As a boy, he was constantly drawing women: “I loved doing the lips and the eyelashes or the cleavage.” When he badgered his father to buy him a new sketch pad, his father said, “I’ll buy you a drawing pad if you draw men.” “It was the most remarkable thing, because it was so clear and precise,” Haynes said of his father’s request. On another occasion, while playing Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother in one of his after-dinner performances, Haynes made a limp-wristed gesture that earned him an immediate, unexpected rebuke. “They were, like, ‘Don’t do that!’ I was, like, ‘I’m playing the Fairy Godmother, you guys.’ I was angry. I wasn’t ashamed. It stirred up a kind of revolt in me,” he said. At Oakwood, which placed a strong emphasis on the arts, Haynes was a class star, and he and McGovern were inseparable. “He was my first experience of loving,” she said. When they weren’t staging their own performance pieces, they were acting in school productions. After school, at Haynes’s house, they played theatre games, improvised sketches, rehearsed scenes from plays. “He was a work machine,” McGovern said. “You’d never see Todd just hanging out. If he was sitting down, he was drawing or writing. Seven days a week. Every waking hour he was making something.” In one of many poems he wrote for McGovern, he envisioned a joint future: . . . I will be the Famous film director and you will be The actress. I will write scripts for you. Ingmar and Liv, she smiled. Someday, I said McGovern often slept over in Haynes’s room, but they were never together “in any remotely physical way,” she said. “He had a fairly clear idea that he was attracted to boys, although not exclusively.” Haynes’s parents maintained “a fantasy for happy heterosexual closure” with McGovern, he said. He didn’t come out to them until he was in college and in his first relationship with a man. “My dad assured me that it was all right with him,” Haynes said. But his mother found the news hard to accept. “She freaked out,” Wendy said. “She had a meltdown. She was concerned about what the world would think. She was concerned about him being hurt in the world. It shattered her dream.” Later, however, according to Haynes, “she would say that my being gay made her grow as a person and rethink the world.” At Oakwood, Haynes’s intellectual “exceptionalism,” as he called it, was matched by his exceptional appearance—he kept his hair in a long blond mane. “He did look like a girl. Everybody thought he was a girl,” McGovern recalled. “It never bothered him.” Haynes’s androgynous look was the outward sign of his increasing ambivalence toward middle-class convention. “I always felt identification with the outcast, fragile, vulnerable people in the classroom,” he said. “I had an empathy for kids who had a harder time fitting in.” In a high-school-era letter to McGovern, Haynes spelled out his own sense of separation: “Tell me our battering ram isn’t a pipe cleaner.” Cartoon by Michael Maslin Sometimes my life is so desperately alone and full of sorrow. It sounds self-centered to say, so pretentious, but I feel so truly different from anyone I’ve met. Sometimes I can barely imagine seeing things the way people do. I do not feel better or worse than them, but apart. In ninth and tenth grades, he made a twenty-two-minute film, titled “Suicide,” which depicted a similarly troubled outsider, Lenny, who is terrified of making the transition from junior high to high school. He is “enraged at the world for making him feel so afraid and subjugated and minimized, and uses his body to exorcise his rage,” Haynes said. The film grew out of a humanities assignment to write a hero myth. Haynes wrote the competing voices in Lenny’s head with different-colored pens. Lenny’s first words, written in red, were “I carefully and intricately began cutting myself into several pieces”—a prescient line for the incipient filmmaker. “The teachers were quite impressed with the method, the style, and the sort of Modernist construction” of the written piece, Haynes said, and he and a few friends decided to turn it into a Super-8 movie. The film crosscut scenes of Lenny stabbing himself with scissors in an all-white bathroom with scenes of schoolyard humiliation and maternal consolation. Lenny’s last voiced-over words are “Really hard to live.” Although Haynes maintains that “Suicide” wasn’t his story, some of its motifs have endured in his work: the montage structure and the idea of a derangement of identity as a form of liberation. The movie looked good but didn’t sound good. Through connections to a Hollywood producer, Haynes and his cohorts were able to get the sound remixed on a soundstage at the Samuel Goldwyn Studio. “We were the session booked after ‘The Last Waltz,’ ” Haynes said. “We brought our little Super-8 projector and synched up to a mixing board, with all our tracks of 35-mm. sound, the music, the effects, the dialogue. We did it in a real way. It was crazy.” When the movie was done, they staged an ersatz Hollywood première at a theatre in Westwood, with a limo hired by one boy’s parents. The experience, however, gave Haynes second thoughts about the template of studio filmmaking. “I kind of turned against that in my head,” he told me. “I said, ‘I don’t want to replicate that system. I want to make experimental films, and I want to do them alone.’ ” When Haynes was in eleventh grade, his film teacher, Chris Adam, told him “that films shouldn’t be judged on how they conveyed reality, that films were not about reality,” Haynes said. Cinema was a trick, almost like Renaissance perspective: a two-dimensional event that represented three-dimensionality; it created the sense of direct, unmediated life, whereas, in fact, everything in it was mediated. The notion, Haynes said, was “a revelation to me.” He began to interrogate our “endless presumptions about realness and authenticity. It started to make me think about stylistic and formal changes and deviations.” Haynes’s graduation project at Brown, in 1985, was “Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud”—a forty-three-minute rambunctious mashup of artifice and anachronism, in which glimpses of the libertine lives of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine are crosscut with scenes of the film’s construction, all set to the sounds of Iggy Pop and Throbbing Gristle. In voice-over at the end, Haynes reads the last line of Rimbaud’s “ Morning of Drunkenness ,” a salvo directed at bourgeois stability: “Now is the time for assassins.” The words are a kind of aesthetic battle cry against cinematic convention. “I was never going to crawl into the Hollywood world of feature filmmaking,” Haynes said. The world of experimental filmmaking, however, was changing. In the wake of such groundbreaking works as Sally Potter’s “Thriller” (1979) and David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” (1986), narrative began to leach into experimental films, and experimental technique was leaching into narrative films. Haynes’s first major offering, which he produced in 1987, while he was in the M.F.A. program at Bard College, was the forty-three-minute “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” (co-written and co-produced with Cynthia Schneider, another friend from Brown). The film set out to tell a straightforward story of the singer’s life, tracing Carpenter’s trajectory from her early success to her slow death, of anorexia, at thirty-two—but dramatized it all with modified Barbie dolls. As Haynes wrote in the introduction to his screenplays, the question he was trying to answer through this radically artificial conceit was: What would happen “if the narrative gears subsumed by our identification were quietly revealed”? Would viewers’ “desire to identify even succumb to an ensemble of plastic”? Haynes made meticulous sets and props for his Lilliputian world, and structured his story using documentary tropes—talking heads, newsreel footage, performance clips, laxative ads. Of the first screening, Vachon wrote, “When it began, there were gasps and laughter from the audience, because it was so funny and perfect to have Karen Carpenter played by a Barbie doll. But at the end, when the doll turned around and half her face was gone, carved away by weight loss, it wasn’t so funny anymore, and some people burst into tears.” “Superstar” was a success at the 1988 Toronto International Film Festival, and played at a few venues in New York, getting unexpectedly good notices in the Village Voice and Artforum . Another unexpected indicator of its impact was a cease-and-desist order served by Karen Carpenter’s brother and musical partner, Richard Carpenter, the estate of Karen Carpenter, and A&M Records. Haynes had failed to acquire the rights to the Carpenters’ songs. “My orientation was that of guerrilla filmmaking, where music rights were historically ignored, never assuming a film would have a commercial life of any sort,” he said. At first, he tried to deflect the demands, but the lawyers prevailed. In 1990, “Superstar” was ordered withdrawn from exhibition and all copies destroyed. Nonetheless, bootleg copies still circulate; and in 2003 the film made it onto Entertainment Weekly’s list of the Top 50 Cult Movies. In 1988, Haynes, Vachon, and another college friend, Barry Ellsworth (who had collaborated on “Superstar”), set up their own company, Apparatus Productions, in New York. The goal, according to Vachon, was “to change people’s perception that ‘experimental’ was synonymous with ‘excruciating.’ ” In the late eighties and early nineties, the aids epidemic in New York was nearing its peak. “Our lives were so defined by that kind of death and fear,” Vachon recalled. “It felt like we were constantly going to memorial services.” Haynes became a founding member of Gran Fury, a group of artists who devised visual campaigns for ACT UP , and he was acutely aware, he said, “of how gay people with H.I.V. were being depicted by the media.” He started to examine the cinematic tropes of other forms of “deviant” behavior—the outcast, the castigated, the criminal. He was trying to locate “the ways that our culture orients the insider and the outsider through our storytelling,” he told me, adding, “These are not benign practices.” The result of this inquiry was “Poison,” which Haynes co-edited with his then lover Jim Lyons, who also acted in the film and later edited and co-wrote the story for Haynes’s “Velvet Goldmine” (1998). A daring, irreverent triptych, “Poison” is organized into discrete segments​—​“Hero,” “Horror,” “Homo”—in each of which society rejects the main character and destroys his sense of belonging. “Hero,” which is shot in faux-documentary style, tells the story of a troubled seven-year-old, who killed his father for abusing his mother, and then apparently flew out an open window. His escape plays as an ironic daydream of romantic transcendence, elevating him from the stigmatized to the sanctified. In “Horror,” filmed in black-and-white, a scientist invents a sex-drive potion. When he drinks it himself, he becomes an incarnation of contagion, his skin mottled with oozing pustules, a walking embodiment of alienation who disgusts himself and others. Rejected, spat on, enraged, and enraging, he is hunted and finally cornered in his apartment, where he jumps to his death from a fire escape in front of a gawping crowd. “Homo,” which is shot in color, reverses the angle on otherness. Drawing on Jean Genet’s work, it depicts a lyrical, elliptical gay prison romance in which transgression is embraced as a weapon against cultural convention, “the ink that gives the white page a meaning,” as Genet wrote. At the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, “Poison” beat out movies by Stephen Frears and Richard Linklater to win the Grand Jury Prize. “He has restored my faith in youth,” John Waters said of Haynes, who at thirty became the poster boy for the budding queer-cinema movement. Haynes said, “The thing I dug about New Queer Cinema was being associated with films that were challenging narrative form and style as much as content. It wasn’t enough to replace the boy-meets-girl-loses-girl-then-gets-girl with a boy-meets-boy version. The target was the affirmative form itself, which rewards an audience’s expectations by telling us things work out in the end.” He went on, “Queerness was, by definition, a critique of mainstream culture. It wasn’t just a plea for a place at the table. It called into question the table itself.” Inevitably, a graphic rape depicted in the “Homo” chapter of “Poison,” and a “gobbing scene”—a ritual humiliation in which prisoners spit into another inmate’s open mouth—got the movie into political hot water. The Reverend Donald Wildmon, of the fundamentalist Christian group the American Family Association, brought it to the attention of some members of Congress, who then protested the twenty-five-thousand-dollar N.E.A. grant that had made it possible for Haynes to finish the film. Haynes found himself drawn into an ongoing congressional debate about government funding of the arts. He appeared on “Larry King Live” and other talk shows to defend himself and artists in general against the right-wing outcry over taxpayers’ money being used to fund art that offended public sensibilities. A special screening of “Poison” was held in D.C. for senators and their spouses. An editorial in the Washington Times afterward declared Haynes “the Fellini of fellatio.” “A proud moment!” Haynes said. Despite his new acclaim and the fact that “Poison” turned a profit, it took Haynes four years to raise the million dollars he needed to make his next feature, “Safe.” A restrained, masterly tale about a rich San Fernando Valley housewife, the well-named Carol White (played by Julianne Moore), who finds herself allergic to her environment, “Safe” was Haynes’s attempt to take on the discourse of recovery. As a heroine, Carol is sensationally uncharismatic: thin-voiced, remote, desireless, a stranger to herself. Her identity is defined by the bourgeois perfection of her material world. Unlike traditional “disease movies,” which, under the guise of teaching about illness, as Haynes put it, “are really the story of people’s personal victories over the odds,” “Safe” provides no clear explanation for Carol’s malaise. Is it chemical? Biological? Psychosomatic? “I was coy, I was tricky,” Haynes said. “I wanted to touch that little bit in everyone where you just aren’t convinced that who you think you are is really who you are—that moment when you feel like a forgery.” “Safe” also refuses the moral certainty and the redemptive narrative resolution of the genre, which, according to Haynes, would have been “contingent on the central character coming to accept her illness, ‘finding herself.’ ” “There’s no achieving perfect health,” Haynes said. “There’s no resolving the conflict of desire and oppression. There’s no resolving the individual and the civilization.” “One of the things that’s interesting to me about Todd is that he’s always examining our position within certain social structures,” Julianne Moore told me. “Is identity purely your own? Or is it something that you’ve assumed?” Carol ends up at a ramshackle New Mexican community of fellow-sufferers, who purvey the mantra of self-love. (The film does not explicitly address aids , but does wink at the New Age recovery language adopted in such books as Louise L. Hay’s 1988 “The aids Book: Creating a Positive Approach,” whose argument Haynes summarizes as “If you loved yourself more, you wouldn’t have gotten sick.”) At her birthday celebration, Carol, surprised by a cake, is asked to make a speech. In Haynes’s script, she is not only lost for words; she is entirely lost. Her sentences are a scaffolding that holds up a nonentity: I don’t know what I’m saying, just . . . it’s true how much I . . . ( she stumbles, her eyes filling unexpectedly ) hated myself before I—came here, so I’m . . . trying to be more—aware . . . seeing myself more as I hopefully am. . . . More positive, like seeing the pluses—like I think it slowly opens people’s minds, it’s like educating and AIDS and other types of disease—and this is a disease . . . . ’Cause it’s out there. It’s just making people aware of it and even our own selves. I mean we have to be aware of it . . . reading labels . . . going into buildings. . . . ( Carol stops, suddenly forgetting what she was saying. ) At the finale, Carol, cut off from all connection to the outside world, sits inhaling oxygen in her white, ceramic-tiled “safe room.” It’s a moment of almost lunar loneliness. She walks over to a mirror and stares into it. “I love you, I really love you,” she whispers. Then, a little louder, “I love you.” She waits in front of the mirror for something to happen, as if her words will somehow inflate her into being. “Nothing happens” is the last line of the script, before the film cuts to black. In that devastating moment, “Safe,” which won the Village Voice’s 1999 poll for the Best Film of the Decade, becomes a coruscating metaphor for the negative. “I got this one in middle school.” Cartoon by Drew Panckeri In “Safe,” the chaos is internal; in Haynes’s subsequent works, including “Far from Heaven,” “Mildred Pierce” (a 2011 HBO miniseries adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel), and “Carol,” the battle between social norms and repressed desires is filtered through the external tumult of the melodrama, a much criticized form that he has enthusiastically adapted to his own expressive needs. “We don’t live in Westerns, noirs, murder mysteries, and shit,” he said. “We live in families and we have relationships that come and go; we suffer under social constraints and have to make tough choices. And that’s really what all these stories are about.” In “Far from Heaven,” Haynes put a semiotic shellac on his homage to Douglas Sirk’s rococo fifties domestic weepies, which featured lush, saturated color, claustrophobic décors, and attractive stars in gorgeous clothes speaking in vapid full sentences, who nonetheless played ordinary people struggling to be happy and stand up to society. “From the outset, I think it was about embracing this beautiful, almost naïve language of words, gestures, movements, and interactions that were totally prescribed and extremely limited—not condescending to it, but allowing its simplicity to touch other feelings that you can’t be over-explicating,” Haynes told the Village Voice . In his meta-melodrama, the beautiful Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore, playing the flip side of Carol White) is living the Populuxe dream in Hartford, Connecticut. But her paradise is soon lost to the conflicting desires of those who inhabit it. Her husband, struggling in vain with his homosexuality, divorces her, and she falls for her African-American gardener only to see him forced out of town by bigotry. “To me, the most amazing melodramas are the ones where, when a person makes a tiny step toward fulfilling a desire that their social role is built to discourage, they end up hurting everybody else. It’s like a chess game of pain, a ricochet effect where everybody gets hurt but there’s nobody to blame,” Haynes said. The pragmatic restaurateur Mildred Pierce (Kate Winslet, who earned an Emmy for her performance in the miniseries), for instance, wins wealth and social standing in the midst of the Great Depression by turning her domestic skills into a business, but it costs her her relationship with her daughter. Likewise, in “Carol,” an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel “ The Price of Salt ,” the suave Carol (Cate Blanchett), who is going through a difficult divorce, and the jejune Therese (Rooney Mara) act out a kind of Kabuki of normality, while the signs and signals of their attraction are being sent, received, and returned. In the aftermath of their connection, Therese loses her fiancé and Carol loses custody of her daughter. Haynes calls his melodramas “assaults” in which “identity as a natural and stable property is the target.” By contrast, his music films celebrate the protean self. Haynes’s goal in the glam-rock fantasia “Velvet Goldmine” (1998) was to construct a “parallel universe in which the self-created fictions and high camp of glam rock become the raw material of a ‘Citizen Kane’ structure, in which no depiction of the ‘famous subject’ is unchallenged.” His Cubist interrogation of Bob Dylan, “I’m Not There” (2007), shows how Dylan turned the strategy of shifting identities into what Haynes calls “a glorious life’s work.” A sort of patchwork of Dylan’s transformations, the movie has six actors playing different personae, including an extraordinary Academy Award-nominated performance by Cate Blanchett of Dylan’s tousled-hair sixties folk “ramblin’ man.” Haynes hit upon the subject of Dylan’s shape-shifting as he himself was facing an identity crisis. “Velvet Goldmine” had been a critical and commercial disappointment. He had also been unmoored by the collapse of his long-term relationship with Jim Lyons and by other romantic tribulations. He was, he said, “bummed out and exhausted”: “I tried to take a break and paint and travel. I went to Hawaii alone and finished Proust. But I wasn’t very inspired.” Haynes’s Brooklyn apartment, on the outskirts of Williamsburg, was so seedy and messy that, in thirteen years, he never invited his parents to visit. By his own admission, he lived those years “mostly out of boxes,” in a room that he’d turned into a workspace, dominated by a flatbed editing machine. “By the end, there were rats,” he said. In January, 2000, Haynes took a road trip to visit his sister in Portland, Oregon, where he planned to work on a script. As he drove west, he found himself craving Dylan’s music, which he hadn’t listened to seriously since he was a teen-ager. He was looking, he said, for “a great physical, emotional, and psychological change.” By the time he reached Portland, he was filled with the kind of excitement “that makes me want to make something,” he said. “I wrote ‘Far from Heaven’ in two weeks, started work on the Dylan movie, and by summer the landlord had taken over my apartment in Williamsburg.” Portland gave Haynes “a kick in the pants in every possible way,” and he began to envision a different life. “I think Todd arrived in Portland at a good moment both for himself and for the town,” the novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond, who worked with Haynes on the screenplay for “Mildred Pierce,” told me. “Portland was still a relatively undiscovered enclave, with a lot of good, bohemian energy.” In this laid-back world, where, according to Wendy, “everybody gets to let their freak fly”—signs and bumper stickers proclaim “Keep Portland Weird”—Haynes blossomed. Although, for a long time, a portrait of him hung in Portland’s city hall, the low-key rhythm of the place allowed him some respite from the burden of acclaim. When Haynes arrived late to a huge Halloween party in 2002, he was refused entrance. “He was so delighted to be turned away,” Raymond said. “That would never have happened in New York.” An old friend, the director Kelly Reichardt, was also living in Portland, and she and Raymond formed the collegial core of Haynes’s new creative life. “Just being friends with Todd is like being in a seminar sometimes,” Raymond said. (The two nicknamed him El Creador Seminal.) In 2002, when Haynes threw an Oscar party, he met his current partner, Bryan O’Keefe, then an aspiring writer. (He is now an archival producer on one of Haynes’s projects, a documentary about the Velvet Underground.) Portland’s other great gift to Haynes was to put him back in touch with nature and his own lightheartedness. Raymond remembers him “romping around the woods in a Bigfoot costume,” during a photo shoot on Mt. Hood, and “slathering himself with mud to scare his friends by some creek.” During the summer, Haynes swims in the Washougal River almost every day. He and Wendy often hike to Wahclella Falls, in the Columbia River Gorge. “You see the intellect fall away,” she said. “You see the creativity fall away. You see a peace come across him. He’s a very innocent human being on a lot of levels.” Eventually, Haynes settled into a 1907 gray-blue Arts and Crafts cottage with boxed beams and dark-wood panelling; his furniture was salvaged from the set of “Far from Heaven,” which gives the place a cozy mid-century flavor. On the wall of his study, he keeps a gallimaufry of images—among them Dylan, Freud, David Bowie, his mother, and Brian Eno. Since 2005, he has shared the house with O’Keefe. In 2010, Haynes’s mother, Sherry, choked on a cheese sandwich and couldn’t be revived. Within half an hour of her death, in Los Angeles, Haynes, who was in New York, had a stroke. “The whole thing was inexplicable. I had no real symptoms,” he said. (He later discovered that he had antiphospholipid syndrome, a hypercoagulable condition.) “The event was uncanny and frightening, but the loss of my mother is what survives,” he said. “He doesn’t like to talk about his losses,” O’Keefe said. “It’s not easy to know what’s going on with Todd emotionally a lot of the time. He is very careful about public display.” At work, however, Haynes’s emotional radiance—what Raymond calls “the golden thing inside him that is untouchable and unvanquishable”—is palpable. There is no grandstanding: Ruffalo refers to him as “the consummate collaborator.” Fairness and equality are core values; in his mind, as Raymond put it, “we are all children together, we need to play fair, everyone deserves their turn.” On the set, Raymond added, “he creates environments where people don’t feel harmed. He’s very strict in his gentleness.” Kate Winslet remembered that, while shooting “Mildred Pierce,” “his energy would never fail.” At one point, she added, “he had salmonella, and he just carried on working. We would do a take and he’d throw up. We would do another take, and he’d throw up again. He would sit in his chair, sweat for a bit, stand up, throw up again, and do another take. This lasted for four or five days. He was very, very unwell.” Winslet went on, “Then there was another day—oh, my fucking God. He had to have a dental surgeon come to the set and pull a tooth out. ‘Thank God, that’s out. O.K., let’s go!’ ” On a stifling New York morning in mid-July, Haynes was sequestered in an editing room at a postproduction facility in Chelsea with his burly, bearded Brazilian film editor, Affonso Gonçalves, whom he affectionately calls Fonzi. They were down to the wire editing “Dark Waters” for an early test screening for the studio, Focus Features, and they worked away with the kind of steady intuitive understanding that’s usually reserved for a quarterback and his wide receiver. This was their fourth collaboration. Fonzi was hunched over the Avid console; Haynes sat on a sofa eight feet behind him, his production notes at his side, staring at a large monitor as they applied a fine filigree of rhythm and clarity to the scenes. The dizzying speed of the production schedule and the fact that “Dark Waters” was Haynes’s first film developed by a studio had him on edge. They were tweaking a scene in which Bilott first tells his wife about DuPont’s dumping drums full of toxic sludge into the Ohio River and the Chesapeake Bay which soon began to wash up onshore. “So DuPont starts digging ditches,” Ruffalo’s Bilott says. “Huge open pits on the grounds of the Washington Works plant. And, in those pits, they dumped thousands of tons of toxic CH sludge and dust.” “I don’t know if this is gonna track, Fonz, but try ‘started digging ditches,’ ” Haynes said. “We’re cutting out ‘huge open pits.’ It’s not much, but try it.” “Remember when this used to be an Italian restaurant, and we weren’t people who knew what every storefront used to be?” Cartoon by Amy Hwang Fonzi reran the scene with the few words scrubbed out. “He’s emphasizing ‘ditches’ so much,” Haynes said. “You could do ‘so DuPont started digging huge, open pits on the grounds of their plant, Washington Works.’ Try that.” Haynes thought for a moment. “Maybe ‘ditches’ is better. He says ‘pits’ in the next sentence.” “Let me show you,” Fonzi said, swivelling back to the console. “No, no, the other’s better.” “The way we just had it?” Fonzi said. “Yeah, I think that’ll work.” Fonzi reinstated the previous trim, then briefly left the room. “I have more fun with Fonzi than I ever do on set,” Haynes said. He compared the intimacy of editing to the process of painting together. “You’re producing results. You’re problem-solving,” he said. “You have to be surrendering all the time, letting go, looking at what you have in front of you, which is not what you imagined.” Haynes, who is concurrently editing his documentary on the Velvet Underground and developing a twelve-part TV series on Sigmund Freud, has contrived to keep himself almost continually in that climate of surrender. As part of their process, Fonzi first edits a version of the film without consulting Haynes. Meanwhile, Haynes assembles his detailed notes to form a sort of outline of the film as he sees it. “What’s really interesting is that he and I find our own favorite takes separately, and they’re often the same,” Haynes said. Once the two are in the editing room, they start again from Scene 1. From then on, the collaboration is more or less a mind meld. “Are you feeling what I’m feeling?” Haynes asked at one point. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Fonzi said. Haynes subscribes to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s contention that revolution belongs not on the screen but in the world. “To provide an audience with a solution—to give them the revolution—is to deprive them of creating their own,” Haynes said. His films ask viewers to contend with ambiguity, which is part of their sly subversiveness. In “Dark Waters,” Bilott is not only an unlikely hero. He’s an unlikely messenger for one of Haynes’s most deeply held Freudian convictions: “There is no resolving of conflict. The conflict is the process of life.” Haynes considers the movie “a primer on how to live with as much knowledge and awareness as possible.” He added, “There’s no silver bullet, no magic solutions. There’s no way to just end corporate greed and corruption. But there are steps to take, and we just have to keep taking them.” Bilott’s struggle to take those steps was what Haynes and Fonzi were trying to punch up next, in a terrifying scene: after deposing DuPont’s C.E.O., Bilott walks slowly through a brightly lit underground parking garage to get to his car—Haynes’s homage to the Deep Throat garage scene in “All the President’s Men.” As the camera tracks Bilott through the concrete pillars, for a split second a stranger appears against the back wall. “I don’t think Rob literally had death threats,” Haynes said. “But he really did have that experience in the parking garage. Rob said that, once the New York Times article came out, in 2016, he knew that he would at least not be killed. The cat was out of the bag.” On the screen, Bilott sits at the wheel of his car, looking around with dread in his eyes, as he cautiously inserts the key into the ignition and turns it. “Stay in the same low angle of him, intercutting with the key,” Haynes said. “Going to another angle then back to the first angle breaks the tension for me.” “I think the tricky part is where he’s closing his eyes,” Fonzi said. “Because once he closes his eyes it’s done. I’m using an extra shot to stretch the moment, delaying that action.” Haynes’s cell phone flashed with a “Breaking News” alert, and Haynes, a news junkie, couldn’t resist peeking at it. “ ‘The E.P.A. will not ban a widely used pesticide associated with developmental disabilities in children and other health problems,’ ” he read. “There you go!” He tossed his phone on the sofa and got back to work. ♦

2017-09-14

ERBIL/KIRKUK, Iraq (Reuters) - The United States and Western allies pressed Iraqi Kurdish leaders to ditch a “very risky” independence vote on Thursday, presenting an alternative plan in an attempt to avoid conflict between the oil rich region and central government in Baghdad. The referendum, slated for Sept. 25, has become a potential flashpoint in the region, with Western powers concerned it could ignite conflict with Baghdad and divert attention from the war against Islamic State militants. “Heading into a referendum for Sept. 25, there is no prospect for international legitimacy,” Brett McGurk, a U.S. special envoy, told reporters after a delegation also including the U.N. and Britain met Kurdish President Massoud Barzani. “This is a very risky process.” McGurk said he was encouraged that Kurdish leaders could embrace an alternative plan focusing on dialogue between the Kurdistan region and Baghdad and a delay in the referendum. He refused to give details. The Kurdish presidency said the autonomous region’s political leaders would study the proposal, without giving details. But Barzani himself was later quoted by local media as telling a pro-independence rally the vote would go ahead on Sept. 25 as planned. The move came after Iraq’s parliament voted to remove the governor of Kirkuk, a staunch supporter of Kurdish independence. Kirkuk Governor Najmaddin Kareem said he had no intention of following Baghdad’s dismissal order, issued at the behest of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. “I will stay in office,” he told Reuters. “The referendum will go on as planned...The prime minister does not have the power to ask parliament to remove me.” Iraqi lawmakers authorized Abadi this week to “take all measures” to preserve national unity before the independence referendum. Baghdad and Iraq’s neighbors are opposed to the vote. Iraqi lawmakers say it will consolidate Kurdish control over several disputed areas, including oil-rich Kirkuk. Turkey has the region’s largest Kurdish population and fears a “Yes” vote could fuel separatism in its southeast where Kurdish militants have waged an insurgency for three decades in which more than 40,000 people have been killed. Iran and Syria also oppose the vote, fearing it could fan separatism among their own Kurdish populations. Iraqi lawmakers say the referendum will consolidate Kurdish control over several disputed areas, including oil-rich Kirkuk. Kirkuk province is claimed by both the central government in Baghdad and Barzani’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Kareem is a vocal supporter of the referendum and campaigned for the vote also to be held in Kirkuk. Kurds have long claimed Kirkuk and its huge oil reserves. They regard the city, just outside their Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, as their historical capital. But the ethnically mixed city also has Arab and Turkmen populations. Kareem has long riled the federal government. Last spring, Kirkuk’s governorate voted to raise the Kurdish flag over state buildings, despite Baghdad’s insistence that only Iraq’s national flag should fly in the multi-ethnic city. “He (Kareem) is an elected governor of the council of Kirkuk,” said Hoshyar Zebari, a close adviser to President Barzani. “That is the only body that can remove him.” “The escalating tactics this week by the Iraqis are causing a large public backlash, and will strengthen the Kurdish referendum enormously,” Zebari said. Kurdish MPs in Iraq’s parliament boycotted Thursday’s vote, which produced a majority for the governor’s removal, lawmaker Husham al-Suhail told Reuters. Asked whether parliament had the right to dismiss Kareem, Suhail referred to an article of Iraq’s provincial law, which parliament used as the legal basis for the vote and which stipulates the prime minister’s authority to remove a regional governor. Suhail gave no details about what Kareem was accused of and Kareem himself said he had not been informed. “This is unlawful ... I have the support of the government council, I have the support of the people, we are here and we will continue,” he said. Reporting by Ahmed Rasheed, Raya Jalabi and Ulf Laessing.; Writing by Raya Jalabi and Ulf Laessing; Editing by Ralph Boulton

2016-10-12 16:00:00

"Catching lobsters, for me, is a combination of Christmas morning and Easter egg hunting," Hank Parfitt says, grinning. Parfitt hails from North Carolina and today he's fully dressed, from head to toe, in a thick neoprene wetsuit. We are on a scuba diving boat chartered by Ocean Safari at Santa Cruz Island—one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. It is October 1, the first day of recreational spiny lobster season this year. The water temperature is 65 degrees and although the visibility isn't fantastic underwater, the excitement on the boat is palpable. Many of the attendees have been anticipating the season opener all year. Parfitt caught a three-pounder on the first dive in the morning; he says he hasn't missed a season in 40 years. Every year, he'll come out from North Carolina to California just to grab some bugs. "They are a tremendous challenge to find in the water. They are the ultimate escape artist," he says. On that morning dive—my first attempt at the art of lobster hunting—I had spotted one underneath a den staring back at me, waving its long, pointy antennas. Lobsters can't see clear images or colors; antennas are their main sensory organs. Excited, I threw my hand inside the crevice and only managed to touch the antennas before the red creature burrowed itself deep underneath the rock. Immediately, a moray eel poked its head out and I jumped back, conceding defeat. Parfitt shakes his head as I tell him this story. "You have to pin the lobsters down. It's all about persistence," he says. — "I did a taste test with friends one time and the California ones won out," Parfitt says. "The first bite is slightly chewy. The second one is the most profound—it has a creamy and extremely nutty flavor." But for most Americans, with the exception of scuba divers like Parfitt, California spiny lobster is a delicious delicacy that won't end up at the average dinner table. It is estimated that up to 95 percent of all commercially caught lobster is shipped to China. In California they are trucked to Los Angeles, where they are packaged up, and flown straight east. In Mexico, that percentage is estimated to be up to 99 percent. "It's because of the cost," Kate Masury, a recent Masters graduate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, says. "There is such a huge demand for spiny lobster in China and the prices have gone up pretty dramatically each year." Masury is behind the site Follow Your Fish, which tracks the supply chain behind certain American seafood like the California squid and spiny lobster. According to Masury, seafood buyers in China initially preferred the Australian spiny lobster. The Chinese, she says, aren't privy to clawed crustaceans and tend to prefer spiny ones. However, the fisheries in Australia could not keep up with Chinese demand and by the early 2000s, the California lobster started to be transported to China in large numbers to meet sales. In 2009, the California lobster retailed for about $10 per pound. In 2015, that price skyrocketed to close to $30. The increased demand from China has raised prices of the California spiny lobster to the point where most Americans consumers are not willing to pay for it. "I would be very happy to sell all those lobsters to the United States," says Dave Rudie, the owner of Catalina Offshore Products, one of the largest seafood import and export companies in California. "The problem is that as much as people talk about buying local, they actually buy based on the price." Rudie estimates that 95 percent of his lobsters are currently shipped to China. He'll personally deliver some of them to the Los Angeles International Airport, into the hands of a buyer, who will put a box of crustaceans directly on a freight flight to China. Rudie says demand from Asia started about two decades ago, and demand from China following ten years after that. "We talk about the factories overseas and people taking our jobs. But the truth is that Americans want cheaper stuff," he says. "That means Maine lobsters instead of California ones because Maine lobsters are cheaper." Even Parfitt, a recreational scuba diver, has observed the increased demand for lobster during his four decades of hunting. "I've noticed that there are more traps out by commercial fisheries," he says. "It's hard to tell if that's affecting the lobster population." The spiny lobster isn't completely inaccessible to American consumers, though. While the bugs can't be found in most supermarkets or restaurants, they can be directly bought online from buyers like Catalina Offshore Products; there are also a few restaurants and markets, like Mitch's Seafood and the Tuna Dockside Harbor in San Diego, that make a point of selling homegrown seafood. "Mitch's Seafood is fantastic," Masury says. "He sells the lobsters at an affordable price and sometimes he doesn't even make a profit off of it. That's how passionate he is about buying local." Back at the boat, my scuba group and I do not manage to catch any lobsters. We had pinned some down underwater but they ended up being too small. It's not a big deal—there are still many months left in the season. "The minimum size limit for California spiny lobster is three and one-fourth inches, from the horn of the lobster to the rear edge of the body shell," Thomas Templar, a scuba instructor at Ocean Safari, says. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife is extremely strict about the regulations. The daily bag limit is seven per person and a license is required. Though we don't get any bugs, there are still plenty of other fish in the sea. Andy Rios, the divemaster in my group, spears a handful of calico bass and a large sheephead. We eat the calico raw and he makes the sheephead into a miso soup. Throughout the trip, I pop scallops and uni, freshly cracked open and picked out from the ocean floor, into my mouth like candy. As I'm eating the bounty of fish on the deck of the boat overlooking the sunset, I realize how extraordinary the moment is. Here I am, eating seafood from California in California that most Californians rarely get the chance to eat. The United States controls more ocean than any other country on earth, yet we import up to 90 percent of our seafood, about half of which is produced via aquaculture. Sheephead and calico, like the spiny lobster, can't be found in the average American supermarket. Most of our best-quality seafood is exported abroad; a third of seafood American catch gets sold to foreign countries. This narrative of domestic seafood being shipped to other countries isn't just limited to spiny lobsters. "As local divers, there's a value that comes from eating in your own backyard," Garrett Lu, a scuba instructor from Ocean Safari, says. "It's a way of connecting with the sea and understanding our own ecosystem."

2019-02-10 15:30:00

Jennifer Aniston wanted to make sure all the people she holds near and dear to her heart attended her 50th birthday party, including ex Brad Pitt, a source tells PEOPLE. “Basically, every single person who Jen loves attended. That included Brad,” the source says. “The party was a celebration of Jen’s life.” “Brad, for long, was a very important part of Jen’s life. She debated back and forth with friends if she should invite him,” adds the insider. “She was very happy that he showed up. Many of his close friends were at the party too.” Even though Aniston invited her ex-husband to the bash, she “didn’t really pay any special attention to Brad,” the source explains. “They hugged and chatted for a bit, but Jen was busy making sure all of her other guests had an amazing time,” the source shares. PEOPLE previously confirmed that Pitt attended the actress’ birthday party on Saturday, which was held at the Sunset Tower Hotel in Los Angeles. Photos show the actor arriving at the hotspot with his long hair slicked back underneath a cap, making a casual entrance at the hotel. A source previously told PEOPLE the party guests at Aniston’s bash also included Pitt’s ex Gwyneth Paltrow, plus Aniston’s ex John Mayer, as well as the musician’s ex Katy Perry, who was joined by boyfriend Orlando Bloom. George and Amal Clooney, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Downey Jr., Ellen DeGeneres, Barbra Streisand, Keith Richards, Kate Hudson, Laura Dern, Demi Moore and Jennifer Meyer were among the familiar faces at the star-studded fête — as were Aniston’s Friends costars and good pals Lisa Kudrow and Courteney Cox. The following day, a handful of Aniston’s pals began wishing the star a happy birthday on social media, sharing their own sweet images taken from the celebration. “Love these ladies,” Hudson wrote alongside a series of photo booth GIFs on Instagram, in which she posed alongside Aniston and Paltrow. “Celebrated this beauty last night ✨Happy Bday JA! We all love you sooo!” Hinting that there had been a ban on sharing images for the bash, the “Chained to the Rhythm” singer commented on the image, writing, “NO SOCIAL MEDIA.” In her own post, Paltrow wrote, “Happy birthday (last night and tomorrow) to #jenniferaniston our ray of sunshine, example of perpetual goodness. We love you so much and you make 50 LOOK 🔥.”

2016-05-23 00:00:00

May 23 (Reuters) - DAOU TECHNOLOGY INC : * Says it signs a contract with KIWOOM Securities Co.,Ltd., to supply IT outsourcing service * Says contract price of 28.1 billion won Source text in Korean: goo.gl/afyBzO Further company coverage: (Beijing Headline News)

2017-02-16 14:07:00

Are we really surprised that Tom Brady’s epic Super Bowl LI performance is being turned into a feature film? Of course not — the New England Patriots’ 34-28 win over the Atlanta Falcons was tailor-made for a classic Hollywood comeback flick. What we’d like to know is who will be cast to portray Brady — star quarterback and, some argue, football’s G.O.A.T. Deadline reports that a book and movie chronicling the Patriots’ win and centered on Brady, 39, is being written by Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson (both behind The Finest Hours and Patriots Day) with author Casey Sherman and journalist Dave Wedge. The site reports that Brady’s deflategate scandal will be covered as well as his triumphant return to win an unprecedented fifth Super Bowl ring. So, who will take on the coveted and complicated role of No. 12 in the pending project? Well, we have some suggestions for the casting director! The Good Will Hunting actor and Boston native is actually Brady’s pick to play himself. In May, the quarterback told Harper’s Bazaar that he’d like Damon to portray him on the big screen in any upcoming movies. “I’ve seen him throw a football though, he definitely needs to work on that!” Brady told the magazine. Plus, Damon has technically already portrayed his pal Brady — on Jimmy Kimmel Live. The day after Super Bowl LI, he crashed the show dressed as the NFL star (helmet, black-eye and all!). When Kimmel asked why Brady was still sporting his game uniform, Damon quickly covered his tracks: “It’s my lucky helmet!” he said. “I’m not gonna take it off. Just so much success here. I’d rather just keep it on.” Sadly, the actor says that the “ship has sailed.” But he would consider directing the film. “I’ll direct anything that’s good!” Damon told Access Hollywood. “I mean, his story is pretty compelling, but it’d be tough to beat the real thing.” The Nashville and The O.C. actor looks so much like Brady, it’s almost scary. Both have signature sparkling eyes, full heads of hair and chiseled jaw-lines. We weren’t sure if Pratt could play Brady … until we saw this photo of him in a Pats shirt. The two are close enough in age (Brady is 39, Pratt is 37), height (Brady is 6-foot-4, Pratt is 6-foot-2) and build. Only problem? Pratt is a huge Seattle Seahawks fan and rooted against the Patriots during Super Bowl XLIX. The Swedish actor showed off some serious muscles in The Legend of Tarzan. In fact, he might even need to slim down to portray the NFL player! Captain America to play Tom Terrific? Doesn’t get any better than that. Evans bears a striking resemblance to the actor. And he’s clearly got that signature Brady smolder down.

2017-10-03 00:00:00

"America needs to know that the clock is ticking" for Dreamers, Sen. Dick Durbin said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday. The bottom line: Homeland Security will only process applications for Dreamers who are eligible for DACA renewal between now and March 5th if they receive them by Thursday. Durbin urged the department to consider applications coming from hurricane-ravaged Texas, Louisiana, Florida and Puerto Rico on a case-by-case basis. What happens if Congress doesn't act by March 5th? Dreamers' work permits will start to expire. Without work authorization and the prosecutorial discretion provided by DACA, they will no longer have a place in the United States. Durbin and Sen. Lindsay Graham introduced the DREAM Act on Sept. 5th, and Durbin said Tuesday, "We do have the beginning of broad bipartisan support in the Senate." But Congress has yet to establish a legal path to citizenship for Dreamers, despite the fact that 83% of Americans support such legislation, per a Fox News poll. From the hearing: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services does not have "specific instructions" to go after DACA recipients for deportation. The Obama-era policy that immigration enforcement offices such as ICE and CBP will not use the information Dreamers provided in applications against them or their families still holds. "[Dreamers] are a benefit to the country, as are many immigrants," Acting Assistant Attorney General Chad Readler said.

2017-03-29 19:43:00

This article originally appeared on Creators. A series of prints reach their transparent fronds upwards and outwards, crafting a visual metaphor of an artist searching for an expression of cultural identity. While in pursuit of communicating her background and reconciling her discoveries with her craft, print artist Edwige Charlot allows her paper pieces to speak for themselves in understated tones. The artist, who lives and works in Portland, Maine, dwells mostly in the collage and printmaking space. The artist's themes often work hand-in-hand with her heritage as part-Haitian, part-Parisian, two components of Charlot's identity that have required a struggle to understand and find a place in her self-expression. The artist's perspective merges French culture with the traditions and values of the Caribbean country. When developing her prints, Charlot artist sketches using photocopied images, continuing to work with ink and watercolor to flesh out her 2D works. Paper is the artist's forte; her pieces are reflective of her transparently delicate style. Interested in learning more, Creators spoke to Charlot about how she generates ideas and her favorite artistic voices: Creators: How significant are your heritage and previous homes to your work? Edwige Charlot: My heritage and the cultures I've had to assimilate into are a large part of my studio's dialogue. They are always a part of the meditation that I consider my creative practice. The untangling [...] is part of my exploration on the press bed or in a drawing. The plant motifs act as a mechanism to work through this conversation about what parts of me have been pruned, cultivated, cut, and mended. What sort of appeal do your particular materials have for you? I do most of my thinking as I print, cut and reassemble. I make a thing to make a thing to make another thing. The first print is never the end, it's the beginning. Can you tell me about what kind of aesthetic you feel your art abides by? That's a hard question. [...] My work has a simplicity to it, and a directness that can be reduced to be 'primitive.' Like the tradition of Haitian painters, I use what is here to inquire about what's out there. The precision and refined quality of work are in line with the spiritual realm of work like Muslim and Shaker works. What are some major artistic developments happening in Portland? Our arts community is undergoing a lot of change in response to our city's gentrification. Smaller art spaces are going big, which is creating new energy and opportunities for alternative spaces to grow, more and more collectives are popping up. I am excited to see that our community isn't waiting for the opportunities now, we are making our own and letting mainstream audiences catch up when they can. What are the some of the most exciting aspects of being a creative in Maine? Maine is fairly white and isolated. For a long time, I saw this as a negativity thing. Over that last couple of years, I have looked more at all the ways that the immigrant and migration narrative have flowered here. This needs for connection also has pushed me to look to the outside of Maine. I know that my work is harder to connected to here because of the lack of diversity but I am convinced that it's even critical for the same reason. I can't fail to mention just how beautiful this place is. The ocean, the coast and the seasons are just a few miraculous things about Maine. Who are some of your favorite artists? Right now, I'm inspired by the works of Kerry James Marshall. His latest show at the Met Breuer brought me to tears [read Creators talk with Marshall here]. Abigail DeVille, anonymous Haitian metalworkers, William H. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, David Driskell, Sam Gilliam, and Alma Thomas. To learn more Edwige Charlot, follow her on Twitter and Instagram, as well visiting her personal website. All year, we're highlighting 50 States of Art projects around the United States. This month, we're covering Arizona, Mississippi, Nebraska, Maine, and Virginia. To learn more, click here . Related: How Salt Lake City Became a Modern Dance Mecca | #50StatesofArt Artists Pioneer a "Fairer Form of Gentrification" in Indiana | #50StatesofArt Learn Quillwork and Indigenous Culture at North Dakota Gallery Five Nation Arts | #50StatesofArt

2016-07-18 14:45:28

The rebooted “Ghostbusters,” starring Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon as an all-female squad of ectoplasm fighters, sold $46 million worth of tickets in North America over the weekend, making it the second-best earning film behind “The Secret Life of Pets.” But even before any tickets had been sold, “Ghostbusters” was already surely the most argued-about movie of the year, attacked by angry male fans on the internet and hailed as a new milestone in Hollywood diversity. Wesley Morris, critic at large for The New York Times, joins its chief film critics Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott to survey the state of the debate now that people have actually seen the movie. The discussion may include spoilers. A. O. SCOTT The pre-emptive backlash was another of those reactionary anti-feminist boy-tantrums that have become a fixture of our culture and our politics lately. The wounded man-children will keep on whining about their ruined childhoods, but meanwhile the debate has moved in other directions. The movie’s feminist bona fides have been questioned, notably by Alyssa Rosenberg in The Washington Post, who wrote that she was “more dismayed by the idea that the uproar around ‘Ghostbusters’ has pushed feminists into championing Paul Feig’s remake” than by the misogynist outrage over the all-female cast. And why is Leslie Jones’s character, the only nonwhite Ghostbuster, also the only nonscientist? I have to say it makes me very happy when big commercial movies provoke serious political arguments, but before we dive into that particular fray I want to make a few statements I trust will not be terribly controversial. 1) Kate McKinnon should be in every movie from now on. 2) The new “Ghostbusters” is like the old “Ghostbusters” in that it gives comic performers who gained popularity on television and in more provocative projects a chance to widen their appeal and increase their earning potential with a mainstream action-comedy. 3) The old “Ghostbusters” isn’t that great to begin with. WESLEY MORRIS You’re right on all counts. Kate McKinnon joins my personal Taraji P. Henson/Emma Stone “more, please forever” club. But the politics around this movie have nothing to do with the politics in this movie, of which, to Mr. Feig’s credit, there isn’t very much. His “Ghostbusters” isn’t defensive so much as pro forma and strangely sedate compared with the original movie and to what else these women can do (and have done). My favorite moments involved the characters being let off their leashes, like when Kristen Wiig is running around New York trying to tell the mayor and whoever else won’t listen that terror is afoot. That’s a great mode for her. As for Ms. Jones’s given occupation as a transit worker, it leaves me, once again, annoyed by the optics. If the other Ghostbusters were, say, Ms. Henson, Jada Pinkett Smith and Gabourey Sidibe as the scientists, and Ms. Jones’s Patty was still the subway worker, who’d care? But under the circumstances, it just seems like the same questionable, stay-in-your-place choice that movies have always made for black performers — and an excuse for the plot to ride the subway. But, look: She’s an equal member of the team and black people work in public transit. Politics! What do we make of the movie’s fetishization of Chris Hemsworth? He’s very funny as himbo man-meat. But somebody involved with this movie clearly thinks he’s utterly captivating — or politically necessary, too. A lot of the plot hinges on him being against-type funny. And I actually found the comedic material to be there for him in a way it wasn’t for almost everyone else, especially Melissa McCarthy, who, maybe, shouldn’t be a straight man after all. I wanted gonzo from this movie and got dutiful. What’s wrong with me? MANOHLA DARGIS Gonzo is tough to find in the current big-studio landscape, which is radically different from what it was when the first movie opened in 1984. Given this, I think the new “Ghostbusters” succeeds on its own fairly narrow commercial mainstream terms, but with some dividends, including a pretty, ditsy secretary (Mr. Hemsworth) and the new Bill Murray (our collective crush, Ms. McKinnon). The only thing I would add is that Ms. McCarthy was already a significant box-office draw in 2014 when Mr. Feig tweeted that he was making an all-female “Ghostbusters.” Oh, and one more thought: The most interesting thing about the reboot isn’t the movie itself but the misogynistic discourse that has swirled around it since this project was announced. I did my best to ignore the anti-reboot chatter before I saw “Ghostbusters” just because I avoid reading anyone else’s opinion about a movie before seeing it. I knew that there was a contingent of angry male fans; of course there were. There are always men enraged by women’s autonomy, whether women are starring in a comedy reboot or “Thelma & Louise”; playing rock or video games; demanding their reproductive rights; running for president; or, you know, doing anything that some men don’t want them to do. The depths of this rage betray a deep fear about a loss of male power that’s been central to the cultural, social and political landscape for decades. “Ghostbusters” turns on the threat of one apocalypse; the irrational hatred toward it turns on another end time. SCOTT I think what pleased me most about this “Ghostbusters” was how matter-of-fact — how chill — the movie was, notwithstanding the bombast of the climactic battle. I think we all agree that it has a generic, middle-of-the-road quality. That’s something it shares with the original, by the way, which far from being a transcendent masterpiece of cinematic imagination was a nice paycheck for the artists involved and an easy, inoffensive night out for the audience. Sorry if I ruined anyone’s childhood. Mr. Feig, like Ivan Reitman before him, has assembled a workmanlike action-comedy about people at work. Professionalism may be the opposite of gonzo, but I think there’s something (dare I say it) radical about how job-focused this story is. Here’s a movie about female friendship and collegiality — which, of course, also entails rivalry, miscommunication and shifting allegiances — that feels no need to entangle any of its heroines in a heterosexual romance plot. Ms. Wiig’s character is distracted by the hotness of her secretary (I was reminded of Zero Mostel in the original “Producers”), but the real emotional stakes are between her and Ms. McCarthy. We don’t know if any of the Ghostbusters are gay, bi, straight, married, single, celibate, polyamorous or whatever. It’s not relevant. Any more than it would be in a western or a platoon picture or a Mafia epic or a movie about a bunch of tech bros building a start-up. (Follow-up think-piece assignment: “Ghostbusters” is actually a remake of “The Social Network.”) “Bridesmaids,” “The Heat” and “Spy” may have had naughtier (and funnier) jokes, but they were also careful to include rom-com flourishes and semiplausible love interests. “Ghostbusters” doesn’t do that. Nor does it pander to the male gaze. And it’s not really out to prove that women can be strong or funny or handle powerful weapons. In most movies, such offers of proof are accompanied by reassurances that the women in question are still sexy or maternal or eager to settle down with the right guy — that they fulfill some kind of conventional idea of femininity. “Ghostbusters” doesn’t bother with any of that, and in the process seems to be on the verge of inventing a new set of archetypes. MORRIS Well, the movie does pander to this male’s gaze, at least in its appreciation of Mr. Hemsworth’s presumed hotness. There’s a randomness to this movie, much of which is devoted to him. (Why does he decide he wants to bust ghosts, too? What’s with all those cheesecake, shirtless head shots that keep showing up?) Still, the more I think about it the more I feel like every word of opprobrium or defense — every profane or besotted emoji — has been in some ways unfair to a movie that just wants to be. But Tony, your ascribing meaning and value to the workplace dynamics really struck me. These women are small-business owners who love their jobs. (To paraphrase the eternal Ray Parker Jr.: Bustin’ makes ’em feel good.) That’s a strong contrast to something like “9 to 5” (1980), whose women hated work because their boss was a pig. Now there’s no boss, just an endless supply of ghosts. Progress! My objection to this movie is purely an exasperation with remakes of stuff that no one needs. (People of the world, for the love of Netflix, your childhoods are still available on demand!) Nonetheless, Manohla, your enthusiasm — and my friend Katie’s — won me over, at least in this case. This is an elastic concept that can withstand all kinds of reconfigurations. It’s not sacred. And to the girls in the audience, who know nothing about the battles roiling their parents’ Reddit feeds, the comedic quartet of McCarthy, Jones, Wiig and McKinnon is just business as usual. But that’s a difference that feels entirely generational, no? DARGIS Maybe it’s generational but it’s also a matter of awareness. Because while a female-driven blockbuster may seem like business as usual to some, reams of data prove that movies like this remain an exception in the male-dominated industry. To cite (again) just one bummer study: From 2007 to 2014, women made up 30.2 percent of all speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing fictional films released in the United States. And while there’s certainly awareness about this sexism, at least in some quarters, that hasn’t translated into real industry progress. For a big studio like Sony, and in an industrial climate in which male superheroes keep studios going, “Ghostbusters” is a gamble. The studio tried to revive “Ghostbusters” for years. In 2009, when Dan Aykroyd talked to The Los Angeles Times about what was then “Ghostbusters 3” (meaning another sequel, not a reboot), female Ghostbusters were part of the story. This iteration would star the original cast and involve the older Ghostbusters passing the proton torch to a new group that included some women. Mr. Aykroyd specifically mentioned Alyssa Milano and Eliza Dushku, casting that was eagerly greeted on some entertainment sites. “Why don’t they have BOTH of them in the movie? That way they can towel the slime off each other,” wrote one commentator on Screenrant. “Slime her!” a writer for Cinemablend enthused about Ms. Milano. Entertainment Weekly even ran a story — “Pick the New ‘Ghostbusters’ Girl!” — with a photo of Megan Fox, who it suggested could be “The Sexpot” alongside Zoe Saldana (“The Geek Queen”), Emma Watson (“The Touch of Class”) and Charlyne Yi (“The Wild Card”), who has “just the right nerd-girl charm for the Ghostbusters crew.” The stars of the new “Ghostbusters” are adult women — three over 40 — they’re not girls or especially charming. And while some moviegoers may not need this particular remake, I think there are plenty of girl and women moviegoers who would say, yes, we do.

2019-11-25 00:00:00

In the summer of 2010, at a block party in downtown Manhattan, a sixteen-year-old named Patrick Morales did something that had become a habit for him: he charged his way to the front of the crowd and began to rap. Given his talent and charisma, the intrusion was welcome. In the audience was a Harlem producer named Eric Adiele, who later said that Morales struck him as “this kind of rapping . . . New York Bart Simpson.” At the party, once the background music stopped, Morales—who is half Puerto Rican and half Irish, and goes by Wiki—continued to rap. Adiele approached Wiki about collaborating. (“I make beats, you’re not corny,” Adiele, who goes by Sporting Life, told him.) Eventually, the pair, along with another rapper, named Hak (Hakeem Lewis), formed a group called Ratking. Like most young artists full of intensity and ideas, the members of Ratking set out to do something novel—or, at least, to resist the temptations of nineties New York hip-hop. But they wound up honoring the city’s hip-hop heritage better than most. On Ratking’s début album, “So It Goes,” from 2014, the trio painted New York as a creative playground, rather than as a city that had all but closed its doors to young and financially disadvantaged artists. New York authenticity was treated as a birthright, not as an object of aspiration or nostalgia. Ratking avoided the narrative of a New York flattened by money and technology. “Think the city has let up? Get up, wake up / Open your eyes,” Wiki implored on a song called “Canal.” Inspired by the nineteen-seventies electronic-art-punk act Suicide and the raucous dynamism of the Wu-Tang Clan, Ratking made the kind of noisy and confident hip-hop that the Beastie Boys, Dipset, and the A$AP Mob had before it. But the music didn’t sound as if it had been directly copied from these groups; instead, Ratking had cut its own path through a similar array of New York-specific experiences and touchstones—turnstile-jumping, uptown house parties, noodle houses and bagel shops, punk and rap music, intergenerational fraternization at skate parks, malt liquor and weed. “This ain’t nineties revival / It’s earlier / It’s tribal revival,” Wiki rapped on “Protein,” a frantic, skittering track from “So It Goes.” Ratking soon disbanded, but Wiki, the group’s magnetic figurehead, was primed for a solo career. On his full-length début, “No Mountains in Manhattan,” from 2017, he sounded like the protagonist of a Harmony Korine fever dream, a tiny, petulant charmer fast-talking his way through bodega lines and subway stations. In Wiki’s cartoon-strip rendering of Manhattan, he could win over beautiful girls despite his small stature and missing teeth, and he could make it onstage in the nick of time, no matter how much he’d drunk. The album’s production created a collage of satisfying textures—soul samples, deep bass, gritty lo-fi noise arrangements, and careful orchestral flourishes—for Wiki to play with. In Ratking’s early days, his rhetorical virtuosity and forceful delivery earned him comparisons to Eminem, but on “No Mountains” that dense, brute-force style gave way to more complex and supple verses. Verbal gymnastics came easy to him, and he knew it. “You was the worst rapper / I was the best rapper!” he shouted on a track called “Mayor,” gleefully stressing “You” and “I.” “Mayor,” which sampled a soul song by the Arrows, was like a campaign anthem, positioning Wiki as a quasi-political leader in his own neighborhood. He wore a suit in the video, which featured him going around New York and meeting strangers. But his arrogance and self-mythologizing were substantiated by obvious lyrical talent. On the Web site Talkhouse, the New York rapper—and former member of Das Racist—Heems described “No Mountains” as “a love letter to New York I wish I could have written, but am happy someone else did.” Wiki found friends and admirers in high places: on “Made for This,” a song about being predestined for greatness, he went toe to toe with the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah. In a short time, he’d become peers with those who helped shape New York rap. But the churn of the music business quickly turns young stars into grizzled veterans, and, in just a couple of years, Wiki has outgrown most of his boyish enthusiasm. His new album, “Oofie,” is a document of disillusionment—not with New York City but with the trials of young rap stardom. Whereas he used to rap mostly in the present tense, much of his new album switches to the past, offering a more rueful perspective on the hedonistic pursuits of his teen-age years and early twenties. (There is even a song called “Back Then.”) The mythology of his youth collides with reality on this album, which has a slower, more laborious energy to it; he laments his inadequate streaming numbers, drained bank account, and drug and alcohol abuse. The record begins with a murky beat and murmuring voices speculating about Wiki’s decline. “He’s lost it,” one mutters. “Every time I’ve seen him, he’s been drunk,” another says. “He’s a scumbag.” Raw talent is a thrilling gift, but in the absence of friendship, commercial success, or infrastructural support—before this record, Wiki parted ways with his label, XL Recordings—it can be a torturous companion. Still, Wiki’s verbal skills are just as effective when refracted through bitterness and regret. “Oofie” takes all the vividness he once levelled at New York and channels it inward, offering a despondent portrait of self-loathing that doubles as a critique of the hype-hungry nature of contemporary rap fandom. Nostalgia for an earlier sound or a different New York was once the enemy, but now it has become a potent tool for Wiki, who describes the rowdiness of his school days with longing and lust. “Oofie” makes Wiki sound like a gentrifying city block newly overrun with chain restaurants and 7-Elevens—under siege but full of pride and history, nonetheless. “I played this game too long to move on,” he says on a song called “Pesto,” describing his rapping ability as “ten thou”—not as a boast but as a matter of fact. Of all the distinct regional sounds and scenes made obsolete by the Internet, perhaps none have been recast quite as dramatically as New York hip-hop. The city’s rising stars now show little interest in the past. The calm pugnacity of Pop Smoke, a twenty-year-old breakout star and Brooklyn native, fits nicely into the city’s hip-hop lineage, but his sound is, quite literally, foreign—most of his grimy beats are made by 808Melo, a producer in London. 808Melo is a key figure in U.K. drill, a lively and controversial scene of young rappers who give voice to the crime and despair of places that are often overlooked in mainstream rap. U.K. -drill rappers, in turn, were inspired by the vibrant toughness of Chicago drill, which originated almost a decade ago. A crop of emergent New Yorkers—Sheff G and 22Gz among them—are legitimatizing U.K. drill in the U.S. Other young New York rap stars, such as Lil Tjay and Smooky MarGielaa, are indistinguishable from the streams of melodic singer-rappers coming out of Atlanta, hip-hop’s commercial epicenter. Their New York-ness seems incidental to their success. Regional heritage and lived experience do not count for much in the economy of music fandom, which feeds simultaneously on novelty and conformity. These trends are the source of a deep well of resentment for Wiki. “I’m an enigma they tryna get rid of / Thought I was a contender until they forget ya,” he raps on “Downfall.” But Wiki is a gifted storyteller above all, and, just as his earlier work was an imaginative exercise that turned New York into an urban Atlantis, “Oofie” is, at least in part, a dramatization. The album takes Wiki, the protagonist of his own adventure, to rock bottom, and then hedges with hints of future triumph. “Gotta be better, not bitter,” he raps. “I’ll be back in all of my splendor.” ♦

2016-08-19

Hypebeasts, right this way. After Kanye West announced Wednesday that he would be blessing fans with 21 pop-up stores this weekend, the day has come to load up on Pablo merch ... if you happen to live in Australia.  Because Australia is way down under (and thus technically in the future), the first stores in the world selling cult Yeezy wares have opened their doors in the Bondi and Fitzroy neighborhoods of Sydney and Melbourne, respectively. And DAMN, the queues wrap right around the block.   By looks of the photos on social media, these people might be waiting hours, if not days, to get inside.  Bondi campers #kanyewest #popupstore A photo posted by Amanda Wynne-Williams (@amandaww) on Aug 18, 2016 at 2:54pm PDT The iconic green and gold of the Australian Olympic team is alive and well in Pablo’s heart, evidently.  Inside @kanyewest's TLOP Melbourne pop-up https://t.co/7w8rqVpB2e pic.twitter.com/orjkw47gGC — Sneaker Freaker (@snkrfrkrmag) August 19, 2016 Except not everyone's into it. sydney better get that tan pablo merch melbourne has. the lime green stuff is kinda wack 😂 — Michael Heal (@MHealx) August 19, 2016 And yes, the street style reportage is coming in thick and fast. See what @kanyewest fans are wearing in the queue for the TLOP pop-up storehttps://t.co/T7fRGK2Akd pic.twitter.com/VQddl6IFB6 — Sneaker Freaker (@snkrfrkrmag) August 19, 2016 But Yeezy's loyal disciples will not be deterred. Yeezy madness downstairs #heaven A photo posted by Patrick Kidd (@patrickkidd) on Aug 18, 2016 at 5:00pm PDT Congratulations to all parties involved. Got my hands on some sweeeet @kanyewest #Pablo merch from the Sydney pop-up store.#KanyeWest pic.twitter.com/vPGBjF06E9 — MC (@mrmikechristian) August 19, 2016 Looking good guys! #kanyewest #pablo #popup #sydney pic.twitter.com/03K69a8Igk — 2DayFM 104.1 (@2DayFM) August 19, 2016 And special mention to this guy, who's just across from the pop-up store, blissing out on the hand pan and proving how very little chill the rest of you have. Daniel Waple's song 😄 #bondibeach #handpan #hang #terrapan #黑夜大良 #midnightallgood A video posted by Base (@base_00_dzy) on Aug 18, 2016 at 4:52pm PDT

2018-12-10

CEO Sundar Pichai put an emphasis on Google's patriotism in his prepared remarks for a congressional hearing on Tuesday where he'll likely face questions about a purported bias against conservative content on search and YouTube. "Even as we expand into new markets we never forget our American roots," he wrote. Tuesday's hearing will focus on potential political bias on Google's platforms, as well as the company's data filtering practices, with House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca.) highlighting claims that Google's business practices "may have been affected by political bias" in a statement. Google has staunchly denied these accusations when they've come up in the past, and did so again in Pichai's remarks. "I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way," Pichai writes. "To do otherwise would go against our core principles and our business interests." By underscoring Google's patriotism Pichai's comments may also attempt to address criticism around the company's decision earlier this year not to renew a Pentagon contract for analyzing drone videos using artificial intelligence. Critics have contrasted this move with how Google has worked with China on controversial plans to launch a censored search engine there. After The Intercept first reported details about Google's censored search plans, human rights groups, lawmakers, and Google's own employees all blasted the company, arguing that by cooperating with the Chinese government, it would have violated principles of free expression and users' privacy rights, among other issues. The censored search app, which Google has said it is "not close" to launching, would have debatably violated a set of artificial intelligence ethics that the company posted following employee blowback to its dropped Department of Defense contract. The document stipulated that Google would work with the government and military on cybersecurity and training, but not on weapons or surveillance that violates "internationally accepted norms." Pichai never directly mentions either controversy, but his prepared comments dance around both. "As an American company, we cherish the values and freedoms that have allowed us to grow and serve so many users," he wrote. "I am proud to say we do work, and we will continue to work, with the government to keep our country safe and secure." Here are Pichai's full remarks: Chairman Goodlatte, Ranking Member Nadler, distinguished members of the Committee: Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I joined Google 15 years ago and have been privileged to serve as CEO for the past three years—though my love for information and technology began long before that. It's been 25 years since I made the US my home. Growing up in India, I have distinct memories of when my family got its first phone and our first television. Each new technology made a profound difference in our lives. Getting the phone meant that I could call ahead to the hospital to check that the blood results were in before I traveled 2 hours by bus to get them. The television, well, it only had one channel, but I couldn't have been more thrilled by its arrival! Those experiences made me a technology optimist, and I remain one today. Not only because I believe in technology, but because I believe in people and their ability to use technology to improve their lives. I'm incredibly proud of what Google does to empower people around the world, especially here in the US. I'd like to take a moment to share a bit of background on that. 20 years ago, two students—one from Michigan and one from Maryland—came together at Stanford with a big idea: to provide users with access to the world's information. That mission still drives everything we do, whether that's saving you a few minutes on your morning commute or helping doctors detect disease and save lives. Today, Google is more than a search engine. We are a global company that is committed to 1 building products for everyone. That means working with many industries, from education and healthcare to manufacturing and entertainment. Even as we expand into new markets we never forget our American roots. It's no coincidence that a company dedicated to the free flow of information was founded right here in the US. As an American company, we cherish the values and freedoms that have allowed us to grow and serve so many users. I am proud to say we do work, and we will continue to work, with the government to keep our country safe and secure. Over the years our footprint has expanded far beyond California to states such as Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma and Alabama. Today in the US, we're growing faster outside of the Bay Area than within it. I've had the opportunity to travel across the country and see all the places that are powering our digital economy—from Clarksville, to Pittsburgh, to San Diego, where we recently launched a partnership with the USO to help veterans and military families. Along the way, I've met many people who depend on Google to learn new skills, find jobs, or build new businesses. Over the past year, we have supported more than 1.5 million American businesses. Over the past three, we have made direct contributions of $150 billion to the US economy, added more than 24,000 employees, and paid over $43 billion to US partners across Search, YouTube, and Android. These investments strengthen our communities and support thousands of American jobs. They also allow us to provide great services to our users to help them through the day. It's an honor to play this role in people's lives, and it's one we know comes with great responsibility. Protecting the privacy and security of our users has long been an essential part of our mission. We have invested an enormous amount of work over the years to bring choice, transparency, and control to our users. These values are built into every product we make. We recognize the important role of governments, including this Committee, in setting rules for the development and use of technology. To that end, we support federal privacy legislation and proposed a legislative framework for privacy earlier this year. Users also look to us to provide accurate, trusted information. We work hard to ensure the integrity of our products, and we've put a number of checks and balances in place to ensure they continue to live up to our standards. I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way. To do otherwise would go against our core principles and our business interests. We are a company that provides platforms for diverse perspectives and opinions—and we have no shortage of them among our own employees. Some of our Googlers are former servicemen and women who have risked much in defense of our country. Some are civil libertarians who fiercely defend freedom of expression. Some are parents who worry about the role technology plays in our households. Some—like me—are immigrants to this country, profoundly grateful for the freedoms and opportunities it offers. Some of us are many of these things. Let me close by saying that leading Google has been the greatest professional honor of my life. It's a challenging moment for our industry, but I'm privileged to be here today. I greatly appreciate you letting me share the story of Google and our work to build products worthy of the trust users place in us. Thank you for your attention. I look forward to answering your questions.

2017-08-01

Apple's cash pile swelled again this quarter, hitting a record $261.5 billion, compared with $256.8 billion last quarter. That's up 13 percent year over year. To put it in context: If all of that money could be put to work today, it would be enough to buy Oracle outright and still have $54 billion left over. It's also enough to buy Wal-Mart or AT&T outright, based on current market cap. Other than high-profile investments in Didi and Beats, it's rare for Apple to make splashy deals. Instead, the company often opts to fuel research and development. The company spent $2.94 billion on research and development during the quarter, up from $2.56 billion a year ago and continuing a nine-month upward trend. Chief financial officer Luca Maestri told analysts that $246 billion of this cash, or 94 percent of the total, was outside the United States. The company has invested in a wide range of businesses worldwide: A new store in Dubai has been a centerpiece of Apple's new retail strategy, noted on a conference call with analysts, while iPad sales during the quarter saw double-digit increases in key markets such as the U.S., Japan, Germany, France and greater China, CEO Tim Cook said. But Apple also faces steep tax penalties associated with repatriating foreign earnings. Cook has been a staunch advocate of tax reform — including a measure, proposed by President Donald Trump, to have a one-time cut in repatriation taxes. That could allow Apple to put money to work buying another company or returning earnings to shareholders. Apple, to be sure, is far from skimping in that arena. Cook told analysts that Apple is investing $1 billion in advanced manufacturing in the U.S., as CNBC's Jim Cramer first reported, and investing in American resources like education. Apple also declared a 63 cent dividend during the third quarter. Apple will have "some things to say" later this year about the fact that two-thirds of Apple's total employee base in the U.S. despite only a third of revenues being U.S.-based, according to Cook. Still, shareholder Ross Gerber of Gerber Kawasaki said he'd be happy with a smart deal from Apple. "The Beats acquisition was such a great move for them .... it really shows how smart good acquisitions are for Apple," Gerber told CNBC's "Closing Bell. " "I think they need to be in other businesses, I think they need to diversify so we're not all out here praying for the iPhone 8 to be something super special, you know."

2018-05-03

May 3 (Reuters) - WidePoint Corp: * WIDEPOINT ANNOUNCES RENEWED REVOLVING CREDIT FACILITY WITH ACCESS NATIONAL BANK Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:

2016-11-09 00:00:00

BERLIN, Nov 9 (Reuters) - German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel wants the cabinet to approve the country’s climate plan next Wednesday, while an international climate conference takes place in Marrakesh, a ministry spokeswoman said on Wednesday. Gabriel on Tuesday blocked a tentative agreement on a climate action plan that aims to reduce the country’s CO2 emissions by 55 percent by 2030 amid concerns raised by a mining union. Reporting by Markus Wacket; Writing by Madeline Chambers; Editing by Michelle Martin

2018-11-24 00:00:00

MBIZA, A BUSINESS that grows berries in Zambia and South Africa, and Niel Finance and Services, which owns the Central African Republic’s largest mobile firm, would seem to have little in common. But both have headquarters in Mauritius, an island of 1.2m people 2,000km off the mainland. The country, which tops the World Bank’s “ease of doing business” ranking for sub-Saharan Africa, has a robust legal system and amenities that make it an attractive place to set up shop. Perhaps a bigger draw, though, is a 15% corporate-tax rate, falling to as little as 3% on foreign income. Mauritius also boasts an extensive tax-treaty network with many sub-Saharan African countries. It has ratified 15 since 1992; only South Africa arranged more over the period. Twelve more are in the works. Double-taxation treaties (DTTs) specify the rate applied by source countries on cross-border income, such as royalties or service fees. Over time Mauritius has secured advantageous terms, typically low or zero rates of withholding taxes—those deducted at source. Since it also has treaties with developed markets and other low-tax countries, multinationals with Mauritian intermediaries can repatriate the proceeds of African investments at minimal cost. Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. DTTs are supposed to encourage foreign direct investment (FDI) by making sure income is not taxed twice. But in a recent paper Sebastian Beer of the IMF and Jan Loeprick of the World Bank find that Mauritius’s DTTs have not channelled new investment towards co-signatories. Rather, they have led to “treaty-shopping”, with firms merely rerouting existing flows of money. That has deprived African treasuries of tax revenue: in countries with such treaties the corporate-tax take was on average 15% lower than in similar countries without them. Some countries have balked. A handful, including Rwanda and South Africa, have renegotiated their treaties with Mauritius to raise withholding rates on interest payments and royalties. But the most forceful efforts to clamp down on treaty-shopping have been led by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, under its “Base Erosion and Profit Shifting” initiative. In July it introduced a mechanism that will automatically update applicable DTTs. Rules will be tightened on beneficial ownership and on “principal purpose”—ie, whether the main motive for incorporating in a jurisdiction is to obtain tax benefits. Although Mauritius signed up, it initially excluded its African treaties. No public announcement has been made but it has now yielded to pressure and agreed to include all its African DTTs (except that with Cape Verde, which is not yet finalised). In order to count as tax-domiciled in Mauritius, companies will soon have to employ more staff and spend more locally, says Rama Sithanen, a former finance minister and deputy premier. Pascal Saint-Amans, the OECD’s top tax official, reckons it should take no more than two years to revamp the DTTs. “Treaty-shopping is dead,” he says. Others are less sanguine. The automatic update mechanisms do not cover withholding taxes. As long as rates remain low or zero, some multinationals will continue to net a bargain.

2016-07-16 22:08:00

Chelsea Lauren/REX/Shutterstock It’s official: Jennifer Lopez‘s latest red carpet look confirms that LWDs are the perfect summertime outfit. The singer and actress looked chic in head-to-toe white while attending the premiere of her latest film, Ice Age: Collision Course, in Los Angeles on Saturday. J.Lo wore a curve-hugging strapless white dress and a sheer lace bolero jacket with matching choker and accessorized with a small white clutch and white pumps. The “Ain’t Your Mama” singer wore her long, ombré locks down and looked extra glowy with her subtle smoky eye and nude glossy lips. Lopez, who reprises her role as saber-tooth tiger Shira in the latest installment of the animated series, has had a busy summer so far. Not only is she promoting Ice Age: Collision Course and filming her police drama Shades of Blue, but she also recently released a song with Hamilton‘s Lin-Manuel Miranda in honor of the Orlando shooting victims. What do you think of J.Lo’s white-hot red carpet look? Sound off below! — Andrea Park

2017-01-18

Apple CEO Tim Cook leaves the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai on May 18, 2016. Apple really wants to make iPhones in India, but before it does that, it would really like the Indian government to give it some major incentives, including a 15-year exemption on customs duty and the freedom to keep the back of the iPhone free of regulatory labelling. So far, India has been reluctant to make exceptions for a single company, but it seems like the country might just give in to Apple. India Minister for Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters on Wednesday that the country will consider Apple’s request “with an open mind.” “We will very much like Apple to come and have a base in India,” he said. BuzzFeed News has reached out to Apple for comment. Making iPhones in India would help Apple lower iPhone pricing in the country, where the company is struggling to gain marketshare against Android, which currently powers 97% of India’s 300 million smartphones. And having Apple make its flagship product in the country would help the government’s “Make in India” initiative, which aims to boost India’s manufacturing industry and create jobs. The Times of India recently reported that a team from Apple's Cupertino headquarters would arrive in India next week to present Apple's case for seeking tax benefits and other perks to make iPhones in India.

2018-11-29 00:00:00

HENRIK POULSEN, boss of Ørsted, a big Danish wind developer formerly known as Dong Energy, has a dream that may scare sailors and seabirds, but warms the hearts of renewable-energy advocates. He reckons there is scope to install 600,000 megawatts (MW) of offshore wind capacity in relatively shallow waters off Europe’s Atlantic, Baltic and North Sea coasts, which could supply 80% of Europe’s electricity. “You could turn the northern seas into one large power factory over the next 10-15 years,” he says. As yet, only 16,000MW of offshore wind has been installed in Europe, and already people are talking about space constraints, as with onshore wind and solar farms. Partly in response, Norway’s Equinor, an energy company, is using its deepwater-oil technology to build floating wind turbines tethered to the ocean floor, which could be installed far from land in the North Sea, off the west coast of America and in East Asia. So far it has built one 30MW project off the coast of Scotland, and is considering another to power North Sea oilfields. But Mr Poulsen says the cost of floating turbines, up to four times that of fixed ones, may be prohibitive. Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. The price of offshore wind generated by his turbines, he says, fell by 60% in 2013-17 as they doubled in size to 8-9MW apiece without needing large increases in their foundations, cabling and installation time. By the mid-2020s he expects each of them to have a capacity of 15MW, but such growth is still not fast enough to meet Europe’s climate goals. The same is true elsewhere. Almost all agree that a lot more electricity, all of it carbon-free, will be the backbone of efforts to decarbonise the energy system. The Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) says that electricity’s share of final global energy demand, currently about 20%, could rise to 60% by mid-late century, with bioenergy and hydrogen providing most of the rest. That entails demand for electricity quadrupling to about 100,000 terawatt-hours over the same period to power vehicles, heating and other users of energy. A quarter of that would be just to make hydrogen. Figures from BP, an oil company, show that last year less than 35% of the world’s electricity was generated from non-carbon sources, including nuclear and hydro, and only 8.4% from non-hydro renewables. The ETC estimates that in order to produce all electricity by renewables in 2050, the annual deployment rate of solar and wind power would have to rise tenfold. Yet it is not necessary that all electricity should come from a mixture of renewables and batteries, even if it were possible. Some argue persuasively that it is cheaper to include non-renewable sources in the power mix to stabilise the system. Nestor Sepulveda at MIT and others argue in a recent paper that it is far more cost-effective to mix intermittent renewables with “firm” (ie, not intermittent) low-carbon resources such as nuclear, natural gas with carbon capture, and bioenergy. Without these, costs rise rapidly as the electricity system gets closer to full decarbonisation, even with storage and the ability to flex demand to cope with surpluses and shortages of power. Savings in the total use of electricity could be made by using it more efficiently, lowering the amount of energy needed to produce each unit of GDP. Energy intensity declined at an average rate of 2% a year in 2010-16, which helped reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, though they have since risen again. Tightening new constructions standards, retrofitting existing buildings and managing consumption better would all help. At the same time electricity consumption in the developing world still lags far behind, averaging around a third of that in rich countries. Moreover, as energy efficiency increases, consumers may simply use more of it. There is an outside chance that a “breakthrough” technology will emerge to replace fossil fuels with a steady source of electricity. Ernest Moniz, who was America’s energy secretary in the Obama administration, says he has never seen so much interest in new nuclear fission technologies. Some continue to hold out hope for nuclear fusion. But as the price of renewables falls, hydrogen is looking more attractive as a way to store electricity over longer periods and distances than batteries. It could have even more uses with further development of carbon capture and storage.

2017-06-08

The Senate parliamentarian has warned Republicans that a provision in their healthcare reform bill related to abortion is unlikely to be allowed, raising a serious threat to the legislation.  The parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, has flagged language that would bar people from using new refundable tax credits for private insurance plans that cover abortion, according to Senate sources.   If Republicans are forced to strip the so-called Hyde Amendment language from the legislation, which essentially bars federal funds from being used to pay for abortions except to save the life of a mother or in cases of rape and incest, it may doom the bill. MacDonough declined to comment for this article. Unless a workaround can be found, conservative senators and groups that advocate against abortion rights are likely to oppose the legislation. Republicans control 52 seats in the Senate; they can afford only two defections and still pass the bill, assuming Democrats are united against it. Vice President Pence would break a 50-50 tie. Normally, controversial legislation requires 60 votes to pass the Senate, but Republicans hope to pass the ObamaCare repeal-and-replace bill with a simple majority vote under a special budgetary process known as reconciliation. The catch is that the legislation must pass a six-part test known as the Byrd Rule, and it’s up to the parliamentarian to advise whether legislative provisions meet its requirements. The toughest requirement states that a provision cannot produce changes in government outlays or revenues that are merely incidental to the nonbudgetary components of the provision. In other words, a provision passed under reconciliation cannot be primarily oriented toward making policy change instead of affecting the budget. Arguably, attaching Hyde language to the refundable tax credits is designed more to shape abortion policy than affect how much money is spent to subsidize healthcare coverage.  The abortion language that conservatives want in the healthcare bill may run afoul of a precedent set in 1995, when then-Senate Parliamentarian Robert Dove ruled that an abortion provision affecting a state block grant program failed to meet reconciliation requirements, according to a source briefed on internal Senate discussions. One GOP source identified the parliamentarian’s objection to the Hyde language along with Republican infighting over how to cap ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion as two of the biggest obstacles to passing a bill. A Republican senator confirmed that negotiators have wrestled with the procedural obstacle facing the anti-abortion language. “That has come up, and there well could be a challenge,” the lawmaker said. The lawmaker, however, said that the problem is surmountable, arguing, “There are ways around it.”  One possibility would be to change the form of assistance to low-income people by changing it from a refundable tax credit to a subsidy filtered through an already-existing government program that restricts abortion services, such as the Federal Employee Health Benefits program or Medicaid.  A second Republican senator said discussions on the topic are ongoing. GOP negotiators picked up the pace of their discussions with the parliamentarian after the Congressional Budget Office released an updated score for the House-passed healthcare bill in late May.  President Trump is pushing the Senate to pass its version of the legislation by July 4.  If GOP leaders are forced to strip the Hyde language from the healthcare bill and cannot find an alternative way to seal off insurance tax credits or subsidies from being used for abortion services, they would lose the support of anti-abortion rights groups, a devastating blow. “We’ve made it clear in a lot of conversations and some letters that any GOP replacement plan has to be consistent with the principles of the Hyde Amendment,” said David Christensen, vice president of government affairs at Family Research Council, a conservative group that promotes Christian values. “Abortion is not healthcare and the government should not be subsidizing elective abortion,” he added. Christensen predicted that activists would be up in arms if abortion services aren’t barred under the bill. “If the Byrd Rule were to be an obstacle to ensuring the GOP replacement plan in the Senate does not subsidize abortion, that’s something that would be a serious problem for us and the pro-life community,” he said.  Republican senators who are thought to be safe votes to support the GOP leadership’s ObamaCare repeal-and-replace plan may suddenly shift to undecided or opposed. “Would that be a deal killer? I’d have to think about it. I’m inclined to think it would [be],” said Sen. James InhofeJames (Jim) Mountain InhofeDemocrats, environmentalists blast Trump rollback of endangered species protections Bottom Line Overnight Defense: Dems talk Afghanistan, nukes at Detroit debate | Senate panel advances Hyten nomination | Iranian foreign minister hit with sanctions | Senate confirms UN ambassador MORE (R-Okla.).  Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin HatchOrrin Grant HatchTrump to award racing legend Roger Penske with Presidential Medal of Freedom Trump awards Presidential Medal of Freedom to economist, former Reagan adviser Arthur Laffer Second ex-Senate staffer charged in aiding doxxing of GOP senators MORE (R-Utah), who has jurisdiction over the tax credits in the healthcare bill, acknowledged it could be tough to pass the bill without the anti-abortion language. “I think a lot of people do think that’s essential,” he said.  View the discussion thread. The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 fax The contents of this site are ©2019 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

2019-08-25 00:00:00

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Emergency services are searching for a man buried alive when a wall collapsed in a manganese mine in Australia’s Northern Territory, police said on Sunday. A wall at the open-cut Bootu Creek manganese mine failed on Saturday afternoon, engulfing the 59-year-old worker in a large volume of soil and rock, police said in a statement. Northern Territory Police Superintendent Christopher Board told reporters in Darwin it was unlikely the man survived. Excavations to find the man were delayed due to safety concerns about the stability of the site. Workers at the Bootu Creek operation said they were unable to comment when contacted by Reuters via telephone on Sunday. The mine, just north of the remote town of Tennant Creek in the center of Australia’s Northern Territory, is owned by Singapore-based OM Holdings. The integrated manganese producer mines, trades and smelts ores in Australia, China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Africa, it says on its website. The Bootu Creek mine was placed in administration in January 2016 before resuming operations in early 2017. The mine produced 814,040 tonnes of manganese ore in 2018, helping the company to double its yearly net profit to A$184.7 million ($124.75 million) in 2018, according to OM Holdings’ annual report published in April. Reporting by Alison Bevege; Editing by Paul Tait

2016-05-12

May 12 (Reuters) - The Olympics are such a television ratings juggernaut for NBCUniversal that rival U.S. networks have always watched from the sidelines, airing reruns and other cheap programs that are not going to attract many eyeballs. But not this year. With a growing number of people now viewing shows on-demand, CBS Corp and Discovery Communications for the first time plan to pit new or popular shows against the global sporting event. CBS, for example, will debut a scripted series about politics by the creators of hit show “The Good Wife.” Not to be outdone, Discovery is bringing back its popular series “Naked and Afraid XL” — a reality show where contestants must survive in the wilderness for 40 days with only one or two items. Those decision show how quickly changing viewing habits are forcing media companies to reassess old ways of doing business to keep audiences engaged, and compete with on-demand programming from the likes of Netflix Inc. Also helping matters is that August — when the Summer Olympics airs this year — marks the all-important back-to-school season when retailers spend big advertising dollars on TV commercials to market their clothes and school supplies. “It used to be that we would just do enough programming to keep the lights on during the Olympics,” said Michael Greco, executive vice president of programming and research at Discovery. “That discussion has completely changed.” This year’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro is expected to draw more viewers than the record 217 million people who watched the 2012 London games because they will take place with just a one hour time difference from the heavily-populated U.S. east coast. While CBS and Discovery recognize that many people will watch the games, they are also betting they will tune into shows using video on-demand (VOD) or apps from networks or cable companies that stream programming. “People have so many more options to catch up on these shows,” said Kelly Kahl, senior executive vice president at CBS Primetime. “Today, it doesn’t feel like you have a losing battle against the Olympics.” The summer programming strategy comes with risks because not all viewers are using, or have access to, video on-demand. Fifty one percent of U.S. cable subscribers used VOD in the past month in 2015, up from 34 percent in 2010, according to Leichtman Research Group. For a graphic on U.S. video on-demand growth, see tmsnrt.rs/1T7EmoM That’s why many networks, like Fox Broadcasting, have scheduled new shows to end before the Olympics, said Dan Harrison, head of scheduling at Fox Broadcasting, a division of 21st Century Fox. Representatives at other networks, including Walt Disney Co’s ABC, did not return requests seeking comment on their summer programming. Still there are advertisers, such as retailers who want to get in front of customers for back to school season, that are looking for opportunities to advertise, according to Krista Lang, executive director of media and analytics at Atlanta-based ad agency of at 22squared. This is particularly true for advertisers who did not want to pay for the premium to run ads on NBCU during the Olympics, she said. “ALL IN” vs THE OLYMPICS CBS is debuting two new original scripted series this summer, “BrainDead,” a comedic-thriller set in Washington, D.C. and “American Gothic” a murder mystery drama. Both start in June and will run through the Olympics. Similarly, Discovery Channel plans to run 23 hours of new programming during prime time when the Olympics airs. That is up from nine hours four years ago, said Discovery’s Greco. The network is also going head to head with the Olympics with “Seven Countries in Seven Days,” where different shows on the network will take place in different countries in order to tap into the international spirit of the Olympics, according to Greco. For example, the network will air an episode of “Treasure Quest,” which features treasure hunters, in Brazil. “We are definitely all in over the Olympics,” Greco said. Reporting By Jessica Toonkel; editing by Edward Tobin

2016-04-25 15:15:00

Photo by Adam Mignanelli for Noisey The only way to begin any tribute to Prince is by belaboring the obvious, which is an implausible hyperbole. Prince Rogers Nelson was the most gifted artist of the rock era. Not the greatest genius—just the most musical in the broadest sense. Singing, playing, songwriting, dancing, putting on a show—he was fabulous at all these things and fabulous at stardom itself, a provocateur with few equals who after major reversals proved himself a profiteer with few equals as well. His shifting trans-genre amalgam of funk and rock and pop and R&B was so original that he long pretended he was biracial even though both his hard-working failed-singer mother and his scuffling pianist father were African-American. His fanatical fanbase was and remains as ecumenical as his great rival Michael Jackson's, and more discerning. With all that on the record, however, let me mention how much he owed both bizzers and rock critics. In 1977 Warner gave a black 19-year-old Minneapolis unknown an unprecedented complete-control contract only partly justified by 1979's "I Wanna Be Your Lover": three hooky minutes of shy-boy synth-guitar disco-funk that went 11 pop and No. 1 R&B. So it helped that soon Rolling Stone's Stephen Holden was creaming over the accompanying album's "blatant sexuality" as my sister Georgia Christgau's Village Voice review ventured prophetically: "He may not know how he feels, only that his feelings are strong enough to sing about." And while sales dipped with 1980's Dirty Mind, half an hour of audaciously radio-unfriendly rock demos including the three-in-a-bed "When You Were Mine," the incestuous "Sister," and the truly dirty-minded "Head," Prince's critical star kept rising. Like 1981's Controversy and 1982's 1999, Dirty Mind earned a Rolling Stone rave and finished top 10 in the Voice's Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll, and by 1999 there were finally more hits. But the historic breakthrough wasn't "1999" itself. It was "Little Red Corvette." It's hard to grasp now, but in 1982 the "death of disco" was still fueling hit radio's racist fear of offending its core demo with "urban" programming—not even a damn rock song about a woman too damn hot for the blatantly sexual Prince. When NYC's WPLJ finally put it in rotation, Warners A&R goddess Karin Berg phoned me just to crow about it. Beat steady and imposing, noisy guitar nailing synthed-up lyric, "Little Red Corvette" was Prince's trans-genre genius in action—without it, MJ's "Beat It" might never have cracked MTV. This kind of stage-tested, studio-documented proof that "rock" and "R&B" weren't mutually exclusive—funk patterns blunted by arena scale, soulful singing intensified by virtuosic shredding—will remain his greatest achievement. All this action predated the summer 1984 launch of the Prince legend as we know it: the two-pronged release of the seriously gorgeous Purple Rain LP and the surprisingly enjoyable Purple Rain flick. For the next decade Prince would be the pop demigod the world mourns today, a prolific, hard-touring, reclusive cash machine who spent every spare minute laying down tracks in his Paisley Park compound—when he wasn't dreaming up movie concepts or bringing the gift of orgasm to bevies of darling Nikkis in his erotic city. The eros is fantasy, of course—his private life was well-guarded. But something not just soulful in his lithe falsetto, gruff baritone, and warm midrange made the fantasy irresistible. Lubricious, solicitous, insinuating, polymorphous, sometimes ungendered, his singing was confident without cock-rock aggression—friendly, good-humored, there for you. But although the 1987 double-LP Sign 'O' the Times was his greatest album by acclamation, his obsessive overproduction led to musical dilution, his cinematic dreams were barely pretensions, and his sales never again approached Purple Rain levels. He was still creating some exceptional music. But with Paisley Park badly overextended by his rock-star extravagance, Prince blamed Warner for his commercial shortfall. Thus ensued his Artist Masquerading as a Rune phase and his insistence that his contract rendered him a "slave." Exploited? Always arguable. Slave? Show some respect. As I once put it whilst praising Prince's exceptional 1992 rune album, I am neither smart nor stupid enough to parse this African-American's racial politics. But I am arrogant enough to insist that chattel slavery is too huge a blot on humanity to exploit as a metaphor, and to observe that the political smarts my critical clan sensed in the most gifted artist of the rock era were a fantasy. Sure he dubbed his band the Revolution and wrote one called "Ronnie Talk to Russia," but that was about the bomb just like "1999" was about the bomb—our most exhilarating bomb song ever. By temperament, Prince always believed the end times were coming. It was this innate belief that inspired his scattershot God-mongering and made his sexual extremism feel so urgent. And it's why the horror of his only child's infant death in 1996 ultimately drove him from the Seventh Day Adventism of his raising to the Jehovah's Witness millenarianism he espoused throughout this millennium. That didn't wreck his music either—because his feelings were always strong enough to sing about, nothing could. But it did put a crimp in his sexual extremism. Yet it's a tribute to his musicality, his intelligence, his will power, and his capacity for change that in the wake of his '90s traumas he proved he'd been right about Warner all along. Marketing directly to his fanatical fanbase via an internet he saw early was made for the job, he earned a far bigger return packaging some of the many unreleased masters he owned than he would have with the most generous label deal. Yet as the decade wore on he further refurbished his legend by wangling one-offs from Columbia, Universal, and even eventually Warner. And he rebuilt his touring career as well—in 2004 alone, he sold a million concert tickets. Prince had always told us he just wanted to get through this thing called life. But now that his own physical life has ended, his artistic life will continue. Who knows how many unreleased masters remain—dozens if not hundreds. And find the viral video where he destroys the Eric Clapton solo on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Reflect that he's never released a full-fledged live album. Pray his last will and testament makes that possible now. Follow Robert Christgau on Twitter and read the archives of his criticism on his website.

2019-04-23

(Reuters) - EBay Inc raised its full-year sales and profit forecasts on Tuesday, as user-friendly changes to its ecommerce platforms attracted more customers and also increased its advertising revenue. The company, facing intense competition from Amazon.com Inc and Walmart Inc, has focused on its promoted listings program and payments business, as well as worked to make its platform simpler to use through the introduction of grouped listings and personal recommendations. More than 800,000 active sellers took advantage of the promoted listings in the first quarter, helping more than double advertising revenue to over $65 million, the company said. Chief Executive Officer Devin Wenig on a post-earnings call reiterated that the company was reducing third-party ads that are not accretive and remained on track toward a $1 billion advertising revenue opportunity. The results come as eBay is in the middle of a review of its StubHub and eBay Classifieds businesses following activist investor pressure. The San Jose, California-based company has also agreed to appoint two new directors to its board as part of an agreement with activist investors Starboard Value and Elliott Management. “We see the beat and raise as a positive reflection of management’s efforts, prior to the involvement of the activist, to improve its operating results - including expanding its efforts in advertising and payments,” said Tom Forte, an analyst with D.A. Davidson. EBay’s shares rose 5 percent in extended trading after the company also beat first-quarter revenue and profit estimates. The company raised its full-year revenue forecast to range between $10.83 billion and $10.93 billion, and its profit to be between $2.64 per share and $2.70 per share. Net revenue rose 2.4 percent to $2.64 billion in the first quarter ended March 31, beating analysts’ average estimate of $2.58 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv. EBay said active buyers grew 4 percent to 180 million in the reported quarter. However, the company’s gross merchandise volume, which is the value of goods sold on its websites within a certain time frame, fell 4.2 percent to $22.59 billion. Excluding items, eBay earned 67 cents per share, beating estimates of 63 cents per share. Reporting by Arjun Panchadar in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila

2016-02-03

Feb 3 (Reuters) - Dongfeng Automobile Co Ltd * Says sold 13,041 vehicles in Jan, down 15.0 percent y/y Source text in Chinese: bit.ly/1PRf2yo Further company coverage: (Reporting by Hong Kong newsroom)

2016-11-30

LONDON — It's easy to dismiss Netflix's new series The Crown as just another period drama to fill the gaping hole left behind by Downton Abbey. But, look beyond the opulent costumes and posh accents and you'll see another story — one about the triumph of female strength in a world powered by men.  On 6 February 1952, a 25-year-old woman became queen of a realm ruled by men. That woman was Queen Elizabeth II. And that day heralded the beginning of a new Elizabethan age. The grieving daughter of a beloved king had just inherited a post that hadn't been occupied by a woman for just over half a century. And, world leadership was no less patriarchal than it had been when the last female monarch, Queen Victoria, died in 1901. While many might see a woman thrust into the apex of power by a position gained through heredity — and not via a democratic process — as the antithesis of a feminist icon, The Crown says otherwise. This story is not one of unabashed privilege, but instead one of power, and a young woman's endeavours to retain the same authority, power and respect that her predecessors commanded.  Claire Foy, who plays Elizabeth in The Crown, told Marie Claire that she sees Elizabeth as "a protofeminist".    "She's a complicated and interesting character who had to navigate a very male world, and did that by convincing other people their ideas were best when they were actually hers," says Foy.  When Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, 77-year-old Winston Churchill was at the helm of the British government and his cabinet was comprised entirely of male politicians. And, despite women receiving the right to stand for election to the House of Commons in 1918, there were few female MPs, according to royal historian Carolyn Harris. And, until 1960, the world was yet to elect its first ever female head of government.  An unimpressed Elizabeth challenges Winston Churchill. "The Queen ascended to the throne at a time when the political sphere was dominated by men," Harris told Mashable. And not merely men, but men who had recently steered the country through the tumult of World War II.  In The Crown, we see a queen who not only takes her role seriously, but is also determined to be taken seriously. She is disappointed that her parents did not think it fit to provide her with a more robust education because of her gender and claims she knows "almost nothing". Conscious that her lack of education is a weakness, Elizabeth enlists a tutor so she can feel more confident when talking to politicians and public figures.  Episode seven of the series sees a volte face in the power dynamic between the Queen and the government.  Increasingly frustrated with the cabinet's interference in her affairs, Elizabeth discovers that government ministers colluded to hide the fact Churchill had suffered a stroke and that Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had gallstones. Elizabeth confronts a tearful Churchill. When Elizabeth discovers this deception, which prevented her from fulfilling her role to "ensure proper governance", she confronts the man behind the collusion, cabinet minister Lord Salisbury.  "You have prevented me from doing my duty. You have hampered and bamboozled the proper functioning of the crown. How could you?" shouts the Queen in what can only be described as a royal dressing down.  The Queen then confronts Churchill, informing him that his decision to withhold information with him directly contravenes the oath she took at her coronation to ensure the nation's prime minister is of sound health.  Elizabeth's words reduced Churchill — perhaps the greatest wartime prime minister to have ever lived — to tears and stunned silence. But, it's her final words to Churchill that really drive the point home. "I would ask you to consider your response in light of the respect that my rank and my office deserve, not that which my age and gender might suggest," says Elizabeth. It wasn't just government, however, that Elizabeth clashed with. The Crown shows Elizabeth and Philip's tumultuous relationship in the early years of his reign as Philip struggles with feelings of emasculation due to the power held by his wife. This portrayal of the conflict between Elizabeth's public role and private life has been confirmed by royal historians as accurate.  On the one hand, Elizabeth is a product of her generation. In 1950s Britain, a fresh emphasis was placed on the importance of marriage and family in society in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the show's first episode we witness the then-Princess Elizabeth promising to "obey" her husband during her wedding vows; an inclusion Churchill says she insisted upon. However, once Elizabeth becomes Queen, this promise to obey becomes increasingly difficult to keep. The first roadblock occurs in episode three when Elizabeth attempts to negotiate with Prime Minister Winston Churchill over the naming of the royal house and the location of her royal residence. Elizabeth wants the royal house to take Prince Philip's name, Mountbatten; something Churchill strongly advises against. She also asks to remain living at Clarence House, which she regards as her and Philip's family home.  Elizabeth and Philip's marriage was put under strain because of her role. According to royal biographer Gyles Brandreth, Prince Philip privately complained IRL: "I am nothing but a bloody amoeba. I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children."Elizabeth eventually heeds the advice of the government and decides to keep the royal house in her name — Windsor — and moves to Buckingham Palace; much to Philip's protestations. Philip's feelings of emasculation continue throughout the series despite Elizabeth's initial efforts to prevent them. But, this initial aim to keep her husband happy soon becomes impossible to achieve because of the demands of her role and the royal protocols she must adhere to. Philip was also forced to give up a promising naval career to support his wife in her role as sovereign and he had to walk behind the Queen during all public engagements — two aspects which could be considered a reversal in the traditional marital roles of the 1950s.  Elizabeth's role as Queen and her wish to protect the national interest remain her highest priorities at all times — often at the expense of her husband's feelings.  In addition to negotiating  the patriarchal expectations of her private life, Elizabeth's public role sees her frequently lock horns in a male-dominated world. In her public duties, Elizabeth demands to be treated as a sovereign and not as a young woman and she fights to be taken seriously. Time and time again, she stands up to the most senior members of government — men who were titans of politics — to defend what she wants and believes.  She flouts royal protocol, disregards the advice of her private secretary and advisers, and goes against the wishes of her mother, sister and husband.  Offscreen, these bold endeavours ensured the Queen retained — and even built upon — the power she inherited at the time of her accession.

2019-06-05

5G networks and smartphones haven't even properly arrived yet, but Samsung is already working on the next generation of cellular network technology.  The Korea Herald reported Tuesday that Samsung has launched a new research center, focusing, among other things, on 6G research.  The new center is called the Advanced Communications Research Center and it's a part of Samsung's main research and development organization in Seoul — Samsung Research. “The current team on telecommunications technology standards has been expanded to start leading research on the 6G network,” an unnamed Samsung official told the outlet.  Given that 5G — at least the consumer-ready portion of it — is still in its infancy, most people (except a certain president) are probably wondering what does 6G stand for at this point, and the answer is: not much. It's a probable name for cellular network tech that comes after 5G, but it's very early in its development, and it probably won't turn into anything sold for at least a couple more years.  On its Samsung Research website, Samsung doesn't say much about 6G. "Already in Europe, China, and the United States, there are open discussions on the need for research on 6G, the next generation after 5G, and the first research projects are already underway across the globe," the website states.  Unsurprisingly, The Korea Herald's report is thin on details as well, besides saying that the new research center will also work on artificial intelligence and robotics.

2017-04-10 00:00:00

A man opened fire Monday inside his wife's classroom in San Bernardino, California, killing her and an 8-year-old boy before turning the gun on himself, police said. A second student, identified as a 9-year-old boy, was also injured inside the North Park Elementary classroom, but in stable condition. The class was for students with learning disabilities, officials said. Police said 53-year-old Cedric Anderson quickly opened fire, fatally hitting his estranged wife, Karen Smith. Jonathan Martinez, the student who died in the attack, and the other, injured student were standing behind Smith when they were struck by gunfire, police added. A GoFundMe page has been set up to help Jonathan's family. “He came in in a very, very quick manner and quickly, upon entering the classroom, started shooting,” San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said. Anderson reloaded his .357 revolver, which was found next to his body, once during the attack, Burguan said. The firearm was last sold in 1979 in Michigan, police Lt. Mike Madden told BuzzFeed News. Investigators are working to track how Anderson obtained the weapon. "We don't know how he came to own or have it," Madden said, adding that Anderson was legally allowed to own a firearm because he had not been convicted of a felony. Cedric Anderson and his wife, Karen Smith. Anderson had a criminal history that included weapons charges, domestic violence, and possible gun violations. He was also charged with battery, but not convicted. The domestic violence incidents in Anderson's criminal record preceded their marriage, Burguan said. Smith, also 53, and Anderson were estranged after a short marriage that lasted a few months, police said. The couple separated over a month ago and Anderson had threatened his wife when she moved out, police said Tuesday. "It appears that he had been making efforts to contact her and to have her come back home and she was resistant to that," the police chief told reporters Tuesday. "And I don't know if that just reached a boiling point, or what that was. Nor do we know exactly why he chose to do this at the school." Police do not know what provoked Anderson to attack or why he chose the elementary school, Madden said. "She was extremely private and never shared anything with her coworkers," he added. "No one really knew there was a problem until after she left." Smith had recently moved in with one of her adult children in March after Anderson accused her of cheating, just three months after the two married, Madden said. Her daughter told police that she and her siblings were just starting to learn there were issues. "He had made indications that he would want to cause her harm, but she didn't take them seriously and thought it was him trying to get attention," Madden said. "He had not previously threatened to shoot her." Camilo Rocha, left, comforts his daughter, Serina, a 11-year-old student at North Park Elementary School. A 9-year-old girl who was in the classroom said she saw her friend and teacher get shot. "He just shot everywhere," she said. "I went under the table and then I just saw my teacher ran out so I just ran out...my friend and my teacher they got shot." Maria Garcia, a spokeswoman for the San Bernardino City Unified School District, said they received a report of an active shooter at about 10:28 a.m. About 500 students attend North Park Elementary. Police arrived minutes later as officials locked down the campus. A total of about 150 police officers responded to the shooting. Garcia said there are no campus police at the district's elementary schools. They do have unarmed security at the middle schools and uniformed police at high schools. Garcia told BuzzFeed News Anderson followed the "exact protocols" anyone would have to go through in order to get into the school. He signed in with the front desk and provided a photo ID. "I believe what he said is he was bringing something to his wife...Nothing from this morning set off any alarms," Garcia said. "Stuff like this doesn't happen. The city of San Bernardino has issues with crime, but the majority of the crime doesn't touch the inside of our schools." In response to the mass shooting that left 14 people dead and 22 injured on Dec. 2, 2015, in San Bernardino, the school district underwent mandatory emergency response training to teach employees how to respond to incidents like a shooting, Garcia said. "Of course, incidents like this are going to force us to go back to the drawing board to look at practices and processes," Garcia said. "We are going to make sure that our students and staff are taken care of beyond this week, beyond this month." School staff greet students at Cajon High School. The mother of a fifth-grader told ABC7 she was shopping when news broke about the shooting and frantically called police to get information. She was later notified through an app that her son was safe. “I just want to hold him,” she said.

2018-01-05

Boston has recorded its highest tide in nearly a century on the heels of this week's snowstorm. The Boston office of the National Weather Service said the city reached the record in a tweet sent Friday: This tide is the highest in the area the weather service has seen since it began keeping records in 1921. The tide has already contributed to icy flooding across the city. For example, this tweet from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Transit Police shows water gushing down the stairs of one of Boston's underground rail stations. "I think what to take away from this is how unprecedented it is," said Benjamin Sipprell, a meteorologist with the weather service in Boston. The new record edges out the one set during the Blizzard of '78, another time when a winter storm flooded the streets of Boston. Apart from beating the record, though, there is something else about this storm that makes it so unique: it happened so quickly. In the case of the 1978 blizzard, it took several tide cycles over days for the highest tide levels to develop, Sipprell said. In contrast. this week's record was set in a single tidal cycle. This was partly due to the rapidly dropping pressure of the storm, which made it intensify rapidly, and the fact that there had been a "supermoon," or a moon at perigee, or its closest point to Earth. Full moons tend to intensify tides, and have an even greater impact when the moon is at perigee. This is what sent waves of ice and water into Boston's days before temperatures are expected to fall below zero. "I think we are still trying to grasp the magnitude of what happened yesterday," Sipprell said, referring to Thursday. "This is a storm that should be remembered."

2018-02-26 19:17:16

LOS ANGELES — Two weeks ago, the embattled Weinstein Company looked like it had finally found a way forward. An investor group had emerged with a plan to buy 90 percent of the studio’s assets, including rights to “Project Runway” and a 277-film library. The new company would be primarily led by women. For the Weinstein Company, crippled in wake of sexual misconduct allegations against its co-owner Harvey Weinstein, the offer was the only way to keep the studio intact and its 150 employees working. Other potential buyers only wanted to cherry-pick properties, and the studio was nearly out of money to keep running. But the Weinstein Company’s board — or at least the three men remaining on it — said late Sunday that the sale talks, which had been teetering since a lawsuit had been filed this month by the New York State attorney general, had fallen apart. By Monday, finger-pointing over who was to blame had begun. And the studio’s future seemed to be a court-directed sale or liquidation, with assets sold off in bankruptcy proceedings like scrap from a wrecked car. “There’s nothing pretty about this,” said Larry Hutcher, a corporate lawyer at Davidoff Hutcher & Citron in New York who has been following the Weinstein Company’s struggles. “It’s likely going to be a free-for-all that stretches on for months.” Since October, when the Weinstein Company began to implode after reports in The New York Times and The New Yorker revealed decades of sexual harassment allegations against Mr. Weinstein, very little has gone as expected. At one point, two female-led investor groups were competing to buy the assets, with one intending to give profits to organizations focused on ending harassment, sexual abuse and discrimination. So there is always the possibility of another twist. The Weinstein Company has yet to file for bankruptcy — it said on Sunday that a filing would happen “over the coming days” — leaving open the possibility, however unlikely, that the two sides could come to an agreement. Before the deal fell apart, the investor group had offered to pay roughly $275 million for the Weinstein Company, plus the assumption of $225 million in debt. Leading the effort was Maria Contreras-Sweet, who ran the Small Business Administration under President Barack Obama. Backers included Ron Burkle, the billionaire investor, and Lantern Capital, a Texas private equity firm. “It appears that this transaction has now ended,” Ms. Contreras-Sweet said in a statement on Monday, adding that the Weinstein Company’s move had “surprised” her. “While our efforts did not materialize as we had hoped, I am grateful for my investors who saw the compelling value of a women-led board.” The Weinstein Company declined to comment. In announcing its bankruptcy plans on Sunday, the company’s board said in a statement, “While we recognize that this is an extremely unfortunate outcome for our employees, our creditors and any victims, the board has no choice.” The studio also made public a sharply worded letter that it sent to Ms. Contreras-Sweet and Mr. Burkle on Sunday that blamed her for failing to “keep your promises” about interim funding. It was in November when Ms. Contreras-Sweet first sent a letter to the board outlining her proposal. “I will be chairwoman of a majority-female board of directors,” she wrote. “Women will be significant investors in the new company and control its voting stock.” She also proposed creating a fund for victims and establishing a mediation process for reaching settlements. After failing to find other buyers who would keep the studio intact — Lionsgate, Shamrock Capital Advisors, Killer Content and the Qatari company beIN Media Group were among those considering various pieces — the board entered into exclusive negotiations with Ms. Contreras-Sweet’s group in late January. Most of the studio’s all-male board had quit in early October. Those who remained were Mr. Weinstein’s younger brother, Bob Weinstein; Tarak Ben Ammar, a Franco-Tunisian financier and film producer; and Lance Maerov, an executive at the advertising giant WPP Group. By Feb. 10, a Saturday, the two sides were finalizing a deal. The Weinstein brothers, who jointly own about 42 percent of the company, would receive no cash from the sale. Other equity holders would also be wiped out. Bob Weinstein, who had been running the studio since the firing of Harvey Weinstein in October, would step down. According to two people briefed on the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private process, the Weinstein Company and Ms. Contreras-Sweet’s group were set to formalize the agreement that coming Monday. Then came a curveball. In a phone call on the evening of Feb. 10, two lawyers who work for Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, told Ms. Contreras-Sweet that they had reviewed the proposed deal and wanted to discuss three major concerns, according to the people briefed on the talks. Those were adequate compensation for victims, protections for the studio’s remaining employees and no financial rewards for studio executives who enabled or perpetuated Mr. Weinstein’s misconduct. (Mr. Weinstein has denied ever engaging in “non-consensual sex.”) Ms. Contreras-Sweet said she believed the proposal addressed those points, but declined to have a substantive conversation. On Sunday, Feb. 11, Mr. Schneiderman, frustrated by a continued lack of responsiveness from the investor group to his queries, filed a lawsuit against the studio and the Weinstein brothers alleging that they repeatedly violated state and city laws barring gender discrimination, sexual harassment and coercion. And he held a news conference the next morning in which he publicly stated his three requirements for a deal. “As of yesterday, there was no deal that would have met these standards,” he said. In particular, he said, “there was no victim compensation fund.” By the end of that week, Mr. Schneiderman had started to get what he wanted. The Weinstein Company, for instance, fired its president, David Glasser, on Feb. 16. Mr. Glasser had been expected to run the new studio; Mr. Schneiderman had pointed to him as one of the managers who perpetuated Mr. Weinstein’s behavior. Ms. Contreras-Sweet and Mr. Burkle also met with Mr. Schneiderman and discussed plans to create a full-fledged victim compensation fund, ultimately earmarking up to $90 million. But the Weinstein Company emailed a letter to the investor group on Sunday saying the deal was dead. “Over the past two weeks, we had very productive discussions with both parties,” Eric Soufer, Mr. Schneiderman’s director of communications and senior counsel, said in a statement on Monday. “We are disappointed that despite a clear path forward on those issues — including the buyer’s commitment to dedicate up to $90 million to victim compensation and implement gold-plated H.R. policies — the parties were unable to resolve their financial differences.” Mr. Soufer added, “We will continue to pursue justice for victims in the event of the company’s bankruptcy.” Bankruptcy would push the pause button on the many lawsuits, some of which predate the harassment revelations, that are pending against the company. “Think of it like musical chairs,” said Jack Tracy, head of legal analysis for Debtwire, a distressed debt research firm. “The music stops and then a judge puts everyone in their chairs one by one.” (Lawsuits can continue against Mr. Weinstein personally unless he makes his own bankruptcy filing.) The Weinstein Company could pursue a Chapter 7 filing, which involves the appointment of an independent trustee to run a liquidation. Filing for Chapter 11 is perhaps more likely, because it would allow the studio more control over the sale of assets. “The important thing in the case of this particular company,” Mr. Tracy said, “is that bankruptcy allows assets to be sold free of liability.”

2016-05-18

May 18 (Reuters) - Rainbow Tours SA : * Said on Tuesday that members of its management, Tomasz Czapla, Remigiusz Talarek and Grzegorz Baszczynski transferred some of the company’s shares to their affiliated units * Tomasz Czapla transferred a 11.07 pct stake to TCZ Holding Sp. z o.o., and currently holds 2.61 pct stake in Rainbow Tours * Remigiusz Talarek transferred a 11.30 pct stake to Elephant Capital Sp. z o.o., and currently holds 2.69 pct stake in Rainbow Tours * Grzegorz Baszczynski transferred a 12.75 pct stake to FLYOO Sp. z o.o. and currently holds 3.0 pct stake in Rainbow Tours * Tomasz Czapla and Remigiusz Talarek are Rainbow Tours’s vice chairmen of the management board, and Grzegorz Baszczynski is the company’s CEO Source text for Eikon:,, ,,,, ,,,, Further company coverage: Gdynia Newsroom

2019-04-12

(Adds oil settlement prices) * Strong JPM earnings help bank stocks, risk appetite * Chinese data eases world economic growth concerns * Oil gains in best run in more than three years * Euro jumps on chatter about Japanese demand * Asian stock markets: https://tmsnrt.rs/2zpUAr4 NEW YORK, April 12 (Reuters) - Global stocks rose on Friday after JP Morgan's results kicked off the U.S. corporate earnings season in style, while signs of stabilization in China's economy also helped riskier assets amid talk that the growth outlook worldwide is better than thought. Chinese data showed exports rebounded in March, lifting U.S. and euro zone bond yields to three-week highs and helping offset weaker imports and reports of another cut to German growth forecasts. Investors are looking for signs of a Chinese economic recovery to temper global growth worries, especially after the International Monetary Fund this week downgraded its 2019 world economic outlook for the third time. China's trade results, as well as credit data, have helped boost risk appetite and reinforce the stabilization thesis, which should have spill-over effects for the global economy, said Candice Bangsund, a portfolio manager with the global asset allocation team at Fiera Capital in Montreal. "The whole China situation really appears to be gaining some ground," Bangsund said. "We saw a very impressive rebound in exports; this of course is helping alleviate fears of a hard landing." MSCI's gauge of equity market performance in 47 countries gained 0.37%, while the EURO STOXX 50 index rose 0.31%. JPMorgan 's earnings easily beat analyst estimates, easing fears that slowing economic growth could weigh on its results. Its shares rose 4.2% and led a broad rally in bank stocks, with the KBW banking index gaining 1.76%. Regional lenders in Europe, including StanChart, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas and Credit Suisse also rallied on JPM's results, taking the European bank index up 1.9 percent to a five-month high. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 223.46 points, or 0.85%, to 26,366.51. The S&P 500 gained 15.24 points, or 0.53%, to 2,903.56 and the Nasdaq Composite added 29.90 points, or 0.38%, to 7,977.26. The euro gained despite the German growth concerns. Dealers were gearing up for demand from Japan as Mitsubishi UFJ Financial closed in on its multi-billion-euro acquisition of DZ Bank's aviation-finance business. The dollar index fell 0.24%, with the euro up 0.42% to $1.1297. The Japanese yen weakened 0.32% versus the greenback at 112.05 per dollar. Euro zone and U.S. government debt yields rose after the rebound in Chinese exports. Yields on Germany's 10-year government bond crossed into positive territory, to 0.058%. Benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury notes fell 15/32 in price to push up their yield to 2.5579%. CRUDE OIL'S BIG 2019 START Oil provided the big milestones. Brent was at $71.40 a barrel, having broken back through the $70 threshold this week, and U.S. WTI was heading for a sixth straight week of gains for the first time since early 2016. Involuntary supply cuts in Venezuela, Libya and Iran have supported perceptions of a tightening market, already constrained by production cuts from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies. Brent crude oil futures settled up 72 cents at $71.55 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate crude futures , the U.S. benchmark, rose 31 cents to settle at $63.89. Commodities have had the best first-quarter start ever, Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts said, calling the annualized returns they are tracking the strongest in the past 100 years. Taking advantage of strong prices and subdued valuations for oil producers, Chevron said it will buy Anadarko Petroleum Corp for $33 billion in cash and stock. Gold steadied en route to its first weekly gain in three weeks as the dollar weakened, although the metal's advances were capped by stronger equities. Gold crept higher after falling more than 1% on Thursday to break below $1,300 following solid U.S. data. Spot gold traded at $1,292.41 per ounce. (Reporting by Herbert Lash; Editing by Dan Grebler and Cynthia Osterman)

2019-07-04 00:00:00

* Metro says talks with Redos consortium are progressing well * Interest comes as Metro faces its own takeover offer (Updates with Metro statement) BERLIN, July 4 (Reuters) - A consortium consisting of property investor X+Bricks and SCP Group said on Thursday that it had made a beefed-up offer to Metro to acquire the German wholesaler’s loss-making Real hypermarkets division. The intensified interest from the consortium comes as Metro itself faces a takeover offer from prominent Czech and Slovak investors that values the firm at 5.8 billion euros. The X+Bricks consortium said it was now offering total cash proceeds of significantly more than 500 million euros ($563.85 million). Metro responded in a statement that it had received the offer but that it favoured a deal for the unit that is already in the works with another consortium led by real estate investor Redos. The two parties are in exclusive talks. Those talks were going well, Metro said, adding that such a deal was in the best interests of shareholders, Real and Real’s employees. Metro’s statement echoed the sentiments expressed by Redos’s chief earlier in the day. $1 = 0.8868 euros Reporting by Michelle Martin Editing by Arno Schuetze and Thomas Escritt

2017-01-07

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2017-11-26 14:27:48

Thousands of Indian sellers have shipped bedding, jewelry, kitchenware and clothing to Amazon warehouses to serve bargain-hunting Americans. Workers at a factory in Jaipur, India, making bedsheets for The Boho Street, an Indian company that sells its products on Amazon.CreditCreditRebecca Conway for The New York Times MUMBAI, India — Americans shopping on Amazon.com this holiday season may find that the best deals for popular gifts like leather shoes and luxury bedding are coming from an unexpected source: Indian merchants. Amazon, always on the lookout for ways to lower prices, has been aggressively recruiting Indian vendors to sell their goods directly on the e-commerce giant’s American site. At least 27,000 Indian sellers have signed up since Amazon began the outreach two years ago. They range from giants like the Tata Group, a conglomerate that hawks its Titan watch line on the site, to smaller firms like The Boho Street, a peddler of vegan tapestries, incense and handcrafted copper mugs. The result is lower prices for consumers because selling foreign goods through the e-commerce giant cuts out some of the usual costs of a traditional importer. But it is also beneficial to Amazon, which gets to add to its enormous product lineup and charge sellers hefty fees. For Indian merchants like Abhishek Middha, founder of The Boho Street, Amazon provides almost turnkey access to the American market. “Amazon handles everything in the U.S., from shipping to customer handling, so we can focus on making the best quality products and adding more products to our catalog,” he said. Although Mr. Middha used to sell on other marketplaces like Etsy, he switched almost entirely to Amazon two years ago because of its vast scale and suite of services. Last year, his sales on Cyber Monday spiked to four times the usual level, helping to propel his annual revenue to $1.9 million. On Black Friday this year, his sales tripled compared with the previous day. “Amazon taught us how to create a brand,” he said. The growth of Amazon’s Indian global seller program shows how sophisticated the Seattle retailer’s strategy has become. The company operates India’s second-largest e-commerce site, Amazon.in, which caters to the country’s growing base of online consumers. But Amazon also sees India as a source of cheap and high-quality products that can be sold on its American site, especially in crucial categories like apparel, to help it take market share from competitors like Walmart. Abhijit Kamra, who heads Amazon’s global selling program in India, said that Americans already buy many products that are made in India, such as cotton towels. “What we are trying to do is compress the global supply chain and bring sellers and customers closer,” he said in a phone interview. Some of the 75 million Indian products on the main Amazon.com site, such as saris, tend to attract customers of Indian heritage. But other categories, like jewelry and health products, have wider appeal, Mr. Kamra said. Amazon has listed many of its Indian products on a special page, Amazon.com/India, to help customers in the United States find them. For the holiday selling season that kicked off with Black Friday, the company spent months helping sellers prepare by stockpiling goods in the United States and programming special “lightning deals” to generate shopper interest. In some cases, the company even lent sellers money for inventory. The India program is quite lucrative for Amazon’s bottom line. A merchant who chooses the full array of Amazon services, including buying advertising and contracting with the company to store and deliver the products from Amazon’s American warehouses, typically hands over about one-third of the item’s sale price in fees and commissions. These third-party sellers are crucial to Amazon’s business, said Aaron Cheris, head of the Americas retail practice at Bain, a global management consulting firm. “They make more money on their third-party stuff than on the stuff they sell themselves,” he said in a phone interview. Amazon says that more than half of the units sold on its shopping sites come from such outside sellers. To attract customers on a crowded site like Amazon.com, it helps to have a niche. For Krishna Murari, the founder of Rajlinen, that niche is luxury cotton bedsheets for the odd-size beds in recreational vehicles. “I have never seen an R.V.,” said Mr. Murari, a former electronics engineer. But he learned about the specialty sheets from an American company that sells custom mattresses, and then studied images of camper mattresses. Now his factory in Indore, in central India, sells more than 10,000 R.V. bed sets per year in the United States, many of them custom sewn. Mr. Murari said buyers have little interest in camper sheets until June or July, so for the holidays, he is focusing on high thread-count percale sheets for regular beds. Mr. Murari often imitates designs sold by big American retailers, but tried to undercut them on price, selling his versions for about $30 a set, slightly below Target’s prices and less than half of Bed Bath & Beyond’s prices for similar items. At the start of the holiday shopping season, Rajlinen had about 42,000 sheet sets sitting in Amazon warehouses across the United States, waiting for orders to come in. Mr. Murari said his profit margin was low and he did not intend to offer big discounts over the weekend or on Cyber Monday, unlike many American retailers. His primary goal was to bring in enough revenue to keep his 115 workers employed. While Amazon.com has sellers hailing from many countries, Mr. Cheris said that India and China are the two most important places for Amazon to recruit new merchants, since both nations are sources of cheap manufactured goods. Unlike China, where local companies dominate e-commerce, India is also a huge domestic market for Amazon. Although most of India’s commerce is conducted offline, Indians are coming onto the internet at a rapid clip through their smartphones. Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, views India and its 1.3 billion residents as vital to his company’s future, and he has vowed to spend at least $5 billion building up his India operations. Flipkart, the top e-commerce site in India by volume, has pushed the central government to pass policies to protect local internet companies from unfair competition by foreign companies willing to lose lots of money. By promoting Indian exports, a top priority of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Amazon is positioning itself as a good corporate citizen. The Indian merchants selling on Amazon.com find their local site, Amazon.in, to be a less appealing marketplace. With a per-capita income of $1,600 a year, most Indians are unwilling to pay anything close to the prices that sellers can command in the United States. Raja Rajan, head of Boston Creative Company in Coimbatore in south India, has done well selling $13 engraved spoons and $60 folded book art on Amazon.com. He recently began selling the spoons on Amazon’s Indian site, too. In the first six days, Mr. Rajan said in a phone interview, he did not have even one sale. Perhaps that was because Indians know how cheap such spoons are to produce. Mr. Rajan said his profit margin is about $8 a spoon — rich enough to allow him to slash prices on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and see what happens. “We are going to cut the price in half,” he said. “I just want to try it.” An earlier version of this article misidentified the company that sells Titan watches on Amazon. It is the Tata Group, not Reliance Industries. It also misstated the number of Indian products on Amazon.com. It is 75 million, not 17 million.