Datasets:

hugosousa

/

professor_heideltime_en

like 0

2016-11-16

000000113309

LONDON (Reuters) - The boss of Rolls-Royce (RR.L) wants to speed up change at the British engine maker, which is battling to recover from a string of profit warnings, saying more needed to be done to increase the group’s resilience in the face of uncertain conditions. The British company, which makes engines for fighter jets, commercial aircraft, ships and nuclear submarines, is one year into a program to cut costs and simplify operations after a slowdown in several markets hit profits. Chief Executive Warren East said cost savings would be towards the top of his target range, but he was not complacent. “I’m restless,” he told investors on Thursday. “I’m not happy with the rate of progress we are making.” Some analysts say the group has a mountain to climb, having made just 15 percent of a consensus full-year profit forecast of 686 million pounds ($854 million) in the first half of the year. Broker Investec says the group faces both structural and strategic challenges: the wide-body market it supplies with engines is shrinking, the commercial aero engine aftermarket is changing to its detriment and a diversified industrial strategy continues to weigh on performance. Rolls-Royce shares, which have recovered from a February low of 488.8 pence, closed down 2.1 percent at 738.5 pence. One analyst, who declined to be named, said the company’s cautious outlook, which included words like “challenging and mixed”, had unnerved investors. Rolls-Royce said demand for extra wide-body civil aircraft engines was strong, but there was further weakening in business aviation and no sign of recovery in offshore oil and gas markets and in marine, where the order book remained “very weak”. But East said he remained comfortable that profit and free cash flow expectations remained achievable. Rolls-Royce said it now expected cost savings to be at the top end of a 150-200 million pound forecast range. East has cut 20 percent of group management and accelerated the manufacturing process. For example, the firm is assembling a Trent 100 engine 27 percent quicker than a year ago, he said. He said his team were starting to look beyond fixing the nuts and bolts towards longer-term strategy, where there were new technology opportunities, for example in electric engines. “During 2017 there might be some output from starting to look more seriously at some of the strategic stuff, but I still expect a broad portfolio of different market applications,” he told reporters. Rolls-Royce also highlighted a change in its accounting procedures to the IFRS-15 standard, designed to make the underlying performance of the business clearer. “It doesn’t affect the profitability of any contract, it is simply pushing back the timing of when we recognize that profit,” finance chief David Smith said. “The new accounting standards do not affect our cash position in any way.” Under the rules, due to be brought in 2018, Rolls-Royce, which makes most of its money from maintenance rather than at the point of sale, will have to wait until it provides servicing before it can book more revenue and profit from long-term deals. Broker Hargreaves Lansdown said when aftermarket revenues were booked upfront, much of the cash never materialized because some customers retired aircraft rather than having them serviced. “The new system should mean greater clarity,” it said. Rolls-Royce said its 2015 civil aviation operating profit would have been 900 million pounds lower under the new rules. Rolls-Royce has not given a specific profit forecast for this year, other than saying it would take a 650 million pound hit due to weaker demand and other factors. But Smith said cash flow from its civil aircraft business - its biggest - was improving. “By implication we expect to see stronger cash flow for 2017, so something around or above break even next year for free cash flow is absolutely what we targeting,” he said. Additional reporting by Tim Hepher; editing by Kate Holton, Mark Potter and Jane Merriman

2019-04-16

000000058766

The shocking number of horse deaths — 23 — since late December at the storied Santa Anita racetrack outside Los Angeles has once again exposed serious safety and welfare concerns in the racing industry. It’s still unclear what factors, including a prolonged period of heavy rain, led to this series of catastrophic breakdowns; necropsies and an investigation might provide answers. Regardless, it appears that whatever checks and oversight procedures were in place failed to protect these equine athletes. Recently, Santa Anita Park set an important precedent by announcing that it would phase out the use of drugs on race days. Now, the rest of the industry needs to stop dragging its feet. Arguably, the most pressing problem that plagues horse racing — and one that has tarnished public perception of the sport — is the continued reliance on drugs to enhance performance, mask pain and push unsound horses to compete past their limit. A 2015 survey found that 90 percent of Americans support efforts to consistently regulate the use of medications and performance-enhancing drugs for racehorses. The news out of Santa Anita is unusual given the spike in fatalities over a short time, yet hundreds of racehorses die on the track each year in the United States. Fortunately, reforms could be on the way. Reps. Andy BarrAndy Hale BarrMcConnell campaign criticized for tombstone with challenger's name McConnnell launches statewide attack ad against Democratic Senate challenger Kentucky Democrat announces challenge to GOP Rep. Andy Barr MORE (R-Ky.) and Paul TonkoPaul David TonkoHouse Democrats push automakers to rebuff Trump, join California's fuel efficiency deal Overnight Energy: Democrats seek help in appealing to conservatives on climate | Whistleblowers say Interior sidelined scientists | Automakers strike fuel efficiency deal with California in rebuff to Trump Interior whistleblowers say agency has sidelined scientists under Trump MORE (D-N.Y.) — co-chairmen of the Congressional Horse Caucus — recently introduced the bipartisan Horseracing Integrity Act (H.R. 1754) to tackle some of the sport’s most glaring problems. The bill would create an independent anti-doping authority that would set uniform national standards, testing procedures and penalties for the racing industry, replacing the patchwork and wildly inconsistent regulatory structures that currently exist among 38 jurisdictions. Moreover, the bill would prohibit race-day medications, aligning U.S. standards with those abroad.  A 2012 New York Times investigation found that the U.S. horse racing industry remains “mired in a culture of drugs and lax regulation and a fatal breakdown rate that remains far worse than in most of the world.” Not much has changed in the years since. It’s telling that while virtually all American racehorses are injected with medications on race day, this practice is banned in most other countries. The unfortunate reality is that administering a cocktail of drugs shortly before a race can hide injuries, pain, inflammation and other warning signs that precede catastrophic breakdowns.  Watching a horse break down on a track is a horrific sight. Yet, fatal injuries will persist as long as 1,000-pound animals are driven beyond what their bodies can reasonably sustain. While it’s unlikely that a perfect solution exists to satisfy all stakeholders, there is widespread agreement that the status quo is untenable. The Horseracing Integrity Act enjoys significant support among lawmakers (garnering 132 cosponsors last Congress) and within the racing industry. During a congressional hearing last year, The Jockey Club testified on the need for “an independent organization … to apply uniform rules, stringent testing, tough penalties, and effective enforcement.” Indeed, The Stronach Group, which owns the Santa Anita Park and is one of the world’s leading racetrack operators, has similarly endorsed the legislation, citing the need to raise standards that can directly improve the welfare and safety of the thousands of horses who race each year. The rash of deaths at Santa Anita has understandably provoked outrage at the senseless loss of so many horses in their prime. Seeing the dire consequences writ large should, if nothing else, build momentum to pass broadly supported legislation that would help the industry clean up its act. Joanna Grossman, Ph.D., is the equine protection manager for the Washington, D.C.-based Animal Welfare Institute. 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.

2016-03-30 00:00:00

000000003852

Jon Jones' first night behind bars in Albuquerque was a quiet one ... with officials telling TMZ Sports the UFC star was a "model inmate." Jones turned himself in to authorities Tuesday morning after a warrant was issued for his arrest for violating his probation. As we previously reported, Jon was on probation from his 2015 hit and run conviction and officials believe his drag racing incident with cops last week may qualify as a violation. We're told Jones is in a segregated cell at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Bernalillo County away from the general population because of his celebrity status. One official told us, "It's for his own protection." A jail source tells TMZ Sports, "From the moment he walked into the jail, everyone knew he was there. It got around fast. Everyone knows who he is because he was just here a few months ago to speak as part of his community service." As far as Jon's diet behind bars ... "he's on a standard 2,800 calorie plan." Jon will remain in jail until he faces a judge which could happen as early as Wednesday.

2019-08-13

000000004898

President TrumpDonald John TrumpFacebook releases audit on conservative bias claims Harry Reid: 'Decriminalizing border crossings is not something that should be at the top of the list' Recessions happen when presidents overlook key problems MORE has a problem with suburban voters — and it could have profound consequences for his chances of reelection next year. An NBC News analysis Monday noted that Trump has been “underwater” with suburban voters in five out of six NBC News–Wall Street Journal polls conducted this year. That finding comports with other surveys that show Trump performing poorly with some of the key voting blocs that populate the nation’s suburbs, notably white women and white college graduates.  Those dynamics make Trump’s path to reelection a steep one, experts say. “We are a long way off from November 2020, but my general sense is that it is going to be very tough for him to reverse the Democratic trends in the suburbs,” said Terry Madonna, a professor of public affairs and a polling expert at Franklin & Marshall College in the electorally crucial state of Pennsylvania. Trump won the Keystone State by about 44,000 votes in 2016 — less than 1 percentage point. He rolled up similarly narrow margins of victory in Michigan and Wisconsin, two other states that had been thought to form a reliably Democratic “blue wall.” The margins were so narrow that any shift in the suburbs could swing those states back into the Democratic column, even if Trump were to retain the enthusiasm of his base. Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said the movement in the suburbs means “there are a number of places where it will simply boost the Democratic share of the vote. In places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, that could be critical to offsetting the working class and rural vote [for Trump].” Most Republican strategists acknowledge the problem exists, but there are divergent opinions as to its cause. Some argue there had been a gradual move away from the GOP among suburban voters even before Trump rose to prominence. The consensus is that those voters, even if fiscally conservative, may have been put off by some of the more socially conservative views expressed by Republican candidates. The 2013 GOP “autopsy” report that followed former President Obama’s defeat of GOP nominee Mitt RomneyWillard (Mitt) Mitt RomneyA US-UK free trade agreement can hold the Kremlin to account Ex-CIA chief worries campaigns falling short on cybersecurity Overnight Defense: US, Russia tensions grow over nuclear arms | Highlights from Esper's Asia trip | Trump strikes neutral tone on Hong Kong protests | General orders ethics review of special forces MORE the previous year, for example, asserted that “the Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself. ... Devastatingly, we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.” Trump’s 2016 win — a shock to many within his own party — looked like a rebuke to such ideas and a validation of his “red-meat” appeal to the white working-class conservative base.  But as his reelection looms, some GOP strategists believe his style and combative approach are having a destructive effect on his chances, and on the broader electoral hopes of his party.  GOP strategist Liz Mair noted her own experience traveling to different states where “one of the things I notice a lot is that there is an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. People are tired. People feel like Donald Trump the reality TV star was fine when we had ‘The Apprentice’ one or two hours a week. But now it’s 24/7, week after week.” Mair added, based on anecdotal evidence, that in their day-to-day lives “a lot of suburban women feel they have quite a lot piled on, and they just don’t need the extra dose of daily drama” that Trump injects. Other Republicans worry about the impact of particular policies with moderate suburban voters.  Doug Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, asserted that the separation of parents from their children at the southern border was “viewed extremely negatively” by the voters in question. Trump loyalists say this is all unfair. They point to how wrong the conventional wisdom was in 2016, when the first-time candidate swept aside 16 more experienced rivals to win the GOP nomination, and then defeated Democratic nominee Hillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonThe exhaustion of Democrats' anti-Trump delusions Poll: Trump trails three Democrats by 10 points in Colorado Soft levels of support mark this year's Democratic primary MORE against the odds. The president and those close to him also believe that the strength of the economy will be a key asset with suburban voters as he seeks a second term. To be sure, much will also depend on whom the Democrats choose as their nominee.  But there is no real doubt that there are serious signs of erosion for Trump and his party in the suburbs. Exit polls in 2016 showed Trump winning suburban voters by 4 points over Clinton. In the 2018 midterm elections, those voters split evenly between Republicans and Democrats.  In 2016, Trump won white college graduates by 3 points — 48 percent to 45 percent. In 2018, that group went for Democrats over Republicans by 8 points, 53 percent to 45 percent. Clinton won white college-educated women by 7 points in 2016. Two years later in the midterms, her party expanded that advantage to 20 points.  “The evidence was crystal clear in 2018 that there was a significant shift in the suburbs,” Murray, the Monmouth University expert, asserted.  Trump allies argue that it will be different once his name is again on the ballot.  But the evidence to support that thesis is scant. In a Quinnipiac University poll conducted late last month, 57 percent of white college graduates said they would “definitely not” vote for Trump next year, while only 30 percent said they definitely would. A further 12 percent said they would “consider” voting from him.  In the most recent of the NBC News–Wall Street Journal polls, conducted last month, he was 3 points underwater with suburban voters as a whole.  Virtually no one expects Trump’s tone or political persona to change — love it or hate it. But that makes it difficult to see any plausible way he can drive up his numbers in the suburbs. His best chance, according to some GOP strategists, is to hope for an equally unpalatable Democratic opponent.  “A lot of this does depend on what the Democrats do. They have an infinite capacity to botch this,” said Mair. “They better be careful.” But one thing’s for sure: Virtually everyone is in agreement that the suburbs will be a crucial battleground.  “You just can’t rule out the pivotal role that the suburbs are likely to play,” said Madonna.  The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage, primarily focused on Donald Trump’s presidency. 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.

2017-03-22 00:00:00

000000082519

March 22 (Reuters) - Fun Yours Technology Co Ltd: * Says it will use undistributed profit to pay cash dividends of T$ 1.0 per share to shareholders for 2016 * To pay cash dividend of T$ 14.1 million in total * To use additional paid-in capital to distribute stock dividend worth T$ 1 for every one share * To distribute stock dividend of 1,408,400 shares in total Source text in Chinese: goo.gl/7Ekt0k Further company coverage: Beijing Headline News

2019-11-05 00:00:00

000000064617

The recent uprising in Chile is full of references to the beloved Negro Matapacos, who accompanied protestors for many years. As his legend spreads, so too do images of the good boy. Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads The streets of Santiago are once again alive with the spirit of revolution. For weeks now, working-class Chileans have occupied national monuments, blocked major intersections, and torched subway cars in protest of widespread inequality. They desire full reform  a request so long in the making that it is practically tradition. The country’s floundering political elite offer half measures while dispatching riot police and the military. Protestors stand their ground nonetheless, harnessing the raw energy of previous movements. The image of a black dog in a red bandana appears throughout the crowds and on social media, commemorating the bravery of a stray who once marched with rioters and defended them from authorities. This canine rebel, named Negro Matapacos (or “Black Cop-Killer”), gained popularity during the student demonstrations of 2011-2013. Illustrator Maldito Perrito recently adapted his likeness to advocate for metro fare evasion in the midst of the #EvasiónMasiva protests, sparked by a recent fare hike. In the image, which went viral on social media, Matapacos hops a turnstile while casting a mischievous sidelong glance, with the word EVADE written in bold lettering.

2017-12-13 00:00:00

000000056105

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) announced on the House floor Wednesday that he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Brooks said he will get surgery on Friday and plans to recover over the holidays. Earlier this year, Brooks lost the GOP Senate primary in Alabama, coming in third after Luther Strange and Roy Moore. Brooks said that loss may have saved his life. "Had I won... I would not have had a prostate biopsy. I would not now know about my 'high risk' prostate cancer that requires immediate surgery."

2018-01-24 10:17:00

000000109416

Have Amber Heard and Elon Musk decided to call off their split? Despite breaking up because of their increasingly busy schedules in August, the duo were spotted out together. On Monday night, Heard held hands with the Tesla founder as they left a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles. Musk, 46, kept things casual in a black t-shirt and jeans, while the 31-year-old actress covered up in a wide-brimmed hat, paired with a skirt that fell past her knees, blouse and jacket. “They’re definitely back together,” a source close to the couple tells PEOPLE. This isn’t the first time the former couple has reunited. A source also tells PEOPLE “they spent New Years together” — plus they were seen vacationing together in Chile at the end of December, enjoying dinner with friends who included Musk’s brother Kimbal. The restaurant they were dining at, El Taringa, posted a photo of the crew with the actress and Musk sitting side-by-side in the left-hand corner of the photo. Heard was looking down at the table while Musk made conversation with their fellow diners. Heard and Musk also made headlines a few days before Christmas when they were photographed sharing a kiss outside of a Los Angeles restaurant. Though the photos left fans speculating if the two had reignited their romance four months after splitting, a source close to Musk claimed the pair were just having a friendly visit. “Amber invited Elon to her favorite Texas-breakfast spot,” said Musk’s friend of HomeState restaurant, the eatery in Los Feliz, California. where the photos were taken. “They shared a quick kiss goodbye. They’re still just friends, not trying to get back together.”   Heard and Musk were first linked together in 2016 as each was weathering a public breakup: Heard and actor Johnny Depp finalized their divorce in January, while Musk filed for divorce from Westworld actress Talulah Riley in early 2015. The actress and the billionaire mogul seemed to confirm rumors when they stepped out together for the first time in public in April 2017 while visiting Australia. In August, they called it quits. However, they were spotted out together in Australia just days after news of their split emerged. “Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think,” Musk told Rolling Stone in a story published three months later. “I was really in love, and it hurt bad.” Musk also said that he “cannot be happy” without a girlfriend. “‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say,” he explained. “I don’t want to be alone.” Despite having a successful career, he said his life feels empty without someone to share it with. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me,” he added. “It’s not like I don’t know what that feels like: Being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there — and no one on the pillow next to you. F—. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?”

2016-06-29 00:00:00

000000086782

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Commodity Futures Trading Commission would have stronger policing powers over the derivatives market, along with a boosted budget, under legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress on Wednesday. The bill, introduced by Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Mark Warner in the Senate and Elijah Cummings in the House of Representatives, also would add new tasks to the regulator’s rulemaking agenda. “The only way to make sure that derivatives can never lead to a financial crisis and taxpayer bailouts again is to put in place clearer rules and stronger oversight,” Warren said in a statement. The bill likely will fizzle in the Republican-led Congress. It could also become part of this year’s election fights, as the relationship between Wall Street and Washington frequently moves to center stage in presidential and congressional campaigns. Democrats such as Warren, who is campaigning for her party’s presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton, regard the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law passed after the 2007-09 financial crisis as crucial for preventing another massive meltdown. That law greatly expanded the CFTC’s reach, as swaps and derivatives had played a key role in the breakdown of banks and other firms. They also seek further regulation, saying vulnerabilities persist in the financial system. The presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, real estate developer and television star Donald Trump wants to repeal Dodd-Frank. Many in the party say the law has gone too far, drying up liquidity and freezing capital. The proposed legislation “gives the CFTC a stable funding stream and the tools necessary to help deter future illegal acts by permitting penalties large enough to impact the bottom lines of even the largest financial firms,” Cummings said. The CFTC currently is funded through annual appropriations from Congress, unlike the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is backed by user fees and fines. CFTC Chair Timothy Massad has sought a change, saying millions of dollars more in funds would help the agency keep up with technology advancements in the markets it oversees and with “high-powered defense teams” in its enforcement cases. Republicans in Congress say the funding process keeps the agency accountable to elected leaders. The Democrats’ bill would move the CFTC to the same model as the SEC. It would also put certain foreign exchange swaps under CFTC jurisdiction, change how derivatives are treated in bankruptcy, require posting initial margin in inter-affiliate swaps, and require regulators to review derivatives clearinghouses. Reporting by Lisa Lambert; Editing by Bill Trott

2016-09-10 15:00:00

000000033238

If you came across a Woody doll that read "ANDY" on its foot, you'd probably try to reunite the toy with its owner despite their bittersweet yet emotionally necessary parting in Toy Story 3. But how about that copy of NHL 96 you picked up at a thrift store that had the name "CHRISTOPHER" scrawled along the label in black sharpie? Even if you thought of trying to contact the original owner, there's a lot of Christophers out there and a decent amount of them owned NHL 96. This is why a new non-profit in Japan is seeking to streamline the task. The Museum of the Preowned Games Collection hopes to reunite Japan's many vintage games with their childhood owners. Junji Seki, founder, director and chairman of the museum has had his fair share of lost games. He told Motherboard via email that someone stole his Famicom games when he was a teenager, copies of Load Runner and Donkey Kong Jr. plundered while he was at a parttime job. The idea for the used game database came during a trip in 2003 to San Diego, when he purchased an NES cartridge at a retro game store. It had someone's name on it. "When [I] noticed that foreigners write the name on the cartridges as well, I [sympathized] and woke up," Seki said. "The game cartridges with names written on them are worth [more] than new game cartridges in condition. As a retro game collector, I have to collect them." Vintage games are everywhere in Japan. You can go to specialty stores like Super Potato or Mandarake for the experience, but even common retail chains like Book-Off have decent selections at affordable prices. The density of Japanese cities created a kind of snare trap for retro wares, and the games many Japanese adults owned as kids may still be in circulation. Whether they want them back is a different question, but regardless the effort is, well, it's really cute. The museum's database so far seems pretty extensive. Images of cartridge labels and backs where many names are scrawled can be found by searching both the name of the game and the name written on the games. Other details like distinctive dings and tears are also noted. There are certain cases where names weren't written on them, but trademarks like stickers and creative labels make it clear that a specific kid once claimed ownership over Devil World. Seki produces videos for the influential video game magazine Famitsu, and said he will use the platform to broadcast news about these abandoned games. The museum is also receiving its fair share of local media attention, said Seki. Unfortunately, no one has made a claim to their own game so far, but the project is still in its infancy, and Seki claims that people are offering to donate parts of their own collection to this niche cause. Seki believes that sentimental value can be worth so much more than the video game inside the cartridge. If it was their first game, or they played it with an influential friend, or received it from a beloved relative, a piece of crap like Hudson Hawk might be greater than The Legend of Zelda. Assuming you find the right person.

2018-02-08 09:35:07

000000017563

WhatsApp has begun testing a new payments feature in India that will allow people to send money to other WhatsApp users, excluding merchant accounts. The feature is currently in beta, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans, but hasn’t been publicly announced because it’s not widely available at this time. The company has been  working on support for a payments feature for some time, which would take advantage of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) and include support by a number of Indian banks, including State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, and Axis Bank. Beta testers have now found that this functionality is live, with a large list of supported banks displayed in the WhatsApp user interface. Image credit: iPhoneHacks According to screenshots posted to Twitter and elsewhere, including this post from the blog iPhoneHacks, those who have gained access to the new functionality will see a payments feature appear in their WhatsApp Settings menu. CONFIRMED!!! #IOS #ANDROIDIf this option does not appear for you yet, please wait 😇😇 https://t.co/srAKgNdLzl — WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) February 8, 2018 pic.twitter.com/1GC6iSb5zV — Nagender Rao Savanth (@nagenderraos) February 8, 2018 Users must then configure the feature by first verifying their phone number via SMS and choosing a bank. The option to send a payment is then available from the main WhatsApp interface, in the same area where you can also share a photo, video, file, contact or location into your chat session. I got yesterday pic.twitter.com/oiQlNRQbBX — Nagender Rao Savanth (@nagenderraos) February 8, 2018 The Facebook-owned company had received approval from the Indian government to integrate UPI into its messaging service last July in order to implement payments, according to The Economic Times. The addition puts WhatsApp into competition with other messaging services that already support payments, including the recently launched Tez from Google and Tencent-backed Hike, for example, as well as digital wallet platform Paytm, which expanded into messaging in order to take on WhatsApp more directly. However, WhatsApp’s support for payments is highly anticipated because of the app’s huge popularity among Indian users. India is WhatsApp’s largest market with over 200 million users active daily users. In fact, it’s so heavily used in that country that it’s even led to issues as Indians grapple with the social norms involving daily messaging ranging from phones’ storage filling up with “good morning” messages, to drama over exiting family group chats. The potential for WhatsApp to dominate Indian P2P payments is strong, given that millions of people have come online in the region thanks to lower-cost data plans and cheap smartphones. The country even surpassed the U.S. for combined iOS and Android downloads for the first time in Q4 2017, according to App Annie, as smartphone adoption is surging. We understand that WhatsApp will let users know when P2P payments becomes more widely available in India, after the best testing phase completes. WhatsApp declined to comment on the launch.

2019-05-15

000000010907

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Declining output of cars and machinery led U.S. factory production to fall unexpectedly in April, a sign the economy is losing a step as a trade war with China intensifies. The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday manufacturing production fell 0.5 percent last month, the third decline in four months. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast manufacturing output would edge up 0.1 percent during the month. Motor vehicles and parts production dropped 2.6 percent in April. Inventories at U.S. businesses have swelled in recent months, with some trying to stock their shelves before new increases in tariffs on Chinese goods took hold. An inventory overhang in the automobile sector is weighing on production. Even excluding motor vehicles and parts, manufacturing output dropped 0.3 percent in April. Factories produced fewer pieces of machinery and electrical equipment like appliances, according to the Fed report. The outlook for the manufacturing sector, which accounts for about 12 percent of the economy, has also dimmed amid a global economic slowdown and as the stimulus from last year’s $1.5 trillion tax cut package diminishes. Overall industrial output, which includes utilities and mining production, dropped 0.5 percent in April. While utilities output fell, mining production rose 1.6 percent. Capacity utilization for the manufacturing sector, a measure of how fully firms are using their resources, slipped to 75.7 percent last month from 76.2 percent in March. Overall industrial capacity utilization fell to 77.9 percent last month, which was 1.9 percentage point below its 1972-2018 average. Officials at the Fed tend to look at capacity use measures for signals of how much “slack” remains in the economy — how far growth has room to run before it becomes inflationary. Reporting by Jason Lange Editing by Paul Simao

2019-04-04 00:00:00

000000012201

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Talks between Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank are proceeding well, a person with knowledge of the talks said on Thursday. The person was speaking on condition of anonymity after a news report that Unicredit was preparing a rival bid for Commerzbank. Reporting by Andreas Framke, Hans Seidensteucker and Tom Sims, editing by Riham Alkousaa; Editing by Kathrin Jones

2019-04-03

000000074844

ZURICH (Reuters) - Roche Holding said its effort to expand in gene therapy via the $4.3 billion takeover of Spark Therapeutics remained on track despite failing to get enough votes to clinch the deal and as U.S. regulators continued scrutinizing it. The Swiss company said it was extending its offer to May 2 from the original deadline of Wednesday, having received support from holders of only 29.4 percent of Spark shares. It needs a majority for its offer to go through. A spokesman said Roche remained confident the deal would be completed by the end of June. “All terms and conditions of the offer shall remain unchanged during the extended period,” Roche said in a statement on the $114.50 per share offer it announced in February. Roche also said a review of the acquisition by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the government agency which seeks to prevent anti-competitive practices, was taking more time than anticipated and its plans had had to be refiled. It did not give any further detail on the refiling but said it had been agreed with the FTC and with Spark. “The FTC review and clearance is required for the deal to be completed and needs more time,” a Roche spokesman said. “The deal is not in doubt at all and we expect it will be completed according to our guidance in the first half of 2019. There needs to be more than 50 percent of the shares to be tendered, but we believe our offer to be full and fair and it has been recommended by the board of Spark,” the spokesman added. Spark shares closed at $114.01 on Tuesday. Roche shares were down 0.3 percent in early trade. Gene therapies use specially engineered viruses to deliver genetic material into defective cells, in hopes of improving or potentially even curing an inherited condition. Roche offered more than twice the Philadelphia-based company’s closing price on Feb. 22 for a portfolio that includes a blindness treatment that has U.S. and European approval and other projects for hemophilia and neurodegenerative disorders such as Huntington’s disease. The offer came as rivals including Novartis also move into gene therapy, where treatments for rare, inherited diseases command some of the highest prices in medicine. Spark’s blindness therapy Luxturna for instance is priced at $850,000 per patient. The treatment had sales of $27 million in 2018. However Spark faces at least three lawsuits in the United States by shareholders challenging the sale, on grounds that it undervalues Spark’s stock and is unfair to shareholders. Roche on Wednesday declined to comment on the lawsuits. Roche Chief Executive Severin Schwan is interested in gene therapies to help compensate for patent losses on his $21 billion per year trio of cancer medicines Rituxan, Herceptin and Avastin, which are facing competition from cheaper copies. Spark, which also has product candidates that have shown promising early results in patients with hemophilia, reduced its net loss to $78.7 million in 2018, while revenue increased to $64.7 million. Editing by David Holmes

2016-03-28 00:00:00

000000089732

Pandora just pressed the shuffle button on its leadership. Tim Westergren, the founder who launched Pandora's online radio service in 2000, is taking over as CEO for the first time in 12 years as part of a broader executive shakeup announced Monday. Re-united and it feels so good — but not to Pandora investors.  Wall Street sent Pandora's stock down as much as 10% in the moments after the executive shuffle was announced. P data by YCharts The management move is a familiar one in the technology world.  Just in the last year, the founders of Twitter, Reddit, Zynga and HTC have all stepped back into the CEO spot. Though often billed as a triumphant return, it usually only occurs when the company is struggling with few other options.  Sure enough: Westergren's return comes at a precarious moment for the company. Pandora has seen increased competition from music-streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music; its losses are mounting as licensing and royalty costs grow; and there are lingering acquisition rumors this year. Westergren is now Pandora's third CEO in a little over three years.  The thinking, according to numerous industry insiders we've spoken with in recent months about this trend, is that the founder has enough moral authority and, ideally, a large enough financial stake to keep weary employees and critical investors at bay.  The dream, of course, is that these founders turnaround their businesses as Steve Jobs did in the late 1990s after returning to Apple.  The track record so far from this latest crop is more mixed.  Twitter's stock continues to hover around all-time lows, with plenty of speculation about its ability to survive.  HTC's revenue is still on the decline.  And Marc Pincus, the founder of Zynga, forfeited the CEO role again less than a year after taking it, doing little to turnaround the company beyond making layoffs.  With few exceptions, Amazon's Jeff Bezos chief among them, the executives best fit to launch a billion-dollar business are typically not thought to be the best fit to run that business once it matures. While Westergren helped build the iconic Internet radio service in the early 2000s — not unlike the character in the show "Silicon Valley," below, who put radio on the Internet — he only held the top role from 2002-2004. For most of Pandora's history, Westergren served as chief strategy officer.  via GIPHY In statements accompanying the announcement, Pandora executives played up Westergren's role as the founding visionary who laid the groundwork for what became a multi-billion dollar business. "As the original founder, Tim carries the vision for how Pandora can transform the music industry and he is uniquely able to connect with listeners, music makers and employees,” Jim Feuille, Pandora's chairman said in a statement. Sound familiar?  It's a growing trend in Silicon Valley: bring back the guy who had the idea for the company in the first place. Here's one of Twitter's board members explaining why founder Jack Dorsey was the best fit for the CEO job: “As the founder and inventor of the product, Jack has thought more about Twitter than anyone else." Never mind that Dorsey hadn't run a publicly traded company before and would be balancing a second CEO job at Square. Just being a founder apparently trumps all. Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

2016-01-03 00:00:00

000000010622

DJ Khaled just dropped a cool $3.8 mil on a waterfront mansion in Miami. Miami producer Khaled turned 40 this year, and what better way to celebrate than to get yourself a 6,600 sq. ft. mansion with an ocean-facing pool and a 45-foot boat dock with a jet ski lift. But Mr. DJ, does it have an elevator? Why yes, yes it does. It also has 7 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms, and pretty much every breathtaking view of the water you could hope for. Fresh off dropping an album in October and the opening of his 2nd Miami "FingaLicking" restaurant, Khaled is busy talking gratitude and never giving up on your dreams in his Tweets and Snapchats. By the looks of this house -- seems the DJ has got a direct line to something good.

2019-10-18 00:00:00

000000045675

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia’s energy ministry allocated 9.59 million kilolitres (KL) of unblended biodiesel for its mandatory biofuel program in 2020, a ministerial decree released on Friday showed. That is 45% higher compared with the 6.63 million KL allocation for this year. President Joko Widodo has proposed starting mandatory use of palm-based biodiesel with 30% bio-content in January, up from the current 20% content. Reporting by Wilda Asmarini; Writing by Fransiska Nangoy; Editing by Shri Navaratnam

2016-05-04

000000086631

At its NewFront presentation on Wednesday, Hulu confirmed reports that it will bring live TV to its subscribers in 2017. The content includes live sports, events and news. According to remarks made by Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins, this live programming would not be contingent on a user having access to a cable TV subscription. News that Hulu would be entering the skinny bundle world first appeared over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal. The Journal reported that Hulu was working with FX, Fox, ESPN, the Disney Channel and ABC on bringing live TV to users. And although Hopkins didn’t go into detail about what these live-TV bundles would look like — or how they'd would work — at least he confirmed the news. Hulu will be officially entering skinny bundle territory. By offering access to live TV, Hulu will be officially entering skinny bundle territory. Skinny bundles are offerings from different service providers that give users live or on-demand access to multiple channels at once, but at a rate that is often less expensive than cable. Dish’s Sling TV service helped kick off the trend, though skinny bundles are now available form other companies including Comcast, Sony and Verizon. Hopkins wouldn’t comment on the price of the bundle, though a report from The New York Times indicates executives feel $40 a month is about the right price point to offer live TV and on-demand content. Still, even without concrete details, experts agree this is big news. Forrester Research’s Jim Nail said, “The biggest outcome of this announcement will be increased consumer education, meaning more everyday TV-watchers will begin to understand there are alternatives to traditional cable services.” And although Nail isn’t convinced that skinny bundles have had as much of an impact as cord-cutting hype may lead one to believe, he still thinks that this is important. “The more likely consumers will begin to shift the way they think about their TV service and, eventually, make the move.” Saba Hamedy contributed to this report Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

2019-10-03 00:00:00

000000021983

BOSTON (Reuters) - The former co-chairman of the New York corporate law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher was sentenced on Thursday to one month in prison for his role in what prosecutors say is the largest college admissions scam uncovered in the United States. That is substantially less than the eight-month sentence federal prosecutors in Boston had sought for Gordon Caplan after he pleaded guilty to paying $75,000 to have a corrupt test proctor secretly correct his daughter’s answers on the ACT college entrance exam. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said Caplan, 52, was among the “least culpable” of the multiple parents charged in the vast investigation. Caplan told the judge he was “deeply ashamed” of his actions and for contributing to the broader perception that the U.S. college admissions system “is rigged for the rich.” He was also ordered to pay a $50,000 fine. So far, 52 people have been charged by prosecutors with participating in the scheme, in which wealthy parents conspired with a California college admissions consultant to use bribery and other forms of fraud to secure the admission of their children to top schools. “This was not a victimless crime,” Caplan said. “The real victims of this crime are the kids and parents who played by the rules of the college admissions process.” William “Rick” Singer, the consultant, pleaded guilty in March to charges that he facilitated cheating on college entrance exams and helped bribe sports coaches at prominent universities, such as the University of Southern California and Yale, to present his clients’ children as fake athletic recruits. The 35 parents charged include executives and celebrities, such as “Desperate Housewives” star Felicity Huffman, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced last month to 14 days in prison, and “Full House” actress Lori Loughlin, who is awaiting trial. Prosecutors said Caplan in 2018 arranged through Singer to have an associate pose as an ACT proctor for his daughter’s exam to correct her answers at a test center Singer controlled through bribery. “Despite having resources to provide his daughter all legal means for success, Gordon Caplan insisted on buying her the one thing that was not for sale: a perfect ACT score,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Rosen said in court. The proctor was Mark Riddell, a former counselor at a Florida private school who pleaded guilty in April to secretly taking SAT and ACT college entrance exams in place of Singer’s clients’ children or correcting their answers. Caplan’s lawyer, Joshua Levy, stressed that his client’s daughter knew nothing about the fraud. Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Grant McCool and Bill Berkrot

2019-06-05 00:00:00

000000050728

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Lennart Johansson, a Swede who presided over European soccer for 17 years as its new Champions League turned into a global commercial juggernaut, has died after a short illness aged 89, Sweden’s Football Association said on Wednesday. Johansson, president of European football association UEFA from 1990 to 2007, was a driving force behind the formation of the Champions League, giving the continent’s top club competition a new identity, a catchy anthem and worldwide reach. His reign saw huge revenue streams flow into the continent’s big clubs, turning Manchester United, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and others into multi-billion dollar enterprises, and their players into global megastars. “World football will be always be grateful to him for all he has achieved for the beautiful game,” UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin said in a statement. The Swedish FA said Swedish football was in mourning. Johansson took over the top job in European football at a turbulent time when money from television coverage was flooding into the sport and players gained complete freedom to move between countries and clubs in Europe. “It was not a given that UEFA would be successful in meeting all these dramatic changes,” the Swedish FA said. “The Champions League became an enormous success, but Lennart Johansson’s other major achievement was finding a fragile balance between the big clubs’ demands and the needs of the broader football family.” Johansson ran against Swiss Sepp Blatter to head football’s world governing body FIFA in an acrimonious vote in 1998 but lost. Blatter, who led FIFA for 17 years, is now serving a six-year ban from football for unethical conduct. The men remained rivals. The Swedish FA quoted Johansson as saying: “It is my 20-year fight with Blatter that people like.” Blatter’s successor at FIFA, Gianni Infantino, who worked earlier in his career under Johansson at UEFA, called the Swede “a friend and an invaluable source of wisdom and inspiration”. “Lennart has always been a role model of professionalism and, more importantly, of humanity,” he said. In 2007, Johansson stepped down as UEFA president after being beaten in an election by former France international Michel Platini. Johansson was given the title honorary president, a role which he took seriously, even attending meetings in his wheelchair. Johansson was a lifelong supporter and honorary president of Stockholm club AIK. Reporting by Simon Johnson; Editing by Peter Graff

2019-12-06 00:00:00

000000023321

RIGA, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Latvia’s financial watchdog said on Friday it had fined Baltic International Bank 1.56 million euros ($1.72 million) for lax anti-money laundering controls. The Financial and Capital Market Commission (FCMC) said in a statement that a review of the country’s eighth-biggest bank had shown it did not have an adequate control system for the prevention of money laundering and terrorism financing. The bank, which has mainly been serving non-resident clients but now says it is shifting towards investment banking in the Baltics, will most likely appeal the decision, its chief executive Viktors Bolbats told Reuters. “Baltic International Bank considers the administrative fine imposed by the FCMC as disproportionate,” a spokeswoman said. It is the latest in a string fines on Latvian banks by the FCMC as Latvia tries to clean up its financial sector after several scandals, including the closure of ABLV last year after U.S. authorities accused it of money laundering. Latvia will next year undergo a review by Moneyval, the money laundering and terrorism financing monitoring body of the Council of Europe. Meanwhile, Latvia’s central bank governor Ilmars Rimsevics is accused of bribery in the first corruption trial of a European Central Bank governor. Rimsevics has denied any wrongdoing. ($1 = 0.9073 euros) (Reporting by Gederts Gelzis, writing by Anna Ringstrom, editing by Alexander Smith)

2016-09-19

000000052213

An explosion that injured 29 people when it rocked a crowded Manhattan neighborhood Saturday night has been determined to be an "intentional act," and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said it was clearly "an act of terrorism." The explosion, on West 23rd Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood, was reported around 8:30 p.m. Twenty-nine people were hospitalized with injuries, but they had all been released by Sunday afternoon, authorities said. "A bomb exploding in New York is obviously an act of terrorism," Cuomo said Sunday morning. Less than three hours after the blast, an object police described as a "possible secondary device" was found just a few blocks away from the original explosion on 27th Street while officers were combing the area. Cuomo said the device was "similar in design" to the one that detonated just blocks away. Authorities studying surveillance video on Sunday from both areas may have identified the same man at each location, law enforcement sources told NBC New York. The device from the second location was later sent to an NYPD range in the Bronx aboard a special containment vessel, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's office said. The device was "rendered safe" and was being sent to a special FBI facility in Quantico, Va., for examination, police said Sunday night. Meanwhile, the FBI confirmed that a "vehicle of interest in the investigation" was stopped near the Verrazano Bridge in New York late Sunday. No one had been charged, and "the investigation is ongoing," said a spokesperson who gave no further details. And police and the FBI responded late Sunday night to a suspicious package near the Elizabeth transit station at 11 West Street. Authorities didn't say whether they believed the package might be related. New Jersey Transit suspended service between Newark Airport and the Elizabeth station. De Blasio said Saturday night that the blast hadn't been linked to terrorism, but Cuomo clarified that the explosion hadn't been linked to an international terrorist group. "A bomb going off is generically a terrorist activity," Cuomo said. De Blasio and other city officials stressed that the investigation was in its early stages and that while investigators had been able to determine that the blast was "criminal" and "intentional," they hadn't nailed down a suspect or a motive. No arrests have been made, but NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill said, "New York City residents can rest assured that we'll get to the bottom of this." Still, O'Neill, who was sworn in just a day before the blast, said the situation worried him. "We did have a bomb detonated on 23rd Street, and we have no one apprehended, so of course I'm concerned." Security had already been tightened in the city for the ongoing United Nations General Assembly, but the presence of officers throughout New York City after the blast will be "bigger than ever," De Blasio said. Cuomo ordered 1,000 New York State police and National Guard members across the city. Police had said the blast in the Chelsea neighborhood appeared to come from inside a large trash bin, and law enforcement sources said they have video of a man dropping something into or next to a dumpster on 23rd Street. Another video from 27th Street shows a man leaving behind a piece of luggage before two other people come along, take a device out of the bag and walk away with just the suitcase, officials familiar with the investigation said. Videos like that — from nearby businesses — are what detectives want to get their hands on from both 23rd and 27th streets to see who was there before the explosions, New York Police Chief Carlos Gomez said. He said the investigation would take time. "There's a lot of people out on the street on a warm Saturday evening in Manhattan," he said. A 911 call, in which the person on the line claimed responsibility, is also being looked at, but officials don't know whether the call was legitimate or a hoax. New Yorkers were encouraged to remain vigilant Sunday and to call police with any information they may have about either device. The explosion sent a dumpster flying more than 150 feet down the sidewalk and shattered windows more than a block away, a senior law enforcement official said. After viewing the extensive destruction, Cuomo said it was "fortunate" that no one had been killed. "When you see the damage, it's amazing that no one was killed, to tell you the truth. We're lucky that only 29 were injured," Cuomo said Sunday on MSNBC. President Barack Obama was apprised of the situation, a White House official said. "The initial indication is this was an intentional act," de Blasio told reporters at the Saturday night news conference. There was also "no specific and credible threat against New York City at this point in time from any terror organization," the mayor added. Cuomo reiterated Sunday morning that there was no further credible threat, and he urged New Yorkers to "err on the side of caution" but feel comfortable to go about their daily business. "We will not allow these type of people and these type of threats to disrupt our life in New York. That's what they want to do, and we're not going to let them do it," Cuomo said. "They want to make you worry about going into New York City or New York state. We're not going to let them instill fear, because then they would win," he added. "Bottom line on this is ... whoever placed these bombs we will find, and they will be brought to justice," Cuomo said. "Period." "There was a loud boom and our entire apartment shook," said Neha Jain, 24, who lives on West 23rd and Sixth Avenue. "All the pictures fell to the floor, and then I heard people screaming." Jain said the explosion shattered the glass in her building's lobby. "My first thought was it's a bomb," Jain said. "It's quite terrifying." A large police presence, including officers of the New York Office of Emergency Management and the NYPD's counterterrorism unit, responded to the scene. There is a construction site near the scene of the Chelsea explosion. Police searched cars and trash cans in the area. Facebook activated its "Safety Check" feature so that users can easily notify friends and family members of their status. De Blasio also said the investigation has so far found no link to an explosive device that blew up in a New Jersey Shore community earlier Saturday, near a planned race route. But officials familiar with the investigation said flip phones were found in the pipe bomb in New Jersey and the pressure cookers in New York, leading investigators to wonder whether the two incidents are connected. They stressed that it's still too early to tell. In that incident in Seaside Park, a device of three pipe bombs exploded along the planned route of a Marines 5K charity race. No one was hurt. The device was placed in a trash can in that incident, NBC New York reported. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Saturday night that she was briefed about the explosion, as well as the explosive device in New Jersey, but she said she wouldn't have more to say on the New York incident until more is known. "Obviously, we need to do everything we can to support our first responders. Also to pray for the victims," she said. Mentioning a third attack by a man with a knife in St. Cloud, Minn., Clinton said in a statement released Sunday: "I strongly condemn the apparent terrorist attacks in Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York. I pray for all of those who were wounded, and for their families." Nine people were hurt in the knife attack at a Minnesota mall hours before the blast in New York. An ISIS-affiliated news outlet claimed that the attacker was "a soldier of the Islamic State," according to NBC News terrorism analyst Flashpoint Intelligence, a global security firm. "Americans have faced threats before, and our resilience in the face of them only makes us stronger. I am confident we will once again choose resolve over fear," Clinton said in response to the three incidents. Her Republican rival, Donald Trump, mentioned the explosion at the start of an event in Colorado Springs on Saturday, saying a "bomb" went off in New York. His remarks came before authorities had said the explosion was the result of a bomb. "Just before I got off the plane, a bomb went off in New York, and nobody knows exactly what's going on, but boy, we are living in a time," Trump said. "We better get very tough, folks." Follow CNBC International on and Facebook.

2016-11-10 00:00:00

000000087541

Like most other late night TV hosts, Samantha Bee is reeling from Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election. But amid the storm of analysis and blame, she says, there's really one reason Trump came out on top: white people. "The Caucasian nation showed up in droves to vote for Trump," she said, "so I don't want to hear a goddamn word about black voter turnout. How many times do we expect black people to build our country for us?" Bee concluded her segment with a plea for white female voters — 52 percent of whom voted for Trump — to redeem themselves by supporting diverse, progressive candidates for Congress in 2018. "We got some karma to work off," she said. These kids have some wild ideas about who should be president in 2020 Seth Meyers roasts the malarkey out of Joe Biden's old-guy debate schtick Stephen Colbert spends 7 minutes gleefully roasting the Democratic candidates Julia Louis-Dreyfus reacts to Marianne Williamson's 'Seinfeld' debate reference

2016-06-02 00:00:00

000000069248

June 1 (Reuters) - AnalytixInsight Inc: * Analytixinsight announces management appointments * Says Prakash Hariharan has been appointed chief executive officer and remains chairman of board Source text for Eikon:

2018-08-07

000000101510

Hubble captured this image of the universe's many galaxies, with an Einstein ring to boot. When the light from distant galaxies warps around an extremely large mass, like a galaxy cluster, it creates this elegant ring. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; Acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt Next time you eat a blueberry (or chocolate chip) muffin consider what happened to the blueberries in the batter as it was baked. The blueberries started off all squished together, but as the muffin expanded they started to move away from each other. If you could sit on one blueberry you would see all the others moving away from you, but the same would be true for any blueberry you chose. In this sense galaxies are a lot like blueberries. Since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding. The strange fact is that there is no single place from which the universe is expanding, but rather all galaxies are (on average) moving away from all the others. From our perspective in the Milky Way galaxy, it seems as though most galaxies are moving away from us – as if we are the center of our muffin-like universe. But it would look exactly the same from any other galaxy – everything is moving away from everything else. To make matters even more confusing, new observations suggest that the rate of this expansion in the universe may be different depending on how far away you look back in time. This new data,  published in the Astrophysical Journal , indicates that it may time to revise our understanding of the cosmos. Hubble's challenge Cosmologists characterise the universe&aposs expansion in a simple law known as  Hubble&aposs Law  (named after  Edwin Hubble  – although in fact  many other people  preempted Hubble&aposs discovery). Hubble&aposs Law is the observation that more distant galaxies are moving away at a faster rate. This means that galaxies that are close by are moving away relatively slowly by comparison. The relationship between the speed and the distance of a galaxy is set by "Hubble&aposs Constant," which is about 44 miles (70km) per second per  Mega Parsec  (a unit of length in astronomy). What this means is that a galaxy gains about 50,000 miles per hour for every million light years it is away from us. In the time it takes you to read this sentence a galaxy at one million light years&apos distance moves away by about an extra 100 miles. This expansion of the universe, with nearby galaxies moving away more slowly than distant galaxies, is what one expects for a uniformly expanding cosmos with  dark energy  (an invisible force that causes the universe&aposs expansion to accelerate ) and  dark matter  (an unknown and invisible form of matter that is five times more common than normal matter). This is what one would also observe of blueberries in an expanding muffin. The history of the measurement of Hubble&aposs Constant has been fraught with  difficulty  and unexpected revelations. In 1929, Hubble himself thought the value must be about 342,000 miles per hour per million light years – about ten times larger than what we measure now. Precision measurements of Hubble&aposs Constant over the years is actually what led to the inadvertent discovery of  dark energy . The quest to find out more about this mysterious type of energy, which makes up 70% of the energy of the universe, has inspired the launch of the world&aposs ( currently ) best space telescope, named after Hubble. Cosmic showstopper Now it seems that this difficulty may be continuing as a result of two highly precise measurements that don&apost agree with each other. Just as cosmological measurements have became so precise that the value of the Hubble constant was expected to be known once and for all, it has been found instead that things don&apost make sense. Instead of one we now have two showstopping results. On the one side we have the  new very precise measurements  of the Cosmic Microwave Background – the afterglow of the Big Bang – from the Planck mission, that has measured the Hubble Constant to be about 46,200 miles per hour per million light years (or using cosmologists&apos units 67.4 km/s/Mpc). On the other side we have  new measurements of pulsating stars  in local galaxies, also extremely precise, that has measured the Hubble Constant to be 50,400 miles per hour per million light years (or using cosmologists units 73.4 km/s/Mpc). These are closer to us in time. Both these measurements claim their result is correct and very precise. The measurements&apos uncertainties are only about 300 miles per hour per million light years, so it really seems like there is a significant difference in movement. Cosmologists refer to this disagreement as "tension" between the two measurements – they are both statistically pulling results in different directions, and something has to snap. New physics? So what&aposs going to snap? At the moment the jury is out. It could be that our cosmological model is wrong. What is being seen is that the universe is expanding faster nearby than we would expect based on more distant measurements. The Cosmic Microwave Background measurements don&apost measure the local expansion directly, but rather infer this via a model – our cosmological model. This has been tremendously successful at predicting and describing many observational data in the universe. So while this model could be wrong, nobody has come up with a simple convincing model that can explain this and, at the same time, explain everything else we observe. For example we could try and explain this with a new theory of gravity, but then other observations don&apost fit. Or we could try and explain it with a new theory of dark matter or dark energy, but then further observations don&apost fit – and so on. So if the tension is due to new physics, it must be complex and unknown. A less exciting explanation could be that there are "unknown unknowns" in the data caused by systematic effects, and that a more careful analysis may one day reveal a subtle effect that has been overlooked. Or it could just be statistical fluke, that will go away when more data is gathered. It is presently unclear what combination of new physics, systematic effects or new data will resolve this tension, but something has to give. The expanding muffin picture of the universe may not work anymore, and cosmologists are in a race to win a "great cosmic bake-off" to explain this result. If new physics is required to explain these new measurements, then the result will be a showstopping change of our picture of the cosmos. Thomas Kitching , Reader in Astrophysics,  UCL This article was originally published on  The Conversation . Read the  original article .

2018-05-15

000000092063

Washington (CNN)An effort to force a House vote on immigration didn't pick up any new supporters Tuesday night, but its backers say they are already sure it will reach enough signatures to hit the floor. "We are extremely confident we already have the votes," Republican Rep. Jeff Denham of California said as he walked onto the House floor for the first votes of the week, which was the first opportunity lawmakers had to sign the measure since last week. He walked into the Capitol with Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, who filed the so-called discharge petition on Denham's rule, which brings a floor vote on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. DACA protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children, but President Donald Trump has decided to end it, though courts have temporarily paused that plan. The two lawmakers are leading the charge among a group of moderate Republicans who are bucking their party leadership to push forward the petition, which circumvents leadership and the committee process. If the petition can pick up 25 Republican signatures and those of every Democrat in the House, leadership would be forced to call four bills to the floor that address DACA. It currently has support from 18 Republicans and one Democrat, who signed earlier than the rest of her party last week because she expected to be out all of this week. The petition's backers still expect to hit the number of signatures this week. Denham's rule would provide for debate and votes on four different immigration-related bills. One would be a bipartisan compromise, one would be a hardline bill supported by conservatives, one would be a Democratic bill to authorize just a version of the DACA program into law and one is completely up to House Speaker Paul Ryan -- leaving him free to choose any bill. Leadership, however, is whipping against the measure, asking moderates to not sign it and emphasizing the importance of House Republicans keeping control of legislation and solving the problem on their terms, according to a Republican leadership aide. On Tuesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, traveled to the White House "to continue the conversation about addressing our broken immigration system," Ryan's spokeswoman AshLee Strong said in a statement. "Obviously -- how do I say this kindly -- the speaker is not too happy," said Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, who has signed the petition. "I thought this was done in a way that was being respectful, but I understand that leadership is unhappy. ... But the reality is this is an issue that has to get solved." Leadership may be successful in buying itself some time, but not indefinitely. Moderate Washington state Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican who has been a supporter of DACA compromise efforts, said he was still considering signing and has spoken with leadership about what else they may have planned. "If they're not going to come forward with any alternatives, then unfortunately the discharge is one of the few options we have left," Newhouse said. "There's a clock that's ticking in order to get this done." Denham said he'd been in contact with Republican leadership "several times" just since returning from the weekend, and that while he didn't know what they discussed at the White House, he knows that Trump is now "focused on" the issue along with leadership. As they walked in together, Curbelo said they were "not at all" concerned about the whipping against them. "I'd hope they invest that time instead in finding a solution," Curbelo said, with Denham chiming in in unison on the last three words. In a quirk of the "queen-of-the-hill" rule, the bill with the most votes advances to a final vote no matter how many of the bills get a majority of the House, leaving conservatives concerned that the process is set up to favor the bipartisan bill. Conservatives are also watching very closely, according to a senior GOP aide, to see how leadership handles the insurrection. If moderates are handled with "kid gloves," the aide said, it could bode ill for members of leadership who are vying to replace Ryan when he retires and would empower the party's right flank to file its own similar rebellious measures. "The responses are a little milquetoast compared to what conservatives usually get," the aide said. "The double standard is a little concerning." CNN's Lauren Fox contributed to this report.

2019-09-18 00:00:00

000000102087

LONDON, Sept 18 (Reuters) - Britain’s banks will implement U.N.-backed “responsible banking” principles being launched next week that will influence lending and company behaviour, British banking trade body UK Finance said on Wednesday. The principles seek to make banking more attuned to the needs of society and the environment. High bonuses and taxpayer bailouts in the financial crisis a decade ago led to a loss of public trust in banking that has yet to be fully regained. “Environmental risk and opportunity is beginning to reshape the way we look at business planning and economic growth,” UK Finance Chief Executive Stephen Jones will tell the trade body’s annual dinner. “A broad base of stakeholder interests, from regulators, to investors, employees and customers are increasingly challenging the banking and finance to find more innovative and sustainable ways in which to operate,” he will say, according to prepared remarks. The United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative principles will be launched during the annual U.N. General Assembly in New York next week. Applying the principles will shape how financial products are designed and bring environmental and other “sustainability” factors into lending decisions and even the frequency of corporate travel, Jones said. Britain’s financial sector is facing uncertainty over future access to the European Union, its biggest customer, as the UK readies to leave the bloc next month. Bankers should not take the UK’s leading position as a global financial centre for granted, added UK Finance Chair Bob Wigley. UK Finance has asked Britain’s government to phase out a levy on bank balance sheets that was introduced after the financial crisis, Wigley said. “It’s clear that many in our country still need persuading that the measures we seek to maintain and enhance the industry’s future competitiveness are worth it,” Jones will say. “Our industry takes a lot of abuse. And sometimes – just sometimes – some of us deserve some of it – but at least we are collectively responsible for putting it right when that happens.” Reporting by Huw Jones; Editing by Lisa Shumaker

2017-12-15

000000102198

Image: Jim Cooke/GizmodoAs 2017 wheezes to its merciful end and the social media titans reckon with growing backlash, Twitter’s largely forgotten video streaming app Periscope has gained an insidious second life as a hub for seekers of child pornography. Gizmodo’s search of the platform over the course of a single afternoon uncovered dozens of accounts—50 in total—which appeared to be soliciting sexualized images of minors, or in the worst cases, depicting it themselves.Acquired by Twitter before launch to compete with a similar app named Meerkat, Periscope allows users to broadcast live videos—such as on-the-ground views of newsworthy events—which can then be shared and rewatched at a later date. Seamless integration with Twitter helped it debut in 2015 as one of the top 25 app downloads, according to analytics service App Annie. Though it’s better off than Meerkat, which shuttered late last year, Periscope has plummeted to the 968th most downloaded app as of December 12th.The presence of bad actors using a derelict platform to traffic in child pornography is almost less surprising than the brazenness of their methods in doing so. 22 of the users spotted by Gizmodo opted for names which did little to hide their intent, with handles like “lovechildrin,” “girlpreteen,” or “addmegroupsCPplease.” (CP—sometimes further obfuscated as “cheese pizza”—is a well-worn shorthand for “child pornography”.) Slightly subtler accounts merely included bios like “Love Little Girls the younger the better” or “j’aime les jeune filles” (which means exactly what you think it does.)Though Periscope claims to have “zero tolerance for any form of child sexual exploitation,” the images used as avatars by some users tell another story. Of the 50 accounts found by Gizmodo, nine displayed the genitalia of prepubescent girls, and six more depicted sexual penetration featuring what appeared to be minors. Image: PeriscopeMany users that seem to reference a desire to share or view child pornography use their accounts’ bio section to ask for admission to private groups—a feature on Periscope where, as the name suggests, sets of users can broadcast only to each other—which explains why the profiles of these users, some of which claimed over 4,000 followers, all displayed a broadcast count of zero. The same is true of adult porn streamers who sometimes amass followings in excess of 100,000 despite sexual acts, legal or illegal, being explicitly prohibited by Periscope’s content guidelines, and whose videos are often recorded and reuploaded to forums like Reddit’s r/Open_Boobs. The most upvoted post in that community (which is dedicated to “info/media on Periscope chicks”) is titled “DO NOT FUCKING POST UNDERAGE GIRLS IN HERE.”Though not counted towards broadcast numbers, private videos can be rewatched later in the same way that public videos can be on Periscope, unless they are deleted at some point after the broadcast ends. If deleted, Periscope declined to quantify how long content is stored on Periscope’s servers. (Gizmodo, it should be said, did not join or attempt to join such private groups for obvious legal reasons and can’t state conclusively that pornography featuring minors is being shared within them. We did, however, attempt to contact users among the 50 accounts who provided an email address, though none replied to a request for comment.)Coexisting on Periscope alongside these users are, worryingly, accounts operated by actual children. Though the platform’s user discovery tools are limited, several of these accounts followed users whose broadcasts featured or consisted solely of innocent broadcasts of young children involved in everyday activities. As Slate reported recently, predators have been known to leverage the app’s live chat functions to encourage underage users to perform sexually exploitative acts like removing their clothing during a broadcast.Periscope added minimal functionality last year that allows chat comments to be flagged as spam or abuse, but that system relies on other users in the chat to verify a comment is harmful. No option of any kind exists to flag accounts as violating platform guidelines—or US law, for that matter. If such an option existed, it isn’t clear who would even handle the reports. A LinkedIn search for Periscope turned up no employees whose job title reflected user safety or content moderation.A Twitter spokesperson told Gizmodo that “when a broadcast is reported, it is reviewed by a member of our teams who are available 24/7,” but declined to specify what “teams” existed and how many people comprised them. A Periscope post from late November addressing the sexual exploitation of children on the platform refers only to content moderation by a “committed team,” singular.Gizmodo alerted Twitter to ongoing issues with child exploitation on Periscope, providing a series of questions as well as a list of accounts seemingly seeking child pornography, all but one of which have since been banned. Their response is reproduced below:Thanks for reaching out. We recently shared an update on our safety efforts here.All content on Periscope must follow the community guidelines. Anyone can report a live or replay broadcast; this article has more details on how to report a broadcast. When a broadcast is reported, it is reviewed by a member of our teams who are available 24/7. We do not have additional numbers to share regarding the app or our team, but happy to help with any other questions you may have. Real-time communication presents extraordinary challenges for user safety: Attempts by Twitter, Periscope’s parent company, to curb extremism have been underwhelming at best, and chat client Discord had its own child pornography scandal earlier this year. For towering fuckups in live video moderation, look no further than Facebook’s rash of user-generated crime and suicide broadcasts. Simply by design, Periscope has to contend with the worst problems of both chatrooms and live video. With Twitter increasingly investing in its own parallel video product, Periscope may be too expensive to repair, but just unpopular enough to quietly dismantle without embarrassment.

2019-07-13

000000095226

(CNN)From curly to crinkle-cut, shoestring to steak, poutine to disco, July 13 is about celebrating one of the most popular side dishes in the world. That's right. It's National French Fry Day. Let's talk about all your burning fry-related inquiries to celebrate. Why do we call them french fries if they don't come from France? Well, the short answer to that they come from Belgium -- but also, not really. Though the origins of fries can be traced to Belgium, the French, Belgians and Spanish can't seem to agree where the idea sprouted and grapple for the claim to greasy fame. American soldiers in World War I first encountered the fried potato in Belgium. Crediting the dominant language of the region, they dubbed them french fries. But it's worth noting that different versions of the fried potato are a worldwide love, whether in India or Kenya. Who brought french fries to America? Founding Father, president, foodie? Yes, Thomas Jefferson is typically credited with bringing french fries to America. During his stint as minister to France from 1784 to 1789, Jefferson had his slave James Heming trained as a chef. French fries (or pommes de terre frites à cru en petites tranches, as he knew them) were one of the recipes he learned, according to National Geographic. Who eats the most of them? The average American eats about 46.4 pounds of potatoes per year, with french fries being the culprit behind the high consumption, according to the US Department of Agriculture. But despite what you may have guessed, neither the French nor Americans come in as the top french fry fanatics; it's the Belgians. Belgium is not only home to its famous waffles, it's home to 5,000 fry vendors. Let's consider the fact that it's a country of 11 million people, 8 million fewer than all of New York state. This means that they can -- and do -- get down on some fries. How many ways are there to say fries? Take your pick: fried potatoes, french fries, frites, chips or Burger Buddies. The great thing about fries is that they can be whatever you want them to be. In France, they're called frites, patates frites or pommes frites. How does McDonald's fit into all of this? When it comes to the fry game, Mickey D's does not come to play. The golden arches may seem like all fun and games, but McDonald's has an empire when it comes to french fries. No less than 7% of all potatoes grown in the United States are used for McDonald's fries, and more than one-third of all fries sold in restaurants in the country come from the chain. Best combo? Everybody loves crossovers, just not always of the culinary variety (e.g. Pop-Tarts and cheese). But I bet these duos will make you change your mind. Okonomiyaki fries are Illegal Food Atlanta's most prized menu ticket. They're drizzled in a type of Japanese pancake sauce and mayo and then sprinkled bonito flakes, nori, sesame seeds and beni shoga. If that doesn't have you salivating, check out Portland, Oregon-based restaurant Kenny & Zuke's pastrami fries or the Tornado Potato in Anaheim. For those food fanatics who like to get experimental, challenge your taste buds with some inventive french fry reimaginings, like french fry poutine. How much can you feasibly eat? It should really come as no surprise that this crispy treat really isn't all that great for your health. Actually, you shouldn't eat fried potatoes more than twice a week, because doing so doubles your risk of early death, according to a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. This one is pretty sad, because it means we can no longer use the "but it's a vegetable" excuse. Where can I go to get free fries today? Burger joints across the country are hosting special french fry deals on July 13. As long as you use the promo code on the app, McDonald's is offering free fries starting at 11 a.m. local time on Uber Eats. BurgerFi and Farmer Boys are also promoting deals, with only $1 for a piping hot serving. BurgerFi requires you to mention the one-day deal at the counter during your order, and Farmer Boys' offer is valid only with an additional purchase. If you order off the Burger King mobile app, you can also cash in on a batch of $1 fries. There are many ways to enjoy your fries: smother them in cheese, top them with chili or turn them into poutine. Dip them in vinegar, mayo, ketchup or a milkshake. Enjoy a few with a glass of champagne. However you like them, be thankful for the french fry in all its crispy (or soggy) glory.

2018-07-30

000000053206

VATICAN CITY – The largest association of Roman Catholic nuns in the United States urged its members Monday to report any sexual abuse of religious sisters by clergy and demanded that church authorities "take action to end a culture of silence, hold abusers accountable and provide support to those abused." The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents about 80 percent of Catholic sisters in the U.S., issued a statement Monday in response to an Associated Press report about several sisters coming forward recently to denounce assaults by priests and bishops. The LCWR said it didn&apost have data on incidents in the U.S., but thanked the sisters for speaking out. "We understand that reporting abuse requires courage and fortitude, however, bringing this horrific practice to light may be the only way that sexual abuse by those in positions of trust in the church community will be put to an end," the association&aposs statement said. The conference has about 1,300 members in 300 orders. LCWR said it reached out to its members and urged them to report any cases to both church and civil authorities. The AP report, citing recent reported cases of assault in Chile, India and Italy, added to the well-documented reports by religious sisters during the 1990s about clergy abuse in Africa. At the time, sisters were increasingly targeted because they were considered "safe" sexual partners during the height of the AIDS epidemic on the continent. "We join with all those demanding the end of a culture that ignores or tolerates sexual abuse of Catholic sisters or any other adult or minor perpetrated by those in positions of trust in the church community," the LCWR said. The Catholic Church in the U.S., which was rocked in 2002 by the clergy sex abuse scandal involving children, has been jolted again following accusations that one of the most prominent U.S. cardinals sexually abused teenagers and adult seminarians. Over the weekend, Pope Francis accepted Theodore McCarrick&aposs resignation as a cardinal and ordered him to live a lifetime of penance and prayer pending the outcome of a canonical trial.

2019-06-26 00:00:00

000000021813

Archimedes, the ancient Greek scientist, was taking a bath when he had his eureka! moment, discovering a physics principle using water displacement to measure density. Rob Reinerman, lead of the innovation team at Procter & Gamble, was taking a dump when genius struck, leading to the creation of Charmin’s Forever Roll, a massive roll of toilet paper for millennial asses. Reinerman, a 14-year veteran of P&G, had been pulled off his job as brand manager of Bounty paper towels and assigned to lead a newly formed innovation team within the toilet paper division. Along with his partner Kevin Mitchell, the bigwigs had tasked them with a singular purpose. “Never run out of toilet paper is the mission,” Reinerman said. “I was at home, I think on a weekend. I was finishing up my business and faced the age-old question of whether to replace the roll or leave that last square for the next person,” Reinerman told BuzzFeed News. Ultimately, he knew the next person to use the bathroom would be his wife, who would be annoyed to find a nearly kicked roll. But the germ of an idea was planted: What if they made a toilet paper roll that was…UNIMAGINABLY HUGE. The Forever Roll is 12 inches in diameter and is equivalent to 24 rolls of regular-size Charmin Ultra Soft. Charmin pinched off its Forever Roll to consumers in April. It’s basically one of those industrial-size rolls you’d find at a rest stop, but so very soft. A few weeks ago, the Forever Roll caught a second wave of internet buzz when it was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article about new household products designed for adults who live alone. Reinerman crowed at the time about how it alleviates the storage problem for urban apartment dwellers (a bigger roll means less TP to store under the sink) and how the huge rolls can last a single person up to two months. The response online was divided. Some thought this was a sad indicator of the state of the millennials: delaying marriage and children, unable to buy homes with ample bathroom storage like their parents, stuck in tiny apartments with nowhere to stuff extra rolls of toilet paper, and suffering from such burnout that the simple task of remembering to buy toilet paper once a week was too hard. Also, it’s a giant roll of paper for going doody, which is inherently funny. Webster’s dictionary defines “forever” as “a limitless time.” Charmin defines it as about one month, possibly two if you’re single, which is how long a single Forever Roll — 12 inches in diameter and equivalent to 24 rolls — will last you. Due to the girth and heft of the roll, it won’t fit standard toilet paper roll holders, so they created special freestanding and adhesive wall holders (for millennials who will never own a home and can’t drill into their landlord’s walls). A starter kit of three rolls and a stand costs $30, and a single roll is $10. The (tiny) TP-in-a-roll format that we know now was popularized around 1890 by the Scott Paper Company — lots of people were wiping with the Sears Roebuck catalog before that. The Hoberg Paper Company of Green Bay, Wisconsin, launched the Charmin brand in 1928 and soon offered the classic four-pack. For the next few decades, the physical form of the roll didn’t change much. It took until 1994 for Charmin to make the double roll. They then created a “Mega Roll,” equivalent to four rolls. Yet aside from tweaks to texture, prints, or even scents (Angel Soft has two new scented core options), the general shape and concept of toilet paper for home use hasn’t changed in our lifetime. The biggest development of late has been wet wipes — including varieties targeted at men: Dude Wipes, Dollar Shave Club’s One Wipe Charlies, or Mangroomer’s Biz Wipes in “Executive scent” — and that’s not going well. Because wipes don’t break down as well as regular TP, they create massive, clogging “fatbergs” in sewer systems. What happened to the American spirit of ingenuity? We put a man on the moon, and we still use basically the same dinky TP rolls as president Taft. Sure, we brought giant-size rolls to public restrooms, but that industrial stuff is thin, rough, hole-ripping. An ass war crime. Only a stone-cold psychopath would consider bringing home that giant wheel of rough paper, encased in a rugged dispenser to protect it from thieves. Why had no one, in over 100 years, thought, Hey, what if we made a GIGUNDOUS roll of soft toilet paper? No wonder the feedback on the Forever Roll on Charmin’s site so far has been disproportionately positive: 4.7 stars out of 5 from more than 2,800 reviewers. They compared the magnitude of the invention to sliced bread (!), touted the roll as successful Father’s Day and birthday gifts (?), and remarked on how smoothly it glides on the Forever Roll stand. Of the complaints that were filed, a large share revolved around the roll not lasting long enough: “This thing just screams ‘use more!! MORE!!’ and my kids comply,” one user griped. But bottom line, folks: “Huge and soft.” Could this signal a future in which all consumer goods are enormous? In which our houses are just Willy Wonka wonderlands of monstrously oversize paper products and fountains of soap? Is this a sign of the excesses of peak capitalism, or a sad sign of the state of the millennial condition? Of course, toilet paper is not without its controversies. If you, a millennial who poops a lot (and who isn’t? avocado toast is chock-full of fiber) and are also concerned about the environmental impact of the Big Ass Roll, you’re not alone. And it’s not just that it encourages people to use more paper per wipe. Shelley Vinyard, of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said Charmin is made from 100% virgin paper, no recycled fibers, just pure trees. “It’s an easy place to make a difference and vote with your dollars for a more sustainable option,” said Vinyard. NRDC notes that competitors like Marcal use recycled materials. Loren Fanroy, a representative for Charmin, told BuzzFeed News, “100% of our wood fiber supply is third-party certified with responsible forestry certification systems, like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), and come from sustainably-managed forests. We do not participate in any deforestation practices, and for every tree we use, at least one is re-grown.” And Reinerman points out that since each Forever Roll equals 24 regular rolls, you use fewer cardboard tubes, and there’s no plastic wrap packaging. Still, destroying forests to wipe our butts can keep you up at night, and it calls into question the merits of toilet paper altogether. If you take it one step further, perhaps it’s time for Americans to embrace the bidet and end this cycle of deforestation and waste once and for all. “[Toilet paper] is totally unhygienic and you could produce the biggest roll in history and it still wouldn’t clean an anus properly,” said Rose George, the author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. “We use water to wash everything from our bodies to our cars, and yet for the dirtiest part of our body, we choose to use a dry substance that really only moves, and doesn’t remove dirt. It’s crazy. It’s like choosing to have a shower with a dry towel. Half the world uses water to cleanse their butts, and they think those of us who have paper cultures are dirty, and they’re right.” After Reinerman and Mitchell recruited a few other people to work on their experimental team, prototyped the giant roll, pitched it to the big bosses (who were receptive), and started testing it and running a small ad campaign on Facebook, they were ready to go public in April 2019. “We were consistently hearing the comment, ‘I can’t believe nobody thought of this before.’ And that’s when you realize that you have something that’s improving somebody’s experience,” said Reinerman. So they hired more people to run an e-commerce site (the Forever Roll is only sold on the Charmin website, for now), and unlike other P&G brands, they do the marketing and social media themselves. “We have a small, mighty team that is running the whole operation,” said Reinerman. Even Charmin’s competitor had to hand it to them for coming up with the Big Roll. “If you talk to folks in the bath tissue category, the one thing we never want to happen is to run out of toilet paper in a critical moment,” said Kim Sackey, consumer knowledge lead for retail at Georgia-Pacific, the Koch Industries–owned company that makes Angel Soft and Quilted Northern. Still, she isn’t too jealous. “The Forever Roll is one potential solution; in my mind, there’s other potential ones,” she told BuzzFeed News. Subscriptions, like the kind Amazon offers, are one option, and she’s interested in optimizing the timing and quantities of subscriptions so you don’t end up with too much or too little. Other manufacturers, including Marcal, Scott, and Cottonelle, did not return requests for comment. To me, Rob Reinerman’s invention was a stroke of genius, a gift to the human race and all our diverse and tender holes. But as a journalist, I needed to dig deeper. Trust, but verify; wipe till it feels clean, but still look at the paper afterward. So I tested out a Forever Roll here in BuzzFeed’s office. The stand came with a screw and its own set of mini Allen wrenches to install (pretty easy). It had a heavy base to prevent it from toppling over and felt solid. The Forever Roll inside the BuzzFeed offices. I set up a Forever Roll in a single-use bathroom in our office, and after lunch, gave it a full test myself. It was…fine? The strangest part was that it was hard to tell how far to turn the roll to get the right amount of paper — I ended up with a little more than I needed. Then I set up a notepad and pen in the bathroom explaining what the Forever Roll was, that I was writing an article about it, and wanted my colleagues’ feedback. It turns out asking my coworkers to describe their toilet paper–wiping experience was perhaps a bad idea. Not a single person wrote anything down on my public notepad (I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to my coworkers and also let HR know I’ve definitely learned my lesson here). But I did get two personal notes. “Way too big. If you drop it on the floor and it gets wet you are losing SO MUCH toilet paper,” said one coworker. “My bathroom is small, and it would 100% get wet somehow. Too much surface area.” My editor said while she was impressed with how smoothly the Forever Roll glided on the stand, she would be mortified for guests to see a massive roll of toilet paper in her small apartment bathroom. To that I say, what is the price of dignity? Is it $30 for the Forever Roll starter kit? Is it never having to waddle across the bathroom, pants around ankles, to get a replacement roll from under the sink? Is it not having guests see an aggressively large toilet paper roll in your bathroom? Don’t ask me, I’m the person who just wrote a long article (which is not sponsored by Charmin, btw, BuzzFeed is literally losing money paying me a salary to do this) about toilet paper. I have no dignity, but boy am I clean. ●

2020-03-10 15:24:24

000000051863

Hitachi Vantara, the wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi that focuses on building hardware and software to help companies manage their data, today announced that it has acquired the assets of Containership, one of the earlier players in the container ecosystem, which shut down its operations last October. Containership, which launched as part of our 2015 Disrupt New York Startup Battlefield, started as a service that helped businesses move their containerized workloads between clouds, but as so many similar startups, it then moved on to focus solely on Kubernetes and helping enterprises manage their Kubernetes infrastructure. Before it called it quits, the company’s specialty was managing multi-cloud Kubernetes deployments. The company wasn’t able to monetize its Kubernetes efforts quickly enough, though, the company said at the time in a blog post that it has now removed from its website. “Containership enables customers to easily deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters and containerized applications in public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise environments,” writes Bobby Soni, the COO for digital infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara. “The software addresses critical cloud native application issues facing customers working with Kubernetes such as persistent storage support, centralized authentication, access control, audit logging, continuous deployment, workload portability, cost analysis, autoscaling, upgrades, and more.” Hitachi Vantara tells me that it is not acquiring any of Containership’s customer contracts or employees and has no plans to keep the Containership brand. “Our primary focus is to develop new offerings based on the Containership IP. We do hope to engage with prior customers once our new offerings become commercially available,” a company spokesperson said. The companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. Pittsburgh-based Containership only raised about $2.6 million since it was founded in 2014, though, and things had become pretty quiet around the company in the last year or two before its early demise. Chances are then that the price wasn’t all that high. Investors include Birchmere Ventures, Draper Triangle and Innovation Works. Hitachi Vantara says it will continue to work with the Kubernetes community. Containership was a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Hitachi never was, but after this acquisition, that may change. ContainerShip Wants To Help You Move Your Containerized Apps Between Clouds

2019-06-16

000000018299

Sen. Tom CottonThomas (Tom) Bryant CottonCotton warns China: Crackdown on Hong Kong would be 'grave miscalculation' Congress must address gender gap in nominations to military service academies GOP senators press Google on reports it developed a smart speaker with Huawei MORE (R-Ark.) on Sunday called said unprovoked attacks on oil tankers the U.S. government has blamed on Iran "warrant a retaliatory military strike." "These unprovoked attacks on commercial shipping warrant a retaliatory military strike," Cotton said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” while insisting President TrumpDonald John TrumpFacebook releases audit on conservative bias claims Harry Reid: 'Decriminalizing border crossings is not something that should be at the top of the list' Recessions happen when presidents overlook key problems MORE had the power to order such a strike without congressional approval. “The president has the authorization to act to defend American interests,” he said. A military strike, Cotton added, “will make it clear we will not tolerate any kind of attacks on commercial shipping on the open seas.” Cotton, an Iraq War veteran, waved off comparisons to the faulty intelligence about Baghdad’s weapons capabilities that were the major justification for the Iraq War, saying that, unlike that intelligence, “there’s not much to assess right here.” U.S. Central Command last week released a video claiming it shows Iranians removing a magnetic mine from the tanker in the Gulf of Oman. U.S. allies and the owner of the Japanese tanker have both disputed the U.S. account. “The video is not enough. We can understand what is being shown, sure, but to make a final assessment, this is not enough for me,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told reporters in Oslo last week. The president of a company that owns one of the damaged tankers also expressed doubt the damage was caused by a mine.   Yutaka Katada, the president of Kokuka Sangyo, also said in Tokyo last week that he does not believe "there was a time bomb or an object attached to the side of the ship."   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.

2019-05-07

000000010701

* Graphic: World FX rates in 2019 http://tmsnrt.rs/2egbfVh TOKYO, May 7 (Reuters) - The Australian dollar sharply rose on Tuesday after the country's central bank held rates at a record low, dashing speculation it may ease policy following a below-par reading of inflation. The Aussie was last up about 0.7 percent at $0.7035 after the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) held its cash rate at 1.50 percent. Ahead of the policy decision, a slim majority of economists polled by Reuters had expected the central bank to keep rates steady, even as calls for an easing grew louder after disappointingly weak first-quarter inflation. While the RBA kept policy unchanged, it opened the door wider for future cuts if the jobs market failed to push unemployment lower as retailers suffered their worst quarter in seven years. Against the yen, the Aussie was last up about 0.5 percent at 77.82 yen. Elsewhere in currency markets, the dollar kept largely to familiar ranges against major peers, even as comments from top U.S. trade officials that China had moved away from trade-related commitments weighed on U.S. bond yields and stock futures. The dollar index against a basket of six rivals was last down 0.1 percent at 97.409, having ended the previous session nearly flat. "From China's perspective, a break up in negotiations isn't really favourable for the domestic economy. I think they want to get a deal one way or the other," said Yukio Ishizuki, senior currency strategist at Daiwa Securities. While there had been talk that Washington and Beijing might reach a trade deal this week, it is likely the negotiations will take a bit more time, he added. Late on Monday, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said China had moved away from commitments made over the course of trade negotiations. Lighthizer said his office would probably put out a notice on Tuesday about a proposed increase in tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods to 25 percent from 10 percent. Futures for the S&P 500 fell following the remarks. U.S. 10-year Treasury bond yields hit their lowest since May 1. The dollar dipped slightly against the euro and the pound on Tuesday, though its moves against those currencies were much less pronounced than the Aussie's moves. The euro last changed hands at $1.1210, up 0.1 percent on the day. Sterling rose about 0.2 percent to $1.3122 . Against the yen, the dollar was down a tenth of a percent at 110.615 yen. It had brushed a five-week low of 110.285 yen per dollar during the previous session. The Japanese currency tends to benefit during periods of geopolitical or financial stress as Japan is the world's biggest creditor nation. (Editing by Sam Holmes and Jacqueline Wong)

2016-05-05

000000061806

Author Jennifer Niven knows that writing can be an intensely personal experience. But the writer behind the bestselling novel All the Bright Places also knows that reading is just as personal — and as she prepares for the release of her next book, Holding up the Universe, her thoughts are with her fans. A collage for her fans, by Niven MashReads has an exclusive look at the cover of Holding Up the Universe, as well as a sneak peek at the book's opening pages. But first, below is a letter from Niven to her fans, sharing what led her to write Holding Up the Universe and what their support means to her. Dear Reader, You are wanted. You are necessary. You are loved. This is the message I have been writing to readers of All the Bright Places since the book's release in January of 2015. Since then, I’ve been contacted by thousands of teens who feel misunderstood or alone. During one particular day in the fall of last year, I wrote that message 141 times. Holding Up the Universe is about seeing and being seen. Like All the Bright Places, this new novel is a personal story. It comes from my own loss and fear and pain, and it comes from real people who are dear to me. It comes from my twelve- and thirteen-year-old self, who struggled with her weight and the bullying that came with it. From the loss of my dad, which happened only months after the loss of my boyfriend, when I shut down completely and couldn’t leave the house because the world was too scary. From having to go back out into that world again and figure out my place in it. And most recently, it comes from the loss of my mom, who was my sun, and from trying not to worry—every day—that I will die unexpectedly, without warning, the way she did. Additionally, the book comes from my sixteen-year-old cousin, who has had to learn to recognize the people in his life, not by faces, but by the important things like “how nice they are and how many freckles they have.” But the story really began with that reader interaction. I wrote this book for Christine in the United States, for Jayvee in the Philippines, for Steysha in Ukraine, for Paolo in Brazil, for Steph in the UK, for Shubham in India, and for all the others like them. These vibrant, smart, giant-hearted teens who need and deserve to be seen, and who need to know they are wanted. They are necessary. They are loved. Love,    Jennifer xx Read on for an exclusive excerpt from Holding Up the Universe: —To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee I’m not a shitty person, but I’m about to do a shitty thing. And you will hate me, and some other people will hate me, but I’m going to do it anyway to protect you and also myself. This will sound like an excuse, but I have something called prosopagnosia, which means I can’t recognize faces, not even the faces of the people I love. Not even my mom. Not even myself. Imagine walking into a room full of strangers, people who don’t mean anything to you because you don’t know their names or histories. Then imagine going to school or work or, worse, your own home, where you should know everyone, only the people there look like strangers too. That’s what it’s like for me: I walk into a room and I don’t know anyone. That’s every room, everywhere. I get by on how a person walks. By gestures. By voice. By hair. I learn people by identifiers. I tell myself, Dusty has ears that stick out and a red-brown Afro, and then I memorize this fact so it helps me find my little brother, but I can’t actually call up an image of him and his big ears and his Afro unless he’s in front of me. Remembering people is like this superpower everyone seems to have but me. Have I been officially diagnosed? No. And not just because I’m guessing this is beyond the pay grade of Dr. Blume, town pediatrician. Not just because for the past few years my parents have had more than their share of shit to deal with. Not just because it’s better not to be the freak. But because there’s a part of me that hopes it isn’t true. That maybe it will clear up and go away on its own. For now, this is how I get by: Nod/smile at everyone. Be charming. Be “on.” Be goddamn hilarious. Be the life of the party, but don’t drink. Don’t risk losing control (that happens enough when sober). Pay attention. Do whatever it takes. Be lord of the douche. Anything to keep from being the prey. Always better to hunt than be hunted. I’m not telling you all this as an excuse for what I’m about to do. But maybe you can keep it in mind. This is the only way to stop my friends from doing something worse , and it’s the only way to stop this stupid game. Just know that I don’t want to hurt anyone. That’s not why. Even though that’s the thing that’s going to happen. Sincerely yours, Jack PS. You’re the only person who knows what’s wrong with me. Prosopagnosia /präsəpaɡˈnōZH(ē)ə/ noun: 1. an inability to recognize the faces of familiar people, typically as a result of damage to the brain; 2. when everyone is a stranger. If a genie popped out of my bedside lamp, I would wish for these three things: my mom to be alive, nothing bad or sad to ever happen again, and to be a member of the Martin Van Buren High School Damsels, the best drill team in the tristate area. But what if the Damsels don’t want you? It is 3:38 a.m., and the time of night when my mind starts running around all wild and out of control, like my cat, George, when he was a kitten. All of a sudden, there goes my brain, climbing the drapes. There it is, swinging from the bookshelf. There it is, with its paw in the fish tank and its head underwater. I lie on my bed, staring up into the dark, and my mind bounces across the room. What if you get trapped again? What if they have to knock down the cafeteria door or the bathroom wall to get you out? What if your dad gets married and then he dies and you’re left with the new wife and stepsiblings? What if you die? What if there is no heaven and you never see your mom again? I tell myself to sleep. I close my eyes and lie very still. Very still. For minutes. I make my mind lie there with me and tell it, Sleep, sleep, sleep. What if you get to school and realize that things are different and kids are different, and no matter how much you try, you will never be able to catch up to them? I open my eyes. My name is Libby Strout. You’ve probably heard of me. You’ve probably watched the video of me being rescued from my own house. At last count, 6,345,981 people have watched it, so there’s a good chance you’re one of them. Three years ago, I was America’s Fattest Teen. I weighed 653 pounds at my heaviest, which means I was approximately 500 pounds overweight. I haven’t always been fat. The short version of the story is that my mom died and I got fat, but somehow I’m still here. This is in no way my father’s fault. Two months after I was rescued, we moved to a different neighborhood on the other side of town. These days I can leave the house on my own. I’ve lost 302 pounds. The size of two entire people. I have around 190 left to go, and I’m fine with that. I like who I am. For one thing, I can run now. And ride in the car. And buy clothes at the mall instead of special-ordering them. And I can twirl. Aside from no longer being afraid of organ failure, that may be the best thing about now versus then. Tomorrow is my first day of school since fifth grade. My new title will be high school junior, which, let’s face it, sounds a lot better than America’s Fattest Teen. But it’s hard to be anything but TERRIFIED OUT OF MY SKULL. I wait for the panic attack to come. Caroline Lushamp calls before my alarm goes off, but I let her go to voice mail. I know whatever it is, it’s not going to be good and it will be my fault. She calls three times but only leaves one message. I almost delete it without listening, but what if her car broke down and she’s in trouble? This is, after all, the girl I’ve dated off and on for the past four years. (We’re that couple. That on-again, off- again everyone-assumes-we’ll-end-up-together-forever couple.) Jack, it’s me. I know we’re taking a break or whatever but she’s my cousin. My COUSIN. I mean, MY COUSIN, JACK! If you wanted to get back at me for breaking up with you, then congratulations, jerkwad, you’ve done it. If you see me in class today or in the hallways or in the cafeteria or ANYWHERE ELSE ON EARTH, do not talk to me. Actually, just do me a favor and go to hell. Three minutes later, the cousin calls, and at first I think she’s crying, but then you can hear Caroline in the background, and the cousin starts yelling and Caroline starts yelling. I delete the message. Two minutes later, Dave Kaminski sends a text to warn me that Reed Young wants to kick my face in for making out with his girlfriend. I text I owe you. And I mean it. If I’m keeping score, Kam’s helped me out more times than I’ve helped him. All this fuss over a girl who, if we’re being honest, looked so much like Caroline Lushamp that—at least at first—I thought it was her, which means in some weird way Caroline should be flattered. It’s like admitting to the world that I want to get back together with her even though she dumped me the first week of summer so that she could go out with Zach Higgins. I think of texting this to her, but instead I turn off my phone and close my eyes and see if I can’t transport myself right back into July. The only thing I had to worry about then was going to work, scavenging the local scrap yard, building (mind-blowing) projects in my (kick-ass) workshop, and hanging out with my brothers. Life would be so much easier if it was just Jack + scrap yard + kick-ass workshop + mind-blowing projects. You should never have gone to the party. You should never have had a drink. You know you can’t be trusted. Avoid alcohol. Avoid crowds. Avoid people. You only end up pissing them off. It’s 6:33 a.m. and I am out of bed and standing in front of the mirror. There was a time, a little over two years ago, when I couldn’t, wouldn’t look at myself. All I saw was the bunched-up face of Moses Hunt, yelling at me across the playground: No one will ever love you because you’re fat! And the faces of all the other fifth graders as they started to laugh. You’re so big you block the moon. Go home, Flabby Stout, go home to your room. . . . Today, for the most part, I only see me—adorable navy dress, sneakers, medium- longish brown hair that my sweet but slightly demented grandmother once described as “the exact color of highland cattle.” And the reflection of my giant dirty cotton ball of a cat. George stares at me with wise gold eyes and I try to imagine what he might say to me. Four years ago, he was diagnosed with heart failure and given six months to live. But I know him well enough to know that only George will decide when it’s time for George to go. He blinks at me. Right now, I think he would tell me to breathe. So I breathe. I’ve gotten really good at breathing. I look down at my hands and they’re steady, even if the fingernails are bitten to the quick, and, weirdly, I feel pretty calm, considering. I realize: the panic attack never came. This is something to celebrate, so I throw on one of my mom’s old albums and dance. Dancing is what I love most and dancing is what I plan to do with my life. I haven’t taken lessons since I was ten, but the dance is in me, and no lack of training can make that go away. I tell myself, Maybe this year you can try out for the Damsels. My brain goes zooming up the wall, where it hangs, shaking. What if it never happens? What if you die before anything good or wonderful or amazing ever happens to you? For the past two and a half years, the only thing I’ve had to worry about has been my survival. The focus of every single person in my life, including me, has been: We just need to get you better. And now I’m better. So what if I let them down after all the time and energy they’ve invested in me? I dance harder to push the thoughts out until my dad thumps on the door. His head appears. “You know I love a good Pat Benatar song first thing in the morning, but the question is: how do the neighbors feel?” I turn it down a little but keep on moving. When the song is over, I find a marker and decorate one shoe. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting; and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living. (Truman Capote, In Cold Blood.) Then I reach for the lipstick my grandmother gave me for my birthday, lean into the mirror, and paint my lips red. I hear the shower running and voices downstairs. I pull the pillow over my face, but it’s too late—I’m awake. I turn on my phone and text first Caroline, then Kam, then Reed Young. The thing I say to all of them is that I was very drunk (an exaggeration) and it was very dark (it was) and I don’t remember anything that happened because I was not only drunk, I was upset. There’s just this shit happening at home that I can’t talk about right now, so if you can bear with me and find it in your heart to forgive me, I’ll be forever in your debt. The shit happening at home part is completely true. For Caroline, I throw in some compliments and ask her to please apologize to her cousin for me. I say I don’t want to contact her directly because I’ve already made a mess of things and I don’t want to do anything else to make things worse between Caroline and me. Even though Caroline was the one who broke up with me, and even though we’re currently in an off-again phase, and even though I haven’t seen her since June, I basically eat crow and then throw it up all over my phone. This is the price I pay for trying to keep everyone happy. I drag myself down the hall to the bathroom. The thing I need most in this world is a long, hot shower, but what I get instead is a trickle of warm water followed by a blast of Icelandic cold. Sixty seconds later—because that’s all I can bear—I get out, dry off, and stand in front of the mirror. So this is me. I think this every time I see my reflection. Not in a Damn, that’s me way, but more like Huh. Okay. What have we got here? I lean in, trying to put the pieces of my face together. The boy in the mirror isn’t bad-looking—high cheekbones, strong jaw, a mouth that’s hitched up at one corner like he just got done telling a joke. Somewhere in the neighborhood of pretty. The way he tilts his head back and looks out through half-open eyelids makes it seem like he’s used to looking down on everyone, like he’s smart and he knows he’s smart, and then it hits me that what he really looks like is an asshole. Except for the eyes themselves. They’re too serious and there are circles under them, like he hasn’t slept. He’s wearing the same Superman shirt I’ve been wearing all summer. What does this mouth (wide like Mom’s) mean with this nose (wide like Mom’s) and these eyes (brown flecked with green)? My eyebrows are darker than my hair but they aren’t as dark as Dad’s. My skin is a kind of middle brown color, not deep brown like Mom’s, and not white like Dad’s. The other thing that doesn’t match up here is the hair. It’s this enormous lion’s mane Afro that looks like it’s allowed to do whatever the fuck it wants. If he’s anything like me, the boy in the mirror calculates everything. Even though this hair can’t be contained, he’s grown it for a reason. So he can find himself. Something about the way these features add up is how people find each other in the world. Something about the combination makes them go, There’s Jack Masselin. “What’s your identifier?” I say to my reflection, and I mean the real identifier, not this giant lion fro. I’m having a right serious moment, but then I hear a distinct snicker, and a tall, skinny blur goes breezing by. That would be my brother Marcus. “My name’s Jack and I’m so pretty,” he sings all the way down the stairs. Extract from HOLDING UP THE UNIVERSE by Jennifer Niven. Copyright 2016 by Jennifer Niven. Publishedinthe United States by Alfred A. Knopf, animprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

2019-05-17 00:00:00

000000014004

BAKU, May 17 (Reuters) - Azerbaijan does not plan to privatise the International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA) this year, Samir Sharifov, Azerbaijan’s finance minister, told Reuters on Friday. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said in February it could start discussions with the oil-rich country’s biggest bank over its privatisation later this year. (Reporting by Nailia Bagirova; writing by Maria Kiselyova; editing by Tom Balmforth)

2018-07-16 00:00:00

000000033266

Gossip is dangerous in Sharp Objects, but in a place like Wind Gap, Missouri, it is as deadly as a weapon. The Southern ladies of the fictional small town collect nuggets of (mis)information like arsenals, keeping them locked and loaded to use at a moment's notice. But the juiciest piece of heard-around-town goss that Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) hears is actually from a group of rough kids, not highlighted and tweezed housewives, and it's not about a living person, it's about a haunted one. In episode 2 of Sharp Objects, Camille speaks to a young boy who gives her her biggest scoop yet: there was an eye witness at the scene of Natalie Keene's (Jessica Treska) disappearance — and the boy, James Capisi (Dylan Schombing) who saw her last also thinks he saw who took her. The only problem is that he believes it was the "woman in white," a Grimm Brothers-esque characters drawn directly from the town's superstitious past. The circumstances around his home life (his mom's sick — with cancer and an addiction to drugs — and his dad's absent), and his statement (he saw a woman clad in all-white hug Natalie and disappear with her into the woods, but not before flashing him a toothy smile), there's a lot to unpack around this "woman in white." Could it really be possible that Camille just solved the mystery of who killed Natalie and Ann Nash (Kaegan Baron)? Let's breakdown everything we know about this mysterious woman in white haunting our little James. And possible kidnapping children. Who is the woman in white? The "woman in white" refers to a long-standing piece of town gossip that an old woman lives in the woods waiting to snatch little kids. This is the first time that the town's folklore has been used to explain the real-life murders of two young girls. The idea of a woman being involved in Natalie's kidnapping is frustrating to officials because they are confident that a man is responsible for these crimes. She's "in white," but what exactly does she look like? We have only seen a flicker of the pale, white woman in the series, but she looks like a ghost. In the book, the "woman in white" is described as looking "old like a mother." James says she "was wearing a white bed dress with white hair. She was just all white, but not like a ghost." Camille presses James further asking, "White like how?" "Just like she'd never been outside before," he replies. Is she real or an illusion? The idea of the "woman in white" is definitely just that: an idea. But that doesn't mean that there wasn't someone in the woods who took Natalie, and that doesn't mean that James didn't see it happen. Maybe the lines blurred between fantasy and reality (it's very hot and humid in this Southern town), but the fact that James is sitting in his house with a gun, reluctant to leave his beat-up home on the outskirts of it, it makes you feel like there's something very real about his fear. What was the folklore about her? The book's author, Gillian Flynn, sees the "woman in white" as a sort-of maternal Slender Man. Even though it's unclear what happened to Natalie, this figment of the murders and disputed piece of evidence is a big part of the story. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she described the importance of her creepy, pale witch-like figure. "The female mythology runs rampant all throughout Sharp Objects, mostly in the novel and, you'll see, in the TV show," she told the site. "That's kind of a first real flicker of that. That whole moment I've always found very creepy, to get to see that come to life." She added that she was so into this flash of magic and the supernatural in the book that she considered creating a spin-off series about her. "I've always wanted to do a Woman in White spinoff — the original Slender Man sort of idea, how that came to be, what the origin story of the Woman in White was," she said. "I actually sketched out a short story years ago when I was writing Sharp Objects. They always said, 'That story's been around for years. Don't pay attention.' I was like, 'Really?' Of course my weird little brain was like, 'It's been around for years? When did it come to be? Let's write this, too.' Because that has to be a story itself." Whether we see her again in Camille's memories or future, it's clear that Wind Gap isn't yet done with this eerie and ominous manifestation. Am I supposed to ignore the fact that Adora (Patricia Clarkson) was wearing a white night gown in last night's episode? How could you ignore that? Looking for more theories, recaps, and insider info on all things TV? Join our Facebook group, Binge Club. The community is a space for you to share articles, discuss last night’s episode of your favorite show, or ask questions! Join here.

2019-03-06

000000084473

LONDON (Reuters) - Legal & General said it had made record sales of annuities in 2018, although some analysts questioned whether Britain’s third-largest insurer could continue to raise its dividend at the same time, knocking its shares on Wednesday. The insurer said it had sold 10 billion pounds ($13.1 billion) of annuities, most of them through the bulk annuity market, in which companies offload the risk to insurers of their defined benefit, or final salary, pension schemes. With the bulk annuity market expected to hit record levels of around 30 billion pounds this year, L&G’s chief financial officer Jeff Davies said it was actively quoting on around 20 billion pounds in bulk annuity deals. British life expectancy improvements are falling, enabling life insurers to release cash set aside to pay pensions and Phoenix delivered above-consensus profits on Tuesday, helped in part by a release of longevity reserves. But annuities are capital-intensive, leading some insurers, such as Prudential, to exit the market in recent years and Barclays analysts asked if L&G “can fund this level of annuity volumes and continue to grow the dividend”. L&G said it would pay a total dividend of 16.42 pence for 2018, up seven percent and in line with forecasts. Barclays reiterated an overweight rating on L&G’s shares, which dropped 3.7 percent to 275.5 pence at 0907 GMT, at the bottom of the FTSE 100 index. The stock has risen 25 percent this year and one trader said there was profit taking. “We have a good outlook for 2019 across annuities and asset management,” Davies told a media call after L&G said that full-year operating profit rose 10 percent to 1.9 billion pounds, in line with consensus forecasts supplied by the insurer. This profit figure excluded the release of longevity reserves, which would have boosted profits further, L&G said. Legal & General Investment Management, one of the biggest investors in the UK stock market, saw a three percent rise in assets under management to 1 trillion pounds. Additional reporting by Helen Reid, editing by Sinead Cruise and Alexander Smith

2018-12-03

000000099158

President Donald Trump's assertions about the U.S.-China agreement to pause tariff escalations that emerged over the weekend do not appear to match the White House's official description of the agreement. Following the conclusion of the G-20 summit in Argentina, the U.S. leader described the agreement brokered with Beijing as "one of the largest deals ever made." He said Chinese President Xi Jinping's government "will be opening up" and "getting rid of tariffs." The White House, however, did not back up Trump's claims about China ending tariffs, but referred instead to a temporary agreement not to raise them further. And it gave little indication of China "opening up." In a statement, the White House press secretary said Beijing will agree to purchase "a not yet agreed upon, but very substantial" amount of U.S. agricultural, energy, industrial and other products in order "to reduce the trade imbalance between our two countries." During the talks at the G-20 meeting, the two superpowers agreed to delay additional taxes on each other's goods for the next 90 days — during which time they will try to overcome difficult differences including "forced technology transfer, intellectual property protection, non-tariff barriers, cyber intrusions and cyber theft." The president's broad conclusions about the trade agreement also didn't mesh with Chinese state media's more measured descriptions. The White House did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment overnight. Political watchers were quick to highlight the contrast between Trump's lofty proclamations and the official statement from the White House. Trump's comments "show his number one priority is the appearance of being a great dealmaker," said Mintaro Oba, a former U.S. State Department official who specialized in the Koreas during the Obama administration. "It doesn't matter to him what the details are, as long as he looks strong to his supporters." "When it comes to anything associated with him, especially deals, things can't just be good, they have to be best," Oba continued. Trump is under pressure from American businesses to resolve the trade fight. In September, U.S. companies in China said they were already hurting from the initial $50 billion worth of tariffs, according to a joint survey from the American Chamber of Commerce China and the American Chamber of Commerce Shanghai. Complaints from American corporations as well as the Republican Party's losses in the midterm elections may be adding pressure on Trump to ease tensions, said David Adelman, former U.S. ambassador to Singapore and adjunct professor at the New York University. "The President seems eager for a deal," he said. While news of a trade cease-fire was welcomed by the international community, skepticism remains as to whether Washington and Beijing can ultimately reach a solution that leads to a rollback of current tariffs. "The results of the discussions in Buenos Aires are positive, but contrary to President Trump's enthusiastic comments, did not result in a breakthrough," said Adelman. Beyond the trade front, Beijing will also more vigorously prosecute fentanyl smugglers, the White House statement said. Fentanyl — a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more addictive than heroin — has been linked to thousands of overdose deaths in the United States. China is one of the world's top producers of ingredients used to manufacture fentanyl, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The White House referred to China's new stance on fentanyl as a "wonderful humanitarian gesture."

2016-07-26 00:00:00

000000065979

(CNN)Bernie Sanders sought to show a united front at the Democratic National Convention Tuesday by asking delegates to accept Hillary Clinton's nomination unanimously and by acclimation. The plan came at the end of the roll call vote of all 50 states. "I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic party for President of the United States," Sanders told the convention. The move came as Sanders has attempted to tamp down his rowdy supporters, at times getting booed by his own backers as he called for Democratic unity. It follows Sanders' speech to the DNC on Monday, where he empathized with the disappointment of his supporters but said they must support Clinton in the fall. Vice President Joe Biden, who was doing a walkthrough of the Wells Fargo Arena Tuesday morning, said that Democrats need to "show a little class" to Sanders supporters who are still stinging from his loss. "We have to show a little class and let them be frustrated for a while," Biden told CNN. "It's OK." Some of his supporters have struggled with that message, interrupting some convention speakers and delegate breakfasts. Sanders, who was booed during a California delegation breakfast Tuesday, is encouraging his backers to think of what a Trump presidency would look like. "It is easy to boo, but it is harder to look your kids in the face if we are living under a Trump presidency," Sanders responded. RELATED: Silverman: 'Ridiculous' remark was unscripted But Sanders' own delegates were as angry as ever Tuesday morning, just hours after he implored them to support Clinton in his prime-time speech. Sanders delegates in California booed down speakers, including Clinton supporter Rep. Xavier Becerra. At one point in Becerra's brief talk, some delegates hopped on tables with Sanders signs, while other delegates pounded loudly on the tables in unison. As of early Tuesday morning, it did not look like even Sanders would be able to sway his supporters. "Believe it or not we are not all blind followers of Bernie. We love Bernie and everything he represents, but all because he tells us to do something doesn't mean we will," said Kari Garcia, a 25-year-old Sanders supporter who went to the convention with the California delegation. Garcia and others at her table, including Sanders delegate Brian Carolus, were loudly booing and chanting "Bernie!" throughout the California breakfast. Carolus, a 27-year-old delegate from California, said calls for them to get behind Clinton or face a Trump presidency amounted to "victim-blaming." "I don't like that characterization, because it's blaming the victim. It's victim-blaming. We are the victims of their fraud and their corruption and their cheating," said Carolus, who cited the leaked DNC emails as part of his mistrust of the Democratic Party. Others Sanders supporters, meanwhile, announced Tuesday they were canning their effort to nominate an alternative to Tim Kaine. Norman Solomon, co-founder of the Bernie Delegates Network, told reporters that he had found a VP candidate who would run against Kaine, but would not reveal the candidate's name because the Democratic Party hid the filing paperwork from them. CLARIFICATION: An earlier story referred imprecisely to the moment Sanders plans to weigh in on Clinton's nomination.

2020-03-05 00:00:00

000000102906

* Tracking the coronavirus: https://tmsnrt.rs/3aIRuz7 * Healthcare sector shines on virus drug development * Stocks still have downside risks due to coronavirus TOKYO, March 5 (Reuters) - Japanese shares posted their biggest one-day percentage gain in a month on Thursday, tracking a surge on Wall Street following strong showing by Joe Biden in Democratic primaries and robust data that lifted sentiment amid a rise in coronavirus cases. The Nikkei index ended 1.09% higher at 21,329.12, boosted by the healthcare and industrial sectors. Former Vice President Biden is now leading the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, and his economic policies are considered more benign than main rival Bernie Sanders. U.S. data that showed strong private sector hiring and robust growth in the services sector added to the upbeat mood. However, many investors warned that the recent sell-off due to the global spread of the coronavirus could quickly return because the flu-like illness has not yet been contained. The virus emerged in China late last year but has since spread to some 80 countries, with infections in Japan topping 200 and deaths totalling six. That excludes more than 700 cases and five more deaths from a quarantined cruise liner. "Japanese stocks are very close to book value, so you really can't sell any further from here," said Takashi Hiroki, chief strategist at Monex Securities in Tokyo. "However, a strong rally is unlikely unless we see a lot more positive news about the state of the virus in Japan." There were 137 advancers on the Nikkei index against 79 decliners on Thursday. Takeda Pharmaceutical Co Ltd rose 3.51% after the company said it was developing a drug for the virus, boosting shares in peers. The largest percentage gainers were drugmaker Kyowa Kirin Co Ltd up 4.51%, followed by food and drugmaker Meiji Holdings Co Ltd gaining 4.23%. Industrial conglomerate Hitachi Ltd advanced 4.18%. The largest percentage losers were aluminium maker Nippon Light Metal Holdings Co Ltd, down 2.63%. Construction company Shimizu Corp slipped 2.1%, while truck maker Hino Motors Ltd dropped 1.9%. Some traders now await the U.S. non-farm payrolls data due on Friday to gauge the health of the world's largest economy. The broader Topix index rose 0.88% to 1,515.71. The volume of shares traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's main board was 1.38 billion, compared to the average 1.36 billion in the past 30 days. (Editing by Subhranshu Sahu and Sriraj Kalluvila)

2018-03-22 00:00:00

000000006083

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey’s parliament has approved a bill granting the radio and television watchdog authority to regulate online content, fuelling concerns about further restrictions on the media. The move closes a loophole under which some Turkish broadcasters have sought refuge from censorship and strict regulations by moving to online streaming platforms. It follows sharp criticism by rights groups and Turkey’s Western allies of restrictions on the media following the 2016 failed coup against President Tayyip Erdogan. Two local streaming websites, PuhuTV and BluTV, have produced popular shows in the past year whose content and language would likely be censored if broadcast on television. PuhuTV’s thriller about a psychologist who falls in love with a dancer includes strong language and erotic scenes that would not be screened on Turkish television. The worldwide streaming service Netflix is also currently working on a show with Turkey’s TV industry. The bill requires broadcasters wishing to stream content online to be licensed by the RTUK watchdog, subjecting them to the same criteria as TV broadcasters. RTUK will be able to report unlicensed shows to a criminal court which can ban them. “A possibility is being created for institutions wishing to stream radio and television content only over the internet to receive a license for only this purpose,” the law reads, adding that these broadcasters currently avoid content regulation as well as taxes. “This way, the broadcasts in question will be subject to the same content supervision by RTUK as those broadcasts on landline, satellite and cable.” In the past, RTUK has censored, fined or halted shows and other programs for inappropriate content - usually due to coarse language, sexual content or the consumption of alcohol and tobacco products. A member of the RTUK board from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) said the licensing process had been made more difficult by a recent decree that requires the approval of the license by the National Intelligence Agency (MIT) and the Security General Directorate (EGM). Licences for pro-government organizations are approved far quicker than potential critics, Ismet Demirdogen told Reuters. “There are license requests that have been on hold for a year and a half.” Turkey’s post-coup crackdown has seen dozens of independent media outlets shut down for what the government says are links to terrorism. The Turkish Journalists Association says that as of January, there were 154 journalists in jail. The bill was passed late on Wednesday, hours before business group Dogan Holding confirmed it had started talks to sell its $890 million media arm to the pro-government Demiroren Holding, a deal seen as further cementing media support for Erdogan. Baris Yarkadas, a CHP lawmaker, said the sale of Dogan media group, as well as the passing of the new law, were an attempt by the AKP to “tighten the screws” before presidential and parliamentary elections next year. “The ruling party does not want to leave any media space for the opposition to express itself ahead of the elections.” Reporting by Gulsen Solaker; Writing by Ali Kucukgocmen; Editing by Dominic Evans and Richard Balmforth

2019-09-11 15:28:29

000000011479

Ledo Pizza appears to have tweeted, then deleted, a photo of a pizza decorated with olives and pepperoni to look like the American flag on Wednesday, September 11. The tweet was captioned #NeverForget. Ledo Pizza did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment, and many people on Twitter are asking the chain to explain the tweet and its disappearance. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.A deleted tweet about remembering September 11, 2001, posted by Ledo Pizza, is going viral.On Wednesday morning, Ledo Pizza — a chain specializing in square pizza with roughly 100 locations — tweeted "#NeverForget." The tweet featured a photo of a square pizza, topped with olives and pepperoni to look like the American flag. Ledo Pizza seems to have quickly deleted the tweet, later tweeting a photo of an American flag. However, a number of Twitter users took screenshots of the image before its disappearance. —ChippedFrontTeeth (@noises_nonsense) September 11, 2019—Mathew Brown (@mathewbrown) September 11, 2019—The Jeopardy Bridesmaid (@JakeMHS) September 11, 2019Ledo Pizza did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment. The chain has also not responded to people on Twitter asking about the original tweet and its deletion. Brands have struggled to respond appropriately on social media when attempting to commemorate the events of September 11, 2001.In 2013, AT&T apologized after tweeting an image of a Blackberry Z10 taking a photo of the two columns of light at Ground Zero. A number of other brands have been mocked for tone-deaf 9/11 tweets over the past 18 years, with many accounts now avoiding tweeting in remembrance altogether.

2016-01-13 18:35:00

000000037284

Video games are always asking us questions. They're not often big ones, or particularly meaningful ones, but they're always there. Take the easiest route to your exit point, or the more dangerous but potentially rewarding one? Are you a "lone survivor" or a "waste of skin"? Do you accept the generous offer from the Pro Evo version of Panathinaikos for an underperforming Shane Long, or keep him on your books as an occasional substitute striker? That Dragon, Cancer, out now for Razer Forge TV, OUYA, Mac, and PC, asks a devastatingly simple question, but one that games have never really asked before, at least not with quite so much feeling: "Can you find hope in the face of death?" Sadly, I'm not sure that I can. Not enough to play the debut release by Numinous Games, headed by developer Ryan Green. That Dragon, Cancer is just too upsetting for me. I can't even watch the trailer without feeling a lump in my throat. (And yes, it's easy to just write that down on a page, but trust me: every time.) 'That Dragon, Cancer,' launch trailer It is, however, a very important game, one that further "validates" this interactive medium as an effective means of artistic catharsis. That's one way of looking at it, anyway—I'm sure that Ryan and wife Amy, who also worked on the game, would rather see it less as a purging of emotions built up in the wake of their son's death, and more a celebration of the time they did spend together. That Dragon, Cancer candidly (and highly stylistically) follows the brief life of Joel Green, diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor in 2010 and given just months to live. He hung on until March 2014, dying at just five years old. My oldest son is five. Like many of you, I've lost family members to cancer. Hell, even superheroes aren't immune to the disease. Putting these things together in my head leads to a place I don't want to be, and that's the main reason why I won't play That Dragon, Cancer. I can't. I know it would wreck me. But I appreciate its existence a great deal. I have so much admiration for Ryan and Amy, and the small team at Numinous Games, for seeing this project through to its conclusion. It's not just emotional hurdles that they've had to overcome—there were some funding problems, and its initially exclusive platform, the OUYA, was discontinued last summer. But this is a game that needed to be finished. I'm glad it was. Gaming isn't without countless personal stories, told through both linear narratives and player-determined paths. Depression Quest and Papo & Yo are two that come immediately to mind. The former is a text-based work made using the Twine engine that, as its title so plainly implies, sympathetically addresses the subject of depression. The latter is its designer's means of articulating his feelings on growing up around an alcoholic, abusive father, presented as a puzzle-platformer. Neither is perfect. I don't imagine That Dragon, Cancer is, either. But where it differs, for me, despite its documented diversions into disruptive metaphorical imagery, poorly realized mini-games and heavy religious sentiments (the Greens are devout Christians), is in its rawness. There's no detachment from the subject. It's right there in your face, giggling as it bumps itself, himself, at the bottom of a slide. I can see the comments, the barbed criticisms, along the lines of this "not being a game" without searching for them. They're absolutely out there, and will only multiply. Partially that's the fault of gaming's gatekeepers for not diversifying its extremely limited array of accepted genres. Steam lists That Dragon, Cancer as an "adventure" game, but that positions it in the same category as Far Cry 3 and Tomb Raider. It is, rather, a short meditation on the loss of a loved one, lasting for a couple of hours. It doesn't feature any fiendish traps or perplexing puzzles, any savage beasts to best or pirates to punch. Its difficulty, according to critics who have played it—like Eurogamer's Martin Robinson and Kotaku's Patrick Klepek—manifests through simply continuing the game to its awful conclusion. There's barely any real "control"; as Kelpek writes: "This is a guided story; players merely determine its pacing." Article continues after the video below Not being able to save Joel is another reason why I won't play That Dragon, Cancer for myself. I love to hold onto hope during the darkest times; but when I know in advance that no amount of concentration, care, comfort, or combat will battle away the untreatable unspeakables that grew within this small boy, and that continue to throughout the game's duration, I can't find within myself the strength to even begin. When a character dies in This War of Mine, because I've not barricaded my shelter sufficiently, I feel guilty for failing to properly prepare for the night. Likewise, when my mother-in-law passes away in Papers, Please, it's because I've been too slow, too slack, at the border crossing to make enough to afford the medicine that could have saved her. But those failures are on me and I can accept them. Joel's death is set. To allow the player to turn this desperate situation around would have comprised a dishonest memory for the Greens, making a terrible situation a hundred times worse. I get why he has to die. I understand why this game only has one ending. We all have but the one ending. In a way, I felt cheated by the climax of The Last of Us, having any chance of choice taken away from me by a bullet. Not that I was expecting it to happen any differently; that game's rather older, battle-scarred Joel's selfishness mightn't have always been obvious, but he was exclusively in it for himself ever since his daughter's death, and the greater good wasn't about to change that. But the journey to that point, that fierce hospital shootout and the heartbeat-skipping epilogue, was dramatic, exciting, fun. I don't see any of those qualities in That Dragon, Cancer. Again: It's not an adventure, it's a predetermined true story. I see suffering, traveling on a one-way ticket, no salvation. I see me in absolute floods if I so much as get five minutes into proceedings. Other writers have expressed that they did feel hope within That Dragon, Cancer's brightly colored scenes—hope that they, too, could find a way to process any tragedy that may befall them, having fully appreciated what they had before it was taken away. That they found new feelings for their own closest through this experience. I'm not saying That Dragon, Cancer allows the Greens to breathe easier, that it in some small way relives the unimaginable pain of losing a child; but its existence has to stand for something good in their lives. Or else it stands for nothing. I've too much of my own baggage to carry any more weight, right now. And I'm sorry about that, but this isn't about me, as That Dragon, Cancer seems remarkable in many ways, and is well worthy of these words, this spotlight, without my participation. I am proud, if pride is quite the right feeling (perhaps it's more gratitude?), of gaming for continuing to present ways and means for people to let their feelings find focus and form. The Greens' work will hopefully gain enough of a profile to show those who don't regularly play video games, or haven't for years, that there's so much more to the medium than military shooters and sports simulations. If it achieves that, it'll definitely be something more than its makers ever intended: a monument to possibility. That Dragon, Cancer is out now. More information at the game's official website. Razer is donating proceeds from sales on its platform to the Morgan Adams Foundation and Family House SF. Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

2020-03-27

000000031054

(Reuters) - The coronavirus pandemic could kill more than 81,000 people in the United States in the next four months and may not subside until June, according to a data analysis done by University of Washington School of Medicine. The number of hospitalized patients is expected to peak nationally by the second week of April, though the peak may come later in some states. Some people could continue to die of the virus as late as July, although deaths should be below epidemic levels of 10 per day by June at the latest, according to the analysis. The analysis, using data from governments, hospitals and other sources, predicts that the number of U.S. deaths could vary widely, ranging from as low as around 38,000 to as high as around 162,000. The variance is due in part to disparate rates of the spread of the virus in different regions, which experts are still struggling to explain, said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, who led the study. The duration of the virus means there may be a need for social distancing measures for longer than initially expected, although the country may eventually be able relax restrictions if it can more effectively test and quarantine the sick, Murray said. The analysis also highlights the strain that will be placed on hospitals. At the epidemic’s peak, sick patients could exceed the number of available hospital beds by 64,000 and could require the use of around 20,000 ventilators. Ventilators are already running short in hard-hit places like New York City. The virus is spreading more slowly in California, which could mean that peak cases there will come later in April and social distancing measures will need to be extended in the state for longer, Murray said. Louisiana and Georgia are predicted to see high rates of contagion and could see a particularly high burden on their local healthcare systems, he added. The analysis assumes close adherence to infection prevention measures imposed by federal, state and local governments. “The trajectory of the pandemic will change – and dramatically for the worse – if people ease up on social distancing or relax with other precautions,” Murray said in a statement. The analysis comes as confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States continue to mount, with the World Health Organization saying the country has the potential to become the world’s new epicenter of the virus. The coronavirus causes a respiratory illness that in a minority of severe cases ravages the lungs and can lead to death. The United States has reported around 70,000 cases of the virus and more than 900 deaths since January. Globally, it has infected more than half a million people, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The University of Washington has been at the center of the outbreak in United States, which first was detected in the state of Washington and has so far killed 100 people in that state, according to date from Johns Hopkins University. Reporting by Carl O'Donnell; Editing by Aurora Ellis

2018-05-16

000000044067

U.S. homebuilding tumbled in April and permits fell, suggesting the housing market continued to tread water amid shortages of land and skilled labor. Housing starts dropped 3.7 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.287 million units in April, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday. The decline reversed March's rise. Data for March was revised to show starts rising to a 1.336 million-unit rate instead of the previously reported 1.319 million-unit pace. Building permits fell 1.8 percent to a rate of 1.352 million units last month. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast housing starts decreasing to a pace of 1.310 million units last month and permits declining to a 1.350 million-unit rate. Starts fell in the Northeast, West and Midwest, but rose in the South. U.S. financial markets were little moved by the data. Single-family homebuilding, which accounts for the largest share of the housing market, edged up 0.1 percent to a rate of 894,000 units last month. Single-family homebuilding has lost momentum since setting a 948,000-unit pace last November, which was the strongest in more than 10 years. Last month's gain in single-family starts was outpaced by an 11.3 percent decline in groundbreaking activity on multi-family housing units. Residential construction has been hamstrung by rising prices for building materials and shortages of land and skilled workers. While a survey on Tuesday showed confidence among single-family homebuilders perked up in May, builders complained that "the record-high cost of lumber is hurting builders' bottom lines and making it more difficult to produce competitively priced houses for newcomers to the market." The Trump administration in April last year imposed anti-subsidy duties on imports of Canadian softwood lumber. These constraints have left builders unable to plug an acute shortage of houses on the market, restraining home sales growth. Investment in homebuilding was flat in the first quarter after growing at a 12.8 percent annualized rate in the October-December quarter. Last month, permits for the construction of single-family homes rose 0.9 percent to a rate of 859,000 units in April. Permits for multi-family units fell 6.3 percent to a 493,000 unit-pace. The number of single-family units completed fell 4.0 percent in April. Single-family units under construction increased 1.0 percent to the highest level since June 2008.

2018-03-23 05:13:40

000000082690

A New York firefighter was killed and two others were seriously injured by a fire at a building in Harlem that was being used as a film set, officials said Friday morning. The five-alarm fire broke out in the basement of 773 St. Nicholas Avenue shortly before 11 p.m. Thursday, Daniel A. Nigro, the New York City fire commissioner, said during a news conference early Friday. The building is the former site of St. Nick’s Pub, which closed in 2011. “Conditions worsened after the hose lines were brought down to the cellar,” Commissioner Nigro said. The flames climbed up through the building and were seen coming through the roof. The commissioner said that it had not yet been determined how the fire had started. Michael R. Davidson, 37, was responsible for operating the fire hose nozzle for Engine Company 69, the first to arrive, the commissioner said. He was somehow separated from other firefighters when the blaze intensified and forced them to pull back from the building, officials said. When he was found by other firefighters, he was unconscious, and critically injured. He was taken to Harlem Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. “New York City is in mourning tonight,” Councilman Mark D. Levine said of Mr. Davidson in a tweet. “He made the ultimate sacrifice to save the lives of our neighbors. Horrific tragedy. We pray for his family and loved ones.” Firefighter Davidson was a 15-year veteran of the Fire Department and had been cited for bravery four times, the department said. The names of the two injured firefighters, who were being treated for burns, were not released. Commissioner Nigro said that fighting a fire in a cellar is one of the most dangerous tasks that firefighters take on, and that in a building that isn’t fireproof, like the one on St. Nicholas Avenue, flames are liable to spread rapidly. Several other firefighters had less serious injuries and three civilians received minor injuries, the commissioner said. “This is an awful night,” Eric Phillips, press secretary for Mayor Bill de Blasio, wrote on Twitter. “We’ve lost an NYC firefighter.” “Sick to my stomach,” he added. Mr. Phillips said that Mr. de Blasio, who on Thursday had flown to Florida, where his baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, have spring training, would return to New York on Friday to grieve with Firefighter Davidson’s family and colleagues. The building, which was one of Harlem’s few remaining jazz clubs before it closed, was being used for the filming of “Motherless Brooklyn,” neighbors said on social media. The film, based on a book by Jonathan Lethem about a detective with Tourette’s syndrome, stars Bruce Willis and Edward Norton, who is also the director. William Johnson, 61, who lives on the block, said the fire “looked crazy, like in the movies.” “It was like a big torch burning up everything,” he added. The crew had been filming on and off for several weeks in the Harlem location, and Thursday seemed to neighbors like a particularly busy day. Actors in period costumes were spotted milling about in the morning, and the crew was still present on the block as late as 10:30 p.m. Early Friday morning, the interior of the building looked to be completely gutted, and a neighboring building appeared to have been damaged. A movie supply truck was parked on the street, across from a fleet of classic cars, including a blue finned Chevrolet Bel Air and a green Ford Customline. (The film is set in 1950s New York.) In a statement, the film’s producers offered condolences to Firefighter Davidson’s family. The statement said that the fire started toward the end of the production’s working day, when the dozens of people working on site noticed smoke coming into their set from below. “To our great sorrow, we now know that a NYC firefighter lost his life battling the blaze that grew, and our hearts ache in solidarity with his family,” the statement said. “New York City firefighters truly are the bravest in the world. We watched firsthand with astonishment as they charged into the smoke to make sure all were safely out and then fought to contain the blaze and prevent it from spreading.” A spokeswoman for the producers said the cause of the fire was not yet known. Barbara Holliday, who lives across the street from the building, saw three Fire Department personnel standing beside an empty stretcher when she emerged from her building on Friday in the morning’s first light. “I’m so sorry, I heard,” she told them, dabbing her eyes. She said she had known for weeks that a movie was being filmed across the street and became friendly with some members of the film crew, who were popular in the neighborhood because they allowed neighbors to pose for photos with the vintage cars. Ms. Holliday, a block resident for almost 20 years, stared at the charred shell of the building, with fire engines out in front among the classic cars, and the glass smashed out of all the windows. Firefighter Davidson, who comes from a family of firefighters, is survived by his wife, Eileen, and four children. He was the 1,150th firefighter in the 153-year history of the department to die in the line of duty, Commissioner Nigro said.

2020-02-14 00:00:00

000000027108

* reuters://realtime/verb=Open/url=cpurl://apps.cp./Apps/econ-polls?RIC=CNGDPQP GDP poll data * reuters://realtime/verb=Open/url=cpurl://apps.cp./Apps/fx-polls?RIC=CNY= CNY poll data * Reuters poll graphic on coronavirus impact on the Chinese economy: https://tmsnrt.rs/3bCVBNp * Reuters poll graphic on China economic outlook: https://tmsnrt.rs/2SKdZLX?eikon=true Feb 14 (Reuters) - The coronavirus-hit Chinese economy will grow at its slowest rate since the financial crisis in the current quarter, according to a Reuters poll of economists who said the downturn will be short-lived if the outbreak is contained. A Feb. 7-13 Reuters poll of 40 economists based in mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, as well as Europe and the United States, predicted China's annual economic growth in the first quarter of 2020 to slump to 4.5% from 6.0% in the previous quarter. That drop was expected to drag down the full-year growth rate in 2020 to 5.5% from 6.1% in 2019, its weakest since at least 1990 when comparable records began. However, economists were optimistic the economy would bounce back as soon as the second quarter, with growth then forecast to recover to a median 5.7%, according to the poll. That figure was pushed higher by several optimistic forecasts from economists based in mainland China. The range was 2.9%-6.5%. The coronavirus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan - a nerve center in the global supply chain with a population of just under 11 million - and so far has claimed over 1,300 lives in China. That outstrips fatalities from the SARS outbreak in 2002-03 which killed 774 people worldwide. "Nobody knows the damage China's virus containment efforts will have on growth, and we probably never will for sure, given the opacity of the statistics. We reckon true GDP growth will fall below 2% in Q1, from 4.0% in Q4, which already was substantially lower than the official 6.0%," said Freya Beamish, chief Asia economist at Pantheon in London. "The lost production probably will be made up over the remainder of this year. But some service sector activity simply will be lost... people aren't going to get their hair cut twice because they missed getting it cut in Q1, or buy two coffees to make up for missed consumption." The enforced shutdown started during the Lunar New Year - usually the busiest time for most services businesses and according to most economists will accelerate an already-noticeable downturn before the outbreak. When asked to comment on what would happen to the economy if Chinese authorities failed to contain the virus from spreading rapidly, some mainland economists were reluctant to respond. Growth was expected to slow to 3.5% in the first quarter in a worst-case scenario, according to a median from 15 economists in response to a separate question, with forecasts ranging between zero and 5.5%. "I think the virus will be under control by April. However, in the worst-case scenario, growth may fall to 2-3% in the first quarter and to 5% in (full-year) 2020," said Bingnan Ye, senior macroeconomic analyst at Bank of China International in Beijing. Their 2020 forecast matched the median worst-case outcome and lined up with the Chinese government's forecast for the full-year economic growth rate to fall as much as 1 percentage point in 2020. "We do not expect a speedy recovery for the economy, even in the unlikely event that there are no new confirmed cases. After the coronavirus has been contained, it may still take four quarters to see a full recovery," said Iris Pang, Greater China economist at ING in Hong Kong. "Compared to 2003's SARS, this is a lot more damaging." Since then, China's economic composition has changed significantly to become a more consumption and service-driven economy from being the world's factory before. China's share of the global economy has quadrupled to 16% since the SARS outbreak, so any major disruption to economic activity is likely to have a bigger impact on the world economy now. "Every day is a deadline in February as Wuhan coronavirus data roll in," noted Lee Hardman, currency strategist at MUFG, the most accurate forecaster for Asian currencies in 2019. "For the yuan, the overall depreciation story continues." (For other stories from the Reuters global long-term economic outlook polls package) (Additional reporting by Sumanto Mondal; Polling by Shaloo Shrivastava and Richa Rebello; Graphics by Indradip Ghosh and Mumal Rathore Editing by Ross Finley and Toby Chopra)

2016-09-25

000000052008

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Sunday told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if elected, the United States would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the campaign said, marking a potential dramatic shift in U.S. policy. During the meeting that lasted more than an hour at Trump Tower in New York, Trump told Netanyahu that under his administration, the United States would “recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel.” While Israel calls Jerusalem its capital, few other countries accept that, including the United States. Most nations maintain embassies in Tel Aviv. Palestinians want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in a 1967 war, as capital of the state they aim to establish alongside Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Netanyahu held a separate meeting later on Sunday that lasted just under an hour with Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump’s rival in the Nov. 8 U.S. election. Clinton emphasized her commitment to the U.S.-Israel relationship and her plan to take the relationship to the next level, according to a statement from her campaign. She also talked about her commitment to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict “that guarantees Israel’s future as a secure and democratic Jewish state with recognized borders and provides the Palestinians with independence, sovereignty, and dignity,” according to the statement. “Secretary Clinton reaffirmed her opposition to any attempt by outside parties to impose a solution, including by the U.N. Security Council,” the statement said. During the meeting with Trump, the Republican candidate’s campaign said he agreed with Netanyahu that peace in the Middle East could only be achieved when “the Palestinians renounce hatred and violence and accept Israel as a Jewish State.” The Trump campaign said he and Netanyahu discussed “at length” Israel’s border fence, cited by Trump in reference to his own controversial immigration policies, which include building a wall on the U.S.- Mexico border and temporarily banning Muslims from entering the country. Other regional issues, including the fight against Islamic State, U.S. military assistance to Israel - “an excellent investment” - and the Iran nuclear deal, which both parties have criticized, were also discussed. Additional reporting by Michelle Conlin in New York and Caren Bohan in Washington; Editing by Bill Trott and Sandra Maler

2017-07-20 00:00:00

000000014850

In a New York Times interview released Wednesday, Donald Trump claims he was not able to converse with Japanese first lady Akie Abe at a G20 summit dinner.  After all, he said, despite being a "terrific woman," she "doesn't speak English." "Like, nothing, right? Like zero?" Times reporter Maggie Haberman asked him. "Like, not 'hello,'" Trump replied.  Except ... it appears that Akie Abe does speak English. In fact, here's a video of her delivering an entire keynote address in English. And the internet has jumped to a tantalizing conclusion: Akie Abe pretended not to know English so she didn't have to talk to Trump.  It's definitely a tempting argument: even if she doesn't speak the language comfortably in conversation, seems like she'd at least be able to say "hello," right? Akie Abe is my new hero. pic.twitter.com/WEnjBsrRQ3 — Sam Thielman (@samthielman) July 20, 2017 Of course, Trump is also a terrible man, so he could have just assumed she couldn't speak English because she's from another country and it's not her primary language. Or many other things could have made this impression on him, or led her not to speak. Either way, avoiding the person next to you for two hours sounds amazing. I will keep this in mind at my high school reunion.

2016-08-09

000000096372

A trade association that represents the largest U.S. commercial banks is backing legislation aimed at ending anonymous shell companies. "We believe the bill would assist public sector efforts to identify money laundering and terrorist financing through the disclosure of the beneficial owners of corporations," The Clearing House Association said in a letter Monday to the sponsors of the legislation: Sen. Chuck GrassleyCharles (Chuck) Ernest GrassleyGOP senators call for Barr to release full results of Epstein investigation Trump health official: Controversial drug pricing move is 'top priority' Environmental advocates should take another look at biofuels MORE (R-Iowa), Sen. Sheldon WhitehouseSheldon WhitehouseSenate Democrats push Trump to permanently shutter migrant detention facility To cash in on innovation, remove market barriers for advanced energy technologies Democrats give cold shoulder to Warren wealth tax MORE (D-R.I.), Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.). "We can see no justification for allowing corporations to shield their ownership," the group added. Under current law, companies do not have to disclose to state governments their true owners at the time that they are incorporated. The legislation would require companies to report ownership information at the time of incorporation and when there is a change in ownership. The Clearing House Association said it "wholeheartedly" backs the bill and recommended the legislation clarify that financial institutions can get access to the ownership information that would be reported to states. "Under the current regime, many if not most of the resources devoted to identifying money laundering and terrorist financing are provided by financial institutions," the association said. "Denying them access to this important information would significantly undermine the goals of the bill." The Clearing House is owned by banks including Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo. 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.

2019-07-25

000000012030

ASUNCION, July 25 (Reuters) - Paraguay's central bank on Thursday cut the country's 2019 economic growth forecast to 1.5% from 3.2%, citing poor performance in the agricultural sector and external factors including trade problems in neighboring Argentina and Brazil. "The forecast is being reduced mainly due to adverse crop weather and a more complicated and unfavorable international scenario affecting trade with Argentina and Brazil," the bank's chief analyst Cesar Rojas told reporters at a news conference. The economic outlook will depend on a possible upturn in the second half of the year, he said. "This should be supported by countercyclical fiscal policies and also by a more lax monetary policy," he added. Paraguay's latest soybean crop fell more than 20% due to poor weather. (Reporting by Daniela Desantis, writing by Hugh Bronstein Editing by Susan Thomas)

2020-01-10 05:00:32

000000068567

TEL AVIV DISPATCH Ultraconservative Orthodox groups may protest, but for many Israelis, the buses offer a new freedom to travel on the weekend. TEL AVIV — The ritual Friday-night scramble for a parking space was well underway, but for once, Rob and Netta Geist Pinfold watched it unfold with a smile. It was late on the Sabbath eve in central Tel Aviv, and swarms of residents who had driven to dinner were cruising for the most precious real estate in the cram-packed capital of secular Israel: a legal spot on the street. The Geist Pinfolds had let their car gather dust for the night. They’d ridden to Ramat Aviv and back in a minibus. And it hadn’t cost them a shekel. Nor were they alone. Some 10,000 Israelis have been riding for free on Friday nights and Saturdays since a new Sabbath-only transit network was rushed into service in November by Tel Aviv and three neighboring municipalities. What is revolutionary about the minibuses is not that they’re free, but that they’re running at all. For an otherwise modern metropolis, known for its start-ups and billion-dollar exits, its beaches and bustling night life, Tel Aviv has long been — literally — slowed down by the statutory shutdown of public transportation from before sundown on Friday until after sundown on Saturday. Religious Jews abstain from driving and from spending money on the Sabbath, and public transportation has been banned in most places since an agreement before Israel’s founding — known as the status quo — struck a balance between religious and secular interests. In heavily religious West Jerusalem, where Sabbath observance is the rule, the pause in bus service inconveniences relatively few. Not so in Tel Aviv, where Friday nights bring crowds to the cafes and bars lining Rabin Square and Rothschild Boulevard, and the clubs and eateries of bohemian Florentin overflow into the wee hours with hipsters whose beards rival any Hasid’s. The weekly transit shutdown amounts to an annoying and costly speed bump on the way to the party. Those determined to go out, or to get to and from their jobs pouring drinks or waiting tables, have options — taxis, private shuttles or even the electric scooters that charge by the minute. But taxis charge extra on the Sabbath. Private shuttles, which are licensed by the state, run only on a few main arteries. And scooting while inebriated is ill-advised; one minibus passenger rolled up a sleeve to show his scar from a drunken mishap. “We waited for this so long,” said Sofia Rabinovich, 18, a student at Tel Aviv University who once depended on her boyfriend to drive her to see friends downtown or in Jaffa. The excitement about what amounts to a slapdash, stopgap transit system captures how Tel Aviv is at once Israel’s most modern city and also strangely backward. It is trying to become more worldly, to make itself more livable to residents and more inviting to visitors. Its skyline is rising, with a 91-story tower under construction. The trenches for a light-rail network have been dug, though it is likely to be inadequate the moment it opens. A rapid-transit subway system is at least on the drawing boards. But the city that launched a thousand killer apps still has plenty of catching up to do with metropolises not known as nearly so innovative. The new bus service was spearheaded by Tel Aviv’s longtime mayor, 75-year-old Ron Huldai, an old-time Israeli socialist and hard-charging former fighter pilot and air force general. He said Zionism was meant to create “a center for the Jews, and not a center for the Jewish religion.” He wants his city to be a “model for democracy and pluralism.” Mr. Huldai said he had wanted to expand Sabbath transit since taking office in 1998. “The first 10 years I didn’t have money to do it,” he said. “The second 10, the minister of transportation kept promising that he was going to do it. Finally, I lost my patience, and we did it.” A loophole made it legal. The Sabbath ban covers only public transportation for which riders pay a fare. Nothing prevented a city from using municipal funds to run buses where passengers rode free. The low cost made it feasible. Running 19-seat minibuses across the metro area from early Friday evening until 2 a.m. on Saturday, and then starting again at 9 a.m. on Saturday, required only $3.6 million a year, shared with the cities of Ramat Hasharon, Giv’atayim and Kiryat Ono. Still, it wasn’t until September, after Israel’s second parliamentary election of the year resulted in another deadlock, that Mr. Huldai gave the project the go-ahead. The stalemate, in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-Orthodox allies remained unable to form a government, had created an opening. Nonreligious voters had risen up against the influence of the ultra-Orthodox, and ultra-Orthodox lawmakers were not looking for another fight, at least until they were assured of another term in power. “I’m secular,” Mr. Huldai said. “But sometimes, God is working for us.” In another twist, Tel Aviv’s lefties were using against the right-wing government in Jerusalem a strategy that Israel long ago perfected against the Palestinians. “It’s the old Zionist way — creating facts on the ground,” said Tomer Persico, a scholar who advocates religious freedom in Israel. There were objections, of course. Bezalel Smotrich, the transportation minister, said he was “pained” by the bus service. Moshe Gafni, of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, called it a “disaster on a national scale.” Shopkeepers for whom Saturday is their only day off complained that their nonreligious customers — suddenly able to ride to open malls — would desert them. From the left, Mr. Persico worried that Tel Aviv’s gambit would set off a “secular arms race,” with cities that cater to affluent nonreligious Israelis accelerating the sorting of the country’s population by providing services like Sabbath buses that poorer and more religious areas would not have. But the throngs of passengers making use of the minibuses in Tel Aviv on a recent Friday had little interest in such quibbles. As the vehicles kept rolling by, because there were no empty seats, the clusters of partyers, restaurant workers and young couples on date night who were willing to wait as much as an hour for a ride attested to a larger-than-expected, pent-up demand. Ridership was just as robust the next morning, with passengers carrying portable grills, strollers or folding chairs for outings in the sunshine. “The paradox is, I like having it quiet on Shabbat,” said Linda Lovitch, an Elmira, N.Y., native who has lived in Israel for 36 years. She said she attends synagogue and lights candles, but resented being denied public transportation out of deference to the more religious. “Why shouldn’t I get to go to the beach or to Jaffa or anywhere else?” she said, returning from the gym. “If people want it, why shouldn’t they have it? That’s democracy.” For Vicky Purmishar, the minibuses arrived just in time. Her 79-year-old mother was hospitalized with a degenerative brain disorder in November. It took her sight and left her unable to walk or eat without choking. The nurses couldn’t sit with her for a half-hour at every meal, so Ms. Purmishar, 48, an only child raising two sons, visited twice a day to help her mother eat. Ms. Purmishar does not drive, and said she could not afford cabs from Ramat Hasharon. Climbing into a minibus outside Ichilov Hospital on a Saturday afternoon, she said the free rides may well have saved her mother’s life. “It’s like God sent me a way to come here,” she said. Irit Pazner Garshowitz contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

2016-10-13 04:57:20

000000067870

Editorial The N.A.A.C.P., the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, has struggled in recent years to win over younger African-Americans, who often see the group as out of touch. The N.A.A.C.P.’s board will reinforce that impression if it ratifies an ill-advised resolution — scheduled for a vote this weekend — that calls for a moratorium on expansion of public charter schools, which receive public money but are subject to fewer state regulations than traditional public schools. These schools, which educate only about 7 percent of the nation’s students, are far from universally perfect, and those that are failing should be shut down. But sound research has shown that, when properly managed and overseen, well-run charter schools give families a desperately needed alternative to inadequate traditional schools in poor urban neighborhoods. This truth has been underscored in several studies by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes. Last year, for example, the center found that students enrolled in charter schools in 41 of the nation’s urban regions learned significantly more than their traditional public school counterparts. According to the study, charter school students received the equivalent of 40 days of additional learning a year in math and 28 additional days of learning a year in reading. Moreover, educational gains for charter school students turned out to be significantly larger for black, Hispanic, low-income and special education students in both math and reading. This performance advantage has been well documented in New York City and has been found to be particularly striking for charters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Washington, D.C., Memphis and Newark. Such academic improvements have stimulated heavy demand for more charters among low-income black and Latino families that are often trapped in failing districts. The Stanford study notes, however, that poorly run charters can be disastrous. In some areas, the study notes, not a single charter school outperforms the traditional school alternative — and in some places, more than half are significantly worse. The city of Detroit, where more than half of all students attend charter schools, has recently become an example of such a failure. Where charter schools excel, however, demand for admission is high. In New York City, for example, charter schools enroll about 107,000 students, roughly 10 percent of the city’s total enrollment. But more than 44,000 students who sought admission for the current school year were turned away. In Harlem and the South Bronx, there are now four applicants for every charter school seat. Given the demand for good charters, a moratorium would clearly be a bad idea. But the N.A.A.C.P. has raised legitimate concerns that lawmakers and education officials need to take seriously. It notes, for example, that minority students are more likely to be suspended from charter schools than their white peers. That is, of course, outrageous, but it is an endemic problem to the public school system as a whole and not limited to charters. The Obama administration has recently put schools on notice that discriminatory disciplinary policies violate federal civil rights law. The N.A.A.C.P. resolution is less credible when it says that charter schools have contributed to “increased segregation.” Yes, many in urban centers have predominantly black or Latino student enrollment, but it’s nonsensical to fault a charter school for serving a minority student body in an overwhelmingly minority area. For many parents and students, a charter school is the only route to a superior education. In advocating a blanket moratorium on charters, the N.A.A.C.P. would fail to acknowledge what’s happening to children who need and deserve a way out of the broken schools to which they have been relegated.

2018-03-16

000000036632

LONDON (Reuters) - Valtteri Bottas could be fighting for his Formula One future this season but the Finn says he feels less pressure than last year when he joined champions Mercedes as Lewis Hamilton’s team mate. The 28-year-old has no certainty beyond 2018, and rivals are already eyeing up one of the sport’s most coveted seats, but believes he can raise his game to the point of being a title contender. “I think in Formula One — in any season, in any case — if you don’t perform then your seat is always in danger. That’s how it goes in this sport,” Bottas told reporters last month at the launch of the new W09 car. “That’s a fact. But especially in a seat like this. “For the last few years it’s been the best two seats in Formula One, so everyone wants to be there...The ball is in my hands and I need to make the most out of the year ahead, but I am confident I can.” Bottas joined Mercedes, who will be chasing their fifth successive constructors’ and drivers’ title double this year, in January 2017 after the sudden retirement of world champion Nico Rosberg. That meant he had plenty to get on top of immediately, unlike Hamilton, with a new team and car after years at Williams. The Finn, who gets on markedly better with the Briton than Rosberg did in his last few seasons, won three races in 2017 to Hamilton’s nine. He was always strong on the smoother surfaces but had a dip in form after the August break, before coming back strongly. Bottas also failed to secure the runner-up position in the drivers’ championship, finishing third behind Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel. “After the summer he kind of couldn’t put it together in the way he expected it himself. And then towards the end of the season he was very good again,” said team principal Toto Wolff, who was previously involved in the Finn’s management team. With Red Bull’s Australian Daniel Ricciardo out of contract at the year end, and making known he would relish being Hamilton’s team mate, and Force India’s young Frenchman Esteban Ocon a Mercedes protege, Bottas has to deliver. “Last year I learnt that I still had many things to be learnt,” he said. “Starting the second year with this team, definitely my chances are much better to be performing every single race weekend on a level that I should.” he said. “Last year there were many race weekends I wasn’t on the level I should have been and wanted to be.” Bottas said he had analyzed the problems and learnt from Hamilton, having plenty of time to reflect over the winter on what he had done wrong and how to get it right, and felt energized. “A lot of it was from my side, understanding issues after the summer break,” he said. “I think now being not kind of a rookie in this team, for sure the team is expecting more from me. So am I,” he said. “I’m aiming for a better season than last year and for sure the team is hoping to see me performing better. “I think last year going into the season there was more pressure than now. Still I have all the targets ahead of me and I’m really hungry for more wins and success.” Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Ed Osmond

2017-11-08

000000088045

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices settled slightly lower on Wednesday after U.S. government data showed rising domestic crude production, a surprise build in U.S. stockpiles and a decline in monthly Chinese crude imports, a triple blow that was offset somewhat by rising tensions in the Middle East. Brent futures LCOc1 fell 20 cents, or 0.3 percent, to settle at $63.49 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude CLc1 fell 39 cents, or 0.7 percent, to settle at $56.81 per barrel. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in a report that U.S. crude production rose to 9.620 million barrels per day during the week of Nov. 3, the highest weekly output on record according to federal energy data going back to 1983. [EIA/S] “The most notable thing in the EIA report was that production increased. We’re on our way to set record crude oil production in 2018,” said Andrew Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates in Houston. The current all-time high for average annual output was 9.637 million bpd in 1970, according to federal energy data. The EIA also said crude stocks increased by 2.2 million barrels, shocking the market after analysts polled by Reuters had forecast a 2.9 million-barrel draw and industry group the American Petroleum Institute on Tuesday reported a decline of 1.6 million barrel. [API/S] ENERGYUSA China’s October oil imports fell to just 7.3 million bpd from a near record-high of about 9 million bpd in September, according to data from the General Administration of Customs. Traders said they were also watching escalating tensions in the Middle East, especially between regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. Brent crude hit $64.65 earlier this week, its highest since mid-2015, as political tensions in the Middle East escalated after a sweeping anti-corruption purge in top crude exporter Saudi Arabia, which in turn has confronted Iran over the conflict in Yemen. Brent futures have gained around 14 percent in the last month alone, propelled largely by evidence that output cuts by OPEC and its partners are reducing the global oil glut. “Stronger oil fundamentals and investor inflows have been the catalyst for higher oil prices, but adding further support now is a focus on several geopolitical risks that have been looming over oil markets for a while,” said analysts at Citi. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ 2017 World Oil Outlook showed the group predicts demand for its crude will rise more slowly than previously expected in the next two years, as higher prices from its supply policy stimulate output growth from rival producers. (For a graphic on 'Brent vs. WTI forward curves' click reut.rs/2hkCcd6) Additional reporting by Amanda Cooper in London and Henning Gloystein and Jamie Freed in Singapore; editing by David Gregorio and Marguerita Choy

2018-02-16 23:49:20

000000050971

Roger Cohen Poland’s lurch into illiberalism and rewritten history, following the well-trodden Hungarian path toward the curtailment of democracy, is the most alarming political development in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall almost three decades ago. Without Poland’s brave leadership and the Solidarity labor movement’s defiance of the Communist government, the crumbling of the Soviet imperium in Central Europe would not have been precipitated. Poles recovered their nation, their history and their freedom in 1989; a Europe artificially severed regained its geography and wholeness. My friend Adam Michnik, enfant terrible of this Polish Revolution, once told me what he had fought for at the price of repeated imprisonment under the Communists. “My obsession had been that we should have a revolution that not resemble the French or the Russian, but rather the American, in the sense that it be for something, not against something. A revolution for a constitution, not a paradise; an anti-utopian revolution, because utopias lead to the guillotine and the gulag.” Michnik’s cry was, “Liberty, Fraternity, Normality.” It was heady to listen to him in the early post-Communist days. Normality — freedom from the deathly hand of the nomenklatura and the prying eyes of the secret police — was thrilling. A revolution for a constitution! The country duly acquired one, and a pretty damn good one, stating that Poland is a democratic state ruled by law, with a political system based on separation of powers, and setting out a range of individual rights. It is this Poland — of democracy guaranteed by constitutional checks and balances — that the government of Jarosław Kaczynski’s Law and Justice Party has set about undermining since 2015, with the backing of President Andrzej Duda. Their model has been the Hungary of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, systematically at work on an illiberal project since 2010. The process is gathering pace. The Law and Justice Party has turned the Polish lower house of Parliament, or Sejm, into a rubber stamp for its agenda. It has also waged a relentless campaign against an independent judiciary. This has involved increasing political control over the Constitutional Tribunal, Supreme Court and the ordinary courts through insistence on early retirement (and so replacement) of judges and refusal to comply with constitutional opinions. Judicial appointments have been politicized, an extraordinary process for review of elections created, the independence of the public prosecutor effectively eliminated, and court dockets manipulated. The Venice Commission, a panel of constitutional law experts, said in December 2017 that the various measures put “at serious risk” the independence of “all parts” of the Polish judiciary. “We are witnessing a slow but insistent and intentional process of undermining the courts so that they will not enforce the Constitution against the executive and the legislature,” Sarah Cleveland, the American member of the Venice Commission and a law professor at Columbia University, told me. “It’s a process of death by 1,000 cuts.” The death involved could be that of constitutional governance and Poland’s democracy itself. Several things need to be said here. The first is that Poland, by far the largest of the formerly Communist Central European nations that joined the European Union and NATO, has gone from poster child of liberty to standard-bearer of nationalist reaction, propelled by the phantasms of migrant waves and European Union “interference” manipulated by Kaczynski. It is an extraordinary volte-face. It is also testimony to how illusory the triumph of liberalism in 1989 has proved under the pressure of globalization. The second is that Donald Trump’s United States, potentially the chief bulwark against illiberalism’s rise, has gone AWOL. He gave Kaczynski and the nationalists a pass during his visit to Poland in July. Indeed, the president has been conducting his own campaign against an independent judiciary. He’s called the American criminal justice system a “laughingstock’ and “a joke,” dismissed the legal system as “broken,” insulted judges, called for quick “strong justice” (read the death penalty), and labeled courts as “political.” The impression Trump leaves is that he’d be happy with Vladimir Putin’s law courts, Xi Jinping’s press, and Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. All this, of course, has empowered the likes of the Polish government. Anyone who seriously believes Trump is innocuous through incompetence on the world stage should think again. The third is that Poland and Hungary, countries for which the European Union was a sanctuary from oppression as they emerged from Communism, now pose a direct challenge to a Union that rests on the principles of “democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights.” A formal European procedure has been initiated that could lead to the loss of Poland’s voting rights within the Union; it should be pursued with vigor. Poland and Hungary cannot be allowed to sabotage without cost the club of which they have been, and remain, such conspicuous beneficiaries. The fourth is the most serious. Independent courts (like a free press) hold power to account; they establish facts and truth. In their absence, the way is opened to Michnik’s “guillotine and the gulag.” When truth goes, so does freedom. Poland’s grotesque “Death Camp” law, signed this month by President Duda, must therefore be seen as of a piece with a broader assault on truth. The law makes it a crime to accuse “the Polish nation” of complicity in the Holocaust or any “Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.” Poles suffered terribly during World War II. The fact that many of the Nazis’ death camps, including Auschwitz, were on Polish soil has led to unforgivable conflations. But if Poles were victims, they were also at times accomplices and perpetrators in the slaughter of Polish Jews, as has been well documented in Jan Gross’s study of the Jedwabne pogrom of 1941, among other works. I know this history personally, having been married to a woman whose Polish Jewish mother was saved through the bravery of a Pole (now belatedly honored at Israel’s Yad Vashem), and whose Polish Jewish grandmother was betrayed by a Pole and sent to the gas chamber. Poles, as no others, know the terrible toll of false history. They know how the Soviet Union tried for decades to obscure the reality of the Katyn massacre. Yet now, a miserable bunch of small-minded nationalist upstarts are trying to play jingoistic games with historical facts in pursuit of their illiberal betrayal of the great Polish contribution to European freedom. Awaken, Poland, before it is too late! Revolutions for a constitution are worth defending to the hilt. OpinionJacob Mikanowski

2019-05-07

000000059735

* Asian stock markets: tmsnrt.rs/2zpUAr4 * Nikkei falls as markets reopen after 10-day break * Spreadbetters expect softer open for European shares * Lighthizer: China reneged on commitments; E-Mini futures slip * U.S.-China talks to continue this week; Chinese VP due to attend By Tomo Uetake SYDNEY, May 7 (Reuters) - Asian shares staggered up from five-week lows on Tuesday but remained fragile after U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest threat to raise tariffs on Chinese goods shocked financial markets and fueled worries that trade talks may be derailed. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan edged up 0.1 percent, erasing earlier losses. It tumbled 2 percent on Monday after Trump unexpectedly jacked up pressure on Beijing in the midst of trade negotiations. Chinese shares staged a mild technical rebound but stayed choppy after their worst drop in more than three years on Monday. The benchmark Shanghai Composite was 0.5 percent higher, while the blue-chip CSI 300 rose 0.7 percent and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 0.3 percent. Japan’s Nikkei shed 1.5 percent, taking a delayed hit as the country’s financial markets opened on Tuesday after a 10-day break to mark the ascension of a new emperor. Financial spread-betters expect London’s FTSE, Frankfurt’s DAX and Paris’s CAC to fall between 0.1 and 0.3 percent when they open. U.S. stock futures for the S&P 500 declined as much as 0.8 percent in Asian trading hours on Tuesday as top U.S. officials said China had backtracked on commitments in trade talks. Trump tweeted on Sunday that he would raise tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods to 25 percent from 10 percent by the end of the week and would “soon” target the remaining Chinese imports with tariffs, prompting investors to dump risky assets on Monday. Yasuo Sakuma, chief investment officer at Libra Investments in Tokyo, believed stocks have entered a new downtrend as investors had growing doubts over whether the United States and China would cut a deal on trade any time soon. “Investors had been too complacent since the beginning of this year. Now it’s time for ‘sell in May and go away,’” he said. Still, some investors are holding out hope that the tariff threats are a negotiating tactic. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said he expected top Chinese negotiator Vice Premier Liu He would lead a delegation coming from Beijing for talks in Washington on Thursday and Friday. “Markets are still not sure (whether Trump will go ahead with the tariff hikes,) and far from a panicky situation. We have to see how the U.S.-China talks will unfold this week,” said Naoki Iwami, fixed income chief investment officer at Whiz Partners. China’ yuan weakened further against the dollar on Tuesday, but the pace of losses slowed, as investors largely digested Trump’s tariff threats and started to seek clues for reaction from Beijing. The offshore yuan slipped 0.3 percent to 6.7939 per dollar while the onshore yuan also fell 0.3 percent to 6.7789 per dollar. Australia’s dollar became the biggest mover among the major currencies, strengthening as much as 0.9 percent to a one-week top of $0.7048, after the country central bank’s decision to hold rates wrongfooted some who had expected a cut. There had been some speculation it would ease policy given recent weak inflation. Other major currencies remained confined to well-trodden ranges on Tuesday, with the euro trading virtually flat at $1.1212 and the dollar holding steady at 110.63 yen . In the commodity market, oil futures traded steady to higher on Tuesday as U.S. sanctions on crude exporters Iran and Venezuela kept supply concerns alive. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures inched up to $62.34 per barrel while Brent crude oil futures were little changed at $71.23. (Reporting by Tomo Uetake; Editing by Kim Coghill & Sam Holmes)

2017-07-12

000000106262

During his first address to Congress in February, President Trump called for more rapid approval of drugs by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), claiming that the agency has a “slow and burdensome approval process” that is keeping medicines from those in need. He also called for slashing regulations at the FDA and his proposed fiscal year 2018 cuts the agency’s budget by 31 percent but aims to make up part of the loss by raising fees paid for drug and device makers to have their products reviewed. Just how would lowering funding help speed approvals?   However, the drug approval system run by the FDA is already without a doubt the best in the world. A new drug is more likely to get approved in the US before it does in any other country. Last year, of the 22 new drugs that were approved, 19 were approved in the U.S. first. And all but one of them came in the first cycle of approval, meaning the FDA didn’t delay approval for additional information from a drugmaker. The FDA also approves more drugs and does it faster than its European counterpart, the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Between 2011 and 2015, the FDA approved new 170 new drugs compared to just 144 by the EMA, according to an April analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine. And the median review time was 303 days at the FDA compared to 383 days at EMA. The review also showed that over the same time period, the FDA approved 43.5 percent of applications for drugs to treat orphan or rare diseases, compared to just 25 percent at EMA. It’s possible that the FDA is already approving drugs too rapidly. The FDA has 4 different expedited pathways in place: priority review (a 6-month FDA review rather than the 10-month standard), breakthrough therapy (for drugs that are an improvement over a current therapy), accelerated approval (approval based on a secondary outcome known as a surrogate endpoint that is thought to predict benefit) and fast track (for drugs where there is a serious unmet medical need). The FDA reported that nearly 73 percent of the 22 novel drugs it approved last year came through one or more of these rapid approval programs. While this sounds great, the reality is there are risks to patients. Many of these drugs often are approved without strong proof of efficacy and have safety issues are always a concern. Shorter trials mean less time to study interactions with other medicines and until a drug is taken by thousands of people for months or years a full safety profile is impossible to create. However, if studies are shortened and fewer people are in the studies that means that side effects won’t become apparent until well after they hit the market. In fact, a May Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study found about one-third of the new drugs the FDA approved from 2001 and 2010 had side effects that caused so much harm that the FDA took action in form of a safety warning to healthcare providers, boxed warning on a drug’s label or even withdrawal from the market. And that doesn’t touch on the issue on not knowing minor side effects like nausea, dizziness or headaches. One of the most common methods used to prove efficacy faster is the use of “surrogate endpoints.” A good example is the cholesterol drug Vytorin. It was shown to decrease LDL (bad) cholesterol and C-reactive protein, both considered “markers” of heart disease. The true endpoint is survival, and out in the real world it was found that patients using Vytorin did not live longer, even though their LDL (also known as the bad cholesterol) was lower. These patients were harmed in three ways: 1) not receiving the benefit promised; 2) being exposed to a drug’s side effects; and 3) by not receiving effective care for their condition. All of the expedited pathways to FDA approval should be limited severely to true breakthrough drugs that are needed urgently. Instead, too many drugs with only incremental benefits are being rushed through vetting creating an unnecessary risk for too small a benefit. The public would be well-served by the FDA getting tougher on requiring post-marketing studies for new drugs. A study published in BMJ in May confirmed that post-market studies are relatively infrequent for new drugs that are approved based on limited evidence. Researchers looked at all the new drugs the FDA approved between 2005 and 2012 based on either a single pivotal trial or trials that used surrogate endpoints. For 35 percent of the indications examined, there were no post-market studies conducted. And at an average of 5.5 years after approval, fewer than 10 percent of those indications had been studied in at least one controlled, double-blind, randomized study that showed clinical efficacy significantly better than placebo. Those that want to streamline the drug approval process believe that the more medications that come to the market the more people benefit. But in order to do this, clinical trials will likely be curtailed, they will be conducted for less time and efficacy measures will be weakened. We will have incomplete knowledge of a drug’s side effects and adverse events. Undoubtedly, drugs that will do more harm than good will be approved as a result. And that could only benefit pharmaceutical companies at the expense of patients’ health. Suzanne Robotti founded MedShadow Foundation in 2012, which is a non-profit organization that explores side effects and long-term effects of medications that many people take. The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill. View the discussion thread. Contributor's Signup 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.

2016-06-23 03:21:05

000000038710

Charles M. Blow On Wednesday, Donald Trump gave a meandering, fact-challenged speech — read from a teleprompter, no less — that framed him and the Republican Party as champions of America’s women and racial, ethnic and L.G.B.T. minorities. I laughed out loud, repeatedly. Trump continues to make the incredible claim that his religion-based anti-Muslim policies on immigration and refugees would be good for members of the L.G.B.T. communities because many of those people come from countries with brutally anti-gay records. As Trump put it: “I only want to admit people who share our values and love our people. Hillary Clinton wants to bring in people who believe women should be enslaved and gays put to death.” What? Not only has Trump never specified a values-based exemption to his Muslim ban, but also how on earth would a values test be administered? And where is the specific proof that Clinton explicitly “wants to bring in people who believe women should be enslaved and gays put to death”? Who is buying that nonsense? I know, I know, a disturbingly large percentage of the electorate, but still: This is just a string of lies stitched together with a silver thread. At another point, Trump said that Clinton “took millions” from countries that “pushed oppressive Shariah law” or otherwise “horribly abuse women and the L.G.B.T. citizens” while not disclosing that, as CNN reported last week: “[Trump], too, has financial ties to some of the same companies. From licensing his name to a golf club in Dubai to leasing his suburban New York estate to former Libyan strongman Muammar el-Gaddafi, Trump has launched several new business ventures connected to Middle Eastern countries since 2000.” This man gives new meaning to the word hypocrisy. But he didn’t stop there. He also framed himself as the best candidate for African-Americans (a group he once said he hated counting his money) and Hispanics (even though he has labeled many Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals). Trump said of Clinton: “She has pledged to grant mass amnesty and in her first 100 days, end virtually all immigration enforcement, and thus create totally open borders for the United States. The first victims of her radical policies will be poor African-American and Hispanic workers who need jobs. They’re also the ones she will hurt the most, by far.” He continued: “She can’t claim to care about African-American and Hispanic workers when she wants to bring in millions of new low-wage earners to compete against them.” This is the epitome of the politics of public division that seeks to pit one part of the electorate against the other, a way of making starving dogs fight for scraps. It’s revolting and un-American — not only the liberal vision of America, but also the conservative vision of America as articulated by Paul Ryan in 2011 when he was hammering President Obama for engaging in what he thought was class warfare. At the time, Ryan told The Heritage Foundation: “The perfection of our Union, especially our commitment to equality of opportunity, has been a story of constant striving to live up to our Founding principles. This is what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said, ‘In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.’ ” Ryan continued: “The American Idea is not tried in times of prosperity. Instead, it is tested when times are tough: when the pie is shrinking, when businesses are closing, and when workers are losing their jobs. Those are the times when America’s commitment to equality of opportunity is called into question. That’s when the temptation to exploit fear and envy returns — when many in Washington use the politics of division to evade responsibility for their failures and to advance their own narrow political interests.” Who is now exploiting fear and envy, Speaker Ryan? Oh yeah, the man you’ve endorsed. The question that ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Ryan earlier this month still lingers in search of a sufficient answer: “You’ve said, in explaining why you’re standing by your endorsement of Mr. Trump, what matters more to you than anything are our core principles. But what core principle is more important to the party of Lincoln than stepping up against racism?” Trump ended his specious speech with a string of baseless boasts about all the fairy-tale, utopian improvements that a Trump presidency would somehow magically induce. One of those boasts was that “inner cities” — invariably a term of art in American politics for poor minority neighborhoods — “which have been horribly abused by Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party, will finally, finally, finally be rebuilt.” Again, what on earth does “rebuilt” mean? Never mind. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything specific, or have any policy substance, but rather simply to sound positive and impressive. Trump’s speech was garbage, pure and simple. Not only was it too often false, it was also flimsy, an effort to paint himself as a champion of the people who loathe him most. Maybe the people who support him despise Clinton more than they cherish the truth, but for those who can see this man’s naked bigotry for what it is, this speech fell like seeds on a stony place. Nothing will come of it.

2019-04-09

000000010037

Washington (CNN)Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin ended a long day of testimony before House lawmakers in a verbal sparring match with California Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, over his insistence on leaving for a previously scheduled appointment. The Treasury secretary at 5:08 p.m. ET interrupted the question-and-answer session with lawmakers to remind the committee of their agreement that he would be able to leave at 5 p.m. Mnuchin said he was scheduled to meet with a senior official from the government of Bahrain to discuss efforts to combat counterterrorism financing, but would be willing to stay until 5:15 and return at a later date to testify before the committee. "It will be embarrassing if I keep this person waiting for a long period of time," Mnuchin said. Waters responded: "Unfortunately, we are all pressed for time." The exchange came at the end of Mnuchin's back-to-back appearances before a panel of the House Appropriations Committee and then before Waters' full committee, where he was grilled about his plans for responding to Democrats' requests for access to President Donald Trump's tax returns. Waters has long been an antagonist to Trump, who has openly ridiculed her on Twitter and in rallies. She was quick to assert her new authority over Mnuchin, reminding him that "it's a new day and it's a new chair" when Mnuchin said that previous Treasury secretaries have never testified for longer than three hours. "I have the gavel at this point," Waters said. "If you wish to leave, you may." Mnuchin momentarily paused and asked for a clarification from the chair, "OK, so we're dismissed? Is that correct?" To which Waters repeated: "If you wish to leave, you may leave. You're wasting your time, remember you have a foreign dignitary in your office." The secretary then threatened to "rethink" whether he would voluntarily return back to the committee to testify if he was going to poorly treated. "If you'd wish to keep me here so that I don't have my important meeting and continue to grill me, then we can do that," said Mnuchin. "I will cancel my meeting and I will not be back here. I will be very clear if that's the way you'd like to have this relationship." Waters seized on the comments and proceeded with acknowledging the next member in line to ask a question, only to have Mnuchin correct the record by saying that the chairwoman was "instructing" him to stay and cancel his meeting. "No. You just made an offer," said Waters. "No, I didn't make you an offer," Mnuchin replied. "You made me an offer that I accepted," Waters said. "No, I'm not ordering you. I said you may leave anytime you want and you said OK. If that's what you want to do, I'll cancel my appointment and I'll stay here. So I'm responding to your request, if that's what you want to do." Mnuchin responded by telling Waters she would need to dismiss him before he could leave the hearing room. "You're supposed to take the gavel and bang it, that's the appropriate ..." He was interrupted by Waters: "Please do not instruct me as to how I am to conduct this committee." Shortly thereafter, Mnuchin was advised by a member of his staff that he was not required to stay and left shortly thereafter. He testified for three and a half hours. Waters told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Tuesday night that Mnuchin's meeting was secondary to the committee's oversight responsibilities. "When he said that he had somebody important (to meet), I don't think that there's anything or anybody more important than the Congress of the United States of America trying to find out what exactly this secretary is doing," she said. CNN's Caroline Kelly contributed to this report.

2019-12-29 00:00:00

000000075226

(Reuters) - New Zealand’s Metlifecare Ltd (MET.NZ) said on Monday it had entered into an initial deal to be acquired for about NZ$1.49 billion ($996.07 million) by a fund managed by Swedish buyout firm EQT AB (EQTAB.ST) The retirement village operator said its shareholders would get NZ$7 per share under the agreement from Asia Pacific Village Group Ltd, which is ultimately owned by EQT. The offer price represents a premium of 9.7% to Metlifecare’s closing price on Dec. 20, before its stock was placed on a trading halt, and a 38% premium to the closing price prior to the announcement of the initial offer on Nov. 19. EQT first approached Metlifecare with an offer of NZ$6.50 per share, which was rejected. Further discussions led to the raised offer, Metlifecare said. The board backed the deal, adding that it had received strong support from a number of institutional shareholders. In a separate statement, EQT said it had also entered into a voting deed with Metlifecare’s largest shareholder, New Zealand Superannuation Fund Nominees Limited (NZSF), to vote in favor of the deal. NZSF holds about 19.9% of the New Zealand company’s shares. The fund manager said a few other Metlifecare shareholders collectively representing around 22% of the register had also indicated their intention to vote for the deal. EQT added the transaction would be implemented by a scheme of arrangement, a court-supervised process in which shareholders meet to vote on the proposed deal. Reporting by Rashmi Ashok in Bengaluru; editing by Nick Macfie

2017-11-13

000000087060

A New York judge ordered Howard Gould to pay his ex-wife, Katherine Gould, $3,000 alimony per month for the rest of her life. Mrs. Gould had argued she should not be required to pay income taxes on alimony.  Over the next 10 years, Mrs. Gould fought her way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled alimony is not taxable income. But that was in 1917.  Fast forward 100 years and the law is exactly the opposite. Today, if the Goulds were still alive, Mr. Gould would receive a tax deduction for paying alimony, and the payments received by Mrs. Gould would be included in her taxable income.   If the Goulds were still alive, Mr. Gould would tell you he has been stoked ever since the Revenue Tax Act of 1942 in which Congress overruled Gould v. Gould and allowed him to start deducting the alimony payments he made to Mrs. Gould. She would likely tell us that 1942 was not the best of times. That’s because in 1942, Congress required individuals like Mrs. Gould, who received alimony, to include those payments as part of their taxable income.  When The Revenue Tax Act of 1942 became law, it required a “wife who [was] divorced or legally separated from her husband” to count the payments she had received as taxable income and her “husband is allowed a deduction” for making the alimony payments. For the most part, this law has hardly changed since 1942 but for gender-neutral language.  Proponents of the Trump tax plan seek repeal of the current law in favor of an “exclusion/nondeduction” alimony system. At first glance, one may believe Trump’s intended repeal of alimony deductions is aimed at providing tax relief to the lower-wage spouses by excluding alimony payments from taxable income. Many argue it has an opposite effect.  First, if you are already divorced or separated and receiving alimony, Trump’s tax plan does not apply to you. Only individuals divorced or separated after 2017 who receive alimony would be entitled to exclude the alimony they receive from taxable income. The tax plan does, however, permit individuals who modify the terms of their divorce of separation agreements following 2017 to exclude the money from their taxable income. But most seasoned family law attorneys are of the position that eliminating a tax deduction for high-income earners who make alimony payments would have unintended consequences on the low-income earning ex-spouses who receive alimony. This is because the tax deduction for alimony payors creates a large incentive for high-earning spouses to pay larger alimony payments than they would under Trump’s proposed statutory scheme. Trump’s tax plan also lacks awareness that higher-income earning spouses who would lose the deduction will likely ascend into a higher tax bracket. This ultimately results in a higher aggregate tax liability imposed on the parties. Translation: The higher earner has less cash to pay alimony. This disparity in alimony payments is not necessarily offset by simply characterizing it as excluded from the recipient’s taxable income. This typically results in the spouse depending on alimony with less cash in the end. This conclusion follows the position of the American Bar Association (ABA) Tax Section’s Task Force which was assembled in the 1980s to research the Tax Reform Act of 1984, which proposed a strikingly familiar exclusion/nondeduction repeal. In the early 1980s, the Senate Finance Committee championed a repeal of the alimony deduction nearly identical to Trump’s tax plan. In 1984, the ABA Task Force argued the exclusion/nondeduction repeal would not only harm wealthy individuals but also couples of lesser means. Especially because for less wealthy couples, alimony payments come from future paychecks — not the transfer of income generating assets that previously existed.  In fact, the language of Trump’s tax plan as it relates to alimony payments is nearly a verbatim rehash of the previously failed Tax Reform Act of 2014, which died in Congress shortly after its introduction. When the Joint Tax Committee provided its technical explanation of the the Tax Reform Act of 2014, it stated its intent was to follow the Supreme Court ruling Gould v. Gould. If Mrs. Gould was alive today she would probably be smiling at that. But she would more likely be disappointed to hear Trump’s proposed elimination of the alimony deduction would not apply to individuals divorced before 2018 — let alone 1907 (unless of course they subsequently modify prior decrees sometime after this year ends).  Donald TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump pushes back on recent polling data, says internal numbers are 'strongest we've had so far' Illinois state lawmaker apologizes for photos depicting mock assassination of Trump Scaramucci assembling team of former Cabinet members to speak out against Trump MORE’s tax plan, the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” was just approved by the House Ways and Means Committee. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimates the repeal of deductions for alimony payments and the corresponding inclusion in gross income would result in an estimated additional $100m in Treasury revenue for the fiscal year of 2018.  Proponents of Trump’s tax plan would argue repealing the alimony deduction would result in higher Treasury revenues. But this goal seems to defeat the intent of Trump's tax plan to provide “tax relief and simplification for the American family” by focusing on strengthening the middle class.  Edward Lyman is a California family law attorney with the firm Walzer Melcher, LLP. Walzer Melcher has handled some of the largest divorce cases in California and represents actors, athletes, entrepreneurs, executives and individuals.   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.

2018-11-28

000000046268

Donald Trump suggested without evidence on Wednesday that special counsel Robert Mueller and his team are bullying witnesses into lying about collusion in order to be spared punishment, marking the president's latest attempt to discredit the Russia probe. The president on Wednesday complained in a tweet that “While the disgusting Fake News is doing everything within their power not to report it that way, at least 3 major players are intimating that the Angry Mueller Gang of Dems is viciously telling witnesses to lie about facts & they will get relief.” Though Trump did not specify to whom he was referring, Jerome Corsi, an associate of longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, has been in the news in recent days for his refusal to agree to a plea deal with Mueller’s investigators. Mueller’s team has investigated Corsi, who is known for his right-wing birther conspiracies, for possibly acting as a conduit between Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In a late-in-the-campaign bombshell, Assange published the emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that were determined to be stolen by Russian hackers. Corsi said the special counsel’s team sought to strike a deal on one count of perjury, but Corsi has insisted that he hasn’t lied to investigators and suggested that Mueller’s prosecutors were attempting to coerce him into a plea deal. Another major player in the Russia investigation, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, saw his plea deal put in danger this week after Mueller’s team accused him of lying to investigators. Manafort had entered into the deal and agreed to become a government witness following his first trial, but his subsequent lack of cooperation with investigators has renewed murmurs of a possible pardon from Trump. There is no hard evidence that Trump's claims are accurate and he neglected to provide proof of his accusations. But he invoked in his tweet the time period when Americans were falsely accused and investigated without evidence of being communists, calling this moment “our Joseph McCarthy Era!”

2020-02-06 04:46:12

000000080162

Passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship are going "stir crazy" quarantined in sometimes very small rooms, according to those on board.Many frustrated passengers — who need to spent 14 days on board after coronavirus spread to the ship — spoke out about their situation.They complained about cramped conditions, and getting poor-quality or inappropriate food.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Passengers trapped on cruise ship quarantined off Japan are going "stir crazy" while confined to their cabins, multiple media outlets reported.Those aboard The Diamond Princess have been ordered to stay in their rooms for the duration of a 14-day quarantine after 20 cases of coronavrius were confirmed on board.The outbreak appears to have started with a passenger who rode the ship in an earlier portion of the cruise, got off in late January, and was later confirmed to have the virus.Later tests found 10 cases on board, and then another 10 as of Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Times.Several passengers posted on social media to share their experiences. One, David Abel, posted several videos to his Facebook page from his cabin. He appeared to be in good spirits when the quarantine was first announced and even joked that it was two extra free weeks of vacation. However, he noted that he was lucky to have a room with a balcony. Many passengers in cheaper rooms do not even have windows to the outside. "Can you imagine? It would be liked being locked in a wardrobe, wouldn't it?" he told the Washington Post. "No fresh air. No natural light. It really must be a living hell for them."Abel, who is diabetic, expressed concern over meals, specifically about getting enough carbs to maintain his blood-sugar levels.Honeymooners Alan and Wendy Steele, told the Post they were offered stale bread and ham for lunch, "a far cry from the meals that had been offered throughout the cruise." The described themselves as going "stir crazy." One Twitter account posted meals from the quarantine, one of which looked like this:—だぁ(On board the Diamond Princess / 乗船中) (@daxa_tw) February 5, 2020The Post reported that one day breakfast was not served till 11 a.m., with calls for room service unanswered. Passengers are not allowed to leave their cabins to get anything for themselves.Some worried for their health. Masako Ish ida told The New York Times that authorities who performed health exams on all the passengers on board "didn't seem to take it very seriously." According to Princess Cruises, the tour operator, those with confirmed infections were taken off the ship to hospitals in Japan. Ishida told the New York Times that she first heard of the quarantine from an online news article rather than from cruise staff. The Steele's, told the Post that they relied on other passengers and the news for information. Alan said the public address system was not communicating with them. "We're basically being treated like we're prisoners and criminals at the moment; that's how we feel," he told the Post. In his videos, Abel said passengers were given free internet, calls, and in-cabin entertainment to pass the time.Instead of remaining docked, the ship headed out to sea to produce fresh water and dispose of its septic material, Princess Cruises said. Another twitter user, Yardley Wong, who is also on the cruise ship tweeted "14 days #Quarantine inside #diamondprincess near #yokohama begins. Still shocked and scared. But better precautions. Have faith in the crews and captain." —Yardley Wong (@yardley_wong) February 5, 2020 Read more:A cruise ship carrying more than 3,700 is stuck at a Japanese port, and 10 people on board just tested positive for coronavirus 3,700 people are being held in a Japanese cruise ship linked to 11 cases of the Wuhan coronavirus. Experts say liners are more than equipped to handle outbreaks.The Wuhan coronavirus has spread to 26 countries. Here's how to protect yourself while traveling. window._taboola = window._taboola || []; window._taboola = window._taboola || [];

2020-02-21 15:16:39

000000036199

20th Century Studios' "The Call of the Wild" is expected to struggle at the box office this weekend against another family-friendly movie, "Sonic the Hedgehog."Boxoffice.com is projecting it to earn $13 million at the domestic box office, and Box Office Mojo is expecting a $17.5 million opening.Those are disappointing numbers for a movie that The Hollywood Reporter has suggested cost $125 million to $150 million to produce.It would be the latest box-office misfire for 20th Century Studios, the studio formerly known as Fox, since the Disney-Fox merger last year.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. 20th Century Studios is expected to have another box-office flop on its hands this weekend with Harrison Ford's "The Call of the Wild."The studio formerly known as Fox has released a string of misfires since Disney closed its acquisition of it last year. Notably, Disney blamed a $170 million quarterly operating loss in the third quarter of 2019 primarily on the X-Men bomb "Dark Phoenix," which made just $253 million worldwide off of a $200 million production budget."The Call of the Wild," based on the classic novel of the same name, had a hefty budget between $125 million and $150 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Based on weekend projections, it could be difficult for the movie to make a profit. Both Boxoffice.com and Box Office Mojo are expecting "The Call of the Wild" to finish behind another family-friendly movie, "Sonic the Hedgehog," in the US this weekend. Boxoffice.com is projecting "The Call of the Wild" to make $13 million over the weekend, and Box Office Mojo is expecting a $17.5 million domestic opening."Ford's films outside his most iconic roles have had a tendency to under-perform since the turn of the century," the Boxoffice.com chief analyst Shawn Robbins wrote. Other Fox box-office disappointments since the merger include "The Art of Racing in the Rain," the buddy comedy "Stuber," and Brad Pitt's sci-fi drama "Ad Astra." window._taboola = window._taboola || []; window._taboola = window._taboola || [];

2019-07-24

000000044946

-report@ (Adds independent sourcing) MEXICO CITY, July 23 (Reuters) - Prosecutors have accused the leader of the Mexican oil workers union, Carlos Romero Deschamps, of corruption, the Reforma newspaper reported on Tuesday, amid a broader push by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to root out graft. The finance ministry accused Romero Deschamps and six relatives of illicit enrichment and money laundering, the paper said, citing suspect deposits and other transactions overseen by the ministry's financial intelligence unit. Later, a source in the financial intelligence unit, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the accusations to Reuters. Mexico's finance ministry and the attorney general's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Romero Deschamps, a former senator, has led the powerful oil workers union since 1993 and his current term is set to end in 2024. The union said it did not have any comment on the story. Reforma and other local media also reported that a federal judge on Monday ordered the "definitive suspension" of any arrest warrant for Romero Deschamps. Lopez Obrador's eight-month-old government has made fighting corruption a top priority, as evidenced in early efforts to stymie fuel thieves working in concert with employees of national oil company Pemex as well as issuing arrest warrants for former Pemex Chief Executive Emilio Lozoya in a separate case. According to the Reforma report, the accused include Romero Deschamps' wife Blanca Rosa, his children Paulina, Alejandro and Juan Carlos, and Juan Carlos' wife Maria Fernanda Ocejo. The lavish lifestyle of Romero Deschamps and his family, which has included trips on private jets and the purchase of luxury sports cars, has for years stoked accusations of corruption. He has consistently denied such allegations. Romero Deschamps is currently leading negotiations for the 2019-2021 collective bargaining agreement with Pemex, which has a July 31 deadline. (Reporting by Rebekah F Ward, Adriana Barrera and Diego Ore; Editing by David Alire and Bernadette Baum)

2016-12-07

000000076396

President-elect Donald TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump pushes back on recent polling data, says internal numbers are 'strongest we've had so far' Illinois state lawmaker apologizes for photos depicting mock assassination of Trump Scaramucci assembling team of former Cabinet members to speak out against Trump MORE has selected professional wrestling mogul Linda McMahon to lead the Small Business Administration. McMahon has long been floated as a potential administration appointee due to her ties to GOP causes and Trump personally, as well as the president-elect’s history of appearances at WWE pro wrestling events.  Trump lauded McMahon in a statement announcing the decision, praising her as "one of the country's top female executives" who helped the WWE become a "global enterprise."  “Our small businesses are the largest source of job creation in our country,” McMahon added in a statement.  “I am honored to join the incredibly impressive economic team that President-elect Trump has assembled to ensure that we promote our country’s small businesses and help them grow and thrive.” McMahon, who lives in Connecticut, is a veteran of the state's board of education. She also ran for Senate as a Republican in the state twice, losing to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D) in 2010 and Sen. Chris MurphyChristopher (Chris) Scott MurphyOvernight Defense: US, Russia tensions grow over nuclear arms | Highlights from Esper's Asia trip | Trump strikes neutral tone on Hong Kong protests | General orders ethics review of special forces White House eyes September action plan for gun proposals Trump phoned Democratic senator to talk gun control MORE (D) in 2012. 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.

2018-02-22 13:17:00

000000063517

Brendan Fraser is the latest actor to come forward with his story of sexual assault in the wake of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. In a new interview with GQ published on Thursday, the Mummy star, 49, claims that former Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the non-profit organization that votes for the Golden Globe awards) president Philip Berk sexually assaulted him in the summer of 2003, while at a luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel — an alleged incident Berk disputes. The actor says he believes he was blacklisted in Hollywood partly due to the aftermath of the alleged incident. According to Fraser, the assault happened when Berk reached out to shake Fraser’s hand on his way out of the hotel. “His left hand reaches around, grabs my ass cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around,” Fraser claimed. The alleged incident left Fraser overcome with panic and fear. “I felt ill,” he said, recalling his emotions after he removed Berk’s hand. “I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry. I felt like someone had thrown invisible paint on me.” Though he told his wife, Afton, about what had happened at the time, Fraser told GQ‘s Zach Baron that he didn’t have “the courage to speak up” earlier, “for risk of humiliation, or damage to my career.” “I didn’t want to contend with how that made me feel, or it becoming part of my narrative,” he added. He did have his reps ask the HFPA for a written apology, telling GQ that the HFPA agreed they would never allow Berk in a room with Fraser again. (Reps for Fraser and the HFPA did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment). “The HFPA stands firmly against sexual harassment and the type of behavior described in this article,” the associated said in an official statement. “Over the years we’ve continued a positive working relationship with Brendan, which includes announcing Golden Globe nominees, attending the ceremony and participating in press conferences. This report includes alleged information that the HFPA was previously unaware of and at this time we are investigating further details surrounding the incident.”  Berk, who is still a member of the HFPA, also did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment but has denied the assault ever happened to The New York Times. “Mr. Fraser’s version is a total fabrication,” he also said in a statement to GQ, acknowledging that he wrote a letter to Fraser about the alleged incident. “My apology admitted no wrongdoing, the usual ‘If I’ve done anything that upset Mr. Fraser, it was not intended and I apologize.’” In his 2014 memoir With Signs and Wonders: My Journey from Darkest Africa to the Bright Lights of Hollywood, Berk recounted the incident too — saying he pinched Frasier’s ass “in jest.” While other factors contributed to the downward momentum of his career, Fraser tells GQ that his alleged experience with Berk “made [him] retreat” and “feel reclusive.” “[I] became depressed,” he said, recounting how he told himself he deserved what happened to him. “I was blaming myself and I was miserable — because I was saying, ‘This is nothing; this guy reached around and he copped a feel,&apos” Fraser recalled. “[Work] withered on the vine for me. In my mind, at least, something had been taken away from me.” Fraser also wondered if the HFPA had blacklisted him. “I don’t know if this curried disfavor with the group, with the HFPA. But the silence was deafening,” he said, adding that he was rarely invited back to the Globes after 2003. (Berk denies that the HFPA retaliated against Fraser, telling GQ, “His career declined through no fault of ours”). Even after speaking about his allegations, Fraser still feels uneasy. “Am I still frightened? Absolutely,” he says. “Do I feel like I need to say something? Absolutely. Have I wanted to many, many times? Absolutely. Have I stopped myself? Absolutely.”

2018-01-03

000000018886

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Wednesday called former White House strategist Steve Bannon's claim that Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with Russians in June 2016 was "treasonous" a "ridiculous assertion." Bannon made the claim in an explosive new book by Michael Wolff, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," due out January 9. "Even if you thought that this [meeting] was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s---, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately," Bannon told Wolff. Bannon also said that there was "zero" chance that Donald Trump Jr. did not bring the Russians — whom Trump Jr. initially believed might have damaging information on Democrat Hillary Clinton — up to his father's office to say hello after their meeting on June 9, 2016. Sanders on Wednesday denied that President Donald Trump knew anything about the meeting at the time it happened. "As the president has stated many times, no, he wasn't part of that [meeting] or aware of it," she said. The book's revelations have driven a vicious wedge between the president and Bannon, his onetime closest adviser. "Going after the president's son in an absolutely outrageous and unprecedented way is probably not the best way to curry favor with anybody," Sanders said of Bannon's comments about Donald Trump Jr. Earlier in the day, the president issued a statement saying that when Bannon was fired from the White House last summer, "he not only lost his job, he lost his mind." Speaking to reporters, Sanders said the president was both "furious" and "disgusted" by the outrageous claims Wolff reported in the book, copies of which were acquired by news organizations on Wednesday. Yet Sanders also acknowledged that Trump has kept in touch with Bannon by phone since the former chief strategist left the White House in the summer of 2017. Their most recent conversation, Sanders said, was in early December.

2017-07-07

000000073423

(CNN)Is Kesha's new song going to be the fresh start she's been praying for? Time will tell. But the singer is certainly hoping that's the case. "I haven't slept in, like, I don't know how many days because I'm so excited and nervous," she said in an interview with The Zack Sang Show on Friday. "I just feel like I'm on another planet." Kesha released ballad "Praying" on Thursday, her first new song in almost four years. "Basically, there was a point where I didn't know if I was ever going to get to put out music again," she said, saying she's been crying "happy tears" for days. "And here we are." The singer has been tied up in a long back-and-forth legal battle with producer Dr. Luke (real name Lukasz Gottwald), stemming from 2014 allegations that he drugged, emotionally abused and sexually assaulted her. Gottwald has long denied those claims. The legal proceedings for some time kept Kesha's career in a holding pattern. Kesha's last album was 2012's "Warrior." In fall 2015, Kesha and her attorney, Mark Geragos, attempted to secure a judge's permission to allow the singer to record with other labels and producers, stating in their petition that Kesha's career threatened to "suffer irreparable harm" due to her lack of new material. The move prompted the #FreeKesha movement on social media, with fans and advocates calling for the singer's release from her existing contract with Dr. Luke and his Kemosabe Records. The effort failed, and Gottwald's lawyers asserted that the courts had already "found that Kesha is already 'free' to record and release music without working with Dr. Luke as a producer if she doesn't want to," according to a statement at the time. "Praying" and the album from which it comes, "Rainbow," are the first pieces of new material from Kesha since the legal dispute began. "Rainbow" is being released on Kemosabe Records/RCA Records. Gottwald, who is no longer CEO of Kemosabe, is said to have had approval on the album, according to Gottwald's lawyer. "There was no change in Kesha's contractual recording obligations -- she has not succeeded on any legal claim or motion to avoid them," attorney Christine Lepera told CNN in a statement Friday. "Instead, she was always free to record and refused to. Now, as legally required all along, the album was released with Dr. Luke's approval by Kemosabe, which is a joint venture label of Dr. Luke and Sony." Dr. Luke has an ongoing defamation and breach of contract claim against Kesha in New York that Lepera said "will be prosecuted fully." "Praying" was produced and co-written by Ryan Lewis, of hip-hop duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Kesha, meanwhile, maintains that her single is a song into which she has "channeled my feelings of severe hopelessness and depression." "It's from our darkest moments that we gain the most strength," she wrote in a published essay. "There were so many days, months even, when I didn't want to get out of bed....I was never at peace, night or day. But I dragged myself out of bed and took my emotions to the studio and made art out of them." "Rainbow" will be released on August 11.

2016-02-11

000000054504

Tesla's entry-level $35,000 Model 3 electric car will be available for preorder on March 31, chief executive Elon Musk announced Thursday on Twitter. The tweets by the billionaire followed a note in the company's earnings release on Wednesday that the Model 3 is on schedule for deliveries in late 2017. Tesla plans to begin installing production machinery this year. In his tweets, Musk said consumers could begin preorders next month with a $1,000 deposit. He also confirmed the rumored $35,000 price tag. The Model 3 is Tesla's entry-level offering, whereas the Model S and Model X SUV carry hefty price tags. Musk also announced that the company would not be releasing a "signature" version of the Model 3. Signature versions of the Model S and X were put on sale and came fully loaded with the top features. A signature Model X costs around $130,000. Tesla hopes the Model 3 will help boost its sale figures and increase the number of its electric vehicles on the road. The company posted positive 2016 guidance on Wednesday, saying it expects to deliver 80,000 to 90,000 new vehicles this year, noting it is aiming for non-GAAP profitability for the year. This was above Wall Street estimates. Analysts said that Model 3 demand will be high due to its cheaper price, but Tesla will still need to push consumers to take the leap of faith on electric cars. "We expect demand for that to also be high," ISI Group auto analyst George Galliers told CNBC on Thursday. "The challenge at the moment for electric cars is really encouraging the public to try them, experience them, realize the benefits and also to get over that misconception around range anxiety," he said. "People think that there's nowhere to charge them. The reality is if you have off-street parking, you can of course charge it at home every night."

2016-02-05

000000004275

Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIFIt’s generally assumed that when you reach retirement age, life starts to slow down. But not for mechanics David Anderson and Mathew Hine, who spent six months upgrading a 10 MPH mobility scooter into a record breaking dragster that officially hit a top speed of 107.6 MPH.Both David and Mathew hail from the Isle of Man—a place renowned for speed—so it’s no surprise they undertook this challenge. How do you make a mobility scooter that still looks like a mobility scooter burn rubber?To build their beast, the team merged the scooter with the best parts of a go-kart, including racing slicks and a Suzuki engine. The result is an official Guinness World Record for their Frankenstein-like creation.So if you know your way around a garage, there’s no reason retirement or old age has to be boring. And you’ll never have to worry about ever being late to bingo again.[Guinness World Records via Damn Geeky]

2016-03-09 21:30:00

000000015861

In a shocking turn of events, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo—a computer program—has defeated South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol in the first of five total matches. Lee had previously been heavily favored to win, and possibly even sweep the series, but many were hedging their bets. Now? It's even more unclear. The first match began at 1 PM local time in Seoul, South Korea on March 9th, meaning this all went down at 11 PM ET on March 8 in North America. Another match is set for 1 PM March 10 (or 11 PM ET March 9), then a break, then two days of matches, a break, and the final match. Now that he's lost the first, Lee will almost certainly be taking the last four even more seriously. Which isn't to say that Lee's play in the first match was bad, or that he didn't take it seriously. The Verge quotes Lee as saying after the match that he was "surprised" at the manner in which AlphaGo played the game, and that he hadn't expected it "would play the game in such a perfect manner." In February, Lee had predicted the games would be 5-0 or 4-1 in his favor. That comes after DeepMind announced in January that AlphaGo had defeated European Go champion Fan Hui 5-0 back in October 2015. The rank gap between Fan and Lee is significant, however—Fan is a 2-dan professional Go player while Lee holds a 9-dan rank—so AlphaGo was not expected to win against Lee with only five months of preparation after playing Fan. Of the two hours allotted to each AlphaGo and Lee, the program had used up nearly all its time with five minutes and 30 seconds remaining, while Lee had 28 minutes and 28 seconds on the clock when he ultimately resigned. It seems clear from the video, and from the professional commentary on the stream, that Lee is aware of what he considers mistakes made by himself and AlphaGo. "They were neck-and-neck for its entirety, in a game filled with complex fighting," reads an update to the Google Asia Pacific Blog posted after the four-hour stream. "Lee Sedol made very aggressive moves but AlphaGo did not back down from the fights." In other words, the match was too close to call for the majority of it. Given the quality of play in the first match, it's not like Lee was outclassed entirely or anything, so it's still possible for humanity to come back and win. For Lee, there's both a $1 million prize and his reputation on the line, so he certainly has the motivation. For Google DeepMind and AlphaGo, a loss or a win would be equally useful. If Lee beats the machine, it still gives the researchers a new trove of information to work with. If AlphaGo wins, the team will have accomplished what had up until recently been considered impossible or at least improbable. With the added pressure of being behind, it'll be interesting to watch Lee take on AlphaGo again.

2017-11-07 00:00:00

000000040621

(Reuters) - The National Football League said on Tuesday it opposes a tax bill proposed by U.S. House of Representatives Republicans that could force teams to put up more of their own money to fund stadium construction. Under the legislation unveiled last week, local governments could no longer fund the building or renovation of professional sports stadiums by issuing tax-exempt, public-purpose bonds, the sort of bonds typically used to fund schools, libraries and public transit. According to the NFL, building new stadiums enhances economic development in cities that are home to the venues and federal tax breaks should be available. “You can look around the country and see the economic development that’s generated from some of these stadiums,” NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart told a conference call. “These sorts of infrastructure projects have a long history and the benefits of them are obvious in many of our communities around the country, so we will continue to make our opposition known on that.” President Donald Trump has called for an end to the subsidy, at least for the NFL, after some of its players angered the Republican president by kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial bias in the criminal justice system. His Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, also proposed ending the tax break for stadiums in 2015. A report last year by the Brookings Institution, the Washington-based social sciences research group, found that of the 45 major-league stadiums built or overhauled since 2000, 36 were at least partly funded by tax-exempt municipal bonds. The NFL’s Oakland Raiders are expected to begin playing in Las Vegas in 2020 and construction on a new stadium is already underway. Lockhart refused to what, if any, impact the bill could have on the viability of the new stadium. “That is a hypothetical at this point and we’d have to see how the final bill comes out,” he said. “What gets proposed out of the writing committee from the party in control very often is not what is eventually signed into law, so we’ll have to see where that goes.” Reporting by Frank Pingue in Toronto; Editing by Dan Grebler

2019-11-27 00:00:00

000000007624

CHINCHINA, Colombia Nov 27 (Reuters) - Colombia’s coffee farmers must reduce production costs and increase the quality of their beans next year if they want to assure profitability, the head of the National Federation of Coffee Growers said. Growers in the Andean country, the world’s top producer of washed arabica, have weathered two years of crisis due to low international prices. For much of 2019, prices on the New York exchange hovered around $1 per lb., sending farmers’ incomes below the cost of production. Prices remain a worry despite recent increases and a weak peso, which helps growers earn more off of exports. “The challenge remains finding a price for Colombian coffee that gives stability to production and to the income of the grower. It’s not easy,” federation head Roberto Velez told Reuters in an interview this week. Velez said growers need to carry on with a federation-sponsored effort to replace old or disease-prone trees. The project allowed farmers to replace trees on some 85,000 hectares this year, about 10% of the area planted with coffee. Labor and fertilizer costs are generally farmers’ biggest expenses. The government has given coffee growers tens of millions of dollars in subsidies this year in response to the low prices. The peso’s devaluation and premiums received by growers for quality coffee have helped farmers survive, Velez said. “With a market at $1.15 and the premium for Colombia coffee at 30 to 32 cents, we’re talking about $1.47, almost $1.50. Those are the levels that Colombian growers need to move forward,” he said. The price for a 125-kg shipment was 960,000 pesos (about $277) on Tuesday, well above estimated production costs of 780,000 pesos. The New York exchange closed at $1.16 per lb. The productivity of the Colombian crop is at its highest-ever, Velez said, with an output of some 20.5 60-kg bags per hectare. But that is well below rates in Brazil and Vietnam, the world’s top two growers, which produce 30 and 38 bags per hectare respectively. The increasing use of mechanization and other new technologies in those countries have led to productivity leaps that far outstrip rivals like Colombia, where many farms are set on steep Andean hillsides that make mechanization difficult and keep costs high. Dismal prices have led many Colombian farmers to consider selling up or switching to other crops like the coveted Hass avocado. Farmers should maintain efforts to improve quality as they cater to ever more discerning coffee connoisseurs, Velez said. “We have to make a greater effort to maintain this quality, increase it and be able to receive better premiums and better prices for the coffee Colombia exports,” Velez said. “The first thing to focus on is quality,” he added. “The second is to be ready because I think we will get an opportunity to post higher volumes at better prices.” Colombia is expected to produce about 14 million bags of coffee this year and a similar figure in 2020. (Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta Writing by Julia Symmes Cobb and Tom Brown)

2019-12-11 00:00:00

000000041841

(Reuters Health) - Many families living in poverty might benefit from diaper banks but don’t receive this support, a U.S. study suggests. Nearly half of U.S. families with infants and toddlers live on less than $51,500 for a family of four, which is 200% of the federal poverty level, researchers note in the American Journal of Public Health. Many of these low-income households may struggle to afford rent and food as well as basic infant care needs, including a sufficient supply of diapers to keep babies clean, dry and healthy. Nationwide, only about 4% of infants and toddlers in these low-income households who needed diapers received them from diaper banks in 2016, the study found. “When we look at specific communities that have diaper banks, the percentage of met need is much, much higher,” said Kelley Massengale of the National Diaper Bank Network in New Haven, Connecticut, the study’s lead author. “The challenge is that not all communities have a diaper bank,” Massengale said by email. Massengale’s team surveyed 262 diaper banks across the country about their activities in 2016. With the assistance of 3,547 community organizations, diaper banks distributed more than 52 million disposable diapers that year. About 74% of these diapers were donated, and the rest were purchased. Diaper banks also distributed 4,395 kits with reusable cloth diapers. Nationwide, researchers estimated that more than 7 million infants and toddlers needed diapers and about 300,000 of these children received support from diaper banks. In each state, the proportion of infants and toddlers in need of diapers who received support from diaper banks ranged from 0% to 16%. Sometimes families may receive diaper donations from food banks or from other nonprofit organizations, Massengale said. One limitation of the study is that it only looked at a national network of diaper banks, and didn’t assess other ways families in need might get diapers, the study team notes. The cost of diapers can add up quickly, with newborns needing up to a dozen diaper changes a day and toddlers requiring around six, Massengale said. “When families do not have enough diapers, children go longer between diaper changes,” Massengale said. “This means their skin is touching urine and feces for longer periods of time, which puts them at increased risk for skin infections and urinary tract infections.” It can also be uncomfortable for children, making babies fussier and more fitful sleepers, which is stressful for parents. Many daycare centers require families to send children with diapers, and parents who can’t afford this may miss work because they’re unable to send kids to child care centers, Massengale added. And low-income families may also have a hard time saving money on diapers with bulk purchases. “Strategies that make diapers more affordable for middle- and upper-income families may not be possible for low-income families who may not have: transportation to big-box stores, memberships to bulk shopping clubs, enough money to make bulk purchases, or the resources to shop online,” Massengale said. SOURCE: bit.ly/36AOn9F American Journal of Public Health, online December 4, 2019.

2016-04-22 13:48:17

000000049968

Fair Game Companies, if granted the leeway, will surely present their financial results in the best possible light. And of course they will try to persuade investors that the calculations they prefer, in which certain costs are excluded, best represent the reality in their operations. Call it accentuating the positive, accounting-style. What’s surprising, though, is how willing regulators have been to allow the proliferation of phony-baloney financial reports and how keenly investors have embraced them. As a result, major public companies reporting results that are not based on generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, has grown from a modest problem into a mammoth one. According to a recent study in The Analyst’s Accounting Observer, 90 percent of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index reported non-GAAP results last year, up from 72 percent in 2009. Regulations still require corporations to report their financial results under accounting rules. But companies often steer investors instead to massaged calculations that produce a better outcome. I know, I know — eyes glaze over when the subject is accounting. But the gulf between reality and make-believe in these companies’ operations is so wide that it raises critical questions about whether investors truly understand the businesses they own. Among 380 companies that were in existence both last year and in 2009, the study showed, non-GAAP net income was up 6.6 percent in 2015 compared with the previous year. Under generally accepted accounting principles, net income at the same 380 companies in 2015 actually declined almost 11 percent from 2014. Another striking fact: Thirty companies in the study generated losses under accounting rules in 2015 but magically produced profits when they did the math their own way. Most were in the energy sector, which has been devastated by plummeting oil prices, but health care companies and information technology businesses were also in this group. How can a company turn losses into profits? By excluding some of its costs of doing business. Among the more common expenses that companies remove from their calculations are restructuring and acquisition costs, stock-based compensation and write-downs of impaired assets. Creativity abounds in today’s freewheeling accounting world. And the study found that almost 10 percent of the companies in the S.&P. 500 that used made-up figures took out expenses that fell into a category known as “other.” These include expenses for a data breach (Home Depot), dividends on preferred stock (Frontier Communications) and severance (H&R Block). But these are actual costs, notes Jack T. Ciesielski, publisher of The Analyst’s Accounting Observer. “Selectively ignoring facts can lead to investor carelessness in evaluating a company’s performance and lead to sloppy investment decisions,” he wrote. More important, he added, when investors ignore costs related to acquisitions or stock-based compensation, they are “giving managers a free pass on their effectiveness in managing all shareholder resources.” It puzzles some accounting experts that the Securities and Exchange Commission has not been more aggressive about reining in this practice. Lynn E. Turner was the chief accountant of the S.E.C. during the late 1990s, a period when pro forma figures really started to bloom. New rules were put in place to combat the practice, he said in an interview, but the agency isn’t enforcing them. For example, Mr. Turner said, some companies appear to be violating the requirement that they present their non-GAAP numbers no more prominently in their filings than figures that follow accounting rules. “They just need to go do an enforcement case,” Mr. Turner said of the S.E.C. “They are almost creating a culture where it’s better to beg forgiveness than to ask for permission, and that’s always really bad.” As it happens, the commission is in the midst of reviewing its corporate disclosure requirements and considering ways to improve its rules “for the benefit of both companies and investors.” This would seem to be a great opportunity to tackle the problem of fake figures. But such work does not appear to rank high on the S.E.C.’s agenda. Kara M. Stein, an S.E.C. commissioner, expressed concern about this in a public statement on April 13. Among the questions the S.E.C. was not asking, she said: “Should there be changes to our rules to address abuses in the presentation of supplemental non-GAAP disclosure, which may be misleading to investors?” With the presidential election looming, Mr. Ciesielski said it was unlikely that any meaningful rule changes on these types of disclosures would emerge anytime soon. That means investors will remain in the dark when companies don’t disclose the specifics on what they are deducting from their earnings or cash flow calculations. Consider restructuring costs, the most common expense excluded by companies from their results nowadays. “Why shouldn’t companies say, ‘This is a restructuring program that is going to take us four years to complete, and here are the numbers,’” Mr. Ciesielski said in an interview. “Restructuring programs cost cash. Why not face up to it and be real about what you’re forecasting? If everybody did that consistently, that would be a dose of reality.” Mr. Turner, the former S.E.C. chief accountant, agreed. What investors need, he said, is a clearer picture of all items — both costs and revenues — that companies consider unusual or nonrecurring in their operations. These details should appear in a footnote to the financial statements, he said. “We need to require the disclosure of both the good and the bad,” Mr. Turner said. “If you have a large nonrecurring revenue item, you need to disclose that as well as a nonrecurring expense. Then you should require auditors to have some audit liability for these items.” Of course, some of the fantasy figures highlighted by companies are worse than others. Excluding the impairment of an asset, Mr. Ciesielski said, is “not the worst crime being committed. But when you’re backing out litigation expenses that go on every quarter, that’s a low-quality kind of adjustment, and those are pretty abhorrent.” The bottom line for investors, according to Mr. Ciesielski and Mr. Turner, is to ignore the allure of the make-believe. Real-world numbers may be less heartening, but they are also less likely to generate those ugly surprises that can come from accentuating the positive.

2019-11-04 00:00:00

000000083871

WASHINGTON, D.C. — "Washington threw a party 95 years in the making Saturday afternoon, with baseball fans gleefully lining downtown streets for a World Series parade and rally that covered the Mall in a sea of red." (WashPost) Look: Photos, videos, tweets Rewind: How D.C. celebrated its last World Series title in 1924 ARCADIA, CALIF. — Mongolian Groom (pictured above) was euthanized after running in the $6 million Classic at the Breeders' Cup at Santa Anita Park, the 37th horse to die at the track since December. What they're saying: "I'll tell you — talk about a sport whose time is up unless they reform," California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently told reporters. "[T]he willingness to just to spit these animals out and literally take their lives is a disgrace." NEW YORK — "It's entirely possible that every big city is at its best on marathon day," writes the New York Times' Matthew Futterman. "[T]his mass of humanity lining up and traversing 26.2 miles ... as another mass of humanity cheers them on, is unique to this period in human history. This sort of thing didn't happen 200 or 500 or 10,000 years ago. Their loss." The winners: Geoffrey Kamworor (2:08:13) and Joyciline Jepkosgei (2:22:38) completed a Kenyan sweep.

2016-04-23 00:00:00

000000083039

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - At least 12 people were killed on Saturday in two separate car bomb attacks in Baghdad targeting security forces, police sources said. Islamic State was behind the larger blast, according to the Amaq news agency which supports the group. The attack on a security checkpoint in the northern al-Husseiniya district killed nine people and wounded 28 others. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the second bombing, which targeted an army convoy in Arab al-Jabour, an area of date palm groves on Baghdad’s southern outskirts. Three people were killed there, and 11 others were wounded. The Iraqi government has retaken several major cities from Islamic State in the past year, including the western cities of Ramadi and Hit, and slowly pushed the militants back towards the Syrian border. Security has gradually improved in Baghdad, which witnessed daily attacks a decade ago, though bombings against the security forces and Shi’ite residential or commercial areas are still a regular occurrence. A blast claimed by Islamic State hit a Shi’ite Muslim mosque on Friday. The rise of the ultra-hardline Sunni group, which is battling government forces over control of vast territory in northern and western Iraq, has exacerbated a long-running sectarian conflict, mostly between Shi’ites and Sunnis, that emerged after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Reporting by Kareem Raheem; Writing by Stephen Kalin; Editing by Alison Williams

2018-03-21

000000108070

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) will stoke speculation that he is considering running for president in 2020 when he makes several stops across Iowa next month. Garcetti will travel to the Quad Cities in April to deliver a keynote address at the Scott County Democrats' annual Red, White and Blue Dinner, his political spokesman said. Later, he will make stops in Altoona, at a Carpenters Union training facility, and Des Moines, where he will take a tour with Mayor Frank Cownie (D). Garcetti will also stop in Waterloo, where his wife Amy has family. In a statement, Garcetti spokesman Yusef Robb strongly hinted that the second-term Democratic mayor would begin pitching himself in the first-in-the-nation caucus state as an anti-Washington solution. "The thrust of his visit is to support his fellow Democrats in the run-up to the midterms, but Mayor Garcetti is also eager to hear from people how we can help each other move ahead despite the extreme dysfunction in Washington," Robb said in an email. It is Garcetti's third trip to an early presidential state. Last August, Garcetti campaigned in New Hampshire for Joyce Craig, the Democrat who defeated Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas (R) in November. And last month Garcetti stumped among local party leaders in South Carolina, which holds the South's first primary. Garcetti is one of a handful of Democratic mayors who are considering runs for president in 2020, including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. 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.

2020-01-10 00:00:00

000000011159

(CNN)Amy Schumer is looking for some advice on her reproductive journey. The comedian and actress posted a photo of her bruised belly Thursday on her official Instagram account and revealed, "I'm a week into IVF and feeling really run down and emotional." "If anyone went through it and if you have any advice or wouldn't mind sharing your experience with me please do," her caption read. "My number is in my bio. We are freezing my eggs and figuring out what to do to give Gene a sibling." Schumer married chef Chris Fischer in February 2018, and the couple welcomed their son last May. The "Trainwreck" star has mined her personal life for both her comedy and to draw attention to social causes. Last year, she used her Netflix special, "Growing," to reveal that her husband is on the autism spectrum, and her baby gender reveal called attention to the plight of female farmworkers.

2018-04-16

000000105049

Porn star Stormy Daniels tore into President Donald Trump's lawyer at a federal court hearing Monday, saying he has long played by a "different set of rules, or should we say no rules at all." "For years, Mr. Cohen has acted like he is above the law," Daniels, wearing a lilac suit and jet black tights, said outside a lower Manhattan U.S. District courthouse. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is suing Cohen and Trump to void a nondisclosure agreement barring her from discussing an alleged tryst with Trump from more than a decade earlier. Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, said he and his client attended the hearing out of concern that none of the documents seized in raids on Cohen's property last week be tampered with or destroyed. Avenatti also had choice words for Cohen, who negotiated the $130,000 hush payment to Daniels a few weeks before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen is "radioactive," and "anybody associated with him in the last 20 to 30 years should be very, very concerned," Avenatti said. Avenatti's attack followed a blow from Judge Kimba Wood, who rejected an attempt by lawyers for Cohen and Trump to get first crack at reviewing materials seized in a series of FBI raids on Cohen's property last week. The so-called temporary restraining order would have allowed lawyers for Cohen to decide which of the documents and communications were inadmissible in court before the prosecuting attorneys could review them. Both Cohen and Trump argue that swaths of the materials — seized from Cohen's residence, hotel room, office, safety deposit box and electronic devices on Monday — are protected by attorney-client privilege. But the prosecuting attorneys suggested in an earlier filing that Cohen's proposal for the appointment of a separate judge called a special master to review the material was tantamount to a slow-walk in the case. "My interest is in getting this moving speedily and efficiently," Wood said at the hearing. Still, she said a special master "might have a role here," though she did not decide on whether or not to appoint one at the Monday hearing. Wood also held off on appointing a so-called taint team — a separate team of federal lawyers who would review the materials — in the case, though she appeared more amenable to the option. "I have faith in the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney's Office. Their integrity is unimpeachable," she said. "I think that a taint team is a viable option." In a stunning revelation, Cohen's lawyer was forced to reveal in court that an unnamed recent client of Cohen's was none other than Fox News talk show host, Sean Hannity. In a court filing that morning, Cohen's lawyers said that Cohen had three clients between 2017 and 2018, but only named two: Trump, and former Republican National Committee official Elliott Broidy. Broidy recently resigned from the GOP organization after news outlets revealed that Cohen negotiated a hush deal worth $1.6 million with an ex-Playboy model who said she was impregnated by Broidy. The third client was anonymous. Lawyers for Cohen refused to identify Hannity, saying in the document that it was "likely to be embarrassing or detrimental to the client." But although Stephen Ryan, an attorney for Cohen, argued at length to keep Hannity's name hidden, Judge Wood would not relent. "The client is a publicly prominent individual," Ryan said, before offering to give Hannity's name to Wood in a sealed envelope. The suggestion drew an objection from another party in the courtroom, who said that except in limited cases, attorney-client privilege did not relate to the identities of clients. Wood agreed, and said the client's name "must be disclosed now." After some more argument, Ryan said, "The client's name involved is Sean Hannity." The admission drew audible gasps from the audience. The prosecuting attorneys pushed back hard on Cohen and Trump's arguments that they should be the first parties to review which of the seized documents were protected by attorney-client privilege. U.S. attorney Thomas McKay repeatedly objected to the request, saying they would use such a process to delay the case for months, if not years. "He's going to hide behind overbroad claims of privilege," McKay said of Cohen. In a Friday court filing, prosecutors said they already conducted searches of Cohen's email accounts, which had not been reported until that point. The searches "indicate that Cohen is in fact performing little to no legal work, and that zero emails were exchanged with President Trump," the prosecutors said. In the same filing, counsel for the Trump Organization said it considers "each and every communication by, between or amongst" Cohen, the organization and its employees to be protected by attorney-client privilege. The materials seized from Cohen in the raids comprise up to 10 boxes of printed documents and more than two dozen electronic devices, including cell phones. Todd Harrison, a lawyer for Cohen, noted that the case involved information seized from "the sitting president of the United States' personal attorney" as part of his objection to handing the materials to a taint team before Cohen. "The stakes are too high," Harrison said. Joanna Hendon, a lawyer for Trump, argued that the president should be the first to review the documents. She acknowledged that "it will take a long time" for Trump and his team to screen the materials, but noted that "this is an extraordinary case." This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

2019-08-21 14:10:00

000000085678

Asher James won’t have his parents "All to Myself" much longer! Dan + Shay singer Shay Mooney is expecting his second child, a boy, with wife Hannah, the couple revealed on Instagram Wednesday alongside a series of photos and a video of their 2½-year-old son announcing he was “having a baby brother!” “Celebrating a number 1 with baby number 2!” the country musician captioned his post. “Hannah and I have been dying to share the news. We thought for sure we’d be announcing a baby girl, but God has other plans for the Mooney’s. Found out today we’re having a BOY! Bout to be a new duo in town 🙌🏻💙” “We have cried and laughed all morning (I thought for sure it was a girl)! 😂,” Hannah wrote alongside hers. “We are over the moon and can’t wait to see this precious guy be the sweetest big brother, early next year! 💙” The little one on the way will make Mooney, 27, and Hannah’s family one of four alongside Asher, whom the couple welcomed in January 2017. Want all the latest pregnancy and birth announcements, plus celebrity mom blogs? Click here to get those and more in the PEOPLE Parents newsletter. After Asher’s arrival, Mooney told PEOPLE of the couple’s new addition, “It has been a huge change and the best change. You love each other a ton and then you have a kid and you never realize how much you could love something. It strengthens your love for each other, but it also just opens up this entire other deeper world of love that you never knew you could have.” The country star and former Miss Arkansas Hannah (née Billingsley), 28, tied the knot in October 2017, his rep confirmed to PEOPLE exclusively at the time. Their ceremony was held between two oak trees on the Mooney family property in Arkansas and was followed by an outdoor reception with the Ozarks visible in the background, revealed wedding planner Jessica Sloane. And the pair’s then-9-month-old son had a very special role, sporting a baby tuxedo as he was carried down the aisle, while Mooney’s bandmate Dan Smyers and the duo’s guitarist Justin Richards stood up as groomsmen. The Grammy-winning duo opened up to PEOPLE in March 2017 about their tear-jerker track “When I Pray for You,” which they wrote for The Shack soundtrack and was inspired in part for Mooney by fatherhood. Among the song’s pull-at-your heartstrings lyrics are, “I talked to God about you / And I ain’t even met you yet / Everybody’s waitin’ on you here / I can’t wait to feel your heartbeat when I lay you on my chest / I’m already holding back my tears / I want to be the dad that my dad was / I hope that I don’t mess this whole thing up.” “I was about to have my kid [when we worked on the song], so a lot of emotions were stirring around, ” Mooney told PEOPLE. “We were in the room with a couple other dads that had just become new dads.” “It was one of those things where it was kind of the perfect storm,” he quipped.

2017-11-13 22:32:16

000000078202

On this episode of Recode Decode, NBC correspondent and MSNBC anchor Katy Tur talks about her new book recounting her time on the Trump campaign trail, “Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History.” Kara Swisher and co-host Hilary Rosen take Katy through her journalism career and how she found herself writing about Trump, even though she’s not a political insider. You can read some of the highlights here, or listen to the entire interview in the audio player below. We’ve also provided a lightly edited complete transcript of their conversation. If you like this, be sure to subscribe to Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Kara Swisher: Recode Radio presents Recode Decode, coming to from the Vox Media podcast network. Hi, I’m Kara Swisher, executive editor of Recode. You may know me as the person who taught Donald Trump everything he knows about Twitter, but in my spare time I talk tech. You’re listening to Recode Decode, a podcast about tech and media’s key players, big ideas and how they’re changing the world we live in. You can find more episodes of Recode Decode on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Play Music or wherever you listen to your podcast, or just visit recode.net/podcast for more. Today is November 8th, 2017, which means it’s the one year anniversary of one of the most surprising days in American political history. To commemorate this special occasion, I’m in New York City with my friend Hilary Rosen. She’s a political strategist for SKDKnickerbocker and a political commentator for CNN. Hey, Hilary. Hilary Rosen: Hey. KS: How you doing? Hilary and I are doing a bunch of interviews together this month, talking with some really interesting people from the political world. We started last week with the Vice President of Public Policy of Yelp Luther Lowe and Washington, D.C., super lawyer Beth Wilkinson. As I mentioned, today is the one-year anniversary of the election of 2016, which is why we’re excited to be talking to Katy Tur, an NBC news correspondent and the anchor of MSNBC Live. She’s the author of a new book called “Unbelievable: My Front-Row seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History.” What campaign was that, again, Katy? HR: Welcome to Recode Decode. Katy Tur: Thanks for having me. Clearly, I’m talking about the George Bush campaign. George Bush Sr. KS: I wish. We all wish that he was running again. We’re going to get to your book, which is about the Trump campaign and how you got to it, but let’s have a little bit of your background, how you got to cover this in order to write this book. Because you’re not a political journalist, initially. No, absolutely not. I was a foreign correspondent. I had just moved to London to live a life overseas. KS: This is for NBC? Yeah, four years was the minimum of time I was going to be there. HR: How did you get to NBC? I got to NBC the good old-fashioned way: Blood, sweat and tears. I was a one-man band in Brooklyn. Then I was a one-man band for The Weather Channel, chasing tornadoes. KS: Wow, that’s a big job. Then I weaseled my way into WNBC. KS: How could you leave that job? That’s like the best ... Because it paid absolutely nothing. It didn’t pay, period. And I was tired of carrying my own camera. Then I made my way to NBC, and here I am now. KS: You were in London, and what happened? You were just sitting there ... So, I’m in London. I’m there for nine months. KS: You were covering what? I was covering terrorism, I was covering feature stories. I had just ... did a story about trying to find the devil in the foothills of the Swiss Alps. I covered everything: Plane crashes, whatever came up that happened overseas. I came back to the states to fulfill a Make-A-Wish request, and then also to remind my bosses that I exist, because if things aren’t going to hell overseas, they tend to forget about you. I am standing around the newsroom, just shooting the shit with some friends, and Donald Trump is in the news. Univision has dropped him, Macy’s has dropped him, NBC’s dropped his pageants. Somebody said, “We need someone to cover this, who can we get?” KS: This was about the Mexicans ... This was about after, right after he announced ... This is when he said, “Mexico’s sending rapists over the border.” Bradd Jaffy, who’s a senior producer on “Nightly,” said, “Katy. She’s just here. She’s standing around the newsroom.” So, that’s how I got put on my first Donald Trump ... The candidate story. HR: So you were still a London bureau person? I lived in London. Officially. Until April of last year. HR: They just said, “We’ll send you”? KS: Is this how these decisions are made? Hilary ... HR: It is, right? Because then they sent you to New Hampshire to cover an event, and you ended up never leaving the campaign. Never. I got told that I was being assigned the campaign full-time, but it would be six weeks, tops. It turned out to be 510 days. HR: At the time, they didn’t think they needed to assign a seasoned political reporter to the campaign because ... They didn’t want to. There was a lot of pushback from the Washington bureau. Why would we put somebody on this guy? He’s a joke. Nobody is taking him seriously. He’s gonna drop out, this is all for publicity. At the time, even though the Trump campaign was adamant about their desire to stay in the race, but there were questions even within the campaign about how long he was going to do this. KS: What did you think? What did you ... Were you annoyed? I thought, “They don’t take me seriously, clearly, if they’re gonna put me on this.” It’s not like they were assigning me to Jeb. But I also thought, “Hey, listen. Sure. Six weeks. New York City. It’s fine. I can go back to London after that.” But it very quickly turned into something much larger. At first, it didn’t seem like much, because it was just, the first rally I went to was a couple-hundred people around a backyard pool, and he was talking about all his standing ovations. And I’m thinking, “What is this guy doing?” He’s calling me out, telling me I’m not paying attention to him, and I’m thinking, “This is ...” KS: This is at backyard rallies? This was the very first rally I ever went to. But quickly after that ... KS: Can I ask you, did you know him? Because we recently interviewed Maggie Haberman, who had covered him for years and years and years. No. Even though I worked in New York City, I had never directly covered Donald Trump. Because he was tabloid fodder, he was a reality show TV host. He wasn’t somebody that ... I was covering fires and shootings. KS: And you were in Brooklyn, right? I was in New York City, too. KS: He didn’t have a lot in Brooklyn. No. I did. I worked for WPIX and WNBC, so I covered the tri-state area for awhile. But he wasn’t a thing, beyond sometimes appearing on Fox News, and talking about birtherism, or being the host of “The Apprentice.” He wasn’t a thing for New York news at the time that I was covering that. HR: And people in New York didn’t take him seriously. No one took him seriously. KS: We’ll get to this, but little footnote in history, he is the only candidate to have won for president, ever, that actually lost his home congressional district. Because the people who knew him best didn’t vote for him. He’s got a long history here. A long history in this city, and it’s not the most positive history in the city. There are lots of fans of his here, no doubt, but you had years of Jimmy Breslin just calling him out, and calling him, seeing him before anybody else saw him. Seeing him just for just somebody who is a snake oil salesman, essentially. Someone who sells his name more than he sells anything of value. HR: But that worked for him, and worked for you. You said in the book that you were a political neophyte, covering a political neophyte. And I thought that was really, really instructive. That in essence, you were able to see something in him that traditional political reporters wouldn’t have seen. KS: Or did you? What was your first impression? My first impression was, “What is this guy doing?” But it changed, because I did that ... I sat down for an interview with him ... It was very contentious. KS: Early? Early. This is July 8, 2015. I thought when I sat down that I was a part of his act. This was just what he was doing to get attention for his brand. So I presumed he’d go after me, I presumed he’d try to tear me down. Because I worked for NBC, we dropped his pageant ... It could be a nice piece of revenge for him. But once the interview was over, I quickly realized that he was pretty serious. Because he started screaming at me off-camera, telling me that I would never be president. Mocking me for stumbling. KS: That he would never be ... Or that you would never be president? No. That I could never ... Katy Tur could never be president. HR: What? What? I know. HR: And you said, “Well, I’m not running.” I said, “I’m not running.” I said, “I have no plans to run.” In the back of my head, I thought, “Well, neither will you.” But I bit my tongue, because I’m a journalist. KS: Did you not think he would? Did you see something ... Because one of the things I remember in that time period, is being at a party — Hilary, you might have been there — where all the political reporters were very typical, they were very ensconced in Washington, and they have a certain tone, political reporters do. They were all making fun of him, and I have relatives in other states, and had been to them, and they loved Trump. The Trump they saw was “The Apprentice” Trump, and they liked that Trump. And I thought, “Oh, I think he may have a shot.” It was really ... Everybody literally yelled at me. “You’re ridiculous, you don’t know politics.” I’m like, “I don’t know, he seems ... I’m a lesbian from San Francisco,and he appeals to me, and I don’t know why ’cause I hate him.” You know what I mean? This is not my candidate. I think there is something that a lot of people, who even hate him, like about him ... Find him entertaining, find charismatic, find ... That draw you into him. There are reasons that people might say, “You know what? I don’t like the guy; I think he’s crass, I think he’s terrible, but the system doesn’t work. Let’s put something else in there. Why not try something different?” I was in Arizona in July of 2015, when everybody was saying, “He’s an absolute joke.” 5,000 people showed up and waited to see him in Arizona, in Phoenix. Soon after that, 20,000 people showed up in Mobile, Alabama. Clearly, there was a vast disconnect between what Washington was saying, what New York was feeling, and what people in the country were feeling. I think I was able to recognize that, and I was able to find value in that sooner, because I didn’t have the preconceptions of what you can and cannot do in a political campaign. I mean, I knew you don’t criticize our veterans, but when I would call the RNC, they would tell me, after the John McCain flap, that there’s no way any Republican voter would stand for that. They would never stand for that. They are not going to vote for him, they are going to force him out of this race. I promise you this. Then I go to these rallies, and there’s thousands of people. They’re saying, “He’s just speaking his mind.” So there was a reality to what was happening on the ground, and then there was this Twilight Zone to what people presumed was happening in the offices in Washington and New York. KS: How did you communicate that back to headquarters, NBC headquarters in New York? We had morning conference calls every day. And every day, there would be this controversy, or that controversy, and the whole room would be whipped up, and would give all the reasons why this was the end of Donald Trump. I remember at first, with a kind of small voice, because who the hell was I ... Then, toward the end of the campaign, in a louder voice, saying, “Guys, you might think this is a giant deal, but I am not seeing that on the road. People do not care. The harder we push at him, the more we shed a light on him, the more we fact-check him, the more we contextualize him; the more they like him. They hate us. They hate us. They don’t believe anything we’re saying. Even if they do, they don’t care. Because they want something different. And that different, that change, is Donald Trump.” I was like the Simpsons’ meme: Old Man Yells at Cloud. HR: I think — and I encourage everyone listening, if you haven’t gotten this book, to read this book. Because I have read a lot of political campaign books, and this one is really good, it’s really readable. I noticed, just at the outset, that one of the things that was so different about it was that you don’t really focus on the campaign as much. Which is what political strategists like me did all year. We focused on: He doesn’t seem to have structure, or he doesn’t have an operation, he’s not professionalizing anything. How can he possibly turn this street popularity into a presidential victory? There was just nothing there, except a bunch of rallies. But your book really promotes the voter, that came in contact with him, and the passion he engendered. I wish that we got more of a chance to talk about the voter on the air for the various broadcasts we do, and I think that’s a major mistake that the media made, the free-press made. HR: Did you try to do that? Was that ... I did. I mean, I certainly did. It’s difficult, because you have a minute and 30, minute and 45 seconds to tell an entire story of the day. We have this tendency to want to do the most recent thing. KS: Whatever crazy thing he says. Whatever crazy thing happened latest in the day, is what you lead with, so that it’s freshest. KS: The hot take. So that people don’t feel like they’re watching old news, and I think that’s kinda misguided. So we would end up talking about his tweets, or the Republican party reaction or the Democratic party reaction. Or this analyst or that analyst, saying that this was the end. Rather than talking to the voter and trying to find out why they believed in him, and why they thought he was a better option than everybody else, despite all of the various outrageous things that he did. KS: Talk about that voter. Talk about how you interacted with that voter, and what you thought of them. I talk about it in the prologue of the book, and ... KS: Why don’t you read a little bit? Just this little ... The sense of why they were so upset, why they felt so left out, why they felt like they weren’t being heard. This is how I encapsulate it all ... I’ll just read a portion of the book: “I’ve learned that none of this matters to an electoral college-majority of American voters.” Talking about all the controversies ... They’ve decided that this menacing, indecent, post-truth landscape is where they want to live for the next four years. “Look, I get it. You can’t tell a joke without worrying you’ll lose your job. Your 20-something can’t find work. Your town is boarded up, patriotism gets called racism, your food is full of chemicals, your body is full of pills, you call tech-support and reach someone in India. Bills are spiking but your paycheck is not. And you can’t send your kid to school with peanut butter. “On top of it all, no one seems to care. You feel like you’re screaming at the top of your lungs, in a room full of people wearing earplugs. I get it." I had just spent nine months out of the country. KS: In London. In London. All over the world, really. You turn the television on, you don’t see commercials for pharmaceutical companies ... For pills. You don’t see those overseas. People aren’t screaming at each other overseas. You don’t have a ban on peanut butter. There is a sense of country in a place like France. There’s a sense of country in a place like the U.K., in the various cities that I visited overseas. And when I came back, and I heard people say, “I just want jobs to go to Americans. I feel like you have to come into this country legal. That is just fair.” I understand that. I understand where that frustration is. You go to small towns and there’s no charm there any longer. It’s not for lack of trying, it’s just that the young people in those towns have moved on to better opportunities in cities. So, big-box corporations swoop in. There’s not mom-and-pop stores. There doesn’t feel like a future for these areas. You don’t feel good. You don’t feel good. And call me crazy, but I ... When I’m overseas, I eat whatever I want, I feel fine. I eat here, I eat, and my stomach hurts. There’s something in our food. You don’t feel good in your daily life in this country. I understand why people just felt like they were not being heard. Not paid attention to. They didn’t matter. And they elect these politicians ... They might like their local politicians, but they go to Washington, and suddenly nothing gets done. They become creatures of Washington, and they’re just fighting, and everyone takes their sides, and I can see why someone like Donald Trump, who refuses to back down, refuses to apologize ... KS: Well, he’s them. Refuses to play by the rules, can be appealing. Because at the very least, he’s somebody who’s not an ideologue ... Hey, he won’t care about this certain thing, he won’t care about that certain thing; he is just going to get things done. He is going to make a deal, he’s going to shake Washington into working again. I understood that feeling, even for those who didn’t find him to be a palatable human being. KS: Right. There’s also the impact of television. Again, what I was saying about “The Apprentice,” that someone ... Some political reporter was talking about that ... They know him in a different way than zip code 10022. They do, and this garners laughter when I mention this, but it’s the truth. You talk to people, and you say, “Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about health care, doesn’t know anything about policy.” And they’ll say, “Well, he doesn’t need to.” Why doesn’t he need to? Well, he’ll hire the correct people to do it. How do you know that? How are you so confident in it? I saw him do it on “The Apprentice.” He’s just always done a very good job of that, selling himself as the smartest person in the room, selling himself as a deal maker. HR: As a boss. As a boss. As unique among men. He’s been doing it for decades. HR: You talk about that in the book, about how many times it came up during the campaign about whether how he ran his race was a good gauge of how he would govern. And there was this sense, among a lot of mainstream business men, for instance, who thought ... Well, he’s saying he’s picked out specific populations and appealed to them with specific coded racism words, or coded women issues, or whatever it was ... That he’s speaking in code to get elected to certain segments of the population. But once he gets there, it’s gonna be different. Once he gets there, he’s going to be very mainstream, he’s gonna ... I would have that conversation with ... HR: Be a good businessman, and the like. So you talk about how important that was, and how you tried on the campaign trail to say that he was going to govern. Behave precisely the same way. HR: So, my question now is, are you surprised with how ineffective he has been at getting things done? No. No. We kept being told by people within his campaign, people in his family, that he would pivot, he’d change. For the general election he’d move towards the middle. He didn’t really care about the things that he was sayings, he was just trying to get Republican voters on his side. KS: And he said it off the record on a lot of issues. Yeah, he did. He’s somebody who was a Democrat before he was a Republican. He doesn’t have a loyalty to any certain policy. He has a loyalty to hearing the crowd roar, to hearing applause, to hearing cheers, to having people like him. So, I kept being told, “He’s transactional. He’s transactional; he’ll do whatever is gonna ... [whatever] he needs to do to get himself elected. He’ll move towards the middle.” But it became very clear that he didn’t want to do that. Because the stuff that got the loudest cheers were the personal attacks. It was the vitriol. It was the anger. It was the outrageous comment. It was the, “I’m not being treated fairly, and everybody around me is criticizing me.” Or, “Everyone that might criticize me is not on my side, therefore, not on your side.” People really liked that message. So when he got into ... HR: So, that’s why he stays there now, because it still gets the loudest applause. It still gets the loudest applause. You’re not going to get giant applause for nuanced policy, for nuanced diplomacy. HR: For compromise. People were tired of that. Not all people; I’m talking about Trump voters. People wanted to be told that there are simple solutions to the world’s problems. KS: Complex problems. When we get back, we’re going to talk about the campaign itself, and you being on it over time. Because, you became the subject. I know you probably don’t like a lot of attention on yourself, but got a lot of attention, and it got a little dangerous. We’re gonna talk about that. We’re also gonna talk about your family’s background, which is in journalism, too. So you had some sense of dramatic incidents. We’re here with Katy Tur from NBC News and MSNBC. She has a new book out called “Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History.” Is it actually patented the craziest? There’s probably some crazy one, too, that we don’t remember. But we’ll be back, we’ll be talking more. I’m also here with my co-host Hilary Rosen. [ad] I’m here in NYC with my co-host Hilary Rosen, political strategist and CNN analyst. She is my co-host for the month of November. We’re talking politics in special bonus episodes of Recode Decode. We’re here with Katy Tur, who is the well-known NBC reporter, on-air reporter ... What do you call yourself, Katy? NBC correspondent, MSNBC anchor. Presenter, if you’re overseas. KS: Anchor, presenter. You’re a presenter. We’re talking about, specifically, her new book “Unbelievable” — we’re talking about a lot of other things — which just came out. It’s about her time on the campaign trail, her unlikely ... What happened, because she was on a campaign that she didn’t think she was gonna be on ... Expect to be on. KS: Expect to be on, and she was not a political reporter. Just very briefly, you come from a journalism ... You’re ... Yeah, my parents are journalists. KS: Your parents are journalists, and very well-known ones. My parents started Los Angeles News Service in the ’80s. My dad convinced a helicopter company to lease them a helicopter when he was 24, or something, and they started covering Los Angeles news from the air ... Police pursuits, fires, shootings, anything that you could see from a helicopter in Los Angeles. Which is good, because Los Angeles is a giant place. My mom would hang out of the helicopter and shoot the video, and my dad would fly and report. They popularized the live police chase on television, they popularized reporting from the air, they have shot and reported on some of the most famous images, scenes from Los Angeles, during the ’90s, especially. HR: Specifically O.J. Specifically O.J. They were the ones that found him on that slow-speed pursuit. My dad remembers other assignment editors yelling, “Find that asshole Tur.” Because my parents were ... HR: Because if you find the asshole Tur, you’d find O.J.? Yeah, exactly. Because my parents were always first on the scene to every story; they had a knack for it. They were the ones hovering over the corner of Florence and Normandy during the L.A. riots, when Reginald Denny, the red gravel truck driver, got pulled from his truck, the cab of his truck and beaten to within an inch of his life. KS: That was their footage. HR: After the Rodney King verdict. That was after the Rodney King verdict, yeah. During the riots. They made history. KS: They did. What did that teach you? Did you bring ... Because that’s ... A lot of tabloid-y, it’s a little more dramatic ... The car chases were tabloid-y, certainly. KS: Journalism, nonetheless, but it introduced a different kind of journalism. It did. This was the ’90s; “The Real World” had just started, people were getting fascinated by watching things happen in the moment. Technology had moved forward fast enough to bring you those images live. You could have a microwave on your helicopter. Not a microwave like you have in your house, but a microwave for projecting images, that would send the images that you shot out of your camera live into a TV screen. That’s new. HR: Were you up there with them? Yeah, all the time. Yeah, since I was a child. KS: That you would go up in the helicopter ... I lived in the helicopter. KS: That’s awesome. I lived in the helicopter. I was so comfortable in the helicopter. I ... My dad was covering the Rose Parade ... I was 4 or 5 or something. And he was doing radio reports, and I got up out of my seat; took my seatbelt off, opened the door of the helicopter, which is a complicated thing for anybody, let alone a 4 or 5 year old, and just wanted to see the floats better, so I just looked outside. I remember I’d always seen my mom with the door open. And my dad ... And I’m not wearing a seatbelt, I’m just standing there, in a helicopter, hundreds of feet above the ground. My dad said he almost had a heart attack. KS: Because he’s flying the helicopter. He’s flying the helicopter. He calmly said, “Katy, please sit down.” So they covered ... HR: Little did he know that day, that their daughter would grow up and win the Walter Cronkite Award for reporting. I think my parents had good expectations for me. I don’t think that they were surprised. I think they’re proud. I hope they’re proud. They risked their lives for their journalism, and I say that because after the Reginald Denny beating, after they shot that video and then testified against the gang members who tried to kill Reginald Denny, they got death threats. KS: Because they saw it. They got death threats. They also called out the LAPD at the time, saying the LAPD had abandoned the city during the riots. So they were nobody’s friend for a little while. KS: Because they saw it, from the air. They saw it, so they weren’t afraid of speaking truth to power, they weren’t afraid of saying something that would put their life at risk. They felt like it was the right thing to do. So, that’s how I understood journalism; that it was worthy of risking everything for. So when I started doing this campaign, and I started getting death threats, myself ... HR: Talk about why. Let’s explain to people who don’t, who aren’t following everything. Donald Trump didn’t like the media. Or doesn’t like the media. KS: Or does, but pretends he doesn’t. HR: He’s obsessed with it, but ... Yeah, he likes you when you’re nice, but he doesn’t like you when ... HR: It’s a permanent foil. You’re not nice, in his words. That was almost the title of the book, “Not Nice.” KS: You had a contentious relationship? We had a contentious relationship. If I said something that he was pleased with, he would try to introduce me to the rallies as if I was this wonderful reporter. One time, he tried to introduce me almost like I was his wife. “This is Katy Tur, everyone.” KS: Right. What was nice in his ... I guess he’s leading in this poll or that, or he’s moderating his tone ... This was mostly early on in the campaign. I was always the one saying, on TV, that his supporters don’t care, that he’s got a real chance of winning. I was always that person. KS: So he liked that? I’m sure that pleased him to a degree, but I was also always the person who would call him out when he wasn’t telling the truth. I was always the person who would fact-check him immediately after a speech. Sometimes those fact-checks would go on for minutes, and minutes, and minutes, where I would just read all of the things that he said and tell you all of the reasons why they were not true. I didn’t sugarcoat anything. I wasn’t going to be cowed by his force of personality, buy his bullying, or by his charm. KS: Was it just him, or the staff? It was both. HR: After those moments ... Our listeners who are not political experts may not realize that you go to these political events and rallies, and they put the press, they put us in, essentially, what in the Trump campaign became known as The Pen, and you’re sort of cordoned off from the rest of the folks. Sometimes you can sneak around and talk to actual real people, but they put you in a single place. Donald Trump used to point to the press pen, frequently ... “Look at that scum.” HR: And call you out, personally. Often, he would ... “Look at that disgraceful Katy Tur.” “That liar.” HR: He called you disgraceful. He called you a liar. The whole crowd would then shift their attention to the press pen and point and boo at you. What did that feel like? And call me names. HR: What did that feel like? That’s when you recalled your parents’ strength? I didn’t recall it in the top of my head. Later on when I was thinking, “Why was I not as freaked out about this as maybe someone else would have been?” I remembered my parents. But, it was just the way we grew up. He would call me out a lot, and yeah, you’re right, we were in a pen. It’s not unusual to be in an enclosed area if you’re in the press, because that’s where you put your equipment. It was unusual because they wouldn’t let us out. Then he would point us out, and get the entire room ... KS: Wouldn’t let you out ... “You cannot leave this area.” Once he got to the venue, we were not allowed to leave, not even to go to the bathroom, unless we had an escort. A bathroom buddy. HR: Why did you all put up with that? Just curious, you just couldn’t ... I kept pushing back, I kept saying, “Why are we dealing with this?” The Secret Service was going along with it. That didn’t make any sense; the Secret Service doesn’t work for the campaign, it works for the American voter. Why are they putting us in this pen, why are they doing the bidding of this campaign? It’s against the Constitution! We’ve got a First Amendment right to talk to people. KS: The Clinton campaign didn’t do that. They kept you away from the candidate, but they didn’t, the Clinton campaign didn’t keep you away from the crowds. It didn’t make any sense. We fought it. We fought a lot of things. We tried. I would just walk out and just give attitude to people. HR: But essentially by doing that, you became part of his act. We did. HR: So you had to then consistently go on air afterwards and reinterpret the act. Because all the networks had started covering his rallies live, which is what they all got criticized for later, was giving him, quote, “too much attention.” Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s a discussion that is worthy of being had going forward: How much attention should we be giving him, and how much should we be airing live? I think it’s a discussion about whether or not we should be airing the press briefings live. HR: They did it yesterday; I was so annoyed. At what point is it worthwhile any longer? They’re not telling you anything. HR: And then you realize how stupid the questions are. They’re obfuscating. They’re ... It’s just ... HR: So go back to the point Kara raised, so you didn’t personalize. Sorry, you’re getting me into my daily struggles. HR: So you didn’t personalize it, is what you’re saying. I tried not to personalized it. HR: Despite how personal he made it. He would call me out all the time; I was used to it. The time that was really scary was the day of the Muslim ban, when he announced he didn’t want any Muslims to come to the country. We were at a rally in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and this is right after San Bernardino had happened, where that couple had murdered a bunch of people at an office party. President Obama, the day before Donald Trump made this announcement, had done a speech on terrorism, and then Donald Trump comes out and says, “I’m gonna ban Muslims, ’cause we don’t know what the heck is going on. The administration in power is not properly vetting people. There are Muslims in you neighborhood hiding other Muslims, who are making bombs in their living rooms, and they’re out to get you, the American people.” Republican voters, at the time, felt like the biggest thing they feared was being the victim of terrorism. Republican voters, majority of Republican voters, felt this way. So we are in a press pen in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, we have just spoken to a number of supporters, none of whom were bothered by this idea. They all welcomed it. The harshest criticism we heard was, “I have to think about this.” Others were saying, “We should deport all Muslims who happen to be in this country.” So there was a lot of anger. Donald Trump walks into this room and he’s whipping up this crowd, and before he gets to the Muslim ban ... And he basically is saying the media is complicit in this, ’cause we’re not reporting it. So, the media is putting your life at risk, dear voter. He takes the stage, and the crowd is angry, and he looks angry, and before he goes to the Muslim ban, he goes on a riff about the press, and then he goes on a riff about me in particular. He’s angry because of tweets I sent a few nights earlier, where I talked about protesters interrupting his rally and forcing him to abruptly end his rally speech. HR: Which happened. Which happened. Furious about this, because he cannot look weak. So, furious at me, already tweeted about how I should be fired. My phone is already ablaze with people telling me that I am a terrible person, telling me that I deserve to die. So I’m sitting in this rally, on the riser, but I’m sitting down, I’m trying not to be ... I’m trying not to stand out. Something did not feel safe. And then he says, “Little Katy, Katy Tur. She’s back there.” And he points me out. The entire room ... We’re in the belly of a warship ... The entire room turns around and boos and screams and calls me names. Men are standing on chairs, and I think to myself, “Just smile and wave.” Because what are you going to do? How are you going to defuse the situation? You smile and wave, you make it seem like it’s all part of an act, and then you go on with your work, and you move one. You just compartmentalize it. HR: But you had to be escorted out of there by security. When the rally was over, a Trump staffer came up to me and said, “These guys are going to walk you out,” and pointed out two guys from Secret Service to walk me to my car, because it was a pitch-black walk down a gangway to my car, which was parked with all of the other Trump supporters. My phone, once again, going nuts. People defending me, and then also other people telling me what a horrible person I am. KS: They didn’t quite use those words, right? More ... they were a little more harsh. HR: Then, after that, you actually ... NBC sent security with you, frequently, right? We got armed security. HR: It’s quite unusual for a political reporter to have to travel with security. KS: Because of actual death threats? Because of actual death threats. Yeah, and I’d get weird things at work, sent to me at work, that people couldn’t explain, coming from random places. Untrackable things, it seemed. There was a lot of concern about my safety, and my parents were certainly concerned about my safety. But, to bring it back to where we started, I think the reason why I didn’t really ... I was able to compartmentalize it, and able to just kind of move past it, and not think about it too much, not let it get in the way of my reporting, is that my parents did this. Even though it’s ... We grew up that way. KS: Can I ask you, why did he pick out you, do you think? It’s not your fault or anything, I just ... What was it about? I had a big sign on my head that said, “Please, point me out.” KS: Obviously, the misogyny is so clear to me. It’s always a woman, it’s always ... Hold on. He uses different terms for men and women. He’ll say, “That wacky Congresswoman.” He called Mika Brzezinski wacky, as well. That’s not a term he uses for men. KS: “Little,” he does. “Little” is one he uses for men and women. HR: That’s the comparison to himself, right? He’s big, and they’re little. Yeah, exactly. Little Kim Jong-Un, Little Katy Tur, Little Bob Corker. He’ll go after men, though, as well. He called Tom Llamas a sleaze, for instance. I think there’s probably a lot of reasons why he singled me out so much. I’m not in his head, so I can’t tell you the one overwhelming factor that was in play, but I will say this: I was on the campaign trail earlier than anyone else. I was the first network news correspondent assigned to cover him full-time, the first one to essentially take him seriously as a presidential candidate. There were long months where I was the only familiar face in a room for him. He knew if he wanted to go after the press ... KS: That you were TV. Yeah, and he knew if he wanted to make someone the face of it, that I would be back there. Because I was always there; he got to know me. HR: Once you’re on a campaign, once you’re a candidate, there gets to be a point where every day is so rote that you don’t learn any new information. You’re only retaining the things you learned in the early days of the candidacy, because you can’t absorb new information. There’s just too much incoming. Yeah, especially with this campaign. It was a daily deluge of invective. HR: You were also the first, if I have my memory correct, you were the first on-air reporter to talk about the “Access Hollywood” tapes. I was, yeah. KS: That was because NBC had the tapes in their vault, because “Access Hollywood” was an NBC distributor. “Access Hollywood” had the tapes. HR: But it was an NBC-distributed show, or something? KS: They had the tapes before anybody else. Yeah, but Access Hollywood still had the tapes. HR: But NBC got ... KS: Was aware of them. HR: You got them sooner than others, so ... Yeah, we did. Because it’s an NBC property. HR: How did that feel? Because up until that time, you were really reporting on the voters as much as you were reporting on Trump, and all of a sudden this is personal, it’s emotional, it’s about women and sexual harassment, and I don’t think there is a single one of us covering the campaign that didn’t also sort of take this personally. How was that, going out there first and taking this on? The first time I heard the tape, I was sitting in an office, and my ear was right up against the computer, because the volume was really low, and I could make out Donald Trump’s voice distinctly. It’s a voice, at that point, I knew better than my own. And he’s talking about trying to sleep with a married woman, he’s saying these things that, on a hot mic, clearly he wouldn’t say if he knew ... Although, he had been saying wild stuff on “Howard Stern” before, so this is not totally out of character. But, hearing him say, “You can grab them by the pussy,” was ... My jaw cartoonishly dropped to the floor. I remember yelling out in this executive’s office, in Executive Row, where everyone’s relatively quiet, “Oh my God, did Donald Trump just say he can grab women by the pussy?” I mean, screaming this out, and then thinking, “Wow, if anything’s going to stop this campaign, it’s gonna be this. Or is it?” I think I thought immediately, “Oh my God, he can never survive this.” HR: You were the one who kept telling NBC that none of these other crises were gonna stop ... Nothing mattered. So I thought ... HR: Did you think this one would? I thought this one might, but almost immediately, I thought, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know.” I thought it might for a few reasons. One, his campaign went completely dark. Fifty former and current Republican lawmakers were either calling for him to drop out or calling for him ... Or saying they weren’t going to vote for him. The crescendo of condemnation was ... It was a crescendo. It was loud. Then again, I knew that Donald Trump was not somebody who would ever drop out of anything; he would never quit. If you forced, if you pushed him back into a corner, he would just fight harder. So, what was going to happen in the debate, was my question. How was he going to try to turn this on Hillary Clinton? How would he use Bill Clinton and his accusers? KS: That was precisely what he did. Would that work for him? And then the real test was: What’s going to happen at his first rally after that? If the same amount of people, same amount of enthusiasm is out there, well then, no, it doesn’t really matter. And that’s what happened. KS: Talk about that. The first one. The first rally out of that was thousands of people. Thousands ... I don’t remember exactly where it was. It might have been Ohio. Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people screaming and cheering. The more that he was backed into a corner, the more that they felt like they needed to defend him, the louder they got. There was a woman wearing a shirt that said ... HR: An equal amount of women, by the way. I went to several of those rallies after that “Access Hollywood” tapes. There were a lot of women there. One woman was wearing a shirt that said ... She wasn’t the only one, but she was the one that I got the images of, I guess ... “Donald Trump can grab me by,” and she had an arrow pointing down. She looked like a normal woman, she was wearing glasses. She looked like someone’s mom. She looked like someone on the PTA at somebody’s middle school. She didn’t look crazy. KS: That she wanted her pussy grabbed. I guess ... KS: Unwelcome. By Donald Trump. It was wild. It was wild. They didn’t care. KS: Why? Again, they wanted change. I am not a ... KS: Psychologist. I’m not a psychologist, I’m not a social anthropologist. KS: How did the other reporters — we still have a few minutes in this section — react to this, to you? What happened to the dynamic? Because there is a dynamic among reporters on the campaign trail. In what way? KS: Were they shocked? What happened among the group of you? Shocked by the “Access Hollywood” tape? KS: No, not that. HR: The attention ... KS: By the attacks on you. Oh, by the attacks on me, personally? On Katy Tur? They were appalled. I would get people coming up to me, other reporters who I respect and who I’ve always looked up to, coming up to me and saying, “Are you okay? Can I walk you to your car? Is NBC taking care of you? I can’t believe he’s doing this. Does he understand what’s happening?” Then you broaden it out, and you say, “This is an attack on all of us.” There was real concern that somebody was going to get hurt. Real, genuine concern that somebody was going to get hurt, surprised that it hadn’t happened already. HR: You continued, even during those attacks, to have a significant amount of access, which I found interesting, and I thought in your book was really well described. That you continued to speak regularly with Hope Hicks, who’s now the Communications Director — Press Secretary in the campaign — that Trump continued to talk to you. He would use you publicly, but privately you would still get your stories, you’d still get some interviews, and you’d still ... Well, because I never ... I had a good relationship. HR: It’s a little bit like what Maggie Haberman does on the print side, right? Where he attacks the New York Times constantly ... Maggie’s amazing. HR: But is consistently calling up Maggie. You’ve become that, in many ways, on the broadcast side. Because you develop a relationship, and there was ... Some of his campaign staff thought it was ... didn’t like what he was doing to me, specifically. KS: What did they say to you? They would dance around it, because it’s an uncomfortable thing. I was talking to one staffer about his attacks on the press, and more in general — I don’t like to make it just about me — towards the end of the campaign, and I said, “Does he know what he’s doing? Does he know that he’s putting us in danger? Does he remember Roanoke, the two reporters who got killed on camera? Is he worried about it?” “Yes he knows, no he’s not worried about it; he doesn’t care.” KS: Doesn’t care. Doesn’t care. KS: All right, on that note, we’re here with Katy Tur, from NBC News and MSNBC, where she’s a correspondent and an anchor. We’re talking about her book, “Unbelievable.” We’re gonna shift and talk when we get back. I’m also here with Hilary Rosen, a political consultant, and also an analyst for CNN. She’s here this month, talking with me in special bonus episodes of Recode Decode about politics. We have guests who are oriented towards politics. When we get back, we’ll talk about that and more. [ad] We’re here with Katy Tur. Her new book is called “Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History.” I can’t remember the subtitle, so don’t worry about it. KS: That’s all right, I like that. You left ... When he won. Talk about, very briefly, what happened toward the end of this campaign. That you ... You left covering. You didn’t go to the White House. I left covering. I didn’t go to the White House. Day of the election ... KS: Did you think he was going to win that day? I did. I did. I thought I must be crazy, but I just had ... KS: Because all polls were to the contrary. HR: Talk when you actually called it before Election Day. You’re one of the few that consistently thought he would win. I just saw that enthusiasm, and I thought, “You can’t discount it.” Bringing the emails back up, the Comey stuff, was a way for Donald Trump to convince weary Republicans, moderates or people on the fence ... HR: To come home. That they should come home. They should vote for him, and they can’t take the risk of somebody who might be under federal investigation ... Oh, what an irony! I just thought, “This guy has defied all of the odds. Why is it going to change on Election Day?” He was right when he would say that he could draw thousands of people, just him on a stage, no guitar. Hillary Clinton needed all the celebrities around her. He was right, that’s true; she didn’t have the same amount of enthusiasm. Who knows what other factors are in play? I’m obviously not a federal investigator, so I can’t tell you how Russia came into this, and how much sway they may have had, or whether or not the campaign may have colluded. I don’t know. I know everyone will say, “But her emails, but her emails.” I don’t know, either. I was covering the Trump campaign, so I rarely talked about that. All those answers will come out sooner or later. KS: Or not. Probably a little bit down the line, if anything. Or not. Or nothing. HR: But you’ve made the decision, as Kara alluded to, after the campaign — and Recode listeners might not know this, but it’s sort of typical after a presidential campaign for the top reporters covering the candidate that wins to then get what is considered the plum reporting position, which is to be the White House correspondent. I took myself out of the running. HR: You decided not to do that. KS: Why was that? I didn’t wanna go to Washington. I think what made me so effective during this campaign was that I wasn’t a political animal, and I shouldn’t become a political animal. HR: A smart decision. I also had had enough of the daily interaction with him and his team. I did it. I wanted to write this book. It would have been really difficult to write this book had I been in the White House press corps. And, on a personal level, I’m getting married, so I wanted to maintain this relationship. It was the first time I think I made a really personal decision in my career. KS: Also, a healthy one. I think a lot of people who are covering ... I talk to a lot of the reporters covering the White House, and they seem ill. And look at Maggie. Maggie didn’t go to Washington. Though she’s there a bunch, she didn’t go to Washington. KS: But even covering it on a daily basis, they seem exhausted. It’s exhausting even from the position I’m in, as an anchor covering it every day. It was exhausting during the campaign, and it was infuriating, and also just tiring having to stand up for basic facts. Basic facts. “Yes, gravity exists.” CNN has a great ad out right now ... KS: The apple. I shouldn’t be promoting a competitor, but it’s a great ad. “This is an apple. You might hear people saying it’s a banana, but it’s not. It’s an apple.” I was tired of having that fight, day in and day out. I was also tired of being so glued to my email. KS: So, what are you doing now? You’re doing a show, you’re doing a daily show. Let’s talk about this. It’s a lot to do with politics. It’s pretty much all ... It’s mostly politics. KS: Mostly politics. You don’t really cover anything else. Talk about where you think the current state we are in this administration. Because, today, again ... The two senators leaving. Giving up. Essentially giving up. They don’t want to cover Trump anymore, essentially. That’s what it feels like. Or maybe I’m wrong. It is everything in relation to ... Everything now is in relation to Donald Trump. How do people ... Not, “do you vote on my side?” but, “Are you praising me?” And that’s where this administration stands. It’s not enough to be a Conservative, it’s not enough to be a Republican voting Republican; you’ve gotta be a Republican who is enthusiastic about the President. Who is willing to say how great he is on camera, in those boardroom-esque ... On-camera-sprays, we call them, where he has everyone go around the room and tell him how great he is. KS: It’s very Dear Father. Dear Leader. KS: Dear Leader. HR: And Senator Jeff Flake and Senator Bob Corker, two senators who’ve just announced that they’re not going to seek re-election. The fact that they’ve both done that, after they took on the president, almost is a victory for Donald Trump, isn’t it? Absolutely. And for Steve Bannon. HR: It’s not that they ... This is not the Republican Party, this is the Trump Party. HR: They’re getting a huge amount attention for their dissent, but there’s still 49 Republican senators who are way on board. I think it’s becoming clearer that the Republican Party as we knew it is ceasing to exist. It’s now becoming the party of Donald Trump, whatever that is. Then the question is, what is the party, what is the policy for the party of Donald Trump? Where do you stand on things? Is it just finding a way to say how great he is all the time? Is that what the Republican Party is going to be going forward? We cover the fracturing of the Party, and where it goes next, every day; we cover the press briefing, we try to fact-check it as needed; we fact-check the president as needed; we’re trying to follow this zeitgeist, where does it lead next? And then the Democrats. What’s going on with the Democrats. HR: I wanna talk about the Democrats in a minute, but Sarah Huckabee Sanders, yesterday ... The Press Secretary said, at a briefing, something that got everybody sort of all up in arms again. When she said that Donald Trump has accomplished more in his nine months than Barack Obama did in eight years. KS: Yeah, she does that a lot. It’s a lie! HR: What I thought was interesting, and I wonder if the media is covering this enough, which is: clearly they’ve had no legislative victories to speak of. But what they have done, systematically and effectively, that gets ... I wonder if you think so ... Too little media attention, is: They’ve essentially begun to dismantle the government; its regulations, its consumer safety, its financial securities, the across-the-board gambit of regulations that have been changed or are in the process of being changed, that will be extraordinarily difficult to undo. Do you think that’s getting enough attention, vis-a-vis ... So in essence, Donald Trump is accomplishing a huge amount, that is true. But is it the things that people sort of expected and are really thinking about? He’s accomplishing a lot through Executive Order, but his accomplishments are, as you said, the rollback of regulations. Is that being covered enough? I don’t think we do. I think we could stand to cover what’s going on at the EPA, for instance, a lot more. There’s a lot of things that are happening there that aren’t getting enough attention and could have severe consequences for the future. I think we’re falling into the same trap, and ... KS: Which is, he doesn’t have legislative victories, and therefore he’s not successful? Yeah, yeah. HR: And that we’re following the bouncing ball. We’re following the bouncing ball. HR: The shiny object, as it were. KS: Talk about that, in the media. In the culpability of that, when you think about that idea ... First, missed the joke the entire time. Now, is indignant almost all the time. It’s dangerous. It’s dangerous. KS: Yeah, I have reporters going, “I can’t believe it.” I’m like, “What? The hundredth time he’s done it? When are you going to believe it?” The surprise and the indignation is misplaced, and it’s not effective. I think we need to come at everything with the knowledge of what happened in the campaign, which is, not normalize it — any of this — but to try and follow what matters more than, again, the bouncing ball. More than the daily tweet, more than the daily controversy, or the fight that he’s in today. It’s hard, because that gets so much attention. It’s hard because that’s what everybody is talking about. It’s hard to pull it back and say, “Wait, hold on. While you weren’t looking, this regulation just got rolled back.” Or, “This committee just passed this bill and is trying to undo Dodd-Frank.” Any of the number of things that were put into place to protect consumers, to protect investors, to protect homeowners, whatever it is. To protect our water, to protect our air, to protect our National Parks, to protect your monuments ... Whatever it is, there’s so much that’s happening behind the scenes that we don’t get to see because we can’t figure out how much attention ... KS: Because he’s attacking widows and orphans now. Yeah, it’s hard. Because again, it’s the President of the United States. How do you ignore the President of the United States? When he says something, it is necessarily news. When there’s no diplomacy with North Korea, when the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker says, “I think he’s putting us in danger,” you have to cover that, that is a huge story. We have North Korea and nukes. How do you not cover the president going after a Gold Star family, another widow? How do you not focus on the change in what we find acceptable in this country? The sea-change of how Americans not only are perceived, but what we tolerate? There is so much happening, culturally, that demands our attention. We have to figure out a way to balance that, and talk about what is happening behind the scenes. KS: The actual impact. HR: This big-picture analysis, this big-picture fight that we are constantly participating in, covering ... Choose your word ... Is actually the very thing, isn’t it, that keeps his supporters on his side? Because it’s the very thing that makes him believe as long as he’s fighting all of us, then he’s fighting for him. So, if we did shift, if we did say, you know, “Your water is going to be more polluted, your kid is going to be less safe in school.” If we did more of that ... The question is whether it would be different or not. No, the results ... They wouldn’t. KS: Well we don’t really know, do we? I don’t think it would, because if we just talked ... HR: First of all, they don’t believe it. KS: So what happens with the Dem ... We have five minutes left ... What do you imagine happens? The Democrats ... Talk a little bit about when you think about ... You’re now a political reporter, whether you like it or not ... Where does it go? People talk about the fatigue, and people will get over it, and he’ll be voted out, and this and that. What is your assessment given ... I don’t know. KS: Because I think Flake talked about the fever will be over ... The fever will break. HR: When you have Democrats on your show now, do you feel like there’s an equal fight? Do you feel like you have Democrats around the table as often as you have Republicans around the table? Do you feel like the Democrats have shown up for the challenge in a way that you think gets to the people that you met on the campaign trail? I think they’re trying to figure out what the challenge is. KS: Or do we need Oprah to fight Trump? She’s the anti-Trump, presumably. Here’s the thing: I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. I think it’s all so ... We’re all living in this fog, and we can’t see past it. I don’t know how Democrats are going to be able to reach the voter that maybe voted for Barack Obama for eight years. KS: Which they did. Two terms. KS: Meaning, everybody’s capable of doing different things. Yeah, which they did. Then they voted for Donald Trump. The message, for them, is a purely economic message. But Democrats, like Donald Trump’s Republican competitors, as well, get caught up in the daily controvert. “Oh, Donald Trump is horrible for saying this. Oh, Donald Trump is horrible for saying that.” Or, “Donald Trump is trying to do this or that.” I think the problem is, it can’t be about Donald Trump. KS: Except he’s the most interesting person in the room. It has to about their message. KS: I mean, who would you write a book about? KS: The only thing people wanna talk about is Donald Trump, so they have to find a way to get their ideas, their platform, their policies, their initiatives ... KS: Who does that? Who does that? I presume it’s the Chairman of the Democratic National ... KS: Yeah, who do you ... because you had a sense that Donald Trump was more serious before ... When Huffington Post put him in entertainment. You had a sense that maybe ... That was a huge mistake. And then the byline ... Not the byline, the little author note after every ... KS: It was ridiculous. I think it was a mistake to be seen as being combative in that way. KS: And cavalier, really. Yeah, just being ... KS: Silly, snarky. Just being snooty about it. KS: So, what is your sense of that. Is there any ... I don’t know. KS: You don’t know? I wish I had answers. I think we won’t have any of those answers, we won’t truly know, until all of us get back out on the road and talk to people again. HR: When you are booking your show, when you’re thinking about how to present the antidote to Donald Trump ... Hold on, that’s not my job. My job is not the antidote to Donald Trump. My job is not to tell people how to vote, my job is not to convince people that Donald Trump is terrible. HR: No, but it’s to show both sides. That’s what I’m saying. When you’re looking at who ... Who are the big gets, who are the big opportunities for the other voices? Right now, the big gets are the people that don’t wanna be gotten, because they don’t wanna get the hellfire from the other side, which is Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders. Those are ... KS: She likes hellfire. She’s good with the hellfire. She’s good at givin’ it back. I know. That’s true. Those are the names that people look at in the Democratic Party as potential leaders for 2020. I wonder if there’s somebody just completely different that we’re just not thinking about. HR: So you think some of the biggest Democratic names are, in essence, avoiding the fight? I think that it’s the ... Conventional wisdom is that you don’t want to put your hat in the ring too early, because you don’t want to be the focus of everybody’s attention. The focus of all of the criticism. KS: And his attention. HR: Therefore, we have a sort of vacuum of ideas at the same time. KS: Yeah, yeah. HR: I’ll say that, as a Democrat. We have a vacuum of ideas. Look at ... KS: Come up with some, Hilary. HR: I’m not putting that on you. Look at what the DNC ... HR: I have a lot of ideas. I just wonder if the DNC has their finger on the pulse. They put out a press release after Flake announced that he wasn’t running again, just attacking Flake. It’s a little tone deaf. HR: It seemed like a lost opportunity. KS: He’s actually quite articulate about this. He’s more articulate than Democrats about the problem. You’re almost, like, “Gosh, he sounds like a Democrat.” I think everybody just needs to tone it the eff down. Just tone it down, just bring down the volume. ’Cause if we’re all loud about everything, nothing penetrates. I think we’re facing big dangers when it comes to our sovereignty, when it comes to our democratic process, our elections. We have a foreign power who’s trying to manipulate us. We need to focus on that. That is a huge story. You can’t keep letting that happen, otherwise where will we be? Look at that story in the New York Times about Idaho Falls and fake news, how it’s ripping the town apart. That’s a really scary story. It terrified me. It made me sincerely worried for our democracy. Is this the fall of Rome? Are we watching the fall of Rome? KS: You have Los Angeles parents. I have relatives in the middle of the country. I’ve had that at every meal, every holiday meal is like that. Yeah, but you know, we need to find a way to get back on the same page, and to share a set of facts, and to share a set of values. Until we do that, I don’t know how anything changes. I don’t know how it gets ... KS: All right, last question. Are you still in touch with Trump? I’m in touch with his people, I have not spoken to him. KS: Do you want to do a big interview with him? I would love to! Of course. KS: Will he? Donald Trump, sit down and do an interview with me. KS: Will he? I think that is not ... I don’t know. It’s possible, it’s possible. Last time I talked to him, he said, “I would like to sit down and do an interview with you.” And people would really respect it, they would. KS: What was your first question for him? I don’t know. “Why are you so angry?” KS: Oh, that’s a great question. HR: That is a great question. KS: That’s a great question. So, this is her book, Katy Tur’s book: “Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History.” It is now for sale, and you can see Katy on NBC and MSNBC, on her show, which she does a great job anchoring. And lots more in the future. Are you going to cover ... When are you on next? KS: What? When are you on next? KS: Whenever you invite me, Katy. I just come when called. You gotta drop that CNN channel. KS: I just like that Don Lemon. He begs me, he calls ... Not you, I’m talking about Hilary. KS: Hilary. Oh yeah, that Hilary. HR: Eh, well, you know. We have our facts straight. KS: You have apples, for sure. Anyway, Katy, it was great talking to you. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you Hilary, for joining me on this side of the interview table. We’ve got a few more to go. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

2019-11-28 00:00:00

000000015923

BRASILIA, Nov 28 (Reuters) - A Brazilian judge on Thursday ruled to free four volunteer firefighters jailed this week on accusations they had set fires in the Amazon rainforest to drum up donations, according to court documents. Michell Durans, a lawyer representing the four men, confirmed to Reuters that they had already walked free on Thursday after the judge's order. "Justice has been restored," Durans said. The firefighters operate in the Alter do Chao region in the northern Amazonian state of Para which saw a surge in forest fires earlier this year. Para state civil police arrested the men on Tuesday as a "preventive" measure while they continued to investigate the cause of the fires, raiding the office of a separate nongovernmental organization called the Health and Happiness Project in the same operation. Police said the Alter do Chao Fire Brigade took pictures and videos of the fires they set and used them to defraud donors, including one who gave 300,000 reais ($71,489.85) to the group. Politicians and other NGOs fiercely criticized the arrest and the raid, saying it was part of a concerted attempt by the government to harass environmental groups. On Wednesday, Cosmetics company Natura, which had partnered with Health and Happiness last year to provide sustainable ingredients for its products, expressed concern over the raid. After the number of fires in Brazil's Amazon hit their highest point since 2010 in August, right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro suggested that NGOs could be setting them. Scientists and activists blame land speculators, farmers and ranchers for setting the fires to clear land for agricultural use, saying that deforesters are being emboldened by Bolsonaro's rhetoric promoting development over preservation. The judge's ruling to free the firemen came shortly after the Para state governor said they would replace the police officer in charge of the investigation with the head of the special unit for environmental issues. (Reporting by Jake Spring)

2016-02-16 00:00:00

000000016307

BEIJING, 16 (Reuters) - Chinese banks extended 2.51 trillion yuan ($385.6 billion) in net new yuan loans in January, far above analysts’ expectations and December’s 597.8 billion yuan. The central bank said on Tuesday that broad M2 money supply (M2) grew 14 percent from a year earlier, also beating forecasts. Outstanding yuan loans grew 15.3 percent by month-end on an annual basis. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected outstanding loans to rise 14.4 percent, and predicted money supply would rise 13.4 percent. $1 = 6.5100 Chinese yuan renminbi Reporting By Xiaoyi Shao and Nick Heath; Editing by Kim Coghill

2018-01-31 00:00:00

000000045782

Stormy Daniels is going to war -- a vagina war -- with Wendy Williams, and she's willing to put it ALL on the line ... TMZ has learned. Stormy caught wind of Wendy's show Wednesday when the host called her washed up, messy -- and the coup de grace -- "all worn out down below." Now, Stormy's firing back, telling TMZ ... "My vagina is a well trained beautiful athlete that would not have the longest running contract in porn history if she were ugly." The porn star -- who now swears she did NOT bang Donald Trump -- says she'd be happy to show Wendy what she's working with, whenever Wendy wants. All jokes aside ... Stormy's upset about the attack on her lady parts, and says she's considering a defamation lawsuit. She might want to get a consultation before pursuing that.

2019-05-17

000000007891

When Lauren Sumahit answered the door of her apartment in Newburgh, New York one summer day last year, she was expecting to find an exterminator to take care of the mice and bedbugs that had become fixtures of the apartment. After months of dealing with pests, a broken and unsafe electrical system, and spotty heating, Sumahit and her husband had reported the conditions to the City of Newburgh’s building code enforcement office, which advised their landlord to send an exterminator and make the necessary repairs. But the day after the Sumahits made the complaint, it wasn’t an exterminator who showed up, it was a messenger—sent by their landlord—to deliver a 30-day eviction notice. The couple spent the next eight months crammed with their 10-year-old daughter and newborn baby into a motel room—a room that was largely paid for by the county’s Department of Social Services. Many upstate tenants like Sumahit have little recourse for violations such as these. While tenants in New York City and a handful of other municipalities currently benefit from at least some legal protections, an estimated five million tenants in the state essentially have none. But affordable housing advocates are fighting to change that. On June 15, the state’s renter protection laws are due to expire, and as the housing crisis spreads across the state, the date marks a potential opening to spread tenant protections across the state, too. In 2000, 40.5 percent of rental households in New York State were “rent burdened,” meaning they paid more than 30 percent of their income in rent. Today, after the foreclosure crisis forced tens of thousands of New Yorkers out of their homes and into the tight rental market, the number of rent-burdened households has climbed to nearly half. Homelessness in the state increased by 43 percent between 2007 and 2017, the highest rate of increase in the country, according to HUD. New York City’s oft-discussed gentrification problem is hardly the only explanation for these numbers. The eviction rates in small to mid-sized cities like Auburn and Gloversville have surpassed those in New York City. Poughkeepsie’s rate, the highest in the state, is an alarming 71 percent higher. And the share of rent-burdened tenants in many municipalities rivals New York City’s, too. In recent years, rent-burdened Brooklynites have fled upstate to places like Newburgh, Beacon, and Hudson, stressing rental markets, driving up rents, and pricing-out long-term upstate renters. “No matter what region we travel to, when we talk to tenants in New York State, stories are the same,” said Rebecca Garrard, a housing organizer with Citizen Action of New York, a grassroots advocacy group. Many tenants, she said, “have no opportunity for upward mobility because of their housing situation. [They] are either one health crisis or loss of a job away from homelessness.” There’s already a foundation in the state, though, on which to build a response to the growing crisis. Currently, 2.5 million tenants living in New York City and three neighboring counties benefit from what is known as “rent stabilization,” a set of laws written to protect against steep and sudden rent increases and arbitrary evictions. But the supply of rent stabilized apartments is steadily dwindling, due to a number of loopholes readily exploited by landlords to bring units up to higher and higher market rates. Since 1993, New York City has lost over 152,000 regulated apartments. Every four years, as the expiration date of the state’s rent laws approaches, advocates and renters make the trek up to Albany, the state capital, to demand that legislators close these loopholes and strengthen protections. For decades, though, these efforts were largely futile: With the renter crisis most acute in New York City, tenants of the five boroughs were left to plead their case to lawmakers who saw it as someone else’s problem. “Upstate legislators have always considered rent to be a New York City issue,” said Michael McKee, a longtime tenant organizer who serves as the treasurer of Tenants PAC, which works to elect pro-tenant candidates to New York’s state legislature. While these legislators may not have cared about renter protections when it came to winning constituents’ support, McKee said, they did “certainly care about the money.”  The real estate industry is one of the top donors to political candidates in the state, contributing over $23.5 million to candidates in 2018. By contrast, Tenants PAC contributed just $52,000 to candidates in 2018. After November, though, the Democratic caucus in the state legislature is much more progressive and much less beholden to real estate cash. And for the first time, they are feeling pressure from a statewide coalition of tenants. The Upstate-Downstate Housing Alliance—whose members hail from New York City and its suburbs, up and down the Hudson Valley, and west to the Great Lakes—is pushing a package of nine bills that would, among other things, expand rent protections to the entire state. On Tuesday, more than 2,000 tenants and supporters from 27 municipalities descended on Albany to demand accountability from their elected officials. The protestors’ call for legislators to overcome geographic differences was clear, as the chant “upstate, downstate, housing justice can’t wait” echoed outside the statehouse.   “NYC can’t win without upstate and upstate can’t win without NYC,” said Kevin Borden, the director of MH Action, which organizes residents of manufactured home communities and is one of the member organizations of the Upstate-Downstate Housing Alliance. “It doesn’t make sense to fight with one hand behind your back.” When rent control in the U.S. exists at all, it has been strongest in big cities. In California, the most robust tenant protections are found in or near Los Angeles and San Francisco. In Washington, D.C., nearly 80,000 apartments are rent controlled. The urban bias of these protections mostly dates back to the 1980s and ’90s, when—under pressure from the real estate industry—many states passed laws banning municipalities from enacting new rent restrictions (31 states currently enforce such laws). When these laws were introduced, existing rent control statutes were frozen in situ. But as the renting population and the rents they pay have swelled across cities and towns of all sizes, this antiquated map of protected areas appears increasingly at odds with today’s affordability crisis. Between 2000 and 2015, the homeownership rate declined in 90 percent of all metropolitan areas. A survey in February by RentCafé found that of the top 20 cities with the largest rent increases, 19 were small cities. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly one-fourth of the nation’s most-rural counties have seen a significant increase over the past decade in the number of “severely cost-burdened” households—those spending at least half their income on housing, including renters and owners. Only two big-city counties saw as large an increase—the Bronx, New York, and Norfolk, Virginia. “The real estate industry set up rent control systems across the country that were dictated at state houses and not in cities,” said Jonathan Westin, executive director of New York Communities for Change, a grassroots organization that works in low-income communities of color. “It was intentionally done because they knew that cities had a lot more rental housing and they wanted to water [the protections] down.” For decades, this plan worked as intended, with renters subjected to these laws having little influence over the people making them. But as demand for rent control spreads beyond the cities, the state-level locus of regulatory power takes on a new significance: The possibility of rent regulation on a larger scale. This is what happened, for example, in Oregon, which passed the nation’s first statewide rent-control bill in February. Because cities in Oregon are banned from adopting their own rent regulations (a law which remains in effect), the only option was to take the fight to the capital. Pressured by constituents, legislators from across the state—representing urban, suburban, and rural districts—voted to cap annual rent increases at 7 percent, a rate still too high to protect the most vulnerable renters, but a crucial precedent for further regulation in Oregon and elsewhere. But even as the housing crisis blurs the boundaries between urban and rural, boundaries to activism remain. In many small cities and towns, there is essentially no infrastructure for tenant organizing at all. In New York, for example, New York City is home to the only dedicated housing courts in the state. Outside of a state’s major urban centers, renters are often separated by many miles, and transportation can be time consuming and expensive, making broad coalitions difficult to maintain. And tenants who speak out, especially in smaller communities, are potentially subjecting themselves to harsh retribution. In a city like Newburgh, 70 miles north of New York City, with a population of 28,000, “the minute a tenant says [their landlord’s name], things start to happen,” said Juanita Lewis, the Hudson Valley Organizing Director for Community Voices Heard, a group that advocates for low-income families in New York state. “Someone might get a 30-day eviction notice, someone might get a letter saying, ‘Oh, I heard you were talking about the conditions at a City Council meeting.’” Perhaps the steepest obstacle is the learning curve for rural and suburban legislators. “There’s a huge amount of misinformation about what some of the legislation does and doesn’t do,” said McKee, referring to common arguments that some rent regulations are a burden to small landlords. “So we’re engaged in a very intensive education effort.” In a number of states across the country, organizers are conducting similar education campaigns with legislators who’ve long used the “urban-rural divide” as an excuse for siding with the real estate industry over renters. In Colorado, California, and Washington, some rural champions have emerged, but the vast majority of legislators sponsoring such measures still hail from major cities. A bill in Colorado that would have repealed the state’s rent control preemption law narrowly made it out of a state Senate committee last month, with the votes following both partisan and geographic lines: Votes in favor came from Democrats representing voters in or near Denver and Boulder; votes against came from Republicans representing rural districts. Two weeks ago, a state Senate vote on the bill was postponed, effectively forcing it into hibernation until next year. Pam Phan, an organizer with the Community Alliance of Tenants in Oregon, said that the key to the Oregon bill’s success was to show that constituents’ needs were all the same, regardless of where they lived. Legislators attempting to prove otherwise, according to Phan, were trafficking in false narratives about the effectiveness of rent control and whom it can protect. The tenacity of these narratives is one factor shaping the outcome of the June 15 vote in New York. “What [anti-rent control legislators] say, and it’s not true, is, ‘our problem isn’t affordability, it’s lack of investment,’” said Cea Weaver, director of organizing for the Upstate-Downstate Housing Alliance. But such a distinction, she argues, is false—across the state, the same rule holds: “Investment without protections means displacement.” Sophie Kasakove is a freelance reporter and fact-checker. She is a former reporter-researcher at The New Republic.

2017-01-19 00:00:00

000000025125

My Hero is a series profiling remarkable people around the world who have touched the lives of anchors and correspondents at CNN. (CNN)Hala Gorani remembers Aleppo before civil war struck in 2011; the streets, the sights, the sounds. The CNN host holds an intimate knowledge of Syria's largest city; both her parents were originally from Aleppo. But the landscape has changed forevermore after years of sustained bombing by regime forces and its allies. Swathes of eastern Aleppo have been destroyed, piles of rubble building in the streets, the loss of homes, businesses and human life forming collateral in a war thousands of civilians want no part of and yet cannot escape from. The Syrian regime reported it had reclaimed Aleppo on December 22, 2016 after four years and a prolonged offensive (the progress of which can be seen below). Driving out rebel forces, the assault also created thousands of new refugees fleeing the city. The fall of Aleppo marked the end of a lengthy chapter for volunteer organization Syria Civil Defence. Known around the world as the "White Helmets," Syria Civil Defence have found countless admirers for their humanitarian mission, delving into the ruins of Aleppo and other Syrian cities, and retrieving survivors in the face of remarkable danger. "Being a White Helmet is Syria has been called the most dangerous job in the world," says Gorani, who chose the organization as her heroes. "There is nothing more dangerous than running towards a building that has become a pile of rubble." The host, who met Raed Saleh, head of the White Helmets, describes the ever-present danger of "double taps" -- secondary bombs sent down with the explicit purpose of attacking first responders. White Helmet volunteers throw themselves in to this environment with the full knowledge they might be the next victims of a civil war which has already cost at least 470,000 lives through 2015, according to estimates from the Syrian Center for Policy Research. On the side of humanity It wasn't always this way for these men and women. "They used to be tailors and electricians, bakers and civilians, leading pretty ordinary lives in Syria, with all the issues the country had before," says Gorani. "They were thrust into this new world of death, horror and destruction." Now White Helmets are so attuned to warzones they can tell the difference between aircraft models just by the tone of their engines. First formed late 2012, the White Helmets began training as a 25-strong unit, working for a small stipend of $150 a month. Twenty-five men have become 3,000, but not without losses. One hundred and forty five have been killed in the line of duty and 500 injured, says Gorani. "A handful of them decided -- whether or not it would kill them -- they would help their countrymen and women," she says. "That's what makes them so special." "When I saw footage of some of the White Helmets saying goodbye to their own kids before heading off to war... it really brought home to me that the risk they are taking isn't just a risk to their own lives -- that they would leave small children fatherless, and their wife a widow." The organization has brought home the scale of the conflict in a painfully visceral way, documenting their recovery operations whenever possible. Some of the defining images of the civil war, of bloodied bodies covered head to toe in concrete dust -- yet miraculously alive -- have come from the very people who have saved them. CNN's host described the difficulty in watching the heroic acts of the White Helmets in Aleppo. "The buildings are destroyed, the neighborhoods are unrecognizable, the hospitals are being targeted -- ambulances they travel in as well are being targeted," says Gorani. "But in the end it's the human beings that are being injured, getting killed, in some cases being deliberately attacked. It's very difficult to watch, but it's also our duty to watch it and tell the world this is going on." Put forward for a Nobel Peace Prize by murdered British Member of Parliament Jo Cox, Gorani says the White Helmets have been forced to counter accusations from the Syrian government and Russia, who claim they have become politicized and help extremist groups, Gorani says. Their defenders say conversation is necessary to move freely through checkpoints in embattled locations. "They have always emphasized their neutrality," says Gorani, "[and] say they would help anyone trapped in those buildings, regardless of what side they were fighting on." What cannot be disputed is the White Helmets' drive to inject hope and humanity where for many there is none. "They are making a difference, they've potentially saved tens of thousands of lives," says the CNN host. "It would be very easy for them not to do it, and yet they do it. I think that's real bravery."

2019-07-19 00:00:00

000000005676

Want the best of VICE News straight to your inbox? Sign up here. PITTSBURGH — Kirsten Gillibrand’s near the bottom of the 2020 pack by every measure: The New York senator is at zero percent in a recent NBC/WSJ poll, and second-quarter fundraising numbers reveal that she’s burning through money faster than any other presidential candidate in the race right now. But she's got a new way to roll: in a bus dubbed "Broken Promises." Gillibrand decided to switch things up last week with a bus tour targeting not her umpteen Democratic primary challengers but rather Donald Trump. She spent 48 hours in three states and six cities in the heart of the Rust Belt, starting in Pennsylvania, touring through Ohio, and ending in Michigan. She told VICE News that bus tours are “fun” — and teased plans of some whiskey drinking while she was on the trail as well. But she was also serious about the kinds of plans she has for a part of the country that used to be a Democratic stronghold and flipped red for Trump in 2016. Some examples of how she says she will revive manufacturing jobs: Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, enacting a deadbeat company tax, and investing in apprenticeship programs run by unions. At a town hall in Youngstown, Ohio, she told a group of about 30 people, “I’ve got to tell you, coming to this community...that has borne the brunt of Trump's broken promises trade deals is one of the most important things I'm going to do in this presidential campaign, because the truth is he lied to you. He lied to the American people." Crystal Carpenter, a former General Motors inspector from the shuttered Lordstown plant nearby, told VICE News at that stop that she’s not sure if Gillibrand can beat Donald Trump, but she immediately said the Trump presidency has affected her life. "I have no job. The same job that he told me don't sell my house for, the same job he said is coming back. Where is it?” For Gillibrand’s part, she may not be on the ballot in these states in the presidential primary if she can’t break through in Iowa or South Carolina, some of the early states that can make or break a presidential campaign. But in a suburb of Detroit, the senator insisted to VICE News she can, and will, make it. "I'm showing by my time and by my message that I'm not only the person to defeat Trump, but I'm actually the person who can heal this country, who can bring us back together again. To find that common ground and remember the notion that we do better when we care about one another when we treat others the way we want to be treated when we actually care about the least among us." This segment originally aired July 18, 2019, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.

2018-02-13 00:00:00

000000000831

Feb 13 (Reuters) - Marimo Regional Revitalization REIT Inc * Says co receives notice from SMBC Nikko Securities Inc., confirming subscription of 1,872 new units in private placement * Says SMBC Nikko Securities will pay 196.3 million yen in total (104,868 yen per share) to the co * Subscription date on Feb. 15 and payment date on Feb. 16 * Proceeds will be mainly used to fund acquisition Source text in Japanese: goo.gl/zdCd4o Further company coverage: (Beijing Headline News)

2019-04-22 09:00:00

000000055255

Baby, let the games begin! Taylor Swift was out for blood (or at the very least, a good-natured competition) on Sunday during a family gathering surrounding the Easter holiday, where she and brother Austin Swift faced off in an egg-breaking contest while other family members looked on. Captioned “Pre Game of Thrones Easter Egg Battles,” the Instagram Story clip had the HBO series’ theme song playing in the background and showed big sister Swift, 29, strictly outlining the rules for Austin ahead of both their match and the second episode of GoT‘s eighth and final season. “You can’t … You gotta stay … The rules are that you stay within … you can’t do that,” she said, attempting in vain to outline the fair play zone with her hands before abandoning the rules altogether and going for Austin’s egg after he lowered it to a more accessible level. “This is not a way we play,” the “Delicate” singer told him. Then, she and Austin, 27, both went for it at the same time — and Austin was the victor, as his sister laughed and threw the broken remains of her egg at him. Swift is a known GoT fan, and may have even written one of her more recent hits in honor of the show — specifically, about Arya Stark. In a speculative piece, Entertainment Weekly humorously outlined all the reasons her lead single from Reputation, “Look What You Made Me Do,” could be about the younger Stark daughter who went on the run after the death of her father Ned in the show’s first season. Swift continues to drop hints on social media about something potentially big on the horizon for fans. The latest is a countdown clock posted to her Instagram story at midnight Monday morning, teasing that there were three days, 23 hours and 59 minutes left until reveal day: this Friday, April 26. On Sunday, she shared a photo of multicolored tiles to her Instagram feed and, previously, images of birds wearing sunglasses, a closeup of her brightly manicured hands, what appears to be bright pink tulle and more. The mysterious social-media activity, which began at midnight on April 13 with an image of a jeweled heart, has stoked speculation that new music is coming shortly. Game of Thrones season 8 airs Sundays at 9 p.m. EST on HBO.

2019-11-18 00:00:00

000000011791

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday said the United States was prepared to impose sanctions on any Iraqi officials found to be corrupt as well as those responsible for the deaths and wounding of peaceful protesters. “We will not stand idle while the corrupt officials make the Iraqi people suffer,” Pompeo told reporters at the State Department. “The United States will use our legal authority to sanction corrupt individuals that are stealing Iraqis’ wealth and those killing and wounding peaceful protesters.” At least 315 people have been killed since the start of mass unrest in Baghdad and southern Iraq in early October, the largest demonstrations since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The protests are an eruption of public anger against a ruling elite seen as enriching itself off the state and serving foreign powers, especially Iran, as many Iraqis languish in poverty without jobs, healthcare or education. On Monday, protesters blocked entry to Iraq’s main commodities port while schools and government offices in many southern cities were shut in response to calls for a general strike. Pompeo said the United States was watching events unfold “very, very closely.” Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Writing by Tim Ahmann and Chizu Nomiyama; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall

2016-05-02 16:05:00

000000087028

If you're a fan of ultra-heavy shoegaze that's loud enough to make your neighbors hate and love you forever, you're probably stoked about the new record from Philadelphia's Nothing. The upcoming record Tired Of Tomorrow drops next Friday May 13, and is shaping up to be their most intense release yet, bringing together one of the worst years in the band's life in a cathartic boom of an album. But Nothing have an entrepenurial spirit, and want to make sure their vision infects every medium out there. Which is why they've gone where no gazey, indie band in their scene has, and are launching their own set of emojis. Today, the band's emojis are coming live through the app Emoji Fame, putting them in the same ranks as other artists with their own emojis like Lil' B, Future, and Kim Kardashian. But instead of the usual boring shit like a series of butts and thumbs up them, Nothing brings their humor to mobile devices everywhere, ranging from battered portraits of the band to classy CoronoRitas. Every emoji is hyper specific, forgoing the metaphors people have attached to eggplants and ballroom dancers. Need to tell someone you need a 40 and a guitar? You're covered. Maybe you need a variety of gravestones to tell your friend exactly how you're feeling? Also covered. Or maybe one of your friends is droning on about how they don't like Nothing because of tenuous ties to other problematic bands? Throw down the boxing gloves and tell them the score. With a world obsessively using emojis to express any fleeting emotion, it's about time a someone buckled down and got weird and fucked up with it. Whatever scenario you find yourself in, you can be sure there's a perfect emoji to let people know what's up through the voice and spirit of Philly's saviors. We spoke to Nicky Palermo from Nothing and Gavin Rhodes from Emoji fame about all the potential applications of these emojis. Noisey: Well, this is a pretty incredible endeavour for Nothing. How the hell did it happen? Gavin Rhodes: Basically someone came to us and was like “would you be interested in doing this?” We launched with primarily hip-hop emoji sets. And I was like “hells yeah.” I was familiar with their tunes and stuff but I wasn’t super familiar with their aesthetic. And then looking at their Instagram and stuff it was like “oh dude, this’ll be amazing.” Nicky: I was checking out the Furture emojis and shit. I remember having a discussion with Bob the president of Relapse Records, I was like “is there any way we could make this happen, it’d be pretty fucking cool.” And he introduced us, and he went to work for sure. What emoji do you think is the absolute definition of Nothing?Nicky: There’s quite a bit of us in that for sure. The burning Philadelphia cop cars are good, I like the money on fire, the percocets and xanax was pretty on point. We have a yellowtail mock up bottle of wine. Honestly it’s all just narcotics I feel like. So yeah, it’s pretty cool. The percocet emojis are pretty tight. If all goes well, hopefully your brand of emojis will be the standard of street-corner drug dealing everywhere!Nicky: I hope so. [Laughs] We also did a mockup of an Applebees and a Taco Bell logo with our name in it, I hang out at Applebees pretty much every day or in the Taco Bell parking lot. Yeah looking at them, you can definitely line them to tell your pals what’s up. You start with the percocet emoji, then the Taco Bell, and maybe the handcuffs. Your boys will know what’s good.Nicky: Oh yeah.I might have to switch it up to a TGI Fridays in case people come through too heavy. Gavin: Or Chili’s. I’m a Chili’s guy. Nicky: It’s funny, we talk shit about Applebee's all the time on Twitter, Applebee's started following us on Twitter and I fuck with them all the time. I talk about how I’m going to kill myself in there, and their social media person is so funny. They ignore it and they’re like “well why don’t you come in and have a two for one appetizer instead!” It’s funny, I just get stoned at my house by myself and just do it. It’s funny now, all these other people see us connected with Applebee's. They tried to send us a $500 gift certificate, since I guess we were plugging them so hard. But I had my manager look at it, there’s fine-print and they litterally tried to get us to sign all our music over to Applebee’s. They tried to fuck us super bad. Yeah, Applebee’s records is moving up in the world.Nicky: Maybe for a stack I woulda did it. Or if the band is ever about to break up, I’m going to sign that contract quick and send it in, tell the rest of the band to fuck off. Gavin: Maybe you can negotiate a lifetime supply of CoronaRitas. Nicky: That’s all I really go there for anyways, I never eat food there. The one I hang out in in Kensington, I’m starting to notice the regulars there. There’s this one angry dude who drinks Diet Coke and scribbles angrily into a yellow legal pad. It’s fucking crazy. Does the staff recognize you at this point?Nicky: I try not to talk to anyone in there, cause I just want to avoid all that. Who’s the dog emoji?Nicky: That’s my dog Pierre. He’s a part of this band, so I figured he had to be there. I do everything with him. Gavin: It’s actually been a common theme, Pierre’s in there and that band Bleached has a dog named Benny, and Zakk Wylde’s rottweiler, pug, and english bulldog. Were there specific emojis you knew had to get in there? Like how high a priority did you set the percocet emoji? Nicky: The first time we had a conversation, I was like kinda hesitant. I would be like “oh what about some wine, or a blunt or some pills? Or that burning cop car?” and I don’t think I ever got to a point where he said no, like we could do whatever the fuck we want. I think if we ever do an update we’ll keep pushing it. What do you think the worst emoji ever is?Nicky: I really don’t know. I really enjoy most of them. I don’t like that the needle emoji is full of red. When I think of needles I usually don’t think of taking stuff out. Not that that’s stuff that I do, but it was always like who wants a taking blood out thing? It should be some gnarly stuff going in. I’m surprised on some of them. I wish they had a better gun that wasn’t a revolver. I guess that’s why your shotgun emoji is a good addition.Nicky: Yeah, we did that for Kurt Cobain. Yeah, rest in peace Kurt. Yeah, expressing suicidal feelings or thoughts has never been easier with these new emojis. Nicky: Yeah, I’ve been using the baby head with the gun next to it for suicide, like “I wanna kill myself’ kind of thing in text for so long. I was a little nervous about making a singular one emoji with a guy sticking a gun to his head. But I feel like nowadays somebody would give us a hard time about it. Gavin: Oh, I thought we were going to do that. Nicky: I just don’t want to get yelled at by a 14-year-old on Tumblr. Gavin: Please don’t get our app shut down. Yeah one of the cool things is once the app is live, we can add stuff in on the fly. So we’ll keep it fresh in the coming months, like for bands we create area code text blocks for tour stops. But there’s so many ideas once you go down the rabbit hole of emojis. Nicky: One of the updates we talked about was to start dropping in pictures of our homies in the app, like Bob Bruno in Best Coast, or Trinidad James, Lee from Trash Talk, faces you would definitely know. Cool. I guess to close, there’s been a lot of dicussion happening about whether or not emojis have the power to eliminate the need for the written language. I was wondering if you two could weigh in on that? Gavin: It’s interesting. We basically started with emojis, cave drawings were the first form of written language. [Laughs] We’re going to come full circle and just have emoji speak? I hope not. Nicky: Maybe in America. I’d rather see people talking in emojis than see what they really have to say, it’s pretty atrocious to read what people write about and care about on a daily basis. So I’d rather see smiley faces or something like that. It would also make it easier to go to Asia for sure, because that shit is so difficult to navigate. Yeah, just go to any country and not worry about any of that shit.Nicky: And then you wouldn’t ever have to hear people talk again. All talking would cease to exist and you’d never have to hear anyone speak again. That would be ideal. Send John all your emojis on Twitter @JohnXHill See all the sick celebrity emojis you can grab for your phone with Emoji Fame.

2018-11-16 00:00:00

000000092422

While there's plenty to love about Thanksgiving (No obligation to check email! Dinner at 3:30! Lots of encouraged napping!), the holiday can start to feel a little repetitive year after year: We wake up early to watch the parade, inevitably fight about politics with our extended relatives, then cap off the night counting down the hours until we blow our entire monthly budget on Black Friday sales. Fret not, though, because it's never too late to hit the refresh button on your Turkey Day celebration. To inspire you to change up your tired traditions and make the most out of the day, we partnered with Amazon Fire TV to create a guide of easy and unexpected activities that'll make this Thanksgiving your most memorable yet — from giving your menu a full refresh to adding an exciting new component to your game-watching routine. Sure, there's no dodging your aunt's uncomfortable questions about your dating life, but rest assured, there's a way to make this year's celebration feel entirely brand-new.

2016-05-31

000000049524

May 31 (Reuters) - Altamir SCA : * To invest 138 million euros ($153.76 million)in Apax IX LP fund Source text for Eikon: bit.ly/1sZ5qyi Further company coverage: ($1 = 0.8975 euros) (Gdynia Newsroom:)

2018-07-22

000000087232

Maja Milikic has worked for many years as an active participant of the reform and European integration process in Montenegro. She is an analyst, speaker and writer. The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author; view more opinion articles on CNN. (CNN)Imagine a country so small that the whole ski-in-the-morning, beach-in-the-afternoon thing is feasible. That's Montenegro, a country on the Balkan Peninsula, full of natural wonders and beauty and where people are known for their candor, enthusiasm and hospitality. But when the leader of the democratic free world, Donald Trump, throws our country, into the chaotic news cycle -- or under the bus -- by calling us "very aggressive" people, we have to stand up for ourselves. Has Montenegro's history been perfect? No, but we have tried to persevere, and we need like-minded allies to continue our efforts. Considering we have a population of only around 600,000, we may seem insignificant to others. But our will and desire to be a responsible member of the international community should be recognized and supported. Surely, NATO will not collapse without Montenegro, but Montenegro might not survive without NATO. Still, our tiny nation has been able to accomplish incredible things. During the era when we were under communist rule, as part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Montenegrins built roads, railroads and ports for trade. And in its 12 short years as an independent country, Montenegro has become one of the hottest tourist destinations in Central and Eastern Europe. It has also become a leading destination for foreign investment. And it has attracted many in the region who are looking for a relatively safe and secure country to call home. We embrace European trends and values, such as respect for human dignity and human rights, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law. Additionally, we are making economic progress. We have a fiscal strategy in place that aims to decrease our debt from 73% GDP to 63% by 2020. Once a conservative society, we have embraced diversity -- gay-pride parades are routinely held without incident -- and we've made great strides to close the political and economic gaps between men and women. We are proud to have many women in important leading roles, such as government ministers, the secretary general to the government, members of parliament and corporate leaders. And we are striving to achieve gender equality on par with much of Western Europe. Many generations were raised on the words of Montenegrin general and writer, Marko Miljanov Popovic, who famously said: "Bravery is to defend yourself from another and humanity is to defend the other from yourself." When you put it like this, it feels like there hasn't been a time in which Montenegro hasn't been "on the defense." In the past, Montenegro has certainly been home to racist and religious intolerance. During World War II, two Yugoslav partisan soldiers -- Boro Vukmirović (an ethnic-Serb from Montenegro) and Ramiz Sadiku (an ethnic-Albanian) -- developed a close friendship. The country's fascists refused to accept this and executed them for it in 1943. However, when the communists took over after the war, they turned the soldiers' friendship into a symbol of "Brotherhood and Unity" (a slogan that Yugoslavia's Communist Party coined). And that symbolism of tolerance continued into the nineties during the Yugoslav Wars. Montenegrins have embraced people from across the region. Nearly 30,000 refugees from Bosnia and Croatia came to our tiny country in the mid-1990s. And another 28,000 internally displaced persons came in 1999 during the Kosovo crisis. Today, there are 22 recognized religious groups living in Montenegro, guaranteed equality and freedom by the Constitution. Indeed, we've opened our arms to others -- even in the midst of trying to fix our own problems. As our foreign minister Srdjan Darmanovic put it in response to Trump's "aggressive" comment, Montenegrins "have been fighting for freedom for centuries. And Montenegrins are brave people in those fights for freedom." We have been dealing with problems inherited from the communist era. Unsuccessful privatization processes have led to the closing of many factories. Once an industrial giant, Montenegro now has many ghost towns, leaving thousands of people without jobs. But we have faith that this path that we have chosen, with the help of our allies, will solve our problems peacefully. We understand the importance of integration. Don't forget that Montenegro started the process of joining NATO even after it was bombed by the alliance in 1999. Although Montenegro was not the intended target, NATO aircraft bombed targets in Montenegro -- then part of a federal republic with Serbia -- during the Kosovo War. We joined NATO so that the horrors of that period would never happen to us again. Montenegro is tiny, but our people are generous and proud -- and we want to be treated as such. We have gracefully assumed our place in modern society, and we hope that no one will ever have an excuse to harm us.

2018-01-03

000000098710

Atkins wants you to think lifestyle, not diet, this new year. The brand that popularized cutting carbs to lose weight wants to tap the growing number of Americans who say they're focused on improving their health instead of simply shedding pounds. These so-called lifestylers are people who may buy Atkins' shakes and bars but don't necessarily follow the plan, said chief marketing officer Scott Parker. Atkins picked actor Rob Lowe, who portrayed health-obsessed Chris Traeger on NBC's "Parks and Recreation," as the face of its latest campaign. He's the first male to represent the brand and someone who has managed his weight with Atkins for years. The ads tout the program as one that's "not measured in pounds or ounces," a departure from traditional diet marketing. Atkins, which was acquired last summer by Conyers Park Acquisition to form Simply Good Foods, has already been trying to revamp its image to attract more people. It has added a plan that allowed 40 grams of carbs per day, in addition to the classic 20-grams-per-day regimen. Last month, it introduced a 100-carb-per-day option in its latest book "Eat Right, Not Less." "I think this is the final step, where we bring in Rob as a spokesman who hasn't had a weight issue or hasn't lost weight but will say it's absolutely critical to his energy level and vitality," Parker said. "This is the final bold step, and I think it makes sense with the steps we've taken in the last three years." Atkins is one of several traditional diet brands that have tried to reinvent themselves. Weight Watchers introduced a program last month called WW FreeStyle that's more flexible than previous programs. Spokeswoman Oprah Winfrey says on the company's website: "WW Freestyle is not a diet. It's a way of living." Wall Street has rewarded Weight Watchers' efforts. Shares skyrocketed 300 percent last year and received another boost Tuesday when DJ Khaled became its first "social media ambassador." January has historically been a rough month for the company even though it's prime health season with people focused on their newly minted New Year's resolutions. Over the past 10 years, Weight Watchers has been one of the worst performers of health and fitness related stocks, seeing an average return of minus 10 percent in January and trading negative 60 percent of the time, according to Kensho. Yet even as these brands pivot, they still haven't entirely dropped the word "diet" and their promises to help customers lose weight. They're still sprinkled into web materials, alongside more on-trend buzzwords. Nutrisystem's South Beach Diet website advertises losing weight within weeks. It's packaging takes a slightly different approach, saying it's "designed for clean eating and optimal health." Atkins has also redesigned its packaging on its bars and shakes to make the brand imagery "more contemporary," Parker said. Its efforts are all aligned with the goal of casting a wider net beyond dieters. Disclosure: NBC and CNBC are owned by Comcast's NBCUniversal unit. Correction: An earlier version misstated who owns Atkins. It is Simply Good Foods.

2019-05-08

000000065238

NEW YORK, May 8 (Reuters) - The S&P 500 fell on Wednesday as a late slide in shares of Intel Corp erased earlier gains fueled by hopeful notes from the White House regarding the status of trade negotiations with China. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.96 points, or 0.01%, to 25,967.05, the S&P 500 lost 4.51 points, or 0.16%, to 2,879.54 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 20.44 points, or 0.26%, to 7,943.32. (Reporting by April Joyner; editing by Jonathan Oatis)