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2018-06-19 00:00:00

2018

6.0

19

A. Ananthalakshmi, Kevin Krolicki, Emily Chow

Exclusive - Malaysia seeks to lay multiple charges against ex-PM Najib over 1MDB: Mahathir

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Embezzlement and bribery with government money are among the charges that Malaysia is looking to bring against former prime minister Najib Razak following a probe into funds allegedly looted from the state-run fund 1MDB, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Tuesday. Mahathir told Reuters in an interview that Malaysian investigators already “have an almost perfect case” against the principal suspects who had defrauded 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) and misappropriated billions of dollars in public funds. He also described Najib, who founded 1MDB in 2009, as playing a central role. “He was totally responsible for 1MDB. Nothing can be done without his signature, and we have his signature on all the deals entered into by 1MDB. Therefore, he is responsible,” Mahathir said. Having retired as prime minister in 2003 after 22 years in power, Mahathir - who is aged 92 - came out of retirement and joined the opposition to topple Najib in an election last month. Following his stunning victory, Mahathir has reopened investigations into 1MDB and Najib’s involvement in its operations. As a result of an anti-kleptocracy probe, the U.S. Department of Justice has alleged more than $4.5 billion was misappropriated from 1MDB and that about $700 million of that ended up in Najib’s personal bank accounts. Mahathir has barred Najib from leaving Malaysia, and police have searched properties linked to him, while anti-graft investigators have questioned both Najib and his wife, Rosmah Mansor. Najib has consistently denied any wrongdoing. He has said having the nearly $700 million transferred into his account had been a donation from an unnamed Saudi royal, an assertion Mahathir said the government was preparing to challenge in court. Responding to Mahathir’s comments, Najib denied doing anything illegal, but added that even if he had given any illegal orders at 1MDB, the management and board of the fund would not have been bound to act on it. “As far as I am concerned, I did not do anything that I thought was illegal (with regards to 1MDB),” Najib told Reuters. Investigators are looking to bring “a number of charges” against Najib, Mahathir said, adding those charges would be based on abuse of power when he was prime minister. They could include “embezzlement, stealing government money, losing government money and a number of other charges. Using government money to bribe. All those things,” he said. Mahathir said Rosmah was also being investigated in connection with 1MDB. “Some of the money is believed to have gone to her, lots of money,” Mahathir said. “We know about this, but finding the paper trail is a bit more difficult in this case because she doesn’t sign any papers. Najib signs a lot of papers.” Mahathir said he expected Malaysia to make its first arrest in the 1MDB case within months and “hopefully” start a trial by the end of the year. “We are working as hard as possible at a furious pace. We think that we already have almost a perfect case,” Mahathir said. Asked to name the targets of that case, he said, “Against Najib, against Jho Low and a few others.” Low is a Malaysian financier, who is also seen as a central figure in the 1MDB scandal. He is regarded as close to Najib and his family. Low’s lawyer could not be immediately reached for comment. “When we go to the courts, we will have clear evidence of the wrongdoing. We cannot afford to lose,” said Mahathir. The prime minister said Low had contacted him to try to make a deal on 1MDB — seeking protection from prosecution in exchange for providing information, but Mahathir said he had turned down the offer. Asked if he would consider reaching any similar kind of arrangement with Najib, Mahathir said: “No deal. No deal.” Mahathir’s promises to root out corruption and punish those responsible for the 1MDB fraud was central to his successful campaign to unseat Najib’s Barisan Nasional coalition that had ruled Malaysia for over 60 years until last month. Malaysian investigations into 1MDB were essentially shut down during Najib’s premiership after the then-attorney general - who was sacked by Mahathir in his first few days in office - cleared him of any wrongdoing even as at least five other countries continued their own investigations. U.S. investigators had regarded Najib’s government as obstructive, sources have said. Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber said last year that Malaysian authorities had refused to cooperate. Mahathir on Tuesday said he was confident of recovering “quite a lot” of the lost 1MDB money, adding Malaysia will look into why Goldman Sachs was paid almost $600 million for helping 1MDB issue debt, an amount that critics say exceeded a normal level for fees. Goldman raised nearly $6.5 billion in three bond sales between 2012 and 2013 for 1MDB. Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng told Reuters last week that Malaysia was looking at whether there were grounds for claims against Goldman Sachs and other banks that profited from 1MDB. Mahathir, who turns 93 next month, is the world’s oldest prime minister. Aides, political allies and Mahathir himself say he has been working long hours in his first six weeks, belying his age. His stint as premier this time around is harder, said Mahathir, in part because of the challenge of rebuilding and restaffing key ministries. “Before when I was prime minister, the structure of machinery was intact. This time around, I had to form a new government with people who have no experience. And then I find that all the ministries, all the departments have become corrupted.” Asked if he believed there had been other abuses beyond 1MDB, he said: “We don’t know for sure, but we have felt that a lot of government money was abused, made use of by the government for non-government purposes.” Mahathir said he also understood he could not make a clean sweep of suspected corruption and keep the government running, as it was hard to find “reliable people” to fill posts. “We can’t sack everybody,” he said. Reporting by A. Ananthalakshmi, Kevin Krolicki and Emily Chow; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Martin Howell

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-malaysia-politics-mahathir-exclusive/exclusive-malaysia-seeks-to-lay-multiple-charges-against-ex-pm-najib-over-1mdb-mahathir-idUSKBN1JF100

World News

Reuters

2019-06-09 00:00:00

2019

6.0

9

Ernest Scheyder

How much does lithium cost? The industry can't seem to agree

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Opaque pricing for lithium, the powerhouse metal fueling the electric vehicle revolution, is expected to be top of mind this week as the industry’s leaders gather in Santiago, with calls rising for more transparency to attract much-needed expansion funding. Unlike for copper or other metals used to make electric cars, there is no traded price for lithium. The London Metal Exchange is working to develop a tradable price for the white metal, but until then, the industry’s investors, customers, analysts and executives are left without a full sense of the global market. “The fact that there isn’t a benchmark price means that some of the banks haven’t been keen to get involved because they can’t hedge their price risk,” said William Adams, an analyst at Fastmarkets, which is hosting the Santiago conference and vying to be a pricing provider for the LME contract. For now, the industry grabs on to whatever scuttlebutt it can find, with data swirling on prices for spodumene, a hard rock containing lithium; prices for hydroxide or carbonate, the two main types of lithium used in batteries; or prices paid by battery manufacturers across China, Japan and South Korea. “You’re almost forced to just take the average of the price estimates that are out there,” said James Calaway, chairman of ioneer Ltd, which is developing a lithium project in Nevada. While spot prices in China have dropped double digits since January due to uncertainty around the country’s electric vehicle subsidies, such prices reflect only a portion of global demand. Some companies, including global leader Albemarle Corp, sell nearly all of their lithium on long-term contracts and are not influenced by Chinese spot prices, a distinction many on Wall Street do not seem to make. Albemarle’s stock is down 12 percent since January. “The China spot price is what the market is watching and until it picks up in a meaningful way, the sentiment will be negative,” said Howard Klein, a lithium analyst and partner with New York-based advisory firm RK Equity. “But the demand is there.” SQM, which eschews long-term contracts, said its first-quarter lithium prices slipped 11 percent, leading it to pause expansion plans in Chile’s Atacama desert. Livent Corp, which operates in Argentina, cut its 2019 forecast and warned that demand was slipping for a version of lithium it produces in China, and would sell product elsewhere. Since January, SQM’s shares are down 19 percent and Livent’s shares have lost 53 percent. “Investors are valuing the industry based on the worst they’re hearing from only a handful of companies, because they don’t have a benchmark price to base analysis around,” said Ernie Ortiz, president of Lithium Royalty Corp, an affiliate of Waratah Capital Advisors, which buys lithium royalty rights. Many long-term supply contracts are already referencing an LME price, an anticipatory step designed to set future deal parameters, Ortiz said. “The LME is continuing to pursue the launch of a lithium contract, in close partnership with industry users,” said LME spokeswoman Bianca Blake. In addition to Fastmarkets, Argus and Benchmark Minerals are vying to supply lithium pricing data, and a decision is expected “shortly,” Blake said. Even with the price uncertainty, though, demand is spiking. Toyota Motor Corp, for example, plans to have half of its global sales come from electric vehicles by 2025. The lithium industry’s largest players are inking fresh expansion deals as a result. Albemarle last fall signed a $1.15 billion joint venture agreement with Mineral Resource Ltd to own and operate the Wodgina lithium mine in Western Australia, a deal that expands Albemarle’s prowess with Asian customers. Ganfeng Lithium Co, which already has several Australian ventures, spent $160 million to boost its stake in an Argentina lithium project with Lithium Americas Corp. Tianqi Lithium Corp, in the world’s largest lithium deal ever, paid $4.1 billion last year for a near-quarter stake in SQM, part of a push by Chinese companies for more lithium access. But smaller and mid-tier players are finding it difficult to procure funding as potential financiers balk without a tradable lithium price, which would let them hedge their investment. Neo Lithium Corp, ioneer, Standard Lithium Ltd, Sigma Lithium Resources Corp and other prospective lithium projects have all struggled to attract investors largely due to that price uncertainty. “Greater transparency is severely needed,” said Jake Fraser, a metals analyst with Roskill. A traded lithium price would make conversations with potential customers or financiers much easier, said Carlos Vicens, finance chief at Neo Lithium, which is developing an Argentine lithium deposit. “Our main focus is to get a financier, a strategic partner, to get this project into construction as soon as possible,” Vicens said. (For a graphic on 'Game of Mines' click tmsnrt.rs/2WiWp6o) Reporting by Ernest Scheyder; Additional reporting by Dave Sherwood; Editing by James Dalgleish

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lithium-electric-prices/how-much-does-lithium-cost-the-industry-cant-seem-to-agree-idUSKCN1TA04F

Business News

Reuters

2019-05-03 00:00:00

2019

5.0

3

Jasmine Weber

The Tantalizing Photographic Figure at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair

At the fair, you can trace visual conversations happening across regions of Africa and their diasporic communities. Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads 1–54 Contemporary African Art Fair, held this year at Industria in the West Village, gathers together an impressive bevy of thoughtful work from and about the African diaspora. With over 70 artists showcased, the 24 participating galleries hail from Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Martinique, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Belgium, France, Portugal, Turkey, the UK, and the US. Walking through the diverse displays, you can trace clear conversations happening across regions of Africa and their diasporic communities. Certain themes repeat themselves — particularly religion, sexuality, beauty, and family — and there is an evident interest in texture and pattern. This year’s edition, curated by Black Chalk & Co. (an art collective founded by Zimbabwean artists Nontsikelelo Mutiti and Tinashe Mushakavanhu) is named Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals, a direct reference to a short story on colonialism in 1970s Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) by Yvonne Vera. The fair pamphlet reads: “Vera recognized the potential of the literary text to function as an important means of appropriating, inverting, and challenging dominant means of representation and colonial ideologies.” This year’s fair takes this challenge to task with visual artworks, in order to “understand and make visible black realities and imaginaries.” New York’s Danziger Gallery put together an impressive photographic display, most prominently featuring Malian legend Seydou Keïta, who is often cited alongside Malick Sidibé as one of the major photographic influences in Mali during the 20th century. Though their creative studio portraits are often conflated, the two have distinct styles — Keïta’s career began much earlier and lean towards editorial. However, their similar styles of photography have defined West African portraiture for generations, and continue to have an influence on the photographers of the African diaspora. The Keïta images on display make clear a number of intriguing beauty trends of the times — most notably, all of the women, girls, and even some infants had sharp, thin, elongated eyebrows drawn on in black. Across the Atlantic Ocean in the United Kingdom, Black beauty pageants revealed other trends. Raphael Albert’s images of “Miss Black and Beautiful” pageants in the UK in the 1970s showcase updated beauty trends for Black women — some bore relaxers, and others rocked afros. Danzinger’s all-photographic display paired Keïta with images by the Grenadan artist, as well as Nigerian photographer JD ‘Okhai Ojeikere, whose images show different hair trends, showcasing the malleability and potential for Black hair as art. At Yossi Milo, I was introduced to the jaw-dropping, laborious work of Kyle Meyer. Meyer’s massive creations take portraits of Black men donning wax-cloth headwraps traditionally worn by women, and weaves these images with strips of the same fabric. The artworks are hard to discern but glorious to look at; they are simultaneously tapestry, sculpture, photograph, and collage, and the sitters gaze at you with an earnest presence. Also on display by Yossi Milo were the visually enticing, bright works of Hassan Hajjaj, a Moroccan portraitist who hybridizes photography and sculpture to bring together pop culture, consumerism, and North African culture. Sanlé Sory’s studio portraits of Burkina Faso add to the fair’s wide presence of West African studio photography from the 20th century. Johannesburg gallery Afronova had an intriguing selection of images. Lebohang Kganye, a 29-year-old South African artist, recreated endearing images of her mother’s youth. John Liebenberg’s photos of Black South African individuals in the 1980s, while the nation was still embroiled in its decades-long apartheid, display a clear reference to the studio genre. Parisian gallery MAGNIN-A brought together a trifecta of vintage prints by Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, and J. D.’Okhai Ojeikere. While Sidibé’s images point toward the groovy male fashion trends happening in 1960s-7os Mali, Ojeikere again captured the sculptural beauty of West African women’s hairstyles. MAGNIN-A also introduced me to Fabrice Monteiro, whose modern studio photographs subvert images of subordination by making them regal, and are titled for offensive stereotypes and slurs like “Mr. Banania” and “Little Ninny.” The Belgian-Beninese artist takes on an unusual fantasy — the visual cues of distinct lips (which are white, rather than red, in the black-and-white images), circus gear, and cotton plants — and asks how and why these offensive symbols got their power. In short, I was dazzled by the photographic figure at 1-54. And despite my proclivity toward the photography, there is also a rich selection of painting, sculpture, and other unique object art. Stunning paintings by Richard Mudariki are presented by Barnard Gallery (Cape Town, South Africa); DeBuck Gallery (New York, NY) is displaying one of Devan Shimoyama’s textured portraits, which are simultaneously a celebration and an ode to the silencing of queer culture in Black communities; and Jean-Ulrick Désert’s “Waters of Kiskeya” is a pearlescent map of colonialism, shown by 14N61W (Martinique). The fair as a whole feels like a modern retrospective on contemporary African art, with something for everyone. 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair continues at Industria (775 Washington St, New York, NY) through May 5. This year’s edition was curated by Black Chalk & Co.

https://hyperallergic.com/498375/the-tantalizing-photographic-figure-at-1-54-contemporary-african-art-fair/

Hyperallergic

2018-01-29 15:43:00

2018

1.0

29

Drew Schwartz

Hillary Was Great, but We Want a 'Fire and Fury' Audiobook by Cardi B

In a last-minute attempt to win 2018's Best Spoken Word Album (or a weird audition for the upcoming Fire and Fury TV show), James Corden rounded up a bunch of celebs to read passages from Michael Wolff's explosive book for the Grammys on Sunday night. The pre-taped segment featured everyone from John Legend, DJ Khaled, Snoop Dogg, Cher, and Cardi B reading about the dysfunctional mess that is the Trump White House. But last in the lineup was a surprise appearance from Hillary Clinton, who apparently took a break from walking her dog in the woods or whatever to read about the president's "longtime fear of being poisoned" and his weird obsession with McDonald's. "That's it, we've got it, that's the one," Corden said. "You think so?" Clinton asked. "The Grammy's in the bag?" Clinton was ostensibly hoping to win her second Grammy award for Best Spoken Word Album, after taking one home back in 1997. In the end, though, it was Carrie Fisher who won the award posthumously for her memoir The Princess Diarist. For what it's worth, Corden might have done better by just having Cardi B read the whole thing. "If Trump was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then more to his liking he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger," the singer read. "Why am I even reading this shit? I can't believe this. I can't believe that he really... this how he lives his life?" Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily. Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter. Related: Yesterday on the Internet: The Grammys Get Political

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paqn79/hillary-clinton-cardi-b-fire-and-fury-grammys-2018-vgtrn

Entertainment

Vice

2016-05-07 00:00:00

2016

5.0

7

Johnny Manziel Club Hopping After Indictment

Johnny Manziel didn't let a domestic violence case cramp his style ... he hit up 3 clubs Friday night in Hollywood. Johnny -- who faces misdemeanor assault charges for allegedly hitting his ex-girlfriend -- went power-clubbing, from Nice Guy, to Hyde, to Bootsy Bellows all within two hours. Manziel was mum, but on the surface the criminal case does not seem to be a top concern.

https://www.tmz.com/2016/05/07/johnny-manziel-nightclubs-criminal-charge-girlfriend-video/

TMZ

2017-06-04 14:26:00

2017

6.0

4

Britt Julious

Scuba, Eats Everything and More in the DJ World React to the London Attacks

Seven people were killed and many more injured in what has been declared a major terrorist attack in London. A man reportedly drove into a large crowd with a white van. Later, he joined two other knife-wielding assailants in stabbing multiple people in Borough Market, a popular area of the city. Metropolitan Police were able to shoot and kill the three assailants within minutes of the initial attack. As news of the attacks continue to unfold, many in the DJ and nightlife world, especially those from the UK like Zane Lowe, Eats Everything, and Scuba, have offered their condolences.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kzqv8/london-bridge-attacks

Noisey

Vice

2019-06-18 00:00:00

2019

6.0

18

Jonathan Barrett, Paulina Duran

Betting the house: investors demand higher premiums for risky Australian mortgage bonds

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Investors in Australian mortgage bonds are demanding higher premiums to buy the riskiest tranches of new debt, as a slowing economy stokes concerns a property downturn could get worse and increase home loan defaults. High-yield investors are receiving up to 40 basis points more than they were last year to buy the lower-rated and unrated portions, according to an analysis of recent deals by large lenders including AMP, National Australia Bank and Members Equity Bank. That marks an important shift from a near decade-long run of relatively stable spreads for the lower-rated residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS), as the previously red-hot property prices have turned sharply lower, particularly in the major Sydney and Melbourne markets. “When you are looking at those lower unrated tranches, they are deteriorating as one would expect at the late stage of the [property] cycle,” said George Boubouras, chief investment officer at Atlas Capital. “We see them as a leading indicator of risk, and they have been getting riskier.” Home prices in Australia’s heavily populated eastern states have fallen rapidly since late-2017 due to souring economic conditions, pushing problem home loans to their highest level since the aftermath of the global financial crisis, according to Standard & Poor’s. Jonathan Kearns, head of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) Financial Stability Department, said on Tuesday that arrears on housing loans are likely to keep rising for a while longer, but should not pose a risk to financial stability as long as unemployment remains low. Indeed, the still-strong appetite for the safer - and much bigger - portions of mortgage debt suggests a major economic shock is unlikely. The sector has also enjoyed a string of favorable policy moves in recent weeks including an interest rate cut for borrowers, proposed easing of lending rules and the surprise re-election of a conservative government which opposes higher property taxes. All the same, as economic growth slumped to a decade low last quarter, an unusually long period of slow wages growth has also throttled household incomes and put pressure on borrowers trying to meet mortgage repayments. The household debt to income ratio is at a record high 190%, according to RBA data. Investors at the riskier-end of mortgage bond deals, which include higher interest payments, would take the first hit should loans start to default, though an investment grade RMBS tranche in Australia has never been hit by losses. AMP last week sold A$1.6 million in un-rated bonds backed by mortgages, with the pricing of 6.2% representing 40 basis points more than the spread offered to buyers of similar risky bonds last year. An ME Bank deal this month included A$5.25 million of unrated securities paying a 6% margin over benchmark rates which is 25 basis points more than what ME Bank paid buyers of similar non-rated bonds in October, the bank said. The premium is in line with the pricing of several other RMBS deals, including one issued by NAB late last year. Australian-issued RMBS volumes were tracking at $9.1 billion between January and June 5 this year, according to Refinitiv data, led by a global thirst for yield, but at a slower pace than the $26 billion for all of 2017. David Bailey, chief executive of mortgage broker and RMBS-issuer Australian Finance Group, said demand for the products remained very strong despite some change to the returns in the lower tranches. “As there’s been more and more discussion around a potential housing bubble and so forth, investors would in the back of the mind be saying, ‘maybe I do need to charge a little more for the risk’.” Property analyst Martin North, of Digital Finance Analytics, said deals structured at the height of the property boom around 2017 and prior to prudential regulator-imposed changes to lending standards in 2014 were among the most susceptible. “The debt bomb is still ticking, and even if a crash is delayed, the debt burden has to be dealt with at some time,” said North.  Reporting by Jonathan Barrett and Paulina Duran in SYDNEY; Editing by Shri Navaratnam

https://www.reuters.com/article/australia-property-debt/betting-the-house-investors-demand-higher-premiums-for-risky-australian-mortgage-bonds-idUSL4N22Y0OL

Business News

Reuters

2016-07-03 18:45:22

2016

7.0

3

Mark Bergen

Israel’s public security minister blames Facebook after recent West Bank attacks

In the wake of deadly attacks in Palestine, a top Israeli government official is pinning blame on Facebook, using severe language that underscores the company’s precarious position in political hotbeds across the globe. The social network is at fault for failing to remove posts from Palestinians that spark such attacks, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s minister of Public Security, told Israeli TV station Channel 2 on Saturday. “The victims’ blood is partially on Facebook’s hands,” he said, via Bloomberg. “Facebook has turned into a monster. The younger generation in the Palestinian Authority runs its entire discourse of incitement and lies and finally goes out to commit murderous acts on Facebook’s platform.” (The interview is in Hebrew, but Recode has confirmed the quote’s accuracy.) Facebook is often criticized for the ways it polices speech, which often puts it in conflict with national governments. The current Israeli government, for example, frequently faces criticism for attempts to curb speech, online and offline, particularly in the Palestinian territories. Israeli officials have recently claimed that social media has fanned the flames of a spate of “lone wolf” attacks that began last fall. The latest one, which spurred Erdan’s comments, involved the fatal stabbing of a 13-year-old Israeli in the West Bank region. Facebook did not immediately reply to a request for comment. But in a statement to Bloomberg, a Facebook rep said the company works “regularly with safety organizations and policy makers around the world, including Israel, to ensure that people know how to make ... safe use of Facebook. There is no room for content that promotes violence, direct threats, terrorist or hate speeches on our platform.” Additional reporting by Noah Kulwin. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2016/7/3/12090532/israel-facebook-west-bank

Vox

2016-02-17 17:00:00

2016

2.0

17

Nicholas Deleon

You’ll Soon Be Able to Search for GIFs Directly On Twitter

Get ready for even more GIFs to populate your Twitter timeline. Twitter on Wednesday began rolling out the ability to search for animated GIFs directly from a tweet or direct message. While Twitter has supported GIFs since late 2013, users previously had to find them on websites like Giphy, then manually copy/paste the link into the tweet. Now, users can merely click the integrated GIF button inside the tweet composition window, then either search by keyword ("cat," for example) or browse GIF-filled categories like Applause, Awesome, and Deal With It. GIF search is powered by Giphy and Riffsy, and will roll out over the next few weeks to all users on Android, iOS, and the web. On the surface this may seem like just a simple feature that Twitter is merely adding for the fun of it, but it actually speaks to a larger trend: augmenting text communication with visual cues like GIFs and emoji. It was only last year that several dedicated GIF creation apps were released for smartphones, letting users, say, turn videos of their adorable pets into social media-ready GIFs. And more recently, news website Quartz's new iPhone app (which has earned rave reviews) makes extensive use of emoji in its user interface to maximize screen real estate. Heck, Quartz in June 2015 even released a dedicated emoji keyboard for the iPhone. Of course, making Twitter more appealing to everyday people—who doesn't like GIFs?—and not just power users is the underlying thread of Jack Dorsey's second stint as CEO, as exemplified by features like Moments (which curates interesting tweets so people don't have to hunt them down on their own) and the algorithmic timeline (which places interesting tweets at the top of users' timelines). Now here's one of my favorite GIFs to mark the occasion: via GIPHY

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xygdv7/twitter-adds-gif-search

Tech by VICE

Vice

2019-07-01 00:00:00

2019

7.0

1

Bus falls into gorge in Indian Kashmir, killing at least 33

SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) - A bus packed with passengers fell into a gorge in Indian Kashmir on Monday killing at least 33 people, a state official said, the second such accident in a week. At least 22 people were injured when the bus skidded off a winding road in Kisthwar district, government official Angrez Singh Rana said. Media reports said the bus was overloaded. Accidents are common in the mountainous region where many roads are in disrepair. Jammu and Kashmir governor Satya Pal Mailk said many of the drivers were untrained and he had ordered state officials to cancel their licenses. “Most of the accidents take place due to careless and untrained drivers who drive without any regard for rules and regulations,” a state government spokesman quoted the governor as saying. Last week, 11 students were killed when their bus fell into a deep gorge at a picnic spot in Shopian district. Reporting by Fayaz Bukhari, Editing by Sanjeev Miglani

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-kashmir-accident/bus-falls-into-gorge-in-indian-kashmir-killing-at-least-33-idUSKCN1TW1ZV

World News

Reuters

2018-05-06 00:00:00

2018

5.0

6

Marianna Parraga, Deisy Buitrago

Exclusive: Conoco moves to take over Venezuelan PDVSA's Caribbean assets - sources

HOUSTON/CARACAS (Reuters) - U.S. oil firm ConocoPhillips has moved to take Caribbean assets of Venezuela’s state-run PDVSA to enforce a $2 billion arbitration award over a decade-oil nationalization of its projects in the South American country, according to three sources familiar with its actions. The U.S. firm targeted facilities on the islands of Curacao, Bonaire and St. Eustatius that accounted for about a quarter of Venezuela’s oil exports last year. The three play key roles in processing, storing and blending PDVSA’s oil for export. The company received court attachments freezing assets at least two of the facilities, and could move to sell them, one of the sources said. Conoco’s legal maneuvers could further impair PDVSA’s declining oil revenue and the country’s convulsing economy. Venezuela is almost completely dependent on oil exports, which have fallen by a third since its peak and its refineries ran at just 31 percent of capacity in the first quarter. The Latin American country is in the grip of a deep recession with severe shortages of medicine and food as well as a growing exodus of its people. PDVSA and the Venezuelan foreign ministry did not respond on Sunday to requests for comment. Dutch authorities said they are assessing the situation on Bonaire. Conoco’s claims against Venezuela and state-run PDVSA in international courts have totaled $33 billion, the largest by any company. “Any potential impacts on communities are the result of PDVSA’s illegal expropriation of our assets and its decision to ignore the judgment of the ICC tribunal,” Conoco said in an email to Reuters. The U.S firm added it will work with the community and local authorities to address issues that may arise as a result of enforcement actions. PDVSA has significant assets in the Caribbean. On Bonaire, it owns the 10-million-barrel BOPEC terminal which handles logistics and fuel shipments to customers, particularly in Asia. In Aruba, PDVSA and its unit Citgo lease a refinery and a storage terminal. On the island of St. Eustatius, it rents storage tanks at the Statia terminal, owned by U.S. NuStar Energy, where over 4 million barrels of Venezuelan crude were retained by court order, according to one of the sources. NuStar is aware of the order and “assessing our legal and commercial options,” said spokesman Chris Cho. The company does not expect the matter to change its earnings outlook, he said. Conoco also sought to attach PDVSA inventories on Curacao, home of the 335,000-barrel-per-day Isla refinery and Bullenbay oil terminal. But the order could not immediately be enforced, according to two of the sources. Last year, PDVSA’s shipments from Bonaire and St Eustatius terminals accounted for about 10 percent of its total exports, according to internal figures from the state-run company. The exports were mostly crude and fuel oil for Asian customers including ChinaOil, China’s Zhenhua Oil and India’s Reliance Industries. From its largest Caribbean operations in Curacao, PDVSA shipped 14 percent of its exports last year, including products exported by its Isla refinery to Caribbean islands and crude from its Bullenbay terminal to buyers of Venezuelan crude all over the world. PDVSA on Friday ordered its oil tankers sailing across the Caribbean to return to Venezuelan waters and await further instructions, according to a document viewed by Reuters. In the last year, several cargoes of Venezuelan crude have been retained or seized in recent years over unpaid freight fees and related debts. “This is terrible (for PDVSA),” said a source familiar with the court order of attachment. The state-run company “cannot comply with all the committed volume for exports” and the Conoco action imperils its ability to ship fuel oil to China or access inventories to be exported from Bonaire. At the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), Conoco had sought up to $22 billion from PDVSA for broken contracts and loss of future profits from two oil producing joint ventures, which were nationalized in 2007 under late Venezuela President Hugo Chavez. The U.S. firm left the country after it could not reach a deal to convert its projects into joint ventures controlled by PDVSA. A separate arbitration case involving the loss of its Venezuelan assets is before a World Bank tribunal, the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes. Exxon Mobil Corp also has brought two separate arbitration claims over the 2007 nationalization of its projects in Venezuela. Reporting by Marianna Parraga and Gary McWilliams; Additional reporting by Brian Ellsworth in Caracas; Editing by Sandra Maler

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-conocophillips-pdvsa-assets/exclusive-conoco-moves-to-take-over-venezuelan-pdvsas-caribbean-assets-sources-idUSKBN1I70RA

Business News

Reuters

2016-04-20 00:00:00

2016

4.0

20

Claire Voon

Martin Parr Photographs Real, Sad Food

Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads Limp slices of bread smeared with butter, a single sausage lounging in orange soup, a presentation of pork knuckles resembling discarded brains — this is far from the stuff you’d find on the menu of your local farm-to-table eatery filled with upcycled furniture. This is real food: the kind left out for hours on platters, or packaged and lingering for days on the dark shelves of supermarkets, or swathed tightly in plastic wrap. You probably won’t find photographs of these dishes on Instagram (#eeeeats) either, but they’re celebrated in Martin Parr’s new book, simply titled Real Food.  Published by Phaidon, the over-200-page book — with a soft cover resembling a plastic red-and-white imitation gingham tablecloth in both appearance and touch — chronicles the Magnum photographer’s international food surveys from 1994 to 2015. Within its pages, Parr lays bare our varied culinary lifestyles, highlighting quotidian views that can be oddly otherworldly or simply amusing: cherry blossoms poke out between the crevices of a mountain of canned Spam in Tokyo, while flat bread tans on the trunk of a car in Cairo. From Uruguay’s Punta del Este comes a veritable sculpture of assorted blood-pressure raisers jostling for real estate on one plate; from Finland’s Nousiainen, a presentation of clearly can-sourced veggies and the most nondescript boiled potatoes. Rather than being organized by geography, though, the images are grouped loosely by subject: you’ll flip through sections of desserts (a stoner’s delight!) that leave you practically feeling the whipped cream from sundaes, cakes, and that plump slice of lemon meringue pie worm its way to your thighs. A series of food in transit to happy mouths — oozing oil, dripping with sauces — will leave you craving either a trip to a state fair or a salad. The photographs aren’t accompanied by captions (an index at the back details their source cities), but each photo still presents a strong sense of place, suggested by, for instance, tacky tablecloths, or less subtly, a red, white, and blue cake elegantly iced with “God Bless America.” In many images of shops and markets, the packaging of foods wrapped, canned, and tinned also offers some hint of where you are: Japanese text is emblazoned on plastic while handwritten labels spell out words in French. More than taking a gastronomic trip around the world, browsing Real Food is like watching a ballet of gluttony, each photograph of fattening, processed, or simply sad food elegantly choreographed into a sequence that has its share of nauseating moments but, in the end, satisfies. Real Food is published by Phaidon and available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

https://hyperallergic.com/292246/martin-parr-photographs-real-sad-food/

Hyperallergic

2016-10-11 23:22:46

2016

10.0

11

Kurt Wagner

Twitter isn’t hosting its annual developers conference, Flight, this year

Twitter will forgo its annual mobile developer conference, Flight, this year. If you’re a developer who works with Twitter, or if you like to keep tabs on a calendar, you’ve likely already figured this out. Flight took place in San Francisco the past two Octobers, and the company hasn’t made a peep about this year’s event. It turns out that’s because this year’s event is not happening. Sources say that the conference was planned, at least tentatively, but then abandoned. Company spokesperson Will Stickney confirmed Flight isn’t happening, and said Twitter plans to focus on smaller developer events instead. Here’s a statement: We heard feedback after last year's Flight conference that small, more intimate events are where our developer community are seeing the most value. So instead of holding a single developer conference in San Francisco, we are hosting a series of regional developer events, continuing the momentum from our global #HelloWorld. Given the diversity of things developers are building with Twitter (from MoPub, to the Ads API, to Gnip, Fabric, and more) having more local events will enable us to engage with our community in a much more personal way. Canceling Flight — or rather, never scheduling it — is notable given how important these kinds of developers conferences are to other big tech companies like Facebook, Apple and Google. They are usually as much a show for the media and investors as they are for developers, an excuse to show off tools and features the company is building. Apple announced a new watch at its developer conference this fall. Facebook launched a messaging bot platform at its event in April, and Google used its conference to talk about its virtual reality plans. Flight has been a stage for Twitter in the past, too, though on a smaller scale. Two years ago Twitter used Flight to announce its full developer suite, Fabric. Last year, CEO Jack Dorsey used the event to apologize to developers for a relationship he described as “a little bit complicated.” “We want to reset our relationship, and we want to make sure that we are learning, we are listening and we are rebooting,” he said at the time. Now Flight is done. And with Twitter’s future as a standalone company very much up in the air, we don’t yet know if it’ll be coming back. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2016/10/11/13250450/twitter-flight-developer-conference-2016

Vox

2018-11-06 15:30:05

2018

11.0

6

Alex Ward

Midterm elections 2018: Russia trying to influence vote, US says

Here’s the good news: Just hours before millions vote in the 2018 midterms, top US security officials said they see no evidence a foreign government compromised the election. But now here’s the bad news: Those same officials say Russia and other countries aim to “influence” the election, in part by spreading misinformation. In other words, your actual ballot is safe, but other countries may still try to influence how you vote. The Monday night statement by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and FBI Director Christopher Wray was clearly meant to calm any nerves ahead of the election. But it’s unsettling to hear that adversaries are still trying to shift public opinion, mostly via online methods. During the 2016 presidential election, for example, Russia used fake Facebook ads, Twitter bots, and other means to sow discord among the public and spread false information. It seems Moscow is at it again, and that China and Iran are also running influence campaigns. “They can do this by spreading false information about political processes and candidates, lying about their own interference activities, disseminating propaganda on social media, and through other tactics,” the statement by leading US security officials reads. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September that would allow the US to automatically sanction any foreigner caught trying to interfere in the election, but that doesn’t seem to have slowed down the pace of meddling attempts. The Boston Globe reported on Monday that the federal government has logged more than 160 instances of suspected interference since August 1 and has jumped to about 10 instances a day in the few weeks before the midterms. They targeted voter registries, election officials, and other networks used to run the midterms. The attackers had some “limited success,” according to intelligence reports reviewed by the Globe, but it’s unclear exactly what that means. Most of the incidents were “foreign-based,” according to official reports. There are also other apparent meddling efforts. On Monday night, Facebook blocked 115 accounts — including 85 on Instagram — that US law enforcement said might be connected to foreign organizations that want to meddle in the election. Most of the Facebook pages were in French and Russian, but the Instagram posts were mainly in English. Facebook has also had to delete fake accounts tied to Iran in the months before the midterm elections. The officials offered three main ways to minimize the risk of influence by foreign governments. But again, the important thing to keep in mind is that a foreign country won’t alter your vote after it has been cast, according to the Trump administration. Not even Russia can do that — at least not yet.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/6/18067756/midterm-election-russia-hacking-interference-meddling-china-iran

Vox

2016-08-18 18:28:00

2016

8.0

18

Michelle Lhooq

Ballroom Is America's Most Slept-On Subculture—MikeQ Wants to Open Our Eyes.

MikeQ is weaving down Central Avenue in a pale gold SUV, trying to catch rare Pokemon on Pokemon Go. As we drive into East Orange, New Jersey—cruising past chain stores and a park that's deserted despite the mid-July heat—he aims his phone at a brick building on our right. "That's my elementary school," he notes. "And right next to it is a Pokestop." When he picked me up from the Newark Path Train station moments before, I noticed that the car's license plate read CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST. Dressed in a grey T-shirt, denim shorts, and black Puma sliders, he apologized to me as soon as I hopped in. "Sorry, the air-conditioning is broken," he said. "It's my grandmother's car." MikeQ, born Michael Cox, is the soft-spoken ambassador of America's flashiest subculture, ballroom. There is no party in the world—no velvet-roped VIP club, no grime-covered warehouse—that can compare to a ball. On any given evening, if you know where to look, you'll see drag queens, butch queens, trans women, and other queer people of color flocking to clubs or rental venues, decked out in everything from head-to-toe Ferragamo, to an LED-lit corset, to trash bags stitched into a gown. The night unfolds as a series of battles for cash prizes and glory, some dancers twisting their bodies into spine-snapping drops to the floor, others swanning around like Naomi Campbell on a Parisian runway. Even though ballroom dates back to the 60s, the scene has largely flown under the radar—not only of mainstream America, but of the gay community itself. "Stop 20 gay men, and ask them about the icons in the ballroom scene," ballroom veteran Power Infiniti lamented to the Miami New Times in 2014. "Most of them wouldn't even know." In recent years, however, this oversight is being slowly rectified thanks to prominent advocates like MikeQ, a 30-year-old DJ and producer who has dedicated his decade-long career to championing ballroom's allure—and its commercial viability. He's toured cities where local ballroom scenes are sprouting up, like Tokyo, Moscow, Paris, Mexico, and Seoul. He's invaded living rooms across the globe with his live-streamed Boiler Room sets, and seduced the heads by linking up with the Fade to Mind label and GHE20G0TH1K party—both bulwarks of the experimental avant-garde. Even Missy Elliott slid into his DMs once, hitting up Mike in 2013 to collaborate on a ballroom track. In some ways, my visit to Mike's suburban hometown couldn't have come at a more inconvenient time. He's just flown home from a gig in LA. Later this week, he'll DJ at a party called Vogue Knights and attend the Latex Ball, an annual ballroom extravaganza co-founded by the Gay Men's Health Crisis nonprofit at the height of the 80s AIDS epidemic to spread awareness of HIV prevention in the scene. He's also preparing for the August 12 release of his label Qween Beat's first album, an 11-track compilation of ballroom-affiliated artists that Mike thinks deserve more shine. On top of everything, he's in the middle of moving out of the home where he's lived with his family since 1990, and into his longtime boyfriend's apartment a few blocks down the street. The house where Mike grew up is three stories tall, with curved white walls and windows with navy blue trim. A beaten-up box of toys lies on the spacious front porch, and more boxes line the entrance hallway. Two calendars of the Obama family—for the same year—are pinned to the bright yellow wall by the door. Stepping over a hamburger recipe book, I follow Mike up the creaky wooden stairs and come face-to-face with his 83-year-old grandmother, who is perched in a chair on the second-floor landing. Smiling sweetly, she grasps my hand with a trembling grip, mumbling a greeting I can't quite catch. Mike tells me his mother and grandfather used to live here but moved out a few years ago, leaving him and his grandmother to support his aunt and her two young kids, who also reside with them. "That's why I hadn't moved out sooner—I wanted to be here helping with this house," he says. Up on the top floor, Mike's room is nearly empty save for his bed, his studio gear, and mountains of Nike boxes. Taking a seat at his desk next to two large computer screens, he swivels his black office chair to gaze around the room. "I get sad on and off about it," he says. "Sometime next week, I'll probably never be able to come in here. But it's time for change." Mike was born in Hackensack, New Jersey and moved to the house here in East Orange when he was four. His dad lives fifteen minutes away, in Paterson—"the same town where Fetty Wap is from," Mike notes—and they would hang out on the weekends when he was growing up. Mike says he's been the "quiet, geeky nerdy type" since childhood, and sang in the choir in elementary school. "I didn't dress nice," he says about his adolescence. "I never had a haircut. I wasn't loud and out-and-about." But he also had a rebellious streak. On the first day of middle school, he erased the name of the school his mother had written on his enrollment form because the building was "so dingy and ghetto," replacing it with one he liked better. Somehow, he never got into trouble. In high school, Mike started smoking weed and skipping class, which got him held back a year. Still, he excelled at his job as a manager at Domino's Pizza. "Work was more important to me," Mike says, "It wasn't that I was stupid—I just got over school in a way." Mike's life changed when he first walked into The Globe, a no-frills club that was the throbbing heart of Newark's gay scene in early to mid-2000s. "I was scared to go there—I have always been who I am but never in a public space," he says, hinting at how suburban New Jersey isn't the most friendly environment for black gay kids like him. But one Friday night when he was 17 years old, Mike mustered his courage and hit the club with a friend. Walking onto the The Globe's black-and-white checkered floor, Mike recognized the familiar staccato chants and taut bass wallops of Jersey club, a hip-hop-influenced genre from Newark that Mike had often heard at local block parties and family barbeques growing up. But at the end of the night, the DJ started playing a he'd never heard before, full of cut-up vocal samples peppered over thunderous crash cymbals and tribal drumming. "All these drag queens came out and started doing this dance," Mike recalls. "[I thought] why the fuck are they throwing themselves on the ground like this? It was so weird, but it looked hot." Mike had discovered the hyper-kinetic sounds of modern ballroom music—the fuel that gives dancers the adrenaline they need to dominate their opponents during battles. Back in the 80s, balls were soundtracked by elegant disco and hard house classics like MFSB's "Love is the Message" and Junior Vasquez's "X." In 1991, Masters At Work's classic "The Ha Dance" changed the game by giving ballroom its two signature sounds: an ecstatic "ha!" chant and metallic crashes on every fourth beat, often used by dancers as cues to dip to the floor. In 2000, tiring of the scene's limited playlist, modern ballroom pioneer Vjuan Allure sampled that "ha" in a remix specifically tailored to battles called "The Allure Ha." Vjuan's new of ballroom dispelled with traditional verse-verse-break song structure, ratcheting up the drama instead. "When you play it, there's a feeling that you're ready to go out and battle," he told RBMA in 2012. The intense ballroom that Vjuan pioneered has ventured into even darker and more aggressive territory with younger producers like LSDXOXO, Quest?ionmarc, and Byrell the Great, while the internet has spawned thousands of bootleg ballroom remixes of popular songs. Mike fell in love with ballroom instantly. Unlike the music he grew up with, ballroom was inherently queer, its stuttering beats often punctuated by a vocalist hooting lines like "Yas, bish, yaaas!" and "Work that pussy!" "Ballroom was danceable like Jersey club or house, but it was just gay," Mike explains. After that fateful night, Mike started driving into the city to hang out in the Village in Manhattan, a historic gay enclave. "I was super amazed at all these gay people like me walking around," he says. "Slowly I just came out." Mike is open about his sexuality with his mother's side of the family, but things with his father are a bit more complicated. "I know that he knows," Mike says matter-of-factly. "We just never had that conversation." Same goes for the wider community of people he grew up with in Jersey. "I won't say super gay things on Facebook because all my friends from school are on there," he says. Teenage Mike fed his growing appetite for ballroom with CDs he bought from Vjuan Allure, Angel X, and Tony Cortes, all pioneering DJs he hung out with at The Club House. After studying their music at home, Mike started making his own tracks using Fruity Loops and ACID Pro, music production programs he got from a friend he met at The Globe. "I would chop tracks and combine my sense of Jersey club with [ballroom]," he explains. Mike tagged all his early productions with a special "drop"—a recording of Vjuan Allure saying Mike's name that the older DJ had given him at his 19th birthday party. To Mike, the gift was a coveted stamp of approval. While Vjuan Allure and Angel X promoted their music the old-school way—selling CDs in-person to their fans at balls—Mike got his name out by posting his tracks to online ballroom forums like Walk 4 Me Wednesdays and DL Thugs. In fact, MikeQ's DJ moniker stems from his old username on those forums: MikeQ7000. "I liked Infinity cars, and they were were always naming cars 'Infinity Q' and a number," he explains. "Once I became a DJ, I just took the 7000 off." In September 2005, Mike got an offer to DJ at The Globe. It was his first gig, and paid $70 for a six-hour slot. Afraid of messing up, he played a pre-mixed set off CDs he'd made at home. Soon, he was DJing all the time at both The Globe and The Club House. "I became the resident at the first two clubs I ever went to, which was weird," he says. "I just did that for years." It's not difficult to see why: standing behind the booth, Mike has a special talent for zero-ing in on the dancefloor smashers you want to hear in a sweaty room full of your friends at 2 AM. When it comes to his own productions, Mike's ear for catchy hooks and propulsive baselines translates to his own idiosyncratic take on ballroom, one that involves cross-breeding that genre's musical DNA with hip-hop, pop, and industrial club. "The Ha Dub ReWork'D," the lead track off his first EP for Fade to Mind in 2011, Let It All Out, pays homage to the Masters at Work "ha" sample, but forgoes the fuzzy house music crunch of the original, instead emphasizing its alien, ear-splitting synth triplets. It sounds like "The Ha Dance" transported from the Paradise Garage into an alien spaceship, 200 years in the future. Though his days at The Globe and The Club House are over, the one party that has remained a fixture in Mike's life is Vogue Knights, where he has been a resident DJ since it started six years ago. Founded by scene stalwarts Jack Mizrahi and Luna Kahn, Vogue Knights serves as as a relaxed space for dancers to practice their moves before joining more competitive balls. Over the years, it has drawn celebrities like FKA Twigs, Robert Pattinson, Queen Latifah, and Boys Noize as spectators; Twigs has even gone on to incorporate vogue dancing into her live shows. The scene has also produced its own breakout stars, like Hood By Air designer and GHE20G0THIK co-founder Shayne Oliver, model Shaun Ross, and Missy Elliott protégé Sharaya J. With his enviable perch in between the ballroom underground and wider music world, Mike seems poised to follow in their footsteps. But while other stars' ties to ballroom are often overlooked by outsiders, Mike is determined to make sure the scene's history isn't forgotten. "I'm always sure to speak about Vjuan Allure and make it known," he says gravely. "A lot of people think that I started [ballroom], because they've only heard about me." Vogue Knights officially starts at 11PM, but the competitions only heat up around 2 AM, leaving the floor to serious ballroom dancers and fans. The streets of Midtown Manhattan are deserted when I roll up to Vogue Knights on a Thursday in mid-July, lit by the distant glow of Times Square a few blocks away. Tonight is the first time the party is taking place at its new home, a gay club called XL, following five years at La Escuelita, a Latin gay club also in Midtown. Mike will DJ the party from start to finish, from 11 PM to around 5 AM. A muffled shout rings out from behind the black marble pillars of an empty office building at the end of the street: " Michelle!" I squint and see Mike huddled with four friends, passing around a joint while keeping out of sight from a police station next to the club. Mike looks fresh and relaxed, his denim long-sleeve shirt unbuttoned to reveal a white shirt and silver chains. As I slide into his circle of friends, he stretches his arms over his head and bends forward at the waist in a stretch. "I'm tired!" he sigh. "It's a little dry tonight—but Vogue Knights to me is always a little dry." A tall, blonde white girl in our midst lifts sparkly chains off someone's neck and sashays down the sidewalk like it's a runway, her legs flashing through a black skirt that's slit up her thigh. "Let's go back in," she calls over her shoulder, and before I get to ask Mike what he meant by his complaint, he turns around and walks briskly back through the club's pink doors. " Work—work—work," instructs a ballroom remix of Rihanna's hit song as he weaves through kids warming up on the sunken dancefloor, headed towards the stage. Bounding up a flight of stairs, he takes his place behind a makeshift DJ booth next to a table of sneering judges in wide-brimmed hats. As if on cue, his trademark drop booms through the speakers, a robotic male voice intoning, "Dee-jaaay MikeQ." Over the next few hours, dancers parade in front of the judges, competing in categories with names like "Old Way" and "Femme Queen Vogue." When competitors try to outdo each other in the "Runway" division, where they're judged by the fierceness of their walks, Mike plays warm, smooth house music made for slinking your hips to. One feminine-presenting dancer in a black cape wins the crowd over by pulling out a vape and billowing out a plume of smoke as she sashays down the catwalk. Another competitor is less successful. "Girl, put down your bag and take off your jacket," booms the MC. "This category is about confidence!" Later, he explains that DJing at a ball is strictly functional, and requires knowing how to interpret commands and non-verbal cues from the MC in addition to choosing the right sounds for different categories. It's very different from playing a gig at a club, where people are coming out specifically to bask in the music. At a ball, "my job is someone who creates the soundtrack," Mike says. I press Mike on what he meant before by Vogue Knights being "dry." "Vogue Knights is my job—that's how I eat today," he begins. Furrowing his brow, he confesses that the rate he gets paid at Vogue Knights pales in comparison to what he pulls as a touring artist: "$200 a night is nothing, like putting me back in 2007." His feelings towards Vogue Knights, he says, have changed with his growing success outside the scene. These days, he thinks of the party as a kind of "community service." Despite what Mike says about wanting to give back to ballroom, I can't help thinking of an Instagram post I noticed on his feed earlier that night: a screenshot of a text conversation he'd had with the Vogue Knights promoter. After being told he would no longer be allowed to bring in friends for free on his guestlist, Mike texted back saying he needed at least two spots, adding that other clubs give free bottles and other perks when he plays. "That's just what comes with hiring me in 2016," he wrote. He deleted the Instagram post a few days later. The origins of New York's ballroom scene go back as early as 1869, when gay men began holding drag fashion shows, with prizes for the most outrageous costumes. But modern ballroom wasn't born until a century later, when black and Latino drag queens started throwing elaborate "balls" in Harlem community centers and other public venues. In the late 1960s, they adopted a new dance called "voguing," inspired by the elegant poses of the women they saw parading down Fifth Avenue and splashed in fashion magazines like Vogue. "To the drag queens of that time, vogue was a beautiful escape, a way to dance away the pain and oppression they were experiencing," Kevin Omni Burrus, a ballroom dancer since 1975, told DNAInfo in 2012. "But beyond that, it was a celebration of their beauty." In the 70s, a queen named Crystal LaBeija founded the first ballroom "house," the House of LaBeija. It functioned like a fraternity, with a "mother" and "father" mentoring younger, less-experienced members. Soon, other rival houses emerged, often named after haute couture labels like Balenciaga and St. Laurent, or qualities its members want to embody, like Xtravaganza and Ninja. The houses became second families for many kids who had nowhere else to turn. "A lot of gay kids and gay youth were turned away from their own families," said Power Infiniti in the Miami New Times interview. "They found this social network in the clubs and on the streets." Underneath its flashy surface, ballroom evolved into a complex world with its own hierarchies, customs, and lingo. Going to a ball for the first time, it's hard to understand what's going on—and how exactly one wins a category called "soft and cunt"—without somebody from the community to guide you. In one of ballroom's first breakthrough moments, nightlife impresario Susanne Bartsch organized a celebrity-studded ballroom competition and AIDS research benefit called the Love Ball in 1989, with David Byrne, Iman, and Vogue's editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley among the judges. According to an article published by Red Bull Music Academy, the Love Ball is said to be where Madonna saw voguing for the first time; her 1990 hit "Vogue" paid homage to the dance style's fluid hand gestures and elegant arcs of movement. The same year, cult documentary Paris is Burning by Jennie Livingston exposed the subculture to a worldwide audience. While public interest in ballroom has waxed and waned since its inception, there is no doubt it's seeped into pop culture's collective consciousness over the decades. RuPaul has been a household name since the 90s, and some of ballroom's juiciest slang—like "throwing shade," "yaaaas," "fierce," "work!"—has filtered down to Bravo-loving suburban moms. More recently, FKA Twigs, Beyoncé, and even Willow Smith have collaborated with vogue dancers on tour and in music videos. Beyoncé told The Independent in 2006 that her fiery alter-ego Sasha Fierce was inspired by the confidence of ballroom dancers. The problem is that ballroom's influence on the mainstream is seldom credited; its signifiers have become familiar but stripped from their original context, leaving the scene and its colorful characters all but invisible to the masses. The ballroom scene also rarely reaps the profits from its popularity. When Paris is Burning was scheduled for a free screening in a New York City park last summer, it re-opened old wounds. Many were offended that the event did not feature any queer and trans people of color from the ballroom community, instead booking white lesbian musician JD Samson, who has little known connection to the scene, to perform as the headliner. A Change.org petition emerged calling for a boycott of the event, calling the film an "exploitation of a vulnerable population," and accusing Livingston of using people "for the sake of her own fame" while "most of the original cast has been murdered or has died in poverty." In 1991, Livingston distributed $55,000 from the film's profits to 13 cast members, but it did little to appease them. Pepper LaBeija, a dancer who is in the film, told the New York Times it was "hush money." Mike's ascent to prominence outside the ballroom world was aided partly by good timing, but also by falling in with tastemakers who have the wider music industry's ear. In 2009, Mike met Kingdom, an LA-based DJ and producer born Ezra Rubin who makes experimental, deconstructed club music. "Ezra asked me if I wanted to be on his label that he was just starting up," Mike recalls, referring to what became Fade to Mind. "From the beginning, Mike knew deep inside he wanted to go further than DJing at balls," Kingdom says. "He wasn't just about making beats—he was doing marketing, pushing his mix CDs, had his own website in the MySpace days... he had big plans [to reach] a broader audience than the community." In 2012, he dropped Let It All Out on the label. His only solo release to date, the five-track EP was the club world's swaggering introduction to ballroom's prowling rhythms, attitude-filled vocal hooks ("I wanna see a bitch let it all out!" raps MC Jay Karan on the title track), and signature crashes. In addition to Mike's own production work, Let It All Out featured ballroom pioneers like the DJ/producer Angel X and MC Kevin JZ Prodigy, as well as Jersey club king DJ Sliink—with whom he released a collaborative EP on Fade to Mind with in 2014—as guests. Following the record's release, the more experimental corners of the electronic music community embraced the genre with gusto, with Kingdom putting his own spin on the "ha" sample with his track "Stalker Ha," and Bok Bok getting Vjuan Allure to guest on one of his Rinse shows in 2012. "The impact was really big because [ Let It All Out] was the first-ever ballroom EP to get a proper full release and be pressed to vinyl. It set into motion this international ballroom movement that has so much potential," Kingdom says. That same year, Boiler Room invited Mike to play its first ballroom stream with Kevin JZ Prodigy. In 2014, Fade to Mind and its sister label Night Slugs did a joint re-issue of mid-90s tribal house-inflected battle gem "Icy Lake," and made a documentary with THUMP about it. With his growing profile, Mike started getting booked for gigs across the country. His first time venturing outside the tri-state area for a show was for Diplo's Mad Decent Mondays in LA in 2011. "After that, "I started traveling a lot, and everything just blew up from there," he says. Last December, I witnessed him DJing another Boiler Room set, this time back-to-back with Night Slugs founder L-VIS 1990, at Brooklyn club Good Room. Dressed in a black shirt with Qween Beat's white geometric logo on it, Mike stood stoically behind the decks, adjusting knobs with quick, precise flicks of his wrist, and exuding a show-stopping confidence. "Linking up with Fade to Mind, Night Slugs, Diplo, Venus X, GHE20GOTH1K parties—all that helped," Mike says. Mike started Qween Beat in 2005. His boyfriend came up with the name; "It's beats for the queens," Mike explains. Up until this point, Qween Beat has functioned mostly as a collective of Mike's friends he'd met online, at The Globe, and in-person. Its 19 members include not just DJs and producers, but rappers and vocalists like Cakes da Killa and Ash B, and dancers like Tokyo-based Koppi Mizrahi. In a way, it felt like Mike was creating a "house" of his own. While more conventional ballroom houses—like the Houses of Mizrahi, LaBeija, and Xtravaganza—have DJs and MCs amongst their members, they are still dominated by dancers. Mike is already part of another house called Ebony, but Qween Beat seems uniquely focused on musicians, with the idea that banding together will help these often-overlooked members of the scene expand their pool of resources. As such, many tracks on Qween Beat's first release are collaborations between different artists on the label: Divoli S'vere laid down the garbage can drumming and hard crashes underneath rapper Ash B's rollicking tribute to "Realness," and Jay R Neutron cooked up the electro bleeps that punctuate Gregg Evisu's sandpaper vocals in "Some Type of Way." "It's a family thing," Mike explains. "We're sharing ideas and working with each other." Perhaps most importantly, the label also allows people in the scene to take ownership of ballroom's popularity—and profit off it. "This music is something that sells," he says bluntly. Still, Mike is protective of the genre he built his career on. Though he touts Queen Beat as the world's first "ballroom label," Mike is careful to draw the line between "pure ballroom" and "ballroom-inspired" music. Lots of producers all over the world have been labeling their music as "ballroom" because they use the genre's trademark sounds, he says, but "just because you use a 'ha' sample doesn't make it a ballroom track." Most of the ballroom-inspired tracks being played at clubs would never work at a ball, he says, because ballroom dancers wouldn't be able to dance to their off-kilter rhythms. "I can't have people call their music ballroom just because they're [associated] with me," Mike says. From the way he talks about the label, I can sense that Mike has a complicated relationship with the spotlight.He tells me that Qween Beat's first release only features one of his tracks—a collab with the late Daft Punk collaborator Romanthony—because he doesn't want the focus to be on him. "Everybody can't get signed to Fade to Mind the same way I was," he says. "That's what Qween Beat is for." But in the same breath, he confesses that managing the egos and resolving conflicts of the ever-growing Qween Beat family can have its toll. "Sometimes I get discouraged and want to end it, because I could just be doing MikeQ—which not everybody understands," he says. But he's determined to soldier on. "I'm not gonna stop. Ballroom was a place for me to find myself and take those talents outside," he says. "I think that should be the goal for everyone in ballroom." Even as the most prominent member of the Qween Beat roster, achieving that goal hasn't always been straightforward for Mike. For one thing, the support he receives inside the scene doesn't necessarily translate beyond the ballroom floor. "It's really hard to get ballroom people to support anything outside of ballroom," Mike says, explaining that many people in the community don't even know—or care—who the DJ is. "At a ball, your name can barely even get on a flyer. A lot of people don't really know what I look like." Mike's stature in the ballroom scene doesn't necessarily translate to success in the wider music industry, either. On a rainy Tuesday night in July, he plays at a show at Baby's Alright that is part of Red Bull Sound Selects, a program that uses bigger acts to draw attention to its roster of emerging artists. Tonight's event was put together by Sound Select artist Cakes da Killa, who asked Big Freedia to play as the headliner and put Mike, his friend, at the end of the night. Unfortunately for Mike, most of the crowd ends up filing out after Big Freedia's set, leaving him to open his set playing Byrell the Great's "Legendary Children"—the opening track off Qweendom—to a nearly empty room, scattered with a handful of sweaty dancers. After the show, hanging around outside the venue waiting to get paid, his frustration is clear. "Big Freedia ruined my set!," he says to Cakes, loud enough for the dozen or so friends clustered around them to hear. "Next time, don't book Freedia. You coulda booked Qween Beat!" He proceeds to rattle off names of his artists, telling Cakes they could have used the opportunity to fly out the ones living outside of New York. Cakes contritely asks if they can all just hang out now that the show is over, but Mike says he has to pack for a trip to Toronto the next day. In 2013, Mike almost had a breakout moment when Missy Elliott hit him up to work on a ballroom track for her protégé Sharaya—who grew up going to balls in New York City. Mike says she ended up going with another producer named DJ Jayhood who makes Jersey Club—a genre he thinks Missy felt had broader appeal. (The song ended up being Sharaya's hit single, "Banji.") As a gesture of friendship, Missy recorded a secret ballroom track for Mike where she tries her hand at ballroom-style rapping, throwing in its choice slang terms like "cunt!" along with her own trademark "BRRRR!" Although the song was never released, Mike says he played it at one of his Boiler Room sets and it immediately went viral, after a fan ripped the song off the stream and posted it online. In some ways, the track feels like a symbol of ballroom's position in the pop culture world: instantly appealing with plenty of commercial potential, but lacking in institutional support. In many ways, Mike reflects the tensions within ballroom culture at large—eager to break out into the mainstream but fiercely loyal to the scene and its traditions, frustrated with the lack of outside recognition by unwilling to give up where he came from in order to get there. After all, voguing is both a fantasy and an act of defiance—the dancers know they will probably never end up on the cover of Vogue, but engage in a performance of upward-mobility in the face of systematic injustice, reclaiming feminine beauty from rich white women. For better or worse, despite the waves of press declaring ballroom's imminent breakout into the mainstream, and all of its celebrity endorsements, ballroom has remained stubbornly underground. But if there's one aspect of the culture that can transcend above its insular customs and appeal to a broad range of people of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds, it's the music—and if there's one person who can be trusted to bring this music to a wider audience without watering it down, it's MikeQ. For his part, Mike says doesn't need to actively participate in ball culture to stay connected to the scene. "I don't really go to house meetings and I don't travel for balls. Especially because I don't enjoy being out in public much," he says, calling his job as a DJ who travels everywhere for gigs is "ironic." "I'm more of a smoker," he says with a deep inhale of the blunt we shared in his room. "I'd rather just be in the house chilling." Mike is a study in contradictions—a shy introvert who found himself in an extremely extroverted scene that's all about peacocking. Maybe this is why he turned to DJing, which allowed him to engage with a culture that took him out of suburban New Jersey and into the thriving gay, black underground of New York City, without having to be at the center of attention. Still, when I meet him to the Latex Ball, I find him surrounded by his Qween Beat fam at the end of the runway, cheering on the dancers on stage. Suddenly, a fight breaks out between a dancer and a judge over a perceived slight. The dancer leaps onto the judges' table, sending drinks spilling everywhere. She gets dragged offstage by security, kicking and punching, but two seconds later she's back, spitting water at her target. 3,000 people on the dancefloor and hanging off the balconies erupt into hoots over the spilled blood—or in this case, spilled tequila soda—and Mike takes a Snapchat of the chaos. Then he shakes his head. "This is embarrassing," he says to me in a low voice, like a father whose child is throwing a tantrum at church. Near the end of the night, he goes to pay his respects to Vjuan Allure, who DJs the ball every year. Sitting on stage with his arms splayed across two CDJs, Vjuan cuts a striking figure, wearing a glittery cap that says "READ" and wiggling his hefty frame in his chair to the music. Every few minutes, Vjuan—who also dances at balls—can't help himself from breaking into vogue hands when playing a particularly hot track. His exuberance is a total contrast to Mike, who stands next to him reverently, like a statue. Before he leaves to catch his train, Mike slips a CD of the Qween Beat compilation to Vjuan. At the end of our day in New Jersey together, Mike drives me back to the PATH station in Newark. In contrast to our sunny drive to his house, the lengthening shadows imbue the streets of the city with an air of danger, and at one traffic light, Mike casually mentions that he was once shot at while waiting at the same intersection. A few minutes later, he points to a street crawling with rugged men, calling it the "weed and xanax corner." As we approach the train station, the towering blue glass windows of a flashy stadium called the Prudential Center come into view. "I saw Rihanna there," Mike tells me, explaining that many northern New Jersey residents have come to view the multi-million-dollar venue a bubble of privilege in the middle of Newark. "They only built up the city until where the stadium is, and put a train station right next it so visitors don't have to interact with the locals." Despite this, Mike is clearly proud of where he comes from. Coasting down the streets he knows well enough to drive blind, he rattles off all the celebrities who've come out of Newark: Ice-T, Queen Latifah, Faith Evans, Paul Simon, Whitney Houston..." He stops catching Pokemon and smiles into the distance: "MikeQ." Michelle Lhooq is THUMP's Features Editor. She walks the runway of Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjjgvy/ballroom-is-americas-most-slept-on-subculturemikeq-wants-to-open-our-eyes

Noisey

Vice

2018-11-29 00:00:00

2018

11.0

29

Ludwig Burger

Bayer to sell businesses, cut jobs after Monsanto deal

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Bayer (BAYGn.DE), the German drugmaker that bought U.S. seed company Monsanto, announced on Thursday the sale of a number of businesses, around 12,000 job cuts and 3.3 billion euros ($3.8 billion) in impairments. Chief Executive Werner Baumann is under pressure to boost Bayer’s share price after a drop of more than 35 percent so far this year, dragged down by concern over more than 9,000 lawsuits it faces over an alleged cancer-causing effect of Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer. The group said it was looking at options - that could include a sale - for the Coppertone sunscreen and Dr. Scholl’s foot care products from the consumer healthcare division it bought from Merck & Co (MRK.N) in 2014 for $14 billion. It will also divest its animal health division, the number five player in the industry, which analysts have said could fetch 6-7 billion euros ($7.9 billion). The unit, the largest maker of flea and tick control products for cats and dogs and a supplier of livestock veterinary drugs, had sales of 1.57 billion euros in 2017, accounting for about 4.5 percent of group revenues. There has already been consolidation in animal health, with Pfizer (PFE.N) and Eli Lilly (LLY.N), successfully floating their veterinary medicine units on the stock market as independent entities. Bayer ranks fifth in veterinary medicine, behind Zoetis (ZTS.N), the former Pfizer unit, Elanco (ELAN.N), unlisted Boehringer Ingelheim, which acquired animal health assets from Sanofi (SASY.PA), and drugmaker Merck & Co (MRK.N). Bayer will also seek a buyer for its 60-percent stake in German chemical production site services provider Currenta. All three possible transactions were previously flagged by Reuters. Its shares were down 0.8 percent in late trade. Markus Mayer, an analyst at Baader Helvea, said Coppertone and Dr. Scholl’s could fetch 1 billion euros and the Currenta stake could fetch 1.5 billion euros. Reckitt Benckiser (RB.L) and Procter & Gamble Co (PG.N) will likely be among the suitors for the consumer brands, said investment bankers, who asked not to be named. Under a cost cutting program that will also target synergies expected from the $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto, Bayer will cut around 12,000 of its 118,200 jobs worldwide. At the Consumer Health and Pharmaceuticals divisions, Bayer will take about 3.3 billion euros in impairments and write-offs the fourth quarter. Consumer Health brands acquired with the Merck & Co. and Dihon businesses will account for 2.7 billion euros of that, while about 600 million euros impairments and write-offs are due to a decision not to utilize a hemophilia drug factory in the German city of Wuppertal and to concentrate production in Berkeley, United States. The consumer healthcare unit, which sells non-prescription treatments, has faced falling revenues as U.S. consumers went from established drugstores to online shops, often switching to cheaper brands. In the first nine months of 2018, Bayer consumer health products’ sales declined by 0.4 percent when excluding currency swings, following a drop of 1.7 percent in the full year of 2017. The company said it was targeting core earnings per share of 6.80 euros in 2019, up from an expected 5.70 to 5.90 euros this year, with a 2022 target of around 10 euros, when discounting the effect of currency swings and portfolio changes. The group’s margin of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) and special items over sales should increase to over 30 percent by 2022, up from 26.5 percent last year, it added. Additional reporting by Arno Schuetze; Editing by Keith Weir and Mark Potter

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bayer-strategy/bayer-to-sell-businesses-cut-jobs-after-monsanto-deal-idUSKCN1NY1SI

Business News

Reuters

2019-05-10 18:10:00

2019

5.0

10

Kelsey Piper

Cage-free eggs: Washington law bans small cages for egg-laying hens

Finding the best ways to do good. Made possible by The Rockefeller Foundation. On Wednesday, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) signed a bill setting welfare requirements for egg-laying hens — the strongest such bill ever to pass a state legislature. By 2023, it will be illegal to sell eggs in Washington if the hens were raised in excessively small cages. The law will affect about eight million hens each year. The Washington law follows up on the success of ballot measures in California and Massachusetts, which imposed similar requirements. The Humane Society of the United States has spearheaded campaigns like this one in more than a dozen states, and in the past few years, these campaigns have started to get results. Why is this a big deal? Because millions of birds live on factory farms producing eggs, and the conditions they’re kept in are pretty terrible. We’re finally making progress towards improving those conditions. There are many ways to raise egg-laying hens on a factory farm. One method, battery cages, keeps each hen in an area about 67-76 square inches big (that’s approximately the dimensions of an iPad). Birds show a lot of distress under those conditions, tending to injure themselves, lose their feathers, and end up covered with cuts and bruises. The alternative methods aren’t great for birds either, but welfare researchers think they’re a little better. The cheapest alternative method (and therefore the one that most producers will likely switch to) is called an aviary system. Those look like this: Aviary systems have their problems — in particular, with more mobility and freedom comes more ways for birds to get injured or sick — but on the whole, they seem to cause less suffering. Washington will require that birds have enough space to turn around and spread their wings; that they’ll have access to perches and dust baths; and that they will be able to socialize with other birds. It’s a start on the path toward humane conditions. Washington’s law isn’t unique — it’s a lot like the California or Massachusetts laws — but it’s unique in one important way: it’s the first time a law like this has happened through the state government, instead of directly through voters. For the most part, voters have been more concerned with animal cruelty than our representatives have been. Initiatives that protect animal welfare have had a striking success rate at the ballot box. Voters have banned gestation crates and battery cages in California and Massachusetts, limited puppy mills in Missouri, and restricted the sale of ivory and animal parts in Oregon and Washington. Meanwhile, legislatures have tended to push the other way. Six state legislatures have banned undercover investigations of factory farms, Iowa passed a law requiring grocers to sell caged eggs, and the federal government is contemplating restrictions on cell-based meat (which is produced without slaughtering animals). The last major federal bill targeting farm animal welfare was introduced in 2010, and it never passed. That’s an unusual level of disconnect between constituents and lawmakers. One explanation is that agricultural lobbies tend to be politically powerful and well-connected, and can usually discourage legislators from taking animal welfare concerns too seriously, while they tend to lose when factory farming practices have to be defended to the public. Washington’s law is a welcome sign that things might be changing. Protections for animal welfare are a good idea — politically popular, morally necessary, and not even all that costly. If legislators have started to get on board, that’s great news. Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/5/10/18564455/washington-jay-inslee-hens-animal-cruelty

Vox

2018-05-16 19:00:00

2018

5.0

16

Kaila Yu

Denny's Helped Me Realize I Could Be Both Chinese and American

Denny’s came into my life in the 6th grade. I had just earned straight As on my report card so I was able to choose any restaurant I wanted to eat at to celebrate. On the rare occasions that my Chinese-American family would eat out, we would go to the local Chinese place, with soggy sweet-and-sour pork that had been sitting out under the heated lamps too long and limp and lifeless chow mein. For me, Denny’s was the exact opposite. It was the ultimate representation of Americana, existing in sharp contrast to the complex and colorless thousand-year-old-egg-embedded jook that my mother would ladle out for breakfast. It felt like the nerd versus the prom queen, played out in food. Even my mom would enjoy our meals at Denny’s (although she would never neglect to mention that we could have had Chinese food for half the price). What’s not to love—big steaks, bottomless sodas, and friendly waitresses who come by to check on you. I loved how we didn’t have to share our meals family-style, and how they arrived in courses: first a plate of crusty, buttered bread; salad with too much ranch dressing (just how I liked it); and then steak with a steaming hot baked potato and all the butter and sour cream I could fit inside. Here, on a plate, was the American Dream. To my young mind, being an all-American teenager was all about rebellion and excess. The “Belgian Waffle Slam” thought so too, with two sunny-side up eggs and two pieces each of bacon and sausage. The star, of course, was the golden, crispy Belgian waffle, topped off by generous amounts of whipped cream, butter, and strawberry jam. My mother would never allow me to order this kind of food under her watch and would moan in Chinese, “Why is it so expensive?” and “Why would one person need so much food?” My Denny’s was the preeminent late-night hot spot in Upland, California in 1994, which says a lot about Upland as a city. Much like Denny’s—which first opened its doors as a donut shop in Lakewood, California—I also had my transformational coming of age in the outskirts of Los Angeles. As a sophomore at Upland High School, I was the obedient apple of my dragon mother’s eye and on track to go to Stanford. But her Chinese-immigrant American dream for me died a sudden death when I met Jessica. Jessica was a perfectly oval-faced Korean beauty with a full-bodied mane of Pantene-glossed hair. She had just transferred to Upland High less than a year ago, and was just a sophomore herself but looked and acted like a college student. In a fortuitous turn of events, I became Jessica’s math tutor and helped her get a C (she was flunking out of class at the time). In return, she took me under her wing. The first time Jessica and I hung out was at Denny’s. Its country-inspired design and red and caramel brown booths were at odds with her glamour and effortless charm, but it was nonetheless her favorite hangout spot. (It helped that it was the only place open at 1 am on a Tuesday night in Upland.) You couldn’t miss it; the banana-colored hexagonal sign and its cherry lettering shouted for attention. I cried for attention too, sneaking out of my house in the middle of the night wearing nothing but a micro-mini and X-Girl baby doll crop top. Our favorite thing to order at Denny’s was the ham-and-egg sandwich they inexplicably call “Moons Over My Hammy.” The griddle-browned crunch of the sourdough bread paired perfectly with not one, but two cheeses: Swiss and American. That was an important lesson in American excess—one cheese is never enough. At 2 AM in Denny's with Jessica, I felt like a total badass and began to act the part—sneaking out at night, making out with boys, and breaking all the rules that I had so judiciously followed for so many years. The American teenagers that I watched in the movies chased their own dreams and made independent choices in life. Now, so could I, at least within the confines of Denny’s ‘Build Your Own Sampler’: nothing was stopping me from curating myself a plate of mozzarella cheese sticks, seasoned fries, and deep-fried chicken strips with ranch, ketchup, and honey mustard sauce. Jessica would often make conversation with whoever was in the vicinity, whether it be our waitress or the people in the neighboring booth. She was extremely outgoing and friendly, and it really brought me out of my shell. She taught me how to socialize like a regular American teenager. On top of that, Jessica would invite her out-of-town friends to come visit us in Denny’s. I was so impressed that these guys would drive 30-45 minutes just to visit us, from far away, heavily populated Asian cities like Cerritos and Hacienda Heights. They drove souped-up, lowered to the ground Acura Integras and were members of Asian gangs like “Dub C” or the Asian Boyz. It was at Denny’s where boys first paid attention to me, and I was confident enough to interact back. It wasn’t long after these excursions to Denny’s that I found myself on the arm of a new boyfriend named Andy, a 21-year-old Chinese guy with a teased-up pompadour and a zero fade. He drove a shiny purple Civic that was slammed to the floor and had a custom stainless steel exhaust. He would pick me up and drive me to faraway late night Chinese cafes like Garden Cafe and St Honors in Monterey Park, and thanks to him, I finally began to see the beauty in my own culture. Garden Cafe was loud and bustling with plates of food flying over our heads and filled with a bunch of teenagers and college students hopped up on hot milk tea and condensed milk. Instead of the various Grand Slam choices, we opted for greasy beef chow fun noodles and my favorite fiery red candied sweet tomato beef rice. The humdrum food of my childhood in Upland somehow became exalted in Monterey Park, and once more embraced as part of my culture and identity. That didn’t mean that I still didn’t love Denny’s. The food there, while maybe not healthy by any particular stretch of the imagination, was intensely nourishing in a way that I needed in those tender and formative years, like a warm hug from a worn out teddy bear that told me it was ok to step outside my comfort zone. There, I learned that I could be proud to be Asian and I could be just as proud to be American too.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3kv3j/dennys-chinese-american

Food by VICE

Vice

2019-06-17 00:00:00

2019

6.0

17

Mexico to finish National Guard roll-out for migration plan this week-minister

MEXICO CITY, June 17 (Reuters) - Mexico will complete deployment of National Guard forces on its southern border with Guatemala this week as part of a new immigration control plan agreed with Washington, foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard said on Monday. “The deployment of the National Guard ordered, with support from the Ministry of Defense and the Navy, will be completed this week,” Ebrard told a regular news conference. Deployment of the guard has been slow so far, but a Reuters reporter near the border this weekend saw a handful of officials wearing National Guard insignia, and spoke to other security personnel who said they were part of the guard. (Reporting by Hugh Bronstein Editing by Dave Graham)

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-immigration-mexico/mexico-to-finish-national-guard-roll-out-for-migration-plan-this-week-minister-idUSS0N1BW00A

Bonds News

Reuters

2016-02-08 00:00:00

2016

2.0

8

VICE News

Video Shows Leopard Mauling Six People in India School Invasion

A male leopard entered a school in Bangalore, India on Sunday – leading to a ten-hour long standoff between the large cat and wildlife officers. Six people were reportedly injured during efforts to remove the leopard – including a scientist, three forest rangers, a member of the school staff, and a TV news cameraman. The eight-year-old leopard was tranquilized and taken to recover at the Bannerghatta Biological Park.  The alarm was raised about the beast when surveillance footage showed it entering the Vibgyor International School's premises. Video also shows the animal running around the swimming pool before attacking a man who had tried to climb up a wire fence to safety.  "It was a long struggle to capture the leopard" senior police official S. Boralingaiah told reporters. "Although it was injected with tranquilisers it could be captured only around 20.15 local time when the medication took full effect." Wildlife official Ravi Ralph told the BBC that he believes the leopard came from a patch of forest not far from the school. A male leopard entered a school in Bangalore, India on Sunday – leading to a ten-hour long standoff between the large cat and wildlife officers. Six people were reportedly injured during efforts to remove the leopard – including a scientist, three forest rangers, a member of the school staff, and a TV news cameraman. The eight-year-old leopard was tranquilized and taken to recover at the Bannerghatta Biological Park.  The alarm was raised about the beast when surveillance footage showed it entering the Vibgyor International School's premises. Video also shows the animal running around the swimming pool before attacking a man who had tried to climb up a wire fence to safety.  "It was a long struggle to capture the leopard" senior police official S. Boralingaiah told reporters. "Although it was injected with tranquilisers it could be captured only around 20.15 local time when the medication took full effect." Wildlife official Ravi Ralph told the BBC that he believes the leopard came from a patch of forest not far from the school. Bangalore is often referred to as India's Silicon Valley, known for its modern metropolis and thriving information technology community. The population of Bangalore grew by 47 percent in the decade between 2001 and 2011, and the size of the city swelled over 300 percent in 20 years. The urban sprawl has eaten into rural areas and forests on the city's outskirts, invading leopards' natural habitats and forcing them to become accidental or unwanted intruders.  Last September, the first official survey of leopards in India revealed that the total population of spotted felines to be somewhere between 12,000 and 14,000. Previous estimations put the figure anywhere between 10,000 and 45,000 nationwide. 

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/ywjq7m/leopard-injures-six-in-school-invasion-in-india

Vice News

2018-04-30 00:00:00

2018

4.0

30

Guess Who This Chocolate Lovin' Kid Turned Into!

Before this ice cream-lovin' kid was a super cool singer, she was just another tot with a treat growing up in New London, Connecticut. Can you guess who she is?

https://www.tmz.com/2018/04/30/guess-who-this-chocolate-loving-kid-turned-into/

TMZ

2017-07-27 00:00:00

2017

7.0

27

VICE News

Donald Trump's highly abnormal presidency: a running guide for the week of July 24

Sign up for a weekly newsletter about President Donald Trump to be delivered to your inbox every Friday. Donald Trump made it clear at the beginning of his campaign that he wasn’t going to follow the normal rules or tone of politics. We’re keeping track of all the ways his presidency veers from the norm in terms of policy and rhetoric. Anthony Scaramucci has been the White House communications director for less than a week, but he has already expressed some — to put it politely — strong opinions about his co-workers. Take, for instance, Scaramucci’s take on the mental health of White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, which he volunteered to The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza: “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.” Or Scaramucci’s thoughts on White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s apparent love of media attention: “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock. I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.” Scaramucci sounded off on Priebus and Bannon during the call to Lizza, which he apparently made in an effort to find out which White House staffer had leaked details about a recent dinner between President Donald Trump and Fox News personality Sean Hannity. When Lizza refused to reveal his source, “The Mooch” — as Scaramucci referred to himself during the call — decided that Priebus had to be the leaker. (Scaramucci reportedly referred to himself in the third person multiple times during the call.) “They’ll all be fired by me,” Scaramucci said of the alleged leakers. “I fired one guy the other day. I have three to four people I’ll fire tomorrow. I’ll get to the person who leaked that to you. Reince Priebus — if you want to leak something — he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” In other words, Scaramucci seems like a perfect fit for serving in a reality TV-spawned presidency: He’s here for the right reasons — and it’s not to make friends. The Boy Scouts’ motto may be to always be prepared, but as it turns out, nobody can prepare for President Donald Trump. Chief scout executive for the Boy Scouts, Michael Surbaugh, apologized Thursday to people who may have been offended by Trump’s speech to the roughly 30,000 Boy Scouts who attended the 2017 National Jamboree last week. “The invitation for the sitting U.S. President to visit the National Jamboree is a long-standing tradition that has been extended to the leader of our nation that has had a Jamboree during his term since 1937,” Subaugh wrote. “It is in no way an endorsement of any person, party or policies. For years, people have called upon us to take a position on political issues, and we have steadfastly remained non-partisan and refused to comment on political matters. We sincerely regret that politics were inserted into the Scouting program.” Trump had used the speech not only to hint that he would fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions and to talk up the latest national jobs report — even though children are probably not all that worried about their job prospects at the moment — but to also rehash his election win. Yes, again. “Do you remember that incredible night with the maps and the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red, it was unbelievable, and they didn’t know what to say?” Trump asked the child-filled crowd, who likely didn’t remember that night since Trump’s victory was declared long past their bedtimes. The president also thanked the crowd for voting for him — even though kids can’t vote. The meeting between Don. Jr and the Russians in Trump Tower last year was “absolutely” a Kremlin-backed effort to repeal the Magnitsky Act. That’s the assertion by Bill Browder, the American financier who was expelled from Russia for exposing corruption, in his testimony to the Judiciary committee Thursday. Browder also testified that the lawyer who wanted the meeting in the first place, Natalia Veselnitskaya, “was definitely working for the Russians — no question.” “Nobody was talking about adoption,” Browder said, speaking in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday morning. “They were talking about repealing the Magnitsky Act so that Russian torturers and murderers could freely travel and keep their money in the U.S.” Browder alleged that not only was Veselnitskaya the point person for the Kremlin, but that Rinat Akhmetshin, the Russian-American lobbyist who is believed to have worked with a Russian counterintelligence unit and was also present in the meeting, was also working on behalf of Moscow. He is a registered lobbyist for Veselnitskaya’s organization, according to CNN. “There’s no such thing as a former intel officer in Russia — like Hotel California, check out but never leave,” said Browder. The Magnitsky Act — a tool that allows the U.S. to deny visas to, or freeze assets of, human rights violators — was initially passed in 2012 after a Russian anti-corruption lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who worked under Browder, died after being tortured in a Moscow prison in 2009. Browder says that the Act is of direct importance to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who he believes to have amassed a fortune of around $200 billion stashed in banks around the world, and his associates. About two weeks before the meeting, June 9, 2016, Trump had clinched the Republican nomination for the presidential election. As rumors about the president’s intention to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions continue to fly, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham told CNN, “If Jeff Sessions is fired, there will be holy hell to pay.” Trump is pissed that Sessions recused himself in March from the DOJ’s Russia investigation, and he’s not happy with the guy heading that investigation, Robert Mueller, either. To get rid of both Sessions and Mueller, Trump could fire Sessions and appoint someone willing to fire Mueller. But Graham’s comments make clear that the political backlash for a firing spree like that might be too great if Trump wants to keep any friends in Congress. “Any effort to go after Mueller could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency,” said the South Carolina senator. Graham went a step further and will reportedly introduce legislation that would prevent anyone from firing Mueller without a court’s review. Donald Trump’s newly appointed communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, isn’t wasting any time tackling the deluge of leaks coming from the White House. Having already fired one assistant press secretary and warning that he’ll “fire everybody” to stop leakers, Scaramucci now appears to be angling to get White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus investigated by the FBI. On Wednesday night Scaramucci tweeted — and quickly deleted — the following message: “In light of the leak of my financial disclosure info which is a felony. I will be contacting @FBI and the @TheJusticeDept #Swamp @Reince45…” The communications director was referencing reports that he stands to profit from his investment firm while in office, based on previously undisclosed financial disclosure forms. This led many to suggest Scaramucci wanted Priebus investigated for any possible part in leaking the documents — which are not classified. The New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza tweeted: “I can confirm that Scaramucci wants the FBI to investigate Reince for leaking.” The Washington Post’s White House bureau chief, Philip Rucker, added that some within the administration are preparing a chart of leakers to show Trump, implicating Priebus. Seven hours after posting his original message, Scaramucci denied claims that he was seeking to get Priebus investigated. It looks like the Pentagon didn’t know the president was going to ban transgender people from the military Wednesday. During the nine minutes between President Trump’s first and second tweets Wednesday morning, some at the Pentagon feared that Trump was going to announce a strike on North Korea, BuzzFeed News reported. It was only after the second tweet that many at the Department of Defense understood that the president was announcing a change to military personnel policies over Twitter. Trump blamed the ban on costs and disruption associated with trans people, saying the military must be “focused on decisive and overwhelming victory.” Officials seemed taken aback despite Trump saying he’d consulted with generals on the decision. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s new press secretary, appeared caught off-guard when she was questioned about the Pentagon’s surprise at the announcement. “When the president made the decision yesterday, the Secretary of Defense was immediately informed as were the rest of the national security team that had been part of this ongoing conversation,” she said. Making an announcement like this through a tweet is unprecedented. Never before has a president reversed a military personnel policy through Twitter. And a tweet alone doesn’t change a standing policy.  An estimated 1,320 to 6,620 transgender individuals serve on active duty in the military, according to a report by Rand. The president’s tweets were met with strong bipartisan backlash and a flood of tweets by defiant trans military people. Donald Trump started this week by bigly lying to the American people. Between 6:31 p.m. on July 24 and 8:09 p.m. on July 25, the president made 29 claims that were either false or misleading, according to an analysis from the Washington Post. That’s more than one per hour, or even more, assuming that Trump sleeps — although his 4 a.m. tweets suggest otherwise. The claims, made at rallies in Ohio and West Virginia, plus a flurry of tweets, ran the gamut from Trump perennials to new favorites: Most people, upon hearing that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had invented a revolutionary new biofuel made of alcohol and pig manure, might raise a skeptical eyebrow. Not Donald Trump’s energy secretary, Rick Perry. In a world where people are quick to cry “Fake news!,” Perry displayed a refreshing wide-eyed innocence, calling the idea “interesting” and saying the fuel would make Poroshenko “a very, very, wealthy and successful man.” There was just one problem: Perry was being had. In a phone conversation Tuesday, he believed he was talking to Ukraine’s Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman. In fact, Perry was speaking to two well-known Russian pranksters — Vladimir Krasnov and Alexei Stolyarov — who have built a reputation for fooling celebrities, including Elton John, tricked into thinking he was speaking to Vladimir Putin. During the 22-minute call on July 19, Perry  — whose department oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons program — also spoke to the pair known as the “Jerky Boys of Russia” about sanctions against Russia, U.S. objections to a potential pipeline across the Baltic sea for Russian gas, attacks against the U.S. power grid, and Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. President Trump said Apple promised to build “three big plants, beautiful plants” in the United States during an interview with the Wall Street Journal Tuesday — a move that would be entirely unheard-of for Apple, as it outsources nearly all of its manufacturing abroad. “I spoke to [CEO Tim Cook]. He’s promised me three big plants — big, big, big,” Trump said, without specifying where these plants will be located or when they’re expected. “I said, you know, Tim, unless you start building your plants in this country, I won’t consider my administration an economic success. He called me, and he said they are going forward.” Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from VICE News, and they declined to comment to the Wall Street Journal. As the Senate debated whether to take healthcare away from millions of Americans Tuesday, President Trump zeroed in on one citizen in particular, depriving her of his most precious tender of all — his tweets. He blocked model Chrissy Teigen on Twitter. The 31-year-old celebrity, a Clinton supporter who is married to the musician John Legend, has been bashing Trump for years, and once referred to him as “the fucking most vile person on this planet.” But her latest tweet apparently was the last straw for Trump. She got the axe after responding to his Sunday tweet about a lack of Republican support, saying, “Lolllllll no one likes you.” Teigen joins a veritable brigade of famous and semi-famous people who have been blocked by the president, including novelist Stephen King and actress Marina Sirtis. Donald Trump continued his very public campaign against “beleaguered” Jeff Sessions Tuesday by telling reporters gathered in the White House’s Rose Garden that “time will tell” if the president ultimately fires his attorney general. “I am disappointed in the attorney general,” Trump said of Sessions — the same person he glowingly nominated to the position just six months ago — during a press conference Tuesday. Trump continued: He should not have recused himself almost immediately after he took office, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me prior to taking office, and I would have, quite simply, picked somebody else. So I think that’s a bad thing, not for the president but for the presidency. I think it’s unfair to the presidency, and that’s the way I feel. A person close to Sessions told the Daily Beast that the attorney general is “pissed” but not ready to resign. Trump shared his feelings on Sessions during an unfettered interview with the New York Times last week. Since then, Trump has repeatedly attacked Sessions on Twitter. Want to know if President Donald Trump is mentally ill? You can now get a professional opinion. On Tuesday, the American Psychoanalytic Association became the first major professional psychiatric organization to announce that it would back away from a rule forbidding psychologists and psychiatrists from discussing people they haven’t treated, and permit its members to publicly discuss Trump’s mental stability (or lack thereof). This rule, the so-called Goldwater Rule, dates back to the 1970s, when many psychiatrists publicly announced that Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was unfit to be president. After Goldwater sued a magazine for libel — and won — the nation’s professional psychiatry organizations later asked its members to refrain from commenting on people they haven’t personally treated. And for over 30 years, the rule went relatively unchallenged. Cue Trump. Just a few weeks after his inauguration, in a letter to the New York Times, 33 psychiatrists publicly broke with the Goldwater Rule by writing, “Mr. Trump’s speech and actions demonstrate an inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions. His words and behavior suggest a profound inability to empathize. Individuals with these traits distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them (journalists, scientists).” The doctors also criticized the Goldwater Rule for leading psychiatrists to shirk their civic duties, saying, “This silence has resulted in a failure to lend our expertise to worried journalists and members of Congress at this critical time.” Still, don’t expect a sudden outpouring of armchair diagnoses of the president’s mental health: The American Psychiatric Association, one of the nation’s largest professional psychiatry groups, reaffirmed its commitment to the Goldwater Rule on Tuesday. Donald Trump woke up on the wrong side of the bed Tuesday, with undermining on his mind. Just after 6 a.m. Washington time, the president began his day by repeating a baseless claim on Twitter that Ukraine tried to undermine his election campaign last year. He then turned his attention to his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, once again undermining his position by calling him “ very weak.” Trump has been angry with Sessions ever since he recused himself from the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Trump reportedly called a political associate in recent days to ask what would happen if he fired Sessions. The president has also raised the idea of replacing him – with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Ted Cruz among the names floated as possible replacements. The most recent attack on Sessions comes just a day after Trump called him “beleaguered” for failing to look into “crooked Hillary’s crimes and Russia relations.” In a remarkable admission to the New York Times Friday, Trump said he would never have picked Sessions as AG if he knew he would recuse himself. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else,” the president told the Times. Sessions said last week that he intends to stay in the role for “as long as is appropriate,” but new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci had a warning for him Tuesday. Speaking on the Hugh Hewitt show, Scaramucci was asked whether Trump wanted to fire Sessions. “I do know the president very well, and if there’s this level of tension in the relationship, that’s public, then you’re probably right,” he replied. Having attacked Sessions once again, Trump then turned his attention to Republicans in Congress, warning that they need to vote to repeal Obamacare later Tuesday, and indicating that he was willing to sign whatever bill was put in front of him. Trump rounded out his busy morning Twitter session by praising son-in-law Jared Kushner and calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt.” Donald Trump is having a hard time holding on to his employees. From Sally Yates to Michael Flynn, Pheet Bharara, James Comey, and most recently Sean Spicer, the revolving door at the White House has been turning fast in the last six months. Now it seems that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson could be next through the door. In what’s being called “Rexit,” Tillerson has reportedly told friends he will be “lucky to last a year in his job,” as frustrations grow over his department’s ability to act independently from the president. Sources speaking to Reuters, CNN, and Politico all claim that Tillerson is upset at not having autonomy and the ability to do the job the way it’s traditionally done. The reports also reveal that H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, is frustrated at the “disorganization and indiscipline” on key policy issues inside the White House. One of the main bones of contention for McMaster is that Trump has largely ignored calls to take a tougher stance on Russia, with the president still challenging the assertion of the U.S. intelligence community that the Kremlin was involved in meddling with the 2016 election. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was the first U.S. senator to endorse Donald Trump during the campaign. Now, he is the latest to be ostracized by him. Trump and his close advisers are reportedly considering replacing Sessions, the Washington Post and the Associated Press reported Monday, with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani both on a shortlist of possible replacements. The president has had private conversations about both the possibility of firing Sessions and the possible consequences of him resigning, according to the Post, which also reported that some in Trump’s close circle believe Trump’s dissatisfaction is part of a broader desire to shut down the investigation into the administration’s relationship to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The Russia investigation and Sessions’ recusal from it is at the center of the debacle: Trump told the Times in an interview last week that he would never have hired Sessions if he’d known he was going to recuse himself. “Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” Trump told the paper. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.” Trump also publicly criticized Sessions on Twitter Monday for not investigating Hillary Clinton and Russia ties, calling him a “beleaguered A.G.” Anthony Scaramucci, the president’s new communications director, addressed the tension Monday. “My own personal opinion: I think they’ve got to have a meeting and have a reconciliation one way or another. You know what I mean? Either stay or go, one way or another,” he said, according to the Associated Press. Jobs, cocktail parties with “the hottest people in New York,” and loyalty — those were just some of the topics President Trump raised in front of a sea of young Boy Scouts in West Virginia Monday.   Speaking at the 2017 National Scout Jamboree — an event held once every four years — Trump took the opportunity to relive the glory of his election, asking the child audience, “Do you remember that incredible night with the maps and the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red, it was unbelievable, and they didn’t know what to say?” Trump also hit on his favorite theme of “fake news,” complaining that the media would probably downplay the size of the crowd of Boy Scouts he was speaking in front of. “The fake media will say: President Trump — and you know what this is — President Trump spoke before a small crowd of Boy Scouts today. That’s some — that is some crowd,” Trump said, adding, “Fake media. Fake news. Thank you.” Trump also bragged about the economy, telling the scouts about the state of unemployment in the U.S. and promising to bring back “trillions of dollars.” “We had the best jobs report in 16 years,” Trump said. “The stock market on a daily basis is hitting an all-time high. We’re going to be bringing back very soon trillions of dollars from companies that can’t get their money back into this country, and that money is going to be used to help rebuild America.” Amid rumors swirling about the possible replacement of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and on the eve of the critical Senate healthcare vote, Trump said, “We could use some more loyalty, I will tell you that.” At one point, Trump went on a bizarre anecdotal tangent about the Long Island developer who created Levittown, telling the assembled children how William Levitt made a “tremendous amount of money,” selling his company, and “bought a big yacht, and he had a very interesting life.” Then Trump seemed to censor himself, telling the adolescents, “I won’t go any more than that because you’re Boy Scouts, so I’m not going to tell you what he did.”  Still, Trump recalled that he saw Levitt years later in New York, after he had lost his wealth and “failed badly.” “I saw him at a cocktail party and it was very sad because the hottest people in New York were at this party,” Trump told the assembled children. The problem? “He lost his momentum.  Meaning, he took this period of time off long — years — and then when he got back, he didn’t have that same momentum.” A cautionary tale — but for whom? Anthony Scaramucci, the new communications director for the White House, told CNN Sunday that the president had called him from Air Force One the previous day to say “Maybe they did it, maybe they didn’t do it.” Trump’s doubt apparently stems from his belief that Russian hackers are so good that they’d evade detection. Scaramucci said Trump told him: “If the Russians actually hacked this situation and spilled out those emails, you would have never seen it, you would have never had any evidence of them.” After saying in early July, “It could very well have been Russia. I think it could well have been other countries,” Trump still appears undecided about the Kremlin’s involvement in undermining the presidential election — despite a rare consensus among the intelligence agencies that Russia did have a hand in hacking the DNC servers and releasing sensitive information to benefit Trump’s grab for the White House. Trump will face a tough decision in relation to Russia this week: legislation designed to increase sanctions against the Kremlin. While the president is expected to sign the bill, he and Vladimir Putin had sought to avoid such actions following their numerous meetings at the G-20 summit in early July. David Gilbert, Joshua Marcus, Alexa Liautaud, Tess Owen, Christina Sterbenz, and Alex Thompson contributed to this report.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/9kdm3e/its-not-physiologically-possible

Vice News

2017-03-09 21:23:00

2017

3.0

9

Brigitte Noël

How Preppers from Around the World Are Gearing Up for Doomsday

Skirt lengths might be a good barometer for the state of the economy, but what do hazmat suit sales tell us about the world we live in? Much like economist George Taylor's "hemline theory," which claims that miniskirts mean positive things for a country's financial health, general consumer statistics on the sale of things like luxury goods, alcohol, and even porn can provide a good read of the general social climate. Four-inch heels apparently mean an economic downturn, and kinky porn habits can offer commentary on social oppression. In uncertain times, it seems normal for citizens to cut spending or seek creature comforts. The popularity of survivalist merchandise—gear used to prepare for a cataclysm or the end of times—offers interesting insight into people's anxieties concerning natural disasters, political situations, or even technological development. For instance, a recent report states that rich Silicon Valley innovators are building shelters to hide from the popular revolt that will occur when robots steal all of our jobs, which is very reassuring. I wanted to learn more about these types of trends, so I contacted survivalist stores in Canada, France, and the US to find out what has been driving their clientele's purchases. VICE: So your store sells army surplus and survivalist stuff? Pascal Lemieux: Yeah, we've been around for 25 years, and we started as an army surplus store. But I developed a survivalist section after September 11 because there was a demand; people were suddenly conscious that stuff like that could happen in America. Our sales depend on what's happening on the planet. There are peaks during political conflicts, US and Russia stuff, or natural disasters. Like Fukushima in Japan—that was a peak in sales. During the next year or so, people were buying anti-radiation stuff, gas masks, chemical-protection suits—those one pieces with a hood and a mask. But the Fukushima disaster is pretty far from Quebec, no? Radiation has no boundaries, never forget that. Did you notice any particular trends in the last year, with the Trump election? No, not really. I think that's more affected the immigration side of things. Where we see changes is really during like political stuff of Cold War–type situations, that's when people feel like something could happen. Or when there are attacks, like what happened in Boston. It's tough to tell, though, because often people buy stuff without telling you what it's for. Do you know if people are building bunkers? I don't know, but you're not supposed to talk about that. What I can tell you is that more and more families are getting prepared. VICE: How long have you been doing this? Neal Crasnow: I've been in Army Navy business for 35 years. This store has been here in central Florida for 60 years. Is it a big business out in Florida? I think there are all sorts of people that collect all sorts of different things. Whether they're preppers or survivalists, that's a good question, and what they're actually waiting for is an even better question. So I don't know if it's the zombie apocalypse or any number of other things. They come in and look for different things. I sell all kinds of fire starting equipment, water-purification equipment, backpacks, and firearms and all kinds of things like that. Do you see any patterns? Are there items that sell more during certain periods? Well, for the US, when there is a chance that a Democrat will get elected to office, then firearms sell better. If you remember the whole thing about the year 2000, the computers, there was a whole group of people who were worried about that, so they would go out and they were buying those [survivalist] things. When people are worried, they make arrangements. I sell a lot during hurricane season. I do think the firearms thing is tied to politics, but the rest is tied to people's angst and feelings. What happened during the most recent election? Prior to election, people were concerned that a Democrat would be elected so firearms sold better. Although during the Obama administration, firearms sold as well as they ever had. Do people inquire about bunkers? Are more people setting up bunkers? I think there was a series of things that happened even a few years ago that led people in that direction more than now. I think there are people that are preppers, and that's a continual audience gaining speed. I mean, I couldn't answer as to what they're preparing for. I think there are always more preppers. I'm not unhappy that it's always growing because I base a lot of my business on it, but I don't think it's indication of something. VICE: Who are your customers? Joël Grimaldier: In France, we're leaders in the sale of survival materials and have been for the last ten years. Our clientele is linked to bushcraft and hiking, but our competitive edge is survivalism. I'm also trying to develop the "pure" survivalist sector, and I'm attracting more and more francophone clients (from France, Belgium, and Switzerland) who are interested in this stuff. Even though survivalists tend to be discrete about their lifestyles and don't directly admit their interests, we can determine their habits through their purchases. We've had a lot of competitors spring up in the last three or four years, who often do this to complement a main business like hunting or fishing. Do you notice changes based on political climate? Do you sell more of certain products after certain events or elections? Yes, for the past ten years, I've seen the survival market evolve. Initially, this was launched by shows like Bear Grylls's, but this whole "surviving in nature" period transformed into a more survivalist trend. This practice isn't as developed in Europe as it is in North America, but it's starting to take off here. Some clients, without calling themselves survivalists, are still preparing for a variety of possible risks. France is more affected by climate-related phenomena, and people are getting ready for that. The attacks we've seen in the last two years have also affected people's mentalities and pushed them toward preparation. While political risks seem increasingly obvious in these parts, they're not considered "major" risks by the general population. Germany and Switzerland are encouraging their populations to set aside rations of food, but that's not a thing in France, at least not really. The current electoral period hasn't affected sales here, at least not yet. And the growing tensions between Europe, the US, and Russia haven't yet had an impact on the "base" population. Since I refuse to sell weapons, my clients generally buy long-term food rations and stock up on all the essentials they need in case of an evacuation. VICE: How long have you been in business? Niels Baartman: This is my sixth year in the business. What kind of consumer trends have you seen in the past few years? I'd say American politics influence us a lot more than Canadian politics. American politics are way more world-changing than Canadian politics will ever be, so I feel people tend to gravitate toward looking at the US policies that might dictate what might come down the pipe. [During those periods], people will buy larger food packages, perhaps water containers, big tanks for emergency water. The food servings can be anywhere from one month to six months of supplies. I think there's a greater awareness that being prepared is a wise thing to do, and I would say the key is finding good quality products that people can rely on. What are people preparing for though? Everything under the sun. Natural disaster, some are for political reasons, road trips, ice storms. I would say it's all over the horizon; there is no specific reason. What do you mean by "political reasons?"  Whether it's foreign policy, or perhaps an economic meltdown, or whatever people in the prepper community are concerned about, a lot of it revolves around political decisions or the direction politics might be going. So many of them prepare for inevitable reasons that there might be a shortage of food or that something might affect the availability of funds or whatever the case may be. What did you notice before and after Trump was elected? We definitely had a relatively strong reaction to preppers buying before Trump was elected, but after he was elected, that quieted down dramatically. People were feeling a sense of relief that the election was over, but also I think those who feared economic problems felt Trump might be beneficial. A lot of the prepper community has more right-wing viewpoints and so they thought Hillary would be disastrous. What were they buying? Food. Our experience is that whenever there is something fearful out there, clients buy food because that's their main concern. Most preppers don't need other supplies because they're already stocked. Do you sell bunkers supplies, and do people ask about bunkers? No, and I don't find that has come up often in Canada. At least I haven't come across it much. But most people don't mention they're stocking a bunker; they'd rather keep that quiet. Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wnkx5q/the-survivalist-economy-are-people-gearing-up-for-the-end-of-the-world

Entertainment

Vice

2018-12-21 00:00:00

2018

12.0

21

Senate Democratic leader Schumer: House funding bill will not pass Senate

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on Thursday a government funding bill being considered by the House of Representatives that includes $5 billion sought by President Donald Trump for a border wall will not get the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate. “It clearly will not come close to getting the 60 votes that it needs,” Schumer told reporters. Reporting by Ginger Gibson; Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by David Alexander

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-budget-schumer/senate-democratic-leader-schumer-house-funding-bill-will-not-pass-senate-idUSKCN1OJ315

Politics

Reuters

2018-07-02 14:19:14

2018

7.0

2

Eric Johnson

How tech workers in the government could make everyone’s life easier: ‘Get rid of the paper’

“We’re not doing anything with blockchain,” said Matt Cutts, the acting administrator of the U.S. Digital Service. For now, at least, the tech-focused division of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget is focused on the more basic ways that technology can make Americans’ interactions with the government user-friendly. “I am less worried about machine learning, I am less worried about artificial intelligence or the blockchain,” Cutts said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “I am more worried about the veteran who calls the VA every single day at 9 am.” Cutts, who spent nearly 17 years at Google before joining the USDS in 2017, said that’s not a rhetorical example. There really was a veteran, named Charles, who was calling every day to check in on the status of a disability claim appeal. “All we did was implement a progress bar so that he knows where he stands out of 100,000-plus veterans,” Cutts said. “So even though he knows he might have a two-and-a-half-year-plus wait, just knowing where you stand in that queue makes you heard and respected and valued.” He urged tech workers to consider a temporary tour of duty in the government because applying Silicon Valley’s “agile practices” to things like veterans’ benefits or Medicare can make a huge difference in people’s lives. And contrary to what some might expect, he said the USDS’ work has remained just as nonpartisan under President Trump as it was under President Obama. “There is so much good work to be done — high-impact work that can help a regular person get access to the sorts of government services that they need to have,” Cutts said. You can listen to Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. On the new podcast, Cutts did propose one big idea that could help everyone, both those working in government and everyday citizens: “Get rid of paper.” “I would be extremely ecstatic,” he said. “For example, H-1B visas. Millions of pieces of paper are shipped to a place, which then does a lottery, and ships all that paper back to the people who lost in the lottery. If you could just start with a preregistraton page that was digital ...” “We’re kind of used to seeing these pictures of supervisors’ offices with stacks and stacks up to the ceiling, which are unsearchable,” Cutts added. “Some people think they can do better by scanning or faxing stuff in, and then having an electronic version of that. The fact is, it needs to be digital-native from the beginning. That’s how it’s searchable, that’s how you can really check for errors.” If you like this show, you should also sample our other podcasts: If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on Apple Podcasts — and if you don’t, just tweet-strafe Kara. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2018/7/2/17523924/matt-cutts-us-digital-service-omb-usa-government-paper-blockchain-kara-swisher-decode-podcast

Vox

2019-06-06 00:00:00

2019

6.0

6

Derby County's Holmes in 23-man United States Gold Cup squad

(Reuters) - Derby County midfielder Duane Holmes has been named in the United States’ 23-man squad for this month’s Gold Cup, a day after making his international debut. Holmes, a dual U.S. and British citizen, came on as a substitute during a 1-0 friendly defeat to Jamaica on Wednesday. The 24-year-old plays his club soccer for Frank Lampard’s English second-tier Championship team Derby County, who failed to reach the Premier League when they lost to Aston Villa in the playoff final last month. Holmes is one of seven players in the Gold Cup squad who play their club soccer in Europe. The other 16 compete in Major League Soccer in North America. Chelsea’s Christian Pulisic will make his Gold Cup debut as part of the U.S. team defending the title they won two years ago. The 16 teams from the CONCACAF region competing in the competition had to name their 23-man squads by midnight on Wednesday. “We’ve had a chance to look at the player pool for the last six months and we feel great about the group that will take on the task of trying to win the Gold Cup,” said U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter. “This is only the start of the journey. Our ambition is to progress as a team throughout the tournament and put ourselves in a position to be playing July 7 in Chicago.” The U.S. play their first game against Guyana in St. Paul, Minnesota on June 18. United States squad, with club team in brackets: GOALKEEPERS: Sean Johnson (New York City FC), Tyler Miller (LAFC), Zack Steffen (Columbus Crew) DEFENDERS: Tyler Adams (Leipzig), Omar Gonzalez (Toronto FC), Nick Lima (San Jose Earthquakes), Aaron Long (New York Red Bulls), Daniel Lovitz (Montreal Impact), Matt Miazga (Chelsea), Tim Ream (Fulham), Walker Zimmerman (LAFC) MIDFIELDERS: Michael Bradley (Toronto FC), Duane Holmes (Derby County), Weston McKennie (Schalke), Christian Pulisic(Chelsea), Cristian Roldan (Seattle Sounders), Wil Trapp (Columbus Crew) FORWARDS: Jozy Altidore (Toronto FC), Paul Arriola (D.C. United), Tyler Boyd (Vitória Guimãres), Jonathan Lewis (Colorado Rapids), Jordan Morris (Seattle Sounders), Gyasi Zardes (Columbus Crew SC) Reporting by Andrew Both in Cary, North Carolina; Editing by Toby Davis

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-soccer-goldcup/derby-countys-holmes-in-23-man-united-states-gold-cup-squad-idUSKCN1T72DZ

Sports News

Reuters

2018-02-12 11:00:02

2018

2.0

12

Kurt Wagner

Facebook lost around 2.8 million U.S. users under 25 last year. 2018 won’t be much better.

Facebook is losing young users even quicker than expected, according to new estimates by eMarketer. The digital measurement firm predicted last year that Facebook would see a 3.4 percent drop in 12- to 17-year-old users in the U.S. in 2017, the first time it had predicted a drop in usage for any age group on Facebook. The reality: The number of U.S. Facebook users in the 12- to 17-year-old demographic declined by 9.9 percent in 2017, eMarketer found, or about 1.4 million total users. That’s almost three times the decline expected. There were roughly 12.1 million U.S. Facebook users in the 12- to 17-year-old demographic by the end of the year. There are likely multiple reasons for the decline. Facebook has been losing its “cool” factor for years, and young people have more options than ever for staying in touch with friends and family. Facebook also serves as a digital record keeper — but many young people don’t seem to care about saving their life online, at least not publicly. That explains why Snapchat and Instagram, which offer features for sharing photos and videos that disappear, are growing in popularity among this demographic. Overall, eMarketer found Facebook lost about 2.8 million U.S. users under 25 last year. And Facebook’s 2018 doesn’t look much better. The research firm released Facebook usage estimates for 2018 on Monday, and expects that Facebook will lose about 2.1 million users in the U.S. under the age of 25 this year. EMarketer predicts that Facebook will see a decline in usage among all three age groups for people under 25: Take the numbers with a grain of salt — eMarketer is an outside research firm so it doesn’t have the full picture that, say, Facebook has. But the fact that eMarketer is predicting declines across the board is a bad sign for Facebook regardless. Young people offer a good barometer for what is popular, but more importantly for Facebook, losing out on the next generation of internet users in the U.S. is troubling for the company’s long-term dominance. The good news for Facebook is that, despite the expected decline in younger users, eMarketer believes Facebook’s overall U.S. audience will continue to grow for the next few years. More importantly, perhaps, eMarketer expects Facebook-owned Instagram to grow significantly. The research firm believes Instagram’s U.S. user base will grow by 13 percent this year, to almost 105 million people. That’s even better than Snapchat’s expected growth — eMarketer believes it will grow its U.S. audience by 9 percent in 2018. That would give Snapchat about 86.5 million users by the end of the year. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2018/2/12/16998750/facebooks-teen-users-decline-instagram-snap-emarketer

Vox

2018-10-02 00:00:00

2018

10.0

2

Sarah Rose Sharp

Damien Hirst Abandons a Seaside Town for a $52 Million Studio

The artist has also laid off 50 employees as part of his desire to “focus on his art.” Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads In a move that contradicts his reputation and career trajectory, ever-diversifying commercial enterprise Damien Hirst announced massive cutbacks to his organization, in the interest of getting back to making art. This restructuring has resulted in the layoffs of some 50 employees, at least some of which work in connection with Hirst’s various interests in the seaside town of Ilfracombe, Devon. This includes the popular Quay restaurant, where art tourists, drawn to the town by the 20-meter Hirst statue, “Verity,” could enjoy the catch of the day while looking at Hirst’s pickled fish, and other works. Though residents of Ilfracombe will surely bemoan any curtailing of tourist trade as a result of the closure, it seems that a handful of Hirst-owned properties have been standing vacant on the main strip for some time now, presenting an impediment to the doubtlessly otherwise bustling nature of the former maritime trade town with a population of 11,000 residents (according to a 2011 parish census). Last year, Hirst abandoned plans for the “Southern Extension,” a 750-unit development of eco-friendly homes on property owned by the artist, which also included a primary school and a health center. Maybe he scored an advance screener of Wild, Wild Country and realized cult leadership is not all it’s cracked up to be, no matter how many Rolls Royces you get to have. As a sort of consolation prize, Ilfracombe does get to keep Hirst’s giant bronze statue on the pier on long-term loan; when reached for comment, the town said, “Eh.” Of course, even after paring down his ambitions to no longer include annexing an entire town, Hirst’s humble return to his roots does include the purchase of a new studio on Beak Street in Soho, central London for a reported £40 million (~$52 million). Come on, guys — you cannot expect an artist to make paintings and pickle formerly living creatures and such without several multi-million dollar facilities. Hirst is showing real restraint here, possibly keeping his operations budget under £1 billion (~$1.3 billion); no doubt we can expect great revelations from this Siddhartha-like renunciation of his worldly holdings. If there’s one thing Hirst has demonstrated throughout a career based in conceptual market engagement, it’s that at the end of the day, he’s all about the art. Art, when reached for comment, reportedly said: “Hey Damien, no hard feelings — it’s totally cool with me if you want to stick with being a restaurateur, or whatever!”

https://hyperallergic.com/463473/damien-hirst-abandons-a-seaside-town-for-a-52-million-studio/

Hyperallergic

2017-10-16 00:00:00

2017

10.0

16

Judge declines to dismiss bribery charges against U.S. Senator Menendez

NEWARK, N.J. (Reuters) - The bribery case against U.S. Senator Bob Menendez survived a key test on Monday, as the federal judge overseeing his trial rejected a defense motion to throw out the most serious charges. U.S. District Judge William Walls in Newark, New Jersey, allowed the trial to proceed on all charges. He had suggested on Oct. 16 that he was inclined to dismiss the core of the case based on a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that narrowed the legal definition of public corruption. Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-jersey-menendez-judge/judge-declines-to-dismiss-bribery-charges-against-u-s-senator-menendez-idUSKBN1CL2EJ

Politics

Reuters

2019-06-18 00:00:00

2019

6.0

18

Google calendar app down globally

(Reuters) - Alphabet Inc’s Google Calendar app users were unable to access their schedules on Tuesday as the app faced technical issues globally. "We are aware of the issues and working on a fix," Google replied here, in response to a tweet. Earlier in the day, DownDetector.com, which monitors outages, showed a number of users saw the “Not Found” “Error 404” message when they tried to access the app. Other apps appeared to be unaffected by the outage. Reporting by Sayanti Chakraborty in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-outages/google-calendar-app-down-globally-idUSKCN1TJ22V

Technology News

Reuters

2016-01-13 15:30:03

2016

1.0

13

German Lopez

Obama's quiet push to ban LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace

President Barack Obama's 2016 State of the Union speech didn't, as previous speeches did, land any firsts on LGBTQ issues. Obama didn't have any big moments like in 2012, when he became the first sitting president to support marriage equality, or in 2015, when he became the first president to say the word "transgender" in a State of the Union address. Instead, he focused on broad platforms, vaguely advocating for equality. But his administration may be on the verge of having the most direct impact it's ever had on LGBTQ equality — by potentially fostering a legal challenge that will lead to a federal ban on discrimination in the workplace and housing. In the US, most states' civil rights laws don't ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace, housing, or public accommodations (hotels, restaurants, and other places that serve the general public). As a result, more than half of LGBTQ Americans, according to the advocacy group Movement Advancement Project, live in a state where, under state law, an employer can legally fire someone because he's gay, a landlord can legally evict someone because she's lesbian, and a hotel manager can legally deny service to someone who's transgender — for no reason other than the person's sexual orientation or gender identity. Banning this type of discrimination has long been a goal of LGBTQ advocates, through the push for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. But the ban is closer than ever to happening as the Obama administration, quietly but surely, helps along a new legal interpretation of decades-old laws. Advocates have long argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act should protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in the workplace and housing, as they do for race, color, national origin, religion, and sex. It's the last protection — sex — that's relevant here: Advocates say that protections against sex-based discrimination also apply to sexual orientation and gender identity, since discrimination against LGBTQ people is, fundamentally, rooted in expectations of what people of certain sexes should be like. (One caveat: These protections would not apply to public accommodations, since sex isn't covered in federal laws for that area.) "It's pretty uncontroversial that discriminating against a man that acts too effeminate or a woman that acts too masculine is a form of sex discrimination," the ACLU's Joshua Block previously told me. "That applies to lesbians and gay men, too." Advocates have long argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act should protect LGBTQ people The federal government, under Obama, has quietly come around to this interpretation of the Civil Rights Act. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), whose five-person commission is made up of four Obama appointees, in 2012 agreed that the Civil Rights Act protects people from discrimination based on gender identity. In 2015, it expanded the protections to sexual orientation. The US Department of Justice has similarly stated that it believes federal civil rights protections apply to gender identity, although it has yet to say the same about sexual orientation. But since EEOC is seen as an expert advisory for other federal agencies on employment issues, it's possible the Justice Department's position could change soon. (LGBTQ advocates certainly hope so; they've been pushing the Justice Department to change its stance for years.) Why does all of this matter? Essentially, this is fostering the beginning of a big court challenge over the Civil Rights Act's reach — one that could end up at the US Supreme Court. And if that were to happen, and the Supreme Court ruled once again in favor of LGBTQ rights, it would likely be a result of support not just from LGBTQ advocates, but also from the EEOC and the Justice Department, both of which are federal agencies that are respected by the courts. Notably, this court challenge could take a while to work up to the Supreme Court, likely until after Obama is out of office. But by planting the seeds to this challenge through his appointees to the EEOC and, possibly, a change in the Justice Department's stated legal opinion in this area, Obama and his administration could lead to yet another huge impact on LGBTQ rights.

https://www.vox.com/2016/1/13/10760268/obama-gay-lgbtq-workplace

Vox

2018-12-11 00:00:00

2018

12.0

11

Guess Who This Giggling Guy Turned Into!

Before this happy human was entertaining audiences with his out-of-this-world acting, he was just another chuckling child growing up in Virginia, MN. Can you guess who he is?

https://www.tmz.com/2018/12/11/guess-who-this-giggling-guy-turned-into/

TMZ

2017-09-13 00:00:00

2017

9.0

13

Alexa Liautaud

Red Cross pulls out of parts of South Sudan after worker is murdered

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Wednesday it was suspending its activities across a third of war-torn South Sudan, just days after one of its aid workers was gunned down on a trip back from delivering aid. Lukudu Kennedy Laki Emmanuel, a driver for the ICRC, was traveling in a convoy of vehicles in Western Equatoria over the weekend when he was shot by attackers the ICRC called “unknown assailants.” “The ICRC will not resume anything until we have a clear picture of exactly what happened and until we receive the necessary security guarantees,” a spokeswoman for the ICRC. Mari Mortvedt, told Reuters. “The security of the ICRC staff is top priority.” The civil war in landlocked South Sudan between the Sudan People’s Liberation Army loyal to President Salva Kiir and and opposition forces has dragged on for over three years, racking up an estimated death toll of tens of thousands. Six million people are severely food insecure, according to the United Nations Office of Humanitarian Affairs. The number of South Sudanese who became refugees reached its peak this August with two million people seeking shelter, according to the U.N. At least 17 humanitarian aid workers have been killed so far this year in South Sudan and 84 since the start of the conflict in December 2013. South Sudan was the most deadly place to deliver aid in 2017, according to the Aid Worker Security Database, which tracks victims across the world.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/j5dbkx/red-cross-pulls-out-of-parts-of-south-sudan-after-worker-is-murdered

Vice News

2019-05-22 17:24:00

2019

5.0

22

Adam Woodhead

How Hippies Turned a Ann Arbor into 'The Dope Capital of the Midwest'

For four months starting in the fall of 1966, the pair had befriended members of the Trans-Love Energies collective, located at the Detroit Artists’ Workshop near Wayne State University. The building was a center of left-wing activism and agitational propaganda in the Motor City—home of the Fifth Estate newspaper, the local office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and the future rehearsal space for revolutionary rock band the MC5. On January 24, 1967, police raided the building, looking for the property manager John Sinclair. “Peg,” to whom Sinclair had gifted two joints, was actually a Detroit Police officer named Jane Mumford Lovelace. “Louis” was not a candle maker, but her fellow cop Vahan Kapagian, who had grown his hair and beard out to blend in. Police made more than 50 arrests, including Sinclair’s wife Leni, but Sinclair was the only one who faced serious charges after being let out on bail. A beat poet and obsessive of black jazz culture as well as a lefty agitator, Sinclair had attracted attention from the Detroit Police “Red Squad,” which monitored left-wing groups. But in their attempt to take him down, which spawned a years-long legal battle, the cops helped turn him into an extremely of-his-time icon. Today, legalization is regarded as a mainstream position, with even right-wing politicians like John Boehner supporting the movement and joining the large multi-state operators now maneuvering to control the cannabis industry. Sinclair and his contemporaries helped create the conditions for that industry to exist, but they aren’t the ones best poised to profit off of it. One of Sinclair’s radical contemporaries, former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers—who roomed with Sinclair’s fellow White Panther Milton “Skip” Taube at the University of Michigan—doesn’t think that Boehner should be able to jump to the front of the line. “You know I heard an interview on the radio where they kept asking him, ‘Aren’t you sorry that a lot of people went to jail and lives were broken?’ He said, ‘No, because that’s the way I understood it then.’ Well that’s bullshit,” Ayers told VICE. “Legalizing marijuana needs to be part of something bigger. It has to include reparations, and that means accountability for the people that brought us to the catastrophic place we were. People like John Boehner.” But Sinclair sees his side as having achieved victory in spite of those people. “They hate marijuana smokers. They used to put us in prison. Now the bulk of the population supports us, but they still haven’t adjusted to that. Pretty soon you won’t be able to get elected if you don’t support marijuana legalization,” the 77-year-old said. “It’s very satisfying to see the tables turned on these rotten, lying motherfuckers. All this horrible police state shit. It’s the fabric of daily life in America that we’ve got to rip apart and dispense of. That’s going to be the hard part, is picking this shit out of the culture and throwing it away.” The pro-weed activists of Sinclair’s era won an important victory: Cannabis legalization has swept through all regions of the country at this point. But their story also shows how difficult lasting change can be. But the strident anti-authoritarianism of the Detroit Artists Workshop—someone hung a banner out of the window during the infamous 1967 riots reading “Burn Baby Burn”—led to what activists described as harassment from the police, and violence from those with anti-hippie sentiments. After a firebomb attack on the MC5 bus and a series of assaults on women in the group, Trans-Love Energies relocated to a house on Hill Street in Ann Arbor, near the University of Michigan. It was there that John and Leni Sinclair left what was arguably their most enduring legacy, as part of a group of agitators who pushed the college town to adopt the most progressive pot policies in the country, making Ann Arbor, as the New York Times put it years later, “the Dope Capital of the Midwest.” There, Trans-Love dreamed of building a revolutionary enclave like the Maoist cadres they admired. Unlike Detroit, Sinclair says now, the cops weren’t going to bust down too many doors. And crucially, it was largely white. “In Ann Arbor it was all the children of rich people,” Sinclair said. “The police were really precisely geared to not cause trouble for them. They were going to have to be lawyers, and doctors, and shit. So we took advantage of that. That’s why we went there. Because they only had ten police cars.” Like campuses across the country, Ann Arbor in 1968 was teeming with radical youth, but something in the Trans-Love formula was especially compelling. In the MC5, the collective found a bridge between their leftist ideology, Sinclair’s Beatnik reefer worship, and the emerging blue-collar rock scene in Detroit. The band would play to a young, suburban audience at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, then return home to Ann Arbor to do free outdoor concerts. As the band’s manager, Sinclair arranged for the MC5 to perform outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August. They returned to form the White Panther Party—named after the Black Panther Party—and called in their ten-point program for revolution through “rock 'n’ roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.” The group even established a nonprofit ecclesiastical wing, the Church of Zenta, based around ritual use of weed and hallucinogens. “Zenta is the religion to end all religions,” Leni Sinclair said. “That’s how I look at it. Because it’s the only religion that says ‘yes’ where other religions say ‘no’ or ‘thou shalt not.’ Well hippies say ‘yes.’ Yes, smoke weed. Have sex. Be who you are... Anybody who smokes weed is a Zenta believer, whether they know the term or not." In 1969, White Panther leaders, including Sinclair, were indicted on conspiracy charges related to a string of bombings in Ann Arbor targeting buildings associated with the military and CIA. FBI Section Chief R.L. Shackelford called the White Panthers “potentially the largest and most dangerous of revolutionary organizations in the United States,” and the group was targeted for surveillance under the agency’s COINTELPRO program. (The bombing case would go all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that the government had illegally wiretapped the WPP; the charges were subsequently dropped.) But the thing that drew the most controversy was Sinclair’s sentence, handed down in July 1969, for those two joints he gave the undercover cop: ten years in prison. The disproportionate penalty made him a cause celebre, with leading figures on the left—from Black Panther Party founder Bobby Seale to John Lennon—coming to his defense. At the John Sinclair Freedom Rally in 1971, Lennon and Yoko Ono performed a new tune, “John Sinclair,” that distilled the case to a sound bite: “They gave him ten for two—what more can the bastards do?” Days later, Sinclair was released on bond and his conviction was overturned the next year, when the Michigan Supreme Court declared the state’s cannabis laws unconstitutional. The landmark case reduced the penalty for “simple possession” to a misdemeanor, and brought the maximum sentence down from ten years to one. The maximum sentence for sale of pot was reduced from life to four years. On April 1, when the new regime came into effect, Sinclair’s supporters gathered on Ann Arbor campus to celebrate his victory. The party has been held every year since, in what is now known as the Ann Arbor Hash Bash festival. “The atmosphere after John got out of jail was one of great expectations for the future,” Leni Sinclair said. “We were on the national stage and had pulled off a very successful John Sinclair Freedom Rally. That is, until the government stepped in and ordered John Lennon and Yoko Ono to be deported, and they had to break off all political activity. But until then it was a feeling of euphoria, of things are going to get better from now on.” After John's release from prison, the Sinclairs became less combative, re-christening the White Panthers the Rainbow People’s Party (RPP) and getting involved in electoral politics. Forming a coalition with the progressive Human Rights Party, the group won two seats on the Ann Arbor City Council. The New York Times noted the willingness of the new coalition to run against the local Democratic Party, rather than solicit its support, and attributed their success to grassroots campaigning and the ability to reach University of Michigan students. The new council members were Jerry DeGrieck, a student himself, and Nancy Wechsler, a central committee member of the Rainbow People’s Party. Both Degrieck and Wechsler assumed office at just 22 years old, and would later come out, making them two of the first openly gay elected officials in American history. The most radical thing the new council members did was pass a law reducing the penalty for cannabis possession to a mere $5, about $30 in today’s money. The Times reported that campaigners had originally proposed a 25-cent fine, but compromised at $5 to cover administrative and court costs. Michigan State Police Director John Plants told the paper he would enforce state law in Ann Arbor, citing fears that the new law could transform surrounding Washtenaw County into a haven for drug trafficking. But the hippies celebrated. “Because of state law, we couldn’t make marijuana legal within the city,” DeGrieck said. “So we did the next best thing.” This made the city one of the first to treat possession as a civil infraction, like a parking violation. It marked a major shift across the country, and within a year Oregon moved to adopt a similar law at the state level. Coverage of Ann Arbor in the Times focused on the open consumption trend, with Sheriff Frederick Postill describing more stringent state laws as “unenforceable” owing to the prevalence of weed use in the city. which Police Chief Walter Krasny estimated at 1,000 pounds per week in 1972. “I guess, unfortunately, marijuana is becoming a part of our way of life,” Kransy told the Times. Sinclair served as chairman of the RPP, helping broker alliances with more moderate elements of the coalition, and found consensus around the $5 pot law, which the group saw as a challenge to the power of the county sheriff department. But when moderates within the HRP expressed reservations about taking on the sheriff in local elections, Sinclair led the Rainbow People’s exit from the group, a move he now says he regrets. But for a time, Ann Arbor really was something of a hippie sanctuary. A system of parallel power structures grew out of Trans-Love commune, including a security force, a drug counseling service, and a vast alternative media network which printed pro-cannabis propaganda like Sinclair’s “Marijuana Revolution,” which argued that drug prohibition had become one of the contradictions of capitalist society in the West, paving the way for post-scarcity communism. “If the Democrats and Human Rights Party were in coalition we could pass anything, and we did,” Leni Sinclair said. “We appropriated money for a daycare center, a free clinic, a dental clinic, runaway children, a food coop, and for a community center, the People’s Ballroom. It was like utopia for a minute.” At one point, Ann Arbor Sun advertised a mail-in contest where readers could win a pound of cannabis. The prize was presented by state representative and Democratic Socialists of America member Perry Bullard. “We lit a fire in Ann Arbor that lasted for a few years,” John said. “and made it a lot of fun.” Republicans took back control of the city council in 1973, and pushed through a repeal of the $5 law. That didn’t end the battle, however. At a council hearing in July, the Rainbow People swarmed the meeting, lighting joints in the council chambers. The following year, their Human Rights Party coalition brought the $5 pot law back as a ballot measure to amend the city charter. Ann Arbor voted to approve the measure in April of 1974, by a margin of 52-48. The law stayed in place until 1990, when the fine was raised to $25. Michigan voters finally approved recreational pot in 2018, but it’s no longer regarded as a symbol of revolution. Instead, some now worry the cannabis industry is dominated by large companies and white men. Canadian firm Acreage holdings, whose executive board includes Boehner, has made a series of multimillion-dollar investments in Michigan, and in April, the state legislature passed a bill making it easier for large companies to acquire commercial licenses by limiting background checks on investors. In states like Massachusetts, which legalized cannabis in 2016, multi-state operators have managed to skirt regulations and position themselves to effectively control the emerging market. Cannabis has gone from being a sacrament in John Sinclair’s eyes to a medicine under the law to a valuable commodity, if one with sometimes uncertain legal status. One sign of the changing times is the effort to eliminate provisions of the Michigan Medical Marihuana Program which allow patients to sign their rights to grow up to 12 plants over to a caregiver, who can possess up to 72 plants in total. Those who want to end the system say medical pot too often ends on the black market, and on May 2, they scored a major victory when a state regulator decided that caregivers could no longer sell their product to dispensaries. But that program also provides patients like Sinclair direct access to affordable weed—he currently receives two free ounces per month—and he sees the plan to end it as a hostile takeover. “They’re opposed to this law that the people enacted. So they try everything they can to fuck it up by getting rid of the caregivers,” Sinclair said. “It’s not only their goal but the goal of the big-time suppliers, and growers, and distributors that pay for the $150,000 licenses. They want to get rid of the caregivers because they’re competition. If you can’t get it from a caregiver you have to get it from them.” Sinclair himself says has never made any real money from weed, despite lending his name to various cannabis businesses over the years. After the new law came into effect in 2018, it was widely reported that Sinclair had partnered with a Detroit business to create Michigan’s first public lounge for recreational smokers. The deal soon fell apart, amid what Sinclair said was an attempt by the building’s owners to exploit his status as a cannabis celebrity. He currently survives on Social Security, and is in the process of signing all intellectual property rights over to the Amsterdam-based John Sinclair Foundation. “It’s in formation,” Sinclair said. “I’m trying to form a creative repository for everything I own, so that it will go down into history.” Maintaining a firm grip on these rights is one of the ways icons like Tommy Chong and Willie Nelson have been able to cash in on their stoner status, launching their own lines of strains, glass pipes, and vape pens. But Sinclair seems to have no interest in capitalizing on legalization, even though his activism helped the country get here. After all these years, he professes not to care about money and property. “I don’t care anything about the industry,” he said. “I have no stake in the industry. I don’t care what they do. I just wanna get the weed.” Adam Woodhead is a freelance journalist from Detroit.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43jnk9/how-hippies-turned-a-college-town-into-the-dope-capital-of-the-midwest

Drugs

Vice

2019-06-11 00:00:00

2019

6.0

11

Josh Horwitz, Yilei Sun

Huawei executive says goal to be world's top phone maker some time off

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd will need more time to become the world’s largest smartphone maker, a goal it originally aimed to achieve in the fourth quarter of this year, a senior executive said on Tuesday. “We would have become the largest in the fourth quarter (of this year) but now we feel that this process may take longer,” said Shao Yang, chief strategy officer of Huawei Consumer Business Group, without elaborating on reasons. Huawei currently sells 500,000 to 600,000 smartphones a day, he said in a speech at the CES Asia technology show in Shanghai. The comments come after the United States put Huawei on a blacklist last month that barred it from doing business with U.S. companies on security grounds without government approval, prompting some global tech companies to cut ties with the world’s largest telecommunication equipment maker. The company in January said it could become the world’s biggest-selling smartphone vendor this year even without the U.S. market. It was the second-biggest vendor in the first quarter, behind South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, according to research and advisory firm Gartner. Analysts estimate the recent U.S. sanctions could push Huawei’s smartphone shipments down as much as a quarter this year and cause its handsets to disappear from overseas markets. Reporting by Josh Horwitz and Yilei Sun; Writing by Brenda Goh; Editing by Christopher Cushing

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-tech-usa/huawei-executive-says-goal-to-be-worlds-top-phone-maker-some-time-off-idUSKCN1TC06L

Business News

Reuters

2017-10-31 16:23:00

2017

10.0

31

Lydia Ramsey

Mylan exec targeted in expanded pricing collusion civil investigation

46 state attorneys general are investigating drugmakers over price fixing of generic drugs.In total, 18 companies and two top executives, including Mylan's president, are now named in the complaint.Mylan's stock fell more than 8% on the news. A lawsuit alleging price-fixing of generic drugs is about to be expanded to include nearly every state in the country, and one company — Mylan — is already feeling the heat. Forty-six state attorneys general are alleging price fixing of generic drugs by 18 companies. The drugs range from anxiety medications to diabetes treatments, to antibiotics. Generic drugs are meant to come in at a lower price than the original branded version that are no longer protected by patents, cutting prescription drug costs for consumers because any number of companies can now make the drug. "We allege in this complaint that the defendant companies' collusion was so pervasive that it essentially eliminated competition from the market for these 15 drugs in its entirety," Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen said in a statement. "Our ongoing investigation continues to uncover additional evidence, and we anticipate bringing more claims involving additional companies and drugs at the appropriate time." That's up from the 20 state attorneys who sued 6 companies, including Mylan, alleging the generic drugmakers colluded on prices. The drugs in question at the time were a generic antibiotic called doxycycline hyclate and an antidiabetic medication called glyburide. The states are zeroing in on a man named Rajiv Malik, Mylan's president and executive director, along with Satish Mehta, CEO at Emcure Pharmaceuticals. Mylan's shares are down more than 8% on the news. Mylan said in a statement: "We have been investigating these allegations thoroughly and have found no evidence of price fixing on the part of Mylan or its employees. Our review of the Connecticut Attorney General's press release underpinning the complaint does not change our views. We have asked the various attorneys general leading this case to share with us what information they believe supports these new allegations and, to date, they have not done so. Mylan has deep faith in the integrity of its President, Rajiv Malik, and stands behind him fully. Mylan and Rajiv Malik both intend to defend this case vigorously, and we look forward to the opportunity to present a full defense." Here are all the companies that are part of the expanded investigation, including the six originally included: Heritage Pharmaceuticals Aurobindo Pharma Citron Pharma Mayne Pharma Mylan Pharmaceuticals Teva Pharmaceuticals Actavis Holdco Actavis Pharma Ascend Laboratories Apotex Corp Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Emcure Pharmaceuticals Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Lannett Company, Inc. Par Pharmaceutical Companies Sandoz Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Zydus Pharmacuticuals

https://www.businessinsider.com/mylan-pricing-collusion-civil-investigation-expanded-2017-10

Business Insider

2016-05-25 00:00:00

2016

5.0

25

Lawmakers see path ahead for Puerto Rico rescue plan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Congressional plan to help Puerto Rico shed billions of dollars in bad debt can win enough support to make its way to a vote in the House of Representatives, U.S. lawmakers who support the measure said on Tuesday. Under the rescue plan, an independent panel would erase some of Puerto Rico’s $70 billion debt load that has crippled the island state already facing a 45 percent poverty rate and the Zika epidemic. U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a Republican, has endorsed the fix and the fate of the measure could help define his tenure as party leader which began in October. But Ryan can rely on some Democrats who say the rescue will aid the ailing island even if some of the legislation’s provisions are too punitive of Puerto Rico. “This is the only bill that will attract enough support from our colleagues on the Republican side to pass in a Congress they control,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, the leading Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee. Grijalva of Arizona said he expects lawmakers will ratify the plan when they write the fine-print of the legislation at a hearing on Wednesday. Rep. Rob Bishop, the panel’s chairman, postponed a law-writing session in April because of opposition to the Puerto Rico rescue but on Tuesday he said he was hopeful. Ryan and Democratic leaders stress the aid plan for the island means relief without federal spending though investors will see a cut in their Puerto Rican bond holdings and they are fighting for terms that could limit the hit to their portfolios. A leading voice for investors, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), on Tuesday backed the plan which expects Puerto Rico to control deficit spending. A Puerto Rico oversight panel, or control board, could veto Puerto Rico spending measures that it finds irresponsible and SIFMA endorsed such “broad powers to enforce and monitor fiscal discipline.” The oversight board would have the power to push creditors to accept a write-down of debt, even over the objections of holdout investors. The plan would also ask the oversight board to protect the interests of Puerto Rico pensioners who rely on a system that is now under funded by at least $40 billion.  Reporting By Susan Cornwell, Richard Cowan and Patrick Rucker; Editing by Bernard Orr

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-puertorico-debt-congress/lawmakers-see-path-ahead-for-puerto-rico-rescue-plan-idUSKCN0YF30C

Politics

Reuters

2019-02-06 19:00:00

2019

2.0

6

Becky Ferreira

Honeybees Can Add and Subtract, Study Finds

Honeybees can perform mathematical calculations such as addition and subtraction, according to a study published Wednesday in Science Advances. A team led by Scarlett Howard, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toulouse who goes by the handle “the beesearcher” on Twitter, devised an experiment that demonstrated that these insects could recognize gains and losses. “Given that honeybees and humans are separated by over 400 million years of evolution, our findings suggest that advanced numerical cognition may be more accessible to nonhuman animals than previously suspected,” said the authors. So how do you give honeybees a math test? Howard’s team conditioned 14 bees to associate the color blue with addition and yellow with subtraction. This was done with an appetitive-aversive (reward-punishment) method, meaning the bees received a sugary food reward when they selected the right color and a bitter-tasting quinine liquid when they were incorrect. The bees were exposed to an initial sample that displayed one to five shapes in either blue or yellow. They were then were trained fly into a “decision chamber” that contained two different display options. The bees were expected to recognize greater quantities in blue addition trials and smaller quantities in yellow subtraction trials. In the addition trials, one of the two blue displays contained one more shape than the initial sample—the correct answer. The other display showed a number that was equal to or fewer than the starting sample. For instance, say the bee first looked at a sample that had two blue shapes printed on it. Once it was in the decision chamber, it might be met with one display with three blue shapes while the other had one blue shape. The reverse was true for the subtraction trials. The bees became progressively better at the test and selected the correct answer 60 to 75 percent of the time, over 100 trials. The fact that the bees were able to learn how to complete these puzzles adds to the previous evidence that they are capable of grasping advanced numerical concepts. Last year, Howard and her colleagues at RMIT University published similar research, suggesting that honeybees understand the concept of zero. That experiment trained bees to select placards with lower quantities printed on them. When a blank placard was introduced, the bees understood that zero was less than one with 80 percent accuracy. These math skills may have been an important factor in the extraordinary evolutionary success of honeybees around the world. “While the specific task of addition/subtraction may not be directly apparent in the honeybee’s natural environment, the skills and cognitive plasticity required for performing the arithmetic task are likely to be ecologically advantageous,” Howard and her colleagues said in the study. For instance, they suggest that bees might be able to numerically assess what flower geometries provide the best resources. The researchers plan to continue giving bees more complicated math quizzes to further explore the range of their computational skills. Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter .

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/panae9/honeybees-can-add-and-subtract-study-finds

Tech by VICE

Vice

2016-07-26 00:00:00

2016

7.0

26

VICE News

Bernie, but shorter: The key moments from Bernie Sanders' DNC speech

On a night when every speaker at the Democratic National Convention called to unite the party behind Hillary Clinton, a vocal contingent of Bernie Sanders supporters repeatedly interrupted to disagree. Then the Vermont senator himself took the stage.Sanders quiets 'Bernie or Bust' contingent with plea for unity. Watch the speech's key moments, and then read our full analysis of the speech.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/wj9ed4/bernie-but-shorter-the-key-moments-from-bernie-sanders-dnc-speech

Vice News

2018-04-23 00:00:00

2018

4.0

23

Madonna Loses Lawsuit Over Tupac Letter Auction

1:00 PM PT -- The auction house just announced they'll start the auction in July. Madonna won't be able to put the brakes on the sale of an old jailhouse letter from Tupac that's being auctioned off because of a release she signed almost 15 years ago ... TMZ has learned. A judge has thrown out Madonna's lawsuit against Darlene Lutz, Madge's old pal and art consultant, saying a release she signed back in 2004 means she couldn't sue over the sale of the letter. According to the judge's order, Lutz had received several items over her two-decade-long relationship with Madonna, and when they ended things Darlene got to keep some stuff. The judge's view was that if Madonna didn't want the Tupac letter to be sold, she should've never signed the release. Madonna claimed that she never knew Darlene even had possession of the letter, which was deeply personal since Tupac touched on their breakup.

https://www.tmz.com/2018/04/23/madonna-loses-lawsuit-tupac-letter-auction/

TMZ

2017-11-19 00:00:00

2017

11.0

19

P!nk Performs on the Side of the JW Marriott Hotel for 2017 AMAs

P!nk sure knows her best angles -- 'cause she just did an entire performance on the side of a building ... and made it look effortless. The pop star did the death-defying stunt Sunday night in L.A. for the 2017 American Music Awards -- in which she hung off the side of the JW Marriott Hotel next to the Microsoft Theater while singing her song "Beautiful Trauma" ... just about 34 floors high. While the rest of us were covering our eyes in complete fear for her safety, P!nk looked like she'd just gotten hired as a Cirque du Soleil ... twirling around like a veteran acrobat. As we reported ... P!nk definitely got some practice in ahead of the performance, which seems like it paid off big time. Kids, don't try this at home.

https://www.tmz.com/2017/11/19/p-nk-performs-on-the-side-of-the-jw-marriott-hotel-for-2017-amas/

TMZ

2016-06-20 00:00:00

2016

6.0

20

Beyonce & Jay Z: Screw Pineapples ... We're Pushing Lemons

Beyonce's working with sour accessories in Hawaii ... call it a sweet marketing ploy. Bey and Jay Z are currently enjoying paradise beachside. Check out the pics ... Beyonce traded diamonds for a lemon rope. She's definitely got "Lemonade" on her mind ... in case that crown wasn't a dead giveaway. We've seen this before.

https://www.tmz.com/2016/06/20/jay-z-beyonce-hawaii-swimsuit-photos/

TMZ

2016-06-27 16:25:00

2016

6.0

27

James Butler

What's Next for the UK After Brexit

It happened. Much of Britain wishes it hadn't, and as the despairing hangover begins to recede, we will need to figure out what to do about it. There are three certainties about Brexit: One—that it is the biggest political crisis in Britain in 60 years. Two—that the changes it could force in the makeup of the British state and political system will be huge. Three—it highlights how utterly dysfunctional our current politics is, how divided and broken the country is. Meanwhile, Europe—the scapegoat for so many—is now gone. Think of the Brexiteer politician who told Sky News that no, actually, there was nothing behind the curtain—that "there is no plan." Think of Nigel Farage basking in his 4 AM victory, declaring "we won it without a bullet being fired" just ten days after a center-left MP was murdered by a committed fascist. Think of David Cameron jacking it all in, abandoning his post after losing the referendum he called to protect his own career. We are entering turbulent times, with nobody at the wheel. Though there have been desperate moves among some Remainers to find a way to nullify the referendum—to hold a second one, or just ignore it, or hope that the Scottish parliament will block it using some obscure constitutional wizardry—this would be a mistake. It would give the hard right a foundation myth of staggering power: the democratic will of the people overridden by a decadent cosmopolitan elite, who need purging from public life. It certainly beats burning down the Reichstag. Beyond being a gift to the very frothiest of racists, though, to press for a second referendum ignores one of the key dynamics of the campaign: an anti-elitist sentiment capitalized on by the Leavers. The bedrock of this was a sense that those in power do not listen and will bludgeon the electorate until they get their own way. It is true that referendums on the EU have been re-run before, in Ireland and Denmark, or ignored, as in France or Greece. But that comes with a cost: it undermines any claim the EU might try to make about its often rather tenuous democracy, and confirms every suspicion "no" voters have about distant technocrats and sham consultations. No: the vote is done. We must work with things as they are. How are they, then? Not good. The immediate economic impacts are obvious: the pound fell off a cliff, a sudden decline in foreign direct investment, international restructuring to move jobs elsewhere. It's hard to weep for a JP Morgan executive, but we're not just talking bankers: Britain's service-heavy economy makes it heavily exposed outside the EU, and there's little hope in concluding a simple deal on trade in services at any speed. In the medium term, another recession seems likely, as well as a "Brexit budget" to institute austerity of a kind undreamt of by the old coalition. The political ramifications are even less cheery. The Tories are in disarray, and it looks probable that Boris Johnson—a man who conspired to beat up a journalist, and was fired from the Times and a front bench position for lying—will ride an even bigger lie into Number ten. The Parliamentary Labour Party, seeing an opportunity with the Tories divided, has decided to gather itself into a circular firing squad. Corbyn, the only major politician to have refused to pander to xenophobia during the campaign, faces an attempted coup by MPs who have failed to learn that trying to ape racists only strengthens racists, and makes you look either cynical or clueless. You'd think that a party that printed up mugs emblazoned with promises to reduce immigration, before losing a general election anyway, might have learned this. If the state of parliamentary politics makes you despair, the widely reported rise in casual street racism and spike in racist attacks, sanctioned by a feverish Brexit atmosphere, might well make you fear. The effects of a vote aren't just in parliament, but in the fabric of our daily lives, too. The implications of Brexit are staggering for the workings of government, too. It seems likely that Whitehall will for years be caught up in extricating British law from EU law. Having shrunk by a fifth and with many departmental budgets slashed, it's almost certain that it will take up most of the civil service's attention. So extensive is the amount of regulation needing review and reform, and so constrained the timescale in which it will need doing, it's easy to imagine that the government will essentially be handed a rubber stamp for its chosen direction. It is certainly possible that Scotland will leave the UK—a possibility only hamstrung by the likelihood the EU would expect it to adopt the Euro, and the disinclination of Spain to make it easy for a small secessionist state to prosper. It also seems likely that political turbulence in Ireland will increase. And in the face of all this: there is no plan. Early intimations from the Leave camp are that they hope to negotiate membership of the European Economic Area (the market part of the EU)—the "Norway" model—but with restrictions on freedom of movement and freedom to pick and choose from European law. This will not happen. Free movement and acceptance of EU regulations are preconditions of EEA membership. If EEA membership does happen, it will exacerbate political tension. It would mean keeping freedom of movement, which would see the anti-migrant voters crying betrayal. Traditional party votes in the Brexit heartlands would collapse and new UKIP MPs would get elected. It would also probably signal the end of the Labour Party as it currently exists. This is comparatively benign; its more malignant expressions are much darker. This is the culmination of a longer story. For 30 years, media and politicians have scapegoated both Europe and migrants as catch-all explanations for why people's lives are blighted and hopeless. We've had reliance on a boom led by the South East, very limited redistribution elsewhere and no substantial fix to the gutted industrial landscape. That—and the ever-growing distance between the political class and the electorate—has led to an explosive situation without clear resolution. In the referendum campaign, the Leavers filled that gap with the kind of lies that are seductive because they promise a very simple world, with very simple fixes. Everyone else is just out for themselves—for instance, the "experts" Gove derided for supposedly pulling the wool over people's eyes. Certainly, some experts are easy to hate, but when those lies unravel, as they very quickly have done, they will leave an even wider and more bitter gap. That is why Boris Johnson is not a clown, or a jester, or light relief: Boris Johnson is a cancer in public life. No immediate political solution seems obvious. Any plan relying on a general election will have to overcome the new Fixed-term Parliaments Act and then actually win the contest. Both are mammoth tasks, and Labour's coffers are depleted. It is certainly necessary for anyone who wants to resist the rightward drift on migration to defend Corbyn's leadership: he has acted as the only bulwark against migrant-bashing in Parliament. Movements outside Westminster in solidarity with migrants will require more active involvement from those disturbed by the racist drift of our politics. But that is fire-fighting—necessary to prevent total ruin of our house, but not enough to rebuild it. Despite the chaos, we must also think in wider terms. The larger task is to survey the changing geography of British politics and look squarely at the failure of the left in this country. Not only the failure to defend the economic fabric of our common life—secure pay, good housing, accessible education—but its political expression. If the Leavers have profited on anti-political feeling, the only possible solution is to find some way of remaking politics so that the specters of fear and insecurity, and disdain for a distant political class, no longer animate so much of the electorate. That requires us to remake our democracy as well. It is a gargantuan task, but it may well be the only thing that can defang the vipers now at the heart of our politics. Follow James Butler on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wdbqmq/how-to-benefit-from-brexit

Europe: The Final Countdown

Vice

2017-08-09 00:00:00

2017

8.0

9

Mike Vick's Wife Hits QB With Sex Ban Over Kaepernick Afro Comments

Mike Vick is officially on a sex time out -- with his wife formally pulling booty privileges over his stupid comments about Colin Kaepernick's afro. Kijafa Vick called out the QB on their reality show, "Baller Wives" -- saying she was sick of getting attacked on social media over the bad advice Mike dished out last month on FS1. "Why does he have to change his hair to get a job?" Kijafa asked. "I don’t know, Kijafa – I was wrong." Mike tried to explain himself ... "I shouldn’t have said what I said. No one in any race should be stereotyped based on the way they look, dress, act -- but that’s the reality of the world we live in." Kijafa says the drama surrounding the comments makes her "relive a part of our life that I want to put in the past" ... a clear reference to the dog fighting scandal. In the end, Vick apologized to his wife -- but still, no booty. "First thing we got to get Colin to do is cut his hair." — @MikeVick advises Kaepernick on rebuilding his image pic.twitter.com/YENvUPOIgP

https://www.tmz.com/2017/08/09/mike-vick-wife-kaepernick-afro/

TMZ

2018-11-28 15:30:00

2018

11.0

28

Marie Solis

Brett Kavanaugh Is Back to Coaching His Daughter's Basketball Team

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Kavanaugh returned to coaching his daughter's basketball team, the very activity he worried he'd be barred from as a result of Ford's allegations, which he vehemently denied. “I love coaching more than anything I’ve ever done in my whole life,” Kavanaugh said during September's Senate Judiciary hearings. “But thanks to what some of you on this side of the committee have unleashed, I may never be able to coach again.” Kavanaugh coached a "Turkey Shootout" tournament last weekend, coordinated by Joe Sego, the coach and athletic director at a local Catholic school, who told the Washington Post he'd felt confident Kavanaugh would be back on the basketball court after enough time had passed. “I was very concerned when the confirmation hearings were going on that we could run into some issues,” Sego told the Post. “But I figured since a little bit of time had gone on and things had kind of settled down, that it would be okay—and it was. There was no issue whatsoever.” At other times, Kavanaugh's public appearances have been met with outright celebration. Earlier this month, Kavanaugh received a standing ovation from the audience at the Federalist Society's annual convention in DC. And when he attended a homecoming football game at Georgetown Preparatory Academy, at which many of the allegations against him centered, Kavanaugh was reportedly lauded as a "hero," according to the Post, posing for photos and mingling with his fellow alums. The ease with which Kavanaugh has apparently been able to slip back into the routines of his life is a stark contrast to reports of Ford's life post-Senate Judiciary hearings. In October, as Kavanaugh prepared to hear his first Supreme Court case on the bench, one of Ford's attorneys told MSNBC that her client continued to face the same "unending" death threats that had resulted in Ford and her family relocating weeks before. “This has been terrifying," Debra Katz said at the time. "Her family has been through a lot. They are not living at home. It's going to be quite some time before they're able to live at home." Last week, Ford spoke out publicly for the first time in more than a month, issuing a statement on a GoFundMe page a group of supporters had launched to cover security measures to protect Ford and her family. Ford wrote that she'd used some of the more than $647,000 in donations to pay for security detail, a home security service, and to subsidize temporary housing during the time she's been displaced. Ford said she'd be closing the fund and donating additional funds to organizations that support survivors of sexual trauma. “Your tremendous outpouring of support and kind letters have made it possible for us to cope with the immeasurable stress, particularly the disruption to our safety and privacy,” Ford wrote. “Because of your support, I feel hopeful that our lives will return to normal.”

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xy4xe/brett-kavanaugh-basketball-coach-christine-blasey-ford

Identity

Vice

2019-06-26 00:00:00

2019

6.0

26

David Shepardson

White House plans new social media summit as Congress raises questions

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House announced on Wednesday it will hold a summit on social media next month amid growing criticism from President Donald Trump and some in Congress. The White House did not say who would take part in the July 11 gathering and major social media firms did not immediately confirm they would attend. White House spokesman Judd Deere said the meeting would “bring together digital leaders for a robust conversation on the opportunities and challenges of today’s online environment.” U.S. politicians, led by Trump, have increasingly used social media to try to go around traditional media and woo voters directly via social media platforms. Trump has said on many occasions that he would have been elected without Twitter and Facebook. Trump, who has more than 61 million Twitter followers, on Wednesday renewed his regular attacks on Twitter suggesting without offering evidence in a Fox Business Network interview that Twitter makes it “very hard for people to join me at Twitter ... and they make it very much harder for me to get out the message. “Twitter is just terrible what they do.” Twitter did not immediately comment while Facebook declined to comment on the summit Wednesday. Alphabet Inc’s Google unit did not immediately respond to a request for comment. At a U.S. House Homeland Security Committee hearing Wednesday, executives from the three major social media firms face questioned about efforts to remove extremist content and alleged political bias Representative Bennie Thompson, a Democrat who chairs the committee, cited the live-streaming of an attack that killed 51 people and wounded 49 at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Facebook and said social media companies need to do more to prevent such content “from spreading on your platforms again.” He said they must also do a better job keeping “hate speech and harmful misinformation off their platforms.” In April, Trump met with Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey and spent a significant time questioning him about why he had lost some Twitter followers, a person briefed on the matter told Reuters. The source said Dorsey explained in response to Trump’s concerns about losing followers that the company was working to remove fraudulent and spam accounts and that many famous people, including Dorsey himself, had diminished followings as a result. Trump again complained on Wednesday he was not gaining followers as quickly as he previously did. Trump lost 204,000 of his 53.4 million followers in July 2018, according to social media data firm Keyhole, when Twitter started purging suspicious accounts after it and other social media services were used in misinformation campaigns attempting to influence voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential race and other elections. Trump has one of the most-followed accounts on Twitter. But the president and Republicans in Congress have repeatedly criticized the company and its social media competitors for what they have called bias against conservatives, something Twitter denies. Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Bill Trott

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-socialmedia/update-1-white-house-plans-new-social-media-summit-as-congress-raises-questions-idUSL2N23X14U

Politics

Reuters

2018-06-22 16:50:32

2018

6.0

22

Ben Gilbert

'Fortnite' is changing how building works, and Ninja isn't happy about it

"Fortnite" is the world's most popular game, with over 125 million players.Epic Games, makers of "Fortnite," are looking to evolve the gameplay. "We are exploring changes to weapon balance and resource economy, like e.g. resource caps," a post on Epic's blog said.Building without limits is core to the gameplay of "Fortnite," and limiting that could turn off a lot of players — including Ninja, the most popular player in the world, who's already voiced his displeasure.

https://www.businessinsider.com/fortnite-changes-building-resource-ninja-2018-6

Business Insider

2018-10-27 00:00:00

2018

10.0

27

Edward M. Gómez

Yoko Ono Sings As If Our Lives Depended on It

With Warzone, the artist revisits some of her older anthems, whose themes are more timely than ever. Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads As millions of her Twitter and Instagram followers know, even now, at 85, the multimedia artist Yoko Ono is still deeply involved in making art and music, and in activism on behalf of women’s rights and the environment, including campaigning against fracking. Her decades-old call for putting an end to war and giving peace a chance has become more timely than ever. Now, against the current backdrop of out-of-control hostility, destruction of nature, political lies and chicanery, repression of human rights, and corruption without impunity of all kinds, Ono has emerged with Warzone (Chimera Music), her newest musical project. Executed over a short period of time this past summer, Warzone features dramatically reworked versions of some of the artist-composer’s own songs from her past albums. Produced in collaboration with the young American keyboardist Thomas Bartlett (who usually performs as “Doveman”), Ono’s Warzone comes as a somewhat unexpected missive from this grandmother and modern-art doyenne, whose roof-busting scream in “Why” on her debut album, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (1970), announced a radical fusion of the avant-garde and rock, and whose inventive use of mass media and celebrity helped create new delivery methods for conceptual art. “It feels like we’re all living in a warzone today,” Ono told me during a recent interview at her home in the Dakota, the hulking apartment building in uptown Manhattan, where she and John Lennon settled in the 1970s. She explained that, a few months ago, acting quickly on an impulse in response to an inundation of ugly, dispiriting news, she combed through her large body of recorded music and selected a batch of songs whose themes and messages still sound urgent right now. Ono, who was concerned about her voice after recovering from flu-like symptoms that slowed her down in 2016, said, “At first I thought I would wait until next year, but then, every day in the newspaper, it’s this and that — and I thought, ‘Are you kidding? I’m not going to wait.’” In enlisting Bartlett, who is known for his stripped-down interpretations that reveal the essence of other songwriters’ compositions (material as diverse as David Bowie’s “Lazarus” or the soundtrack of the 1984 film Footloose), Ono found a collaborator who instinctively cut some fat from her original recordings to expose her songs’ structures and showcase their melodies. Bartlett also gently calls attention to the distinctive character of her songs, which sometimes feature quirky chord changes or phrases. (“I’m just living on tiptoe, feeling like so-so,” she sings in “It’s Gonna Rain.”) Ono said, “I knew about Tom, who had done a few of my songs before, and I knew his sensibility.” She decided that assembling a conventional backing band “was not the way to go” this time and recalled, “I said to Tom, ‘You and I are going to make this record — along with the animals.’” The sounds of elephants honking, monkeys screeching, and other beasts cooing, whining, and wailing open and close the album, and punctuate various passages of Warzone’s songs. Ono said, “Animals are musicians, too.” Warzone revisits songs from such Ono albums as Approximately Infinite Universe (1973), Feeling the Space (1973), Starpeace (1985), and Rising (1995). From Approximately, “Now or Never” is an unabashedly political song, originally performed in a folk-music style and first released when the Vietnam War had become an ever more costly, desperate, aimless mission. Dismissed by some critics at the time as both idealistic and naive in its message, in the face of the Trump fascists’ destruction of democracy, its lyrics could not be more timely. Now delicately propelled on gusts of synthesizer and the gurgle of an electric piano, in Warzone’s version of “Now or Never,” Ono sings: Are we gonna keep pretending things are alright? Are we gonna keep our mouths closed just in case? Are we gonna keep putting off until it’s too late? Are we gonna be known as the century of fear? Isolating the electric-guitar riff that anchors Ono’s feminist anthem “Woman Power,” from Feeling the Space, Bartlett pushes her voice forward in the mix; here, she declaims as much as she sings, like an older woman, mother, and observer of human foibles who has witnessed a lifetime of power plays by macho men and beer-soaked bromancers: Every woman has a song to sing. Every woman has a story to tell. And make no mistake about it, brothers, We women have the power to move the mountains! For such songs as “I Love All of Me,” an empowerment anthem for the bullied, overlooked, and powerless; “Children Power,” a jaunty march whose all-embracing spirit offers a lift for little ones from the playground to the boardroom; and “It’s Gonna Rain,” in which Ono, with little-girl glee, runs outside into a drenching downpour, Bartlett peels away the drum machines and bombast of their original 1980s versions. Such new arrangements give Warzone the feeling of an intimate recital, with Ono and Bartlett capturing the essence of each song in one or two takes, and only minimal layering-on of additional instruments, effects, or vocals — children’s voices, animal sounds, or the replicated sound of machine-gun fire. Into the overall mix Ono drops her familiar yelps, gulps, chortles, whoops, yodel-like cries, and full-throttled caterwauls, providing remarkably appropriate textures to several songs’ new settings. Her detractors will never like — or understand — her music, and that, she knows, is okay. However, for numerous alternative-rock acts, there are lessons to be derived from her take-no-prisoners candor and unflagging experimentation. Listen, for example, to “Gold Rush,” from Death Cab for Cutie’s recently released Thank You for Today, which samples the underlying riff from Ono’s funk-romp “Mindtrain,” from her 1971 album Fly. Or “This Cities Undone,” from Moonlandingz’s debut album Interplanetary Class Classics (2017), in which Ono cries “Wake up!” and “Get on with it!” throughout a spaced-out sonic ride. Then there is the British DJ-producer Hifi Sean’s “In Love with Life,”   from his 2016 album Ft., which features Ono lamenting, over a fluid-seductive, inescapably danceable groove, humanity’s tendency for self-destruction. “It saddens me, because I am really in love with life — and with people,” she observes. “They’re beautiful.” Such humanistic strains have long been present in Ono’s art. Today, the spirit of the written, kōan-like instruction pieces she produced early in her career has given way to the nuggets of wisdom or well-meaning provocation Ono telegraphs via Twitter to the world. “Healing yourself is connected with healing others,” a recent tweet advised. Another observed, “Music is in all our blood. Some of us just haven’t discovered that yet. For someone who ostensibly has been lying low, Ono is lately everywhere. Along with granting younger music-makers avant-garde cred through guest appearances on their records or samplings from her own recordings, Ono last year was recognized by the National Music Publishers’ Association in the US as the co-author, with John Lennon, of the song “Imagine.” (In a 1980 BBC interview, Lennon had said, “That should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song because a lot of it — the lyric and the concept — came from Yoko.”) Now, Imagine John Yoko (Grand Central Publishing), a new book chronicling the creation of Lennon’s Imagine album and its now-classic title song, has just come out. Ono compiled its never-before-published selection of photos and documents from the Lennons’ archive and sought recollections from the musicians who played on the record, whose production began at their Georgian-style mansion near London, in 1971. The book illuminates the breadth of Lennon and Ono’s exchange of ideas and influences in the early years of their partnership and, in retrospect, adds to our understanding of the roots of many of their later art and music projects. For inquisitive Ono-ologists, a last batch of re-releases from the labels Secretly Canadian and Chimera Music of her past solo albums, including Wedding Album (made with Lennon in 1969) and those of more recent decades, will be issued next year. Meanwhile, the film Imagine, which Lennon and Ono made to accompany Lennon’s album has been restored and released in theaters. First seen in 1972, it is now regarded as a pioneering, long-form music video, consisting of segments illustrating each of the album’s songs. In them, Ono’s familiar references to skies and water, and her earlier experience as a maker of experimental films, are evident. For all the heady idealism of “Imagine,” which she also records on Warzone, and, for that matter, of much of Ono’s work, there is grit and unsettling candor in her music, too. “Are we getting tired of blood and horror? Are we getting ready for God and terror?” she sings in “Where Do We Go from Here?” In “Warzone,” she pleads, “It’s a warzone. Men flashing their guns and balls. Women looking like Barbie dolls. […] Help us. Help us.” As our conversation shifted back to current events — it took place before Trump’s latest pronouncements against women and a free press; the latest suicide bombing in Afghanistan; and the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul — Ono alluded to such horrific news and the sense of darkness and hopelessness it engenders: “We’re all stuck in it. We’ve got to wake up. It’s terrible, and I’m very sad and angry about it, about grown men who still do not seem to understand that getting money isn’t everything. But still, I understand them. When I say, in one of my songs, ‘I love all of me,’ I’m really talking about loving everyone — and that includes those asses.” Whether in its original, big-beat, 1985 version on Starpeace or now, on Warzone, enveloped in an ethereal overdub of Ono’s voice, peppered with sinister background laughter and the singer’s guttural spurts, “Hell in Paradise” captures the peculiar mix of hopefulness and foreboding that is the new album’s signature. With the chilling accuracy of a song like Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times” (1987), Ono sings: This is hell in paradise We’re all asleep or paralyzed Why are we scared to verbalize Our multi-color dreams? When will we come to realize We’re all stoned or pacified While the boogeymen organize Their multilevel schemes? We’ve become, she sings, “Mesmerized by mythology. Hypnotized by ideology. Antagonized by reality. Vandalized by insanity. Jeopardized by lunacy.” I asked Ono about the positive vibe that pulses through her work even when it takes on heavy subjects — domestic abuse, gun violence, war (the impact of which she witnessed firsthand as a child in Japan) — and if she still has a sense of optimism. “Of course, I do,” she said. “But it’s very hard.” So, how or why, I asked her, despite the unfathomable crisis in which the world finds itself today, does she remain optimistic? Ono leaned forward and, as though revealing the most obvious-than-ever answer to the knottiest of kōan riddles, matter-of-factly replied, “Because I’m alive.”

https://hyperallergic.com/467704/yoko-ono-warzone-2018/

Hyperallergic

2016-11-09 18:48:00

2016

11.0

9

Lawrence Burney

Mr. Eazi Wants to Connect a Billion People Through Afrobeats

When Mr. Eazi returned to his native Nigeria from Kumasi, Ghana, two years ago, it wasn't to chase a dream of being a successful music artist. In fact, he was trying to get away from music in order to make a practical living for himself—one that didn't depend on hanging in clubs. "I thought it was a gamble because in the African system, there is no proper setup for distribution of African music or promotion of African music," the 25-year-old Afrobeats artist tells me over the phone from Accra. "How you get your music out in Nigeria and Ghana? You go pay the radio station huge sums of money, pay TV stations to play your video, and you're not even sure if it's a good investment. To me, it was like going to the casino and throwing away money." That system didn't work for Eazi. Due to his time as a party promoter at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, he knew a bit about what audiences were looking for. Stepping away was hardly a crisis for him. On the phone, he calmly speaks as someone with plenty of poise to make a taxing decision. "I was always around and helping emerging artists because they wanted to get on my shows for free just to show themselves," he remembers. He'd pay them, but if anything that kept his own ambitions in check. He adds, "I didn't used to pay them a lot of money. I knew how much I booked them for." Being a promoter gave Mr. Eazi access to the scene, and he booked some of West Africa's biggest artists, such as Ghana's Sarkodie and R2Bees and Nigeria's Wande Coal. That connection would occasionally lead him to the studios of artists vying for his attention. "One of those days I went to a studio and a guy told me I should jump on this record, so I did it," he proudly recalls. "It became a very popular record at school because it was good and I was already popular from being a promo guy and party boy." That song—"My Life" a minimally produced Afrobeats tune—took off, and by sheer circumstance, Mr. Eazi was unofficially born that day. The Afrobeats music that Mr. Eazi makes is the ascendent contemporary West African pop genre, born out of 70s, Fela Kuti-headed, jazz-infused Afrobeat (with no "s") and merging those sounds with elements of house music, dancehall, soca, and hip-hop. As Eazi's first attempt at contributing to the genre gained more traction around campus, he put a pause on partying and started hitting the studio on Friday nights after class. Still, the social currency his new music provided couldn't prevent him from making the move back to Nigeria. "I'm not gonna lie, I disrespected the music," he tells me—his deep voice and speedy delivery regularly punctuated by "uh"s. "And because of how easy I made the music, you know, I'd just go to the studio, and I could make like ten songs in one day. Then I wouldn't go for two months, go back and make another five songs. So I didn't really put value on it and I wasn't pushing my music. For me, it was just a hobby." Many of the most popular Afrobeats artists—such as Wizkid, Davido​, and Patoranking—wield an upbeat vocal tempo, but Eazi's brand is a direct contrast to his contemporaries. He uses his calming, deep hum of a voice to give ballad-like qualities to dance-forward production. As a result, his music has an R&B-like quality reminiscent of Beres Hammond, Gregory Isaacs, and others who took on reggae in the 70s to create the subgenre of lovers rock. In conversation, Eazi has a modest confidence; everything he says feels like it's been pondered on many times before our talk. That kind of calculation has almost certainly contributed to the success he's seen up to this point, which has all come without releasing a proper project and which makes the case for his eventual stardom even stronger. Born Ajibade Tosin in Port Harcourt—the largest city in Rivers State, Nigeria—Mr. Eazi grew up with strong examples of entrepreneurship in his life. His mother owned a small business, and his father, a pilot, ran his own private aviation consulting practice. Aside from a short stint in the choir at his primary school in Lagos, Eazi had no musical background to speak of. At 16, inspired by distant maternal relatives in Ghana, he moved from Port Harcourt to Kumasi to prepare for college, and, once at school, he studied mechanical engineering. Although he flirted with music at Kwame Nkrumah, his business acumen led Eazi back to Nigeria, where he started his own e-commerce platform for trading stocks in Lagos at 23. Preoccupied with handling his company, Eazi fell out of music quite easily. But, within two months of the move in late 2014, he got a direct message on Twitter from Juls, a UK-based Ghanaian producer and DJ who had gotten his hands on a few songs Eazi recorded while still in Kumasi. Juls reached out to collaborate, but Eazi stalled, for a long time unable to even find the files from his old songs. When he finally sent vocals to Juls, the producer made a new beat and proper artwork to what would become Mr. Eazi's first single, "Bankulize," featuring Ghanaian hip-life artist Pappy Kojo. "The day Juls put it out, I was so busy at my startup, I wasn't even on Twitter," Eazi remembers. "I come on Twitter later in the night and I had so many tweets. So after that, I started going back to the studio and would send everything I recorded to Juls." After Juls dropped the track in November of 2014, it began to rack up plays, and its video, which was released in January of this year, now has over 2 million views. That's no flash in the pan, though; including "Bankulize," five videos Eazi released this year have eclipsed the 1 million view mark—"Skintight," "Hollup," "Anointing,"​ and "Dance For Me" being the others. In Ghana in December 2015, Eazi opened up for Ghanaian star Sarkodie, whom Eazi had previously booked during his time as a promoter. It was the biggest moment of his career up to that point. "Sarkodie asked me to perform at his gig, so I get there, got on stage and everybody started screaming," he says, still sounding amazed as he walks me through the event. "That's when it really hit me that, maybe I'm onto something. From that day, I thought, let's put some time and attention to the music." The next day, Eazi, who was still operating his startup full time, and his team started tracking their streams and sales. They realized that the bulk of both was coming from the UK, partly due to Juls's promotion of their collaborations. They set up a four-show UK tour for July of this year. Afterward, Eazi entrusted a friend to run his startup, started setting up interviews to promote his music, and finally put up a website. Over the past year, Afrobeats has garnered more attention in North America than ever before, most notably when Nigeria's Wizkid—Afrobeats' biggest artist—made an appearance on Drake's hit single "One Dance" in April of this year. Since its release, it has become the most streamed song of all time on Spotify, totaling over 880 million plays—a sure win for Afrobeats and African music, in general. Last year, another Nigerian Afrobeats star, Davido, collaborated with Meek Mill for his song, "Fans Mi," and this year he released a single with Tinashe called "How Long" for his Son of Mercy EP . Both artists signed record deals with Sony Music subsidiary RCA Records this year. Wizkid's deal was the biggest ever signed by an African artist. It's a pivotal time in black music around the world, as the rise in popularity of Afrobeats is mirrored by the mainstream resurgence of Caribbean music in America. At the same time, since the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, there has been a boost in awareness of police violence and injustices against black Americans, and a developing signal seems to be crying across much of the global African diaspora that is using music to mend severed connections. It's similar to what happened in the 1960s, when artists like Nigeria's Fela Kuti, Jamaica's Bob Marley, and America's Nina Simone used their music to narrate the social challenges that blacks were facing in their respective countries. At the time, nations in Africa and the Caribbean were gaining their independence from European powers, while black Americans were fighting to gain their civil rights. The music being made in each of these countries tapped into a broader narrative of struggle that then helped each of these artists find traction among international audiences. It's a phenomenon that Mr. Eazi is aware of, but he's still keeping his guard up. "Right now, because Drake had a song with Wizkid, people will start listening to other songs that have that kind of sound," Eazi tells me, his tone giving off more passion and urgency than any other point in our conversation. "On the politics side, it's good because now the dancehall genre and the Afrobeats genre are getting a wider exposure, wider access, wider fan base. At the same time, I feel it's now the responsibility of African artists to maintain their originality and make sure they are not lost in the whole craze and export because the moment this sound is hijacked and an African artist starts to sound like Drake, then there's nothing we have to give anymore." Cautious of being a victim of swift, under-the-nose acculturation, Eazi decided to put his debut album on hold in order to release a mixtape that features him exclusively performing indigenous West African music called Accra to Lagos, which he recently announced would be released on December 1. The project's inspiration came over the summer when, after his string of shows in the UK and getting offers to collaborate with Western artists, Eazi realized that people were not genuinely interested in what he had to offer. "Most of the musicians coming to work with me are not coming to work with me to project my culture or project my sound," he says. "They're coming to change my sound to sound like what they think the rest of the world wants. Mr. Eazi is not Tory Lanez. Mr. Eazi is not Bryson Tiller. I should be able to have my heart. I should be able to have a video where we're in an African farm and show the cows." A a good chunk of Mr. Eazi's listeners may not understand the lyrics in Accra to Lagos, but his mission transcends language barriers. "It's education at the end of the day. Even though, I feel that if every artist is on the same page, it's gonna be an interesting time because there are a lot of people of African descent around the world," he pauses to think. "I think it's over 1 billion. There's no reason why we shouldn't be able to reach out to a billion people around the world with the culture and the music to bridge that gap that has been severed by slavery and export." Photography: Mohamed Abdulle. Follow him on Instagram. ​ Lawrence Burney is a Staff Writer at Noisey. Follow him on Twitter ​

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kwzp33/mr-eazi-wants-to-connect-a-billon-people-through-afrobeats

Noisey

Vice

2016-03-24 18:20:00

2016

3.0

24

Derek Mead

Microsoft's Tay Experiment Was a Total Success

Heretofore, we humans have always been inherently narcissistic in our embrace of progress. From our nervous fascination with sexbots to the anthrocentric blinders that guide our search for aliens, our innovations are rarely more than a mirror shining back on our own needs. And why wouldn't it be selfish? The goal is to make the world a better, more interesting place, but those are naturally subjective targets. The big question, then, is if we keep pushing technology and discovery further and further, who is it for? This is what Rose Eveleth asks in her new column, Design Bias: tech is reflective of the people who build and design it, which means that if the builders lack a diverse perspective, so will the end product. Using the example of facial recognition algorithms, which have struggled with already-marginalized groups, she writes, "facial recognition is a simple reminder: once again, this tech is not made for you." These types of biases are not necessarily made with malice, but it's no more excusable for tech to end up being exclusionary simply because its developers weren't aware that they might have blind spots in the first place. Our future is not distributed evenly, and access and inclusion are the most important issues facing the most important industries and areas of development today. But this week we've seen insight into an entirely different aspect of this gradiated future: What happens when, instead of tech being designed in the image of its designers, it ends up being reflective of each individual user? A truly distributed technology would learn its mores from all of us. Will we like what we see? A whole lot of blogs have been written about Tay, the Microsoft chatbot meant to mimic teens in order to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding," per Tay's official site. Through "casual and playful conversation" on Twitter, Tay was designed with an AI-like ability to learn how humans speak so it could better connect with us—so we can have an "experience can be more personalized for you." Who is "you," here? At first, the "you" of Tay was a corporate dad stuck in the uncanny valley of teen talk—I'll never stop laughing at Tay's nonsensical original bio, "Microsoft's A.I. fam from the internet that's got zero chill!", which read like a 90s commercial for scrunchies—which is about what you'd expect from a Microsoft research project aimed at teens. No harm, no foul, aside from some awkwardness. But then, thousands and thousands of tweets later, where did Tay end up? As a virulent racist, of course. Tay is designed to specifically not be reflective of its own designers, but reflective of whoever interacts with it. In that, it was certainly a success! It's a notable shift in design considerations: the "you" in this case are the people who actually use Tay, which is theoretically not exclusionary at all. Tay has no blind spots, because Tay is constantly learning from its users. Contrast this with Siri, which didn't know how to react to questions about rape or domestic abuse, presumably because it never occurred to the programmers that someone might want to make that search. If tech is designed purely to learn and evolve in response to its users, not its designers, then design bias would seemingly be a moot point. Presumably, that's why Microsoft built Tay in the first place. If the company recognizes it's not so great at talking to teens, why even waste time trying to build products that speak to what its older engineers think teens are into? Why not build tech that goes out there and finds out and responds on its own? In this ideal scenario, engineers can avoid excluding people by having an AI do market research, communications, and strategy development in real time. This episode of the Radio Motherboard podcast explores how humans treat bots. It is available on all podcast apps and iTunes. Hilariously enough, there's bias implicit to what seems like such a democratic ideal: the programmers made a rather rosy assumption about what Tay would be exposed to out there on the wild, wild web. They forgot that building a technology to purely mirror a user base means it will reflect ALL of that user base. And guess what, this is the internet: there are a lot of generally shitty people out there, and they tend to delight in being louder than everyone else. It's notable that more than a few posts recapping Tay's racist tirades spent precious sentences explaining that it wasn't Microsoft or Tay's fault that the chatbot had learned a bunch of horrible racist tropes and 9/11 memes from its users. It's an algorithm, the argument goes, and an experimental one at that, so let's not burn down Redmond. It's a fair argument to make that we shouldn't blame algorithms and nascent AI for doing dumb things. But this makes for a rather profound conundrum: Who is in control of Tay? Microsoft, much like Twitter, is certainly guilty of being fundamentally unaware of how quickly Twitter can turn into a garbage fire. So while Microsoft presumably did a good turn by recognizing its own blind spots and trying to AI its way out—this also is just an obvious admission of its inability to corral younger users—Microsoft still has shown a fundamental misunderstanding of just how trollish Twitter users can be. That's especially glaring considering just about every major corporate outreach program online always ends up getting trolled. Remember the Coca-Cola Hitler moment? This matters, not as an excuse to blame Microsoft or Coke for the actions of trolls, but as evidence that the most important democratizing technology on the horizon—truly intelligent AI—is still highly susceptible to the blind spots of its creators. The dream is that an AI that can get to know you—as in you, the person reading this now—will end up being free of prejudice or bias. It'll learn who you are, and exist to help you, and won't inadvertently ignore your needs or say something accidentally offensive. The more important lesson here is significantly larger: As all of our devices come online and talk to each other and make decisions and actions for themselves based on their study of our own habits, the Internet of Things is going to turn into its own proto-neural network, an AI by proxy that will eventually be filled more and more with actual AI. The dream is big: Tech that works for you to do exactly what it knows you, individual reader, need, rather than what a company thinks you, generic target user group, need. Yet as Tay shows, humans are not as polished as a marketing-based profile of our humanity would suggest. That means technology that's truly reflective of who we all are will include the obnoxious and the terrible, and the only way around that is the same solution to problems of bias that affect tech now: development and engineering teams that aren't built to be diverse enough to identify their blind spots in addressing users are inevitably going to misunderstand the reality of their users' experiences—at their own peril.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3dadk5/microsofts-tay-experiment-was-a-total-success

Tech by VICE

Vice

2017-02-02 11:00:01

2017

2.0

2

Peter Kafka

Super Bowl 2017: Here’s how you can stream the game

The Super Bowl starts at 6:30 pm ET this Sunday, Feb. 5. Most people will watch the New England Patriots play the Atlanta Falcons the old-fashioned way — on TV, where Fox will broadcast the game. But do you want to stream the Super Bowl instead? No problem: Fox will stream the game, for free, at FoxSportsGo.com. You can also use a free Fox Sports Go app to watch the game on iOS, Android and Amazon tablets — but not phones — as well as connected TV devices including Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast and Xbox. And don’t worry, cord-cutters: Just like last year, when CBS streamed the game, you won’t need a pay TV subscription to watch. You want more options? Fine: If you’re a Verizon customer, you can watch the game on your phone, via the NFL app. And if you have a subscription to a streaming TV service, you may also be able to watch the game there, though that will likely depend on what city you live in. Sling TV customers who have Sling’s “Blue” package can watch the game — but only if they live in Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Detroit, Gainesville, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, Tampa or Washington, D.C. AT&T’s DirecTV Now service, meanwhile, will stream the game to people in a slightly smaller set of cities: Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Detroit, Gainesville, L.A., Minneapolis, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, Tampa and Washington, D.C. Confusing, right? Here’s the bigger issue for most people who want to stream the game: The internet really isn’t set up to stream live sports. I explained why last year. That doesn’t mean it won’t work — last year’s CBS stream worked very nicely, after some initial hiccups — but you may have to work a little harder to watch something most people watch just by sitting on their couch and hitting a button. What’s that? You really, really want to stream the Super Bowl, and you don’t want to hear from naysayers? Fine. Here’s a list of hints I compiled last year, when we went through this same exercise. Good luck, and go Falcons: Finally, an alternate method that may make you just as happy as a stream: Ditch the Web and use an antenna. Doing so could provide you (depending on your geography) with a crystal-clear HD signal, without ever having to use terms like “buffering.” The Wirecutter says you can get a really good indoor antenna that won’t look insanely ugly for as little as $10, but if you’re reading this now, it’s probably too late to order one. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2017/2/2/14479772/super-bowl-51-2017-nfl-sunday-stream-watch-online

Vox

2016-04-19 00:00:03

2016

4.0

19

Dara Lind

Vox Sentences: Supreme Court Kremlinology, immigration edition

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind. Add your email to receive a daily newsletter from Vox breaking down the top stories of the day. .newsletter-li { margin: 20px 0; font-size: 1.1em !important; } .newsletter-li:before { background: #808285 !important; border-radius: 50% !important; width: 5px !important; height: 5px !important; top: 7px !important } .newsletter-ul { margin: 0 0 0 30px !important; padding: 0 !important; } .newsletter-p { font-size: 1.2em; margin: .3em 0 !important; } .newsletter-h3{ color: #363636; font-weight: 800 !important; } .newsletter-sponsored { font-size: 70%; vertical-align: middle; text-transform: uppercase; margin-right: 10px; } .newsletter-sponsored__image img { display: inline; vertical-align: middle; } .newsletter-logo { text-align: center; } .newsletter-logo img { max-width: 400px; width: 100%; } .newsletter-source { font-size: .9em; } .newsletter-signup-container { border-top: #e0dedf solid 2px; margin: 3em 0; padding-top: 2em; } .newsletter-signup { margin-top: 1em; text-align: center; max-width: 400px; margin: 0 auto; } .newsletter-signup h2 { font-family: "HarrietDisplayBlack","Harriet display",Harriet,serif; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; } .newsletter-intro { font-size: 1.4em; margin: .3em 0 !important; } .newsletter-section { background-color: #fff200; display: inline-block; font-weight: 700; margin: 0; padding: 0; }

https://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11456140/vox-sentences-supreme-court-united-states-v-texas

Vox

2018-12-11 17:54:00

2018

12.0

11

Joseph Cox

Google CEO Says No Plan to ‘Launch’ Censored Search Engine in China

On Tuesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee on a host of different subjects, including perceived political bias in the company’s search results, artificial intelligence, and alleged manipulation of search results. One looming issue though, which came up a handful of times in the hearing, is DragonFly, Google’s highly controversial search product for the Chinese market. As The Intercept first revealed, DragonFly would censor certain search terms, in particular around human rights. The search platform would also make it easier for Chinese authorities to surveill and track those using the service. During the hearing, Pichai responded to a question about DragonFly from US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, who asked how the company could censor search results from users seeking a “lifeline” of democracy and freedom. “Right now we have no plans to launch in China,” Pichai said. Pressed again by US Representative Tom Marino on DragonFly, Pichai said “Right now there are no plans for us to launch a search product in China.” Marino asked how working with the Chinese government to help censor certain search topics can sit with Google’s core values. “We always have evidence, based on every country we have operated in, us reaching out and giving users more information has a very positive impact, and we feel that calling, but right now there are no plans to launch in China.” Pichai said he will be fully transparent with policy makers if the company ever does “approach a position like that,” meaning launching a search product in China. Pichai described DragonFly as a "limited effort internally," and said the company developed "what search could look like" in China. According to The Intercept, in July Ben Gomes, Google’s search engine chief, told staff that the plan was to launch the search product as soon as possible. The Intercept noted the project has been in development since spring 2017, and involved around 300 employees. (Pichai said in one response that, at one point, the project had a hundred people working on it.) On Twitter, in response to Pichai’s comments, associate professor at the University of North Carolina Zeynep Tufekci wrote “this very answer must have been lawyered to death and practiced. The ‘launch’ is not planned for, yet. There are plans for search for China, just not plans for exactly how and when it gets launched.” Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. After Pichai repeatedly claimed there are ‘no plans to launch’ its Chinese search engine, Marino asked what information the company would share with Chinese authorities if Google did offer a product in the country. “We would look at what the conditions are to operate,” Pichai said. It’s no secret that Chinese law is particularly strict against technology companies operating in the country, requiring them to hand over data collected on users. Apple outsources its Chinese iCloud services to a local company. An Associated Press investigation recently found that shared data can even include information collected by cars such as Teslas. During the hearing, a protester held a poster at the doorway, showing a Google logo in the style of the Chinese flag, according to a tweet from CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy. “Getting access to information is an important human right,” Pichai said. Update: This piece has been updated to include additional comments from Pichai made during the hearing. Subscribe to our new cybersecurity podcast, CYBER.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gy7mnx/google-ceo-says-no-plans-to-launch-dragonfly-chinese-search-engine-sundar-pichai

Tech by VICE

Vice

2018-04-06 22:50:00

2018

4.0

6

Eric Stinton

Every Crazy Thing Leading Up to the Cursed UFC 223 Event

UFC 223 was supposed to be simple: Khabib Nurmagomedov, the undefeated number one contender would finally square off against interim lightweight champion Tony Ferguson. They had been paired three times before, and each time the fight fell through due to alternating injuries – Khabib, then Tony, then Khabib again. The winner would become the undisputed lightweight champion, the title that Conor McGregor had gone 500 days without defending. With McGregor’s absence from the cage, Ronda Rousey’s disappearing act, and the PED problems of Jon Jones and Brock Lesnar, the UFC desperately needed to give fans something to be excited about. Anticipation for the main event and a comprehensively stacked card underneath it made UFC 223 the first quality mixed martial arts offering of 2018. And in a matter of days, it all went to shit. Of course it all started on April Fools Day. While Ferguson was in a Fox Sports studio for an interview, he tripped on a cord and tore a ligament in his knee. On the face this is a silly way to get injured, but it’s even more ridiculous considering Ferguson is known for some of the most stupidly dangerous training exercises in all of professional fighting. The freak accident cancelled the matchup for the fourth time, and a week out from the fight a replacement had to be found. Enter Max Holloway, the reigning 145-pound champion. Though he was forced to pull out of his March 3 title defense due to an ankle injury, he claimed to be fighting-fit and ready to test Nurmagomedov ten pounds above his weight class. The damper of losing Ferguson was quickly replaced by excitement over the new matchup’s superfight narrative and stylistic intrigue, not to mention Holloway’s supremely ballsy gambit to step in on short notice. He immediately flew out from Hawaii to New York to start cutting weight. Meanwhile, Nurmagomedov had his sights set elsewhere. Fighting on the undercard was Artem Lobov, a training partner of McGregor’s. No shortage of shit has been bandied about between the three of them, so when Nurmagomedov saw Lobov in a Brooklyn hotel, he took the opportunity to confront him. Nothing much happened in the moment, but it compelled McGregor to fly across the planet to come to Lobov’s defense. McGregor and his posse attacked a bus of fighters—including Nurmagomedov—by throwing a dolly through the window. He then ran off into a getaway van and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Shattered glass from the broken window resulted in two fighters sustaining injuries severe enough to be removed from the card. McGregor turned himself in and spent the night in jail. The sports biggest star was charged with three counts of assault and criminal mischief. This was only the beginning. During weigh-ins, the day before the fight, Holloway was deemed unfit to continue cutting weight, though this medical diagnosis was determined by the New York State Athletic Commission, not doctors. Holloway was pulled from the card and the UFC scrambled to find Nurmagomedov an opponent. The first choice was former lightweight champion Anthony Pettis, whose original opponent was injured by McGregor’s bus attack. He weighed in .2 pounds over the limit and was given two hours to shed the extra weight. No problem. Before he could weigh-in again, however, commission officials removed the scale. Pettis asked the UFC for more money—understandably so given the circumstances—but the UFC declined and Pettis walked away. The clock ticked, the search continued. Next up: Paul Felder. Previously scheduled to fight Al Iaquinta on the undercard, he weighed in right on the money, and with a three-fight win streak he seemed about as good a replacement as any. The NYSAC then put a stop to this, claiming Felder was not ranked high enough to fight for a title. There are two ironies here. First, nobody takes the UFC rankings seriously, not even the UFC matchmakers, who have on several occasions ignored them outright to make more fan-friendly title fights. Second, this is the same commission that five months ago allowed Georges St-Pierre—who had never fought at middleweight in his career—to fight for the middleweight title after four years on the shelf. Nonetheless, Felder was bounced from the main event, leaving Nurmagomedov with an increasingly shrinking pool of potential replacements. Yet the most absurd clusterfuck of a UFC event finally got the resolution it deserved. Nurmagomedov’s opponent for the lightweight title will be a fighter whose claim to fame has been publicly feuding with the UFC, Felder’s original opponent Al Iaquinta. It’s almost poetic that one of the UFC’s most combative fighters on the roster would be the one to save the promotion's ass. So if your brain is spinning, let's just briefly recap what happened here: Tony Ferguson was TKO’d by a production cable, Khabib was slated to fight five different opponents in the span of a week, McGregor would rather commit assault to defend a friend than get paid to defend a title, a flying hand truck left six fighters out of work, the New York State Athletic Commission is composed of medical diagnosticians who take the UFC rankings very seriously, a former lightweight champion was nickle-and-dimed at the 11th hour, Paul Felder went from a title shot to having no opponent in a matter of minutes, and a fighter who was punitively banned from getting post-fight bonuses is bailing out the UFC. All in the last six days. [Takes a very long, very deep breath.] What a sport.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxwkw/every-crazy-thing-leading-up-to-the-cursed-ufc-223-event

Sports

Vice

2018-06-10 00:00:00

2018

6.0

10

Rachel Browne

Trump aide accuses Trudeau of “backstabbing” as relations tank

Trump’s top economic advisor said the president doesn’t want to appear weak to North Korea Trump’s top economic advisor said the president doesn’t want to appear weak to North Korea Political relations between Canada and the U.S. took a nosedive this weekend as President Trump and his advisors piled on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for remarks he made during the G7 Summit about a brewing trade war. Trump said the U.S. would not endorse the joint G7 statement after he accused Trudeau of making “false statements” during a press conference after leaders met in Charlevoix, Quebec on Saturday. At that press conference, Trudeau repeated the line he had been delivering all week amid an escalating trade war. He reiterated Canada’s determination to, come July 1, impose retaliatory tariffs against American goods — a move in response to Trump-imposed tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel. "I have made it very clear to the President that it is not something we relish doing, but it something that we absolutely will do," Trudeau said on Saturday. "Canadians, we're polite, we're reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around." “He really kinda stabbed us in the back,” Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic advisor, said in an interview Sunday morning with CNN’s Jake Tapper in response to Trudeau. He accused him of betrayal and a “sophomoric play.” He added that the reaction was actually about how Trudeau’s remarks made Trump look ahead of his historic denuclearization negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore. Political relations between Canada and the U.S. took a nosedive this weekend as President Trump and his advisors piled on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for remarks he made during the G7 Summit about a brewing trade war. Trump said the U.S. would not endorse the joint G7 statement after he accused Trudeau of making “false statements” during a press conference after leaders met in Charlevoix, Quebec on Saturday. At that press conference, Trudeau repeated the line he had been delivering all week amid an escalating trade war. He reiterated Canada’s determination to, come July 1, impose retaliatory tariffs against American goods — a move in response to Trump-imposed tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel. "I have made it very clear to the President that it is not something we relish doing, but it something that we absolutely will do," Trudeau said on Saturday. "Canadians, we're polite, we're reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around." “He really kinda stabbed us in the back,” Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic advisor, said in an interview Sunday morning with CNN’s Jake Tapper in response to Trudeau. He accused him of betrayal and a “sophomoric play.” He added that the reaction was actually about how Trudeau’s remarks made Trump look ahead of his historic denuclearization negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore. “POTUS is not going to let a Canadian prime minister push him around, push him, POTUS, around on the eve of this. He is not going to permit any show of weakness on the trip to negotiate with North Korea,” said Kudlow. “Kim must not see American weakness.” Other Trump advisors had more harsh words for the Canadian leader on Sunday morning. "There's a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door," trade adviser Peter Navarro told Fox News. "And that's what bad faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference. That's what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did, and that comes right from Air Force One." Trudeau would not respond to those remarks on Sunday as he entered more G7 meetings. Canada’s foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland held a press conference, telling reporters that both she and the prime minister were insulted by the comments coming out of the U.S. “Canada does not believe that ad hominem attacks are a particularly appropriate or useful way to conduct our relations with other countries,” Freeland said when asked about Navarro’s comments. She repeatedly slammed the “illegal” tariffs being imposed against Canadian aluminum and steel and said that any retaliatory measures being taken by Canada come from a place of “sorrow” rather than anger. Freeland announced last week that Canada will impose “dollar-for-dollar” retaliatory tariffs on up to $16.6 billion worth of U.S. goods — including a wide range of products from steel to pens — beginning this July 1st, Canada Day. She has described the measures as the strongest trade action Canada has ever taken since the Second World War. In an apparent rebut Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro's remarks, European Council President Donald Tusk tweeted praise at Trudeau and Canada on Sunday afternoon after the summit had ended. "There's a special place in heaven for @JustinTrudeau," wrote Tusk. "Canada, thank you for the perfect organisation of G7!" Trump continued his assault on Trudeau, the European Union and America's NATO allies Monday, firing off a series of angry tweets ahead of his summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore. Trump has used a “national security” provision to impose a 25 percent steel tariff and 10 percent aluminum tariff on Canada, Mexico and the European Union. But in a tweet following the G7, he wrote that that the move against Canada was in response to Canadian tariffs on dairy. Trump’s move to reject the G7 communiqué agreed to by the rest of the world leaders drew condemnation from Germany and France. “International co-operation cannot be dictated by fits of anger and throwaway remarks,” a representative for French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters. Germany’s foreign affairs minister tweeted: “You can destroy an incredible amount of trust very quickly in a tweet.” This article originally appeared on VICE News CA.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/59qj93/trump-aide-accuses-trudeau-of-backstabbing-as-relations-tank

Vice News

2016-08-19 15:00:02

2016

8.0

19

Aja Romano

Kubo and the Two Strings is a gorgeous stop-motion homage to Kurosawa and the power of stories

"If you must blink, do it now." So begins the gripping and gorgeous story of Kubo and the Two Strings, the latest film from the Oregon-based stop-motion animation studio Laika and an early comer for the best animated film of the year (and one of the best films of the year, period). A quintessential hero’s journey set in a dreamy, folkloric Japan, Kubo is a story about stories, told with a sophistication that never gets in the way of its straightforward earnestness or its stunning visuals. It’s also fully self-aware: The film knows that blinking is the last thing you’ll want to do while watching it. Rating Kubo and the Two Strings is the story of a young boy, Kubo (voiced by Game of Thrones’ Rickon Stark, Art Parkinson), who has a very special ability: the powerful inherited gift of magic-infused storytelling. The stories Kubo weaves for the spellbound audience in his small village and the magic he culls by playing his three-stringed shamisen are wondrous, but Kubo knows little about the extent of his powers. Instead, he spends most of his time caring for his convalescent mother, who never fully recovered from the death of Kubo’s father years ago, in an accident that cost Kubo one of his eyes. Kubo doesn’t know what parts of the stories his mother tells him of his past, and of his mysterious family origins, are real — or why she insists that he never be caught outside of their tiny house after sundown. Soon he finds himself being pursued by his grandfather, the sinister Moon King, and his malevolent aunts, who slink through the sky like white-faced kabuki ghosts. To help him escape, his mother awakens the magic of a charmed snow monkey (Charlize Theron) and sends him on a journey to find a magical suit of armor that once belonged to his samurai father. A giant talking beetle, voiced by Matthew McConaughey of all people, is a surprisingly endearing, if mostly useless, addition to their troupe. But this is just the superficial quest. The real quest, the heart of Kubo’s journey, is a search for family, and perhaps even more, to find the truth behind every story. In this way, as well as in its nods to legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, Kubo is a Rashomon for the whole family: a tale that examines its own multiplicity and gently reminds us that every story looks different depending on who’s telling it. Laika has gained a cult following over the past decade for its painstakingly wrought stop-motion animation and the vivid storytelling of its popular films Coraline and ParaNorman (and its less popular, but still excellent, The Boxtrolls). The studio's CEO, Travis Knight, who served as lead animator for those films, makes his directorial debut with Kubo, working with a story by longtime industry artist Shannon Tindle and a script by Marc Haimes and ParaNorman writer Chris Butler. Knight’s direction lends a fluid grace to Kubo’s story, which weaves seamlessly back and forth between magical realism and pure fantasy. Under his deft touch, feudal Japan comes to life in bold strokes of color and light. But the stellar achievement of Kubo is the animation itself. Kubo took five years for the studio to perfect; animators and sculptors essentially handcrafted the film’s universe from scratch. Featuring intricate set design and a coterie of puppets, including the largest stop-motion puppet ever built, and a mix of old and new technology, Kubo feels vivid and alive. Shadows have teeth and pulse with raw danger. The gilded armor Kubo seeks sparkles and glitters like jewelry you could touch. An underwater sequence featuring an eerie eyeball garden is as unnerving as it is rich with beauty. Kubo, perhaps more than any other animated film in the Western canon, has infused emotion into the animation itself. The yearning, the desire for connection, that drives Kubo on his journey is almost palpable in the somber, gorgeous sweep of deep hues that cover his village during the annual lighting of the floating lanterns, a real ceremony for the dead still practiced today in Japan. Dario Marianelli’s lavish, light score echoes the emotive properties of the art, doing its best to channel the refined aesthetic of Hayao Miyazaki’s longtime collaborator, composer Joe Hisaishi, without ever losing the dynamic, lively sensibility of a Kurosawa samurai epic. Knight has called Kubo a "Kurosawa myth in miniature," and there’s hardly a better way to describe how the film invokes heroic samurai tales of yore, even as it leaves you wondering what real truths lie behind Kubo’s quest. In this film, it’s easier to make origami folding paper take flight, easier to conquer a terrifying giant, than it is to make sense of familial loss and dysfunction. In its quieter moments, Kubo owes almost as much to legendary Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, whose postwar anxieties expressed themselves through the silences that exist between mother and son, father and daughter. Kubo’s lush silences, too, often speak louder than its script. However, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that the primary creative team around Kubo isn’t Japanese. This is partly because the story itself feels fundamentally driven by Kurosawa’s own cultural borrowing of shoot-'em-up Westerns for its plot conflicts and character dynamics. It’s also because the main voice cast consists mostly of famed white celebrities; the fourth-wall-breaking interjection of George Takei’s most famous catchphrase mostly just serves to distract from the story and highlight what small roles he and the other Japanese actors in the cast have. This is a shame, not only because of the missed opportunity for a more authentic voice cast but because the film’s characterizations, in comparison to the sumptuous artistry of the rest of its elements, are Kubo’s weakest point. We know almost as little about Kubo and his family at the end of our journey as we did when we started. Kubo’s mother is wholly defined through her relationship to each of the men in her life, while her two terrifying sisters are essentially puppets for their father’s will. Kubo himself is as much a typical boy as you could expect from a paper-bending, magical lute–playing genius — but we’re never really sure, in the end, how he’s grown from his adventure. Of course, Kubo and the Two Strings is beautiful enough, and the story compelling enough, that such complaints feel like quibbling. Laika has once again set a new standard for animation, particularly for the blending of CGI and more traditional stop-motion animated effects. The result is a sumptuous array of visual delights, enough to do justice to traditional tales of knights in shining armor, runaway princesses, lost boys, and talking monkeys. Whether or not you leave the theater believing in Kubo’s story, you’ll surely wind up believing, as Kubo does, that a world without myriad stories — not to mention a world without myriad animation styles — is no world to live in at all.

https://www.vox.com/2016/8/19/12520870/kubo-and-the-two-strings-review-kurosawa

Vox

2018-06-10 00:00:00

2018

6.0

10

Sofia Menchu

In Guatemala, woman searches for 50 relatives buried by volcano

SAN MIGUEL LOS LOTES, Guatemala (Reuters) - Eufemia Garcia watched in horror as Guatemala’s Fuego volcano sent scalding ash and gas surging over her home a week ago, burying her children and grandson among 50 of her extended family. She has been searching for their remains ever since. At least 110 people died after Fuego erupted last Sunday, pushing fast-moving currents of dust, lava and gas down the volcano’s slopes in its greatest eruption in four decades, and close to 200 more are believed buried beneath the waste. Among them, Garcia believes, her nine siblings and their families as well as her mother, her own grown-up children and a grandson, making her family possibly the hardest hit in a disaster that officials admit was made worse by delays in official warnings. The hamlet of San Miguel Los Lotes on the lush southern flank of the volcano was almost completely swallowed by several meters of ash, and formal search efforts have been suspended until the still-erupting volcano stabilizes. Defying the suspension order, each morning, Garcia, 48, leaves the shelter she now sleeps in, grabs a pickaxe or a shovel and heads into the danger zone, where groups of volunteers and other families dig down through ash hardened by rain and sun to try and reach their homes below. Another desperate survivor, Bryan Rivera, is searching for 13 missing relatives. All he has found so far in the dust and desolation is a guitar his 12-year-old sister had loved to play. “I’m not going to give up until I have a part of my family and am able to give them a Christian burial,” Garcia said, her features drawn with fatigue and grief but her voice unfaltering. A fruit seller who lived for more than three decades with her extended family in Los Lotes, Garcia said she was out purchasing eggs when she saw the volcanic flow racing toward her village. She sprinted back to her family’s homes, where uncles and a brother, children and cousins were preparing for a lunch to celebrate a sister visiting from a nearby town. Rapping furiously at one door after the next, she cried for them to flee. Few heeded the warnings. Her 75-year-old mother decided she could not outrun the danger. “Let God’s will be done,” she said. Desperate, Garcia ran, jumping over fences together with fleeing neighbors. From a safe distance, she saw the burning flow rise to the roof of her house, submerging it completely with her son Jaime, 21, inside. She watched as the ash rushed toward her daughter Vilma Liliana, 23, who sprinted for safety barefoot but was unable to outpace its terrible path. Her other daughter Sheiny Rosmery, 28, stayed at home, her son in her arms. The visiting sister and her husband have not been found. With almost no family left, she does not know where she will live next, or what she will do to survive. But for now, she says, all that matters is the search. She ticks off a list of her missing, including her three children, her mother, her grandson, brothers, sisters, nephews, children of nephews and brothers-in-law, generations of a relatives among the clutch of families that settled in Los Lotes in the 1970s. The only survivors are Garcia and a brother who long ago moved away. “I’ve looked here in the morgue and in another morgue, but there is no sign of them,” she said, standing in front of a row of coffins at a makeshift mortuary. “My family is buried. All 50 of them.” Reporting by Sofia Menchu; Writing by Delphine Schrank; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Lisa Shumaker

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-guatemala-volcano-family/in-guatemala-woman-searches-for-50-relatives-buried-by-volcano-idUSKBN1J60OD

World News

Reuters

2018-02-22 00:00:00

2018

2.0

22

Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani

Dying on death row

Alabama is going to execute a man who is dying of cancer Alabama is going to execute a man who is dying of cancer Alabama has executed 26 inmates in the last decade. What’s different about Thursday’s scheduled execution of 61-year old convicted murderer Doyle Lee Hamm is that he has terminal cancer — a condition his lawyer contends the state has been medically treating just so it can be the one to end Hamm’s life. “What they’re doing is a delicate balance of keeping him alive just long enough that they can be the ones who execute him, and that he doesn’t die of natural causes,” Bernard E. Harcourt, a Columbia Law School professor who has been representing Hamm pro-bono since the early '90s, told VICE News. Hamm, who was sentenced to death for the murder of Cullman County, Ala. motel clerk Patrick Cunningham back in 1987, has been on death row for 30 years. Since Hamm was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 2014, his lawyer has repeatedly argued that killing him via lethal injection could result in a botched execution because his cancer treatment has impaired his veins. “[If] it's a compromised vein, the lethal drugs don't go into the blood system...but into your flesh causing what's called infiltration” Harcourt said. “[It’s] an extraordinarily painful death, rather than going into your bloodstream. This is beyond ghoulish.” The United Nations agreed, and has said killing Hamm intravenously could be tantamount to torture. Alabama has executed 26 inmates in the last decade. What’s different about Thursday’s scheduled execution of 61-year old convicted murderer Doyle Lee Hamm is that he has terminal cancer — a condition his lawyer contends the state has been medically treating just so it can be the one to end Hamm’s life. “What they’re doing is a delicate balance of keeping him alive just long enough that they can be the ones who execute him, and that he doesn’t die of natural causes,” Bernard E. Harcourt, a Columbia Law School professor who has been representing Hamm pro-bono since the early '90s, told VICE News. Hamm, who was sentenced to death for the murder of Cullman County, Ala. motel clerk Patrick Cunningham back in 1987, has been on death row for 30 years. Since Hamm was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 2014, his lawyer has repeatedly argued that killing him via lethal injection could result in a botched execution because his cancer treatment has impaired his veins. “[If] it's a compromised vein, the lethal drugs don't go into the blood system...but into your flesh causing what's called infiltration” Harcourt said. “[It’s] an extraordinarily painful death, rather than going into your bloodstream. This is beyond ghoulish.” The United Nations agreed, and has said killing Hamm intravenously could be tantamount to torture. But Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall rejected a request to halt Hamm’s execution in a Facebook video posted on Wednesday morning. The state of Alabama has also disputed Harcourt’s claim that Hamm is dying of cancer, contending that he is in remission. Harcourt is set to file a last-ditch motion to the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of execution on Thursday morning, but told VICE News he is not optimistic that Hamm won’t be killed as scheduled tomorrow night. This segment originally aired on February 21, 2018, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/4377ym/alabama-may-execute-a-man-dying-of-cancer

Vice News

2019-01-25 00:00:00

2019

1.0

25

Guy Faulconbridge, Kate Holton

Queen sends a Brexit message to UK politicians: end your bickering

LONDON (Reuters) - Queen Elizabeth has sent a delicately coded message to Britain’s fractious political class over Brexit, urging lawmakers to seek common ground and keep their eyes on the big picture to resolve the crisis. With the clock ticking down to March 29, the date set in law for Britain to leave the European Union, the United Kingdom is in the deepest political crisis in half a century as it grapples with how, or even whether, to exit the European project it joined in 1973. While Elizabeth, 92, did not mention Brexit explicitly in an annual speech to her local Women’s Institute in Norfolk, the monarch said every generation faced “fresh challenges and opportunities.” “As we look for new answers in the modern age, I for one prefer the tried and tested recipes, like speaking well of each other and respecting different points of view; coming together to seek out the common ground; and never losing sight of the bigger picture,” the queen said. Though steeped in the conventional language the queen has made her hallmark, the monarch’s remarks in the context of Britain’s crisis are a signal to politicians to end the turmoil that has pushed the world’s fifth largest economy to the brink. “She’s been a gold standard monarch for very nearly 67 years now and this is a particularly gilt-edged moment, I think it’s very important what she said and how she said it,” historian Peter Hennessy said. Buckingham Palace declined to comment though the British media was clear about the significance of her remarks. The Times’ headline read: “End Brexit feud, Queen tells warring politicians”. As head of state, the queen is expected to be neutral on politics in public and is unable to vote, though ahead of the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence she made a delicately crafted plea for Scots to think carefully about their future. The future of Brexit remains unpredictable with options ranging from a disorderly exit that would spook investors across the world to a new referendum that could reverse the process. The organiser of government business in the lower house of parliament, Andrea Leadsom, suggested on Friday that the EU could let Britain delay leaving the EU by a couple of weeks if required to get relevant legislation passed. “I am absolutely certain that if we needed a couple of extra weeks or something then that would be feasible,” she told the BBC. Leadsom’s comments come after a turbulent week in which several businesses warned about the dangers of a no-deal Brexit to jobs and investment in the country. Prime Minister Theresa May is engaged in a last-ditch bid to win support for a tweaked divorce deal after parliament this month crushed the original plan, defeating the government by the biggest margin in modern British history. May has been meeting lawmakers to discuss options on how to address concerns on the Irish “backstop”, a contentious policy to avoid a hard border in Ireland by keeping some EU rules in place should the two sides fail to agree any other solution. “Work is ongoing, as to what we may eventually bring forward and potentially discuss with Brussels, we are not there yet,” her spokesman said. The Northern Irish party which props up May’s minority government has decided to back her new deal if it includes a time limit to the backstop, The Sun newspaper reported. Sterling scaled a high of $1.3176 and was poised for its biggest weekly rise in more than a year as traders bet Brexit will be delayed. Options markets indicated sterling could rise to the mid-$1.30s. But in a sign of the turmoil at the heart of government, finance minister Philip Hammond declined to say if he would quit if Britain left the EU without a deal, a scenario he predicted would lead to short-term disruption and hurt the economy. France and other European powers said they were preparing for the worst. Goldman Sachs will invest less in the United Kingdom if there is a difficult or hard Brexit, Chief Executive Officer David Solomon said. “Our headcount in the UK over the last couple of years has not gone down but it hasn’t gone up either - we have added head count you know on the continent,” Solomon told the BBC in Davos. “But I would say that, over time, if this is resolved in a difficult way or a hard way, it’ll have an impact on where we invest and where we put people,” he said. Additional reporting by Costas Pitas, Sujata Rao and Kylie MacLellan in London; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Janet Lawrence and Peter Graff

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu/queen-sends-a-brexit-message-to-uk-politicians-end-your-bickering-idUSKCN1PJ0QJ

Davos

Reuters

2019-06-18 00:00:00

2019

6.0

18

Factbox: Trump's immigration enforcement lags behind Obama's first term in office

(Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Monday that U.S. authorities next week would begin removing “millions” of immigrants living illegally in the United States, without giving more details. However, while cracking down on illegal immigration has been a signature issue for the Republican president, arrests and deportations under his administration have so far fallen behind Democratic former President Barack Obama’s first term in office, from 2009-2013. The following is a breakdown of non-criminal and criminal arrests and non-criminal removals for Obama’s first and second terms and the first two years of Trump’s four-year term, broken down by the Oct. 1-Sept. 30 fiscal year. (For a graphic, please see tmsnrt.rs/2ZsSNvB. Non-criminal arrests: 182,031 Criminal arrests: 115,867 Non-criminal removals: 136,343 Criminal removals: 253,491 Non-criminal arrests: 129,302 Criminal arrests: 143,082 Non-criminal removals: 195,772 Criminal removals: 197,090 Non-criminal arrests: 121,197 Criminal arrests: 167,195 Non-criminal removals: 216,698 Criminal removals: 180,208 Non-criminal arrests: 93,648 Criminal arrests: 171,925 Non-criminal removals: 192,412 Criminal removals: 174,880 Non-criminal arrests: 63,843 Criminal arrests: 168,444 Non-criminal removals: 151,834 Criminal removals: 216,810 Non-criminal arrests: 48,969 Criminal arrests: 134,734 Non-criminal removals: 137,983 Criminal removals: 177,960 Non-criminal arrests: 17,892 Criminal arrests: 101,880 Non-criminal removals: 96,045 Criminal removals: 139,368 Non-criminal arrests: 15,353 Criminal arrests: 94,751 Non-criminal removals: 101,586 Criminal removals: 138,669 Non-criminal arrests: 37,734 Criminal arrests: 105,736 Non-criminal removals: 98,420 Criminal removals: 127,699 Non-criminal arrests: 53,441 Criminal arrests: 105,140 Non-criminal removals: 110,823 Criminal removals: 145,262 Notes: Figures are year-end, but presidential terms begin on Jan. 20 of the first year of their term and end on Jan. 20 of the last year of their term. Fiscal year 2018 non-criminal figures include those with pending criminal charges and immigration violations. Fiscal year removals data was updated through Aug. 25, 2012. Source: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Compiled by Jonathan Oatis

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-enforcement-factbox/factbox-trumps-immigration-enforcement-lags-behind-obamas-first-term-in-office-idUSKCN1TJ21C

Politics

Reuters

2018-07-11 00:00:00

2018

7.0

11

Prince's Old Bible, Suit and Copy of 'Purple Rain' Hitting Auction

What's cooler than your copy of "Purple Rain" on vinyl? Try owning one of Prince's personal copies on vinyl!! Some 27 items previously owned by Prince are hitting the auction block -- thanks to The Purple One's old bodyguard -- and the memorabilia is expected to fetch several thousand bucks. For instance, the starting bid for the record alone is $1,500. One of Prince's Jehovah's Witness Bibles is also in the lot, and is expected to fetch $7k. But the crown jewel of the collection has to be Prince's navy silk suit ... which has a starting bid of $10k! The auction also includes some of his wedged shoes, cuff links, an ear cuff, a pair of sunglasses and a bunch of Prince's old backstage passes. Heritage Auctions is behind the online auction ... and bids close July 21.

https://www.tmz.com/2018/07/11/prince-auction-bible-suit-purple-rain/

TMZ

2018-10-19 13:20:02

2018

10.0

19

Alex Abad-Santos

Making a Murderer season 2 review: Netflix’s true crime hit has changed

Nearly three years after the true crime docuseries Making a Murderer premiered on Netflix, its subjects Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey are still behind bars, serving life sentences for the murder of Teresa Halbach. But even though Avery and Dassey are right where we left them at the end of season one, a new 10-episode season of the show — billed as full of additional details and follow-up reporting — launches on Netflix today. Could there be new twists? Is there another suspect? What exactly is Making a Murderer going to tell its biggest fans that they don’t already know? It’s impossible to summarize every detail of the Avery-Dassey-Halbach murder case in a single paragraph; Making a Murderer’s first season spent 10 hour-long episodes digging into the case, and was still criticized for what it left out. But the most important thing to remember is that season one posited the idea that Avery and Dassey were framed by a crooked police force that planted DNA and coerced a confession. And though there have been appeals (in June, the Supreme Court decided not to hear Dassey’s case), the two are still convicted of Halbach’s murder and serving out their respective sentences. That said, it’s easy to see why Netflix wanted to make a second season, considering how immensely popular the first one was. But this one feels more like dramatized entertainment and less like a genuine, trustworthy investigation into a real-life murder case. There’s one scene in particular that is so weird it becomes hilarious, but at the same time dark and sad. The effect is unnerving, albeit probably not in the way the show intended. Season two feels as if Making a Murderer’s creators were more spectacle-driven than concerned with making a statement about the criminal justice system. Here are five things to know. In season one, Making a Murderer had a lot more to explain. The public didn’t know who Steven Avery, Brendan Dassey, or Teresa Halbach were, nor were they familiar with the politics of Manitowoc County or how many people in the community are intertwined. Making a Murderer’s first season laid this foundation, and I think a large part of what made that first season so compelling was that the show let its audience form their own judgments about Avery, Dassey, and the people who hold power in this pocket of Wisconsin while slowly introducing new information that could alter those judgments. Season two doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting of explaining all of Making a Murderer’s main players and their relationships with one another. But the drawback is that without a bunch of backstory and history to convey, the show clearly has a lot of time to kill. Perhaps that’s why the series seems to have evolved from a story about whether Avery and Dassey are innocent, or from a critique of the US justice system, into a show about Avery’s lawyer trying to dismantle the state of Wisconsin’s case against her client. That lawyer is Kathleen Zellner, a being who’s equal parts of deadpan and steely earnestness and seems like she was created in a lab specifically for Cecily Strong to play her in a future episode of Saturday Night Live. Zellner, as Making a Murderer is quick to emphasize, specializes in wrongful convictions — which makes it feel like she’s just the person Avery needs in his corner. The first few episodes of season two take on the air of a documentary that is specifically about how Zellner intends to fight the state. Throughout the first season, Making a Murderer certainly contained moments of objectivity, and its central premise clearly professed to be about questioning the legal system. But it was easy to argue — as many people ultimately did — that in the end and perhaps all along, it was in favor of Avery and Dassey. Some observers suggested creators Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi were biased and really just wanted to show that Avery and Dassey were framed. A key detail of this argument was that Making a Murderer completely omitted a crucial piece of evidence from its season one narrative: that Avery’s sweat was found beneath the hood latch of Halbach’s car. Ken Kratz, who was the prosecutor in the case, said that the show, in its omission of sweat DNA evidence, “really presents misinformation” to its audience. The criticism about why the show failed to address the sweat DNA was a valid one. Not addressing it seemed strange in that the show paid so much attention to detail regarding other forms of DNA evidence — for example, season one specifically discussed how Halbach’s DNA was not found in Avery’s garage, despite the alleged presence of a bullet with Halbach’s DNA that prosecutors say was found in the garage and suggests he shot her there. There were also discussions of Avery’s DNA being found on Halbach’s keys, even though Halbach’s DNA was not found on said keys. Because the docuseries did not discuss the sweat DNA found on the hood latch, the omission could be viewed as deliberate, with the intention of skewing viewers’ judgment. Season two’s second episode specifically tackles this criticism. Through Zellner, the show rehashes some of the theories raised by season one that Avery’s DNA was planted on Halbach’s keys by law enforcement, and that the planted blood was acquired from old samples. She walks through a scenario of how authorities could have planted Avery’s sweat DNA under the hood of Halbach’s vehicle and then coerced Dassey to confess that Avery reached his hand under the hood latch, thereby securing their crooked plan. It’s a compelling and fascinating idea, but it puts viewers in the odd position of having to weigh how much of what Zellner is saying counts as a lawyer presenting the facts of a solid case, versus how much the series benefits from making Zellner seem competent and trustworthy. It is, after all, in Making a Murderer’s interest to have Zellner shoot down Kratz’s criticism about omitting a key piece of evidence, since it makes it seem like the show was justified in omitting it. But Making a Murderer doesn’t do much to show us that it’s analyzing Zellner’s theories thoroughly and objectively. It doesn’t make any effort to challenge what she’s saying by, say, cross-referencing Zellner’s multiple claims about DNA evidence and what might have happened in the case with the opinions of independent experts and scientists. It feels as if the show is less concerned with highlighting systemic issues in the criminal justice system than with proving Avery’s innocence and responding to conspiracy theories. The show allows Zellner to be a dominant, definitive voice even though it would’ve boosted Making a Murderer’s credibility, if the show still wants to tell an objective story, to thoroughly vet and scrutinize what Zellner is saying. Not much has changed with Dassey or Avery since the end of Making a Murderer season one — they’re both still in jail serving life sentences. But that doesn’t mean that nothing has changed with the show itself, and the early episodes of season two make sure to let you know that. In the season premiere, in what is both a poignant and indulgent six or so minutes, the show underlines how much people loved season one and all the attention it got from the media. It also, perhaps too gleefully, shows how fans of the show went online to completely trash the Yelp page for Kratz’s law firm. Seeing the visceral response to Making a Murderer’s first season compressed into season two’s opening segment is slightly nostalgic, and it will make many viewers question why it was this show specifically that seemed to best harness the potential of the true crime genre. Was it because people wanted justice for a possibly innocent man? Was it because the show made it easy to identify bad guys and good guys? Was it because viewers saw how seemingly simple it would be to frame someone for murder if had you enough expertise and resources? Was it because it’s blazingly easy for just about anyone to play detective on the internet? Making a Murderer season two unfortunately isn’t particularly concerned with those answers, or with examining what it is about Avery and Dassey’s case that hit a national nerve. The show doesn’t want to explain why it became a phenomenon, just to remind you that it was one. Of everything that happens in season two’s early episodes, what stands out most is a strange, Mythbusters-esque sequence in episode one that had me shaking my head and wondering if I was watching an episode of The Office. In an attempt to recreate blood splatter patterns that were found and recorded in Halbach’s SUV during the initial investigation into Halbach’s death, Zellner and a cohort find a mannequin that is approximately the same height as Halbach, and tie 135 pounds of weight to it so that it weighs approximately the same. They then splatter fake blood in its hair and try throwing it into the same model of SUV that Halbach drove, at many different angles. Each time they try, with a thump of the mannequin plastic hitting the car interior, they fail to recreate the splatter pattern. So they resort to whipping the mannequin’s head, and the blood in its hair, onto a white piece of paper like Jackson Pollock flinging paint at a canvas. The whole sequence plays like a dark comedy, something propped up at the intersection of macabre, silly, and hilarious. All that’s missing is Zellner deadpanning to the camera with a shrug. There are a few more instances in season two where Zellner attempts to reenact certain aspects of Halbach’s killing — including shooting an animal skull to prove that bone fragments shoud’ve been found in Avery’s garage, retracing Teresa Halbach’s last steps before her death, and breaking into Avery’s trailer. And it all made me question how serious season two wants to be. Just as they did in season one, members of Teresa Halbach’s immediate family opted not to participate in the Making a Murderer season two episodes screened for press. A list of their names appears on a title card that lists people who were contacted by the show but chose not to appear on it. Prior to the show’s release in 2015, Halbach’s family had issued a statement saying that they viewed the show as crass entertainment based on Halbach’s death: Having just passed the 10-year anniversary of the death of our daughter and sister, Teresa, we are saddened to learn that individuals and corporations continue to create entertainment and to seek profit from our loss. We continue to hope that the story of Teresa’s life brings goodness to the world. The continued absence of the Halbachs and their feelings in season two shades the way viewers think not only about Making a Murderer but also about who does participate on behalf of the Halbachs. It’s particularly icky listening to Halbach’s college friend provide season two’s voiceovers defending the Halbach family— the thought being that if Halbach’s immediate family didn’t want to appear on the show, how much of a “friend” could this person really be? In concert with season two’s gory mannequin blood splatter reenactment and responses to viewer conspiracy theories, it really makes you think about the Halbach family’s 2015 statement regarding the show being more entertainment than a thorough investigation. Making a Murderer unfortunately feels more like the former than the latter.

https://www.vox.com/2018/10/19/17981134/making-a-murderer-season-2-review-netflix

Vox

2017-12-12 18:34:47

2017

12.0

12

Emily Todd VanDerWerff

Scrooges, ranked

Few fictional characters have been portrayed onscreen as often as Ebenezer Scrooge, the hero and villain of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Really, the list comes down to Scrooge, Dracula, and Sherlock Holmes, all British literary characters who’ve been warped and twisted in all directions to fit whatever context a given narrative demands. IMDB lists 135 separate instances of someone playing Scrooge in one work or another — and that’s to say nothing of characters who are clearly riffs on Scrooge, or cartoon characters taking a whirl at being Scrooge, or any of pop culture’s other many Scrooge permutations. For as long as humans celebrate Christmas and worry about unchecked greed, we’ll need people to play Scrooge. But who is the best Scrooge? It’s impossible to see every portrayal of Scrooge ever — especially since so many are lost to the mists of time — but I’ve seen a lot of them. So I’ve zeroed in on the 15 most notable Scrooges, then ranked them from worst to best. I tried to keep to the most famous of Scrooges and characters actually playing Scrooge, not a Scrooge-like character — with a couple of notable exceptions. With all of that out of the way, here are 15 of the most famous Scrooges, ranked. Hicks, well known for his stage work as Scrooge, played the character onscreen in 1913, one of the very first film adaptations of A Christmas Carol. I haven’t seen that one, so I’m reduced to judging Hicks’s work based on this low-quality 1935 adaptation, where the various ghosts aren’t represented onscreen at all. Instead, we only hear their voices. It doesn’t give the hammy Hicks much to react to, and his performance suffers as a result. Adding songs to A Christmas Carol has been attempted many times but rarely pulled off. This made-for-TV adaptation boasts the talents of Broadway composers Lynn Ahrens and Alan Menken, whose 1994 stage musical is adapted here. The songs aren’t bad, but Grammer doesn’t really add anything to the part. He scowls and stomps around, and he always seems like he’s putting on an act. Thus, the final moment of redemption falls flat. There’s one neat idea at the center of this big-screen, computer-animated adaptation of the book: Carrey plays not only Scrooge but also the three spirits who visit him, which underlines how Scrooge’s true transformation always came from within. But this is another project where form defeats function. The film’s manic motion-capture action sequences seem to exist solely to pad out the story, and the alienness of the computer effects undercuts Carrey’s sweetly soulful work. Some people swear by this musical adaptation (yes, again) of the story, but I’ve never quite gotten into it. Finney, like Carrey, seems a touch young to play the role, and he overcompensates with blustering and shouting. That might be okay if the songs were more memorable, but they’re not. A Christmas Carol usually requires some degree of simplicity, but everything about Scrooge is overwrought, befitting its title as one of the last Hollywood mega-musicals. Here’s the one non-Scrooge on the list, since Murray technically plays a TV executive named “Frank Cross,” who nonetheless is visited by three ghosts, etc. Murray is a lot of fun in this film, but of all the Scrooges on this list, he seems the most likely to revert back to “Bah, humbug” by the time January 1 rolls around. It doesn’t help that the movie is a mess — confused and stuffed full of too many big effects sequences. Trying to turn this ghost story into a treat for the whole family stretches back almost to the book’s publication, but this was the first major movie to attempt the transition. As such, many aspects of the story — including some of its moral about taking care of society’s neediest — are left out. Fortunately, Owen, though very stagey, is pretty good, offering a rock-solid take on the character heavily inspired by Lionel Barrymore’s radio work. One of the problems with latter-day Scrooges is that there are so many interpretations of the character that there’s almost no new ground to tread. Stewart offers his best effort in this made-for-TNT TV movie, and he really sinks his teeth into the scenes where Scrooge is a mean old bastard. But he’s a bit of a letdown when playing reformed Scrooge — even though jovial, chuckling Patrick Stewart is one of this planet’s greatest treasures. Of all the musical Christmas Carols, this one is my favorite. (It was also adapted into a pretty good Rankin-Bass animated special, with Walter Matthau as the old miser.) Rathbone, most famous for playing Sherlock Holmes, mostly shouts a lot to convey mean Scrooge, but when he has his big transformation scene — complete with a song to mark the occasion — you really buy it. Sometimes it pays to cast an actor better known for “good guy” parts as Scrooge. This is also cheating, since Barrymore never brought his work as Scrooge to the screen. (He was intended to star in the 1938 film version but fell ill. The radio role was played that year by none other than Orson Welles.) But listen to the above performance, and you’ll understand just why he became the Scrooge to many Americans during the Depression. Laugh all you want, but Mr. McDuck was many kids’ introduction to the Scrooge character, and Mickey’s Christmas Carol is the gold standard for the “characters popular from another context get together to act out A Christmas Carol” subgenre. (God help you if you stumble upon the Flintstones variation on that form.) Alan Young’s voice work is impeccable, and the short film foreshadowed Disney’s slow return to form in the late 1980s. Technically, Atkinson plays “Ebenezer Blackadder,” but the bigger change to the Christmas Carol mythos is that this Ebenezer goes from a kindhearted man to a bitter, vengeful villain, due to spirits who mean to congratulate him and accidentally change his ways. If you need a blast of black humor this Christmas, you could do much, much worse than this. Wisely, the Jim Henson Company chose to fill the role of Scrooge with a human being and not a puppet when embarking on its first project in the wake of Henson’s tragic death. That said human being was Caine, who never met a role he couldn’t take 100 percent seriously, was a plus. Caine is just as committed to pretending these puppets are real beings with whom he shares the universe as he is to selling Scrooge’s transformation, and that makes a strong center for this lively little film. The very first animated TV Christmas special, Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol remains one of the very best, thanks to Jim Backus’s murmuring and muttering as the title character. Though Magoo is most known for his near-blindness, that quality barely comes into play in this special, which is mostly a straightforward adaptation of the story. (The idea is that Magoo is starring in a stage presentation.) Backus already plays Magoo as a bit crotchety, so the full-on transition into Scrooge makes plenty of sense. The songs are good, too. Scott offers something very different in a Scrooge: a kind of quiet menace. He certainly has his moments when he shouts and snarls, but he never lets Ebenezer be a one-dimensional monster. This Scrooge is world-weary, beaten down by a life of constant disappointment. Scott makes you almost sympathize with the idea of taking out all of that pain and frustration on your fellow man, and when Christmas morning comes and he’s ready to begin anew, he sells that with the same quiet stoicism. Sim just happens to star in my two favorite adaptations of the story — one live-action and one animated. What makes both work is a kind of hushed intensity. These adaptations remember that this is a ghost story and should be just a touch frightening to really work. And Sim stands up to all that horror with an admirable bluster. His Scrooge is a man used to getting what he wants, not afraid to push back when the universe insists he change. That makes his metamorphosis both all the more gradual and all the more rewarding. This Scrooge won’t lapse into his old ways, because his new ones have been so hard-won. God bless us, everyone!

https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/12/21/14020014/scrooges-ranked-best-scrooge-christmas-carol

Vox

2016-06-09 00:00:00

2016

6.0

9

Justin Bieber Brawler: I Wanted an Autograph, Not a Street Fight!

Justin Bieber's street fight erupted over chicks and autographs ... at least according to a guy who's claiming he's the one who went toe-to-toe with Bieber. Lamont Richmond, a 6'5" Cleveland local, is taking credit for taking down Justin -- and explaining his take of what led up to the brawl. Just like Bieber, Lamont looks no worse for wear in the video he posted. Check out the clip ... he makes it sound like it all could've been settled if Justin signed something. We can't confirm Lamont really is THE GUY ... but it would be odd to lie about fighting Justin. Hardly earns you a CSD (Certified Street Dude).

https://www.tmz.com/2016/06/09/justin-bieber-fighter-comes-forward/

TMZ

2018-07-18 19:06:00

2018

7.0

18

Dana Varinsky, Dave Mosher

NASA Juno probe at Jupiter just sent back new photos of the gas giant

It's been a busy and exhilarating couple of months for scientists who study Jupiter— and space nerds fascinated by the gas giant. Yesterday, a team of researchers announced the discovery of 12 new Jovian moons, bringing Jupiter's total up to 79. Last week, scientists revealed that data from NASA's $1 billion Juno mission suggested there may be a previously undiscovered volcano on Jupiter's moon Io. And last month, the team behind Juno figured out that Jupiter's lighting is more similar to Earth's than previously thought — which solved a 39-year-old mystery. But most excitingly, NASA confirmed in June that Juno, which has orbited Jupiter since July 2015, will cheat death for at least three more years. The probe was scheduled to crash into Jupiter's clouds this month, but instead the mission has been extended until at least July 2021. That gives scientists a chance to complete the mission's main goal: to map Jupiter's magnetic and gravitational fields. This work is done by flying Juno over Jupiter's cloud tops at speeds roughly 75 times as fast as a bullet. These flybys, called perijoves, happen once every 53.5 days. The most recent one (Juno's 14th perijove) occurred on July 16, and the prior flyby was on May 24. The high-speed trips have allowed NASA to document the gas giant like never before. An optical camera called JunoCam captures beautiful images of Jupiter each time, and the space agency uploads the raw photo data to its websites. Then people around the world can download that data and process it into stunning color pictures. Here are 13 mesmerizing images from the latest perijove, along with a few highlights from past flybys. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Juno makes an elliptical orbit around Jupiter. It's a compromise between getting unprecedented new data and staying out of the planet's intense radiation field, which can damage sensitive electronics. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. During a perijove, the Juno probe dives over Jupiter's north pole, screams past the Jovian cloud tops at 130,000 mph, and exits at the south pole. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. While the probe is close to Jupiter, Juno records the planet with radar systems, radiation detectors, magnetic and gravitational field recorders, and more. This high-contrast photo was processed by NASA software engineer Kevin M. Gill, who processes raw data from each perijove soon after it becomes available. You can find more of his work on Twitter or Flickr. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Juno was the first spacecraft to fly above and below Jupiter, photograph the planet's poles, and begin to unravel their mysteries. Color processing often gives the storms near the poles a blue hue. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Researchers have used data collected by Juno to model Jupiter’s storm-choked north pole in 3D. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Juno can't get a picture of the entire planet at once. The spacecraft is roughly 66 feet long, while Jupiter is more than 88,840 miles wide at its middle. Jupiter is about 1,321 times as voluminous as Earth. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Björn Jónsson, an Icelandic computer scientist, recently stitched together over 100 images from the Juno mission and the Cassini mission to Saturn to create this full photographic map of Jupiter. Learn more about how Jónsson created the complete, detailed map of Jupiter >> Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Among Juno fans, photos of the Great Red Spot have been a favorite, since the storm could easily swallow Earth. The probe didn’t photograph that area during the most recent flyby, though — the last new images of the spot were captured in April 2018. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. But Jupiter has plenty of other remarkable cloudscapes and storms swirling. This swath of high-altitude clouds is located in the planet's northern hemisphere. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Jupiter's storms and clouds form patterns that can look as trippy as they are beautiful. Seán Doran, a graphic artist who is one of the most prolific processors of JunoCam data, created this image. "Planet of Screaming Skulls," he called it on Twitter. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Doran also made this mysterious portrait of the planet, in which you can see the twinkle of myriad stars in the background. You can see more of Doran's work on his Twitter or Flickr pages, and he also sells some of his Jupiter images as posters through the platform Redbubble. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Although Juno will continue to orbit Jupiter through at least July 2021, NASA ultimately plans to destroy the robot by plunging it into Jupiter's clouds. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. The rationale for that dramatic ending is similar to the one behind the Cassini probe's demise at Saturn: Jupiter's icy moon Europa may be habitable to alien life, so deliberately destroying Juno will prevent it from crashing into that moon and contaminating whatever's there. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. For the next three years, though, we'll continue to get new batches of incredible images from the farthest solar-powered spacecraft ever launched from Earth.

https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-juno-probe-at-jupiter-new-photos-2018-7

Business Insider

2016-08-14 21:28:00

2016

8.0

14

Libby Nelson

Usain Bolt’s big races in Rio: time, race schedule, and how to live-stream Olympics track and field

Usain Bolt, the sprinter from Jamaica who is the fastest man in the world, is looking to repeat his gold medal–winning streaks in three events in 2008 and 2012 at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, starting Saturday. Bolt is facing off against American Justin Gatlin, who won the 100-meter race in 2004 before being banned for doping. The first round of the 100-meter race is at 11 am Eastern time Saturday, August 13. The semifinals and final follow at 8 pm Eastern time on Sunday, August 14. The 200-meter race begins with the first round at 10:50 am Eastern time on Tuesday, August 16, with semifinals at 9 pm Eastern time on Wednesday, August 17, and the final at 9:30 pm Eastern time on Thursday, August 18. The final of the 100-meter race on Sunday night will air live on NBC. To watch the first round and semifinal live, you’ll need to stream them on NBCOlympics.com. After the first half-hour of streaming, you’ll need a cable package login. Here are the links for the first round of the 100-meter race and for the semifinal. Similarly, while the 200-meter race final will air live on NBC on Thursday night, you’ll need to go to NBCOlympics.com to watch the earlier rounds.

https://www.vox.com/2016/8/12/12458642/usain-bolt-rio-2016-olympics-track-and-field-live-stream

Vox

2018-12-06 17:00:06

2018

12.0

6

Julia Azari

Death of a statesman: George H.W. Bush’s legacy

This post is part of Mischiefs of Faction, an independent political science blog featuring reflections on the party system. President George H.W. Bush’s legacy will be shaped by the political moment at which he died. At least, the first round of takes and analyses seems to focus heavily on the contrast between his political style and that of President Donald Trump, and the ways in which the Republican Party has changed since 1992. These comparisons lend themselves to similar conclusions: that Bush was a leader who had some bipartisan accomplishments, who united the nation around foreign policy goals (heavy set of asterisks here for those who did not share his goals or were harmed by them), and who wrote a gracious note to Bill Clinton after the 1992 election. Even before his death, Bush’s pragmatism had been elevated to full-blown statesmanship. Detractions from this narrative have mentioned Bush’s 1988 Willie Horton ad, which stoked racial fears, and his neglect of the growing AIDS crisis. There are obvious reasons why even a fairly minimal commitment to bipartisanship, combined with interest in foreign policy, might be an especially potent nostalgia formula right now. But it’s also worth considering how this approach was received at the time, and what the challenges that Bush faced tell us about the evolution of the presidency as an institution. He was a president of limited rhetorical talent in a time of a highly personalized and media-packaged presidential politics. His presidency followed that of an important party icon, something he struggled with during that particular moment. Bush’s presidency, both as it really was and in its retrospective treatment, tells us about what modern presidential politics forgives, rewards, and punishes — and about the gap between the abstract depiction of the presidency and its concrete reality. First, it’s not entirely an accident that Bush was a single-term president couched between two leaders who were known for their communication skill and style. It’s also true that the abilities of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to magically alter the preferences of the electorate are mostly a myth. At the same time, their public personas were a lot different from Bush’s, in ways that were consequential for the presidency. Although many have remembered Bush’s warmth and humor in the days since his passing, when he was president he was often depicted as distant and awkward. There are lots of possible explanations for why the 1992 election turned out as it did. But Clinton’s strength wasn’t his experience, and it certainly wasn’t his impeccable character; it was his ability to convey warmth and empathy. Similarly, Reagan’s presidency is frequently regarded as a turning point in “candidate-centered politics,” in which candidates could take advantage of the new nomination system; attract media attention through a savvy, telegenic, and likable persona; and engage voters directly without party intermediaries. The promise of a candidate-centric presidential politics that transcended partisanship never materialized. Metrics of likability and sociability for presidential aspirants, on the other hand, appear to be here to stay. Reagan and Clinton may have set the standard for the use of 20th-century forms like the television ad or the primetime address. But Bush’s own son also fit into this presidential mold, satisfying voters as a promising drinking buddy and a leader of authentic moral character. Presidential media profiles have become increasingly polarized, it seems, in each successive term. We know neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump scored well in this regard, but both loom as big figures, distinct and well-known personalities who can crowd rivals out of the media landscape. And the basic foundation remains: Presidents pretty much need to command media attention, offer compelling rhetoric (this takes wildly different forms for different candidates), and have at least one communication setting in which they excel. As Lori Cox Han points out in her book about George H. W. Bush’s communication strategy, Bush and his advisers may have “put too much faith in the American public, and the news media, to appreciate a more substantive presidency with less public relations flair.” There are perhaps good reasons for the turn toward a more personality-driven and media-oriented presidency at the end of the 20th century. Still, a few decades earlier, Bush’s leadership style might have seemed less of a liability. Pop cultural portrayals of Bush showed him as the opposite of a magnanimous statesman — instead they showed him as kind of small, playing on the quality he himself acknowledged: lack of the “vision thing.” The impression that he didn’t relate to people’s problems or daily lives has stuck, as have phrases that sounded good but never quite acquired deep and agreed-upon significance, like a “thousand points of light” or a “kinder, gentler America.” (The FiveThirtyEight podcast has a good overview of some of these things, including the misconception about Bush and the grocery scanner.) This brings us to the second point: Bush was the last president to win a “third term” for his party. The 1988 election made Bush the first sitting vice president since Martin Van Buren to be elected to the presidency. The “kinder, gentler” line came as Bush was navigating the very beginning of this new phase, as he accepted the Republican nomination at the 1988 convention. Presidents in this position — what Donald Zinman calls the “heir apparent” presidency and Stephen Skowronek calls “articulation” — have to differentiate themselves without rejecting their predecessors outright. This situation, too, proved to be especially challenging for a late-20th-century president. As Skowronek writes of Bush, “in the more party-centered politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries, orthodox innovators were better able to submerge their own identities in the collective identities of the political organizations they presumed to represent. Not so today.” Bush’s extension of Reagan’s presidency could only go so far; the tax issue, of course, compromised his credibility with movement conservatives, and Pat Buchanan took up the mantle of cultural conservatism. It’s not just that kinder and gentler seems at odds with our current politics. It was a distinct alternative even then — one that lacked the clarity and force of other appeals. In other words, the qualities that inform the warmest pieces about Bush as a post-presidential figure, especially those after his death, were also the ones that made his style incompatible with the late-20th-century presidency. There are two important implications here, ones that take us beyond simply using the late Bush to frame criticisms of Trump and the current GOP. First, the existing definitions of bipartisan leadership, civility, and statesmanship are far too forgiving of racism, homophobia, and other forms of marginalization. What it means to represent the whole nation is shifting, in a way that is likely to make such representation an elusive goal for some time to come. The second implication is that the country probably needs to take a look at what we actually want in a president and what we say we want. Some of the problem is that when people say they want compromise, what they really want is the other side to compromise. But in other ways, the emphasis on a presidential politics that rewards rallies, tweets, and highly personalized appeals — one that is increasingly participatory and open — is exactly the kind that crowds out quieter, gentler candidates and removes the incentives for civility and rhetorical restraint. Perhaps we should consider why these qualities dominate headlines, but a president who possesses them, in myth or reality, is worth more dead than alive.

https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2018/12/6/18128804/george-hw-bush-legacy-president-death

Vox

2017-05-27 16:16:00

2017

5.0

27

David Roberts

Voting by mail is fair, safe, and easy. Why don’t more states use it?

Earlier this week, Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep Earl Blumenauer, both Democrats from Oregon, introduced a bill that would expand their state’s vote-by-mail system to the entire country. It’s not a new notion. Wyden has been pushing versions of the bill since 2010. But given the events of the past year — Trump’s narrow electoral-college victory, accusations of voter fraud, voter-suppression laws in various states — it is more relevant than ever. Its Senate co-sponsor list has grown to 19 and now includes leftie stalwarts like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The bill has little chance of passage — one of the core truths of US politics is that anything that increases voting turnout hurts Republicans, so they inevitably oppose it. But at the very least it ought to kick up a national conversation about America’s abysmal voting system and one dead-simple way to fix it. I spent the run-up to the 2016 election reading about people taking advantage of early voting, which is supposed to be more convenient than voting on Voting Day. Unfortunately, in the US, that’s a pretty low bar. I read about people like Cynthia Perez, who stood in the hot Arizona sun for three hours to vote in Maricopa County, Arizona — the county that contains Phoenix, the state’s most populous city. Officials recently cut the number of polling places in that county by 70 percent. Bill Jones, a 69-year-old African American, stood in line for two hours to vote in Charlotte, North Carolina, eager to cast an early vote in a state where Republican officials have worked tirelessly to restrict voting, especially among minorities. Amanda Stephens tried two separate polling places in Corpus Christi, Texas, hoping to vote early on her lunch break. One said the wait would be two and a half hours. The other said three hours. She gave up. In Washington, D.C., Ian Watlington, who has cerebral palsy, was forced to navigate his wheelchair up a steep ramp and over gaps in the concrete to reach a difficult-to-operate door — all to get inside a polling place. In Nevada: View from the back of what's probably a 45-minute line to early vote in Henderson, NV. It's 10:45 am...on a Tuesday pic.twitter.com/Z4DlyHNSmX Put aside the deliberate attempts to make voting harder — hassles with ID, understaffed or eliminated polling places, purges of voter rolls, and the other horror stories covered so well in Ari Berman’s recent book Give Us the Ballot. Beyond all that, it is simply absurd that voting in America means taking time off of work on a particular day or set of days, schlepping to a specific building, standing in long lines, and registering your voting preferences in person, with a physical mark. We know how to register people’s preferences remotely! We’ve had remote-preference-registering technologies for centuries now. They work pretty well. Take the US postal system. I live in Washington, one of three US states (Oregon and Colorado are the others) that does all its voting by mail. Here’s how voting went for me. I got my ballot in the mail several weeks before the election. One night the following week, after dinner, my family gathered around the dining room table. On one side, we had our ballots. On the other, we had Washington state’s official voter guide, along with several informal voting guides from some of our favorite publications and people. We went through the ballot vote by vote — president, governor, on down to ballot initiatives on carbon taxes and public transit — discussing the opposing arguments, allowing the boys (11 and 13) to ask questions. Overall, it took about an hour. When we were done, we put our ballots in a special envelope, affixed stamps, and dropped them in the mailbox. That’s it. We did this at our leisure, not during proscribed hours. We weren’t subject to the vagaries of weather or the idiosyncrasies of polling staff. We didn’t have to show any ID or wait in any lines. We had plenty of time to research and mull over each vote. It felt deliberative, civilized, like the way human beings ought to vote. In Washington State there aren't polling places, just literal ballot boxes where everyone votes by mail...oddly simple! #vote pic.twitter.com/SAeJeNRIAt The advantages of universal voting by mail (UVBM) are legion. This long piece on the subject by Phil Keisling, the former Oregon secretary of state who introduced the system, lays out the case in detail. States save millions of dollars because they don’t need to establish polling places or pay polling staff (one reason Montana counties were desperate for vote by mail, though Republicans in the state legislature ended up rejecting it). Voter turnout is higher, especially among younger, older, poorer, and minority voters. There’s no need to run two separate election processes, one for in-person votes and another for mail-in absentee votes. Voter rolls are much easier to maintain and verify. Every vote leaves a paper trail. There are no issues with forms of ID, difficulties with access, or opportunities for voter intimidation. And there have never been any proven cases, or even serious allegations, of substantial voter fraud in UVBM states, mainly because the system renders it almost impossible. Keisling summarizes the security case: Mail-based voting systems today are far less risky than most polling place elections, precisely because they distribute ballots (and electoral risk) in such a decentralized way. To have any reasonable chance of success, an organized effort to defraud a mail-based system and its safeguards must involve hundreds (if not thousands) of separate acts, all of them individual felonies, that must both occur and go undetected to have any chance of success. Contrast that to the risks inherent in polling place elections that increasingly rely on direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting systems and proprietary software systems that both record and tally votes. A single successful software hack potentially could affect thousands of votes. It’s the difference between "retail" fraud and "wholesale" fraud. Voting by mail is inherently more resistant to wholesale voter fraud. As this piece in Governing magazine covers, UVBM has had trouble spreading elsewhere, despite its unblemished track record. Some 22 states have limited forms of vote-by-mail, for certain voters and in certain elections, but it is universal only in three. (UVBM legislation failed in Montana in 2011 and again this year.) Voters remain nervous about security. (Hacking seems remote, somehow, but the idea of someone coming into their kitchen and forcing them to mark a ballot a particular way, despite being absurd and never actually happening, haunts them.) And of course the Republican Party remains staunchly opposed to UVBM, just as Republicans are opposed to all voting reforms that make voting easier or increase turnout. It adds up to a difficult political hill to climb. But still. It’s crazy. No one should have to take time off work, stand in line, or search for particular polling places to vote, not when more secure and accessible alternatives are available. The many-faceted horror of Donald Trump seems to have stirred progressives to life and opened up novel political possibilities. One thing Democrats ought to do in response to this trauma is emphasize that, even if we can’t seem to get anything else right, we can get voting right. It’s easy. Postal mail works. We should use it to vote.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/27/15701708/voting-by-mail

Vox

2018-11-01 14:08:17

2018

11.0

1

Rebecca Jennings

Crocs spring 2019 collection: Crocs is targeting cool teens now

Right now on the hypebeast resale site Grailed, a pair of Crocs is going for $500. To be fair, they are not the normal kind of Crocs that you can find at, like, J.C. Penney; they’re from the brand’s collaboration with the streetwear brand Alife from earlier this summer. Still, it’s a lot of money for a squishy orthopedic shoe that Time magazine once included in a slideshow of the 50 worst inventions. But it’s not all that surprising, given that Crocs have been a kooky side note in high fashion for a few years. Crocs regularly clomp down runways at fashion week; there are heel versions and fur versions and platform versions that cost $850 and sold out before they even went on sale. A post shared by Crocs Shoes (@crocs) on Sep 24, 2018 at 4:09pm PDT Yet most of that industry clout has been due to its collaborations, like the ones with streetwear brands such as Alife or established houses like Balenciaga, in which the Platonic ideal of the classic Croc is reimagined by a high-profile creative director. And the rest of it overlaps with the fact that, somehow, hideous sandals in general are in vogue. Crocs themselves aren’t responsible for the confounding relevance of footwear like Birkenstocks and Tevas over the past five-plus years. The Crocs we know today have been around for more than a decade; their existence just happened to overlap with the fact that suddenly, their particular brand of ugly is on trend. And with its new collection, Crocs is actively chasing the customer who probably already owns an ironic pair (or a few). Brand employees told me they even have a special name for him (he’s a dude): the “explorer,” the hypebeast-adjacent Gen Zer who stores his Crocs next to his Yeezys. In an even more blatant teen-targeting move, on November 1, the brand announced a collab with rapper Post Malone. “We know this group is all about self-expression, which is why our spring 2019 collection features a bright, bold color palette, positive messaging, oversized logos and trend-right platform silhouettes,” explained Michelle Poole, senior vice president and chief product and merchandising officer of Crocs. Alongside the brand’s standard fare of flexible sandals, bedazzle-able clogs in a rainbow of shades, and dad-approved water shoes, the Crocs collection preview on October 30 featured certain styles that wouldn’t have looked out of place at, say, an Adidas store. There were minimalist slip-ons in sleek black-and-white combinations, a sneaker that looked almost like Allbirds but with techier fabric, and a rubbery slide with a millennial pink upper and a translucent red flatform. They’re shoes that pair well with current fashion: casual, streetwear-influenced clothing that’s relatively unflashy. The move is similar to what pretty much every other brand is doing, with the hope of attracting devoted customers that will be around for a long time (and especially when they start holding jobs with disposable incomes). Kodak, a camera company in an era when people already have cameras on their phones, is targeting teens obsessed with old-school analog technology with its collaboration with Forever 21. Formerly struggling fashion brands like Abercrombie and Delia’s have attempted rebrands to capture fresh Gen Z consumers who don’t remember when they were trendy the first time around. And Crocs’ courting of the cool teen appears to be working. In a recent survey conducted by the investment firm Piper Jaffray of about 8,600 teenagers, Crocs was ranked 13th in the “top footwear brand” category, up from 27th last year. It’s a statistic that’s clearly influenced by the larger trend of ugly shoes as status symbols, and of ironic fashion in general (which also explains the rise of brands like Vetements and Off-White). Even though most teens can’t afford to drop multiple hundreds on the versions peddled by other brands, they’re probably a lot more likely to spring for Crocs’ regular ol’ $30 to $40 versions. People are even creating their own imaginary brand collabs on places like YouTube, which has dozens of videos of people DIYing their concepts of Crocs by Supreme, Off-White, and Gucci. Sales of Crocs may be down from their 2014 high, but focusing on the cool-young-person market could help. And Crocs appears to be leaning in: “Our ‘explorer’ consumers play an important role in shaping our global product and marketing strategies,” added Poole. It’s hard to say how long ugly shoes will be cool — fashion is a pendulum, and trends tend to arrive as a backlash to whatever came before — but as long as teens are buying Crocs, it seems that Crocs will be giving them what they want.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/1/18043612/crocs-spring-2019-slides-platforms

Vox

2017-06-19 00:00:00

2017

6.0

19

Mike Tomlin Isn't Down with Le'Veon Bell's Rap Tracks, 'I'm Too Old'

Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin loves him some Le'Veon Bell -- but he ain't listening to the RB's rap music. Bell -- aka "Juice" -- has kinda blown up in the rap world over the past year ... getting some real traction from his Skip Bayless diss track and the secret song he recorded with Snoop Dogg. But Tomlin tells TMZ Sports he hasn't listened to a single second -- not because he's anti-Juice ... "I'm too old for all that." Tomlin says his teenage kids are probably Juice fans -- but he's an old school kind of a guy. "I'm 45-years-old man. I like Erick and Parrish Makin’ Dollas -- I’m an EPMD guy." BTW, Tomlin was out with his pal, Jay Glazer -- and the two of 'em weighed in on Mayweather vs. McGregor ... with the Steelers coach basically putting the super fight on blast.

https://www.tmz.com/2017/06/19/mike-tomlin-leveon-bell-rap-jay-glazer/

TMZ

2016-02-10 20:51:58

2016

2.0

10

Kurt Wagner

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Appalled by Marc Andreessen's Appalling Comments About India

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is not at all thrilled with his company’s longtime board member Marc Andreessen. Not. One. Bit. That’s because Andreessen stuck his foot in his mouth late Tuesday night when, while philosophizing on Twitter, he compared Facebook’s Free Basics service in India to colonialism and suggested that Indians are setting themselves up for economic ruin by resisting Facebook’s “help.” The tweets were inappropriate, and a lot of people were quick to call him out. Andreessen, who joined Facebook’s board in 2008, has since deleted the original tweet (which you can read below) and apologized multiple times in his now famous tweetstorm style. Still, Facebook and Zuckerberg are quickly trying to distance themselves from the comments. In a post Wednesday afternoon, hours after a company spokesperson said that Facebook “strongly rejected” Andreessen’s comments, Zuckerberg wrote: “I found the comments deeply upsetting, and they do not represent the way Facebook or I think at all.” He continued: “Facebook stands for helping to connect people and giving them voice to shape their own future. But to shape the future we need to understand the past.” Zuckerberg has spent a lot of time and energy trying to bring Free Basics to India. It’s a pet project of his, and he made a public trip to India and hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Facebook headquarters in 2015. https://twitter.com/KurtWagner8/status/697496625074180096 Free Basics provides a set of Internet services, including Facebook, free of charge to users, but doesn’t provide access to everything on the Internet. Regulators and critics argue that it violates the concept of net neutrality, which is why it’s currently banned in the country. What’s particularly tough about Andreessen’s comments is that many Free Basics opponents believe that Facebook’s free Internet plan will stifle Indian innovation by promoting established, existing services instead of allowing local Indian services to grow. The thinking is that Free Basics will allow an American gatekeeper (Facebook) to pick the winners and losers. Here’s Andreessen’s original tweet that sparked all the outrage. And here’s Zuckerberg’s full post. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2016/2/10/11587768/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-appalled-by-marc-andreessens-appalling

Vox

2016-03-03 00:00:00

2016

3.0

3

#GIFparty: Bieber, Kanye, Rihanna ... Who Will You Pick?

https://www.tmz.com/2016/03/03/twitter-gif-party/

TMZ

2017-12-20 18:20:02

2017

12.0

20

Alex Ward

South Korea has a message for Trump: hold off on military tests until after the Olympics

Next year’s Winter Olympics are set to take place in Pyeongchang, South Korea, roughly 50 miles from the border with North Korea. Given how tense the nuclear standoff between the US and North Korea has gotten in recent months, many fear that North Korea might try to disrupt the games with an attack or other provocative behavior like a nuclear test. To try to avoid that outcome, South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, is pushing the US to postpone its annual joint military drills with South Korea until after the Olympics. The US and South Korea hold joint military drills every spring to maintain readiness in case of potential war with North Korea and to demonstrate their military strength and resolve. One of the biggest is “Foal Eagle,” which this past year included around 30,000 US and South Korean troops who jointly practiced air, sea, and special operations from March to April. North Korea usually perceives these exercises as preparation for an invasion, and usually responds pretty harshly every time. South Korea is rightly worried about what North Korea could do before or during the Olympics, since Pyongyang already has a deadly track record. In 1987, North Korean agents bombed Korean Airlines Flight 858, killing all 115 people onboard. The attack was meant to deter attendees at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. But if President Donald Trump were to accept Moon’s offer, it’s entirely possible that North Korea would see the move as a sign of good faith and decide not to take any action around the Olympics to reignite tensions. China and North Korea consistently have advocated for a “freeze for freeze” plan, in which Pyongyang would stop improving its nuclear and missile programs if the US and South Korea — and potentially Japan — stopped conducting military exercises together. Trump, however, has consistently rejected that proposal. Retired Lt. Gen. Chip Gregson, the Pentagon’s top Asia official from 2009 to 2011, is also skeptical of Moon’s suggestion. “What does North Korea do in return?” he told me in an interview. “If it is nothing worthwhile, then it is not a good idea to preemptively compromise in the hope that it will somehow cause a change in North Korea’s actions. We would be extending an olive branch in response to North Korean and Chinese intimidation.” A Pentagon spokesperson declined to say if there are currently plans to pause the upcoming drills with South Korea, saying only that “it would be inappropriate to discuss plans for future exercises at this time.” In the Tuesday interview with NBC News, South Korean president Moon said, “I hope that this Olympics will be able to promote the peace between the North and South Korea and become an Olympics for peace.” Whether Trump, who so far hasn’t shown much willingness to deescalate tensions with North Korea, is willing to help Moon make that happen remains to be seen.

https://www.vox.com/2017/12/20/16800484/north-korea-trump-olympics-moon-south

Vox

2018-11-26 16:25:00

2018

11.0

26

Dylan Scott

Midterm elections 2018 live results: the House seats Democrats flipped

Democrats have won the 23 House seats they needed for a House majority — and then some, as they continue to score victories in districts represented by Republican members of Congress. Even a week after Election Day, Democrats are still racking up wins as votes get counted and close races are called. The House battlefield was huge: Election forecasters considered more than 100 House elections to be competitive in the 2018 midterms, the vast majority of them held by the GOP. Democrats were buoyed by the backlash to President Donald Trump and a campaign focused on protecting Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting conditions after the Republican effort to repeal the law last year. Once the results began rolling in, it was clear Democrats were quickly winning Republican-held House seats. So far, Democrats have won 41 GOP-held seats for a net gain of 39 seats, more than the 23 they needed to take control of Congress. Democrats have lost two seats they previously held — one in Minnesota and one in Pennsylvania — but they still cruised to a new House majority. They could end up picking up 40 seats when it’s all said and done, with a few races yet to be called. You can see all the results here, and we’re tracking the Democratic gains here: Barbara Comstock always looked like one of the most vulnerable House Republicans, after Hillary Clinton won her district by 10 points in 2016. The race was called quickly for Democrats on election night. Democrats worried at one time about Donna Shalala’s candidacy, but her momentum won out. Democrats were widely expected to flip this seat after Pennsylvania’s court-mandated redistricting. This was an open seat vacated by former Rep. Patrick Meehan, who resigned from the House amid sexual assault allegations. Democrat candidate Susan Wild defeated Republican candidate Marty Nothstein. Mike Coffman always seemed likely to lose this moderate suburban district in an election environment favorable to Democrats. Hillary Clinton won the Sixth by 9 points. This race was weird thanks to redistricting — pitting two current Congress members against each other — but it still counts as a Democratic pickup. This is a big win for Democrats: Carlos Curbelo is one of the most moderate Republicans in the House, and Republicans liked their chances of holding on here even in a Democratic year. A solid win for Democrats in the Great Plains, in a district that Hillary Clinton won by 1 point. Sharice Davids is the first Native American woman elected to the House. Top House Republican Rodney Frelinghuysen retired rather than defend this seat, and now Democrats have won it. Democrats snag one of two House pickup opportunities in the Land of 10,000 Lakes in a district Hillary Clinton won by 9. Scott Taylor’s campaign was ensnared in a voter fraud scandal, opening up an opportunity for Democrats that they took advantage of. Dan Donovan was the last Republican lawmaker representing a part of New York City in the House. His district voted for Trump by 9 points, but Max Rose, a combat vet, prevailed. Redistricting strikes again, handing Democrats an important win. Pete Sessions had risen high in the Republican conference, taking over the influential Rules Committee, but fell short in this Clinton +2 district. Sean Casten has defeated Peter Roskam, who served in the House since 2007. Hillary Clinton won the district by 7 points in 2016, but Roskam won his last reelection by nearly 20 points. Ann Kirkpatrick previously held Arizona’s First Congressional District. She won her race in the Republican-leaning Second Congressional District, vacated by Rep. Martha McSally (R), who is running for Senate. This district, northwest of Detroit, was previously held by retiring Republican Rep. Dave Trott. Democratic candidate Haley Stevens has now defeated Republican candidate Lena Epstein. This is a big pickup for Democrats; Antonio Delgado is a young African-American candidate who just won an overwhelmingly white district. House Republicans’ attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act became a huge point in the race. John Culberson has been in the House since 2001, but Democrats take this district that narrowly voted for Clinton. David Young has served in the US House since 2015. Health care and the GOP attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act was a huge issue in the race. Abby Finkenauer will become one of the youngest members of the House, elected at age 29. Randy Hultgren has served in the US House since 2011; he has been defeated by Lauren Underwood, a 32-year-old African American woman. Underwood is a registered nurse and former adviser to the Obama administration who helped implement the Affordable Care Act. Leonard Lance opposed the House’s Obamacare repeal bill, but it wasn’t enough to save him. Jason Lewis, who once lamented on his radio show that men could no longer call women “sluts,” loses to a woman in the Year of the Woman. Kendra Horn’s victory is maybe the biggest upset of election night so far: Trump won this district by 13 points and election forecasters thought it was a Likely Republican win. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA operative, unseated Dave Brat, a star among conservatives who four years ago unexpectedly dethroned then-House majority leader Eric Cantor. This seat, replacing retiring Rep. Frank LoBiondo, was one that Democrats were hoping to pick up. Jeff Van Drew won in a dramatic swing from 2016, when LoBiondo was reelected by a 22-point margin. Seth Grossman lost the support of national Republicans earlier this year over his history of racist comments and white nationalist sympathies. This is a big win for Democrats in the district of Republican Rep. Mark Sanford, who lost his primary to Katie Arrington, a more pro-Trump candidate, earlier this year. Joe Cunningham’s victory is the first time Democrats have flipped a House seat in South Carolina since 1986, according to the Post and Courier. It’s another big swing from 2016, when Sanford won by a 25-point margin. This was expected: Darrell Issa retired rather than defend his old seat, which Clinton won by 7 points in 2016. Katie Hill is one of the most notable wins in the Year of the Woman: Steve Knight was a fierce abortion opponent, and a target of abortion rights groups, while the Democrat spoke openly about her own unplanned pregnancy. Dana Rohrabacher — the lawmaker once dubbed Putin’s favorite congressman, who swore he could never lose reelection — fell to his Democratic challenger, Harley Rouda. Lucy McBath, who is black, suffered the loss of her son in 2012 when he was shot by a white man. She’ll soon be sworn in as the next representative of Georgia’s Sixth District. This is also a bit of redemption for Democrats, after Jon Ossoff narrowly lost to Republican Karen Handel in the 2017 special election to replace Tom Price. Republican Rep. Dave Reichert decided to retire rather than run for reelection in this Hillary Clinton district, and Kim Schrier will join the record number of Democratic women in Congress next year. Media outlets have called this race for Xochitl Torres Small, even as Republican Yvette Herrell rails on Fox News against the vote count. The Democrat, a former aide to Sen. Tom Udall, will be one of the younger members of the new Democratic majority; she’ll be 34 when she’s sworn in. Republican Rep. Tom MacArthur was critical to the House’s Obamacare repeal efforts, forging a compromise with the archconservative Freedom Caucus to roll back the health care law’s rules protecting preexisting conditions. Kim, who hammered MacArthur as one of the authors of repeal, is a former Obama administration official and he will become the first Korean-American Democrat to come to Congress. Denham was a more moderate Republican, willing to speak up against his party on issues like immigration. But he also voted for Obamacare repeal and the tax bill in a district Hillary Clinton won by 3 points. That proved to be his undoing against Harder, a political neophyte. In a razor-thin race, Porter — a UC-Irvine law professor who has focused on consumer protections for bankruptcy, worked under Elizabeth Warren, and endorsed Medicare-for-all — edged out Walters in a district that had never before elected a Democrat. Another open Republican-held California seat that Democrats will now represent. Kim led through most of the vote counting, but Cisneros, a Navy veteran, pulled ahead at the end. The headline is that veteran Jared Golden beat Republican incumbent Bruce Poliquin, but the real excitement was Maine’s ranked-choice voting system. The state has instituted a new way of voting. When voters step into the ballot box, they rank the candidates. If no candidate gets 50 percent of first-place votes, then ranked-choice kicks in. People who voted for the candidates who received the fewest votes have their second-choice votes distributed among the top two candidates (and then the third, and the fourth, if need be) until one candidate hits 50 percent. Poliquin was actually leading after Election Day but didn’t reach 50 percent. And once the spreadsheets were run with the ranked-choice votes, Golden pulled out the win. When it’s all said and done, this might end up being the closest House race of 2018. The two candidates traded leads as mail-in and provisional ballots were counted. In the end, McAdams, the Democratic mayor of Salt Lake County, beat first-term Rep. Love by fewer than 700 votes. This district swung heavily toward Trump — Mitt Romney won it by less than 1 point; Trump won it by 16 — to help put Tenney in Congress, but there was a fierce rebound in 2018 to land Brindisi, a state assemblyman and native of the Utica area, in the House.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/6/18070396/midterm-elections-2018-live-results-house-seats-flip

Vox

2018-01-18 18:30:00

2018

1.0

18

Mike Pearl, Lia Kantrowitz

Trump's Year of Living Dangerously with North Korea

This article is part of a weeklong series looking back at the first year of Donald Trump's presidency. During Donald Trump's presidential campaign, North Korea barely came up. The reality TV star didn't spend too much time on foreign policy—or any policy, really—and in his big "America First" campaign speech in April 2016 that covered global politics he mentioned North Korea only as a problem the US needed to pressure China into solving. Back then, "America First" sounded like old-fashioned isolationism, or maybe even some sort of mercantilism. In any case, it didn't seem like a President Trump would get the US into new wars. The idea that Trump would forgo international adventures and focus on a domestic agenda has long since gone up in smoke. Hawks in the White House seem to be itching for direct conflict with Iran. Trump has expanded the US military presence in Afghanistan. The use of Special Operations Forces remains on the rise. Most terrifying of all, it seems like every day there's a new sign that an all-out return to war with North Korea is on its way. North Korea was always going to be a major problem for Trump—Barack Obama explicitly warned his successor about the danger the nuclear-armed nation poised. Throughout the first year of Trump's presidency, North Korea continued to develop an arsenal that could wipe out US cities at the push of a button. Of particular interest were the detonation in September of a possible H-bomb—a huge leap in terms of sheer nuclear kilotonnage—as well as November's maiden voyage of the impressive Hwasong-15 missile, which looks like it could place a warhead anywhere in the US. Every step North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has taken into the nuclear big leagues has been met by a provocation from Trump. In August he did some off-the-cuff saber-rattling—the famous "fire and fury" line—that scared seemingly everyone except Kim Jong-un, and in September, he gave Kim a cute nickname that he got either from an Elton John song or from a line Nicolas Cage said in The Rock. In this atmosphere, war with North Korea—once unthinkable because of the massive civilian casualties in Korea and Japan that would result—has become a topic of open conversation. "It's Time to Bomb North Korea," read one provocative headline in Foreign Policy this month. (The article below it, a sadistic op-ed by Edward Luttwak, argued that if the Seoul area sustained heavy civilian casualties during a US-led war, that would simply be their nation's comeuppance years of poor planning.) Rodger Baker, who analyzes the Korean Peninsula for the military intelligence firm Statfor, thinks war is still not imminent. For the US, "it still seems like overall, the cost of military action continues to outweigh the benefit," he told me in a phone interview, adding that "the North Koreans don’t want war." Last month's bilateral talks between North and South Korea have been a tangible sign that movement in the direction of something other than war is not inconceivable. The takeaways from those talks have, so far, centered on the decision by the two nations to march together in the Winter Olympics, but that's more than nothing. According to Baker, Trump could have been a factor in the two countries' decision to chat. "He certainly contributed to the factors that led the North Koreans to have this dialogue with the South at this time," Baker told me, though he hastened to add that the timing also "matches where the North Koreans are in their program"—so it's entirely possible that we'd be seeing talks like these no matter who was sitting in the White House. The latter view is the perspective of Karl Friedhoff, a foreign policy fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs who formerly worked as a public opinion pollster in South Korea. "It was essentially preordained that North Korea was going to being to play nice right before the Olympics," Friedhoff told me, adding, "I don’t think [Trump] was responsible in any way shape or form for this coming together." Friedhoff perceives the broad strokes of Trump's North Korea plan as nothing new. What Trump is doing is presenting a credible military threat, just as past presidents have done, hoping sanctions actually hurt the regime, and then, once the medicine has done its work, eventually "bringing North Korea back to the table." The difference this time, according to Friedhoff: "Now we have a president who is relatively erratic in his behavior. One day he’ll make fire and fury comments, and the next he’ll come out and say, We need to have negotiations and talks! We can talk anywhere and anytime!” On many foreign policy issues, Trump's ideological compass seems to spin around like a propeller. His own most ardent fans, many of whom believed he would be a less interventionist president than Obama, watched in horror as he lobbed missiles at Syria last April and cozied up to Saudi Arabia in May. He hasn't been as soft on Russia as many of his opponents feared, but he's spent his first year alarming traditional American allies with his rhetoric, threatening to leave NAFTA, gutting the State Department, and causing international incidents for no reason—most recently when he reportedly called all of Africa a "shithole." Through it all, however, Trump's perspective on the two regimes that have been America's most persistent antagonists—North Korea and Iran—has never really changed. Trump’s clearest foreign policy program has been a bifurcated effort aimed, apparently, at deepening tensions with the two countries. But while Trump appears poised to scrap the nuclear deal with Iran and could ratchet up hostilities against it, the prospect of war with North Korea is the thing really keeping Americans scared of their own shadows. Unlike Iran, North Korea has nuclear weapons and potentially the capability to use them against the US, creating one of the most delicate, high-stakes geopolitical situations in the world. A report in the New York Times on Sunday painted a bleak picture of an unenthused US military glumly proceeding with the march toward war with North Korea, conducting exercises that simulate combat conditions. But Baker says we might not want to read too much into that. "We’ve known about these trainings for months and months," he explained. He told me their emergence in the news cycle right now makes sense. "My guess is that the [US] government is sort of intentionally letting these stories come out now, just as a reminder that the inter-Korean talks don’t mean the US is stopping its [war] preparation." Some analysts have speculated that with Trump watching from the sidelines, those aforementioned inter-Korean talks could exacerbate squabbles between South Korea and the US. Baker didn't seem too worried about that either. Yes, North Korea could certainly try to whisper dreams about a wonderful America-free future into South Korean President Moon Jae-In's ear, but that's not likely to get them very far. "At this phase, it’s hard to see what would potentially undermine US strength that wouldn’t, in the immediate [term], also undermine South Korea’s own national security," Baker said. So the question remains: Is there some uniquely Trumpian flourish to the North Korean deal-making process? Something no other president would have the gold-plated cojones to try? "The rumor is that there’s there’s a trade war looming with China, which, if it’s carried out, will have an impact on what China is willing to do with North Korea as well," Friedhoff told me. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in Vancouver to talk to a crew of representatives from all the nations that were allied with the US during the Korean War. The move, Baker told me, was designed to create, "a pseudo legitimate entity." But the summit pissed off China, which was excluded from the talks, and Russia, another excluded party, which condemned the talks as harkening back to an "inappropriate Cold War mindset." According to Baker, here's how this new source of pressure is meant to work: These talks are designed "to let the Chinese know that the US has alternatives to the United Nations Security Council." While this may not be a formal meeting of the UN, it is, "a United Nations thing," and while the UN Security Council can't seem to agree that North Korea is a "belligerent" (perhaps because that council includes Russia and China), this group definitely does. "Obviously these days China and Russia are not acting as if North Korea is a belligerent," and this meeting is a way of saying that needs to change, Baker said. In the longer term, the big question is whether the US will decide that coexisting with a nuclear North Korea is anything other than a total nonstarter. If the US can eventually shift from the position absolutely no nukes ever or we'll never talk to you, and into what Baker calls "a long-term containment strategy," then, he said, "there is a lot of room for dialogue." Will Trump decide to make that shift, backing away from his months of angry tweets? I don't think anyone in the world—maybe not even Trump himself—has any idea. Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kn8ev/trumps-year-of-living-dangerously-with-north-korea

Donald Trump

Vice

2017-05-18 15:00:00

2017

5.0

18

Lawrence Burney

Chief Keef Could Have Been the First Artist Signed to Apple Music

Chief Keef's influence can't be denied. As a 16-year-old in 2011, the Chicago rapper's rise changed the genre's sound, inspiring artists outside of the city to adopt drill elements in their own music. If you've heard someone scream "gang gang," "bang bang," or "squad," they likely got that from him. Most videos from street artists at this point are direct products of his "Don't Like" video, which was mostly shot in one room with his friends behind him toting heavy artillery. But even with his influence being so evident on the genre, Keef has granted a very limited amount of people access to his life and artistic process, especially after being dropped from Interscope Records in 2014. Lucky for us, Keef has broken his silence and in a new interview with XXL, he spoke about his influence, getting offered to be Apple Music's first signee, and his recording process. Of Apple Music's attempt to acquire him, he said: Apple Music's head of content, Larry Jackson, who recruited Keef to Interscope, confirmed that he did make the offer but didn't expect the rapper to bite. When asked about his feelings towards artists like Lil Yachty, Lil Uzi Vert, and other newcomers, Keef said: Keef also talked about his new music and direction, sharing that he likes playing with en vogue afrobeats and dancehall vibes, as he did on recently released "Can You Be My Friend." When asked of his plans for the remainder of 2017, he responded, "I just want to show. I'm gonna get on my beast shit and get to dropping shit on their ass out of nowhere. Just know, you're gonna see some heat." Read the rest of the interview at XXL. Photo: Taken from Chief Keef's Instagram. Follow Lawrence Burney on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qkga3b/chief-keef-could-have-been-the-first-artist-signed-to-apple-music

Noisey

Vice

2018-03-26 16:12:00

2018

3.0

26

Beckett Mufson

'Rick and Morty' Creator Says Season Four Delay Is Due to 'Complicated' Negotiations

Last week, Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon revealed in a spicy tweet that Adult Swim hasn't ordered new episodes of its most popular show. But by Monday, we got a clearer reason why that might be. "The reason we're not working on Rick and Morty right now ain't because I figured out that I don't need to impress you," Harmon said on Kevin Smith's SModcast over the weekend. "It's because of a little something called contract negotiations and it's gotten complicated this time around." In previous inter-season interviews, Harmon would say he and co-creator Justin Roiland were taking their time to ensure the show stayed up to par for its rabid fanbase. But this time around, that rhetoric seems to have been replaced by frustration at the Turner Broadcasting executives in charge of their contracts. The duo certainly has a lot of leverage and could always walk away from giving Adult Swim another ratings-busting season of the show. Roiland is currently pouring his voice acting talents and explosive visual imagination into virtual reality game company Squanch Games, which just announced a new title called Dr. Splorchy. Last year, Harmon executive produced a series for fledgling streaming service YouTube Red, which would likely pay top dollar for his writing skills and fanbase. Meanwhile, Adult Swim has been squeezing every last drop of Rick and Morty secret sauce into marketing for artists it represents and its new festival in LA. And we're hoping this silent Snickers branded spot isn't the last time we get to see the universe-traveling duo. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily. Tweet your Rick and Morty conspiracy theories at Beckett Mufson on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evqxke/rick-and-morty-season-four-delay-new-episodes-negotiations-dan-harmon-justin-roiland-adult-swim-vgtrn

The VICE Guide to Right Now

Vice

2016-11-10 00:00:00

2016

11.0

10

Obama-Trump meeting 'less awkward' than some might have expected: White House

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama’s Oval Office meeting on Thursday with his elected successor, Donald Trump, was an important first step for a smooth transition of power, the White House said. “President Obama came away from the meeting with renewed confidence in the commitment of the president-elect to engage in an effective, smooth transition,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told a news briefing. Trump and Obama did not resolve their differences, Earnest said, but, based on their agreement on the need for an effective transition, “the meeting might have been at least a little less awkward than some might have expected.” Reporting by Susan Heavey; Writing by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Jonathan Oatis

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-whitehouse/obama-trump-meeting-less-awkward-than-some-might-have-expected-white-house-idUSKBN1352EY

Politics

Reuters

2016-12-17 08:11:00

2016

12.0

17

AFP, Ben Moshinsky

'Cut it out,' Obama told Putin on cyber attacks

Washington (AFP) - President Barack Obama said Friday he had confronted Vladimir Putin in person over allegations of Russian hacking when they met ahead of the US election, telling him to "cut it out." Washington (AFP) - President Barack Obama said Friday he had confronted Vladimir Putin in person over allegations of Russian hacking when they met ahead of the US election, telling him to "cut it out." After being alerted over the summer to Russian cyber attacks on the Democratic Party, Obama told a year-end news conference his chief concern was to ensure the hacking did not escalate and hamper the vote counting last month. "In early September when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn't happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out and there were going to be serious consequences if he didn't," Obama said. "And in fact we did not see further tampering of the election process," he added. Just five weeks before he leaves the White House, the outgoing president has vowed to retaliate against Moscow over the cyber-meddling, which US intelligence says was designed to help Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton, a Putin critic. "Our goal continues to be to send a clear message to Russia or others not to do this to us because we can do stuff to you," warned the US president. Obama said there also was "some evidence" of China curbing cyber espionage in response to US warnings. "I had to have the same conversation with President Xi (Jinping) and what we've seen is some evidence that they have reduced but not completely eliminated these activities," the US leader said. Obama's traditional year-end press conference -- held as tensions soar with Russia -- was expected to be closely watched by his elected successor Trump, who has pledged to foster closer ties with the Kremlin. While Obama has not directly named Putin over the election hacking, one of his top advisors, Ben Rhodes, said Thursday: "I don't think things happen in the Russian government of this consequence without Vladimir Putin knowing about it." Meanwhile US officials said a Chinese warship had seized a US underwater drone in the South China Sea, triggering a formal diplomatic protest. The Global Times cited a Chinese military source as saying Beijing believed the incident involving the U.S. drone would be resolved "smoothly."

https://www.businessinsider.com/afp-cut-it-out-obama-told-putin-on-cyber-attacks-2016-12

Business Insider

2018-03-21 00:00:00

2018

3.0

21

What are the links between Cambridge Analytica and a Brexit campaign group?

LONDON (Reuters) - British consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica lies at the center of a storm for using data obtained from millions of Facebook users without their permission after it was hired by Donald Trump for his 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. However, the analytics firm is also under scrutiny over campaigning for the 2016 referendum when Britons voted to leave the European Union. Cambridge Analytica and the leaders of the Leave.EU group have previously boasted about working together during the Brexit campaign. However, they have since retracted their claims, saying no contract was signed and no work was completed. Parliament is investigating the links between Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU as part of an investigation into fake news. Did Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU work together? Arron Banks, the co-founder of Leave.EU, said in a book that in October 2015 his group hired Cambridge Analytica, a company that uses “big data and advanced psychographics” to influence people. In a November 2015, Leave.EU said on its website that Cambridge Analytica “will be helping us map the British electorate and what they believe in, enabling us to better engage with voters”. In the same month, Cambridge Analytica director Brittany Kaiser spoke at a Leave.EU news conference. She said her organization would be “running large-scale research of the nation to really understand why people are interested in staying in or out of the EU”. In February 2016, Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix wrote in Campaign magazine that his company was working for Leave.EU. “We have already helped supercharge Leave.EU’s social media campaign by ensuring the right messages are getting to the right voters online,” said Nix, who was suspended by the company this week. Leave.EU’s communications director Andy Wigmore also said on Twitter last year that his campaign group had used the company. “You should use Cambridge Analytics,” he said, adding that he could “highly recommend them”. What does Leave.EU say now? Banks says Cambridge Analytica sought work with the Leave.EU before the referendum but that ultimately it never did any - paid or otherwise - for the campaign. “We did have dealings with Cambridge Analytica – they put forward a pitch that went into the designation document submitted to the electoral commission,” Banks told Reuters. No work was done with Cambridge Analytica because Leave.EU did not win the designation as the official leave campaign and due to concerns about the consultancy, Banks said. When asked if Leave.EU paid or accepted any services from Cambridge Analytica, Banks said: “No benefit in kind, no data, no nothing.” Banks told a parliamentary committee earlier this month that when he referred to Cambridge Analytica being “hired” in his book this was a reference to the intention to work them. What does Cambridge Analytica say now? Nix told a parliamentary committee last month that he contacted Banks and Wigmore and their statements were not true. The article written in the Campaign magazine was a mistake and “drafted by a slightly overzealous PR consultant”, he said. This “referenced work that we hoped and intended to undertake for the campaign. Subsequently, work was never undertaken. The moment that that statement went out we were absolutely crystal clear to all the media outlets that we were not involved and that it had been released in error,” he said. Reporting by Andrew MacAskill; editing by David Stamp

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge-analytica-leave-eu/what-are-the-links-between-cambridge-analytica-and-a-brexit-campaign-group-idUSKBN1GX2IO

Cyber Risk

Reuters

2018-04-07 00:00:00

2018

4.0

7

Dahlia Nehme, Roberta Rampton

Trump says 'big price to pay' for Syria chemical attack

BEIRUT/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump warned on Sunday there would be a “big price to pay” after aid groups said dozens of people were killed by poison gas in a besieged rebel-held town in Syria, an attack the opposition blamed on Syrian government forces. As international officials worked to try to confirm the chemical attack which happened late on Saturday in the town of Douma, Trump took the rare step of directly criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin in connection with the incident. With tension running high, Syrian state television later issued a report of a suspected U.S. missile strike on a Syrian air base, prompting a swift U.S. denial of any such attack. The Syrian state denied government forces had launched any chemical assault. Russia, President Bashar al-Assad’s most powerful ally, called the reports fake. Trump threatened action, although it was unclear what he had in mind. Last year, he authorized a cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base days after a sarin gas attack on civilians. “Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price to pay,” Trump wrote on Twitter. The Russian Foreign Ministry warned against military action on the basis of “invented and fabricated excuses.” The medical relief organization Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) and the civil defense service, which operates in rebel-held areas, said in a joint statement 49 people died in the attack. “Yesterday reports emerged of yet another chemical weapons attack by the Syrian regime,” said the Syrian Negotiation Committee, a political opposition group. U.S. government sources said Washington’s assessment was that chemical weapons were used in a besieged rebel-held town in Syria, but they are still evaluating details. The European Union also said evidence pointed to the use of chemical weapons by Assad’s forces. A European diplomat said Western allies would work on building a dossier based on photos, videos, witness testimony and satellite images of Syrian flights and helicopters. However gaining access to samples on the ground would be difficult. The U.N. Security Council will meet twice on Monday following rival requests by Russia and the United States. U.N. war crimes investigators had previously documented 33 chemical attacks in Syria, attributing 27 to the Assad government, which has repeatedly denied using the weapons. Russia has repeatedly blocked efforts to hold Syria accountable both at the U.N. and OPCW. In the early hours of Monday, Syrian state television reported loud explosions heard near the T-4 airfield in the city of Homs in what it said was a suspected U.S. missile strike. The report ignited a storm of messages on Twitter. The Pentagon denied any such attack. “At this time, the Department of Defense is not conducting air strikes in Syria,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “However, we continue to closely watch the situation and support the ongoing diplomatic efforts to hold those who use chemical weapons, in Syria and otherwise, accountable.” Last week, Trump said he wanted to bring home the 2,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Syria working to help fight Islamic State militants. His advisers have urged him to wait to ensure the militants are defeated and to prevent Assad’s ally Iran from gaining a foothold. Republican U.S. Senator John McCain said Assad was “emboldened” after Trump’s remarks and said the U.S. president now needed to respond decisively. Tom Bossert, Trump’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, told ABC’s “This Week” the White House would not rule out launching another missile attack and called photos of the incident “horrible.” One video of the new attack shared by activists showed bodies of about a dozen children, women and men, some with foam at the mouth. “Douma city, April 7 ... there is a strong smell here,” a voice can be heard saying. Reuters could not independently verify the reports. Last year, one factor in Trump’s decision to bomb Syria was televised images of dead children. Two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Trump would likely await a conclusive “high confidence” intelligence assessment that the government used chemical weapons. The presence of Russian forces at a number of Syrian military bases complicates the process of picking targets for any strike, said one official. While some in the administration believe Russian forces should not be considered immune to attack because of Moscow’s support for Assad, officials said Putin would see any loss of Russian lives or equipment as a deliberate escalation, and likely would respond by increasing support for Assad, or retaliating in other ways. Trump had a previously scheduled meeting at the White House on Monday with senior military leaders. He has shaken up his core national security team, replacing national security adviser H.R. McMaster with John Bolton, a hard-charging former U.N. ambassador, who officially begins on Monday. Bolton last year praised Trump’s missile response, though he has generally focused more on Iran as a bigger security threat. Top White House officials were uncertain what advice Bolton may have given Trump about Syria, said a U.S. official. However, two officials said Trump has been adamant about withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria, despite warnings about the consequences from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other military officials. The Ghouta offensive has been one of the deadliest in Syria’s seven-year-long war, killing more than 1,600 civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The monitoring group said it could not confirm whether chemical weapons had been used in the attack on Saturday. Medical relief organization SAMS said a chlorine bomb hit Douma hospital, killing six, and a second attack with “mixed agents”, including nerve agents, had hit a nearby building. Basel Termanini, the U.S.-based vice president of SAMS, told Reuters another 35 people, most of them women and children, had been killed at a nearby apartment building. SAMS and the civil defense said medical centers had taken in more than 500 people suffering breathing difficulties, frothing from the mouth and smelling of chlorine. Tawfik Chamaa, a Geneva-based Syrian doctor with the Syria-focused Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM), a network of Syrian doctors, said 150 people were confirmed dead and the number was growing. “The majority were civilians, women and children trapped in underground shelters,” he told Reuters. Douma is in the eastern Ghouta region near Damascus. Assad has won back control of nearly all of eastern Ghouta from rebel groups in a Russian-backed military campaign that began in February, leaving just Douma in rebel hands. Facing defeat, rebel groups elsewhere in eastern Ghouta have left. Until now, the prominent insurgent group Jaish al-Islam has rejected that option, but the attack led the group to finally give in to the government’s demand to leave. There was no immediate comment from the group. Taking Douma would seal Assad’s biggest victory since 2016, and underline his unassailable position in the war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people since it mushroomed from protests against his rule in 2011. Reporting by Dahlia Nehme and Tom Perry in Beirut, Mustafa Hashem in Cairo, Roberta Rampton, John Walcott, Mark Hosenball, Matt Spetalnick, Michelle Price and Sarah Lynch in Washington, Michelle Nichols in New York, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Anthony Deutsch in Amstersdam, John Irish in Paris, and Polina Ivanova in Moscow; Writing by Tom Perry, Roberta Rampton and Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Adrian Croft, James Dalgleish and David Gregorio

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-attack/trump-says-big-price-to-pay-for-syria-chemical-attack-idUSKBN1HE0RR

World News

Reuters

2018-03-12 00:00:00

2018

3.0

12

Tom Brady Says His Kids Live In Different Cities with Different Moms

Makes sense ... guess we didn't think about it before -- but Tom Brady just said his 3 kids don't live in the same city ... his oldest boy lives about 215 miles away with his mom, Bridget Moynahan. Brady was talking about his family during an interview with "Good Morning America" when Michael Strahan asked if his kids understood how big of a deal he is. That's when Brady said his oldest son -- 10-year-old Jack -- is starting to get it because he lives in New York around a bunch of Giants and Jets fans. Brady then said his other two kids -- 5-year-old Vivian and 8-year-old Benny -- live in Boston with him and Gisele. Of course, Jack is Brady's son with his ex-GF, Bridget Moynahan -- and she's based out of New York these days. Judging from Brady's comments, it sounds like he primarily lives with her and goes to school in NY. Still, based on Tom's reality show "Tom vs Time" it seems like Brady and Jack have a pretty good relationship.

https://www.tmz.com/2018/03/12/tom-brady-kids-biridget-moynahan-gisele/

TMZ

2019-06-10 00:00:00

2019

6.0

10

Philip Pullella

Vatican condemns gender theory as bid to destroy nature

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican condemned gender theory on Monday as part of a “confused concept of freedom”, saying in a new document that the idea of gender being determined by personal feeling rather than biology was an attempt to “annihilate nature”. LGBT rights advocates denounced the 30-page document, called “Male and Female He Created Them”, as harmful and confusing, saying it would encourage hatred and bigotry. The document, the Vatican’s first on gender theory, was written by the Congregation for Catholic Education as an “instruction” to Catholic educators on how to address the topic of gender theory in line with Church teaching. It was released as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people around the world have been celebrating “Pride Month” amid a surge in demands for acceptance of the idea that gender is more complex and fluid than the binary categories of male and female, and depends on more than visible sex characteristics. “The concept of gender is seen as dependent upon the subjective mindset of each person, who can choose a gender not corresponding to his or her biological sex, and therefore with the way others see that person,” the Vatican booklet says. It says gender theories are “often founded on nothing more than a confused concept of freedom in the realm of feelings and wants, or momentary desires provoked by emotional impulses and the will of the individual, as opposed to anything based on the truths of existence”. Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, which seeks to reconcile LGBT Catholics and the institutional Church, called the booklet “a gross misrepresentation” of the lives of LGBT people that could encourage violence against them. “The misinformation the document contains will cause families to reject their children, and it will increase alienation of LGBT people from the Church,” he said in a statement. While the document is not signed by Pope Francis, it several times quotes from his speeches and teachings and those of previous popes. It was issued with little advance notice to reporters and without the customary news conference. It denounced theories that attempted to “annihilate the concept of nature” and “educational programs and legislative trends that ... make a radical break with the actual biological difference between male and female”. A prominent American Jesuit writer, Father James Martin, tweeted: “The document is mainly a dialogue with philosophers and theologians, and with other church documents; but not with scientists and biologists, not with psychologists, and certainly not with LGBT people, whose experiences are given little if any weight.” DeBernardo added: People do not choose their gender, as the Vatican claims: they discover it through their lived experiences. The Church should respect and encourage this process of discovery, because it is a process by which individuals discover the wonderful way that God has created them.” Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Kevin Liffey

https://www.reuters.com/article/vatican-gender/vatican-condemns-gender-theory-as-bid-to-destroy-nature-idUSL8N23H3MQ

World News

Reuters

2018-10-07 00:00:00

2018

10.0

7

Tom Allard, Kanupriya Kapoor

Indonesia's fickle quake spares some, destroys others at epicenter

LENDE INDUK, Indonesia (Reuters) - Just 500 meters from the epicenter of the earthquake that triggered a wave of destruction in Indonesia, a modest wooden home built on hollow concrete foundations in Lende Induk village stands completely and remarkably unscathed. A few kilometers away, along the main road of its sister village, Lende Tovea, scores of homes - many built with reinforced concrete - were completely destroyed by the violent shaking, leaving a mess of rubble neatly covered by fallen tin roofs. The contrasting scene in the hamlets nestled between the coast and lush hills visited by Reuters on Saturday illustrate the fickle effects of the major 7.5 magnitude quake and ensuing tsunami that battered Palu, a coastal city 78 km (48 miles) to the south, on Sept. 28. More than 66,000 buildings were badly damaged and at least 1,649 people were killed in the disaster but neither the quality of building construction nor proximity to the quake explain why some areas were destroyed and others nearby left relatively untouched. Zainar, 38, who lives in the intact house closest to the epicenter, was inside when the quake struck. While the house built a year ago held strong, she said everything inside was broken. “There was a monstrous shaking and everything inside fell over. We can’t use anything,” Zainar told Reuters. “Luckily, by the grace of God, our house didn’t collapse. I don’t know why,” she said. Mudrik Rahmawan Daryono, an earthquake expert from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences who did his doctorate on the geology around Palu, said an unusual web of fault lines that intersect the area helped explain the discrepancies. There are four main interconnected fault lines active in the area and a multitude of smaller ones that radiate from them. The immense energy created by the slippage of the tectonic plates underneath Lende Induk tracked the ruptures. “It is clear based on the satellite image that one of the major fault lines, the Palu segment, is responsible for the quake,” he said. “It goes through the city and the sea.” He said earthquakes cause greater damage where the soil is softer with higher saturation levels from groundwater. At its extreme during powerful quakes, the soft, wet soil produces liquefaction, turning the ground into a roiling, muddy liquid. In Balaroa and Petobo, two sub-districts in the south of Palu hit by extensive liquefaction, hundreds of people were killed and countless homes destroyed, many sucked into the churning quagmire. Rescuers retrieved dozens of bodies from the areas at the weekend. Many victims are believed to be buried under meters of mud and debris. The imam of Lende Tovea, Launi, knows little of seismology but has been pondering the fickle disaster. He was inside his mosque along with the village chief, Rahman Lakuaci, listening to the call to prayer by the muezzin, Darwis, when the earthquake struck. Within five seconds of the first impact, Lakuaci said the mosque collapsed. Lakuaci escaped but Iman Launi was trapped inside, rescued by villagers four hours later. Darwis was killed instantly, one of dozens in the area Lakuaci believes perished. He said 70 percent of homes had collapsed. Sitting under a tarpaulin in front of his obliterated home, a mangle of shattered timber and broken concrete surrounding an immaculately intact green cupboard, the imam said shocked worshippers had questioned him about the quake. “I tell them this is a test from God,” he said, smiling congenially. “I say ‘don’t let this shake your faith. It’s troubles like these that bring us closer to God’.” Editing by Robert Birsel and Paul Tait

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-quake-epicentre/indonesias-fickle-quake-spares-some-destroys-others-at-epicenter-idUSKCN1MH06N

World News

Reuters

2018-05-17 01:47:53

2018

5.0

17

Jen Kirby

Report: official leaked Michael Cohen’s financial transactions because of fears over missing records

Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’s attorney, published a memo last week that he said detailed Michael Cohen’s financial transactions. The “Project Sunlight” memo revealed Cohen’s firm Essential Consultants LLC had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from major corporations, including a $500,000 payment from a company with ties to a Russian oligarch. Various companies that paid Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, for amorphous consulting services — AT&T and Novartis among them — confirmed the payments. The admissions corroborated Avenatti’s revelations. But questions arose about how Avenatti had obtained the confidential information, especially as he referenced “3 Suspicious Activity Reports” related to Cohen’s dealings and teased more significant disclosures to come. The Treasury Department launched an inquiry into the potential leak. Reporting by the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow answers that question. A law enforcement official leaked the documents, the official told Farrow, after becoming concerned that two reports on Cohen’s suspicious financial activity could not be found in a government database. Both of those reports, according to the New Yorker, detail even more substantial financial transactions — about $3 million, three times the amount of last week’s disclosures. This is an extraordinary allegation. This whistleblower is claiming the documents went missing from the database, the more sinister — but so far unverifiable — implication being that they were purposely being withheld. The documents this law enforcement official said they could not find are not easily misplaced bureaucratic paperwork. Suspicious activity reports, or SARs, are reports that banks and other financial institutions file if they have an inkling that someone might be engaging in money laundering or another illicit activity. They are filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which maintains a database for government and law enforcement officials. A suspicious activity report is not proof of any crime, just a red flag, and can help authorities establish patterns. “I have never seen something pulled off the system. ... That system is a safeguard for the bank,” the source told the New Yorker. “It’s a stockpile of information. When something’s not there that should be, I immediately became concerned.” Some former government officials suggested to the New Yorker that it’s possible (though it would be unusual) that access is restricted because of the extremely sensitive nature of the SARs, given that Cohen is under federal investigation by the Manhattan US attorney’s office. That investigation, while apparently separate from special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, was referred to federal prosecutors in New York by Mueller’s office. A FinCEN spokesperson confirmed Thursday to the Wall Street Journal that the agency does limit access to SARs at the request of law enforcement if there’s an open investigation. New statement from FinCEN spox - it does limit access to SARs in ongoing investigations pic.twitter.com/aoeAwggB34 The statement from FinCEN seems to clamp down on the more alarming possibility of foul play while underscoring how delicate the matter into Cohen might be. FinCEN also reiterated that the Treasury inspector general is still investigating the disclosure of the one SAR document, which is a federal criminal offense. There are reportedly three SARs related to Cohen filed by First Republic Bank by January 2018, where Cohen opened an account for Essential Consultants. Cohen set up Essential Consultants to pay Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money days before the 2016 election to silence her about a 2006 affair she says she had with Trump. Avenatti’s disclosure last week revealed that Cohen had also been busy selling himself as an essential consultant in the Trump era, peddling his services to major corporations, including AT&T, Novartis, and a Korean aerospace firm, which took him up on his offer, and Ford and Uber, which did not. Among those payments was a $500,000 transaction from Columbus Nova, which has ties to a company belonging to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. The information in that disclosure covers one of the SARs, from September 2017 to January 2018. The other two reports, which total $3 million, are the ones that the official allegedly couldn’t find in the database. A lot of that money ended up in Cohen’s personal coffers, which was flagged in a separate suspicious activity report by Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. Cohen deposited checks with the institution — two in the amount of $250,000 and one in the amount of $500,005. According to the New Yorker, “Morgan Stanley Smith Barney marked those transactions, which added up to more than a million dollars, as possible signs of ‘bribery or gratuity’ and ‘suspicious use of third-party transactors (straw-man).’” First Republic also seemed to think Cohen’s description of Essential Consultants didn’t match up with the financial transactions. As the New Yorker reports: In paperwork filed with the bank, he said that the company would be devoted to using “his experience in real estate to consult on commercial and residential” deals. Cohen told the bank that his transactions would be modest, and based within the United States. In fact, the compliance officers wrote, “a significant portion of the target account deposits continue to originate from entities that have no apparent connection to real estate or apparent need to engage Cohen as a real estate consultant.” Likewise, “a significant portion of the deposits continues to be derived from foreign entities.” The implications of the SARs — both the one released and the two others that reportedly exist — reveal, at best, that Cohen still has a lot of explaining to do. Mueller reportedly reached out to AT&T, Novartis, Ford, and other companies to ask questions last year about their relationship with Cohen. On Wednesday, the Washington Post confirmed that the FBI investigated payments Korea Aerospace Industries paid to Cohen, asking questions of its representatives “a few weeks ago.” It’s unclear if Mueller’s team or federal prosecutors in Manhattan followed up on those payments. Update: This post has been updated with a statement from FinCen.

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/16/17363242/michael-cohen-trump-avenatti-leaks-financial-records

Vox

2017-03-13 15:30:02

2017

3.0

13

German Lopez

A new video challenges the official story about what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson

A few seconds of video have reopened old wounds about police brutality in America. Over the weekend, documentary filmmaker Jason Pollock debuted his movie Stranger Fruit at SXSW, and with it previously unreleased surveillance footage of black teenager Michael Brown at a grocery store. The video shows Brown just hours before he was shot and killed by then–Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in August 2014. According to the filmmaker, the new video shows Brown walking into a store and exchanging marijuana with the clerk for cigarillos at about 1 am on August 9, 2014. But in the footage, Brown turns around and returns the cigarillos — presumably so the clerk can hold them until Brown comes back later. This footage was never released by police before. The video that was previously released by police, however, showed Brown at this exact same store around 11 hours later. But this time, Brown was shown strong-arming a clerk and getting away with a pack of cigarillos. Back in August 2014, police said the video proved Brown had robbed the store — which police and Wilson’s defenders used as evidence to argue that Wilson had reason to fear for his life when he shot and killed the teenager. The new video complicates the story by suggesting that Brown showed up at the store not to rob it, but to pick up his cigarillos as part of an ongoing consensual — if illegal — exchange. So it’s not so much that Brown took part in a robbery, but that a run-of-the-mill drug deal went wrong. The video has not been authenticated by media outlets, nor have local police verified its legitimacy or what it shows. It’s possible that it was edited or otherwise doctored. But it’s already led to protests in the Ferguson area, according to CNN. Still, the newly released video casts new questions on the Brown shooting case: Why wasn’t this video previously released by police but the other video was? Why did it take a documentary to force it into the light a few years later? And does this really mean anything for the actual shooting of Brown, given that the standards for use of force are so narrow and Wilson was already cleared after a grand jury decided not to indict him? In other words, nearly three years after Brown’s death, we are once again relitigating the shooting that elevated the massive Black Lives Matter movement over police brutality and the broader racial disparities in how cops use force. The new video raises two big questions about what happened hours before Brown was shot and killed. The first question: Did Brown really forcefully rob the store? The surveillance video that police originally released only seemed to show the end of Brown’s dealings with the store — particularly the moments where he pushed aside a staff member at the store who was trying to keep him from leaving. Police used that piece to make the case that Brown took part in a strong-arm robbery of the store just hours before the shooting. But the new video, again, suggests that Brown had a more consensual arrangement with the business. The store, for its part, has denied that it was participating in an illegal drug deal. “There was no transaction. There was no understanding. No agreement. Those folks didn’t sell him cigarillos for pot. The reason he gave it back is he was walking out the door with unpaid merchandise and they wanted it back,” Jay Kanzler, attorney for Ferguson Market & Liquor, said in a statement. The second question: How could this new video not be relevant if the old one was? St. Louis County Police have said that incident in the video “is still irrelevant to our investigation because our department investigated the encounter between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson” — suggesting that they were focused on the moments of the shooting itself, not what happened before. But if that’s the case, why was the old surveillance video of the alleged robbery released in the first place? How was that old video relevant to the shooting if this newly released video isn’t? Pollock, the documentary filmmaker, said the selective withholding of the video evidence suggests an attempt at character assassination. “We had to do this so that people understand what really happened,” he told reporters. “Because people think all these ridiculous things about him — that he was a thug. And he was not a thug. He just graduated from high school in a place were there was only 62 percent graduation rate. That means he was a rock star, and he beat all the odds, and he was murdered eight days after his graduation.” Again, the video still needs to be authenticated. But whatever comes of it, all of this contributes to greater distrust in the police story. The Ferguson Police Department and St. Louis County police investigators have been mired in distrust from the start, with many people refusing to believe the official story of what happened in the moments around when Brown was shot and killed. If more people come to believe that the police were trying to selectively withhold evidence to hurt Brown’s reputation, that will only further worsen distrust in the police over what, exactly, happened in August 2014. The video alone, however, doesn’t show that Wilson wasn’t legally justified when he shot and killed Brown. Under the law, what’s relevant is that Wilson reasonably perceived a threat to himself or others in the moments when he shot and killed Brown. Wilson claimed that after he stopped Brown, the teenager tried to reach for his firearm and later charged at him when he fired the fatal shots. It is these last few moments that would be truly relevant to the shooting: If Wilson thought Brown was trying to hurt him, that would be enough for Wilson to reasonably perceive a threat and use force. Wilson also claimed that he believed Brown was a robbery suspect, based on a call he got moments before the shooting suggesting that Brown matched the description of a robbery suspect — which would bolster Wilson’s argument that he genuinely believed Brown posed a threat. But even the video might not be too relevant here, because Wilson wasn’t at the time aware of the newly or previously released footage. And, again, what matters is whether in the moment Wilson reasonably perceived a threat. A local grand jury, police, and the US Department of Justice have so far come down in Wilson’s favor. The physical evidence suggested Brown reached into Wilson’s car during their physical altercation and likely attempted to grab the officer’s gun. The most credible witnesses agreed that Brown moved toward Wilson before the officer fired his final shots. Although some credible witnesses suggested Brown raised his hands up before he died, witnesses who disputed major parts of Wilson’s side of the story were discredited by the physical evidence and when they changed their accounts. In the end, there simply wasn’t enough evidence, especially given the struggle at the car, that Wilson wasn’t justified in fearing for his life when he fired the shots that killed Brown. The video doesn’t change any of these details. So it’s likely not relevant to the criminal case against Wilson. Still, it may be ultimately relevant to the Brown family’s ongoing wrongful death lawsuit against Ferguson. While it’s unclear if the newly released video will alter the legal battles around the Brown shooting, there’s little doubt that it will worsen a very real crisis in policing: distrust in law enforcement. Consider that even though Wilson was never indicted, the Justice Department found that the Ferguson Police Department was racially biased and used to generate budget revenue instead of protecting the public. Essentially, local officials asked police to raise as much revenue as possible through fines and court fees, and Ferguson police carried out those orders by targeting the city’s poorer, less politically powerful black residents. This led to often frivolous police work, exemplified by one of the Justice Department’s findings: Officers frequently arrest individuals under Section 29-16(1) on facts that do not meet the provision’s elements. Section 29-16(1) makes it unlawful to “[f]ail to comply with the lawful order or request of a police officer in the discharge of the officer’s official duties where such failure interfered with, obstructed or hindered the officer in the performance of such duties.” Many cases initiated under this provision begin with an officer ordering an individual to stop despite lacking objective indicia that the individual is engaged in wrongdoing. The order to stop is not a “lawful order” under those circumstances because the officer lacks reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot. … Nonetheless, when individuals do not stop in those situations, FPD officers treat that conduct as a failure to comply with a lawful order, and make arrests. More broadly, there are massive racial disparities in police use of force. A previous analysis of the available FBI data by Dara Lind for Vox found that US police kill black people at disproportionate rates: They accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population. Although the data is incomplete, since it’s based on voluntary reports from police agencies around the country, it highlights the vast disparities in how police use force. One possible explanation for the racial disparities: Police tend to patrol high-crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black. That means they’re going to be generally more likely to initiate a policing action, from traffic stops to more serious arrests, against a black person who lives in these areas. And all of these policing actions carry a chance, however small, of escalating into a violent confrontation. That’s not to say that higher crime rates in black communities explain the entire racial disparity in police shootings. A 2015 study by researcher Cody Ross found, “There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.” That suggests something else — such as, potentially, racial bias — is going on. At the same time, police are often missing when black communities need them most. Consider the clearance rate — the rate at which cases are solved — for murders and shootings in black communities. As David Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, previously told Mother Jones, in minority communities, clearance rates for murders and nonfatal shootings can get “pathetically low. They can easily fall down to single digits.” Journalist Jill Leovy captured the sentiment this fosters in her award-winning book Ghettoside: “Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened. Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens.” Together, all of this feeds into the idea that police overpolice black communities by stopping and shooting black men for petty crimes and simultaneously underpolice the same communities for more serious crimes that actually require police help. And that crisis of confidence is why police are wrangling with movements like Black Lives Matter that think how America does policing is fundamentally broken and needs to be fixed — and why we’re still debating what happened the day Michael Brown was shot and killed.

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/13/14905320/michael-brown-ferguson-shooting-video

Vox

2016-12-06 17:27:00

2016

12.0

6

Noisey UK Staff

Lock Mariah Carey Out of Your Home This Xmas

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK. For too long, Christmas has been haunted by the glittering, damp spectre of routine. As family members sit around the table, it's likely some form of recognisable music will come tooting from the speakers. The work of Slade, Wham! and Mariah Carey, perhaps. Or the sound of "Little Drummer Boy", which is comparable to the emission of wind from the depths of the anus. These enduring compositions aren't completely terrible, but they're also as dusty as the decaying tinsel that gets dragged down from the attic each December. They speak of reindeers, fairytales and non-existent snowmen. They tell a tale of a "White Christmas" that only exists in Richard Curtis films and they very rarely involve existential despair or an impressive desire for drinking the house dry. In fact, the standard set of Christmas songs have become increasingly underwhelming to the point of nausea. Every radio station, music channel, work playlist, plays the same 50 on repeat, and you engage with them anyway, don't you, because what other choice do you have? They are like the last withered pie at Greggs, or a genuinely attractive person on Tinder who has set "Panda" as their anthem. With that in mind, we're drawing a line in the fake snow and we're cleaning up the damn playlist. Here are a list of new-ish songs to listen to while inebriated and around your immediate family this festive season. This is the most iconic Christmas song of all time. I'm sorry Band Aid, I'm sorry The Pogues, I'm sorry Las Ketchup – who re-released "The Ketchup Song" with added sleigh bells in an attempt to pass it off as festive – but Gucci Mane has re-written history with this, the hardest Christmas single since East 17 stood in formation in leather trousers whinging about touching someone's face while they're asleep. "St. Brick Intro" is not the first time East Atlanta Santa has graced the holidays with an appearance, but let's break down why it's the best: Firstly, Zaytoven has somehow written an ice cold piano line that passes as both a club-ready trap loop and a faithful homage to "Jingle Bells". Secondly, the video deserves several Oscars. Opening with Gucci trapping through the snow in a bright red Rolls Royce convertible, CGI snowflakes tumbling onto his denim jacket replete with enormous fur trim, it's an ominous yet beautiful piece of cinematography, like Harmony Korine was tasked with remaking The Grinch, and it has changed the way we view Christmas forever. Do you put Oreos out for Santa? You do now. Have you ever carved up a turkey while singing "Over the hills we go / Got an extendo and an AK"? Probably not, and maybe you shouldn't, but it's nice to have options. VH1 will now have to reshoot the countdown they air every year to include David Gest saying "And finally, at number one, Gucci Mane with this nasty-ass beat from 2016". So, next time someone comes at you with some bullshit about how there have been no good Christmas singles since the mid-90s, kindly inform them they are wrong and crank this up so loud your nan whips out her trigger fingers. Emma Garland There's something about this track that really gives me the feels. Maybe it's because GFOTY whisper-chants "angel, mistletoe, Christmas day" over and over again until you can't help chanting along to it, under your breath, at work. Maybe it's because it utilises that pleasing jingle bell sound that immediately makes the festive transmitters in your brain light up. Or maybe it's because it contains the line "let me ride your christmas sleigh", which we all know means something hella dirty. Either way, this is an underrated holiday banger that definitely deserves a place on the next That's What I Call Christmas CD. Sort your shit out, NowMusic. Now, you bellends! Daisy Jones Releasing a "twee" indie Christmas track that doesn't make you vom sausage rolls all over your ironic reindeer woollens is no mean feat, so big up Best Coast and Wavves. Coming at you like a more acceptable version of She & Him, they recorded this cutesy, low-fi Christmas song to celebrate the holidays in 2010. It's the sort of thing you would send your crush in sixth form to prove your indie credentials and show that you were above the local carol service, but it's still just as sweet now as it was six years back. Granted, it does just layer bells of various descriptions (church; jingle; all the other ones) over what would otherwise be a regular indie track, but who is really complaining when this ode to the trying to find your Christmas presents before the big day is so good natured? Lauren O'Neill Featuring everyone from Cam'ron to Pusha T to Jim Jones, "Christmas in Harlem" is arguably the most exquisite Christmas track to have been squeezed into existence. Yes, there are all the stylistic tropes of the festive season - sleigh bells, a synth that sounds as fresh and beautiful as recently fallen snow, an overall aesthetic in the production that feels like every jovial moment in the Home Alone series. But this shit also goes hard. Clocking in at nine minutes long, it takes in everything from festive sex, to late-night christmas shopping, to shopping bricks of yay around the neighbourhood. This is the holiday track you didn't know you wanted, but the one you deserve. Oh - and like all the best presents it's rare and is only available to listen to on this weird-ass website here. Ryan Bassil 2015 was a banner year for Ariana Grande. She released "Focus", performed it at the AMAs dressed like R&B game Jessica Rabbit, and verbally slapped the shit out of two radio hosts for being basic as hell and claiming the unicorn emoji was "for girls". She also scandalously licked some donuts in a shop, didn't buy them, then proclaimed "I hate America". To top it all off, she recorded an entire Christmas EP in her home studio and released it without warning. Titled Christmas & Chill, it sounds like a Cassie album but with sleigh bells and lyrics like "tis the season for some giving!", making it the only Santa-referencing release you can pash to without feeling deeply uncomfortable. Every song is fantastic, truly, but this cut stands out because it's essentially a stand-in for everything the Spice Girls have failed to gift us during their various reunions over the last two decades. Emma Garland With a knowingly kitsch throwback aesthetic and tongue-in-cheek lyrics straight out of a kitchen sink romance novel, the Long Blondes were the Pulp the 2000's never knew they needed. Nowhere is this more blindingly obvious than on their wry tearjerker of a Christmas song "Christmas is Cancelled". A story of heartbreak. A tale of a particularly British sense of being eternally underwhelmed by everything. A lyric that is the best to have entered any Christmas song before or since, which is: "No mum, don't worry about me / I'll just have fish and chips for tea / I'll watch the Queen and go to sleep". Ultimately, "Christmas is Cancelled" is the sort of cold, hard #realism that always goes down well with some wine and a Christmas lunch. Load it on up! Lauren O'Neill Unless you're unfortunate enough to have been born into Jamie Oliver's family, Christmas day looks nothing like Love, Actually. Tradition and custom expects you to be rosy-cheeked and gleeful, but if you're feeling like an empty vessel devoid and incapable of any feeling, or your family resembles the cast of Nil By Mouth, Christmas is the salt for all wounds. So, with that in mind, slap on Miley Cyrus' "My Sad Christmas Song" because it's a great track about how much this time of year sucks. "This year feels kind of lame, but the last one was the same," she sings, which is waaay better to drunkenly shout along to than that absolutely fucking deranged Wizzard song. Daisy Jones You can find us all on Twitter. Header image from How Guwop Stole Christmas mixtape.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/znm733/verban-mariah-carey-uit-je-huis-met-deze-alternatieve-kersthits

Noisey

Vice

2017-06-08 00:00:00

2017

6.0

8

David Lawder

Wilbur Ross sees 'genuine' national security concern on steel

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said on Thursday that a national security review of the U.S. steel industry will be completed “very shortly” and will seek to protect the interests of both domestic steel producers and consumers. Ross told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing that he believes there is “a genuine national security issue that must be considered in this case,” the second major signal in two days that the Trump administration is preparing new steel import restrictions. In a speech in Cincinnati on Wednesday, Trump said: “Wait until you see what I’m going to do for steel and for your steel companies. We’re going to stop the dumping, and stop all of these wonderful other countries from coming in and killing our companies and our workers. You’ll be seeing that very soon.” The steel review under a Cold War-era trade law would result in a “thoughtful” set of recommendations for Trump to consider for action, Ross said. He has previously said he expected to complete the study by the end of June. Ross identified three kinds of actions that could be recommended: imposing tariffs above the current, country-specific anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on steel products; imposing quotas limiting the volume of steel imports; and a hybrid “tariff-rate quota” option that would include quotas on specific products with new tariffs for imports above those levels. Choosing the latter option would help mitigate concerns over steel price inflation from tariffs, Ross said. Some steel users have voiced concerns that import limits would cause price increases that would make them more vulnerable to foreign competitors. “The overall impact on inflation, were that to be the route, should be relatively modest,” Ross said. “So we’re very mindful of the need both to protect the domestic steel producers from inappropriate behavior on the part of foreign dumpers, but also to protect the steel consumers, the steel fabricators, the auto companies and everybody else who uses steel.” Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Dan Grebler

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-steel/wilbur-ross-sees-genuine-national-security-concern-on-steel-idUSKBN18Z26U

Politics

Reuters

2018-09-19 00:00:00

2018

9.0

19

AutoNation's Mike Jackson to step down as CEO next year

(Reuters) - AutoNation Inc’s (AN.N) longtime Chief Executive Officer Mike Jackson will step down from the role next year but remain executive chairman until 2021, the largest U.S. auto retail chain said on Wednesday. AutoNation’s stock has more than tripled since Jackson became CEO in 1999 after the company’s founder H. Wayne Huizenga hired him from Mercedes-Benz USA, where Jackson was president. The Fort Lauderdale, Florida-headquartered retailer has retained its No.1 position in the United States under Jackson’s leadership. His departure as CEO comes as U.S. automotive sales are cooling down after a solid run for several years following the 2008 financial crisis. AutoNation said executive search firm Spencer Stuart would support its CEO succession process. Reporting by Ankit Ajmera in Bengaluru; Editing by Sai Sachin Ravikumar

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autonation-ceo/autonations-mike-jackson-to-step-down-as-ceo-next-year-idUSKCN1LZ1GV

Business News

Reuters

2017-10-28 00:00:00

2017

10.0

28

Steve Harvey's Sidekick Shirley Strawberry Sued for Being Deadbeat Tenant

Steve Harvey's right-hand woman on his morning radio show was a months-long freeloader when it came to rent and then bounced when the landlord put his foot down ... this according to a new suit. Shirley Strawberry -- who appears with Steve on "The Steve Harvey Morning Show" -- is being sued by the homeowner's leasing agent, Pacific Shore Property Management, claiming Shirley and her hubby were deadbeat tenants. In the docs, obtained by TMZ, PSP says Shirley had a 1-year lease for $7,500 a month. Shirley paid the first month's but May's payment was 25 days late. After that Shirley paid zilch. The homeowner tells TMZ ... Shirley made nothing but excuses about why rent was late. The owner adds sheriff's finally came to evict her in September but Shirley bounced minutes before they arrived. Pacific Shore is suing for rent owed and late fees. We've reached out to Shirley, so far no word back.

https://www.tmz.com/2017/10/28/steve-harvey-sidekick-shirley-strawberry-sued/

TMZ

2018-01-02 00:00:00

2018

1.0

2

Alex Lubben

It's 2018, and Trump is still tweeting about Hillary Clinton's email

Donald Trump’s highly abnormal presidency: the week of Jan. 1 Donald Trump’s highly abnormal presidency: the week of Jan. 1 Sign up for a weekly newsletter about President Donald Trump to be delivered to your inbox every Friday.Donald Trump made it clear at the beginning of his campaign that he wasn’t going to follow the normal rules or tone of politics. We’re keeping track of all the ways his presidency veers from the norm in terms of policy and rhetoric. The election was in 2016, and 2017 was a long, long year. Welcome to 2018, where President Donald still has questions about Hillary Clinton’s email. Trump called for the Justice Department, which he said was part of the “deep state,” to investigate Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s top aides, for having reportedly sent State Department passwords to her personal Yahoo email account. The Daily Caller, a conservative publication that Trump reads regularly, published a report late on New Year’s Day that says that Abedin had violated State Department protocol, allowing her passwords to be claimed in the Yahoo hack of 2013, which compromised some 3 billion of the email service's accounts. The information was auctioned off by a collective in Eastern Europe. And though Trump runs the government, he’s still suggesting that the “deep state” is really in charge. The term “deep state” refers to the entrenched, bureaucratic, conspiratorial forces that are, Trump suggests, wielding considerable power within the government that he leads. The emails in question, found on Abedin’s soon-to-be ex-husband Anthony Weiner’s laptop. were released by the State Department on Friday. The “sailors pictures on the submarines” Trump’s likely referring to here is another throwback to 2016: It refers to a U.S. Navy sailor who pleaded guilty to snapping a couple of photos of a classified part of a submarine. He was sentenced to six months home confinement. Trump, in the tweet, suggested that the two incidents were comparable, and appeared to be calling for jail time for Abedin, because her failure to follow security protocol was similar to the Navy sailor’s. The sailor received a sentence of one year in prison as well as six months' home confinement. CORRECTION Jan. 2, 5:12 p.m.: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that a U.S. Navy sailor had not received jail time for photographing classified areas of a submarine. The sailor did in fact receive a year-long prison sentence, as well as 6 months of home confinement. — Alex Lubben

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/43qabd/its-2018-and-trump-is-still-tweeting-about-hillary-clintons-email

Vice News

2016-01-15 11:00:02

2016

1.0

15

Libby Nelson

What the US could learn from Singapore about making teachers better

For teachers in Singapore to advance in their career, they must make sure their students learn. They also have to help their fellow teachers get better. This model of collaborative professional development is one way other countries are doing a better job than the United States at improving the skills of educators. While the US spends billions of dollars a year for occasional workshops on the latest technology or curriculum trends, there's almost no evidence to suggest that the model works. A new study from the National Center on Education and the Economy explores teacher professional development in three countries with excellent education outcomes — Shanghai, Singapore, and British Columbia. The report found that unlike in the United States, in these countries teaching is much more like other careers, where advancement is expected and interaction with other professionals is expected for growth. If the US were able to imitate these systems, experts have argued for years, it could help attract more qualified teachers, raise test scores, and have a lifelong impact on students. There are two ways that teaching doesn't look like other jobs in the United States: The job stays pretty much the same for as long as a teacher is in the classroom, and there's little interaction with other adults. Experts argue that both are a problem when it comes to helping teachers improve. If you started out teaching third grade 35 years ago and retired this year, your last day in the classroom easily could have looked a lot like your first. You might have been getting paid more for more years of experience, but the expertise you'd developed after decades in the classroom wasn't formally recognized. Most professions don't work this way. Lawyers move up from first-year associate to managing partner; nurses can deepen their specialization in branches of medicine. Experts have argued for years that the lack of a similar path in teaching makes it harder to retain good teachers. The clearest path up is becoming a principal — which is essentially an entirely different job. Teachers' skills, perhaps as a result, improve quickly in the first five years they're in the classroom. Then the research disagrees on what happens next. Some studies have found teachers plateau completely; others find they continue to improve, but not as dramatically. "There’s no reward for getting better at it," said Marc Tucker, director of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which released the report today exploring how teachers' professional development works in Shanghai, Singapore, and British Columbia. "There’s no career in teaching. There’s no high amounts of responsibility to aspire to." And although teachers are rarely alone, teaching in the US is a solitary profession: They spend most of their time with students, not other adults. Compared with teachers in other countries, teachers in the US spend far more time in front of their classes, which means they have less time to work on lesson planning or collaboration. Teachers in the US teach about 27 hours per week, compared with 19 hours per week in Korea and Shanghai. That means they have less time to discuss problems and techniques with each other and improve their skills. "Teachers have no time to think, no time to learn, no time to study the kids, no time to study the curriculum," Elizabeth Green, the author of Building a Better Teacher, told me last year. "They have no way of seeing anything that's happening outside their own classroom." Research has found that collaboration is key to helping teachers improve — or at least that teachers think it is. A 2007 study found a link between teacher collaboration and higher student test scores in Tennessee. A different system of helping teachers learn on the job, already in use in Shanghai, Singapore, and British Columbia, could solve all these problems. Those systems give teachers more time to collaborate, get rid of ineffective professional development, and create a more varied career path for teachers who want to stay in the classroom. Teachers are responsible not just for their students' learning but also for each other's. They work together to develop better lesson plans or new ways of teaching. And they constantly evaluate whether the work they're doing is paying off in the classroom. In Singapore, an elite group of "master teachers" are responsible for helping other teachers in the school system to improve. Those teachers train mentors and other leaders within the system, who in turn work with newer teachers to develop their skills. The system expects tangible results. The teachers set goals for what their students will learn, and if students aren't performing well they're expected to adjust. This approach, according to Tucker, turns teachers into researchers who evaluate data and change their approaches accordingly. Teachers use four questions to guide their work: 1) What do we want students to learn? 2) How will we know they have learned it? 3) How will we respond when they don't learn? 4) How do we respond when they already know it? Educating teachers is seen as crucially important: Teachers advance within the profession based in part on how successfully they educate each other, and schools are held accountable for helping their teachers improve. The Singapore system, as well as similar teacher development systems in Shanghai and British Columbia, "make it very clear that the way we improve schools is to improve teaching," said Ben Jensen, the CEO of Learning First and a co-author of the new report. But it also requires a high level of trust in teachers. "Until you’re willing to let schools try, and some of them will get it wrong, you’re not going to get the growth that’s possible," Jensen said, adding that he's not sure the system in the US has that much trust. Unlike many reforms meant to help the US catch up with other countries, this idea wouldn't require a big, national effort. And Tucker suspects that it wouldn't cost more than the billions of dollars that they're already spending on less effective forms of professional development. Creating a system like Singapore's would still face huge hurdles. It would require reimagining how professional development works and, in some cases, reimagining what a teaching career looks like. It would require huge amounts of training to ensure that it's effective. While teachers unions aren't necessarily opposed to a system of master teachers, most teachers' contracts aren't set up for anything like this, and altering them would require tricky political negotiations. Freeing up more time for teachers to collaborate also often means larger classes — common in Singapore and Shanghai but strongly resisted by American teachers One state has come further than the rest in trying to rethink how it helps its teachers improve: Iowa. A new system, backed by the teachers union, creates leadership positions for teachers, including mentoring, serving as a model of good teaching for others, or helping develop the curriculum within their school. At a coaching session at Roosevelt Middle School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in September, Laura Zimmerman, who teaches students learning English, met with instructional coach Anne Ironside to talk about what was going well and poorly in her classroom. They discussed how she could change her language to reflect a "growth mindset" — the idea that intelligence isn't fixed but can be developed over time. Ironside asked Zimmerman to pick out specific words and phrases — "effort," "perseverance," "rise to the challenge" — to encourage students who are struggling. And she asked her to pick out when in her lesson plan she might use those techniques. "Sometimes when I give them a writing prompt … that's when they groan," Zimmerman said. Ironside asked her which students were most likely to struggle, and asked her to role-play how she would encourage those students to keep it up. They brainstormed other ways she could get students started, including model sentences and extra detail on the assignment, and scheduled Ironside's next visit to Zimmerman's classroom during a writing assignment to check up on whether the advice worked. Feedback in Cedar Rapids used to be much more cursory: a short visit from an administrator, followed by written comments. Under the new system, teachers meet with instructional coaches, some of whom also spend part of their day in the classroom, for 15 to 30 minutes once a week. "Teachers are saying, I haven’t ever received this much support; I’m getting more support now than I ever have," said Mary Ellen Maske, a Cedar Rapids deputy superintendent. Iowa's model has gotten national attention: Education Secretary Arne Duncan visited Ironside and Zimmerman's coaching session on a bus tour in September and said Iowa leads the country in developing new roles for teachers. But it's still far less sophisticated than the systems that Tucker's group highlighted. The key is a policy reform: "We need an overall strategy that says professional learning is important, we’re going to be explicit about what it looks like, and we’re going to structure policies to get that improvement," he said.

https://www.vox.com/2016/1/15/10773592/teachers-singapore-shanghai-professional-development

Vox

2018-10-18 00:00:00

2018

10.0

18

'Love & Hip Hop' Star Tommie Lee Arrested Twice in 24 Hours, Allegedly Stalked Daughter

Tommie Lee got her dumb ass hauled into jail Wednesday night for stalking of her own daughter ... just 24 hours after Tommie allegedly slammed the child into a school locker the day before. The "Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta" star outdid herself, even by her own low standards, by getting arrested TWICE within 24 hours. The first bust came Tuesday night when she was booked for battery, aggravated assault and child cruelty. Cops say Tommie unloaded on one of her daughters at the child's middle school in Cobb County, GA. Tommie posted a $27k bond and was released Wednesday morning at 4:40 AM -- but she was also slapped with a court order to stay away from the daughter. Apparently, she just couldn't stick with that program. She violated the order by making contact with her daughter within 3 hours of getting out of jail. Tommie was back in handcuffs Wednesday night, and she's currently being held without bail.

https://www.tmz.com/2018/10/18/love-and-hip-hop-tommie-lee-second-arrest-24-hours/

TMZ

2019-05-31 00:00:00

2019

5.0

31

President Trump 'Honors' LGBT, Month After Transgender Military Ban

President Trump ain't got no shame in his Twitter game ... kicking off Pride Month by congratulating the LGBT contributions a month after his administration effectively banned transgender people from the military. POTUS reminded us moments ago in a tweet, "As we celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation, let us also stand in solidarity with the many LGBT people who live in dozens of countries worldwide that punish, imprison, or even execute individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation." Earlier this month the Trump Administration also announced a proposal that would essentially allow health care providers to discriminate based on gender identity, rolling back progress for the transgender community that was made over the past decade. Just last month, the Pentagon began to implement a controversial new policy that critics say is essentially a "don't ask, don't tell" policy for trans service members. The Department of Defense says it's NOT a ban ... but it clearly says anyone with gender dysphoria taking hormones or who has already undergone gender transition will NOT be allowed to enlist. #SAD. What's more ... the DOD says going forward military members diagnosed with gender dysphoria will have to serve in their sex as assigned at birth. They'll also be barred from taking hormones or getting gender-affirming surgery.

https://www.tmz.com/2019/05/31/president-trump-lgbt-pride-month-military-gay-ban-transgender-rights/

TMZ

2017-10-13 13:10:02

2017

10.0

13

Natalia Antonova

Some victims stayed friends with Harvey Weinstein. I did the same with my rapist. Here’s why.

First-person essays and interviews with unique perspectives on complicated issues. “That’s it. That’s what they’ll bury her for,” was the first thing I thought. I was reading Ronan Farrow’s excellent New Yorker article on Harvey Weinstein’s alleged history of rape and sexual harassment, when I got to Weinstein’s alleged rape of actress Asia Argento. Argento claims that Weinstein performed oral sex on her, against her will, in a hotel room. Argento goes on to say that she grew close to Weinstein after he assaulted her — accepting gifts, meeting his mother, and having consensual sex with him. A familiar sick feeling washed over me. I could understand how Argento could allow the same man who she says forced himself on her to continue to be part of her life. I also knew — just as she did — exactly how this sequence of events would affect her credibility, in the public’s eye, if she came forward about the assault. “He made it sound like he was my friend and he really appreciated me,” Argento tells Farrow about the relationship she and Weinstein formed after the alleged rape. I shuddered in recognition. Once upon a time, my rapist, another well-connected and accomplished man, did the same to me. Not only did he encourage me to pretend as though nothing bad had happened between us, but he also made it abundantly clear that he would trade on his privilege to encourage me to stay silent. Among the basic tenets of rape culture is the typecasting of the rapist as an aberrant monster and an outlier. Rape culture does not allow for the possibility that a rapist can be a regular guy with a family, your neighbor or colleague, a trusted friend, or the cute guy smiling from across the room at a party. To allow for that possibility is to admit that none of us are truly safe. It would also mean admitting that the victim could not have predicted the rapist’s behavior. One rape culture myth is the idea that “a real rape victim” always acts bravely in the aftermath. She would never appear to be on good terms with her rapist — she would only treat him as the monster he revealed himself to be. A famous example of this is the case of Emma Sulkowicz, or “mattress girl,” who famously accused a fellow Columbia University student of rape. Because Sulkowicz sent friendly texts to the student, Paul Nungesser, after the incident, doubt was cast on her story. Nungesser went on to sue Columbia for sexual discrimination and reached a settlement. “A real rape victim wouldn’t do that,” a male friend told me when we were discussing the controversy. Yet to cast doubt on this scenario ignores both the power differentials between men and women in society and the self-loathing survivors deal with in the aftermath of rape. When I was in my 20s and just starting my writing career, I met a charming fellow writer. He was successful and constantly surrounded by admirers. Meanwhile, I was an unknown. He was known for being a political progressive. Journalists wrote breathless articles about how reading his work had changed their lives. In spite of all that, he seemed shy, startled by his own fame. That disarming shyness was a good disguise. When we saw each other again, in a different city where I barely knew anyone, I readily accepted his invitation to a party at his friend’s house. It was there, after lots of laughter and many more drinks, that he leaned in for a kiss — and my world was turned upside down. He led and I followed willingly into a private room. What started out as consensual turned into something else as he became increasingly violent. Through the haze of alcohol, I remember him gripping me so tightly that I cried out in pain. He clearly liked the sound of me in pain, because things only got worse from there. I could not believe it was happening at first. “You’re hurting me,” I kept saying. “I don’t want this. Please, no.” He apologized — and then he kept going. “You should have known better.” I heard that refrain many times in the years that followed about what happened after that kiss. I heard it especially loud in my own head. I was young, hopeful, and dazzled by him — but I was also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and violence. How could I not have seen the signs, spotted the fatal flaw? I would later come to realize there was nothing that gave away what would follow. In the light of dawn, he finally let me go. We could both see the road map of bruises and bloody scratches on my body. I was shaking with horror and disgust. He alternated between begging for forgiveness and insisting that nothing bad had occurred. Then he spoke of his admiration for my talent. He said he felt like I had a bright future but that I still needed to jump through hoops to find success. My rapist hugged me by the shoulders and offered me writing advice. I sat next to him, wiping away tears, and listened. We were friends — that was the fiction I created for myself. We’d just had too much to drink. It had been “confusing.” He hadn’t actually meant to hurt me. Forget reporting the rape: Merely admitting it to myself made me want to die. Admitting the truth was dangerous to my writing career. When he came up in conversation in my professional circles, I played out the scene in my head. What if I said, “Actually, this guy is a rapist who got off on my helplessness and pain? Stay away from him.” What would his many fans, fans who included mutual friends of ours, say? I would be cast out. I would be branded a hysterical bitch, a liar, and a jealous fraud who wanted to ruin a great man of letters. Who would want to work with me after that? My rapist, meanwhile, went around introducing me to people, helping me network, pointing me out to his friends whenever we ran into each other. “Natalia is talented; read her plays,” he’d say. Oh, and you also raped me, I would think. The contradictory thoughts would ensue. He feels like he owes me, and that’s why he’s doing this. Or maybe, the bitter voice of my own self-hatred whispered, I owed him. Sexual violence doesn’t just affect the body. It warps and pollutes the mind. He had already done the bad thing. He had assaulted me. Now the least he could do was make up for it somehow. I’ve heard plenty of women assaulted by their colleagues say the same thing over the years. But the truth is, favors from a rapist become just another sick game the victim is drawn into. It doesn’t make anything better — not on the inside, anyway. It makes things worse. “When I see him, it makes me feel little and stupid and weak,” Argento said of Weinstein. I know that feeling well. Sexual assault engenders it, and being forced to play nice with your rapist perpetuates it. The guilt of knowing that your silence may have enabled your rapist to harm others sits like a slab of granite on your chest. In the United States, only about a third of rapes and sexual assaults are reported. It’s not just that rape is a difficult crime to prosecute — it’s that our very attitudes about rape are simplistic. To this day, we still talk more about what women should do to prevent rape as opposed to worrying over how to raise boys not to feel entitled to women’s bodies. Harvey Weinstein, while admitting some wrongdoing and denying that he raped anyone, has also defended himself by suggesting that he is merely a product of a different time. Yet we recently elected a man who boasts about assaulting women to the highest office in the land. How much has really changed, after all? As for me, years later, I began trying to rebuild my self-worth against all odds. You are not the thing he did to you, I tell myself these days. You don’t owe him anything. They still occasionally sound hollow, these words. One day, I hope they will stick. Natalia Antonova is a writer and journalist. She is the associate editor of openDemocracy Russia and a co-founder of the Anti-Nihilist Institute. First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/10/13/16465064/harvey-weinstein-rape-allegations-asia-argento

Vox

2016-08-29 00:00:00

2016

8.0

29

Congressional leaders ask for more time to study new fuel rules

DETROIT (Reuters) - Three Congressional leaders on Monday asked top federal environmental and safety officials to extend by 60 days the public comment period on new vehicle emissions and fuel economy standards. The public and their advocates need more time, beyond the comment period that ends Sept. 26, to absorb more than 1,000 pages of a draft technical assessment report, the three said in a letter to the environmental and safety chiefs. A week ago, U.S. regulators denied a similar request for an extension by major automakers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a July report that automakers have the technology to meet aggressive mandates to hike fuel efficiency, but improvements will not be as great as the Obama administration once forecast because buyers are switching to pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles from lighter cars. When the administration first outlined its goal of boosting average fleet fuel economy to 54.5 miles per gallon, regulators forecast that 67 percent of vehicles sold in 2025 would be cars. Since then, gasoline prices have fallen and truck and SUV sales have surged. Regulators now estimate the fleet will average 50 to 52.6mpg in 2025. The letter dated Monday was sent to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Administrator Mark Rosekind. It was signed by three members of the U.S. House of Representatives: Fred Upton, chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce; Ed Whitfield, chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Power; and Michael Burgess, chairman of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade. Reporting by Bernie Woodall; Editing by Tom Brown

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-autos-emissions/congressional-leaders-ask-for-more-time-to-study-new-fuel-rules-idUSKCN1142BW

Politics

Reuters

2016-04-04 19:43:00

2016

4.0

4

Noisey Staff

Watch Mongolian Folk Metallers Tengger Cavalry's New Video for "Mountain Side"

They've sold out Carnegie Hall, they've dazzled audiences all over New York City, and now, Tengger Cavalry is hitting the road. Formed by frontman and mult-instrumentalist Nature Ganganbaigal while he was still living back home in Beijing, the Tengger Cavalry project has grown far beyond its initial concept—a band meant to celebrate both Ganganbaigal's Mongolian roots and his love of heavy metal. The band has become a cultural force, and the release of its latest EP, Mountain Side, cements their status as one of North America's most dynamic and unique musical—let alone metallic—entities. Mountain Side features reworkings of older material (which incorporate Native American tribal music, Mongolian traditional folk, and cinematic filmscapes, in a nod to Ganganbaigal's day job as a composer), as well as a few new songs and remixes. The album is available here, and we're debuting the music video for the title track below. As Ganganbaigal commented, “This is our very first music video, and it really represents the band's musical and cultural ideas behind the scene! Catch Tengger Cavalry on tour across the United States in May: 5/14 – Naugatuck, CT @ Cooks Cafe5/15 – Philadelphia, PA @ Kung Fu Necktie5/17 – Indianapolis, IN @ 5th Quarter5/18 – Chicago, IL @ Subterranean5/20 – Kansas City, MO @ Riot Room5/22 – Denver, CO @ 3 Kings5/24 – Seattle, WA @ Highline5/25 – Portland, OR @ Ash St. Saloon5/26 – San Francisco, CA @ Elbo Room5/27 – San Diego, CA @ Brick By Brick5/28 – Los Angeles, CA @ Viper Room5/29 – Phoenix, AZ @ Pub Rock5/31 – Austin, TX @ Dirty Dog6/1 – New Orleans, LA @ Siberia6/2 – Asheville, NC @ Mothlight6/4 – New York, NY @ Webster Hall

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/rmjnbb/tengger-cavalry-mountain-side

Noisey

Vice

2016-07-22 16:19:00

2016

7.0

22

Tom Taylor

Jose Aldo Expects McGregor Rematch in NYC

In the main event of UFC 194, Jose Aldo's incredible reign as WEC and UFC featherweight champion came to a skittering halt when he walked into a Conor McGregor left hand just 13 seconds after the fight began. Almost seven months later, on the main card of the historic UFC 200, Aldo rebounded from this career-altering loss in the strongest way possible, out-striking long-time contender Frankie Edgar to a unanimous decision win, and winning the interim featherweight title in the process. The reason for the creation of this interim title, of course, comes down entirely to McGregor. Shortly after his title-winning blitzkrieg of Aldo, the Irishman set his sights on the lightweight strap, and after an unfortunate injury to then lightweight champion Rafael Dos Anjos, ended up in the welterweight division, where he would lose to Nate Diaz in one of the year's biggest upsets. Today, McGregor is preparing for a UFC 202 rematch with Diaz, and not surprisingly, that rematch is incredibly important to his career. If he loses, it'll be two losses in a row to the same man, and this will deflate whatever is left of his mystique. If he wins, meanwhile, he'll restore some of that mystique, and continue on down the road as MMA's biggest and most marketable star. The ramifications of this rematch extend far beyond McGregor, however. The outcome of his UFC 202 bout with Diaz will also have a huge impact on the featherweight division and the many elite fighters that currently fill its uppermost ranks. McGregor still is, after all, the division's undisputed king. Aldo, who now wears interim gold in McGregor's stead, is acutely aware of the strange influence this welterweight bout will have on his division. During a recent media scrum in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian explained that the more worrying outcome for him is a McGregor victory. "He has to lose [to Diaz.]," Aldo told the media. "Otherwise, they will do a third fight. If he wins, they will do another rematch with Nate, and that's bad." The reason this would be so "bad" for Aldo, of course, is that he's unlikely to earn the McGregor rematch he so desperately craves as long as the Irishman is fighting outside the featherweight division. If McGregor loses to Diaz again, however, Aldo's future looks much brighter. In fact, the Brazilian believes a second loss to Diaz will send McGregor back down to featherweight, which would lay the groundwork for their title-unifying rematch. And should such a rematch occur, Aldo believes there would be no better choice of location than the UFC's debut in New York City this November. "If he loses (to Diaz), it's highly likely that they put us to fight on November 12 at Madison Square Garden," Aldo explained. "The Irish community is big over there." If McGregor wins and continues to compete in heavier divisions, Aldo told the media that he expects a bout with streaking contender Max Holloway is next. And though this isn't the fight the interim champ is hoping for, he said it's a fight he'll take, especially if it's in New York City. "If it's a fight against Holloway, I don't see any problem. This event in New York will make history. I really hope I'm at this card because I want to be part of history," Aldo explained. "But I really hope [the McGregor rematch] happens." Yes, it's safe to say that Jose Aldo will be watching the UFC 202 main event very closely, as its outcome will have a huge impact on the course of his immediate career.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d7m3jw/jose-aldo-expects-mcgregor-rematch-in-nyc

Sports

Vice

2019-07-09 00:00:00

2019

7.0

9

Russia's Transneft says it imposed limits on oil intake from Rosneft - RIA

MOSCOW, July 9 (Reuters) - Russian oil pipeline monopoly Transneft has had to impose limits on oil intake from the country’s largest oil producer Rosneft in July “after several warnings”, RIA news agency reported on Tuesday. It said it had to cut oil intake from a Rosneft subsidiary by 0.5% of its yearly production, RIA reported. Four industry sources told Reuters earlier on Tuesday that Transneft had curbed oil intake from Rosneft’s main upstream unit Yuganskneftegaz. (Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; writing by Vladimir Soldatkin; Editing by Jan Harvey)

https://www.reuters.com/article/oil-russia-transneft-rosneft-oil/russias-transneft-says-it-imposed-limits-on-oil-intake-from-rosneft-ria-idUSR4N24501F

Company News

Reuters

2016-01-21 20:19:00

2016

1.0

21

Liam Daniel Pierce

Jordan Morris Signs with the Seattle Sounders, the U.S. Soccer World Implodes

Traditionally, young national players have been brutally dragged into the destructive hype machine of U.S. soccer (*cough* Freddy Adu *cough*), and the 21-year-old Jordan Morris is no different. The debate about whether a young U.S. player should develop his talents in a domestic or foreign league spiked after rumors emerged of Morris signing with Bundesliga side Werder Bremen. But on Thursday, Morris officially signed with his hometown Seattle Sounders. Cue USMNT fan base overreaction. Morris represents a bit of an anomaly: he's a talented non-professional American who has garnered the attention of a reputable European club, despite falling outside of the typical age range for European youth recruitment. Morris went to the Seattle Sounders FC Youth Academy for a year before signing a letter of intent to play for Stanford University. He was later brought up to play for the USMNT by Jurgen Klinsmann, a coach known for encouraging his players to play abroad. But despite earning the seal of approval from the USMNT German manager, it seems that whatever happened rubbed Werder Bremen coach Thomas Eichin the wrong way. "We're in a situation now where we need players who fully identify with Werder and the way things are done here, in order for them to focus properly on the task ahead," Eichen said. Eichin later went on to tell Bild that Morris was "homesick." The Werder Bremen manager's comments are not a good look for American soccer players, who bear a reputation of being soft (*cough* Landon Donovan *cough*). But despite getting turned down by the more highly-regarded Bundesliga, pundits are saying that the move to the Sounders is solid. Not to mention the fact that reports are stating that it is the richest homegrown player contract in MLS history. Hard to tell what life Morris would have led to in Germany, but maybe a little under-hyped move could be beneficial to the young player.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wnmbqq/jordan-morris-signs-with-the-seattle-sounders-the-us-soccer-world-implodes

Sports

Vice