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2019-06-11 00:00:00

2019

6.0

11

Colin Packham

Australia PM to meet national broadcaster after police raids

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he will meet with executives from the national broadcaster on Tuesday as he sought to calm tensions following two police raids against prominent media organizations. Police last week raided the head office of the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC) and the home of a News Corp editor amid investigations into two alleged national security leaks. The raids, which police said were unrelated, triggered complaints of assaults on press freedom. Under mounting pressure, Morrison said he will consider any proposals to improve media protection when he meets ABC chairperson Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson. “If there is a suggestion or evidence or any analysis that reveals there is need for further improvement of those laws, then the government is always open to that,” Morrison told reporters in Sydney. Australia has no underlying safeguards for free speech in its constitution. When the government ratcheted up counter-espionage laws in 2018, it added a provision to protect whistleblowers. Morrison, who was overseas during the police raids, can ill afford to have the issue drag on, analysts say. He wants parliament to approve promised tax cuts when legislators return after last month’s election, but some lawmakers want to prioritize amendments to protect press freedoms. The government does not hold a majority in the upper house Senate and Morrison will probably need the support of several independents to pass his signature tax cuts. “We should move that protection across to any investigation of journalists in the conduct of their role,” said independent senator Rex Patrick, referring to the provision for whistleblowers. Editing by Darren Schuettler

https://www.reuters.com/article/australia-security-media/australia-pm-to-meet-national-broadcaster-after-police-raids-idUSL4N23I1LI

World News

Reuters

2019-04-08 20:50:00

2019

4.0

8

Jane Coaston

College admissions fraud: 14 people, including actress Felicity Huffman, plead guilty in college admissions scam

Of the scores of people who allegedly took part in a wide-ranging college admissions scam to get the children of wealthy parents into top-ranked colleges, 14 of them will plead guilty to bribery and mail fraud charges, the Department of Justice announced Monday. According to the Department of Justice, 13 parents, including actress Felicity Huffman, and one former college tennis coach have accepted plea deals, though their sentences are yet to be determined. In a statement, Huffman said, “I am in full acceptance of my guilt, and with deep regret and shame over what I have done, I accept full responsibility for my actions and will accept the consequences that stem from those actions.” In a statement, Felicity Huffman says she’s pleading guilty.“I want to apologize to the students who work hard every day to get into college, and to their parents who make tremendous sacrifices to support their children and do so honestly.” pic.twitter.com/T6tx1VUiCE As I wrote in March, more than 50 people, including Huffman and actress Lori Loughlin, were initially charged with fraud as part of “Operation Varsity Blues,” a massive investigation into a college admissions fraud in which parents paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to William “Rick” Singer, a Southern California business executive, to facilitate cheating on standardized testing exams like the ACT and to have their children falsely designated as athletes. In some cases, that even entailed paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to make coaches claim the children were being recruited to play sports for their schools. The scheme worked in two ways. Some parents paid Singer through his foundation to either have someone take their child’s SAT and ACT tests or “correct” their answers: First, the Department of Justice alleges that in return for payments from parents ranging from $10,000 to $75,000 per test, Singer paid other people — including a man named Mark Riddell, who was also indicted — to either take standardized tests required for college admissions at many schools for their children or correct their answers after the fact. He also, according to the DOJ, used those payments to bribe teachers and ACT and SAT test administrators so they would overlook the cheating, often sending those payments via the Key Worldwide Foundation. When a parent asked whether bribing test administrators worked, Singer laughed and replied, “every time,” adding the kids “just have no idea that they didn’t even get the score that they thought they got.” Other parents paid Singer to bribe college sports coaches to “recruit” their child and get them into universities, even creating fake “recruiting profiles.” The second part of the scheme is where things get even more interesting. According to the charging documents, wealthy parents collectively paid Singer more than $25 million to get their children into top universities by bribing college coaches and administrators into designating their children as recruited athletes — when they very much were not. According to the DOJ, the parents who took a tax deduction from their “contributions” to Singer’s foundation (in reality, money used to bribe college coaches or pay people to take standardized tests for students) will also pay back the IRS. In addition, the Department of Justice notes: “The charge of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud provides for a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss, whichever is greater.”

https://www.vox.com/2019/4/8/18300903/college-scam-huffman-admissions-sports

Vox

2016-09-30 11:00:00

2016

9.0

30

Joseph Cox

This Cybersecurity Firm Maps Hackers' Lives by the Clues They Leave Online

The digital underground, populated by hackers, drug dealers, and other criminals, is a vast space. The sheer number of forums, cybercriminal handles, and backroom dealings can be overwhelming to researchers or journalists. Some cybersecurity companies have devised ways to gain a bird's-eye view on that space. Next month at the Black Hat Europe hacking conference, Christopher Ahlberg, CEO and co-founder of threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, will show how, by scraping vast quantities of posts from forums, it's possible to reveal trends among different groups of users—such as hackers—and potentially generate leads to identify some of them too. "We wanted to see: Could we actually track individuals, and groups of individuals, without knowing their individual handles?" Ahlberg told Motherboard in a phone interview. For the past four years, Recorded Future has crawled forums and sites across the dark, deep, and surface web. Using this information, the company provides customers with information about any perceived threats to their business or organisation, such as planned attacks or data on sale. According to Recorded Future's website, 86 percent of Fortune 100 companies get their intelligence from Recorded Future. Today, the company is monitoring close to 1,000 sites, Ahlberg said. With that wealth of data comes the opportunity to track users or groups from one place to another or map out when they're active. For example, Ahlberg said that users of an Iranian hacking forum basically went quiet on the anniversary of the Iranian revolution, while a Saudi forum peaked on Ramadan. Those sort of findings may seem pretty innocuous, but there are more revealing insights. On one Iranian forum, there was a spike in activity on Wednesdays. Why? Microsoft traditionally releases new security patches on Tuesdays: The hackers were discussing how to reverse-engineer the newly published information to figure out how to exploit vulnerabilities. A similar phenomenon exists for Russian forums too. "We can actually see proof of it in the data," Ahlberg said. But whereas the tool shows Russian users tend to post at night, a number of Iranians are active during the day. That gives an indication, according to Ahlberg, "that the Iranians are either university students or government employees doing this stuff." It's then possible to zoom in further and analyse when some users stop posting and others start. Ahlberg pointed to two prolific Iranian hackers, "Hassan20" and "Crisis". When one would stop posting, the other would suddenly spring into action. "Now I probably have a very good indication that Hassan20 and Crisis is the same guy," Ahlberg said. This is not to say that big data just magically unmasked these hackers. Instead, information like this might act as a decent starting point for further investigation. "Of course, this is just leads," Ahlberg said. Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/53dk7q/this-cybersecurity-firm-maps-hackers-lives-by-the-clues-they-leave-online

Tech by VICE

Vice

2019-07-02 00:00:00

2019

7.0

2

BRIEF-Kerevitas Gida's CEO Zeynep Dilmen Steps Down

July 2 (Reuters) - KEREVITAS GIDA SANAYI VE TICARET : Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage: (Gdynia Newsroom)

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL8N2430VV

Consumer Goods and Retail

Reuters

2019-06-27 00:00:00

2019

6.0

27

Hong Kong shares end higher on Sino-U.S. trade truce hopes

* Hang Seng index closes up 1.42% * China Enterprises index HSCE rises 1.22% * HSI financial sector sub-index up 1.5%; property sector up 1% June 27 (Reuters) - Shares in Hong Kong rose on Thursday, extending the previous day’s cautious gains, as investors’ hopes of a trade truce between the United States and China rose ahead of a highly anticipated meeting between the countries’ leaders. ** At the close of trade, the Hang Seng index was up 399.44 points or 1.42% at 28,621.42, adding to the previous day’s 0.1% gain. The Hang Seng China Enterprises index rose 1.22% to 10,897.13. ** The sub-index of the Hang Seng tracking energy shares rose 0.5%, while the IT sector rose 1.86%, the financial sector ended 1.51% higher and the property sector rose 0.97%. ** U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday a deal with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping was possible this weekend, but that he was prepared to impose U.S. tariffs on virtually all remaining Chinese imports if the two countries continue to disagree. ** Adding to hopes for a trade war resolution, the South China Morning Post reported, citing sources, that the United States and China had agreed to a tentative truce ahead of the meeting between Xi and Trump. ** The top gainer on the Hang Seng was Sunny Optical Technology Group Co Ltd, which gained 4.03%, while the biggest loser was CK Infrastructure Holdings Ltd, which fell 0.31%. ** China’s main Shanghai Composite index closed up 0.69% at 2,996.79, while the blue-chip CSI300 index ended up 1.07%. ** Around the region, MSCI’s Asia ex-Japan stock index was firmer by 0.86%, while Japan’s Nikkei index closed up 1.19%. ** The yuan was quoted at 6.8771 per U.S. dollar at 08:26 GMT, 0.05% firmer than the previous close of 6.8803. ** The top gainers among H-shares were CITIC Securities Co Ltd up 4.54%, followed by Shenzhou International Group Holdings Ltd, gaining 4% and Guangzhou Automobile Group Co Ltd, up by 3.69%. ** The biggest H-shares percentage decliners were China Gas Holdings Ltd, which was down 0.50% and Guangdong Investment Ltd, which fell 0.25%. (Reporting by Andrew Galbraith; editing by Gopakumar Warrier)

https://www.reuters.com/article/china-stocks-hongkong-close/hong-kong-shares-end-higher-on-sino-us-trade-truce-hopes-idUSZZN2NM400

Cyclical Consumer Goods

Reuters

2016-11-14 00:00:00

2016

11.0

14

David Gilbert

Prosecutors to question South Korea’s president over alleged corruption

Hundreds of thousands take to the streets to demand that President Park resigns Hundreds of thousands take to the streets to demand that President Park resigns This segment originally aired Nov. 14, 2016, on VICE News Tonight on HBO. Responding to public outcry, South Korean prosecutors will question President Park Geun-hye this week about alleged political corruption. The move comes after hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets of Seoul for a third weekend in a row. The protesters are calling for Park’s resignation after it was revealed that she shared secret documents with her longtime advisor Choi Soon-sil, even though the religious leader didn’t hold an official position in the government. Choi, who has denied South Korean prosecutors’ charges of abuse of power and fraud, is also accused of using her influence to direct millions of dollars in donations to her own foundations. Following Saturday’s protests, a spokesman for President Park said Sunday that she had “heard the voices of the people yesterday with gravity and deeply realizes the seriousness of the current situation.” Park, who became the country’s first woman president when she began her five-year term in February 2013, has admitted sharing some documents with Choi and has now publicly apologized twice. Yet with her approval rating plummeting to 5 percent, it’s clear that the people of South Korea want her to step down. This segment originally aired Nov. 14, 2016, on VICE News Tonight on HBO. Responding to public outcry, South Korean prosecutors will question President Park Geun-hye this week about alleged political corruption. The move comes after hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets of Seoul for a third weekend in a row. The protesters are calling for Park’s resignation after it was revealed that she shared secret documents with her longtime advisor Choi Soon-sil, even though the religious leader didn’t hold an official position in the government. Choi, who has denied South Korean prosecutors’ charges of abuse of power and fraud, is also accused of using her influence to direct millions of dollars in donations to her own foundations. Following Saturday’s protests, a spokesman for President Park said Sunday that she had “heard the voices of the people yesterday with gravity and deeply realizes the seriousness of the current situation.” Park, who became the country’s first woman president when she began her five-year term in February 2013, has admitted sharing some documents with Choi and has now publicly apologized twice. Yet with her approval rating plummeting to 5 percent, it’s clear that the people of South Korea want her to step down. “I think people must feel baffled and angry, because our democracy and our power has gone,” protestor Junhee Lee told NPR. Choi is the leader of a religious movement called the Eternal Life Church, which was founded by her father and mixes strands of Christianity, Buddhism, and shamanism. According to Korean media, she claims to be able to converse with the dead and produce objects offering magical protection. Her father became a close confidant of Park’s father, former president Park Chung-hee, after his wife was killed by a North Korean assassin in 1974. “It’s much more than simply, ‘Oh, she knows this person’; it’s deeply intertwined, almost like they’re Rasputin and Park Geun-hye is just a puppet,” David Kang, a Korea expert at the University of Southern California, told CNN. North Korea has taken a keen interest in the corruption scandal that has engulfed its neighbor country’s president. Last week, Pyongyang’s state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun published a five-page feature on South Korea’s corruption scandal, along with pictures of the protests held in Seoul and other major cities.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/ev5gzz/prosecutors-to-question-south-koreas-president-over-alleged-corruption

Vice News

2016-07-10 00:00:00

2016

7.0

10

Peyton Manning: My Neck Feels GREAT ... But I Ain't Coming Back

Good news Broncos fans ... Peyton Manning says his neck is 100% healthy!!! Bad news Broncos fans ... Peyton Manning says there's NO WAY IN HELL he's coming back to the NFL despite the aforementioned good news. We got Peyton at LaGuardia airport in NYC earlier this week ... and chopped it up with the future Hall of Famer about the state of Manning ... and he told us it's ALL GOOD. The clip is pretty freakin' awesome ... Manning also gives us the goods on his favorite topping on a pizza, and his standing in the town of Omaha, but when we ask if he's ever strapping it on again he couldn't have been more firm. "I'm out of eligibility, I'm expired." Rest easy, Mark Sanchez.

https://www.tmz.com/2016/07/10/peyton-manning-broncos-nfl-comeback/

TMZ

2016-12-18 19:12:00

2016

12.0

18

Joel Balsam

How Will We Rebel in the Future?

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada What did you do to piss off your parents when you were a kid? Did you sneak off to the park and smoke a J? Maybe you had sex somewhere or with someone you weren't supposed to? Now that I've got you thinking about the good ol' days, pull out your crystal ball and think about how your bratty kids and even grandkids will tell you to shove it. They're going to do something that we think is painfully idiotic, that's no doubt. But what? Will they still smoke weed when their parents are having lame cannabis and cheese tastings? Will they bother to bone when they're oversaturated with porn from the moment they start feeling tingly in weird places? To find some answers I called up Dr. Ian Pearson, a futurologist who predicted that human-on-robot sex will be more common than human-on-human sex by 2050. Pearson predicts that many drugs we know (and love) today will likely become legal after they're chemically engineered to be safer. But, advances in medicine and biotech will have us getting high in trippy new ways. For instance, scientists have already developed transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), as a form of therapy for psychiatric disorders. In the future, you might be able to pop on a pair of nifty rTMS headphones and feel the effects of getting high by disabling different parts of the brain. You might even have the ability to turn your high on and off whenever you want. Scientists are also working on ways to steer pills packed with medication into certain areas of the body as a way to fight off cancer. Once the drug reaches the desired location in the body, like the liver for instance, the plan is to rupture the capsule from outside the body using electromagnetic waves or ultrasound. "But what if," Pearson asks, "you were to encapsulate heroin or morphine in smart drug capsules?" Picture this scenario: You go to the club after dropping a pill of Molly—but nothing happens after you take it. You're bobbing around sober for a while, until suddenly the DJ flicks a switch. Invisible electromagnetic waves are sent out into the club, rupturing all the ecstasy pills, and boom—everyone is higher than a spaceship telling their friends how much they love them. Maybe you're even wearing a pair of rTMS headphones at the same time, giving you the ability to turn off your high if you're not into it. Cool right? But if the drugs are all safe and legal, taking them would be about as rebellious as gobbling up munchies on the couch with your blazed parents—kinda meh. "The trouble with becoming a rebel is that if something's legal it's not very rebellious to take it," said Pearson. So what could our grandkids do that's unsafe, stupid, and illegal all at the same time? "Supposing you were able to use one of these fancy drugs and put some clever IT in there so that you could give control of your brain to somebody else, now that would be rebellious," Pearson said. He predicts that by 2040, humans will be able to electronically share bodies with somebody else, link consciousness through the internet, and even control someone else's brain against their will. Yep, we'd have the power to turn our friends, sex slaves, and enemies into freaking zombies. For this to go mainstream, Pearson says all it would take is the Selena Gomez of 2040 to post on social media about how dope it is to be a zombie and millions of teens will be going to school not just dressed as their BFF, but living as their BFF. Pearson took me further down the rabbit hole by throwing another future technology into the mix. He says the next level of Fitbits will be receptors pasted right on our skin. At first, we'll be able to simply record our pulse and basic stuff like that. But when we're able to insert the device deeper than the first layers of skin and get in contact with our nerves, we'll have the potential to record, replay, and even control an orgasm as easily as pressing Ctrl+Alt+O. Pearson provided this scenario: "So if you were wanting to go to bed with your best friend's girlfriend and you give the best friend this fancy wristwatch and you don't tell him that it's got his nervous system on it. You could use that to hack into his nervous system and steal his sensations and effectively be in bed with his girlfriend." Which is basically a David Cronenberg film come to life. Besides mind and nerve control to spice it up in the bedroom, Pearson predicts "an explosion of sexual capability" where future generations will move past the binary of male and female and invent third, fourth, and fifth genders. And he's not talking about transgender. With the ability to electronically control sensations in addition to advances in virtual and augmented reality, people could dream up completely new genders and genitalia. "There's nothing to stop you from having another organ coming out of your belly button or your right arm," he said. "You could have some appendage that attaches to your forehead and acts as a sex organ." Again, social media, might determine what becomes a popular way to rebel, and what's just plain weird. "You can't predict which [genders or sexual orientations] will be successful because ultimately it'll come down to which pop star is most popular on the future Twitter and they'll create fads." But the problem with going down a path where we continuously seek out new ways to fuck and get fucked up is that it could just as easily go too far—think raping and murdering robots like in Westworld or watching torture on live TV. So what if we go down a different path? Pearson says the mob mentality we see today on social media where everyone gets offended could lead us down a road where we'd become outcasts for what we do and say today. "You can bet your life that whatever things you believe today, that same basket would get you into trouble in 2050," said Pearson. "Kissing your girlfriend might be a criminal offense." In that dystopia, advancements in surveillance technology could make it possible to be thrown in jail for committing thought crimes à la Nineteen Eighty-Four or automatically fined for swearing like in Demolition Man. In either scenario, Pearson says the world is probably going to shit (WTF grandkids?). The reason the futurologist has such a negative viewpoint of the future is because even if we develop all the technology we can muster to make sex and drugs better, at the end of the day, we're still the same species that has tortured, enslaved, and imprisoned each other for centuries, and that's the problem right there. "We have plenty of evidence humans aren't really nice underneath," he said. "We haven't really progressed since we were cavemen in any real respect and given the right technology or the right legal environment people would do exactly the same again." Follow Joel on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vvdxzy/hoe-gaan-we-in-de-toekomst-de-rebel-uithangen

Drugs

Vice

2016-01-11 12:00:00

2016

1.0

11

Mike Piellucci

Jake Coker Is Another Quarterback Cog in the Crimson Tide Machine

Functionally speaking, Jake Coker is to Alabama what Blake Sims, A.J. McCarron, Greg McElroy, and John Parker Wilson were before him: a cog in the greater Process. Each of those quarterbacks had distinctive flourishes, of course. Coker made it to Alabama—and before that, to Florida State—on raw arm strength, which separates him from Sims's hare-like scrambles, McCarron's unerring poise, McElroy's moxie and resourcefulness, or Wilson's immaculate high school pedigree. Still, those differences don't seem to matter much, not when the most glamorous and important position nearly everywhere else in football—quarterback—is anything but in Tuscaloosa. When Alabama and Clemson meet in tonight's College Football Playoff championship game in Glendale, Arizona, all eyes will be on the matchup between dynamic Tigers quarterback DeShaun Watson and the Crimson Tide's smothering defense. Meanwhile, is anyone even talking about Coker? Watson is college football's best player at his position, and the Tigers head into the game as the sport's top-ranked team; the former unquestionably informs the latter. Watson will be expected to win the Heisman Trophy as a junior next year. After that, he'll probably be a first-round NFL Draft selection. Barring catastrophic injury, football fans will hear and recognize his name for years to come, no matter what happens in the title game—a game Clemson wouldn't even be playing without Watson's game-breaking run-pass abilities. Contrast this to Alabama. The Crimson Tide are the college game's current standard-bearer, even though head coach Nick Saban has never enjoyed the campus equivalent of Tom Brady behind center. That seems to be by design: the ideal Saban game plan requires his quarterbacks to conform to the rhythms of a conservative, smash-mouth football game, not disrupt them. Indeed, Alabama's eternal signal-caller mandate goes something like this: maintain possession, primarily through depositing the ball safely into the gut of whichever 220-plus-pound tailback-cum-mauler happens to be on campus that year; supplement those handoffs by throwing ropes to the super-talented, defense-breaking likes of Julio Jones, Amari Cooper, or Calvin Ridley; and above all, don't fuck things up for a perpetually punishing defense full of five-star high school recruits and future NFL Draft picks. None of this precludes star-making turns, per se: McCarron's path to becoming a Crimson Tide icon and eventual Heisman runner-up began with an iconic performance in the 2012 National Championship game against LSU. Still, there's a reason why McCarron never even cracked first team All-SEC. Quarterbacks can be stars within the parameters set by Saban, but they'll never transcend them. The Saban war machine will continue grinding bodies up long after Coker is gone. For all Alabama's success in his only season as a starter, Coker is highly likely to never play another moment of meaningful football after tonight. You won't see him anywhere near the top of the NFL draft boards; the only debate about his draft stock heading into his appearance in this month's Senior Bowl centers around whether he deserves to be invited at all. Modern college football tells us that Jake Coker should be significant. All of us have internalized the rules of the Way We Play Now: quality quarterbacking wins games, especially when it comes by way of dynamic, spread-based sets. Prolific pro-style quarterbacks are a threatened species, hefty defensive fronts can't handle frenetic no-huddle looks, and, well, it's just easier to assimilate than to fight the long arc of history. Yet Coker is notable precisely because he is not: while Alabama hardly wins in spite of him, he is nowhere close to the catalyst for what could be the Crimson Tide's fourth title in seven seasons, an inarguably dynastic run. Fairly or not, the Tigers, with their generational quarterback and their up-tempo offense, are touchdown underdogs in tonight's game, seen as inferior to Alabama's old-school pro sets and replacement-level quarterback. The Tide's overall breadth of talent plays a role here, certainly, but mostly the line reflects confidence in Alabama's ability to smother opposing innovation with relentless, overpowering convention. Look, Alabama isn't stuck in the 1980s. Saban isn't stupid, and anyone who has peered above assistant coach Lane Kiffin's Denny's menu play card can make note of his quietly good work as offensive coordinator. Still, Alabama has a winning formula. Sims was a stylistic outlier, and Alabama tailored its offense to fit his gifts, but Saban is far more likely to tweak his old-school system than to overhaul it. Why change what's working, especially when all of your opponents' speeding up has done so little to slow you down? As such, it's hard to envision Alabama needing its quarterback to matter, let alone matter at the level of a Watson. The right player very well could through sheer force of talent; redshirt freshman David Cornwell, in particular, has more tools than any of his predecessors. But season in and season out, players like Coker will do just fine. That's something of the Alabama way, a perfect fit for a program that claimed 13 national titles before it snared its first Heisman Trophy, and which until yesterday had not produced a quarterback that started a NFL playoff game since 1982. Coker still bears watching tonight, because there is always a chance that he builds on a strong semifinal performance and transcends Alabama's limits one more time. Even if he doesn't—even if Alabama's entire offensive game plan is to let Henry rumble downhill 45 times—he's still the starting quarterback for a school in the middle of one of college football's best-ever runs. Sometimes it's better to be part of the machine than to fight it.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mgzjpq/alabama-jake-coker-is-another-quarterback-cog-in-the-crimson-tide-machine

Sports

Vice

2016-07-26 00:00:00

2016

7.0

26

Nathan RP Young

The Flower-Filled Photos of Hmong Women on Dating Sites

Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — At the age of four, in 1986, Pao Houa Her sought refuge from Laos with her family in the US. By 2011, she became the first Hmong woman to graduate from Yale’s MFA program, focusing her photography on Hmong refugee populations in the US. Currently up at Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis is My Mother’s Flowers, Her’s new body of work where she pairs lo-fi studio shots of her mother’s collection of silk flowers with profile pictures that Hmong women use on dating sites. Most of these women post pictures of themselves posing with flowers, often standing next to real trees or before studio backdrops. According to Her, though such social networks publicly market themselves for dating, these women, living in Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, in fact seek Hmong-American suitors to send money to their families and deliver them to the US. Her’s mother has amassed countless bouquets of silk flowers, collecting dust in corners of Her’s childhood home or cast away into the basement. The juxtaposition of flowers in My Mother’s Flowers bridges the lives of Hmong women around the world as a symbol of the search for a better life. On the night of the opening last month I was chatting with Her as photographer Wing Young Huie arrived. Back in 2012 Huie curated one of Her’s first exhibitions, Somebody, at Gordon Parks Gallery at Metro State University. Since 1995 Huie has produced massive public art projects, his most recent being University Avenue Project (2010), spanning six miles of University Avenue in Twin Cities. These days he’s narrowed his focus with a book project, Chinese-ness, a series of stories and portraits of Chinese-American immigrants, adoptees, and his fellow American-born Chinese — sometimes referred to as ABC’s. Together Her’s and Wing’s projects capture a working image of the Asian-American experience. We sat down again a few weeks later and discussed the cultural gulf between first and second generation immigrant and refugee families, the ways photographs represent our selective memories, and Her’s own significance as a distinguished female voice in the Hmong-American community. *    *    * Nathan Robert Payne Young: Pao, some of your earlier projects touch on studio photography, an activity popular among some Hmong-American communities.  With businesses like Xiong Portraits in St. Paul’s Hmong Village, what is it about posing for pictures with costumes and backdrops that you, your friends, and your family find so compelling? Pao Houa Her: My earliest memories of Thailand, being in the refugee camps, are actually these memories of getting our portraits taken at one of these places. And thinking about it now, and looking at countless studio portraits, for a lot of us it’s a way out of reality, right? Once you’re in front of this backdrop that’s usually very floral, or usually an iconic image, and you put on clothes that you don’t wear every day, shiny clothes, maybe things you wear once a year, maybe for the Hmong New Year, or even clothes that you don’t actually have yourself — like at Xiong Portraits they have clothes from all over the world, Chinese outfits, Vietnamese outfits, wedding gowns. I think what it does is transport you out of your own reality. You’re this reimagined person, and I want to say, for a lot of us, that’s the allure of studio portraits. NRPY: Pictures on the walls of Xiong Portraits show iconic images of poppies and Hmong regalia. What were the backdrops and costumes for studios in Thailand? PHH: They were these painted backdrops, sometimes of mountainscapes or of Hmong villages, and always prop plants at the sides. I think a lot of Hmong folks from my parents’ era and my own era who were born or spent time in Laos have these pictures. These are pictures that we carry, that I still have of my parents, of us. NRPY: Two of the three types of pictures in this exhibition are either found studio portraits of Hmong women posing for online dating sites, or studio shoots that you’ve personally produced. Could you tell us about these dating sites, and why you grouped the two types of portraiture? PHH: With these dating sites, Hmong men go overseas to look for a “pure Hmong woman,” one who has not been altered, a Hmong woman that is very Hmong, that, you know, hasn’t been influenced by Western ideology. Wing Young Huie: These are Hmong men in the US  looking for — PHH: — for Hmong girls not in the US.   NRPY:  And what’s their idea of the “pure Hmong woman”? PHH: Well, there’s a general conversation that happens in our community among Hmong men when asked why they need to go to Laos to find these girls. And the conversation always comes down to them saying, “girls here are too Westernized, and because they’re Westernized they use Western rules and social norms and so they can’t be Hmong.” They have their own ideas of how a Hmong woman should behave in front of their husband. NRPY: Wing, this reminds me of a few pictures from your project, Frogtown, of a Hmong family in a suburban house conducting a ceremony for a sick child. A shaman’s there with a live pig on the ground, eventually they gut the pig — WYH: — and drink the blood. NRPY: Right, and you have this picture of the men doing their work and then another with all the women in a different room eating together. PHH: Yes, there’s a huge separation and that’s there in our culture. The men kill the pig, the women do the prep, we set the table for the men, and we eat the men’s leftovers. It’s a practice, it’s our tradition. And actually, can I just say, Wing, your work was essentially the reason why I became a photographer. Because, Wing, you’ve had these public exhibitions on Lake Street and University Avenue and in Frogtown and the community has been able to see your work, which is something remarkable in itself. Not only have you inspired me to become a photographer, I truly believe that you’ve influenced a whole generation of Hmong artists. When I saw Frogtown it was the first time that I saw myself. I’d never ever seen images of my people like those before. WYH: Wow. PHH: It was the first time I saw myself, and I thought, “this is what I want to do.” NRPY: Before seeing Frogtown, were you actively aware of the images around you, that you were not being reflected back? Thinking, these people aren’t me, I am not them. PHH: Oh, yeah! Absolutely. So I knew of Diane Arbus before Wing, and I knew August Sanders, and thinking, oh these are great, but I specifically remember a photo that Wing took of my uncle who — WYH: — I photographed your uncle? PHH: You photographed a lot of my family members! You have this portrait of my uncle, who killed himself in the very same place that you photographed. He’s there with all my other uncles. So with Frogtown I’m seeing for the first time these pictures of my people, literally my family. WYH: Wow. But, Pao, your relationship to photography, I mean it’s no different from anybody’s. You think about weddings and wedding photographers: what do those pictures have to do with the wedding? They’re idealized versions, so you look at the photo, you show it, you keep it for generations and everyone remembers your life through that idealized, glamorized memory. PHH: You know, I don’t think of photography as just memory. For me photography is never real. It’s fiction. Think of this show now, and the decision to choose a photograph. The photograph in front of us is like the selected memory in our minds. So maybe it’s not that photography is fiction, but photography is selected memory. WYH: I feel like what I’m seeing in your work here is a collision of different intentions and all the artifice at the same time. So, one of these men on these sites, where they grew up they had all the power, and they come here, they don’t speak English, they don’t have power, their kids do the translating for them. They want to go back home, to that time. They want that again, through a pure, young girl. These dating sites … they’re not really dating sites. PHH: No. WYH: They’re a business transaction. PHH: Yup. WYH: My first thought is, this woman is selling herself. And for what? NRPY: Because the agreement is that this Hmong man will deliver her from Laos or wherever back to the US, right? PHH: Oh, yes.   WYH: And the family’s helping, they’re helping sell her wife duties. It’s heartbreaking. All of these realities are converging. It’s all imagined, romanticized, and then real. NRPY: So this exhibition’s titled My Mother’s Flowers. As you set up the low-key photo studio in your mother’s home, how did she respond, and what has been her reaction to the printed images? PHH: My mom has never been to an opening. I think in some ways she doesn’t really get the concept of being an artist. So when I do set up these studios in our house, and as I’ve photographed her before, she’s supportive and she helps, she allows it to happen, but … WYH: Same with my mom. Art has no meaning for our mothers. They just want you to do well. The cultural gulf between the first and second generation — you never really understanding why she did this, and her not getting what you’re up to, it’s really the same, it’s you two trying to connect, it’s unknowable. I see these flowers, they’re our mothers — frozen in time, collecting dust. Now my parents never set foot in a museum. Why would they? They’re immigrants. Art’s a luxury. For you, Pao, to go to Yale, just to understand what that culture’s like, it’s unfathomable for them. PHH: Hmong folks have only been in the US for about 40 years and so it’s still very much about survival. Parents think, hey let’s get our kids to be doctors and lawyers and successful in elite, traditional, reliable ways. WYH: There have been three or four waves of generations of Chinese immigrants to the US. But how many Chinese artists can you name? How many directors? How long does this take? It’s a luxury. You know, Pao, in a sense, what you’re doing now has taken me 30 years to figure out. I had to photograph thousands of people before I could really think about and make art about my family. It’s your idea of Laos, and the reality; the young girl’s idea of marriage, and the reality; ideas of America, and the reality; the older men and their ideas of the past. Your photographs are a culmination of layers and layers of cultural illusions. NRPY: Wing, your family also migrated to America, from Guangzhou, China. But you were born in Duluth. Could you tell about your current project, Chine-ness, and about your relationship with your families’ migration? WYH: When I went to China for the first time, six years ago, I was working for the US Embassy and Arts Midwest on a new program showing the US through a Chinese-American’s eyes, and traveled to 10 cities in China. Coming from Minnesota, inside I felt like everyone else, but outside I stuck out. And in China, where I look like everyone, but inside I really feel like a foreigner, it all made me think, what if? How would my life have turned out if my family never left China? So what if I owned a restaurant like my dad, or became an engineer like my brother, or, if I turned like my mom really wanted, which was to marry a nice Chinese woman and have nice Chinese kids — that didn’t happen. So I decided to photograph men whose lives I could have had, and then I gave them the camera and asked to wear their clothes and have them photograph me. Then I put the photographs together as a diptych as a way to try and understand, what if? NRPY: Do you think, Pao, if you never left Laos, that you might have been one of these women in your own exhibition? PHH: Yes, all the time. I think about the Hmong narrative in the US and it lacks a female perspective. If you think about Hmong oral history, it’s always Hmong men telling our history, and they block our voices. Even our story cloths from the 1970s from the refugee camps. The Hmong men decided the story and the women did the sewing. With my photography it’s important that the female voice and perspective becomes center stage. Pao Houa Her: My Mother’s Flowers continues at Bockley Gallery (2123 W 21st Street, Minneapolis, Minn.) through August 6. 

https://hyperallergic.com/313442/the-flower-filled-photos-of-hmong-women-on-dating-sites/

Hyperallergic

2016-11-09 00:00:00

2016

11.0

9

Javier Galeano

Anti-Trump protesters gather for third night, one shot in Portland

MIAMI (Reuters) - Thousands of protesters took their frustrations over Donald Trump’s election as the next U.S. president onto the streets on Friday and into Saturday in several cities, including Portland, Oregon, where one protester was shot. The unidentified man was wounded on Portland’s Morrison Bridge at 12:45 a.m. local time as he and dozens of other protesters crossed it during their demonstration, one of several across the country denouncing Trump’s campaign rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims and women. In the Portland incident, police said in a statement that a man got out of a vehicle on the bridge where he confronted and then shot a protester, who was taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries. The suspect is still at large, police added. Earlier in the night, protesters blocked traffic and threw objects at Portland police dressed in riot gear who responded with pepper spray and flash-bang devices. At one point, police pushed protesters back and appeared to take at least one person into custody, according to footage on a local NBC affiliate. Hundreds of protesters also marched through the streets of Los Angeles, blocking traffic as they waved signs in opposition of Trump and chanted “We reject the president elect” and “Whose streets? Our Streets”. Several thousand activists marched through downtown Miami, with a few hundred making their way onto a highway, halting traffic in both directions. In New York, demonstrators again gathered in Washington Square Park and by Trump Tower, where the Republican president-elect lives, on Fifth Avenue. Trump, who initially denounced Americans who protested against his election, saying they had been “incited” by the media, reversed course and praised them on Friday. “Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!” Trump said on Twitter. The tweets were further evidence of Trump’s mixed messages since he announced his candidacy 17 months ago. After Democrat Hillary Clinton conceded defeat early on Wednesday, he took a far more conciliatory tone than he had often displayed during his campaign and promised to be a president for all Americans. Anti-Trump demonstrators have voiced concerns that his presidency, due to start on Jan. 20, would infringe on Americans’ civil and human rights. They cited his campaign promises to restrict immigration and register Muslims, as well as allegations the former reality-TV star sexually abused women. Protesters in various cities have chanted slogans, including “No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” and carried signs reading “Impeach Trump”. White supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) have praised Trump’s election, and some civil rights advocacy groups have reported a spike of attacks on minorities following Trump’s victory on Tuesday. Trump has rejected the KKK’s support. Most of the protests across the country, which have also taken place in Washington, D.C., have been largely comprised of young adults and college students. With the country evenly divided, many voters were shocked by the result given that opinion polls failed to predict Trump’s triumph. The Republican Party also managed to maintain its majorities in both houses of Congress in Tuesday’s vote. More anti-Trump demonstrations were planned for the weekend, including in New York and Los Angeles. A group calling itself “#NotMyPresident” has scheduled an anti-Trump rally for Washington on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, when the New York real-estate developer formally succeeds President Barack Obama. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus acknowledged on Friday the tight race with Clinton, but said anti-Trump protesters have to accept the election results. He pointed to Trump’s call for unity and meetings on Thursday with Obama and Republican leaders as reasons for reassurance. Security barricades now shield some of Trump’s most visible properties, including the newly opened Trump International Hotel near the White House and Trump Tower in New York. Trump’s base of support in the election was the broad middle of the country, with voters in states that had long supported Democrats shifting to him after he promised to renegotiate trade deals with other countries. Additional reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee, Ian Simpson and Susan Heavey in Washington, D.C., Scott Malone in Boston, Gina Cherelus in New York, Donna Owens in Baltimore, Rory Carroll in San Francisco and Alex Dobuzinskis and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman, Michael Perry and Hugh Lawson

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-protests/anti-trump-protesters-gather-for-third-night-one-shot-in-portland-idUSKBN1343CO

Politics

Reuters

2018-03-20 19:56:00

2018

3.0

20

Patrick Klepek

This Company Specializes In Designing One Specific Thing: Video Game Guns

This article is part of a special series on the intersection of guns and games. For more, click here. Most video games have weapons, and lots of those weapons happen to be guns. Some are based on real-life firearms, others are pure fantasy, and often it’s somewhere in the middle. It’s also common for developers to seek outside help for very specific tasks—art, writing, etc. Rmory, founded in 2008 by former German ground forces soldier Kris Thaler, specializes in something very unique: designing weapons. If you need video game guns, you come to him. “Believe it or not, I actually did not set out to start a company specialised in weapons,” he told me over email recently. Years back, Thaler uploaded some concept art to a message board he lurked on, looking for feedback. A few of the images included guns, and he was later contacted by a developer, interested in having Thaler work up ideas for their game. Thus, he doubled down on guns. Since then, Rmory has worked on everything from small independent projects like the XCOM-like strategy game Xenonauts to the biggest crowdfunded game ever, Star Citizen. “We focus on realistic feeling armaments for our clients that look cool and don't break the immersion in their product,” he said. Though Rmory does provide contractual services to drum up concepts for other military items—tanks, mechs, etc.—the primary reason companies seek Rmory out is firearms. Generally speaking, Thaler told me, the process begins with a company approaching Rmory about a game, sometimes asking for them to come up with a specific weapon they have in mind, or to fill in the details on a weapon they’re working on but need Rmory to flesh out. “For example, a client comes to us and says, ‘Hey we need a rocket launcher,’” he said. “We then work out details like ammo capacity, animations, alternate firing modes, etc. We then provide the client with all the visuals he needs to give the weapon to the next member in the production pipeline.” Even in fantasy settings, Thaler said Rmory tends to pull inspiration from the real-world. His favorite real gun is the German HK G3—”it has a lot of oomph”—while his favorite game gun is, shockingly enough, the Groovitron from Ratchet & Clank, which makes enemies dance. Thaler started shooting guns at 12-years-old, as soon as legally allowed. (That wouldn’t fly today. Germany has since adopted incredibly stringent gun control laws, in the wake of various mass shooting incidents, and in 2009, the country started a government database.) He later joined the German military, where he was trained on everything from pistols to missle launchers. Thaler credits his time in the military with giving Rmory an edge. “I personally think it [my experience] makes or breaks believability,” he said. “You can read all you want about guns, but having handled them in different situations gives you a totally different perspective on them. Almost everybody can make a cool looking gun, but as soon as it feels unbelievable in game it breaks immersion, providing both is key.” Besides gun design, one of the services Thaler offers is “gun tactics,” in case a client “wants to know explicit use scenarios for guns or what calibre to use where, we got him covered.” When I pitched Thaler on talking to me, I mentioned this was part of a larger set of stories Waypoint was running about the relationship games have with guns, timed to the ongoing conversation the United States was having about mass shootings involving children. Given his profession—making virtual weapons— I wondered if moments like that gave him pause. “Of course,” he said, “any tragedy especially involving children do give you pause, and your thoughts and prayers are with the victims and the bereaved. But to bring it back around to our conversation—guns are not the problem, video games are not the problem. Crazy people are the problem, and, unfortunately, there will always be crazy people.” Though mental health is an important consideration when discussing how to deal with America’s gun problem—it comes up every single time this debate returns—new research suggests there’s not as much of a link between mental illness and gun violence as society generally presumes. According to The New York Times, a recent analysis of 235 mass killings, many of which involved a gun, revealed only 22 percent of attackers would have been classified as mentally ill. It’s even lower for annual gun homicides: 1 percent. In the case of Rmory, though, they’re working with and designing virtual guns, not real ones. “One is a piece of a cultural good, the other is for self-defense,” said Thaler. Rmory is just one link in the larger relationship between games, guns, and firearms manufacturers—both real and imagined. A still shocking 2013 investigation by reporter Simon Parkin explored how gun creators co-op the popularity of games to increase awareness of their creations, often without players being aware. We know games don’t cause violence, a topic we explored in an interview with a research psychologist yesterday, but it remains true most of us spend a lot of our time running around killing fields. And because of companies like Rmory, the weapons we’re running around with are, for better or worse, surprisingly authentic. Follow Patrick on Twitter. If you have a tip or a story idea, drop him an email: patrick.klepek@vice.com. Have thoughts? Swing by Waypoints forums to share them!

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjpx8q/this-company-specializes-in-designing-one-specific-thing-video-game-guns

Games

Vice

2019-06-19 00:00:00

2019

6.0

19

Britain's Tesco says no timetable for 'finest' store launch

LONDON (Reuters) - Tesco, Britain’s biggest retailer, said it is considering a trial of an upmarket convenience store under the ‘Tesco finest’ banner but has not disclosed when or where a pilot will be launched. Tesco hosted a capital markets day for analysts and investors on Tuesday at which it presented a slide flagging an opportunity for a ‘Tesco finest’ store concept with a 7% operating margin - significantly ahead of the group-wide target of 3.5% to 4%. The premium ‘finest’ range of grocery products is Tesco’s most expensive. “‘Tesco finest’ as a brand is one of the largest food brands in the country. We have a very high percentage of more upmarket customers,” Chief Executive Dave Lewis told reporters on Wednesday. “The opportunity to curate that range and bring new things in a more convenient outlet is something that we have tested, is something we’re interested in.” But Lewis said Tesco is: “Not at a place where we are saying we’re going to open this shop or this many shops.” The CEO said the point of the capital markets day was to share with investors a number of growth opportunities Tesco is actively looking at without giving specific details on timings. “No dates for any of the initiatives were given yesterday,” he said. News of Tesco’s new concept sent shares in upmarket food retailer Marks & Spencer down as much as 4.5% on Wednesday on competition fears. Last year Tesco launched the Jack’s chain to compete with German-owned discounters Aldi and Lidl. Other initiatives Tesco discussed on Tuesday include opportunities to sell more unique brands and online meal subscriptions, developing its Clubcard loyalty program with a subscription model, setting-up mini fulfillment centers at the back of stores for online grocery, and delivery robots. Celebrating its 100th year, Tesco is deep into a recovery plan under Lewis after a 2014 accounting scandal capped a dramatic downturn in its fortunes. He said in April Tesco had met, or would soon meet, most of the turnaround goals he set in 2016, including a key margin target of earning 3.5 to 4 pence of operating profit for every pound customers spend by the end of its 2019-20 financial year. Lewis said on Wednesday he did not issue a new margin target at the capital markets day. “We said there was more opportunity for us to lower cost and that gave us the opportunity to invest back in the customer offer (and) new propositions, or if none of those were available then the opportunity would be to improve margin,” he told reporters. Reporting by James Davey; editing by Costas Pitas and Louise Heavens

https://www.reuters.com/article/tesco-outlook/update-1-britains-tesco-says-no-timetable-for-finest-store-launch-idUSL8N23Q2SK

Business News

Reuters

2017-01-27 00:00:00

2017

1.0

27

Joe Jonas in the Shred Zone

Joe Jonas is flaunting his body of work ... 16 weeks of intense work to be exact. The DNCE frontman bulked up and then shredded by weight training and boxing at Unbreakable Gym in West Hollywood. The gym's co-founder (and 'NFL On FOX' star) Jay Glazer says Joe committed to a pro-athlete training regimen that included specific caloric intake and two-a-day workouts. Can't argue with Joe's results, but here's the thing -- his little bro, Nick, pumps up at the same gym, and recently showed off a bulkier physique. So, we gotta ask ...

https://www.tmz.com/2017/01/27/joe-jonas-shredded-workout-photo/

TMZ

2017-01-16 00:00:00

2017

1.0

16

Steelers' James Harrison Back In Gym at 5 AM ... NO DAYS OFF (VIDEO)

Just HOURS after crushing the KC Chiefs' Super Bowl dreams ... 38-year-old James Harrison was back in the gym -- getting ready for New England. The guy is an absolute maniac ... busting out speed drills, power squats and back work. By the way, Steelers coach Mike Tomlin (in a Facebook video streamed from the locker room) had estimated the Steelers jet wouldn't even land until 4 AM!!!! #BEAST #BEAST #BEAST

https://www.tmz.com/2017/01/16/james-harrison-gym-steelers/

TMZ

2018-08-12 00:00:00

2018

8.0

12

More than 100 large wildfires in U.S. as new blazes erupt

(Reuters) - Six large new wildfires erupted in the United States, pushing the number of major active blazes nationwide to over 100, with more expected to break out sparked by lightning strikes on bone-dry terrain, authorities said on Saturday. More than 30,000 personnel, including firefighters from across the United States and nearly 140 from Australia and New Zealand, were battling the blazes that have consumed more than 1.6 million acres (648,000 hectares), according to the National Interagency Coordination Center. “We are expecting that there will be more fire-starts today,” Jeremy Grams, lead forecaster with the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma, said in an interview on Saturday. He said dry thunderstorms, which produce lightning but little rain, are expected for parts of the Rocky Mountain region, while the U.S. northwest has critical fire weather conditions that include strong winds and low relative humidity. Firefighters were battling another day of extremely hot temperatures and strong winds on Saturday, the National Interagency Coordination Center said. The fires have scorched states from Washington to New Mexico, with California among the hardest hit. A mechanic helping to fight the Carr Fire near Redding in northern California was killed in a car crash on Thursday, the eighth person to die in that conflagration. The 190,873-acre (77,243-hectare) Carr Fire has destroyed nearly 1,100 homes. About 100 miles (160 km) southwest of the Carr Fire, about 3,500 firefighters are battling the Mendocino Complex Fire, which has burned 328,226 acres (132,828 hectares) as of Saturday and was the largest fire on record in California. Reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Richard Borsuk

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-wildfires/more-than-100-large-wildfires-in-u-s-as-new-blazes-erupt-idUSKBN1KX00B

Environment

Reuters

2018-03-01 20:28:00

2018

3.0

1

Patrick Klepek

In Search for Any Excuse But Guns, Trump to Meet With Video Game Industry

President Trump is scheduled to meet with “members of the video game industry” next week, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced today. There were no details about the meeting, such as who might be in attendance, but it will focus on “what they [the industry]” can do about America’s gun violence problem. The Entertainment Software Association, the chief lobbying group for the video game industry, did not respond to an immediate request for comment about the meeting. [Update: See below for the ESA's newly-released statement.] In the wake of last month’s high school shooting in Florida, an anxious nation has quietly wondered when an administration happy to spend time, money, and resources handing out tax cuts to the rich and taking away health insurance from the poor might consider doing something—anything—about our mass shooting epidemic. Instead, Trump has suggested everything from taking away the rights of due process to wondering if maybe those darn games might be the real source of a problem plaguing a nation that did nothing after 20 elementary school kids were gunned down in 2012. "We have to look at the Internet because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds and their minds are being formed, and we have to do something about maybe what they’re seeing and how they’re seeing it," said Trump this week. This isn't the first time Trump has weighed in on this question, either. "I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts,” he said. “And you go the further step, and that’s the movies. You see these movies, and they’re so violent. And yet a kid is able to see the movie if sex isn’t involved, but killing is involved, and maybe they have to put a rating system for that." Finally, video games might get a ratings system! We’re fucked. Updated, 7 PM March 1: The ESA made the following statement in response to these reports. Follow Patrick on Twitter. If you have a tip or a story idea, drop him an email: patrick.klepek@vice.com. Have thoughts? Swing by Waypoints forums to share them!

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x7jb9/in-search-for-any-excuse-but-guns-trump-to-meet-with-video-game-industry

Games

Vice

2019-05-07 11:55:52

2019

5.0

7

Shirin Ghaffary

Recode Daily: Amazon is the newest tech giant offering money to digital publishers

Amazon wants to pay the New York Times and BuzzFeed to expand, so it can reach more shoppers outside the US. According to sources, Amazon has been proposing deals that would give publishers advance money to expand their international online presence, specifically for consumer-oriented shopping sites. It’s a deal that Amazon is interested in because it’s looking to bring new shoppers to the company who click on “affiliate links” embedded on publishers’ websites. As Peter Kafka writes, “If any of the deals get finalized, they will mark a new chapter for Amazon,” as it will be the first time the company has “paid publishers in advance to make specific kinds of videos or other content” — as well as “an indicator that even though Amazon dominates online commerce, it still thinks it needs help getting shoppers inside its giant site.” It’s not known how much Amazon is considering paying publishers, “though it’s enough for several publishers to take seriously.”[Peter Kafka / Recode] [Want to get the Recode Daily in your inbox? Subscribe here.] Tim Cook wants you to know Apple’s not the same as Facebook and Google. In a recent interview on CNBC, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he’s “frustrated that tech is painted as monolithic” and that his company is different than companies like Google and Facebook. As Emily Stewart writes, “Apple has for a long time been beating the drum about it being better than the other tech giants on privacy,” and Cook’s comments show that “Apple has upped its efforts to emphasize that it’s different,” especially in light of calls from politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren who believe big tech, including Apple, should be broken up. “I don’t think anybody would call us a monopoly,” said Cook, who made the case that Apple has only a 15 percent share in the world on smart phones and eight or nine percent on personal computers.[Emily Stewart / Recode] Several lawsuits reveal a pattern of alleged discrimination toward pregnant warehouse workers at Amazon. A new report from CNET examined seven different lawsuits filed by pregnant women who were fired from their jobs at Amazon warehouses over the last eight years. The women reportedly endured limited bathroom breaks and heavy lifting, against their doctors’ advice. “Amazon wants to push out as much product as possible,” said one of the plaintiffs, Beverly Rosales. “They need as many people that don’t need accommodations to work there. They care more about the numbers than their employees.” Amazon, meanwhile, denied the allegations. A spokesperson for the company said that “[i]t is absolutely not true that Amazon would fire any employee for being pregnant; we are an equal opportunity employer.” The company, which employes 600,000 people, has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years for its working conditions at its warehouses around the world.[Alfred Ng and Ben Fox Rubin / CNET] Two top senators are urging the FTC to move faster with their investigation into Facebook’s privacy practices. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MT) wrote in a statement that the investigation “has been long delayed in conclusion — raising the specter of a remedy that is too little too late.” The senators pressed the regulatory agency not to shy away from being tough on Facebook, and called for individual executives at the company to be held accountable if any were found to have knowingly broken the law. They also called a potential fine in the range of billions of dollars a “bargain” for the social giant. Facebook has previously stated that it’s preparing for a fine as high as $5 billion.[Tony Romm / The Washington Post] Tristan Harris says tech is “downgrading” humanity — but we can fix it. Harris, previously best known for his association with the Time Well Spent movement, compares the unchecked rise of tech to the “catastrophic” future of climate change.[Kara Swisher] The Facebook free speech battle, explained. Is Facebook a platform or a publisher? When users are getting banned, it makes a difference.[Jane Coaston] Disney+ will not be a “Netflix killer” because at this point, nothing can kill Netflix. Redef CEO Jason Hirschhorn watches a lot of TV and he says Netflix has sucked him into watching less of everything else on the lastest Recode Media.[Peter Kafka] The fabulous looks of the 2019 Met Gala Recode and Vox have joined forces to uncover and explain how our digital world is changing — and changing us. Subscribe to Recode podcasts to hear Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka lead the tough conversations the technology industry needs today.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/7/18534660/recode-daily-amazon-new-york-times-tim-cook-apple

Vox

2016-03-20 00:00:00

2016

3.0

20

Reese Witherspoon -- Good Bye 30's ... 40th Birthday Bash (VIDEO)

Reese Witherspoon will never have another birthday celebrating her 30's, but her big 4-0 was pretty epic. Reese had #40 at Warwick in Hollywood Saturday night, and lots of celebs showed up, including Taylor Swift, Elizabeth Banks, Keith Urban, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Jason Bateman, Toby McGuire and Zoe Kravitz. Reese turns 40 March 22nd. Waiting for your permission to load the Instagram Media.

https://www.tmz.com/2016/03/20/reese-witherspoon-birthday-party-video/

TMZ

2018-06-21 00:00:00

2018

6.0

21

Tommy Lee Wants Son at Wedding, But Thinks He'll No-Show

Tommy Lee is getting married on Valentine's Day 2019 and wants everyone to feel the love, even his estranged son, Brandon, who he still wants at his wedding. Sources close to Tommy tell us he's planning on sending an invite to his eldest despite their drama over Father's Day. Y'know, Tommy called his sons "a**holes" and said they didn't value things ... then Brandon called Tommy an absentee father, and posted a vid of Tommy knocked out in March after their fight. We're told Tommy's hoping time heals all wounds, with his wedding to Brittany Furlan still months away. Our sources say Tommy thought he and Brandon put the KO behind them when he decided not to press charges. We're told Tommy only resorted to airing out their feud on social media because Brandon's blocked his number and emails. All that said, we're told Tommy still tells friends he loves Brandon, and wants him at the wedding.

https://www.tmz.com/2018/06/21/tommy-lee-wedding-invite-brittany-furlan-son-brandon/

TMZ

2019-06-17 00:00:00

2019

6.0

17

Hong Kong regulator probing book-building for equities and bonds

HONG KONG, June 17 (Reuters) - Hong Kong’s securities regulator is reviewing how banks build books for equity and debt capital raisings, one of the city’s top regulators said on Monday, warning about potential conflicts of interest. So-called “books” are built by banks as they take in orders for equity deals such as initial public offerings, or for bond sales, by companies. The book is the basis from which bankers and their clients allocate shares or bonds to investors in each deal. The move comes as the process of selling securities is coming under scrutiny elsewhere in the region. Last year Australian authorities filed criminal charges against ANZ and the local units of Citigroup and Deutsche Bank and six senior bankers over the sale of A$3 billion ($2.17 billion) in ANZ shares in 2015. Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission conducts inspections when it identifies trends, emerging risks or compliance lapses that it feels may require a regulatory response. “If [underwriting syndicates] submit fictitious and inflated orders or provide inducement to investors, they would undermine the discovery of IPO prices, the fair allocation of securities to subscribers, and ultimately investor confidence in the integrity and transparency of the capital market,” Julia Leung, deputy chief executive of the SFC, told the regulator’s annual compliance forum. Last year the SFC published the findings of a review into investment banks’ activities when sponsoring, or leading, IPOs. In March of this year, it banned UBS from sponsoring IPOs for a year, while fining it and its Wall Street rivals a combined $100 million for due diligence failings. Leung also said on Monday that the SFC was conducting a review into licenced corporations’ cybersecurity practices, and was looking at spreads charged by licenced corporations when trading bonds. (Reporting by Alun John, Editing by Jennifer Hughes and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

https://www.reuters.com/article/hongkong-regulator/hong-kong-regulator-probing-book-building-for-equities-and-bonds-idUSL4N23O2AW

Financials

Reuters

2019-01-23 15:00:00

2019

1.0

23

Sarah Kliff

Under Trump, the number of uninsured Americans has gone up by 7 million

The number of Americans without health insurance has increased by 7 million since President Donald Trump took office, new Gallup data released Wednesday shows. The country’s uninsured rate has steadily ticked upward since 2016, rising from a low of 10.9 percent in late 2016 to 13.7 percent — a four-year high. The uninsured rate is still well below where it was in 2013, before the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of health insurance coverage began. But under the Trump administration, a trend of Americans gaining coverage through the private marketplaces and the Medicaid expansion appears to be reversing. Certain demographic groups are experiencing a greater loss of coverage than others. Gallup data shows, for example, that Americans who are younger and lower-income have seen a greater decline in insurance coverage than those who are older and wealthier. Women have had insurance rates decline more quickly than men. This trend is especially surprising given that over the same time period, the unemployment rate has been declining. Usually, when more people have jobs, it means more people with access to employer-sponsored health insurance. But even during this period of job growth, America’s uninsured rate keeps climbing. The Affordable Care Act is still standing law. Republicans weren’t able to repeal Obamacare when they controlled both houses of Congress. And the one big change they did accomplish — repealing the individual mandate — didn’t go into effect until this year. So why was the uninsured rate rising from 2016 through 2018? There are probably a few factors at play that are worthing thinking about It’s not totally clear where this trend goes next. On the one hand, multiple states are beginning to expand Medicaid. Nebraska, Idaho, and Utah all passed ballot initiatives to expand the program for low-income residents in the 2018 midterms. Maine and Kansas are also likely to join the program this year. Those changes will increase the number of Americans with health insurance coverage. But there are other things happening that will depress those figures. More states are going to roll out work requirements for Medicaid. The individual mandate penalty goes away this year, meaning there is no longer a tax for not carrying health insurance coverage. And the Trump administration isn’t likely to restore Obamacare’s outreach and enrollment budget anytime soon. All those trends are likely to decrease the number of Americans who have health insurance coverage for years to come.

https://www.vox.com/2019/1/23/18194228/trump-uninsured-rate-obamacare-medicaid

Vox

2017-10-18 16:20:02

2017

10.0

18

John Patty

If we’re being honest, the GOP has no agenda

This post is part of Mischiefs of Faction, an independent political science blog featuring reflections on the party system. agenda, noun: A plan of things to be done or problems to be addressed. The problem with Republicans’ agenda in Washington is that there is no plan. Indeed, the real problem is not even that there is no plan: It is that the fact there is no plan is plainly visible and not even denied. Regardless of whether we think the current situation represents one of “unified government,” the reality is that regardless of who is in the White House, the congressional Republicans have remained largely unchanged over the past few years. Accordingly, the fact that they are unable to come up with a common plan — or even a common set of talking points — speaks volumes about how the realities of President Trump’s America interact with the “weak party system” of the United States federal government. Trump is president. The remainder of his party in Congress is subject to elections, and challenges, on a different schedule. Given that members of Congress typically value reelection but do not need Trump’s permission to seek it, Trump’s power over them is effectively limited to his power to persuade voters and help secure or deter their reelection goals. This power, it turns out, is finite. For example, consider the (ironically labeled) Strange special election in Alabama, in which Luther Strange — the putative insider candidate, with Trump’s (admittedly tepid) endorsement — lost to outsider candidate Roy Moore. Accordingly, Trump’s ability to enforce party discipline through his power to endorse is clearly limited. While Trump’s electoral power is circumscribed, his ability (and apparent willingness or proclivity) to cause electoral problems is seemingly unbounded. For example, consider the absolute mess created by Trump’s late-night kinda-sorta rescission of cost-sharing subsidy payments for health care insurance, or the desolate wasteland of unnecessary backlash initiated by his invocation of one of the most sensitive of duties of the commander in chief (contacting the relatives of armed services members who lost their lives in the line of service). The Republican Party has, collectively, not only consistently missed opportunities to make headway but has endured self-inflicted wounds on an astonishingly regular basis. Describing those two (of many) missteps requires at least two mouthfuls with a breath in between. In fact, together they represent an abomination with respect to Trump’s putative role as leader of the GOP. The fact that describing his missteps is so wordy and convoluted simply and vividly illustrates the crap storm that the GOP has inherited and seemingly countenances under his leadership. To validate the assertion that “the GOP seemingly countenances” said crap storm, I simply note that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell met with Mr. Trump for lunch on Monday to declare that they “are together totally on this agenda...” My point here is not that the GOP should necessarily pursue its agenda or not; it’s rather a plea for coherence. After all, a “do nothing government” is at least doing nothing. In contrast, the GOP is currently occupying a huge swath of bandwidth with the equivalent of an animated GIF of the party shooting itself in the foot over and over. The good news is that fixing this should be easy. Here’s one simple guide to doing so: I could dig deeper about other “priorities” for the GOP prior to 2018, but realistically, getting a real budget — not a contrived continuing resolution — passed seems to be a stretch. Tax reform is “possible,” and worth going after, from a programmatic/agenda perspective. But none of it happens if the GOP doesn’t set repealing the ACA to the side for the time being. An apocryphal quote attributed to Albert Einstein is a fitting send-off: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader McConnell would be well advised to keep this in mind as they plot out the few months remaining before the midterm election cycle gets into full swing.

https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2017/10/18/16496740/republican-party-no-agenda

Vox

2017-08-02 19:20:00

2017

8.0

2

Callie Beusman

If You Support Anti-Abortion Democrats, You Should Expect Anti-Woman Policy

Most recently, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Ben Ray Luján told The Hill that the party will continue to provide funding to candidates who oppose abortion rights. "There is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates," he said. His comments immediately attracted the ire of several reproductive rights advocacy groups: NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue lambasted them as indicative of "an ethically and politically bankrupt strategy," and Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards tweeted that reproductive rights are "non-negotiable," adding that her organization will "hold any politician who says otherwise accountable." In an emailed statement, DNC spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa tepidly emphasized to Broadly that the Democratic Party platform is pro-choice. "Tom Perez has stated previously that he is pro-choice," she added. "That has not changed." But even if the platform remains the same, top Democrats have hardly been vociferous in their defense of reproductive rights. In May, most notably, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told the Washington Post that abortion is "kind of fading as an issue" for Democratic voters. Unfortunately, abortion is not fading as an issue for conservative legislators. While the Democrats have been wringing their hands and assuring media that they don't believe in ideological purity tests, the political arm of the anti-abortion movement has continued forging ahead with startling efficacy. In the past seven years, nearly 350 restrictions on abortion access have been enacted. In the past few months, we've seen states passing particularly cruel and byzantine legislation: laws mandating that aborted or miscarried fetuses must be buried or cremated, laws that would require women to notify their rapists before getting an abortion, and laws that would essentially ban terminations after 13 weeks. That the Democrats are willing to submit to the anti-abortion movement isn't really a new development. "We have so many anti-choice Democrats in state houses… [who] have really been helping to pass a lot of the anti-choice restrictions that we see today," Renee Bracey Sherman, the senior public affairs manager at the National Network of Abortion Funds, told Broadly over the phone. "We didn't get to seven states with one abortion clinic with just the Republican Party. There were Democrats that helped." When pundits and politicians argue that Democrats should "compromise" on abortion or to rethink their approach to the subject, they tend to speak in vague absolutes. Abortion is "polarizing" and "divisive." It "alienates" red-state voters. Framing it this way—as a fundamentally ideological debate, rather than one with tangible consequences—trivializes the real and pressing danger of restricting abortion access. Laws that limit abortion erode women's constitutional right to access full healthcare, endanger them, and enshrine into law the idea that their basic bodily autonomy matters less than the belief that an embryo is sacrosanct. When women cannot safely and legally terminate their pregnancies, some resort to dangerous and illegal alternatives, like the estimated hundreds of thousands of women in Texas who've performed DIY procedures, or the women across the country who have risked arrest to self-induce an abortion. Those who are forced to carry to term against their will face dire consequences as well: Research shows that women who are denied abortion care are three times more likely to end up below the federal poverty level after two years, and less likely to be able to leave abusive partners. Supporting a staunchly anti-abortion candidate isn't a harmless ideological "compromise"—it's capitulation to a dangerous, blatantly repressive agenda, one that can have profound effects on women's ability to access crucial healthcare services. Take, for instance, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat who ran on an anti-abortion platform and received the inaugural leadership award from Democrats for Life of America in 2016. "The future of the Democratic Party is a stake," the organization's executive director said in a typo-riddled press release at the time. "And, John Bel Edwards shows that Democrats can gain victories in Red States like Louisiana, if the party is willing to reverse course, listen to the voters, and support pro-life candidates." If politicians like Edwards are the future of the Democratic Party, it's an extremely bleak one for women and families. As governor, Edwards signed into law a series of extremely draconian measures, making Louisiana one of just seven states to require women to wait three full days before getting an abortion and attempting to defund Planned Parenthood despite a massive STD epidemic in the state. Under Edwards, the number of clinics in the state dropped to three, down from seven in 2011. Enabling a bipartisan attack on women's right to healthcare in the name of party unity is only a viable solution if you're fine with forcing people to bear children against their will. If this is true of the Democratic Party, they can't claim, as they currently do, to "unequivocally" believe "that every woman should have access to quality reproductive health care services, including safe and legal abortion—regardless of where she lives, how much money she makes, or how she is insured." I agree that the Democrats need to change the way they address abortion. Instead of weakly and ineffectively gesturing towards reproductive justice as some kind of nebulous progressive ideal, they need to actually stand up for the women they represent and fight to protect their rights.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j58e38/if-you-support-anti-abortion-democrats-you-should-expect-anti-woman-policy

Identity

Vice

2016-10-06 15:06:00

2016

10.0

6

Chris Weller

Bill Gates says the next president must prioritize 4 major innovations

When Bill Gates talks about world-changing innovation in his latest Gates Notes blog post, he takes a step back in time. The billionaire philanthropist points to President John F. Kennedy's 1961 call to put a man on the moon as a shining example of a world leader bringing public and private sectors together for the betterment of society. "In the face of fear, President Kennedy successfully summoned our country to harness American ingenuity and advance human progress," Gates writes. Because of Kennedy's exhortation, we now have complex weather mapping tools and satellites that give us turn-by-turn directions. Gates believes it's imperative that the next president of the United States — and other world leaders — tackle equally important challenges. Here are the four he sees as the highest priorities. 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. Provide everyone on earth with affordable energy, without contributing to climate change. Finding alternatives to carbon-emitting fuels is one of the most pressing challenges of the coming decades. Gates writes that within the next eight years, we could see significant declines in our reliance on such fuels — if resources are devoted to new research and initiatives. A decade from now, we could be using batteries to power our cars and renewable energies like wind and solar to run our towns and cities. 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. Develop a vaccine for HIV and a cure for neurodegenerative diseases. Curing diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's, which are both destructive and expensive, would mark an enormous leap forward in scientific achievement. Likewise, science is moving ever closer to eradicating HIV, which is already highly manageable. "Based on recent progress, I believe world leaders could help make an effective AIDS vaccine a reality within the next decade," Gates writes. "And with a vaccine, we would be on the path to ending the disease altogether." 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. Protect the world from future health epidemics. Epidemics stemming from infectious diseases are fast-moving and scary. Science can stop their spread fairly well, but to prevent a large-scale outbreak from occurring in the future, Gates argues that governments need to work closely with private research. If an outbreak does occur, "we will need to be able to detect it, develop a test for it, and produce cures very quickly," he writes. 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. Give every student and teacher new tools so all kids get a world-class education. Gates strongly supports personalized education as the primary way kids around the world should learn. Technology is finally letting teachers tailor lessons to each student based on their individual needs, so curricula and pedagogy should evolve accordingly. "The private sector has started work on these ideas," Gates says, "but funding for government research budgets would boost the market and help identify the most effective approaches, giving teachers and students new tools that empower them to do their best work."

https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-innovations-2016-10

Business Insider

2016-05-08 00:00:00

2016

5.0

8

Miranda Kerr and Snapchat's Evan Spiegel Shacking Up in Style

Miranda Kerr and Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel have emptied their piggy banks to buy a super awesome home in the land of O.J. ... Brentwood, CA. The model and the techie dropped a cool $12 mil on an incredible 7,100 square foot gated estate on almost an acre of precious land. The main house has 4 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, a pool and a home gym. The architecture is spectacular ... it was designed by one of the most famous architects in California history ... Gerard Colcord. Lucky for the gazilionaires ... the house was listed for $12.5 mil, so they got a deal.

https://www.tmz.com/2016/05/08/miranda-kerr-evan-spiegel-buy-home/

TMZ

2016-05-14 21:14:00

2016

5.0

14

John Hill

Anohni Pens Take Down of Current Election In New Note "Americans, You Are Being Used"

Last week, Anohni released her incredibly powerful and charged HOPELESSNESS, extensively targeting issues from drone warfare to criticism of Barack Obama. Today she continued her critique, in a sharply written letter on Facebook titled "Americans, You Are Being Used." In her note she expounds upon some of the topics she spoke about on the record, as well as speaking about the current election's complete refusal to acknowledge the United States' role in "the destabilization and radicalization of the Middle East." She also criticizes politicians's exploitation of trans issues on both sides of the coin, writing "The democrats masticate over the aura of fake liberalism that trans sympathy might bring them. The republicans glory in an opportunity to convince poor ignorant bigots to vote for banks and corporations because they are scared of seeing a trans person in the bathroom at Target." Read the full note below. "AMERICANS, YOU ARE BEING USED Did you all get the memo? This election cycle in the USA is not about ecocide, the dying oceans and the extermination of biodiversity, grotesque income disparity, corporate sovereignty and US warcrimes that have played a big part in the destabilization and radicalization of the Middle East! No, it is about transgendered bathroom access! Once again, both parties goad us into becoming smokescreens for their insidious initiatives. Transpeople, we are being used. I have watched it on every election cycle for the last 30 years. They used to wheel out the gays every election year to convince America to vote for Reagan and then the Bush dynasty, or else succumb to homosexual encroachment in schools and churches! Now they are trying to do it to trans people, taking advantage of our vulnerabilities to flood the media with titilating identity politics on an election year. The democrats masticate over the aura of fake liberalism that trans sympathy might bring them. The republicans glory in an opportunity to convince poor ignorant bigots to vote for banks and corporations because they are scared of seeing a trans person in the bathroom at Target. And idiotic reviewers from the Financial Times are desperate to quarantine any transgendered artist that dares to name this rot in her work. – Anohni"

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/689pyz/anohni-facebook-letter-americans-you-are-being-used

Noisey

Vice

2017-11-23 16:48:00

2017

11.0

23

Premila D'Sa

Here’s What University Students Have On Their Dorm Walls

I read a while back that the stars of 13 Reasons Why (Netflix’s problematic teen drama) Dylan Minnette and Katherine Langford decided that their characters would have matching Arcade Fire posters in their bedrooms. This happened because Minette is a big fan and both actors thought the posters fit their characters personalities. I think they were right, because I thought the two leads were the most pretentious people alive when I watched the show, and the abstract Arcade Fire posters were the cherry on top. Is that what they intended? Maybe not. Am I wrong for thinking Arcade Fire posters are pretentious? I don’t think so. But it illustrates an important point: people (like me) are going to judge you based on what you have on your walls. Your “Live Laugh Love” poster is going to say a lot more about you than anything you could actually say. Especially in college, where your drunk floormates are inevitably going to end up in your dorm room looking at them. So VICE ventured into college dorms to check out what students are putting up on their walls and ask them what they want people to think. Please explain this very moody poster of teen idol Shawn Mendes. Adyn: OK, so at first we liked him “ironically” but the more we listened to him, it became a real thing. Mateus: Yeah, we really like him now. Adyn: So we bought the poster off Amazon and put it up. Have you guys seen him live? Mateus: Yeah, we saw him at WE Day in Toronto two years ago. He was really good. What do people think when they see the poster? Adyn: We have to explain to people that we actually like him. It’s not ironic anymore. He makes good music! Both of you also have Montreal Jazz Fest posters in your rooms. It’s a pretty big cultural shift from Shawn Mendes. Adyn: Well, we like Shawn Mendes and we like jazz. It’s a taste of both worlds. VICE: You’ve got a lot of Lady Gaga and RuPaul going on. Daniella: Well, they’re like pretty much mostly gay people, because I’m gay. It’s just all of my favorite people, I just think they’re really beautiful and having queer beauty and art up on my walls is really inspiring to me, and it makes me feel really beautiful. What do you think people who walk into your room think about them? Do a lot of people recognize the RuPaul stars? People who aren’t familiar with it are always kind of surprised. But I have mostly queer friends, so that doesn’t happen a lot. With this Gaga poster, people are always like “woah, what’s going on with her eyes?” People are always very inquisitive about them. Why those specific Gaga posters? They’re pretty wild. They’re both from ArtPop which is my favorite album and I just like how they look. You got some art on your other wall? Yeah, I want to kind of shift from those fandom posters and move towards art that I resonate with. I guess it’s a more “mature” aesthetic? Yeah, I’m kinda getting there. VICE: Explain your poster collection. Cameron: It’s mostly Nicki Minaj, but a lot of other cool, badass people too. It’s a collection of the people who represent who I want to be, Lts of Nicki. Did you see that PAPER magazine cover? Yeah, I’m actually getting that blown up and putting it on the wall. I want to fill the entire space. It’s a pretty expansive collection for one wall. Yeah, sometimes they don’t stick! In the mornings I’m ready to wake up and look at them and they’re all on the ground. They just fall on me during the night, it’s pretty sad. It is because you’re using scotch tape? They don’t let you nail stuff on in dorms. So how do people react when they walk in here and see all of this? People are mortified! They don’t expect it. The first time my roommate walked in I could tell he was shocked. Do you think your roommate likes them? No, he doesn’t. But I don’t care. You got some artsy fandom posters going on. Yeah, I got Sherlock and some Pokémon. They’re all from FanExpo. I get them from the Artist’s Alley. Why do you buy artists’ renditions instead of actual posters? I just think they’re a bit cooler. I like seeing artists at cons and supporting them. Do you get a lot of people coming in here being like “Sherlock!” No. No one really recognizes the show. VICE: You’ve got a lot of black tape going on. Take me through your walls. Tristan: OK so my first wall, it’s “The Wall of Fame,” I’ve got that written in black tape. And then I stick whatever art I’m into right next to it. I’m usually sticking up a T-shirt. But this way people know what’s going on. You just stick up a T-shirt with black duct tape? Yeah, I treat them like art, like posters. This wall has “T-Bone” written on it, what does that mean? It’s my nickname. Do people actually call you that? Yeah. What’s this wall here? You’ve got a “T” inside a rectangle. Yeah okay so “T” is my intial, and it’s inside— that was supposed to be a square not a rectangle. Anyways, the “T” is me and it’s in the box because it’s like a reminder to “think outside the box” you know. But the “T” is in the box? Yeah, because you’ve got to think of it outside the box. OK, cool. Yeah, it’s very abstract. I’ve also got this tapestry that has all the major American Dolls on it, but it’s too heavy to put up. I tried but it keeps falling down. Wait, what. Why do you own this? It’s just cool, it’s got all the dolls on it. It’s classic. What do you think other people think of it? They’d probably think it’s cool too, when they see it. Got to figure out how to get it up. VICE: You’ve got exclusively film posters. Sawyer: Yeah, I’m a film student so I decided people should be able to tell, so I got a bunch of movie posters and put them up. What do you think people think of the movies you’ve picked? I think I’ve picked some classic ones, The Godfather, Back to The Future, movies that everyone likes. Hopefully people think I’ve got good taste and stuff. I mean, I am in film. You’ve got Pulp Fictio n up here too. Do you think it’s Tarantino’s best? Dude yeah, easily. You’ve got a space theme going on here, was that intentional? Nuvaira: Nah. I just really like Space Odyssey because I used to watch it all the time when I was younger. And this tapestry with the girl and the moon, I just thought it was cool. Like how she’s alone in solitude, looking at the moon. It’s peaceful. What do people think when they see you poster? The first thing people always ask me is whether I’ve actually seen the film. Have you actually seen the film? Yes! I believe you. Where’d you get the poster from? My university has these posters sales. I always check stuff out. This was the only poster liked and it was my favorite movie so I got it. It’s a really nice poster, really pretty. VICE: What do you think your posters say about you? Kiki: I think they show that my taste is all over the place cause there's no real running theme with them, I have the Travis Scott album cover and then like a poster about Lincoln's assassination and another one about Frida Kahlo so it just indicates that I like a lot of different things I suppose. What do people usually say when they see them? People usually comment on the New Yorker covers saying they really like them or are kind of curious about the Lincoln poster. One person said they didn't even know Lincoln had been assassinated, so I'm glad my posters can be educational too. The New Yorker covers are really nice. Where did you get them? The New Yorker covers I bought outside the Met for like two bucks apiece and I just really liked how they complimented each other. One's the city during sunset and the other is the city at dusk so they just look really nice side by side. And I love the New Yorker. Why the little Frida Kahlo portrait? I've just always loved her and how unashamed she was to be herself and be an independent woman at a time when it was harder to do so. My mom brought me back that portrait from Mexico when she went last winter. You got things like the New Yorker and Frida Kahlo, do you ever worry that people will think you’re a pretentious snob or something? Honestly it's never crossed my mind, but now I’m slightly worried. Follow Premila on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwab33/heres-what-university-students-have-on-their-dorm-walls

Entertainment

Vice

2018-09-14 06:21:51

2018

9.0

14

John Walsh

Foreign-born population in US is larger and more educated than ever

The number of foreign-born people living in the US in 2017 reached its highest level since 1910, according to data compiled by the US Census Bureau. The largest and second-largest of the groups had arrived from Asia and Latin America, respectively, the report said. Roughly 45 percent of people who immigrated into the US since 2010 to have college degrees The number of foreign-born people living in the US in 2017 reached its highest level since 1910, according to data compiled by the US Census Bureau. The agency's figures for 2017 show that 13.7% of the US population included people born in another country, which represented roughly 44.5 million people. That number had risen slightly from the previous year, which was 13.5%, The New York Times reported Thursday. Foreign-born US residents reached their highest numbers at the beginning of the 20th century, when large waves of European immigrants left their home countries to escape poverty and violence. The influx drove the percentage of foreign-born people to nearly 15% in the US. As of 2017, the largest and second-largest of the groups had arrived from Asia and Latin America, respectively, a report from the Brookings Institution said. Nearly three million Asian immigrants have arrived in the US since 2010, with the majority hailing from China and India. More of the people arriving to the US from other countries held college degrees than groups who arrived in years prior. "This is quite different from what we had thought," William Frey, the Brookings Institution researcher who conducted the analysis, told The New York Times. "We think of immigrants as being low-skilled workers from Latin America, but for recent arrivals, that's much less the case." New York and California, which are both sanctuary states and considered to be immigrant-friendly, witnessed their foreign-born populations rise by 6% since 2010. The state that saw the biggest uptick in foreign-born immigration was North Dakota, where there was a roughly 87% increase, The Times reported.

https://www.businessinsider.com/foreign-born-population-in-us-is-larger-and-more-educated-than-ever-2018-9

Business Insider

2017-05-25 00:00:00

2017

5.0

25

Odell Beckham Jr. Ain't Dating Iggy Azalea, Say Sources Close To OBJ

Odell Beckham Jr. ain't dating Iggy Azalea, despite reports the 2 had a romantic date night this week ... sources close to Odell tell TMZ Sports. Multiple outlets reported the stars hit up Bowlero bowling alley in Woodland Hills, CA on Monday night ... and were "cozying up" with each other, "being romantic." But we talked to sources close to Odell who vehemently denied they were in a relationship ... or dating at all ... saying "people will create anything." As for Odell, he did make 1 hookup when he was out in L.A. ... running routes and catching passes with Johnny Manziel.

https://www.tmz.com/2017/05/25/odell-beckham-jr-iggy-azalea-bowling-date-night-relationship-not-dating/

TMZ

2017-03-30 21:26:29

2017

3.0

30

Matthew Yglesias

Trump is still tweeting angrily about the Freedom Caucus

Republican leaders have been complaining for years about the Freedom Caucus, the group of hard-right House members who live to annoy the party brass. But they’ve never taken a shot so public, vocal, and direct as what Donald Trump tweeted today — basically calling Freedom Caucus members electoral enemies on a par with the Democratic Party. The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018! Thursday evening, Trump renewed his (so far one-sided) Twitter fight against Freedom Caucus leaders, suggesting they would hold up his desired tax overhaul too: If @RepMarkMeadows, @Jim_Jordan and @Raul_Labrador would get on board we would have both great healthcare and massive tax cuts & reform. Where are @RepMarkMeadows, @Jim_Jordan and @Raul_Labrador?#RepealANDReplace #Obamacare Coming from any other president in living memory, this would be a clear warning that the president is prepared to back primary challenges against House members who issue conservative dissents from his agenda. Trump, however, has a tendency to say things without necessarily meaning them. As we saw during the AHCApocalypse last week, he enjoys bluffing as a political strategy — as when he threatened to force the House to hold a doomed vote on the American Health Care Act so that everyone in the caucus would have to go on record as a friend or a foe, only to demur at the last minute when Paul Ryan pointed out to him that this would create huge political problems for his members. So Trump is probably just bluffing here, too. At least that’s how I would interpret it. (Also, the historical track record of presidents trying to back primary challenges to incumbent members of Congress is dismal.) Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokesperson, declined to clarify, telling NBC News that “the tweet speaks for itself.” It’s worth noting that while the Freedom Caucus certainly has been known to scuttle the GOP’s best-laid plans in the past, it’s far from clear that this is really what happened with the Obamacare repeal effort. Many moderate or vulnerable House Republicans had serious doubts about the bill, and the legislation, as written, wasn’t going to make it through the Senate. It’s possible that if every single Freedom Caucus member had been prepared to vote for the AHCA it would have passed the House, but that’s far from certain. And even if it had passed the House, the basic reality that the bill was too extreme and poorly designed to pass the Senate would have forced major modifications. All of which suggests Trump might be better served blaming the bill’s architects — including himself.

https://www.vox.com/2017/3/30/15121624/trump-freedom-caucus-tweet

Vox

2016-11-08 00:00:03

2016

11.0

8

Tara Golshan

Where early voting stands going into Election Day

As the candidates make their closing arguments before Election Day, millions of Americans have already cast their ballots for the presidential election. At least 42 million citizens have voted early, with more than 18 million ballots cast in battleground states. This is a bit of a drop-off from 2012, when 46 million people voted early. Since early voting is a sign of enthusiasm for the candidates, it’s an indication that fewer voters were motivated to get to the polls early — perhaps due to the unpopularity of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. So far, this what we know from early voting results: More women have voted than men, Latino voter turnout is so far at an all-time high, and black voter turnout is still below the last presidential election, when Barack Obama was on the ballot. The results are a mixed bag for Clinton and Trump, and as I have reported throughout, it’s tough to draw conclusions from early voting numbers — different states have different early voting laws and report ballot returns inconsistently, and drawing conclusions based on party affiliation is fallible at best. But on a bigger scale, the early voting returns still seem to be following national polling: It’s a tighter race than Clinton would have hoped for, but there are some positive signs for the Democratic nominee going into Election Day. As my colleague Dara Lind writes, early voting has made a “serious case that the Latino ‘sleeping giant’ is finally rustling awake.” And it’s happening in a big way: In Arizona, Latinos have gone from 11 percent of the early voting electorate in 2012 to 13 percent this year. In Texas, Latino early voting rose 26 percent. In Florida, 152 percent. In North Carolina, an increase in early voting among Latinos in the face of restrictions has helped keep Democratic hopes alive in the state. In Nevada, a surge in the last few days of early voting made the state, according to state politics expert Jon Ralston, all but unwinnable for Republicans. It’s a good sign for Clinton: When the early voting periods were about to open, University of Florida early voting expert Michael McDonald told CNBC, "There is speculation that Trump's rhetoric could entice Hispanics to vote against him, and there is some evidence in polls that Hispanic voting enthusiasm is running higher than normal." His prediction has seemingly come to fruition, and it’s bad news for Trump in Florida, a state the Republican nominee cannot afford to lose. The Clinton campaign is hoping the surge in Latino voting will counteract what has been a small decline in the black vote in states like North Carolina — as well as Clinton’s terrible numbers among non-college-educated whites. Initial alarm bells over Clinton’s alleged “black voter problem” went off last week in Florida, where African Americans were slower to turn out than in the past two elections. It’s not particularly surprising that Clinton’s early black voter turnout numbers weren’t matching Obama’s. But results have drastically improved, since those earlier reports — University of Florida early voting expert Daniel Smith called it “old news” at this point, projecting that total black voter turnout in Florida will actually be higher in 2016 than it was in 2012. Total black turnout in Florida in 2016 will be higher than 2012. Mark it.At 777k as of yesterday. Souls to polls today. VBM & ED to come That’s not the case in North Carolina, however, which has seen an 8.7 percent decline — about 66,000 votes — in black voter turnout, much of which has been attributed to more restrictive early voting rules, including earlier poll closures. Trump and Clinton seem to be close to a dead heat in North Carolina, but a breakdown of the Obama coalition is a better sign for Trump. Even so, Clinton’s overall strength on the electoral map may prove to hold her up, and while polls remain tight in states like Nevada, Clinton has also been able to grow a substantial margin in early voting — Democrats are up 6 points — which could prove to be a firewall come Election Day. Early voting is usually a good measure of enthusiasm; lots of early voters means lots of decided voters. And while there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for either candidate this year, there is some speculation that people voting against the opposing candidate rather than affirmatively voting for their candidate might bring people to the polls. Paul Gronke, director of the Early Voting Information Center and a professor of political science at Reed College, said this could play out among the minority vote. "Trump continues to make statements that alienate African-American voters, and he struggles to get beyond 2 percent in some state polls. Under that circumstance, and faced with a well-oiled Democratic [get-out-the-vote] machine, why would African-American voters wait?" he told me in September, noting that Trump also doesn’t seem to have much of an early voter ballot-chasing operation, which has been effective in getting out the Republican vote. It is also an effective way to show the campaigns where to focus their day of get-out-the-vote resources. And that could make the difference with some demographics. According to a recent poll from the African American Research Collaborative, black voters do recognize the stakes of the election. And while they are not as enthusiastic about Clinton as they were about Obama, Trump’s dog-whistling to white nationalist voters has resonated negatively among African-American voters; the “perceived importance” of voting for the president is higher this year than it was in 2012. In other words, black voters are still committed to casting their ballots this cycle. "All of this might lead to an early electorate that is even more Democratic and more diverse than in the Obama elections — but all of this is contingent on all kinds of assumptions," Gronke said. There has been a shift in early voting demographics in the past two decades. "Prior to 2008, these ‘decided’ early voters matched demographic patterns that are well-established in American politics," Gronke said; they were older, educated, wealthier, ideological, and highly partisan. And for the most part, particularly with mail-in voters, these early voters mostly leaned Republican, which can also be attributed to a strong GOP push for mail-in absentee voting in the 1990s and 2000s. Meanwhile, in-person early voters tend to lean more toward Democrats. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign made a big stride with Democratic in-person early voting in 2008, targeting areas with higher Democratic voter potential — areas that also had higher populations of African-American voters. Black churches used Sunday services to push people to the polls in what they called "souls to the polls" initiatives, University of Wisconsin Madison political scientist Barry Burden recalls. In 2012, more restrictive early voting laws also served as a mobilization tool to get out the vote, Gronke notes. “It ended up being nearly impossible to extract out the impact of the laws from the impact of the campaign,” he said. For the most part, 2016 remains consistent with these trends. Notably, Democrats and the Clinton campaign have focused this year’s efforts on mail-in voting. They have had tangible results in states like Florida, where voter registration between Democrats and Republicans has evened out. While “compared to in-person early voting, absentee voting patterns in Florida do not deviate as much from 2012,” as Burden notes, Republicans don’t lead Democrats with as wide a margin in absentee voting this year. And according to the Clinton campaign, more African Americans requested mail ballots in this election than ever before. Clinton may not have the same pull this year. But it’s still early to tell, and as University of Florida’s McDonald wrote for the Huffington Post Sunday, Democrats still have a lot of unreturned ballots in their hands: Second, there are 71,700 more Democrats than Republicans who have requested mail ballots but have not returned them. While Democrats typically have a problem with unreturned mail ballots, my sense is given this lopsided number that at some point Democrats will start achieving at least daily parity in the returned mail ballots. It’s important to remember — as a general scan of contradicting headlines on early voting from the New York Times to Fox News will show you — that it’s still early to say definitively that these early voting numbers indicate final results: “It is quite difficult to discern what the election results will be from early voting numbers,” Burden said. “The patterns do not tell a coherent national story. … Ballots are coming in at different rates for the parties in each state. The messages appear to differ from one state to the next.” And as McDonald warns in his weekly update on the early voting numbers for Huffington Post: “These are still early hints of the direction of the election. There is still much time left in the election, and these numbers can be affected by how election officials run the election, campaign strategies to mobilize voters, and voters’ behaviors.” There are a lot of limitations: States reporting early voting totals don’t always include all counties; some states, like North Carolina, require party registration, while others, like Wisconsin, don’t; and numbers derived from party registrations are fallible. These distinctions can explain some of the early results. University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket crunched the numbers for FiveThirtyEight on how well early voting numbers predicted the final tally in past elections. He simply concluded, “The relationship is positive, but it’s pretty noisy. In other words, knowing how a party is doing in early voting doesn’t tell you much about how it will do once all the votes are counted.” In fact, he found that looking at early voting numbers in 2012 would give you “wildly misleading” results: Democrats maintained substantial leads among early voters in North Carolina, Louisiana and West Virginia, and were trailing by a relatively narrow margin in Oklahoma, but still lost those states when all the votes were counted. Republicans won early voters in Pennsylvania and Colorado but lost the final tallies there. Maryland was a safely Democratic state in 2012, but the 75 percent of the early vote that went the Democrats’ way was a far cry from the 63 percent of the total vote they won once voting was finished. Even so, it seems like on a macro level, early voting supports national polling — which might be a sign of relief for Clinton voters.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/7/13541612/where-early-voting-stands-election-day

Vox

2018-09-27 14:45:00

2018

9.0

27

Jelisa Castrodale

Axe-Throwing Bar Temporarily Loses Liquor License Over Serious Safety Concerns

If you’re reading this while you’re at work, pull your chair a little closer to your computer screen and put both feet flat on the floor. If you’re on public transport, make sure that you’re either already folded into a cramped plastic seat or take a firm grip on one of the overhead straps. And if you’re walking, then put this down until you’ve reached your destination. What we’re about to tell you is shocking, and you might need a few minutes to quietly process this information. If you’re ready, read on: According to investigators from the Michigan Liquor Control Commission (MLCC), a bar that allows its patrons to get wasted while throwing axes at wooden targets was (temporarily) deemed unsafe. We know. We couldn’t believe it either, but the MLCC suspended Hub Stadium’s liquor license for one day, as a result of what it called “a significant threat to the public health ... at this establishment.” According to MLive, the suspension to give Hub Stadium time to address some of the investigators’ concerns and to develop new safety procedures. In addition, the Commission said that Hub’s owner’s failed to mention that its patrons would be throwing axes when it applied for its license. “It is our job to make sure that the health, safety and welfare concerns of the public are taken into account wherever alcoholic beverages are sold in the state of Michigan,” MLCC chairman Andy Deloney said in a statement. (The Commission did say that it did not regulate axe-throwing in bars or other establishments, nor was it against the law for sporting activities—presumably including axe-throwing—to be held inside booze-serving establishments). Some of the concerning scenarios that the MLCC’s investigators witnessed during their visit to Hub included patrons drinking alcohol while they threw axes and axe-throwers wearing open-toed shoes. Then they started scrolling through Hub’s social media postings, and hooo boy, they saw some things; among their other concerns were photos and videos of “patrons throwing axes at bottles of spirits [and] consuming shots from the bottle that was not struck,” a person throwing two axes at once, three “coaches” throwing axes at the same target, a person bouncing the axe off the floor in an attempt to hit the target, and someone walking barefoot on a tightrope-style strap while he or she threw an axe. (OK, we’d actually like to see that last one.) Hub’s license was suspended on September 10 and, at a hearing which took place before the suspension, Hub’s management said that they “had implemented some of the changes” that the MLCC had suggested. According to AFAR, North America’s first commercial indoor axe-throwing facility opened in Toronto in 2011. Its owner, Matt Wilson, has since expanded his Backyard Axe Throwing League (BATL) to a dozen additional locations in the United States and Canada. A second axe-throwing chain, Bad Axe Throwing, has 24 locations scattered between the two countries. And there are legit dozens of others— check your local listings!—but Hub is possibly the first to have its liquor license suspended, even temporarily. (Although Revolution Axe, an as-yet-unopened axe-throwing bar in Everett, Massachusetts, has had three hearings in an attempt to get its own liquor license). MUNCHIES has reached out to Hub Stadium for comment but has not yet received a response. We would also like to know more about that person on the tightrope.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qva38x/axe-throwing-bar-temporarily-loses-liquor-license-over-serious-safety-concerns

Food by VICE

Vice

2018-05-08 00:00:00

2018

5.0

8

Trump, China's Xi discuss trade ahead of talks next week

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed ongoing trade issues on Tuesday, as both sides continue to position themselves amid a heated feud over tariffs between the world’s two largest economies. The two leaders spoke after high-level U.S. and Chinese officials in Beijing last week failed to reach a consensus, with talks set to resume next week in Washington. Trump struck a positive tone in announcing the call earlier on Tuesday, calling Xi “my friend” and pledging in a post on Twitter that “good things will happen” on trade. Chinese state television said Xi told Trump China-U.S. relations were in an important phase. “I attach great importance to bilateral relations, and cherish the good working relationship with Mr. President,” it quoted Xi as saying. In a statement after the call, the White House said the U.S. president “affirmed his commitment to ensuring that the trade and investment relationship between the United States and China is balanced and benefits American businesses and workers.” Chinese state media said Xi told Trump the two countries should strive to find a way to properly resolve trade disputes. Xi said trade and economic relations had always been the ballast and propeller of U.S.-China relations. He described their talks last week on trade as “frank, efficient and constructive.” “The two sides’ teams can maintain communication, and strive to find appropriate ways to resolve issues and achieve win-win outcomes,” Xi said. China’s top economic official, Vice Premier Liu He, is scheduled to visit Washington next week to resume negotiations sparked by the Trump administration’s threat to impose tariffs on up to $150 billion of Chinese imports. Beijing has countered with its own planned tariffs on American goods. The tariff threats have roiled U.S. and other stock markets in recent weeks amid fears that a trade war between the two economic powerhouses will hit global markets. Trump won the White House in part over his harsh rhetoric on China and trade, and vowing to press Beijing over economic issues and make trade fair for the United States. Since taking office, he has also touted his personal relationship with Xi. Last week, a seven-member U.S. delegation returned to Washington and briefed Trump on their meeting. American negotiators, led by U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, issued a lengthy list of demands, according to people familiar with the talks that the White House later called “frank” discussions. Chinese state media, after the meeting, struck a positive note. Trump and Xi also discussed North Korea’s nuclear program during their call, according to both the White House and Chinese state media. Reporting by Susan Heavey and Makini Brice in WASHINGTON; additional reporting by Michael Martina in BEIJING and David Brunnstrom in WASHINGTON; editing by Bernadette Baum and James Dalgleish

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china/trump-chinas-xi-discuss-trade-ahead-of-talks-next-week-idUSKBN1I91FI

World News

Reuters

2016-06-16 00:00:00

2016

6.0

16

Fetty Wap: So Sorry I Got Your Principal Suspended

Fetty Wap did a mea culpa after his rap video got a school principal benched. The remorseful rapper took the mic Wednesday night at a Paterson, NJ school board meeting in the wake of the suspension of the principal who let him film at the high school he attended. Fetty had been adamant the school district missed the point of his video that features images of weed and pole dancing in a classroom. Before the board meeting Fetty rallied troops to gather support for the principal. Waiting for your permission to load the Instagram Media.

https://www.tmz.com/2016/06/16/fetty-wap-apologizes-music-video-principal-suspended/

TMZ

2019-07-01 19:59:00

2019

7.0

1

Cameron Kunzelman

Video Game History Is More Than Just Software and Hardware

When we talk about game history, we’re most often talking about familiar things: the Big Crash of the 1980s, the console wars of the 1990s, and the various business strategies of Sony and Microsoft jockeying for position in the early mid 2000s. ROMchip, a new open access academic journal dedicated to the history of games, is trying to get us to think a little more broadly about what the history of games are and what they could be. Being an academic work, the journal is aiming for something more than a collection of anecdotes about consoles and lists must-play obscure game titles. The first issue is made up of work from scholars and writers who are collecting, contextualizing, and rethinking the history of games, game production, and the people who play. It has a big task in front of it. Co-editors Laine Nooney (who I have sat on academic panels with), Raiford Guins, and Henry Lowood argue in their opening editorial that video game history has a problem. As an academic field, it is hard to define, and the shape that it takes for one person might not be what it is for another. It still has big, conceptual questions that remain unresolved or unconsidered. As the editors suggest, it means that game history still has some big, unresolved questions: “What types of histories are being written? Whose history is being accounted for as well as not being accounted for?” Any cursory search or YouTube scouring of “game history” will provide you with long accounts of specific companies or series, with the occasional video from The Gaming Historian or Kelsey Lewin. These public histories are mostly geared toward fans or aimed at people who want to learn more about fascinating devices such as a blood testing device for a Nintendo handheld. Academic history writing takes a slightly different angle, looking to fill in context and situate video games in a cultural and technological context. It’s less look at this and more look at this whole world of things. The first issue of ROMchip centers on what the history of games might look like if we were more attentive to different perspectives instead of only being interested in forgotten peripherals. In a large polemical section of essays, writers take on the question of what games history should be. For example, VICE’s own Austin Walker argues in his piece in the issue, what would a history of play that archived feel of play look like? Or, as TreaAndrea M. Russworm writes, where is the history of games that takes seriously the contributions of black people to every sector of video games from Jerry Lawson’s and Edward Smith’s hardware and software designs to the fan labor of blerds and beyond. The array of concerns and potential ways of thinking game history bloom from there, from Patrick Harrigan’s suggestion that Civil War games be thought as public debates to Jodi A. Byrd’s demand that “a history of games be one that focuses on those submerged and contrary stories that counter the possessive logics of colonialism and imperialism.” This first issue also contains a section of interviews, one of which is with Tom Kalinske, whose tenure as president of Sega of America coincided with the anti-Nintendo, pro-Genesis attack ads that we associate with the console wars of the 1990s. The final section, titled “Materials,” is made up of two longform traditional academic articles, one of which deals with Suffragetto, a board game from the early 1900s. Although it is written for an academic audience, I think that ROMchip is pretty accessibly written, and would be engaging for anyone who is trying to think of new ways of considering how we engage with, and think through, the history of games. Have thoughts? Swing by the Waypoint forums to share them!

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neayq7/video-game-history-is-more-than-just-software-and-hardware-romchip

Games

Vice

2018-12-09 00:00:00

2018

12.0

9

Ilana NovickHakim Bishara

Activists Protest at Whitney Museum, Demanding Vice Chairman and Owner of Tear Gas Manufacturer “Must Go”

Members and supporters of activist group Decolonize This Place emphasized that Warren Kanders is only a symptom of a larger problem. Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads “I’d rather see this than Andy Warhol any day!” a young Whitney visitor exclaimed to her friend Sunday afternoon, as she sprinted from the museum door to the lobby. As the atrium slowly filled with the scent of burning sage, protesters shouted, “We will not be silent” and “Decolonize this place.” Members and supporters of activist group Decolonize This Place, alongside curious onlookers, arrived outside the Whitney just after noon. Visitors hoping for a selfie with Marilyn Monroe or a Campbell’s soup can print were treated to art of a different kind. Armed with colorful banners reading messages like “WHITNEY MUSEUM: NO SPACE FOR PROFITEER OF STATE VIOLENCE,” drums, a cowbell, and the aforementioned burning sage, protesters gathered on what one member aptly described as “a cold ass Sunday,” to lead a protest against Warren B. Kanders. Kanders is a Vice Chairman on the Whitney Board of Directors, and the owner of Safariland, a tear gas manufacturer whose products were used on immigrant families approaching the US–Mexico border, seeking asylum in the United States. He was also among those who provided “significant support” to the blockbuster Andy Warhol exhibit, From A to B and Back Again, according to the exhibition’s web page. “The immediate goal is that Warren Kanders must go,” said Marz Saffore, a member of Decolonize This Place. Saffore emphasized, however, that Kanders is only a symptom of a larger problem. Saffore continued, “That does not mean that there aren’t dozens and dozens of other issues within the board of trustees at the Whitney, or within the way that the Whitney shows art or who curates the art.” The protest, according to organizers, was in solidarity with but separate from the nearly 100 Whitney staff members who signed a letter expressing their dismay at Kanders’s presence on the board and requesting a new policy around trustee participation in exhibitions. In response to that letter, Museum Director Adam Weinberg wrote in a statement: “Even as we are idealistic and missionary in our belief in artists — as established by our founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney — the Whitney is first and foremost a museum. It cannot right all the ills of an unjust world, nor is that its role.” Weinberg also called the museum “a safe space for unsafe ideas.” Maria Garcia from Comite Comadre, a group that supports asylum-seekers and fights against deportations, told Hyperallergic that the museum’s claims to be “a safe place for unsafe ideas,” as stated by Weinberg, is “a slap on the face of their workers and the public at large.” Weinberg’s response, says Garcia, “infantilizes and insults” the pain that her community is going through at the border.    To help spread the message of that pain, organizers fanned out across the plaza in front of the museum and at the entrance to the Highline, handing out flyers that read, in part: Need we remind Weinberg that “the laws of society” have included the legal sanctioning of slavery, the Indian Removal Act, Jim Crow laws, and indeed the entire juridico-economic regime of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism that underpins contemporary US society? We say to Weinberg: We are not fools. We know law is not justice. Your statement makes it clear which side you are on: the side of Safariland, and this we simply cannot accept. Passersby were largely receptive, stopping to ask the protesters questions and to take pictures and videos of them, even following protesters into the museum’s lobby around 1pm. Museum security tried to hold back the group with a series of lines, supposedly for a bag check, which ultimately failed when around 70 protesters pushed past the guards. They formed a circle that eventually overflowed the space between the gift shop and the ticket desk and lit sage, sang, chanted, and a series of speeches were delivered from members of the American Indian House, the Bronx-based Hydro Punk movement, and the New Sanctuary Coalition. Shellyne Rodriguez, a member of Decolonize This Place, told Hyperallergic that she felt compelled to protest today because, “If we do not shock and awe this museum with our anger and our rage, then we’re saying it’s okay. Who’s going to be the next person on the board? One by one, we need to hold these people accountable. It’s about time we start questioning where our philanthropy comes from.” Rick Chavolla from the American Indian Community House in New York City, a nonprofit representing Indigenous communities in the city, told Hyperallergic, “Finding out that [Kanders] is CEO of Safariland was incredibly sad for us. Admittedly, it angered us to know that it’s someone who is responsible for tear-gassing our own Indigenous people in Standing Rock, and more recently, on the border.” The American Indian Community House has an ongoing collaboration with the Whitney Museum, a series of monthly events named “Socials,” which highlight Indigenous culture. The recent revelations, says Chavolla, put the next “Social” event, scheduled for February 22, 2019, in question. “We have to able to move forward in a way that we know that the museum is conscious of who their leadership is … If the Whitney Museum is not going to find a way to change that leadership, we are really going to have to rethink our ongoing relationship with them.” Around 1:30pm, the fire department arrived, apparently because of the increasing layers of smoke. Protesters were undaunted, shouting “Fire! Fire! Fire to the colonizers!” and demanded that if the sage were, in fact, a fire hazard, that they be allowed to put it out themselves. Eventually, the protesters relocated, and the action continued peacefully back outside. Whitney representatives did not offer comment when reached prior to Sunday’s event and have not yet responded to followup requests.

https://hyperallergic.com/475198/activists-protest-at-whitney-museum-demanding-vice-chairman-and-owner-of-tear-gas-manufacturer-must-go/

Hyperallergic

2017-06-29 15:32:00

2017

6.0

29

Emily Guy Birken

I always ask myself the same question before buying something big

Recently, my husband had to buy a new bathrobe. The old one, which had completely worn out after a decade of wear, was the exact same ridiculous pastel coffee mug robe that Brad Pitt sported ironically in the movie Fight Club. The coffee mug robe cost $188, and had been a gift from me because my husband simply could not bring himself to spend nearly $200 on something he was going to wear around the house on lazy mornings. He loved that intentionally ridiculous robe, but despite my urging him to replace it with the same one from the same boutique, he again balked at spending that kind of money on a bathrobe. No matter how often I pointed out that he'd be spending a little less than $19 a year on daily joy (assuming the replacement robe also lasted 10 years), I could not change his mind. This situation got me wondering, though. How do you decide whether it's worth it to spend $200 on a ridiculous bathrobe, $500 for a phone upgrade, or an additional $5,000 to get the trim package you really want on your new car? Here's the thought process you should go through to figure out if a major purchase is worth it. The big question: Is this an investment or an indulgence? The basic definition of an investment is something that will appreciate in value over time. Buying a house is a common example of an investment purchase. In addition, upgrading your flight to business class so that you can more easily get work done on the plane may be an investment (if you can truly commit to working in flight) since the cost of the upgrade will be more than covered by the money you make while working. But what about investments that appreciate in something other than monetary value? For instance, you might spend money on biweekly massages, which do not appreciate in financial value, but they do keep you pain- and stress-free, which might be worth far more to you than the cost of the massages. That is an investment in your physical and mental well-being, even if you never see a specific financial return. On the other hand, an indulgence is something that simply makes you feel good in the moment. You don't expect an indulgence — like buying your favorite gourmet coffee, driving a sporty car, or purchasing the latest trendy clothes — to appreciate in financial value. There is nothing wrong with spending money on indulgences, and in fact, they can be an important part of your budget. The problem is when you justify your indulgences by claiming they are investments. (See also: How One Nice Thing Can Ruin Your Whole Budget) How to tell the difference The fundamental disagreement that my husband and I have over the bathrobe comes down whether or not spending nearly $200 on it would be an investment or an indulgence. I believe that it's an investment in his daily happiness. He believes it's an indulgence, and therefore not worth the money. There are a couple of things to consider to help you figure out if your major purchase falls into one category or the other: Length of use In general, the longer you can get good use out of a product or service, the more likely it is that you are looking at an investment. That means that clothing fads are more likely to be indulgences, whereas well-made classic pieces like a suit or little black dress are more likely to be investments. Is there a possible substitute? If there is no other way you'd get the same feeling from another purchase, then it's likely that you're looking at an investment. For instance, you may feel more professional, put-together, and relaxed when you get a weekly manicure. Painting your own nails does not feel the same, and in fact, you feel less professional with your DIY manicure. That means your weekly manicure date is likely an investment in your positive outlook, rather than an indulgence. Just because it's an investment doesn't mean you should buy it Even though the big ticket item you want to buy will be an investment in your well-being, that doesn't necessarily mean you should buy it. Major expenditures can derail your finances, even if your purchase will appreciate in value in some way. Before you make your investment purchase, ask yourself if you can afford to make the purchase. If you can't, commit to saving up for it. (See also: 5 Mental Biases That Are Keeping You Poor) Know what you value Ultimately, determining whether or not you should make a major purchase is all about knowing the things you value most. Spending money on things that will appreciate in value — whether financial or emotional — can be a good investment. Spending money on things that will offer more fleeting value is generally an indulgence. Knowing which is which can help you decide when to spend, when to save, and when to just go ahead and buy the silly robe. WiseBread is an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read the original article on WiseBread. Copyright 2019. Follow WiseBread on Twitter.

https://www.businessinsider.com/i-always-ask-myself-the-same-question-before-buying-something-big-2017-6

Business Insider

2016-01-14 18:25:00

2016

1.0

14

THUMP Staff

7 Producers Reflect on David Bowie's Influence on Electronic Music

In addition to his role as transformational deity to the rock and pop worlds, David Bowie left an indelible touch on electronic music. His mid-70s experimental work proved formative for a nascent avant-garde scene and a vast swath of DJs responded with tributes over the years, using his compositions as jumping-off points for head-spinning productions. But in the wake of the art-pop legend's death, it's become apparent that beyond his direct contributions to the dance world, he's had an immeasurable impact on the scene's younger practitioners. Techno pioneers, avant-pop luminaries, and ambient zoners alike all took to Twitter after his death to process the passing of an inspiration. Words always fail when grappling with the loss of an icon, and even moreso when attempting to distill a man who so readily defied easy definition. For this reason, THUMP reached out to a just a few of the producers and composers influenced and impacted by Bowie's life and work—including Tiga, ex-Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt, spaced-out experimentalist Maria Minerva, and more—to pay tribute to a man whose singular vision sparked several generations of auteurs and iconoclasts. Bowie was at the very core of believing you can be somebody strange and mysterious and creative and successful and cool and interesting and funny and intelligent all without compromise or contradiction. He was not a god or a guru or a hero (maybe a bit of those), but he was proof that it was possible. Living proof. The only argument you needed against the doubters and the garbage and the compromises. And he made the best music. I'm certainly not a scholar of his work, nor am I the most ardent fan of his entire discography. But David Bowie's music has touched my life at certain times like many others and has proved to be one of the more enduring legacies in popular music. You would be hard-pressed to find a person who can't find something to like across his discography, given his unique ability to both adapt and be transgressive simultaneously. When I was a teenager I inherited a worn copy of Station to Station from the remainder of my father's record collection from the 70s and 80s before I ever purchased my first vinyl LP. So his music has unintentionally had a kind of familial, relatable (not alien) quality to it for me from the beginning. Fast forward to the mid oughts at the onset of Emeralds. While stoned out of our gourds, our "spiritual advisor" Witchbeam blew our minds with the b-side to Low. 'What is this strange music that sounds like early Cluster doing on a David Bowie record?" we thought. With regards to Low and the rest of the "Berlin Trilogy," it's important to understand the contributions of both Visconti and Eno in tandem with Bowie if you're going to appreciate its influence on ambient music. But also keep in mind, they will always colloquially be David Bowie records and that is what is more important since many people who heard these records aren't really trying to pick them apart. Certainly it's apparent that tracks like "Subterraneans" and "Art Decade" were a kind of genesis of sorts; a precursor to Eno's Ambient 1: Music For Airports which would be released the following year. Equally as influential is the koto and string-synth heavy track "Moss Garden" on Heroes from the same year. In 2009, with an advance, I purchased an old Eventide Harmonizer and used it extensively on the recordings for the album Does It Look I'm Here. Only years later I would find out that it was the device creating many of the time-destroying, crazy artifacts on some of those tracks that blew my mind way back when. It's even more discernible on the Low bonus tracks 'Some Are' and 'All Saints' if you're keeping count. In any case I would say there has always been an underlying influence from his records despite the equipment and contributions of Visconti/Eno. It was ultimately Bowie's visions of the unseen which pushed the music forward to a new place I think. Rest in peace. I remember being 16 or so and pressing down the distortion pedal with my foot and playing the riff from "Ziggy Stardust" on my guitar. I felt like I owned the world. Those moments...that's whats music is all about. After that, David Bowie has followed me through my life with music in a lot of different ways. When I read about his death I just didn't find any words—and decided to record a short cover instead. That's why I love music. Music doesn't need words or explaining. Everyone has their own idea of Bowie. I was never a Bowie superfan and yet, his death comes as a complete shock. Bowie was the king of the self-styled, king of the working-class-gone-art-school—very authentic in that sense, despite all the different masks and personas. These days, it's rich kids who make artsy music, and the execs who tell 'em what to wear. In that sense, there will never be another Bowie. My favorite Bowie "album" is the B-side of Low, produced in collaboration with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti. A true masterpiece that pays homage to the Eastern Block ("Subterraneans," "Weeping Wall," "Warszawa"), something that I—as someone born in the USSR during its final years—truly appreciate. Bowie said he dove into this subject matter after living in sunny and coked-out Los Angeles (my current hometown). The result is a deeply cathartic voyage into... what it's like to come out on the other side. The other side of west/east, darkness/light, but also drugs. I can relate in so many ways. We have lost a true visionary. So many people felt they knew David Bowie because his identity shone through each mask he wore, every character he showed us. Every time he shifted characters, a slightly clearer picture of a remarkable person stood out in the erasure, and we recognized a bit of ourselves. Each bold new character broke through a wall that constrained us in our own lives. If you were trapped by outdated rules of gender, genre, race, culture, class, cliché or some musical pretense, you could see Bowie stride through the same wall and suddenly feel a little safer to be free. And he did it with a kind of captivating grace, musicianship and style that made it cool to be weird. This became his trademark more than any particular sound or image. For so many of us who are outsiders, musicians or artists, he showed us a way into ourselves by taking fascinating, elegant, terrifying risks. He didn't only cross boundaries, he stood right over them and refused to pick a side, until there wasn't a boundary at all. It's entirely fitting that one of his most famous songs is about standing at a wall, declaring that "the shame was on the other side." That wall, and so many others, are gone now, and so is he. But the feeling he gave us is still here. He let us be heroes. Now that David Bowie is dead and I am older and more experienced with life and music and the industry, my understanding of his grandeur is even deeper. He must have been an angel sent from heaven to shine this bright and deeply creative light upon us that will never ever let us go. He managed to touch all of us so deeply and profoundly. It's breathtaking. He means the world not only to his friends and family, but to all of us looking for more than just answers in music. He is it. He is the godfather of popular music and expression, style and performance, artistry and fame. He mastered it all—an incredible existence. [I'm] so happy and proud to be sharing this love for him with millions of other people. David Bowie was one of the few true rocks stars of what now seems like a halcyon age. No matter what Bowie did, it never seemed stale or contrived. His interests seemed to genuinely lie in art and expression, and not relevance for the sake of attention. He just did what interested him, and he, if anyone, was frankly himself. I admire him for keeping his health issues private, and his choice to bow out with grace. His death still seems very unreal. His career obviously speaks for itself, and his influence is extremely pervasive to this day. He both lived and died artistically, leaving a final album as a parting gift. One can only hope to live a life so stylized and brilliant, and I'm sure wherever Bowie is now, It's a more interesting place because of his presence.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gvnygm/7-producers-reflect-on-david-bowies-influence-on-electronic-music

Noisey

Vice

2016-05-19 17:10:02

2016

5.0

19

Matthew Yglesias

Seattle and Portland are showing how cities can grow without sprawl

When a metropolitan area adds population, it typically does so in part by adding people to areas that are already developed (infill) and in part by expanding its geographic footprint (sprawl). With the Census Bureau out today with new information on population dynamics in America's cities, I was interested in which effect predominates and where. So I asked Jed Kolko, an economist with research expertise in housing and urban growth patterns, and he sent me this scatter plot of population growth versus change in density: The density concept used here is tract-weighted density rather than raw density. Usually you hear about raw density, which takes a metro area's total population and divides it by the total landmass. That's easy to calculate, but it leads to some funny results, like Greater Los Angeles being denser than Greater New York. Instead, this concept of tract-weighted density measures tends to be more accurate. It shows the density of the place where the typical resident of the metro area lives and tells us a lot more about the nature of the urban form. What we see here, with tract-weighted density, is that the two cities adding the most density are two very low-density metros in North Carolina. They're followed by the two major metropolitan areas of the Pacific Northwest — further evidence that Oregon and Washington have housing policy regimes that California and the Northeast should try to emulate. Conversely, we see the metros that are de-densifying at the most rapid clip tend to be experiencing low or negative population growth. These are typically places where the urban core is still hollowing out rather than adding people, while the suburban frontier continues to grow. Last but by no means least, with the state of Texas accounting for a huge share of America's overall population growth, it's interesting to look at the divergent fates of its metro areas — Austin and Dallas are sprawling, but San Antonio and Houston are getting denser.

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/19/11713668/growth-and-sprawl

Vox

2017-08-18 00:00:00

2017

8.0

18

Sean Smith's Victim Was Hospitalized In Critical Condition, Cops Say

Oakland Raiders cornerback Sean Smith allegedly beat his sister's boyfriend so badly during a July 4 attack, the guy was hospitalized in critical condition with multiple broken bones in his face, TMZ Sports has learned. Law enforcement tells us ... officers responded to calls of an unconscious male on the streets of Pasadena and when help arrived they found him bloody and beaten on the sidewalk. We're told it was obvious the man had multiple facial fractures. Cops previously said Smith beat the man and then stomped his head. Investigators spoke with multiple witnesses -- and fingered Smith as the assailant. Smith -- who signed a 4-year, $38 million contract in 2016 -- was arrested for felony assault. He posted $80,000 bond and is due back in court to be arraigned in September. For his part, Smith has denied any wrongdoing and has vowed to fight the case. The NFL has launched its own investigation into the incident. So far, no comment from the Raiders.

https://www.tmz.com/2017/08/18/sean-smith-victim-hospitalized-in-critical-condition-broken-bones/

TMZ

2016-09-22 14:09:00

2016

9.0

22

UK Sports Staff

Jiangsu Suning Supporters Filmed Viciously Beating Shanghai Shenhua Fan

Jiangsu Suning supporters have been filmed viciously beating a Shanghai Shenhua fan, in footage that provides a glimpse into hooliganism in China. Jiangsu beat Shenhua 1-0 in the Chinese Cup on Wednesday, with the game being played at the Nanjing Olympic Sports Centre in Jiangsu Province. After the match, a clip emerged of home fans kicking and punching a lone Shenhua supporter, while also pelting him with eggs, bottles and rubbish. While the Shenhua supporter curls up in a protective ball on the ground, one Jiangsu fan can be seen calling for an end to the beating. With the atmosphere still extremely aggressive, the shaken Shenhua fan then makes his escape. Chinese football fans have been quick to condemn the attack on social media, with the video being widely circulated online. The South China Morning Post reports that the assault took place before kick off, and that the man was forced to go to hospital in the aftermath of the attack. The Chinese authorities are reportedly investigating, with the police aware of the incident. According to the Morning Post, Shenhua have also complained about offensive banners displayed by Jiangsu fans during the match.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z4adb8/jiangsu-suning-supporters-filmed-viciously-beating-shanghai-shenhua-fan

Sports

Vice

2017-08-31 00:00:00

2017

8.0

31

Princess Diana Death Anniversary Commemorated in Grand UK Fashion

Princess Diana was clearly in the hearts and minds of Englanders Wednesday as they marked the 20th anniversary of her death ... and if anyone forgot there were plenty of visuals to jog their memories. Kensington Palace -- where Diana lived -- was festooned with banners, posters and flowers commemorating her death. Diana died when she was only 36. Her children, Princes William and Harry, honored their mother by visiting the Kensington Palace White Garden -- which was planted in her honor.

https://www.tmz.com/2017/08/31/princess-diana-20th-anniversary-death/

TMZ

2016-06-29 20:00:00

2016

6.0

29

Ebony-Renee Baker

​This Tiny Endangered Frog Has Halted a Condo Development in Canada

Read: Weed Might Be Able to Block the Onset of Alzheimer's This post originally appeared on VICE Canada. Last week, Ottawa's Liberal government issued an emergency order to stop construction of a residential area in Quebec in order to save the western chorus frog, an endangered frog species. This frog has been stirring up a lot of shit in Quebec's construction industry. Also known as Pseudacris Triseriata in scientific terms, the western chorus frog is so small it can fit on your index finger, it chirps rather than croaks, and lives underground for three seasons of the year. But the problem is that this frog's ideal habitat consists of flat damp land, or in other words, prime real estate. So when Symbiocité, a large residential development, planned to build 1,000 units over western chorus frog habitat in La Prairie, Que., just south of Montreal, environmentalists rushed to the defense of their tiny froggy friends. After the government's emergency order last week, this development was cut by 171 units, or two square kilometers, to protect the species. In a statement last week, Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna said that the federal government made this decision based on scientific knowledge. "We firmly believe that economic development and the protection of biodiversity can, and must, go hand in hand," she said. This rare ban on construction was supported by the Species at Risk Act, making the western chorus frog the first species to be protected on private property, and one of the only species the federal government has protected under emergency circumstances. This is the not the first time that people have tried to protect the chorus frog. Since Symbiocité announced their plans for development in 2013, environmentalists have been fighting construction in court. Former environment ministers Leona Aglukkaq and Peter Kent declined previous requests for an emergency order, however McKenna revisited the issue back in December when she succeeded Kent's role. According to the federal government, 60 percent of western chorus frog habitat has been lost in La Prairie in the last quarter century and, at this rate, the tiny amphibian could be extinct by 2030. Follow Ebony-Renee Baker on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvezdv/this-tiny-endangered-frog-has-halted-condo-development-in-quebec

Tech by VICE

Vice

2018-09-18 00:00:00

2018

9.0

18

Visa, Mastercard reach $6.2 billion settlement over card-swipe fees

(Reuters) - Visa Inc, Mastercard Inc, and a number of U.S. banks on Tuesday agreed to pay $6.2 billion to settle a long-running lawsuit brought by merchants over the fees they pay when they accept card payments. Visa and Mastercard previously reached a $7.25 billion settlement with the merchants in the case, but that deal was thrown out by a federal appeals court in 2016 and the U.S. Supreme Court last year refused to revive it. The deal had been the largest all-cash U.S. antitrust settlement, although its value shrank to $5.7 billion after roughly 8,000 retailers opted out. The card issuers named in the class-action lawsuit include JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citigroup and Bank of America. The lawsuit, brought on behalf of about 12 million retailers and dating back more than a decade, accuses the credit card companies of violating federal antitrust laws by forcing merchants to pay swipe fees and prohibiting them from directing consumers toward other methods of payment. In rejecting the earlier settlement, which was opposed by retailers including Amazon.com Inc, Costco Wholesale Corp and Walmart Inc, a federal appeals court found that the accord was unfair because some retailers would receive little or no benefit. The card companies have already paid $5.3 billion and will now pay an additional $900 million. Mastercard will pay an additional $108 million from funds set aside in the second quarter, the company said reut.rs/2OA2V0i. Visa’s share represents around $4.1 billion, which the company expects to pay using funds previously deposited with the court, and from a litigation escrow it set up on June 28. The settlement must still be approved by a court. Reporting By Aparajita Saxena in Bengaluru and Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-creditcards/visa-mastercard-reach-6-2-billion-settlement-over-card-swipe-fees-idUSKCN1LY1PQ

Business News

Reuters

2018-03-14 00:00:00

2018

3.0

14

Kim Zolciak Calls Cops for Car Break-in, Says She's Got Thief on Camera

Kim Zolciak called the cops Wednesday morning after an alleged burglar broke into her daughter's car at their home ... TMZ has learned. Sources with Milton PD in Georgia tell TMZ ... police responded to a call from Kim at her house saying she believed one of their cars had been broken into. Sources close to the 'Real Housewife' tell us it was actually Brielle's car ... and Brielle's purse and wallet got jacked. Hey you loser we got your ass on camera 🎥 stealing our shit! You are a dumb fuck!! It's unclear if cops have a suspect yet, but Kim seems pretty confident her security cams should help bust the perp. She tweeted out, "Hey you loser we got your ass on camera stealing our sh*t! You are a dumb f**k!!" Story developing ...

https://www.tmz.com/2018/03/14/kim-zolciak-calls-cops-after-purse-stolen-from-car/

TMZ

2018-10-26 14:08:00

2018

10.0

26

Daisy Jones

Gerard Way’s Halloween Song “Baby You’re a Haunted House” Slaps

The Halloween song tradition goes way back, and it’s a particularly fun one. Unlike Christmas songs—which are often corny, contain sleigh bell effects and remind you of your dysfunctional family dynamic—Halloween songs are just like normal songs but “spooky.” And if you’re a spooky artist anyway, you’re given extra license to wallow in your natural state, which allows for all sorts of weird goth shit (think: Marilyn Manson “This is Halloween,” David Lynch “Crazy Clown Time,” Glass Candy “Halloween,” Tyler, the Creator “Transylvania,” all the best ones.) What I’m trying to say is, Gerard Way has released a song called “Baby You’re a Haunted House” alongside a grainy lyric video of some skeletons playing guitar, and it’s exactly what you’d imagine—meaning it slaps. Sitting somewhere between Weezer and Wavves, this song is the sort of thing you’d find soundtracking a 2000s teen movie that culminates in a dramatic high school Halloween dance where everyone kisses and all their problems are ultimately resolved. This will be the My Chemical Romance frontman's first solo track since releasing “Don’t Try” and “Pinkish” for Record Store Day 2016, which were originally meant to appear on his 2014 solo debut LP Hesitant Alien. Gerard is also co-producing a Netflix Series called The Umbrella Academy, based on his own comic series, which is due to star Mary J. Blige (!). Anyway, if you haven't already, press play above and get in the mood for jelly spiders and scream masks and whatever else. You can follow Daisy on Twitter. This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa9nmy/gerard-way-baby-youre-a-haunted-house-slaps

Noisey

Vice

2018-09-05 20:49:34

2018

9.0

5

Dara Lind

The New York Times’s Trump-bashing op-ed from a senior Trump official, explained

Apparently President Donald Trump is right: There really is a “deep state” of top government officials conspiring to thwart his will. And now, one of them is taking to the pages of the New York Times to brag about it. On Wednesday afternoon, the Times published an op-ed by an anonymous author, described as a “senior official in the Trump administration.” In a note accompanying the op-ed, the Times says that the author’s “identity is known to us,” but that the person’s “job would be jeopardized” if their name were published. The anonymous “senior official” claims to be part of an informal network to protect America from its president: “Many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.” The op-ed comes on the heels of advance reports about Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book Fear, which is said to describe several occasions of Trump staffers thwarting the president. At one point, then-chief economic adviser Gary Cohn reportedly whisked a tariff proposal off Trump’s desk before Trump could see and approve it. But while active White House officials have denied Woodward’s account, the Times op-ed claims that Trump’s inner circle trusts the president even less than anyone has guessed. Interestingly, the official response from the White House doesn’t claim the op-ed is fiction (as Trump has with Woodward’s book and other unflattering accounts). Instead, they attack the Times for lack of scruple in publishing the piece, and call the author a coward who simply resents what Trump has done for the country: The White House just issued an official response to the NYT pic.twitter.com/v5NMeJ9SYT Ironically, the White House’s conclusion — that it would be more honorable for the author to name themselves and resign than to keep their perch and whine anonymously — is also the position taken by many of the Trump critics sharing the op-ed and speculating about its author. Because even if a lot of people are willing to believe that the anonymous official is telling the truth, there are a lot of other people out there who aren’t — and another anonymous report about Trump’s unfitness for office doesn’t do anything to solve the problem it’s identified. We don’t know, and that’s the point. Countless Twitter gumshoes have come up with theories about who wrote the op-ed based on close scrutiny of its language: use of particular phrases like “lodestar” (Vice President Mike Pence!) and “don’t get me wrong” (Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen!) This is a bad idea. We don’t know how many rounds of edits Times editors went through with the op-ed author, and anyone who’s been edited can tell you that after even a moderate edit the prose doesn’t necessarily read “like you.” So without wild textual speculation, here’s what we got. The term “senior official” is pretty elastic; the term “Trump administration” is even more so. It could refer to someone in the White House or at any of the executive-branch agencies. In theory, this article could be written by a career government employee at a federal agency — which would hew much closer to Trump’s own theory of the “deep state,” and blunt the implication that Trump’s own hand-picked appointees think he is “half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless.” That said, the piece’s author sounds like a traditional mainstream Republican. They write in favor of “free minds, free markets and free people” (a vaguely libertarian slogan, but one that wouldn’t be out of place in the halls of the Heritage Foundation), and list “deregulation, historic tax reform, (and) a more robust military” as accomplishments to be proud of. If you were inclined to read tea leaves, you could note that the examples the author gives appear to focus on foreign policy and national security. If you were inclined to read tea leaves even more closely, you could note that this paragraph certainly implies that the author is at least privy to the mindset of Cabinet officials themselves: Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over. Did the Times actually get a Cabinet official (or a top aide to one) to write an anonymous op-ed trashing the president? Or did they allow a lower-level “senior” official to write a piece that casually implied membership in a “we” of Cabinet officials and those who consult with them? Only Times editors (and the author) know — which brings us to the next question. So basically: Times reporters now must try to unearth the identity of an author that our colleagues in Opinion have sworn to protect with anonymity? https://t.co/wj2nKmDHz9 As leaky as the Trump administration is, this op-ed is the strongest case anyone has seen that even the people in the top levels of the White House — people who believe that a “Trumpist” agenda would be good for America — don’t trust Donald Trump, the man, to carry that agenda out. It’s great gossip. Guessing who wrote it will probably be a DC parlor game for years, or at least until the Times’s Maggie Haberman (or the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey) dig up the name. But publications generally have a higher bar for publishing quotes from people who won’t put their names to their words than just “juicy gossip.” In particular, there has to be a good reason that the person refuses to be named — because a lot of people, up to and including the president himself, reflexively assume that any anonymous quote is made up maliciously. And while the White House is famously leaky — and a lot of people are leaking mean things about the president — few of them are willing to actually say these things in public. Lots of Trump officials quit, but none of them says they are quitting because the president is erratic and terrifying — even though many of them appear to believe he is. It can be hard to tell the staffers who are saying bad things about Trump because they believe them from the staffers who are doing so because they want to signal to reporters that they know it’s considered impolite at best to work for this president. Meanwhile, voters who believe that Trump is a brilliant strategist who knows exactly how to make America great again are free to disregard any of the anonymous quotes. In this case, it seems fairly obvious that the person who wrote the op-ed would be fired by the president if their identity were revealed. On the other hand, if the person who wrote the op-ed were willing to lose their job to tell the public the truth about Trump’s unreliability, it would make their case much more notable. The thesis of the op-ed is that America is running on a “two-track presidency” — there’s the track on which the government actually runs, independently of the president, and then there’s the track on which the president complains about it as if he’s watching his own government on TV. The op-ed author points to anti-Russian sanctions as an example of this. And it’s true that for all Trump’s rage-tweeting about (for example) the Department of Justice, he doesn’t appear to be doing anything to prevent federal attorneys from (for example) continuing to prosecute Republican members of Congress. But there are a couple of problems with the idea of the “two-track” presidency. One of them is that the line between “what Trump believes” and “what conservatives believe” is, frankly, a lot clearer to elite conservatives than it is to elite liberals. A lot of Trump critics are suspicious of the deregulatory agenda the Times’s op-ed author crows about because they worry about the rapacity of corrupt business owners. A lot of them are skeptical of a more muscular military because they don’t want a weapon that can be used by a president who thinks that “kill more people” is a preferred substitute for strategy. The op-ed author doesn’t mention immigration, but that is one area where Trump’s own desires are being put into policy on a frequent basis — it took eight months and multiple attempts to invent a travel ban that would satisfy Trump’s campaign promises, and at least one conservative in the White House reportedly resigned because she felt that refugee-policy decisions weren’t being made based on reality. And even when people are actively trying to protect America from Trump, that effort may not work. The “free market” op-ed author, whoever they are, hasn’t stopped Trump from enacting steel and aluminum tariffs with very little review, or engaging in an escalating trade war with China — or from nearly scuttling NAFTA renegotiation talks by insulting Canada off-the-record during an interview. The “deep state” can try to hammer out an agreement with representatives of Kim Jong Un about denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, but they can’t stop the president from agreeing, behind closed doors, to Kim’s request to formally declare an end to the Korean War. The Times op-ed writer seems convinced that they are doing more good by staying than they would by telling the truth, with name attached, and leaving. But that doesn’t mean that every reader, even without knowing who the author is, has to agree.

https://www.vox.com/2018/9/5/17824538/new-york-times-who-is-senior-official-trump-op-ed

Vox

2018-03-30 11:53:59

2018

3.0

30

Julia Belluz

Lead is linked to heart deaths in adults

The ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, is a reminder that lead exposure remains a toxic, irreversible threat to children’s brains, even in otherwise wealthy countries. After the city switched to a new water supply to cut costs, thousands of children suffered from lead exposure and the mayor declared a state of emergency in 2015 over the disaster. New research published March 12 in The Lancet suggests the water crisis likely harmed adults too — in particular, their hearts. The study estimated that more than 400,000 — or 18 percent — of all deaths in the US every year can be linked to lead exposure from all sources. Some 250,000 of those deaths are from cardiovascular disease, while 185,000 were related to coronary artery disease. That’s about 10 times more than the current estimates of lead-related deaths — and it suggests, lead study author Bruce Lanphear of Simon Fraser University, said, “Lead exposure appears to be a major but largely ignored risk factor for cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular disease — especially coronary heart disease.” “This is huge,” said Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician in Flint whose research helped expose the water crisis there. “It’s time our policies and practices caught up with the science, and we truly invested in lead elimination not only for our children today but also for decades to come.” The participants in the study, who were adults in the late 1980s, were exposed to lead through sources like paint, gasoline, water, or soil, potentially starting in childhood and lasting throughout their lives. And there was a strong association between people with higher blood levels of lead and a higher risk of death, especially from cardiovascular complications. While smoking, a lack of exercise, and an unhealthy diet are certainly important contributors to cardiovascular disease, health researchers are now warning that lead exposure needs to be considered too. “These findings throw one important risk factor into the mix [for cardiovascular problems], which has largely been overlooked until now,” said Philip J. Landrigan, dean of global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who wrote the study’s related commentary. Lead is a naturally occurring heavy metal found in mineral deposits in the Earth’s crust. It’s also a poisonous substance for humans, accumulating in our teeth and bones. At higher levels, lead can register in blood tests. People are typically exposed to lead by breathing in lead-contaminated dust, drinking water from leaded pipes, or eating from cans that have been soldered with lead. For children, there are other risks: eating soil, or paint chips, for example. “Children’s innate curiosity and their age-appropriate hand-to-mouth behavior result in their mouthing and swallowing lead-containing or lead-coated objects,” the World Health Organization summed up. Inside the body, lead can slip into human cells easily and wreak havoc. In children, particularly under the age of 10 or babies in the womb, the metal can pass through the blood-brain barrier and kill off brain cells. Children absorb up to five times as much lead as adults, and with their smaller bodies and developing nervous systems, it doesn’t take much to sicken them. “That is why children who have been exposed to lead in early life have loss of IQ or shortening of attention span or other cognitive or mental health problems,” Landrigan explained. There’s also no real cure for lead poisoning. Chelation therapy can reduce the amount of lead circulating in the bloodstream — but this hasn’t been proven to improve children’s intellectual abilities or behaviors after lead damage has been done. Since the 1970s, lead exposure has been declining worldwide after the metal was eliminated from paint and gasoline in the wake of research exposing its health effects. Researchers have also known that lead can enter blood vessels in both adults and children, harming the endothelial cells that line the vessels. This process hardens arteries and causes plaque to form in blood vessels, increasing blood pressure and the risk of heart disease and stroke. Meanwhile, lead can damage kidneys, which play an important role in regulating blood pressure — also increasing a person’s risk of heart disease and stroke, Landrigran explained. This is why the Environmental Protection Agency, the World Health Organization, and the National Toxicology Program out of the National Institutes of Health have all determined that high levels of lead exposure increase the risk of high blood pressure and coronary heart disease, Lanphear said. But lead’s potential harms to adults and their hearts have gotten relatively little attention among the public and policymakers. Lanphear and his co-authors hope to change that. For the study, the researchers gathered data on a nationally representative sample of 14,000 adults who were enrolled in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 1988 and 1994, and followed up until December 31, 2011. The study participants had undergone a slew of medical tests, including quantifying the lead levels in their blood. Their health data was also linked up with records about their cause of death, when relevant. Lead in the blood is typically measured in µg/dL (micrograms per deciliter) or in parts per billion. Researchers used to think 5 µg/dL — or 50 parts per billion, about the same concentration as 100 tablespoons in an Olympic swimming pool — was a safe blood lead level. But agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recently determined there’s actually no known safe blood concentration for children. Lanphear and his colleagues believe the same may be true for adults. In the study, they found a strong correlation between lead in the blood and a higher risk of death from cardiovascular complications: Comparing the group with the lowest level of lead exposure (1 µg/dL or 10 parts per billion) to the group with the highest (6.7 µg/dL or 67 parts per billion), the researchers found a 70 percent increase in cardiovascular disease mortality risk and a doubling of mortality from coronary heart disease. This indicates that more lead exposure may lead to more heart trouble, and also that there is no safe threshold for lead exposure. Even after the researchers controlled for potential confounding factors — including age, sex, ethnic origin, where people lived, smoking status, diabetes, alcohol intake, and even household income — the association held. Still, this was an observational study, which can only tell us about relationships between phenomena, and not whether one caused the other. And at least one important potential confounding factor was overlooked, said Stephen Lim, director of science at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which measures health effects of lead exposure on blood pressure and cardiovascular disease globally. Lead is correlated with other known risk factors for cardiovascular disease — most importantly, that lead exposure tends to be higher in lower-income communities like Flint, Lim said. “[They] did not control for community-level socioeconomic factors, and as a result, the magnitude of the effect found in the study may be confounded by the relationship of higher lead exposure in lower socioeconomic communities.” And it’s possible this might have exaggerated the magnitude of lead’s effects on heart health. “That lead increases the risk of cardiovascular disease is not surprising, [but] what is surprising is the magnitude of the effect,” Lim said. “Today, lead exposure is much lower because of regulations banning the use of lead in petrol, paints, and other consumer products, so the number of deaths from lead exposure will be lower in younger generations,” Lanphear said. Landrigan suggested that blood lead testing should become the norm in adult medicine the way pediatricians now often screen children for lead exposure. Flint’s Hanna-Attisha said the study should be further fuel for policymakers working to eliminate lead exposures from our environment. “We spend billions each year treating cardiovascular disease — medications, hospitalizations, procedures — yet with lead elimination, we know how to prevent a portion of this health burden, not even considering preventing all the other evils of lead exposure,” she said. There are many ways the EPA and federal regulators can continue to reduce people’s lead exposure, Lanphear said, by enforcing stricter standards on allowable levels of lead in the air, water, dust, and soil. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has declared a “war on lead” in drinking water in the wake of the Flint water crisis, but the agency has dragged its feet on new regulations for lead in paint. “Ongoing sources... need to be phased out, remediated, or banned,” Lanphear said, adding that manufacturers should further reduce lead levels in foods, drinks, and cosmetics. With limited treatments available for lead, he emphasized, “the ideal solution is prevention.”

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/15/17107924/lead-health-adults-heart-problems

Vox

2017-07-12 00:00:00

2017

7.0

12

Alexa Liautaud

Brazil’s “Lula” gets 9.5 years in prison but is still a favorite to be president

Brazil’s beloved ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — once dubbed “the most popular politician on Earth” by Barack Obama — was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in prison Wednesday on corruption and money laundering charges, throwing a wrench in his 2018 bid for Brazil’s presidency. In the first of his five corruption trials, Lula, who served as president from 2003 to 2011, was found guilty of accepting thousands of dollars in bribes from an engineering firm that paid for the former president’s refurbished apartment in exchange for lucrative contracts with state-owned oil giant Petrobras. His trial is among the hundreds of graft cases that comprise the enormous corruption scandal known as Operation Car Wash that has engulfed the highest echelons of Brazilian politics for the better part of three years. Current President Michel Temer and former house speaker Eduardo Cunha are also among the hundreds of political and business elites embroiled in the controversy. But being swarmed by corruption allegations for more than a year hasn’t affected Lula’s popularity. Despite his many scandals, he remains one of Brazil’s most popular politicians and is among the favorites to win the presidency in 2018. A poll published by Brazilian polling company Datafolha on June 26 showed that regardless of who Lula was put up against, he’d receive about 30 percent of the first-round vote — a healthy lead over his opponents. Another poll commissioned by pollster MDA showed that Lula would crush Temer in a head-to-head, winning 42.9 percent of the vote to Temer’s 19 percent. (Temer has been a historically unpopular president from the start, with his approval rating sinking to a mere 9 percent in April.) Lula is credited with reviving Brazil’s economy during his presidency and creating popular social welfare programs like the “Bolsa Familia” cash-grant program for families and aid to farmers. Such programs lifted many of the country’s marginalized populations out of poverty and earned Lula an enduring and loyal base, said Dr. Riordan Roett, director of the Latin American Studies program at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Brazil’s beloved ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — once dubbed “the most popular politician on Earth” by Barack Obama — was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in prison Wednesday on corruption and money laundering charges, throwing a wrench in his 2018 bid for Brazil’s presidency. In the first of his five corruption trials, Lula, who served as president from 2003 to 2011, was found guilty of accepting thousands of dollars in bribes from an engineering firm that paid for the former president’s refurbished apartment in exchange for lucrative contracts with state-owned oil giant Petrobras. His trial is among the hundreds of graft cases that comprise the enormous corruption scandal known as Operation Car Wash that has engulfed the highest echelons of Brazilian politics for the better part of three years. Current President Michel Temer and former house speaker Eduardo Cunha are also among the hundreds of political and business elites embroiled in the controversy. But being swarmed by corruption allegations for more than a year hasn’t affected Lula’s popularity. Despite his many scandals, he remains one of Brazil’s most popular politicians and is among the favorites to win the presidency in 2018. A poll published by Brazilian polling company Datafolha on June 26 showed that regardless of who Lula was put up against, he’d receive about 30 percent of the first-round vote — a healthy lead over his opponents. Another poll commissioned by pollster MDA showed that Lula would crush Temer in a head-to-head, winning 42.9 percent of the vote to Temer’s 19 percent. (Temer has been a historically unpopular president from the start, with his approval rating sinking to a mere 9 percent in April.) Lula is credited with reviving Brazil’s economy during his presidency and creating popular social welfare programs like the “Bolsa Familia” cash-grant program for families and aid to farmers. Such programs lifted many of the country’s marginalized populations out of poverty and earned Lula an enduring and loyal base, said Dr. Riordan Roett, director of the Latin American Studies program at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “He is still very popular because there is still a class and race divide in Brazil,” Roett said. “There’s a sense that if Lula comes back, magically he’ll be able to put back into place the programs.” Roett said that if Lula’s appeal of his conviction is denied and he is barred from seeking office, public protests and demonstrations will likely ensue, plunging Brazil deeper into its political and economic spiral.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/mb9kkb/brazils-lula-gets-9-5-years-in-prison-but-is-still-a-favorite-to-be-president

Vice News

2017-02-02 17:08:00

2017

2.0

2

River Donaghey

Apparently Trump's SCOTUS Pick Ran a 'Fascism Forever' Club in High School

Update February 3, 2017: Steve Ochs, a former history teacher at Georgetown Preparatory School, told America magazine that the club didn't actually exist and that students could make up fictitious clubs for the yearbook as "inside jokes."  Judge Neil Gorsuch, Trump's pick to fill Antonin Scalia's vacant Supreme Court spot, apparently started a student organization called the "Fascism Forever Club" while a high schooler at the DC-area Georgetown Preparatory School in the 1980s, the Daily Mail reports. That's not to say that Gorsuch—a lifelong conservative and the youngest SCOTUS nominee since Clarence Thomas—was actually flying the fascist flag as a freshman. The whole thing was mostly just a way to troll his left-leaning teachers. But still. "In political circles, our tireless President Gorsuch's 'Fascism Forever Club' happily jerked its knees against the increasingly 'left-wing' tendencies of the faculty," the Georgetown Prep yearbook states. The yearbook also includes a photo of a young Gorsuch lounging with a copy of William F. Buckley's Up from Liberalism. Gorsuch's nomination has already come under fire from Senate Democrats, who have threatened to filibuster the pick. Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have spoken out against Gorsuch, with Warren blaming his nomination on "far-right activist groups that were financed by big business." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called the conservative judge's beliefs "well outside the mainstream of American legal thought." "[Trump's] administration, at least at its outset, seems to have less respect for the rule of law than any in recent memory, and is challenging the Constitution in unprecedented fashion," New York senator Chuck Schumer said Wednesday. "There's a special burden on this nominee to be an independent jurist."

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/aejjg5/apparently-trumps-scotus-pick-ran-a-fascism-forever-club-in-high-school-vgtrn

The VICE Guide to Right Now

Vice

2017-09-08 21:20:23

2017

9.0

8

Recode Staff

Full transcript: Self-driving car engineer Chris Urmson on Recode Decode

Chris Urmson, the CEO of Aurora and former CTO of self-driving cars at Google, stopped by the Recode podcast studio to talk with Kara Swisher about the future of autonomous cars. You can read some of the highlights here, or listen to the entire interview in the audio player below. We’ve also provided a lightly edited complete transcript of their conversation. If you like this, be sure to subscribe to Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Kara Swisher: Recode Radio presents Recode Decode, coming to you from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Hi, I’m Kara Swisher, executive editor of Recode. You may know me as the person who thinks Google should buy Uber and rename it Guber, but in my spare time I talk tech and you’re listening to Recode Decode, a podcast about tech and media’s key players, big ideas and how they’re changing the world we live in. You can find more episodes of Recode Decode on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Play music or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Or just visit recode.net/podcasts for more. Today in the red chair is Chris Urmson, the CEO of Aurora. Chris was previously the CTO of self-driving cars at Google, and he co-founded Aurora last year along with Sterling Anderson and Drew Bagnell who ran their own self-driving projects at Tesla and Uber. Chris, welcome to the show. Chris Urmson: Thanks for having me here. No problem. I’m so excited to talk about something good about cars, not Uber ... I was joking with you then. I’m so tired of these people. In any case, I’m not tired of you, you’re fantastic. So just by way of background, Chris and I met when ... explain, you showed me the first really autonomous car essentially that Google had in a parking lot near Google. Yeah, I think we had you out in one of the Priuses way back in the early days. Well, the early days, right. That was when they were ... those were outfitted cars that we drove around the area, the Google campus area. That’s right. I think we’d go buy them off the dealership and then we put lasers and radars and cameras on them, add our software to them and go and test them out on the roads. Right exactly. But after that, it was the little clown car. Remember we did the clown car thing and I tried to have it run you over but it wouldn’t do it. No, it was good. You know, I think about the koala car rather than clown car, but ... Okay, what do we call it? Koala car. Koala car. All right, okay, I can call it clown car, but explain that. We showed it off at the Code Conference a couple years ago for the first time. But I came out there and Liz Gannes and I got in it. Explain that car, because that was different from the others we had done. Yeah, so that was a car that we built from the ground up at Google, and the goal behind it was one, to learn what it meant to integrate the software and sensors into a car, and then the other was to have the first shot at having a car that was designed to be a self-driving car. And you know, what do you want that vehicle to look like so it can be a good avatar for the technology in the community and what experience do you want people to have in it. What was fascinating was just how much extra space there was and how ... Right. There’s no wheel, no driving wheel, no pedals, no nothing, right? Really just a screen. That’s right. You just tell it where you want to go and it takes you there. So you get to think differently about the interior of the car, you have to think differently about what people want to do in the car and that was part of the exercise in developing the vehicle. Yeah, we’ll get more into that concept at the time, but it was really cool. It was sort of like being in a Disney ride or something like that. That’s what it felt like because it was small and adorable and stuff like that. Yeah that’s the kind of thing we were shooting for, right? We wanted your experience in the first time you’re in a truly self-driving car to be not scary, to be friendly, to be fun. Right. But you kept it in a parking lot, correct? Because you were testing it, you didn’t want it out in the wild, essentially. It wasn’t ready yet for us to let it loose on the roads. Right, right. All right, we’ll talk about that more going forward, but let’s go to your background. Now, talk about ... we’re going to get to what Aurora is, but how did you get into self-driving cars? You were there super early and now everyone seems to be a self-driving car engineer. Yeah. I guess I started working on robots in ’98 when I went to Carnegie Mellon to do my PhD. Did you do that before when you were in high school? Were you a big robotics person? No. I built little robot things out of Lego and had fun with that and at some point while I was doing my undergraduate degree I saw a poster for this robot crawling out of a volcano and I said, “That looks really cool. That would be fun to go do.” You wanted to build a robot crawling out of a volcano? Or just the concept. Just the idea that you could ... there’s something really appealing about technology that you can touch. With robots, everyone’s seen them in the movies — whether it’s R2D2 and C3PO or what have you — but they don’t really exist. And so the chance to go and work on that, and this was a place that was doing it that seemed really exciting. I went there and I spent a number of years working on NASA projects. Just before the grand challenge, which were these big robot races out in the desert, I was part of a project that was testing a robot down in the Atacama Desert in Chile. So we had this little four-wheeled robot, it was called Hyperion. It was really ... it was a cute robot and it would move around at 15 cm a second to 30 cm a second which is like a slow walk to a slightly less slow walk kind of speed. And we’re out in the middle of the desert testing this thing and there’s a dozen engineers and most of the time it didn’t work. We were experimenting, playing with it and fixing it, and that was when this DARPA challenge got announced. The idea was to build a robot that could drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas across the desert. Which isn’t very hard because it’s straight, right? The desert, it’s ... Well, it was pretty hard. No, so no, I get that, but they did a challenge that was relative to something that was manageable, correct? Well, they called it a grand challenge ... I know it’s hard, you smart people, but you know what I’m talking about. Well honestly at the time it wasn’t obvious that it was doable, right? Nobody had done it before and in fact, people thought that it was not solvable, at least in the year and a half or year or whatever it was that we had. And it turns out they were right. We had a bunch of graduate students and undergraduates and we took a Humvee and tore it apart and put lasers and radars and stuff on it. So robot car, not a robot driving a car. A robot car. Right, right, okay. Because that’s creepy, a robot driving a car. It could be pretty cute. Have you seen the little Asimo robots? No I’m thinking Terminator, but go ahead. Yeah, that would be creepy, yeah. So we got this thing, we got it out to the desert, we tested it a bunch. Turns out 10 days before the race we rolled over during testing so that was disappointing. Wow, did you roll it over? Or did it roll itself over? It rolled itself over. This was ... we wanted to do a 150-mile test and we were going to do it at 30 mph and take five hours. We said, “Well, why don’t we do it at 50 mph because that would take three hours. That seems better than taking five hours." That was a bad decision. Too fast. Yeah, a little too fast. It ended up getting off the road and rolling. We got it put back together, we took it to the competition. It was kind of like robot Woodstock, right? There was all kinds of different things there, from something inspired by centipedes to little ATVs to our big Humvee and everything in between. Most of them didn’t work that well, ours ended up working the best. We got it out to the race course, set off in the morning and it was just magnificent, right? We’d been working on this for a year and a half and this was kind of the first time we let it loose in the desert. Was someone in the car? No. It was completely by itself. Somebody from the government was chasing it in a pickup truck and they had just one button that could basically kill. Blow it up? No, no ... There was some rumor that they had people that were out in case one of them went crazy, but no, they just had a little remote e-stop for it. And so this thing, you know, we’re stood off to the side and off it goes charging into the desert and it had this giant fin on the top for no real good reason. It looked cool and that was all you could see as it went into the sagebrush. So it charges off into the desert and that was all we knew until a little later in the day, seven and a half miles into the 150-mile course, basically it burst into flames. Oh, all right. That’s an issue. It got off the side of the road and high-centered. It was trying really hard to move forward, it didn’t realize it was stuck so it spun the wheels harder and harder and the tires melted and big clouds of smoke. Oh. Did anybody win? No, not that year. We went the furthest. We drove through, I don’t know, three fence posts on the way. The guys who went behind us had a much smaller vehicle and so it was really good for them that we took the fence posts out because they were riding our tire tracks and would’ve driven right into the fence posts and probably not broken them. So this was the end of the first challenge. This is how great inventions are made. Right. A lot failure, right? So have you been interested in this as a kid? Or were you just going to go into regular computing? I didn’t know what I wanted to do. When I went to college, up until the last minute I was debating between going into medicine and engineering. At some point, I realized I really didn’t like the sight of blood and that seemed kind of gross. And then I was like, “Hm, maybe I should do engineering.” And you like the sight of metals, so you’re fine with that. It’s okay with metal, it’s not ... But have you thought about ... robotics was not ... just a regular computing career, correct? Engineering. Yeah, I went into computer engineering. It seemed like the thing to do. At the time, Nortel Networks was a big thing in Canada and it was hiring and it seemed like that could be fun. And then, like I said, this poster just caught my attention and I was like, “That’s cool.” So a lot of people do start in robotics. They do start before they’re doing this. What moved you into cars, because you did this car because you did this — it was just that DARPA had this challenge — that entranced you. It just seemed really cool. Right? The idea that you could actually have a robot do something meaningful. There had been ... robotics had made it into manufacturing and obviously there were space exploration robots, but there wasn’t really robots in people’s everyday life and there wasn’t a way they could have an impact. I wouldn’t claim that at the time could see the future and see what’s transpiring now in the industry, but at the time it was very much, this is a way to help the military, right, and get young men and women out of harm’s way, particularly moving supplies to the front line, which is a big part of their job. Yeah, so that’s what you were thinking. Had you thought about other robotic uses in the home, of the actual servants or those kind of things, or not? Driving got you because why? Because it, again, it just poignantly seemed cool and that’s really all the backstory right there. Having spent time walking very slowly behind a robot in the desert in Chile, the idea that you could have a robot instead of moving at walking speed, move faster than I could run and drive through a desert, that just was mesmerizing. This was a nascent area of doing this, of doing automated cars, essentially. Although in science fiction it’s certainly, that’s all there is. That’s how people have imagined it and things like that. How did you stay in the area? So you started doing it at Carnegie Mellon and then what? Yeah. So there was that first challenge where no one won. The second challenge happened and a number of vehicles actually finished and this was a year later. There was a third challenge, which this time was at an air base and it was driving on roads and it was much closer to what we’re doing today. No pedestrians, no cyclists, no traffic lights, but the basics of it and that was in 2007. That was the last of the DARPA challenges. It was exciting and fun, that one, the team I was tech for ended up winning. And what did you do in that one, in the third one? So the third one, it was 60 miles driving around on roads. 60 mph. No, 60 miles of distance. It ended up ... it was probably between 30 and 40 mph, that sort of thing. It had to deal with other traffic. So the ones across the desert, they made sure that nothing was moving near the vehicles. This last one, the urban challenge, they had stunt drivers out there bringing traffic into it and following the vehicles around and the vehicles themselves had to interact with one another, so if two of them came to a four-way intersection with stop signs, they had to stop and take turns and if you squinted, you could kind of see the future, right? This was very cool. And then DARPA basically said ... Any big mishaps during ... No huge mishaps, there was some entertaining things. One of the vehicles literally drove into a building. Oh fun. Yeah. It was a big truck, it was one of these big military trucks and it drove into the building. And they had given you the trucks they wanted you to ... No, everybody got to bring their own. There was another one where a car didn’t see one of these foldover gates and drove into it and basically the gate decapitated these Velodyne lasers, you know the spinning Kentucky Fried Chicken things. Right, it just drove into it and off the things flew. Gone it went, which makes them get around, essentially. Yeah, that was kind of the end of that for them. Then the cars from Cornell and MIT were in the competition. They both did incredibly well but they had the first robot-robot crash on course. So, that was ... Did they crash into each other? One wouldn’t give way for the other? They were both moving at about three miles per hour and it was kind of like a super-slow-speed train wreck. So they were like, “Nooooooo.” “Nooooo.” It was very Austin Powers. Yeah. But then, you know, three, five, six vehicles finished that challenge. So when you were doing these ... These are all fun. I mean, I’ve seen, I’ve been to some of these events: Is it how things get created? Is these challenges and people try to do the contest ... there’s bunches of space contests, all kind of different things. So you were doing this at Carnegie Mellon, how did you get to Google? This was what year you were doing these? So this wound up in 2007, basically 10 years ago almost, yeah. It was quite early. I spent a couple years still at the university. I worked with Caterpillar and there we were moving, automating these big house-sized dump trucks, which was ... imagine 400 tons with nobody in it moving 40 mph. Yeah, I would imagine that would be scary. Cool and scary, but yeah. So spent some time on that and then I ... Sebastian Thrun and I had been talking about doing something together. We had been competing against one another in the challenges and thought it would be great to work together and we had a lot of respect for one another. The teams we had led finished one and two. He was where? He was at Stanford at the time. And then he had just sold View Tool to Google, which is what became Street View over time. So he was now mostly at Google and partly at Stanford. So we were talking about starting something, and at some point it came out that the right thing to do was actually just do it at Google. So in the beginning of 2009, I went on leave for my faculty position at Carnegie Mellon and moved my family, we moved out here. My wife was incredibly understanding; we had all our network of friends and relationships in Pittsburgh and things were feeling pretty good. It was this risk to move out to crazy California where everyone wears Birkenstocks and, you know, whatever. In retrospect, best decision we ever made. Sure. So you came ... and what was the promise? Did you meet with ... who was most interested, Larry or Sergey? Both of them have been long interested in that. Yeah. I think both of them have been long interested in it. When I came out, I chatted with Sebastian, chatted with some of the early team members and then we decided, “Yeah, let’s do this.” But where does the impetus come at Google, from the top? They wanted to do ... what was the idea at the beginning? So the idea at the very beginning was to find out if this could actually be done and it really did come from the top. I credit Larry and Sergey for having the vision to go and try this before anyone else, right? In 2009. When we started talking about this 2010, it was kind of a joke, right? “Google’s doing self-driving cars, that’s such ...” Effectively, “Why are they wasting money on this? That’s never going to work.” But they saw this back in 2009, right? And they said it really came from a place of they have amazing technology, they have an incredible ability to harness engineering talent, and transportation is such an important problem to work on. They had been working on a lot of different things, Fiber, all kinds of different schemes and stuff like that. They had some barge in San Francisco Bay that they were working on. This is an area of great interest to them, for some reason, I’m not sure why particularly. But they were the first, they were the first of the companies that set off the interest in it. At Carnegie Mellon, you were doing it mostly theoretically, correct? That the idea that who would ... except for Caterpillar, I’m thinking, or the military. Yeah, the military, Caterpillar, we had sponsorship from General Motors. They had set up a research lab. Volkswagen had a lab out here with Stanford. So but it was still in the, “Hey, this is 20 to 30 years out” kind of mindset, not the committed, concentrated effort that we saw at Google. So what were you trying to do there initially at Google when you were starting? So the goal initially was just to show, prove to ourselves that this could actually become a technology that works. So we had basically two milestones. One was to drive 100,000 miles on public roads, which was ten times more than anyone had done before. And then the other was to drive a 1,000 miles of really interesting roads. What’s an interesting road? So driving down the Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco effectively and LA, or driving all the Bay bridges and dealing with all of the interchanges. And if you remember when 92 and 680 was all dug up, so we’re driving through that at the time, or driving through the Presidio where there’s these windy roads and in fact, this one place where there’s a road that’s only one lane wide but traffic goes both directions on it. We drove Lombard Street. Oh, the crookedest street in the world. And those goals were because just to show ... to have hype around it or have proof that you could do these things? The two goals were slightly different. The 100,000 miles goal was really to kind of get statistical data, right. To say, we’re not just kind of driving anything once. This is an interesting data set we can learn something from. Right, to teach the cars, that’s what you’re trying to do, presumably. To teach and understand, teach the engineering team, too. It wasn’t just data gathering, it was like, “Oh I never really thought about how retro-reflective signs are or how difficult it is to understand the behavior of an articulated truck.” And then the 1,000 miles ... But humans do by themselves, for the most part, successfully. Yeah. It’s very humbling as somebody working in this space, how easy some of these tasks are for people to do and how hard they are to actually get software and technology to solve. So you were doing that there and you created both cars that were outfitted? Like those Priuses you talked about and then the car itself, the koala car. Thank you. No problem, it looks like a clown. But talk about why the different efforts, because one is semi-autonomous, correct? No, they were all on the path to being fully automated. Yeah. Why go in those two directions at Google at the time? Which everyone followed, really. First, it was expedient. So when we started with the Priuses we were trying to understand whether this was even interesting or viable and so we wanted to get on the road as quickly as we could, safely of course but quickly. So, that meant using a vehicle. We then moved to the Lexus and it was the same thing, we were augmenting the Lexuses with our sensors and getting them out on the road, but again it was towards fully self-driving vehicles. When we started the koala car, that was to now starting thinking more about what this looks like as a product. So we’ve spent a lot of time learning about the technology and we’re getting closer to having it ready to deploy. What’s the first vehicle we’d like where somebody might see it on the road with nobody behind the wheel? How do we, as we start to think about partnerships with car companies, how do we become a better educated partner so that as we work with them and they say something about the flux capacitor, we have some inclination about what a flux capacitor is, right? Yeah. You’re making a reference from a movie. Anyway when we get back with Chris Urmson, we’re going to talk more about what are the challenges they faced at Google and why he started his startup Aurora. [ad] We’re here with Chris Urmson, who was the first CTO of the Google car effort and now has his own self-driving car startup, Aurora. So you were at Google doing these things trying essentially to proof of concept, would that be the right way to put it? Or really wanted to make products. You, I know, wanted to make a car on the road, correct? Yeah. The company really wants to make a product. I believe that deeply. There’s very little value in working on technology if you don’t get it out there and get it helping people. Right. What was the path to do that? Because everyone suddenly jumped in from Apple, Tesla, everybody else was jumping in, Uber and others. Talk about that environment when suddenly everybody gets excited about something that you were one of the few companies doing. Yeah, I think on the one hand, you’d like to be able to be the one company doing this and pushing it forward, and on the other, it’s awesome. Because you know a — what is it? — a rising sea floats all boats. And so if you think about the social values of the increased safety on the road, the better access to mobility for people, we want to see this happen, right? I think it’s really important for society, and so as more companies get involved, there’s a broader ecosystem, there’s more likelihood that one of them succeeds. So I think that’s fantastic, right? That’s very desirable. Right, and so everybody rushed in, including creating companies. Why did you leave Google? What was the ... what happened? So at the end of the day, I just ... I wasn’t having as much fun, right? And we had a tremendous team and it’s an amazing company. I owed it to the team and I owed it to the company that I was at my best. It just didn’t seem like that was where I was, and you know they had tremendous leaders there, Dmitri Dolgov is a very close friend of mine and he’s just fantastic. He’s stepped up and leading the technology development; with John coming in they have an experienced automotive person there. It seemed like a good time to step aside, and honestly, when I left, I didn’t know what I was going to do. It wasn’t like, “I’m out of here. I’m going to go make a self-driving car company.” It was ... What did you want to do different that you couldn’t do with the giant sums of money Google throws at people at all times of day? I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. I talked to a couple companies, actually. This is hard to say, I was talking to a couple of different companies that were working on flying cars. Flying cars, okay. Blows my mind that I can say that today. All owned by Larry Page, anyway, go ahead. I know he has one of them. They were in fact ... I talked to a number of car companies. I talked to ... I was just genuinely, “Hey, I’ve spent the last decade-plus working on this.” “I know a thing or two about self-driving cars,” just when everybody is suddenly very interested in it. Well, that was part of ... you know like certainly people ... it was very flattering, right? When I left there was a lot of interest in talking to me about it, but I was not convinced that this was the next thing I should be doing, right? It was an amazing ride at Google and it was time to like, “Okay, let’s see what else is out there.” Were you worried they weren’t going to make a car, like actually produce a car, or ... No, I don’t think that’s necessarily the right path, for Google to make a car. I think Google is very good at the technology side of this, the self-driving technology ... So as they did in phones. They didn’t make the phones, they made .... Right, well, that was recently. But no, I think they were very good at the self-driving technology, and there’s people who are very good at making cars and it seems clear that the right path is to marry those up or marry a few of them together. From what I can tell from the outside at this point, it seems like they’re making progress for that. Seems like Fiat Chrysler and them are working well together. I read something in the press about Honda potentially or not, it’s hard to say. Let’s talk a little — quickly, before we talk about your startup — about the big car companies in this, very slow to it initially but now GM bought up Cruise, everybody’s trying to get a piece of it. Talk about their roles, because they’re the obvious ... At one point I had one car person saying, “Oh it’s trivial to build a car.” I was like, “No, it’s not. No, it’s not.” Yeah, you’re shaking your head. And I was sort of ... that’s so arrogant of Silicon Valley. I mean, obviously the software is incredibly difficult, but car building is incredibly hard at the same time. And yet they’ve been pretty slow. Why is that, from your perspective? So I think it’s really important to understand the context, right? And I think the biggest thing that’s lacking — honestly, on both sides — is mutual respect. Because I think it’s very easy for Silicon Valley to look at the car companies and say, “Oh my goodness, they’re so slow.” “We’re going to disrupt them.” They’re going to disrupt them, right? And then it’s very easy for the car companies to say, “Oh my goodness, look at those Silicon Valley guys, they’re so seat-of-their-pants,” right? “How can they actually ever do anything big and complicated?” Obviously both of those statements are completely false. What you have when you look at the car companies, you have to realize they’ve been at this for 100 years, they work in this incredibly regulated industry and they kind of make a miracle happen like every two minutes. They basically put a car on the road that’s going to work for the next 15 years, that’s got explosions going off inside it, right, and it just works. You’re safe, right? If you get in a car crash, more likely than not ... Most cars you’re safe in, yeah. No, they’re very safe comparatively. Comparatively. Certainly in the U.S. right? You’re going to do pretty well. So there’s so much constraints on their ecosystem that they’ve developed management processes and they’ve developed business processes that allow them to execute within those constraints. It takes two billion dollars to make a new car. If you could imagine, if to launch any web app you had to spend two billion dollars, the process that we put in place and the way we’d invest in them would be very different. And so my view is that, the key is to get ... find a way to have a trusting and respectful relationship on both sides, where because of all of those great processes they have in place to allow them to ship cars, they’re not particularly good at kind of innovative software development, right? Those processes are great for the engineering cycles they need, but they’re not really compatible with the top-flight Silicon Valley software engineers. So this is where we thought that Aurora could maybe fit, is that we do have people who understand — you know, not nearly with the depth that the folks in the automotive space have — but respect how complicated what they do is and at the same time we actually pretty deeply understand the complexity of developing the self-driving car systems and how to do that and how to motivate the team and how to build the team that needs to do that. So that’s the goal for Aurora, is to get self-driving cars on the road as quickly as possible and do that safely and thoughtfully and do it through partnership with the folks that can help us. Right, which is the carmakers. It’s carmakers, it’s a broader ecosystem than that. What meaning? Meaning that, transportation as a service — you know, whether it be Uber, Lyft or Didi, right? That’s going to be an important part of how this technology comes to market. The car company ... you have to have a car to have a self-driving car. There’s folks who actually ... so I think I understand a little bit about lasers, a little bit about radar, can probably contribute to the design of those, but I don’t really know how to make it so that it can submerge in a salt bath and drive on your car for the next 15 years. So there’s a whole collection of tier-one automotive suppliers who know how to do that part really well. And it would be silly for me to try and do that or for even our team even to do that. Right, but it requires the coordination of a lot of people and that I think is why it’s so difficult. Absolutely. What’s interesting is that carmakers themselves, though seen as slow, it’s sort of eating into their current business. I mean, every time they can ship a Ford 150 or whatever, the trucks and things like that, there’s that. Like who’s thinking of it at these car companies? They’re looking at companies like Uber, Didi and Lyft and they’re seeing that something is happening. Meaning nobody wants to drive. Well, not just nobody wants to drive, but there’s an immense amount of value — at least on paper being credited. And if you look at, say, the market cap of Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler, the U.S. big three, and you look at the market cap of Uber, Didi and Lyft, they’re basically the same. I think it may actually be ... And Tesla is all of them together or something like that. Well, I don’t know about all of them together, but it’s bigger than one or two of the U.S. guys. I think that the market cap of the ride-sharing companies is probably going to double in the next few years. Why is that, given that ... they sell millions of cars and make lots of money, this group doesn’t? I think that part of it is the opportunity to capture kind of the usage of the car in a way that they can’t do as a car company. So when you buy a car, you know you probably use it ... I don’t know if you own a car or not. Yeah, I do. You probably use it an hour, maybe two hours a day at most. If you’re in the ride-sharing business and you operate it effectively, you might be operating that car 16, 18 hours a day. And so you get much higher utilization so there’s much higher value you create out of that vehicle. So the carmakers, the danger they had ... they have been worried about is becoming the dumb pipes, essentially, the way the cable operators were. Yeah and often the metaphor they use is they don’t want to be the handset provider, actually. And part of that is because what they do is complicated and valuable and so they don’t want that to be devalued. So how do they stop being that way? Well, they’re trying. You see almost all of them at this point running a different set of experiments, whether it be Ford with the ride-sharing bicycles around town and Chariot, or General Motors with the Lyft investment and purchasing Cruise, or VW with the experiments they’re running as well. So they are trying to make the leap and they’re trying to be innovative, and I hope some of them succeed. I just think it’s going to be difficult for them given how they’ve operated historically. Right, so what do they have to do? Buy things or just ... move or what? So I believe they need to work with partners, right? I get that that’s kind of my thesis. So let’s move then to the tech companies that are working on it. Apple which seems to have pulled out somewhat, Google, Tesla, Uber, all of them. What’s their problem? What challenges do they face? Yeah. They don’t make cars, one. Well, except Tesla, Tesla makes cars, and so on paper I think Tesla is positioned pretty strongly in this space. I think the biggest challenge with Tesla is that the approach they’re taking is not maybe connected with reality on what it takes to actually make the car drive itself. Meaning what? Meaning, I think they’re underestimating the complexity of actually getting to a fully self-driving car. Right. Theirs is semi-autonomous. Yeah. And I think it’s potentially a great feature, what they’re developing, and Elon has a very complicated space that he’s fighting in and he needs to have feature parity with the luxury cars. So some of what he’s doing really makes a ton of sense, but it’s hard for me to believe that with that just cameras that they’re going to, in any time in the near future, get to the level of reliability you really need to launch a car where you can kind of go to sleep in it and let it take you where you want to go. Right, we’ll talk about it in the next section. And then, the regulatory environment, you know that’s another thing and then humanity is one of the biggest issues. But talk about the regulatory environment first. And this is what actually makes this space so exciting, right? It’s the technology is really interesting and cool, the business cases are pretty exciting and then there’s this incredible opportunity for social good, but you have to communicate that. You have to work with the regulatory bodies, whether it be at the state, city or federal level. Right now, I think in general the tone is relatively optimistic. The federal government set guidance last year that you know was basically as attractive as they could make it, I think, reasonably be expected to make it. A number of states are trying to jump in to support and to kind of encourage the technology coming to their state. The challenge with that is that we don’t really need them to do a whole lot, and the worst thing would be for there to be 50 different sets of rules because then you’re in your self-driving car and you get to the border, and now it’s not legal in a new state. How does the government do that? Is this federal government equipped to do that? They’re working hard to be. What’s ... and maybe this is nuanced, but the way regulation works is at the federal level they regulate the safety of the car and at the state level they regulate the safe operation of the car. So the driver ... and so what’s fascinating about self-driving cars is you’re now making a virtual driver and so there’s a little bit of state-federal power grab for who gets to make the rules around that. Right, right. Where do you think it ends up? In the interest of my sanity and other people’s work in the space, we wanted the federal so there’s kind of one regulation nationally. Right, which is something, everything is regulated by the state, DMV, almost everything that touches the user. Yeah. Anything that’s operating the vehicle, like which roads you can run it on, which speed limits you can drive at, who’s appropriate to drive, that’s all kind of state level. Are there any states that are really fast forward? I’m guessing California. So California, through Senator Bhatia’s leadership, ended up putting out regulation ... Nevada actually had regulation out before them. Florida had some guidelines out early. They were really well intentioned, but what we’re seeing is in some cases a little bit of the regulation was there before we were really ready for it. And for the most part it’s not been an issue, but it’s ... you look at some of it now and you say, “Oh, hm. Maybe that wasn’t quite what ...” What’s the biggest problem? Oh I don’t have a great example off the top of my head. But there’s ... There’s just like little things. There’s no huge problems. Cart before horse. Yeah a little bit. Or car, so to speak. No more horses. Yeah. So to speak. And what about internationally? So internationally, it’s interesting. So in Europe they’re generally more conservative and the law there ... in the U.S. the law is generally permissive: You know, if we don’t say you can’t do it then do it and if somebody gets offended they’re going to sue you. In Europe, they’re much more strict at delineating what it is you’re allowed to do and what you’re not. So I think the law in Europe historically has been relatively protectionist. So as the European auto manufacturers get to the point where technology is ready and the law obviously moves along with it. Along with the car manufacturers. Right. And there’s no big tech firm there that really is out in front of this. Well again, they would argue that a Volkswagen or a Daimler is a big ... yeah, but you’re right, there isn’t outside of that. But those two companies are investing heavily in this space. Yes, they are. I’ve been in some other cars. So last thing, humans. The idea of humans doing ... I mean obviously Tesla got a lot of press when that man died. That was just in a semi-autonomous car, but the idea of sleeping or doing something else or watching a movie or doing anything else. When I was in the car I was like, “Where’s the bar?” kind of thing, “I think I’ll text,” and things like that, but that was because I was in a parking lot at Google and I felt totally comfortable doing that. How do you switch humanity into that mode? I think they’ll do it really fast. I do too. And we’ve seen this. Because I felt comfortable pretty quickly. Yeah. It’s amazing how quickly people go from, “Oh my goodness, how could it possible work?” to “Oh, all it does it drive?” Right? And they do that in a matter of minutes to hours. And I think this is one of the biggest challenges for some of the semi-autonomous features, is that ... The grab for the thing. Well, it’s not even that they grab for it, it’s that they experience it for a while and it works, right? And maybe it works perfectly every day for a month. The next day it may not work, but their experience now is, “Oh this works,” and so they’re not prepared to take over and so their ability to kind of save it and monitor it decays with time. But when we think about the rate at which bad things happen, they’re very low. So you know in America, somebody dies in a car accident about 1.15 times per 100 million miles. That’s like 10,000 years of an average person’s driving. So, let’s say the technology is pretty good but not that good. You know, someone dies once every 50 million miles. We’re going to have twice as many accidents and fatalities on the roads on average, but for any one individual they could go a lifetime, many lifetimes before they ever see that. So that experience with the technology and kind of becoming falsely comfortable with the safety of it is one of the challenges they face. Also, liking to drive, how do you beat that? What’s your argument? So, people like to drive some of the time, right? There’s an awful lot of driving that people do that they really hate. Road rage would not be a thing if people truly liked driving. So enjoyable this traffic jam, we’re looking right now at the Bay Bridge. I’m really enjoying 101 today. I hate the Bay Bridge. Yeah. And so, I think what this can do is, so much of getting around is just mundane. Let’s make that pleasurable, right? People are on their phone, people are wanting to do other things in the car. Like instead of kind of continuing prohibition, once this technology is out there we now allow people to do what they want. And while they do that, they’ll still be safe in the vehicle. Then for people who want to enjoy driving, go and drive in your spare time, like go drive on Sunday afternoon when the roads aren’t bad and you enjoy it. Sure, like a horse. Yeah. I think over time that’s kind of ... that’s going to be the experience. Even that whole idea of Americans love their cars ... I don’t think they do. I think a lot of Americans do. I think they take pride in it, I think they do spend an hour or two a day in it, and the ... you know, people buy a car because what it says about them, right? It’s kind of their avatar on the road. I have a Ford Fiesta, I don’t know what that says since I don’t care about cars. You’re like, “I wish I had a self-driving car right now. This is so awful.” It’s a stick shift. But I only got it because it was the cheapest smallest car that was fast. You could get a small cheap car with an automatic transmission. That’s true, but I like my stick shift. Yeah. Exactly, so there’s part of driving you enjoy. That’s true. So finishing up this section, so how much money have you guys raised for what you’re doing? What precisely does Aurora do? Yeah. So we aren’t talking about how much money we’ve raised ... I’m assuming a buttload because everybody’s ... everyone and their mother is raising money. We’ve been fortunate in our ability to raise money. So far we’ve just taken a little bit of money from some folks who helped me and my other co-founders think about how to start up a company and just grow. And your idea is to help ... be the software layer, presumably. Yeah. We’d like to be the system. So we’re going to work on the software and we’re going to build a reference architecture that we’ll share with automotive partners that’ll include: These are the sensors you should have, these are roughly where you should have them on the vehicle and this is the computation you should have. We’ll be designing our software to work with that reference architecture and then hopefully ... If it’s a current car that already has a wheel or if it doesn’t, if it moves to the other part. So we’ll be agnostic. Our intent is to build the self-driving vehicle capability. There’s a lot of companies, all the tier-one automotive suppliers are developing the driver system, so things where you’re still driving but it’s keeping you in lane or doing adaptive cruise control. We want to work on the part that comes after that. Right, fully self-driving. Fully self-driving. All right, we’re with Chris Urmson, we’re talking about self-driving cars and where they’re going. We’re going to talk next about the future and what the future actually looks like when we get back. [ad] We’re here with Chris Urmson of Aurora. Chris used to be the CTO of Google’s self-driving efforts. Talk a little bit about where we’re going. First, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask, you were at Google during the Anthony Levandowski era, you’ve been sucked up into Waymo. It’s called Waymo now, Google’s self-driving unit. Where is that name from? Don’t tell me, you don’t know either. I don’t know. No, I don’t know. What’s going to happen there, this fight with Uber ... I’m guessing you’re being deposed and etc. so you can’t say much. Yeah, so in fact I was deposed yesterday, so there’s not much I can say. The good news is I don’t know a whole lot, right? I obviously had some experience with Anthony and spent a lot of time with the team, but don’t know what they’ve found and what the true meat of the case is. Right, but I think at the center of this there’s going to be a lot of fighting over this stuff because everybody wants to sort of have the edge going forward. So let’s talk about how quickly that edge is coming because there’s lots of money going in, every week there’s a different self-driving car unit gets sold or there’s some aspect of it. Let’s talk about what it looks like, where does it come first? Like Levandowski had Otto, which was the trucks. You were talking about working with Caterpillar long ago, military ... where do the first ones really emerge that are useful and not completely accident-proof but pretty close? Sure. So we’re already seeing this technology come to market today. There are mines where you can go to where they have big haul trucks they call them, big dump trucks driving around with nobody in them. So, in those kind of closed-course environments you can see ... Sure, where they’re on tracks. They’re not literally on tracks, they’re on roads and they’re using GPS and figuring out where they are, but it’s mostly a closed site. You can go and see that today. I don’t know exactly where they are, but I’m sure some folks at Caterpillar would be able to tell you. And you’re starting to see some of the really high-end driver system features, where I think Audi just announced that their 2019 or 2018 model you’ll be able to go on a freeway, on a divided highway at less than 35 mph it’ll stay in the lane and not bump into the cars around you and you can read a book or whatever for however long the traffic jam lasts. So you’re starting to see that today. I think within the next five years, you’re going to see transportation services, fleets, vehicles where in kind of some limited environments they’ll be on the road and you’ll be able to get a ride in one. And this is without a driver in them. I think without a driver, yeah. You’ll just get in. What’s limited? What do you mean by limited? Like around a university, where there’s no other humans or ... No it’ll ... No driving cars. I think the issue is that they’re humans is the problem. If everything was self-driving presumably they could start really talking to each other. It would be much easier. That is what makes my job hard ... yeah let’s not .... Me. I’m the problem. It also undercuts some of the value, right? People move around. It’ll be in environments where it’s relatively benign. So nice wide roads, maybe not as many people using them, I think that’s part of the reason why somewhere like Arizona is appealing, right? It’s a relatively modern city, it’s so darn hot that you don’t have a whole lot of people enjoying the outdoors. So you can’t run them over. That’s your point. Yes. You know, and again, the safety arguments here really all come down to statistics. It’s a statistical argument that the rate at which bad things will happen is lower with the automation than it is with people. And so, wherever you can find advantages to push the statistics in the right direction, then you know that’s the way to think about this as an engineer. So you would, say, have a car come and pick you up, no driver in it, in these places like Palm Springs, for example. Somewhere like that, yeah. And I imagine that happening within the next five years. Then, once you kind of are able to let that proverbial genie out of the bottle, at that point it becomes incremental to make it work in slightly more difficult places. The big delta will be when you have a partner that can allow you to scale the technology because making 100 of something or making even 1,000 of something is manageable. But when we want to get to the point where the technology is proven and you want to scale it to the point where it can service a whole city or hopefully many cities, then you need somebody who knows how to make vehicles and you need somebody who knows how to make sensors that’ll last and can do that repeatedly. Where is the problem? Is it the sensor problem? Or where is ... humans, I’m guessing, is the biggest one. People, other people, when you have that moment of mixing ... probably when you mixed horses with cars was probably one of the more dangerous moments of car introduction. Hence the person walking in front of the car with the flags. I don’t know if you’ve heard this story. No, no, tell me. Yeah, so apparently, I can’t remember which state it was, it was somewhere east. When the first cars came out there was a law in the books that you had to have somebody walk in front of your car with a red flag so that you wouldn’t startle the horses, which somewhat undercuts, again, the value of the car. Obviously we don’t do that today. Right. So there has to be a transition period. Do you imagine cities getting rid of cars completely and then using only self-driving units? That could be something ... I think in the distant future, yeah. I think there’s going to be a long period of crossover where there’s going to be people driving cars and self-driving cars together on the roads and that’ll be the most difficult time. And then once the technology starts to prove out, the opportunities again for safety, for low-cost mobility, for mobility for people who can’t see or can’t otherwise drive, reducing congestion and all this stuff, cities will want ... because we’re only seeing ... in the U.S. we’re seeing urbanization. In China, they’re seeing urbanization in a way that I can’t comprehend and so what we need to find is a way to provide the same mobility that you and I take for granted, but that can scale to a much denser population. I think that’s one of the promises this technology has. What role does .... so people would not own cars, right? Presumably they would hire. This is why Uber and Didi and all these companies have such big valuations because they’re the reservation system essentially for these things that you wouldn’t own a car. I think you wouldn’t need to. Right. Right, so for someone like yourself who professes to hate driving, you only own a car because you need the convenience of it. If somebody were offering you the same service but it would show up, you wouldn’t have to worry about driving and you knew it was going to be there and it was going to work and it was as expensive or less than your current thing, then you would take it. And I think you see this in New York today, where a vast majority of people don’t own cars because it’s much more convenient to use ... Like cabs, public transportation. Right, which was transportation as a service at the time. What happens to public transportation during all this? So I think this ends up becoming public transportation. Okay. You know, buses are fantastic when they’re loaded, right? That’s one of the best ways that you can actually move people. But on certain paths only, right? Right. On certain paths, but most of the time they’re not. Or they don’t go where you want. Or they don’t go where you want and the whole system of where do we set the routes is a very political process that maybe is not the best that it could be. If instead over time we keep the buses for the core routes and treat them almost like trains, but then we either serve to them or go point to point with much smaller vehicles that really stop at your house, stop at my house, I don’t know where you live but if we live close to each other. That would be a really bad routing. But on the way, and really they ... it looks like public transportation on demand and it’s actually, when you look at some of the numbers on this, you can probably operate that at a lower cost per mile to the transit authority than the bus system. There wouldn’t even be a transit authority, save money, make money for someone else. I think there’s some things that should be public good over time and it feels like ... over time this might be something that becomes part of the utility of the city. The utility of the city. What are some of the weirder transportation modes that you know? Vertical lift and take off, Uber was thinking about that. I don’t know, they’ve got some issues right now to deal with separately, but talk about like where the craziest transportation schemes are coming, from your perspective. You like robots coming out of volcanoes, I’m assuming vertical lift and take off ... That seems pretty cool. Yeah. That’s where you say you’re here in San Francisco and you want to get to Berkeley and not go over that horrible Bay bridge, you just get in a ... it’s not a helicopter, it’s something else. It’s like a giant drone that flies you over there, right? That actually sounds pretty neat to me. One of the neat things that’s happened with drone technology is you solve reliability. The nice thing about being up in the sky is there’s not a whole lot to hit, right? Yet. Yet. But even then, there’s so much more space than there is on the ground. We’re stuck on the surface. Once you get up there you can segment: All the eastbound traffic could be at one elevation, all the westbound at another, north and south, and so you don’t end up with a whole lot. You don’t have to build roads where we’re going. There’s no need. There’s no need for roads. Thank you, Doc Brown. Yeah. Speaking of that, so vertical lift and take off, flying cars ... Yup. Which is an adjunct, a to-the-side adjacency, correct? Yup. When are those coming? I don’t know. They’re working on it. They’re working on it. Why? Why? I think because there is ... you know, again, I think it’s this density and congestion problem and that there’s just so much resource available up there in terms of space that if we can tap into that maybe it makes it more livable. I worry a little bit about the sound. They’re noisy. Maybe this is a little too nimby, but you know there’s going to be a lot of noise. Well I don’t want someone taking off a car in my neighborhood, you’re right. Like why would you want it? What about jetpacks? C’mon. I don’t know much about jetpacks. I haven’t seen that. Okay, you’re not working on those. Personally I’m not working on flying cars either. What is the craziest thing that you ... well, a teleporter. A teleporter would be fantastic. That would solve the commute problem, put me out a job. That would be great. I haven’t seen a whole lot ... the Boring Company stuff, the idea of digging giant tunnels seems on the one hand, I remember looking at ... This is Elon Musk’s ... Tunnel boring. Yeah. So on the one hand I remember reading books about the future and it was all going to be vacuum pods moving underground ... Hyperloops. Yeah, they didn’t call it that at the time. I think he coined that later. So on the one hand that would be ... it would make the future happen, at least the 1970-something future happen. On the other hand, it seems like there’s other ways that we can ... digging holes seems hard. Yeah. I think he just likes to fuck with us all the time. Like he’ll say something crazy. “Next I will be invisible.” “Oh yes. Yay Elon!” Do you know what I mean? I know what you mean. You know what I mean? Well good, I’m glad someone’s doing that. I really admire him for putting out. And what Tesla and SpaceX ... It’s better than a photo app, let’s just say. Yeah. You know what Tesla and SpaceX, their mission is just tremendous. Right? I’ve got to believe for the folks that’s incredibly motivating. So to finish up, give me the timeline. When is this going to be like done? It’s never going to be done. No I know, but like right now cars are done. There’s no more horses around. Oh the transition? I think it’s going to take at least 30 years. 30 years. At least. Just part of that is it takes about 15 years for a car to cycle through the American, what we call the car park, right? The cars on the road. Part of it is the technology’s not ready yet and there’s going to be continued development on it over time to get it to the point where it can really be deployed. Part of it is that, unlike a web app or a mobile app, there’s actually investment you have to make to adopt it and so it’s going to have a slower roll out. There certainly is a lot of money going towards it. There’s a lot of money going towards it, but even a lot of money when you start thinking about buying cars, it starts to get factored down pretty quickly. I want to finish up on the social concept of it, which we talked to a lot of Silicon Valley people about, is if you’re going to make all these cars, self-driving cars and autonomous vehicles, do you have a responsibility to those who lose their jobs? Do you think about that as an inventor? Yeah, no, this is actually something I do think about a fair bit. It’s a real challenge and this ends up being a trade-off in social goods. So on the one hand, there’s people who drive for a living today. Not just at parking lots, insurance companies, like you could iterate and iterate and iterate. There’s a lot of scale in this business, and a lot of ecosystem. On the other hand, you have the opportunity to make people safer on the road and save tens of thousands of lives. Save energy. Save energy, which is good for the environment, good for the planet. You can decrease congestion, give everybody back more time. You can give access to people, probably a commensurate number of people that can’t drive today as those who drive for a living, and then you give them the freedom now to go and contribute to the economy, have a job and work in a way they may not otherwise be able to. So it’s difficult, right? No matter what you do, whether ... you know if I go buy lunch at Subway or Jack in the Box, you know that has some implication in it. I don’t mean to be trite about this, but how you put your finger on the social scale here is a really tough question. I don’t have a good answer. Well, who’s responsible then? I think one of the things that Silicon Valley is, it’s not responsible, and very similar to a lot of companies that make things and change things. But who? Is it the government? Is it ... because then you could lead to you know we’re right in the middle of a populist political situation, could get worse. I’m not ... in no way am I trying to abdicate the responsibility of ... I get that, but wondering who you think ... I’m not blaming you. No, no, I appreciate that. I think we all are and I think that this is one of the saddest things for me about what’s happening in the political world right now is, we are faced with a variety of challenges, right? It started early with factory automation. It started with globalization. And these are things that have been good, much like self-driving technology. It’s hard to argue, I think, on an Earth-wide perspective that globalization was a bad thing. I think it tied countries together, it raised the economies in parts of the world that wouldn’t otherwise have. Yeah, it made us interdependent in a way that prevents war, and so there was some clear social good from that, but it wasn’t distributed uniformly. Like any change is not distributed uniformly. It’s part of our community, part of our political leadership, part of our social activism, is finding the right way to bring society, all of society, along with that. I think we’ve fallen short. It’s clear that we’ve fallen short. I don’t think we would be in the political situation we are today if we had not fallen short. I would love to be able to tell you, like, this is my vision, this is the answer. Honestly, it hurts a little bit not to be able to do that because I recognize the implications of what we’re doing. I just, I’m not smart enough and I think we need to attack it together. Interesting. I had Marc Andreessen onstage talking about this and he was like, “Well, there were blacksmiths.” I’m like, “Yeah, but what about the blacksmith families? What happened to them?” What happened to ... you don’t even know what happened to them. They went away, certainly. They died eventually, but it’s a really interesting question that Silicon Valley abdicates its responsibility for ... and this is a big one. To me, this a really ... like the biggest. I think this is, yeah ... You know, they’ve ruined media, but that’s okay we’ll be fine, but you know what I mean, like it’s sort of ... It’s important and it’s not ... this is a broader challenge that we’re facing that isn’t just self-driving cars. I think the automation is going to kick in more broadly. I think it’s going to be on a ... kind of the net it’s going to be a good thing. I think in general the advance of technology has been a good thing, but it requires us to be thoughtful and it requires us to come together and figure out how do we help those that are displaced. How do we move them into new roles? How do we even think about that? It is something I worry about. Unfortunately it’s in the state of academic worry. One concrete way to think about this — and we talked earlier about public transit. You could imagine like bus drivers lose their jobs. That’s certainly one way that the pendulum could swing. An alternative is, we put the bus drivers on the core routes that are driving the buses, we don’t hire any more bus drivers, but we phase this technology in over time and we support it with the self-driving cars. The self-driving cars, if we get reasonable occupancy on them and they really are a public transit, then today we subsidize public transit, about 90 percent of it is subsidized by taxes. We instead will no longer have to subsidize it and then we have this extra money that’s sat around in city and transport authority coffers that we can use in different ways. Yeah, yeah, you have to be. It’s interesting, I was just in Kentucky and talking to some coal miners. They’re like, “They’re going to bring back jobs.” The minute they can automate you, my friend, they’re going to automate your work and they probably already have in lots of ways, which is interesting. It’s definitely an interesting question for all of us, I think. And I’m so glad someone as thoughtful as you is thinking about it. You’re more thoughtful than most people. Most people are like, “Eh, let’s invent it. Who cares?” No, I think that’s dangerous. Yup, I agree with you. Chris it was great talking to you. Thanks for coming on the show. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16278566/transcript-self-driving-car-engineer-chris-urmson-recode-decode

Vox

2017-03-28 21:45:39

2017

3.0

28

Jacob Gardenswartz

Read President Trump’s executive order on climate change

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order rolling back a number of policies put in place by the Obama administration to combat climate change. As Vox’s Brad Plumer explained in detail, the order includes these key instructions to the federal government: Still, experts agree that dismantling Obama’s climate policies will be much trickier than simply signing this document. Tuesday’s order is just the first step in what is sure to be a years-long process. The full text of the executive order, titled “Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth,” is available here, or you can read it below. PROMOTING ENERGY INDEPENDENCE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Policy. (a) It is in the national interest to promote clean and safe development of our Nation's vast energy resources, while at the same time avoiding regulatory burdens that unnecessarily encumber energy production, constrain economic growth, and prevent job creation. Moreover, the prudent development of these natural resources is essential to ensuring the Nation's geopolitical security. (b) It is further in the national interest to ensure that the Nation's electricity is affordable, reliable, safe, secure, and clean, and that it can be produced from coal, natural gas, nuclear material, flowing water, and other domestic sources, including renewable sources. (c) Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that executive departments and agencies (agencies) immediately review existing regulations that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources and appropriately suspend, revise, or rescind those that unduly burden the development of domestic energy resources beyond the degree necessary to protect the public interest or otherwise comply with the law. (d) It further is the policy of the United States that, to the extent permitted by law, all agencies should take appropriate actions to promote clean air and clean water for the American people, while also respecting the proper roles of the Congress and the States concerning these matters in our constitutional republic. (e) It is also the policy of the United States that necessary and appropriate environmental regulations comply with the law, are of greater benefit than cost, when permissible, achieve environmental improvements for the American people, and are developed through transparent processes that employ the best available peer-reviewed science and economics. Sec. 2. Immediate Review of All Agency Actions that Potentially Burden the Safe, Efficient Development of Domestic Energy Resources. (a) The heads of agencies shall review all existing regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, and any other similar agency actions (collectively, agency actions) that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources, with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy resources. Such review shall not include agency actions that are mandated by law, necessary for the public interest, and consistent with the policy set forth in section 1 of this order. (b) For purposes of this order, "burden" means to unnecessarily obstruct, delay, curtail, or otherwise impose significant costs on the siting, permitting, production, utilization, transmission, or delivery of energy resources. (c) Within 45 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency with agency actions described in subsection (a) of this section shall develop and submit to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB Director) a plan to carry out the review required by subsection (a) of this section. The plans shall also be sent to the Vice President, the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, and the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality. The head of any agency who determines that such agency does not have agency actions described in subsection (a) of this section shall submit to the OMB Director a written statement to that effect and, absent a determination by the OMB Director that such agency does have agency actions described in subsection (a) of this section, shall have no further responsibilities under this section. (d) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency shall submit a draft final report detailing the agency actions described in subsection (a) of this section to the Vice President, the OMB Director, the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, and the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality. The report shall include specific recommendations that, to the extent permitted by law, could alleviate or eliminate aspects of agency actions that burden domestic energy production. (e) The report shall be finalized within 180 days of the date of this order, unless the OMB Director, in consultation with the other officials who receive the draft final reports, extends that deadline. (f) The OMB Director, in consultation with the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, shall be responsible for coordinating the recommended actions included in the agency final reports within the Executive Office of the President. (g) With respect to any agency action for which specific recommendations are made in a final report pursuant to subsection (e) of this section, the head of the relevant agency shall, as soon as practicable, suspend, revise, or rescind, or publish for notice and comment proposed rules suspending, revising, or rescinding, those actions, as appropriate and consistent with law. Agencies shall endeavor to coordinate such regulatory reforms with their activities undertaken in compliance with Executive Order 13771 of January 30, 2017 (Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs). Sec. 3. Rescission of Certain Energy and Climate-Related Presidential and Regulatory Actions. (a) The following Presidential actions are hereby revoked: (i) Executive Order 13653 of November 1, 2013 (Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change); (ii) The Presidential Memorandum of June 25, 2013 (Power Sector Carbon Pollution Standards); (iii) The Presidential Memorandum of November 3, 2015 (Mitigating Impacts on Natural Resources from Development and Encouraging Related Private Investment); and (iv) The Presidential Memorandum of September 21, 2016 (Climate Change and National Security). (b) The following reports shall be rescinded: (i) The Report of the Executive Office of the President of June 2013 (The President's Climate Action Plan); and (ii) The Report of the Executive Office of the President of March 2014 (Climate Action Plan Strategy to Reduce Methane Emissions). (c) The Council on Environmental Quality shall rescind its final guidance entitled "Final Guidance for Federal Departments and Agencies on Consideration of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the Effects of Climate Change in National Environmental Policy Act Reviews," which is referred to in "Notice of Availability," 81 Fed. Reg. 51866 (August 5, 2016). (d) The heads of all agencies shall identify existing agency actions related to or arising from the Presidential actions listed in subsection (a) of this section, the reports listed in subsection (b) of this section, or the final guidance listed in subsection (c) of this section. Each agency shall, as soon as practicable, suspend, revise, or rescind, or publish for notice and comment proposed rules suspending, revising, or rescinding any such actions, as appropriate and consistent with law and with the policies set forth in section 1 of this order. Sec. 4. Review of the Environmental Protection Agency's "Clean Power Plan" and Related Rules and Agency Actions. (a) The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (Administrator) shall immediately take all steps necessary to review the final rules set forth in subsections (b)(i) and (b)(ii) of this section, and any rules and guidance issued pursuant to them, for consistency with the policy set forth in section 1 of this order and, if appropriate, shall, as soon as practicable, suspend, revise, or rescind the guidance, or publish for notice and comment proposed rules suspending, revising, or rescinding those rules. In addition, the Administrator shall immediately take all steps necessary to review the proposed rule set forth in subsection (b)(iii) of this section, and, if appropriate, shall, as soon as practicable, determine whether to revise or withdraw the proposed rule. (b) This section applies to the following final or proposed rules: (i) The final rule entitled "Carbon Pollution Emission Guidelines for Existing Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units," 80 Fed. Reg. 64661 (October 23, 2015) (Clean Power Plan); (ii) The final rule entitled "Standards of Performance for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New, Modified, and Reconstructed Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units," 80 Fed. Reg. 64509 (October 23, 2015); and (iii) The proposed rule entitled "Federal Plan Requirements for Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Electric Utility Generating Units Constructed on or Before January 8, 2014; Model Trading Rules; Amendments to Framework Regulations; Proposed Rule," 80 Fed. Reg. 64966 (October 23, 2015). (c) The Administrator shall review and, if appropriate, as soon as practicable, take lawful action to suspend, revise, or rescind, as appropriate and consistent with law, the "Legal Memorandum Accompanying Clean Power Plan for Certain Issues," which was published in conjunction with the Clean Power Plan. (d) The Administrator shall promptly notify the Attorney General of any actions taken by the Administrator pursuant to this order related to the rules identified in subsection (b) of this section so that the Attorney General may, as appropriate, provide notice of this order and any such action to any court with jurisdiction over pending litigation related to those rules, and may, in his discretion, request that the court stay the litigation or otherwise delay further litigation, or seek other appropriate relief consistent with this order, pending the completion of the administrative actions described in subsection (a) of this section. Sec. 5. Review of Estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon, Nitrous Oxide, and Methane for Regulatory Impact Analysis. (a) In order to ensure sound regulatory decision making, it is essential that agencies use estimates of costs and benefits in their regulatory analyses that are based on the best available science and economics. (b) The Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (IWG), which was convened by the Council of Economic Advisers and the OMB Director, shall be disbanded, and the following documents issued by the IWG shall be withdrawn as no longer representative of governmental policy: (i) Technical Support Document: Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order 12866 (February 2010); (ii) Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis (May 2013); (iii) Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis (November 2013); (iv) Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis (July 2015); (v) Addendum to the Technical Support Document for Social Cost of Carbon: Application of the Methodology to Estimate the Social Cost of Methane and the Social Cost of Nitrous Oxide (August 2016); and (vi) Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis (August 2016). (c) Effective immediately, when monetizing the value of changes in greenhouse gas emissions resulting from regulations, including with respect to the consideration of domestic versus international impacts and the consideration of appropriate discount rates, agencies shall ensure, to the extent permitted by law, that any such estimates are consistent with the guidance contained in OMB Circular A-4 of September 17, 2003 (Regulatory Analysis), which was issued after peer review and public comment and has been widely accepted for more than a decade as embodying the best practices for conducting regulatory cost-benefit analysis. Sec. 6. Federal Land Coal Leasing Moratorium. The Secretary of the Interior shall take all steps necessary and appropriate to amend or withdraw Secretary's Order 3338 dated January 15, 2016 (Discretionary Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) to Modernize the Federal Coal Program), and to lift any and all moratoria on Federal land coal leasing activities related to Order 3338. The Secretary shall commence Federal coal leasing activities consistent with all applicable laws and regulations. Sec. 7. Review of Regulations Related to United States Oil and Gas Development. (a) The Administrator shall review the final rule entitled "Oil and Natural Gas Sector: Emission Standards for New, Reconstructed, and Modified Sources," 81 Fed. Reg. 35824 (June 3, 2016), and any rules and guidance issued pursuant to it, for consistency with the policy set forth in section 1 of this order and, if appropriate, shall, as soon as practicable, suspend, revise, or rescind the guidance, or publish for notice and comment proposed rules suspending, revising, or rescinding those rules. (b) The Secretary of the Interior shall review the following final rules, and any rules and guidance issued pursuant to them, for consistency with the policy set forth in section 1 of this order and, if appropriate, shall, as soon as practicable, suspend, revise, or rescind the guidance, or publish for notice and comment proposed rules suspending, revising, or rescinding those rules: (i) The final rule entitled "Oil and Gas; Hydraulic Fracturing on Federal and Indian Lands," 80 Fed. Reg. 16128 (March 26, 2015); (ii) The final rule entitled "General Provisions and Non-Federal Oil and Gas Rights," 81 Fed. Reg. 77972 (November 4, 2016); (iii) The final rule entitled "Management of Non Federal Oil and Gas Rights," 81 Fed. Reg. 79948 (November 14, 2016); and (iv) The final rule entitled "Waste Prevention, Production Subject to Royalties, and Resource Conservation," 81 Fed. Reg. 83008 (November 18, 2016). (c) The Administrator or the Secretary of the Interior, as applicable, shall promptly notify the Attorney General of any actions taken by them related to the rules identified in subsections (a) and (b) of this section so that the Attorney General may, as appropriate, provide notice of this order and any such action to any court with jurisdiction over pending litigation related to those rules, and may, in his discretion, request that the court stay the litigation or otherwise delay further litigation, or seek other appropriate relief consistent with this order, until the completion of the administrative actions described in subsections (a) and (b) of this section. Sec. 8. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect: (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or (ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals. (b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations. (c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person. DONALD J. TRUMP THE WHITE HOUSE, March 28, 2017.

https://www.vox.com/latest-news/2017/3/28/15094182/read-trump-executive-order-climate-change

Vox

2018-04-13 19:05:01

2018

4.0

13

Jane Coaston

RNC donor resigns over Michael Cohen-arranged sex scandal settlement

On April 3, 2017, Republican National Committee finance chair Steve Wynn announced the addition of new members to the committee’s leadership team, with two names leading the pack as national deputy chairs: Elliott Broidy and Michael Cohen. “The challenge of guiding a swollen and overreaching government to a position that serves its citizens in a truly efficient manner will be best served by the leadership our team hopes to achieve,” Wynn said in a statement. In January of this year, Wynn resigned from the committee after dozens of women accused him of sexual assault and abuse. On Monday of this week, Cohen’s home, office, and hotel room were raided by FBI agents investigating his role in making hush money payments to two women on behalf of Donald Trump. And Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Cohen helped make another payment: $1.6 million to a former Playboy playmate reportedly impregnated by Cohen’s RNC committee colleague Elliott Broidy. Broidy has reportedly resigned from the RNC. According to the Journal, in the settlement agreement, Cohen even used the same pseudonyms for Broidy and the former Playboy model as he used in the nondisclosure agreement between Trump and porn actress Stormy Daniels: David Dennison and Peggy Peterson. Cohen is still a member of the RNC finance committee as of today. And the RNC (and a Trump 2020 Super PAC) have refused to return Wynn’s donations.

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/13/17234930/michael-cohen-rnc-trump-scandal

Vox

2017-01-24 16:54:14

2017

1.0

24

Lara O'Reilly

Ad agencies paying settlements in order to not reveal contracts and MSAs

Some US ad agencies are making secret settlements to clients to avoid being fully audited by them, sources tell Business Insider.The payments come after the industry was accused of keeping millions in media rebates that should have gone to clients.The settlement sums are in the millions of dollars and have taken the form of cash or significant fee reductions.Multiple agencies have denied involvement. Media-buying agencies in the US are paying their clients secret multi-million dollar settlements rather than show them all of their contracts and service agreements with media owners. Multiple sources with knowledge of the matter suggested there have been at least 20 cases where either a settlement has been paid or where there are ongoing negotiations about a settlement payment. The settlement amounts have ranged from the low single-digit millions of dollars to more than $10 million — but below the materiality threshold at which agency holding companies would have to disclose them in their annual reports. Some of these settlements have been in cash, while some have taken the form of an agreement to significantly discount the client's fees the following year. This practice is not pervasive across the US ad-buying industry, but multiple, competitive agency groups have been drawing up settlement agreements Settlements have been paid out by a range of media-buying agencies and have not been isolated to a specific holding company. That isn't to say that the practice is pervasive across the industry — and not every holding company has been involved, according to our sources — but rather that settlements agreements have been by different, unrelated, competitor advertising groups. Both parties — the marketer and the agency — usually sign NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) as part of the terms of the settlement, preventing either company from revealing publicly it took place. The sources asked we did not reveal the names of the agencies and clients involved, due to these NDAs. This new type of settlement payout appears to be a direct response to the release of the high-profile Association of National Advertisers (ANA) report into media-buying practices in the US last summer. The report claimed rebates and other non-transparent business practices were "pervasive" in the US media ad buying ecosystem. The major advertising agency holding groups denied wrongdoing and criticized the methodology of the report shortly after it was released, arguing that the anonymous nature of the interviews conducted and the fact that it named no individual bad actors or agencies had the potential to damage the reputation of the entire industry. Regardless, the report, which advised marketers to take a closer look at their agency relationships and contracts, sparked a wave of big-name marketers commissioning third-party auditing companies to examine their media-buying agencies. Some agencies are paying clients in the form of cash or significantly capped fees, rather than disclose all their contracts Media-buying companies are employed by advertisers to secure them the most strategic and best value-for-money advertising slots. When companies appoint auditors to look at their media agency relationships, they are looking for reassurance that they are getting what they paid for when it comes to their advertising spend and that the agency has been compliant with their contract. Sometimes, audits result in overpayments being returned to the company, or contracts being renegotiated. Audits within the industry are normal, but this time around, marketers have been using the findings of the report — plus a contract template provided by the ANA— as leverage to get more detail about the types of agreements their agencies have in place with media owners. As a result, many marketers have been asking more specific questions about media — particularly digital media — that agencies buy upfront in advance and sell back to clients and also for evidence of any agreements agencies have in place with media owners to receive credits — either in the form of cash rebates, free inventory, or other discounts — when their spending (usually across a range of clients) reaches a certain threshold. They have also been asking for information on whether their advertising budgets have been spent on media properties in which the agency owns a stake. But some agencies have been reticent to hand over such information, even if required to do so by the audits rights sections of their contract. Instead, they have negotiated to pay their clients settlements — either in the form of cash or agreeing to significantly cap their fees — rather than disclose those contracts and master services agreements. In the majority of these cases, the contracts between the media agency and client have then been redrawn, with more specific wording around the type of media the marketer agrees can be bought in a non-transparent way. Taking a settlement can be in the interest of the marketer too Buying media in a non-transparent way is not a nefarious activity, so long as the marketer is aware and agrees to it upfront. Some agencies argue that when they take a "principal position" in buying media upfront — i.e. by using their own money to buy the media and then selling it at a markup to their clients — they are taking on the risk that they might not eventually sell those ad slots back at-cost or at a profit. And, they argue, they add value through their investments in data and technology that justify selling the media space back at a higher cost than it was bought at. Put it another way: if you buy a car and choose the performance brakes option, you know that the dealership is making an additional profit from the upsell. But it's unlikely you'd ever demand the dealer disclose how much they paid for the brakes. As long as you feel the brakes are performing well, you're happy with the purchase. Opting to take a settlement is often in the best interests of an advertiser too — and they are particularly appealing to their procurement and financial departments, happy to see any savings or clawbacks of cost. A settlement also prevents ruining a relationship by taking the matter to court to force the agency to disclose all their contracts. Litigation is costly and distracting, and could run the risk of exposing the marketer as not being fully aware of how their company's budget was being spent under their watch. It is the marketer's responsibility to ensure their company is getting the most value for money from its advertising spend. The ANA and The 4A's, the trade body that represents US advertising agencies, declined to comment. Business Insider also contacted the six major holding agencies for their comments on this article. Here are their responses: WPP's GroupM: "As a rule GroupM, does not comment on contractual matters; however, we can confirm that we are not involved in the practices described." Publicis Groupe: "Integrity and trust continue to be cornerstones of how we approach relationships with our clients. We continue to comply on client audits as standard agency-client operating procedure, including any audits that have commenced since the ANA practices were announced. We have approached them with deep collaboration with our clients and these audits have resulted satisfactorily with positive conclusion. There has been neither need nor instance of non-disclosure settlements as part of an audit or client discussion." IPG: "We do not engage in and are also not aware of such practices. IPG upholds the highest standards of transparency in our media practices, which is key to our decisions not to accept rebates in the U.S. and not to buy 'inventory media.' This long-standing position has been a differentiator for our company." Dentsu Aegis: Declined to comment. Omnicom: Declined to comment. Havas: Declined to comment.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ad-agencies-paying-settlements-contracts-2017-1

Business Insider

2016-07-22 14:10:04

2016

7.0

22

Jeff Stein

Americans trust Donald Trump to take on the “special interests.” They shouldn’t.

Most Republican politicians don’t lament how wealthy donors have corrupted the political system through big campaign contributions. But Donald Trump is not like most Republican politicians. Accepting the party’s presidential nomination on Thursday night, Trump returned to an argument that’s at least superficially similar to one routinely made by the left: that the money sloshing through US politics privileges special interests. Here’s Trump on Thursday night attacking Hillary Clinton as a "puppet" of her wealthy donors: A number of these reforms that I will outline tonight will be opposed by some of our nation’s most powerful special interests. That is because these interests have rigged our political and economic system for their exclusive benefit. Big business, elite media, and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have total control over everything she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings. That is why Hillary Clinton’s message is that things will never change. This is a line Trump frequently deployed against his Republican rivals in the primary, calling both Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush "puppets" of their big donors. Trump promised to self-fund his campaign instead, arguing that doing so would give him the freedom to act on behalf of the public. The concept has worked brilliantly as a campaign strategy. One MSNBC report found it was the single biggest reason voters thrilled to Trump’s candidacy. It’s also the issue on which Trump consistently beats Clinton in polling: But it also raises a real policy question. Trump may be a white nationalist with dangerously authoritarian tendencies. But isn’t it also theoretically possible that a Trump administration would be better at taking on special interests and lobbyists? Given that Trump is a billionaire who largely self-financed his own primary, isn’t it at least conceivable that he’d be less indebted to big donors than Clinton? I’ve thought a lot about this question and interviewed the leading campaign finance experts over the last several months. But my conclusion is ultimately pretty simple: No, Trump wouldn’t do more to help reduce the role of big money in politics. And he’d actually probably make things a good deal worse. There are a few explanations for why, but the most important thing to recognize may be that Trump actually hasn’t kept his distance from the big donors he claims to despise. On a literal level, there’s really very little daylight between his campaign fundraising operation and Clinton’s. Here’s a brief accounting of just how much Trump has courted the very donors and special interests he claims have corrupted his opponent: But according to the Center for Public Integrity, Trump has now dived headlong into using them himself. At least three Super PACs — with tens of millions of dollars in the bank — are now acting on his behalf to spend money. Now, Super PACs are working on Clinton's behalf as well, and she has maintained that she also wants to do away with them. But Trump’s theory has long been that you can’t both have a Super PAC working in your favor and then claim to govern free of their influence. By his own standard, he’s bought and paid for. Trump has since raised over $32 million by going to these megawealthy donors, according to NPR. About 60 people gave over $100,000 each. "He's done a complete 180," Josh Stewart, a spokesperson for the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money in politics, told me. Moreover, after criticizing his primary rivals for wantonly "begging" the Koch Brothers for money, Trump began asking the Koch organization for help, according to USA Today. "[Former Trump aide Sam] Nunberg later confessed to me that Trump’s principled stand against the corrupt donor class was little more than lucky spin," Coppins reported. "The truth is, he would have raised money if he could have … Donald never had any intention of self-financing." According to Coppins, Trump came to reject money in politics because big donors wouldn’t fork over their dough to him — not because of any principled stand. But there’s another, more philosophical reason Trump fundamentally misunderstands the way big money influences our political system — and why he doesn’t offer anything remotely resembling a solution to fix it. Trump’s conception of how money influences politics is clear: Like many Americans, he essentially imagines that Clinton — and his Republican rivals before her — engage in a quid pro quo in which donors are transactionally rewarded for their campaign contributions. This idea posits a direct line of influence from lobbyist to politician, and then back the other way for the return back-scratch. Here’s Trump back during the debates: "Their lobbyists, their special interests and their donors will start calling President Bush, President Clinton. And they’ll say: ‘You have to do it. They gave you a million dollars to your campaign." There’s just one problem with this criticism: it’s wrong. According to most campaign finance experts I’ve interviewed, the real problem with our campaign finance system is not that donors are transactionally rewarded for their gifts. Instead, what happens is that politicians’ dependence on special interest money generally elevates the priorities of the wealthy across the board. That itself is a massive problem with corrosive implications for democratic outcomes. In having to raise huge sums of money, politicians end up spending far more time with the superrich than they do with the poor and middle class. That makes them far more attuned to the priorities of elites and the megawealthy. This is what makes Trump's response so off. He's a billionaire notorious for partying it up with the rich and famous. (Several literal billionaires spoke at the RNC convention.) Since he's ordinarily part of elite social circles, he'll be keenly attuned to their issues. Trump has already demonstrated that his presidency would advance policies that favor the wealthy. His tax policy calls for unprecedented tax cuts for the superrich. His family would get a $7 billion windfall from his estate tax plan. He has no plans to raise the minimum wage or make college more affordable. His health care policy would screw millions of poor people. "You can say that if you're spending your own money, you're free to do what you think and not be obligated to donors," Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of Democracy 21, a nonprofit that focuses on government transparency and campaign finance, told me in March. "But the other side of that coin is to say, 'We don't want really wealthy people to buy elections and have a system only run by the superrich.' And Trump doesn't say that."Trump may look like a quick fix to Americans fed up with the big role money plays in our government. He's not.

https://www.vox.com/2016/7/22/12254266/donald-trump-special-interests

Vox

2016-12-16 00:00:00

2016

12.0

16

Tyson Gay's Daughter's Alleged Killer Indicted

A grand jury has indicted three men in connection with a shooting that killed Olympic sprinter Tyson Gay's daughter back in October. As we previously reported, 15-year-old Trinity Gay was killed during a shoot-out between 2 cars in a Lexington, KY restaurant parking lot. Officials say Gay was struck by a stray bullet. According to Lexington PD, Chazerae M. Taylor was indicted on 1 count of wanton murder and 4 counts of wanton endangerment. Lamonte Williams and D'Markeo Taylor were also charged with wanton endangerment. A fourth suspect is still in jail on a wanton endangerment charge.

https://www.tmz.com/2016/12/16/tyson-gay-daughter-death-indicted/

TMZ

2019-06-06 00:00:00

2019

6.0

6

Richard Leong

TREASURIES-U.S. yield curve flattens as ECB holds back on rate cut

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-bonds/treasuries-us-yield-curve-flattens-as-ecb-holds-back-on-rate-cut-idUSL2N23D0XH

Bonds News

Reuters

2017-11-21 13:50:02

2017

11.0

21

Ezra Klein

The best analogy to Donald Trump in 2017 is George W. Bush in 2005

We are living through unusual times, and the tendency is to reach for extreme historical analogies. I have seen this era compared to the runup to the Civil War, to Watergate, to the dawn of Nazi Germany, to the presidency of Andrew Jackson, to the rise of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, to the fall of the Roman Empire. But the most persuasive analogue is nearer both in time and in space. What this period most closely resembles, argues political scientist Brendan Nyhan, is the aftermath of the 2004 election, when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry. Then, like now, a culturally polarizing Republican candidate was narrowly elected after a campaign waged atop nationalistic, identitarian appeals. Then, like now, the GOP gained control of both the White House and Congress. Then, like now, the winner had no clear policy mandate, and quickly suffered massive legislative defeat (Social Security privatization for Bush, Obamacare repeal for Trump). Then, like now, the president watched his favorability ratings tumble into the 30s, and appeared to be headed for a severe backlash in the midterms. I would take the analogy yet further. Trump’s callousness and indiscipline has left many liberals yearning for Bush’s more dignified and decent bearing. A poll in October found that a majority of Democrats now hold a favorable opinion of the 43rd president. But in 2004, Democrats absorbed Bush’s reelection as more than a defeat; it was a cultural rejection and a political crisis. Democrats warned that it was “the most important election of our lifetime.” If John Kerry didn’t win, the results could be, would be, catastrophic. But Bush crushed Democrats with a campaign that, as Robert Reich wrote, was “not just God and gays but also true grit in fighting the evils of Saddam Hussein and global terrorism.” This was the age in which Bill Clinton warned that "when people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right,” the era of flag pins, of Swift Boat Veterans, of books with titles like Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane. It was the era of anti-same-sex marriage ballot initiatives, of Democrats panicking over the loss of white Christian voters. When Bush won, the left absorbed it as a trauma — proof that they had lost touch with the heartland, that they no longer understood the country they called home. The 2004 election, wrote Paul Starr in the liberal American Prospect, confirmed that Democrats were “no longer a majority party.” In the same magazine, Alan Brinkley wrote, “The greatest success of the modern right has been transforming conservatism into a populist phenomenon.” Sound familiar? Just wait. In the New York Times, the headline was “Baffled in Loss, Democrats Seek Road Forward.” The article records a litany of prominent Democrats unloading their fears and their confusion. “We need to be a party that stands for more than the sum of our resentments,” said Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat then in the Senate. “In the heartland, where I am from, there are doubts. Too often, we're caricatured as a bicoastal cultural elite that is condescending at best and contemptuous at worst to the values that Americans hold in their daily lives." All of this could have been said by, and written, about, Democrats in the aftermath of 2016. And it yields, I think, a few lessons. Today, 2004 is one of the few elections I know of that many Democrats believe it’s better that they lost. Had they won, it would have been President John Kerry facing a Republican Congress, managing the flailing Iraq War, and ultimately blindsided by the financial crisis. The congressional majorities Democrats built in 2006 and then expanded on in 2008 — the majorities that permitted the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the stimulus and much else — would never have materialized. Bush’s continued presence in office meant Republicans paid the political price for their past mistakes, and Democrats reaped the rewards. A similar future is plausible, though far from assured, today. With the important exception of replacing Justice Antonin Scalia with Neil Gorsuch, Trump and the Republican Congress appear to be getting less done, and paying more of a political price, than most expected. It seems possible now that Democrat Doug Jones will win Jeff Sessions’s Senate seat in Alabama; if that happens, retaking both the House and the Senate is well within reach for Democrats in 2018, putting an end to Trump’s legislative agenda. If Trump’s presidency continues to flail — to say nothing of if there’s a recession or a poorly managed foreign crisis — it’s easy to imagine a Democrat beating him in 2020 and entering office with massive congressional majorities, setting up, again, a period of sweeping progressive governance. The down-ballot gains could also lead to more Democratic statehouses before the next census, which would in turn mean less Republican gerrymandering and a significantly improved House outlook for Democrats through 2030. The cultural forces Trump represents also seem weakened by his ascent. Opinions toward trade and immigration have swung sharply to the left since Trump’s election, and the acceptance of sexual harassment that Trump’s win seemed to suggest has been overwhelmed by the stunning power of the #MeToo movement. Which is all to say that one lesson of the post-2004 moment is low ebbs in political power sometimes set up massive gains in political power, particularly when the governing party governs poorly. Just as Democrats regret Bush’s second term less, and Republicans regret it more, than either side expected at the time, the same could well prove true of Trump — particularly if the loathing he inspires among younger voters hardens into a persistent distaste for the GOP. Another lesson is that the path back to power often looks very different from what the post-election analyses suggest. The Democrats agonizing over evangelical heartland voters and whether they had any candidates who looked natural holding a hunting rifle did not think their resurgence lay with a cosmopolitan, liberal African American whose name rhymed with “Osama.” But it did. The same is true for Republicans who worried over Barack Obama’s victories and the rising Democratic majority. Readers of the GOP’s post-2012 “autopsy” report know that the party expected it would be a candidate with Marco Rubio’s profile that led them back to the majority. “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too. We must recruit more candidates who come from minority communities,” warned the party that would soon nominate Donald Trump and win back the White House. It’s a mistake to think that the only way to win an election is to win over your opponent’s coalition, rather than creating a new version of your own. For all the debates about the white working class and identity politics currently roiling the Democratic Party, my guess is if Democrats are successful in 2020, it will be with a candidate who transcends these arguments rather than one who embodies them. But the most important lesson is that the story of American politics is ongoing and unpredictable. We tend to take elections as the closing of chapters, as statements about what America really believes and where we are truly going. Yet they’re anything but. In 2004, Democrats could not imagine where they would be in 2008. In 2014, no one believed Donald Trump would be president today — including Donald Trump. History shows American politics is often far from what it seems, and you don’t need to reach long into our past for examples.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/21/16676390/donald-trump-george-bush-historical-analogies

Vox

2018-03-01 00:00:00

2018

3.0

1

Tova Cohen, Ari Rabinovitch

Exclusive: Israel's El Al seeks international help to access Saudi airspace

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Israel’s flag carrier El Al has asked an airline industry lobby group to help it access Saudi Arabian airspace, so it can compete with Air India’s [AIN.UL] planned route between India and Israel. The request came in a letter on Wednesday from El Al’s chief executive to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), in which he said he has also approached Israel’s prime minister. Saudi Arabia does not recognize Israel though there has been a thawing of the relationship between the U.S. allies, with a shared concern over Iranian influence in the region. Granting an Israeli airline access to its air space by lifting a 70-year-old ban, however, would mark a dramatic diplomatic shift. The appeal is a response to plans revealed by Air India last month to begin direct flights to Tel Aviv which pass through Saudi airspace, a shorter route so far off-limits to all Israel-bound commercial planes. There has been no official announcement whether Air India has received permission to fly over Saudi soil for its proposed thrice-weekly flights. El Al’s CEO has now turned to the head of IATA, Alexandre de Juniac, saying he understood no such permission would be granted to Israeli jetliners and asking Juniac to step in to prevent “an uneven playing field.” “I am approaching you and kindly requesting IATA to intervene and to represent aviation industry’s interest by advocating equal overfly rights for all carriers over the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and opposing any form of discrimination,” CEO Gonen Usishkin wrote in the letter seen by Reuters. IATA’s membership includes 280 airlines in 120 countries. Usishkin said he has also requested help from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resolve the issue. El Al has yet to receive a response. El Al currently flies four weekly flights to Mumbai, but these take seven hours rather than five as they take a route south towards Ethiopia and then east to India, avoiding Saudi airspace. Shortening the route would also be a significant cost-cutter. Air India has not received any communication yet from the aviation regulator, a company spokesman said when asked whether the airline had received permission to operate flights to Israel over the Saudi airspace. The proposed India-Israel route is a result of strengthening ties between the two countries. In his letter Usishkin, who became CEO two weeks ago, said Air India’s flights are scheduled to begin on March 6, citing slot information from Israel’s Airports Authority. Additional reporting by Sudarshan Varadhan in New Delhi; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-el-al-arlns-saudi-exclusive/exclusive-israels-el-al-seeks-international-help-to-access-saudi-airspace-idUSKCN1GD4SZ

World News

Reuters

2016-09-14 20:05:00

2016

9.0

14

Ezra Marcus

The Fat Jew’s Major Lazer Cover Band Is Accidentally Funny

Everyone's favorite problematic-Instagrammer-cum-inescapable-culture-virus the Fat Jew—aka Josh Ostrovsky—is belly-flopping into the sordid petri dish of EDM parody with a new Major Lazer "tribute band" called Major Behavior. In a new video, Billboard dance editor Matt Medved conducts a straight-faced interview with the humorist and his hype man, the New York DJ Maachew Bentley. After introducing himself as "Diplo" before clarifying, "no, I'm Josh!" Ostrovsky explains how "all of the greatest musical acts throughout history have had tribute acts. Major Lazer are one of the greatest musical acts in history, and they needed a tribute act." "Who are the greatest Jamaicans?" he continues. "Bob Marley, Hailie Selassie, and Diplo." Ostrovsky's humor has less to do with what he's saying than how he says it—he's skilled at milking monstrous amounts of affect from his hammy physical presence, even when the material is thin. That talent comes in handy here. When Ostrovsky humps a speaker at Guitar Center his body ripples like flan. He rescues a weak joke—"I was in a Skrillex cover group called wooomp"—with an eyes-closed expression so lugubrious you can't help but chuckle. Ostrovsky is funny in the elemental way that sports mascots or rubber balls are funny. Major Behavior's effectiveness as satire is limited, though, because Diplo doesn't take himself too seriously to begin with. Major Lazer—which started out in the late 00s as a sincere attempt to bridge Caribbean dancehall with American electronic pop—has since metastasized into a winningly goofy brand that provides a tongue-in-cheek Twerking Experience at festivals and undergrad Spring Formals. Headlines like "Diplo Attempts to Break Twerking "World Record" With Twerk-Wall at Electric Zoo" and videos like "Bubble Butt" demonstrate how Major Lazer have immunized themselves to parody through winking exaggeration. As such, Major Behavior feels less like a biting critique of the group and more like a brand extension. Presumably this all culminates with Ostrovsky taking the stage at a Major Lazer show, clad in gold hot pants and slapping his belly to the beat of "Pon De Floor." You may be in the audience, and you may laugh. You won't be able to help it.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4x8qpg/fat-jew-major-lazer-cover-band-major-behavior-video

Noisey

Vice

2016-09-01 13:56:00

2016

9.0

1

Noisey Staff

Here’s Eleven from ‘Stranger Things,’ Millie Bobby Brown, Rapping Nicki Minaj’s “Monster” Verse

You don’t need to have watched Netflix’s Stranger Things to appreciate this video of Millie Bobby Brown, Eleven on the show, perfectly running through Nicki Minaj’s verse from “Monster.” Brown—who was, um, six-years-old when “Monster” came out—manages to go through the whole thing while fucking her co-stars up with silly string, too. The best thing here though? Fallon’s face. The man is like Bill Clinton on balloons. Jimmy Fallon just wants to hang out, play with silly string, and occasionally get hammered at bars on the Lower East Side. My kinda guy. Watch the video below. .@Stranger_Things's @milliebbrown shows off a hidden talent -- rapping @NICKIMINAJ's verse from "Monster" pic.twitter.com/4eTTRB5oqA Follow Noisey on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvpaj5/eleven-stranger-things-minaj-monster

Noisey

Vice

2016-03-29 08:30:22

2016

3.0

29

Mark Bergen

Google's Alphabet Has a CEO Problem

The Alphabet companies not named Google make up just 6 percent of the entire tech conglomeration’s workforce, but they account for a growing share of its headaches. Those frustrations are less about the technical hurdles of these lofty moonshots than a concern commonplace with startups: A crisis of leadership. Google co-founders, now Alphabet honchos, really want to replicate their search engine’s success across a range of industries with operations run like startups. To do that, though, they have to face a dilemma inherent in their structure. That is, they must find execs willing to work within Alphabet’s corporate umbrella, and teams willing to work with their chosen execs. A trio of developments has emerged in the last two weeks underscoring this tension. First, there was the Bloomberg report that Google is selling Boston Dynamics, its unit that builds dexterous, humanoid robots. Then there was a damning tale of the struggles inside Nest, Alphabet’s connected device company, and its mercurial CEO, Tony Fadell. Finally, the bio-tech trade publication STAT released another damning story on Monday about Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences company, accusing its chief exec of alienating employees and business partners. With the first two cases, Alphabet’s newfound financial strictness was named as a key factor. Bloomberg cited internal emails from a Google exec voicing concern over the unit’s lack of a short-term revenue plan. Similarly, Fadell pointed to the parent company’s prudence to defend troubles at his own. “The fiscal discipline era has now descended upon everything,” Fadell told The Information. (Google and its Alphabets all declined to comment.) It’s true that, with Google’s new structure, the company is attempting to manage costs and revenue roadmaps for its most ambitious endeavors. But that’s only half the story. Consider the other grandiose projects within Alphabet — self-driving cars, Internet balloons and the longevity-research lab Calico — that don’t appear to face pressure to generate cash immediately. (Aside from Nest, Verily and Google Fiber, the broadband business, no other non-Google company produces any revenue now.) According to these three reports and multiple sources, the root of these particular corporate hiccups is with leadership squabbles, namely with the exec at the top. For Nest, some of the business’s difficulties stemmed from internal clashes, primarily around the acquisition of security-camera startup Dropcam, which soured dramatically. Several former employees accuse Fadell of a micromanagement that stifles product releases. Fadell openly belittled Dropcam’s staff to The Information, calling them “not as good as [he] had hoped.” Others familiar with Nest spoke of a mismatch of expectations internally and a rift between Fadell’s assertive style and the more experimental, laissez-faire culture at Google. While Nest suffers from executive turmoil, Alphabet’s robotics struggle has the opposite problem: A leadership vacuum. Boston Dynamics came to Google with its slew of robotics acquisitions in 2013, orchestrated by former Android chief Andy Rubin. The robot makers operated fairly independently from the others, which were primarily software focused, but remained integral to Rubin’s vision of a formidable artificial intelligence operation, according to a source familiar with the deal. But Rubin left a year after. And until recently, the entire division was essentially homeless inside Google, draining talent steadily; James Kuffner, who filled Rubin’s spot, left for Toyota in January. Likewise, the STAT story reveals a steady exodus of top-level medical talent from Alphabet’s Verily, reportedly over discontent with its CEO, Andy Conrad. Our earlier reporting on Verily, which has eked out some revenue in pharmaceutical partnerships, has developed a reputation in the biotech industry for a lack of focus. Michael Luther, a former research partner with Conrad, gave the publication this blistering quote: “We used to joke and call [Conrad] the ‘seagull of science.’ He used to fly in, squawk, crap over everything, and fly away.” Earlier this month, at a conference in San Diego, Conrad said he was planning to add a thousand staffers in the coming months. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11587320/googles-alphabet-nest-verily-ceo-problem

Vox

2017-08-08 07:04:00

2017

8.0

8

Pilot Viruet

Laverne Cox, Lena Waithe, and More Explain Why Representation Matters

At Friday's Television Critics Association press tour, GLAAD hosted two panels dedicated to emphasizing the necessity of representation in media: "Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Trends on TV" and "Transgender Trends on TV." Each panel boasted an impressive roster of names: The first featured Megan Townsend (director of entertainment research at GLAAD), Stephanie Beatriz (Danger & Eggs), Wilson Cruz (Star Trek: Discovery), Pete Nowalk (How To Get Away with Murder), Lena Waithe (Master of None), and Emily Andras (Wynonna Earp); the second featured Nick Adams (director of transgender media & representation at GLAAD), Alexandra Billings (HTGAWM), Laverne Cox (Orange Is The New Black), Jill Soloway (Transparent), Shadi Petosky (Danger & Eggs), and Rhys Ernst (Transparent). The panels—easily my personal highlight of the tour so far—were both informative and imperative and a welcome addition. Even though it may seem like television has been making strides to push away from the cis-, straight-, and male-dominated narratives that are abundant in media, it's still very obvious that we have a lot of work to do. As the GLAAD presentation noted, even though there has been an increase in LGBTQ characters (it counted 278 regular and recurring on television and streaming), it's not enough when you take into account how much television there is (and that these characters, when they do exist, are still mostly male and white). Transgender characters are even more scarce: There are only 11 trans characters, and three are of them are on Transparent. And, Townsend emphasized, so many of these characters still fall prey to stereotypes—particularly bisexual characters. Men are "portrayed as these kind of wicked, villainous characters" whose bisexuality is tied to why they're "bad" people while women are "depicted as lacking morals or kind of to be scheming manipulators." (TV Tropes calls this the "Depraved Bisexual" and features many examples.) As for the "Bury Your Gays" trope, since 2015, more than 50 queer women have been killed on television, and two queer characters were killed off just last week (on Power and Kingdom). When these deaths occur over and over, "as a queer woman, if you're watching TV, you kind of learn 'OK, I can't have a happy ending. I am never going to find love. I'm not going to live a happy, long life with my partner,'" said Townsend. During both panels, panelists echoed how much we need positive representation because often, how our identities are portrayed on television can dictate how people view us in real life—or how we view ourselves. As Nick Adams explained, GLAAD looked at 134 episodes (aired between 2002 to 2014) with trans characters and "88 percent of them were either straight up defamatory or barely passable as mediocre." They were psychopaths, murderers, victims, "a dead body laying on the ground," and sex worker was the most common profession. These negative portrayals have lasting, harmful effects on trans folks, especially younger children and teens. Transparent director Rhys Ernst recalled a specific memory of the first time he saw a trans man on television: "The way he was depicted was so sad and horrible and pitying. Everybody sort of stared at him like he was such a freak, and it was just mortifying. And I immediately identified that I was like him," Ernst said, explaining that he wanted to hide that part of him because he couldn't stomach the image. Jill Soloway brought up the "It's Pat" recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live as being an "awful piece of anti-trans propaganda" and a "hateful, awful thing to do to non-binary people." Alexandra Billings, who talked bluntly about how trans women of color are "systematically hunted" and about her "many nights in jail" because she wasn't wearing at least three articles of male clothing, later said that "the fact that we have any kind of trans representation on television right now that is positive, that speaks to people of color—that is inclusive—is remarkable and a gift." Intersectionality was also an important topic of the panels. Lena Waithe, who wrote Master of None's standout "Thanksgiving" episode (and became the first black woman nominated for an Emmy in comedy writing), spoke about how she felt a personal responsibility to tell stories for queer people of color, but she's still trying to convince "certain networks and studios to make shows where a queer person of color is the lead. "Insecure is phenomenal, but now imagine if Issa's character is a lesbian. How dope would that be?" But, Waithe said, she still needs "the business to kind of work with me." It's so vital for young people—and particularly young people of color—to see themselves reflected back on the screen in positive, multi-dimensional characters. That's what makes shows like Danger & Eggs so essential, as Stephanie Beatriz explained. Amazon's animated children's series—created by trans woman Shadi Petosky—features queer, trans, and non-binary characters, with the season finale even taking place during a pride parade. "It's so critical to me that that show and others like it are introduced to children at an early age... I believe in that show so much that I literally got one of the characters tattooed on my arm." A television series like Danger & Eggs helps children see themselves and feel better and more accepting of their own identities (and those of others), whatever those may be. Throughout the discussion, many of the panelists spoke about what an impact seeing positive representations of their identity on screen had on their lives: Waithe cited when Shug and Celie kissed in The Color Purple; Laverne Cox mentioned Candis Cayne on Dirty Sexy Money. These characters allowed Waithe and Cox to see themselves—now, they want to do the same for others. It should be noted, an ultimate goal these panelists share isn't to litter television with perfect LGBTQ characters but rather to get to a point where these characters aren't just defined by being members of the LGBTQ community. They want them to be heroes and villains, and everything in between. "I don't think anybody up here would say that there are not LGBTQ people who do not do bad things," Wilson Cruz said, and continued that the problem stems from these characters being depicted as bad because they're also gay or trans. "We're all human beings," Cruz affirmed, "And as an actor, you want the opportunity to play a human, not a caricature or a cartoon." Follow Pilot Viruet on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nezaaz/laverne-cox-lena-waithe-and-more-explain-why-representation-matters

Entertainment

Vice

2019-06-30 00:00:00

2019

6.0

30

Japan's Abe offers Saudi crown prince help in reducing oil dependency

OSAKA (Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday praised Saudi Arabia’s efforts to reduce its dependence on oil and promised Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that Japan will help the kingdom with a sweeping reform plan. “Saudi Arabia’s ‘Vision 2030’ is an unprecedented major reform aimed at shifting away from dependence on oil and at diversifying industry, under your majesty’s initiative,” Abe told the crown prince at the beginning of a bilateral meeting after a summit of Group of 20 leaders in the city of Osaka. “Japan will continue its utmost efforts by government and the private sector to help achieve its success,” Abe said. Riyadh announced the reform plan in 2016, with goals ranging from overhauling its state-owned Public Investment Fund to increasing visits of Muslim pilgrims and encouraging more Saudis to play sports. Despite last October’s murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi agents, big investors are pushing ahead with deals and pouring money back into its stock market as well as Vision 2030 projects that aim to diversify the economy of the world’s top oil exporter and create jobs. “Saudi wants to do the utmost to continue our old - but new - strong partnership with Japan,” the crown prince told Abe through an interpreter. Reporting by Tetsushi Kajimoto; Editing by William Mallard, Robert Birsel

https://www.reuters.com/article/g20-summit-japan-saudi/japans-abe-offers-saudi-crown-prince-help-in-reducing-oil-dependency-idUSL4N241027

World News

Reuters

2017-03-29 00:00:00

2017

3.0

29

The Weeknd Cuts Selena Gomez's PDA Short in Argentina

The Weeknd was all about Selena Gomez's public cuddling ... until he noticed paparazzi watching. Paps got the couple Tuesday showing some extreme PDA while strolling around Buenos Aires before Abel's gig later this week. He seems down with her clinging onto him ... but watch what happens when he sees the camera guy across the street. Back to basics ... hand-holding 101.

https://www.tmz.com/2017/03/29/the-weeknd-cuts-selena-gomez-pda-short/

TMZ

2019-07-05 00:00:00

2019

7.0

5

John Kemp

RPT-COLUMN-U.S. diesel consumption hit by economic slowdown: Kemp

(Repeats July 4 column with no changes to text. John Kemp is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own.) * Chartbook: tmsnrt.rs/2FPNnDi By John Kemp LONDON, July 4 (Reuters) - U.S. consumption of diesel and other middle distillate fuels is decelerating in line with the wider slowdown in manufacturing and construction activity. Consumption of distillate fuel oil was up by 3% in the three months from February to April compared with the same period a year earlier, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Consumption growth has fallen from more than 5% year-on-year in the three months from August to October and the trend is slowing despite short-term volatility (“Petroleum Supply Monthly”, EIA, June 28). Distillate fuel oils are mostly used in manufacturing, freight transport, construction, mining, oil and gas production, and farming - as well as small amounts for home and commercial heating, especially in the U.S. northeast. Distillate consumption is therefore most heavily exposed to the business cycle and the recent slowdown is consistent with business surveys and government data showing the rate of economic growth is decelerating. Farm diesel consumption has been hit by heavy rains and flooding across the Midwest which has delayed or even cancelled the traditional planting season. Midwest distillate consumption was up by just 2% in February-April compared with the same period a year earlier, down from peak growth of more than 4% in August-October. But the distillate slowdown cannot be wholly or mainly attributed to the farm sector’s severe weather problems (tmsnrt.rs/2FPNnDi). Fuel consumption has slowed even more sharply in the states along the East Coast to less than 1% in February-April down from almost 7% in August-October. Gulf Coast and West Coast consumption growth also shows signs of levelling off or slowing after accelerating for much of last year. Slowing distillate consumption growth is consistent with a broad range of other indicators pointing to a sharp slowdown in manufacturing and a downturn in construction and freight transportation. Hedge funds have responded by turning a bullish net long position in distillate futures and options of as much as 63 million barrels in October into a bearish net short position of 19 million barrels by the middle of June. By June, hedge funds’ outlook for distillate prices, as measured by the ratio of their long to short positions, had become the most negative since the middle of 2017 and before that the economy-wide slowdown of 2015/16. Since then, fund managers have covered some of their short positions, which has helped lift oil prices from their mid-June lows. The outlook for the rest of the year depends on whether the current softness in manufacturing and construction activity proves to be just a mid-cycle slowdown followed by re-acceleration or an end-of-cycle recession. Related columns: - Global economy heading for trouble as manufacturing and construction shrink (Reuters, July 3) - Oil prices get a lift from short-covering (Reuters, July 1) - Global economic slowdown hits oil consumption (Reuters, June 19) - Global economic slowdown hits diesel consumption (Reuters, May 29) (Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-diesel-kemp/rpt-column-us-diesel-consumption-hit-by-economic-slowdown-kemp-idUSL8N2452VJ

Davos

Reuters

2018-11-07 14:13:45

2018

11.0

7

Recode Staff

Recode Daily: Democrats take the House, San Francisco votes for a homelessness tax on big business

Democrats took back the House while Republicans built on their majority in the Senate in one of the hardest-fought, most expensive midterm elections in U.S. history. The two parties each posted wins on Election Day, with Democrats taking over at least 26 seats in the House to give them the majority as Republicans held onto important Senate seats in high-profile contests in Florida and Texas. Here’s what the Democrats’ takeover of the House could mean for President Trump. And for the latest on all the races, visit Vox.com’s election results page. [Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns / The New York Times] [Want to get the Recode Daily in your inbox? Subscribe here.] San Francisco voters passed Proposition C, a first-of-its-kind tax measure that has divided the tech community and sparked a national debate about the industry’s responsibility to fix the city’s homelessness crisis. Supported by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and opposed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, Prop. C will raise the city’s gross receipts tax by an average of .5 percent on annual gross receipts over $50 million that companies like Square, Lyft and Salesforce generate. The new funds will bring in an estimated $250 million to $300 million a year — twice what the city currently spends on an annual basis to help the homeless in tech’s de facto capital. [Shirin Ghaffary / Recode] Even before ballots were counted from yesterday’s elections, Google and Facebook emerged as clear winners, reaping windfalls from political advertising after a season of controversy over online political speech. Political ad spending is on course to set a record, exceeding expenditures in the 2016 presidential election year, totaling up to $9 billion. Facebook said it took in $354 million from more than two million ads; Google alone sold about $74.7 million worth of ads that mentioned federal candidates or incumbents. Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke was the biggest political spender on Facebook, placing $7 million in ads; President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again Committee was the No. 2 spender at $3.4 million, and the Trump presidential campaign spent an additional $2.6 million. [Todd Shields, Gerry Smith and Sarah Frier / Bloomberg] Facebook blocked approximately 115 user accounts for “inauthentic behavior” just hours before the polls opened yesterday. U.S. law enforcement officials alerted the social media company to suspicious behavior that was potentially linked to a foreign entity. Facebook said it needs to conduct further analysis to determine if the accounts were linked to the Russia-based Internet Research Agency — an organization special counsel Robert Mueller named in a February indictment for allegedly attempting to sway U.S. public opinion — or to another foreign group. Meanwhile, Facebook said that by the time it blocked the Trump reelection campaign’s racist anti-immigration ad, between three million and five million people had likely already seen it in their Feeds. [Jesus Rodriguez / Politico] Google’s top trending search term in the U.S. on the morning of Election Day was the Spanish translation of “where to vote,” which could suggest that a number of Hispanic-Americans were looking to get out the vote in Tuesday’s midterm elections. The company’s GoogleTrends Twitter account wrote Tuesday morning that “Dónde votar” had surged to the top of the U.S. Google trending search terms list, while other election-related searches including “polling place,” “voting” and “Election Day” dominated other top spots on the trend list. [John Bowden / The Hill] Foxconn is considering bringing in workers from China to help staff a large facility under construction in southern Wisconsin as it struggles to find engineers and other workers in one of the tightest labor markets in the U.S. Wisconsin pledged $3 billion in tax and other “performance-based” incentives to help lure Foxconn, and local authorities added $764 million; Foxconn, the Taiwanese supplier to Apple, promised the state it would invest $10 billion and build a 22-million-square-foot liquid-crystal display panel plant, hiring 13,000 employees, primarily factory workers along with some engineers and business support positions. [Yang Jie, Shayndi Raice and Eric Morath / The Wall Street Journal] Bill Gates believes the world needs better toilets. So he held the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing, a chance for companies to showcase their takes on the simple bathroom fixture, including toilets that could separate urine from other waste for more efficient treatment, or that recycled water for hand-washing and sported solar roofs. The reinvented toilets on display are a culmination of seven years of research and $200 million given by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Gates pledged $200 million more yesterday in an effort get companies to see human waste as a big business — he said improved sanitation could end 500,000 infant deaths and save $233 billion annually in costs linked to diseases caused by poor water, sanitation and hygiene. [Sui-Lee Wee / The New York Times] How Amazon’s proposed HQ2 and HQ3 locations compare with Seattle and the U.S. overall. Crystal City and Long Island City have high office vacancy rates and are both cheaper places to buy homes than Seattle. [Rani Molla] On Election Day, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower is blasting Facebook for still not doing enough. Christopher Wylie knows a bit about voter manipulation. [Kurt Wagner and Theodore Schleifer] American capitalism broke in the 1980s. Can it be fixed? Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein talks about his new book, “Can American Capitalism Survive?” on Recode Decode. [Kara Swisher] People raised more than $70,000 to send pizza to voters waiting in line. Polling places ran out of “I voted” stickers, so voters made their own. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2018/11/7/18069936/midterms-election-political-ad-spending-google-facebook-foxconn-wisconsin-gates-toilet-amazon-hq2

Vox

2018-09-06 00:00:00

2018

9.0

6

Nate Raymond

Maryland charges Insys with engaging in deceptive opioid scheme

(Reuters) - Maryland on Thursday charged Insys Therapeutics Inc with deceptively marketing a powerful opioid pain killer so that it was prescribed inappropriately beyond its intended use with cancer patients. Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh announced that he had filed administrative charges against Arizona-based Insys, which he said provided thousands of dollars in inducements to doctors to promote prescribing its medication Subsys to their patients. The company declined comment. It has said that it has taken steps to prevent past mistakes from happening again. Maryland alleged the company influenced doctors to prescribe the drug beyond its labeled use with inducements that included payments purported to be compensation for participating in educational events. In one instance the company supplied the drug for a doctor’s own illegal use and in another a sales representative engaged in a sexual relationship with a doctor, the state said. The state alleged that over 90 percent of the prescriptions for Subsys in Maryland ultimately were for patients who should never have received the product, an under-the-tongue spray that contains fentanyl, an opioid 100 times stronger than morphine. “The allegations against Insys describe a calculated scheme employing doctors, pharmacist, and sales reps to increase profits and market share at the expense of the health and well-being of vulnerable patients,” Frosh said in a statement. The state’s case, which would be heard by an administrative law judge, seeks to recover of all funds Insys earned through the scheme plus penalties. Frosh’s office said Insys earned more than $20 million in Maryland from its conduct. The case added to the legal woes of Insys, whose former top executives have been caught up in a federal criminal investigation into accusations the company paid medical practitioners kickbacks to prescribe Subsys. Those executives include billionaire founder John Kapoor, who has pleaded not guilty to racketeering conspiracy and other charges. Insys in August said it reached a deal to pay at least $150 million to resolve a U.S. Justice Department probe. Federal prosecutors in Boston say that beginning in 2012, Kapoor, former Chief Executive Michael Babich and others conspired to bribe doctors to prescribe Subsys and to defraud insurers into paying for it. Babich has also pleaded not guilty. Insys previously settled cases by attorneys general in Oregon, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Illinois for $9.45 million. It faces lawsuits by several other states as well. Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Cynthia Osterman

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-insys-opioids/maryland-charges-insys-with-engaging-in-deceptive-opioid-scheme-idUSKCN1LM2HI

U.S. Legal News

Reuters

2016-01-31 00:00:00

2016

1.0

31

Susan Sarandon - Lots of Support At SAG Awards

Susan Sarandon let it kinda all hang out at the SAG Awards. The actress wore a bandeau -- look it up -- under a blazer and it got some double takes. She's 69 -- seriously -- so she's killin' it.

https://www.tmz.com/2016/01/31/susan-suranden-sag-awards-cleavage/

TMZ

2016-06-23 00:00:00

2016

6.0

23

Sinead O'Connor: Suicide Watch on Chicago Bridges

Cops are on the hunt for Sinead O'Connor after someone in her family told cops she's threatening to kill herself. Chicago PD got a call from Irish authorities saying Sinead contacted her family an hour ago and said she was suicidal and planned to jump off a bridge in the Chicago area. We're told cops actually spotted someone who looked like she fit the profile but it wasn't Sinead. TMZ obtained scanner audio from the PD giving officers the heads up. We're told there's not an active search ... but cops were told to be on the lookout. Sinead's been struggling with depression lately -- just last month she was reported missing and her friends and family feared suicide -- she was later found at a Chicago hotel.

https://www.tmz.com/2016/06/23/sinead-oconnor-suicide-bridge-cops-scanner/

TMZ

2018-04-12 15:08:39

2018

4.0

12

Shirin Ghaffary

WeWork is on an acquisition spree — and they’re all over the board

WeWork’s purchase of Chinese co-working startup Naked Hub marks its sixth acquisition in the past eight months. Since raising $4.4 billion from SoftBank — whose CEO has told founder Adam Neumann to grow WeWork “10 times bigger than your original plan” — the company has been acquiring companies at a rapid pace, averaging one about every two months. Most of its deals have been outside of WeWork’s core business of renting out work space, ranging from education tech to apps for construction workers, and have been for undisclosed amounts. Here’s a frequently updated list of the companies WeWork has acquired: Naked Hub (April 2018) — A Chinese co-working startup with a large presence in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. The deal marks WeWork’s second acquisition of a co-working competitor. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but Bloomberg reported the sale was for $400 million. The move comes at a time when WeWork is planning most of its growth outside the U.S. Conductor (March 2018) — A digital marketing startup that helps businesses target advertisements to their customers based on user data. WeWork says it plans to run Conductor as a separate line of business available to WeWork members and non-members. Meetup (November 2017) — The website that CEO Scott Heiferman started with the idea to “use the internet to get people off the internet” and help people with similar interests — say, vegetarian rock climbers or corgi owners — meet up in real life and do things together. WeWork acquired it for around $200 million, according to Axios. Neumann said WeWork plans to use Meetup to “bring people together around the things that matter most to them.” Flatiron School (October 2017) — A private coding academy in Manhattan that specializes in a 15-week software engineering program. WeWork has since expanded it by opening a school in Brooklyn that offers students no tuition upfront, but instead a repayment plan. Unomy (August 2017) — An Israeli sales and marketing platform tech company. According to its website, it’s no longer offered as a service, and shut down as of September 2017. Spacemob (August 2017) — A Singapore-based co-working company. Soon after the acquisition, WeWork allotted $500 million for expansion to Southeast Asia and South Korea. Fieldlens (June 2017) — Mobile apps designed for construction workers to communicate faster. Welkio (March 2016) — A digital sign-in system for guests at an office. Case (August 2015) — A firm that built technology for property builders. WeWork has since made Case’s apps open source. In addition to these acquisitions, in the past year WeWork has also bought a large stake in Wavegarden, which makes wave pools; purchased the iconic Lord & Taylor flagship department store building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, which will serve as its new corporate headquarters; and led a $32 million investment round in The Wing, a co-working/membership club for women. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2018/3/7/17086788/wework-acquisition-list-conductor-meetup-flatiron

Vox

2018-08-24 12:40:02

2018

8.0

24

Brian Resnick

Genetic risk for heart attacks, and the new tests to find it, explained

In the United States, around 735,000 people each year have a heart attack. In all, heart disease (and its complications, including heart attacks) kills 610,000 a year here, making it the leading cause of death in America and worldwide. Preventing heart disease is a huge public health challenge. And right now doctors have good, but limited, options for finding out who is at greatest risk for it. Doctors know that about half the risk for heart disease comes from lifestyle choices: how much, and what, a person is eating, how much alcohol they drink, if they smoke. The other half is related to genetics, and it’s much harder to assess. You can ask a person about their family history of heart disease and can check for high blood pressure and obesity, which are also related to genetics. But up until the recent explosion in genetic science, it was hard to probe the genes themselves. Last week, in the journal Nature Genetics, researchers at Harvard University and the Broad Institute published evidence that they can check out 6 million spots in a person’s genome to assess their risk for developing coronary artery disease, when the main blood vessel supplying the heart with oxygen gets clogged with plaque. It’s a precursor to a heart attack, when a clot cuts off blood flow to the heart, starving it of oxygen. In the study, people who carried the greatest number of genetic variants suggestive of heart attack risk were three or more times likely to develop coronary artery disease than controls. The researchers argue that with this test, about one in 12 people could be identified as having a higher risk of heart attack based on their genetics alone. “If you told me there was a genetic score that could identify 8 percent of the population with more than a threefold risk, I’d say, that’s amazing,” Robert Yeh, a cardiologist at the Smith Center for Outcomes Research in Cardiology, who was not involved in the study, says. Currently, the best commonly available genetic test for heart disease risk — which looks for a single gene linked to high cholesterol — can only detect increased risk in 0.4 percent of people. “The big takeaway is that we can now capture the inherited component to heart attack risk with a single number,” Sekar Kathiresan, the Massachusetts General Hospital cardiologist and geneticist who led the study, says. With this new tool, Kathiresan hopes doctors could put those people at higher risk on cholesterol-lowering medications (statins) at an earlier age, or more easily persuade them to make lifestyle changes to lower their risk. The new tool here is called a polygenic risk score, which you can think of as a tally of the tiny changes in your genome that are correlated with risk of developing a disease. In the coming years, you’re going to hear a lot more about them. These scores, while increasingly helpful in some areas of medicine, come with a lot of caveats. Indeed, when you dig a bit deeper into this latest Nature Genetics paper, you find there’s a lot more work to do to validate polygenic risk scores for heart disease, so they will be useful and relevant to people around the globe. For one: This study was exclusively conducted with subjects in the UK of white European background. The predictions derived from this group do not necessarily transfer over to another. For this and other reasons, scientists skeptical of polygenic risk scores say they are not yet ready for the clinic — and wonder if they will ever be. At the same time, it seems likely these polygenic risk scores are going to change the way we think about our health and our medical decision-making. Over the past decade, medical researchers have realized that our risk for many common conditions like heart disease and diabetes are not influenced by just one gene, or even a small handful of them. Instead, studies analyzing huge numbers of human genomes have found that there are hundreds of genes that work in constellation influencing our risk for diseases. DNA is the recipe for our biology. But it turns out that recipe looks something like an M.C. Escher drawing, with a huge number of genes influencing life outcomes in hard-to-understand, hard-to-follow, interconnected ways. That is, there can be hundreds of interrelated spots in the genome that are correlated with a person’s risk for heart disease, or raising or lowering their height by a millimeter. Scientists are getting better at identifying these spots in the genome that confer risk and are now trying to figure out if tallying up these genetic changes — in what’s known as a “polygenic risk score” — is useful in trying to predict, and prevent, disease. (They are also calculating them for behavioral traits like educational attainment.) In developing polygenic risk scores, in many cases, genetics researchers often don’t know what the underlying genes do. All they know is that these genes are correlated with — which does not mean cause — the disease. “It’s pretty mindless,” says Cecile Janssens, an epidemiologist at Emory University who is critical of the hype of polygenic risk scores. Proponents of polygenic scoring, though, argue that you don’t need to know what the genes are doing to make predictions off them. “It’s all about getting a predictor and then repeating it in other groups,” Kathiresan says. “At the end of the day, I could just call it a magic number generator. It doesn’t exactly matter how I’m getting there, as long as it works in other groups equally well.” That’s what happened in this latest paper. A polygenic risk score derived from huge genome-wide association studies predicted heart attack risk in nearly 300,000 people in the UK. (Read more about how scientists come up with polygenic risk scores here.) Because each change in the genome — called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced “snip”) — confers such a tiny change in risk, adding more and more of them to the risk score yields diminishing returns. “We see this trend already for years — every new SNP that we discover has a smaller effect than we knew already,” Janssens, says. In the recent Nature Genetics study, she points out, when the researchers increased the number of SNPs in their risk model from 74 to 6 million, the predictive power of the test only increased by a smidgen. Most of those SNPs have a predictive power of approximately zero. Here’s a chart showing where the polygenic risk score for coronary artery disease matters most. Polygenic scores, like so many human traits, are normally distributed, meaning they follow the pattern of the bell curve. But a person’s risk for coronary artery disease really only starts to increase if they have the very highest number of SNPs that are correlated with heart disease risk. The top 8 percent of the participants had a three times greater risk of heart disease. The top 0.5 percent had five times the risk. There are many caveats to this risk prediction, which the authors of the study acknowledge. One is that it’s currently unclear if predicting heart attack risk in this manner provides an additional benefit to the risk models derived from asking people simple questions about their lifestyle and family history. The researchers suspect it does, but they didn’t set up their study to test this question. Another is that this risk model was developed and tested solely on people who had donated their medical and genetic information to the UK Biobank, which contains only genetic data of people of white, European ancestry. The predictive power of these tests is expected to diminish in people of African ancestry, Asian ancestry, and so on. Genetics researchers will need to repeat polygenic risk studies with data from these populations if these predictions are truly going to be useful and equitable. And yet one more: We shouldn’t take it for granted that intervening with early medication or lifestyle changes for the people at highest risk will make a difference in lowering their risk. Other studies have found that people with higher genetic risk scores for atherosclerosis tend to receive a stronger benefit from statins. But the question needs further testing. All that said, Yeh, the research cardiologist, says there’s still a lot of optimism around these scores. Current risk factors for heart disease, like high blood pressure or family history, don’t always help single out who truly is most at risk. “The majority of being who develop coronary artery disease are not people who have a multitude of cardiac risk factors,” Yeh says. “About half of people have just one risk factor, high blood pressure alone. People like that, although they only have one cardiac risk factor, sometimes none, they wouldn’t think of themselves of [having] a very high elevated risk for coronary artery disease.” A genetic risk factor could help narrow it down. Polygenic risk scores, says Eric Topol, a cardiologist and geneticist with Scripps Research, “are going to take hold in common medical practice. It’s a matter of when, not if.” And they’ll be used for conditions outside of heart disease. Indeed, in the latest Nature Genetics study, the researchers also calculated risk scores for diabetes, atrial fibrillation (irregular heart rhythm), inflammatory bowel disease, and breast cancer. The genetic tests for these conditions found fewer people at elevated risk than the tests for heart disease. And not every test will be equally predictive. Kathiresan points out that while only 8 percent of the study participants were singled out for elevated risk for coronary artery disease, about 20 percent of all the participants were flagged as having elevated risk for at least one of the diseases listed above. And while these scores are now being generated for all kinds of health and behavioral issues, medicine isn’t really ready to implement them. Huge questions remain. For instance, while it’s possible to do a genetic risk assessment of an infant, or even an embryo, does it make sense or is it even ethical for new parents to learn their embryos or newborns are at a threefold risk for heart disease? Doctors will also have to think long and hard about how they discuss these kinds of risks with their patients. Scoring in the 70th percentile of risk for coronary artery disease may sound scary, but it won’t increase a person’s chances of getting that disease by all that much. There are also likely to be unintended consequences of giving patients a new health metric to fear. Consider what happened with cholesterol, a risk factor for heart disease that people began being commonly tested for in the 1980s. Fear of cholesterol came to inspire low-fat food trends. Those dietary trends made food companies money, but they didn’t necessarily make people healthier, especially as many of the foods marketed as low-fat were still loaded with sugar. What happens when some huckster starts selling vitamins to complement a polygenic risk score, or some other forms of woo? (Currently, you can buy a customized diet guide based on a sequencing of your DNA.) There’s a lot of education that needs to happen here to prevent genetic risk prediction from becoming genetic astrology. For now, aside from a polygenic risk score for breast cancer, these tests don’t yet exist in the clinic. But they’re going to get easier and easier to discover on your own. If you have your genetics data from a commercial company like 23andMe, you can upload it to a number of sites on the internet to see your risk scores for a slew of traits and diseases. Kathiresan’s team is hoping to build a free tool for people to assess their coronary artery disease risk in this manner. Here’s a reasonable fear: It’s going to be hard for consumers, without much input from doctors, to know when the risk scores matter and when they do not. Heck, you can currently take a genetics test for intelligence that really won’t tell you anything valuable. It’s possible to develop polygenic risk score for loneliness, baldness, marital status, or really any human trait that is even vaguely influenced by genes. It takes more information — like odds ratios — to know whether those scores really matter in your life. It will also be hard to know what to do to diminish risk. A high polygenic score for breast cancer might mean a woman wants to make more frequent mammogram appointments, Janssens says. But the current recommendations for people at higher risk of heart disease are things everyone should be doing: living a healthy lifestyle free of tobacco. “I actually think there’s going to be a whole [medical] field that emerges, kind of like radiology emerged in 1900 with the invention of X-rays,” Kathiresan says, “where [doctors] are basically interpreting that genetic information for medical risk.” That field needs to start up soon, because there’s a lot more coming.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/24/17759772/genetics-polygenic-risk-heart-disease-nature

Vox

2016-06-27 10:30:03

2016

6.0

27

Eric Johnson

This is why your fears about artificial intelligence are wrong

Artificial intelligence will take over the world! Or so we’re told by the movies. We’re all doomed to become "house cats" if the machines so desire! Or so prominent experts like Elon Musk have warned. Humbug, say Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky. On the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, the co-founders of Numenta (who previously co-founded Palm and Handspring) predicted AI will indeed drive technological advances for the rest of the century ... but they threw water on the idea that intelligent machines would behave as they do in popular fiction. "There’s very smart people, whether it’s Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Stephen Hawking, who have said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really dangerous,’" Hawkins said. "You imagine these things becoming crazy and alive and taking over the world. It is so far from that, it is crazy. The current technology is not even on a road to true intelligence. It’s just not going to happen." Dubinsky explained that a lot of what we call machine learning today isn’t learning in the traditional sense. Computers are being taught to recognize, for instance, pictures of cats by being shown millions of pictures that have already been labeled "cat." However, Numenta claims that it is trying to develop artificial intelligence that thinks the way a human does ... to a point. "This is a generalized approach," Dubinsky said. "It’s about a learning machine. Your child is born and its brain doesn’t have stuff in it. It learns from what it’s exposed to." Hawkins stressed that Numenta is specifically trying to reverse engineer only part of the human brain: The neocortex, which is what lets us learn and create a model of the world based on our environments and experiences. The company is officially uninterested in engineering the 25 percent of the brain that controls emotions like anger. "We didn't evolve to do mathematics, but our brains can do it," he said. "Imagine you could build a brain that’s a million times faster than a human, never gets tired, and it’s tuned to be a mathematician. We could advance mathematical theories extremely rapidly." "This machine doesn’t want to eat, it doesn’t want to have sex, it’s not jealous that you got the tuna sandwich," Hawkins added. "That’s the kind of thing we can look forward to: Machines that are brilliant and smart." On the new podcast, Dubinsky and Hawkins also discussed their history as entrepreneurial partners dating back to the early 1990s, the biggest challenges currently facing machine intelligence and why you shouldn’t listen to tech pundits who won’t shut up about mobile. "I find it very amusing when people now say, ‘The future is mobile!’" Dubinsky said. "No, no, no. Seeing that the future was mobile 20 years before it happened is the hard part. Seeing that the future is mobile once you’re in the midst of it, that’s not the future any more." You can listen to Recode Decode in the audio player above, or subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn and Stitcher. If you like this show, you should also sample our other podcasts: If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on iTunes — and if you don’t, just tweet-strafe Kara. Tune in next Monday for another episode of Recode Decode! This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2016/6/27/12037248/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-numenta-jeff-hawkins-donna-dubinsky-podcast

Vox

2018-01-18 18:59:58

2018

1.0

18

Tony Romm

A bill to put more self-driving cars on U.S. roads is stuck in the Senate

An ambitious attempt by U.S. lawmakers to put more self-driving cars on the country’s roads has stalled out in the Senate, where some Democrats are raising new doubts about the technology. For a few senior party lawmakers, the fear is that these computer-driven vehicles aren’t yet ready for major roadways or might be susceptible to cyber attacks. So they’re standing in the way of a Senate vote on the bill, demanding changes that they say are essential to protect riders’ safety. Chief among the critics is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose state of California is a home base and critical testing ground for companies like Uber, Tesla and Google. In December, Feinstein sounded off in early opposition to lawmakers’ self-driving car bill. And in an interview Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol, the Democratic lawmaker doubled down — stressing that she is “apprehensive as to whether we’re ready” for a world in which highly autonomous sedans share the road with humans. “It seems to me that you have to have a period of time where these cars are put on roads, but not necessarily heavily impacted California freeways that are going 65 to 75 miles an hour,” she said. “That’s my view, and I’m a driver, and I know I wouldn’t feel very comfortable.” In California, though, Google search giant’s self-driving car division, Waymo, racked up roughly 636,000 miles’ worth of rides on local roads just last year. In a sign of the stakes, the company even paid Feinstein a visit in Washington, D.C., this week to try to pitch her on the technology. “People need to be assured, and they need to be assured over time,” Feinstein told Recode. “And you can’t just dump something on a freeway and have people looking over saying, ‘My God, there’s no driver.’” Members of Congress first set their sights on autonomous vehicles this spring, beginning in the House. Lawmakers there specifically sought to help tech giants and automakers obtain special exemptions so that they could test droves of new experimental vehicles around the country — without adhering to the same safety standards that apply to older cars. Their bill, called the Self-Drive Act, won swift, broad approval from House Democrats and Republicans alike. But the Senate has squabbled a bit more over its own proposal, the AV START Act. Since last fall, chamber pols have raised a litany of objections, from the protections afforded to driver data collected by cars to the effects they might have on the trucking industry. And when architects like Republican Sen. John Thune sought to bring the bill up for a speedy, final vote, some skeptical Democrats and Republicans intervened to hit the brakes, placing official holds on the measure that prevented it from being considered and approved. Among those expressing skepticism at the time was Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who told Recode in a statement that autonomous-driving technology is still “an emerging and unproven technology.” “As it stands, this bill does not include enough protections to keep drivers, passengers and pedestrians safe,” he said in December, “but I’m hopeful we can strengthen these safeguards while allowing for limited testing and continued innovation.” His office did not comment this week as to whether the senator remains opposed. Last month, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey similarly raised a formal objection with the bill. And on Thursday, an aide to the Democratic lawmaker said he still has his doubts — and aims to “strengthen provisions in the bill related to automotive defects, cyberattacks, and consumer privacy, especially on the privacy provisions.” Despite those setbacks, the authors of self-driving car legislation said this week that they’re hopeful. “We’re willing to work with people who have objections, and address their concerns, if it can be done in a way that doesn’t undermine the purpose and the basic framework of the legislation,” Thune told Recode in an interview. But even he acknowledged that the toughest roadblock of all might be Feinstein. “I don’t know if she’s asked for anything in particular; she just doesn’t like the bill,” he said of his Democratic colleague on Wednesday. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2018/1/18/16905964/self-driving-car-testing-roads-congress-senate

Vox

2019-06-13 00:00:00

2019

6.0

13

Dena Aubin

First Merchants settles red-lining complaint with Justice Department

The U.S. Department of Justice has reached a settlement with Indiana’s First Merchants Bank over allegations that it engaged in illegal red-lining, the practice of excluding predominantly African-American neighborhoods from its services. Announced by the Justice Department on Thursday, the settlement calls for the bank to spend about $1.6 million on loan subsidies and community outreach and open a branch and a loan office in a majority-black neighborhood in the Indianapolis area. The deal requires court approval. To read the full story on WestlawNext Practitioner Insights, click here: bit.ly/2ZoLTau

https://www.reuters.com/article/firstmerchants-settlement/first-merchants-settles-red-lining-complaint-with-justice-department-idUSL2N23K1UD

Westlaw News

Reuters

2017-03-14 18:00:00

2017

3.0

14

Janine Hawkins

Make Beautiful Art With A Switch Joy-Con

Above image courtesy of Nintendo. Artists kuromelon and redjuice have both recently posted their own respective videos of the Joy-Con in action as an art periphera, and yet another artist, Noxbat, created a helpful tutorial for those looking to try the clever setup out for themselves. Any command that can be mapped to a Joy-Con can also be executed with a keyboard, but many digital artists work with setups where keyboards aren't as accessible. Drawing inputs like tablets and displays can take up a lot of space on a desk and they also tend to have just a few remappable buttons available at most. So who wants to fumble for hotkeys on a keyboard stuck off to the side, or navigate menus with a stylus? The Joy-Con's small size makes it easy to keep in whichever hand is free and with the help of JoyToKey can be mapped to suit the user's needs, extending the number of commands immediately at their fingertips and potentially speeding up workflow as a result. Of course, pairing a Joy-Con to a PC doesn't keep it from working with the Switch. Unpairing it (or turning off Bluetooth temporarily while the Switch is in use) is enough to switch the Joy-Con from work back to play. While digital artists are the ones running with this idea now, Joy-Con's could also be a boon for video editors, streamers, teachers, and anyone else who doesn't want to have to reach over and peck out the same half dozen commands on their keyboard all the time while they're knee-deep in something else.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pgwz77/make-beautiful-art-with-a-switch-joy-con

Games

Vice

2019-07-03 00:00:00

2019

7.0

3

MacDonald Dzirutwe

Premium prices attract small farmers back to coffee growing in Zimbabwe

HONDE VALLEY, Zimbabwe (Reuters) - David Muganyura smells the coffee cherries on the slopes of his plot and breaks into a smile, as he chats to workers who are harvesting a crop he expects to be his biggest to date. A long-time Zimbabwean coffee grower, Muganyura almost gave up on the crop when prices slumped to as low as U.S. 20 cents a pound at the turn of the millennium, and foreign buyers took flight after land seizures drove out more than 120 white commercial coffee farmers under the banner of post-colonial reform. But with companies like Nestle’s Nespresso arm now willing to pay a premium for Zimbabwe’s beans, small-scale farmers like Muganyura are returning to a sector that was all-but destroyed under former President Robert Mugabe. Coffee output in Zimbabwe was 430 tonnes in 2018, a 10% increase over the previous year. This year production is set at 500 tonnes, according to industry officials. Zimbabwe was never among the world’s top producers: output peaked at around 15,000 tonnes in the late 1990s. But its Arabica coffee is prized for its zesty and fruity tones, and the sector once provided a livelihood for more than 20,000 poor farmers. Nespresso, which started buying Zimbabwean coffee last year at a 30%-40% premium above international prices and pays farmers in U.S. dollars, is helping to drive the modest revival. It bought 200 tonnes from 450 small Zimbabwean farmers and two large estates in 2018 and wants to attract more growers, said Daniel Weston, who heads Nespresso’s corporate affairs division. Its limited edition “Tamuka muZimbabwe” (“We Have Awakened in Zimbabwe”) coffee, launched in 16 countries in May, sold out in three weeks, he said. “What we are hoping to achieve over time is to increase the volume of coffee coming initially from the smallholder farmers we are working with and also to encourage other smallholder farmers to join the program,” Weston told Reuters. Nespresso has teamed up with international non-profit Technoserve to offer training to small farmers in the growing techniques needed to achieve the high quality it demands. “The market has a huge appetite for Zimbabwean coffee,” said Midway Bhunu, Technoserve’s farmer trainer. “The world was about to lose one of the world’s best coffees.” Muganyura, a father of eight, received the training in 2017 and managed to more than triple output from his 2-hectare plot to 700 kg last year. This year, he expects to harvest 1.5 tonnes, a personal best that will earn him more than $10,000. “This is only introductory to a stage where we will get real money,” Muganyura told Reuters during a visit to his plot in the eastern Honde Valley, about 360 km from the capital, Harare. The dollar payments have enabled Muganyura to hire labor, install solar power at his homestead, buy farming inputs, pay school fees for some of his grand-children and medicine for his diabetic wife - which he struggled to do in the past. This year, he aims to buy a car, a lifelong dream. Because of his success, he said, neighbors are inquiring about growing coffee. He plans to add another half a hectare of coffee trees. Zimbabwe outlawed the use of dollars and other foreign currencies last month, ending a decade of dollarization. Nespresso said it was still assessing what that would mean for its dollar payments to farmers. The Honde Valley is one of four districts that together had about 2,000 small coffee farmers at the turn of the millennium. But most quit and started growing bananas. Just two white-owned commercial coffee farms remain in Zimbabwe. Robert Boswell, 50, owns one of them. His family lost two other farms to land seizures in 2000 and cut the area under coffee production by 46%. Boswell said he felt more confident after President Emmerson Mnangagwa replaced Mugabe in 2017, promising to restore property rights and revive the ravaged economy. Boswell, who had been selling coffee to roasters in Germany and Canada, started delivering to Nespresso in 2018. This year he will expand the area under coffee by 25% to 60 hectares, he said during a tour of his Crake Valley estate in the scenic Vumba hills, 140 km south of the Honde Valley. Commercial growers have an average yield of more than 2 tonnes per hectare. Tanganda Tea Company, owned by diversified group Meikles Limited, is Zimbabwe’s biggest coffee grower but its 134 hectares are a far cry from the more than 1,000 hectares it used to grow two decades ago. Tanganda had largely abandoned coffee due to poor prices and started to grow avocados and macadamia nuts. But it too started selling to Nespresso in 2018 and plans to add another 40 hectares of coffee this year, according to a statement on its website. Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe; editing by Alexandra Zavis and Alexandra Hudson

https://www.reuters.com/article/zimbabwe-farming-coffee/premium-prices-attract-small-farmers-back-to-coffee-growing-in-zimbabwe-idUSL8N23Z2E2

Commodities

Reuters

2016-02-02 18:41:00

2016

2.0

2

Nicholas Deleon

Here’s Why Microsoft is Automatically Downloading Windows 10 Onto PCs

Microsoft in July 2015 released Windows 10, its latest and greatest operating system that earned acclaim from critics (the Start Menu is back!) and criticism from privacy rights activists (it sure does collect a lot of personal data!) within just a few days of release. Uptick was quick, too, with Microsoft noting 75 million installations by late August and 110 million installations by late October. The company's stated goal? To get to 1 billion installations by July 2018. One new change in how Microsoft distributes the upgrade may help the company reach that number—which in turn may have broader implications on how you use Windows. For users of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, upgrading to Windows 10—Windows 10 is a free upgrade for these users, remember—is now considered "recommended" and no longer "optional." This isn't a mere change in terminology, since "recommended" updates are automatically downloaded (provided users' bandwidth settings are configured to enable automatic downloads) to help users install them quickly; an "optional" update would otherwise just sit in the Windows Update queue waiting for the user to initiate the download. In other words, Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users who've put off upgrading to Windows 10 will now have to dive deep into their Windows Update settings to prevent the automatic download. To be clear, Microsoft isn't so strident that it automatically installs Windows 10 onto PCs, but once automatically downloaded installing Windows 10 becomes a mere mouse click away. Microsoft encourages users to keep automatic updates turned on because that's how the company quickly rolls out patches and security updates, which are vital to keep PCs protected from malware and other nuisances that may affect Windows PCs. While there may be plenty of reasons for not wanting to upgrade to Windows 10, including the not insignificant task of having your already existing installation tweaked exactly to your liking, upgrading to Windows 10 signals to developers that Windows is a thriving platform that's worth their time. Without that, Windows merely becomes a commercial layer of software you use to run something like Chrome and Steam—apps you can run for free using Linux.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d7yp7m/heres-why-microsoft-is-automatically-downloading-windows-10-onto-pcs

Tech by VICE

Vice

2016-12-30 13:41:00

2016

12.0

30

James Cook

10 things in tech you need to know today, December 30

Good morning! Here's the technology news you need to know this Friday. 1. Tesla stock might close down for the year — and that could be a good thing. Tesla is down just over 10% in 2016, after sliding more than that at some point, but shares are also trading above $200 (£163). 2. It sounds like Microsoft's first-ever PC is performing better than anyone expected. Microsoft was expecting to ship roughly 15,000 Surface Studio PCs in the first quarter they were available, but the company may end up shipping as many as 30,000 units instead. 3. $3.8 billion (£3 billion) Slack just lost another high-profile executive. Slack's head of product Jason Shellen has suddenly left the company, less than a year after joining. 4. It looks like "Super Mario Run" is coming to Android sooner rather than later. A pre-register link has gone live on the Google Play Store. 5. Toshiba is "burning cash at an alarming rate." It's expecting a major write-down. 6. Amazon is considering using blimps as huge airborne warehouses. The company filed a patent for the idea on December 22. 7. Serena Williams is marrying Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian. Williams and Ohanian have been in a relationship since late 2015, following her relationship with the musician Drake. 8. Windows 10 is getting a "Green Screen of Death" for people who test new features early. It's only slightly different from the blue screen of death. 9. Twitter is battling Facebook for livestreaming supremacy with the launch of 360-degree live video. Twitter is introducing 360-degree live video streaming to its streaming app Periscope. 10. London wearables company VINAYA has gone into administration. CEO Kate Unsworth told Business Insider that the company will undergo a "restructuring" and is spinning out certain parts of the business.

https://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-in-tech-you-need-to-know-today-december-30-2016-12

Business Insider

2016-11-29 17:06:00

2016

11.0

29

Sarah MacDonald

Meet Dufferin Starship, the Band Who Made an EP About Bunz Trading Zone

This article originally appeared on Noisey Canada. Toronto, though actually expansive, is often referred to as the "biggest small town." Now with the online bartering community Bunz Trading Zone, that feeling of closeness and community is further entrenched in city's social make-up. Bunz, formerly Bums, now commonly referred to as simply BTZ, began as a Facebook group dedicated to people trading unwanted items for something they do want. Trades for or including actual money are forbidden. Commonplace items include tall cans, tokens for transit, gift cards, and bottles of wine. These Torontonians have modest needs. In the last year-and-a-half in particular, BTZ has exploded in popularity with over 58,000 members in its original group with spin-off, if you will, groups like Bunz Home Trading Zone, Bunz Dating Zone, and, a personal favourite, Bunz Pet Zone. BTZ has even gone north and reached Montreal. In homage to the connections, jokes, and trials of the group (think of the worst online comment threads and you'll likely find one in BTZ), we have Dufferin Starship. The band, its members only known by their first names, was formed by and write music about BTZ. Dufferin Starship, which is a name inspired by the insufferably Dufferin St. bus, have made a jangly pop-rock EP called Not In Service, which captures the breeziness of BTZ. "Trade It All" is the purest BTZ track of the bunch, detailing all the kinds of items for trade—skills, marijuana, CDs, half pack of smokes—with the lyric "I'll trade it all to you/for a stick and poke tattoo." Noisey spoke to the band via email about why the hell they decided to make an EP, let alone music, about the BTZ experience. Not In Service will be available Nov. 30 on the Bunz Trading Zone app and Bunz headquarters at 372 Richmond St. W tomorrow in exchange for a non-perishable food trade to the Parkdale Community Food Bank. Listen to the EP below and read our interview: Noisey: Can you take me through Dufferin Starship's origin story? Which thread or post did you all find yourselves on Bunz Trading Zone?Dufferin Starship: I posted my 1998 Stratocaster because I needed a new bike or set of bike wheels to finish another bike project so I could get around. I posted the guitar on Bunz and people were pretty interested. When I took the guitar over to this place, James and I realized we had met a couple times in the neighbourhood. He plugged it into his amp to test it and played a bit. We shot the shit. I was laughing about it because we were talking about Bunz and all the funny shit that goes on. A week later he reached out and had a demo of a song about Bunz. We were joking about that but I didn't think he would actually do it. It was basically a Bunz themed song and he had an idea about making a Bunz themed band. Anyway, it was funny and I liked it. So I started messing around and I wrote one too. Bobby wanted to record it so we went out to my friend Bradley's place and recorded it with our friends John and Tyler. We were having fun and it [set] off a spark in us. The sound is distinctly a vintage pop and rock with sharp, quaint guitars. How does the content inform the sound?The whole concept for the band is Bunz. The funny stuff, the trades, the topics, and all the trolls. I mean it's all kind of kitschy and fun, it's not serious so we just did what we wanted. The sound is mostly an accident, we all wrote songs after we heard James' first one so we kind of all followed that lead, I guess. Our vibe was really light and fun, we wanted the music to reflect that. Does BTZ proper have much influence on the group or what music you make?It's funny, because when we started getting this going we realized we all have lots of mutual friends. Bobby is friends with Morty from Bunz. Morty was laughing his ass off when we played him the first song and instantly wanted to help out. His idea was to make it a trade-based album where people could only get it if they traded a food item in support for the Parkdale Community Food Bank. That made sense to us because we aren't trying to make money off this and it's a real Bunz move to use it for charity. Would you consider doing an EP for every BTZ offshoot group? I'm looking at Bunz Dating Zone or maybe Bunz Pet Zone.Oh god. It was such a funny thing that we haven't even really thought about the next steps or anything. How many of you take the Dufferin bus on the regular and how infuriating do you find it?Oh, we have ALL taken the Dufferin Bus so many times. You enter the 29 bus a regular everyday person, get projected into the Dufferin realm and it may or may not transform you into your own bizarro starship character eating generic brand Cheesies from a fedora. You are definitely in a new world. The Dufferin Starship is what you make it. One time I saw a guy with no shirt on try to light a smoke on the bus until everyone stopped him. A friend of mine watched a rider eating a raw hotdog while dipping it in an open container of sour cream. The Dufferin Bus is like a national treasure on one of the worst maintained streets in Toronto. The patrons are wonderful characters. Sarah traded a lamp for really delicious French cheese once. Follow her on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4w3pgm/meet-dufferin-starship-the-band-who-made-an-ep-about-bunz-trading-zone

Noisey

Vice

2018-05-28 00:00:00

2018

5.0

28

Sam Aung Moon, Yimou Lee

Myanmar police witness says searched Reuters reporters' phones without warrant

YANGON (Reuters) - Police in Myanmar examined the mobile phones of two Reuters reporters accused of possessing secret documents without a search warrant after their arrests in December, an officer told a court on Monday, in what has become a landmark press freedom case. Prosecution witness Major Aung Kyaw San said police did not have a warrant to search the phones because the reporters were accused under the Official Secrets Act, which gave officers the power to make arrests and begin an investigation without needing prior permission from a court. That assertion was disputed by defense lawyer Khin Maung Zaw, who told Reuters after the hearing that only the arrests were allowed before seeking the approval of a judge. “This is not acceptable,” he said. “Regarding (obtaining) evidence, a warrant is needed.” (Follow latest updates on detained reporters here) Lead prosecutor Kyaw Min Aung declined to comment. Myanmar government spokesman Zaw Htay was not immediately available for comment. Previously, he has declined to discuss details of the proceedings or the police investigation, saying Myanmar’s courts were independent. The court in Yangon has been holding hearings since January to decide whether Wa Lone, 32, and his Reuters colleague Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, will be charged under the colonial-era Official Secrets Act, which carries a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison. Judge Ye Lwin last week accepted as evidence printed copies of documents that Major Aung Kyaw San, a police IT expert, said were found on the reporters’ phones. The documents included alleged confidential government letters and plans for the development of an island off Myanmar’s west coast for tourism. Defense lawyers had argued the documents should not be admitted as evidence because it was unclear who had access to the phones after the reporters’ arrests on Dec. 12, and that the prosecution did not explain how the 21 documents were relevant to the case. Some of the documents came from the Facebook Messenger app, the defense said, and it was not clear the reporters themselves had accessed them. “We don’t know anything about the documents they said they found in our phones,” Wa Lone told reporters after Monday’s hearing. “The documents can be sent automatically to Messenger.” At the time of their arrests, the reporters had been working on an investigation into the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men and boys in a village in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state. The killings took place during a military crackdown that United Nations agencies say sent nearly 700,000 people fleeing to Bangladesh. The reporters have told relatives they were arrested almost immediately after being handed some rolled up papers at a restaurant in northern Yangon by two policemen they had not met before, having been invited to meet the officers for dinner. Last month, Police Captain Moe Yan Naing testified that a senior officer had ordered his subordinates to plant secret documents on Wa Lone to “trap” the reporter. At a news conference on May 15, Police Director General Aung Win Oo dismissed the testimony as untruthful. After his court appearance, Moe Yan Naing was sentenced to a year in jail for violating police discipline and his family was evicted from police housing. Police have said the eviction and his sentencing were not related to his testimony, but have declined to elaborate further. Global advocates for press freedom, human rights activists, as well the United Nations and several Western countries, have called for the release of the Reuters journalists. On Monday, diplomats from France, Denmark and the European Union - as well as others - observed the proceedings. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Tuesday. Reporting By Sam Aung Moon and Yimou Lee; Editing by Alex Richardson

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-journalists/myanmar-police-witness-says-searched-reuters-reporters-phones-without-warrant-idUSKCN1IT1DC

World News

Reuters

2018-10-30 00:00:00

2018

10.0

30

Fathin Ungku, Yuddy Cahya

Indonesian divers, 'pinger locators', hunt for doomed plane's cockpit recorders

JAVA SEA, Indonesia (Reuters) - Indonesia deployed divers on Tuesday to search for an airliner that crashed with 189 people on board, as “pinger locators” tried to zero in on its cockpit recorders and find out why an almost-new plane went down in the sea minutes after take-off. Indonesia, one of the world’s fastest-growing aviation markets, has a patchy safety record. With the now almost certain prospect of all on board having died, the crash is set to rank as its second-worst air disaster. (Graphic: Indonesian plane crash - tmsnrt.rs/2OZPYBz) Ground staff lost contact with flight JT610 of budget airline Lion Air 13 minutes after the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft took off early on Monday from the airport in Jakarta, the capital, on its way to the tin-mining town of Pangkal Pinang. Dozens of relatives of those on board gathered at a police hospital where body bags were brought for forensic doctors to try to identify victims, including by taking saliva swabs from family members for DNA tests. “I keep praying for a miracle although logically, the plane has sunk in the ocean,” said Toni Priyono Adhi, whose daughter was on the flight. “But as a parent, I want a miracle.” A Reuters witness on a boat at the crash site saw about 60 divers scattered in inflatable boats over the slightly choppy waters entering the sea, which is about 35 metres (115 feet) deep. Sonar vessels and an underwater drone have also been hunting for the wreckage of the fuselage, where many victims were feared trapped, officials said. The head of a national transport safety panel, Soerjanto Tjahjono, said that underwater “pinger locators”, including equipment from Singapore, were being deployed to help find the aircraft’s black boxes. The priority is finding the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder to help determine the cause of the disaster, safety experts said. “The visibility is not good as it’s very overcast,” a special forces officer said. Underwater footage released by the national search and rescue agency showed relatively poor visibility. In all, 35 vessels are helping to search. The focus was initially an area within 5 nautical miles of where the plane lost contact, but that was expanded to 10 nautical miles on Tuesday and will be expanded to 15 on Wednesday, a search and rescue agency officer said. But only debris, personal items, including 52 identification cards and passports, and body parts have been found off the shore of Karawang district, east of Jakarta. Police said human remains were collected in 37 body bags after sweeps of the site, roughly 15 km (nine miles) off the coast. Most of those on board were Indonesian but the airline has said an Italian passenger and Indian pilot were on the plane. The pilot of flight JT610 had asked to return to base shortly after it took off, at about 6.20 a.m. on Monday. Investigators are trying to determine why the pilot issued the request, which was granted. The deputy of the national transportation safety committee told a news conference the plane had technical problems on its previous flight, from the city of Denpasar on Bali island on Sunday, including an issue over “unreliable airspeed”. “We are also asking for information from the last pilot who flew from Denpasar to Jakarta, but we have not met the technician,” Haryo Satmiko said, referring to the technician who handled the aircraft after it landed on Sunday. The committee also had a recording of the conversation between the pilot of JT610 before it crashed and the control tower at Jakarta, he said. Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi told reporters at Jakarta’s dock that the investigation would result in sanctions being handed out, but he did not elaborate. Lion had operated 11 Boeing 737 MAX 8s and a transport ministry official said inspections would be made on all of those models operating in Indonesia though they would not be grounded. On Monday, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and Boeing Co (BA.N) said they were providing assistance for the investigation. The accident is the first to be reported involving the widely sold Boeing 737 MAX, an updated, more fuel-efficient version of the manufacturer’s workhorse single-aisle jet. Two witnesses described the plane as swaying or rocking as it came down, adding that the nose hit the water first and there was a tall column of smoke afterwards. The aircraft did not make a noise when it came down, they said. “From a long way off, it was already leaning,” said Gauk, a fisherman who uses one name. Privately owned Lion Air, founded in 1999, said the aircraft, which had been in operation since August, was airworthy, with its pilot and co-pilot together having amassed 11,000 hours of flying time. Indonesia’s worst air disaster was in 1997, when a Garuda Indonesia A300 crashed in the city of Medan, killing 234 people. Additional reporting by Cindy Silviana, Bernadette Christina Munthe, Agustinus Beo Da Costa, Fergus Jensen, Fransiska Nangoy, Gayatri Suroyo and Fanny Potkin in JAKARTA; Writing by John Chalmers and Ed Davies; Editing by Clarence Fernandez, Robert Birsel

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-crash/indonesian-divers-pinger-locators-hunt-for-doomed-planes-cockpit-recorders-idUSKCN1N4067

World News

Reuters

2019-06-26 00:00:00

2019

6.0

26

China stocks end lower as financials weigh

* SSEC -0.2%, CSI300 -0.2%, HSI 0.1% * HK->Shanghai Connect daily quota used -1.6%, Shanghai->HK daily quota used 3.1% * FTSE China A50 -0.2% SHANGHAI, June 26 (Reuters) - China stocks ended slightly lower on Wednesday as financial stocks weighed on the market, and as investors exercised caution ahead of the meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. ** The blue-chip CSI300 index fell 0.2%, to 3,794.33, while the Shanghai Composite Index shed 0.2% to 2,976.28. ** Trump views the meeting as a chance to see where Beijing stands on the two countries’ trade war, and is “comfortable with any outcome” from the talks, a senior U.S. official said on Monday. ** The United States hopes to re-launch trade talks with China after Trump and Xi meet in Japan on Saturday, but Washington will not accept any conditions around the U.S. use of tariffs in the dispute, a senior administration official said on Tuesday. ** Meanwhile, financial stocks led the decline on Wednesday, as investors planned to dump shares in leading brokerage firms, whose stocks slumped as a result. ** Banking stocks also weakened, after a report said that some Chinese banks may face U.S. action in N.Korean sanctions probe. ** The CSI300 financials index and the CSI300 banks index retreated 0.8% and 0.5%, respectively. ** Around the region, MSCI’s Asia ex-Japan stock index was weaker by 0.09%, while Japan’s Nikkei index closed down 0.51%. ** At 07:18 GMT, the yuan was quoted at 6.8835 per U.S. dollar, 0.07% weaker than the previous close of 6.8786. ** The largest percentage gainers on the main Shanghai Composite index were Danhua Chemical Technology Co Ltd , up 10.12%, followed by Shanghai Shenqi Pharmaceutical Investment Management Co Ltd, gaining 10.06% and CSSC Offshore & Marine Engineering Group Co Ltd , up by 10.02%. ** The largest percentage losers on the Shanghai index were Henan Yuguang Gold & Lead Co Ltd down 10.05%, followed by Gansu Ronghua Industry Group Co Ltd losing 10.04% and First Tractor Co Ltd down by 10.03%. ** So far this year, the Shanghai stock index is up 19.3% and the CSI300 has risen 26%, while China’s H-share index listed in Hong Kong is up 6.4%. Shanghai stocks have risen 2.68% this month. ** As of 07:19 GMT, China’s A-shares were trading at a premium of 28.05% over the Hong Kong-listed H-shares. (Reporting by Shanghai Newsroom; editing by Uttaresh.V)

https://www.reuters.com/article/china-stocks-close/china-stocks-end-lower-as-financials-weigh-idUSZZN2RM300

Asia

Reuters

2019-03-21 00:00:00

2019

3.0

21

Michael Jackson to Stay in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Michael Jackson might be getting muted on various platforms in the wake of "Leaving Neverland" ... but the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ain't gonna be one of them. MJ's two slots in the HOF will stay put and won't be removed or altered in any way ... despite the allegations made in HBO's doc about the singer. The reason is simple ... according to an HOF official -- music is music is music. HOF honchos say Jackson, as with all of its inductees, was recognized for musical excellence and talent, along with having a lasting impact on rock 'n' roll. In other words, MJ changed music, like, forever. What's more ... Michael was voted into the Hall (twice) by a voting body of historians, fellow musicians, and music industry professionals. He got in with the Jackson 5 in 1997, and again as a solo artist in 2001, when 'NSYNC inducted him. As for whether his HOF exhibit might be changed at all -- possibly even removing memorabilia -- our HOF sources say it all stays the same. It's interesting ... a children's museum in Indianapolis recently removed three pieces of MJ memorabilia items in the wake of Wade Robson and James Safechuck's claims. Not in Cleveland, though. Once a HOFer, always a HOFer ... or so it seems. In fact, Michael could come up again at this year's HOF induction. Janet Jackson's going into the Hall and there's a lot of speculation about whether she'll mention her brother and the 'Neverland' allegations. It's going down March 29 at Brooklyn's Barclays Center.

https://www.tmz.com/2019/03/21/michael-jackson-rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame-leaving-neverland/

TMZ

2016-04-27 13:30:03

2016

4.0

27

Chavie Lieber

Teatox Party

Jillian Trigg, a nutritionist from Vancouver, joined Instagram in April of 2012. She had struggled with an eating disorder as a teenager, and was now turning to social media as a source of inspiration and comfort. She posted fitness photos, protein bar recipes, and other health-related images. A few months later, requests for sponsored posts from brands of all kinds began to trickle in. Among those getting in touch with Trigg were companies that sold tea promising to detoxify your body; they were called teatoxes. First, brands reached out through email, and then through Instagram itself, once direct messaging was introduced. "The emails all kind of read the same," says Trigg. "It was something like, ‘Hey, we noticed you're in good shape and we think you'd be a great promoter for our brand. Here's a link to our tea website, let us know if you'd like to post.'" Trigg was initially intrigued. She was already an ambassador for Viva Health, a Vancouver-based natural skincare line, and AboutTime, which sells protein powder — brands whose products she could get behind. But after going to the teatox companies' websites, she found little information about the teas themselves. Instead, she saw photo after photo of "girls who fit the criteria of being young, good-looking, and in shape, holding the tea." Trigg declined the various requests from the tea brands, but many, many others have not. If you spend any time scrolling through Instagram, odds are you've seen teatox posts, whether they be from that hot trainer at your gym, the beauty blogger you know from YouTube, or the random girl you went to high school with who somehow managed to rack up an impressive social media following. Then there are the actual celebrities, from A-list to D-list, that promote them. Nicki Minaj and Britney Spears are on the teatox train, as are Hilary Duff, Coco, Lea Michele, and Amber Rose. A good portion of the Kardashian-Jenner clan promotes these brands: Kylie, Khloe, Kourtney, Scott. Celebrities looking to get back in the spotlight and/or make a quick buck like Snooki and Lindsay Lohan shill for tea. So do social media stars like Brock O'Hurn and those in the Bachelor universe like Andi Dorfman. The teatox industry is enormous, with hundreds of brands from all over the world selling their products — and paying as much as a quarter of a million dollars per post to get the influencer seal of approval. In fact, promoting teatoxes has become one of the fastest growing businesses on Instagram. It's hard to pinpoint what exactly was the original teatox brand, but the companies in play today are all remarkably similar. A simple search on Instagram will bring you to Lyfe Tea, Fit Tea, Skinny Bunny Tea, SkinnyMint, TinyTea Teatox, Flat Tummy Tea, ShowGirlSlim, Baetea, Naked Me Tea, and My Beauty Tea. The list goes on. Most of them are mysteriously operated, with no discernable press representation or even employees made available to answer questions. Some you can place geographically: Teami Blends from Florida, Bootea from England, Skinny Teatox from Canada, SkinnyMe Tea from Australia, TeaTox Me from Russia, Teatox & Co. from Indonesia. These brands promise the tea "promotes fat burning," "reduces bloating," "makes you feel light," and "cleans the digestive system." In other words: these teas act as laxatives. All of these brands more or less sell the exact same product: tea that comes in colorful pouches and breaks down into two categories, morning tea (the "skinny" tea) and evening tea (the "detoxifying" tea). The ingredients are essentially the same, regardless of brand — some combination of green, chamomile, and peppermint tea leaves; licorice, dandelion, rhubarb, ginger, and ginseng roots; and cloves, cinnamon bark, and dried goji berries. A 14-day starter pack usually sells for around $30, a 28-day pack for about $55, and a deluxe combination pack somewhere between $100 and $120. On the packaging, these brands promise the tea "promotes fat burning," "reduces bloating," "makes you feel light," and "cleans the digestive system." In other words: these teas act as laxatives. The primary ingredient in nearly every single evening "detoxifying" tea is senna, an FDA-approved plant found in Ex-Lax and a number of its stimulant laxative competitors. Some teatox brands offer full disclosure about senna and its effects. Others don't list ingredients or make them a little bit harder to find, requiring consumers to do their homework. Those that are more upfront explain you could experience "a churning tummy" that will require you to "visit the bathroom more often," but they're also quick to assure customers that you should "not experience diarrhea" — even though many do attest to this side effect. "I am in mortal fear that I am possibly going to shit my pants," Megan Reynolds wrote in a story about using Skinny Teatox for Racked last year. While senna isn't necessarily harmful for one-off use, health experts say it's not a substance people should be consuming on a regular basis, let alone for two weeks straight as an attempt to drop a few pounds. "It can cause cramping, indigestion, dehydration, and is also just not particularly pleasant," says Scott Gavura, an Ontario-based pharmacist and writer at the medical watchdog site Science-Based Medicine. "Taking a laxative when you think you're bloated or overweight is not something you want to do from a medical perspective. That's not healthy to yourself, and if you take it for a long period of time, it can be disruptive for your digestion and to the bacterial flora in your colon." A product like a teatox is "problematic because it's not science-based," says Jim White, a registered dietician with the Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics. "It also promises quick fixes, which is what worries me." As the Guardian noted in a much-shared piece about the myth of the "detox," so-called detoxification is just a "pseudo-medical concept designed to sell you things." "The healthy body has kidneys, a liver, skin, even lungs that are detoxifying as we speak. There is no known way — certainly not through detox treatments — to make something that works perfectly well in a healthy body work better," Edzard Ernst, an academic physician, told the newspaper. He called products that promise to detoxify your body "a criminal exploitation of the gullible man on the street." Teatoxes, like all dietary supplements sold in this country, are not formally regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA's Lyndsay Meyer says that while these brands are required to register with the agency, they are only expected to self-determine if their product is safe, as per the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994; this means companies do all of their own testing, without any regulation or input from the FDA. The law also does not give the FDA the power to pre-approve products before they go on sale. Meyer says the the FDA is well aware of these teatox companies, and Federal Trade Commission attorney Michael Ostheimer says that 21 cases involving dietary supplements were brought by the FTC over the last few years, though he would not disclose any further information, including how many of those cases related to teatoxes specifically. Teatox reviews are all over the internet, and many of them are positive. Those on Amazon have customers raving they "lost 3 lbs after only 4 days of taking this product every morning"; people claim they have "a lot more energy than I usually do" and that their "bloating went down as well." But you can also find plenty of complaints that label teatoxes as a scam, as well as accounts of the teas messing with menstrual cycles and affecting the efficacy of birth control. However, because few people actually file official reports with the FDA, choosing instead to contact companies directly or post comments online, Meyer says there is little the FDA can do. "Unless there's a safety signal, there's no reason for us to take action," she explains. "Which is why we tell people, ‘If you think you've been harmed, you need to report to us and not only to the manufacturer,' because teatox companies don't have to let us know what adverse events are happening. Unless people are dying, they don't have to tell us about complaints they are receiving." Brands often post before-and-after weight loss transformation photos on their own sites and social media accounts, and according to Trigg, many of these photos are stolen from Instagram users who participate in fitness communities on the platform, like Kayla's Army. Even when they aren't grabbing photos from other sources, brands will also post their own weight loss photos and credit the progress solely to their teas, when in fact many of these customers use the product in conjunction with diet and exercise. "Tea is not evil. Telling girls they will lose 15 pounds by going on a teatox, that is evil," Trigg says. "I work with some clients who are young girls and when they say they want to take a teatox because they feel bloated, I have to explain that it's not actually going to ‘detoxify' them and that these companies are just devaluing hard work." Emma Richards, a 28-year-old from Waterloo, Canada, is the founder of Skinny Teatox and the only representative from a teatox brand willing to go on the record for this story. She says she started her company in early 2013 after seeing "a few big teatox companies overseas, like Bootea, MateFit, and FitTea, gaining some attention on social media." "I ordered a few, and shipping took literally three weeks to a month-and-a-half, and then I had to pay customs to receive the shipment," Richards writes over email. "I thought, ‘Well, that's ridiculous,' so we started a North American-based company to serve these markets with better service and shipping times. There are hundreds — god, maybe thousands now — of different teatox companies around the world, the vast majority of which are independently owned." "There are hundreds — god, maybe thousands now — of different teatox companies around the world, the vast majority of which are independently owned." There are countless copycat brands, and all of their websites look almost exactly the same; every one of the at least 30 teatox sites investigated for this story is powered by Shopify, a Canada-based e-commerce platform. Brandon Chu, a senior product manager at the company, would not disclose how many tea businesses his company works with, but says Shopify has seen "a lot of growth with teatox." He is similarly vague when addressing the question of whether the brands first came to Shopify or if Shopify sought them out, saying it "was a little bit of both." Part of the strategy involves gaming SEO; when you Google "sell tea online," a Shopify link is one of the first results to show up. Skinny Teatox operates via Shopify, and though Richards wouldn't share sales figures for her company, she says selling teatoxes is a "profitable business" and claims Skinny Teatox is "the leading teatox company in North America." (She also operates the brand OMG Waist Trainers; waist trainers, as well as teeth whitening systems, are among the most wildly popular products to promote on Instagram.) Richards adds that the largest markets for her teatox company are LA and Miami, and that Instagram has been integral to her success. Instagram was the perfect place for the teatox industry to flourish, explains Thomas Rankin, the CEO of Dash Hudson, a company that helps brands grow their followings and monetize on the platform. "There were people early on that realized it was a visual channel, where you could take a visual product and get it in front of a big audience for next to nothing," says Rankin, "and these tea brands were one of the first to do it." A weight loss product marketed by a woman in a bikini is an easy win. "Everything has shifted," adds Matt Britton, chairman of Talent Resources, a marketing and entertainment company that works with digital influencers. "Consumers are not watching shows on TV but streaming them, and when they listen to music, it's not on the radio but with Pandora or Spotify, so the mediums people used to spend their money on are waning in influence. This generation is glued to their phones, so this is obviously the place where companies can get eyeballs and attention." Two and a half years ago, the St. Louis-based MateFit paid Instagram fitness star Jen Selter to post of a photo of herself with its products. Back then, Selter had around 1.3 million followers; she now has 9 million, thanks to her famous "belfies". MateFit decided she should be their first big-name Insta-spokesperson, and the company went through Talent Resources to make it happen. Yehuda Neuman, the company's director of brand relations, says that MateFit set the bar for celebrity teatox endorsements. "That killed the Instagram marketing game because at the time, there were no competing tea brands working with celebrities, and so they were able to explode," Neuman explains. "That kicked everything off." Since Selter's first Instagram post, Talent Resources has brokered hundreds of deals between teatox companies and celebrities on social media, working with clients like Bootea, FitTea, and MateFit. Neuman says that when it comes to celebrity buzz, the baton has been passed from MateFit to FitTea, a Florida-based brand that's partnered with the Kardashian family. While some celebrities are eager to promote teatoxes on Instagram, Neuman says others only post as part of a package deal that also involves more traditional product placement. In the case of Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda," Britney Spears and Iggy Azalea's "Pretty Girls," and Big Sean's "I Don't Fuck With You," Instagram posts were added as a contractual requirement when MateFit paid for its tea to be featured in the music videos. "Studios aren't funding videos the way they used to. Artists are now funding them, so at the end of the day, they need the money," says Neuman. "Product placement makes or breaks it, so they take the Instagram deal." Neuman says plenty of talent reps for big stars have turned him down, and that Minaj insisted on tasting the tea before agreeing to any sort of deal. But Britton points out that a partnership with a teatox brand is hard to say no to because posting is "literally no work." "These deals are like one-night stands," Britton says. "They aren't like the endorsements Katy Perry does with Popchips — they are transactional. Celebrities take them because it's not like doing a long shoot for a magazine, or having to travel for a gig. It requires, like, 10 seconds." Some agreements even allow the influencer to delete the post a few days later — it's called a "deletion clause" — which is why you won't find live product posts on the Instagram accounts of Kim Kardashian or Scott Disick. Some agreements even allow the influencer to delete the post a few days later — it's called a "deletion clause" — which is why you won't find live product posts on the Instagram accounts of Kim Kardashian or Scott Disick. You can still find these posts via Google Image, though. Mike Heller, Talent Resources' CEO, says the pay scale for teatox Instagram posts he places starts at $3,000 and goes all the way up to $250,000. The amount you get paid depends on your follower count, and while Heller wouldn't confirm which celebrities are getting paid a quarter of a million dollars per post, it's fair to assume someone like Kylie Jenner, with her 59 million followers, is among the highest-paid celebrity endorsers. Yes, it seems inconceivable that teatox brands are able to shell out this kind of cash to influencers. Heller notes, though, that the costs these companies incur are very low. Bundles of loose tea leaves and dried bark are cheap to buy, especially in bulk, and these brands turn around and sell their products at ten times the cost. With such high margins, Heller explains, "they can spend all of their money using digital and social media to amplify and get their message out there." Neuman adds that "these are small businesses that have a lot of flexibility; they don't have the corporate structures, so there's more opportunity to have target investments." Richards says Skinny Teatox only has a team of "three to four," which means very little overhead. And pay-for-play does help these businesses. According to data provided to Racked by Dash Hudson, a FitTea Instagram post from Kylie Jenner on March 28th performed worse than average, with an engagement rate (likes and comments in relation to follower count) of 1.3 percent as opposed to her normal 2 percent. Still, the photo exposed the brand to her 59 million followers and gained FitTea nearly 3,000 new followers of its own. Plus, Neuman says his team's research has found that teatox companies see an unusually high number of repeat buyers, so every potential new customer is a potential longtime customer. In addition to tea companies spending money to work with celebrities, they reach out to smaller-scale influencers of all types. Many teatox brands start out by contacting small-time bloggers and lesser-known models. Once a brand gains enough name recognition and sells enough product, they can broker deals with stars who have higher price tags. Claire Felske, a 24-year-old model and actress living in LA, says companies she's been in contact with typically pay $3,000 per one million Instagram followers. Last year, Felske worked with a teatox company called Teami Blends. After dating Vine star Curtis Lepore, Felske developed a nice-but-modest following of around 45,000 followers. She was initially offered $700 for three Instagram posts, followed by $600 for two; Lepore, she says, was getting something like $6,000 per post because he had 2 million Instagram followers. Some brands have found their own niches when it comes to lower-profile endorsers. According to the Dash Hudson data, teatox brand Skinny Bunny Tea has the best results when it works with Eastern European models; its top influencer is Russian model Mirgaeva Galinka. Bootea's posts are most successful when the Instagrammer is male, and since it is a British company, you'll find more "foppish emo images than dudes with six packs," says Rankin. Skinny Teatox generally aligns with food and lifestyle bloggers, with its top influencer being French food blogger Coralie Bancal of @cocohealthyflorist. Tea companies often use hashtags to identify tight-knit communities on Instagram, and determine which groups to target and who within those groups to work with. They look to every corner of the platform to seek out fit models, Australian surfer babes, and more. Neuman says that once deals are inked, brands study engagement levels to decide who is worth developing long-term relationships with, keeping a close eye on if accounts have bought followers: "We'll test five people from the same demographic and then build from there. It's market research." This is likely how Teami Blends discovered Latiffa Cisero, a 37-year-old government intelligence officer from Northern Virginia who is a natural hair blogger and model on the side. "They had to have found me through my natural hair hashtags," Cisero says of Teami. "I'm assuming they were looking for natural girls because I've seen other girls with natural hair like me posting Teami. Someone from their marketing must have been told to go after the natural hair world." Tea companies often use hashtags to identify tight-knit communities on Instagram, and determine which groups to target and who within those groups to work with. Cisero is sent photos from Teami that she can put on her Instagram if she chooses, though she prefers to take her own. She also gets regular email updates from the company reminding her when it's time to post. (In the case of both Cisero and Felske, the emails come from a woman named Jennyris, who did not respond to any communication from Racked.) Cisero doesn't get paid by Teami Blends, but instead struck a deal where she gets free tea in exchange for her posts. This is in fact the case for many teatox ambassadors that were interviewed for this story but did not wish to be quoted, for fear of losing their partnerships. The appeal is not necessarily getting freebies as much as it is appearing to be big enough to post sponsored content. These would-be social media stars hope their gratis teatox posts will trigger other brands, those who will offer money and help seriously kickstart their Instagram careers, to get in touch. It's also about gaining followers. Many brands will regram influencers, and so posting a picture of a teatox product and using the proper hashtags can lead to an increased following of your own. With so many Instagrammers teaming up with teatox companies, Dash Hudson's Rankin says the space has turned into something of a circus. "It's a race to scale," he explains. "We are waiting to see who will spend the most money on influencers so they can become the number one tea." Chavie Lieber is a senior reporter at Racked. Editor: Julia Rubin

https://www.vox.com/2016/4/27/11502276/teatox-instagram

Vox

2018-04-13 00:00:00

2018

4.0

13

Alexa Liautaud

Prosecutors think Michael Cohen’s request for special treatment is dumb

President Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen is trying to get special treatment — like really, really special treatment. In a move that prosecutors and legal experts believe to be entirely unheard-of, Cohen wants his counsel to review the materials the FBI seized from his home, office, and hotel room earlier this week as part of a criminal investigation into his business dealings. The FBI was reportedly seeking information on Trump’s "Access Hollywood" tape and payments to Stormy Daniels. Cohen then wants his attorneys to re-release the documents they see as “responsive, non-privileged items” back to prosecutors. READ: Trump and Cohen want their lawyer on the “taint team” screening raided documents Federal prosecutors for the Office of the Southern District of New York who are overseeing the investigation called that request “extraordinary” in court documents on Friday. They cheekily noted Cohen would need to create a new law that converts a search warrant, which allows law enforcement to take what they want, into a subpoena, which places the burden to turn over documents on the recipient. A federal magistrate judge, however, granted the FBI a search warrant because she believed they would probably find evidence of a crime. President Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen is trying to get special treatment — like really, really special treatment. In a move that prosecutors and legal experts believe to be entirely unheard-of, Cohen wants his counsel to review the materials the FBI seized from his home, office, and hotel room earlier this week as part of a criminal investigation into his business dealings. The FBI was reportedly seeking information on Trump’s "Access Hollywood" tape and payments to Stormy Daniels. Cohen then wants his attorneys to re-release the documents they see as “responsive, non-privileged items” back to prosecutors. READ: Trump and Cohen want their lawyer on the “taint team” screening raided documents Federal prosecutors for the Office of the Southern District of New York who are overseeing the investigation called that request “extraordinary” in court documents on Friday. They cheekily noted Cohen would need to create a new law that converts a search warrant, which allows law enforcement to take what they want, into a subpoena, which places the burden to turn over documents on the recipient. A federal magistrate judge, however, granted the FBI a search warrant because she believed they would probably find evidence of a crime. “Cohen advances the novel proposition, without any precedent or legal basis, that Cohen’s own counsel should undertake the initial review of the returns of lawfully executed search warrants,” the federal prosecutors wrote. “The USAO [U.S. Attorney’s Office] is aware of no precedent for such an unconventional practice.” “You could imagine there are a lot of drug dealers in the south side of Chicago who would love to have that right. But that’s not how it works.” “This Court should not accept Cohen’s invitation to make new law and convert a duly authorized search warrant into a subpoena,” they continued. For Cohen to pick and choose what materials his team sees as “responsive” to the search warrant would allow him to essentially dictate the investigation, according to former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. “You could imagine there are a lot of drug dealers in the south side of Chicago who would love to have that right,” Mariotti said. “But that’s not how it works.” He added there was virtually no chance a judge would accept Cohen's request. For his part, Cohen claims the prosecutors’ search was overbroad and that the government seized “thousands and thousands of privileged documents” his team should be able to review. But federal prosecutors have incessantly dismissed that theory and said they found close to no evidence that Cohen did enough legal to work to produce the volume of paperwork Cohen claims. They’ve also implemented a third-party “filter team” or “taint team” to analyze and exclude privileged documents from being shared with investigators. “The results of that review, as reported by the USAO’s Filter Team, indicate that Cohen is in fact performing little to no legal work, and that zero emails were exchanged with President Trump,” prosecutors wrote in Friday’s filing. Cover image: Michael Cohen in New York on Wednesday, April 11, 2018. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vbxqd3/prosecutors-think-michael-cohens-request-for-special-treatment-is-dumb

Vice News

2016-11-23 00:00:00

2016

11.0

23

See Inside Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Resort

It's not a bad second home for sure ... this is where President-elect Donald Trump and fam will chill when it gets too chilly in D.C. Trump is at Mar-a-Lago for Thanksgiving, and it's likely where he'll be spending time when he's not living in D.C. or NYC. The club sits on 20 acres and Trump shares it with 500 members. His home is palatial ... set around a golf course that Trump hits up when he's there.

https://www.tmz.com/2016/11/23/donald-trump-mar-a-lago-winter-white-house-thanksgiving/

TMZ

2019-06-11 00:00:00

2019

6.0

11

Ernest Scheyder

Albemarle declines to participate in LME lithium contract

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Albemarle Corp, the world’s largest lithium producer, said on Tuesday it will not participate in the London Metal Exchange’s plan to launch a new contract for the white metal, depriving it of a key source of pricing data. The move reflects a view by some that lithium, used to make electric car batteries, is a specialty chemical rather than a basic commodity, and should be priced on a contract-by-contract basis. “An exchange contract tends to support a commodity market, and that’s not what we believe this (lithium market) is,” David Ryan, Albemarle’s head of corporate strategy and investor relations, told the Fastmarkets Lithium Supply and Markets Conference in Santiago. The LME, owned by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd, on Monday chose Fastmarkets to provide a reference price for the contract. “At this point our intent is that we will not be providing price information to the index,” said Ryan. The LME said in a statement to Reuters that it respects the right of companies to operate in whatever ways best suit their needs. “The LME continues to work with a supportive group of industry participants to develop solutions for the lithium industry, and will launch a contract when those participants are ready to use it,” spokeswoman Bianca Blake said Unlike for copper or other metals used to make electric cars, there has not been a traded price for lithium, leaving the industry’s investors, customers, analysts and executives without a full sense of the global market. Ryan spoke on a panel presentation alongside executives from rivals SQM and Tianqi Lithium Corp, which agreed that lithium is not a true commodity. “The challenge of the index is to try to have very good representation of the market, which I really feel is not possible today because of how the lithium industry works,” Pablo Altimiras, SQM’s vice president of lithium and iodine, told the conference. An SQM spokeswoman did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Tuesday when asked after Altimiras spoke if the Chilean company plans to participate in the LME contract. Tianqi President Vivian Wu had said on Monday that the contract is “going to be helpful for us” and should bring more clarity to the market. Charlotte, North Carolina-based Albemarle operates across Chile, Australia and the United States, providing lithium used by Panasonic Corp to make batteries for Tesla Inc and other electric automakers. The company sells nearly all its lithium on long-term contracts, not spot deals, which would be the most influenced by a LME lithium price. Many long-term supply contracts are already referencing an LME price, an anticipatory step designed to set future deal parameters, industry investors have told Reuters. (GRAPHIC-Game of Mines link: tmsnrt.rs/2WiWp6o). (GRAPHIC-Global Lithium Production link: tmsnrt.rs/2HLefGh). Reporting by Ernest Scheyder; Additional reporting by Dave Sherwood; Editing by David Gregorio and Lisa Shumaker

https://www.reuters.com/article/lithium-electric-lme/update-3-albemarle-declines-to-participate-in-lme-lithium-contract-idUSL2N23I0NQ

Commodities

Reuters

2017-04-04 23:15:46

2017

4.0

4

Peter Kafka

Amazon will stream Thursday night NFL games this year

Last year, the National Football League experimented by letting Twitter livestream 10 Thursday night games. This year, pro football will continue the test, but will switch it up: Amazon has bought the rights to the league’s streaming package, and will offer the games for free to its Amazon Prime subscribers around the world. Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube had also expressed interest in carrying the games this year. Amazon is paying around $50 million for the 10 games it will show next fall, according to a person familiar with the deal. That’s a big increase from the $10 million Twitter paid for last year’s games. The rest of the deal is roughly similar to the one Twitter had last year: CBS and NBC will each broadcast five games, and Amazon will stream the networks’ coverage, including their ads. Amazon will have the rights to sell a handful of ad slots per game. Amazon says it may sell ads for those slots, but says it will also use them to promote the company’s other video offerings. Amazon won’t have exclusive streaming rights for the games. CBS and NBC will also have the ability to stream the games they broadcast, and Verizon will stream the games to its wireless subscribers. The deal is Amazon’s first significant foray into livestreaming (besides Twitch, the live video game streaming platform it bought a few years ago), and its first major move into sports; Amazon has also worked with the NFL on “All or Nothing,” a behind-the-scenes documentary series that debuted last summer. But Amazon has been ramping up its interest in live sports. “For us, this is about starting to bring live sports to our Prime members all around the world,” said Jeff Blackburn, the company’s head of business development and entertainment. Last year, when Twitter beat out Amazon for the NFL games, both Twitter and the NFL made a big deal about the fact that Twitter had around 300 million users worldwide. And they said Twitter could reach even more people with NFL games, because it wouldn’t require anyone to log in to Twitter to watch them. This year, the NFL seems to have made a different calculation. By putting it behind its Amazon Prime paywall, Amazon will reach a smaller potential audience. Amazon has never disclosed its Prime subscriber numbers, but my colleague Jason Del Rey thinks the company has 66 million subscribers; some Wall Street analysts think the number is higher. But Brian Rolapp, the NFL executive in charge of the league’s media deals, argues that Amazon should be able to find at least as many viewers as Twitter did, since Amazon Prime members visit and use Amazon a lot. “Reach is a focus of ours. I think Amazon has been able to demonstrate, in everything that they do, massive scale,” he said. “I don’t think this is limiting the reach. I think this is expanding the reach.” It’s unclear what benefit streaming the games actually provides for a digital platform. Last year, both Twitter and the NFL said they were pleased with the results of the experiment, but the games didn’t generate a huge audience: They averaged less than 300,000 viewers per minute, while CBS and NBC averaged 15.8 million viewers. This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

https://www.vox.com/2017/4/4/15184100/nfl-amazon-football-games-thursday-streaming-watch-live-prime-twitter

Vox

2018-07-20 17:30:00

2018

7.0

20

Alex Robert Ross

Del The Funky Homosapien Discusses His Near-Fatal Fall and Painful Recovery

Del The Funky Homosapien fractured seven ribs, one of which punctured a lung, after falling from the stage during Gorillaz' headline set at Roskilde Festival in Denmark on July 7. Since then the 45-year-old rapper, born Teren Jones, has undergone surgery and been released from hospital. He's spent the past five days holed up in a nearby hotel room, watching battle rap videos, playing Nintendo, and trying to type up lyrics. He's on a steady diet of morphine, and he can't reduce his dose. "I kind of let them wear off for a minute to see what it really was like," he says over the phone. "It was unbearable." Despite the painkillers and the trauma, Jones remembers the incident clearly. He'd only played two dates with Gorillaz in Europe on this run before the show in Denmark, and he'd been asleep since arriving in Roskilde. He woke up shortly before his set. It was night time, there was a smoke machine, and he was wearing sunglasses. He wasn't aware that there was a platform jutting out from the middle of the stage, so he came out for his first verse on "Clint Eastwood" as he usually does, ran past the band's frontman Damon Albarn, and barely got his first bar out before he fell off the side. "And then I was on the ground, crumpled up, crying, looking up into the lights and shit," he says. "Just crying, begging for help, in extreme pain. Damon I think tried to reach his hand down toward me [but] I couldn't move. I thought I was gonna die, basically." He was rushed straight to hospital, where Denmark's socialized healthcare system took over. "I will say that Denmark, their medical system, they was on it," he says. "If it was any other place, like the United States, I'm dead now." He had an epidural so that doctors could pump morphine directly into his veins, and a cannula to help him breathe. Doctors explained everything to him, but it was gory nonetheless: "They had to do surgery and had a tube directly in my lung. So the dude was pumping blood and air out of my lung. I had like four or five tubes hooked up to me." After successful surgery, all that Jones can do now is rest. Domino, the producer and a fellow member of underground hip-hop group Hieroglyphics, helps him out and brings him food. Jones is trying to type up lyrics when he gets the chance, and he's not passing out from the morphine now that his body's worked up a resistance. Still, he's in pain, and he's frustrated. Someone should have warned him about the setup on stage, he says: "If there's a danger of any sort, somebody would usually tell me. I had been asleep the whole time I was there. I went straight to the dressing room and just laid on the couch and went to sleep. I was exhausted. So when I woke up, they let me know it's time to go on, I went to the stage, they handed me a mic[...] I don't know. All I know is it wasn't my fault. I ran out there thinking everything was cool, and all of a sudden it wasn't cool no more." He'd usually be out skateboarding, but that's out of the question for a long time. His new album, Gate 13, a brilliantly minimal and dextrous collaboration with producer Amp Live, only came out in April, but Jones has had to cancel the rest of his tour dates for the year. Doctors told him the recovery would take roughly three months, but he doesn't think that will be the end of things: "I would imagine I'm probably going to be handicapped to some degree. I find it hard to believe that I'm going to be restored back to 100 percent after this. That just doesn't make any sense. Even if you repair something that you owned, it might work, but it ain't like when you first bought it out the store. That just seems ridiculous to me." He smashed his elbow on tour with Hieroglyphics a few years ago, pushing things too far on a playground swing. The bone recovered, but it still bugs him occasionally. It's understandably difficult for him to see how he'll bounce back perfectly from a busted chest. But the lyrics he's writing in between those YouTube videos and Nintendo interludes are still funny, he says. Gate 13 is packed with crisp one-liners—something he prides himself on coming from the battle rap scene—and he's not losing it now. "You can take things like that and find a way to express them," he says. "That's really all it is. Humor is just a socially acceptable way of saying things that you might not be able to say without disturbing people otherwise. So I naturally have a good sense of humor I guess, otherwise I'd be probably bouncing off the walls or arrested." There's nothing anyone can do to help (the Danish healthcare system, again, makes that simpler) but Jones says the messages he's received so far have been invaluable. He'd been thinking about dropping live shows altogether, having lost faith in the industry after the fall. "And then I feel like, if I'd have died, people would have just gone on, making money off of my death as well," he says, morbidly. But the support he's got so far has kept him from dropping out. "The one reason why I would want to still perform is because of the fans. So it's very encouraging and reassuring to see that so many people care about how I'm doing." Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbjva9/del-the-funky-homosapien-discusses-his-near-fatal-fall-and-painful-recovery

Noisey

Vice

2019-03-30 00:00:00

2019

3.0

30

Letitia Stein

Ex-vice president Biden doesn't recall inappropriate kiss alleged by activist: spokesman

(Reuters) - A spokesman for Joe Biden said the former vice president does not recall an incident in 2014 when a female activist said he inappropriately kissed her, but some of his potential rivals for the Democratic nomination said on Saturday they believe his accuser. The allegation was made in an online essay published on Friday by Lucy Flores, a party activist who was running to be Nevada’s lieutenant governor. Flores said Biden also touched her shoulders and smelled her hair when they appeared at an event together, making her feel uncomfortable. “He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head,” Flores wrote in the essay published in The Cut, an outlet of New York Magazine. “I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me.” Responding to the accusation, Biden spokesman Bill Russo said the vice president had been happy to support Flores and to speak on her behalf at the event. “Neither then, nor in the years since, did he or the staff with him at the time have an inkling that Ms. Flores had been at any time uncomfortable, nor do they recall what she describes,” Russo said on Friday in a statement. Biden believes Flores has every right to share her own recollection, Russo added, and that it is a positive change for U.S. society that she has the opportunity. In a separate statement on Saturday, Russo said: “People know Joe Biden and they know his character, his integrity and his values,” adding that he was a champion for women. Biden served eight years as vice president under former President Barack Obama and 36 years in the U.S. Senate. He has not yet said whether he will run for president in 2020, but has been expected to throw his hat into the ring soon. Some of his potential rivals for the Democratic party’s nomination to take on Republican Donald Trump addressed the allegation on Saturday. Elizabeth Warren, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, told reporters in Iowa that she believed Flores. “Joe Biden needs to give an answer,” Warren said. Julian Castro, a former U.S. secretary of housing and urban development from Texas who is also running for president, said he also found Flores credible, according to news reports. Flores supported Bernie Sanders in his losing 2016 bid for the Democratic nomination. Although the U.S. Senator from Vermont is running again, Flores has said on Twitter that she has not endorsed any of the candidates in this race. Should Biden decide to run in 2020, after failed bids to be the party’s nominee in 1988 and 2008, he will be a key figure in the Democratic debate over whether a liberal political newcomer or a centrist veteran is needed to win back the White House. Reporting by Letitia Stein; Editing by Daniel Wallis

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-biden/ex-vice-president-biden-doesnt-recall-inappropriate-kiss-alleged-by-activist-spokesman-idUSKCN1RB0QE

Politics

Reuters

2017-12-01 00:00:00

2017

12.0

1

White House says Flynn's Russia plea implicates Flynn alone

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The guilty plea entered by former U.S. national security adviser Michael Flynn to a charge of lying to the FBI implicates Flynn alone, the White House said in a statement on Friday. “Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicates anyone other than Mr. Flynn,” said Ty Cobb, a White House attorney. “The false statements involved mirror the false statements to White House officials which resulted in his resignation in February of this year,” Cobb said, adding that the plea “clears the way for a prompt and reasonable conclusion” of the Office of the Special Counsel’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and potential collusion by Trump’s campaign. Reporting by Roberta Rampton and James Oliphant

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-whitehouse/white-house-says-flynns-russia-plea-implicates-flynn-alone-idUSKBN1DV5H0

Politics

Reuters

2019-03-05 00:00:00

2019

3.0

5

David Shepardson, Heather Somerville

Uber not criminally liable in fatal 2018 Arizona self-driving crash: prosecutors

(Reuters) - Uber Technologies Inc is not criminally liable in a March 2018 crash in Tempe, Arizona, in which one of the company’s self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian, prosecutors said on Tuesday. The Yavapai County Attorney said in a letter made public that there was “no basis for criminal liability” for Uber, but that the back-up driver, Rafaela Vasquez, should be referred to the Tempe police for additional investigation. Prosecutors’ decision not to pursue criminal charges removes one potential headache for the ride-hailing company as the company’s executives try to resolve a long list of federal investigations, lawsuits and other legal risks ahead of a hotly anticipated initial public offering this year. The crash involved a Volvo XC90 sport utility vehicle that Uber was using to test self-driving technology. The fatal accident was a setback from which the company has yet to recover; its autonomous vehicle testing remains dramatically reduced. The accident was also a blow to the entire autonomous vehicle industry and led other companies to temporarily halt their testing. Scrutiny has mounted on the nascent technology, which presents fatal risks but has minimal oversight from regulators. Vasquez, the Uber back-up driver, could face charges of vehicular manslaughter, according to a police report in June. Vasquez has not previously commented and could not immediately be reached on Tuesday. Based on a video taken inside the car, records collected from online entertainment streaming service Hulu and other evidence, police said last year that Vasquez was looking down and streaming an episode of the television show “The Voice” on a phone until about the time of the crash. The driver looked up a half-second before hitting Elaine Herzberg, 49, who died from her injuries. Police called the incident “entirely avoidable.” Yavapai County Attorney’s Office, which examined the case at the request of Maricopa County where the accident occurred, did not explain the reasoning for not finding criminal liability against Uber. Yavapai sent the case back to Maricopa, calling for further expert analysis of the video to determine what the driver should have seen that night. An Uber spokeswoman declined to comment on the letter. The National Transportation Safety Board and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are still investigating. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office did not immediately comment on Tuesday. Uber in December filed confidentially for an initial public offering and is expected to seek a valuation of up to $120 billion. Its self-driving program, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars and does not generate revenue yet, is likely to come under scrutiny by investors. The ride-hailing company, which last year lost about $3.3 billion, is betting on a transition to self-driving cars to eliminate the need to pay drivers. At an autonomous vehicles conference in Silicon Valley last week, industry leaders lamented the loss of confidence from the public, regulators and investors that lingers a year after the Uber crash. There is no consensus on safety standards for the industry. In March 2018, authorities in Arizona suspended Uber’s ability to test its self-driving cars. Uber also voluntarily halted its entire autonomous car testing program and left Arizona. In December, Uber resumed limited self-driving car testing in Pittsburgh, restricting the cars to a small loop they can drive only in good weather. The company is now testing with two people in the front seat and more strictly monitors safety drivers. The company also said last year it made improvements to the vehicles’ self-driving software. Uber has not resumed testing in San Francisco or Toronto, where it previously had programs. Reporting by David Shepardson. Additional reporting by Heather Somerville in San Francisco and David Schwartz in Phoenix; Editing by Grant McCool and Cynthia Osterman

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-crash-autonomous/uber-not-criminally-liable-in-fatal-2018-arizona-self-driving-crash-prosecutors-idUSKCN1QM2O8

Business News

Reuters

2016-07-21 00:00:00

2016

7.0

21

Amber Heard: Hangin' a Lot with Elon Musk

Amber Heard -- who's in the throes of a divorce with Johnny Depp -- is spending a lot of time with a guy who makes Johnny look like a pauper -- billionaire extraordinaire Elon Musk ... TMZ has learned. Our sources say Amber has known the Tesla inventor for several years, but in the last few months they've been spending a lot of time together. Just last weekend Amber and her sister were hanging out in Elon's hotel bungalow in Miami. We're told she had a 1-on-1 dinner at his L.A. house 2 weeks ago. We're told she recently went to Elon's L.A. area office to spend time with him. And we're told he's paid several visits to her home. No one in Amber's camp is calling it "dating," but we're told the amount of time they spend together has definitely increased. Elon -- who's worth an estimated $12.7 billion -- is also going through a divorce with Talulah. They married, divorced, remarried and she filed for divorce for a second time in March.

https://www.tmz.com/2016/07/21/amber-heard-elon-musk-dating/

TMZ

2018-01-24 22:30:00

2018

1.0

24

Jason Bailey

Don't Call Maggie Gyllenhaal's Latest Character 'Unlikable'

Since her breakthrough performance in the 2002 Sundance Film Festival prize winner Secretary, Maggie Gyllenhaal has been one of the most reliably engaging actors in all of independent cinema, crafting raw, eccentric, and often electrifying performances in films like Sherrybaby, Away We Go, Crazy Heart, and Frank. (She also occasionally crosses over to more mainstream ventures, with memorable supporting turns in The Dark Knight, Stranger Than Fiction, and Nanny McPhee Returns.) This year, she’s back at Sundance with a leading role in Sara Colangelo’s remake of the 2014 Israeli film The Kindergarten Teacher. She stars as Lisa Spinelli, a career teacher and would-be poet who discovers that one of her five-year-old students (played by young Parker Stevak) is something of a poetry prodigy—a young Mozart, she insists. Her enthusiastic nurturing of his talent, coupled with her own artistic frustrations, takes the story in unexpected, unpredictable, and somewhat unnerving directions. The Kindergarten Teacher is also the first feature film on which Gyllenhaal is credited as a producer, so VICE sat down to talk with her about wearing that particular hat while creating this complex, challenging character. VICE: This character has this intensity and ends up making some poor choices, yet you render her with such sympathy. What did you see in her that you initially identified with, and did that change through the process of making the movie? Maggie Gyllenhaal: I think women have gotten used to seeing, like, 30 percent of our feminine experience represented realistically in a movie or television show—and we're like, Cool, that's awesome, I'll use my imagination for the other 70 percent. When I read a script that demands 100 percent of my own feminine expression, that's very exciting. As I started to think about [the character], I realized she's an artist. The script originally framed her as an "OK" poet, which... I think it's a more interesting story if she's a good poet, if there's a possibility that someone sees her work as compelling and excellent—I mean, I do. A really phenomenal poet wrote my poems. I was working with them, saying, "Maybe there's a way that you can tone this poem down, make it more predictable." My husband said to me, "Why? It's a better movie if the poetry's great." This is a woman with an exciting mind who's not getting the artistic and human connections she needs. Ultimately, she's driven crazy by the insanity of the culture and the time that she lives in—and she lives in the same culture and time that we do! She crosses way more lines than most of us can imagine crossing, but she's also us. Somebody said to me outside on the street, "I loved your movie, how were you able to live with such an unlikable person? Why do you have to push her so far away from yourself? Isn't it a more interesting movie if she feels like you? Branding a character as unlikable shuts off so much interesting conversation, and it gets applied to women way more than men. And this was a woman who said it to me! There's times I'm real unlikable. [Laughs] And there's times where people like me a lot. Isn't that true of every human being? I have a four-year-old daughter, and there's a very specific way her teachers interact with her. I noticed that you have that very specific communication you have to have with kids around that age. How did you develop that? My daughter is in kindergarten now, and [co-star Parker Sevak] is the same exact age as my daughter, which was very helpful. I didn't want to observe my children at either of their schools—I felt that that was too intrusive. So I asked my daughter's pre-K teacher to recommend a teacher, and I ended up observing this wonderful kindergarten teacher's class. Then we had the kids come in, and I taught them a class. And they all went, "I know your name isn't Mrs. Spinelli. You're in Batman!" I keep thinking about the opening shot where you see the ritual of starting the day. We know so much about that character before she's even said a word. We shot that scene a few times. I remember advocating for a take where I was doing a little breathing exercise. That tells you so much about this person—preparing for the day is a performance. Imagine just taking care of 25 five-year-olds. It's not that different from getting ready to do a play. This is your second credit as a producer—the first one was The Deuce, in which you're playing a character who decides that maybe that the real power lies in being a filmmaker. Did you have that same kind of moment where you decided to make the move into producing? I was inspired by [The Deuce character] Candy to move into directing. She was originally conceived as more of an entrepreneur—a producer—and I was really pushing for her to be a filmmaker, an artist. She goes to make that first porn, and she's like, Holy shit. She's a storyteller. I don't want to make a movie that nobody sees, but I also don't want to make movies only so a lot of people will see it—I can't. It drives me crazy! The only thing I can do well are things I am deeply compelled by. That's the truth. We've heard for a while now that there needs to be more representation on both sides of the camera. Do you think this moment we're having culturally is going to translate into anything that's going to move that needle? I really hope so—and I'm actually hopeful. I'm adapting a book that I would like to direct, and I feel like it's a great time to be doing that—a hopeful time, a supportive time, particularly for women. I'm compelled by the question of, "What is feminine filmmaking?" It's different than just movies made by women, right? I remember being 16 and seeing The Piano, seeing that image of Holly Hunter with her ankle tied to the rope, to the piano. I can't tell you why that was something I understood, but it stayed with me for 20 years. There was something fundamentally feminine about it, and I think the same is true for our movie. That's what I'm interested in exploring as a director, and I do believe that there's room for it. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily. Follow Jason Bailey on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59wvgk/maggie-gyllenhaal-the-kindergarten-teacher-vice-interview

Entertainment

Vice

2018-05-19 19:32:20

2018

5.0

19

Emily Stewart

Trump Jr. met with Saudi Arabia and UAE rep offering 2016 election help

Russia isn’t the only country Donald Trump Jr. was open to meeting with about getting a boost for his father’s presidential campaign. According to a report from the New York Times on Saturday, the president’s son also met with an Israeli social media specialist and an emissary for the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia who said the countries wanted to help Donald Trump win. On August 3, 2016, Trump Jr. took part in a meeting with Erik Prince, a Trump booster, founder of the private security firm Blackwater, and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; George Nader, a business executive and emissary for the princes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; and Joel Zamel, an Israeli expert in social media manipulation. The men met at Trump Tower in New York, according to a report from Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman, and David Kirkpatrick. Nader told Trump Jr. that the princes of Saudi Arabia and UAE were “eager” to help Trump win the White House, saying they believed he was a strong leader who would “fill the power vacuum” they thought President Barack Obama had left in the Middle East. Zamel’s company, Psy-Group, had put together a proposal for an online manipulation program to help elect Trump using thousands of fake accounts to promote him on Facebook. According to the Times, it’s not clear whether the proposal was executed, and it’s not clear who commissioned it in the first place. But Trump Jr. “responded approvingly,” and Nader joined the Trump-world fold, meeting often with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and his former strategist, Steve Bannon. After the election, Nader paid Zamel as much as $2 million, and what the money’s intended use isn’t clear. White Night, a Philippines-based company linked to Zamel, reportedly provided Nader with an elaborate presentation about the importance of social media campaigning in Trump’s win. There are multiple reasons the report matters. It indicates that it wasn’t just Russia that was offering to help the Trump campaign ahead of the 2016 election. It also raises questions about what sort of repayment the Middle East countries in question might have received for their help. And it demonstrates the Trump campaign’s reckless, if not nefarious, attitude toward campaign laws in the United States. Per the Times: It is illegal for foreign governments or individuals to be involved in American elections, and it is unclear what — if any — direct assistance Saudi Arabia and the Emirates may have provided. But two people familiar with the meetings said that Trump campaign officials did not appear bothered by the idea of cooperation with foreigners. Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump Jr., told the Times that the younger Trump “recalls” a meeting with Prince, Nader, and someone who “may be” Zamel. “They pitched Mr. Trump Jr. on a social media platform or marketing strategy. He was not interested and that was the end of it,” Futerfas said. Marc Mukasey, a lawyer for Zamel, said that he had “no involvement whatsoever in the US election campaign.” Kathryn Ruemmler, a lawyer for Nader, said he has “fully cooperated” with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Nader’s name has come up multiple times in the context of the Mueller investigation. According to the Times, his interactions with Zamel, Prince, and Trump Jr. are a focus of the probe. During the 2016 campaign, Nader visited Moscow at least twice as a confidential emissary from Crown Prince Mohammed of Abu Dhabi, and he helped to arrange a meeting in Seychelles between Prince and a Russian business executive close to Vladimir Putin that Mueller has also been probing. Companies tied to Zamel have connections to Russia as well. And after Trump’s inauguration, Nader was reportedly promoting a proposal to use private contractors for an economic sabotage against Iran that might get the country to abandon its nuclear program. He pitched it to Saudi officials last spring. And he was in discussions with Prince about a plan to convince Saudi Arabia to pay $2 billion to create a private army to fight against Iranian proxy forces in Yemen. The Times’s report asks as many questions as it answers, especially in the final paragraphs, where the writers wonder what Nader’s, Prince’s and Zamel’s efforts may have gotten for Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Since entering the White House, Mr. Trump has allied himself closely with Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. His first overseas trip was to Riyadh. He strongly backed Saudi and Emirati efforts to isolate their neighbor Qatar, another American ally, even over apparent disagreement from the State and Defense Departments. This month, Mr. Trump also withdrew from an Obama administration nuclear deal with Iran that both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had campaigned against for years, delivering them their biggest victory yet from his administration.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/19/17372344/donald-trump-jr-saudi-arabia-russia-meeting

Vox

2017-08-26 18:54:10

2017

8.0

26

Cork Gaines

Pedro Martinez says MLB pitchers will make Gary Sanchez pay for sucker punch

On Thursday, the New York Yankees and Detroit Tigers were involved in a wild game that included a legit brawl with haymakers, eight ejections, and a fastball to the head James McCann. On Friday, Major League Baseball suspended four players and one manager a total of 17 games, including seven games for Tigers slugger Miguel Cabrera. Also among the players receiving suspensions was Yankees catcher Gary Sanchez who received a four-game ban. However, if Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez is correct, the suspension is just the start of problems for Sanchez. Sanchez's suspension likely stems from a sucker punch he threw at Cabrera during the brawl while he was on the ground entangled with Yankees catcher Austin Romine. "At that moment, just instinct takes over because you want to defend your teammate, that's your family out there," Sanchez said after the game through an interpreter. While discussing the brawl on the MLB Network, Martinez noted that this is something the rest of the league is going to remember and that pitchers throughout baseball who are friends with the ever-popular Cabrera may look to exact some revenge. "The entire league remember those [cheap shots]," Martinez said. "Those don't go away ever from the league. And most of the other pitchers, the other friends that Miggy has on different teams, they're going to be looking at that... Gary Sanchez is going to wear it." Martinez later added on Twitter that Sanchez will be "badly remembered for this for a long time." You can see Martinez's full comments here, starting at the 4:50 mark.

https://www.businessinsider.com/pedro-martinez-gary-sanchez-sucker-punch-miguel-cabrera-2017-8

Business Insider

2019-03-25 00:00:00

2019

3.0

25

Heather Kapplow

A New Swiss Museum Shows Women’s Art Through a Multivalent Lens

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women at the Museum Susch suggests that letting women be multivalent is a critical piece of letting women be seen. Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads SUSCH, Switzerland — It takes some time to determine what artworks are part of the Museum Susch’s inaugural exhibition, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, and what belongs to the museum’s permanent, site-specific collection. There’s minimal traditional signage and wall texts have been renounced in favor of a smartphone app. The app works most of the time but not always, and not knowing who made an artwork or whether it is in the exhibition turned out to be pleasant intellectual stimulation. This ambiguity allows layers of meaning to settle, fantastically, on Monika Sosnowska’s “Stairs” (2016-17), for example. The large-scale installation of a staircase deconstructed by invisible forces but straining to rise up read as an effort to ascend from — to transcend — patriarchal models of femininity and womanhood, leaving the exhibition title resting, like dust, on its rungs. As part of the permanent collection, it becomes the museum’s spinal cord, transmitting the knowledge that perspective is always partial. Of the works included in the exhibition, Hannah Wilke’s 1976 video Through the Large Glass is a critical piece. Sited outside of the main entry to the exhibition, in its own little cavern, Wilke’s striptease at the Philadelphia Museum of Art next to Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)” (1915-23) enacts the exhibition’s title as women watch men in the room watching Wilke undress. Wilke’s ritualistic disrobing clearly both challenges and allures her audience. But she also subverts Duchamp’s power and authority with her own. Wilke’s work feels like a spell being cast on visitors before they cross the threshold into the main exhibition hall. Duchamp has described the bride here as the “Pendu femelle”: a female equivalent of the hanged man in Tarot. Perhaps the inclusion of Wilke’s video is a signal that any outdated male/female dynamics must be abandoned upon entering this exhibition. On the other side of the threshold, several paintings explore how female bodies conform to the male gaze, or don’t. In these works women look directly at the viewer and, in some cases, turn the gaze back on us in ways that feel disconcerting. For example, Ida Applebroog’s painting “The Ethics of Desire” (2013), which portrays helmeted, jackbooted, but otherwise nude women marching in formation, implicates the voyeuristic viewer in fascism or Nazism. Conversely, Teresa Pągowska’s semi-abstract painting “Yellow Room” (1970) shows what looks like a woman melting under our gaze. Sarah Lucus’s “Florian” (2013), a giant, gold-plated bronze sculpture in the shape of a butternut squash, is the primary representation of maleness in the room—but, in fact, it lies in a fetal position on the floor instead of standing upright. It still nearly dominates the space, with its size and shiny surface, but its outsized power is neutralized by the many women surrounding it. In a smaller room, works by Lucio Fontana, Renate Bertlmann, and Magdalena Abakanowicz push the boundaries of painting towards sculpture and performance. They treat canvas as a portal or interface rather than a surface, and the results are often easily read as vulvic. Once the surface has been ruptured, sexuality becomes more explicit in the exhibition. The show includes works by many of the art world’s heavy-hitting feminists, including “Fuck Painting #9” (1974) by Betty Tompkins and Carolee Schneemann’s large “Vulva’s Morphia” (1995). Dorothy Iannone’s “Let Me Squeeze Your Fat Cunt” (1970-1971) represents the strategy of many works in the show by wresting sexual language and imagery from tradition, handing it from men to women to exploit both the sexual content and its recontextualization. Comfort & Joy (2015), Julie Verhoeven’s giddy, polymorphously perverse film, employs everything from feathers to cake in service of demonstrating how sexist and archaic Alex Comfort’s 1972 manual The Joy of Sex is, and acts as the capstone of this section of the show. The rest of the exhibition addresses less explicit experiences, such as motherhood, and, more frequently, mourning in relation to motherhood, as in Andrzej Wróblewski’s “Mother with Dead Child” (1949). Cocks reemerge here and there in the upper floors of the museum — but it feels like the focus has shifted away from the form, to color and texture. One possible addition to the show could have been a work accessible only via the app — perhaps a sound piece bringing the strong history of feminist artists working in virtual spaces into conversation with this primarily earthbound collection of works. Many of the museum’s permanent and site-specific works are also by women and seem to address themes adjacent to those of the exhibition. In some ways these other works, though not explicitly included, feel like part of the show, and speak to its fluid boundaries. Among the exhibition’s works, the same artists re-appear with different identities in different rooms — for example, Hanna Wilke, who opens the exhibition as a performance artist, is represented by delicate sculptures near the end. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women seems to say that letting women be multivalent is a critical piece of letting women be seen. A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women continues at the Museum Susch (Surpunt 78, Susch, Switzerland) through June 30. The exhibition is curated by Kasia Redzisz.

https://hyperallergic.com/490962/museum-susch-a-woman-looking-at-men-looking-at-women/

Hyperallergic

2018-05-08 00:00:00

2018

5.0

8

Macron to discuss Iran with Merkel and May ahead of Trump decision: Elysee

PARIS (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron will discuss Iran and U.S. President Donald Trump’s looming decision on its nuclear accord in a phone call with German Chancelor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May at 1730 GMT on Tuesday, a source said. Trump is due to announce his final decision on whether to pull out of the agreement at 1800 GMT. Reporting by Marine Pennetier, writing by Sybille de La Hamaide, editing by Richard Lough

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-macron-call/macron-to-discuss-iran-with-merkel-and-may-ahead-of-trump-decision-elysee-idUSKBN1I92I1

World News

Reuters