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2018-05-11

A former CIA contractor on Friday pleaded guilty to improperly removing and retaining classified materials, and then later lying to federal law enforcement officers about these unauthorized actions, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Prosecutors for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia say Reynaldo Regis searched classified databases without authorization during the time he worked as a contractor for the spy agency, between August 2006 and November 2016. He then copied the information into his personal notebooks and brought it to his house.  "During a search of his home, FBI agents recovered approximately 60 notebooks containing classified information. The classified information contained in the notebooks included information relating to highly sensitive intelligence reports, disclosure of which could cause serious damage to the national security," the Justice Department said. Regis then lied during an interview with federal investigators about improperly handling classified materials. It is unclear what his motives were for taking the information. “Mr. Regis is a decent man who has served his country for many years with distinction," Regis's attorney, John Zwerling, told Reuters during a phone interview. “He made a mistake — a serious mistake. He has acknowledged it, he has pled guilty, he has accepted responsibility and he is now a convicted felon because of this mistake. He needs and wants to do what he can to move on with his life,” Zwerling continued. U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady accepted the plea of Regis, a 53-year-old from Fort Washington, Md.  Regis, who could face a maximum prison sentence of five years, is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 21.  View the discussion thread. The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 fax The contents of this site are ©2019 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

2019-05-14 04:00:01

Article of the Day Before reading the article: Would you want to go to school with your grandparents? How might that change your school experience? What might you be able to learn from them and their peers? What might they learn from your generation? Now, read the article, “Running Out of Children, a South Korea School Enrolls Illiterate Grandmothers,” and answer the following questions: 1. The article starts with the story of a yellow school bus ride. What is surprising about Hwang Wol-geum’s daily ride? 2. Why was Ms. Hwang not able to attend school as a child? 3. Why is there a child shortage in rural areas of South Korea? Why does the future of Gangjin County depend on enrolling students in its elementary school, according to the article? 4. What was Ms. Hwang’s first day of school like? What has been the grandmothers’ experience of school? 5. What has been the reaction of teachers and other students to the presence of grandmothers who are now attending the school? How are classrooms arranged differently to support the learning of older adult students? 6. How did illiteracy affect Ms. Hwang and the other grandmothers throughout their lives? What hardships — emotional, social and economic — did they face? 7. What are some of the things the grandmothers hope to do, now that they are finally learning to read and write? Which of these lifelong dreams do you find most memorable or touching? Finally, tell us more about what you think: — What is your reaction to the story of grandmothers attending elementary school? What can we learn from their experience? Which aspect of their story did you find most fascinating or inspiring? — Would you want to attend school with these elderly learners? Why or why not? How do you think you might benefit from their presence? How do you think their lives might be positively affected? — Look through the photos and videos featured in the article. Select one and write about how it illustrates the value of lifelong or intergenerational learning. — Should all schools have an intergenerational component? What ways can your school more meaningfully bring elders into the educational experience? (You can research some different ideas and programs here, here and here.) Further Resources: Fostering Connections Between Young and Old New Women’s Groups Focus on Generational Mix The Growing Generational Divide

2017-04-24 00:00:00

Sony’s “super mid-range” Xperia XA1 phone is now available to preorder through Amazon and Best Buy. It’ll go on sale at other retailers, like B&H and Fry’s, on May 1st. The phone will cost $299.99. The company announced the device during Mobile World Congress this year. Here are the specs again: The XA1 and the larger XA1 Ultra also feature something called “Xperia Actions,” which Sony says can learn users’ habits to automatically change settings and manage apps. For instance, the phone’s software could learn your bedtime and automatically adjust screen brightness and volume.

2018-09-27 00:00:00

Millions of Americans were fixated Thursday on the scene of a woman, Christine Blasey Ford, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee her claim of being sexually assaulted as a 15-year-old high school girl in the early 1980s by a drunken Brett Kavanaugh, who is now President Donald Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court. Photos of them watching and listening Ford's testimony, or visiting Congress to show their support for her — or for Kavanaugh — were shared across social media. Kavanaugh, who strongly denies Ford's allegations, as well as those made by at least two other women who have recently come forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct, vehemently denied sex misconduct allegations later Thursday afternoon and lashed out at Democrats on the panel.

2016-07-26 14:23:46

PHILADELPHIA — Follow along with our coverage of the Democratic National Convention. If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, Bill Clinton will not become a regular at cabinet meetings, his wife’s advisers say. He will not be invited into the Situation Room. He will step away from his family’s foundation work and may not even have an office in the West Wing, given the undesirable optics of a former president and husband looking over the shoulder of the first female commander in chief. But the steps that Clinton aides are planning to shape his new life do little to address a potentially thornier problem: Historically, when Mr. Clinton does not have a job to do, he gets into trouble. It was during the government shutdown in 1995 that Mr. Clinton began his affair with Monica Lewinsky. It was in the early years after he left the White House that his friendships with wealthy playboys became tabloid fodder. Sidelined by Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, Mr. Clinton went rogue and started lashing out at Barack Obama. More recently, his dinner with the businessman Mark Cuban and his tarmac encounter with Attorney General Loretta Lynch were reminders that when Mr. Clinton has time on his hands, he can create dangerous distractions for his wife. “He loves getting involved in things — no one loves policy and politics more than Bill Clinton,” said Mickey Kantor, a longtime friend and secretary of commerce under Mr. Clinton. “He loves, and needs, to have a purpose.” How we analyzed in real time the second night of the Democratic National Convention, featuring Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Lena Dunham. Putting Mr. Clinton to good use, while containing his less helpful impulses, would be a major test for Mrs. Clinton as president, given the spotlight and pressure they would be under and her limited ability in the past to rein in his excesses. Mrs. Clinton sees him as her most trusted confidant and sounding board on national security and the economy, advisers say; one recalled a recent golf outing where Mr. Clinton received several phone calls and emails from Mrs. Clinton before reaching the 14th hole. Yet Mrs. Clinton is still not sure if she would give a formal position to Mr. Clinton or rely on him to help behind the scenes and keep a low profile, aides say. She clearly wants him busy: Appearing on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Mrs. Clinton said that it would be “an all-hands-on-deck time” if she won the presidency and that she would rely on Mr. Clinton — as well as President Obama — and “put ’em all to work.” At the same time, she emphasized that she and Mr. Clinton would not be co-presidents, leaving open the question of how he would spend his days when he is so close to the levers of power that he knows well. Given his insights and experience, Mr. Clinton could be more capable than anyone else in ensuring the success of her presidency — or he could cast a long shadow over her. “Their relationship as a current president and a former president would be a very, very sensitive issue early on, and they’d need to carefully work out the rules of the road for the sake of both of them,” said David Gergen, who was a senior adviser to several presidents, including Mr. Clinton. “There’s some revisionist history underway about his presidency that clearly bothers him, for instance, and he may want to rewrite the story of his presidency partly by influencing Hillary’s policies as president,” Mr. Gergen added. “They both have to be very careful with that.” Aides and allies of the Clintons were emphatic that his sole focus would be on helping his wife and doing what she asked. They played down any controversies over the last several years, pointing out that Mr. Clinton had focused on the foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative during that time. But at the same time they acknowledged that Mr. Clinton would not be content to sit idly by or speak only when spoken to. At 69, even as age and health have somewhat slowed him, Mr. Clinton still has a strong desire to be in the center of the action, friends say, and his intellectual interests and curiosity remain vast. One aide says Mr. Clinton now spends an extra hour every day reading about world economies, partly in anticipation of helping Mrs. Clinton if she asks him to help with economic revitalization, as she has indicated. He enjoys working abroad — his popularity is sky-high in many countries — and he likes calling up whomever he wants, whenever he wants, especially his wife. But if the Clintons return to the White House, his life will inevitably become more circumscribed, and he will be expected to show the self-discipline that most first spouses have demonstrated. “He’ll do anything she wants and nothing more,” said Erskine Bowles, Mr. Clinton’s chief of staff from 1997 to 1998. “That will be hard for him at times, but that’s the reality of the situation if she is going to succeed on her own.” Tina Flournoy, who is Mr. Clinton’s chief of staff, noted that Mr. Clinton had been a prodigious campaigner and fund-raiser throughout the campaign at Mrs. Clinton’s request — a role that political analysts have described as a net asset for her candidacy. “If Secretary Clinton is elected, he will continue to support her whenever and wherever he’s asked,” Ms. Flournoy said. Mr. Clinton is not likely to shoulder many of the traditional duties of first ladies, advisers say, like selecting White House china and floral arrangements and presiding as the host in the national home and arranging state dinners. Some of that is expected to fall to the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea. Mr. Clinton also has not given thought to using the role of first gentleman to redefine ideas about American masculinity and patriarchy, nor has he decided if he will draw on his personal interests — like veganism — for a healthy-eating initiative the way Michelle Obama did, his advisers say. Friends of Mr. Clinton say the smartest way to use him would involve a major but focused appointment, like leading a task force to fight climate change, global poverty or the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic, which would be natural outgrowths of his foundation work. Others, including some who worked in Mr. Clinton’s administration, like the idea of him as Middle East peace envoy, given his herculean efforts in the region during his presidency, or as a kind of jobs mastermind focused on rebuilding the most struggling regions of America. Milestones in politics when women and minorities were first elected to federal, state and local government. “In some ways the Middle East is the most natural job for him, because he’s so popular with all sides and he spent so much time on peacemaking,” said Martin S. Indyk, a United States ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration and a longtime negotiator in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Aides to Mr. Clinton said Middle East peace envoy was not a job they had heard him express interest in. They also noted that for every possible job, there is a potential downside — that he would create tensions with his wife’s secretary of state, Treasury secretary or other cabinet officer; that he might upstage Mrs. Clinton or box her in because she might have difficulty overruling him; or that he would become a political target of Republicans once again. Mrs. Clinton has some familiarity with the issue. In 1994, she led the White House’s health care effort, an endeavor that put her in conflict with congressional Republicans and competition with Vice President Al Gore. Advisers say she is mindful of that experience and wary of putting Mr. Clinton in the cross hairs with a high-profile policy role. But the Clintons would not simply be changing roles if she became president and he the supportive spouse. Unlike Mrs. Clinton, who was new to Washington when she became first lady, Mr. Clinton brings a wealth of political relationships, untold diplomatic experience and vast firsthand knowledge about issues and crises that presidents face. He could easily be deployed to make discreet phone calls to governors, members of Congress and business leaders, or to play a role in negotiations between foreign leaders or in global hot spots. Advisers to Mrs. Clinton, asked about specific roles that Mr. Clinton might play, said she had not given the matter much thought. “She would certainly seek his advice and counsel,” said Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton. “Beyond that, it being July, it would be getting ahead of oneself to talk about any sort of formalized role for anyone in an administration.” Mr. Clinton would not necessarily be at the White House full time, advisers say. The couple would most likely keep their home in Chappaqua, N.Y., and Mr. Clinton might continue doing some work in Manhattan with his foundation or at the offices he has kept in his post-presidency. When in Washington, he would be less likely to be a social planner for his wife than to be her protector within the White House. Some friends of the Clintons said they could see him taking a page from Nancy Reagan, who could be aggressive in ensuring that administration staff members were serving the interests of President Ronald Reagan. Mr. Clinton might know better than most if Mrs. Clinton was being overburdened or receiving bad advice. “He’ll be her advocate, he’ll be her lawyer, and if he thinks the staff isn’t protecting her, they’d have private conversations about it,” Mr. Kantor said. He said, however, that he did not think Mr. Clinton would go as far as Mrs. Reagan, who orchestrated the ouster of Donald T. Regan as White House chief of staff. “He wouldn’t meddle,” Mr. Kantor said, “in a negative way.” Advisers to the Clintons say they have no models for their lives in the White House if Mrs. Clinton wins; Mr. Clinton would be in a league of his own as a former president as well as the first male spouse. His focus at this point, advisers say, is simply to help Mrs. Clinton get elected. “It’s remarkable,” Mr. Gergen said. “She would be the first president in history who is protecting the legacy of two presidents. And I think her presidency would bring him a certain amount of redemption — that the country did see the Clinton years as good enough that they wanted to return this couple to the White House.” OpinionKate Andersen Brower

2019-09-04 00:00:00

(Corrects Paragraph 6 to say co cut its sales forecast last week, not this week) Sept 4 (Reuters) - Australia’s Pilbara Minerals on Wednesday said a Chinese electric-vehicle battery manufacturer has bought an 8.5% stake in the company as part of a A$91.5 million ($61.8 million) capital raising. Contemporary Amperex Technology Co, one of China’s leading electric-vehicle battery makers, bought the stake through a A$55 million placement while an additional A$36.5 million was raised through an institutional placement. The fund-raising comes a few days after the miner took a stake in its flagship Pilgangoora lithium project in Western Australia off the market for lack of an appealing offer. The raising will provide working capital for the ramp-up of the Pilgangoora operation and will also fund Pilbara’s participation in a joint venture with South Korea’s POSCO for a chemical conversion plant, the company said in a statement. Pilbara said a Share Purchase Plan will also be offered to raise up to an additional A$20 million. Last week, the Western Australian miner cut its sales forecast and curbed spending plans amid a downturn in the market for the battery raw material. The lithium market is going through a lean phase as China’s sales of electric vehicles fall following sweeping changes to subsidies. Reporting by Aby Jose Koilparambil in Bengaluru; Editing by Richard Pullin

2019-09-10 00:00:00

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and newly signed wide receiver Antonio Brown began their crash course in chemistry building on Monday, and Brady says he came away impressed that Brown “is into doing what’s in the best interest for the team.” Brown spent nine years starring for the Pittsburgh Steelers before forcing a trade to the Oakland Raiders, only to be released on Saturday after a series of squabbles with the team. Brown agreed to a deal with the defending Super Bowl champion Patriots hours later, and made his way to Foxborough, Mass., on Monday. During his weekly interview with Westwood One, Brady said he “really enjoyed being around” Brown, and called him “a very smart football player, knows how to play the game. He’s been extremely productive.” Brady, who led the Patriots to a 33-3 win over the Steelers on Sunday night, said he wasn’t “buying into any hype or potential. I’m into work. He’s into work, and our entire offense is into doing what’s in the best interest for the team. I’m really excited to get to practice on Wednesday.” Brown is a seven-time Pro Bowl selection and four-time first-team All-Pro. In 130 games, he has 837 catches for 11,207 yards and 74 touchdowns. In 2014, Brown led the NFL with 129 catches and 1,698 yards. He led the league again the next year with 136 catches, although his 1,834 yards barely trailed league-leading Julio Jones’ 1,871. Brown’s 1,533 yards receiving in 2017 was also the best in the NFL. Brady said he and Brown are “going to meet as much as we possibly can. I think that quarterback-receiver relationship is so important. The more you know each other, the more you know what each other’s thinking, the faster you can accelerate the trust and confidence in one another when you get on the field.” —Field Level Media

2018-06-06 14:33:00

Kendra Wilkinson is taking responsibility for her part in the demise of her marriage. Wilkinson, 32, issued a public apology to ex-husband Hank Baskett in a series of tweets on Wednesday, admitting she made “a lot of mistakes” in their marriage. “I want to apologize publicly to Hank. I was the reason your football career ended,” she tweeted. “I regret doing that to u and I hope u learn to forgive me one day. I loved u and was always your number one fan.” Wilkinson filed for divorce from the former NFL player in April after almost nine years of marriage and two kids together, citing irreconcilable differences. She listed their separation date as Jan. 1. “I was 24 when I got married,” she said in another tweet. “Now I’m 33. I made a lot of mistakes through those young years and I’m sorry for making u feel the way I did.” In her final tweet, the former Playboy model said she acting immaturely during their relationship. “All I ever wanted was family because I never had a solid one but me being immature was the reason I couldn’t give u more,” she wrote. But she deleted the messages shortly after posting them. Her tweets come after the Kendra On Top star accused Baskett of “recording” her in a since-deleted tweet. “Why is Hank recording me right now. Please tell him to leave me alone and stop,” she wrote before taking the post down. A source recently told PEOPLE Wilkinson is doing her best to stay positive in the months since the split. “Kendra is not in the best place right now,” said the source. “She’s trying to convince herself she’s happy, but she’s not.” “During their marriage, Kendra and Hank went through all the right steps to make it work, and while there seemed to be some great and positive changes for them as a couple and as individuals, she struggled to deal with everything fully. She was hiding,” added the source. The former couple’s marriage was rocked by scandal in 2014 when he allegedly had an affair with a transgender model while Wilkinson was eight months pregnant. Wilkinson and Baskett are parents to two children, Hank IV, 8, and daughter Alijah Mary, 3. The TV reality star is requesting joint legal and physical custody of their kids and is also seeking the restoration of her maiden name, Wilkinson. “I’m doing the best I can in my life with the cards I’ve been dealt and I will continue to do that. I’m hurt because the world I thought was promised to me forever is now coming to an end,” Wilkinson wrote on Instagram in May. Last month, Wilkinson asked her Twitter followers when the right time is to move on from her past relationship. “What’s your opinion… do i start dating/sex now or give myself more time? My heart is broken but i have needs. Lmaoooo #gimmelovin #notgettingyounger #33hereicome,” Wilkinson tweeted, along with a spider web emoji and a grandma emoji.

2018-01-03

Jan 3 (Reuters) - Xiamen Intretech Inc : * SAYS IT AIMS TO RAISE UP TO 1.7 BILLION YUAN ($261.90 million) AT 22.5 YUAN PER SHARE FOR ITS INITIAL SHENZHEN SHARE OFFERING Source text in Chinese: bit.ly/2lJpK4H ($1 = 6.4910 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Hong Kong newsroom)

2017-09-18

Sept 18 (Reuters) - ARABIAN FOOD INDUSTRIES CO: * EXPECTS GROSS REVENUE OF EGP 700 MILLION IN Q3 2017 Source:(bit.ly/2hcmz3c) Further company coverage:

2019-03-31

(CNN)The day before we met, human rights campaigner Aref Jaber recorded the arrest of a 9-year-old Palestinian boy, taken out of school in the West Bank city of Hebron by armed Israeli soldiers. His footage shows soldiers inside Ziad Jaber elementary school, arguing with the school principal and other teachers, as they attempt to remove Zein Idris and his 7-year-old brother Taim. At one point on the video, one of the teachers is told that if he does not let go of Zein, the soldier will break the teacher's arm. The age of criminal culpability in Israel -- under both civilian and military law -- is 12, but when the principal points out that the brothers are just young children, an Israeli officer replies, "They threw stones, I don't care how old they are." Taim was hidden in a classroom but, as the video shows, Zein was eventually frog-marched away and taken to an army vehicle. According to the school and residents of the neighborhood, he was taken off to a nearby military post and held for just under an hour. Describing the incident to CNN, the Israeli army spokesperson's unit said that a group of students had thrown stones toward cars belonging to residents of Israeli settlements in the city, and that soldiers then conducted a warning chat with the pupils. The army disputed the suggestion it had made any arrests, but added that the incident will be investigated, and regulations clarified accordingly. 'You threw a stone' When I visit Zein Idris, he is playing on the roof of the family house. Sitting next to his mother, he tells me he was on his way out of school with Taim when they saw the soldiers running towards them, so they went back to school to hide. "They ran into the school and arrested me. One of the soldiers screamed at me while twisting my ear and said, 'you threw a stone.' I told him I didn't, but he grabbed my shoulder and pushed me hard to the wall and kept me arrested for two hours." Aref Jaber has lived in Hebron all his life. He documents as much as he can in the West Bank's largest Palestinian city with his video camera or his phone. "The most dangerous thing," he says, "is that arresting children here is becoming normal." Children's rights UNICEF, the United Nations agency which seeks to protect children's rights, characterizes what happened as an arrest. While noting that Zein was released without charge, it says that incidents of military forces entering schools are all too common in the West Bank. "Not only do all children everywhere have a right to a safe education and protection from all forms of violence and exploitation, but it is also essential for their mental and physical well-being," says UNICEF Palestine Special Representative, Genevieve Boutin. "Children who face such violations often experience difficulties in schools and are at risk of drop out." In 2018, the UN agency received testimony from 65 Palestinian children arrested or detained either at school, or on their way to or from classes. Numbers from the Israeli Prison Services show a monthly average of 271 Palestinian children detained in 2018 for alleged security offenses. This does not include the total number of children who come into contact with security forces but are released after a few hours, such as in Zein Idris's case, UNICEF adds. Permanent state of tension The situation in Hebron is a particular concern. Lying less than 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Jerusalem, even by the standards of the region, the city's administrative arrangements are complex. It is divided into two, with Palestinians controlling one part, Israelis the other. The Israeli part, which includes the Old City, is home to about 40,000 Palestinians and a few hundred Israeli settlers, according to figures from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Guarding the settlers are around 650 Israeli soldiers, according to Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation organization made up of former Israeli servicemen and women. The army itself does not comment on the number of troops it deploys. Security in the Israeli-controlled part is based on what is called the "principle of separation." In the words of Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem this means that Palestinians living there "are subjected to extreme restrictions in their movement, by car or on foot, including the closure of main streets, while [Israeli] settlers are free to go where they wish." The result is a permanent state of tension; a place seething with hostility and mistrust. Abu Jalal owns a shop right in front of Zein Idris's school and was present when the soldiers marched him out. He describes what he sees as a game the soldiers play with the children. "The soldiers storm the school to provoke the kids. When the kids see them with their weapons they start screaming, to provoke the soldiers, who then feel they have a reason to arrest the kids," he says. The army disputes that description and says it only ever enters a school when it believes an incident, like a stone-throwing, has taken place and it wants to find the perpetrator. Going forward, Israeli authorities, in discussions with UNICEF, have also "expressed willingness ... to issue directives that would forbid the entry of armed forces into schools" according to the UN agency, though this is yet to be implemented. 'Moral blindness' B'Tselem is another group which records incidents in the West Bank in which it says Israeli security forces have detained Palestinian children below the age of criminal liability without informing their parents. It says the justification often given is that soldiers were detaining the children before handing them over to Palestinian authorities. "It is unacceptable for armed forces to hold a young child alone for any time at all, and especially without notifying his or her parents, regardless of whether the child has thrown stones or not. The fact that Israeli authorities believe that this conduct is acceptable speaks volumes as to the moral blindness afflicting them." The influence on Israeli society of Israel's long military occupation of the Palestinian territories is a sensitive one for many Israelis, especially when the suggestion is made that its own soldiers might be paying a price. Israeli TV news anchor Oshrat Kotler was heavily criticized recently for suggesting, during a live broadcast in February, that serving in the West Bank was turning Israeli soldiers into animals. "We send our children to the army, to the territories and get back animals. That is the result of the occupation," she said. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was just one of those to raise a critical voice against the TV anchor. "I am proud of the soldiers of the IDF and love them very much. Kotler's comments should be condemned," he said. 'Careful, they are filming!' Aref Jaber says Hebron's children are clearly paying a psychological price. "The scars are deep. Many of the children here are scared to go to school, others are prevented by their own parents from leaving the house and playing with their friends in the neighborhood," he says. Another human rights activist, Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, sees no solution to the current situation. The only weapon that can make even a small difference he says is a camera. "As soon as the soldiers see a camera they start telling each other, 'Careful, they are filming!' This is the only way we have succeeded to document their crimes and show them to the whole world."

2016-10-03

Japan's Yoshinori Ohsumi won the 2016 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology for his discovery of how cells break down and recycle their content, which could lead to a better understanding of diseases like cancer, Parkinson's and type 2 diabetes. "Ohsumi's discoveries led to a new paradigm in our understanding of how the cell recycles its content," the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement on awarding the prize of 8 million Swedish crowns ($933,000). "His discoveries opened the path to understanding ... many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection," the statement added. Ohsumi's work on cell breakdown, a field known as autophagy, is important because it can help explain what goes wrong in a range of diseases. "Mutations in autophagy ('self eating') genes can cause disease, and the autophagic process is involved in several conditions including cancer and neurological disease," the statement said. Ohsumi, born in 1945 in Fukuoka, Japan, has been a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2009. "I am extremely honored," he told Kyodo News agency. The prize for Physiology or Medicine is the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year. Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel. This year, the Karolinska Institute, the institution that awards the medicine prize, has been immersed in a scandal over the hiring of a controversial surgeon. The Swedish government dismissed several members of the board in September.

2019-01-08

TOKYO (Reuters) - For years, Japan’s retail currency investors were known as “Mrs Watanabes”, a reference to the metaphorical housewife who invests family savings mostly in foreign exchange. Now, a younger generation of women is looking at a wider asset range in which to park investments. Like their elders, Japan’s “Kinyu-joshi” or “finance girls,” who are largely in their 20s and 30s, face a challenging investment landscape with bank deposits offering minimal, near-zero returns. Unlike their senior counterparts, however, younger female investors tend to be more frugal and averse to overexposure to any one single asset class. For this reason, many of them are tapping a broader asset universe using mobile-based services to keep costs low. While younger female investors account for a much smaller chunk of Japan’s investment base than their seniors do, their increasing appetite for yield represents a significant mobilization of personal capital into global financial markets. “All my savings were in cash, but I thought that’s really scary,” said Haruka Hirokawa, 32, who works at a call center for a domestic life insurer. “I thought it’ll be necessary to diversify my investments globally from now on.” Hirokawa, who has invested about 130,000 yen so far, has put her money into eight trusts, including international equity and multi-asset funds by investing 100 yen ($0.92) per trading day into each trust, for a total of 16,000 yen a month. She constructed her portfolio after meeting like-minded investors at meetings of Kinyu-joshi, a women’s community largely made up of people in their late 20s and early 30s that regularly meets to discuss finance matters. Japan’s senior Watanabes were best known for bets on speculative assets with volatile risk-reward ratios, specifically through foreign exchange margin trading. That generation became big players in currency trading in the past decade as they sought to beat meager returns through tactics such as the famous carry-trade. However, the Turkish lira’s sell-off in August and its slump against the yen on Jan. 3 have forced many to abandon the high-yielding Middle Eastern unit, previously a popular choice for retail investors, and reassess their risk exposure. By comparison, younger Watanabes are building nest eggs through regular and small investments into passive funds. Many take on international exposure by diversifying their holdings through multiple funds, rather than direct investments in underlying assets, said Minako Takekawa, a financial journalist. Driving the shift in female investment habits in Japan is a wider anxiety about retirement in a country where the number of citizens age 65 and older is expected to grow from 28 percent of the population to 36 percent by 2040, according to the government-backed National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. More broadly, Japanese are flocking to new private retirement accounts to secure their own financial future, even with government encouragement. Since opened to the general population in 2017, the new accounts, called “iDeCo” for individual defined contribution accounts, have grown more than threefold to more than 1 million. They are modeled on the U.S. tax-deferred Individual Retirement Accounts plans. “The increase in new accounts is prompted by people’s concerns about the future, whether they can make ends meet in their old age,” said Aguri Sagawa, a researcher at Daiwa Institute of Research. (GRAPHIC: Japanese are flocking to private pension accounts - tmsnrt.rs/2AArPYN) More than half of the 1.859 quadrillion yen ($17.19 trillion) in Japanese household assets are still either in bank deposits or cash, compared with 13.1 percent for the United States. Data from the Central Council for Financial Services Information, a public entity, showed that 59 percent of households inhabited by people in their 20s didn’t have any savings in 2017, up from 31.8 percent a decade earlier. However, another survey, from consultancy J.D. Power, showed 26 percent of Japanese in their 20s who didn’t already invest intended to do so, compared with 8 percent and 4 percent for those in their 50s and 60s, respectively. For young investors like Hirokawa, there are still three decades left to build up retirement savings before these are needed. “Assuming that we’ll only receive 60 or 70 percent (in pensions) of what people are now given when we reach our retirement age, we must increase our assets by ourselves,” said Hirokawa. (This story has been refiled to make subject in first line plural) Editing by Sam Holmes

2019-01-30 14:43:00

There is a distinctly nostalgic feeling to playing Wargroove. It reminds me of the Game Boy Advance, and my first brushes with Advance Wars, a series that made turn-based strategy both accessible and difficult. Wargroove rekindles a lot of that flame, while also giving me tools to spark a whole new obsession. The new game from Chucklefish, publisher of several indie gems and developer of Starbound, has the look and sound of exactly what I remember from Advance Wars years ago. Units bob up and down on the screen, numbers clash into numbers, weakness into advantage, and eventually all but one commander resigns. It’s been a decade since the last Advance Wars game, as Nintendo’s focused on other strategy franchises like Fire Emblem and Mario + Rabbids. But when I was in middle school I, like most my age, had a GBA, and most of us had the first Advance Wars. It was a revelation at the time, a persistent arena of strategy and chaos. We made our own maps. We argued over the best commander. (Grit, by the way.) It was easy to pick up but tough, challenging, and demanded chess-like strategy to outwit both the computer opponent and each other. Wargroove taps into the same energy, but doesn’t just play rose-tinted melodies. With new ideas that change your approach to strategy, a fantasy setting, and an extremely robust custom creation suite, Wargroove is the real successor to a series I thought had been long forgotten. The core loop of Wargroove is still very much Wars. Multiple commanders vie for cash-producing towns; unit-producing structures like barracks, towers, or harbors; and the stronghold, the base of operations. Unlike Nintendo’s other grid-based strategy games Fire Emblem, this isn’t as much about individual characters, love and relationships, or building up stats. It’s armies against armies, with dozens of knights, dragons, and skeletons clashing at once. Since Wargroove takes place in the realm of fantasy, your units are fittingly medieval but still adhere to some basic tenets. Swordsmen are fast and cheap, but not particularly effective against anything; contrast that with pikemen, slightly more expensive and slower, but bulkier and more powerful, especially against cavalry. The various rock-paper-scissors triangles can sometimes lock strategy into a stalemate. Wargroove doesn’t just rely on basic strengths and weaknesses, though. A major marker of a good commander is utilizing critical hits. Meet certain requirements, and your unit will do extra damage, potentially turning the tides of a battle. Archers will critically hit if they fire without moving, fliers get critical hits if they’re over a mountain, and pikemen will do more damage if they’re standing next to other pikemen. It rewards not just smart positioning, but risk-taking. Sometimes it’s worth putting a unit in danger to land a crucial critical, ensuring a barracks crumbles or a powerful unit falls. Because of that, winning can sometimes feel like a Herculean task, driving just enough of a wedge into the opponent’s line that you can start to crack it open. Commanders, another major change in Wargroove’s formula, are crucial. Unlike the Wars’ series absentee generals, commanders in Wargroove take to the field and lead the charge as actual units. Each has their own characteristics as a commander, whether it’s the scrappy Queen Mercia, the sneering vampire Ragna, or the cheerful prince Koji and his giant puppet/mecha, and each has a signature ability called a “groove.” One particular mission in the campaign stumped me for ages; I controlled two forces, and had to get one commander from the western side of the map to the east, where my other was. In this mission, Mercia’s healing aura was key to keeping her entourage alive throughout an onslaught of oncoming forces, while Nuru’s teleport beam let me gradually shove out my eastern line to meet Mercia halfway. While it was an escort mission, your commander’s livelihood is always a second win condition, the “king” of the proverbial chessboard. This mission seemed determined to halt my progress, throwing waves of archers, harpies, and felbats to strike down Mercia over and over. I repeated the same ordeal over and over until I sussed out the perfect solution. The right mix of units, the right positioning, and the key choke points to secure. It was brutal, but satisfying. The next mission was a breeze. The gauntlet had internalized some of the overarching strategy in me. That stirring feeling of progress is when Wargroove clicks. By forcing me to break habits (stop spamming pikemen) and utilize a wide range of units, while being careful and checking ranges, I’d become a better virtual general. The next few commanders were no match for me. The pain of bashing your head against a wall is eased by the charming aesthetic. Have you ever wanted to liberate villagers from an outlaw’s stronghold as a very good dog named Caesar, clad in armor and flanked by two crossbowmen? This is your game. Wargroove feels both extremely familiar and still fresh. Every battle is still a dichotomy of cautious, careful advances and measured gambits, finessing the frontlines into perfect formation while determining what I needed next from my conga line of reinforcements, shuttled back and forth by carriers, and kept healthy by my towns. Those battles on their own, in both a well-crafted and surprisingly tough-at-times campaign and multiplayer, which can be local or online (asynchronous as well, so you can send turns and return to your other battles), are fuel enough alone to stoke the fires of my Wars love. But what’s really piqued my interest for the future is the custom suite. I say “suite” because it’s more than just a map editor. While you can make maps with different win conditions, sizes, and player counts, there is also a cutscene editor and campaign editor on top. Out of the box, you’re able to craft entire narratives, as varied as the base campaign. Part of my love for the Wars games was making custom maps and showing them to friends. Passing around a flippable GBA with someone’s interpretation of Helm’s Deep or Ace Combat was a mainstay. It’s what kept us coming back; not just being able to play against each other, but designing the boards on which our battles took place. Being able to craft my own stories, using actual text and flags, managing a party and creating various interactions, means my Helm’s Deep just got deeper. (Sorry.) The number of flags, variables, and settings you can toy with to craft something your own is staggering. It seems like you could spend hours in the editor and still learn new nuances and methods for making a campaign just as you envision it. You can also just ignore that and only consume others’ content through the share hub. The ability to easily download maps and campaigns my friends have made all over the world, challenging them or dissecting the terrain and placements on my own time, is sublime. It remains to be seen how effective the curation and sharing will be once servers are live and everyone’s piled in, but right now, it has the potential to be the Super Mario Maker of Advance Wars. It’s been a decade since the last Advance Wars game. But in Wargroove, the spirit lives on, not just charming my nostalgia but sparking new life and ideas in the format. I can’t wait to see what others make, to delve deeper into the game’s chesslike puzzle mode and challenging arcade mode, and send turn after turn of havoc to my friends, even across various platforms. But in a week of games that remind me of a decade-gone childhood, I’m happy to see an army on my screen bobbing with the music, as I carefully scrye the board for my next move. It’s good to have the Wars back.

2019-04-24

The "Pharma Bro" is back in his native Brooklyn — for now. Notorious drug-company fraudster Martin Shkreli has been removed from a federal prison in New Jersey after there were claims he was running his pharmaceuticals firm while locked up with the help of a contraband cellphone. Shkreli, who had been in the low-security prison in Fort Dix serving a seven-year fraud sentence, now is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Brooklyn, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. He will remain at the facility — not far from the location of his conviction in Brooklyn federal court — until he is transferred to his new home, a federal prison facility in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, his lawyer Benjamin Brafman told CNBC. "A formality," Brafman said in an email when asked about the move to Brooklyn and its reason. A Bureau of Prisons spokesman said "we do not share the reasons why a specific inmate was transferred to a particular correctional institution." However, the spokesman said that generally speaking, "there are number of factors that must be considered." Those include "the level of security and supervision the inmate requires, medical and programming needs, and other considerations. including proximity to an individual's release residence," he said. Shkreli, who was born in Brooklyn and who was living in Manhattan when he was convicted at trial, previously spent more than half a year locked up in the same Brooklyn federal jail where he now is being held. In September 2017 — a month after he was convicted of multiple criminal charges — Shkreli's $5 million release bond was revoked by his trial judge because of his offer of a $5,000 bounty on Facebook to any of his social media followers who could provide him with a lock of Hillary Clinton's hair. The Wall Street Journal reported on March 7 that Shkreli, 36, "still helps call the shots" at the drug company Phoenixus AG, using a banned cellphone to fire the Manhattan company's CEO — a decision he later reversed — and direct other actions as part of his plan to acquire rare medications and invest in "an ambitious research-and-development agenda." Phoenixus gained Shkreli and the firm international infamy under its previous name, Turing Pharmaceuticals, in 2015 when it hiked by more than 5,000% the price of a medication, Daraprim, which is used to treat a parasitic infection found in pregnant women, babies and HIV patients. That price increase made Shkreli the poster boy for the issue of rising drug costs in the United States. The inmate handbook at Fort Dix specifically says, "Conducting a business, in any way, is a prohibited act," the Journal noted. The Journal also reported that Shkreli, who had been banned by Twitter while still a free man, was tweeting under a new account, which became suspended when the article appeared. A day after the Journal's article was published, the Bureau of Prisons said it was investigating whether Shkreli had broken prison rules barring inmates from running a business or possessing a cellphone. He reportedly was moved into solitary confinement at Fort Dix that same day. Shkreli was convicted in August 2017 of three out of eight felonies.Two of those counts related to misleading investors about key details and the awful financial performance of two hedge funds he had operated, MSMB Capital and MSMB Healthcare. He also was convicted of conspiring to fraudulently manipulate stock shares of Retrophin, the pharmaceuticals company he founded after his hedge funds collapsed. At trial, prosecutors alleged that Shkreli defrauded multiple investors out of millions of dollars placed in his hedge fund, only to repay them with stock and cash that he looted from Retrophin. At his sentencing, Shkreli wept and told Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, "The one person to blame for me being here today is me." "Not the government. There is no conspiracy to take down Martin Shkreli," he said. "I took down Martin Shkreli with my disgraceful and shameful actions." He also said, referring to the investors he had swindled, "I am terribly sorry I lost your trust ... you deserve far better."

2019-09-11 00:00:00

More than 4 in 10 respondents in a poll released Wednesday said they believe the U.S. economy will weaken if President TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump conversation with foreign leader part of complaint that led to standoff between intel chief, Congress: report Pelosi: Lewandowski should have been held in contempt 'right then and there' Trump to withdraw FEMA chief nominee: report MORE is reelected next year. In the Economist/YouGov survey of roughly 1,500 U.S. adults, 42 percent said the economy will suffer if Trump wins another term in office, compared to 30 percent who expected the economy to improve.  Another 15 percent expected the economy to hold steady if Trump were reelected, while 13 percent were unsure of the potential economic impact of another term for him. Respondents were split evenly at 35 percent over whether a Democrat winning in 2020 would improve or worsen the economy. Another 13 percent expected the economy to remain unchanged in that scenario, while 17 percent said they were unsure how a Democratic victory would impact the economy. The success of Trump’s reelection bid will depend largely on the state of the U.S. economy, which has enjoyed unemployment near record lows and solid growth throughout his term. While the president is widely unpopular beyond his base, Trump had previously received decent marks for his handling of the economy. Even so, months of growing fears about a potential recession before the 2020 election and the rising costs of Trump’s trade war with China have dampened the president’s standing on economic issues. The U.S. added just under 100,000 private sector jobs in August, according to a federal jobs report released last Friday. That level is close to what economists consider the minimum monthly job gain needed to prevent an increase in unemployment and sustain more than a decade of economic expansion. Trump has been largely dismissive of concerns about a recession, but has amped up pressure on the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates and boost the economy with levels of stimulus last seen during the 2008 recession. "The Federal Reserve should get our interest rates down to ZERO, or less, and we should then start to refinance our debt. INTEREST COST COULD BE BROUGHT WAY DOWN, while at the same time substantially lengthening the term. We have the great currency, power, and balance sheet," Trump tweeted Friday. View the discussion thread. The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 fax The contents of this site are ©2019 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

2017-07-04 00:00:00

(This is Joey Chestnut, who defended his title this year with a staggering 72 hot dogs.) (And this is Miki Sudo, the women's champ, who managed 41.)

2019-10-14 02:30:19

A decade after Congress gave the F.D.A. the power to regulate tobacco products like e-cigarettes, the federal government has repeatedly delayed or weakened efforts that could have protected teenagers.  In 2009, not long after Dr. Margaret Hamburg became commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, a package arrived at her home. Inside was a clunky device called an e-cigarette. “It was my first exposure to this emerging, new technology,” Dr. Hamburg recalled. The package was sent by an antismoking activist as a warning about a product that was taking off in the United States. But over the next decade, the federal government — across the span of two presidential administrations — allowed the rise of a largely unregulated industry that may be addicting a new generation to nicotine. E-cigarettes and vaping devices, with $7 billion in annual sales, have become a part of daily life for millions of Americans. Youth use has skyrocketed with the proliferation of flavors targeting teenagers, such as Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum and Zombie Blood. And nearly 1,300 people have been sickened by mysterious vaping-related lung injuries this year. Yet the agency has not vetted the vast majority of vaping devices or flavored liquids for safety. In dozens of interviews, federal officials and public health experts described a lost decade of inaction, blaming an intense lobbying effort by the e-cigarette and tobacco industries, fears of a political backlash in tobacco-friendly states, bureaucratic delays, and a late reprieve by an F.D.A. commissioner who had previously served on the board of a chain of vaping lounges. “The minute you saw cotton candy flavors — come on,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who had warned since 2013 of the harms to adolescents. “Everything that could have been done should have been done to get them off the market.” Dr. Hamburg’s F.D.A. suffered an early setback after two e-cigarette companies successfully sued the agency in 2009 for trying to regulate the products as drugs. The F.D.A. was forced instead to treat them as tobacco products under the newly passed Tobacco Control Act, which had less-stringent safety requirements. The agency then spent five years trying to issue regulations that would survive further legal as well as political scrutiny by a White House that had other priorities, including rolling out the Affordable Care Act. Then, in President Obama’s last year, the administration rejected a proposal to ban flavored e-cigarettes. It came in the face of fierce lobbying over the tobacco regulations, including by a former senator and by a onetime White House analyst who had represented the Obama administration in the same discussions a year earlier. [DEEPENING MYSTERY How one man who tried e-cigarettes to stop smoking died of vaping-related illness.] In 2017, President Trump’s F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, granted e-cigarette companies a reprieve of four years before they would have to prove that the public health benefits of their products outweighed the risks. That extension — which Dr. Frieden described as “public health malpractice” — left the door wide open for the surge in popularity of devices such as those made by Juul Labs, the troubled company that now dominates the market. Meanwhile, the federal government has largely ignored the explosion in vaping THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, which coincided with either recreational or medicinal legalization in many states. That regulatory dead zone has left public health officials scrambling to track the cause of the vaping-related lung illnesses that have led to at least 29 deaths. Dr. Ned Sharpless, the acting F.D.A. commissioner, recently acknowledged in a congressional hearing that the agency should have acted sooner. “We’re going to catch up,” he promised. Last month — facing rising rates of teen vaping and alarm over the lung illnesses — administration officials announced they would finally impose a flavor ban for e-cigarettes. But the ban has yet to materialize, and industry groups have been fighting it, especially any limits on menthol and mint. As of Oct. 11, there have been 1,299 vaping illnesses and 29 deaths. More maps and charts. Cases of lung illness Deaths 0 10 50 100 15a0 Mont. Minn. Ore. Mass. Wis. Mich. N.Y. Conn. Pa. Neb. Ind. N.J. Ill. Utah Del. Kan. Mo. Calif. Va. Tenn. Ala. Ga. D.C. Miss. Tex. Fla. Virgin Islands Cases of vaping-related lung illness Deaths 0 10 50 100 150 Mont. Minn. Ore. Mass. Wis. N.Y. Mich. Conn. Pa. Neb. Ind. N.J. Ill. Utah Del. Kan. Mo. Calif. Va. Tenn. Ala. Ga. Miss. D.C. Tex. Fla. Virgin Islands Cases of vaping-related lung illness Vaping-related deaths 0 10 50 100 150 Mont. Minn. Ore. Mass. Mich. Wis. N.Y. Conn. Pa. N.J. Neb. Ind. Ill. Utah Del. Calif. Mo. Va. Kan. Tenn. Ga. Ala. Miss. D.C. Tex. Fla. Virgin Islands Hawaii By The New York Times | Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state agencies Even bigger changes to the e-cigarette industry might be on the way. That deadline Dr. Gottlieb extended has been overturned by a judge, who ordered the F.D.A. to require e-cigarette companies to apply for approval by May, and to submit evidence their products do more good than harm. Last week, Reynolds American began the process, filing its application with the F.D.A. for VUSE, the company’s cartridge-based vaping system that features flavors such as mixed berry, tropical, menthol and others. Vaping manufacturers and retailers have opposed more regulations, saying smokers need access to a potentially safer alternative, given that traditional cigarettes kill hundreds of thousands of Americans a year. “We think that harm reduction, and the potential of harm reduction, for these products cannot be dismissed,” said Brittani Cushman, the board president of the Vapor Technology Association, an industry trade group. But some public health officials say they doubt Juul and other companies will be able to surmount the regulatory hurdle if teenage use keeps climbing. The F.D.A.’s lack of action has baffled some families of those who have fallen ill, including Ruby Johnson of Illinois, whose 18-year-old daughter, Piper, nearly died after vaping nicotine and THC. “If this was romaine lettuce, the shelves would be empty,” she told a House panel last month. The earliest forms of e-cigarettes arrived in the United States market in 2007 and sought to mimic the smoking experience. The products intrigued many public health experts, who hoped they would wean people off traditional tobacco. They didn’t contain the harmful byproducts and chemicals of cigarettes, although there was little evidence that they were safe. The F.D.A. was wary. In 2009, the agency declared that the e-cigarettes were illegal drug-device combinations — like a nicotine patch — that had not been approved. The F.D.A. halted imports and warned that they contained toxic chemicals and appealed to young people with flavors like chocolate and mint. E-cigarette companies sued, setting up the first major court fight over vaping nicotine. The court’s ruling in favor of the industry in 2010 “set the agency back significantly,” said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, who was then the deputy director of the F.D.A. and who left in 2011. The agency’s loss was a harsh reminder of the tobacco industry’s staying power. “It can be very hard for a regulator to address potential risks when there is an aggressive industry on the other side,” he said. Over the next several years, as the agency slowly developed regulations to oversee all types of tobacco items, including cigars, vaping devices and liquids, “the market became flooded with products that Congress never intended to be on the market at all without F.D.A. review,” said Gregg Haifley, director of federal relations at the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. Vape shops became commonplace, and users experimented with thousands of flavors that were often mixed on store premises or at home. One of the tobacco industry’s fiercest critics, Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, had urged the agency beginning in 2009 to rein in nicotine vaping products, and mentioned allies like Mitchell Zeller, who oversees tobacco at the F.D.A., and who was among the early advocates for a ban on flavors. Dr. Hamburg, who left the F.D.A. in 2015, said the agency struggled to move quickly to issue the broad regulation for e-cigarettes as well as other tobacco products, including cigars. It was a complex process, she said, given previous court challenges. “For something so important for health, the delays at H.H.S. and the White House were distressing and confusing — people were getting very frustrated,” she said, and given the expanding industry, “I wanted to get it out, from a reputational point of view and from a morale point of view for F.D.A.” At the time, the Obama White House and the Department of Health and Human Services were also dealing with mounting Republican opposition to the administration’s signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act, which was passed in 2010 and went into effect in 2014 with an exceptionally bumpy rollout. Several states have announced e-cigarette bans in response to recent vaping illnesses and deaths. More maps and charts. Wash. Mont. Mass. Ore. Mich. N.Y. R.I. Chicago Pine Ridge Reservation S.F. Utah Ill. The Trump administration Los Angeles Considering or working on a ban Announced or enacted ban on flavored e-cigarettes Announced or enacted ban on all e-cigarettes Four-month ban on all vaping products Wash. Mont. Ore. Mass. Mich. N.Y. S.D. R.I. Calif. Chicago Pine Ridge Reservation Ill. Utah San Francisco The Trump administration Los Angeles Considering or working on a ban Announced or enacted ban on flavored e-cigarettes Announced or enacted ban on all e-cigarettes Four-month ban on all vaping products Wash. Mont. Ore. Mass. S.D. N.Y. Mich. R.I. Pine Ridge Reservation Chicago San Francisco Ill. Utah The Trump administration Calif. Los Angeles Considering or working on a ban Announced or enacted ban on flavored e-cigarettes Announced or enacted ban on all e-cigarettes Four-month ban on all vaping products By The New York Times In 2015, the agency finally sent its proposed rule — for oversight of all e-cigarettes and tobacco products — to the Office of Management and Budget for final approval. Over that fall and winter, the tobacco and e-cigarette industries made a major push to weaken the regulations, enlisting people like former Senator Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, to lobby the Obama administration. The tobacco and e-cigarette industries overlapped considerably — major tobacco companies like Reynolds American had begun selling their own e-cigarette products as they sought to replace revenues lost from declining smoking rates. And the nicotine liquids used in vaping are derived from tobacco leaves. Altria, the nation’s largest tobacco company, threw its weight against a flavor ban. In comments to the F.D.A. on Aug. 8, 2014, it contended that restriction could result in more illicit sales, and that adults also liked fruity and sweet e-cigarette flavors. In Congress, the tobacco industry lobbied hard against the proposals, using its pull as a major donor to get Republicans and some Democrats to sign on to industry-friendly bills. And at the Office of Management and Budget, officials hosted dozens of meetings, mostly with industry groups weighing in on the F.D.A.’s 468-page proposal. Some visits were held back to back, with dozens of people — from vape shop owners worried about the economic impact, to product distributors, to public health experts who favored the restrictions — attending the meetings, according to White House records. “This country is run off the backbone of small business,” read a statement from one entrepreneur, Wade Jordan, who owned vape shops in Bedford, Texas. One frequent visitor was a familiar face — Andrew Perraut, a former policy analyst who had left the federal budget office in 2014. Federal records show that he represented the budget office in a meeting in April 2014 with Cigar Rights of America, a premium cigar lobbying group. A little over a year later, in late 2015, Mr. Perraut was back, but this time as a representative of Cigar Rights of America and others, including the e-cigarette company NJoy. Mr. Perraut, now director of public policy at Juul, declined to comment through a Juul spokesman. When the White House returned the final rule to the F.D.A. in 2016, language for a ban on flavors had been crossed out. Shaun Donovan, the director of the budget agency, and other Obama administration officials, including Kathleen Sebelius and Sylvia Mathews Burwell, both of whom served as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services during that period, declined to comment. Dr. Robert M. Califf, who had supervised policy on tobacco products at the F.D.A. before becoming commissioner in 2016, said he did not know why the flavor ban had been deleted. However, “I’m sure the small business impact had something to do with it,” he said. Dr. Hamburg, who had left by then, also said she did not know why it had been deleted. Some former Obama administration officials said the White House considered the flavor ban too restrictive and that there was no solid evidence that flavored e-cigarettes were harmful. In addition, it would have extended to products like cigars, which was opposed by the industry, as was regulation of premium cigars, which threatened Democrats in tobacco-friendly states like North Carolina and Florida. One former Obama administration health official, who asked not to be identified because it could jeopardize his employment as a lobbyist, said the political risk for banning flavors seemed too high, given Republican control of Congress. The White House was worried about several Republican proposals that aimed to unravel the F.D.A.’s ability to regulate tobacco products. “We were very nervous about what would happen if we did this,” the former official said. “Would the Obama ‘nanny state’ criticism come in to play? Not all Senate Democrats were strong champions of those things. There had to be give.” The rule approved by the White House did set new requirements for the industry, including forbidding sales to minors and mandating the submission of ingredient lists by e-cigarette manufacturers. In 2017, the vaping landscape shifted again with Mr. Trump’s appointment of Dr. Gottlieb, who had served on the board of Kure, a chain of vaping lounges. Although he divested from Kure when he became the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Gottlieb held on to the idea that vaping could help adults quit smoking. Two months into his new job, he handed the e-cigarette industry the breathing room of a four-year extension to comply with the new rules as part of a broader package that appeared to straddle competing interests. He called for lowering nicotine in cigarettes to render them less addictive, while ensuring access to e-cigarettes and other alternatives for smokers trying to quit. Then, in 2018, new federal survey data showed that teen vaping had jumped sharply in the past year, driven by the popularity of Juul, and that more than three million American high school students had tried e-cigarettes. “It was just a horror show,” said Katy Talento, a former top health policy adviser to Mr. Trump on the Domestic Policy Council. After that, she said, “the calculus changed.” In an interview, Dr. Gottlieb said he then began lobbying the White House and lawmakers to win support for an e-cigarette crackdown. “I couldn’t outright ban the sale of e-cigarettes in convenience stores, because the law prohibited me from doing that,” he said. “And that’s where the kids were accessing the products.” The agency issued warning letters to companies that sold products that appealed to youth, and began an investigation into whether Juul had illegally marketed to young people and marketed products as smoking cessation devices. In November 2018, Juul responded by discontinuing sales of most of its flavors to retail shops, with the exception of mint and menthol. But Juul also brought its lobbyists to the White House numerous times, to argue that restrictions would hurt cigarette smokers who wanted to quit. “I had to work harder to make the arguments,” Dr. Gottlieb said. “I spilled a lot of blood on this issue.” Last fall, Juul dispatched the lobbyist Tevi Troy, a former Bush administration health official, and others to make the company’s case at the White House, and tried to temper outrage over whether it had played a role in the rise of youth vaping. Ms. Talento, the former Trump health adviser, said a generational split became apparent between younger White House health staff members who did not have teenagers, and “the uncool 40-somethings” — like her — who did. “We were like, ‘It’s not working,’” she said. “They may have expected a warmer reception,” she said of Juul’s team. Several federal and state inquiries into its marketing practices have put Juul on the defensive, and it is leaning more heavily on the regulatory expertise of Altria, which has a 35 percent stake in the company. Last month, Juul replaced its chief executive Kevin Burns with a top Altria executive, K.C. Crosthwaite. It has dropped its biggest marketing campaign and said it would discontinue its efforts to overturn an e-cigarette ban in San Francisco. Soon after Juul stopped stocking retail shelves with its flavor pods, the F.D.A. announced it would require retailers to wall off such e-cigarette products from minors — a watered-down version of more severe actions threatened by Dr. Gottlieb. But those plans have drawn considerable opposition from retailers, conservative groups and businesses. Last month, after Dr. Sharpless and Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, told White House officials that new figures showed teen vaping had increased again, they said they would draft the proposed ban on most flavored e-cigarettes. “We can’t allow people to get sick,” the president said, with his wife Melania at his side in the Oval Office. “And we can’t have our youth be so affected.” Mr. Trump recently tweeted that he liked “the vaping alternative to cigarettes” but wanted to keep young children from using the products. Some states and cities have stepped in. Massachusetts has halted sales of all vaping products for four months, and other states, including Michigan, Rhode Island, Washington, Oregon and New York, have imposed flavor bans or taken steps to do so. And several major retailers, including Walmart, Walgreens and others, have said they would stop selling e-cigarettes altogether. Efforts to track the cause of the lung illnesses have been hampered by the fact that THC-based products largely fall into a regulatory vacuum, and relaxed laws in many states have enabled an illicit trade. While marijuana is still illegal at the federal level, nearly three dozen states permit medicinal use, and 11 states and the District of Columbia have fully legalized it. The F.D.A.’s authority over THC is considered a gray area of law. A handful of cannabis-derived drugs have been approved, and the F.D.A. is talking to other agencies about expanding its reach. Nearly 1,300 people, disproportionately young, have been sickened from vaping THC, nicotine or both. At least 29 have died. It often takes a public health crisis for the federal government to enact major change, said Dr. Califf, the former F.D.A. commissioner. “It has to get bad enough before you can actually get down to what needs to get done,” he said. “And I guess in a way this is an example.” Julie Creswell contributed reporting. [Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]

2016-04-20

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld redistricting maps devised by Arizona's independent redistricting commission, holding that challengers had not shown that partisanship likely was the predominant reason for the commission's map-making decisions. After the 2010 census, Arizona redrew its state legislative districts — the new districts have populations that differ from each other by less than 10%. When maps meet that condition, the unanimous court held, challenges "must show that it is more probable than not" that the population differential "reflects the predominance" of illegitimate factors like partisan interests over legitimate factors. Legitimate factors for redrawing districts include, as the court noted, geographic compactness, following local boundaries, and — as Arizona claimed here — seeking to follow the Voting Rights Act. The decision will make it very difficult — though not impossible — for those challenging redistricting maps when the population disparity between districts is less than 10%. The court's decision marked a middle ground between the extreme positions taken by the lawyers in the oral arguments over the case this past fall. At that time, the challengers argued that even a 1% distinction in population levels, if based on impermissible factors, should be held to be unconstitutional. On the other side, the Arizona commission argued that a plan with 9.9% disparity based solely on partisan concerns "might well [be] constitutional." The court — as Justice Stephen Breyer suggested at arguments would be the case — adopted neither position. "[H]ow do we write this? There are two areas that are difficult to write," Breyer said at the time, referencing the court's propensity to allow the implementation of plans with less than 10% disparity and the court's concern with addressing how much partisanship is too much. On Wednesday, Breyer wrote the court's short, 11-page opinion, ultimately deciding that, within that 10% disparity range, a higher standard would need to be met for people or groups to successfully challenge redistricting maps. "[T]hose attacking a state-approved plan must show that it is more probable than not that a deviation of less than 10% reflects the predominance of illegitimate reapportionment factors rather than the 'legitimate considerations' to which we have referred [in the court's cases]," Breyer wrote. "[W]e believe that attacks on deviations under 10% will succeed only rarely, in unusual cases."

2017-12-01

Does the Nov. 28 launch of North Korea’s new Hwasong-15 ICBM mean time has run out to use sanctions and diplomacy to halt the growing threat from its nuclear and missile programs? I believe the answer is probably no, but such a day is rapidly approaching. The range and technical sophistication of the Hwasong-15 surprised experts. Reaching an apogee of 2,800 miles on a vertical trajectory into space, this missile may be capable of flying more than 8,000 miles on a normal trajectory, putting all of the United States in its range. Some experts believe the range would be significantly reduced if this missile carried a heavy payload such as a nuclear warhead but could still be used to attack the entire Asia-Pacific region, Alaska, Hawaii and the West Coast. North Korea likely has several technical challenges to resolve before it can add this missile to its arsenal such as perfecting a re-entry vehicle and a guidance system. But the U.S. shouldn’t draw any comfort from this given the rapid technological advances in the North’s nuclear and missile programs over the last few years. Haley warns North Korea: You will be "utterly destroyed" if war breaks out https://t.co/8emkqLMRRW pic.twitter.com/91UVA2xPcL The left typically reacted to North Korea’s latest missile test by insisting that tensions can only be resolved with negotiations and sanctions. This includes The New York Times, which made the delusional claim in a Nov. 29 editorial that North Korea’s recent nuclear and missile developments may be “a sign of hope” for diplomacy. Hillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonTop Sanders adviser: Warren isn't competing for 'same pool of voters' Anti-Trump vets join Steyer group in pressing Democrats to impeach Trump Republicans plot comeback in New Jersey MORE also is urging negotiations and made the ludicrous statement during a visit to China that “Beijing should remember that inaction is a choice as well.” Clinton must have forgotten that the Obama administration’s inaction toward North Korea is why its nuclear and missile programs surged to the dangerous levels they are at today. These naive views ignore two fundamental truths about North Korea’s nuclear program. First, Pyongyang has never negotiated with the U.S. in good faith and has repeatedly violated nuclear agreements. North Korea is waiting for the moment when its missile and nuclear tests once again lead to multilateral talks it can manipulate to extract huge concessions in exchange for commitments it has no intention of honoring. Pyongyang has done this many times over the past 25 years. President Trump is determined not to fall for this trap. Second, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is not just a deterrent that the world can tolerate. The U.S. intelligence community believes North Korea may have 60 nuclear weapons. It possesses or is developing hydrogen bombs. Pyongyang also may be developing nuclear weapon-driven electromagnetic pulse weapons to destroy the U.S. power grid. North Korea’s huge missile arsenal includes ICBMs, solid-fueled intermediate-range missiles and cruise missiles. It also is developing submarine-launched missiles. JUST IN: Trump swipes at China: Envoy would returned from North Korea “had no impact” https://t.co/tSYiT0FvO9 pic.twitter.com/dWyS0fplH4 This is far more than a deterrence force to protect the Kim regime and stave off an attack by the United States — this is an offensive force that Pyongyang will eventually use to unite the Korean Peninsula by force on its terms and drive U.S. forces from the region. For this reason it is crucial that President Trump not kick the North Korea threat down the road like prior presidents did. Sen. Tom CottonThomas (Tom) Bryant CottonCongress must address gender gap in nominations to military service academies GOP senators press Google on reports it developed a smart speaker with Huawei Sunday shows - Mass shootings grab the spotlight MORE (R-Ark.) put this best when he said “kicking the can down the road has not worked, and we’re about to run out of road.” The Trump administration has taken the right approach to the North Korean threat by increasing sanctions, collaborating with our allies and pressing China and Russia to pressure Pyongyang before using military force. But it is now time for President Trump to consider limited military action to seize the initiative and demonstrate his resolve to solve this crisis. Military action should be carefully calibrated to send the message that the U.S. will no longer stand by while Pyongyang develops nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. This should start by declaring North Korean airspace as a missile no-fly zone and shooting down future North Korean missiles. The U.S. might need to ratchet up this response by destroying North Korean missiles on the ground. Other initial military action could include a naval blockade and stopping and searching North Korean ships at sea for WMD-related cargo. US, China held rare security meeting after North Korea missile launch: report https://t.co/Zmvh3PpOga pic.twitter.com/n2ts0c0Xhh The U.S. cannot be sure whether limited military action would result in North Korean retaliation and escalation. (More aggressive military action such as air strikes against nuclear and missile sites would almost certainly lead to this.) But limited military action is a risk worth taking since the alternative is conceding nuclear weapons and missiles to Pyongyang that it will one day use to take control of South Korea, attack Japan, drive U.S. forces from the region and possibly attack the United States. Limited military action against North Korea by the U.S. — or the prospect of this — could also motivate other nations to significantly increase their pressure on Pyongyang. This might even include China taking action to replace the Kim regime with a more stable, pro-Beijing government. There are no easy solutions to the North Korean mess that President Obama handed President Trump. Employing carefully calibrated military action now is dangerous, but it is the best of numerous bad options and the only one that might prevent the North from becoming an existential threat to the region and the United States before we “run out of road.” Fred Fleitz was chief of staff to Under Secretary of State John Bolton from 2001 to 2005. He served in national security positions for 25 years with the CIA, the DIA, the State Department and the House Intelligence Committee staff. He is now senior vice president of the Center for Security Policy. Follow him on Twitter @fredfleitz. View the discussion thread. The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 fax The contents of this site are ©2019 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

2019-01-08 00:00:00

BEIJING (Reuters) - China approved five genetically modified (GM) crops for import on Tuesday, the first in about 18 months in a move that could boost its overseas grains purchases and ease pressure from the United States to open its markets to more farm goods. The United States is the world’s biggest producer of GM crops, while China is the top importer of GM soybeans and canola. U.S. farmers and global seed companies have long complained about Beijing’s slow and unpredictable process for approving GM crops for import, stoking trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies. The approvals, announced on the agriculture ministry’s website, were granted while a U.S. trade delegation is meeting with its counterparts in the Chinese capital this week. “It’s a goodwill gesture toward the resolution of the trade issue,” said a China representative of a U.S. agricultural industry association. “It’s been in the system for a long time but they chose today to release this good news,” he added, declining to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter. The approved products included DowDuPont Inc’s DWDP.N DP4114 Qrome corn and DAS-44406-6 soybean, known as Enlist E3, as well as the SYHT0H2 soybean developed by Bayer CropScience and Syngenta SYENF.PK but now held by German chemical company BASF. The other two newly approved products - BASF’s RF3 canola and Bayer-owned (BAYGn.DE) Monsanto’s glyphosate-tolerant MON 88302 canola - had been waiting six years for permission. The approvals came as farmers in North America were deciding which seeds to plant this spring. China before the trade war bought some 60 percent of U.S. soybeans and U.S. farmers do not widely plant varieties it has not approved. The newly approved canola will allow farmers in Canada to boost production, according to Jim Everson, president of industry group the Canola Council. “The industry expects growers will produce $400 million more canola every year using the same amount of land - a step-change for canola productivity,” Everson said in a statement. Five other products known to be seeking approvals were not given the green light, including two GM alfalfa products developed by Monsanto and two DowDuPont soybean traits. Corteva Agriscience, the agriculture unit of DowDuPont, said, “We are happy to see the regulatory approval of our seed traits progressing in China.” Bayer said in a statement it welcomed the news but noted “many of these products were stuck in China’s regulatory process for many years and others were not granted approvals, underscoring the need for continued improvement in China’s regulatory processes.” Chinese officials met their U.S. counterparts in Beijing on Monday for the first face-to-face talks since U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed in December to a 90-day truce in a trade war that has roiled global markets. China had not approved any GM crops for import since July 2017, when it cleared two products following high-level talks with Washington. It also approved two products in June 2017. China’s scientific advisory board on GM crops met in June but did not give the go-ahead for imports of any products. “China’s approval of the new GMO products is paving the way for China to import large volumes of U.S. soybeans in the future. It is a positive signal,” said Li Qiang, chief analyst with Shanghai JC Intelligence Co Ltd. The truce in the Sino-U.S. trade war prompted a resumption of U.S. soybean purchases. Buying had slumped after China imposed a 25 percent import duty on U.S. shipments of oilseed on July 6 in response to U.S. tariffs. China does not allow the planting of genetically modified food crops, but imports of GM crops such as soybeans and corn for animal feed are fine. The country, the world’s biggest soybean consumer, has so far purchased only about 5 million tonnes of the 2018 U.S. soy harvest, a fraction of its typical purchases. The United States has demanded that China change its GM crop import application process to make it more transparent, timely and based on scientific methods. The latest approvals should not be taken as a sign that China is conceding to those demands, said a China-based industry source, who also asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter. “It’s another piece of evidence that China’s approval process is not entirely scientific but political,” said the source, who also believed the approvals were timed for the trade visit. The ministry also announced on Tuesday the extension of import approvals for 26 other GM crops by a further three years. Reporting by Dominique Patton; additional reporting by Hallie Gu in Beijing, Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, and Mark Weinraub and Michael Hirtzer in Chicago; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Joseph Radford and James Dalgleish

2017-08-10 17:56:00

The summer of 2017 has seen as many viral moments from Hilton as controversial staff firings from president Donald Trump. Vintage mid-2000s photos, like one featuring the heiress staring at her reflection in a side-view mirror, have transformed into memes on Instagram and Twitter, and her comedic posts alluding to The Simple Life have received 116,000-plus retweets—a marked difference from only 11 months ago, when a photo of her paired with a throwaway hashtag only garnered 163 retweets. Few expected Hilton to dominate social media in 2017, but in Hollywood history, stars with longevity, like Betty White and Angela Lansbury, kept working because they found ways to stay hip while remaining true to themselves—not because they spent decades atop the A-list. Hilton's new image as the FuckJerry of 2000s Pop Culture Twitter plays off her status as an icon for a simpler time, a symbol many young people are craving in the midst of endless news about White House scuffles and nuclear war. "Things were pretty good for Paris in 2005, so it's almost soothing to remember that era because it was literally carefree," points out marketer Wynter Mitchell, who has worked on social media campaigns for celebrities like Joss Whedon. "[Hilton is] so closely tied to its iconography." Hilton is beating other 2000s starlets on social media by mixing Bush-era images with 2017 memes. Below "My Crush: I want someone who knows how to cook. Me:" she recirculated a popular video of her cooking with an iron. She also captioned an image of her getting out of a pink car in a pink dress, "On Wednesdays we wear pink," and posted, "When everyone expected you to be hungover this morning but you wake up feeling fine," alongside a GIF of her saying, "Bonjour bitch." Nineteen-thousand people retweeted, "When people you don't even know hate you, that's when you know you're the best," and over 48,000 people shared, "What is Walmart, do they sell like wall stuff?" "It's the most benign statements that get the most traction," Mitchell explains. But Hilton's simple messages come loaded with nostalgia for a simpler time: the early 2000s, when pink velour sweatsuits and Hilton and her comrades Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan dominated the headlines. Perhaps most importantly, Hilton's tweets have introduced her to members of Generation Z, who didn't get to know the starlet via The Simple Life. Only toddlers during the heyday of MySpace, Generation Z-ers have always lived in a culture filled with reality stars, but Hilton's self-referential (and sometimes self-roasting) memes illustrate how she pioneered both "being famous for being famous" and also the archetype of the cheeky reality star who plays along with the public—something Kim Kardashian emulated when she released a Kimoji modeled on her crying face. "[Her tweets] appeal to Gen Z who are probably curious about her staying power and what she meant to that era over a decade ago," Mitchell explains. Some may be shocked to see Hilton as a meme-generating star, but she's always had a talent for keeping herself in the spotlight. When she left reality television, she reinvented herself as a DJ in the midst of the EDM crave. Today, she's a meme queen. But she's not giving her fans cheap, cynical content. People are returning to Hilton's Twitter and Instagram pages because she's reinvented her social media content while remaining true to the public's conception of her. "No matter which tweet you get from her," Mitchell says, "She's consistently Paris."

2019-12-06 00:00:00

(John Kemp is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own) * Chartbook: tmsnrt.rs/2DUjD6W By John Kemp LONDON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Like the rest of the U.S. economy, the labour market is split between sluggish manufacturing and a much stronger services sector, but both appear to have averted falling into recession at the end of the third quarter. Nonfarm employment was up by 1.46% in the three months between September and November compared with the same period a year earlier, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published on Friday. Employment growth has decelerated from a peak rate of 1.84% at the end of 2018 and the start of 2019, but is no longer slowing further, which indicates the worst of the business cycle slump may be over. Manufacturing has been hit much harder by the shock caused by the U.S.-China trade war, while the larger and more domestically focused services sector has weathered the confrontation with less impact. Manufacturing employment was up by just 0.6% in the three months between September and November compared with a year earlier, while private service-sector jobs increased by 1.7%. Manufacturing jobs command an average weekly earnings premium of 23% compared with the private service sector (“Current employment statistics”, BLS, Nov. 6). Nonetheless, the labour market overall remains tight enough to deliver economy-wide earnings growth of almost 1.2% year-on-year, after inflation, close to its fastest for three years. Real consumer incomes and expenditures are both rising at around 2.5% per year, down from more than 3.0% a year ago, but well below the levels that would indicate a recession. Consumer sentiment has also improved since the end of the third quarter, with preliminary results from the University of Michigan’s survey showing confidence bouncing back in December to its highest level since May. The Federal Reserve’s three quarter-point interest rate cuts, coupled with an escalation pause in the U.S.-China trade conflict, and a renewed rise in equity prices, seem to have steadied the economy over the last three months. If business conditions in manufacturing are not yet improving, they are at least not getting any worse, and the services sector continues to report slow but steady growth (tmsnrt.rs/2DUjD6W). Business investment spending remains stalled but household consumption spending is still rising at a modest rate which should ensure the economy continues expanding. Provided the economy can avoid any more shocks, especially the introduction of higher tariffs on imports from China in mid-December, it looks like having modest momentum going into 2020. Related columns: - Oil traders bet on economic upswing in 2020 (Reuters, Nov. 22) - Global economy dodges recession by narrowest of margins (Reuters, Nov. 19) - Global economy slows, recession risk hangs in the balance (Reuters, Oct. 18) (Editing by Giles Elgood)

2019-08-05

(Adds move to revoke special rights; paragraphs 3-13) NEW DELHI, Aug 5 (Reuters) - India's government on Monday revoked the special status of Kashmir in a bid to fully integrate its only Muslim-majority region with the rest of the country, the most far-reaching move on the troubled Himalayan territory in nearly seven decades. Interior Minister Amit Shah told parliament the federal government would scrap Article 370, a constitutional provision that grants special status for disputed Kashmir and allows the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir to make its own laws. "The entire constitution will be applicable to Jammu and Kashmir state," Shah said, ending the state's rights to make its own laws. In a subsequent order, India's president approved the government's changes. The step would also mean revocation of a bar on property purchases by people from outside the state. Such plans have in the past provoked warnings of a backlash in Kashmir, which is claimed by both India and Pakistan. The law had also reserved state government jobs for residents, as well as college places, in an effort to keep the state from being overrun by people from the rest of India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party had pushed for an end to Kashmir's special constitutional status, arguing that such laws had hindered its integration with the rest of India. Political leaders in Kashmir had warned that repeal of the law would trigger widespread unrest. Since last year, Kashmir has been ruled by the Indian federal government, after Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) withdrew from a coalition there with a regional party. Monday's announcement came hours after authorities launched a clampdown in Kashmir by suspending telephone services and placing state leaders under house arrest. Telephone and internet services were suspended early on Monday, and state leaders wrote on Twitter that they had been put under house arrest. On Sunday, a meeting of regional parties had vowed to safeguard the region's special status, saying any move to scrap the privilege would amount to aggression against the people of the state. Tension had risen since Friday, when Indian officials issued an alert over possible militant attacks by Pakistan-based groups. Pakistan has rejected those assertions, but thousands of alarmed Indian tourists, pilgrims and workers streamed out of the region over the weekend. (Reporting by Aditya Kalra; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani and Clarence Fernandez)

2016-08-07 04:00:00

In the late 1970s, the BBC commissioned a TV series called Seven Artists (7 Parts) in which various creators speak about the production of a single art object. The final episode features iconic pop artist Edward Ruscha retrieving a damaged cardboard and papier-mâché "rock" from the Mojave desert in California. Ruscha then uses it to create a mold for a fiberglass replacement that he subsequently deposits back in the desert. The replacement rock is known as "Rocky II." That might sound like just another weird piece of art history, but when Pierre Bismuth—a Brussels-based artist known for reinterpreting artifacts and for helping write Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind—watched the film, his instinct was to ask: Where is 'Rocky II'? He eventually posited that question to Ruscha at the press launch for a retrospective of the American's work in London's Heyward Gallery in 2009. When Ruscha refused to answer, Bismuth, perhaps inspired by the American artist's infatuation with the contradictory and the illogical, decided to hire a private detective to explore the matter without telling him the gig would be part of a larger art project. He also asked screenwriters to pen a film based on the private eye's findings. Then, Bismuth began making a quasi-documentary about the hired screenwriters making a movie about the hired private detective who's been tasked to find this possibly-nonexistent art object. The weird and wonderful results, which blur the boundaries between what the real and unreal, are on offer in Bismuth's debut directorial effortWhere is Rocky II? presented by Art Basel in Locarno, Switzerland on August 9th. We got in touch with the director to discuss his strange exploration of an even stranger artwork. VICE: Have you ever seen Rocky II, the Sylvester Stallone film? You never discuss this in your movie!Pierre Bismuth: [laughs] That is a very good question. Did I see Rocky II? You know what, I'm not sure anymore, to be honest. I have seen some of the Rocky films—it's all mixed up now. I've probably seen it, but I didn't decide to watch it again before shooting my film because there is no real connection. Is Sylvester Stallone aware that there is a different Rocky II out there?Initially, we intended to have Stallone in the film. We wanted to have Michael Scott, the private detective, go to Stallone and ask if he knew that there was an art piece named after his film—at one stage, we even thought it would happen. This is the only single thing that I would have asked Scott to do, because most of the time, we didn't ask Scott anything, we just followed him. He would say, "I want to interview this person," and we would organize the interview. As for Stallone, his publicist was not against the idea, but it never quite worked out. It's good that you don't remember if you have seen Rocky II, because in your films, you like to play with the idea of memory. What is it about memory that you're so fascinated by?I suppose you're referring to Eternal Sunshine. I think I'm interested in how you build up a fiction, how you fictionalize events, and my belief is that you don't need to add anything strange or special to it. What I mean is that to fictionalize something is not to add some weird elements to a story, but rather it's just a normal product of remembering something. My idea is that you don't have to work so hard to create a fiction because everything you remember is already fictional. I think that is probably what interests me about memory: the way that it uses experience to create something new and unique. In both Eternal Sunshine and Rocky II you are clearly interested in the rewriting of history, too.Exactly, because I'm obsessed with the creative process. Where Is Rocky II? is very much about the creative process, how you accept an idea, and try to build on this. Without being too deep, I think the idea behind the film is to say that the private investigator and the screenwriter are more or less doing the same job, but they start from opposite directions, they meet in the middle, and then they separate again. The detective starts from hypothesis, he starts with fiction, he thinks that the artist took something precious and hid it in the desert for someone else. Whereas in the case of the screenwriter, they go in the opposite direction—most of them start with a real fact, they immerse themselves in real facts, they search, and then when they are in the context of what really happened, they start to build up their own understanding of that, as well as their understanding of something fictional. Are you a man of hypothesis or fact?I like to start from fact. I'm very bad at telling stories, for example. Even though you won an Oscar for screenwriting?Even Eternal Sunshine started from an anecdote I was told—I'm not a very imaginative person. My brain does not produce stories out of the blue; I need to start with something concrete and then I develop. I don't need much effort to develop, but I need to start with something that I've seen, heard, read, or something that I saw. I need that. Where did you start with Mike, the private detective? Did you know him before, or did you just call up any detective?When I decided to do the film, I went to LA and we did a casting. We basically saw 30 to 40 private investigators. The difficulty was in asking these people if they were interested in doing a film without telling them the whole story. That was the dynamic and the strategy of most of the film—to involve people without telling them what it was about. It was not so easy because [private detectives] are very different from what you imagine, and what you see in films. Mike is probably the character that is most like a detective you see in films. When you saw the BBC film, did you ever wonder if this was a fake movie, meaning that Ed Ruscha had participated in a documentary and made a joke about creating Rocky II the artwork?I never expected it to be a joke because it is a BBC documentary and I don't think the BBC can be that... I don't think the BBC would play that game unless it's by Monty Python. It was obvious that Ed was involved [in creating the documentary] because I know Ed Ruscha's work very well. It is clear that his aesthetic and his mind and his sense of humor are authentic in that documentary. You say that the film has two stories: the detective and the scriptwriter. But there is also your story and Ed's story. So you have four different truths running through it, no?True, but it depends on how you look at it. If you look at it as a documentary, it's very complicated to explain. If you look at it as a classic story, it's a very simple plot. It's a film director who needs to do a movie, so he pushed a private investigator on an impossible task in order to produce a series of events that he will use to write a story in order to make another film. So is this also an elaborate joke?I think the trick was to start as if it were a serious documentary and to do everything possible to believe it was a documentary. What we were doing here was basically using the material of a reality show and trying to elevate that kind of material to classic cinema. Was there anyone in the crew who said, "Let's just go to the Mojave desert and bang on some rocks until we find the missing artwork?"The scriptwriters wanted to do that, but the way the film was made was that after each day's shoot, in the evening, we would think about what had happened and what we would need to shoot next as a result. So the film was being written in real-time as we were shooting, and when the scriptwriters expressed their desire to go to the desert, we started to think about how this could happen. I much preferred the idea that they got there by writing and their imagination, rather than by physically showing them going there by car. In all your art pieces and in the gallery work, you seem to be a man who loves a conspiracy theory. You always want to take a sideways glance at something and say, how about if you look at it this way?[laughs] Why do you say this? I can see myself in that description, but I don't think I have the anxiety or the paranoia that comes with the idea of somebody interested in conspiracies. I don't believe there is one truth. If we go back to the beginning of our conversation, it's a question of how you remember something or how you, on the linguistic level, express ideas. I'm sure you have experiences that you try to explain something with some words, and you realize that if you rephrase it in a different way, the meaning is better and the idea is slightly different. Are any questions answered about 'Rocky II' the artwork, and what happens to the private detective at the end?Without revealing too much, I can say the mystery about 'Rocky II' is totally resolved at some point and to the great surprise of the detective. What happen to the detective in the end is much more open ended, but it is clear to me that he understood the value of his unusual journey and certainly encountered someone he could develop a friendship with. All of this is what really happened, and not something I ever intended to organize. I just saw it happen in front of the camera. The film is not only about 'Rocky II,' but also about all the things that happen on the way to find it. But the film could not happen without 'Rocky II' because this unusual object encapsulates or summarizes the tension between reality and fiction that is at the center of this quest. In that sense, 'Rocky II' is not a 100 percent Hitchockian McGuffin (like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction is, for example). The nature of the mysterious object everybody is after is important to know. 'Rocky II' is a fake rock, but not a fake target. I'd like to know what you hope the viewer gets out of the film.Where is Rocky II? is a journey into creativity. It is a film that shows from different points of view how creativity works and how potentially everybody is an artist. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. The European premiere of 'Where Is Rocky II?' will take place on August 9 at La Sala Theatre in Locarno, Switzerland. Follow Kaleem Aftab on Twitter.

2017-03-30 00:00:00

Marshall’s Monitor headphones are the top-of-the-line model in the company’s lineup, as the only over-ear cans it offers. Marshall claims that the Monitors offer “studio quality sound” and improved noise isolation over the cheaper, on-ear Major II model, and now the company is taking them wireless with the Monitor Bluetooth. Aside from cutting out the cord, the Monitor Bluetooth is virtually identical to its wired predecessor. If you’re familiar with any of Marshall’s other products, the style of the Monitor Bluetooth will be immediately identifiable — dark vinyl, black aluminum, and brass accents. I’ve been using the Monitor Bluetooth headphones for a few days, and they pretty much work as promised. Marshall has taken a light touch when it comes to the tuning, so you hear mostly what you’d expect from a decent pair of headphones: very clear sound, with minimal artificial boosts on both the bass or treble ends of things. On the hardware side of things, the Monitor Bluetooth has Bluetooth aptX for audio, and Marshall claims that the headphones will get up to 30 hours of wireless playback. And like Marshall’s other headphones, the Monitor Bluetooth uses the same single joystick scheme for volume and playback controls, which remains one of the best systems I’ve seen on a pair of headphones. The brass stick is located on the left earpiece, and works exactly like you’d expect — tilt up and down for volume, front, and back to skip tracks, and press in to toggle play / pause. There are a few downsides to the new headphones: Marshall has cut one of the headphone jacks from the wired Monitor (presumably for more battery life), so you won’t be able to pass music through with the Bluetooth variant, and the headphones use Micro USB to charge, not the newer USB-C spec. The Marshal Monitor Bluetooth will cost $250 — $50 more than the tethered version — and are available on Marshall’s website today.

2018-05-01 13:00:41

Global Health Farewell, carefree days of summer. The number of people getting diseases transmitted by mosquito, tick and flea bites has more than tripled in the United States in recent years, federal health officials reported on Tuesday. Since 2004, at least nine such diseases have been discovered or newly introduced here. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not suggest that Americans drop plans for softball games or hammock snoozes. But officials emphasized that it’s increasingly important for everyone — especially children — to be protected from outdoor pests with bug repellent. New tickborne diseases like Heartland virus are showing up in the continental United States, even as cases of Lyme disease and other established infections are growing. On island territories like Puerto Rico, the threat is mosquitoes carrying viruses like dengue and Zika. Warmer weather is an important cause of the surge, according to the lead author of a study published in the C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. But the author, Dr. Lyle R. Petersen, the agency’s director of vector-borne diseases, declined to link the increase to the politically fraught issue of climate change, and the report does not mention climate change or global warming. Many other factors are at work, he emphasized, including increased jet travel and a lack of vaccines. “The numbers on some of these diseases have gone to astronomical levels,” Dr. Petersen added. C.D.C. officials called for more support for state and local health departments. Local agencies “are our first line of defense,” said Dr. Robert Redfield, the new director at the agency, which is facing its own deep budget cuts. “We must enhance our investment in their ability to fight these diseases.” Although state and local health departments get brief infusions of cash during health scares like the Zika epidemic in 2016, they are chronically underfunded. A recent survey of mosquito control agencies found that 84 percent needed help with such basics as surveillance and testing for resistance to pesticides, Dr. Petersen said. [READ: Tips for Protecting Yourself Against Mosquitoes and Ticks] Between 2004 and 2016, about 643,000 cases of 16 insect-borne illnesses were reported to the C.D.C. — 27,000 a year in 2004, rising to 96,000 by 2016. (The year 2004 was chosen as a baseline because the agency began requiring more detailed reporting then.) The real case numbers were undoubtedly far larger, Dr. Petersen said. For example, the C.D.C. estimates that about 300,000 Americans get Lyme disease each year, but only about 35,000 diagnoses are reported. The study did not delve into the reasons for the increase, but Dr. Petersen said it was probably caused by many factors, including two related to weather: ticks thriving in regions previously too cold for them, and hot spells triggering outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases. Other factors, he said, include expanded human travel, suburban reforestation and a dearth of new vaccines to stop outbreaks. More jet travel from the tropics means that previously obscure viruses like dengue and Zika are moving long distances rapidly in human blood. (By contrast, malaria and yellow fever are thought to have reached the Americas on slave ships three centuries ago.) A good example, Dr. Petersen said, was chikungunya, which causes joint pain so severe that it is called “bending-up disease.” In late 2013, a Southeast Asian strain arrived on the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Maarten, its first appearance in this hemisphere. Within one year, local transmission had occurred everywhere in the Americas except Canada, Chile, Peru and Bolivia. Tickborne diseases, the report found, are rising steadily in the Northeast, the Upper Midwest and California. Ticks spread Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, babesiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, rabbit fever, Powassan virus and other ills, some of them only recently discovered. Ticks need deer or rodents as their main blood hosts, and those have increased as forests in suburbs have gotten thicker, deer hunting has waned, and rodent predators like foxes have disappeared. [READ: Lyme Disease’s Worst Enemy? It Might Be Foxes] (A century ago, the Northeast had fewer trees than it now does; forests made a comeback as farming shifted west and firewood for heating was replaced by coal, oil and gas.) Most disease outbreaks related to mosquitoes since 2004 have been in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa. But West Nile virus, which arrived in 1999, now appears unpredictably across the country; Dallas, for example, saw a big outbreak in 2012. For most of these diseases, there are no vaccines and no treatment, so the only way to fight back is through mosquito control, which is expensive and rarely stops outbreaks. Miami, for instance, was the only city in the Western Hemisphere to halt a Zika outbreak with pesticides. The only flea-borne disease mentioned in the C.D.C. report is plague, the bacterium responsible for the medieval Black Death. It remains rare but persistent: Between two and 17 cases were reported from 2004 to 2016, mostly in the Southwest. The infection can be cured with antibiotics. Dr. Nicholas Watts, a global health specialist at University College London and co-author of a major 2017 report on climate change and health, said warmer weather is spreading disease in many wealthy countries, not just the United States. In Britain, he said, tick diseases are expanding as summers lengthen, and malaria is becoming more common in the northern reaches of Australia. But Paul Reiter, a medical entomologist at the Pasteur Institute, has argued that some environmentalists exaggerate the disease threats posed by climate change. The 2003-2014 period fell during what he described as “a pause” in global warming, although the notion is disputed by other experts. Still, the dynamics of disease transmission are complicated, and driven by more than temperature. For example, transmission of West Nile virus requires that certain birds be present, too. In the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, St. Louis encephalitis, a related virus, surged, “and it looked like climate issues were involved,” Dr. Reiter said. But the increase turned out to depend more on varying hot-cold and wet-dry spells and the interplay of two different mosquito species. St. Louis encephalitis virtually disappeared, weather notwithstanding. “It’s a complicated, multidimensional system,” Dr. Reiter said. A. Marm Kilpatrick, a disease ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said many factors beside hot weather were at work in the United States, including “a hump-shaped relationship between temperature and transmission potential.” Warm weather helps mosquitoes and ticks breed and transmit disease faster, he explained. But after a certain point, the hotter and drier it gets, the more quickly the pests die. So disease transmission to humans peaks somewhere between mildly warm and hellishly hot weather. Experts also pointed out that the increase in reports of spreading disease may have resulted partially from more testing. Lyme disease made family doctors begin to suspect tick bites in patients with fevers. Laboratories began looking for different pathogens in blood samples, especially in patients who did not have Lyme. That led to the discovery of previously unknown diseases.

2016-05-26 00:00:00

THE REFUGEE CONVENTION says that states should do “everything within their power to prevent [refugees] from becoming a cause of tension” between them. They have manifestly failed. Chaotic flows set governments against one another. Countries hosting lots of refugees bitterly resent the rest of the world for failing to do its bit. Refugees, bar the lucky few who have made it to developed countries, are increasingly locked in limbo, wards of a system run by NGOs that offers them no hope of building a meaningful life. That does not mean the world should rip up the convention and start again, as some urge. A tapestry of international law has been woven around the idea that there is a specific class of people who deserve the protection of states other than their own. Starting from scratch is more likely to undermine that idea than expand on it. A legal definition of refugees is needed to secure consent in countries that protect them. Without it the right to asylum, and the prospect of resettlement, will evaporate. Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. Instead, suggests James Hathaway of the University of Michigan, view the convention as a beautiful house with a worn carpet. It needs renovation, not reconstruction. That means two things. First, recognition that refugees will eventually need more than humanitarian protection. Second, a new compact between the rich world, which has the resources to manage the problem, and the poor, which bears the brunt of it. Countries like Lebanon and Kenya are providing a global good and deserve more help. The starting point must be a new approach to protracted situations to place integration at the heart of refugee policy. That does not mean giving refugees immediate citizenship rights (although in due course they should be offered to some). The possibility of a return home should never be blocked off. But over time, granting refugees a degree of self-determination can reduce the distressing waste of human potential in places like Dadaab, and reduce friction between refugees and their hosts. For too long Western politicians have been profusely thanking refugee-hosting countries for their generosity while chastising them for not allowing their guests to work or move around freely. Such hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed in the developing world. So in a related change, the West should introduce long-term development thinking into refugee policy, the better to align the interests of refugees with those of the communities that host them. Some refugee aid should be shifted from humanitarian agencies to development budgets, politically difficult though that might be. The World Bank has already changed its rules to help middle-income countries facing large refugee burdens. Individual rich countries, or clubs of them, could offer trade preferences to countries with large refugee populations, as they do for the world’s poorest. But governments are not the only actors. Jordan’s economic zones show how the private sector may be encouraged to help both locals and refugees. Managing the world’s stock of refugees is one thing; dealing with sudden flows from conflict areas that can strain economies, infrastructure and social cohesion is another. Countries like Lebanon and Jordan, dealt a poor hand by geography, should not be left to cope on their own. It is impossible to tell where or when the next wave of displacement will appear, but educated guesses can be made. The UNHCR is worried about women and children fleeing gangs in Central America and heading for the United States. In north-east Nigeria Boko Haram has displaced 2.2m people. The Middle East is as flammable as ever. And other potential sources of large population shifts loom, notably climate change, which might generate fresh waves of migration as arable land degrades and water scarcity leads to conflict and flight. Help from the rich world should begin with the traditional responses: more resettlement and more help for humanitarian bodies. Acutely overstretched countries should be given particular support. David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian group, wants rich countries to accept 10% of the world’s refugees, concentrating on the most vulnerable. More money is needed, too. Last year the UNHCR was able to meet only half the needs it had budgeted for, and several of its projects were left massively underfunded. But fresh thinking is also needed to help countries avoid sinking into protracted situations. Places like Lebanon should not have to hold out the begging bowl at hastily convened donor conferences every year or two. Agencies have learned to move equipment and personnel near conflict zones in preparation for a wave of refugees. An expanded global fund for displacement, overseen by an independent authority that can spring into action when required, would make such planning and response easier. Governments might prefer the predictability of regularly paying into a fund to ad hoc donor events. And once refugee problems turn from acute to chronic, the response should shift from humanitarian to development. The International Organisation for Migration, which may soon be folded into the UN, could help match global migration supply and demand as part of a tighter international migration regime. But global governance has its limits. The international system is prone to inertia and turf wars. The UNHCR, the traditional guardian of the rules governing refugee movements, no longer carries the clout it once did, and may find it difficult to embrace fresh approaches to protection. So the political energy for change will have to come from governments, often acting together. The next American president, if so inclined, might encourage a rethink of the global protection scheme, perhaps with the help of a new UN secretary-general. The new approach should work with the grain of international politics. Bilateral relationships often yield better results than sluggish international bodies can offer. Spain’s deals with West African countries such as Senegal, which combine police and patrol co-operation, repatriation deals and lots of aid, slashed illegal immigration some years ago. Some countries will be well placed to accept particular refugee groups because of historical or colonial ties, as in the successful resettlement in Britain of the Ugandan Indians expelled by Idi Amin in 1972. Rich countries seeking to plug particular gaps in their labour markets might be encouraged to take in refugees. All these changes would make it clearer that legal responsibilities to refugees cannot be separated from politics. Too often national politicians and international officials talk past each other: accusations of xenophobia fly in one direction, dismissals of starry-eyed idealism in the other. In the West, the first principles of international refugee law are wearily revisited every time numbers surge. Migration is an intrinsically ambivalent business, both for the governments that must manage it and for the migrants themselves Lawyers and NGOs need to accept that the treaties and rules they cherish will wither without the continued consent of the democracies that drew them up. Politicians, for their part, should acknowledge that aid agencies manage a problem they would otherwise struggle to keep a lid on. The disorderly flows into Europe last year were the outcome of a problem allowed to fester. “Refugees are convincing governments of the need to act,” says Mr Grandi of the UNHCR. If nothing is done, “they will come anyway.” European leaders no doubt regret having paid so little attention to illegal migration until a year ago. Many fear the next wave, from Libya, Turkey or even Russia. A pre-emptive approach might be seen as a form of insurance. So there is a strong case for Europe leading the way. But first the EU must get its own house in order, using the breathing space that the deal with Turkey has granted (provided it holds). Rather than squabbling about plans drawn up in Brussels to spread refugees around member countries, it should think about different ways in which countries may contribute, be it in cash or in kind. There is a case for generating common resources to manage this common problem, whether by issuing bonds, as Italy has proposed, or through a new tax, as Germany might prefer. At the same time the EU must continue its slow trudge towards a harmonised asylum system. The advantages of co-operation are less obvious to countries isolated from the direct consequences of regional unrest, such as Australia, Japan and, to a degree, America. But they, too, have an interest in preserving the liberal order that is threatened by vast refugee flows. They do not want to see the EU, its greatest champion, tear itself apart. Another refugee crisis in the Middle East could topple governments, with unpredictable consequences in a combustible region. And even the status quo might not be stable. Some refugee populations, if left to rot, can turn to what aid groups call “negative coping strategies,” from drug abuse to crime to the threat of terrorism across borders. Many will be exploited, especially children. In the end, though, nothing can force a government to do more for refugees outside its borders. The policies of the next age of refugee management still depend on a spirit of compassion and humanitarianism. Migration is an intrinsically ambivalent business, both for the governments that must manage it and for the migrants themselves. The hopes they have invested in a new homeland will always be tempered by regret for what they have lost and by fear of what may lie ahead. As for policymakers, there is nothing they can do to prevent unpredictable refugee flows. But they could certainly make a better job of managing

2016-03-30

Dr. Dorry Segev and Dr. Niraj Desai inspect a kidney during a transplant. Doctors from Johns Hopkins Medicine announced Wednesday that they had performed the world’s first HIV-positive liver transplant, as well as the first HIV-positive kidney transplant in the U.S. Both organs were donated by the same deceased HIV-positive donor to two patients currently living with HIV. The successful procedures open the door to other HIV-positive patients — who often suffer organ complications either because of the virus or because of the available treatments to fight it — to have an additional lifeline to consider when placed on crowded waiting lists for organ donations. “For those living with HIV this is a very exciting time,” Dorry Segev, director of the Epidemiology Research Group in Organ Transplantation at Johns Hopkins, said at a news conference. “Now every HIV-positive donor is potential lives saved.” The transplants were only made possible after President Barack Obama signed the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act into law in 2013, opening the door to medical facilities performing transplants using organs obtained from HIV-positive donors. Prior to that, a 1988 amendment to the National Organ Transplant Act had banned research into HIV-positive transplantation during a time when public fears around AIDS were high. "At that time, it made sense because HIV/AIDS was a deadly disease," Segev said. "But our ability to treat and control this disease has progressed rapidly in the last few decades." Segev, who helped write the HOPE Act, noted that roughly 122,000 Americans are on the transplant waiting list at any given time. His research team determined that if the door was opened to HIV-positive transplants, 300–500 HIV-positive donors would be available every year for about 1,000 individual transplants. “It occurred to us that there were thousands of patients with HIV in need of transplants who were waiting on waiting lists and suffering high rates of dying while waiting for these organs,” Segev said. “At the same time, we were throwing away organs from HIV-positive patients.” Both of the patients who underwent the recent surgeries are in good condition, with their donated organs functioning well, said Christine Durand, assistant professor of Medicine and Oncology at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Both individuals have been living with HIV for several decades. The most important risk to note in HIV-positive transplants is that the recipient will be exposed to a second strain of HIV from the donor, Durand noted. This means that doctors will have to consider whether they will be exposed to strains with drug resistance and match the recipient accordingly. Sigev and his group have assembled a consortium of roughly 30 medical facilities across the country who currently perform HIV negative-to-positive transplants that might have the capabilities to expand to their HIV positive-to-positive protocols. Once the procedures are taken up across the country, more organs will be available overall. “This is an advancement that will affect everyone on the donor waiting list, including those with HIV,” Durand said. This was the first HIV-positive kidney transplant to occur in the U.S. A previous version of the story implied that it was the first-ever HIV-positive kidney transplant.

2020-03-18 00:00:00

BACH SAYS IOC WILL “CONTINUE TO BE VERY REALISTIC IN OUR ANALYSIS” ABOUT TOKYO 2020

2019-07-31

(Fixes typo in headline) July 31 (Reuters) - LafargeHolcim Ltd: * LAFARGEHOLCIM CEO SAYS WE DON’T SEE ANY MAJOR MARKETS IN TROUBLE; WE ARE MORE CONFIDENT THAN AT START OF THE YEAR * LAFARGEHOLCIM CEO SAYS DECLINES TO COMMENT ON IF COMPANY IS BIDDING FOR BASF CONSTRUCTION CHEMICALS BUSINESS * LAFARGEHOLCIM CEO SAYS WE HAVE GOOD ORDER BOOKS AND STRONG DEMAND IN THE SECOND HALF Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage: (Reporting by John Revill)

2016-09-25 00:00:00

His voice quivered and his eyes welled, but in a moment of sorrow, Marlins Manager Don Mattingly thought about joy.  Mattingly recalled the passion and joy of the team's star pitcher José Fernández at a press conference Sunday following his sudden death. The 24-year-old right hander died earlier that morning after a boating accident in Miami Beach. "I see such a little boy in him," Mattingly said, holding back tears. "The way he played, there's just joy with him when he played and when he pitched." Emotional Don Mattingly honors José Fernández: "There was just joy with him when he played" https://t.co/PT7xK3hMsh https://t.co/R5amuTDm8s — ABC News (@ABC) September 25, 2016 Mattingly's sentiment echoed that of the baseball world. Fans and fellow players mourned Fernández's loss on social media, recalling his love for the game, as well as the joy others had while watching him play. "You just see that little kid that you see when you watch kids play little league," Mattingly said. "That's the joy that José played with." A Coast Guard crew found Fernández on a 33-foot boat overturned on a jetty around 3:30 a.m. He was scheduled to pitch Monday for the Marlins, who canceled their series finale against the Braves on Sunday.  Statement from the Miami Marlins organization: pic.twitter.com/6A4Rv6m2g9 — Miami Marlins (@Marlins) September 25, 2016

2018-09-08 00:00:00

When Sex and the City turned 20-years-old in June, fans and pop culture commentators celebrated its groundbreaking portrayal of four strong, confident and (mostly) sex-positive women. They also criticized the iconic show for its lack of diversity and offensive plot lines, pointing out that SATC has not aged as gracefully as its cast. In 2018, it's impossible not to be disappointed by the series's glaring lack of diversity – especially considering it's set in one of the world's most multicultural enclaves, New York City. "It was a show that was simultaneously progressive and regressive, where people of color were either stereotypes or punchlines," Refinery29's Hunter Harris wrote as the show's 20th anniversary approached. Sex and the City's overwhelming whiteness hasn't escaped the attention of star Sarah Jessica Parker, who acknowledged this week that the show now looks "tone-deaf." "You couldn't make it today because of the lack of diversity on screen," the actress told The Hollywood Reporter at the Deauville Film Festival in France. "I personally think it would feel bizarre." When asked about the possibility of rebooting the series with a more diverse cast, Parker wasn't optimistic, saying, "I don't know that you could do it with a different cast. I think that's radical and interesting, but you can't pretend it's the same." "It wouldn't be a reboot as I understand it," she continued. "If you came back and did six episodes, you'd have to acknowledge the city is not hospitable to those same ideas. You'd look like you were generationally removed from reality, but it would be certainly interesting to see four diverse women experiencing NYC their way." Luckily, we don't need to reboot SATC to accomplish that goal. Black-helmed shows like Insecure are showing sex positive, female friendships with women of color at the center. Insecure has positioned itself as SATC for a new generation, revolving around four female friends with very different sex lives and fashion senses. It's even spawned quizzes to tell whether you're an Issa or a Kelli, the same way personality types were defined by being a Carrie or a Miranda in the early aughts. In 2018, Sex and the City also feels problematic because of its mistreatment of the LGBTQ community, including transphobic language and bi erasure. Parker doesn't need the Woke Charlotte meme to wake her up to this reality. In the interview, Parker reminded us that feminist movements like #MeToo have to include the LGBTQ community. If Sex And The City is one of you're all time faves, that's OK. But take a look back on the show's most cringe-worthy moments while you're celebrating.

2017-04-27 00:00:00

Facebook revealed on Thursday that it saw an increase in government requests for user data from the first half of 2016 to the second. According to Facebook’s latest transparency report, in the first six months of last year, the social media giant received 59,229 government requests for user data worldwide; in the next period, that number rose by 9 percent to 64,279. In the U.S. alone, Facebook received 26,014 requests for account data from July to December — also a 9 percent increase. The report also showed that Facebook provided data in response to 83 percent of the requests. “As we have previously emphasized, we apply a rigorous approach to every government request we receive to protect the information of the people who use our services,” Chris Sonderby, Facebook’s deputy general counsel wrote in a blog post. “We scrutinize each request for legal sufficiency, no matter which country is making the request, and challenge those that are deficient or overly broad. We do not provide governments with ‘back doors’ or direct access to people’s information. Twitter revealed in its own transparency report earlier this year that it saw a similar bump in government requests for user data over the same period. View the discussion thread. The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 fax The contents of this site are ©2019 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

2017-11-07 00:00:00

Nov 7 (Reuters) - Wajax Corp: * Reports 2017 third quarter results * Q3 revenue rose 4 percent to C$299 million * Q3 earnings per share C$0.46 * Q3 earnings per share view C$0.34 — Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S * Q3 2017 backlog was $170.3 million, an increase of $10.6 million, or 7 percent, from Q2 2017 backlog of $159.7 million​ * Q3 ‍inventories of $333.0 million increased $27.9 million from Q2 2017 inventories of $305.1 million​ * Continues to anticipate adjusted net earnings for 2017 will increase compared to 2016 adjusted net earnings​ Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:

2017-10-12

(CNN)Let's start out with the caveat that President Donald Trump's Republicans control the entire federal government, so none of this is going to happen short of a mass rebellion against the President by his own party. Until that happens, the following is a purely academic discussion. But it is completely fascinating. With that out of the way... The fabulous Googlers of the Washington press corps and political class were searching for the 25th Amendment this week after reading an anonymously sourced piece by Gabe Sherman in Vanity Fair that was sensationally headlined: "'I hate everyone in the White House!' Trump seethes as advisers fear the President is 'unraveling'". The piece begins with mention of Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker's broadside warning of his fear that Trump could march the country into World War III, comments he made to The New York Times, and that some of the members of Trump's national security team were essentially "adult day care." Sherman's piece ends with the anonymously sourced description of an exchange between Trump and strategist Steve Bannon, who has since been fired from the White House, although the two are thought to remain politically simpatico. Here's that portion: "Even before Corker's remarks, some West Wing advisers were worried that Trump's behavior could cause the Cabinet to take extraordinary Constitutional measures to remove him from office. Several months ago, according to two sources with knowledge of the conversation, former chief strategist Steve Bannon told Trump that the risk to his presidency wasn't impeachment, but the 25th Amendment -- the provision by which a majority of the Cabinet can vote to remove the president. When Bannon mentioned the 25th Amendment, Trump said, "What's that?" According to a source, Bannon has told people he thinks Trump has only a 30 percent chance of making it the full term." Again, that's anonymously sourced material and it hasn't been verified by CNN. But how intriguing! For either people who are worried about efforts to remove the President from office or those who'd love to see him leave, it's worth knowing the facts. There are plenty of scholarly articles on the 25th Amendment. This one from Brookings describes the process as "more difficult" than impeachment. Impeachment requires an investigation by a House committee of "high crimes and misdemeanors," a vote in the House, a trial in the Senate and a super majority vote there in order to remove a President from office. There's no requirement of a crime to be committed to invoke the 25th Amendment. Rather, the President's colleagues must simply deem him unable to do his job with a simple vote by the Cabinet and vice president. The Vanity Fair story, by the way, was released on the same day that Rep. Al Green introduced an impeachment resolution in the House (which has zero chance of passing). Regardless, the story sparked an immediate discussion of the 25th Amendment, which was enacted in 1967 in the years after the Kennedy assassination and clarifies presidential and vice presidential succession. Three of its sections have been invoked. Section 1, in 1973 when Richard Nixon left office and Gerald Ford became President. Section 2, when Gerald Ford used it to bring Nelson Rockefeller on as his Vice President. Section 3, periodically when the President undergoes a medical procedure. But the final section, Section IV, contains provisions for a dire emergency. Here's that portion in full: Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President. Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office. Putting that into plainer English, the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet (or some other body determined by Congress), can tell the leaders of the House and Senate the President is unfit for duty and the vice president -- in this case Mike Pence -- takes over. The President can disagree with them, sure, and try to get his powers back. But if a majority of the Cabinet (or some other body determined by Congress) stays strong and says he's unfit to do the job, then it's up to Congress. Super majorities would have to ratify the suggestion of the Cabinet and vice president, who at that point would be acting president, or else the President would take back over. It seems hard to believe that two-thirds of both chambers, which are controlled by Republicans, would vote to depose the Republican President, but by even considering this 25th Amendment option we're so far into a maze of hypotheticals, why not just go with it? Imagine the US being in such straits that Pence, in the role of Brutus here, organizes this mutiny and that all these people Trump appointed join forces against him. Anti-Trump Republican super majorities don't seem so crazy in that very unlikely light. The 25th Amendment option is a paranoid conspiracy theory extraordinaire that puts the notion of a deep state -- a favorite of Bannon's -- to shame. In this case, the Deep State is Trump's own Cabinet. On the other hand, Trump has used some very tough love on some of his Cabinet secretaries of late. He said he regretted picking Attorney General Jeff Sessions, challenged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to an IQ test after reports that Tillerson called him a moron. Then said he was kidding! Just for kicks, here's the full list of 24 Cabinet officials, with two acting heads at HHS (Tom Price was pushed out) and DHS (John Kelly became his chief of staff after Reince Priebus was fired): Vice President Michael R. Pence Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson Secretary of the Treasury Steven T. Mnuchin Secretary of Defense James Mattis Attorney General Jeff Sessions Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue Secretary of Commerce Wilbur L. Ross, Jr. Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Benjamin S. Carson, Sr. Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao Secretary of Energy James Richard Perry Secretary of Education Elisabeth Prince DeVos Secretary of Veterans Affairs David J. Shulkin Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke Acting Secretary of Health and Human Services Don J. Wright White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats Representative of the United States to the United Nations Nikki Haley Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Mike Pompeo Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt Administrator of the Small Business Administration Linda E. McMahon There are plenty of organizations and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who have raised questions about Trump's fitness to perform his duties. The New York Times editorial board, as one example, called on Congress Thursday to pass legislation that would denude him of the ability to launch a unilateral nuclear strike. And it's on this issue -- a nuclear strike, perhaps -- that you could see the Cabinet actually moving to remove Trump from office, even if only temporarily.

2016-07-28 00:00:00

Democrats spent their third night in Philadelphia making the case for Americans to elect nominee Hillary Clinton to become the next US president. A heavy-hitting lineup of speakers outlined why they believe their candidate is best suited for the nation's top political office and, more importantly, why Republican nominee Donald Trump is not. The evening's early speeches focused on gun violence — including repeated references to the gun lobby and Clinton's purported willingness to stand up to it. On the convention floor, the crowd appeared more rowdy than previous nights, often catching speakers off guard. Anti-fracking chants were audible when California Governor Jerry Brown spoke while anti-war chants rumbled as former CIA director Leon Panetta spoke. Here's what else happened: -The headlining speakers rained heavy blows on Trump, beginning with a passionate speech from Vice President Joe Biden. He lauded President Barack Obama's tenure in office and drew on his personal relationship with Clinton to talk about her passion. "If you worry about your job and getting a decent pay, if you worry about your children's education, if you are taking care of an elderly parent," he said. "Then there is only one person in this election who will help you, only one person in this race who will be there, who has always been there for you, and that is Hillary Clinton's life story." Democrats spent their third night in Philadelphia making the case for Americans to elect nominee Hillary Clinton to become the next US president. A heavy-hitting lineup of speakers outlined why they believe their candidate is best suited for the nation's top political office and, more importantly, why Republican nominee Donald Trump is not. The evening's early speeches focused on gun violence — including repeated references to the gun lobby and Clinton's purported willingness to stand up to it. On the convention floor, the crowd appeared more rowdy than previous nights, often catching speakers off guard. Anti-fracking chants were audible when California Governor Jerry Brown spoke while anti-war chants rumbled as former CIA director Leon Panetta spoke. Here's what else happened: -The headlining speakers rained heavy blows on Trump, beginning with a passionate speech from Vice President Joe Biden. He lauded President Barack Obama's tenure in office and drew on his personal relationship with Clinton to talk about her passion. "If you worry about your job and getting a decent pay, if you worry about your children's education, if you are taking care of an elderly parent," he said. "Then there is only one person in this election who will help you, only one person in this race who will be there, who has always been there for you, and that is Hillary Clinton's life story." Yes, Joe Biden really walked on stage to the Rocky theme song. — VICE News (@vicenews)July 28, 2016 -After delivering a series of one-liners that mocked Trump, Biden quieted the crowd to talk about what's at stake in this year's election. "Let me talk about something that I'm deadly serious about. This is a complicated and uncertain world we live in," he said. "The threats are too great, the times are too uncertain, to elect Donald Trump as president of the United States." Joe Biden: 'No major party nominee in the history of this nation has ever known less or has been less prepared.'— VICE News (@vicenews)July 28, 2016 -One of the more strategic speeches of the night came from former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who delivered a highly anticipated endorsement of Clinton. The now-independent politician, who left the Democratic party before running for mayor in 2001 as a Republican, spoke to undecided and independent voters. Bloomberg emphasized that while he does not agree with Clinton on everything, he believes she is the best option. "There are times when I disagree with Hillary Clinton. But let me tell you, whatever our disagreements may be, I've come here to say: We must put them aside for the good of our country. And we must unite around the candidate who can defeat a dangerous demagogue," Bloomberg said. Michael Bloomberg: 'Trump says he wants to run the nation like he's running his business? God help us' — VICE News (@vicenews)July 28, 2016 -Virginia Senator Tim Kaine followed, officially taking on the vice presidential nomination and giving a speech focused on selling his own political trajectory and accomplishments. He pitched himself as a dad-like figure with traditional midwest roots and a Jesuit school upbringing, while taking time to focus on his work with Clinton's progressive primary rival Senator Bernie Sanders. Kaine brought out an unexpected willingness to go after Trump, highlighting his lack of trust in the Republican nominee. "You know who I don't trust? Donald Trump. The guy promises a lot. But you might have noticed, he has a habit of saying the same two words right after he makes his biggest promises," he said, referring to the words "believe me." "It's gonna be great — believe me! We're gonna build a wall and make Mexico pay for it -- believe me! We're gonna destroy ISIS so fast -- believe me! There's nothing suspicious in my tax returns -- believe me!" Kaine said, mimicking Trump. Here's Tim Kaine's best Donald Trump impression. — VICE News (@vicenews)July 28, 2016 -Obama wrapped up the night, taking the stage to talk about what his positive outlook for the country and why a President Trump would take the country in the wrong direction. While propping up his administration's successes, he devoted much of his time highlighting why Clinton is the candidate most prepared to succeed him in office. President Obama: 'Tonight, I ask you to do for Hillary Clinton what you did for me. ... I'm ready to pass the baton'— VICE News (@vicenews)July 28, 2016 Obama: 'There has never been a man or a woman—not me, not Bill, nobody—more qualified than Hillary Clinton'— VICE News (@vicenews)July 28, 2016 "You can read about it, you can study it, but until you've sat at that desk, you don't know what it's like to manage a global crisis or send young people to war," Mr. Obama said. "But Hillary's been in the room; she's been part of those decisions." Watch Obama's full speech here: Follow VICE News on Twitter: @vicenews

2019-06-19

June 19 (Reuters) - Slack Technologies Inc, whose instant messaging app has taken workplaces by storm, is scheduled to go public via a direct listing on June 20, instead of the more popular initial public offering route. Unlike a traditional IPO in which companies sell shares to raise proceeds, a direct listing is a way for existing shareholders to sell stock. Here are some facts about Slack, which is one of the most high-profile companies left to go public in 2019 and its debut could be a bellwether for other tech listings this year. E-mail Killer? Slack is an internet-based platform that allows teams and businesses to communicate with each other. Launched in 2013, Slack allows communication through groups and has quickly replaced e-mail at many companies, although e-mail is still the dominant medium of communication in workplaces. Diverse Clients: The San Francisco-based company, whose customers include Electronic Arts Inc, Nordstrom Inc and Ford Motor Co, said it ended the first quarter with 95,000 paid customers. Slack also said it had over 10 million daily active users. Rising Competition: Its closest competitor is Microsoft Teams, a free chat add-on for Microsoft Corp's Office365 users. Other similar platforms include Google Hangouts, Workplace by Facebook and Skype for Business. Loss Making: Slack reported an adjusted operating loss of $33.8 million for the quarter, compared with a $20.2 million loss a year earlier. The company expects second-quarter revenue to grow 51% to 53% to a range of $139 million to $141 million, with an adjusted loss of between $77 million and $75 million. Valuation: The company was hoping for a valuation of more than $10 billion in the listing, Reuters had previously reported. The company is expected to be valued by investors at $16 billion to $17 billion when it lists its shares publicly, Bloomberg reported https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-12/slack-listing-is-said-likely- t o - v a l u e - i t - a t - u p - t o - 1 7 - b i l l i o n last week. Slack's last private valuation was $16.1 billion, based on shares sold in private transactions, according to Matthew Kennedy, senior IPO market strategist at Renaissance Capital. Investors: Slack's biggest shareholders include Accel Partners, an investor in Facebook and Dropbox, which holds 24%, followed by Andreessen Horowitz, with 13.3%. Japanese conglomerate SoftBank owns 7.3%. Fewer Advisers: The company has hired Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Allen & Co to be financial advisers on the direct listing, which requires a fraction of the number of banks compared to an IPO. (Reporting by Saumya Sibi Joseph, Arundhati Sarkar and Arjun Panchadar in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)

2016-05-11 00:00:00

After May 13, Michael Strahan's time on Live! With Kelly and Michael will just be a memory. But the abrupt, shocking nature of Strahan's departure has left a mark on Kelly Ripa. Ripa described the reverberating effects of Strahan's announcement in an interview with People, chalking it up to a matter of respect. "I think that all people are deserving of fair treatment in the work place." she said. "People deserve respect. People should be treated equally and with dignity." Ripa took several days off work after news broke of Strahan leaving Live! for Good Morning America! In the interview, she describes the Live! With Kelly and Michael crew as a family, noting that families aren't always best at communication. "Sometimes when you are so comfortable with somebody, you may not give them the same consideration as somebody you're not as comfortable with — a certain formality falls away," she said. Ripa reassured People of her strength, while reiterating that even strong, stable people can benefit from empathy. "I don't think of anybody as a monster or out to get me," she said. "But sometimes stability and dependability can be misinterpreted as passive. Like, 'Oh, we don't have to worry about her, she's fine. She's fine.'"  Ripa and Strahan will continue working together until his last day on May 13. "We're excited for Michael," she added. "He wanted that job, and it's great for him...However, what nobody considered is there's a whole other group of people that it really impacts, because we have to now find another great person."  Ripa's full interview can be found in Friday's issue of People. Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

2018-04-14 06:00:01

David Foster, the Jerry Bruckheimer of power ballads, likes to say that he hasn’t seen the inside of an elevator in more than 30 years because he’s afraid of hearing his own music. Millennials know him as the former stepfather to Gigi and Bella Hadid and as a background player on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Before all that, he produced Whitney Houston’s world-famous rendition of “I Will Always Love You.” He won sixteen Grammy awards and worked with Michael Jackson, Madonna, Neil Diamond, Toni Braxton, Barbra Streisand and Lionel Richie, often on songs that topped charts and divided critics. You can even see him perform some of the ballads he produced, including Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love,” along with Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” and Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing,” while he’s on tour, performing at theaters around the country starting on April 17 in Washington D.C. with a band of singers and musicians. You’ve written disco classics for Cheryl Lynn and produced Whitney Houston’s biggest hit. Do great pop songs share a secret? I don’t know. I can only say that I gravitate toward schmaltz. I’m a commoner, not an elitist. Years ago, Rolling Stone said I plunged the dagger into Boz Scaggs’ white suit, but I thought we did a good album together. Boz liked it. So I’m not a Rolling Stone favorite. It’s O.K. Rolling Stone magazine also called you the master of “bombastic pop kitsch.” What was the song that cemented that? Was it Chicago’s “You’re the Inspiration?” No. I would say it was Earth, Wind and Fire’s “After the Love is Gone.” You’ve said that Maurice White, of Earth, Wind and Fire, is the singer you learned the most from. Why? Because he did Jazz, Pop, R&B, Country. Because you name the genre and he could do it. Tell me about Celine Dion. When she walks into the studio, does that voice just come soaring out? Celine Dion is the person every singer should study, whether you like her singing or hate it. How she’s raised her children. How she’s been in her marriage. How she’s been in her shows. How she takes care of her voice. How she treats people. And yes, when she opens her mouth that voice just comes out. You’ve also been quoted saying that you love her because she does what she’s told. For a guy like me who wants to get his licks in, it’s great. She can interpret exactly what I want at all times. She’s so amenable. I think that’s to her credit. When I asked Whitney for something, she would give me something different. Sometimes it was better, sometimes it was not as good. But it was never what I imagined. Did you feel you knew Whitney Houston? I felt I did not. We never had an argument. We never had a problem. But it was not like Natalie Cole, where we were great friends right up until she died. And you did how many songs with Whitney? 10 Over the course of twenty years. It was a surface relationship. I don’t read anything into the fact that we weren’t close. Don’t you have people you work with who you don’t really know? Different levels of success. Different level of tragedy. Who was the most difficult superstar to work with? I’m not answering that, but it’s none of the obvious people. It’s not Whitney. It’s not Natalie. It’s not Madonna. Although Madonna was not always nice to you when you collaborated on her ballads collection in 1995. She was constantly telling you how uncool you were. She was right. I was uncool. Madonna was also a great co-producer. She arrived at 9 a.m., was there until the very end, and had great ideas about how to make the music sound better. Is Barbra Streisand ever not exacting? You know the answer to that. I could say to Barbra, ‘if you come to this party tonight, and just shake a few hands and take a few pictures, your album will come out at No. 1. These people can help you.’ ‘I don’t care.’ I don’t want to go.’ You say, ‘But Barbra, for sure. It’ll make your album come out…’ ‘ I don’t care. I don’t want to.’ But she’s a really true friend and she usually ends up being right. I will tell you that she’s not the person you asked about. She just doesn’t compromise. She believes compromise breeds mediocrity. I agree, though I haven’t always operated accordingly. So the worst compromise you made was? Deciding to do this interview. Use that. Also, in the eighties I did a bunch of projects in Japan just for the money. When you make decisions based on the money, it never really works What’s in that sandwich? Turkey, lettuce, tomato, cucumber and heroin. Want some? No, but I’d bet there are no opioids. In fact, I think you are probably one of the rare people who’s succeeded in the music business without ever doing drugs. That’s basically true. Ladies and gentlemen, sometime in David Foster’s distant past there was a puff of a joint. A few times. But that’s all. I was raised to not disappoint my parents. I had a great upbringing on Vancouver Island. I was in Chuck Berry’s band at 16. There was nothing but sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll and I never took part. Although you made up a little for being such a good boy by appearing on reality TV. And you got a tattoo on your hand. Ten years ago, my stepson started carrying a camera around saying, ‘We’re going to get a TV show going.’ I said ‘if you can get that TV show on a network, whatever it is you’re trying to do, I will get the same tattoo you have and I will be on your show.’ And sure as hell, they sold a reality show about our family to Fox and I wound up with this tattoo.’ That’s how both things happened. The show was called “The Princes of Malibu” and your wife then was Linda Thompson, a singer and actress, whose other ex is Caitlyn Jenner. After that, you married Yolanda Hadid, who became a cast-member on the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” A show you appeared on with some regularity. I wanted to be supportive. And I think about it like this. I’m currently working with Michael Bublé. Would he really say, ‘I was going to call him to do my new album but then I saw The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and thought, not that guy. Never again.’ I doubt it. But your question seems to be implying something. What do you think? I would imagine there’s an upside to these shows or you wouldn’t be on them. No. There is no upside. Besides maybe more Instagram followers. It’s not a good look. Now you’re in the tabloids dating Katharine McPhee. Well, that we won’t talk about. Why? The two of you have been photographed together kissing outside restaurants in Los Angeles. It’s not a secret. At some point, you can’t keep going in back doors. At some point, you’ve got to live your life. But I did learn one thing over the last five years. Never talk about your personal life.

2017-11-07

MOYO, Uganda (Reuters) - A South Sudanese military commander said he had defected with more than 200 soldiers to the country’s largest rebel group, amid a showdown between President Salva Kiir and his former military chief. Lieutenant Colonel Chan Garang, an ally of former army chief Paul Malong, defected to join the largest rebel group fighting Kiir, he said. All three men are ethnic Dinkas and any split within the powerful group could represent a threat to Kiir. The four-year civil war has split the country into a patchwork of fiefdoms, created Africa’s biggest refugee crisis in two decades and led to ethnic cleansing. A third of the 12 million-strong population has fled their homes and half are dependent on food aid. In May, Kiir fired Malong, whom U.N. investigators accused of directing ethnic militias responsible for the rape, torture and murder of civilians. Malong, who is also on a U.S. sanctions list, briefly fled north but returned to the capital, where he has been under house arrest ever since. Over the weekend, Kiir’s troops surrounded Malong’s house in Juba and unsuccessfully attempted to disarm his bodyguards. An armed standoff continues outside his house. Garang is the first Malong loyalist to join the rebels. Garang said he defected because allies of Malong’s were being badly treated, troops had not been paid for seven months and other tribes were being discriminated against. “I left Juba because when are you are a supporter of Paul Malong, you will be arrested,” Garang told Reuters via satellite phone. “We are preparing our army so that we can launch an attack on Juba. Salva Kiir divided the tribes so we need him to go.” Garang told Reuters he took more than 200 soldiers with him, although a rebel press release put the number at 150. A photo provided by the rebels showed more than 30 armed men but their identities were unclear. Army spokesman Lul Ruai Koang said they were not aware of any defection from their ranks. Malong was unreachable by phone, but his wife Lucy Ayak distanced her husband from the defected commander.     “[Garang] is not happy with the government and he has deserted. Why is he saying it is the issue of General Malong?” she asked Reuters. South Sudan’s war began in December 2013 between troops loyal to Kiir and rebels of former vice president Riek Machar, a Nuer. Oyet Nathaniel, a senior rebel official, told Reuters that Garang had brought 150 men with him and that anyone deciding to join them against Kiir is a “welcome development,” regardless of their background. There are several rebel groups, but none of them is well-funded or well-armed. (This version of the story was refiled to remove repetition in second to last paragraph) Editing by Katharine Houreld and Matthew Mpoke Bigg

2020-02-29 00:00:00

These plays depict a reality that seems familiar and plausible yet feels dreamlike, monumental, and mythical. “Mud [table work]” by María Irene Fornés, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, music by Philip Glass, performers: from left, Paul Lazar, Wendy vanden Heuvel, and Bruce MacVittie, Mabou Mines (photo by Julieta Cervantes)Mud/Drowning: [table work]/an Opera is a stellar, intimate production of two short plays by María Irene Fornés, presented by Mabou Mines, the venerable experimental theater company, and directed by the esteemed JoAnne Akalaitis, a Mabou Mines founding member, with music by Philip Glass. Fornés, who died in 2018, was born in 1930 in Havana and emigrated to the United States at age 15. Also famous as Susan Sontag’s lover, she has enjoyed considerable attention recently with the autumn 2019 revival of Fefu and Her Friends at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn and an Akalaitis-led Fornés festival at the Public Theater in New York in 2018. Moreover, in 2018, she was the subject of a documentary by Michelle Memran called The Rest I Make Up and NYU hosted the LTC Maria Irene Fornés Symposium. Fornés’s writing in Mud and Drowning is terse and plain, cut down to the dry bone. The scenes exist in a reality that seems familiar and plausible yet feels dreamlike, monumental, and mythical. The plays were presented together in 1999 in a Fornés season at Signature Theatre in New York, where Paul Lazar played Lloyd in Mud as he does here. Mud relates the tragic journey of Mae from caretaker to murder victim in 17 swift scenes. At the start, Mae and Lloyd live a spartan existence, their relationship unclear until later. They are brutally poor and uneducated. Mae does ironing. Lloyd does not work. They argue about sex. Mae longs to better herself and wants to read, which is how Henry enters their life. He moves in and replaces Lloyd as Mae’s principal companion. Mae is ready to walk out on both men by the end, but Lloyd kills her. The plot changes are as sudden as a head-on collision, as when Henry masturbates and in the next instant, Mae accuses him of theft. The scene has only two lines, but it moves the story along at breakneck speed. Paul Lazar seems born to play the malicious, mentally stunted Lloyd. Bruce MacVittie, like Lazar a downtown stalwart of many decades, morphs convincingly from Mae’s preening, superior, educated lover into the lump of human flesh that Mae gives Lloyd permission to kill because Henry is disabled and of no use to her anymore. Wendy Vanden Heuvel provides a pleasingly restrained performance as Mae. Akailitis, who has served as co-chair of the Juilliard directing program and artistic director of the Public Theater, successfully evokes the tone of Fornés’s worlds, though with her own twists. In Mud, Akailitis adds an onstage narrator, Giselle LeBleu Gant, who is an engaging performer, but her presence changes the nature of the play. She embodies the new subtitle, the “table work,” a term of art that refers to the initial stages of theater rehearsal when the company sits around a table, scripts in hand, and the stage directions are spoken aloud, rather than enacted. In this Mud some of the stage directions were actually performed, and some were merely read aloud. For example, throughout the play Mae irons on a laminated folding table of the sort often seen in rehearsal rooms, but some of the stage directions referring to her laundry activities are read aloud rather than acted out. The logic of these choices was unclear. The other major addition is Glass’s music, which is finely paired with the texts in both instances. In Mud, the music of keyboardist Michael A. Ferrara remained in the background, though he was present onstage. For Drowning, Ferrara was joined by harpist Lavinia Maijer in what the program notes termed a “pocket opera.” Glass, who began his collaborations with Mabou Mines in the 1960s, describes his work as “music with repetitive structures,” eschewing the term “minimalism.” Here his compositions subtly embraced and supported Fornés’s stories. Perhaps best known for his opera Einstein on the Beach, Glass has produced a vast body of work and distinguished himself as one of the most important composers of his generation. Drowning, like Mud, tells its story swiftly, in a handful of pages, sketching a love affair from the first moment of desire to the bitter end. All the characters, including the jilted lover, are described in the script as potato-heads with bodies “like seals or sea lions” and shiny, oily flesh covered in warts. Their revolting exterior (convincingly executed by makeup designer Gabrielle Vincent) brands them as unlovable and oddly makes the story feel more universal: their repulsiveness makes them vulnerable and draws empathy. Clocking in at under half an hour, Glass’s “pocket opera” has all of the pathos and tragic narrative arc of a five-hour epic thanks to Fornés’s tight script and visual premise. Pea’s love, like Cyrano de Bergerac’s, is a story of unattainability. As one actor sang and gestured, the other would often re-enact the speaker’s gesture, suggesting an extreme form of empathetic listening. Gregory Purnhagen (Pea), Peter Stewart (Roe), and Brandon Hynum (Stephen) sang tenderly, their voices well tuned to the size and acoustics of this tidy theater space. Kaye Voyce, credited with both the scenic and costume design, stuck to the bare essentials of a table reading in Mud (a table, a few chairs, and the props gathered at the foot of the narrator and unused for the most part) and conjured the setting of Drowning with a pair of garden chairs and table in fanciful wrought iron. Her costumes for Mud were unexceptional, perhaps overdone in the case of Henry whose spiffy jacket and tie seemed to go too far in differentiating him, since he appears to be more or less as broke as Lloyd and Mae. For Drowning, Voyce let herself go: the fat suits beneath boldly patterned sweaters and jackets and ballooning trousers make a joyful visual display of these repulsive men, particularly when they dance and gesture in unison; their garments sway pleasantly, almost hopefully. The pocket opera, and indeed the scale of the entire production, suited the chamber-theater feel of Mabou Mine’s 99-seat space in the newly reopened CC122, formerly PS122. I had thought that Drowning as the shorter work would precede, but the order was quite right, moving from the mythical realism of Mud to the mundane love affair of Drowning, transposed into its own kind of myth by the strange physical presence of the characters and Glass’s excellent music. Mud/Drowning: [table work]/an Opera is presented by Mabou Mines (150 First Avenue, 2nd Floor of 122 CC, Lower East Side, Manhattan) and Weathervane Productions, in association with Philip Glass’s Days and Nights Festival, and continues through March 7.

2019-12-13 00:00:00

Shared Destiny. Shared Responsibility. The American Prairie Reserve would be the biggest wildlife reserve in the lower 48. Story at a glance In the open plains of northeastern Montana, a coalition of wealthy investors are trying to create what would be the largest wildlife sanctuary in the Lower 48. When completed, the American Prairie Reserve would stitch existing reserves together with purchased private lands to create a 5,000-square-mile grassland reserve nearly as big as Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, NPR reports.  The project seeks to “rewild” the Great Plains ecosystem by bringing back key species such as bison, wolves and grizzly bears that roamed the plains for millennia before being exterminated. The reserve’s ambitions have received positive attention from outside northeastern Montana — some call it the next Yellowstone —  but locally the project faces entrenched opposition from cattle ranchers who have called the region home for years. The majority of private lands being purchased to flesh out the reserve are cattle ranches, prompting slogans like "Save The Cowboy, Stop The American Prairie Reserve."   "I see them coming in with big money, buying up ranches and walking over the top of the people who are already here," ranch owner Conni French told NPR. "For them to be successful in their goals, we can't be here, and that's not OK with us." The organization has purchased almost 30 properties from willing sellers, but it needs at least 50 more. But the American Prairie Reserve has found supporters in a group that predates the ranchers by thousands of years: Native Americans. Two tribal councils have voiced support for the project, in part because of the cultural significance of bison, which the reserve is already bringing back. American Prairie's planned herd would be the largest in North America, and more than 800 are already roaming the plains. The tribes would be granted permits to hunt the reserve’s bison. The investors behind the project are led by founder Sean Gerrity, who started it more than 18 years ago when he moved back to his home state of Montana from California, where he did consulting work for tech companies such as AT&T and Apple.  Gerrity had come to feel that the federal government wasn’t going to save America’s wildlands and that the Great Plains represented a unique opportunity to create a huge, unbroken swath of protected land that would soon disappear. He’s since secured millions of dollars in donations from billionaires and top executives in the financial sector.  Some of that money has ties to industries that drive climate change, which is harming the ecosystems Gerrity is seeking to protect. But Gerrity told NPR the reserve can't be too choosy about its sources of funding if it wants to protect one of the only remaining intact grassland ecosystems in the world before it disappears. Despite being privately funded, the reserve would be free to the public, but unlike a national park it would allow a broader range of recreational activities, including hunting. Some of the locals who support the reserve think making the region more attractive to outdoor enthusiasts like hikers and hunters could help buoy the local economy which has been in decline along with its population.  That leakage of human and economic capital is part of what’s shifting northeastern Montana away from farming and cattle. Many ranchers have struggled to find family members to take the reins of their land and businesses. This turnover is what put much of the land that the American Prairie Reserve has purchased up for sale in the first place.  But some argue that responsible ranching is part of what kept this land pristine enough to turn into a reserve in the first place, and needs to be kept in the mix. Conservation groups are working with some ranchers to preserve their chunks of the prairie with sustainable cattle operations.  "We are the best hope to keep this land here," French, who owns C Lazy J Ranch, told NPR. "I really feel like ranchers — these land stewards — are the best option for conservation." The American Prairie Reserve could save some of the last grasslands on Earth, but bringing back bison and grizzlies may mean displacing ranchers and shifting a region's identity. The president’s war on environmental regulations is one of his signature fights. Here’s where dishwashers come into it. The president’s war on environmental regulations is one of his signature fights. Here’s where dishwashers come into it. The MyShake app is designed to warn users before an earthquake strikes nearby.   The MyShake app is designed to warn users before an earthquake strikes nearby.    The region’s reefs have declined by 90 percent in the last 40 years, and the new effort aims to help them recover by transplanting nursery-grown corals. The region’s reefs have declined by 90 percent in the last 40 years, and the new effort aims to help them recover by transplanting nursery-grown corals. America is changing fast! Sign up for our newsletter to stay informed and engaged.

2016-04-13 15:19:00

Anna Wintour is known to have an icy reputation as the hard-hitting editrix of Vogue. But during a stop at Late Night with Seth Meyers she shared the harrowing tale of the time she cried — at a fashion show. And no, this is not an elaborate joke like her last Late Night appearance. Lloyd Bishop/NBC/Getty It all went down at Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion show in February. As she describes it, she got there “very early” as she tends to do (she’s always prompt), and she was waiting in the VIP section alone for 30 minutes, saying she felt “abandoned” and “embarrassed.” Eventually her seatmates arrived (which were none other than the Kardashian/Jenner family and Jay Z). After 45 minutes into the show, she noticed Jay Z slipped away, so she decided to do the same — except she sneaked into the basement of Madison Square Garden instead of the exit. She says she was lost for 30 minutes and reduced to tears before being saved by a security guard/baseball coach who recognized her because he used to coach her son. [Insert “there’s no crying in baseball” joke here.] And if you’re wondering (we know you are) her review of the Life of Pablo concert and “migrant chic” fashion show was: “wonderful.” Wintour was on Late Night to promote the new documentary, The First Monday in May, which chronicles the making of the notoriously stylish Met Gala, otherwise known as the “Super Bowl of social fashion events” and “Fashion prom.” The doc opens the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday. What do you think of Wintour’s Yeezy meltdown? Share your thoughts in the comments below. — Colleen Kratofil

2017-09-11 00:00:00

Sept 11 (Reuters) - Sunway Bhd * Declares first interim single-tier dividend of 3 sen per ordinary share in respect of FY ending 31 december 2017 Source text: (bit.ly/2fdpGre) Further company coverage:

2018-11-09 00:00:00

To Dream Avant-Garde acknowledges the artistic innovators of today — those who push the cultural status quo in their work. COLUMBUS, Ohio — There are at least two schools of thought around notions of the avant-garde. One defines it narrowly as linked to the period of modernism in contemporary art, from the late 19th century into the mid-20th century, while another associates it more broadly by the earmark of vanguardism — that is to say, a tendency to push the cultural status quo. Put another way: one version casts the avant-garde as a fixed canon, to which entry is permanently closed. The other considers it a kind of ongoing party, which any like-minded and counter-cultural artist may join. As a number of the artists participating in To Dream Avant-Garde, curated by Alteronce Gumby at Hammond Harkins Galleries, are engaged in rather exciting and extremely current practices, we can assume the avant-garde in this case represents the latter view, rather than the former. The show includes work by young guns like Aaron Fowler and Tariku Shiferaw, as well as that of long-established practitioners like Faith Ringgold, who grew up in Harlem on the heels of the Harlem Renaissance — the centennial of which is being celebrated citywide in Columbus this year. To Dream Avant-Garde is Hammond Harkins’s piece of dedicated programming within I, Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100, and unsurprisingly, every featured artist and participant is reflective of the collective flourishing of artists of color in the mainstream, due in part to the influence of that movement.   “As an acknowledgment to those innovators, who were also dreamers of an American identity and country to call their own,” wrote Gumby in his curatorial statement, “the artists in this exhibition display a survey of ideas, intention and materials that invoke the legacy and culture of Harlem.” Through a series of eclectic choices, Gumby extends his cohort beyond a sense of kinship — which is ultimately a compulsory kind of relationship — into an air of riffing and conversation more characteristic of friendship. From Lucia Hierro’s digital print collages mounted on felt pillow-like canvases that were expressly forbidden from being hung on walls, to a partition by Eric N. Mack, comprised of pegboard panels embellished with rope and acrylic, to a series of hanging blown-glass ornaments containing evocative hand-stitched iconography by Leslie Jimenez, and Tschabalala Self’s loose, figurative study of cans of incense, there is a feel of abstraction on the edges of everyday objects. This kind of culture-bending is, arguably, owed its own chapter within the mapping of the avant-garde, a kind of remaking and customization of Duchampian readymades; a different approach to cultivating the stuff of life to the stuff of art. Other works tap and warp cultural history more directly, like Hugh Hayden’s carved wooden statuette in the style of vintage statuary of Burkina Faso and other African traditions; one of Fowler’s eye-catching multimedia works that resizes and re-contextualizes hip-hop style bling as a giant hanging pendant; and of course, Ringgold’s jazz and dancehall scenes, rendered quilt-like on canvas with pieced fabric borders. Perhaps here, the avant-garde does not coalesce around either style or subject as artifacts of culture, but in terms of their definition and placement within the field of fine art. One might argue that the true vanguardism at work is the centralization of the art and curatorial practices of all these artists of color, without explicit emphasis on the role of race in their work. Race and identity is inevitably particulate of the ideas and process, but hearteningly, not the whole or unifying truth at hand in this exhibition. Even among this group of avant-garde dreamers, there are a few who dared to dream a little more wildly. A pair of portraits offer the show some of its most indefinable moments — one by David Shrobe, and the other by Shiferaw. Shrobe’s choppy, conglomerate-material portraits literally graft fragments of art history to contemporary images and materials, carving a place for his subjects out of a canon from which they have been continually excluded. Shiferaw, with a new work, “Rose in Harlem (Teyana Taylor),” pushes the envelope a little more, presenting a kind of glossy-black, dimensional canvas, that reveals, within its fathomless depths, a series of horizontal line-blocks. It is Shiferaw’s way to reference recording artists and albums in his works, but the direct correlation between the piece and its titular inspiration is not overtly apparent. But then, the image is arresting, and so is the song, and the potential for them to inform each other in the life of the artist or the mind of the critic seems to be a small ask from a playing field as vast and open as the type of avant-garde that allows itself to continue to dream. To Dream Avant-Garde, curated by Alteronce Gumby, continues at Hammond Harkins Galleries through November 11.

2018-03-05

U.S. government debt yields rose Monday as top Republican lawmakers urged President Donald Trump against tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note rose to 2.881 percent at 4:06 p.m. ET, while the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond was up at 3.151 percent. Bond yields move inversely to prices. Investors across global markets remained on edge Monday after a surprise announcement came from the U.S. administration last Thursday, when President Donald Trump stated that the U.S. would be imposing new tariffs on aluminum and steel. A host of international leaders criticized the decision as a potential trade war catalyst. On Monday, GOP leaders including House Speaker Paul Ryan implored the president to reconsider the taxes. "We are extremely worried about the consequences of a trade war and are urging the White House to not advance with this plan," said AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Ryan. "The new tax reform law has boosted the economy and we certainly don't want to jeopardize those gains." A GOP source told CNBC that Congressional leaders would not rule out potential action down the line should the president stand by the tariffs. Still, the president appeared undeterred in his protectionist rhetoric Monday, saying that he'd only consider revoking tariffs on steel and aluminum if a new, "fair" NAFTA is signed. "We have large trade deficits with Mexico and Canada. NAFTA, which is under renegotiation right now, has been a bad deal for U.S.A. Massive relocation of companies & jobs. Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum will only come off if new & fair NAFTA agreement is signed." "No, we're not backing down," the president said later during an Oval Office meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. "We had a very bad deal with Mexico, we had a very bad deal with NAFTA." Trump said that the U.S. had been "ripped off" by other countries on trade. "We lost $800 billion on trade," he said. "We are going to take care of it." Another concern set to dwell on investors' minds is that of higher interest rates. Last week, newly-appointed chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, delivered two speeches to Congress, where he discussed monetary policy and the state of the U.S. economy. One of his remarks that shook up markets was that the U.S. central bank could raise interest rates three or more times during the course of 2018. Markets remain on edge overseas, with Asia closing lower as Chinese leaders headed into an annual parliament meeting. While in Europe, politics dominated following news that early projections in Italy indicated that no party was emerging with a clear majority in the election that took place Sunday.

2016-11-18

GUANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) said on Friday it expects sales of Volkswagen brand vehicles in China to hit 3 million this year, an increase of 340,000 from last year. Stephan Wollenstein, executive vice president of Volkswagen Group China, made the projection at the Guangzhou auto show. Reporting by Jake Spring; Writing by John Ruwitch; Editing by Stephen Coates

2018-01-22 11:22:00

Doctors did not expect 2-year-old Skye Savren-McCormick to survive after she was diagnosed with two types of cancer. Now, she’s meeting two dozen strangers who donated blood to save her life. Just months after little Skye was born, doctors diagnosed her with lymphoma and juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia — a rare cancer that only affects one in one million children. “These words were like a hydrogen bomb had just been dropped in our laps, with the smiling face of your own child,” Skye’s mother, Talia Savren-McCormick, 33, tells PEOPLE. “[Doctors] gave us a 10 percent chance of survival and the option to fight or quit. As parents, we decided we had to keep fighting and Skye would tell us when or if she was done.” Skye required blood and platelet transfusions — often on a daily basis — and underwent three bone-marrow transplants, surgery to remove her oversized spleen and several rounds of chemotherapy for the cancers, hospital officials say. She had received 77 units of blood and platelets during a 10-month stay at UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital. “The donations were life in a bag,” Savren-McCormick says. “It’s not a fight I would ever wish on anyone. But we fought it none the less, and every time we got knocked down, we stood back up.” The family, of Ventura, California, spent nearly 300 days at the hospital before Skye was discharged last May. Now, with her cancers in remission, doctors say Skye is gaining weight and her health is steadily improving. Recently, Skye and her parents met 24 of the 71 donors who gave the blood and platelets that saved her life. “We were pretty excited to be able to meet a few of these special people. We had an idea that we’d meet at least a few, but we weren’t prepared for exactly how many would actually show up. There was a real palpable sense of gratitude and awe amongst everyone there,” Savren-McCormick says. The diverse group of donors ranged in age from 17 to 71. “I kept saying thank you and thank you again from the bottom of my heart to each and every person we met that day. Skye was a little wary at first, but we had friends and family close around her and soon warmed up to being her normal bubbly self. And every time we met a donor, she was sitting in either Todd or my arms.” Photos of the meet-up showed little Skye surrounded by the smiling donors as her mother and father, 36-year-old Todd, held her and posed. Now, Savren-McCormick says that although Skye, who will be 3 in March, is still dealing with the after-effects of the illnesses and treatments, the family is in a much better place. Cookies for Kids’ Cancer Funds Cancer Treatments by Encouraging Everyone to ‘Be a Good Cookie’ “Cancer will forever be a part of our lives. It is just our life now to enjoy the miracle after having come through this. We will always be checking to make sure Skye is okay, but we will never allow it become the ultimate focus of our lives,” Savren-McCormick tells PEOPLE. “Skye has had a few obstacles such as … eating issues, different infections, and breathing issues. She has been in-patient since her May release five times. Even though we knew that was always something that could happen, it is always a blow. But she continues to be a happy toddler and continues to bring joy to our family.” The family has set up a YouCaring page to cover medical costs.

2019-10-25 00:00:00

PARIS (Reuters) - Brexit negotiations should only be extended beyond Oct. 31 for as long as Britain can justify to the European Union’s 27 remaining members, a source close to French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday. The EU agreed earlier on Friday to London’s request for a Brexit deadline extension but set no new departure date, giving Britain’s divided parliament time to decide on Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s call for a snap election. “France wants a justified and proportionate extension. However, we have nothing of the sort so far,” the source told Reuters. “We must show the British that it is up to them to clarify the situation and that an extension is not a given.” One EU diplomat said France favored a delay until Nov. 15 or Nov. 30 to keep pressure on the British parliament to approve the departure deal Johnson negotiated with the EU or face a disorderly Brexit. The source close to Macron declined to say for how long Macron would agree to extend. French officials have previously suggested that the holding of an election or referendum could provide a political justification for an extension. Macron believes time pressure is important to ensure the ratification process by Britain’s parliament can be completed, with or without an election. “Pressure must be maintained,” the source added. Any extension must serve a clear purpose, such as ratifying the current deal, or holding a new election, French officials said. It is up to Britain to explain how much time it needs in each scenario, a second French official said. “We’re not being firm for the sake of being firm. It’s just that we’ve seen that simply giving time to time leads to nowhere,” the official told Reuters. “It is up to the British to tell us how much time they need to pass a bill. You don’t need 110 years to pass a bill, surely,” the official said, adding that if parliament simply needed time for ratification, then 10 or 15 extra days should suffice. More time could be granted if parliament supported Johnson’s call for a new election, the official added. “We want to respect British sovereignty. If it must be expressed by elections, we would understand that. But what we need is clarity,” the official said. Asked what France made of other EU countries’ preference for a long-term extension to Jan. 31, the official said: “This period of uncertainty is toxic. What is the point of just giving time to time?” Reporting by Michel Rose; Editing by Geert De Clercq and Philippa Fletcher

2016-10-27

Oct 28 (Reuters) - Manalto Ltd * Apponited Jim Mckerlie as a non-executive director and chair of manalto board of directors * Non-Executive director and interim chair, Joseph Miller, has stepped down from board of directors Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:

2016-02-15 19:05:00

Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson have a gramophone for “Uptown Funk”! On Monday night, the collaborators took home the award for best pop duo/group performance prior to the 58th annual Grammy Awards. The Recording Academy announced that Ronson’s song featuring Mars nabbed the award via Twitter on Monday. Congrats Best Pop Duo/Group Performance @MarkRonson ft. @BrunoMars – "Uptown Funk" #GRAMMYs pic.twitter.com/YmC3a6aIRd — Recording Academy (@RecordingAcad) February 15, 2016 They triumphed over an exciting group of nominees this year – Florence & The Machine for “Ship To Wreck,” Maroon 5 for “Sugar,” Taylor Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar for “Bad Blood,” and Wiz Khalifa featuring Charlie Puth for “See You Again.” “Uptown Funk” is also a winner in First Lady Michelle Obama‘s book – she told PEOPLE it was her favorite song of 2015. This was only the fifth time the Grammys handed out an award for best pop duo/group performance, as the category only began in 2012. Last year’s trophy went to A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera for their song, “Say Something.” The 58th annual Grammys are airing live on Monday on CBS.

2018-10-07

SYDNEY/HONG KONG (Reuters) - Investment bankers are bracing for the start of a landmark legal case about alleged cartel activity in Australia’s financial sector, nervous the proceedings could lead to increased scrutiny and tougher measures from regulators worldwide. Australian authorities filed criminal charges in June against the local units of Citigroup (C.N), Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE), Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ.AX) and six bankers over a $2.3 billion stock sale. Most past investigations into cartels by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) have looked at trade in goods. This is the first time a probe has led to charges alleging criminal cartel conduct in the financial sector. Lawyers representing the banks and the six bankers are due to appear in court in Sydney on Tuesday, although hearings are not expected to begin for several months. The charges are linked to an August 2015 sale of $2.3 billion worth of new ANZ shares and the subsequent trading of some of the shares by two of the underwriters - Deutsche Bank and Citigroup. All three have denied wrongdoing and said they will fight accusations. JPMorgan (JPM.N), which also underwrote the capital raising, has not been charged and has not commented on the case. Charges have also been brought against six executives - ANZ’s former treasurer Rick Moscati; Citi’s former Australia head Stephen Roberts, current local head of capital markets John McLean, London-based head of foreign exchange trading Itay Tuchman; and Deutsche’s former local chief Michael Ormaechea as well as former local capital markets head Michael Richardson. None of the executives have commented publicly so far. An ANZ spokesman declined to comment on behalf of Moscati when Reuters contacted the bank on Friday. For investment banks, the case will set a precedent in an area of financial markets activity that lacks clear rules and has never been tested in the courts, according to Citi. “Underwriting syndicates exist to provide the capacity to assume risk and to underwrite large capital raisings, and have operated successfully in Australia in this manner for decades,” Citi said when the case was first made public. A Citi spokeswoman declined to comment any further when contacted by Reuters. The fear is that a court hearing involving such high-profile firms and individuals might prompt regulators to take a fresh look at equity deals. “These aren’t just criminal charges at the trader level, or someone in operations, these are very senior people who have been charged,” said Ben Quinlan, CEO of consultancy firm Quinlan & Associates. Cartel charges in Australia come with a maximum penalty of three times the profit made from the cartel activity or 10 percent of a firm’s revenue. Penalties for individuals found guilty carry fines or a maximum 10-year jail term. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has sued ANZ over the same share placement. The regulator said ANZ broke company laws by failing to tell investors that its underwriters had bought about A$791 million ($558 million) of the total it was trying to sell. Regulators are under pressure to rein in Australia’s finance sector, as a powerful public inquiry, or Royal Commission, airs almost daily allegations of misconduct. The commission has issued a scathing interim report saying big banks and wealth managers had pursued profit ahead of customer interests and viewed regulatory compliance as a cost rather than a guide to proper conduct. Several other scandals have engulfed Australian banks, ranging from rate-rigging to money laundering. The cases against all parties involved are listed as to be “mentioned” on Tuesday’s calendar for Sydney’s Downing Local Court. Prosecutors told Reuters that the people accused have been excused from being present as it will be an administrative affair where a timetable for future hearings will be set. Meanwhile, the Royal Commission continues, and ANZ alongside Australia’s other three major banks are scheduled to face questioning over the interim report before a parliamentary committee in Canberra this week. Reporting by Paulina Duran in Sydney and Alun John in Hong Kong; Editing by Himani Sarkar

2018-07-25 22:05:00

Kim Zolciak-Biermann is preparing to go under the knife — again. The Don’t Be Tardy star revealed Wednesday that she’s planning to get smaller breast implants after she asked her fans to cast their votes in a poll on what size they think she should reduce to. “Which one,” Zolciak-Biermann, 40, wrote in an Instagram Story with two implant size options: “Full C [or] DD.” “Thx @kanebiermann for taking this pic of me today!!” the mother of six captioned a photo — snapped by her 4-year-old son, Kane — of herself wearing a strapless red bikini while standing beside a swimming pool. “Lopsided boobs and all (clearly it’s the bathing suit lol) 😂🤣” she wrote. “But thanks you guys for voting on C/DD can’t wait to downsize a little @dr.hochstein 💃🏼💃🏼” During her House of Kim podcast on Wednesday, Zolciak-Biermann opened up about her decision to go smaller. “I obviously have implants. I have the largest implants they actually make, but it doesn’t look that big on my body because of just the way I’m built,” she shared. “But, I’m thinking about actually getting my boobs reduced.” “I already called Dr. Hochstein, who did my boobs and tummy a few years ago — he did my hernia repair and my tummy tuck after that, you might as well! And I said, ‘You know, I feel like I should get my boobs reduced. They’re heavy, my posture’s terrible, I’m getting older.’ What do you guys think?” “I was thinking of going from like a DD to like a C. So head on over to my Instagram please and vote: DD or C,” she said. “I’ve actually already had my surgery scheduled in a couple months, but I can always change that.” “I had a lift and I have like the nicest boobs ever. I did breastfeed all of my kids, so ladies, let’s be honest, they were stretched out, loss of volume, pancake nipples,” she explained. “So [Dr. Hochstein] gave me back my 18-year-old chest, which was amazing. He’s the best for that you guys.” “So anyways, let me know. I’m thinking like a C, a full C. I have to have all my clothes altered. I have to buy a size 6 in everything when I could wear a size 2 in tops because of my boobs and then have everything altered. So it’d be nice to just be able to wear something. They’re perky because I had a lift, so it’s not really that, it’s just the weight of them,” said Zolciak-Biermann The Bravo star has been very open about her relationship with plastic surgery in the past, including documenting her breast augmentation on her Bravo reality show. “I will always nip and tuck if I feel the need to do so” Zolciak-Biermann told E! News in 2016. “I’m open about it. I don’t care. You only go around one time, and I especially understand that.” “I had a boob job and I’ve had a hernia fixed,” Zolciak-Biermann explained. “I had a pretty big hernia from the twins, so I said just do a tummy tuck, which is kinda the same thing, just make the skin really tight. But that doesn’t change my size. I’m the same size I was the day I walked into surgery, I’m just a little bit tighter looking.” At the time, she also explained that her tiny frame runs in the family. “A lot is genetics,” she said. “My mom’s very small, I’m tall, I’m 5-8, I do have height on me. My mom is 5-4. But my mom’s been a size 2 her whole life. I’ve been a size 27 jean my whole life.”

2018-03-05 00:00:00

March 5 (Reuters) - Memories Group Ltd: * ‍TO ACQUIRE BURMA BOATING BUSINESS FOR A PURCHASE PRICE OF ABOUT US$1.0 MILLION​ Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:

2016-07-06 00:00:00

HONG KONG, July 6 (Reuters) - Hong Kong property sales fell by almost 40 percent in the first half of the year, according to government data released on Wednesday. There were 26,571 sale and purchase agreements worth HK$189.49 billion ($24.42 billion) in the six months to the end of June, according to the Land Registry, declines of more than 39 percent in both volume and value compared with the same period last year. The volume decline is the worst in at least 11 years, based on limited data posted on the Land Registry website. The value decline is the worst in a decade. Consultant estimates placed the figures as the worst in between 15 and 26 years. A decline was expected - and the first half of 2015, which is the comparison, was particularly strong. But the decline is still significant in a city where property-related businesses account for about a fifth of the economy. Half-year economic data will not be published until next month but Hong Kong’s economy contracted 0.4 percent in the first quarter, its first contraction in nearly two years. Property sales in the first half were hurt by increased U.S. interest rates, fluctuations in the stock market and deprecation of China’s renminbi, said Thomas Lam, head of valuation and consultancy at Knight Frank. The market improved somewhat in the second quarter, however, and the slowdown would affect estate agents more than the economy, he said. He also said the further slowing of mainland China’s economy could drive more home sales in Hong Kong. “There will be more and more Chinese buying property in Hong Kong or overseas for wealth protection,” he said. Separate Hong Kong data from the Rating and Valuation Department showed modest month-to-month increases in home prices in April and May and a slight increase in home rental prices in May. It is not clear how long the improvement will last. The number of homes worth less than the amount paid for them has skyrocketed this year. There were 1,432 such homes at the end of March, worth $4.9 billion ($631 million), the highest amount since the global financial crisis in 2009. That is up from just 95 cases worth HK$418 million at the end of December. Last month, Credit Suisse said aggressive mortgage plans backed by developers could stoke short-term gains but actually signalled that the quality of primary property sales was deteriorating. The bank said it expected prices would continue to come under pressure from rising supply and a slowing economy. Developer Henderson Land Development Co Ltd has been advertising mortgages of up to 95 percent of the value of certain properties while Sun Hung Kai Properties Ltd has advertised loans worth 120 percent. ($1 = 7.7587 Hong Kong dollars) (Reporting by Clare Baldwin, Lindsy Long and Sharon Shi)

2018-06-24 19:46:00

Actress Evan Rachel Wood wants to learn and do more to raise awareness of the issues facing the U.S. and Mexico border, even if it means checking out the conditions first-hand. Wood, who appears in HBO’s Westworld, decided to take a tour across Texas this weekend and has been documenting her journey on her Instagram. “I don’t think it’s ever too late to want to make a change, and that’s why I’m here now because I want to learn,” Wood, 30, tells PEOPLE. On Sunday, she visited a shelter in McAllen, Texas, where she was able to deliver supplies and meet some of the immigrant families who have been released from detention and are waiting to find out their next step in the chaotic process. “[I wanted] to put faces with the stories,” she says, “[and] to actually be there and hug the children and play with them, see how sweet and loving they are but to see how tired and in pain they are — and see the fear in their parents’ eyes.” As hundreds of family members visit similar shelters across the region, for many of them, it’s the first time they’re getting a chance to rest, take a shower and have a nutritious meal after a grueling journey. One mother shared how she and her 3-year-old son trekked across the country from Honduras to the U.S., often walking for hours in the middle of the night. She traveled for 20 days, and for four of those days, she and her son were inside a trailer without food or water. “It was terrible,” she recalls. Once they made it to the U.S., they approached ICE officials to ask for asylum. They were immediately detained, taken to a detention center and forced to sleep in cages, similar to the images seen on television, she told PEOPLE. “I heard they were taking our children, but I was hopeful they wouldn’t take my son,” she says. “Every time a new group came in, they were taking children [age] 5 and older and putting them in separate cells. They were crying for their mothers.” She and her son are headed to stay with a family member in the Northeast where she will attend a court hearing next week. For now, the shelter will provide her with a new pair of shoes, which needs to fit around her government-issued ankle monitor. The shelters depend on donations to provide services. Wood purchased supplies for the shelter she visited Sunday morning. Wood says the impact of the gesture struck close to home. “I was buying things that I’ve bought my for my own son,” says Wood, who has a 5-year-old son. “I broke down when I picked up a pair of shoes that I’ve bought for him because it made it so personal.” Meanwhile, Wood is participating in a 24-hour hunger strike and prayer chain that will last 24 days, in honor of the more than 2,400 children separated from their parents due to President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. The #BreakBreadNotFamilies movement was launched by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group, La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) and the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP). Wood says it’s a “privilege and not a sacrifice” to take action that honors the work done by Cesar Chavez, a labor leader and activist who participated in multiple hunger strikes to bring attention to mistreated farm workers. “It’s a small price to pay considering what families are going through,” she says. Amid a massive backlash to the separation policy, Trump signed an executive order reversing the position on Wednesday. On Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security said the U.S. government had reunited 522 migrant children who were separated from adults, saying in a statement outlining the reunification process that the government “knows the location of all children in its custody and is working to reunite them with their families.”  While waiting for the parents to complete their deportation hearings, children will continue to be held in custody. The families will then either be reunited before getting deported, or after the parent is released from detention and applies to be the child’s sponsor. While Trump’s executive order said the government would maintain a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal entry into the country, a senior U.S. official told The Washington Post on Thursday that Border Patrol agents have been told to stop referring parents with children for prosecution.

2017-05-11 04:00:00

A couple of weeks ago, Alternative for Germany (AfD), Germany's upstart right-wing populist party, met in Cologne to decide its future. The AfD, which has a strong chance of entering the German parliament in the national elections in September, was in the midst of a dramatic showdown between its far right and more mainstream wings. Frauke Petry, the chemist and former businesswoman who has been the public face of the party since 2015, had announced that she wasn't interested in being the party's chancellor candidate for the election—an attempt to pressure members to move toward the mainstream. It didn't work. The party instead selected two members of the conservative wing to represent it in the election, including Alice Weidel, a 38-year-old management consultant from the central German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In typical AfD style, Weidel is highly skeptical of the EU in its current form, once accused Germany's Central Council of Muslims of "never having distanced itself credibly from Stone Age Shariah," and has agreed to campaign with a member of the party who has argued that Hitler wasn't "absolutely evil." In less typical AfD style, she is also in a relationship with a woman, with whom she is raising two children. The combination of gayness and right-wing nationalism is nothing new per se—in academic and activist circles, the term "homonationalism" is often used to describe the overlap—but the recent populist wave in Europe has marked a turning point in gay people's willingness to publicly embrace the populist right. Depending on which poll you're reading, between 16.5 percent and a quarter of French LGBTQ voters supported the Front National (FN) late last year; according to another, more informal poll by the gay dating app Hornet, over one-third of gay men overall planned to vote for Le Pen in the second round of the recent French election. A 2016 survey by a German gay magazine found that nearly 17 percent of gay male readers supported the AfD. And it's not just France and Germany—in the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, and Austria, right-wing populist parties have registered surprising success with openly gay voters, complicating the widely held assumption that LGBTQ people are innately more likely to support left-wing parties. Alex Tassis, the head of the AfD's Alternative Homosexuals group (a group of LGBTQ AfD supporters), believes it will soon be the most popular party among gay men in Germany despite the fact that it officially opposes gay marriage—a "luxury problem," as Tassis called it when I interviewed him. Like many other gay AfD supporters, Tassis's primary concerns are "Islamization," which he believes threatens Germany's Western values, and multiculturalism, which he called a "West Coast fantasy" that doesn't belong in the country. "If you are gay, you have to see the way the social environment is changing, now through Merkel's refugee politics," he said, referring to Merkel's decision to let in hundreds of thousands of refugees in 2015. He added that "gender mainstreaming," a term right-wing Germans use to describe vague conceptions of gender equality, "is a psychological disease." Tassis also doesn't believe gay people have a moral duty to support other marginalized people, like refugees: "Humanitarianism," as he called it, is a "decadent millionaire upper-class immorality." He added: "Gays need to distance themselves so it's clear on which side we'll stand in the future." Patrick Wielowiejski, a PhD candidate at Berlin's Humboldt University who has been studying gay and lesbian members of the AfD, said that although gay people have been voting for conservative parties for decades, this recent populist wave has marked the first time that large numbers of gay people have done so publicly. "If they voted for them in the 70s and 80s, they were probably closeted people with nationalist beliefs," he said, "but what's new is that they stand up and say, 'We are gay or lesbian or homosexual, and we are voting FN or AfD.'" Wielowiejski believes this shift might be the unintended consequence of the success of the European gay rights movement. During the 1970s, many LGBTQ activists in Germany and elsewhere wanted not just to gain rights for themselves but fundamentally change society's views of sexuality and gender. "They didn't want to be recognized as a minority," he said. "They said, 'You are afraid of homosexuality because it threatens your masculinity,' and wanted to integrate gayness into society." But as gay rights activism adopted a more identity politics-focused strategy in the 80s and 90s, centered on the argument that LGBTQ people were a minority in need of protection, it opened the door for the groups like the Alternative Homosexuals. As Wielowiejski put it, this approach meant that many gay people became satisfied with being accepted as a minority and felt comfortable ignoring other social injustices that didn't directly affect them. "This kind of politics can easily be combined with nationalism," he said. The rise of gay people to leadership positions in the parties also serves as a kind of fig leaf for the parties' more extreme xenophobic policies. Although Weidel is the first queer high-ranking member of AfD, there are numerous LGBTQ people in leadership positions in the Front National, including Florian Philippot, Marine Le Pen's closest advisor. The AfD has made some targeted attempts to reach out to gay voters. Last summer, the Berlin branch of the party launched a billboard campaign that featured a gay couple saying: "My partner and I don't want to get to meet Muslim immigrants who believe that our love is a deadly sin." The mayor of Berlin called the campaign "disgusting." This attempt to reach out to gay and lesbian voters allowed the AfD to portray itself as a "tolerant" bulwark against the "intolerant" invaders—i.e., Muslims and other foreigners—even as it condemns pro-gay policies like same-sex marriage. Beate Küpper, a social psychologist at Germany's Hochschule Niederrhein University who has studied the far right, argues that there are more psychologically fraught explanations for many gays' attraction to right-wing populism. "If I push people down, I automatically look better, relatively speaking," she said. She pointed to several studies that have shown that minority groups have a tendency to "close the door after themselves, or kick downwards"—which is to say, to work against the interests of other minorities once they have gained rights themselves. For gay people who still feel ostracized or marginalized in their daily lives, publicly joining or supporting right-wing populist parties allows them to demonstrate their belonging to the majority: "It's a protection mechanism." In the case of Alice Weidel, Küpper said, her anti-Muslim rhetoric allows her to distance herself from her outsider identity as a lesbian. "We've seen it in group conflicts; when groups of youths beat someone else, it's usually not the leaders that are doing the beating—it's the ones that are lower on the hierarchy," she said. Weidel, for her part, has attacked the media for focusing on her personal life. Unsurprisingly, Alex Tassis isn't a huge fan of Küpper's analysis. "This kind of psychologization is what the Nazis did," he said. "You can read in SS magazines how they did it." He is, however, very happy about Alice Weidel's prominent role in the party, which he sees as a step forward for gay visibility in the party. "I welcome it," he said. "Being gay is not a problem in the AfD. The AfD is concerned with other things." Follow Thomas Rogers on Twitter.

2017-02-22 00:00:00

Feb 22 (Reuters) - AddLife AB: * Acquires Norwegian Hepro Group - three companies providing home care products and welfare technology * Ownership will come effective on March 1 * Acquisition is expected to have marginally positive effect on AddLife earnings per share * Hepro Group companies have sales of 155 million Norwegian crowns, mainly in Norwegian market Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage: (Gdynia Newsroom)

2018-09-26

Mark Corallo, a former Justice Department official during the George W. Bush administration, briefly served in 2017 as spokesman for President Donald Trump's legal team. He is a veteran of the US Army. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN. (CNN)Perhaps it's my age and the state of today's politics that has me thinking about the final scene of the movie "Camelot," with Richard Harris as Arthur standing with young Tom, pleading with the boy to remember and tell everyone of the glory that was Camelot so that the world would never forget. The attempt by Democrats to run a professional smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh is another sign of the irreparable fissure that has cracked open between the political left and right. Increasingly, I find myself lamenting, "We used to be America." We are here, at this sad, confusing moment in our cultural history because we no longer share the common belief that we are truly blessed to be Americans. We focus on our historic faults -- slavery, racism, segregation -- to the exclusion of what is truly exceptional about America. Today, too many citizens believe that because of those original sins, the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the government established under the Constitution are open to question. Overlooked is the fact that we have achieved more in the name of individual liberty for ourselves and our posterity than any other nation in the history of the world. I believe that the core of our public discontent is that government and therefore politics has assumed a place in our lives that was never envisioned by the founders who saw limited government as a necessity to ensure the blessings of liberty. So much of our money and time is on the line that we are consumed by the political power struggle -- the street fight for pieces of the government pie. Politics based on race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation touches every facet of American life. We no longer see our unique traits as ingredients to the "unum" at the end of the "e pluribus." Instead, we wield them as weapons to divide the spoils in what has become a zero-sum game. Even the NFL is not immune. I came of age in the late 1970s and into manhood in the late 1980s. The 1970s were not the best of times for this republic of ours. We went from the social turbulence of the late '60s and Vietnam right into Watergate, the Church Committee, gas crunches and the economic and social "malaise" of the dreadful Carter years. The constant specter of the Cold War and the very real potential for a nuclear holocaust loomed large. Yet growing up in a working-class neighborhood in New York, I was reminded daily of what made Americans different from the rest of the world. I was surrounded by adults, some of whom had fought in World War I, and almost all of whom had lived through the Great Depression. Many had fought and survived World War II and Korea -- and a few were survivors of the Holocaust -- and they were now dealing with yet another recession. We were optimists. We were cheerful. We were exuberant. We were Catholics and Jews hailing from Italy, Ireland, Russia, Greece, Germany, Portugal and Poland. Our grandparents or parents came over on the boat. It was noisy. For all of our cultural differences, we shared two things in common: None of us had two nickels to rub together, and we were all fiercely, passionately in love with this country. We were Americans first. In fact, my off-the-boat grandfather forbade his sons, and my father and mother in turn forbade their sons, to call ourselves Italian-Americans. (Today so many Americans feel obligated to hyphenate, not for cultural reasons alone, but to make sure they are getting their perceived piece of the government policy pie.) We shared an unshakeable certainty bordering on religious faith that no matter how bad today was, tomorrow would be better. How couldn't it be? We were Americans, and this country, despite its flaws, was still the greatest, freest, most God-blessed country in history. We held that in common. It was our bedrock national value. Everyone had an opinion -- on religion, baseball and politics, usually shared while watching the kids play wiffle ball or stickball in the street as the dads came home from work at day's end. We debated, argued, yelled and got red-in-the-face mad at each other, and then we took a deep breath and got over it. Life's too short to lose lifelong friends and neighbors over who was voting Republican or Democrat. Donald Trump has certainly contributed his share to the ever intensifying vitriolic atmosphere. He can be a boor and a bully. But the roots of this disease predate 2016, and there's plenty of blame to spread around. How about Joe Biden in 2012 telling a group of African-Americans that Mitt Romney would put them "back in chains"? Or lest you forget, it was Barack Obama who exhorted Latino voters to "punish your enemies." We never saw our fellow Americans as enemies. The President had an opportunity to change the trajectory of our national discourse and perhaps the course of his presidency and our future when US Rep. Steve Scalise was shot last summer simply for the sin of being Republican. Instead, he chose to wallow in the muck of division along with those on the left who routinely employ words such as "racist" and "Nazi" to describe Republicans over immigration policy. Trump had a chance to raise us up again when the haters marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. Instead he waffled and mitigated. There are no "fine people" marching under the swastika or wearing the hoods and robes of the Ku Klux Klan. For those of us who try to be consistent in our political philosophy -- agreeing with the President when his actions are in line with our policy preferences and disagreeing with him when his actions are not aligned with ours -- we are called "traitors" by whichever group of our fellow citizens disagrees with us at that moment. If I extol the integrity and patriotism of Robert Mueller, I'm castigated by what has become the political right. If I express my disgust at the behavior of FBI and Justice Department officials such as Peter Strzok, author of the anti-Trump text messages, and Bruce Ohr, who had ties to Trump dossier creator Christopher Steele, then the left wants me flogged. I often say that those in politics should never underestimate the collective wisdom of the American people. But wisdom requires a healthy dose of kindness, tolerance, equanimity, humility, gratitude and love. Those virtues seem to be in short supply these days. Absent those virtues, the bonds of our common culture are bursting asunder. If you believe that we are, in the words of former US Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, "a country, a people, not just an economy," then like me, you are lamenting that things seem so bleak when the economy is doing so well. So as I talk to my four children and try to make sense of it all with them, I am starting to feel more and more like Arthur at the end pleading with young Tom, kneeling on a dark, smoldering battlefield as the armies -- once allies questing for right and honor and justice, now enemies vying for raw power -- clash nearby: "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot." We used to be America. Now run boy. Run boy!

2016-06-29

(Fixes headline) June 29 (Reuters) - Toyota Europe Ceo Johan Van Zyl says * will study how we can ensure we have a sustainable future for the car industry in britain * will target to sell more than 900,000 vehicles in europe this year * will work closely to ensure we still have a sustainable future for the car industry in britain * by 2050 wants to reduce emissions by 90 percent from 2010 level * we do not want to see uk business shrink * sees no immediate change to uk operations at the moment * longer-term decisions will depend on outcome of the brexit talks * would not want to speculate on job cuts in uk, priority is to bring stability * will need to wait for outcome of discussions but sees no change at the moment * for roughly next six year period, decisions on new models have already been made * we are on a continuous drive to increase local supply content in the uk and elsewhere * we will have to be patient until Britain invokes article 50 Further company coverage: [ ] (Reporting By London Bureau)

2017-11-24 09:25:15

BERLIN — Barely an hour after Chancellor Angela Merkel watched her efforts to form a broad coalition government fall apart, she retreated to a private room with two dozen conservative allies. Four weeks of intense talks had just ended, with three deadlines missed. The mood was somber. One of her colleagues stood up to thank her, initiating a standing ovation. It was a polite gesture to mark the end of a polite era. But German politics is now poised to enter a more raucous phase. The breakdown of the coalition talks last weekend has done more than dent Ms. Merkel’s seeming invulnerability and raise the prospect of new elections, analysts say. Although the Social Democrats agreed on Friday to meet with the chancellor’s party next week — raising hopes for, if not a coalition, then a tolerated minority government — the current situation may well signal the breakdown of Germany’s postwar tradition of consensus and the dawn of a messy and potentially unnerving politics. “The distinctive political tradition of the Federal Republic of Germany is change through consensus,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at the University of Oxford. That was what was at stake, he said. “It hasn’t worked so far this time.” In the four decades it was split from the Communist east, West Germany had strong governments, traditionally formed by one of the two larger parties teaming up with a smaller partner or, in rare circumstances, the two big parties forming a grand coalition. This tradition was continued after reunification in 1990, with far reaching changes — like the labor market reforms of the early 2000s — often carried out with support from across the aisle. That looks harder now — four parties have become seven, and the two larger parties shrunk — though not everyone thinks that is a bad thing. Some analysts say it will bring more voices into the public debate, with the potential to revitalize politics. But it will no doubt make governing harder, as Germany becomes more like other countries in Europe — among them, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands — that have seen a similar political fracturing. Wolfgang Merkel, director of the democracy and democratization unit of the Berlin Social Science Center, said the dwindling of consensus was a sign of maturity. “The past 30 years we have experienced a disenchantment with politics that can be seen in the persistent drop in voter turnout since the 1970s,” said Mr. Merkel, who is not related to the chancellor. “Now, the important questions are being debated once again. You can say it is a revival of pluralism, of pluralist discourse.” Ms. Merkel has embodied that tradition of consensus more than perhaps any of her predecessors. Of her three terms over 12 years, she has spent two in a grand coalition with her party’s traditional opponents, the Social Democrats. She has been a creature of a political center she has made ever more capacious. Pragmatic, reactive, a scientist by training, Ms. Merkel rarely stooped to ordinary politics. She was instead Germany’s first post-ideological chancellor. But politics and ideology have now come roaring back. The Sept. 24 election returned a difficult result, with seven parties crowding into Parliament, including far-left and — for the first time since World War II — far-right populists. That result not only reflected the country’s increasing fragmentation and polarization, but also a feeling among many Germans that the centrist dominance of Ms. Merkel had stifled political opposition and healthy debate. More than a fifth of voters cast their ballots either for the nationalist Alternative for Germany, or for the post-communist Left Party. Both parties rode a wave of public discontent over migration and globalization. “We want to go in a different direction from all the others, that is our purpose,” Beatrix von Storch, a deputy leader of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, told the public broadcaster RBB on Monday, after the German president had urged parties to reconsider their positions. “Our task right now is to bring about political change in this country. All parties are going in the same direction,” Ms. von Storch said. “They can happily join a coalition,” she added, “because there are hardly any differences between them.” The coalition the chancellor had sought would have been the culmination of Merkellian consensus-building, spanning the mainstream political spectrum. A straddle in the extreme, it aimed to join at one end the ecologist Greens — born out of an antinuclear pacifist protest movement — with the business-friendly Free Democrats at the other. Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the socially conservative Christian Social Union, were to be the glue in between. But instead of emphasizing points of agreement, party leaders appeared at pains to emphasize their differences, fearful of having their independent political identities subsumed. The discussion at times notably veered from the collegial. Three weeks into the exploratory coalition talks, the leading negotiator for the Christian Social Union, Alexander Dobrindt, declared that closing the country’s coal plants, a campaign promise of the Greens, would be “absolutely absurd.” The Greens’ negotiator on climate issues, Annalena Baerbock, told the Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung that as they passed one another in the hallways during the talks, he had muttered in her direction, “Yes, yes, the Greens live in their beautiful, idyllic world.” But it was not the split between the conservatives and the Greens that brought down the talks. It was a surprise move by the Free Democrats, whose party chief, Christian Lindner, walked out shortly before midnight on Sunday, citing irreconcilable differences. “We are unwilling and unable to take responsibility for the spirit of the negotiation results,” Mr. Lindner announced. “We would be forced to abandon convictions we have spent years fighting for.” A deal may still happen. President Frank-Walter Steinmeier began holding talks this week with all party leaders, hoping to find a solution. On Thursday, he met for more than an hour with Martin Schulz, leader of the Social Democrats, who had repeatedly ruled out another grand coalition, but has now agreed to meet with Ms. Merkel next week. But even if the parties do agree to another grand coalition, that might not forestall the dawn of a messier, perhaps nastier, politics. It would leave the far-right AfD, the third-largest vote-getter in the election, as the country’s chief opposition party — something the political establishment had made clear that it wanted to avoid. In its debut in the new Parliament, the AfD immediately signaled that it was not playing by the old rules of consensus. On the contrary, it proudly touted that it would not compromise. The big dilemma of politics in the age of populists, said Yascha Mounk, a lecturer at Harvard University, is that “You either need to share government with people whom you are ideologically opposed to or you have no majority government.” “There are no good solutions,” he said. Another grand coalition would almost certainly cost the centrist parties even more ground and “allow the populists to rise further,” he said. The centrist consensus of recent years has come at a price — even at a time of low unemployment, solid exports and a budget surplus of around 20 billion euros, about $24 billion. “Those who are unhappy with the government are unhappy with both main parties and go to the extremes — that has happened,” said Professor Garton Ash. One of Ms. Merkel’s stock phrases, he pointed out, was describing policies as being “without alternative.” “It may be no surprise that the populists call themselves Alternative for Germany,” he said. Some said the return of vibrant debate was exactly what was needed. Mathias Döpfner, chairman of the board of directors at the publisher Axel Springer, called on Germans to view a new political climate as an opportunity. “The country must again get used to the idea that politics can be something other than just maneuvering,” Mr. Döpfner wrote in an editorial in the mass-circulation Bild newspaper on Tuesday. “A compromise is not always wise, but sometimes simply lazy.” What some are viewing as a lack of stability in Germany, Mr. Merkel of the Berlin Social Science Center argued, was simply a correction of the system, aligning it with its other European partners. Where two parties used to suffice, now three or even four are required. The Netherlands, Sweden and Spain have all had minority governments. The challenge facing mainstream parties, said Professor Garton Ash, who wrote about the subject in The New York Review of Books, was to win back voters from the AfD without legitimizing its nativist rhetoric. In one session, Mr. Lindner had insisted that he wanted those who had voted for the AfD to be able to vote for him, a shocked Green politician recounted. “The question is: Can they do that without actually encouraging people to go to the far right?,” Professor Garton Ash said. “That is a challenge that is coming up fast.” In recent years, Ms. Merkel has become almost synonymous with German leadership. Now, her inability to forge consensus risks becoming synonymous with a fractured, weakened Germany. While Ms. Merkel is weakened, with no clear successor in the wings she also remains the strongest leader by default. “This is the beginning of the end of Merkel,” Professor Garton Ash said. “But it could be a very long end.”

2019-10-29 00:00:00

(Reuters) - Pfizer Inc (PFE.N) reported a higher-than-expected third-quarter profit on Tuesday on increased sales of cancer drug Ibrance and a strong launch of new heart medicine Vyndaqel, prompting the largest U.S. drugmaker to lift its earnings forecast for the year. Pfizer raised its 2019 adjusted earnings forecast to $2.94 to $3.00 per share from its prior estimate of $2.76 to $2.86, and its shares rose 3.6%. Analysts on average were expecting $2.82, according to Refinitiv IBES. Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla, on a conference call, also raised the 2019 revenue growth forecast for the company’s Upjohn unit in China to “mid-to-high single digits” from an earlier view of low-to-mid single digits, even as it prepares to spin off that business. The New York-based drugmaker announced in July it would separate the Upjohn unit, which sells off-patent branded drugs, and combine it with generic drugmaker Mylan NV (MYL.O), allowing Pfizer to focus on its more profitable newer medicines. Mylan will be able to leverage a strong base in Asia through Upjohn, whose headquarters Pfizer had shifted to China, a prime market for the older branded drugs with high name recognition such as Lipitor. Mylan shares rose 2.8% to $19.51. Bourla said he envisions Pfizer as a “smaller, science-based company” following close of the Mylan deal, expected next year. While sales of breast cancer drug Ibrance rose 25% to $1.28 billion rheumatoid arthritis drug Xeljanz had a sales jump of nearly 39% to $599 million, the performance of Vyndaqel out of the gate was an eye opener. The drug, chemically known as tafamidis which was approved in May, brought in sales of $156 million, nearly double the Wall Street estimate of $82 million. “Ibrance is back to strong growth after a period of slowing,” said UBS analyst Navin Jacob, adding that “the Vyndaqel number in particular is impressive.” Priced at $225,000 per year, Vyndaqel’s high cost has faced criticism. Experts affiliated with Boston-based Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) said it could become among the most costly cardiovascular treatments ever. Investor sentiment on Pfizer has been poor since it announced the deal with Mylan, making the third-quarter beat a relief, Jacob said. Excluding special items, Pfizer earned 75 cents per share, topping analysts’ average estimate by 13 cents. Total revenue fell about 5% to $12.68 billion as sales of pain treatment Lyrica, which now faces generic competition in the United States, fell by more than half to $527 million. Reporting by Tamara Mathias and Aakash Jagadeesh Babu in Bengaluru and Michael Erman in New York; Editing by Anil D'Silva and Bill Berkrot

2017-08-17

Aug 17 (Reuters) - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd * Says its Nanjing unit orders machinery equipment worth T$614 million ($20.26 million) Source text in Chinese: bit.ly/2fNnji9 (Please cut and paste the link into a browser to see the release) Further company coverage: ($1 = 30.3050 Taiwan dollars) (Reporting by Hong Kong newsroom)

2016-04-05

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - United Nations sanctions monitors confirmed in their latest report the recent presence of cluster munitions in Sudan’s conflict-torn Darfur region in violation of a U.N. arms embargo while rebel groups earned cash from illicit gold mining. The U.N. Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Darfur said it had evidence Sudan’s air force recently had RBK-500 cluster bombs at the weapon loading area at the Nyala Forward Operation Base. “Although Sudan is not a signatory to the Cluster Munition Convention, it has previously denied either possessing or using cluster munitions,” the panel said in its report, seen by Reuters on Tuesday. Cluster munitions explode in the air and scatter smaller “bomblets” over a huge area that detonate when stepped on or picked up. The panel’s sighting of cluster munitions supports the findings of the U.N. Mine Action Service that the Sudanese Air Force has used RBK-500 cluster bombs. The panel also raised concerns about gold smuggling. Moscow, which has good relations with the Khartoum government, was unhappy with the panel’s reporting. Russian Deputy U.N. Ambassador Petr Iliichev said Russia was opposed to publishing the report because “the experts are not behaving like they are required to.” The U.N. Security Council sanctions committee has to agree by consensus to release the report. The experts said some 48,000 kg (105,822 pounds) of gold was potentially smuggled to United Arab Emirates from Darfur between 2010 and 2014 and “such an export level equates to an additional income of $123 million to the armed groups of Darfur over this period.”     The experts visited the Jebel Amir artisanal gold mines in June 2015 and said they were certain that the Abbala militia control at least 400 mines. They said the group earns some $54 million annually from levies on prospectors and support businesses, direct prospecting and the illegal exporting of mined gold. The panel said South Sudan violated the sanctions regime by failing to stop training of the Darfur rebel group known as the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) on South Sudanese territory, and by failing to prevent it from transferring weapons into Darfur. The experts said the Juba government clearly knew about JEM’s presence and therefore violated the sanctions. The Darfur conflict began in 2003 when mainly non-Arab tribes took up arms against the Arab-led government in Khartoum, accusing it of discrimination. The U.N. says up to 300,000 people have been killed and millions displaced in Darfur. Editing by Alan Crosby

2019-01-14 19:00:04

Enough with the endless talks and handshakes. We need to untie the American economy from China. Mr. Scissors and Mr. Blumenthal are experts on China at the American Enterprise Institute. The Trump administration has been clear about its view of China. A 2017 national security strategy document called China a “revisionist” power attempting to reorder international politics to suit its interests. It’s difficult to think otherwise given Beijing’s military buildup, its attempts to undermine American influence and power, its retaliations against American allies such as Canada, and its economic actions. How to respond is more controversial. After years of unsuccessful talks and handshake deals with Beijing, the United States should change course and begin cutting some of its economic ties with China. Such a separation would stop intellectual property theft, cut off an important source of support to the People’s Liberation Army and hold companies that are involved in Chinese human rights abuses accountable. This will be no easy task. Some industries will have problems finding new suppliers or buyers, and there are entrenched constituencies that support doing business with China. They argue that any pullback could threaten economic growth. But even if American exports to China fell by half, it would be the equivalent of less than one-half of 1 percent of gross domestic product. The cost of reducing Chinese imports is harder to assess, but there are multiple countries that can substitute for China-based production, none of them strategic rivals and trade predators. The United States economy and its national security have been harmed by China’s rampant theft of intellectual property and the requirement that American companies that want to do business in the country hand over their technology. These actions threaten America’s comparative advantage in innovation and its military edge. Even uncoerced foreign investment in technology can strengthen the Chinese military-industrial complex, especially since the Communist Party has moved, since President Xi Jinping took office in 2012, to a defense industrial policy that translates in English to “civil-military fusion.” In practice, many Chinese and foreign “civilian” companies serve as de facto suppliers for the Chinese Army and its technological-industrial base. Residents and visitors are subject to constant visual surveillance, and a nascent “social credit program” in which disobedience to party dictates is reflected in credit scores, which could affect everything from home purchases to job opportunities. These forms of social control often use technology developed by Western companies. The United States should make major adjustments to its economic relationship with China. Comprehensive tariffs, which harm American consumers and workers unnecessarily, are not the right reaction. But neither are admonishments to “just let the market work.” The scale of China’s industrial-policy distortions, technology thievery and efforts to modernize its army are too significant for such superficial responses. The American government must intervene in the market when it comes to China, although that intervention should be limited to areas that are genuinely vital to national security, prosperity and democratic values. For example, the United States government should impose sanctions on the Chinese beneficiaries of intellectual property theft and coercion, in cooperation with our allies. This was the legitimate target of the United States trade representative’s original inquiry in August 2017 under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, but the policy steps chosen — tariffs — focus on the trade deficit instead of loss of intellectual property. Rather than across-the-board tariffs, Chinese companies receiving stolen or coerced intellectual property should not be allowed to do business with firms in America or, with our allies’ cooperation, in Europe and Japan. The United States should also intervene to halt foreign investment in any technology that assists the Chinese Army or contributes to internal repression and limit the access to global markets of any Chinese company that is tied to human rights abuses and army modernization. Taking these actions would require an enormous amount of intelligence collection by American security agencies as well as crucial information from American companies. The latter is difficult to obtain: Out of fear of Chinese retribution, the foreign business community will cooperate only if there is a clear, bipartisan and long-term commitment by the American government. While the United States must act unilaterally if necessary, the cooperation of allies such as Japan, Germany and Britain would make these steps more effective. Such countries have their own interests in China. Imposing sanctions in the name of national security on the European Union and China, as the Trump administration has threatened, would unwisely give them common cause. Previous efforts to assert America’s influence against China, such as the discarded Trans-Pacific Partnership, did not push back effectively on Chinese economic aggression. Working with allies to directly address China’s malfeasance would. All this means putting China at the top of American international economic priorities and keeping it there for years, without overstating or overreacting to trade disputes with our allies. The administration has demonstrated some good instincts on China, but it must not be distracted by the next round of Beijing’s false economic promises. Protecting innovation from Chinese attack makes the United States stronger. Hindering the Chinese security apparatus makes external aggression and internal repression more costly for Beijing. China is our only major trade partner that is also a strategic rival, and we should treat it differently from friendly countries with whom we have disputes. If Washington wants the global free market to work, it must intervene to blunt Beijing’s belligerence. Derek Scissors (@DerekScissors1) is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where Daniel Blumenthal (@DAlexBlumenthal) is the director of Asian studies. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

2018-10-31 13:11:37

working it out A startling new industry standard. First there were the impossible-to-get-into $40 exercise classes. Then came $365 foam rollers and $1,000 yoga mats. And now: $320 workout tights you basically have to pass a background check to be allowed to buy. Of course, they’re sold out. No, you’re not reading The Onion. The matte black, logo-free leggings came to market in June, part of the five-piece first collection of a company called Wone (pronounced “won”), started by Kristin Hildebrand, a onetime fashion blogger and former global concept creative director for Nike. Each piece in the all-black collection (two sports bras, one pair of shorts, a sheer cardigan and the leggings) was numbered like a limited-edition lithograph, and they have all sold out. To buy anything, hopefuls (who mostly heard about the brand by word of mouth) had to request access to the Wone website by clicking a button. Ms. Hildebrand, 36, then Googled aspiring customers — “these people have fascinating lives,” she said — before writing to some personally to grant them one-week access to make a purchase. “I’m not trying to be exclusionary,” said Ms. Hildebrand, who got the members-only-buying idea in part from some boutique wineries near her home in Portland, Ore. Her extreme “customer profiling,” as she called it, is in service, she said, of making buyers feel important. She described, with distaste, going to a pop-up boutique in Los Angeles, where a brand took the time to confirm the time she planned to show up. When she arrived, the owner seemed more interested in checking Instagram than in interacting with Ms. Hildebrand. Who didn’t make the cut? People who want to buy “five of everything,” Ms. Hildebrand said. “I get multiples of the bra or of the legging, but excessive numbers of the entire collection and I get skeptical,.” (She feared these people planned to resell at higher prices.) She also rejected anyone she suspected was buying to knock off her design, or for research. “I’ll email them and say, ‘Is this you on LinkedIn?’” Ms. Hildebrand said. There is no actual rejection email; she just ghosts those she doesn’t want to buy her wares. Approved buyers talk about Ms. Hildebrand’s wares with the zeal of religious converts, or maybe just of people who’ve paid a premium. “A little slice of heaven,” said Chloe Pacheco, 27, a pediatric nurse in Albuquerque. “They’re like a second skin. I’m in love with them,” said Melanie Palmer, 29, who works in sales and lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Sarah Burdash, 30, a financial analyst in St. Paul, Minn., second-guessed her leggings order, wondering if “it was all just hype.” Then she went for her first run in what are the most expensive leggings she has ever bought. “They were so buttery soft I forgot to turn my Garmin on,” she said, referring to her performance-tracking watch. Wone’s leggings aren’t the only ones that are hard to get. In December, the upscale London brand Lucas Hugh will begin offering leggings featuring a design that looks like the support tape physiotherapists use, in a limited edition of 20. Cost: $250 apiece. This past summer, Bandier boutiques, which sell designer active wear, quickly sold out of $198 black Ultracor leggings printed with lightning bolts. The wait list topped 1,000, according to the company. The brand eventually was restocked in five patterns — some women bought one of each — and special fits like a higher waist. Jennifer Bandier, the boutique’s founder, was not surprised. “The customer needs to feel like making a purchase is an experience and that what they are buying has a good story that they can share with their friends (and their social media followers),” Ms. Bandier wrote in an email. Wone’s offerings also aren’t the most expensive out there. Katie Warner Johnson, a founder and the chief executive of Carbon38, which sells fashion forward active wear, said that women’s willingness to pay about $300 for Michi leggings was “essentially the foundation of our business.” One of the first items Carbon38 offered was a style called Medusa: a swirling patchwork of black spandex, mesh and heather gray fabric that made it look as if the pants were growing up the wearer’s leg. And women were lining up for them back in 2014. “We’ve been really able to play with the price spectrum since then,” Ms. Johnson said. Elizabeth van der Goltz, the global buying director of Net-a-Porter, said the site was initially “nervous” to stock leggings over $200. Now there are $490 blue and black Fendi leggings printed with scribbled hearts and $345 Lucas Hugh black leggings with opalescent tape stripes and pinhole mesh inserts for ventilation. These brands have “high sell-throughs,” Ms. Van der Goltz wrote in an email. (Their cost continues to accrue after purchase: The Fendi leggings, though designed to sweat in, require hand washing or dry cleaning.) What does $300 and up buy you? In the case of Wone, not strategic color blocking, or extra ventilation. Instead, Ms. Hildebrand touts personalized finishing and Italian and French fabrics, which cost $20 to $25 per yard, as opposed to the $3 to $4 for fabrics more typically used in active wear. As opposed to the standard promise of holding up through 50 machine washes, Wone’s are guaranteed through 50,000 washes — that’s every single day for the next 136 years, or at least through your lifetime, no matter how much exercise might extend it. (What will future archaeologists think when they excavate large amounts of indestructible athleisure?) Wone’s social media strategy is also different from most brands’: The company’s lone Instagram post, for example, is of blank white space.“ It’s hard to be in health and wellness and advocate or even promote something that’s sort of the antithesis of wellness,” Ms. Hildebrand said of the brand’s tactic. “It wouldn’t make sense from a philosophical standpoint.” And yet influencers, to whom Ms. Hildebrand gave products, helped stoke demand (one influencer described a Wone bra in an Instagram Story as the best she’d ever worn). The brand’s packaging — a brown box containing a sleek black box, tissue paper sealed with embossed sticker — has inspired many an unboxing video. Ms. Hildebrand, who also founded a now-defunct meditation studio, will also email customers at all hours, which might seem at odds with wellness. “I struggle with that,” she said. “I’m trying to build this to a place where I can absolutely afford to limit my hours.” But not for long her customers: Barneys New York will begin selling Wone in December.

2017-11-10 00:00:00

Nov 10 (Reuters) - Evershine Group Holdings Ltd * Qtrly revenue from continuing operations HK$692,000 versus HK$438,000 a year ago‍​ * Qtrly loss attributable to shareholders from continuing operations HK$14.4 million versus loss of HK$12.4 million Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:

2017-04-24

(Reuters) - Elton John spent two nights in intensive care with a potentially deadly bacterial infection and has canceled all his concerts for the rest of April and May, his publicist said on Monday. The British musician, 70, became “violently ill” on a flight home from his recent South American tour, spokeswoman Fran Curtis said in a statement. The “Rocket Man” singer spent two nights in intensive care in the UK and is resting at home after being released on Saturday, the statement said. The infection was not identified, but the statement said John contracted the “harmful and unusual bacterial infection” during his South American tour, which ended in Chile on April 10. “Infections of this nature are rare and potentially deadly,” the statement said, adding that his time in intensive care was followed by an “extended stay in hospital.” John is expected to make a full recovery but has canceled all his concerts in Las Vegas for April and May, as well as a gig in Bakersfield, California, on May 6. John apologized to fans for disappointing them, adding in a statement: “I am extremely grateful to the medical team for their excellence in looking after me so well.” He is due to resume performances at a concert in Twickenham, England, on June 3. John, a Grammy, Oscar and Tony winner for his work in film and theater, is working on a score for a Broadway musical adaptation of the comedy-drama “The Devil Wears Prada.” Reporting by Jill Serjeant in New York; Editing by Peter Cooney

2020-03-12 17:44:00

It's easy to find your liked pages on Facebook to keep track of your "likes" from over the years.  You can see a list of the Facebook pages you've liked on both a computer and mobile device.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. You've probably liked a lot of pages over the years on Facebook. When Facebook first started, liking a page was a way to tell people your preferences and hobbies. People liked movies, TV shows, bands, activities, and even common actions such as "going to tell someone something and then forgetting what you were going to tell them."Now, when you like a page, be it for a group, restaurant, or something else entirely, it's more so to follow those pages and keep yourself updated. People still like their favorite bands and TV shows, but they also like pages such as "existential despair" because the page posts funny memes.Your likes also serve more purposes nowaday for new features such as Facebook Dating, where potential matches can see if you two share the same interests.You may be wondering just which and how many pages you've liked - and maybe thinking about cleaning up and getting rid of a few. The easiest way to do that is to view all your liked pages. Here's how to find liked pages on Facebook.Check out the products mentioned in this article:MacBook Pro (From $1,299.99 at Best Buy)Lenovo IdeaPad 130 (From $299.99 at Best Buy)iPhone 11 (From $699.99 at Best Buy)Samsung Galaxy S10 (From $899.99 at Best Buy)How to find liked pages on Facebook on a computer1. Go to your Facebook profile page on a Mac or PC.2. Under your cover photo on the far right, click the dropdown menu labeled "About."3. From the dropdown menu, near the bottom, select "Likes." 4. You will now see a list of all your liked pages. If you want to, you can use the categories at the top to sort them. How to find liked pages on Facebook on a mobile device1. Go to your Facebook profile page on your phone. 2. Under your public About Info, tap the three dots labeled "See Your About Info." 3. Scroll down until you get to Likes, then tap "See All." Related coverage from How To Do Everything: Tech:How to permanently delete your Facebook Dating profile, or 'take a break' from itHow to delete a Facebook group on desktop or mobileHow to add your location to a Facebook post using the check-in featureHow to block a page on Facebook using your computer or mobile deviceHow to edit a post on Facebook and view its edit history Insider Inc. receives a commission when you buy through our links. window._taboola = window._taboola || []; window._taboola = window._taboola || [];

2016-12-16

Morgan Stanley raised its rating for Eli Lilly to overweight from equal weight, citing the potential of its product pipeline and improving profit margins in the coming years. "Lilly's new product growth drivers are in place, and we believe Lilly's guidance is low risk and achievable. Additionally, Lilly has a history of providing conservative guidance," analyst David Risinger wrote in a note to clients Friday. "We expect outperformance to be driven by new product growth and execution on margin expansion."

2016-05-26 00:00:00

May 26 (Reuters) - Dennys Corp * Repurchase authorization is in addition to repurchases previously authorized * Denny’s Corporation announces new $100 million share repurchase authorization Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage: (Bengaluru Newsroom: +1 646 223 8780)

2016-10-10

– This is the script of CNBC's news report for China's CCTV on September 9, Friday. Welcome to CNBC Business Daily, I'm Qian Chen. The European Central Bank (ECB) surprised markets on Thursday by failing to extend the deadline for its trillion-euro bond-buying program. Expectations were high the central bank would prolonging the program beyond its current deadline of March 2017, but it did not do so. ECB President Mario Draghi said the central bank did not discuss extending the program at its latest monetary policy meeting. "Our program is effective and we should focus on its implementation," he said at his regular post-decision media conference on Thursday. The ECB held its key interest rates unchanged on Thursday, as expected. The rate on the ECB's marginal lending facility stands at 0.25 percent, with the rate on the deposit facility at -0.4 percent. The fixed rate on the ECB's main refinancing operations remains at zero. The ECB last moved rates in March, when it cut the rate on the marginal lending facility by 5 basis points. The euro zone STOXX 50 index fell on the news, but the euro rose slightly against the U.S. dollar to near a two-week high. The yields on German benchmark 10-year Bunds turned slightly less negative. [MORITZ KRAEMER, S&P Global Ratings,Chief Rating Officer, Sovereign Ratings] So the question is not really about market expect whether theres another little bull run that can be squeezed out of bonds, but what they actually do to the real economy, that's what the ECB is interested. What does that do to inflation, what does it do to credit growth, what does it do to employment. And there, it appears that the monetary policy stimulus is reaching the boundary of effectiveness. " Despite the ECB's monetary stimulus program - which includes low or negative rates, low-interest loans to banks and a trillion-euro bond-buying program - the euro zone's economic growth and inflation rate remain stubbornly low. On Thursday, the central bank raised its economic growth outlook for the euro zone slightly for 2016, but cut it for 2017 and 2018. It now sees growth in the 19-country bloc averaging 1.7 percent this year, having previously forecast 1.6 percent growth. It forecasts expansion of 1.6 percent in 2017 and 2018, down from its June forecast of 1.7 percent in both years. The central bank's 2016 inflation forecast was held at 0.2 percent and its 2018 estimate stayed at 1.6 percent. However, it cut its 2017 forecast to 1.2 percent from 1.3 percent. The ECB's inflation forecasts are particularly important, as the central bank has a single mandate to target price stability. It aims for inflation of close to, but below 2 percent over the medium term. Average inflation in the bloc, based on non-harmonized national consumer price indexes fell below 1.75 percent in March 2013, kept on falling, and is currently around 0.2 percent. Prior to Thursday's announcement, there was speculation the ECB might extend the deadline on its quantitative easing program. Focus has now shifted to whether the ECB will announce an extension to the program later this year. CNBC's Qian Chen, reporting from Singapore. Follow CNBC International on and Facebook.

2019-08-02

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson about trade, next-generation 5G mobile networks and global security, White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said in a statement on Friday. Trump told Johnson during a call on Thursday that he looked forward to meeting him at the G7 economic summit in France later this month, the White House said. The United States is pressuring its allies, including Britain, to avoid using equipment from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd[HWT.UL] in its 5G mobile networks. Washington says Huawei is a national security risk here Britain’s National Security Council, chaired by Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May, had decided in principle to give Huawei limited access to sensitive parts of the 5G network. But the council has yet to make a final decision, and Johnson is more publicly aligned with Trump than May was. Trump has pushed for a trade deal between the United States and Britain following the latter’s planned exit from the European Union. Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Writing by Makini Brice; Editing by Susan Heavey and Bernadette Baum

2018-02-05

Feb 5 (Reuters) - Peeks Social Ltd: * PEEKS SOCIAL LTD. ENTERS INTO DEFINITIVE AGREEMENT FOR THE ACQUISITION OF PERSONAS.COM CORPORATION Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:

2019-06-07 14:05:00

Thomas Rhett does not back down when it comes to protecting his wife. The country singer, 29, slammed Instagram users who criticized his wife Lauren Akins, 29, for her choice of attire at the CMT Awards on June 5, and is continuing to defend his wife. “There just kind of comes a point where you can say whatever you want about me and my outfits and how ridiculous I look, but once you start talking about my wife, sometimes I can’t hold back,” Thomas Rhett told Entertainment Tonight on Thursday. After the couple walked the CMT’s red carpet in Nashville on Wednesday, fans heavily criticized Akins on Instagram for her outfit —  a pink top, a leopard print dress, and pink heeled sandals. “She looks like a mess,” one user commented, with another writing, “is Cheetah Girls 4 coming out?” Rhett disabled comments on his own account, and proceeded to jump in on PEOPLE’s Instagram of the couple, defending his wife from the critical comments against her. “All of you with these hateful comments should be ashamed,” Rhett commented. “This world doesn’t need any more of your negativity.” Rhett received both support and added criticism for standing by his wife, but the “It Goes Like This” singer does not regret stepping in. “I said that stuff basically just to encourage people to be kind,” Rhett continued to ET. “I can’t imagine being on someone’s [Instagram] page and seeing something and ragging on them for something like that. I can’t imagine myself doing something like that, therefore I can’t imagine how someone else could do that.” “But that’s the world we live in with the internet and cyber-bullying,” he added. “It’s really unfortunate, and I wish people would just be kinder.” Rhett, who has two children with Akins —  daughters Willa Gray, 3, and Ada James, 22 months — opened the show on Wednesday night with a performance of his hit song “Don’t Threaten Me with a Good Time,” alongside Little Big Town and Trombone Shorty. The singer released his fourth studio album, Center Point Road, on May 31, which features collaborations with Little Big Town and Kelsea Ballerini. The singer will cohost the highly anticipated 2019 CMA Fest along with Ballerini, which will air Sunday, Aug. 4 on ABC.

2016-05-14 00:00:25

Heat 103, Raptors 91 | Series tied, 3-3 MIAMI — The general arc of this series landed a surprising figure smack dab at the center of it all before Game 6 on Friday night. Alex McKechnie is the director of sports science for the Toronto Raptors, who have required his services in their Eastern Conference semifinal series with the Miami Heat. At Toronto’s morning shootaround here, McKechnie stood before a group of reporters and explained how he was attempting to reduce the swelling in DeMar DeRozan’s sprained right thumb. The process involved wrapping a red shoelace around DeRozan’s thumb during timeouts — and a lot of pain. McKechnie stressed that it was not as uncommon as it sounded. “It’s actually a very standardized method of treatment,” he said, adding, “These guys are playing through all sorts of things.” Through heaps of injuries. Through poor shooting. Through some of the most inartistic basketball this side of the Philadelphia 76ers. On Friday, though, the Heat poked their heads through the muck just long enough to escape with a 103-91 victory that evened the best-of-seven series at three games apiece. Game 7 is scheduled for Sunday afternoon in Toronto. The Cleveland Cavaliers, who are enjoying an extended sabbatical, await the winner in the conference finals. The Heat avoided elimination behind Goran Dragic, a guard who scored a team-high 30 points. He was everything that the first five games of the series were largely not — crisp, efficient, fun to watch — and he seemed to have a response for every run that Toronto could muster. “I was just aggressive,” Dragic said. “I don’t want to go home to Europe. I still want to be here.” Dwyane Wade added 22 points in the win. When the Raptors cut into the Heat’s lead midway through the fourth quarter, Dragic connected on a midrange jumper. Wade soon followed with a basket of his own. It was a missed opportunity for the Raptors, who are still seeking the franchise’s first appearance in the conference finals. Before the game, Coach Dwane Casey went straight for the buffet of elimination-game platitudes, saying he wanted his team to play with resolve. The Heat have won championships. But this is all still fairly new to the Raptors. “We should be the hungry team,” Casey said. “We should be the desperate team.” Instead, the Raptors missed open layups and fumbled loose balls out of bounds. Kyle Lowry scored a game-high 36 points, and DeRozan added 23, but they had little help. Depleted rosters led to some unusual situations. Justise Winslow, nominally a 6-foot-7 forward for the Heat, spent time defending at the center position — but then helped bring the ball upcourt. Late in the first quarter, Coach Erik Spoelstra played three point guards at once. He had anticipated an unusual tenor to the evening’s festivities. “This is a whatever-it-takes game,” he said at his team’s morning shootaround. The Raptors entered Game 6 shooting 43.2 percent from the field, with DeRozan and Lowry combining to shoot 37 percent. The Heat had not been much better, shooting 44.5 percent from the field and 30.4 percent from 3-point range. Before Game 6, Wade was asked whether he expected his team’s shooting touch to return. “We would love it to,” he said, “just like they would love it to. But it probably ain’t going to happen in this series.” He added: “The biggest thing has been timely shots, timely makes. If the ball goes in for you, hey, great. But the rhythm of this series just is not as fluid.” Along with missed shots, injuries had been mounting, too. Both teams were without their starting centers — Toronto’s Jonas Valanciunas because of a sprained right ankle, and Miami’s Hassan Whiteside because of a sprained right knee. Toronto’s DeMarre Carroll and Miami’s Luol Deng injured their left wrists in Game 5. They played with limitations in Game 6. Sure enough, the two teams plodded along at the start, combining to miss 16 of their first 23 shots before the first timeout. “Offense wasn’t our issue,” Casey said. “We needed to get stops.” After the Heat went ahead by 9 in the second quarter when Josh Richardson drilled a 3-pointer, DeRozan scored 5 straight points for the Raptors. But others soon emerged for the Heat, including Dragic. He scored 19 points to lead the Heat to a 53-44 halftime lead. “We felt like we’ve been playing in mud,” Spoelstra said. “We looked a little more like ourselves tonight.” Facing elimination was nothing new to Miami. Against the Charlotte Hornets in the first round, the Heat were down, three games to two. But they won Game 6 — on the road, no less — and then took Game 7 at home. It reinforced the notion that they had some mettle. On Friday, with their season once more at stake, the Heat delivered again.

2018-02-04 14:10:05

Asia and Australia Edition Here’s your Morning Briefing: • The Winter Olympics begin Friday, but the normally quiet period ahead of competition has seen a lot of commotion. That’s because South Korean journalists trail the North Korean athletes everywhere, deploying high-powered lenses and sharp elbows. North Korea plans to send a 22-member delegation to the opening ceremonies, headed by the 90-year-old chairman of its Parliament. _____ • Thousands of battle-hardened Islamic State fighters have escaped Syria, perhaps to fight another day. Classified Western intelligence assessments say that some militants are defecting to Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria. Others are paying smugglers to spirit them to Turkey, with an eventual goal of returning to their home countries. And Egypt and Israel are secret allies in a covert war against Islamist militants in the Sinai Peninsula — dramatic evidence of a reconfiguration of regional politics. _____ • The Super Bowl champions are the Philadelphia Eagles, in a 41-33 victory over the New England Patriots. We’re curious whether the international audience has grown or fallen. The game was broadcast in China, Japan, India, Australia and many other countries. Justin Timberlake’s halftime show sought redemption after a 2004 performance remembered for Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction; a flu-stricken Pink sang the national anthem. In the U.S., there’s a new level of disquiet over enjoying a sport rife with concussions that cause permanent brain damage. Our “On Football” columnist even consulted a priest (and in an Op-Ed, a woman chronicles one painful case study, that of her husband, a former N.F.L. player). _____ • Uma Thurman finally talked about Harvey Weinstein. The actress, who said in October that she was waiting to feel “less angry, spoke about abusive encounters with him and a gruesome episode during filming of the 2003 film “Kill Bill.” And dozens more young women say they were molested by Larry Nassar, the former doctor for U.S.A. Gymnastics — even as the F.B.I. was pursuing its case against him. (A distraught father rushed at him in court.) Athletes say he’s not the only problem. This video explores accounts of abuse involving three U.S.A. Gymnastics coaches. _____ • “It’s being blind, and then being able to see.” That was an archaeologist explaining how laser technology uncovered the ruins of a vast Maya civilization that had been hidden under tree canopy in Guatemala. The same laser technology, known as lidar, was also used recently in Cambodia to discover a network of ancient cities near the Angkor Wat temple complex. _____ • Consumers in China have lifted the fortunes of many Western brands. But some Western products — like tampons, deodorant and breakfast cereal — have failed to impress them. • Exxon Mobil said even aggressive climate change policies would not prevent it from burning fossil fuels. Critics say the company is underplaying how such policies could threaten its bottom line. • Beijing opened an investigation into whether the U.S. subsidizes grain sorghum, which China imports to feed ducks and produce baijiu, a powerful liquor. • New Fed chairman: Jerome Powell takes office today. We look at the risks he faces. • Will U.S. stocks recover from Friday’s plunge? Here’s a snapshot of global markets. • An Amtrak train traveling from New York to Miami collided with a freight train early Sunday, killing at least two people and injuring at least 100 others. It was the second major crash involving an Amtrak train in less than a week. [The New York Times] • President Trump’s scorched-earth assault on the F.B.I. and Justice Department, now largely focused on a Republican memo released Friday, is unlike anything America has seen in modern times. [The New York Times] • In Pakistan, at least 11 soldiers, including an army captain, were killed when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives at an army base. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility. [The New York Times] • A ruling is expected today on an appeal by Lee Jae-yong, the heir to the Samsung business empire, who was convicted of offering kickbacks to former President Park Geun-hye. [Yonhap] • Singapore, one of the world’s safest countries, is preparing for the possibility of terrorist attacks ahead of a meeting of defense ministers this week. [Reuters] • The Maldives government ordered security forces to resist any move by the Supreme Court to arrest or impeach the nation’s president, Abdulla Yameen. [BBC] • The Philippine National Police reported killing nearly 50 suspected drug users and sellers in the last two months. [The New York Times] • Two U.S. government studies suggested, based on animal tests, that the risk of getting cancer from cellphone radiation is small. [The New York Times] • The oldest son of Fidel Castro committed suicide, according to Cuba’s state news media. Fidel Ángel Castro Díaz-Balart was a nuclear physicist who had been treated for depression. [The New York Times] Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life. • Work on your pizza skills by baking a pie topped with sweet and hot peppers. • If your New Year’s resolution has fallen by the wayside, email our Smarter Living editor (subject line “2018 resolutions”) with your name, your goal and why you chose it, and two steps toward it. • Mount Everest’s official height is 29,029 feet, but there are divergent opinions on how the height should be measured. Nepali surveyors are now heading to Everest’s summit — and hoping to settle the debate. • Decades before e-commerce sites were popularizing handmade crafts, an American master weaver in Laos was working to keep local traditions alive. Our correspondent visited her workshop. • And meet Naomi Watanabe, a Japanese comedian who lip-syncs to Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, and Aito Iguchi, a Japanese hockey prodigy who dreams of turning pro in North America. A century ago on Tuesday, the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt died in Vienna. Klimt is famous for his heavily ornamented portraits, one of which was confiscated by the Nazis during World War II but later recovered. It sold for $135 million in 2006, and the recovery effort inspired “The Woman in Gold,” a 2015 film starring Helen Mirren. Among the artist’s quirks — and a source of irritation for his wealthy patrons — was that he often refused to declare his works complete. Above, Klimt’s “Bauerngarten.” One Belgian family stopped paying Klimt for a frieze it had commissioned for a palace in Brussels, as a way of motivating him to finish. He eventually did. But patrons who tried to collect his artwork were sometimes offered a refund instead of a painting. Klimt would even tweak pieces after they had won critical acclaim. His painting “Death and Life,” for example, won first prize at the International Art Exhibition in Rome in 1911. But Klimt later changed the background from gold to gray, according to the Leopold Museum in Vienna, and gave his representations of death and life “further ornaments.” _____ Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online. Sign up here to get it by email in the Australian, Asian, European or American morning, or to receive an Evening Briefing on U.S. weeknights. And our Australia bureau chief offers a weekly letter adding analysis and conversations with readers. Browse our full range of Times newsletters here. What would you like to see here? Contact us at [email protected].

2017-08-03

Vector — a private spaceflight startup based out of Tucson, Arizona — just successfully pulled off another test flight of one of its micro-rockets, launching the 40-foot-tall vehicle this morning from a spaceport in Georgia. It’s the second flight of the vehicle: a full-scale prototype of one of the company’s rockets, the Vector-R. And though the vehicle didn’t reach orbit, it puts Vector one step closer to its goal of rapidly launching tiny satellites to space starting in 2018. The Vector-R is one of two rockets that the company hopes to start launching on a regular basis in the years ahead. It’s designed to launch very small payloads weighing up to 145 pounds into lower Earth orbit. Vector’s other rocket under development is the Vector-H, a slightly larger vehicle that can carry payloads weighing over 350 pounds into orbit. Once testing is done, Vector hopes to launch these two rockets hundreds of times a year in order to get small probes into space as quickly as possible. “We’re not going to be the guys developing new rockets,” Jim Cantrell, CEO and co-founder of Vector, tells The Verge. “We hope to get these two vehicles running and milk the hell out of them... We’re going to be building the same thing over and over — like the McDonald’s of rocket business.” Vector seems to have the credentials and resources to meet its goal. Formed last year, the company boasts an impressive team with extensive spaceflight experience. Cantrell is a member of SpaceX’s original founding team, and he’s working with engineers who come from Boeing, Virgin Galactic, and more. In its latest round, Vector raised $21 million, totaling more than $30 million in overall funding. It’s also racked up numerous customers that include a few major players in the aerospace industry. Today’s launch was fully funded by Vector’s customers and carried test payloads from NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Center for Applied Space Technology, and Astro Digital — a company that specializes in small imaging satellites. Today’s launch also marks the first rocket flight ever out of Camden Spaceport, located near the coast of Georgia. The site was once used by NASA in the 1960s to do ground-based testing of rocket motors, but since then it hasn’t seen much action. Camden County officials have been vying recently to turn the site into a commercial spaceport, and in May, the Georgia state government passed legislation to help foster the growth of the site. The spaceport is still very new, though, so there isn’t much equipment on the ground to support launches. “Where we’re launching from in Camden, there’s really no infrastructure there whatsoever,” says Cantrell. “We’re proving we can go anywhere really and launch these rockets.” Vector’s first test flight was done in Mojave, California. Ultimately, Vector hopes to capitalize on what is being hailed as the small satellite revolution. Satellite companies are building and operating space probes that are much smaller than your typical, bus-sized satellite, with some ventures like Planet making imaging satellites that are about the size of a shoebox. Normally, these tiny probes have to ride-share to space, though. They hitch a ride to orbit on the launch of a much larger satellite and are deployed only after that satellite has been released. But Planet, for instance, can fit eight of its satellites on a Vector-R or 20 on a Vector-H — no larger rocket required. So far, the company says it has seen an enthusiastic response from potential customers about this strategy. “We’re already seeing signs that the existence of rockets like ours would create its own demand,” says Cantrell. Vector’s prices are minuscule compared to larger rocket launch providers. Typical rocket launches will run tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, but Vector’s rockets will start at around $1.5 million and $3 million per flight. Cantrell is confident the team will be able to make these rockets fast enough to launch between 400 and 500 a year. The key, he says, is that they’re easy to make. “They’re just dead simple. We’re really building the simplest rocket possible and the smallest rocket possible,” says Cantrell. “Technologically it’s like the Model T versus the modern Mercedes. [Other rocket companies are] all using Mercedes-level technology.” Cantrell says the company is aiming to do up to six test flights before commercial launches begin next year. The next test will tentatively occur in December.

2016-05-24

May 24 (Reuters) - Treehouse Foods Inc * Treehouse foods announces plans to close Azusa, CA and Ripon, WI facilities * Azusa, California facility has approximately 660 employees * Treehouse Foods Inc says full facility closure and end of production at Azusa is expected to occur in Q2 of 2017 * Total costs to close Azusa and Ripon facilities are expected to be approximately $17.0 million, or $0.19 per fully diluted share * Treehouse Foods Inc says full facility closure and end of production at Ripon is expected to occur in q4 of 2016 * Does not expect supply disruptions during transition. * Expects approximately $1.1 million of charges to be incurred in Q2 of this year * After evaluating various options, company has decided to discontinue sugar wafer products due to declining demand * Full facility closure and end of production at Ripon is expected to occur in Q4 of 2016 * Expects approximately charges of $4.0 million on a quarterly basis beginning in Q3 of 2016 through Q2 of 2017 Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage: (Bengaluru Newsroom: +1-646-223-8780)

2016-12-16 00:00:00

Over the next four years, New Cities, Future Ruins plans on a series of intelligent and creative projects that will face the cultural and environmental realities of the Sun Belt. Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads DALLAS — For the next four years, the art and design initiative New Cities, Future Ruins plans to leave its mark on the United States Sun Belt. When the project’s inaugural meeting took place last month, artist Sophia Al-Maria captured the tone of the weekend when she explained how she came up with the term “Gulf Futurism”: The [Persian] Gulf has a strange set of conditions which I think are perhaps unique — this real living memory of a deep historical way of life mixed with a super rapid development, that has taken centuries for many other places, suddenly dive-bombing the region. […] Through that I began to think about these conditions and I never came to any conclusions. Other than the very obvious ones [sic] that we’re all fucked. The apocalypse is a popular subject — books and artworks and Hollywood films have been grappling with the human effects on the environment in the age of the Anthropocene for years now. But New Cities, Future Ruins questions the assumption that the apocalypse must be an impending disaster. A basic premise, borne out over the weekend’s events at the Meadows School for the Arts at Southern Methodist University (SMU), is that the apocalypse has in fact already happened. Now, we must learn to live in the world we have made, one in which we are, in fact, all fucked. Although Al-Maria’s comments focused specifically on her conception of the Persian Gulf in the early 2000s, it’s useful to transpose some of those conditions onto the Sun Belt — a region spanning across Texas and New Mexico, up to Colorado, and down through Arizona and southern California. In his keynote address, Andrew Ross, author of Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City (2011), also invoked parallels between the Sun Belt and the Gulf: desert climates, economies driven by oil, rapid urban growth that erases or ignores indigenous ways of life, widespread migrations across borders. Ross’s talk was a call to action — a plea to reorient Americans’ collective, and ultimately capitalist, approach to environmental activism. Ross speculated that the conservative right has in fact already accepted climate change as a reality, but rather than legislating for the preservation of natural resources, they have instead begun hoarding them. This is a chilling thought, especially in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s most recent cabinet appointments, such as Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. Ross, like many of the participants of New Cities, Future Ruins, advocated for a renewed understanding of the means necessary for enacting meaningful environmental legislation: We must recognize climate change as a civil rights issue, rather than a corporate or merely economic one. We must, as activists Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman argued during their talk, approach activism as a bottom-up rather than a top-down process. In keeping with this grassroots mentality, some of the most successful projects on view in New Cities, Future Ruins were those that engaged directly and thoughtfully with local communities. For instance, [bc]Workshop, a nonprofit community design center, has been working for the past several years in Dallas’s Jubilee Park, a historically African American neighborhood. The project, which builds houses for Jubilee Park’s longtime residents — whose homes were under threat due to changing economic conditions and demographics — demonstrates how implementing sustainable technology and building methods can combat gentrification in disenfranchised communities. [bc]Workshop’s methods involve interviewing residents to learn about their daily habits and how they ideally utilize their domestic space, from gardening to watching television to storage needs. The designers then place the family in a Holding House on Congo Street built specifically for the project while their new home is built. The Congo Street Initiative serves as a means for thinking about the implications of institutions and companies who arrive as outsiders to a community in need, and for treating the resultant relationship ethically and respectfully. As a contrast to the more practical and site-specific presentations, many of the performers at New Cities, Future Ruins focused on imaginary utopian futures that would destroy or upend dominant social structures. Autumn Knight’s performance “L-A Consortium” (the dash is not silent) is set in the wake of an unnamed but presumably revolutionary event that has resulted in black people becoming the controlling arbiters of all cultural institutions in Texas. Knight cast her fellow performers (NCFR participants Iv Amenti, lauren woods, David Herman, and RonAmber Deloney) as a committee tasked with building a new nonprofit, donor-sponsored consortium of cultural organizations — the names of which are more conspicuously ethnically diverse compared to the usual endowed institutions one sees even nationally (e.g., Shepanique Center for Literacy, NaQuante Gallery, La shiri Center for Curatorial Studies). Knight instructed the committee members to present and react to each other’s proposals by using a prescribed set of body language — the side-eye, the lip pucker, the shoulder shake — that resulted in hilarious yet poignant moments of communication. For the space of her performance, Knight provided both ideological and visual means for subverting current cultural norms, and for imagining an alternative world in which rubbing a colleague’s “kitchen” is an officially sanctioned gesture of accord. If the larger project of New Cities, Future Ruins is to establish an ethics of urban development and preservation, which it certainly has the capacity to do, it will be as a result of intelligent and creative projects that confront the cultural and environmental realities of the Sun Belt, while reimagining ways of living — even thriving — among them. As Gavin Kroeber, artistic director of New Cities, Future Ruins, reminded attendants, the Sun Belt is, at least in the American imaginary, the Rust Belt’s foil: if the Rust Belt is a post-industrial wasteland of economic depression and pollution, then the Sun Belt is the wave of the future, gleaming urban sprawl and economic boom. But of course, the rapid growth across America’s southwest contributes to mounting racial injustices and sustainability issues. It is the ambitious goal of New Cities, Future Ruins to articulate these conflicts, and to create a set of events over the next four years — artist residencies, public projects, and exhibitions — that will guide the discourse around those issues facing the country’s fastest-growing region. Now that the time span of New Cities, Future Ruins coincides almost eerily with the United States’ next presidential term, the initiative stands as a potential source of resistance to narratives that deny climate change and institutional racism. The “New Cities, Future Ruins” Convening took place at the Meadows School of the Arts at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) (6101 Bishop Blvd, Dallas, Texas) November 11–14.

2019-12-06 12:10:00

No one has more best friends than Jen Glantz. The 31-year-old entrepreneur works with anywhere between 20 and 35 brides per year since breaking ground on her business, Bridesmaid For Hire, in 2015. The gist of her pitch is remarkably simple: Glantz is not a wedding planner, she will not schedule the father-daughter dance or color coordinate the unruly groomsmen, but she will serve as the emotional fulcrum on the biggest day of your life by being the best bridesmaid she can be. Sometimes that job is easy. Sometimes all it takes is eating cake and breaking in the dance floor. But other times it means extinguishing long-simmering fires that flare up between newly ordained in-laws, or arriving in the clutch when a maid of honor drops out after an ugly meltdown. Consider it contract-based female solidarity, for around $2,000 a client. Glantz tells me that Bridesmaid For Hire originated as a Craigslist ad, posted after serving as a civilian bridesmaid for countless friends. The hundreds of emails she received in response to that ad validated her suspicion that, within the titanic $72 billion wedding industry, there was room for a service that focuses entirely on the well-being of a stressed out, overwhelmed bride. Today, the business is how she makes a living. Glantz works with her clients anywhere from three months to a full year before their wedding date, after establishing a rate with them that hinges on what they want out of the service. She’s trained other women to be part-time bridesmaid engineers, written two memoirs, and has diversified Bridesmaid For Hire into a number of distinct verticals and financial plans. (If, for instance, you only need an hour of her expert counseling, you can schedule a “1-on-1 wedding vent session.”) Some clients, says Glantz, are completely open about hiring her services, not caring who knows that they’ve brought on a professional bridesmaid to make the ceremony run smoothly. Others demand absolute confidentiality, which means Glantz often invents fictional backstories and fake names to seamlessly integrate them with the rest of the bridal party. Every wedding she works is a little bit different. Some brides hire her to create a buffer between the Problem Relatives, some are at a point in their life where they don’t have a ton of close friends, and some just want to inject a sparky personality in a staid social environment. We talked about all of that, as well as Glantz’s own upcoming wedding, where for the first time in her life, she’ll get a taste of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a bridesmaid’s tender love and care. So how did you first come up with the idea of being a bridesmaid for hire? So early in my 20s my friends got engaged, and they were constantly asking me to be their bridesmaid. Two things happened: I learned that behind the scenes at weddings, there was nobody whose job it was to be there for the bride. Sure there’s a wedding planner, but a wedding planner’s job is to set up the wedding. It’s not to deal with the emotional labor, and your friends can’t deal with all the ins and outs of your wedding. There was one day in particular where two friends asked me to be their bridesmaid on the same night, and my roommate said, “Jen, you’re a professional bridesmaid!” That got me thinking that if I could do this for friends, I could do it for the wedding industry. How did the business pick up steam? I had no business experience before starting Bridesmaid For Hire, so I thought the best way to test an idea was to put it out to the universe. I put an ad on Craigslist, and I got hundreds of emails from all around the world from people who wanted to hire me. From there I wrote tons of articles for a bunch of bridal magazines speaking out about the wedding industry, and being a bridesmaid, and that’s how the business took off. I never paid for advertising or marketing. It was strictly just word-of-mouth, and me establishing myself as someone who was very outspoken. Were you surprised that there was such an interest in hiring a bridesmaid? It didn’t surprise me but it validated the idea. I saw that there were so many areas that people needed help with in my friends’ weddings. Not the wedding planning, not picking out the flowers, but dealing with a difficult mother-in-law, and what to do when your maid of honor is quitting on the day of the ceremony. These were problems that couldn’t just be happening with my friends. I watched my friends fire bridesmaids, I watched grooms go missing, and I realized there was a business here after I worked my first wedding for a bride named Ashley. After I finished, I realized that this was a business that nobody had the courage to touch, and I was going to do something with it. So when a client brings you on, what’s the conversation you have with them to figure out what they’re looking for? Is every wedding unique that way? Or are you generally able to follow some sort of formula? Because it is such a unique position, a lot of it is figuring out if my client’s needs fit the business. We’re not a modeling agency, where we just send out humans. Some people contact us and say, “We need two bridesmaids that look like this,” and we say, “This is not what we are.” What we are is a service for women who need that support on the biggest day of their life, and beforehand. So a lot of it is interviewing the person, seeing what their needs are, and a lot of it is making sure that our personalities jive. If they’re hiring me to be their friend for a year before the wedding, we need to make sure that that relationship can exist. If they are looking for something more like a wedding planner, I’ll refer them to that job. Because that’s not what we do. I’m not going to be able to pick your flowers out or taste your cake with you, but there are plenty of people who will. How long is the terms of engagement when you take on a client? From getting hired, to going to the wedding, and finishing up the assignment. Brides sometimes hire me anywhere between three months to a year for a wedding. I’ve been hired for two weeks before a wedding. It really depends. How often is it someone who just wants a couple extra bridesmaids, just so they fill out a wedding. And how often is it someone that wants to build some more longterm emotional intimacy? It’s mostly people trying to build that relationship. Everyone who hires me has a story. It’s the one time in your life where all of your friends and family are coming together, so when they hire me they’re not looking to fill a quota, or to have that tenth bridesmaid. They’re looking for someone to be there, to answer their questions for them. They rely on me for that truthful advice, unlike a wedding planner or anyone in the wedding industry, I have no incentives to lie or upcharge them. It allows me to be very honest with them. What do you look for in someone who’s applying for a job with your company? It’s definitely somebody who can deal with all different kinds of people, and has respect for all kinds of people. You need to be able to think on your feet, because a lot of times at weddings you’re running around putting fires out. And also someone that has some endurance. You’ll clock 30,000 steps in one wedding. Really simply, you need to have a strong, passionate love for people. That’s what gets me through the job. What have been some of the more unique circumstances that you’ve entered as a bridesmaid for hire? I’ve had people who had fired their maid of honor a month before the wedding because they were causing drama. I’ve gotten people who have reached a point in their life where they don’t have a lot of close friends. That’s a natural progression of life. I’ve had people who’ve had a very closed, private ceremony because a family member isn’t doing so well, and they just want to get through this fast. Every wedding comes with a situation, but they’re the same situations that everyone goes through. Nobody has a wedding without some sort of wrench getting thrown into it. Have any of those clients become real life friends, past the parameters of your assignment? There’s a handful of people. I’ve been doing this for five years, and there’s people that I still keep in contact with. I see my first bride, Ashley, quite frequently. But on the flipside, there’s plenty of people who, at the end of the wedding, I say, “Great to meet you!” And I never see them again. Because the relationship is what it is. What it’s like for you to exist in a constant state of matrimony, where you’re constantly in the middle of some extremely high emotions? That’s something I don’t think people realize about this job. I’ve had 30,000 people apply to work for me, and all their applications say, “I’d be great at this because I love to party.” It’s not a party; it’s an emotional roller coaster. There were some years where I worked 50 plus weddings in a year and I’d come home crying. It’s emotionally draining. Weddings are not the best day of people’s lives. It’s often the most chaotic. It really affected my perspective on love and marriage, and also just friendship. It’s the kind of thing where you walk into a situation, and you never know what is going to happen. A lot of the chaos and drama falls on you. I’m the person the bride is screaming at. I’m the person the mother of the bride is screaming at. And, when I first started out, I saw some very intense things. The average person goes to 10 to 15 weddings in their lives. That was two months for me. Have you become an expert at all in defusing wedding-day drama? I always say that the qualification of the job is you use of humor to break up the situations. And also to see the future a little bit and predict these situations before they happen and stop them. But that’s absolutely the reason I’m there. To be that bodyguard. How often do your clients want you to not disclose that you were hired for this event? Are people ever open about that at the wedding? Over 75 percent will have me either sign some sort of agreement, or ask me to keep it a secret, with a backstory and a fake name. But there’s a handful of people who are like, “I hired Jen and I’m cool with it!” I respect both sides. Do you come up with the backstory with the bride? Yeah, because it has to be something that nobody is able to challenge. I always say like, “Who’s going to be there? Is there anyone who’s going to not be here from this part of your life?” And they’re like, “Yeah, you can be a friend from this hobby that I had.” But there’s a lot of work in maintaining and researching the back story. I have to know street corners I used to live on. It’s never determined before we talk. Has anyone gotten suspicious of you at a wedding? Oh yeah, sometimes a bride has hired me when she has eight other bridesmaids. They’re like, “Who are you? I’ve never met you before? You went to that grad school with her?” But I’m really good at deflecting. I don’t think they suspect that she hired me, but they’re wondering why they haven’t met me before. I’m the absent friend, so I come off as the bad friend. Do you think anyone has just hired you for the fun of it? I think maybe, but they haven’t outwardly told me. I’ve had situations where I’m like, “Okay! What do you need, what do you need?” And they’re like, “Just sit here, just dance.” I think some people do hire me just for the energy I bring to things. So you’re getting married soon, which must be such a trip considering how you’ve spent so much of your professional life working on other people’s weddings. How does it feel to finally be at the center of attention at a wedding? It felt impossible. Right after getting engaged I had a panic attack. That’s why I started Finally The Bride, which is where I’m inviting strangers to plan my entire wedding. That’s helped me relieve the tension. I want my wedding to not look like anyone else’s, and I’ve seen hundreds. One thing this job has shown me is the different dimensions of love, and I think that helped me get to where I am today with the right person. People spend too long planning the right wedding without considering the right person. Will you be hiring bridesmaids for your wedding? Well, currently I’m letting people vote on if I should hire my own bridesmaids. I’m planning on having complete strangers as my bridesmaids, and I’m planning on opening it up to strangers who have hired me in the past to come celebrate. (Each chapter of Glantz’s wedding is being documented in an online book.) Is there any part of this job, where you’ve been a stranger entering other people’s weddings, that has affirmed a faith in the kindness of strangers? Strangers are the most important people we can connect with. Sit next to a stranger on a park bench and you’ll tell them things you don’t tell anyone else. The core of what Bridesmaid For Hire is, is that people want to open up to people, but they’re afraid if they do that to their friends and family they’ll be judged. When you let strangers into your life, even when you least expect it, it can be one of the most life-changing things you can do. Sign up for The Goods newsletter. Twice a week, we’ll send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters.

2018-10-31 20:36:16

Editors’ Note: November 14, 2018 An earlier version of this article included a conclusion from a study about ocean warming that is now in doubt. The researchers are working to revise their study because of errors detected in their calculations and it appears unlikely that they will be able to support their original conclusion that the oceans have warmed an average of 60 percent more per year than the current official estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The sections of the article dealing with that conclusion have been removed and the headline has been updated. How do you take the ocean’s temperature? The question might sound like the prelude to a children’s joke. But for climate scientists, the answer has serious consequences. Climate change is rapidly warming the world’s oceans, killing off aquatic organisms — like coral reefs and kelp forests — that anchor entire ecosystems. The warmer waters also cause sea levels to rise and make extreme weather events like hurricanes more destructive. In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global organization for climate data, released a major report predicting that some of the worst effects of climate change — including coastal flooding, food shortages and a mass die-off of coral reefs — could come to pass as soon as 2040 if human greenhouse gas emissions continue at current levels. The I.P.C.C. report showed that scientists may have been underestimating the severity of the world’s present climate trajectory. If scientists can more accurately measure the speed at which oceans are warming, they can better predict the future effects of climate change. A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, led by Laure Resplandy, a biogeochemical oceanographer at Princeton University, used a new approach that derived ocean temperatures by measuring the levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere. Those gases dissolve in ocean waters, but the amount the ocean can hold depends on its temperature. “As the ocean has been warming, it’s basically pushing out oxygen and carbon dioxide,” said David Nicholson, an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved in the study. As Dr. Resplandy put it: “If you leave a Coke outside in the sun, it’s going to warm and it’s going to lose the gas. It’s a little bit the same idea.” Scientists normally measure ocean temperatures using thermometers, but stitching together a global temperature record requires thermometers around the globe. Global temperature records were spotty before 2007, when an international consortium began a program, known as Argo, creating an international network of ocean-temperature-measuring instruments. But a group from Scripps Institution of Oceanography had been taking careful measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1991, for unrelated reasons. Dr. Resplandy and her team used that data set for this study. Dr. Nicholson said the study was an example of how collecting data now can have unexpected benefits later. “It kind of supports the importance of collecting these long-term time series even if it isn’t apparent at the start what the outcome will be,” he said. This year is on track to be the third consecutive hottest year on record. Where does that heat go? The oceans, mostly. There are some caveats. This is a novel approach, and it is unclear if it will hold up to further scrutiny. Kevin E. Trenberth, a senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, noted that the methodology works best over long periods of time but does not detail what happens year to year. Dr. Resplandy said her work did not upend the I.P.C.C. report’s warnings that humanity has only a couple of decades to ward off some of climate change’s most catastrophic effects. “It doesn’t change the results,” she said. “What it does is that it makes it harder to get there.” For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

2017-06-27 00:00:00

COPENHAGEN/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Wind farm operators are betting on a new generation of colossal turbines, which will dwarf many skyscrapers, as they seek to remain profitable after European countries phase out subsidies that have defined the green industry since the 1990s. The world’s three leading offshore wind operators - DONG Energy, EnBW and Vattenfall - all told Reuters they were looking to these megaturbines to help adapt to the upcoming reality with dwindling government handouts. According to interviews with turbine makers and engineers, at least one manufacturer - Siemens Gamesa - will have built a prototype megaturbine by next year and the first farms could be up and running in the first half of the next decade. These massive machines will each stand 300 meters tall – almost as high as London's Shard, western Europe's tallest building - with 200-metre rotor spans that will stretch the length of two football fields. The wind power sector is at a critical juncture as the subsidies that have cradled it since its inception in the early 1990s, and underpinned its business model, disappear as politicians enact a long-planned push to make the industry more commercially viable and able to compete with other energy sources. The countries that form the hub of the European offshore wind industry - Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain - are looking to gradually phase out the handouts over the next decade. This will end a crucial source of revenue for operators; in tenders concluded as recently as 2014, subsidies still accounted for around half of European wind projects’ income. With the writing on the wall, DONG and EnBW submitted bids with no subsidies factored in at a tender in April for a German project planned for 2024. The auction represented an industry milestone, the first with zero-subsidy bids, but raised the burning question of how operators will be able to make money and survive while offering a commercially attractive alternative to coal and nuclear. The answer, according to the companies, are the megaturbines, which would sweep a far bigger area and harness more wind, cutting costs per megawatt. They will each generate between 10 and 15 megawatts (MW) of power - a considerable leap from the largest turbines currently in operation, made by MHI Vestas, which are 195 meters tall and generate 8 MW. The megaturbines are no sure bet for the companies’ bottom lines, however. There are challenges on the technical front to create monumentally tall towers and light, slender blades that can withstand the strain of gale-force winds. Economically, there are also doubts among some industry experts about whether zero-subsidy wind projects can make money, even with the increased efficiency delivered by megaturbines. They say deeper savings must be made by operators across their businesses and electricity prices must also rise significantly to bring profitability. Michael Guldbrandtsen, offshore wind consultant at MAKE, said there were financial and technical risks associated with megaturbines, but that operators had little choice but to invest in a technology needed to make zero-subsidy projects viable. “Without a significant increase in the size of turbines it would not be possible to ensure a reasonable return,” he added. Operators are nonetheless banking on the new technology. Michael Simmelsgaard, head of offshore business at Swedish utility Vattenfall, said the industry would cross the 10 MW turbine threshold “faster than many expect now”, without being more specific. A 10 W turbine could power about 9,000 homes. “We will definitely see these big turbines,” he added. DONG Energy’s wind business, Samuel Leupold, laid out more ambitious plans: “We believe we can utilize (turbines) in the range of 13 to 15 megawatts,” he said on the sidelines of an offshore wind conference in London this month - the first time an industry executive has given such a high figure. Previously, companies have only spoken about turbines in the region of 10W. EnBW also said it was turning to megaturbines. “Size is an important driver of efficiency,” said Dirk Guesewell, its head of generation portfolio development. “Bigger rotors mean fewer turbines and foundations are needed to achieve the same capacity.” German turbine maker Senvion said it was developing megaturbines of over 10 MW. While the machines are still in the design stage, it said it was already offering them for future use to wind farm operators. “We envisage that the installations of those wind farms will take place in the first half of the next decade,” head of Senvion’s Global Offshore business, Cornelius Druecker, told Reuters without saying how close the firm was to a prototype. An independent engineer working with Siemens Gamesa, who asked not to be named as they are authorized to speak publicly, said the German company will have built a prototype megaturbine by next year. Another engineer, who works with several big turbine makers, said designs had almost been completed across the sector and the process of producing prototypes was about to start.  Siemens Gamesa declined to comment. The biggest technical hurdle involves increasing the length of the turbine blades without putting too much strain on the structure which is built on a platform fastened to the seabed. With spans of around 200 meters, the blades will be about 50 meters longer than those of the most powerful turbines now in operation. As they are constantly exposed to different levels of wind, their construction, which requires adhesives that join different layers of carbon or glass-fiber to dry at exactly the right temperatures, is extremely complex. Denmark’s state research institute DTU Wind Energy, which has propelled much of the innovation in wind power, is working on keeping down the weight of these super-long blades by bumping up the carbon fiber content. They have designed blade features similar to the flaps on aeroplane wings to control and reduce load variations so turbulence does not break the blades. “Most people understand it is complicated to make calculations on an airplane or a helicopter, but turbines are at least as complicated and it is the same methods we use,” said Flemming Rasmussen, the institute’s head of aerodynamic design. When mass production begins, new factories will be needed with enough space for the blades. No operator is prepared to publicly disclose the calculations and projections that underpins its strategy, citing commercial sensitivity. Even with megaturbines in place, the operators would also need other things to go their way to turn a profit without state subsidies - crucially, electricity prices must rise to a level where profitability outstrips investment costs. Bernstein researchers calculated that, at their current power price forecast, operators would need to reduce their capital expenditure (capex) by around 60 percent for zero-subsidy projects to break even. Increasing turbine sizes from 7 MW to 14 MW would reduce capex by around 40 percent, they added. The researchers expect a 5-6 euros a megawatt hour (MWh) rise from current power market prices of 30 euros/MWh by 2023. “Cost reductions and power prices will have to be consistently much higher than our predictions for the subsidy free projects to break even,” they said. Reporting by Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen and Vera Eckert in Frankfurt; Additional reporting by Karolin Schaps, Susanna Twidale and Nina Chestney in London, and Alissa de Carbonnel in Brussels; Editing by Tom Pfeiffer and Pravin Char

2018-05-10

Apple is reportedly working with Goldman Sachs to launch a new joint credit card under the Apple Pay brand. The card could launch as soon as early 2019, The Wall Street Journal reports, with Apple replacing its current rewards-card partnership with Barclays. The partnership will cover other services such as Goldman offering in-store loans to Apple customers buying iPhones and other products, according to the Journal, which reported that both companies are still working out details on terms for possible perks. The move could help Apple expand its business model as it focuses more on Apple Pay, while sales of its flagship products, like the iPhone, slow. Such an effort would help bolster Apple’s efforts in the space as it faces increased competition from established firms like PayPal and rapidly expanding upstarts like Square. A partnership could also help Goldman Sachs get a better hold on the consumer banking matter, something it has sought to do. View the discussion thread. The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 fax The contents of this site are ©2019 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

2016-04-18 00:00:00

April 18 (Reuters) - AK BARS Bank : * FY 2015 net interest income 1.21 billion roubles ($18.22 million) versus 7.52 billion roubles year ago * FY 2015 loss for the period 2.66 billion roubles versus loss of 1.11 billion roubles year ago * FY 2015 provision for loan impairment 14.73 billion roubles versus 2.04 billion roubles year ago * FY 2015 net fee and commission income 1.97 billion roubles versus 1.66 billion roubles year ago * Says core capital adequacy ratio as at Dec. 31, 2015 of 7.30 pct versus 7.27 pct as at Dec. 31, 2014 Source text: bit.ly/1Wb7PAl Further company coverage: ($1 = 66.3957 roubles) (Gdynia Newsroom)

2019-01-26 14:30:03

Three (provisional) reasons not to put the president on trial. Opinion Columnist You could argue that the month of January has very modestly raised the odds that Donald Trump will not finish his term as president. First, the government shutdown has demonstrated that Trump’s own incompetence suffices to cost him support in the polls and in the Senate — an indication that a larger crumbling of his political firewall might be possible. Second, the indictment of Roger Stone, based on his lies to Congress about outreach to WikiLeaks, keeps open the possibility of future revelations of conspiracy implicating Trump himself. Finally, there has been a burst of media interest in impeachment — an Atlantic cover story by Yoni Appelbaum prodding Democrats to take the plunge, and a more cautious essay by my colleague David Leonhardt putting the option on the table. [Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.] I’m open to these arguments; indeed, I have to be, since I’m on the record urging this president’s removal from office using the unusual remedy of the 25th Amendment. But there are several difficulties with the current briefs for impeachment, which suffice for now to keep a Pence presidency out of reach. The first is the gulf between the democracy-subverting powers that the briefs ascribe to Trump and the actual extent of his influence. In Appelbaum’s essay, the president is charged with nothing less than having “trampled” on “the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.” But many of his examples feature Trump failing to actually trample anything. He “did his best” to enact a Muslim travel ban (the actual ban was limited and upheld by the Supreme Court), he has “called for” the firing of political enemies (with little discernible result), he has made “efforts” to impede the Mueller investigation (which continues apace), and so on down the list of outrages that exist primarily on his Twitter feed. Much of the case for “trampling,” then, is a case against Trump’s rhetoric. And one can acknowledge that rhetoric’s evils while doubting that the ranting of a president so hemmed in, unpopular and weak is meaningfully threatening the Constitution. Especially because of the second problem with the case for impeachment, which might be summed up in a line from a poem that Trump often quoted in 2016: You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in. Meaning, in this case, that little about his rhetorical excess, his penchant for lies and insults or the seaminess of his courtiers was hidden from voters on the campaign trail in 2016, in an election that by the Constitution’s standards Trump legitimately won. The electorate’s foreknowledge of a politician’s sleaziness doesn't preclude impeachment. But it means that there is, at least, a quantum of sleaze that the president's supporters voted to accept. And the closer we get to a new election — including another primary campaign — the stronger the case for asking voters to retract that endorsement, instead of pre-empting their judgment from on high. The rebuttal here is that the danger of keeping Trump in office is too great — a point with which I sympathize, because I fear Trump’s incapacity in an unlooked-for crisis. But I’m more doubtful about the policy dangers that are supposedly evident right now. Appelbaum, for instance, analogizes Trump’s race-baiting to Andrew Johnson’s efforts to impede Reconstruction in the late-1860s South. But when he was impeached, Johnson was literally using his veto to abet the possible restoration of white supremacy. Whereas Trump is conspicuously losing a fight over some modest border fencing, and his last race-inflected policy move was … a criminal justice reform supported by many African-Americans. The president may be a bigot, but the policy stakes do not remotely resemble 1868. Then there are the geopolitical risks of Trump’s alleged Russian loyalties. After the Stone arrest, Appelbaum’s Atlantic colleague David Frum deemed these too severe to wait even for Robert Mueller’s verdict: “But now — now! — the country is in danger.” But in the absence of Mueller-stamped evidence, what we have to prove that peril is Trump’s actual foreign policy, which is erratic but frequently quite unfriendly to Moscow — with the administration’s effort to subvert the Russian-aligned Maduro regime in Venezuela just this week’s example. Which makes it entirely reasonable to wait to see whether Mueller vindicates the various uncorroborated scoops about a conspiracy hatched in Prague or the Ecuadorean Embassy, rather than trying to impeach Trump for, say, his private griping about NATO. At the end of my invoke-the-25th-Amendment column I wrote, “There will be time to return again to world-weariness and cynicism as this agony drags on.” That was month four of this presidency; as we approach month 25 I suppose I have become that world-weary cynic. But like all cynics I prefer to call it realism. If you want Trump gone, the existing case for impeachment will not do it. You must either prove him — not Stone or some other hanger-on, but him — guilty of conspiracy, or accept that he will depart only when he is beaten at the polls. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram, join the Facebook political discussion group, Voting While Female.

2019-02-04

Washington (CNN)The US and South Korea have reached a preliminary agreement on the cost of keeping nearly 30,000 troops in South Korea, two State Department officials said, alleviating fears among President Donald Trump's advisers that he could move to withdraw US troops during his upcoming summit with North Korea's leader. Under the revised Special Measures Agreement, South Korea would boost its financial contribution to nearly $1 billion, according to a State Department official and South Korean media. That's an increase on the about $800 million South Korea had been paying per year during the previous five-year commitment. The most recent agreement lapsed at the end of last year. Since then, Trump had been pressuring South Korea to double its financial support to $1.6 billion, making some of his own administration officials worry that the President might offer to withdraw US forces from South Korea during his second summit with Kim Jong Un later this month. "Both sides are committed to working out remaining technical issues as quickly as possible," a State Department official said in a statement. "The United States appreciates the considerable resources the ROK provides to support the Alliance, including its contribution towards the cost of maintaining the presence of US forces in Korea through the Special Measures Agreement." Steve Biegun, the US special representative on North Korea, said last week there have been no discussions with North Korea about a withdrawal of US troops in South Korea. "We are not involved in any diplomatic discussion -- full stop -- that would suggest this tradeoff. It has never been discussed," he said last week. Yet Biegun also said the Trump administration is "prepared to discuss many actions that could help build trust" between North Korea and the US. The State Department said Biegun will travel to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang Wednesday to prepare for the upcoming second summit. A one year agreement The revised Special Measures Agreement is not be a long term fix: it is only a one year agreement, with the possibility for a one year extension, according to the State Department source. The previous agreements had been for five years. A US official familiar with the negotiations told CNN that South Korea proposed the dollar figure and the US agreed to it only for a year. This means American and South Koreans officials will have to come back to the negotiating table on this same topic again later this year. Another round of talks will allow the Trump administration to demand more money, once again. The agreement could also still get nixed by Trump. It is unclear if the president has personally signed off on what his top negotiators have agreed to. The National Security Council did not respond when asked if Trump has signed off on the current agreement. The preliminary agreement relieved considerable anxiety in Washington and Seoul, but experts said the one-year span of the new deal could still tempt Trump to put the future of US forces in South Korea into play during his meeting with Kim. They pointed in particular to Trump's surprise decision during his first summit with the North Korean dictator to suspend US-South Korea military exercises, unbeknownst to his advisers. "The Koreans have spent some money to batten down the hatches before this summit," said Mike Green, the former director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. "But it doesn't mean (Trump) won't say something again about US Forces Korea because his statements in Singapore were completely unscripted and surprising to his own team." If the agreement goes through, Green said it would reduce the "danger" of Trump proposing a withdrawal of US forces during his meeting with Kim. Trump has long publicly lamented the cost of stationing US troops around the world and has privately pressed his advisers about the possibility of withdrawing US forces from the country. Last May, The New York Times reported Trump ordered the Pentagon to bring him options on reducing the US troop presence in South Korea. But Trump insisted in an interview that aired Sunday on CBS that he has "no plans" to withdraw US troops from South Korea and claimed to have "never even discussed removing them," but said "maybe someday" he would withdraw US forces from the country. "I mean, who knows. But, you know, it's very expensive to keep troops there," Trump said, even though US military officials have said it is cheaper to house those troops in South Korea than in the US. It's comments like those that also heightened anxiety on Capitol Hill, prompting lawmakers last year to insert a provision into the National Defense Authorization Act disallowing the President to reduce the troop figure in South Korea below 22,000 without certification from the defense secretary. Additional legislation is currently pending that would further limit the President's ability to withdraw troops. Both would likely be challenged on constitutional grounds should Trump make such a move. His top national security advisers have repeatedly urged him against doing so and stressed the benefit of having US military bases in the region. Under pressure Trump is under pressure to demonstrate progress in his diplomatic opening with Pyongyang. Despite saying after his first meeting with Kim that the nuclear threat from North Korea had been eliminated, the regime is continuing to develop its nuclear program. The hermit kingdom has insisted any steps to roll back the program be accompanied by parallel measures, such as sanctions relief. It is the economic benefits of denuclearization that Trump sought to emphasize during his last summit with Kim, held in June in Singapore. But with the next summit nearing, some in the administration worried Trump could raise the future of US troops in South Korea as another incentive to prod Kim along. As the Special Measures Agreement deadline approached late last year, US and South Korean officials were poised to reach an agreement that would have likely increased South Korea's financial commitment, but kept it under $1 billion. Over the course of the negotiations, which began in early spring, Trump was not regularly updated in detail, and US officials hoped to wrap up talks and then sell the agreement to Trump as a win. But the plan was inadvertently disrupted by South Korean President Moon Jae-in. During a conversation late last year, as Trump was once again lamenting what he saw as an insufficient financial commitment from South Korea, Moon reassured Trump that negotiations were underway and that he believed they were close to a new cost-sharing agreement, a US official and source briefed on the matter told CNN. The revelation prompted Trump to up the ante, telling his aides that US negotiators should demand double the current South Korean financial commitment, the sources said. The demand stalled negotiations between the two sides for weeks until the White House approved South Korea's latest offer for just under $1 billion over the weekend. It was not immediately clear what prompted Trump to accept the latest offer, which fell short of the $1 billion threshold most officials involved believed would need to be met in order for Trump to accept. Moon has come under political pressure from members of his left-leaning party to limit South Korea spending on US troops. He, along with other senior members of the party, are veterans of a student democracy movement in the 1980s that came to view the US military presence skeptically. Some senior members of Moon's government have openly questioned whether US troops would need to remain in South Korea if a peace treaty is signed ending the Korean War, one of the possible outcomes of Trump's North Korean diplomacy. Troop withdrawals elsewhere While the President's advisers were breathing a sigh of relief in light of the preliminary agreement, Trump had given them more reasons to worry in recent weeks. His recent decisions to begin the withdrawal of US forces from Syria and Afghanistan heightened fears among the President's advisers that he could be inching toward a similar move in South Korea, multiple sources familiar with the matter said. Trump is also now surrounded by fewer top advisers who served as bulwarks against some of his impulses, such as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House chief of staff John Kelly, who left the administration in December. Mattis resigned in part over Trump's decision to withdraw US forces from Syria. Others inside Trump's administration, such as Joint Chiefs Chairman Joseph Dunford and national security adviser John Bolton, are likely to argue against withdrawing US troops from South Korea, one official said. But as with his Syria decision, Trump has surprised aides with abrupt decisions. The concern among Trump administration officials, sources said, has been that Trump could put it on the table during one-on-one discussions with Kim, just as he emerged from his first summit with Kim and announced he was suspending US-South Korean joint military exercises. That decision caught Mattis by surprise. It also came without advance warning to Seoul. CNN's Ryan Browne contributed to this report. This story has been updated.

2017-10-02

The hundredth anniversary of the death of Auguste Rodin prompts “Rodin at the Met,” a show of the Metropolitan Museum’s considerable holdings in works by the artist. But no occasion is really needed. Rodin is always with us, the greatest sculptor of the nearly four centuries since Gian Lorenzo Bernini perfected and exalted the Baroque. Matter made flesh and returned to matter, with clay cast in bronze: Rodin. (There are carvings in the show, too, but made by assistants whom he directed. He couldn’t feel stone.) You know he’s great even when you’re not in a mood for him. Are “The Thinker” and “The Kiss” kind of corny? I’ve felt that. Does the grandiosity of “Monument to Balzac” (for which there is a small study in the show) overbear? Sure. There’s a stubborn tinge of vulgarity about Rodin, inseparable from his strength. But roll your eyes as you may, your gaze is going to stop, again, and widen at the sight of one or another work of his. What does it is a touch that thinks. He—or his hand, as his mind’s executive—wrenched figurative sculpture from millennia of tradition and sent it tumbling into modernity. A team of Met curators led by Denise Allen has installed about fifty bronzes, plasters, terra-cottas, and carvings by Rodin, along with works by related artists, in the grand foyer of the museum’s galleries of nineteenth-century painting and filled one room with a chronological survey of his drawings. The ensemble tells a number of stories, depending on how you proceed and where you focus. I took it randomly, as a picaresque culminating in a visit to the museum’s ground-floor sculpture court. There, permanently on view, is a full-sized cast of Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais” (1889), to my mind the most stunning of modern monuments. It depicts six wealthy men who, in 1347, volunteered to be executed by a besieging English force as a price for mercy to their fellow-citizens. Milling at odd angles to one another on uneven ground, naked beneath robes or draped sheets, the burghers are heroes whose shared moment of heroism—stepping forth for sacrifice—is over. Each man is now terribly alone. One appears resigned, one writhes in despair, and another, tasked with surrendering the key to the city, attempts defiance while palpably trembling on the verge of tears. The youngest pleads with an older one who turns angrily away; but another, forgetting himself, offers comfort. Enlarged hands and feet emphasize the bodies to counterbalance the faces. Light pools and, as you move, flows on the black patina. Rodin wanted the monument placed at ground level in Calais, but the city’s officials weren’t ready for so radical an overture to common humanity. They hoisted the humble and humbling burghers onto a ceremonious pedestal. (It’s too bad, but understandable, that the Met must protect the work by installing it on a low plinth.) Rodin was a child of the working class. (His father was a police clerk.) I think that this explains a lot about him—and about his reception, to this day—as it does about his close friend Pierre-Auguste Renoir (the son of a tailor). Both men came to art by way of tradecraft: architectural ornament in Rodin’s case, decoration of ceramics in Renoir’s. Their training in commercial aesthetics, aimed to please, distinguished them from their more privileged and urbane Impressionist and Post-Impressionist contemporaries. They loved flesh, which Rodin sensualized and Renoir prettified, both shamelessly. Rodin had no avant-gardist desire to reject academic convention, which, nonetheless, rejected him. He was refused, three times, admittance to the École des Beaux-Arts, probably because of his early fondness for eighteenth-century rococo—too old-fashioned for the academy’s reigning neoclassicists. He was doomed to independence. He worked as a craftsman, in Belgium, while living with Rose Beuret, a seamstress. (They had a son in 1866 and, despite Rodin’s many infidelities, married in 1917, the last year of both their lives.) On a trip to Italy, in 1875, works by Michelangelo and Donatello set Rodin’s imagination afire. He was ready for Paris. Rodin’s breakthrough work, “The Age of Bronze” (modelled in 1876), made when he was thirty-six, is beautiful: a nude youth, life-sized, rests his weight on one leg, lifts his face with eyes closed, clutches the top of his head with one hand, and half raises the other, clenched as if grasping something. (The model had held a staff to keep his arm up.) When the enigmatic work was first shown, in 1877, Rodin titled it “The Conquered Man,” to elegize his nation’s recent defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. But no one was eager to be reminded of that. In addition, the figure’s extreme naturalism, which caused an immediate public sensation, gave rise to rumors that Rodin hadn’t sculpted it but had cast it from an actual body. Stung on both counts, he subsequently steered clear of contemporary political references and made his figures either larger or smaller than life. Meanwhile, his initial notoriety morphed, by quick stages, into international fame, crowned by the triumph of a show of his work at the 1900 Paris world’s fair, the Universal Exposition. In 1880, Rodin was commissioned to design the portal for a museum of decorative art in Paris. The museum was never built, and Rodin’s Dante-inspired, megalomaniacal melee of a hundred and eighty figures, “The Gates of Hell,” was still unfinished when finally cast after his death. It spawned many of his touchstone sculptures: constituent figures, cast in varying sizes. “The Thinker,” a presiding presence in “The Gates,” ponders damned souls, apparently, while displaying a set of muscles that might as easily juggle them. But Rodin wasn’t much for musculature generally. The physical organ that most galvanized him was the skin, not just as the outside limit of the body but as the inner limit of the outer world. It is what excites—and stops—his hand. The effect is timelessly startling. Abandoning the refinement of “The Age of Bronze,” it shrugs off beauty, which requires a degree of detachment. Rodin didn’t behold his subjects or present them for admiration. He had at them, and they have at us. The kinetic appeal of Rodin’s most original works is complicated by something like wit, if wit can be said to impart power. A primary case in point is “The Walking Man” (modelled before 1900), for which he plunked the rough torso of one uncompleted sculpture onto the fully articulated legs of another. The legs appear to stride, with momentum conveyed by a twist at the hips. But they can’t do it. Both feet are flat on the ground. Try assuming the posture yourself, as I did at the Met. (People will stare. So what?) Your rear foot feels stuck in something. Walking becomes lurching. The effect is simple, but it electrifies as the sign of an intelligence that comprehends, and can gainfully subvert, the fictive language of figuration in sculpture. You get, in a flash, that Rodin could have played no end of Picasso-like games with givens of the medium, had he been more of a sophisticate. As it is, Rodin’s reputation was long qualified, in the twentieth century, by an imputation of laggard taste, like that of the painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, several of whose suavely executed Arcadian scenes complement the show. Did Rodin drag Romantic and Symbolist longueurs and boilerplate mythology into the stern light of modernity? Yes. He could title even an inventive, violently erotic figure—headless, with spread legs—“Iris, Messenger of the Gods” (modelled in 1890). But I would be for forgiving him that, if it needed forgiveness. His retention of old tropes is no more inherently sentimental than the myth of progress that led some modernists to snoot him. Indeed, his ready access to the past in art, combined with the absolute audacity of his stylings, recommends him to a moment—our own—that is disillusioned with formal development while hungering for authenticity. If you give Rodin the chance, he will show you possibilities of transcendence that aren’t only close at hand but identical with it. ♦ 6 “The Burghers of Calais,” by Auguste Rodin, modelled 1884-95 and cast in 1985. Photograph courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art 6 “The Age of Bronze,” by Auguste Rodin, modelled 1876 and cast circa 1906. Photograph courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art 6 “The Walking Man” (“L’Homme Qui Marche”), by Auguste Rodin, modelled before 1900 and cast before 1914. Photograph courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art 6 “Origin of the Greek Vase,” by Auguste Rodin, from 1900 to 1910. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art 6 “The Embrace,” by Auguste Rodin, from 1900 to 1910. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art Full-screen 1 of 5 5 “The Burghers of Calais,” by Auguste Rodin, modelled 1884-95 and cast in 1985. Photograph courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

2020-02-08 00:00:00

Joe Biden was more combative and forceful in Friday night’s Democratic debate than he has been for much of the last year, as he tries to keep his campaign alive after a tough week in Iowa and days away from New Hampshire, where other candidates have distinct advantages in Tuesday’s primary. “Bernie's labeled himself, not me, a democratic socialist. I think that's the label that the president's going to lay on everyone running with Bernie if he's a nominee,” he said on the debate stage after moderator George Stephanopoulos asked him if the two leaders out of Iowa, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, are "too big a risk for Democrats." “Mayor Buttigieg is a great guy and a real patriot. He's a mayor of a small city who has done some good things, but has not demonstrated he has the ability to ⁠— and we'll soon find out ⁠— to get a broad scope of support across the board, including African Americans and Latinos,” Biden continued. The message was loud and direct: Joe Biden, despite what you may have heard, is fighting. “Earlier this week, we took a gut punch,” Biden said in a fundraising email to supporters almost as soon as the debate ended, a line he first used at a campaign event in New Hampshire on Wednesday morning. “But I’ve never been more ready to fight, and anyone on that stage tonight who counted me out was dead wrong.” “He’s fighting," a senior Biden adviser told reporters on a conference call before the debate. "I think you saw that from him this week.” Biden’s schedule in New Hampshire this week, however, was noticeably sparser than Buttigieg’s — while the two other frontrunners, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, were called back to Washington in the middle of the week to tie up the impeachment process. Biden was out of New Hampshire on Thursday for meetings with advisers. On Friday night Biden amped up his attacks on competitors — something he started to do on the campaign trail in New Hampshire earlier this week, but laid out at more length during the debate — and continually emphasized his experience in the Senate and role in the Obama administration. After being questioned on his vote in favor of the 2003 Iraq war, Biden talked at length about his foreign policy record, centering his own role in a range of diplomacy initiatives including strengthening NATO, "along with the president of the United States, Barack Obama, as his partner." “I was part of the reason [for] putting that deal together with Iran. I was there. I was involved in that. I was also part of the deal putting together the Paris climate accord. I brought in the Chinese. I was part of that,” he said. “I've been part of every major initiative we've had relative to diplomacy. I have not argued for the placement of major numbers of US combat troops.“ The former vice president centered himself as a key part of the last several decades of American history, after Buttigieg repeated a criticism he’s used in recent days, about leaving “the politics of the past in the past.” “The politics of the past, I think, were not all that bad,” Biden said. “I wrote the Violence Against Women Act. I managed the $900 billion Recovery Act, which in fact put millions and millions of dollars into his city before he came and help save his city. I was able to pass a chemical weapons ban, arms control. And I was the first major leader holding public office to call for same-sex marriage. So I don’t know what about the past of Barack Obama and Joe Biden was so bad. What happened? What is it that he wants to do away with?” Biden continued. Biden’s refusal to disavow some legacies of the Obama administration and his own record have drawn criticism from immigration and civil rights activists, and other candidates — the mass deportations under Obama, which Biden has refused to explicitly apologize for when pushed, though he recently hinted at a Las Vegas campaign stop that he was opposed to the policy, and his opposition to busing as a means of encouraging desegregation of public schools, which he has tried to downplay. Biden was knocked off his stride after Monday’s Iowa caucus, where about the only certainty in the midst of the messy counting of votes was that he finished far behind the top two candidates, Buttigieg and Sanders, and significantly behind in votes for the third, Warren. A few days later, after acknowledging his disappointing performance, he criticized both candidates at the top. He cast Sanders, because he identifies as a democratic socialist, as a liability if he’s the Democratic nominee. And he accused Buttigieg of speaking dismissively of Obama when he blasts Biden as part of the failed old Washington ways. As hard as Biden advisers worked to lower expectations in the days before, and as much as they’ve said Biden’s campaign is built for a long race past South Carolina and Super Tuesday at the start of March, the weak Iowa showing rattled his allies. And he’s already working on expectations for next week. On Wednesday, two days after Iowa, Biden told a crowd in Somersworth, New Hampshire, “I’m counting on New Hampshire.” On Friday night, Biden seemed to walk that back again. ”It's a long race. I took a hit in Iowa and I'll probably take a hit here. Traditionally, Bernie won by 20 points last time. And usually it's the neighboring senators that do well,” he said. “We have to restore the soul of this country, bring back the middle class, and make sure we bring people together. And so it's a simple proposition. It doesn't matter whether it's this one or the next,” he said. “I've always viewed the first four encounters, two primaries and two caucuses, as the starting point.”

2018-04-21

(CNN)Swedish superstar DJ Avicii thrilled concertgoers with his catchy hits, flashing lights and soulful collaborations. But despite a life of jam-packed arenas and screaming fans, he constantly struggled with fame and health issues. So much so, two years before he died, he took a break from touring and the exhausting lifestyle that comes with it. In messages posted on social media, Avicii, whose real name is Tim Bergling, said stress, anxiety and illness were a factor in his decision. Avicii was one of the most successful touring DJs in the industry, working with artists such as Madonna and Chris Martin. He had a crossover pop hit in 2013 with "Wake Me Up," and was a big name in the electronic dance music genre known as EDM. Last live show In August 2016, he said goodbye to his fans in what he described as his last live show. The decision to retire from touring was tough, he said, but he needed to step away and pursue other interests. "Creating music is what makes me happy and I have gotten to know so many great people in my days of touring, seen so many amazing places and created endless of good memories," he posted on social media at the time. "The decision I made might seem odd to some but everyone is different and for me this was the right one." Partying and anxiety Avicii said his more than 800 shows had taken a toll on him, added to his anxiety and drawn him to a life of partying. He also had several health scares, including acute pancreatitis, which he blamed on excessive drinking. "Yeah I was drinking way too much, partying in general way too much," he said. "Then I got a pancreatitis attack [at 21], which is very rare. So that forced me to do a 180 and stop drinking." Fans left him supportive messages on Facebook after he stopped touring, with some expressing regret that they did not get a chance to see him live. He reassured them that he'll continue making music -- in the studio. And in August 2017, a year after his last tour date, he announced that he was releasing a new album. "Really excited to be back with music once again, it has been a long time since I released anything," he posted on social media. "My focus on this first EP of the album was to get a mix of new and old songs, some that fans have been asking about/waiting for mixed with brand new songs that they haven't heard before." 'Avicii: True Stories' The DJ had been open about his struggles. A documentary about his life, "Avicii: True Stories," highlighted some of his struggles with fame after his 2011 hit song, "Levels," followed by "Wake Me Up" two years later. "The year of 2015 should have been a peak for the producer, but behind the scenes, it was too much. Stress, anxiety and illness were eating him away," a synopsis of the documentary posted on his site says. Filmmaker Levan Tsikurishvili describes the documentary as a "cautionary tale that explores the taxing nature and intensity of fame" from the artist's perspective. "Everybody knows Avicii but very few people know Tim," Tsikurishvili said. " I think this documentary really shows Tim's struggle and strength of character. Being a worldwide superstar artist is not as easy as it looks on Instagram." Avicii, 28, was found dead Friday in Muscat, Oman. The cause of death has not been released. Fans and musicians mourn Heartfelt tributes poured in from fellow musicians and fans alike. "Devastating news about Avicii, a beautiful soul, passionate and extremely talented with so much more to do," fellow superstar DJ Calvin Harris tweeted. "My heart goes out to his family. God bless you Tim." Singer Wyclef Jean described him as "a little brother." "In my darkest hour, I went to Sweden and he was there for me and we found light in great conversation and in music," Jean tweeted. " He will be forever be missed. This pain I cannot describe." CNN's Lisa Respers France contributed to this report.

2016-04-04 00:00:00

April 4 (Reuters) - Vistula Group SA : * March 2016 revenue 39.7 million zlotys ($10.7 million), up 16.8 percent year on year * Prelim Q1 revenue 119.2 million zlotys, up 15.4 percent yoy Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage: ($1 = 3.7175 zlotys) (Gdynia Newsroom)

2018-03-20 11:47:08

Ruchir Sharma There was never much suspense about whether Vladimir Putin would win the election on Sunday, but there is at least some question about which Putin will show up for his fourth term as Russia’s president. It’s long forgotten now, but Mr. Putin was once a classic economic reformer. He took over as president in 2000, after a decade in which Russia was devastated by financial crisis, twice. With his country’s back against the wall, Mr. Putin in his early years pushed major economic reforms, including a simple flat tax and opening Russia to the world. His stated goal was to make Russia feel like any other European country. By the end of the decade, boosted by soaring oil prices, Russian per capita income had more than quintupled to over $11,000. Then, as so often happens to even the best reformers, success made Mr. Putin complacent if not arrogant. By 2010 Russia was a middle-income country, and to make the next step in development it needed to reduce its reliance on oil, which had provided $1.5 trillion in revenue over the previous decade. And it needed dynamic new private companies to replace the doddering state-owned oil and gas giants that still dominated the economy. Instead, the economic reformer of the early 2000s gave way to Putin the hyper-nationalist, stirring fears of a new Cold War. He is now widely seen as a geopolitical provocateur who has dispatched disguised soldiers to invade Ukraine and internet trolls to disrupt American and European elections, and who this month boasted of a new intercontinental missile capable of piercing Western air defenses “like a meteorite.” However, on the domestic economic front, a very different Putin has been at work: responsible and cautious to a fault, focused only on guaranteeing stability, controlling inflation rather than stimulating growth and insulating the economy from foreign pressures. Going forward, Mr. Putin’s legacy depends on which personality prevails: the genuine reformer of the last decade or the inward autocrat of this decade, aggressively provocative abroad and cautious to a fault at home. The current siege mentality has roots in the multiple financial crises Russia has suffered since the fall of Soviet Communism in 1989. Serial crises sent the value of the ruble into free fall, considerably decreasing real incomes and making it nearly impossible for the Kremlin to pay its foreign debts. When oil prices collapsed in 2014 and threatened to start this humiliating cycle all over, Mr. Putin’s government shifted its focus further inward. While other emerging economies fought the oil price collapse by either carrying out economic reforms to attract new foreign capital or trying to spend their way out of trouble and racking up more debts, Russia went the opposite direction. It restrained spending to shrink its deficit and pay down hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign debt. Instead of lowering interest rates to stimulate growth, it raised rates to choke off inflation. To a large extent, these Fortress Russia policies worked. Government debt is just 15 percent of gross domestic product, and the Kremlin is now less vulnerable to foreign interest payments than any emerging world government save Thailand’s. Inflation has plummeted to below 3 percent from 13 percent in 2015 — so low by Russian historical standards that many people have a hard time believing it won’t come roaring back. More remarkably, Russia has developed a new policy to prevent the ruble from swinging wildly with oil prices — as most oil currencies do — and that has worked too. The ministry of finance now buys foreign currency to prevent the ruble from increasing in value when oil prices rise above a set target and sells when oil falls below that target. For the past 18 months, the ruble has held relatively steady against the dollar. Caution has a cost, alas. Belt tightening in the face of an economic downturn made the recession last through 2016 and limited the recovery in 2017, when economic growth rebounded weakly to just 1.5 percent. Mr. Putin will be hard pressed to restore Russia as a great power — his avowed goal — if the economy grows at a pace that invites comparisons with the Brezhnev era of stagnation. Russia is aging fast. The working-age population is shrinking at a pace of more than 1 percent a year, and with fewer people entering the work force, the only way to generate faster growth is to increase output per worker, which is now almost stagnant. To increase productivity, Mr. Putin would need to reform an economy that still exports mainly oil, wheat and guns, and relies on a unique mix of mom-and-pop businesses and huge state-run companies, much as it did in the Soviet era. More than any other large emerging economy, Russia has a deficit of small- and medium-size companies — the sector that is often the hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as productivity and job growth. For all its foreign adventures, Mr. Putin’s Russia has dispatched not even one company capable of disrupting global markets. Russia has no companies in the top 100 global brands, compared with 22 from China and 46 from the United States. The Moscow stock exchange lists not one global manufacturer. Russia punches well below its weight in commercial competition in part because its brand of state capitalism fosters so little competition at home: As Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank, has pointed out, the three most valuable companies in Russia today were also the three most valuable 10 years ago. Over the same period, the United States and China have seen dramatic churn in their top companies. Moreover, the failure to diversify the economy away from hydrocarbons means Russian livelihoods still swing with oil prices. There is some reason to believe that Russia’s stagnant economy will be enough to push Mr. Putin back onto the economic reform path. In the same speech this month, when he unveiled his “meteorite” of a missile, Mr. Putin said all the right things about the economy, apparently at the behest of his few reform-minded advisers. He spoke of the need to boost growth in gross domestic product and productivity, trim the state’s role in the economy, diversify beyond oil and encourage more small- and medium-size enterprises. Unfortunately Mr. Putin’s actions in recent years, as opposed to his recent speech, suggest no change in his essentially feudal view of capitalism or his unwillingness to ease state control over the economy, which he has embraced since his university days. His Ph.D. thesis extolled state support for large conglomerates that could “compete as equals” with Western multinationals. Mr. Putin’s defensive economic mind-set also reflects the desire of the voters who just rubber-stamped his return to power. In a 2015 survey, in which the Levada Center, an independent pollster, asked what issues matter most, the largest share of Russians said “stabilization of the political and economic situation.” Next came “social protection,” job security and “on-time payment of wages and pensions.” Not even 10 percent said “continuation of reform,” encouraging entrepreneurship or any of the bolder moves Russia needs to stir a dormant economy out of its slumber. The poll is three years old, but there is little evidence that Russian attitudes have changed. To the extent Russians want “decisive change,” they want more protection from global competition and inflation, and are vehemently opposed to any cuts in their bloated pension benefits. Even among the Moscow business elite, the buzz before the election was not about fixing the economy. It was about how Washington’s recent sanctions on Russia for election interference only further increases the need to reduce Russia’s vulnerability to global pressures. So which side of Mr. Putin will we see in his fourth term? Clearly the best outcome for Russia would be a return of the early Putin, an aggressive reformer keen on making Russia a genuine economic power. There are pressures pushing him in that direction. But the weight of evidence suggests that we’ll see more of the recent Putin, a defensive economic manager at home and an aggressor abroad.

2019-11-05 00:00:00

The congressional investigation into possible presidential crimes related to the withholding of U.S. military assistance to Ukraine in exchange for political favors is a legitimate process with historic implications to the nation. Here are three reasons why the Ukraine issue deserves the full attention of Americans. First, the ongoing situation in Ukraine has serious national security consequences as the U.S confronts the Putin regime’s offensive against Western democracies. Russian military aggression in Ukraine is but one element of Vladimir PutinVladimir Vladimirovich PutinWhy Americans should care about Ukraine FBI hand-slapping outweighs any lies by Michael Flynn Democrats feud over health care, Trump strategy in Iowa MORE’s current offensive. The Mueller Report exposed Putin’s use of corruption and a massive social media campaign to undermine democracy in the United States and European nations. That effort reached a peak in the 2016 U.S. election, but it continues and will increase in the national election in 2020. Another element of Putin’s offensive is to fill the leadership vacuum in the Middle East created by the American military withdrawal from Kurdish-controlled border regions of Syria. The Russian military invasion against Ukraine is also a component of Putin’s aggressive strategy. Ukraine historically has sought independence from Moscow, although Russia traditionally has considered Ukraine to be an integral part of Russia. Ukraine, like others in the Soviet empire, declared independence when the Soviet system collapsed and is now an internationally recognized nation within its borders. In 2014, Russia seized the Crimea region of Ukraine and began a military conflict in eastern Ukraine where Russia continues to confront Ukrainian forces today. Western democracies in the U.S., Canada and Europe cannot allow Russia to invade a sovereign nation in Europe without serious penalties. Economic sanctions are not enough. Giving Ukraine the means to adequately defend itself against Russian aggression is essential to confronting Putin’s offensive. The Obama administration failed to provide lethal military assistance during its term. That was a mistake, but President TrumpDonald John TrumpBiden allies see boost in Tuesday's election results Sanders vows to end Trump's policies as he unveils immigration proposal Republicans warn election results are 'wake-up call' for Trump MORE reportedly withheld $400 million in appropriated military assistance to Ukraine — including lethal aid — as leverage to get political dirt on his most likely and formidable American political opponent. Political manipulation for domestic advantage or any reduction of serious U.S. and European consequences for Russian military aggression in Ukraine only encourages Putin’s aggressive instincts — and raises doubts in Eastern Europe and elsewhere about the American commitment to defend democracies around the world. Further, if Trump withheld desperately needed U.S. military aid to Ukraine to promote his 2020 political campaign, the president of the United States has placed his personal political aspirations above the national security interests of the United States. Second, allegations related to Ukraine represent the potential precedent for foreign interests to determine the legitimacy of U.S. elections, and therefore, the future of American democracy.  Official transcripts, a whistleblower report, and congressional testimony by career professionals in government implicate President Trump, his personal attorney, a U.S. ambassador, a special envoy and others in an alleged bribery scheme to withhold appropriated taxpayer funds and equipment to pressure Ukraine’s government to provide Trump a personal political advantage in the 2020 presidential election. Federal law and regulations prohibit the following: Every career professional involved in foreign and national security policy knows that the use of official position for political gain is corruption and that it is improper and illegal to solicit or accept foreign assistance for domestic political purposes. That is why an increasing number of career professionals reported what they saw as potentially illegal and corrupt activity by the president and others accused of withholding essential military assistance to Ukraine to get political help in the upcoming U.S. election. The corruption of elections by U.S. officials or foreign interests is a lethal threat to constitutional democracy in this nation. If Donald Trump or future presidents and officials avoid accountability for the use of government influence and taxpayer funds to obtain help from foreign sources in U.S. elections, those elections will be compromised. Such actions will set a precedent for hostile foreign nations and special interests to corrupt American democracy in the future, and the American public will lose confidence in the American system of government. Third, ethical actions by career professionals in the civil service and the military who respect their oath to the constitution and the rule of law over personal political loyalty are critical to the defense of this country against government crime and corruption. So far, several career professionals have shown the courage to speak up inside government and publicly or to engage in legal whistleblower reporting when they saw potential wrongdoing in the president’s policy on Ukraine. The disgraceful campaign by the president and his loyalists on Fox television and in Congress to smear the loyalty and integrity of professional men and women in government and the military who have served this nation with honor and distinction for decades and who speak truth as they see it is outrageous. Their behavior brings to mind the statement that Army Legal Counsel Joseph Welsh made to Senator Joseph McCarthy during his Senate hearings: “…have you no sense of decency?” Without regard to what party is in power, Americans who want clean government and rule of law in the United States should value the courage of career professionals who officially raise concerns about corruption in government. The issues involving the threat to U.S. national security and the future of American democracy represented by Trump’s alleged actions in Ukraine are too critical to be ignored. Today, Americans are best served by a legal and ultimately public congressional investigation into the allegations. Once the testimony of the professionals and those associated with the issue is complete, Americans and their representatives in congress can decide if the evidence constitutes crimes and misdemeanors sufficient to justify the constitutional impeachment of Donald J. Trump. James W. Pardew is a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria and career Army intelligence officer. He has served as deputy assistant secretary-general of NATO and is the author of "Peacemakers: American Leadership and the End of Genocide in the Balkans." View the discussion thread. The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 fax The contents of this site are ©2019 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

2018-05-17

BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - European countries are ignoring evidence of Russian interference in their politics and the destabilizing effect on the region of policies that will make Europe more reliant on Russian energy, Slovakia’s President Andrej Kiska said on Thursday. Kiska, who is not a member of any political party, is a pro-Western voice in NATO and euro zone member Slovakia but has limited executive powers. He said this week he would not seek reelection next year. Former prime minister Robert Fico, who was replaced in March by his deputy Peter Pellegrini of the same leftist Smer party that dominates the government, has often spoken against sanctions imposed by the European Union over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. “We openly speak about Russian spies active in our countries. And many politicians, my country included, turn a blind eye thereto,” Kiska told the Globsec security conference in Bratislava. “We face propaganda and hoaxes attacking our societies, and we do not search for its originators. Because we already know,” he added. Unlike neighboring Poland and Hungary, Slovakia has avoided clashing with Brussels over the rule of law, but was the only central European country not to expel any Russian diplomats over the March poisoning of a Russian former double agent in Britain. Britain says Russia poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with a military-grade nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ‘80s. Moscow denies any involvement in the attack, which sparked the biggest Western expulsion of Russian diplomats since the height of the Cold War. Russia has also denied accusations of meddling in the U.S. and French presidential elections and launching cyber attacks against the West. Speaking at a conference also attended by Russia’s United Nations envoy Vassily Nebenzia, Kiska described the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, preparatory works for which are set to begin off the German coast, as selfish and harmful to EU stability. An initiative of Russia’s Gazprom and five European companies, and with German backing, the gas pipeline on the Baltic seabed will connect Russia directly with Germany, bypassing eastern Europe and limiting flows via Ukraine. It will double Russia’s gas export capacity to Germany but cost Ukraine valuable revenues while increasing EU reliance on Russian gas. The project would also limit flows through Slovakia. “This project has serious political consequences, it is an example of purely selfish economic interests at the expense of stability and prosperity of our immediate neighborhood,” the Slovak president added. “We send a signal to Russia about how short-sighted we are in our policies.” Kiska called Russia’s involvement in Syria “shameful” and called for resolute collective action to counter “undemocratic regimes pretending to be peacemakers while waging war not for peace, but for repairing a lost national pride and to regain a place among major world players”. “And to those who send their troops to steal land of sovereign states,” he added — a reference to the annexation of Crimea, which prompted the United States and EU to impose sanctions on Russia. Reporting By Tatiana Jancarikova; Editing by Catherine Evans

2016-11-11 10:18:35

Tech is as much a liability as it is an opportunity, as this election demonstrated. The next few years will be scary for many reasons, and to some more than others, and part of that will be the continued and likely expanded exploitation of the technologies and services we’ve come to rely on. Communities likely to be targeted by Trump policies may want to take a few steps online to help ensure their safety and privacy. Trump has gone on the record asking for backdoors to encryption and devices, saying he supports surveillance, and is against Net Neutrality. Policies pursuant to these goals will necessarily put your data at risk. The following are privacy tips anyone can use, but they are particularly relevant for anyone who, for example, plans to participate in protests or grassroots organizing, or for undocumented immigrants who would like to decrease their online presence. I’ve listed them roughly in order of importance. If Trump makes good on his promise to make deportation of undocumented immigrants, you can expect police to bring the same measures they use in serious crimes to bear on this task. One such measure is the interception of mobile phone calls and messages, whether using a Stingray-type device (which imitates a cell tower, causing phones to send it data instead) or more traditional tapping at the network level. Ordinary phone calls and text messages are incredibly easy to collect this way, and are often also exposed as part of other investigations. It’s easily imagined that the police may run a dragnet in areas densely populated by immigrants and watch for keywords pertaining to under the table employment, family across the border, remittances, and so on. They can’t do that if you’re using an app like Signal, which uses “end-to-end encryption,” preventing electronic snooping anywhere along the line — including on the service’s own servers and while the data is in transit between networks and devices. This type of encryption is the bane of every authority because not only can they not see what is being sent, nor can the company that runs it, so the information can’t be subpoenaed or hacked out. It may be a pain, but getting your family and friends switched over to one of these apps could prevent a lot of trouble down the line. Some other options, if for some reason Signal doesn’t work: WhatsApp is a popular and versatile option, but it’s owned by Facebook, and while it’s technically independent, that still makes us nervous. Apple’s iMessage is reliable and popular, but requires an iOS device or Mac — Apple is also under tremendous scrutiny, having been called out specifically by Trump as a company to put pressure on. Avoid Allo and Telegram, which have been criticized for their encryption and privacy choices. If you’re on a major computing or mobile platform, encryption is available but may not be enabled by default. Windows has Bitlocker, Macs have FileVault — turning them on is simple (follow the instructions in those links) and it doesn’t change the way you use your computer at all. It’s the same, more or less, on iOS and Android. On Android, go to Settings>Security>Encrypt Phone and follow the instructions there. Some phones may have this enabled by default, but it’s good to check. On iOS, if you’ve set up a PIN or TouchID, your device is already encrypted — but if you skipped that step because you don’t like tapping a code every time you check your email, you might want to reconsider that choice now. Trump’s naked xenophobia, tacit support of vigilantism, and lack of concern over police militarization and brutality suggest it may soon become far less safe for people of color, Muslims and Sikhs, LGBT individuals and other targeted minorities to walk home alone. Tech can’t prevent bigotry and bashing, but it can at the very least help create a safety net. Apps like Kitestring and Companion let you set emergency contacts, and if you, for example, don’t check in at home within 15 minutes, or if you shake the phone hard for 5 seconds, it will send them your location and a message that you need help. (They use SMS, but we’ll make an exception in this case.) It’s scary and unfair that this should even have to be recommended, but it’s an opportunity to protect yourself using technology you already have. Check with some friends and see what app looks best. Part of the fun of social networks is the idea that you’re sharing with the world. But law enforcement also uses them as investigative tools, establishing whereabouts, work history, and anything else that your posts imply. Like anything you say to the police, this can and will be used against you, and if you have reason to think you may be targeted by them, you should make it difficult to get at. Making your account private is an easy way to do that, even if it’ll be harder to garner followers. Be sure to check your preferences and privacy settings in every app and service and opt out of things like default public check-ins or anything with “personalized,” “tailored,” or “curated” in it — it means they’re reading your data. On Google, you should turn off (“pause”) your location history and opt out of other tracking measures in the search and ads areas. On your phone, you can turn off location services or restrict them per app. Using an alternative to Google, like DuckDuckGo, helps keep your browsing habits private. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a plug-in for Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers that forces them to make a secure connection even when it isn’t the default for the website or service you’re connecting to. You’ll also be warned when the connection isn’t secure (browsers also tell you this, but not very loudly). The latest versions of Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS don’t bring just the latest features, but also lots of fixes for serious security holes. These fixes will apply to a few of the previous versions, but not really old ones. Hackers — and the authorities — know this. If your phone and OS are new enough to take full advantage of encryption tools and resist well-known methods for unlocking and hacking, they’re secure against adversaries domestic and foreign. It isn’t always easy to stay updated, but keep it in mind when buying a new phone or computer. If you’re on an OS more than a year or two old — before things like full-disk encryption were standard — you should consider updating at the earliest opportunity. Slightly older iPhones will still get the critical updates (mainly iOS 8) that added broader encryption, as will Nexus phones and other flagship devices. Budget (but still modern) phones like the Moto E and G are also great options for those on a budget. Virtual Private Networks obscure your internet traffic from your ISP and others by routing it through other servers first. If all your connections are to your VPN (which then passes it on to wherever it was headed), and your VPN doesn’t keep any records of those connections, there are far fewer ways for your browsing to be tracked. Good VPNs cost money. We don’t recommend any VPN in particular, but it should be a VPN that plainly states that it doesn’t log your traffic. Examples include ExpressVPN, Anonymizer, and Private Internet Access. There are dozens to choose from, however, and I don’t claim to be an expert; many are reviewed here if you want to be careful about the jurisdiction the VPN is based, the extent of its record keeping, and so on. If you attend lots of protests or demonstrations, or often choose to film police encounters, you might want to keep a burner phone around in case yours gets smashed or confiscated. You can get a cheap Android phone for $100 or less, and if you aren’t relying on SMS and phonecalls, you can do pretty much everything you need over wi-fi until you get a replacement. Should the authorities choose to enforce blocks of certain websites — for your own sake, of course — the easiest way to do it is ordering major domain name services (which connect URLs like beta.techcrunch.com to IP addresses like 155.91.18.66) to simply prevent internet users from getting to them. Fortunately, this type of censorship is as easy to circumvent as it is to put in place. You can easily change the DNS your computer uses in its network settings. OpenNIC has detailed instructions for various operating systems, and has proven itself trustworthy. Google’s Public DNS is another option, and has the benefit of being easy to remember: change the preferred and alternate DNS servers to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 respectively. Another way governments have quashed dissent is by suppressing mobile communication altogether. It can’t hurt to have an app like Firechat installed on your phone, which passes messages directly between devices without the need for a network. This is also useful in case of power outages and other disasters — a good emergency measure to take regardless. Even if the various smart appliances worked well, we’d still have issues with their security and the way data is handled. You’re not missing out on much, so just skip the wi-fi front door lock and Amazon Echo for now. This is harder to do for many people, since services like Gmail and Dropbox have become practically ubiquitous. But if you’re really worried about privacy, there are options that provide similar services but with a “zero knowledge” guarantee — basically that the company that runs them never knows a thing about what you use their service for. ProtonMail is a solid one if you’re looking to get away from Gmail, or just have a second email for sensitive topics. SpiderOak One is like a super-private Dropbox. If you’re really worried about snooping, consider using an alternative to the standard operating systems that’s designed with privacy and security in mind. This isn’t an easy option but it might be good to explore if you have an old laptop or phone lying around. Copperhead is worth trying if you’re used to Android, although it won’t have all the conveniences of the usual Google-powered version. Tails is what Edward Snowden has recommended for desktop and laptop work that needs to stay private. It’s basically a simple, security-focused OS that deletes itself when you’re done. Suggestions? Comments? I’m under no illusions that this list is complete or perfect. Feel free to contact me or leave a comment below if you think something should be added or adjusted.

2016-10-25

Trump campaign manager on sexual assault allegations: "It's not for me to judge what those women believe."https://t.co/h6wSCus2nT A top aide to Donald TrumpDonald John TrumpPossible GOP challenger says Trump doesn't doesn't deserve reelection, but would vote for him over Democrat O'Rourke: Trump driving global, U.S. economy into recession Manchin: Trump has 'golden opportunity' on gun reforms MORE says she will not scrutinize the women accusing the Republican presidential nominee of sexual misconduct. “Donald Trump has told me and his family and the rest of America now that none of this is true, they’re lies and fabrications, these are all made up,” campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told CNN Tuesday about the 11 women who have accused Trump of past unwanted kissing or touching. “I think that it’s not for me to judge what those women believe. I’ve not talked to them; I’ve talked to him.” Conway admitted, however, that she was shaken upon hearing Trump uttering lewd remarks about groping women's genitals in a 2005 video that emerged earlier this month. “I felt like Rapunzel in the tower all weekend,” she said of the initial days after the "Access Hollywood" audio surfaced. “I told Mr. Trump in private what I’ve said in public, or a variation thereof. I found the comments to be horrible and indefensible," Conway said. "He didn’t ask anybody to defend them, by the way.” Trump's campaign manager said she never considered abandoning the campaign following the uproar over his past treatment of women. “I did not,” she responded after host Alisyn Camerota asked if Conway had considered quitting. Footage leaked earlier this month of Trump speaking crudely with former “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush in 2005. In the audio, Trump bragged about his celebrity, before detailing his failed sexual advances on a married woman and saying he can grope women without consent. Eleven women have since come forward and accused Trump of kissing or touching them without permission in the past. Trump fiercely denies the claims and has accused the media of fixating on them to boost Democratic presidential nominee Hillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonLewandowski on potential NH Senate run: If I run, 'I'm going to win' Fighter pilot vs. astronaut match-up in Arizona could determine control of Senate Progressive Democrats' turnout plans simply don't add up MORE. Clinton has built modest leads over Trump in national and state polls since the footage first came to light. The Democratic nominee leads Trump by about 5 points nationwide two weeks from Election Day, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls. View the discussion thread. The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 fax The contents of this site are ©2019 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

2019-06-11 00:00:00

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Euro zone deputy finance ministers supported on Tuesday the European Commission’s view that disciplinary action against Italy over the country’s rising debt is warranted, a European Union official said. The deputy finance ministers, called the Economic and Financial Committee (EFC), discussed the Italian case on Tuesday after the Commission issued a report last week saying Italy was breaking EU rules by not reducing its public debt. “The EFC has adopted its opinion on Italy — fully in line with the Commission’s assessment,” the EU official, with insight into the EFC’s work, said. Reporting By Jan Strupczewski; Editing by Frances Kerry

2020-03-20 00:00:00

PARIS (Reuters) - The European Central Bank’s new crisis response package to fight the impact of the coronavirus outbreak impact will be effective, ECB governing council member Francois Villeroy de Galhau said on Friday. Villeroy, who is also governor of the Bank of France, told French BFM Business radio that there would be no liquidity problems. Villeroy also urged companies drawing on credit lines unnecessarily as a precaution to be reasonable. Reporting by Leigh Thomas; Writing by Matthieu Protard

2019-10-29 00:00:00

LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. sanctions on a top Chinese shipping fleet is set to produce a totally unintended result — less burning of the dirtiest marine fuels at sea at the start of next year, Refinitiv data showed on Tuesday. The move to blacklist ships from COSCO on Sept. 24 for allegedly ferrying sanctioned Iranian oil will undercut demand for ships’ traditional means of power because a vessel crunch meant fewer docked and attached kit to filter the dirtier fuels. From January 2020, the United Nations International Maritime Organization (IMO) will ban ships from using fuel with a sulphur content above 0.5%, compared with 3.5% now. This high sulphur fuel oil (HSFO) will not be banned outright but allowed if vessels attach at port a cleaning device called a scrubber — something fewer shipowners and brokers did given the highest profits for freight seen in years. “The postponement of scrubber installations triggered by soaring freight rates in October will only delay the absorption of HSFO volumes next year, exacerbating the decline in HSFO demand especially in H1 2020,” Refinitiv said in a report. The IMO rules herald the biggest transformation in shipping power since oil replaced coal over a century ago. Airborne pollutants like sulphur and nitrates which are deeply harmful to human health were the target of the IMO rules, which allowed the use of scrubbers in order not to upend the shipping and refining industries. Some industry watchdogs have questioned that exception, however, pointing to sea pollution in sensitive waterways. Refinitiv estimated that just 2,500 ships will be fitted with scrubbers by Jan. 1 compared with 4,000 initially projected by the IMO. Estimated 2019 Bunker Consumption by Region: here However, it projected a rebound in demand as the year goes on and more ships carry out their re-tooling. “We expect the demand for HSFO for scrubber installed ships to account for about 2.5 million megatonnes per month (16% of global bunker demand) as of Jan. 1 2020 and increasing to almost 4 million megatonnes month once the current orders are completed.” Estimated 2020 Bunker Consumption by Region: here Reporting by Noah Browning; editing by David Evans