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2018-12-12 00:00:00

(Corrects statistic on SAG nominees going on to win Oscars best picture in paragraph 5.) By Lisa Richwine LOS ANGELES, Dec 12 (Reuters) - Musical drama remake “A Star is Born” led a wide range of contenders for the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Wednesday, landing four nominations, including best movie ensemble. The film will compete for SAG’s top movie prize in a diverse group that includes superhero movie “Black Panther,” romantic comedy “Crazy Rich Asians,” rock biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” and director Spike Lee’s historical drama “BlacKkKlansman.” “A Star is Born,” released by AT&T Inc’s Warner Bros, features Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga in a classic story about a young woman trying to make it in the music business. Both actors were nominated for individual awards for their performances. The SAG awards are closely watched as an indicator of likely Oscar success because actors form the largest voting group in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In the last 23 years, only one film has won the best picture Oscar without being nominated for SAG’s top ensemble prize, last year’s “The Shape of Water.” SAG award winners will be announced on Jan. 27 at a televised ceremony in Los Angeles. “Black Panther” and “Crazy Rich Asians” were both heralded this year as milestones for diversity in Hollywood, which has faced criticism for under-representation of actors and filmmakers of color. “Black Panther” was the first big-budget superhero movie to star a predominantly black cast, while “Crazy Rich Asians” was the first film with an all-Asian ensemble cast from a major Hollywood studio in 25 years. “Vice,” which garnered the most Golden Globe nominations, was shut out of SAG’s best ensemble film race, although stars Christian Bale and Amy Adams were nominated for their roles as former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne. Other actors nominated for leading roles included Rami Malek for playing Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Viggo Mortensen for road-trip comedic drama “Green Book” and John David Washington for “BlacKkKlansman.” In the running for lead actress were Emily Blunt in the musical sequel “Mary Poppins Returns,” Glenn Close for drama “The Wife,” Olivia Colman for British historical comedy “The Favourite” and Melissa McCarthy in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” SAG also announced nominations for the year’s best in television. Amazon.com Inc comedy “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and Netflix Inc drama “Ozark” topped the list with four nods each. “Black Panther” and “Mary Poppins Returns” were released by Walt Disney Co. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “The Favourite” and “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” were distributed by Twenty-First Century Fox Inc. Warner Bros released “Crazy Rich Asians,” “The Wife” was distributed by Sony Corp and privately-held Annapurna Pictures released “Vice.” (Reporting by Lisa Richwine Editing by Bill Berkrot)

2017-05-24

A Los Angeles-area woman was arrested Tuesday by federal agents in a scheme to illegally export sensitive space communications technology to her native China, the U.S. Justice Department announced. The equipment, worth more than $100,000, included components the government said are commonly used in military communications jammers. The 14-count indictment described how Si Chen, also known as Cathy Chen, allegedly received payments for the illegal export of products. Payments were allegedly made through a bank account in China held by a family member. The 32-year-old Chen was arraigned Tuesday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. If convicted of the charges, the defendant faces a statutory maximum penalty of 150 years in prison. Chen is charged with conspiracy, money laundering, making false statements on an immigration application and using a forged passport. She also is charged with violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which dates back to the 1970s and restricts and controls the export of certain technology and goods to foreign countries. "Federal export laws are designed to protect American interests by preventing the proliferation of technology that may fall into the wrong hands, said acting U.S. Attorney Sandra R. Brown in a release. "We will vigorously pursue those who traffic items that could harm our national security if they land in the wrong hands." According to the indictment, Chen purchased and smuggled the sensitive items to China without obtaining the required licenses from the U.S. Department of Commerce. The documents allege she tried to avoid detection by removing the export-import warning stickers prior to shipping the components. The government further alleges Chen rented an office in Pomona, California, under a false name and took delivery of the export-controlled items at this location. After obtaining the goods, the indictment alleges she then shipped the devices to Hong Kong, using a false name and providing false product descriptions and monetary values on the parcels. The charges were contained in an indictment returned by a federal grand jury on April 27 and unsealed Tuesday after Chen's arrest. The probe began back in 2015 when federal agents intercepted a parcel that contained communications equipment sent by "Chunping Ji," the false name allegedly used by the defendant in the smuggle scheme.

2018-11-13 09:49:18

On a late October day, Amazon executives flew to New York to answer a final question before they committed to opening a massive technology center in Queens: Could Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio stop bickering long enough to see the project through? “They wanted to just trust-but-verify that everybody was on the same page,” said Alicia Glen, a deputy mayor who was at the meeting with Mr. de Blasio. After meeting with both men separately that day, the Amazon officials decided the two Democrats could put aside their longstanding differences. Soon after, documents were exchanged, and re-exchanged, ironing out details of a package worth more than a billion dollars in tax incentives and state grants. The politicians even agreed to a plan to circumvent the City Council to prevent future roadblocks. The deal for the Queens development, in Long Island City, was announced on Tuesday, after Amazon concluded a 14-month, countrywide search for a location for a second headquarters for some 50,000 well-paid tech workers. The company, which ended up picking two sites and dividing the new workers between them, is also opening a huge corporate site in Arlington, Va., in an area across the Potomac River from Washington. Amazon said the new developments, both to be called headquarters, would require $5 billion in construction and other investments. The company also said it would develop a much smaller operations and logistics facility in Nashville, creating 5,000 jobs. The announcement capped a frenzied competition among nearly 240 communities across the country. Many politicians saw it as an opportunity to remake their city or a neighborhood for the tech era. Some economists and policymakers warned against using public money to help one of the most valuable companies in the world, and of the potential for escalating housing costs and traffic. [Here’s a $2 billion question: Did New York and Virginia overpay to attract Amazon?] Amazon said that the size and quality of the winners’ labor pools decided the competition. Amazon was also offered more than $2 billion in tax incentives from New York and Virginia. Up to $1.2 billion of that will come from New York state’s Excelsior program, a discretionary tax credit. In Virginia, the company could receive up to $550 million in cash incentives from the state by 2030, and $200 million more after that if it continues to hire. Both state programs are tied to the number of jobs the company creates — if Amazon’s hiring falls short of projections, the incentive payments will be smaller. Both states have pledged to help Amazon with infrastructure upgrades, job-training programs and, in the case of New York, assistance “securing access to a helipad” — some of which did not come with a price tag. Still, in New York and Virginia, most top politicians hailed the Amazon news as a major victory, and the culmination of an aggressive sales job. “We had an unprecedented opportunity to add to the number of jobs,” Mr. de Blasio said on Tuesday. The project is a “transformational opportunity to diversify the economy” of Northern Virginia, which is heavily dependent on government contracting, said Stephen Moret, president and chief executive of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership. New York’s sales pitch began in September 2017, immediately after Amazon began its search for a second headquarters that Mr. Bezos promised would be a “full equal to our Seattle headquarters.” Amazon executives had realized that if its projections were right, the company needed a plan for its fast growth, said Jay Carney, a senior vice president at Amazon. It made the search public because “you can’t quietly talk to cities about investing $5 billion and creating 50,000 jobs,” he said. Shortly after the announcement, a group of Long Island City leaders, including Elizabeth Lusskin, the president of the Long Island City Partnership, a business group, and Alan Suna, the chief executive of Silvercup Studios, a film and television studio there, were meeting to discuss their plans to bring biotech and life science companies to the neighborhood. But they quickly began talking about Amazon, according to Mr. Suna. Within a month, about 16 sites in the neighborhood had been identified, including the parcels along the waterfront eventually chosen by Amazon. The area is now a combination of public and private land that includes a distribution center for city school lunches, warehouses, studios and an outdoor bar and grill. When New York City submitted its bid to the company, just a few weeks later, Long Island City was one of four spots proposed, along with Lower Manhattan, Midtown Manhattan’s West Side and an area in central Brooklyn. By January, Amazon narrowed the list to 20 locations, including New York. Amazon visited in April, July and September, said a person familiar with the meetings. The executives narrowed their search to sites on the West Side of Manhattan and in Long Island City before finally settling on the Queens neighborhood. Mr. Carney said Mr. Bezos did not tour any of the sites. The process was run by Holly Sullivan, who leads the company’s worldwide economic development. John Schoettler, the executive who oversees Amazon’s real estate, negotiated with the private developers. During one visit, the Amazon executives visited the Cornell Tech campus, a new high-tech school on Roosevelt Island, and took the ferry from there to Long Island City. They rode Citi Bikes as city officials and local Queens representatives showed off the area. On another occasion, they took the ferry at sunset. It wasn’t until the past few weeks that things really took off. Gov. Cuomo met Amazon executives, including Jeff Wilke, who runs the company’s retail business, in his offices on Third Avenue. From the window, he said, they could see the site along the waterfront Amazon would eventually select. “I showed them the pictures of the progress of LaGuardia, of J.F.K., Penn Station, Kosciuszko Bridge — I explained what doubling the span means,” he said, referring to building projects. He said Amazon executives were interested in having a pipeline of educated employees, not just from the top universities, but from other places such as Queens College and the nearby LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City. Amazon expressed concern about the city’s planning process, which is slow and allows for local officials and the City Council to veto projects. The company’s lawyers appeared to know about those pitfalls and wanted to avoid them. So Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Cuomo agreed to let the state control the approval, meaning there could be local input but no local veto. Mr. Cuomo said it was a “friendly condemnation” of the city-controlled land by the state, not a source of tension. Though the mayor and governor met separately with Amazon, they were in close contact, comparing notes and strategizing over the phone, according to a person briefed on the talks. “I know him so well, it’s just more open and verbal,” Mr. Cuomo said in an interview. “Whether it’s good or bad.” Mr. de Blasio said, “I’m very comfortable that we made the right move.” In Virginia, the initial HQ2 announcement came as the state was wrapping up a planning process to focus its economic development on tech, as well as diversifying away from government work. The request for proposal from the company “hit right in the bull’s-eye,” said Mr. Moret of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership. The proposal for Northern Virginia, one of three regions presented by Virginia, stressed regional cooperation. The Arlington neighborhoods of Crystal City and Pentagon City, as well as the adjacent Potomac Yards neighborhood in Alexandria, were rebranded into a new area, National Landing, as part of the proposal. That is the name Amazon used in its announcement on Tuesday. Then after Virginia officials submitted the proposals in October 2017, things went quiet. A few months later, Victor Hoskins, the director of Arlington Economic Development, was walking up to the stage at a conference with other development officials when their phones started buzzing with news reports that Virginia, Washington and Maryland were among Amazon’s 20 finalists. “It quickly became, ‘Hey, we got three locations in that list of 20, we’ve got a good chance here,’” Mr. Hoskins said. Crystal City is a neighborhood filled with dated office buildings developed in the 1970s for military contractors. Much of it has sat empty since the Pentagon reorganized in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. The developer JBG Smith had recently acquired much of the land and buildings there and was trying to spruce up the staid streets. Ahead of Amazon’s first tour in late February, it wrapped buildings in colorful patterned fabrics, and hired muralists to decorate long construction walls and parking lots, trying to show how the neighborhood could be reimagined. Amazon visited several times, at one point going up to the top of a tower, near Reagan National Airport, for a bird’s-eye view of Crystal City. But it was more down to business than New York. Catering was ordered in. “Talent was at the core of a tremendous amount of our conversations,” Mr. Hoskins said. He said Amazon never discussed the incentives or proposals other locales offered. Mr. Carney said inside Amazon, the team running the search decided at a meeting in August that it would be easier to hire the number of workers they wanted if they split the headquarters into two. (An Amazon spokesman later said the meeting happened the first week of September.) “We also think that 25,000 as a floor is easier for the communities to absorb,” Mr. Carney said. The company did not tell the cities about the split immediately. When Mr. Hoskins first heard about it, he was conflicted. “You want the 50,000, but you know what, hey, 25,000 is a huge number,” he said. By early November, local officials were feeling good. A small stage went up on an empty lot in Crystal City for the announcement, only to take be taken down quickly. It was premature. After a final round to address the last details, on Monday, Mr. Moret was driving through rural Virginia when he signed the final state agreements digitally, his cell reception cutting in and out along the road. “We had a call from them just an hour after we executed it saying we won,” he said. The company said it would start hiring in New York, Virginia and Tennessee next year. OpinionBryce Covert

2017-08-23 17:56:00

Joshua Jackson is spending time with someone new. More than a year after Jackson, 39, and Diane Kruger ended their 10-year relationship, the actor was spotted with a mystery woman over the weekend in Los Angeles. Jackson was captured shopping alongside a brunette at the farmer’s market in Studio City, California, on Sunday. The pair looked relaxed as they strolled through the canopied vendors: Jackson sported a black zip-up hoodie and black workout shorts while his female companion donned jean cut-off shorts, a blue and white-striped sweater and a tan hat. (A rep for Jackson did not respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.) WATCH: Diane Kruger and Joshua Jackson Have Split After 10 Years Together Earlier this year, the Dawson’s Creek alum was spotted hitting it off with a mystery brunette during the Sundance Film Festival. According to a partygoer, the star of Showtime’s The Affair arrived solo at the bash and was in high spirits, drinking cocktails and dancing along to a Justin Timberlake song before getting close with the woman, who wore a floor-length orange dress. “He was having a blast and at one point got really cozy with her,” said the onlooker. “They were dancing, and he really looked like he was having fun just living the single life.” Since splitting from Jackson last July, Kruger, 41, has found romance with The Walking Dead‘s Norman Reedus. The pair met on the 2015 film Sky and took their romance public last March when they stepped out in New York City for a sweet, PDA-filled stroll following repeated sightings together in previous weeks.

2017-01-22

(Reuters) - A man suspected of leaving a burning propane tank next to a Boston squad car last week was taken into custody after an investigation into the incident, police said on Sunday. Asim Kieta, 42, was arrested late on Saturday in the city’s Charlestown section and charged with possession of an explosive device, arson and assault with intent to murder, among other counts. Kieta, a Boston native, is homeless and has an extensive police record, Police Commissioner William Evans told a briefing on Sunday. He characterized the act as “deliberate” but said investigators were still uncertain of a motive. Police were on high alert nationwide on Friday as Donald Trump was sworn in as U.S. president. Hundreds of protesters were arrested in Washington as sporadic violence broke out in the capital during the inauguration festivities. “I think it goes to some of the hatred out there, whether it is because of what has happened across the country, or whether this was personal with him, because he has had some encounters with police,” Evans said. “I don’t know whether it was payback or not.” Members of the Boston police bomb squad responded on Friday to a report that a parked police cruiser in South Boston had been damaged by an incendiary device, described by a spokeswoman as a propane tank. When they arrived, officers found the damaged car with evidence of an explosive device underneath it, the Boston Police Department said in a statement on Sunday. The vehicle had been unoccupied. The squad car sustained minor damage and two police officers were treated for minor injuries in the incident, it said. The suspect will appear in South Boston District Court, the statement said, without specifying a date. Reporting by Frank McGurty in New York; Editing by Paul Simao and Peter Cooney

2017-10-20 11:00:00

After model Cameron Russell shared her own sexual assault story under the hashtag #MyJobShouldNotIncludeAbuse, more and more models are speaking up about their own experiences of sexual abuse, on and off the job. For the past week, Russell has lent her Instagram to sharing direct messages she's received from models all over the world who want to share their stories anonymously, to spread awareness about sexual abuse within the fashion and modeling industries. The latest model to come forward is Victoria's Secret Angel Sara Sampaio. After posting her support for Russell, the Portuguese model posted on Instagram detailing a recent experience with the French magazine Lui, in which they published a nude photo of the model without her consent. According to Sampaio, it was agreed beforehand that she would not go nude for the shoot. But several of the shots included accidental nudity, which the Lui team assured Sampaio would not make the final cut. And when the issue hit newsstands, they'd chosen two cover images of Sampaio in which her nipples are exposed. "My agency and I insisted on having a clear agreement in place to protect myself in order to control the choice I made around not being shot nude," she wrote. "Even with the 'No Nudity' clause in my agreement with Lui, I was aggressively pressured to do nude shots on set, asking me why I didn't want to show my nipples or go fully nude. Throughout the shoot day, I needed to constantly defend myself and reiterate my boundaries with no nude images, making sure I covered myself as best as I could." Sampaio explained that she noticed the accidental exposures of parts of her body while reviewing the final images with the team, who insisted those images would not be printed in the final editorial. She went on to relate her experience to similar situations she's been put it in the past, where photographers or stylists would cajole or demand that she pose nude because she'd previously done so in other photoshoots. But she makes a good point about being bullied on set: It's her body, her choice. "Many times, I was showed nude images of myself as examples to coerce me into posing nude, and whenever I stood my ground and refused, I was criticized and judged as being difficult," she wrote. "I am comfortable with my body and with being nude in circumstances I consider a form of art --- this process comes naturally, and is very thoughtful, creative and collaborative. Throughout my career, I've been very selective with when and how I do shoots with nudity." Finally, she declared that just because she consented to posing nude in the past doesn't give anyone permission to assume she'd do it again. "I have the right to show my body how, when, where and for whatever purpose I choose. It's my choice. And when I make that choice, I expect to be treated with respect and professionalism." Sampaio says that she is working with her agency and attorney to pursue legal action against Lui. At the time of publishing, the French magazine has yet to respond to Sampaio's allegations. If you have experienced sexual violence and are in need of crisis support, please call the RAINN Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

2017-12-19 00:00:00

Dec 19 (Reuters) - Leucadia National Corp: * JEFFERIES REPORTS RECORD 2017 NET REVENUES AND NET INCOME LED BY 48% INCREASE IN INVESTMENT BANKING NET REVENUES AND 19% INCREASE IN TOTAL EQUITIES AND FIXED INCOME NET REVENUES * JEFFERIES GROUP LLC SAYS Q4 REVENUE $823 MILLION Source text for Eikon: [ID: nBw4SThhha] Further company coverage:

2017-03-16

March 16 (Reuters) - Ptc Therapeutics Inc * Total revenues for Q4 of 2016 were $25.2 million versus $12.7 million in same period of 2015 * For 2017, ptc expects to achieve ex-U.S. Translarna net sales between $105 and $125 million * Net loss for Q4 of 2016 was $26.8 million compared to a net loss of $50.9 million for same period in 2015 * PTC is reviewing its guidance for 2017 operating expenses and ending cash in light of PTC’s planned acquisition of Emflaza * Translarna net product sales were $25.1 million for Q4 of 2016, representing 98 pct growth versus $12.7 million in Q4 of 2015 * Two SMA clinical trials on track to advance into pivotal studies in 2017 * Qtrly loss per share $0.78 * Q4 earnings per share view $-1.07, revenue view $24.0 million — Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:

2019-10-23 06:57:27

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday.WeWork's largest investor, SoftBank announced a deal to take control of the company with CEO Adam Neumann stepping down from the board. The rescue plan, which comes weeks before WeWork was set to run out of money, includes a capital infusion and stock buyback from the Japanese investor.Tech and finance experts are shocked by SoftBank's possible $1.7 billion golden parachute for ousted WeWork CEO Adam Neumann. According to a Wall Street Journal report, SoftBank will give Neumann close to $1.7 billion to leave WeWork's board and give up his voting power; Softbank did not specify details on his exit package.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday to answer questions about his company's impact on the financial services and housing sectors. The committee will likely ask Zuckerberg about the Facebook-created cryptocurrency network called Libra that it announced in June. It's expected to launch as soon as 2020. The CEO of Box roasted former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann's rumoured $1.7 billion handout. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, poked fun at the absurdity of Neumann's golden parachute, with a sharp tweet referencing a missing chapter in startup business books.Elizabeth Warren, who wants to break up Big Tech as president, has raised more money from tech employees than anyone else. Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren raised more than $173,000 from tech employees in the third quarter, according to a Bloomberg report.Zoox cofounder Jesse Levinson said there's 'no chance' Tesla will launch fully self-driving cars next year, despite Elon Musk's claims. Zoox is also a self-driving car startup, but unlike Tesla, it is developing autonomous vehicles specifically meant for ride-hailing, rather than for individual ownership.One of Facebook's biggest advertising execs announced that he is leaving the company. Rob Goldman, most recently Facebook's VP of Ads and one of the company's top-ranking advertising executives, announced on Twitter that he's leaving the company.One of Tesla's most vocal investors sold more than $39 million of the stock ahead of the company's earnings report. ARK Investment Management, a relatively small but extremely vocal supporter of Tesla, trimmed its stake by 150,000 shares ahead of the company's earnings report, which will be released on Wednesday. A Yale professor and Goldman Sachs veteran have teamed up on an eccentric new blockchain-powered social network to try to make Facebook irrelevant. The new social network, called Revolution Populi, will operate on the blockchain and is slated to launch next year.German flying-taxi startup Lilium said it has taken a big step toward providing intercity rides for $70. Lilium has demonstrated that its electric jet can take off vertically and then move into "level flight" — flying forward — and hit speeds of up to 100 kph (62 mph). Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.You can also subscribe to this newsletter here — just tick "10 Things in Tech You Need to Know.

2016-06-08 12:00:00

Martha Stewart doesn't need to watch Orange Is The New Black because the 74-year-old mogul has her own stories from prison. On an episode of Netflix's Chelsea, Stewart told Chelsea Handler that the women incarcerated on the show have nothing on the friends she made when she served time herself. "It's not as good as the real thing," Stewart told Handler. "When you live through something like Orange Is the New Black, the real characters are better." In case you forgot about those iconic "Free Martha Stewart" t-shirts, in 2004 the author and DIY guru was found guilty of lying to federal investigators about a stock sale. The following year Stewart served five months in a prison facility in West Virginia.Stewart has treated her jail stint with seriousness in the years since, but was candid with Handler about life behind bars. A big change? Her media diet: "In prison it was BET television at all times. I had to get up really early to watch the news," Stewart said.Watch the Chelsea clip below:

2019-05-01

[The stream is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. ET. Please refresh the page if you do not see a player above at that time.] Attorney General William Barr is slated to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, where he will likely face a barrage of questions from the panel's Democrats about his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report. Hours before Barr was set to face the lawmakers, news outlets reported that Mueller sent a letter to the attorney general complaining about his initial four-page summary of the 448-page Russia report's principal conclusions. Ahead of Barr's testimony Wednesday morning, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., called on Barr to resign.

2017-02-15

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Iran’s president must do more to improve the economy, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday in a rare public criticism from the supreme leader three months before Hassan Rouhani runs for re-election. Unemployment, recession and inflation - issues that could win or lose an election - all remain major problems in the final month’s of Rouhani’s first four-year term, Khamenei said in a speech, according to the state broadcaster’s website. Rouhani, who secured relief from economic sanctions in exchange for checks on Iran’s nuclear program, may face a hardline candidate in May’s election who could swing the Islamic Republic back away from such international engagement for which Khamenei has never expressed huge enthusiasm. “I have asked the honorable president to advise his executive managers that management must take place with transparency, supervision and follow-up,” Khamenei said. “Otherwise if managers say ‘This should take place’ and another person says ‘Of course’ there will be no progress and no visible work will get done.” Rouhani is likely to run a campaign highlighting the economic benefits of the nuclear deal which opened Iran to international investment that had been lacking for years due to sanctions. Many Iranians, however, say the benefits have yet to trickle down to them and any gains could be at risk due to President Donald Trump’s dislike of the deal as well as U.S. rhetoric that hints at some kind of military confrontation. Khamenei’s comments could give hardliners, who have not yet named an election candidate, a green light to more harshly criticize Rouhani. In the speech, Khamenei also said calls for national reconciliation were “meaningless”, a reference to comments by former reformist Mohammad Khatami who said the country should unite in the face of a hostile Trump administration. Khamenei’s rebuff may have been because Khatami’s words were interpreted as a call to release Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, former presidential candidates who have been under house arrest for six years. Reform-minded voters, many of whom supported Rouhani as well as Mousavi and Karoubi, are likely to see Khamenei’s comment as aimed at them. Editing by Robin Pomeroy

2019-12-12 21:35:34

Letter 137 What do the fires around Sydney, the volcano eruption in New Zealand and Bougainville’s vote for independence have in common? The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. What do the fires and smoke around Sydney, the volcano eruption in New Zealand that left at least eight people dead, and Bougainville’s vote for independence from Papua New Guinea all have in common? During a long run yesterday, thinking about the Australia bureau’s stories over the past week, I began to see a theme running through them all: complacency. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines it as “a feeling of calm satisfaction with your own abilities or situation that prevents you from trying harder.” Other dictionaries deliver even more scathing judgments, calling the complacent smug and unwilling to change even when confronting uncertain or dangerous situations. But no matter how harsh the definition, there is no denying that complacency — “the great chewing complacency,” as Aesop put it — damages lives in ways that bring sadness and rage. Let’s consider just the most recent examples, each of which offers its own insights on how a pattern of self-satisfied inaction might be broken. Prime Minister Scott Morrison came to Sydney Tuesday, on a day when bush fire smoke was at its thickest, and spent less time talking about the fires than about a religious freedom bill. He was immediately pilloried by Sydneysiders who have become frustrated with his government’s refusal to actively address climate change through sharper emissions cuts, and more firefighting help here in a country where volunteers do most of that work. At one point, when asked about firefighters raising money online for equipment, Mr. Morrison declared that firefighters didn’t need more assistance because they “want to be there.” That’s what did it. Outrage surged. The complacency broke, at least a little. The next day, he announced a boost of 11 million Australian dollars for more planes and helicopters to help firefighters on the ground. The Lesson: Climate change complacency tied to vested interests (coal, coal, coal) can be much harder to dislodge than the complacency around adaptation, which allows for more immediate visibility. Also: people risking their lives (in this case, for free) are powerful weapons in any fight against the status quo. The tour operators who brought dozens of tourists to an active and remote volcano in New Zealand had gotten used to seeing the boiling crater lake and gas vents throwing hot fumes into the air. They trusted local volcanologists, who said tour groups should be fine, and failed to plan for the evacuation that was needed Monday when White Island erupted, trapping 47 people. Eight have been confirmed dead and the bodies of another eight were in the process of being recovered as of Friday morning, for a total of 16 killed. Ray Cas, an emeritus volcanologist at Monash University who visited White Island twice and immediately felt that tour groups should not be allowed, said he told colleagues in New Zealand about his concerns, but with 30 years of tour groups having passed through without incident, no one seemed eager to adjust or change. “It’s the isolation and the lack of available of emergency services that is really a concern,” he said. Now, New Zealand officials are just starting to discuss whether the tour groups should be banned, or whether more precautions need to be taken if anyone is to return to the island. The Lesson: Tragedy, immediate and visceral, often does more to identify complacency and shift the dynamic than anything else. When the Bougainville Peace Agreement of 2001 brought an end to the civil war that killed 20,000 people, many people in the region hoped Papua New Guinea would develop an equitable revenue-sharing deal for the mineral-rich islands before an independence vote arrived. But in nearly two decades, little changed. And on Wednesday, nearly 98 percent of those who voted in Bougainville supported becoming an independent nation. The Lesson: If you ignore people’s needs and desires they eventually break away. For New Zealand’s tourism industry, and Australia’s conservative coalition, it’s worth keeping in mind. Now for the stories of the week. Australia Burns Again, and Now Its Biggest City Is Choking. In Sydney, fresh air and ocean breezes have long been treated as a daily birthright. Not anymore. [Read the story] As Water Runs Low, Can Life in the Outback Go On? In Australia’s vast interior, rivers and lakes are disappearing. “We’re starting to glimpse what the future is going to be like,” one scientist said. [Read the story] Player, Captain, Ambassador. In Australia, Tiger Woods Is Game. Buoyed by a career renaissance and eager fans, Woods is relishing his stint as the player-captain of the Presidents Cup team for the United States. [Read the story] In Australia, Diving Right Into Summer. With just a few stops left on a yearlong trip, the 52 Places Traveler reveled in the sunny days in Perth and the Northern Rivers region, but there were ominous signs as well. [Read the story] Live Updates: Risky Recovery Mission Begins Near New Zealand Volcano. A volcanic nightmare on White Island in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty takes a new turn on Friday with a daring operation to recover eight bodies of people killed in an eruption on Monday. About two dozen among those who were able to escape remained hospitalized with horrific burns. [Read the Live Briefing] New Zealand Seeks Human Skin to Treat Volcano Burn Victims. The country’s need highlights a little-known type of organ donation. [Read the story] Why Were Tourists Allowed to Visit an Active New Zealand Volcano? Visitors were allowed to tour the mouth of the White Island volcano despite recent warnings about bursts of gas and steam. [Read the story] After Eruption in New Zealand, 5 Dead, 8 Missing and ‘No Signs of Life.’ Rescuers were struggling to reach White Island, where conditions remained dangerous. The authorities said a criminal investigation had been opened in the eruption’s aftermath. [Read the story] The Year in Pictures: 5.6 million. That’s the number of images photo editors of The New York Times sift through each year to find the perfect photographs for our readers. This collection of images is a mere fraction capturing the drama since January. [See the photos] Weinstein and His Accusers Reach Tentative $25 Million Deal. The settlement would not require the Hollywood producer to admit wrongdoing or pay anything to his accusers himself. [Read the story] Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question. Was she the reason he was alive today? [Read the story] When a DNA Test Says You’re a Younger Man Who Lives 5,000 Miles Away. After a bone-marrow transplant, a man with leukemia found that his donor’s DNA traveled to unexpected parts of his body. A crime lab is now studying the case. [Read the story] Bickering More After Kids? Learn how to avoid the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse. [Read the story. Subscribe to the NYT Parenting newsletter.] Tell us what you think at [email protected]. Enjoying the Australia Letter? Sign up here or forward to a friend. For more Australia coverage and discussion, start your day with your local Morning Briefing and join us in our Facebook group.

2019-08-15 00:00:00

While about half of consumers still use cash for small purchases, many are turning to credit cards. Among U.S. adults, 16% say they usually pay with credit cards for totals under $10, according to new survey data from CreditCards.com. That's up from 12% who said the same in 2018. Among people who have credit cards that come with rewards — i.e., cash back, miles or points — the share is 26%, up from 23% last year. "We've seen a steady decrease in cash and an increase in credit card use for small purchases since 2014," said Ted Rossman, industry analyst for CreditCards.com. The data are based on an online survey done in July of more than 2,500 U.S. adults. From 2014 through 2017, when the annual poll defined a "small purchase" as one under $5, the share of consumers preferring a credit card for those buys also rose to 17%, from 11%. Roughly half of all survey respondents (49%) prefer cash for purchases under $10. Among those with rewards credit cards, the share is 43%. About a third of both groups — 35% and 31%, respectively — report using a debit card as their go-to choice for covering those small buys. Collectively, U.S. households owe $1.07 trillion in credit card debt, according to June data from the Federal Reserve. While the amount edged down slightly from May, it has been trending upward since 2011. "Unfortunately, not enough people are paying their bills in full," Rossman said. "Sixty percent carry a balance month to month. "That's expensive debt." The average interest rate on credit cards is close to 18%, although consumers with poor credit might pay more in the neighborhood of 25%, Rossman said. Among survey respondents, 57% said they have rewards credit cards. While using them for small purchases can help rack up cash back, miles or points, not paying the balance in full each month can cancel out the benefit of the rewards due to the interest tacked on to your balance. "The most important thing is to pay the balance in full before interest accrues," Rossman said. "If you can do that, then by all means go for the rewards. "But if you carry a balance, forget about rewards and think about the interest rate first," he added. If credit card debt is weighing you down, it's worth exploring lower-interest options. Depending on your credit score, you might qualify for a card that comes with a zero-percent balance transfer offer. In that scenario, you would pay a balance transfer fee — 3% or so — but pay no interest on the amount transferred for a set amount of time. You also could look at personal loans, which might come with a lower interest rate than you're currently paying. The range is from about 4% to north of 30%, depending on factors including the amount, the length of the loan and your credit history. And, of course, cutting expenses or earning extra income are ways to try coming up with extra cash to throw toward the balance. "Credit card rates are so high right now that paying off your credit card debt needs to be a major priority," Rossman said. Meanwhile, the top reason that survey respondents gave for preferring cash for small purchases was that it's easier or quicker (40%). Other reasons included concerns about credit card debt (24%), stores having credit card minimums or fees for small purchases (14%), no incentive (11%) and "it's rude" (5%).

2017-07-03

PARIS, July 3 (Reuters) - Eurazeo: * Eurazeo announces the acquisition of Iberchem, a global producer of fragrances and flavors * Eurazeo says deal worth enterprise value of 405 mln euros * Eurazeo will invest around 270 million euros to become the majority shareholder, with a stake of around 70 pct, alongside the existing management team (Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta)

2016-10-13

Oct 13 (Reuters) - Arbuthnot Banking Group Plc * Third quarter trading update * Has continued to trade well during quarter * Overall lending pipeline has shown good growth, although period of time between approval and drawdown of loans has marginally increased * Commercial bank continues to develop at a good rate * Have accelerated our expansion plans and are taking on new premises in manchester to cover north west and expect to have a further six commercial bankers in place by early 2017 * Recent reduction in base rate will result in a short term fall in arbuthnot latham’s net interest margin * However, longer term impact of this may be reduced dependant on where rates in deposit market stabilise * Are proposing to pay a further special dividend of £3 per share, which equates to approximately £45 million Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:

2019-10-31 00:00:00

Laura Lewis and her team of researchers have been putting in late nights in their Boston University lab. Lewis ran tests until around 3:00 in the morning, then ended up sleeping in the next day. It was like she had jet lag, she says, without changing time zones. It’s not that Lewis doesn’t appreciate the merits of a good night’s sleep. She does. But when you’re trying to map what’s happening in a slumbering human’s brain, you end up making some sacrifices. “It’s this great irony of sleep research,” she says. “You’re constrained by when people sleep.” Her results, published today in the journal Science, show how our bodies clear toxins out of our brains while we sleep and could open new avenues for treating and preventing neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. When we sleep our brains travel through several phases, from a light slumber to a deep sleep that feels like we’ve fallen unconscious, to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when we’re more likely to have dreams. Lewis’ work looks at non-REM sleep, that deep phase which generally happens earlier in the night and which has already been associated with memory retention. One important 2013 study on mice showed that while the rodents slept, toxins like beta amyloid, which can contribute to Alzheimer’s disease, got swept away. Lewis was curious how those toxins were cleared out and why that process only happened during sleep. She suspected that cerebrospinal fluid, a clear, water-like liquid that flows around the brain, might be involved. But she wasn’t sure what was unique about sleep. So her lab designed a study that measured several different variables at the same time. Study participants had to lie down and fall asleep inside an MRI machine. To get realistic sleep cycles, the researchers had to run the tests at midnight, and they even asked subjects to stay up late the night before so people would be primed to drift off once the test began. Lewis outfitted the participants with an EEG cap so she could look at the electrical currents flowing through their brains. Those currents showed her which stage of sleep the person was in. Meanwhile, the MRI measured the blood oxygen levels in their brains and showed how much cerebrospinal fluid was flowing in and out of the brain. “We had a sense each of these metrics was important, but how they change during sleep and how they relate to each other during sleep was uncharted territory for us,” she says. What she discovered was that during non-REM sleep, large, slow waves of cerebrospinal fluid were washing over the brain. The EEG readings helped show why. During non-REM sleep, neurons start to synchronize, turning on and off at the same time. “First you would see this electrical wave where all the neurons would go quiet,” says Lewis. Because the neurons had all momentarily stopped firing, they didn’t need as much oxygen. That meant less blood would flow to the brain. But Lewis’s team also observed that cerebrospinal fluid would then rush in, filling in the space left behind. “It’s a fantastic paper,” says Maiken Nedergaard, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester who led the 2013 study that first described how sleep can clear out toxins in mice. “I don’t think anybody in their wildest fantasy has really shown that the brain’s electrical activity is moving fluid. So that’s really exciting.” One big contribution of the paper is it helps show that the systems Nedergaard has been studying in mice are present and hugely important for humans too. “It’s telling you sleep is not just to relax,” says Nedergaard. “Sleep is actually a very distinct function.” Neurons don't all turn off at the same time when we're awake. So brain blood levels don't drop enough to allow substantial waves of cerebrospinal fluid to circulate around the brain and clear out all the metabolic byproducts that accumulate, like beta amyloid. The study also could have clinical applications for treating Alzheimer’s. Recent attempts at developing medications have targeted beta amyloid. But drugs that looked promising at first all failed once they got into clinical trials. “This opens a new avenue,” says Nedergaard. Instead of trying to act on one particular molecule, new interventions might instead focus on increasing the amount of cerebrospinal fluid that washes over the brain. That would help clear out beta amyloid but also could help with other molecules like tau, a protein that gets tangled in Alzheimer’s patients’ brains and harms the connections between neurons. Finding a way to clear out all of that garbage could be much more powerful than just focusing on one piece of the problem. “Aging is not just about one molecule,” says Nedergaard. “Everything fails.” These discoveries bring along their own set of questions. Lewis didn’t study what happens during other stages of sleep, and she only looked at healthy young adults. But the methods she used were entirely noninvasive—or as noninvasive as having people sleep in an MRI while hooked up to lots of machines can be. She didn’t even inject any dye. That will make it easier to start studying older participants who may be developing neurodegenerative diseases. It also probably means many more late nights in the lab for Lewis.

2020-01-10 00:00:00

PARIS, Jan 10 (Reuters) - France's 580 megawatt (MW) Havre coal power plant will close on April 1, 2021, the energy ministry said on Friday. The closure is part of the government's plan to phase out its remaining 3,000 MW of coal generation capacity by the end of 2022 to meet its target of curbing carbon emissions from the energy sector, while boosting renewable sources of energy. The Havre generator operated by state-controlled utility EDF , is one of the five remaining coal-fired generators in France. EDF also operates the two 580 MW coal generators at the Cordemais coal power plant. It is working to convert those to burn biomass instead of coal, which could enable it to continue operations beyond 2022 with government approval. France's two other coal-fired plants, the Emile Huchet 6 and Provence 5, with combined installed capacity of 1,200 MW, are owned by Central European energy group EPH, which bought them from German utility Uniper. (Reporting by Bate Felix; Editing by Mark Potter)

2016-06-21

LONDON — On Jacob Alexander's 22nd birthday, he got a phone call. Sitting next to his mum, he picked up the phone, but the caller wasn't ringing to wish him a happy birthday. They were calling to tell him his test results. He had tested positive for HIV.  From that moment forth, Alexander's life changed forever. He lost some of his friends. His best friend — with whom he shared a house — rejected him and even bought a new fridge because he was scared Alexander would "infect" his food.  It didn't end there.  The response that Alexander's diagnosis garnered — from both friends and strangers alike — spoke volumes about the alarming lack of awareness and knowledge about the virus.  "When I told one person that I had HIV, they visibly flinched." His solution was to build an app to create a space that helps both HIV-positive and non-HIV-positive people to learn more about it. Alexander says that since his diagnosis, he's experienced discrimination on a daily basis. Something he believes is due to an absence of education about how the virus is transmitted and what it means to be HIV-positive.  "When I told one person that I had HIV, they visibly flinched," the 22-year-old student told Mashable. "On another occasion I was on the Tube talking to my boyfriend about HIV and people actually got up and moved to a different carriage to get away from me," he continued. He's witnessed friends cracking jokes about his virus while he struggled with depression and the feeling that his life was unravelling.  "There is a stigma to HIV and a fear that runs deep," he says. This stigma hasn't prevented Alexander from telling people about his diagnosis. In fact, Alexander first publicly announced that he was HIV-positive in a powerful TED talk at the University of the Arts London, which reduced his audience to tears.  Research suggests that the fear that accompanied the HIV epidemic of the 1980s still lives on today. Indeed, a recent UN AIDS report found that 50% of men and women surveyed had "discriminatory" attitudes towards people with HIV.  But, with an estimated 36.9 million people living with HIV or AIDS worldwide, Alexander feels that it's high time something was done about that stigma. "Everyone my age is always on their phone. I thought that the best way to get through to people my age would be through an app," Alexander told Mashable.  Alexander's app, The Positive Project — provides HIV facts, health information, and helps users locate the nearest test centres. Users can also ask questions anonymously, book appointments, and connect with centres. Some of the resources available on the app. For people wanting to know more about the virus, the app contains resources that can tell you about the history and origins of HIV and the difference between HIV and AIDS, as well as providing research and information about the extent of HIV's stigma. This is the place to go if you've ever felt shy about asking questions about the virus.  But, this app isn't just a tool to help people clue up on some background information. There are also vital resources for people who've been diagnosed with the virus, and for people whose partners have been diagnosed. It covers things from using condoms and lube to what it means to be "undetectable".  Alexander — who is currently a full-time student at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London — is singlehandedly uploading the clinic data to the app. It's a work in progress, but soon there will be a comprehensive list of every test centre in the UK. A map showing some of the clinics in London. Cary James, Head of Programmes at Terrence Higgins Trust, says that while incredible medical progress has been made in the past 20 years, attitudes and awareness of HIV haven't kept up with that progress.  “The devastating impact of HIV stigma cannot be underestimated – it is a well-known barrier stopping people getting tested and onto treatment, as people fear reactions from friends, family, colleagues and their community, should they test positive," James told Mashable. “Stigma also has a damaging effect on people’s health and wellbeing, with the People Living with HIV Stigma Index UK reporting that stigma had prevented 15% of respondents from accessing their GP in the last year, and 66% had avoided dental care," James continued.  “The devastating impact of HIV stigma cannot be underestimated." The Terrence Higgins Trust says it welcomes innovative ways to reduce stigma, increase knowledge of HIV and good sexual health as well as bust myths about the virus.  “Here at Terrence Higgins Trust, we successfully use apps, including dating apps, to encourage HIV testing as part of our health promotion outreach work," James continued.  While tackling stigma is uppermost on Alexander's agenda, he's not looking for anyone's sympathy. "When you have HIV, you feel quarantined. People feel like they have to be nice to us and they say 'oh, I'm so sorry.' But, I don't want your sympathy. I'm living my life. It's not your problem," he says. Alexander's hope is that his app will make people feel less alone and a little safer knowing they have access to sexual health information. Alexander's overarching aim is to make it possible for people to speak freely and without fear about their diagnosis.  "People shouldn't feel afraid to say they have HIV," says Alexander.  The app is now live, and free to download on iOS.  Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

2016-09-21 00:00:00

In the minutes after a police officer in Charlotte, North Carolina fatally shot a black man named Keith Lamont Scott on Tuesday, a woman who identified herself as his daughter got to the site of the shooting and started recording on Facebook Live.  In the video, which has around 691,000 views as of this writing, Lyric Scott confronts police who have already strung yellow tape around the area. Her Facebook page has since been disabled, but a version of the video exists on YouTube.  At the start of the video, she knows her dad's been shot. Slowly, she gets word that those bullets were fatal. Around 16:30, she breaks down.  Warning: Video contains strong language "They just shot my daddy!" she shouts. "My daddy is dead!" A crowd gathers by the end of the video as police walk back and forth. Officers were searching the area for a man with an outstanding warrant, though that man was not Scott, according to police. Officers then allegedly saw Scott step out of his vehicle carrying a gun. Moments later, Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer Brentley Vinson fatally shot him. Charlotte residents said Scott, 43, had no gun, and was reading a book in his car while waiting to pick his son up from a school bus stop. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney insisted on Monday that officers had found a gun, but said they can't publicly disclose any evidence for the time being. He also said police did not find a book, and that Vinson was not wearing a body camera.  LIVE NOW: Chief Kerr Putney speaking now» https://t.co/Y7g1vAUMMe pic.twitter.com/qG5HWdynCf — WBTV News (@WBTV_News) September 21, 2016 "It is early in our information gathering," Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Robertson said at a press conference on Monday. "It’s too early for me to give any definitive judgement about the Department of Justice, any other resources we might need." Protests following the shooting turned violent, as officers fired tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd.  Video shows police fire tear gas as protesters confront officers in Charlotte, N.C., after deadly police shooting. https://t.co/63OncctShU pic.twitter.com/TmeXB0vchc — ABC News (@ABC) September 21, 2016 Protesters smashed the windows of police and news vehicles, and set fires on a nearby highway.  Fatal police shooting sparks violent protests in Charlotte #KeithLamontScott https://t.co/DVaK5Lhuyp pic.twitter.com/n7S8fsSK1x — CNN (@CNN) September 21, 2016 Police said 16 officers were injured during the night, though they didn't provide information on how many protesters were also injured. Video from the protest shows demonstrators running away from tear gas canisters.  A dozen officers hurt in #Charlotte protests. Here is video of tear gas being shot in crowd. #KeithLamontScott pic.twitter.com/m6Ao8gLK8S — Chris Stewart (@CStewartWPTV) September 21, 2016 The shooting in Charlotte took place as the nation had its eyes turned on Tulsa, Oklahoma.  There, Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby fatally shot a black man named Terence Crutcher as he stood alongside his car.

2016-03-24

Halloween may have trick-or-treating and Valentine's Day may be synonymous with boxes of chocolates, but Easter is the day that leaves candy companies salivating. In the week before Easter last year, Americans bought $823 million in creme-filled eggs, chocolate rabbits and colored marshmallow Peeps, according to Nielsen data. That narrowly beats out Halloween as the most lucrative week of the year for candy retailers. Looking at weight alone, Americans purchased 146 million pounds of candy in the week before Easter. That's nearly half a pound of candy for every man, woman and child in the country, or the weight of more than 11,000 African bush elephants. Costumed kids seem to be consuming more candy by the pound, but their neighbors are handing out some of the cheapest candy — several dollars per pound cheaper than the fancy chocolates for significant others on Valentine's Day. As for Easter, the red line in the chart seems to show retailers selling leftovers cheap the week after the holiday. "In the weeks around Halloween consumers are buying in bulk with a volume mentality for the trick-or-treaters," said Carman Allison, vice president of consumer insights at Nielsen. "Easter and Valentine's Day are more gift based purchases where premium packaging plays a role in what consumers purchase for their loved ones and how much they are willing to spend." Holidays are huge money makers for candy companies, but Americans apparently need no excuse to eat candy all year round. In a normal week, Americans still pay about $300 million for 76 million pounds of sweets. According to Nielsen's point-of-sale data, about 17 percent of the candy sold each year is "seasonal" branded to be consumed during a specific holiday. Easter, surprisingly, makes up more than a third of that seasonal candy, according to the data. Halloween is still the biggest holiday from the manufacturer's side, said Chris Gindlesperger, vice president of public affairs and communications at the National Confectioner's Association, citing the trade group's data. But the sales figures can change each year depending on retail factors, the night that a holiday falls in a given year or even what the weather is like around holiday. The concentration of the sales week could also give Easter a higher peak – Halloween candy sales tend to be more spread out and piggyback onto back-to-school sales, said Allison. Making a little over a billion dollars a year in just seasonal Easter candy isn't too shabby, but it's small compared to the approximately $45 million pulled in every single day for nonseasonal candies such as chocolate candy bars in convenience stores. But — and there's no way to sugar-coat it — Easter's candy throne may be crumbling. Annual sales growth for the holiday's seasonal offerings was slowing compared with other categories over the last four years. That may explain why Just Born, a company known for its iconic Easter candy, has been trying to expand Peeps sales beyond Easter. The varieties of Peeps available have exploded in recent years — pumpkin spice Peeps in October and hot cocoa and peppermint Peeps around Christmas. The company has been making a concerted effort to expand to other seasons over the past few years, but 70 percent of sales still come from Easter, according to a Just Born spokesman. That's the same percentage as 2014, when the company launched its first year-round Peeps product. Easter is the king of candy holidays, and Peeps are arguably the king of Easter candies (they've been the No. 1 non-chocolate candy for the last 20 years). The company is pushing Peeps for the summer, Valentine's Day and all the rest of the year, and they're not the only one. Everyday brands are also coming up with new products to capture shares of those holidays — think Reese's peanut butter eggs and Swedish Fish jelly beans. "Consumers have an affinity and loyalty to certain brands and manufacturers who can convert that loyalty to a seasonal sale or unique format will win," said Allison. "To take a seasonal product and make it every-day is a bit more challenging since you need to change the consumer perception of not only what they brand stands for but also the perception of freshness." Despite the earlier-than-normal date, the Confectioner's Association has high hopes for this Easter. The group is projecting that it will bring in $2.4 billion, up about 1.4 percent from last year. Halloween could catch up, based on the Nielsen data, but it may be too early to tell.

2018-06-26 02:23:15

A report by the UK’s Electoral Commission has called for urgent changes in the law to increase transparency about how digital tools are being used for political campaigning, warning that an atmosphere of mistrust is threatening the democratic process. The oversight body, which also regulates campaign spending, has spent the past year examining how digital campaigning was used in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum and 2017 general election — as well as researching public opinion to get voters’ views on digital campaigning issues. Among the changes the Commission wants to see is greater clarity around election spending to try to prevent foreign entities pouring money into domestic campaigns, and beefed up financial regulations including bigger penalties for breaking election spending rules. It also has an ongoing investigation into whether pro-Brexit campaigns — including the official Vote Leave campaign — broke spending rules. And last week the BBC reported on a leaked draft of the report suggesting the Commission will find the campaigns broke the law. Last month the Leave.EU Brexit campaign was also fined £70,000 after a Commission investigation found it had breached multiple counts of electoral law during the referendum. Given the far larger sums now routinely being spent on elections — another pro-Brexit group, Vote Leave, had a £7M spending limit (though it has also been accused of exceeding that) — it’s clear the Commission needs far larger teeth if it’s to have any hope of enforcing the law. Digital tools have lowered the barrier of entry for election fiddling, while also helping to ramp up democratic participation. “On digital campaigning, our starting point is that elections depend on participation, which is why we welcome the positive value of online communications. New ways of reaching voters are good for everyone, and we must be careful not to undermine free speech in our search to protect voters. But we also fully recognise the worries of many, the atmosphere of mistrust which is being created, and the urgent need for action to tackle this,” writes commission chair John Holmes. “Funding of online campaigning is already covered by the laws on election spending and donations. But the laws need to ensure more clarity about who is spending what, and where and how, and bigger sanctions for those who break the rules. “This report is therefore a call to action for the UK’s governments and parliaments to change the rules to make it easier for voters to know who is targeting them online, and to make unacceptable behaviour harder. The public opinion research we publish alongside this report demonstrates the level of concern and confusion amongst voters and the will for new action.” The Commission’s key recommendations are: The recommendations follow revelations by Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower (pictured at the top of this post) — who has detailed to journalists and regulators how Facebook users’ personal data was obtained and passed to the now defunct political consultancy for political campaigning activity without people’s knowledge or consent. In addition to the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, Facebook has also been rocked by earlier revelations of how extensively Kremlin-backed agents used its ad targeting tools to try to sew social division at scale — including targeting the 2016 US presidential election. The Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has since been called before US and EU lawmakers to answer questions about how his platform operates and the risks it’s posing to democratic processes. The company has announced a series of changes intended to make it more difficult for third parties to obtain user data, and to increase transparency around political advertising — adding a requirement for such ads to continue details of how has paid for them, for example, and also offering a searchable archive. Although critics question whether the company is going far enough — asking, for example, how it intends to determine what is and is not a political advert. Facebook is not offering a searchable archive for all ads on its platform, for example. Zuckerberg has also been accused of equivocating in the face of lawmakers’ concerns, with politicians on both sides of the Atlantic calling him out for providing evasive, misleading or intentionally obfuscating responses to concerns and questions around how his platform operates. The Electoral Commission makes a direct call for social media firms to do more to increase transparency around digital political advertising and remove messages which “do not meet the right standards”. “If this turns out to be insufficient, the UK’s governments and parliaments should be ready to consider direct regulation,” it also warns. We’ve reached out to Facebook comment and will update this post with any response. A Cabinet Office spokeswoman told us it would send the government response to the Electoral Commission report shortly — so we’ll also update this post when we have that. Update: A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “The government is committed to increasing transparency in digital campaigning, in order to maintain a fair and proportionate democratic process, and we will be consulting on proposals for new imprint requirements on electronic campaigning in due course.” The UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, has an ongoing investigating into the use of social media data for political campaigning — and commissioner Elizabeth Denham recently made a call for stronger disclosure rules around political ads and a code of conduct for social media firms. The body is expected to publish the results of its long-running investigation shortly. At the same time, a DCMS committee has been running an inquiry into the impact of fake news and disinformation online, including examining the impact on the political process. Though Zuckerberg has declined its requests for him to personally testify — sending a number of minions in his place, including CTO Mike Schroepfer who was grilled for around five hours by irate MPs and his answers still left them dissatisfied. The committee will set out the results of this inquiry in another report touching on the impact of big tech on democratic processes — likely in the coming months. Committee chair Damian Collins tweeted today to say the inquiry has “also highlighted how out of date our election laws are in a world increasingly dominated by big tech media”. On its forthcoming Brexit campaign spending report, an Electoral Commission spokesperson told us: “In accordance with its Enforcement Policy, the Electoral Commission has written to Vote Leave, Mr Darren Grimes and Veterans for Britain to advise each campaigner of the outcome of the investigation announced on 20 November 2017. The campaigners have 28 days to make representations before final decisions are taken. The Commission will announce the outcome of the investigation and publish an investigation report once this final decision has been taken.”

2018-05-11 13:00:00

On Thursday, Congress released more than 3,000 advertisements that the Russia-based Internet Research Agency ran on Facebook and Instagram between 2015 and 2017. More than 11.4 million American users were exposed to the ads, according to the House Intelligence Committee. In November, we saw a glimpse of what this data dump might contain: memes weaponized to stoke the racial, religious, and political tensions of the country around the 2016 presidential election. Now, all 3,393 of the ads, along with targeting data and social metrics, are publicly available for download. Most of these Russian troll memes were not very advanced, lest we forget. They often pandered to stereotypes, from young, progressive millennials, to middle-aged conservatives, liberals, and seemingly everyone in between. Facebook said in an announcement that the social giant is taking steps toward advertising and monitoring, including efforts to find and disable fake accounts and more transparency around who pays for ads. Scrolling through the trove of ads and accompanying social media captions is like watching a Facebook feed from the time around the 2016 election and its immediate aftermath flash by in fast-forward. A lot of it looks like mindless shit your old high school friends posted all day during that time, or the frothing nationalistic imagery shared by some distant relative. Many of the images and some of the memes deal with race, with messaging that snaps from “protect our police officers” to “cops are murderers.” “These ads clearly show that the Russian government not only meddled in our election to sway the results in favor of Donald Trump,” Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, wrote in a press release after the ads were made public. “But that they did so by promoting anti-Black hate speech, creating fake Black Lives Matter Facebook accounts, and stoking fears about Muslims, immigrants, and queer people.” Here are five types of memes represented in the data dump. Black Lives Matter Memes An account called Black Matters posted ads and memes that frequently targeted people in Baltimore, Ferguson, and St. Louis—places where police violence sparked protests in the years leading up to the 2016 election: Generic Millennial Humor One of the more generic accounts, called Memeopolis, posted internet millennial humor, with stock images accompanied by pithy jokes: “Fuck Yeah America” Memes Several accounts, such as Angry Eagle and Army of Jesus, promoted nationalistic ideas framed as patriotism: Pride Memes Aimed at young people, accounts like LGBT United tried to garner followers that cared about gender issues and sexuality: Memes for Robot Overlords? Not all of the memes contained in the dump were perfectly executed to sound like they were written by a teen memelord. An account called Stop AI posted this very confusing advertisement, which appears to have been written by the Terminator (or possibly the intelligent machine from the Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment): BONUS CATEGORY: Whomever This Is For Memelords whose obsession with Pokémon Go interferes with their sex lives, I guess. Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.

2016-04-20 00:00:00

(The following statement was released by the rating agency) NEW YORK, April 20 (Fitch) Increased non-prime lending, weakening underwriting standards, and a moderate reduction in used car values will contribute to a gradual decline in auto asset performance for auto finance companies through 2016 and subsequent years, according to a new report from Fitch Ratings. "Following a strong 2015, we expect auto asset performance to deteriorate going forward, particularly as used car values begin to weaken," said Michael Taiano, Director, Fitch Ratings. "Sub-prime lenders and non-traditional auto lenders will experience the greatest performance variability due to their higher risk nature." New vehicle sales increased in 2015 reaching nearly 17.5 million units due to growing light truck demand from low gas prices, the prevalence of cheap financing and heavy promotions. Heated competition, however, led to further loosening of industry-wide underwriting standards and increased non-prime lending which will have adverse implications for more recent vintages. Fitch further expects used car values to return to more normalized levels driven by downward pressure from increasing used vehicle supply caused by higher new car sales and elevated lease return volumes through 2018. Despite the headwinds, credit quality remains strong, supported by a stable economic backdrop. Losses among the major auto finance lenders remain low relative to historical terms even though they have continued to creep up year over year (4Q15 versus 4Q14). Quarter-over-quarter, though, the average net loss rate for Fitch-rated lenders decreased marginally from 1.06% in 3Q15 to 1.03% in 4Q15 and average 30+ day delinquencies decreased slightly from 3.96% to 3.82% during the same period. Prime auto loan ABS also continues to perform well, although with slightly higher loss rates versus 3Q15 and year-over-year figures. Subprime, however, has not fared as well as prime, and the divergence in loss rates between the two sectors continued to widen into 2016. Since year-end 2015 both prime and subprime ABS have seen some marginal improvement in performance with delinquencies and net losses falling slightly. Fitch notes, however, that this is occurring due to favorable seasonal trends and that the Mannheim index has continued to decrease in March. Credit losses and delinquencies will continue to increase over time, largely due to the uptick in subprime lending and easing underwriting standards which are producing weaker new vintages. Falling used car values will also impact loss severity. Nonetheless, as auto lenders provision for higher losses, we expect Fitch-rated auto lenders will have sufficient capital and liquidity relative to their asset quality to support the uptick in losses. The report is available at 'www.fitchratings.com' or by clicking on the link. Michael Taiano Director +1-646-582-4956 Fitch Ratings, Inc. 33 Whitehall Street New York, NY 10004 Richard Wilusz Assistant Director +1 312 368-5459 Media Relations: Hannah James, New York, Tel: + 1 646 582 4947, Email: [email protected]. Additional information is available at www.fitchratings.com U.S. Auto Asset Quality Review: 4Q15 (Gradual Performance Decline Ahead) here ALL FITCH CREDIT RATINGS ARE SUBJECT TO CERTAIN LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS. PLEASE READ THESE LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS BY FOLLOWING THIS LINK: here. IN ADDITION, RATING DEFINITIONS AND THE TERMS OF USE OF SUCH RATINGS ARE AVAILABLE ON THE AGENCY'S PUBLIC WEBSITE 'WWW.FITCHRATINGS.COM'. PUBLISHED RATINGS, CRITERIA AND METHODOLOGIES ARE AVAILABLE FROM THIS SITE AT ALL TIMES. FITCH'S CODE OF CONDUCT, CONFIDENTIALITY, CONFLICTS OF INTEREST, AFFILIATE FIREWALL, COMPLIANCE AND OTHER RELEVANT POLICIES AND PROCEDURES ARE ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE 'CODE OF CONDUCT' SECTION OF THIS SITE. FITCH MAY HAVE PROVIDED ANOTHER PERMISSIBLE SERVICE TO THE RATED ENTITY OR ITS RELATED THIRD PARTIES. DETAILS OF THIS SERVICE FOR RATINGS FOR WHICH THE LEAD ANALYST IS BASED IN AN EU-REGISTERED ENTITY CAN BE FOUND ON THE ENTITY SUMMARY PAGE FOR THIS ISSUER ON THE FITCH WEBSITE.

2019-04-18

London (CNN Business)New artificial intelligence software is being used in Japan to monitor the body language of shoppers and look for signs that they are planning to shoplift. The software, which is made by a Tokyo startup called Vaak, differs from similar products that work by matching faces to criminal records. Instead, VaakEye uses behavior to predict criminal action. Company founder Ryo Tanaka said his team fed the algorithm 100,000 hours worth of surveillance data to train it to monitor everything from the facial expressions of shoppers to their movements and clothing. Since VaakEye launched last month, it has been rolled out in 50 stores across Japan. Vaak claims that shoplifting losses dropped by 77% during a test period in local convenience stores. That could help reduce global retail costs from shoplifting, which hit $34 billion in 2017 according to the Global Shrink Index. Moral questions Using AI to catch thieves raises all kinds of ethical questions. "While the incentive is to prevent theft, is it legal or even moral to prevent someone from entering a store based on this software?" said Euromonitor retail analyst Michelle Grant. This should not be up to the software developer, says Tanaka. "What we provide is the information of the suspicious, detected image. We don't decide who is criminal, the shop decides who's criminal," he said. Yet that is precisely what concerns the human rights charity Liberty, which is campaigning to ban facial recognition technology in the United Kingdom. "A retail environment — a private body — is starting to perform something akin to a police function," said Hannah Couchman, Liberty's advocacy and policy officer. Liberty is also worried about the potential of AI to fuel discrimination. A 2018 study by MIT and Stanford University found that various commercial facial-analysis programs demonstrated skin-type and gender biases. Tanaka explains that since the Vaak software is based on behavior rather than race or gender, this should not be a problem. But Couchman remains skeptical. "With technologies that rely on algorithms — particularly in regards to human behavior — the potential for discrimination is always there," she said. "Humans have to teach the algorithm what to treat suspiciously." Customer consent Then there is the issue of transparency. "Are people aware of what's happening?" asked Couchman. "Do they consent? Is it meaningful consent? What happens to the data? How is it protected? Might it be shared?" Grant said consumers are willing to sacrifice some privacy for convenience — such as using face recognition for payment authentication — but only when they're aware the technology is being used. Tanaka does not dispute this. "There should be notice before they [customers] enter the store so that they can opt out," he said. "Governments should operate rules that make stores disclose information — where and what they analyze, how they use it, how long they use it," he said. Christopher Eastham, a specialist in AI at the law firm Fieldfisher, said the framework for regulating the technology is not yet in place. "There is a need for clarity from lawmakers and guidance from regulators, who will ultimately need to decide in what circumstances the use of this technology will be appropriate or desirable as a matter of public policy," he said.

2019-10-01 17:16:40

Long before Google, he helped create The New York Times Information Bank, an electronic repository of content from The Times and other publications. John Rothman, who in an era before Google conceived and helped develop The New York Times Information Bank, a revolutionary system that let computer users easily find journalism by The Times and dozens of other publications, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 95. His son, Andrew, said the cause was a stroke. Introduced in 1972, the Information Bank was an electronic retrieval system that gave subscribers computer access, through telephone lines, to long abstracts of articles from The Times and other newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, as well as from magazines like Newsweek, Time and Business Week. Mr. Rothman was a fitting leader for the Information Bank. He had, since 1946, worked for The New York Times Index, the invaluable monthly, quarterly and annual publications that offered summaries of articles from as far back as 1913, guiding students and researchers to find the full ones on microfilm. “Indexing is a giant guessing game,” Mr. Rothman wrote in Saturday Review magazine in 1965, when he was the index’s editor. “Indexers must assess in advance what information a user is likely to seek, where he is likely to look for it and how much detail the abstract (or entry) should include to possibly spare him a trip to the original item in the newspapers.” Working on the index led Mr. Rothman to think about how computers could store, sort and deliver abstracts of Times content to users at the paper and other locations, like public libraries, universities and major corporations. He proposed the Information Bank — the Times Index writ large — in 1965 and began working on it with IBM the next year. “The Times was interested in computers for typesetting and printing the newspaper,” Mr. Rothman said in 2013 in an interview with the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he was a volunteer archivist after retiring from The Times in 1990. “And of course they were blocked by the unions. They were interested in having me pursue this because they thought it would give them a chance to get their feet wet with computers.” In 1972, Times staff members began testing the Information Bank as a research tool. It would soon augment the paper’s archives, known as the morgue, where file cabinets are packed with clippings dating to the 19th century. In Times Talk, the paper’s in-house newsletter, Mr. Rothman assured colleagues that “once the basic methods” of searching the Information Bank were mastered, “retrieving the information is quite simple.” In late 1972, the first installation of the Information Bank outside The New York Times was made at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library. Within six months, its 14 customers included NBC, The Associated Press, the State Department, the C.I.A., the Library of Congress, Exxon and the Chase Manhattan Bank. At its inception, the Information Bank’s retrieval capability went back three years. Users at The Times and elsewhere were able to get full articles through microfiche cards, which were part of an institution’s Information Bank subscription. The Times was not alone in recognizing the promise of electronic data retrieval. Mead Data Central started its Lexis legal information service in 1973; its Nexis news and information service began six years later. The Information Bank was a pioneering venture. But financially speaking, Mr. Rothman told the Graduate Center, “it wasn’t a rousing success.” In 1983, The Times made a deal for Mead to exclusively license and distribute the Information Bank. The company shut the Information Bank’s computer facilities and let Mead handle the transmission and dissemination of the Times’s data as part of Nexis. Hans Rothmann was born on April 21, 1924, in Berlin. He and his parents — who were Jewish and designated by the Nazis as resident aliens because his grandfather was a Polish immigrant — had their property and possessions seized and were expelled in 1939. They fled to Brooklyn, where his father, Max, sold refrigeration equipment to restaurants, and his mother, Johanna (Marcuse) Rothmann, known as Hennie, was a homemaker. Hans learned English by working at a movie theater and attended Queens College before enlisting in the Army. (At 19, he changed his name to John Rothman, which he felt sounded more American.) While serving in military intelligence for the Fourth Armored Division in Europe, he used his native language to interrogate German prisoners of war and civilians. After his discharge, Mr. Rothman went back to Queens College to finish his bachelor’s degree, in English and comparative literature. He then sought a job at The Times. He wanted to be a theater critic — he would earn a master’s degree in 1949 at New York University for a thesis about drama criticism at The Times — but was offered a job as an indexer. Within a few years, he was assistant editor of The Times Index. In 1956, he earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia University. He worked for 44 years at The Times. In addition to editing the Index and serving as director of library and information services — the position he held when the Information Bank began — Mr. Rothman later oversaw the newspaper’s research and information technology and its archives. In addition to his son, Mr. Rothman is survived by his wife, Gertrude (Ullmann) Rothman; a daughter, Vivien Tartter; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. After his retirement, he organized the archives of Cyrus Vance, the lawyer and former secretary of state; William Scranton, the former governor of Pennsylvania; and Ellmore C. Patterson, the chairman of J.P. Morgan & Company during the 1970s. From 2000 to 2015, he was a volunteer at the Graduate Center, where he brought order to the archives of its presidents and student organizations. “This was his retirement gig, but he came in wearing a suit and tie, and he gifted this organization his archival skill,” Polly Thistlethwaite, chief librarian of the Graduate Center, said by phone. “There were no sick days for him on a volunteer job.”

2016-05-29 14:21:49

TEHRAN — In a sign of further tension between regional rivals, Iran will not allow its citizens to travel to Saudi Arabia for the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in September, Iran’s state television reported on Sunday. The decision, which means that tens of thousands of Iranians cannot make their spiritual journey to the main pilgrimage site of Islam, came after several failed rounds of talks between officials of both countries and on the heels of accusations that Saudi Arabia has started a cyberwar against Iran. Iran’s culture minister, Ali Jannati, told state television that “no pilgrims would be sent to the Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina, because of obstacles created by Saudi officials.” In a statement, Iran’s Hajj and Pilgrimage organization condemned Saudi Arabia for what it said was a lack of cooperation. “Too much time has been lost, and it is now too late to organize the pilgrimage,” the organization said, according to the semiofficial Mehr news agency. The Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah accused a visiting Iranian delegation of refusing to sign an agreement resolving issues. “They will be responsible in front of Allah Almighty and its people for the inability of the Iranian citizens to perform hajj for this year,” the ministry said in a statement published by the official Saudi Press Agency. The annual hajj pilgrimage is one of the pillars of Islam. According to religious tenets, every Muslim is duty bound to visit Mecca. The absence of Iranian Shiites during the pilgrimage will further widen the rift with Sunnis; some extremist Sunni adherents accuse Shiites of not being true Muslims. Relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia have remained strained since the start of the conflict in Syria more than five years ago. Iran supports President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus, while Saudi Arabia supports rebel militias. Throughout the last year, there have been tensions over Iranian visits to Mecca. During the 2015 hajj, many pilgrims died in a stampede, with Saudi Arabia claiming around 700 deaths and Iran saying more than 4,500 people had been killed. An independent investigation by The Associated Press put the death toll at 2,411. In January, Iranian protesters ransacked the Saudi Embassy in Tehran after a Shiite Muslim cleric was executed in Saudi Arabia, events that led to the severing of diplomatic ties between the two countries. Maps showing where more than 700 people were killed in a stampede near Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Besides supporting several opposing groups in multiple conflicts in the Middle East, both countries are engaged in a low-level cyberwar. Since Saturday, several websites belonging to official institutions, including that of Iran’s cyberpolice, have been taken down by hackers. In an interview with state television, the deputy commander of the digital police force, Hussein Ramezani, said the IP addresses of the attackers originated in Saudi Arabia. Among the targeted websites were crucial pieces of government infrastructure, including the Deeds and Property Organization and the postal service. Iran’s Statistical Center was also hacked. The Al Jazeera news channel reported that a Saudi hacker known as Nimr, Tiger of Saudi Arabia, had announced that his group, Electronic Decisive Storm, attacked Iranian satellite channels’ websites. The semiofficial Iranian news agency Tabnak said other sites had been hit by a hacker called Da3s. “This is not the Islamic State,” Tabnak’s website said. “It appears this comes from Saudi Arabia.” The attacks occurred a week after Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of the Iranian Passive Defense Organization, warned against coming cyberattacks by Saudi Arabia. In 2012, Saudi Arabia accused Iran of hacking the state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco, an attack widely seen as Iranian retaliation for the hacking of its main oil terminal on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf. In March, the United States Justice Department unsealed an indictment against seven Iranian computer experts accused of carrying out cyberattacks against several targets, including financial institutions and a dam in the United States, as part of an assignment for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. On Sunday, General Jalali said the experts were still in Iran.

2017-11-15

French President Emmanuel MacronEmmanuel Jean-Michel MacronThe Hill's Morning Report - Trump on defense over economic jitters Trump criticizes France's Macron for sending Iran 'mixed signals' Hillicon Valley: DOJ approves T-Mobile-Sprint merger | Trump targets Google, Apple | Privacy groups seek to intervene in Facebook settlement | Democrats seize on Mueller hearings in election security push MORE said Wednesday that France would cover the amount the U.S. contributed for climate science research to a United Nations panel after President Trump signaled America would exit the Paris climate change pact. “They will not miss a single euro,” Macron said, according to Reuters, referring to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The U.S. has given the IPCC about 2 million euros a year in the past. Trump announced in June he would be withdrawing from the Paris agreement, a pact he denounced as "unfair." “The bottom line is that the Paris accord is very unfair, at the highest level, to the United States,” Trump said at the time. The Trump administration filed a formal notice with the U.N. in August that it would be leaving the agreement "as soon as it is eligible to do so." The earliest the U.S. can leave is Nov. 4, 2020. Trump's decision was met with widespread criticism.  Earlier this month, an official in Macron's cabinet said Trump is "for the time being" not invited to the climate change summit scheduled to be held next month in France. The summit — scheduled for Dec. 12 — will include more than 100 countries and nongovernmental organizations. 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.

2018-09-23 22:39:00

At long last, Kylie Jenner‘s pregnancy is being openly discussed on Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Sunday’s episode chronicled the new mom welcoming her first child, daughter Stormi, with rapper Travis Scott on Feb. 1. When the day arrived, Kylie chose to have just her mom Kris Jenner and sister Khloé Kardashian in the delivery room with her, in addition to Scott. And while the other sisters may have been disappointed to be left out, they were mostly relieved that they wouldn’t be blamed if the secret got out. (Though PEOPLE first confirmed the news of the baby on the way in September 2017, Kylie, 21, didn’t publicly address it until after she gave birth.) “Kylie is about to have her baby and it’s pretty crazy that it really hasn’t been confirmed,” said Kourtney, 39. “So I don’t want to be the one with the info, or getting blamed for someone finding out the secret.” Kim, 37, marveled that her little sister had some amazing friends for having kept the news under wraps all those months. “Can you believe that Kylie got out of the hospital with not one report?” she said. “Now Caitlyn [Jenner] can never say we have big mouths and we leak everything. We kept that a secret!” Momager Kris, 62, admitted keeping a lid on the news wasn’t easy. “That was a lot of anxiety for me,” she said. “People were saying, ‘We’re going to post, we’re going to announce,’ and I’m like, ‘No!’ But she did it perfectly and it was such a positive experience for her.” “Totally,” Kim said. “Everyone was just like, ‘Okay, we get it. We get why you kept it private.’ … Kylie’s always wanted to be a mom, so this is really exciting for her. She just didn’t want anyone changing her happy moment and her happy pregnancy, so I’m really proud of her that she stuck to her guns and was able to tell her story her way.” And Kylie, who said she was “really doing this for myself,” said the experience couldn’t have gone any better. “I like [pregnancy,]” she said. “I miss it. I had the easiest pregnancy ever. You never feel alone — I was really sad to not be pregnant anymore.” At the end of the day, no one was more proud than Kris, who delivered the baby herself. “It’s only been a couple of days since Kylie had baby Stormi, and I can already tell that Kylie is going to be the most amazing mom and is so in love with her baby,” she gushed. But at the same time, the momager was going through a challenging time with a different daughter. “My relationship with Kourtney over the years has been kind of fabulous, but lately there’s definitely a shift,” she said. “I really don’t know where this is coming from and it makes me really, really sad. I just wish she would make an effort to treat me the way I would love to be treated. I love her so much. She’s my firstborn daughter.” As it turned out, the tension had started bubbling up after Kourtney’s therapist apparently informed her that she has an “issue with betrayal” because Kris cheated on her father, the late Robert Kardashian Sr., with soccer player Todd Waterman. “Lately, in therapy, a lot of topics that have been coming up are about childhood issues and how that affects so many of my relationships today,” she said. “If I had a problem, I wouldn’t go to [Kris], ever. I would go to Dad. She was not my person that I found comforting.” But Kris said Kourtney was “doted on” as a child. “I think she’s going through a phase in life where she has some anger inside that I don’t quite understand,” she said. “I wish her dad was around to say, ‘You’ve had the best most magical childhood of any child, ever.’ That’s what we prided ourselves on.” “She probably felt like she was always picking a side and it was always my dad’s,” remarked Khloé, 34. “In the divorce, she picked his. In the [O.J. Simpson] trial, she picked his. She wanted to live there over your house. She’s always picked his.” Khloé said she wished her sister would communicate her feelings more openly with the family. “I know Kourtney, for some reason, finds more comfort in talking to a stranger about family stuff, rather than talking to the source,” she said. “I would be fine with that if Kourtney took whatever her therapist talked about and then came to the source, but that’s the part we’re missing and that’s what’s frustrating to us all, because we never resolve something or work through something or just even fight about something if we don’t know what’s going on. It’s always us pulling teeth and guessing with her.” Eventually, Kourtney decided she had to talk things through with Kris. “If my going to therapy and figuring this all out is making me resentful towards my mom, which is not how I want to feel and it’s not how I want to treat her, then I feel like it is worth having a conversation with her, just to let her know that’s not my intention,” she said. “It’s really about me working on myself.” “I’ve gone through a phase of being more sensitive to things,” she admitted. “It’s nothing bad, it’s just understanding and then understanding how that affects our current relationships. Like, if there’s certain behavior that Younes [Bendjima] will do that’s similar to things that my mom would do, just subconsciously, it will just bring up similar issues. There is that uncomfortable place when you are growing, but I think it’s something that I have to just deal with myself.” Sitting down with her mom, Kourtney did her best to explain where she was coming from. “As you know, I’ve been gong to therapy lately and my therapist says your intimate relationships bring up childhood issues,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s fair if I’m not communicating it. I don’t want to go back in time … I feel like it has passed and I’m not feeling that way anymore, but I just wanted to explain that to you so you understand where it’s coming from.” “What we usually do as a family is we criticize each other, we’re judgmental and we give each other an attitude and we’re bitchy,” she added. “So moving forward in life, I’ve made a point with my sisters already to not accept that anymore.” Tearing up, Kris said all she wanted was “the best, most joyful, peaceful life” for her daughter. “Whatever it takes for me to be part of that, that’s all I want,” she said. “That’s the joy of my life, is you guys. I have nothing else. I never want you to be disappointed in me, so if there’s something you want to say or something that you need to have me work on, I’m 100 percent ready to work on it because I love you so much. You’re my firstborn and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.” The two of them hugged it out, and Kourtney agreed to work on things, too. “Moving forward, I’m going to tell you if I don’t like something or if something is hurtful, instead of just being a bitch about it,” she promised. “I think Kourtney and I have gotten through that rough patch and started a healing process,” said Kris. “That’s a really big step in the right direction, especially for her. She’s always going to hang onto the past a little bit, but what I am hopeful for is that we can look forward to an amazing future together because I love her more than anything.” Keeping Up with the Kardashians airs Sundays (9 p.m. ET) on E!

2017-03-02

(Reuters) - Supermarket operator Kroger Co (KR.N) surprised analysts with its first quarterly same-store sales decline in 13 years, as competition intensified in the U.S. grocery industry, sending its shares down as much as 5.6 percent on Thursday. Kroger, like other grocers, has been struggling with lackluster U.S. economic growth and a cut-throat price war with Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N) and Amazon Inc (AMZN.O). Cincinnati-based Kroger said, excluding fuel, sales from stores open for at least a year fell 0.7 percent, widely missing analysts’ average estimate of a 0.1 percent rise, according to Consensus Metrix. Kroger blamed the decline on deflation. This was Kroger’s first quarterly same-store sales drop since the first quarter of 2003, raising concerns it is losing customers to rivals. “With peers Ahold Delhaize (AD.AS), Walmart and Publix (PUSH.PK) reporting better comparable sales than Kroger, it is becoming increasingly likely that the company is losing overall market share,” J.P. Morgan analyst Ken Goldman said. Price competition in the industry has been increasing, with Wal-Mart reportedly running a new price-comparison test to knock out competition from German discount grocery chain Aldi Inc [ALDIEI.UL] and Kroger. Target Corp (TGT.N) said on Tuesday it would sacrifice full-year margins to keep its prices competitive. Kroger has become more promotional and aggressive on some pricing as sales were softer, CEO Rodney McMullen told analysts on a call. “There is no doubt several competitors are improving and running better stores ... it’s much broader than just Walmart,” he added. Kroger, whose chains include Ralphs and Fred Meyer, forecast full-year earnings of $2.21-$2.25 per share, the midpoint of which meets analysts’ average estimate of $2.23, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. “We are disappointed in the comparable number and are starting to wonder how Kroger will get anywhere near its long-term outlook for 8-11 percent earnings per share growth in today’s environment,” Goldman added. The No. 1 U.S. supermarket chain said it expects full-year same-store sales excluding fuel to either remain flat or rise as much as 1 percent, short of the 1.2 percent rise analysts had estimated. Kroger’s shares, which had already taken a 4 percent hit this week after news of Wal-Mart and Target’s pricing strategies, were down 3.2 percent at $31.01 in morning trading. The company earned 53 cents per share, in the fourth quarter ended Jan. 28, beating the average analyst estimate by one cent. Net sales rose 5.5 percent to $27.61 billion, beating analysts’ average estimate of $27.31 billion. Reporting by Richa Naidu in Bengaluru; Editing by Martina D'Couto

2019-11-20 00:00:00

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa’s power utility Eskom needs around 187 billion rand ($12.60 billion) to comply fully with existing legislation curbing harmful emissions, a government presentation to parliament showed on Wednesday. Eskom, which uses mainly coal-fired power plants to generate electricity, was one of 37 top domestic polluters, including Sasol (SOLJ.J), granted a five-year reprieve by government until 2020 to meet air emission standards. The new minimum emissions standards for air quality laws in South Africa, which cover particulate, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions, came into effect on April 1, 2015. “Complete compliance with the 2010 Minimum Emission Standard would require an estimated 187 billion rand,” the presentation by the Department of Public Enterprises said. Africa’s biggest public utility supplies over 90% of South Africa’s electricity, relying largely on ageing, heavily polluting coal-fired power stations but does not generate enough cash to meet its debt servicing costs. Project delays and cost overruns at Medupi and Kusile, two mega-coal plants currently being built by Eskom, largely contributed to Eskom’s debt ballooning to 440 billion rand. “Given the current financial constraints, at this stage Medupi will be prioritized to be retrofitted with Flue-Gas Desulfurization (FGD technology),” the department said. South Africa has said any new coal plants would need to have emission-reducing technology, such as FGD. In September, Eskom said it might have to shut some plants if it fails to reduce emissions, raising the prospect of further power cuts in the county and also putting more pressure on the government which has had to bail out the debt-ridden company to keep it afloat. Eskom has applied to the Department of Environmental Affairs for rolling postponements of its obligations under the legislation to meet the emissions and air standards. Ageing plants and poor maintenance has triggered several power cuts throughout the year, putting pressure on key economic industries, such as mining, as the country skirts a recession. The latest bout of nationwide blackouts come after repeated power cuts in February and March, which hit the economy and pushed the government to grant Eskom a $4 billion bailout on top of a $16 billion bailout spread over the next 10 years. Reporting by Wendell Roelf. Editing by Jane Merriman

2016-09-05

Sept 5 (Reuters) - German drugmaker Bayer AG said on Monday it was in advanced talks to acquire Monsanto Co and was raising its offer for the U.S. seed producer. Bayer said it would be prepared to offer $127.50 per Monsanto share from its previous offer price of $125 per share only in connection with a negotiated deal. In July, Monsanto had turned down Bayer’s offer to buy the company at $125 per share, but said it was open to further talks with the German healthcare and chemicals group as well as other parties. (Reporting by Gayathree Ganesan in Bengaluru; Editing by Sandra Maler)

2016-11-23

With "Dow 19,000" in the books, some say Dow 20,000 might not be far behind. The Dow Jones industrial average broke through the 19,000 level for the first time Tuesday after closing higher in all but two sessions since the election. "Risk is coming back to the market after really, how we see it, a two-year decline favoring risk-off trades. So we think the bull market's continuing," Ari Wald, Oppenheimer's head of technical analysis, said Tuesday on CNBC's "Power Lunch. " Wald sees the index hitting 20,000 in the first half of 2017. This would mark an accelerated pace for round numbers, given that the Dow first hit 18,000 in December 2014. Not only is the index breaking out, said Wald, but it's breaking out "with the right leadership." "This is very classic bull-market behavior. When the Fed starts to tighten interest rates, you have your mid-cycle correction — that's what we've had over the last year, the very wide gyrations — and now we're breaking out to the upside." If all 30 stocks in the Dow rose to analysts' median price targets, the Dow would be trading at about 20,065. Based on FactSet price target data, Apple would contribute the most gains to the Dow in that scenario, followed by Home Depot and Visa. The Dow is a price-weighted index, unlike the market-cap weighted S&P 500, meaning that stocks with higher dollar values have more prominence. That gives Goldman Sachs, the most expensive stock by share price, a much greater effect on the index than the performance of Cisco, the cheapest name by share price. Caterpillar, Chevron and Goldman Sachs are three names to play at these loftier levels, Rich Ross, head of technical analysis at Evercore ISI, said Tuesday on CNBC's "Fast Money. " "Traders like three things. They like higher yield, higher volatility and fleece vests. This is a great way to get all three; those are three stocks to play the move higher in the Dow."

2018-11-08

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - British children are having vast quantities of personal data collected from birth, according to a report released on Thursday that calls for more transparency and greater legal protection. From proud parents sharing a photo of their newborn baby online to internet-based toys, smart speakers and location tracking gadgets, children’s every move is being tracked, the Children’s Commissioner for England warned in the report. “We’re all datafied but the difference for children is ... they’re datafied from birth,” the report’s author Simone Vibert, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I think we should be concerned because we don’t know what the consequences of all this information about children will be in the future.” Vibert said parents should stop and think before sharing information online about their children, whose online data footprints could one day put them at greater risk of identity theft or limit their job and university prospects. Last year, a popular children’s toy, CloudPets, was found to have breached data laws after gathering and storing online about two million personal messages shared between children and their family members. About 79 percent of five to seven year olds in Britain go online every week, mostly using a tablet, this jumps to 99 percent of 12 to 15 years olds, according to a 2017 report by Britain’s communications regulator, Ofcom. Children aged 11 to 16 post on social media on average 26 times a day, which means by the age of 18 they are likely to have posted 70,000 times, the report found. It said that while personal information in the wrong hands could pose an immediate threat to children’s safety, there is less understanding of how personal data gathered in childhood shape people’s prospects in the long term. Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield called on the government to urgently refine existing data protection legislation. The report said her office would draft a law outlining the statutory duty of care governing the relationship between social media companies and their audiences. It also urged companies to be more transparent about their collection and use of children’s data and recommended safeguards including improved education in schools on social media use. Asked to respond, the government said it was “determined to make Britain the safest place to be online”. “Parents need to have confidence their children are protected,” a spokeswoman for Britain’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Reporting by Adela Suliman; Editing by Claire Cozens. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit news.trust.org

2017-07-11 16:30:00

Jennifer Lopez has always been, and always will be, Jenny from the Block. She's an iconic performer because of her electric presence on the stage, and her ability to dance the shit out of any choreography. Plus, her voice is perfect in both her Spanish and English hits. Unfortunately, though, it's been a minute since we've gotten a music treat from Lopez. She's been busy acting on her series Shades of Blue, building her relationship with former Yankees player Alex Rodriguez, and being a mom to 9-year-old twins Max and Emme. But that changes now. The 47-year-old just released a brand new track from her forthcoming album, and it even features her ex-husband and collaborator Marc Anthony. Along with the audio for "Ni Tú Ni Yo," Lopez also released the tropical music video for the song, which includes the musical talents of a Cuban reggaeton group, Gente De Zona. In April, while promoting the song and album, Lopez told ET she was happy with the work she did on it. "I think it's one of the best albums I've made in a long time and I'm super proud of it," she told the site. She added that it already had one fan from the beginning: A-Rod. "He loves it," the singer said. "I'm so excited, you know, every time I finish something, I bring it home and I want him to hear it." So far, fans love the vibrant Latin masterpiece, too. (And they're really loving the Anthony-Lopez dynamic at the beginning of the video.) Watch the full video below, and tell me you weren't thinking of a future Rihanna-Lopez "Wild Thoughts" + "Ni Tú Ni Yo" collab the whole time. Read these stories next: The Hottest Movie Sex Scenes, Ever (NSFW)The Best Part Of Snapchat? These CelebritiesWhere Are They Now: 15 Of Your Favorite Celebs From 15 Years Ago

2020-03-02 00:00:00

March 2 (Reuters) - Digital Bros SpA: * GROUP EXPECTS TO GENERATE LIFETIME REVENUES IN EXCESS OF EURO 50 MILLION FROM VIDEOGAME ON PERSONAL COMPUTER Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage: (Gdansk Newsroom)

2019-01-07 11:38:00

Lady Gaga ended her Golden Globes night on a very sweet note. After taking home the trophy of the night for best original song, the Star is Born actress, 32, celebrated by cozying up in bed with a bowl of Fruity Pebbles and her award. Her fiancé Christian Carino captured the breakfast in bed moment around 12:30 a.m. following the ceremony and posted the snuggly picture to Instagram. “what a rager. ❤️,” he wrote of the photo. Carino—who has been tied to Gaga since February 2017—did not walk the carpet with the singer, but he was inside the ceremony to cheer her on. To much surprise, A Star is Born only took home one award of its five nominations on Sunday night, with many saying it was snubbed. In the film, Gaga plays Ally, a struggling artist who falls in love with famous musician Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) with vices of his own, as she follows her dream and kicks off her singing career. The production won best original song for “Shallow,” the heart-wrenching tune performed by Cooper, 44, and Gaga in the movie. The actress accepted the award alongside her fellow songwriters. “I just have to say, as a woman in music, it is really hard to be taken seriously as a musician and a songwriter. These three incredible men … they lifted me up and supported me,” Gaga said. “Bradley, I love you.” Gaga’s role also earned her a nomination for best actress in a drama, though the award ultimately went to Glenn Close for her performance in The Wife. This was Gaga’s fourth nomination and second win. She previously won a Golden Globe for best performance by an actress in a limited series or TV movie for her role in American Horror Story: Hotel.

2019-02-27

Sen. Josh HawleyJoshua (Josh) David HawleyRecessions happen when presidents overlook key problems Government regulation of social media would kill the internet — and free speech Juan Williams: We need a backlash against Big Tech MORE (R-Mo.) is going on offense as he's come under fire from some conservatives for his skepticism about one of President TrumpDonald John TrumpFacebook releases audit on conservative bias claims Harry Reid: 'Decriminalizing border crossings is not something that should be at the top of the list' Recessions happen when presidents overlook key problems MORE's picks for a key appeals court. Hawley, in an op-ed for The Federalist, pledged that he would ask "tough questions" and "challenge conventional wisdom" when it comes to judicial nominations, despite potential criticism. "I know what a strong constitutional judge should do and say, and I’m not going to let other people, and certainly not the Washington establishment, do my thinking for me," Hawley wrote. Hawley's op-ed comes as he's come under criticism for publicly raising concerns about Neomi Rao, Trump's nominee to succeed Supreme Court Justice Brett KavanaughBrett Michael KavanaughThe exhaustion of Democrats' anti-Trump delusions Lewandowski on potential NH Senate run: If I run, 'I'm going to win' Cook Political Report moves Susan Collins Senate race to 'toss up' MORE on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that Hawley "joins the left in trashing" Rao and argued that the GOP senator was trying to use a "litmus test" on Trump's nominee. Hawley fired back on Twitter that the editorial was "embarrassing." Hawley's concerns have also put him in the crosshairs of the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative group deeply involved in the fight over confirming Trump's nominees, which announced that it would run ads in Missouri on Rao's nomination. Axios first reported over the weekend that Hawley had concerns about Rao's nomination. He's supposed to meet with Rao on Wednesday, a day before the Judicial Committee is scheduled to vote on her nomination. Hawley expanded on his concerns about Rao and her views on abortion in a letter to her that was publicly released by his office on Tuesday. "Understanding that lower court judges are bound by precedent, I will not vote to confirm nominees whom I believe will expand substantive due process precedents like Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania," Hawley wrote in the letter. Hawley added that he questioned Rao's "judicial philosophy and approach to constitutional law," including "concerns" about some of Rao's academic writings. Republicans have a 12-10 majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee, meaning that Republicans could send Rao's nomination to the Senate floor even if Hawley voted "no," as long as every other Republican on the panel voted "yes." Since Republicans hold a 53-seat majority in the Senate, they could lose three Republicans and still confirm Rao. Sen. Joni ErnstJoni Kay ErnstErnst town hall in Iowa gets contentious over guns Air Force probe finds no corroboration of sexual assault allegations against Trump pick Gun control activists set to flex muscle in battle for Senate MORE (R-Iowa), a member of the committee, had previously raised concerns about Rao's college writings on date rape. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Sen. Tom CottonThomas (Tom) Bryant CottonCotton warns China: Crackdown on Hong Kong would be 'grave miscalculation' Congress must address gender gap in nominations to military service academies GOP senators press Google on reports it developed a smart speaker with Huawei MORE (R-Ark.) has also raised questions about Rao. Judicial nominations are a top priority for Republicans, who confirmed Trump's 31st circuit court pick on Tuesday. Sen. Lindsey GrahamLindsey Olin GrahamTwo-thirds of Republicans support 'red flag' gun laws: NPR poll Red flag laws won't stop mass shootings — ending gun-free zones will Pelosi warns Mnuchin to stop 'illegal' .3B cut to foreign aid MORE (R-S.C.), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has scheduled a vote for Rao on Thursday. "I really like Josh. He's really smart. I think she's extremely qualified and very mainstream in her thinking," Graham told reporters on Tuesday evening. "So we'll see what happens, but hopefully we can resolve any differences." 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.

2019-09-24 00:00:00

BEIJING, Sept 24 (Reuters) - China will step up efforts to stabilise economic growth, Ning Jizhe, a vice head of the state planner, said on Tuesday, adding that authorities will speed up construction of investment projects and relax restrictions on auto purchases. Ning made the comments in a briefing ahead of the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. At the same briefing, central bank governor Yi Gang reiterated that China would maintain a prudent monetary policy stance and would not resort to "flood-like" stimulus. (Reporting by Kevin Yao Editing by Shri Navaratnam)

2018-02-23 00:00:00

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s son dropped a planned speech on foreign affairs in the Indian capital on Friday after ethics experts said he should avoid wading into policy issues as a private citizen. Donald Trump Jr. is on a tour of India to promote real estate projects in several cities but ethics watchdog groups in the United States say there is a possible conflict of interest in pushing the Trump brand name while his father is in the White House. He was billed to make a speech on the topic “Reshaping the Indo-Pacific - The New Era of Cooperation” but hours before the conference began that was changed into a “fireside chat” where he spoke about his business and stayed clear of policy issues. “I am here on business, I am not representing anyone,” he said at the conference organized by the Economic Times, a leading newspaper, and Yes Bank. He spoke before Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered a keynote speech on preparing India for the future to a gathering of business leaders from India and overseas. U.S. Senator Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to the U.S. ambassador to India this week to ask for guarantees that the embassy and the State Department will not offer any support to Trump Jr. beyond helping the U.S. Secret Service to provide him with security. Trump Jr. said he had been coming to India for more than a decade to build business for The Trump Organisation and it had reached a take-off stage but there were self-imposed curbs following the election of his father as president. “I learnt about doing business here through the school of hard knocks, we have built partnerships here,” he said. This week he was wooing buyers to book luxury apartments in Trump Towers in Gurgaon on the outskirts of New Delhi as well as in Mumbai, attending champagne receptions. Trump’s partners in India are playing up the Trump brand. In the days leading up to Trump Jr.’s visit, one of its development partners in Gurgaon began an advertising campaign in newspapers offering dinner and conversation with the president’s son. But Trump said his company could not build on the gains it had made in India because of the curbs over the past year. “Ten years of hard work to get there, this would be a time to capitalize, but its a sacrifice, its a big sacrifice,” he said. “But we will be back, once we are out of politics.” Shortly before taking office last year, Trump Sr. said he would hand off control of his business empire, which includes luxury homes and hotels across the world, to his sons Donald and Eric, and move his assets into a trust to help ensure that he would not consciously take actions as president that would benefit him personally. Several government and private ethics watchdogs said he should have gone further, divesting himself of assets that could cause a conflict of interest. Reporting by Sanjeev Miglani and Manoj Kumar; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg

2017-07-24

DUBAI (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirates energy minister said it was too early to talk about additional cuts to oil output, Sky News Arabia reported on Monday on its Twitter feed. Suhail bin Mohammed al-Mazroui said global oil demand is expected to rise in the second half of 2017 and that any increase in shale oil production in a short period would hurt oil markets. Reporting By Aziz El Yaakoubi; editing by Sylvia Westall

2018-09-24

In 2012, the English playwright Richard Bean tickled Broadway audiences silly with “One Man, Two Guvnors,” which transplanted a commedia-dell’arte classic to nineteen-sixties Brighton—and helped launch James Corden to stardom. Bean’s new comedy, “The Nap” (in previews, at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman), is set in the surprisingly seedy world of pro snooker. Ben Schnetzer (above) plays a rising champion who gets drawn into a match-fixing scheme, culminating in a live onstage tournament.

2019-10-04 00:00:00

(Adds Clarida's comment, updates dateline to add New York) Clarida: Fed to act 'as appropriate,' takes meeting at a time * Evans says he is supportive of further adjustments if needed * Kaplan says he too is "open-minded" on rate cuts * Fed funds futures: traders see 90% chance of October rate cut By Jennifer Hiller and Jonnelle Marte THE WOODLANDS, Texas/NEW YORK, Oct 3 (Reuters) - Two Fed policymakers on Thursday signaled they are open to delivering another rate cut after a report showed the growth in the vast U.S. services sector is slowing, but the Fed's No. 2, speaking late in the day, gave little away on his own thinking. The Fed "will act as appropriate to sustain a low unemployment rate and solid growth and stable inflation," Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida said in New York, repeating a phrase Fed Chair Jerome Powell has used ahead of meetings when the Fed did cut rates, as well as in June, when it didn't. The U.S. consumer and economy are in a "good place," and the U.S. labor market is "very healthy," Clarida said. At the same time, risks include slowing global growth, uncertainty over trade, and persistent low inflation overseas, all of which impact the U.S. economy. "We have eight meetings a year, we take them one at a time. We are not on a preset course," he said. Clarida's circumspect comments came at the end of a day where traders bid up expectations of two more Fed rate cuts this year after the Institute for Supply Management (ISM)'s non-manufacturing activity index dropped to its lowest reading since August 2016. Separate data earlier in the week showed an index of U.S. factory activity contracting to its lowest level in more than a decade. The reports may signal that a slide in exports, business sentiment and business investment is spreading to the consumer, whose spending accounts for the bulk of the $20 trillion U.S. economy. "If we wait for weakness in global growth and manufacturing and business investment to seep into other parts of the economy... I think we likely have waited too long," Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan told a group in a Houston suburb after that report. The Fed's two rate cuts so far this year have reduced the likelihood of a severe downturn, Kaplan said, but have not eliminated it, adding that he has an "open mind" as regards to rate-setting and is watching "extremely carefully" for evidence of broader economic weakness. "We will go to our next meeting, have a discussion about what's appropriate, and I'm extremely open-minded to making an adjustment if that's what the appropriate policy is," Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Evans said in Madrid, before the services report. The Fed has cut rates twice this year as U.S. businesses were hit by rising trade tensions with China, political risk including Britain's potentially chaotic divorce from the European Union, and weakening economic growth in Germany and elsewhere. But not all 17 Fed policymakers backed the cuts; in September, several wanted rates to stay where they were, and one wanted a deeper rate cut. U.S. household spending and jobs growth have so far remained strong, momentum that U.S. central bankers have attributed at least in part to the Fed's pivot from a tightening stance as recently as 10 months ago. At the same time, inflation has lingered below the Fed's 2% goal. Fed policymakers have said they are on the lookout for any signs that the hit from trade uncertainty and a weakening global economy is no longer confined to the U.S. export and manufacturing sectors. Rate futures traders now see an 88% chance of a quarter-of-percentage-point rate cut at the Fed's October 29-30 meeting, and a better-than-even chance of a fourth rate cut by year's end that would bring the central bank's target range to 1.25% to 1.5% and completely reverse all of last year's tightening. U.S. stocks also rose Thursday on expectations of further Fed rate cuts. A U.S. government report on September jobs growth, out early Friday, could be pivotal as Fed policymakers weigh whether trade uncertainties are reaching deeper into the U.S. economy. Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester, who was against the decision to cut rates in July, on Thursday pushed back against the idea that the labor market could strengthen much further than it is now. Unemployment in August registered at 3.7%, well below most economists' view of a sustainable level without pushing up on inflation. (Reporting by Jesús Aguado and Jose Elias Rodriguez in Madrid, Lindsay Dunsmuir in Washington, Jennifer Hiller in The Woodlands, Texas, Jonnelle Marte in New York with writing by Ann Saphir in San Francisco; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Sandra Maler)

2019-10-31 00:00:00

Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew NapolitanoAndrew Peter NapolitanoAfter Obama-era abuses, Republican hysteria over impeachment process is absurd Fox's Napolitano defends Schiff: He's 'following the rules of the House' Fox News analyst: Republicans are protesting their own impeachment inquiry rules MORE defended Rep. Adam SchiffAdam Bennett SchiffTrump rails against House Democrats, impeachment inquiry during campaign rally: 'It's all a hoax' Graham: Schiff comment on inquiry findings 'full of crap' Democrats set stage for Watergate-style TV hearings MORE’s (D-Calif.) handling of the impeachment inquiry amid fierce criticism from GOP lawmakers, with Napolitano stating the rules Republicans are complaining about were written when the party controlled Congress in 2015. “Congressman Schiff is, in my opinion, following the rules of the House of Representatives. You generate the information in secret. You decide which you want to make public. You can’t use anything against the president that hasn’t been challenged and aired in public," Napolitano told "Fox & Friends." “So his [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's] lawyers, whoever they are going to be, ultimately will be seated at a table at the House Judiciary Committee challenging that evidence," he continued. "When that challenge is over, the House Judiciary Committee votes, and then the House of Representatives votes.” Schiff serves as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and is helping lead the impeachment inquiry.  “The Republicans have asked for a vote, so they’re getting this vote about the procedure of the inquiry going forward," noted co-host Steve Doocy. "But also want it to be fair. There is nothing fair about this. Congress has got some screwy rules.” “Congress does," Napolitano agreed. "The rules were written in 2015 when Republicans controlled Congress. And now they are stuck with those rules.” “They come back to haunt the Republicans," replied Doocy. “Yes, it has come back to haunt the Republicans," said Napolitano. "One of the more interesting phrases that I heard the other day is an impeachable offense is whatever the House says it is. Because at that point, it’s political.” House Democrats will hold their first floor vote on impeachment Thursday, shifting the process from being behind closed doors to being public and broadcast on television. If impeached in the Democratic-controlled House, 20 Republicans in the Senate would have to vote with Democrats to get the 67 votes required for Trump to be removed from office. 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.

2017-02-15 00:00:00

Hannah Jeter is insanely attractive ... now that we've gotten that out of the way we can get to something equally as sexy, her telling TMZ Sports which female athlete she has the girl hots for. We got the pregnant Mrs. Jeter (way to go, Derek) out in NY and asked her who her girl crush is ... you know, seeing as how she's around incredibly beautiful women all day. If you thought she was gonna take one of her S.I. models you're WRONG ... Hannah's girl crush is the same as her husband ... a world-class athlete. Thank you Hannah, thank you.

2016-12-21

D P.K. Subban did not make the trip to Philadelphia and sat out his second straight game with an upper body injury on Monday. D Ryan Ellis scored the only goal of the shootout, leading the Predators to a 2-1 win over the Flyers on Monday. “We needed somebody to step up because I’ve been struggling (in shootouts), and Elly found a way to get it by him,” Predators F Ryan Johansen said. “Then Pekka (Rinne) obviously stopped three in a row against some good shooters. So, we found a way to get it done tonight. It wasn’t our best game, but we’re walking out of here with two points.” C Filip Forsberg sent the game into overtime with a third-period goal, and the Predators went on to beat the Flyers 2-1 in a shootout Monday. Forsberg, who has struggled offensively this season after netting a career-high 33 goals last season, staked a spot in front of the Flyers net and deflected a point shot by D Matt Irwin behind G Steve Mason for his second goal in four games. D Adam Pardy was recalled Monday from the AHL Milwaukee Admirals. He finished with an even rating in a team-low 7:46 of ice time Monday night at Philadelphia. G Pekka Rinne stopped 30 of 31 shots, and he made saves on Nick Cousins, Claude Giroux and Jakub Voracek in the skills competition to give the Predators their first shootout win of the season, 2-1 at Philadelphia on Monday.

2016-10-21

In a bizarre end to an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Friday, Curt Schilling asked the Jewish host why followers of the faith back Democrats. “I would like to ask you something as a person who is practicing the Jewish faith and have since you were young, I don't understand, maybe this is the amateur, non-politician in me, I don't understand how people of Jewish faith can back the Democratic Party, which over the last 50 years have been so clearly anti Israel, so clearly anti-Jewish Israel that I don’t know what else need to be done, said or happen — the Democratic Party is aligned with Israel only because we have agreements in place that make them have to be ” Schilling said. Tapper did not hesitate in responding to the former Red Sox pitcher and World Series champion who is considering a challenge to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2018. “Well, I don’t speak for Jews and I don’t support the Democratic or Republican Party,” Tapper told Schilling. “I would imagine, just to try to answer your question, one of the reasons many Jews are Democrats has more to do for social welfare programs and that sort of thing than it does for Israel." The CNN anchor said he knows a lot of “Jews who are strong supporters of Israel and do support the Republican Party,” but again stated calmly that he does not speak for his faith. After coming under scrutiny for his comments, Schilling doubled-down on them during an interview on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" later Friday. Asked by the host if he wished to clarify his earlier statements, Schilling lashed out. "I'm apparently an anti-Semite now because I had the gall and the audacity to ask someone of the Jewish faith why or how they believe people of the Jewish faith vote Democrat," the retired baseball star said. "I mean, god forbid I listen to someone of the faith, rather than the media, who clearly are not biased and don't have an agenda." Pressed by Matthews to explain why he felt Tapper could speak for those who practiced Judaism, Schilling said he was merely "curious" and accused Democrats of similarly overgeneralizing with Christian adherents. "Liberals do it with Christians all the time," he said. "I'm not going to play the victim game because I'm a white male Christian, which apparently makes me a racist to anybody, that as long as -- if I don't speak out in favor of whatever it is they want me to speak out of." Schilling was fired from ESPN earlier this year after multiple incendiary comments and an anti-transgender posting on Facebook.

2017-03-01 00:00:00

(CNN)An armed and dangerous fugitive wanted in connection with the killing of his girlfriend and the attempted killing of another woman in Mississippi is now in custody. Alex Bridges Deaton, 28, was captured early Wednesday near Dorrance, Kansas, the Kansas Highway Patrol said. A nationwide manhunt had been launched to find Deaton after his girlfriend was found dead last week in Rankin County, Mississippi, near Jackson, and a jogger was shot near the girlfriend's apartment. Troopers tried to stop a black Cadillac headed eastbound on Interstate 70 just before 8 a.m. after it matched the description of a car seen following a shooting at a Pratt, Kansas, convenience store earlier Wednesday morning, according to a statement from the patrol. The driver fled at a high rate of speed, the statement said. The vehicle then crashed and caught on fire, and Deaton was pulled out and placed under arrest. "I understand that the troopers did some pretty heroic, tactical moves with their vehicles to get the man stopped," said Marshall Fisher, head of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, at a news conference. " ... He's led us on quite the chase the last few days, and everybody here is very happy that he's in custody." Deaton is also considered a person of interest in a third incident in Mississippi that left a woman dead, according to authorities. Local and federal authorities had offered a reward up to $32,500 for information leading to his capture. Deaton was spotted Tuesday night in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he allegedly carjacked a couple there, according to the Rankin County Sheriff's Office. The couple were able to escape, but the male victim sustained a gunshot wound, the sheriff's office said. Deaton escaped in the couple's Honda Civic, police said. Suspect's girlfriend found dead, jogger shot Deaton's girlfriend, Heather Robinson, 30, was found dead in her apartment Friday afternoon following a welfare check. Earlier that morning near the apartment, a jogger had called 911 to say she had been shot by a man who was driving a white SUV, believed to belong to Robinson, authorities said. The jogger was shot in the thigh and is expected to recover. Robinson's family sent a statement to CNN affiliate WJTV-TV in Jackson, saying: "Our family has been overwhelmed by our tragic loss since Friday afternoon. Our lives are forever changed and words cannot express our pain and sorrow. For those that did not know Heather, she had a BS degree in nursing and enjoyed her career in the medical field. She was a very hard working and determined young lady and held respect for all. At this point we ask that our privacy be respected so we can grieve as a family." Deaton sent cryptic text messages from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to his mother Saturday, Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey told HLN's Ashleigh Banfield. Deaton has no prior criminal history, Bailey said. But he said there were some disturbing reports about the suspect from Robinson's family. "I think some of the signs were there about an abusive boyfriend, a controlling boyfriend," Bailey said. "I believe that's what started all these tragic events; I believe Heather was trying to distance herself or break up with him." Woman killed in church Deaton also is "a person of great interest" in the Thursday shooting death of Brenda Pinter, 69, at a church in Neshoba County, Mississippi, said Sheriff Tommy Waddell. Surveillance video showed an SUV similar to the one in the jogger incident entering the parking lot of Dixon Baptist Church that day. Pinter, a member of the church, came by herself around 4 p.m. to clean. Later that afternoon, her husband tried unsuccessfully to reach her by phone and then drove over to the church to check on her. He found her body in the church office. She had been shot to death. "I have a video showing a vehicle that is very similar to the vehicle that he (Deaton) was known to be driving," the Neshoba sheriff said. "That vehicle belonged to a victim that was found deceased in Rankin County. There is no link we know of between this woman and the other two victims." Deaton has been charged with one count of first-degree murder in his girlfriend's death as well as aggravated assault in the jogger's shooting, according to Rankin County District Attorney Michael Guest. The preliminary cause of death in the Robinson case was manual strangulation, he said. "The charges may be upgraded to capital murder once we have received the final report from the medical examiner," Guest told CNN. CNN's Mayra Cuevas contributed to this report.

2017-01-26 19:58:23

Tesla filed a suit against its former director of Autopilot, Sterling Anderson, on Thursday, alleging he attempted to recruit engineers from Tesla to join the self-driving startup he and the former CTO of Google’s self-driving arm, Chris Urmson, were establishing. The suit further alleged that Anderson downloaded “hundreds of gigabytes of Tesla confidential and four proprietary information” documents to his personal computer. When he was terminated, Anderson returned the documents, but not the backups he created, the company alleged. In addition to making offers to a dozen Tesla employees — only two of whom accepted, according to the suit — Tesla is also alleging Anderson worked on the company Urmson was starting, called Aurora, during company time. Recode first reported that Urmson was starting his own self-driving company and that he was recruiting big names from many players, including Tesla and Uber. The suit claims that Urmson recruited Tesla engineers on behalf of Anderson, and Anderson recruited engineers from Google on behalf of Urmson to avoid being accused of breach of contract. According to the suit: Although Anderson worked mostly behind the scenes so that he could try to create the false impression that his "hands stayed clean" — ignoring that his contract with Tesla prohibited both direct and indirect solicitation of Tesla employees — he took a more hands-on role with respect to certain recruits, directly lobbying them to join Aurora. Anderson’s conversations with Urmson began in the summer of 2016, according to the suit, but it wasn’t until December 2016 that he notified Tesla he was leaving. The company claims that he did not indicate he was leaving to join a competing venture with Urmson and instead said that he was going to spend time with family or start a non-competing company. “Obviously, had Anderson disclosed the true facts to Tesla, he would have been terminated immediately,” the suit read. “Instead, it was agreed that Anderson would remain with the company through the release of the next Autopilot upgrade, expected within the following several weeks.” Anderson joined Tesla in 2014 as a senior product manager and was promoted to director of Autopilot in 2015. Tesla also claims Anderson attempted to cover his tracks and wiped his work computer and iPhone before returning them to the company “in a manner intended to prevent them from being restored and manipulated the timestamps,” the suit reads. The company is seeking damages, to be determined during a jury trial, from both Anderson and Urmson for breach of contract, breach of duty of loyalty and aiding and abetting breach of duty of loyalty among other things. Update: Urmson sent Recode this statement: “Tesla’s meritless lawsuit reveals both a startling paranoia and an unhealthy fear of competition. This abuse of the legal system is a malicious attempt to stifle a competitor and destroy personal reputations. Aurora looks forward to disproving these false allegations in court and to building a successful self-driving business.” Tesla said it had no comment beyond what was included in the suit. Here’s the full suit: Tesla v Anderson by Johana Mb on Scribd This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

2019-08-26 00:00:00

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany’s cartel office said on Monday it would appeal a regional court decision to suspend restrictions it had placed on Facebook’s data collection practices to the country’s highest court. A court in Duesseldorf had earlier suspended a February decision by the Federal Cartel Office to order Facebook (FB.O) to restrict its data collection in Germany. “We are convinced that with the available antitrust laws we can take regulatory action,” Andreas Mundt, the head of the cartel office, said in a statement. “To clarify these questions we will file an appeal to the Federal Court of Justice.” Facebook appealed February’s landmark decision by the cartel office that the world’s largest social network abused its dominant market position to gather information about users without their consent. The Higher Regional Court in Duesseldorf said in its ruling earlier on Monday: “The suspension of the order means that Facebook does not have to implement the decision of the Federal Cartel Office for the time being.” Facebook, the world’s largest social network, declined to comment. The court said its temporary injunction removing restrictions on Facebook’s data gathering would be valid until it had made a final decision on the company’s appeal. Germany, where privacy concerns run deep, is at the forefront of a global backlash against Facebook, fueled by last year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal in which tens of millions of Facebook profiles were harvested without their users’ consent. The antitrust watchdog objected in particular to how Facebook pools data from third-party apps - including its own WhatsApp and Instagram - and its online tracking of people who aren’t members through Facebook ‘like’ or ‘share’ buttons. Last month, Facebook said it would improve user data safeguards as part of a settlement to resolve a U.S. government probe into its privacy practices, which resulted in a $5 billion fine. Additional reporting by Riham Alkousaa,; Editing by Louise Heavens and Kirsten Donovan

2019-01-17 00:00:00

Anna Chambers says two on-duty NYPD cops raped her while she was in custody; their lawyer says it was consensual. The case of two former New York Police Department officers charged with raping a teenage girl was thrown into limbo on Thursday after the district attorney filed a motion asking a special prosecutor to take over the closely watched proceedings. The development stemmed from weeks of legal sparring among defense attorneys, the district attorney’s office, and the alleged victim, Anna Chambers. Both sides have now accused Chambers of lying under oath. “We are gravely concerned there is now a substantial risk of impropriety,” Nancy Hoppock of the Kings County District Attorney’s Office wrote in a letter to Judge Danny Chun on Thursday, five days before the former officers were scheduled to go on trial. Chambers, who brought the allegations in September 2017 against two narcotics detectives, has long been accused by defense attorneys of changing details in her story — an accusation that amounts to perjury. In New York, perjury is a misdemeanor that carries a maximum prison sentence of one year. While Chambers, now 20, hasn’t been charged with the crime, a judge last week assigned a criminal defense attorney to represent her if she takes the witness stand — presumably to protect her against such charges. In turn, Chambers criticized the Kings County DA — the same office prosecuting her alleged attackers — for “trying to flip things on me and accuse me of perjuring due to inconsistencies I made while traumatized.” She accused the prosecutors of corruption and of protecting fellow law enforcement. “You cannot flip a story on a victim,” Chambers tweeted. On Tuesday, Mark Bederow, a defense attorney for one of the accused men, asked the judge to appoint a special prosecutor. Two days later, the district attorney’s office appeared to be in agreement. It wasn’t clear Thursday when the judge would make a decision. “We are pleased that the Brooklyn DA has finally acknowledged that [Chambers] repeatedly lied and perjured herself, although they have known this for more than one year,” Bederow said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “We have been presenting them with proof of this since before the indictment. This case was flawed from day 1. Nobody should ever be prosecuted by perjured testimony and false evidence.” In a letter requesting a special prosecutor, the DA said it was concerned it could not legally call Chambers to testify under oath because of her false statements. Additionally, an assistant district attorney who was not involved with Chambers’ case had been in a romantic relationship with one of the accused. After news broke Thursday of the DA’s request, Chambers tweeted that the DA had “prejudiced me by releasing false statements against me. I need justice.” The tweet was later deleted. Chambers’ civil attorney Michael David told BuzzFeed News he was “very, very upset that the prosecutor is withdrawing from the case. Nothing has changed in terms of what happened to Anna on that night.” In the fall of 2017, Chambers accused two officers — Eddie Martins and Richard Hall — of raping her after detaining her, bringing national attention to a legal loophole that allows cops in most states to have sex with people in their custody if they claim it was consensual. Martins and Hall both said Chambers had consented to sex. Former NYPD detectives Eddie Martins (center) and Richard Hall (right) leaving court in January. Chambers was 18 at the time of the alleged assault, which unfolded one evening in South Brooklyn, when the plainclothes detectives approached a parked car, finding three young people and marijuana. Chambers said she was handcuffed and put into the backseat of their unmarked van, where the officers took turns raping her before dropping her off. DNA later that night in Chambers’ rape kit matched Martins and Hall, who resigned in Nov. 2017 and were charged with rape, kidnapping, and official misconduct. Last February, BuzzFeed News told Chambers’ story, revealing that New York was one of 35 states where police could claim sexual encounters with detainees were consensual. Lawyers for the officers have aggressively cast doubt on Chambers’ claims and character; in short, they’ve said she’s a pathological liar. “[Chambers’] credibility will be the most important issue at trial,” attorneys for Martins and Hall wrote in a court filing in late November 2018, arguing that she embellished her encounter with the police because she was afraid her father — already frustrated with Chambers’ drug use — ”would punish her for being arrested.” (No arrest report was ever made that night.) The defense has accused Chambers of changing various details of her story over the past 16 months, including what she was wearing, the description of the van’s interior and exterior, and which of the two officers had handcuffed her. The #MeToo movement began weeks after Chambers reported her rape, and her case garnered wide attention, thrusting Chambers into the spotlight as a symbol for victims standing up to law enforcement. Because of her case, the legal loophole allowing police officers to have “consensual” sex with detainees has been closed in multiple states, including New York, Maryland, New Hampshire, and Kansas, and legislation was introduced in the US Congress to prohibit federal officers from having sex with people in their custody and to incentivize more states to change their laws too. Earlier this month, Chambers asked for support from her thousands of social media followers — including some who plan on showing up for her at the trial. “Guys this is a long ride, but my story will make a change. For everyone out there who ever got violated. This is for us. They will try to talk down on me & make me look bad. Nope. The truths in the DNA,” she wrote. “No matter how bad theyll try to make me look & accuse me, i will hold it down. I pray for justice.” Some victims of sexual misconduct by law enforcement officers have found justice in criminal courts. Most famously, the Oklahoma City Police Department officer Daniel Holtzclaw was found guilty of multiple counts of rape in 2015, after more than a dozen women brought allegations against him. He was sentenced to 263 years in prison. However, as BuzzFeed News reported last year based on a review of a Buffalo News database, at least 26 law enforcement officers nationwide between 2006 and 2017 had their sexual misconduct charges dropped or were acquitted in states where the “consensual” loophole still existed.

2016-03-09

He argues in his latest column for the Times that Democrats should be worried about the fact that Donald Trump is “sitting with three aces that he hasn’t played yet.” These include: 1) his ability to swing to the center; 2) a possible terrorist attack between now and November; and 3) his ability to attack Hillary Clinton with unique venom. But Friedman adds that Trump “is also holding two jokers with those aces.” The jokers in this hypothetical hand are that he may go too far or that his supporters may go too far.  Now, most people don’t play poker with jokers. But when jokers are used, they are wild cards, which means Trump is holding an unbeatable hand of five aces. To mangle our metaphors a little more, Trump’s mixed bag is actually a jackpot. (N.B.: While it is strongly suggested that the game Trump is playing is poker, it is possible that Friedman is referring to another game in which aces count as points and jokers demerits. If you know what this game might be, please drop us a line.) (h/t James Taranto)

2016-01-18

At a corner table in the dining room of Marea, a restaurant on Central Park South, the conversation was smooth but disputatious. Three men in suits were drinking red wine and eating pasta that cost thirty-four dollars a serving. One of them was a hedge-fund manager, a famous short seller. Another was the financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. The third man, in from London, was the actor Damian Lewis. Sorkin had made the introduction. The hedge-fund manager and Lewis were doing most of the talking. “Does your business have a societal benefit?” Lewis asked. He wanted to know what made a hedge-fund manager more than “a paper shuffler.” The hedge-fund manager said that he and his peers basically function as market-based regulators—that they have a financial incentive to expose wrongdoing. Sorkin had set up other audiences for Lewis with financial machers. One of them urged Lewis to consider an underperforming company with entrenched management or a sclerotic board: an activist investor, even if he came in and cut things and fired people—well, that’s capitalism. “What about your compensation?” Lewis said, at the restaurant. “Do you deserve it?” Lewis was preparing for his latest role. In “Billions,” which premières on Showtime this week, he plays Bobby (Axe) Axelrod, a knockaround guy—Yonkers native, Hofstra grad—who scraps his way up from golf caddie to hedge-fund eminence: library benefactor, wearer of cashmere hoodies, keynote speaker at the Delivering Alpha conference. (Sorkin created the show with Brian Koppelman and David Levien, whose other credits include “Rounders” and “Ocean’s Thirteen.”) Lewis was born in London in 1971. He is the son of an insurance broker (Lloyd’s) and the brother of an equities trader (Merrill Lynch). He went to Eton, where he recalls scaring up funds from “somebody’s rich uncle” to rent the school theatre—he and his troupe of friends, calling themselves the Chameleons, put on a production of “The Long and the Short and the Tall.” As Sergeant Nicholas Brody, a United States marine and recently rescued prisoner of war, in “Homeland,” he reportedly commanded two hundred and fifty thousand dollars an episode. He is at ease in the world of money, and comfortable with acknowledging it. As a preproduction exercise, touring boardrooms wasn’t the sort of extravagantly crafty immersion program that prompts other actors to frequent bootmakers’ ateliers and mental hospitals. “I am Damian Lewis, not Daniel Day-Lewis,” he told me, with a wit as self-assured as it was self-deprecating. Rather, his approach was forensic. He wasn’t trying to be a hedge-fund manager but to identify and analyze what distinguished one. He was, in a sense, gathering evidence. “I found the hedge-fund guys I met all to be very, very concentrated listeners—watchful and articulate and quick to defend, if needed,” Lewis recalled. “They all seemed to have this contained sitting posture. The legs, if they weren’t crossed at right angles, tended to be close over the knee, their hands put together.” In trying to “unlock” a character, he often zeroes in on a single fine-grained physical attribute. (“Perhaps stealing a bit from Laurence Olivier, who said, ‘Always start with the shoes.’ ”) The key to Soames Forsyte, Lewis’s weirdly alluring misanthrope from the 2002 version of “The Forsyte Saga,” was a constipated limp. In order to differentiate his character’s walk in “The Escapist,” he shot the entire film wearing a woman’s thong. When production for “Billions” began, in July, Lewis intended to embody a “compelling stillness.” But as the season progressed the Zen-master approach no longer felt appropriate. He said, “I just found, for Bobby, once we made the choice that he was a jeans-and-trainers guy, and that he liked wearing knitwear ”—he broke into a sort of garmento-inflected American accent—“that he was going to take the space. It was a way to find the expansiveness of the king.” The U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades, played by Paul Giamatti, is Axelrod’s potential dethroner. In trying to persuade Lewis to take the role, Koppelman and Levien spoke of the characters’ conflict in grand terms, as a “huge King Lear, Shakespeare kind of battle,” but the show acknowledges more parochial clashes. It is a knowing study of the folkways of the tristate area—the orphans’ funds, the Spitzer jokes, the way you might not get prosecuted for insider trading until you buy an eighty-three-million-dollar beach house, embarrassing the law into vigilance. The New York Post has speculated that the series is “inspired by US Attorney Preet Bharara’s pursuit of criminal charges against hedge-fund mogul Steve Cohen.” The creators say that the characters are amalgams, but the rarefied guessing game is an obvious part of the fun. “Billions” seems to aspire to be to bankers and lawyers what “The Wire” was to drug dealers. (A private screening of the first episode will be held at Goldman Sachs.) In the pilot, Axelrod meets Hall, his fixer: Hall : You remember that night in Reykjavik? Axe : Wish I didn’t, but I do. Hall : You said there was only one thing you were afraid of. Axe : Windbreakers. Hall : Guys in windbreakers walking in your office saying, “Step away from the computer.” Before the dinner at Marea, Sorkin received an e-mail from Lewis. He’d been reading about short selling and the ethical code of “the hedgies.” Were they policing Wall Street, he asked, or were they simply opportunists? The e-mail’s subject line posed the question that would orient his performance: “Vultures or Crusaders?” Upstate, the sun was going down in Orangeburg, yellow and purple above a deer crossing, contrails making looseleaf paper of the sky. Driveways terminated in basketball hoops. A right off Chief Bill Harris Way and a quick left led to Corporate Drive, where a location scout had seen fit to turn a former Olympus headquarters—“Certain required positions will relocate, and it is our intention to consider any of those employees as a good candidate for the relocated positions or for new locations,” a company representative had asserted, in the tortured flackspeak of the summer of 2008—into Axe Capital, a showcase of Fairfield County extravagance. The set designers had refreshed the walls with would-be Basquiats and reimagined a dated atrium as a sort of gangway that led to Axelrod’s terrifyingly spare office. The trading floor suggested the presence of a finicky overlord—even the staplers were white. A fleece hugged the back of an Aeron chair. Bruised bananas languished on desks, suggesting a certain meanness amid the plenty. There were Post-it Notes on computer terminals: “I’m horny”; “Remember to throw up after this”; “Big hands smell like beef.” Outside, Lewis and Maggie Siff, who plays the U.S. Attorney’s wife—she is also Axe Capital’s in-house psychiatrist—were marking out the evening’s first scene. It required them to leave the building together, and continue down the sidewalk as they hashed over an office tragedy, to which Axelrod has responded coldly. The scene seemed fairly straightforward, but, after several tries, Lewis stopped under a tree, pulling over the director. “The dialogue is written as though they’re mid-stroll, walking over—to me it seems that way,” he said, presenting his argument as modest while brooking no disagreement. “Which just presupposes a very short distance.” They huddled for a few minutes. “I mean, part of me feels like there’s something great in having this be the piece that transitions us from not wanting to talk about this tragedy to doing it,” the director said. “I think it works unless you guys are bumping up against something.” The actors went back to the walk-through. “Acting balm, ahhh!” Lewis intoned, between takes, slathering his lips with petroleum jelly. He kept up the banter and thus—on a bone-cold night—his collaborators’ morale. He chatted with the wardrobe assistants (“You have on a peacoat, almost a pea tunic ”); he broke into song (Madonna’s “Holiday”; the Welsh national anthem). Between antics, he kept pushing the director to refine the encounter. “I asked for some more specific psychology,” he said, “and I didn’t really get an answer.” It was soon time for the first take. Axelrod was beginning to question the ruthless behavior that has enabled his success. As the psychiatrist asked him when he had last cried, something seemed to flicker behind Lewis’s pupils. The script called for him to launch into a speech about heroism. Lewis nailed the physical manifestations of American male sentimentality—the watering eyes, the bulbous clench of the jaw when talking about fathers playing catch with their kids and soldiers coming home from war. Yet his performance contained a note of irony. He seemed, in the movement of his eyes, to be leaving it open as to whether Axelrod came by his tears earnestly or was manufacturing them in order to pull one over on the shrink. “Yeah, and then?” Axelrod says, in the scene’s last line. Lewis stared at Siff, letting the ambiguity linger. Finally, someone yelled, “Cut.” Lewis’s jaw slackened. “I’m looking forward to some tomato soup!” he said, rubbing his palms together like an urchin queuing for gruel. Siff told me later that Lewis is the least neurotic actor she’s ever met. “There’s something kind of Johnny Appleseed about him, where he’ll do a take and let it go, do a take and let it go,” she said. “He keeps things light and moving, and I read that as real confidence.” Confidence is Lewis’s hallmark as much as intensity is De Niro’s. In describing him to me, colleagues from all periods and facets of his career used the word again and again. His abundance of it is a result of his background (stable), class (upper), schooling (élite), and disposition (“Red hair confuses people,” he told me, making an asset, and a joke, of a feature that a less secure actor might have bemoaned). These advantages have perpetuated themselves in his marriage (loving), parenting style (involved), and level of satisfaction with himself, with others, and with life in general (high). The director Peter Kosminsky cast Lewis in “Warriors,” his first big television role, in 1999. Last year, Kosminsky directed the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall.” He recalled, “When I came on board, the very first thing I said was ‘We should get Damian Lewis to play Henry.’ It’s Thomas Cromwell’s show, so when you’re playing a huge character like Henry VIII you have to bring a certain gravitas, a certain sense of self, a certain power. You can’t just tug at your forelock and say, ‘Yes, guvnor, where would you like me to stand?’ If you’re going to be the king, you’ve got to have a fuck-off quality about you.” Dominic Maxwell, writing in the London Times , called Lewis’s Henry “cordial but deadly.” Lewis sees himself as a champion for his characters, be they rapacious monarchs or domestic terrorists or capitalist pigs. Acting, for him, is analogous to mounting a case. “If you pick up an eighteenth-century play, at the top it says ‘The Argument,’ and then you have a list of characters, and then you have the play,” he said. “I was just always struck by that—that, of course, good drama is about conflict. And if there’s conflict there’s an argument, and there’s two sides of the argument, and, therefore, one must advocate for one side of the argument, just as much as a lawyer does in court.” The sense that a performance is a contest, a debate that can be won, appeals to Lewis’s competitive nature. The harder the fight, the greater the spoils. Lewis said, “I will always find a defense for characters, and that’s why it’s fun playing characters that are morally ambiguous, or are at least perceived superficially as being problematic.” On the set in Orangeburg, Lewis continued to lobby for more particularity. “It was an episode that I struggled with personally,” he said, later. “I found it hard to unravel. I felt it had a tonal shift from the rest of the show.” He was unconvinced, he said, that his character, “a billionaire intuitive street fighter,” would suddenly begin to ask himself, as Axelrod does later in the episode, whether he has sociopathic tendencies. “I didn’t want to appear generalized in any way,” he recalled. “And I felt the scene wasn’t necessarily there yet in terms of what it revealed about Bobby. If any thinking person’s assumption is that people who rule us—who run a multinational, a political party, a country, or a financial corporation that turns over billions of dollars a year—probably have a particular personality type, I thought the audience might have been ahead of us, like, ‘Oh, really?’ ” “And thus the hunters become the hunted.” Werner Herzog cast Lewis, “on the basis of his natural authority and dignity,” as Lieutenant Colonel Charles Doughty-Wylie in his forthcoming colonial epic about Gertrude Bell, “Queen of the Desert.” “What I needed was a manly man,” Herzog told me. The film, which premièred last year at the Berlin International Film Festival, has received mixed reviews, but, on Indiewire, Jessica Kiang singled out Lewis as one of two actors—along with Robert Pattinson, who plays T. E. Lawrence—whose performances weren’t overwhelmed by the production’s elaborate period apparatus. Lewis’s style “may be more classical than Pattinson’s semi-method manner,” she wrote, but Lewis “handles the role of the married consul, whose amused admiration for Bell flares into love, with a deftness that had us palpably relaxing during his scenes.” Even with a director as famously combative as Herzog, Lewis was able to plead the best conditions for his work. At one point, the two men disagreed over a walking stick that Lewis wanted to use as a prop. Herzog recalled, “I said to him, ‘We do not have to imitate a person, we have to invent them,’ but he brought a lot of knowledge and details. At first, I didn’t like it, but he briefed me that, at Gallipoli, Doughty-Wylie walked into the machine-gun fire without a weapon, only with his walking cane.” The stick stayed. Alex Gansa, the co-creator of “Homeland,” told me that the “biggest pushback” he ever got from Lewis involved “Marine One,” the final episode of the first season, in which Brody attempts to assassinate the Vice-President. “Damian said, ‘I don’t believe a marine would wear a suicide vest,’ ” Gansa recalled. “There was something about a soldier assuming the tactics of a terrorist that he was quite reluctant to do, and felt it was a mistake. When he read the script, he was on the phone with me that second, like, ‘I just don’t want to do this.’ ” Overruled, Lewis took the argument to the screen, making a suicide bomber relatable—possibly even admirable—and delivering the seminal performance of the series. The great bizarrity of Lewis’s career is that he is a white-tie Briton who has made his reputation playing blue-collar Americans. The closest he comes, biographically, to the heartland are some cousins in Darien. Over lunch this fall in New York, he rhapsodized about his native land. “There’s this sort of preindustrial agricultural bucolic dream of England which we hark back to whenever we can,” he said. “There’s still evidence of it in the shires of England, where the sound of leather on willow, cricket games played on village greens, the idea that the burning blacksmith with his shirt rolled up is there supping a real ale, and children are sort of dancing around a Maypole and playing with a hoop and stick . . .” His sentence trailed off. He had been to bed at 6 a.m. after a late shoot, still in his makeup—“Mascara on the pillowcase, it’s a terrible embarrassment for a girl!”—but he had had the presence of mind to stuff a Murakami paperback in his jeans pocket. He was wearing a sweater and a flat cap. He spoke beautifully, with a sensibility that was more Brideshead than Budweiser. “I think probably my deepest fantasy is that I will have money enough and time enough, that I won’t get so caught up in the rat race to succeed, that I’ll just take time out to create an artistic salon with a pool and a tennis court and a gorgeous country house, and glamorous and brilliant friends will come and spend a weekend there,” he said. “It’s what I long for.” Lewis’s family tree includes baronets and knights. There is Welsh blood on his father’s side. His maternal grandfather, Ian Bowater, was Lord Mayor of London. His mother, Charlotte, had two children by a first marriage—one of them went on to manage personnel at Highgrove, Prince Charles’s country estate—before marrying J. Watcyn Lewis, with whom she had Damian and, two years later, another son. Lewis remembers his parents as “open and emotionally accessible people,” despite their traditional mores. Watcyn ate two boiled eggs every morning, Lewis said, “until he was told his cholesterol was too high and we never saw another boiled egg.” He opened the mail with a letter opener. He went on business trips to the Middle East. “He had a very curious way of getting dressed, my dad,” Lewis recalled. “He would put his shirt on, and his boxer shorts, and then his socks, which, being an English gentleman, would always be pulled halfway up to the calf, and then he would put his Gucci loafers on with this long shoehorn with a little golf ball on the top, and then put his pants on.” Lewis was a rambunctious but observant child, decoding the grownups around him as he later would his characters. When he was eight, he started at Ashdown House, a prep school in the English countryside. He recalls climbing the rhododendrons, playing in the ha-ha, and being caned. He made his first appearance onstage, as a policeman in “The Pirates of Penzance.” At thirteen, following his grandfather and his half-brother, he entered Eton, where he stood out, for his prowess both on the playing fields and on the stage. “I was in many respects perfectly suited to these kinds of schools,” he recalled. “But it wasn’t always the sort of happy-go-lucky experience which I chuntered through chortling and enjoying every moment of it. It was not without its challenges—just being in a very competitive environment, feeling constricted, feeling that, at any moment, you must try to create bubbles of time, where it just stands still and elasticates itself, so you could create space around you as you’re driven from A to B to C to D relentlessly through the day.” Charles Milne, Lewis’s tutor, recalls him as a “very confident without being cocky young guy,” with “a natural easy informality in dealing with adults.” At the end of Lewis’s final year of school, his dormitory burned. He was billeted at Milne’s house. “Having him there made me aware that he had this sort of emotional maturity,” Milne recalled. “He would want to know about my love life, about whom I was going out with—at the stage of the relationship I’d got to, why wasn’t I doing this or that? It wasn’t just a schoolboy’s idle curiosity in order to find out information and then going to go share it with his mates. It was a real wanting to understand.” Milne saved a note that Lewis, per Eton tradition, sent him upon leaving school. “Sir/Charles/Mate/Nanny/Mummy, etc,” it read. “I’m beginning to piece you together, the Milney puzzle (which you’ll hate me claiming any knowledge to), but just remember . . . I’m working on you.” “I’m getting red fruits, earth tones, and oak. Amen.” Lewis decided to forgo university. “Precocious or not, I had a sense that I had had an intensive engagement with the highest end of the educational system, and, unless I was going to go to Oxford or Cambridge, I was going to be at a university or a college that was going to be sort of less good, less interesting than where I’d been for the past five years,” he told me. He cultivated a new look: paisley shirts, drainpipe jeans, black suède winklepickers. There was a gap year in Africa—“taking guitars up to ancient rocks.” In 1990, he enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in London. The school introduced Lewis to a wider social milieu. “I was sitting in class with lesbians and gay men and people of different ages, people who were two or three years younger than me, from Italy and China, people who had run businesses—and I liked it, whilst at the same time being totally unprepared and ill-equipped to be comfortable within it,” he recalled. “I remember thinking, God, I must keep my head down a little bit.” According to Ken Rea, one of Lewis’s professors, he arrived at Guildhall “an articulate, well-mannered young man with a bit of a polite façade,” and left with “the complete raw vulnerability that really grabs you as an audience.” After Guildhall, Lewis worked with theatre companies in England and in New York, and eventually joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing such roles as Don John and Posthumus. He was building a solid career on the London stage when Peter Kosminsky cast him in “Warriors,” a BBC miniseries about a squad of British peacekeepers during the Bosnian war. “I walked in there with my hair down to my shoulders, having been for several years, you know, shouting onstage doing Shakespeare,” Lewis recalled. “I initially felt intimidated by the camera and uncertain what to do in front of it.” He continued, “I remember saying to Peter, ‘You’ll look after me, won’t you? You’ll be strict with me?’ ” A few months later, Lewis was in Los Angeles, auditioning on “five cups of coffee and three showers”—he had a horrible hangover—for Steven Spielberg, who had seen him in “Hamlet” and was casting “Band of Brothers.” Lewis had adapted quickly to the screen. “Onstage, you have to in some small nuanced way give a demonstration of what you’re thinking so that the people at the back can see it, whereas on camera you just quite literally have to think it,” he said. “I realized that you could actually have a whole range of thoughts in a short space of time and the camera would see them all. You become a sort of mental gymnast.” Spielberg cast Lewis as Lieutenant Dick Winters, a teetotalling Mennonite from Ephrata, Pennsylvania. Lewis played him quietly, with both sang-froid and idealism, exuding, as the Times wrote, “a star-making command of every scene.” Lewis is renowned for his freakishly accurate American accent. (His greatest nemesis: phrases with two “r”s, such as “there are.”) But his talent is more than mimetic. His Americans are original compositions, reflecting, in the manner of David Hockney’s Los Angeles paintings, a view of ourselves that we cannot see. “I think there’s a machismo,” Lewis said. “Where you’re still brought up to believe that a man represents traditional values. They take care of stuff, they get it done, and they get it done now.” David Nevins, the president of Showtime, told me, “I don’t think Damian could ever get away with playing a working-class character in England. But somehow his Britishness, translated to America, comes off as salt-of-the-earth—a little bit sinister salt-of-the-earth.” An argument is embedded in his portrayals of G.I.s and masters of the universe. He said, “I have had to make conscious decisions to appear American and, therefore, I have had to take a view on what I think an American is.” Lewis’s mother died in a car accident in India just as “Band of Brothers” was coming out. “I understood what the word ‘sad’ meant for the first time,” he said. “It had always felt like an inconsequential word to me, like ‘nice.’ ” He did “Dreamcatcher,” a Stephen King adaptation that might have launched him as a movie star but didn’t. “It started to dawn on me how big the industry was, and that it was global, and that there were TV shows and films one could be a part of that I’d had no inspiration to be a part of before,” he recalled. “I just knew that I was too curious and hungry for experience and adventure and the chance to try things out, so that was a moment of anxiety for me, that I perhaps would never get a taste of that.” In 2004, he met Helen McCrory, playing her husband in “Five Gold Rings” at the Almeida Theatre. The couple married in 2007, and have two children, Manon and Gulliver. McCrory, who is best known in America for playing Narcissa Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” movies, is herself a formidable actor—“The really good thing about having babies, as I did, when you’re seventy-five is that you’ve had a chance to establish your career first,” she told British Vogue . Lewis considers McCrory his “ferociously intelligent” co-counsel. The year they met, he was offered the lead role in “Keane,” Lodge Kerrigan’s drama about a schizophrenic father who stalks the Port Authority bus terminal, searching for the daughter he may or may not have lost. “That was a Helen moment because she’d read it, and she said, ‘Whatever happens, you have to do this,’ ” Lewis recalled. “Initially, I thought, If this is handled by a young director it could read a little like a catalogue of greatest mental-health tics.” He accepted, and says that the film was one of his best experiences, “even if thirty-three people saw it.” One of them was Alex Gansa, the “Homeland” showrunner. Having admired Lewis’s performance in “The Forsyte Saga,” Gansa had put him forward for the Brody role. “When we first brought him up, everyone was very negative about the suggestion,” Gansa recalled. Lewis was coming off “Life,” a decisive failure of an NBC police procedural, in which he’d played the lead character, a homicide detective with a passion for fresh fruit. “That carries a pretty big stigma,” Gansa recalled. “The network really wanted Ryan Phillippe; Patrick Wilson passed. I kept talking about Damian until I got a call from the head of the studio saying, ‘Look, Alex, please do not bring up Damian’s name again.’ Hanging up the phone in my office—I think we were two weeks from the start of principal photography—I was like, Are we going to cast Ryan Phillippe in this role?” One of the show’s producers mentioned “Keane” to Gansa. “Every ounce of me wanted to go home and pour a gin-and-tonic, but I thought, Let me see if it’s streaming on Netflix. I looked on my computer and put on my headphones and opened my laptop and there was this little movie. The first forty-five minutes of the film are essentially Damian on camera. I hit pause and picked up the phone and called the studio head and said, ‘This is just an incredible performance—a damaged person on camera holding the frame.’ ” “I’m fifty-three, but I have the résumé of a much younger man.” Lewis was clutching a yellow feather duster and a grocery bag full of squirt bottles. He had just driven in his car, a blue Mini, from a cramped rental apartment—hamsters named Stella and Rapido, invitations to Lady Rothschild’s and an “intergalactic birthday party,” a bicycle in the master bedroom—to a Victorian town house in Tufnell Park. For the past six months, the house, which Lewis and his family have lived in for a decade, had been under renovation. “My wife and I have realized that basically our tastes meet at the intersection of hotel lobbies and speakeasy bars,” Lewis had told me, in New York. “We keep saying, ‘Oh, shit, is our home going to just end up looking like a night club in Manhattan?’ ” McCrory was working—filming “Peaky Blinders” in Liverpool. Tomorrow was moving day. “There’s no way I’m going to get the truck down here,” Lewis said, squinting as he surveyed the length of the block. “It’s going to be a disaster.” Toting his cleaning supplies, he walked up a garden path to the house’s entrance. “This is our brand-new blue door, which I’m still not sure about,” he said. “I’m the guy who asks you to paint everything twice.” “So how many coats is that, Alex?” he called, to a workman. “That’s three.” “I think it’s gonna work, boys,” Lewis said, removing his shoes to reveal a pair of gray socks with red reinforced toes. He ran a finger over the glossy surface. “Groovy.” Lewis was home on a week’s break from “Billions”—the Americans were celebrating Thanksgiving. He had to call the cable company, pick up the kids from school, go back to the hardware store for an extra door handle, as he’d needed twelve and got only eleven—things that a famous actor would be a chump to do in Los Angeles but a wanker not to in London. The family moved to Los Angeles once, when Lewis was doing “Life.” “It is an inferior city to London,” Lewis told a reporter. They moved back after eighteen months. Lewis may be the world’s most famous actor who has never anchored a major film. When I asked him if he sticks to television intentionally, he said, “You shouldn’t think for a second that I’ve somewhere or somehow made a commitment to only doing these premium-cable shows.” He continued, “But there are other considerations, to do with family, which is hardly the answer of an artist, but it’s reality. ” During his tenure on “Homeland,” Lewis spent a cumulative five months of the year in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the show was filmed. He would sometimes “cry in frustration,” he said; on Halloween, he dressed up in a scary clown costume and got on Skype with his kids. Unusually for a man—a man renowned for his portrayals of terse masculinity—the dilemma of how to “have it all” dominates his conversation. “I try hard to be a modern dad,” he told me. “I like not just being the figurehead of the family—it means that I want to take the kids to school, I want to pick them up, and I want to take them on their playdates and come home and do their homework with them and understand actually in detail what their homework is rather than having it relayed to me by my wife.” In London, dusk was approaching. “Let’s have a wander,” he said. “It’s such a pretty evening.” As he strolled the sidewalks—waving to neighbors, pointing out landmarks—he seemed to be subjecting himself to a sort of trial. “Why does one go away?” he said. “What is it that drives you on? If you are instinctively, or have been brought up or educated in a way that you demand of yourself that you make the best of your life and the best of your opportunities, then there is a constant conversation going on between definitions of success versus definitions of happiness. The two don’t always go together, and at what point do you stop striving so hard to be successful in the conventional sense, because every fibre in your body has been educated to take your opportunities, versus arguably a more enlightened view, which is you don’t have to chase and go for these things?” When “Billions” came along, Lewis was almost annoyed—another TV show, another Showtime production, another conflicted middle-class guy, another year (at least) of commuting across an ocean. At the height of the “Homeland” craze, President Obama invited Lewis and McCrory to a state dinner. (Lewis presented him with a set of DVDs, inscribed “From one Muslim to another.”) “Billions,” given its topicality, was too seductive to forgo. “I said yes, because it has the potential to be the show that dovetails in and out of the hard news in the same way that ‘Homeland’ has been able to do,” Lewis said. “And—I hate this phrase—it’s quite heady, being ‘part of the conversation.’ ” He turned a corner, continuing the argument. ♦

2019-03-18 00:00:00

BELFAST (Reuters) - Three young people died on Sunday night in an incident at a St Patrick’s Day event at a hotel in Cookstown, Northern Ireland, police said after they were called to the scene amid reports of a crush outside a disco. Three teenagers — a 17-year-old girl, a 17-year-old boy and a 16-year-old boy — died, while a 16-year-old girl is in a stable condition in hospital, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said in a statement. Another two teenagers were treated for injuries received during the incident which unfolded in the town 75 kilometers west of Belfast shortly before 2130 GMT. “While the exact cause of the incident is still unknown, there are reports of a crush at the scene and initial enquiries indicate that a large group of young people were waiting to enter a disco,” PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton said. “We also have reports of some fighting after the incident commenced and at least one person has reported that they were assaulted.” reporting by Amanda Ferguson in Belfast; Writing by Padraic Halpin in Dublin; Editing by Catherine Evans

2019-04-27 00:00:00

Chinese President Xi Jinping said Saturday that the country's second Belt and Road forum resulted in $64 billion worth of deals among business leaders, the AFP reports. What's new: Italy, Yemen, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Luxembourg, Jamaica, Peru, Barbados and Cyprus are the latest countries to join China's sprawling infrastructure initiative, which, critics say, benefits China at the expense of its partners and leads to unsustainable debt. Xi reportedly did not disclose more details about his claims of creating $64 billion in deals at the forum. Buzz: Xi issued a joint press release at the forum's close with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, and Russia's Vladimir Putin, who took the opportunity to criticize President Trump's ongoing trade war with China. Russia has benefitted the most in the aftermath of these tariffs, along with Brazil, as China turns to other countries for imports of "animal, vegetable, paper, and mineral products" it used to get from the U.S. What we're watching: Xi and other world leaders pledged to keep the Belt and Road initiative green amid concerns of negative environmental impact, largely due to the plan's focus on coal-fired power plants. Go deeper: World leaders gather in Beijing for second Belt and Road forum

2017-03-23 11:02:00

This article originally appeared on Time.com. Donald Trump Jr. took to Twitter on Wednesday to criticize London Mayor Sadiq Khan while details of the Westminster terror attack were still emerging. “You have to be kidding me?!” Trump Jr. tweeted with a link to an article dating back to September 2016 from British newspaper the Independent. “Terror attacks are part of living in big city, says London Mayor Sadiq Khan.” You have to be kidding me?!: Terror attacks are part of living in big city, says London Mayor Sadiq Khan https://t.co/uSm2pwRTjO — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) March 22, 2017 His cited article detailed remarks Khan made following a bombing incident in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. Trump Jr.’s assessment of Khan’s comments were misleading, however. The mayor did not imply that terrorism is a part of everyday life in big cities — he said that preparedness is “part and parcel of living in a big city.” “That means being vigilant, having a police force that is in touch with communities, it means the security services being ready, but it also means exchanging ideas and best practice,” the Independent reported Khan saying to another British paper, the Evening Standard. “Nothing is more important to me than keeping Londoners safe,” Khan added. “I want to be reassured that every single agency and individual involved in protecting our city has the resources and expertise they need to respond in the event that London is attacked.” FROM COINAGE: If You’re Angry About Taxes, Here’s Who To Blame Some Britons fired back at Trump Jr., accusing him of mischaracterizing Khan’s comments during an ongoing incident. Is this helpful @DonaldJTrumpJr? Did you even read the article before goading London's Mayor during a live incident?https://t.co/Sm68UOcJQG — Ciaran Jenkins (@C4Ciaran) March 22, 2017 Headline is based on very first sentence, which if you'd bothered to read it could apply to any major city in the world. Key word: "threat" pic.twitter.com/u2S9WA7yoA — Ciaran Jenkins (@C4Ciaran) March 22, 2017 You use a terrorist attack on our city to attack London's Mayor for your own political gain. You're a disgrace. — Wes Streeting MP (@wesstreeting) March 22, 2017 Khan is right. These things happen. We fight against them. But we don't wildly over-react or let them change our way of life — Tom Coates (@tomcoates) March 22, 2017 The New York Times attempted to reach Trump Jr. for comment, but he declined to elaborate, saying in an email, “I’m not going to comment on every tweet I send.”

2016-10-17

The U.S. dollar retreated from seven-month highs on Monday as investors evaluated whether the Federal Reserve will let inflation run above target before raising interest rates, and as some investors took profits from the recent dollar rally. Fed Chair Janet Yellen said on Friday that the U.S. central bank may need to run a "high-pressure economy" to reverse damage from the 2008-2009 crisis that depressed output, sidelined workers and risks becoming a permanent scar. "The question is if the Fed is going to let inflation run hot and then have to tighten very aggressively at the back end of the cycle, which would have potentially negative economic implications," said Mark McCormick, North American head of FX strategy at TD Securities in Toronto. At the same time, "I think the market is starting to take a little bit of profits on the long U.S. dollar trade that has been doing pretty well over the last couple of weeks," he said. was last down 0.10 percent at 97.914, after rising to 98.169 in overnight trading, the highest since March 10. The dollar also weakened against the euro before the European Central Bank is due to meet on Wednesday. The ECB is expected to extend its quantitative easing program, though it is also viewed as likely to taper purchases next year. "The market broadly sees that the ECB is going to be somewhat more positive on the outlook for Europe this week," said Richard Cochinos, Citi's G10 FX strategist in London. "They still will need to announce more accommodative policy next year, but it does seem that they may also believe the need for ever greater accommodation is decreasing. That is leaving the euro positive on the (non-dollar) crosses." The euro, which fell below $1.10 for the first time in almost three months last week, gained 0.24 percent to $1.0995. The U.S. dollar briefly added to losses earlier on Monday after data showed factory activity in New York State weakened further in October. Other data showed that U.S. industrial production barely rose in September as a rebound in manufacturing output was offset by a decline in utilities production, suggesting a moderate acceleration in economic growth in the third quarter.

2017-06-19

Washington (CNN)The leaders of the Senate judiciary committee have reached an agreement about the scope of an investigation into political interference at the FBI, with the possibility that the inquiry could explore whether President Donald Trump acted improperly during his interactions with fired FBI Director James Comey. Chairman Chuck Grassley and the panel's top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, plan to move forward on their inquiry, which will look into Russia meddling in the elections as well as whether there was any improper political interference with the FBI under both Trump and former President Barack Obama's administration. "I think there's general agreement," Feinstein told CNN on Monday. "I think the important thing is to get started. What I found in these investigations is when you do them, you look at things you need to look at in addition." Leaders of the Senate intelligence committee have suggested that investigating whether Trump obstructed justice will not be a main focus of their investigation, which is primarily aimed at reviewing Russian efforts to sway last year's election to Trump. That means that the judiciary panel could be the main body in Congress to investigate whether Trump improperly used his authority to urge Comey to back off an investigation of his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Asked if exploring obstruction under Trump would be part of the probe, Feinstein said, "I think whether it includes it or not, people look for it. That will be the result. ... You look at various pieces of information, you see something and say, 'Woah." A Grassley spokesperson agreed with Feinstein's comments, saying the two sides are in "general agreement" on the scope of the inquiry. Robert Mueller, the Justice Department special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, is expected to meet with committee leaders Wednesday. RELATED: What is obstruction of justice? Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat on the committee, said Monday on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" that "obstruction of justice has to be included" in the investigation, and critiqued Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump who has dismissed the idea the President could have obstructed justice by firing Comey. "Political interference with an ongoing investigation, regardless of what the President's lawyer may say, could make the President a target, a subject, a person of interest," Blumenthal said. "So our hearing will very much involve potential obstruction of justice in the firing of Comey and other actions." The two leaders of the panel have both been frustrated that key witnesses have testified before the Senate intelligence committee -- rather than their panel -- and both have warned that Comey in particular could face a subpoena if he does not agree to testify before Judiciary. In an interview with CNN last week, Grassley suggested he would be on board with issuing subpoenas for Comey and other witnesses to testify before his panel. Asked last week if he was open to investigating the White House on questions of obstruction of justice, Grassley did not rule it out. "I think I better wait until I get done with my conversations with Feinstein before I answer that question," said Grassley, who also wants to review any actions taken by Obama attorney general Loretta Lynch to influence the Clinton email investigation. Comey was among those critics who cited Lynch's June 2016 tarmac meeting with former President Bill Clinton as a sign the Justice Department was not capable of an independent investigation into Hillary Clinton. CNN's Eli Watkins contributed to this report.

2016-11-18 00:00:00

All but one of the Ottawa Senators’ eight games thus far this month have been one-goal decisions, with five being victories. Ottawa’s lone multi-goal decision in that span came against the Nashville Predators, who continue their three-game road trip Thursday in Canada’s capital. The Senators suffered a 3-1 loss at Nashville on Nov. 8, a contest that was the sixth during the team’s current 10-game streak of being limited to fewer than three goals prior to a shootout. Captain Erik Karlsson, who is one of only two Senators with double-digit point totals, enters Thursday with a three-game streak during which he has recorded four assists. Nashville had its three-game winning streak snapped Tuesday as it began its trek with a 6-2 setback in Toronto. James Neal has been red-hot for the Predators, scoring six of his team-leading seven goals during the career high-tying five-game streak he brings into the contest in Ottawa. TV: 7:30 p.m. ET, FSN Tennessee (Nashville), TSN5, RDS (Ottawa) ABOUT THE PREDATORS (6-6-3): Pekka Rinne could be back in net against the Senators as he returned to practice on Wednesday after sitting out the loss to the Maple Leafs with a lower-body injury. “I think he’s feeling better, and it’s good to have him out there,” captain Mike Fisher told the team’s website. “He brings the level of practice up with the way he works.” Another sign of Rinne’s return to the crease came Wednesday, as the Predators assigned goaltender Juuse Saros to Milwaukee of the American Hockey League. ABOUT THE SENATORS (10-5-1): Ottawa’s impressive record can, in part, be attributed to its penalty kill, which entered Wednesday tied for fourth in the league with an 87.5 percent success rate. The Senators have extinguished 27 consecutive penalties over their last 11 games after going a perfect 4-for-4 in Tuesday’s shootout victory over Philadelphia. Kyle Turris has scored in two straight games to increase his team-leading total to eight, which is five shy of the amount he registered in 57 contests last season. 1. Karlsson is one point away from becoming the 12th active defenseman with 400 in his career. 2. Nashville LW Filip Forsberg, who scored a team-high 33 goals last campaign, ended his season-opening 13-game drought Saturday against Anaheim but was kept off the scoresheet again versus Toronto. 3. Ottawa RW Mark Stone has netted only three tallies in 15 games this season, with two coming in his last three contests. PREDICTION: Predators 4, Senators 2

2017-11-30 00:00:00

General Electric (GE), an industrial conglomerate founded by Thomas Edison 125 years ago, is in trouble. Its market valuation, once over $400bn, is now closer to $150bn. Its share price has fallen by about two-fifths this year alone. The firm recently replaced Jeffrey Immelt, its long-serving chairman and CEO, with John Flannery (pictured), another company veteran. What went wrong at one of America’s best-known and oldest companies? GE’s traditional strengths are in asset-heavy, engineering-oriented industries. Starting with electrical goods (Edison famously commercialised the light bulb), the firm expanded into areas such as power-generation equipment, locomotives, industrial plastics and aviation. It also built up a successful business in health-care technology, making high-end medical scanners and other fancy kit. Its global network of research laboratories is one of the world’s top generators of new patents. Under Jack Welch, who ran the firm from 1981 to 2001, GE expanded dramatically (with hindsight, analysts say recklessly) into financial services, which by 2000 contributed more than half of the profits. The diversification away from the company’s core strengths made it seem much more valuable to investors, but this proved a chimera. The financial engineering was built on unsustainably risky bets, and the distractions arising from that complicated and politicised business led bosses to ignore festering problems on the industrial side. Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. After GE’s finance arm had been weakened by the global financial crisis Mr Immelt wound down the company’s financial holdings. Its current troubles are primarily the result of his failure to prepare GE for heightened competition in a slowing global energy market. This has squeezed GE’s power business, its biggest division, and the firm expects operating profits in this segment to decline by over 25% in 2018. Mr Immelt also made some expensive acquisitions at a time of low oil prices. He spent $10.1bn to buy Alstom, a French company selling power-generation kit, and $7.4bn to win control of Baker Hughes, an American oilfield-services group. Neither is doing as well as hoped. Mr Flannery unveiled a new strategy in November. It rests on three pillars: cost control, cultural change and cuts. He slashed the promised dividend by half, which will save on top of the $2bn in annual cuts Mr Immelt was forced to concede earlier this year. Mr Flannery is using carrots and sticks to restore management’s focus on financial returns. He will alter the pay structure to incentivise executives to generate free cash flow. He is also slimming down the unwieldy and toothless board of directors, even placing an activist investor on the board. But while his approach to costs and culture looks sensible, big investors wonder at his efforts to shrink the firm. Mr Flannery says he will dispose of some $20bn in assets in the next two years. That may sound like a lot, but is rather less impressive compared with GE’s total assets last year of $365bn. If Mr Flannery can defy the sceptics and turn the firm around, he will deserve to surpass even the lionised Mr Welch in the annals of American management.

2020-03-18 00:00:00

March 18 (Reuters) - * CHINA’S TENCENT SAYS Q1 OUTLOOK FOR GAMES, HEALTHCARE SECTORS ARE HEALTHY, LESS SO FOR AUTOMOBILES AND LUXURY * CHINA’S TENCENT SAYS TO MAINTAIN STEADY ADS REVENUE GROWTH DESPITE IMPACT of CORONAVIRUS, SUPPORTED BY “SOCIAL AND OTHERS” ADS Further company coverage: (Reporting by Pei Li and Brenda Goh, editing by Louise Heavens)

2020-02-29 00:00:00

The U.S. reported on Saturday its first death from the coronavirus in King County in Washington state.  Jamie Nixon, a public information officer with the Washington State Department of Health, said that a patient in the state has died from the infection. The patient was a man in his 50s with underlying health conditions, who was tested at the Washington State Public Health Lab, according to U.S. health officials. There was no evidence that he got the infection through travel or contact with another infected person. Officials are investigating how he contracted the virus.  President Trump during a Saturday press conference incorrectly said the patient was a woman. There are more than 85,000 confirmed cases of the virus worldwide and at least 2,933 confirmed deaths. At least 64 cases have been confirmed in the U.S.  The death comes as several cases in Washington state, California and Oregon have raised fears over the local, person-to-person transmission of the virus in people who have not recently traveled or been in contact with infected people.  Washington state officials said on Friday that a high school student in Snohomish County, near Seattle, had the virus and was in home isolation. Officials also confirmed a case in a woman in her 50s in King County, who had recently traveled to Daegu, South Korea, and had since been in home isolation.  Health officials said that more than 50 people in a Washington state nursing facility called Life Care are sick and being tested for the virus. There are two presumptive positives associated with the facility: a health care worker and a woman in her 70s.  "In addition, over 50 individuals associated with Life Care are reportedly ill with respiratory symptoms or hospitalized with pneumonia or other respiratory conditions of unknown cause and are being tested for COVID-19," Seattle and King County officials said on Saturday. "Additional positive cases are expected," they said.  Washington state governor Jay Inslee declared a state of emergency on Saturday after the man's death. "We will continue to work toward a day where no one dies from this virus," the governor said in a statement.

2016-07-19 13:00:41

Critic's Notebook This was not the way Jeb Bush would have entered a room. After a night of dire, doomsaying, death-ridden speeches, Donald J. Trump strode into the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Monday night to the tune of Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” He was bathed from behind by celestial light, like a star child from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or an avenging angel — or, well, a reality-TV host. It was not restrained. It was not subtle. It was the visual moment when Mr. Trump hung his shiny golden “T” on the Republican Party, imposing his brand, tone and aesthetic on his newly acquired property. The first night of Mr. Trump’s convention was not the radical Hollywood rethinking of the speech-video-speech convention format that you might have expected from a candidate who, last year, was firing Ian Ziering on NBC’s “The Celebrity Apprentice” for copying “La Cucaracha” in an advertising jingle. It was not entirely smooth or well organized, either, and it somehow managed to culminate in charges of plagiarism over a section of the showcase speech by Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, about the value of hard work. But the night infused the Republican convention with the febrile tone and spirit of a Trump rally: heated emotion, gasoline for the fires of suspicion and insecurity, and rhetoric that elbowed the norms of campaign discourse — all building to a hagiographic image of the show’s star and ringmaster. Mr. Trump was onstage only briefly Monday night, thanking the crowd — “We’re going to win, we’re going to win so big, thank-you-very-much-everybody” — and turning the podium over to “my wife, an amazing mother, an incredible woman.” It was not, however, the first time Mr. Trump inserted himself into the festivities. Earlier, he called in to Fox News, diverting that conservative-friendly network from showing a raw, anguished convention speech by Patricia Smith, who personally blamed Hillary Clinton for her son’s death in the 2012 attack on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. It’s not every convention that you see a candidate counterprogramming his own campaign event. But Mr. Trump must be Mr. Trump, which is to say he must be everywhere. Ms. Smith’s speech was one of several about death: death from terrorism, death from cop killers, death from undocumented immigrants, all painting a sick, twisted world against whose dangers, the speakers suggested, Mrs. Clinton and the Obama administration were impotent — or worse. The theme was “Make America Safe Again.” It often felt more like “Make America Freak Out Again.” The passions were intense. The sentiment was vicious. The rhetoric made the kind of accusations traditional politicians usually lay between the lines. Speakers and audience members alike declared that Mrs. Clinton should be not just defeated but jailed. Marcus Luttrell, a former member of the Navy SEALs, spoke what could have been the night’s mantra: “The world outside of our borders is a dark place, a scary place.” Many of the speakers on Monday were not politicians, maybe partly because so many elected Republicans took a pass. Instead, the audience heard testimonials from soldiers, law enforcement officials, the parents of murder victims. There were also enough minor celebrities to cast a small season of “Dancing With the Stars.” Many of them, like Mr. Trump, had a background in reality TV. But even some of the more typical political endorsers took on a kind of unshackled tone. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, gave a fiery speech on law and order — like playing the oldies, for him — gesticulating with both hands like a conductor furious at his orchestra. All this built to Ms. Trump’s speech, which, in contrast, was reassuring and upbeat. She complimented Mr. Trump’s primary opponents and praised her husband’s determination. It was boilerplate in content — there were no memorable personal anecdotes from their 18-year relationship. But Ms. Trump’s delivery was engaging. She was a reluctant public speaker, reading lines not in her native language in front of a prime-time audience. It was a naturally sympathetic situation, and she stayed poised. The content of her speech might have seemed out of place amid the night’s themes of insecurity and danger, other than providing a contrast to the tough talk on immigration. (Ms. Trump is from Slovenia, and spoke about becoming a United States citizen.) But that’s if you’re just parsing the words. The convention program, like a Trump rally, really operated on a nonverbal gut level. It was a drum solo of incitements and emotions — resentment, fear, grief, outrage — pounding the fight-or-flight center of the brain, cresting with Mr. Giuliani’s aria, then delivering a climax, relief, the glorious leader radiating electric light and his wife, sheathed in white. The scary part was over, the staging said; father and mother were here. Except it wasn’t over. The program continued after Ms. Trump, well past prime time, with speakers including Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa addressing to an increasingly empty convention hall. And the discussion continued and turned with the observation, first posted by a journalist on Twitter, that Ms. Trump’s speech evidently repeated significant passages from Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic convention. The night’s last twist: A program devoted to excoriating Barack Obama left the party faithful moved by the words of the president’s wife. If nothing else, the unforced error ensured that the next day’s coverage would be focused on the lyrics. But Mr. Trump’s audience may have still had his campaign’s anxious, operatic music ringing in their ears.

2018-12-18 00:00:00

President Donald Trump on Tuesday ordered the creation of a unified combatant command to oversee all U.S. military activities in space. Why it matters: This is a step toward the creation of a sixth branch of the military, the Space Force, which the administration is seeking congressional support for. Go deeper: National security figures dominate early Space Force meeting

2020-03-03 00:00:00

In a preview for The Bachelor: Women Tell All, Chris Harrison promised, "All of your favorite women are back, and you won't believe what they all have to say." But there are actually several missing faces at this year's WTA. That means they're not on stage with the rest of Peter Weber's contestants to get answers, tell their side of the story, and make themselves memorable enough to get cast on Bachelor in Paradise. This isn't the first time someone has been missing from the special. Last year, during Colton Underwood's Women Tell All, Elyse Dehlbom couldn't attend because she'd made a prior commitment to go to a friend's wedding. As for this year's missing faces, we got to the bottom of why they weren't there. Why Wasn't Kelley Flanagan At The Women Tell All? The Women Tell All filmed on Feb. 21 in Los Angeles, and Kelley was actually in the area that same weekend. But despite her proximity, Bachelor spoiler blogger Stephen Carbone (aka Reality Steve) reported that she allegedly hadn't been invited to the WTA. Kelley didn't confirm or deny anything directly, but she did "like" several tweets about her not having been invited, including these ones: ABC did not provide a comment to Refinery29 regarding the reports that Kelley wasn't invited. Regardless, Kelley went to L.A. during the same time anyway to see her Bachelor buddies for the weekend before her birthday. Kelley spent it with Mykenna Dorn, Tammy Ly, Shiann Lewis, Sydney Hightower, Kelsey Weier, to name a few. Kelley also seemingly made a vague reference to her absence in one Instagram caption taken of her at the Los Angeles-area restaurant Élephante. "Let's acknowledge the Élephante in the room. I'm hanging with my chicks," she wrote. If she truly wasn't invited, it's unclear exactly why. However, Cosmopolitan reported that Kelley has a habit of liking tweets that are not always very flattering about Peter. One notable one was: "I respect Kelly so much more than I thought I would because she clearly hates Peter and this process and she’s not hiding it." And this one: "Pete is disrespectful to women who know what they are looking for and call him out on his shit—take Kelley for example: he rolled his eyes, interrupted her and asked her not to judge him? When she was being upfront and honest." Why Wasn't Natasha Parker At The Women Tell All? When the news first broke that Natasha wasn't spotted at the WTA either, fans wondered if she also didn't get an invite. Natasha didn't specifically mention the WTA, but she seemingly cleared up the rumors on Twitter. "Uh oh... lots of speculation out there," she wrote. "Please don't put us in the same boat...I was invited, I just unfortunately couldn’t make it." A couple of days after the WTA was taped, Natasha posted an Instagram photo of herself in New York, so perhaps she just couldn't make the trip across the country. She is an event planner in NY, and weekends are probably just busy times for her. Who Else Is Missing From The Women Tell All? It also seems that a few other faces are missing from the crowd. Some of the women who went home early on or didn't get much screen time were also not in the crowd, including Jasmine Nguyen, Payton Moran, and Courtney Perry. The answer here might be simply that as people who didn't get much screen time, the Women Tell All is a pretty frustrating, mixed bag. Why Weren't Madison Prewett & Hannah Ann Sluss At The Women Tell All? Historically, the final two women do not attend the WTA. That event is for the already-eliminated contestants. Instead, Hannah and Madison will get to answer burning questions and tell their sides of any stories during the After The Final Rose special that airs following the finale.  While the rest of the cast was in L.A. for the taping, Madison's Instagram shows she was hanging out and playing basketball at the Auburn Arena in Alabama. Hannah Ann was spending some time in Florida. Even without the appearances of Kelley, Natasha, Madison, and Hannah Ann, there will be plenty to see and hear about during the WTA. Victoria Fuller will be in the hot seat, Kelsey Weier will make a now much too-late attempt to pitch herself as the Bachelorette (that honor just went to Clare Crawley from Bachelor days of yore), Alayah will be back to explain herself, and Chris Harrison will make some over-the-top claim about the impending After The Final Rose special. Update: This story has been updated to include new information as seen on The Bachelor.

2017-07-15 12:05:00

Although we think of "beauty coming from within" as something spiritual, something defined by the soul and essence of a person, London-based artist Mia-Jane Harris takes it literally, photographing deceased human body parts exhibited in various museums and medical collections. Harris's project, entitled Beautiful Corpses, documents human remains, bringing attention to the detail and beauty of our inner composition. "My art delves into the curious, fascinatingly odd, and morbidly beautiful. I aim to intrigue the viewer and pull them into my world with strange objects and morbid curios to manipulate their emotions on the subject of mortality," she tells Creators. Harris's work not only captures the intricate textures, folds, patterns, and layers of the inner human form, her work critiques our feelings towards our demise and challenges us to rethink the bleak "nothingness" that awaits us. Harris believes that utilizing and understanding how to preserve human tissue gives her control over her own passing. As a result, she challenges the inevitability of human disappearance after death by turning her fear of it into a fascination and artistic preservation. "I give a second life, a creative resurrection, to the deceased in the hope that in return this second chance I give them will help me live on through these creations when I am gone." For several years, Harris has been a volunteer at various medical museums and mortuaries which inevitably has inspired and shaped her creative direction. "Being around death in my everyday life helped me to dull some of my fear of it by making it seem like a day-to-day normality," Harris says. Although photographs of cadavers are usually not permitted in mortuaries, due to respect for the dead and their families, Harris was given permission to sketch and draw individuals who had died within days or months of their death. "The intimacy of these sketch sittings, being so near and looking so carefully at the bodies in front of me, made me want to break more into this taboo of seeing death so closely," Harris says. For her Beautiful Corpse series, Harris photographed the organs of people alive during the Victorian era—mostly hearts, wombs, and intestinal tissue between 100 and 200 years old preserved in formaldehyde. As a result of the Victorian preservation process—the washing and bleaching of human tissue—Harris's work captures the otherworldly aesthetic of preserved organs: their bluish and purplish hues, which resemble the marbling found within natural stone. Mortality fascinates Harris, in particular the fear of her own demise. "There were complications during my birth which resulted in me being born deceased, and after resuscitation left with Erb's Palsy and partial paralysis and stunted growth of my right arm, so I have always had a fascination with the morbid and abnormal." Harris's work explores ways to help others find death and loss less challenging. She aims to shed a different light on medical collections and interpret them in a new and modern way. "Museums hold thousands of human cadaver sections and specimens that are used for scientific research and study. They are looked at every day to learn from, but in their dull and dirty containers surrounded by thousands of others, they lose a part of their charm. People are so focused on what they are that they don't notice how beautiful they are," Harris explains. "I want to take away the scientific surroundings, the educational environment, the dust, the grime, and the textbooks to leave behind solely the objects; focusing on the patterns and colors of the tissues instead of what each specimen was." To view more of Harris's work, click here. To view her Instagram click here. Related: Meet the Death Photographers of India's Holiest City Can Virtual Reality Help us Better Understand Dying? Death and the Daguerreotype: The Strange and Unsettling World of Victorian Photography

2016-06-08

June 8 (Reuters) - Financial Street Holdings Co Ltd : * Says it issued 2016 third tranche non-public corporate bonds worth 1.5 billion yuan with coupon rate of 3.85 percent Source text in Chinese: goo.gl/l05ak3 Further company Coverage: (Beijing Headline News)

2018-09-09

National security adviser John Bolton is expected to announce Monday that the U.S. will shutter the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) office in Washington, D.C., The Wall Street Journal reported. “The Trump administration will not keep the office open when the Palestinians refuse to start direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel,” Bolton is expected to say, according to a draft of his speech reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Bolton will reportedly threaten the International Criminal Court with sanctions if it carries out investigations into the U.S. and Israel. The action against the PLO, which serves as the main entity representing the Palestinian people, comes as the Trump administration takes a harsher stance toward Palestinians amid ongoing Middle East peace negotiations. The State Department announced late last month that the U.S. will cut more than $200 million in economic aid for Palestinians and direct the money toward other projects. A State Department official said the decision was made "at the direction of President TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump pushes back on recent polling data, says internal numbers are 'strongest we've had so far' Illinois state lawmaker apologizes for photos depicting mock assassination of Trump Scaramucci assembling team of former Cabinet members to speak out against Trump MORE" to ensure the money is spent "in accordance with U.S. national interests and [will] provide value to the U.S. taxpayer." The decision could heighten tensions between the U.S. and Palestinian leaders, who already cut off communications in peace negotiations after Trump announced the U.S. Embassy in Israel would be relocated to Jerusalem. The White House, led by senior adviser Jared KushnerJared Corey KushnerTop immigration aide experienced 'jolt of electricity to my soul' when Trump announced campaign Dick Cheney to attend fundraiser supporting Trump reelection: report Trump Jr. dismisses conflicts of interest, touts projects in Indonesia MORE, has yet to release its long-awaited Middle East peace plan involving Israel and the Palestinians. 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.

2018-09-30

Image: GizmodoIf e-ticketing startup MoviePass isn’t quite dead yet, there’s been no mistaking the telltale signs of a dead man walking for months now. After months of reports that the service was about to hit a financial brick wall, it suddenly ceased paying for major new releases, nuked its unlimited plan, and offered customers who didn’t want to continue subscribing to a plan only good for three a la carte movie selections a month and a discounted fourth ticket a cancellation and refund. It’s posted huge quarterly losses and is facing a shareholder lawsuit over alleged fraud.And now, the cardiac arrest has begun in earnest. According to the Verge, the company is now sending emails to what it described as a “select test group” of customers who it says did not opt in to the new three movies a month plan. The emails say that these subscribers’ accounts will be re-activated on October 4th and be put back on the monthly $9.95 billing cycle unless they click a specific opt-out link. In the email, MoviePass wrote that these subscribers will be rolled back into a program that offers “unlimited movies (up to one new movie title per day based on existing inventory)”. It added that the company has chosen to do this “Because we really hope you begin enjoying your MoviePass subscription again... [this is] the same subscription that you signed up for and previously enjoyed.”Of course, it is not, because those subscribers who left did so because MoviePass is now a shell game that cycles the availability of films according to their financial whims. For example, if you wanted to see the horror thriller Hell Fest, the only upcoming date listed is Monday, October 1st. MoviePass doesn’t even have a list of available films past October 3rd on its website.The email also tells customers that if they do opt-out, their “subscription will be canceled and no longer held in a ‘suspended’ status, and [they] will not be able to re-join until 9 months have passed.”According to the Verge, MoviePass appears to believe it has the right to re-enroll people whose accounts lapsed just because it says it does:The company claims its TOS gives it pretty much free reign to change any aspect of the service regardless of when you subscribed or when your next billing cycle happens to be. When MoviePass realized that it had to change the terms of its subscription for its annual members prior to the start of a new billing cycle — a move that opened it up to legal action — the company tried to make amends by offering refunds or the option to transition to a paid out monthly plan.Prior to that, members who cancelled the service in August during the period of tumultuous and seemingly non-stop service changes were automatically opted back into new plans, which the company attributed to “bugs” in its service. This is at least the second time since August when MoviePass has used a shady tactic to re-enroll customers. But this latest move is at the very least unethical, and it is questionably legal. Customers on Twitter and Reddit are describing it as a form of fraud, and some users claim to have explicitly canceled their accounts (as opposed to just letting them lapse) or un-linked their payment cards, yet still received the email. MoviePass has long been plagued with allegations of absentee customer service, and the unending string of changes to its service were frustrating enough. But this is a whole other level.This seems more likely to end in the complete and total destruction of any remaining customer goodwill and/or a class action lawsuit than a MoviePass revival, but it is also clearly a desperation move. If you don’t want MoviePass to start charging you $9.95 a month without your consent, check your inbox for the following email:In August 2018, we announced a new offering for three movies a month for $9.95, giving subscribers the ability to opt-in to this plan if they wanted to continue as a MoviePass subscriber. However, our records show that you have not yet taken any action on the new plan, and because of that your subscription was suspended and your monthly subscription charges have stopped.Because we really hope you begin enjoying your MoviePass subscription again, we have chosen you to be a part of a select test group, who beginning Friday, October 5th will be restored to unlimited movies (up to one new movie title per day based on existing inventory) – the same subscription that you signed up for and you previously enjoyed. If you decide that you do not want this you must “opt out” before Thursday, October 4th at 9:00PM ET.To be clear, unless you opt out, your unlimited subscription will be restored and you will begin enjoying unlimited movies again (up to 1 movie per day, based on existing inventory) at $9.95 per month, and your credit card on file will be charged on a monthly basis beginning Friday, October 5th, 2018.If you do opt out of the restoration of your subscription to the unlimited plan, your subscription will be canceled and no longer held in a “suspended” status, and you will not be able to re-join until 9 months have passed.Even if you’re fine with the a la carte “unlimited” plan, we encourage you to cancel, because there’s just no telling what tricks MoviePass will pull in the future at this point.[The Verge]

2018-06-12

Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIFReplicating the complicated muscle structure that allows fish to wiggle their bodies and dart through the water is no easy feat. But not every underwater creature moves that way. Cuttlefish instead use long fins that undulate in waves to propel themselves, which is an approach that robotics maker Festo found relatively easy to replicate.Festo’s new BionicFinWave robot isn’t the first underwater automaton that replicates the movements of creatures like cuttlefish or marine planarians. Robotics engineers have been working to replicate Mother Nature’s designs for decades, and when it comes to swimming, the undulating fin approach is one of the easiest.So what makes Festo’s creation stand out from its predecessors? By simplifying the design, using a pair of one-piece silicon fins powered by just two servo motors, the robot can move about underwater without any cords or tethers. It’s completely self-contained, including battery packs that not only power the fin motors and wireless communications, but a servo in the head that allows the BionicFinWave to flex its body so it can swim up or down.The BionicFinWave isn’t just an exercise in copying Mother Nature. Robots like these can be used to autonomously monitor underwater conditions, as this one does with temperature and pressure sensors that wirelessly send data to a tablet outside its enclosed tank. There’s even the potential to incorporate this unique propulsion system, which allows the robot to move in almost any direction in 3D space, into submarines and other marine vessels, making it even harder to hunt for Red October.[Festo]

2017-10-06 04:49:11

Reports from a few iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus buyers have suggested there could be an issue with the battery inside some of the devices swelling, causing the case of Apple’s new iPhone to split open and expose the smartphone’s internals. Apple has now confirmed it is looking into it, although a spokeswoman declined to comment further when asked how many devices are affected. From what we’ve heard the number of reports so far is very few. Second Taiwan iPhone 8 buyer reports casing split open by swollen battery pic.twitter.com/lf6Tnp7wqc — Brightwire (@BrightwireInc) October 5, 2017 届いたiPhone8plus、開けたら既に膨らんでた pic.twitter.com/eX3XprSzqv — まごころ (@Magokoro0511) September 24, 2017 Yesterday CNET rounded up the handful of reports that have emerged — saying there are at least six different reports in at least five countries of the iPhone 8 splitting along its seams. Today Reuters also noted a report in Chinese state media of an iPhone buyer claiming a newly purchased iPhone 8 Plus arrived cracked open on October 5, though apparently without any signs of scorching or an explosion. Apple rival Samsung had big problems with smartphone batteries in its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. In that instance some Note 7 batteries caught fire, and the problem was extensive enough that it led Samsung to recall all Note 7 handsets — at great expense. In the case of the iPhone 8 the issue appears to be limited to batteries bloating/swelling, rather than catching fire — at least as reported so far. Although the phone only went on sale on September 22 so it’s still early days for the device. Apple did not release figures for the first weekend sales of the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, as it has in the past with new iPhones, so it’s also not yet clear how many of these handsets are in the hands of buyers at this point. Some analysts have suggested consumers may be holding off on upgrading their iPhone to buy the top-of-the-range iPhone X, which Apple also announced at the same time, but with a later release date. Pre-sales for the iPhone X are due to begin on October 27, with the handset slated to ship on November 3.

2019-12-05 07:43:36

For her Métiers d’Art debut as Chanel creative director, Virginie Viard showed a collection full of Parisian references at the Grand Palais. PARIS — The festive holiday lights of Paris sparkled from store fronts and Christmas garlands, arched over roads and the Eiffel Tower, twinkled over the River Seine and through an inky black sky. It was the eve of an indefinite national strike in France. The public walkout was expected to be the country’s biggest demonstration in over twenty five years. For Chanel, however, it was business as usual. The French luxury fashion house was celebrating its latest Métiers d’Art collection, the first under new creative director Virginie Viard. Now in its 18th year, the Métiers d’Art is an annual presentation by Chanel of the intricate craftsmanship of the specialist ateliers the company has bought over the years to preserve and nurture for their know-how; from embroiderers and feather makers to pleaters and milliners. Previously, it has been a traveling spectacular of sorts, unveiled in Dallas, Hamburg, Rome and, last year, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That Eygptian-themed extravaganza was the last Métiers d’Art line designed by Karl Lagerfeld, who died two months later. Ms. Viard, who took the creative helm of Chanel days after his death, is the first woman to run the house since Coco Chanel. She now has a lot to live up to and, so far, has been playing it relatively safe — that includes, for her fourth solo collection, the return to Paris and the return to the Grand Palais, Chanel’s usual runway show haunt. Plus ça change, and all that. The idea of homecoming was a recurring theme of the evening; a reminder that though the directors in the wings had recently changed, the story and vision of Chanel would remain the same. Acknowledging the importance of continuing Chanel’s tradition of cinematic-style blockbuster runway shows, Ms. Viard had collaborated with Sofia Coppola, the Oscar-winning movie director (and a former teenage studio intern at Chanel), to codesign a set full of familiar scenes. After making their way through doors lined with Christmas trees decorated with white camellias, almost 1,000 show-goers (including Kristen Stewart, Penélope Cruz and Lily-Rose Depp) walked into an opulent series of salon rooms created to resemble Coco Chanel’s Paris apartment with coromandel lacquered screens and gilded chairs. From there, they stepped into a runway show space that mimicked Chanel’s historic 31 Rue Cambon store, complete with its famous grand mirrored staircase. Giant chandeliers descended, the lights dimmed, and down the stairs came the models, showcasing a collection called, well, 31 Rue Cambon. Also a wee bit of freshness. An opening series of signature black bouclé tweed skirt suits, coats and blazers were given bold 1980s-style shoulders and bejeweled collars and cuffs, loosely belted with silk ribbons or gold chains and worn with modest-heeled Mary Jane shoes. A certain streetwise femininity was visible in a spliced black and white jacket and pencil skirt worn open with cascading jewels on a naked chest; a clutch of terrific gold knitted and buttoned jumpsuits; and a black bomber jacket covered with silky flower petals and teamed with glittering pants. A flimsy halter baby-doll dress, tie-dye T-shirts, bare midriffs and belly chains in a tequila sunrise palette, however, seemed to get lost in translation. It was, in the end, the classic pieces that showcased the art of the ateliers that made the biggest statement: a beautiful sheer cape embroidered with sequined gold wheat sheaves, for example, or feather covered cocktail dresses. Such showstopping pieces come with equally eye-watering price tags. For some, such opulent scenes might have jarred with the social unrest that brewed outside the gilded doors. But for others, the Métiers d’Art provided a fleeting moment of fantasy and creativity. After all, fashion is as French as going on strike.

2018-01-20 00:00:00

WEEKEND FUN! -- THE HOUSE reconvened at 9 a.m. Members have been advised that votes are possible today. House Democrats and Republicans are slated to hold separate caucus meetings at 10 a.m. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is scheduled to hold a post-caucus meeting press conference at 11:15 a.m. THE SENATE is also in session at noon. LAST NIGHT was one of the more remarkable scenes we’ve witnessed in politics in the last decade. After it was clear the Senate failed to invoke cloture -- end debate, in English -- senators milled about the floor for a long stretch. For almost two hours, with the clock slowly ticking toward midnight, we all sat spellbound in the Senate press gallery as strange alliances popped up on the floor. It started off just below where we were sitting, where LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-S.C.), huddled with senators like LAMAR ALEXANDER (R-TENN.), TIM KAINE (D-VA.), JOE DONNELLY (D-IND.), AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-MINN.), SUSAN COLLINS (R-MAINE), JEFF FLAKE (R-ARIZ.), CHRIS COONS (D-DEL.), ANGUS KING (I-MAINE), BEN CARDIN (D-MD.), ROGER WICKER (R-MISS.) and TOM UDALL (D-N.M.). DIFFERENT VERSIONS of this group popped up on the Senate floor for more than an hour. Graham was always in the middle of things, as was Klobuchar, Flake and Alexander. They shuttled between party leaders, chatting in good spirits, seemingly cutting deals. AT MULTIPLE POINTS, SENATE MAJORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY.) huddled in private conference rooms off the floor with SENATE MINORITY LEADER CHUCK SCHUMER (D-N.Y.). Graham was flashing thumbs up, hugging Democrats … and then … … THE GOVERNMENT SHUT DOWN. Schumer and McConnell started blaming each other. IT TURNS OUT that the two parties had discussed stopgap funding bills that expire either after the State of the Union or on Feb. 8 -- after the party planning retreats. WE WERE TOLD that 10 Democrats would support a Feb. 8 funding measure. We also hear it will take more Democrats than that. WHAT DEMOCRATS THINK ... The two sides are talking, and that’s a good start. They say this doesn’t really feel like 2013, when both sides were dug in and at war. Both parties want to fund government and solve the immigration problem -- the issue is what to tackle first. … AND REPUBLICANS: The GOP seems to think we’re not very close to solving this shutdown. The Senate is open to changing the government-funding expiration, but they don’t think they have the votes at the moment. Things might get tricky in the HOUSE as well. They feel like their funding bill is good enough, and there could be moderate resistance to changes. WHAT TO WATCH FOR TODAY -- REPUBLICANS walloping Senate Democrats. HOUSE REPUBLICANS will beat them up verbally. SENATE REPUBLICANS can use the floor to force them into uncomfortable votes. THE CHALLENGE FOR TRUMP: THE PRESIDENT lives for drama and stagecraft. If reopening the government comes down to Senate Democrats, Trump will have to find a way to try to be constructive. It could be a long few days for a president who hasn’t shown a lot of patience with the way Washington does things in his first year in office. … ONE OTHER DANGER: Most House Republicans haven’t been in the minority, so they don’t know how useless they will feel if that happens. Expect the rank and file to want to overplay their hand. THE JOINT WHITE HOUSE-HILL POSITION: Republicans say they won’t negotiate on immigration and budget caps until the government is open. If they hold firm on that, it’s going to be a long few days for Democrats.

2016-03-15 17:40:00

Women’s Running has done it again. After earning raves for their August cover featuring curvy model Erica Schenk, and again in December when autistic runner Kiley Lyall won their cover competition, the magazine has put another curvy model, Nadia Aboulhosn, on the cover of their April issue. Aboulhosn, who also moonlights as a blogger and fashion designer, was initially photographed for a story inside the magazine, but Women’s Running editor-in-chief Jessica Sabor decided to give her a bigger role in the issue. “We originally selected Nadia for our feature on fitness/fashion influencers, but we loved her energy so much, we knew we had to put her front and center on our cover,” Sabor says in a statement to PEOPLE. Aboulhosn, 27, says she was blown away to hear that she’d be leading the issue. “When I got the email, I still didn’t believe it was going to happen,” she wrote on Instagram. “I for sure thought last minute something was going to happen and I wouldn’t be on the cover, just solely off the fact that things have turned wrong for me so much of my life. […] I’m never satisfied and feel like I could always be doing more, but seeing my cover made me calm down and enjoy this moment that’s such a milestone for me and my career.” Seeing the cover for the first time was an incredible experience for Aboulhosn. “I was in the airport last night flying from Florida back to L.A. and went in the store, saw it and started crying,” she recalls. “This elderly couple next to me was like, ‘Whats wrong?’ I’m like, ‘This is my first magazine cover after working non-stop for five years!’ ” Aboulhosn has long been a trailblazer. In eighth grade, frustrated with the lack of a girls’ football team, she joined her school’s all-boys team as a linebacker. She discovered her love of running through the team’s daily track workouts. These days, Aboulhosn goes for three to four runs a week, and does bodyweight workouts in between modeling for fashion brands Addition Elle (a fave of Ashley Graham), Lord & Taylor and BooHoo. Sabor was thrilled to feature someone like Aboulhosn, who is working to change the body-image game. “You don t need to be an Olympic marathon runner to get the physical, emotional and psychological benefits of staying fit and healthy. We love that Nadia uses running as a way to be her best self – and that self is pretty incredible,” Sabor says. “Whether it’s being the only girl to join her high school’s football team or scoffing at the idea that high fashion is only for stick-thin models, Nadia blazes her own path.”

2017-07-27

Late-night host Stephen Colbert will produce an animated cartoon about President Trump set to air on Showtime this fall, Variety reported Thursday. The show will span 10 episodes and will be produced close to the premiere date to be able to stay relevant to current events, according to Variety. Meant to show “tru-ish” situations for the president and his family and other White House staffers, the show will explore what makes the president's actions "Trumpian."  The show will present “tru-ish adventures of Trump’s confidants and bon vivants — family, top associates, heads of government, golf pros, and anyone else straying into his orbit — intrepidly exploring their histories and their psyches, revealing insights into what makes them so definitively Trumpian," Variety reported.  Colbert said the show will offer viewers a glimpse into “the man behind the MAGA” — an acronym for Trump's campaign slogan, Make America Great Again. “I’m honored that the Cartoon President invited our documentary crew into his private world. I’ve seen some of the footage, and I look forward to sharing the man behind the MAGA,” he said. “It’s a workplace comedy where the office happens to be oval; it’s a character study in search of character, as seen through the eyes of an imaginary documentary crew,” according to Showtime. View the discussion thread. The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 fax The contents of this site are ©2019 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

2017-03-15 21:30:00

Super-cute Hollywood couple who somehow never manages to make any #couplegoals roundup Emily Blunt and John Krasinski will be making a movie together. The AV Club reports that the pair will star in A Quiet Place, a head-scratching film that involves suspense, supernatural beings, and Michael Bay — so probably also explosions. And maybe robots. And also maybe dinosaur robots. While the film's plot isn't clear, Krasinksi has taken on the roles of director and writer as well as actor. Blunt will remain where she's often found: in front of the camera. Michael Bay and his production company, Platinum Dunes, are producing the endeavor. Are you thinking that cerebral joker Jim Halpert and Boom-Boom Bay make for strange bedfellows? Well, the two did work together on 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016). A Quiet Place will put Krasinski and Blunt in very colorful company among A-list romances who also paired up on the big screen. Remember: Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck didn't just make Gigli (2003); they were also in Jersey Girl (2004) together. Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone took on a new Spider-Man franchise. David Arquette and Courtney Cox? Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Philippe? Yep, they all graced the silver screen as a duo...and ended up breaking up. All that off-screen chemistry often didn't translate to on-screen sizzle — or box-office payoffs. Many films — Scream (1996) and Cruel Intentions (1999) notwithstanding — featuring a Hollywood power couple flopped. By the Sea (2015), anyone? Let's hope that these two follow in the footsteps of Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, who appeared together in the Green Lantern (2011) flick (remember that?) and managed to make it work in real life, too. And hey, maybe Blunt and Krasinski will take a few cues from Jenna Dewan and Channing Tatum, too. Or even Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. No matter what, we can't wait for Krasinski and Blunt's two-person stand-up act — er, we mean press tour — when the film finally hits theaters.

2018-01-26

Author and self-made millionaire Steve Siebold has spent a lot of time studying the ultra wealthy. He's interviewed more than 1,200 millionaires and billionaires over the past 30 years. A key question Siebold always asks is: What do you teach your kids about financial success? His latest book, "Secrets Self-Made Millionaires Teach Their Kids, " is a culmination of the answers he's received. The sooner you can get your kids thinking like the wealthy do, the better off they'll be. Here are 14 lessons self-made millionaires and billionaires instill in their kids: Wealth and success take work. "Becoming financially independent will be the fight of your life. You'll have to be willing to sacrifice your time, sleep and leisure to build something great," writes Siebold. "It's not glamorous or pretty. While your friends are out having fun, you'll be working." The top earners know that money flows from ideas and problem solving. "If you want to be rich, solve a problem," writes Siebold. "If you want to be very wealthy, solve a bigger problem. " While "the masses solve small problems for their employers," he says, "the rich solve significant problems and get compensated accordingly." This makes it easier than ever to get rich: "It's simple. Solve a big problem, and the world will gladly turn their money over to you." The wealthiest people set high expectations. "Almost every self-made I've interviewed over the past 30+ years has told me he expected to be rich," writes Siebold. "You'll want to do the same." And don't be afraid to think big: "Expect to get rich in your 20s or 30s. … It's not going to happen overnight, but it doesn't have to take a lifetime. Your expectation will quicken the process and keep you on track." Who you hang out with matters. "You need rich friends," says Siebold. "The sheer exposure to their heightened level of awareness around everything related to wealth will dramatically expand your thinking." Find ways to cultivate relationships with wealthy, successful people: "Read their books, attend their events, donate to their charities … and whatever else you can do to gain introductions and build relationships." Your career affects every aspect of your life, so you want to choose your path carefully. "It's difficult to invest the necessary time and energy into a profession that bores you or that has little meaning beyond money," says Siebold. "Waking up everyday with excitement for going to work is a formula for financial abundance, emotional fulfillment, and life satisfaction." The rich aren't afraid to admit that money can solve most problems. "Being rich won't make you happy, but it will solve 90 percent of your problems," writes Siebold. "If you have a problem, and you can make it disappear by writing a check, you don't have a problem. … Make your money by solving problems, and you'll get rich enough to purchase your own problems away. " "The rich are investors, not spenders, " says Siebold. "They invest their money today, so they'll have more tomorrow." To be a successful investor, stick to what you know or what you're interested in: "If you like to play guitars, you might study the vintage guitar market. If you're a baseball fan, look into investing in rare baseball cards. If you like dissecting stocks, you could study the stock market." No matter how big your paycheck is, you won't be rich unless you're disciplined enough to keep what you make. "Excessive spending can ruin you," warns Siebold. "It happens every day to people with millions of dollars at their disposal." That's not to say you should never spend: "Just make sure you don't overextend yourself in the process because that will put you on a treadmill of having and not having money." The top earners tell themselves they deserve to be rich, while the masses think getting rich is reserved for a lucky few. The truth is, "in a free market economy like America, if you serve enough people and solve enough problems, you deserve to be rich," says Siebold. "The only people who tell you that the self-made rich don't deserve it are people that have never done it. Believe me, by the time you get rich, you'll be convinced that you've earned it." Rich people see money as abundant. After all, "If earning money is based on solving problems, and the number of problems is infinite, then your ability to earn money is infinite," says Siebold. "Reject the mass belief that money is a scarce resource. … It's not. What is scarce are people with solutions that others want to buy, and that's what you need to master. " The rich use their time differently than the average person, says Siebold: "The masses spend their time, while the rich invest in it. "Spend your time basking in entertainment, and you will struggle your entire life financially. Invest your time creating solutions to people's problems, and you'll never lose a minutes sleep worrying about how to pay the mortgage." The quickest way to get rich is to generate multiple revenue streams. While you want to focus on earning, keep the big picture in mind, too. "Total focus on money might lead you to do anything to get it, so I don't recommend that approach," says Siebold. "Instead, decide to match your talents and interests with a problem people will pay you to solve and go to work until you succeed. This formula offers you the fulfillment of doing work you love while profiting from solving other people's problems." The masses falsely believe "that rich people are smarter than everyone else," says Siebold. The truth is, "most of them are no brighter than the average person struggling to make ends meet." You don't have to be a genius to make it big: "Getting rich is less about intellect and more about focusing on the accumulation of wealth." Again, being rich won't make you happy, says Siebold, but wealth does offer freedom: "Being rich allows you to live anywhere you want, do anything you want, and be anything you want to be. "Wealth gives you the power to make your own rules, as long as they don't break any laws or hurt any people. It may not make you any happier, but it will certainly give you the freedom you deserve."

2016-03-23 18:20:00

Easter is this weekend, which means once again we'll be mourning the fact that the Easter bunny doesn’t visit people who are old enough to rent cars. We can usually make ourselves feel okay by remembering that we can buy twice as much half-priced chocolate on Monday. But this year, we’re feeling the Easter basket FOMO a little harder — and it’s all Kourtney Kardashian’s fault. Kardashian shared her Easter basket making tricks on her website and app, and we’d like to request to be formally adopted by the Kardashian-Jenners so we can get one of our own. “Easter is such a special holiday for my family, and I look forward to making Easter baskets for my kids every year," Kardashian writes. "I bought these cute chalkboard signs to tie to each basket with my kids' names on them. I also make baskets for North, and now Saint.” Her post also includes suggested basket fillers, and it’s not exactly stuff you could buy at your nearest drugstore. Though would you expect a Kardashian baby to celebrate Easter with anything less than $328 bunny ear sneakers? Or the finest $52 toy rabbit? If these adorable bunny slippers came in adult sizes, you bet we'd snatch them up, too.

2016-11-14 06:15:00

Amazon is beefing up its Home Services business — a marketplace rival to the likes of Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack and Handy for helping people find and hire contractors for everything from plumbers to at-home reflexologists. Today, the company added 20 more metro areas, one of its most significant expansions of Home Services since launching in March 2015, and bringing the number of markets covered to 50. New cities getting added today include Indianapolis, IN; Las Vegas, NV; San Antonio, TX; Ann Arbor, MI; Cleveland, OH; Milwaukee, WI; Boulder, CO; Raleigh, NC and Trenton, NJ. The news comes at a time of other developments in the home services category. First, Amazon itself appears to be considering entering into another, related on-demand area: housekeeping and helping people organise their lives. Last week, the Seattle Times spotted Amazon job openings for a new role at Amazon called “Home Assistant.” This is a concierge-style service where the employee “will be an expert in helping Amazon customers keep up their home…working with customers each day with tidying up around the home, laundry, and helping put groceries and essentials like toilet paper and paper towels away. You will assure that customers return to an errand-free home,” according to one of the ads. We’ve contacted Amazon for a comment and will update as we learn more. A few months earlier, Google launched a beta version of its own home services platform, where consumers can search and find for professionals for tasks by typing in keywords into Google. This appears to be live only in the Bay Area at the moment. Meanwhile, there is also some consolidation underway in the market: Angie’s List — which last year rejected a $512 million acquisition from IAC’s HomeAdvisor for being too low — hasn’t had a smooth time of it, and now, one year on, it’s laying off employees and exploring strategic alternatives. The company currently has a market cap of around $517 million. Amidst that competitive landscape, Amazon has been relatively quiet about its own Home Services effort in the last several months, with a lot of the company’s consumer hullabaloo continuing to swirl around its latest efforts to double down on its Echo voice-responsive home hub and the multiple cloud-based services that can be used in conjunction or alongside it. Home Services is somewhat related to this. It is, essentially, one more on-demand offering and cloud-based marketplace that leverages Amazon’s giant network effect and gives people one more way of making customers’ lives run more smoothly. But it is also fairly distinct and somewhat anachronistic, couched as it is in a fairly time-honored, traditional way of getting things done — by looking to skilled craftspeople for help. Given the wider developments in the U.S. right now, it will be interesting to see how services like Amazon’s fare. In one regard, trades like plumbing may be immune to the rising and falling tides of the economy: a blocked toilet is a blocked toilet, after all. In another, many services may not be quite as essential and will be impacted with a fall in consumer spending or other forces that would put a squeeze on disposable income. On the other hand,, if the housing market declines, another area like home improvements could be positively impacted as home owners might be less inclined to move house and more motivated to spruce up the place where they live. Amazon is, in keeping with its usual practice, not giving much away about how successful Home Services has been to date, but it’s definitely growing in terms of supplier interest. Amazon said that the number of service providers has gone up 1,500 percent, and it now covers 60 professions and 1,200 unique services. “We’re thrilled to be offering more Amazon customers access to our network of trusted pros throughout the U.S.,” said Nish Lathia, General Manager of Amazon Home Services, in a statement. “Today, customers can search over 1,200 unique services from pros in over 60 professions – from house cleaning, to lawn work and beyond. The availability of Home Services in more cities means that more customers can quickly find and schedule the help they need around the house heading into the holiday season.” It also notes that the services most popular with customers include TV wall-mounting, house cleaning and furniture assembly.

2019-08-21 00:00:00

2020 Democratic contender Sen. Kamala Harris' campaign announced Tuesday that she will take part in a Sept. 4 CNN town hall on climate change after initially declining due to a scheduling conflict. Why it matters: She has said rather little about her climate platform compared to detailed plans from some other top-tier hopefuls. What they're saying: "We were happy to change our schedule to accommodate such a critical conversation," Harris spokesperson Lily Adams told multiple outlets. "As Harris has said, this is a climate crisis and is one of the most urgent reasons we need a new president." The intrigue: Harris' reversal followed criticism from some climate activists, including the Sunrise Movement, over her initial decision against participating. It's still unclear whether Harris will have unveiled details about her plans ahead of the event. The campaign did not respond to inquiries. Go deeper: Jay Inslee unlikely to qualify for CNN's climate change town hall

2017-07-27 08:09:48

Twitter reported its second-quarter earnings today, and it did not go over well. As a result, the stock is down more than 12% in trading today — which is a very Twitter thing to happen, so to speak. Here’s the chart, which could pretty much be summed up with a 😐: Today also wiped out most of the gains that it accrued year to date. Twitter’s last report was a rare positive one for the company, when its monthly active users actually grew faster than expected and everything came in ahead of Wall Street’s analysts. This quarter, the very Twitter move of its users not growing and its advertising business stalling happened once again and shed more doubt on the company’s future. To be fair, the company is still more or less being gauged on the growth of its monthly active users. And Twitter’s actual audience has always been a pretty hard thing to gauge given that a lot of content bleeds beyond the platform and it’s trying to further expand into live video. The company has tried to distance itself from that MAU metric because, for better or worse, its growth is probably being sized up against other advertising networks like Facebook. That stock dive is really a reevaluation of the company’s future success, but it certainly doesn’t help it in the short term. Twitter is trying to get its stock-based compensation under control, but it’s also important to keep that price up to help recruit additional talent and improve morale. Twitter is rapidly trying to roll out products that will help make the service better, like trying to curb harassment and making the service easier to use with algorithmic feeds. To counter that obsession on MAUs, Twitter has started to emphasize its growth in its daily active users. That’s the strategy that Snap employed in its pitch that it’s an alternative to Facebook. The goal is to convince Wall Street that its eyeballs are more valuable than Facebook’s eyeballs because the service is much more engaging, and people spend a lot more time looking at Twitter multiple times throughout the day. Better engagement means more expensive ads, which means that the company will be able to restart its engine — but that means it has to grow those DAUs. Still, Twitter isn’t being to open about those DAUs, and instead doing the Very Tech Move of telling us the growth rate and giving us a chart without a Y axis when talking about its DAUs. We may, in the future get more clarity, but for now that’s not helping Twitter’s case as being a potentially huge advertising product alongside other options in the market.

2016-01-19 00:00:00

A new video taken by a telescope in space shows a small slice of the awesome beauty of Earth's closest star. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the video, which shows "cascading magnetic arches" on the sun after a filament of solar material erupted from the star on Dec. 16 to 17, the space agency said. The arches look like they're glowing as they give off ultraviolet light, which is actually invisible to the human eye — but researchers colorized it to make the details of the magnetic arches really pop. Scientists are keeping an eye on the sun to learn more about the star and watch for any potentially dangerous space weather that could harmfully impact Earth. A huge burst of plasma in our planet's magnetic field could create problems with power grids on Earth, satellites in space and even humans on orbit, but monitoring the sun can give researchers a heads up about any extreme space weather heading toward us.

2018-03-29 00:00:00

March 29 (Reuters) - Shire Plc: * ‍ANNOUNCED EUROPEAN MEDICINES AGENCY HAS VALIDATED ITS MARKETING AUTHORIZATION APPLICATION FOR LANADELUMAB (SHP643)​ * ‍REPORTS THAT HEALTH CANADA HAS COMPLETED SCREENING AND ACCEPTED NEW DRUG SUBMISSION UNDER PRIORITY REVIEW FOR INVESTIGATIONAL COMPOUND​ * ‍HEALTH CANADA’S RECENT ACCEPTANCE OF LANADELUMAB NDS FOR PRIORITY REVIEW SHORTENS REVIEW TIMELINE FROM 300 TO 180 DAYS​ Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:

2017-09-25 00:00:00

Sydney, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Australia’s prudential regulator should be given powers as soon as October to cap bank executives’ salaries, delay their bonuses and drive them out of the industry if they were guilty of wrongdoing, Treasurer Scott Morrison said on Monday. The government is pushing ahead with tougher rules for banks after a series of scandals undermined public confidence in the sector, including alleged breaches of money-laundering laws by Commonwealth Bank of Australia. While the Australian Bankers Association says the proposed changes are being rushed through with insufficient consultation, Morrison said he was not prepared to wait. “I know the banks don’t want many of the elements of this legislation but I’m not about to give them three months to make the case as to why they shouldn’t be in there,” Morrison told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “They are going in, I’m not mucking around.” Australia’s biggest banks have gone through a tumultuous period peppered with allegations of misleading financial advice, insurance fraud and interest-rate rigging. The country’s biggest lender by market capitalisation, Commonwealth Bank, is facing billions of dollars in fines over allegations of systemic breaches of money-laundering and terror-financing laws. Policy-makers have sought to reassure the public they are holding the banks to account, and on Friday unveiled new powers over executive pay to be handed to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority in October. The banking scandals have fuelled calls for a broad judicial inquiry into Australia’s banking system, which could recommend greater regulation or even criminal charges. But the Treasurer said on Monday that a so-called Royal Commission was not necessary, although it has the strong backing of the public and the opposition Labor Party. $1 = 1.2569 Australian dollars Reporting by Paulina Duran in SYDNEY. Additional reporting by Colin Packham.; Editing by Stephen Coates

2020-02-25 00:00:00

Feb 25 (Reuters) - Gold prices fell 1% on Tuesday as investors chose to pocket profits after the metal hit a seven-year high in the previous session, although growing fears over a spike in new coronavirus cases outside of China capped bullion's losses. FUNDAMENTALS * Spot gold was down 0.7% to $1,649.49 per ounce by 0132 GMT, having touched a session low of $1,642.89. * Bullion rose to a more than seven-year high of $1,688.66 in the previous session. * U.S. gold futures fell 1.5% to $1,651 an ounce. * "The 1% fall was because of margin calls but definitely that has triggered an added wave of profit-taking," said Stephen Innes, chief market strategist at AxiCorp. * "In this kind of an environment, when stock markets are crashing it is easy to cover margin call. (But) given the overwhelmingly risk-off market, we should see gold find some support," he added. * Asian shares extended losses amid fears the virus was rapidly mutating into a pandemic that could cripple global supply chains and wreak far greater economic damage than first thought. * The death toll climbed to seven in Italy on Monday and authorities sealed off the worst-affected towns, closed schools and halted the carnival in Venice, where there were two cases, while several Middle East countries were dealing with their first infections. * Investors are pricing in an increased chance the European Central Bank will cut interest rates sooner rather than later, reflecting heightened fears that the virus will spread and hit the euro zone economy hard. * U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Reuters he does not expect the outbreak to have a material impact on the Phase 1 U.S.-China trade deal, although that could change as more data becomes available in coming weeks. * Financial markets on Monday ratcheted up bets the U.S. Federal Reserve will be pressed to cut interest rates to cushion a feared hit to economic growth from the epidemic. * The U.S. economy should continue to perform well this year and monetary policy is currently well positioned despite the risk posed by the virus, Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester said on Monday. * The Trump administration is considering asking lawmakers for emergency funding to ramp up its response to the fast-spreading coronavirus, a White House spokesman said without providing details. * Goldman Sachs said commodity prices could fall sharply before Chinese stimulus to combat the coronavirus impact later this year helps the sector achieve its 12-month return forecast of about 10%. * Palladium rose 0.6% to $2,642.97 an ounce, while DATA/EVENTS (GMT) 0700 Germany GDP Detailed YY NSA (Q4) 0700 Germany GDP Detailed QQ SA (Q4) (Reporting by K. Sathya Narayanan in Bengaluru; Editing by Subhranshu Sahu)

2017-10-18

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. refiners are set to blow past quarterly earnings expectations after margins surged to a two-year peak on the back of a crippling hurricane season that squeezed already tight gasoline and diesel supplies. A series of hurricanes, most notably Harvey, which struck Texas in late August sapped demand for crude oil and led to crushing gasoline lines in various parts of the U.S. Southeast and Midwest. However, those supply interruptions boosted margins for refiners, suddenly presented with lower crude oil costs and a big jump in gasoline and diesel prices. It came after a summer when refiners surprisingly reduced their volumes of distillates - heating oil, diesel, jet fuel and kerosene - just before demand for those products ramps up in the fall and winter. Refiners such as Valero Energy (VLO.N) and PBF Energy (PBF.N) will continue to ride healthy diesel margins in the coming months amid post-hurricane recovery efforts and sustained exports that will keep supplies at some of the lowest levels in years, analysts said. “In addition to the increased distillate demand based on economic activity, there will be immense rebuilding needs in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico from damage caused by hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, all in August and September 2017,” Moody’s said in a note. Diesel margins rose about 50 percent during the third quarter, the biggest jump seasonally in six years, as overall volumes fell by about 10 percent to a two-year low. Per-share earnings estimates for the third quarter for seven independent refineries, have, on average, seen their earnings-per-share estimates rise by 2.4 percent over the past week, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine figures. Current estimates may not be high enough. StarMine currently predicts those seven companies will beat consensus expectations by an average of 3 percent. All seven companies rank in the top 25 percent of U.S. companies in StarMine’s analyst revision models, which take into account changes in forecasts for revenue and earnings, as well as overall analyst recommendations. Quarterly results should detail which companies were most hurt by lost production due to Harvey, and which benefited most by being able to boost refining runs as margins peaked. Valero Energy Corp (VLO.N), which operates three refineries affected by Harvey, has nonetheless seen 13 upward revisions to EPS predictions in the last week, compared with 4 downward revisions. On the flip side, analysts have been lowering expectations for Phillips 66 (PSX.N), with 6 increases and 10 decreases, according to StarMine. Refiners will begin reporting earnings next week, kicking off with Valero on Oct. 26. Barclays said in a note last week that estimates are likely to fluctuate, due to the difficulty in predicting how some refiners fared during the storm. Robust exports are expected to keep demand for U.S. fuels elevated. European appetite for U.S. diesel has soared in recent months, but imports for September and October have been dented by the supply crunch created by Harvey. Margins to produce diesel fuel rose to a more than two-and-a-half year high of $26.95 a barrel during the third quarter and traded at nearly $24 a barrel on Wednesday, a four-year high for this time of the year. Gasoline margins RBc1-CLc1 also jumped during the third quarter, hitting two-year highs in early September. U.S. distillate exports will remain more than 10 percent higher in 2018 than in 2016, with further increases possible with continued demand and unplanned refinery outages from Latin America and Europe, according to Moody’s. Morgan Stanley currently estimates U.S. refiners’ 2018 earnings per share to beat estimates by 20 percent. “We anticipate refiners will have a higher tilt toward distillate production heading into year-end ... In our view this will help set up an attractive 2018 gasoline market,” Morgan Stanley said in a note. Reporting by Devika Krishna Kumar and Jarrett Renshaw in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama

2016-02-02 00:00:00

Washington (CNN)President Barack Obama's administration said Tuesday it was seeking to expand U.S. military spending in Europe four-fold in a bid to reassure allies still unsettled by Russia's incursion into Ukraine. The new spending would increase to $3.4 billion under the new plan, which is set to be formally unveiled next week as part of Obama's final presidential budget. The Pentagon also said Tuesday it was ramping up spending for the battle against ISIS, doubling last year's request to $7 billion. The White House said that figure would allow for "continuous U.S. armored brigade rotations" through stations in central and eastern Europe, as well as ramped-up U.S. participation in NATO military exercises and the deployment of additional combat vehicles and supplies to the region. Obama has sought to affirm the U.S. commitment to NATO ever since Russia annexed sections of Ukraine in 2014, causing alarm in other neighboring countries, some of which belong to the military alliance. In a statement, the President said Tuesday's announcement "should make clear that America will stand firm with its allies in defending not just NATO territory but also shared principles of international law and order." He said at an upcoming meeting of NATO leaders in Poland the discussion would center on bolstering military commitments among the nations. "It is clear that the United States and our allies must do more to advance our common defense in support of a Europe that is whole, free, and at peace," Obama said. Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, said the move was a "clear sign of the enduring commitment by the United States to European security." "It will be a timely and significant contribution to NATO's deterrence, and collective defense," he said in a statement. But Yury Melnick, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, told CNN that the actions are "destabilizing and detrimental to the European security." "These steps are intended to establish new facts on the ground, and are in contradiction to the NATO-Russia Founding Act principles. There should be no doubt that Russia under any circumstances will be able to defend its citizens and national security interests," Melnick said. "At the same time, confrontation is not our choice, and the right path for the U.S. and NATO in Europe, if they want to return to normal relations with Russia, would be de-escalation, self-containment, and responsibility in their military posture." CNN's Brian Todd contributed to this story.

2016-02-12 15:30:00

It's hard to watch Mad Men and not feel a little jealous of the clothes the women wear — but knowing what was under those clothes makes us glad we don't still sport the uncomfortable girdles ladies used to get that hourglass shape. Actress Alison Brie, who played Trudy Campbell on the '60s-era drama, talked to Seth Meyers on Late Night Thursday evening about the complications that came with wearing those vintage undergarments and costumes. Apparently, there are a lot of layers, and sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what's going on down there. "You’re really working blind," she explained. On the way to set one day, Brie really had to pee, so they stopped in a public restroom. "I just start peeing, and I can’t hear the pee hitting the toilet, so I realized I missed my underwear, they didn’t quite make it out of the way," she said. "And I just did a full pee. It was not a slight trickle, there was no stopping it in the middle. I just got very warm, just soaked." And then...she did a quick costume change and everything was fine? Nope. As they say, the show must go on. "Someone outside was like, ‘We have to go!’ So I just went to set and shot a full scene.'" Way to be a trooper, Alison! Handled like a pro. Watch Brie explain the story, below.

2019-03-11

(Reuters) - Wells Fargo & Co Chief Executive Tim Sloan will tout the scandal-plagued bank’s progress in repaying wrongly charged customers and highlight changes to its risk management in testimony to U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday, according to prepared remarks. Since 2016, Wells Fargo has reviewed 165 million accounts, contacted more than 40 million customers and payed out millions in compensation stemming from sales practices issues, Sloan said in an opening statement to the House Financial Services Committee that was posted on the bank’s website on Monday. The remarks detailed other steps the bank has taken to improve its culture and interactions with customers in order to move past a series of sales practices scandals. But Sloan will likely face tough questions on Tuesday from House Democrats like U.S. Representatives Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are seeking to ramp up oversight of big banks. Wells Fargo’s remediation efforts have also faced scrutiny from U.S. regulators who say the plans were not thorough enough. The bank has improved risk management controls by centralizing oversight and restructuring its board in order to prevent new problems from developing, the remarks said. Last year, the Federal Reserve imposed a consent order on the bank, preventing it from growing its balance sheet until it proves it has improved its risk management controls. Sloan said the bank has thousands of employees working to satisfy the Fed’s requirements and that Wells Fargo executives and board members have been meeting regularly with U.S. banking regulators to address their concerns and seek input. Earlier this year the bank said it expects to operate under the asset cap until the end of 2019, pushing back prior guidance by six months. Reporting by Imani Moise; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli

2016-05-24 00:00:00

Twitter finally made a key change that most users actually want — but it still wasn't enough to appease Wall Street. Twitter stock fell as much as 4% in late morning trading on Tuesday, touching a new low even after the company officially announced plans to relax its 140-character policy by no longer counting images, polls and user names toward the limit.  The announcement, which had been rumored for more than a week, did little to change Wall Street's increasingly negative impression of the stalled social media service. Multiple analysts downgraded the stock on Tuesday with brutal investor notes shortly before the character limit change was announced.  In a note titled "Hope Is Not a Strategy," MoffettNathanson analysts criticized Twitter's latest monetization efforts — including its plans to make money off of users who don't log in to the service — as "too little too late." A note from James Cakmak, an analyst with Monness Crespi Hardt, was equally damning. "Twitter has been frustrating to cover, not only because of its declining share value, but more so because of its vast potential that’s eroding by the day. Admittedly, as an avid user we’ve seen only incremental improvements to the experience when steep changes are needed," Cakmak wrote. "There is still time for a turnaround, but that window is closing." TWTR data by YCharts With the exception of a brief honeymoon period with Wall Street immediately following its IPO in late 2013, Twitter has struggled to woo investors who doubt its ability to re-ignite user growth. Sure enough, Cakmak told Mashable by e-mail that the much-hyped character limit change "has no bearing" on his criticism of Twitter's turnaround efforts. "This tweet format change is strictly a tweak for existing users and doesn’t change new user outlook," he says, "because their daily actives are holding firm anyway regardless." Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

2019-01-14

(CNN)More than 40,000 immigration hearings have been canceled because of the partial government shutdown, according to a report released Monday. Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks immigration court data, released a report showing that an estimated 42,726 immigration court hearings had been canceled as a result of the shutdown. The estimate is based on the number of hearings that were scheduled, dating to November 30. It's not an official statistic. But the report is the first detailed analysis that reveals the potential implications of the shutdown for an immigration court system that's already facing a crushing backlog. Susan Long, a co-director of the clearinghouse, said researchers had arrived at the estimate by tallying scheduled cases recorded in official government data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. CNN couldn't independently confirm the estimate. Officials from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the branch of the Justice Department that runs US immigration courts, could not be immediately reached for comment. Many judges and office employees have been furloughed as a result of the partial government shutdown. An official from the Executive Office for Immigration Review told CNN earlier this month that thousands of cases had already been postponed because of the shutdown. The figures the clearinghouse released are in line with what immigration attorneys and judges say they're seeing. "We do think every day cases are being canceled. We're looking at several thousand a day," said Judge Ashley Tabaddor, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. The clearinghouse's figure "is consistent with our estimates. I don't know the exact number but it's definitely in the ballpark." Last week, Tabaddor sent a letter to Congress detailing the issues facing the courts. Immigration courts that handle non-detained dockets -- the cases of people who are not in immigration detention -- are closed as a result of the shutdown. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, more than 800,000 cases were pending in immigration courts before the shutdown. And this isn't going to help matters, Long said. The Executive Office for Immigration Review released guidance in December that noted that "cases will be reset for a later date after funding resumes." Immigration judges who work with non-detained cases will likely return to overbooked dockets and a slew of cases to reschedule. For those waiting to have their cases resolved, that'll likely mean even more years of wait and uncertainty. Detained dockets are to continue as planned. The clearinghouse's estimate excluded hearings that were scheduled in detention facilities. The shutdown runs counter to the Trump administration's goal of bulking up the number of immigration judges in order to cut down the backlog. A letter provided to Congress earlier this month from the Office of Management and Budget outlining President Donald Trump's priorities to reopen the government included the addition of immigration judges. Prior to the shutdown, the immigration court backlog had been gradually increasing. Pressing pause on the non-detained docket is likely to exacerbate the issue. "Many of the courts, prior to the shutdown, were scheduling individual merit cases two or three years out," said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "As soon as the court reopens, it won't be put on the calendar until there's a date available, likely two to three years." CNN's Geneva Sands contributed to this report.

2017-10-16 05:01:04

On the Market 15 Photos View Slide Show › Though home prices in Toronto are on the rise from recent months, the overall cooling has continued for the area’s real estate market as recent data shows September sales were down 35 percent from last year. Brokers said many buyers have been spooked by rising interest rates and rumors of proposed changes to the application process for uninsured mortgages. 15 Photos View Slide Show › Buyers are also wondering what will happen when the Ontario government toughens regulations around industry ethics violations and “double-ending,” where brokers represent both the buyer and the seller in the same transaction. The controversial practice has already been banned in Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and soon also will be prohibited in British Columbia. Click on the slide show to see this week’s featured properties in Toronto: • In North Riverdale, a one-bedroom, one-bath townhouse with a second-floor skylight and loft-style setup. The house is steps from Withrow Park, the Danforth Music Hall, the Chester subway station and a strip of mom-and-pop shops and restaurants. • In Summerhill, a two-bedroom, three-bath corner condo in Summerhill that is decked out with imported Italian cabinetry, a porcelain stone master en suite bath with heated floors, two underground parking spots and a storage locker.

2016-02-22 20:40:03

Well, this is awkward. C-SPAN has resurfaced video of a floor speech delivered by then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden on June 25, 1992. In it, Biden explicitly calls on then-President George H.W. Bush to not nominate anyone to fill whatever Supreme Court vacancies should arise between then and the presidential election in November, and suggests that if Bush did put forth a nominee, the Judiciary Committee might not hold hearings. That is, of course, exactly the argument that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his allies have been making ever since Justice Antonin Scalia died on February 13 — that President Obama should let the seat stay vacant because it's an election year. Sen. Joe Biden in 1992 says President Bush should "not name a nominee until after the November election..." #SCOTUShttps://t.co/setQGLzePt As a result, it is my view that if a Supreme Court justice resigns tomorrow or within the next several weeks, or resigns at the end of the summer, President Bush should consider following the practice of a majority of his predecessors and not — and not — name a nominee until after the November election is completed. The Senate too, Mr. President, must consider how it would respond to a Supreme Court vacancy that would occur in the full throes of an election year. It is my view that if the President goes the way of Presidents Fillmore and Johnson and presses an election year nomination, the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over. And I sadly predict, Mr. President, that this is going to be one of the bitterest, dirtiest presidential campaigns we will have seen in modern times. I'm sure, Mr. President, after having uttered these words, some will criticize such a decision, and say that it was nothing more than an attempt to save a seat on the court in hopes that a Democrat will be permitted to fill it. But that would not be our intention, Mr. President, if that were the course we were to choose as a Senate, to not consider holding hearings until after the election. Instead, it would be our pragmatic conclusion that once the political season is underway — and it is — action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over. That is what is fair to the nominee, and essential to the process. Otherwise, it seems to me Mr. President, we will be in deep trouble as an institution. Biden's comments since Scalia's death directly contradict his earlier stance. In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio's Cathy Wurzer on February 18, Biden mocked the idea of waiting until after the election to appoint a nominee: "To leave the seat vacant at this critical moment in American history is a little bit like saying, 'God forbid something happen to the president and the vice president, we're not going to fill the presidency for another year and a half.'" He sounded a similar note in an interview with Rachel Maddow, saying that Senate Republicans were only promising to block a nominee because they want to get "out ahead of Ted Cruz," and declaring, "We have a dysfunctional Congress now. We don't need an institutionally dysfunctional Supreme Court." Same goes for his interview with Politico's Michael Grunwald in which he noted, "There are a whole hell of a lot of people who Republicans who have already voted for" whom he thinks they should confirm again for the Court vacancy. There did not turn out to be any vacancies in 1992, when Biden decried election year nominations. Two aging justices did wind up waiting to retire until Bill Clinton took office: the liberal Harry Blackmun, and the mostly conservative but JFK-appointed Byron White. And Clinton's picks did change the Court. While Stephen Breyer is about as liberal as Blackmun, Clinton replaced White with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is substantially to White's left. (White dissented in the case creating police Miranda warnings, and in Roe v. Wade, which he called "an exercise in raw judicial power.") Biden can protest that he was merely speaking hypothetically, and that June is further along in the campaign season than February. And, of course, perhaps he just changed his mind on the merits. But a skeptical observer could be forgiven for finding his change of heart rather convenient. Update: Some liberal outlets are pushing back on this, focusing on a part later in the speech where Biden suggests some openness to a moderate nominee. That doesn't really change the substance of his other comments, but you could make the case that it means he was taking a more moderate view than McConnell is today. I personally don't buy it — he clearly seems to be talking about the next administration, not Bush — but watch for yourself:

2019-12-03 00:00:00

YANGON (Reuters) - Bangladesh is blocking hundreds of thousands of Rohingya children from accessing meaningful education, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday, urging authorities to lift restrictions on schooling in refugee camps. In a report called ‘Are we not human?’, Human Rights Watch accused Bangladesh of violating the rights of 400,000 school age children who have fled Myanmar and are currently living in the Cox’s Bazaar refugee camps. “Depriving an entire generation of children of education is in no one’s interest,” Bill Van Esveld, associate children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch told Reuters. “The international community needs to act and demand that Bangladesh and Myanmar change course.” More than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh since a 2017 crackdown by Myanmar’s military, which followed attacks by Rohingya insurgents. The Human Rights Watch report said Bangladesh had banned Rohingya refugees from enrolling in schools outside the camps or taking national exams and also barred U.N. agencies and foreign aid groups from giving formal accredited education. It accused Myanmar of not agreeing to recognize the use of its school curriculum in the camps. Bangladesh’s Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission Chief Mahbub Alam Talukder said it was untrue that children in the camps were not being educated and that there were 4,000 learning centers in the camps. “Rohingya will have to go back to Myanmar,” he told Reuters. “They are not our citizens and we can’t allow them to use our national curriculum.” The Myanmar government did not respond immediately to a Reuters request for comment. Additional reporting by Ruma Paul in Dhaka; Editing by Matthew Tostevin and Jane Wardell

2018-11-27

President TrumpDonald John TrumpFacebook releases audit on conservative bias claims Harry Reid: 'Decriminalizing border crossings is not something that should be at the top of the list' Recessions happen when presidents overlook key problems MORE confirmed Monday that he is considering a possible shake-up of his Cabinet officials, but defended the current members of his administration as "incredible people" when questioned by reporters. Trump said during a round table discussion on the Senate's criminal justice reform package that he was looking at changes to "a few positions," but declined to discuss any specifics. "Let me start off by saying, I have a fantastic Cabinet," Trump said. "We have incredible people. You know it's a lot of people. There are a few positions that I'm thinking about, but I could leave it the way things are now and be very happy with it, or make changes and maybe be even happier with those positions." "But we have a great Cabinet, they are tremendously talented people, and they're really doing a good job," he added. Trump's comments follow remarks he gave to reporters earlier this month, when the president said he was expecting "customary" changes to his administration following the midterm elections. "Administrations make changes usually after midterms and probably we'll be right in that category. I think it's very customary," he said at the time. "For the most part, I love my Cabinet," Trump added. "We have some really talented people. Look at the deals we're making on trade. Look at the job we've done on so many different things, including foreign affairs. I mean, we've done record-setting work. I don't know that we get the credit for it, but that's OK." The Trump administration has already seen some recent high-profile staffing changes, including the forced resignation of Attorney General Jeff SessionsJefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsDOJ should take action against China's Twitter propaganda Lewandowski says he's 'happy' to testify before House panel The Hill's Morning Report — Trump and the new Israel-'squad' controversy MORE just days after the midterm elections were held. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott PruittEdward (Scott) Scott PruittEnvironmentalists renew bid to overturn EPA policy barring scientists from advisory panels Six states sue EPA over pesticide tied to brain damage Overnight Energy: Trump EPA looks to change air pollution permit process | GOP senators propose easing Obama water rule | Green group sues EPA over lead dust rules MORE and Secretary of State Rex TillersonRex Wayne TillersonThe Hill's Morning Report - Trump searches for backstops amid recession worries State Dept. extends travel ban to North Korea Scaramucci breaks up with Trump in now-familiar pattern MORE also left the Trump administration earlier this year. 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.

2016-08-12 16:15:00

By now, you should have the chorus of "Sorry" memorized. "Formation" ought to be your theme song. "***Flawless" should have been your anthem for at least a year.And now is the time when you can't eff it up. Beyoncé's Formation World Tour has officially started, and, as any true Bey fan knows, it's time to bring your A-game.That means belting along to every song in tune (like this guy at the Rihanna concert), nailing down that sass (like this little girl), and memorizing the choreography to "Single Ladies" (like these Bey superfans).So, to help you prepare, we scoured the set list so far and pulled together the songs you must memorize before even calling yourself a member of the Beyhive. From old-school classics to the newest off her Lemonade album, these are the tracks to sing along to and prep in order to bow down to Queen Bey. Click ahead to get your jam on, and leave your favorites in the comments below.

2016-08-14 16:50:00

Hendrik Weber is back. After a long hiatus, the German producer (who performs as Pantha du Prince) returned with The Triad, his first solo album in six years. Since dropping the record this May on Rough Trade records, the producer has embarked on a global tour with numerous festival stops throughout Europe and the UK. Later this year, he'll make his way to the United States for a small tour along the country's East Coast with stops in Brooklyn and Washington D.C. Despite his status as a master and legend in the German electronic scene, Weber's personal musical tastes lean more toward the culturally conventional. When we spoke to Weber in June about his most recent purchases, his choices were a far cry from many of his peers. "What else did I listen to? What else did I download? I'll have to check on my phone," Weber said through Skype on a Friday afternoon. Many of his most recent purchases have been downloads to "take" the physical music he owns with him wherever he goes. His most contemporary purchase is the album Dissolver by Younghusband, a UK indie rock band. Unfortunately, the music hasn't spoken to the producer as much as he initially anticipated. "It's a British band, but I'm not listening to it a lot. I have to be honest," Weber said. "I downloaded it because I thought it's very interesting, like a new way or new interpretation of shoegaze music." Besides indie rock, Weber is a big fan of classical music. His most recent purchases–"Für Alina," created by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and "Weihnachtsoratorium," the six-part oratorio by J.S. Bach–reflect this secret interest. "I enjoy a lot of classical music but I only have the records and what not," he said. "Yeah, that's basically it. So that's two classical pieces and one guitar pop record. That's pretty unusual I guess for an electronic artist." Unusual indeed.

2020-03-02 20:50:54

The man impersonated Nikolas Cruz, the confessed gunman, on social media and taunted the families about their deceased loved ones. A 22-year-old California man was sentenced to 66 months in federal prison on Monday after cyberstalking and threatening to kidnap relatives of those killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., federal prosecutors said. The man, Brandon Michael Fleury, impersonated the confessed gunman on social media for three weeks to threaten and taunt survivors of the shooting and victims’ loved ones. He was found guilty in October of three counts of cyberstalking and one count of transmitting a kidnapping threat. Sabrina Puglisi, Mr. Fleury’s lawyer, said she was disappointed that the judge did not place Mr. Fleury in a residential treatment program, given that he has autism spectrum disorder. However, she said, she was pleased the judge’s sentence was much lower than the maximum 20 years that Mr. Fleury had faced. “The judge made a strong argument that this type of trolling behavior on the internet is not OK, not acceptable and it won’t stand,” Ms. Puglisi said in an interview on Monday. “He wanted to send a message to deter people from doing the same.” A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday. From late December 2018 into early January 2019, Mr. Fleury used 13 different Instagram accounts to target survivors and victims’ families, prosecutors said. He operated under various aliases, including Nikolas Cruz, the man who has confessed to killing 17 people at Stoneman Douglas, and Ted Bundy, the notorious serial killer, according to prosecutors. From his home in Santa Ana, Calif., Mr. Fleury sent dozens of messages. According to prosecutors, some of the messages included: “I’m your abductor I’m kidnapping you fool,” “I killed your loved ones hahaha,” “Did you like my Valentines gift? I killed your friends” and “With the power of my AR-15, I take your loved ones away from you PERMANENTLY.” He used Instagram handles that included “the.douglas.shooter,” “nikolas.killed.your.sister” and “nikolas.the.murderer,” and used images of Mr. Cruz as profile pictures on the accounts, according to court documents. Mr. Fleury expressed remorse in a 25-minute video that was shown at the sentencing hearing on Monday, Ms. Puglisi said. “As you can imagine, he just wants to go home,” Ms. Puglisi said. “He never thought that what he did was illegal. He thought he was just doing trolling, which is what so many people do on the internet. He never intended to scare anybody, so for him this is obviously a nightmare.” Mr. Fleury’s father, who raised his two sons on his own after his wife died about 17 years ago, spoke at the hearing and apologized to the two victims who were present, Ms. Puglisi said. Mr. Fleury was taken into custody when he was convicted five months ago, Ms. Puglisi said. He was then transferred to a prison in North Carolina, where his mental capabilities were evaluated for several weeks. The judge has recommended Mr. Fleury serve his time at a low-security prison in Connecticut, one of only two in the country with a skill-building program offered to prisoners with different disabilities, his lawyer said.

2018-07-10

close Video The disease that could collapse Medicare, Medicaid Fox News’ Dr. Manny Alvarez sat down with Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School who participated in PBS’ A Texas couple said they are considering getting divorced so that they can qualify for better health care coverage to help pay for the needs of their disabled 6-year-old daughter. Maria and Jake Grey, whose daughter Brighton was born with a rare chromosomal disorder called Wolf-Hirschhorn Syndrome, said they spend up to $15,000 per year out of pocket on her care, WFAA.com reported. “I used to get anxiety just opening the mail because I was scared of what would come or what bill would come or what denial would come,” Maria Grey  told WFAA.com , adding that a divorce would allow her to qualify for Medicaid. TRAGIC PHOTO SHOWS PARENTS COMFORTING DAUGHTER, 5, HOURS BEFORE DEATH The Greys, who have been married for nine years, said that Jake’s $40,000 income as an Army veteran disqualifies them for Medicaid, and that 30 percent of their collective income now goes toward Brighton’s care. They also told the news outlet that they are on the waiting list for state assistance, but that their number is 59,979. Brighton’s needs require 24/7 care, in addition to the needs of their 2-year-old daughter Fairen. “We’ve just struggled and struggled with it and now we’ve gotten to the point, where we feel it’s a real possibility,” Jake Grey told WFAA.com. “For someone to make you choose between your marriage and your child is just — it’s a really weird spot to be in.”

2019-01-28 13:34:00

Alysa Liu took home the top prize for women at the U.S. Figure Skating Championship in Detroit on Friday — making history as the youngest champion ever, multiple outlets have confirmed. The 13-year-old from Northern California beat the year’s previous winner, Bradie Tennell, for first place. In fact, Tennell, 20, had to help the teen climb onto the 2-foot, first place podium because she’s only 4 feet and 7 inches tall, according to USA Today. The bronze went to Mariah Bell, 22. During her routine, Liu landed two triple axels. She’s only the fourth American female to land a triple axel in competition, after Tonya Harding in 1991, Kimmie Meissner in 2005 and Mirai Nagasu at the Olympics in 2018. She’s the first to make two. After the competition, reporters asked the young skater what was running through her head once she successfully completed the first axel. “I still have the second one,” she responded. And after the second, she thought, “I still have every other jump to do in the program.” “I was just happy that I beat my personal record, and I did a clean long program,” Liu told reporters, according to ESPN. Before Liu, Tara Lipinski held the record for the youngest U.S. women’s champion. She won at age 14. The athlete was a commentator during the event, and told viewers, “Records are made to be broken … It is quite an honor that she is the one to do it. What a phenomenal talent,” according to ESPN. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Liu is too young to compete in the next few world championships, which have a minimum entry age of 15, but she will be 16 when the 2022 Olympics roll around. It’s perfect timing as the U.S. hasn’t clinched an Olympic medal in women’s figure skating since 2006.