The Dow Jones Industrial Average suddenly crashed 400 points off its session high.
Analysts and traders are baffled by the sharp move lower.
Tech stocks suffered the brunt of the damage.
A quiet day for the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) turned into a near-bloodbath on Thursday as the U.S. stock market pivoted sharply lower.
Dow Crashes 400 Points in Minutes
After opening to slight losses, the Dow quietly crept into positive territory before rapidly plunging shortly after 10:45 am ET. Over the next 45 minutes, the index dove more than 400 points off its session high to trade as low as 28,959.65.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) fell sharply amid a broad risk-off pivot in the U.S. stock market. | Source: Yahoo FinanceAs of 12:09 pm ET, the Dow had suffered a net loss of 308.26 points or 1.05% to decline to 29,039.77.
The S&P 500 slid 1.09% to 3,349.15.
The Nasdaq fell furthest, diving 1.49% to 9,671.37.
Gold and bond prices spiked, sending the yellow metal to fresh seven-year highs above $1,625 and 10-year Treasury yields as low as 1.51%.
Wall Street Scrambles as Tech Stocks Collapse
There was no clear trigger for the stock market sell-off, which caught many traders and analysts completely off-guard.
What was clear is that tech stocks were suffering the brunt of the damage. That’s why the Nasdaq was far and away the ugliest index.
Tesla stock (black) dragged the Nasdaq (blue) lower. | Source: Yahoo FinanceTesla stock fell 3.2% to $888, taking the edge off the automaker’s historic speculative rally.
In the Dow Jones, blue-chip tech firms Intel (-3.3%) and Microsoft (-2.4%) anchored the losses.
Goldman Sachs Warns of Correction as Economic Index Rallies
Ironically, economic data published shortly before the downturn painted a surprisingly bright outlook for U.S. growth.
The Conference Board Leading Economic Index rose 0.8% in January to 112.1, erasing the damage from December’s -0.3% print.
Ataman Ozyildirim, Senior Director of Economic Research at The Conference Board, said that the data release was encouraging but that the coronavirus outbreak threatens the green shoots that have begun to emerge in U.S. manufacturing.
The LEI’s six-month growth rate has returned to positive territory, suggesting that the current economic expansion – at about 2 percent – will continue through early 2020.
While weakness in manufacturing appears to show signs of softening, the COVID-19 outbreak may impact manufacturing supply chains in the [United States] in the coming months.
Goldman Sachs has been even less sanguine, warning clients this week that investors had grossly underestimated the threat that coronavirus presents to U.S. stocks.
While a full-on bear market may be unlikely, the investment bank predicts that the outbreak could wipe out corporate earnings and prime major indices like the Dow Jones for a decline of at least 10%.
This article was edited by Sam Bourgi.
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Direct to consumer startup Crown Affair’s special strategy to acquire customers – Business Insider
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Before she started her company, Dianna Cohen, a first-time founder, spent years working on ways to bring in customers at Away, Harry’s, and Outdoor Voices.She’s making a key strategy change at Crown Affair, a startup that makes hair-care products and ships directly to customers.Cohen said the venture-backed company would not spend millions of dollars on marketing and sales costs.Crown Affair’s strategy relies on building a community instead.Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Crown Affair is a new startup that could be described as Casper for hair — or Warby Parker for hair or Quip for hair.The rise of companies that sell directly to customers has promised a better alternative in every consumer category, from mattresses to makeup to razors, sneakers, bras, and luggage. The newest entrant, Crown Affair, makes products like a brush designed to promote healthy hair and an oil that reduces frizz, and sells the items directly to customers.But there’s one major difference between Crown Affair and the profusion of other direct-to-consumer startups, Dianna Cohen, the company’s founder, said.Crown Affair’s business plan does not call for spending millions of dollars in outside capital on sales and marketing, said Cohen, a first-time founder who previously worked at Away, Harry’s, and Outdoor Voices. Crown Affair just raised $1.7 million in funding to hire a staff, but Cohen said there was a possibility that the startup would never need to raise venture capital again because it could take in enough profit to offset the cost of goods.”I actually feel really bad for a lot of my peers who have raised tens of millions of dollars on the expectation that they can sell through paid marketing because paid marketing is expensive now,” Cohen said. “It’s not as sustainable.”
It’s not cheap to acquire customers
Crown Affair’s strategy doesn’t call for millions of dollars spent in sales and marketing.
Crown Affair
The goal of almost any business is to make money. Still, a lot of consumer companies invest their gross profit on sales and marketing costs to accelerate growth. That’s because these brands can’t rely on people discovering their products in the wild, said Julian Shapiro, the founder of Bell Curve, an agency that trains marketers on growth.For example, Intercom, a startup that makes solutions for customer support, has exposure to prospective customers every time they visit the website of one of Intercom’s customers and see a pop-up saying, “Hi! How can we help?””Only some products can inherently get away with not having to spend on paid customer acquisition, and others are at the mercy of it,” Shapiro told Business Insider.Crown Affair has a business model that should require some paid customer acquisition to jump-start growth.Its founder is familiar with the strategy.
Flamingo is a direct-to-consumer razor brand for women.
Bebeto Matthews/AP
Cohen started her career in 2012 as an intern at Into The Gloss, a widely read beauty blog created by Emily Weiss, who later founded Glossier. She had a brief stint as the senior manager of partnerships at Away, where she worked on products born of collaborations between the luggage startup and mainstream brands like Madewell and West Elm. As a contractor, Cohen helped bring to market a female-focused shaving and waxing brand called Flamingo, which was spun out from Harry’s, and built Outdoor Voices’ network of “microinfluencers” who promote its products on social media.
Cohen said many of the strategies to get new customers involved spending millions of dollars on ads, promoted posts on social media, and sponsored content from celebrities.”I would never do that again,” Cohen said. “That’s not how customers are responding anymore. Working with a megainfluencer with millions of followers doesn’t mean the same thing anymore. And I think people question a brand’s authenticity and question the influencer.”The cost of acquiring new customers on channels like Instagram and Google is also getting out of control, Shapiro said. The channels set their rates based on how many eyes they get and the demand from advertisers.
happydancing/Shutterstock
These days, more businesses with similar branding and similar packaging are competing for clicks, which means paid customer acquisition is becoming more expensive as it becomes less effective as a strategy.A low-cost strategy to grow the businessCrown Affair’s strategy relies on smart content marketing instead, Cohen said.
Its first campaign, called “Good People,” features short profiles of women with great hair. They answer questions about their hair routines and sources of inspiration on the company’s blog and appear in professional photography on Instagram. The campaign will have a mix of friends of the company and lesser-known influencers, including a comedian on “Saturday Night Live,” the chief marketing officer of Squarespace, and a startup founder.Here’s Juliana Salazar, a stylist and creative director, looking windswept on Instagram:
Cohen said she wanted to show photos of people on social media, instead of just products, with the goal of starting a conversation around hair care.”Everyone is the expert on their own hair. We live in a world where it’s been, like, professionals and hair stylists telling you how you should do your hair. But for us, as we build our community, it’s so people can see themselves in other people and realize that like, ‘Oh, that might also work for me.'”Crown Affair has something else going for it.
The profit margins are extremely high in beauty, Cohen said. The products are meant to be used and replaced, and customers tend to shop a beauty brand they trust, which brings down the cost of acquiring customers.”We’re lucky to be in a category where there is a very clear road to profitability,” Cohen said.
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Benjamin Bifalco allegedly detailed the scheme to the Colombo crime family.February 20, 2020, 4:53 PM3 min read
A Staten Island man is set to plead guilty Thursday to charges he tried to bribe college basketball players to fix games, his attorney said.
Federal prosecutors said that Benjamin Bifalco concocted a “scheme to fix an NCAA college basketball game.” Investigators learned of the alleged crime in December 2018 as part of an organized crime investigation.
Bifalco, 25, allegedly has purported ties to the Colombo crime family and was caught on an FBI wiretap telling a family capo about a plan to pay thousands of dollars to players of an unnamed team, according to his indictment.
The players were to throw the NCAA Division 1 game, the indictment claimed.
Bifalco allegedly encouraged the Colombo capo to place a big bet on the game but the indictment said there were no wagers placed.
He is now prepared to plead guilty to a charge of sports bribery, according to his attorney Vincent J. Martinelli.
Bifalco had previously worked for the office of Assemblywoman Nicole Milliotakis, but was swiftly fired when he was arrested last October.
ABC News’ Ella Torres contributed to this report.
Mike Bloomberg’s net worth vs everyone else running for president – Business Insider
Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg was attacked by his rivals and panned by observers across the political spectrum in his first appearance in a Democratic presidential primary debate on Wednesday evening.Bloomberg, however, maintains an enormous financial advantage in the field: The business-information and media mogul is worth nearly $62 billion, according to Forbes.That is about 13 times the combined net worth of everyone else running for president this year.We made a chart illustrating just how much Bloomberg’s cash trove outweighs everyone else in the field.Bloomberg has been fueling his campaign with his personal wealth. An FEC filing on Thursday showed that his campaign spent over $220 million in January alone.Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Mike Bloomberg’s first appearance in a Democratic presidential primary debate did not go well.Bloomberg was repeatedly attacked by his rivals. Sen. Elizabeth Warren pushed the former New York City mayor and business-media mogul on his history of sexist statements about women and the non-disclosure agreements his company requires from its employees. Several candidates on stage attacked Bloomberg for the controversial stop-and-frisk policy of police detaining and searching random people, disproportionately young men of color, that he advocated for and dramatically expanded during his time as mayor.Political observers across the spectrum laid into Bloomberg during and after the debate. Even President Donald Trump weighed in, mocking Bloomberg during a rally Wednesday evening and in a late-night tweet.Despite the rough night, Bloomberg does have one advantage over his rivals: his massive wealth.Forbes maintains estimates of the net worth of everyone still in the presidential race, based on “financial disclosure statements, scouring local real-estate records, and calculating pension benefits.”
According to those estimates, Bloomberg is worth $61.8 billion. The bulk of that wealth comes from his ownership stake in his eponymous business information and media company, Bloomberg LP, according to Business Insider’s Katie Warren and Emmie Martin.Bloomberg’s fortune is nearly 20 times Forbes’ estimate for the wealth of the next-highest contender, incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and his estimated net worth of $3.1 billion (although it’s worth noting that Trump’s exact wealth is unknown, as he has not released any of his tax returns as is traditional for presidents and candidates). To get a sense of just how much richer Bloomberg is than anyone else in the field, we put Forbes’ candidate net worth estimates into the following chart. The area of each candidate’s circle represents his or her wealth.Behold:
Business Insider/Skye Gould/Andy Kiersz, data from Forbes
The chart loosely resembles a scale model of the solar system, with a giant sun dwarfing even the largest planets in its orbit. Bloomberg’s money hoard outclasses even his fellow billionaires in the race, and on this scale, most of the net worths of the other Democratic candidates — most of whom are millionaires — appear as small dots.
Indeed, Bloomberg’s net worth is about 13 times the combined wealth of the rest of the presidential field.What does all that money get you? Bloomberg has hired an elite campaign staff working on an unorthodox strategy, ignoring the early primary states and focusing on the massive delegate haul available in the Super Tuesday contests on March 3. As Politico put it in their Playbook Audio Briefing podcast, “the goal here is to create an aura of professionalism and invincibility.”Bloomberg has been investing heavily in advertising, running TV ads for months, including an $11 million Super Bowl spot gunning directly for Trump.On Thursday, Bloomberg’s campaign filed its receipts and expenditures for January with the Federal Election Commission, and Politico reporter Zack Montellaro highlighted that the campaign spent over $220 million in that month, likely far dwarfing other candidates’ expenditures.And those expenditures aren’t just on TV commercials — earlier this month, several popular Instagram meme accounts suddenly started posting pro-Bloomberg images as part of a campaign push to target younger, social-media-friendly voters.
It appears the media-heavy strategy could be working. Despite sitting out the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Bloomberg is in third place in Real Clear Politics’ national polling average of the Democratic primary behind former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders. We will see if Bloomberg’s outsize wealth and unorthodox strategy will lead to electoral success, with the next voting happening in the Nevada caucuses on February 22, the South Carolina primary on February 29, and over a dozen states and territories holding contests on March 3.Read more:We did the math to calculate how many hours it takes America’s top CEOs to make what their workers earn in one yearMillennials and boomers voted very differently in New Hampshire, and neither preferred Mayor Pete. The rest of the Democratic primary race could be similar.Oscar Best-Picture-winner ‘Parasite’ isn’t just a Korean story — taking care of rich people is America’s hottest gig, tooTrump boasts the US economy is the best it’s ever been under his watch. Here are 9 charts showing how it compares to the Obama and Bush presidencies.
10% Plunge In Stocks ‘Looking Much More Probable’ as Coronavirus Spreads – Goldman Sachs
Analysts at Goldman Sachs believe the market may be underestimating the impact of coronavirus on corporate earnings and economic growth.
The novel disease has infected nearly 76,000 people, killing 2,130 in the process. Some scientists believe the actual infection rate is much higher.
U.S. stocks closed at record highs on Wednesday, with the S&P 500 Index returning nearly 5% year-to-date.
The record surge in stock prices leaves investors vulnerable to extreme downside risks as coronavirus threatens to disrupt everything from consumption to supply chains. That’s the main takeaway of a recent forecast by U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Goldman Sees Risk in Equity Valuations
Analysts at Goldman Sachs are worried that investors may be underestimating the impact of coronavirus. In a note to clients obtained by CNBC, analysts led by Peter Oppenheimer said:
We believe the greater risk is that the impact of the coronavirus on earnings may well be underestimated in current stock prices.
The analysts added:
While a sustained bear market does not look likely, a near-term correction is looking much more probable.
In market speak, a correction is defined as a decline of 10% or more from a recent high. A full-blown bear market requires a plunge of 20% or more.
The large-cap S&P 500 Index closed at record highs on Wednesday. Year-to-date, the index is up 4.8%. | Chart: BloombergEconomic Impact of Coronavirus Already Being Felt
Investors weren’t always this complacent about the coronavirus risk. Equity markets plunged to start February after it became apparent that the virus was much worse than initially feared.
Markets in mainland China crashed 9% in their first session back from the extended Lunar New Year holiday. That was the biggest decline since August 2015.
Three weeks later, mainland stocks have fully recovered thanks in large part to emergency liquidity from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC).
Equities may have rebounded, but the real economy is still suffering from the coronavirus epidemic. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are under some kind of lock down. Inflation in January clocked in at eight-year highs, while housing sales crashed through the first week of February.
Government-affiliated research institutes, like the National Institute for Finance and Development, believe coronavirus will shave one full percentage point off China’s GDP growth this year. That’ll have a cascading effect on the global economy, with companies like Apple already reporting supply-chain disruptions.
Even Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell conceded that coronavirus will disrupt the global economy, though the size of the impact isn’t fully understood yet.
Nearly 76,000 people have been infected with coronavirus to-date, according to official figures collected by Johns Hopkins CSSE. Many scientists believe the outbreak is much worse than Chinese officials are letting on. A peer-reviewed article appearing in The Lancet medical journal put the infection rate in Wuhan at 75,800. That was three weeks ago.
Disclaimer: The above should not be considered trading advice from CCN.com. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of CCN.com.
This article was edited by Josiah Wilmoth.
Inside the relationship of Michael Bloomberg and Diana Taylor: Photos – Business Insider
Bloomberg has said that Taylor would be the “de facto first lady” if he’s elected.
Bryan Bedder/Getty
Democratic presidential candidate and billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s longtime girlfriend is Diana Taylor, a former Wall Street executive and former New York State Superintendent of Banks.Bloomberg and Taylor met when they were seated together at a business lunch in 2000, according to The Washington Post.Although the couple is not married, Taylor was known as “The First Lady of New York” while Bloomberg was mayor from 2002 to 2013.Bloomberg has said that Taylor, who’s been hitting the campaign trail for the candidate, would be the “de facto first lady” if he’s elected.Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Michael Bloomberg has been in a relationship with Diana Taylor for 20 years, since they were seated together at a business lunch.Worth an estimated $65 billion, according to Forbes, Bloomberg is the richest person by far in the 2020 presidential race. The 78-year-old billionaire’s longtime girlfriend, Taylor, is a 65-year-old former Wall Street executive and former New York State Superintendent of Banks. Since Bloomberg announced his run for president in November 2019, she’s been hitting the campaign trail for her partner, who she was with throughout his three-term tenure of mayor of New York City.Bloomberg’s campaign declined to comment for this story.Here’s a look at Bloomberg and Taylor’s 20-year relationship.
Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg and his longtime girlfriend, Diana Taylor, have been together for 20 years.
The couple met two years before Bloomberg became mayor.
Bruce Glikas/Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic
The couple met in 2000 at a business luncheon, The Washington Post reported.That same evening, they found themselves coincidentally eating at the same restaurant, Taylor recently told The Post.”He looked at me and came over and said, ‘Would you like to have a drink after this?'” Taylor told the Post. She said yes.
The couple lives in a five-story townhouse on New York City’s Upper East Side that Bloomberg bought in 1986 for $3.5 million.
They’ve lived together in the townhouse for 19 years.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
According to New York Magazine, Bloomberg has often hosted dinner parties at the townhouse over the years. The parties “were often pretentious in their unpretentiousness,” serving things like fried chicken and coleslaw, according to the magazine. Bloomberg has also been buying up units in the neighboring brownstone for years and tearing down walls to combine the spaces with his primary home, The New York Times reported.The couple has lived together for 19 years, Bloomberg told CBS’ Gayle King in December 2019.At the end of his last term as mayor, the billionaire spent at least $1.7 million renovating the home. Zillow estimates its current value at $17.7 million.
Taylor worked on Wall Street in the 1980s and went on to be appointed New York state’s superintendent of banks by Gov. George E. Pataki in 2003.
Pataki, Taylor, and Bloomberg at a charity event in NYC in 2013.
Donald Bowers/Getty Images for Cancer Research Institute
Taylor has an MBA from Dartmouth University and a public health degree from Columbia University.Throughout her career, her roles have included deputy secretary to former New York governor George Pataki, superintendent of banking for the State of New York, managing director at Wolfensohn Fund Management, vice president of KeySpan Energy, and vice chair of Solera Capital, a women-owned private equity firm.New York Republicans once encouraged Taylor to run for Senate against Kirsten Gillibrand, but she ultimately declined — even though she thought she would win, she told the Observer in 2011.”It was the thought of actually having to go and do that job, that was really not all that appealing,” she said.
During Bloomberg’s three-term tenure as mayor of New York City, Taylor was known as “The First Lady of New York,” despite the fact they’re not married.
Bloomberg was mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013.
Andrew Toth/Getty Images for The Museum of Modern Art
Taylor has said she hates being referred to as Bloomberg’s “gal pal” and that “girlfriend” isn’t quite the right word either.”I hate ‘girlfriend’ because it sounds so temporary,” Taylor recently told the Post. “It’s very junior high … Nobody’s come up with the language around what we are.”
She’s also been hitting the campaign trail for her longtime partner, telling people why she thinks Bloomberg would make a good president.
Taylor at a campaign rally in NYC in January 2020.
Scott Heins/Getty Images
“He believes in healthcare for everybody at an affordable rate, he believes in combating climate change, he believes in education, he believes in all the things that I think everybody wants for themselves and their families,” Taylor said at a recent campaign stop in Colorado.”The Republican Party has gone way to the right, and (Bloomberg’s) values are now more affiliated with the Democrats than they are with the Republicans. But he has not changed his values one iota,” she said.Taylor has also revealed humanizing tidbits about her partner, such as that his favorite dinner is Shake ‘n Bake chicken.
Taylor has high-profile friends that include Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
Taylor and Wintour at a Vogue dinner in NYC in 2007.
BILLY FARRELL/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
“Her famous boyfriend may be the least interesting thing about her,” Wintour recently told the Post, adding, “She’s intelligent, independent — and completely her own person. Michael is lucky to have her.”
Bloomberg and Taylor have been photographed together at events around the world, from the exclusive weeklong Sun Valley Conference in Idaho …
Bloomberg and Taylor in Sun Valley, Idaho, in July 2019.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
… to the US Open …
Taylor and Bloomberg at the US Open in 2018.
Jean Catuffe/GC Images
… to equestrian events in the Hamptons.
Bloomberg and Taylor at an equestrian event in the Hamptons.
Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images
In 2019, Bloomberg took both Taylor and his daughter, Georgina Bloomberg, as his dates to the Met Gala in New York City.
Taylor, Bloomberg, and his daughter, Georgina Bloomberg, at the 2019 Met Gala.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogu
The former New York mayor has said that if he wins the presidency, Taylor would be the “de facto First Lady.”
Bloomberg and Taylor at the 2018 Met Gala in NYC.
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
In a December 2019 interview with CBS’ Gayle King, King asked Bloomberg if Taylor would be the country’s “de facto first lady” and if she was playing a role in his campaign.”She’s playing a role in the campaign, number one,” Bloomberg said. “Number two, we’ve only been living together for 19 years. And I think it’s fair, if I can speak for her as well, neither of us have any plans to change.”King pressed him to answer whether or not Taylor would be the “de facto first lady” if he’s elected.”Oh yeah, of course,” Bloomberg responded. “She would do the ceremonial things that Donald Trump’s wife does.”When King asked whether he and Taylor would ever get married, Bloomberg said he wouldn’t discuss that subject.
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Trump names staunch loyalist and current US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as acting intelligence chief
Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he has named Richard Grenell, a staunch loyalist, as acting spy chief.
“I am pleased to announce that our highly respected Ambassador to Germany, @RichardGrenell, will become the Acting Director…
Chinese whistleblowers who spoke about coronavirus have vanished, died – Business Insider
Democracy activist Leung Kwok-hung, wearing a mask, attends a vigil for Chinese doctor Li Wenliang in Hong Kong on February 7, 2020.
Kin Cheung/AP
Whistleblowers and citizen journalists in China are speaking out against the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak that originated in Wuhan.Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang contracted the coronavirus after being silenced by local police. He died on February 7.Other citizen journalists and critics in China have been censored or arrested after sharing information about the outbreak. Some have disappeared or are under surveillance.More 75,000 people have gotten the coronavirus since December. (For the latest case total and death toll, see Business Insider’s live updates here.)Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Chinese law professor Xu Zhangrun recently posted a scathing review of the way president Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have handled the coronavirus outbreak.”They all blithely stood by as the crucial window of opportunity to deal with the outbreak of the infection snapped shut in their faces,” he wrote, suggesting that government censorship of information about the coronavirus hampered China’s ability to control its spread.Xu, who teaches at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, added: “The cause of all of this lies with The Axlerod [that is, Xi Jinping] and the cabal that surrounds him.”The essay, published online February 10, was immediately taken down. Xu was placed under house arrest, cut off from the internet, and scrubbed from all social media sites, The Guardian reported.His critique came three days after Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang died of the coronavirus. Li had sent a message to a group of medical school alumni, warning them about a mysterious new illness. But local police reprimanded and silenced him.
In addition to Li and Xu, at least three citizen journalists have disappeared or were arrested after sharing information about the outbreak on social media.Here’s what we know about all five of them.
A friend of Xu told The Guardian that the professor was placed under house arrest after he returned to Beijing following the Lunar New Year celebration.
“They confined him at home under the pretext that he had to be quarantined after the trip,” the friend said. “He was in fact under de facto house arrest and his movements were restricted.”—Anna E. Ridgway (@AnnaERidgway) February 16, 2020The Guardian reported that guards were patrolling outside Xu’s home last week, though they have since left. Xu remains incommunicado.The law professor’s name is notably absent from China’s Weibo social network.
Xu’s essay ended with an ominous acknowledgement: “I can now all too easily predict that I will be subjected to new punishments; indeed, this may well even be the last piece I write.”
Students do exercise on the playground at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, November 7, 2019.
Xinhua/Li Jing/Getty
This isn’t the first time Xu has been punished for “speech crimes,” according to his essay.In 2018, he was placed under investigation by Tsinghua University after publishing another essay criticizing Xi Jinping.”I was suspended from my job as a university lecturer and cashiered as a professor, reduced to a minor academic rank,” he wrote, adding, “my freedoms have been curtailed ever since.”
Another activist, Xu Zhiyong, published an article on social media this month urging Xi Jinping to step down.
A photo of Xu Zhiyong is raised by a demonstrator protesting against a Chinese court’s decision to imprison him outside the Chinese liaison office in Hong Kong, January 27, 2014.
Vincent Yu/AP
The recent post from Xu, a civil-rights lawyer and public intellectual, called out the Chinese president for his “inability to handle major crises,” according to the South China Morning Post.Xu previously served four years in prison for his legal activism. He was arrested again on February 15 after being on run for two months following a police crackdown on a meeting of human-rights lawyers and activists that he attended in Xiamen.
“When I saw them circulating online, I realized that it was out of my control and I would probably be punished,” Li told CNN.
A screenshot of the letter Li signed on January 3.
Four days after sharing the message, Li was summoned to a police station. Authorities told him that his warning was illegal and had “severely disturbed the social order,” the BBC reported.According to the BBC, the letter he was told to sign read: “We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice — is that understood?”Beneath that, Li wrote, “Yes, I do.”Li was not detained, and he returned to work.
After his release, Li unknowingly treated a woman infected with the coronavirus. Two days later, he checked himself into the hospital after showing symptoms. He died less than a month later.
A photo of Li Wenliang is seen with flower bouquets at the Houhu Branch of Wuhan Central Hospital, where he worked, on February 7, 2020.
STR/AFP via Getty Images
While sick in the intensive care unit, Li continued to post on his Weibo account.”I was wondering why [the government’s] official notices were still saying there was no human-to-human transmission, and there were no healthcare workers infected,” Li wrote on January 31 from his hospital bed, according to CNN.Days before his death, he told the New York Times that officials could have done better at sharing information about the coronavirus at the beginning of the outbreak. “I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency,” he said.
Following Li’s death, Chinese lawyer and citizen journalist Chen Qiushi went missing.
Chen Qiushi, a Chinese lawyer and citizen journalist, went viral on YouTube and Twitter for reporting on the coronavirus.
Screenshot YouTube/Chen Qiushi
Chen traveled to Wuhan in late January and uploaded more than 100 posts from Wuhan to his Twitter and Youtube accounts over two weeks. His videos showed overwhelmed hospitals and medical wards.Chen’s friends and family have been unable to reach him since February 6, according to posts on his Twitter account. They say he was forcibly quarantined by Wuhan police. Chen’s Weibo account — which had more than 740,000 followers — was shut down on the day of his disappearance, according to his friends and family.
On January 30, Chen uploaded a video to his YouTube channel in which he said police had called him wanting to know where he was and had questioned his parents, according to the Associated Press.
“In front of me is the virus, and behind me is the legal and administrative power of China,” he said in the video. “Even death doesn’t scare me! Do you think I’m scared of the Communist Party?”
Chen’s mother uploaded a video onto Chen’s Twitter account after his disappearance, begging for help to find her son.
—陈秋实(陳秋實) (@chenqiushi404) February 6, 2020The Wuhan and Qingdao city police said they had no information about Chen’s whereabouts when contacted by CNN.
This wasn’t the first time Chen has been silenced by Chinese officials.
Chinese citizen journalist Chen Qiushi speaks in front of a convention center turned into a makeshift hospital in Wuhan. This image is from video taken February 4, 2020.
Chen Qiushi via AP
Chen traveled to Hong Kong in August to report on the protests there. After his trip, all of his social media accounts were deleted, he told Quartz in early February.So this time, he added, “I gave my overseas friends all the passwords to my social media accounts like YouTube, and if I don’t contact them for 12 hours they will change the passwords.”One of Chen’s friends, Xu Xiaodong, posted an update on YouTube February 9 saying Chen had been “detained in the name of quarantine” for two weeks, despite showing no symptoms of the virus. According to the AP, Xu also said on Twitter that day that no one had been able to get in touch with Chen in quarantine.”I risked my life to post the videos,” Chen told Quartz, and added: “If I get arrested they could force me to delete all my videos on YouTube and Twitter, and that would be a great blow to me.”
Blogger Fang Bin also got a call from the police in Wuhan. Authorities confiscated his laptop from his home on February 1 and brought him in for questioning. Fang filmed the encounter.
Fang told The Los Angeles Times that authorities ordered him to stop posting “rumors” that would “spread panic” online. The police released him the next morning. Fang posted a video suggesting that he was released because of the outpouring of support for his freedom on social media.
A video Fang posted on February 1 showed a hospital in Wuhan where eight body bags were being loaded onto the back of a truck. The footage also showed an overwhelmed medical clinic. It went viral.
—曾錚 Jennifer Zeng (@jenniferatntd) February 1, 2020After his release, Fang continued posting videos from hospitals across Wuhan.”This pneumonia we see today, this Wuhan flu, it’s both a natural disaster and a man-made problem,” he said in one of his videos. “That’s because they’ve covered up the facts. They muffled Li Wenliang for telling the truth.”
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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is considering issuing additional pardons and commutations and has assembled a team of advisers to recommend and vet candidates for clemency, a White House official confirmed Thursday.
The process is normally handled by the Department of Justice, but the White House has taken the lead, with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, heading the effort, and is joined by White House counsel Pat Cipollone.
The Washington Post first reported Wednesday night that Trump had put together this team, which the report said is basically an informal task force of at least a half-dozen allies of the president. According to the report, the group has been meeting since late last year.
This comes as speculation swirls around whether Trump will pardon his longtime ally Roger Stone who is expected to be sentenced by a federal judge on Thursday. Early in the morning, Trump tweeted a video clip from a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News that suggested the president is considering pardoning Stone.
Last week, the Justice Department announced its decision to reduce the recommended sentence for Stone of seven to nine years in prison, asking Judge Amy Berman Jackson of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to reduce the sentence after Trump himself called the proposal “a miscarriage of justice.”
Earlier this week, Trump went on a pardon spree, granting clemency to 11 people. The list included commuting the sentence of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, pardoning former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, pardoning former San Francisco 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. and pardoning former junk bond trader Michael Milken.
Coronavirus updates: 2 passengers die after leaving ‘chaotic’ quarantined cruise ship
• Ukranians protest over evacuees returning from China
• Chinese warns of more action against Wall Street Journal
• 2 people who were on quarantined cruise ship in Japan have died
• Quarantine on Diamond Princess cruise ship ‘chaotic,’ Japanese expert claims
• Number of new confirmed cases drops in Hubei province
• South Korea confirms first death of person infected with coronavirus
• Two people die in Iran after contracting coronavirus
• Thousands of Americans voluntarily self-quarantine after returning from China
Ukrainians burn tires, block hospitals in protest of evacuees from China
Protesters from the village of Novi Sanzhary in Ukraine blocked the road leading a quarantine building where evacuees arriving by plane from Wuhan, China are due to be held for at least two weeks. The plane carrying Ukraine nationals landed at the Kharkiv Airport Thursday.
Hundreds of police were dispatched to keep order, and some were seen dragging some protesters away from the crowd at the demonstration, which the authorities said had started overnight on Wednesday.
Local media reported thatresidents of the town in the Poltava region protested the people arriving from China by blocking the road and burning tires. They also engaged in clashes with police.
The protest prompted President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to issue a statement Thursday reassuring Ukrainians that there was no danger, that the authorities had done everything possible to make sure the virus would not spread to Ukraine.
“But there is another danger that I would like to mention. The danger of forgetting that we are all human and we are all Ukrainian,” he said.
“Attempts to block routes, block hospitals, not allow Ukrainian citizens into Ukraine – this does not show the best side of our character. Especially when you consider that most passengers are people under 30 years of age. For many of us, they are almost like children.”
The Ukrainian authorities say all passengers on board had been screened twice for the virus before being allowed to fly, but that was not enough to quell the protesters.
Ukraine has no confirmed cases of the virus. — Oksana Parafeniuk and Reuters
Chinese warns of more action against Wall Street Journal
China warned on Thursday that it might take more action against the Wall Street Journal, a day after revoking the press credentials of three of the U.S. newspaper’s correspondents over a column that China said was racist.
“Regrettably, what the WSJ has done so far is nothing but fudging the issue and dodging its responsibility. It has neither issued an official apology nor done anything on accountability,” Geng Shuang, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said on Thursday.
“We are not interested in the structural divide at the WSJ,” he said. “There is only one media agency called the WSJ, and it must be responsible for what it has said and done.”
China on Wednesday revoked the press credentials of the newspaper’s Beijing deputy bureau chief, Josh Chin, and reporters Chao Deng and Philip Wen, also based in Beijing, ordering them to leave the country in five days.
The decision came after authorities repeatedly called on the newspaper to apologize and investigate those responsible for the headline of a Feb. 3 column that called China the “real sick man of Asia.”
Also on Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo condemned China’s expulsion of the three foreign correspondents and said that China should not restrict freedom of speech. — Eric Baculinao
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2 former passengers on quarantined cruise ship in Japan have died
Two people diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by novel coronavirus, who were at one point on board a quarantined cruise ship have died, Japan’s health minister said in parliament Thursday.
13 more coronavirus cases were also reported on the ship Thursday, bringing the total number of cases on the ship to 634.
The deaths appear to be the first involving cases from the Diamond Princess, which was quarantined off Yokohama with around 3,700 passengers and crew after a one-time passenger later tested positive for the virus.
Health Minister Katsunobu Kato offered his condolences to the family of the couple, who were both were Japanese nationals — a man and woman in their 80s.
The man was taken off the cruise ship on Feb. 11 and the woman was taken off on Feb. 12 after testing positive for the coronavirus.
The health ministry has also confirmed that two government officials who performed administrative duties on the cruise ship have tested positive for the virus.
People were quarantined on the cruise ship for around two weeks, and those who have tested negative have begun to leave the ship.
Princess Cruises, the operator of the Diamond Princess, said Thursday that around 600 passengers had been cleared by the Japanese health ministry to disembark on Wednesday, and several hundred others were expected to be cleared Thursday.
The two deaths linked to the Diamond Princess brings the number of people who have died in Japan to three. The other death was not connected to the cruise ship. — Olivier Fabre and Phil Helsel
Coronavirus quarantine on Diamond Princess cruise ship ‘chaotic,’ Japanese expert claims
The novel coronavirus quarantine measures put in place by Japanese officials on board a cruise ship where thousands of people have been kept in isolation were “completely chaotic,” an infectious disease specialist who visited the vessel has claimed.
In two YouTube videos, one in English and one in Japanese, Kentaro Iwata, a professor at Kobe University Hospital in the central Japanese city of Kobe, criticized the situation on the Diamond Princess.
“Everybody could have the virus,” he said, adding, “The cruise ship was completely inadequate in terms of the infection control.” — Matthew Mulligan and Yuliya Talmazan
Number of new confirmed cases drops in Hubei province after diagnostic change
Health officials in Hubei province, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, recorded a big drop in the number of new confirmed cases Wednesday.
Over the last 24 hours there were 349 new confirmed cases, down from 1,693 a day earlier.
However the number of deaths in Hubei jumped to 2,029, up by 108 the previous day.
On Wednesday, China’s health authority released the sixth edition of it`s diagnostic criteria for the coronavirus, removing a category of cases diagnosed clinically, such as through chest x-rays, in Hubei.
The Hubei health commission did not say in its statement if the sharp drop in the province’s new confirmed cases on Wednesday was due to the change.
Last week, the province tweaked its diagnostic methodology to include clinically confirmed cases, resulting in a massive spike in new confirmed cases.
Meanwhile, nationwide, the death toll from the coronavirus outbreak climbed to 2,118 as of Wednesday. It surpassed 2,000 the day before. The total number of confirmed cases rose to 74,576. — Leou Chen, Dawn Liu and Reuters
South Korea confirms first coronavirus death
South Korea has reported its first death of a person infected with coronavirus as well as 22 new cases, bringing the nation’s total to 104.
The exact cause of death is being investigated, the country’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the mayor of a large South Korean city told residents to stay indoors Thursday as a surge in confirmed cases linked to a local church raised the prospect of wider transmission.
Malls, restaurants and streets in Daegu, the country’s fourth largest city with a population of 2.5 million, were largely empty in scenes that local social media users likened to a disaster movie.
The cases in the city have been traced to an infected person who attended a local church, a scenario that KCDC described as a “super-spreading event.”
The mayor cautioned that at least 90 more of the around 1,000 other people who attended services at the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony were also showing symptoms. — Nayeong Kim and Reuters
Two people die after contracting coronavirus in Iran
Iran has recorded its first two deaths linked to the coronavirus outbreak, an adviser to the country’s minister of health told Mehr news agency Wednesday.
Alireza Vahabzadeh said the two people died in hospital due to age, respiratory illness and immune deficiency.
Six other people and families of the two dead have also been put under quarantine as schools and universities in the city of Qom closed their doors to stop the spread of the virus.
On Thursday, thee more patients were confirmed to have the virus, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country to five, according to the head of health ministry’s public relations office. — Amin Hossein Khodadadi
Thousands of Americans voluntarily self-quarantine after returning from China
Thousands of travelers who have returned to the United States after recent trips to China are spending nearly half a month behind closed doors under voluntary self-quarantine, even though they do not pose any immediate coronavirus-related health risk to others and are showing no symptoms.
Instead, they simply traveled in China within the past few weeks and have since been flagged by health officials at one of the 11 airports nationwide through which all U.S. citizens and their families flying from China are being routed.
And now they’re being asked to stay home for 14 days — the maximum amount of time it’s thought to take to develop the illness after being exposed — limiting physical contact with others as much as possible and watching for symptoms. — Erika Edwards
LAS VEGAS — Mike Bloomberg might not be Donald Trump. But he was a perfect presidential stand-in for his Democratic rivals Wednesday night.
They upbraided him again and again, wasting no time or opportunity in the NBC/MSNBC debate here to show voters just how each of them would treat an ideologically ambiguous billionaire New York politician with a spotty record on matters of race and gender discrimination.
“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against, a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians.’ And, no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump — I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said just a couple of minutes into the debate.
“Look, I’ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is. But understand this: Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.”
Bernie Sanders, the national front-runner, piled on, as did Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.
Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, took their blows, often refused to make eye contact and punched back only selectively — suggesting that Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, backs “communism,” for example — as he implored Democrats to pick the candidate who can defeat Trump and run the country.
“I would argue that I am the candidate that can do exactly both of those things,” Bloomberg said.
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Bloomberg basically told Democrats that they need him — and his billions — more than he needs them. That’s the subtext of his campaign, and his obvious hope is that his debate performance will matter little to voters compared to the slick advertisements he’s running and the money he’s pumping into organizations in the states.
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And yet he actively worked to alienate key parts of the Democratic coalition that he would need to win a general election against Trump. Sanders, the central object of his derision, is currently the choice of about one-third of the Democratic electorate in national polls, which is more than any other candidate. Warren, with whom he also clashed, represents another group of progressive and moderate voters.
“I’m a philanthropist who didn’t inherit his money but made his money, and I’m spending money to get rid of Donald Trump, the worst president we have ever had,” Bloomberg said. “And if I can get that done, it will be a great contribution to America and to my kids.”
To follow that logic: In his benevolence, he’s spending his hard-earned cash in behalf of the country and his kids — not himself — in pursuit of the presidency.
As a candidate who waited for more than a year to jump into the race and is now pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money into his campaign, Bloomberg could not have been surprised that he was the target of attacks from all sides. He and his campaign anticipated that and lowered expectations for his performance.
But no one could have figured just how unprepared he would look when he was asked obvious questions like whether he would release women from their obligations under non-disclosure agreements.
Under the rising pressure of a two-week stretch in which voters in 16 states will cast ballots, all of the candidates — including Bloomberg — turned on one another with a ferocity that made their last several meetings look like yoga classes.
It was ugly. It was reminiscent of 2016 Republican debates, which devolved into personal invective between Trump and a series of rivals. And it was basically what a lot of Democrats have been waiting to see as they try to determine which of their hopefuls actually has what it takes to stand up for their values and win a battle with Trump.
Of course, most of the candidates themselves — who spent the last year averting risk by avoiding conflict — won’t ever say that they think it’s useful to draw a lot of blood on a debate stage.
“Not my favorite night for the Democratic Party,” said Klobuchar, a senator from Minnesota. “It bothered me that it got personal.”
And yet Klobuchar got pretty personal in her back-and-forth moments with Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who ripped her for failing to recall the name of Mexico’s president when she was asked recently.
“I wish everyone was as perfect as you, Pete,” she said.
Ultimately, Bloomberg served as the necessary catalyst for the Democratic candidates to step up their fight.
“This election is accelerating and happening before our very eyes,” David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, said on MSNBC after the debate.
‘Thrilling’: Unprecedented number of critically endangered blue whales recorded off Antarctic island
Scientists have recorded an “unprecedented” number of blue whales around the coastal waters of the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia.
Just two individuals of the critically endangered species, and largest animal ever to have lived on our planet, were recorded in the area during a survey in 2018, but this year during a more extensive survey, an extraordinary 36 separate sightings meant a total of 55 blue whales were spotted by the scientists.
The research team, led by the British Antarctic Survey said: “For such a rare species, this is an unprecedented number of sightings and suggests that South Georgia waters remain an important summer feeding ground for this rare and poorly known species.”
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The blue whale population was decimated through the 19th and early 20th centuries, reducing their population by as much as 97 per cent, according to some estimates.
The British Antarctic Survey said when the Antarctic explorer and whaler Carl Larsen first visited the island of South Georgia, he was so impressed by the number of whales there, he said “I see them in hundreds and thousands”, and immediately applied for a licence to open a whaling station there.
South Georgia became a key whaling station, with numerous species hunted to the brink of extinction, including blue, humpback, and fin whales.
But the resulting collapse of whale populations meant the South Georgia whaling industry became unprofitable by the early 20th century.
According to the South Georgia heritage trust the largest whale ever recorded was processed at the Grytviken whaling station on the island. It was a blue whale caught in 1912, with a length of 33.58 meters (110 feet).
Since the whalers left and tighter international regulations on whaling have been agreed, populations have begun to bounce back, with researchers saying the seas still have the capacity to support large numbers of whales.
Whale project leader Dr Jennifer Jackson, a whale ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey told The Independent the survey broke new ground, enabling scientists to better understand whale populations’ recovery from centuries of hunting.
She said the “researchers were thrilled… It suggests blue whales are returning to their old feeding grounds at South Georgia which suggests it’s still an area with abundant food for them to eat.
“Relative to many other oceans on the planet, the Southern Ocean is still relatively pristine, so it still has capacity to support large numbers of whales.”
She said during the trips, which were the first whale surveys conducted on the south side of the island, the team were fortunate to have Antarctic blue whale expert Paula Olson on board, who holds the largest photo-identification catalogue of Antarctic blue whales and is currently conducting a new analysis of blue whale abundance.
Ms Olson said: “Given that it was the first voyage in decades to survey for whales [round the whole island] we truly felt like explorers.”
Though whaling has been carried out by humans for several centuries, industrial whaling only took off in the 20th century. The impact on populations has been colossal. In the 20th century alone, nearly three million cetaceans were wiped out in what may have been the largest cull of any animal – in terms of total biomass – in human history, a 2015 study found.
A new assessment of Antarctic blue whale recovery will be conducted by the International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee next year in order to find out how well the population is recovering from exploitation.
Mike Bloomberg, the Richie Rich of Stop and Frisk, embarrassed himself horribly in last night’s debate. It was a delight to watch
For a moment there, I was becoming concerned. I’ve seen the national polls highlighting a dramatic surge for Mike Bloomberg — we all have — but there’s something even more alarming about hearing anecdotally how well those hundreds of millions of dollars spent on TV ads have worked on his intended targets. Talk to Black adults with parents in their 60s and 70s who live across the South and you’ll likely find that many of them have been enticed by Bloomberg’s ads, given they present him as Barack Obama’s real best friend best fit to defeat Donald Trump because he could loan God money. Couple that with the unfortunate wave of endorsements from Black mayors across the country and the fear of Bloomberg buying the nomination was becoming rapidly more real.
Before the debate, a friend literally joked to me that “It’s time for Black millennials to return to Facebook and educate our parents about Mike Bloomberg!”
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Fortunately, there was last night’s debate, which offered an introductory course on what a disaster Mike Bloomberg is as a candidate and why it would be foolish to let him buy the Democratic Party for pennies on the dollar.
In his many, many, many ads that air on many, many, many stations many, many, many times on the hour, every hour, Bloomberg comes across as some sort of Wizard of Oz type character who is as omnipotent as he is efficient at running government (because yay for capitalism). In person, you saw a grouch bored out of his mind having to hold conversation with (poor) people he wouldn’t hire. Then, at other times, the grouch became dismissive and condescending, offering disastrous responses to questions about racist policies such as stop and frisk and whether he would release former female employees at his companies from NDAs.
What boggles the mind is Bloomberg, a Republican-turned-conservative-Democrat-for-convenience, was not prepared at all to address questions that were obviously going to be asked of him. I’ve read about how well Bloomberg is paying staffers. Did none of them feel compelled to prep him for a better response to why he used a massive police force to maintain a quasi-authoritarian state in which Black and brown men of all ages could be subject to legalized discrimination? The same for all the awful things he’s accused of saying about women and other minorities.
Or does Money Bags Mike solely pay for compliments while donating constructive criticism to charity? That says so much about his hubris and so much about what little inspiration can be drawn from him and his campaign. That said, I can’t forget the other times Bloomberg just sat in the corner. Richie Rich for Stop and Frisk spends all of that money to buy his way onto the debate stage (which the DNC allows) only to show up on stage and let the competition hammer him over and over again? Zoom — look at this candidate these clueless rich New York-based pundits swore could be unstoppable go.
Before I get to you-know-who, I would like to compliment Joe Biden for reminding the nation that the only old white man running for president who’s cool with Barack Obama like that is him, not Bloomberg. Kudos also to Pete Buttigieg, who, in spite of being queer, hasn’t mastered shade as well as the rest of us (bless his heart), but managed to get good digs in on Bloomberg himself. Bernie Sanders hollered profusely about Bloomberg being a plutocrat, too, and, even if that was expected, Sanders’ debate style is solid. It’s often overlooked and undervalued, but it was deployed to huge effect last night.
And then there’s Amy Klobuchar, whose best trait is her contempt for Pete Buttigieg, but, to her credit, knows how to chop someone’s head off with the grin of a suburban mom on an early 1990s-era ABC family sitcom. Again, ask Bloomberg.
Elizabeth Warren, however, is the MVP of the night, because not only did she verbally molly-whop her competitors at every turn, she took her biggest criticism to Bloomberg, the living embodiment of everything her candidacy seeks to bring to heel. We’ve since heard that during commercial breaks, Bloomberg and Warren apparently engaged in friendly banter. Cute for them, but I’m more interested in Warren eviscerating the plutocrat who dabbles in racist policy and rhetoric.
Rolling your eyes when a woman asks you if you will allow women the legal freedom to speak openly about harassment or discrimination they allegedly endured during their time at your company is the sort of response you expect from a Republican. Same with the idea that these women are just complainers who “didn’t like a joke I told or something.” All of this is why, among many reasons, Mike Bloomberg would make better use of his time giving his money to charities and actual Democrats and those who vote with them.
After the debate, Warren told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: “After [Bloomberg’s] performance tonight, I have no doubt he is about to drop another $100 million to erase America’s memory of what happened on that debate stage.”
That is likely the case, but money can only take you so far. Last night Bloomberg had to offer a performance that adequately answered why he should be allowed to buy his way into a race that started well over a year ago. He also had to offer an explanation of discriminatory practices that happened on his watch and harmed many. He failed at both. While more commercials may try to cloud his limitations as a candidate, as last night showed, Mike Bloomberg and his sins can only hide between the TV for so long.
When we think of tribal art, it’s likely to be indigenous cultural artifacts such as wooden masks, dance regalia and sculptural forms. Not AK-47 assault rifles and an 11-ton war machine that have been transformed into symbols of beauty and peace with multi-coloured traditional African beadwork.
But at the popular San Francisco Tribal and Textile Art Show this week, the artist Ralph Ziman is exhibiting apartheid-era weapons from the Casspir Project (2016), a travelling multidisciplinary fine art exhibition that was recently on display in Miami, during Art Basel.
He created the project in response to apartheid’s effects on South African culture, a regime the white South African artist fled aged 19, when he dodged military service in 1981 and moved to LA.
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Boris Johnson news – live: Priti Patel hit by bullying allegations, as Cummings’ ‘ludicrous’ designer babies views emerge amid eugenics storm
Priti Patel is facing allegations she bullied officials at the Home Office. The home secretary is reported to have clashed with the department’s top civil servant and is accused of belittling officials, making unreasonable demands and creating an “atmosphere of fear”.
It comes as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn attacked Boris Johnson for failing to visit flood-hit communities in England and Wales – claiming the prime minister has been “nowhere-to-be-seen”. The Fire Brigades Union branded the PM’s response “a shambles”.
Meanwhile Mr Johnson’s senior adviser Dominic Cummings has been criticised for his “ludicrous” views on IQ, genetic selection and so-called “designer babies” – unearthed from a blogpost entitled: ‘Standin’ by the window, where the light is strong’.
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Labour needs ‘fundamental reconstruction’ to survive, Blair warns
Labour needs to undergo “fundamental reconstruction” in order to survive, Tony Blair will warn the leadership candidates as he marks the 120th anniversary of the party’s founding.
As Sir Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy, and Rebecca Long-Bailey compete to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour prime minister will insist that “retreating to a narrow part of the left” always ends in defeat.
Recognising his own toxicity among party members – 62 per cent viewed him unfavourably in recent poll – Mr Blair will stop short of endorsing a candidate vying to take the party into the 2024 general election.
‘Outrageous, ridiculous and so deeply offensive’
Plenty of responses to John McDonnell’s earlier remarks comparing Julian Assange’s extradition case to “the Dreyfus case”.
The shadow chancellor was referring to the 1895 conviction at a court martial of French officer Alfred Dreyfus on treason charges many felt were brought against him because he was Jewish. He was later exonerated after a long campaign.
Karen Pollock, chief executive at the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: “Go figure how or why John McDonnell could make such an inappropriate comparison with the Assange case. Outrageous, ridiculous and so deeply offensive.”
Where’s the prime minister?
Boris Johnson has been criticised for staying at the foreign secretary’s Chevening estate this week rather than visiting flood-hit areas in the aftermath of Storm Dennis.
He’s there because the PM’s official country retreat of Chequers is having repair work, with scaffolding visible outside the mansion.
New pictures show scaffolding covered in white sheeting outside the 16th century Buckinghamshire property. The building work is described as “routine maintenance” by Downing Street.
No 10 said Johnson had been receiving “regular updates” about the flooding.
Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t rule out shadow cabinet job
Outgoing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has – according to the BBC – declined to rule out taking a job in his successor’s shadow cabinet. It’s a stark contrast to shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, who has said his time in frontline politics is over.
Of course, any role for Mr Corbyn would be dependent on the new leader offering him a job – and Rebecca Long-Bailey is likely the only candidate to consider it.
Corbyn visits flood-hit town in south Wales
Jeremy Corbyn is doing something he thinks the prime minister should have been out doing this week – meeting victims of flooding.
The Labour leader is speaking to affected residents and business owners in Pontypridd in south Wales.
He said earlier: ‘Failing to convene Cobra to support flood-hit communities sends a very clear message: if the prime minister is not campaigning for votes in a general election he simply does not care about helping communities affected by flooding, especially communities that have repeatedly been flooded in recent years.”
Raab blames Russian military intelligence for ‘menacing’ cyber attacks on Georgia
The government has condemned Russia’s military intelligence service over a “significant” number of cyber attacks against Georgia last year.
Foreign secretary Dominic Raab said the GRU’s campaign was “brazen” and “totally unacceptable”.
“The GRU’s reckless and brazen campaign of cyber-attacks against Georgia, a sovereign and independent nation, is totally unacceptable,” Raab said.
“The Russian Government has a clear choice: continue this aggressive pattern of behaviour against other countries, or become a responsible partner which respects international law.
“The UK will continue to expose those who conduct reckless cyber-attacks and work with our allies to counter the GRU’s menacing behaviour.”
Civil service union speaks out against ‘atmosphere of fear’
The FDA union – the body representing civil servants – has intervened in the row at the Home Office, as Priti Patel faces allegations of bullying.
“Ministers must recognise the consequences of their behaviour,” said the union’s general secretary Dave Penman.
“An atmosphere of fear is not conducive to a successful workplace and anonymous briefings against civil servants are not only unfair, they corrode public trust in government.”
The Times reported earlier about allegations of bullying behaviour, citing “multiple sources” inside the Home Office. One said she was responsible for an “atmosphere of fear” at the department.
PM’s floods response a ‘shambles’, says union
The Fire Brigades Union has criticised the “shambles” of Boris Johnson’s response to the floods ravaging communities in many parts of England and Wales in the wake of Storm Dennis.
Matt Wrack, the union’s general secretary, said visiting communities would be “an opportunity for a prime minister to turn out and hear the concerns of people who’ve been affected”.
“Mr Johnson needs to be seen to be taking change,” he added.
Jeremy Corbyn, heading to a flood-hit community in south Wales this afternoon, condemned Johnson’s failure to visit victims – claiming he was “nowhere to be seen”.
Assange ‘persecuted for political reasons’, says McDonnell
Julian Assange should not be extradited to the US and is being “persecuted for political reasons”, shadow chancellor John McDonnell has claimed. The Labour MP visited Assange for two hours at Belmarsh prison, where the WikiLeaks founder is awaiting the start of an extradition hearing next week.
McDonnell said: “I think this is one of the most important and significant political trials of this generation … I think it’s the Dreyfus case of our age.
“The way in which a person is being persecuted for political reasons, for simply exposing the truth for what went on in relation to recent wars.”
McDonnell was referring to the 1895 conviction at a court martial of French officer Alfred Dreyfus on treason charges many felt were brought against him because he was Jewish. He was later exonerated after a long campaign.
McDonnell said: “We’re hoping that in court he (Assange) is able to defeat the extradition bid. We don’t believe that extradition should be used for political purposes.”
Assange, 48, is wanted in the US to face 18 charges, including conspiring to commit computer intrusion, over the publication of US cables a decade ago. If found guilty he could face up to 175 years in jail.
“We have a long tradition in this country of standing up for journalistic freedom, standing up for the protection of whistleblowers and those who expose injustices,” McDonnell said.
Top Tory MP ‘ashamed’ of inaction over Syria
Tobias Ellwood, the head of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, has said he is “ashamed to see how cowardly the West‘s become” over the ongoing conflict in Syria.
“The world mobilises to contain the Coronavirus, affecting thousands, but shows indifference to the hundreds of thousands killed Syria,” the tory MP tweeted. “We hide behind a broken UN that can’t agree a ceasefire.”
Priti Patel ‘asked to move permanent secretary’
More now on the apparent bust-up at the Home Office. According to the BBC, Priti Patel try to move her department’s permanent secretary Sir Philip Rutnam.
A source told the broadcaster No 10 had been asked to “intervene” to move the top civil servant after a fall-out with the home secretary.
The Home Office spokesperson said no “formal complaints” had been made against Patel after The Times reported earlier about allegations of bullying behaviour, citing “multiple sources” inside the department.
Caroline Lucas probed over ‘£150 tour of Commons’
Green MP Caroline Lucas is under investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.
The parliamentary authorities are probing whether she broke the Code of Conduct rules by offering a “personal guided tour” of the Commons for £150 during an election fundraising drive last year.
“I do not believe I have done anything wrong,” she said.
According to The Argus, a member of the public referred to the parliamentary authorities for offering the tour to party donors in exchange for money.
Rory Stewart sets out ‘London Youth Corps’ plan
The former Tory minister has pledged to introduce a citizenship programme for teenagers in London if elected as mayor. Stewart, running as an independent in the race, plans to create a ‘London Youth Corps’, with young people carrying out two shifts each month for a year.
Building on the National Citizen Service (NCS), teenagers would spend two weeks away from home after completing their GCSEs, taking part in activities such as rock-climbing and canoeing, as well as learning skills such as public speaking. He said: “Teenagers face a peer-pressure cooker of social media, an increasingly competitive job market, and in some areas, the threat of gangs and drugs.”
“Our young people need worthwhile and engaging activities outside school, and they need to be shown broader opportunities … As mayor I will make the London Youth Corps a rite of passage for all young Londoners.”
Tony Blair says he would refuse to sign trans rights pledge
Tony Blair has warned Labour’s leadership contenders not to get involved in a “culture war” over transgender rights, warning it could cost the party any chance of power.
The former prime minister said he would not sign a controversial trans rights pledge, which has been backed by Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy, but which leadership frontrunner Keir Starmer has refused to put his name to.
Three-time election winner Blair declined to endorse any of the trio fighting to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, saying that his support would only damage their chances.
London ready to host 2020 Olympic games, says Tory mayoral candidate
Shaun Bailey, who is running in the capital against Sadiq Khan in the mayoral contest, has suggested London could host the Olympic games later this year if Japan is unable to due to the outbreak of coronavirus.
Priti Patel at centre of bullying row
More here from political correspondent Lizzy Buchan on the bullying allegations against the home secretary and claims she attempted to oust her most senior official in the department.
Blair warns Labour against prioritising trans rights in ‘culture war’
Tony Blair said he would not sign a controversial transgender rights pledge backed by leadership Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy.
While it might be right to support transgender rights, it was a tactical mistake for a political party to launch itself into a “culture war” on the issue, he said.
“If you go ‘transgender rights are our big thing’” and the right say “immigration control is our big thing”, you are going to lose that war, so you are not going to advance any of the things you want to do,” said Blair.
“We shouldn’t be fighting that culture war.”
Blair warned against a “finger-jabbing, sectarian” approach to identity politics which he said risked “putting a lot of people off” voting for the party.
Cummings an ‘arrogant thicko’, says Charlie Brooker
The screenwriter and Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker has attacked the No 10 supremo Dominic Cummings – calling him an “an arrogant thicko”.
“The sole upside of living through this humblingly s***** era is knowing you’ll *probably* get to witness arrogant thicko Dominic Cummings’ inevitable comeuppance five minutes before a blinding white flash in the sky,” he tweeted.
He added: “‘Superforecasting’. Christ. What a f***ing clown.”
Earlier this week Cummings recommended everyone read Philip Tetlock’s book Superforecasting.
Starmer denies Ed Miliband lined up for shadow cabinet job
The campaign for Labour leadership hopeful Keir Starmer has denied he’s ready to offer former party Ed Miliband a return to the frontline if wins the contest.
Unnamed allies told The Telegraph Miliband could be given the shadow chancellor role, with one praising him as a “giant on strategy”.
But a close to Keir Starmer told The Independent: “It’s the first we have heard of it! It’s people speculating. We’re focusing on the campaign, not speculating on who will or won’t be in any possible future shadow cabinet.”
Blair won’t name his choice for Labour leadership
Tony Blair has refused to name his preferred candidate to succeed Jeremy Corbyn – but said that any of them would be better than the current leader.
Answering questions after his speech at King’s College in London, the former prime minister said: “I don’t want to damage anyone by supporting them so I’m not going to give an opinion on which candidate.
“Whatever happens is going to be a significant improvement.”
Blair said he believed Labour would have done “much better” in the December election if it had dumped Corbyn and gone into the campaign with a more moderate leader.
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Deontay Wilder: ‘I don’t want to be the next Muhammad Ali. I don’t want to be the next anyone’
Deontay Wilder can surpass his idol Muhammad Ali for consecutive world heavyweight title defences this weekend but, five years after first clinching the belt, the Alabama man still feels under-appreciated in his own country.
The so-called Bronze Bomber puts his WBC belt on the line at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Saturday night against Tyson Fury in an eagerly awaited rematch of their genuinely stunning 2018 draw at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
And, although menacing pictures of him and Fury have dominated this famous strip in the Nevada desert this week, the truth is, Wilder is still a niche celebrity in the eyes of the wider American public. It is a fact not lost on the champion.
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“Do I feel under-appreciated here? Of course.” Wilder says. “This country is supposed to be so diverse, but this is not one nation. They say we’re one nation under God with liberty and justice, it’s not true.
“Even some of the Americans can be lured into supporting a foreigner rather than their own. That’s how America is built. It will always be difficult, it will always be hard.
“Boxing in this country is nowhere near first, second, third, we are four, five, six, maybe seventh most popular sport here. The things that are going on now are elevating it and everybody is getting into boxing now, whether it is a workout or they feel like they have this illusion of a career.
“We all have to start somewhere. It was tough just getting to a point where people could have insight, have knowledge about it, just coming to fights and realising, damn, we have a heavyweight champion of the world.
“People say I’m going to be the next Muhammad Ali, I don’t want to be the next no-one. I am Deontay Wilder.”
He can, however, surpass the 10 straight world title defences which Ali racked up during his second reign as champion, which began on one famous 1974 night in Kinshasa when The Greatest dethroned the fearsome George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle.
He held that belt for a three-and-a-half-year stint and the run included victories over greats like Joe Frazier, Ken Norton and Ron Lyle. Wilder’s reign, so far, pales in comparison to that but he has quietly transformed himself in the eyes of many from a crude swinger to one of the most devastating punchers in history.
“In boxing I found my way,” he added. “Nobody gave me any opportunities, I had to do it myself. I betted on myself. I’m here, I’m enjoying every minute of it and there’s more to come.
“I believe if people pay their money, they should see great things. I remember that life. I know how hard that it is. I am one of the best in world boxing and I want to display that to people.”
Wilder’s initial encounter with Fury, which included a pair of heavy knockdowns, was described as an instant classic and the 12th round, where the Morecambe visitor somehow beat the count after appearing to momentarily lose consciousness altogether, immediately entered boxing folklore.
That night Fury moved and danced his way to what many people thought was victory, only for the judges to score it a draw. Determined not to leave the decision up to the judges again, Fury insists he will turn his back on his trademark style and pursue a knockout win as early as possible instead. A 60/1 second round KO is the bet he has advised.
But it has been suggested that Fury’s has talked up a gameplan so wildly at odds with his usual modus operandi simply as a method of getting inside his opponent’s head during fightweek.
“I don’t believe anything he says but that’s going to be up to him,” Wilder added “He said it. I’m a man of my word and when I say things I mean it. I mean what I say and I say what I mean. So with that being said I will hold him to his word.
“If he don’t back it up he’s going to look like a liar. At the end of the day there are a lot of things he could say. Fighters do it all the time. They can be friendly, say ‘how you doing’, ‘how was your day’, shake hands and be friendly on social media but then you get in the fight and you want blood.
“All those things take place, especially in a big fight like this, but you have to break out all the secrets and all the tools to get the victory. People will do anything for victory just as they will do anything for money.”
Jack London: The reckless, alcoholic adventurer who wrote The Call of the Wild
To the American public, Jack London was one of the most romantic figures of the early 20th century. To his eldest daughter Joan, though, the famous author of The Sea-Wolf, White Fang and The Call of the Wild was a man of “relentless calculating cruelty”.
In her posthumous memoir Jack London and his Daughters, Joan, who died in 1971 at 70, was still scarred by correspondence she received from her father in February 1914. He ended his letter with a brutal message. “If I were dying I should not care to have you at my bedside,” London wrote. “A ruined colt is a ruined colt, and I do not like ruined colts.” Joan was just 13 at the time. By then, London was the highest-paid writer in America, receiving 10,000 fan letters a year, many of which were in praise of what he called his “crackerjack dog book”.
A new version of London’s bestselling novel The Call of the Wild (1903) is out in cinemas this week and stars Harrison Ford, Dan Stevens and Bradley Whitford. The hero of the tale, however, is a sled dog named Buck – a cross between a Saint Bernard and a Scotch collie – and the book is about that animal’s unbreakable spirit as he battles for survival in the desolate wilds of Alaska. There were powerful echoes of the writer’s own life in Buck’s tale. George Orwell described the handsome, rugged London as “an adventurer and a man of action, as few writers have ever been”. Orwell was not exaggerating. London’s life was a helter-skelter ride of jeopardy and misadventure. His somewhat inevitable early death came in 1916, when he was 40.
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London’s dramatic rags-to-riches success story began on 12 January 1876 – five months before Custer’s Last Stand – when he was born in San Francisco. The circumstances of his birth were appropriately chaotic. His mother Flora Wellman was a medium, who was often heard whooping out the cries of her Native American spirit world contact, a chief called Plume. Flora was pregnant after an affair with an astrologist called William Chaney. He denied paternity, claiming that he was impotent. The story made the local Chronicle newspaper after Flora wounded herself with a gunshot in an apparent suicide attempt. She survived and the newborn boy was given the name John Griffith Chaney. The astrologer fled, however, and Flora turned her attentions to a disabled, impoverished Unionist Civil War veteran called John London, whom she married. In time, his step-son took the name Jack London.
By the age of 10, the future writer was already “a work beast”, grafting all hours delivering newspapers, setting up pins in a bowling alley, ironing shirts in a steam laundry and shovelling coals in a factory. By 14, he was working 18 hours a day at The Hickmott Canning Company, handing his pittance wages to his parents after a day canning peaches and asparagus. It was at this point that his natural inclination to take risks came into play.
At 15, he rented a small sailboat called The Razzle-Dazzle and began poaching oysters from the Oakland waterfront, making good money by selling his illegal haul to restaurants. The violent, hard-drinking criminals he fell in with nicknamed him “The Prince of the Oyster Pirates”. He called them “the booze fighters” and they introduced him to heavy drinking, starting a lifelong addiction to alcohol.
In July 1894, when he was a travelling hobo, the 18-year-old was arrested for vagrancy outside the city of Niagara Falls. London spent 30 days in prison, and said he witnessed “unprintable, unthinkable” things. Looking back on this period in his memoirs, London described sliding to the subterranean depths of misery. “I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel house of our civilisation,” he wrote.
His conclusion was that he would have to make his fortune as a “brain merchant”. He’d always had a good imagination and was a voracious reader. As a teenager, he signed up everyone in his family for lending cards at the Oakland Free Library so he could take out multiple books. He was engrossed by the stories of Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Washington Irving and Rudyard Kipling.
The experience behind bars persuaded him to leave America. After a spell on a seal-hunting schooner bound for Japan, he found the inspiration he was looking for as writer by joining the Gold Rush of 1897. He spent 11 months in the foreboding wilds of Klondike – a region of the Yukon territory in Canada, near the Alaskan border – among an odd cast of prospectors. “It was in the Klondike that I found myself,” London recalled. “There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine.”
London wanted to appeal to two types of book buyer – he called them “the superficial and the deeper reader” – with a graphic style of fiction. He figured that the Alaskan setting would be a strong draw for American book lovers, who would be gripped by tales of pioneers trying to avoid starving or freezing to death, in a place where heroism could come to the fore.
Unbowed by more than 600 rejection letters, London eventually sold his stories to magazines – including 1897’s A Klondike Christmas – and began to make good money. By 1900, he was back in San Francisco, where he wed a teacher called Bess Maddern. Within two years they had two daughters, Joan and Becky, and had moved to an idyllic house in the Piedmont Hills.
Although all seemed well, beneath the surface his marriage was fracturing. London had frequent affairs and was visiting brothels with his friend George Sterling. The two authors drank heavily and smoked hashish together. Bess would often find the pair wrestling on the parlour floor. Joan speculated in 1939 that her father’s relationship with the Bohemian writer was one of “latent homosexuality”.
Among the women London seduced was Charmian Kittredge, a writer five years his junior who had reviewed his fiction. What began as a sexual relationship turned to love, and London divorced his wife and married Charmian in 1905. Her diaries from the time suggested it was a happy partnership: she called him her “angel” and called their early days together her “lollypop days”. The marriage was certainly unusual. They called each other “mate” in public and had regular boxing sessions together. On one occasion, recounted in Earle Labor’s 2013 biography Jack London: An American Life, Charmian pummelled London against the door “so ferociously that the redwood panel was cracked”. Nevertheless, they remained together until the end, despite the agony of losing a baby daughter and suffering a miscarriage.
Charmian enjoyed being the wife of a hugely successful novelist. After The Cruise of the Dazzler and A Daughter of the Snows (both released in 1902), everything changed for London with the publication of his most celebrated book. The Call of the Wild was first serialised in the Saturday Evening Post in June 1903. The first edition hardback, which featured a distinctive illustration of a dog sled scene in three panels, sold out immediately. The cheaper paperback version, with a large illustration of Buck adorning the front, became a bestseller and one of the most famous book covers of its time. The Call of the Wild made the 27-year-old author a celebrity, with stories about his exploits filling gossip columns.
The potent tale of Buck, the pampered pet of a Californian judge who is stolen and sold to be an Alaskan sled dog, remains in print more than a century on, and has been translated into 47 languages. Chris Sanders, director of the 2020 movie adaptation, believes London’s book remains popular because it is “a gritty story of perseverance”, which speaks to the young and the old alike.
In the novel, Buck becomes the property of outdoorsman John Thornton and the dog ends up saving his master’s life. Thornton is portrayed in the new film by Harrison Ford. It was a role first played by Clark Gable in the 1935 version of The Call of the Wild, a performance still stained by controversy, because the surviving family of Loretta Young have since claimed that the 34-year-old Gable raped his 22-year-old co-star during the production. In that film, Buck was played by three leonberger dog “actors”. In the 2020 film, Buck is a CGI creation.
London was caught up in his own controversy following the publication of his bestseller. In 1907, the weekly New York magazine The Independent carried a story headlined, “Is Jack London a plagiarist?” The article suggested that London had ripped off Egerton R Young’s book My Dogs in Northland. The magazine printed passages of both books side-by-side as evidence. London laughed off the row, claiming that Young’s book was simply one of several sources for his novel. The public didn’t seem to care anyway and the success of The Call of the Wild, along with The Sea-Wolf (1904) and White Fang (1906), made London rich. In 1906, he spent $7,000 ($200,000 or £154,000 in today’s money) on a 55ft cutter-rigged ketch of his own design, naming it The Snark, after Lewis Carroll’s poem.
Buying his own boat was part of a relentless quest for adventure. In 1904, he accepted a commission from Hearst newspapers to report from the Korean Peninsula on the Russo-Japanese War. London was a fearless photojournalist. He was arrested by Japanese secret police in Chemulpo Bay for taking war photographs of Japanese forces. A week later, he was arrested again and sent to a military prison near Seoul. His third scrape proved to be his last of the war. He punched a Japanese officer he caught stealing food from a horse, and was saved from a court-martial only by the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt.
In his final decade, London became increasingly politically engaged. Despite all his success and riches, he said he remained a pessimist because of the behaviour of “a mighty ruling class that intends to hold fast to its possessions”. In 1908, London published a dystopian novel called The Iron Heel, which chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. He would surely have been amused by Oscar-nominated actor Ford’s attack on Donald Trump during a promotional interview with Jimmy Kimmel for The Call of the Wild. In 1909, London published Martin Eden, a novel that is in part an attack on the masquerade of celebrity that helps “enslave” the public.
For all his activism, London was happiest when out riding on his ranch in the Sonoma Valley in California, the heart of wine country. “The air is wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are stealing,” London wrote. “The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive.”
London identified the four great things in life as work, sincerity, a philosophy of life and good health. Unfortunately, illness dogged him for most of his life. The scurvy he contracted in his early travels left him with lasting gum problems. He did not use a toothbrush until he was 19 and lost four front teeth before he was 21 – something that may explain why hip-hop band LA Symphony included the surprising lyric, “My name is Jack London and I got bad breath” in one of their songs.
The effects of the amoebic dysentery he caught in Mexico in his thirties, allied to his alcoholism, began to take a heavy toll late in life, when London suffered from gout, gastric disorders, rheumatism, pyorrhoea and kidney disease. He wrote about heavy drinking in his frank autobiographical novel John Barleycorn. That book came out in 1913, a year in which he underwent an appendectomy that showed his diseased kidneys were failing. In photographs from the time, London looks pale and puffy. He was barely sleeping, suffering from depression and consuming large amounts of morphine to deal with the pain. Against medical advice, he continued to eat raw fish and his bizarre daily diet consisted of two undercooked mallard ducks. Somehow, incredibly, he was still writing a thousand words a day.
London slipped into a coma and died on 22 November 1916. His death certificate lists the cause as uraemia (urine in the blood), following acute renal colic. The Call of the Wild is among the 50 books he left behind, including the posthumous novel Jerry of the Islands. London lived an extraordinary life, true to his avowal that “I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet”.
The Call of the Wild Is out in UK cinemas on Friday
Democratic debate: Bloomberg becomes punchbag as rivals fight to keep campaigns alive
Mike Bloomberg has been angrily denounced as an arrogant and sexist billionaire – a wealthier version of Donald Trump – as Democrats turned on each other in their most contentious debate yet.
The former New York mayor, who has soared in the polls after spending up to $400m on political advertising, must have known he was going to come under fire in his first appearance in one of the party’s primary debates.
But the pumelling he received from his rivals in the first fifteen minutes on stage at Las Vegas’ Paris Theatre, felt like something more commonly seen in one of the boxing heavyweight prize fights frequently hosted at the nearby Caesar’s Palace.
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Elizabeth Warren, conscious she was trailing Mr Bloomberg in the polls and needing to finally deliver a strong performance in Nevada’s caucus on Saturday, tore into him from the start.
“I’d like to talk about who we are running against. A billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse faced lesbians. And no I am not talking about Donald Trump. I am talking about mayor Bloomberg,” she said.
“Look, I’ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is, but understand this, Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.”
Mr Bloomberg, 78, was also attacked by Ms Warren over nondisclosure deals that a number of women who worked for him were asked to sign, after deals following complaints. Joe Biden, who was also looking for a chance to kickstart his fading campaign, was also happy to pile on, grateful for once not to be the target of his rivals’ attacks.
“We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many nondisclosure agreements and the drip, drip, drip of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against,” said Ms Warren.
Mr Bloomberg was also attacked for his policy of stop and frisk when he was New York mayor, something that was used invariably against people of colour. Mr Bloomberg has since apologised for the policy, and has said it was one of the things he was most embarrassed about from his time as mayor.
But his his fellow presidential hopefuls would not let it go.
“It’s not whether you apologise or not, it’s the policy. The policy was abhorrent,” said Mr Biden. “And it was in fact a violation of every right people have.”
Even Mr Trump entered the fray. At a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, he said of Mr Bloomberg: “I hear he’s getting pounded tonight.”
Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, whose candidacy was kept alive by a strong third-place in New Hampshire after a solid performance at the last debate, also sought to land some punches.
Some were directed at Mr Bloomberg, but plenty were aimed at fellow Midwesterner and centrist Pete Buttigieg. When he criticised her for forgetting the name of the Mexican president at a forum, the evening before, she asked him if he was saying she was “dumb”.
“I said I made an error,” she added. “I think having a president that maybe is humble and is able to admit that here and there maybe wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
Much of the anger directed at Mr Bloomberg appeared to come from the fact he had soared in the polls, and onto the debate stage, while not contesting the first four voting states, and buoyed by vast personal wealth. He has said he is prepared to spend up to $2bn to defeat Mr Trump.
Asked about the apparent unfairness of someone “buying” their way onto the debate stage, Democratic Party chairman Tom Perez told reporters people had the chance to show their distaste by voting for someone else. “There are six candidates on the stage,” he said.
For his part, Mr Bloomberg did not crumple under pressure. Yet he also made no attempt to try and win over any new friends from his rivals.
In particular, he took aim at frontrunner Bernie Sanders, and his plan for universal healthcare.
“I can’t think of a way to make it easier for Donald Trump to get reelected than listening to this conversation,” he said at one point. “This is ridiculous. We’re not going to throw out capitalism. We tried that. Other countries tried that. It was called communism and it just didn’t work,” Mr Bloomberg said.
He said Mr Sanders had no chance of defeating Mr Trump, despite polls showing he performs as well as any of the candidates
“You don’t start out by saying I’ve got 160m people I’m going to take away the insurance plan that they love,” said Mr Bloomberg.
Additional reporting by Reuters
It is the second time this product has been recalled in recent months.February 20, 2020, 4:01 PM3 min read
Nearly 6 million children’s water bottles from Contigo have been recalled over a spout that poses as a choking hazard, the company announced.
It is the second time the product, Contigo Kids Cleanable Water Bottles, has been recalled in recent months.
A total of 427 reports had been made to the Chicago-based company about the spout detaching, including 27 reports that spouts had been inside a child’s mouth, according to the recall notice.
The product had already been recalled once back in August 2019, and this recent recall involves the lids that had been given to customers as a replacement, according to the notice.
Only bottles with a black base and cover of the spout are being recalled.
Contigo said customers “should immediately stop using” the product and “take them away from children.” They can contact Contigo for a water bottle.
The recalled product had been sold from April 2018 through Feb. 7, 2020 at Costco, Walmart, Target and other stores nationwide and online on various websites. The bottles were imported from Chicago and have the recall number 20-074.
Fidelity glitch causes panic after customers see $0 account balance – Business Insider
Fidelity customers were in a panic after a glitch caused their 401(k) accounts to show a balance of $0.”I saw my @Fidelity account and almost had a heart attack,” one person wrote on Twitter. “The balance was $0.” Fidelity told MarketWatch, which first reported the glitch, that some customers were experiencing technical issues but that the issue was resolved.Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Fidelity customers checking their 401(k) accounts got an unwelcome surprise on Wednesday when they logged in and saw a $0 balance. “I saw my @Fidelity account and almost had a heart attack,” one person wrote on Twitter. “The balance was $0.” —Guy Spann (@GuySpann) February 19, 2020Fidelity did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but told MarketWatch, which first reported the story, that some customers were experiencing technical problems but that the issue was resolved. It advised customers to “try logging back in” to fix the problem, according to the report. Some users were also unable to see their entire accounts. One user wrote on Twitter, “@Fidelity decided my accounts don’t exist this morning,” along with a screenshot of a blank screen under his “All Accounts” page. —Not Bill Gross (@debtinstruments) February 19, 2020For customers who have spent decades putting money into the accounts — many reaching into the millions — the glitch was sure to cause a panic.
“Could you imagine if you went to bed last night with $1,000,000+ in your Fidelity accounts and woke up this morning to a total account balance of $0.00,” one person said on Twitter. “So scary! I have brokerage accounts at 20 different firms for this reason.”
Las Vegas (CNN)Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar first publicly vented her chief frustration with Pete Buttigieg nine months ago in a parking lot in Cresco, Iowa.
He is benefiting from male privilege and wouldn’t be treated the same if he were a woman, she said. …
‘The Banks Are Broke’: This Viral Video From 2013 Is More Relevant Than Ever
“All the Banks Are Broke,” and they’ve only got worse. Quantitative easing forever? The threat of cryptocurrencies will disrupt the financial sector. A video from 2013 depicting a European minister’s tirade against the global banking system has recently re-emerged and gone viral. Gaining massive traction within the crypto community, the speech is now more relevant than ever — and central banks know it. “All the Banks Are Broke” Within an impassioned speech, British politician and former member of European Parliament (MEP) Godfrey Bloom thoroughly dismantles the global banking sector, proposing that banks are ‘broke” and highlighting what he calls institutional “incompetence and chicanery.” Watch: Godfrey Bloom’s tirade against the financial sector Packing in as much vitriol as one can within a two minutes, Bloom systematically tears the financial system apart. Aiming at the sector’s penchant for fractional reserve banking, the former-MEP remarks that “banks lending money that they don’t actually have” is tantamount to a “criminal scandal.” Financial institutions around the world have been operating fractional reserve systems for many years. The practice entails using the vast majority of customer deposits to generate profit via interest rates on loans. This results in a mere fraction of bank deposits (10% for larger institutions) remaining available for withdrawal. Bloom also focused on the moral hazard within banking, alluding that the government’s promise to bail out banks—as they have done time and time again—encourages riskier behavior. The now-viral video of Bloom berating the banking sector. | Source: TwitterMost pertinent of all was Bloom’s take on quantitative easing (QE): We have counterfeiting, sometimes called ‘quantitative easing,’ but counterfeiting by any other name—the artificial printing of money—which, if any ordinary person did, they’d go to prison for a very long time, and yet governments and central banks do it all the time. Quantitative Easing Can’t Last Forever In the decade since the financial crisis, the world’s central banks have combated rising interest rates by buying copious quantities of government debt—aka QE. Watch: Trump calls for negative interest rates. In 2019 following a dovish turn from the U.S. Federal Reserve, global economies started upping their fiscal policy games. Among the more unconventional monetary maneuvers was QE. In 2019, the Fed’s repo operations offered a veneered return to QE. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank (ECB) didn’t even bother with the charade, announcing in September that it would start up QE once again, buying up bonds at a rate of €20 billion for “as long as necessary.” While QE proved to quell the last financial crisis, “the artificial printing of money” — to quote Bloom — isn’t sustainable. Worryingly, speaking before the Senate Banking Committee last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell commented that the Fed would use QE “aggressively” should another recession hit. It is much more likely we will have to turn to the tools we used in the financial crisis […] I believe we will use them aggressively should the need arise to do so. There is no need to do that now but we will use those tools aggressively. Watch: Jerome Powell tells lawmakers a return to Q.E. is on the cards The problem is, many economists—as well as the World Economic Forum (WEF)—have noted that QE may not be as effective as it was last time. According to its 2019 annual Global Competitiveness Report, the WEF opines that unlike 2008, the next recession will leave central banks with “fewer policy options.” The Banks Know Their Time Is up QE can’t last forever. | Source: ShutterstockThe cryptocurrency industry—underlined by blockchain tech—is slowly reaching critical mass. Bitcoin adoption is on an exponential rise, while companies ranging from Amazon to Alibaba, are adopting blockchain. Now, central banks are starting to sweat. To keep the threat of crypto at bay, many institutions accept that it’s time to overhaul the antiquated financial system via central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). From the Bank of England-led research collective to the People’s Bank of China’s incipient CBDC, central banks all over the globe are hurrying to either implement a digital currency or actively research them. The topic of CBDCs was even broached by Powell during a congressional hearing last week. Every major central bank is currently taking a deep look,” Powell said, “We feel that’s our obligation, technology has now made that possible. I think it’s very much incumbent on us and other central banks to understand the costs and benefits and tradeoffs associated with a possible digital currency. The pressure to compete with China, combined with private sector initiatives such as bitcoin and Facebook’s Libra, it’s do or die time for the U.S. and Wall Street. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of CCN.com. This article was edited by Sam Bourgi. Last modified: February 20, 2020 3:46 PM UTC
L Brands plummets as Victoria’s Secret is taken private at $1.1 billion valuation (LB)
AP Photo/Mary AltafferL Brands shares plummeted in early trading after the company announced it would relinquish control of Victoria’s Secret.
Private equity firm Sycamore Partners will take a 55% stake in Victoria’s Secret, in a deal that values the company at $1.1 billion.
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L Brands shares tumbled as the company ceded control of Victoria’s Secret, one of its main brands, to a private equity firm Thursday.
L Brands stock dropped as much as 15.85% in early trading Thursday, after the company announced that Sycamore Partners would take a majority, 55% stake in Victoria’s Secret. The deal values the lingerie business as a separate company worth $1.1 billion, according to a press release.
L Brands was up 35.76% so far this year when markets closed Wednesday. Reports of the talks between the Fortune 500 company and Sycamore had already been in the news in the weeks leading up to the Thursday announcement.
The decision to take Victoria’s Secret private separates L Brands from its iconic brand. Victoria’s Secret made up more than half, 52.76%, of L Brands’ total sales last quarter. But the company faced growth challenges: Overall sales were down versus the same period last year, and the company had to shutter 38 stores in the 11 months to January 4, 2020.
Shares fell 7.51% after the company announced its last round of earnings, closing near a 10-year low, CNBC reported.
The deal will leave Bath & Body Works a standalone public company, promote growth for Bath & Body Works, which “represents the vast majority of 2019 consolidated operating income,” and reduce overall debt, the release said.
Leslie Wexner, longtime chairman and CEO of L Brands, will step down from his role to a chairman emeritus position once the transaction is complete, according to the release. He was the longest standing CEO of any Fortune 500 company.
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How a Hawaii veteran started an award-winning BBQ business – Business Insider
Former Army Sergeant Frank Diaz served over 34 years in the military, including a tour in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War as well as other operations with the Department of Defense.After retiring, Diaz started Tin Hut BBQ with recipes he had developed with the expert advice from competitive barbecue chefs like Myron Mixon and “Fast Eddy” Maurin and David Bouska.He credits his business success to his military training, and makes a point to hire other veterans — even if they received an other-than-honorable discharge — because they are “phenomenal workers.”Diaz says that skills and training developed in the military can be tailored to fit the challenges of the civilian business world, and Facebook has rolled out some new tools and partnerships to help.Visit BI Prime for more stories.
Ever since Frank Diaz was a military brat, he loved the taste of barbecue.Even more than that, he loved how when his dad would make a meal for his fellow soldiers at the Army bases they’d call home, the food would always bring people together. When Diaz was 12, his father taught him the low-and-slow cooking technique that the younger Diaz would carry with him around the world during a 34-year career with the Army and the Department of Defense, where he served as an anti-terror specialist from 1996 to 2014.While stationed in Hawaii, Diaz longed for “mainland” barbecue, especially the tang of Carolina pulled pork or the burnt-ends of Texas brisket, or the fall-of-the bone texture of Kansas City ribs.As that active military career was winding down, Diaz imagined how he would like to spend post-service life. He decided to make Hawaii his home, BBQ his work, and serving the military community his mission — with the help of some social-media-based recruiting.
From battle plans to business plansDiaz’s business inspiration was an ordinary sight for soldiers serving in the field: the MKT, or Mobile Kitchen Trailer. (Think of an MKT as a sort of food truck that can be towed behind a Humvee or parachuted from a C-130 transport aircraft.)
Diaz prepares some pulled pork.
Courtesy Tin Hut BBQ
Diaz started Tin Hut BBQ on a part-time basis in 2012 with a simple MKT-style trailer and recipes he had developed with the expert advice from competitive barbecue chefs like Myron Mixon and “Fast Eddy” Maurin and David Bouska.Since retiring in 2014, his operation has expanded to include a fleet of food trucks that serve cuisine from all over the world.In 2017, Tin Hut won the Honolulu Star Advertiser’s Best Food Truck in Hawaii, and in October opened a restaurant in Oahu.Diaz uses Facebook to connect with customers and let them know where to find his trucks, named “The Kahuna” and “Mini Mee,” throughout the week. Tin Hut has become a mainstay of the military bases around Pearl Harbor, and Diaz counts top commanders as some of his biggest fans, as well as Hawaii congressperson Tulsi Gabbard.
Diaz also uses Facebook’s job-posting tools to find and hire his employees. He has enlisted the help of two dozen veterans or military spouses to keep Tin Hut’s wheels turning.Diaz says that his military experience, and that of his team, is an advantage for his small business. Running a food truck is certainly different from running antiterrorism operations, but Diaz sees both through a lens of strategy and planning.Veterans who are able to translate their military training over to the civilian workforce are especially valuable to Diaz. More important than specific qualifications, he says, is the discipline soldiers learn in the service, even if they receive an other-than-honorable discharge.”Discipline is teamwork, commitment, duty,” Diaz said. “People make mistakes in life. And still, I think that the military is a good breeding ground for good employees.”Veteran-focused tools and services
Diaz (right), poses with a ROTC unit in front of his award-winning food truck.
Tin Hut BBQ
Diaz cast a wide net from the start, and has continued that approach as he grows: from the Small Business Administration’s Boots to Business program, to Defense Department supports for service-disabled veterans (like Diaz), to digital training with Facebook.
“When you’re starting a business, use the resources out there,” Diaz said. “Facebook has tons of resources. SBA has tons of resources.””Find out what’s best for you, find out what’s best for your market, find out what’s best for your business, and bring all those tools together,” he added.Last week Facebook rolled out several initiatives for its members in the military community. The company estimates there are close to a million Facebook members that are active US military, veterans, and military families around the world.The transition from military service can be scary, says Payton Iheme, herself a veteran and now US Public Policy manager at Facebook. Finding a place in the civilian sector can sometimes feel like starting from scratch, she said.The new Military and Veterans Hub pulls together the existing resources, and a new partnership with SCORE offers mentor-matching and skills-training for veterans who are interested in starting a business.
“Glean from them all. Get a nugget here, nugget there that’s going to assist you,” Diaz said of the various resources he has used. “Not any of them had all the answers, but all of them had some of the answers.”The national pictureRoughly one in ten Americans is a veteran, and while the employment rates are broadly similar between those groups, veterans with a service disability face higher rates of unemployment than the general population.Additionally, nearly 38,000 veterans are currently homeless and another 1.4 million are considered to be at risk of becoming homeless. Of Diaz’s 24 employees, four were veterans that were able to transition from homelessness to new opportunities through working at Tin Hut.When Desiree Cortez got out of the Navy, she suffered from PTSD, and became unemployed and homeless. When Frank met her, he quickly offered her a job. Now Cortez manages one of the Tin Hut trucks.Another veteran was able to reconnect with his experience as an electrical engineer in the military and move on from barbecue to a career as a civilian electrician.
“I love the phrase, ‘we’ve got your six,'” Diaz says about the military-speak for having one another’s’ backs. “And that’s just been my mindset, even with business.”
Brandon Hoeg
Lili Trifilio felt nervous. A year ago, the DePaul University senior was bracing for graduation in a few months, gripped by the looming post-collegiate demands that materialize once the final semester kicks off — work, money, that wide-open void of the future. What gave the journalism major a slight edge, though, was her preferred extracurricular activity, fronting the bubbly indie rock outfit Beach Bunny.
They had no record deal or hit song (yet) — just a strong string of EPs and snug homemade recordings Trifilio created by herself. They’d just started working with managers, too. Despite the promising start, that postgrad anxiety nagged, exacerbated by questions from family and friends. Trifilio’s fears were specific.
“I was debating how I was going to make music a career or if I needed to get a nine-to-five, or what the heck was going on,” she told MTV News. But it’s been a good year for both her and Beach Bunny. “I’m a lot less stressed about my livelihood now.”
She should be. Beach Bunny, which she began alone in 2015 and expanded into a full band two years later, has since played Lollapalooza, had a hit blow up thanks to TikTok, and used that viral leverage to land on a label roster alongside Sleater-Kinney and Courtney Barnett. In April, they’ll hit Coachella and might even cross paths with Trifilio’s fave Charli XCX. (“I CANT BELIEVE WERE PLAYING THE SAME DAY AS @charli_xcx omfg igxgixgixgixgixgizgixgixgix,” she tweeted after the announcement.)
But Coachella is the future, and graduation is the past. Right now, Trifilio is living in the present — and for Beach Bunny, the present is a Honeymoon phase. The group’s debut album, a delightful collection of sunny indie-pop in the vein of Alvvays and Charly Bliss, dropped on Valentine’s Day, complete with romantically entangled song titles like “Cuffing Season” and “Dream Boy.” It’s the kind of heartbreak pop that can take you deep into a well of feelings, and “Ms. California” finds Trifilio singing her lovelorn blues: “Every time you cross my mind, the words come out in figure eights.” But ultimately, it ends triumphantly on “Cloud 9.”
“I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t just repeating the same song over and over again, even though it’s similar themes but different angles,” she said. “Like, oh, I’m sad, but this time, I’m jealous, or this time, I’m rageful.”
Trifilio and her band recorded Honeymoon in May 2019, right around the time of her graduation. It was already a lot to juggle; then came the TikToks. Beach Bunny’s 2018 tune “Prom Queen” was concurrently blowing up among users, thanks to its lead-off lyrics about body image. Trifilio’s deadpan opening, “Shut up, count your calories / I never looked good in mom jeans,” gave an anthem to the short videos, which began as likewise fretting examinations of self (young folks eating salads and stepping on scales) and have since grown to include more innocuous activities, like painting a playroom and doodling at school.
“Prom Queen” has jangled its way through nearly 430,000 different TikToks. Add that to the currently 41 million streams it’s enjoyed on Spotify and you have quite the ammo for a band ready to level up. It’s leverage Trifilio used when it came time to sign with a label, and she went with Mom + Pop Music. “The opportunity to work with the label seemed more appealing because we had a very solid fanbase,” she said of the energized crowds who hit the Beach Bunny gigs ready to mosh respectfully and even go all in on a wall of death. “We could negotiate terms more and make them super artist-friendly, where in the past, the deals weren’t that great in our favor.”
Beach Bunny first assembled as a four-piece for a noteworthy gig: a local battle of the bands that found Trifilio competing against an ex-boyfriend. “I think at the time, I was like, wow, we sound so good! But then looking back, I’m like, oh my god, none of us are in time,” she said. “Our guitarist’s out of tune. It was very exciting though.” Matt Henkels, who plays guitar, recalls it the same way: “We didn’t have a bassist and we were so new, so it probably sounded awful, but I remember feeling like we were killing it.” Drummer Jon Alvarado actually played in both Beach Bunny and Trifilio’s ex’s group (“I was like, ‘You traitor!'” she joked); despite their then-rudimentary stage presence, he was ready to go big: “I felt incredibly happy and very fulfilled and couldn’t wait for the next show.”
When you see the full band — those three, plus Anthony Vaccaro on bass — onstage now, it’s hard to picture any undergraduate jitters. They’re tight, like when they rip through a “Party in the U.S.A.” cover and when Trifilio uses the power of suggestion to lower the crowd to the floor for a slower, strummy number without any drums. “When we’ve toured with more punk bands, everyone’s just down [to mosh]. But sometimes at a headlining show, I think people, their first time seeing us, are like, ‘I am not really sure what to do,'” she said. “I feel I judge how good the show is based on the movement.”
That can also include more covers, potentially even “Bennie and the Jets” (which should ceremonially be retitled “Bunny and the Jets” if there’s any justice). Maybe Trifilio will string together her three songs called “February,” “April,” and “July” for some kind of month-centric suite, or perhaps she’ll leave those (and the nine more to be written) for a future “collector’s edition” EP. In the meantime, there’s Honeymoon, spanning quiet ballads, massive choruses, and the right pop-punk bangers to bounce to.
A month ago, Trifilio was riding out another Chicago winter, trying to beat cabin fever as she counted down the days until the album’s release by writing more songs (and sometimes jogging and meditating). Even though it just arrived — and perhaps in keeping with the demands of an ever-accelerating industry — she’s already looking past the Honeymoon period. She’s shared snippets of new songs, including lyrics, on Instagram and Twitter. “I still love Honeymoon, but the songs are almost old to me now, even though they’re new to everyone else.” Vaccaro, who joined the group a year ago (well after that fabled first show), said he feels like he’s finally locking into what Beach Bunny means and will mean going forward. “When we are learning new stuff, I feel that we now get what sound we want. I feel I just finally get what works and what doesn’t.”
Trifolio recently returned to DePaul to speak about her songwriting. She’s not thinking about the people who asked her about the financial stability and long-term viability of her musical plans a year ago. “I guess I just have more street cred now,” she said, “and I feel confident expressing it.”
Rock
Music
Beach Bunny
Ex-boyfriend allegedly threw Hollywood therapist over balcony to her death: DA
Dr. Amie Harwick was assaulted at her Hollywood Hills home this weekend.February 20, 2020, 2:58 PM3 min read
The ex-boyfriend of Hollywood therapist Dr. Amie Harwick was lying in wait before allegedly throwing her over a balcony to her death, prosecutors said.
Gareth Pursehouse, 41, was charged Wednesday with murder and residential burglary with the special circumstance allegation of lying in wait, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said.
Pursehouse could face the death penalty if convicted, prosecutors said, though a decision on whether to seek the death penalty has not yet been determined.
Harwick was allegedly killed in the early hours of Feb. 15. Around 1:15 a.m., officers in the Hollywood Hills responded to a radio call of a woman screaming, and Harwick’s roommate met them in the street, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The roommate said Harwick was being assaulted, so he jumped a wall and went to a neighboring home to call for help, police said.
The 38-year-old therapist was found on the ground below a balcony at her Hollywood Hills home.
Harwick was a well-known marriage and family therapist who worked with people suffering from domestic violence, according to her website.
Harwick “recently expressed fear about a former boyfriend” who she had filed a restraining order against, according to police. The restraining order had since expired, police said.
Records show two restraining orders filed by Harwick against Pursehouse: one from 2011 and another from 2012.
Pursehouse is set to be arraigned on Thursday.
Drew Carey, who was previously engaged to Harwick, said in a statement Monday, “I am overcome with grief,”
Carey called Harwick “a positive force in the world, a tireless and unapologetic champion for women, and passionate about her work as a therapist.”
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