Country’s ‘Gentle Giant’ Don Williams Dies at 78
Country music singer Don Williams, one of the biggest stars of the 1970s and 1980s, died on Friday at the age of 78, his publicist said.
Williams, known as “the Gentle Giant” because of his 6-foot, 1-inch frame, mellow voice and low-key profile, had hits with Tulsa Time, I Believe in You and It Must Be Love over the course of a 50-year career.
He died on the same day as Troy Gentry, one half of the country music duo Montgomery Gentry, who was killed in a helicopter crash in New Jersey.
“2 legends lost at once. Troy Gentry and Don Williams will be missed so much. Praying for their families and may they rest in peace,” country-pop band Big & Rich wrote on Twitter.
The statement announcing his passing said Williams died of an undisclosed illness but gave no further details.
Williams was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2010 and released his last studio album, “Reflections,” in 2014.
Two years later, he announced his retirement from touring, saying it was “time to hang up my hat and enjoy some quiet time at home.”
Williams was a big influence on other musicians, spanning country to rock. Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend were among those who have recorded his music.
In 2016, a tribute album, “Gentle Giants: The Songs of Don Williams,” was released featuring performances by Alison Krauss, Trisha Yearwood, Garth Brooks and many others.
…
Troy Gentry of Country Duo Montgomery Gentry Dies in Crash
Troy Gentry, one half of the award-winning country music duo Montgomery Gentry, died Friday in a helicopter crash just hours before a concert, according to a statement from the band’s website. He was 50.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the helicopter crashed into a wooded area near the Flying W Airport in Medford hours before Montgomery Gentry was due to perform at a resort that is also housed at the airport.
The band’s website called Gentry’s death “tragic” and said details of the crash are unknown.
“Troy Gentry’s family wishes to acknowledge all of the kind thoughts and prayers, and asks for privacy at this time,” the website said.
Medford Township Police Chief Richard Meder told NJ.com that police got a call at around 1 p.m. about a helicopter that was “distressed.”
He said crews were able to remove the passenger from the wreckage, but he died on the way to a hospital. The pilot died at the scene and crews were working to remove his body, Meder said.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Gentry was the pilot or the passenger.
Gentry was born on April 5, 1967, in Lexington, Kentucky, where he met bandmate Eddie Montgomery and formed a group based off their last names.
Montgomery Gentry had success on the country charts and country radio in the 2000s, scoring No. 1 hits with Roll With Me, Back When I Knew It All, Lucky Man, Something to Be Proud Of and If You Ever Stop Loving Me. Some of the songs even cracked the Top 40 on the pop charts.
The band mixed country music with Southern rock. It was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 2009. The group released their debut album, “Tattoos & Scars,” in 1999.
…
Hugh Jackman, Lupita Nyong’o to Co-host New York’s Global Citizen Fest
Hugh Jackman, Lupita Nyong’o, Aaron Paul and Demi Lovato will co-host this year’s Global Citizen Festival, an annual free event held in New York’s Central Park.
Performers at the Sept. 23 event include Stevie Wonder, Green Day, The Killers, The Lumineers, The Chainsmokers, Pharrell Williams, Big Sean, Andra Day and Alessia Cara.
The organization announced Friday that Frieda Pinto, Connie Britton, Deborra-lee Furness, Joan Smalls, Kal Penn, Malin Akerman, Mark Cuban and others will also co-host the multi-hour event. It will air live on MSNBC and Comcast NBCUniversal.
Fans can earn their free tickets for admission by joining the movement at globalcitizenfestival.com.
Last year, Jackman co-hosted the event with Neil Patrick Harris, Chelsea Handler and others. Performers at the 2016 concert included Rihanna, Eddie Vedder, Kendrick Lamar and Metallica.
…
Apple Embarks on Emmy Quest With Big Bet on Video Streaming
Television is one of the few screens that has Apple hasn’t conquered, but that may soon change. The world’s richest company appears ready to aim for its own Emmy-worthy programming along the lines of HBO’s Game of Thrones and Netflix’s Stranger Things.
Apple lured longtime TV executives Jaime Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg away from Sony Corp. in June and has given them $1 billion to spend on original shows during the next year, according to a Wall Street Journal report quoting unnamed people.
The programming would be available only on a subscription channel, most likely bundled with the company’s existing Apple Music streaming service. Apple declined to comment.
While $1 billion is a lot of money, it’s a drop in the bucket for Apple and its $262 billion cash hoard. But it’s still enough to vault Apple into the top tier of tech-industry outsiders producing their own slates of television shows.
iTunes came first
Hollywood has long shuddered at the thought of Apple training its sights on TV the way it once did on the music business.
Almost 15 years ago, Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs convinced record labels to let the company sell digital music on its iTunes store for 99 cents a single, a deal the music industry was happy to take in the face of growing music piracy enabled by Napster. Over time, though, Apple’s dominance in digital music chafed music executives, who saw the company siphoning off a chunk of their profits.
Movies and television have proven much harder for Apple to crack. The company’s interest in transforming television has been an open secret for years, but Hollywood has so far spurned Apple’s efforts to make itself an indispensable digital middleman for video.
In a way, Netflix beat Apple to the punch with its groundbreaking video streaming service. Launched in 2007, that service pioneered “binge watching” of entire TV seasons on any device with an internet connection. That gave new life to existing shows such as Breaking Bad, whose creator credits Netflix with its survival , and spawned the creation of other series tailor-made for bingeing.
Netflix also helped unleash a crescendo of creativity in Hollywood. Follow-on rivals Amazon and Hulu also boast popular video streaming services, and mainstream broadcasters such as CBS and Walt Disney Co. — the owner of ABC and ESPN, among other networks — are also jumping in.
Pressure to act
All of that has increased the pressure on Apple to step up its game in TV — not least because the increasing popularity of streaming is hurting its business of renting and selling video from iTunes.
Apple “doesn’t want to be left behind,” said Debby Ruth, senior vice president of consumer research firm Magid. “This is a way for them to put a stake in the ground.”
This year, the company released its first two original series, Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke, on its Apple Music service, which has 27 million subscribers. But neither show has generated much buzz or critical acclaim.
The recent hiring of Erlicht and Van Amburg signaled Apple’s intent to make bigger splash. The executives have helped orchestrate several TV hits, including AMC’s Breaking Bad, and more recently branched out into video streaming with The Crown, which landed on Netflix last year and is up for 13 Emmy nominations in this Sunday’s ceremony.
Apple also has a not-so-secret weapon: hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads already in the hands of faithful fans. It could easily transform those into a marketing platform to lure users to its TV service.
But the company has a steep hill to climb.
Bigger players
Netflix has more than 100 million worldwide subscribers and a video library that will add 1,000 hours of original programming this year alone. And HBO has become the Emmys’ pacesetter since branching into original programming 20 years ago.
Both companies vastly outspend Apple’s reported $1 billion production budget. HBO spends about $2 billion annually on its programming, which garnered 111 nominations in this year’s Emmy Awards, more than any other network. Netflix, which boasts the second most Emmy nominations with 91, expects to spend $6 billion on programming this year.
Apple is still experimenting in TV, said Gene Munster, a longtime Apple watcher and managing partner with the research and venture capital firm Loup Ventures.
“In five years, I bet Apple will either be investing $10 billion a year in content or zero,” said Munster. “It’s going to be one or the other.”
Jobs’ legacy
Jobs discussed his ambitions to shake up TV with his biographer, Walter Issacson, shortly before his death in 2011.
“He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players and phones: Make them simple and elegant,” Isaacson wrote.
But no Apple television ever materialized. Instead, Apple has periodically upgraded its Apple TV, which isn’t a television, just a video streaming player that connects to TVs. That device has been losing market share to other streaming players made by Roku, Amazon and Google, according to the research firm Park Associates.
Building a successful programming lineup could give Apple more leverage to license shows from other Hollywood production houses. It might even embolden the company to finally release its own streaming TV set.
Apple will presumably also want to emulate Netflix’s ability to exploit usage data to determine what it thinks audiences want to watch. Netflix’s data analysis has helped it attract 25.5 million more subscribers in the U.S. alone since the February 2013 debut of its first original series, House of Cards.
But if Apple decides it needs a little more help in video streaming, Munster thinks there’s in 1-in-3 chance that it will buy Netflix to instantly gain the cachet and expertise in TV programming that it craves.
…
Rwanda’s Largest Solar Field Also Empowers Orphans
In Rwanda, less than 15 percent of the population has access to electricity. In rural areas, it can be as low as one percent.
In order to increase Rwanda’s energy capacity, a 17-hectare solar field with 28,000 panels was constructed in six months in 2014 by private power companies.
It is East Africa’s first large-scale commercial solar field, bringing in 8.5 megawatts of power at its peak — four percent of the country’s total power capacity. The project has brought power to more than 15,000 homes.
“We are living in the world and we have to contribute or to eradicate or eliminate polluting the atmosphere,” said Twaha Twagirimana, plant supervisor for Scatec Solar, which operates the project. “We need energy, and we need clean energy.”
Twagirimana said this investment in solar power is a step toward reducing global warming. Rwanda’s power grid relies heavily on diesel fuel, which is expensive and bad for the environment.
According to Scatec Solar, the solar field reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 8,000 tons per year.
Orphanage land
Private homes aren’t the only ones to benefit from the project. The solar panels are on land owned by the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village.
The choice of the site, about 60 kilometers from the capital, Kigali, was no accident. The rent paid for the land helps vulnerable children and young adults who were orphaned during or after Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.
About 500 young Rwandans live, study and play on the 144-acre residential community.
Mediatilice Kaytitesi, the community’s art center and theater coordinator, says she uses art to help youth cope with their losses.
“It’s something that can help open the mind of the kids,” she said. “Some draw tears, which means they have the tears in their hearts, their wounds. You can see their expressions.”
Pascal Atismani Claudien lost his father in 2006 and his mother in 2010. He said he doesn’t exactly know why they died — just that they were sick.
“When I have a problem, I take a paper and a pencil and draw and that problem goes away. When I have stress, I draw or paint,” said Claudien, who is starting his final year of high school at the village. “And when I am painting or drawing, I feel very happy.”
The Agahozo Shalom Youth Village was modeled after similar ones built for orphans in Israel after the Holocaust. In the Rwandan language of Kinyarwanda, Agahozo means “tears are dried.” In Hebrew, Shalom means peace.
“The mission was really to help bring back all the children who have lost parents and siblings and everything in their lives, to try to recreate the next best family that these children should have had, had their parents been alive,” explained Jean-Claude Nkulikiyimfura, the youth village’s executive director.
Claudien said he considers it more of a family than a school. “That’s why we call each other brothers and sisters,” he said.
Learning engineering
During his time at the school, Claudien visited the nearby solar panels and learned from the staff about how Rwanda’s largest solar field is positively impacting the country. He, himself, is from a small village with limited access to electricity.
About 50 students also received technical training at the solar field on engineering and solar technology to encourage them to work in green jobs in the future.
The construction of the nearly $24 million solar field employed more than 350 Rwandan workers.
Gigawatt Global developed the project with early-stage funding from the U.S. government’s Power Africa initiative.
“Rwanda had the right leadership and the right conditions to be really the test case and the positive fruits of concept for the entire sub-Saharan Africa for commercial scale solar,” said Yosef Abramowitz, the CEO and founder of Gigawatt Global.
About 600 million Africans don’t have access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency.
Rwanda’s government aspires to nearly triple its power capacity by the end of 2018, through renewable power sources like methane, hydro, mini-hydro, peat, thermal and more solar fields.
In 2016, Rwanda partnered with developer Ignite Power to provide rooftop solar to 250,000 houses by the end of next year. Users will pay about $5 per month for the solar power system in a rent-to-own model.
Efforts like this will go toward the Rwandan government’s goal of bringing power to 70 percent of households.
Abramowitz said he’s convinced “solar is the future of Africa.” His firm wants to replicate this model throughout sub-Saharan Africa, increasing energy capacity while also benefiting the social good.
“There’s every reason in the world — economic, social and political — that solar should be the main generation source of energy on the continent,” he said.
…
New Genetic Discovery May Eventually End Premature Birth
Researchers have found genetic mutations that affect whether a woman is likely to have her baby early or carry it to full term.
Even late preterm babies, those born between 34 and 36 weeks of gestation, are more likely to die or experience problems, even if they are the size and weight of some full-term infants born after 37 to 41 weeks in the womb.
Preterm birth is the leading cause of death among children younger than 5 worldwide. These babies have higher death rates even into adolescence and beyond.
Several studies show health problems related to preterm birth persist through adult life, problems such as chronic lung disease, developmental handicaps, vision and hearing losses. The World Health Organization reports that every year, an estimated 15 million babies are born early, and this number is rising. Until now, little was known about the causes, but these findings could help solve the mystery.
Beginning of a journey
Dr. Louis Muglia coordinated the study of the DNA of more than 50,000 pregnant women. The study identified six gene regions, which influence the length of pregnancy and the timing of birth. While the study doesn’t provide information about how to prevent prematurity, Muglia says it could eventually do that.
“It’s just the beginning of the journey, but at least we know now, what the foundation is,” he says.
Muglia is co-director of the Perinatal Institute, which focuses on preterm babies, at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. He’s also the principal investigator of one of the March of Dimes’ five prematurity research centers. The March of Dimes helped pay for the study along with the National Institutes of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other medical research institutes.
Muglia said scientists have known for a long time that preterm birth is a combination of genetic and environmental factors. This study showed the genes involved were from the mother.
“For the first time, we have an idea of what tissue in the mom is the one that is likely driving the one for preterm birth,” Muglia says.
Selenium
One of the genes identified is involved in how the body uses selenium, a common mineral provided in food or supplements, but not currently included in vitamins women commonly take while pregnant. Selenium supplements are low-cost, and if the results are confirmed, this supplement could save millions of lives. Supplements including folic acid have been shown to greatly reduce birth defects, so much so that food in many countries is fortified with this particular B vitamin.
Another gene indicated that cells that line the uterus play a larger-than-expected role in the length of pregnancy.
The researchers were from the U.S. and from Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden. They only tested women of European descent, so more work needs to be done involving women of other races and ethnic origins.
But their study does open up areas for researching potential diagnostic tests, new medications, improved dietary supplements or other changes that could help more women have full-term pregnancies, all areas which will require several more years of study.
The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
…
New Genetic Discovery May Someday End Premature Birth
An international team of researchers has identified — for the first time — six genes that determine the length of pregnancy and whether a baby is born preterm. Preterm birth is a major cause of infant death and disability. Now, as VOA’s Carol Pearson reports, scientists may have clues about preventing prematurity.
…
World’s First Biodegradable Car Designed
There are smart cars, hybrid cars, electric cars, and now a biodegradable car. A group of technology students has built the first car with a biocomposite structure. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
…
DC’s Bats Good for Environment but Threatened by Disease
Washington, D.C., is home to nine species of bats. They play a vital role in the ecosystem, but biologists are worried that some may have contracted a deadly disease called white-nose syndrome. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias went on a so-called bat walk with the researchers on an island in the middle of Washington’s Anacostia River.
…
Alcohol Industry Accused of Misleading Public Over Cancer Risk
Scientists have accused the liquor industry of misleading the public over the link between consuming alcohol and cancer. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine compare the actions with the tobacco industry’s attempts to dispute the link between smoking and lung cancer. Henry Ridgwell reports.
…
UN Environment Head: Asia Must Lead Charge for Pollution-free Planet
Asia-Pacific — home to more than half the world’s population and some of its fastest-growing economies — is a key battleground in the fight against pollution, one of the biggest threats to the planet and its people, the U.N. environment chief said.
An estimated 12 million people die prematurely each year because of unhealthy environments, 7 million of them due to air pollution alone, making pollution “the biggest killer of humanity,” Erik Solheim told the first Asia-Pacific Ministerial Summit on the Environment in Bangkok this week.
Humans have caused pollution and humans can fix it, said Solheim, executive director of UN Environment, in an interview with Reuters at the four-day summit.
“The struggle for a pollution-free planet will be won or lost in Asia — nowhere else,” said the former Norwegian minister for environment and international development.
The sheer size of Asia-Pacific, as well as its continued economic growth, put it at the heart of the challenge, he added.
The region’s development has been accompanied by worsening pollution of its air, water and soil. Its emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide doubled between 1990 and 2012, and the use of resources such as minerals, metals and biomass has tripled, according to the United Nations.
World Health Organization figures also show Asia has 25 of the world’s 30 most-polluted cities in terms of fine particles in the air that pose the greatest risks to human health. The pollution comes largely from the combustion of fossil fuels, mostly for transport and electricity generation.
Solheim said Asia is also a major contributor of plastic polluting the world’s oceans — and solutions can be found in the region. He pointed to a huge beach cleanup campaign in Mumbai that inspired Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to overhaul the country’s waste management system.
“There’s enormous environmental opportunity,” Solheim said. “Asia has by and large strong governments, and they have the ability to fix problems.”
Coal no longer king?
Solheim said fighting pollution by moving toward renewable energy sources such as wind and solar would also benefit efforts to curb climate change, which scientists say is stoking more deadly heatwaves, floods and sea-level rise around the world.
But environmentalists worry that Asia’s demand for coal, the most polluting of the major fossil fuels, is likely to grow for years to come.
Figures from a forum organized by the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center in Singapore earlier this year show that some 273 gigawatts of coal power are still being built, although much more has been put on hold.
In July, analysts told Reuters that Japan, China and South Korea are bank-rolling coal-fired power plants in Indonesia despite their pledges to reduce planet-warming emissions under the Paris climate deal.
The landmark 2015 Paris Agreement seeks to limit the rise in average world temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Experts say curbing or ending the use of coal is required if this goal is to be reached.
Globally, many countries — including China — are shutting down or suspending plans for coal-fired power plants as costs for wind and solar power plummet.
Solheim is optimistic, noting that the International Energy Agency significantly raised its five-year growth forecast for renewables led by China, India, the United States and Mexico.
“There are very, very few people in the world who believe that the future is coal,” he said. “I think we will see the shift [to renewables] happening much faster than people tend to believe.”
On U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull his nation out of the Paris Agreement, Solheim sees a silver lining.
“The surprising judgment of history may be that Donald Trump did a lot of service to this fight against climate change by withdrawing, because he galvanized the reaction of everyone else,” said Solheim.
“All the big, iconic companies of modern capitalism — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon — they immediately said, ‘We will move into the green economy.'”
…
BMW Gears Up to Mass Produce Electric Cars by 2020
Germany’s BMW is gearing up to mass produce electric cars by 2020 and will to have 12 different models by 2025, it said on Thursday, as traditional manufacturers race to catch up with U.S. electric car pioneer Tesla.
Car buyers shunned electric vehicles because of their high cost and limited operating range until Tesla unveiled the Model S in 2012, a car that cracked the 200 mile (322 km) range barrier on a single charge.
Since then, big advances in battery technology and a global crackdown on pollution in the wake of Volkswagen’s diesel scandal have raised pressure on carmakers to speed up development of zero-emission alternatives.
BMW, which launched the i3 electric car in 2013, said it was now readying its factories to mass produce electric cars by 2020 if demand for battery driven vehicles takes off.
“By 2025, we will offer 25 electrified vehicles — 12 will be fully-electric,” Chief Executive Harald Krueger told journalists in Munich, adding the electric cars would have a range of up to 700 km (435 miles).
It marks a significant foray by a major manufacturer into electrification. BMW, which includes the Mini and Rolls-Royce brands and sold 2.34 million cars last year, announced the move on the day smaller rival Jaguar said it would offer electric or hybrid variants of all its models by 2020.
On Wednesday, Nissan unveiled a new version of its Leaf electric vehicle in its latest move to take on Tesla, the U.S. firm co-founded by Elon Musk that sold 83,922 vehicles last year.
Rolls-Royce
Traditional carmakers have been slow to embrace the electric vehicle market because it remains unprofitable, largely due to the cost of batteries which make up between 30 percent and 50 percent of the cost of an electric vehicle.
A battery pack with 60 kWh capacity and 500 km range costs around $14,000 today, compared with a gasoline engine that costs around $5,000. Add to that the $2,000 for the electric motor and the inverter, and the gap is even wider.
But capacity investments into the battery sector may bring down costs of electric vehicles to a “tipping point” when they reach parity with combustion-engine equivalents some time between 2020 and 2030, according to analysts at Barclays.
With cities threatening to ban combustion-engine vehicles or to tax diesel cars more heavily, the total cost of ownership of electric cars could drop below their combustion-engine equivalents, and Europe could become a 100 percent pure battery electric vehicle market by 2035, according to analysts at ING.
The Frankfurt motor show, starting next week, will be used by BMW to unveil a new four-door electric car positioned between the i3 city car and the i8 hybrid sportscar, Krueger said.
“We will be increasing the share of electrified models across all brands and model series. And, yes, that also includes the Rolls-Royce brand and BMW M vehicles,” he said.
German rivals will also be showing electric cars, with Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz brand unveiling the EQA, a concept mass market electric car, Volkswagen taking the wraps off the ID Crozz.
Aside from vehicle cost, a key obstacle to making electric cars popular is the amount of time it takes to recharge, and a lack of charging stations.
London needs to spend 10 billion euros ($12 billion) to get charging infrastructure to a level where retail buyers can practically own an electric car, consultancy AlixPartners has said. Almost none of that spending has been earmarked so far.
($1 = 0.8331 euros)
…
Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter to Step Down in December
Graydon Carter, the longtime editor of Conde Nast’s culture magazine “Vanity Fair,” will be stepping down in December after 25 years at the helm, the publication said on Thursday.
Carter, 68, who has steered Vanity Fair through the shifting journalism landscape and expanded it onto a successful digital platform as well as print edition, will oversee the magazine’s 2018 Hollywood issue, the publication said.
“I’ve loved every moment of my time here and I’ve pretty much accomplished everything I’ve ever wanted to do,” Carter said in a statement, adding that he was “now eager to try out this ‘third act’ thing.”
Carter said in an interview with The New York Times published on Thursday that he wanted to “leave while the magazine is on top.”
“I want to leave while it’s in vibrant shape, both in the digital realm and the print realm. And I wanted to have a third act – and I thought, time is precious,” he told the Times.
The Times said no replacement has been named yet for Carter, who earns a “seven-figure salary” at the magazine, but suggested that New York magazine’s editor-in-chief, Adam Moss, and Janice Min, former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, are potential candidates.
Carter, appointed editor of Vanity Fair in 1992, and turned the magazine’s focus to crime, culture and celebrities. He nurtured revered writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Dominick Dunne, humorists Fran Lebowitz and James Wolcott, and photography great Annie Leibovitz.
…
Poll: Two-thirds of Americans Get Their News from Social Media
A full 67 percent of Americans now report receiving at least a portion of their news from social media, according to a new poll released Thursday.
The Pew Research poll showed a small increase since early 2016, when 62 percent of people said they relied on social media for some of their news. The overall change isn’t particularly substantial, but among some demographics, social media use increased significantly.
Among non-white U.S. adults, 74 percent now say they get news from social media, marking a 10-percent increase over last year when 64 percent said they did. Similarly, among those aged 50 or older, the percentage who said they receive news from social media rose by 10 percent from 2016 to 55 percent.
While Facebook still dwarfs other social media sites in terms of news dissemination, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube made strong gains in the number of people using the sites for news over the course of the last year.
“Looking at the population as a whole, Facebook by far still leads every other social media site as a source of news. This is largely due to Facebook’s large user base, compared with other platforms, and the fact that most of its users get news on the site,” the report reads.
Twitter showed a 15-percent increase in the number of users who said that’s where they get their news, from 59 percent in 2016 to 74 percent in 2017. The number of YouTube users who get news from the site rose from 21 percent in 2016 to 32 percent in 2017. Snapchat showed a 12-percent gain, from 17 percent in 2016 to 29 percent in 2017.
…
Stephen King Joins Moviegoers for Special Screening of ‘It’
Movie fans attending a special screening of the movie It in Bangor, Maine, got a bonus: Author and local resident Stephen King joined them.
King’s radio station, WKIT-FM, sponsored the special showing Wednesday night, and King received a standing ovation. He told the moviegoers: “You’re going to be scared out of your seats anyway, so you might as well sit down.”
It is based on King’s book about a sewer-dwelling, homicidal clown in Derry, Maine. King has said the fictionalized town is based on Bangor.
The new adaptation of King’s novel will be previewed in many select theaters Thursday before it opens nationwide Friday.
…
No Smartphones! Vintage Mobile Phone Museum Opens in Slovakia
As new smartphones hit the market month in month out, one Slovak technology buff is offering visitors to his vintage cellphone museum a trip down memory lane – to when cellphones weighed more than today’s computers and most people couldn’t afford them.
Twenty-six year-old online marketing specialist Stefan Polgari from Slovakia began his collection more than two years ago when he bought a stock of old cellphones online. Today, his collection boasts some 1,500 models, or 3,500 pieces when counting duplicates.
The museum, which takes up two rooms in his house in the small eastern town of Dobsina, opened last year and is accessible by appointment.
The collection includes the Nokia 3310, which recently got a facelift and re-release, as well as a fully functional, 20-year old, brick-like Siemens S4 model, which cost a whopping 23,000 Slovak koruna – more than twice the average monthly wage in Slovakia when it came out.
“These are design and technology masterpieces that did not steal your time. There are no phones younger than the first touchscreen models, definitely no smartphones,” said Mr Polgari.
“It’s hard to say which phone is most valuable to me, perhaps the Nokia 350i Star Wars edition,” said Mr Polgari – who uses an iPhone in his daily life.
…
Kate Millett, Feminist Author of ‘Sexual Politics,’ Dies
Kate Millett, the activist, artist and educator whose best-selling “Sexual Politics” was a landmark of cultural criticism and a manifesto for the modern feminist movement, has died. She was 82.
Millett died of a heart attack while on a visit to Paris on Wednesday, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the family. The publishing house that carried her books in French also confirmed the death but provided no details.
“Sexual Politics” was published in 1970, in the midst of feminism’s so-called “second wave,” when Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Millett and others built upon the achievements of the suffragettes from a half-century earlier and challenged assumptions about women in virtually every aspect of society. Millett’s book was among the most talked-about works of its time and remains a founding text for cultural and gender studies programs.
Millett chronicled millennia of legal, political and cultural exclusion and diminishment, whether the “penis envy” theory of Sigmund Freud or the portrayals of women as disrupters of paradise in the Bible and Greek mythology. She labeled traditional marriage an artifact of patriarchy and concluded with chapters condemning the misogyny of authors Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer, but also expressing faith in the redemptive power of women’s liberation.
“It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination — and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity,” she wrote.
While countless women were radicalized by her book, Millett would have bittersweet feelings about “Sexual Politics,” which later fell out of print and remained so for years. She was unhappy with its “mandarin mid-Atlantic” prose and overwhelmed by her sudden transformation from graduate student and artist to a feminist celebrity whose image appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Amused at first by her fame, she was worn down by a “ruin of interviews, articles, attacks.”
“Soon it grew tedious, an indignity,” she wrote in the memoir “Flying,” published in 1974.
She was dubbed by Time “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation,” and rebutted by Mailer in his book “The Prisoner of Sex,” in which he mocked her as “the Battling Annie of some new prudery” Meanwhile, she faced taunts from some feminists for saying she was bisexual (she was married at the time), but not gay. During an appearance by Millett at Columbia, an activist stood up and yelled, “Are you a lesbian? Say it. Are you?”
“Five hundred people looking at me. Are you a Lesbian?” Millett wrote. “Everything pauses, faces look up in terrible silence. I hear them not breathe. That word in public, the word I waited half a lifetime to hear. Finally I am accused. ‘Say it. Say you are a Lesbian!’
“Yes, I said. Yes. Because I know what she means. The line goes, inflexible as a fascist edict, that bisexuality is a cop-out. Yes I said yes I am a lesbian. It was the last strength I had.”
Millett’s books after “Sexual Politics” were far more personal and self-consciously literary, whether “Flying” or “Sita, ” a memoir about her sexuality in which she wrote of a lesbian lover who committed suicide; or “The Loony Bin Trip,” an account of her struggles with manic depression and time spent in psychiatric wards.
“There is no denying the misery and stress of life,” she wrote. “The swarms of fears, the blocks to confidence, the crises of decision and choice.”
The daughter of Irish Catholics, Millett was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was long haunted by her father, an alcoholic who beat his children and left his family when Millett was 14. She attended parochial schools as a child and studied English literature at the University of Minnesota and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, from which she graduated with honors.
For a couple of years, Millett lived in Japan, where she met her future husband and fellow sculptor Fumio Yoshimura (they divorced in 1985). They moved to Manhattan in 1963, and Millett embraced the political and artistic passions of the city. She joined the National Organization for Women and began attracting a following for her sculpture, which appeared in Life magazine and has been exhibited worldwide. Through her own Women’s Liberation Cinema production company, she directed the acclaimed feminist documentary “Three Lives.” She also founded the Women’s Art Colony Farm in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Millett taught at several schools, including the University of North Carolina and New York University. In 1968, she was fired from her job as an English lecturer at Barnard College, a decision that stemmed at least in part from her support of student protests against the Vietnam War. The extra free time did allow her to complete “Sexual Politics,” which began as her doctoral thesis at Columbia University.
Less known to younger feminists than Steinem or Friedan, she was honored several times late in life. In 2012, she was given the Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation and the same year was presented a Courage Award for the Arts prize by her longtime friend Yoko Ono. Millett was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2013 and, in her acceptance speech, reflected on her years as an activist.
“The happiness of those times,” the joy of participation, the excitement of being part of my own time, of living on the edge, of being so close to events you can almost intuit them. To raise one’s voice in protest, just as the protest is expressed in life, in the streets, in relationships and friendships,” she said.
“Then, in a moment of public recognition, the face of the individual becomes a women’s face. ”
your ad here
Dry Jordan Launches Project to Grow Crops From Seawater
Water-poor Jordan on Thursday launched a project using seawater to produce crops with clean energy.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Crown Prince Haakon of Norway, which contributed most of the $3.7 million cost, inaugurated the facility in the kingdom’s Red Sea port city of Aqaba.
Haakon told reporters he was “impressed by the way innovative ideas have been translated into a plant the size of four football fields.”
The facility, part of the Sahara Forest Project (SFP), produces “energy, freshwater and food and all this in an arid desert,” he said.
The facility, surrounded by rocky desert, uses seawater to cool greenhouses. A solar-powered plant then desalinates the water for irrigation.
Inside the greenhouses, pesticide-free cucumbers flourish.
The project is set to produce 130 tons of vegetables a year and 10,000 liters of freshwater a day.
“This is just the start,” said Joakim Hauge, head of SFP. He said the organization selected Jordan because it has the required abundance of sunlight and seawater.
Last month, a report by Stanford University suggested that Jordan, one of the world’s driest countries, could face more severe droughts unless new technologies are applied in farming and other sectors.
“Future adaptation to extreme droughts in Jordan will be an immense challenge,” said the report by the university’s School of Earth Science. “The projected negative impacts of more severe droughts of greater duration calls for essential alternatives.”
…
Ex-pharma CEO Shkreli Selling One-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Album
Former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli has put the only known copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album he bought for $2 million in 2015 up for sale on eBay.
In the auction listing for “Once Upon A Time in Shaolin,” Shkreli writes that he has “not carefully listened to the album.” He adds that he purchased the double album “as a gift to the Wu-Tang Clan for their tremendous musical output,” but instead “received scorn” from one of the members of the group. Ghostface Killah mocked Shkreli in a video last year, calling him “the man with the 12-year-old body.”
The top bid for the album stood at just less than $1 million early Thursday.
“Pharma Bro” Shkreli was convicted last month of deceiving investors in a pair of failed hedge funds.
…
Ex-Manson Disciple Must Get Past Governor to See Freedom
Getting the approval of a parole panel was the easy part for Leslie Van Houten, the youngest of Charles Manson’s murderous followers.
Between her and her release stands a governor who has shown zero willingness to allow anyone involved in the Manson killings to go free.
Van Houten, now 68, was found suitable for parole by the two-person state panel after a hearing on Wednesday.
Now, she must still be approved by the state Parole Board, which is likely, but then must hope Gov. Jerry Brown won’t block her release as he did last year.
In blocking her release then, as he has with several would-be parolees from the Manson “family,” Brown said Van Houten had failed to adequately explain to the panel how a model teenager from a privileged Southern California family who had once been a homecoming princess could have turned into a ruthless killer by age 19.
On Wednesday, the panel grilled her for two hours on how she could address those concerns.
“I’ve had a lot of therapy trying to answer that question myself,” she said.
“To tell you the truth, the older I get the harder it is to deal with all of this, to know what I did, how it happened,” added Van Houten, now a frail-looking 68-year-old who appeared before the panel on crutches, her gray hair pulled back in a bun.
Her attorney, Rich Pfeiffer, said after the hearing that he believes Van Houten addressed the concerns the governor had when he denied her parole last year.
“My hope is he’s going to follow the law and let his commissioners do their job,” he said.
He added his client was relieved by Wednesday’s ruling, adding he believes she will be released eventually.
“I’m getting her out of here. That’s not an issue. The question is when,” he said.
No one who took part in the Manson clan’s two-night killing rampage has been released from prison so far.
Van Houten told the panelists she was devastated when her parents divorced when she was 14. Soon after, she said, she began hanging out with her school’s outcast crowd in the Los Angeles suburb of Monrovia. She started smoking marijuana and graduated to LSD at 15. When she was 17, she and her boyfriend ran away to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District during San Francisco’s summer of love.
When they returned, she said, she discovered she was pregnant. When her mother found out, she ordered her to have an abortion and bury her fetus in their backyard.
Soon after, she was traveling up and down the California coast, trying to find peace within herself when acquaintances led her to Manson, who was holed up at an old abandoned movie ranch on the outskirts of Los Angeles where he had recruited what he called a “family” to survive what he insisted would be a race war he would launch by committing a series of random, horrifying murders. His disaffected youthful followers became convinced that the small-time criminal and con man was actually a Christ-like figure and believed him.
Van Houten went on to candidly describe how she joined several other members of the “Manson Family” in killing Los Angeles grocer Leno La Bianca and his wife, Rosemary, in their home on Aug. 9, 1969, carving up La Bianca’s body and smearing the couple’s blood on the walls.
She was not with Manson followers the night before when they killed pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others during a similar bloody rampage.
On the night of the second attack she said she held Rosemary La Bianca down with a pillowcase over her head as others stabbed her dozens of times. Then, ordered by Manson disciple Tex Watson to “do something,” she picked up a butcher knife and stabbed the woman more than a dozen times.
“I feel absolutely horrible about it, and I have spent most of my life trying to find ways to live with it,” she added quietly.
Relatives of the La Biancas didn’t believe her. They spoke emotionally as they pleaded with the commission to reject her parole bid.
“No member of the Manson family deserves parole, ever,” nephew Louis Smaldino said. “She is a total narcissist and only thinks of herself and not the damage she has done.”
The voice of the La Biancas’ oldest grandson, Tony LaMontagne, broke as he noted he’s about to turn 44, the same age his grandfather was when he was killed.
“Please see to it that this fight doesn’t have to happen every year for the rest of our lives,” he said of Van Houten’s nearly two dozen parole hearings.
Family members left before the panel announced its decision.
In reaching it, Parole Commissioner Brian Roberts and Deputy Commissioner Dale Pomantz said they took into account Van Houten’s entire time of incarceration. During those years she has earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in counseling, been certified as a counselor and headed numerous programs to help inmates.
“You’ve been a facilitator, you’ve been a tutor and you’ve been giving back for quite a number of years,” Roberts said.
Still, he warned her that if she is released that living in society again will not be easy. He noted parole officials have heard from “tens of thousands” of people who don’t want her released. But others, he added, including many who have known her since childhood, spoke up for her, saying they’ve seen her mature in prison and become a different person.
“So with that we’d like to wish you good luck,” he said.
your ad here
Saudi Filmmakers Build Audiences Without Cinemas
With daring filmmakers, untold stories and entertainment-starved young people, Saudi Arabia has all the makings of a local movie industry — except for theaters.
As the traditionally austere kingdom cautiously embraces more forms of entertainment, local filmmakers are exploring a new frontier in Saudi art, using the internet to screen films and pushing boundaries of expression — often with surprise backing from top royals.
“Saudi Arabia is the future of filmmaking in the Gulf,” said Butheina Kazim, co-founder of Dubai’s independent cinema platform “Cinema Akil,” pointing to a crop of Saudi films that have emerged in recent years.
Kazim screened three Saudi short films to audiences in Dubai last month, including one called “Wasati,” or moderate in Arabic. The movie is based on a real-life event that took place in the mid-1990s when a group of ultraconservatives rushed the stage during a play in Saudi Arabia and shut it down. The incident dampened theater in Saudi Arabia for years.
The film by Ali Kalthami was screened in Los Angeles last year, and was shown for one night in June at Riyadh’s Al Yamamah University — in the same theater where the play was shut down two decades ago.
One of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent film pioneers, Kalthami is co-founder of C3 Films and Telfaz11, a popular YouTube channel that has amassed more than 1 billion views since it was launched in 2011.
His movie “Wasati” was one of several Saudi shorts produced last year with funding from the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, an initiative named after the founder of the kingdom by Saudi Arabia’s state-oil company Aramco. Kalthami said it was the first time he’d ever received funding for a film from a state-linked entity.
“I think because of the history we made online… they trusted we could tell wonderful stories, human stories in Saudi,” he said.
By using the internet to show films, Telfaz11 and other Saudi production houses have managed to circumvent traditional distribution channels and make do without cinemas. Even so, Saudi filmmakers have to contend with how to tell their stories within the bounds of the kingdom’s ultraconservative mores and its limits on free speech.
It wasn’t always like this. There used to be movie theaters across Saudi Arabia from the 1960s through the 1980s, until religious hard-liners were given greater sway over public life. In the years that followed, Saudis could rent movies from video stores, though scenes of lovemaking and cursing were edited out. Saudis also had access to movies on satellite channels.
Nowadays, Saudis can stream movies online — where Telfaz11 has partnered with YouTube.
Some of the local films being produced are purely for entertainment, while others wade into the myriad everyday challenges people in Saudi Arabia face.
The film “Wadjda” made history in 2013 by becoming the first Academy Award entry for Saudi Arabia, though it wasn’t nominated for the Oscars. The movie follows the story of a 10-year-old girl who dreams of having a bicycle just like the boys in her ultraconservative neighborhood, where men and women are strictly segregated and where boys and girls attend separate schools. The film was written and directed by Saudi female director Haifaa al-Mansour, who shot the film entirely in the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia is vying again this year for an Oscar in the foreign-language film category. The film “Barakah Meets Barakah,” by director Mahmoud Sabbagh, made its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. The movie, which has been called the kingdom’s first romantic comedy, tells the story of a civil servant who falls for a Saudi girl whose Instagram posts have made her a local celebrity.
Though four years apart, the two films tackle the issue of gender segregation in Saudi Arabia, which remains strictly enforced.
The emergence of a Saudi film scene is happening as the kingdom begins to loosen the reins on fun and entertainment after nearly two decades without cinemas or concerts.
Saudi Arabia’s 31-year-old heir to throne, Mohammed bin Salman, is set to inherit a nation where more than half of the population is under 25, and most are active on social media, where they can access the world beyond the reach of state censors.
The crown prince is behind an ambitious blueprint to transform Saudi Arabia’s economy and society. He wants to encourage Saudis to spend more of their money locally, including doubling what Saudi families spend on entertainment in the kingdom.
While Saudi Arabia’s influential clerics and many citizens consider Western-style entertainment sinful, the prince’s backing means there could soon be cinemas in the kingdom. Prince Mohammed’s nonprofit, MiSK, sponsored a screening in August of an Arabic 3D action film in the capital, Riyadh. There have been other similar screenings in the coastal city of Jiddah.
The government has also backed a Saudi film festival that’s taken place for the past few years in the eastern city of Dhahran. This year, some 60 Saudi films were screened.
After watching the Saudi shorts in Dubai’s Cinema Akil and meeting the filmmakers, aspiring filmmaker Lamia al-Shwwier, who’s just graduated with a master’s degree from the Los Angeles campus of the New York Film Academy, said she felt confident about the prospects of a Saudi film industry.
“We have so many incredible stories to tell, whether they are stories of success or challenge. Our society is rich in stories and ideas,” she said.
…
Space Business Booming in Cape Canaveral
After the last space shuttle mission ended, in July 2011, the activity at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, seemed to be waning. NASA’s next launch vehicle was still in the early stages of design, so launch activity was transferred to the Russian space center in Baikonur. But this opened new opportunities for the space center, and today it is booming with private business activity. VOA’s George Putic reports.
…
House of Representatives Passes Bill on Self-Driving Vehicles
U.S. congressmen have approved a bill to deploy self-driving cars and prevent states from blocking them. The U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday passed the bill that would allow automakers to obtain exemptions to deploy up to 25,000 vehicles without meeting auto safety standards in the first year. That number would increase to 100,000 vehicles annually over the next three years. Automakers and technology companies hope to begin deploying vehicles around 2020. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.
…
Waste Not: Belgian Startup to Print 3-D Recycled Sunglasses
A Belgium-based start-up is on its way to making the world a bit sunnier, by printing the first 3-D sunglasses out of recycled plastic.
The Antwerp-based company w.r.yuma – pronounced “We are Yuma” and named after one of the sunniest places on earth – began a month-long online crowd-sourcing campaign on Kickstarter on Wednesday.
After two years of prototyping and testing different materials, it promises to transform old car dashboards, soda bottles, fridges and other plastic waste into different colored shades.
“It’s the icon of cool, really, and when you wear, literally you are looking to the world through a different set of lenses, and that’s exactly the message that I want to bring,” Founder Sebastiaan de Neubourg said of the company, named after Yuma, Arizona.
“I want to inspire people to have, quite literally, another look at waste.”
The plastic waste is sourced from the Netherlands and Belgium’s Flemish region. The waste is fed into the 3-D printer, melted to form thin strands of plastic wire and layered together to construct the frames.
These are then assembled by hand and fitted with Italian made Mazzuchelli lenses.
Marketing schemes include setting up stands at music festivals to transform plastic drinking cups into sunglasses on the spot.
The company is also making a limited number of soda white sunglasses made from 90 percent recycled PET plastic from soda bottles.
It is also inviting would-be clients to return the glasses once they are done with them to be turned into a new pair of glasses.
“The idea … [is] also to make sure that the materials eventually come back to us in a closed loop system,” de Neubourg said.
With five unique designs and three colours of lenses to choose from, de Neubourg is trying to make sustainable recycling fashionable and useful. The sunglasses will be shipped to customers in January 2018.
“I think that sustainability should become mainstream,” said de Neubourg, a former mechanical engineer for a sustainability consultancy.
“We’re not going to solve the plastic waste problem by just taking this plastic and putting it in sunglasses, but it’s a first step. … I want to touch a lot of people with that message.”
…
ePUMB skype chat
