Month: January 2021

Categories
Business

JC Penney CEO Jill Soltau to depart retailer after rising from chapter

JC Penney CEO Jill Soltau to leave retailer after emerging from bankruptcy

The signage will be displayed outside a JC Penney Co. store in Chicago, Illinois.

Christopher Dilts | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Jill Soltau, CEO of JC Penney, who wanted to flip the contested department store, will leave the company on Thursday.

The company’s new owners, Simon Property Group and Brookfield Asset Management, said Wednesday that they are looking for a new leader “focused on modern retail, the customer experience and the goal of creating a sustainable and lasting JCPenney.”

The Plano, Texas-based retailer filed for bankruptcy in May. It was bought by the two US mall owners in the fall and showed up earlier this month. It joined a growing list of retailers marginalized by the coronavirus pandemic. However, the old retailer’s problems began before the global health crisis. Sales have decreased annually since 2016. At the time of filing for bankruptcy, the sales area of ​​around 860 stores in 2001 was less than a quarter of the store base.

About two years ago, the company hired Soltau to advance its turnaround efforts after its former CEO Marvin Ellison left to run Lowe’s. Before that she was CEO of the fabric and handicraft retailer Joann Stores. She also worked for Sears, Kohl’s and Shopko stores. At the time, news of her hiring sent stocks up as investors hoped she would bring fresh ideas and fuel growth in the department store.

This year, however, the company’s efforts were scaled back as its stores were temporarily closed during the pandemic and its already tight finances were hit.

According to a press release, Simon and Brookfield have selected Simon’s chief investment officer Stanley Shashoua as interim CEO. You have started an executive search with the strategic partner Authentic Brands Group. The licensing firm owns interests in other retailers that have emerged from bankruptcy, including Brooks Brothers and Forever 21.

Categories
Entertainment

11 Issues Our Critics Are Trying Ahead to in 2021

11 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2021

As a new year begins, our reviewers highlight the television, movies, music, art, and streaming dance and theater that await them before summer.

Jason Zinoman

Sure, the new Netflix series “History of swear wordsIn the premiere on January 5th, comics like Sarah Silverman, Joel Kim Booster and Nikki Glaser can be seen, who work as talking heads and break down the meaning, effect and poetry of six important bad words, the majority of which cannot be published here. One exception is “Damn” which, as you can learn from this show, used to be much more taboo than it is today. And there are also some very clever academics who will explain such a story, some of whom are tainted with some questionable legends. Etymology can be really exciting. But let’s face it: the main reason to look forward to this show is the prospect of its host, Nicolas Cage, hammy screaming curses over and over again. I’ve seen the screeners and it is as expected.

Jon Pareles

How does a songwriter hold onto an honest vulnerability as her audience grows? It is a question Julien Baker started wrestling when she released her first solo album, “Sprained Ankle”. She sang about trauma, addiction, self-doubt, self-invention and the pursuit of belief, with subtle passion in naked arrangements. And she quickly found listeners who held on to every word. With her second album “Turn Out the Lights” and her songs together in the Boygenius group (with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus), she used better studios and relied on richer sounds, but projected intimacy. Your third album “Little oblivions, ”Is due February 26th. With this she scales her music to larger rooms, supported by a full rock band with ringing guitars and powerful drums. But she doesn’t hide behind them; She’s still ruthless and ruthless, especially around herself.

When I heard that the Scarlet Witch, also known as Wanda Maximoff, was joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I was thrilled. Sometimes known as the daughter of Magneto (yes, we have an X-Men crossover here), the powerful mutant had the ability to change reality. So imagine my disappointment when Wanda hunched over and shot red explosions from her hands, but not much else. Wanda, they got you wrong.

But I am not only enthusiastic about “WandaVisionShe finally blamed this heroine for her fault. The new series that plays the main role Elizabeth Olsen and arrives on Disney + on January 15th, grants the Scarlet Witch her own universe to manipulate and uses it to play with a fresh tone and new aesthetic for the MCU. Unconventional and moody and a perversion of the classic sitcom series, “WandaVision” seems to give its superhero the space to unfold and unravel in a way that she couldn’t in the overcrowded “Avengers” films. Olsen seems up to the task, and Kathryn Hahn, Paul Bettany, and Randall Park are also there to provide additional comedy and pathos.

Jason Farago

This mid-career retrospective of Julie more and its great, lavish abstractions made a big hit when it opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last year and, belatedly, in the artist’s hometown of March 25th Whitney Museum of American Art. 20 years ago, Mehretu became known for his dense wall-scale paintings, whose curved lines suggested flight paths or architectural representations. Later she turned to a freer, more fluid marking that places abstract painting in the areas of migration and war, capital and climate.

Her latest work, created during the initial lockdown and seen in a thunderous show at the Marian Goodman Gallery, is less readable, more digital and more confident than ever. One must concentrate fully to fully appreciate its jostling layers of screen-printed grids, sprayed veils, and calligraphic strokes of black and red. Come early, take a good look.

Jesse Green

Enough with “The Crown”. Television may have cornered the market with stories about the nobility, but it was theater that traditionally got into heads of state and tried to understand what they were thinking.

This tradition will be updated in February when the Steppenwolf Theater presents “Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!” – a filmed piece by Vivian JO Barnes, directed by Great Mengesha. Inspired and / or appalled by the experiences of Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle, Barnes envisions a dialogue in which a black duchess helps adjust a future black duchess to her new position. Together they explore what it means to join an institution that pretends to feel honored to be admitted even if it eats them alive.

That the institution in question is not only about kings but also about racism when the two are different adds to the story. How black women negotiate power and at what price in traditionally white arenas is something that resonates well beyond Balmoral.

Mike Hale

The title character of the Syfy series “Resident alien, “The premiere on January 27th does not have a green card, but it does have green skin or at least a green-purple exoskeleton. He was sent to earth to exterminate us. There is a delay and in the meantime he has to pretend to be a small town doctor in Colorado and learn with the greatest awkwardness how to act like a human. This snowy scary monster comedy won’t make a top 10 lists, but it looks like a scream and is tailor-made for the eccentric comic book talents of Alan Tudyk (“Doom Patrol”, “Arrested Development”), who doesn’t feel comfortable in any skin he is in.

On December 4, 1969, 14 Chicago police officers raided an apartment owned by members of the Black Panther Party with a search warrant for weapons and explosives. When they left, party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were dead. Congressman Bobby Rush, then the party’s deputy minister, testified that 21-year-old Hampton was sleeping in his bed when police shot him, one version of what happened who were investigated in The Murder of Fred Hampton, a 1971 documentary. Now there is a feature film about the robbery. “Judas and the black messiah“Tells the story of Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) and William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), an FBI informant who was part of Hampton’s security team and reunites the two stars of Get Out. Shaka King’s (” Newlyweeds ”) Is expected to be released in early 2021.

Margaret Lyons

“David makes people“Is one of the finest dramas in recent years, and its structural daring added new facets to the coming-of-age genre. David (Take care of McDowell) was in middle school for season 1, but for the upcoming second season (currently slated for early summer at OWN) he’s in his thirties and facing challenges for adults. That kind of time jump – and creative jump – would be fascinating on its own, but the way the show captured the warlike thoughts in adolescent psychology makes me even more excited to see how it portrays the turbulence of maturity.

Gia Kourlas

Since the beginning of the pandemic, robust digital programming has been at the Martha Graham Dance Company distinguished himself with his multifaceted approach to researching the works of his groundbreaking modern choreographer. It helps, of course, to have Graham’s works excavated at all. (And access to a healthy archive.)

Since most dance companies continue to keep their distance from the stage, the Graham Group – now in its 95th season – opens the year with thematically arranged digital programs. The main focus in January is on nature and the elements, both in Graham’s dances and in more recent works. How is the natural world used metaphorically?

On January 9, “Martha Matinee,” hosted by Artistic Director Janet Eilber, will view Graham’s mysterious, ritual “Dark Meadow” (1946) with vintage footage by Graham himself along with the company’s latest “Dark Meadow Suite”. And on January 19th, the company unveiled New @ Graham with a closer look at Canticle for Innocent Comedians (1952), Graham’s unabashed festival of nature, with an emphasis on the moon and stars.

Jason Farago

In this market it is better if you sublet! If the Frick Collection Eventually it received approval to renovate and expand its mansion on Fifth Avenue. It started looking for temporary digs – and had a happy hiatus when the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would vacate the rental of Marcel Breuer’s brutalist citadel three years early. Henry Clay Frick’s will blocks credits from the core collection, according to Frick’s modernist pop-up Frick Madisonbecomes the first and probably only new setting for Bellini’s mysterious “St. Francis in the Desert ”, Rembrandt’s lively“ Polish Rider ”or Holbein’s duel portraits by Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More (a must for fans of“ Wolf Hall ”).

However, modern architecture is only part of the customization; The Frick is a house museum, and the Breuer subletting offers curators the unique opportunity to browse and restore the collection outside of a living space. The real UFOs at Frick Madison expected in the first quarter of 2021 could therefore be the decorative arts: all those gold-plated clocks, all that Meissen porcelain that has been relocated from plutocratic salons to concrete cubes.

Lindsay Zoladz

Few new years have come with such high expectations as 2021. To avoid disappointment, let’s calibrate our hopes: I know that New Zealand pop poet Lorde promised in 2021 to bring out at least a book of photos from her last trip to Antarctica. Titled “Go south” it marks the writing through Lorde (who describes her trip as “that great white pallet cleaner, kind of heavenly foyer that I had to walk through to do the next one”) and photos of Harriet wereThe net proceeds from the sale will go to a scholarship fund for climate research. Cool. I love it. My real aim of anticipation is of course Lorde’s third album, the long awaited sequel to their spectacularly intimate 2017 release, “Melodrama”, but after a year like 2020 I won’t rush it. You know what? I am. Lorde, Ella, Ms. Yelich-O’Connor: Please release your epic concept album on glaciers and spiritual rebirth at the South Pole in 2021. After a year in the Antarctic climate of the soul, which was 2020, we all deserve this.

Categories
Health

New York Mayor de Blasio needs to immunize 1 million residents in January

New York Mayor de Blasio wants to immunize 1 million residents in January

A FDNY EMS Fire Department employee receives a COVID-19 Moderna vaccine amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in the Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, New York, United States. December 23, 2020.

Carlo Allegri | Reuters

New York officials plan to vaccinate 1 million residents against Covid-19 in January. The federal government and drug manufacturers need to accelerate the production and distribution of the vaccine.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday the city will use schools, pop-up clinics and “whatever it takes” to reach 1 million people in a month.

“We know New York City can vaccinate 1 million people in January and really get this thing going,” de Blasio told CNN. “Every time we vaccinate someone, we’ve come one step closer to the coronavirus in terms of its terrible impact on society.”

IIt’s an ambitious goal considering the city only received 390,425 doses of vaccine and, according to the city, could only administer about 78,000 shots.

“This thing isn’t moving the way it needs to be in the US,” said the mayor. “New York City will show that we can speed this up and vaccinate people at record speed. And we want the whole country to be a part of it because we have to move faster to fight the coronavirus if we want to recover.”

The U.S. government has fallen far short of its original target of delivering at least 20 million Covid vaccine shots before the end of the year – something federal officials have admitted is disappointing. The US has so far distributed 12.4 million doses of vaccine and vaccinated only 2.8 million people with the first Pfizer or Moderna two-shot schedule, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. U.S. officials say the data is 72 to 96 hours behind due to state and local delays. Even so, it’s still a fraction of the Trump administration’s original goal.

The slower-than-expected adoption of Covid vaccines has been disappointing, said the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, opposite CNN on Thursday.

“We agree that this number is lower than we had hoped,” Moncef Slaoui, chief advisor to the government’s Operation Warp Speed ​​vaccination program, told reporters on Wednesday. “We know it should be better and we’re working hard to make it better.”

De Blasio’s explanation comes from the fact that health officials in Colorado and California have discovered a new strain of the coronavirus in a few cases in those states. The new variant, which de Blasio said has not yet been found in New York, was first identified in the UK and appears to be far more contagious.

It also comes as the city prepares for its annual New Years Eve celebrations, albeit without the usual crowds. Only a few hundred people, instead of the usual thousands, will be in Times Square with masks and by invitation only for the midnight ball drop for the kick of 2021. De Blasio said the one year that unites all Americans in this divided country is “We want to get rid of the hell of 2020.”

Categories
World News

A Locked-Down Europe Bids a Subdued Good Riddance to an Terrible Yr

A Locked-Down Europe Bids a Subdued Good Riddance to an Awful Year

Saying world wishes for a year had been an illusion; the greatest event in Paris was really one. It may be an optimistic “welcome to the other side”.

Inside a virtual Notre Dame Cathedral – a resurrected, reinterpreted version of the fire-lashed treasure – the city broadcast a computer-generated concert and light show with no one actually inside the cave-like landmark and no crowd outside.

Most of the people living now have never seen a year in which Europe, like much of the world, was so eager to break free of it – or was unable to go out with fanfare. Vaccines are the first real glimmers of hope, but the coronavirus is still ruling uncontrollably, a new variant is fueling new fears and much of the continent is locked in some form.

Concerts? Canceled. Crowds and parties? Forbidden. Stay out all night? Don’t even think about it. Across Europe, where Covid-19 has killed nearly 600,000 people, cities and nations sent the message that the only acceptable place to spend New Years Eve was home, and they tried to arrange enough spectacle or online shows to to keep people there.

“Covid loves a crowd,” said Professor Stephen Powis, England’s medical director for the UK’s National Health Service. “So please leave the parties for later in the year.”

In a televised address from the Élysée Palace, French President Emmanuel Macron, who had recovered from his own virus, said: “The year 2020 will end in the course of development: with efforts and restrictions.”

  • in the BerlinThe traditional television broadcast from the Brandenburg Gate ended without fireworks or live viewers. It’s one of 56 popular New Year’s Eve spots in the city that authorities are closing overnight in hopes to discourage banned outdoor gatherings. Indoor meetings are limited to five adults from no more than two households. The sale of private fireworks, a tradition for the holidays that Germans call New Years Eve because it is the feast day of St. New Years Eve, was banned – although some went off anyway. “It is necessary that this is probably the quietest New Year’s Eve Germany can remember,” said Jens Spahn, the country’s health minister.

  • Instead of his annual live concert outdoors Rome replaced an online streamed celebration with a series of performances and a hard-to-describe event, part concert, part light show and part stargazing entitled “How to Hear the Universe in a Spider / Web”. After Italy went under 10 p.m. curfew and banned the traditional New Year’s Eve fireworks, President Sergio Mattarella said in his annual address that the pandemic had changed the country, “exacerbating past fragility, exacerbating old inequalities and creating new ones”.

  • in the GenevaFireworks around Lake Geneva (also known as Lac Leman) in the heart of the city have been canceled and bars and restaurants have closed, although restrictions on private gatherings have been eased from five to ten people. Many residents of the quiet city had set out for open Swiss ski areas – much to the chagrin of neighboring European countries, which decided to close their slopes to prevent the further spread of coronavirus cases.

  • in the LondonBig Ben, which has been largely silent in recent years when its clock tower was renovated, was scheduled to ring 12 times at midnight, one of the few standout moments in a country where major celebrations have been canceled. Most Britons were forbidden to socialize with anyone outside their own household. This rule was backed up by a fine of up to £ 1,000 or more than $ 1,300.

  • Madrid The night curfew was eased from midnight to 1:30 a.m., which is usually this early for a night in Spain, but the traditional gathering in Puerta del Sol square has been canceled. People were told to stay home as much as possible, eating the traditional New Years Eve grapes while watching events on television and gathering in groups of no more than six people.

  • And in ParisThe only people roaming the Champs-Élysées – where around 300,000 people gathered for giant fireworks a year ago – were some of the 100,000 police officers stationed across the country to keep crowds from gathering. City officials urged people to watch the electronic music artist Jean-Michel Jarre’s Notre Dame virtual concert, an event that connects the old and the modern, the old and the new year, the pandemic and hope for an end. It would be a message of hope and a “tribute to Notre-Dame who is weakened”, Jarre told the French media, “like all of us”.

Categories
Business

5 Anchorwomen to Go away NY1 After Settling Discrimination Go well with

5 Anchorwomen to Leave NY1 After Settling Discrimination Suit

Five NY1 presenters, including longtime New York television personality Roma Torre, are leaving the local news network after settling an age and gender discrimination lawsuit against the beloved local media institution.

“After a long dialogue with NY1, we believe it is in the interests of everyone – ours, NY1, and our viewers – that this dispute be resolved, and we have mutually agreed to part ways,” the plaintiffs wrote on Thursday in a statement. In addition to Ms. Torre, these are Amanda Farinacci, Vivian Lee, Jeanine Ramirez and Kristen Shaughnessy.

The terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

The announcement ended a legal saga that began in June 2019 when the anchor women, ages 40 to 61, sued NY1’s parent company, cable company Charter Communications. They said they had been forced out of thin air and turned away by managers who preferred younger and less experienced hosts.

The presenters’ decision to leave NY1 entirely was a staggering result for many viewers, including Governor Andrew M. Cuomo.

“2020 was a year of loss and NY1 has just lost five of its best reporters,” Cuomo wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “This is an enormous loss for all of your viewers.”

For New Yorkers who revered NY1 as a publicly accessible public space for the five boroughs – with gracious anchors that were part of the all-in-the-neighborhood charm – the discrimination lawsuit persisted. In the legal complaint, Ms. Torre, a signature-on-air presence that joined the network in early 1992, described her frustration at what she thought of including NY1’s more favorable treatment of the station’s star morning anchor, Pat Kiernan The advertising campaign and a new studio that they are not allowed to use were sparkling.

Charter executives responded that the lawsuit and allegations were unfounded and described NY1 as “a respectful and fair place to work.” The company found that another longtime female presenter, Cheryl Wills, had been named to host a prominent weekday newscast as part of a network redesign.

On Thursday, Charter, based in Stamford, Connecticut, said it was “pleased” with the solution to the anchor women’s suit. “We would like to thank you for your years of dedicated service in reporting the news to New Yorkers and wish you all the best in your future endeavors,” Charter said in a statement.

Ms. Torre and the other plaintiffs continued to appear on their regular slots in NY1 while the lawsuit was pending. But occasionally tensions came into view.

Last month, the New York Post wrote to journalists about an attorney’s request that Charter reveal Mr. Kiernan’s contract as a means of determining his salary. (The claim was denied.) Another lawsuit accused Mr. Kiernan’s talent agent of attempting to intimidate Ms. Torre by telling her brother the lawsuit should be dropped, an allegation the agent denied.

The women were represented by Douglas H. Wigdor, a prominent Manhattan attorney who has filed discrimination lawsuits against large corporations like Citigroup, Fox News, and Starbucks.

The lawsuit also touched upon greater tensions in the television news business, an industry where older women often make careers when male colleagues thrive. In the world of New York television, the case brought to mind Sue Simmons, the popular WNBC TV host who was ousted in 2012 and whose longtime co-host Chuck Scarborough continues to be a star of the station.

“We feel we are being withdrawn,” Ms. Torre told the New York Times in 2019 when the lawsuit was filed. “Men age with a feeling of heaviness on television, and we as women have an expiration date.”