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Entertainment

Los Angeles to Require Masks at Massive Out of doors Concert events and Occasions

With coronavirus cases continuing to surge, Los Angeles County said Tuesday that masks must be worn at large outdoor concerts and sporting events that attract more than 10,000 people.

The new rule, which comes into effect Thursday at 11:59 p.m., means that visitors to the Hollywood Bowl, Dodger Stadium, outdoor music festivals and events designated by the county as “mega-events” must now wear masks. The rule applies to people regardless of their vaccination status.

People are allowed to take off their masks while eating and drinking, but only for a short time.

The order came as cities across the country took steps to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Chicago joined Los Angeles County, Washington, DC, San Francisco, and other areas to require masks in indoor public spaces. New York City Requires Proof of Vaccination for Indoor Dining and Entertainment Activities; Broadway will require proof of vaccination and masks when it reopens.

The new rules requiring masks at major outdoor events in Los Angeles came when the county reported that cases, hospitalizations, and positivity rates have all increased significantly. According to data collected by the New York Times, Los Angeles County is seeing an average of 3,361 new cases per day, an 18 percent increase from the average two weeks ago.

Los Angeles County has been aggressive in introducing masking requirements amid evidence that the Delta variant of the virus has spread. In the past month, people were forced to wear masks in public indoor spaces, regardless of their vaccination status.

Covid guidelines at the Hollywood Bowl have changed repeatedly over the year as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which runs the Bowl, tried to adhere to the county’s changing regulations. It has drawn large crowds for the past six weeks. With a few exceptions, the people in the audience were maskless, as allowed by the district rules. But they tend to put on their masks when they join the hustle and bustle of people walking down the crowded sidewalks after the show.

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Politics

Harvey Weinstein ordered extradited to Los Angeles to face intercourse costs

Harvey Weinstein leaves the courtroom in New York City with attorney Benjamin Brafman before the New York State Supreme Court on October 11, 2018.

Stephanie Keith | Getty Images

Harvey Weinstein, the once prominent film producer convicted of rape last year, was extradited from New York on Tuesday to face sexual assault charges in Los Angeles.

Weinstein, who is currently serving a 23-year sentence in New York State, is charged with rape, sexual harassment and other crimes in connection with five incidents that allegedly occurred between 2004 and 2013.

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His lawyers fought extradition to Los Angeles last year, citing, among other things, his poor health.

But Erie County, New York, Judge Kenneth Case ultimately dismissed her arguments on Tuesday.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Weinstein, 69, is unlikely to move to California until July at the earliest.

Weinstein faces up to 140 years in prison if convicted in the Los Angeles case.

Weinstein became the face of the #MeToo movement in 2017 after The New Yorker magazine and the New York Times published articles detailing allegations made by women alleging that he committed rampant sexual misconduct against them.

The entertainment company co-founder Miramax was convicted by the Manhattan Supreme Court in February 2020 of a first-degree sexual act against production assistant Mimi Haleyi in 2006 and third-degree rape for assaulting aspiring actress Jessica Mann in a hotel room in 2013.

Weinstein’s lawyers appealed his conviction in April.

During his career, Weinstein has produced award-winning films such as Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love and Gangs of New York.

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Business

Movie show chain in Los Angeles, pressured to shut by the pandemic, is not going to reopen.

ArcLight Cinemas, a popular chain of Los Angeles-based cinemas, including the historic Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, will permanently close all locations, Pacific Theaters announced on Monday after the pandemic decimated cinema business.

ArcLight’s locations in and around Hollywood have been home to many movie premieres and are popular spots for moviegoers looking for blockbusters and prestige titles. They are operated by Pacific Theaters, which also operate a handful of theaters under the Pacific name, and are owned by Decurion.

“After closing our doors more than a year ago, today we have to share the difficult and sad news that Pacific will not reopen its ArcLight cinemas and Pacific Theaters locations,” the company said in a statement.

“This was not the result anyone wanted,” he added, “but despite a tremendous amount of effort that has exhausted all potential options, the company has no viable path forward.”

Between the Pacific and ArcLight brands, the company owned 16 theaters and more than 300 screens.

The cinema business was particularly hard hit by the pandemic. But in the past few weeks, most of the country’s biggest theater chains, including AMC and Regal Cinemas, have reopened in anticipation of the list of Hollywood films to be reopened, many after repeated delays due to pandemic restrictions. There is even a hint of optimism in the air after the Warner Bros. movie “Godzilla vs. Kong” has raked in revenues of around $ 70 million since it opened over the Easter weekend.

Still, the industry’s trade organization, the National Association of Theater Owners, has long warned that the criminal closings would most likely affect smaller regional players like ArcLight and Pacific. In March, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, which operates around 40 locations nationwide, announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but that most locations would remain operational during the restructuring.

This does not appear to be the case with Pacific Theaters, which two knowledgeable people said they laid off all their staff on Monday.

The response to the ArcLight Hollywood closure has been emotional, including a pour out on Twitter.

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Business

Los Angeles Museums Can Reopen, at 25 P.c Capability

LOS ANGELES – After the museums had been closed for a year, they were finally given the right to reopen indoors on Monday with a capacity of 25 percent when the state of Los Angeles County moved into its less restrictive red level of Covid-19 Relocated regulations.

“It’s exciting that we’ve finally got permission to reopen,” said Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Art Museum, which is slated to reopen April 1, was able to see the beauty, comfort and exposure to the Using the topics of our time that museums can offer. After all, so can those in Los Angeles. “

The change reflects an improving pandemic picture in Los Angeles, where coronavirus cases decline as the number of vaccinations increases. Visitors can finally see shows like Made in LA 2020 at Hammer and the Huntington, an important showcase for emerging local artists.

The lengthy shutdown cost the county’s museums, zoos, and aquariums more than $ 5 billion in 2020, according to the California Association of Museums. Galleries were allowed to operate because they are classified as trade.

Some museum directors said it would take a while to set up the appropriate security protocols. Govan said LACMA “can’t wait to greet visitors in person.”

Ann Philbin, director of the hammer, said, “It will take us a few weeks to get up. We look to the middle of April. “

“I’m so excited to see people in the galleries and that ‘Made in LA’ is finally getting an audience,” she added.

Categories
Entertainment

Silas Farley to Lead Dance Academy in Los Angeles

Silas Farley, a retired New York ballet dancer who surprised many when he left the company at the beginning of his dance career last year, will succeed Jenifer Ringer as director of dance programs at Colburn School in Los Angeles on July 1, said the school with on Wednesday. He will become Dean of the Trudl Zipper Dance Institute, and Loen Callaghan, former director of the North Carolina Dance Theater School and Miami City Ballet School, will succeed James Fayette as Associate Dean.

Ringer and Fayette, who are both former City Ballet Headmasters, began their tenure at Colburn School in 2014, raising the profile of the dance department in both teaching and professional circles. In a phone interview, Ringer said she and Fayette want to spend more time with their young children and be close to their family in South Carolina, but will keep a relationship with school and return frequently to teach.

Ringer said that 26-year-old Farley, who created a piece with the students during the school’s virtual summer intensive course and choreographed part of his virtual production of “The Nutcracker,” immediately came to mind as the head of the school. He was also proposed as a candidate by Sel Kardan, President of the Colburn School.

“It felt like the right next step,” Farley said in a phone interview from Dallas, where he spent the past year as an artist-in-residence in the dance department of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University.

The Colburn School, Farley said, is already a world-class center with a music school. “And the hope is that the name is synonymous with the best dance training,” he said, “as if the Paris Opera Ballet School and the Paris Conservatory were in one place.”

Farley, who said he has always wanted to be a leader in the dance world, does not allow himself to be discouraged from entering an important position at a young age. He said he knew he would be helped by Callaghan, who was the director of the ballet school he joined when he was 9 and with which he still has a close relationship.

“She will be an amazing contributor and teach me about the budgetary, administrative dimension of being an art guide,” he said.

Since his early teens, Farley has been observing, reading and learning all about ballet, choreography and dance history. He began teaching at the School of American Ballet in 2012 and has taught at many institutions including Ballet Austin and the Boston Ballet School. He has also been a board member of the George Balanchine Foundation since 2019 and, since last year, the most knowledgeable and sociable presenter of City Ballets “Hear the Dance” podcast.

“He’s young but he’s been teaching for a long time, and I love how passionate he is about dance and dance history,” said Ringer. “He wants to learn both and has a wealth of expertise.” She added that she was excited that Farley “as a man of color in the role will be a beacon in the dance world”.

Farley said he wanted to promote the freedom of choice among Colburn School students and develop whole dancers. “I don’t want automata that are programmed to perform dance steps,” he said. Dance history, he added, should be an integral part of a dancer’s education, “not a 30-minute-a-week add-on”.

Diversity issues would need to be addressed on all fronts, what types of ballets are performed, what music is selected, who teaches and who has access to school. “The wider a network, the richer our art form,” he said. “Ballet is a big tent with a big hug, and there’s space to welcome everyone.”

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Business

Washington Publish, Reuters and Los Angeles Occasions Seek for New Prime Editors

Vox, the flagship of Vox Media, has two high-profile vacancies: Editor-in-Chief and Senior Vice President. Both jobs will be filled by Lauren B. Williams, one of the relatively few black women to have run a large general interest media company. In November, she announced that she was heading to a startup, Capital B, a website targeting black communities nationwide. Vox Media has limited its search for the next Vox editor to three finalists, said two people with knowledge of the matter who were not empowered to publicly discuss it.

HuffPost will likely not name its next editor until after it completes its sale to BuzzFeed, a deal that was announced in November. Jonah Peretti, who will be the managing director of the combined companies, is leading the search with Mark Schoofs, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.

HuffPost hasn’t had an editor-in-chief since Lydia Polgreen, a former New York Times deputy editor-in-chief who ran the site for three years, left Spotify in March for podcasting company Gimlet Media. A BuzzFeed spokesperson said the search involved “a strong pool of diverse candidates.”

A number of other outlets are on the alert. Since December Wired, Condé Nast’s tech-oriented magazine, has been looking for a replacement for its editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson, who is leaving as the Atlantic’s chief executive. Leading candidates for the wired job include Nilay Patel, 40, editor-in-chief of The Verge, a Vox Media website, and Megan Greenwell, 37, editor of Wired.com, according to three people with search skills.

Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s Chief Content Officer, has the final say on the election. A Condé Nast spokesman declined to comment on the details of the search.

As members of the emerging generation of journalism refine their résumés, watch a possible change at the New York Times as its editor-in-chief Dean Baquet approaches the newspaper’s usual 66-year retirement age for editors and top executives. Mr Baquet turned 64 in September and there have been numerous promotions among the newspaper’s editors lately.

Categories
Health

Operating low on oxygen, emergency employees in Los Angeles County are advised to manage the minimal vital.

California’s daily coronavirus case numbers remain about four times what it was during the state’s summer flood, and officials predict the aftermath of a December wave related to holiday gatherings will worsen over the winter.

After new infections – fueled by Thanksgiving trips and gatherings, then Christmas festivities – led to a surge the state hadn’t seen before, the trend in its new cases flattened somewhat in the early days of 2021.

But there are more than twice as many Covid-19 patients in California hospitals as there were a month ago, and many intensive care units in the state are overcrowded. It has also been found that at least six people in the state are infected with the new, more transmissible variant of the virus first identified in the UK.

The state is also facing a lack of oxygen for patients and has deployed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the California Emergency Medical Services Authority to help with the delivery and refilling of oxygen tanks.

As a sign of how bad the shortage is, Marianne Gausche-Hill, the medical director of the Los Angeles County EMS agency, issued guidelines on Sunday for emergency responders to administer the “minimum amount of oxygen” required keep the patient’s oxygen saturation at a level or just over 90 percent. (Levels in their low 90s or below are an issue for people with Covid-19.)

In the brutal logic of the pandemic, more cases inevitably lead to more suffering and death. As of Monday evening, 4,258 people had died with Covid-19 in the past two weeks, compared to 3,043 in the two weeks prior.

Updated

Jan. 5, 2021, 6:31 p.m. ET

“This is a deadly disease, this is a deadly pandemic,” Governor Gavin Newsom told reporters on Monday. “It remains deadlier today than at any point in the history of the pandemic.”

Some progress has been made. For example, California’s daily average of 38,086 cases per day for the past week is an 11 percent decrease from the average for two weeks earlier. And although hospital stays in Covid-19 have increased 18 percent to 20,618 in the past two weeks, that means a slight flattening of the curve, according to Governor Newsom.

But the state’s last major Covid-19 surge in the summer only caused about 10,000 infections on the worst days. And in Los Angeles County, the recent crisis has made the healthcare system so thin that patients arriving at a hospital were recently ordered to wait in an outdoor tent.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Sunday that the county’s recent spike infected a new person every six seconds and that many transmissions were in private settings.

“It’s a message for all of America: We may not all have the same density as LA, but what is happening in LA can and will come to many churches in America,” he said.

The state’s worst outbreak is centered in southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, where intensive care units are zero percent. Officials are now working to recruit additional nurses to handle the flood of patients. Governor Newsom said 90 patients were being held in “alternative care locations” outside of hospitals to ease the burden.

More vaccinations would help ease the burden on California, but Governor Newsom said vaccinations were only just increasing after some early challenges. So far, the state has only administered about 35 percent of the coronavirus vaccine doses received.

“That’s not good enough,” he said. “We recognize that.”

In the meantime, says Dr. Mark Ghaly, the secretary of state for health and human services, Californians should be extra careful when meeting with people outside of their household as the virus is so widespread.

“The same activities that you did a month ago today are much riskier today than from a Covid transmission perspective,” he said.

Categories
Health

Coronavirus surge hits Los Angeles

Los Angeles County, already in a devastating spike in coronavirus cases after Thanksgiving trips and gatherings, is hit by a surge in Christmas festivities.

The weekly average of new cases per day in the county, the largest in the United States, is highest at 16,193.

That’s roughly 12 times the November 1st weekly average, which was 1,347.

Though the spate of coronavirus cases has overwhelmed hospitals across the state, and Los Angeles County in particular, some Angelenos tried to celebrate the New Year at secret parties. Police dispersed more than a thousand people who attended a camp party, the Los Angeles Times reported.

According to a New York Times database, more than 21,000 people were hospitalized in California on New Year’s Day, up 26 percent from two weeks earlier.

Many intensive care units in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley have been at full or almost at full capacity for weeks. At a Los Angeles hospital late last month, arriving patients waited outside in a tent – the lobby was used to treat patients and stretchers were placed in the gift shop.

Governor Gavin Newsom said Monday the state of the virus in California had made it “natural” that orders would remain in place for the southern and central regions of the state that were due to expire.

“Unfortunately, it gets worse before it gets better,” he said, adding that emergency room care for non-Covid patients has been slowed as intensive care units struggle to cope with the onslaught caused by the wave of coronavirus cases .

Categories
Business

On-line procuring results in pressure at Port of Los Angeles

The number of shipments delivered through the country’s busiest container port complex in Los Angeles has increased significantly from the first half, driven by a recovery in business and a change in consumer habits.

Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, said during an appearance on CNBC on Monday that cargo volume increased 50% in the second half of 2020 after arriving at the docks in the first six months of the year, and that loaded ships often anchor at sea waiting for a dock to open.

“It’s all the change in the American consumer,” Seroka said on Power Lunch. “We don’t buy services, we buy goods.”

The surge in shipments has put a strain on the seaport supply chain, which is managed by the Los Angeles Port Authority. It’s a stark contrast to spring, when volume plummeted as the coronavirus pandemic plunged the global economy into recession.

With retailers seeing a surge in online ordering and e-commerce in the world of stay-at-home, it has created long delays in unloading ships at ports across the country and a lack of desired storage space.

Seroka said the port expects demand to surge. The Port of Southern California has been the busiest container port in North America for the past two decades, welcoming 17% of all US cargo.

In November, the Port of Los Angeles saw 890,000 shipments, equivalent to 20 feet, passing through its facilities, up 22% from the same month last year, partly due to vacation orders. Imports from Asia are at a record level, announced the port authority. Meanwhile, exports at the port have declined in 23 of the last 25 months, partly due to trade policy with China.

“In addition to trade policy, it is the strength of the US dollar that makes our goods a bit more than would otherwise be the case for competing nations in the same product categories,” Seroka said. “And right now the most amazing statistic is that we are sending back twice as many empty boxes as we are American exports through our docks.”

Monthly cargo volumes averaged 930,000 units in 20 foot units since August, which Seroka called “unusual” at the end of the year. The activity is expected to last several months.

Seroka said the port has been focusing on digitization to streamline shipping schedules and logistics.

“The port is tense,” he said.