Tag: critic

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Politics

Biden to Identify a Critic of Huge Tech because the Prime Antitrust Cop

Biden to Name a Critic of Big Tech as the Top Antitrust Cop

The White House said on Tuesday that it would nominate Jonathan Kanter to be the top antitrust official at the Justice Department, a move that would add another longtime critic of Big Tech and corporate concentration to a powerful regulatory position.

President Biden’s plan to appoint Mr. Kanter, an antitrust lawyer who has made a career out of representing rivals of American tech giants like Google and Facebook, signals how strongly the administration is siding with the growing field of lawmakers, researchers and regulators who say Silicon Valley has obtained outsize power over the way Americans speak with one another, buy products online and consume news.

Mr. Biden has named other critics of Big Tech to prominent roles, such as Lina Khan, a critic of Amazon, to lead the Federal Trade Commission. Tim Wu, another legal scholar who says regulators need to crack down on the tech giants, serves in an economic policy role at the White House. And this month, Mr. Biden signed a sweeping executive order aimed at increasing competition across the economy and limiting corporate dominance.

Mr. Kanter, 47, is the founder of Kanter Law Group, which bills itself online as an “antitrust advocacy boutique.” He previously worked at the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. His services have attracted some of the most prominent critics of Big Tech in corporate America, including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Microsoft as well as upstarts like Spotify and Yelp.

If he is confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Kanter will lead a division of the Justice Department that last year filed a lawsuit arguing Google had illegally protected a monopoly over online search services. The antitrust division of the agency has also been asking questions about Apple’s business practices.

The White House took more than six months from Mr. Biden’s swearing-in to land on Mr. Kanter. The administration has had to juggle progressive and moderate factions within its own party, as well as the likelihood of Republican support in a divided Senate.

The decision won immediate approval from policymakers and advocacy groups helping to lead the charge for more stringent antitrust enforcement.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who leads the antitrust subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, called Mr. Kanter “an excellent choice,” citing his “deep legal experience and history of advocating for aggressive action.”

Sarah Miller, the executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, a progressive advocacy group, said in a statement that “President Biden has made an excellent choice to lead the D.O.J.’s antitrust division,” noting that Mr. Kanter had “devoted his career to reinvigorating antitrust enforcement.”

Makan Delrahim, a lawyer who led the Justice Department’s antitrust efforts under President Donald J. Trump, said in a text message that Mr. Kanter would be a “great leader” of the division and called him a “serious lawyer” with private sector and government experience.

Daily Business Briefing

Updated 

July 20, 2021, 6:55 p.m. ET

The announcement may be less warmly embraced by deal-makers on Wall Street who have helped drive mergers and acquisitions volumes to record levels, propelled in part by an exuberant stock market.

Scrutiny in Washington on acquisitions has expanded beyond headline-grabbing Big Tech deals to industries like consumer goods, agriculture, insurance and health care.

The Justice Department has sued to block the proposed merger of Aon and Willis Towers Watson, its first major antitrust action since Mr. Biden took office. The F.T.C. announced in March that it was forming a group to “update” its approach to evaluating the impact of pharmaceutical deals, an industry that generally falls under its purview. That followed a report led by Representative Katie Porter, a Democrat from California, scrutinizing deals in the industry.

In recent years, Mr. Kanter built an unusual practice out of criticizing the tech giants from inside Washington’s corporate law firms. The tech giants have become lucrative clients for major law firms, often making it difficult for those firms to work for their opponents.

But last year, he left Paul, Weiss — an elite corporate litigation firm — because his portfolio representing critics of the tech giants conflicted with other work the firm was doing.

“Jonathan made this decision due to a complicated legal conflict that would have required him to discontinue important and longstanding client representations and relationships,” the firm said at the time.

Mr. Kanter’s critics are likely to question whether his previous work is a conflict of interest that should keep him out of investigations into the tech giants. Both Facebook and Amazon have asked that Ms. Khan recuse herself from matters involving the companies at the F.T.C., even though her background is as a legal scholar and not a paid representative for their rivals.

Asked whether Mr. Kanter would recuse himself from cases involving Google and Apple, a White House official simply said the administration was confident that it could move forward with his nomination given his expertise and record.

Even if Mr. Kanter has the votes to be confirmed it is likely to be months before he takes over at the Justice Department. Congress takes a long break during August — which could push his confirmation past Labor Day.

Cecilia Kang contributed reporting.

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Politics

Trump critic Liz Cheney faces seemingly ouster from Home GOP management

Liz Cheney, John Katko will vote to impeach

House Republicans are expected to vote on Wednesday whether Trump critic Rep. Liz Cheney should be stripped of her party leadership role and replaced by pro-Trump MP Elise Stefanik.

A vote of no confidence will likely take place during a closed GOP conference meeting scheduled for 9:00 a.m. ET.

The showdown comes days after two other senior House Republicans, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise, said they were done with Cheney as chairman of the House’s GOP conference.

She and former President Donald Trump have endorsed Stefanik, a fourth-term New York congressman who gained national attention in 2019 for forcibly defending Trump during his first impeachment trial.

The urge to swap the strictly conservative and politically deeply rooted Cheney for the less conservative, Trump-supportive Stefanik is a good example of the GOP’s shift towards a firm realignment behind the former president with the upcoming mid-term congressional elections in 2022.

Cheney, one of only 10 Republicans who voted against Trump for inciting the deadly invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, survived an earlier attempt in February to oust her. At the time, the Wyoming Republican had the support of her counterparts.

To their chagrin, Cheney has continued to beat Trump in the three months since then for spreading the lie that the 2020 elections were rigged against him.

With this, Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House of Representatives, stands out from almost all other conferences which, after Trump’s loss, have only been more committed to maintaining the status of the ex-president as leader.

Trump never conceded the 2020 election to President Joe Biden and still falsely claims he won the race – although his reach is limited after several social media companies banned him from their platforms after the January 6 uprising.

There is no evidence of widespread electoral fraud. William Barr, Trump’s attorney general at the time, said the Justice Department had found no evidence of fraud that would undo Biden’s victory. However, opinion polls suggest that large segments of Trump’s supporters still believe that illegal voting or cheating changed the outcome of the race.

Some Republicans, including McCarthy and Scalise, have suggested that Cheney’s refusal to back down on Trump is a distraction that violates the GOP’s goal of getting the house back in 2022.

“Every day we relitute the past is one less day we have to seize the future,” McCarthy said Tuesday in a letter in which Cheney was not mentioned by name.

But Cheney argued in a scorching speech on Tuesday night on the floor of the house and in a statement last week that countering Trump’s election lies was practically a patriotic duty.

“Ignoring the lie encourages the liar”

Cheney has vowed to continue the fight against Trump’s “Big Lie” even if booted by the leadership. On the eve of the expected vote to oust her, Cheney appeared to have a head start and went to the floor of the house to represent her case.

“Today we face a threat America has never seen before: a former president who provoked a violent attack on this Capitol to steal elections has resumed his aggressive efforts to convince Americans to believe him the elections were stolen, “Cheney said.

Trump “risks further violence,” she said, and he “continues to undermine our democratic process and sow doubts as to whether democracy really works at all.”

She noted that after dozens of legal challenges and official investigations, no widespread electoral fraud has been discovered.

“The election is over,” said Cheney. “Those who refuse to accept the decisions of our courts are at war with the constitution.”

“Our duty is clear: each of us who have sworn the oath must act to prevent the dissolution of our democracy,” she said. “This is not about politics, this is not about partisanship. This is about our duty as Americans.”

“Silence and ignoring the lie encourages the liar.”

“I’m not going to take part,” said Cheney. “I will not sit back and watch in silence as others lead our party on a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”

Trump’s role

After the 2020 election cycle, Republicans lost control of the White House and Senate. But much of the party still sees Trump as the biggest draw.

“He’s by far the most popular Republican in the country. If you try to get him out of the Republican Party, half the people will leave,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., a dedicated Trump ally, said Tuesday Fox News.

“So that doesn’t mean you can’t criticize the president, it means that the Republican Party can’t move forward without President Trump being a part of it,” Graham said.

While the vote on Wednesday will be secret, the internal Cheney argument aired in broad daylight – resulting in unusual political optics, such as Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who praised Cheney for giving “truth to power” say.

The Biden administration has largely stayed away from the fight. “We’ll leave that up to them to work among themselves,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday when asked about the GOP power struggle.

But when asked right about it last week, Biden said the GOP looked like it was going through some “kind of mini-revolution”.

“We urgently need a Republican Party. We need a two-party system. It is not healthy to have a one-party system,” Biden said in the White House. “And I think Republicans are further from figuring out who they are and what they stand for than I thought they’d be at that point.”

McCarthy and other Republicans are expected to visit the White House later this week to discuss the government’s economic investment plans.

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Business

Ed Ward, Rock Critic and Historian, Is Useless at 72

Ed Ward, Rock Critic and Historian, Is Dead at 72

After his years in Austin, Mr. Ward moved to Berlin in the mid-1990s to work for a planned magazine that had passed away before it was published, and then to Montpellier, France. During his years in Europe he wrote freelance articles, continued to contribute to Fresh Air (where he has been since 1987) and worked as a bartender.

He returned to Austin in 2013 and began work on The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963, which was published in 2016. A second volume covering the history of music up to 1977 was published in 2019. However, his publisher declined to publish a third because the sales of the second book had not been as good as the first.

Although well-known names like Elvis and the Beatles are in the first book, there are also those of black artists like Earl Palmer, the drummer of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and many other classic New Orleans records, and Lowman Pauling, the guitarist and Haupt -Songwriter of the R&B group the “5” Royales.

“There’s this misconception that one day in 1954 Elvis invented it all at once, and that’s not only wrong, it’s really simple and unfair,” he told The American-Stateman Black Music of the 30s, 40s and 40s in 2016 early 50s and the extent to which this shaped the sound from which Elvis emerged. “

The book was in some ways a result of Mr. Ward’s “Fresh Air” work. In sections that lasted only seven or eight minutes, he told compelling, detailed stories about famous and obscure musicians and groups.

“I think this is Ed’s most outstanding work,” said Marcus in a telephone interview. “They were so interesting and well produced and so sharp. I am not ignorant of this, but from time to time he would present a snippet of something I had never heard of. He was a great explorer, a great digger. “

When Fresh Air refused to interview him about his book in 2017, he resigned.

“Leaving ‘fresh air’ was a dangerous thing,” said Patoski, “and it hurt him because people knew him like that.”

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Politics

Biden Picks Trump Critic Chris Magnus to Run Border Company

Biden Picks Trump Critic Chris Magnus to Run Border Agency

“I’ve been thinking about how I really wanted to treat people differently,” he said. “And it had an impact, that’s for sure.”

Chief Magnus began his law enforcement career as a dispatcher in the Lansing Police Department in 1979, rose through the ranks to become Chief of Police in Fargo, ND, in 1999, helping set up a refugee liaison program.

Later, as the chief of police in Richmond, he helped fight violent crime. In 2014, one of his last years in the department, the city recorded only 11 murders, the lowest number in more than four decades. That year Chief Magnus was photographed holding the Black Lives Matter sign and when criticized by the local police union said he would do it again.

However, in Richmond, Chief Magnus also faced a racial discrimination lawsuit filed by seven black sergeants, lieutenants and captains, despite a 2012 jury rejecting all claims. In 2015, a former Richmond police officer settled a dismissal suit with the department after saying he was fired for complaining that Chief Magnus sexually molested him and committed racial slurs. Chief Magnus called the allegations “completely wrong”.

“At that time, there were still people who said I was an easier target because I was a gay man,” he said. “This is not the first time in my career that I’ve seen it.”

In Tucson last year, Chief Magnus drew fire again when it took the department two months to release the body camera video of the death of a 27-year-old Latino man, Carlos Ingram Lopez, who repeatedly asked for water while he was withheld was by police officers.

Chief Magnus blamed the delay on a bureaucratic breakdown and said he didn’t see the video right away. But he said he wish he had done more to see it for himself. “We should have asked to see the video but it didn’t and when we finally saw it we were obviously very concerned about it,” he said. Chief Magnus offered to resign during a press conference when the video was released, but the mayor kept him updated and praised his work in a statement Monday.

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Business

Biden Nominates Critic of Huge Tech to F.T.C.: Reside Updates

“The worst was avoided by swift and vigorous action,” Mr. Powell will tell the House Financial Services committee, according to prepared remarks.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Pool photo by Susan Walsh

Jerome H. Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve, will tell lawmakers on Tuesday that the economy is healing, saying that while many workers and businesses continue to suffer, the aggressive response from the central bank, Congress and the White House helped to avoid the most devastating economic scenarios.

“While the economic fallout has been real and widespread, the worst was avoided by swift and vigorous action,” Mr. Powell will tell the House Financial Services committee, according to prepared remarks.

He will point out that the economy has recently improved, including the labor market, which has begun adding back jobs after a winter lull.

“However, the sectors of the economy most adversely affected by the resurgence of the virus, and by greater social distancing, remain weak, and the unemployment rate — still elevated at 6.2 percent — underestimates the shortfall,” Mr. Powell is set to say.

The Fed chair will add that the central bank, which currently has rates at near-zero and is buying bonds to keep credit flowing and to bolster the economy, “will not lose sight of the millions of Americans who are still hurting.”

Mr. Powell will say the Fed’s many market-facing programs in 2020, which supported credit to corporations, midsize businesses and municipalities, helped to “keep organizations from shuttering and put employers in both a better position to keep workers on and to hire them back as the recovery continues.”

And he will underline that the programs, in most cases, have either shut down or will soon end. Mr. Powell consistently has said that the lending efforts, supported by the Treasury, were emergency tools that the Fed would stop using once conditions were stable.

David Dobrik is one of YouTube’s most popular creators, with more than 18.7 million subscribers on his primary channel. Credit…Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images

Some investors have started distancing themselves from Dispo, a fast-growing photo-sharing app, after its co-founder, the YouTube creator David Dobrik, became embroiled in controversy.

Dispo, which launched in 2019, is a photo-based social platform similar to Instagram that mimics the experience of using a disposable camera. Photos taken through the Dispo app take 24 hours to “develop” and appear on a user’s feed.

In October, Dispo raised $4 million in a funding round led by Seven Seven Six, the firm of Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder. In February, the company garnered an additional $20 million in a financing led by Spark Capital; the funding valued Dispo at $200 million.

But in an investigation by Insider that published last week, Mr. Dobrik was accused of playing a role in a sexual assault scandal involving a former member of his “Vlog Squad.” He later told The Information that he would leave Dispo and step down from its board. And some of Dispo’s investors have also started backing away.

On Sunday, Spark Capital said it would “sever all ties” with Dispo. “We have stepped down from our position on the board, and we are in the process of making arrangements to ensure we do not profit from our recent investment in Dispo,” the venture firm posted on Twitter.

On Monday, Mr. Ohanian and Seven Seven Six also issued a statement calling the accusations against Mr. Dobrik “extremely troubling” and “directly at odds with Seven Seven Six’s core values.” Mr. Ohanian posted to Instagram that he and Seven Seven Six supported Mr. Dobrik’s choice to step down from the company.

Seven Seven Six also said on Twitter that it would donate any profits from its investment “to an organization working with survivors of sexual assault.”

We have made the decision to donate any profits from our investment in Dispo to an organization working with survivors of sexual assault. We have believed in Dispo’s mission since the beginning and will continue to support the hardworking team bringing it to life.

— 7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣ (@sevensevensix) March 22, 2021

Unshackled Ventures, another early investor in Dispo, said on Monday that it would also donate any profits from its investment to organizations focused on survivors of sexual assault, including Maitri, which is focused on helping South Asian survivors of domestic violence.

“We are a female majority team that does not take this lightly. We are in full support of their decision to part ways with David,” Unshackled Ventures said in a statement.

The recent allegations against David Dobrik are disturbing and counter to Unshackled values. As a female majority team, we do not take this lightly. We are in support of the companies decision to part ways with David and will continue to monitor the situation closely.

— Unshackled Ventures (@UnshackledVC) March 22, 2021

Dispo and Mr. Dobrik did not respond to requests for comment.

Over the past year, many investors have become enamored with the influencer world. “I feel like something has palpably shifted in the past year among investors, and it seems like everyone is talking about the creator economy now and investing in creator tools,” Li Jin, founder of Atelier, a venture firm investing in the creator space told The New York Times in December.

But several popular YouTube stars have come under fire over the past year for scandals involving racism and sexual assault.

Mr. Dobrik is one of YouTube’s most popular creators, with more than 18.7 million subscribers on his primary channel. After gaining fame on Vine, the short-video app, he and a group of friends called the “Vlog Squad” began creating short, comedic content often involving stunts for sites such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

Lina Khan during her fellowship at the F.T.C. in 2018. Credit…Lexey Swall for The New York Times

President Biden on Monday nominated Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, installing a vocal critic of Big Tech into a key oversight role of the industry.

If her nomination is approved by the Senate, Ms. Khan, 32, would fill one of two empty seats earmarked for Democrats at the F.T.C.

Ms. Khan became recognized for her ideas on antitrust with a Yale Law Journal paper in 2017 called “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” that accused Amazon of abusing its monopoly power and put a critical focus on decades-old legal theories that relied heavily on price increases as the underlying measure of antitrust violations.

She served as a senior adviser to Rohit Chopra when he was F.T.C. commissioner. Most recently, she was a leading counsel member to a 16-month-long investigation of online platforms and competition by the House antitrust subcommittee. As a result, Democratic leaders on the subcommittee called for the breakup of Big Tech and legislation to strengthen enforcement of competition violations across the economy.

“As consumers, as users, we love these tech companies,” Ms. Khan said in an interview with The New York Times in 2018. “But as citizens, as workers, and as entrepreneurs, we recognize that their power is troubling. We need a new framework, a new vocabulary for how to assess and address their dominance.”

Ms. Khan is the second prominent advocate of breaking up the large tech companies placed by the Biden administration in top antitrust roles. Also this month, Mr. Biden picked Tim Wu, a prominent critic of Google, Facebook and Amazon, as special assistant to the president on competition policy.

Turkish lira banknotes at a currency exchange in Ankara. An unexpected change at the head of Turkey’s central bank caused a steep drop in the lira’s value.Credit…Murad Sezer/Reuters

Turkey’s currency tumbled on Monday after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fired the head of the central bank, who had been in the job just four months and had pursued policies aimed at taming inflation. The Turkish lira plunged 7 percent against the U.S. dollar.

The removal of Turkey’s central bank chief, Naci Agbal, signals a return to the unorthodox policies that Mr. Erdogan has long favored, such as cutting interest rates to lower inflation, but which most economists regard as counterproductive. Mr. Erdogan has repeatedly meddled in the central bank’s activities and over the years traders have dumped the lira.

Since his appointment in November, Mr. Agbal has raised the central bank’s benchmark interest rate from 10.25 percent to 19 percent in an effort to slow the overheating economy, control inflation and lure in foreign investment. He had succeeded in pulling the lira up from its record low. The most recent increase in the benchmark rate was on Thursday and he was fired on Friday.

The annual inflation rate was officially 15.6 percent in February but is probably much higher.

The new central bank chief, Sahap Kavcioglu, a university professor and former member of Turkey’s National Assembly, said in a statement that he would continue to fight inflation. But on Monday, the lira was trading at about 7.77 to the dollar, compared with 7.22 on Friday. The plunge in value was a sign that currency traders expect him to bow to pressure from Mr. Erdogan to cut rates, worsening the inflation problem and pushing the country of 82 million people closer to economic collapse.

“We have abandoned our cautiously optimistic view on the lira,” Piotr Matys, a strategist at Rabobank wrote in a note. Mr. Kavcioglu’s comments suggest he is clearly in favor of lower interest rates to stimulate growth, he added.

  • The S&P 500 closed up 0.7 percent on Monday, while the Nasdaq composite finished the day up 1.2 percent and the Dow Jones industrial average gained 0.3 percent.

  • Yields on 10-Year Treasury notes fell to about 1.69 percent.

  • European indexes were mixed. The Stoxx Europe 600 index gained 0.2 percent, and London’s FTSE 100 gained 0.3 percent. France’s CAC 40 dropped about 0.5 percent.

  • Shares in IAG, the airline group which owns British Airways, fell more than 5 percent after the British government’s scientific advisers warned against overseas travel this summer. On Sunday, a government minister also indicated that travel restrictions could be extended. Shares in easyJet and Ryanair also fell.

  • Deliveroo, the food-delivery company, started taking orders for its initial public offering on Monday. The share sale would value the company up to 8.8 billion pounds ($12.2 billion). The company will be listed on the London Stock Exchange, and is the exchange’s largest I.P.O. this year.

The Upper East Side mansion once owned by Jeffrey Epstein.Credit…Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

A longtime executive at Goldman Sachs and his wife are the buyers of Jeffrey Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion, paying $51 million for the disgraced financier’s former home.

Michael D. Daffey, a former Goldman executive, and his wife, Blake Daffey, are getting Mr. Epstein’s seven-story Manhattan mansion at a considerable discount. The initial asking price was $88 million, but it received no takers. The estate of Mr. Epstein — who killed himself in 2019 while in custody and facing federal sex trafficking charges — put the house on the market less than a year after his death.

Mr. Daffey spent nearly three decades working at Goldman Sachs, and his recent retirement was disclosed in February. He was an early investor in Bitcoin.

While the sale was reported earlier this month, the buyers had not yet been identified until recently. The sale formally closed March 8, Vivian Marino reports for The New York Times, becoming one of New York City’s largest closings in March.

The Epstein mansion is just one location where he was accused of running his sex-trafficking operation. The money from the sale is expected to go to a compensation fund for victims.

A group of junior bankers at Goldman Sachs assembled a presentation about working conditions at the Wall Street bank that circulated on social media.Credit…Emon Hassan for The New York Times

Last week, a presentation by a group of junior bankers at Goldman Sachs went viral on social media, in which they complained about what they described as workplace abuse, including 100-hour weeks.

The DealBook newsletter’s inbox has been overflowing with reactions, notably from current, former and aspiring investment bankers. Here’s what some had to say — most requested anonymity to speak freely about their experiences — edited and condensed for clarity:

  • “My view is that if it’s not to your liking, quit and find another line of work. It won’t pay as well, but it’s also possible that you won’t learn as much. I am still reaping the benefits of what I learned.” — Anonymous in Sydney

  • “I had heard all about the long hours, but once I was in it, I found that I had underestimated. I threw in the towel and left banking, because no amount of money was worth the terrible lifestyle.” — Anonymous in New York

  • “I knew I was worked like a donkey but quid pro quo. I could leave, work fewer hours and make less money. But I wasn’t interested in that.” — Anonymous in London

  • “In our day, we may have complained to our friends or our family, but we knew that short-term pain was good for long-term gain. I now live a comfortable life enabled by my first years at Goldman Sachs.” — Anonymous in New York

  • “We would do the math on the compensation and realize that we were making less than minimum wage per hour. It wasn’t worth being tortured. My health still suffers from my years on Wall Street.” — Anonymous in New York

  • “The learning experience was incredible and career-wise it set me on the right track. In hindsight, it could have actually killed me, but I was too young to realize this.” — Anonymous in Dubai

  • “Yes, we were ‘abused’ and yelled at, but this was expected and how we learned. My message for these analysts is: If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” — Anonymous in New York

  • “There is no money that rewards the mental and physical harm that investment banking does to you. Of course, it’s a hell of an experience, Excel and PowerPoint-wise.” — Anonymous in São Paulo

  • “I spent many long nights in the office at the behest of associates and V.P.s, most of the time for no reason but ‘they might need me.’ Then I joined the military, where I had better work-life balance and more respectful leadership than I did in banking.” — Anonymous in New York

  • “I am an incoming Goldman Sachs intern. I knew about the work conditions before applying to the job. Anyone engaging in a career at a top investment bank knows about it, or else they applied for the wrong reasons.” — Anonymous in Europe

Carlos Ghosn, the former chief executive of Nissan, is a fugitive after fleeing Japan, where he was facing charges of alleged financial misconduct, which he had denied.  Credit…Hussein Malla/Associated Press

Tokyo prosecutors on Monday charged two Americans with helping Carlos Ghosn, the former Nissan chief, jump bail in Tokyo, where he was awaiting trial on four counts of financial wrongdoing.

Japanese prosecutors said in an indictment that the two men, Michael Taylor, 60, a former Green Beret, and his son Peter Maxwell Taylor, 27, assisted Mr. Ghosn’s efforts to escape the country, helping him flee to Turkey and then on to Lebanon, where he has been beyond the reach of Japanese law.

American officials arrested the men last May in Massachusetts. Earlier this month, they were extradited to Japan, where they have been held in a Tokyo detention center while undergoing questioning by prosecutors. A third man believed to have aided Mr. Ghosn’s escape remains at large.

The Japanese authorities have accused Michael Taylor of helping Mr. Ghosn travel by train to the western city of Osaka, through security checks at a private jet terminal and then onto a plane bound for Turkey. Once there, Mr. Ghosn transferred to a flight bound for Beirut. Peter Taylor assisted in planning for the escapade, visiting Mr. Ghosn several times before the escape, officials say.

Mr. Ghosn and his son, Anthony Ghosn, paid more than $1.3 million to the Taylors and a company they controlled, U.S. prosecutors have said in court filings.

Mr. Ghosn’s case raised international concerns about what some critics call Japan’s system of “hostage justice,” which includes lengthy detentions of criminal suspects without charge. While in the United States, the Taylors fought a long legal battle to prevent their extradition, with their lawyers arguing that they could be subjected to harsh conditions in a Japanese jail.

  • Unions in Italy said they held a 24-hour strike against Amazon on Monday over a breakdown in talks over working conditions. The unions, representing delivery workers and warehouse employees, said they walked out for a day to protest excessive workloads while Amazon has earned huge profits during the pandemic. The three groups — Filt-Cgil, Fit-Cisl and Uiltrasporti — said an average of 75 percent of their memberships had taken part. A spokesman for Amazon said that only about 10 percent of its 9,500 Italian employees participated and that the strike did not cause any delays in shipments, orders or deliveries. He said Amazon already offers “excellent pay, excellent benefits and excellent opportunities for career growth.”

  • Leon Black, the Wall Street billionaire who was the main client of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein for the last decade of his life, is stepping down as chief executive and chairman of Apollo Global Management, several months ahead of schedule, the firm said Monday. Jay Clayton, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman who recently joined the firm as an independent director, will take over as chairman. Mr. Black said he had decided to leave now to focus on his family and his and his wife’s health. In January, the firm had said he would step down as chief executive before his 70th birthday in July while retaining the chairman role.

  • Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern announced plans on Sunday to combine in a $29 billion deal that would create the first railroad network connecting the United States, Mexico and Canada. It is an effort to capitalize on the flow of trade that is expected to increase as the three countries rebound from the pandemic. The boards of both companies have unanimously approved the cash-and-stock deal, which is expected to close by the middle of 2022, subject to customary approvals.

  • Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, said on Sunday that its net income last year had fallen by 44 percent, to $49 billion, as lower oil prices stemming from the pandemic cut into earnings. The company’s chief executive, Amin H. Nasser, described 2020 in a statement accompanying the earnings data as “one of the most challenging years in recent history.” But Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, said that it would stick by a pledge to pay a $75 billion dividend. Nearly all of the payment will go to the Saudi government, which owns about 98 percent of the company.

VideoCinemagraphCreditCredit…By Alexis Jamet

In today’s On Tech newsletter, Shira Ovide talks to The Times’s Ben Sisario about why streaming music has been a letdown for many musicians.

Categories
Entertainment

Peter G. Davis, Music Critic of Vast Data and Wit, Dies at 84

Peter G. Davis, Music Critic of Wide Knowledge and Wit, Dies at 84

Peter G. Davis, who was considered one of the leading critics of American classical music for over 30 years with crisp, witty prose and an encyclopedic memory of countless performances and performers, died on February 13th. He was 84 years old.

His death was confirmed by his husband, Scott Parris.

First as a critic for the New York Times and later for New York Magazine, Mr. Davis wrote precise, astute reviews of all forms of classical music, though his great love was opera and the voice, a bond he developed in his early teenage years .

He presided over the field during New York’s blessing years of the 1960s and 1970s, when gigs were plentiful, tickets were relatively cheap, and when the ups and downs of a performer’s career were the fodder for cocktail parties and post-concert dinners to mention the notebooks of writers like Mr. Davis, which often got five or more reviews a week.

He wrote these reviews with a knowing, dead, sometimes world-weary tone. During a concert by Russian violinist Vladimir Spivakov in 1976, an activist protesting the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union threw a paint bomb on the stage and splashed Mr. Spivakov and his companion. Mr Davis wrote, “Terrorists need to be extremely insensitive to music because throwing color to a violinist playing Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ is simply bad timing.”

He held onto the traditions of classical music not to keep the past alive but to keep its inner strength, and looked askance at those who tried to update it just to be trendy.

In a nineteenth-century review by French composer Daniel Francois Auber of the Bronx Opera’s 1977 production of Fra Diavolo, he condemned what he saw as “a refusal to believe in the piece by doing it treated as an embarrassment, a work that needs a maximum of directing gimmicks if the audience is to stay interested. “

He might equally disapprove of new music and composers whom he thought were overly hyped. Minimalist composers Philip Glass and Beverly Sills (early “a reliable, hardworking, but not particularly notable soprano” who only became a star after her talents peaked) were regular targets.

Looking back at a performance of Mr. Glass’s work at Carnegie Hall in 2002, he wrote, “It was pretty much the same as usual: the same silly syncopation and jigging ostinatas, the same crazy little tunes on their way to nowhere. the same awkward orchestral climaxes. “

That’s not to say that Mr. Davis was a reactionary – he advocated for young composers and emerging regional opera companies. His great strength as a critic was his pragmatism, his commitment to assessing the performance before him on his own terms and at the same time keeping a skeptical eye on gimmicks.

“He was a vocalist with unquestionable authority,” said Justin Davidson, a former Newsday classical music critic who now writes on classical music and architecture for New York magazine. “He felt that the things that were important to him were important, that they weren’t a niche, not just entertainment, but that they were at the heart of American culture.”

Peter Graffam Davis was born on May 3, 1936 in Concord, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, and grew up in nearby Lincoln. His father, E. Russell Davis, was a vice president at the Bank of Boston. His mother Susan (Graffam) Davis was a housewife.

Mr. Parris, whom he married in 2009, is his only immediate survivor.

Mr. Davis fell in love with the opera as a teenager, built a record collection at home, and attended performances in Boston. In the months leading up to his junior year at Harvard, he toured European summer music festivals – Strauss in Munich, Mozart in Salzburg, Wagner in Bayreuth.

He encountered European opera at a hinge point. It was still shaped by longstanding traditions and had yet to emerge fully from the destruction of World War II, but a new generation of performers emerged from the rubble: the French soprano Régine Crespin, the Austrian soprano Leonie Rysanek, the Italian tenor Franco Corelli and Giuseppe di Stefano. Mr. Davis needed to see her up close.

He graduated from Harvard in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in music. After spending a year at a Stuttgart Conservatory, he moved to New York to do a Masters in Composition from Columbia University.

Mr. Davis wrote a number of his own musical works in the early 1960s, including the opera “Zoe” and two operettas in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan. But he decided that his future was not to write music, but to write about it. He has become a classical music editor for both High Fidelity and Musical America magazines and a New York music correspondent for The Times of London.

He began writing freelance articles for the New York Times in 1967 and was hired as Sunday’s music editor in 1974, a job that enabled him to add articles to his almost daily edition of reviews – whether it be recordings, concerts, or countless debut evenings which he commissioned from other authors. “He had a great memory,” said Alex Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker. “Everything you threw at him he could discuss precisely and intelligently.”

Mr. Davis moved to New York Magazine in 1981. There he could select his reviews and occasionally step back to survey the classical music landscape.

Increasingly, he didn’t like what he saw.

As early as 1980, Mr. Davis lamented the future of opera singing, blaming talent and hard work as well as a star system that pushed promising but immature singers to their physical limits for “good looks and easy adaptability.”

The diminished position of classical music in American culture he documented spared no critics, and in 2007 New York magazine let him go. He returned to freelance work for The Times, writing regularly for Opera News and Musical America.

Despite all of his thousands of reviews, Mr. Davis seemed most proud of his 1997 book, The American Opera Singer, an exhaustive, exciting, and often withered story in which he praised the versatility of contemporary American artists while recording many of them Task of being superficial workhorses.

“I can’t think of a music critic who cares more about the state of opera in America,” wrote critic Terry Teachout in his review of the book for The Times. “If you want to know what’s wrong with American singing, you’ll find the answers here.”

Categories
Entertainment

A Critic and a Pianist, Shut however Not Fairly Mates

A Critic and a Pianist, Close but Not Quite Friends

The pianist Peter Serkin made his New York debut when he was only 12 years old. His real introduction to the public – as an artist of his special merits, not just as the son of the well-known pianist Rudolf Serkin – took place six years later, in 1965, 1965. with his recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” variations.

Critics praised the lively, elegant and clear game. Many pointed to the extraordinary maturity of this teenager’s interpretation.

I was very impressed by this recording. Just a year younger than Serkin, I was a serious pianist at the time, planning on making music in college. But our backgrounds couldn’t have been more different. There were no musicians in my family; My talent and passion seemed to come from nowhere. Serkin had inherited the mantle of classical music as a birthright for generations and received the best education imaginable.

Even so, I felt that he and I were kindred spirits, though I couldn’t explain why at the time. When I hear this remarkable Bach recording today, I better understand what touched me so deeply.

From his relaxed lyrical design of the opening theme to his quiet but subtly restrained playing of the first variation of the jump, he approached this impressive masterpiece with unspoiled directness and sincerity. His performance combined an almost spiritual equilibrium with subtle joy. He sent the brilliant variations clearly and neatly, without a trace of conspicuousness.

This breakthrough was reissued as part of a 35 disc box set of his full recordings on the RCA label (and some on Columbia) made during the first three decades of his career. It was released last year, just four months after he died of pancreatic cancer in February. The collection offers a large selection of solo pieces, chamber works and concerts by Beethoven, Berio, Chopin, Mozart, Takemitsu, Stravinsky, Schönberg and others – in exploratory, clear, often intoxicating performances. I did not know some of these recordings; I hadn’t heard others in years. The set has strong memories of Peter – how I met him – and revived his great artistry and the intersection of our lives and professions.

Since his recordings kept coming out after these “Goldberg” variations, I eagerly bought them and followed Peter’s journey. There was his spacious, searching, yet seductively playful account of Schubert’s late, long Sonata No. 18 in G, which was recorded during the same sessions as Bach but published in 1966. There were exciting collaborations with Seiji Ozawa and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Bartok’s First and Third Piano Concertos and Schönberg’s Piano Concerto, a piece that overwhelmed me at the time. The Schönberg album from 1968 contained the five piano pieces (op. 23). Peter’s convincing performance inspired me to learn this job, which I ended up doing, with tremendous effort, to graduate from college.

Rudolf Serkin was a childhood hero to me and I will always appreciate his impressive art. But in my early 20s, a generation change brought me to solidarity with his son. Peter seemed to be the unimpressed pianist leader of our emerging generation, claiming classical music on his own terms. I wanted to meet him, hang out. I had a hunch that we could become friends.

However, we didn’t meet until the summer of 1987, just a few weeks before he turned 40. Until then, I was a freelance critic for The Boston Globe, and he taught young artists at Tanglewood Music Center. He was known to be interview-shy, burned by the derogatory reactions of critics in the 1970s when he wore a ponytail and a thread-like goatee. often performed with Nehru shirts and love pearls; and despised the virtuoso touring route, which he compared to a “monkey who performs his trained action again and again with the same pieces”.

In 1973 he and three like-minded young musicians founded Tashi, an ensemble that focused on contemporary music. These adventurous players put on dozens of intriguing performances and made a best-selling recording of their signature track, Messiaen’s mystical “Quartet for the End of Time”.

Peter wanted to shake up classical music, which in his opinion was far too indebted to the old repertoire and traditional protocols. Even so, he found it difficult to keep himself from being seen as “the reluctant ambassador of the counterculture for the pure concert world,” as critic Donal Henahan put it in a 1973 profile in the New York Times. And he was fed up with being asked about his complicated relationship with his father.

I knew all of this in our interview and was a little careful. But from the moment we met, I felt good. We sat on the grass under the sun on the Tanglewood grounds and talked for a few hours about everything: his memories of how intensely he experienced music as a child; his trips to India, Thailand and Mexico in the early 20s when he stopped performing and even practicing for a while to “find out who I am without her”; the satisfaction he gained that summer in coaching a new generation of musicians who seemed to share his innate curiosity about new music; and his enthusiasm for an ambitious project he was planning to tour a program of 11 new works written for him. It also learned to deal with difficult fathers. We met the following week in Tanglewood – which, as we would have said at the time, was really cool.

At that point, however, our relationship was defined and, to some extent, constrained by our respective roles as performer and critic. (Actually, I was still performing actively at the time, and Peter wanted to know everything about my work and hear some concert recordings that I shared with him.) Had I not been a critic, we might have developed a real friendship; Had I not been a critic, I might never have met him. In a way, I already felt that I could do more for the music and for Peter by being an informed observer of his remarkable work.

For years after that first meeting, he and I spoke on the phone occasionally, exchanged emails, and sometimes found opportunities to meet. He was so fond of teaching in Tanglewood that summer that he bought a house in the Berkshires and lived there with his wife and children. He invited me to visit. Right now I wish I had accepted. But even he understood, I think, that it was better to keep a certain amount of professional distance.

People may assume that, as a critic, there is no way I can be objective about an artist whom I feel very much about. But just as a writer can tell the truth about problematic aspects of a manuscript to a friend of a writer, perhaps I, who admired Peter’s play so much, could see when his take on a piece wasn’t quite clicking.

For example, the new collection includes three albums of Chopin works recorded between 1978 and 1981 when Peter revisited a composer he was not known for performing. He brought out the ruminant, poetic elements of the music, even in mazurkas and waltzes that might seem smooth on the surface. His recording of the 14-minute polonaise fantasy, one of Chopin’s most elusive and original scores, is overwhelming. Peter makes the piece seem like a dark, restless, fantastic reflection on the deeper legacy of the polonaise, a defining dance of Chopin’s war-torn homeland.

But he also applied this thoughtful approach to Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante with less success. This was perhaps the next step Chopin took to write an unabashed virtuoso showpiece. I understand what Peter wanted and it’s fascinating. But the performance is so testing it feels a little grounded. You want the effortless glare of a Vladimir Horowitz.

Peter’s extraordinary recording of Messiaen’s “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésu” from 1973 remains final for me. This two-hour work, which consists of 20 pieces, presents astonishing technical challenges, as the music alternates between meditative timelessness and exuberant, almost frenzied spirituality, which is traversed by the calls of birds. Peter took it on tour, played it completely and by heart, sometimes accompanied by atmospheric lighting. When we first spoke, he remembered Messiaen hearing him play the piece. After that the composer was “really too nice,” said Peter: “He told me that I respect the score, but if I don’t, it’s even better.”

The album that perhaps meant the most to Peter was “… in real time” with works written for him, including some of the 11 scores he had on this commissioned program from Henze, Berio, Takemitsu, Kirchner, Alexander Göhr and Oliver Knussen and Peter’s childhood friend Peter Lieberson played. He lets the swirling busyness and the sour sounds of Berio’s “fire piano” sound like a crackling fire; He dives under the surging grace and tenderness of Lieberson’s “Breeze of Delight” to reveal the eerie pull of the music.

Peter began teaching at the Bard College Conservatory of Music in 2005 and loved working with the curious students that the program attracted. Even while enduring debilitating cancer treatments, he continued to try to teach and play. In an email to me in April 2019, he wrote of “terrible pain and exhaustion, much worse than last time”. Nevertheless, he had forced himself to attend a performance of Brahms’ piano quartet in C minor because the cellist Robert Martin, a close colleague, was playing his final concert as director of the Conservatory. “It went well enough,” he wrote. In fact, it’s a profound performance hit, as a video makes clear.

I had agreed to visit him at his home near Bard in August, on my way back to New York, after covering Tanglewood’s contemporary music festival for a few days. But on the morning of our scheduled meeting, Peter wrote that he was miserable. The next day he texted me again to tell me how sad he was that he canceled.

“I brought out a little four-handed music in case you wanted to play, but I think I’ll bring it back down now for possibly another time,” he wrote.

There was no other time. We tried to reschedule, but his health was too shaky. The last email he sent me three months before he died was a brief reply to a message I had sent. “Yes, we are good friends,” he said, “and I look forward to seeing you.”

Friends in our own way indeed.

Categories
Politics

Biden picks China critic Katherine Tai for U.S. Commerce Consultant

Biden picks China critic Katherine Tai for U.S. Trade Representative

Katherine Tai speaks during a House Ways and Means Committee meeting on the US-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement (USMCA) in 2019.

CSPAN

President-elect Joe Biden named Katherine Tai, a trade attorney with a history of taking over China, to be his new administration for the United States’ chief trade agent on Thursday.

If this were approved by the Senate, Tai would inherit a critical position at the cabinet level, tasked with enforcing American import regulations and negotiating terms of trade with China and other nations.

Tai, who is Asian-American, would also be the first black woman to act as a USTR. She is fluent in Mandarin.

With the election of Tai, the senior trade attorney on the House Ways and Means Committee, the Biden team is likely signaling an intention to revert to a multilateral trade approach to advance U.S. trade interests and face growing economic competition from China.

The president-elect announced Tai’s experience in a press release on Thursday as key to key insights as the new administration reviews outgoing President Donald Trump’s Beijing-brokered trade deal.

“Your in-depth experience will enable the Biden-Harris administration to get a foothold in trade and harness the power of our trade relations to help the US emerge from the COVID-induced economic crisis and get the president-elect’s vision from a professional pursue – American Labor Trade Strategy, “wrote the Biden transition team.

Tai would succeed current Trade Tsar Robert Lighthizer, whose achievements during the Trump administration include stepping up negotiations with Beijing and introducing hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs on goods imported from China.

China’s Deputy Prime Minister Liu Er speaks to U.S. Sales Representative Robert Lighthizer during a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on February 22, 2019.

Carlos Barria | Reuters

Though Tai prefers multilateral enforcement mechanisms more than Lighthizer, its leadership as a USTR would not necessarily signal a change in tougher stance on China. She said China should be approached vigorously and strategically.

“Both also have long histories of dealing with China’s unfair practices, the most pressing trade problem of our time,” said Clete Willems, former White House top trade negotiator. “Katherine’s approach is most likely different in how she uses the WTO system and alliances to pressure China to change its behavior.”

From 2007 to 2014, Tai successfully negotiated Washington’s disputes against Beijing at the WTO, the global trade organization based in Geneva, Switzerland.

Lighthizer and his team, frustrated with what they saw as slow bureaucracy and China’s influence on the WTO and the World Bank, often chose to bypass the WTO and take a more direct approach through tariffs. The US still has import tariffs on Chinese imports of $ 370 billion.

“As a former head of the USTR China Trade Enforcement, Katherine has experience leading and winning joint WTO disputes against China while working with countries like the EU and Japan and is likely to take a similar approach,” Willems said now Partner at Akin Gump. added in an email.

Willems also noted that Tai’s fluent mandarin would command respect at the negotiating table with China.

US President-elect Joe Biden will announce his health team members on December 8, 2020 at the Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

In August, Tai called for a different approach to China than Lighthizer’s year-long tariff war, saying the use of import taxes was actually a defensive maneuver.

Rep Don Beyer, D-Va., Said in a press release on Wednesday night that Tai would be a smart choice for USTR as they work together on the Ways and Means Committee.

“She is smart, knows her way around and is committed to ensuring that trade policy is right for our employees, companies and the environment,” said Beyer.

“Katherine is widely recognized and loved, but she will also be a tough and principled negotiator,” he added. “She’s just the right kind of cooperative leader to bring our trade policies back to a rational level and restore the respect of our allies around the world.”

This should please Biden, who has proposed a return to a multilateral, allied approach and a departure from President Donald Trump’s nationalist “America First” approach.

Still, in a recent interview with the New York Times, Biden said that he will not immediately lift tariffs on China and instead will weigh up a variety of tactics when considering how best to compete with Beijing.

“I’m not going to take any immediate steps, and neither will the tariffs. I will not affect my options,” Biden told columnist Thomas Friedman in an interview earlier this month.

The President-elect has refused to say whether he would support joining certain trade deals. One of President Donald Trump’s first acts of office was the removal of the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the Obama administration had negotiated with eleven other nations.

The TPP excluded China and was a cornerstone of Obama’s efforts to cement US influence in Asia. China has since signed the regional comprehensive economic partnership with 14 other countries, a trade agreement that excludes the US and covers about 30% of the world economy.

Biden has promised to go into more detail about what agreements he would support after his inauguration, but has repeatedly stressed the importance of working with allies to establish the “rules of the road” of world trade.