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Entertainment

Mentors Named for Subsequent Class in Rolex Arts Initiative

Mentors Named for Next Class in Rolex Arts Initiative

Ghanaian-born visual artist El Anatsui, British writer Bernardine Evaristo, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, French architect Anne Lacaton and American jazz singer Dianne Reeves are the new mentors in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a program launched by Rolex was established in 2002 to nurture new generations of outstanding talent.

The names of the new mentors and their protégés, who will work together for two years, were announced Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the Arts Initiative is celebrating the culmination of its current program cycle. This cycle featured Lin-Manuel Miranda, the first mentor in a recently added open category that includes multidisciplinary artists.

The protégés are architect Arine Aprahamian, writer Ayesha Harruna Attah, visual artist Bronwyn Katz, filmmaker Rafael Manuel and singer-songwriter Song Yi Jeon. In addition to travel and expenses, the protégés each receive a grant of around 41,000 US dollars.

The new group of mentors and protégés hail “from nine different countries in Asia, Africa, North America, Europe and the Middle East,” said Rebecca Irvin, Rolex’s head of philanthropy, in an email. “And her artistic work reflects many of the most pressing issues of our time, including sustainability, diversity and social change.”

Evaristo, who wrote in a statement that she had mentored the program “since Toni Morrison 20 years ago,” said that the “very close and personal attention” the mentee receives was very different from attending workshops or the writing courses. “It could also include career advice and personal development, as well as opening up conversations about creativity and society, and drawing inspiration from other art forms,” ​​she said.

Twenty years after its inception, the Arts Initiative, which uses influential advisors to select mentors and protégés, now has a bold list of alumni including David Adjaye, Alfonso Cuarón, Brian Eno, Lara Foot, Stephen Frears, Nicholas Hlobo, David Hockney , Joan Jonas, Anish Kapoor, Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Crystal Pite, and Tracy K Smith.

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World News

Child Born on Afghan Flight Is Named Attain, After Jet’s Name Signal

Baby Born on Afghan Flight Is Named Reach, After Jet's Call Sign

The Afghan parents of a baby born on a C-17 plane that was evacuating passengers to Germany named their daughter after the plane’s call sign, a senior US general said this week.

“They named the little girl Reach, and they did so because the callsign of the C-17 plane that flew them from Qatar to Ramstein was Reach,” said General Tod Wolters, commander of US European Command, in a Pentagon -Message conference on Wednesday.

The Afghan mother, who is not named, had contractions and complications on Saturday on a flight from a base in Qatar to the Ramstein air base in southwest Germany, the US Air Force said on Twitter.

In response, the C-17 – identified on the radio as Reach 828 – sank in altitude to increase air pressure on the plane, “which helped stabilize and save the mother’s life,” the Air Force said.

After the plane landed, paramedics got on board and helped drop the baby into the hold. A group of women protected their mother’s privacy with their scarves, said Capt. Erin Brymer, a nurse who helped deliver the child, told CNN.

By the time they got there, the woman was “past the point of no return,” she said. “This baby was supposed to be born before we could possibly move it to another facility.”

Pictures released by the US Air Force showed the woman being transported from the plane to a nearby medical facility shortly after the birth of her daughter.

General Wolters said the baby was one of three – all in good condition – born to women who boarded evacuation flights from Afghanistan. Two more were delivered at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a military hospital in southern Germany.

“It is my dream to see this little kid named Reach grow up and become a US citizen and fly United States Air Force fighter jets in our air force,” General Wolters told reporters.

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World News

Ana Turns into First Named Storm of Atlantic Hurricane Season

Ana Becomes First Named Storm of Atlantic Hurricane Season

The Atlantic recorded its first storm of hurricane season on Saturday after a sub-tropical storm developed northeast of Bermuda, the National Hurricane Center said.

Storm Ana developed long before June 1, when hurricane season begins. It was the seventh year in a row that a named storm developed in the Atlantic prior to the official start of the season.

By early Saturday the storm had winds of up to 45 mph and was moving slowly west at 3 mph. For subtropical storm Ana to become a hurricane, it would have to reach wind speeds of up to 74 miles per hour, which is not expected to happen, the Hurricane Center said.

Jack Beven, a senior hurricane specialist at the center, said in a forecast update that the strength of subtropical storm Ana is unlikely to change during the daytime on Saturday and that it would weaken until Saturday evening and Sunday.

Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman and meteorologist at Miami’s Hurricane Center, said subtropical storms can still have significant effects.

“They can do just as much damage and do just as much,” he said. “That probably won’t happen with this one.”

The storm was expected to drift further northeast into the Atlantic before resolving in a few days. It is not expected to reach land, the Hurricane Center said.

A storm is only named after it has reached wind speeds of at least 39 miles per hour. Although the storm formed on Saturday had wind speeds similar to a tropical storm, it was considered subtropical because of its location and wind flow, Beven said in an update.

However, the subtropical storm Ana was the first in what is expected to be a busy hurricane season.

The Climate Prediction Center said the Atlantic could have 13 to 20 named storms this year, of which six to 10 could become hurricanes. Three to five could become large hurricanes with winds in excess of 200 km / h – enough to damage well-built homes, uproot trees, and make electricity and water inaccessible for days to weeks.

“While NOAA scientists don’t expect this season to be as busy as last year, it only takes one storm to destroy a community,” said Ben Friedman, acting administrator of NOAA, the country’s climate science agency, this week.

Last year, a record 30 storms developed in the Atlantic, of which 13 became hurricanes, according to NOAA, including six that intensified into larger hurricanes, according to NOAA.

It was the highest number of registered storms, surpassing the 28 in 2005, and became the second highest number of registered hurricanes, the agency said. Last September, five active storm systems moved simultaneously across the Atlantic.

There were so many storms in the Atlantic last year that NOAA ran out of a list of 21 names for the season and had to name storms by Greek letters for the second time in the agency’s history.

The next named storm to develop in the Atlantic this year will be Bill, followed by Claudette.

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Business

Yamiche Alcindor Is Named Host of ‘Washington Week’ on PBS

Yamiche Alcindor Is Named Host of ‘Washington Week’ on PBS

When Yamiche Alcindor found out last month that she was going to be the next presenter on the PBS show Washington Week, she immediately felt the emotions of the moment.

“I basically cried right away,” recalled Ms. Alcindor, “and thought of Gwen.”

Washington Week, a quiet redoubt on the screaming battlefield of political television, is most closely associated with its longtime host Gwen Ifill, the pioneering journalist who broke barriers as a black woman in the Washington press corps.

Prior to her death in 2016, Ms. Ifill also mentored Ms. Alcindor, the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour. Beginning with Friday’s episode, Ms. Alcindor, 34, will take over Ms. Ifill’s old chair at the head of Washington Week. She succeeds Robert Costa, a Washington Post reporter who took office in 2017 and left the show that year.

PBS and WETA-TV, the Washington subsidiary that produces the show, announced the appointment of Ms. Alcindor on Tuesday.

“I know how much ‘Washington Week’ meant to Gwen and how much she put her stamp on the legacy of the show,” Ms. Alcindor, a Haitian-American woman, said in an interview. “I also feel this incredible responsibility to think deeply about taking this and making it a show that people want to see, that people believe lives up to their great legacy.”

Ms. Alcindor will continue to report on President Biden for NewsHour while continuing to contribute to NBC News and MSNBC. She was previously a reporter for the New York Times and USA Today.

She said that she had been a Washington Week viewer since college and that she wanted to expand the scope of a show that is sometimes imbued with DC Arcana. She also plans to maintain the bourgeois tone – “a sense of respect and respectability,” as she put it – that has been the show’s signature since its debut in 1967.

“When you work and live in Washington it can feel like everything is about what’s going on in DC,” said Ms. Alcindor. “What has guided my journalism so much is how vulnerable populations are affected by these guidelines. That will be my directional light. “

As a White House reporter, Ms. Alcindor became known as a frequent target of former President Donald J. Trump’s anger at press conferences. Once in 2018, Mr Trump labeled her question “racist” after asking if his policies had encouraged white nationalists. “As a black woman, it wasn’t the first time someone had targeted me or said something about me that I knew wasn’t true,” recalled Ms. Alcindor.

When Ms. Alcindor was first booked as a guest on NBC’s Meet the Press, she called Ms. Ifill “in a panic”.

She recalled Ms. Ifill’s advice: “She was basically telling me, ‘You are a reporter who knows as much as the people at this table. You deserve it and you are ready for it. ‘”

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Business

Danielle Belton Named Prime Editor of HuffPost

Danielle Belton Named Top Editor of HuffPost

Danielle Belton, who led The Root for the past five years, will take over the top position at HuffPost next month, taking on a role that has been empty for more than a year.

Ms. Belton’s appointment was announced on Wednesday by Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, who acquired HuffPost in February.

“I realized that journalism was right for me when I was in J-School in college, and I realized that these are my people. I had the same feeling of speaking to HuffPost employees, ”Ms. Belton said in an interview. “These are people who are really passionate about giving people the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their daily lives. These are people who love to inform the world. “

BuzzFeed began looking for a top new HuffPost editor after the acquisition was announced in November. This was revealed in an internal email that Mr Peretti sent to staff on Wednesday. In the email received from the New York Times, Peretti said BuzzFeed had prioritized finding a HuffPost leader with a long-term vision who could “champion its urgent, compelling and far-reaching journalism.”

Belton, 43, editor-in-chief of The Root, a black news and culture site operated by G / O Media, was offered the position last week.

HuffPost, originally known as The Huffington Post after its founder, Arianna Huffington, has had financial problems in the competitive digital news arena for the past several years. The youngest editor-in-chief, Lydia Polgreen, a former Times editor who had run the site since 2016, traveled to Gimlet Media last March. HuffPost has since been headed by Editor-in-Chief Hillary Frey.

BuzzFeed announced in November that it had acquired HuffPost from Verizon Media. On March 9, shortly after the deal was signed, BuzzFeed laid off 47 HuffPost employees and closed the Canadian edition of the publication. Mr Peretti said at the time that the cost cut was needed as HuffPost lost more than $ 20 million in 2020 and forecast it would lose the same amount this year.

The company was criticized for the way it handled the layoff notice. This included that the employees use the password “spr! NgisH3r3 ”, a variation of“ Spring is here ”, to take part in the video conference.

Ms. Belton is now faced with the task of uniting a tumbling newsroom and setting a new course for posting on BuzzFeed. She will report to Mark Schoofs, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, although the two publications will have separate editorial teams and websites.

“I’m very excited about this healthy competition between HuffPost and BuzzFeed,” said Ms. Belton. “I’m excited about the moment HuffPost hits BuzzFeed on a ball.”

Ms. Belton, who describes herself as a “hardcore media nerd,” said her priority was to create a more diverse newsroom. She said the leadership told her it was committed to diversity and that it could hire more workers.

“I firmly believe that all newsrooms should be different and that all newsrooms should reflect the different communities that make up this country,” she said.

Ms. Belton said that “there is simply no good way to fire people” and that she wants to turn to her new team “in a healing way.”

“I’m so excited about the journalism and the journalists who work there every day to make HuffPost an amazing publication,” she said. “So I really want to focus on them and make them feel good about their situation and their place of work and continue to feel the pride they have always felt.”

Ms. Belton was the first editor-in-chief of The Root. She has written and edited for publications such as TheGrio, Essence, The Washington Post, and The Times. She also created the award-winning blog, The Black Snob.

Ms. Belton will begin her new role on April 12th. Her appointment was previously reported by The Daily Beast.

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Health

Hahn Resigns as F.D.A. Commissioner; Woodcock Named Interim Chief

Hahn Resigns as F.D.A. Commissioner; Woodcock Named Interim Chief

Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, who became Commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration just weeks before the coronavirus pandemic began, resigned on Wednesday when President Biden’s administration began.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, longtime director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Review, will serve as acting commissioner, according to an agency official.

From May, Dr. Woodcock has been tasked with Operation Warp Speed, the previous government’s program to accelerate vaccine and treatment development for the coronavirus.

She has been with the FDA since 1986 and has served in a number of key roles including Chief Medical Officer and Assistant Commissioner.

The Biden administration has not yet appointed a permanent commissioner, but Dr. Woodcock is one of the contemplated candidates, according to several advisors to the new president’s transition team. Dr. Amy Abernethy, Deputy Chief Commissioner, is also being considered, as is Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a former agency officer who is the vice dean of public health practice and community involvement at Johns Hopkins University.

The resignation of Dr. Hahn was expected to be part of the routine departure of senior political figures that comes with the assumption of office of a new administration. In a farewell message to FDA staff on Wednesday, he wrote: “As a nation and as a health agency, we have faced major challenges and turbulent times over the past year, particularly due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout all of this, FDA staff have been instrumental in responding to the disease with very real scientific advances like the approval of the first non-prescription OTC [over the counter] Covid test, the approval and approval of an antiviral agent, and the first two FDA-approved Covid-19 vaccines. “

Dr. Hahn received considerable criticism in the course of the pandemic. He has been accused of bowing to political pressure from President Trump and the White House to issue emergency clearances for unproven treatments such as hydroxychloroquine that did not provide evidence of their effectiveness. For the past few months, he has led reviews of the first vaccine against the virus, Pfizer and Moderna products.

In the past, 72-year-old Dr. Woodcock among other presidential administrations in the race for the top position of the FDA. It was first introduced by Dr. David Kessler, the former FDA commissioner who was named chief science officer for the Biden Administration’s vaccination efforts, no longer referred to as Operation Warp Speed, to the FDA’s Drugs Division.

The Biden administration did not specify when an FDA commissioner would be appointed.

Categories
World News

International Amazon websites named in U.S. ‘infamous markets’ listing for counterfeit items

Foreign Amazon sites named in U.S. 'notorious markets' list for counterfeit goods

Peter Endig | AFP | Getty Images

A handful of Amazon’s overseas websites have been added to the US government’s annual “Notorious Markets” list due to concerns that they may host counterfeit goods.

The USTR (United States Trade Representative) office released its review of the infamous markets in 2020 on Thursday. The list includes e-commerce websites and companies that are believed to facilitate the sale of counterfeit goods, and to commit intellectual property violations or piracy.

Amazon websites in the UK, Germany, Spain, France and Italy were named in the report. Complainants against the overseas websites alleged that the process of removing counterfeit products from Amazon is slow, even for companies participating in its trademark protection programs. They also argued that Amazon does not thoroughly scrutinize third-party sellers in its market or make it clear to brands and consumers “who is selling the goods”.

Amazon denied the sales agent’s report, which did not include Amazon’s US website, citing its extensive programs and tools designed to stop counterfeiters.

“Amazon’s inclusion in this report is a continuation of a personal revenge against Amazon and nothing more than a desperate stunt in the last days of this administration,” an Amazon spokesman told CNBC in a statement. “Amazon is doing more against counterfeiting than any other private organization known to us.”

USTR officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos during his four-year tenure. Bezos owns the Washington Post, which Trump has criticized for its unfavorable reporting on his administration. Amazon has also claimed it did not win a Pentagon cloud computing deal that could be worth up to $ 10 billion due to attacks by Trump against the company and Bezos.

Amazon websites were first added to the USTR’s Notorious Markets list in 2019. The American Apparel & Footwear Association asked the sales representative in 2018 to add some Amazon websites to the list.

In addition to Amazon, the other companies featured on the list include Chinese e-commerce website Pinduoduo, South American e-commerce company Mercadolibre, and file-sharing website The Pirate Bay.

Amazon has stepped up its counterfeit containment efforts as the third-party market has grown. The marketplace now accounts for more than half of the company’s total revenue and is home to millions of third-party providers.

While it continues to be an important component of Amazon’s business, the market has also faced a number of issues related to the sale of counterfeit, unsafe, and expired goods. In 2019, Amazon started mentioning counterfeit products as a risk factor in its annual filing.

The company has prosecuted counterfeiters in court, launched various programs to search for and detect sales of counterfeit goods, and in June set up the Counterfeit Crime Division, composed of former federal attorneys, investigators, and data analysts, to break down the website for fraudulent activity.

As a result of this and other efforts, 99.9% of the pages viewed by customers on the site never had a valid forgery report, the spokesman said.