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☆ Flood-Battered Italian Region May See More Violent and Frequent Storms
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-27 | by ( Elisabetta Povoledo | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The floods that submerged the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna this month, killing 15 people, leaving thousands homeless and grinding transportation and businesses to a halt, were not one-off events, warn experts, who predict that there are more similar, frequent and violent storms to come. “The question to ask,” the country’s civil protection minister, Nello Musumeci, told an Italian newspaper, “is not whether a disastrous event” like the deadly flooding will happen again, “but when and where it will occur.”The causes of floods are complex, including land development and ground conditions. But many experts in Italy, including Barbara Lastoria, a hydraulic engineer, have linked the two devastating storms that occurred over two weeks to climate change. The amount of water that fell — about 19.6 inches of rain in 15 days, more than half the average annual rainfall in the region — was extraordinary, experts say, exacerbated by a monthslong drought that had left the terrain struggling to absorb all of that rain. It swelled nearly two dozen rivers and sent billions of gallons of water pouring into streets and untold acres of farmland.

☆ Russia's claim that it won in Bakhmut may be meaningless — and a good sign for Ukraine's upcoming counteroffensive
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-22 | by ( Lloyd Lee | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Russia claimed victory over Bakhmut after a monthlong battle over the eastern Ukrainian city. On Sunday, Russia's defense ministry backed a claim first made by the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, Prigozhin, that Russian forces have seized Bakhmut. "Their capture does not grant Russian forces operationally significant terrain to continue conducting offensive operations or any particularly strong position from which to defend against possible Ukrainian counterattacks." The battle in Bakhmut has also, at times, put the Wagner leader at odds with Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Russian forces will likely need additional reinforcements to hold Bakhmut City and its flanks at the expense of operations in other directions," ISW reported.

☆ Some of the Books That Hernan Diaz Owns Surprise Even Him
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Scott, Deborah Eisenberg, Paul Yoon, Ottessa Moshfegh, Michael Ondaatje, Louise Erdrich, Colson Whitehead, Sigrid Nunez, Jean Strouse, Lorrie Moore. The novel contains four different books, written by different fictional authors in disparate genres and styles. “Trust” closes with a personal diary that is also a sort of a prose poem and a love letter to modernism. While writing this, I read and revisited authors as different as Jean Rhys, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Dawn Powell, Theodor Adorno and Gertrude Stein. Wodehouse section of my library and can report that I’ve read 29 of his books.

☆ Evelyne Axell was a trailblazer of erotic pop art in the 1960s. Then she died
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Jacqui Palumbo | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

CNN —Throughout Evelyne Axell’s short but radical career, the Belgian artist revered the female body in psychedelic hues rendered in gleaming enamel. In 1972, only a handful of years into painting, she died in a car crash and faded into relative obscurity. But such sales for Axell are infrequent, according to Sara Friedlander, Christie’s deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art. Her stylistic approach — a mix of pop art influences and dreamy surrealist settings — is still underrecognized, according to Morris. “She acts as a historical bridge (between surrealism and pop art),” she said.

A group of mostly Democratic senators pressured Tesla CEO Elon Musk to end the company's use of forced arbitration clauses in employee and customer contracts, in a letter on Monday. Forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts have similarly obscured important details about Tesla's vehicle safety and business practices from the public, the lawmakers wrote. They asked for the same details about sexual harassment complaints from Tesla workers. However, Tesla makes and sells its cars direct to consumers so its forced arbitration clauses cover more than the norm where auto sales are concerned. Tesla uses arbitration clauses as a tactic to shunt people into a forum that's pretty rigged for the corporation."

☆ Opinion: My family and I barely escaped from Khartoum. Here’s what we owe those left behind.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-06 | by ( Opinion Mohamed Eisa | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

At my mother’s house in Khartoum, friends and family kept us company, mourning with us and exchanging stories late into the night. After all, my family lived on one of the busiest streets in a packed city. Only then did I realize that my family and I were trapped in the middle of a war zone in the heart of Khartoum. In 2019, an uprising by the Sudanese people spurred the SAF and RSF to remove longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir from power. The silence was haunting, a scene out of a horror movie: abandoned cars ablaze; scores of dead bodies rotting in the streets; RSF soldiers glaring and pointing their guns directly at us.

☆ Opinion | The Hollywood Writers’ Strike Isn’t About Money, It’s About Survival
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-30 | by ( Zack Stentz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Continuing to succeed consistently over the course of a career can often seem next to impossible. But after three seasons of steady television work and a screenplay credit on the hit movie “Agent Cody Banks,” my luck finally ran out. The W.G.A.’s members make on average around $250,000 a year — and that’s before taxes, union dues and commissions to agents, managers and lawyers. The reality is that the seemingly big paychecks of Hollywood have to last through the lean periods that nearly every writer experiences. The formulas used to calculate the money owed for various forms of reuse are complicated and vary widely across platforms.

☆ Coronation travel guide: Transport advice, London hotels and where to watch
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Julia Buckley | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +16 min

Take the Conrad London St. James, for example, which sits between the Mall and Westminster Abbey. Most of the roads around Westminster Abbey and St. James’s Park Underground station will be blocked off. How to see the coronationCharles and Camilla will ride in the Diamond Jubilee State Coach to Westminster Abbey for the ceremony. Niklas Halle'n/AFP/Getty ImagesThe coronation itself will take place on the morning of Saturday May 6 at Westminster Abbey. Royal Windsor Racecourse, near Windsor Castle, and on the bank of the River Thames, is having a race night to celebrate the day’s public holiday.

☆ BBC's Sharp resigns after breaching rules over Boris Johnson loan
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Sarah Young | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

The investigation, initiated by the public appointments watchdog, examined the way in which Sharp was selected by the government to chair the corporation in 2021. Specifically, it looked at whether Sharp fully disclosed details of his role in facilitating an 800,000 pound ($1 million) loan for Johnson before he was named chairman. The report found that, while he had breached the government's code for public appointments, that breach did not necessarily invalidate his appointment. "I have decided that it is right to prioritise the interests of the BBC," Sharp said in a statement. The report mentions Johnson's Downing Street office as having recommended Sharp as "a strong candidate" for the role, which attracted 23 applications.

☆ Opinion | Private Equity Is Gutting America — and Getting Away With It
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Brendan Ballou | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

In this case, as in nearly every private equity acquisition, private equity firm benefit from a legal double standard: They have effective control over the companies their funds buy, but are rarely held responsible for those companies’ actions. This mismatch helps to explain why private equity firms often make such risky or shortsighted moves that imperil their own businesses. But it isn’t just that firms benefit from the law: They take great pains to shape it, too. The most prominent of these benefits is the carried interest loophole, which allows private equity executives to pay such low tax rates. Instead, Congress approved an amendment that largely exempted small and midsize companies owned by private equity firms from a new corporate minimum tax.

☆ Crypto is either dead in the water or about to notch new records as soon as next year - it depends on who you ask
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-25 | by ( Max Adams | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

You can scroll a bit further down for the market's reaction to the stunning Tucker Carlson announcement, but for today, we're turning our attention to crypto. If you ask Chamath Palihapitiya, that's because crypto crossed the wrong people and now it's dead, at least in the US. While crypto may be "dead in America," bitcoin is still going to $100,000. The housing market is close to bottoming and that could stave off a bad recession. That's according to Morgan Stanley, which wrote in a research note that housing is linked to broader business cycles.

SQM's lithium contract in Chile is set to expire in 2030 and Albemarle's in 2043, giving it more insulation from the potential move. Mexico nationalized its lithium deposits last year, and Indonesia banned exports of nickel ore, a key battery material, in 2020. SQM has a larger footprint in Chile, with 81,000 hectares (about 200,000 acres) for lithium extraction compared with Albemarle's 16,000 hectares. Argentine state energy firm YPF last year began exploring lithium, while Bolivia has long maintained strict control over its huge though largely untapped resources. Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Bolivia's Luis Arce have touted the idea of a regional lithium "OPEC" to coordinate on lithium policy and benefit local economies.

☆ Opinion: The untold story about Anne Frank’s hiding place
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Opinion Roy Schwartz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +10 min

British actors Bel Powley and Joe Cole play Miep and Jan, with Liev Schreiber as Otto Frank. Only Otto Frank survived. Anne Frank's (1929-1945) world famous diary charts two years of her life from 1942 to 1944, when her family were hiding in Amsterdam from German Nazis. Anne Frank has particularly been in the zeitgeist in recent years, with the 2021 French animated film “Where Is Anne Frank,” a magical retelling of her story loosely based on the 2018 graphic novel; the 2022 Dutch Netflix movie “My Best Friend Anne Frank,” based on the book “Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend”; the controversial, eventually pulled 2022 book “The Betrayal of Anne Frank”; and “After the Annex: Anne Frank, Auschwitz and Beyond,” coming out in May. While 89% have heard of Anne Frank, 32% don’t know she died in a concentration camp.

DHAKA, April 20 (Reuters) - Bangladesh is being forced to cut power to millions of people as a relentless heatwave has led to a surge in demand for power resulting in massive electricity supply shortfalls. Greater use of irrigation pumps by farmers and an increase in commercial activity due to preparations for festivities for the end of the holy month of Ramadan have contributed to increased power demand, officials say. Power shortages have been most severe at night, government data showed. The average maximum temperature in Dhaka was 6.5% higher during the seven days ended on Tuesday, compared with the week before, government data showed. Overall electricity supply fell short of demand by 6.2% over the seven days to Tuesday, government data showed, as demand surged nearly 15% compared with the preceding seven days.

☆ They Saw the Horrific Aftermath of a Mass Shooting. Should We?
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Jay Kirk | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +12 min

Jeff decided that he and Sam would be the only two permitted to have phones inside, in order to limit photographs. It was something Jeff learned to do from the nurses at Bristol Hospital a million years ago when he was a paramedic. He had already made the mistake when one fluttered out as he was dumping an uneaten lunch into the trash. They would set up staging tables in the tent for mass processing of the evidence, nothing they’d ever done at this scale. The problem was that during these interruptions it was not as if they could just step outside for a break.

☆ Who won the Fox-Dominion case? Lawyers and an obscure private-equity fund
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-19 | by ( Allison Morrow | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

That remains true in the case of Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems, which averted a trial with an 11th-hour deal Tuesday. Money aside, Fox had to acknowledge the court’s ruling that “certain claims about Dominion” that Fox perpetuated on-air were in fact false. The Neutral-to-Positive Winner: Dominion Voting SystemsFor more than two years, Dominion spent untold amounts of money building a defamation case against one of the most popular TV networks on the planet. Davida Brook, left, Justin Nelson, second from left, and Stephen Shackelford, attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems, exit the New Castle County Courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware, on Tuesday. But for a company that’s valued somewhere between $30 million and $80 million, it’s quite a deal.

☆ Stop stereotyping Gen Z. Focus instead on why we're disillusioned about the future of work.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-12 | by ( Alexandra York | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

But Gen Zers who work overtime on their own startups or corporate roles disprove the "lazy" stereotype. Most of my Gen Z peers actually fall somewhere in between, advocating for work-life balance and professional growth, including climbing the corporate ranks. Our jobs aren't our whole identityI talk with Gen Zers every day and most of the time we don't speak about our careers. have recently come under fire for being too network-y, which is a no-go for many in Gen Z. Why we feel anxious about workFor many Gen Zers, discontent with the workforce dates back to middle school.

☆ Ben Ferencz, last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, dies at 103
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-08 | by ( Will Dunham | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +6 min

We mourn the death of Ben Ferencz—the last Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor. At Nuremberg, Ferencz became chief prosecutor for the United States in the trial of 22 officers who led mobile paramilitary killing squads known as Einsatzgruppen that were part of the notorious Nazi SS. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law," Ferencz added. "Genocide - the extermination of whole categories of human beings - was a foremost instrument of the Nazi doctrine," Ferencz said. After the Nuremberg trials, Ferencz worked to secure compensation for Holocaust victims and survivors.

☆ More than 180 Rohingya Muslims arrive by boat in Indonesia's Aceh
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-27 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

JAKARTA, March 27 (Reuters) - More than 180 Rohingya Muslims landed in Indonesia's Aceh province on Monday, officials said, the latest among hundreds who have fled by boat from desperate conditions in Myanmar and in camps in Bangladesh. A spokesperson for the local police, Kamil, confirmed by phone that 184 Rohingya had arrived in East Aceh district and were "all in healthy condition". Since November last year, Indonesia has registered 918 Rohingya who reached Aceh, its westernmost region, according to the foreign ministry, having made the journey south in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. Nearly 1 million Rohingya live in crowded conditions in Bangladesh, among them those who fled a deadly crackdown in 2017 by Myanmar's military, which denies committing crimes against humanity. Reporting by Ananda Teresia and Stanley Widianto; Editing by Martin PettyOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ More Movies About Shoes Are on the Way
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Joe Queenan | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Next week, Amazon will release “Air,” the untold story of how the Air Jordan sneaker came into existence. It stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who also directed it. Right after that comes “ BlackBerry ,” a Canadian biopic about the smartphone that changed the world and then went away.

☆ The trailer for the new 'BlackBerry' movie is here and former 'CrackBerry' fans are shocked at how entertaining it looks
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-16 | by ( Jordan Hart | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

The "BlackBerry" trailer dropped Wednesday, and it's trending at number 21 on YouTube only 24 hours later. Critics and nostalgic BlackBerry fans alike say they're thrilled by the cast and the chance to revisit the iconic phone. It tells the story of the rise and fall of Canadian tech company Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry. "I'm shocked that BlackBerry actually looks like it might be pretty damn good," Canadian tech editor Patrick O'Rourke tweeted. Although the film might strike the hearts of BlackBerry loyalists or Y2K enthusiasts, the phones most likely won't be back.

☆ AI Tech Like ChaptGPT, Bing, Bard Is a Bigger Threat Than Social Media
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-14 | by ( Hasan Chowdhury | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +13 min

Nowadays, the promise of social media as a unifying force for good has all but collapsed, and Zuckerberg is slashing thousands of jobs after his company's rocky pivot to the metaverse. Much like social media in 2012, the AI industry is standing on the precipice of immense change. And as Altman and his cohort charge ahead, AI could fundamentally reshape our economy and lives even more than social media. If social media helped expose the worst impulses of humanity on a mass scale, generative AI could be a turbocharger that accelerates the spread of our faults. Social media amplified society's issues, as Wooldridge puts it.

☆ A rash of proposed Florida laws use 'genocidal rhetoric' to attack trans people, legal experts say
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-13 | by ( Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert | Katie Balevic | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

If passed, the bills would restrict access to gender-affirming care and classify it as child abuse. Experts told Insider the bills are posturing ahead of the 2024 presidential race. New legislation 'short circuits existing law'The proposed new bills go further to expand anti-trans legislation than others across the nation, disrupting established custody and health care precedent, legal experts told Insider. "I think that's important, just to note how brazen the language has become — it's genocidal rhetoric," Caraballo told Insider. "This is all about politics, and this is all about bolstering DeSantis is run for the presidency," Caraballo told Insider.

☆ South African court orders striking healthcare workers to end walkout
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-13 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

[1/5] Members of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers' Union (NEHAWU) march during a strike over wage disputes, at the Thelle Mogoerane Regional Hospital in Vosloorus outside Johannesburg, South Africa, March 13, 2023. REUTERS/Siphiwe SibekoJOHANNESBURG, March 13 (Reuters) - The South African Labour Appeal Court on Monday ordered striking state healthcare workers to end a week-long walkout that has affected services in some of the country's major hospitals, the health department said. National Education, Health and Allied Workers' Union (NEHAWU) members went on strike last week after wage talks with the government failed. The labour relations act prohibits essential workers from engaging in strike action which is detrimental to healthcare services with a risk of loss of life, he told a press briefing. The South African military said it had deployed medics to help in the affected hospitals at the request of the health department.

☆ U.S. seizes website selling malware that stole computer data
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-09 | by ( Zeba Siddiqui | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

SAN FRANCISCO, March 9 (Reuters) - U.S. authorities said on Thursday they seized an internet domain that was selling malicious software criminals used to steal data from and take control of victims' computers. The site sold NetWire, a type of malware called a 'remote access trojan' (RAT), which is "a sophisticated program capable of targeting and infecting every major computer operating system," the statement said. It allows covert surveillance, creating a "'backdoor' for administrative control and unfettered and unauthorized remote access to a victim’s computer, without the victim’s knowledge or permission," according to court records filed in Los Angeles the statement cited. It was unclear how many times the malware had been bought off the seized website. The seizure comes as U.S. authorities work on improving collaborations with other countries on investigating cybercrimes, which are often cross-border.

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