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Hollywood on Edge
| Roger Friedman | October 22nd 2017 |
SDhowbiz411
It’s a bizarre season in Hollywood. Almost nothing is “working,” and the studios can’t afford to waste any more money hoping things will turn around. They’re pulling flops from theaters earlier than usual.
This weekend, for example, Warner Bros. is putting out a white flag on “Blade Runner” after three tough weeks. They’ve cut the number of theaters showing Denis Villeneuve’s beautiful film by 855. So far, “Blade Runner” has made just $66 million. Audiences have not clamored to it. And now, week by week, Warners will quietly take it away.
Warner’s isn’t alone. Universal is pulling Tom Cruise’s “American Made” from 539 locations after a month in release. The Doug Liman directed thriller has made just $43 million. Good reviews haven’t helped push Cruise fans to theaters. One problem was lack of promotion since Cruise wasn’t available. Also, audiences may have just soured on him after “The Mummy” and other flops. With both studios, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Read more ..
Series Review
| Stephen Kelly | October 17th 2017 |
Guardian
 |
When House of Cards first premiered on Netflix in 2013, the biggest story in American politics was that nothing was happening – that Congress, gridlocked over the budget of President Obama, was stuck in a frustrating state of paralysis. By comparison, the show was a parallel universe in which Washington, so mundane in reality, became the domain of snakes and raptors, of machiavellian masterminds epitomised by Democratic congressman Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), the house majority whip with ambitions of absolute power. Moodily lit and beautifully shot, it was still always considerably trashier than it looked, but none the worse for it, full of ridiculous dialogue and knowing hyperbole. But not since The West Wing had politics looked so possible, politicians so impressively full of agency. In the words of Obama himself: “Man, this guy’s getting a lot of stuff done.”
House of Cards has always thrived upon topicality. Its third, Russia-centric series riffed upon the homophobic policies of Vladimir Putin; its fourth gave Frank a scandal involving the KKK. Season five had him calling for a travel ban, and also saw his wife, Robin Wright’s Claire, attain power – obviously banking on a Hillary Clinton administration. But yes: in recent years, its outrageous portrayal of American politics doesn’t seem so outrageous any more. Read more ..
Hollywood on Edge
| Bruce Haring | October 15th 2017 |
Deadline
The Weinstein Company is down to three board members, as Richard Koenigsberg today became the fifth to resign in the wake of the ongoing scandal involving company co-founder Harvey Weinstein.
Koenigsberg, an independent board member and one-time accountant to Harvey and Bob Weinstein, was reported to have resigned by the New York Times. That leaves co-founder Bob Weinstein, Tarak Ben Ammar, and Lance Maerov left on the company board, as rumors of sales and/or shut-downs swirl.
The departure by Koenigsberg follows the resignations of Tim Sarnoff, Paul Tudor Jones, billionaire Dirk Ziff and Marc Lasry.
Creatives and outlets have been galloping away from TWC since the October 5 New York Times piece on October 5 into Harvey Weinstein’s many sexual harassing actions and their resulting settlements. Since then, other women have come forward, former TWC partners have backed away, and law enforcement officials have allegedly started investigations into potential criminal complaints.
Hollywood on Edge
| Maria Pasquini | October 13th 2017 |
People
On Thursday, Rose McGowan’s access to her Twitter account was restored and she celebrated by firing off a series of angry tweets at people she thinks covered for Harvey Weinstein and accusing the movie mogul of rape.
Addressing all of her tweets to Jeff Bezos — the founder and CEO of Amazon — McGowan wrote, “I told the head of your studio that HW raped me. Over & over I said. He said it hadn’t been proven. I said I was proof.”
In response to the lengthy allegations made against Weinstein, a spokesperson for the movie mogul said, “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein.” Read more ..
Historians on Edge
| Michael Adams and Joseph Smith | October 11th 2017 |
Globe and Mail
The resignation of University of Toronto emeritus history professor Michael Marrus from a senior fellowship at Massey College has provoked discussion far beyond the college. In an exchange covered elsewhere, Mr. Marrus made a slavery-related remark to a black junior fellow, in reference to the approach of the college's head or "Master," that concerned the graduate student and others nearby.
Globe editorial: Globe editorial: Massey professor showed terrible judgment, but the response was worse
As word of the incident spread, petitions demanding action from the college attracted hundreds of signatures. The upshot to date, in addition to Mr. Marrus's resignation, has been an official apology from Massey College and the suspension of the use of the title "Master" for the head of the college, among other commitments. Read more ..
Historians on Edge
| Miriam Katawazi | October 8th 2017 |
The Star
A history professor who made racially offensive remarks to a Black student at the University of Toronto’s Massey College has submitted his resignation as a senior fellow at the school.
After commenting about the “master” of Massey College to a Black student, Michael Marrus resigned his fellowship Sunday when nearly 200 students and faculty signed a petition demanding that he be removed.
“First, I am so sorry for what I said, in a poor effort at jocular humour at lunch last Tuesday,” Marrus wrote in his resignation letter to college head Hugh Segal.
“What I said was both foolish and, I understood immediately, hurtful, and I want, first and foremost, to convey my deepest regrets to all whom I may have harmed.”
On Tuesday, Marrus was sitting with three junior fellows — graduate students who earned residence at Massey College through academic and extracurricular achievements — when Segal asked to join them. At the time, Segal’s title was “master” of the college. Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Mike Tomko | October 6th 2017 |
BTH
No one’s fact-checking the fact-checkers. After 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, Congress passed two spending bills. Congress suspended its rules to pass the second one. What started out as emergency relief for Hurricane Sandy became Disaster Relief Appropriations. By skipping the normal appropriations process, Congress could load the bill with billions in hand-outs not related to Sandy. Or not an emergency. The annual appropriations process is the proper and transparent mechanism to review spending requests.
Recently, the Washington Post [here] and PolitiFact [here] claimed “virtually all” money was spent on Sandy relief. In fact, billions were not for emergency relief. Or for Sandy.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development received 16 of the 51 billion from the 2nd bill. Here are just two examples of HUD spending. Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Martin Barillas | October 3rd 2017 |
Spero
 |
CBS executive Hayley Geftman-Gold apparently has no sympathy for the 58 persons who died at the hands of a mass-shooter on Sunday night in Las Vegas. She wrote on Facebook that “If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing,” in what may have been a reference to the Sandy Hook mass shooting by a crazed young man. The top legal adviser to the network added, “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”
Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada, took aim at approximately 22,000 country music fans from his room on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Besides the dead, Paddock left more than 500 wounded. According to The New York Times, the gunfire began during a performance by the singer Jason Aldean, the closing act of the Route 91 Harvest Festival.
Subsequent to Gelfman-Gold's missive on Facebook, CBS announced her dismissal. “This individual, who was with us for approximately one year, violated the standards of our company and is no longer an employee of CBS. Her views as expressed on social media are deeply unacceptable to all of us at CBS. Our hearts go out to the victims in Las Vegas and their families,” a CBS spokeswoman told Fox News. Read more ..
The Digital Voice
| Author's Guild | October 2nd 2017 |
AG
The recent firing of the prominent anti-monopolist Barry Lynn and his Open Markets team from a Google-funded think tank has amplified attention on the tech giant’s readiness to use its power to suppress criticism and sway the cultural dialogue in its favor.
An August 31 New York Times article reported that Lynn and the Open Markets team had been fired from the New America Foundation shortly after he authored a statement praising the European Union’s landmark €2.4 billion penalty against Google for breaching antitrust rules. “The story began June 27, when we released a statement welcoming a European antitrust action against Google’s abuse of its monopoly power,” Lynn said in a press release. “Two days later, we were given two months to leave.” Read more ..
Significant Lives
| Lyn Julius | September 24th 2017 |
NJ Jewish Standard
Iraqi Jews in Israel and abroad are mourning the death, on the second day of the Jewish New Year, of Professor Shmuel Moreh, 85, emeritus professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Born Sami Muallem in 1932 in Baghdad’s upmarket district of Bataween, Professor Moreh was a well-respected academic (as chairman of the Association of Academics from Iraq in Israel, he presided over the publication of countless books), who excelled in his command of the Arabic language.
Immigrating, together with most of Iraq’s Jews, to Israel with his family in 1951, he received his B.A. and M.A. from the Hebrew University in Arabic literature and Islamic Studies and his Ph.D. in modern Arabic poetry (SOAS, London University) in 1965. He was a poet and a prolific author of over 20 publications in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
His memoirs were serialised in the online Arabic medium Elaph in 2009 -10 and awakened huge interest among Iraqis in their lost Jewish community. The series was later published in Arabic as Baghdad Mon Amour. Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Shoshana Bryen and Stephen Bryen | September 19th 2017 |
JPC
The company that manages the Russian news outlet R.T. (Russia Today) announced last week that it had received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice requiring it to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The Russian news outlet Sputnik International may be next.
FARA was passed in 1938 to require entities or individuals who represent foreign governments to disclose their relationships, activities, and finances.
Registration would not stop R.T. from broadcasting in the U.S. or censor its programs – it is a paperwork requirement – but it would formally label R.T. an arm of the Russian government rather than an independent media source. This, in essence, would tell Americans that news from R.T. should be considered suspect.
As a practical matter, all news – particularly from government-sponsored sources – should be considered skeptically. Read more ..
Film News
| Anna Marie de la Fuente | September 18th 2017 |
Variety
Mexican location scout Carlos Muñoz Portal was shot to death in a violent region in central Mexico Monday while scouting for season four of Netflix’s hit show “Narcos.” The seasoned scout, who worked for Stacy Perskie’s Mexico City-based production company Redrum, has a slew of high profile credits to his name, including, “Sicario,” “Spectre,” “Fast & Furious” and “Apocalypto.”
Netflix issued the following statement: “We are aware of the passing of Carlos Muñoz Portal, a well-respected location scout, and send our condolences to his family. The facts surrounding his death are still unknown as authorities continue to investigate.
Muñoz’s bullet-riddled body and car were found in a remote area near San Bartolo Actopan in the state of Mexico near the borders of Hidalgo state, which is said to have one of the highest murder rates in Mexico. In July, 182 cases of homicide were reported in the densely populated state, a ratio of 12.2 for every 100,000 inhabitants. Read more ..
Screen Music
| Noah Yoo | September 17th 2017 |
Pitchfork
Jóhann Jóhannsson is no longer involved with Blade Runner 2049, according to Icelandic newspaper Fréttablaðið (via the Iceland Review).
It had first been revealed in summer 2016 that Jóhannsson would be the film’s sole composer. In July 2017, it was reported that Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch were brought on to assist Jóhannsson.
All of Jóhannsson’s contributions have now been reportedly removed from 2049.
When reached for comment, Jóhannsson’s representatives replied, “Unfortunately due to a legal Non Disclosure Agreement Jóhann signed we’re not able to speak about this film at all.”
Book Business
| Ed Nawotka, Dennis Abrams, Jason Boog, Alex Green, Claire Kirch | September 16th 2017 |
Author's Guild Bulletin
Sales were strong across much of the country this past summer, and the attitude going into the fall is positive, according to a PW survey of more than 15 independent bookstores last week.
“We had a really good summer,” said Ann Woodbeck, owner of Excelsior Bay Books outside of Minneapolis. “Sales were way up. We expect to finish out the year with a double-digit increase over last year.”
Anne Holman, general manager of the King’s English in Salt Lake City, reported that sales were up 14%–15%, and Kristen Sandstrom, manager of the Apostle Islands Booksellers in Bayfield, Wisc., said sales were likely to add up to the “best year ever.”
Peter Reynolds, owner of the Blue Bunny Books & Toys in Dedham, Mass., said that sales are up 25% this year, 9% from last summer—despite the fact that Amazon Books opened a store less than a mile away earlier this year and his own store closed for three weeks to renovate. “Our loyal customers became even more loyal,” he added.
Nicole Sullivan, owner of BookBar in Denver, pegged the increase in sales at her store this summer at 20%, in part due to an influx of new residents in her store’s neighborhood and the addition of an outdoor patio where customers can linger over coffee, tea, and hors d’oeuvres. “That helps sustain us through the summer while others might be leveling off after the holidays” she said. In Athens, Ga., the Avid Bookshop saw sales 57% higher than last summer after adding a second, larger location in town, owner Janet Geddis said. Read more ..
The Digital Age
| Julien Happich | September 8th 2017 |
EE Times
8K displays deliver ultra-high-definition images with 16 times the resolution of full-HD which could not be expressed with 4K images. It reproduces images with ultra-fine details even the naked eye cannot capture.
In October 2015, Sharp had released an 85-inch 8K monitor using an 8K LCD panel, and the advanced wideband digital satellite broadcast receiver compatible with 8K ultra-high-definition (UHD) broadcasts in 2016, followed in June 2017 with the release of a 70-inch 8K monitor. The Japanese company aims to complement its 8K TVs by accelerating development of 8K broadcast receivers, 8K cameras, and other 8K products to lead the world by Read more ..
Book Review
| Ron Briley | September 7th 2017 |
HNN
The Nation magazine has served as a bastion of liberal thought since Reconstruction, providing a home for the writings of journalists, politicians, and scholars. Among these scholars is historian Eric Foner of Columbia University whose contributions to the Nation from 1977 to the present are gathered in the aptly titled Battles for Freedom, as the concept of liberty is at the core of Foner’s scholarship focusing on such topics as abolitionism, Reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln. These selections highlight Foner as a public intellectual who is willing to engage with the major issues of our time and does not retreat into the isolation of academic objectivity and the ivory tower. Foner is a man of the political left but is hardly doctrinaire in embracing a radical tradition in American history from Tom Paine to Bernie Sanders that has struggled to expand the fabric of freedom within American society. Read more ..
The Digital Age
| Elizabeth Kolbert | August 26th 2017 |
New York
 |
On the night of November 7, 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife, Lucy, took to her bed with a headache. The returns from the Presidential election were trickling in, and the Hayeses, who had been spending the evening in their parlor, in Columbus, Ohio, were dismayed. Hayes himself remained up until midnight; then he, too, retired, convinced that his Democratic opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, would become the next President.
Hayes had indeed lost the popular vote, by more than two hundred and fifty thousand ballots. And he might have lost the Electoral College as well had it not been for the machinations of journalists working in the shady corners of what’s been called “the Victorian Internet.”
Chief among the plotters was an Ohioan named William Henry Smith. Smith ran the western arm of the Associated Press, and in this way controlled the bulk of the copy that ran in many small-town newspapers. The Western A.P. operated in tight affiliation—some would say collusion—with Western Union, which exercised a near-monopoly over the nation’s telegraph lines. Early in the campaign, Smith decided that he would employ any means necessary to assure a victory for Hayes, who, at the time, was serving a third term as Ohio’s governor. Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Martin Barillas | August 19th 2017 |
Spero
Robin Simcox, a Thatcher Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, dismissed allegations in an appearance on Fox News that the terrorist attack in Spain was a work of a copycat emulation of the incident in Charlottesville VA that resulted in the death of a protester. On Thursday, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer appeared to draw parallels between the Charlottesville incident and the attacks in Spain. The latter caused the deaths of 14 innocents, and injured dozens more.
Speaking to show host Tucker Carlson Fox , Simcox said on Thursday: “I find that really hard to believe, really. Jihadists have been carrying out these kinds of attacks way before Charlottesville. This year alone you’ve seen a truck being used in Stockholm and London, and before that you’ve seen Nice and Berlin. So I don’t find that really credible.” Read more ..
Inside Film
| Charles Bernstein | August 17th 2017 |
Jewish Voice
 |
New York state has closed on a $7 million acquisition with the Greenpoint-based soundstage company Broadway Stages for a 69-acre former prison facility in Staten Island. The new facility is expected to draw in lots of television and movie productions that are looking to film authentic jail scenes.
Broadway Stages agreed to invest $20 million for maintenance work, renovations and the future construction of six soundstages in the old Arthur Kill Correctional Facility as part of the acquisition. The facility sits on the water’s edge in Staten Island’s neighborhood of Rossville.
The recent popularity of prison-themed shows, like Orange is the New Black, are increasing productions’ needs for jail locations, Broadway Stages president and CEO Gina Argento told Crain’s. She explained that her company can gain an edge over its city competitors by having a prison facility in its portfolio.
Argento said, "A lot of productions have had to go Upstate to film prison scenes. To have a prison in the city that has such a feeling of authenticity to it is going to be very attractive to a lot of productions that are otherwise based in the city."
According to Crain’s, “Broadway Stages won a state solicitation for buyers of the site over three years ago, but was delayed in part in closing on the deal by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. DiNapoli's office had directed scrutiny at Argento after her name arose in an investigation by federal and state prosecutors into Mayor Bill de Blasio's campaign fundraising. Read more ..
Inside Books
| Authors Guild Staff | August 11th 2017 |
contributed
We wrote in May that Amazon had begun allowing third-party booksellers to win featured status in a book’s “Buy Box.” That’s a problem because authors don’t earn royalties on sales of books by third-party retailers, whose source is often unclear. Since then, we’ve heard from a number of you about how the change affected you as authors and self-publishers, and we’ve spoken to Amazon about the new policy.
David Naggar, Amazon’s VP of Kindle Content, explained that only brand new books—not “like new”—are allowed to win the Buy Box. Vendors are required to describe their books as “new” only if they are in fact new books retailed directly from the publisher. Advanced review copies (“ARCs”) and remaindered copies should not be advertised as “new,” according to Amazon. Naggar explained that it’s unclear how third-party sellers would obtain copies that are not ARCs, remainders, or other second hand books. Those copies, he explained, should only win the Buy Box if the publisher has no copies available through Amazon to allow it to fill the order promptly. The problem lies in part with resellers who label their books as “new” when they are actually secondhand books that look new. Read more ..
Author Profile
| Rebecca Bynum | August 10th 2017 |
contributed
Alhough he served as a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign in 2016, Dr. Walid Phares did not join the ranks of the administration in 2017. After election-day, as he returned to the private sector, he told diplomats and journalists, who continued to seek his assessments, that he “remains at the service of the President elect and later his administration, when needed.”
Dr. Phares is a veteran when it comes to advising presidential candidates and lawmakers. Back in 2011, he was appointed as a senior national security advisor to Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who asked Phares to review the Middle East related chapter of his own book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness (March 2010) and who later endorsed the Phares’ book which predicted the Arab Spring before it happened, titled The Coming Revolution, published in October 2010.
The Beirut-born scholar, who immigrated to the United States in 1990, has not only published several books and numerous articles, but has been prolific in national and international media interviews. The impact of his expertise, particularly on Jihadism, Islamism, Iran’s strategies, minorities’ issues and human rights in the Middle East, can clearly be found in number of congressional discourses, European Parliament policy conferences, the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and the present administration.
Phares had briefed candidate Trump in the fall of 2015 but was not officially appointed until March 2016. Among the many talking points he advanced for the campaign on Fox News, French, British, Asian as well as Arab media was the call for an “Arab Alliance against Terror.” First published back in 2011 on al Arabiya, Phares’ concept of a NATO-like coalition was circulated in several arenas before advocated as a Trump foreign policy component in 2016. The idea, which Phares had discussed with a few Arab leaders early on, materialized when President Trump addressed fifty Arab and Muslim leaders in Riyadh earlier this year. Read more ..
Book Review
Mosaic
The battle for Deir Yassin was a milestone in the Israeli-Arab conflict, but exacting historical research reveals that no individuals were killed outside of battle, and that the myth was the result of a hasty Irgun propaganda effort. A review of a new book.
The battle which took place at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948 should not have been different than any other battle in the War of Independence. For various reasons, the battle went haywire and dozens of Arab citizens were killed (the exact number is disputed), many women were shot, and much property was looted to aid Jews who were in dire straits due to the war.
The events of Deir Yassin became a key symbol in the consciousness of both Arabs and Jews. All those involved, past and present, didn’t hesitate to use demagoguery, half-truths, and unverified data to confirm their prejudices. The claims being made may have declarative value, but certainly no scholarly or factual value. Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Mike Tomko | August 6th 2017 |
BTH
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” That quote is attributed to Mark Twain. It resonates today. A number of newspapers have attacked the parent company of this station. Here’s an example.
Politico first reported that President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner claimed the campaign “struck a deal” with Sinclair. That characterization was mindlessly echoed by countless outlets including The New York Times, Washington Post, The Hill, Salon, The Nation and others.
But what they didn’t report was that Sinclair made identical offers to both Trump and Hillary Clinton for campaign coverage. In fact, nearly 30 offers were made to the Clinton campaign. Shockingly, Politico refused an offer to see correspondence with the two campaigns. Refused to look at it. What’s that say about Politico’s agenda? Read more ..
Composer's Story
| CBS Interactive | August 4th 2017 |
from CBS and agencies
The first time most movie-goers heard the music of Hans Zimmer was in the 1988 movie "Rain Man." The composer went on to write the scores of more than 100 films. He has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won for "The Lion King."
Zimmer has also won four Grammys and two Golden Globe awards.
"Dunkirk" has been hailed as a visual masterpiece. But what you hear – the film's sweeping musical score – is the latest genius from the legendary composer, reports CBS News' Mark Strassmann.
"I wrote by going to the beach, picking up the sand, seeing the misery on that beach. You have to get a movie under your fingers. It's as simple as that," Zimmer said. To score "Dunkirk," the German-American Zimmer found inspiration in his own past. "I approached it at first, of course, as somebody who wouldn't be here if my parents had not escaped the Germans," Zimmer said. His Jewish mother escaped the Germans in 1939. Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Larry Goldbetter | July 15th 2017 |
Author's Guild
The National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981 (NWU) is preparing to go to court after the EBONY Media Organization (EMO) and its parent company, the Clear View Group (CVG) failed to meet a self-imposed deadline to compensate as many as 50 freelance writers who are owed as much as $200,000.
After mounting media attention due to the #EbonyOwes hashtag on Twitter, EBONY Media released a statement to NBC BLK on June 3 affirming their commitment to paying all of their freelance writers, in full, by the end of June.
“This is completely unacceptable,” NWU President Larry Goldbetter said about the missed deadline. “We took them at their word, in good faith, despite some freelancers going more than a year without payment. Now, we move on to the next step.”
The union represents 30 writers who are owed about $60,000. EBONY did issue checks to eleven writers for a total of $18,000. Only three of those were paid in full. He added, “Creatives don’t work for free and there are very real consequences when we don’t get paid. While EBONY Media executives from CVG were throwing lavish Super Bowl parties and Hollywood events, unpaid freelancers were struggling to pay the rent.” Read more ..
Trump vs the Media
Lifezette
CNN found itself ensnared in yet another ethical quagmire on Wednesday after a young reporter apparently tracked down the creator of a mock video tweeted by President Donald Trump and extracted an apology from him.
The Reddit user created the controversial animated GIF that showed Trump body-slamming a man at a World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) match. The man in the original video was Vince McMahon, the former president of WWE and a personal friend to Trump. In the mock video, the CNN logo was in place of McMahon’s head.
Trump tweeted the video on Sunday, and CNN reacted with outrage. CNN and other journalists claimed the tweet from Trump was not mockery but rather that Trump was encouraging violence against reporters. Read more ..
Media on Edge
BTH
“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
That quote was attributed to Mark Twain. False stories spread faster than the truth.
On June 14th, the New York Times published an editorial with an outright falsehood that appears to defame Sarah Palin. The paper claimed Palin incited Jared Loughner. He was the man who shot U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords and 18 others, killing six back in 2011. Immediately afterwards, some liberals blamed Palin for instigating the shooting rampage. Palin was widely considered a potential opponent to Barack Obama the following year. This claim was quickly debunked. In fact, Loughner was a George Bush-hating liberal. This week, Palin sued the New York Times. Read more ..
The Edge of Music
| Martin Barillas | June 27th 2017 |
Spero
 |
Susan Boyle, whose rags to riches story has captivated music lovers ever since her Britain’s Got Talent debut, was attacked by a gang of as many as 15 teen assailants near her home in Scotland. Boyle has been regularly victimized by attacks. The latest episode has left her “cowering in fear,” according to a spokesman. The 56-year-old singer has Asperger syndrome and has been deliberately targeted by thugs near her home in Blackburn, West Lothian. She has been subjected to regular verbal abuse, while the group also throws stones at her car.
In one incident, the teens set a piece of paper alight and threw it at her when they spotted Boyle at a shopping mall, and called her an “ugly old bitch.” A witness told The Mirror that members of the gang threw stones, screamed and shouted abuse at the singer while she was riding on a bus.
Boyle has become a favorite in the United Kingdom and throughout the English-speaking world. According to the Sunday Mirror, most of the teens are boys. A spokesman for Boyle is seeking police protection for her. Read more ..
Media on Edge
Newsweek
CNN’s announcement of new publishing restrictions on articles about President Donald Trump and Russia, as reported by Buzzfeed, has delighted right-wing media.
Populist website Breitbart reported that the “very fake news scandal” was consuming the network, while Fox News host Sean Hannity taunted CNN's Jeff Zucker on Twitter.
CNN has long been accused of liberal bias by critics and has been one of the key focuses of President Donald Trump’s relentless rhetorical assaults against what he has branded the “fake news” media.
Trump aimed barbs at the network during his 2016 election campaign; White House press secretary Sean Spicer accused it of spreading unsubstantiated rumours in a bid to attract viewers. In his first press conference as president, Trump shouted down CNN’s Jim Acosta after denouncing the news network from the podium. Read more ..
Media on Edge
IPT
Last month's suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester wasn't the first time an Islamist terrorist targeted young people out for a night of fun. In 2001, a Hamas-affiliated terrorist blew himself up outside the Dolphinarium, a Tel Aviv nightclub, killing 21 Israelis, including 16 teenagers.
But news coverage of the two massacres was strikingly different, as the Manchester attack generated exponentially more attention. The New York Times, for example, offered a handful of small accounts about the Tel Aviv attack. But the Manchester bombing generated dozens of wire service and Times staff updates along with analysis stories and an editorial lamenting the horror of targeting children.
There are reasons why attacks in Europe are covered more exhaustively than those targeting Israelis. But as a result, Americans may not fully appreciate the depth of Palestinian violence because the near-daily examples of it are all but ignored. Read more ..
Film News
JV and agencies
Wonder Woman may be a hit at the box office, grossing $228 million worldwide in its first weekend, but the movie has hit the rocks in much of the Arab world because of its Israeli star, Gal Gadot.
After being banned in Lebanon, Wonder Woman is now facing bans in Tunisia, Jordan and Algeria.
The Hollywood media site Deadline.com reported Thursday that the movie’s scheduled release in Tunisia has been suspended because of Gadot’s defense of Israel’s 2014 incursion into Gaza.
Deadline said the secular Arab nationalist People’s Movement party petitioned the Tunisian culture ministry to ban the movie as part of an effort to isolate Israel. “We must continue the mobilization on this type of affair, as on everything related to normalization with the Zionist entity,” the People’s Movement said in a statement. Read more ..
Author Essay
| Newt Gingrich | June 14th 2017 |
contributed
The most startling revelation from fired FBI Director James Comey’s testimony this week was his barefaced admission that he intentionally leaked details of his private conversations with the President to the press in an effort to prompt the appointment a special counsel.
When asked Thursday by Senator Susan Collins of Maine whether he shared the memos he wrote about his conversations with President Trump with anyone outside the Department of Justice, Comey answered:
“I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter – didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons – but I asked him to, because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” Read more ..
Book Review
| Amram Sherby | May 21st 2017 |
Contributor
Genesis of the Palestinian Authority, by David Bedein. Edited by Bernhard Rosenberg. Behr Publishers, Edison, NJ. 2017
Over the past 30 years of covering the Israeli-PLO relations, David Bedein has witnessed many of its defining moments. He was present at the signing of the Oslo Accords, has met with the Fatah and Hamas leadership and has sent dispatched camera crews into key Palestinian Authority and UNRWA meetings and institutions.
While Bedein has consistently reported groundbreaking news, news agencies have often been n reluctant to publish his stories, most of which contradicted the “peace narrative” which was prevalent in the 90’s and early 2000’s.
Today, nearly 25 years after the signing of the Oslo accords, it is clear something went awry in the “peace agreement” aimed at ending the Israeli-Arab conflict. Read more ..
Amazon and the Book World
| Authors Guild | May 9th 2017 |
AG
The Authors Guild is deeply disturbed by Amazon’s new policy of allowing third-party book resellers to claim featured status in the “buy boxes” on Amazon. In a move that’s very likely to cut into publishing industry profits even more, Amazon will no longer automatically assign the main buy box for each hard copy, paper, audio and Kindle edition to the copies that Amazon distributes on behalf of the book’s publisher. Rather, a secret algorithm—which reportedly weighs factors such as price, availability, and delivery time, will now decide which seller (i.e., Amazon or a third party re-seller) gets the buy box. Amazon’s new policy states that “eligible sellers will be able to compete for the buy box for Books in new condition.” What this means is that second-hand book distributors—who often sell at extremely steep discounts—will be able to claim that premium real estate if they can beat out the publishers’ copies under the algorithm. Read more ..
Books on Edge
Author's Guild
A shocking proposal from the Internet Archive (IA) illustrates how deeply fragmented traditional alliances in the literary marketplace have become. IA has proudly announced that it’s a semifinalist for a $100 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which will allow IA to digitize over 4 million books. IA then plans to make a digital copy of every work available to any library in the country that owns a physical copy of that book. The idea is to create tens of millions of new ebooks, available for free to library users throughout America. It’s inevitable that most of the newly digitized books would still be within their copyright, since IA wants to concentrate on works published in the last century. Despite that, the IA does not plan to pay a penny to the authors or publishers of these books. Read more ..
Author Interview
CleanTechnica
 |
When I first met Paul Scott at the AltCar Expo in Santa Monica back in 2009, I automatically liked this friendly man on his electric Vectrix. Paul was frank, straightforward, and driven by a strong motivation to tell the world how to clean up its act with a smile. But make no mistake, this mild-mannered looking man is on a mission, and a dangerous one at that — to avoid a climate meltdown and terrorism. Paul Scott’s Radical book subtitle says it all: With Billions of Lives at Stake, What Would You Do?
When Paul first told me he was writing a dangerous book two years ago, I chuckled. What could be so dangerous writing a book about the environment? Surely, Paul isn’t one of those conspiracy theorists? But as he told me more about it, I knew the book would do more than raise a few eyebrows. The book is a chilling insight into what could easily happen if we continue on our merry way destroying our planet while mega-corporation pockets grow larger and larger. But who really is Paul Scott, anyway? Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Bassam Tawil | April 28th 2017 |
Gatestone
Seven Palestinian journalists are the latest victims of the Palestinian Authority's (PA) continued crackdown on the media.
The repressive measures are aimed at silencing critical voices among the journalists and deterring others from reporting stories that reflect negatively on the Palestinian leadership in particular and Palestinians in general.
In the view of President Mahmoud Abbas and his PA, Palestinian journalists exist to write stories slamming Israel or praising PA leaders. Media, for them, is defined as a mouthpiece for Abbas, the PA leadership and the Palestinian cause.
Any journalist who dares to think outside this checkpoint is subject to severe punishment. Under Abbas and the PA, there is no room for an independent media. The three major Palestinian newspapers -- Al-Quds, Al-Ayyam and Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda -- are controlled, directly and indirectly, by the PA. Read more ..
Book Review
| Dan Lazare | April 15th 2017 |
HNN
 |
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, experts agreed that the world would soon be a more peaceful and democratic place. But with war raging across the Middle East and showdowns looming from Eastern Europe to Asia, Richard Haass’s A World in Disarray is a primer on how they went wrong. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the country’s premier foreign-policy think tank, so he’s in a position to know. But his book is vague, meandering, and about as penetrating as a strand of overcooked spaghetti. The only insight it offers is into how alarmingly shallow the US foreign-policy establishment has become.
Haass served as special assistant to President George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War and then as the State Department’s director of policy planning during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, the only effect has been to lock in a world view that is self-serving and contradictory. He writes that post-invasion Iraq “proved far less ripe for democratic change than had been anticipated by the war’s proponents,” as if people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had any interest in democratizing Iraq in the first place. (They didn't.) He writes that the Iraqi collapse led to the rise of “subnational identities tied to set, tribe, and ethnicity” and that “Sunni anger and humiliation stoked recruiting for both al-Qaeda and subsequently ISIS.” But he doesn’t mention the role of close US allies such as Saudi Arabia in building such forces up. (By 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was warning that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”)
He criticizes the Obama administration for abandoning Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak during the Arab Spring because it would be “taken as a sign in Riyadh and elsewhere that the United States could not be expected to back its friends of long standing.” But he doesn’t explain why the US should be friends with such a nightmarish dictatorship. He notes that in order “not to alienate the Saudis,” the US held its tongue when the kingdom sent troops to crush pro-democracy demonstrations in neighboring Bahrain. But he avoids saying whether this was a good policy or not.
A World in Disarrayalso criticizes America and its allies for failing to put Libya back on its feet after toppling Muammar Gadhafi but doesn’t mention the role of Qatar, which joined the anti-Gadhafi campaign at Clinton’s behest and then distributed some $400 million in military aid to Salafist rebels so that they could spread havoc from one end of the country to the other. It accuses Barack Obama of “an act … of omission” for failing to fund anti-Baathist rebels in Syria, when in fact CIA was spending close to a billion dollars per year. Haass assails the White House for not responding more forcefully when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was accused of using poison gas in August 2013, but neglects to mention that Obama only pulled back when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper informed him that the case against Assad was less than a “slam dunk.” He says that the US should have proceeded regardless with a concerted assault on “important military and political targets over several days involving both aircraft and cruise missiles.” But then he cautions a few pages later that “the rapid collapse of the Assad regime [in 2015] without careful preparation for what would take its place would likely have paved the way for ISIS to establish a caliphate in Damascus, something to be resisted at all costs.” So why would a massive missile barrage not have produced the same disastrous result two years earlier? A World in Disarray doesn’t explain.
Finally, Haass is less than forthcoming about his own role in the great Middle East debacle. He says of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq: “The road to a transformed Middle East, it was widely believed, ran through Baghdad. I did not share this view, but I had little opportunity to challenge those who did, given the structure of decision making in the George W. Bush administration.” In fact, he had ample opportunity when the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann called him for an interview just as the war was getting underway. Instead of letting loose with his misgivings, though, he mounted a vigorous defense, accusing the French of “being disingenuous” in objecting to the invasion and declaring that Bush was right to proceed without UN approval.
“This is a way, I believe, quite honestly, of preserving the UN’s potential viability in the future,” he said. “We’ve not destroyed it. We’ve just admitted, though, that it can’t do everything, when the great powers of the day disagree.”
These are the weasel words of someone who had just gotten the nod to become head of the Council on Foreign Relations – which Lemann correctly describes as “one of the foreign-policy world’s plummiest jobs” – and didn’t want to say anything to queer the deal. Estimates of Iraqi war deaths from March 2003 to June 2006 run as high as 600,000, all because the Bush administration thought it had a unilateral right to disregard both the UN and world opinion in general. Judging from A World in Disarray, Haass still hasn’t faced up to the enormity of his mistake. - See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165504#sthash.YDg3Ug9L.dpuf
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, experts agreed that the world would soon be a more peaceful and democratic place. But with war raging across the Middle East and showdowns looming from Eastern Europe to Asia, Richard Haass’s A World in Disarray is a primer on how they went wrong. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the country’s premier foreign-policy think tank, so he’s in a position to know. But his book is vague, meandering, and about as penetrating as a strand of overcooked spaghetti. The only insight it offers is into how alarmingly shallow the US foreign-policy establishment has become.
Haass served as special assistant to President George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War and then as the State Department’s director of policy planning during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, the only effect has been to lock in a world view that is self-serving and contradictory. He writes that post-invasion Iraq “proved far less ripe for democratic change than had been anticipated by the war’s proponents,” as if people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had any interest in democratizing Iraq in the first place. (They didn't.) He writes that the Iraqi collapse led to the rise of “subnational identities tied to set, tribe, and ethnicity” and that “Sunni anger and humiliation stoked recruiting for both al-Qaeda and subsequently ISIS.” But he doesn’t mention the role of close US allies such as Saudi Arabia in building such forces up. (By 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was warning that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”)
He criticizes the Obama administration for abandoning Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak during the Arab Spring because it would be “taken as a sign in Riyadh and elsewhere that the United States could not be expected to back its friends of long standing.” But he doesn’t explain why the US should be friends with such a nightmarish dictatorship. He notes that in order “not to alienate the Saudis,” the US held its tongue when the kingdom sent troops to crush pro-democracy demonstrations in neighboring Bahrain. But he avoids saying whether this was a good policy or not.
A World in Disarrayalso criticizes America and its allies for failing to put Libya back on its feet after toppling Muammar Gadhafi but doesn’t mention the role of Qatar, which joined the anti-Gadhafi campaign at Clinton’s behest and then distributed some $400 million in military aid to Salafist rebels so that they could spread havoc from one end of the country to the other. It accuses Barack Obama of “an act … of omission” for failing to fund anti-Baathist rebels in Syria, when in fact CIA was spending close to a billion dollars per year. Haass assails the White House for not responding more forcefully when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was accused of using poison gas in August 2013, but neglects to mention that Obama only pulled back when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper informed him that the case against Assad was less than a “slam dunk.” He says that the US should have proceeded regardless with a concerted assault on “important military and political targets over several days involving both aircraft and cruise missiles.” But then he cautions a few pages later that “the rapid collapse of the Assad regime [in 2015] without careful preparation for what would take its place would likely have paved the way for ISIS to establish a caliphate in Damascus, something to be resisted at all costs.” So why would a massive missile barrage not have produced the same disastrous result two years earlier? A World in Disarray doesn’t explain.
Finally, Haass is less than forthcoming about his own role in the great Middle East debacle. He says of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq: “The road to a transformed Middle East, it was widely believed, ran through Baghdad. I did not share this view, but I had little opportunity to challenge those who did, given the structure of decision making in the George W. Bush administration.” In fact, he had ample opportunity when the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann called him for an interview just as the war was getting underway. Instead of letting loose with his misgivings, though, he mounted a vigorous defense, accusing the French of “being disingenuous” in objecting to the invasion and declaring that Bush was right to proceed without UN approval.
“This is a way, I believe, quite honestly, of preserving the UN’s potential viability in the future,” he said. “We’ve not destroyed it. We’ve just admitted, though, that it can’t do everything, when the great powers of the day disagree.”
These are the weasel words of someone who had just gotten the nod to become head of the Council on Foreign Relations – which Lemann correctly describes as “one of the foreign-policy world’s plummiest jobs” – and didn’t want to say anything to queer the deal. Estimates of Iraqi war deaths from March 2003 to June 2006 run as high as 600,000, all because the Bush administration thought it had a unilateral right to disregard both the UN and world opinion in general. Judging from A World in Disarray, Haass still hasn’t faced up to the enormity of his mistake. - See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165504#sthash.YDg3Ug9L.dpuf
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, experts agreed that the world would soon be a more peaceful and democratic place. But with war raging across the Middle East and showdowns looming from Eastern Europe to Asia, Richard Haass’s A World in Disarray is a primer on how they went wrong. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the country’s premier foreign-policy think tank, so he’s in a position to know. But his book is vague, meandering, and about as penetrating as a strand of overcooked spaghetti. The only insight it offers is into how alarmingly shallow the US foreign-policy establishment has become.
Haass served as special assistant to President George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War and then as the State Department’s director of policy planning during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, the only effect has been to lock in a world view that is self-serving and contradictory. He writes that post-invasion Iraq “proved far less ripe for democratic change than had been anticipated by the war’s proponents,” as if people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had any interest in democratizing Iraq in the first place. (They didn't.) He writes that the Iraqi collapse led to the rise of “subnational identities tied to set, tribe, and ethnicity” and that “Sunni anger and humiliation stoked recruiting for both al-Qaeda and subsequently ISIS.” But he doesn’t mention the role of close US allies such as Saudi Arabia in building such forces up. (By 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was warning that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”)
He criticizes the Obama administration for abandoning Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak during the Arab Spring because it would be “taken as a sign in Riyadh and elsewhere that the United States could not be expected to back its friends of long standing.” But he doesn’t explain why the US should be friends with such a nightmarish dictatorship. He notes that in order “not to alienate the Saudis,” the US held its tongue when the kingdom sent troops to crush pro-democracy demonstrations in neighboring Bahrain. But he avoids saying whether this was a good policy or not.
A World in Disarrayalso criticizes America and its allies for failing to put Libya back on its feet after toppling Muammar Gadhafi but doesn’t mention the role of Qatar, which joined the anti-Gadhafi campaign at Clinton’s behest and then distributed some $400 million in military aid to Salafist rebels so that they could spread havoc from one end of the country to the other. It accuses Barack Obama of “an act … of omission” for failing to fund anti-Baathist rebels in Syria, when in fact CIA was spending close to a billion dollars per year. Haass assails the White House for not responding more forcefully when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was accused of using poison gas in August 2013, but neglects to mention that Obama only pulled back when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper informed him that the case against Assad was less than a “slam dunk.” He says that the US should have proceeded regardless with a concerted assault on “important military and political targets over several days involving both aircraft and cruise missiles.” But then he cautions a few pages later that “the rapid collapse of the Assad regime [in 2015] without careful preparation for what would take its place would likely have paved the way for ISIS to establish a caliphate in Damascus, something to be resisted at all costs.” So why would a massive missile barrage not have produced the same disastrous result two years earlier? A World in Disarray doesn’t explain.
Finally, Haass is less than forthcoming about his own role in the great Middle East debacle. He says of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq: “The road to a transformed Middle East, it was widely believed, ran through Baghdad. I did not share this view, but I had little opportunity to challenge those who did, given the structure of decision making in the George W. Bush administration.” In fact, he had ample opportunity when the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann called him for an interview just as the war was getting underway. Instead of letting loose with his misgivings, though, he mounted a vigorous defense, accusing the French of “being disingenuous” in objecting to the invasion and declaring that Bush was right to proceed without UN approval.
“This is a way, I believe, quite honestly, of preserving the UN’s potential viability in the future,” he said. “We’ve not destroyed it. We’ve just admitted, though, that it can’t do everything, when the great powers of the day disagree.”
These are the weasel words of someone who had just gotten the nod to become head of the Council on Foreign Relations – which Lemann correctly describes as “one of the foreign-policy world’s plummiest jobs” – and didn’t want to say anything to queer the deal. Estimates of Iraqi war deaths from March 2003 to June 2006 run as high as 600,000, all because the Bush administration thought it had a unilateral right to disregard both the UN and world opinion in general. Judging from A World in Disarray, Haass still hasn’t faced up to the enormity of his mistake. - See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165504#sthash.YDg3Ug9L.dpuf
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, experts agreed that the world would soon be a more peaceful and democratic place. But with war raging across the Middle East and showdowns looming from Eastern Europe to Asia, Richard Haass’s A World in Disarray is a primer on how they went wrong. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the country’s premier foreign-policy think tank, so he’s in a position to know. But his book is vague, meandering, and about as penetrating as a strand of overcooked spaghetti. The only insight it offers is into how alarmingly shallow the US foreign-policy establishment has become.
Haass served as special assistant to President George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War and then as the State Department’s director of policy planning during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, the only effect has been to lock in a world view that is self-serving and contradictory. He writes that post-invasion Iraq “proved far less ripe for democratic change than had been anticipated by the war’s proponents,” as if people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had any interest in democratizing Iraq in the first place. (They didn't.) He writes that the Iraqi collapse led to the rise of “subnational identities tied to set, tribe, and ethnicity” and that “Sunni anger and humiliation stoked recruiting for both al-Qaeda and subsequently ISIS.” Read more ..
Block Review
| Stephanie Block | April 10th 2017 |
Cutting Edge News Contributor
Get the Book
Shaken Earth. Amazon Kindle
History, in its purest form, is a collection of facts about past events. As a discipline, however, historians impose an interpretation onto selected facts in order to tell a story about the past, from a given perspective.
See the Interview
Historical novels, if they’re well-written, carry the process a step further – that historical perspective is fleshed out, given blood and sinews and filled with the breath of human drama. Martin Barillas’ novel about 1930s Guatemala, with one foot in a rapidly modernizing world and the other in a romantic past of Spanish high culture and indigenous mystery, conveys familiarity. It is a place where Barillas spent much of his youth, visiting his father’s family, drinking in their stories, and walking their roads. The era about which he writes was still within their living memory and the result is a highly compelling tale that evokes the flavor of a specific time and place – one that intersects with American history, as well.
The heroine is Soledad, a fiery Latina who, in the course of Shaken Earth, is courted, marries, betrays her husband Mariano and, in the end, is (perhaps) reconciled with him. Against that framework, we are introduced to Central America’s dizzying development, glorious promise, revolutionary madness, and (possible) settlement into modernity. Read more ..
Media on Edge
| Mark Hemingway | April 6th 2017 |
Daily Standard
Bloomberg's Eli Lake dropped a bombshell on Monday: Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice was responsible for "unmasking" the identities of Trump officials in intelligence intercepts, and spreading this information around the government.
Now House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has emphasized that the fact identities were unmasked does not validate President Trump's claim Obama surveilled him and his campaign. Further, there is no evidence that Rice did anything illegal and, given the ongoing Trump-Russia investigation, reasons may yet emerge to justify the unmasking. Read more ..
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