Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Chicago Tribune: Suit alleges Chicago violating law by destroying 911 recordings after 30 days by Steve Schmadeke
A lawsuit filed Tuesday by a Chicago civil rights lawyers group alleges the city is violating state law by destroying 911 recordings too quickly.
The lawsuit by the Chicago Civil Rights Project, which describes itself as a group of lawyers specializing in civil rights and police misconduct, said the city is illegally destroying the records after 30 days unless a specific request is made for their preservation.
The 30-day deadline is a relic from days when such recordings were made on tape and unnecessary in an era when they can be stored electronically at relatively low cost, the lawsuit alleged.
According to the lawsuit, the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications could store 20 years of 911 calls by purchasing less than $10,000 worth of electronic storage.
Recordings — including video — that are missing or recorded over have long been an issue in civil lawsuits against the city and Police Department.
"Balanced against the financial, let alone human cost of just one wrongful conviction, it is unconscionable that the City refuses to preserve this evidence," Nick Albukerk, an attorney and the group's co-founder, said in a statement.
Billings Gazette: 3G's stores urged to review policies after discrimination against a Native American man by Ashley Nerbovig
Billings' 3G's Convenience Stores must pay a 59-year-old Native American man $7,000 after employees there refused to accept his tribal identification card as proof of his age.
Carl High Pine filed a complaint against 3G's after trying to buy a single serving bottle of sparkling wine and was told the store did not accept tribal IDs.
The complaint was filed with the Montana Department of Labor and Industry's Human Rights Bureau in May 2016. On March 17 the bureau gave notice to the parties that 3G's must pay High Pine $7,000 in compensation for the emotional distress of its discriminatory practice.
A lot of tribal members only have their
tribal IDs, High Pine told The Gazette on Monday. They could drive hundreds of miles to come to Billings and get turned away, he said.
The store may no longer refuse to accept tribal ID cards unless the ID is either damaged or altered, or is in some other way invalid under Montana law. The stores may only ask for a secondary identification if the tribal ID card shows a photo of the person as a child.
Boston Globe: ‘I just wasn’t going to go down for something he did,’ Hernandez witness says Travis Anderson
Alexander Bradley finished his direct testimony against one-time “best friend” Aaron Hernandez Tuesday, saying he would have kept silent about a double murder in Boston if only the former New England Patriots star had not shot him between the eyes.
“When it came down to it, at the end, I just wasn’t going to go down for something he did,’’ Bradley testified in Suffolk Superior Court. “I probably would have prior [to the shooting,] but I had no more loyalty to him. After what he did to me, there was no more loyalty. Prior that, I wouldn’t have cooperated at all.’’
Bradley is the star prosecution witness against Hernandez in his ongoing double murder trial for the July 16, 2012, shootings of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado in Boston’s South End. Hernandez is also charged with witness intimidation for shooting Bradley in Florida in 2013.
Hernandez, 27, has pleaded not guilty.
East Bay Times: Judge: Debris from Ghost Ship fire must be preserved by Thomas Peele
OAKLAND – A Superior Court judge on Tuesday said all debris from December’s fatal Ghost Ship fire, dumped in both an open field and an airport hanger, must be preserved as potential evidence in wrongful death lawsuits.
“It is not a clear cut situation” whether the charred material, much of it belongings of artists who lived in the unpermitted warehouse cooperative, will be needed for evidence, said Judge Brad Seligman, as more than a dozen lawyers stood shoulder to shoulder before him.
But, he added, “the material must be preserved.”
With bodies of some of the 36 victims of the horrific Dec. 2 blaze still inside the warehouse two days after the fire, the city had debris trucked away to clear space for recovery efforts. Some was dumped behind a soccer field on Oakport Street; the rest in a hanger at Oakland International Airport.
A lawyer for Chor Ng, the warehouse owner and defendant in a growing number of lawsuits, said he has been in contact with a Berkeley laboratory which may take the material from the field.
“It was put there by the city. We’ve got to do something,” the lawyer, Stephen Dreher said.
New York Times: White Artist’s Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Draws Protests by Randy Kennedy
The open-coffin photographs of the mutilated body of Emmett Till, the teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955, served as a catalyst for the civil rights movement and have remained an open wound in American society since they were first published in Jet magazine and The Chicago Defender at the urging of Till’s mother.
The images’ continuing power, more than 60 years later, to speak about race and violence is being demonstrated once again in protests that have arisen online and at the newly opened Whitney Biennial over the decision of a white artist, Dana Schutz, to make a painting based on the photographs.
An African-American artist, Parker Bright, has conducted peaceful protests in front of the painting since Friday, positioning himself, sometimes with a few other protesters, in front of the work to partly block its view. He has engaged museum visitors in discussions about the painting while wearing a T-shirt with the words “Black Death Spectacle” on the back. Another protester, Hannah Black, a British-born black artist and writer working in Berlin, has written a letter to the biennial’s curators, Mia Locks and Christopher Y. Lew, urging that the painting be not only removed from the show but also destroyed.
There’s a time, place, collection, and exhibit for a painting like this but this isn’t it. Especially not at a time when we have already gone through seeing scenes like this play out in videos time and again.
I am not for the painting to be destroyed, however. I think that goes much, much too far.
The Root: Report: Black Workers in Los Angeles Face a ‘Jobs Crisis’ That Is Causing a Decline In The Black Community by Monique Judge
A new study conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles, says that the Black community in Los Angeles is on a decline as a direct result of the lack of jobs available to Black workers, who are more likely to remain unemployed or drop out of the workforce entirely as a result of the 2007-2009 recession.
The report, “Ready to Work, Uprooting Inequity: Black Workers in Los Angeles County,” was published Tuesday in collaboration with the Los Angeles Black Worker Center and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, found that although Black workers have lost blue-collar jobs at the same rate as whites in the county, they seem less likely to find replacement work, the
LA Times reports.
Additionally, 17 percent of Black workers were unemployed on average from 2011 to 2014, compared with 9 percent of white workers, and 25 percent of Black workers who had a high school degree or less were unemployed compared with 14 percent of white workers
As the Times notes, while education helped bridge the gap, it did not completely erase it, because 9 percent of Black workers with at least a bachelor’s degree were unemployed over that period compared with 7 percent of white workers.
The report says, “Los Angeles is in the throes of a Black jobs crisis.”
Mic: Gay workers may lose promotions, raises because of bias toward their voice, study suggests by James Dennin
Gay men and lesbian women may be passed over for leadership positions, and possibly even raises, because of discrimination related to the sound of their voice, according to new research.
During the study, published in March by the Archives of Sexual Behavior, sample groups were provided pictures and recordings of a mix of different speakers, some heterosexual and some not. The respondents, recruited through an Italian university, were asked to guess speakers' sexual orientations based only on the images and voices.
Next, researchers chose the speakers who were most likely to be perceived as homosexual and the speakers who were most likely to be perceived as straight: In a follow-up study, researchers played a short recording of the two "types" of voices and had subjects answer a series of questions about the speakers' qualifications for an executive job listing. Study participants also had to supply a monthly salary figure they thought was fair.
While this study was conducted in Italy, this sounds about right. I know that when ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) comes up as a topic of discussion, usually the discussions revolve simply around hiring and firing but my gut has always told me that the more pernicious workplace discriminations against LGB’s actually take place in this entire realm of salaries and promotion. (I do feel that hiring and firing issues are more acute for transfolk.)
Raw Story: ‘I believed everything he said’: Ex-supporter whose son OD’d says Trumpcare made him turn on the president by Elizabeth Preza
CNN’s Erin Burnett Out Front on Tuesday profiled a former Donald Trump supporter who attended 45 rallies during the campaign, but no longer supports the president or his agenda.
Kraig Moss shadowed Trump’s campaign rallies during the 2016 election to tell the story of his son, Rob Moss, who died on Jan. 16, 2014 from a heroin/fentanyl overdose at age 24. The grieving father was a staunch Trump supporter, and was encouraged to support then-candidate Trump by his promise to help addicts struggling with addiction. Trump even reached out to Moss personally at a rally, calling him “a great father,” and assuring him, “your son is proud of you.”
“I’m not on the Trump trail anymore, and I’ve lost my heart,” Moss told CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen in an interview, pointing to the president’s support of the American Health Care Act, which would drop an addiction treatment and mental health mandate that covers 1.3 million Americans. Moss told Cohen he believes Rob would still be alive if he had health insurance.
“I believed everything he said,” Moss said. “Now I don’t believe he was true in his word when he was speaking. I think he was looking for votes, to be honest with you.”
“It’s not at all what Mr. Trump promised everybody he was going to provide for us,” he added. “I feel that now—anger, I feel hurt inside.”
VICE: Steve Bannon's Sad, Desperate Crusade by John Saward
The world is a pitch-black graveyard and only Steve Bannon can save you. This is the man's fantasy. He dreams of terror so there can be vengeance, of rubble so there can be a man pulling people from it, of conspiracies and cabals of diabolical elites so that he can expose them, one by one.
You can hear it in the death rattle of an inauguration speech he wrote for Donald Trump. You hear it in his bigoted wolf howls from the fringes years ago, the website he operated like a haunted hayride, the hip-hop-themed Shakespeare adaptation about gangs and pornographic descriptions of handguns.
You hear it in all the trash movies he made before he became White House adviser. Generation Zero, Bannon's delirious 2010 documentary about the decay of American ideals, features, within its first six minutes: scenes of robbery, fiery plane crashes, heavy rain, emoji-faced men with their tongues wagging at money, handshakes in back alleys, incinerated houses, the boat sail-size dorsal fin of an approaching shark. A sun explodes, and then, a Black Panther flag, flown proudly. The advancement of black people, you see, is analogous to the death of a solar system.
Palm Beach Post: No Secret Service nightmare: Agents ready for presidents who stray by Lawrence Mower
So while some expressed alarm after President Donald Trump stepped out of his armored SUV to greet supporters on his way to the airport on Sunday, former Secret Service agents only grimaced.
“While the Secret Service would certainly prefer the president never, ever do that, they all do that,” said former Secret Service agent Dan Emmett, who served for 21 years and is the author of the upcoming book, “I Am a Secret Service Agent.” “It’s a Secret Service nightmare, but agents are trained for that.”
Former agents say such impromptu stops — known as “off the record” events — are more common than most people believe, and obviously riskier than staying in places that have been screened by the president’s security detail.
But because they’re random, they carry an element of surprise that works to agents’ advantage: Bad guys don’t know they’ll be there, either. The track record bears it out (knock on wood): Presidential assassins all knew where the presidents would be when they pulled the trigger.
New York Times: Gorsuch Says He’d Rule Against Trump if Law Required It by Adam Liptak and Matt Flegenheimer
WASHINGTON — Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, sought to assure the Senate and the nation on Tuesday that he would be a fair-minded and independent justice. He said he would not hesitate to rule against Mr. Trump if the law required it, and he repeated his earlier private criticism of Mr. Trump’s attacks on judges who had ruled against the administration.
“When anyone criticizes the honesty or integrity or motives of a federal judge,” Judge Gorsuch said at his confirmation hearing, “I find that disheartening and demoralizing.”
Asked if that general statement applied to Mr. Trump, Judge Gorsuch said, “Anyone is anyone.”
By turns expansive and evasive, Judge Gorsuch discussed legal doctrines at length, but refused to take positions on specific issues. He asserted, as have previous Supreme Court nominees, that it would be unfair to future litigants for him to announce his views on issues that could come before the court.
Judge Gorsuch’s style was folksy, earnest, learned and emphatic, and he easily dodged questions from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was not inclined to answer. But he spoke forcefully about his devotion to the rule of law.
His exchanges with Democratic senators were sometimes tense and testy. Yet through every planned line of attack — from his record on workers’ rights to his skepticism of the power of regulatory agencies — Judge Gorsuch emerged with few scratches.
Smithsonian: The History of “Stolen” Supreme Court Seats by Erick Trickey
A Supreme Court justice was dead, and the president, in his last year in office, quickly nominated a prominent lawyer to replace him. But the unlucky nominee’s bid was forestalled by the U.S. Senate, blocked due to the hostile politics of the time. It was 1852, but the doomed confirmation battle sounds a lot like 2016.
“The nomination of Edward A. Bradford…as successor to Justice McKinley was postponed,” reported the New York Times on September 3, 1852. “This is equivalent to a rejection, contingent upon the result of the pending Presidential election. It is intended to reserve this vacancy to be supplied by Gen. Pierce, provided he be elected.”
Last year, when Senate Republicans refused to vote on anyone President Barack Obama nominated to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Democrats protested that the GOP was stealing the seat, flouting more than a century of Senate precedent about how to treat Supreme Court nominees. Senate Democrats such as Chuck Schumer and Patrick Leahy called the GOP’s move unprecedented, but wisely stuck to 20th-century examples when they talked about justices confirmed in election years. That’s because conservatives who argued that the Senate has refused to vote on Supreme Court nominees before had some history, albeit very old history, on their side.
What the Senate did to Merrick Garland in 2016, it did it to three other presidents’ nominees between 1844 and 1866, though the timelines and circumstances differed. Those decades of gridlock, crisis and meltdown in American politics left a trail of snubbed Supreme Court wannabes in their wake. And they produced justices who—as Neil Gorsuch might—ascended to Supreme Court seats set aside for them through political calculation.
Washington Post: As White House seeks distance, former campaign chairman Manafort faces new allegations by Rosalind S. Helderman, Andrew Roth and Tom Hamburger
New corruption allegations lodged in Ukraine against President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, have thrust Manafort back into the forefront of ongoing scrutiny over whether the Trump team coordinated with the Russian government to influence the U.S. election.
The allegations were disclosed Tuesday at a news conference by a Ukrainian lawmaker who said he had obtained documents showing that Manafort had attempted to hide payments he had received from the party of Ukraine’s former president, who is living in Russia and wanted on corruption charges in his home country.
A spokesman for Manafort called the claims “baseless” and said some of the documents released Tuesday appeared to be fabricated because the letterhead and signatures did not match those belonging to Manafort.
The spectacle in Kiev came just hours after FBI Director James B. Comey confirmed the existence of a federal probe into possible connections between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin.
Buzzfeed: A Russian Lawyer Involved In A US Prosecution Mysteriously Plunged From His Apartment Window by Mike Hayes
A Russian lawyer who was a witness in a US federal court case connected to the largest money-laundering scheme in Russian history was hospitalized in critical condition after mysteriously plunging four stories on Tuesday in Moscow, a spokesman said.
There are conflicting reports about what happened to the lawyer, Nikolai Gorokhov. His spokesman, William Browder — who was an alleged victim in the money-laundering scheme — says he was “thrown from the fourth floor of his apartment building.” Russian media, often controlled by the state, says he “fell while he and workers were trying to lift a Jacuzzi into his apartment.”
“His name is redacted in all the documents,” Browder told BuzzFeed News regarding court filings in the US Southern District. “The feds were very concerned for his safety. I can confirm his role.” The Department of Justice didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
The case, USA v. Prevezon, is on the brink of going to trial in Manhattan — right in the middle of a massive shakeup of federal prosecutors by President Trump.
In court filings, the Department of Justice alleges that Prevezon, a Cyprus-based real estate company owned by a Russian national, purchased several New York City apartments with funds linked to a decade-old $230 million tax fraud — the biggest in Russian history — perpetrated by gangsters and corrupt officials. In court filings, Prevezon claims that the DOJ has no hard evidence to back up its claims.
Wired: Inside the Hunt For Russia's Most Notorious Hacker by Garrett M. Graff
ON THE MORNING of December 30, the day after Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2016 US election, Tillmann Werner was sitting down to breakfast in Bonn, Germany. He spread some jam on a slice of rye bread, poured himself a cup of coffee, and settled in to check Twitter at his dining room table.
The news about the sanctions had broken overnight, so Werner, a researcher with the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, was still catching up on details. Following a link to an official statement, Werner saw that the White House had targeted a short parade’s worth of Russian names and institutions—two intelligence agencies, four senior intelligence officials, 35 diplomats, three tech companies, two hackers. Most of the details were a blur. Then Werner stopped scrolling. His eyes locked on one name buried among the targets: Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev.
Werner, as it happened, knew quite a bit about Evgeniy Bogachev. He knew in precise, technical detail how Bogachev had managed to loot and terrorize the world’s financial systems with impunity for years. He knew what it was like to do battle with him.
Los Angeles Times: Israeli prime minister talks of a snap election amid concerns over a new public broadcaster by Joshua Mitnick
A dispute over the reform of public broadcasting has plunged Israel’s coalition government into a crisis, prompting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to threaten to dissolve parliament and hold a snap election to block a plan to begin independent television and radio broadcasts.
The crisis highlights Netanyahu’s long-running mistrust of Israel’s mainstream print and broadcast news outlets, which he has accused of being “leftist” and “Bolshevik” and of engaging in a personal witch hunt against him.
Netanyahu helped pass legislation in 2014 to shutter Israel’s inefficient state-run broadcast authority and replace it with a new public broadcasting corporation whose executives wouldn’t be political appointees.
But in recent months, allies from his Likud Party have complained that the new broadcasting corporation is liable to be overly critical of the government. Netanyahu has pushed to have the start of broadcasts delayed and to pass a law to gain more control over public and commercial radio and television.
Reuters: U.S. reverses course and offers new dates for NATO talks by Arshod Mohammed and Robin Emmott
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson proposed new dates on Tuesday for a NATO meeting, the State Department said, after he initially decided to skip the talks and rebuffed the alliance's efforts to reschedule them.
Tillerson's decision to miss his first meeting with NATO foreign ministers, set for April 5-6 in Brussels, unsettled European allies who worried it reopened questions about U.S. President Donald Trump's commitment to the alliance.
Reuters exclusively reported on Monday that Tillerson would stay in the United States to attend Trump's expected April 6-7 talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Florida. U.S. officials also said Tillerson would visit Russia later in April.
The alliance had offered to change the meeting dates so Tillerson could attend both it and the Xi talks but the U.S. State Department rebuffed the idea, a former U.S. official and a former NATO diplomat, both speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Monday.
On Tuesday, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the department put forward new dates for a meeting when Tillerson could come, noting that such a decision would have to be made by consensus among the 28 NATO members.
"We are certainly appreciative of the effort to accommodate Secretary Tillerson," Toner told reporters. "We have offered alternative dates that the secretary could attend."
He also sought to allay European concerns by saying that "the United States remains 100 percent committed to NATO."
OK, schedule confusion and mix-ups happen and are completely acceptable. But you would think that the State Department would be able to handle schedule mix-ups and confusion in a diplomatic and professional way, right?
teleSUR: Cambodia Rejects US War Debt, Slams US Imperial Brutality
Following the United States’ renewed insistence that Cambodia pay back its alleged "war debts," fury across Cambodia has been widespread.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has been calling for the cancellation of the debt since President Donald Trump was elected, rejected paying it, saying, "I have not sent an official letter to Trump asking him to cancel the debt … They brought bombs and dropped them on Cambodia and (now) demand Cambodian people to pay.”
Speaking at a conference earlier this month, Sen, a former commander with Cambodian communists, slammed recent comments made by U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia William Heidt about repayment, and recalled the atrocities committed by the United States in the 1970s.
“They dropped bombs on our heads and then ask up to repay. When we do not repay, they tell the IMF (International Monetary Fund) not to lend us money," Sen said. "We should raise our voices to talk about the issue of the country that has invaded other (countries) and has killed children."
In the late 1960s, the United States gave Cambodia a US$274 million loan, mostly for food supplies to the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government who had taken over the country in a coup a year earlier. The debt has almost doubled since then, as Cambodia has refused to enter into a repayment program.
Deutsche Welle: How does Germany contribute to NATO? by Lewis Sanders IV
In Germany, the question of defense spending has become a contentious topic ahead of key parliamentary elections slated for September, with officials of the ruling "grand coalition" backing differing views.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) have vowed to increase defense spending and meet NATO's target of 2 percent of GDP by 2024.
On the other side, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel of the Social Democrats (SPD) has cast doubt on the prospect of increasing defense spending "in this form," saying other factors should be included in determining how the target is assessed.
But CDU politician Norbert Röttgen on Monday lashed out at Gabriel's remarks, telling the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" that the SPD, and more so the foreign minister, "should not use this issue as a domestic election campaign theme, but rather be responsible for Germany." The issue has divided the center of German politics, but why now?
Reuters: In Serbian election, the comedy candidate is no joke by Matt Robinson
It started as a joke, a way to poke fun at a discredited political class in elections last year for the local assembly in this rundown town in central Serbia.
Communications student Luka Maksimovic, 25, donned a white suit and loafers, an over-sized gold watch and gaudy ring, and rode a horse-drawn carriage through the streets of Mladenovac, promising jobs and cash to anyone who would give him their vote.
He assumed the guise of the worst kind of politician - a sleazy fraudster he duly christened Ljubisa 'Beli' Preletacevic. Beli means white in Serbian, while Preletacevic denotes somebody who switches political party for personal gain.
Spreading the word on Youtube and Facebook, his party won 20 percent of the vote.
"We were just fooling around," Maksimovic said. But Serbia's political establishment isn't laughing anymore.
With a presidential election due on April 2, an opinion poll published on Monday has Maksimovic's alter ego coming second, albeit far behind the overwhelming favorite, Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic.
Mother Jones: The Guy From Blink-182 Has One Helluva Story About Aliens by A J Vicens
One little-discussed aspect of the hacked emails from the 2016 presidential campaign was the interest that John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, had in extraterrestrial life. As a self-described "curious skeptic," Podesta has openly called for greater government transparency on UFO-related matters. In his forward to UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, a 2011 book by journalist Leslie Kean, he wrote, "The American people—and people around the world—want to know, and they can handle the truth."
After hackers working at the behest of the Russian government accessed Podesta's Gmail account and shared his emails with WikiLeaks, according to the US government, WikiLeaks, in turn, released more than 50,000 of them over the course of several weeks. Among the revelations were details about campaign strategy, Podesta's tips on preparing the perfect risotto, and a cache of his correspondence with entrepreneur, author, and rock star Tom DeLonge. DeLonge is best known as a founding member of the multiplatinum pop-punk band Blink-182 (with whom he had a falling out in 2015). He's busy with his other band, Angels and Airwaves, but it was the work of his Encinitas, California-based company, To the Stars, that he discussed in his correspondence.
Christian Science Monitor: Blaxploitation movies, South Africa style? A lost era of film sees new light. by Ryan Lenora Brown (3.12.17)
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA—On the surface, Joe Bullet seems an unlikely enemy of the apartheid state.A karate-chopping, knife-throwing 1970s action film hero, Mr. Bullet’s enemies were the chain-smoking gangsters of South Africa’s seedy criminal underworld – not the white government.
But in 1973, after just two screenings, the South African government banned the popular action film in which Bullet was the title character, sending its swashbuckling hero into unceremonious early retirement.
The reason? They were worried Joe Bullet might give black South Africans the wrong idea about what was possible in their lives.
“He was a black man staying in posh places, driving a nice car, taking the law into his own hands – today it seems ordinary in a film but then it was an extraordinary thing,” says Tonie van der Merwe, a white construction company owner who produced the film, and later hundreds more like it. “My belief is that the government just didn’t know what to make of it, so they just banned it outright.”
Variety: Studios Flirt With Offering Movies Early in Home for $30 (EXCLUSIVE) by Brent Lang
Six of the seven biggest Hollywood studios are continuing to push to offer movies in the home mere weeks after their theatrical debuts.
However, the companies, particularly Fox and Warner Bros., are showing greater flexibility about timing. Initially, Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara had kicked off negotiations with exhibitors by offering to cut them in on a percentage of digital revenues if they agreed to let them debut films on-demand for $50 a rental some 17 days after they opened. Currently, most major movies are only made available to rent some 90 days after their release. Some studios offer films for sale electronically roughly 70 days after their bow in theaters.
Other studios, particularly Fox and Universal, felt that $50 was too steep a price to ask consumers to pay. They are now trying to get exhibitors to agree to a plan that would involve a lower priced premium on-demand option that was made available at a slightly later date, according to three studio insiders and two exhibition insiders. Fox and Warner Bros., for instance, are considering making films available between 30 to 45 days after their opening, but at $30 a rental, a price they believe won’t give customers sticker shock. Universal, which is seen as being the most aggressive negotiator in these talks, would like the home entertainment debut to remain in the 20-day range.
Well…?
BBC: Why it's hard to be a Kevin in France by Kevin Connolly
There is a theory called nominative determinism, much beloved of students of literature and other idlers. It holds that your character will come over time to match your name.
So if you are called Max Power or Chuck Handgrenade then you are predestined to life as a man of action - and if you're called Ray O'Sunshine or Sunny B Happy then you will be lovability incarnate.
I'd never expected to find myself touched by the theory personally, being equipped as I am with a wholly unremarkable name. I wasn't even given a middle initial on the utilitarian grounds that they're only useful to professional cricketers and American politicians.
That all changed when a colleague drew my attention to an article in a French magazine called The Curse of Kevin.
Its point was that, in the French-speaking world, that Christian name - my Christian name - more or less predestines you to being considered an idiot. And not necessarily a particularly lovable idiot either.
Don’t forget that Hunter is hosting an open thread for night owls tonight.
Everyone have a great night!