Hollywood film studios are courting Chinese investors to gain access to the world’s most populous nation, brushing aside concerns that their new partners will seek to censor the next generation of films and TV shows.
In the latest sign of the growing mutual interest, Dalian Wanda Group Co. said yesterday it’s in talks to acquire a stake in Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. (LGF), maker of “The Hunger Games” films. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (BABA) Chairman Jack Ma toured Hollywood in October seeking alliances, while Shanghai-based Fosun International Ltd. (656) invested in Jeff Robinov’s Studio 8, which is making films for Sony Corp. (6758)
Hollywood is seeking Chinese investors despite the country’s routine censorship of films and TV shows. Studios from Walt Disney Co. to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. have changed story lines, altered national identities and removed sex scenes to accommodate government oversight. Hollywood has even partnered with the Chinese government-owned companies on movies like “Kung Fu Panda 3,” from DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. (DWA)
“Every mainstream studio is keenly aware of not offending the Chinese market, because it’s become such an important revenue stream,” said Tom Nunan, a visiting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Theater, Film and Television.
Wanda is interested in buying control of Lions Gate, though the studio, run from Santa Monica, California, is only willing to sell a minority stake, Wanda Chairman Wang Jianlin said yesterday in an interview.
South Stream's purpose was to ship gas to Europe, bypassing Ukraine. This would have allowed Russia to wring political concessions from its rebellious southwestern neighbor by choking off its energy supply, without endangering lucrative contracts with European customers. Russia's state-controlled gas giant Gazprom currently has to pump gas across Ukrainian territory to meet those obligations, making it possible for Ukraine to siphon off Europe's gas whenever its own supplies are shut off.
[. . .]
The EU has warned countries that signed bilateral deals with Russia to build the pipeline -- Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary and Slovenia -- that they would face fines if they went ahead with the project. It also told Serbia that letting South Stream cross its territory when it didn't comply with EU rules would hurt the country's efforts to join the bloc.
[. . .]
The pipeline to Turkey will use the infrastructure already built for South Stream and still deliver gas to Europe, only by a more circuitous route. According to Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller, the pipeline's capacity will be 63 billion cubic meters of gas per year, the same as South Stream's target capacity. Turkey will buy 14 billion cubic meters of that, and send the rest to the Balkans.
On the face of it, Putin is demonstrating Russia's resilience in the face of a stinging diplomatic defeat at the hands of Brussels. Announcing a deal with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose methods of governing and deeply conservative views are similar to Putin's, is a way of telling Europe and the U.S. that their attempts to isolate Russia are futile. In terms of geopolitical optics, strengthening that relationship is similar to sidling closer to China, with which Russia also signed a major gas deal this year.
Turkey, however, doesn't have any freebies for Putin. Russia agreed to give the country a 6 percent discount on current natural gas supplies, which will cost Gazprom $700 million a year.
A 2012 report by the Open Society Foundation estimated that 70 percent of people under age 35 in Mozambique - who form the majority of the 25 million population - cannot find stable employment.
First-time entrants to the labour market and unskilled youth such as Beto, who is illiterate and speaks Changala instead of Portuguese, Mozambique's national language, are worst off.
Lacking jobs at home, many Mozambicans such as Beto's brother migrate to next door South Africa, which also has high levels of youth unemployment, to work in mining and agriculture.
Relative peace and stability since 1992 when the war ended, make Mozambique attractive to investors, and the economy has grown by more than 7 percent each year over the last 10 years, spurred by projects such as the MOZAL Aluminium plant near Maputo, and from mining by Brazilian company Vale in Tete province.
[. . . T]he mineral and gas extraction projects create few jobs - just 3,800 in 2010, according to a 2014 report by Africa Economic Outlook. The few jobs that Mozambique's "megaprojects" create tend be highly qualified positions that are often taken by foreigners.
Unlike South Africa's mining industry, which needs a huge labour force and provides jobs, the capital-intensive projects in Mozambique use heavy machinery to extract coal and gas and require little manpower.
One day in September, Ahmed Adam, 23, sat on the ground in the regional capital, Ndélé, and rolled a cigarette. Adam was restless. Earlier that week he returned from the capital, Bangui, about 400 miles away. He was happy to be home. But with no money or means to buy what he needed to restart his life, he said, he was waiting for the U.N.-run demobilization program to begin, when he hoped to collect some cash. “If it works, I’ll be a farmer and work in the fields,” Adam said. “But if it doesn’t work, I’ll return to fight.”
Adam had been fighting since 2010, he said, when he joined the Convention of Patriots for Justice and Peace (CPJP), a northern rebel group that sought to overthrow the government of François Bozizé since 2008. Adam fought, he said, for the rights of the people in the north. But it was also to avenge a personal insult that he suffered at the hands of Bozizé’s police.
The CPJP believed that Bozizé, an ethnic Gbaya, was corrupt and that he failed to uphold promises to make his government more inclusive of other regions and ethnic groups. In 2012 a faction of the CPJP, along with other rebel groups, foreign mercenaries and local volunteers came together to form the Séléka, which means “alliance” in Sango, the national language. Most but not all the fighters were Muslim like Adam. The movement often recruited impoverished, uneducated men, and Ndélé quickly became a stronghold. The Séléka gathered strength as they went south, and on March 24, 2013, they succeeded in overthrowing Bozizé and installing their own president, Michel Djotodia.
The Séléka’s nine-month hold on power was cataclysmic. Djotodia proved unable to control his ranks of rebels. They raped women, plundered villages and killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of people whom they associated with Bozizé. In the south, nearly everyone was affected in some way. When asked if he ever killed innocent citizens or committed the abuses that so many spoke of, Adam laughed uncomfortably and asked if it was possible to fight and not kill. “But I only killed other soldiers,” he said.
By mid-2013, a mostly Christian group of fighters known as the anti-Balaka, which translates to either “anti-machete” or “anti-bullets,” emerged in rural villages to fight back. The movement was, in part, truly revolutionary: a self-organized militia of young men armed with rudimentary weapons like machetes and homemade rifles. But the anti-Balaka also counted among their ranks former army officers, many of whom remained loyal to Bozizé.
War in the Central African Republic is usually understood abroad as a grinding religious conflict. Of the 4.5 million people who live in the remote, landlocked country, only 15 percent are Muslim; the rest are either Christian or animist. These communities have lived together peacefully for centuries. The latest explosion of violence, though, has succeeded in pitting them against each other. Victims on both sides have suffered, but the minority Muslim population appears to have borne the brunt of it. Two years ago, there were nearly 700,000 Muslims in the country. Now, according to some counts, fewer than 90,000 remain.
The Canadian Olympic Committee has announced its support for LGBTQ athletes in an agreement with You Can Play and Egale Canada, two North American anti-homophobia groups.
The agreement includes training and support for Olympic athletes who want to come out.
It's described as "the most wide-reaching such agreement by a national Olympic committee."
COC chief executive Chris Overholt told CBC News on Tuesday that the committee's responsibility is to create an environment "where athletes and coaches feel safe always."
"This partnership will set us up to tackle some of the issues related to LGBTQ issues, taking the conversation to another level within the sports community," Overholt said.
Walk into the Strand Book Store, at East 12th and Broadway, and the retail experience you’ll have is unexpectedly contemporary. The walls are white, the lighting bright; crisp red signage is visible at every turn. The main floor is bustling, and the store now employs merchandising experts to refine its traffic flow and make sure that prime display space goes to stuff that’s selling. Whereas you can leave a Barnes & Noble feeling numbed, particularly if a clerk directs you to Gardening when you ask for Leaves of Grass, the Strand is simply a warmer place for readers.
In the middle of the room, though, is a big concrete column holding up the building, and it looks … wrong. It’s painted gray, and not a soft designer gray but some dead color like you’d see on a basement floor. Crudely stenciled signs reading BOOKS SHIPPED ANYWHERE are tacked to it. Bookcases surround the column, and they’re beat to hell, their finish nearly black with age.
This tableau was left intact when the store was renovated in 2003. Until then, the Strand had been a beloved, indispensable, and physically grim place. Like a lot of businesses that had hung on through the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD years, it looked broken-down and patched-up. The bathroom was even dirtier than the one in the Astor Place subway. You got the feeling that a lot of books had been on the shelves for years. The ceiling was dark with the exhalations from a million Chesterfields. There were mice. People arriving with review copies to sell received an escort to the basement after a guard’s bellow: “Books to go down!” It was an experience that, once you adjusted to its sourness, you might appreciate and even enjoy. Maybe.
That New York is mostly gone, replaced by a cleaner and more efficient city—not to mention a cleaner and more efficient Strand. “Books to go down!” is extinct. So is Book Row, the Fourth Avenue strip that fortified the readers and writers of Greenwich Village. Though there are signs of life in the independent-bookseller business — consider the success of McNally-Jackson — few secondhand-book stores are left in Manhattan. Only two survive in midtown, and the necrology is long. Skyline on West 18th Street, New York Bound Bookshop in Rockefeller Center, the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th — closed. Academy Books is now Academy Records & CDs.
With its cyborg cars and omniscient backpacks festooned with cameras, Google has mapped out and photographed much of the planet. From the comfort of their browsers, people can now visit Times Square, Tiananmen Square or the Square One mall in Mississauga, Ontario.
Starting this year, one of the most forbidden places in Manhattan became virtually accessible, too. And despite being off limits to outsiders, particularly those toting cameras, all it took was a borrowed key and a smartphone to let the world inside Gramercy Park.
“When I found out where I was, I thought, ‘This has to be captured,’ ” said Shawn Christopher, a computer programmer and former Army sergeant from the Pittsburgh area who visited in May while on his honeymoon. “The Internet is all about sharing knowledge, especially these secret, hidden things.”
Mr. Christopher took three 360-degree panoramas using Photo Sphere, a Google app, and then uploaded them to the company’s ubiquitous Maps site. He had gotten into the park using another of his favorite technologies, Airbnb, where the room he rented included not only fresh linens and Wi-Fi but also one of the 383 coveted keys to the park. Mr. Christopher was unaware at the time that guests had to be accompanied by key holders on their visits and that commercial photography was prohibited.
Unwittingly, Mr. Christopher achieved something not even Robert De Niro or Woody Allen could manage: shooting inside the park.
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