January 19, 2016

No Image

Entertainment January 19, 2016

New 'Suicide Squad' Trailer Sets Up a Villainous Rhapsody

Suicide Squad

The first Suicide Squad trailer debuted during Comic-Con last summer and since then we’ve had to be content with a series of promotional images for a movie that will revolve around a team of superpowered individuals who are not exactly heroic in the traditional sense.

Deadshot, the world’s best marksman, is played by Will Smith, the most notable name in the ensemble cast. The other squad members are Harley Quinn (portrayed by Margot Robbie), Katana (Karen Fukuhara) and Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), along with Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman).

The team is assembled by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) as a secret task force to handle the jobs for which the government doesn’t want to claim responsibility. Among the foes they must face in the movie is the Joker (Jared Leto). The first trailer set up the mood and atmosphere; the second trailer, just released tonight, doesn’t reveal anything more about the plot, keeping the focus on the characters, all to the tune of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

[embedded content]

We know that Batman (Ben Affleck) will be making an appearance in the movie, perhaps with other players in the DC movie universe, although we didn’t see him in the trailer. David Ayer wrote the screenplay and directed. He wrote terrific movies like U-571, The Fast and the Furious, Training Day and S.W.A.T. before becoming a director, making End of Watch, Sabotage and Fury, all filled with rough action and a cynical sense of humor, which is very much on display in the new trailer.

Everything points to an above average and very dark thriller heading our way this summer. A new series of crazy posters for the movie debuted earlier this week, which you can check out in our gallery. (See one of them below.) Suicide Squad will open in theaters on August 5.

Suicide Squad

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

No Image

Business January 19, 2016

Gun Stocks Up, But Activists Move To Expand Anti-Investment Push

Anti-gun groups and state officials joined New Yorkers Against Gun Violence to mark the sixth month anniversary of the Newtown massacre on the steps of New York City Hall in 2013.
3:42

Download

Anti-gun groups and state officials joined New Yorkers Against Gun Violence to mark the sixth month anniversary of the Newtown massacre on the steps of New York City Hall in 2013. Bebeto Matthews/AP hide caption

toggle caption Bebeto Matthews/AP

After years of trying and failing to push new laws through Congress, gun control advocates are targeting American firearms makers from a different angle.

“The only thing they really understand is money,” says Leah Gunn Barrett, executive director of the nonprofit New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. She’s also part of a coalition called the Campaign to Unload, which encourages investors large and small to divest from owning stock in companies that make guns and ammunition.

“You may not even know that your 401(k) has gun stocks in it,” Barrett says. “So asking the question is very, very important. Not only for individuals, but for public pension funds…it’s really raising the issue and making gun stocks toxic.”

Gun control advocates have been pushing for years to get investors to divest from companies that make firearms and ammunition. Now officials in New York City want to widen that push to include retailers. But not everyone thinks their divestment campaign will succeed.

“If it’s made to be punitive, it’s not going to work,” says Andrea James, a firearms industry analyst with Dougherty & Company. She says gun stocks have performed well because gun sales have been brisk.

“When the divestment happens,” James says, “I don’t think it really affects the underlying business, meaning the number of firearms they sell.”

The divestment camp has claimed some victories after mass shootings in Connecticut and California. Big institutional investors like the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) and pension funds in New York and Philadelphia have dropped their holdings in gun companies.

But the stock price of those gun companies has not gone down. In fact, since the Sandy Hook shootings in 2012, the stock prices of Sturm, Ruger & Co. and Smith & Wesson have mostly gone up, even as big institutional investors have moved to sell.

“In a free and open market, other shareholders will come and take their place,” James says.

Members of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence and the National Action Network march against gun violence on the streets of New York in 2012.

Members of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence and the National Action Network march against gun violence on the streets of New York in 2012. Kathy Willens/AP hide caption

toggle caption Kathy Willens/AP

This includes some investors who want to hold gun stocks as an expression of support for the Second Amendment.

Still, divestment supporters say this latest push is different because it’s aiming beyond just the gun companies themselves. New York Public Advocate Letitia James is pushing the city’s largest pension fund to divest from national retailers that sell firearms, including Wal-Mart, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Cabela’s.

“It really sends a strong moral message that public dollars should not be used to prop up an industry that has caused so much carnage on the streets of New York City and other urban centers across this nation,” Letitia James says.

Letitia James and other divestment supporters point to the success of past campaigns against the tobacco and coal industries — especially the push to end the apartheid in South Africa. But even in that famous campaign, some economists question whether divestment had the kind of impact its supporters claim.

“Well, unfortunately, it does not have an effect,” says Paul Wazzan, an economist at the Berkeley Research Group in California. He has studied the divestment campaigns against companies that did business in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Wazzan says there was no measurable effect on their stock prices.

“But it does generate a lot of press and interest,” Wazzan says. “And the political pressure starts to build and that did ultimately have an effect. It’s not what our paper was about, but I think the political pressure ultimately did have an effect on these companies.”

That kind of pressure is harder to measure than a stock price. But divestment supporters say it’s still worth a try.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

No Image

Sports January 19, 2016

Allegations Of Tennis Match-Fixing Overshadow Australian Open

The BBC and BuzzFeed published an investigative report alleging widespread match-fixing and corruption in the sport of tennis. The report was released just before the start of the Australian Open.

The BBC and BuzzFeed published an investigative report alleging widespread match-fixing and corruption in the sport of tennis. The report was released just before the start of the Australian Open. Rafiq Maqbool/AP hide caption

toggle caption Rafiq Maqbool/AP

No. 5 seed Rafael Nadal lost in the first round of the Australian Open to fellow Spaniard Fernando Verdasco in a five-set thriller on Tuesday. It’s only the second first-round loss in a major tournament for the former world No. 1, and the upset was the headline of the tournament so far — or, at least, it would have been.

On Sunday, the BBC and BuzzFeed published an investigative report alleging widespread match-fixing and corruption in tennis that is reverberating around the world.

The report — based on information from a “cache of leaked documents” from a 2008 probe commissioned by tennis authorities, the statistical analysis of 26,000 tennis matches and betting information from 2009 through 2015 — alleges that some players were paid to throw matches and that tennis officials did not act on the findings. The report says there is evidence that “winners of singles and doubles titles at Grand Slam tournaments are among [a] core group of 16 players who have repeatedly been reported for losing games when highly suspicious bets have been placed against them.”

The report also accuses the Tennis Integrity Unit, which was created following the 2008 probe, of not sufficiently pursuing and prosecuting allegations of match-fixing. Top tennis officials have categorically denied this.

“The Tennis Integrity Unit and tennis authorities absolutely reject any suggestion that evidence of match-fixing has been suppressed for any reason or isn’t being thoroughly investigated,” ATP Chairman Chris Kermode said at a news conference Monday, according to The Associated Press.

The report, which also alleges that one top-50 player competing in the Australian Open is suspected of “repeatedly fixing his first set,” did not name the implicated players, saying it couldn’t definitively prove they were involved in illegal activities. John Templon, the BuzzFeed reporter who collaborated on the report, told NPR’s All Things Considered that the exposé was meant to serve as a call to action for tennis authorities to crack down on match-fixing and betting in the sport.

World. No. 3 Roger Federer, however, said the names needed to be released in order for the sport to move forward.

“I mean, it’s, like, who, what? It’s, like, thrown around. It’s so easy to do that,” Federer said according to The Guardian. “I would love to hear names. Then at least it’s concrete stuff and you can actually debate about it. Was it the player? Was it the support team? Who was it? Was it before? Was it a doubles player, a singles player? Which slam? It’s so all over the place. It’s nonsense to answer something that is pure speculation.”

Roger Federer called for the release of players' names who were implicated in match-fixing.

Roger Federer called for the release of players’ names who were implicated in match-fixing. Rick Rycroft/AP hide caption

toggle caption Rick Rycroft/AP

The No. 2 player in the world, Andy Murray, said he would not be surprised if match-fixing was happening, even at the sport’s elite levels. He said: “I’ve been aware of it since I was quite young and I think when people come with big sums of money when you’re at that age, some people can make mistakes.”

At a press conference, the current top player in the world, Novak Djokovic, said he was approached to throw a match in 2007. He said someone propositioned a member of his team, offering $200,000 if Djokovic lost a match at the St. Petersburg Open in Russia. Djokovic said the offer was rejected and that he didn’t even play in the tournament. He went on to say that the sport has come a long way since 2007 and that he doesn’t think that match-fixing is a problem at the top levels of tennis.

Serena Williams, too, dismissed the allegations. “I play very hard and every player that I play plays very hard,” she said at a press conference. “If that’s going on, I don’t know about it.”

Paul Scotney, the director of Sports Integrity Services, was one of the lead investigators during the probe into tennis match-fixing back in 2008. He told NPR’s Morning Edition that the investigation uncovered a number of suspicious bets. He also said that tennis is “one of the three top sports for betting,” along with horse racing and soccer, and that that’s not going to change.

“So the facts are, it’s a bet-on sport and will continue to be a bet-on sport, and authorities need to understand that and work closely with the betting operators because of that,” Scotney said.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

No Image

Health January 19, 2016

People With Minor Injuries Are Increasingly Getting CT Scans

Neck strain might not feel like a CT-worthy injury to you, but it's increasingly getting advanced imaging.

Neck strain might not feel like a CT-worthy injury to you, but it’s increasingly getting advanced imaging. Reza Estakhrian/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Reza Estakhrian/Getty Images

If you fall off a curb, bop your head and go to the ER to make sure you’re OK, there’s a good chance you’ll be trundled off for a CT scan.

That might sound comforting, but people with injuries minor enough that they get sent home are increasingly being given computed tomography scans, a study finds. That’s despite efforts to reduce the unnecessary use of CTs, which use radiation and increase the lifetime risk of cancer.

There’s been a lot of focus on excess use of CTs in children, but much less on adults who go to the emergency department for things that turn out to be no big deal.

So researchers at the University of California, San Francisco looked at data on every single emergency department visit in the state from 2005 through 2013. They looked at people who had relatively minor injuries, focusing only on those who were sent home after being evaluated and treated. That could include people with fractures, sprains, strains and concussions.

Out of those 8,535,831 people with injuries that didn’t appear to be serious, 5.9 percent got at least one CT scan while they were in the emergency department. That number rose over time, from 3.51 percent in 2005 to 7.17 percent in 2013. The study was published Monday in the Journal of Surgical Research.

“There is a lot of awareness about overuse of CTs,” says Renee Hsia, a professor of emergency medicine and health policy at UCSF who was the senior author of the study. But patients and doctors both have reasons for wanting a scan.

“Patients tend to want to be safe, which is not a bad thing,” Hsia says, “but sometimes they want more rather than less. It’s a very American thing. Also doctors don’t want to miss anything.”

But safety comes with a price. The 72 million CT scans that Americans got in 2007 will cause 29,000 excess cancers, according to a 2009 study from the National Cancer Institute. Nearly 15,000 of those cancers could be fatal.

Efforts to get doctors to cut back on use of CTs may have caused the little downward blip in Hsia’s data from 2009 to 2011, but the numbers then continued to rise. CTs of the head were most popular. The pelvis and abdomen was the only body area that got scanned less often.

People who went to Level I and II trauma centers were more likely to get CTs, the authors found, which may reflect the culture of institutions used to dealing with severely injured patients.

As a practicing ED doctor, Hsia says there’s a lot pressure to scan patients and get them out the door rather than keep them in the hospital overnight for observation, as they would have done in the past. “There’s a lot of pressure for earlier and earlier diagnosis,” she says. “And there are consequences.”

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.