June 16, 2016

Business June 16, 2016

'Shakespearean Drama' At Viacom As 5 Board Members Are Ousted

Sumner Redstone attends a film premiere in Los Angeles in 2012. Matt Sayles/AP hide caption

toggle caption Matt Sayles/AP

Media mogul Sumner Redstone has moved to replace five board members of Viacom Inc., including the chairman and CEO whom he has considered a surrogate son.

A statement from Redstone’s National Amusements, Inc. – Viacom’s parent company – said simply that the five were “removed” and replaced with five others who have “deep experience in corporate governance of public companies.”

But in an interview with All Things Considered, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik compared the Viacom shakeup to a “Shakespearean drama.” David explains:

“You’ve got Sumner Redstone, he’s now 93 years old… he’s the figure who assembled Viacom and also the CBS corporation. His protégé, his lawyer for many years, his advisor and counselor for three decades — kind of a surrogate son — Philippe Dauman, is the CEO and chairman of Viacom. And he’s tossed him off, not only now off the Viacom board but also National Amusements, which is Redstone’s holding company through which he controls both Viacom and CBS.

“This is a battle that’s pitted Dauman, in a sense, against the daughter, the long-estranged daughter of Sumner Redstone, who has in recent years reconciled with the media mogul. And so you see a surrogate son and a once-estranged daughter battling for control of the future of this media empire.”

Folkenflik says the two may be at odds because of “the desire of Shari Redstone to control the future of this company, and Dauman clearly doesn’t want any part of that.”

But at the same time, Dauman’s leadership has come under fire in recent months. Former Viacom CEO Tom Freston called for new leadership in an interview with David earlier this month: “It went from really being No. 1 in its class, as a cable networker and as a creative enterprise, to pretty much the bottom of the barrel.”

Dauman “has been criticized by analysts and investors alike for failing to keep up with changes wrought by the internet on Viacom’s TV networks like Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon,” as The Associated Press reports.

National Amusements is privately held by the Redstone family and owns nearly 80 percent of the voting shares of Viacom, according to corporate statements.

National Amusements said it had filed papers with the Delaware Court of Chancery to affirm the changes on the board. In its statement, it says it asked the court to maintain the existing board until it affirms the changes. Dauman remains CEO, the company says. But as Reuters reports, Thursday’s move “could be a prelude to the 93-year-old media mogul forcing Dauman out of the company entirely.”

Likewise, one of the ousted board members has filed a lawsuit in an effort to stop his ouster, All Things Considered reported.

Redstone is also fighting accusations in a Massachusetts probate court that he is “not mentally competent … and was in effect being manipulated by his daughter Shari,” David added.

In summary: “What you have here is a corporation whose upper management and currently-elected board is at open war with the family that ultimately controls the fate of this company. And it’s very hard to see a clean resolution for the current leadership of Viacom, even if they managed to find a way to prevail,” David said.

Redstone stepped down as executive chairman of the CBS board of directors in February, as The Two-Way reported.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Health June 16, 2016

Will Genetic Advances Make Sex Obsolete?

The creation of eggs from skin cells and genetic screening of embryos could transform in vitro fertilization for the masses. Ted Horowitz/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Ted Horowitz/Getty Images

Stanford law professor and bioethicist Hank Greely predicts that in the future most people in developed countries won’t have sex to make babies. Instead they’ll choose to control their child’s genetics by making embryos in a lab.

On KQED’s Forum program, Michael Krasny spoke with Greely about his new book, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction. Greely highlights the ethical and legal questions that might arise in the future’s reproductive paradigm.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Krasny: There are a lot of new advances, technology and so forth. We reached the point where you get some sperm donor and a little piece of skin and you’re in business because of stem cells.

Greely: My book argues that two different biomedical innovations coming from different directions and not really propelled by reproduction are going to combine here. One is whole-genome sequencing, and the other is what I call easy PGD, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, [that] is, getting rid of egg harvest … which is unpleasant, dangerous and really expensive.

This ties in with in vitro fertilization also being not as onerous as it has been in the past.

What I think is going to happen, we’ll be able to take some skin cells from anyone and turn them into any cell type. Make these into eggs or sperm and that is going to make IVF much easier, cheaper and less dangerous.

You [can] decide, “Well, I want these traits,” and it becomes a selective process.

Yes, I think we will see an increased and broad use of embryo selection. I would be careful to set the time frame at 20-40 years. I think we’ll actually see a world where most babies born to people with good health coverage will be conceived in the lab. People will make about a hundred embryos, each will have its whole genome tested, and the parents will be [asked … “Tell] us what you want to know and then tell us what embryo you want.”

This could bring down health care costs, and it is also good for same-sex couples, isn’t it?

Well, yes and maybe. I think it should bring down health care costs, and, in fact, one of the advantages to it is that it would be so beneficial for public health care costs that I think it would be provided for free. If it costs say, $10,000 to start a baby this way, 100 babies is a million dollars. If you avoid the birth of one baby with a serious genetic disease, you’ve saved $3 [million to] $5 million. The same-sex issue, I think that’s going to work, but that’s another jump. That would be taking a skin cell … from a woman and turning it into a sperm. I think [it’s] probable, but that hasn’t been done yet.

This is not the end of sex — because recreational sex will always be with us — it’s the end of sex as a way of procreating.

I think it will not be the complete end. I think people will still get pregnant the old-fashioned way, right, sometimes for religious reasons, sometimes for philosophical reasons, sometimes for romantic reasons, sometimes because they are teenagers and the back seat of the car is there.

A lot of people talk about playing God, but before we get into that, there’s the rubric of consumer eugenics. And there is a eugenics fear when we start talking about selection.

There certainly is. Eugenics is a slippery word; it means many things to different people. To some, it’s state-enforced reproductive control. To some … what we had was state-enforced sterilization. To some, it’s any kind of reproductive choices, but those are different things. For me, I think the coercion is much more important than the issues of selection. The concern about the state or the insurance company or someone else, forcing you to pick particular babies, worries me a lot more than having parents make choices, though that raises its own set of questions.

What do you see as the biggest question here?

I worry about the dilemma of Republican legislators in very conservative states. They want to spend as little money as possible on Medicaid. I could imagine a state saying, “We’re not going to pay for this via Medicaid,” which would mean that the roughly 40-50 percent of babies born in that state who are paid for by Medicaid wouldn’t get to go through this, and although they are not “superbabies,” adding another 10-20 percent health advantage to the babies of the rich over the babies of the poor is a bad thing.

Listen to the full interview here. Greely shares his thoughts on cost, socioeconomics, gene editing and the ethics of designer babies.

This story was produced by KQED’s daily health and technology blog, Future of You. The blog’s host and editor is Jon Brooks.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Entertainment June 16, 2016

First Listen: A-WA, 'Habib Galbi'

A-WA’s new album, Habib Galbi, comes out June 24. Tomer Yosef/Courtesy of the artist hide caption

toggle caption Tomer Yosef/Courtesy of the artist

Last year, a newly formed trio of sisters from Israel called A-WA (pronounced “AY-wah”) caught attention with a video that seemed to come out of nowhere. In the midst of an arid desert landscape, here was A-WA, resplendent in fuchsia-pink robes and accompanied by three male dancers decked out in blue tracksuits and red snapbacks topped with fez-style tassels. Their singing was just as brash — an old Yemeni folk song, utterly transformed in bracing three-part harmonies and understitched with electronic beats.

That video, for “Habib Galbi” (Love Of My Heart), became a calling card for what A-WA is all about. The band is fronted by sisters Tair, Liron and Tagel Haim, who take the Arabic-language songs of their heritage and recast them for the 21st-century dance floor. Their father’s family is Yemeni Jews, whose distinct culture and nearly extinct Arabic dialect bridges the Arab world and Israel; that video for “Habib Galbi” was shot near their home village, in Israel’s far south, nearly wedged in between Egypt and Jordan. Even the band’s name is a callback to shared cultural identity: aywa means “yeah” in Arabic.

The album opens with an a cappella selection, “Yemenite Lullaby,” which features the trio in those signature, surprising harmonies and fully grounded in their desert roots. But almost as soon as you settle into those otherworldly textures, A-WA flips the script and bursts into a psychedelic-soaked, drum-pad-fueled song called “Ya Raitesh Al Warda” (I Wish You Were A Rose). It’s here that you really begin feeling the influence of the album’s producer, Tomer Yosef, whose band Balkan Beat Box has provided a few massive hits with its distinctive and brassy-brash earworms, including Jason DeRulo’s “Talk Dirty” featuring 2 Chainz and Mac Miller‘s “Goosebumpz.”

There’s a lot of cheeky humor in the arrangements A-WA worked up with Yosef, a fellow Israeli of Yemenite descent. Take, for example, the ska-ish backbeat and squealed chorus in “Lau Ma Al Mahaba” (If Not For Love), the synth-driven bleeps and bloops that leaven the uneven rhythm of “Galbi Haway” (My Heart Is Lost In Love), and even the overtly childlike singsong of “Ala Wabda” (I Will Begin By Calling You) — a tune with firmly religious lyrics, beginning with, “I will begin by calling you, oh God / The great Almighty / Oh, king of kings / Who has no bounds.” The heaviest beats come late in the album, in “Shamak Zabad Radai” (Your Scent Is Of Rada’a), a song that’s ripe for remixing.

But throughout, it’s the sisters’ vocals, perfectly attuned to each other, along with their cutely off-kilter reimaginings of Yemenite folk songs, that makes Habib Galbi such a pleasure, and such a logical continuation of what they started with the “Habib Galbi” video. Instead of earnestly reconstructing the music of their cultural ancestors, A-WA has catapulted this roots material into new terrain.

A-WA, Habib Galbi Courtesy of the artist hide caption

toggle caption Courtesy of the artist

A-WA, ‘Habib Galbi’

01Yemenite Lullaby