June 23, 2017

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Entertainment June 23, 2017

The Week in Movie News: Here's What You Need to Know

Need a quick recap on the past week in movie news? Here are the highlights:

BIG NEWS

Ron Howard Takes Over the Han Solo Star Wars Spin-Off: Early in the week, we got the shocking news that Phil Lord and Chris Miller were stepping down from directing the Han Solo Star Wars spin-off prequel due to creative differences. After a couple days of uncertainty, Ron Howard was announced as their replacement to finish the film. Read more here and here.

MORE UNEXPECTED NEWS

Daniel Day-Lewis is Retiring: One of our greatest actors has decided to stop now while he’s ahead. The three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis will hang up his hat following the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread this Christmas. Read more here.

GREAT NEWS

Jurassic World 2 Has a New Title: With the sequel to Jurassic World hitting theaters in just one year, we finally got the official title: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. What that means, we’re not sure, but we did also learn this week that Jeff Goldblum is writing some of his own dialogue and that the movie will owe a lot to Michael Crichton’s original novels. Read more here and here.

EXCLUSIVE SCOOP

Michael Bay Discusses His First Few Movies: We talked to Transformers: The Last Knight director about his first three movies (Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon), and he shared some personal stories about how they impacted his whole career. Read more here.

COOL CULTURE

The Makings of a Transformers Movie: With Transformers: The Last Knight in theaters this week, a lot of outlets have been helping us out with Transformers franchise recaps, trivia, ingredients and product placement supercuts. Learn more below.

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MUST-WATCH TRAILERS

The Only Living Boy in New York Offers Romance in the Big Apple: The latest from (500) Days in Summer and The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb centers on a young man (Callum Turner) who begins a relationship with his father’s girlfriend (Kate Beckinsale). Jeff Bridges, Kiersey Clemons and Pierce Brosnan co-star. Watch the trailer here:

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Stronger Promises a Hearfelt True Story: Oscar nominee Jake Gyllenhaal plays a victim of the Boston Marathon bombing in David Gordon Green’s Stronger, the second major movie to come out of the tragedy. Orphan Black‘s Tatiana Maslany co-stars. Watch the first full trailer below.

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Thank You For Your Service Recognizes More Heroes: American Sniper writer Jason Hall makes his directorial debut with Thank You for Your Service, another movie based on real-life American heroes in pain. For them it’s PTSD following their military tours in Iraq. Check out the new trailer starring Miles Teller here:

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Business June 23, 2017

Arkansas Tries To Stop An Epidemic Of Herbicide Damage

Soybean leaves showing evidence of damage from dicamba. Thousands of acres of soybean fields have shown this kind of damage this spring.

Courtesy of the University of Arkansas

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Courtesy of the University of Arkansas

Arkansas’s pesticide regulators have stepped into the middle of an epic battle between weeds and chemicals, which has now morphed into a battle between farmers. Hundreds of farmers say their crops have been damaged by a weedkiller that was sprayed on neighboring fields. Today, the Arkansas Plant Board voted to impose an unprecedented ban on that chemical.

“It’s fracturing the agricultural community. You either have to choose to be on the side of using the product, or on the side of being damaged by the product,” says David Hundley, who manages grain production for Ozark Mountain Poultry in Bay, Arkansas.

The tension — which even led to a farmer’s murder — is over a weedkiller called dicamba. The chemical only became a practical option for farmers a few years ago, when Monsanto created soybean and cotton plants that were genetically modified to survive it. Farmers who planted these new seeds could use dicamba to kill weeds without harming their crops.

Farmers, especially in the South, have been desperate for new weapons against a devastating weed called pigweed, or Palmer amaranth. And some farmers even jumped the gun and started spraying dicamba on their crops before they were legally allowed to do so. (Dicamba has long been used in other ways, such as for clearing vegetation from fields before planting.)

A map showing the number of complaints filed by county. According to the Arkansas Agriculture Department, the investigations into these complaints have yet to be completed.

Courtesy of Arkansas Agriculture Department

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Courtesy of Arkansas Agriculture Department

The problem is, dicamba is a menace to other crops nearby. It drifts easily in the wind, and traditional soybeans are incredibly sensitive to it. “Nobody was quite prepared, despite extensive training, for just how sensitive beans were to dicamba,” says Bob Scott, a specialist on weeds with the University of Arkansas’s agricultural extension service.

As soon as spraying started this spring, the complaints began arriving. By June 23, state regulators had received 242 complaints from farmers who say their crops have been damaged. “This has far eclipsed any previous number of complaints that we’ve gotten, and unfortunately, this number seems to just keep growing,” says Scott. “Every day we get an update with eight or ten more complaints.”

In his area, Hundley says, “any soybean that’s not [resistant to dicamba] is exhibiting damage. I can name 15 farmers within three or four miles who have damage, and I can only name 3-4 farmers who have used the technology.”

On June 20, the Arkansas Plant Board met to consider an emergency ban on further spraying of dicamba, and farmers crowded into the meeting to argue both sides.

“The individuals who were damaged were quite passionate. The growers who had invested money in the technology also were quite passionate,” says Jason Norsworthy, a weed specialist at the University of Arkansas, who attended the meeting.

At that first meeting, a procedural mix-up prevented the board from holding a valid vote. On June 23, it reconvened and voted, 9-5, to ban any spraying of dicamba on any crops except for pasture land for 120 days. The ban will take effect immediately if the governor of Arkansas signs it.

The decision, assuming it goes into effect, is a hard blow for farmers who paid extra for dicamba-resistant seeds. They now won’t be able to spray dicamba, which they were counting on doing. “A lot of those growers will not have a good option for pigweed,” Scott says.

Even Hundley, who was in favor of banning dicamba, doesn’t feel that it’s an optimal solution. “It’s pitting Arkansas farmers against Arkansas farmers, and that’s never good,” he says.

Looking toward the future, Scott isn’t sure whether dicamba ever will be a good tool for farmers, because it appears to be so difficult to control. “I have walked a lot of fields that leave you scratching your head, how did this happen? Because it seemed like they did everything right,” he says.

He also doesn’t think the problem will be limited to Arkansas. His state just happened to hit this problem first, because Arkansas’s farmers adopted dicamba earlier than those in other states. “Arkansas may be ahead of the curve, but I anticipate other states also having this problem,” he says.

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Health June 23, 2017

President Trump Praises Senate Republican Health Care Bill

President Trump is praising the Senate’s health care bill. But the bill lacks a mechanism requiring people to have continuous coverage, which could create problems in the individual health care market.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

President Trump says he’s very supportive of the Senate’s new bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. But the president admits tinkering with the nation’s health care system is complicated. Senate Republican leaders unveiled the legislation yesterday. They want it to pass next week. They have little margin for error, as NPR’s Scott Horsley reports.

SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Senate Republicans can only afford to lose two votes if they hope to pass their bill. And five Republicans are already on record in opposition to the measure in its current form. After the first four Republicans raised concerns, President Trump told “Fox & Friends” there’s a narrow path to success.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “FOX AND FRIENDS”)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think we’re going to get there and we have four very good people that – it’s not that they’re opposed. They’d like to get certain changes. And we’ll see if we can take care of that.

HORSLEY: One of the holdouts is Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. He told NBC’s “Today” show, in its current form, the Senate bill could aggravate the problem of healthy people going without insurance and driving up costs for everyone else.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “TODAY”)

RAND PAUL: If you can get insurance after you get sick, you will. And without the individual mandate, that sort of adverse selection, the death spiral, the elevated premiums – all of that that’s going on gets worse under this bill.

HORSLEY: Obamacare addressed that problem by requiring Americans to have health insurance or pay a penalty. But the so-called individual mandate is one of the least popular provisions of the law. And Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and his colleagues are determined to get rid of it.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MITCH MCCONNELL: We agreed on the need to free Americans from Obamacare’s mandates so Americans are no longer forced to buy insurance they don’t need or can’t afford.

HORSLEY: But the Senate bill preserves another, more popular piece of Obamacare, the requirement that insurance companies cover everyone, even those with pre-existing conditions. Health policy expert Linda Blumberg of the Urban Institute says imposing a coverage requirement on insurance companies without a corresponding mandate for customers creates a very shaky insurance market.

LINDA BLUMBERG: What you don’t want to have is a situation where you’re saying, we’re going to have everybody, regardless of their health problems, come in and then have all of the healthy people exit the market because then the average cost of those who remain goes up really high.

HORSLEY: As premium costs go up, even more healthy people drop out. That’s the so-called death spiral. The House version of the health care bill tried to discourage healthy people from fleeing the market by allowing insurance companies to charge more for those who don’t maintain continuous coverage. Former GOP Senate staffer Rodney Whitlock thinks the Senate bill will have to add something similar.

RODNEY WHITLOCK: I believe that the bill that the Senate will vote on, assuming they get to that point, will have some sort of mechanism to cause participation in it.

HORSLEY: So why isn’t that already in the bill? Whitlock says McConnell may be worried that it runs afoul of procedural rules that allow Republicans to pass the health care bill with a simple majority vote.

WHITLOCK: If you are concerned that that might be the case, then, strategically, you may want to wait until the very last second to be presenting the language to the parliamentarian.

HORSLEY: Blumberg warns without a strong provision to keep healthy customers in the marketplace, insurance companies will be tempted to offer more stripped-down policies. And that could leave the individual market in worse shape than before Obamacare.

BLUMBERG: What will be available are policies that don’t cover a number of benefits that people are used to getting coverage for today. They will have much higher deductibles than they’re used to seeing. And I think, as you get older, the coverage will be less and less affordable.

HORSLEY: AARP is already on record against the Senate bill, citing what it calls an age tax, as well as cuts to Medicaid. The senior lobby is promising to hold all senators accountable for their votes. Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Sports June 23, 2017

NFL's Jermichael Finley On Head Trauma: 'It Felt Like 100 Bees Stinging Me'

NPR’s Kelly McEvers speaks with former NFL tight end Jermichael Finley about his experience living with the effects of head trauma sustained on the field.

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Jermichael Finley was a tight end for the Green Bay Packers for six seasons, played 70 games, caught 223 receptions, scored 20 touchdowns. He also got five concussions. And then Finley took a hit to the crown of his helmet during his final game in 2013. He suffered a bruised spinal cord and eventually retired at age 28.

Jermichael Finley wrote about all this in a recent article in The Players’ Tribune. He’s with us from member station KERA in Dallas. Welcome to the show.

JERMICHAEL FINLEY: Hey. How are you?

MCEVERS: I’m good. Thanks. Can you tell us about that game in 2013 when you took that hit? What do you remember happened?

FINLEY: What I do remember – before I even caught the ball, I faced the guy up. I took the slant route, caught the ball, lowered my head. And when I lowered my head, he jammed my head, and it kind of, like, jammed my spinal cord. So instantaneously I, like, froze up. When you get a spinal cord concussion, your head – it just, like, flops back and forth. And it felt like a hundred bees was on me, stinging me. So it was a crazy, crazy experience.

MCEVERS: Wow. They put you on a stretcher, and they took you to the hospital. But they took you the back way.

FINLEY: Yes. When I was on that ride to the hospital, they were saying the media is on the main floor, so we got to take you to through the basement – and then went through the basement. As I start waking up from getting knocked out, I started looking around, and everything was, like, half-painted. It was freezing cold. And I’m like, man, where am I? And they was like, we had to take you through the morgue. And I’m like, am I dead?

MCEVERS: Somebody had to say, like, no, you’re not dead.

FINLEY: Yeah, no, you’re not dead. Just sit back, and relax.

MCEVERS: So what was your injury exactly?

FINLEY: My injury was C3, C4 vertebrate. At the time, they had to widen my narrow canal because that’s what – it squeezed down on my spinal cord, so I couldn’t breathe or do none of that, so I just blacked out.

MCEVERS: But after a time, you wanted to go back and play – right? – after this injury.

FINLEY: I did. I did.

MCEVERS: Yeah, why? I mean, you know, I think somebody’s listening to this would think, like, you get hurt that badly, like, why would you want to go back for more?

FINLEY: It’s that high – running out the tunnel with a hundred thousand people screaming at you, you know, I mean the fame, the fortune of course. And you get lost in that. And that’s what I’m trying to let guys know. You know, I mean it’s a fantasy world, and it’s temporary, so you got to take care of yourself also.

MCEVERS: You talk about getting your bell rung on the field, like, when you get hit. What does it feel like when you get your bell rung?

FINLEY: That’s a good question ’cause when I get my bell rung, I’m just out of it.

MCEVERS: Yeah.

FINLEY: It feels like you’re going blind. You can’t really hear anything. I had got my bell rung week three of the same year that I got injured. I was stumbling off the field, and the only way I can find the sideline that my team was on is that we had the bright-yellow pants on. So I couldn’t hear. You can’t talk. And I think the fans on TV – you can tell when a guy get his bell rung ’cause you get that oh, that ah. You’re off balance. It’s a train wreck every time you collide into an opponent.

MCEVERS: And that’s just normal. Like, I mean how many times…

FINLEY: Yes.

MCEVERS: …Would you say that you, like, got your bell rung?

FINLEY: I would say once a game, if you want to be real.

MCEVERS: So you were not cleared by doctors to play again. You had to retire after this injury in 2013. But you actually had a clause in your contract that set you up financially. Can you tell me about that?

FINLEY: It was 10 million bucks tax-free. It was an insurance policy through Lloyd’s of London to set myself up. And so happened, 2013, I had got the career-ending injury. And after that, I had collected on that insurance policy.

MCEVERS: How common is that now in the game for people to have a policy like that?

FINLEY: It’s not common at all. Some guys don’t want to fork over a half million dollars for a $10 million deal. You know what I mean?

MCEVERS: Yeah.

FINLEY: But at the end of the day, you’re protecting yourself.

MCEVERS: It just seems so – I don’t know – just so cynical to me. Like, it’s almost like there’s an understanding that this is very likely to happen, right?

FINLEY: Most definitely. And when you come in the NFL, you come into that orientation as a rookie or whatnot. They got it for you highlighted. There’s 99 percent chance you’re going to get injured in this game.

MCEVERS: They say that.

FINLEY: Yeah. They’ll let you know that. The matter’s not that you’re going to get injured. It’s when you’re going to get injured. So everyone plays this game. You’re going to get some type of injury that’s going to, in my opinion, haunt you for the rest of your life.

MCEVERS: So you retired, and then after that, you started feeling bad. What was happening?

FINLEY: Irritability. I really couldn’t stand much – impulsiveness, addictions, just being honest. I was dealing with all types of things around the board.

MCEVERS: And your wife eventually encouraged you to go to a clinic that deals with brain injuries, right?

FINLEY: Yes, Ma’am.

MCEVERS: What are your symptoms now?

FINLEY: My symptoms now – it’s minor to what it used to be – but forgetting things (laughter). You know, I mean if I’m out or having a conversation with someone, I may tend to kind of have to think a little bit more. But I feel a ton better, most definitely.

MCEVERS: ‘Cause you’re 30 years old. Is that right?

FINLEY: Yes, Ma’am.

MCEVERS: What is it like to know that you will live with this your whole life?

FINLEY: It probably come across my mind probably once a day. It’s disturbing, but at the end of the day, I know how to hone myself back in and realize that I chose the game. I chose to play this game as a kid and carry on with it. So that’s the things that I have to deal with.

MCEVERS: You’ve been critical of the NFL for, you know…

FINLEY: (Laughter).

MCEVERS: …Encouraging this get-back-on-the-field attitude that, you know…

FINLEY: Yeah.

MCEVERS: …Where players, you know, downplay their injuries so they can keep playing like you wanted to. Do you think the NFL is doing enough?

FINLEY: I don’t. My thing is – here, and not to throw the NFL under the bus, but I don’t think they’re doing their wholeheartedly best at helping players realize that after the game, it’s going to be a struggle from all of the damage and the scars that’s on their brain. I don’t think they educate guys around that good enough. If I can go back and do this thing all over, I would have baseline tests every single year, twice a year. You know what I mean? I would check my brain a lot more than I did.

MCEVERS: You now coach football for kids, including your own kids.

FINLEY: Yes, Ma’am, yeah.

MCEVERS: And I just think anyone listening to your story would want to know why? Like, why encourage kids to get into a sport that you know can be so dangerous?

FINLEY: So I – with my son, I want to be hands-on with him. I want to show him how to play the game correctly, fair, not just go knock this guy out. You know what I mean? Play the game, and just educate yourself around it.

MCEVERS: Do you still watch NFL games on TV?

FINLEY: I do. The year after I got hurt, I hated it. But now I’m pretty comfortable. The thing is, I cringe when guys get hit now.

MCEVERS: Right.

FINLEY: I just cringe up because I know how damaging it is in the long run.

MCEVERS: Well, Jermichael Finley, thank you so much for your time and for telling your story.

FINLEY: Yes, Ma’am. Thank you guys also.

(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY’S “TO WEST TEXAS”)

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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