February 22, 2018

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Entertainment February 22, 2018

Today in Movie Culture: Proposing a 'Star Wars'-Inspired Olympic Sport, a Spotlight on Stunt Performers and More

Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture:

Dream Olympic Sport of the Day:

More people would watch curling at the Winter Olympics if it involved everyone’s everyone Star Wars droid (via io9):

Fan Build of the Day:

Speaking of Star Wars-inspired things, check out how to make an AT-ST high chair for your baby in this Never Not Making video (via Geekologie):

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Reworked Trailer of the Day:

Seeing Solo: A Star Wars Story as being like the Star Trek reboot, War Starts at Midnight added The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” to the trailer to make it even better (via Geek Tyrant):

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Oscars History of the Day:

Burger Fiction highlights every Academy Award winner for Best Animated Feature in this shorter than most Oscar history supercut:

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Vintage Image of the Day:

Luis Bunuel, who was born on this day in 1900, directs Catherine Denueve on the set of his 1967 classic Belle de Jour:

Movie Comparison of the Day:

Last year, Rob Stone compared the opening and closing sequences of Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Now Will DiGravio responds with more side-by-side looks at the two classics (via Film School Rejects):

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Movie Science of the Day:

What is the toxin on the lips of Poison Ivy from Batman & Robin? Kyle Hill gives a scientific explanation of her deadly powers:

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Movie Job of the Day:

They don’t get to win Oscars, but Mashable honors stunt people by showcasing what it takes to do their job in this video:

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Inspired Look of the Day:

Filmmaker Ava DuVernay shared this tweet from a fan who is halfway to cosplaying as a character from her upcoming movie A Wrinkle in Time:

#AWrinkleInTime@WrinkleInTime “Mrs. Whatsit” inspired look! @RWitherspoonpic.twitter.com/M2eqLbivnP

— Katy Mae (@KatyMaex) February 21, 2018

Classic Trailer of the Day:

This week is the 15th anniversary of the release of Ron Shelton’s Dark Blue starring Kurt Russell. Watch the original trailer for the classic crime film below.

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Sports February 22, 2018

Zagitova Edges Medvedeva To Win Figure Skating Gold At Pyeongchang Olympics

Alina Zagitova won the first gold medal for the Olympic Athlete from Russia team at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

Harry How/Getty Images

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Harry How/Getty Images

Update at 12:50 a.m. ET Friday

Alina Zagitova narrowly beat her teammate Evgenia Medvedeva in the women’s singles figure skating competition at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, winning the first gold medal for the Olympic Athlete from Russia team.

“I haven’t fully realized yet that I’ve won,” said Zagitova, who is just 15. “I think I need some time to understand that I won the Olympic Games.”

It would begin to sink in, she said, when she gets her medal in tonight’s ceremony in Pyeongchang.

In addition to her jaw-dropping talent, Zagitova has drawn scrutiny for the composition of her program, in which she saves all the most complicated moves for the second half, to maximize their scoring potential.

But Zagitova also uses the first half of the program to show her artistry and dramatic flair. She did that in her free skate here in South Korea – and when it was time to hit her jumps, she nailed them in spinning, smooth precision.

As she finished, the crowd, including a large and vocal Russian contingent, cheered loudly. Coming off the ice, Zagitova was beaming.

Of her score, Zagitova said, “I was surprised and it was a nice surprise. I am glad that I was able to deal with my nervousness, go out there and skate my program calmly.”

She added that she would have given herself “a 4 with a little plus [out of 5] for my performance, because I didn’t do the first jump combination [triple Lutz-triple loop], but I did it later. I proved one more time to myself that I can change my jump elements during the program.”

The three Americans in the field — Mirai Nagasu, Karen Chen, and Bradie Tennell — needed to turn in eye-popping performances today to even approach the podium. None of them had scored above 70 points in their short program, as six other skaters had. In the final rankings, they held onto their spots, all in a group, with Tennell vaulting from 11th, last in the group, to 9th.

An updated version of our original story, recapping the event:

Zagitova’s score in the free program of 156.65 points staked her claim to the gold medal.

“Kaetlyn Osmond brought her A-game to the Olympics.” @kaetlyn_23‘s first individual medal in the #WinterOlympics, and she earned it with a blissful free skate! https://t.co/fmMl0BMYXFpic.twitter.com/Z6YjxstCLU

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 23, 2018

Canada’s Kaetlyn Osmond, 22, followed with a graceful and smooth skate, with elements flowing into one another. One highlight: a triple salchow – double toeloop – double loop combination that drew loud cheers.

For Osmond, there was at least one stumble on a landing. But when she spun into her finish, the packed arena (with many Canadian fans) was already roaring its approval. Osmond put her hands on the ice, smiling and laughing — and clearly trying to catch her breath: These elite skaters only make these routines SEEM easy.

“I was so excited, I was so ready for this program,” Osmond said later. “All day I was terrified, I was so nervous, but it is a program I feel super comfortable with in practice, and I was so ready to show it in competition — that’s exactly what I felt.”

Osmond’s score: 152.15, putting her into second place overall — a bump up from third and assuring her of a medal.

But then it was all up to Medvedeva, skating in the final slot of the day to “Anna Karenina” by Dario Marianelli. The question in the arena was: Would the reigning world champion take gold, or silver?

.@JannyMedvedeva was stunning in the free skate, a performance that earned her silver. #WinterOlympicshttps://t.co/fmMl0BMYXFpic.twitter.com/mZFRNI25mO

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 23, 2018

Medvedeva’s fluid technique and ability to express herself on the ice — while pulling off jumps with technical skill and grace — are captivating. The crowd cheered her dramatic program with appreciation, but it wasn’t the loudest we heard today.

Finishing her program, Medvedeva immediately started weeping on the ice, covering her face with her hands. As she skated off and hugged her coach, she began crying openly.

Medvedeva’s score: 156.65 points — a tie in the free skate with Zagitova, who had come into the final skate leading her by less than two points: 82.92 to 81.06. That sealed the gold medal for Zagitova, with 239.57 total points.

“I felt today in my program really like Anna Karenina in the movie,” Medvedeva said, discussing her performance and likely mortifying Russian literature professors. “I put everything out there that I had, I left everything on the ice. I have no regrets.”

She skated “in a fog,” Medvedeva said, saying she was in the moment and aware that for four minutes she could express herself to the world.

“My soul thrives on that feeling, the body and the brain did their job,” she said.

When Medvedeva left the scoring area, she and Zagitova shared a big and long hug.

Of her bronze medal, Osmond said, “Not long after the last Olympics, I didn’t even know that I would be competing at this one. It means so much, and to know that I fought so hard in the last four years.”

She added, “My main goal was to place higher than 13th, which I did, and I improved that by 10 placements. I am so excited.”

Divine.

There are very few words to describe Alina Zagitova’s short program, so let’s just watch it. #WinterOlympicshttps://t.co/KZ4MBNvQzppic.twitter.com/1QgRsNMdnM

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 21, 2018

Among the U.S. trio, Tennell led the way in this final, after trailing on Wednesday. She and Chen turned in solid, but far from perfect, performances that left them behind Russian athlete Maria Sotskova. Nagasu, who made history earlier in Pyeongchang by landing the first triple axel at an Olympics, pulled out of her jumps today and didn’t seem as steady as she was during the team event. She finished between Tennell and Chen.

“I’m ready to go home,” Nagasu said afterwards, according to NPR’s Tom Goldman.

The start times for the final six women in the free skate on Friday in South Korea (Thursday night in the U.S.) had Medvedeva going last:

Satoko Miyahara (Japan)
Carolina Kostner (Italy)
Kaori Sakamoto (Japan)
Alina Zagitova (OAR)
Kaetlyn Osmond (Canada)
Evgenia Medvedeva (OAR)

Before the highest-ranked skaters from the short program began their programs, Chen and Tennell had come closer to skating the way many had expected them to – and the way they didn’t quite manage to in their short program (for Tennell, it included a fall, something she rarely does).

After Chen earned a 119.75 score, Tennell put down a solid program to get a 128.34 – and 192.35 total points, with nine skaters still to take the ice.

As she finished her skate and awaited her score, Tennell looked relieved, proud, and happy.

There were 24 skaters in the final — but Zagitova and Medvedeva were the only ones to score above 80 points in the short program. Zagitova had the edge with 82.92 points, partly because her program is shaped to maximize scoring: All of her big jumps come in the last section, when they’re worth more.

Medvedeva, 18, is the reigning world champion. She’s competing in South Korea after recovering from a broken foot that she suffered last October.

Zagitova, 15, won this year’s European championship in Moscow. She has risen to the heights of the world’s elite skaters just one year after winning the world junior championship.

With a Russian skater winning gold, it set off a celebration for fans of the Olympic Athletes from Russia team — who are competing under a neutral flag at these Winter Games because of doping punishments. Before today’s event — and with the final weekend of competition looming in Pyeongchang, the team hadn’t managed to win a gold medal, it has now also won five silver and eight bronze medals.

For a brief while earlier this week, Medvedeva owned the Olympic record for the highest-scoring women’s short program in history, after turning in a flawless skate at the Gangneung Ice Arena. But within moments, her score of 81.06 was eclipsed by Zagitova’s 82.92.

Both Medvedeva and Zagitova attend Sambo 70, a large sports center and school in Moscow that was founded in 1970. The school trains Olympic athletes in a variety of winter and summer sports, from judo and swimming to skiing and figure skating. Another product of Sambo 70:Julia Lipnitskaya, who was 15 when she won a gold medal as part of Russia’s figure skating team at the Sochi 2014 Olympics.

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Business February 22, 2018

Iran May Follow Venezuela In Launching Its Own Cryptocurrency

Iran has announced its intent to establish a national cryptocurrency. In a tweet posted Wednesday, an Iranian official said that a test model for a “cloud-based digital currency” is being developed for submission to the Iranian banking system.

The official, Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi, heads Iran’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technology. Jahromi made the announcement after a meeting with the state-owned Post Bank of Iran.

It is not yet clear what role the currency will play in the Iranian banking system. Iran’s central bank has hinted at regulating cryptocurrencies in the past, even suggesting the adoption of an “infrastructure” to integrate digital currencies into the country’s financial system.

But the central bank backpedaled on Wednesday just as news of the state-sponsored digital currency went public. In a statement reported by Iran Front Page news, the Central Bank of Iran highlighted the “highly unreliable and risky” nature of cryptocurrency markets. It warned that Iranians “may lose their financial assets” in a space marked by extreme volatility and “pyramid scheme”-like businesses.

The announcement comes on the heels of Venezuela’s oil-backed “petro” cryptocurrency launch earlier this week. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro claims that the cryptocurrency has raised over $700 million for the cash-strapped country. But doubts remain over the currency’s long-term viability, as Venezuela struggles to profit from the oil reserves that are supposed to back it.

There are fears that the rise of state-backed cryptocurrencies could pose a challenge to international efforts to regulate financial transactions and impose sanctions. The countries most interested in the technology – Iran, Venezuela and Russia – are all targeted by U.S. sanctions.

The Treasury Department has warned that U.S. citizens purchasing these currencies may be violating sanctions laws. And just last month, Treasury officials told Congress that rogue states and international criminal organizations are using virtual currencies “to launder their ill-gotten gains.”

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Health February 22, 2018

Does A Larger Role For Midwives Mean Better Care?

A new study offers a systematic look at what midwives can and can’t do in different states, offering evidence that empowering them could boost maternal and infant health.

Trina Dalziel/Getty Images/Ikon Images

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Trina Dalziel/Getty Images/Ikon Images

In Great Britain, midwives deliver half of all babies, including Kate Middleton’s first two children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte. In Sweden, Norway and France, midwives oversee most expectant and new mothers, enabling obstetricians to concentrate on high-risk births. In Canada and New Zealand, midwives are so highly valued that they’re brought in to manage complex cases that need special attention.

All of those countries have much lower rates of maternal and infant mortality than the U.S. Here, severe maternal complications have more than doubled in the past 20 years. Shortages of maternity care have reached critical levels: Nearly half of U.S. counties don’t have a single practicing obstetrician-gynecologist, and in rural areas, the number of hospitals offering obstetric services has fallen more than 16 percent since 2004. Nevertheless, thanks in part to opposition from doctors and hospitals, midwives are far less prevalent in the U.S. than in other affluent countries, delivering about 10 percent of babies, and the extent to which they can legally participate in patient care varies widely from one state to the next.

Now a new study, a systematic look at what midwives can and can’t do in the states where they practice, offers new evidence that empowering them could significantly boost maternal and infant health. The five-year effort by researchers in Canada and the U.S., published Wednesday, found that states that have done the most to integrate midwives into their health care systems, including Washington, New Mexico and Oregon, have some of the best outcomes for mothers and babies. Conversely, states with some of the most restrictive midwife laws and practices — including Alabama, Ohio and Mississippi — tend to do significantly worse on key indicators of maternal and neonatal well-being.

“We have been able to establish that midwifery care is strongly associated with lower interventions, cost-effectiveness and improved outcomes,” said lead researcher Saraswathi Vedam, an associate professor of midwifery who heads the Birth Place Lab at the University of British Columbia.

Many of the states characterized by poor health outcomes and hostility to midwives also have large African-American populations, raising the possibility that greater use of midwives could reduce racial disparities in maternity care. African-American mothers are three to four times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than their white counterparts; black babies are 49 percent more likely to be born prematurely and twice as likely to perish before their first birthdays.

“In communities that are most at risk for adverse outcomes, increased access to midwives who can work as part of the health care system may improve both outcomes and the mothers’ experience,” Vedam said.

That’s because of the midwifery model, which emphasizes community-based care, close relationships between providers and patients, prenatal and postpartum wellness, and avoiding unnecessary interventions that can spiral into dangerous complications, said Jennie Joseph, a British-trained midwife who runs Commonsense Childbirth, a Florida birthing center and maternal care nonprofit. “It’s a model that somewhat mitigates the impact of any systemic racial bias. You listen. You’re compassionate. There’s such a depth of racism that’s intermingled with [medical] systems. If you’re practicing in [the midwifery] model you’re mitigating this without even realizing it.”

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, analyzes hundreds of laws and regulations in 50 states and the District of Columbia — things like the settings where midwives are allowed to work, whether they can provide the full scope of pregnancy- and childbirth-related care, how much autonomy they have to make decisions without a doctor’s supervision, and whether they can prescribe medication, receive insurance reimbursement or obtain hospital privileges. Then researchers overlaid state data on nine maternal and infant health indicators, including rates of cesarean sections, premature births, breastfeeding and neonatal deaths. (Maternal deaths and severe complications were not included because data is unreliable).

The differences between state laws can be stark. In Washington, which has some of the highest rankings on measures such as C-sections, premature births, infant mortality and breastfeeding, midwives don’t need nursing degrees to be licensed. They often collaborate closely with ob/gyns, and can generally transfer care to hospitals smoothly when risks to the mother or baby emerge. They sit on the state’s perinatal advisory committee, are actively involved in shaping health policy, and receive Medicaid reimbursement even for home births.

At the other end of the spectrum, North Carolina not only requires midwives to be registered nurses, but it also requires them to have a physician sign off on their application to the state for approval to practice. North Carolina scores considerably worse than Washington on indices such as low-birthweight babies and neonatal deaths.

Neel Shah, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a leader in the movement to reduce unnecessary C-sections, praised the study as “a remarkable paper — novel, ambitious, and provocative.” He said licensed midwives could be used to solve shortages of maternity care that disproportionately affect rural and low-income mothers, many of them women of color. “Growing our workforce, including both midwives and obstetricians, and then ensuring we have a regulatory environment that facilitates integrated, team-based care are key parts of the solution,” he said.

To be sure, many other factors influence maternal and infant outcomes in the states, including access to preventive care and Medicaid; rates of chronic disease such as diabetes and high blood pressure; and prevalence of opioid addiction. And the study doesn’t conclude that more access to midwives directly leads to better outcomes, or vice versa. Indeed, South Dakota, which ranks third from the bottom in terms of midwife-friendliness, scores well on such key indicators as C-sections and preterm births. Even North Carolina is average on C-section rates, breastfeeding, and prematurity.

The findings are unlikely to quell the controversies over home births, which are almost always handled by midwives and comprise a tiny but growing percentage of deliveries in the U.S., or fears among doctors and hospitals that closer collaborations with midwives will raise malpractice insurance rates. In fact, said Ann Geisler, who runs the Florida-based Southern Cross Insurance Solutions, which specializes in insuring midwives, her clients’ premiums tend to be just one-tenth of premiums for an ob/gyn because their model of care eschews unnecessary interventions or technology. Far from being medical renegades, the vast majority of midwives want to be integrated into the medical system, she said.

Generally, licensed midwives only treat low-risk women, Geisler said. If the patients become higher risk, midwives are supposed to transfer them to a doctor’s care. Since many ob/gyns only see midwife patients when a problem emerges, she said, they may develop negative views of midwives’ skills.

You can read a full report from our partner, ProPublica, here.

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