The next six years are going to be quite eventful for Los Angeles, as the city prepares to host the FIFA World Cup in 2026, followed by the Olympics just two years later. Reporter Angelina Bagdasaryan looked into how the city is getting ready for these significant sporting events that will attract millions.
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Day: July 4, 2018
United States Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell reportedly told German auto makers Wednesday the U.S. would back off threats of tariffs on European car imports in exchange for the European Union’s elimination of duties on U.S. cars.
The German newspaper Handelsblatt reported Grenell told BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen executives of the proposal during a meeting Wednesday at the embassy in Berlin.
Daimler and Volkswagen declined to comment and BMW was not immediately available for comment, the report said.
The reported proposal comes after the European Union warned U.S. President Donald Trump last Friday the potential indirect costs of imposing tariffs on cars could amount to $294 billion.
The EU report, submitted to the U.S. Commerce Department, maintained the tariffs would disrupt cross-border supply chains in the automotive industry. The report said the tariffs could possibly trigger higher U.S. industrial costs, raise consumer prices, hurt exports and cost jobs.
The World Trade Organization said Wednesday trade barriers being set by world economic powers could jeopardize the global economic recovery.
“This continued escalation poses a serious threat to growth and recovery in all countries, and we are beginning to see this reflected in some forward-looking indicators,” WTO Director General Roberto Azevendo said.
Azevendo did not expound on his remarks, but the WTO’s quarter trade outlook indicator in May suggested trade growth in the second quarter would decelerate.
Scientists say they’re several steps closer to perfecting a method for saving the northern white rhino from extinction.
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, researchers said Wednesday that they had succeeded in creating embryos using frozen northern white rhino sperm and eggs from a southern white rhino.
It’s the first time such hybrid embryos have been created, and the scientists from Europe and the United States hope it will provide a pathway to saving the northern white rhino subspecies, of which only two females remain.
They plan to harvest the females’ egg cells soon and produce “pure” northern white rhinos to be borne by a southern white surrogate in three years. They’re also working on a second method that would see sperm and eggs produced from preserved cells of northern white rhinos.
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European businesses are unsettled as they watch the U.S. and China collide over trade. And for good reason: the nascent global trade war could represent the biggest single threat to the economic upswing that has helped the region get past its financial crisis.
In theory, some European companies could benefit, jumping into market niches if Chinese businesses are kept out of the U.S. market. But that would only be a few companies or sectors.
When your entire economy is heavily dependent on trade, an overall slowdown in global commerce caused by tit-for-tat import taxes provokes fear and undermines confidence.
And that’s just what’s happening in Europe. By one measure, business confidence has fallen in six of the past seven months in Germany, where exports are almost half of annual economic output.
“It’s worth all our efforts to defuse this conflict, so it doesn’t become a war,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Wednesday.
The U.S. is due to put tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods on Friday. The Chinese will respond with tariffs on an equivalent value of U.S. products such as soybeans, seafood and crude oil.
Amid all this, Europe has its own trade dispute with the U.S. After the U.S. put tariffs on steel and aluminum from many allies, including the European Union, the 28-country bloc responded with import taxes on some $3.25 billion of U.S. goods. The Trump administration is also studying the option of putting tariffs on cars, which would significantly escalate the confrontation.
The head of the EU’s executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, will head to Washington in late July to try to personally persuade Trump against further measures targeting Europe.
The disputes over trade threaten to spoil the good times for Europe’s economy.
Growth last year was the strongest in a decade, since before the global financial crisis. While that has eased in recent quarters, the economy is still strong enough to create jobs. The number of unemployed fell by 125,000 in May, leaving unemployment in the 19 countries that use the euro at 8.4 percent, the lowest since 2008 and down from a high of 12.1 percent in 2013.
“Trade tensions stoked by U.S. President Donald Trump are clouding the economic outlook in Europe,” wrote analysts at Berenberg bank in London. They rated the trade risk ahead of troubles from Italy’s heavy debt load or faster than expected interest rate increases from the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Many European companies would suffer because they both produce and sell goods in the U.S. and China, the world’s biggest economies.
For example, tariffs that China is expected to impose Friday on U.S.-made autos would hit German carmakers Daimler and BMW since they both make vehicles in the United States and export them to China.
Daimler has already lowered its outlook for profits, citing higher than expected costs from the new tariffs. BMW warned in a letter to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Friday that tariffs would make it harder for it to sell in China the vehicles it builds at its factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, “potentially leading to a strongly reduced export volumes and negative effects on investment and employment in the United States.”
Last year, BMW exported 272,000 vehicles from the Spartanburg plant, more than half its total production. Of those, 81,000 — worth $2.37 billion — went to China. BMW says its exports reduced the U.S. trade deficit by around $1 billion.
By themselves, the tariffs that take effect Friday won’t immediately have a dramatic impact on global trade. The fear is that retaliation will spiral, hitting the total amount of global commerce.
Even if the overall effect is to harm growth, there could be benefits for some European companies and sectors. Economists Alicia Garcia Herrero and Jianwei Xu at the French bank Natixis say that European makers of cars, aircraft, chemicals, computer chips and factory machinery could in theory snare market share by substituting for Chinese or American products in the two markets. But that’s only if Europe’s own trade dispute with the U.S. does not escalate — a big if.
Europe is waiting to see whether the Trump administration will go ahead separately with tariffs on auto imports. European companies like BMW, Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen’s Porsche and Audi divisions, and Fiat Chrysler send $46.6 billion worth of vehicles every year to the U.S. Some 13.3 million people, or 6.1 percent of the employed population of the EU, work in the automotive sector, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association.
“Europe cannot win anything” on an overall basis “for one obvious reason: we are net exporters,” said Garcia Herrero, chief economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis and a senior fellow at European research institute Bruegel. “But we should not understate the view that some sectors could get something out of a U.S.-China trade war.”
Amid the brewing conflict, China has sought to get Europe on its side, putting on a diplomatic charm offensive during visits by Merkel and French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe. The EU and China agreed last month to deepen commercial ties and support trade rules. But the EU remains a close, longtime ally of the U.S. on a range of issues, despite the current tensions with the Trump administration.
One negative outcome for Europe, Herrero said, would be if Trump can push the Chinese into a trade agreement aimed at reducing the U.S. trade deficit. The additional U.S. goods to China could come at the expense of European competitors.
“If China concedes to the U.S. proposed agreement, the whole situation faced by the EU would be much tougher,” she and Xu wrote in a research note. “For China to massively reduce its trade surplus with the U.S., it has to in some way substitute its imports away from the EU to the U.S., which would have a significant negative impact on the EU producers.”
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Skygazers will have a celestial treat this month, when the longest total lunar eclipse of this century will grace the night sky on the evening of July 27.
NASA says the lunar eclipse will last for 1 hour and 43 minutes with total viability in Eastern Africa and Central Asia. Residents in other parts of Africa and Asia as well those in Europe, Australia and South America will be able to see a partial lunar eclipse.
Skywatchers in North America will not be able to see the rare event and will have to wait until 2020 to experience a total lunar eclipse.
During a lunar eclipse, the moon appears to be red because it lines up perfectly with the Earth and sun such that the Earth’s shadow totally blocks the sun’s light. The moon loses the brightness normally caused by the reflection of the sun’s light and takes on an eerie, reddish glow, giving the lunar eclipse moon the nickname of blood moon.
Scientists say the reason this lunar eclipse is especially long is because the moon is passing almost directly through the central part of Earth’s shadow. To compare, it falls just 4 minutes shy of the longest possible time a lunar eclipse could last.
Earlier this year, a lunar eclipse occurred in January at the same time as a super moon, which takes place when a full moon is at its closet orbital point to Earth, appearing brighter and larger than usual. That event delighted moon watchers by being both a blood moon and super moon at the same time.
For those who aren’t able to see the lunar eclipse this month, July has another treat in store for skygazers.
At the end of the month, Mars makes a close approach to Earth, reaching the point in its orbit when it is closet to our planet. Mars will appear about 10 times brighter than usual, with peak brightness occurring on July 31.
Everyone in the world will have the possibility to see this celestial phenomena, providing the skies are clear.
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It might seem meshuganah — crazy — to stage a beloved musical in a language that most of the audience won’t understand. But Tevye the dairyman and his family will speak Yiddish in an off-Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof” directed by Oscar and Tony winner Joel Grey.
Previews start Wednesday for the show, which will be the first-ever U.S. production of “Fiddler” in the language its characters would have spoken.
“I always knew what this play was about and that’s how I had the chutzpah to tackle it,” Grey said during a rehearsal at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, which is housed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan. “We work in English first on the scenes so that everybody understands the characters, and the third or fourth time we do it in Yiddish, and we just keep at it.”
There will be supertitles in English and Russian for theatergoers who don’t know their schmaltz from their schmutz.
“Fiddler on the Roof” opened on Broadway in 1964 starring Zero Mostel as Tevye and ran for eight years. It has been a favorite of schools and community theater groups ever since and has been revived on Broadway four times. Its songs including “Sunrise, Sunset” and “If I Were a Rich Man” are familiar even to people who’ve never seen the show.
Based on stories by Sholom Aleichem originally written in Yiddish, “Fiddler” is set in 1905 in a Jewish village in czarist Russia.
A Yiddish version of “Fiddler” translated by actor and writer Shraga Friedman as “Fidler afn Dakh” was performed in Israel in 1966 but was never staged in the United States until now.
In the Yiddish version of the show, the song “To Life!” doesn’t have to be translated from “L’Chaim!” — It’s just ‘L’Chaim!” “If I Were a Rich Man” becomes “Ven ikh bin a Rotschild,” from a story by Aleichem about a man who imagines he were as wealthy as a member of the Rothschild family.
The new production shows how decades of work to preserve Yiddish by organizations including the Folksbiene — Yiddish for World Stage — have paid off.
“For more than a generation we’ve had an explosion of contemporary Yiddish arts and culture by musicians, poets, theater makers, scholars and writers who have studied the language and its history and its incredible volume of modern literature and eclectic music,” said Alisa Solomon, the author of “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof,” published in 2013.
Solomon said “Fiddler” is “free to just kind of be itself in a way that 50 years ago it couldn’t be in some circles because there was an absence of that vibrant Yiddish culture.”
Yiddish, which is based on German with elements taken from Hebrew and other languages and is written with the Hebrew alphabet, was once spoken by millions of Eastern European Jews but fell victim both to the Holocaust and the pull of assimilation. Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won a Nobel Prize for his stories written in Yiddish, famously said the language “has been dying for a thousand years, and I’m sure it will go on dying for another thousand.”
Immigrants to the United States built a thriving Yiddish theater scene that launched the careers of famed acting teacher Stella Adler and stars such as Edward G. Robinson. The Folksbiene was founded in 1915 and was once one of more than a dozen Yiddish theater companies on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It presents plays from the Yiddish theater canon as well as new work and adaptations of Yiddish literary works such as “Yentl,” based on Singer’s story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.”
Grey’s father, Mickey Katz, was a musician and actor who performed Yiddish comedy songs, but Grey said he doesn’t speak much Yiddish himself and has been learning while rehearsing.
Grey watched as the actors rehearsed the tavern scene from “Fiddler” in which Tevye agrees to let the butcher Lazar Wolf marry his eldest daughter. To a non-Yiddish speaker, the most easily understood words were schnapps and vodka.
The 86-year-old is best known for his role as the master of ceremonies in “Cabaret,” a musical that improbably turned the rise of Hitler into popular entertainment.
“He brings a whole other dimension in terms of his theatrical knowledge and sense,” said Zalmen Mlotek, the Folksbiene’s artistic director. “It’s an experience.”
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It was 50 years ago the sci-fi epic “2001: A Space Odyssey” by author Arthur C. Clarke and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, opened in theaters across America to mixed reviews. The almost three-hour long film, was too cerebral and slow-moving to be appreciated by general audiences in 1968. Today, half a century later, the movie is one of the American Film Institute’s top 100 films of all time.
Film director Douglas Trumbull was a special photographic effects supervisor on the “2001” set. He describes Kubrick as a perfectionist and an innovative genius, who spent four years producing the film.
“He started out with the intention of making a more conventional movie, with dialogue and suspense and character development and drama and things that movies are normally are made out of. And during the production he began stripping away all of the conventions of normal melodrama because he was working on this 70mm giant widescreen Cinerama process and the movie progressively became more immersive. And the more immersive it became and the more experiential it became the less you had to talk about it,” says Trumbull.
To create this immersive experience Kubrick built “a centrifuge set, the big center piece of the movie” as Trumbull describes it.
The cameras were tied on the rotating set and were filming in 360 degrees. This is how Kubrick created the illusion of the spacecraft crew walking from the floor to the ceiling. And then there was the music.
“The movie differentiates itself in many ways with using classical music rather than a score which underscores every moment and the composer will often gouge the strings at the moment you are supposed to be afraid. Kubrick did not want any of that manipulation,” says Trumbull.
The music of Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz is in step with Kubrick’s crisp, slow moving images of space: an otherworldly spectacle watched on huge Cinerama curved screens in 1968.
Many describe the effect as ‘hypnotic,’ enhancing the message of “2001:A Space Odyssey,” that humanity’s intellectual advancement was aided by alien intelligence.
Kubrick steered clear of images of stereotypical aliens. Instead, the alien presence appears suddenly, through a looming black monolith, transmitting signals that teach apelike anthropoids how to use tools for hunting and survival. Millions of years later, in Kubrick’s imagined high tech world of 2001, the aliens make contact again through the monolith.
This time, the sleek rectangle prods humans towards an exploration voyage to Jupiter.
“And they get to Jupiter and that’s where the transformation takes place.” By “transformation,” Trumbull means the evolution of Dave Bowman, the only surviving astronaut aboard Spacecraft Discovery 1, into a noncorporeal entity after he makes contact with aliens through a stargate that transcends time and space. Trumbull, takes credit for the visual effects that created the famous Stargate.
“I seemed to be able to come at it with some new solutions for Stanley that no one had thought out before and he began to trust me. So, I would go to him and say ‘I think I have the solution for the Stargate,’ for example, that was one of the high points for me on the movie. And it was this idea that you could take photography and open the camera shutter for a long period of time, several seconds, and move lights and blink them on and off in patterns and create three dimensional light streams for the star gate, which seems to me to be in perfect harmony with the idea of the Stargate which of itself was supposed to be a transition through time and space,” Trumbull says.
Other innovations followed.
“There was one artist who was in charge of painting the Earth for example, no one had any photographs of the Earth yet, because they had not added orbiting satellites yet,” says Trumbull. “And so, he worked out this technique painting with water colors on glass and then painting the clouds on glass and then going back and scratching it with a razor blade which started creating things that simulated the way clouds naturally form on the Earth. Then, I painted all the stars in the movie. All the stars are spattered white paint from my airbrush onto black shiny paper and I’ve worked out this technique of reducing the pressure of the airbrush until it started to sputter, and it would sputter stars which would become completely irregular and very natural looking, not like I painted them with a paintbrush, which would look artificial.”
Trumbull compares Kubrick’s filming of “2001” to today’s all-immersive Virtual Reality filmmaking:
“You know, the time when the ‘2001’ was made, it was in a time of Cinerama and these 70-millimeter spectacles of “Sound of Music,” “West Side Story,” and giant-screen theaters and you would go out, it was a big deal to go out to see a big-screen movie.”
Today, he says, the equivalent all immersive 360-degree filming and viewing would be virtual reality.
“A lot of people want to have their virtual reality experience, they want to go into another dimension, they want to have some experience that transcends their everyday reality. That’s what I think virtual reality promises.”
Equally significant to the film’s technology is the plot.
“The story it was trying to express was extremely cosmic and very big. Because the idea was that some super intelligent highly evolved civilization way beyond our imagination that to us would look like a god would be incomprehensible to us, like magic, was intervening in human affairs from time to time just to make sure we got through,” says Trumbull.
A powerful sub plot was the antagonistic relationship between man and artificial intelligence. Hal, the ship’s malfunctioning central computer, and Bowman, clash over the ship’s control.
Bowman prevails. His psychedelic-looking passage through the Stargate ends in a static hotel room the aliens have recreated from his memory in order to make contact with him in a different dimension. There, on the bed, Bowman, a very old man, is dying before he gets transformed into a transparent star child.
To celebrate the film’s 50th anniversary, artist Simon Birch recreated that hotel room at the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. Exhibit curator Martin Collins explains the lasting power of the film.
“The movie did not seek to pose specific answers to its largest questions. What would be the fruits of space exploration, what would be the potential meaning of contact with extra-terrestrials, what would be the possible transformations that might occur to humanity as it undertakes exploration outside the planet? So, all of these larger questions are kind of implied here in this room and I think we hope that these visitors will sit back a little bit and think about why this room is here and think about this larger set of questions that Kubrick and Clark posed in “2001: (A Space Odyssey).”
The film has been remastered in HD format and has been released in IMAX theaters to celebrate its 50th anniversary. It feels as contemporary as ever.
“I think the movie has stood all these 50 years because it’s unique, it’s spectacularly beautiful, it’s 70mm giant screen. You have to see it on a giant screen to say ‘ah, now I understand why it’s so beautiful, and why these shots last so long, because they are worth looking at. And then the story is this very cosmic evolutionary future looking. And so, when the movie is over, there is a lot to think about,” says Trumbull.
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The weirder it gets, the more Lakeith Stanfield looks right at home.
It was Stanfield, as the bodysnatched Andrew Hayworth, personifying the nightmare of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” In Donald Glover’s “Atlanta,” his cosmically lackadaisical pot-smoking philosopher Darius is the epitome of the show’s freewheeling surrealism. And in Boots Riley’s comic and caustic social satire “Sorry to Bother You,” Stanfield is the entry-level telemarketer Cassius (“Cash”) Green, whose swift rise introduces him to a darkly dystopian world.
“I do find I’m a little more comfortable than the average person in strange situations, which is probably why I’m an actor,” says Stanfield. “I’ve been in some strange situations. Like orgies. And I was in an orgy in this movie. It wasn’t strange to me at all. I had no reservations about getting naked. I was supposed to be naked in this, full frontal.”
He grins. “Maybe I am, I don’t know.”
Since his acclaimed feature-film debut in 2013’s “Short Term 12,” Stanfield, 26, has become one of the most arresting, unpredictable, and in-demand actors in Hollywood. He has played Jimmie Lee Jackson (“Selma”), Snoop Dogg (“Straight Outta Compton”‘), Miles Davis (“Miles Ahead”) and, um, Chandler, in Jay-Z’s “Friends”-style music video “Moonlight.” In even his soberer parts, Stanfield has a disarmingly laid-back, unflappable presence, like his antennae is tuned to a different frequency than everyone else.
Glover, the “Atlanta” creator, vividly remembers first meeting Stanfield.
“He barely talked to me,” Glover said in an email. “He was not concerned with getting the job at all. He was already living in a different dimension than the rest of us.”
“Sorry to Bother You,” which opens Friday on the heels of ecstatic reviews, Stanfield may have found the best feature-film vehicle yet for his particular dimension. The movie is a years-long passion project for Riley, the Bay-area hip-hop pioneer and activist, who along the way also spoke to Glover and Peele about the role. It’s a wild, anti-capitalist romp through workplace America, all seen through the dazed eyes of Stanfield.
“What holds the movie together — which is why I picked Lakeith — is there’s all this crazy stuff happening but you have to believe that character,” says Riley. “If it’s an actor that’s like, ‘Oh, this is how I show I’m scared. This is how I show I’m confused’ — it wouldn’t work. Lakeith doesn’t care about what his face looks like. He just gets to that emotion.”
In the film, Cassius is catapulted into overnight success once he begins using what an older employee played by Danny Glover terms is “your white voice.” Stanfield’s rise, though, has been predicated on remaining himself.
“It’s a hard thing to be yourself and be available,” Stanfield said in a recent interview in Soho. “It’s much easier to use the white voice, which I’ve also done. But at some point, I become exhausted with it and I have to say what’s on my mind and do what I feel. Part of that is the reason why people put cameras on me.”
Stanfield has previously channeled into music his underprivileged upbringing in the Southern California desert city of Victorville. In eachof the 2015 music videos for his hip-hop duo Moors, Stanfield (who recently apologized for a freestyle with homophobic lyrics) returns to an image of drowning on the seafloor.
“At the time I made those, I felt smothered by circumstances,” says Stanfield. “There was a lot of family drama at the time. I watched a family member that I love try to kill themselves by suffocation. I was writing from that place. The reason why you haven’t seen very much follow-up to that kind of material is because, luckily, I haven’t been in those kinds of situations.”
Drawn into acting by a high-school drama class, Stanfield came to Los Angeles at 18. He recalls spending hours staring at Echo Lake in between auditions, with nothing else to do.
“I was homeless. And I was hungry sometimes,” Stanfield says. “But I didn’t really view it as hard. I always kept a positive idea about it. I remember being in my car listening to Jimi Hendrix and eating McDonald’s and being like: One day, I’m going to remember this moment. And I still do.”
Stanfield’s breakthrough came via Destin Daniel Cretton’s college short film “Short Term 12,” which five years later became the feature about a foster care facility for at-risk teens. By then, Stanfield was in Sacramento working at a marijuana factory. His character, who gradually comes out of his shell, mirrored Stanfield’s own journey. But any reticence is now long gone.
“I always want to expand,” says Stanfield. “I can learn something from everyone and everything and hopefully I get to play a dog that is also a cat, that is also a man and a woman and a flower so I can just be all versions of life.”
“Playing a flower would be awesome,” adds Stanfield, smiling, before referencing his “Atlanta” character. “It’s a very Darius thing to say.”
Exactly where Darius ends and Stanfield begins can be difficult to define. A lot of Darius’ eccentric serenity comes directly from Stanfield, who improvises much of Darius’ non-sequitur musing. “In some ways, he is me,” says Stanfield.
“I think he’s not acting. Acting is pretending. And Keith doesn’t seem to pretend much,” explains Glover. “Darius, like Lakeith, is living in the now. I can honestly say Lakeith is the only person in the world I know who could play Darius.”
There’s some method to Stanfield’s madness, even if the method is the sort that worries directors. Riley discovered that himself, when he realized Stanfield didn’t know his lines as shooting approached on “Sorry to Bother You.”
“And he’s like: ‘I don’t usually do that until right before,’ says Riley. “His brain is still going through a process of finding the words. It might just be a millisecond more, but it’s not that polished thing. That makes the lines more real for him. That’s what all the fantastical elements and the absurdity rely on.”
Last summer, Stanfield had a baby with his girlfriend, actress Xosha Roquemore. He has his biggest budget film yet coming in October: “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.” In a since-deleted Instagram post, Stanfield noted of the largely Swedish cast: “I’m the only black person in this film.”
But having grown up gravitating toward movies that he saw himself in, Stanfield likes the idea that “Sorry to Bother You” could be “some kid’s ‘Menace to Society’ … but with less guns.”
“Now, black bodies can occupy space where we have these fantastical and absurd things happening, which we haven’t seen,” he says. “You can’t do that when you’re too busy trying to make yourself seem human. We can still talk about those things, but now we can also talk about these other things.”
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China is putting pressure on the European Union to issue a strong joint statement against President Donald Trump’s trade policies at a summit
this month, but it’s facing resistance, European officials said.
In meetings in Brussels, Berlin and Beijing, senior Chinese officials, including Vice Premier Liu He and the Chinese government’s top diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, have proposed an alliance between the two economic powers and offered to open more of the Chinese market in a gesture of goodwill.
One proposal has been for China and the European Union to launch joint action against the United States at the World Trade Organization.
But the European Union, the world’s largest trading bloc, has rejected the idea of allying with Beijing against Washington, five EU officials and diplomats told Reuters, ahead of the Sino-European summit in Beijing on July 16-17.
Instead, the summit is expected to produce a modest communique that affirms the commitment of both sides to the multilateral trading system and promises to set up a working group on modernizing the WTO, EU officials said.
Liu has said privately that China is ready to set out for the first time what sectors it can open to European investment at the annual summit, expected to be attended by President Xi Jinping, China’s Premier Li Keqiang and top EU officials.
Chinese state media have promoted the message that the EU is on China’s side, officials said, putting the bloc in a delicate position. The past two summits, in 2016 and 2017, ended without a statement because of disagreements about the South China Sea and trade.
“China wants the European Union to stand with Beijing against Washington, to take sides,” said one European diplomat. “We won’t do it and we have told them that.”
China’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Beijing’s summit aims.
In a commentary on Wednesday, China’s official Xinhua news agency said China and Europe “should resist trade protectionism hand in hand.”
“China and European countries are natural partners,” it said. “They firmly believe that free trade is a powerful engine for global economic growth.”
China’s moment?
Despite Trump’s tariffs on European metals exports and threats to hit the EU’s automobile industry, Brussels shares Washington’s concern about China’s closed markets and what Western governments say is Beijing’s manipulation of trade to dominate global markets.
“We agree with almost all the complaints the U.S. has against China. It’s just we don’t agree with how the United States is handling it,” another diplomat said.
Still, China’s stance is striking, given Washington’s deep economic and security ties with European nations. It shows the depth of Chinese concern about a trade war with Washington, as Trump is set to impose tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese imports on Friday.
It also underscores China’s new boldness in trying to seize leadership amid divisions between the United States and its European, Canadian and Japanese allies over issues including free trade, climate change and foreign policy.
“Trump has split the West, and China is seeking to capitalize on that. It was never comfortable with the West being one bloc,” said a European official involved in EU-China diplomacy.
“China now feels it can try to split off the European Union in so many areas — on trade, on human rights,” the official said.
Another official described the dispute between Trump and Western allies at the Group of Seven summit last month as a gift to Beijing because it showed European leaders losing a longtime ally, at least in trade policy.
European envoys say they already sensed a greater urgency from China in 2017 to find like-minded countries willing to stand up against Trump’s “America First” policies.
No ‘systemic change’
An April report by New York-based Rhodium Group, a research consultancy, showed that Chinese restrictions on foreign investment were higher in every single sector save real estate, compared with the European Union, while many of the big Chinese takeovers in the bloc would not have been possible for EU companies in China.
China has promised to open up. But EU officials expect any moves to be more symbolic than substantive.
They say China’s decision in May to lower tariffs on imported cars will make little difference because imports make up such a small part of the market.
China’s plans to move rapidly to electric vehicles mean that any new benefits it offers traditional European carmakers will be fleeting.
“Whenever the train has left the station, we are allowed to enter the platform,” a Beijing-based European executive said.
However, China’s offer at the upcoming summit to open up reflects Beijing’s concern that it is set to face tighter EU controls, and regulators are also blocking Chinese takeover attempts in the United States.
The European Union is seeking to pass legislation to allow greater scrutiny of foreign investments.
“We don’t know if this offer to open up is genuine yet,” a third EU diplomat said. “It’s unlikely to mark a systemic change.”
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“Space Jam 2?” A whole new “House Party” franchise?
With the leadership of LeBron James, anything is possible.
As James comes from Cleveland to Los Angeles looking to take the Lakers to more championships with a blockbuster $154 million contract announced this week, he could also push those two 1990s properties closer to reality and go from part-time presence to major player in Hollywood.
James hasn’t yet spoken about his plans for Los Angeles. But if he wants to, he’s already shown he can act, and not just in that good-for-an-athlete way.
His one real film role, playing himself in the 2015 Amy Schumer film “Trainwreck,” directed by Judd Apatow, won big raves.
The Associated Press’ Lindsey Bahr called him “a comedic revelation.” Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post said he showed “expert, deadpan timing.”
James’ co-stars agreed.
“He was really good. Like everything with him it was very effortless,” said Bill Hader, who played the movie’s male lead with James as his sidekick and previously acted with James when he hosted “Saturday Night Live.” “He’s always listening. I know actors that don’t listen, they’re just waiting to say their line. He listened.”
Hader said there was frequent improvisation on “Trainwreck,” and LeBron easily kept up with the sketch comedy pros like Hader.
“You’ll never believe this, but he was super confident,” Hader told the AP with a laugh by phone from the Toronto set of the film “It 2.”
“But not cocky,” Hader added.
“I remember Chris Rock was on set and rattled off a line suggestion really fast for LeBron, and LeBron said it back during the scene verbatim,” Hader said. “I remember thinking, “I can’t do that.”
He wouldn’t be the first Laker to try acting. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal had their share of famous, and infamous roles. And Kobe Bryant ended up with an unlikely Academy Award for an animated short based on a poem he wrote about basketball.
Whether or not he appears on screen, James has already begun a major media career that can only get a boost from LA.
Gone are the days when athletes had to be in a major market to make it in film and television, as James himself has shown through his years building his brand in Cleveland.
But there’s nothing like face-time for becoming a force in Hollywood.
James and his business partner Maverick Carter have a production company, SpringHill Entertainment, that has a deal with Warner Bros. and office space on the legendary movie company’s lot, where he could become a regular.
“Certainly the proximity will make it easier for LeBron personally to be part of future projects,” said David Schwab, an executive vice president at Octagon, a global sports and entertainment marketing and management firm. “The advantage of a market like New York, Los Angeles and Golden State is the ability to have coffee, lunch or dinner daily” with key decision makers. “In a smaller market you don’t get those consistent opportunities,” he said.
Schwab said James’ partners at Warner Bros. and elsewhere are most likely “excited that he’s in Los Angeles as they could possibly use LeBron personally to close business deals with future partners of their own.”
James, via SpringHill and his digital film company Uninterrupted has already brought some projects to big and small screens, with many more in the works.
Here are some highlights:
"Space Jam 2.'' The idea of James reviving the 1996 movie starring another candidate for greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan, has been in circulation for several years. The movie with Jordan battling animated aliens alongside Bugs Bunny and his Warner Bros. cartoon buddies brought mixed reviews and eyerolls at the time, but has become a cult classic. Justin Lin of the "Fast & Furious'' films has been attached as director.
"House Party.'' Stephen Glover and Jamal Olori of "Atlanta'' are writing a script that James and SpringHill hope will revive the franchise that starred Kid n' Play and spawned three big-screen sequels from 1990 to 1994.
"Smallfoot.'' James will have another chance to show off his comic chops as the voice of a skeptical yeti in Warner Bros' animated film.
"Now We're Talking.'' A digital comedy series on Uninterrupted that features two rival professional football quarterbacks who become broadcasters and frequent pro athlete cameos is about to enter its second season.
SpringHill is also producing several more television projects including the game shows "The Wall'' and "Do or Dare'' and "Rise Up,'' a documentary about the civil rights movement for the History Channel.
The arrival of warm weather in the United States means it is agricultural festival time – popular events featuring food, farm animals, concerts, contests and races. One of the most unusual races is held at the annual Purple Hull Pea festival in Emerson, Arkansas. As Faith Lapidus reports, it is the world championships of Rotary Tiller Racing.
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Sophia, one of the world’s most advanced and perhaps most famous artificial intelligence (AI) humanoid robot, was a big hit at this year’s Information & Communication Technology International Expo in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Visitors, including various dignitaries, were excited to meet the life-like AI robot as she communicated with expo guests and expressed a wide range of facial expressions. As VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports, Sophia has become an international sensation.
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President Donald Trump continues to turn up the heat on trade, a tactic that he insists will result in better deals for the American people. But the president’s rhetoric has economists concerned about a trade war. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has more.
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In the busy summer travel period in Cuba, a long line of people wait for hours in the sweltering heat outside the Havana office of state-owned airline Cubana, many of them eager to visit families in the provinces.
But they are not waiting to book flights. Instead, they hope to get their money back on plane tickets or exchange them for bus tickets across the island.
Cubana, which has a virtual monopoly on domestic flights, has suspended nearly all of them due to a lack of working aircraft, plunging travel on the Caribbean’s largest island into chaos and highlighting problems at what was once a vanguard of Latin American aviation.
The flight suspensions were made a month after a Cubana flight crashed after takeoff from Havana airport in May, killing 112 people. They come at a time when Communist-run Cuba is trying to stimulate tourism, one of the few bright spots in its economy, by promoting beach resorts and colonial towns hundreds of kilometers (miles) from the capital.
“Now I will have to take a 16-hour bus ride to Guantanamo, but what other options do I have?” said kindergarten teacher Marlene Mendoza, who was bathed in sweat and got a bus ticket to eastern Cuba after queuing for more than seven hours.
Analysts say Cubana’s troubles stem largely from dual ills that afflict the whole state-run economy: the U.S. trade embargo and a problematic business model.
Cubana did not reply to requests for comment for this story.
Founded in 1929 as one of Latin America’s first airlines, Cubana was nationalized after Fidel Castro’s leftist 1959 revolution. In its heyday, it flew Cuban troops to Africa and passengers to allied socialist countries around the globe.
For decades it got around U.S. sanctions that restricted it from buying planes with a certain share of U.S. components — including European Airbus and Brazilian Embraers — by acquiring first Soviet and then Russian aircraft.
The carrier maintained a decent safety record, but its reputation for mediocre service and delays prompted many foreign tourists to use mostly land transport.
Then, over the past year, it started canceling more flights than usual, often putting passengers up in hotels for days, without commenting publicly on the disarray.
After the Boeing 737 crashed on May 18, Cubana said it had leased the plane from Mexican company Damojh due to a lack of its own aircraft. A second Damojh plane has been grounded pending a safety audit of its fleet by Mexican authorities, data from Flightradar24 shows, aggravating the shortage.
Cuban, Mexican and U.S. authorities are still investigating the crash and have not commented on possible causes. Damojh has said in a press release that is fully cooperating with those investigations into the “lamentable accident.”
Just four of Cubana’s own 16 planes are flying, according to a Reuters examination of data on Flightradar24 and Planespotters.net.
Not flying high
Over the past month, the airline announced it was axing several routes mainly used by Cubans and reducing the frequency of flights to Santiago, Holguin and Baracoa, all popular tourist destinations. In a statement, it said it was working to resolve the situation and apologized for the disruption.
Cubana also suspended all international routes except to Buenos Aires and Madrid, several staff told Reuters. The company did not comment publicly, leaving would-be travelers sharing their confusion on online forums.
“It has lost a lot of prestige. It’s already not the famous Cubana that used to fly to all parts of the world,” said one former employee, who asked to remain anonymous, who retired 6-1/2 years ago after working for Cubana for 40 years. “Anywhere else in the world, a company like Cubana would have folded.”
Cubana said in mid-June it did not have enough aircraft largely because of maintenance issues and lack of parts, which aviation experts say can cost millions of dollars.
The airline sells tickets to Cuban citizens at heavily subsidized prices. Its budget is also stretched by ferrying official delegations around sometimes at a financial loss, a former Cuban diplomat familiar with Cubana operations said.
Cash-strapped Cuba points the finger at the 56-year-old U.S. trade embargo, saying it has cost its flagship carrier millions of dollars.
The coup de grace was possibly the purchase of six AN-158 regional jets from Ukrainian manufacturer Antonov since 2013.
Cubana has said those planes have had technical problems and getting parts for the joint Russian-Ukrainian project has proven difficult since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
An Antonov representative told Reuters that Cubana had not been paying for the necessary work, but it had signed a deal in April with the airline to cooperate “to resume the use of AN-158 planes before the end of the current year.”
Typically, airlines lease planes when theirs are undergoing maintenance or there is a spike in demand, but the U.S. embargo and financial constraints likely complicate this for Cuba, said Richard Aboulafia, vice president of U.S. aviation consulting company the Teal Group.
In May, Lithuanian lessor Avion Express and Italian lessor Blue Panorama both ended their contracts with Cubana, the companies told Reuters, without explaining why. Data from Flightradar24 shows they withdrew respectively four Airbus A320s and one Boeing 737.
That is around the time when Cubana turned to the little-known Damojh, leasing the 39-year-old Boeing 737.
Damojh has faced safety concerns in other countries in the region. Guyana’s aviation authority told Reuters it had revoked Damojh’s permit to fly there last year due to issues such as overloading planes. The airline declined to comment on the matter.
The crash in May has undermined trust in Cubana.
“I like to travel by plane. It’s faster and more comfortable,” said Maylin Lopez, 48, waiting at Havana’s bus station for her 15-hour ride to eastern Cuba. “But I can’t even imagine doing that now.”
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The U.S. Commerce Department on Tuesday granted a temporary reprieve to ZTE that allows China’s No. 2 telecommunications equipment maker to conduct business needed to maintain existing networks and equipment in the United States as it works toward the lifting of a U.S. sales ban.
The authorization from the department’s Bureau of Industry and Services, dated July 2 and seen by Reuters, runs until August 1.
ZTE and spokespeople for the Commerce Department did not respond to requests for comment.
ZTE, which makes smartphones and networking gear, was forced to cease major operations in April after the United States slapped it with a supplier ban saying it broke an agreement to discipline executives who conspired to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea.
The company had also agreed to pay a $1 billion penalty and put $400 million in an escrow account as part of the deal to resume business with U.S. suppliers — which provide almost a third of the components used in ZTE’s equipment.
The escrow agreement is still pending, according to a source. Until it is executed, ZTE cannot deposit the $400 million in escrow necessary to get the ban lifted.
While the denial order is still in place, the authorization grants a waiver to some companies that do business with ZTE to do so for one month, a source told Reuters.
The waivers allow for a limited type of activity but do not authorize any new business.
The uncertainty about the ban amid intensifying U.S.-China trade tensions has hammered ZTE shares, which have fallen 60 percent since trading resumed last month following a two-month hiatus, wiping out more than $11 billion of the company’s market valuation.
ZTE announced a new board last week in a radical management shakeup as part of a $1.4 billion deal with the United States.
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