04/03/2019 | Page 2 of 2

Cuba Releases List of First Group of Players Eligible for MLB

By Uponent | 04/03/2019 | No Comments | Entertainment

Cuba’s Baseball Federation announced on Tuesday a first list of players authorized to sign contracts directly with Major League Baseball organizations, moving Cuban-U.S. cooperation in the sport forward despite tense broader bilateral relations.

The list announced of 34 players between 17 and 25 years old who classify as international amateurs under MLB rules did not include any major stars. Some, however, have already played professionally abroad like Raidel Martinez who has played in Japan.

The move comes after the federations reached a historic agreement last December allowing Cuban players to sign with U.S. teams without needing to defect, seeking to end the practice of their being smuggled off the island on speedboats.

“A first step forward for baseball and against the trafficking of human beings,” the Cuban Baseball Federation said on Twitter, upon announcing the list.

MLB teams will pay their Cuban counterpart a release fee for each player to be signed, providing a huge windfall for Cuban baseball, which has suffered from dwindling budgets and the defection of its best players.

Under the deal, Cuban players 25 years old or under or who have not yet done six years of service in the Cuban leagues must have their federation’s permission to sign up with MLB organizations.

Older, more experienced players are free to sign with MLB teams. The Cuban Federation said it would send the MLB a list of its over-25 “free agents” in July.

Some of the biggest stars in MLB are Cubans who have defected like Yasiel Puig of the Cincinnati Reds, Yoenis Cespedes of the New York Mets and Jose Dariel Abreu of the Chicago White Sox — all of whom have signed multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts.

The mininum salary for players in Cuba is $50 per month, so the payoff was huge for the stars, although they often had to undertake dangerous journeys to get to the United States.

More than 350 Cuban ballplayers have defected since the start of 2014.
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UN: Soap and Superbugs: 2B People Lack Water at Health Facilities

By Uponsci | 04/03/2019 | No Comments | Science

A quarter of the world’s health facilities lack basic water services, impacting 2 billion people, the United Nations said on Wednesday, warning that unhygienic conditions could fuel the global rise of deadly superbugs.

In the poorest countries, about half of facilities do not have basic water services — meaning water delivered by pipes or boreholes that protect it from feces — putting birthing mothers and newborns in particular danger, new data showed.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said more than 1 million deaths a year were associated with unclean births, and 15 percent of all patients attending a health facility developed infections.

“Hospitals are not necessarily points of care where you can heal, but points of almost infection. (We) are very alarmed by this,” WHO public health coordinator Bruce Gordon told a media briefing in Geneva.

Worldwide, nearly 900 million people have no water at all at their local health facility or have to use unprotected wells or springs. One in five facilities also lack toilets, impacting about 1.5 billion people, the agencies said.

One of the development goals agreed by world leaders in 2015 was for all to have access to safe water and sanitation by 2030.

“A health care facility without water is not really a health care facility,” said UNICEF statistician Tom Slaymaker.

“Sick people shed a lot more pathogens in their feces, and without toilets, staff, patients — this includes mothers and babies — are at a much greater risk of diseases caused and spread through human waste.”

The agencies said good water and sanitation services were crucial to reducing the spread of antimicrobial resistance, one of the greatest global health threats.

International charity WaterAid said rising rates of superbugs had been linked to poor sanitary conditions in health facilities which lead to the overuse and misuse of antibiotics.

Helen Hamilton, WaterAid policy analyst, said the data revealed the “often-deplorable conditions” in which health workers were trying to help patients.

“The battle to save lives, and to slow the rise of deadly superbugs which threaten us all, cannot be won as long as these dedicated frontline staff are denied … the fundamentals of health care,” she said.

She urged governments to prioritize the issue when they meet at next month’s World Health Assembly in Geneva.

The data showed that West Africa had some of the lowest rates of access to water and sanitation.

WaterAid said this was alarming given that a lack of clean water and good hygiene had contributed to the spread of the world’s worst Ebola outbreak in the region, which killed more than 11,300 people between 2013 and 2016.
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Netflix Looms Large as Theater Owners Assess Industry Future

By Uponbiz | 04/03/2019 | No Comments | Business

As movie theater owners converge on Las Vegas for their annual convention, one topic that keeps coming up is how they contend with a company that has resisted their traditional business model: Netflix.

The world’s most successful streaming service sends some movies to theaters but has insisted on making them available on Netflix at the same time, or just a few weeks later. That has upset big movie chains, which refuse to show Netflix films and want a longer “window” of time to play films exclusively.

The issue of how Netflix fits into, or threatens, the theater business dominated a press conference on Tuesday at CinemaCon, the theater industry trade show.

“All of your questions from the first 17 minutes or whatever are about Netflix,” grumbled John Fithian, president and chief executive of the National Association of Theatre Owners.

He insisted that Netflix and theaters can happily co-exist, citing data that showed the biggest consumers of streaming video visit theaters more often. He also said Netflix had helped revive interest in documentaries, which had helped draw people to theaters to see them.

Earlier, Fithian told a crowd in a Caesars Palace theater that films reached their full potential only with a “robust theatrical release.” He spoke just after “Crazy Rich Asians” director Jon M. Chu said his film would not have had as big an impact if it had debuted on a streaming service.

Some members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the group that hands out the Oscars, have been debating whether films must play in theaters for a specific length of time to compete for the awards, which could exclude Netflix or force the company to agree to longer exclusive theatrical runs.

Department of Justice Weighs In

Hollywood publication Variety reported on Tuesday that the Department of Justice had weighed in on the issue.

Antitrust chief Makan Delrahim sent a letter to the academy warning that any changes that limited eligibility for the industry’s highest honors “may raise antitrust concerns,” according to Variety.

An academy spokesperson confirmed it had received the letter and said any rule changes would be considered at an April 23 meeting. A source close to Netflix said the company was not involved with or aware of the Justice Department’s letter.

Netflix is a member of the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade association for Walt Disney Co., AT&T’s Warner Bros. and other movie studios.

“We are all stronger advocates for creativity and the entertainment business when we are working together … all of us,” MPAA CEO Charles Rivkin said on the CinemaCon stage.

Both Rivkin and Fithian noted that box office receipts hit a record $11.9 billion in the United States and Canada in 2018 even as Netflix released dozens of original movies.

Mitch Neuhauser, managing director of CinemaCon, also was asked to address the issue when he wandered into a work room for reporters.

“Streaming is not a problem!” he exclaimed, noting that there are limits to how much people can stand to stay at home with all of the modern conveniences including grocery delivery. “We’ve got to get out of the house. We are talking about becoming a society of hermits!”
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Zuckerberg: Facebook Cannot Guarantee Interference-free EU Eections

By Uponsil | 04/03/2019 | No Comments | Silicon Valley

Facebook is much better than it was in 2016 at tackling election interference but cannot guarantee the site will not be used to undermine European Parliament elections in May, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday.

Chastened since suspected Russian operatives used Facebook and other social media to influence an election that surprisingly brought Donald Trump to power in the United States, Facebook has said it has plowed resources and staff into safeguarding the May 26 EU vote.

Zuckerberg said there had been a lot of important elections since 2016 that have been relatively clean and demonstrated the defenses it has built up to protect their integrity.

“We’ve certainly made a lot of progress … But no, I don’t think anyone can guarantee in a world where you have nation states that are trying to interfere in elections, there’s no single thing we can do and say okay we’ve now solved the issue,” Zuckerberg told Irish national broadcaster RTE in an interview.

“This is an ongoing arms race where we’re constantly building up our defenses and these sophisticated governments are also evolving their tactics.”

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia ran a disinformation and hacking operation to undermine the American democratic process and help Republican Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Moscow denies interfering in the election.

Under pressure from EU regulators to do more to guard against foreign meddling in the bloc’s upcoming legislative election, Facebook toughened its rules on political advertising in Europe last week.

It also announced plans to ramp up efforts to fight misinformation ahead of the vote and will partner with German news agency DPA to boost its fact checking.

“Here in the EU for the upcoming elections we are bringing the full battery of all of the strategies and tools that worked very well in a lot of important elections so far so I’ve a lot of confidence,” Zuckerberg said during a trip to Dublin, home to Facebook’s international headquarters.

“But I think that we should expect that for some of these countries that are out there that are trying to interfere, they are just going to keep trying, so we need to stay ahead of that and keep on doing this work in order to stay ahead.”
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