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Rainbow Six Siege's Cutest Crossover Is Also Arknights’ Most Brutal KotakuRose McGowan believes Oprah Winfrey faked her support of the #MeToo movement.
“I am glad more are seeing the ugly truth of @Oprah,” the “Charmed” alum, 47, tweeted Sunday along with an old photo of the talk show host, now 67, smiling alongside convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. “I wish she were real, but she isn’t.”
McGowan, an outspoken survivor of sexual assault, continued, “From being pals with Weinstein to abandoning & destroying Russell Simmon’s [sic] victims, she is about supporting a sick power structure for personal gain, she is as fake as they come. #lizard.”
Weinstein’s long list of alleged sexual assaults dating back to the 1970s was the catalyst for the #MeToo movement in October 2017, with McGowan being one of the first of dozens of women to accuse him of rape.
The disgraced film producer, who has denied having “any nonconsensual sex,” was found guilty of two felonies in February 2020.
Meanwhile, Simmons has also been accused of rape and sexual misconduct by 20 women. The music executive, 63, has denied the accusations and kept a low profile in recent years, though he resurfaced in the Hamptons earlier this month.
It appears McGowan’s tweet refers to Winfrey’s almost-involvement in a 2020 documentary titled “On the Record” that centered on Simmons’ alleged sexual misconduct.
While the multi-hyphenate was originally on board to executive-produce the project, she ended up backing out, citing differences with the film’s directors.
“I have decided that I will no longer be executive producer on the untitled Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering documentary, and it will not air on Apple TV+,” Winfrey said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter in January 2020.
“I want it to be known that I unequivocally believe and support the women. Their stories deserve to be told and heard. In my opinion, there is more work to be done on the film to illuminate the full scope of what the victims endured, and it has become clear that the filmmakers and I are not aligned in that creative vision.”
Reps for McGowan and Winfrey did not immediately respond to Page Six’s requests for comment.
Y Combinator kicked off its fourth-ever virtual Demo Day today, revealing the first half of its nearly 400-company batch. The presentation, YC’s biggest yet, offers a snapshot into where innovation is heading, from not-so-simple seaweed to a Clearco for creators.
The TechCrunch team stuck to its tradition of covering every single company live (but, you know, from home,) so you’ll find all of the Day 1 companies here. For those who want a sampling of standouts, however, we’re also bringing you a host of our favorites from today’s 1-minute pitch-off extravaganza.
As reporters, we’re constantly inundated with hundreds of pitches on a daily basis. The startups below caught our picky attention for a whole host of reasons, but that doesn’t mean other startups weren’t compelling or potential unicorns as well. Instead, consider the below to be a data point on which startups made us do a double-take, be it due to the size of the market opportunity, the ambition exhibited by the founding team or an idea that was just too clever to pass up.
Genei is, dare I say, a refreshing mashup between robots and writers. The startup has a simple goal: Automatically summarize background reading so content creators can grab the top facts, attribute and move onto the next graf. Writing is innately an art, so I find Genei’s positioning as a tool for writers instead of a replacement out to take their jobs as smart. Better yet, it’s launching by targeting some of the hardest workers in our industry: freelance writers. These folks often have to balance consistent pitches, diverse assignments and tight deadlines for their livelihood, so I’d presume a sidekick can’t hurt. Down the road, I could totally see this startup playing the same role as a Grammarly: a helpful extension of workflows that optimizes the way people who write for a living, write. — Natasha
The deaths over three days in Suffolk County reflect a dangerous shift in the street-drug marketplace, according to police and prosecutors.
SOUTHOLD, N.Y. — The 911 calls to the Southold Town Police Department began to pour in on a Wednesday. And for three days they did not stop.
Female, 34, Greenport Village, unresponsive.
Male, 25, Southold, unresponsive.
Male, 30, Southold, unresponsive.
Male, 27, Greenport Village, unresponsive.
Male, 32, East Marion, unresponsive.
Male, 40, Shelter Island, unresponsive.
By Friday at least eight people in the string of small towns along Long Island’s North Fork had overdosed, and six of them — none older than 40 — were dead. Their deaths were caused, police said, by cocaine laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can be 50 times more powerful than heroin.
They left behind a seaside enclave wreathed in grief that feels both familiar and confounding: Nearly 3,000 people have died from overdoses in Suffolk County over the last decade. But what’s new is the drug cocktail that killed the six in mid-August: cocaine adulterated with highly lethal fentanyl, which delivers a cheap and powerful high and was in the past more commonly mixed into heroin.
The tragedy in Suffolk County, according to police and prosecutors, reflects an emerging and dangerous shift in the street-drug marketplace, a trend that has grown in the past year as dealers have been affected by the same pandemic-linked issues plaguing global supply chains and driving up prices.
Some have turned to substitutes like fentanyl — cheaper and more readily available than cocaine or heroin — to bulk out their wares, keeping their supply of drugs flowing, whatever the human cost. But even a speck of fentanyl can kill.
“The same market forces that are causing shortages in everyday products are also putting pressures on the drug markets,” said Timothy D. Sini, the Suffolk County district attorney. “All the while we have seen demand skyrocketing from users because of the impact the pandemic has had on them.”
The presence of fentanyl in Southold is nested in an even larger-scale tragedy gripping the county and the country: the opioid epidemic that hooked hundreds of thousands of people on prescription pain pills. Last month, New York State, including hard-hit Suffolk and Nassau Counties, wrested a $1 billion settlement from the drugmakers, distributors and purveyors of prescription opioids to mitigate the harm that stemmed from their role in the epidemic.
Preliminary data from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that in 2020, the highest number of people ever recorded died from an overdose in the United States — 93,000, a nearly 30 percent increase over the previous year.
On the North Fork, the dead were not hardened addicts but mostly recreational users, police said, seeking a fleeting high. Behind the brief descriptions in the police reports were rich and varied lives: a sometime jewelry maker from Tehran who loved heavy metal music, and a restaurant worker and fashion plate rarely seen without his gold lamé boots. A Jamaican chef with a special knack for sourdough, and a landscaper who always answered the phone with a joke. A woman who loved goth makeup, whose mother called her “noodle.” A new father of a 6-month-old boy.
Several other people also overdosed on fentanyl-laced cocaine between Aug. 11 and Aug. 13, according to the Southold police; emergency responders resuscitated them with naloxone, or Narcan, a medication that can reverse an opioid overdose.
Family members of those who died blamed the dealers. “They poisoned them to make money,” said Seth Tramontana, whose 27-year-old son, also named Seth, died on Aug. 13 after ingesting cocaine, which his family believes he did not know had been doctored with fentanyl. “You can say he made his choice and did what he was doing to have fun — but this is not what he asked for.”
The trend is not limited to Suffolk County. In February, the San Francisco Department of Public Health issued a public health warning following a slew of fentanyl overdoses by people who believed they had consumed only cocaine. Authorities in Nebraska issued a similar warning in August after 26 overdoses in three weeks were linked to fentanyl-laced cocaine.
In New York City, users passed warnings across social media in the spring about “bad batches” of cocaine containing the drug, urging one another to check cocaine for the presence of fentanyl using testing kits designed for the purpose.
“People who use cocaine think that the overdose epidemic is not relevant to them,” said Dr. Chinazo O. Cunningham, executive deputy commissioner in the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. In 2017, just 17 of the city’s overdose deaths were from cocaine combined with fentanyl; that number rose to 183 in 2019, the last year for which data was available. “Part of the problem nationally is that the narrative has been around opioids, and what we’ve seen is that it’s not just opioids — it’s cocaine,” she said.
A few days after the chain of deaths on Long Island, two men, Lavain Creighton, 51, of Greenport, and Justin Smith, 46, of Smithtown, were arrested. Mr. Creighton was charged with several counts of criminal sale of a controlled substance; in a news conference, the district attorney said Mr. Creighton sold the drugs that caused at least two of the fatal overdoses, based on text message exchanges and other communication.
Mr. Smith was charged with possessing drugs and drug paraphernalia. Anthony Scheller, Mr. Smith’s lawyer, said his client did not sell the drugs. “He feels terrible for those people,” Mr. Scheller said. “But he had no involvement.” A lawyer for Mr. Creighton did not return a request for comment.
Suffolk County has aggressively pushed to hold dealers accountable for overdose deaths, obtaining a manslaughter conviction for a dealer in 2017, the first in the state. The county has successfully prosecuted just three similar cases since then.
Prosecutors say they are hampered in holding dealers accountable because to successfully argue manslaughter they must prove that the dealer acted recklessly.
Shortly after the spate of deaths, Long Island state legislators made a renewed push for a “Death by Dealer” law, which would allow prosecutors to level felony homicide charges at drug dealers and impose stiffer sentences. Since 2011 about half of all U.S. states have adopted similar laws, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit organization.
But critics argue that such legislation does not prevent overdose deaths and conversely may increase the risk by making people afraid to call for help when someone is overdosing because of fear of reprisal.
Increasing access to fentanyl testing kits and naloxone is a better way to head off tragedies like those on Long Island, said Grey Gardner, a senior staff attorney with the Drug Policy Alliance.
“What we need to be doing is doing a better job as a country, as a society, helping people know when their supply is tainted, and having safe places for people to use to prevent overdose,” he said.
On Aug. 12, a victim with the initials M.L. received a text message from a friend warning him about the presence of fentanyl in cocaine he had purchased from Mr. Creighton, prosecutors said. But by the time it was sent, the man was already dead.
The police would not confirm M.L.’s identity. But the initials matched those of one of the men who died that day: Matthew Lapiana, a landscaper. His friend Clarisse Stevens said he was a whiz at cooking Italian food who always answered the phone with a goofy joke.
Ms. Stevens was outraged at those who provided the fentanyl-laced drugs. “You put it in your supply, and then you sell it and then people die, it’s because it came from your hands,” she said. “They should definitely be charged with murder.”
Following the six deaths, police and social service organizations fanned out across Southold, handing out Narcan kits and offering workshops on how to administer the anti-overdose drug.
Local newspapers and social media feeds were crammed with obituaries, funeral notices, and tributes: Nicole Eckardt, Fausto Rafael Herrera Campos, Swainson Brown, Matthew Lapiana, Seth Tramontana, Navid Ahmadzadeh.
They had been linked by small-town life; some were distant cousins, others former co-workers. Now they were joined in death.
Sitting on their porch on 5th Street in Greenport, Mr. Tramontana’s grandparents, Richard and Joan Olszewski, clung to memories of their 27-year-old grandchild, whom everyone called Boogie.
They recalled how Boogie sang his way through the quaint fishing village in battered gold boots he patched with duct tape. How Boogie always slipped out after Christmas dinner to bring a plate of his grandmother’s cooking to a friend who struggled with the holiday season.
“He did what he was put on this earth to do,” Mrs. Olszewski, 74, said. “Make all these people realize how wonderful they were.”
At the Pridwin hotel on Shelter Island, Glenn Petry, a co-owner, was saving a single jar of sourdough starter, left behind by his friend and head chef, Swainson Brown. When he could tear himself away from fishing, Mr. Brown, 40, had turned the kitchen of the hotel into a laboratory of dishes of his own devising.
“We’d say, ‘Swainson, that’s not exactly what we are looking for,’” Mr. Petry recalled, “And he’d say, ‘Taste it’ — and it would be like, ‘Oh, my God.’”
He paused. “It breaks my heart now we are at this point eulogizing this young guy,” Mr. Petry said.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Dhaka, Bangladesh – A court in Bangladesh has sentenced six members of a banned group to death and acquitted two others in connection with the murder of two LGBTQ rights activists five years ago.
Xulhaz Mannan was the editor of Bangladesh’s first and only gay rights magazine, Roopban. Mahbub Rabby Tonoy was his friend and associate.
The two were hacked to death at their apartment in capital Dhaka on April 25, 2016, by the men belonging to Ansar al-Islam, a group banned by the Bangladesh government the previous year. Officials say the group is a local affiliate of the al-Qaeda group.
Police escorting the accused in the 2016 murders of Mannan and Tonoy, outside a court in Dhaka [Mahmud Hossain Opu/Al Jazeera]Amid tight security on Tuesday, Judge Md Majibur Rahman of the special anti-terrorism tribunal pronounced the verdict in the presence of four of the eight accused in a packed courtroom in Dhaka.
Those sentenced to death include former army officer Syed Ziaul Haque Zia, who officials say is the chief of the banned group.
The other five convicts are Akram Hossain, Md Mozammel Hossain alias Saimon, Md Sheikh Abdullah, Arafat Rahman, and Asadullah.
Zia and Akram are on the run and were tried as fugitives, while two other suspects – Sabbirul Hoque Chowdhury and Zunaid Ahmed – were acquitted.
The six, wielding guns and machetes, had forced their way into Mannan’s home in the Kalabagan area of central Dhaka and murdered him and Tonoy.
While pronouncing the verdict, Judge Rahman said the punishment will “set an example” that Bangladesh does not tolerate “militancy or terrorism in any form”.
Five of those convicted had already been sentenced to death in February for the 2015 murders of a blogger and a publisher who were hacked to death in separate incidents.
Mannan’s brother Minhaz Mannan Emon, who had filed the case against unidentified assailants after the murders, told Al Jazeera he was happy that the “law enforcers have been able to find my brother’s killers”.
“Though we are not going to get Xulhaz [Mannan] back, it’s a consolation for us that the killers have been handed the maximum punishment,” Emon said.
Defence lawyer Khairul Islam Liton told Al Jazeera they would appeal against the verdict in a higher court.
An LGBTQ Pride march in Dhaka in April 2014 [[Mahmud Hossain Opu/Al Jazeera]Mannan, 35, was a graduate of international relations from Dhaka University. He joined the US Embassy in Dhaka in 2007 and later joined the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
In 2014, he along with Tonoy set up the magazine to spread tolerance and raise awareness about LGBTQ rights.
Tonoy, 26, was also involved with a theatre group in the capital and used to teach drama to children at an organisation called the People’s Theatre.
On the anniversary of their murders earlier this year, the US Department of State issued a statement, saying they “were murdered for their courageous work on behalf of marginalised communities in Bangladesh”.
The attack on the two activists was among a series of assassinations of secular activists, bloggers, academics and religious minorities perpetrated by the Ansar al-Islam group between 2013 and 2016.
In those three years, members of the group, who claimed affiliations with ISIL (ISIS) and al-Qaeda, killed or injured more than 50 people in Bangladesh.
Often, they attacked in broad daylight with machetes or crude homemade firearms.
Exiled Bangladeshi journalist and LGBTQ rights activist Tasneem Khalil told Al Jazeera that by killing Mannan and Tonoy, the violent group was “able to kill the nascent LGBT rights movement” in the country.
“Today’s verdict does not change the fact that in Bangladesh, where homophobia remains the norm, thousands of gay men live in constant fear and ostracization,” Khalil said.
“Xulhaz and Mahbub’s work for the recognition and protection of LGBT rights in Bangladesh must be continued.”
Homosexuality is illegal in Bangladesh, whose law allows life imprisonment for “unnatural intercourse”.
In December 2008, the Muslim-majority country was among 59 nations that opposed the recognition of LGBTQ rights by the United Nations.
Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia head of Human Rights Watch, said the killings of Mannan and Tonoy occurred amid “a spate of attacks to curb the freedom of speech and belief because it offended some”.
She said the Bangladesh government should “respond to this terrible and deadly assault to do much more to uphold free speech rights and the rights of the LGBT community”.
Ganguly, however, added that the death penalty is “inherently inhumane and cruel, and should be abolished by all countries”.
Calling all Middle-earth fans--a new mega-bundle that collects all six movies in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit franchises is coming this October on 4K.
The $250 Middle Earth 6-Film Ultimate Collector's Edition, as it's called, launches on October 26 in the US. The bundle comes with 31 4K and Blu-ray discs in all, comprising the theatrical and extended cuts of each movie, along with director's commentary from Peter Jackson.
Unfortunately, it appears this giant package leaves out the celebrated Appendices, which are the highly detailed, incredibly informative, and illuminating behind-the-scenes features that originally came with the movie on DVD. Based on the promotional images and descriptions on Amazon, it doesn't appear these Appendices are included, but WB has yet to officially announce this bundle so we don't know for sure at this point.
The 31st disc is a recording of the Alamo Drafthouse's special 20th anniversary event where host Stephen Colbert spoke to the cast, Jackson, and other key people involved. What's more, the Festival de Cannes presentation reel is included, the contents of which were not officially disclosed, but this is likely footage from Cannes 2001 where Fellowship debuted. The package also includes a code to download the movies digitally.
The movies come inside collective foil sleeves themed around each film, while the entire package has a collectible slipcase that can be transformed into different configurations, highlighting characters and imagery from across the film series.
Other extras include a 64-page booklet containing costume sketches, photography, and production notes from the fantasy series. Also included are seven poster art cards that imagine famous places in Middle-earth as tourist destinations. They are two-sided, and there is one card for each movie, with the Rivendell card being an additional bonus for a total of seven.
This is presumably the new bundle that Warner Bros. announced last year, though at the time the company said it would include "new" bonus features. That may well be the Cannes footage and not anything more exciting, but Warner Bros. hasn't officially said at this point.
2021 is a big year for The Lord of the Rings, as it marks the 20th anniversary of Peter Jackson's film series. In addition to the new six-movie collection, fans can look forward to a new The Lord of the Rings audiobook read by none other than Andy Serkis.
Looking beyond that, Amazon is working on a The Lord of the Rings TV show for 2022 (check out the first image here), while Warner Bros. is fast-tracking an animated The Lord of the Rings movie. A new video game focused on Gollum is also slated for release in 2022.
MiHoYo has released a brand new Genshin Impact demo trailer for the upcoming playable character Raiden Shogun.
Ahead of the launch of update 2.1 tomorrow (September 1), Raiden Shogun takes the spotlight in the latest character demo trailer depicting her story, personality and gameplay style in montage form.
The dedicated trailer shows the Electro-powered Archon – a god in the world of Genshin Impact – engaging in fast-paced combat as well as activating her ultimate ability. Raiden Shogun has been shown off in several trailers before, however, this is the first one showing her in full detail.
Raiden Shogun was first introduced in update 2.0’s storyline with the addition of the newest region, Inazuma. As described on the official website, the Shogun is “the awesome and terrible power of thunder incarnate” and the exalted ruler of the Inazuma Shogunate.
Raiden Shogun will be a five-star character when she is introduced, making her one of the rarest figures in Genshin Impact. She will also be the third playable Archon in the game, after Venti and Zhongli.
Update 2.1 will also introduce Kujou Sara and Sangonomiya Kokomi. Kujou Sara will be a four-star bow-wielder who uses an electro Vision and was previously revealed during the Inazuma storyline in 2.0, while Sangonomiya Kokomi is a hydro mage healer.
The update will also introduce Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn, a timed PlayStation exclusive character who will eventually arrive on PC at a later date.
Meanwhile, miHoYo is already releasing new teasers for Genshin Impact update 2.2, confirming Thoma will be playable soon. The developer shared a new post yesterday detailing the “Protector From Afar”.
As Thoma is a side character it’s unclear whether or not he will be a four-star or five-star character when his banner is eventually added to the game. As 2.1 is set to launch on September 1, it’s likely 2.2 will arrive in the next couple of months.
Despite Genshin Impact requiring players to unlock and complete the quest to access the Inazuma region, one player was able to break into the region while underleveled.
depolitikblog.blogspot.com Before multiple friends of mine went out of their way to sing the praises of Granblue Fantasy: Relink to ...
