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 Forbes | American Men And Millennials Are Drinking Pink...And Changing The Rosé Market Forbes Rosé appears to be entering a new phase of appreciation in the United States. After years of the pink-wine news being mainly focused on reports of its growing acceptance among consumers and sommeliers, and the ever-increasing sales of it, discussion of ... |
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DJ Khaled, John Legere
IMAGE DISTRIBUTED FOR T-MOBILE - DJ Khaled and T-Mobile CEO John Legere celebrate the launch of T-Mobile's Un-carrier 11, a move to offer customers free gifts and shares of the company stock, Tuesday, June 7, 2016, in New York. (Diane Bondareff/AP Images for T-Mobile) (Diane Bondareff)
The Madison Senators football program stopped football in the middle of the 2014 season due to a lack of varsity athletes, but have risen under second-year head coach Don Johnson, as the program has 70 kids in its program this fall.
Still, the journey from "unable to finish a season" to playoff contender is a long one – even if the program boasts USC middle linebacker commit Daniel Green.
This week, hoping to deliver a message to his program, Johnson used his connections to reach out to famous record producer DJ Khaled, who recorded a short motivational video.
"He's a friend of a friend. We want to get the kids excited and motivated," Johnson said. "He knows the story of the program and where we're coming from and where we are trying to go. It was great."
During his career, Khaled has worked with artists Birdman, Busta Rhymes, Chris Brown, Jay Z, Future, Lil Wayne, Meek Mill, Rick Ross, T.I. and more.
Madison is among the top contenders for the PIL title, and begins its season Friday at South Eugene.
-- Andrew Nemec
anemec@oregonian.com
@AndrewNemec
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 The Guardian | 2000 UK children reported to police over three years for explicit images The Guardian More than 2,000 children were reported to police in the UK for crimes linked to indecent images in the space of three years. The figures, released following a freedom of information request, come amid concerns about sexting among young people, where ... Nearly 2000 offences involving indecent images reported in three years, say children's charityHerald Scotland Thousands of children reported over indecent imagesBBC News NSPCC report found 2000 children quizzed by police over nude selfiesDaily Mail Nottingham Post -Sky News -Coventry Telegraph all 30 news articles » |
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MONTEREY PARK (CBSLA.com) — How does a healthy newborn baby end up dead in the hospital a day after she is born?
That is a question a grieving Monterey Park couple want answered.
Moreover, compounding their ordeal, news that the baby was cremated without their permission.
It’s a story that is Only On 2.
Auroaanne De La Torre-Johnston was born on May 27 inside Beverly Hospital in Montebello.
“She was in perfect health,” said her father, Michael Johnston. “Very alert, very awake — she was the loudest baby in the ward, apparently.”
On May 28, the baby was dead.
Johnston says he and the baby’s mother Yvette De La Torre are waiting for the Coroner’s Office to tell them the official cause of death.
“We have no clue,” says Johnston, “It’s devastating.”
The sad story doesn’t end there. Johnston says when he and his wife called the coroner last week to check on the progress of their findings, he couldn’t believe what he was told.
“They sent her to USC to be cremated, and her ashes are now in the USC morgue,” Johnston said.
He and his wife said they were stunned into disbelief.
“I said ‘Where is my daughter? What did you do with my daughter?,” he says.
The coroner’s office allegedly told the couple that they left a message on their answering machine saying if they didn’t pick up their baby within 30 days, the body would be disposed of. The couple says they never got that message.
A spokesperson for the coroner’s office declined to comment saying they can’t comment over concerns the coroner’s office could potentially face a lawsuit in this case.
“The fact that the coroner won’t be transparent and accountable really raises from questions here that only the Board of Supervisors or possibly the DA’s office can answer,” says Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog in Santa Monica.
“I mean, this is the worst pain a human being can feel, losing a child. To not have an answer is throwing salt on that wound. Then to dispose of the body before a family can make a choice about what to do with it, to get more answers is inhuman,” said Court.
Now all the parents have is one photo of their little girl.
It’s something Johnston says he looks at a lot.
“I can tell she had my hands,” he said, “I make sure I look at [the picture] every day.”
And he is left with the agonizing question: Why did she die?
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Donald J. Trump’s campaign was teetering early last month, with an increasingly isolated candidate and a downcast staff that seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis. Having fired his campaign chairman and retooled his message, Mr. Trump was still far behind Hillary Clinton in the polls, and Republicans were running away from him.
Under those desperate conditions, Mr. Trump’s closest allies last month pressed him to approve a daring plan: Go to Mexico and meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto, presenting himself to the world as a statesman and earning a new look from millions of American voters.
But the political gymnastics involved in Mr. Trump’s gambit will likely be difficult to sustain: His approach involves avoiding discussion of his former campaign pledges without renouncing them, and making ostentatious gestures of conciliation toward Hispanic voters and Mexicans without withdrawing — and at times actually repeating — remarks that have offended them in the past.
In the space of a few hours on Wednesday, Mr. Trump veered from avoiding a clash with Mr. Peña Nieto over his proposal for a border wall to goading an Arizona crowd into chants about constructing the barrier.
If winning over people who view him as a racially divisive or reckless candidate would seem to require a dizzying political reinvention, it is far from certain that Mr. Trump is prepared to transform himself so thoroughly.
He appeared solicitous, even pleading, in his visit to Mexico City, shirking confrontation with Mr. Peña Nieto and reading slowly from a cautious, tightly phrased statement that described his admiration for Americans of Mexican descent.
“Spectacular, spectacular, hard-working people,” Mr. Trump said of Mexican-Americans. “I have such great respect for them and their strong values of family, faith and community.”
In Arizona, Mr. Trump made his most brazen attempt yet to back away from his pledge to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants, denouncing illegal immigration in vehement terms, while at the same time revising his policy agenda. Where he has, in the past, suggested creating a special force to achieve that goal, Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that a new “deportation task force” would focus on rounding up only the “most dangerous criminal illegal immigrants.”
Underscoring the new approach, Mr. Trump was introduced in Phoenix by a pair of loyal supporters, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who took turns wearing a baseball cap bearing the slogan: “Make Mexico Great Again Also.”
Mr. Trump has already sought several times to reboot his campaign and reintroduce himself to general-election voters, many of whom hold him in low regard. He has periodically reworked his message to conform more closely to conventions of political discourse, briefly earning praise from Republicans and critics in the media, only to lapse soon after into old, unrestrained habits.
On Wednesday night, as the crowd in Phoenix grew more energized, he could not resist returning to his fiery form, even as he outlined his new approach to immigration control.
Graphic | A Look at Trump’s Immigration Plan, Then and Now Here’s a look at how the Republican candidate’s positions on immigration have changed, or remained the same, throughout the campaign.
He repeated at high volume his harsh denunciations of illegal immigration as a threat to public safety. Mrs. Clinton’s plan, he said, was “open borders and let everybody come in and destroy our country.”
At one point, referring to Mrs. Clinton, he told the crowd that perhaps he should “deport her.”
And Mr. Trump, as is his pattern, created confusion for even his closest supporters as he appeared to embrace opposite sides of important issues as the day unfolded.
He told reporters in Mexico that he and Mr. Peña Nieto had not discussed forcing that country to pay for a border wall, suggesting the delicate question would be explored in the future by the two leaders. But hours later, Mr. Trump thundered in Phoenix that his mind was made up: Mexico would foot the bill.
Mr. Trump’s course adjustment emerged in an atmosphere of growing urgency and alarm within his campaign. Over the last week, close associates have told both Mr. Trump and members of his family that he is in real danger of losing the race, according to a half-dozen people close to the Trump campaign and briefed on its activities, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid angering the nominee.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who lobbied in favor of the trip to Mexico, has told Mr. Trump that he must make immediate changes to regain his footing, associates said. And on Monday, Mr. Trump’s son Eric met with senior officials at the Republican National Committee in Washington and heard a grim prognosis of his father’s campaign, according to people briefed on the meeting.
Without a major shake-up of the electoral map, strategists indicated to the younger Mr. Trump, his father’s already narrow path to the 270 electoral votes he needs to win could vanish. Going through the swing states one by one, party officials showed Eric Trump that his father was drastically underperforming other Republicans in the polls.
Interactive Feature | Donald Trump’s Immigration Speech: Analysis Donald J. Trump delivered a speech in Phoenix on Wednesday that was expected to clarify his shifting stance on hard-line immigration policies, following a trip to Mexico to speak with President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Ahead of his travels on Wednesday, Trump aides told his political allies that the campaign hoped to provide a new template for talking about immigration for the remainder of the race: One that would continue to stress law-and-order themes and nationalistic passions, while abandoning his specific commitment to quickly deport 11 million migrants.
The idea of a trip to Mexico had been under consideration for weeks: Melania Trump, Mr. Trump’s wife, endorsed the move earlier in August and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, had raced to open talks with the Mexican foreign ministry. Yet Mr. Trump himself had been hesitant, fearing a fiasco if Mr. Peña Nieto attempted to embarrass him.
Mr. Giuliani, who has become one of Mr. Trump’s chief counselors, and Mr. Christie urged him to make the trip and ultimately helped craft the statement he delivered in Mexico City.
There were holdouts in Mr. Trump’s inner circle: Roger Ailes, the former chairman of Fox News who is now advising Mr. Trump, saw the idea as needlessly risky.
By Monday morning, however, Mr. Trump decided that his political circumstances demanded bold action.
Dan Senor, a former adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign who has been critical of Mr. Trump, said the trip to Mexico likely helped elevate Mr. Trump in the eyes of some voters. “The expectation was so low that simply showing up on the stage next to a head of a state was a win for him,” Mr. Senor said.
Still, with his decision to seek reinvention in a whirlwind trip, Mr. Trump signaled on Wednesday that any effort to run a cautious or conventional general-election campaign is clearly behind him. And with less than 10 weeks to go in the race and a darkening political landscape confronting him, Mr. Trump’s brand of disruptive spectacle may increasingly come to define his candidacy.
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"You're tellin me I switched to Tidal & Frank gotta go and drop an album exclusively for Apple Music?" one person tweeted. "I do not have time for you Frank Ocean."
Ocean's release was just the latest example of tech companies vying for exclusives on new albums in a bid to attract customers. It's a tactic that has become more common over the last 18 months as streaming services try to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive and combative market.
Apple Music, built on top of the company's $3 billion purchase of Beats, and Tidal, the service owned by Jay Z, have been the most aggressive in signing up exclusives. These include Ocean, Drake and Taylor Swift for Apple and Prince, Beyonce and Kanye West for Tidal.
The exclusives can go on indefinitely, in the case of Prince, or last as little as 24 hours. The rewards can be significant: Tidal got more than one million customers to create accounts in the first week that Beyonce's album Lemonade was released, according to the New York Times.
The two companies have clashed with each other in the process. After a rumor that Apple (AAPL, Tech30) would buy Tidal, West tweeted that "this Tidal Apple beef is f***ng up the music game."
Apple and Tidal may have also angered Spotify, which was recently reported to have penalized artists for signing exclusive deals with rivals by making their music harder to find. (Spotify later denied it.)
More disputes may be coming. Amazon (AMZN, Tech30), which has a track record of bidding to stream exclusive videos, is said to be planning to launch a streaming music option as soon as next month.
Pandora (P) is rumored to be working on an on-demand streaming service too, moving beyond online radio.
Related: 'Carpool Karaoke' series will be exclusively on Apple Music
For a few years, the streaming market was dominated by Spotify and smaller services of varying legality, with less headbutting over exclusive deals.
"That was a really good period. You didn't have to worry about who you were offending," says Ted Cohen, managing partner at Tag Strategic and a former music exec who worked at EMI. "Now it's getting territorial again."
Suddenly big tech companies all want a piece of the pie.
"A major reason why you buy iPhones, Android phones and Amazon Echos is because you play music on them," says David Pakman, a venture capitalist at Venrock and former CEO of eMusic. "Right now, the current tactic [tech companies] are using to fight with each other is not features, it's content."
The price is the same for most -- around $9.99. So a key difference is the selection. As a result, Pakman says the push for exclusive music deals is becoming "the strategy of the moment."
To get those deals, music streaming services have brought on prominent figures from the recording industry who have clout with leading musicians.
Chief among them is Jimmy Iovine, the former head of Interscope Records and cofounder of Beats, who now runs Apple Music. Under the leadership of Iovine and head of original music content Larry Jackson, Apple has worked to broaden the idea of music exclusives.
"Larry and Jimmy don't just think of content as the album or the recording," says Neil Smith, former head of business development at Beats Music who now works with MediaNet. "The exclusive isn't just the album or the single. It's that and the stuff around it."
In the case of Frank Ocean, that meant Apple getting exclusives to a new audio album as well as a separate "visual album" and hosting a live stream from Ocean before the release.
Related: Will buying Tidal help Apple fend off Spotify?
Tidal, meanwhile, has capitalized on its impressive list of owners, including Jay Z, Kanye West, Chris Martin and Rihanna, to land coveted exclusives.
Even Spotify, which has not publicly gone after exclusive deals, has nonetheless brought on Troy Carter, who has managed artists like Lady Gaga.
As Jay Samit, a former exec at Sony (SNE), put it, this is what companies feel is necessary "when a handful of current acts make up 40%-50% of all music revenue and there's a handful of executives who have access to them."
But this approach comes at a cost -- more money spent courting artists, more frustration for listeners who just want everything in one place and more crossfire all around in the industry.
"Everybody is being as aggressive in the current marketplace as terrestrial radio was," says Cohen, referring to the days of record execs jockeying for airplay. "It's just a different set of weapons."
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A racing play set, a Disney princess carriage and a drone are among Walmart’s top toy picks for the upcoming holiday shopping season.
The world’s largest retailer, relying on the recommendations of hundreds of pint-sized experts — children ranging from 1½ to 12 years old — came up with the 25 most appealing games and gizmos. They could be destined to become some of the season’s biggest sellers.
“Whatever your child is interested in, there’s a great toy this year in that category, and I think that’s what’s driving the health of the business,’’ says Anne Marie Kehoe, vice president of toys, Walmart U.S., in a conference call with news media Wednesday.
The top picks include a Num Noms Lip Gloss Truck, which may have particular appeal to budding makeup mavens, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mega Lair Playset and a Disney Princess Carriage, one of six of the top 25 toys that are exclusive to Walmart.
There’s a Little Live Pets Puppy for animal lovers and, for would-be adventurers, a Sky Viper Streaming Drone and a Razor Power Core E100 Electric Scooter. And the force is expected to stay with Star Wars for another year. Just as last year’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiere focused shoppers attention on all things galactic, the debut of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story on Dec. 16 is likely to spur sales of soon-to-be released toys such as the Star Wars Electronic R2D2, another of Wamart’s most popular picks.
Walmart doesn’t break out sales by product category, but it says toys play a significant role in its holiday revenue. And the season is critical to the toy industry as a whole, which sees 70% of its sales in the last two months of the year.
Walmart isn’t leaving much to chance, not only checking the opinions of its littlest customers, but even working with suppliers to design toys the retailer thinks will have particular appeal, such as the Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice Batcave, which will be another Walmart exclusive with Mattel.
“We ... thought this would be a great gift, and the kids who love that brand would really love that play set,’’ Kehoe said of Walmart’s collaboration with the manufacturer behind the Batman v. Superman toy.
Kehoe said toy sales last year remained strong after Christmas on through the spring, and she expects that trend to continue.
Still, industrywide, retail sales were not as robust as expected last holiday season. Sales in November and December increased 3% to $626.1 billion, below the National Retail Federation’s projected uptick of 3.7%. The increase was also less than the 4.1% growth seen during the 2014 holiday season. Retail experts attributed the more anemic sales to warmer winter weather, an increasing preference for experiences over material gifts, and the growing number of consumers who prefer to browse online than in brick-and-mortar stores. Online sales surpassed projections last year, rising 9% to $105 billion.
Walmart shoppers wanting to get a head start picking and paying for holiday gifts can take advantage of the store’s layaway policy, which — after being phased out in 2006 in all categories except jewelry — came back for the holiday season starting in 2011. Since then, shoppers have been able to start putting money down on gifts earlier and earlier, and this year the program will begin on Sept. 2. They have until Dec. 12 to fully pay for their items.
“While we may think it’s a long time till Christmas,’’ Kehoe said, “for many customers, it really is a need and a want, so it just gives them that time.’’
Shoppers do not have to pay a fee for a layaway account, and can put down as little as 10% or $10, whichever is more.
Beyond toys, Walmart expects cookware, video games and consoles, and makeup kits to also be big sellers this holiday season, with the Sony PlayStation Virtual Reality Bundle looking like it will be a particular standout.
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