Month: January 2018

Defending champion Serena Williams has withdrawn from the Australian Open, saying she is not ready to return to tournament tennis.

The season’s first major starts Jan. 15 at Melbourne Park and seven-time Australian Open champion Williams will be missing it for the first time since 2011.

Williams was pregnant with her first child when she won here last year to collect her Open-era record 23rd Grand Slam singles title.

She gave birth to her daughter, Alexis, in September.

Abu Dhabi exhibition

Williams played in an exhibition tournament last week in Abu Dhabi and indicated after her loss to French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko that she might not make it to Melbourne.

“After competing in Abu Dhabi I realized that although I am super close, I’m not where I personally want to be,” Williams said in a statement released Friday by Australian Open organizers.

“My coach and team always said ‘only go to tournaments when you are prepared to go all the way.’ I can compete — but I don’t want to just compete, I want to do far better than that and to do so, I will need a little more time.

“With that being said, and even though I am disappointed about it, I’ve decided not to compete in the Australian Open this year.”

The 36-year-old Williams needs one more Grand Slam singles title to equal the all-time record held by Margaret Court, who won 24 titles before and during the Open era.

Murray out, too

Her withdrawal comes less than 24 hours after fellow former world No.1 Andy Murray withdrew from the men’s event with a chronic hip injury.

Several other stars, including top-ranked Rafael Nadal, six-time champion Novak Djokovic and 2014 winner Stan Wawrinka, also are dealing with injuries.

Williams last year beat sister Venus in the final, and later revealed she played the tournament despite knowing she was pregnant.

Australian Open tournament director Craig Tiley said Williams waited as long as she could before letting organizers know she wouldn’t be able to compete.

“I’ve been in constant contact with Serena and her team and know this is why she has pushed it and pushed it until the 11th hour to make her final decision,” Tiley said.
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Michael Wolff, an American author, essayist and journalist, has written Fire and Fury, a book that portrays a chaotic initial year for the presidency of Donald Trump. What’s his background?

Michael Wolff

Age: 64

Early life: Wolff was born in New Jersey to a father who worked in advertising and a mother who was a newspaper reporter. He attended Columbia University in New York and worked as a copy boy at The New York Times while in school. 

The journalist: Wolff published his first book of essays, White Kids, in 1979. He was most recently a media critic and columnist for USA Today, Hollywood Reporter, New York Magazine and, before that, Vanity Fair and Newser. 

In 2011, he briefly was at the helm of AdWeek magazine, but left after less than a year. 

The author: In 1997, he wrote the bestseller Burn Rate, about his early dotcom company Wolff New Media.

In 2004 he published Autumn of the Moguls, about the decline of mainstream media that would occur later in the decade.

He was perhaps best known for his 2009 biography of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News.

Accolades: Wolff has won two National Magazine Awards, which recognize excellence in the magazine industry in both print and digital mediums.

One of the awards was for a series of columns he wrote from the Middle East at the start of the Iraq War in 2003. 

Controversies: Wolff’s work has often drawn criticism from his fellow journalists as well as his subjects. Just before the publication of The Man Who Owns the News, Murdoch took issue with several parts of the book, just as U.S. President Donald Trump has over Wolff’s latest work. 

In a 2004 cover story for The New Republic, reporter Michelle Cottle characterized Wolff’s writing by saying that “even Wolff acknowledges that conventional reporting is not his bag.” Rather, she said, “he absorbs the atmosphere and gossip swirling around him at cocktail parties, on the street, and especially during those long lunches.”
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For a second consecutive day, the White House press secretary on Thursday fielded a barrage of reporters’ questions about a forthcoming book that portrays a chaotic initial year for the presidency of Donald Trump.

Most people in the United States could “probably care less about a book full of lies,” responded Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who characterized Fire and Fury as “trash” and something “a fired employee wanted to peddle.” 

That fired employee is Steve Bannon, who ran Trump’s presidential campaign in its final quarter of 2016 and was chief strategist in the White House for the initial seven months of his presidency.

Bannon is quoted extensively by author Michael Wolff in the 336-page book.

Asked whether Breitbart News should fire Bannon, who is executive chairman of the right-wing news and opinion website, Sanders replied, “I certainly think it’s something they should look at and consider.” 

A lawyer for the president on Thursday sought to block publication of the book, contending it is defamatory and libelous and demanding that Wolff and his publisher, Henry Holt and Co., stop its release. It originally had been scheduled to be released Tuesday, but Wolff said Thursday that it now would arrive in bookstores Friday — four days early.

Charles Harder said his legal team was “investigating numerous false and/or baseless statements” made about Trump in the book that Wolff said came from more than 200 interviews he conducted during Trump’s successful election campaign and after the president took office a year ago.

Harder, the previous day, also sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bannon, demanding that he stop making defamatory remarks about Trump and his family.

On Thursday, Trump said, “He [Bannon] called me a great man last night, so he obviously changed his tune pretty quick.”

The White House said Trump was not trying to block anyone’s constitutional protection of freedom of speech through the legal threats.

“The president absolutely believes in the First Amendment,” Sanders responded to a reporter’s question at Thursday’s media briefing. “But as we’ve said before, the president also believes in making sure that information is accurate before pushing it out as fact when it certainly and clearly is not.”

In perhaps the most controversial passage in the book, Bannon is quoted as saying he thought it “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” that Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.; the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, now a White House adviser; and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Russians in the midst of the campaign at Trump Tower in New York.

The younger Trump had been promised by an intermediary for the Russians that he would be handed incriminating documents about Trump’s election challenger, Democrat Hillary Clinton, as part of Moscow’s effort to help Trump win, although Trump Jr. subsequently said no such damaging evidence materialized.

Within hours of the surfacing of excerpts from the book, Trump said in a statement Wednesday, “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”

Trump said that Bannon was “only in it for himself” and “spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was,” at the same time that he had declared war on the media.

Bannon also is quoted as saying that Trump Jr. will “crack like an egg” under the pressure of the investigations into meddling by Russia in the last U.S. presidential election.

On Thursday, White House officials continued to attack Wolff’s credibility, accusing him of having a record of misquoting interview subjects and inventing scenarios. 

“This is a practice he is used to doing,” said Sanders, describing Wolff’s latest book as “mistake after mistake after mistake.”
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New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is partially abandoning its “pay-what-you-wish” admissions policy that has made it an egalitarian destination for generations of art lovers.

Starting March 1, the museum will charge a mandatory $25 entrance fee to most adult visitors who don’t live in New York state.

Museum President and CEO Daniel Weiss announced the change Thursday.

Weiss says the extra money will help balance the Met’s $305 million annual operating budget.

Entrance will remain free for all children under 12 and pay-as-you-wish for students up to graduate school in New York and surrounding New Jersey and Connecticut.  

The $25 fee will allow visitors to enter the Met over three consecutive days, instead of just one.
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Aharon Appelfeld, a prolific Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor whose works examined the lost world of European Jews and the new lives they pursued in Israel, died Thursday. He was 85.

Writing in Hebrew, the Romanian-born Appelfeld penned more than 40 books and was one of Israel’s most widely translated authors.

Appelfeld’s “Blooms of Darkness,” the tale of an 11-year-old boy hidden from the Nazis by a prostitute, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in London in 2012. Appelfeld was also awarded the State of Israel Prize for Literature in 1983 and was a Man Booker International Prize finalist in 2013.

‘Our beloved writer’

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, on Twitter, expressed sorrow “about the passing of our beloved writer.”

Amos Oz, one of Israel’s most prominent novelists, said on Army Radio that Appelfeld shied away from graphic depictions of the Holocaust, choosing instead to describe its effect on the lives of his characters.

“Appelfeld never wrote about gas chambers, never wrote about executions, about mass graves, atrocities and experiments on human beings. He wrote about survivors before and after. He wrote about people who did not know what was about to happen to them and about people who already knew everything but hardly spoke about it,” Oz said.

“He didn’t want, or he was unable, to write depictions of the horrors — he said that too. They are beyond the ability of human language to express them. You have to approach them indirectly, tiptoeing from afar,” said Oz, once Appelfeld’s student in a kibbutz.

Escaped concentration camp

Appelfeld was a young boy when his mother was killed by the Nazis. He and his father were sent to a concentration camp in Transnistria in an area of Ukraine then under control of the German-allied Romanian forces. Age 10 at the time, he escaped and spent three years hiding in forests in Ukraine.

“I survived in the fields and forests. Sometimes I worked as a shepherd or taking care of broken-down horses,” he told The New York Times in 1986. “I lived with marginal people during the war — prostitutes, horse thieves, witches, fortune tellers. They gave me my real education.”

After the war, he immigrated to Israel — he learned Hebrew beforehand — and when he was 28 he discovered that his father had survived and they were reunited in Israel.

“Even though I spent time on kibbutzim that tried to change me, I did not change. I remained, basically, the Jewish refugee child who survived,” he said in an interview with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper in 2015.

American-Jewish author Philip Roth once described Appelfeld as a “displaced writer of displaced fiction, who made displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.”

Works by Appelfeld translated into English include “Badenheim 1939” (1978), a tale set in a fictional Austrian resort on the eve of World War II, and “The Immortal Bartfuss”
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Hollywood’s first awards show of the new year included a visit from Wonder Woman Gal Gadot and a promise from Jessica Chastain that “major change is coming” to how women are treated in the industry.

Actors Gary Oldman, Holly Hunter, Sam Rockwell and others journeyed out to the desert Tuesday night for the opening gala of the 29th annual Palm Springs International Film Festival, a non-televised ceremony that offers a chance for honorees to reconnect with friends, prepare for the more high-profile upcoming Golden Globe Awards and promote critically-hailed but mostly little-seen movies.

In her speech to the crowd gathered for dinner at the city’s convention center, Chastain predicted that there would be changes to what she called a “flawed system” in Hollywood. The “Molly’s Game” star was one of several actresses at the ceremony supporting the just-announced Time’s Up, an anti-harassment coalition.

“Major change is coming. And change is good. Change is needed,” she said. “We must be better. And we will.”

The 40-year-old actress grew emotional in recalling her first trip to the festival five years earlier, telling a story of spying on Gary Oldman while he was eating lunch.

Oldman also made a return trip to the festival, and was honored for his lead role in “Darkest Hour.” The 59-year-old British actor drew perhaps the loudest applause of the night when he told the crowd he and his wife were planning to make Palm Springs their permanent home.

“So it feels a little bit like local boy makes good,” he said with a sly smile.

Gadot appeared to hold back tears as she took the stage alongside her “Wonder Woman” director Patty Jenkins.

“I’m dancing from within,” the 32-year-old Israeli actress told the crowd. Professing her admiration for Jenkins, Gadot teased her director, saying, “You’re going to get tired of me” when filming begins this year on the sequel.

Like Gadot, newcomer Timothee Chalamet was honored as a rising star by the festival. The 22-year-old actor noted the gap at the box office between his movie, “Call Me By Your Name,” and her superhero hit.

“Your film has literally made 250 times more money than my movie has. So I’m feeling a little insecure, unqualified to be up here, but that’s OK,” he said. Chalamet also thanked the wife of Armie Hammer, his co-star in the gay romance, “who let me crawl all over her husband for two months.”
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Pop superstar Justin Timberlake on Tuesday announced his first album in nearly five years, promising more “personal” songwriting inspired by his home and family.

The 36-year-old singer and actor said that “Man of the Woods,” his fifth solo studio album, will come out on February 2 — two days before he headlines entertainment during the Super Bowl, generally the most watched television event of the year in the United States.

Timberlake unveiled the album with a short video on social media that, true to the album’s title, shows him walking reflectively in scenes of nature from a snowy forest to a sunny corn field.

“This album is really inspired by my son, my wife, my family, but — more so than any other album I’ve ever written — where I’m from,” Timberlake says in the video. “And it’s personal.”

Timberlake — who had a son in 2015 with his wife, actress Jessica Biel — grew up near Memphis, Tennessee, one of the capitals of blues and soul music as well as rural-rooted country.

The video features snippets of acoustic guitar, hinting perhaps at a more somber sound for the album, but closes with Timberlake in the studio with all-star pop producer Pharrell Williams.

Timberlake, one of the top-selling artists of the 21st century both as a solo artist and with boy band NSYNC, rose to fame with an electronic pop sound before finding a new voice by bringing in R&B, notably on his 2006 album “FutureSex/LoveSounds.”

Timberlake has been offering hints of his upcoming album for years. In a 2016 interview with the BBC, Timberlake declined to describe it as a country album but acknowledged the influence.

“I really did grow up in a place in America where I was like two hours from the country music capital of the world (Nashville), home of the blues, birthplace of American rock ‘n’ roll,” he said.

Timberlake last released full albums in 2013, putting out “The 20/20 Experience” and “The 20/20 Experience — 2 of 2” in quick succession.

Even without albums, Timberlake has kept putting out music, scoring a mega-hit in 2016 with “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” a giddy summer song that appeared in the animated film “Trolls.”

But Timberlake has focused increasingly on acting rather than music in the past several years, most recently starring as a bookish and seductive lifeguard in Woody Allen’s “Wonder Wheel.”
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A music publisher is seeking at least $1.6 billion from Spotify for alleged copyright violations, the latest lawsuit to hit the fast-growing streaming company.

Wixen Music Publishing Inc., which holds rights to songs of major artists including Neil Young, the Doors, Tom Petty and Santana, charged in a lawsuit that Spotify failed to seek licenses for significant parts of its 30 million-song catalog.

“While Spotify has become a multibillion-dollar company, songwriters and their publishers, such as Wixen, have not been able to fairly and rightfully share in Spotify’s success, as Spotify has in many cases used their music without a license and without compensation,” said the lawsuit filed last week in a federal court in Los Angeles.

The lawsuit said that Spotify initially tried to work with record labels but, “in a race to be first to market, made insufficient efforts to collect the required musical composition information.”

Wixen, which is seeking a jury trial against the Swedish company, presented a list of 10,784 songs for which it questioned Spotify’s permission to stream.

The publisher said it was seeking the maximum allowed $150,000 in damages for copyright damages for each song, meaning an award of at least $1.6 billion, along with the fees of its lawyers.

Spotify did not immediately comment on the latest suit. In May, it reached an agreement to settle a pair of two similar lawsuits under which Spotify said it would set up a $43.45 million fund to compensate songwriters.

Wixen called the settlement, which still needs final approval from a judge, “grossly insufficient” and said that it would opt out of the deal insofar as possible.

Even if unsuccessful, lawsuits amount to a headache for Spotify as the company considers going public.

Spotify, which has been valued at anywhere from $8 billion to $16 billion, has maintained its dominance as streaming rapidly grows and transforms the recorded music market.

Spotify said in July that it had 60 million users worldwide who pay for subscriptions, with 80 million more using its free tier.
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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) welcomed on Tuesday the possibility of North Korea competing at next month’s Pyeongchang Games in South Korea and said the invitation remained open.

A spokesman said the IOC “welcomes the mutual intention” of the two governments to start direct talks about North Korean athletes participating in the Feb 9-25 Games.

“In this context, the IOC continues its discussions with the NOC [national Olympic committee] of DPRK [North Korea],” he added.

“To allow for such a participation in respect of the Olympic Charter, the IOC is keeping its invitation for a delegation of the NOC of DPRK open and will take the final decision in due time.”

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un referred to the Games in a New Year’s Day speech in which he also spoke of “mass-producing nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles for operational deployment.”

“North Korea’s participation in the Winter Games will be a good opportunity to showcase the national pride and we wish the Games will be a success,” he said. “Officials from the two Koreas may urgently meet to discuss the possibility.”

South Korea has welcomed Kim’s offer but U.S.-based experts saw Kim’s speech as a clear attempt to divide Seoul from its main ally, the United States.

Washington has led an international campaign to pressure North Korea through sanctions to give up weapons programs aimed at developing nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States.

The Pyeongchang Games will take place just 80 km (50 miles) from the world’s most heavily-armed border, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
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Alabama record producer Rick Hall, who recorded some of the biggest musical acts of the 1960s and ’70s and helped develop the fabled “Muscle Shoals sound,” has died.

Longtime friend Judy Hood said Hall died at his home Tuesday following a fight with cancer. He was 85.

Hall founded FAME Recording Studios in northwestern Alabama in 1959 and went on to record major acts including R&B stars Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett. 

Hall also recorded country artists, including George Jones and Brenda Lee, and produced pop acts Paul Anka and the Osmonds, among others.

A new generation of listeners came to know Hall through the 2013 documentary Muscle Shoals. The movie tells the story of Hall, the region’s musicians and its distinctive, soulful sound featuring heavy bass, electric piano or organ, and drums.
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Viewers intrigued by the Gianni Versace murder case featured in the new season of American Crime Story can retrace the fashion designer’s steps at his former mansion in South Beach.

Tourists stop on its stone front steps every day to pose for pictures where serial killer Andrew Cunanan fatally shot Versace in 1997. There’s more to the Mediterranean-style mansion than Versace’s death, however.

Now a boutique hotel, The Villa Casa Casuarina, Versace’s former home still reflects his glamorous designs and opulent lifestyle. Visitors can swim in the pool he lined with 24-karat gold tiles, sleep on double-king-sized beds so large they require custom-made sheets, gaze at the ocean from his rooftop observatory and dine in a gourmet restaurant established in his former dining room.

A resident artist maintains the mosaics and frescos that Versace had made for the property, including designs showcasing his signature snake-haired Medusa head, said Chauncey Copeland, the hotel’s general manager.

“We actually have preserved what Versace created here and just augmented it with some modern touches for the convenience of our hotel guests and restaurant patrons,” Copeland said.

Versace spent $33 million renovating the three-story building he purchased in 1992. It was originally an apartment complex built in 1930 by Standard Oil heir Alden Freeman. After Versace’s death, his family sold the property. The Villa Casa Casuarina now is part of the Victor Hotels group, which acquired the mansion at a 2013 auction for $41.5 million.

The opportunity to sleep in Versace’s former bedroom stands out among other luxury hotel experiences, even in glitzy South Beach, said Joey Cargill, of Manila, the Philippines, a hotel guest relaxing in the pool just after Christmas.

“It’s just the history, and Versace was an artist, and I kind of consider myself a little bit of an artist. Maybe I can grasp a little bit of that, in a different fashion,” Cargill said.

To live like Versace is to live large, transforming the most ordinary things into outrageous memories. “I can’t even hit all sides of the bed, it’s so big. I just take a corner of it,” Cargill said.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story premieres January 17 on FX.

The cast and crew spent about a month filming at the hotel, Copeland said. “It’s really striking just how accurate they are,” he said.
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