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Ashley Judd Sues Harvey Weinstein, Saying He Harmed Her Career

April 30, 2018 by Leave a Comment

Ms. Judd is suing Mr. Weinstein for defamation and sexual harassment and for violating California’s broadly written Unfair Competition law, which prohibits “unlawful, unfair and fraudulent business acts and practices.” Unfair competition has not historically been applied to the area of sexual harassment and retaliation.

“Ashley is fighting back, but she also wants to point the way for others,” Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., the lead lawyer representing Ms. Judd in the suit, said in an interview. Mr. Boutrous, who is known for his high-profile work for companies like Walmart and Apple and for pushing the courts on issues like gay marriage, added that “if this isn’t an example of unfair business practice then I don’t know what is.”

Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in gender and sexual harassment issues, said Ms. Judd’s complaint is notable because it “speaks to the fact that this is not just a sexual issue — that, beyond physical and emotional harm, it also involves economic harm.”

She added, “If successful, the legal arguments that are being marshaled here are a big deal for lots of people, not just in show business but in all sorts of hiring contexts.”

Ms. Judd said in a statement that “financial recuperation will be donated to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, so that women and men in all professions may have legal redress for sexual harassment, economic retaliation and damage to their careers.”

The lawsuit maintains that Mr. Weinstein was retaliating against Ms. Judd for refusing to engage in sexual activity with him. About a year before Ms. Judd was in contention for the “Lord of the Rings” role, Mr. Weinstein had her meet him in a hotel room in Beverly Hills — under the guise of discussing business — where he appeared in a bathrobe and, among other things, asked her to submit to a massage and watch him shower, the complaint said. Ms. Judd had previously recounted the episode in an interview with The New York Times published last October.

“Weinstein’s wrongful and outrageous conduct has not just deprived Ms. Judd of the specific opportunity to play a prominent role in a blockbuster film trilogy; it has had a long-lasting ripple effect on her whole career,” the complaint said. “No person — in whatever job, in whatever industry — should have to forfeit professional aspirations and the right to earn a living to the abusive whims of the powerful.”

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A spokesman for Mr. Weinstein released a statement late Monday that said in part, “The most basic investigation of the facts will reveal that Mr. Weinstein neither defamed Ms. Judd nor ever interfered with Ms. Judd’s career, and instead not only championed her work but also repeatedly approved her casting for two of his movies over the next decade.”

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Mr. Weinstein has previously denied trying to derail Ms. Judd’s career. In December, when Mr. Jackson told a publication in New Zealand that Mr. Weinstein had told him not to cast Ms. Judd or Mira Sorvino, Mr. Weinstein said in a statement that he had “no input into the casting whatsoever.” (Ms. Sorvino has also accused Mr. Weinstein of harassment.) Although the “Lord of the Rings” movies were started at Miramax, a boutique studio run by Mr. Weinstein and then owned by Disney, the project moved to New Line Cinema before filming began.

Mr. Jackson rejected Mr. Weinstein’s denial in subsequent public comments in December, saying that his creative partner on the films, Fran Walsh, “remembers these negative comments about Ashley and Mira as clearly as I do.”

The lawsuit filed by Ms. Judd on Monday laid out a pattern of retaliatory behavior by Mr. Weinstein against actresses who rebuffed his sexual advances — what California courts have described as “me too” evidence in employment cases. Ms. Sorvino is cited as one example.

“Weinstein made false statements of fact about Ms. Sorvino to others in the film industry to punish her and damage her career,” the suit said. “These comments included, but were not limited to, statements made to Mr. Jackson and Ms. Walsh in a private business meeting that Ms. Sorvino was ‘a nightmare to work with.’” Ms. Sorvino told The New Yorker in October that Mr. Weinstein tried to massage her and “chased her around” a hotel room at a film festival in 1995.

Another example cited by Ms. Judd involved Annabella Sciorra, who has said that Mr. Weinstein raped her in the 1990s. “She believes she did not work from 1992 to 1995 because the ‘Harvey machine’ spread a baseless rumor that she was ‘difficult,’” the complaint said of Ms. Sciorra. Mr. Weinstein has repeatedly denied ever engaging in “nonconsensual sex.”

The case adds to already formidable legal entanglements for Mr. Weinstein, who was one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers before dozens of women — led by Ms. Judd, Rose McGowan, Rosanna Arquette and others — came forward last fall with allegations of sexual misconduct against him.

Prosecutors in New York, Los Angeles and London are now pursuing possible criminal cases against him. Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, is suing Mr. Weinstein and his brother and business partner, Bob Weinstein, for repeatedly violating state and city laws barring gender discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual abuse and coercion. Mr. Weinstein also faces additional civil suits, including one filed by Kadian Noble, a British actress who is suing him for sex trafficking.

Amid these investigations, the Weinstein Company has toppled into bankruptcy. Bids for the movie and television studio’s assets were due on Monday, with an auction scheduled for later in the week should competing offers emerge.

In a statement on Monday afternoon, Mr. Schneiderman pressed bidders to propose “enhancements that set aside financial resources to compensate and provide support services for injured employees and industry talent.”

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He added, “Bid enhancements also should include nonmonetary terms that protect future employees and contractors and avoid rewarding wrongdoers.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/business/media/ashley-judd-harvey-weinstein-lawsuit.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business

Gig Economy Business Model Dealt a Blow in California Ruling

April 30, 2018 by Leave a Comment

In its place, the court erected a much simpler “ABC” test that is applied in Massachusetts and New Jersey. Under that test, the worker is considered an employee if he or she performs a job that is part of the “usual course” of the company’s business.

By way of an example, the court said a plumber hired by a store to fix a bathroom leak would not reasonably be considered an employee of that store. But seamstresses sewing at home using materials provided by a clothing manufacturer would probably be considered employees.

In addition, a company must show that it does not control and direct the worker, and that the worker is truly an independent business operator, not just classified that way unilaterally.

While companies like Uber have had some success arguing that they don’t exert sufficient control over drivers to be considered employers, it would be hard to assert that drivers are performing a task that isn’t a standard feature of their business.

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In a recent case involving the restaurant ordering and delivery service GrubHub, for example, a California judge found that food delivery was a regular part of the company’s business in Los Angeles, where the plaintiff worked, potentially satisfying the ABC test. But she ruled in favor of the company, concluding that it did not exert sufficient control over the worker to be considered an employer.

Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney for the plaintiff in that case, said she would seek reconsideration in light of the new ruling.

GrubHub said in a statement that it was aware of Monday’s ruling but could not comment because of the appeals process in the case, other than to say it “will continue to ensure delivery partners can take advantage of the flexibility they value from working with our company.”

Uber declined to comment.

The case on which the court ruled Monday was brought by delivery drivers at a company called Dynamex, who had been considered employees before 2004, when the company changed the relationship to a contracting arrangement.

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Were the courts to find that workers at companies like GrubHub and Uber, as now constituted, were employees rather than contractors, the companies could respond in several ways. They could simply make their workers employees rather than contactors.

Alternatively, ride-hailing companies like Uber might choose to rein in their operations, providing a more limited platform in which drivers and passengers can negotiate prices and the terms of the service.

Even if Uber and the like are eventually forced to change their business model, however, that moment could be far off. Uber drivers typically sign an arbitration agreement stating that any disputes must be brought individually and outside the court system. While the United States Supreme Court recently heard a challenge to such agreements, it is widely expected to uphold them.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/business/economy/gig-economy-ruling.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News

It Took 17 Years: Freelancers Receive $9 Million in Copyright Suit

April 30, 2018 by Leave a Comment

The suit came about shortly after the journalist Jonathan Tasini and five co-plaintiffs won a similar case in the Supreme Court.

Jonathan Tasini, center, and the actor and writer Michael Imperioli walk the picket line for the striking Writers Guild of America in 2007. Chip East/Reuters

“The argument that we made was the writers got paid for one-time use,” said Mr. Gleick, who worked as a reporter and editor for The Times for 10 years. “We sued The Times because they sold copyrighted work by not just their staff, but also freelance writers. And the correct thing to do would have been to ask the freelance writers for permission and then pay the writers.”

The parties had seemingly come to an agreement in 2005, but negotiations stalled, over disagreement of how to handle plaintiffs who had not registered copyrights for their work, until a Supreme Court ruling, in 2010, held that the settlement proceedings could continue. The groups reached what seemed to be a final agreement in 2014, only to endure four more years of delays caused by 41,000 objections from the defendants and specific claims by the authors.

“There were very prolific freelance writers who made a living writing for many publications and were fighting for every dollar they got,” Mr. Gleick said. “This lawsuit was very bitter at times. But it really was unfair and it’s good that they are getting some money back.”

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The writers will start receiving checks this week. Each plaintiff’s payout will vary depending on how many pieces he or she published and when they appeared in print. A few will be paid in the six figures, according to the Authors Guild. The settlement also allows for additional reimbursements of nearly $4 million in attorney fees and close to $900,000 in administrative expenses.

Despite the 17-year wait, the freelancers who were part of the lawsuit may consider themselves lucky. Since the case went to court, it has become common practice for publishers to own the digital rights of the articles they publish.

“We can see in hindsight that this early battle contained hints of things to come,” Mr. Gleick said in a statement. “Then, as now, big tech companies had the idea that they could profit from new uses of creative work without including the creators. We scored a victory, but the effects weren’t long lasting, and writers continue to struggle.”

The New York Times declined to comment on the settlement.

Mr. Gleick said the checks may come as a surprise to some plaintiffs, adding, “Some people are going to be very happy this week.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/business/media/freelancers-digital-copyright-lawsuit.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business

New York Times Metro Editor Resigns, Citing ‘Mistakes’

April 30, 2018 by Leave a Comment

Wendell Jamieson in September 2017. “I regret and apologize for my mistakes and leaving under these circumstances,” he said in a statement announcing his resignation. Earl Wilson/The New York Times

The New York Times announced on Monday that Wendell Jamieson, the newspaper’s metro editor, had resigned after an internal investigation but did not specify the reason for his departure.

“I regret and apologize for my mistakes and leaving under these circumstances,” Mr. Jamieson said in a statement that was included in a note to employees from Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, and Joseph Kahn, the managing editor.

Mr. Jamieson, 51, joined The Times in 2000 after having worked for Newsday, The Daily News and The New York Post. He was named metro editor in 2013.

Susan Chira, a senior correspondent and an editor covering gender issues, replaced Mr. Jamieson in an interim capacity.

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Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for The Times, declined to specify the reason that Mr. Jamieson had been investigated. In their message to Times employees, Mr. Baquet and Mr. Kahn said, “To protect the privacy of those involved, we do not intend to comment further.”

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In his statement that was included as part of that note, Mr. Jamieson said, “Leading Metro for the last five years and working with the incredible Times team has been the high point of my professional life.” After issuing his apology, he added: “I’m especially proud of all the talent I’ve helped bring to The Times. Susan Chira is a wonderful editor, a true New Yorker, and I know Metro will rise to even greater heights under her leadership.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/business/media/nytimes-metro-editor-wendell-jamieson.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business

WhatsApp Co-Founder Leaving Facebook Amid User Data Disputes

April 30, 2018 by Leave a Comment

The controversies have prompted disagreements among top Facebook executives about how to deal with those issues. In March, The New York Times reported that Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief information security officer, intended to leave the company after an internal dispute over how to handle the threat of Russian influence efforts. Facebook has also reshuffled the top ranks of its Washington office, where lobbying and policy matters are handled.

Facebook declined to comment beyond Mr. Koum’s post. Mr. Koum’s decision was earlier reported by The Washington Post.

Facebook’s business depends on getting people to spend time on its sites and allowing advertisers to target users based on their interests. WhatsApp has had no advertising on its service, but in recent years it has been sharing more information about its users with Facebook.

In March, Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp with Mr. Koum and who has since left the company, wrote on Twitter that it was time to delete Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica revelations.

Mr. Koum and Mr. Acton, who met at Yahoo while doing a security audit for the company, founded WhatsApp in 2009. Originally, the service was a way for people to tell friends and family whether they were available to text and talk. But it soon morphed into a general and free way of sending messages without the help of the services run by cellular network operators like Verizon and ATT.

WhatsApp became enormously popular in countries where messaging services were expensive or where social networks like Facebook had not taken hold. By February 2014, WhatsApp had about 450 million users and 50 employees. Facebook’s acquisition of the company turned many WhatsApp employees into millionaires.

In the spring of 2016, Mr. Koum and WhatsApp revealed that it was adding end-to-end encryption to every form of communication on the company’s service, which was by then used by more than 1 billion people across the globe. That meant that even company employees could not see messages, phone calls, photos or videos sent across the WhatsApp network, and the company had no way of complying with any court order demanding access to those communications.

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Though Mr. Koum joined the board of Facebook after his company was acquired, WhatsApp continued to operate independently in many ways. Its staff remained small, and they worked from their own office in Mountain View, Calif., away from Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The Mountain View building carried the names of neither Facebook nor WhatsApp on the outside.

While WhatsApp does not carry advertising, the company has worked over the past two years to create ways for businesses to communicate with customers via its service.

In 2016, WhatsApp said it would start disclosing the phone numbers and analytics data of its users to Facebook. A year later, the European Commission fined Facebook 110 million euros, or about $122 million, for misleading the commission during its acquisition of WhatsApp, saying that Facebook incorrectly claimed that it was impossible to combine user data collected by the two companies.

Last November, Mr. Acton left WhatsApp and later became the executive chairman of the Signal Foundation, the nonprofit that has run the encrypted communication app Signal.

By then, Mr. Koum had also shared his unease over Facebook’s data and privacy policies with others, according to the company executive who has spoken with Mr. Koum. While Mr. Koum personally got along with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, he felt the company’s board simply paid lip service to privacy and security concerns he raised, according to the executive.

In particular, the executive said, Mr. Koum was tired from fighting back against pressure from the board throughout 2017 to allow advertisements on WhatsApp.

Facebook did not intend to announce Mr. Koum’s departure until later this week, the person added. Facebook will hold its annual developer conference in San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday and Wednesday and it wanted to first get past the event. But The Post’s report foiled those plans, the executive said.

“Jan and Brian’s departures mean that Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are all controlled even more tightly by a single person — Mark Zuckerberg,” said Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook manager who is now an adviser at The Center for Humane Technology. “This centralized control is bad for the users of all of these products.”

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Mr. Koum’s departure was a blow to those at WhatsApp, according to one engineer at the messaging service, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. There had been a certain level of pride within WhatsApp’s team over the dedication to privacy and the departure of their co-founder had left many wondering whether Facebook would now open WhatsApp to tracking user data and, eventually, to ads on its service.

Mr. Zuckerberg said in a comment on Mr. Koum’s Facebook post that he would miss working with Mr. Koum.

“I’m grateful for everything you’ve done to help connect the world, and for everything you’ve taught me, including about encryption and its ability to take power from centralized systems and put it back in people’s hands,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. “Those values will always be at the heart of WhatsApp.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/technology/whatsapp-facebook-jan-koum.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business

Did Michelle Wolf Kill the White House Correspondents’ Dinner?

April 30, 2018 by Leave a Comment

“I always wanted to talk about the dinner,” added Mr. Knox, a correspondent for SiriusXM radio who starts his year in the role in July. “But this has bumped it up a couple notches in terms of the priority list.”

The dinner’s usual format — barbed punch lines from the president followed by a comic’s roast — has caused dust-ups over the years, like Stephen Colbert’s filleting of George W. Bush in 2006, which did not sit well with the black-tie crowd. But until President Trump’s boycott in 2017 deprived the comedian of a foil, the evening had remained more or less the same.

Now, pressure on the Correspondents’ Association to reimagine the dinner is building, ratcheted up by social media, a heightened political climate and a frustrated press corps wondering if a sober moment for American journalism requires a comparably sober event.

Ms. Wolf’s jokes about Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway set off a debate about the dinner’s format. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

Executives at CBS News were so dismayed by Saturday’s presentation that the network considered ending its participation in future dinners, according to three people who spoke anonymously to describe internal discussions. The network has since eased its position, after receiving assurances that the Correspondents’ Association will seriously consider changes to the dinner’s format.

Still, even as some Washington journalists seethed over what they deemed Ms. Wolf’s over-the-line jokes, others criticized the association for calling her monologue “not in the spirit” of its mission, arguing that a group dedicated to advancing journalism ought to defend a comedian’s right to free speech.

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“It’s like going to a Billy Joel concert and being shocked he played ‘Piano Man,’” Judd Apatow, the writer, director and comedian, said in an interview on Monday.

The Correspondents’ Association gala raises money for the organization, which advocates for press access in the White House, and the scholarships it awards to journalism students. The inclusion of an entertainer was meant, originally, as a counterbalance to the president, who traditionally delivered his own zinger-packed monologue, flaying his foes and roasting the roasters.

Mr. Trump’s decision to avoid the evening made him the first presidential no-show since Ronald Reagan in 1981 — and the Gipper skipped the event only because he had been shot by a would-be assassin. (Not one to show weakness, Reagan called in from his hospital bed.)

Stephen Colbert’s performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner did not sit well with the black-tie crowd. Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“We have a president who refuses to talk to anybody but Fox News,” Mr. Apatow said.

A complete end to the dinner has been floated, too, though it would be a special kind of cosmic irony if Mr. Trump presided over the fall of the event that inspired his political rise.

The president is said to have launched his pursuit of the Oval Office after a particularly demeaning night at the 2011 dinner, when he sat stone-faced as President Barack Obama called him a paranoiac and the entertainer, Seth Meyers, expressed surprise that Mr. Trump would run as a Republican, “because I thought he was running as a joke.”

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Mr. Trump tweeted on Monday that “the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is DEAD as we know it.”

“This was a total disaster and an embarrassment to our great Country and all that it stands for,” he wrote. “FAKE NEWS is alive and well.”

Mr. Apatow said he viewed the event differently.

“I believe it’s the best part of America,” Mr. Apatow said. “This is what you’re not allowed to do in other countries! You’re not allowed to speak openly! You’re not allowed to criticize the president!”

He added: “This is the best thing we can do. We can say you’re safe to speak out in America.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/business/media/michelle-wolf-white-house-correspondents-dinner.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business

No longer tech darling? Tesla is losing $6,500 every minute

April 30, 2018 by Leave a Comment

There is now a “genuine risk” that Elon Musk’s electric car company will not survive until the end of the year, Bloomberg reports.

Tesla is failing to meet its own production targets for its Model 3 sedan, a Tesla driver was killed while using his cars autopilot feature and a shareholder in the company urged the board to boot Musk as chairman.

On April Fool’s day, Musk joked on Twitter that his company had gone bankrupt and now Bloomberg is reporting that that is a distinct possibility. “Tesla is going through money so fast that, without additional financing, there is now a genuine risk that the 15-year-old company could run out of cash in 2018,” the financial news agency said on Monday.

The company tripled its workforce between 2014 and 2017. During that time, its revenue per employee stagnated and now it is lower than its rivals in the auto industry.

Credit analysts also downgraded Tesla stock and it has dropped 24 percent from its peak last September. Analysts have routinely questioned the price of Tesla’s stock, saying it doesn’t correspond with its production rates and multi-billion losses.

Wall Street traders also smell blood, as, earlier this month, Tesla reclaimed its position as the largest US equity short. According to S3 Partners, the total amount of bets against Tesla surged 28 percent in the last month to $10.7 billion.

Moody’s has warned that Tesla will need an additional $2 billion to make it through the year, and its $1.2 billion of existing debt will come due by 2019.

This isn’t Tesla’s first brush with capitulation. For most of its first decade in existence, the company relied entirely on private and venture capital funds, with much of the cash coming from Musk himself. In 2008, he put together a $40 million debt deal that closed on Christmas Eve, just hours before the company would have gone bankrupt.

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Filed Under: Global Business

China Is Set to Take a Hard Line on Trump’s Trade Demands

April 30, 2018 by Leave a Comment

“I don’t expect a comprehensive deal whatsoever,” said Ruan Zongze, the executive vice president of the China Institute of International Studies, which is the policy research arm of China’s Foreign Ministry. “I think there is a lot of game playing here.”

Beijing is frustrated with Mr. Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on $150 billion in Chinese goods and dismayed by suggestions in the West that China has a weak bargaining position. Chinese officials think the country’s one-party political system and President Xi Jinping’s enduring grip on power — particularly after the repeal of presidential term limits in March — mean that China can outlast the United States and Mr. Trump in any trade quarrel.

The Chinese government believes Mr. Trump’s background as a businessman means that at some point he will agree to a deal. Seminar participants also reaffirmed previous Chinese trade policy offers to further open the country’s financial and automotive sectors, though not in ways that would impact China’s industrial modernization program, called Made in China 2025. They also suggested that China would be willing to tighten its intellectual property rules so as to foster innovation within China as well as protect foreign technologies from counterfeiting and other illegal copying.

China is insisting that the parameters of any negotiations be limited, and that the tariff threat be removed before a final deal can be struck.

Chinese officials have reached out to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who has reacted positively to China’s overtures in the auto and financial sectors. Mr. Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive who will be on the Trump administration’s team in Beijing later this week, has sought to calm investors worried that the rhetoric between Washington and Beijing could break out into a full-blown trade war.

The U.S.-China Trade Conflict: How We Got to This Point

American companies want a level playing field with their Chinese counterparts. China wants to build its industries into sophisticated global competitors. This week, both countries demonstrated a willingness to escalate trade tensions to defend their positions.

China’s position is that the bilateral trade imbalance arises from differences in savings rates. Households in China save roughly two-fifths of their income. Americans, on average, save almost nothing. So money from China tends to flow to the United States, buying factories, technology companies, real estate and more, and Americans in turn spend much of that money to buy goods from China. Many economists in the United States, including some at the Treasury, share that view.

A worker making carbon fiber on a production line in Lianyungang, in China’s Jiangsu province. The material is used in aerospace and other applications. The Chinese government is frustrated with Mr. Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on $150 billion in Chinese goods. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By contrast, many trade lawyers, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and Mr. Trump contend that the trade deficit stems to a large extent from unfair practices, including cheap loans by state-controlled banks to exporters.

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China is ready to discuss shrinking the $375 billion annual trade deficit. But it wants to do so by buying more high-tech American goods. Washington has long blocked such deals because of concerns that they may have military value. China is also willing to buy more oil, natural gas, coal and other goods from the United States, and to help finance the extra pipelines and other infrastructure that would be needed to move them to China.

A senior Chinese government official said that Beijing is unwilling to negotiate with the United States on any curbs on Made in China 2025, which includes large-scale government assistance to favored industries in advanced-technology manufacturing. China perceives the American demands as an attempt to stop China’s economic development and technological progress, the senior Chinese official said.

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Germany and other countries also have industrial policies, and the United States has not objected to them, he added. American and European officials have argued that those policies elsewhere are much narrower and less ambitious.

Other advisers and officials said that the United States had misunderstood the Made in China 2025 industrial policy. They expressed hope that it might be possible to resolve differences by explaining the program better and making very small tweaks to it — a stance that still may not appease the Trump administration.

The Chinese government is not simply throwing money, land and other resources to favored industries like robotics, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and aircraft manufacturing, they said. China is engaged instead, they contended, in a carefully thought-out program that measures potential profits for each dollar of investment. So China’s program bears some resemblance, they said, to private sector investment programs in the West.

One subject was repeatedly and conspicuously avoided by all officials throughout the seminar, even when advisers occasionally speculated about it: whether China might someday try to link trade disputes to national security issues.

China has been deeply involved in international pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, an issue of high importance to the Trump administration. Beijing also wants to someday assert control of Taiwan, a self-governing democracy that Beijing regards as a renegade territory.

Tsinghua University’s new Academic Center for Chinese Economic Practice and Thinking organized the seminar, which was held at Tsinghua and two other venues in western Beijing. President Xi graduated from Tsinghua, which is in Beijing and is China’s top university, and he has filled much of the senior ranks of his government with Tsinghua professors and graduates.

In some respects, the hard stance struck by Chinese officials reflects a hardening of public attitudes in China.

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In mid-April, the United States barred American companies from selling their wares to a Chinese telecom equipment maker, ZTE. The move is seen as potentially crippling to the Chinese company, which needs American chips and software to power the smartphones and equipment it sells around the world.

Washington officials cited ZTE’s repeated violations of sanctions against Iran and North Korea, but many in China saw it as a reminder by the United States that sizable sectors of the Chinese economy still rely on American-made goods. Much of the Made in China 2025 policy is aimed at reducing that dependence.

The ZTE case “has changed a lot of Chinese people’s opinion,” said Mr. Ruan, of the China Institute of International Studies. “In the past, people saw us as interdependent.”

Follow Keith Bradsher on Twitter: @KeithBradsher.

Chris Buckley contributed reporting.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/business/china-trump-trade-talks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News

Critic’s Notebook: Michelle Wolf Did Her Job. It’s the Correspondents’ Dinner That Is the Problem.

April 30, 2018 by Leave a Comment

Ms. Wolf’s most controversial jokes were about the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, partly because she made them to her face. Ms. Sanders was on the dais in place of Mr. Trump, who counterprogrammed the dinner with a campaign rally in Michigan.

The jokes were personal, yes, because character is personal.

Comparing Ms. Sanders to Aunt Lydia, the rigid enforcer for a misogynist state on “The Handmaid’s Tale,” jabs at Ms. Sanders’s role, not her looks. (The regal Ann Dowd, one of TV’s best character actresses, deserves better than that assumption.) Likewise her dig that Ms. Sanders “burns facts, and then she uses the ash to create a perfect smokey eye” (unless “perfect” is now an insult). And likening her to a gym coach browbeating White House reporters was, like Melissa McCarthy’s imitation of Sean Spicer, a sendup of a public figure’s public performance.

Ms. Sanders, after all, is an adult woman who freely chose the job of spokeswoman for the president. That job once involved defending Mr. Trump’s tweet that claimed the “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski came to see him “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” The president, Ms. Sanders said, “fights fire with fire.” (Ms. Brzezinski nonetheless tweeted in Ms. Sanders’s support.)

If only Ms. Wolf had a Sarah Huckabee Sanders of her own. Instead she has the W.H.C.A., a group whose essential work is undermined by its highest-profile event, which is perennially trapped between provocation and caution, between the thirst to be edgy and the need to be liked.

The dinner — carried, probably unwisely, on live TV — is a multicourse tasting menu of mixed messages. It argues passionately for reporting without fear or favor, but shows reporters hobnobbing with their subjects like “Great Gatsby” extras. (The Times has not attended in a decade.)

It takes some doing to emerge from one event painted as simultaneously partisan and toothless, elitist and crude, adversarial and complicit. But the dinner somehow pulls it off.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/arts/television/michelle-wolf-white-house-correspondents-dinner.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business

IMF blasts New Zealand’s ‘discriminatory’ ban on home sales to foreigners

April 30, 2018 by Leave a Comment

In its annual report, the IMF criticized the measure, claiming that “foreign buyers seem to have played a minor role in New Zealand’s residential real estate market recently.”

If the government’s broader housing policy agenda is fully implemented, that “would address most of the potential problems associated with foreign buyers on a less discriminatory basis,” it said.

New Zealand bans new offshore oil gas exploration

Home prices in New Zealand have risen dramatically by around 60 percent since the financial crisis. The increase came as a result of a combination of factors, including limited supply, low interest rates fueling a boom in borrowing, and foreign speculation.

Under the Overseas Investment Act which was proposed last year, the government of New Zealand plans to slash immigration and focus on regional development and job creation. If the act becomes law, it will bring New Zealand into line with neighboring Australia.

The law would classify residential land as “sensitive,” which means non-residents or non-citizens can’t purchase existing dwellings without the consent of the Overseas Investment Office. Non-resident foreigners will be allowed to invest in new construction but they will be forced to sell once the homes are built.

IMF Mission Chief Thomas Helbling said a ban is a “very definitive measure” and could send a negative signal to foreign investors more broadly.

“Foreign direct investment, trade, commerce abroad involves various dimensions, including employee housing,” he said. “I find it difficult to assess that signal, but that’s one thing perhaps to worry about.”

Selling the land is also a sensitive issue for Australia due to concerns that foreign investors are buying up properties to meet the growing food demand in Asia.

Last year, the Australian government blocked the purchase by a Chinese-led consortium of 11 million hectares belonging to the country’s largest private landowner.

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/425529-new-zealand-home-sales/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business
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