
By BY KATIE G. NELSON, MIKE SHUM, SAMEEN AMIN, DMITRIY KHAVIN AND BARBARA MARCOLINI from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2TTYlis
MINNEAPOLIS — Officials in Minnesota say no protesters appear to have been hit after a semitrailer drove into a crowd demonstrating on a freeway near downtown Minneapolis.
The Minnesota State Patrol says in a tweet that the action appeared deliberate. The patrol says the driver was injured and taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
It wasn’t clear how the driver was hurt. TV footage showed protesters swarming the truck, and then law enforcement quickly moving in.
Other TV footage showed the tanker truck moving rapidly onto the bridge and protesters appearing to part ahead of it.
The protesters were demonstrating against the death of George Floyd.
Universal continues to dig into its catalogue of horror classics on the heels of the success of "The Invisible Man."
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(NEW YORK) — A New York City police officer will face disciplinary charges for a violent arrest during a social distancing enforcement action that ended with him kneeling on a man’s back or neck, a technique similar to the one that led to George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis.
Several other officers involved will also face discipline, the department said Friday, after an internal affairs investigation into the caught-on-video confrontation May 2 in Manhattan’s East Village. Police did not specify what violations the officers are alleged to have committed.
Bystander video showed plainclothes officer Francisco Garcia pulling a stun gun on 33-year-old Donni Wright and leveling him in a crosswalk, slapping him in the face and punching him in the shoulder before dragging him to a sidewalk and kneeling on his backside to handcuff him.
Garcia was stripped of his gun and badge and placed on desk duty after the incident, which Mayor Bill de Blasio called “very troubling” and “absolutely unacceptable.” He could still face criminal charges.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office said Friday that it is “conducting an independent review of this incident.”
A message seeking comment was left with Garcia’s union.
The police disciplinary process sometimes involves an administrative trial, where a department employee acting as a judge hears testimony before deciding what, if any, punishment is warranted, such as a loss of vacation days all the way up to firing. The final decision is left to the police commissioner.
Wright was treated at a hospital after his arrest and has filed a notice of claim with the city, the first step before a filing a lawsuit. Prosecutors deferred charges resulting from his arrest pending further investigation.
Wright’s lawyer, Sanford Rubinstein, called the disciplinary charges a “step in the right direction” and said Garcia should be fired.
The Rev. Kevin McCall, an adviser to Wright’s family, said: “We want to send a clear message that Donni Wright could have been dead today. Before we were calling George Floyd’s name, we could’ve been calling Donni Wright’s name. Thank God he wasn’t also killed by the actions of the police.”
The video of Wright’s arrest was one of several that spurred outrage over the city’s use of police to enforce social distancing, along with data showing people of color were subject to the vast majority of distancing-related arrests and summonses in the city.
Read more: Police Data Reveals Stark Racial Discrepancies in Social Distancing Enforcement Across New York City
One video showed a police officer running at a black man and throwing him to the ground for mouthing off. Another showed an officer punching a man in the head as he lay pinned to a sidewalk, unable to fight back.
The city later altered its approach, telling officers to stop citing people for not wearing face coverings.
Minutes before the confrontation with Wright, video from a security camera showed officers using force to arrest a couple for allegedly failing to comply when asked to disperse. Police said officers saw that one of them had a “bag of alleged marijuana in plain view.”
Bystander video of Wright’s arrest showed Garcia helping take one of those people to the ground before turning to Wright, who was walking toward the area of that arrest from about 10 to 15 feet away.
Garcia turned toward Wright and cursed at him to “[get] back right now,” according to the video. At the same time, the officer pulled up his Taser and pointed it at Wright, possibly triggering the device. Garcia continued toward Wright and eventually holstered his Taser.
It wasn’t clear what Wright was doing because he wasn’t in the frame the entire time, though just before Garcia tackled him, he stopped and stood in front of the officer with what appeared to be a clenched fist at his side.
“What you flexing for? Don’t flex,” Garcia said, before grabbing Wright and wrestling him to the ground. Another officer then stepped in and helped handcuff Wright.
A police spokeswoman said shortly after the arrest that Wright “took a fighting stance against the officer” when he was ordered to disperse.
Over the years, Garcia been named as a defendant in six lawsuits that the city settled for a total of $182,500, according to court records and a Legal Aid Society database.
In a case similar to the May 2 incident, Garcia and other officers allegedly threw a man to the ground and then punched and kicked him. In another, Garcia was accused of throwing a woman against a metal grate and onto a sidewalk and using a homophobic slur after she asked for his badge number.
(Bloomberg) — Coty Inc. tumbled Friday after Forbes reported that Kylie Jenner allegedly provided the magazine with misleading financial information about her cosmetics brand.
Shares of Coty, which acquired a majority stake in Kylie Cosmetics last year, dropped 13% to close at $3.63, extending its 2020 decline to 68%.
The news report raises questions about one of Coty’s most visible brands as it seeks to overcome stagnating sales, changing consumer tastes and retail challenges caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The company, which took billions of dollars in writedowns last year, agreed this month to sell the Wella and Clairol brands to buyout firm KKR & Co. as part of a $4.3 billion deal, allowing it to focus on mass beauty and the Jenner brand. Last week, it launched the Kylie Skin beauty line in Europe.
Representatives at management company Jenner Communications and her publicist, Christy Welder, didn’t immediately reply to messages seeking comment, nor did Lisa Kessler, a spokeswoman for New York-based Coty.
“All I see are a number of inaccurate statements and unproven assumptions,” Jenner said Friday in one of several tweets responding to the Forbes report. “I can name a list of 100 things more important right now than fixating on how much money I have.”
Forbes spokesman Matthew Hutchison defended the report.
“Today’s extensively-reported investigation was triggered by newly filed documents that revealed glaring discrepancies between information privately supplied to journalists and information publicly supplied to shareholders,” he said in an email. “Our reporters spotted the inaccuracies and spent months uncovering the facts.”
Jenner, 22, a scion of the Kardashian family, became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire in March 2019 and agreed to sell a 51% stake in her cosmetics line to Coty in November. The $600 million deal valued her business at roughly $1.2 billion.
Some analysts questioned the price tag at the time and, on top of the recent writedowns, “any renewed suggestion they overpaid for Kylie Cosmetics will shake investors,” said Deborah Aitken at Bloomberg Intelligence.
The pandemic has diminished her net worth, leaving her with a fortune of less than $1 billion. Forbes said the social media star spent years inflating the size and success of her business to the magazine in order to boost its estimate of her wealth.
Jenner, in one of the tweets, said: “I’ve never asked for any title or tried to lie my way there EVER. Period.”
(NEW YORK) — In Steven Clay Hunter’s 23 years as an animator at Pixar, he has drawn a seven-armed octopus, a Canadian daredevil and a wheezing toy penguin. But there were scenes he never expected to animate until he began working on his short, Out.
Hunter wrote and directed the nine-minute Pixar film, which recently debuted on Disney+. It’s about a man named Greg who, while packing up to move, temporarily switches bodies with his dog, Jim. While frantically trying to hide evidence of his boyfriend, Manuel, Greg discovers the courage to reveal his sexual orientation to his parents.
Greg, who’s loosely based on Hunter, is Pixar’s first LGBTQ protagonist. And while Out includes some more typically Pixar material (a pair of rainbow animals, a cameo from Wheezy of Toy Story), it features images never seen before in the 25 years of the studio, or in the longer history of Disney. Like when Greg and his boyfriend, Manuel, hug each other.
“The first time I drew Greg and Manuel holding each other in the bedroom, I was bawling my face off,” says Hunter. “All this emotion came welling up because I realized I had been in animation for decades and I had never drawn that in my career. It just hit me.”
Out is a small movie on a streaming service, not one of Pixar’s global blockbusters. But it has already had an outsized impact and been celebrated as a milestone for inclusion in family entertainment. GLAAD called it “a huge step forward for the Walt Disney Company.”
“Out represents the best of Disney and Pixar’s legacy as a place for heartwarming stories about finding one’s own inner strength in the face of life’s challenges,” said Jeremy Blacklow, GLAAD’s director of entertainment media.
From his home in Oakland, California, Hunter, a 51-year-old animator making his directorial debut, has humbly taken in the warm responses. He managed to meet his producer, Max Sachar, for a celebratory, socially distanced glass of rose last weekend. But he’s been reluctant to talk about such a personal film.
“I felt like this was something I had to do,” said Hunter in one of his first interviews. “I didn’t come out until I was 27 and I’m 51 now, and I feel like I’m still dealing with it. You can’t hide who you are for half of your life and then not carry that baggage around. You’ve got to process it somehow. I got lucky enough to process it in the making of this movie.”
It’s part joke, part truth that Out is labeled “based on a true story.” The first shot is of a magical dog and cat jumping through a rainbow. Hunter has had a dog named Jim but, naturally, hasn’t experienced a canine Freaky Friday. But the central story is autobiographical.
“The relationship of Manuel and Greg is something I went through,” he says. “I wasn’t out to my family and I was in a relationship but they didn’t know about him. It took a toll on our relationship and we ended up breaking up because of that. And that break-up led to me coming out to my family, over the phone in a conference room at Pixar.”
Hunter first came up with the idea of a coming-out film five years ago. But it was the Pixar SparkShorts program, which is meant to discover new voices and experiment with different techniques, that presented Hunter with an opportunity. After working on the Spark short Purl, he pitched Out. It was greenlit and finished by December.
“It was cool that he was telling this coming out story but he was doing so while coming out as a filmmaker,” says Sachar. “It was really wonderful for everyone to be a part of and witness.”
LGBTQ characters have been increasingly appearing in Disney films but often do so fleetingly. Gaston’s sidekick LeFou (Josh Gad) was suggested to be gay in 2017’s live-action Beauty and the Beast. Pixar’s Onward, released earlier this year, featured what many consider Disney’s first outwardly gay animated character: a police officer voiced by Lena Waithe who refers to her girlfriend. Some Middle East nations banned the film.
Out, finally, is far more straightforward. It includes, for example, a tender kiss between Manuel and Greg. To animate it, Hunter approached Wendell Lee, the only other gay animator still at Pixar from Hunter’s early days with the company.
“I just went to him and said, ‘You’ve got to animate this.’ And he was like, ‘Heck yeah,’” says Hunter. “I said: I want a kiss. I don’t want a peck.”
Hunter recently watched Out with his family, who live in Canada, over Zoom. It was a moment of connection that he hopes plays out similarly for others during quarantine. For young and old, gay and straight, Out is about being proud of who you are, whoever you are.
Reflecting on the film’s significance, Hunter on Thursday noted the passing of playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer. Out, not coincidentally, came out on Harvey Milk Day.
“We’re just an extension of that. We’re moving toward more visibility. It doesn’t mean we’re taking over. We’re just trying to tell our stories like everyone else,” says Hunter. “And we’re not going anywhere. We’re here to stay.”
Being able to buy a washer/dryer, refusing to play into stereotypes for roles, the ability to say “no” -- that's how a few of Hollywood's most prominent Asian Americans have defined success over the course of their careers. In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May, Variety gathered prominent AAPI creatives Kumail Nanjiani […]
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