Electric vehicles are only as great as the charging network available to those who buy them. We’ve seen different companies roll out charging stations at destinations all over the U.S., and now BMW is adding its name to the list (again) with plans to launch 100 electric vehicle charging stations at National Parks throughout the nation. The first of those … Continue reading
The folks at the Facebook innovation lab “Building 8” have announced Project: Hear With Your Skin, one of two projects aimed at new types of communication. “Two projects focused on new capabilities of communication” is what the folks at Building 8 (B8) are suggesting this set is all about – the other is “Project: Type With Your Brain”. With Project: … Continue reading
Even in the proudly freaky domain of performance art, Hermann Nitsch is an odd bird. Since the 1960s, his pagan performances have incorporated the carcasses, blood and entrails of slaughtered animals into elaborate aesthetic rituals resembling botched orgies or alien religious ceremonies. The Austrian artist, who has been arrested three times for his work, is no stranger to controversy.
Nitsch’s newest performance, part of his ongoing “Orgy Mystery Theater” series, just might be his most gag-reflex-triggering yet. The three-hour piece, titled “150.Action,” will feature 500 liters of bull blood as well as an actual slaughtered bull.
“Action” participants, who Nitsch calls “disciples,” are invited to dress in white and engage with the bloody mess by bathing in blood, butchering dead animals, whatever floats your boat. The performance will involve a bizarre buffet of blood, semen and guts, a visceral event at once pleasurable, horrifying, pornographic, spiritual and grotesque.
Nitsch’s work is slated to run in June as part of the Museum of Old and New Art’s Dark Mofo festival in Tasmania, but a petition by Animal Liberation Tasmania is calling on the Hobart city council to ban the literal blood bath.
The appeal reads: “We are opposed to this event, which trivializes the slaughter of animals for human usage, and condemns a sentient being to death in the pursuit of artistic endeavors.” It had received over 9,000 signatures at the time of this article’s publication.
Though an actual bull will need to be killed for this debauched sensory overload, Dark Mofo creative director Leigh Carmichael told ABC Radio Hobart that reports of a “live slaughter” are incorrect. Instead, the animal will be “slaughtered humanely” at a local butchery before the performance, he explained, adding that the blood used in the performance would also be locally sourced.
Despite this clarification, Peter West, the general manager of animal welfare group RSPCA Tasmania, is still concerned with what will happen to the carcass after it’s slaughtered.
“I think the difficulty we have is the respect shown to the animal with this action, that’s the challenge that we have with this particular artwork,” West told Guardian Australia. “It’s clearly not respectful to the beast and even though it has been humanely and respectfully dispatched, what happens after that is anything but respectful.”
Surely no bull wants its life to end with a crowd of young art enthusiasts bathing in its blood, but for Nitsch, such an action evokes intensified sensations that are often muted in everyday life, feelings that get to the core of what it means to be a human being.
“I want my work stir up the audience, the participants of my performances,” the artist told Hyperallergic in 2014. “I want to arouse them by the means of sensual intensity and to bring them an understanding of their existence. Intensity is an awakening into being.”
As of now, Dark Mofo remains unsurprised by the controversy Nitsch’s performance has provoked and has no plans to cancel the performance. As Carmichael explained, the festival will “not shy away from presenting work that challenges us to consider the ethical implications of our actions both today, and in the past… Some artists use paint, he uses blood and meat.”
Barring cancelation, Nitsch’s “150.Action” will run in Hobart as part of Dark Mofo from June 8 to June 21. “Action” attendees ― all of whom must be 18 years or older ― may even be able to feast on the freshly butchered meat itself, if the museum can sort out the details with Australian health and safety regulations.
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Rising sea levels have overtaken some of America’s most iconic landmarks in a series of mock travel posters released by a Boulder, Colorado-based marketing agency this week.
The project offers a dark prediction of the country’s future if U.S. lawmakers ignore climate research. Designers at Walden Hyde created the posters for purchase a few years ago and re-released them on the firm’s website for free this week in anticipation of this weekend’s nationwide March for Science.
Lucia Robinson, co-founder of Walden Hyde, designed the posters with the company’s art director, Stephanie Sizemore. She said activists are welcome to use the “fun free art” during demonstrations and hopes the project will drum up support for federal funding of climate science.
“Climate change can be a really scary topic,” Robinson said. “It’s an issue that will increasingly impact every part of our lives both environmentally and socially.”
The Environmental Protection Agency’s estimates for sea level rise by the end of the century range between 1 and 4 feet, with an uncertainty range of 0.66 to 6.6 feet. Some researchers argue that earlier predictions don’t sufficiently account for Antarctica’s melting ice and that a more accurate estimate is over 6 feet of sea level rise if greenhouse gas emissions don’t decrease.
In one poster, a kayaker paddles his way through Utah’s iconic Arches National Park, while scuba divers in another surreal scene explore a submerged Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The posters may be a dramatic representation, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has provided a tool to map what could actually happen to our coastlines and landmarks if sea levels rise up to 6 feet.
Thousands of people are expected gather in Washington and other cities across the country during the March for Science this Saturday, which is Earth Day. Participants in the nationwide day of action will call on U.S. lawmakers to embrace and form policies based on scientific evidence.
“Climate action initiatives introduced by the Obama administration are at risk of being rolled by back right now,” said Robinson, who plans to attend Denver’s science march this weekend. “We’d like to see those left in the place, and for the U.S. to take a leadership role in climate science.”
Environmentalists have spoken out against President Donald Trump and his administration’s regressive stance on climate change. Trump has vowed to “revive” America’s coal industry and signed an executive order last month to review the Obama administration’s signature program to combat climate change.
Meanwhile, EPA head Scott Pruitt, who sued the agency he’s now running over a dozen times during his tenure as Oklahoma’s attorney general, has denied that human activity is the principal cause of climate change ― dismissing a theory that 97 percent of climate scientists agree on. Last month, Pruitt intensified his anti-science stance, claiming that carbon dioxide doesn’t play a major role in global warming.
Pruitt, along with Trump adviser Stephen Bannon, has been a driving force behind the administration’s reluctance to support the 2015 Paris climate accord, in which nearly 200 countries pledged to cut back their carbon emissions to limit global warming.
Walden Hyde called its posters a “contribution to climate science advocacy” in a statement to The Huffington Post. You can download them for free on the agency’s website.
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Forget your mundane birthday cake because this woman just slayed the competition.
Sabrina Hersi Issa decided to have her cake in the image of one of Rep. Maxine Waters’ most iconic tweets.
The tweet, which the Democratic congresswoman sent in response to Bill O’Reilly’s tasteless insult about her hair, reads, “I am a strong black woman. I cannot be intimidated, and I’m not going anywhere.”
Issa, CEO of digital agency Be Bold Media, told Mic that she was so inspired by Waters’ words that she commissioned bakery Cakeroom to decorate her coconut layer cake to look like the tweet.
Issa said she spent years feeling “low” and “stuck” on her birthdays. But now, she uses her cakes for expression and inspiration. Last year, she put a quote from writer Rebecca Traister on her cake. This year, she didn’t plan on using a quote, but “Maxine Waters kept being America’s hero and giving me all the life.”
“When I reflected on what energy and ethos I wanted to bring into my year ahead, I kept circling back to Maxine Waters and her style of unapologetically delivering necessary truths,” she told Mic. “I thought of all the black women leaders I know who lead boldly day in and day out, I thought this is the leadership and energy I want to elevate and honor on my birthday. This is what we all need to source within ourselves.”
The California rep even wished Issa a happy birthday on her Instagram page.
Hope the cake was as delicious and empowering as it looks, sis.
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Bill O’Reilly will no longer be employed at Fox News, the network’s parent company 21st Century Fox said in a statement Wednesday. The decision comes after allegations of him sexually harassing female colleagues prompted protests outside network headquarters and a mass exodus from advertisers.
“After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the Company and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning to the Fox New Channel,” the statement read.
O’Reilly had said mid-April that he was taking a vacation. The official departure from Fox is an unceremonious end for the host, who had anchored the top-rated cable news show “The O’Reilly Factor” since its inception more than 20 years ago. His stunning exit mirrors that of former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, who launched Fox News in 1996 and abruptly left the network last summer amid widespread sexual harassment allegations.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson will take over O’Reilly’s 8 p.m. time slot next Monday, Fox confirmed. “The O’Reilly Factor” will continue this week with guest hosts Dana Perino on Wednesday and Thursday, and Greg Gutfeld on Friday.
Following a bombshell New York Times report earlier this month indicating O’Reilly and Fox News have paid around $13 million in settlements to address complaints brought by five of his former female colleagues, advertisers began fleeing the show. Within days, more than 50 companies announced they would no longer air spots during the show.
New York magazine reported that Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, had advocated for keeping O’Reilly on board, while sons James and Lachlan had pushed for his departure.
Though 21st Century Fox had pledged to clean up Fox News following the Ailes scandal, the Times revealed that the company continued to privately settle lawsuits with O’Reilly accusers and even renewed the host’s contract, reportedly at more than $20 million a year.
The entertainment and media giant presumably stuck with O’Reilly because he has been a cash cow for Fox News. He’s the linchpin of the network’s primetime lineup and his top-rated show is major draw when it comes to negotiating fees to carry the channel with cable and satellite providers. And “The O’Reilly Factor” brought in around $111 million in advertising dollars over a three-year period.
But advertisers quickly began to feel the pressure from consumers following the Times report and allegations from a sixth woman, Wendy Walsh, who held a press conference two days after the story was published online.
Mercedes-Benz was the first to announce its departure from the show’s ad schedule. “The allegations are disturbing and, given the importance of women in every aspect of our business, we don’t feel this is a good environment in which to advertise our products right now,” spokeswoman Donna Boland said.
“Fox News was forced to act,” Media Matters president Angelo Carusone said Wednesday. “Without advertisers, Bill O’Reilly’s show was no longer commercially viable. Fox News had no choice but to fire O’Reilly. Accountability came from the outside, not from within. Fox News deserves no accolades, only scorn for the industrial-scale harassment they have forced their employees to endure.”
In initial responses to the Times’ report that O’Reilly inappropriately propositioned women and retaliated against them when they turned him down, both he and the network issued statements saying no accusers ever called Fox’s internal hotline, an 800 number employees can use to anonymously report concerns.
Following the Times’ report, 21st Century Fox announced Sunday that law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison would conduct an investigation into the claims of Walsh, a former guest on O’Reilly’s show who accused him of reneging on a promise to get her a contributor deal after she rebuffed his advances.
On Tuesday, civil rights attorney Lisa Bloom said that an African-American former clerical worker at Fox News, who remains anonymous, had claimed O’Reilly leered at her and called her “hot chocolate.”
Bloom, who also represents Walsh, submitted a request for a second, independent probe to the New York State Division of Human Rights.
That request comes as the U.S. attorney’s office in New York is already investigating 21st Century Fox over whether the company properly notified investors about payments made to Ailes’ accusers.
The recent allegations against O’Reilly aren’t the first time he was dogged by claims of sexual harassment. In 2004, O’Reilly settled a lawsuit filed by former Fox News producer Andrea Mackris, which contended that he spoke to her about sexual fantasies and masturbation.
And Fox News has faced an advertiser boycott before. In a campaign led by the racial justice organization Color of Change in 2009, advertisers began leaving former host Glenn Beck’s show after he called then-President Barack Obama a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
But O’Reilly and Fox News weren’t able to weather this latest scandal, which occurred in a different media environment.
“We weren’t in the same type of social media climate that we are in now,” Rashad Robinson, the executive director of Color of Change, told The Huffington Post earlier this month. “The speed and pace of people’s interest is different because of the participation age … Companies are hearing from their consumers directly through Twitter.”
This is a breaking story. Check back for updates.
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It’s a poorly kept secret that Bill O’Reilly was not popular at Fox News. Sure, he was popular with Fox News viewers. But internally, many staffers have long loathed the bombastic host, holding their nose and putting up with him because his ratings regularly make him the top dog in cable news.
It’s not hard to understand why so many Fox News employees recoiled at O’Reilly. While there are new women who have come forward recently to accuse him of sexual harassment, O’Reilly’s behavior has long been known. The New York Times reported that the network “has been aware of complaints about inappropriate behavior by Mr. O’Reilly since at least 2002, when Mr. O’Reilly stormed into the newsroom and screamed at a young producer.”
The most well-known incident dates back to 2004, when a producer named Andrea Mackris filed a lawsuit against O’Reilly alleging sexual harassment. Mackris’ lawsuit said, among other things, that O’Reilly engaged in unwanted phone sex with her while using a vibrator.
Still, the network kept him around.
Even beyond these incidents, O’Reilly often made clear his contempt for women. On his radio show in August 2006, he commented on the rape and murder of a young woman, suggesting that she shared some of the blame because of her intoxicated state and what she was wearing:
Now Moore, Jennifer Moore, 18, on her way to college. She was 5-foot-2, 105 pounds, wearing a miniskirt and a halter top with a bare midriff. Now, again, there you go. So every predator in the world is gonna pick that up at two in the morning. She’s walking by herself on the West Side Highway, and she gets picked up by a thug. All right. Now she’s out of her mind, drunk.
I wrote about O’Reilly’s comments in 2009 when I worked for the site ThinkProgress, tied to the news that he was slated to speak at a fundraiser to benefit rape survivors. In return, O’Reilly sent his producer, Jesse Watters, to track me down and ambush me while I was on vacation in another state a few weeks later.
O’Reilly never contacted me in advance for comment, and Watters never identified himself as being with The O’Reilly Factor. He did, however, launch immediately into questions about why I was causing “pain and suffering” to rape survivors and their families.
Apparently, O’Reilly’s way of showing that he is a friend to women who have been victims of crimes was to send his male producer to follow a young woman who lived alone across state lines while she was on vacation. He then aired multiple segments on me, accusing me of being a “villain.” Fearing for my safety at the time, my employer took extra security precautions and encouraged me to buy pepper spray.
And of course, his treatment of women isn’t the whole story. There’s also how he has treated people of color over the years as well. (His shock that a soul food restaurant in Harlem was no different from other restaurants in New York City ― “even though it’s run by blacks” ― gives you a taste of what he thought.)
For years, Fox News deliberately looked the other way on O’Reilly. What’s amazing isn’t that O’Reilly finally lost his show, it’s that he was allowed to keep it for so long.
And despite O’Reilly’s attempt to ruin me, unlike him, I still have a job today.
Want more updates from Amanda Terkel? Sign up for her newsletter, Piping Hot Truth, here.
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Bill O’Reilly weathered sexual harassment charges for more than a decade, but not this time: Fox News has fired the controversial host.
The media company was under extreme pressure from advertisers, protesters and its own employees ― all fed up with a company culture that enabled O’Reilly’s misbehavior for too long.
But behind all that was the growing power of women, more emboldened than ever before, to protest sexual harassment and assault. For this, at least in part, we can thank President Donald Trump.
Trump’s surprise victory in November sparked a massive wave of energy among progressives, activists and especially women, outraged that the reality TV star had won office despite more than a dozen sexual assault accusations, a record of strikingly misogynistic comments and insults, and a damning video in which he boasted of grabbing women by their genitals and kissing them without consent.
You’d think that Trump’s election would have sent the message that speaking up doesn’t matter. Instead, it galvanized an already growing movement.
“I never thought a man who openly bragged about committing sexual assault could get elected,” said Karin Roland, chief campaigns officer for UltraViolet, a women’s group that helped organize several anti-O’Reilly petitions and protests at Fox News headquarters in New York on Tuesday.
“Women are now trying to figure out how to make [sexual misconduct] something that would doom a future presidential candidate or aspiring athlete or a Fox News host,” Roland said.
Pussy-gate was supposed to doom Trump. Last summer, after the tape of his bragging about grabbing women by the genitals was made public, thousands of women shared their own stories of sexual assault on Twitter and other social media. It was a natural next step. For at least the past couple of years, more and more women have been coming forward to tell their own stories of sexual assault and harassment.
Long-silenced women told horrifying stories about Bill Cosby in 2015, for example. Roland also pointed to the furor over Stanford student Brock Turner, who served just three months of a lenient six-month sentence for sexual assault last year. His victim bravely spoke up.
Trump’s election only added fuel to the fire.
“Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two steps forward,” said Amy Siskind, president of The New Agenda, a nonprofit women’s group. She’s been working on women’s issues for close to a decade, after leaving a career on Wall Street. “There is a level of engagement and awakening now,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
The pressure on Fox News to dump O’Reilly began in earnest soon after a bombshell New York Times report on April 1 revealed that the network and the news host had together paid out $13 million to five different women who accused him of inappropriate behavior over a decade and a half. The women alleged that O’Reilly had targeted them with verbal abuse and lewd comments ― even phone calls in which he could apparently be heard masturbating.
Two of the O’Reilly settlements happened after Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes was ousted from the company. Female employees had accused Ailes of sexual misdeeds, including firing host Gretchen Carlson after she declined his sexual advances. At the time, Fox said it would no longer tolerate this kind of misconduct.
The New York Times story was a tipping point for advertisers, said Rashad Robinson, executive director of the racial justice nonprofit Color of Change. His group had been pressing companies to stop running ads on “The O’Reilly Factor” for two years, after reports emerged that the news host had lied about being attacked by protesters during riots in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Another group that got on Fox’s case, Sleeping Giants, is actually a loosely organized group of volunteers who came together after Trump’s win to push advertisers to abandon Breitbart News.
The Times story was hard for advertisers to ignore, Robinson said. As more of them pulled their spots from O’Reilly’s show ― over 80 have dropped out ― the media ramped up its coverage, Robinson said.
Recently, Color of Change created a call line for Fox News employees to report harassment and placed ads online that geo-targeted social media users at Fox headquarters. Robinson hoped the ads were hard for Fox’s human relations department to ignore. “We wanted to encourage employees to speak out,” he said.
The ads look like this:
On Tuesday night, O’Reilly dismissed the idea that Americans were angry at him for good reason. In a statement, his lawyer said they had “uncovered evidence that the smear campaign is being orchestrated by far-left organizations bent on destroying O’Reilly for political and financial reasons.” Yet to come: the promised “irrefutable evidence” of that.
But more Fox News employees and contributors have been talking, activists say. Earlier on Tuesday, a black woman who’d once worked at the network said O’Reilly had called her “hot chocolate” and made repeated comments about her appearance.
Adding to the pressure on Fox was Megyn Kelly’s example: The rising star left the company in January in part because of O’Reilly’s behavior.
“Women are fired up,” Roland said.
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Hosting the White House’s news conferences isn’t always easy for press secretary Sean Spicer. Fortunately, Rob Gronkowski was there Wednesday to make sure he didn’t drop the ball.
The New England Patriots tight end made a surprise appearance during the daily press briefing, obviously startling the press secretary.
“Need some help?” the NFL star asked after unexpectedly popping out of a side door in a suit and tie.
“I think I got this, but thank you,” Spicer replied, as the room broke into laughter.
After Gronk’s exit, Spicer had to ask for a moment to recompose himself.
“All right, that was cool,” Spicer conceded, appearing slightly red-faced. “How do you follow that?”
Gronkowski was joining other members of the Patriots at the White House as President Donald Trump recognized the team’s February Super Bowl LI victory.
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“Girl Meets World” actress Rowan Blanchard is not your typical Disney child star. Ever since penning an essay about intersectional feminism on Tumblr, Blanchard has been anything but shy when it comes to discussing socio-political issues with her fans on social media.
In an interview with Nylon, the 15-year-old actress revealed that ever since “Girl Meets World” was canceled she’s been able to express herself and her opinions more freely, which she feels especially passionate about in today’s political climate. She explained, “as much as I loved my ‘Girl Meets World’ family, working for the Disney Channel is stressful, and I have more freedom to do what I want and talk about what I want without feeling inhibited.”
Blanchard has been particularly vocal about subjects relating to the LGBTQ community, gender equality and racial equality, and points out the importance of openly discussing important societal issues:
If Hillary Clinton had won, things would have obviously been much better, but now that we have somebody who’s the pinnacle of racism, sexism, xenophobia — all of this — we’re able to have conversations about where that started, and it was a long, long time ago.
So what are her thoughts on celebrities who remain tight-lipped about similar issues, like Taylor Swift infamously not endorsing a candidate during the 2016 election?
Specifically with celebrities that have so much power, I’m like, Maybe you wanna do something with that. But I’m not super-duper concerned with Taylor Swift as much as I am getting young girls to identify with [politics] for themselves.
As for her sexuality, Blanchard embraces the term queer and identifies as such. “I just don’t understand why you’re straight or gay,” she said. “I don’t understand why you want me to be one of two things. What is the driving force behind binaries?”
You can read her full interview here and see for yourself why this Disney star is wise beyond her years and one to watch out for.
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