Month: June 2017

Sweet Sizzlin’ Beans! Fancy Names May Boost Healthy Dining

Posted on by Cosc

Researchers tried a big serving of food psychology and a dollop of trickery to get diners to eat their vegetables. And it worked.

Veggies given names like “zesty ginger-turmeric sweet potatoes” and “twisted citrus-glazed carrots” were more popular than those prepared exactly the same way but with plainer, more healthful-sounding labels. Diners more often said “no thanks” when the food had labels like “low-fat,” “reduced-sodium” or “sugar-free.”

More diners chose the fancy-named items, and selected larger portions of them, too, in the experiment last fall at a Stanford University cafeteria.

“While it may seem like a good idea to emphasize the healthiness of vegetables, doing so may actually backfire,” said lead author Bradley Turnwald, a graduate student in psychology.

Other research has shown that people tend to think of healthful sounding food as less tasty, so the aim was to make it sound as good as more indulgent, fattening fare.

Researchers from Stanford’s psychology department tested the idea as a way to improve eating habits and make a dent in the growing obesity epidemic.

“This novel, low-cost intervention could easily be implemented in cafeterias, restaurants, and consumer products to increase selection of healthier options,” they said.

Study’s details

The results were published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The study was done over 46 days last fall. Lunchtime vegetable offerings were given different labels on different days. For example, on one day diners could choose “dynamite chili and tangy lime-seasoned beets.” On other days, the same item was labeled “lighter-choice beets with no added sugar,” “high antioxidant beets,” or simply “beets.”

Almost one-third of the nearly 28,000 diners chose a vegetable offering during the study. The tasty-sounding offering was the most popular, selected by about 220 diners on average on days it was offered, compared with about 175 diners who chose the simple-label vegetable. The healthy-sounding labels were the least popular.

Diners also served themselves bigger portions of the tasty-sounding vegetables than of the other choices.

Turnwald emphasized that “there was no deception” — all labels accurately described the vegetables, although diners weren’t told that the different-sounding choices were the exact same item.

The results illustrate “the interesting advantage to indulgent labeling,” he said.

Dr. Stephen Cook, a University of Rochester childhood obesity researcher, called the study encouraging and said some high school cafeterias have also tried different labels to influence healthy eating.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise to us because marketing people have been doing this for years,” Cook said.
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U.S. Bank Bosses Succumb to Email Hoaxer

Posted on by Coeco

The bosses of Wall Street banks Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are the latest executives to fall victim to an email prankster who has also managed to connect with the head of Barclays and the governor of the Bank of England.

While neither Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein nor his Citi counterpart Michael Corbat revealed any sensitive information, the exchanges will raise questions about the way banks’ computer systems handle emails to addresses outside their companies.

Blankfein was drawn into the simple hoax when he replied to an email purporting to be from his company’s president and co-chief operating officer, Harvey Schwartz, congratulating him on a tweet that Blankfein wrote last week on a trip to China about the country’s impressive infrastructure.

“Tweet won some online award for humorous tweet — Trump will be so pissed ;)” the anonymous hoaxer, who used the Twitter handle @SINON_REBORN, said in a published exchange on the social media site pretending to be Schwartz.

New to Twitter

Blankfein, who only recently joined Twitter, replied to whom he thought was Schwartz, saying he had tweeted when he landed in China because it “seemed like a good way to bookend my trip.”

When asked about the incident, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs in New York said: “In the aftermath of the elections in France and England, I would have thought Reuters had more consequential events to report on.”

The prankster then attempted to draw in Corbat and Citi’s head of global consumer banking, Stephen Bird, by masquerading as Citi’s chairman Michael O’Neill.

Couldn’t open link

The hoaxer sent Corbat and Bird an online article from British newspaper CityAM about the exchange between Blankfein and the emailer, according to the prankster’s Twitter feed.

Corbat replied that he couldn’t open the link.

Bird replied: “Can never be too careful Mike. Hope that’s our real Chairman!” He then went on to describe Citi’s email filtering system before commenting on Blankfein’s mishap.

“At least Lloyd was responsive … in the new economy that’s something. Some of his peers are still getting their messages printed out.”

A spokeswoman for Citi in New York confirmed the existence of the email exchange but declined to comment further.

Hoax prompts changes

Due to concerns about hoaxing and security, a small group of the Wall Street elite refuses to say anything substantive in an email, text or chat, and some will not communicate digitally at all, Reuters reported in November.

Last month, Barclays chief Jes Staley became the first high profile executive to be caught out by the prankster, and the bank reportedly responded by tightening its computer security so employees get a warning whenever they are sending messages to someone outside the firm.

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney was also targeted and replied to an email he believed was from the head of the central bank’s internal oversight body, Anthony Habgood. In his response, Carney poked fun at the drinking habits of one of his predecessors.
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Cybersecurity Firms Warn of Malware That Could Cause Power Outages

Posted on by Cobiz

Two cybersecurity firms said they have uncovered malicious software that they believe caused a December 2016 Ukraine power outage, warning that the malware could be easily modified to harm critical infrastructure operations

around the globe.

ESET, a Slovakian anti-virus software maker, and Dragos Inc, a U.S. critical-infrastructure security firm, on Monday released detailed analyses of the malware, known as Industroyer or Crash Override. They said they had also issued private alerts to governments and infrastructure operators in a bid to help them defend against the threat.

They said they did not know who was behind the December Ukraine cyberattack. Ukraine has blamed Russia, though officials in Moscow have repeatedly denied blame.

Still, the security firms warned there could be more attacks using the same approach, either by the group that built the malware or copycats who modify the malicious software.

“The malware is really easy to re-purpose and use against other targets. That is definitely alarming,” said ESET malware researcher Robert Lipovsky. “This could cause wide-scale damage to infrastructure systems that are vital.”

Dragos founder Robert M. Lee said the malware is capable of attacking power systems across Europe and could be leveraged against the United States “with small modifications.”

It is capable of causing outages of up to a few days in portions of a nation’s grid, but is not potent enough to bring down a country’s entire grid, Lee said.

With modifications, the malware could attack other types of infrastructure including local transportation providers, water and gas providers, Lipovsky said.

Industroyer is only the second piece of malware uncovered to date that is capable of disrupting industrial processes without the need for hackers to manually intervene after gaining remote access to the infected system.

The first, Stuxnet, was discovered in 2010 and is widely believed by security researchers to have been used by the United States and Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear program.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s state cyber police said it was not clear whether the malware was used in the December 2016 attack because the security firms had not provided authorities with the samples they had analyzed.

Representatives with Ukraine’s state-run Computer Emergency Response Team, which advises businesses on defending against cyberattacks, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Kremlin and Russia’s Federal Security Service did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

Crash Override can be detected if a utility specifically monitors its network for abnormal traffic, including signs that the malware is searching for the location of substations or sending messages to switch breakers, according to Lee, a former U.S. Air Force cyber warfare operations officer.

Malware has been used in other disruptive attacks on industrial targets, including the 2015 Ukraine power outage, but in those cases human intervention was required to interfere with operations.

ESET said it had been analyzing the malware for several months and had held off on going public to preserve the integrity of investigations into the power system hack.

It said it last week shared samples with Dragos, which said it was able to independently verify that it was used in the Ukraine grid attack.
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Unseen Stage Managers Keep Broadway Shows on Track

Posted on by Corts

Broadway’s highest honor – the Tony Awards – were presented Sunday night in New York. Recognition also went to a lot of people who work behind the scenes on Broadway – writers, directors and designers.  But there are some people who work behind the scenes who go unheralded.

People like stage managers, who are usually in the wings, sitting at a desk covered with video monitors and lots of buttons and switches, wearing a headset — known as the “God mike” — to communicate with the cast and crew. 

“I like to think of a stage manager as the chief operations officer of the corporation that is the show,” says Ira Mont, stage manager of the long-running musical Cats.

Donald Fried has a different image of his job for the Tony-nominated play Sweat. “I also like to think of the stage manager as the captain of the Enterprise.”

 

Karyn Meek, production stage manager for another Tony-nominated work, the musical Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, calls the position ‘the hub of the wheel.’

“We are the person in charge of communication across all departments and also management and to the cast as well,” Meek says. “During the show, we are in charge of making sure the lights happen, the set moves, sound happens, all the things that we are the person who’s controlling all of that as well as somebody who’s backstage supervising the crew. So, it is a multifaceted, multilayered job and sort of a jack-of-all-trades.”

 

Involved from before the run to final curtain

Long before a show starts its run, the stage manager is an integral part of the rehearsal process, says Fried – in his case, with Lynn Nottage’s Sweat.

“Everything begins and ends with the script,” he says. “I gotta read the script, read it several times. Once, just to read it as a person, not as a stage manager or an artist or anything. Just to have an initial emotional feeling for it. Then, I go back and read Lynn’s stage directions so that I know what would happen light-wise, how she envisions the props, how she envisions the set moving, people entering and exiting, whether or not they’re changing costumes.”

 

Once a show is up and running, Karyn Meek says stage managers and their teams put in long hours. “Well, my day started today at 9:30 with the cast beginning to tell me that they were going to be in or out of the show based on injuries or sicknesses or things like that. … And then we have a matinee or rehearsal ends at about 5 or 5:30, have a dinner break, and then come back and do it again.”

 

Shows that feature complicated choreography or simulated fight scenes require daily rehearsals. Over at Sweat, Donald Fried is supervising one of them. “We’ll do a fight call before every show, because there’s a big fight,” he explains. “We want to make sure everyone is safe and limber, and that the props are working.”

In the half hour before each performance, the stage manager walks through a beehive of activity, making sure everyone’s ready for curtain. And as actors vocalize and stretch backstage and orchestra members tune up, Karyn Meek climbs a ladder to her perch, high above stage left at Great Comet. Actors perform throughout the theater and from up there, she can keep an eye on them all. Once the show starts, Meek follows a musical score, with post-it notes showing the hundreds of lighting, sound and tech cues she’ll call for during each performance.

From the front of the stage to backstage

Many stage managers started out doing other things. Karyn Meek was a costume designer; Donald Fried, a dancer; Ira Mont, an actor. So, Mont was used to getting applause. Even though he does not get any now, he would not want to do anything else.

“I don’t expect or look for praise or acknowledgement,” he admits. “I am here to support the shows I work on and the actors who do them, and that’s what gives me the joy. And I’m very fortunate to have had a 30-year career in a profession that is not easy to get into and is not easy to stay in. I’m a lucky guy.”
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Living Drugs New Frontier for Cancer Patients Out of Options

Posted on by Cosc

Ken Shefveland’s body was swollen with cancer, treatment after treatment failing until doctors gambled on a radical approach: They removed some of his immune cells, engineered them into cancer assassins and unleashed them into his bloodstream.

 

Immune therapy is the hottest trend in cancer care and this is its next frontier – creating “living drugs” that grow inside the body into an army that seeks and destroys tumors.

 

Looking in the mirror, Shefveland saw “the cancer was just melting away.” A month later doctors at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center couldn’t find any signs of lymphoma in the Vancouver, Washington, man’s body.

“Today I find out I’m in full remission – how wonderful is that?” said Shefveland with a wide grin, giving his physician a quick embrace.

 

This experimental therapy marks an entirely new way to treat cancer – if scientists can make it work, safely. Early-stage studies are stirring hope as one-time infusions of supercharged immune cells help a remarkable number of patients with intractable leukemia or lymphoma.

 

“It shows the unbelievable power of your immune system,” said Dr. David Maloney, Fred Hutch’s medical director for cellular immunotherapy who treated Shefveland with a type called CAR-T cells.

 

“We’re talking, really, patients who have no other options, and we’re seeing tumors and leukemias disappear over weeks,” added immunotherapy scientific director Dr. Stanley Riddell. But, “there’s still lots to learn.”

 

T cells are key immune system soldiers. But cancer can be hard for them to spot, and can put the brakes on an immune attack. Today’s popular immunotherapy drugs called “checkpoint inhibitors” release one brake so nearby T cells can strike. The new cellular immunotherapy approach aims to be more potent: Give patients stronger T cells to begin with.

 

Currently available only in studies at major cancer centers, the first CAR-T cell therapies for a few blood cancers could hit the market later this year. The Food and Drug Administration is evaluating one version developed by the University of Pennsylvania and licensed to Novartis, and another created by the National Cancer Institute and licensed to Kite Pharma.

 

CAR-T therapy “feels very much like it’s ready for prime time” for advanced blood cancers, said Dr. Nick Haining of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who isn’t involved in the development.

 

‘There’s a desperate need’

Now scientists are tackling a tougher next step, what Haining calls “the acid test:” Making T cells target far more common cancers – solid tumors like lung, breast or brain cancer. Cancer kills about 600,000 Americans a year, including nearly 45,000 from leukemia and lymphoma.

 

“There’s a desperate need,” said NCI immunotherapy pioneer Dr. Steven Rosenberg, pointing to queries from hundreds of patients for studies that accept only a few.

 

For all the excitement, there are formidable challenges.

 

Scientists still are unraveling why these living cancer drugs work for some people and not others.

 

Doctors must learn to manage potentially life-threatening side effects from an overstimulated immune system. Also concerning is a small number of deaths from brain swelling, an unexplained complication that forced another company, Juno Therapeutics, to halt development of one CAR-T in its pipeline; Kite recently reported a death, too.

 

And, made from scratch for every patient using their own blood, this is one of the most customized therapies ever and could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“It’s a Model A Ford and we need a Lamborghini,” said CAR-T researcher Dr. Renier Brentjens of New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, which, like Hutch, has a partnership with Juno.

 

In Seattle, Fred Hutch offered a behind-the-scenes peek at research underway to tackle those challenges. At a recently opened immunotherapy clinic, scientists are taking newly designed T cells from the lab to the patient and back again to tease out what works best.

 

“We can essentially make a cell do things it wasn’t programmed to do naturally,” explained immunology chief Dr. Philip Greenberg. “Your imagination can run wild with how you can engineer cells to function better.”

 

Two long weeks to brew a dose

 

The first step is much like donating blood. When leukemia patient Claude Bannick entered a Hutch CAR-T study in 2014, nurses hooked him to a machine that filtered out his white blood cells, including the T cells.

 

Technicians raced his bag of cells to a factory-like facility that’s kept so sterile they must pull on germ-deflecting suits, booties and masks just to enter. Then came 14 days of wait and worry, as his cells were reprogrammed.

 

Bannick, 67, says he “was almost dead.” Chemotherapy, experimental drugs, even a bone marrow transplant had failed, and “I was willing to try anything.”

 

Genetically engineering cells

 

The goal: Arm T cells with an artificial receptor, a tracking system that can zero in on identifying markers of cancer cells, known as antigens. For many leukemias and lymphomas, that’s an antigen named CD19.

 

Every research group has its own recipe but generally, scientists infect T cells with an inactive virus carrying genetic instructions to grow the desired “chimeric antigen receptor.” That CAR will bind to its target cancer cells and rev up for attack.

 

Millions of copies of engineered cells are grown in incubators, Hutch technicians pulling out precious batches to monitor if they’re ready for waiting patients.

 

If they work, those cells will keep multiplying in the body. If they don’t, the doctors send blood and other samples back to researchers like Riddell to figure out why.

 

What’s the data?

 

Small, early studies in the U.S. made headlines as 60 percent to 90 percent of patients trying CAR-Ts as a last resort for leukemia or lymphoma saw their cancer rapidly decrease or even become undetectable. Last week, Chinese researchers reported similar early findings as 33 of 35 patients with another blood cancer, multiple myeloma, reached some degree of remission within two months.

 

Too few people have been studied so far to know how long such responses will last. A recent review reported up to half of leukemia and lymphoma patients may relapse.

There are long-term survivors. Doug Olson in 2010 received the University of Pennsylvania’s CAR-T version for leukemia. The researchers were frank – it had worked in mice but they didn’t know what would happen to him.

 

“Sitting here almost seven years later, I can tell you it works,” Olson, now 70, told a recent meeting of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

 

Bannick, the Hutch patient treated in 2014, recalls Maloney calling him “the miracle man.” He had some lingering side effects that required blood-boosting infusions but says CAR-T is “giving me a second life.”

 

Scary side effects

 

“The more side effects you have, that sort of tells everybody it’s working,” said Shefveland, who was hospitalized soon after his treatment at Hutch when his blood pressure collapsed. His last clear memory for days: “I was having a conversation with a nurse and all of a sudden it was gibberish.”

 

As CAR-T cells swarm the cancer, an immune overreaction called “cytokine release syndrome” can trigger high fevers and plummeting blood pressure and in severe cases organ damage. Some patients also experience confusion, hallucinations or other neurologic symptoms.

 

Treatment is a balancing act to control those symptoms without shutting down the cancer attack.

 

Experienced cancer centers have learned to expect and watch for these problems. “And, most importantly, we’ve learned how to treat them,” said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society, who is watching CAR-T’s development.

 

Fighting solid tumors will be harder

 

CAR-Ts cause collateral damage, killing some healthy white blood cells, called B cells, along with cancerous ones because both harbor the same marker. Finding the right target to kill solid tumors but not healthy organ tissue will be even more complicated.

 

“You can live without some normal B cells. You can’t live without your lungs,” Riddell explained.

 

Early studies against solid tumors are beginning, targeting different antigens. Time-lapse photos taken through a microscope in Riddell’s lab show those new CAR-T cells crawling over aggressive breast cancer, releasing toxic chemicals until tumor cells shrivel and die.

 

CARs aren’t the only approach. Researchers also are trying to target markers inside tumor cells rather than on the surface, or even gene mutations that don’t form in healthy tissue.

 

“It’s ironic that the very mutations that cause the cancer are very likely to be the Achilles heel,” NCI’s Rosenberg said.

 

And studies are beginning to test CAR-Ts in combination with older immunotherapy drugs, in hopes of overcoming tumor defenses.

 

How will patients get the first CAR-T therapies?

 

If the FDA approves Novartis’ or Kite’s versions, eligible leukemia and lymphoma patients would be treated at cancer centers experienced with this tricky therapy. Their T cells would be shipped to company factories, engineered, and shipped back. Gradually, more hospitals could offer it.

 

Because only certain patients would qualify for the first drugs, others would have to search for CAR-T studies to try the treatment. A drug industry report lists 21 CAR-T therapies in development by a dozen companies.

 

“This is the hope of any cancer patient, that if you stay in the game long enough, the next treatment’s going to be just around the corner,” said Shefveland, the Hutch patient.
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Study: Nearly Third of World’s Overweight Risk Illness, Death

Posted on by Cosc

Nearly a third of the world’s population is obese or overweight and an increasing number of people are dying of related health problems in a “disturbing global public health crisis,” a study said on Monday.

Some 4 million people died of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and other ailments linked to excess weight in 2015, bringing death rates related to being overweight up 28 percent on 1990, according to the research.

“People who shrug off weight gain do so at their own risk,” said Christopher Murray, one of the authors of the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In 2015, excess weight affected 2.2 billion people equal to 30 percent of the world’s population, according to the study.

Almost 108 million children and more than 600 million adults weighed in as obese, having a body mass index (BMI) above 30, said the research that covered 195 countries.

More than 60 percent of fatalities occurred among this group, the study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington found.

BMI is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared, and is an indication of whether a person has a healthy weight.

A BMI score over 25 is overweight, over 30 is obese and over 40 is morbidly obese.

According to the World Health Organization, obesity has more than doubled since 1980, reaching epidemic proportions.

Obesity rates among children were increasing faster than among adults in many countries, including Algeria, Turkey, and Jordan, the study said.

Meanwhile, almost 800 million people, including 300 million children, go to bed hungry each night, according to the United Nations.

Poor diets and sedentary lifestyles were mainly to blame for increasing numbers of overweight people, experts said. Urbanization and economic development have led to increasing obesity rates also in poor countries where part of the population doesn’t have enough to eat, as people ditch traditional, vegetable-rich diets for processed foods.

“People are consuming more and more processed foods that are high in sugar and fat and exercising less,” said Boitshepo Bibi Giyose, senior nutrition officer at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Research in Mexico, Brazil, China, South Korea and Britain by London-based Overseas Development Institute has shown that the cost of processed foods like ice cream, hamburgers, chips and chocolate has fallen since 1990, while the cost of fresh fruit and vegetables has gone up.
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Researchers Say Power-grid-wrecking Software Discovered

Posted on by Cobiz

Researchers say they’ve discovered a worrying breed of power grid-wrecking software, saying the program was likely responsible for a brief blackout that hit Kyiv, Ukraine, late last year.

 

Slovakia-based computer security company ESET and Maryland-based Dragos, Inc. said in a report published Monday that the malicious software has the ability to control the switches and circuit breakers – a nightmare scenario for those charged with keeping the lights on.

 

Policymakers have long ranked malware that can remotely sabotage industrial computers among some of the world’s most dangerous threats because of its potential to deal immense damage across the internet.

 

The researchers stopped just short of blaming the malware for the Ukrainian power outage on December 17, 2016.

 

Ukrainian officials didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment on the report.
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US Top Court Rules for Microsoft in Xbox Class Action Fight

Posted on by Cobiz

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of Microsoft Corp in its bid to

fend off class action claims by Xbox 360 owners who said the popular video game console gouges discs because of a design defect.

The court, in a 8-0 ruling, overturned a 2015 decision by the San Francisco- based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed console owners to appeal the dismissal of their class action lawsuit by a federal judge in Seattle in 2012.

Typically parties cannot appeal a class certification ruling until the entire case has reached a conclusion. But the 9th Circuit allowed the console owners to voluntarily dismiss their lawsuit so they could immediately appeal the denial of a class certification.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing on behalf of the court, said such a move was not permitted because a voluntary dismissal of a lawsuit is not a final decision and thus cannot be appealed.

The Xbox console owners filed a proposed class action against Microsoft in federal court in 2011, saying the design of the console was defective and that its optical disc drive could not withstand even small vibrations.

The company said class certification was improper because just 0.4 percent of Xbox owners reported disc scratches, and that misuse was the cause.
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Cosby Defense Rests Without Calling Comedian to Testify

Posted on by Corts

Bill Cosby’s lawyers put on a case consisting of just one witness and six minutes of testimony Monday, wrapping up the defense side in the sexual assault trial without the comedian himself taking the stand.

 

The jury was expected to hear closing arguments next and could get the case in the afternoon.

 

The question going into Monday’s proceedings was whether Cosby hismelf would testify – a high-stakes gamble that could have allowed him to work his charm on the jury but could have also exposed him to blistering cross-examination.

 

With Cosby’s wife of 53 years, Camille, looking on from the gallery for the first time in the 6-day-old trial, he told a judge that he made the decision not to take the stand after talking it over with his lawyers.

 

Judge Steven O’Neill asked Cosby a series of questions designed to make sure he was aware of his right to testify and wasn’t pressured into deciding against it. Cosby spoke loudly as he answered, responding “YES!” or “NO!”

 

The defense called just one witness, the detective who led the 2005 investigation into allegations that Cosby drugged and violated Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home.

 

Detective Richard Schaffer was one of 12 witnesses who testified during the five-day prosecution case. In a six-minute appearance Monday, Shaffer told jurors under defense questioning that Constand had visited with Cosby at an out-of-state casino and that police knew he had vision problems more than a decade ago.

 

The judge shot down a defense request to call a second witness, a woman who worked with Constand at Cosby’s alma mater, Temple University.

 

Cosby could spend the rest of his life in prison if convicted of molesting Constand in 2004. He has said the encounter was consensual.

 

Constand, 44, told her side of the story over some seven hours on the witness stand.

 

The question hanging over the trial Monday was whether the TV star himself would testify. Cosby’s spokesman suggested last week that the comic might take the stand, but his lawyers were mum.

 

Experts had said the legal risks would be considerable.

 

“He could be a fantastic witness. … He’s an actor and he’s a very good actor,” Duquesne University School of Law professor Wes Oliver said ahead of Monday’s court session. But “he is potentially opening the door to a whole lot of cross-examination that they fought really hard to keep out.”

 

Prosecutors wanted 13 other accusers to testify at the trial, but the judge allowed just one, an assistant to his agent at the William Morris Agency.

 

The defense’s main goal in the prosecution phase of the case was to attack the credibility of Constand and the other accuser, Kelly Johnson.

 

Johnson had corroborating evidence in the form of her 1996 workers’ compensation claim. A lawyer on the case recalled her startling account of being drugged and sexually assaulted by Cosby, but his notes revealed a glaring discrepancy in the account. He said the encounter occurred in 1990, while Johnson insists it was 1996.

 

The defense had more trouble trying to discredit Constand, 44. Cosby’s lawyers hammered home the point that she doesn’t know just when it happened, and they questioned why she had regular phone contact with Cosby later that spring, including more than 50 calls to him.

 

Constand said she had to return calls from the Temple University trustee because he was an important booster and she worked for the women’s basketball team.

 

She filed a police complaint in January 2005 after moving back home to the Toronto area, and then sued Cosby in March 2005 when the local prosecutor decided not to charge him.

 

Cosby’s testimony in her civil case showed just how hard a witness he would have been to control. His answers, like his comedy routines, meandered and veered toward stream of consciousness.

 

And he used jarring language to describe his sexual encounters with various young women. He spoke in the deposition of “the penile entrance” and “digital penetration.” And he displayed hints of arrogance.

 

“One of the greatest storytellers in the world and I’m failing,” Cosby said when asked to repeat an answer in the deposition.

 

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand and Johnson have done.

 
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2 Corporate Sponsors Pull Support From Trump-Like ‘Julius Caesar’

Posted on by Corts

Two corporate sponsors have pulled their support for a controversial New York Public Theater production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that depicts Caesar as U.S. President Donald Trump.

Delta Air Lines and Bank of America pulled their long-standing sponsorship of New York’s Public Theater amid criticism the play crosses a line in its depiction of the grisly assassination of the Trump-Caesar character.

“No matter what your political stance may be, the graphic staging of ‘Julius Caesar’ at this summer’s Free Shakespeare in the Park does not reflect Delta Air Lines’ values,” the company said in a statement late Sunday.

“Their artistic and creative direction crossed the line on the standards of good taste,” the company continued. “We have notified them of our decision to end our sponsorship as the official airline of the Public Theater effective immediately.”

Soon after Delta’s announcement, Bank of America, a sponsor for 11 years, pulled its financial support of the theater.

“The Public Theater chose to present Julius Caesar in a way that was intended to provoke and offend,” spokesman Susan Atran told the New York Times. “Had this intention been made known to us, we would have decided not to sponsor it. We are withdrawing our funding for this production.”

The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., also weighed in on Twitter questioning how the Public Theater is funded.

“I wonder how much of this “art” is funded by taxpayers?” he tweeted. “Serious question, when does ‘art’ become political speech & does that change things?”

In addition to Caesar made to look like Trump, the play includes a character that resembles First Lady Melania Trump.

The play is set to officially open Monday as part of the Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in the Park festival. It has been running in previews since May 23.

The controversy comes amid several scandals involving anti-Trump stunts, including comedian and CNN personality Kathy Griffin posing with a severed head that looked like Trump and a CNN contributor, Reza Aslan, using profanity to describe the president in a tweet. CNN severed ties with both.
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ILO: Children Risk Exploitation Most in Asia, Africa

Posted on by Coeco

The International Labor Organization (ILO) reports children caught in conflict and natural disasters are most at risk of child labor and of falling prey to trafficking, sexual exploitation and abuse. To mark the World Day Against Child Labor, the ILO is calling on governments to eliminate the worst forms of child labor.

The world is facing its greatest refugee and displacement crisis, with more than 65 million people forcibly displaced by war and persecution. Children are among those most at risk of exploitation from the breakdown of family and social systems, the loss of homes, schools, and livelihoods.

The ILO reports an estimated 168 million children are in child labor globally, including 85 million engaged in the worst forms of child labor. This includes the use of children who work in slave-like conditions, in hazardous work, such as mining and agriculture, and in the use of children in combat or as prostitutes.

The ILO reports child labor is most prevalent in Asia and Africa.

ILO Senior Technical Officer on Crisis and Fragile Situations Insaf Nizam told VOA children are particularly abused in situations of conflict in Africa, where many are recruited as child soldiers by armed groups in conflicts such as Somalia, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

“We also have seen certain armed groups using children for extreme types of violence as suicide bombers or forcibly recruiting them as brides and for sexual slavery.  So, the types of violations against children have increased in diversity,” he said.

Nizam said children also are recruited as soldiers and suffer other forms of exploitation in conflicts in Asia and the Middle East.  But he noted in countries such as the Philippines and Myanmar in eastern Asia, children run greater risks from natural disasters.

“You get a lot of displacement of children.  Families lose their livelihoods.  Their community networks are lost.  They are displaced.  Communities become poor overnight.  They lose their sources of income.  Schools are either damaged or destroyed due to natural disasters.  So, there children are pushed easily because of that,” he said.

Nizam said conflicts tend to grab world attention more quickly than natural disasters.  This, he said, is especially true of slow onset disasters, such as drought, climate change and floods.  

He added these situations are as harmful as conflicts to children, who are easily exploited by nefarious people.
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GE CEO Immelt Stepping Down, Flannery to Take Over Role

Posted on by Coeco

General Electric says Jeff Immelt is stepping down as CEO and John Flannery, president and CEO of the conglomerate’s health care unit, will take over the post in August.

 

The 61-year-old Immelt will stay on as chairman until his retirement from the position at the end of the year, with the 55-year-old Flannery stepping into the role after that.

 

Immelt has been at the helm of the conglomerate for 16 years, overseeing a transformation that included selling many of the company’s units. Over that time, General Electric sold its insurance, credit card, plastics and security divisions.

 

It also invested more heavily in new technologies, including a recent $1.65 billion acquisition of LM Wind Power, a Denmark-based manufacturer of rotor blades for wind turbines.

 

Flannery is a longtime General Electric executive, starting his career at GE Capital in 1987. He became president and CEO of the company’s equity unit in 2002 and eventually joined the health care unit in 2014, focusing on advanced technologies.

 

In addition, Chief Financial Officer Jeff Bornstein was named vice chair and Kieran Murphy was named president and CEO of GE Healthcare to succeed Flannery.

 

GE said Monday that the moves were part of its succession plan.

 

Shares of General Electric Co. climbed more than 3 percent in premarket trading. They are down about 7.6 percent over the last 12 months.

 

 
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Protests by Indian Farmers Highlight Rural Distress

Posted on by Coeco

They were no common protests. As angry farmers dumped milk and vegetables on the streets in India’s western Maharashtra state and six farmers were killed by police in Madhya Pradesh state when they blocked roads and burnt vehicles, the spotlight has turned on growing rural distress in the country.

The protests flared unexpectedly when bumper harvests following a good monsoon were supposed to augur well for rural prosperity.

But the opposite has happened: a price crash due to the crop glut not just wiped away any prospect of a profit but left farmers struggling to pay back loans which they often raise to buy seeds, fertilizers and other inputs to plant crops.

Low crop prices

The violence witnessed last week was a rare eruption of anger in the rural community in a country whose economy is the world’s fastest-growing, but where tens of millions of farmers are coping with stagnating incomes as they struggle to make a living off small land holdings.

Experts say decades of neglect in crucial infrastructure in the farm sector has left behind India’s countryside. With no easy access to markets close to villages and few storage facilities, farmers say they are at the mercy of traders and middlemen who often do not give them a fair price for their produce.

“The farmer does not have the right to set the price. It is the middlemen who set the price. They buy my produce for Rs 10 per kilo and sell it for Rs. 20 or 30 to customers. This is a major problem in the country,” lamented Bhim Singh, a farmer in northern India. “There should be better marketing platforms for us.”

 

Once a week, he makes an 80 kilometer trip to Gurugram, a flourishing business hub near the capital New Delhi, where he sells directly to consumers to get a better price. But he says he is forced to dump the rest in a wholesale market for prices that barely cover his cost of cultivation.

Farmers always seem to suffer

“There is a strong pro-consumer bias in the system,” said agriculture economist Ashok Gulati at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations in New Delhi. “When there is a drought, as there was in 2014 and 2015, farmers suffer as production drops, and when there is a good harvest they suffer again as prices crash in the absence of commensurate storage and processing facilities or due to export restrictions.”

 

Rural experts have long urged the government to build more roads and markets closer to villages and storage facilities that will make it possible for them to sell produce at better prices when there is a bumper crop instead of resorting to distress sales as has happened this year.

Better roads and storage facilities needed

In fact, although food production has increased steadily in India making it self-sufficient, farmers incomes have lagged behind. New Delhi based agriculture expert Devender Sharma pointed out the average income of a farmer in 17 states, as per the government’s 2016 economic survey, is a meager Rs. 20,000 (about $300) per year.

“The real income of farmers is static for last 25 years. There is something terribly, terribly going wrong… he requirement is overhaul of agriculture policies. We need to give farmers his due income,” he points out.

Too many farmers

The low incomes are not surprising — too many people depend on agriculture for a living. Farming accounts for just 15 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product, but it supports more than half the country’s 1.3 billion people.

In a cover story this month, a leading news magazine, India Today, called India “No country for Farmers” and said the country “desperately needs another revolution in agriculture for the farmer to break out of his vicious cycle of misery.”

Reports of farmers committing suicide because they cannot repay their loans come in with alarming regularity.

 

Farmer Bhim Singh testified to the sense of despondency in his community. “My children don’t want to go into farming. They say they will toil as labor, work in factories, but they will not farm.”

State takes action after protests

In the wake of protests by farmers in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, the state governments have promised to write off bank loans and ensure farmers get better prices for their crops. In the northern Uttar Pradesh state, where elections were held earlier this year, the government has also promised to write off loans.

But this has triggered even greater anger among farmers in the rest of the country, said chief adviser to the Consortium of Indian Farmers Association, P. Chengal Reddy.

Disappointment with new prime minister

He said farmers had pinned high hopes on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had promised to address their problems when he was voted to office three years ago and has pledged to double farm incomes by 2022.

But farmers feel let down because on the ground nothing has changed. And the crash in prices of farm produce this year was for many he says “the last straw.”

“The dichotomy of India is that Indian agriculture is successful but farmers are angry, annoyed, disgusted, unhappy,” Reddy warned. “This [dumping of] vegetables and milk is only a beginning.”

 
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Bangladesh Trains Girls to Fight Online Predators

Posted on by Cobiz

Bangladesh has begun training thousands of school girls to protect them from being blackmailed or harassed online following an alarming rise in cybercrimes. 

Government officials recently finished conducting a pilot project in which female students from urban areas were taught how to keep themselves safe if faced with online threats.

“Most of the victims of cybercrime in our country are young girls. So, we decided to spread awareness among the girls first,” said Zunaid Ahmed Palak, state minister of the Information & Communication Technology (ICT) Division of Bangladesh’s Ministry of Post, Telecommunication & Information Technology. “In this pilot project, over 10,000 girls from 40 schools and colleges took part in our workshops and we got a massive response. Now we have our target to take this campaign across the whole country involving 40 million students in 170,000 schools and colleges.”

Internet growth

Bangladesh has experienced a double-digit growth in internet use every year in the past 15 years and almost half of the social media users in the country are women and teenage girls, but authorities say they make up about 70 percent of cybercrime victims.

Mishuk Chakma, a cybersecurity expert of Dhaka Metropolitan Police said the boyfriends of the Facebook-using girls often trick them into posing for intimate photographs or videos.

“Later, when their relationships are on the rocks, their former boyfriends post the photos and videos in the social media to emotionally blackmail the girls. Such photos and videos often trigger troubles in the lives of the girls after they get into new relationships or get married,” Chakma told VOA. “In such a situation many marital relationships are getting into troubles and even in a few cases the girls are taking extreme steps like attempting suicide.”

Sahana, a 15-year-old who took part in an ICT-organized workshop, said she feels she has benefitted from the training. 

“I shall verify one’s identity in many ways before I accept his or her Facebook ‘friend request’ now. Now I have also learned that I should not disclose much of my personal information on Facebook,” she said. “Also, I am quite confident now that none can harass or blackmail me on Facebook.”

Raising awareness

Sometimes the criminals are superimposing faces of the girls, who are known to them, onto the bodies of nude models or adult film stars to blackmail and defame the girls, Chakma said.

“Cyber harassment of girls and women can be effectively curbed if the spread of awareness among the social media users increases,” he said.

ICT hired cybersecurity consulting agency Four D Communications to conduct the recent training of the 10,000 girls.

Abdullah Al Imran, managing director of Four D Communications, said apart from learning how to defend themselves online, the girls also learned how to bring cyber criminals to justice. 

“Very surprisingly we found that as much as 93 percent of the girls who participated in the training did not know that Bangladesh already has an ICT Act to help cyber harassment victims. We also taught them where and how they would seek help in case they were harassed or blackmailed online,” Imran said. “Girls mostly from urban areas took part in our pilot project. I am sure, in smaller towns and rural areas the Internet literacy level among girls is even lower and they are more vulnerable there.”

But lawyer Tureen Afroz, an advocate in Dhaka’s Supreme Court, said the government should tighten or update laws to deal with the growing cybercrime.

“Indeed it’s a good initiative that the government is trying to educate the girls and raise awareness among them about the growing trend of cybercrimes.  But, the government also needs to revamp the judiciary to achieve higher rate of success in fight against such crimes,” she said. “We are still unable to make the best use of smarter electronic evidences to pin down the cyber criminals in the court of law.”

Expansion

Senior officials say the government is keen to spread cyber safety awareness across the whole country.

Abul Mansur Mohammad Sharf Uddin, who heads the government’s cyber safety awareness campaign, said his department is busy on a blueprint to expand the campaign. 

“For the students, the contents on Internet literacy, which will be included to the national curriculum, will be ready soon. We want to introduce the course not just in schools and colleges, but also in over 100 universities of the country. We will also raise teachers across academic institutions of the country who will conduct cyber safety training classes for students locally,” Sharf Uuddin said.    
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Will Cosby Testify at Sex Assault Trial? Lawyers Remain Quiet

Posted on by Corts

Actor Bill Cosby could charm jurors at his sexual assault trial if he testifies this week, but experts say the risk would be considerable.

Accuser Andrea Constand has told her side of the story. The jury also heard Cosby’s version in the form of his police statement and his lurid deposition in her 2005 lawsuit. But will they hear from the 79-year-old actor himself when the defense starts Monday?

Cosby’s spokesman says maybe, but his lawyers remain mum.

“He could be a fantastic witness. … He’s an actor and he’s a very good actor,” said Duquesne University School of Law professor Wes Oliver. “(But) he is potentially opening the door to a whole lot of cross-examination that they fought really hard to keep out.”

Prosecutors wanted 13 other accusers to testify at the trial, but the judge allowed just one, an assistant to his agent at the William Morris Agency. That meant the prosecution rested its case on Friday, just five days after the trial began.

If Cosby testifies, and denies drugging and molesting Constand or anyone else, the judge might allow more accusers to testify as rebuttal witnesses.

“It would be very bad for him for the jury to even begin to think about the other women,” Oliver said.

The defense’s main goal this past week has been to attack the credibility of Constand and the William Morris assistant, Kelly Johnson. Johnson had corroborating evidence in the form of her 1996 worker’s compensation claim. A lawyer on the case recalled her startling account of being drugged and sexually assaulted by Cosby, but his notes revealed a glaring discrepancy in the account. He said the encounter occurred in 1990, while Johnson insists it was 1996, the year she left her job.

The defense had more trouble trying to discredit Constand. They hammered home the point that she doesn’t know just when it happened, and they questioned why she had regular phone contact with Cosby later that spring. Constand said she had to return calls from the Temple University trustee because he was an important booster and she worked for the women’s basketball team.

She filed a police complaint in January 2005 after moving back home to the Toronto area, and then sued Cosby in March 2005 when the local prosecutor decided not to charge him.

Cosby’s testimony in her civil case shows just how hard a witness he would be to control. His answers, like his comedy routines, meander from point to point and veer toward stream of consciousness.

And he uses jarring language to describe his sexual encounters with various young women. He talks in the deposition of “the penile entrance” and “digital penetration,” and he told Constand’s mother, when she called to confront him, that her daughter had had an orgasm. And he can display hints of arrogance.

“One of the greatest storytellers in the world and I’m failing,” Cosby said when asked to repeat an answer in the deposition.

The defense could call other witnesses to try to bolster their argument that Cosby had a consensual relationship with Constand, 35 years his junior.

The trial would move to closing arguments on Monday if they decide not to put anyone on the stand.

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand and Johnson have done.
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Katy Perry Opens Up on Livestream About Suicidal Thoughts

Posted on by Cosc

Katy Perry opened up about having suicidal thoughts during a marathon weekend livestream event.

 

“I feel ashamed that I would have those thoughts, feel that low, and that depressed,” she said Saturday on YouTube during a tearful session with Siri Singh from the Viceland series “The Therapist.”

 

The pop star has been livestreaming herself since Friday, filming her life for anyone with an internet connection to see. She’s been doing yoga, hosting dinner parties, sleeping, applying makeup and singing, of course.

 

By Sunday, the most revealing 60 minutes of the four-day “Katy Perry – Witness World Wide” event was her time with Singh.

 

Perry told Singh she struggles with her public persona. In the past, she said, she has had suicidal thoughts. She talked about the challenge of being her authentic self while promoting her public image as she lives “under this crazy microscope.”

 

“I so badly want to be Katheryn Hudson (her birth name) that I don’t even want to look like Katy Perry anymore sometimes – and, like, that is a little bit of why I cut my hair, because I really want to be my authentic self,” she said.

 

Perry is sporting a new short, blond hairstyle.

 

The YouTube event is a promotion for her new album “Witness.” The livestream will culminate in a free concert Monday in Los Angeles for 1,000 fans.
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Uber Discussing Leave for CEO, Reports Say

Posted on by Coeco

The board of Uber was meeting Sunday to consider placing the CEO of the ride-hailing company on leave, according The New York Times and other news outlets.

 

The Times reported that three people with knowledge of the matter have confirmed that Uber’s board was meeting to consider recommendations from a law firm hired to review Uber’s corporate culture and that the board may decide to put CEO Travis Kalanick on temporary leave.

 

The newspaper said its sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for Uber.

 

Uber Technologies Inc. has been rocked by accusations that its management has fostered a workplace environment where harassment, discrimination and bullying are left unchecked.

 

Uber spokesman Matt Kallman said that he wasn’t sure the company would make a statement after the meeting.

 

Reuters and the tech blog Recode reported the board meeting earlier. The Wall Street Journal also was citing unnamed sources about the meeting.

 

Uber has hired the law firm of former Attorney General Eric Holder to review policies and recommend changes. A report by his firm, Covington & Burling, was expected to be made public soon.

 

Uber announced last week that it fired 20 employees for harassment problems.

 

Under CEO Kalanick, Uber has shaken up the taxi industry in hundreds of cities and turned the San Francisco-based company into the world’s most valuable startup. Uber’s valuation has climbed to nearly $70 billion.

 

Management style at issue

But Kalanick has acknowledged his management style needs improvement. The 40-year-old CEO said earlier this year that he needed to “fundamentally change and grow up.”

 

In February, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler wrote on a blog that she had been propositioned by her boss in a series of messages on her first day of work and that superiors ignored her complaints. Uber set up a hotline for complaints after that and hired the law firm of Perkins Coie to investigate.

 

That firm checked into 215 complaints, with 57 still under investigation.

 

Uber has been plagued by more than sexual harassment complaints in recent months. It has been threatened by boycotts, sued and subject to a federal investigation that it used a fake version of its app to thwart authorities looking into whether it is breaking local laws.

Kalanick lost his temper earlier this year in an argument with an Uber driver who was complaining about pay, and Kalanick’s profanity-laced comments were caught on video.

 

In a March conference call with reporters after that incident, board member Arianna Huffington expressed confidence that Kalanick would evolve into a better leader. But Huffington, a founder of Huffington Post, suggested time might be running out.

 

He’s a “scrappy entrepreneur,” she said during the call, but one who needed to bring “changes in himself and in the way he leads.”

 

The board meeting comes fresh on personal tragedy in Kalanick’s life. His mother was killed in late May after the boat she and her husband were riding in hit a rock. Kalanick’s father suffered moderate injuries.

 

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Chief Business Officer Emil Michael is planning to resign as soon as Monday.

 

The company has faced high turnover in its top ranks. In March, Uber’s president, Jeff Jones, resigned after less than a year on the job. He said his “beliefs and approach to leadership” were “inconsistent” with those of the company.

 

In addition to firing 20 employees, Uber said Tuesday that it was hiring an Apple marketing executive, Bozoma Saint John, to help improve its tarnished brand. Saint John most recently was head of global consumer marketing for Apple Music and iTunes.
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Judy Garland Returns to Hollywood, Laid to Rest in Mausoleum

Posted on by Corts

Judy Garland has been laid to rest in a mausoleum named for her at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

 

A spokeswoman for Garland’s estate says her family and friends held a private memorial service for the actress Saturday, which would have been Garland’s 95th birthday. She was buried in the Judy Garland Pavilion.

 

Garland’s children, Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft and Joe Luft, wanted to bring their mother’s remains “home to Hollywood” from her original burial site at New York’s Ferncliff Cemetery, publicist Victoria Varela said. They attended the service, along with Garland’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

 

In a statement released to The Associated Press, they offered gratitude to their mother’s “millions of fans around the world for their constant love and support.”

 

Garland’s children announced earlier this year that they had relocated their mother’s remains to Los Angeles. Garland’s third husband, Mickey Deans, buried her in New York, but her children said she wished to be interred with her family in Hollywood, Varela said.

 

The Judy Garland Pavilion is intended as a final resting spot for Minnelli, Luft and other family members, cemetery spokeswoman Noelle Berman said in January.

 

Garland, star of classic films including The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me in St. Louis, died in 1969 at age 47 in London.

 

Jayne Mansfield, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino and Cecil B. DeMille are among the entertainment luminaries buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Rocker Chris Cornell was laid to rest there last month.
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Natural, Manmade Wonders in the Land of Enchantment

Posted on by Corts

Natural caves where desert natives once made their homes … places where massive boulders appear to rise up from the desert … ancient rocks inscribed with symbolic carvings … a once-active volcano where visitors can walk down into its center. These are just a few of the timeless wonders that national parks traveler Mikah Meyer recently visited during his journey through the southwestern state of New Mexico. He shared highlights with VOA’s JulieTaboh.
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Musicon Helps Disabled Children Enter the World of Music

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Music is as much about math, as it is about sound. It’s also about imagination and learning. But it’s out of reach for some disabled or physically challenged students, until now. A team of Polish inventors has created a push-button instrument that almost anyone can play. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Data Gathering Turns Zurich into Virtual City

Posted on by Cobiz

Do you ever wonder what could be done with all of those street views and Instagram photos of your favorite city? Well, a group of technical experts has taken all that data and turned it into an amazingly detailed 3D city map. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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South Korean Yekwon Sunwoo Wins Cliburn Piano Competition

Posted on by Corts

Pianists from South Korea and the United States took the top three places Saturday in the 15th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition held in Fort Worth, Texas, this past week.

Yekwon Sunwoo, 28, of South Korea claimed the gold medal, while Americans Kenneth Broberg and Daniel Hsu followed as silver and bronze medalists, respectively.

More than half a century ago, international relations between the United States and Russia warmed when a tall, soft-spoken young pianist from Texas claimed first prize at the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

Not long after, the piano competition that bears his name — Van Cliburn — was founded, attracting outstanding young talent from around the globe to compete for the coveted gold, silver and bronze medals every four years.

The competition began with 30 competitors, and the winners were announced Saturday evening.

As the gold medalist, Yekwon earns a $50,000 cash prize, Broberg, $25,000, and Hsu, $15,000. All three receive three years of professional concert management.

Leonard Slatkin, conductor and chairman of the jury, said the Cliburn competition, one of more than 200 piano competitions in the world, is an important one.

“Clearly the Cliburn is the premiere competition in the United States,” he notes. “It attracts the highest level. … The Cliburn ranks in a similar manner as, say, the Queen Elizabeth or the Tchaikovsky in terms of the international prestige it brings.”

​Life-changing and surreal

Twenty-five-year-old Rachel Cheung from Hong Kong, one of the finalists, said earlier this week that attending the competition would change her life, “because this is really the biggest competition in the world, and the engagements that would bring with winning it, would be very, very helpful to my career, and there will be a lot of opportunities and exposures.”

Hsu said being a finalist at the Van Cliburn competition was a bit surreal. 

“Even though it’s a competition, and there’s a lot of stress and preparation, but the overall feeling is just incredible and it’s a lot of fun, and I’m having a blast,” he said.

All of the competitors have played concerts. But for some, including Georgy Tchaidze, a 29-year-old finalist from Russia, playing in a competition is different from an ordinary performance.

“It’s all about pressure,” Tchaidze said. “Pressure is so high that sometimes you forget to enjoy the music. And music making is all about enjoying it. And to bring the joy and pass it to the audience.”

On the other hand, Hsu said he doesn’t approach a competition performance any differently from a concert.

“I’ve heard people say that, in competitions you should be more careful, and you should try and play for the jury. I didn’t particularly take that approach for this competition. I played how I felt in the moment, and how I thought the music should be portrayed.”

A life in music

Earlier this week, Yekwon said no matter the outcome of the competition, qualifying for the Cliburn validates a dedication to a life in music.

“My passion and love for music is just, deeply enough, and I can never get enough of it. You have to spend a lot of hours, and really such dedication to it,” she said.

Slatkin added that the Van Cliburn is not the be-all and end-all to a career.

“It should be just one possible step among many paths that the pianist can take. They wouldn’t have gotten this far if they weren’t good enough to be at the Cliburn.”
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