fortune--2020-05-29--Matthew Macfadyen, Sian Clifford go inside ‘Quiz,’ a very British heist drama

What could possibly make for more compelling television than Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the British game-show sensation in which contestants answered multiple-choice trivia questions in hopes of walking away with a million-dollar cash prize?
A) A high-stakes drama about the cunning couple (Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen and Fleabag’s Sian Clifford) who cheated their way to victory on said game show, a fellow contestant enabling the heist by strategically timing coughs to indicate the right answer.
B) The harrowing tale of that same couple—not so much cunning as lucky and quiz-obsessive—who, after producers doubted their unlikely victory on said game show, had their lives turned inside out by a media frenzy that branded them guilty long before they saw their day in court.
C) A show in which Michael Sheen, sporting a fake tan and bleached-blond wig, pulls off a truly uncanny impression of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? host Chris Tarrant, and seemingly has the time of his career doing so.
For those who think there should have been an option D, for “all of the above,” the answer is actually AMC’s Quiz, a three-part miniseries premiering May 31. Already a ratings hit in the U.K., where it aired last month as a three-night event, the Stephen Frears–directed miniseries looks at the 2001 case of Charles Ingram, better known as the “coughing major,” who was accused alongside his wife, Diana, of cheating his way to victory on an episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
From left: Sian Clifford as Diana Ingram, Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Ingram, and Michael Sheen as Chris Tarrant in “Quiz.” MATT FROST—AMC/ITV
Whether Charles and Diana Ingram were in fact guilty is the central mystery of Quiz, which writer James Graham adapted from his own stage play. But that’s far from the only question it poses, instead taking a broader approach to explore how the media’s rush to condemn this couple distorted the public’s perception of what actually occurred. Fortune spoke by phone with Macfadyen and Clifford about the series, the unique way in which Quiz tackles British tabloids, and what it was like to see Charles Ingram himself live-tweet their show.
While these interviews were conducted at separate times, they have been edited together and condensed for clarity.
We’re speaking a few days after Quiz was first broadcast in the U.K., where it was a ratings hit, drawing more than 5 million viewers across all three nights. It must be surreal to see this reception for a series that goes inside the biggest scandal to befall Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, a show that was once the country’s biggest TV event.
Sian Clifford: Our ratings went up every day, which is amazing. And, yeah, [Millionaire] was huge, wasn’t it? It totally captivated the nation, and I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that in that first episode, where we explore the creation of the show itself, that at one time a third of the country were watching it, which is insane. We obviously watch TV in a very different way now, but that was a thing where people would really sit down and watch it.
Matthew Macfadyen: It’s been lovely to have such a brilliant reception, partly because everyone’s been home, I reckon. I think a lot of people remember that show, which is still on, at a time when it was very popular. I think at its height, it was pulling in 19 million viewers a night, which is a lot. And people remember that event. Our show, Quiz, is also something the whole family can watch—and then argue about.
Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Ingram and Sian Clifford as Diana Ingram in “Quiz.” MATT FROST—AMC/ITV
When you both first read the scripts for Quiz, what about them persuaded you to get involved?
Macfadyen: They’re so eccentrically English, those people, and I thought it was beautifully, thoughtfully, wittily, and sensitively written by James Graham. And it was very different from what I’d been doing at the time, so that was a boon. And also, the cast, the other actors involved, I’d either worked with them before and loved them very much, or I was a big fan, as with Sian. It was a no-brainer, really.
Clifford: I think the vilification [the Ingrams] experienced is extraordinarily disproportionate to what was actually going on. They suffered so much, and it’s so ugly what they went through. It was very easy to cultivate empathy for them right from the offing, as soon as I read the script. You don’t have to dig very deep to uncover how awful it was, what happened to them. That was what most gripped me when I first read the script, because I had no idea. You don’t consider—or at least I certainly didn’t at that time, because I was a teenager—the human cost on the other side of these stories, and the way the press doggedly pursued these narratives and wrote their own narratives regardless of the truth, how dangerous that can be.
Macfadyen: There’s a very wonderful, skillful way in which James’s scripts suggested things that are quite deep and quite meaningful without beating you over the head with them. Stephen’s put the whole thing together with a real twinkle to it, where it’s almost like a caper. But it’s also an awful lot about truth, and what happens when truth is spun and sold.
“I think the vilification [the Ingrams] experienced is extraordinarily disproportionate to what was actually going on,” says Clifford. MATT FROST—AMC/ITV
Charles and Diana Ingram are still in the public eye today, as they challenge the verdict that court ultimately handed down in 2001. I understand that they came to set, but only on the last day of filming.
Clifford: We were asked right off the bat if we wanted to meet them. We knew they had a desire to come to set, to be involved. We decided the best thing to do would be for them to come right at the end. We thought that protected us, the integrity of James’s script and the project we were trying to create, and it also protected them, because it meant we couldn’t be influenced by them. And they seemed to just enjoy being on a set, seeing the inner workings of that. Our intention was never to impersonate them, but to emulate them in some way. We had to really rely on James’s script, but he’d put that script together with such tender care, that he’d captured them brilliantly, I have to say, having met them.
Macfadyen: I was a little nervous to meet him. I was pretending to be a real person, and I don’t know how I’d feel about somebody pretending to be me. But he was charming and very polite. It was a less than five-minute chat, in between takes, but it was lovely.
Charles Ingram was actually live-tweeting the broadcast, and he praised the accuracy of the series, calling it “significantly more accurate and just than the court ever was” at one point.
Macfadyen: I’m not in Twitter world, so I’m blissfully unaware of that.
Clifford: Charles sent me a message today! They’ve been nothing but kind and generous. I can’t overstate that. It’s all been lovely. I feel very lucky that I’m part of a project that’s been so balanced and so mindful of every single person involved. I know that all parties are happy, regardless of what side they’re on, which I think is an astonishing feat. Because everyone has been so sensitive and mindful throughout this process, I didn’t at any point feel concerned or compromised. I always believed everyone’s integrity was going to be protected.
“I was pretending to be a real person, and I don’t know how I’d feel about somebody pretending to be me,” says Macfadyen of meeting Charles Ingram. MARK JOHNSON—AMC/ITV
The series is structured in this fascinating manner where each episode introduces a different point of view, with its own perception of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and the events that transpired. You wind up with this panoramic view of the scandal.
Macfadyen: That’s right. You have to lay out the case for the prosecution, and the case for the defense. James had originally written a play, which came into the West End a few years ago. The audience members had keypads, and they were asked to vote as to their guilt or innocence at the interim, then again at the end. And it’s a similar structure in our TV series, showing different arguments.
And without spoilers, the third and final episode of Quiz complicates this central question of the Ingrams’ guilt or innocence, which their highly publicized trial had at one point been seen as answering.
Clifford: So many people are in turmoil today because I think in their own personal spheres they’ve never questioned this story. They’re having a kind of reckoning with themselves: “What does it mean if I’ve accepted that narrative that’s been sold to me by the press as true? If I don’t believe it anymore, what does that mean?”
“She was just painted as this Lady Macbeth, a calculating woman who led her husband into this mess,” says Clifford of playing Diana Ingram, a part she tried to approach with sensitivity. AMC/ITV
Sian, your portrayal of Diana is remarkable, and you bring out so many sides of her. You see her watching Charles compete on the show, helpless to weigh in as he struggles through questions and yet manages to find the right answer, seemingly out of nowhere. And as they’re bombarded by the media, you can feel Diana’s fear, how much the attention confuses and upsets her. How did you approach this role?
Clifford: I just wanted to be really sensitive to her. Honestly, I treated her with the same care I would any character. I think it’s not your job as an actor to comment on your character, ever. My job is to make them a three-dimensional person, and what was interesting about Diana is that she was never presented as that. But it was still my job to do that, so I had to create this three-dimensional person that people had never seen her as before. She was just painted as this Lady Macbeth, a calculating woman who led her husband into this mess. I knew intuitively to ignore anything that had been written about her, to try to get to the core of her. There was a Fiona Bruce documentary that was made about a year after their convictions in 2004, and I watched that probably a hundred times. I watched it over and over and over, to pick up speech patterns and physical traits, to just capture some essence or spirit of her that I could tap into.
Matthew, you’ve played some particularly unctuous, conniving characters lately, between Tom Wambsgans on Succession and Wilcock in The Assistant, but there’s still a certain charm to them that I find fascinating. It’s the inverse with Charles Ingram, where I found it so easy to cultivate sympathy for him, given all he went through, but there are glimmers of doubt about his guilt or innocence. How much do you consider the morality of the characters you play?
Macfadyen: I don’t really think about their moralities as such. I do what they do, and I think that’s all you really can do as an actor. You can’t play good or evil. You simply play actions, and do good and bad things. What’s good and what’s bad is often in the eye of the beholder. Often, people think they’re doing the right thing, but it’s the wrong thing. I don’t think Tom Wambsgans thinks he’s a bad guy. In fact, I think he thinks he’s sometimes quite heroic. [Laughs] He thinks he’s doing the best under his circumstances, with a difficult father-in-law, a frightening wife, and an idiot assistant working for him. I think he thinks he’s wonderful, sometimes.
Already a hit in the U.K., “Quiz” premieres May 31 on AMC. MATT FROST—AMC/ITV
Succession is an interesting comparison point for Quiz, because it plays out in this almost impenetrable bubble of privilege. Quiz, conversely, offers the Ingrams no insulation, no escape. They are swarmed by press, someone shoots their pet, and they’re utterly terrorized. I feel like the nature of British tabloids is difficult to explain to those who’ve never lived in the U.K., the intensity of what it can mean when they go after you.
Clifford: What, how vile it is? A lot’s changed, obviously, because we consume media in a completely different way now. But even in the show, I think it’s so hard to capture the tabloid furor around something, that frenzied pursuit of a story and of people, the harassment that goes on. I guess that equivalent is TMZ, or something, where people get doorstepped, or surprised in the street. It’s like that, but it’s 100 journalists on your front lawn. I don’t know. There isn’t really a comparison.
Macfadyen: They’re just rapacious. It’s weird, prurient, sanctimonious, invasive—it’s just horrible. They rile people up, appeal to their worst fears, and it’s all a little peculiar—as well as desperately unattractive. I’m not talking here about good journalism or accurate reporting, but more the tabloids. And they were much more powerful then than they are now, which gives you a sense of how truly revolting it must have been. Thank God they didn’t have social media to wield while harassing the Ingrams. All the red-tops—the Sun and the Daily Mirror, that lot—they really went after them. Because that narrative was a great story: A bumbling major and his Lady Macbeth wife cheated their way to a million quid. The editor must have been licking her lips.
Quiz really does get at that media mob mentality, how quickly you can vilify people while knowing nothing about them. It feels like a timely story to be telling now, with Twitter as major a force in cultural and political discourse as it is. The potential for people to be dragged over the coals, misrepresented or maligned, is so high.
Clifford: It’s a level of cruelty that I don’t think is acceptable on any level, to persecute people in that way. The second we dehumanize anyone, I think we’re in deep trouble. There’s so much gray. There’s no black and white to this story. There’s a lot of misinformation and a lot of cruelty that people didn’t even consider. That’s what was so important to Matthew and I, to humanize these people.
Both of you have become better known as actors in recent years, Sian through Fleabag and Matthew through Succession. What has it been like to navigate any increased media attention you might have had to field, and did that at all inform your performances?
Macfadyen: That’s a good question. I don’t think it did inform it. To be perfectly honest, I haven’t felt an increase in media scrutiny. I’ve had to do a bit more publicity for the show, I guess, but I have amazing publicists…That helps. When my wife and I got together, there was a spike in tabloid attention, and we were followed and papped. And then it dies away. That was, like, 15 years ago. Then you do something on TV and get papped again, and then it dies away again. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people who are really, properly famous, who get stalkers. I’ve known very successful actors who’ve been stalked for years. And it’s grim. And nobody knows what that feels like until it happens to them.
Clifford: That’s probably what helped me cultivate a lot of sympathy for the Ingrams. I only experienced a certain level of exposure in that way, and I’m in the entertainment industry, so there’s a level of expectation about having media involvement. But for them, I cannot imagine how terrifying and discombobulating that was for them to experience. It’s hard. I don’t think there’s anyone who’d say it’s something easy or necessarily something they enjoy.


fortune--2020-05-29--Medical devices are nearly impossible for patients to track. Can these companies finally fix that?

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At 75, Margaret Evans has survived breast cancer, heart problems, and three knee replacements. That medical history has left her with multiple artificial body parts, or medical devices—and, like millions of Americans, almost no way of keeping track of them.
Her lack of information went from an inconvenience to a more immediate threat last year, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration asked Allergan to recall a type of breast implant that academic studies have linked to a sometimes-fatal lymphoma called BIA-ALCL. Evans, who had gotten a mastectomy in 1991 and a silicone reconstructive implant in 2007 as part of her breast cancer treatment, first read about BIA-ALCL on Facebook and wondered if she might be affected.
But she never heard anything from the government or Allergan, and she had misplaced the little information card she got along with the implant, 12 years earlier. When she called her surgeon’s office to see if her implant fell under the recall, Evans was told, “It’s been more than five years, and we didn’t keep your records,” she says. “Something needs to be done in terms of keeping the patients informed.”
That’s a mounting refrain from many patients, not just those affected by the problems with breast implants. Medical devices, a catchall term for all kinds of artificial parts and equipment, include implants inside the body as well as machines used externally, such as pacemakers, artificial joints, and ventilators. Their sale makes up a $400 billion global industry. But, as I reported in Fortune’s recent investigation into the persistent problems of breast implants, many medical devices have been sold without adequate study or regulation—or, in some cases, full disclosure of the problems reported with them.
“More and more surgery is replacing parts of the human body—and yet in many cases, these implants are being put in where there’s been no rigorous study before approval to see whether they work,” says Sidney Wolfe, a physician and cofounder of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, who’s been raising concerns about the safety of breast implants and medical devices since the 1970s.
Those problems have been amplified by a widespread lack of tracking systems—meaning many patients have little idea, or means of finding out, what make or model device might be surgically buried within their bodies, or if there’s something wrong with it. As several women affected by the Allergan recall told me, they received none of the alerts that are standard for recalls of cars or other, more mundane consumer products.
“Pepperidge Farm had a recall of orange crackers,” recalls Terrie Reed, a former FDA associate director of informatics, who worked on the agency’s efforts to improve the tracking of medical devices and is soon joining startup Symmetric Health Solutions. “The next day, my neighbor got an alarm on her phone that she had bought these crackers at Walmart: ‘Here’s what to look for, the UPC code and expiration date, and here’s what to do.’ That’s not true for patients.”
The toll of this lack of tracking can be deadly. More than 1.7 million injuries and 83,000 deaths worldwide have been traced back to medical devices, according to extensive reporting in 2018 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Now various startups, government entities, pharmaceutical companies, and professional medical societies are developing more technology to digitally track the devices implanted into human bodies every day. But they have a tough road ahead.
“Patients don’t know what they have in their bodies,” says Jeremy Elias, the founder and CEO of device-tracking startup TrackMy Solutions, which Evans is using to track her implants. (Reed has served as an adviser to the company.) “They aren’t finding out about recalls. And if they are, they’re not finding out about them soon enough.”
The future of tracking your device
When Evans got her Allergan breast implant in 2007, she was given what has historically been the extent of the “tracking” of these devices: a small card, easily misplaced, with the name and long serial number of her device.
There are various efforts to digitize this information and make it easier for hospitals, doctors, and patients to share, but they are disparate and slowgoing. Starting in 2014, the FDA started requiring implant manufacturers to put “unique device identification” (UDI) numbers on devices. UDI numbers can run to more than 70 characters, but they can be scanned like bar codes and fed into electronic health records, following patients from hospital to doctor’s office.
In an interview earlier this month, Binita Ashar, director of the FDA’s Office of Surgical and Infection Control Devices in the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, told Fortune the UDI program “allows tracking of particular devices through their life cycle” and could enable the “manufacturer or others to hone in on a particular lot or model of device to be able to possibly communicate to patients more easily.”
There are still a few bugs in the system, at best. UDI numbers are long, and have yet to be fully adopted in patients’ electronic health records. Public health advocates have criticized the UDI system for being slow to roll out, or to be widely adopted by the hospitals and doctors’ offices that actually deal with the patients. And manufacturers have in some cases made the process more analog. Last year, Allergan informed hospitals and doctors’ offices about a recall of some of its implants over an “error in labeling,” saying that the bar codes on some of its breast implants “may be unreadable” by some scanners. The solution: asking hospital technicians to enter the long string of UDI information by hand. “The UDI information can be entered manually by using the human readable information,” said an Allergan notice of the recall filed with the FDA.
Reed criticizes this fix for being long and labor-intensive, pointing out that UDI numbers were “never meant to be recorded manually.”
A spokesperson for Allergan, which was recently sold to Humira maker AbbVie, did not directly address the labeling recall in an emailed response to Fortune’s questions. The company said it “has taken important steps to address the inherent challenges of tracking implants and to improve our device-tracking capabilities,” including by establishing a website for patients affected by the more serious recall last year. It also “advises all patients to keep records on their devices.”
Physicians and their professional organizations are also working on various efforts to improve the tracking of breast implants and the communication with patients. In 2018, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons established the U.S. National Breast Implant Registry in collaboration with the FDA and manufacturers, and is working with patient advocacy groups to develop it. “The idea is to collect as much information we can about implants in general, and in the near future we hope to get patient-reported outcomes from it,” says Lynn Jeffers, a plastic surgeon and the society’s president.
Meanwhile, the Aesthetic Society is beta-testing an app for patients that William P. Adams Jr., a plastic surgeon and the society’s president-elect, describes as “an implant passport” for patients, with information about their devices and another way of communicating about them with their doctors. He says the app, which has received funding from Allergan, will be widely available to U.S. patients in 2021.
Still, even when those systems come online, they will be limited to single types of medical devices. Elias of TrackMy Solutions and other startup founders think they can do better. “If Jane Doe goes and gets a breast implant, then what happens if she gets a knee replacement? And if you get a knee, usually you get a hip,” says Ryan Bass, cofounder of Patient Alerting Logistics, an early stage device-tracking startup. “It’s not realistic to expect patients to keep nine different registries and nine different sign-ins.”
Patient Alerting Logistics and TrackMy Solutions both say they have gotten interest from the FDA and some hospital partners—but they’re in early days, and will require long-term cooperation from hospitals, insurers, manufacturers, patients, and the FDA to buy into using their services. “Imagine, no one’s ever scanned anything in the grocery store. That’s where we are. And all of a sudden, in this digital world, start scanning!” as Reed puts it. “It just doesn’t happen overnight, and it requires commitment not only by government but manufacturers, vendors, and hospitals.”
In the meantime, patients like Margaret Evans will likely still have to resort to being their own medical investigators. A retired clinical social worker who used to work at a veterans hospital in Gainesville, Fla., Evans says she’s “quite comfortable calling people to track down medical information.” Which is a skill she’s needed over the past few years, to find files buried in hospital warehouses or in the records of manufacturers that sold their implants to Evans’s doctors, without ever communicating directly with the ultimate patients.
Last year, Evans eventually found a form with her breast implant’s serial number, and called Allergan to ask if that code matched the textured implants that have been recalled. It did. She’s registered that number with TrackMy Solutions and is monitoring her implant with yearly MRIs. Meanwhile, she’s also on a mission to track the other devices she has in her body, even though some doctors’ offices have initially put her off.
Earlier this month, Evans emailed me. “My surgeon who did my knee replacement in 2012 and who told me that my records were in the warehouse finally mailed me the needed info,” she wrote. “Persistence pays off!”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to further clarify the definition of medical devices.


fortune--2020-05-29--New lawsuit says Harvey Weinstein raped woman when she was 17

A woman who says Harvey Weinstein raped her when she was 17 is among four plaintiffs in a new lawsuit against the imprisoned movie mogul, the latest court action accusing him of decades of vile sexual behavior.
The woman, now 43, alleges Weinstein forced her to disrobe, demanded she perform oral sex on him and raped her in a hotel room in 1994 during what she thought would be a meeting about helping her break into the entertainment business, according to her allegations in the lawsuit filed Thursday in New York City.
The woman, now living in Tennessee, alleges that Weinstein was nearly naked when she walked into the room and that he threatened her after the rape. She says that he made her hand over her driver’s license and told her that she’d never act in films and that he would have associates harm her and her family if she told on him.
Weinstein’s lawyer said the disgraced film producer — now serving 23 years in prison for a February rape conviction — intends to defend himself against the claims in the new lawsuit, some of which date back even earlier.
Lawyer Imran Ansari said some of the claims may be barred by the statute of limitations, though the woman alleging she was raped when she was 17 is suing in state court under New York’s Child Victims Act, which opened a window for people to sue over sexually abuse they say they endured as children, sometimes decades ago.
A former model who says Weinstein sexually assaulted her when she was 16 sued him in December under the act, saying she didn’t want to be included in a proposed global settlement that would split $25 million among various accusers because the compensation wasn’t enough and because it didn’t hold Weinstein and his enablers accountable.
In Thursday’s lawsuit, another woman alleges Weinstein jammed his tongue into her mouth and fondled her breasts and vagina as he pinned her against a hotel door at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 1984.
The woman, now 70 and living in Ecuador, alleges a friend who worked with Weinstein told her she should keep quiet or be blackballed from the industry.
The two other plaintiffs are a woman, now 38 and living in New York, who alleges Weinstein raped her during a supposed business meeting at a Manhattan apartment in 2008; and a woman, now 35 and living in Hungary, who says he forced her to perform oral sex on him in a hotel suite.
The women are suing Weinstein; his brother; Miramax, the company they founded; Disney, which once owned Miramax; and 10 “doe corporations,” renewing allegations made elsewhere that they knew of his behavior and didn’t stop him.
Weinstein, the Oscar-winning producer of “Shakespeare in Love,” was convicted of raping an aspiring actress in 2013 and forcibly performing oral sex on a TV and film production assistant in 2006. His lawyers have said they’ll appeal.
An effort by Los Angeles prosecutors to have him arraigned there on charges that he raped a woman and sexually assaulted another in 2013 has been put on hold because of the coronavirus crisis.
Soon after arriving in state prison in March, Weinstein tested positive for the virus. He has recovered, his spokesman said.
The women in Thursday’s lawsuit are identified in court papers only as Jane Doe I-IV. The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission.


fortune--2020-05-29--Inside Tulsa’s underdog bid for Tesla’s next big factory

On May 20, Tulsa residents woke up to a strange sight. The Golden Driller, a 75-foot statue that has stood as a tribute to the city’s fossil-fuel legacy for more than half a century, now sported a belt buckle reading “Tesla,” the electric-car maker’s logo on its chest, and a new face that vaguely resembled that of Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The revamp was part of a charm offensive from an informal network of Tulsa residents and businesspeople hoping to persuade Tesla to build a huge factory there. It’s one small element of the small city’s multi-front, underdog effort to nab the plant, perhaps as many as 10,000 jobs, and priceless bragging rights.
A city’s effort to attract a new factory is usually a matter of quiet, closed-door negotiations, but Tesla has attracted much broader community involvement. Tulsa’s efforts began back in March, when Musk tweeted: “Scouting locations for the Cybertruck Gigafactory. Will be central USA.” Tesla’s Cybertruck is the carmaker’s unusual take on a pickup truck, which attracted more than 250,000 refundable deposits from would-be buyers after its unveiling last year.
A mysterious website, Bigfuckingfield.com, quickly appeared to pitch Tulsa as the site for the factory. From its risqué address to its sardonic, meme-y content, the site was carefully aimed at both Musk himself and the media, which has highlighted the site in a number of articles.
The mind behind Bigfuckingfield.com, it turns out, is Jacob Johnson, cofounder of Tulsa-based marketing agency Gitwit Creative. Johnson’s efforts have since grown into an informal network known as Tulsa for Tesla, which also helped pull together the Driller’s revamp. (The new face, Johnson emphasizes, is just a temporary decal.)
“The initial goal [of the website] was just to get on the radar of Tesla’s decision-makers,” says Johnson. It may have worked. There’s no sign Tulsa was in consideration in March, but on May 15, anonymous sources told the Associated Press and other news outlets that Tesla was considering just two sites for the new factory: Tulsa and Austin.
Tulsa may not seem a likely tech-hub candidate, but the city’s boosters can cite a number of points in its favor. Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum points to recent investments in amenities like the Gathering Place, an expansive public park, and a huge $918 million program called Vision Tulsa that includes money for the arts in addition to infrastructure.
Culture is often a major factor when innovative companies choose where to locate, because it’s key to recruiting top talent. Tyler Moore, a professor in the University of Tulsa’s cybersecurity program, was born and raised in the Tulsa area, then left for more than a decade before returning recently.
“Tulsa has a lot more to offer young professionals than it did in 2004,” Moore says. “The downtown’s revitalized. It’s a lot more interesting than it used to be.”
Tulsa is also competitive with Austin on more fundamental points, including a strong manufacturing talent pool (and plenty of big fields). Bynum says a large American Airlines maintenance facility and an array of energy industry manufacturers have been magnets for skilled labor. Though Tulsa’s metro area population is under 1 million compared with Austin’s 2.2 million, Tulsa currently has nearly 54,000 manufacturing workers, compared with 64,000 in Austin.
As for the irony of repainting a statue of an oil derrick worker to resemble a famously anti–fossil fuel CEO, Bynum says Tulsa’s past as “The Oil Capital of the World” has actually helped fuel energy innovation, including a growing alternative energy industry. Wind, for instance, now provides more than a third of Oklahoma’s energy needs.
“Oil and gas really grew here as a new energy source,” says Bynum, “growing out of an era that was reliant on steam and coal. We regard electricity as just another extension of that continuum.”
A competitor, or just leverage?
Despite those strengths, though, there’s widespread suspicion that Tulsa isn’t really in the running for Tesla’s new Gigafactory at all.
“Most likely this is Austin, and Tulsa is a stalking horse,” says Gene Munster, a longtime Tesla analyst and investor at Loup Ventures. Munster and others believe Tesla leaked Tulsa’s candidacy to news outlets not because it’s a serious contender, but as leverage for extracting tax breaks or other incentives from Austin. Tesla declined to comment on this assessment, or on the selection process as a whole.
Even leaving aside culture and cachet, there’s a laundry list of points in Austin’s favor. Austin is already the home of Tesla’s Autopilot chip engineering team, and Samsung manufactures the Autopilot chips there. Musk’s other company, SpaceX, also has operations in south Texas, so locating in Austin could save the multitasking CEO time. Austin is also better located for shipping Cybertrucks or other vehicles to Europe.
“I would put the odds at 30 to 1 Austin now,” says Matt Joyce, an independent Tesla analyst and investor. “The only way that 3% chance goes Tulsa’s way is if they offer a deal too good to turn down.”
Bynum wouldn’t comment on Tulsa’s incentive offers to Tesla, but it’s a safe bet he’s pulling every lever available, and then some. In Oklahoma, those include tax increment financing zones, which let cities and counties recycle property and other taxes into loans and grants for companies; and the state’s Quality Jobs program, which gives companies cash payments of up to 5% on new payrolls for up to 10 years.
Cynthia Rogers, an economist studying incentive packages at the University of Oklahoma, is generally critical of such giveaways of taxpayer money. “The problem is if Tulsa empties their pockets for this, if they overpay,” she says, citing the infamous example of Wisconsin’s so-far meager returns on a $4 billion incentive package to electronics manufacturer Foxconn.
But even Rogers allows that Tesla is a different animal. Its glitz would radically reshape how the world thinks of Tulsa, something that’s hard to put a price tag on.
That’s why, even if Tulsa doesn’t come from behind to beat Austin, Johnson, the marketer, thinks just being in the race is huge for the city: “The fact that we got validated on the national stage as a competitive city for this is a huge win. And Tesla’s not done building factories after this one. If we were able to get this deep in the consideration process, that’s not going away.”
The verdict on Tulsa’s efforts should be clear soon. Production of the Cybertruck is scheduled to begin in late 2021, and observers expect the site for the new factory to be announced in a matter of months.


fortune--2020-05-29--What to watch this weekend on Hulu, Netflix, and more

Between traditional television, video-on-demand releases, and a growing number of streaming services, it can be hard to keep up with what one should watch week to week. Fortune is here to help you keep track of new releases as well as the occasional older title worth checking out. Take a look at this weekend’s notable arrivals, a couple you may have missed earlier in the week, and what else is coming soon:
Hulu
From left: Ramy (Ramy Youssef) and Sheikh Ali Malik (Mahershala Ali) in “Ramy” on Hulu. Craig Blankenhorn—Hulu
Ramy: The second season of the acclaimed Hulu dramedy will be available for streaming May 29. Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali, who apparently took notice of the show even before its first season was officially out, joins Golden Globe–winning star Ramy Youssef for this round.
Netflix
Space Force: The highly anticipated Steve Carell workplace comedy, which also includes Lisa Kudrow and John Malkovich in its cast, arrives on the streamer May 29. But viewer beware: reviews for the series have not been kind.
Somebody Feed Phil: Phil Rosenthal returns in the third season of this foodie docuseries, which also premieres May 29, taking viewers to Marrakech, Chicago, London, Seoul, and Montreal.
As we mentioned last week, the new Hannah Gadsby comedy special, Douglas, is also now on the streaming service. And if you missed it in theaters this past winter, the much-talked-about Uncut Gems is also available to watch, in case you want to see what all the Adam Sandler fuss was about.
Amazon Prime Video
Jake Horowitz as Everett (left) and Sierra McCormick as Fay in “The Vast of Night,” which arrives on Amazon Prime Video May 29. Amazon Studios
The Vast of Night: Fans of The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and even The X-Files will be drawn to this new feature film, a 1950s UFO period piece that got a drive-in theater debut a couple of weekends ago. The film, which is at least partially influenced by non-genre features like Zodiac, will be available to stream on Amazon May 29. Read Fortune’s interview with director Andrew Patterson and stars Jake Horowitz and Sierra McCormick here.
Apple TV+
Central Park: Three episodes of this musical animated series, from Loren Bouchard, Nora Smith (Bob’s Burgers), and Josh Gad (Frozen), will arrive on Apple TV+ on May 29. After that, a new episode will come out each Friday. Early reviews have been solid, with some calling it “heartwarming” and others saying it’s a surprising gem.
On TV
From left: Sian Clifford as Diana Ingram, Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Ingram, and Michael Sheen as Chris Tarrant in “Quiz.” MATT FROST—AMC/ITV
After already airing in the U.K., the three-part limited series Quiz makes its stateside debut on AMC, dramatizing a very British real-life scandal involving Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The series will premiere at 10 p.m. Eastern on May 31, after the season finale of Killing Eve, which will be simulcast on AMC and BBC America at 9 p.m. ET. Read Fortune‘s interview with Quiz stars Matthew Macfadyen and Sian Clifford here.
Sunday movie nights continue on CBS with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at 8 p.m. ET on May 31.
Coming Soon
The new season of Dirty John, now subtitled The Betty Broderick Story, focuses on just that—the infamous divorce-turned-murder case. Amanda Peet and Christian Slater star in the second season as Betty and Dan Broderick. The series premieres June 2 at 9 p.m. Eastern with two episodes airing back-to-back. Read Fortune‘s interview with Slater here.
ABC’s Wonderful World of Disney revival continues with a June 3 airing of Up at 8 p.m. ET.


fortune--2020-05-29--Don’t confuse this with junk mail: The IRS is sending 4 million stimulus payments via prepaid debit

Don’t confuse this with junk mail: The IRS is sending 4 million stimulus payments via prepaid debit cards

Uncle Sam is swapping paper for plastic.
After mailing tens of millions of paper stimulus checks to Americans across the country, the federal government is set to send 4 million “economic impact payments” in the form of prepaid debit cards, the Internal Revenue Service announced this week.
The Visa-branded cards will arrive in plain envelopes from “Money Network Cardholder Services,” and will allow Americans to receive up to $1,200 in stimulus funds each to directly make purchases anywhere that accepts Visa; withdraw cash from ATMs (and from select in-network ATMs without fees); transfer funds from the card to their personal bank account; and check the card’s balance online or by phone.
The IRS noted that individuals cannot specifically opt to receive the “EIP cards,” as they’re known, over a paper check. According to the Treasury Department, the cards are being distributed to individuals who don’t have their bank account information on file with the IRS, and whose tax returns were processed by the IRS service centers in Austin, Texas, and Andover, Mass. The first cards were mailed out last week.
The deployment of the PIN-activated, prepaid debit cards comes after criticism of the government’s technologically outdated approach to disbursing stimulus funds. The IRS’s “Get My Payment” portal, designed to allow Americans to provide their direct-deposit bank details and track the status of their stimulus payments, has been beset by technical challenges, while the decision to dole out payments via paper checks struck many as archaic.
The IRS already allowed individuals to receive stimulus payments via their own reloadable, prepaid debit cards by providing their account and routing numbers through the “Get My Payment” portal. Kathryn Cleary, Mastercard’s senior vice president of business development, has lauded prepaid debit cards as a quicker, more efficient way to send stimulus funds to tens of millions of unbanked Americans.
“Receiving funds by check can create additional financial hardship for the unbanked,” Cleary said last month, noting that Americans spend $1 billion on check-cashing fees annually.
The EIP cards are being issued by MetaBank, the financial agent for the Treasury Department’s U.S. Debit Card program, which provides prepaid debit cards to federal agencies for non-benefit payments. Already, there are reports of people mistaking the nondescript envelopes and unassuming debit cards for junk mail, and discarding them in the trash.
According to the Treasury Department, the federal government has already delivered more than 140 million stimulus payments worth a combined $239 billion. The payments are part of the $2.2 trillion coronavirus aid and stimulus bill known as the CARES Act.


fortune--2020-05-29--A WeWork rival gets ready for an IPO, even as offices stay shut

Once valued at $47 billion, battered and bruised coworking startup WeWork saw its valuation drop to $2.9 billion as the coronavirus compounded the SoftBank-backed company’s woes.
Now a competitor is gearing up for an initial public offering soon.
Industrious, a coworking startup with over 95 locations in the U.S. told Bloomberg Friday that it has begun interviewing investment bankers ahead of a potential IPO slated for the spring or summer of 2021 and will add Mary Hogan Preusse, a board member at Kimco Realty, to its board. Hogan Preusse will become the company’s first female board member.
The news comes as the pandemic shutters offices and dampens the sharing economy, a painful crosspoint for coworking spaces. Like its peers, Industrious made cuts, laying off 18% of its workforce, or 90 employees, in April. Another 64 were furloughed.
Unlike WeWork, known for taking on outright leases on companies, Industrious has been pivoting toward management-sharing agreements with landlords so the company doesn’t have to “put millions and millions to fix the space up,” CEO James Hodari told Fortune last year. IWG, another competitor, has also sought to disperse risk by franchising its brand rather than renting office spaces themselves.
PPP purgatory: On Thursday, the House almost unanimously passed a bill offering businesses greater flexibility in the Paycheck Protection Program. The bill would extend the time in which businesses need to spend funds from eight weeks to 24 weeks and alter the time that they must spend on the funds on payroll for full forgiveness to 60%.
But don’t expect an easy pass in Senate. Senate Republicans have shown resistance to the House legislation over “inadvertent technical errors,” per Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). The Senate meanwhile has its own PPP extension bill.
Change the world: Fortune is seeking candidates for the annual Change the World list of companies that are doing (financially) well, by doing good. Last year, Qualcomm featured as number one for its work on sensors that could have a profound impact on the environment. Have a nominee in mind? Make a nomination here. Note: The list prioritizes companies with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-hailing giant, raised $500 million for its autonomous driving subsidiary. SoftBank led the round.
- Mabwell Biotech, a Shanghai-based developer of monoclonal antibodies and long-acting recombinant proteins, raised RMB1.97 billion (US$278.5 million) in Series A funding led by Shiyu Capital. Read more.
- Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based biotech developing testing for Covid-19, raised $70 million in funding from Illumina (Nasdaq: ILMN) and existing investors General Atlantic and Viking Global Investors.
- Benchling, a San Francisco-based life sciences R&D cloud platform, raised $50 million in Series D funding. Alkeon led the round and was joined by investors including Spark Capital, Lux Capital and ICONIQ Partners.
- Palvella Therapeutics, a Wayne, Penn.-based biopharmaceutical company focused on genetic diseases, raised $45 million in Series C funding. Investors include CAM Capital, Samsara BioCapital, BVF Partners L.P., Adams Street Partners, Opaleye Management, Ligand Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: LGND), Agent Capital, BioAdvance and Nolan Capital.
- Otrium, an Amsterdam-based company selling clothing at the end of the seasons at a discount, raised $26 million in Series B funding. Eight Roads Ventures led the round, and was joined by investors including Index Ventures and Hans Veldhuizen. Read more.
- Tia, a New York-based women’s health startup, raised $24.3 million in Series A funding. Emily Melton, a managing partner at early-stage venture capital firm Threshold Ventures, led the round. Other investors include Define Ventures, ACME and Torch Capital. Read more.
- Variant Bio, a Seattle-based company developing therapeutics by studying the genes of people from understudied populations, raised $16 million in Series A funding. Lux Capital led the round.
- Accern, a New York-based AI startup, raised $13 million in Series A funding. Fusion Fund led the round and was joined by investors including Mighty Capital, Allianz Life Ventures, Vectr Fintech Partners and Viaduct Ventures.
- Stackin’, a Los Angeles-based text-message based financial platform, raised $12.6 million in Series B funding led by Octopus Ventures.
- Siren, a maker of socks that monitor diabetes patients, raised $11.8 million in Series B funding. Anathem Ventures led the round, and was joined by investors including Khosla, DCM, and Founders Fund. Read more.
- Commerce Layer, an Italy-based API maker for commerce, raised $6 million in Series A funding. Benchmark, led the round, and was joined by investors including Mango Capital, DAXN, PrimeSet, SV Angel, and NVInvestments.
- Stringr, a video-focused startup, raised $5. million in funding. Investors included Thomson Reuters, G5 Capital, and Advection Growth Capital. Read more.
- Caraway, a New York-based direct-to-consumer home brand, raised a $5.3 million in seed funding. Investors include Republic Labs, Springdale Ventures, Wesray Social, Bridge Investments, WTI, CompanyFirst, and G9 Ventures.
- RudderStack, a San Francisco-based open source customer data platform, raised $5 million in seed funding. S28 Capital led the round, and was joined by investors including Salil Deshpande (Uncorrelated Ventures ) and Florian Leibert (468 Capital).
- a55, a Latin American income-secured SME lender, raised $5 million in funding. Santander Innoventures led the round.
- Truth{set}, a San Francisco-based quality monitor of consumer data, raised $4.8 million in seed funding from super{set}, WTI, Ulu Ventures, and strategic angel investors.
- Cabana, a Seattle-based luxe mobile hotel company, raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Craft Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Goldcrest Capital. Read more.
- Warehouse Exchange, a Los Angeles-based on-demand warehouse platform, raised $2.2 million in seed funding. Investors included Xebec Realty.
- Kippo, a Los Angeles-based dating and social app for gamers, raised $2 million in seed funding. Primer Sazze Partners led the round.
OTHERS
- Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) acquired Rivet Networks, an Austin-based maker of software and cloud-based technologies for network connectivity. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Comcast is spinning off Blockgraph, a data platform for creating targeted ads, and selling two-thirds of it to Charter Communications Inc. and ViacomCBS. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Read more.
IPOs
- Legend Biotech, a Somerset, N.J.-based cell therapy oncology biotech spinning out of GenScript, plans to raise $350 million in an offering 18.4 million ADSs priced between $18 to $20. It posted revenue of $57.3 million in 2019 and a loss of $133 million. It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “LEGN.” Read more.
BANKRUPTCIES, HANG UPS, AND BREAKUPS
- NMC Health PLC, a hospital operator based in the United Arab Emirates, filed for bankruptcy protection. Read more.
EXITS
- Keysight Technologies agreed to acquire Eggplant, a London-based software testing firm, for €350 million ($385 million). The Carlyle Group was the seller. Read more.
- Connexity, backed by Symphony Technology Group, acquired Skimlinks, a provider of monetization solutions for commerce-oriented publishers. Skimlinks has raised funding from investors including Greycroft. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Cisco Systems Inc (NASDAQ: CSCO) agreed to acquire ThousandEyes, a cybersecurity company. The deal is worth nearly $1 billion, Bloomberg reports citing sources. ThousandEye has raised from the GV, Salesforce Ventures and Sequoia Capital Read more.
F+FS
- KKR raised $4 billion across two funds: the $2.8 billion KKR Dislocation Opportunities Fund, and $1.1 billion from separately managed accounts committed to the same investment opportunities.
- Salesforce Ventures launched a $125 million Europe Trailblazer Fund.
- Natalie Hwang, the former head of Simon Property Group Inc.’s venture capital arm, launched a new firm and is seeking $200 million for a debut fund. Read more.


fortune--2020-05-29--One museum is documenting women’s experiences of the pandemic

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Pansy Ho is in line to take over her late father’s Macau gambling empire, the U.S. Women’s Soccer League has a plan to restart play, and the National Women’s History Museum is documenting our experiences of the pandemic. Find some rejuvenation this weekend.
– Living history. Regular readers will know The Broadsheet has spent much of the past couple months covering the myriad ways the COVID-19 pandemic is a having a disproportionate impact on women (though I still refuse to use the term “she-cession”!).
They say journalists write the first draft of history—and our profession is certainly striving to live up to that—but there’s no doubt that those who look back at this moment in the years and decades to come will learn even more about what women are feeling and facing right now.
Many museums and researchers are already thinking about how to create a historical record of what it’s like to be living through this pandemic, but I was particularly interested to see that the National Women’s History Museum is compiling an aptly-named journaling project: “Women Writing History.”
The museum urges women, girls and non-binary people to “participate in the simple act of recording their daily thoughts and personal experiences” and to contribute those journals—written, oral, video, photo or other—to the NWHM. The purpose: to ensure “that women and girls’ unique voices and experiences are not left out of the telling of the COVID-19 story.”
Although we live through history on a daily basis, never in my lifetime has the feeling that we are writing a critical chapter been so intense—or that it’s vital to know more about what challenges others are facing. So if you have the time and inclination to record your experience, do! Even if you don’t feel ready to share your innermost thoughts with a museum, you are an essential part of this story.
***
A quick bit of Fortune housekeeping: We are beginning the process of putting together our 2020 ‘Change the World’ list, and we’re looking for your nominations. To qualify, companies should be using the creative tools of business to help the planet and tackle society’s unmet needs—and making money by doing so. You can find more info, and see last year’s honorees, here. To nominate a company, please use this Google form. The deadline for submissions is June 22; the list will come out in the October issue of the magazine. Thank you!
Kristen Bellstrom
kristen.bellstrom@fortune.com
@kayelbee
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Making the list. Fast Company debuted a new list: the Queer 50, recognizing 50 LGBTQ women and nonbinary people in business. Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario, Land O'Lakes CEO Beth Ford, and Reddit COO Jen Wong are among the honorees who discuss their careers and experiences here: Fast Company
-Taking to the streets. Among the protests against police brutality that are roiling U.S. cities this week: Demonstrators gathered in Louisville, Kentucky to call for accountability in the shooting of Breonna Taylor, a black woman who was killed by three white police officers in her home earlier this year. Seven people were shot at the protest last night. New York Times
- Business as unusual. Fortune's series "The Coronavirus Economy," in which professionals across fields share how their jobs have changed during the pandemic, is going strong. Check out these interviews with the founder of a toilet paper startup, an entrepreneur behind a meal-delivery service, a cookbook author, and the CEO of women's health service the Tia Clinic.
- A penny saved. Americans are using their stimulus checks for a purpose that's very, well, un-American, historically speaking. They're saving or "increasing their security blanket," as Jackie Reses, head of SquareCapital, puts it. She shared the insight during a Fortune Brainstorm Finance virtual event yesterday that also featured Julie Sunderland, business operations officer for payments at Google, and Robinhood COO Gretchen Howard. Fortune
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Columbia Financial added Impact Consulting CEO Lucy Sorrentini to its board of directors. Former Netflix exec Tara Duncan is the new president of Freeform.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Family fortune. The death of Stanley Ho, the billionaire who built Macau into the world's largest gambling hub, has put his $15 billion fortune in the hands of his 57-year-old daughter Pansy Ho. One of the tycoon's 16 recognized children, Pansy Ho is co-chairman of casino operator MGM China Holdings and now faces the task of uniting a fractured, competitive family empire. Bloomberg
- Best at B2B. Do women have an advantage in B2B sales jobs—especially during global remote work? Women hold less than one-third of these positions, but 86% of female B2B sales professionals achieve their quota compared to 78% of men. Women's strengths in collaboration and developing long-term relationships—an edge for subscriptions, compared to one-time purchases—are helping them succeed in this industry right now, a group of academics and consultants argue here: Harvard Business Review
- Activism, back in action. Just before the coronavirus pandemic hit, Argentina seemed poised to legalize abortion. But the proposal was never formally introduced as the government's attention shifted to the crisis. Now activists are revitalizing the movement online. Guardian
- Soccer season. The National Women’s Soccer League is one of the first sports leagues to commit to an exact return date post-shutdown. The organization will run a tournament in Utah beginning June 27; all players will be tested for coronavirus 48 hours before departing for the event and upon arrival. All U.S. Women's National Team players also play for the NWSL, although they won't be required to participate in the June matches. Wall Street Journal
ON MY RADAR
The unbearable grief of black mothers Vox
Rosanne Cash: I will miss what I wanted to lose The Atlantic
Ava DuVernay launches Array 101, an online education platform to dig deeper into her films’ social themes Fast Company
PARTING WORDS
"There are hundreds if not thousands of us across the country. But we all have to try for some of us to get in."
-Mckayla Wilkes, a Maryland Democratic Congressional challenger, on running for office with a nontraditional background for politics


fortune--2020-05-29--I don’t like Section 230 either, but Trump’s attempt to remove it is still wrong

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 exempts online platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from liability for content its users post on their sites. I’ve repeatedly advocated that Section 230 be tweaked—or even repealed—in order to subject the multi-billion-dollar publishing behemoths to the same restrictions other media companies face.
On Thursday, Donald Trump, who uses the platforms in the vilest of ways—The Wall Street Journal editorial board this week accused him of debasing his office with his shameful tweets about the death of a young woman who once worked for a media critic of his—signed an executive order trying to do away with the exemptions.
This obviously is the wrong way to go about it. Section 230 is a portion of a law passed by Congress. The way to remedy its weaknesses is to pass new laws. Tech companies should be held to the same standard as other publishers: They should enjoy the same protections under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and be liable for the same no-nos as other media companies.
The tech behemoths make two broad arguments in their defense. The first is that the views on their sites aren’t theirs and therefore aren’t their responsibility. The result, until this week, when Twitter posted a “fact check” on a presidential tweet, is filth that any respectable publisher would edit out. The second argument is that the economy would be hurt if fledgling “Internet” companies couldn’t flourish in a protected fashion. This is laughable on the face of it; Twitter and its far more successful competitors don’t need constitutional protection to sell billions of dollars of ads.
An executive order by an obviously vindictive president is the wrong approach to changing an outdated law. That doesn’t mean altering it is a bad idea.
Adam Lashinsky
@adamlashinsky
adam.lashinsky@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
When the President does it, that means it's not illegal. As predicted, today is just another day to consider the president and Twitter. The latest twist came overnight when Twitter obscured several Trump posts about the violence in Minneapolis following George Floyd's brutal death at police hands. A label covering Trump's tweets, which can still by read by clicking through, reads: “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”
Oh you cursed brat, look what you've done. Adam wasn't the only one to find AT&T's HBO Max a little confusing and a little annoying, apparently. Only about 90,000 people downloaded the new streaming service's mobile app on Wednesday, according to tracking firm SensorTower. That compares with 300,000 first-day downloads of short video service Quibi and 4 million for Disney's Disney+ service when it debuted back in November. AT&T said the number was inaccurate but did not supply its own figure.
Look what I'm whippin' up. At the other end of the new product spectrum, everybody is buying smart earbuds, it seems. Sales of so-called smart hearables like Apple's AirPods jumped 68% in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to IDC.
Stealing face. The American Civil Liberties Union sued facial recognition startup and trampler of privacy rights Clearview AI on Thursday in state court in Illinois, which has a law requiring consent before the collecting of biometric data. Clearview AI is the company, you may recall, which scraped billions of photos from social media sites and constructed a searchable database for law enforcement and other paying customers. A future lawsuit may be coming for companies providing background checks on renters. Algorithmic software is spewing lots of erroneous data, according to a report in The Markup.
Which Tiger King character are you? On Wall Street, the lovers cried and the poets dreamed. Just kidding. The traders bought and the traders sold. Salesforce said its first quarter sales rose 30% to $4.9 billion, slightly ahead of analyst expectations, but gave a disappointing forecast. Its shares, previously up 11% in 2020, lost 3% in pre-market trading on Friday morning. Dell Technologies saw flat revenue of $21.9 billion. Its stock, down 11% in 2020, jumped 7% on Friday morning. And as Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins promised in his recent Fortune interview, the company continues making big acquisitions despite the pandemic. On Thursday, it agreed to pay a reported $1 billion for network monitoring firm ThousandEyes. The two sides negotiated the deal over Webex.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
While everyone is talking about when they can go back to work in an office, some people say they never want to. Computer science professor and author Cal Newport examines the debate in The New Yorker. He's not a big fan of remote work.
A gallery of thumbnail-size co-workers on a laptop screen is a diminished simulacrum of the conference-table gatherings that drive so much of corporate life. Yahoo is hardly the only organization to have concluded that the richness of in-person interaction is irreplaceable. During the Second World War—at what, in retrospect, was the dawn of electronic telework—American and British military commanders regularly exchanged telegraph messages and held secure phone conversations. Even so, with surprising frequency, high-level officials undertook risky transatlantic crossings to meet in person. Military planners realized that being physically together mattered.
Face-to-face interactions help people communicate and bond, but that’s only part of their value. The knowledge work pursued in many modern offices—thinking, investigating, synthesizing, writing, planning, organizing, and so on—tends to be fuzzy and disorganized compared to the structured processes of, say, industrial manufacturing. In many offices, tasks are assigned haphazardly, and there are few systematic ways to track who is working on what or find out how the work is going. In such a chaotic work environment, there are profound advantages to gathering people together in one place.
FOR YOUR WEEKEND READING PLEASURE
A few long reads I came across this week:
A Feud in Wolf-Kink Erotica Raises a Deep Legal Question (New York Times)
What do copyright and authorship mean in the crowdsourced realm known as the Omegaverse.
Influencers lose their gloss (Financial Times)
Coronavirus has sparked a backlash against those who promote themselves, and products, online
Elon Musk, His Rocket, and the Grand Scheme that Tore Apart Boca Chica (Esquire)
SpaceX is dismantling a remote beach community at the southernmost end of Texas, one house at a time. Some residents took its money. Others refuse to leave. Still others are sticking around to see what happens.
Lavish Parties, Greedy Pols and Panic Rooms: How the ‘Apple of Pot’ Collapsed (Politico)
MedMen was the country’s hottest pot startup—until it flamed out. Its fall has exposed the gap between “green rush” hype and the realities of a troubled industry.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Why GitLab hired a ‘head of remote’ before the coronavirus pandemic By Michal Lev-Ram
Silicon Valley is divided over Trump’s executive order to rein in social media By Danielle Abril
Americans are doing something surprising with their money right now By Jeff John Roberts
Wall Street vs. Big Tech: Why finance is racing back to the office while tech embraces WFH By Rey Mashayekhi
To recover from COVID-19, Europe wants more 5G By David Meyer
COVID-19 can’t be used as an excuse to limit skilled immigration By Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
Getting back to the office in the midst of coronavirus is going to be complicated By Sy Mukherjee
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. There is a 50% discount for our loyal readers if you use this link to sign up. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
How can cultural life get back to normal? A small museum in New York, Magazzino Italian Art, has an idea. It will likely reopen this summer and require visitors to wear smart tags that flash and vibrate if they get too close to another visitor, as demonstrated in this video. I'll put it in the category of 'distracting but necessary.' Have a good weekend.
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
aaron.pressman@fortune.com


fortune--2020-05-29--‘Nuclear option’: How the U.S. could leverage Hong Kong to hurt Beijing

President Donald Trump is expected to hold a news conference on Friday to announce new measures against Beijing in response to its approval of a controversial national security law in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government is worried that it will end up bearing the brunt of Trump’s retaliation.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reported to Congress that Hong Kong—one of two special administrative regions in China—could no longer be considered autonomous enough to qualify for special economic treatment from the U.S., paving the way for Washington to revoke the city’s unique privileges.
While revoking Hong Kong’s special trade status is the most obvious means of retribution, it’s not the most effective if the U.S.’s end goal is to punish Beijing. In fact, it would leave Washington’s main target largely unscathed.
“Practically, in Hong Kong–U.S. relations, any sanctions are a double-edged sword that will not only harm the interests of Hong Kong but also significantly those of the U.S.,” the Hong Kong government said in a lengthy statement Thursday.
To inflict real economic pain on Beijing, the U.S. would have to trigger what experts call the “nuclear option”: cutting Hong Kong off from the U.S. dollar. But even that blow has the potential to miss its mark.
En garde
Economists at Oxford Economics say that revoking Hong Kong’s special trade status would have “major consequences” for local and U.S. companies in Hong Kong but would have “relatively little direct impact” on mainland China.
Such a move would mean that goods exported to the U.S. from Hong Kong would be subject to the same tariffs as goods from mainland China. That could hurt Hong Kong, but the relative impact on mainland China would be small. Only 8% of China’s exports to the U.S. pass through Hong Kong.
Increasing the costs of Hong Kong exports would, however, harm the special administrative region’s status as a major logistics hub, potentially hurting the local economy. But Iris Pang, chief economist for ING Greater China, says Beijing is unlikely to notice the pinch from Hong Kong’s economy getting squeezed.
“If the U.S. penalizes mainland China then mainland China will be hurt, but if the U.S. wants to hurt Beijing through Hong Kong, it will be much more difficult,” Pang said, arguing that, economically, mainland China actually derives very little from Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s relative contributions to China’s economy have diminished significantly in the decades since the former British colony was returned to Chinese sovereignty. In 1997, Hong Kong accounted for roughly 18% of China’s GDP. In 2018, that contribution dwindled to roughly 3%
“I really can’t think of anything the U.S. can do to Hong Kong that would hurt Beijing in a serious way,” said Pang.
Dollar clearing
However, Zhuang Bo, chief China economist at TS Lombard, argues that Hong Kong’s relative GDP contributions to mainland China are not the crux of this relationship. Rather, it’s mainland China’s existing financial exposure to Hong Kong—companies listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange and the stock-connect schemes that enable international traders to invest in Chinese stocks—that matters most.
“If Hong Kong was to become marginalized as a hub for international finance, it would undermine mainland companies’ access to liquidity there,” said Zhuang. For that to happen, the U.S. would have to pull a different, heftier lever: prohibiting the Hong Kong Monetary Authority from clearing U.S. dollars—essentially cutting off Hong Kong’s access to the world’s most internationalized currency.
According to Zhuang, Hong Kong is the best place for mainland Chinese firms to raise funds as the city provides direct access to international investors. However, if Hong Kong is unable to clear U.S. dollars, those investors will be deterred, and China’s big businesses will have to look elsewhere.
Pang, meanwhile, argues that cutting Hong Kong off from the U.S. dollar would be a “nuclear option” that could ultimately hurt the U.S. more than Beijing. Without access to U.S. dollars, traders in Hong Kong would seek an alternative global currency to work with and would likely resort to the euro or Chinese yuan. The U.S. does not want the yuan to gain prominence globally—Beijing does.
“Banning Hong Kong from clearing the U.S. dollar would be an extreme case, and I don’t think the U.S. is likely to do it,” Pang says. “But then again, who knows what President Trump will do?”


fortune--2020-05-30--These five stocks are eating up your index fund. Here’s a better strategy for investing in this mark

These five stocks are eating up your index fund. Here’s a better strategy for investing in this market

Not since the tech bubble of the late 1990s has the S&P 500 been so dominated by a handful of richly valued glamour stocks—a cast that in those days starred the likes of Cisco, Lucent, and IBM. Today, the superhot names are the Fab Five: Microsoft (a stalwart in ’99 as well), Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
Starting last year, their weight in the S&P 500 jumped, then exploded in 2020 as they defied the COVID-19 crisis: The Fab Five, along with the likes of Netflix and Salesforce.com, got much more expensive while the rest of the market got a lot cheaper. So most big-cap funds load you up on the hot names that have been soaring, and go light on what’s beaten down to dirt cheap—think financials and energy. “People risk buying into indexes that are top-heavy with these high-priced stocks,” says Chris Brightman, chief investment officer at Research Affiliates, a firm that oversees strategies for $145 billion in mutual funds and ETFs. “We’ve seen these patterns before, and they usually end in tears.”
The problem with S&P index funds
S&P 500 index funds, and most traditional big-cap portfolios, are usually “cap weighted.” That means the portion of your dollars allocated to each stock simply tracks the market value of each company in, say, the S&P 500 index as a percentage of the total capitalization of 500. If Microsoft’s $1.38 trillion valuation is 5.5% of the S&P total of $26.7 trillion and Facebook’s $660 billion market cap represents 0.25%, the fund puts automatically 5.5% of your money in Microsoft, and 0.25% in Facebook.
The problem: When prices of a few ultra-fashionable stocks rocket far faster than their earnings, a bigger and bigger part of your portfolio will skew toward those pricey momentum plays, and a shrinking portion will go to laggards that offer the best bargains. You’re stuck with a strategy that’s always selling low and buying high. Meanwhile, you’re watching the overall price-to-earnings ratio on your fund, the dollars you’re pocketing in earnings for every dollar you’ve invested, keep rising. The fund is parking more and more of your money in expensive stocks just because they’re getting pricier.
The cap-weighed approach looks like a winner when the index is doubling down on high-fliers that keep climbing. But in most cases, profits don’t wax fast enough to meet those great expectations, fans depart, and the shooting stars deliver poor returns over the next several years. On the other hand, the outcasts the index dumped often do great, because they’re so downtrodden that even if their earnings grow modestly, they’ll deliver an upside surprise.
Research Affiliates ran numbers for Fortune showing how a few stocks with gigantic market caps—most of them boasting king’s ransom valuations—have grabbed a bigger and bigger slice of the S&P 500. By widening the gap between the haves and have-nots, the pandemic lockdown has hastened the trend. To be sure, the big run-up in a handful of marquee names has cushioned losses in cap-weighted funds this year. But it bodes ill for the future: The trampled “value” stocks likely to outperform from here are precisely the ones those funds are ditching to chase what’s hottest, and most vulnerable.
At the close of 2019, the stocks with the five largest market caps in the S&P 500 were the same group as today: Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook. They accounted for 16.1% of the index’s total valuation, meaning that if you owned an S&P index fund or ETF, or most other big-cap funds for that matter, you had 16.1% of your money in the Fab Five on Dec. 31. It’s worth noting that in 2017, those tech giants also occupied the top five spots but accounted for just 11.5% of the index’s total value.
The 16.1% concentration was well above the average: Since 1999 the five biggest names have made up 13.2%. This year, the winners-losers divide widened vastly. Let’s step back and compare the picture to a year ago. In the last days of May 2019, the S&P 500 had a total market cap of $24.7 trillion, and the Fab Five had a combined value of $4 trillion, exactly the same 16.1% share they held at year-end. In the 12 months since, despite the roller-coaster ride in 2020, the index has risen to $26.7 trillion, for an increase of $2.0 trillion or 8.1%. By contrast, the valuations of the Fab Five rose by $1.56 trillion, or 40%, to $5.56 trillion. No less than 78% of the entire $2 trillion increase came from those top names.
By the end of May, the Fab Five constituted 21.1% of the S&P’s total valuation. That’s almost twice their share in 2017, and five points, or one-third, higher than their position just five months ago. That number easily eclipses the highest reading in the past two-plus decades, 16.4% marking the height of the tech bubble at the end of 1999. Then, Cisco, General Electric, and Exxon ranked in the top five, with Microsoft the only repeat.
Look what happened to the weights of the five tech champs in the past year. Microsoft’s share of the S&P has gone from 3.9% to 5.2%, Apple from 3.3% to 5.2%, and Amazon from 3.7% to 4.6%. All of the five saw their shares rise by at least one-third.
The astounding advance for the five biggest-cap members, amid a general retreat, is troubling for a basic reason. It’s not an earnings surge that’s driving the Fab Five to new heights, but investors’ stampede to pay ever higher prices for each dollar in profits. Since late May of last year, the total net profits for Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Facebook, over their most recent four quarters, have declined slightly, from $148.8 billion to $147.5 billion. But since their valuations have mushroomed 40%, their combined P/E has followed, rising from a lofty 27 to a vertiginous 38. Over the 12 months in which these five companies got 30% more expensive, your fund beefed up on 30% more of them.
The Fab Five aren’t the only super-pricey shares the funds are piling into. A second group, made up of four high-profile tech luminaries, are also taking a bigger and bigger share of cap-weighted holdings, and they’re even more richly priced than the five leaders, by a lot. Since the close of 2019, the combined market caps of Nvidia, Netflix, Salesforce.com, and PayPal have jumped by $200 billion, or 39%, to $729 billion. But since their earnings for what we’ll call the Fantastic Four aren’t nearly as robust as the Fab Five’s, their combined P/E is three times as high at 109. As with the Fab Five, cap-weighted funds bought more and more of the Fantastic Four. This year, their weight in the S&P has jumped from roughly 2% to 3%. Put the Fab Five and Fantastic Four together, and their share in five months catapulted from 18.1% to 24.1%, and the combined P/E for the nine stands at 41.
The S&P would be a far better deal if you didn’t have to park over one-fourth of your money in a handful of players selling at over 40 times earnings.
A better way: fundamental indexing
Research Affiliates pioneered an approach that avoids piling more and more into hot stocks, and instead channels the lion’s share into the distressed, overlooked, and unloved with one feature in common—they’re cheap. The methodology is called “fundamental indexing.” The formula invests dollars based on the company’s size in the overall economy, not its market value as a share of the entire S&P. It deploys four metrics to establish those weights: sales, cash flow, and dividends, each averaged over five years, and current book value. Each metric is given equal importance. “If we only looked at revenues, we’d overweight retailers and airlines,” explains Brightman. “If we used only book value, you’d underweight tech, because they spend a lot on R&D not counted in book, and overweight industrials. Using the four benchmarks gives the right balance.”
Market cap, the only factor that counts in cap weighing, isn’t part of the formula. Put simply, you get a lot more in cash flow, sales, and dividends in a fundamental fund for each dollar invested than in a cap-weighted rival. The most basic comparison is the P/E. Today, the multiple for the cap-weighted S&P index fund is around 27.5. By the way, it’s so lofty in large part because of the huge gains in the Fab Five. That’s been a boon to investors until now, but the ever-more-lopsided approach signals danger ahead.
For the fundamental indexes using Research Affiliates methodology, the P/E is over 40% lower at just 16. Measured in price to book value, the tilt toward bargain stocks is even sharper: In cap-weighted funds, investors are paying 10 times book value, versus around two times in a fundamental fund. Fundamental indexing delivers three times more in cash flow per dollar of investment, and seven times more sales. The “fundamental” dividend yield is 3%, dwarfing the 0.9% from a cap-weighted index.
Research Affiliates oversees a broad family of fundamental funds covering a wide range of portfolios, including international large-cap, U.S. small-cap, large and small for emerging markets, and of course, U.S. large-cap based on the S&P 500. Funds using its formula are managed by Invesco, Charles Schwab, and BlackRock. Among the most popular offerings is the Schwab Fundamental U.S. Large Company Index Fund (SFLNX), which manages $4.4 billion. Because it allocates dollars based on companies’ heft in the economy and not their valuations, the SFLNX places its biggest and smallest weights in totally different places than cap-weighted funds.
Right now, cap-weighted indexes allocate 22.8% of their overall dollars to the on-fire infotech sector. By contrast, SFLNX puts just 19.7% in tech simply because its metrics tag the sector as highly expensive. SFLNX is also underweight in commercial services, home to Alphabet and Amazon. By contrast, it’s far more heavily invested in battered financials (10.2% to 8%), consumer staples (9.7% to 7.9%) and especially the most despised sector of all, energy (7.1% to 2.9%).
The difference in the top five or six companies getting the biggest allocations is also striking. It’s interesting that the SFLNX awards Apple the biggest allocation, and under cap weighting, Apple is tied for first with Microsoft. In fact, SFLNX gives Apple almost exactly the same weight as its cap share, around 5.65%. The reason: Apple’s giant cash flow, dividends, and book value. “Apple doesn’t look all that expensive,” notes Brightman. On the other hand, the Schwab fund puts only 2.5% in Microsoft, less than half its cap footprint, since Apple’s cash flow from operations and revenues is much larger than Microsoft’s, while dividends and book value are similar. As for the Fantastic Four, Netflix, Salesforce.com, Nvidia, and Netflix, SFLNX awards them just 0.37% of its investment dollars, one-eighth their position in cap-weighted funds.
So far this year, cap-weighting competitors have far outperformed the SFLNX. It’s down 12.6%, versus a negative total return of around 5% when following the cap-weighted model. Indeed, fundamental indexing is a value strategy, and value stocks have been lagging growth stocks for a number of years.
But over history, value has a much better record, as demonstrated by the performance of its champion Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. The huge shift in concentration to those five superstars in the past couple of years, accelerated by the pandemic crisis, has made dumping that strategy more urgent than ever. The winners have broken loose of the fundamentals during the lockdown and notched record after record. The losers got pounded. It’s time to choose the formula that gets the royal share of those screaming buys.


fortune--2020-05-30--Southwest Airlines CEO predicts a ‘brutal low-fare environment’ to lure passengers

These five stocks are eating up your index fund .
Here ’ s a better strategy for investing in this @

Southwest Airlines Co. CEO Gary Kelly predicted that intense competition for passengers will create “a brutal low-fare environment” among carriers once coronavirus fears subside and more people start to fly.
Even with capacity cuts, the number of available airline seats will still far outnumber customers in the near term, the chief executive officer said in a video message to Southwest employees on Friday. Demand for airline travel is expected to return slowly as the country starts to reopen its businesses.
With a potential price war putting more pressure on already struggling airlines, Southwest is preparing contingency plans in case more radical changes are required for survival, the CEO said.
“We’re well prepared for this catastrophe and we must strive to stay that way,” Kelly said. “Our low-cost philosophy, strategy, and structure will serve us very well.”
The Covid-19 pandemic brought the airline industry to its knees as travel demand plummeted more than 90% in a few weeks. Carriers responded with a wave of job cuts, furloughs and deep cost-cutting measures.
On Thursday, Southwest said it expected to operate about the same capacity in late 2020 as it did a year earlier after flying was reduced by the grounding of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max. Kelly added that demand “still has a long way to go.” That thought was echoed this week by United Airlines Holdings Inc.’s CEO Scott Kirby, who said it’s still unclear when demand will “bounce back.”


fortune--2020-05-30--Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg decides against removing Trump’s controversial post

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has decided against removing a controversial post by President Trump about the Minneapolis protests, putting his company in stark contrast to Twitter, which labeled Trump’s comments as “glorifying violence.”
In the post on Thursday night, Trump had said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” He also called out Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, telling him to “get his act together and bring the City under control” and then advocated for sending in the National Guard to “get the job done right.”
Under intense pressure, Zuckerberg late on Friday explained that Facebook would take no action. He acknowledged that many people would be upset by the decision, but that his company sides with free expression unless a post can “cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers.”
“We read it as a warning about state action, and we think people need to know if the government is planning to deploy force,” Zuckerberg said on Facebook about Trump’s post. He denied that the post had incited violence, which would have violated Facebook’s policies.
Zuckerberg, who said his team had been in touch with the White House in preceding hours, pointed to a follow-up post by Trump that he said had “explicitly discouraged violence.” In it, Trump tried to expand on his earlier comment by saying that “looting leads to shooting, and that’s why a man was shot and killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday.” Trump continued, “I don’t want this to happen, and that’s what the expression put out last night means.”
Zuckerberg’s comments come amid a heated battle between the Trump administration and social media companies. On Thursday, the President signed an executive order aimed at weakening a federal law that shields social media networks from liability for users’ posts after he had long complained about social media companies unfairly censoring conservatives.
During the past few months, Zuckerberg has positioned Facebook as a protector of free speech and has said he doesn’t think social media companies should be arbiters of truth. As such, Facebook has allowed politicians to lie in political ads while Twitter banned political ads completely.
Twitter also took the unprecedented step on Thursday of obscuring Trump’s original tweet about Minneapolis behind a warning that users must first click. That comes after Twitter labeled another Trump tweet about mail-in ballots as misinformation.
In Friday’s Facebook post, Zuckerberg started with empathy towards the struggle African-Americans face, reciting the names of unarmed black victims Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot by a white men while jogging in Georgia, and Breonna Taylor, who was shot by Louisville police while in her apartment, in addition to George Floyd, a Minneapolis man who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck. In addressing the president’s comments, Zuckerberg said: “I’ve been struggling with how to respond to the President’s tweets and posts all day. Personally, I have a visceral negative reaction to this kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric.”
He added: “I disagree strongly with how the President spoke about this, but I believe people should be able to see this for themselves, because ultimately accountability for those in positions of power can only happen when their speech is scrutinized out in the open.”


fortune--2020-05-30--Trump threatens to use ‘unlimited power’ of the military to crack down on George Floyd protestors

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President Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to rally at the White House, inviting a potentially dangerous mix of protesters after people angry about the death of an unarmed black man in Minnesota police custody skirmished with the Secret Service on Friday.
He threatened “the unlimited power” of the U.S. military to clamp down on demonstrations, tweeting from Air Force One as he traveled to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for the launch of a SpaceX spacecraft. The military is “ready, willing and able” to assist, Trump said earlier.
In a series of tweets early on Saturday, Trump also seemed to revel in the potential for violence outside the White House, warning that Friday’s protesters would have been met by “the most vicious dogs” and “most ominous weapons” had they dared to breach the fence around the property.
He depicted Secret Services agents as eager to battle the demonstrators, and later issued an appeal to his supporters to assemble: “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???”
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser rebuked the president in her own series of tweets, calling him “a scared man. Afraid/alone” and saying she stood with people peacefully protesting the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis this week.
Those demonstrations were not altogether peaceful, though. The Secret Service said in a statement that it arrested six people and that “multiple” personnel from the agency were injured when protesters assaulted them with “bricks, rocks, bottles, fireworks and other items.”
Videos from Friday’s demonstration showed protesters chasing journalists from the park and throwing objects at officers wearing riot gear, and Secret Service officers responding with pepper spray.
Contrary to Trump’s assertion that Bowser “wouldn’t let the D.C. police get involved,” the Secret Service said the city’s police and U.S. Park Police were also on the scene of the protests.
Call for Restraint
Bowser called a press conference on Saturday to discuss the situation. “I call upon our city and our nation to exercise great restraint, even while the president tries to divide us,” she said.
Trump told reporters he had “no idea” if his boosters would assemble on Saturday night at the White House.
“I heard that MAGA wanted to be there—that a lot of MAGA was going to be there,” Trump said as he departed the White House, using the acronym for “Make America Great Again.”
Washington on Friday entered “Phase One” of its reopening from coronavirus stay-at-home restrictions. Large gatherings of people are currently prohibited.
Trump also tweeted that “ANTIFA and the Radical Left” were stoking protests against Floyd’s death, a day after saying he understood the “pain” that demonstrators were feeling. “Antifa,” short for anti-fascist, is sometimes used to describe militant left-wing activists.
Attorney General William Barr made a brief televised statement to make similar comments, tying the protests to “groups of outside radicals and agitators exploiting the situation.”
“It is a federal crime to cross state lines or to use interstate facilities to incite or participate in violent rioting. We will enforce these laws,” Barr said. He took no questions.
Minnesota officials, including the state’s Democratic governor, echoed Trump’s suggestion that organized agitators were exploiting anger about the death of Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed black man.
“The situation in Minneapolis is no longer in any way about the murder of George Floyd,” Governor Tim Walz said. “It is about attacking civil society, instilling fear and disrupting our great cities.”
Video showed a white police officer in Minneapolis kneeling on Floyd’s neck to the point the arrested man could no longer breathe. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was arrested Friday and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter.
In Washington, demonstrators gathered in a park across from the White House around dusk on Friday, briefly causing the compound to be locked down. It was just one of a string of protests around the country, from Atlanta to Oakland, California.
Safe Inside
Trump said he “watched every move” of Friday’s protests outside the White House, and “couldn’t have felt more safe.”
Had protesters breached the complex’s fence, they would have faced “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons,” Trump said. “That’s when people would have been really badly hurt, at least.”
Bowser said in her briefing that Trump’s reference to attack dogs was “no subtle reminder to African-Americans of segregationists that let dogs out on women, children and innocent people in the South.” She called the comments “an attack on humanity.”
Friday night’s protests came on a day after Trump appeared to threaten violence against certain demonstrators, tweeting overnight that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
The phrase echoed a remark made in 1967 by a white Miami police chief when announcing tougher policing policies for the Florida city’s black neighborhoods. In a rare reversal, Trump later said his tweet wasn’t intended as a threat, but merely meant to discourage looting that has historically coincided with violence.
Trump also said he’d spoken with Floyd’s family and that he understood the hurt and pain of demonstrators.
“We have peaceful protesters, and support the rights for peaceful protesters,” Trump said Friday. “We can’t allow a situation like in Minneapolis to descend further into lawless anarchy and chaos.
–With assistance from Jordan Robertson.


fortune--2020-05-30--SpaceX launches historic manned mission, boosting private space race

Trump threatens to use ‘ unlimited power ’ of the military to crack down on George Floyd protestors

A SpaceX rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Saturday carrying two astronauts to the International Space Station, marking the first-ever commercial launch of humans into orbit.
Astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken are also the first people to lift off into orbit from the United States since the most recent space shuttle flight in July 2011. The launch went off as planned on Saturday, after bad weather forced SpaceX to postpone its initially scheduled blast off on Wednesday.
The mission, paid for by NASA, is expected to kick off the next major phase of the privatization of space, which has so far focused on satellite launches. Plans include the launch of private astronauts, constructing a private space station, and possibly private missions beyond Earth.
“What today is about is reigniting the dream of space,” SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said this week before the launch. “It’s just a great, exciting, inspiring day.”
NASA hopes the lower cost of commercial flights will allow the agency to expand its space exploration and research efforts, with a goal to revisit the moon and ultimately reach Mars, as well. “The challenge with the Apollo program is that it ended,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said before the launch. “What we’re doing here today is sustainable.”
If all goes according to plan, Hurley and Behnken should arrive at the ISS on Sunday. The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket used in the launch returned intact onto the deck of a ship offshore.
In 2014, NASA commissioned SpaceX and Boeing to build launch vehicles capable of carrying humans to the station. Boeing has fallen somewhat behind its rival with its first mission expected next year if it can work out glitches with its Starliner capsule.
Beginning in 2021, the private space industry hopes to send the first-ever private astronauts to the space station. Texas-based startup Axiom Space, run by former NASA manager Mike Suffredini, has a deal with SpaceX to send four astronauts on commercial missions, while another startup, Space Adventures, contracted with SpaceX to carry tourists into space starting in 2022. Both deals hinge on the success of SpaceX’s Dragon crew capsule that is being used in Wednesday’s launch.
Putting humans in orbit who aren’t government workers could help spur low gravity manufacturing techniques. It could also allow for working on satellites that need some assembly after launch or that need repairs.