fortune--2020-01-24--Pentagon: 34 US troops had brain injuries from Iran’s missile strike

The Pentagon said Friday that 34 U.S. troops were diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries suffered in this month’s Iranian missile strike on an Iraqi air base, and that half of the troops have returned to their military duties.
Seventeen of the 34 are still under medical observation, according to Jonathan Hoffman, the chief Pentagon spokesman.
President Donald Trump had initially said he was told that no troops had been injured in the Jan. 8 strike. The military said symptoms were not immediately reported after the strike and in some cases became known days later.
After the first reports that some soldiers had been hurt, Trump referred to them as “headaches” and said the cases were not as serious as injuries involving the loss of limbs.
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—Millions have been purged from voter rolls—and may not even realize it
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fortune--2020-01-24--What to watch (and skip) in theaters and on Netflix this weekend

Purdue Pharma bankruptcy is now open to OxyContin-related personal injury claims

Whether you’re standing in the theater lobby or curled up in bed, deciding what to watch next is often the most difficult part of any pop-culture junkie’s day. And with dozens of films in theaters on any given weekend, plus virtually endless layers of streaming purgatory to sort through in search of your next binge-watch, there’s more out there—and tougher decisions to make—than ever.
Fortune‘s here to help you navigate the week’s latest offerings, boiling all the entertainment out there down into three distinct recommendations: should you see it, stream it, or skip it? Find out below.
SEE IT: ‘Color Out of Space’ (In theaters)
South African auteur Richard Stanley returns for his first film as a director since being infamously fired off The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1996, and if this vivid, terrifying H.P. Lovecraft adaptation is any indication, the time off’s only made him sharper.
Behind the camera of this gorgeously hallucinogenic, strangely moving film, Stanley floods the screen with colorful psychedelia and some impressively grotesque body-horror imagery, but his more impressive triumph is a matter of pacing. A story that ends in an entirely different place from where it starts, narratively and tonally, Stanley’s adaptation is a character-driven slow-burn that at around the hour mark abruptly explodes in a blaze of loopy, creature-feature chaos.
He’s aided in that sense by star Nicolas Cage, perhaps one of the best working actors at pulling out all the stops; across films as disparate as Vampire’s Kiss, Ghost Rider, and Mandy (to name three of 30), he captures the delirious, darkly comic splintering of men confronted with impossible circumstances. Casting Cage in your movie can sometimes feel like a stunt to cover up weaknesses in the script, something like hiring a clown to entertain at your kid’s sparsely attended 10th birthday party—in other words, it can backfire in any number of disastrous ways. Here, he’s just the right man for the job. Cage plays Nathan, an alpaca farmer who—with his wife Theresa (Joely Richardson), who’s recovering from cancer, and kids Benny (Brendan Meyer) and Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur)—one day witnesses a meteorite dropping out of the sky, crash-landing in their yard and beginning to emit a pink/purple haze none of them can quite identify. Then, well, things change, and not in a way that bodes well for the family.
Color Out of Space is famously one of Lovecraft’s trickier short stories, and the author’s personal favorite. Its articulation of “the alien” as something transformative and inescapable, steadily mutating both the landscape and the people living in reach, has aged particularly well; it was most recently adapted, albeit unofficially, in Annihilation, which saw the alien as something unknowable and beautiful. If the original story was in many senses about cancer, how metastasis must feel like a ceding of ground to something that doesn’t belong there, Annihilation likened it more to depression, the idea of a “death drive,” self-destruction that stems from emotional extremis instead of a disease.
Stanley’s Color Out of Space, a much more straightforward adaptation, disagrees with this and sees the alien as something monstrous and terrifying. It’s unsurprising to learn the filmmaker came across the story as his mother was battling cancer. There’s something deeply personal about it, especially as the family unit faces an apocalypse so assured that they actually begin to embrace it. That such a devastating, gruesome concept is relayed with such artistry and aesthetic beauty feels, though, like proof Stanley was the perfect choice to tackle this property. News that he’s plotting a trilogy of Lovecraft adaptations is music to the ears; science-fiction and horror are in sore need of movies as odd and deeply felt as this, and even stranger things.
STREAM IT: ‘John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum’ (HBO Now)
The John Wick movies are bloody, bullet-strewn ballets, action extravaganzas that move with a grace and precision so head-and-shoulders above near everything else in the genre that they’ve rightly been commending for triggering a full-on renaissance, in both star Keanu Reeves’s career and action filmmaking on a whole.
Chapter 3 – Parabellum can’t help but to feel privy to this success, playing like something of a victory lap for stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski, who made his debut codirecting the first John Wick with David Leitch. It picks up where Chapter 2 left off, with Reeves’s once-retired assassin racing through New York as every card-carrying member of the secret society of killers to which he once belonged competes to collect the $14 million bounty on his head. In a bravura opening sequence, Wick utilizes every tool at his disposal to slow down his pursuers, weaponizing the likes of a library book, a belt, and a horse to make his eventual escape. For all their action operatics, the greatest kick these movies offer is Wick’s wry and brilliantly tactical thought process, as he tries to figure out any number of creative ways to dispatch his adversaries (or just pumps them full of lead), and Reeves has only grown more comfortable in the role.
As its elongated title might suggest, Chapter 3 – Parabellum is a calculated scaling-up of the franchise’s scope and ambitions, two-plus hours of furious gunfights and breakneck escapes that, within all its mayhem, whirs rather mechanically as it lays the groundwork for even bigger, bloodier battles to come down the line. (The title translates from Latin as “prepare for war,” as in “if you seek peace…”). It’s this franchise’s Infinity War in every sense, including the worst ones: a globe-trotting adventure that is itself loaded to the brim with frenetic and sometimes arrestingly gorgeous fight sequences but holds off on applying real emotional stakes to any of them by advancing the logic that such concerns can be dealt with in the next chapter.
That’s not to say Chapter 3: Parabellum doesn’t satisfy. If you’re seeking nonstop carnage shot with an artist’s sensibility and choreographed as elegantly as anything in the Bolshoi’s latest season, Parabellum is the meatiest and most technically accomplished entry in the series. But as the John Wick universe expands, one hopes Stahelski will exercise a little more restraint next time around—franchise bloat is one adversary even Wick’s most devastating roundhouse kick won’t topple.
SKIP IT: ‘The Goop Lab’ (Netflix)
Gwyneth Paltrow, once known for acting, has emerged as a self-styled health guru across the past five years, riding the success of her wellness brand Goop. Her empire, polished to a preternaturally high gloss and channeling an excessively moisturized brand of feminism, has become a $250 million operation largely by convincing Americans to buy their way into better health.
More specifically, Goop’s built on exploiting the body dysmorphia and everyday anxieties of middle-class women, selling them on pseudoscientific treatments such as inserting jade eggs into your vagina and taking pills that “address multiple systems in the body that contribute to optimal metabolism” for when yours is slowing down (i.e. when you age, as most of us non-Hollywood folks do). It’s all fairly depraved, as we’re reminded when candles that smell like Paltrow’s vagina sell out online, though no less so than any of the dietary supplements peddled to men across the Internet’s backpages, including InfoWars (which sells many of Goop’s same products despite dressing them a little differently).
Enter The Goop Lab, Paltrow’s Netflix series expansion of the empire, which plays less like woo-woo corporate propaganda than you might expect it to without really emerging as much of anything in its own right.
Each episode looks at a different health or wellness trend, featuring an expert who walks audiences through what their chosen process is and how everyday consumers might be able to apply it to their daily lives. Paltrow’s on camera intermittently, occasionally popping in to participate in a wellness ritual but more often ceding ground to people serving more or less as health-guru tour guides. A focus on stories of people who overcame various struggles leads to some interesting moments, such as an episode on orgasms that, in addition to pushing boundaries, emerges as a surprisingly affirming look at the beautiful individuality of women’s bodies.
But The Goop Lab, which carries the disclaimer that it’s “designed to entertain and inform, not provide medical advice,” still furthers the Goop brand’s insinuation that medical doctors won’t do nearly as much for you as alternative healers, that accessing your inner “energy” can be as much a path to salvation as professional medical care. The truth is that Paltrow is exploiting a failure on the behalf of the worldwide medical community: namely, that women experience pain all the time without being adequately treated or often even being believed by their doctors. And even in instances when doctors are in agreement that there’s a biological cause for a woman’s suffering, as in the plight of women living with chronic illnesses like IBS, they’re often powerless to offer practical, effective treatments.
But therein lies the danger of The Goop Lab and Paltrow’s brand of woo-woo lifestyle coaching. For all their wide smiles and empowering messages, Goop lacks the scientific backing to posit its bizarre wellness trends as actual solutions that can improve people’s lives. That it does so with such nonchalance feels misguided at best and at oftentimes downright deluded.
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—Zombi Child auteur Bertrand Bonello on colonialism, French trap music, and a “cinema of fear”
—Sundance 2020: Hunting for the next indie hit and what it may be worth
—Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens team: Asian-American representation is not a “fad”
—Parasite director Bong Joon Ho dissects his tale of two families
—The History channel’s aliens and UFOs content continues to blossom as Project Blue Book returns
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fortune--2020-01-24--As the USPS faces privatization, here’s what it can learn from Canada

After 13 straight years of losses, the United States Postal Service (USPS) could partially privatize this year.
The Postal Service’s Board of Governors is currently on the hunt for a new Postmaster General and, shortly after appointing one, is slated to create a package of structural changes intended to make the organization more profitable. Megan Brennan, the current Postmaster General, was originally set to retire on Jan. 31, but she has agreed to delay her departure in order for the USPS to have more time. The Board of Governors remains in the throes of conducting a “nationwide search” to find someone to fill her spot, they announced in a Jan. 6 release.
Privatizing parts of the USPS is at the top of the list of anticipated structural changes following the appointment of Brennan’s replacement, according to the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), which does not endorse the idea.
A representative from the USPS declined to comment, instead pointing to a November 2019 statement where Brennan noted: “Revenue growth in our package business will never be enough to offset imbalances in the Postal Service’s business model, which must be addressed through legislative and regulatory reforms in order to secure a sustainable future.”
The move would make the U.S. one of many countries worldwide with a semiprivate postal service—including Denmark, Switzerland, Spain, and France, each of which has seen varying degrees of success in doing so.
Canada also falls on this list. Since becoming a public corporation in 1980, the organization has attempted to replace door-to-door delivery with community mailboxes, contracted services out to private retailers, and faced its fair share of labor disputes with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) that have resulted in losses for the company. If Canada’s 40 years with a semiprivate postal service indicate anything, it’s that privatizing is neither a smooth nor an easy fix.
While neither the USPS nor Canada Post receives taxpayer funding, the former has lost money every year for over a decade, while the latter has remained fairly and consistently profitable. This is largely due to a U.S. congressional mandate ordering the USPS to budget retiree health care for every new employee as soon as they’re hired. As retirement costs grow, so have worker compensation costs; the upfront health care mandate is the source of 80% of the USPS’s debt. It’s unclear how privatization would affect this requirement. Canada Post does not have to fulfill this requirement, though the CUPW ensures Canada Post employees have competitive benefits.
Like the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., the Bank of Canada, and national passenger rail service Via Rail, Canada Post is a crown corporation: a hybrid public-private entity that’s state-owned and regulated, yet given the autonomy to operate the way a corporation would. Canada Post does not have to submit an annual operating budget for federal approval before making decisions in the interest of beating out private competitors, like FedEx. Crown corporations submit quarterly financial reports, and their management is subject to federal intervention should any red flags arise.
Canada Post fulfills public sector goals “using private sector methods,” like cutting wages, raising prices, and contracting out services, says Robert Campbell, president and vice chancellor of Mount Allison University and author of two books on contemporary postal systems. “It’s attracted better talent. It’s attracted better expertise. Its thinking is much more market-oriented,” he says.
While its mandate has been reviewed by the federal government every five years since it corporatized, over time, the company “has acted increasingly like a private corporation, and less like a bureaucracy,” Campbell says.
A representative from Canada Post declined to comment.
Canadian crown corporation status is typically given to entities that offer an essential public service that would not be economically viable if run by private corporations alone. Postal delivery fits this criteria to a tee: Canada Post couriers serve as “the eyes and ears of the public,” says Megan Whitfield, president of the Toronto chapter of the CUPW. Beyond delivering citizens vital pieces of mail like disability and social security checks, mail carriers also socialxize with seniors and check in on people living in isolation. “Nobody knows more about the people than their letter carriers,” Whitfield says.
Yet, operating in Canada—a sprawling landmass where, similar to the U.S., nearly 20% of the population lives in rural communities—is a huge economic challenge, one that Canada Post has struggled with amid pressure to break even each year.
Canada Post debated slashing routes as a cost-cutting measure, but its attempts have always been met with criticism. As recently as 2013, emboldened by the support of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada Post announced plans to phase out home mail delivery in favor of community mailboxes. The move would have saved the organization an estimated $700 million to $900 million, but it would have ended door-to-door service for approximately 5 million Canadians, including senior citizens and people with disabilities who would have difficulty traveling to public mailboxes, critics of the reforms argued.
“You’d be devastating communities,” Whitfield says. “It’s not just about losing your mail. It’s the trust issue. It’s the door-to-door. It’s the services [postal workers] provide. It’s the network.”
After major public backlash, a grassroots campaign by the CUPW, and the eventual election of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2015, a moratorium was placed on discussion about ending door-to-door mail delivery.
But many Americans fear that a privatized USPS would make similar moves, like cutting routes in unprofitable areas and increasing prices for consumers. While the USPS is limited in how quickly it can raise rates, the task force President Donald Trump called in 2018 to identify solutions to make the Postal Service more profitable has proposed charging more for “commercial services,” including advertising mail and Amazon orders—a move critics fear will hit small businesses especially hard. The task force has recommended retaining uniform pricing on essential services, however, including the mailing of pharmaceuticals and government notices.
Another cost privatized postal services commonly slash in an effort to boost profit margins are jobs and wages. The Netherlands, which privatized its postal service in 1989, cut 12,000 jobs in doing so, while Germany, which privatized in 1995, cut 38,000. Private postal services across Europe have also seen wages drop and benefits slashed, Alan Barber, then director of domestic policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, reported in a 2018 paper.
According to the APWU, the Trump administration is likely to begin privatization by selling off pieces of the Postal Service—a move Canada Post has also made, but at the expense of workers, Whitfield says. The Canadian postal service sells contract bids to retailers with a postal service center in the building, like pharmacy giant Shoppers Drug Mart. In these situations, postal employees work for the host company, not for Canada Post, and they work under conditions set by the retailer. Many staff who work at Canada Post desks at these franchises are paid far less than direct employees of the postal service, and nearly all lack the right to unionize, Whitfield estimates.
Indeed, Trump’s task force has recommended rolling back workers’ collective bargaining rights. But if history is any indication, this move could be disastrous, says Robert Hebdon, professor emeritus in organizational behavior and industrial relations at McGill University in Montreal.
He predicts that an illegal strike, similar to the one in which approximately 200,000 U.S. postal workers participated in 1970, could be on the horizon. While USPS workers currently do not have the right to strike, Hebdon is not ruling out the possibility of an illegal walkout.
“If workers are generally unsatisfied with their conditions, as we’re seeing with Amazon, they’ll still take action,” Hebdon says. “They’ll do something about it. And you won’t be able to stop it, and you won’t be able to predict when it will happen.”
The long history of labor disputes between Canada Post and the CUPW only affirms this assertion. Postal workers held rotating strikes most recently in the fall of 2018 after a year of contract negotiations that failed to reach an agreement. The disruption in working patterns led many Canadian consumers to turn to competitors for package delivery, causing Canada Post to report a loss of $270 million for 2018.
“[The U.S.] government seems to want to return to some kind of unregulated model where workers don’t have rights, and believe me, we’ve been there,” Hebdon says. “That doesn’t work.”
Correction, January 26, 2020: A previous version of this story misstated the number of Canadians who would have been affected by the 2013 plan to phase out home delivery.


fortune--2020-01-24--As coronavirus spreads in China, Shanghai Disneyland shuts down

How to ease the return to work after maternity leave

There are a lot of sad faces at the happiest place in China as Disney has shut down its Shanghai Disneyland amid a growing outbreak of the deadly coronavirus.
The company, on the park’s Website, announced the closing, saying it was taking the action as a safety precaution and was working with government officials to determine when the park would reopen. As of Friday morning, there was no timeline for that to occur.
“In response to the prevention and control of the disease outbreak and in order to ensure the health and safety of our guests and Cast, Shanghai Disney Resort is temporarily closing Shanghai Disneyland, Disneytown including Walt Disney Grand Theatre and Wishing Star Park, starting January 25, 2020” the company said. “We will continue to carefully monitor the situation and be in close contact with the local government, and we will announce the reopening date upon confirmation.”
Guests will receive refunds for tickets and resort hotels.
Disney is joining many other public facilities nationwide in closing its doors. China’s National Health Commission has confirmed 875 cases of coronavirus infection throughout the country, with 26 deaths. A second case of the disease was confirmed in the U. S. Friday morning by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The park closure comes at what would have been a peak time for visitors, amid the Chinese New Year (also called the Spring Festival), the busiest travel time of the year in the country. This is also the year of the rat (mouse), which the park has been planning to celebrate lavishly.
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—Mysterious GPS outages are wracking the shipping industry
—Google CEO Sundar Pichai on managing a tech giant’s growing pains
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fortune--2020-01-24--This tech giant says A.I. has already helped it save $1 billion

This article is part of a Fortune Special Report on Artificial Intelligence.
For employers embracing artificial intelligence, it’s not about the bottom line—but it’s not not about that, either.
Companies are increasingly using robots and other machine-learning technology to recruit, hire, assess, and manage their staff, as I report in a feature that’s part of Fortune’s February special report on artificial intelligence. Most of the employers and vendors I spoke with for that article told me they were automating some human resources functions because it saves them time, and because some A.I. technology can help them hire a more diverse workforce. Efficiency and greater diversity were also the top reasons cited by recruiters and hiring managers LinkedIn surveyed in 2018; meanwhile, only 30% of those surveyed said they were using artificial intelligence because it “saves money.”
Still, “efficiency” and “cost-cutting” are usually synonyms in corporate-speak — as several human resources executives acknowledged to me. “We haven’t really focused on the cost-saving element, but there is a financial component to filling jobs faster,” says Rupert Bader, senior director of people analytics for Expedia Group, which is using A.I. -enabled technology from startup Textio to recruit employees.
Using machine-learning technology in human resources can help companies cut costs by hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, in some cases. IBM, for example, estimates that it has realized “almost $1 billion in savings” since 2011 by integrating artificial intelligence and other modernization efforts in its HR department, according to global head of talent Obed Louissaint.
The technology giant has more than 350,000 employees, and receives up to 10,000 job applications every day. Machine learning helps IBM sort through the applicant deluge for the best matches, Louissaint explains: “Trying to find a needle in the haystack becomes a little easier when you have a magnet.”
IBM also has created A.I. -enabled systems that help its human managers handle employee training, performance reviews, and even compensation and retention conversations. The company has created what it compares to a Netflix for employee development, an internal program that tracks a worker’s skill set and recommends classes or training sessions to advance their professional learning. (Topics can range from leadership-focused sessions on public speaking or negotiation to more technical instruction on how to build chatbots or other types of programs.)
And then there’s what IBM calls its “proactive retention” program, which guesses when an employee is getting ready to quit—and alerts managers that now might be a great time to offer a raise, a promotion, or another incentive to keep someone around. Louissaint estimates that IBM has saved about $300 million in hiring-related and lost-productivity costs since implementing that technology in 2011.
Some of the other $700 million in savings that IBM has realized in human resources result from other modernization efforts, including developing in-house technology to replace a third-party employee-development platform. That shift eliminated the licensing fees it paid externally. IBM also says it has reduced the overall expenses of its human resources department by 30%, in part by automating some of its lower-level “data verification and reconciliation” work in the department, according to a company spokeswoman. She adds that the company has reassigned its remaining HR staffers to more sophisticated tasks.
Louissaint was careful to emphasize that IBM still plans to keep humans involved in managing its workforce. Artificial intelligence can provide “an insight or an input, but the manager then makes the ultimate decision,” he says, adding that employees “want a human who knows them behind the decision—versus thinking that they’re being managed by machine.”
Clarification: This article has been updated to more clearly describe how IBM has saved money in its human-resources department.
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—Medicine by machine: Is A.I. the cure for the world’s ailing drug industry?
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fortune--2020-01-24--What to know about Trump’s new U.S. Border Patrol chief

The Trump administration has named a new head of the U.S. Border Patrol.
Rodney Scott will take over for Carla Provost, who is retiring, according to an announcement obtained Friday by The Associated Press from Mark Morgan, acting head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Scott has been a member of the Border Patrol for 27 years. He takes over the Border Patrol at a critical time. The agency is in charge of border security and has managed massive numbers of crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border. An increasing number were families from Central America.
Scott led the San Diego Sector, which includes 60 miles (97 kilometers) of border shared with Mexico and 931 miles (1,498 kilometers) of coastal border.
Morgan says Scott is the absolute “embodiment of the U.S. Border Patrol’s motto, ‘Honor First.'”
Provost was the first female leader of the Border agency.


fortune--2020-01-24--23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki is ‘surprised’ that DNA test sales have declined. I’m not.

This article originally ran in Term Sheet, Fortune’s newsletter about deals and dealmakers. Sign up here.
DNA testing company 23andMe just laid off 100 people, or roughly 14 percent of its workforce, reports CNBC. The downsizing comes at a time of declining sales and lack of enthusiasm for at-home DNA test kits.
CEO Anne Wojcicki says she was “surprised” to see the market turn and isn’t sure about the cause of this lull. Could it be privacy fears? Maybe it’s concern over an impending recession? “This has been slow and painful for us,” she told CNBC.
The data indicates this problem isn’t unique to 23andMe. It’s systemic. Sales have been down across the board for consumer-focused DNA tests. Since Fortune has given me this platform to share my opinion, allow me to offer my two cents. It ain’t about the economy — it’s about privacy. (Wojcicki has acknowledged that “privacy is top of mind” for 23andMe leadership.)
We assume a lot of things in life, and we tend to also be pretty trusting. Even I — a person who writes about privacy and data breaches all the time — would’ve happily jumped on the at-home DNA test bandwagon if it wasn’t for my mom begging me not to volunteer my genetic information to a random company. (My argument that I need to get my DNA tested to better understand if I’m predisposed to liking vanilla or chocolate ice cream better was somehow not convincing enough.)
Here’s the thing: During the at-home DNA test boom, many people who wanted to learn more about their family tree didn’t realize that their data could be shared for other purposes. Consumer DNA testing companies can share users’ data with law enforcement, drug makers, and even app developers. (For six years, 23andMe allowed customers to share their data with third-party app developers until finally cutting off access in 2018.)
More than 26 million people have willingly shared their DNA with one of the four leading ancestry and health databases. But now, an increasing number of people are aware of the dangers of giving up your data. The implications of privacy around genetic information came into full view when police used a genealogy website to track down a suspect in the decades-old case of the Golden State Killer. Last year, FamilyTreeDNA, an early pioneer of the rapidly growing market, granted the FBI access to its database of nearly 2 million genetic profiles.
Margo Georgiadis, president and CEO of Ancestry, has said that her company does not cooperate with law enforcement unless compelled by a court order. (23andMe has a similar policy in place.) In 2018, Georgiadis said, the company had 10 requests from law enforcement. But those inquiries were related to credit card fraud, not genetics.
“There’s no question that in the industry as a whole, other actors have chosen to go down a different path and not meet the highest standards,” Georgiadis said at Fortune’s 2019 Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colo. “Consumers need to understand they do have a choice, and that there are real differences between companies.”
PS. The Broadside, Fortune’s monthly newsletter on career advancement for women, launches today. Subscribe for career advice and a robust list of jobs and networking opportunities. Sign up here.
Polina Marinova
Twitter: @polina_marinova
Email: polina.marinova@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Kneron, a San Diego-based on-device edge artificial intelligence, raised $40 million in funding. Horizons Ventures led the round.
- Clubhouse, a New York-based developer of collaborative tools for software teams, raised $25 million in Series B funding. Greylock Partners led the round, and was joined by investors including Battery Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.
- Beacon Platform, a New York-based vendor of cloud-based enterprise technology and capital markets software solutions, raised $20 million in Series B funding. Centana Growth Partners led the round, and was joined by investors including PIMCO and Global Atlantic.
- CloudKnox Security, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based developer of cloud security software, raised $12 million in funding. Sorenson Ventures led the round, and was joined by investors including ClearSky Security, Dell Technologies Capital and Foundation Capital.
- Moov, a San Francisco, Calif.-based data-fueled marketplace for used manufacturing equipment, raised $2.4 million in seed funding. NFX led the round, and was joined by investors including Decent Capital, Darco Capital, and Great Oaks Venture Capital.
EXITS
- TPG Growth agreed to acquire Denali Water Solutions, a Russellville, Ark.-based organic residuals management company, from The Firmament Group. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Novacap agreed to sell Intelerad Medical Systems, a Canada-based provider of medical imaging software and enterprise workflow solutions, to Hg. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
FIRMS + FUNDS
- Allos Ventures, an Indianapolis-based venture capital firm, raised $52 million for its latest fund, Allos III.
PEOPLE
- Clay Fisher joined Spark Capital as an investor.
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fortune--2020-01-24--Drones for business are still barely getting off the ground

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Some new technologies slip into our lives quietly. You may not even know how often you’ve interacted with or been analyzed by the machine learning-driven apps Aric mentioned in yesterday’s Data Sheet. Some technologies, on the other hand, buzz noisily into our awareness. You will almost certainly hear when a drone zips past you.
But in terms of actually making an impact in the business world, they’re also still a long way behind technologies like A.I. or 5G.
When I was interviewing UPS CEO David Abney last month, the talk quickly turned to drones. UPS is very interested in using drones to improve the efficiency of the giant, global logistical puzzle of delivering 20 million packages a day. UPS has a couple of efforts underway, testing drones to deliver pharmacy orders and bring medical samples from a doctor’s office to a lab. Abney shared a funny story about how he tried to impress his grandkids with a drone and ended up landing it in the swimming pool. (That didn’t happen when my teenage son let me pilot his drone. He flipped on a safety setting restricting me to a maximum speed of 2 miles per hour. I managed not to get into too much trouble.)
The business question is one of the biggest hurdles drones face. We can’t just let anyone and everyone who has a business idea for drones fill the skies with flying pizza-delivery bots or mosquito-spraying quadcopters. Switzerland last year halted a major delivery trial for several months after one drone crashed near a kindergarten playground.
So the Federal Aviation Administration is moving slowly, some say too slowly, in granting permission to companies for commercial operations beyond the sight line of a drone’s pilot. So far, just a couple have won a Part 135 certification, as it’s known, including UPS and Wing Aviation, the Google sister company. Imagine if only two companies had permission to use A.I. in commercial applications.
The day after Christmas, the FAA issued a 300-page proposal to improve safety by requiring all drones to broadcast an identification signal. The complex plan has drawn criticism for requiring an expensive, Internet-connected solution, and it could take a while to get to a final rule. “This is an important building block in the unmanned traffic management ecosystem,” the FAA said in the proposal.
The much more difficult task of creating a drone air traffic-control system, akin to the FAA’s system for overseeing all the airplanes in the sky, still lies ahead. For now, drones for business are barely getting off the ground.
Aaron Pressman
Twitter: @ampressman
Email: aaron.pressman@fortune.com
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NEWSWORTHY
That wasn't very cash money of you. Amazon and others may imagine a future of retail stores not accepting cash, but New York City authorities are having none of it. The city council voted Thursday to require stores and restaurants to accept cash for payment. “This practice punishes the underbanked,” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said before the 43-3 vote in favor of the rule.
A really bad date. Copying Twitter's blue checkmark, Tinder debuted a photo verification service so users of the popular dating app can have confidence that the person they're swiping right on actually looks like their profile picture. The feature relies on self-authentication via a series of guided selfies. The company also added a panic button to its app to call for help on dates that go dangerously wrong.
Camouflaged. The latest tweaking by Google of its search results page makes it harder to tell the difference between organic results and paid advertising, some critics charge. Click rates on ads in the results page have increased since the tweaks, which added similarly sized icons to both kinds of results, Digiday reports.
More gigahertz. On Wall Street, Intel delighted investors by posting much better fourth quarter results than expected and offering an upbeat forecast for 2020. Intel said sales of $20.2 billion grew 8% from the year before and exceeded the average analyst forecast by $1 billion. Intel's share, up 31% over the past year, gained 6% in pre-market trading on Friday morning. Communications chipmaker Broadcom got a bounce after announcing a new $15 billion supply deal with Apple. Broadcom shares, up 24% over the past year, gained 3% in pre-market trading.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
While the designers and developers at Apple get all the attention, the company's success has also been fueled by some wizardry in the areas of supply chain management and procurement. The Wall Street Journal's Tripp Mickle has a profile of Tony Blevins, Apple's vice president of procurement, showing just how far the company will go to save a few bucks. Blevin's nickname is the Blevinator.
For years, Mr. Blevins wore a tourist trinket from Hawaii, a cheap puka-shell necklace he had negotiated to a $2 price from $5. It was a reminder to his staff that nothing should fetch full price, said Helen Wang, who worked on his procurement team for years. “If he’s like that for himself, you can only imagine how he is with company money,” she said.
FOR YOUR WEEKEND READING PLEASURE
A few long reads that I came across this week:
I Tried Listening to Podcasts at 3x and Broke My Brain (OneZero)
‘Podfasters’ listen to their favorite pods at 1.5x, even 2x speed. But how fast is too fast?
The Gene Drive Dilemma: We Can Alter Entire Species, but Should We? (New York Times Magazine)
A new genetic engineering technology could help eliminate malaria and stave off extinctions — if humanity decides to unleash it.
Taylor Swift: No Longer ‘Polite at All Costs’ (Variety)
Taylor Swift — who, at 30, has reached a Zen state of cheerful realism — laughs as she leans into a pillow she’s placed over her crossed legs inside her suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, leaning further still into her infinitesimal odds of winning a Golden Globe, which will zero out when she heads down to the televised ball in a few hours.
At Home With Rem Koolhaas (WSJ Magazine)
The legendary architect Rem Koolhaas is turning his unflinching gaze to the earth’s future, with an exhibition opening at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Exclusive: American Well’s next act is turning your bedroom into a hospital By Sy Mukherjee
The U.S. doesn’t mandate diverse boardrooms—but now Goldman Sachs does By Claire Zillman
FedEx text scam: These fake personalized ‘alerts’ could result in identity theft By Chris Morris
These tailors show that custom suiting is no longer just for men By Kristen Bellstrom
5G is supposed to be the future. But here’s what it’s like today By Aaron Pressman
The long ocean voyage that helped find the flaws in GPS By Katherine Dunn
Minding the GAAP: companies are using a wider range of accounting metrics to inform investors—and sometimes mislead them By Erik Sherman
BEFORE YOU GO
British comedy troupe Monty Python has been getting chuckles for decades, but lost one of its core members this week with the death of Terry Jones at age 77. Guardian News put together a highlight reel of some of Jones' best bits over the years with Monty Python. Have a great weekend, with plenty of laughs.


fortune--2020-01-24--Taika Waititi on Kiwi humor, directing as Hitler, and why kids should see ‘Jojo Rabbit’

Few helmers this awards season had a tougher gig than Jojo Rabbit’s Taika Waititi.
Actually, make that four gigs.
The New Zealand–born filmmaker (Marvel’s Thor; Hunt for the Wilderpeople) produced, wrote, directed, and acted in Fox Searchlight’s tragicomic Best Picture nominee about a young boy whose dream of becoming a Nazi is derailed when he discovers his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in their home. (Oh, and his imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler, played by Waititi.)
The Directors Guild Award–nominated Waititi appeared in front of a live audience on Jan. 8 in Los Angeles, alongside Jojo costar Thomasin McKenzie, to discuss their complex, wrenching, and, yes, funny film.
What follows are highlights of Waititi’s portion of the conversation, which was hosted by the SAG-AFTRA Foundation.
Tackling “Jojo”
I learned from making Thor that my follow-up film should be a potential career-ender! Jojo is impossible to pitch. They lose interest soon after: “Picture this: Little boy wants to be the best Nazi he can be!” People did not want to see a story about a 10-year-old Hitler youth. I got support early on from [Jojo’s source material] Caging Skies author Christine Leunens, added the Hitler character—he wasn’t in the book—and decided to write the best script I could. Let that be the pitch. The hope was, “Don’t judge until you read it.”
Roman Griffin Davis and writer-director Taika Waititi on the set of “Jojo Rabbit,” a film Waititi says was “impossible” to pitch. “People did not want to see a story about a 10-year-old Hitler youth.” Kimberley French—Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Kiwi-flavored humor
My sensibility is to mix drama and comedy. Growing up on an island like New Zealand, there’s nowhere to go except Australia, so we spend a lot of our time wandering the suburbs. Ours is comedy of the mundane. Also, Kiwis chill people out; we don’t like upsetting people, which is why I thought, “There’s no way New Zealand would make a film like Jojo.” Though in my mind, this film isn’t offensive at all.
Casting Hitler
We scoured the acting community, but sometimes your search leads you to the mirror. No, no, no… it was never my intention to play Hitler; that’s Searchlight’s fault. “We’ll only do the movie if you play him.” It’s every brown, indigenous boy’s dream to grow up and play Germany’s most popular guy. A real actor would have put in too much effort; I wanted him to be a buffoon. “George Clooney as Hitler!” is all people would have cared about. It would’ve detracted from the story’s heart, which is the kids.
In one of the film’s many absurdly comedic scenes, Jojo (Davis) has dinner with his imaginary friend Adolf (Waititi), and his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson). Kimberley French—Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Location, location, location
We shot at Barrandov Studios, near Babelsberg in Berlin—the first stop for any Holocaust film. Other productions were happening at the same time. We’d see other Nazis walking in the hallway. “Wait, are those our Nazis?” It’s an unnerving thing, especially when I was dressed as “The Idiot.” They’re like, “Hey, they’ve got a Hitler!” I probably had about 65 schnitzels during the shoot.
Directing in costume
Playing Hitler is hard; directing as Hitler is harder. Thankfully it was a stick-on mustache, but that costume does change the way you do things. “Thomasin, on the next take, you should…and this is not an order…” I’d try to at least take the jacket off when I could. It’s not nice to catch that reflection while you’re working. And if I was in the scene, I’d just call “Cut!” when I felt like people were getting bored.
Waititi (right, with Davis and Johansson) relished the days on set when he didn’t have to direct in-costume as “The Idiot.” Kimberley French—Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Managing Jojo’s trauma
I didn’t want to show Rosie on the gallows; we didn’t have the right to see Jojo’s mother like that. Also, things like that can pull audiences out of their experience, especially seeing Scarlett Johansson in that way. “Wait, I know she’s not dead because I just saw her in Marriage Story!” We had to keep it from Jojo’s point of view. There are also so many connotations of shoes around that period, with her dancing in the movie too. So showing just her shoes was a classier approach.
Modern twist
David Bowie’s Heroes was the only song I ever considered using at the end. A lot of the music and dialogue are actually very contemporary. It was important that Jojo not feel like other war movies. I wanted to contemporize it so young people could see how easily this story could happen now; these kids just don’t have cell phones and they dress a little differently.
Brothers in satire
My awards season starstruck moment? Mel Brooks. At the AFI luncheon, he praised Jojo in front of everyone, and it felt like validation from a hero. He opened doors for movies like this, and I slipped in behind him. People are still “Oh, we’re not ready for that,” but comedy is the most important tool we have to combat bullies, dictators, and intolerance.
Before helming big-budget films, Waititi collaborated for years with longtime friend and fellow Kiwi Jemaine Clement, including on HBO’s “Flight of the Conchords” and the comedy feature “What We Do in the Shadows,” which inspired FX’s hit comedy series. Kimberley French—Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Managing criticism
I think most of Jojo’s critics haven’t seen the movie. “Nope! Don’t want to see that!” For some, it’s too close because of a family experience, or it’s just uncomfortable. People often need permission to laugh at difficult things. In America specifically, “divisive” is often seen as “bad.” But it’s good! It makes people think. I saw [the Australian war movie] Gallipoli when I was 8. If something’s too safe, children aren’t forced to think. I think they should be seeing films like Jojo too.
Acting, writing, or directing?
The writer part of me is finicky. “You’ve got to get that line right!” The actor part is, “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want!,” and the director is, “Quit it you two! I’m out of time and need to get this shot!” I acted a lot before I directed, and I started hating it. Working with Jojo’s director, I’ve fallen back in love with it. But if I had to choose one, I’d choose directing because I can more easily achieve godlike status. Creating worlds, commanding everyone. Total control. (By the way, I’ve been suspended four times from the DGA for not paying my dues. But I’m on top of it now.)
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens team: Asian-American representation is not a ‘fad’
—Parasite director Bong Joon Ho dissects his tale of two families
—The History channel’s aliens and UFOs content continues to blossom as Project Blue Book returns
—What does Parasite’s best ensemble win at SAG mean for Oscar?
—These Oscar Best Picture nominees are “problematic,” but will that matter?
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.


fortune--2020-01-24--Responsible investing is a rare field of finance led by women. Now it’s hot—and men want in

It was the usual setup for panelists at a finance conference talking about making smart investments. They were all the same gender.
In this case, all women. That probably wasn’t surprising, considering the event was hosted by the United Nations-backed Principles for Responsible Investment. Still, Karine Hirn, founding partner at East Capital in Hong Kong, watched in admiration. She celebrated on Twitter: “Climate finance is at last opening up perspectives for great talent within the otherwise very unbalanced world of finance.”
Probably the first time ever I listen to a female-only panel at an investment conference (which is not dealing about gender parity). Climate finance is at last opening up perspectives for great talent within the otherwise very unbalanced world of finance #PRIinPerson pic.twitter.com/cdy1vz0FTi — Karine Hirn (@Karinoshka) September 10, 2019
Men rule that world, except for one key field: the fast-growing arena of what’s known by the shorthand ESG. There’s big money pouring in, and there are big names promoting the idea of applying environmental, social and governance standards to the business of making money.
Which means, of course, that the men may try to muscle in.
“The ESG person was once seen as a junior. Now their expertise is considered essential,” said Rebecca Chesworth, senior ETF strategist at State Street Global Advisors, where she’s on a team developing investment strategies to promote environmental and social goals. “And so now many more men are paying attention.”
For decades a finance backwater, responsible investing—variously also called sustainable or values based or ethical—is having its moment. Fund bosses are under pressure from shareholders, clients, employees and activists to use their resources to fight climate change or address a raft of other issues, such as workplace diversity or LGBTQ rights or corporate governance on compensation.
The behemoth BlackRock Inc. announced its shift last week, when founder Larry Fink said it would redirect the roughly $7 trillion of assets the firm manages toward environmental sustainability and devoted his annual letter to sounding the warning on climate change, saying the evidence of the risk is “compelling investors to reassess core assumptions.” Because of it, Fink said, “I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.”
That would catapult to new heights the profiles of ESG teams at banks, money-management firms and public companies, the rare area in finance where the gender imbalance in top jobs isn’t hugely lopsided in men’s favor.
“As sustainable finance roles rise in prominence, so do the many women that occupy them,” said Jane Ambachtsheer, global head of sustainability at BNP Paribas Asset Management in Paris. “It’s a bit of a fast track to get women into more influential positions as more people realize connecting finance with the real economy is a critical issue.”
Hard data are limited, but according to what’s available, and interviews with more than 30 ESG executives, women are unusually well represented in decision-making roles, including top spots. They lead ESG units at firms including JPMorgan Asset Management, Invesco and Fidelity Investments.
“ESG was not always popular or glamorous,” said Bonnie Wongtrakool, a portfolio manager and global head of ESG investments at Western Asset Management in Pasadena, California. “If you have an important but thankless task, you give it to a female, because you know they will get it done.”
Assets managed using a broad definition of the ESG approach are growing. They were at $23 trillion at the start of 2016, up 73 percent increase from four years earlier, according to the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance, whose members are financial companies, including Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP. Now they’re over $30 trillion.
“ESG has become a central discipline,” said Emily Chew, global head of ESG research and integration at Manulife Investment Management in Boston, Early on, “it was marginal and was not seen as attractive to young men wanting to build their careers.” Now, “there’s a war on talent that favors people who have been involved in ESG for years, including many mid-career and senior women.”
Over the past five years, 44% of the top ESG jobs that recruiter Acre Resources helped fill went to women. That’s a stark difference from the industry in general. Women on average made up 17% of senior managers and investment advisers and managers in the U.K. last year, according to the Financial Conduct Authority, and their share of those roles had barely changed since 2005. In the U.S., McKinsey & Co. data show that women are in 22% of similar positions at asset managers and investment banks.
A survey by Responsible Investor and the Sustainable Finance Network found that the ranks of men and women in the business of sustainable financing “to be almost equal”—though, tellingly, another finding was that men are twice as likely to be in roles commanding more than $197,000 annually.
Where women are vastly outnumbered is in the dedicated investment or financial product roles, with just 19% of those filled by women, according to Acre Resources. And last year, data compiled by Bloomberg show, all but one of the top-10 best performing sustainable funds as ranked by Morningstar Inc. were run by men. The exception had three managers, two male, one female.
The numbers could get worse, said Ian Povey-Hall, principal consultant for sustainable and impact investing at Acre Resources. “There could be a temptation for senior management to withdraw their support from the women that have been key to the development of those franchises in the wilderness years when appointing senior investment roles, reverting back to more jobs for the boys.”
At State Street, Rakhi Kumar, head of ESG investments and asset stewardship, said she’s seen waves of applications from men. “The gender dynamics will look very different 10 years from now.”
Wall Street, often criticized for its lack of gender diversity the closer jobs get to the C-suite, has an incentive to work to prevent that from happening, even if just for the sake of public relations. John Goldstein, head of Goldman’s sustainable finance group, said the talent and experience of the women in the business is too valuable for them to be shunted aside. “I would instead look for women in the space to ascend to more senior, broad based roles.”
Recently, two announcements captured attention. The New York State Common Retirement Fund hired a man as its first director of sustainable investments and Man Group Plc, the world’s largest publicly traded hedge fund firm, tapped Robert Furdak for the new role of chief investment officer for ESG.
But two others also stood out. JPMorgan Chase & Co. put a woman in charge of a new group that intends to meet United Nations sustainability goals in providing more financing and advice for development in emerging markets, while BofA hired Karen Fang for the new role of head of sustainable finance.
“This is still an emerging field,” said Lindsay Patrick, head of sustainable finance at Royal Bank of Canada’s capital markets unit in Toronto, “so there is more room and opportunity for gender equity.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Why investors should pick the underdogs in sports gambling
—In the optimism divide between CEOs and investors, somebody’s wrong
—6 experts on what the U.S. won (and lost) in the China trade agreement
—Fertility Inc.: Inside the big business of babymaking
—The World’s Most Admired Companies in 2020
Subscribe to Fortune’s Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.


fortune--2020-01-24--Goldman Sachs introduces its own gender quota for IPOs

This is the web version of the Broadsheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The Trump administration will restrict visas for pregnant women, Kotex ditches the mystery blue liquid in its commercials, and Goldman sets a quota. Have a wonderful weekend.
– Goldman’s goal. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon shook up the World Economic Forum yesterday when he announced that the bank would refuse to take a company public unless it had at least one “diverse” board member.
The initiative will start in July in the U.S. and Europe, Solomon said at the summit in Davos, Switzerland. The initial requirement will be one board member, but the bank will move toward two in 2021. I spoke with him briefly after the announcement; he said, “IPOs are a pivotal moment for firms,” and that diversity in the boardroom “matters for performance.” Solomon said that in the past four years, the public offerings of U.S. companies with at least one female director performed “significantly better” than those without.
It’s worth noting that WeWork was a high-profile culprit of the all-male board trend and that Goldman would have been one of the investment banks to lead its IPO, which was ultimately pulled amid questions related to the co-working space’s valuation and governance.
The U.S. has tiptoed into the boardroom quota trend that’s already reached places like Italy, Germany, and France, but it hasn’t done so via Washington. Rather, California passed a law in 2018 that requires public companies to have at least one female director. But amid the lack of federal action, some influential players in the private sector—a group that now includes Goldman—have introduced measures to nudge companies toward more diversity. Investors BlackRock and Vanguard, for instance, are using their voting power to pressure companies to add women to their boards.
At the World Economic Forum on Thursday, Finland’s new 34-year-old Prime Minister Sanna Marin was asked why gender quotas are needed if the business case for diversity has already been made. “There are people behind businesses,” she said. Therefore, “businesses don’t always work in a logical way.” You can read my whole story on the Goldman news here.
Finally, a quick housekeeping note: Please keep an eye out for a new addition to the Fortune newsletter family, The Broadside. Publishing once a month, it’s focused on giving women the insight and resources they need to get to the next level in their careers.
Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman
Today’s Broadsheet was produced by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Billionaire backlash. Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s richest woman with an estimated fortune of $2 billion and the daughter of Angola’s former President, will be charged with "committing crimes to enrich herself," including money laundering, influence peddling, harmful management, and forgery of documents. The expected charges stem from her time running the state oil company Sonangol; Angolan officials conducted an investigation. New York Times
- Let it bleed. Goodbye, blue mystery liquid! Tampon and pad brand Kotex will air an ad featuring a red substance that looks more like actual menstrual blood. Some smaller menstrual product startups have done this, but Kotex is the first major brand to make the switch. "Blood is blood. This is something that every woman has experienced, and there is nothing to hide,” says Sarah Paulsen, creative and design director for Kimberly-Clark’s North American feminine-care brands. Wall Street Journal
- Swipe right on safety. Mandy Ginsberg's Match Group invested in Noonlight, a company that makes safety products. Now Tinder will feature a panic button, the option to receive safety check-ins, and the ability to call the authorities to the user's location. Tinder will also introduce a new photo verification service, and is the first of the Match Group's dating apps to implement these features.
- Visa restriction. The Trump Administration's State Department issued new rules yesterday that will allow visa officers to deny pregnant women entry to the United States if officials believe they're visiting for the purpose of "birth tourism"—to try to obtain citizenship for their child. Conservatives have long railed against "anchor babies," while others question whether it's a legitimate phenomenon or concern. New York Times
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: JPMorgan Chase promoted president of co-brand credit cards Leslie Gillin to CMO, succeeding Kristin Lemkau, who was named CEO of a new U.S. wealth management division in December. Little, Brown SVP and publisher Reagan Arthur was named publisher of Knopf. Americares promoted EVP and chief development officer Christine Squires to president and CEO. The American Exploration and Production Council named Liz Bowman VP of communications. Global marketing agency CSM Sport & Entertainment hired Group Nine Media president Christa Carone as president of CSM North America. Pinterest head of diversity and inclusion Candice Morgan joins GV as equity, diversity, and inclusion partner.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- 23andNotMe. Are consumers becoming warier of sharing their genetic information with private companies? 23andMe has seen sales decline, and the company led by Anne Wojcicki just laid off 14% of its staff, or 100 people. "I think the tech world needs to own this better communicate privacy standards to build trust," Wojcicki says, adding that the turn in the genetic-testing market has been "slow and painful" for the company. CNBC
- Just what a professional woman needs? The target customer at the country's largest gun trade show this week? The "professional, modern woman." "She has a job, she has kids," says Sandi Little, president of a company that makes women's clothing designed to hide a handgun. "But she also wants to feel safe." The gun show featured greater inventory of smaller guns—said to appeal to women—compared to past years' focus on rifles and shotguns, a trend following states' loosened restrictions on concealed weapons. Wall Street Journal
- Photoshopping history. Before last weekend's Women's March, the Washington Post reported that the National Archives had altered a displayed image of the 2017 march to blur out some signs critical of President Trump and the many that included the word "pussy." The National Archives said it blurred Trump's name to not "engage" in "political controversy," but restored the original photo after protest from historians and others. Washington Post
- Google results. Googled any professional women lately? Did Google's autofill suggest you search for their husband or wedding? BuzzFeed's Katie Notopoulous conducted a non-scientific experiment and found that when she searched the names of Harvard professors and Forbes 30 Under 30 list members, the suggestion to add "husband" to a search of a woman's name appeared more often than the suggestion to add "wife" to a man's. BuzzFeed
ON MY RADAR
Oscars to feature female conductor for the first time Variety
Obama portraits to tour the nation New York Times
Afghan female journalists fight for their place in the newsroom Zora
Marianne Williamson says she'll support Andrew Yang in Iowa New York Times
PARTING WORDS
"As a black woman, I make music for people, from an experience that is from a black woman."
-Lizzo, in a Rolling Stone cover story


fortune--2020-01-24--The long ocean voyage that helped find the flaws in GPS

This article is part of the Fortune series, “When GPS goes wrong.”
In late April 2017, a commercial container ship left port in Hamburg, Germany. The ship looped around western Europe and through the Mediterranean, then passed through the Suez Canal to the Middle East, on its way to Asia. It was the first of many times the Basle Express would traverse a path between the continents, traveling thousands of miles and heading as far afield as far eastern Russia, before ending its journey in Singapore 10 months later.
The vessel itself was sailing standard commercial seaways. But it carried special cargo: On board were two specially built receivers developed by the German Aerospace Center, Germany’s counterpart to NASA, to detect the frequency of disruption to GPS and other satellite navigation systems along its route.
GPS interference was a problem that, by 2017, was anecdotally on the rise, according to multiple maritime experts and government agencies—and it was beginning to make the shipping industry nervous. (See Fortune’s feature story on the phenomenon here.)
The interference had been linked to “jamming” and “spoofing” techniques, which interrupt genuine satellite signals, either by disrupting them entirely or producing fake signals that can mislead a receiver. Commercially available “jammers”, though illegal, were cheap, and easy to find online, and disruption had increasingly been reported in geopolitical hotspots, particularly in the Black Sea around Russia-annexed Crimea. Later that year, after the Basle Express began its voyage, authorities in Norway and Finland would report outages during NATO drills.
But nobody seemed to know exactly how often GPS interruptions were occurring, how strong they were, and how they impacted shipping, one of the world’s most global industries.
The German Aerospace Center team gathered data that would help demonstrate the sheer scale of the problem. And what the team found surprised even the researchers themselves.
“It was a big deal!” says Emilio Pérez Marcos, one of the lead researchers on the study and a researcher in the Institute of Communications and Navigation at the aerospace center. “We expected to see some interference, accidental ones (maybe due to malfunction of equipment and such), but never so much and by no means so powerful.”
Interruptions from the Suez to Shanghai
The data from the Basle Express, which was first presented in September 2017 and has been expanded on since, presented a striking picture.
The crew documented interference with GPS—usually taking the form of much stronger conflicting signals—at some of the world’s largest seaports, including Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and less often, on the open sea.
At least 140 “strong” cases were documented, defined as powerful enough to disrupt the GPS receivers of a regular commercial ship. The researchers documented two particularly strong cases of interference, one in the Suez Canal, where the researcher’s receivers lost all GPS signals for hours, and another in Jebel Ali, a major commercial port just south of Dubai. Both those locations are relatively close to geopolitical conflict zones where other interruptions of GPS have been documented. (The Suez has witnessed a pattern of interruptions dating from mid-2017.)
The researchers have been quick to note that they can’t draw conclusions on which of the interference incidents they documented were caused intentionally, and which were accidental. They could guess, says Pérez Marcos, but not know for sure—and GPS interference is notoriously difficult to attribute.
Still, the Basle Express research has been one of the biggest contributions to a growing body of evidence about the scale of GPS disruption. Since its first research was published, reports from the U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center has mapped out GPS risk areas, and a European Union-funded monitoring project that covered numerous international highways and ports recorded interference events in the tens of thousands.
That evidence is stirring a desire for a definitive response in the global shipping community. In June 2019, a letter to the U.S. Coast Guard signed by 14 maritime organizations cited the German study and asked the agency to address the problem of interference with the International Maritime Organization, the UN agency for shipping. (The Coast Guard recently told Fortune that it’s still considering what action to take.)
Meanwhile, reports of disruption from commercial ships have been spreading: Through 2018 and 2019, alleged jamming and spoofing was reported across the East Mediterranean, near the North Korean border, in the northern Scandinavian Arctic, around the Port of Shanghai, and in the Strait of Hormuz, the shipping chokepoint that separates the Persian Gulf states from export markets in Asia.
Coping with a ‘menace’
In total, this tide of evidence suggests that GPS is not as resilient as we’ve come to expect, and that the commercial shipping industry, in particular, needs to consider alternatives.
After all, the most widely used standard vessels and their equipment were developed in an era where unreliable GPS was impossible to imagine, points out Pérez Marcos. “They simply were not designed to cope with that menace,” he says.
To prepare, the industry may need to make a substantial investment: in technology, including pricey but more robust anti-jamming antennae; in training their crews more regularly in how to navigate without GPS—or, more likely, in both.
“When the GPS service is not available, it all comes down to two factors,” says Pérez Marcos. “Are there any other means of positioning and timing to keep navigating? Or, is the crew capable to navigate by old/more traditional nautical means?”
Without such back-ups, some crews would likely be completely fine in the event of a GPS disruption, Pérez Marcos points out, while others would be completely lost.
But like many in the industry, the researcher says his deeper concerns revolve around what’s to come: a looming age of automation in global shipping in which, as in many other industries, humans will be taken “out of the loop.” That will increasingly leave machines to assess what is a real or reliable GPS signal while at sea—and what to do next.
“That is a question that shall keep us scientists busy for the next years.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Mysterious GPS outages are wracking the shipping industry
—How GPS went from the tech everyone hated to the tech everyone needs
—Into the ‘crucible’: How the government responds when GPS goes down
—The World’s Most Admired Companies in 2020
—The forces behind Boeing’s long descent
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-01-24--Into the ‘crucible’: How the government responds when GPS goes down

This article is part of the Fortune series, “When GPS goes wrong.”
When GPS signals were suddenly disrupted in January 2007 near the port of San Diego, the U.S. government agencies responsible for upholding the integrity of the world’s most-used satellite navigation system got a taste of what a wide-scale outage might look like. Five years later, when it happened again, they got a reminder.
The outages were most noticed in some unexpected places. They interrupted networks you wouldn’t normally associate with traveling—impacting the operations of 150 cell towers, and shutting down two entirely, while disrupting hospital pagers across downtown San Diego, according to Rick Hamilton, the GPS Information Analysis Team Lead at the U.S. Navigation Center, part of the U.S. Coast Guard.
San Diegans “got a really good idea of exactly what GPS outages cause,” said Hamilton. “Most people don’t know. They don’t even know that without the synchronized worldwide time provided by GPS, the cell phone tower can’t hand [a signal] off to the next tower,” affecting how functional mobile networks would be during a long-term outage.
The 2007 outage lasted just a couple of hours before government officials determined where it was coming from—a stronger signal that had accidentally been emitted from a U.S. Navy ship in the harbor. While Hamilton says the incident did affect mobile service, cellphone networks could also rely on temporary backup systems designed to provide synchronized time during an outage.
The incident resulted in a more sophisticated system for detecting GPS interference being installed at military bases around the country. And when another outage occurred in 2012—another Naval ship entered the harbor with some equipment left on that interfered with GPS—the disruption was quickly detected, and shut down.
By then, the Navigation Center was also developing an emergency-response system that’s still being refined today—to deal with suspected incidents of GPS interference, particularly ones that affect critical infrastructure. It’s a plan for what various government agencies call a “crucible” event.
What the government doesn’t have is a back-up system to compensate for a widespread failure—or a clear answer for how to approach the rise in geopolitically-motived disruption of a U.S. system in the world’s global hotspots.
A conceptual diagram that shows how GPS triangulation works. Up to 4 of the 24 satellites in orbit transmit position and time signals that allow each user or device to determine its location. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
‘Unknown interference’
The U.S. Navigation Center has published 77 reports of “unknown interference”—disruptions to GPS that could be accidental, or could be examples of nefarious “jamming” and “spoofing”—referring to hundreds of incidents dating from 2017 onwards. Together, those incidents sketch the outlines of a geopolitical heat-map: from the Black Sea to South Korea to the Mediterranean. (See main story, here.)
But such disruptions in the U.S. remain rare. Only eight self-reported “unknown interference” events have been reported by the Coast Guard, and though that’s likely only a small portion of the total cases, experts say that the kind of disruptions now common around the Suez Canal—interference strong enough to disrupt the signal to even sophisticated receivers—are still unheard of on American soil.
Even so, the Navigation Center has a clear approach for handling such “crucible” events, says Hamilton. Each such event triggers the co-ordination of a group of agencies including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which pool resources and contact local authorities to determine where an outage is coming from. Their next steps range from the high-tech—using targeted receivers run by the FAA at airports to detect the source of disruptions—to the simple, like having a state trooper drive past the area to see if their own GPS signal gives out.
The economic fallout of a GPS outage isn’t likely to be immediate, but nonetheless, time is of the essence.
“Almost all of this critical infrastructure has some sort of back up already, but in varying levels of quality,” Hamilton explains, particularly for their timing synchronization. In the case of a long, large outage, the impact would probably be felt in waves, as various back-up systems timed out. Hamilton notes he doesn’t know exactly how long the back-up systems would last, but from experience, “some people start screaming in 30 minutes, some have three days.”
In a worst-case scenario, the military can be brought in to find the source of the interference. That would require the relevant authorities to invoke the so-called Stafford Act, a law that can mobilize military assistance in cases of disasters or emergencies. But such a move would be rare, Hamilton says: “Over the 11 years I’ve been [in his role], I’ve never seen it get as far as the Stafford Act.”
A rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral in 2009 to put a NAVSTAR Global Positioning Satellite in place. Matt Stroshane—Getty Images
No backup
When it comes to a more robust backup—what to do, in other words, if even the military can’t find the source of the disruption—the government is currently at a loss. On a national level, “there is no back up [to GPS], and that is the big controversy right now,” says Hamilton.
As a result, many countries—including the U.S.—are looking increasingly at reviving navigation systems that, while widespread before GPS, have largely disappeared.
Chief among them is the eLoran system, a system that tracks time and location using signals that are beamed from transmission towers on the ground, rather than from satellites in space as GPS does. The system was widely used into the 2000s in the U.S., and partly because its signals do not have to travel as far to reach a receiver, they are stronger and harder to disrupt. Testing for a new eLoran system and other potential back-up systems will take place this March in locations near Boston, Hampton, Virginia; and in Cape May, New Jersey, Hamilton says.
A total outage of GPS is still theoretical, and extreme—more the plot of a spy movie than a current risk.
That said, in July 2019, the European GPS equivalent, Galileo, then in its testing phase, suddenly went down for a week due to technical problems. The outage went largely unnoticed—because users could rely on signals from GPS instead.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Mysterious GPS outages are wracking the shipping industry
—The long ocean voyage that helped find the flaws in GPS
—How GPS went from the tech everyone hated to the tech everyone needs
—The World’s Most Admired Companies in 2020
—The forces behind Boeing’s long descent
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-01-24--How GPS went from being the tech everyone hated to the tech everyone needs

This article is part of the Fortune series, “When GPS goes wrong.”
The Global Positioning System has transformed everyday life over the past two decades. But the revolutionary system was far longer in the making.
Like many other pieces of world-changing technology, GPS can trace its genesis to the battles and the arms races of World War II. But far from bursting onto the global stage, the system—which uses satellites positioned around the globe to provide accurate timing and location to tens of millions of travelers and countless businesses—endured a long and fraught gestation period, deep within the U.S. military bureaucracy, largely out of sight.
And if the advent of GPS included several unexpected twists and turns, the scale of its eventual impact has also proved surprising. Today, it’s not just helping us get from A to B, but often shifting how we look at time and space entirely.
in 1983 then-President Ronald Reagan suggested that GPS should be used in the civilian realm as a navigational safety net. SSPL/Getty Images
Bad kids
During World War II, militaries needed a radio navigation system—and all had their own benefits and drawbacks. Some were good for guiding blind bombing missions, others for traversing the English Channel in bad weather, or hunting U-boats.
In the U.S., the different needs of different users meant a fragmented system, where several branches of the military used different technology. In the years after the war, many experts in the Department of Defense acted under the assumption that this system would gradually simplify.
That didn’t happen, explains William Rankin, a professor of the history of science at Yale and author of After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century. Instead, the military systems remained staunch rivals, each jealously guarded, even as the U.S. entered the Sputnik era and began launching the satellites into space that would eventually make GPS possible. Eventually, the Department of Defence attempted to create an entirely new system, by instituting a “top-down program of getting these bad kids to play with each other,” as Rankin puts it, that resulted in modern GPS finally taking shape in 1973.
It was officially created as the first project of a Department of Defense project called the Joint Program Office. The new GPS program combined elements of two systems already under development, one under the Air Force and the other under the Navy. But the system for years remained deeply unpopular among some branches of the military. “Everyone hates [it],” says Rankin, recalling that era. “It doesn’t have wide support for its first decade at all.”
In 1983, the tide began to shift. That year, an error with the plane’s internal navigation systems resulted in a Korean Airlines jet being downed over Soviet airspace, causing a crash that killed everyone on board including a U.S. Congressman. After the accident, then-President Ronald Reagan publicly committed to creating a GPS system used by both the military and civilians, as a navigational safety net. In the early 1990s, the system gained credibility after it played a fledgling role in the first Persian Gulf War. By the mid-1990s, it was finally being used commercially, including in industries like shipping, for more accurate navigation.
By the 1960s the U.S. was instituting a “top-down program of getting these bad kids to play with each other,” as William Rankin, an associate professor of the history of science at Yale and author of “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twenty-First Century” says. Instead, the military systems remained staunch rivals, each jealously guarded. Courtesy William Rankin
But the real jump to GPS becoming ubiquitous came in the 2000s. In 2000, then-President Bill Clinton announced that the military would stop intentionally degrading the quality of the “civilian” GPS signal, allowing the system to become far more robust and accurate. And over the ensuing years, GPS receivers became smaller and smaller, allowing them to make their way into all kinds of portable products—including smartphones. By the mid-2000s, “it’s in everything,” says Rankin.
Never lost
What the early creators of GPS couldn’t have anticipated is not just the sheer number of applications that would be found for the system, but the way it would change how we move through the world at large. For many of us, traveling anywhere now involves perceiving our place in space as a tiny, roving blue dot on a confined screen.
Now, “there is this sense that time and space are just fundamentally known quantities, and there really aren’t places in the world where can’t not know where you are, as long as you have the right receiver,” says Rankin. That’s an idea that even 30 years ago would have been “baffling,” he points out.
What the early creators of GPS couldn’t have anticipated is not just the sheer number of applications that would be found for the system, but the way it would change how we move through the world at large. But errors are common as with this road in England, traveling anywhere now involves perceiving our place in space as a tiny, roving blue dot on a confined screen. Geography Photos/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Rankin himself rejects the idea that GPS, in its efficiency and convenience, has wreaked havoc on our ability to rely on our own senses—after all, in the GPS age, we’ve gained new skills that allow us to navigate. But he does note that where everyday people used to look to multiple sources of information to know our place and time in the world, we now rely disproportionately on the one.
“That does make it more fragile, and all of your eggs are in one basket,” he says.
To merely focus on how GPS makes it easier to navigate is to miss what’s really transformative about the system. Because of its ability to offer highly precise timing, it also allows vast networks—cellphone towers, banking systems, and electrical grids—to synchronize, creating the kind of seamless communication we now take for granted.
That ubiquity extends into places that you may not associate with GPS, and applications that it was probably never anticipated it would be used for—not just the high-stakes ones involving financial networks and missiles, but examples that affect us in a profoundly ordinary way. One example Rankin’s finds fascinating: the timing of ordinary traffic lights.
“Not timing of a nuclear warhead [or a] stock trade kind of thing. Just stop lights.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Mysterious GPS outages are wracking the shipping industry
—The long ocean voyage that helped find the flaws in GPS
—Into the ‘crucible’: How the government responds when GPS goes down
—The World’s Most Admired Companies in 2020
—The forces behind Boeing’s long descent
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-01-24--All of your questions on filing taxes in 2020, answered

The ongoing COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has resulted in some changes to the 2020 tax season. The biggest of those is you no longer have to sweat an April 15 tax deadline.
Tax day has been postponed until July 15 due to the virus’s spread. News of that decision, made March 20, came a few days after the federal government announced it was deferring payments by 90 days.
It’s a lot to keep up with—and it’s still changing regularly. And, even though we’ve had a year to adjust to the numerous changes in the tax code), there’s still a lot of confusion out there.
Here’s the good news: You can get free help putting together your taxes. You can get an extension if things get overwhelming. And, with a little planning, you can lay the groundwork for a refund next year (or a bigger one if you’re in line for money back in 2020).
As you get started on your 2019 tax filings, we’ve gathered answers to some of the most common questions.
When are federal taxes due in 2020?
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building stands on April 15, 2019 in Washington, DC. Zach Gibson—Getty Images
You’ve got an extra three months this year, amid the coronavirus pandemic. The IRS and Treasury Department have changed the deadline from April 15, 2020 to July 15, 2020 to file taxes for your 2019 income. If you’re still not quite ready then, you can file for an extension before that date.
At @realDonaldTrump’s direction, we are moving Tax Day from April 15 to July 15. All taxpayers and businesses will have this additional time to file and make payments without interest or penalties. — Steven Mnuchin (@stevenmnuchin1) March 20, 2020
Special rules typically apply to people serving in the Armed Forces who are in a combat zone/ contingency operation or have been hospitalized due to an injury sustained in such an area. Those individuals have traditionally had 180 days after they leave the area to file and pay taxes. It’s unclear, though, how the extension of this year’s deadline and the pandemic will factor in to that.
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What are the U.S. tax brackets for federal income in 2019-2020?
After sweeping changes to the tax code in 2018, the IRS made even more changes to its individual income tax brackets last year to adjust for inflation. Curious where you stand? As always, it depends, in part, on how you file.
Download the 2020 tax bracket table here.
How much do you have to make to file taxes?
That really all depends on your filing status and age.
If you’re single and under the age of 65, you’ll need to file if you make more than $12,200. If you’re older than that, the minimum amount jumps to $13,850.
Married and filing jointly? If both spouses are under 65, the threshold is $24,400. If one spouse is younger than 65 and one is older, it’s $25,700. And if you’re both 65 or older, it’s $27,000. (If you’re married and filing separately, it’s $5 for all ages.)
Heads of household under age 65 who make more than $18,350 will need to file. That jumps to $20,000 if they’re above that line.
And qualifying widows and widowers with a dependent child who make over $24,400 need to file if they’re under 65 or $25,700 if they’re over.
Can I file taxes for free? How do I qualify?
You can! It’s called IRS Free File and it’s a program that works with brand-name online tax providers, including TurboTax and H&R Block. You’ll need to have made $69,000 or less to use the system, which is currently available for the 2020 tax filing season. Once the filing season officially opens, the Free File provider will submit your return to the IRS. Nearly 57 million people have used Free File since it became available in 2003.
When can I expect to get my tax refund from the IRS?
Roughly 90% of refunds are issued within three weeks of the day the return is filed under normal circumstances. That might be delayed given the ongoing crisis. If you’re wondering where yours stands (and don’t want to bother your tax preparer), the IRS has a website to help you track its progress.
The Where’s My Refund? tool lets users check the status of their tax refund, updating the information daily (usually overnight). You’ll need to provide your Social Security number as well as the exact amount of your expected refund. The tool’s also available on the IRS2Go app.
What’s the fastest way to receive my tax refund?
While it’s nice to get a big check from the government in your mailbox, signing up for direct deposit can significantly speed up your refund. Money can be split into one, two, or three accounts, including Individual Retirement Accounts, and it’s used by 80% of all U.S. taxpayers.
You’ll get your refund even sooner if you e-file your taxes in addition to utilizing direct deposit.
When did the IRS start processing returns?
The Internal Revenue Service began processing tax returns for the 2019 tax year on January 27, 2020. Late January and early February are one of two peak times for the IRS, as people with relatively simple tax filings and those expecting big refunds often file as soon as possible. All totaled, over 150 million individual tax returns are expected to be filed this year.
What are the most common errors people make when filing taxes?
Simple mistakes can screw up your tax filing, delaying your refund or sending up a red flag to the IRS.
Here are the nine most common errors, according to tax officials:
Missing or inaccurate Social Security numbers Misspelled names Filing status errors Math mistakes Errors in figuring tax credits or deductions Incorrect bank account numbers Unsigned forms Electronic filing PIN errors Filing with an expired Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN)
What happens if I file my taxes late?
Should you fail to file by the April 15 deadline, you could incur fees and penalties on top of any taxes you might owe. There are a number of different categories, depending on whether you didn’t file at all or didn’t pay owed taxes. The penalty for filing late is normally 5% of the unpaid taxes for each month a return is late. The failure-to-pay penalty is typically 0.005% of your unpaid taxes per month.
Of course, if you file for an extension, these penalties do not apply.
How can I get an extension for filing my taxes in 2020?
Filing an extension isn’t especially hard and can be done either via a Free File provider or by filling out a form on the IRS Website. That will give you until Oct. 15 to file your return.
For an automatic six-month extension, use IRS Form 4868, which will require you to estimate your tax liability, based on the data available to you. (You won’t have to make a payment immediately, but you will owe interest on your tax bill.)
Special rules may apply if you’re serving in a combat zone or a qualified hazardous duty area or living outside the United States.
Just don’t wait until the last minute. In 2018, the online service went offline due, in part, to a flood of traffic.
What are my odds of being audited by the IRS?
Assuming you didn’t cheat on your taxes, you’re probably in pretty good shape.
The IRS audited roughly 1 out of every 220 individual taxpayers in 2019. Compare that to 1 in 90 the prior decade. That works out to just 0.45% of individual tax returns, versus 0.59% in 2018, when audits hit their lowest figure in 15 years.
The IRS has lost close to one-third of its enforcement staff since 2010.
How can I get a bigger tax refund next year?
Earlier this year, the IRS launched an improved version of its Tax Withholding Estimator calculator. That will help you target a specific refund amount and help you best prepare for it through adjustment withholdings.
It’s important to note that income tax withholding is no longer based on your marital status and withholding allowances. Instead, it’s now based on your expected filing status and standard deduction. You can also have itemized deductions, the Child Tax Credit and other tax benefits reflected in your withholding.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—The World’s Most Admired Companies in 2020
—Fertility Inc.: Inside the big business of babymaking
—A.I. breakthroughs in natural-language processing are big for business
—Industry standouts: The companies most admired by the business world
—The forces behind Boeing’s long descent
Subscribe to Fortune’s Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.