For Yu Kaiguang, harsh new United Nations sanctions on North Korea are a disaster.

The trader in the Chinese border city of Dandong has seen business all but dry up, and he spends his days scrambling to obtain payment from the suddenly broke North Korean state companies to whom he sold on credit.

“They have no money to pay us in cash, and the worst is that because of sanctions they can’t settle the bill with goods such as coal, as they did in the past,” said Yu, reached by telephone at the offices of his Dandong Gaoli Trading Company.

Yu said he’s owed about $1 million in all for deliveries of toothpaste, instant noodles and other household items. He’s trying to avoid laying off staff by continuing to export foodstuffs such as pine nuts and red beans. “If they become unemployed, it would be bad for both the state and society.”

​Common problem for traders

Yu’s plight appears increasingly commonplace across Dandong, where the bulk of the cross-border trade is handled. Interviews with four trading companies and recent media reports indicate Chinese companies are hurting in a city where North Korean trucks used to rumble across the Yalu River bridge several times a week delivering metal scrap and returning with everything from televisions to toilet bowls.

The owner of another firm, Dandong Baoquan Commerce and Trade Co., which used to import iron ore and coal and export basic consumer goods, said he was owed around $200,000 by his North Korea clients.

“I had to lay off about 10 staffers, but I had no other choice because it was the government policy,” Han Lixin said, referring to the sanctions. “I’m still in business hoping to trade with other countries, but it takes a lot of time and efforts to develop customers.”

Large-scale trade involving North Korean resources such as iron ore and coal has been banned entirely under the sanctions, dealing a big blow to Dandong’s port, whose operator defaulted on a $150 million corporate bond this week in part because of cratering revenues.

Both economies hurting

“The sanctions have a broad effect, and both the economies of North Korea and China are suffering a lot,” said Jin Qiangyi, professor at the Institute of Northeast Asia Studies at Yanbian University in Northeast China. “Chinese companies doing business with North Korea may see quite a lot of losses, and the companies that have already invested in North Korea will suffer more.”

Dealing with North Korean companies was never easy. Wang Chengpeng, former manager of Dandong Hongwei Trading Company, quit doing business with the North entirely because of hassles, restrictions and low-profit margins, even before the latest sanctions began to bite.

Despite that, China has long been the North’s biggest economic partner. Beijing accounted for more than 90 percent of its neighbor’s foreign trade of about $6.5 billion in 2016, according to the South Korean-owned Korea Trade Investment Promotion Agency. China continues to be a key source of food and fuel aid to help keep North Korea’s weak economy from collapsing, and Chinese officials say they won’t agree to measures that could cut off basic life necessities and possibly cause Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship to topple.

Sanctions holding

China’s patience with Kim has grown increasingly thin, however, and Beijing has lent its support to increasingly tough resolutions unanimously approved by the Security Council this year that target North Korea’s economy in response to its ballistic missile launches and latest nuclear test.

China has said it sees sanctions purely as a means of inducing North Korea to return to nuclear disarmament talks and has rejected unilateral measures not approved by the Security Council, of which it is one of the five veto-wielding permanent members.

Still, despite some allegations of cheating, China appears to be seeking to enforce the sanctions that also ban exports of lead, textiles and seafood, prohibit joint ventures, and bar any country from authorizing new permits for North Korean workers, all sources of hard currency for Pyongyang.

The sanctions have also blacklisted a number of firms in the extraction and financial industries, imposed travel bans and frozen the assets of some government officials, banned the import of natural gas liquids and condensates, and capped the country’s crude oil imports.

It’s hard to gauge the exact impact of sanctions on the North Korean economy because the crucial food and energy sectors are less likely to be hurt by external conditions, said Lee Seok-ki, a senior researcher at the South Korean government-run Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade.

However, while the North’s economy has been expanding, by 3.9 percent in 2016, according to an estimate by the Bank of Korea in South Korea, that rate almost certainly can’t be sustained if sanctions continue, Lee said.

China for its part is watching North Korea to see how its ally will respond to the new measures, eager for signs of a shift in tactics by Kim and an improvement in relations between Beijing and Pyongyang that have “sunk into a standstill,” as Jin puts it.
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From: MeNeedIt

The New York City Police Department said Friday that it had a credible narrative from an unidentified woman who has made a rape allegation against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and was gathering evidence for a possible arrest warrant.

Reuters requests for comment from Weinstein’s representative and his attorney were not immediately answered.

Robert Boyce, the police department’s deputy chief of detectives,  said at a news conference that the alleged victim “put forth a credible and detailed narrative.”

“We have an actual case here,” Boyce said.

He said the police department became aware of the accusation October 25. Boyce said it was a seven-year-old case and “we have to move forward gathering evidence.”

Boyce said that because Weinstein was out of state, the police department would need a court-ordered warrant for any arrest.

More than 50 women have claimed that Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them over the past three decades.

Encounters denied

Weinstein has denied having nonconsensual sex with anyone. Reuters has been unable to independently confirm any of the allegations.

Boyce said police had spoken to the woman and “we found corroboration along the way.”

He said the NYPD was working on the case with the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

“Right now [Weinstein] poses no threat to anybody in New York City. He’s out of state. So it’s a continuing investigation,” Boyce told reporters.

Earlier Friday, in response to media reports, Joan Vollero, a spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., told Reuters, “A senior sex crimes prosecutor is assigned to this investigation, and the office has been working with our partners in the NYPD since the new allegations came to light.”

Police in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and London have also said they are investigating sexual assault allegations against Weinstein, but no charges have been brought against him.
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From: MeNeedIt

California Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers asked the U.S. government Friday for $7.4 billion to help rebuild after a cluster of fires tore through the heart of wine country, killing more than 40 people and leaving thousands without housing.

In a letter to the White House, Brown joined California’s U.S. senators and 39 members of its congressional delegation to urge President Donald Trump and Congress to quickly adopt a disaster-related appropriations measure to support the state’s recovery.

Brown said the funding would go toward cleanup and programs to support housing, transportation, agriculture, environmental protection and other services for those affected by the fires.

A series of blazes that started in Northern California the night of Oct. 8 killed at least 43 people and destroyed about 8,900 homes and other buildings. At the peak, thousands of firefighters battled 21 blazes that burned simultaneously.

Officials have not yet assessed all the damage and effects of the fires, but the governor’s office and the affected counties determined that $7.4 billion in federal funding is needed to help California recover, the letter says.

The wildfires significantly damaged farmland, rangeland and watersheds, and more than a third of the funding requested, $3.1 billion, would go toward helping agricultural industries bounce back, including affected wineries, California officials said.

“The full economic impact to the agricultural, tourism, hospitality, and wine industries is still not known,” the letter says. “Nine California wineries were destroyed and 21 were damaged in the nation’s most prominent winemaking region.”

Congress last month approved $576.5 million in aid for wildfires earlier this summer in California and the U.S. West. It also has approved billions in relief funding to help states affected by hurricanes and other weather-related disasters this year.

Trump pledged aid for California fire victims on Oct. 10, saying he had told Brown that “the federal government will stand with the people of California.”

Brown said he has asked the California Department of Finance to expedite doling out $41.5 million to support the immediate needs of victims not eligible for federal aid.

During the wildfires last month, Brown declared a state of emergency for the Northern California counties of Solano, Napa, Sonoma, Yuba, Butte, Lake, Mendocino and Nevada as well as Orange County in the south.
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From: MeNeedIt

The largest port complex in the nation has set goals to drastically reduce air pollution over the next several decades.

The plan approved Thursday at a meeting of the governing boards of the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach outlines strategies for improving equipment and efficiency to eventually move cargo with zero emissions.

The ports estimate that the cost of the efforts ranges from $7 billion to $14 billion, but the plan does not make clear who will pick up the tab. And detailed plans for implementing each program will require approval by each port’s harbor commission.

“Collaboration will be critical to our success,” Long Beach Harbor Commission President Lou Anne Bynum said in a statement. “Moving the needle to zero requires all of us — the ports, industry, regulatory agencies, environmental groups and our communities — to pool our energy, expertise and resources.”

The plan has raised concerns that the enormous cost of the clean air goals could make the two ports less attractive in the face of competition from ports on the East and Gulf coasts.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Pacific Merchant Shipping Association President John McLaurin told commissioners he feared the cost “and its potential negative impacts on port competitiveness and the one in nine jobs in the Southern California region that are reliant on the ports.”

Largest pollution source

The neighboring ports 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles are the single largest fixed source of air pollution in Southern California, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

Main points of the plan include clean-engine milestones for trucks, creating incentives to speed up fleet turnover to near-zero and zero-emission trucks, and efficiency programs for truck reservations and staging yards. The timeline for achieving a zero-emission truck fleet is 2035.

Other elements include requiring terminal operators to use zero-emission equipment by 2020, if possible, or the cleanest available equipment.

The plan also pursues electrification of terminal equipment and expands on-dock rail, with a goal of moving 50 percent of all cargo out of the ports by train.

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach sprawl over more than 23 square miles (60 square kilometers) of land and water. They handle about 40 percent of U.S. container import traffic, about 25 percent of total exports, and together rank as the ninth-largest port complex in the world, according to the ports.
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From: MeNeedIt

A Chinese official on Friday disputed President Donald Trump’s claim that the deadly opioid fentanyl flooding the U.S. is mostly produced in China.

China doesn’t deny that some fentanyl produced illicitly inside the country is contributing to the epidemic, Wei Xiaojun, deputy director-general of the Narcotics Control Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security, said at a news conference.

However, according to the intelligence the two countries have exchanged, “the evidence isn’t sufficient to say that the majority of fentanyl or other new psychoactive substances come from China,” Wei said.

Trump, Xi to talk

Trump last month said the U.S. was stepping up measures to “hold back the flood of cheap and deadly fentanyl, a synthetic opioid manufactured in China and 50 times stronger than heroin.”

He said he would mention it to Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing next week. “And he will do something about it,” Trump said.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s representative in Beijing, Lance Ho, declined to comment on Wei’s assessment.

Wei also said the Justice Department’s public announcement last month of indictments against two Chinese men accused of making tons of fentanyl and other powerful narcotics sold in the U.S. could impede efforts to bring them to justice.

“I have to admit regret regarding the U.S. move to unilaterally use the method of calling a news conference to announce the matter of these two wanted individuals who’ve fled to China,” he said.

​US, China cooperation

The release of information would “impact on the ongoing joint investigation into the case,” Wei said, adding that China noted the U.S. failure to mention their successful cooperation on this and other cases.

The Justice Department said Xiaobing Yan, 40, and Jian Zhang, 38, worked separately but similarly and controlled one of the most prolific international drug-trafficking organizations. The lack of an extradition treaty significantly reduces the chances they will be returned to the U.S. for trial.

The Trump administration’s anti-drug efforts suffered another recent setback when its nominee as drug czar withdrew from consideration following reports that he played a key role in weakening the federal government’s authority to stop companies from distributing opioids.

Trump last week declared opioid abuse a national public health emergency and announced new steps to combat the crisis.

Fentanyl can be lethal even in small amounts and is often laced with other dangerous drugs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated the drug and its analogues killed more than 20,000 Americans last year, and the number is rising.

Friday’s rare news conference, held in the Ministry of Public Security’s tightly guarded compound near Tiananmen Square, appeared aimed at emphasizing China’s progress on cooperation with the U.S. on fighting opioids ahead of Trump’s visit.

China has noted Trump’s announcement of an opioid crisis and “China attaches great importance to this,” Wei said.
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From: MeNeedIt

In the past 25 years, the world has made remarkable progress in saving the lives of young children, according to the latest report from the United Nations.

In 1990, 35,000 children died every day; last year, 15,000 children and babies died daily, the first time that annual child deaths have fallen below the 6 million mark. But most of these deaths could have been prevented, according to a U.N. interagency group that put together this year’s report on child mortality.

Dr. Flavia Bustreo of the World Health Organization acknowledged the effort it has taken to get to this point. But while the progress is good, it is not enough, she said.

“I need to stress these deaths can be prevented. With the scientific knowledge we have, with the interventions we have, with the resources that we have available, these deaths can be prevented,” said Bustreo, WHO assistant director-general for family, women’s and children’s health.

And that is the tragedy that coincides with this achievement. The report on child and infant mortality states that every year, millions of children younger than 5 die, mostly from malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea. The last two are related to unsanitary conditions.

​Malnutrition plays a part

In almost half of these cases, malnutrition weakens the immune system, leaving the child unable to fight off the disease.

Bustreo said access to clean water and exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of life can reduce an infant’s risk of infection.

Although more children are living to their fifth birthday, Bustreo says the U.N. report shows that 46 percent of child deaths occur shortly after birth. She said the babies who die in the first months of life are born prematurely.

“They (the deaths) are caused by low birth weight. They are caused significantly by sepsis, severe infection that is acquired during the delivery, and they are also caused by asphyxia,” Bustreo said.

While in the womb, the fetus floats in amniotic fluid. This fluid is in the fetus’ mouth, ears and nose. But after birth, if a baby cannot breathe and the birth attendant, if there is one, does not know how to clear the baby’s airways, the baby will suffocate.

The report shows the largest number of newborn deaths occurred in Southern Asia (39 percent), followed by sub-Saharan Africa (38 percent). Five countries accounted for half of all newborn deaths: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.

Children younger than 5 also are more likely to die from malaria than adults, which is one reason sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia have higher child mortality rates than other parts of the world.

​Progress with vaccines

But there are bright spots in the report. 

A vaccine for yellow fever spared children’s lives during an outbreak in Angola last year, and a new vaccine for malaria has proved effective for children. Tanzania has tackled air pollution, improved sanitation, and has worked to provide safe drinking water, which has also had a positive impact on child health there.

Bustreo said the concentration of child deaths are increasingly occurring in countries that are either in acute conflict or in a chronic state of strife, such as Somalia, which has the highest child death rate.

“That is important because it also links to not just the medical care, but also the social determinants of health, which, of course, include peace, stability and education, particularly girls’ education,” she said.

Bustreo explains that a girl who is educated can take better care of herself, “she does not become pregnant too early, because that is another important social phenomenon that we’re seeing that is early pregnancy associated with early and forced child marriage.”

Part of the solution lies in multisectorial planning, better training for midwives, training for nurses and vaccines.

Bustreo is dismayed that some parents in developed countries are refusing to get their children vaccinated against these diseases. Ongoing outbreaks of measles in Europe have claimed the lives of 35 children so far.

She said this trend needs to be tackled aggressively. Parents in low- and middle-income countries want to see their children immunized against measles and other disabling or life-threatening diseases.

Despite the overall gains in reducing child mortality, there’s a sense of urgency among health officials. The U.N report said if current trends continue, about 60 million children younger than 5 will die between now and 2030, and half of them will be newborns.
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From: MeNeedIt

Over the past 25 years, the world has made remarkable progress in saving young children’s lives. For the first time ever, child deaths have fallen below the 6 million mark globally, but most of these deaths could be prevented according to the latest report from the U.N. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more.
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From: MeNeedIt

Google is partnering with AutoNation, the country’s largest auto dealership chain, in its push to build a self-driving car.

AutoNation said Thursday that its dealerships will provide maintenance and repairs for Waymo’s self-driving fleet of Chrysler Pacifica vehicles. The agreement will include additional models when Waymo brings them on line.

Terms of the multi-year deal were not disclosed.

Google has been partnering with a number of car-centric companies like Avis, the ridesharing company Lyft, and Fiat Chrysler.

AutoNation Inc., based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, runs about 360 dealerships in the U.S.
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From: MeNeedIt

The hackers who upended the U.S. presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, U.S. defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press. 

The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that stretched back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users across the globe – from the pope’s representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow. 

“It’s a wish list of who you’d want to target to further Russian interests,” said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP’s findings. He said the data was “a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence.” 

The AP findings draw on a database of 19,000 malicious links collected by cybersecurity firm Secureworks, dozens of rogue emails, and interviews with more than 100 hacking targets. 

Secureworks stumbled upon the data after a hacking group known as Fancy Bear accidentally exposed part of its phishing operation to the internet. The list revealed a direct line between the hackers and the leaks that rocked the presidential contest in its final stages, most notably the private emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. 

The issue of who hacked the Democrats is back in the national spotlight following the revelation Monday that a Donald Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, was briefed early last year that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton, including “thousands of emails.” 

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the notion that Russia interfered “unfounded.” But the list examined by AP provides powerful evidence that the Kremlin did just that. 

“This is the Kremlin and the general staff,” said Andras Racz, a specialist in Russian security policy at Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Hungary, as he examined the data. 

“I have no doubts.” 

The new evidence

Secureworks’ list covers the period between March 2015 and May 2016. Most of the identified targets were in the United States, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Syria. 

In the United States, which was Russia’s Cold War rival, Fancy Bear tried to pry open at least 573 inboxes belonging to those in the top echelons of the country’s diplomatic and security services: then-Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-NATO Supreme Commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, and one of his predecessors, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark. 

The list skewed toward workers for defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and _ especially _ Democrats. More than 130 party workers, campaign staffers and supporters of the party were targeted, including Podesta and other members of Clinton’s inner circle. 

The AP also found a handful of Republican targets. 

Podesta, Powell, Breedlove and more than a dozen Democratic targets besides Podesta would soon find their private correspondence dumped to the web. The AP has determined that all had been targeted by Fancy Bear, most of them three to seven months before the leaks. 

“They got two years of email,” Powell recently told AP. He said that while he couldn’t know for sure who was responsible, “I always suspected some Russian connection.” 

In Ukraine, which is fighting a grinding war against Russia-backed separatists, Fancy Bear attempted to break into at least 545 accounts, including those of President Petro Poroshenko and his son Alexei, half a dozen current and former ministers such as Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and as many as two dozen current and former lawmakers. 

The list includes Serhiy Leshchenko, an opposition parliamentarian who helped uncover the off-the-books payments allegedly made to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort – whose indictment was unsealed Monday in Washington. 

In Russia, Fancy Bear focused on government opponents and dozens of journalists. Among the targets were oil tycoon-turned-Kremlin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison and now lives in exile, and Pussy Riot’s Maria Alekhina. Along with them were 100 more civil society figures, including anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and his lieutenants. 

“Everything on this list fits,” said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media analyst who was himself among the targets. He said Russian authorities would have been particularly interested in Navalny, one of the few opposition leaders with a national following. 

Many of the targets have little in common except that they would have been crossing the Kremlin’s radar: an environmental activist in the remote Russian port city of Murmansk; a small political magazine in Armenia; the Vatican’s representative in Kiev; an adult education organization in Kazakhstan. 

“It’s simply hard to see how any other country would be particularly interested in their activities,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on Russian military affairs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. He was also on the list. 

“If you’re not Russia,” he said, “hacking these people is a colossal waste of time.” 

Working 9 to 6 Moscow time 

Allegations that Fancy Bear works for Russia aren’t new. But raw data has been hard to come by. 

Researchers have been documenting the group’s activities for more than a decade and many have accused it of being an extension of Russia’s intelligence services. The “Fancy Bear” nickname is a none-too-subtle reference to Russia’s national symbol. 

In the wake of the 2016 election, U.S. intelligence agencies publicly endorsed the consensus view, saying what American spooks had long alleged privately: Fancy Bear is a creature of the Kremlin. 

But the U.S. intelligence community provided little proof, and even media-friendly cybersecurity companies typically publish only summaries of their data. 

That makes the Secureworks’ database a key piece of public evidence – all the more remarkable because it’s the result of a careless mistake. 

Secureworks effectively stumbled across it when a researcher began working backward from a server tied to one of Fancy Bear’s signature pieces of malicious software. 

He found a hyperactive Bitly account Fancy Bear was using to sneak thousands of malicious links past Google’s spam filter. Because Fancy Bear forgot to set the account to private, Secureworks spent the next few months hovering over the group’s shoulder, quietly copying down the details of the thousands of emails it was targeting. 

The AP obtained the data recently, boiling it down to 4,700 individual email addresses, and then connecting roughly half to account holders. The AP validated the list by running it against a sample of phishing emails obtained from people targeted and comparing it to similar rosters gathered independently by other cybersecurity companies, such as Tokyo-based Trend Micro and the Slovakian firm ESET. 

The Secureworks data allowed reporters to determine that more than 95 percent of the malicious links were generated during Moscow office hours – between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday to Friday. 

The AP’s findings also track with a report that first brought Fancy Bear to the attention of American voters. In 2016, a cybersecurity company known as CrowdStrike said the Democratic National Committee had been compromised by Russian hackers, including Fancy Bear. 

Secureworks’ roster shows Fancy Bear making aggressive attempts to hack into DNC technical staffers’ emails in early April 2016 – exactly when CrowdStrike says the hackers broke in. 

And the raw data enabled the AP to speak directly to the people who were targeted, many of whom pointed the finger at the Kremlin. 

“We have no doubts about who is behind these attacks,” said Artem Torchinskiy, a project coordinator with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund who was targeted three times in 2015. “I am sure these are hackers controlled by Russian secret services.” 
…

From: MeNeedIt

Facebook, Twitter and Google executives testified in public before Senate and House investigations into Russian election interference for the first time Wednesday, amid disclosures that Russian influence on social media platforms was much wider in scope than previously understood. The lawmakers had tough questions for the Silicon Valley executives as VOA’s Katherine Gypson reports from Capitol Hill.
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From: MeNeedIt

In a vast, subterranean space in New York City, three flights down from the largest sound stage east of Hollywood, 80,000 costumes await their return to the limelight.

This is the TDF Costume Collection, run by the not-for-profit Theater Development Fund. The clothing and accessories have been donated from Broadway, Off Broadway, opera, film, and regional productions. And they are all available for rent, but not to anyone, says collection director Steven Cabral.

“We’re not renting for Halloween, and we’re not renting for parties with food or liquids where something could happen to the costume. But if you’re doing something that seems of an artistic nature in some way, we’re going to be able to rent to you.” And, he notes, there’s a little bit of everything in the collection – from medieval suits of armor to outfits from the 1920’s to modern ball gowns.

He says TDF got into the costume business in the mid-1960s, when the Metropolitan Opera was about to move into a new home in Lincoln Center. “They had [costumes for] 22 full operas that they knew that they would not be taking with them, but they didn’t want to just toss away. So TDF took on all of these old productions from the Met, and began to, at a very, very, very inexpensive rate, rent out these costumes.”

High school, college and community theater groups, movie production companies and TV shows have all taken advantage of the incredible variety of costumes in the collection. Opera companies can find whatever they need here.

Cabral points out a gown from a Met production of Lucia di Lammermoor, which was once shipped to an opera company in the Midwest. Cabral recalls a phone call he got later from the company director, who told him, ‘You had one of my singers in tears last night.’

“The person being fitted for this costume was a young opera singer,” he says, “and when she saw the costume, and saw that it had the Metropolitan Opera label, and it said wedding scene, and it said Beverly Sills. The young woman broke down because she couldn’t believe that she was so fortunate to not only wear Metropolitan Opera, but to wear something owned by Beverly Sills.”

Costumes from the Met are built to last, so when they arrive, they go into a small room of “special stock.” After these costumes have seen their share of use, they’re moved into “regular stock.” And once they start looking shabby, they might go into the “distressed” section. Or they could go straight to the semi-annual bag sale, where Cabral says there’s a set price for everything you can stuff into one bag.

“And the rule is, we just don’t ever want to see the costume again.”

Because there’s always a new crop of donations waiting for space on the TDF racks.
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From: MeNeedIt

The head organizer of the 2010 World Cup has denied raping a singer and former South African ruling party lawmaker 24 years ago.

Danny Jordaan, the head of South African soccer, released a statement through his lawyer to deny the allegations made by Jennifer Ferguson, who said in a series of online posts that she was raped by Jordaan at a hotel in South Africa in 1993.

Ferguson made the claim two weeks ago, using the hashtag #MeToo, an online campaign denouncing sexual assault and harassment.

In the statement, Jordaan’s lawyer, Mamodupi Mohlala-Mulaudzi, said Jordaan denies raping Ferguson.

Jordaan was criticized in South Africa for taking so long to respond, but his lawyer said “Dr. Jordaan’s perceived silence in the face of such serious allegations is because of his empathy with the victims of gender-based violence. Dr. Jordaan has, however, after careful consideration decided to assert his innocence.”

The lawyer said Ferguson’s allegations must be tested in court.

Ferguson said she didn’t report the rape because she was “too ashamed to go through the reporting procedure.” She said she met Jordaan at a hotel where she was performing. She claimed Jordaan followed her back to her room and raped her.
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From: MeNeedIt