David h koch

The odds are, if you believe the polls, that Donald Trump will never be president. But there is more than a possibility that the reality show billionaire will start his own television network shortly after the election. “A TV network is a logical way to monetize a brand,” Nebraska’s junior senator, Republican Ben Sasse, tweeted this week, channeling increasing speculation in media circles that Trump TV is the likeliest outcome of the celebrity real estate mogul’s 2016 campaign. “Anyone wanna bet against claim that a new cable network will launch soon after Nov 9th?” Certainly not former CNN President Jonathan Klein—although Klein, the co-founder and chief executive of TAPP Media, a personality-focused network of online video channels, says Trump’s best television play is in the subscriber-based digital world rather than advertising-supported basic cable. “I would say Trump has all the necessary ingredients to be a huge a success … [Read more...] about This Is How Trump TV Could Become Real

We’re coming to the end of what might be called the anti-democracy decade. It began on 21 January 2010 with the supreme court’s shameful decision in Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission, opening the floodgates to big money in politics with the absurd claim that the first amendment protects corporate speech. It ends with Donald Trump in the White House, filling his administration with corporate shills and inviting foreign powers to interfere in American elections. Trump is the consequence rather than the cause of the anti-democratic decade. By the 2016 election, the richest 100th of 1% of Americans – 24,949 very wealthy people – accounted for a record-breaking 40% of all campaign contributions. That same year, corporations flooded the presidential, Senate and House elections with $3.4bn in donations. Labor unions no longer provided any countervailing power, contributing only $213m – one union dollar for every 16 corporate. Big corporations and the … [Read more...] about Trump is the natural consequence of our anti-democracy decade

John Ashbery, who has died aged 90, was widely considered the most innovative and influential American poet of his generation. The critic Harold Bloom, who played an important role in establishing Ashbery’s reputation in the mid-1970s, declared: “No one now writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgments of time.” Yet Ashbery’s work also frequently aroused controversy; his early volume The Tennis Court Oath (1962) was dismissed by one critic as “garbage”; and even after his 1975 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer prize for poetry, the National Book Critics Circle award and the National Book award, catapulting him to stardom, he was not without doubters and detractors. Ashbery’s highly distinctive style has been widely imitated, and his elusive but compelling poems explored in numerous critical books, academic articles and PhD theses (of which I wrote one myself). From his … [Read more...] about John Ashbery obituary

The 96-year-old American inventor of the Heimlich manoeuvre has used the technique himself to save a choking woman at his retirement home.Dr Henry Heimlich said he had demonstrated the technique many times but never used it in an emergency.His action dislodged a piece of meat with a bone in it from the 87-year-old woman's airway."I didn't know I really could do it until the other day," he told the BBC.Dr Heimlich was having dinner with eight or nine others at the Deupree House retirement home in Cincinnati when he turned to talk to a woman at his table and noticed she was choking."She had a skin colour that was no longer pink. Her mouth was puffed up and her lips were out," he told the BBC."Though I invented the Heimlich manoeuvre I had never been called on to do it before."How easy is it to do the Heimlich manoeuvre?Dr Heimlich described how he turned the woman, Patty Ris, around in her chair so her back was exposed.The manoeuvre requires a rescuer to carry out abdominal thrusts on a … [Read more...] about Dr Heimlich saves choking woman with manoeuvre he invented

Adrian Wootton: Would you please welcome, Tony Curtis. [standing ovation] Tony Curtis: Hello everybody. Happy to see you all. It's wonderful for me to be able to see glimpses of these old movies [referring to clips of The Defiant Ones and Sweet Smell of Success]. It's very moving for me - there I am, a kid, and here I am, a man. Thank you for your kindness and your friendship. AW: Tony, welcome. Can we start at the start - can you tell us about how you became an actor and got to work for Universal? TC: Acting is something that we all practice at some time in our lives. We're different people to our mothers, fathers, our friends, people that we hung out together with, people that didn't like us or we didn't like them. We readjust ourselves. And as a boy in New York City, I was very aware of that. My parents were Hungarian immigrants; my father was a tailor and we lived in the back of a tailor store. And that was my first inkling of what it was like to be raised in America. It had a … [Read more...] about Tony Curtis