PARIS: The Walt Disney Company on Tuesday announced a two-billion-euro ($2.5-billion) expansion of its Paris amusement park which will add a new Star Wars-themed zone to the huge site.
Disneyland Paris will also build new areas devoted to its hit animated film “Frozen” and the Marvel comics franchise (Spider-Man, The Hulk, X-Men) as part of the makeover, which will take several years.
The work will start in 2021 and significantly expand the park, which is Europe’s most popular private tourism destination with 320 million visits since it opened in 1992.
A new artificial lake at the site in Marne-la-Vallee, in the eastern Paris suburbs, will become a hub for live entertainment shows.
French President Emmanuel Macron hailed the investment as a “very strong commitment” to France after talks at his office with Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger.
“Your confidence shows that France is back!” tweeted the business-friendly president, who has made reinvigorating the economy a top priority.
Disneyland Paris accounts for 6.2 percent of France’s tourism income alone, according to the Walt Disney Company, which described the expansion plan as “one of the most ambitious development projects” in the park’s history.
The US entertainment giant took back full control of the park last year after buying the 14 percent of shares it did not already own.
Despite its popularity, Disneyland Paris is burdened by heavy debts that surpassed a billion euros in the financial year to September 2016, and has made a loss almost every year.
It managed to reduce its losses in the first half of 2016-17 thanks to a boost in visitor numbers, which had dropped after a string of jihadist attacks in France.
Disneyland Paris to add Star Wars zone in $2.5bn upgrade
Disneyland Paris to add Star Wars zone in $2.5bn upgrade
Russell Brand pleads not guilty to charges of rape and sexual assault in London court
- Brand denied two counts of rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault
- He said “not guilty” after each charge was read in Southwark Crown Court
LONDON: Actor and comedian Russell Brand pleaded not guilty in a London court Friday to rape and sexual assault charges involving four women dating back more than 25 years.
Brand, who turns 50 next week, denied two counts of rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault. He said “not guilty” after each charge was read in Southwark Crown Court.
His trial was scheduled for June 3, 2026 and is expected to last four to five weeks.
Prosecutors said that the offenses took place between 1999 and 2005 — one in the English seaside town of Bournemouth and the other three in London.
Brand didn’t speak to reporters as he arrived at court wearing dark sunglasses, a suit jacket, a black collared shirt open below his chest and black jeans. In his right hand, he clutched a copy of the “The Valley of Vision,” a collection of Puritan prayers.
The “Get Him To The Greek” actor known for risqué stand-up routines, battles with drugs and alcohol, has dropped out of the mainstream media in recent years and built a large following online with videos mixing wellness and conspiracy theories, as well as discussing religion.
On a five-minute prayer video he posted Monday on social media, Brand wrote: “Jesus, thank you for saving my life.”
When the charges were announced last month, he said that he welcomed the opportunity to prove his innocence.
“I was a fool before I lived in the light of the Lord,” he said in a social media video. “I was a drug addict, a sex addict and an imbecile. But what I never was a rapist. I’ve never engaged in nonconsensual activity. I pray that you can see that by looking in my eyes.”
Brand is accused of raping a woman at a hotel room in Bournemouth when she attended a 1999 Labour Party conference and met him at an event where he was performing. The woman alleged that Brand stripped while she was in the bathroom and when she returned to the room he pushed her on the bed, removed her clothes and raped her.
A second woman said that Brand grabbed her forearm and attempted to drag her into a men’s toilet at a television station in London in 2001.
The third accuser was a television employee who met Brand at a birthday party in a bar in 2004, where he allegedly grabbed her breasts before pulling her into a toilet and forcing himself on her.
The final accuser worked at a radio station and met Brand while he was working on a spin-off of the “Big Brother” reality television program between 2004 and 2005. She said Brand grabbed her by the face with both hands, pushed her against a wall and kissed her before groping her breasts and buttocks.
The Associated Press doesn’t name victims of alleged sexual violence, and British law protects their identity from the media for life.
Tate brothers will return to UK to face charges after Romanian legal proceedings, lawyers say
LONDON: Internet personality Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan will return to Britain to face criminal charges once separate legal proceedings in Romania have been concluded, a lawyer for the siblings said.
Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service confirmed earlier this week that it had previously authorized charges against the brothers including rape, actual bodily harm and human trafficking.
The Tates are facing a separate criminal investigation in Romania over trafficking allegations, and the courts there have already approved their extradition to the UK.
The brothers have denied all the allegations.
“Once those proceedings are concluded in their entirety then The Tates will return to face UK allegations,” Holborn Adams, the law firm representing the brothers, said in a statement on Thursday.
Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who has gained millions of fans by promoting an ultra-masculine lifestyle, separately faces a civil lawsuit in Britain, which has been brought by four women and is due to go to trial in 2027.
Ex-assistant testifies Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sexually assaulted her and used violence to get his way
- “I was going to die with this. I didn’t want anyone to know ever.”
NEW YORK: Sean “Diddy” Combs ‘ former personal assistant testified Thursday that the hip-hop mogul sexually assaulted her, threw her into a swimming pool, dumped a bucket of ice on her and slammed a door against her arm during a torturous eight-year tenure.
The woman, testifying at Combs’ sex trafficking trial under the pseudonym “Mia,” said Combs put his hand up her dress and forcibly kissed her at his 40th birthday party in 2009, forced her to perform oral sex while she helped him pack for a trip and raped her in guest quarters at his Los Angeles home in 2010 after climbing into her bed.
“I couldn’t tell him ‘no’ about anything,” Mia said, telling jurors she felt “terrified and confused and ashamed and scared” when Combs raped her. The assaults, she said, were unpredictable: “always random, sporadic, so oddly spaced out where I would think they would never happen again.”
If she hadn’t been called to testify, Mia said, “I was going to die with this. I didn’t want anyone to know ever.”
Speaking slowly and haltingly, Mia portrayed Combs as a controlling taskmaster who put his desires above the wellbeing of staff and loved ones. She said Combs berated her for mistakes, even ones other employees made, and piled on so many tasks she didn’t sleep for days.
“It was chaotic. It was toxic,” said Mia, who worked for Combs from 2009 to 2017, including a stint as an executive at his film studio. “It could be exciting. The highs were really high and the lows were really low.”
Asked what determined how her days would unfold, Mia said: “Puff’s mood,” using one of his many nicknames.
Mia said employees were always on edge because Combs’ mood could change “in a split second” causing everything to go from “happy to chaotic.” She said Combs once threw a computer at her when he couldn’t get a Wi-Fi connection.
Her testimony echoed that of Combs’ other personal assistants and his longtime girlfriend Cassie, who said he was demanding, mercurial and prone to violence. She is the second of three women testifying that Combs sexually abused them.
Cassie, an R&B singer whose legal name is Casandra Ventura, testified for four days during the trial’s first week, telling jurors Combs subjected her to hundreds of “freak-offs” — drug-fueled marathons in which she said she engaged in sex acts with male sex workers while Combs watched, filmed and coached them.
A third woman, “Jane,” is expected to testify about participating in freak-offs. Judge Arun Subramanian has permitted some of Combs’ sexual abuse accusers to testify under pseudonyms for their privacy and safety.
The Associated Press does not identify people who say they’re victims of sexual abuse unless they choose to make their names public, as Cassie has done.
Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking and racketeering charges. His lawyers concede he could be violent, but he denies using threats or his clout to commit abuse.
Mia testified that she saw Combs beat Cassie numerous times, detailing a brutal assault at Cassie’s Los Angeles home in 2013 that the singer and her longtime stylist Deonte Nash also recounted in their testimony. Mia said she was terrified Combs was going to kill them all, describing the melee as “a little tornado.”
The witness recalled jumping on Combs’ back in an attempt to stop him from hurting Nash and Cassie. Mia said Combs threw her into a wall and slammed Cassie’s head into a bed corner, causing a deep, bloody gash on the singer’s forehead. Other times, she said, Combs’ abuse caused Cassie black eyes and fat lips.
Mia said Combs sometimes had her working for up to five days at a time without rest as he hopped from city to city for club appearances and other engagements, and she started relying on her ADHD medication, the stimulant Adderall, as a sleep substitute.
Combs, with residences in Miami, Los Angeles and the New York area, let Mia and other employees stay in his guest houses — but she wasn’t allowed to leave without his permission and couldn’t lock the doors, she testified.
“This is my house. No one locks my doors,” Combs said, according to Mia.
Mia didn’t appear to make eye contact with Combs, who sat back in his chair and looked forward, sometimes with his hands folded in front him, as she testified. Occasionally, he leaned over to speak with one of his lawyers or donned glasses to read exhibits. Mia kept her head down as she left the courtroom for breaks.
She testified that she remains friends with Cassie.
Rescued giant moths emerge from cocoons in Mexico’s sprawling capital
MEXICO CITY: Two moths the size of a hand, their wings patterned with brown and pink around four translucent sections, mate for hours hanging from a line alongside cocoons like the ones they emerged from just hours earlier.
“When I get here and find this, I jump with delight,” said María Eugenia Díaz Batres, who has been caring for insects at the Museum of Natural History and Environmental Culture in Mexico City for nearly six decades.
The mating pair of “four mirrors” moths as they’re popularly known in Mexico, or scientifically as Rothschildia orizaba, are evidence that the museum’s efforts to save some 2,600 cocoons rescued from an empty lot were worth the trouble.
The moths, whose numbers have fallen in Mexico City due to urbanization, have cultural relevance in Mexico.
“The Aztecs called them the ‘butterfly of obsidian knives,’ Itzpapalotl,” Díaz Batres said. “And in northern Mexico they’d fill many of these cocoons with little stones and put them on their ankles for dances.”
These cocoons arrived at the museum in late December.
“They gave them to us in a bag and in a box, all squeezed together with branches and leaves, so my first mission was to take them out, clean them,” Díaz Batres said.
Mercedes Jiménez, director of the museum in the capital’s Chapultepec park, said that’s when the real adventure began since they had never received anything like this before.
Díaz Batres had the cocoons hung in any place she thought they might do well, including her office where they hang from lines crisscrossing above her table. It has allowed her to watch each stage of their development closely.
The moths only survive for a week or two as adults, but they give Díaz Batres tremendous satisfaction, especially when she arrives at her office and new moths “are at the door, on the computer.”
So she tries to help them “complete their mission” and little by little their species recovers.
US supercomputer named after Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna to power AI and scientific research
- Dell Technologies contracted with the energy department to build the computer
- Not clear yet how the computer will rank on the listing of the world’s fastest supercomputers
BERKELEY, California: A new supercomputer named after a winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry will help power artificial intelligence technology and scientific discoveries from a perch in the hills above the University of California, Berkeley, federal officials said Thursday.
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced the project Thursday alongside executives from computer maker Dell Technologies and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
The new computing system at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will be called Doudna after Berkeley professor and biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who won a Nobel in 2020 for her work on the gene-editing technology CRISPR. It’s due to switch on next year.
“One of the key use cases will be genomics research,” said Dion Harris, a product executive in Nvidia’s AI and high-performance computing division, in an interview. “It was basically just a nod to her contributions to the field.”
Dell is contracted with the energy department to build the computer, the latest to be housed at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. Previous computers there have been named after other Nobel winners: Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist, and Gerty Cori, a biochemist.
It’s not clear yet how the computer will rank on the TOP500 listing of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The current top-ranked computer is El Capitan, located about an hour’s drive away at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. That’s followed by other supercomputers at US national labs in Tennessee and Illinois.
