US Business

Two top executives at Snap are leaving to join Netflix, the streaming giant said Tuesday, after a report emerged that the Snapchat parent company is to slash its workforce by a fifth.

Netflix said in a statement that Snap’s chief business officer Jeremi Gorman and Peter Naylor, the vice president of ad sales for the Americas, will be joining the company in September.

The announcement came after tech news website The Verge reported that the southern California-based Snap Inc. plans to lay off about 20 percent of its more than 6,400 employees. or

Snap declined to comment on the report but shares sank more than four percent to less than $10 in after-market trades.

On an earnings call in July, Snap chief financial officer Derek Andersen said the company has seen “macroeconomic challenges develop” through the first half of this year and that headcount was a significant portion of its operating expenses.

Snap reported that its loss in the recently ended quarter nearly tripled to $422 million despite revenue increasing 13 percent under conditions “more challenging” than expected.

A hit with young internet users in its early days, image-centric ephemeral messaging app Snapchat has remained a small player in the social networking space as competition has grown ever more intense.

The number of people using Snapchat daily grew to 347 million in the recently ended quarter, Snap reported.

Snap recast itself a while back as a “camera company,” fielding offerings such as picture-taking glasses called Spectacles and a pocket-sized Pixy flying camera drone.

“Long-term the most exciting opportunity is (augmented reality) and we’re investing heavily around the future of AR,” Andersen said in the earnings call.

Meanwhile, the battle for people’s attention online grows increasingly fierce as established titans such as Meta and Google adapt offerings to changing trends and relative newcomers such as TikTok grab the spotlight.

Stanley Kubrick once famously said J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy of novels was unfilmable.

It is hard to imagine what the great director would have made of Amazon’s $1 billion gamble on “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” a 50-hour television series based on the dry historical footnotes published at the end of book three.

The show, out Friday globally on Prime Video, aims to tap into the huge and enduring appeal of books still regularly voted the world’s best-loved novels of all time, as well as Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning film adaptations.

It is central to Amazon’s bid to stand out in the “streaming wars” with Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max — whose own “Game of Thrones” prequel just launched — and is bankrolled by multi-billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, a Tolkien mega-fan.

But populated by heroes and villains who are barely — if at all — referenced in Tolkien’s trilogy and its “Appendices” of fictional mythology, and featuring a largely unknown cast and creators, there is no doubting the scale of the gamble.

“It is quite nerve wracking — we’re building something from the ground up that’s never been seen before,” said Sophia Nomvete, who plays Princess Disa, the first female and first Black dwarf depicted on screen in Tolkien’s world.

“There’s definitely a few nerves. We want to get it right,” she told AFP at the Comic-Con fan event last month.

“The Rings of Power” is set in Tolkien’s “Second Age” — a period of history in his fictional Middle Earth world thousands of years before the events of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”

So while a handful of characters from Jackson’s films reappear in Amazon’s show — mostly younger versions of elves such as Galadriel and Elrond, who are of course immortal — there is no Frodo, Gollum or Aragorn in sight.

Most characters from Tolkien lore are appearing on screen for the first time, and some have even been created entirely from scratch for the show.

“Tolkien hasn’t really written much about who he is as a person,” said Maxim Baldry, whose character Isildur was briefly seen fighting the evil lord Sauron in a flashback at the start of Jackson’s trilogy.

Here, Baldry plays a younger version of the tragic hero, struggling with the death of his mother, over-bearing pressure from his father, and a romantic yearning for adventure.

“What a gift, firstly, to explore someone’s beginnings, finding their true colors, understanding who they really are,” said Baldry.

He added: “Season one is purely about setting up characters and introducing new characters to the family… fleshing out a pretty skeletal world that Tolkien just created in the Second Age.”

– ‘Wonderfully crazy’ –

The fate of the series rests in the hands of creators — or “showrunners” — Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne, who pitched their concept to Amazon after it bought the rights in 2017, but had only a handful of previous projects credited on their CVs.

“We wanted to find a huge Tolkienian mega epic. And Amazon were wonderfully crazy enough to say ‘yes, let’s do that,” McKay said at Comic-Con.

At the London premiere Tuesday, Bezos admitted that “some people even questioned our choice” to bring in “this relatively unknown team.”

“But we saw something special,” he said, according to Variety.

Amazon has also put on glitzy premieres for “The Rings of Power” in Los Angeles, New York and Mumbai.

The show’s lavish globe-trotting promotion is just a drop in the ocean compared to the astonishing cost of actually making a series dubbed the most expensive ever for television.

Amazon splurged $250 million buying the rights from Tolkien’s estate, and some $465 million on the first season alone. It has committed from the start to making five full seasons, meaning the final cost is expected to pass $1 billion.

With high stakes has come considerable secrecy.

Plot details and reviews were strictly embargoed until Wednesday, just two days before the series’ launch, and even its actors have not been told the fates of their characters.

“No idea! I don’t even know what’s happening next season,” said Megan Richards, who plays Poppy Proudfellow, a character whose Harfoot race are ancestors of the hobbits.

“There’s an arc that Tolkien has given us for the Second Age. So there are certain things we know,” Daniel Weyman, who plays a mysterious man billed simply as “The Stranger,” told AFP.

“The thing that I hold on to is that our showrunners, they definitely know their arc. They know their arc already.”

A giant Saguaro cactus that had lived for some 200 years was toppled by heavy rain in the southwestern US state of Arizona.

“Powerful seasonal rains can quickly make an impact on the desert landscape. The loss of this huge, iconic ~200 year old Saguaro on the Romero Ruins trail overlooking the Sutherland wash at Catalina State Park in Tucson is one change regular park visitors can’t miss,” Arizona State Parks said on Facebook.

A photo accompanying the post showed the cactus’s giant arms splayed on the ground, its trunk shattered.

The Saguaro cactus can reach more than 10 meters (32 feet) in height and weight more than two tons when full of water. The plant, which grows in the United States and Mexico, has become a symbol of the American West and particularly of the desert landscape of Arizona.

“Thankfully this giant has fallen off the trail and will stay where it landed, providing habitat and food for many creatures as it decomposes,” Arizona State Parks said.

US President Joe Biden touted his plans to curb gun crime and framed Trumpist Republicans as a threat to the rule of law Tuesday on the first of multiple visits to the key swing state of Pennsylvania.

The Keystone State — which is hosting Biden three times over the coming days, including for a rare prime-time address to the nation on Thursday — is one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds as the president’s party seeks to hold on to Congress in the midterm elections.

The Democratic leader was in the city of Wilkes-Barre Tuesday — near his hometown of Scranton — where he promoted his Safer America Plan and called out Republicans for blocking gun reforms.

“I’m determined to ban assault weapons in this country. Determined. I did it once before and I’ll do it again,” Biden said, referring to his work as a senator in the 1990s to institute the last ban.

Biden’s proposals include substantial new funding for 100,000 extra police officers on the streets, investment in crime prevention, and “commonsense steps on guns to keep dangerous firearms out of dangerous hands.”

His visit came as former president Donald Trump, still the most influential Republican, is due to host his own rally in the same area on Saturday.

Republicans have presented themselves as the party of law-and-order amid a nationwide spike in murders — with some success, according to multiple polls — while accusing Democrats of wanting to defund the police.

– ‘Afraid of the NRA’ –

But Biden has attempted to turn the tables by pointing to the Republicans’ defense of US Capitol rioters and highlighting the various criminal investigations embroiling Trump.

The president set out his party’s actions on violent crime, highlighting the bipartisan gun safety package he signed into law in June, breaking a decades-long stalemate on firearms control.

Only 14 Republicans crossed the aisle and approve the package, which included enhanced background checks for younger buyers and federal cash for states introducing “red flag” laws that allow courts to temporarily remove weapons from those considered a threat.

Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice president, said at the time that the legislation “undermines Second Amendment freedom.”

“The NRA was against it, which means the vast majority of Republicans in Congress couldn’t even stand up and vote for it because they’re afraid of the NRA,” Biden said Tuesday.

He also denounced attacks on the integrity of the FBI, three weeks after it raided Trump’s Florida residence to retrieve government secrets removed from the White House.

The federal law enforcement agency came under a barrage of criticism in right-wing circles after searching the Mar a Lago resort for government secrets — and was attacked by an armed man at its Cincinnati office in the following days.

– ‘Sickening’ –

“It’s sickening to see the new attacks on the FBI… There is no place in this country for endangering the lives of law enforcement. No place. None. Period,” Biden said.

“I’m opposed to defunding the police, I’m also opposed to defunding the FBI.”

And he berated “every single” Pennsylvania Republican lawmaker for voting against his American Rescue Plan, which provided hundreds of billions of dollars for states to help fund law enforcement and public safety programs.

The outcome of the upcoming US Senate election in Pennsylvania could decide whether the Democrats cede control of the evenly divided upper chamber of Congress to the Republicans for the next two years.

But Republican strategists worry that controversial Trump-backed candidates are muddying their path to victory.

The Cook Political Report moved the race to “lean Democrat” this month, however, citing widespread Republican concerns with Trump-backed celebrity physician Mehmet Oz’s campaign.

Initially preferring to present himself as a unifier in a deeply divided country, Biden has recently been concentrating his fire on Trumpist Republicans he has accused of embracing “semi-fascism.”

The 79-year-old Democrat, who narrowly beat Trump in Pennsylvania in 2020, will follow Tuesday’s address with two further visits to the state.

On Thursday he will echo his 2020 campaign theme about the battle for the “soul of nation” in historic Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution were written.

He will set out how an imperiled democracy threatens America’s standing on the international stage, according to White House officials, highlighting action to protect voting rights but warning that access to the ballot box is still at risk.

The James Webb space telescope has revealed dazzling new detail of a previously known slice of the cosmos 32 million light-years away, in a new picture released by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

The infrared technology of the telescope, launched in December 2021, has allowed for an even clearer view of the so-called Phantom Galaxy than astronomers had ever seen before.  

“Webb’s sharp vision has revealed delicate filaments of gas and dust in the grandiose spiral arms which wind outwards from the center of this image,” NASA and the ESA said Monday. 

“A lack of gas in the nuclear region also provides an unobscured view of the nuclear star cluster at the galaxy’s center,” the agencies said in a statement.

The whirling celestial form, officially called M74, is located in the Pisces constellation 32 million light-years away from Earth. 

The Webb image shows the galaxy’s brilliant white, red, pink and light blue appendages of dust and stars swirling around a bright blue center, all set against the dark backdrop of deep space. 

M74 was previously photographed by the Hubble telescope, which captured the galaxy’s spiraling blue and pink arms, but instead showed its glowing center as a soft yellow. 

The Phantom Galaxy is a “favorite target for astronomers studying the origin and structure of galactic spirals,” NASA and the ESA said. The picture taken by Webb will help them “learn more about the earliest phases of star formation in the local Universe,” and record more information about 19 star-forming galaxies close to our own Milky Way. 

Astronomers will also use the picture to “pinpoint star-forming regions in the galaxies, accurately measure the masses and ages of star clusters, and gain insights into the nature of the small grains of dust drifting in interstellar space,” the statement said. 

Webb’s new pictures have thrilled the space community as the telescope orbits the Sun at a distance of a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, in a region of space called the second Lagrange point.

The telescope, which has a primary mirror more than 21 feet (6.5 meters) wide, is an international collaboration between NASA, the ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. It is expected to operate for approximately 20 years.

Mississippi officials declared a health emergency Tuesday after historic flooding damaged treatment systems and left 180,000 people in the state capital Jackson without safe drinking water.

Governor Tate Reeves warned residents about the crisis and on Tuesday deployed the National Guard to assist in water distribution throughout the city.

The Mississippi State Department of Health (MSDH) said water treatment pumps had failed and there were low levels of water in storage tanks serving Jackson.

Many city taps were dry, and water that was flowing was contaminated or untreated, officials cautioned.

“We do not have reliable running water at scale,” Reeves told a press conference late Monday. 

“The city cannot produce enough water to fight fires, to reliably flush toilets and to meet other critical needs,” he said, adding emergency services would distribute drinking water to residents in a “massively complicated logistical task.” 

Facing aging infrastructure, Jackson has been under a boil water order since late July.

Recent torrential rains intensified the crisis as the city’s Pearl River has faced historic flooding, which finally started to ease Monday, Jackson City Hall said in a statement. 

“It is no surprise that we have a very fragile water-treatment facility, and (the city’s treatment plant) OB Curtis receives its water from the reservoir, and because of the river water coming into the plant, we have to change how we treat the water,” Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said at a press conference, according to the Mississippi Clarion Ledger newspaper.

According to the MSDH, water treatment plants in Jackson do not have sufficient maintenance staff or certified operators to safely run the system, leading to potential for contamination from dangerous organisms such as E.Coli and Giardia.

Reeves urged residents to avoid the water coming out of their faucets. 

“In too many cases, it is raw water from the reservoir being pushed through the pipes. Be smart, protect yourself, protect your family, preserve water, look out for your fellow man and look out for your neighbors.”

Without water, Jackson public schools were conducting virtual learning Tuesday, with no return to school yet scheduled.

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden had been briefed on the situation.

“At his direction, we have been in regular contact with state and local officials, including Mayor Lumumba, and made clear that the Federal Government stands ready to offer assistance,” she tweeted. 

Jackson’s water system has suffered “significant deficiencies” since 2016, according to an MDSH report, with lead-contaminated pipes often more than a century old. 

The majority-Black city’s former public works director Charles Williams told AFP in April it could cost up to $5 billion to replace the necessary infrastructure.