US Business

Long relegated to an obscure corner of the collectibles market, VHS tapes have been fetching eye-popping prices at auctions in recent months, thanks to nostalgia and an appetite for new investment opportunities.

At a sale by Heritage Auctions in June, a “Back to the Future” videocassette went for $75,000, while “The Goonies” and “Jaws” copies were sold for $50,000 and $32,500, respectively.

Videotape collectors have been around since the late 1970s, when the format was first introduced, but these days most “VHS tapes are worth next to nothing”, according to John, from Newmarket in Canada, who claims to have sold around 3,000 of them over span of more than 20 years.

“You’ll be lucky to get $5 each”, says this active eBay user, who declined to give his last name.

Until recently, only some movies that hadn’t been released online or on other medium, as well as little known horror movies, could command higher prices, sometimes above $1,000.

But this new trend is mostly focused on blockbuster titles, particularly from the early 80s. To be deemed valuable, a tape has to meet some specific criteria, with a premium put on first editions and sealed copies. A limited edition, such as a larger box version of “Star Wars”, would also draw interest.

The George Lucas sci-fi cult classic is widely considered a must-have and several copies have already been sold for over $10,000.

The Holy Trinity could be movies from the first slate ever released on the US market in 1977, namely “MASH”, “Patton” and “The Sound of Music”, by a financially troubled 20th Century Fox with Magnetic Video.

Jay Carlson, VHS Consignment director at Heritage Auctions, said these could reach “a six-digit number, maybe seven.”

– Nostalgia meets investment opportunity –

Many long-time collectors are wondering about the sudden surge, 16 years after the last release of a film in this format (“A History of Violence”). The last video recorders were manufactured in 2016.

“I think a lot of it is nostalgia and the compulsion to collect”, says Philip Baker, who runs the www.videocollector.co.uk website. “One of the special things about VHS over the other formats is it was the first accessible way to watch a movie in your own home.”

Host of the Completly Unnecessary Podcast, Pat Contri has a different take and draws a parallel between the current VHS trend and video games. He said both markets are flooded with “people who just decided to get into it. They said to themselves: ‘I have money, let’s invest in it.'”

Over the last decade, several of these cultural staples have become collectible asset classes, from sneakers to skateboards, thanks to a new generation of investors, many of whom grew up with them.

A whole industry is getting together, as shown by the growing number of dedicated Facebook groups, grading services assessing authenticity and condition, and auction houses willing to add VHS to their sales.

Contri is critical of the process, “where instead of letting a relatively new collecting hobby for the masses develop naturally, you sort of try to entice people with +FOMO+ fear”, as in fear of missing out on a lucrative investment.

“There’s people who are only open box guys, and they’re very skeptical of sealed guys and what it means to their own collecting”, Carlson said. “But I just think it’s a good thing. It’s just a difference in the way that you’re collecting.”

Carlson sees even more potential in VHS tapes than in video games, which recorded two sales for over a million dollar each last year.

“I know a lot of people who aren’t into video games and don’t play video games, but I don’t know very many people who who wouldn’t have a favorite movie.”

Twitter shares slid late Thursday after a Washington Post report that Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy the social media giant is in danger.

The world’s richest man has previously expressed misgivings and even implied he could walk away from the deal over concerns about what he believes are an abundance of fake accounts.

According to the Post, however, Musk has been unable to pin down the percentage of Twitter accounts that are not genuine, despite being given access to internal data.

While Musk has already made comments putting his commitment to the deal in doubt, the latest report cited an anonymous source saying his team is preparing for a “change in direction.”

Twitter shares, which were already trading lower than the price offered by Musk, sank about four percent on the news in after-market trades.

“The Twitter soap opera is clearly coming to some sort of finale over the coming months as Musk makes the decision to stay (with a lower price) or go,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors.

“The Twitter deal has clearly caused chaos at Twitter.”

Ives expected Musk to reveal details of his fake account concerns in the coming weeks.

During the Qatar Economic Forum last month, Musk said that his Twitter purchase remained held up by “very significant” questions about the number of fake users on the social network.

“So we are still awaiting resolution on that matter and that is a very significant matter,” the Tesla car and SpaceX exploration chief said via a video link to the gathering.

Twitter executives have held firm that less than five percent of accounts are bogus, with Musk saying he believes the number to be much higher.

Musk said there were also questions about Twitter’s debt.

The chances of Musk buying Twitter as originally negotiated are slim, Ives said.

Wedbush set the chance of the deal happening at a lower price at 60 percent, leaving open the door to the possibility Musk will try to walk away with only paying a required $1 billion breakup fee.

US soccer icon Megan Rapinoe paid silent tribute Thursday to a fellow sports star — basketballer Brittney Griner, who is detained in Russia — during a White House awards ceremony. 

As she and several others received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest American civilian honor, Rapinoe wore a white pantsuit with the initials “BG” and a flower embroidered on the lapel.

Griner, who has been imprisoned in Russia since February, pleaded guilty to drug smuggling charges earlier Thursday in a case that has further inflamed tensions between Moscow and Washington.

The two-time Olympic gold medalist and WNBA champion, detained days before Russia sent troops to Ukraine, faces up to a decade behind bars for bringing vape cartridges with cannabis oil into the country, but insists she did not intend to break the law.

US President Joe Biden “is going to do everything he can to make sure she gets home safely,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said in response to criticism from the basketball star’s family on the administration’s involvement.

In addition to Rapinoe, who helped lead the US women’s national soccer team to 2019 World Cup victory and advocates for LGBTQ+ rights, Biden also commemorated gymnastics champion Simone Biles for shining a light on mental health struggles.

Other award recipients included former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords who is a survivor of gun violence, the nurse who was the first person in the United States to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, and posthumous awards for Apple founder Steve Jobs and Republican senator and war hero John McCain. 

“This is America,” Biden said of the esteemed group.

Also honored was Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington, who could not attend the White House ceremony because he recently tested positive for Covid.

A top aide and ex-boyfriend of fallen Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted on Thursday of defrauding investors and patients at the failed blood testing startup.

Jurors found Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani guilty on all 12 fraud counts charged by federal prosecutors, a spokesperson at the courthouse in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose told AFP.

He is to be sentenced on November 15 and faces the potential for prison time as well as cash fines. The judge set his bail at $750,000 to insure he shows up for sentencing.

Balwani was tried separately from one-time US biotech star Holmes, whose trial in the same California courtroom ended in January with guilty verdicts on four counts of tricking investors into pouring money into what she claimed was a revolutionary blood testing system.

But the jury — who had listened to weeks of sometimes complex evidence — also acquitted her on four charges and could not reach a verdict on three others.

Holmes could also be hit with prison time when she is sentenced on September 26. She has filed an appeal asking that her convictions be tossed.

During her trial, Holmes alleged that Balwani was emotionally and physically abusive during their romantic relationship — claims he has denied. She also painted Balwani as a controlling force at Theranos.

Holmes and Balwani are rare examples of tech executives facing charges over a company’s flame-out, in a sector littered with the carcasses of failed startups that once promised untold riches.

Her trial shined a spotlight on the blurred line between the hustle that characterizes the industry and outright criminal dishonesty.

US prosecutor Robert Leach told jurors in a federal courthouse in San Jose that Balwani piloted the firm alongside Holmes and that the pair were “partners in everything, including their crime.”

But 57-year-old Balwani’s attorney Stephen Cazares said his client never committed fraud, and was convinced of Theranos’s potential.

Balwani, nearly two decades Holmes’s senior, was brought in to help steer the company she had founded in 2003 at just 19 years old.

Holmes, now 38, would go on to promise self-service testing machines that could run an analytical gamut cheaply and on just a few drops of blood — a pledge shattered under fraud allegations.

Prosecutors alleged Holmes and Balwani were aware the technology did not work as advertised, but continued to promote it as revolutionary to patients and the investors who pumped money into the company.

As Theranos soared, it attracted luminaries such as Rupert Murdoch and Henry Kissinger, but a series of reports casting doubt on the firm’s claims from Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal set the company’s collapse in motion.

Mississippi on Thursday became the latest US state to outlaw abortion after last month’s Supreme Court ruling revoking protection for the procedure, leading to 11th-hour confrontations outside a clinic in Jackson.

Alternately thrilled or furious, opponents and supporters of abortion rights gathered outside Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the facility at the heart of the United States Supreme Court’s decision stating access to pregnancy termination is not a constitutional right. 

Nicknamed the Pink House because of the building’s colorful walls, Jackson Women’s Health performed its final abortions Wednesday and saw its last consultation patients Thursday ahead of its closure.

Brandishing signs reading “Love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind,” dozens of abortion rights opponents greeted the final trickle of patients with music and shouted prayers.

On the opposite side of the gathering, abortion rights advocates answered with placards referencing the poor southern state’s high maternal death rate to ask, “Why do you care more about hypothetical lives than real ones?” and others proclaiming “Abortion is health care.”

Cheryl Hamlin, one of the doctors who had until Thursday worked at Jackson Women’s Health, vehemently took the anti-abortion protesters to task outside the pink building, accusing them of not respecting women’s rights.

In recent years, Jackson Women’s Health was the only place to offer abortion care in religiously conservative Mississippi. That status left the clinic as the logical organization to take legal action when state legislators passed a law restricting abortion in 2018.

The case eventually made its way to the nation’s high court, which on June 24 overturned its own landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that had enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion in federal law. 

Thirteen states, anticipating the seismic shift by the court, had already passed trigger laws to ban abortion, which were designed to take effect immediately after the overturning of Roe.

Approximately seven of them have so far successfully banned abortion entirely, but legal battles have delayed the end date in states such as Louisiana.

Mississippi’s 2007 law, which went into effect on Thursday, carries penalties of up to 10 years in prison for violations, and provides exceptions only in cases of danger to the life of the mother — but not for rape or incest.

Diane Derzis, the owner of Jackson Women’s Health, now plans to move to Las Cruces, New Mexico, which “for the time being is a very receptive state. We’ve been welcomed,” she told NPR public radio.

Other clinics are also in the process of relocating to New Mexico or Illinois, but, Derzis added she was concerned there would not be enough facilities to handle the influx of patients from the South crossing state lines to seek abortions.

“I’m not sure we’re ready for it,” she said.

Ultimately abortion access is expected to disappear in about half of the country’s 50 states.

Russian forces left a trail of destruction Thursday, seeking to push deeper into the eastern Donbas region as President Vladimir Putin said his military campaign was still ramping up.

Diplomatic tensions meanwhile mounted between Ankara and Kyiv, with Ukraine accusing Turkey of ignoring calls to seize Ukrainian grain being transported by a Russian ship.

A Russian air strike in the eastern Ukrainian industrial city of Kramatorsk left at least one dead and several others wounded earlier in the day, as Russian troops fight for full control of the surrounding Donbas.

The explosion left a gaping crater next to a hotel and residential buildings and several cars were on fire, AFP journalists said, as emergency services arrived on the scene.

It came ahead of a speech by Putin to lawmakers in which he said “everyone should know that we have not started in earnest yet.”

He also sounded a note of menace towards the West, telling the alliance that has coalesced against his invasion of Ukraine that if they wanted to defeat Russia on the battlefield “let them try”.

The head of Ukraine’s battled-scarred Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, announced before the strike on Kramatorsk that Russian bombardments had killed at least seven people over the past 24 hours.

The fatalities came after Ukrainian officials again called for civilians in the region to flee, as Russian forces turn their sights on the city of Sloviansk.

– Battle for cities –

Russian troops captured cities in the Lugansk region after long battles, consolidating their hold in the east after failing at the start of the February invasion to take the capital Kyiv and Ukraine’s second-largest city Kharkiv.

Despite the raging conflict, Kyiv took time to hail outgoing UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, one of Ukraine’s keenest allies throughout the war.

Johnson said that even though he was leaving office, Britain would continue supporting Ukraine for “as long as it takes”. 

“We all welcome this news with sadness. Not only me, but also all of Ukrainian society,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said, after Johnson resigned as leader of Britain’s Conservative party, paving the way for the selection of a new prime minister.

“We don’t doubt that Great Britain’s support will continue, but your personal leadership and your charisma made it special,” he said.

In the diplomatic clash between Ukraine and Turkey, Kyiv says that a 7,000-tonne vessel set off from Ukraine’s Russian-occupied port of Berdyansk after picking up wheat.

The marinetraffic.com website on Thursday showed the vessel moving away from Turkey’s Black Sea port of Karasu before apparently switching off its transponder and disappearing from view.

Ukraine said it was “deeply disappointed” that Turkey had not seized the ship.

– Control over Snake Island –

Zelensky in his evening address again called for more arms from international allies.

“The bigger defense support to Ukraine will be now, the quicker the war will end with our victory and the lesser will be losses of all countries in the world,” he said.

Ukraine this week also said it had regained control of Snake Island in the Black Sea, raising its flag there following the withdrawal of Russian forces.

“I want to thank for the final stage of the fight for Snake Island.  Our national flag was erected there. This operations lasted for two months,” Zelensky said.

“Let now every Russian captain of a ship or a plane see the Ukrainian flag at Zmeiny and know that our country cannot be broken.”

Russia said it pulled back from the symbolic island in a gesture of “good will”, but has since continued targeting positions there.

The Russian defence ministry said it had carried out “precision” missile strikes on the island early Thursday, killing Ukrainian soldiers.

Finland meanwhile passed legislation to build stronger fences on its border with Russia, as the country seeks to join NATO following the invasion.

Finland reversed decades of military non-alignment by seeking membership in the military alliance in May, formally starting the process to join this week.

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