US Business

Lawyers for Amber Heard rested their defense on Tuesday against the defamation suit filed by her former husband Johnny Depp, after six weeks of testimony riding on graphic claims and counterclaims of domestic violence.

Depp’s attorneys responded by asking that Heard’s countersuit against the “Pirates of the Caribbean” star be dismissed but the judge hearing the case in Virginia, near the US capital, declined to do so.

Judge Penney Azcarate said enough evidence has been presented for the case to continue and for both suit and countersuit to eventually go to the seven-person jury.

The 58-year-old Depp filed suit against Heard over an op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in December 2018 in which she described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”

Heard, 36, who had a starring role in “Aquaman,” did not name Depp in the op-ed, but he sued her for implying he was a domestic abuser and is seeking $50 million in damages.

The Texas-born Heard countersued, asking for $100 million and claiming that she suffered “rampant physical violence and abuse” at his hands.

Depp, during his four days on the witness stand, denied ever striking Heard or any other woman and claimed that she was the one who was frequently violent.  

– ‘Chemistry’ –

After the judge denied the dismissal motion by Depp’s attorneys, lawyers for the “Pirates” star called their first rebuttal witness.

Walter Hamada, president of DC Comics-based film production at Warner Brothers, testified about Heard’s contract with the studio for the “Aquaman” series.

Heard’s legal team has claimed her role and compensation for “Aquaman 2” was harmed by allegedly defamatory remarks made about her by Depp’s former attorney, Adam Waldman.

Waldman’s statements form the basis of the counter-claim for defamation filed by Heard, who earned $1 million for “Aquaman” and $2 million for “Aquaman 2.”

Hamada said Heard’s compensation for “Aquaman 2” was not affected by anything said by Waldman or Depp.

He said it was not the practice of Warner Brothers to renegotiate contracts although he acknowledged that the studio did so for “Aquaman” star Jason Momoa.

Hamada said there had been “conversations” about recasting Heard’s role in “Aquaman 2” but that was because of a perceived lack of “chemistry” between her and co-star Momoa.

“The reality is it’s not uncommon on movies for two leads to not have chemistry,” he said. “You know it when you see it.”

– ‘Negative publicity’ –

On Monday, a Hollywood expert called by Heard’s team, Kathryn Arnold, said Heard’s career was “on the precipice of a meteoric rise” following “Aquaman” but it has been stymied by a “lot of negative publicity.”

Arnold estimated that Heard has suffered between $45 and $50 million in lost film and TV roles and endorsements.

Depp’s lawyers put experts on the stand earlier in the trial who testified that the actor lost millions because of the abuse accusations, including a $22.5-million payday for a sixth installment of “Pirates.”

Depp filed the defamation complaint in the United States after losing a separate libel case in London in November 2020 that he brought against The Sun for calling him a “wife-beater.”

Depp, a three-time Oscar nominee, and Heard were married in February 2015. Their divorce was finalized two years later.

Azcarate, the judge, has scheduled closing arguments in the case for Friday, after which it will go to the jury.

Republican voters in the battleground US state of Georgia appeared set Tuesday to deliver a stark repudiation of Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.

Four other states — Texas, Arkansas, Alabama and Minnesota — are also picking contenders for November’s midterm elections, which will decide which party controls the US Senate and House of Representatives for the remainder of President Joe Biden’s first term.

But all eyes are on the Peach State, where wounds from the 2020 presidential election are still festering two years after Trump lost there by the narrowest of margins.

Up and down the ballot, the Republican side of the Georgia primary pits candidates peddling the former president’s false claims of widespread election fraud against hopefuls who pushed back in defense of the Constitution.

In the contest to be the next governor, incumbent Brian Kemp, frequently the target of Trump’s wrath for refusing to help overturn the election, leads former senator David Perdue by more than 20 points.

Perdue has made bogus claims about 2020 a centerpiece of his campaign, in a direct appeal to Trump supporters who continue wrongly to question the validity of the outcome.

But some analysts argue that outrage over the fiction that Trump was the victim of election theft is beginning to dissipate.

They point to an April University of Georgia poll showing almost 60 percent of Republican voters said they were confident that November’s midterms would be fair.

Trump, who banked much of his own political capital in the race, faces humiliation if Kemp’s lead holds — undermining his push to make his nationwide endorsements a sign of his continuing sway over the party.

– Dead heat –

After sinking $2.5 million of his own campaign funds into the Perdue effort, the former president appeared largely to have given up on the candidate, declining to visit his state in the home stretch.

But Trump did offer an 11th-hour endorsement of the “conservative fighter” — and landed swipes at his opponent, charging in a statement Tuesday that Kemp had “failed Georgia” and “allowed massive Election Fraud.”

Kemp’s confidence in victory over his imploding opponent was apparent Monday at a rally in Cobb County with former vice president Mike Pence, where neither man mentioned Perdue once.

“I was for Brian Kemp before it was cool,” Pence told a cheering crowd of a few hundred at an airfield on the outskirts of Atlanta.

Pence’s support for a candidate Trump reviles marks a high-profile clash between the former president and his White House wingman, and only highlights the party’s internal tug of war over its future direction. 

The race to be Georgia’s secretary of state is seen as equally consequential, as these are the officials who oversee elections in the United States.

Democrats fear that, across the country, Trump will be able to install loyalists who can weaponize specious fraud accusations from 2020 to make it harder for his opponents to vote in 2024.     

As the man responsible for certifying Georgia’s 2020 election results, Brad Raffensperger was in lockstep with Kemp in pushing back against Trump.

He faces Jody Hice, one of more than a dozen Trump-backed candidates across America bidding to become secretary of state and professing to believe the 2020 election was stolen.

The four-term congressman was also among 147 House Republicans who voted against certifying the results for Biden without evidence of election fraud.

In an April poll published by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the University of Georgia, Raffensperger and Hice were in a dead heat.

Biden was the first Democratic presidential candidate since 1992 to win Georgia, while Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff triumphed in runoff elections in January 2021 that wrested control of the US Senate from Republicans.

Georgia’s Democrats are doing all they can to cement those gains, headlined by news that Democratic star campaigner Stacey Abrams is reprising her bid for governor.

Abrams is unopposed in her effort to unseat Kemp in November and Warnock is expected to sail through his primary before facing a challenge from Trump-backed former football star Herschel Walker.

A deafening stream of fighter jets land and take off from a US aircraft carrier, part of a long-planned NATO exercise in the Mediterranean to show military might while Russia wages war in Ukraine.

“I want us to be as ready as we can possibly be,” US Rear Admiral Curt Renshaw, commander of the Carrier Strike Group Eight, told reporters this week on a visit on board USS Harry S. Truman. 

“We look at the Russian capability and we look at our own capabilities and then we train to counter what they might do and to defend ourselves and to defend partners and allies.”

The aircraft carrier is taking part in “Neptune Shield 2022”, a NATO training activity in the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea this month involving nations from Italy, Poland and Turkey to Britain and the United States.

The goal is to overcome the difficulties of integrating command and control of air, sea and land assets from different countries in the NATO military alliance.

The operation has been in the pipeline for two years, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February has cast a new light on events.

Speaking in Mediterranean waters between Crete and Libya, Renshaw is well aware how this show of strength comes across on the other side of Europe.

“Look at the strike fighters, look around you! Of course this should be a deterrent effect,” he said, surrounded by F-18 Super Hornet jets lined up in a hangar.

“I think anyone would not be very wise to attack us or to have some sort of aggression against an ally if you think of the capabilities we have.”

Asked about more precise activities, he added: “I won’t talk about specific operations but we do keep close track of where Russia operates submarines.”

– ‘Weighs on our minds’ –

USS Harry S. Truman is akin to a small floating town, carrying around 4,800 individuals, with a disturbingly short runway from which jets fire off regularly or land abruptly, their tailhooks snagged in the ship’s arresting wires.

Among the pilots is British Royal Navy officer Rory Cheyne, who is on an exchange programme with the Americans and recalls recent training flights into France, Germany and Spain.

Asked about the impact of the Ukraine war, he told AFP: “Clearly the training nature of this activity, enhanced vigilance activity, has been put into a different context.

“But certainly what we’re doing… is no different given that context. We are here to work hand in hand with our allies and be ready for whatever eventuality should occur.”

Lieutenant Commander Jeannette Lazzaro, a 33-year-old American, works in the operations department, which sets out the air plan on which flight schedules are based.

The war “has not had a direct impact on what we’re doing… however it does certainly weigh on our minds”, she told AFP.

The exercise is a serious business, but there are moments of levity — not least an informal competition by some of the pilots to grow the best moustache, an adornment typical of World War II fighter pilots.

“It’s a proven fact that a man sporting a moustache is far better in tactical execution and esprit de corps within a combat unit than a man without a moustache,” joked Hayward Foard, second-in-command of the Strike Fighter Squadron.

“Typically we compete who can grow the most finely shaped moustache. I like to think I’m first in the running.”

Leaders of Japan, India, Australia and the United States warned Tuesday against attempts to “change the status quo by force” as concerns grow about whether China could invade self-ruled Taiwan.

A joint statement by the so-called Quad bloc avoided any direct mention of China’s growing military power in the region, but left little doubt about where its concerns lie.

The carefully worded document also made reference to the conflict in Ukraine, but without offering any joint position on the Russian invasion, which India has pointedly declined to condemn.

The Quad’s other members have been less coy about their view that a strong response to Russia’s war is needed, one that would deter other countries, including China.

“As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is shaking the fundamental principles of the international order… (we) confirmed that unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force will never be tolerated anywhere, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region,” Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said, using another term for the Asia-Pacific.

The group’s statement made no mention of Russia, or China, but inveighed against a range of activities that Beijing has regularly been accused of in the region.

“We strongly oppose any coercive, provocative or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo and increase tensions in the area, such as the militarisation of disputed features, the dangerous use of coast guard vessels and maritime militia and efforts to disrupt other countries’ offshore resource exploitation activities,” it said.

Hours after the summit, Japan said Chinese and Russian military planes had flown jointly over the Sea of Japan and East China Sea as the leaders met, in a move the country’s defence minister called “provocative”.

“As the international community responds to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the fact that China took such action in collaboration with Russia, which is the aggressor, is cause for concern. It cannot be overlooked,” Nobuo Kishi told reporters.

Beijing confirmed the flights, saying they were in line with the Chinese and Russian “annual military cooperation plan”.

The Quad nations are attempting to build their loose grouping into a more substantive counterweight to China’s rising military and economic power, despite their differences.

They unveiled plans to invest at least $50 billion into regional infrastructure projects over the next five years, and a maritime monitoring initiative seen as intended to bolster surveillance of Chinese activities.

– ‘Democracies versus autocracies’ –

The moves come with worries over recent efforts by China to build ties with Pacific nations including the Solomon Islands, which signed a security pact with Beijing last month.

China’s foreign minister will this week kick off a visit to a host of Pacific nations including the Solomons, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Kiribati as well as holding video calls with Micronesia and the Cook Islands, Beijing confirmed Tuesday.

Kishida urged Quad members to “listen carefully” to regional neighbours, including the Pacific islands, while Australia’s newly elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the bloc needed to “push our shared values in the region at a time when China was clearly seeking to exert more influence”.

The Quad met a day after US President Joe Biden raised eyebrows and the regional temperature by saying Washington was ready to intervene militarily to defend Taiwan against any Chinese attack.

He insisted Tuesday that his comments did not mean a change to Washington’s longstanding “strategic ambiguity” on how it might respond to a Chinese invasion, prompting another fierce response from Beijing.

Foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin accused Washington of playing “word games” on Taiwan and warned of an “unbearable cost” if the United States “carries on down the wrong path”.

If Biden was keen to avoid being seen as changing policy on Tuesday, he left little doubt about where the Quad’s focus lies.

“This is about democracies versus autocracies, and we have to make sure we deliver,” Biden said as the summit began.

Among the regional concerns are increased Chinese sorties, naval exercises and encroachments by fishing vessels that are viewed as probing regional defences and red lines.

The bloc said its new maritime monitoring programme would “promote stability and prosperity in our seas and oceans”, again avoiding pointing the finger at Beijing while referencing illegal fishing — an accusation frequently levelled at China.

US actor Mark Ruffalo on Tuesday joined a call by over 150 wealthy people for governments to tax them more, as global elites and policymakers met at the World Economic Forum in Swiss resort Davos.

The face of Hulk in a decade of Marvel movies was one of dozens of new millionaires to put their names to an open letter titled “In Tax We Trust”, which was first delivered to attendees at a virtual WEF conference in January.

“While the world has gone through an immense amount of suffering in the last two years, we have actually seen our wealth rise during the pandemic — yet few if any of us can honestly say that we pay our fair share in taxes,” the letter read.

The Patriotic Millionaires group said it had boosted the number of signatories to over 150 by May, from 100 in January.

Its chairman Morris Pearl, a former managing director at mammoth asset manager BlackRock, vowed in a statement to “continue to pressure global leaders to heed our call: tax the rich before it’s too late”.

But Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) secretary-general Mathias Cormann said that wealth taxes could be less effective than other revenue-raising options.

“They don’t necessarily raise that much revenue,” he told a panel discussion at Davos. 

“In terms of the politics of it, it’s attractive, but in terms of the substance of what it achieves it’s not that attractive.”

Cormann did suggest that “property taxes are probably the most efficient, least distorting” form of wealth tax.

“There’s huge scope in wealth taxation… it’s been tried and in some countries it works,” Oxfam executive director Gabriela Bucher responded.

“These amounts that are being accumulated. You could not spend them in several lifetimes”.

Cormann and the OECD are betting on a deal struck by over 130 countries last year to tax multinational companies at a minimum of 15 percent to boost revenue for hard-up governments.

Asked if Washington might walk back its commitment should Republicans win control of Congress at November mid-term elections, Cormann said that “it’s in the rational self-interest of the United States to be part of this deal”.

For companies, it’s “much better for them to be operating in a globally consistent framework” rather than navigate conflicting tax regimes, he added.

“I can’t imagine that any country or any side of politics in any country would make a judgement that would put themselves at that sort of disadvantage.”