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Rocket Pharmaceuticals to present at 42nd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

CRANBURY, N.J. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Rocket Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: RCKT), a fully integrated, late-stage biotechnology company advancing a sustainable pipeline of genetic therapies for rare disorders with high unmet need, on Wednesday announced that Gaurav Shah, M.D., Chief Executive Officer, is scheduled to present at the 42nd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference on Monday, Jan. 8, 2024, at 3:45 p.m. PT.

 

A webcast of the presentation will be available under “Events” in the Investors section of the Company’s website at https://ir.rocketpharma.com/.

 

About Rocket Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Rocket Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: RCKT) is a fully integrated, late-stage biotechnology company advancing a sustainable pipeline of investigational genetic therapies designed to correct the root cause of complex and rare disorders. Rocket’s innovative multi-platform approach allows us to design the optimal gene therapy for each indication, creating potentially transformative options that enable people living with devastating rare diseases to experience long and full lives.

 

Rocket’s lentiviral (LV) vector-based gene therapies target hematologic diseases and consist of late-stage programs for Fanconi Anemia (FA), a difficult to treat genetic disease that leads to bone marrow failure and potentially cancer, Leukocyte Adhesion Deficiency-I (LAD-I), a severe pediatric genetic disorder that causes recurrent and life-threatening infections which are frequently fatal, and Pyruvate Kinase Deficiency (PKD), a monogenic red blood cell disorder resulting in increased red cell destruction and mild to life-threatening anemia.

 

Our adeno-associated virus (AAV)-based cardiovascular portfolio includes a late-stage program for Danon Disease, a devastating heart failure condition resulting in thickening of the heart, an early-stage program in clinical trials for PKP2-arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (ACM), a life-threatening heart failure disease causing ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death, and a pre-clinical program targeting BAG3-associated dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a heart failure condition that causes enlarged ventricles.

 

For more information about Rocket, please visit www.rocketpharma.com and follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube and X.

 

Rocket cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements

Various statements in this release concerning Rocket’s future expectations, plans and prospects, including without limitation, Rocket’s expectations regarding the safety and effectiveness of product candidates that Rocket is developing to treat Fanconi Anemia (FA), Leukocyte Adhesion Deficiency-I (LAD-I), Pyruvate Kinase Deficiency (PKD), Danon Disease (DD) and other diseases, the expected timing and data readouts of Rocket’s ongoing and planned clinical trials, the expected timing and outcome of Rocket’s regulatory interactions and planned submissions, Rocket’s plans for the advancement of its Danon Disease program, including its planned pivotal trial, and the safety, effectiveness and timing of related pre-clinical studies and clinical trials, may constitute forward-looking statements for the purposes of the safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and other federal securities laws and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and assumptions. You should not place reliance on these forward-looking statements, which often include words such as “believe,” “expect,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “plan,” “will give,” “estimate,” “seek,” “will,” “may,” “suggest” or similar terms, variations of such terms or the negative of those terms. Although Rocket believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, Rocket cannot guarantee such outcomes. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including, without limitation, Rocket’s ability to monitor the impact of COVID-19 on its business operations and take steps to ensure the safety of patients, families and employees, the interest from patients and families for participation in each of Rocket’s ongoing trials, our expectations regarding the delays and impact of COVID-19 on clinical sites, patient enrollment, trial timelines and data readouts, our expectations regarding our drug supply for our ongoing and anticipated trials, actions of regulatory agencies, which may affect the initiation, timing and progress of pre-clinical studies and clinical trials of its product candidates, Rocket’s dependence on third parties for development, manufacture, marketing, sales and distribution of product candidates, the outcome of litigation, and unexpected expenditures, as well as those risks more fully discussed in the section entitled “Risk Factors” in Rocket’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, filed February 28, 2023 with the SEC and subsequent filings with the SEC including our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. All such statements speak only as of the date made, and Rocket undertakes no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Contacts

Media
Kevin Giordano

media@rocketpharma.com

Investors
Brooks Rahmer

investors@rocketpharma.com

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Conveyer Policy APIs bring federal rules into businesses’ data ecosystems

TopicLake™ technology unlocks regulatory insights to put companies in control of compliance processes.

 

 

HACKENSACK, N.J. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Conveyer, a revolutionary AI platform transforming the way that businesses operationalize data, today announced the launch of its Curated Data Repository, a powerful Data as a Service (DaaS) platform that organizes, summarizes, and filters large and complex datasets to enable seamless knowledge discovery.

 

The first dataset accessible via the Curated Data Repository is Conveyer’s U.S. Policy Data solution, a unique, constantly growing resource comprised of more than 16,000 regulations drawn from over 400 federal agencies and sub-agencies.

“Our U.S. Policy Data enables businesses to drink from the full firehose of regulatory policy information in real time, while providing the clear structure and trustworthy data analytics needed to make regulatory information immediately actionable across the enterprise,” says Carolyn Parent, Conveyer CEO.

 

“That’s a game-changer for government agencies, contractors, and enterprises — and a clear sign of the transformative power of Conveyer’s Curated Data Repository.”

 

A suite of flexible APIs enable organizations to rapidly unlock the full power of Conveyer’s U.S. Policy Data, drawing on a constantly expanding dataset that already incorporates over 16,000 enacted and proposed federal rules dating back to 2020. Conveyer also announced the first free-to-use public version of a subset of its U.S. Policy Data, allowing enterprise customers and other interested parties to explore the solution’s capabilities online via a powerful Microsoft Power BI front end.

 

Using Conveyer’s proprietary TopicLake™ technology, the Curated Data Repository automatically digests federal regulations into over 328,000 unique Topics, each representing an individual concept or idea. The Topics and underlying text are then further processed to yield over 10.2 million unique GenAI artifacts — including summaries, keywords, categories, auto-generated Q&As, and sentiment analysis — which can be seamlessly activated across existing data ecosystems to enable powerful analytics or create intuitive new tools for non-specialist users.

 

Conveyer’s Curated Data Repository and U.S. Policy Data bring key benefits including:

  1. Democratized data access, making data insights accessible across the organization for strategic decision making, advanced analytics, compliance assessments, and more.
  2. Dependable data quality, with robust pre-processing to validate and vet content before it reaches users, customers, or downstream AI models.
  3. Transparent data provenance, enabling insights to be activated with confidence and seamlessly verified by compliance teams and legal specialists.
  4. Effortless implementation, with IT teams able to connect to policy data using existing headcount and infrastructure, enabling end-users to seamlessly self-serve data insights.

 

Using the Curated Data Repository, organizations of all kinds can now seamlessly integrate Conveyer’s U.S. Policy Data into their operations. Key use cases include accelerating product innovation by enabling teams to navigate complex new privacy or security regulations; increasing the speed of legal discovery across disparate datasets; and helping clinicians and healthcare administrators to improve patient care by amplifying the value of existing tools.

 

“For any business impacted by federal rulemaking, the U.S. Policy Data Source is a game-changer,” Parent says. “We’re turning unstructured federal rules and policies into structured data — and our new APIs enable that data to be harnessed across organizations to enable innovation, support compliance, and drive strategic planning at all levels.”

 

A subset of Conveyer’s U.S. Policy Data can be explored online, and the Conveyer team is available to discuss off-the-shelf and bespoke API implementations to give enterprises instant access to the full range of federal rulemaking.

 

About Conveyer

Conveyer is a revolutionary AI platform that ingests organization-wide data and quickly generates high-trust, high-accuracy topics, metatags, and new data for AI models. With 80% of the world’s content unstructured, Conveyer makes the power of AI more accessible across a wide band of high-value use cases.

 

Conveyer’s Data Transformation product is already trusted and deployed in production by Fortune 100 companies across a variety of sectors, including automotive, industrial, materials, technology, and utilities. These products are a powerful demonstration of the core technology: the ability to transform data using AI into high-trust business applications that dramatically reduce costs and support development of future AI applications by creating pre-packaged, cleaned training data for company-wide digital transformation.

Find out more at www.conveyer.com

Contacts

Ben Whitford

ben.whitford@conveyer.com

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MLK Jr. Day 2024 honors the King by ‘Restoring a cultural legacy of care — A Day of Community Service’

First Steps – “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
Martin Luther King Jr.

 

 

The James Kerney Campus (JKC) of Mercer County Community College plans to celebrate its annual Martin Luther King Jr. community day of service on Jan. 15, 2024 with a day of events.

 

The day’s agenda starts at 8 a.m. with registration in the JKC Front Lobby. The organizers plan to follow through about one hour later with the welcoming remarks in Kerney Hall. Then, the variety of service projects will begin.

 

At 12:30 p.m. the participants will break for lunch in the JKC cafeteria. They will resume their service agenda with a Service Celebration at 1:30 p.m. in the Trenton Hall at JKC.

SERVICE ACTIVITIES TO INCLUDE:

  • Sock Drive – Collecting men’s white crew or tube socks for clients of Task. The mission of Task is to feed those who are hungry in the Trenton Area and offer programs to encourage self-sufficiency and improve the quality of life of its patrons.
  • Utensil Wrap Up and Bag Lunches – Task –(Peanut butter and Jelly sandwiches, juice box, dessert) The mission of Task is to feed those who are hungry in the Trenton area and offer programs to encourage self-sufficiency and improve patrons’ quality of life.
  • Community Clean Up – MLK Park/ City Streets
  • Trenton Hall Garden – Building raised beds for the MCCC’s Vegetable garden. This project will provide fresh produce to supplement the colleges’ food pantry.
  • Kidspack 2.0 – the goal is to provide snack (granola bars, fruit and Juice) to the street Teams for Jan. 16th walk home.
  • Blessing Bags – Rescue Mission and Womanspace – provide hygiene bags for clients.

 

 

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Hollywood unions against AI to recreate actors’ performances set precedent for future labor movements to prevent automation

—  The year was dominated by talk of what artificial intelligence could do — and what it could do better than most humans.

 

 

Angela Watercutter / Wired:

 

 

Revolt against the machines began at Swingers. And at Bob’s Big Boy, where for weeks Drew Carey picked up the tab. Members of the Writers Guild of America, (WGA), met at both Los Angeles-area diners frequently during their 148-day strike, which hinged on protecting Hollywood’s scribes from being overrun by the march of artificial intelligence.

 

Members of the WGA were just a small part of the resistance. There were others. The Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, soon joined them on the picket lines, together forming a formidable uprising against the perceived threat of AI.

 

What each union was seeking was different. Writers wanted to make sure AI couldn’t be trained on their work or manipulate it without their say-so; actors wanted guardrails on how the technology could be used to recreate their performances. Both parties ended up setting a tone for how labor movements in the future could push back against encroaching automation.

“It is interesting that the Hollywood strikes became the highest-profile example of workers resisting AI in 2023,” says Brian Merchant, author of this year’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, a book about the Luddite movement.

 

At the same time, he adds, the unions’ confrontations with studios came at a time when the boom in AI technology was causing a lot of folks to be critical of Silicon Valley and new tools primed to take their jobs. Originally, the WGA’s AI stipulations didn’t seem like they’d be hotly contested demands—then they became a central issue. “Workers and unions have been fighting automation and certain uses of AI in the workplace for years, of course, but the Writers Guild were among the first to do so after the rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT,” Merchant says. Ultimately, it was the first big face-off between humans and AI, he adds, and “the humans won.”

 

Their timing couldn’t have been better. Throughout 2023, many trades and professions, from painters to coders and beyond, found themselves vulnerable to being replaced by machine learning. IBM’s CEO estimated out loud that some 7,800 jobs at the company could be done by bots in the next five years. A Goldman Sachs report from late March estimated nearly 300,000 jobs globally could be affected by automation. Radiologists, journalists(gulp), tax preparers—everyone, it seemed, spent at least part of 2023 wondering if robots were coming for their jobs.

 

That, in turn, led to increased interest in what protections organized labor could provide workers, even as some unions, like the United Auto Workers and Teamsters, seemed to fall behind on addressing AI’s potential to encroach on jobs. In a recent piece for Harvard Business Review, MIT engineering professor Yossi Sheffi argued short-sightedness on these issues affects both workers and employers, since disengaged staffers could become part of a workforce that’s even less prepared if and when automation comes to their industry.

 

Sheffi wrote the piece in September, when both SAG and WGA were deep into their strikes. At the time, he noted that other industries should “take to heart” what was happening in Hollywood. “Resolving these issues [between the actors and writers and the studios] will take time, but at least in this case, the parties have started the process before AI has become an industry mainstay,” he wrote. “But other unions don’t seem to be facing up to the ways technological advances will change jobs.”

AS THE ADVANCE of AI marched on throughout 2023, it became clear that unions were only part of the resistance. Authors, worried that large language models had been trained using their books, filed a handful of lawsuits against OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and others. So did visual artists, against Stable Diffusion,

 

Midjourney, DeviantArt, and more. None of those suits has reached any kind of conclusion, and some argue copyright claims aren’t the way to stop the bots from absorbing creative work, but the suits did turn the courts into yet another battlefield, in addition to picket lines, on which humans pushed back against AI incursion.

 

By the end of 2023, governments entered the fray. In early November, US president Joe Biden signed an executive orderattempting, among other things, to curtail AI’s impact on human work and provide “federal support for workers facing labor disruptions, including from AI.” Unions, including SAG, praised the move, which came as world leaders were heading to the UK for the AI Safety Summit, where, as my colleague Will Knight wrote, they sought to contain the threats of machine learning while also harnessing its power.

 

That has always been the tricky part. From weavers to writers, lots of people use machines to improve their work. Automation helps! As AI boosters will tell you, the technology can cultivate new forms of creativity. People can write books alongside AI, create new styles of visual art, build infinite Seinfeld generators. Some Hollywood writers use the tools for basic brainstorming tasks. Fear comes in when brainstorming evolves into a studio head asking ChatGPT to write a new movie about a cat and a cop who are best friends. No scribes needed.

 

Currently, chatbots can’t whip up fully formed scripts, or novels, or Caravaggios, but the tech is evolving so quickly it feels all but imminent. When Sam Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI in November, there was all kinds of speculation that the company was developing its tech too quickly, that its for-profit ambitions had overwhelmed its altruistic intentions. Altman is now back at the head of his company, but whether or not OpenAI is still evolving too quickly remains to be seen. But Microsoft does now have a nonvoting board seat.

 

Funny thing about that: Microsoft actually offered jobs to OpenAI staffers during that brief period when Altman was voted off the island. So did Salesforce. OpenAI employees all but told Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to go screw, but the sentiment stood as a reminder that while AI is poised to take many jobs, it also creates jobs in AI. The “learn to code” crowd has all new ammo. Even Biden’s executive order was clear about the fact that the US government wanted to attract the best and brightest in the field.

 

But that’s job creation, not job displacement. New technologies create jobs all the time, but with AI, some of those jobs pay pennies. What’s more, AI can also ask you to train it to do your job before picking up your tools. Going forward, the likelihood that AI will displace many entry-level jobs while creating a few highly skilled gigs seems high. The biggest questions in AI right now nearly all revolve around what these machines are learning from people, whether it’s human skill or human bias.

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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A study estimates that there are 13.3B+ videos on YouTube, with 4B+ posted to its platform in 2023; median YouTube video has 39 views

—  I got interested in this question a few years ago, when I started writing about the “denominator problem.”

 

Ethan Zuckerman:

 

 

— A great deal of social media research focuses on finding unwanted behavior – mis/disinformation, hate speech – on platforms. This isn’t that hard to do: search for “white genocide” or “ivermectin” and count the results. Indeed, a lot of eye-catching research does just this – consider Avaaz’s August 2020 report about COVID misinformation. It reports 3.8 billion views of COVID misinfo in a year, which is a very big number. But it’s a numerator without a denominator – Facebook generates dozens or hundreds of views a day for each of its 3 billion users – 3.8 billion views is actually a very small number, contextualized with a denominator.

 

A few social media platforms have made it possible to calculate denominators. Reddit, for many years, permitted Pushshift to collect all Reddit posts, which means we can calculate what a small fraction of Reddit is focused on meme stocks or crypto, versus conversations about mental health or board gaming. Our Redditmap.social platform – primarily built by Virginia Partridge and Jasmine Mangat – is based around the idea of looking at the platform as a whole and understanding how big or small each community is compared to the whole. Alas, Reddit cut off public access to Pushshift this summer, so Redditmap.social can only use data generated early this year.

 

Twitter was also a good platform for studying denominators, because it created a research API that took a statistical sample of all tweets and gave researchers access to every 10th or 100th one. If you found 2500 tweets about ivermectin a day, and saw 100m tweets through the decahose (which gave researchers 1/10th of tweet volume), you could calculate an accurate denominator (100m x 10) (All these numbers are completely made up.) Twitter has cut off access to these excellent academic APIs and now charges massive amounts of money for much less access, which means that it’s no longer possible for most researchers to do denominator-based work.

 

Interesting as Reddit and Twitter are, they are much less widely used than YouTube, which is used by virtually all internet users. Pew reports that 93% of teens use YouTube – the closest service in terms of usage is Tiktok with 63% and Snapchat with 60%. While YouTube has a good, well-documented API, there’s no good way to get a random, representative sample of YouTube. Instead, most research on YouTube either studies a collection of videos (all videos on the channels of a selected set of users) or videos discovered via recommendation (start with Never Going to Give You Up, objectively the center of the internet, and collect recommended videos.) You can do excellent research with either method, but you won’t get a sample of all YouTube videos and you won’t be able to calculate the size of YouTube.

 

I brought this problem to Jason Baumgartner, creator of PushShift, and prince of the dark arts of data collection. One of Jason’s skills is a deep knowledge of undocumented APIs, ways of collecting data outside of official means. Most platforms have one or more undocumented APIs, widely used by programmers for that platform to build internal tools. In the case of YouTube, that API is called “Inner Tube” and its existence is an open secret in programmer communities. Using InnerTube, Jason suggested we do something that’s both really smart and really stupid: guess at random URLs and see if there are videos there.

 

Here’s how this works: YouTube URLs look like this: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vXPJVwwEmiM

 

That bit after “watch?v=” is an 11 digit string. The first ten digits can be a-z,A-Z,0-9 and _-. The last digit is special, and can only be one of 16 values. Turns out there are 2^64 possible YouTube addresses, an enormous number: 18.4 quintillion. There are lots of YouTube videos, but not that many. Let’s guess for a moment that there are 1 billion YouTube videos – if you picked URLs at random, you’d only get a valid address roughly once every 18.4 billion tries.

 

We refer to this method as “drunk dialing”, as it’s basically as sophisticated as taking swigs from a bottle of bourbon and mashing digits on a telephone, hoping to find a human being to speak to. Jason found a couple of cheats that makes the method roughly 32,000 times as efficient, meaning our “phone call” connects lots more often. Kevin Zheng wrote a whole bunch of scripts to do the dialing, and over the course of several months, we collected more than 10,000 truly random YouTube videos.

 

There’s lots you can do once you’ve got those videos. Ryan McGrady is lead author on our paper in the Journal of Quantitative Description, and he led the process of watching a thousand of these videos and hand-coding them, a massive and fascinating task. Kevin wired together his retrieval scripts with a variety of language detection systems, and we now have a defensible – if far from perfect – estimate of what languages are represented on YouTube. We’re starting some experiments to understand how the videos YouTube recommends differ from the “average” YouTube video – YouTube likes recommending videos with at least ten thousand views, while the median YouTube video has 39 views.

 

I’ll write at some length in the future about what we can learn from a true random sample of YouTube videos. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the idea of “the quotidian web”, learning from the bottom half of the long tail of user-generated media so we can understand what most creators are doing with these tools, not just from the most successful influencers. But I’m going to limit myself to the question that started this blog post: how big is YouTube?

 

Consider drunk dialing again. Let’s assume you only dial numbers in the 413 area code: 413-000-0000 through 413-999-9999. That’s 10,000,000 possible numbers. If one in 100 phone calls connect, you can estimate that 100,000 people have numbers in the 413 area code. In our case, our drunk dials tried roughly 32k numbers at the same time, and we got a “hit” every 50,000 times or so. Our current estimate for the size of YouTube is 13.325 billion videos – we are now updating this number every few weeks at tubestats.org.

 

Once you’re collecting these random videos, other statistics are easy to calculate. We can look at how old our random videos are and calculate how fast YouTube is growing: we estimate that over 4 billion videos were posted to YouTube just in 2023. We can calculate the mean and median views per video, and show just how long the “long tail” is – videos with 10,000 or more views are roughly 4% of our data set, though they represent the lion’s share of views of the YouTube platform.

 

Perhaps the most important thing we did with our set of random videos is to demonstrate a vastly better way of studying YouTube than drunk dialing. We know our method is random because it iterates through the entire possible address space. By comparing our results to other ways of generating lists of YouTube videos, we can declare them “plausibly random” if they generate similar results. Fortunately, one method does – it was discovered by Jia Zhou et. al. in 2011, and it’s far more efficient than our naïve method. (You generate a five character string where one character is a dash – YouTube will autocomplete those URLs and spit out a matching video if one exists.) Kevin now polls YouTube using the “dash method” and uses the results to maintain our dashboard at Tubestats.

 

We have lots more research coming out from this data set, both about what we’re discovering and about some complex ethical questions about how to handle this data. (Most of the videos we’re discovering were only seen by a few dozen people. If we publish those URLs, we run the risk of exposing to public scrutiny videos that are “public” but whose authors could reasonably expect obscurity. Thus our paper does not include the list of videos discovered.) Ryan has a great introduction to main takeaways from our hand-coding. He and I are both working on longer writing about the weird world of random videos – what can we learn from spending time deep in the long tail?

 

Perhaps most importantly, we plan to maintain Tubestats so long as we can. It’s possible that YouTube will object to the existence of this resource or the methods we used to create it. Counterpoint: I believe that high level data like this should be published regularly for all large user-generated media platforms. These platforms are some of the most important parts of our digital public sphere, and we need far more information about what’s on them, who creates this content and who it reaches.

 

Many thanks to the Journal for Quantitative Description of publishing such a large and unwieldy paper – it’s 85 pages! Thanks and congratulations to all authors: Ryan McGrady, Kevin Zheng, Rebecca Curran, Jason Baumgartner and myself. And thank you to everyone who’s funded our work: the Knight Foundation has been supporting a wide range of our work on studying extreme speech on social media, and other work in our lab is supported by the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.

 

Finally – I’ve got COVID, so if this post is less coherent than normal, that’s to be expected. Feel free to use the comments to tell me what didn’t make sense and I will try to clear it up when my brain is less foggy.

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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‘The Crime Is Mine’ review: Everyone wants to be a murderess in François Ozon’s feathery French farce

Isabelle Huppert shows up late and in style to a party mostly centered on Nadia Tereszkiewicz’s fame-hungry ingenue, eagerly standing trial for a murder she may or may not have committed.

 

 

Quick, silly and lent weight only by the costume department’s copious wigs and furs, “The Crime Is Mine” finds tireless French auteur François Ozon in the playful period pastiche mode of “Potiche” and “8 Women.”

 

It’s a film less about any frenetic onscreen shenanigans as it is about its own mood board of sartorial and cinematic reference points — Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder, some vintage Chanel — and as such it slips down as fizzily and forgettably as a bottle of off-brand sparkling wine.

 

This story of an aspiring stage star standing trial for a top impresario’s murder (and making the most of her moment in the tabloid flashbulbs) may be based on a nearly 90-year-old play, but for those versed more in Hollywood and Broadway than in French theater, Ozon’s adaptation resembles a kind of diva fanfic: What if Roxie Hart went up against Norma Desmond, except in rollicking 1930s Paris?

 

As it happens, Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil’s 1934 comedy “Mon crime” has twice been adapted into Hollywood screwball romps: 1937’s Carole Lombard vehicle “True Confession” and the lesser 1946 remake “Cross My Heart,” starring Betty Hutton. Returning to the milieu of its source, “The Crime Is Mine” nonetheless updates proceedings with a righteous dose of post-#MeToo gender politics: Whether its blonde-bombshell heroine is guilty of the crime or not is ultimately immaterial to a case that builds to an impassioned defense of a woman’s right to defend herself from unwanted patriarchal advances, by any means necessary. That her lawyer is a gal pal, rather than a male love interest as in previous iterations, ups the ante, though the relative earnestness of the film’s feminism stands in contrast to an otherwise wholly flippant exercise.

 

“Some women are born to love, others to listen,” sighs cash-strapped junior attorney Pauline (Rebecca Marder), with one of many lingering Sapphic gazes at her platinum-bobbed roommate Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz). Madeleine is firmly in the former camp, though her covert romance with spineless tire-factory heir André (a winsome Edouard Sulpice) is of less importance to her than her budding acting career. We first encounter her storming out of the sprawling Art Deco mansion of star-making theater producer Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet), with whom she had an auspicious afternoon appointment; when he’s found dead later that day, with a bullet in his skull, she’s the prime suspect.

 

When bumbling investigating judge Rabusset (a drolly pompous Fabrice Luchini) first interrogates her, Madeleine flatly denies any culpability. With Pauline’s counsel, however, she swiftly settles on another narrative, one that rests on Montferrand’s reputation for being more than a little handsy with his ingenues: She killed him in the face of an attempted rape. “Bit melodramatic,” mutters Rabusset after their explanation — dramatized in glamorously silvery black-and-white — as if the film’s entire construction hasn’t been gleefully heightened from the jump. His misgivings, however, aren’t shared by the jury, the public or the tabloid press, as Madeleine’s teary self-defense story, cannily coached by Pauline, captures the popular imagination and makes her an overnight celebrity.

 

Is it true? Who cares? Nobody, it seems, except faded silent-movie siren Odette Chaumette (Isabelle Huppert), who strides in past the one-hour mark with conflicting evidence and a welcome surge of vampish venom, just as Ozon’s energy is beginning to flag. Comeback-seeking Odette is after Madeleine’s spotlight, but Huppert herself hardly has to wrest it from the game, fluttery Tereszkiewicz: The camera all but genuflects the second the veteran makes her imperious entrance, crowned in feathers and a frizzy copper coiffure, and vocally asserting her right to its continued attention. Huppert has little to do but spit out pithy lines with her signature disdain, and cast the odd lascivious glance at a duly mesmerized Pauline — but it hardly takes a lot to stroll off with a film this light.

 

With its distinguished scenery-chewer finally present, then, it’s a pity that “The Crime Is Mine” oddly peters out in its final third — the script averting seemingly pre-ordained clashes in the name of female solidarity, but also pulling back from its queerest and most subversive possibilities. A witty script sidebar details how Madeleine’s case inspires other women to consider bumping off the men in their lives to improve their standing and peace of mind, though it never escalates to dizzier farcical heights, even as it gifts us the film’s best line: Asked by André why he was spared the bullet, Madeleine shrugs, “I can’t kill everyone.” There are passing pleasures, too, to be had in Manu Dacosse’s buttery lensing and the silky gloss of the production and costume design alike. Yet “The Crime Is Mine” never aspires to the exacting postmodern formal rigor of “8 Women”: An out-and-out divertissement, Ozon’s latest is at pains only to avoid trying too hard.

 

 

— Variety

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More than a century-old, buried documents throw doubt on fate of condemned man

NEW YORK — Patrick O’Donnell survived the seemingly unsurvivable — including the Great Hunger, the aptly nicknamed Coffin Ships and the infamous Typhoid Sheds — on his way to the hangman’s noose in December 1883.

 

Having traveled from Ireland to the United States in search of a better life, Patrick O’Donnell sealed his grim fate when he committed murder, but there is so much more to his life than was ever revealed — until now.

 

In his unforgettable new book, The Execution, Life and Times of Patrick O’Donnell, author Gavin O’Donnell uses an epistolary technique to reconstruct the story of Patrick’s remarkable life using a series of letters purportedly written by Patrick as he awaited the hangman’s noose — letters smuggled from his death cell in his wife Margaret’s petticoats and that have remained undiscovered for 133 years.

 

“There has in my family always been a belief that we are related to a man named Patrick O’Donnell,” Gavin O’Donnell explained in an interview. “There is some evidence to support this but it’s patchy and not strong. … but it is the reason I took an interest in the man.”

 

Gavin O’Donnell blends real world events, biographical information about Patrick and his own imagination to create a compelling narrative that follows Patrick’s path through the Great Hunger to the typhoid sheds of Quebec; from his service in the Confederate army and capture at Chattanooga in 1863 to the grisly O’Donnell massacre at Wiggan’s Patch, Pennsylvania; and ultimately to that fateful day off the coast of Port Elizabeth where Patrick put three bullets into James Carey, and in so doing sealed his own fate and his place in history — but for the wrong reasons.

 

“He was a real person, but how I draw him is how I imagine him to have been as he faced his lifelong challenges and as he sat in his death cell,” Gavin O’Donnell said.

 

Included are accounts of letters of clemency sent to Patrick’s trial and indeed to Queen Victoria herself by Victor Hugo, (the great author but also well-known campaigner against capital punishment), and from U.S. President Chester Arthur. Interventions which hint at an extraordinary life for an Irish peasant.

 

“History tells us that Patrick O’Donnell was hanged in Newgate Prison in December 1883 for the murder of James Carey,” Gavin O’Donnell added. “History, however, tells us almost nothing of his remarkable life. Was he a British agent, hero of Ireland or something else altogether?”

 

About the Author

Gavin O’Donnell grew up in Wales, Ireland, North Africa and England. A selective mute until age 5, he was unable to read properly at age 11 and was classified as “Educationally Sub Normal.” He studied Construction Management in Limerick, obtaining a degree, and later, at age 40, by way of distance learning, he obtained a Bachelor of Laws honors degree at Nottingham.

 

While vacationing in Bordeaux in 1990, he and his wife lost their daughter in a fire, and their son was badly injured. Later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and PTSD partly as a result of the trauma, he retired from his career in Project Management and concentrated on property development.

 

He and his wife, Linda, refurbished several cottages in Southern France and built up a small holiday business before selling up and returning to rural South Wales. They now reside in a self-built stone cottage along with three cats, Jess, Bob and Kpo; a few thousand bees, whom they have not named; and several chickens. Two grown children and one grandchild live nearby.

 

For more information, please visit https://www.patrickodonnell.uk or  https://www.facebook.com/executionpatrickodonnell

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United Natural Foods releases ‘Better for All’ environmental, social, and governance report for fiscal year 2023

Details significant progress on the Company’s key areas of focus – delivering positive impact, operational efficiency, and reinforcing its value proposition to stakeholders.

 

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — United Natural Foods, Inc. (NYSE: UNFI) (the “Company” or “UNFI”) today released its 13th annual Better for All Report detailing UNFI’s progress on its social, environmental, and governance objectives during the Company’s 2023 fiscal year, ended July 29, 2023.

 

The report demonstrates the success of the Company’s enhanced focus on its most pressing impact areas – safety, well-being, waste, climate, sourcing, and community. It underscores that UNFI’s initiatives benefitting the planet, society, and the food industry can also directly benefit the Company’s business performance, resulting in enhanced value for all of its stakeholders.

 

UNFI’s Better for All strategy continues to focus on establishing the Company as a key connector within the food system value chain, creating and growing critical linkages among farmers, suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, and consumers.

 

“UNFI is building a company that creates sustainable value for stakeholders and shareholders, and a better food system for all,” said Sandy Douglas, President and CEO of UNFI. “In FY2023, we issued new responsible sourcing policies and position statements, expanded supplier diversity efforts, reaffirmed our broader commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), started work on our ninth and largest on-site solar array, completed LED lighting conversions across all of our distribution centers (DCs), and deployed a new system that helps us reduce food waste in our DCs.”

 

As a result of these efforts across the Company during fiscal 2023, UNFI reported the following milestones toward its goal to build a food system that is better for its people, its communities, and the planet:

  • Published, in connection with the Company’s new Supplier and Vendor Code of Conduct, both a formal policy designed to support the goal of zero deforestation across our primary deforestation-linked commodities by 2025, and a position statement and action plan for animal welfare standards in our supply chain. These have allowed the Company to work more efficiently and effectively with suppliers and vendors in pursuing these goals.
  • Completed a roof-mounted solar array installation, the Company’s largest to date, at its Howell, New Jersey distribution center, with a new, even bigger roof-mounted solar array at its Riverside, CA distribution center slated for the near future. UNFI’s solar array initiatives lower the Company’s carbon footprint and provide an excellent return on investment while also reducing the energy cost of operating a distribution center.
  • Launched the Climate Action Partnership to encourage suppliers to make credible climate commitments and provide innovative and scalable resources specific to the food system. This forum allows the Company to share best practices with suppliers who have common goals and drive more collaboration and efficiency across supply chains.
  • Reaffirmed its commitment to DEI and continued to build a diverse, high-performing, and agile workforce by delivering more DEI programming to employees. These initiatives help UNFI recruit talented associates and benefit from their diverse perspectives, whether they work in Company distribution centers or corporate offices.
  • Successfully completed an electric vehicle (EV) Blueprint that outlines how the Company plans to transition to zero-emission vehicles in the state of California. This reduces fuel and maintenance costs while also improving air quality.
  • Completed LED lighting conversions in all distribution centers, which not only decreases greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and lowers cost but also improves safety by increasing lighting and limiting maintenance work throughout the facility.
  • Deployed a Reverse Logistics Disposition Reporting (RLDR) system at all UNFI distribution centers that increases inventory visibility, improves operating efficiency, reduces food waste, and minimizes waste disposal costs, contributing to lower shrink in distribution centers.
  • Supported the “Acres: Cultivating Equity in Black Agriculture” program, launched by The National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC), to improve the Company’s relationships with an excellent source of high-quality producers.

 

Mr. Douglas added, “Our associates can be very proud of the solid progress on company sustainability and operational efficiency goals. I look forward to what we’ll accomplish together in 2024.”

 

About UNFI

UNFI is North America’s premier grocery wholesaler delivering the widest variety of fresh, branded, and owned brand products to more than 30,000 locations throughout North America, including natural product superstores, independent retailers, conventional supermarket chains, eCommerce providers, and foodservice customers. UNFI also provides a broad range of value-added services and segmented marketing expertise, including proprietary technology, data, market insights, and shelf management to help customers and suppliers build their businesses and brands. As the largest full-service grocery partner in North America, UNFI is committed to building a food system that is better for all and is uniquely positioned to deliver great food, more choices, and fresh thinking to customers. To learn more about how UNFI is delivering value for its stakeholders, visit www.unfi.com.

 

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: Statements in this press release regarding the Company’s business that are not historical facts are “forward-looking statements” that involve risks and uncertainties and are based on current expectations and management estimates; actual results may differ materially. The risks and uncertainties which could impact these statements include those described in the Company’s filings under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, including its annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended July 29, 2023 filed with the SEC on September 26, 2023 and other filings the Company makes with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and, as such, speak only as of the date made. The Company is not undertaking to update any information contained in this press release to reflect subsequently occurring events or circumstances. Any estimates of future results of operations are based on a number of assumptions, many of which are outside the Company’s control and should not be construed in any manner as a guarantee that such results will in fact occur. These estimates are subject to change and could differ materially from final reported results.

Contacts

For UNFI Investors:
Kristyn Farahmand

401-213-2160

kristyn.farahmand@unfi.com
-or-

Steve Bloomquist

952-828-4144

steve.j.bloomquist@unfi.com

For Media:
UNFI
Charles Davis

215-539-1696

cdavis@unfi.com

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On the 800th anniversary of the Christmas nativity scene a story emerges that takes readers back to that time

FORT WORTH, Texas — It’s rare to find a holiday book like A Bellwether Christmas: It tells a story that can entertain every member of the family regardless of age; it reveals history about a beloved Christmas tradition, and it features charming animal characters.

 

Laurel Guillen’s work of fiction was inspired by a life-changing trip to Italy and years of caring for some remarkable farm animals.

 

“Many years ago,” Guillen said, “I visited central Italy and came away with a burning desire to write a novel set in the time of Francis of Assisi and the early Franciscans. I did extensive research, but nothing ever came of it. In the meantime, I raised a son who adopted farm animals, including a horse, two sheep and two donkeys. One Christmas season a few years ago, the plot for this novel suddenly downloaded into my brain in a few minutes.”

 

She added that she suddenly realized “I was being given the chance to write a novel that combined my knowledge of 13th-century history as well as farm animals. I knew it was supposed to be a children’s novel, but one that adults would love also.”

 

A Bellwether Christmas depicts medieval rural life from its songs to work, food to customs, and each chapter begins with a beautifully drawn illustration that evokes the style of medieval woodcut art. Guillen also includes “afterwords” to help readers understand St. Francis’s life and his importance to the Church, and to introduce readers to the real-life farm animals her characters are based upon.

 

Bart is a curious, impetuous lamb who lives in a tiny village in medieval Italy. He is always getting into trouble and feels like he doesn’t belong. In chance encounters with a hare, a lark and then a terrifying wolf, he learns about the poor man from Assisi who loves all creatures and talks to them about love, honor and belonging. Bart is convinced that this man, and the new kind of celebration he is planning for Christmas Eve, holds the key to understanding his own destiny. But when Christmas Day dawns, he faces his biggest challenge yet: a dangerous mission to bring the gift of love to a friend. Will he be brave enough and finally find the place where he belongs?

 

The winner of multiple awards, including a First Place Christian Indie Award and Finalist in the 2022 Readers’ Choice Book Awards, A Bellwether Christmas is full of historical details to entertain kids and adults alike and offers a perfect opportunity for parents to talk to their kids about the meaning of Christmas.

 

Laurel Guillen is a Cornell University graduate and former radio, newspaper, and television journalist who has always loved medieval tales. She helped her husband, Michael Guillen, PhD, produce the award-winning family movie Little Red Wagon and now writes the blog God and Gardening on Facebook.

 

 

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Audiences to experience Amanda Gorman, Jan Vogler at Carnegie Hall – An evening of poetry and Bach

NEW YORK — History-making Presidential inaugural poet and bestselling author Amanda Gorman and internationally acclaimed cellist Jan Vogler share the stage for the first time at Stern Auditorium/ Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall on Saturday, Feb. 17, 2024 at 8 p.m.

 

It will be an evening of spoken word and music featuring the award-winning poetry of Ms. Gorman and the Cello Suites of J.S. Bach, for offering a message of hope and humanity. 

 

Vogler says, “I grew up reading poetry, and have played the music of Bach for nearly my entire life, reveling for many years in the universal appeal of his captivating Cello Suites. To collaborate with Amanda and to see how her wonderful poems change my interpretation of Bach’s music is a great joy. I can’t wait to share the results of this extraordinary inspiration.”

 

Gorman states, “Like many people, Bach’s music captures my heart and my imagination. To be in dialogue with it, and with Jan and his cello – a Stradivarius that was made around the time that Bach wrote this music – is to touch something timeless.”

 

Tanja Dorn, President and CEO of presenter Dorn Music  comments, “I am elated that Dorn Music will be bringing together these two incredible artists around the eternal music of Bach and Ms. Gorman’s contemporary poetry in this very special evening. We are so honored to be presenting Ms. Gorman at Carnegie Hall and to be helping to bring this collaboration to life.”

 

Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history. She is a committed advocate for the environment, racial equality, and gender justice. Amanda’s activism and poetry have been featured on the Today Show, PBS Kids, and CBS This Morning, and in The New York Times, Vogue, and Essence. After graduating cum laude from Harvard University, she now lives in her hometown of Los Angeles.

 

In 2017, Gorman was appointed the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate by Urban Word – a program that supports Youth Poets Laureate in more than 60 cities, regions and states nationally. Gorman’s groundbreaking performance of her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at the 2021 Presidential Inauguration received international critical acclaim, inspiring millions of viewers with her message of hope, resilience, and healing.

 

Amanda appeared on the cover of TIME magazine in February 2021 and was the first poet to grace the cover of Vogue in their May 2021 issue. She was Porter Magazine‘s July 2021 cover star and received The Artist Impact Award at the 2021 Backstage at the Geffen Awards. In 2021 Amanda was one of 5 Variety Power of Women honorees and cover star, as well as one of three cover stars for Glamour‘s Women of the Year. The following year she was Allure’s beauty issue cover star, and one of four cover stars for Harper’s Bazaar’s 2022 Icons issue. The special edition of her inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” her debut picture book, Change Sings, and her poetry collection, Call Us What We Carry, were published in 2021, all debuting at #1 on New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestsellers lists. Her latest children’s book, Something, Someday, was published in September 2023 with illustrations by Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Honor winner Christian Robinson, also debuting at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Please visit theamandagorman.com.

 

Vogler’s distinguished career has brought him together with renowned conductors and internationally acclaimed orchestras around the world. Highlights of his career as a soloist include concerts with the New York Philharmonic (both in New York and Dresden at the occasion of the reopening of the rebuilt Dresdner Frauenkirche under the direction of Lorin Maazel in 2005), performances with the Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh and Montréal Symphony Orchestras and many others. He collaborates with conductors such as Andris Nelsons, Fabio Luisi, Sir Antonio Pappano, Valery Gergiev, Omer Meir Wellber, Manfred Honeck and Kent Nagano.

 

His interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous cello Suites have been praised by audiences and critics. His recording of the six solo suites was awarded the Echo Klassik award in 2013. His great ability allowed him to explore the sound boundaries of the cello and to establish an intensive dialogue with contemporary composers and artists. This includes regular world premieres, including works by Tigran Mansurian, John Harbison, Udo Zimmermann, Wolfgang Rihm, Jörg Widmann, Nico Muhly, Sven Helbig, Zhou-Long and Sean Shepherd. In addition to his classical career Jan has collaborated with artists like actor Bill Murray (New Worlds) and rock legend Eric Clapton.

 

Jan has been an exclusive Sony Classical artist since 2003. His latest recording combines the world premiere recording of the Cello Concerto by Enric Casals with the Cello Concerto by Lalo, his partners being the Moritzburg Festival Orchestra and conductor Josep Caballe Domenech. In addition, his recording “Pop Songs” with the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Omer Meir Wellber was released in May 2022. In 2006, Jan received the European Award for Culture and in 2011 the Erich-Kästner Award for tolerance, humanity and international understanding. In June 2018 he received the European Award for Culture TAURUS as Director of the Dresden Music Festival and in 2021 Jan Vogler was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Jan Vogler has been Director of the renowned Dresden Music Festival since October 2008 as well as Artistic Director of the Moritzburg Festival since 2001. Please visit janvogler.com.

 

Tickets are on sale through the Carnegie Hall website, www.carnegiehall.org by calling CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800, and at the Carnegie Hall box office at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue. Regular ticket prices start at $35. Student and Senior rush tickets are available for $35 at the Carnegie Hall box office. Students must show ID.