Latest news with #catastrophe
New York Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Life of Chuck' Review: Don't Worry, Be Happy
It's the end of the world as we know it, or at least that's how it seems in 'The Life of Chuck.' A strange, feel-good fantasy about the end times, the movie traces a loose network of characters going about life while facing multiple personal and planetary catastrophes. When the story opens, Earth's big clock, a.k.a. life itself, seems close to running out: Cataclysmic disasters, both natural and otherwise, are raging worldwide, species are rapidly going extinct, people are checking out and the internet is about to do the same. That's bad, though given our enduring connectivity issues, it can also seem like just another day on Planet Reality. 'The Life of Chuck' is a curious movie, starting with its relatively relaxed, almost blasé attitude toward extinction of any kind. It uneasily mixes moods and tones, softens tragedies with smiles and foregrounds a title character — Chuck, an accountant with a tragic past, played as an adult by Tom Hiddleston — who has a tenuous hold on both the story and your interest. Chuck is present from the start but only comes to something like life midway through. He has a kid and is happily married, at least according to the narrator (Nick Offerman), whose dry, lightly detached voice-over winds throughout. That the narrator proves to be a more vivid presence than Chuck is another oddity, one that's presumably unintentional. Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, the movie is based on a vaporous three-part novella by Stephen King, also titled 'The Life of Chuck,' that's included in the author's 2020 collection 'If It Bleeds.' Flanagan's adaptation is scrupulously, unwisely faithful to the source material. As in King's tale, the movie unfolds in three sections in reverse chronological order. Also as in the original, Chuck first appears on a billboard that doesn't seem to be selling anything. It just features a photo of a suited Chuck at a desk smiling out at the world, a mug in one hand, a pencil in the other. '39 Great Years!,' the billboard reads. 'Thanks Chuck!' The billboard catches the eye of the movie's most fully realized character, Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the focal point of the disaster-ridden inaugural chapter. A schoolteacher whose slight connection to Chuck emerges much later, Marty is dutifully plugging away in class despite the world's looming end. 'I contain multitudes,' one of his students unpersuasively reads from the Walt Whitman poem 'Song of Myself.' Given everyone's palpable listlessness, Marty's included, T.S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men' would probably have been too on the nose: 'This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.' A sensitive, appealing performer, Ejiofor is a master of melancholy, and he gets the movie off to a fine start. His soft face and large, plaintive eyes naturally draw you to him, but even when they water, as directors like them to do, it's Ejiofor's talent for emotional nuance and depth that holds your gaze. That skill is particularly useful for characters as vaguely conceived as Marty, a nice, lonely guy who's still close to his ex, Felicia (Karen Gillan). There's not much to either character or their relationship, but Ejiofor fills in Marty with dabs of personality and a sense of decency that suggests that while humanity is lost, not every individual is. It's too bad the movie doesn't stick with Marty, who warms it up appreciably. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Globe and Mail
02-06-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
HCI Group Announces Completion of its 2025 – 2026 Catastrophe Reinsurance Programs
TAMPA, Fla., June 02, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HCI Group, Inc. (NYSE: HCI) has successfully completed its catastrophe reinsurance programs for the 2025-2026 treaty year, which runs from June 1, 2025 through May 31, 2026. 'We are grateful for the strong support from our global reinsurance partners, whose continued confidence in HCI underscores the quality of our underwriting and our disciplined approach to risk,' said Paresh Patel, HCI's chairman and chief executive officer. 'We believe our reinsurance programs are prudently structured to protect the long-term financial stability of our insurance companies. With the reinsurance placement now finalized, we are well-positioned to pursue strategic initiatives aimed at delivering sustained value to our shareholders.' HCI secured three reinsurance towers for the 2025-2026 treaty year. Reinsurance Tower 1 is shared between HCI subsidiary, Homeowners Choice Property & Casualty Insurance Company, and HCI sponsored reciprocal insurance company, Tailrow Insurance Exchange, and covers all Homeowners Choice policies issued in Florida and all Tailrow policies issued in Florida. Reinsurance Tower 2 is shared between HCI subsidiary, TypTap Insurance Company, and Homeowners Choice and covers all TypTap policies (whether issued in Florida or outside of Florida) and all Homeowners Choice policies issued outside of Florida. Reinsurance Tower 3 covers all Condo Owners Reciprocal Exchange policies issued in Florida. Condo Owners Reciprocal Exchange, known as CORE, is a reciprocal insurance company sponsored by HCI. Across the three reinsurance towers, HCI secured over $3.5 billion in excess of loss aggregate limit and full reinstatement premium protection for the 2025-2026 treaty year. Claddaugh Casualty Insurance Company Ltd, HCI's Bermuda-based reinsurance subsidiary, selectively participates across all three reinsurance towers. All participating reinsurers are AM Best rated 'A-' (Excellent) or better or have fully collateralized their obligations to HCI. The statutory retentions for the first and second event are $18 million for both Reinsurance Tower 1 and Reinsurance Tower 2, and $3 million for Reinsurance Tower 3. Claddaugh's estimated maximum retained loss is approximately $117 million for a first event and $35 million for a second event. For the three reinsurance towers, HCI expects to incur net consolidated reinsurance premiums ceded to third parties, excluding Claddaugh, of approximately $422 million from June 1, 2025 through May 31, 2026. The reinsurance premiums are an estimate based on exposure projections and subject to true up at September 30, 2025. More information is available in the Company's Form 8-K, filed today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. About HCI Group, Inc. HCI Group is a holding company with two distinct operating units. The first unit includes four top-performing insurance companies, a captive reinsurance company, and operations in claims management and real estate. The second unit, called Exzeo Group, is a leading innovator of insurance technology that utilizes advanced underwriting algorithms and data analytics. Exzeo empowers property and casualty insurers to transform underwriting outcomes and achieve industry-leading results. The company's common shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "HCI" and are included in the Russell 2000 and S&P SmallCap 600 Index. HCI Group, Inc. regularly publishes financial and other information in the Investor Information section of the company's website. For more information about HCI Group and its subsidiaries, visit
BreakingNews.ie
28-05-2025
- Climate
- BreakingNews.ie
Swiss village destroyed by landslide in ‘major catastrophe'
A huge mass of rock and ice from a glacier has thundered down a mountainside in Switzerland, destroying nearly all of a village in the valley below. Video on social media and Swiss TV showed the mudslide near Blatten, in the southern Lotschental valley, with homes and buildings partially submerged under a mass of brown sludge. Advertisement 'What I can tell you at the moment is that about 90% of the village is covered or destroyed, so it's a major catastrophe that has happened here in Blatten,' Stephane Ganzer, the head of security in the southern Valais region, told local TV channel Canal9. Villagers were evacuated before the mudslide (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone via AP) The regional government said in a statement that a large chunk of the Birch Glacier located above the village had broken off, causing the landslide which as well as covering the village had also buried the nearby Lonza River bed, raising the possibility of dammed water flows. Mr Ganzer said it was not immediately clear whether anyone was injured, and that the army had been mobilised after earlier indications that the movement of the glacier was accelerating. 'There's a risk that the situation could get worse,' he told Canal9, alluding to the blocked river. Advertisement In recent days the authorities had ordered the evacuation of about 300 people, as well as all livestock from the village, amid fears that a 1.5 million cubic metre glacier above the village was at risk of collapse. Local authorities deployed across the area to assess the damage and whether there has been any casualties, Jonas Jeitziner, a spokesman for the Lotschental crisis centre, told The Associated Press by phone. In 2023, residents of the village of Brienz, in eastern Switzerland, were evacuated before a huge mass of rock slid down a mountainside, stopping just short of the settlement. Brienz was evacuated again last year because of the threat of a further rockslide.
The National
25-05-2025
- Climate
- The National
Israeli air strike in Khan Younis kills nine children
Best photos of May 24: Catastrophic flooding in New South Wales to US President Donald Trump's visit to New Jersey
Al Jazeera
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Seventy-seven years after the Nakba, we are naming our new ruin
When my grandmother, Khadija Ammar, walked out of her home in Beit Daras for the last time in May 1948, she embarked on a lonely journey. Even though she was accompanied by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – also forced to leave behind their cherished homes and lands to escape the horror unleashed by Zionist militias – there was no one in the world watching. They were together, but utterly alone. And there was no word to describe their harrowing experience. In time, Palestinians came to refer to the events of May 1948 as the Nakba, or the catastrophe. The use of the word nakba in this context invokes the memory of another 'catastrophe', the Holocaust. The Palestinians were telling the world: just three years after the catastrophe that befell on the Jewish people in Europe, a new catastrophe – very different, but no less painful – is unfolding in our homeland, Palestine. Tragically, our catastrophe never came to an end. Seventy-seven years after my grandmother's expulsion, we are still being hunted, punished and killed, for trying to live on our lands with dignity or demanding that we are allowed to return to them. Because it has never truly ended, commemorating the Nakba as a historical event has always been difficult. But today, a new challenge confronts us as we try to understand, discuss or commemorate the Nakba: it has entered a new and terrifying phase. It is no longer just a continuation of the horror that began 77 years ago. Today, the Nakba has transformed into what Amnesty International described as a 'live-streamed genocide', its violence no longer hidden in archives or buried in survivors' memories. The pain, the blood, the fear and the hunger are all visible on the screens of our devices. As such, the word 'Nakba' is not appropriate or sufficient to describe what is being done to my people and my homeland today. There is a need for new language – new terminology that accurately describes the reality of this new phase of the Palestinian catastrophe. We need a new word that could hopefully help focus the averted eyes of the world on Palestine. Many terms have been proposed for this purpose – and I have used several in my writing. These include democide, medicide, ecocide, culturicide, spacio-cide, Gazacide, and scholasticide. Each of these terms undoubtedly defines an important aspect of what is happening today in Palestine. One term that I find especially powerful as an academic is scholasticide. It underlines the ongoing, systematic erasure of Palestinian knowledge. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. Ninety percent of schools have been reduced to rubble. Cultural centres and museums flattened. Professors and students killed. The term scholasticide, coined by the brilliant academic Karma Nabulsi, describes not only the physical destruction of Palestinian educational institutions but also the war being waged on memory, imagination and the Indigenous intellect itself. Another term I find evocative and meaningful is Gazacide. Popularised by Ramzy Baroud, it refers to a century-long campaign of erasure, displacement and genocide targeting this specific corner of historic Palestine. The strength of this term lies in its ability to locate the crime both historically and geographically, directly naming Gaza as the central site of genocidal violence. Although each of these terms is powerful and meaningful, they are all too specific and thus unable to fully capture the totality of the Palestinian experience in recent years. Gazacide, for example, does not encompass the lived realities of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, or those in refugee camps across the region. Scolasticide, meanwhile, does not address the apparent Israeli determination to make Palestinian lands inhabitable to their Indigenous population. And none of the aforementioned words address Israel's declared intentions for Gaza: complete destruction. On May 6, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich chillingly stated, 'Gaza will be entirely destroyed … and from there [the civilians] will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.' As such, I propose a new term – al-Ibādah or the Destruction – to define this latest phase of the Nakba. The term reflects the horrifying rhetoric employed by Smotrich and numerous other Zionist fascist leaders and captures the comprehensive and systematic erasure under way not only in Gaza, but across historic Palestine. Al-Ibādah is capacious enough to encompass multiple forms of targeted annihilation, including democide, medicide, ecocide, scholasticide, culturicide and others. In Arabic, the phrase for genocide, 'al-Ibādah jamāʿiyyah' meaning 'the annihilation of everyone and everything' has the word al-Ibādah as its root. The proposed term al-Ibādah intentionally truncates this phrase, transforming it into a concept that signifies a permanent and definitive condition of destruction. While it does not assign a specific geographical location, it draws conceptual strength from the work of Pankaj Mishra (The World After Gaza), who argues that the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza represents a qualitatively distinct form of genocidal violence. According to Mishra, Gaza constitutes the front line of Western neocolonial and neoliberal projects, which seek to consolidate global order around the ideology of white supremacy. By pairing the definite article with the noun, al-Ibādah asserts this condition as a historical rupture – a moment that demands recognition as a turning point in both Palestinian experience and global conscience. Today, when it comes to Palestine, the word 'destruction' is no longer whispered. From military commanders to politicians, journalists to academics, vast segments of the Israeli public now openly embrace the complete destruction of the Palestinian people as their ultimate goal. Entire families are being wiped out. Journalists, doctors, intellectuals and civil society leaders are deliberately targeted. Forced starvation is used as a weapon. Parents carry the bodies of their children to the camera, to document the massacre. Journalists are killed mid-broadcast. We are becoming the martyrs, the wounded, the witness, the chroniclers of our own destruction. My grandmother survived the Nakba of 1948. Today, her children and over two million Palestinians in Gaza live through even darker days: the days of destruction. My pregnant cousin Heba and her family, along with nine of their neighbours, were killed on October 13, 2023. By then, just days after October 7, dozens of families had already been erased in their entirety: the Shehab, Baroud, Abu al-Rish, Al Agha, Al Najjar, Halawa, Abu Mudain, Al-Azaizeh, Abu Al-Haiyeh. On October 26, 2023, 46 members of my own extended family were killed in one strike. By last summer, that number had grown to 400. Then I stopped counting. My cousin Mohammed tells me they avoid sleep, terrified they won't be awake in time to pull the children from the rubble. 'We stay awake not because we want to but because we have to be ready to dig.' Last month, Mohammed was injured in an air strike that killed our cousin Ziyad, an UNRWA social worker, and Ziyad's sister-in-law. Fifteen children under 15 were injured in the same attack. That night, as he had done countless times over the past 18 months, Mohammed dug through the rubble to recover their bodies. He tells me the faces of the dead visit him every night – family, friends, neighbours. By day, he flips through an old photo album, but every picture now holds a void. Not a single image remains untouched by loss. At night, they return to him – sometimes in tender dreams, but more often in nightmares. This month, on May 7, Israeli strikes on a crowded restaurant and market on the same street in Gaza City killed dozens of people in a matter of minutes. Among them was journalist Yahya Subeih, whose first child, a baby girl, was born that very morning. He went to the market to get supplies for his wife and never returned. His daughter will grow up marking her birthday on the same day her father was killed – a terrible memory etched into a life just beginning. Noor Abdo, another journalist, compiled a list of relatives killed in this war. He sent the list to a human rights organisation on May 6. On May 7, he was added to it himself. A worker at the restaurant that was hit spoke about a pizza order placed by two girls. He said he overheard their conversation. 'This is expensive, very expensive,' one girl said to the other. 'That's okay' she replied. 'Let's fulfil our dream and eat pizza before we die. No one knows.' They laughed and ordered. Soon after their order arrived, the restaurant was shelled and one of the girls was killed. The worker does not know the fate of the other. He, however, says he noticed a single slice from their pizza was eaten. We can only hope that the one who was killed got to taste it. This, all this, is al-Ibādah. This is the destruction. In the face of global inaction, we are all but powerless. Our protests, our tears, our cries have all fallen on deaf ears. But we are still left with our words. And speech does have power. In the Irish play Translations, which documents the linguistic destruction of the Irish language by the British army in the early 1800s, the playwright Brian Friel explains how by naming a thing we give it power, we 'make it real'. So in a final act of desperation, let the commemoration of this year's Nakba be the time when we name this thing and make it real: al-Ibādah, the Destruction. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
