Latest news with #hawking
The South African
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The South African
How the BET Awards managed to attract star power this year
The BET Awards have been dismal for years now. This time around, however, they managed to attract actual talent. Star power was the order of the day from host Kevin Hart to some of the winners on the night. It should be noted that even though it was great to see people like Tyler Perry presenting an award, Mariah Carey was also in attendance, and they even had Snoop Dogg in the front row. Still, all those people had ulterior motives for being there. Mariah Carey is celebrating 20 years of the release of her iconic opus, The Emancipation of Mimi. She also debuted a new song at the BET Awards. Perry is hawking the release of his latest film, Straw, and Snoop Dogg needs the visibility as he has a decent album out now. Nobody is fooled; it is all just advertising. Snoop, Carey and Jamie Foxx all received awards for being icons and pivotal to the culture. The big winner on the night is a man who owes most of his recent success to Canada's Drake. Kendrick Lamar walked away with more awards than he deserves, most of which were centred around the flaccid offering GNX. Best Male Hip Hop Artist, Album of the Year, Video of the Year, and even Best Collaboration of the Year all went to the pride and joy of Compton. Future and Metro Boomin won Best Group for their efforts last year. Florida's Doechii either inflamed or put the industry plant rumours to rest when she scooped the award for Best Female Rap Artist. She used her acceptance speech to shine a light on the recent protests around immigration and deportation happening in Los Angeles. Comedian and actor Kevin Hart oversaw the responsibilities of hosting. He made fun of everyone, from lightly insisting that after parties would not be happening, as things tend to get slippery at those. A clear reference to rapper P. Diddy and the abundance of baby oil found in his home when Homeland Security raided one of his properties. Hart has enjoyed sharing the spotlight with streamers Kai Cenat and Druski. This has kept Hart relevant, and the three together are always worth a watch. Seeing behind-the-scenes footage on Cenat's stream was refreshing as all those moments happened in real time, as it were. Fans of music channels, back in the days when they played music, will recall a once immensely popular show called Total Request Live (TRL) on MTV. BET's urban response to that was a similar show called 106 and Park. Rapper Bow Wow was a large part of this. Naturally he took to the stage and let loose with some of his more memorable hits from that moment in time. Amapiano was not left out of this celebration of Black artistry. South African DJ duo TxC won Best New International Act, ensuring the amapiano fraternity was not ignored. The BET Awards has been steadily foregrounding South African music in recent years, which our artists surely appreciate. Everything from the performances to the slick delivery of the overall production was infinitely better than it has been in recent years. The star power they managed to get into the Peacock Theatre was more impressive than it was last year or the year before. Everything from the performances and the acceptance speeches was a pleasure to take in. This might be because of the 25-year milestone reached by the awards this year, or that BET, as a network, has now been around for 45 years. We can only hope the BET Hip Hop Awards will be as good. Let us know by leaving a comment below, or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 11. Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X and Bluesky for the latest news.
New European
09-04-2025
- Business
- New European
Osborne and Balls have knuckles rapped for 'misleading' podcast ad
But it appears not – as the pair have had their knuckles rapped by the advertising regulator for a 'misleading' ad on their podcast for a ticket reselling firm. One was chancellor of the exchequer and the other really wanted to be, so one might have thought George Osborne and Ed Balls might have some basic understanding of maths. The pair – who put past enmities behind them in 2023 to launch Political Currency – have been hawking the ticket resale website Viagogo, with Balls telling listeners that 'over half the events listed on Viagogo had tickets selling below face value' and Osborne musing in a rather unlikely fashion that 'It sounds like Viagogo might be the solution next time I need cheaper tickets to the hottest shows in town.' That might seem surprising – sites such as Viagogo and rivals such as StubHub made their reputation allowing professional ticket 'traders' to make huge profits by hoovering up seats at gigs by acts such as Oasis and selling them on for massive mark-ups, rather than 'selling below face value'. And so it is – with the Advertising Standards Authority (AS) today ruling that Viagogo had misled the public with its claim about the amount of events for which tickets were available below face value, saying the ad breached the advertising code and banning it from appearing again. Viagogo's claim was based on the rather creative mathematics that 53% of concert listings on the site include at least one ticket listed at below face value, with the ASA not unreasonably countering that the average podcast listener might take Balls's claim to mean more than one lower-priced ticket was available. It said: 'One ticket per event was not a significant proportion of tickets and, as such, did not represent a reasonable chance for consumers to purchase tickets below face value… we considered that the claim, as it would be understood by consumers, had not been substantiated and was therefore misleading.' Perhaps Osborne and Balls should have stuck to politics. And if Osborne needs a new solution next time he needs cheaper tickets to the hottest shows in town, perhaps he should emulate his current successor and call them in for free!
New York Times
26-01-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Carol Downer, Feminist Leader in Women's Health, Dies at 91
Carol Downer, a leader in the feminist women's health movement who drew national fame for her role in a case known as the Great Yogurt Conspiracy — so named because she was charged with practicing medicine without a license for dispensing yogurt to treat a yeast infection — died on Jan. 13 in Glendale, Calif. She was 91. Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Angela Booth, who said she had suffered a heart attack a few weeks earlier. Ms. Downer was a self-described housewife and the mother of six in the late 1960s when she joined the women's movement and began to work on the abortion committee of her local chapter of the National Organization for Women. Years earlier, she had had an illegal abortion, and she was determined that others should not suffer as she did. A psychologist named Harvey Karman had refined a technique for performing an abortion by suctioning the lining of a women's uterus. It was safer, quicker and less painful than the more traditional dilation and curettage technique, and he was using it to perform early-term abortions and teaching doctors how to use it. Ms. Downer and others thought the technique was so simple that it could be performed without medical training. They learned to practice the procedure themselves. Lorraine Rothman, another member of NOW, refined Mr. Karman's device into a kit she patented called the Del-Em, which included a flexible tube, a syringe and a jar. Doctors called the technique a vacuum extraction. The women called it a menstrual extraction — it was also a way to to regulate menstrual flow — as a kind of linguistic feint. Ms. Downer set out to explain its use to a group of women at a feminist bookstore in Venice Beach. As she later recalled, when she began to describe the technique, which involved inserting the tube into the cervix, she realized that she was losing her audience. They were horrified. This was the era of back-room abortions, when women were dying from unsafe procedures, and here she was hawking what seemed to be an even more suspect practice. So she changed tactics. She lay down on a table, hiked up her skirt, inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited her audience to look. The conversation veered from do-it-yourself abortions to an anatomy lesson. The women had never seen inside their own vaginas — it was not the habit of male gynecologists in those days to educate their patients about their own anatomy — and it was an 'aha' moment for Ms. Downer. Like many women around the country — notably those in the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, who would go on to produce the self-help bible 'Our Bodies, Ourselves' — she became determined to teach women about their reproductive health. She and Ms. Rothman toured the country demonstrating cervical exams — and menstrual extraction. They so impressed the prominent anthropologist Margaret Mead that she declared the practice one of the most original ideas of the 20th century. 'The idea of women being able to control their own birthrate is fundamental. It goes right to the heart of women's political situation,' Ms. Downer told The Los Angeles Times when Ms. Rothman died in 2007. 'We both wanted to turn the whole thing upside down. We wanted to make women equal with men.' They opened their first clinic in Los Angeles in 1971. The next year, the police raided the place and confiscated, among other things, a tub of strawberry yogurt. As the story goes, a clinic worker protested: 'You can't have that. That's my lunch!' Ms. Downer and a colleague, Carol Wilson, were charged with practicing medicine without a license. Ms. Downer's crime was her yogurt treatment, and Ms. Wilson's was that she had fitted a woman with a diaphragm. Ms. Wilson was also charged with performing a menstrual extraction, conducting pregnancy testing and giving a pelvic exam. She pleaded guilty to the diaphragm charge and received a fine and probation. Ms. Downer decided to fight the yogurt charge. Using yogurt to treat a yeast infection, her defense claimed, was an old folk remedy, and in any case a yeast infection was so common that it did not require a doctor's diagnosis. The jury agreed, and as Judith A. Houck, a gender and women's studies professor, recounted in 'Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women's Health Movement' (2024), the male foreman sent Ms. Downer a note of appreciation. 'Carol — You're not a downer, you're a real upper!' he wrote. 'Good Luck!' The Great Yogurt Conspiracy helped popularize women's clinics, which were sprouting up all over the country. Though many in the women's health movement were also working to eliminate gender bias in the medical profession, particularly with regard to reproductive health, and to help those who needed it most gain access to medical services, Ms. Downer remained leery of what she felt was a patriarchal institution incapable of reform. She was not convinced that change was possible. She and others went on to found the nonprofit Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers, and she continued to research the ways women could manage their own fertility. Yet many feminists, abortion rights supporters and medical professionals were more than uncomfortable with Ms. Downer and Ms. Rothman's teaching; they were deeply opposed to having laypeople practice the procedure. 'Carol Downer demonstrated a very reckless form of courage and defiance,' Phyllis Chesler, the feminist psychologist, activist and author, said in an interview. 'I had a problem with the paranoia around the medical profession, and although I of course harbored a similar distrust, I didn't think it was safe or wise to put abortions in the hands of amateurs.' In the years after the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteed a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, vacuum extraction, the technique devised by Mr. Karman, became the most common surgical procedure used by doctors to end a pregnancy. It still is, said Dr. Louise P. King, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School. The technique, she added, is safe when practiced by a medical professional. 'There are risks and complications if it's done wrong, notably uterine perforation,' she said in an interview, 'which is what we train not to do. I'm fully in support of those who want to take control of their health and their lives, and it saddens me to think people might have to turn to these methods without the help of professionals, that they might not have access to these professionals.' In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, published 'A Woman's Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486,' essentially a consumer guide to abortion. Le Anne Schreiber, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it 'a print hotline in a time of government-ordered gag rules' as well as 'a warning sign.' 'When so few doctors perform abortions," she wrote, 'when so few medical schools teach the techniques, when so many states seek to impose so many restrictions, women reluctantly begin to take risks that other people call choices.' Carollyn Aurilla Chatham was born on Oct. 9, 1933, in Shawnee, Okla., and grew up there and in Glendale. Her father, Meade Chatham, was a clerk in a gas company; her mother, Nell (Stell) Chatham, was a secretary. Carol studied sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, but dropped out during her first year when she was pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Earle Wallace Brown, stayed in college and worked as a cabdriver and then a special-education teacher before contracting tuberculosis. The family spent a year on welfare, an experience that Ms. Downer later said politicized her. Unlike most welfare recipients, she and her husband had additional support. They lived rent free in a house owned by her parents, and they received financial help from his parents and fellow teachers. 'I began to gradually develop a radical political consciousness,' she said in an oral history conducted by the Veteran Feminists of America in 2021. 'I mainly learned that no one survives on welfare without some kind of informal support network or a hustle.' She had four children and was separated from her husband when she became pregnant, and decided to have an abortion. It was 1962, five years before abortion was legalized in California and 11 years before Roe. While the procedure was performed by a someone with experience and was medically safe, she received no anesthesia so that if the place — an office with no furniture beside a table — was raided by the police, she could get up and run. In addition to Ms. Booth, Ms. Downer, who lived in Los Angeles, is survived by two other daughters, Laura Brown and Shelby Coleman; two sons, David Brown and Frank Downer Jr.; eight grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren. Her second husband, Frank Downer, whom she married in 1965 after her divorce from Mr. Brown, died in 2012. A daughter, Victoria Siegel, died in 2021. Ms. Downer went back to school in the late 1980s. After earning a degree from Whittier Law School, in Costa Mesa, Calif., in 1991, she practiced immigration and employment law. 'There's a through line from Carol Downer to the current reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,' said Dr. Houck, the author of 'Looking Through the Speculum.' 'Hers was a form of activism where women could use their heads, their hands and their hearts.'
