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Category: Entertainment

  • Disney Cuts Deep: 200 Jobs Axed Amid Media Shift

    Disney Cuts Deep: 200 Jobs Axed Amid Media Shift

    The Walt Disney Company is set to eliminate approximately 200 positions, impacting nearly 6% of the combined workforce within its ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks divisions, a move signaling the relentless pressures reshaping the media landscape. This restructuring, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, underscores the company’s ongoing efforts to adapt to the seismic shifts in consumer viewing habits and the diminishing influence of traditional cable television.

    The reported restructuring will see significant changes across several key divisions. Notably, ABC’s venerable news magazine programs, “20/20” and “Nightline,” are slated to merge into a single unit. Additionally, the company plans to dissolve the team behind FiveThirtyEight, the respected political and data analysis website. “Good Morning America” production staff are also expected to experience reductions. Within Disney Entertainment Networks, which oversees cable channels like FX, programming and scheduling operations are anticipated to be streamlined.

    “Several key divisions to be affected by this restructuring are: ABC’s long-running news magazine programs, 20/20 and Nightline, are set to merge into a single unit, while the company is also eliminating the team behind FiveThirtyEight, the political and data analysis website,” as stated in the initial WSJ report.

    These layoffs come at a challenging time for Disney. Like many in the entertainment sector, the company is grappling with the steady decline of cable television viewership, driven by the rise of streaming services and cord-cutting. Disney’s flagship streaming platform, Disney+, has also faced headwinds, experiencing subscriber declines in recent quarters, even as competitors like Netflix continue to expand. According to reports the company experienced a 1.3 million subscriber drop for Disney+ in the final quarter of 2023 following a price increase. While Disney+ has managed to reduce streaming business losses, the company has also acknowledged that it anticipates a “modest decline” in subscriptions for the second quarter.

    Read Also: Meta Platforms Announces New Round of Layoffs in Africa, Europe, and Asia

    Despite these challenges, Disney’s recent earnings report exceeded Wall Street expectations, bolstered by cost-cutting measures and strong performances in its theme park and experiences segment. However, the company’s stock has declined approximately 4% over the past year, reflecting investor concerns about its ability to navigate the industry’s turbulent waters.

    These layoffs are not just about corporate restructuring; they represent real people facing job losses and uncertainty. The implications extend beyond Disney, reflecting a broader trend of media companies rethinking their business models in the face of technological disruption and changing consumer preferences. The closure of FiveThirtyEight, for example, signals a shift in how political and data analysis is consumed, potentially impacting public discourse and understanding of current events.

    This restructuring is part of a broader strategy to reduce expenses and streamline operations, as Disney adapts to a rapidly evolving media industry. It’s a stark reminder that even industry giants are not immune to the profound changes reshaping the way we consume news and entertainment. As we navigate this evolving media landscape, it’s crucial to understand the implications for both the industry and the individuals who work within it.

  • Aisha Achimugu: Winning on all fronts

    Aisha Achimugu: Winning on all fronts

    Astute businesswoman and industrialist, Aisha Achimugu is the Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, FELAK CONCEPT GROUP; a technical and professional consortium consisting of about 8 active companies in various sectors and industries such as Engineering, Maritime, Oil and Gas, ICT Learning and Development, and various other leading sectors.

    Over the years, she has best ridden the business world like a colossus. Achimugu, an embodiment of beauty and brains, has her hands in many pies, including energy, civil, structural and transportation engineering; consultancy/ transaction advisory services; maritime and environmental waste management and catering.

    In all of these, she boasts an enviable clientele from both the private and public sectors. It is a truism that her success stories in all she has ventured into speak to the fact that she is a perfectionist par excellence. Indeed, it is no exaggeration that those who have listened to her nuggets of information on how to run a successful business are thanking their stars for making their paths cross hers in life.

    She is a brilliant businesswoman with the proverbial Midas touch, as anything she touches turns into gold. She is not only respected at home, she is also one of those who make Nigeria proud abroad.

    No wonder, she has bagged several coveted awards and honors home and abroad, for her contributions to Africa’s economy. To those who know her, the ability of the 1998 graduate of Accounting from the University of Jos, as a strategist and winner has never been in doubt.

    Her many stories of happy endings have confounded many, leaving even her worst critics to acknowledge the abundance of God’s grace and wisdom in her Her feats as a hugely successful player in the dangerous and turbulent waters of Nigeria’s business climate are acknowledged, while her audacity to face challenges where others have fallen by the way has made her a role model for starters trying to climb the rope of success.

    For her, audacity of hope and self- assurance first manifested as a young woman when she started her business on a shoe-string budget. The mustard seed that was sown deep into the soil then has germinated and grown into an Iroko that not only gives shade to millions of people, but also feeds many millions spread across the world.

    She has grown to become a familiar name in the Nigeria business climate she can hold the candle to anyone else in the industry owing to her brilliance.

    Her businesses are scattered within and outside the country and she dazzles with beautiful ideas always.

    For instance, the high-flying woman recently launched Grenada into the world map and set become a major Energy hub as one of her numerous company, Oceangate Oil and Gas Engineering, secured a historic multi-billion dollar deal with Global Petroleum Group to launch one of the Caribbean’s largest oil and gas ventures. This transformative partnership is aimed at developing Grenada’s significant hydrocarbon reserves, paving the way for the island nation to emerge as a major energy hub in the Caribbean and beyond.

    With a vision to fuel long-term economic growth and sustainable development, this ambitious project promises not only to elevate Grenada’s energy production capabilities but also to foster job creation, infrastructure development, and technology transfer within the local economy.

    Set against the backdrop of the Caribbean’s evolving energy landscape, the venture is expected to provide unprecedented economic opportunities, delivering benefits across sectors and positioning Grenada as a key energy supplier in the region. Aisha attended Federal Government Girls Science School, Kuje, Abuja and transited to the University of Jos, Nigeria where she acquired a B.Sc. in Accountancy in 1998.

     

  • Cartoon: But remove your fingers from my eyes, I need ‘uncommon sight’

    Cartoon: But remove your fingers from my eyes, I need ‘uncommon sight’

    Cartoon: But remove your fingers from my eyes, I need ‘uncommon sight’
    Cartoon: But remove your fingers from my eyes, I need ‘uncommon sight’

    Akpabio Vs Natasha

  • Jim Morrison is charged with lewd behavior at a Miami concert

    Jim Morrison is charged with lewd behavior at a Miami concert

    The Dade County Sheriff’s Office issues an arrest warrant for Doors’ lead singer Jim Morrison. He is charged with a single felony count and three misdemeanors for his stage antics at a Miami concert a few days earlier.

    When Morrison first got word of the charges for lewd and lascivious behavior, indecent exposure, profanity, and drunkenness, he thought it was a practical joke. But he soon learned that Miami authorities were entirely serious. In fact, they later added an additional charge, simulated oral copulation on guitarist Robby Krieger during the concert.

    The trial did not begin until September 1970, when the prosecution trotted out witnesses who claimed to be shocked at the scene they had witnessed at the Doors concert. However, virtually every witness was somehow connected to the police or the district attorney’s office. There was some question as to whether the popular singer had ever actually exposed himself on stage. But there was little doubt that he was so drunk that he had been able to do little more than mumble during the show. Morrison turned down a plea bargain arrangement where the band would play a free concert in Miami.

    This turned out to be a mistake as he was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison and a $500 fine. Morrison died in Paris before he could serve the sentence. Twenty years later, Dade County, Florida, once again placed itself in the middle of rock concert controversy when they prosecuted 2 Live Crew for alleged obscenity on stage.

    In December 2010, Jim Morrison received a posthumous pardon by the state of Florida, thanks in part to the efforts of outgoing governor Charlie Crist, who cited lingering doubts about the singer’s actions.

  • Hula Hoop patented

    Hula Hoop patented

    March 5, 1963: the Hula Hoop, a hip-swiveling toy that became a huge fad across America when it was first marketed by Wham-O in 1958, is patented by the company’s co-founder, Arthur “Spud” Melin. An estimated 25 million Hula Hoops were sold in its first four months of production alone.

    In 1948, friends Arthur Melin and Richard Knerr founded a company in California to sell a slingshot they created to shoot meat up to falcons they used for hunting. The company’s name, Wham-O, came from the sound the slingshots supposedly made. Wham-O eventually branched out from slingshots, selling boomerangs and other sporting goods. Its first hit toy, a flying plastic disc known as the Frisbee, debuted in 1957. The Frisbee was originally marketed under a different name, the Pluto Platter, in an effort to capitalize on America’s fascination with UFOs.

    Melina and Knerr were inspired to develop the Hula Hoop after they saw a wooden hoop that Australian children twirled around their waists during gym class. Wham-O began producing a plastic version of the hoop, dubbed “Hula” after the hip-gyrating Hawaiian dance of the same name, and demonstrating it on Southern California playgrounds. Hula Hoop mania took off from there.

    The enormous popularity of the Hula Hoop was short-lived and within a matter of months, the masses were on to the next big thing. However, the Hula Hoop never faded away completely and still has its fans today. According to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, in April 2004, a performer at the Big Apple Circus in Boston simultaneously spun 100 hoops around her body. Earlier that same year, in January, according to the Guinness World Records, two people in Tokyo, Japan, managed to spin the world’s largest hoop–at 13 feet, 4 inches–around their waists at least three times each.

    Following the Hula Hoop, Wham-O continued to produce a steady stream of wacky and beloved novelty items, including the Superball, Water Wiggle, Silly String, Slip ‘n’ Slide and the Hacky Sack.

  • Iconic photo of Che Guevara taken

    Iconic photo of Che Guevara taken

    Moments before he was shot to death by a soldier of the Bolivian government, the revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara told his executioner, “Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!” Guevara died a short time later, on October 9, 1967 at the age of 39, but he was correct in his assertion that this would not be the end of his legacy. Today, that legacy almost always takes the form of a single photograph, Guerrillero Heroico, which some have called the most famous photograph in the world.

    That photo was taken on March 5, 1960, seven years before Guevara’s death, at a funeral for workers killed in an explosion in a Cuban port that Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government blamed on the Americans. Guevara, a general in the revolution and the intellectual heavyweight of Castro’s regime, looked on as Castro delivered his fiery funeral oration. For about thirty seconds, he stepped to the front of a crowd near Castro’s rostrum, into the view of newspaper photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, also known as Alberto Korda. Korda snapped two shots of Guevara, his face resolute and his long hair flowing from under his trademark beret, before Guevara retreated back into the crowd. Perhaps due to his background as a fashion photographer, Korda took a liking to one of the images and cropped it into a portrait, even though the newspaper La Revolución declined to use it.

    For several years, the now-iconic photo remained nothing more than a personal favorite of the man who took it. Korda named the picture Guerrillero Heroico—“Heroic Guerrilla Warrior”—and hung it on his wall, occasionally handing out copies to guests. It was not until 1967 that the public would first see the image, which appeared in the magazine Paris Match alongside an article about Latin American guerilla movements.

    Guevara was killed in October of that year, captured while fighting with Bolivian revolutionaries. During his memorial service in Havana, an enormous print of Guerrillero Heroico was hung over the façade of the Ministry of the Interior. The service marked Che’s canonization as a martyr of global revolution, as well as the ascendance of Korda’s image as an icon of rebellion.

    The following year the image of Guevara went viral. It appeared on the cover of a copy of Guevara’s memoirs, published in Italy. It was also used as the cover of a literary journal advertised on the New York City subway. In the same year, Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick created a stylized version of the image, setting a black-and-white Guevara against a red background, and distributed it as widely as he could to honor Guevara’s legacy. A poster bearing Fitzpatrick’s image was shown at the Arts Laboratory in London. 1968 was a year of upheaval across the world, and Guevara’s image featured prominently during the student riots that swept France in May, the populist protests of Italy’s “Hot Autumn” and the nonviolent, surrealist-inspired demonstrations of the Dutch “Provos.”

    In addition to being held aloft at protests or hung in the homes of his admirers, Guevara’s image has become popular as a fashion statement, adorning t-shirts and posters wherever counterculture is revered. Rage Against the Machine used a modified version of the image as the cover for their 1993 single “Bombtrack,” and Madonna referenced it on the cover of her 2003 album American Life. Korda succeeded in stopping Smirnoff Vodka from using his photo in one of its campaigns, but it has appeared in countless other advertisements, including ads by Nike and a campaign by Taco Bell which featured a Chihuahua in revolutionary garb.

  • Marvin Miller elected first full‑time MLB Players Association executive director

    Marvin Miller elected first full‑time MLB Players Association executive director

    On March 5, 1966, Marvin Miller, the 48-year-old assistant to the president of the United Steelworkers of America, is elected the first full-time executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Miller, whose role with the United Steelworkers of America included serving as lead negotiator, takes over at a time when the average yearly MLB player’s salary is only $19,000 and the minimum salary is under $10,000. By the time Miller, a fierce advocate for MLB players, retires in 1982, the average salary for a player is $241,497.

    Looking back on the early days of his leadership of the MLBPA, Miller said the biggest problem was the low self-esteem of the players. “They had been so beaten down [by management] that they really didn’t understand their value in the game,” he said.

    With the MLBPA, Miller also helped players win the right to seek arbitration to resolve contract disputes and advised Curt Flood when he sued the MLB over the reserve clause, which kept a player bound to his team. The reserve clause was struck down in 1975, leading to free agency for players. Miller described Flood as “a union leader’s dream” for pursuing the lawsuit despite knowing that it would effectively end his career, but would benefit future players.

    Miller was a Brooklyn native with an economics degree from New York University. He worked with the National War Labor Board, then worked for the International Association of Machinists, the United Auto Workers and finally, the United Steelworkers of America.

    Miller, who died in 2012, was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame posthumously in 2019. “He is, for lack of a better term, the Godfather of it all,” MLBPA representative  Andrew Miller, a St. Louis Cardinals pitcher, told the Associated Press about Miller’s advocacy for players.

    By 2017, five years after Miller’s death, the average player salary was nearly $4.1 million, according to the Associated Press.

  • Ernest Hemingway finishes “The Old Man and the Sea”

    Ernest Hemingway finishes “The Old Man and the Sea”

    Ernest Hemingway completes his short novel The Old Man and the Sea. He wrote his publisher the same day, saying he had finished the book and that it was the best writing he had ever done. The critics agreed: The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and became one of his bestselling works.

    The novella, which was first published in Life magazine, was an allegory referring to the writer’s struggles to preserve his art in the face of fame and attention. Hemingway had become a cult figure whose four marriages and adventurous exploits in big-game hunting and fishing were widely covered in the press. But despite his fame, he had not produced a major literary work in a decade before he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. The book would be his last significant work of fiction before his suicide in 1961.

    Hemingway, born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, started working as a reporter for the Kansas City Star in 1917. During World War I, he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross and was severely wounded in 1918 on the Austro-Italian front while carrying a companion to safety. He was decorated and sent home to recuperate.

    Hemingway married the wealthy Hadley Richardson in 1920, and the couple moved to Paris, where they met other American expatriate writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. With their help and encouragement, Hemingway published his first book of short stories, in the U.S. in 1925, followed by the well-received The Sun Also Rises in 1926.

    During the 1930s and 40s, the hard-drinking Hemingway lived in Key West and then in Cuba while continuing to travel widely. He was wounded in a plane crash in 1953, after which he became increasingly anxious and depressed. Like his father, he died by suicide, shooting himself in 1961 in his home in Idaho.

  • John Lennon sparks his first major controversy

    John Lennon sparks his first major controversy

    On March 4, 1966, an offhand John Lennon comment appeared in the London Evening Standard. Months later, it erupted in the “Bigger than Jesus” scandal that brought a semi-official end to the giddy phenomenon known as Beatlemania.

    In England, no one took much notice of Lennon’s quote which later set off a media frenzy in America. Chalk it up to a fundamental difference in religious outlook between Britain and America, or to a fundamental difference in sense of humor. Whatever the reason, it was only after the American press got hold of his words some five months later that Lennon’s comment set off a firestorm.

    In their original context, Lennon’s remarks were meant not as a boast, but as a sardonic commentary on the waning importance of religion. “Christianity will go,” Lennon said. “It will vanish and shrink….We’re more popular than Jesus now.” It was only one comment in an interview that covered such wide-ranging topics as gorilla suits and car phones, but it was this comment alone that made its way into the American teenybopper magazine DATEbook several months later, boiled down to the straightforward line, “We’re more popular than Jesus.”

    From there, a handful of Bible Belt disc jockeys took over, declaring Lennon’s remarks blasphemous and vowing an “eternal” ban on all Beatles music, past, present, and future. “Our fantastic Beatle boycott is still in effect,” announced two DJs on WACI Birmingham in August 1966: “Don’t forget to take your Beatle records and your Beatle paraphernalia to any one of our 14 pickup points in Birmingham, Alabama, and turn them in this week.” The plan in Birmingham, as in various other cities around the South, was to burn the Beatles records turned in by angry listeners. Though it is unclear how many such events really took place, the story of the burnings definitely reached the Beatles. “When they started burning our records…that was a real shock,” said John Lennon years later. “I couldn’t go away knowing I’d created another little piece of hate in the world. So I apologized.”

    The apology Lennon offered was not for the message he was trying to convey, but for conveying it in a way that confused its meaning. At a press conference in Chicago, John explained: “I’m not anti-God, anti-Christ or anti-religion. I was not saying we are greater or better. I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I’m sorry I said it. I never meant it to be a lousy anti-religious thing. From what I’ve read, or observed, Christianity just seems to be shrinking, to be losing contact.”

  • Andrew Jackson holds “open house” at the White House

    Andrew Jackson holds “open house” at the White House

    On March 4, 1829, Andrew Jackson upholds an inaugural tradition begun by Thomas Jefferson and hosts an open house at the White House.

    After Jackson’s swearing-in ceremony and address to Congress, the new president returned to the White House to meet and greet a flock of politicians, celebrities and citizens. Very shortly, the crowd swelled to more than 20,000, turning the usually dignified White House into a boisterous mob scene.

    Some guests stood on furniture in muddy shoes while others rummaged through rooms looking for the president–breaking dishes, crystal and grinding food into the carpet along the way. (White House staff reported the carpets smelled of cheese for months after the party.) In an attempt to draw partygoers out of the building, servants set up washtubs full of juice and whiskey on the White House lawn.

    The White House open-house tradition continued until several assassination attempts heightened security concerns. The trend ended in 1885 when Grover Cleveland opted instead to host a parade, which he viewed in safety from a grandstand set up in front of the White House.