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Kyrie Irving will begin suspension of at least 5 games Friday over antisemitism controversy. The NBA star has since apologized | CNN

Published

2 years ago

November 4, 2022

Kyrie Irving will begin suspension of at least 5 games Friday over antisemitism controversy. The NBA star has since apologized | CNN

CNN
—

Kyrie Irving will miss the primary of a number of Brooklyn Nets video games Friday after he was suspended for feedback concerning his tweet linking to an antisemitic documentary.

The Nets suspended Irving Thursday after he initially doubled down on his resolution to share the content material on his Twitter account. The NBA star level guard issued an apology hours in a while his verified Instagram account, by which he mentioned he takes full accountability for his motion.

“To All Jewish households and Communities which are harm and affected from my submit, I’m deeply sorry to have induced you ache, and I apologize,” Irving wrote. “I initially reacted out of emotion to being unjustly labeled Anti-Semitic, as a substitute of specializing in the therapeutic means of my Jewish Brothers and Sisters that had been harm from the hateful remarks made within the Documentary.

“I had no intentions to disrespect any Jewish cultural historical past concerning the Holocaust or perpetuate any hate. I’m studying from this unlucky occasion and hope we will discover understanding between us all,” Irving continued.

The backlash towards Irving mounted after he defended his resolution to share a hyperlink to the 2018 movie “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America” final week. The film, based mostly on Ronald Dalton’s e book of the identical title, has been blasted by civil rights teams for its antisemitism.

Reporters requested Irving earlier Thursday – earlier than he posted his apology – if he holds antisemitic beliefs or if he was sorry. On the time, he replied saying he respects “all walks of life” and that he didn’t imply to trigger any hurt.

The Nets later said they had been “dismayed” when the participant “refused to unequivocally say he has no antisemitic beliefs, nor acknowledge particular hateful materials within the movie,” throughout a media session.

“Such failure to disavow antisemitism when given a transparent alternative to take action is deeply disturbing, is towards the values of our group, and constitutes conduct detrimental to the crew,” the Nets mentioned of their assertion earlier than Irving apologized.

The crew additionally mentioned they made repeated makes an attempt to assist Irving “perceive the hurt and hazard of his phrases and actions.”

Irving’s suspension with out pay means he won’t play in Friday’s recreation towards the Washington Wizards. The suspension will final for not less than 4 extra video games, and Irving can also be required to fulfill “a collection of goal remedial measures that deal with the dangerous influence of his conduct,” the Nets mentioned.

Irving’s Nets teammate Kevin Durant described this week’s issues as “pointless” and expressed his perception that the crew may have “stored quiet” about Irving’s feedback.

“I ain’t right here to evaluate no person or discuss down on no person … I simply didn’t like something that went on. I really feel prefer it was all pointless,” Durant mentioned about Irving’s team-issued suspension through the Nets’ pre-game availability on Friday. “I really feel like we may have simply stored enjoying basketball and stored quiet as a corporation. I simply don’t like none of it.”

Requested whether or not he thought the suspension was unfair, Durant mentioned, “I imagine and belief within the group to do what’s proper.”

Shortly after his media availability, Durant tweeted, “Simply wanna make clear the statements I made at shootaround, I see some persons are confused..I don’t condone hate speech or anti-semitism, I’m about spreading love all the time.”

“Our recreation Unites individuals and I wanna ensure that’s on the forefront,” he added.

Irving’s remarks through the media session with reporters Thursday have escalated the controversy.

When requested if he was apologizing, he mentioned, “I didn’t imply to trigger any hurt. I’m not the one which made the documentary.”

Requested if he was shocked by the response, Irving mentioned, “I take my full duty, once more I’ll repeat it, for posting one thing on my Instagram or Twitter that will have had some unlucky falsehoods in it,” Irving replied.

Requested if he had any antisemitic beliefs, Irving responded: “I respect all walks of life. I embrace all walks of life. That’s the place I sit.”

Pressed additional to reply sure or no to a query on whether or not Irving had any antisemitic beliefs, he replied: “I can’t be antisemitic if I do know the place I come from.”

When Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, discovered of how the NBA star answered that query, he identified that Irving has “a number of work to do.”

“The reply to the query ‘Do you could have any antisemitic beliefs’ is all the time ‘NO’ with out equivocation. We took @KyrieIrving at his phrase when he mentioned he took duty, however at the moment he didn’t make good on that promise,” Greenblatt wrote.

After Irving was suspended Thursday, the ADL refused to just accept a $500,000 donation that Irving and the Nets had beforehand introduced. The ADL’s resolution to say no the donation was earlier than Irving apologized late Thursday.

The star’s feedback additionally garnered reproach from NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, who mentioned he was “dissatisfied” in Irving.

“Kyrie Irving made a reckless resolution to submit a hyperlink to a movie containing deeply offensive antisemitic materials,” Silver mentioned in an announcement earlier than Irving apologized.

The controversy comes as antisemitism has been on the rise within the US over the previous few years. No less than 2,717 antisemitic incidents had been reported within the US in 2021, a rise from 942 such incidents in 2015, in accordance with the ADL.

Irving has run into controversy lately that has affected his enjoying time. Final season, Irving didn’t play in lots of Brooklyn’s house video games as a result of he was not vaccinated towards Covid-19, which was a hindrance to enjoying in indoor arenas as a consequence of a New York Metropolis office vaccine mandate. The rule was later lifted and he returned to Barclays Middle in March.

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‘No Cake, No Entry’: More Than 1,000 Picnic to Celebrate the Love of Cake

Published

17 minutes ago

March 30, 2025

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‘No Cake, No Entry’: More Than 1,000 Picnic to Celebrate the Love of Cake

More than a thousand people gathered for a picnic on Saturday around tables draped with white tablecloths and spread over the lawn of the Legion of Honor art museum in San Francisco.

There was just one rule: “No cake, no entry.”

Attendees — including pastry chefs, home bakers and people with store-bought cakes — walked, drove and flew to bring elaborate cake creations to Cake Picnic, a touring festival where you can have your cake and eat it, too.

“It was harder to get than a Taylor Swift concert ticket,” said Elisa Sunga, Cake Picnic’s organizer, noting that the $15 tickets sold out in less than a minute.

This Cake Picnic turned out to be the biggest since it started nearly a year ago. Ms. Sunga described the intense interest in the festival as both “exciting” and “terrifying.”

A spectacular variety of cakes adorned the tables, including: a light lemon cake with passion fruit filling, a tower made out of smaller spongecakes, Jell-O cake, pink champagne cake, a kid-baked dinosaur pyramid cake, and plenty of desserts with flowery ornaments.

In the first hour, picnickers placed their cakes on stands and crammed them onto the tables. Then, after the arranging was complete, came that fleeting and glorious moment: The crowd gawked and took photos of the 1,387 cakes, both sweet and savory, in their pristine, unsliced form.

After the photos were taken, the ensuing buffet was an act of controlled chaos.

Smaller groups went up for cakewalks. Each person was given a pastry box and instructed to collect slices at will. Once everyone had a turn, the tables were opened for ravenous seconds, thirds and fourths, until no crumbs were left behind.

In April 2024, Ms. Sunga, a 34-year-old home baker, hoped to gather about a dozen people in Potrero del Sol Park in San Francisco to sit in a circle and eat cakes that they had baked and brought.

“It started primarily because I wanted to eat a lot of cake,” Ms. Sunga said. “I love cake.”

She posted the gathering on the invitation app Partiful, and it took off. Hundreds of people responded.

After the first event in April 2024, she took the cake show on the road, first to Los Angeles, then to New York and then back to San Francisco in November — “places with cake communities,” she said. At the last picnic, 613 cakes were on display.

“It’s not my full-time job, but I would love to travel full time for cake,” said Ms. Sunga, who works at Google. “It’s taken on a life of its own.”

Ms. Sunga, who brought two red velvet cakes of her own, said chefs from well-known bakeries, such as Tartine and SusieCakes, attended.

The Legion of Honor, the picnic venue, opened a special exhibit last week, “Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art,” celebrating Mr. Thiebaud, who died in 2021 and is most famous for his decadent paintings of cakes and confections.

The Cake Picnic aimed to turn his dessert still lifes into a “living tribute,” according to the museum’s website.

Joyce Lim, 32, who lives in San Francisco, called herself a Cake Picnic “groupie.” She said that she has baked for every Cake Picnic so far and will attend future picnics set for London and New York. (A two-day April picnic in Carlsbad, Calif., is sold out.)

Ms. Lim, an architect, said she has embraced cake baking for the picnics after at first being intimidated by it. On Saturday, she brought a scallion-pancake focaccia cake with chili-crisp cream cheese frosting and crème fraîche.

“I enjoy procrasti-baking, basically baking instead of handling my other life responsibilities,” Ms. Lim said.

She said she has been impressed by the creativity and diversity of cakes that people bring. Her cake might just top her previous elaborate entries: a kabocha cake layered with ginger-poached pears and miso-caramel cream cheese frosting, and a smörgåstårta, a Swedish cake with rye layers, hard-boiled eggs and caper filling.

Brenna Fallon, one of dozens of volunteers at the picnic, said that the brief period after the cakes are laid out and before the buffet begins is an “‘Alice in Wonderland’ moment.”

“Everybody is just gleefully going through the aisles,” said Ms. Fallon, 34, who is from Walnut Creek, Calif. “People are plotting — which cakes do they want to make a beeline for when they get in?”

Ms. Fallon, an amateur baker who brought an Earl Grey chocolate cake with a salty buttercream, said that a feeling of celebration was in the air.

“It’s a slice of life,” she said. “It feels like a big picnic with a bunch of friends you just don’t know yet.”

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Dutch pensions to invest €100bn in risky assets boosting Europe’s defence efforts

Published

2 hours ago

March 30, 2025

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Dutch pensions to invest €100bn in risky assets boosting Europe’s defence efforts

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Dutch pension funds are set to plough tens of billions of euros into risky assets in Europe, as their move to a system without fixed benefits supports the continent’s efforts to attract investment and bolster its defence sector.

Reforms being rolled out in the Netherlands could lead to its €2tn pensions industry — one of the largest in the world — boosting investment in private equity and credit investments by about 5 percentage points over the next five years, said the head of the biggest Dutch asset manager.

The “largest part” of the anticipated €100bn is expected to be deployed in Europe owing to “more attractive valuations” and a wish to have a “real-world impact”, Ronald Wuijster, chief executive of APG Asset Management, told the Financial Times.

He added that Dutch funds might be able to do “even more” to finance defence initiatives in the continent, saying that APG had already invested about €2bn in companies that contribute to the defence industry.

Wuijster’s comments came as the EU has been under pressure to raise defence investment, with former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi last year calling on the bloc to boost investments by €800bn annually to keep up with US and China. US President Donald Trump has also demanded governments shoulder a greater burden for Europe’s security.

“There used to be a penalty for private investments and for credit risk that is now diminishing, which increases the budget to take more risk,” Wuijster said.

He added that the reforms would allow investors to consider assets with “a slightly higher risk profile”, predicting an increase of “five-ish” percentage points in risky assets, as well as higher allocation to private assets and credit spreads.

In 2023, Dutch senators passed a law to transition the country’s occupational pension system into a model in which pension funds no longer guarantee a fixed retirement income to members. The transition is expected to take place between 2025 and 2028.

The old defined benefit system pushed the schemes into liquid, low-risk assets such as government bonds by requiring pension funds to closely match assets with long-term pensions owed.

The funds will now be able to set target returns that can fluctuate with market movements, removing some liability driven constraints and increasing their risk appetite.

This was a significant step because “psychologically, it puts the funds closer to regular lifecycle investing . . . and on that measure, Dutch pensions are probably taking too little risk”, Wuijster said.

ABP, which is responsible for the pensions of Dutch civil servants and is by far the largest fund managed by APG with €544bn of assets, expects to transition to the new system by 2027.

At the end of last year, just over a quarter of ABP’s assets were in private markets. About 40 per cent of its private equity exposure was in Europe, which also had 57 per cent of its global allocation in private credit.

Wuijster said this geographical balance could continue under the new system, and that the shift into private assets and credit would be “a very gradual process” taking place “over the next five years”.

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FCC chair opens investigation into Disney and ABC over DEI practices

Published

3 hours ago

March 30, 2025

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FCC chair opens investigation into Disney and ABC over DEI practices

The Walt Disney Co. logo appears on a screen above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Aug. 8, 2017.

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Brendan Carr, who was picked by President Trump to chair the Federal Communications Commission, said he’s ordering an investigation into the Walt Disney Co. and its ABC television network over concerns that they are “promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

In a letter to Disney CEO Robert Iger, Carr said the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau will review whether Disney or ABC have violated any FCC equal employment opportunity regulations. He added that the probe will apply to both past and current policies.

“Numerous reports indicate that Disney’s leadership went all in on invidious forms of DEI discrimination a few years ago and apparently did so in a manner that infected many aspects of your company’s decisions,” Carr wrote on Thursday.

The inquiry comes after Disney scaled back its diversity efforts, either by dropping certain initiatives or softening language around DEI.

A GMC pickup truck is displayed for sale on a lot at a General Motors dealership in Austin, Texas. Last year, General Motors told investors in its annual report that "we are committed to fostering a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion." But in its latest report, published last week, GM doesn't mention diversity once.

Among the changes, Disney+ shortened its warning about racist stereotypes on certain classic movies, like Aladdin and The Jungle Book, removing a longer message written in 2020 that also expressed the company’s commitment to an inclusive community.

Last month, Disney also told employees it would replace “Diversity & Inclusion” for “Talent Strategy” as a performance factor to evaluate executive compensation, Axios reported.

In the letter on Thursday, Carr said although he acknowledged Disney’s recent efforts, he wanted to make sure they were not just surface-level, adding that “all discriminatory initiatives” needed to come to an end.

“Although your company recently made some changes to how it brands certain efforts, it is not clear that the underlying policies have changed in a fundamental manner,” he said.

An empty elementary school classroom is seen on Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2021 in the Bronx borough of New York.

Carr took issue with Disney’s Reimagine Tomorrow initiative, which he accused of being a “mechanism for advancing its DEI mission.” The initiative’s social media described itself as a platform meant to amplify “stories and storytellers that inspire a more inclusive world.” While some of its social media accounts remain active, the Reimagine Tomorrow website itself was taken down last month, according to archived versions on the Internet Archive. Axios first reported the website deletion.

Carr also cited a 2020 memo outlining ABC’s updated inclusion standards, which required at least 50% of regular and recurring characters must be drawn from “underrepresented groups.” The same applied for actors and writing staff, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

In a statement, Disney said: “We are reviewing the Federal Communications Commission’s letter, and we look forward to engaging with the commission to answer its questions.”