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Over the years, the Howard County Cat Club has written hundreds of cat tales with happy endings. There was Mr. Jeff, who was abandoned in a carrier beside an apartment complex dumpster on a blazing hot summer day. Bootsy, an elderly pure-bred Maine Coon, was left in the overnight "drop box" at Carroll County Animal Control in mid-February. And then there was Harvey, who got lost in a state park and was sick and starving when his rescuer found him. "In the 20 years we've been in existence, there have been so many cats," says HCCC founder and president Missy Zane. "With a lot of hard work and determination, we've been able to create hundreds of 'cat tales' with happy endings." But now, the Howard County Cat Club is looking for that special person who will create a story with a happy ending for them. The registered 501 (c)(3) no-kill rescue lost its shelter two years ago and has been desperately searching for a new home ever since. The rescue currently has 10 cats in foster homes. "But finding fosters is extremely difficult," Zane says. "And since we rescue mainly older cats, our cats tend to stay in their foster homes for a very long time. "If we had a shelter again, we could save so many more lives." What HCCC Needs In A Shelter A vacant retail or office space. The walkout basement of a private home would work, too, as long as it has a separate entrance. Other possibilities include a garage with windows or an outbuilding. Or, the rescue would love to have a tiny piece of land where it could turn a 16x24 shed into the most fabulous cat shelter ever. The group is able to pay a small amount of rent. A location within a 15-minute drive of Columbia. The space needs heating and air conditioning, working electricity and running water. "It has to be a welcoming, comfortable space, not just for the cats, but for our volunteers and potential adopters who come to visit," Zane says Parking for no more than three cars. Space for an outdoor enclosure or "catio." About The Howard County Cat Club Zane started the Howard County Cat Club nearly 20 years ago in celebration of her cat sitting service's 20th anniversary. Since then, the organization has saved the lives of hundreds of cats. All of the cats are neutered/spayed, have current vaccinations and are microchipped. HCCC is a rescue for adult cats and rarely has kittens. They never have very young kittens or expectant moms. Most of the cats come from the Baltimore/Washington area's kill shelters, although some are "owner give-ups." A dedicated team of volunteers cares for the cats 365 days a year, including holidays. In addition to fostering cats, HCCC provides free cat behavior consultations by email, advises feral cat caretakers and assists people who want to rehome their cats. Baltimore's Virtual Cat Adoption Center is HCCC's Facebook page for owner give-ups. "To see the hundreds of cats who need a safe place to go and know there's very little we can do to help is heartbreaking," Zane says. "We're hoping against hope that someone will save us so we can save more cats."

I published an article early this morning about a potential partnership between GM and Tesla in which GM would build electric trucks using Tesla powertrains. Tesla denied such a partnership and GM declined to comment on the story. (Despite what some people have written, GM did not deny the rumor. It declined to comment.) I am not permitted to say much more regarding our sourcing due to requests for anonymity, but the story was not invented out of thin air and the originating rumors came from two unrelated parties based in different locations. Also, I find it interesting that news broke a few hours later that GM and Amazon are in talks about investing in Rivian. Odd timing, eh? Some have claimed this definitively knocks down the idea that GM might want to use a Tesla powertrain for an electric truck. I personally think it’s more than a coincidence that both matters came up at around the same time, and I believe there are a few possibilities here. But I’ll come back to that conjecture at the end of this piece. For now, I’m jumping to a loosely related matter I’ve been planning to write about for a couple of weeks. As some of you read, I collected the story that a certain early investor in Tesla who held 7.6% of the company soon after IPO turned around and sold all of its shares in one day after receiving a “hold strong, have faith, we’ll get through this” kind of update from Elon Musk. The shareholder sold all of its shares (7%) the day after receiving that update. I received this information more than a year ago from someone fairly close to the matter on the former shareholder’s side, and I confirmed it definitively before publishing the article. Some readers thought I was referring to Ron Baron, who has mentioned in interviews that he held Tesla shares very early, sold them, and then got back in at a significantly higher price. I was not referring to Mr. Baron and don’t think he ever held more than 5% of Tesla’s shares, certainly not after IPO. The shareholder I was referring to was essentially the Abu Dhabi government, through a specific agency, the Abu Dhabi Water & Electricity Authority (ADWEA). Despite having definitive confirmation of the overall story, I wanted to tidy up some specific details, so I spent a few hours going through old SEC filings. That was interesting by itself since it threw me back into much earlier Tesla history — mostly stories that I knew well but that nonetheless struck me as I looked at the old press releases and SEC documents. I decided I’d use a couple of stories for some Tesla flashback articles. (If I found it interesting to go back in time and reflect on Tesla’s progress since then, surely others would as well.)

The climactic basketball game in High Flying Bird, the slick new Netflix drama from the director Steven Soderbergh and the writer Tarell Alvin McCraney, doesn’t play out on any NBA-sanctioned courts. No 360-degree telecasts capture the action, and not a single fan wears officially branded merchandise while cheering in the bleachers. Instead, amid an interminable NBA-wide lockout, two of New York’s most promising young athletes face off in an unlikely venue and attract ire from the league’s executives after unofficial footage of it goes viral. Though the players’ confrontation had been catalyzed by fairly pedestrian masculine acrimony, the social-media broadcasting of their courtside conflict has profound business consequences for the NBA higher-ups who control the players’ futures. The cheekily self-aware, iPhone-shot film teases out a host of power imbalances in sports without feeling unduly heavy-handed. Soderbergh’s direction is frenetic and dexterous. McCraney’s script deftly balances lofty ambitions of capitalist satire with the human contours of a story driven by distinct personalities. Much of that is owed to the screenwriter’s deep understanding of both his craft and the economic machinations of the sports world. MORE STORIES The Low-Budget Netflix Film Where NBA Players Overturn the System DAVID SIMS Lakeith Stanfield stars as Cassius Green, a telemarketer, in 'Sorry to Bother You.' Sorry to Bother You Is a Dystopian Send-Up of Dystopias VANN R. NEWKIRK II Barry Jenkins directs KiKi Layne (right) on the set of his film 'If Beale Street Could Talk' How Barry Jenkins Turned His James Baldwin Obsession Into His Next Movie DAVID SIMS The Pilgrims Coming to See the Obama Portraits, All Year Long KIM SAJET After initial conversations with Soderbergh and André Holland, who both stars in the film and executive-produced it, McCraney undertook intense research about the demands and restrictions placed on professional athletes. The resulting insights shaped the underlying conflict of High Flying Bird, the league-wide lockout. “[Holland] at some point decided that he was going to create a film about the industry of sport, particularly disenfranchised men, athletes, and their access to just owning their own image,” McCraney said of the film’s origin story when we spoke over the phone last week. “[The players] accept in some cases hefty financial gain, but sometimes lose the ability to advocate. Whatever the political bent of team owners, team players were expected to capitulate toward that vantage point.” At the center of the hostility between the parsimonious team owners and the frustrated players of High Flying Bird is Ray Burke (Holland), an agent who grows more and more disillusioned with the league’s inflexible protocol. Ray represents Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg), a rookie whose lockout-stalled contract has left him vulnerable to the whims of executives. As Ray navigates the lockout that’s threatening to end his management career, he receives guidance from Spence (Bill Duke), a sagacious middle-school basketball coach and former NBA player. Together with Ray’s ambitious former assistant, Sam (Zazie Beetz), and Myra (Sonja Sohn), a Players Association advocate, the two men counsel the wayward Erick and brainstorm methods of circumventing the deeply entrenched inequalities in the profit-driven league. McCraney, who wrote the play on which the director Barry Jenkins’s 2016 Best Picture–winning Moonlight was based, is a longtime friend of Holland. In contemplating the arc of High Flying Bird, McCraney knew he wanted to focus on both economic stratification and sports’ ability to bring people, particularly men, together. At times, the film’s three central men—Ray, Spence, and Erick—regard one another with adversarial stubbornness. But Spence’s fatherly admonitions of Ray, and Ray’s paternalism in turn toward Erick, stem mainly from concern. “Ray's in the middle of an institution or a system that is asking him to not care, and he’s trying. He’s trying to just shut up and agent or get his players to do what the owners are asking, which is to shut up and dribble,” McCraney said. “And at the same [time], he can’t, because he and Spence, particularly, recognize what the sport means to so many … and how the love of it can heal and come from a place of nurturing rather than obliteration or just competitiveness.” For McCraney, who grew up in Liberty City, Miami, sports have long been an important arena for forming both interpersonal and community-wide connections. The neighborhood, where Moonlight was set, boasts a staggeringly high rate of professional and collegiate athletes (among them, Jenkins). Though many of these success stories are framed as individual achievements, McCraney is careful to note the importance of athletics as a collective endeavor. “It’s important that young men come to the court not just to show who’s the greatest and who can do the best but to compete and to work out, exercise a lot of the questions and dealings that are happening in the community,” he said. “And that’s what sports has been for communities since time immemorial, since days of antiquity.” But capitalist enterprises don’t prioritize that kind of connection. In High Flying Bird, the conditions of the NBA lockout are the most obvious threat to the players’ livelihoods, though the league and its expectations had already done their damage, too. The film tenderly weaves in a story about Ray’s cousin, the first player he managed, whose life and career were deeply affected by the toll of maintaining a specific kind of public image. Even in absentia, the athlete influences Ray’s renegade approach to management and league dynamics. The divergence in the two men’s paths is revelatory, and the film uses the athlete’s legacy to critique the dangerously narrow confines of acceptable masculinity without being didactic. It’s a welcome, nuanced narrative choice. High Flying Bird crackles with the knowledge of its own timeliness. Though the film never directly addresses any recent advocacy in professional football or basketball, it was written not long after the news that Donald Sterling, then the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, had been taped making racist comments, and during the early days of Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest. “I don’t run away from those parallels, because I think again it just speaks to the fact that black athletes in particular have always had to use their platform and are often told not to,” McCraney said of the recent uptick in the long tradition of athletes’ dissent. He noted that admonitions against speaking out are also colored by gender: “If black men in basketball think they’ve got it bad with people telling them to just shut up and dribble, what about Serena? Every time she says something and talks about racism and talks about misogynoir and misogyny, people point to the fact that she’s made millions of dollars.” The racialized restrictions that often accompany financial rewards don’t end with athletics. For the film’s creators, the core tensions of High Flying Bird—how capitalist gatekeeping dampens both creative expression and intra-community connection—dovetail with the systemic barriers that hinder creators of color in the entertainment industry. Among those is a pernicious expectation that even the most accomplished actors, directors, and writers of color should temper their ambitions with a healthy serving of gratitude for having been given a chance. The implication, of course, is that talented and driven artists are lucky to even be in the room. But just as black athletes (and their communities) support one another amid hostility or suppression from executives, McCraney noted that he’s seen tremendous solidarity among his cohort. He’s particularly effusive when speaking about Holland’s role in High Flying Bird. “It’s … brilliant to watch André sort of self-actualize,” McCraney said. “He’s a brilliant actor but he’s also—if you talk to any of the actors and the crew on the set, he’s just magnanimous and generous in so many ways and has the ability to bring folk together toward a single focus. “Seeing that in a friend or a person you’ve known for a long time is really exciting because it tells me that there’s more room than what he has been given to do. He had been in a way sort of told to shut up and act, and that he did over many platforms, plays, television shows, films,” McCraney added. “There was a while where you couldn’t stop spotting him behind Person X or talking to Person Y. Now that he’s in the forefront as the leading man, he’s also doing that behind the camera, making sure that folk are able to feel like they’re included and also finding a way to tell stories that are important to him.” The writer recalled a time when Holland’s commitment to supporting his collaborators extended to McCraney’s vision, too. As McCraney entered the early stages of Moonlight’s filming process, Holland and another close friend, the actor Glenn Davis, helped the writer find a way to envision his newest project: David Makes Man, McCraney’s forthcoming show on OWN. The coming-of-age drama, set in South Florida, follows a young teenager who must choose between his home and the lonely pathway to success laid out for him. The story draws from McCraney’s own life, but the writer credits Holland and Davis with creating the conditions for him to harness inspiration: “They believed in my voice and what I was doing and felt like I was doing a lot but being paid very little. And they just were like, What do you need the most? Do you need us to just write you a check?” McCraney said. “And I was like, No, no, but it would be great to just have some time to look at ideas that are interesting to us.” “And so one of the ideas that came out was for a television show talking about young people who are deemed gifted or talented—and then afforded this opportunity to ‘get out’ and what that kind of experience can do to a person who has to then every day get on a bus and become almost a different person at school and then come home,” he continued, before explaining a core similarity between the OWN series and High Flying Bird: “If you’re rewarded, if you move on to become Eric Holder or the next whoever outside of that community, the system implicates you, [and] you can’t go back and advocate for that community in a lot of ways.”

ASO say they took adequate safety precautions ahead of incident with spectator that put Italian out of the race Organisers of the Tour de France have written to Vincenzo Nibali to defend the security measures on Alpe d’Huez during last year’s race – six months after the Italian was forced to abandon the race when he crashed due to a spectator’s camera strap getting entangled in his handlebars. The incident happened 4 kilometres from the end of the stage, which Nibali finished in seventh place, 13 seconds behind winner Geraint Thomas, to remain fourth overall. However, a scan that evening revealed that he had fractured a vertebra, and he abandoned the race. The Gazzetta dello Sport reports (link is external) that in the letter, written in French and Italian and sent last month to the Bahrain-Merida rider’s lawyer, ASO insisted that “the safety of the athletes is our top priority” and that the security measures adopted in 2018 were “greater than those required by the UCI.” Among the measures detailed in the letter were the use of 40 private security guards on the climb, the first time that had ever happened, a security cordon being put in place at the boisterous Dutch Corner, and a publicity campaign that urged spectators to respect the riders. It added that it would be working with the French ministry of the interior on further bolstering security during this year’s race, which starts in Brussels on 6 July. Nibali’s lawyer Fausto Malucchi said that he and his client “appreciated the reaffirmation of the prioritisation of safety and the involvement of the ministry of the interior. But on what happened that day, our opinions diverge because more than on thing went wrong and Vincenzo was thrown to the ground. “The drunken state of many spectators, the lack of barriers, so many people but just one gendarme present, subsequently helped by one other. “We hope to have a lengthy meeting with ASO’s lawyers, because what happened seems clear to us, just as it is clear that Vincenzo was penalised for that Tour (and the remainder of the season) given that in the final of that stage he put in the fastest time for the climb despite the fractured vertebra.” Hinting that he and Nibali would hope to reach a settlement with ASO without having to take legal action, he added: “When things are that evident, there’s no need to sit down in front of a judge.” In conclusion, Malucchi said: “I consider this letter to be the opening episode of the story. At first the incident was undervalued, Vincenzo managed to get back to the group even in a fairly short time, but he took a risk. And not a small one.” Last year, Nibali filed a formal complaint against “persons unknown” with the public prosecutor in Grenoble in relation to the incident and met with French police to discuss the incident, but so far it does not seem that the spectator has been identified. > Vincenzo Nibali's lawyer confident after meeting police that fan who ended his Tour de France will be caught However, that investigation has identified issues that would be relevant to any action brought by Nibali against ASO, including that the gendarme at the location in question had requested immediate reinforcements ahead of the race’s arrival due to his inability to control the crowd alone. Just one colleague was sent to assist him, although the Gazzetta dello Sport notes that there were no fewer than 485 gendarmes on duty that afternoon on Alpe d’Huez.

From Marie Claire Close your eyes and picture the personification of "royal grace and sophistication." Did you picture Kate Middleton? Because that would be totally fair. The Duchess of Cambridge is, in many ways, the epitome of the royal ideal. While Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are out holding hands in public like heathens, Kate and her love, Prince William, are pretty royal classic when it comes to decorum and rule-following. Turns out, however, that the royal family matriarch, Queen Elizabeth II, wasn't always so sure about Kate and her lifestyle choices. In fact, according to Express, royal expert and biographer Katie Nicholl said that the Queen expressed “grave concerns” about Kate back in the day, even going so far as to criticize Kate's "unpalatable" "frivolous displays of wealth." Oh, and she thought it was kind of lazy and unbecoming that Kate didn't have a full-time job after college. According to Nicholl, the Queen, who was-and is-still one of the "hardest-working Royals, despite her age" felt like the fact that "a future member of the family was without a full-time job was unacceptable." YIKES. Is anyone else curling up into fetal position on Kate's behalf right now? Because, to paraphrase the immortal words of Cher Horowitz, "Way harsh, Liz." Kate was reportedly super hurt by the comments (which, duh), but was advised to "hold her tongue" because talking back to your future grandmother-in-law is never a great plan, but it's even worse when she's the Queen of England and legally has say over who your fiancé marries. Apparently, the Queen thought Kate and her love of lavish holidays was a bad ~lewk~ for the royal family, considering the state of the British economy at the time. "If Kate was not with William at Balmoral then the couple were skiing or holidaying on Mustique," Nicholl wrote of Will and Kate, according to Express. "Britain was now in recession and such frivolous displays of wealth were unpalatable to the Queen." So how did Kate and the Queen mend the rift in their relationship? Apparently, the Queen "quietly suggested" that Kate start working with a charity and the future Duchess of Cambridge took the, um, advice to heart. She promptly got involved with Starlight, a charity that works with seriously and terminally ill children, and it seemed to do the trick because, these days, Kate and the Queen are all, "Feud? What feud?"

How do you know I am really a human writing this article and not a robot? Several major publications are picking up machine learning tools for content. So, what does artificial intelligence mean for the future of journalists? According to Matt Carlson, author of “The Robotic Reporter”, the algorithm converts data into narrative news text in real-time. Many of these being financially focused news stories since the data is calculated and released frequently. Which is why should be no surprise that Bloomberg news is one of the first adaptors of this automated content. Their program, Cyborg, churned out thousands of articles last year that took financial reports and turned them into news stories like a business reporter. Forbes also uses an AI took called Bertie to assist in providing reporters with first drafts and templates for news stories. The Washington Post also has a robot reporting program called Heliograf. In its first year, it produced approximately 850 articles and earned The Post an award for its “Excellence in Use of Bots” from its work on the 2016 election coverage. However, The Post is using their system to not replace journalists, but to assist them and make their jobs easier and faster. The Heliograf can detect trends in finance and big data to alert reporters to give them a heads-up for reporting. Like how The LA Times is using AI to report on earthquakes based on data from the U.S. geological survey and also tracks homicide information on every homicide committed in the city of Los Angeles. The site created by the machine called “Homicide Report” utilizes a robot-reporter with the ability to include in its reports tons of data that includes: the victim’s gender and race, cause of death, officer involvement, neighborhood and year of death.

he battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was an especially ugly episode of a reality-show presidency that degrades almost everyone swept up in it, and many characters stagger away from it looking worse than ever. That’s Senator Lindsey Graham you see at the head of the pack. That’s Graham you hear talking and talking and talking some more, in committee rooms and on stages and before the television cameras that he rushes to the way a toddler chases soap bubbles. His words are whichever ones guarantee a major role and a powerful patron, which means that these days he sounds like a more articulate echo of his golfing buddy Donald Trump. That wouldn’t, by itself, be cause to dwell on him. Washington is lousy with lackeys, and not even the maddest of kings thins their ranks. But Graham is special. He really is. I can’t think of another Republican whose journey from anti-Trump outrage to pro-Trump obsequiousness was quite so illogical or half as sad, and his conduct during the war over Kavanaugh completed it. For the president he fought overtime, he fought nasty and he fought without nuance. In so doing, he distilled our rotten politics – its transactional nature, its tribal fury, its hysterical pitch – as neatly as anybody in the current Congress does. Has a diva at La Scala ever delivered an aria as overwrought as the one that Graham performed on the day when both Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee? I doubt it. “Boy, you all want power,” Graham, who serves on the committee, railed at his Democratic colleagues, accusing them of ginning up accusations against Kavanaugh. “God, I hope you never get it.” Because Graham and his fellow Republicans exercise it so much more responsibly? Because they’re so principled themselves? I guess that’s why they minimise Russian interference in our elections; indulge Trump’s bromances with Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte and Kim Jong-un; and smile upon his mendacity, misogyny, racism and unchecked greed. They’re modelling integrity in government. Less partisan “You want this seat?” Graham said to them. “I hope you never get it.” No, Senator Graham, you do more than hope. You cheat. Let me introduce you to Merrick Garland, a figure far less partisan than Kavanaugh and thus much more deserving of a seat on the highest court in the land. You and your Republican colleagues in the Senate, every bit as desirous of power as Democrats are, crushed him, and the fact that it didn’t involve an attack on his reputation doesn’t diminish its ruthlessness. “This is not a job interview,” Graham told Kavanaugh, soothing him. “This is hell.” Interesting word choice. I remember when Graham used “hell” in a different context. This was back in December 2015. He was campaigning vainly for the Republican presidential nomination, saw Trump clearly and didn’t suck up to him. “You know how you make America great again?” Graham said then. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed,” he tweeted, apparently referring to the Republican Party’s prospects in 2016. “And we will deserve it.” He called Trump the “world’s biggest jackass”. He said that choosing between Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, who survived much deeper into the party’s 2016 presidential primary than Graham did, was like deciding whether to be shot or poisoned. Trump returned these kindnesses by publicly divulging Graham’s mobile phone number and forcing him to get a new one. There were sound policy reasons for Graham’s revulsion. At the risk of alienating some of the conservatives in South Carolina who routinely voted for him, he had pressed for sensible immigration reform, the kind that didn’t involve ethnic slurs, the forced separation of children from their parents and border walls. He was one of the Senate’s most ardent hawks, and Trump was dissing foreign military interventions, damning NATO, pimping for Putin and peddling isolationism. Revulsion There were also personal reasons for Graham’s revulsion. Graham’s closest ally and constant companion in the Senate, a man he claimed to revere beyond measure, was John McCain. And Trump, at the beginning of his campaign, bizarrely and grotesquely mocked McCain’s long, brutal years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. Trump’s belittling of McCain never ceased, and Graham took proper offense – for a while. Then Trump became president, started inviting Graham to play golf and Graham parted ways with his nerve and his spine. What beautiful fairways you have, Mr President. What a virile tee shot. That’s the sad part I mentioned. And this is the absolutely pathetic twist: McCain, battling brain cancer, stopped spending much time in Washington, and, as his health deteriorated, Graham’s ardour and cheerleading for Trump intensified. McCain, you see, wasn’t just Graham’s friend. He was his road to greater relevance. And Trump presented a veritable expressway. So Graham switched vehicles and directions, and pressed the pedal to the metal. He went from defending Jeff Sessions to pushing him toward the exit, from sounding the alarm about Russia to hyperventilating about the Justice Department and the FBI, from calling Trump a “kook” to savaging the media for portraying him as one, from wanting to put Trump on a bed of nails to fluffing his pillows and smoothing his duvet. At times he gushes so much that he makes Rudy Giuliani look withholding. Open line Shocker of shockers: He now has a nearly open line to the president and the president in turn calls him. White House reporters routinely mention this and him. He has all the TV time that he could ever want. On Thursday he got a prime spot at the Atlantic festival in Washington, where he was interviewed by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. On Friday he got a big profile in the Style section of the Washington Post. He claims that he’s serving a higher purpose by softening Trump’s stances where they sorely need softening, but that certainly hasn’t happened with immigration. He notes that he does chastise Trump occasionally. But his smearing of Christine Blasey Ford and the Democrats who championed her was so vehement that he earned public raves from Giuliani, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Eric Trump and Sean Hannity. They and the president are his constituency now, and his agenda? According to a few people who know him well, he’s auditioning for attorney general. Him or Sessions? It’s like deciding whether to be shot or poisoned. And, to plunder a quote from a quintessential Washington hack, God, I hope he never gets it.