Sabrina Spellman’s journey back to the small screen has been a long time coming. More specifically, before Chilling Adventures of Sabrina landed at Netflix, showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who also wrote the comic of the same name, had two other ideas for how the teenage witch could make her comeback. The first plan involved bringing Sabrina to Riverdale, where Aguirre-Sacasa also serves as showrunner.
“During season 1 of Riverdale — before Riverdale exploded and found its footing as sort of a noir, crime, pulp show — we had said, ‘Maybe season 2 will be like [the comic] Afterlife With Archie. We’ll do a big genre switch and it will be horror, and it will be Afterlife and Sabrina could come and be the antagonist,’” Aguirre-Sacasa recalls. “There was even a time when we talked about the season 1 cliffhanger being the arrival of Sabrina.”
Ultimately, Aguirre-Sacasa and his team changed their minds. “For various reasons, and I think partly because Riverdale found its footing as more crime show, that felt less and less like the right fit,” he says. “It felt like if Riverdale is crime and pulp and all that stuff, then Sabrina could be horror. It felt like there was a separation between Greendale and Riverdale — magic should exist in Greendale, but not in Riverdale. That was the thought.”
Before Aguirre-Sacasa started developing Chilling Adventures of Sabrina as what he calls a “companion show to Riverdale,” he also thought about taking the teenage witch to the big screen. “For a long time I was trying to get Sabrina done as a low-budget horror movie for Jason Blum [of Blumhouse Productions], and even wrote a screenplay with a friend that strangely, though it’s very different from the show, it did center on her 16th birthday,” Aguirre-Sacasa says. “Ultimately, Jason didn’t want to pursue that, and thank goodness because we’re getting to do this as a TV show, which feels right.”
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina hits Netflix on Oct. 26.
Welcome to Fat Bear Weekat Mashable! Each fall, Katmai National Park holds a competition as Alaska’s brown bears finish fattening up for their long winter hibernation. This year, Mashable is getting in on the salmon-munching action. Check back with us all week as we follow the fat bear face-offs each day, and remember to get your votes in for each round. Happy fishing!
It borders on nearly inconceivable that any wild animal can grow so exceptionally plump over the course of just four months. But, it’s happening.
The voting for Fat Bear Week in Katmai National Park — where bears are blessed with a copious supply of sockeye salmon that allows them to fatten up tremendously before hibernating — has opened up, and there are two matches in play on Wednesday.
Match 1 pits former Fat Bear Week champion Bear 409, known as “Beadnose,” against the still-growing adult male Bear 151, called “Walker.”
The second match of the day, posted at 4 p.m. ET, pits Bear 845, or “Divot,” against Bear 503.
Both these bears also have rich histories. Four years ago, divot survived a severe wire-trap that sliced an inch into her neck, while Bear 503 was adopted by Bear 435 (“Holly”) after being abandoned by his biological mother.
Image: bob al-greene/Mashable
Image: BOB AL-GREENE/MASHABLE
Voting is done through the Katmai National Park Facebook page, where the park presents images of each skinny bear in June, versus their enlarged fall appearance.
Image: bob al-greene/Mashable
Image: Bob Al-greene/Mashable
Voting is easy.
To vote for your choice, click into the photos of each large brown bear. Click the “Like” button for whichever bear you think has grown the fattest over the course of the season.
The park will announce the winners at 10 p.m. ET each day.
Fat Bear Week is certainly entertaining for us far-off viewers. But for the wild animals, growing fat is essential.
The bears lower their metabolism to extreme degrees during winter hibernation.
Yet, the energy they do consume is believed to come almost entirely from their fat stores. Fatter, in short, isn’t just better for bears — it’s a big-time adaptive advantage.
Meet Art and Barbara Bushue, a couple for our polarized times.
America’s partisan divide runs not just through their marriage. It runs through their front yard.
The Bushues have painted a white line on the grass outside their home in the southern Wisconsin village of Clinton (pop. 2,154).
Art has placed Republican campaign signs on one side of the line.
Barbara has placed Democratic signs on the other.
“She’s a ‘union thug,’ and I’m a ‘management moron,’ ” said Art Bushue, joking about their conflicting world views. “It’s kind of nothing serious. We get along just fine.”
Barbara Bushue jokes about it, too, though she described the partisan divide in their marriage as a challenge.
“We fight all day long over the TV. Anybody that walks in, turns it to either Fox or CNN. We’ve been known to hide remotes. We’ve been known to wrestle over the remote,” she said. “If the TV is off, that helps. If we don’t talk about it, that helps. We can talk about other things, as long as we aren’t constantly reminded about (politics).”
Neither is quite sure exactly when it was in recent years they drew the line. Barbara said she painted it after she went searching for Democratic signs to counter her husband’s Republican signs.
“People kept saying (to me), ‘signs don’t vote.’ I don’t give a (hoot) — he’s outnumbering me!’” she said. “It was getting on my nerves … I start getting my signs up. He starts getting a couple more. l go out and draw a line down the middle, putting my signs on one side and his on the other side.”
Their Rock County village was also split down the middle in 2012, with Democrat Barack Obama winning by three-tenths of a percentage point over Republican Mitt Romney. But President Donald Trump carried the community by 17 points in 2016.
“We’ve gotten a lot of attention … (it) being a small town,” Art said of their yard.
While their solution to the yard-sign issue is unusual, the Bushues are hardly alone among couples in dividing their vote. They are a microcosm of many partisan divisions found in contemporary polls: between men and women; between public employees and private employees (she’s a retired teacher and he worked in the private sector before he retired); between labor and management (she was active in her union and he was a middle manager with an MBA); and between consumers of conservative media and consumers of liberal media.
Their political differences haven’t always been as pointed as they are now.
Art said Barbara has become more liberal over time, though he praised her as a “realist” who “can see the other side of the story.” She said she voted Republican for both President Bushes, then for Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. She became deeply opposed to GOP Gov. Scott Walker during the union wars and recall fight in Wisconsin.
“I’ve got stress in my life. It’s called Trump and Walker,” she said.
Barbara said Art has become more conservative over time.
“He wears this damn red cap that says, ‘Make America Great Again.’ My son got it for him as a joke. He wears it everywhere, which is very embarrassing to me,” she said. “I have a little button that says, ‘If you hear crazy voices in your head, turn off Fox News.’ ”
She said she made sure her husband got a hearing aid that allows him to listen to the television without it being audible to her.
“At least when (Fox) is on, I don’t have to listen to it,” she said. “I’d have to leave the room, especially when (Sean) Hannity was on. That would make me crazy.”
Art is a longtime village trustee in Clinton. He said he has some mixed feelings about Trump but believes he has accomplished huge things and might “turn out to be one of the greatest presidents in history.” He described himself as “anti-Democrat.”
“I don’t think the Republicans have moved. I think it’s the Democrats who are moving left,” he said.
Art said he is the only one in his extended family who is a Republican, so he is used to managing his partisan differences with loved ones.
In a recent statewide poll by the Marquette University Law School, one in five Wisconsin voters said they’ve stopped talking to someone due to disagreements about politics.
Art said it’s not that dire in their case.
“Barbara and I, we’re best buddies. We joke with each other. She is my best friend,” he said.
Barbara said she finds the campaign stressful, even at home.
“It’s just very tense these days,” she said. “I’ll just be glad when it’s over and everything calms down.”
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Cubs shortstop Addison Russell suspended 40 games for violating MLB domestic abuse policy
Major League Baseball announced the suspension Wednesday for the 24-year-old who was placed on administrative leave in September.
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Published 4:26 p.m. ET Oct. 3, 2018 | Updated 4:59 p.m. ET Oct. 3, 2018
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SportsPulse: USA TODAY Sports’ Bob Nightengale recaps Colorado Rockies’ victory over the Chicago Cubs in a memorable 13-inning wild-card game and how they’ll fare against the Milwaukee Brewers in the NLDS. USA TODAY
Chicago Cubs shortstop Addison Russell was suspended 40 games for violating Major League Baseball’s domestic abuse policy, the league announced Wednesday.
Russell’s suspension is retroactive to Sept. 21 and the league said in a statement says he has agreed to not appeal the ban.
The statement says Russell “will participate in a confidential and comprehensive evaluation and treatment program supervised by the Joint Policy Board.” Russell’s suspension will be unpaid.
Russell’s ex-wife, Melisa Reidy, wrote in a blog post in September that Russell physically abused her during their 2½-year marriage.
Her post came three weeks after the couple’s divorce was finalized, and 15 months after an MLB investigation of Russell launched after a close friend of Reidy’s suggested Russell was physically abusive in a comment on Reidy’s Instagram post detailing their separation.
MLB placed Russell on administrative leave on Sept. 21.
The Cubs, who didn’t have Russell on their postseason roster, lost in NL wild card game on Tuesday.
Small-cap stocks were the outperformers of the market this year until recently.
For three months, the group of companies with market caps of less than $2 billion has underperformed large-cap stocks. In September, the divergence became so significant that it has become a bearish signal, according to Jodie Gunzberg, the head of US equities at S&P Dow Jones Indices.
In September, Gunzberg said, the S&P 500 climbed to a high with a 0.43% gain while the S&P SmallCap 600 fell behind with a 3.32% decline.
This created the biggest outperformance gap on a monthly basis in four years. And it’s a rare occurrence: Over the past quarter century, the small-cap index has underperformed the S&P 500 only about 8% of the time, Gunzberg said.
“Not only is this the current scenario, but the bearish divergence has only been bigger seven times in history where two of those times preceded major stock market drops,” she said and illustrated with the chart below:
S&P Dow Jones Indices
Gunzberg added that “even if the large cap outperformance does not happen exactly on the market high, or if the bearish diversion signal is just the first of many, it seems there may be a bearish signal from the inability of small caps to keep up with the large cap momentum.”
There’s evidence in the Russell 2000 futures market that small caps are losing ground, according to Nomura. Its Tokyo-based cross-asset strategy team estimated that commodity trading advisers had systematically sold futures to cut long positions since the index hit 1,660, which was the average entry cost of the long positions they had built up since April.
“At the very least, we expect small caps to undergo a price correction led by systematic trend-follower selling until its volatility calms down,” Nomura’s Masanari Takada said in a note on Wednesday.
On the other hand, Gunzberg noted that there were still fundamentals in place such as strong economic growth and a rising dollar that could lift small caps.
Mark your calendar for November 6: You’ve got a party to go to.
This Election Day, MTV’s +1 the Vote is teaming up with Yara Shahidi and #VoteTogether to throw parties at the polls in all 50 states. To sweeten the deal, 50 grants of up to $1,000 will be available for you (yes, you!) to host an epic party of your own for your friends and family. The grant program was designed with the pivotal midterm elections in mind — after all, young people comprise the most powerful voting bloc in the country, and that power deserves to be celebrated.
For Shahidi, this new undertaking is just the latest case of her exemplary political activism. The 18-year-old Grown-ish star has her own non-profit initiative, Eighteenx18, that aims to educate the next generation of voters, particularly those hitting voting age in 2018, and urges them to get involved politically.
“We (Gen Z) generally care about the world around us, and so we’re voting for more than just our self-interest,” Yara told MTV News. “My passion really stemmed from having gone through the 2016 election, where myself and many of my peers were unable to vote. I’m looking forward to partnering with MTV to help my peers across the country celebrate voting in their first-ever midterm election and using their power to vote.”
Angie Jean-Marie, director of #VoteTogether at Civic Nation, said in a statement, “#VoteTogether is proud to be partnering with MTV and Yara Shahidi’s Eighteenx18 to shift the culture of voting for young people and make it a more social, fun, and celebratory occasion. Our goal is to create positive experiences for new and young voters at thousands of voting parties nationwide and establish a tradition of long-term voting.”
To find out how you can apply for a grant and throw your very own democracy-friendly bash during early voting or on Election Day, head to plus1thevote.com. The deadline to apply is October 5 at midnight. Happy voting!
Everyone’s favorite surfing extraterrestrial genetic experiment is back.
Disney is developing a live-action version of Lilo & Stitch, EW has learned. The 2002 animated comedy centered on a young Hawaiian girl named Lilo who befriends a tiny blue alien named Stitch.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, which first broke the news, Mike Van Waes is writing the new film with Dan Lin and Jonathan Eirich producing.
Lilo & Stitch joins the ever-growing list of Disney live-action remakes, a list that already includes Cinderella, Pete’s Dragon, The Jungle Book, and Beauty and the Beast. 2019 will also see the release of Tim Burton’s Dumbo, Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, and Jon Favreau’s The Lion King, with a Mulan movie scheduled for 2020, too.
The original Lilo & Stitch wasn’t a massive box office hit, grossing only $146 million domestically, but it spawned several direct-to-video sequels and TV series. It remains to be seen whether the new film will get a traditional theatrical release or launch on Disney’s upcoming streaming service. (The streaming service already has a live-action version of Lady & The Tramp in the works, with Tessa Thompson and Justin Theroux set to star.)
Wikipedia, the internet’s crowd-sourced encyclopedia, has declared “fake news” on far-right site Breitbart, deeming the outlet asn unreliable source for facts.
The decision, flagged by Motherboard, was declared on September 25, 2018 after an ongoing discussion amongst site administrators that concluded, “[Breitbart] should not be used, ever, as a reference for facts, due to its unreliability.
Scrolling through the debate is enlightening, seeing the various reaction from site admins to the nature of Breitbart, with some comparing it to the Daily Mail, the UK paper that was similarly demoted as an unreliable source in 2017.
Support. If anything, it’s even more unreliable than the Daily Mail, as they at least use trained journalists, whereas Breitbart is a fringe propaganda organization which lets its extreme partisan bias get in the way of how it reports things, and whether it does so, just as Fox News does. It too should be deprecated, but let’s start with Breitbart (and InfoWars). — BullRangifer(talk) 17:51, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
And:
Support. I don’t like the use of blanket bans, but Breitbart seems to satisfy the conditions that required the Daily Mail one – an obviously unreliable source, with a reputation for inaccurate stories, which a few users nonetheless insist on trying to use as if it were a reliable news source.
Some opposed the comparison, too, claiming the issue with the Daily Mail was about fabricated stories rather than unreliability and partisanship:
“I will support a ban for any news outlet if it is proven it is currently fabricating stories on a regular basis, but no evidence of fabrication has been presented in the proposal. The precedent established by The Daily Mail ban simply does not apply in this case.”
Breitbart isn’t completely banned, though, as citations for the site will still be allowed in regards to opinion and commentary.
Motherboard also notes a similar August discussion surrounding Info Wars that was eventually closed citing the “Snowball clause,” which states: “If an issue does not have a snowball’s chance in hell of being accepted by a certain process, there’s no need to run it through the entire process.”
TL;DR, no one in their right mind would believe an Info Wars citation anyway so there’s no need to ban it.
That President Trump has legitimized both sites did little to sway the Wikipedia decisions so it remains to be seen what this does for his own rallying cry of “fake news.”
Cristiano Ronaldo has denied the accusations of rape against him, saying Wednesday that he had a “clear conscience” as he awaits the conclusions of an investigation.
The 33-year-old has been accused of rape by Kathryn Mayorga, a former model from the US. She has said the star football player raped her in a hotel in Las Vegas in 2009.
“I firmly deny the accusations being issued against me. Rape is an abominable crime that goes against everything that I am and believe in. Keen as I may be to clear my name, I refuse to feed the media spectacle created by people seeking to promote themselves at my expense,” Ronaldo said in a statement.
I firmly deny the accusations being issued against me. Rape is an abominable crime that goes against everything that I am and believe in. Keen as I may be to clear my name, I refuse to feed the media spectacle created by people seeking to promote themselves at my expense.
Mayorga filed a civil lawsuit in Nevada last week seeking monetary damages from Ronaldo, according to lawyer Larissa Drohobyczer.
The civil lawsuit filed in state court in Las Vegas alleges Ronaldo raped Mayorga, who was then 24, in his penthouse suite at a Las Vegas hotel and hired a team of what the document called “fixers” to shape a monetary settlement, obstruct a police criminal investigation and trick Mayorga into taking $375,000 to keep quiet.
Drohobyczer said Tuesday that Mayorga, now 34, was “emotionally fragile” and agreed to an out-of-court financial settlement nine years ago because she never wanted her name made public.
In an Instagram video posted hours after the suit was filed, Ronaldo appeared to deny the allegations.
“Fake. Fake news,” said the five-time world player of the year. “You want to promote by my name. It’s normal. They want to be famous, to say my name. But it is part of the job. I am a happy man and all good.”
Mayorga met Ronaldo at a nightclub, according to the lawsuit, and went with him and other people to his suite, where the alleged attack took place in a bedroom.
On Tuesday, Las Vegas police spokesperson Aden OcampoGomez said that because the investigation is open, the department would not make public a police report that Mayorga filed the day of the alleged attack. The lawsuit said Mayorga also went to a hospital, where a sexual assault medical examination was conducted.
However, Mayorga refused to tell police the location of the alleged attack or to identify a suspect other than to say he was a European football player, OcampoGomez said.
Ronaldo, who is a Portuguese citizen, went from Manchester United to Real Madrid in 2009 for a then-record sum of 94 million euros, or about $130m. He now plays for Italian club Juventus.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages of at least $200,000. It makes 11 accusations against Ronaldo or those working for him, including conspiracy, defamation, abusing a vulnerable person, battery, infliction of emotional distress, coercion and fraud, racketeering and conspiracy, breach of contract, abuse of process and negligence for allowing details of the confidential settlement to become public.
Sears Holdings is closing at least three additional stores as the retailer faces serious questions about its future heading into the crucial holiday shopping season.
The company is closing one Sears store in New York, a Kmart in New York and a Kmart in Virginia, according to layoff notices filed to government authorities.
Business Insider reported that the company is closing another five Sears and three Kmarts for a total of 11 locations in this latest round.
The company has closed several hundred stores in recent years as it tries to stabilize its finances amid deteriorating sales. The most recent round, announced Aug. 23, involved plans to close 13 Kmart stores and 33 Sears locations in November.
As of Aug. 4, the company still had 506 Sears locations, including 482 full-line department stores and 360 Kmart stores, according to a public filing.
Sears spokesman Howard Riefs declined to confirm the latest round of closures, referring instead to the company’s Sept. 13 statement: “We continue to evaluate our network of stores, which is a critical component to our integrated retail transformation, and will make further adjustments as needed.”
Investors are increasingly concerned about the company’s future as it negotiates a potential deal to sell assets to its largest shareholder and CEO, Eddie Lampert.
Lampert has described such a deal as vital to the company’s future, saying it would provide much-needed cash and debt reduction.
Lampert’s hedge fund last month proposed that Sears sell more assets and restructure its liabilities to further extend its life, saying it “must act immediately to have sufficient runway to continue its transformation.”
Sears shares have lost more than 40 percent of their value since that statement. Shares were down 3.9 percent to 78 cents in afternoon trading Wednesday.
The company faces a key deadline of Oct. 15, when it must make a $134 million debt payment that could strain its finances.
The latest round of stores to close, according to the layoff notices:
• Kmart: 635 Dutchess Turnpike in Poughkeepsie, New York
• Kmart at 4251 John Marr Drive in Annandale, Virginia
• Sears at Eastern Hills Mall in Willliamsville, New York
Follow USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey on Twitter @NathanBomey.
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