Associated Press

Published 3:53 a.m. ET Aug. 23, 2018

BEIRUT – The Islamic State group has released a new militant audio recording, purportedly of its shadowy leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, his first in almost a year.

In the audio, al-Baghdadi – whose whereabouts and fate remain unknown – urges followers to “persevere” and continue fighting the group’s enemies everywhere.

The 54-minute audio entitled “Give Glad Tidings to the Patient” was released by the extremist group’s central media arm, al-Furqan Foundation, on Wednesday evening.

The audio’s authenticity could not be independently verified and there were no clues as to where it was recorded.

The question of whether al-Baghdadi is dead or alive has been a continuing source of mystery and confusion. The extremist group has lost around 90 percent of territory it controlled in Iraq and Syria in 2014, when IS declared its so-called “caliphate.”

He is believed to be hiding somewhere in the desert that stretches across the Syrian-Iraqi border region. His last audio message was on Sept. 28, 2017 in which he called on his followers to burn their enemies everywhere and target “media centers of the infidels.”

In Wednesday’s recording, al-Baghdadi congratulates followers on the occasion of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Ada and makes references to current events, including Turkey’s row with the United States over its detention of American pastor Andrew Brunson.

If the voice on the audio is confirmed to be that of al-Baghdadi, this would date the message to this month and disprove reports of his death.

“America is going through the worst time in its entire existence,” al-Baghdad says, adding that Russia is competing with the U.S. over regional influence and clout.

He also criticizes surrenders by the rebels in southern Syria to President Bashar Assad’s forces, calling them traitors and urges fighters to join the Islamic State group instead. He also urges patience, perseverance and continued jihad, or holy war.

Al-Baghdadi has only appeared in public once in 2014 in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. There have been recurring reports of his death or injury, including reports by Russian officials last year who said there was a “high probability” that al-Baghdadi was killed in a Russian airstrike on the outskirts of the Syrian city of Raqqa.

U.S. officials later said they believed he was still alive.

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Gambling is so prevalent in football, but it’s so difficult to police it. People will put bets on in their family’s name or their friend’s name. And, in terms of the punishment, that’s so hard to judge too. If I’d been banned when I was really addicted, I’m not sure that would have helped me. That would have been an extra problem, because, then, I’m an addict and I’ve been banned. But not every footballer who bets on games is an addict. Someone may have betted once, or they may be doing it habitually. I think it would take a lot of investigation around each individual case, which is why, at the moment, there’s the blanket ban.

The United States and China imposed more tariffs on billions of dollars worth of each other’s products on Thursday in the latest escalation in a trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

American penalties apply to $16bn worth of Chinese goods including automobiles, factory machinery, and metals. 

China had to “continue to make the necessary counter-attacks”, its commerce ministry said in a statement immediately after US tariffs began at 04:00 GMT. 

China said it will also file a legal challenge with the World Trade Organization (WTO) over the US‘ increase, which American officials say was a response to unfair trade practices by Beijing. 

Thursday’s 25 percent increase came as envoys from the two countries met in Washington, DC in their first high-level talks in two months. No details were released about the two-day meeting that began on Wednesday.

In July, the United States hit China with a 25 percent increase in tariffs on $34bn worth of goods, prompting Beijing to hit back with levies on the same amount.

Fifty-billion dollars worth of imports have now become subject to tariffs. The US Trade Representative is currently hearing arguments for and against imposing duties on some $200bn worth of Chinese imports.

The US accuses China of unfair trading practices, particularly on technology. US President Donald Trump also wants to slash the country’s trade deficit, which reached $375bn last year. 

Tariff war

China’s foreign ministry said on Thursday it wants to reach a good result in trade talks with the US, adding it hopes Washington can meet Beijing halfway.

“If the trade war can end as soon as possible, I think the effect on the Chinese economy will be relatively small,” said economic commentator Hu Xingdou.

“But if the trade war continues to escalate, from $50bn to $200bn to $500bn, then the blow to China’s confidence will indeed be relatively large.” 

Al Jazeera’s Adrian Brown, reporting from Beijing, said the latest tariffs come at a time of economic difficulty for China.

“It’s not just the tariff war that China’s having to deal with at the moment, the economy is also starting to slow and you’re seeing signs of a lack of confidence among consumers. Consumers are starting to spend less to tighten their belts. They worry not so much about what’s happening with the trade war, but what’s going to happen in the future,” he said.

“One of the biggest red flags is debt. China is sitting on a mountain of debt and that pile is going to get bigger because China’s government is … turning on the credit tap to try to insulate its industries and businesses from the effects of this tariff war.”

Yuan plunge

Beijing has rejected US demands to scale back plans for state-led technology development, which its trading partners say violates market-opening commitments.

The yuan currency has plunged in recent months and businesses’ confidence is being affected, analysts say.       

An all-out trade war could shave off 0.25 percent of the gross domestic product of both economies this year, with more damage expected in 2019, according to research by Singapore’s DBS Bank. 

“There’s a deep unease about what the future holds if this becomes a protracted trade war, with these tariffs remaining in force not just for weeks or months, but possibly years,” said Brown.

SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies

After resisting for years, Nikon’s finally launching its own full-frame mirrorless cameras, the Z 6 and Z 7, to compete with Sony’s ever popular Alpha cameras.

The new Nikon Z cameras are a big step forward for the established camera company. Though its DSLRs will no doubt continue to be its bread and butter for years, as Sony has proven, mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras that are smaller, lighter and better for shooting video are the future.

One look at the pricing for the cameras and it’s clear they’re not for amateur photographers. The Z 6 (body-only) will cost $2,000 when it’s released in November and the Z 7 (body-only) will cost $4,000 when it launches on Sept. 27.

The Z 6 packs 24.5 megapixels and has an ISO 100-51200 range. Pony up for the Z 7 and you get an even more ridiculous 45.7 megapixels and ISO 64-25600.

If you’re scratching your head at these specs, here’s a dummy’s translation: The cameras shoot really large, really high-resolution photos.

Both cameras also record 4K-resolution video (3,180 x 2,160 resolution) at 30p, 25p, and 24p, making them pretty competitive with Sony’s A7 series full-frame mirrorless cameras.

Picture and video quality are two reasons to consider the Nikon Z cameras. Another is performance. Both cameras are powered by Nikon’s EXPEED 6 image-processing engine and can lock onto a crazy number of focus points: 273 for the Z 6 and 493 for the Z 7. Furthermore, the Z 6 is capable of shooting continuously with 12 fps and the Z 7 with 9 fps.

Around back, both cameras have an electronic viewfinder with a high-res 3690k-dot OLED display inside as well as a 3.2-inch LCD touchscreen with 2100k-dot resolution that tilts.

Nikon’s new cameras also have built-in Wi-Fi to easily transfer content to smartphones and tablets.

The specs look great, but can the Z 6 and Z 7 actually compete with Sony’s established full-frame cameras? Hard to say until we get the cameras in our hands, but everything suggests they will.`

HONOLULU, Hawaii — Stores were jam packed, lines were long at gas stations and trailers carrying generators could be seen on the highways. But most people in Honolulu were relatively calm about the possibility of the island being hit by the first hurricane since Hawaii attained statehood in 1959.

Pearl Ng had a shopping cart full of ramen noodles, bottled water and a box of Fig Newtons as she shopped at the Safeway store near downtown.

“I’m not really worried. But better safe than sorry. And if it doesn’t happen, then we’ll have these in the cupboard,” she said.

More: As Hurricane Lane approaches Hawaii, Kilauea volcano simmers down

As of Wednesday night, Hurricane Lane, with maximum sustained winds at 145 mph, was about 270 miles from the Big Island of Hawaii and moving on a northwesterly course to pass close to the islands Thursday and Friday, according to the National Weather Service.

Forecasters can’t yet say whether the core of the storm’s winds will make landfall. But even if it is not a direct hit, Lane is expected to bring high winds, heavy rains, possible flash flooding and mudslides. Some areas could get as much as 20 inches of rain, according to the weather service.

The onset of damaging tropical storm-force winds could come as early as Thursday morning on the island of Hawaii and by Thursday night on Oahu, with hurricane force-winds possible Friday, the weather service said. Tornadoes and large waterspouts are also possibilities.

At a nearby Longs Drugs, lines stretched far back into the aisles and the bottled water and canned food aisles were almost picked clean by 5 p.m. local time. Heads popped up as almost every cell phone in the store began emitting the ominous blat tone of an emergency warning that was automatically sent to everyone in the area that a Hurricane Warning was in effect.

“That’s the first one I’ve got,” Sophie Granger said as she put her goods on the checkout  conveyor. She was not buying up water but had grabbed a few batteries “just in case,” she said. 

In the parking lot, Justin Pagba was delivering a room-sized generator for Longs. He skillfully maneuvered the large trailer into place under some trees where it would be accessible to the store. 

His company, Golden Equipment Transport of Waipahu, west of Honolulu, has been working hard since the hurricane emerged as a threat. He’s been delivering generators to Longs and CVS Pharmacy all day. 

“We’ve set up five of these today and we’ve got another five scheduled for tomorrow,” he said. 

The generators are enough to run an entire large store for 10-15 hours, he said. “But it’s just in case the power goes off,” he said.

While state and county officials have been encouraging residents and visitors to prepare for the worst, many weren’t all that concerned. 

“It is what it is,” said Leanne Day of Sydney, Australia. She and her husband have spent the last two weeks touring the Hawaiian islands and are scheduled to leave on Saturday. 

“Or not,” she said, laughing, as she and her husband picked up their rental car at the Honolulu airport. 

“You can’t control nature,” Jeff Day said. “We get them in Australia, too. You just have to pay attention.”

“Though he did call the hotel and make sure that the parking wasn’t underground,” said his wife. “We didn’t know what the rental company would say if we had to call and say our car was underwater.”

Carla Magallanes and her family arrived Wednesday night in Honolulu from Florida, where she and her daughter, Arianna, have been preparing to take part in a grueling sports obstacle competition called the Spartan Race.

“We’re used to this, being from Florida,” she said. 

Though as they were arriving at the airport, race organizers had already cancelled events on Friday and Saturday due to the hurricane.

“Our race is on Saturday,” she said, laughing.

Race organizers were hoping to possibly hold an event on Sunday.

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Golf greats Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson will go head-to-head in a winner-takes-all $9m (£7m) exhibition match in Las Vegas.

The Americans, who have 19 major championship titles between them, will face off in the 18-hole event at Shadow Creek Golf Course on 23 or 24 November.

The contest, which coincides with Thanksgiving weekend in the US, will be screened on pay-per-view.

Woods confirmed “The Match” on social media, saying: “It’s on”.

Mickelson, who has attracted almost 100,000 followers in less than 24 hours on Twitter, replied to Woods, saying: “I bet you think this is the easiest $9M you will ever make.”

The possibility of a duel between the former Ryder Cup team-mates has been mooted repeatedly down the years.

Woods, a 14-time major winner, has won over £88m prize money on the PGA Tour in comparison to Mickelson’s £68m.

“It’s an opportunity for us to bring golf to the masses in prime time during a period where we don’t have much going on in the world of golf,” Mickelson told ESPN.

“It’s a way to show a side you don’t normally see by having us mic’d up to hear some of the interaction between us.”

Despite the good-natured approach, there is no chance of the duo sharing the purse, with Mickelson saying that the event had to be winner-takes-all.

“If you [don’t] do that, it undermines it,” Mickelson said. “The whole point is the winner-take-all thing. That’s the exciting part about it.”

Former world number one Woods returned to golf this year after missing most of the previous two years due to recurring back problems.

The 42-year-old finished tied for sixth at The Open and was second at the PGA Championship earlier this month while 48-year-old Mickelson missed the cut.

A Ugandan pop star who has become an opposition party leader is preparing to appear before a military court on Thursday.

Bobi Wine’s arrest last week sparked violent demonstrations and battles with police.

Since then, his supporters say he has been tortured in custody.

Al Jazeera’s Catherine Soi reports from Uganda’s capital Kampala.

Image: Paul Sancya/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Hailing a Lyft or Uber has become so normal those companies pretty much have become verbs, kind of like “googling.” But no one is asking, “Wanna Getaround to dinner?” It’s clear car-sharing hasn’t become as popular as ride-hailing, and it may stay that way.

Car-sharing, which involves renting someone else’s car or borrowing a car from a fleet, has some major roadblocks. It’s inherently difficult to get people who already have cars to take someone else’s vehicle. For car-less folks, renting a car means driving yourself — and parking, not drinking, staying focused, following traffic rules, and more. 

With ride-hailing, even if you have a car, ordering a Lyft is a smaller, supplemental cost with fewer responsibilities. We’d rather a stranger drive us around than drive a stranger’s car.

Cox Automotive, which owns Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader, released its latest alternative car study Thursday. After surveying 1,250 Americans, it found ride-hailing use has increased 77 percent since its last survey back in 2015. Car-sharing only saw a 17 percent increase. 

Getaround is one of the peer-to-peer car-sharing companies hoping to keep pushing through. It’s now in 66 U.S. cities and recently raised $300 million in a funding round led by SoftBank, the same company betting big on Uber. 

We’d rather a stranger drive us around than drive a stranger’s car.

Getaround founder and CEO Sam Zaid said that he believes every car will be a shared car eventually. In the meantime he wants “to make it easier to share” or find a car when you need it. 

Zaid acknowledged car-sharing is a “noisy” market with several players trying to rise to the top, including Zipcar, Turo, and Car2Go. Traditional car maker General Motors is even in the space with its car-sharing service, Maven. There’s no one name that sticks out as the Uber of the car-sharing world yet. 

Looking at the different car-sharing apps, monthly user numbers indicate growth and a crowded list of apps used for car-sharing. Turo had 1.7 million monthly active users, Car2Go (which rents out cars from a fleet) saw 759,000, and Getaround had 276,000. That’s up 153 percent since May, based on an analysis from Apptopia. 

A study from AlixPartners this year found car rentals clearly fall into a “leisure” activity, not an everyday option to get from place to place. And 35 percent of survey-takers said they replaced car rental services with Lyft and Uber rides — not a good sign for car-sharing.

Turo CMO Andrew Mok said that ride-hailing and car-sharing services work side-by-side. Instead of getting people across town (like an Uber ride to the movies), Turo let’s you borrow someone’s car for a few days for a weekend getaway or business trip. You wouldn’t road-trip in a Lyft.

“Folks will always use Uber and Lyft,” Mok acknowledged. So Turo is targeting people looking to rent for longer periods of time. 

This muddled ecosystem of car-sharing and ride-hailing is why HyreCar is focused on car rentals for the ride-sharing driver community. CEO Joe Furnari said that his company focuses on a more niche market as car-sharing starts to break into communities beyond the major metro areas. “There’s still a lot of room to grow there,” Furnari said.

Even so, car-sharing isn’t as widely accepted as ride-hailing. The study found that 75 percent of respondents consider ride-hailing services to be at least somewhat accessible, compared to 38 percent for car-sharing. Looks like the technology has a long road ahead of it. 

Mr. Mercedes

type

TV Show

run date

08/09/17

performer

Brendan Gleeson, Harry Treadaway

seasons

1

Current Status

In Season

Genre

Crime, Horror

We gave it a B+

It’s good to be the King, and —these past few years more than ever — the King is good. Scratch that: Stephen King’s doing great, whatever screen you’re looking at.

Hollywood has long been fascinated by the macabre maestro’s creep-filled canon, but lately it actually seems to have cracked that most essential element of King’s writing: his unparalleled ability to conjure an ambience so immediately chilling you consider fetching a sweater before turning the page.

IT nailed the town of Derry by leaning into the oh-so-important idea that its underlying darkness had seeped into every local and locale, slowly turning both rancid. Gerald’s Game, less showily, used a tiny, claustrophobic setting and one powerhouse performance (from Carla Gugino) to accentuate the heartbreakingly intimate nature of its horrors. And over at Hulu, Castle Rock — while basically a Halloween treat-or-treat for King aficionados —is elevated beyond mere fan service by a marvelously unnerving atmosphere and performers fiendishly clever about how they stew in it. (Side note: We’re all still in agreement The Dark Tower never happened, right?)

But for my money, Mr. Mercedes — premiering tonight at 10 p.m. ET after a crackerjack first season that flew largely under the radar at AT&T AUDIENCE Network last year — is fast on its way to becoming the best Stephen King TV show for a few reasons, just one of which involves that question of ambience. It’s set not in Maine (as is standard for King) but rather in the small, economically strapped city of Bridgton, Ohio, which as the series kicks off its sophomore run is just one year on from narrowly escaping a second massacre at the hands of malevolent Brady Hartsfield (Harry Treadaway).

For the uninitiated: Season 1 opened with Brady — a teeth-gnashing basement creep, bred of class rage, toxic male entitlement, and a healthy dose of straightforward sociopathy — plowing a stolen luxury car through a crowd of job-seekers queuing up outside an employment fair. That ghastly deed went unpunished, though the crime understandably consumed the detective who failed to solve it, the cantankerous but eminently lovable Bill Hodges (Brendan Gleeson). This brought the increasingly deranged Brady no shortage of delight, inciting him to draw the detective out of retirement with fiendish messages promising another attack. Their high-stakes chess match — one that racked up quite the body count — dominated the first season, so much so that when Brady was finally apprehended (read: brained by Bill’s valiant sidekick before he could blow up an arts fair), one naturally wondered if the show could sustain itself.

Thankfully, the first few episodes of season 2 dispel such fears; if anything, Mr. Mercedes has actually grown more gripping in the wake of Brady’s capture. If the first season was broadly about purpose, its two leads finding a sick fulfillment in their deadly game of cat-and-mouse, the second is at least initially more concerned with stasis, what happens inside a person when they’re locked into unsatisfying holding patterns, increasingly restless and seeking a new way forward.

For Bill, chasing Brady was an unexpected redemption, a chance to prove himself holistically while rising above the boozy, broody haze to which he’d previously consigned himself. And for Brady, being chased was much-craved validation, another twisted way to assert his own dominance over others’ lives after a lifetime of abuse, ostracism, and anonymity. They got off on each other’s attentions, and it was to Mr. Mercedes‘ great credit that it never sugarcoated the deviancy of such a dynamic.

Except now that Brady’s been taken into custody, neither have anywhere left to run; and moreover, both have reason to believe staying still is basically just rolling over and submitting to a slow death.

“I’ve lost my moorings a bit,” Bill admits to ex-wife Donna (Nancy Travis), as they contemplate a devastating loss he suffers early in the new episodes. Without his quarry, Bill’s just waiting around, at risk of falling back into the same destructive habits he was only able to curtail when someone else’s life depended on it.

Brady, for his part, isn’t stalled by choice; he’s been in a vegetative state since Bill’s aforementioned sidekick — Holly (Justin Lupe), who’s since become Bill’s partner at a freelance detective agency — delivered some brutal, entirely justified blows to the back of his skull.

Bill visits him often, still obsessed with his much-hated archnemesis and hopeful that one day he’ll awaken to face prosecution. That’s not an entirely likely scenario based on his injuries: that is, until his doctor (Jack Huston) — egged on by his enterprising wife (Tessa Ferrer) — juices Brady up with some experimental Chinese serum, which (spoiler alert) quickly brings the evil mastermind back toward the land of the living. This is really, really bad news for the land of the living, mind you, especially because the serum gives Brady the ability to hijack other people’s minds, pushing them to carry out his will as he lounges in a hospital bed.

Herein lies the tricky bit: Having expended King’s first novel by the end of season 1, head creatives David E. Kelley, Dennis Lehane, and Jack Bender (who also directed the first four episodes) were faced with the prospect of either excluding Treadaway’s Brady to adapt second novel Finders Keepers, in which Brady doesn’t feature, or glazing over it to focus on trilogy topper End of Watch.

They made the right choice, undoubtedly, in skipping ahead and keeping the character; Brady’s sinister relationship with Bill is the jet-black engine fuel coursing through this series. But King’s novel took the psycho in a strange direction, imbuing him with essentially supernatural powers so as to ensure he remained a serious menace even while comatose.

That transformation, one the Mr. Mercedes team honors, is frankly at odds with the awards-worthy performance Treadaway turned in last year. His Brady was a statedly mortal monster, a sneering nerd with an axe to grind and the kind of warped internal logic Thomas Harris would have killed to have written. He was also a creepily current kind of adversary, a resentful outcast convinced the world (especially women) deserved to die for not delivering what it so obviously owed him all along. One gets the sense he voted, and not for Hillary.

All of this is to say Brady terrified so ably because you believed he was out there somewhere. What he wasn’t was a mind-controlling supervillain, and turning him into that denies Mr. Mercedes some of its rough-hewn relevance. Of course, the genre shift is handled nimbly by the writers (one dream sequence too good to be detailed here improves on a similarly calibrated sequence in IT); and Treadaway gamely sinks his teeth into scenes that occur inside Brady’s head, which he envisions as his basement computer lair. But, at least in the early going, it’s a little strange.

The new season accounts for this by otherwise reaffirming the show’s central ideas, mainly those concerning masculinity, mortality, and how the former treats the latter — paradoxically —  as a threat. Season 2 packs in scenes set at funerals and in graveyards, not to mention a local hospital; Bill and Brady are both surrounded by death, so much so that when Brady muses to Bill that “I’m what keeps you alive,” you actually believe him.

Still infallible are the actors, who remain rooted in the same bleak but recognizable humanity that made Mr. Mercedes such a treat in its first season. Gleeson often has a melancholy air that hangs about him like musky cologne; his Bill remains the most stubbornly Irish character on television, uttering phrases like “I’ve built many a bicycle whilst pedaling it” and pouring whiskey into his frozen yogurt.

More peripherally, Lupe is doing exceptionally strong work as Holly, who becomes something of a guardian angel for Bill while remaining terribly fond of him as a person and detective. Though Mr. Mercedes hasn’t officially diagnosed Holly, Lupe’s efforts to sensitively depict her OCD-like tendencies are some of the most dramatically satisfying to watch in a series full of fantastic performances. Jharrel Jerome, Breeda Wool, and Holland Taylor are all also back, and they’re good enough you hope Mr. Mercedes will find more natural ways to fold them into its story.

Four episodes in, the season’s still in cruise control, taking its time to build mood and character in ways a lesser show might deem unneccessary but that continue to make Mr. Mercedes one of the most sturdily constructed thrillers on television. One gets the sense it’ll jam down its accelerator sooner rather than later, and at that point it’ll become apparent whether Brady’s newfound gifts take the show in a direction its gruff, tense tone isn’t equipped to follow. But for now, what’s the harm in relishing what’s still one of television’s darker, most compelling rides? B+