Blake Lively is defended by director Paul Feig amid allegations of a smear campaign by Justin Baldoni Have YOU got a story? Email tips@dailymail.com By ALESIA STANFORD FOR DAILYMAIL.COM Published: 20:24 GMT, 23 December 2024 | Updated: 20:29 GMT, 23 December 2024 e-mail 60 shares 8 View comments Blake Lively has received support from a director who praised her work ethic in a social media post following her sexual harassment complaint against Justin Baldoni . Lively, 37, has accused It Ends With Us director and star of creating an 'hostile work environment' while working on the film and hiring a crisis management team to 'take down' the actress afterward. Paul Feig, 62, who worked with Lively on the psychological thriller A Simple Favor and the sequel, A Simple Favor 2, took to X/ Twitter on Sunday to defend her. 'I’ve now made two movies with Blake and all I can say is she’s one of the most professional, creative, collaborative, talented and kind people I’ve ever worked with,' the Directors Guild of America Award winner stated. 'She truly did not deserve any of this smear campaign against her. I think it’s awful she was put through this.' Feig included the link to an article in The New York Times detailing alleged efforts to make the veteran star look bad during the promotion of the drama about domestic violence after rumors of discord between her and Baldoni, 40, emerged. Director Paul Feig, 62, has offered his support to embattled actress Blake Lively, 37 amid her sexual harassment complaint against It Ends With Us director and star Justin Baldoni alleging he created a hostile work environment on set and launched a smear campaign against her The legal complaint , filed Friday, contained subpoenaed communication, including texts, between Baldoni and the PR Crisis team he hired. 'You know we can bury anyone, but I can't write that to him (Baldoni)' Melissa Nathan of The Agency Group wrote to Jennifer Abel of RWA communications in a text. Nathan reportedly represented Johnny Depp during his 2022 lawsuit against former wife Amber Heard, following an op-ed piece she wrote about her experience with domestic violence in The Washington Post . Heard did not mention the actor by name in the piece. A screen shot showing an unflattering article about Hailey Bieber being a bully alleged to be from Baldoni to Abel was included in the documents, with Baldoni telling his team 'this is what we would need.' Lively's breakout role was in 2005's The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and her co-stars, America Ferrera , Amber Tamblyn and Alexis Bledel, have all spoken in support of their longtime friend. In a joint Instagram post on Sunday, Tamblyn and Ferrera released a statement signed by all three of them, including Bledel, who is not active on the platform. 'In support of our sister, Blake,' they wrote in the caption and signed off with a red heart emoji and their first names. 'As Blake's friends and sisters for over twenty years, we stand with her in solidarity as she fights back against the reported campaign waged to destroy her reputation,' the trio's statement read. The director spoke out in a posting on X/Twitter Sunday night, praising the actress for her work ethic Feig worked with Lively on 2018's A Simple Favor and the upcoming sequel Lively has accused Baldoni, 40, of launching a smear campaign against her by hiring a PR Crisis management team to 'take' her 'down'. The actor and director has denied the allegations Read More Amber Heard speaks out about Blake Lively's Justin Baldoni claims as celebs pick sides in viral feud 'Throughout the filming of It Ends With Us, we saw her summon the courage to ask for a safe workplace for herself and colleagues on set,' they stated. 'And we are appalled to read the evidence of a premeditated and vindictive effort that ensued to discredit her voice,' they continued. 'Most upsetting is the unabashed exploitation of domestic violence survivors' stories to silence a woman who asked for safety,' Lively's Sisterhood co-stars wrote. 'The hypocrisy is astounding.' Lively's Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants co-stars have also come forward to defend Lively whom they have known for some two decades: from left to right: Lively, Ferrera, Bledel, Tamblyn pictured in 2008 portrait The three actresses issued a lengthy statemen defending their longtime friend, praising her for her 'courage to ask for a safe workplace' and 'to stand up for herself and others.' The women said they were appalled by the 'premeditated and vindictive effort' to 'discredit her voice' In the lengthy complaint Lively also detailed dozens of alleged incidents of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior toward herself and other women on the set. Among the allegations, The Rhythm Section actress accused Baldoni of being overly concerned with her appearance and weight. She detailed how he allegedly went behind her back to talk to her personal trainer about helping her to lose weight, and disguised a referral to a weight loss expert as someone who would 'help her with probiotics and to combat' strep throat. Baldoni has denied the allegations, however, the damning charges have resulted in his being dropped by talent agency WME, which also represents Lively . Blake Lively Justin Baldoni Share or comment on this article: Blake Lively is defended by director Paul Feig amid allegations of a smear campaign by Justin Baldoni e-mail 60 shares Add commentNonesports background 。

Qatar tribune Tribune News Network Doha Top-seed Arjun Erigaisi of India made a winning start to his Qatar Masters Chess 2024 campaign but defending champion Nodirbek Yakubboev and last year’s runner-up and World No. 6 Nodirbek Abdusattorov (both Uzbekistan) suffered opening round reversals at the Aspire Zone Hall on Tuesday. Abdusattorov went down to the 71st seed FIDE Master Reza Mahdavi of Iran while his compatriot Yakubboev (seed No. 9) lost to India’s IM Amith Doshi Moksh in his opening game. The 22-year-old GM Yakubboev had won the tournament title last year in a blitz play-off. There were no hic-cups for Erigaisi, who outsmarted Uzbek IM Mukhammadali Abdurakhmonov. Earlier, the fourth edition of the prestigious Qatar Masters Open got underway with Mohammed Al Mudahka, President of Qatar Chess Association, in presence of several key officials, made the first official move in the opening round match between Erigaisi and Abdurakhmonov. Al Mudahka expressed his delight at organizing the fourth edition of the tournament, emphasizing the extensive preparations made to ensure grand success having attracted top-ranked players from around the world. Chief Arbiter Laurent Freyd highlighted the significance of the event in fostering global talent, adding that Qatar’s organizational excellence will contribute to the event’s success. He thanked Qatar for its efforts in promoting chess in the region, noting the importance of events of this calibre in nurturing the next generation of players. There were more intriguing results on the opening day of the ten-day tournament with several top-ranked players including No.3 seed GM Parham Maghsoodloo and GM M Amin Tabatabaei being held by much lower-ranked players. Iran’s Maghsoodloo was held to a draw by Mongolia’s IM Ganzorig Amartuvshin while his compatriot Tabatabaei agreed to a surprising draw with FM Artin Ashraf. India’s IM Vantika Agrawal also moved spotlight on her holding Uzbekistan’s GM Vladislav Artemiev to a draw. Qatar’s International Master Husain Aziz, meanwhile, earned an impressive draw against China’s IM Zhihang Xu, seeded 35th. As many as 300 players representing 25 countries are participating in the tournament being held according to the Swiss system of 9 rounds “90 minutes per round + 30 seconds per move”. The Qatar Masters Open B tournament also got underway on Tuesday with the participation of 153 players from 40 countries, competing at ratings under 2300. Qatar’s CM Erfan Mohamad Firdaus beat Uzbekistan’s Abdulazizova Asmirakhon in his opening match while Firdaus’ compatrior Turki Al Kuwari secured a win over Englishman Alexander Torchinsky. Khaled Aljamaat beat his Qatari compatriot Mohammed Al Subaiey, while CM Hamad Al Kuwari drew with Pakistan’s Muhammad Khan and Abdulrahman Al Atas shared a point with Tharun Ashok Kumar of India. Copy 04/12/2024 10

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2024 in pop culture: In a bruising year, we sought out fantasy, escapism — and cute little animalsHOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec 3, 2024-- Stewart Information Services Corporation (NYSE:STC) today announced its Board of Directors has agreed with Frederick H. Eppinger , Chief Executive Officer (CEO), to amend and restate his employment agreement, extending the term for another three years through the end of 2028. “In five years as CEO, Fred has guided Stewart by developing our strategy, capabilities and team, much in a down market, resulting in more than doubling our market cap and increasing market share to over 10 percent,” said Thomas G. Apel, Chairman of the Board. “Fred has built momentum, both financially and operationally. The Board is confident that Fred is the right leader for Stewart to continue delivering financial stability and shareholder value.” “In my first three years at Stewart, my goal was to focus our company’s strengths and fortify our position in the market, and I’m extremely proud of the commitment and dedication of our employees to get behind this singular goal,” said Eppinger. “Now that we are five years into our mission, not only have we fortified Stewart as an industry leader, but we have grown our share of the market. The work is not done and I’m excited about the continued opportunities ahead to innovate, expand and enhance our value proposition for our employees and customers, and to see us execute on our plans to capture 15 percent market share and 11-12 percent pretax margins.” Eppinger took over as CEO in September of 2019 after having served as a director of Stewart since 2016. Since assuming the CEO position, Eppinger has led the company through a global pandemic and driven sustained growth and momentum through one of the worst housing markets in history. Even when managing through these difficult macro conditions, he has remained relentless in his pursuit of growth, scale, and pretax margin improvement. Eppinger has hired best-in-class leaders, delivered on more than thirty strategic acquisitions, expanded the company’s digital and technological capabilities, built additional capacity into the system, and sought out ways to drive efficiencies through process and data management improvements. All these actions and more have enhanced the company’s market presence and its financial strength, helping to solidify Stewart’s position as a leader in the title insurance space for another 130 years. About Stewart Stewart (NYSE-STC) is a global real estate services company, offering products and services through our direct operations, network of Stewart Trusted ProvidersTM and family of companies. From residential and commercial title insurance and closing and settlement services to specialized offerings for the mortgage and real estate industries, we offer the comprehensive service, deep expertise and solutions our customers need for any real estate transaction. At Stewart, we are dedicated to becoming the premier title services company and we are committed to doing so by partnering with our customers to create mutual success. Learn more at stewart.com . Cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements. Certain statements in this press release are "forward-looking statements", including statements related to Stewart’s plans to achieve certain market share and pretax margin targets. Forward-looking statements, by their nature, are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially. Such risks and uncertainties include the volatility of general economic conditions and adverse changes in the level of real estate activity, as well as a number of other risk and uncertainties discussed in detail in our documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023. We expressly disclaim any obligation to update, amend or clarify any forward-looking statements contained in this press release to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date hereof, except as may be required by applicable law. ST-IR View source version on businesswire.com : https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241203492253/en/ CONTACT: John Chattaway, Stewart Media Relations (713) 625-8180;mediarelations@stewart.com KEYWORD: UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA TEXAS INDUSTRY KEYWORD: PROFESSIONAL SERVICES OTHER CONSTRUCTION & PROPERTY RESIDENTIAL BUILDING & REAL ESTATE COMMERCIAL BUILDING & REAL ESTATE FINANCE CONSTRUCTION & PROPERTY SOURCE: Stewart Information Services Corporation Copyright Business Wire 2024. PUB: 12/03/2024 04:45 PM/DISC: 12/03/2024 04:43 PM http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241203492253/en

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Marcel Dzama remembers a day last year when wildfire smoke from Canada had settled thick and heavy over New York City, the place the Winnipeg-born artist has called home for 20 years. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * Marcel Dzama remembers a day last year when wildfire smoke from Canada had settled thick and heavy over New York City, the place the Winnipeg-born artist has called home for 20 years. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? Marcel Dzama remembers a day last year when wildfire smoke from Canada had settled thick and heavy over New York City, the place the Winnipeg-born artist has called home for 20 years. “I was driving my son to school at that time, and there was, like, zero visibility on the Brooklyn Bridge,” he recalls. It was an evocative, unsettling image, an existential threat made visible on the landscape. “And it was just like, ‘Oh, what is this terrible thing we’re just leaving for our kids?’” Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, 460 Portage Ave. To March 8, 2025 Live Chat, Nov. 23 , 2 p.m. Featuring Dzama, Wayne Baerwaldt, Guy Maddin, Alison Norlen and Robert Enright Existential threats abound in the surreal Canadiana landscapes that make up Dzama’s first major solo exhibition in Canada in a decade. There are moody skies and inky reflections of jack pines in lakes, but there are also floods and fires and a foreboding sense that all-out catastrophe lurks on the margins. Dzama, 50, was inspired by the Canadian landscape paintings by the Group of Seven — specifically those by Tom Thomson — as well as his own childhood spent in the harsh Prairie landscapes of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. (A magazine profile from 2005 has him down as “born in 1974 in the isolated Canadian wilds of Winnipeg...”) But one can’t paint contemporary landscapes without contending with, well, the contemporary landscape. The climate anxiety that hums through these works is palpable; the wilderness the Group of Seven immortalized on canvas, carving out a Canadian national identity in the process, has been altered forever. “It was my fear of what we’re doing to the environment and how we’re just throwing away one of the most important and beautiful things,” Dzama says. MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS Wnnipeg-born artist Marcel Dzama is back in his hometown this weekend for the opening of his first Canadian solo show in ten years. Dzama is in Winnipeg for this weekend’s exhibition opening at the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art; he’s taking this call on his dad’s landline. He gets back fairly regularly, but a long absence created by the pandemic had him thinking about the Prairies. During that same period, Dzama and his own family moved to Long Island and bought a small house in the woods, about a 10-hour drive southeast of where Thomson would have painted scenes from Algonquin Provincial Park, “and I just kind of was taken aback by looking at his work again,” he says. Thomson’s paintings, coupled with his physical surroundings, made Dzama think about the wild landscapes of his youth — at Birds Hill Park and at his grandparents’ farm. He thought about the stories his midwife grandmother would tell him about having to walk across the Saskatchewan plains during a snowstorm to help deliver a baby, braving both the elements and the bobcats. (Existential threats have always existed in the Prairies.) His work imagines her as a young woman, guided through a creepy, almost radioactive-looking forest by a shimmering constellation of stars. And he thought, too, about the vastness of these spaces. “We’re kind of close to the ocean over there in Long Island and it gives me that exact same feeling as when I go to my grandparents’ farm and just look at the stars in the sky — or you see the aurora borealis — and it’s just so vast and open and you realize how insignificant you are,” he says. “There’s something humbling about that, though. It feels scary, but there’s some weird comfort in there as well.” MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS Dzama’s exhibition, Ghosts of Canoe Lake, was inspired by climate anxiety and the iconic Canadian landscapes painted by the Group of Seven. Dzama spent a lot of time at his grandparents’ farm. “I think that’s where I gathered a lot of my strange mythology of animal-creatures,” he says with a laugh, referring to the bats and bears and deer and trees with faces that populate his works, which are held in museum collections all over the world and have appeared on the covers of many albums, those by The Weakerthans and Beck among them. Thomson, meanwhile, offered a different strange mythology to pull from. The Canoe Lake of the exhibition’s title refers to the lake in Algonquin Provincial Park where a 39-year-old Thomson’s body was discovered eight days after his upturned canoe was found in July 1917. There has since been more than a century’s worth of speculation about Thomson’s mysterious, untimely death in the very place that so inspired him. It was ruled an accidental drowning, but some people believe he was murdered. Others believe he died by suicide. Going to art school at the University of Manitoba, the Group of Seven seemed to follow Dzama around. “There are a few buildings named after the Group of Seven and you hear about them in art history, but at the time, I was almost rebelling against it. I wasn’t very painterly. I kind of had a more comic-book-quality to my work,” he says. Dzama was following twin obsessions when he began creating the works that would eventually become . He had been commissioned to make a film about Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca — another ghost that looms large in the exhibition — but that had fallen through, so he resurrected the idea to create the work , a film loosely based on Lorca’s 1929 screenplay . “At the same time, I was totally obsessed with Tom Thomson, and was reading all these possible narratives about his death. Lorca ends up getting killed at the end by the fascists before the start of (the Second World War) and so I kind of thought there was this kind of parallel tragedy with Tom Thomson’s mysterious death around (the First World War),” he says. “(Thomson) objected to the war and he’d get these chicken feathers and stuff from people. And I mean, that could have been one of the reasons he was killed. There’s multiple mysterious reasons why he could have been killed as well — but also, it could have been an accident.” MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS Dzama delivers an artist talk Saturday at the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art for opening of Ghosts of Canoe Lake. debuted last December at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection outside Toronto. Executive director and chief curator Sarah Milroy had talked to Dzama about doing an exhibition focused on his political art; he knew the McMichael was home to one of the largest Tom Thomson and Group of Seven collections in Canada and he wanted to continue to pull that thread. He ended up making 50 works in a year-and-a-half. “The obsession was kind of fuelling me, and there was kind of an energetic boost from looking at his work, and then also just looking back at my past in Canada,” he says. Dzama hadn’t visited here for more than three years owing to the pandemic. When he did finally return, he found himself searching for other ghosts. “So much had changed since I’d been back to Winnipeg. We’ve lost grandparents and a parent-in-law, and a lot of the places I thought would be around forever were just kind of gone, and so I kind of wanted to pay a little homage to my puppet of the past.” is on view until March 8. jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the . A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the in 2013. . Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the ‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about , and . Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider . 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