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New York, Nov 23 (AP) Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, was chosen by Donald Trump to serve as US attorney general hours after his first choice, Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration after a federal sex trafficking investigation and ethics probe made his ability to be confirmed dubious. The 59-year-old has long been in Trump's orbit and her name had been floated during his first term as a potential candidate for the nation's highest law enforcement role. Trump announced his plans to nominate Bondi Thursday in a social media post. If confirmed by the Republican-led Senate, Bondi would instantly become one of the most closely watched members of Trump's Cabinet given the Republican's threat to pursue retribution against perceived adversaries and concern among Democrats that he will look to bend the Justice Department to his will. Here's a few things to know about Bondi: She's long been a fixture in Trump's world Bondi has been a longtime and early ally. In March 2016, on the eve of the Republican primary in Florida, Bondi endorsed Trump at a rally, picking him over the candidate from her own state, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. She gained national attention with appearances on Fox News as a defender of Trump and had a notable speaking spot at 2016 Republican National Convention as Trump became the party's surprising nominee. During the remarks, some in the crowd began chanting "Lock her up" about Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Bondi responded by saying, “Lock her up,' I love that." As Trump prepared to move into the White House, she served on his first transition team. When Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was ousted in 2018, Bondi's name was floated as a possible candidate for the job. Trump at the time said he would “love” Bondi to join the administration. He ultimately selected William Barr instead. She kept a toehold in Trump's orbit thereafter, including after he left office. She served as a chairwoman of America First Policy Institute, a think tank set up by former Trump administration staffers to lay the groundwork if he won a second term. She was Florida's first female attorney general Bondi made history in 2010 when she was elected as Florida's first female attorney general. Though the Tampa native spent more than 18 years as a prosecutor in the Hillsborough County State Attorney's Office, she was a political unknown when she held the state's top law enforcement job. Bondi was elevated in the primary after she was endorsed by former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. She campaigned on a message to use the state's top legal office in a robust way, challenging then-President Barack Obama's signature health care law. She also called for her state to adopt Arizona's “show me your papers” immigration law that sparked national debate. As Florida's top prosecutor, Bondi stressed human trafficking issues and urged tightening state laws against traffickers. She held the job from 2011 to 2019. She worked as a lobbyist for both US and foreign clients Bondi worked as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners, the powerful Florida-based firm where Trump's campaign chief and incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles was a partner. Her US clients have included General Motors, the commissioner of Major League Baseball and a Christian anti-human-trafficking advocacy group. She also lobbied for a Kuwaiti firm, according to Justice Department foreign agent filings and congressional lobbying documents. She registered as a foreign agent for the government of Qatar; her work was related to anti-human-trafficking efforts leading up to the World Cup, held in 2022. Bondi also represented the KGL Investment Company KSCC, a Kuwaiti firm also known as KGLI, lobbying the White House, National Security Council, State Department and Congress on immigration policy, human rights and economic sanctions issues. She defended Trump during his first impeachment trial Bondi stepped away from lobbying to serve on Trump's legal team during his first impeachment trial in 2020. He was accused — but not convicted — of abuse of power for allegedly pressuring the president of Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rivals while crucial US security aid was being withheld. He was also charged with obstruction of Congress for stonewalling investigative efforts. Trump wanted Ukraine's president to publicly commit to investigating Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. He pushed for the investigation while holding up nearly USD 400 million in military aid. Bondi was brought on to bolster the White House's messaging and communications. Trump and his allies sought to delegitimise the impeachment from the start, aiming to brush off the whole thing as a farce. She's been critical of the criminal cases against Trump Bondi has been a vocal critic of the criminal cases against Trump as well as Jack Smith, the special counsel who charged Trump in two federal cases. In one radio appearance, she blasted Smith and other prosecutors who have charged Trump as “horrible” people she said were trying to make names for themselves by “going after Donald Trump and weaponising our legal system”. It's unlikely that Bondi would be confirmed in time to overlap with Smith, who brought two federal indictments against Trump that are both expected to wind down before the incoming president takes office. Special counsels are expected to produce reports on their work that historically are made public, but it remains unclear when such a document might be released. Bondi was also among a group of Republicans who showed up to support Trump at his hush money criminal trial in New York that ended in May with a conviction on 34 felony counts. As president, Trump demanded investigations into political opponents like Hillary Clinton and sought to use the law enforcement powers of the Justice Department to advance his own interests, including in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Bondi appears likely to oblige him. She would inherit a Justice Department expected to pivot sharply on civil rights, corporate enforcement and the prosecutions of hundreds of Trump supporters charged in the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol — defendants whom Trump has pledged to pardon. She's had a few of her own political issues Bondi issued a public apology in 2013 while serving as attorney general after she sought to delay the execution of a convicted killer because it conflicted with a fundraiser for her reelection campaign. The attorney general, representing the state in death row appeals, typically remains available on the date of execution cases in case of any last-minute legal issues. Bondi later said she was wrong and sorry for requesting then-Gov. Rick Scott push back the execution of Marshall Lee Gore by three weeks. Bondi personally solicited a 2013 political contribution from Trump as her office was weighing whether to join New York in suing over fraud allegations involving Trump University. Trump cut a USD 25,000 check to a political committee supporting Bondi from his family's charitable foundation, in violation of legal prohibitions against charities supporting partisan political activities. After the check came in, Bondi's office nixed suing Trump's company for fraud, citing insufficient grounds to proceed. Both Trump and Bondi denied wrongdoing, the state's ethics commission tossed the complaints and a prosecutor assigned by then-GOP Gov. Rick Scott determined there was insufficient evidence to support bribery charges over the donation. "This is old, discredited news,” said Trump transition spokeswoman Alex Pfeiffer. Two days before being sworn in as president in January 2017, Trump paid USD 25 million to settle three lawsuits alleging Trump University defrauded its students. Trump also paid a USD 2,500 fine to the IRS over the illegal political donation to support Bondi from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which he was forced to dissolve amid an investigation by the state of New York. (AP) PY PY (This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)Thousands flee as Syrian insurgents advance to the doorstep of the country's third-largest city

Brandon Nunez tosses 2 TD passes to help New Mexico State beat Middle Tennessee 36-21Where Is JonBenet Ramsey's Brother Burke? Inside His Life After Her Murder

TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi reportedly sought advice from Tesla CEO Elon Musk . According to an exclusive report in WSJ, ByteDance-owned TikTok chief executive officer Chew Shou Zi has sought input on US matters from Elon Musk. Tesla CEO has emerged as one of the closest advisers to President-elect Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported on November 23, citing people familiar with the matter. TikTok CEO Chew is reported to have reached out to Tesla CEO in recent weeks and asked for his opinions on topics ranging from the incoming administration to potential tech policy, the report added as per news agency Reuters. The report added that both the executives have not discussed specific measures to keep TikTok running in the United States. ByteDance's senior leadership remains cautiously optimistic. Before the US election, ByteDance executives met with people close to both Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Elon Musk joined Trump in calls with Google CEO and Ukraine president Incidentally, there are also reports that Musk joined President-elect Donald Trump during his call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And earlier this week, The Information reported that Musk was there in the call when Google CEO Sunadr Pichai called to congratulate Pichai. The big Yes and No on Tiktok ban in the US Trump, who previously attempted to ban TikTok, has stated that he would not allow the app to be barred if elected in November. However, President Trump's pick for Federal Communications Commission chairman could be bad news for TikTok. In his Project 2025 chapter, Carr asserted that the Chinese social media platform TikTok “poses a serious and unacceptable risk to America’s national security” and should be banned. The new FCC chairman also reportedly has a close relationship with Musk and has accused Democrats of waging “regulatory lawfare” against Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service.

Pair of original MLS clubs to play for Cup title

Peavy's 24 help Georgetown beat Albany 100-68

AI Is Being Trained To Spot Anomalies During Tests In The Medical SectorPair of original MLS clubs to play for Cup titleTikTok is inching closer to a potential ban in the US. So what's next?

I n June, Raman Bhatia walked into the fifth-floor office at Starling Bank’s headquarters in east London with a clean slate. It was set to be an antidote to a turbulent two years steering his former employer, Ovo, through an energy crisis and fines for overcharging customers . At the digital-only challenger bank, where he was taking over from the founder, Anne Boden, things looked more rosy, with a possible stock market listing on the horizon. He began his term by rubbing shoulders with new Labour ministers in No 10’s rose garden , and charming staff during a tour of Starling offices in Cardiff, London and Southampton. But autumn brought the honeymoon to an abrupt end. In October, Starling was hit with a £29m fine for “shockingly lax” financial crime controls , which the City regulator said had left the financial system “wide open to criminals and those subject to sanctions”. It threatened to take a hefty chunk out of Starling’s 2024 profits, and raised questions over the bank’s vehement defence of its customer screening process two years earlier when a former fraud minister challenged the bank’s handling of Covid loan applications. It meant that when Bhatia addressed a London banking conference at the start of December, one of the first questions he was asked was not about Starling’s bright future but its recent failings. Starling once seemed poised for unwavering success. It was part of a trio of online-only neo-banks, alongside Revolut and Monzo, which emerged in the mid-2010s to disrupt traditional banking. Boden, a former Royal Bank of Scotland executive, presented Starling as a grown-up among the upstarts, with 30 years of banking experience and £48m of seed funding from the reclusive Austrian billionaire Harald McPike. Not everyone agreed with her leadership style – as illustrated by a staff rebellion that led to a former colleague launching a rival, Monzo. But in 2016, two years after its launch, Starling clinched a coveted UK banking licence, allowing it to hold its own customers’ deposits and issue lucrative loans. It would take Monzo another year, and Revolut until 2024 , to do the same. And although the pandemic loomed, the government-backed schemes that followed would fuel Starling’s growth: it was among a number of smaller lenders that eagerly queued to distribute bounce-back loans (BBLs). Meant to support businesses during lockdown, banks offered companies loans of up to £50,000 at 2.5% interest, but carried little risk, with taxpayers picking up 100% of losses if borrowers defaulted. Large banks restricted BBLs to their own customers. But challengers such as Starling opened applications to new clients and experienced exponential growth as a result. The bank had only issued £23m of its own loans before the pandemic in November 2019, but had distributed £1.6bn in BBLs by the time the scheme closed in March 2021. Meanwhile, its business customer base swelled from 87,000 to 330,000: equivalent to onboarding 15,000 a month. High street banks, by comparison, were onboarding 1,500 to 8,000 on average. Starling – which had 1,245 staff at the time – credited the feat to its cutting-edge tech. , a feat that the bank – which had 1,245 staff at the time– chalked up to its cutting-edge tech. Within months, it was toasting its first annual profit. Not everyone was celebrating. In May 2022, Lord Agnew, a former Treasury minister with an anti-fraud brief, accused Starling of acting against taxpayers’ interests and using BBLs as a “cost-free marketing exercise to build their loan book and so their company valuation”. He added that the bank was “one of the worst when it came to validating the turnover of businesses or submitting suspicious activity reports”. Boden was incensed. She accused Agnew of making “defamatory statements” and threatened to take legal action against the Tory peer, and said the bank had reported his comments to regulators. She also insisted Starling was one of the “most active and effective banks fighting fraud”. In the background, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) had been raising serious concerns about Starling’s financial crime controls. In late 2020, during a sample review of challenger banks, the watchdog said it had “identified several issues” with Starling’s anti-money-laundering and financial sanctions controls, as well as its governance and oversight. But this would not have been news to some, at least, of Starling’s management. In 2018, an internal audit report had identified “several significant gaps” in Starling’s financial crime procedures. However, those shortcoming were not adequately conveyed to either Starling’s board or the regulator, FCA documents said. The regulator flagged “wide-ranging concerns” in a letter to Starling bosses in March 2021, just as the BBL programme was winding down, but further tests found problems in Starling’s client screening. By September, Starling had agreed to a VREQ – or voluntary requirement – that banned it from processing applications for any high-risk customers while it improved controls. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion Months passed. In July 2022, Starling realised that a key check was not working properly. It meant that nearly 300 customers who had previously been booted out of the bank for “financial crime reasons” had been able to reopen accounts. By November, Starling’s financial crime rating was raised to “red”. And two months later, in January 2023, it found that an automated screening system had only been checking against a partial list of individuals under sanctions since 2017. Starling ultimately breached the VREQ, opening 54,000 accounts for 49,183 high-risk customers between September 2021 and November 2023, earning £900,000 in interest and fees along the way. An external consultancy later chalked up the failings to an inexperienced management team that lacked sufficient anti-money laundering and regulatory expertise. Engineering teams, given responsibility for upgrading the systems and controls, were not told of the existence of the regulator’s order. It was only in April this year that Starling managed to go a full month without breaking the rules. The VREQ remains in place today. The regulator did not refer to the BBL scheme in its report. But Agnew revived his concerns in October. The digital bank has so far claimed £94m of taxpayer money through the BBL scheme on loans that were later flagged for fraud, a figure only surpassed by the four largest high street banks. “The government should consider the FCA’s findings and examine whether there needs to be a clawback on any of the taxpayer funds paid to Starling to cover fraud losses,” Agnew told the Times . The new revelations have undoubtedly hurt Starling’s reputation and kicked the prospect of a stock market listing – and payouts to investors such as Goldman Sachs and McPike – down the road. “It makes it harder to ‘sell the story’ to investors,” said John Cronin, an independent banking analyst and founder of SeaPoint Insights. “I would be surprised to see a successful IPO within the next two to three years,” he added. Boden stepped down as chief executive in 2023 citing a “conflict of interest” between being a boss and a large shareholder, leaving Bhatia to weather the storm. Starling said: “We fully accept and have apologised for the FCA’s findings. Their fine related solely to breaches of the VREQ and to sanctions controls. The loans issued during the Covid crisis were to a small proportion of our new customers. In line with other banks, we were supporting the government’s efforts to keep the economy alive and small business owners active. “We’re moving forward with plans for new products and services and are excited about the prospects for 2025.” Boden and the Treasury declined to comment.Some directors are good with music. James Mangold is one of them. Back in 2006, “Walk the Line” scored five Oscar nods and won Best Actress for Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash. (Joaquin as Johnny Cash lost to Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Capote”). A hard-drinking Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) makes a memorable appearance in “ A Complete Unknown ” (in theaters December 25 from Searchlight), Mangold’s latest music movie, this time focused on the four-year origin myth of Bob Dylan, from his arrival in New York at age 19 in 1961 to his going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Mangold is returning to his bent for more personal filmmaking (Best Picture Oscar nominee “Ford v Ferrari” ) after tackling 2023 franchise entry “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” for Steven Spielberg. The writer/director spoke to me on Zoom during his global press tour for “A Complete Unknown,” which has earned upbeat reviews, especially for Timothée Chalamet . On the awards circuit, Chalamet could follow his Best Actor Oscar nomination for “Call Me By Your Name” with a second, while Mangold and Jay Cocks are in the running for Adapted Screenplay; Mangold was nominated for Adapted Screenplay for “Logan” but has never made it into the Best Director circle. So far “A Complete Unknown” is landing with awards groups, nabbing the same three Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award nominations for Chalamet, supporting actor Edward Norton, and Best Motion Picture Drama/Picture; Elle Fanning won Best Supporting Actress from the National Board of Review, and the film made it to both the NBR and AFI Top Ten. This Zoom interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity. Anne Thompson: Did you hear Zane Lowe’s unfettered interview with Timothée? James Mangold: It was remarkable. I love him. He’s a remarkable young man. Our journey on this movie has been five-and-a-half years. We met for the first time in 2019 at the Toronto Film Festival. I had just gotten my hands on the Elijah Wald book and Jay Cocks’ script. And there was a project in turnaround from HBO, and I had heard Timmy was interested in it. That was a home run idea. I had only a week ago just heard about the material, found out Timmy was in Toronto while I was there. So on the day that “Ford v Ferrari” premiered, I met with him there and told him how I saw the movie working in the most abstract sense. Do you remember that pitch? The simplest version was using “Amadeus” as a template. The way to structure this was to use the supporting cast to see the effect that genius has on them and to try to understand Bob through each of their eyes, instead of trying to crack him in the classic Freudian sense that he would have some big scene in the third act where he confesses some secret that everyone’s been waiting for, which from all my research, I’m not sure there is one. [Timmy] was excited, and he was thrilled. The fact that I made “Walk the Line” gave him confidence. He’s also a quick decision-maker and an instinctual actor. We decided to do this together, and I went to work revising the script. How big a Dylan fan were you at that point? The project didn’t come from me being a Dylan fan. I’ve listened to Dylan all my life, and like many people have gone in and out... listening to him non-stop, and then I have to take a rest, and then a year later, another wave of Dylan comes into my life. I wasn’t walking around going: “I’ve got to make a Bob Dylan movie.” The idea of making a movie about any true-life person, alive or dead, is to know what part of their life you’re making a movie about [before] you start to assemble a birth-to-retirement or death storyline that is so sprawling that it rarely has thematic unity to it at all. The book Cocks had adapted was focused on the road to the electric breakout? Jay wrote many scenes that still survive in the movie now. But Jay went into 1965 quickly. And I wanted to watch this ascent, and there wasn’t any folk period in the early 1960s. He did introduce Woody [Guthrie, played by Scoot McNairy], but then you jumped forward. The idea of keeping Woody alive through the movie for visits mid-picture and at the end of the movie was another thing I felt was important, to keep him, literally and figuratively, alive through the movie as a primal touchstone for Bob. Was Pete Seeger [Edward Norton] supposed to be what Dylan became? He was going to take over the folk mantle and be the popularizer of folk music, and he handed it to Dylan? Do you see it that way? Not exactly. I deeply admire Pete Seeger. I learned to play banjo in high school, inspired mainly by Pete and Steve Martin, but it’s not controversial to say that Pete only wrote a handful of songs and was much more of a missionary and an evangelist for folk music. Then he was an iconic artist whose unique brand of folk music defined and lifted all folk music. His optimism and generosity and sense of lifting all other boats, as he did with Bob and Joan and many others, and his sense of causes, which he would attach himself to all the way to the end of his life with Toshi, his wife, saving the Hudson River, were who Pete was. Look at it this way: Woody Guthrie, singer-songwriter, auteur, prickly, difficult man, salt of the earth; Pete Seeger, more of an evangelist operator, expert communicator, who was lifting Woody’s work and all the others. And then into their world arrives this star that Pete Seeger recognizes, who has some of what Pete doesn’t have, youth and edge, and a songbook that is staggering, and Seeger recognizes the value of an artist like this and immediately embraces him and is rewarded with Dylan becoming the center, holding up the circus tent of folk music. Did Dylan eventually betray Seeger? Did Bob ever agree to anything? Did he take a pledge? I don’t think he’s betrayed. Must all marriages, even ones that are unofficiated, last forever? And these are the questions the movie asks. In our movie, in the first scene alone with Pete in a car, Bob is clear that he’s not necessarily drinking the same kind of purity; he doesn’t view things in the same clearly divided way. You know that he doesn’t see things as us vs. them. He admires Little Richard and Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, and these are all influences which he thinks are marvelous, and they play on the pop charts, and they have drums and keyboards and rhythm sections. Bob becomes what Pete suggests and excels at it as a solo artist. You spoke with Dylan. Dylan himself was clear to me that he never envisioned himself being a solitary artist on stage. That was not his kind of dream. So that’s why he came to pay homage to Woody, who also, by the way, played with many string bands and bands in his career. But that didn’t mean that all he wanted was to be the Bob Dylan that he became. Dylan’s break toward electric music or band music was something that he always wanted to do and it was actually a matter of how long he was going to hold himself back to maintain this kind of tribalism that had divided these two camps from each other. Also Johnny Cash played at Newport Folk Festival many times, and had no problem as they brought a complete band on the stage. So obviously their concern about Dylan was that he was a symbol of their music. Johnny was a country music star coming as a special guest, a novelty, but Bob was folk, and if Bob turned to something other than folk, the tent might collapse. It struck Timothée that who Dylan was and what he represents is the exact opposite of what everything is today. The movie shows us not that he was pure but that he was true to his art. I agree with Timothée’s observation. [Bob] wanted to paint, but he didn’t want to be the voice in your headphones at MoMA, when you look at the paintings, he didn’t want to have to explain his work. And I think we’ve only gotten worse in that we can’t look at mystery. Art is mystery. The power of art is that it could be read different ways by different people. That it is not journalism. And it is not a Wikipedia entry, and it is not a set of facts or bullet points or simple references, and that to point out what you’re doing is to cheapen your work, and that those of us like Timothée and myself who live in this modern era, we know that’s unavoidable. You have to do it. But Dylan avoided it. But I don’t think it was out of intellectual fortitude or artistic ethics. Dylan was uncomfortable with interviews and with explication of oneself and one’s intentions. It’s easy for one to take what could be the result of a social anxiety and make it an artistic dogmatic position. And I tried to write the script with Jay that tried to depict [Dylan] as someone who loved making, but he didn’t necessarily enjoy or find comfort or even could be unwound by this mass adoration. His goal was never gigantic adoration. His goal was always to send these missives out in the world and let people process them. Timothée had to find that balance where he’s hooded, enigmatic, and mysterious but is also trying to draw you in while he’s keeping you out. It’s hard to pull off. Yes, but I don’t think Timmy tried to keep us out. I don’t think that’s a way you can direct an actor. One of the most beautiful touches early in the film that Timothée did in one take that I circled immediately, was Elle Fanning and him are out on a date, and they’re walking by a subway station, and she writes her number on his hand, and then she kisses his cheek, and Timmy has this moment where he flinches as she kisses his cheek, almost like it scares him a little. It was a penetrating moment: What if this character is actually living with an element of fear and anxiety about social interaction and love and connection, that it’s scary for them? I had this theory that the best angle would be to play him so that the outside world and the sensory world is intrusive to him, and it’s a struggle for him to stay present, and that instead of assuming everything is an attitude or an edge, what if there’s social awkwardness and a lack of filter that makes him blurt out things that are resoundingly blunt to the point that they seem impolite? But where he exists is a space of extreme honesty that doesn’t work in our world; it comes off as rudeness. I tried to find other ways to look at his behavior and encourage Timothée to examine them. For instance, we can call his making stories up about his past a lie, but we can also call it a wish, meaning that he wished he wasn’t a middle-class kid who grew up in comfort, the son of a man who owned a hardware store in Hibbing, Minnesota. He wished he came from the carnival and the rails and the dirt of the alleys like Woody Guthrie. And so those wishes becoming fantasies became legend, and I was trying to understand everything without assuming that he was this puppet master organizing this PR campaign of mystery and subterfuge, which I found slightly hard to believe. His sexual and professional bond with Joan Baez [Monica Barbaro], who was a bigger star, goes on through the movie until he turns up in her hotel room playing guitar in the middle of the night and she kicks him out! Joan was the one equal. Yes, they had different talents. Joan had a nightingale’s voice. She was a masterful guitar player. She had a perfection in her execution of her songs, but she only wrote a handful of songs. On the other side you had Bob, who was more of a wild card, who didn’t always sing, even on pitch, he was sloppy and slightly provocative and rambling in his stage presence. And so they’re completely opposite, but completely fascinating to one another, because, of course, the songs are springing from him like a fountain and how annoying that might be for Joan, that somehow this disheveled and semi-rude, rumpled genius, had no problem springing forth. With songs that she wanted to sing. They loved each other and were fascinated by one another. But it was unavoidable that there would be a slight competitive nature between them, and that each would covet something that the other had. Bob coveted her beautiful voice, her beautiful visage, her brilliant execution, and admired her stardom and her professionalism. And Joan admired the artistic volcano out of which these songs seem to spring. You’ve said the movie isn’t political, but weren’t Dylan’s songs political in their time? All movies are political, either directly or metaphorically. “Ford v Ferrari” is political. I wanted to represent all sides. But does it involve politics? Yes, not even just the obvious politics of the moment, but also the politics of what is music here for? Now, music is almost entirely about the self. We have very little music about our world, we sing entirely about our personal lives. In preparing the music, you did pre-recordings, but once you were shooting, it became apparent that after years of pandemic and strike delays with time for practice, the live performances were better? Was that scary ? It was less scary for me than it was for my sound team and in the edit room. Recordings are more challenging in these different locations, wherein to get a quality recording of the guitar playing, banjo playing, and singing, you have trucks going by, random creaks and sounds. And I had to convince them I didn’t care, that we could fix them later. But there were myriad technical issues, like, “What if Timmy plays the song at one rhythm in one take and then increases by two rhythm beats the next take?” The truth was, he did; the rhythm does vary slightly, but you don’t feel it because the song is so alive. It was much ado about nothing compared to the gains we got by allowing him to do it. It was a process that was rolling. I let us do the first song live; that worked so well we tried it again with the next. And in a sense, we always held the pre-records back there as a backup, and as we rolled forward, we got better and better. The sound team figured out where to hide mics in [Chalamet’s] hair or his hat, or secret mics inside the guitar. Everyone adapted and suddenly developed a brilliant technique to make it all happen. And you somehow got the period right. I grew up in New York in the ’60s and ’70s. I was born in ’63 but I remember those streets, the smell of them, the pickle barrels, the wonderful collection of humanity. That later period, 1969, is harder because you could look like a road production of “Hair” if you don’t watch yourself. But this period, as Bob himself said, the early ’60s were an extension of the ’50s, and the late ’60s were the beginning of the ’70s. And the ’60s, according to Bob, didn’t really exist. There was a dividing line at ’65 and everything onward was a prologue to the ’70s. The big change occurred somewhere around the Newport concert, and the arrival of the Beatles and The Stones, and the worsening of the Vietnam War, and the assassinations, and Woodstock, became demarcations of of a dramatic cultural shift. You recreated Greenwich Village in New Jersey? One of the advantages we had by landing in New Jersey: for a lot of the street scenes, we found blocks that were still pretty much exactly as they were 60 years ago, and they just required a bit of dressing. If you tried to shoot this in New York, there’s not a single block we could even afford to shut down, given the five-star restaurants and businesses that would never agree to anything that didn’t give them each $100,000 a night to close. We shot a few days in New York, obviously, outside the Chelsea Hotel and the Supreme Court courthouse. But most of it was in New Jersey. This is not a conventional narrative. How did you keep the audience invested in the story, even though it was basically a string of musical performances? First of all, I viewed the musical performance as part of the scenes. I viewed the songs as part of the scene where the actors were acting, but on pitch. I had the same demands when they were singing as when they were acting without singing, which is that there always had to be a subtext. There always had to be dramatic tension, whether in the wings or between each other on the stage or with someone in the audience, that I never wanted it to just be wholly a recreation of a famous concert. Watching people sing is no different than when you’re doing an action sequence in an action picture: if there isn’t story development inside the action, or if there isn’t story development inside the song, then the song is a commercial break from the drama of the movie, and the movie unwinds. In the film, Chalamet performs 40 songs, some are guitar or harmonica or radio fragments, including 26 whole songs. He prepared 30 songs, but you had to pick the ones that you put in the movie for a reason. When I started writing, I was just dropping the songs where they went in. I was conscious of how the songs gained power as explications of his emotional state in the context of what was going on politically and emotionally for him at that time. So him singing “Song for Woody” couldn’t be more intentional. Each one of these songs were revealing another aspect of him, also a different energy. Many of his songs were talking directly to the audience. Had that been done much before? Folk music, at that point, existed as a world of covers. All popular music was primarily in [the early ’60s] people singing standards, even Coltrane and Davis, most of their albums were taking Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes, or “My Funny Valentine,” or taking popular melodies and bending them. What happened in the age of Dylan? The power of modern songwriting. Personal songwriting took over, and this idea that we only should sing songs that existed already, that have proven themselves with time, evaporated. And that’s what opened the door for Dylan’s descendants, because he was ready with a portfolio of insanely powerful original music. This film is an antidote to what is going on in Hollywood. It is the opposite of franchise filmmaking, and while we know Dylan and his songs, this is a modest movie that celebrates a gritty authenticity that we don’t see much anymore. I move between those worlds, and in some ways, they give me the license to drive and make these movies, and the wherewithal to put them together financially. And otherwise, these are a big risk for studios, especially if they’re going out theatrically. It’s a white elephant at this point that you have mainstream studios making original movies that don’t have a guaranteed audience, that rely upon execution in order to succeed. And I’m grateful to Searchlight and my friends at Disney for supporting me on this movie because it is a risk, and I miss these movies in the theater. And I grew up on 7’0s films, and so my style is, if anything’ more formed from the work of Mike Nichols and Alan Pakula and Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin and Bogdanovich, these are the movies I grew up on. And these were all extremely versatile filmmakers who moved from comedy to serious to fantasy to adventure, and there wasn’t this demand that we exist in a lane or a box. I feel that the work I do, moving from one to the other, is always additive, that I learned something about making a horror film that I bring to a musical biopic. I learned something making a fantasy film or a Marvel film that then becomes confidence in how to solve a problem in a dramatic scene. Making a movie like this, finding a bunch of amazing, committed, passionate young actors who are all supporting each other, lifting each other, the environment and the camaraderie on the set was a real joy and we felt purpose, because we felt that this music was about a world in which art could change things, not by directly protesting, but by getting under your skin, by reminding you that we can look within and ask ourselves some of these questions about the direction our world is heading without hitting us over the head with a history lesson or shaming us, so that we could be inspired to think about what our world could be. “A Complete Unknown” will be released in theaters December 25.Bucky Irving joined a very select group of players with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The rookie running back ran for 113 yards during the Buccaneers’ 48-14 win over the Carolina Panthers on Sunday. Irving has now rushed for 1,033 yards during the 2024 season, becoming the first Tampa Bay running back to reach the number since Doug Martin in 2015 and the first rookie running back to rush for at least 1,000 yards since Martin in 2012. Irving is the ninth player in franchise history to achieve the feat. “I will always give credit to those guys [offensive line],” Irving told reporters after the game. “They do a fantastic job going out there and executing and creating the holes for me. I just do my job and trust my track and good things happen.” Irving eclipsed the 1,000-yard mark on a 6-yard run late in the second quarter, but the 2024 fourth-round draft (No. 125) pick out of Oregon posted a couple of explosive plays earlier in the game. Irving ran around right end for 34 yards to set up the Buccaneers’ second touchdown. “We had a counter play and we had two pullers,” Irving told reporters after the game. “I had to trust the pullers and read it all out and then my instincts kicked in.” Irving is also vastly improved catching passes, he caught four passes for 72 yards in the game, with the majority coming on a 42-yard gain on a screen pass. “On the second one, we had a slow screen and we had to be able to sell the action and then avoid if it was a blitz and I had to get out in space and do what I do,” Irving told reporters. The back-to-back plays prompted Buccaneers’ fans to start chanting, “Bucky! Bucky!” Irving started for the first time since the season began and he rewarded coach Todd Bowles’ decision by rushing for at least 100 yards for the third time this season and he reached the mark for the third time in his last five games. “The guys trust me to go out there and have the ball in my hands,” Irving told reporters after the game. “I’ve just got to go out there and make plays when the ball is in my hands and go out there and execute at a high level.”

Jack Iuliano recovered a fumble by Malcom May at the Hampton 24, and though it took 10 plays, Uga went in for the touchdown and the game's final lead. Malcolm Mays scored on a 25-yard run for Hampton (5-7, 2-6 Coastal Athletic Association) but the PAT was blocked and Kevon Angry ran it back for Albany (4-8, 2-6), leaving Hampton with a 34-27 lead with 10 minutes remaining. Alex Jreige's 53-yard run then tied the game. Hampton led 28-0 before Van Weber threw a 12-yard touchdown pass to Carter Moses with a couple minutes left in the first half. Albany added 10 points in the third quarter, including Jackson Parker's 38-yard touchdown catch. Nick Totten's pick-6 early in the fourth quarter got the Great Danes within 28-25. Weber threw for 184 yards with two scores and an interception. Jreige rushed for 110 yards. AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football . Sign up for the AP’s college football newsletter: https://apnews.com/cfbtop25

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