Oct. 23 (UPI) — American Airlines announced Thursday it is onboarding a new commercial chief as the air carrier seeks to match its rivals.
Company officials revealed Nathaniel Pieper will be American Airlines’ next chief commercial officer effective Nov. 3.
“Nat is a world-class, results-oriented leader who has achieved tremendous success throughout his entire career,” said American CEO Robert Isom, adding that Pieper was “well-versed in the airline business, having led teams across multiple” different airline conglomerates.
Pieper, 56, currently sits as CEO of the Oneworld alliance in a collaborative that includes a number of airlines, including American and British Airways. His prior experience included high-level positions in finance, networks and fleet strategy.
“Nat’s experience and expertise, coupled with his recent work with us leading oneworld, make him incredibly well-suited to lead our Commercial team moving forward,” added Isom in a statement.
Pieper, who will report directly to Isom, replaced Vasu Raju after a corporate business-travel strategy failed its goal and ignited fierce pushback from travel industry leaders.
“He is exactly the kind of leader we want at American — collaborative and a great people leader with a relentless focus on delivering results while keeping an eye to the future,” Isom said in a staff note seen by CNBC.
Pieper joined American after time at Northwest Airlines, Delta and Alaska Airlines after entering the industry in the late 1990s.
He will oversee, among other departments, American’s commercial business strategy, loyalty program, network planning and revenue and sales departments.
In the annals of things I could not have seen coming, none has been more unexpected than “Women Wearing Shoulder Pads,” a queer Spanish-language stop-motion comedy melodrama, set in the aesthetic world of a 1980s Pedro Almodóvar film. (It arrives Sunday at midnight on Adult Swim, the home of things one doesn’t see coming, and premieres the next day on HBO Max.)
Though it takes place in Ecuador, its central character, Marioneta Negocios (Pepa Pallarés), is Spanish, and it’s easy enough to imagine Almodóvar muse Carmen Maura in the role — though it is also impossible to imagine the story told as well, or at all, in any other way. When I call this series perfect, notwithstanding the happy imperfections of its puppets and sets, it’s not because everything works as its meant to, but because there’s nothing you can measure it against — it occupies its own self-created space. Every element is necessary. Even presenting it in English would be to lose romantic, dramatic, telenovelistic force.
At the center of the story is the cuy, a guinea pig eaten in Andean South America, though in this telling they’re also used in a version of bullfighting. (Some cuys are large enough to ride on.) The primary action is a power struggle between Marioneta, a socialite running a campaign promoting cuy as pets, not food, and Doña Quispe (Laura Torres), who has risen from life as a humble butcher to the anything-but-humble CEO of the country’s most famous restaurant, El Cuchillo (the knife).
Mixed up in their lives are Coquita Buenasuerte (Gabriela Cartol), Marioneta’s seemingly happy-go-lucky assistant; Espada Muleta (Kerygma Flores), a matadora in love with Marioneta; Nina (Nicole Vazquez), Doña Quispe’s vegetarian daughter, serving a pro-cuy group as its Minister of Refreshments and Head of Recruitment for Rebellious Teens — “I have looked upon the caged cuy through the prison of capitalist enterprise, through the hubristic iron bars of a homocentric world view” — who will become a pawn in the older women’s game.
Not everything will be as it seems.
Created by Gonzalo Cordova (a veteran of “Tuca & Bertie” and “Adam Ruins Everything”) and produced by the Mexican animation studio Cinema Fantasma, the series comes packaged as eight 11-minute episodes — that is cartoon length — which neatly constitute a short feature film. On the bill are mystery, suspense, terror, revenge, hot romance (including some puppet sex), masked stalkers, performance art, love notes posted with knives, parodies of television shows and commercials, old secrets coming to light and nuns singing karaoke.
From “Gumby” to “Rudolph” to “Wallace and Gromit” to “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” stop motion is of all forms of animation most magical and in its real-space, three-dimensional, handcrafted way the most like life, if not necessarily the most lifelike. (It can look ungainly, which is also part of its charm.) It’s a magnification of childhood playtime, a puppet show in which the puppets have broken loose from the puppeteers. The cleverness of the execution is as or more important than how seamless it is. “Women Wearing Shoulder Pads” does all sorts of neat tricks, some you notice and more you simply accept — and when deemed necessary, or just amusing, it will insert a live-action hand or mouth. It’s an exaggerated world — appropriately to the heavy-breathing material — but emotionally expressive, even moving, and lots of fun.
Aug. 10 (UPI) — A federal judge in Hawaii has outlawed commercial fishing in the Pacific Islands Heritage marine national monument, a protected and fragile ecosystem in the Pacific Ocean.
The action by judge Michael WJ Smith reverses a decision made by a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that banned fishing in parts of the monument that was signed by President Barack Obama while he was in office.
Friday’s court order by Smith means that commercial fishing cannot occur in waters 50 to 200 nautical miles around Johnson Atoll, Jarvis Island and Wake Island, and must stop immediately.
“The Fisheries Service cannot ignore our perspectives as the native people who belong to the islands and to the ocean that surrounds us,” said Solomon Pili, Kaho’ohalahala, a founding member of Kapa’a, the Conservation Council for Hawaii and the Center for Biological Diversity.
“The law guarantees a process where we can advocate for protecting the generations of our children’s children who are yet to be born.”
Earthjustice, an environmental conservation group, filed a lawsuit in May, arguing the National Marine Fisheries Service violated federal law by sidestepping the formal rulemaking process required to change fishing rules, which mandates public notice and comment.
President George W. Bush established the moment in 2009. It comprised 500,000 square miles of a remote part of the central Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaii. Obama widened the area in 2014.
Basketball Hall of Famer and former Lakers fan favorite Vlade Divac broke his hip Thursday when he fell from his motorcycle while riding near the Adriatic Sea coast in Montenegro.
On Friday, a spokesperson for a hospital in Risan said the 57-year-old Serbian basketball legend now has an artificial hip after emergency surgery.
“During the day, a surgical procedure was performed,” hospital spokesperson Ljubica Mitrovic said of Divac. “He is in a stable general and physical condition and is under a careful supervision of the medical staff.”
Divac, a 7-foot-1 center, was drafted by the Lakers in 1989 after leading the Yugoslavia men’s basketball team to an Olympic silver medal the previous year. He became a full-time starter during his second season as a Laker and soon emerged as a fan favorite, with frequent appearances in commercials, sitcoms and late-night talk shows.
After seven seasons with the Lakers, Divac was traded to the Charlotte Hornets for the recently drafted Kobe Bryant on July 1, 1996. (The Lakers would sign another 7-1 center, Shaquille O’Neal, as a free agent later that month.)
Divac played two seasons with the Hornets and signed with the Sacramento Kings as a free agent in 1999. He spent six years there — a stint that included his only All-Star season, in 2000-01 — before returning to the Lakers for the last of his 16 NBA seasons in 2004-05.
After finishing his career with 13,398 points, 9,326 rebounds, 3,541 assists and 1,631 blocked shots, Divac had his No. 21 jersey retired by the Kings in 2009. He was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2019.
Kampala, Uganda – It was June 5 when Ugandan soldiers arrived in Kasenyi, a town on the shores of Lake Albert in Ituri province in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Uganda’s army chief, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, posted a video on X showing what he said were residents “enthusiastically” welcoming the soldiers, as Chris Magezi, an aide to Kainerugaba and at the time acting spokesperson for Uganda’s People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) said the army had “occupied” it together with another Congolese town, Tchomia.
When Kampala first deployed troops to eastern DRC in November 2021, they were in pursuit of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a rebel group with Ugandan roots whose strongholds were located in Beni territory, in DRC’s North Kivu province. The group initially fought against the Ugandan government in pursuit of regime change, but from the 2010s onwards, it began aligning itself with the Islamic State Central Africa Province. In Uganda, the government accused the ADF of being behind several high-profile assassinations, while both countries blamed it for massacring civilians.
In 2021, during that first joint military operation between the Ugandan and Congolese armies, towns like Kasenyi remained unaffected.
But today, the Ugandan army’s footprint has expanded well beyond its original mission and into Ituri, by its own admission. This is despite the fact that the ADF, which has since dispersed and relocated far from its traditional bases, is not active in Kasenyi or other areas where the military has recently been operating, observers note.
In a statement in February, General Kainerugaba declared that Uganda would secure the entire border it shares with DRC: “That is our sphere of influence. Nothing will happen there without our permission,” he said on X.
On social media, Kainerugaba has frequently inserted himself into conversations about internal conflicts and the regional dynamics of the Congolese crisis.
He has openly expressed support for the M23 rebel group that has made rapid advancements in eastern DRC this year, seizing control of the capital cities of both North and South Kivu provinces.
M23 is reportedly backed by Rwanda and Uganda, according to various United Nations reports, though both countries have denied these allegations.
A Ugandan soldier patrols in Kasese, western Uganda bordering the DRC [File: James Akena/Reuters]
Economic interests
The expansion of the Ugandan army’s area of operation reflects Kampala’s shifting priorities in eastern DRC, according to army spokesperson Felix Kulayigye. He said the army is protecting Congolese communities as well as Uganda’s economic interests in the neighbouring country.
“Who is consuming Uganda’s products? Can commerce take place where there is instability? If we have commercial interests in eastern DRC, are those protectable or not?” Kulayigye told Al Jazeera.
From the start, Uganda’s military presence in DRC has carried an economic subtext.
According to a 2023 report by Deutsche Welle, as part of the agreement with the Kinshasa government to combat the ADF, Uganda was granted permission to build tarmac roads connecting key towns in DRC – routes designed to boost the movement of goods and deepen Uganda’s trade footprint in the region.
Although the text of the agreement was not released to the public, Ugandan soldiers, military equipment and road construction equipment entered all entered DRC in November 2021.
Solomon Asiimwe, an international relations lecturer at Nkumba University in Kampala, says although Uganda’s pursuit of the ADF may have appeared to be security-driven, the overriding factor was economic, though this was “hidden under the carpet”.
While some Congolese may be angered by Uganda’s expanded deployment, he suggests they should also consider the benefit of a steady supply of goods from Uganda. “Even Congolese have interests in supplying minerals to Uganda; they benefit from infrastructure and peace,” he said.
Eastern DRC’s market has become a battleground of its own. A recent analysis by The East African valued regional exports to the DRC at $2.9bn over nearly three years, with Uganda commanding a 68 percent share. Kenyan financial institutions have also staked their claim, entering DRC through bank acquisitions and the market was highly profitable – until M23’s advance this year halted their expansion.
But this trade has a dark side. Over the years, analysts and UN reports have accused both Uganda and Rwanda of acting as conduits for smuggled Congolese minerals and agricultural products such as cocoa and coffee.The International Court of Justice in 2022 ordered Uganda to pay the DRC $325m in reparations for the illegal exploitation of natural resources during its military presence in eastern DRC between 1998 and 2003; Kampala has paid several instalments since.
Analysts argue that mineral exploitation is visible in export data of these countries: for instance, Uganda’s gold exports reached $3bn in 2024, despite the country lacking any significant large-scale gold deposits.
Democratic Republic of the Congo military personnel patrol against Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU) rebels near Beni in North Kivu province, in 2013 [File: Kenny Katombe/Reuters]
‘Violation of Congolese sovereignty’
Ugandan army spokesperson Kulayigye said his country’s expanded deployment in Ituri was requested by Congolese authorities seeking help in fighting other armed groups destabilising the province.
“We had an additional mission at the request of Congolese authorities to deal with negative elements within Ituri,” he said.
Al Jazeera reached out to Congolese government spokesperson Patrick Muyaya to respond to this claim, but he did not reply to our questions at the time of publication.
Meanwhile, Congolese experts were sceptical, questioning both the legality and legitimacy of Uganda’s expanded mission.
“Uganda doesn’t have an agreement with the Congolese army to be in some parts of Ituri,” said Reagan Miviri, a conflict researcher at Ebuteli, a Kinshasa-based think tank. “They entered Congolese soil without permission. This is a violation of Congolese sovereignty.”
According to Miviri, Kinshasa has been silent on Uganda’s expanded operation, not because of approval but because it doesn’t want to have to confront both Uganda and Rwanda at the same time.
But he admits that in many areas where Uganda has deployed, it has more presence than the Congolese army.
Kambale Musavuli, a Congolese political analyst, calls Uganda’s growing military presence an occupation – one that “should alarm every Congolese and African who believes in sovereignty and territorial integrity”.
In response to criticism from analysts, Kulayigye said he was “disappointed by intellectuals” who sit in comfort talking about nothing, while on the ground, “people are dying at the hands of militias”.
Reminders of Congo wars
For Congolese observers, Uganda’s behaviour follows a historical script. From 1996 to 2003, Uganda and Rwanda intervened heavily in DRC, initially backing the rebel group that overthrew longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and installed Laurent Kabila – only to later turn against him. Both countries subsequently supported various rebel factions attempting to oust Kabila.
Though international pressure forced Uganda and Rwanda to formally withdraw at the beginning of the century, both nations maintained ties to rebel groups, including M23, which was born out of the unresolved issues of the 1990s Congo wars.
In January and February this year, M23 captured key cities including Goma and Bukavu in eastern DRC, which they still hold. The UN accused Rwanda of deploying up to 4,000 Rwandan soldiers in the DRC, which helped rebels capture the cities, while Uganda has been accused of allowing M23 to get supplies and recruits through its territory.
“It’s a continuation of a pattern we have seen for decades, where neighbouring countries exploit instability in eastern Congo to pursue military and economic interests under the guise of security operations,” said Musavuli.
In the aftermath of the Congo wars, several reports emerged, including from the UN, that Rwanda and Uganda were targeting Hutu civilians and looting and smuggling resources like coffee, diamonds, timber and coltan from the DRC.
Josaphat Musamba, a Congolese researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, sees direct links between today’s conflicts and the wars of the 1990s in a cast of characters that remains strikingly familiar: Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and former Congolese President Joseph Kabila – who is now based in Goma, an area under M23 control – were key players in those earlier conflicts.
“If you look at [today’s M23] commanders, you can connect them to those who were fighting in the First Congo War,” Musamba said. “All of them were working with Rwandan officers like James Kabarebe. I know two or three commanders of M23, and one of them was part of James Kabarebe’s bodyguard,” he claimed.
Kabarebe, now Rwanda’s state minister for regional integration, was a central figure in the rebellion that toppled Mobutu. He later served as army chief of staff under Laurent Kabila, the former Congolese leader and father of Joseph Kabila. Kabarebe was sanctioned by the US government for being “central to Rwanda’s support for the March 23 [M23]”.
Researchers also note that after M23’s first rebellion in the DRC failed in 2012-2013, many rebels fled across the borders to Rwanda and Uganda.
Congolese researchers say that while Kampala and Kigali may claim to be addressing security threats and rebel groups in eastern DRC – like ADF and the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), whose remnants were linked to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda – they are effectively carving out zones of control and economic exploitation in eastern DRC, just as they did in the 1990s.
The Congolese people, meanwhile, remain displaced, impoverished and without security. The UN said in April that renewed fighting with M23 this year had displaced nearly four million people in North and South Kivu alone.
“I don’t believe that Uganda [soldiers] have good intentions, especially in the operation in Ituri,” said Miviri. “I don’t understand why they are there.”
In Gaza, the sound of drones can be heard everywhere.
An analysis by Al Jazeera’s digital investigations team, Sanad, has revealed that Israel is repurposing commercial drones to use as weapons of war in the Strip.
And as drones become ever more accessible, the line between their civilian use and their military use is becoming increasingly blurred.
HONOLULU — Environmentalists are challenging in court President Trump’s executive order that they say strips core protections from the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument and opens the area to harmful commercial fishing.
On the same day of last month’s proclamation allowing commercial fishing in the monument, Trump issued an order to boost the U.S. commercial fishing industry by peeling back regulations and opening up harvesting in previously protected areas.
The monument was created by President George W. Bush in 2009 and expanded by President Obama to nearly 500,000 square miles in the central Pacific Ocean.
A week after the April 17 proclamation, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service sent a letter to fishing permit holders giving them a green light to fish commercially within the monument’s boundaries, even though a long-standing fishing ban remains on the books, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Honolulu.
The first longline fisher started fishing in the monument just three days after that letter, according to Earthjustice, which has been tracking vessel activity within the monument using Global Fishing Watch.
The Department of Justice declined to comment Friday.
The lawsuit noted that commercial longline fishing, an industrial method involving baited hooks from lines 60 miles or longer, will snag turtles, marine mammals or seabirds that are attracted to the bait or swim through the curtain of hooks.
“We will not stand by as the Trump administration unleashes highly destructive commercial fishing on some of the planet’s most pristine, biodiverse marine environments,” David Henkin, an Earthjustice attorney, said in a statement. “Piling lawlessness on top of lawlessness, the National Marine Fisheries Service chose to carry out President Trump’s illegal proclamation by issuing its own illegal directive, with no public input.”
Designating the area in the Pacific to the south and west of the Hawaiian Islands as a monument provided “needed protection to a wide variety of scientific and historical treasures in one of the most spectacular and unique ocean ecosystems on earth,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit added that allowing commercial fishing in the monument expansion harms the “cultural, spiritual, religious, subsistence, educational, recreational, and aesthetic interests” of a group of Native Hawaiian plaintiffs who are connected genealogically to the Indigenous people of the Pacific.
Johnston Atoll is the closest island in the monument to Hawaii, about 717 nautical miles west-southwest of the state.
May 23 (UPI) — State parks in Florida are now protected from commercial construction after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the State Park Preservation Act into law Thursday.
The act, which will take effect in July, prevents developers from constructing hotels, golf courses or other commercial enterprises in any of Florida’s 175 state parks.
Pinellas County Democratic Rep. Lindsay Cross, who also is an environmental scientist, posted to social media Friday that the act establishes “protections for all 175 state parks against commercial development,” and also thanked “everyone who fought for this bill, and who stood up to preserve our home.”
Republican Rep. Peggy Gossett-Seidman, Highland Beach, called the passage of the act a “bipartisan, bicameral legislative victory,” on her X account Thursday, and then quoted “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss to close her post with “I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.”
The new law came after a backlash caused by a purported plan proposed by the state in 2024 and allegedly leaked by the Florida Wildlife Federation to allow commercial development at nine different state parks. All future developments are not completely banned but will instead need to be conservation-minded, and support nature-friendly activities such as camping, hiking and kayaking.
The Florida Wildlife Federation posted a note of appreciation to its website Thursday, with thanks given to the Florida Senate and House “for their unanimous support of this legislation every step of the way,” and it called the law “a massive win for wildlife, outdoor spaces, and future generations who will get to experience Florida’s natural wonders just as they should be: wild and natural.”
