fouryear

The Directors Guild of America on Thursday night said it approved a four-year contract with the major studios.

The new contract will boost studio contributions to DGA’s healthcare plan, increase minimum salaries and offer AI protections. The DGA declined to say how many voted in favor of the contract, but in a memo to members, union President Christopher Nolan and National Executive Director Russell Hollander said members “voted overwhelmingly” to ratify it.

“Throughout this process, our focus was clear: protect our members, strengthen the Guild, and address the challenges facing our industry during a period of profound change,” Nolan and Hollander wrote in a memo to members sent on Thursday. “… We have achieved critical wins that put the Guild in a position to further protect our members economic and creative rights now and into the future.”

The newly ratified contract provides some stability in Hollywood, about three years after a summer of strikes led by the Writers Guild of America and performers guild SAG-AFTRA. WGA approved a contract with major studios under the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers in April and SAG-AFTRA members ratified their contract in June. All the contracts extend the terms to four years instead of three years, which studios had sought out.

The AMPTP in a statement thanked DGA, WGA and SAG-AFTRA “for their thoughtful and collaborative approach to negotiations.”

“Together, we reached agreements that deliver substantial gains for guild members while supporting greater stability across the entertainment business,” the AMPTP said. “We are encouraged by the trust built throughout this cycle and look forward to building on that momentum to advance opportunity and shared success across our industry.”

The new DGA contract starts on July 1 and runs through June 30, 2030. Key aspects of the agreement include requiring the studios to increase their contribution to DGA’s health plan by 24.4% over four years. In return, the DGA would support “modest” increases to the eligibility threshold and annual premiums.

The contract also increases minimum salaries on many jobs by 2.5% in the first year and up 3% for each of the following years in the agreement.

It also adds more rules around the use of AI technology, including requiring that directors oversee any footage created by artificial intelligence.

The final journey

“By mid-June it is over,” Evansis says.

The mature cicadas, dark-shelled and spent, begin flying towards the Umrong River in large numbers and drop into the rapids. The river fills with them. Along the banks, dead cicadas collect against wet stones and bamboo roots, their wings plastered flat by the current.

Locals call it niangtaser suicide. Hajong offers a simpler explanation: Cicadas are naturally drawn to sound and movement, and the fast-moving river may trigger that instinct in their final hours.

For the fish below the surface, it is a feast. For the forest above, closure.

The journey that began four years earlier beneath the ground ends in the same river that separates Livi’s home from the sanctuary.

Not everyone has watched that cycle for as long as Kewstar Majaw.

At 92, he has witnessed more emergences than almost anyone alive in the village. He served in the Indian Army. He loves watching football. And every four years, without fail, he waits for his noisy visitors.

For Kewstar, the passing of the cicadas has become another way of measuring life. World Cups came and went. Governments changed. Forests retreated. But every four years, if the rains arrived on time and the bamboo still held, the forest sang.

As a boy, he would follow his parents into the forest carrying bamboo containers, the sound reaching them before the insects came into view. In those days, the niangtaser was everywhere. Behind houses. In the trees along village paths. Young ones, mature ones – the forest floor was alive with them.

The chorus was so loud, he recalls with a laugh, that people stuffed cotton into their ears to bear it.

The insect did not need to be searched for. It found you.

Kewstar sits quietly for a moment. At his age, he has watched the forest retreat, the bamboo thin, and the chorus fade with each passing emergence. The insect that once appeared on his doorstep now requires a torch and a walk in the dark to be found.

“It was everywhere,” he says softly. “Now you have to go looking for it.”

In a few weeks, the cicadas will disappear beneath the earth once more,  keeping time in darkness until the cycle begins again. By the next emergence, another football World Cup will be under way somewhere else in the world.

Whether Saiden’s forests will still sing with them depends on what survives until then.

Michael O’Neill says he is “100% committed” to Northern Ireland after he signed a new four-year contract with the Irish FA, but he has not ruled out another dual role in the future.

O’Neill had been appointed interim Blackburn Rovers boss in February and had been balancing this role with his position at Northern Ireland, who lost to Italy in the World Cup play-offs in March.

However, it was announced earlier in the month that he would not be taking on the Blackburn job on a permanent basis.

On Wednesday, the IFA confirmed that O’Neill had extended his current contract by four years until 2032.

When asked if he would consider taking on a short-term dual role again in the future, O’Neill did not rule it out as he said: “That’s not a question I need to answer at this minute”, adding it was “hypothetical”.

O’Neill said that he did not “have any regrets” about taking on the role with Blackburn, but admitted he “probably could have done with a little less drama”.

“I said all along, I didn’t think it would affect our preparation for the Italy game, which it didn’t,” O’Neill said.

“I managed to keep Blackburn up, which was the remit of the job.

“I probably think that maybe I underestimated the reaction to it a little bit, but ultimately that’s a learning experience for me as well.”