STATUS UPDATES
A week in which Aussies were dissed, a guitar was missed and a drug lord’s brother took on Netflix
WARNED Fans of Pokemon GO, a game in which players use their phones to capture virtual characters in the real world. One of the game’s locations is Australia’s Darwin Police Station. In a Facebook post, the force advised, “You don’t actually have to step inside in order to gain the poke-balls . . . It’s also a good idea to look up, away from your phone and both ways before crossing the street.”
SCORNED Netflix and Narcos, the series about Medellin drug lord Pablo Escobar, by Escobar’s brother Roberto. The show’s first season contained “lies and discrepancies,” he wrote in a letter to the streaming network, obtained by TMZ. “I hope you are not profiting from my show,” he adds, “and if you are I ask you to share some profits with us.”
SENTENCED Two young brothers in court. Their preliminary sentence is to write essays about Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old with a toy gun who was shot dead by Cleveland police in 2014. The boys were found playing with BB guns in another Clevelandarea park. “When a police officer has to respond, in this particular climate, you are putting yourself at risk,” Magistrate Je’Nine Nickerson said.
UPHELD A lower court’s refusal to dismiss charges against Michelle Carter, a teen who sent her boyfriend dozens of text messages encouraging him to commit suicide. “The time is right and you’re ready, you just need to do it!” the then 17-year-old wrote in one text to Carter Roy III, 18. Roy was found dead in his idling truck in a Massachusetts parking lot in 2014.
HUMBLED Emma Watson’s new film, The Colony, which took in £47, or $79, from U.K. theatres on its debut weekend. The film, about a woman rescuing her boyfriend from a cult, opened at only three cinemas on the same day it was made available to stream online. Watson’s next movie should make a considerably bigger splash: she stars in the Disney remake of Beauty and the Beast.
STUMBLED Vanity Fair and its cover profile of Margot Robbie, which has inspired withering reaction, both from those offended by its perceived sexism — “sexy and composed even while naked but only in character” — and by its characterization of the actress’s native land, Australia, as being populated by “throwback people” who “still live and die with the plot turns of soap operas.”
DISPUTED The ownership of Kurt Cobain’s most famous guitar. His daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, and her estranged husband, Isaiah Silva, are involved in a bitter fight over the Martin D-18E used on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged, which Silva says his wife gave him as a wedding gift. Bean and mom Courtney Love both say no way, TMZ reports. They want the instrument — valued at $1 million or more — returned. Now.
COMPUTED The number of seconds in 2016, which will be one more than usual. To compensate for a slowing of the Earth’s rotation, the U.S. Naval Observatory will insert a “leap second” on Dec. 31 at 23:59:59 p.m. co-ordinated universal time (UTC), or 7:59:59 p.m. eastern standard time. As a result, the Master Clock in Washington, D.C., will move to 23:59:60 before changing to 00:00:00.