Technology

Walmart continues to beef up its portfolio of digital brands, announcing on Friday that it had acquired Bare Necessities, an online retailer of lingerie, swimwear, hosiery and other intimates.

Walmart declined to disclose the terms of the deal.

The lingerie company, founded in 1998, will operate independently of Walmart. Over time, the e-commerce giant says it will make Bare Necessities& products available on Walmart.com, as well as on Jet.com, which Walmart acquired for more than $3 billion in 2016 to bolster its e-commercebusiness.

Walmart has long been one of the most active acquirers of startups and hasn&t slowed down in 2018. Just last week, thecompany announced it would purchasewomenplus-sized clothing brand ELOQUII. Before that, itpaid $225 million for a grocery delivery service called Cornershop and earlier this year, it completed its $16 billion acquisition of Flipkart —its largest M-A play yet.

ModCloth,Bonobosand Moosejaw are other Walmart-owned brands, all of which were acquired in 2017.

In a statement, Walmart said Bare Necessities fit into its broader acquisition strategy of buying up &category leaders with specialized expertise and assortment that can help enhance the customer experience.&

As part of the deal, Bare Necessities co-founder and chief executive officer Noah Wrubel will continue to run the company alongside chief operating officer Bill Richardson. Wrubel will also take charge of the intimates category for both Walmart.com and Jet.com. Bare Necessities& 170 employees will continue to run the business out of Edison, N.J., where the company is headquartered.

The global lingerie market is expected to bring in upwards of $60 billion in revenue by 2024, driven in large partby tech-enabled direct-to-consumer businesses& e-commerce sales.

In a letter addressed to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio make a very public case that Canada should leave Chinese tech and telecom giant Huawei out of its plans to build a next-generation mobile network.

&While Canada has strong telecommunication security safeguards in place, we have serious concerns that such safeguards are inadequate given what the United States and other allies know about Huawei,& the letter states.The senators warn Canada to &reconsider Huaweiinclusion in any aspect of Canada5G development, introduction, and maintenance.&

The outcry comes after the head of the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security dismissed security concerns regarding Huawei in comments last month. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security is Canadadesignated federal agency tasked with cybersecurity.

Next generation 5G networks already pose a number of unique security challenges. Lawmakers caution that by allowing companies linked to the Chinese government to build 5G infrastructure, the U.S. and its close allies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K.) would be inviting the fox to guard the henhouse.

As part of the Defense Authorization Act, passed in August, the U.S. government signed off on a law that forbids domestic agencies from using services or hardware made by Huawei and ZTE. A week later, Australia moved to block Huawei and ZTE from its own 5G buildout.

Due to the open nature of intelligence sharing between the U.S. and its closest allies, the Canadian government would be able to obtain knowledge of any specific threats that substantiate the U.S. posture toward the Chinese company. &We urge your government to seek additional information from the U.S. intelligence community,& the letter implores.

Even for those of us born decades after the event itself, Neil Armstrongfirst steps on the moon remain among historymost iconic and indelible images. Can a Hollywood movie tell us anything new about that moment

With &First Man& (which opens today), &La La Land& director Damien Chazelle certainly tries. The film climaxes with an eerie and beautiful dramatization of Apollo 11, and with Armstrongfamous words about a giant leap for mankind. But itwhat comes before that feels revelatory — the filmfastidious attention to the training, the mistakes and the disasters that all led up to that moment.

Most of those details come from real life, according to screenwriter Josh Singer (who won an Oscar for co-writing &Spotlight&). His starting point was James R. Hansenbiography of Armstrong (whoplayed in the film by Ryan Gosling), and Singer said he was also able to pepper Hansen, as well as Armstrongsons Mark and Rick, with questions.

That doesn&t mean everything in the film sticks to the historical record. In fact, Singer said that one of the things he tried to do in the annotated screenplay was to highlight the areas where the movie diverged from reality. But even then, it seems like the moments when Singer made things up or fudged the facts weren&t all that far from the truth.

&We felt a tremendous responsibility to Neil and his family,& he said. In addition, he noted that &anytime you&re treading in territory thatbeen written about a lot, you feel that ita little bit of a higher bar.&

For example, while the film shows the Gemini astronauts using a multi-axis trainer to prepare for weightlessness, itnot totally clear whether they actually used the trainer (basically a giant whirling machine) or the &vomit comet& plane.

Ultimately, Singer said they decided to go with the trainer despite the uncertainty because it &just felt better storywise,& foreshadowing a later scene in the film. Similarly, he said that while the LLRV crash shown in the movie was real, Armstrongactual injuries consisted of &a bloody tongue and trouble talking.& However, to convey that &he really did almost die,& Singer and Chazelle decided to show external injuries, rather than &making Ryan talk funny.&

In Singerview, it was the research that allowed him to write a film that &pushes [against] the historical narrative& around the space program. To be clear, itnot a wildly revisionist film — I walked out of the theater admiring Armstrong, his colleagues and what they accomplished. But Singer said he wanted to show that &there really was a human cost here.&

&Thata fairly provocative thing to say,& he argued. &The majority of the portraits of these men show the stiff upper lip. In that way, we&re trying to do what Steven [Spielberg] was trying to do with ‘Saving Private Ryan,& show the human side. Why was this the greatest generation Not because they were inherently great, but because they were willing to sacrifice.&

Singer said that the idea of sacrifice has contemporary relevance as governments and private companies plan to return to space exploration. He recalled being a child and hearing Ronald Reaganspeech after the Challenger disaster, where the president declared, &The future doesn&t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.&

&Those lines are just so powerful,& Singer said. &They sum up everything that this effort requires.&

Similarly, the film shows some of the broader social and political context of the Apollo missions, with protesters criticizing the extraordinary cost of the program when there were so many unsolved problems here on Earth.

&That question was much more prominent than people remember,& Singer said. &We think that at the time, everybody was all gung-ho, but it just wasn&t the case.&

For Singer, though, the answer to &Is it worth it& is clear. Itexpressed early in the film when Armstrong is asked why he wants to go to space. In response, he recounts going up in an F15 and looking down at the atmosphere, a view that gives him an entirely new perspective on Earth.

&Therea certain faith involved: I don&t know what I&m going to see, but I&m going to learn something, thatwhy we explore,& Singer said. &I&d like to think that actually, this movie is an argument for why to buck the trends and the criticism and the questions. That it is worth our time, and effort, and money, and sacrifice.&

And it sounds like Armstrongfamily is happy with the results. Via email, Rick Armstrong told me that Gosling and Claire Foy (who plays Rickmother Janet) &do an excellent job of capturing memories that I have.

&For example I was very glad to see that some of my Dadsense of humor comes through in the film, because he really was a pretty funny guy,& Armstrong said. &Claireportrayal is just so spot on that I don&t know how it could have been better. She was a very tough and independent woman and I think that comes through brilliantly.&

Rick and his brother Mark didn&t just consult on the film — they also had cameos (Rick told me, &I have a new appreciation for the patience required by everyone involved in movie making, there are long hours and a lot of sitting around!&), and they spoke out after Senator Marco Rubio suggested (absurdly) that the film might not be patriotic enough.

When I asked Rick how he sees the moon landing now, he said he agreed with his father that it was far more than a personal accomplishment.

&I believe it was a national accomplishment of 400,000 people that committed themselves to a goal and who all put in long hours and extra effort to make the impossible become possible, as well as the American taxpayers that footed the bill for it, and the government that authorized it,& Armstrong said.

&It was a global one in the sense that it was done on behalf of ‘all mankind&, as they went to great lengths to present it as a human achievement,& he continued. &Furthermore, our leadership rightly used the moon landing as a platform to improve relations with other countries based on scientific achievement, and of course, used it as a bridge with the Soviet Union to bring the Cold War to an end.&