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The 105-year-old Adolphus hotel strikes just the right balance between old-world sophistication and Wild West fun.

British designer Daniel Hopwood brings whimsy and sophistication to one of his latest residential interior design projects.

Two leading initiatives trying to move the apparel industry towards a single solution for compliance and sustainability are to practice what they preach by working together in a bid to reduce the time and money spent on duplicated auditing.

A new study says new policies and technologies to substantially reduce release of textile microfibres “are urgently needed.”

Vietnam is expected to yield comprehensive gains from the Comprehensive and Progressive Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a new report predicts, with the country’s apparel sector one of the main beneficiaries.

US apparel giant VF Corp has entered into a definitive agreement to sell the Nautica brand business to Authentic Brands Group (ABG), owner of Juicy Couture and Jones New York.

Bricks and mortar stores remain a key part of the retail experience, a new study suggests, as traditional and digital continue to merge and consumers seamlessly shop across the two touchpoints.

Imagine lying in bed cozy and warm, wondering if you should get up, pack your surfboard and go surf.

“Alexa, ask Surfline what’s the surf report at the Huntington Beach Pier?” 

Or maybe you have a trip coming up, and want to know whether to pack a wetsuit.

“Alexa, what’s the water temperature at Waikiki?”

Finding out the surf conditions just got easier, as Huntington Beach-based forecasting company Surfline.com this week announced a new collaboration with Amazon called “Surfline for Alexa” giving wave-chasers a new way to “know before you go,” as the Surfline motto goes.

“I think that’s a cultural value of our company, to be pushing our limits,” said Ross Garrett, Surfline.com’s Senior Vice President of corporate development. “Surfline, in the surf media landscape, we have a bit of responsibility to take the surfing world into the future. There’s not really any one else that is going to do that. But that’s not new, we’ve done that for 35 years.”

From phones to Fitbits

When the company was first started by founder Sean Collins with 976-SURF, the call-in recording was groundbreaking for the time. Most 976 calls at the time were illicit in nature, Garrett joked, and there were plenty of upset parents wondering what the $1.50 charge was on their phone bill.

Then came the invention of the fax machine.  Then came the website, admittedly “clunky and weird,” Garrett said, and the first web cams, which were flip photos that uploaded so fast that the stream looked like a video.

Besides getting forecasts from computers and phones, Surfline has also in recent years brought surf reports to wearable products. Four years ago, they teamed up with watch brand Nixon for the “Ultra Tide,” which gives surf forecasts and tides. They also recently teamed with Fitbit to have the Surfline app on the wrist device.

Developing an Alexa “skill” (an app for voice-activated Amazon devices) is just another way for the surf forecasting company to explore new methods to deliver wave information.

“Voice is on this really rapid curve of adoption. The interface is getting better and better. For us, it’s super important that we can figure this thing out,” Garrett said. “We’re returning to voice, (but now) it’s a robot reading the data and output. It’s kind of the next frontier of how we deliver value to surfers.”

How it works

The skill has a catalog of Surfline’s daily reports, which include surf conditions, wave height, wind, tide and water temperature data for thousands of surf spots.  For the moment, the reports are limited to spots in the United States.

It works on any Alexa-enabled device, such as Echo devices, Fire TV with Alexa remotes and Fire tablets.

In addition to surf height, users can request: “Alexa, ask Surfline for the wind at Malibu,” or “Alexa, ask Surfline for the tide at Trestles.” The skill launches when a user says “Alexa, open Surfline.” Saying “Alexa, ask Surfline for help” will bring up the voice of lead forecaster Kevin Wallis, who will talk users through directions.

“Voice interface, it’s sort of astounding, for certain tasks for quarries it is so much easier to ask then to touch your way through the experience, typing it in,” Garrett said. “Voice is just the next  step on that curve. To me, it’s the jump from mouse to touch, it’s that significant… l think we’ll find it’s one big step, in many steps to follows.”

Facebook shares posted their steepest drop since 2015 as U.S. and European officials demanded answers to reports that a political advertising firm retained information on millions of the social network’s users without their consent.

Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are calling on Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to appear before lawmakers to explain how U.K.-based Cambridge Analytica, the data-analysis firm that helped Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency, was able to harvest the personal information.

Facebook has already testified about how its platform was used by Russian propagandists ahead of the 2016 election, but the company never put Zuckerberg himself in the spotlight with government leaders. The pressure may also foreshadow tougher regulation for the social network.

U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, and John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, have called on the chairman of the Judiciary Committee to bring in technology company CEOs, including from Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, for public questioning.

In a letter Monday to Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, Klobuchar and Kennedy said they have “serious concern regarding recent reports that data from millions of American was misused in order to influence voters.”

“The lack of oversight on how data is stored and how political advertisements are sold raises concerns about the integrity of American elections as well as privacy rights,” the senators wrote. A hearing with the CEOs would allow the committee to learn “what is being done to protect Americans’ data and limit abuse of the platforms, as well as to assess what measures should be taken before the next elections.”

Facebook on Friday said that a professor used Facebook’s log-in tools to get people to sign up for what he claimed was a personality-analysis app he had designed for academic purposes. To take the quiz, 270,000 people gave the app permission to access data via Facebook on themselves and their friends, exposing a network of 50 million people, according to the New York Times. That kind of access was allowed per Facebook’s rules at the time. Afterward, the professor violated Facebook’s terms when he passed along that data to Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook fell nearly 7 percent $172.56 on Monday in New York, wiping out all of the year’s gains so far. That marked the biggest intraday drop since August 2015. The company has lost some $35 billion in market value following news of the Cambridge Analytica breach.

Facebook found out about the breach in 2015, shut down the professor’s access and asked Cambridge Analytica to certify that it had deleted the user data. Yet the social network on Friday suspended Cambridge from its system, explaining that it had learned the information wasn’t erased. Cambridge, originally funded by conservative political donor Robert Mercer, on Saturday denied that it still had access to the user data, and said it was working with Facebook on a solution. On Monday, Facebook said Cambridge has agreed to a forensic audit of its servers and systems to determine whether the data was retained.

A researcher who worked with the professor on the app is now currently an employee at Facebook, which is reviewing whether he knew about the data leak.

The denials and internal inquiries did little to ease the criticism.

Damian Collins, a British lawmaker, said Sunday that Zuckerberg or another senior executive should appear in front of his committee because previous witnesses have avoided difficult questions, creating “a false reassurance that Facebook’s stated policies are always robust and effectively policed.” He added in an interview on British radio Monday that Zuckerberg should “stop hiding behind his Facebook page and actually come out and answer questions about his company.”

The next few weeks represent a critical time for Facebook to reassure users and regulators about its content standards and platform security, to prevent rules that could impact its main advertising business, according to Daniel Ives, an analyst at GBH Insights.

“Changes to their business model around advertising and news feeds/content could be in store over the next 12 to 18 months,” Ives wrote in a note to investors.

Facebook, meanwhile, has sought to explain that the mishandling of user data was out of its hands and doesn’t constitute a “breach” ” a definition that would require the company to alert users about whether their information was taken, per U.S. Federal Trade Commission rules.

Menlo Park-based Facebook no longer allows app developers to ask for access to data on users’ friends. But the improper handling of the data raises systemic questions about how much companies can be trusted to protect personal information, said Nuala O’Connor, president and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology.

“While the misuse of data is not new, what we now see is how seemingly insignificant information about individuals can be used to decide what information they see and influence viewpoints in profound ways,” O’Connor said in a statement. “Communications technologies have become an essential part of our daily lives, but if we are unable to have control of our data, these technologies control us. For our democracy to thrive, this cannot continue.”

The Clippers looked exhausted Sunday. Their legs looked heavy. Their arms, too.

It’s been a long, difficult run to reach this point in 2017-18, and no one can say they didn’t push it to the limit, fighting through injuries, absorbing a blockbuster trade at midseason, battling with determined competition and emerging as a playoff contender in the chaotic Western Conference.

The Clippers looked fatigued during and after a 122-109 loss Sunday to the Portland Trail Blazers at Staples Center. Their third consecutive loss dropped them into 10th place in the conference standings, two games out of the eighth and final playoff position with 13 regular-season games to play.

They vowed to fight to the finish, but how much fight is left in them?

“I don’t want to hear, ‘I’m tired,’” Clippers guard Austin Rivers said before the team left for a four-game trip that begins Tuesday. “Everyone’s tired. I’m exhausted when I’m playing out there. So is everybody else. We are in a different situation. We have three or four guys who have been injured.”

In fact, the Clippers will be without guards Patrick Beverley and Avery Bradley because of season-ending knee and abdominal surgeries, respectively, and forward Danilo Gallinari, who is sidelined indefinitely by a fractured right hand.

At one point earlier in the season, the Clippers were without four of their opening-night starters because of injuries. They lost nine consecutive games at one point and were thought to be too down and too out to rally for a seventh consecutive playoff appearance.

The Clippers rallied, though. They rose as high as seventh place before falling back last week.

“You play hard and give yourself opportunities,” said guard Lou Williams, who has come off the bench to score 30 points or more 11 times this season, the most by a reserve in the NBA since Ricky Pierce had 17 games with 30 or more in 1989-90 with the Milwaukee Bucks.

“There’s no science to it,” he added.

Six of their next seven games are on the road, starting with Tuesday’s visit to the Target Center to face the eighth-place Minnesota Timberwolves. They conclude the regular season with home games in five of their final six, including their finale against the Lakers on April 11.

“We’ve just got to go hoop, man,” Rivers said. “Just go have fun. We’ve got to go out there and have fun and compete and let things come. You can’t ease into things anymore. There’s 13 games left and we’ve got to understand that. We do have to have a sense of urgency.

“But at the same time, I don’t want us to be in panic mode. Let’s just go hoop. Just take it game-by-game. I’m just looking at Minnesota. I don’t know who we play after that. I don’t really care. We’ve got to beat Minnesota. Then after that, the next team. Then after that, the next team.

“It’s a big-time stretch for us.”

The Clippers also play the Milwaukee Bucks, Indiana Pacers and Toronto Raptors on their trip. They return home to host the Bucks before hitting the road again to play the Phoenix Suns and the Trail Blazers. The Suns are the only opponent among the six that’s not in the playoff picture.

“Listen, it’s hard, we’re shorthanded, this trip is tough, but I guarantee you ‘Thibs’ isn’t telling Minnesota, ‘The poor Clippers, we got to take it easy on them,’” Clippers coach Doc Rivers said, referring to Timberwolves coach Tom Thibodeau by his nickname.

“They’re going to be ready. It’s a huge game for us. It’s a huge game for them. Then after that, each team you play, it’s a big game for them. It should be something you enjoy. Enjoy this thing because it’s great. I love it. We’ve just got to be ready to play.”