United Airlines to furlough 16,000 employees, Walmart creates virtual toy focus groups, and Facebook to block political ads the week before presidential elections

Hello, communicators:

The 77^th edition of La Biennale di Venezia, or the Venice Film Festival, premiered on Wednesday—the first in-person event for the film industry in six months.

Roberto Cicutto, the festival’s president, wrote in a statement: 

We were afraid that the same thing was going to happen at the Lido after the cancellation of so many festivals large and small. We have been lucky, and perhaps a little courageous too, in deciding, together with the director of the festival Alberto Barbera, the whole team of the Biennale and our cousins of the Venice Days and the Critics’ Week, to hold, in the presence of filmmakers, technicians and the public, our Film Festival on the appointed dates.

We are not proud to be the first, after the forced pause, to be able to do so. But we are proud of having shown (bearing in mind the situation of the pandemic in Italy and the world) that it can be done, putting in place all the safety measures and presenting a program that has little to envy those of the preceding years.