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Kalashnikov, the maker of the world-renowned AK-47, has unveiled a new logo and a new slogan.

In a briefing for reporters, Rostec Corp. said the new branding emphasizes that its weapons are "protecting peace."

"The rebranding is a symbol of changes in the way our business works and our product lines that have been long in the making," Alexei Krivoruchko, Kalashnikov's chief executive, said at Tuesday's unveiling. "The new brand will reflect our main principles: reliability, responsibility and technological efficiency."

Russia Today notes that the new slogan is a little more complex than that. In English, the company says, the slogan is "Protecting Peace," but in Russian, the slogan can mean two things depending on how you interpret the Russian word mir.

"In Russian it translates as 'Weapons of Peace' or 'Weapons of the World,' " the state-funded Russia Today reports. "The ambiguity missed in the English version is meant to stress both the prevalence of Kalashnikov firearms in the world and its producer's mission to provide nations and individuals with the means to protect themselves."

In its story, The Guardian takes note of a slick video released to promote the new branding. The paper reports that it relies on an "edited version of its history that glosses over the numerous messy civil wars in which it has been the main instrument of killing."

The paper goes on:

" 'The gun was made for the defence of a country that was living through the cold war and had to be prepared for a major intervention,' says the video voiceover. 'The simple and reliable AK was also in demand well beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.

" 'It precipitated not just a technological but a social revolution. Freedom movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America could at last fight back against professional colonial armies. The AK-47 gave them the chance to demand rights and achieve justice. This is a weapon which helped people defend their families and futures, and demand the right to a peaceful future.' "

In truth, the gun was used by freedom fighters, but the more than 100 million AK-47s and its variants sold across the world have also been used by a wide range of infantry soldiers and terrorists.

We noted this back in January, when the Russian Orthodox Church published a letter it received from Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47.

In the letter, Kalashnikov expressed anguish over the deaths his invention may have caused. He wrote:

"My spiritual pain is unbearable.

"I keep having the same unsolved question: If my rifle claimed people's lives, then can it be that I ... a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?

"The longer I live, the more this question drills itself into my brain and the more I wonder why the Lord allowed man to have the devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression."

With the new branding, the company hopes to expand its business domestically and internationally.

Krivoruchko added that the company was planning to ship 200,000 weapons a year to the U.S. and Canada, but those plans are on hold because of the sanctions imposed on Russia by the U.S. and its allies.

AK-47

Women's reproductive rights are once again before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday. Only this time, pregnancy discrimination is the issue and pro-life and pro-choice groups are on the same side, opposed by business groups.

In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that an employer that does not include pregnancy in its disability plan is not discriminating based on gender; it's just omitting coverage for one disability. Congress quickly amended the sex-discrimination law to ban discrimination based on pregnancy. But since then, most appeals courts have interpreted the law narrowly. Wednesday's case is a test of what is now required under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

The case was brought by Peggy Young, then of Annapolis, Md., who had been driving a United Parcel Service delivery truck for four years when she became pregnant. UPS requested that she contact the company nurse, and the nurse asked for a doctor's note.

Young explained to her doctor that her job involved driving the early morning shift at the airport, and that almost all of her pickups involved envelopes and small packages. She says the doctor thought the request for a note was "odd," but wrote one recommending that Young not lift more than 20 pounds.

"When I took the note to the nurse, she basically said, 'Well, we don't give alternative work or light duty to off-work incidents.' I'm like, 'I'm pregnant, there's not an incident here, and I can do my regular job.' They would not allow me to," says Young.

She lost her job and UPS health insurance for nine months.

The job and insurance losses were financially difficult for Young and her husband, she says. "Many nights I didn't sleep so well." She adds that it was "very disturbing that I couldn't work when I wanted to work. ... They coded me in their system as disabled, but I didn't qualify for disability because I could work. ... I'm a normal person, I was just pregnant. Pregnancy is not a disability. Pregnancy is not a handicap. It's none of that."

Young sued UPS for back pay and damages under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. UPS fought the suit in court, contending that it treated Young just as it treated other employees who were limited in their ability to lift as a result of events that took place off the job. UPS's policy is that drivers are supposed to be able to lift up to 70 pounds. It didn't matter to the company that Young's actual job required her to lift more than 20 pounds only a few times a month, and that a co-worker was willing to help.

In the Supreme Court on Wednesday, lawyer Caitlin Halligan, representing UPS, will tell the justices that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was not intended to accommodate pregnancy. Rather, she says, the act bars only intentional discrimination by an employer. UPS, she asserts, has no animus toward pregnant women; it has a generally applied policy that does not accommodate disabilities that occur off the job.

"A facially neutral policy, a policy that does not single out pregnant women on its face for unfavorable treatment, has never been determined to be intentionally discriminatory on its face," Halligan contends.

Although UPS prevailed in the lower courts, the case was dismissed without trial, and some of the facts in this case are in dispute.

Representing Peggy Young in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, University of Michigan law professor Samuel Bagenstos will tell the justices that drivers who lost their licenses were assigned light duty until they could get their licenses back — in other words, that nonpregnant workers with temporary disabilities were treated more favorably than pregnant workers.

He says that UPS had drivers who had strokes and hypertension who were reassigned to light duty to allow them to get their health back so they could once again qualify for driving. "And that's exactly the same treatment that UPS refused to give Peggy Young," he contends.

He maintains that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act requires pregnant women to be treated the same way that other individuals are treated who have temporary disabilities.

UPS says that it did just that. It argues that workers who suffer on-the-job injuries are in a separate category. And it disputes the contention that it accommodated with light duty nonpregnant workers who could not drive or lift because of events that occurred off the job.

While Wednesday's case could have enormous ramifications for women in the workplace, other factors are moving to limit policies like the one at UPS. Indeed, after the Supreme Court agreed to hear Peggy Young's case, UPS changed its policy to accommodate pregnant workers like Young. The company notes that nine states have now adopted laws mandating such accommodations. But there is another reason as well. In 2008, Congress amended the Americans with Disabilities Act to require accommodation of temporary disabilities, and the federal government has interpreted that coverage to include accommodations for pregnancy.

That word seems not to have gotten to the U.S. Postal Service, which still has a policy on pregnancy-related disabilities like the old one at UPS.

Given the times, the Norwegian thriller Pioneer is hardly the first thriller in recent memory to delve into the poisonous fallout from a nation's suddenly acquired wealth. But it may be the first to conduct business from the floor of the noirishly cinematic North Sea, a roiling stretch of grey water where huge supplies of oil and gas were discovered off the coast of Norway in the 1980s. Trust me, this is not Bikini Bottom.

Expertly directed by Erik Skjoldbjaerg (who made the original Insomnia, later remade by Christopher Nolan with Al Pacino and Robin Williams), Pioneer takes its cue from the thrillers of the 1970s. So it's less concerned with the seeking truth than with paranoia's nasty little habit of swelling to fill all available psychic space in the mind of any poor schlub who tries to take on Mighty Mammon. That's a daunting task under the best of circumstances, but it can turn deadly when undertaken from inside a pressure chamber 500 meters under the sea, where the Norwegian government, aided by American industry, means to lay a pipeline to the shore.

That's mostly where we find Petter (Aksel Hennie), an alpha deep-sea diver growing crazier by the hour as he tries to find out who or what is behind the apparently accidental death of his experienced brother Knut (Andre Eriksen) in what ought to have been a routine dive. The more Petter pokes his nose into standard procedure, the less standard it looks to him. Americans and Norwegian pols get bossy; fat envelopes change hands a lot. Colleagues slide between support and menace: one slips him a potentially incriminating videotape and pays a price; another may or may not be taking orders from foreign bodies; still another is blamed for the death of Knut, whose grieving widow (Stephanie Sigman) is mysteriously reluctant to join Petter in his bid for justice. Is an American diver (Wes Bentley, giving great scowl) trying to kill him or protect him?

Is a war between Big Government and Bigger Finance being waged over Petter's hot head? Pioneer is rooted in real events: The Norwegian divers, who may or may not have sustained neurological damage from the expedition, filed suit against the Government; the dispute drags on today. But Skjoldbjaerg nimbly juggles realism with genre, with Polanski a powerful influence. Petter's psychic anxiety and confusion recall Chinatown, while Pioneer's palette owes much to the murky, slate-grey ambience of The Ghost Writer. The underwater sequences stun and terrify — nothing says claustrophobia quite like two weeks in a pressurized diving bell with someone you can't necessarily trust — and there's almost as much moisture and terror on land to drive Petter round the bend.

Like Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes, Petter is a crusader crossed with a rube who doesn't understand the forces he's up against. The movie's take on human nature is only a shade less jaundiced than Polanski's. Watching Petter grow ever more unhinged by the ambiguity of his quest, one thinks of Noah Cross' dictum that in the right time and place, everyone is capable of anything. Where powerful interests are at play, Petter discovers, it can be awfully hard to tell whodunit.

The new film Inherent Vice satirizes over-complicated detective story plots by having an especially over-complicated plot of its own. It's a Paul Thomas Anderson adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel.

"It's so dense," co-star Josh Brolin tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I mean, Pynchon will be following some linear structure and then suddenly he'll take a big bong hit and go off on some tangent that still, you realize, eventually comes around and actually is connected in various ways."

The film is set in 1970 in a fictional California beach town where a burned out hippie private eye, played by Joaquin Phoenix, squares off with a Los Angeles Police Department detective, played by Brolin. Brolin's character, Lt. Detective "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, who hates hippies and calls himself a "renaissance cop," is investigating a murder and kidnapping case.

The son of actor James Brolin, Josh Brolin started his film career when he was 17 in The Goonies. After that he played gay ATF agent in the comedy Flirting with Disaster. In the film Milk, he was nominated for an Oscar for his role as Dan White, the San Francisco supervisor who shot supervisor and gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

But Brolin says he was a "blue-collar actor" who was always looking for his next job before his role in No Country for Old Men, where his character was pursued by a demented hit man.

Now, he says, he gets to act for directors like Paul Thomas Anderson.

"I find the experience so much more familial than anything else I've ever experienced regarding film," he says.

Brolin has often played extreme personalities. He attributes that more to his imagination than his experience as a teenager hanging out with people who were into extremes — music, sports and drugs.

"I don't think acting is experience," he says. "I could be wrong. I could be completely wrong, but I think that acting is a very active imagination and the ability to find conviction, total conviction, in your imagination. That's what it is for me now, at least."

Interview Highlights

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Actor Josh Brolin also recently starred in Oldboy and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Larry Busacca/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Larry Busacca/Getty Images

Actor Josh Brolin also recently starred in Oldboy and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.

Larry Busacca/Getty Images

On reading the screenplay of Inherent Vice for the first time

You can't speed-read Pynchon. It's just impossible. And [Paul Thomas Anderson's] adaptation was so loyal that it was like reading the book. ... But when you're reading it, you have to lend yourself to it.

I was trying to read it for me in order to meet [Director] Paul [Thomas Anderson] before I left on vacation. And then once I went on vacation and was able to really read the book and take it in slowly — as it should be taken in — I saw the validity in me possibly playing it.

On his experience working with Paul Thomas Anderson

Before No Country [For Old Men] — not that I'm not now — but [I was] just more of a blue-collar actor who was looking for his next job, whereas [now I work] with the Coen [Brothers] or ... Paul [Thomas Anderson] or Gus Van Sant or people like that. ...

There's usually a lot of ego, a lot of pretense, a lot of screaming, a lot of yelling, a lot of putting people in their place, where I don't see that with this.

This just seems like creating an ambiance of creative allowance and trusting the filmmaker that he's going to edit it in a way that will be the least embarrassing in an embarrassing venue. That's how I've always seen it, it's an embarrassing profession. It's not embarrassing to be in the profession, but the act of doing it is humiliating sometimes.

“ That's always the question as an actor: Can I live up to what this person has written? There's always a fear around that.

- Josh Brolin

On why acting can be humiliating

You're revealing things and you don't know, given a scene, if you're going to be able to do it. That's always the question as an actor: Can I live up to what this person has written? There's always a fear around that. I would love to feel an arrogance in saying, "I hope that the writing is as good as I'm going to be right now," but I've never felt that, I don't think I'll ever feel it. There's a nervousness and an embarrassment. It's not an embarrassment like, "I'm going to look bad." It's just an embarrassment of, "I don't know if I'm good enough to live up to this."

On his father James Brolin landing a role on Marcus Welby, M.D. and becoming a TV star

I don't remember exactly when he did that show, when he started the show, but I do remember ... that we'd have no money or we'd be staying in a guest house and I remember [my mom] saying at one point [that] my crib was a dresser drawer. They really didn't have any money. ...

My dad was just kind of doing what he could do for jobs and money and small work, but then he got that job and it turned out to be the No. 1 show. I remember people reacting to him. I don't think I ever saw it until much, much, much later. I didn't understand what that meant, being an actor, other than we weren't moving as much.

On growing up on a ranch surrounded by animals

We had a 230-acre ranch in Paso Robles, [Calif.]. And with the money that my dad made, which I'm sure was much more my mother's decision than my father's, she ran a wildlife way station with the wild animals ... on our land. We grew up with a few wolves. I helped birth a lot of mountain lions; we had a lot of bobcats. I've a lot of scars — physical, not emotional.

On how film allows you to re-create yourself

I love film so much because not only can you research it and can you study it, almost like a play, but then you do the film for three months and then that's it; it's done. I think that was happening in my life, too, and it also happened in my kid's life: a lot of moving, a lot of different cultures and completely immersing yourself in that culture and then it turning into something else when you left. So I was the cowboy kid and then I was the punk rock kid and then I moved to L.A. and then I was the karate kid or whatever I did.

More On Josh Brolin

Movie Reviews

At Home, With Mom And Her Murderous Beau

Josh Brolin: Playing The President

On whether he sees drama as a drug and not getting lost in art

I used to. I don't anymore. I heard something recently that I liked: "Drama is not an emotion." ... I would never agree with that until fairly [recently]. I think [drama] has its place, creatively, when you're representing human behavior and extremes of human behavior, but I don't necessarily think that [it's necessary] in your life, whereas I [used to think that]. I didn't understand the split between the two. I didn't see the wall between the two. ...

Now I'm on another kick, probably another extreme kick: ... Why do you have to lose yourself in art? Can't there be moments where you can lose yourself within the boundaries of what you're doing — and then come back from that?