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Its Loeffler vs. Warnock and Perdue against Ossoff. Heres a quick look at the candidates whose contests will determine control of the Senate.Published Jan. 5, 2021Updated Jan. 6, 2021[Read more on the history Raphael Warnock is chasing.]Georgia voters have two runoff elections, and control of the Senate, to decide on Tuesday. Heres a look at the four candidates lives and careers.Kelly Loeffler, a Republican appointed a year ago, has become deeply loyal to Trump.ImageCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesSenator Kelly Loeffler, 50, has spent the campaign telling audiences that she has lived the American dream, pitching herself as a modest farm girl who worked her way through college before becoming a financial executive and co-owner of the Atlanta Dream, a W.N.B.A. team.Ms. Loeffler is the daughter of a wealthy farming family from central Illinois, who inherited large tracts of rich agricultural land when she was in her early 20s. Her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, is the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and her largest campaign donor.Until 2017, Ms. Loeffler was the chairwoman of a corporate foundation that matched small donations that her companys employees made to many groups, including those that support abortion rights, among them Planned Parenthood, though she is a staunch opponent of abortion.Before she was appointed last year, President Trump made clear that he supported a rival. Ms. Loeffler did not contribute to his 2016 campaign; she was previously known as a Republican donor eager to support more centrist candidates. But during this campaign, the first she has had to mount, she has portrayed herself as a steadfast ally of the presidents, boasting of her 100 percent Trump voting record and backing his baseless attempts to subvert the election.Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, wants to move from the pulpit to politics.ImageCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesAfter spending his adult life preaching about politics from the church pulpit, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, 51, has decided to enter the political arena in a more direct route. For more than 15 years, he has spoken from one of the worlds most famous pulpits, Ebenezer Baptist Church, once the home of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.Republicans have tried to portray Mr. Warnock as a dangerous radical, though he says his role is one of a moral compass. He has said some of his sermons are designed to make people uncomfortable, urging Black churches to be more accepting of gay people and criticizing them for being shamefully slow to focus on gender inequality. In his book, he criticized white churches for being participants in slavery, segregation and other manifestations of white supremacy.Mr. Warnock grew up in a housing project in Savannah, Ga., where he was the 11th of 12 siblings. Both his father and mother were pastors. He gave his own first sermon at the age of 11 and, after graduating from Morehouse College, went on to Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he also worked as a youth minister at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where another preacher-turned-politician, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., once led.David Perdue, a Republican, puts his business experience at the core of his pitch.ImageCredit...Nicole Craine for The New York TimesDavid Perdue, whose first Senate term ended over the weekend, has made his international business experience the core of his political persona, presenting himself as a success story from rural Georgia who has navigated free markets across the globe while building his personal wealth.And yet he has also embraced the populist, made-in-the-U.S.A., tariff-enacting approach of Mr. Trump. During his time as a top executive at companies that include Reebok, Sara Lee and Dollar General, Mr. Perdue was deeply involved in shifting manufacturing jobs to low-wage factories in China and other Asian countries.Mr. Perdue, now 71, grew up in Warner Robins, a small city in central Georgia, and went on to Georgia Tech for his undergraduate and graduate degrees before entering the business world.In his campaign, he has portrayed himself an paradigm of a Washington outsider, even though it was his cousin Sonny Perdue, the former governor of Georgia, who gave him his first experience in politics and mentored him through elections.David Perdue has largely avoided directly engaging with his opponent in the race, Jon Ossoff, choosing not to participate in debates after Mr. Ossoff called him a crook over frequent stock trading during Mr. Perdues time as a senator.Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, raised record sums in his bid to defeat Perdue.ImageCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesAt 33, Jon Ossoff has run the best-funded Senate campaign in history, raising more than $106 million in the final months of 2020 almost $40 million more than his opponent.Mr. Ossoff first appeared on the national political scene in 2017, when he ran for Congress in a special election the first after Mr. Trumps victory in 2016. That congressional race attracted attention, and money, from all over the country, though Mr. Ossoff lost in what became the most expensive House contest in history.Yet after spending most of his career running a small documentary film company based in England from his home in Atlanta, Mr. Ossoff has little in the way of a record to run on, or against.At 26, he was made chief executive of the film company without any journalism experience apart from an internship. As a teenager, Mr. Ossoff wrote a letter to John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and civil rights pioneer, later landing as a volunteer in Mr. Lewiss office. Mr. Ossoff went on to work for Congressman Hank Johnson while he was still an undergraduate at Georgetown University.During the campaign, Mr. Ossoff has cast himself as the latest in a long line of young people, including Mr. Lewis, who have taken leadership roles in liberal Southern politics. | Politics |
World|Armies Used by U.N. Fail Watchdog Groups Testhttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/world/armies-used-by-un-fail-watchdog-groups-test.htmlApril 3, 2016The militaries of the 30 countries that provide the most soldiers and police officers to United Nations peacekeeping operations also are among those most susceptible to corruption, according to a study released Sunday by an anti-corruption monitoring organization. The organization, Transparency International, known for its annual corruption rankings of governments around the world, said that in its A-to-F grading for the armed forces of the top troop-contributing countries, only Italy scored higher than a D. Six of the countries Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Egypt, Morocco and Togo received F grades, Transparency International said.The three countries that contribute the most troops, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and India which together provide about 25,200 uniformed personnel, roughly a quarter of the total in United Nations peacekeeping operations also scored poorly in the studys rankings. Bangladesh and India each received a D, and Ethiopia an E.The organization cited poor anti-corruption practices and inadequate training as factors in assessing the rankings. The study comes against a backdrop of new allegations against some peacekeepers. The most recent catalyst for concern has been a growing sex-abuse scandal that has implicated peacekeepers deployed to the Central African Republic, in episodes dating to 2013, many involving children. Transparency International did not cite any examples of peacekeeper corruption in the study. United Nations officials did not dispute the findings but said the study did not reflect steps the organization had taken to prevent corruption by peacekeepers. There are a full range of audit and independent oversight systems that are in place to protect against such risks once individual units deploy to peacekeeping operations, Nick Birnback, a spokesman for United Nations peacekeeping, said. | World |
Credit...Jacquelyn Martin/Associated PressJan. 6, 2021About 1,100 troops from the D.C. National Guard and 650 from Virginia will deploy in Washington on Wednesday night, a National Guard spokesman said Wednesday night.The entire D.C. National Guard has been mobilized and is prepared to support law enforcement officers in various locations in the city to protect property, allowing federal and local law enforcement officers to do law-enforcement missions, Capt. Tinashe T. Machona, a spokesman for the D.C. Guard, said in a statement.He said the D.C. Army and Air National Guard have a combined 2,700 troops. | Politics |
Feb. 12, 2014Doug Mohns, a durable and versatile skater who lasted 22 seasons in the National Hockey League, playing in seven All-Star Games, died on Feb. 7 in Reading, Mass. He was 80.The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood and bone marrow disorder, said his wife, Tabor Ansin Mohns.For most of his career, which extended from 1953 to 1975, Mohns was a stalwart of the old, compact N.H.L. when there were only six franchises, rivalries were especially intense, no one wore a helmet, and players were intimately acquainted with the strengths and weaknesses of players on every other club. He played 11 seasons for the Boston Bruins and had his most productive period in Chicago, playing for the Black Hawks (now the Blackhawks), before finishing his career in the era of expansion with the Minnesota North Stars, the Atlanta Flames and the Washington Capitals. Agile, swift and sturdy on the ice his nickname was Diesel and tough to separate from the puck once he controlled it, Mohns could play both as a wing on the front line and on defense. When he retired, he was in the career top 10 in regular-season games played, with 1,390. (He is still in the top 40.) Though not primarily a scorer, he was, in the early 1950s, among the first wave of players to adopt the slap shot, and he had four consecutive seasons with Chicago, from 1965-66 through 1968-69, in which he scored more than 20 goals, often skating on the left wing with Stan Mikita at center and Ken Wharram on the right, a combination known as the Scooter Line. Over his career, he scored 248 regular-season goals and had 462 assists. Douglas Allen Mohns was born on Dec. 13, 1933, in Capreol, Ontario, where his father worked for a railroad. He was a gifted skater from an early age; according to his website, he was offered a contract with the Ice Capades when he was 7. He began playing organized hockey at 14, became a Canadian junior hockey star with the Barrie Flyers and ascended to the Bruins when he was 19. He scored in his first game, a victory over the Montreal Canadiens (outplaying the heralded young Canadiens star Jean Beliveau, according to a United Press report), though he would have limited luck against Montreal from then on. He never played on a Stanley Cup winner, but he played in the finals three times, in 1957 and 1958 with Boston and in 1965 with Chicago, losing to the Canadiens each time. Mohnss first marriage, to Jane Foster, ended with her death in 1988. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a sister, Erma Wilson; a son, Douglas Jr.; a daughter, Andrea Brillaud; a stepson, Greg Ansin; a stepdaughter, Lisa Ansin; and nine grandchildren. After his retirement, Mohns worked in the human resources department at New England Rehabilitation Hospital in Woburn, Mass. At his death, his home was in Bedford, Mass.Anyone who lasts for decades in the N.H.L. can take care of himself on the ice, and Mohns was no exception. He spent 1,250 minutes not quite a full day in the penalty box and was not averse to throwing a punch. In 1957, still playing with the Bruins, he had his jaw broken by an opponent, Ian Cushenan of the Black Hawks, and he was out for several weeks. Cushenan had taken umbrage after he dropped his stick on the ice and Mohns kept kicking it out of his reach. That made me sore, Cushenan said, and I slugged him. | Sports |
TrilobitesScientists have developed an explanation for one of the most striking features of Enceladus, an ocean world that has the right ingredients for life.Credit...JPL/NASADec. 9, 2019Of the strange and unexplained terrains in our solar system, the south pole of Saturns moon Enceladus is among the most perplexing.Enceladus is an ocean world, with a vast and briny sea tucked beneath its icy crust; this makes it one of the most tantalizing places in the solar system to look for life beyond Earth. But unlike other frozen moons, Enceladus constantly erupts. The tiny world blasts salty water into space through cracks in its crystalline shell. These fissures, raked across the moons southern pole, are roughly parallel and evenly spaced. And ever since scientists first took a good look at this alien moon, theyve had a tough time explaining those tiger stripes.What is going on? said Doug Hemingway of the Carnegie Institution for Science. In a way, its an obvious question its been in the back of everyones mind for a long time.Now, Dr. Hemingway and his colleagues think they know how the moon got its stripes and, curiously, why the stripes are found only at the Enceladian south pole. They described their hypothesis Monday in Nature Astronomy. Learning more about how extraterrestrial oceans on worlds such as Enceladus evolve and interact with planetary surfaces is important for understanding how life might exist beyond Earth and how we might find it, Dr. Hemingway said.In 2005, NASAs Cassini spacecraft first swooped in and stared at 313-mile-wide Enceladus. The spacecraft saw a stunning array of geysers erupting from the moons south pole eruptions that vent the moons ocean into space and sculpt Saturns E ring. Later, when Cassini flew through the jets, it tasted an alien soup containing all the ingredients necessary for life as we know it.The moons southern hemisphere is riven by four prominent fractures. Approximately parallel and spaced about 20 miles apart, the massive cracks are, like other features of Enceladus, named after locations in One Thousand and One Nights.Previous ideas about the origins of the cracks Alexandria, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus and a smaller crack unpoetically referred to as E included massive impacts, hot spots, strike-slip faulting and a migrating icy shell. Dr. Hemingway and his colleagues modeled the evolution of the moons icy shell, accounting for its thickness, elasticity, strength and temperature, and uncovered a simpler, more comprehensive explanation.Some time after it formed, they think, Enceladus slowly began to cool. Some of its inner ocean froze, expanded as frozen water does and strained the moons icy crust, which was thinner at the poles.Eventually, the swelling sea fractured the southern crust.The first fissure to form was 80-mile-long Baghdad, the largest and most prominent of the tiger stripes. As water began erupting through Baghdad, some of it snowed back to the moons surface, piling up near the fractures margins. The weight of that accumulating material strained the ice shell, and new cracks Cairo and Damascus opened up on either side of Baghdad, each roughly parallel and about 20 miles away.Then Alexandria and E opened up.Why doesnt this cascading sequence just keep going? Dr. Hemingway said. Its not clear. Maybe as you open up more and more of these fractures, the eruption rate per ridge kind of drops, or the overall background ice shell thickness just gets too big.The process may have taken between 100,000 and one million years. The tiger stripes even spacing is simply a result of the ices elasticity and its thickness, which is thinner at the poles and bulkier at the equator.But why did the stripes only rupture the southern pole?Its kind of a coin toss whether that first fracture happens at the north pole or the south pole, Dr. Hemingway said. But as soon as the crust breaks open, he added, the swelling oceans pressure is relieved and the other pole will just stay quiet for the rest of time.Although this new model answers many questions about the strange moon orbiting Saturn, several remain. Alyssa Rhoden of the Southwest Research Institute called the hypothesis plausible, but she wonders how the model links up with other, less dramatic fractures and features on the moon:Now that we have this idea, how do we fit it into the broader picture of how Enceladus evolved over time? | science |
Europe|Hunger Strike by Migrants in Hungary Enters Second Dayhttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/world/europe/hungary-hunger-strike-migrants.htmlMarch 14, 2017BUDAPEST Dozens of people seeking asylum in Hungary continued their hunger strike for a second day on Tuesday, demanding to be released from detention, the authorities said.The protest coincided with a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in favor of two refugees from Bangladesh seeking asylum who were found to have been detained and deported illegally by Hungary in 2015.The 80 detainees on a hunger strike are part of a group of 102 people, mostly from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria, being held at a closed reception center in Bekescsaba, a city in southeastern Hungary.Images broadcast on Hungarian state television showed some of those inside the reception center holding a sheet saying We are refugees, we are not terrorists through a barred window.Hungarys Office of Immigration and Asylum said in a statement that it had expanded medical services because of the hunger strike, with social workers and armed security guards monitoring the detainees for any signs of sickness. Ninety-four detainees began the strike on Monday.According to European Court of Human Rights ruling, the two men from Bangladesh, Ilias Ilias and Ali Ahmed, were each given 10,000 euros, or $10,645, as well as costs because of their detention in a transit zone at Hungarys border with Serbia, where both had applied for asylum.Among other problems, the court found that the Hungarian authorities had failed to carry out an individual assessment of each applicants asylum case and had put them at risk of being sent back to Greece to face inhuman and degrading reception conditions.The court also found that the 23 days the two men were held at the fenced transit zone amounted to detention, meaning they had effectively been deprived of their liberty without any formal, reasoned decision and without appropriate judicial review.In 2015, Hungary built fences on its southern borders with Serbia and Croatia to stop migrants. | World |
Harvey Weinstein Former Assistant Claims He Made Me Clean Up His Semen 1/25/2018 -- A rep for Weinstein tells us, "Mr. Weinstein categorically denies these claims and his lawyers will respond in the appropriate legal forum with evidence proving they are untrue. The evidence will show these claims for money are in the realm of a science fiction movie." Harvey Weinstein is being sued by a woman who claims a variety of terrible things, including that Weinstein allegedly forced her to take dictation while he was naked. Sandeep Rehal claims in a new lawsuit she started working for Weinstein as his personal assistant in 2013. She says among other things, he made her get him clean underwear, and when she would sit in his SUV with him he would rub between her thighs. She says he would press himself against her while they walked and would use sexist and profane language, including calling her a c*** and a p***y. She says on numerous occasions he said, "What's wrong Sandeep, is the tampon up too far today?" Rehal says Weinstein would often brag about his power, saying, "I am Harvey Weinstein and you are at Weinstein University. I decide whether or not you graduate." She also says she would facilitate his sexual liaisons, maintaining a list of available women and manage his stock of Caverject shots for erectile dysfunction. And there's this ... Rehal says she had to clean up semen on Weinstein's office couch and pick up used condoms on a regular basis. She's suing both Weinstein, The Weinstein Co. and Bob Weinstein for unspecified damages. We reached out to Weinstein's rep ... so far no comment. | Entertainment |
Credit...J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressJune 4, 2018WASHINGTON The Supreme Court on Monday turned away a request from the Justice Department to discipline lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union for assisting an undocumented teenager to obtain an abortion.In an unsigned opinion with no noted dissents, the court vacated an appeals court ruling that had allowed the teenager to obtain the procedure, saying the dispute was moot. That wiped out the appeals courts ruling as precedent.The case attracted wide attention after the Justice Department, in an unusual Supreme Court filing in November, accused the A.C.L.U. of serious professional misconduct in the case of the teenager, who was known as Jane Doe. She obtained an abortion in October over the governments objection after an appeals court allowed it.The government said the civil liberties group had misled it about the timing of the abortion, frustrating its ability to seek a stay from the Supreme Court. The group denied the accusations and said it had acted properly and diligently.The Trump administration blocked Jane Doe from getting constitutionally protected care for a month and subjected her to illegal obstruction, coercion and shaming as she waited, David Cole, the A.C.L.U.s legal director, said at the time. After the courts cleared the way for her to get her abortion, it was the A.C.L.U.s job as her lawyers to see that she wasnt delayed any further not to give the government another chance to stand in her way.The appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, ruled in favor of the teenager, who was in government custody in Texas, on Oct. 24. According to the Justice Departments brief, lawyers for the A.C.L.U. initially indicated that the abortion would take place on Oct. 26. On that understanding, the departments brief said, it had planned to file an emergency application for a stay in the Supreme Court on Oct. 25.Under Texas law, women must attend a counseling session at least 24 hours before having an abortion with the doctor who will perform the procedure. The teenager had attended such a session on Oct. 19, but the doctor she consulted was initially thought to be unavailable to perform the procedure.Had a new doctor been required, the teenager would presumably have received counseling on Oct. 25 and obtained the abortion on Oct. 26. It turned out that the original doctor was available after all, and the teenager received the abortion early in the morning on Oct. 25.In its brief, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to vacate the appeals courts ruling, which the court did. It also asked the justices to consider punishing the A.C.L.U.s lawyers.The Supreme Court rejected that request on Monday in its unsigned opinion in the case, Azar v. Garza, No. 17-654.The court takes allegations like those the government makes here seriously, for ethical rules are necessary to the maintenance of a culture of civility and mutual trust within the legal profession, the opinion said. On the one hand, all attorneys must remain aware of the principle that zealous advocacy does not displace their obligations as officers of the court.Especially in fast-paced, emergency proceedings like those at issue here, it is critical that lawyers and courts alike be able to rely on one anothers representations, the opinion said. On the other hand, lawyers also have ethical obligations to their clients and not all communication breakdowns constitute misconduct.But, the opinion concluded, the court need not delve into the factual disputes raised by the parties in order to vacate the appeals courts decision. | Politics |
One sick singer attended choir practice, infecting 52 others, two of whom died. A study released by the C.D.C. shows that self-isolation and tracing efforts helped contain the outbreak.Published May 12, 2020Updated May 18, 2020It was a chilly evening in Mount Vernon, Wash., on March 10, when a group of singers met for choir practice at a church, just as they did most Tuesday nights.The full choir consists of 122 singers, but only 61 made it that night, including one who had been fighting cold-like symptoms for a few days.That person later tested positive for the coronavirus, and within two days of the practice, six more members of the choir had developed a fever. Ultimately, 53 members of the choir became ill with Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, and two of them died.The event, which was reported in March by various news organizations, demonstrated how contagious and dangerous the coronavirus is, especially among older populations. The median age for those attending the practice that night was 69.A study since then has showed that swift action by the members of the choir, including voluntary isolation, along with contact tracing by the Skagit County health department, helped contain the spread and prevent what could have been a much larger outbreak in that community, about an hours drive north of Seattle.ImageCredit...Centers for Disease Control and PreventionAlthough the virus spread quickly and thoroughly within the choir, it did not result in a significant increase in the infection rate of the community at large.If they hadnt initiated their own isolation and quarantine before we got involved, you can conceive of a situation where every one of those people would have infected another three people each, said Dr. Howard Leibrand, the Skagit County health officer. You would have had a huge change in our viral curve based on this one episode.As communities around the world begin to look at ways to ease restrictions on movement and gathering, as well as reopen their businesses and houses of worship, reports like this one raise clear warnings about the dangers posed when a large number of people gather indoors during an outbreak. That is especially the case for activities like singing that can spur transmission.Dr. Leibrand and Lea Hamner, a communicable disease and epidemiology supervisor in Skagit County, conducted the investigation into the choir outbreak and were the authors of the report, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Tuesday.They labeled the choir practice a point-source exposure and said very few such events had been so clearly isolated as this one, making it a helpful study of how the virus spreads.Its rare to have a group with a single common exposure, Ms. Hamner said. Here, we have a defined group, and they all had a similar exposure for a similar amount of time, so we are able to really understand transmission a little bit better with that kind of event.What made the choir practice so fertile for transmission was most likely the very act of singing, in which people projecting their voices at loud volume are prone to emit tiny droplets known as aerosols that can carry the virus. It is a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has sat close to the stage during a play or a musical performance.When you project your voice, you can project more virus, Dr. Leibrand said. So it seems like this would be a pretty good indicator we shouldnt be going back to large groups singing in an enclosed space, i.e., church, because that would be the same sort of situation as this.Some people in the Skagit County choir may even have been what the report calls super-emitters people who release more particles than others during speech.As of Tuesday afternoon, the total number of cases in Skagit County was 406, according to the Washington Department of Public Health.Pia MacDonald, an infectious disease epidemiologist for RTI International, who was not part of the study, said it was remarkable that the outbreak in the choir did not lead to more infections in the community at large, especially considering the cases were not confirmed until six days after the practice.You still have a number of days there where people could have been walking around in close contact with other people, she said.The practice took place from 6:30 to 9 p.m., and for much of it the choir members sat in a large room in assigned seats, correlating to how they would sit during a performance. The seats were packed together, six to 10 inches apart, far closer than the minimum six-foot recommendation by the C.D.C. during the pandemic.Because only about half the members of the choir were present, many sat next to empty seats. But later they broke off into separate groups, and cookies and oranges were served during a break in the back of the room.When the practice was over, several members helped to put the chairs away, and this contact with surfaces may also have contributed to transmission.Weeks earlier, Washington reported its first coronavirus case, connected to a traveler from Wuhan, China, where the disease outbreak began, but awareness of the coronavirus in many parts of Washington and the United States was still in its early stages on March 10.Ms.. Hamner and Dr. Leibrand said that on March 15, the choir director sent an email to everyone in the choir reporting that six people had become ill. They said that from that point forward, the members of the choir were diligent about remaining isolated.Three days later, they began working with the Skagit County health department, which initiated its investigation and began doing contact tracing. The doctors said the choir members were forthcoming and extremely helpful, not only with maintaining self-quarantine, but also with providing useful information that aided the investigation.They were the ideal group to do disease investigation with, Ms. Hamner said. Ive done disease investigations for five years now, and that was a really nice relationship. | Health |
Cristiano Ronaldo Big Black Eye After Bloody Collision 1/23/2018 Alas, Cristiano Ronaldo's perfect face finally has a flaw ... Just a few days after taking a cleat to the face during a match against Deportivo, the Real Madrid star hit the practice field in Spain with a big ol' shiner on his left eye. CR7 was also sporting a bandage over the corner of his eye -- where it appears he suffered the laceration that left him bloody during the game. Ronaldo seemed to be in pretty good spirits during the workout -- despite the fact his face may never look the same again!!! Kidding, he's still beautiful. | Entertainment |
Politics|Trump Blasts Robert De Niro on His Way Home From Singapore: Wake Up Punchy!https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/us/politics/trump-deniro-tweets.htmlCredit...Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJune 12, 2018President Trump wasted no time after tying a bow on his meeting with Kim Jong-un to finally punch back, so to speak, at the actor Robert De Niro, who spent the last couple of days publicly slamming the president, going as far as to use profanity during the Tony Awards on Sunday night.____ Trump, Mr. De Niro shouted into the microphone on Sunday, before introducing Bruce Springsteen. Its no longer Down with Trump! Its just ____ Trump! he said. The crowd gave him a standing ovation. Mr. De Niro flexed both of his arms.At an event in Toronto on Monday, Mr. De Niro apologized to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, and to others who attended the Group of 7 summit meeting in Quebec last week, for what he called the presidents idiotic behavior.President Trump had refused to sign a communiqu at the summit, and called Mr. Trudeau dishonest and weak in a tweet afterward. Mr. De Niro said Mr. Trumps behavior was a disgrace and disgusting.In a two-tweet thread on Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Trump called Mr. De Niro a very Low IQ individual, who had received to many shots to the head by real boxers in movies.I watched him last night and truly believe he may be punch-drunk, added the president, who was en route back to the United States from Singapore. It was unclear if he was referring to Mr. De Niros remarks at the Tonys or in Canada.Wake up Punchy! the president concluded, after boasting about the United States economy.Representatives for Mr. De Niro declined to comment on the presidents tweets.About 15 minutes before posting about the actor, the president tweeted that he had gotten along great with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. Great progress was made on the denuclearization, the president wrote.Sunday night was not the first time Mr. De Niro, who starred in one of Mr. Trumps favorite movies, Goodfellas, had used a public stage to hurl insults and expletives at the president. In January, before introducing Meryl Streep at the National Board of Review awards gala, he used profanities when referring to Mr. Trump. Mr. De Niro also called Mr. Trump a fool and the baby-in-chief.And his tweet on Tuesday was not the first time Mr. Trump had called someone a low IQ individual. He used that same insult to describe Mika Brzezinski, the co-host of Morning Joe on MSNBC, in June of last year, and Maxine Waters, a Democratic congresswoman from California, in March. | Politics |
Credit...M. Spencer Green/Associated PressFeb. 18, 2014CHICAGO Kain Colter, a football recruit, arrived at Northwestern University with dreams of becoming an orthopedic surgeon. But the summer before his freshman year, he said, he was steered away from a chemistry class toward less strenuous options like sociology and African history. He is now pursuing a psychology degree instead of the premed track.During the 2012 season, after Colter was named the starting quarterback, Northwestern traveled to Ann Arbor, Mich., for a day game against Michigan. The Wildcats made the five-hour trip by bus, had team meetings, held walk-throughs, played the game, met reporters and then returned to campus in Evanston, Ill. According to Kolters accountable hours log to ensure he had time for academics, he spent 4 hours 8 minutes on football activities.Colter, the leader of the Northwestern football teams petition to form a union, which was filed last month, offered more than four hours of testimony Tuesday afternoon before the National Labor Relations Board. In question is the relationship between academics and football for players specifically, which comes first and whether these athletes should be classified as students or employees. Colter insisted he was on campus to play football.Its truly a job, Colter said. Theres no way around it.Northwestern graduates 97 percent of football players, the highest among schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision. Lawyers for the university, which argues that its football players do not meet the requirements for a union because they are full-time students, expressed difficulty in understanding why Northwestern was chosen as a test case.They then painted Colter as a football player who has benefited greatly from his educational experience, and argued that athletics and academics go hand-in-hand.Colter has a grade point average above 3.0. He was Academic All-Big Ten each year he was eligible. He took classes like Financial Business and Introduction to Neurology. He received tutoring and extra help when he asked for it. He is scheduled to graduate this year, earlier than expected. There could be no truth, Northwesterns lawyers said, to the accusation that he was not permitted to study and study what he wished.The hearing was moved from the N.L.R.B.s regional office to a larger room in a federal building in downtown Chicago because of increased interest. Tuesday began with Colter fielding questions from John Adam, a lawyer for the College Athletes Players Association, the newly formed group seeking to represent Northwestern players in collective bargaining.Colter, who exhausted his athletic eligibility last season, laid out in great detail his experiences during what he called the yearlong college football season. He spoke of the time demands, the control exerted by coaches and administrators and the academic sacrifices he said he had to make.It makes it hard for you to succeed, Colter said. You cant ever reach your academic potential with the time demands. You have to sacrifice, and were not allowed to sacrifice football.Training camp before the season, Colter said, requires 50 to 60 hours per week and 14-hour days, on occasion. The in-season commitment is 40 to 50 hours each week. Summer workouts require a return to campus only a few weeks after the end of the previous school year. Colter said he was never allowed to schedule a class before 11 a.m. because of practice, which made it difficult to take the courses he needed to continue as a premed student.The idea was to cast Colter and his teammates as employees, with responsibilities to match. The compensation, argued Colter, is an athletic scholarship, valued by Northwestern at $76,000 per year. And, he continued, because it can be revoked year to year in some cases, there is a quid pro quo to deliver on the football field. (When Colter was recruited, he received a one-year renewable scholarship, but later he was given a multiyear scholarship.)When he was cross-examined by university lawyers, Colter was pressed about whether his scholarship money dedicated to tuition was taxed. And he was asked whether he received retirement and paid time-off benefits like other Northwestern employees. He said he did not.Beyond the employee-student construction, there were other logistical questions raised by Northwesterns lawyers. The College Athletes Players Association does not seek to represent non-scholarship football players or any athletes who do not play football or basketball, including women, which raises issues surrounding Title IX, the federal law that requires equal spending on mens and womens sports.The hearing continues Wednesday and is expected to last all week.The players group has another witness to call, and Northwestern will call several experts to try to rebut Colter. The regional N.L.R.B. office here will then make a ruling, most likely within a month of the hearings conclusion. That decision can be appealed to the federal board in Washington.Colter, meanwhile, will head to the N.F.L. combine in Indianapolis this weekend. | Sports |
Science|Why did Richard Branson take this risk?https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/richard-branson-space-flight-risk.htmlWhy did Richard Branson take this risk?Credit...Joe Skipper/ReutersJuly 11, 2021Founding a space exploration company was perhaps an unsurprising step for Mr. Branson, who has made a career and a fortune estimated at $6 billion building flashy upstart businesses that he promotes with a showmans flair.What became his Virgin business empire began with a small record shop in central London in the 1970s before Mr. Branson parlayed it into Virgin Records, the home of acts like the Sex Pistols, Peter Gabriel and more. In 1984, he co-founded what became Virgin Atlantic to challenge British Airways in the field of long-haul passenger air travel. Other Virgin-branded airlines followed.The Virgin Group branched out into other businesses as well, including a mobile-phone carrier, a passenger railroad and a line of hotels. Not all have performed flawlessly: Both Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Australia filed for insolvency during the pandemic last year, while few today remember his ventures into soft drinks, cosmetics or lingerie.Virgin Galactic was announced to much fanfare in 2004 with the promise of creating a space tourism company with style. Virgin Orbit, a spinoff of that company that launches small satellites from a jumbo jet, came 13 years later. Virgin Orbit, now separate from Virgin Galactic, has carried payloads to orbit twice this year.The space tourism company is of a piece with Mr. Bransons penchant for highflying pursuits like skydiving and hot-air ballooning. And unlike many of the Virgin Groups businesses that are actually minority investments or simply licensees, Virgin Galactic has been a major focus of Mr. Bransons. He raised $1 billion for the space companies from Saudi Arabia, only to call off the deal in 2018 after the killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And in a regulatory filing, the company said it had benefited from his personal network to generate new inquiries and reservation sales, as well as referrals from existing reservation holders.Weve spent 14 years working on our space program, Mr. Branson said in a Bloomberg Television interview in 2018. And its been tough, and space is tough its rocket science. He added that he had hoped to travel on one of Virgin Galactics flights by the end of that year.Virgin Galactic joined the New York Stock Exchange in 2019 after merging with a publicly traded investment fund, giving it a potent source of new funds to compete with deep-pocket competitors and publicity, with Mr. Branson marking its trading debut at the exchange in one of the companys flight suits.But while Virgin Galactic has sought to keep pace with the likes of Mr. Bezos Blue Origin, Mr. Branson has downplayed any rivalry between the two. I know nobody will believe me when I say it, but honestly, there isnt, he told The Today Show earlier this week. | science |
Disso Queen Laura Wasser Launches Do-It-Yourself Divorce Website 1/25/2018 Laura Wasser, one of the most prominent divorce lawyers in the country, is firing up a website today which allows couples who want to end their marriage a way of doing it on their own for a super reasonable cost, with a little help from a lawyer. The site, itsovereasy.com, guides couples through the process of filling out forms and dealing with issues such as child custody, child and spousal support as well as property division. The cost is way cheaper than hiring a lawyer ... $750 plus court costs. Add another $750 for a half hour call with a lawyer who can serve as a mediator to explain the process and help resolve conflicts. Lawyers are available for longer mediations for an additional cost. The site also has YouTube videos to walk people through the process if they're not into reading instructions. And there's more ... a bunch of contributors give accounts of their divorces and how they navigated them. There are also referrals to co-parenting counselors, financial planners and even personal trainers who focus on life after divorce. It's interesting ... Wasser reps just about every big celeb who gets divorced, so why the whole do-it-yourself thing? She says lawyers are often beyond the financial reach of couples who end up going through the process without assistance or vital information. Plus the site avoids a big pitfall ... hiring certain divorce lawyers who fuel conflict to rack up fees. | Entertainment |
Researchers hope the findings will improve conservation efforts, as some killer whale populations have dwindled and become endangered.Credit...Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA FisheriesDec. 10, 2019Parents, at least the human sort, know the benefits of having a grandmother close by: the extra help with child care, the reassuring advice borne from years of experience. In evolutionary biology, scientists call this the grandmother effect, and have hypothesized its one of the reasons humans live so long.Now, a new study suggests that the effect isnt limited to humans, and that killer whales also benefit from having grandmothers around. The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that grandmother killer whales helped improve their grandcalves chances of survival, particularly when food was scarce.The findings may shed light on an enduring mystery: why some whale species live for years after they go through menopause and stop reproducing. The study showed that, by stopping reproduction, grandmother killer whales avoided conflict with their reproducing offspring and helped their grandcalves find enough to eat when salmon stocks dwindled.Having a living grandmother improves your survival; youre less likely to die when shes alive than in the years following her death, Stuart Nattrass, the studys lead author, and a researcher at the University of Hull, in Britain, wrote in an email. Weve known this is true of humans and a few other animals that dont have menopause, like African elephants, for a while, and had a strong inkling that it was also true in these resident killer whales, he wrote.He and other researchers said the findings could be important for orca conservation, suggesting its just as vital to protect older, postmenopausal females as it is younger females of breeding age and their offspring.Worldwide, there are an estimated 50,000 killer whales, or orcas. But several populations have declined in recent decades, and some have become endangered, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.To assess the survival rates of killer whales in lean years, the study examined census data for two populations, off Washington State and British Columbia, as well as annual catch numbers from chinook salmon fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. The population off Washington State has been endangered since 2005, and is now critically endangered. It has just 73 orcas and four grandmothers, according to Deborah Giles, a killer whale researcher at the University of Washingtons Center for Conservation Biology. Dr. Giles, who was not involved in the study, called that scarcity of grandmothers startling and scary.Orca matriarchs, she said, play a critical role in the species survival by guiding their families to fish when stocks are low and caring for the young while the mothers of breeding age hunt.Its part of what makes killer whales amazing animals, Dr. Giles said. They are these large-bodied, long-lived apex predators, and a lot of the life span for post-reproductive females is spent caring for, and being there with, their families. We dont see that as readily in other species.Female killer whales typically start reproducing in their teens and stop in their 30s or 40s. Yet they can live well into their 80s and 90s, posing the question for scientists of why this postmenopausal stage of life has evolved. Why stop breeding if the goal is to pass on your genes?Dr. Nattrass said the study could point to some answers. It found that postmenopausal killer whales provided the biggest boost to their grandcalves chances of survival, beyond that provided by grandmother killer whales that were still breeding.This is a particularly striking example of a case where there might be a fitness benefit to not breeding yourself you can better help your grandkids if youre not preoccupied with a baby of your own, he wrote.Dr. Nattrass said postmenopausal killer whales are able to guide their families to salmon when its scarce, using stores of ecological knowledge gained over decades of life experience. Without that knowledge, Dr. Nattrass said, the grandcalves could die.As salmon stocks continue to fall, the presence of these grandmothers becomes more and more important, Dr. Nattrass wrote. But there is going to be a point where that knowledge isnt enough. We really need to boost salmon stocks if these grandmothers are going to be able to help their families.Dr. Giles recalled one striking instance of this grandmotherly help: an aerial photo, taken in 2016, that showed a killer whale known as J2, estimated to be at least 75 and possibly older than 100, catching and sharing salmon with a recently orphaned youngster, presumed to be her granddaughter. The grandmother was feeding the youngster even as she was getting thinner and thinner toward the end of her life, Dr. Giles said.Heres this old, old female still trying to make sure her family members have enough food to eat, Dr. Giles said. She could have eaten that fish in one bite. But she didnt. | science |
Credit...Bruno Levy/Divergence-imagesMarch 3, 2017PARIS He and his writing partner were the toast of the Left Bank, published and celebrated by the prestigious and chic. They were praised as authentic voices from Frances troubled suburbs, articulate and poetic chroniclers of the immigrant youth experience.Barely into their 20s, Mehdi Meklat and Badroudine Sad Abdallah Mehdi and Badrou, as they are known were stars of Bondy Blog, a much-praised chronicle of suburban France sponsored by the mainstream press. They were seen poolside in Los Angeles and at Le Select in Paris, and had their own show on national radio, all the while going home to the cramped housing projects of their parents in the suburbs.All that is gone now. Mr. Meklat, 24, is now a media phenomenon of a different sort. He has been revealed as the semi-hidden author, under a pseudonym, of hateful and obscene tweets anti-Semitic, misogynistic, pro-jihadist and homophobic.Bring on Hitler to kill the Jews, he tweeted during the Csars, the French Oscars ceremony; Charb, what Id really like to do is shove some Laguiole knives up his he wrote about the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist, not long before the massacre in which Charb was killed; I find the phrase, I love death the way you love life, of Mohammed Merah troubling in its beauty, he wrote about the murderer of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse; I miss Bin Laden, Mr. Meklat said in another tweet.And there were other, even more repulsive utterances among his 50,000 tweets over five years under a barely concealed Twitter identity, Marcelin Deschamps.Mr. Hyde was posing as Dr. Jekyll. He might have carried it off if an alert Twitterer, identified by Le Monde as a teacher, had not been angered by Mr. Meklats television appearance last month to promote his new novel. Aware of Mr. Meklats tweets she had warned about them before she blew the whistle, and other Twitterers took up her outrage.Overnight Mr. Meklat has gone from hero to pariah. A mini-culture war has erupted over the erstwhile star. It has led to uncomfortable reflections on the wide gulf that separates the immigrant suburbs from mainstream France, and on the navet of Frances progressive elite. So eager is it to connect with that world, that it is often blind to the dangerous anger and isolation of the banlieues.Reached by phone in Asia he wouldnt reveal the country Mr. Meklat sounded contrite, half-pleaded to be forgiven, acknowledged that tweeting had become an obsession, and insisted that Marcelin Deschamps wasnt really him.I created a character, its a fictional character, Mr. Meklat said. He had no morality, his whole business was provocation massive, extreme provocation, bad jokes. We laughed about it, my friends, the journalists around me, he said.I accept everybodys pain, Mr. Meklat said. People who dont know me have the right to be shocked. Because yes, these messages are shocking.Editions du Seuil, the prestigious publisher of his and his partner Badrous novel, Midnight, has condemned him but is not answering questions about him.A largely flattering profile in Le Monde last fall mentioned the Marcelin Deschamps identity without highlighting it. The articles author said much of Mr. Meklats Twitter stream had been suppressed, and Le Monde said its journalist received threats from Mr. Meklats circle merely for evoking his double identity.Everywhere, everybody is scrambling to get a piece of them, Le Mondes article said. For a while now, Harlem or Hollywood have been among the favorite destinations of Mehdi and Badrou.No more. Encomiums to Mr. Meklat have been replaced by a bitter war of recrimination on French airwaves and in print. The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism has turned over Mr. Meklats tweets to the Paris prosecutor.Now the question is being asked: How could anybody harboring such vile views have been taken up with such enthusiasm?In their blog posts Mr. Meklat and his partner depicted, with force and emotion, the troubled inner life of the suburbs. Their writing never transgressed societal norms. That made both rare commodities in the French literary world, spurring their lightning ascension.Now, on the left, Mr. Meklats defenders are reduced to stuttering disavowal or halfhearted defense, and on the right, critics are spinning variations of I told you so.Meanwhile, the National Front of Marine Le Pen has been having a field day with the Meklat Affair, in an election season where the far-right party is doing everything it can to stir up fears about the menace of Islam.Praise for Merah, threats, homophobia, hatred of France and anti-Semitism: why does the media protect @mehdi_meklat? Marion Marechal Le Pen, Ms. Le Pens niece and a rising star in the National Front, gleefully tweeted while the affair unfolded late in February.More mainstream figures on the right, some the object of Mr. Meklats nasty tweets, have raised questions about the paternalistic attitude of much of the French literary and media establishment, as the political scientist Laurent Bouvet put it in Le Figaro.Mr. Meklat tweeted about the right-leaning philosopher and essayist Alain Finkielkraut, son of a Holocaust survivor, that they should have broken his legs, that son of a whore. Mr. Finkielkraut responded in Le Figaro that Mehdi and Badrou were the turbulent chouchous pets of the hate-filled left.But as unsettling as what Mr. Bouvet called in an interview the complaisant attitude of part of the media establishment is the content of Mr. Meklats tweets.It reveals that in a certain milieu, in the suburbs, and in the Bondy Blog, there is a sort of regular anti-Semitism that is almost anodyne. Its not necessarily aggressive, its almost on the level of a joke, Mr. Bouvet said.There is a kind of mockery of the Jews and Israel, said Mr. Bouvet. He went very far.Despite that, Mr. Meklat had benefited from a kind of impunity that, today, is a real problem, the governments anti-discrimination representative, Gilles Clavreul, said in an interview.All the people in his professional entourage knew about his bad behavior, he added. They thought it wasnt important. Whats really terrible is that Meklat reinforces the xenophobes stereotypes about the suburbs. Its a gift to them. | World |
Megyn Kelly Jane Fonda's a Traitor She Has No Right to Call Me Offensive 1/22/2018 Megyn Kelly lashed out at Jane Fonda Monday, essentially calling her a traitor who has no business lecturing her, or anyone else, on what qualifies as offensive. Kelly was reacting to Fonda's blistering criticism of her for asking about Fonda's plastic surgery on one of Kelly's earlier shows. Fonda felt it was inappropriate and silly. Kelly just exploded with her own criticism, saying Jane told just about anyone who would listen that she had work done. And then Megyn called Jane out for her comments during the Vietnam war, which earned her the nickname, "Hanoi Jane." Now a new war has erupted. | Entertainment |
TrilobitesCredit...John Kappelman/The University of Texas at AustinNov. 30, 2016Lucy was a small one. She weighed about as much as the average 2nd grader and stood about three-and-a-half feet tall. But that lady (or pre-lady, because Australopithecus afarensis like her werent quite human) was strong. Her famous skeleton, a 3.18 million-year-old fossil also known as AL 288-1, tells us so. But to build arm bones as strong as hers, she, and possibly other members of her species, probably spent a lot of time in trees, suggests a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.Lucy, discovered almost half a century ago, was the most complete skeleton of the earliest hominid ever found at the time. She changed our understanding of human evolution. Theres little doubt Lucy walked on two feet like a modern human, or that she climbed trees to sleep, avoid predators or gather food. Some scientists including some involved in this study even think she died after a fall from one. But just how much time she spent in trees has been a subject of contention because interpretations of her ancient skeletal clues are hard to prove. For the latest study, researchers looked at the ways bones can grow stronger or weaker with everyday use. And by examining the internal structure of Lucys upper right arm and leg bones and comparing them with the bones of around 100 chimpanzees and 1,000 modern humans, they concluded that climbing trees wasnt just some trivial task. Lucy did it enough that the ratio of strength between her arms and legs is slightly more chimpish than human.VideotranscripttranscriptIn the Trees With LucyThis is a digital reconstruction of Lucy's upper arm bone. By comparing the CT scans with those of modern primates and humans, scientists found that her upper limb strength was more like a chimpanzee's than a human's.n/aThis is a digital reconstruction of Lucy's upper arm bone. By comparing the CT scans with those of modern primates and humans, scientists found that her upper limb strength was more like a chimpanzee's than a human's.CreditCredit...Wiley Akins/University of Texas-AustinThat doesnt mean she was acting like a chimp, just that she was stressing her limbs more like a chimpanzee than a modern human, said Christopher Ruff, a paleoanthropologist at Johns Hopkins University who led the study.To make inferences about how Lucys bones were used in day to day life, the researchers analyzed 3-D digital models of bones built from scans of the fossil. Bones, like drinking straws, are hollow, and if you were to slice them horizontally youd have a set of bone bangles. The width of each one of those bangles at particular parts of the bone indicate its strength. This width is called cortical thickness. For example, a professional tennis players racket arm bone has a larger cortical thickness than that of the other arm.Lucys bones were pretty thick.Shes tiny, but for her size, shes coming in very strong, said John Kappelman, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin who conceived of the study.Because there isnt much evidence for tool use, which could have made her bones stronger, the researchers concluded she must have been climbing.Other researchers, like Donald Johanson, the paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University who discovered Lucy, still thinks Lucy and other A. afarensis were primarily walkers.They would have had to spend a considerable amount of time in the trees for this to happen, and I think the overwhelming anatomical evidence is that they were terrestrial in their preferred locomotion, he said, suggesting that activities like food gathering and digging up roots could have contributed to the thickness of their bones.The study brings new evidence to a long debate about whether Lucys skeleton reflects life in trees as well on the ground, or just unused adaptations leftover from ancestors. Long arms, curved fingers and toes and shoulder blades that pointed more toward the head than side of the body are indications she was a climber. But her big toe which looks more like yours and mine than a chimpanzees is strong evidence, said Dr. Johanson, that she was mainly a walker.Debates aside, one thing is clear about Lucy: You dont develop that kind of arm strength unless you exercise your arms a lot, said Dr. Ruff. She wasnt just doing a couple of pull-ups a week. | science |
on techApple says it will make it tougher for apps to track you. It will also help you wash your hands.VideoCreditCredit...By Dae In ChungJune 23, 2020This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays.Greetings, friends! Im your personal tech columnist. Ill be taking the wheel for todays intro.This week is a big one for Apple, which is hosting its annual conference for the software developers who make apps for Apple phones, tablets, watches and computers. The company started the weeklong event with a video presentation streamed on Monday, outlining its new features.The presentation was chock-full of jargon and deeply technical stuff that only engineers would understand. But heres the news that you may care about:Apple is making it tougher for apps to track you. Unbeknown to many of us, thousands of apps that we lovingly use on our smartphones have invisible trackers running in the background. The trackers may be collecting and sharing our personal information, like our location, email address and phone number, with businesses and other entities for the purpose of serving targeted ads. You cant opt in or opt out of app tracking.That may soon change. Apple said that beginning this fall with its next mobile operating system, iOS 14, it will require so-called third-party apps to ask for your permission to track you.Apple will also give iPhone and iPad users more control over how their location is shared. Instead of sharing your precise location with an app, you will be able to share your approximate location, giving a developer a rough idea of where you are. That could be helpful if you are using a news app, for example, and you want to see articles about your hometown but dont want to share precisely where you live.In the past, Apple and Google have required apps to ask for permission to access sensors, such as your camera and microphone. These new protections expand on Apples efforts to give users greater transparency and control over the data collected about us. (Your move, Google.)The Mac is about to make a big shift. Have you ever noticed how sluggish Macs feel compared to Apples mobile devices? Macs use Intel processors, but mobile processors have outpaced Intel chips in terms of speed and power efficiency. Even the cheapest new Apple phone, the $399 iPhone SE, by some measures outperforms the most powerful Mac laptops, which cost more than $2,500.Thats why its a big deal that this week Apple announced the beginning of the Macs transition to Apple-made silicon, which will be based on the same chip architecture powering iPhones and iPads. If all goes well, we can expect Macs with snappier performance and much longer battery life, and they should also be able to run iPhone and iPad apps.The transition to Apple chips is expected to take two years. If you buy a Mac in 2022, it should have the horsepower of an iPad, but work with a mouse and keyboard.The Apple Watch is trying to be more helpful during the pandemic. Apple said the next version of the Apple Watch operating system, WatchOS 7, would take advantage of the watchs motion sensors to detect when you are washing your hands and start a 20-second timer to ensure you scrub thoroughly. The watch will also use its sensors to track sleep patterns. These are relatively minor new features, but we could all probably use better sleep and hygiene these days.Seeking therapy through screensThanks to Brian for tag-teaming with me. This is Shira Ovide for the rest of todays dispatch.The last few months have been A LOT. As the stresses on our bodies, finances, families and minds have piled up, its gotten more complicated to seek help as physicians and mental health specialists paused seeing patients in person because of coronavirus fears.But a silver lining, said Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a psychologist and founder of the mental health resource Therapy for Black Girls, is that moving therapy sessions online has been more rewarding for some people although that hasnt been true for everyone.For some, taking face-to-face interaction out of therapy makes difficult conversations easier. Adding a screen is just enough of a barrier where it maybe feels safer to share something, Dr. Bradford said.Dr. Bradford had advice for people seeking therapy right now through online appointments. During virtual sessions, try to find a private, personal space even if that means taking a video call alone in your car, while on a walk or in the bathroom with the door closed.She also advised people to give themselves a time to transition after sessions end, rather than jumping right back into family or work obligations.Dr. Bradford also said people shouldnt be afraid to find a new therapist if their current one isnt a good match, for example a practitioner who isnt responsive to the added stresses that some black people are feeling.For people worried about costs, Dr. Bradford said some individual therapists and apps such as Talkspace offer free appointments, and a number of health insurers have been waiving co-payments for people to speak to therapists virtually during the coronavirus.And nonprofit groups including the Loveland Foundation, Open Path Psychotherapy Collective and the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation offer financial assistance or lower-cost options for people who are seeking therapy.Before we go Never waste a crisis, I guess? Companies are repurposing their technology products as untested and sometimes comical-sounding coronavirus-fighting systems. My colleagues Natasha Singer and Julie Creswell write about software for tracking product inventory that has been remade into an employee virus-tracking system. Income verification software has been pitched for workers to report their health status to employers.I want to know everything about K-pop fans: The New York Times pop music writer Joe Coscarelli explains the internet might of Korean pop music fans, who often use their online savvy to support their favorite boy bands and now are taking credit for helping inflate attendance expectations for President Trumps Tulsa rally.Also, read the Times Opinion writer Charlie Warzel fretting about oversimplifying young peoples motivations in the online information wars.Your regular reminder to be cautious of what you see and share online: A Times team found 41 U.S. cities and towns where false rumors spread about anti-fascist activists coming to cause mayhem. Davey Alba and Ben Decker traced the origins of how friends, neighbors and trusted businesses in four towns sometimes unwittingly spread bogus fears and forced law enforcement to respond.Hugs to thisRescued baby swans! Look how fuzzy they are! (Thanks to my colleague Dodai Stewart for sharing this one.)We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else youd like us to explore. You can reach us at [email protected]. Get this newsletter in your inbox every weekday; please sign up here. | Tech |
Credit...Jessica Eve Rattner for The New York TimesMay 28, 2019SAN FRANCISCO Mindy Cruz had an offer for a full-time position at another big tech company when she accepted a temporary job as a recruiter at Google in 2017. The pay was less and the benefits were not as good, but it was one step closer to her dream of becoming a Google employee.Ms. Cruz became one of Googles many temps and contractors a shadow work force that now outnumbers the companys full-time employees. But she never made the jump to full time. She was swiftly fired after a Google manager, who she said had harassed her for months, told the temp agency that had hired her that he wanted her gone.High-tech companies have long promoted the idea that they are egalitarian, idyllic workplaces. And Google, perhaps more than any other, has represented that image, with a reputation for enviable salaries and benefits and lavish perks.But the companys increasing reliance on temps and contractors has some Google employees wondering if management is undermining its carefully crafted culture. As of March, Google worked with roughly 121,000 temps and contractors around the world, compared with 102,000 full-time employees, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times.Though they often work side by side with full-timers, Google temps are usually employed by outside agencies. They make less money, have different benefits plans and have no paid vacation time in the United States, according to more than a dozen current and former Google temp and contract workers, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.Better treatment for those workers was one of the demands made by organizers of a Google employee walkout last year to protest the companys handling of sexual harassment complaints.Its time to end the two-tier system that treats some workers as expendable, the walkout organizers wrote on Twitter in March.When Sundar Pichai, Googles chief executive, did not respond to those demands, a group of anonymous contractors sent an open letter demanding equal pay and better opportunities for advancement. In April, hundreds of Google employees signed another letter protesting the dismissal of about 80 percent of a 43-person team of contingent workers working on the companys artificial intelligence assistant.In response, Google said it was changing a number of its policies to improve conditions for its temps and contractors.The reliance on temporary help has generated more controversy inside Google than it has at other big tech outfits, but the practice is common in Silicon Valley. Contingent labor accounts for 40 to 50 percent of the workers at most technology firms, according to estimates by OnContracting, a site that helps people find tech contracting positions.OnContracting estimates that a technology company can save $100,000 a year on average per American job by using a contractor instead of a full-time employee.Its creating a caste system inside companies, said Pradeep Chauhan, who runs OnContracting.In statements to The Times, Google did not directly address concerns that it had created a two-tiered work force, but said it did not hire contractors simply to save money.Eileen Naughton, Googles vice president of people operations, said that if a contingent worker is not having a good experience, we provide lots of ways to report complaints or express concerns.She added, We investigate, we hold individuals to account and we work to make things right for any person impacted.Googlers Are EverythingWhen Google became a public company in 2004, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wrote that they believed in rewarding employees with unusual benefits because our employees, who have named themselves Googlers, are everything.But not everyone doing work for Google over the years has been a Googler. The company has been using temps and contractors since its early years in projects like scanning books for online search. According to one former Google employee, temps and contractors accounted for about a third of the work force about a decade ago, and that share has steadily climbed.Googles contractors handle a range of jobs, from content moderation to software testing. Their hourly pay varies, from $16 per hour for an entry-level content reviewer to $125 per hour for a top-shelf software developer.Google usually pays staffing companies, which find the workers and provide them with salaries and benefits as their employer.But the current and former contract and temp workers, as well as four Google employees, said Google was the employer in all but name. It decides what jobs they do, dictates where and what hours they work, and often decides if and when to fire them.Googles contractors are barred from company events like holiday parties and all-hands meetings. They are not permitted to look at internal job postings or attend company job fairs.In some instances, email messages about workplace security concerns that went out to full-time staff were not shared with contract workers even though they worked in the same offices, the contractors and temps told The Times.In their letter to Mr. Pichai, the temp workers said the company sent security updates only to full-time employees during a shooting at YouTubes offices last year, leaving contractors defenseless in the line of fire. They were also barred from a meeting the next day to discuss the attack.Andrea Faville, a YouTube spokeswoman, said that the exclusion had been an oversight and that contractors had been invited to another companywide meeting later that week. She said all security updates went out to all staff, including contractors and temps, although two contractors working at YouTube said they had not received notices.ImageCredit...Jim Wilson/The New York TimesTemps for Training A.I.Google has relied on temporary workers even when the work has become more permanent.When the company started a research project code-named Pygmalion in 2014 to improve its speech-recognition technology, it hired temporary employees many of whom had doctorates in linguistics to help annotate and structure data so Googles computers could better understand what people were saying, according to five people familiar with the project.The team grew to about 250, and the majority were contractors. Some contractors worked two years on the project, which is Googles limit, and took a six-month break before returning in a similar role.As the project grew, Google managers pressed contractors to do more. In a complaint to the human resources department, one full-time employee said project leaders pressured contractors to work longer hours than stated in their contracts without reporting overtime. The project leaders made subtle promises of conversion to full-time status, two of the employees said.Google said it had learned of a possible violation in February and immediately opened an investigation, which is still continuing, into unpaid overtime. The company said it instructed employees not to promise temps future employment.Our policy is clear that all temporary workers must be paid for any overtime worked, Ms. Naughton said. If we find that anyone isnt properly paid, we make sure they are compensated appropriately and take action against any Google employee who violates this policy.States and the federal government are trying to define the distinction between contractors and employees more clearly. The difference usually depends on how much control the company exercises over the worker. That is based on certain criteria, like whether the company has the power to hire or fire the employee, or supervise and control work schedules or conditions of employment. As a result, companies keep contingent workers at arms length.In response to the issues with its temp work force, Google is both trying to improve their treatment and distancing itself from their management.Last month, Google said it would require staffing agencies to provide contract and temp workers with comprehensive health care, paid parental leave and an hourly minimum wage of $15.Many contractors who reported to a Google employee are now being managed by another contractor, who is the only one permitted to speak to full-time employees, three of the workers said. And Google is moving groups of contractors out of some offices in the United States and into separate buildings owned by Google but mostly managed by outside contractors.When Ms. Cruz, the temp recruiter, worked in a Google office in Mountain View, Calif., she sat with permanent recruiters and used a Google email address. Her manager, a Google employee, said he expected to convert her to full-time status after a year as long as she met her hiring quotas, which she did.Thats why she didnt say anything when her manager started asking her out. She repeatedly rebuffed him, she said, and his advances turned to harassment. He once invited her to a team outing at a winery that turned out to be just the two of them. That night, he tried to kiss her and put his hand up her dress.I had heard that a lot of times when you say something to your recruiting agency, they just take you out of the situation and put you somewhere else, Ms. Cruz said. And I didnt want my job to go away.She said she had considered reporting a claim when she suspected her manager was looking for a way to fire her. But she was fired in February before she had a chance. Her account was detailed in legal documents seen by The Times. Ms. Cruzs sister, Kristi Beck, said her sister had told her about the harassment while it had been going on.Ms. Cruzs agency, Search Wizards of Sarasota, Fla., told her that Google was dissatisfied with her work. She was told that the dismissal was unusual, but that there wasnt much the agency could do because her manager wanted her gone.Miranda Hinshaw, chief executive of Search Wizards, said the company did not discuss past or present employees/contractors with any third party.Ms. Cruz filed a complaint to Google a month later. Google said it had fired the manager in April after it investigated.Ms. Cruz agreed to a settlement in mediation after months of proceedings. (Google said the matter was now resolved.) But one part of the settlement still gnaws at her: She is not allowed to work for Google again.It feels so unfair, she said. They took away this very big opportunity. | Tech |
Credit...William Sauro/The New York TimesJune 1, 2018Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for president in the grand Senate Caucus Room on March 16, 1968, declaring that the United States, mired in war and riven by racism, ought to stand for hope instead of despair.Eighty-one days later, he celebrated victory in Californias Democratic primary with an ebullient speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and walked off the stage into a pantry, where he was assassinated in front of news cameras and screaming supporters.In a year that seemed determined to shake Americans confidence in the foundations of their society, Kennedys death at 1:44 a.m. Pacific time on June 6, 25 hours after he was shot, was one of the biggest inflection points. Sirhan Sirhans bullets not only demolished the hope for a savior candidate who would unite a party so fractured that its incumbent, President Lyndon B. Johnson, had decided not to seek re-election. Coming just two months after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they also fueled a general sense not entirely unfamiliar today that the nation had gone mad; that the normal rules and constants of politics could no longer be counted on.[Read more about how America fractured in 1968.]Fifty years is ample time for romanticized narratives to develop, and so they have. Kennedys rougher edges have often been sanded, and the volatility of the 1968 campaign has been glossed over, creating an alternative history in which electoral victory was inevitable and his promises certain to be kept, if only he had left the ballroom by a different door.Certainly, there is no denying that history would have been different if Kennedy had survived to win in November, and especially if he had managed to fulfill a campaign pledge to quickly wind down the Vietnam War.If he gets to be president, then theres no Nixon, said Peter Edelman, a professor at Georgetown Universitys law school who worked as a legislative assistant to Kennedy. I know this as much as anybody could know, because he was gone, but he had every intention of ending the war right away.And of course then theres no Watergate, he added.This is the rosiest version of what could have been: plausible, but unprovable. Perhaps the better question is not what would have happened if Kennedy hadnt been assassinated inherently speculative but what did happen because he was.ImageCredit...George Tames/The New York TimesHis death had a powerful and immediate effect on the American political psyche, intensified by its proximity to Kings. Why, many people asked, should they continue to pursue change peacefully, through the ballot box and nonviolent protest, when two of the biggest evangelists of that approach had been gunned down?Over the course of five years, starting with the killing of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, assassins had robbed the country of three of its most prominent and promising leaders, leaders who represented change, said Ross Baker, a distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University. I think the most immediate reaction was despair and a sense that perhaps the democratic experiment was in the process of failing.The despair was particularly acute among African-Americans, many of whom had put their faith in Kennedy after losing King.On the part of African-Americans, there was a sense that if any white politician was in their corner, it was Robert Kennedy, Dr. Baker said.[Read The New York Timess original reports of Kennedys assassination.]In fact, in the hours after Kings assassination, it was Kennedy who broke the news to a mostly black crowd in Indianapolis and, speaking emotionally and without notes, had urged them not to turn to violence in response.In the days that followed, riots erupted in Washington, in Chicago, in Detroit and Baltimore but not in Indianapolis.Nearly half a century later, Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who marched with King and campaigned with Kennedy, sobbed in an interview for Dawn Porters documentary Bobby Kennedy for President as he recalled the loss that followed.I think I cried all the way from L.A. to Atlanta, Mr. Lewis said. I kept saying to myself, What is happening in America? To lose Martin Luther King Jr. and two months later Bobby. He apologized, burying his face in his hand. It was too much.ImageCredit...Barton Silverman/The New York TimesSpring turned to summer, and a seething nation boiled over. In July, the police and black snipers engaged in a firefight in Cleveland. In August, fearing unrest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the government deployed National Guard troops with license to shoot to kill.As the party nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, an emblem of the status quo, for president, chaos reigned outside the convention center. In the streets of Chicago, the police and National Guard battled protesters with tear gas and clubs.Thurston Clarke, author of The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America, said a direct line could be drawn between Kennedys assassination and the social breakdown of August 1968. What happened at the Democratic convention, which was terribly wounding for years to come I cant believe there would have been that kind of protest and that kind of violence if Kennedy had been the presumptive or actual nominee, he said.As one segment of a disillusioned populace turned to violence, another retreated from politics altogether.Kennedys death really did persuade many people to seek private solutions, to retreat, to achieve a kind of personal redemption, and that had a very, very long-lasting effect on American life, Dr. Baker said, pointing to the Back to the Land movement and cult phenomena like Jonestown. People just turned away from the public square and said that any kind of national reconciliation and progress was hopeless through the political process.Voter turnout in 1968 was only slightly lower than in previous elections: 60.7 percent of the voting-age population that year, compared with 61.4 percent in 1964 and 62.8 percent in 1960, according to the Census Bureau. But moving forward, it fell off a cliff, into the mid- and low 50s, and didnt rebound for decades.When Mr. Clarke was promoting his book in 2008, he said, he spoke with many readers who told him that Kennedys death still haunted them.I heard again and again that they felt the loss of Bobby Kennedy more keenly even than the loss of John F. Kennedy, Mr. Clarke said. That they felt the country would have been even more different had Robert Kennedy been president than if John F. Kennedy had lived. | Politics |
Credit...Rebecca Blackwell/Associated PressMarch 16, 2017MEXICO CITY Even as Mexico fumes over President Trumps aggressive stance toward its people, the Mexican government is quietly trying to rip up basic legal protections for its citizens at home and gut longstanding efforts to fix the nations broken rule of law.Legal experts fear the move will set back human rights in Mexico by decades.The tool is an innocuous-sounding bill, submitted last month by a close ally of President Enrique Pea Nieto only a day after his government publicly chided the Trump administration to respect the rights of all Mexicans.The governing party says the bill, labeled a reform to the criminal code, will make adjustments to Mexicos new legal system, a linchpin of cooperation with the United States that was completed last year with more than $300 million in American aid. It is widely considered Mexicos most important legal advancement in the past century.But while the American-backed legal system is supposed to enshrine human rights in a nation desperately lacking them, this new bill heads squarely in the other direction. Legal scholars say it will broaden the power of the Mexican government to detain suspects for years before trial, enable the police to rely on hearsay in court and potentially allow prosecutors to use evidence obtained by torture.Beyond that, the bill, which has not yet been approved by Congress, flips the very premise of modern justice on its head: Rather than innocent before proved guilty, it would require concrete evidence of reasonable doubt, essentially shifting the burden of proof to the accused.It is not only a counter reform, but it has reforms that contravene the right to a proper defense, said Alejandra Ramos, a judge in the state of Chihuahua. They want to pass this because it is easier to do than to train police officers and prosecutors, clean up the entire system and break the use of torture as the main tool of investigation.The new legislation reflects a central contradiction of modern Mexico under Mr. Pea Nieto and his party: the version of the country that his government promotes to the world versus the reality it creates on the ground.In promoting Brand Mexico, the government has fashioned the image of an ascending nation, a regional leader ready to take its place on the global stage, competitive on issues of trade, economics and culture. And yet, presented with mounting violence, vast inequality and a human rights crisis in which torture at the hands of security forces is generalized, in the words of the United Nations, the same government frequently runs roughshod over the rights it claims to defend.ImageCredit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe governments recent scolding of the Trump administration while actively trying to roll back the rights of Mexicans at home underscores the paradox.When Mr. Trump ordered a wall between the two nations, the Mexicans called it an alarming assault on their dignity, vowing to defend their citizens in the United States and publicly insisting last month that all Mexicans should be treated with absolute respect to their civil rights and human rights.But back home, the Mexican government was busy doing the opposite, introducing a bill to reverse central tenets of the new justice system with such little publicity that many lawmakers, judges and defense lawyers do not even know about it.International bodies that oversee Mexicos human rights record say the legislation is part of a long pattern by the government. In its handling of the vast corruption that runs through the justice and political systems, the impunity of its security forces, or the investigations into the tens of thousands of disappearances across the country, they say, the government often undermines the major breakthroughs it claims to be making.Mexico has worked hard to promote its image as a state that defends or advances international human rights, said James Cavallaro, a commissioner on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and a professor at Stanford Law School. But at home, the human rights situation is simply dreadful: severe abuse, torture, summary executions and virtually guaranteed impunity.The bill is part of a broader packet of changes. The governing party and other lawmakers have also submitted several versions of a separate law that would legalize the armys enforcement of domestic security, a role the military has played without a legal mandate since the drug war began a decade ago.During that time, torture and extrajudicial killings have soared. According to the governments own data, the military kills far more combatants than it injures, a lopsided record that defies the history of war. The elite marine forces, for instance, kill 30 people for every person they injure, a ratio that experts say points to a high likelihood of extrajudicial killings.Very few soldiers are ever punished for crossing the line. Of the roughly 4,000 complaints of torture that the attorney generals office has reviewed since 2006, only 15 have resulted in convictions, raising broad international concerns about impunity and the governments willingness to tackle human rights abuses.The government says the military bill will help regulate the armed forces, giving them the legal authority to continue their essential role in fighting organized crime.ImageCredit...Bryan Denton for The New York TimesBut that isnt the right question, said Jan Jarab, the representative for the United Nations high commissioner for human rights in Mexico. The right question is, Should they continue to do it at all? The right question is, Has the military paradigm been successful? The answer to that, in a huge and overwhelming majority, is no.Driving the governments legislative push is a profound fear: that the nations fragile security situation, already a major stain on Mexicos international image, could unravel further.The new legal system, for example, retooled with the United States over a period of eight years, affords more protections for defendants and requires robust evidence to detain people. As a result, Mexican officials say, suspects are walking free, to the frustration of prosecutors, the police and even regular citizens.Like all recently implemented systems, it is necessary to make certain adjustments for it to work as it should, the presidents office said in a statement explaining the proposed changes. Different sectors of the new justice system and civil society groups have expressed the need to make adjustments.The government added that it was fully committed to human rights, had pressed forward vigorously to enact the legal system and had trained all of the police in the country in the new legal standards.But under the governments latest proposals, critics say, longstanding efforts to tighten rules on evidence and train a functioning police force would most likely be abandoned for a more expedient approach to dealing with crime, leaving untouched a central problem plaguing Mexico today: impunity.If you look at both of these laws, they are geared toward the same goal the police having more power and slowly transitioning the country into something like a police state, said Javier Carrasco, the executive director of the Institute of Penal Justice. They are both geared toward the same horizon.The United States has been notably quiet about the new bills, given how much it has invested to overhaul Mexicos legal system. The Americans have equipped courtrooms across the country and trained judges, prosecutors, police officers and law professors.To some critics, the United States silence is a reflection of the new relationship between the two countries, with American influence waning amid the hostilities between Mr. Trump and Mexico.ImageCredit...Ivn Stephens/Agencia El Universal,via Associated PressWe have lost our ability to have a dialogue with them now, said Mark Feierstein, the former director of Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council under President Barack Obama. With the Trump administrations attitude toward our press and judicial system, and the coarse language he uses, we have lost our standing globally.When the legal reform was first passed in 2008, it was hailed across Mexicos political spectrum as a seminal moment for the country. No longer would court decisions remain shielded under an opaque written system. Instead, the entire country would move to a so-called accusatorial system, in which prosecutors and defense lawyers presented their evidence in public.But the new criminal justice system has exposed deep flaws in the capacity of law enforcement to collect evidence and investigate cases. Despite eight years of training, the authorities still often rely on a single confession obtained through torture, and some officials have condemned the higher burden of proof, especially when suspects are released because of it.What is absurd is that they are not letting the 2008 reform sit, or allowing it to be managed by the judges first, Fernando Gmez Mont, a former Mexican interior minister, said of the governments push to undercut the legal system.For all of the criticism of the military, there is widespread agreement in Mexico that no other institution is ready to battle organized crime. Sending soldiers back to their barracks could create a security vacuum, a point leaders of the army have repeatedly made when demanding legal protections.Mr. Pea Nieto, whose approval ratings are the lowest of any president in a quarter century, has been supportive of both measures currently before Congress.In 2014, one of his allies submitted a similar package of changes to the new legal system. Then, as now, the effort came at a time of national tension and distraction, just two months after the mysterious disappearance of 43 students. Opponents fought the changes and prevented their passage.Then, in December, during a session with his National Security Council, Mr. Pea Nieto urged lawmakers to broaden the militarys power in domestic affairs and promised that in 2017 his administration would work on correcting the operational flaws of the new penal justice system.To gain support for the bills, Mr. Pea Nieto has relied on a strategic ally, Csar Camacho, the leader of his party in Congress who submitted them. Mr. Camacho, a longtime politician, is in a unique position: He was a principal shepherd of the new legal system that was hailed as a breakthrough for Mexico. But he has been conspicuously quiet about his current bill to change it, even when publicly discussing the problems he is supposed to be solving.ImageCredit...Fernando Brito/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesOn a recent panel in Mexico City, Mr. Camacho shared the dais with several legal experts invited to assess the New System of Justice: What Is Lacking for Its Consolidation?For more than two hours, the panelists talked about the American-backed legal system, discussing the need to ensure that prosecutors and police officers are better trained. Not a single person, including Mr. Camacho, mentioned his bill to reverse significant elements of the system, a reflection of the lawmakers power and the reluctance of many to challenge him.After the discussion, when asked about his new bill in an interview, Mr. Camacho shook his head and smiled.I am a proponent of the accusatory system, and I know it inside out, he said. What is necessary now is to make adjustments that allow for an absolute respect to civil liberties, and to give the Mexican state instruments and elements to make it more efficient.Mr. Camacho has been more outspoken about the new military bill, tamping down opposition in January by saying that it would ultimately benefit human rights.This law is not intended to militarize the country, he said during a radio interview, but rather to give certainty to the population so we know the boundaries of the armed forces actions.But rather than curtailing the scope of the militarys operations, Mr. Camachos bill would expand its official powers to include police functions like executing arrest warrants, tapping private communications, overseeing crime scenes, interviewing witnesses and investigating cases.Mr. Camacho has told officials that while the new legislation carries his name, its true authors are the arms of law enforcement in the country: the attorney generals office, the National Security Council and the military.The decision to install the military on the front lines with drug traffickers was, from the beginning, a tacit admission that the police could not manage the fight. With the police picked apart by corruption, poor training and disorganization, the army was the only force left capable of confronting the growing power and violence of the cartels.ImageCredit...Rebecca Blackwell/Associated PressBut a decades worth of research has shown that deploying the army has only deepened the countrys crisis. Beyond human rights violations, many argue that the strategy has been a failure from a security standpoint alone. Violence in Mexico today is once again approaching the peak levels of the drug war reached six years ago.New research has also shown that when the army is deployed in a community, violence tends to rise. Homicide rates increased 8 percent in areas where the armed forces deployed, and 9 percent where the army specifically was active, according to research published by CIDE, a Mexican research center.We have been through the same strategy of militarizing public safety, and it has been a tremendous failure, said Catalina Perez-Correa, a professor at CIDE who has studied the issue. Not only has it not diminished violence, we now have evidence that it has worsened violence in Mexico.Justice has always been a moving target in Mexico, where 98 percent of homicides go unsolved. But most legal scholars say the new legal system is infinitely better than the one it replaced. Still, its execution, they warn, relies on civil servants with poor training and, in some cases, bad habits.We have not done what was necessary to make the system function properly, Jos Ramn Cosso Daz, a Supreme Court justice, said in an interview with the newspaper Universal. I think a lot of people are assuming that just because we have oral trials and courtrooms, because we have the scenery, that the trials will work, but this is not a play.The state of Chihuahua, along the border with Texas, was the first to undergo the transition in 2008, and the first to pass legislation to essentially reverse it after an outcry from law enforcement officials in 2010 and 2011.A reform of this size and relevance requires a complex transition process, a cultural change of mind, a generational turnover even, said Pablo Gonzalez, a judge in Chihuahua. But that doesnt mean we should stop walking the path toward that goal, no matter how complex and how much time it takes us to get there.Fundamentally, he said, it boils down to a choice between controlling crime with arbitrary arrests or delivering something closer to justice.We cannot play the same game on the federal level, he said. We cannot make that bet, because there is simply too much at stake. | World |
Porn Star Stormy Daniels I'm Gettin' Gigantic Tips off Trump 1/19/2018 Stormy Daniels may have taken hush money from Donald Trump, and that's now paying handsome dividends. Stormy's headlining Saturday night at the Trophy Club in Greenville, South Carolina and the owner's using the Trump scandal to lure in the curious. She reportedly hooked up with Trump back in 2006 -- something she first reportedly claimed and now denies. The Wall Street Journal reports Trump's lawyer funneled over $130k to her during the 2016 campaign to keep her quiet. So, in the greatest American tradition, Stormy is now on her own campaign trail ... Make America Horny Again! Capitalism ... ain't it the best? | Entertainment |
matterA cave drawing in Borneo is at least 40,000 years old, raising intriguing questions about creativity in ancient societies. Credit...Luc-Henri FageNov. 7, 2018On the wall of a cave deep in the jungles of Borneo, there is an image of a thick-bodied, spindly-legged animal, drawn in reddish ocher.It may be a crude image. But it also is more than 40,000 years old, scientists reported on Wednesday, making this the oldest figurative art in the world. Until now, the oldest known human-made figures were ivory sculptures found in Germany. Scientists have estimated that those figurines of horses, birds and people were at most 40,000 years old. Researchers have found older man-made images, but these were abstract patterns, such as crisscrossing lines. The switch to figurative art represented an important shift in how people thought about the world around them and possibly themselves. The finding also demonstrates that ancient humans somehow made the creative transition at roughly the same time, in places thousands of miles apart.Its essentially happening at the same time at the opposite ends of the world, said Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia and a co-author of the report, published in the journal Nature.Archaeologists have been discovering cave paintings and ancient sculptures for centuries, but it was only in the mid twentieth century that it became possible to precisely determine their age.Traces of radioactive carbon are present in some types of art, and scientists gauge their age by measuring how long the carbon has been breaking down.In the 1950s, radiocarbon dating on paintings in the Lascaux Cave in southern France showed that the images of horses and other animals were made 15,500 years ago.On further investigation, the Lascaux paintings were shown to be 18,000 years old, making them the oldest artwork known at the time.Eventually even older art came to light. Another French cave, called Chauvet, is decorated with drawings of animals that researchers estimate date back as far as 37,000 years.In 2003, Nicholas Conard of the University of Tbingen in Germany discovered the ivory figurines, which turned out to be far older: up to 40,000 years old.For years, those sculptures stood out as the oldest figurative artworks on the planet. It was very lonely for a long time, said Dr. Conard.ImageCredit...Pindi SetiawanScientists suspected that still older art was out there, but radiocarbon dating has limits. Many cave paintings lack the carbon required to date them.Moreover, the half-life of radioactive carbon is only 5,730 years. In a sample thats 40,000 years old or older, all of the carbon required to date it may be long gone.In recent years, scientists have developed a new dating method.When water trickles down cave walls, it can leave behind a translucent curtain of minerals called a flowstone. If a flowstone contains uranium, it will decay steadily and at a predictable rate into thorium. In 2014, Dr. Aubert and his colleagues dated the age of a flowstone that covered a picture of a pig-like animal called a babirusa in a cave in Sulawesi. They discovered that the image was at least 35,400 years old.That ancient age stunned Dr. Aubert and his colleagues, and they grew eager to use their method on other cave art. Pindi Setiawan, an archaeologist at Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia, invited Dr. Aubert and his colleagues to try it in Borneo.Dr. Setiawan and Adhi Agus Oktaviana, of the Indonesian National Center for Archaeological Research, had spent years studying drawings in remote mountain caves there.Getting to the site was not easy. The team had to travel upriver by boat into the rain forest, then to backpack up mountains for days, hacking a path with machetes.Over the course of two field seasons, the researchers visited six caves. They removed bits of flowstone overlying paintings and used the samples to date the minimum age of the artwork underneath.[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]The scientists discovered flowstones underneath some images, as well; these samples allowed them to determine a maximum age. The earliest art in the caves, the researchers found, were reddish-orange hand outlines and drawings of animals. The oldest of all was covered by a flowstone that formed 40,000 years ago.That drawing depicts a four-legged animal that Dr. Aubert suspected was a species of wild cattle called a banteng.Since the 40,000-year-old flowstone covers the banteng image, the artwork must be older than that and thus the oldest known figurative art on the planet.Its hard to say when people first began to make these cave drawings, but one intriguing clue comes from a hand stencil. A flowstone atop it is 23,600 years old, while another underneath is 51,800 years old.Combining the evidence from this stencil and the banteng image, its possible that people started making art in the Borneo caves sometime between 52,000 years ago and 40,000 years ago.The new discovery indicates that people in Borneo were already making figurative images at the same time as people in Europe or perhaps even thousands of years beforehand. Now Dr. Aubert and other researchers are puzzling over what triggered these bursts of creativity.One thing is clear: Figurative art came late in the history of our species. The oldest fossils of Homo sapiens, found in Morocco, are 300,000 years old. A study last year of genetic diversity among people today indicates that populations began diverging from one another in Africa between 260,000 and 350,000 years ago. Today, every culture makes art of some sort, and it is likely that humans in Africa over 200,000 years ago had the capacity to create it. But for thousands of generations, theres no evidence that people actually made figurative art. The closest thing to it are abstract engravings etched on shells or pieces of ocher.Only much later did our species expand out of Africa. They arrived in Southeast Asia and Australia perhaps as early as 70,000 years ago. Modern humans didnt get to Europe until much later, about 45,000 years ago, researchers suspect.Dr. Aubert speculated that over thousands of years, certain societies of hunter-gatherers found places with good food supplies, or developed new kinds of tools, and thus attained denser populations.In those societies, people may have begun communicating with symbolic images and pictures.When they arrive at a certain place and theres an increase in population, they make rock art, said Dr. Aubert.The early images and figures might have illustrated stories contained vital information for how to survive in hard times, Dr. Conard said.Or perhaps the drawings helped joined people as a group, encouraging them to cooperate a kind of glue to hold these social units together, he said.If thats the case, then ancient figurative art may yet turn up in other places where early humans reached dense populations, including Africa, Asia or Australia.There are many examples of early cave art that have yet to be dated with the latest flowstone method. Theyre just everywhere, Dr. Aubert said.For now, however, he just wants to go back to the caves of Borneo and figure out how ancient humans made those remarkable images. Aside from their artwork, no one has found a trace of the people who once lived there. We want to go there and dig, said Dr. Aubert. We want to know who those people were. We want to know how they lived. We want to know everything.ImageCredit...Pindi Setiawan | science |
Credit...Jeff Chiu/Associated PressJune 6, 2018Aaron Persky, the California judge who drew national attention in 2016 when he sentenced a Stanford student to just six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, was recalled on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. He is the first judge recalled in California in more than 80 years.With nearly all precincts reporting on Wednesday, just under 60 percent of voters were in favor of removing Judge Persky from the Santa Clara County Superior Court, where he had served since 2003. Cindy Hendrickson, a prosecutor, was elected to replace him.The recall stemmed from the case of Brock Turner, who sexually assaulted a woman near a dumpster in 2015 after she had blacked out from drinking. In March 2016, a jury found Mr. Turner, then 20, guilty on all three felony charges against him: sexual penetration with a foreign object of an intoxicated person, sexual penetration with a foreign object of an unconscious person, and intent to commit rape.The maximum sentence in Mr. Turners case was 14 years, and Judge Persky had sentenced him to six months. Mr. Turner served only three months before being released in September 2016. (He also received three years of probation and was required to register as a sex offender, and Stanford forced him to withdraw and barred him from campus.)The voters of Santa Clara County are the winners of this election, Michele Dauber, a law professor at Stanford who led the recall campaign, said in a statement. We voted that sexual violence, including campus sexual violence, must be taken seriously by our elected officials, and by the justice system.LaDoris Cordell, a retired judge and a spokeswoman for Judge Persky, called the recall an attack on judicial independence and said it had encouraged people to think of judges as no more than politicians.The judge said he thought Mr. Turner would not be a danger to others and expressed concern that a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him. He did not mention the impact of the assault on the victim, known publicly only as Emily Doe, who described her suffering in a more than 7,000-word statement that went viral soon after it was published by BuzzFeed. The CNN host Ashleigh Banfield devoted more than 20 minutes of airtime to reading it almost in its entirety.Judge Persky was cleared of any official misconduct, but talk of a recall campaign began almost as soon as he handed down his sentence. Early this year, the Santa Clara County registrar announced that supporters of a recall led by Ms. Dauber, whose daughter is friends with Emily Doe had collected enough signatures to put the question on Tuesdays ballot. Among the efforts most prominent backers were Anita Hill and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.In a statement filed with the county registrar in response to the effort, Judge Persky said he had a legal and professional responsibility to consider alternatives to imprisonment for first-time offenders.As a judge, my role is to consider both sides, he said in the statement. Its not always popular, but its the law, and I took an oath to follow it without regard to public opinion or my opinions as a former prosecutor.Ms. Dauber said Tuesdays result demonstrated that violence against women is a voting issue, and that if candidates want the votes of progressive Democratic women, they will have to take this issue seriously.Opponents of the recall, including some who disagreed with Judge Perskys decision in Mr. Turners case, argued that this electoral punishment would make other judges reluctant to be lenient in cases where leniency might be appropriate.They had a very emotional appeal: You say rape, dumpster, six months, everyone goes ahhh without looking at the facts, Ms. Cordell said, arguing that Judge Persky had been unfairly targeted by people whose real complaint was with California law at the time of Mr. Turners sentencing.In fact, the sentence, and the backlash to it, prompted California lawmakers to change the law. Within four months, they enacted mandatory minimum sentences in sexual assault cases and closed a loophole in which penetrative sexual assault could be punished less harshly if the victim was too intoxicated to physically resist. | Politics |
Washington MemoThose who warned of worst-case scenarios under President Trump only to be dismissed as alarmists found some of their darkest fears realized in the storming of the Capitol on Wednesday.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York TimesJan. 6, 2021WASHINGTON So this is how it ends. The presidency of Donald John Trump, rooted from the beginning in anger, division and conspiracy-mongering, comes to a close with a violent mob storming the Capitol at the instigation of a defeated leader trying to hang onto power as if America were just another authoritarian nation.The scenes in Washington would have once been unimaginable: A rampage through the citadel of American democracy. Police officers brandishing guns in an armed standoff to defend the House chamber. Tear gas deployed in the Rotunda. Lawmakers in hiding. Extremists standing in the vice presidents spot on the Senate dais and sitting at the desk of the speaker of the House.The words used to describe it were equally alarming: Coup. Insurrection. Sedition. Suddenly the United States was being compared to a banana republic and receiving messages of concern from other capitals. American carnage, it turned out, was not what President Trump would stop, as he promised upon taking office, but what he wound up delivering four years later to the very building where he took the oath.The convulsion in Washington capped 1,448 days of Twitter storms, provocations, race-baiting, busted norms, shock-jock governance and truth-bending prevarication from the Oval Office that have left the country more polarized than in generations. Those who warned of worst-case scenarios only to be dismissed as alarmists found some of their darkest fears realized. By days end, some Republicans discussed removing Mr. Trump under the 25th Amendment rather than wait two weeks for the inauguration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.The extraordinary invasion of the Capitol was a last-ditch act of desperation from a camp facing political eviction. Even before the mob set foot in the building on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Trumps presidency was slipping away. Democrats were taking control of the Senate with a pair of Georgia runoff election victories that Republicans angrily blamed on the presidents erratic behavior.Two of his most loyal allies, Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, broke with Mr. Trump as never before, refusing to go along with his bid to overturn a democratic election after standing behind him or remaining quiet through four years of toxic conflict, scandal and capriciousness.And following the attack on the Capitol, even more Republicans abandoned him. While most Republicans in the House stuck with him, he lost more than half of the Republican senators who started the day on his side of the battle, leaving him just six on the first Senate vote when deliberations resumed after the rioters were removed.What we have seen today is unlawful and unacceptable, said Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington State, who reversed plans to join Mr. Trumps effort. I have decided I will vote to uphold the Electoral College results and I encourage Donald Trump to condemn and put an end to this madness.Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking Republican in the House, said Mr. Trump was responsible for the violence. Theres no question that the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob, she told Fox News in comments she then posted online. He lit the flames. This is what America is not.Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, another senior Republican, said he had no more interest in what Mr. Trump had to say after the events that forced lawmakers to flee their own chambers. I dont want to hear anything, he told reporters. It was a tragic day and I think he was part of it.The cascade of criticism came even from within Mr. Trumps circle, as advisers expressed deepening concern about how far he has been willing to go to undo an election he lost. At least three aides, Stephanie Grisham, Sarah Matthews and Rickie Niceta, resigned with more expected to follow. After he initially offered only mild statements calling on the mob in the Capitol to be peaceful, several members of Mr. Trumps team publicly implored him to do more.The best thing @realDonaldTrump could do right now is to address the nation from the Oval Office and condemn the riots, Mick Mulvaney, who served as his White House chief of staff and still serves as a special envoy, wrote on Twitter. A peaceful transition of power is essential to the country and needs to take place on 1/20.Others debunked their own former bosss brazenly false fraud allegations. Dear MAGA- I am one of you, wrote Alyssa Farah, who just stepped down as Mr. Trumps communications director last month, noting that she has worked not just for Mr. Trump but also the conservative Freedom Caucus in the House. I campaigned w/ Trump & voted for him. But I need you to hear me: the Election was NOT stolen. We lost.Moments after Mr. Biden went on live television to deplore the insurrection at the Capitol and call on Mr. Trump to go before cameras, the president posted a recorded video online that offered mixed messages. Even as he told supporters it was time to withdraw, he praised them rather than condemning their actions and repeated his grievances against people who were so bad and so evil.I know youre hurt, he told the rioters. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. He added: We love you. Youre very special. Rather than calming the waters, the video was seen as further roiling them so much so that Facebook and Twitter took it down and temporarily suspended Mr. Trumps accounts.Tom Bossert, the presidents former homeland security adviser, called out his former boss. This is beyond wrong and illegal, he said on Twitter. Its un-American. The President undermined American democracy baselessly for months. As a result, hes culpable for this siege, and an utter disgrace.While Washington has seen many protests over the years, including some that turned violent, the uprising on Wednesday was unlike anything that the city has seen during a transition of power in modern times, literally interrupting the constitutional acceptance of Mr. Bidens election victory.The assault on the Capitol was the first by a large hostile group of invaders since the British sacked the building in 1814, according to the United States Capitol Historical Society. Four Puerto Rican nationalists entered peacefully in 1954 and sat in the House visitors gallery, at which point they pulled out guns and opened fire, injuring five lawmakers. In 1998, a gunman walked into the Capitol and killed two members of the Capitol Police.But none of them was egged on by an American president the way that Mr. Trump seemed to do on Wednesday during a Save America March on the Ellipse south of the White House just as Congress was convening to validate Mr. Bidens election.We will never give up, Mr. Trump had declared. We will never concede. It doesnt happen. You dont concede when theres theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and thats what this is all about.As the crowd on the Ellipse chanted, Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump! the president lashed out at members of his own party for not doing more to help him cling to power. There are so many weak Republicans, he growled and then vowed to take revenge against those he deemed insufficiently loyal. You primary them, he said.He singled out Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican who angered him by not intervening in the election, calling him one of the dumbest governors in the United States. And he went after William P. Barr, the attorney general who debunked his false election complaints. All of a sudden, Bill Barr changed, he groused.Other speakers, including his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, castigated Republican lawmakers for not standing up for Mr. Trump. Lets have trial by combat, exhorted Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor who has served as the presidents personal lawyer.The people who did nothing to stop the steal this gathering should send a message to them, Donald Trump Jr. said. This isnt their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trumps Republican Party.ImageCredit...Pete Marovich for The New York TimesBut the question is for how long. Mr. Trump faced the end of his reign much as he began it, with a fervent, hard-core base but without the support of most Americans. He won in 2016 through the Electoral College with nearly three million fewer votes in the popular tally than his opponent and lost by seven million in November. He did not earn the approval of a majority of Americans in major surveys for a single day of his tenure, unlike any of his predecessors in the history of polling.Had it not been for the attack on the Capitol, the break by Mr. Pence and Mr. McConnell would have been a political earthquake by itself. Mr. Pence rebuffed the presidents demand that he use his role as presiding officer over the Electoral College count to reject electors for Mr. Biden. And Mr. McConnell gave a forceful speech repudiating Mr. Trumps effort to nullify the election.If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral, Mr. McConnell said before the Capitol was overrun.Mr. Pence released a letter saying he did not have the power to do what the president wanted him to do. Vesting the vice president with unilateral authority to decide presidential contests would be entirely antithetical to the constitutional design, he wrote.He added: It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.With Mr. Pence unwilling and unable to stop the count, the presidents supporters made it their mission to do it themselves. And for several hours, they succeeded. But after they were finally cleared out of a ransacked Capitol, lawmakers resumed the process of ending the Trump presidency.Even Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of his strongest allies, essentially declared the Trump era done as he opposed the attempt to override the election results. Enoughs enough, he said on the floor. It is over. | Politics |
Credit...Beth Israel Deaconess Medical CenterMarch 7, 2017Dr. George Blackburn, a surgeon, clinician, researcher, teacher and author who was considered pre-eminent in the study of obesity and nutrition, died on Feb. 20 at his home in Boston. He was 81.The cause was malignant melanoma, said his wife, Susan Kelly.Over his career, largely spent at Harvard Medical School and at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Dr. Blackburn correlated poor nutrition with obesity, advocated lower-fat diets and helped develop gastric bypass surgery and nutritional liquid diets.He joined Dr. Bruce Bistrian and other colleagues in providing the foundation for what became the field of nutrition medicine.What really put him and his colleagues on the world map were publications highlighting the inadequate nutritional management of people in the hospital so-called hospital malnutrition, said a former colleague, Dr. Steven Heymsfield.Dr. Blackburn helped develop nutritious liquid and solid diets, supplementing them with protein to encourage loss of body fat while preserving muscle. These protein sparing diets protected the heart and other organs, and one of these, the protein-sparing modified fast, became the basis for the low-carb and the very-low-calorie diet for obesity, said Dr. Caroline Apovian, a former colleague.He also found that reducing dietary fat improved the survival rate of breast cancer victims and that weight loss benefited patients with Type 2 diabetes.Dr. Blackburn was a professor of nutrition at Harvard and at Beth Israel was the chief of the Nutrition/Metabolism Laboratory and director of the Center for the Study of Nutrition Medicine.He was not an absolutist. The occasional craving for a brownie or a French fry could be indulged, he said; otherwise dieters might abandon their self-discipline.He also practiced what he preached, walking several miles every morning and bounding up eight flights of stairs to his office.Dr. Blackburn also followed five strategies he developed during four decades of encouraging patients to shed pounds. They were summarized in the most recent Harvard Heart Letter: Make time to prepare healthy meals. Eat slowly. Consume evenly sized meals, beginning with breakfast. Do not skimp on sleep. Weigh yourself often.George Lincoln Blackburn was born on Feb. 12, 1936, in McPherson, Kan., a city in the center of the state. He was raised in Joplin, Mo. His father, also named George, sold farm equipment. His mother was the former Betty Warrick.After graduating from the University of Kansas with a bachelors in chemistry, he served in the Navy before attending the University of Kansas School of Medicine on the G.I. Bill. He trained in surgery at Boston City Hospital and earned a doctorate in nutritional biochemistry from M.I.T.His first marriage, to the former Dona Seacat, ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Kelly, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Amy, David and Matthew Blackburn; a daughter from his second marriage, Vali Blackburn Udin; 10 grandchildren; and a great-grandson.Dr. Blackburn advocated a diet of lean meat, fish and fowl supplemented by vitamins and minerals. He often said that even a small decrease in caloric intake could result in healthier weight.But he said sustained weight loss required a three-pronged approach: Cut the calories, eat quality food and exercise. In 2005, he resigned from a McDonalds advisory council on balanced lifestyles because, he said, the company had not incorporated his message in its health education campaign.The first two messages werent making it through, he said. Instead, the campaign focused largely on exercise.If I were on the exercise side, Id be ecstatic, Dr. Blackburn said. But Im focused on the role of food in a healthy lifestyle. Every scientist knows that increasing exercise is not going to replace cutting the calories. | Health |
Credit...Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesNov. 21, 2018ROME The European Union upped the ante in a standoff with Italy on Wednesday, taking another step toward punishing a government that has repeatedly flouted its fiscal rules by insisting on a heavy-spending budget that fails to bring down the countrys burdensome debt.With what the Italian government has put on the table, we see a risk of the country sleepwalking into instability, said Valdis Dombrovskis, the European Commission vice president.The country, which is led by populist and anti-establishment forces, was a case of particularly serious noncompliance, he added.The European Commission, the blocs executive branch, will now turn its negative assessment of the budget over to eurozone countries. In two weeks, they could give the commission the green light to start an excessive deficit procedure against Italy, which could lead to steep fines.Italy is the eurozones third-largest economy, and its crippling debt and minuscule growth is a source of deep concern in Brussels and international markets. A financial collapse there has the potential to infect and, some say, sink the entire European economy.Within Italy, the budget has exposed tensions and the opposing priorities of the populist coalition government, led by Matteo Salvini, of the populist League party, and Luigi Di Maio, of the Five Star Movement.But both are happy to fight the European Union, and both have a history of skepticism when it comes to membership of the euro. Ahead of European Parliament elections in May, both parties need an enemy to run against, and with migrant landings down, bureaucrats in Brussels fit the bill nicely.Brussels had rejected a previous version of the budget, but the Italian government responded this month with only small amendments. The new round of budget rejection and Italian defiance on Wednesday, when the commission made its annual review of eurozone spending plans, was completely expected.We are still committed to our budget, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told reporters, adding that the Italian government was sure of its position but that he would be very willing to discuss it with Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, when they met to discuss next steps at a dinner in Brussels on Saturday.A letter arrived from Brussels? I was expecting one from Santa Claus, said Mr. Salvini, the deputy prime minister and the most powerful force in the Italian government, who has suggested that Mr. Juncker has a drinking problem.He added that he would be polite in discussing the budget with European Union officials but would not be persuaded to reinstate the previous governments pension reductions. Italy has a need to grow, he told reporters.A report in the Turin-based newspaper La Stampa, citing anonymous sources, suggested that Mr. Salvini could be willing to significantly soften his position. That appeared to mute the market reaction, but a spokeswoman for Mr. Salvini disputed the report on Wednesday.ImageCredit...Yves Herman/ReutersTo the citizens we say have no fear because we will not retreat, said Francesco DUva, a member of Parliament with the Five Star Movement. We werent elected to enact the same destructive policies of the old governments.The Italians say that austerity measures imposed by Brussels and the powerful northern European countries that have sway there have suffocated the Italian economy.They argue that only through spending on a citizens income, generous pensions, and reduced taxes can they stimulate the stuck Italian economy, and that they will then bring down their deficit currently at 132 percent of output, more than twice the European Union limit through growth.But the European Union, and other international institutions and ratings services, have deemed Italian growth projections to be fanciful and overly optimistic. The reality, critics and opponents of the government said, was that Wednesday marked a decline in the countrys standing.Today a very sad thing happened to our country, said Pier Carlo Padoan, the finance minister in the previous Democratic Party administration.I am very worried, said Antonio Tajani, the president of European Parliament and a top official in Forza Italia, the center-right party of the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.He pointed to the risk premium on Italian government bonds that consistently hovers in dangerous territory, to the poor performance of the Italian stock market and to rising investor anxiety.The Italian citizens dont deserve this disaster due to an irresponsible government that, instead of resolving the problems of Italians, everyday invents new enemies, Mr. Tajani said.Despite the posturing of both sides, the process leading to sanctions is lengthy, and leaves plenty of time for Brussels and Rome to find a compromise and avoid a confrontation that would further destabilize the European Union when it is already struggling with slower economic growth and Britains planned departure.The Italian Parliament has to approve a budget by Dec. 31, which leaves time to change proposals. And some members of European Parliament have suggested that Brussels should bend.Sven Giegold, a German member of the European Parliament from the Green Party, said that, while the excessive deficit procedure against Italy was unavoidable under European Union rules, the commission should be willing to compromise.More spending could be sensible if it revives Italys economy, Mr. Giegold said in a statement. Both sides should give ground.The question is whether Brussels will stand firm and whether there is any pressure outside of crippling market reactions large enough to change the political calculus that appears to be motivating Italys coalition partners to refuse to budge. Both the League and Five Star are looking to increase their domestic popularity, and leverage, ahead of Mays elections.We are convinced of the numbers we put in our budget, Mr. Salvini said on Wednesday. Well go forward. | World |
TrilobitesJune 9, 2017European eels are born and die in the North Atlantic Ocean, but spend most of their lives in rivers or estuaries across Europe and North Africa.In between, they traverse thousands of miles of ocean, where its often unclear which way is up or down. Scientists have therefore long suspected that these critically endangered fish use magnetism to help guide them.A study published Friday in Science Advances shows, for the first time, that European eels might link magnetic cues with the tides to navigate. Studying juveniles during the crucial stage when they move toward land from open ocean, the authors found that eels faced different directions based on whether the tide was flowing in (flood tide) or out (ebb tide).Changing orientation might help eels take advantage of tides to travel from the ocean to the coast, and into fresh water, more efficiently, said Alessandro Cresci, a graduate student at the University of Miami and lead author of the study.Previous studies have shown that eels can detect magnetic fields, but how they use this sixth sense has remained a matter of speculation until now, said Michael J. Miller, an eel biologist at Nihon University in Japan who was not involved in the study.When transitioning from sea to coast, European eels are in a stage of their lives where they are about the size of a finger and transparent along their bodies, thus the name glass eels.Mr. Crescis group studied glass eels from the coast of Norway, observing the animals in the field by putting 54 slippery, see-through eels, one by one, in a drifting chamber equipped with cameras and compasses. When the tide ebbed, these animals generally faced south, but when it flowed in, they showed no consistent orientation.The researchers then studied 49 of the same eels in laboratory tanks. They subjected some of the eels to reoriented magnetic fields, rotating magnetic north to the east, south or west.During the time of day corresponding to ebb tide, eels still tended to face whichever direction meant south to them under their assigned magnetic field, even though there was no change in the water around them suggesting they paired a biological compass with an internal tide clock to maintain a consistent behavior. During flood tide, they tended to face magnetic north.Changing direction between tides fits with a strategy commonly observed in marine animals: Many try to catch free rides upstream as the tide flows in, but then dart down to the sea bottom so as not to get swept back to sea as the tide ebbs.Its unknown whether facing south during ebb tide is a universal behavior, or whether glass eels in different regions orient differently, said Caroline Durif, a senior researcher at the Institute of Marine Research in Norway and an author of the study.If the latter is the case, she added, that might have implications for restoration programs that relocate glass eels from heavily to sparsely populated areas. Its possible relocating them could disturb their orientation system, Dr. Durif said.This study deepens scientific understanding of glass eels, an important and historically overfished life stage, said David Righton, an eel expert at the Center for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science in Britain who was not involved in the study.It remains unclear, however, how eels use magnetism in other life stages. They behave almost like several different species in their lifetime, Dr. Righton said. The mystery of eel migration is not going to be solved with one study. | science |
Credit...Christopher Polk/Getty Images for a+E NetworksDec. 8, 2015Tickets for Bruce Springsteens 2016 tour will not go on sale until Friday, but hundreds of seats have already been listed for up to $5,000 or more on StubHub and other resale sites listings that have drawn the attention of the New York attorney general in the latest volley over the $8 billion ticket scalping business.On Monday, letters from the office of the attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, were sent to StubHub and two other popular resale sites, TicketNetwork and Vivid Seats, asking about speculative ticket listings offerings of seats on secondary markets when the seller may not actually possess the advertised tickets. Such listings are common in the online ticketing world, but the attorney general believes that they may constitute deceptive advertising, which would violate state business laws.Speculative tickets harm both consumers and the ticket industry, says the letter, signed by Jordan Adler, an assistant attorney general in the offices Internet bureau. In many cases, consumers who purchase a speculative ticket do not receive the seats that were advertised and paid for. In some cases, consumers receive no tickets at all. Speculative ticket sales also drive up prices for consumers, and often cause widespread confusion and frustration among consumers, who wonder how tickets can appear on the resale market before tickets are released to the public.StubHub, TicketNetwork and Vivid Seats all operate as marketplaces on which third-party sellers, many of them professional brokers, offer tickets for sale. In a statement, StubHub, which is owned by eBay, said it was reviewing the attorney generals letter, but that it has no reason to believe that there are speculative tickets on its site and that the company offers refunds or replacements for any invalid tickets.A TicketNetwork spokesman said, after receiving the attorney generals letter, that the company had voluntarily chosen to take down any inventory listed on our site for Bruce Springsteen concerts in New York until the public salethis Friday. Vivid Seats said it had a goal of ensuring a positive customer experience in ticket buying.Online ticket scalping for Mr. Springsteens tours has spurred outrage in the past. In 2009, Ticketmaster customers complained that the site had pointed them without their knowledge to TicketsNow, then TicketMasters online resale site, where tickets were being scalped well above face value. The Federal Trade Commission and the attorney general of New Jersey both investigated the episode. Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation Entertainment, settled both complaints and agreed not to link to TicketsNow for a year.Since then, Live Nation has pursued the secondary ticket market aggressively, and for many concerts it lists new tickets alongside others that are being offered for resale. At an investor conference in New York last month, Michael Rapino, the chief executive of Live Nation, said that the company valued the secondary ticket market at $8 billion.Recently Adele released tickets for sale in Europe using Songkick, a concert listing and ticketing site, and announced that the resale of tickets will not be tolerated. According to Songkick and Adeles manager, that system kept most of the first batch of tickets out of resale markets. | Business |
Letter 79Credit...Illustration by Yoshi SodeokaNov. 2, 2018The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau chief. Sign up to get it by email. Heres where to find all our Oceania coverage.______At one point while I was preparing to interview Rukmini Callimachi about Islamic terrorism at Twitters Sydney offices today, I found myself thinking about international threats and journalism.Not coverage per se, but the way that both are being shaped by two forces: ideological ruptures and digital networks.For both journalism and geopolitics, a breakdown of monoliths and norms has created what sometimes feels like more of everything.Traditional news outlets, especially newspapers, are struggling. In their place are more partisan products and aggregators, more niche publications, greater availability of unfiltered (and often inaccurate) news through social platforms and more readers and viewers in more places than most of us could have imagined a generation ago.For foreign affairs, the networked world has also meant proliferation. Theres an equalization thats happened across the nodes and cables, whereby power can be wielded by far more than superpowers. Ideologies, motivations and methods of mayhem have multiplied.North Korea can lock up computers in 150 countries, canceling thousands of appointments in Britains health care system. The Islamic State can recruit terrorists across borders. Russia can interfere in American elections, smugglers can encrypt communication with the efficiency of a modern military, and WikiLeaks can undermine diplomatic relationships worldwide.Not all of these impacts are bad or the result of bad actors. Technology and trade have helped lift more than a billion people out of poverty since 1990. There are also implications that are harder to categorize: Netflix, for example, can build a huge business in Australia with barely any local employees. Is that a net positive or negative?In many ways, it used to be simpler. During the Cold War, the world was mostly divided into two camps with ideologies and spheres of influence that were well known. Now, it can be hard to know where the biggest threats or opportunities come from or which ones deserve the most attention.For many people, all of this creates a sense of dislocation and anxiety. Even within national borders, its hard to know whats really shaping daily life as the world feels progressively harder to understand.At The New York Times, of course, we believe that part of our job is to help with that for readers in Australia and everywhere. But we also rely on political leaders to frame goals and strategies for dealing with the forces that affect us all.This week, I got a taste of how Australias leaders are managing.Both Bill Shorten, the opposition leader, and Scott Morrison, Australias prime minister, gave speeches in Sydney on foreign policy. I attended both.Id hoped to hear them grapple with some of the new challenges that go beyond nation-states or China vs. America. Id hoped to hear a sophisticated argument and maybe a vision for what the world could learn from Australia, and what Australia could learn from the world.Instead, I heard status quo thinking and caution.Mr. Shortens lecture at the Lowy Institute emphasized that if Labor wins the next election, Australia will not view China solely through the lens of worst-case scenarios, seemingly a dig at the Liberals focus on foreign interference. He emphasized a need for independence, but did not provide much clarity when I asked about Australias areas of concern. Perhaps that was because the Chinese ambassador was in attendance.Mr. Morrison, speaking at an Asia Society gathering hosted by Bloomberg, focused more on the benefits of trade and expanded military spending. He started out trying to emphasize values: We are more than the sum of our deals, he said. We are better than that.Then he proceeded to talk mostly in transactional terms. The word technology did not appear once in his prepared remarks.Foreign policy speeches tend to be cautious, as they are directed towards multiple audiences, said Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute. Australian foreign policy speeches are doubly so, as our external conditions have conditioned our foreign policy in the direction of pragmatism.Australias 2016 defense white paper provides a more nuanced outlook, explaining the tectonic shifts among nations that will affect Australias future. There, the word technology appears 56 times.But I still find myself left with a question: Do todays leaders, in Australia and elsewhere, really understand the effects of a networked world enough to grasp the role its playing in both their own democracies and in foreign affairs? Are they doing enough deep thinking about this?This week, I saw no signs that they are.Now for our stories of the week, about this part of the world, about technology, and a few other things to smile and think about.Join our Facebook group for more discussion!______Australia and New ZealandImageCredit...Jada Yuan/The New York TimesImageCredit...Photo Illustration by Tracy Ma/The New York Times; Shutterstock (child and phone)Nellie Bowles, one of our most talented tech reporters (who will be in Australia next month for some reporting and writing), published three stories this week that look at how those who have built our digital world are now eagerly protecting their children from it.They were all among the weeks most read stories among New York Times readers worldwide. Youll want to digest at least one: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley: I am convinced the devil lives in our phones. Silicon Valley Nannies Are Phone Police for Kids: Child care contracts now demand that nannies hide phones, tablets, computers and TVs from their charges.VideoBird watchers were delighted to see a Mandarin duck, native to East Asia, unexpectedly appear in Central Park in October.CreditCredit...EJ BartolazoThis week also featured a few stories about animals that will make you smile. Because, why not?Theres the East Asian duck that mysteriously showed up, unannounced, in New Yorks Central Park. Theres the wildebeest, which might just have the most efficient muscles in nature (dont tell The Rock).Even spiders, yes spiders, are worth appreciating. As one of our esteemed science writers explains in this overview of all their gloriousness: Scary and beautiful are not mutually exclusive.If only we could say the same for politics.______Opinion | SelectionsImageCredit...Kagenmi/iStock, via Getty ImagesFinally, a bit of commentary for you: David Brophy: Politicians and activists are shaping nationalist sentiment into pride in artificial and ahistoric notions of civilization. And Australia is just the latest test case. David Brooks: These mass killings are about many things guns, demagogy, etc. but they are also about social isolation and the spreading derangement of the American mind. Kara Swisher: This is what the internet has come to thugs like Mohammed bin Salman funding tech companies to host the vitriol of thugs like Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers.... And We RecommendRukmini Callimachi deserves more than just my brief mention above. Shes a force when it comes to reporting on global extremism, and The New York Times is partnering with ABC RN to broadcast her podcast Caliphate.RN will provide a unique Australian context for this series with its specialist presenters: Science Friction host Natasha Mitchell about the brain science of radicalization, and Religion & Ethics host Andrew West on the politics and religion of Islam in Australia, with Samina Yasmin, director of the Centre for Muslim States and Societies.The next episode can be heard on the radio on Saturday at 4 p.m.Here is where to find the series at the ABC, including an interview with the Caliphate producer Andy Mills that aired after the first episode. You can also find transcripts and additional reporting on our site. | World |
Business BriefingDec. 28, 2015The co-founder of the mining giant Freeport-McMoRan, James Moffett, will step down as chairman and quit its board, months after the miner added two new directors under pressure from the billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn. Freeport said Mr. Moffett, 77, who had been appointed chairman emeritus, would be a consultant to the board and advise the company on its Indonesia operations. He played a central role in developing Indonesias Grasberg gold and copper deposit, one of the worlds largest. Freeport shares fell more than 9 percent. Mr. Icahn, who owned 8.8 percent of Freeport as of Sept. 22, has criticized its spending, capital structure and executive compensation in the face of weak commodity prices. | Business |
1 Ligetys line on the first run was tight and elegant. There were some scary sections in there, Ligety said after the race. There is no such thing as being in complete control in ski racing when youre trying to be fast. Composite image by The New York Times 2 Ligety finished the first run with a lead of nearly a second. 3 In the second run, Steve Missillier of France had the fastest run. Ligety, who skied more cautiously, said, It definitely took a little bit of the anxiety away from the second run knowing I didnt have to make any huge risks in places that could be really costly. ligety missillier Composite image by The New York Times 4 Missillier narrowed the gap, but Ligety finished with a combined time that was nearly half a second faster. | Sports |
He and his wife and collaborator made headlines with their finding that they could communicate with a young ape using the language of the deaf.Credit...WBGHOct. 1, 2021Washoe was 10 months old when her foster parents began teaching her to talk, and five months later they were already trumpeting her success. Not only had she learned words; she could also string them together, creating expressions like water birds when she saw a pair of swans and open flower to gain admittance to a garden.Washoe was a chimpanzee.She had been born in West Africa, probably orphaned when her mother was killed, sold to a dealer, flown to the United States for use of testing by the Air Force and adopted by R. Allen Gardner and his wife, Beatrix. She was raised as if she were a human child. She craved oatmeal with onions and pumpkin pudding.The object of our research was to learn how much chimps are like humans, Professor Gardner told Nevada Today, a University of Nevada publication, in 2007. To measure this accurately, chimps would be needed to be raised as human children, and to do that, we needed to share a common language.Washoe ultimately learned some 200 words, becoming what researchers said was the first nonhuman to communicate using sign language developed for the deaf.Professor Gardner, an ethologist who, with his wife, raised the chimpanzee for nearly five years, died on Aug. 20 at his ranch near Reno, Nev. He was 91.His death was announced by the University of Nevada, Reno, where he had joined the faculty in 1963 and conducted his research until he retired in 2010.When scientific journals reported in 1967 that Washoe (pronounced WA-sho), named after a county in Nevada, had learned to recognize and use multiple gestures and expressions in sign language, the news electrified the world of psychologists and ethologists who study animal behavior.The Gardners, who were childless, raised the young ape on their ranch in her early years.Her ability to form simple phrases like gesturing Me, Washoe when she looked in a mirror was a linguistic feat that Roger Brown, a Harvard psychologist, told The New York Times was akin to getting an S.O.S. from outer space.Absolutely frontier-breaking work, Duane M. Rumbaugh, a scientist emeritus at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, said in retrospect in 2007.The Gardners findings challenged the premise that humans are uniquely equipped to express themselves through language. Their research also expanded educators understanding of the ways children learn language, and of how to apply that knowledge to people with learning disabilities.Evidence of the Gardners early communication with Washoe was greeted skeptically by some researchers.Herbert S. Terrace, a Columbia University cognitive psychologist, said at the time and repeated in a recent email that only humans can speak spontaneously and use grammar, two mainstays of language.He said his own analysis had found that most of the chimpanzees signs were artifacts of unconscious cuing by their teachers and not spontaneous.Nonetheless, the Gardners were able to replicate their research with four additional infant chimpanzees.And subsequent studies by the couple and by other researchers using various methods of communication, like identifying objects through symbols and pressing buttons instead of signing demonstrated that while chimps and bonobos lacked sufficient physical control over their tongues, lips and larynx to speak vocally like humans, they were capable of understanding the concept of a word and of learning language, and could chat by using hand signals.Robert Allen Goldberg, known as Allen, was born on Feb. 21, 1930, in Brooklyn. (It is unclear when his surname was changed.) His father was Milton George Goldberg, an industrial engineer and onetime bootlegger. His mother was May (Klein) Goldberg. His younger brother, Herb Gardner, would achieve fame as a playwright.His parents took Allen with them as they drove around delivering illegal liquor, on the assumption that the police would not suspect a couple with a baby.ImageCredit...Valerie ChalcraftHe earned a bachelors degree from New York University in 1950, a masters from Columbia in 1951 and a doctorate in 1954 from Northwestern University, where he studied learning theory under the educational psychologist Benton J. Underwood.He served in the Army as a research psychologist and taught at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where, at a lecture on love by the psychologist Harry Harlow, he met a fellow teacher, Beatrix (sometimes spelled Beatrice) Tugendhut, known as Trixie.They married in 1961 and moved to the University of Nevada, where she, a psychologist and zoologist herself, became his research collaborator. She died in 1995.No immediate family members survive.Professor Gardner co-founded the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Nevada in 1984 and was its director from 1990 to 1993.In 1965, he encouraged a psychology student, Roger Fouts, to begin demonstrating, as his doctoral thesis, that Washoes capacity to communicate approached the level of young human children.But the Gardners concluded that the only way to correlate the apes developmental skills with those of children would be to create a comparable environment, and to treat their simian subjects as if they were foster children.The Gardners published their initial results in the journal Science in 1967 and presented them to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York.In 1974, Washoe was featured on the PBS science series Nova. In 1989, the Gardners published the book Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees. In 1998, three years after his wife died, Professor Gardner published another collaboration, The Structure of Learning: From Sign Stimuli to Sign Language.Washoe lived with the Gardners until she was about 5 years old, then moved to the Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute of Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Wash. She died in 2007 at 42. | science |
Credit...Barbara L. Salisbury/MCT, via Getty ImagesFeb. 28, 2017ROME A 10-year legal battle over the extraordinary rendition of a terrorism suspect by American intelligence agents seemed to draw nearer to resolution on Tuesday, when the president of Italy commuted part of a prison sentence that one former C.I.A. officer had been given in absentia.The presidents decree opens the way for the former officer, Sabrina de Sousa, 61, to avoid imprisonment, by serving her remaining sentence some other way, such as through monitored release or community service.Ms. de Sousa was indicted in 2007, along with 25 other Americans, over the kidnapping of a radical Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003. Several high-ranking Italian intelligence officials also were indicted, but the case against them fell apart when evidence was withheld from the court on national security grounds.Ms. de Sousa and the other Americans left Italy before the indictment, so they were tried and convicted in absentia. Most have remained beyond the reach of Italian law by not traveling to Europe. But Ms. de Sousa, who has both American and Portuguese citizenship, moved to Portugal in 2015 for family reasons. Since October 2015, she has been fighting in the Portuguese courts to avoid extradition to Italy; most recently, she was detained on Feb. 21 in Lisbon and was scheduled to be sent to Milan by Thursday.Ms. de Sousa was initially sentenced to seven years for kidnapping; that was later reduced to four years, and President Sergio Mattarella reduced it on Tuesday to three. Under Italian law, sentences of three years or less are eligible for alternatives to imprisonment.After Mr. Mattarella acted, the Italian authorities revoked the arrest warrant that was the basis for the extradition order. Ms. de Sousa now has 30 days to petition a court in Milan for alternative punishment. It was not immediately clear when she would do so.Shell come to Italy to defend herself as a free woman, said Dario Bolognesi, Ms. de Sousas Italian lawyer, who has been seeking a pardon for his client for more than four years. Were very happy with the outcome.Had she gone to prison, Ms. de Sousa, would have been the first former C.I.A. operative to serve time in prison outside the United States over the controversial rendition program. Two of the Americans convicted along with her have been pardoned, and a third had his sentence reduced.Her role in the case came to light when Italian prosecutors were investigating the 2003 abduction of the cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, who was seized in Milan and taken to Egypt.Mr. Nasr, who had been granted political asylum in Italy, said he was interrogated and tortured in Egypt before being released. His case helped fuel a broad debate over the practice, begun after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, of abducting terrorism suspects and transferring them to other countries or to secret C.I.A. prisons abroad for interrogation.In the years since she left the C.I.A., Ms. de Sousa has been publicly critical of the rendition program. Even so, some human rights advocates expressed disappointment at the Italian presidents clemency for her.It is very worrying, and sends a clear message that you can engage in what amount to be crimes under international law torture and enforced disappearance and get away with it, said Julia Hall of Amnesty International. Pardoning people, or giving lesser sentences effectively letting them off the hook, is not the way to give victims of these crimes justice.Ms. Hall did, however, criticize the conviction in absentia of Ms. de Sousa, and said she should have the right to a fair retrial and the chance to contest the charges against her. Without that process, this remains unfinished business, she said.Under Italian law, Ms. de Sousa has exhausted her appeals, though, so a new trial did not appear to be a possibility.Mr. Mattarellas statement announcing the reduction of the sentence said he had taken into account that the United States had discontinued the rendition program and that her sentence was out of balance with the consequences others in the case had faced.Ms. de Sousas lawyer, Mr. Bolognesi, said her sentence was so clearly an injustice, when three others were pardoned, state secrecy was invoked for some defendants, and yet she was facing prison.It made no sense, in particular because she later took a strong position against renditions. | World |
The ShiftCredit...Glenn HarveyJune 6, 2018SANTA MONICA, Calif. I wanted to hate the scooters. I really did.Before going to the Los Angeles region last week for work, I had heard about the areas invasion by dockless, rent-by-the-minute electric scooters. I saw their sudden arrival described as a plague of two-wheeled terrors that had crowded sidewalks and endangered pedestrians, and I knew that some cities had issued cease-and-desist orders and passed emergency ordinances to get them off the streets.I also knew that Los Angeless leading e-scooter company, Bird which reportedly just raised $150 million at a valuation north of $1 billion was run by Travis VanderZanden, a former executive of Uber and Lyft. His new venture seemed to be an unholy mix of the formers lawless arrogance and the latters saccharine branding. (A group of people riding Bird scooters is called a flock, Mr. VanderZanden has insisted.)Tech hubris on wheels whats not to loathe?But I wanted to experience the scooter craze for myself. So for a week, I used shared e-scooters as my primary mode of transportation. I rode them to meetings, ran errands across town and went for long joy rides on the Venice Beach boardwalk. In all, I took more than a dozen scooter rides, from just a few blocks to several miles.And heres my verdict: E-scooters might look and feel kind of dorky, but they arent an urban menace or a harbinger of the apocalypse. In fact sigh theyre pretty great.My journey to e-scooter acceptance began when I saw an empty scooter outside my hotel. I downloaded the Bird app, entered my drivers license and credit card information, agreed to some basic terms (no riding on sidewalks, no riding two to a scooter, no speeding downhill) and scanned a code on the scooters handlebar.The scooter beeped, telling me that it was unlocked, and I was off.Battery-powered scooters have been available for years, but only recently have they been outfitted with GPS trackers and wireless connectivity and arranged into on-demand fleets. These scooters are limited to 15 miles per hour, but that is still zippy enough to put a satisfying whoosh in your hair. And when youre done riding, just park it anywhere, choose end ride on your app, take a photo to help the next rider find it and walk away. Rides are cheap (Bird charges $1 plus 15 cents per minute), and an abundant supply of scooters in Santa Monica meant that I was never more than a block or two from one.ImageCredit...Tovah AckermanThe rise of shared e-scooters is just one of several recent tech-powered experiments in urban mobility. Dockless bike-sharing programs, which have been popular in China for years, are starting to take off in America. The programs added 44,000 bikes in the United States during the last half of 2017, according to a report by the National Association of City Transportation Officials. Other wheeled innovations like electric unicycles and skateboards are also making gains.Like the earliest ride-hailing providers, many e-scooter companies have taken a cavalier approach to growth, dumping thousands of vehicles on city streets with no permits and little advance notice. This tactic has not endeared them to cities. Bird paid $300,000 in fines and other fees to settle a legal dispute with Santa Monica after the city sued it for operating without a proper license last year. Denver recently ordered Bird and LimeBike, another e-scooter provider, to remove their scooters, and Nashville and other cities have begun seizing scooters from their streets. (Citizen-led protests are happening, too in San Francisco, scooters have been vandalized and thrown in front of Google buses.)Emerging technology should always be scrutinized, especially when it could involve health risks and strain public infrastructure. And new forms of transportation have always been controversial. (In the 19th century, critics of bicycles labeled them tools of the devil.)But people should think twice before condemning e-scooters as an ill-conceived tech-world fantasy. Because if you can get over their dopey aesthetics and dubious corporate strategy, e-scooters actually solve some problems. Theyre lightweight and emission-free. They dont require bulky docks or parking lots, and theyre perfect for trips that are too long to walk but too short to justify driving or hailing a car. If they take off, they could alleviate congestion and become a low-cost way of getting around cities without robust public transportation systems.Opponents of e-scooters typically make three major claims. But as I learned during my experiment in California, none of those arguments hold up particularly well under scrutiny.1. Scooters are a public safety hazard.Anti-scooter activists tend to paint scooter riders as kamikaze daredevils, slaloming through cars and pedestrians. I did see a few instances of dangerous behavior couples riding two to a scooter, people riding one-handed while taking selfies and some running red lights. There is also the issue of helmets, which many states require but which, as far as I can tell, no scooter riders are wearing.ImageCredit...Jason Henry for The New York TimesThere have been five traffic incidents involving Bird scooters in Santa Monica since November, and 424 citations of motorized scooter riders, according to a Santa Monica Police Department spokesman. Bird, which declined to provide information about accidents, offers helmets to active riders for a $1.99 shipping fee, and about 30,000 people have taken it up on the deal. (The deal is available only to riders who live in a current Bird market, which excludes out-of-town visitors like me.)There is no doubt that scooters could be safer if helmet laws were better enforced and basic safety training was provided before riding. But its probably not time to panic just yet. We dont have enough data to know if scooters are more dangerous than bikes, motorcycles or other types of two-wheeled transit, and scooter safety will most likely improve as riders get more experience and drivers learn to share the road.In fact, the only scary scooter rides I had were the times that cars veered a little too close to the bike lane I was riding in. If cities want to encourage safe scooter riding and they should, given the benefits they have for congestion and environmental health they should create protected scooter lanes and encourage drivers to give them more room.2. Scooters are cluttering sidewalks, roads and other public spaces.This anti-scooter case was made most memorably by a columnist at The Los Angeles Times who complained that these electric scooters are everywhere roads, sidewalks, street corners, parking lots, boardwalks, apartment complex hallways beeping while stationary and whirring when rolling, ridden mostly by stoic mannequins in flip-flops.Its true that scooters have gone from nonexistent to ubiquitous in a matter of weeks one morning, I counted more than 100 within a few blocks of my hotel. But their visibility is a function of their novelty. We dont view parked cars and bus stops as eyesores, even though theyre everywhere.This isnt just about clutter cities are worried that parked scooters will impede wheelchairs and block entrances. But there are easy solutions here. Just as we have parking meters for cars, cities could designate scooter parking areas on every block, and begin ticketing riders who leave their scooters in the middle of the sidewalk. Companies like Bird which already pay armies of contract workers to recharge their scooters at night could also give users small rewards for clearing badly placed scooters out of the way.3. Scooters are annoying symbols of tech-world elitism.Some people object to e-scooters on political and symbolic grounds, claiming that they represent everything that is wrong with the tech industry. Critics have taken aim at their perceived elitism (you need a smartphone and a credit card to use scooter-sharing apps) and the sudden, permissionless way they were rolled out in cities, which fit a pattern of bad behavior set by tech companies like Uber and Airbnb.Its true that scooter companies have not exactly covered themselves in glory. They have invited a backlash by flooding the streets with scooters with no explanation and little or no contact with local officials. As these companies grow, they will need to prove that they can cooperate with regulators, rather than trying to circumvent them.But theres nothing inherently elitist about e-scooters. (In fact, at between $2 and $5 for most rides, theyre price competitive with public transportation, and far cheaper than services like Uber and Lyft.) And while e-scooter companies have moved brazenly into new markets, they have also shown some willingness to compromise in cities like Austin, Tex., where local officials required that scooters carry licenses and proof of insurance.David Estrada, Birds chief legal officer, told me that the company had cooperated with officials in Miami and other cities to plan orderly rollouts. He said the company obeys local laws and doesnt introduce scooters in cities, such as New York, that expressly prohibit them. But he said that cities tended to drag their feet on new transportation policy, and that seeking pre-emptive approval for e-scooters could take years.Wed have happy cities, but we wouldnt have a business and we wouldnt be solving a problem, Mr. Estrada said.Its possible that the skeptics are right, and that electric scooters will end up like Segways novelty gadgets for big-city tourists. Its also possible that theyll end up like Uber and Lyft a multibillion-dollar industry that spends years battling local officials but ultimately changes urban transportation as we know it. The answer will most likely depend on the regulations that emerge, and whether scooter companies can operate profitably in cities that, unlike Santa Monica, dont have flat terrain and year-round sunshine.Whatever happens, you can count me as a slightly embarrassed member of Team Scooter. If liking fun, inexpensive, short-distance transportation is wrong, I dont want to be right. | Tech |
Europe|Lawyer for Family of Sergei Magnitsky, Dead Russian Whistle-Blower, Is Seriously Injuredhttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/world/europe/russia-sergei-magnitsky-william-browder.htmlMarch 21, 2017MOSCOW A lawyer representing the family of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a Russian auditor and lawyer who died in prison in 2009 after uncovering a $230 million fraud targeting an American-born financier, suffered severe head injuries on Tuesday after plunging from his Moscow apartment building.Russian news organizations said the lawyer, Nikolai Gorokhov, fell while helping movers carry a hot tub up to his fourth-floor apartment. They showed photographs of a shattered tub outside the building.The financier, William F. Browder, said Mr. Gorokhov was to appear in a Moscow court on Wednesday to appeal on behalf of Mr. Magnitskys mother for an investigation into new evidence relating to the fraud scheme first exposed by Mr. Magnitsky.Basically, there is a trail of dead and seriously injured people leading from the Magnitsky case, Mr. Browder said in a telephone interview early Wednesday. He said Russias post-Soviet version of the K.G.B., the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., is doing everything it can to shut down any serious investigation.Whether Mr. Gorokhovs injuries were the result of an accident or foul play, the episode became the latest gruesome twist in a story that began when Mr. Magnitsky blew the whistle on what he believed was a tax rebate fraud involving official collusion and targeting Mr. Browder, who ran an investment company in Moscow, Hermitage Capital, from 1996 to 2005.The Russian authorities have accused Mr. Browder, a British citizen who now lives in London, of orchestrating the fraud that he and Mr. Magnitsky attributed to criminals working in collusion with law enforcement authorities.Mr. Gorokhov is a major witness in a case brought by American prosecutors against a Cypriot company accused of laundering some of the proceeds from the fraud.Mr. Magnitsky, who was jailed in Moscow after speaking out about the fraud, died in 2009 after being denied essential medical care. His death earned the Kremlin widespread condemnation and led the United States Congress in 2012 to enact the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, aimed at punishing the officials involved in the arrest and subsequent mistreatment of Mr. Browders lawyer.A Russian opposition politician, Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has since urged Congress to expand the economic sanctions imposed by the Magnitsky Act, has twice become seriously ill in the past two years from a mystery ailment that his family says was caused by poisoning. | World |
Credit...RumuR Inc.June 23, 2017John E. Sarno, a doctor at New York University whose controversial books on the psychological origins of chronic pain sold over a million copies, even while he was largely ignored or maligned by many of his medical peers, died Thursday in Danbury, Conn. He was 93.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Christina Horner, who said the cause was cardiac failure. He had a home in nearby Carmel, N.Y., as well as one in Manhattan.He died a day before his 94th birthday and the release of All the Rage (Saved by Sarno), a documentary film about him.Revered by some as a saint and dismissed by others as a quack, Dr. Sarno maintained that most nontraumatic instances of chronic pain including back pain, gastrointestinal disorders, headaches and fibromyalgia are physical manifestations of deep-seated psychological anxieties.His books, including the best-selling Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection, became popular largely through word of mouth. Thousands of people have claimed to have been cured by reading them.His ideas inspired online support forums that doubled almost as shrines to him, and he received glowing endorsements from celebrities like Anne Bancroft, Larry David and Howard Stern, who dedicated his autobiography to the doctor.Another who swore by him, the financial writer and Wall Street trader Edward Siedle, described Dr. Sarno in a Forbes column as the most brilliant doctor in America and unfortunately, a largely neglected national treasure.The mainstream medical community, however, generally dismissed his theories as simplistic and unscientific, and felt that he went too far in saying that emotional factors not only worsen chronic pain, but also directly cause it.His views are definitely considered on the fringe, said Dr. Christopher Gharibo, a pain management specialist at the Langone Medical Center at N.Y.U. His position was that almost all chronic pain is purely psychological and all in the head, which I certainly disagree with.Eric Sherman, a psychotherapist who worked with Dr. Sarno for many years, recalled how Dr. Sarnos colleagues would belittle him behind his back in lunchtime conversations at N.Y.U., even as some would visit him privately for their ailments.It was him against the world, yet he was never afraid of not fitting in, Dr. Sherman said. He had a damn the torpedoes perspective on his work, and was notoriously indifferent to others opinions of him.Dr. Sarno, who specialized in rehabilitation medicine, developed his theories over almost 50 years at N.Y.U. He gave the various forms of chronic pain the collective name tension myositis syndrome (T.M.S.), which, apart from its psychological roots, he attributed to mild oxygen deprivation caused by reduced blood flow to muscles and nerves throughout the body.He said most of his patients improved simply by learning and thinking about the psychosomatic connection to pain, and that others recovered by journaling regularly and, in some cases, doing psychotherapy.Dr. Sarno, a health-conscious man who walked from his Upper East Side home to N.Y.U. every day well into his 80s, said he had gotten rid of his allergies by regarding them as T.M.S.ImageCredit...Grand Central PublishingUntrained as a researcher, Dr. Sarno never conducted formal studies of his methods, saying he preferred to spend his time helping people individually. My proof is that my patients get better, he often told his doubters.Some of his ideas, like his assertion that there is no correlation between chronic back pain and herniated discs, have been validated by research published in The New England Journal of Medicine.A handful of doctors have embraced his mind-body theories and started testing them empirically.In my practice, Ive seen enough examples of people getting rid of chronic pain through psychotherapy to know that the mind-body connection needs to be researched in more depth, said Dr. Howard Schubiner, who started a Mind-Body Medicine program several years ago at Providence Hospital in Southfield, Mich., basing it on the work of Dr. Sarno.A study led by David Schechter, a professor at the University of Southern California, in 2007 found that chronic pain subjects who underwent a mind-body treatment which included reading educational materials, journaling about emotions and, in more extreme cases, undergoing psychotherapy experienced an average pain reduction of 52 percent.John Ernest Sarno Jr. was born June 23, 1923, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to John Ernest Sarno, a printing press worker, and the former Delia Astone, a homemaker. He grew up in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn and at 16 graduated from Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens. He repeated his senior year to attend, and graduate from, the private Horace Mann School in the Bronx.He went on to Kalamazoo College in Michigan and stayed for three years before leaving in 1943 to join the Army. He worked in field hospitals in Europe for the remainder of World War II.Dr. Sarno received his medical degree from Columbia University in 1950 and spent nearly a decade in family practice in Fishkill, N.Y., where he founded the Mid-Hudson Medical Group. He returned to New York in 1960 for a residency in pediatric medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and then another residency at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at N.Y.U.He joined N.Y.U.s Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine in 1965 and practiced there until his retirement in 2012. For 10 years, he directed Rusks outpatient department but was not reappointed after he started delving more deeply into mind-body concepts.His other books include The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain; The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders; and Mind Over Back Pain.A wiry 5 foot 3 inches tall, Dr. Sarno almost invariably wore a Brooks Brothers shirt and tie under his lab coat. Eschewing computers, he wrote patients letters in elegant cursive with his treasured Mont Blanc fountain pen. He frequented the ballet and the Philharmonic, and would often hum along to the opera tunes he played on his office radio.Dr. Sarnos first marriage, to Penny Patt, ended in divorce in 1966. He married Martha Lamarque, the former director of speech pathology at the Rusk Institute, in 1967. She survives him.Besides Ms. Horner, their daughter, he is also survived by three children from his first marriage, Lindianne, Lauren and David; a brother, Modesto; four grandchildren, and one great-grandson.Dr. Sarno expressed disappointment that his ideas had never been widely accepted by his peers, and he acknowledged that many had been chilly toward him.By contrast, his relationship with his patients was largely one of mutual affection.On his living room table, he kept a thick scrapbook given to him by members of TMS Wiki, a support forum. In its pages, both patients and strangers wrote about experiencing years of pain before stumbling across Dr. Sarnos writings; some posted recent photos of themselves running marathons and climbing mountains.Since 1982 Ive used your books to help almost one hundred friends and acquaintances, wrote one former pain sufferer. In a just world youd have the Nobel Prize for medicine. | science |
Business BriefingDec. 29, 2015Macys is recalling two Martha Stewart frying pans after customers said metal discs popped off the pans and caused bruises, burns and welts. The Consumer Product Safety Commission said Tuesday that there were seven reports of metal discs flying off the frying pans and three reports of injuries. The metal discs cover the rivets that attach the pan to the handle. The recall covers about 120,000 8-inch and 10-inch frying pans that were sold as part of a Martha Stewart Collection 10-piece stainless steel cookware set. The sets cost about $170 and were sold at Macys stores and its website for four years until September. The Martha Stewart brand was bought by the brand management company Sequential Brands Group this month. | Business |
Business BriefingDec. 3, 2015A Volkswagen lawyer said on Thursday that the company would like hundreds of federal civil lawsuits filed against the carmaker over its emissions cheating scandal to be consolidated in Michigan. The lawyer, Jeffrey L. Chase, joined hundreds of other lawyers at a hearing in federal court in New Orleans to look at consolidating more than 460 lawsuits against the German carmaker. At the hearing, in front of the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, the lawyers made their cases for consolidating the lawsuits in federal districts of their liking. The panel, which happened to be meeting in New Orleans, did not rule on Thursday on where the lawsuits should be consolidated. Mr. Chase asked the panel to choose Michigan, where Volkswagen is working with the Environmental Protection Agency. | Business |
VideoIndonesian Navy divers retrieved one of the flight recorders from Lion Air Flight 610. All 189 passengers are believed to be dead.CreditCredit...Pradita Utama/EPA, via ShutterstockNov. 1, 2018BANGKOK An Indonesian Navy diving team retrieved one of the flight recorders from Lion Air Flight 610 on Thursday from the depths of the Java Sea, raising hopes that investigators will be able to solve the mystery of what led a brand-new Boeing jet to fall from the sky this week.The navy team located the device at a depth of around 30 meters in waters northeast of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. On Wednesday, search teams had heard pings from a locating beacon attached to the data recorder, but strong ocean currents stopped them from recovering the device.Speaking from a ship where the device was being transported to Jakarta, the leader of the diving team, Senior Chief Petty Officer Hendra, told reporters that divers had to dig into the seabed to recover it. Although the machine was covered in mud, it was intact.We were desperate, said Mr. Hendra, who uses just one name.There are two so-called black boxes on each plane, and they are actually bright orange. One records conversations in the cockpit, while the other tracks crucial data, like airspeed, altitude and fuel flow.We can confirm that we found one of the two black boxes, said Soerjanto Tjahjono, the head of the National Transportation Safety Committee, which is leading the crash investigation.The Indonesian Navy initially said that the device that was discovered was the flight data recorder. But Thursday evening, Ony Soerjo Wibowo, an investigator for the transportation safety committee, said that it was not yet clear which black box it was.The recorder had been propelled with such force that it had ruptured from its metal casing, Mr. Ony said, adding, The energy was enormous.Without the flight recorders, investigators despaired of figuring out what caused Lion Air Flight 610, bound from Jakarta to the small city of Pangkal Pinang on Monday morning with 189 people on board, to crash into the Java Sea. The weather en route was fine, and the plane had only begun flying in August for Lion Air, a low-cost carrier with a history of safety issues.ImageCredit...Fauzy Chaniago/Associated PressSpeculation about what caused the crash has centered on possible problems with the planes transmission of airspeed data. The day before the crash, the same plane had experienced unreliable airspeed readings, which could have been the result of a malfunction of instruments that measure data needed to fly the plane.Such an information glitch does not necessarily doom a plane, but it can catalyze a deadly sequence of events. That is what is believed to have happened when Air France Flight 447 plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 after a coating of ice addled readings from its pitot tubes, the external probes affixed to airplanes to monitor airspeed data.Lion Air, which is part of a company that controls the majority of Indonesias domestic aviation market, was told on Wednesday by the Transportation Ministry to suspend its technical director and the ground crew that serviced the plane in the hours before the planes takeoff on Monday.Investigators want to know whether the problem with inaccurate airspeed readings that occurred on Sundays flight was truly resolved, as maintenance logs seen by aviation experts indicate.Representatives from Boeing are scheduled to meet with Transportation Ministry officials on Thursday. The plane, a 737 Max 8, is one of the most advanced and newest aircraft on offer. While there is no indication that there is a systemic flaw with the plane model, Indonesia ordered an inspection of all Max 8 jets operated by domestic carriers.Lion Air has suffered at least 15 major problems since it began operations in 2000, ranging from fatal crashes to airplane collisions. But the airline has expanded quickly, in part because of the urgent need for air travel in an island nation spread out across the Equator.For years, Indonesias aviation record was so poor that Western nations blacklisted the countrys carriers. But both the United States and European Union have since lifted their bans on Indonesian airlines.On Thursday, the transportation minister, Budi Karya Sumadi, said that the licenses of four Lion Air personnel had been suspended, including those of the companys director of maintenance and engineering and the fleet maintenance manager. A day earlier, Mr. Budi said that the government was evaluating the safety systems of low-cost carriers in Indonesia.Low-cost carriers are a necessity, he said. Its not that low-cost carriers are in the wrong, its that we want to increase their safety. | World |
Yung Berg Wanted Man Again!! ... For Missing Court Yung Berg apparently loves to learn the hard way -- not showing up to court is asking for trouble. The 'Love & Hip Hop' star is a wanted man in Miami after missing ANOTHER court date following a weed bust. TMZ broke the story ... cops were called following an altercation in his hotel room back in October and they found 2 blunts on him. Normally, not a big deal but Berg had a 9-year-old warrant, so they arrested his ass. He was later released, but was supposed to appear in court for his arraignment in the weed case on January 11 but -- you know how Berg's favorite game goes -- he never showed. It's called Google Calendar, Berg. | Entertainment |
As businesses grapple with how to safely reopen the workplace, companies like Fitbit and Verily, Googles sister company, are rushing out new work force health-vetting and tracking tools.Credit...Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesJune 18, 2020Verily Life Sciences, a sister company of Google, scrambled to introduce a free coronavirus-screening site for the public and set up testing locations in March after President Trump made an off-the-cuff announcement about the program. It had a rocky start, but has since helped more than 220,000 people get tested in 13 states.Now, the company has its sights set on employers. It is introducing a health screening and analytics service for businesses trying to safely reopen during the pandemic.The service, announced on Thursday, will offer Covid-19 diagnostic testing for employees and clear them to return to the workplace based on their test results and other health data. It will also make recommendations to employers on how often workers should be retested, based on the prevalence of the virus in their work force and the local community.Employers are really focusing on how to ensure that they are not the source of another outbreak, said Dr. Vivian Lee, the president of health platforms at Verily, a unit of Googles parent company, Alphabet. And that they do not wind up in a situation where theyre putting the safety of their employees at risk when they need to be back in an office or a workplace setting.With its new service, Verily is joining numerous tech giants and start-ups rushing to help business across the United States as they grapple with how to safely reopen the workplace. Microsoft and the large insurer UnitedHealth Group, for instance, recently collaborated on a free symptom-checking app that helps pinpoint workers at obvious risk for the virus and direct them to testing resources. On Tuesday, Fitbit introduced a program that includes a daily symptom-checking app for employees and a work force health-monitoring dashboard for employers.Kogniz, an artificial intelligence start-up, is marketing thermal camera systems as coronavirus fever-screening and social-distancing enforcement tools for the workplace. And Jvion, another A.I. start-up, is marketing an employer recovery package to predict the risk of employee exposure to the virus and likelihood of developing it.There is such a glut of new coronavirus risk-reduction products that its a challenge for many employers to assess them all.A big market rose up overnight, said Jeff Becker, a senior analyst for digital business strategy at Forrester, a market research firm, who recently surveyed two dozen vendors offering coronavirus solutions for employers. But its a fractured ecosystem, much like traditional health care.To address the fragmented market, Verily and other health companies are introducing more comprehensive health-screening programs for employers, complete with Covid-19 lab tests and health counseling for employees who test positive. The new services are also trying to mitigate a pressing problem for employers: Perhaps one quarter or more of people who have the virus do not experience symptoms like fevers and coughs. That means symptom-checking apps and fever-scanning cameras could clear employees who have the virus to return to the workplace, where they might inadvertently infect their colleagues.Color, a Bay Area health technology company whose labs are processing Covid-19 tests for the City of San Francisco, reported on Monday that, among a group of 30,000 people it tested for the virus, the majority of those who tested positive had mild or no symptoms.Things like fever checks, fever screening those things are actually not going to prevent transmission in a workplace setting, said Caroline Savello, the chief commercial officer at Color, which recently introduced a testing program for employers.Many medical centers, nursing homes and other high-risk facilities for essential workers have already adopted such employee-testing programs. Colors program for businesses that are reopening involves testing employees for the virus at least once before they return to the workplace, and then testing asymptomatic employees again at regular intervals.ImageCredit...Gretchen Ertl for The New York TimesThere was no infrastructure in place for businesses to test asymptomatic persons, said Dr. Sekar Kathiresan, the chief executive of Verve Therapeutics, a biotech company in Cambridge, Mass., that began using Colors program in May in a pilot test with 11 other local biotech firms.The biotech employees visit a central site once a week to have a nurse practitioner swab their noses, he said, at a cost of $130 per test. In 704 tests over the first month, he added, none of the employees had positive results.This gives our companies, our employees great peace of mind because they know that everybody thats coming into the laboratory to do the research is negative, Dr. Kathiresan said. So its an expense that is well worth it.He said he expected employee-testing costs to decrease significantly over time as home self-collection kits, which allow people to swab their own noses or collect saliva samples and then send them to labs, became more available.Federal health authorities, however, have so far provided little guidance for businesses on testing employees for coronavirus.In late May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published guidelines on Resuming Business, which recommended that employers prepare a plan for conducting daily in-person or virtual health checks (e.g., symptom and/or temperature screening) before employees enter the facility. But the guidelines mentioned employee testing for the virus only in passing.One concern is that the diagnostic tests could give employees a false sense of security, public health experts said. Because the virus can take several days to develop, they said, the time between taking a test and getting the lab results back could cause some employees who have the virus to receive false negative test results. Despite comprehensive testing, for instance, a group of Army recruits and instructors at Fort Benning, Ga., recently suffered a major outbreak of the virus.Another concern is that scaling employee-testing programs nationwide could lead to unnecessary medical screening particularly for workplaces where employees, wearing masks, can be spaced far enough apart to adhere to social-distancing guidelines and might overwhelm labs that are running more urgent coronavirus tests for patients with serious symptoms. And some employees may object to being required to take medical tests and have the results automatically sent to their employers.Dr. Lee, the Verily executive, said the company would consult with employers to tailor virus testing and workplace safety protocols to the number of their employees, workplace locations, the prevalence of coronavirus in the local community and the type of work employees performed.Truck drivers are different than meatpackers in terms of susceptibility, Dr. Lee said. She added that the first client for Verilys employer program, Brown University, planned to begin pilot-testing it on Monday.For many vendors seeking to sell employers on new workplace health and safety tools however, coronavirus solutions which will quickly obsolesce once a vaccine is developed are not the endgame, analysts said. They merely provide another opening for businesses to introduce new clients to their technology.The opportunity here is to start a relationship with these companies and not necessarily to generate revenue off of these sales right now, Mr. Becker, the Forrester analyst, said. | Tech |
Credit...Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman, via Associated PressNov. 7, 2018WASHINGTON Despite the uncertainty and partisan gridlock that Tuesdays election results ensure, one policy change seems guaranteed: hundreds of thousands more poor Americans in red states will qualify for free health coverage through Medicaid.Voters in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah, which President Trump won easily in 2016, approved ballot initiatives to expand the government insurance program under the Affordable Care Act. Democratic victories in governors races also improved the chances of Medicaid expansion in Kansas and Wisconsin, and all but ensured it in Maine. As a result, Medicaid could see its biggest enrollment bump since the health law began allowing expansion in 2014.For all the campaign warfare over the health laws effect on insurance premiums and protections for people with pre-existing conditions, Medicaid has remained quite popular. In a Kaiser poll last month, 56 percent of people across the 17 states that had not yet expanded Medicaid said they favored doing so. And the share of people saying Medicaid was very important to them grew to nearly half during efforts to repeal the health law last year, Kaiser found.Medicaid per se is much more popular than the Affordable Care Act, said Robert Blendon, a health policy expert at Harvard who has closely followed public opinion of the health law. And the people organizing these referendums on Medicaid expansion arent making them about the A.C.A. Theyre taking a program thats been in the state for years and adding to it, saying, All these other people need coverage and we can get outside money for it.Somewhat unexpectedly, Medicaid expansion has also proven the sturdiest pillar of Obamacare, as the president and Republican Congress have chipped and pecked away at other aspects of the law. While they have essentially stopped promoting the insurance marketplaces, eliminated the requirement that uninsured people pay a tax penalty and allowed insurers to offer plans with fewer benefits, Medicaid, which now covers about 1 in 5 Americans, has kept gaining momentum.ImageCredit...Nati Harnik/Associated PressThe three states that approved expansion on Tuesday will join Virginia, which this spring approved Medicaid expansion, and Maine, where voters approved an expansion last year that has been blocked by the outgoing Republican governor, Paul LePage. In all, nearly 800,000 people could be newly eligible for the program across the five states.That a bedrock of President Lyndon B. Johnsons Great Society and longtime target of conservative politicians is drawing strong support in deep-red states is particularly striking. Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, who adamantly opposed Medicaid expansion in the past, did not fight his states initiative, and Gov. Butch Otter of Idaho, an Obamacare critic, went so far as to endorse the initiative there at the last minute, called it good sense and the right thing to do.With the three successful ballot initiatives, the number of states that have expanded Medicaid coverage to most of their poor adult population will increase to 37 including the District of Columbia. Enrollment in the program has already grown by at least 15.6 million, or 28 percent, since 2013, the year before the health laws main provisions took effect. That eclipses the 11.7 million people who have private health insurance through the laws marketplaces.Tuesdays election results did provide one setback to Medicaids growth. Voters in Montana rejected a plan to preserve expanded Medicaid by sharply raising taxes on tobacco products to pay the state share of future costs. When the legislature expanded the program in 2015, it was for only four years. Now, about 100,000 low-income Montana residents could now lose Medicaid benefits unless the legislature agrees on another funding source by mid-2019. The tobacco industry poured more than $17 million into ads opposing the tax hike.In Maine, where Mr. LePage is leaving office because of term limits, the Democratic candidate, Janet Mills, won. On Wednesday morning she showed up at a hearing in the protracted legal battle between Mr. LePage and Medicaid advocates, saying, Dragging our feet any longer on this is inexcusable at this point. She declared that she would move forward with expanding Medicaid to at least 70,000 low-income adults there as soon as she takes office in January.ImageCredit...Greta Rybus for The New York TimesProspects for expanding Medicaid also improved in Kansas, where Laura Kelly, a Democrat who campaigned on it, won the governors race Tuesday, and Wisconsin, where Tony Evers, the Democrat, defeated Gov. Scott Walker. The Republican-controlled state legislature in Kansas voted last year to expand the program, but former Gov. Sam Brownback vetoed it.Another state to keep an eye on is North Carolina, where Republicans lost their supermajority in the state House and Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, has been trying to build support for Medicaid expansion.But two closely watched states with particularly large numbers of uninsured people Florida and Georgia, which together have close to two million residents with no coverage appear unlikely to expand Medicaid any time soon, as both appear to have been won by Republicans who oppose it. In Georgia, the Democrat, Stacey Abrams, made expanding Medicaid a top priority, and a poll taken in January found that 75 percent of the states voters, including 51 percent of Republicans, supported doing so. Like most of the other Southern states that have continued to reject Medicaid expansion, Georgia and Florida residents who would benefit are disproportionately black and Hispanic. To be sure, beneficiaries of Medicaid expansion still face threats to their coverage. The Trump administration has granted a number of requests from Republican-led states to impose work requirements on newly eligible adult beneficiaries, and while the courts will have the final say, they have already led to several thousand people in Arkansas losing coverage. And a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the health law, filed by 20 Republican governors and attorneys general, could end expanded Medicaid if the plaintiffs prevail.Yet work requirements could also make expansion more appealing to conservative lawmakers and voters in the remaining holdout states.ImageCredit...Rick Bowmer/Associated PressThis may be precisely what allows people to feel comfortable in some states about having a Medicaid expansion, said Gail Wilensky, an economist who oversaw Medicaid under President George H.W. Bush, speaking last week at a forum at Harvard University last week.The biggest reason Republican lawmakers have opposed Medicaid expansion is concern that it will eat up too much of the state budget. In a number of states that have already expanded the program, enrollment has far exceeded expectations, driving up costs. But under the terms of the health law, the federal government pays at least 90 percent of the costs for the newly eligible adult population, compared with 62 percent on average for the traditional population of children, pregnant women and poor disabled and elderly people.Total Medicaid spending was $557 billion in fiscal year 2017, with 62% paid by the federal government and 38% by states, for which it is often the biggest budget item.In Nebraska and Idaho, the ballot initiatives did not include a way to pay the state share of expansion costs. That could potentially make them vulnerable to the type of stalling thats happened in Maine, where Mr. LePage has grounded his resistance in the fact that the initiative did not include a funding mechanism.In Utah, the measure increases the state sales tax rate on items other than food to 4.85 percent, from the current 4.7 percent, to pay the state share.The largest donor overall to the Medicaid ballot initiatives was the Fairness Project, which is backed primarily by a California labor union. The group spent more than $5 million on signature-gathering efforts, advertising, field offices and other efforts.This election proves that politicians who fought to repeal the Affordable Care Act got it wrong, said Jonathan Schleifer, executive director of The Fairness Project. Expanding access to health care isnt a blue state value or a red state value; its an American value. | Health |
Feb. 2, 2014Credit...Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesMADRID Luis Aragons, the coach who shaped the Spanish national soccer teams rise from perennial underachiever to global powerhouse with a long-awaited title at the 2008 European Championship, died here on Saturday. He was 75.His death, after a battle with leukemia, was announced by the Spanish soccer federation. Aragons had a successful playing career as a sharpshooting forward, then became a well-traveled coach. But he will be remembered most for what happened on June 29, 2008, when his team beat Germany, 1-0, in Vienna to claim its first major title in 44 years.Luis Aragons changed the history of Spanish football, Iker Casillas, Spains captain and goalkeeper, said. And for that we will always be thankful.The Euro 2008 triumph was a culmination of Aragonss four-year reign as Spains coach; he had taken over a team that for the previous 20 years had earned a reputation for coming up short in major tournaments.Aragons instilled a new sense of belief in his players, even after they lost to France in the second round of the 2006 World Cup. He also made the team adopt the quick-passing style made famous by Barcelona a style his players came close to perfecting at Euro 2008.Led by Barcelona midfielders Xavi Hernndez and Andrs Iniesta, and the goal scoring of David Villa, Spain went undefeated through the tournament but needed a penalty shootout against Italy to advance from the quarterfinals.Aragons stepped down after the tournament, and the team went on to win its first World Cup two years later and then added a third straight major title at Euro 2012 under his successor, Vicente del Bosque.Without a doubt, our current run of success is a result of his legacy, del Bosque said on Saturday.But Aragonss tenure was not without controversy.He made a racist slur about the French striker Thierry Henry, who is black, during a training session in October 2004, and followed that remark with an outburst about Englands colonial past. The Spanish Football Federation refused to fire Aragons, although it fined him 3,000 euros.Denying he was a racist, Aragons explained that his comment about Henry had been an attempt to motivate forward Jos Antonio Reyes, and he received backing from several black players he had coached. In February 2007, Aragons won a legal appeal against the Spanish Committee for Sporting Disciplines ruling that his behavior could have fostered violent, racist or xenophobic acts.The Spanish news media often complained about his grouchy demeanor and regularly called for his dismissal during the two years before the teams triumph. There was another uproar toward the end of 2006 when he dropped the national teams captain and career scoring leader, Real Madrids Ral Gonzlez, arguing that he was past his prime.It proved a masterstroke.The team embarked on a 22-game unbeaten run that culminated with the 2008 title, making Aragons the oldest coach to win a European Championship title.Despite the victory, the Spanish federation made no attempt to persuade him to extend his contract. Five days later, he moved abroad to take charge of the Turkish club Fenerbahce.Aragons is survived by his wife, Pepa; five children; and 11 grandchildren. | Sports |
Simone Biles to Larry Nassar Judge: 'You Are My Hero' 1/24/2018 Simone Biles is giving the judge who signed Larry Nassar's "death warrant" a big, public thank you ... telling her, "YOU ARE MY HERO" for sentencing the ex-Team USA doc to 175 years in prison. Simone -- who earlier this month revealed she was sexually assaulted by Nassar -- thanked judge Rosemarie Aquilina in a tweet just hours after Nassar learned his fate in a Michigan courtroom. WLNS In the same message, she also gave a shout-out to all of Nassar's victims who gave impact statements in court "for being so brave and speaking like the queens that you are while looking at that monster." Biles added -- "He will no longer have the power to steal our happiness or joy. I stand with every one of you." | Entertainment |
Common Kanye Deserves To Name His Kid After Chicago 1/20/2018 TMZ.com Kanye West has done so much for Chicago, naming his daughter after the Windy City is both awesome and deserving ... so says Common. Common seemed both happy and entertained by his Chicago brethren's name choice for his third born when we got him Friday at LAX. Kanye named his baby Chicago..... Thats the most Kanye thing ever @Chris_Wormley43 The name choice had mixed reviews, with one person on Twitter commenting Kanye naming his baby Chicago is the most Kanye thing to do ... but Common says 'Ye deserves the right for good reason. | Entertainment |
Technology|Google, Rebuilding Its Presence in China, Invests in Retailer JD.comhttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/technology/google-china-jd-com.htmlCredit...Wang Zhao/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesJune 18, 2018BEIJING Googles best-known products have been blocked by the authorities in mainland China for years. If the American internet giant wants that to change someday, then half a billion dollars worth of good will couldnt hurt.Google will invest $550 million in the Chinese online retailer JD.com, the two companies said on Monday. In return, JD.com will join the Google Shopping advertising platform, and will work with the Silicon Valley company on other e-commerce projects in Europe, Southeast Asia and the United States.The companies did not provide details of the projects. According to a JD.com spokesman, the deal will give Google less than 1 percent of the Chinese retailers shares, which trade on the Nasdaq.Google pulled its search engine out of China in 2010, deciding that it would no longer censor its own search results as required by Beijing. But lately, the company has been looking for other ways to serve the planets largest population of internet users.It opened a research center in China dedicated to artificial intelligence and signed an agreement with Tencent, the Chinese internet conglomerate, that will allow the two businesses to work together without fear of patent lawsuits. It made an app version of its translation service available to users in China last year. More recently, it released a Chinese version of an app that helps people manage their files. (Googles own app store, like its email service, remains inaccessible behind the Great Firewall, as the countrys system of internet controls is known.)The company never quit China entirely, despite its travails. It has hundreds of employees working on research and product development in the country, which has become a major fount of engineering and scientific talent. Its online advertising business helps Chinese companies reach customers overseas.Still, mounting a broader return to the Chinese market would not be easy for Google, even if the authorities were to permit it. In the eight years since the company withdrew from China, local rivals have created formidable products in many areas in which it competes, including search, chat, video streaming and cloud computing.JD.com, meanwhile, is apparently hoping that Googles global reach will help it sell more products internationally. The company already counts Walmart as a major shareholder. It has extended its reach into Southeast Asia, setting up a local retail business in Indonesia, becoming a partner on an e-commerce venture in Thailand and backing another one in Vietnam.Across the world, however, JD.com will face tough competition. Alibaba, the Chinese internet behemoth, has poured billions of dollars into its Southeast Asian shopping site, Lazada, and is strengthening its logistics capabilities in that region, Europe and the Middle East. | Tech |
Grammy Awards 2018 Stop and Smell the (White) Roses ... For #TimesUp 1/28/2018 Musicians at the 2018 Grammys are trying to pull off their own symbol for the #TimesUp movement ... but they're not nearly as united as actors were for the Globes. Celebs began arriving to Madison Square Garden Sunday ahead of the 60th annual Grammy Awards in NYC, where some stars have vowed to wear a white rose to honor Time's Up. There've been a handful of heavy hitters rockin' the white appendage -- Lady Gaga , Kelly Clarkson, Ne-Yo, Eve, The Chainsmokers and Reba McEntire so far. Others expected to wear the flower include Kesha, Halsey and Camila Cabello ... just to name a few. Still, artists in the music world have been relatively quiet about Time's Up (aside from those mentioned above). Looks like they're keeping it that way for the time being. | Entertainment |
CricketFeb. 11, 2014For cricket fans who like seeing fire fought with fire, there is only one place to be this week. That would be Centurion, south of Pretoria in South Africa, where the Proteas, the South African national cricket team, are set to begin their test series against Australia on Wednesday.It is arguably the greatest clash of pace batteries since the Pakistan teams featuring the left-armer Wasim Akram, the skidder supreme Waqar Younis and Imran Khan clashed with the last great generation of West Indian fireballers in the early 1990s.South Africa, rated No. 1 in the world, will start the first of three five-day tests with the established and balanced attack of Vernon Philander and Dale Steyn, the No. 1 and No. 2 ranked bowlers in the world, alongside the aggressive Morne Morkel.Australia, which is coming off a 5-0 win over England in the Ashes, will counter with a trio that relies on speed, spearheaded by the ultrafast Mitchell Johnson, along with Ryan Harris and the relentless Peter Siddle.I think its going to be a tough tour for the batsmen, Australias captain, Michael Clarke, told reporters in South Africa when his team arrived for the series. You have two very good bowling attacks. I dont know what the wickets are going to be like, but generally there is a bit in the wickets in South Africa.Im a bit biased, but in my opinion this Australian attack is the best in the world, added Clarke, who probably ensured he would face an even more furious barrage than he normally does as his teams best batsman.Johnson, who played superbly in the Ashes, has had an up-and-down international career, but his previous peak came in South Africa five years ago. This time around, though, he could not be starting anywhere tougher. Centurion is South Africas favorite ground, and the Proteas have won 14 of 18 tests there. The teams only loss there came in a freak result in 2000 when their captain was Hansie Cronje, who later was banned for match fixing.The pace trio for South Africa will love Centurion. Steyn, their acknowledged leader, has taken 36 wickets in six matches at an average of fewer than 18 runs each.Each side faces its own challenges. For 18 years, South Africa built its team around the formidably unflappable Jacques Kallis, the most productive all-rounder in international cricket. But he quit at the end of last year.The mental shift is going to be just as important as the statistical shift, Russell Domingo, the South Africa coach, said in announcing his 15-man team for the series. He acknowledged it was impossible to find a straight-up replacement for his former star: Were not looking for another Jacques Kallis; were looking for someone to step up to the plate. Australia wants to prove that its massacre of the hapless English was not a one-off, and it also wants to end its miserable run of results on the road. It lost seven out of nine away tests in 2013, including a 4-0 sweep by India.And while the pace batteries look evenly matched, the top-order batsmen who must face them do not. Even without Kallis, South Africa looks formidable.AB de Villiers (1st), Hashim Amla (4th) and the captain Graeme Smith (9th) are all ranked among the worlds top 10 batsmen.Australia has only Clarke (8th) in that group. Its top order looked shaky even in the sweep of England, and was regularly hauled out of trouble by the batting of the wicketkeeper Brad Haddin.Australia is likely to give a first cap to the Tasmanian batsman Alex Doolan, a late-developing 28-year-old who has been on the fringe of the team for a couple of years.It has been 44 years since South Africa last won a series at home against Australia a 4-0 sweep that lived in memories for a long time; South Africa did not play test cricket again for 22 years while it was isolated from the game for its policy of apartheid.Since readmission, South Africa has dominated most other visiting teams, winning 58 tests and losing 11. But it has yet to beat Australia, which has won four and drawn two of the six series so far, winning 11 matches to five.Wednesday will also see the return of crickets great rotisserie-style auction, in which the owners of the Indian Premier League buy their squads for the next three years. Some players will take the field at Centurion significantly richer, while others may be disappointed. | Sports |
Larry Nassar Gets Up To 175 Yrs. In Prison ... 'I've Just Signed Your Death Warrant' 1/24/2018 WLNS -- Larry Nassar is going to spend the rest of his life rotting in a prison cell. The judge in Nassar's sexual assault case says she just signed his "death warrant" ... sentencing him up to 175 years behind bars. Before the judge sentenced the disgraced ex-Team USA doc, Nassar gave a statement to his victims. WLNS Disgraced ex-Team USA doctor Larry Nassar will be sentenced Wednesday in his sexual assault case after his final victims give their impact statements ... and we're live streaming the proceedings. Through 7 days, we've heard from over 150 women and girls who Nassar assaulted -- including former Team USA gymnasts Aly Raisman and Jordyn Wieber. Of course, the 54-year-old was already essentially going to be behind bars for life ... after getting 60 years in a separate child porn case. This time, he's facing a minimum of 25 to 40 years. Sayonara, scumbag. | Entertainment |
Olympics|Billie Jean King Wont Join U.S. Olympic Delegationhttps://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/sports/olympics/billie-jean-king-wont-join-us-olympic-delegation.htmlFeb. 5, 2014WASHINGTON Billie Jean King is no longer scheduled to join the presidential delegation to the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, the White House announced Wednesday. King cited the failing health of her mother, Betty Moffitt, who is 91 and lives in Arizona, in her decision to stay behind.It is important for me to be with my mother and my brother at this difficult time, King, 70, a tennis pioneer, said in a statement. I want to thank President Obama for including me in this historic mission, and I look forward to supporting our athletes as they compete in Sochi.Kings brother, Randy Moffitt, is a former major league pitcher.The White House had announced that King would attend the opening ceremony, which is on Friday, in a group that also included the former secretary of homeland security Janet Napolitano. As one of three openly gay athletes who were set to represent the United States at the Games, King would have personified a rebuke of Russias ban on so-called gay propaganda.The White House does not appear to have replaced King in the delegation, initially named in December, which still includes two openly gay athletes: the figure skater Brian Boitano and Caitlin Cahow, a former member of the United States womens ice hockey team. For the first time since 1988, the delegation does not include a current or former president or vice president or a member of their families. | Sports |
Dec. 18, 2015The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported on Friday that in the weeks before Sheldon Adelson bought the paper, its journalists were asked to monitor three local judges. One of those judges is overseeing a case involving Mr. Adelson, a billionaire casino magnate.The assignment was handed down by corporate management over the objections of the newsroom, the paper reported.No reason was specified for the assignment, the papers editor, Michael Hengel, said in an interview on Friday, and the material, which the paper said amounted to 15,000 words, was never published.They insisted that we do it even though we didnt see the purpose of doing so, Mr. Hengel said, referring to the papers corporate management.One of the judges the reporters were told to monitor, Elizabeth Gonzalez, is handling a wrongful dismissal lawsuit filed in 2010 against Mr. Adelson and his casino company by Steven Jacobs, the former chief executive of its operations in Macau.Mr. Jacobs has contended in court papers that he was fired after refusing to carry out what he believed to be illegal demands ordered by Mr. Adelson such as digging up potentially damaging information on high-ranking members of the Macau government. He also contended that he was ordered to continue to use a lawyer there despite his fears that doing so could violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.Mr. Adelson and his company have rejected those assertions as unfounded and said Mr. Jacobs was fired for cause. Filings in the case have also pointed to the possible involvement of Chinese organized crime in the Macau gambling industry. During the course of the case, Judge Gonzalez has had sharp words for Mr. Adelson and his team in the courtroom.In its article, The Review-Journal said that it was not clear how the judges came under scrutiny just as GateHouse Media, the company that manages the newspaper, was quietly finalizing the newspapers sale and an ongoing management contract with Adelsons family.The article is the latest puzzle in the controversial transfer of the newspapers ownership. Mr. Adelson and his family paid $140 million for the newspaper last week, giving the seller, New Media Investment Group, which operates from the offices of the investment management firm Fortress, with an estimated gain of nearly $57 million.Mr. Adelson chose to buy the paper through a Delaware corporation called News & Media Capital Group L.L.C., with just a Connecticut newspaperman, Michael E. Schroeder, named on the documents. The uncertainty left many observers both inside and outside the newsroom scrambling to discover who the owner was.In another twist, The Review-Journal reported that The New Britain Herald, a Connecticut paper controlled by Mr. Schroeder, had run an article less than three weeks ago that had singled out Judge Gonzalez for criticism. Its author was Edward Clarkin, who had previously submitted reviews of local restaurants. Reached by phone on Friday, Mr. Schroeder declined to comment on the matter, but said that journalists in Las Vegas were merely stirring up trouble.Mr. Hengel, The Review-Journals editor, said on Friday that his reporters had done a great job covering the newspapers sale.Theyve been all over it. | Business |
Science|Why Some Societies Practiced Ritual Human Sacrificehttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/science/ritual-human-sacrifice.htmlTrilobitesCredit...Paulus Swaen Old Maps & PrintsApril 4, 2016One thing thats definitely gotten better over time: not as much ritualistic human sacrifice.But a new study published Monday in Nature revisits the ancient practice to look for fresh insights. The scientists found that, for better or worse (and only worse for the victims, of course), human sacrifice helped create the hierarchies present in many modern societies.The scientists from the University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington, both in New Zealand, found that ritual sacrifice may have spurred the transition of small, egalitarian societies to large, stratified ones. The study examined 93 traditional Austronesian cultures (speakers of a family of languages in parts of Africa, Asia and Oceania).They looked at whether and how these cultures used ritual sacrifice 40 of them practiced it and how it affected social organization. The cultures were then divided into groups: egalitarian, moderately stratified and highly stratified. They were defined by the presence or absence of social hierarchy, and the rate of social mobility.The scientists found, perhaps not surprisingly, that human sacrifice contributed to creating and preserving social hierarchies, and that it increased the chances that societies would have more fixed strata, which were inherited positions, and less mobility. It also generally helped prevent loss of social divisions once they existed.Despite its barbaric nature, human sacrifice was a useful tool for rulers, elites, and religious figures to maintain or cement their power, or even to proclaim their own divinity.In these cultures, human sacrifice usually of slaves or others with low status was sometimes called for in response to several events, including the breaking of taboos or customs, the funerals of important people, or the consecration of a new house or boat, according to the authors.The authors list some run-of-the-mill techniques for human sacrifice, but others they mention are more, lets say, specific: being crushed under a newly built canoe, or being rolled off the roof of a house and then decapitated.Human sacrifice was practiced at some point in most parts of the world, but because most major religions forbid the custom, it hasnt lasted into modern times.Even so, rumors of human sacrifice or ritual murders sometimes circulate. And popular culture helps fan the flames, too. Game of Thrones Season 6, anyone? | science |
Credit...BurtonFeb. 6, 2014Beyond the thrilling victories and agonizing defeats, the Olympics are a 16-day fashion show, even for fans blithely unaware that the United States Alpine skiing uniforms are meant to evoke the nations flag reflected in the water off Fort McHenry the morning after the British bombardment, 200 years ago, that inspired The Star-Spangled Banner.To some, it might just look like a super-tight ski uniform. But dressing the athletes is more complicated than that, an Olympic sport in itself. Companies vie for the right to design and manufacture clothes, both functional and aspirational, then spend months promoting their creations through choreographed unveilings, hoping to outdo their sartorial rivals. Such competition might help explain why the inside of American freeskiing jackets includes a yellow star cut from gear worn to the top of Mount Everest, but snowboarders will wear high-tech corduroy pants and jackets inspired by a quilt found at an antique show. Fans might be impressed to learn that the aerodynamic suits of the speedskaters were designed with the help of Lockheed Martin. They might be more impressed to know that the similarly clingy uniforms of the luge team were designed by Valiant Entertainment, a comic-book publisher.The biggest fashion runway will be Fridays opening ceremony, where the American team will march in heavy cardigans festooned in bold patchwork and iconography, which one fashion pundit compared to wearing Times Square. Afterward, athletes can return to their rooms and relax in specially designed village apparel, as if those two words go together.The question that viewers might ask, when confronted with the kaleidoscope of styles, is as complex as any of the designs: Why? Why would companies devote untold hours, effort and money to imagining, creating and making (mostly in the United States, after commotion over Ralph Laurens made-in-China collection for the 2012 London Games) mostly small batches of high-tech uniforms with tiny logos that will not be sold to the public?The short answer is a familiar one in business jargon: branding.Its definitely a more broad brand play than it is a moneymaking play, said Jeff Timmins, senior global brand director for Columbia Sportswear. Columbia provided freestyle skiing uniforms for Canada, Russia and the United States, whose moguls team will wear pants with a snow camouflage pattern white, basically to disguise motion, a key element of judging.Companies and various governing bodies declined to reveal details of their uniform arrangements. But generally, the companies pay for the right to sponsor the Olympic teams and make and supply the uniforms, seeing it as a rare chance to reach a global audience and align themselves if only temporarily with some of the worlds top athletes. ImageCredit...The North FaceIt builds buzz, its marketing, it creates fan engagement, said Peter Zeytoonjian, managing director of consumer products and events for the United States Olympic Committee. Its not completely different than what any professional sports team does.Nike and Ralph Lauren are among those selling some products to the public. That Times Square sweater? It was $598, but Ralph Laurens website says it is no longer available. The reindeer-themed hat is, for $95. Columbia, like several others, uses the Olympics to push technology and fashion in the years to come. We wanted to build the best product weve ever built, Timmins said. Were using this really as a product design and development opportunity. Some of these skiers are the coolest kids on the mountain; to get their feedback is priceless.The only American athletes absolved from becoming runway models for someone elses idea of patriotic fashion are the figure skaters. They choose their own costumes. That changes if and when they win a medal, at which point they will don Nikes medal-stand look, with its soulful details, as the company described them, like Land of the Free and Home of the Brave in the jacket pockets and on the insoles of the shoes.ImageCredit...Columbia SportswearThe design of the uniforms and the deals struck with the manufacturers are left to the national governing bodies for each sport. The United States Olympic Committee usually approves the uniforms with little debate, as long as the uniforms conform to the requirements set by the International Olympic Committee.Those rules, explained in a 33-page book called Guidelines Regarding Authorised Identifications, generally allow only one manufacturers logo on each piece of clothing or equipment. On clothes, it must be in specific places (chest or arm) and cannot be more than 20 square centimeters in size (a bit more than 3 square inches). On equipment, it can be no larger than six square centimeters. Uniform designs must be different from one Winter Olympics to another no hand-me-downs but there are no hard rules about palettes. Countries are encouraged to use their national colors, although some might think that Germanys candy-colored striations this year might stretch the guidelines. Clothing designers, typically, are not conformists, and neither are some of the companies where they work. To be honest, the idea of a uniform is a bit counterintuitive to what were all about, said Greg Dacyshyn, chief creative officer of Burton, which dresses the American snowboarding team. ImageCredit...Columbia SportswearEven with Olympic uniforms, they want to surprise. The goal is buzz among fans, love among clients and jealousy among rivals. With luck, the uniforms will get the positive viral attention of the pants worn by Norways curling team an eye-crossing zigzag pattern of red, white and blue. (They were made by Loudmouth, an American company.)For the 2010 Vancouver Games, Burton created a preppy plaid jacket and pants that looked like torn, faded jeans, but were actually high-tech snow pants. This year, for an heirloom hippy theme, Burton found a quilt at an antique show in Brimfield, Mass., deconstructed it and put it back together to use as a screen print for the teams jackets. An image of an old, faded flag adorns a sleeve. Officials at the United States Olympic Committee cannot recall quashing a design proposal for being too outlandish. Companies like Burton, involved in the Winter Games for the third time, simply want to bend expectations.Theres a mutual level of trust there were going to make everyone look good and were not going to break too many rules, Dacyshyn said. But I was surprised, pleasantly surprised, the last time around when we did the denim thing.Beyond appearances, companies eagerly tout the technical superiority of their uniforms, from the articulation of elbows to the latest in waterproof zippers. Many features focused on weight, ventilation and aerodynamics, and companies reached deep into the jargon thesaurus to explain them.ImageCredit...Columbia SportswearThe inner details become a game of one-upmanship. Nike said that each United States hockey jersey was made from about 17 recycled plastic bottles and that the socks used about five. (Ralph Lauren did not say how many Oregon-based sheep were used for each of its wool cardigans for the opening ceremony.)Most boldly, perhaps, North Face sewed star-shaped fabric that had been to Mount Everest, with the phrase Bigger than Me, into the inside of its jackets for freeskiers in sports like halfpipe, where they will climb a 22-foot wall, not a 29,029-foot mountain.Fans might just notice the outside of the clothes. In events where speed is critical, most American teams have gone to black, as if red, white or blue might increase drag. American speedskaters will don black, skintight uniforms designed in a partnership between Under Armour and Lockheed Martin. The uniforms have tiny rubber nubs because wind-tunnel tests showed that a slight disruption of air is a good thing, not unlike the effect of dimples on a golf ball. Unlike the snowboarders, whose corduroy pants might make the vtttt, vtttt noise as they walk, the speedskaters have antifriction fabric between their thighs.The sleek uniforms of American Alpine skiers, by Spyder, are black at the shoulders, fading to ever-lighter blue as they descend to the waist, like pre-dawn over a horizon specifically, the dawns early light over Baltimore Harbor during the War of 1812. Only at the Olympics, apparently, can Francis Scott Key provide posthumous inspiration to both a ski team and to the insoles of shoes worn on a medal stand. | Sports |
Credit...James Hill for The New York TimesFeb. 16, 2014SOCHI, Russia The ice dance teams train together in suburban Detroit, tossing world titles back and forth like jugglers. One seems certain to win a gold medal after Mondays free skate.In Sundays short program, Meryl Davis and Charlie White of the United States moved a step closer a fox trot and quickstep closer, to be precise to becoming the first American Olympic champions in dance.With an elegant, effervescent and athletic performance to music from My Fair Lady, Davis and White scored a world-record 78.89 points and took a 2 -point lead over their training partners and chief rivals, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir of Canada, the defending gold medalists.Virtue and Moir received 76.33 points in the short program. Elena Ilinykh and Nikita Katsalapov of Russia took third place with 73.04 points.At the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, White and Davis had to be satisfied with silver medals as Virtue and Moir prevailed with a more classical style and romantic approach. But the judges have signaled a changing of the guard at these Games.The Americans decisively defeated the Canadians in the dance portion of the team figure skating competition a week ago. On Sunday, Davis and White were technically better on a required step sequence and prevailed on skating skills, transitions and linking footwork, performance, choreography and musical interpretation.They fly; they just fly, Marina Zoueva of Russia, who coaches both dance teams, said of Davis, 27, and White, 26. You can see they are very, very strong. At the same time, so light and flowing. You didnt see any moment when they are forcing it.Davis and White grew up 10 minutes from each other outside Detroit. They have skated together for about 18 years, since they were in elementary school. Along with familiarity and comfort, they have also developed an enhanced sense of expression and musicality since finishing as runners-up in Vancouver.I dont think either of us was really thinking about pushing, really, rather enjoying it, enjoying each others company, White said of Sundays short program.Midway through the routine, Davis said, I just felt like I was in a dream.The Americans and the Canadians have each won two world championships in addition to their Olympic medals. But White and Davis have not lost to Virtue and Moir over five competitions (including the Olympic team event) in the last two years.On Sunday, Virtue, 24, and Moir, 26, skated to Louis Armstrongs Dream a Little Dream and Ella Fitzgeralds Cheek to Cheek. They lost some ground on a sequence called a Finn step, a bubbly, compulsory movement of 30-plus seconds that requires light steps, hops and precise timing.Virtue, Moir and their coach could not immediately explain the slight mistake without the aid of film.I think that was the strongest we skated, for sure, Moir said.Ice dance has suffered in credibility because of a perception of predetermined outcomes. That suspicion was validated by the vote-trading scandal involving pairs skating and dance at the 2002 Salt Lake Games.The old 6.0 system was scrapped in an attempt to make the sport more objective with a code of accumulated points. But scandal again threatened skating as the Sochi Games began. Lquipe, a French sports newspaper, quoted an unnamed Russian coach as saying that Russia and the United States had conspired to fix some events at the expense of the Canadians.The Americans would supposedly help the Russians win the team and pairs competitions, the newspaper reported, while the Russians would help the Americans win the ice dance.But Russia seemed to need no help in winning the team and pairs gold medals. And the Americans did not appear to need any help in ice dance, with Davis and White the Olympic favorites.The United States figure skating association called the reports of collusion categorically false. The International Olympic Committee declined to investigate, saying it was treating the Lquipe article as a bit of gossip, frankly, which is groundless.In the team competition, Davis and White won the short and long programs. In the short program, Virtue made a mistake on a twizzle, which is a one-footed turn or traveling spin. There was no obvious error by the Canadians on Sunday, but Davis and White have clearly moved ahead in the rivalry.Perhaps, said Tracy Wilson, a 1988 Olympic bronze medalist in ice dance from Canada, Virtue and Moir have become so devoted to the creativity of their skating that it was a case of artists getting lost in their art.Wilson added that the more athletic Davis and White might remain more attuned to their performances and technique, repeatedly telling themselves, Step, connect, smile.In Mondays free skate, Davis and White will perform to Scheherazade, based on the story of a dissatisfied and felonious sultan who marries and murders a bride each day. His latest and most clever wife saves herself by telling the sultan a fascinating story that does not end.Zoueva, the coach of Davis and White, said recently that she wanted the couple to add more erotic feeling to the Olympic free skate to elevate the dramatic tension of love and escape.Thats a little room for improvement, Zoueva said. My mission is, you cant turn your eye from them. Everyone has to watch. Even the men will watch ice dance. | Sports |
VideoThe United States began installing the advanced antimissile system after North Korea tested four ballistic missiles on Monday. Correction: An earlier version of this caption misidentified the military base. As the article correctly notes, the equipment arrived at Osan Airbase, not Yongsan Garrison.CreditCredit...U.S. Forces KoreaMarch 6, 2017HONG KONG Alarmed over North Koreas increasingly provocative behavior, the United States said Tuesday that it had started to deploy an antimissile system in South Korea that China has angrily opposed as a threat to its security.The deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or Thaad, came after North Korea launched four ballistic missiles on Monday, apparently in response to joint naval exercises by South Korea and the United States. Those launchings led South Korea to call for the accelerated deployment of Thaad.A spokeswoman for the United States forces in South Korea said that one of five major components of the missile system had arrived on Monday. Officials said it could take a couple of months for the system to become fully operational. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had urged the South Koreans to move ahead with the deployment of the system during a visit to Seoul in February.In telephone calls on Monday to South Korean and Japanese leaders, President Trump said the United States would stand with its Asian allies and take steps to defend against North Koreas growing ballistic missile threat.Mr. Trump emphasized that the United States was taking steps to enhance our ability to deter and defend against North Koreas ballistic missiles using the full range of United States military capabilities, the White House said in a statement.China has been incensed over the deployment of the system, fearing it could give the United States military the ability to quickly detect and track missiles launched in China, according to analysts. A spokesman for Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Geng Shuang, said Tuesday that China would take the necessary steps to safeguard our own security interests, and the consequences will be shouldered by the United States and South Korea.Mr. Geng warned the two countries not to go further and further down the wrong road.Yang Xiyu, a former senior Chinese official who once oversaw talks with North Korea, said China was worried that the deployment of the system would open the door to a broader American network of antimissile systems in the region, possibly in places like Japan and the Philippines, to counter a growing Chinese military.China can see benefits only for a U.S. regional plan, not for South Koreas national security interest, he said.The state media recently encouraged Chinese citizens to boycott South Korean products and companies over the Thaad issue. The Chinese authorities recently forced the closing of 23 stores owned by Lotte, a South Korean conglomerate that agreed to turn over land that it owned for use in the Thaad deployment. Hundreds of Chinese protested at Lotte stores over the weekend, some holding banners that read, Get out of China.Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the head of the United States Pacific Command, announced the start of the deployment, saying that continued provocative actions by North Korea, to include yesterdays launch of multiple missiles, only confirm the prudence of our alliance decision last year to deploy Thaad to South Korea.The developments come as South Korea is consumed by turmoil over the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, whose administration agreed to the Thaad deployment. But with the president facing possible removal from office over a corruption scandal, the fate of the system had been in doubt. Its accelerated deployment could make it harder, if not impossible, for her successor to head off its installation.Moon Jae-in, an opposition leader who is the front-runner in the race to replace President Park, acknowledged that it would be difficult to overturn South Koreas agreement to deploy the system. But he has insisted that the next South Korean government should have the final say on the matter, saying that Ms. Parks government never allowed a full debate on it.Last year, thousands of people in Seongju, a rural southern county in South Korea, protested when it was announced that a Thaad battery would be established there. They said they feared that the system would harm their agricultural livelihoods. Many South Koreans also worry that any expansion of military ties with the United States could worsen already festering tensions with North Korea and China.Under its deal with Washington, South Korea is providing the land for the missile system and will build the base, but the United States will pay for the system, to be built by Lockheed Martin, as well as its operational costs.The United States military statement said that the first elements of Thaad were deployed on Monday, the same day as the Norths missile launchings.A C-17 cargo plane landed at the United States militarys Osan Air Base, about 40 miles south of Seoul, on Monday evening, carrying two trucks, each mounted with a Thaad launchpad. More equipment and personnel will start arriving in the coming weeks, South Korean military officials said.South Korea and the United States are doing their best to make the Thaad system operational as soon as possible, the South Korean Defense Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday, adding that the system was necessary to protect South Korea from the nuclear and missile threat from North Korea.The ministry declined to specify when the system would be operational. But the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that the deployment was likely to be completed in one or two months, with the system ready for use by April.The arrival of Thaad equipment was announced after South Koreas acting president, Hwang Kyo-ahn, talked with Mr. Trump on the phone on Tuesday morning. The two leaders condemned the Norths missile tests as a violation of the United Nations Security Council resolutions and agreed to beef up the allies joint defense posture, strengthen sanctions and step up pressure against the North, Mr. Hwangs office said.On the phone with Mr. Trump, Mr. Hwang called the Norths nuclear and missile threat a present and direct danger to its allies, his office said.The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said he spoke for 25 minutes on Tuesday with Mr. Trump, who reiterated his pledge to stand by Japan 100 percent, according to the public broadcaster NHK. I appreciate that the United States is showing that all the options are on the table, Mr. Abe said, adding that Japan was ready to fulfill larger roles and responsibilities to deter North Korea.Takashi Kawakami, a professor of international politics and security at Takushoku University in Tokyo, said the deployment of Thaad could put the United States in a stronger position to consider a pre-emptive strike on North Korea. If the United States took such action, he said, North Korea is going to make a counterattack on the U.S. or Japan or another place, so in this case they will use Thaad.With tensions increasing over the deployment of the system, some in China have advocated stern measures, including severing diplomatic relations with South Korea, or more.A retired general, Luo Yuan, even suggested that China destroy the system with a military strike.We could conduct a surgical hard-kill operation that would destroy the target, paralyzing it and making it unable to hit back, General Luo wrote in Global Times, a state-run newspaper. | World |
Credit...Dominique Faget/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesMarch 18, 2017NEW DELHI The 43-year-old Badarpur Thermal Power Station, a coal-burning plant on the edge of what has been called the worlds most polluted city, New Delhi, was quietly cleared to resume pumping smoke into the air last week.In Parliament, around the same time, Indias environment minister dismissed a major study of global air pollution that found that high levels of particles in India cause more than a million people to die prematurely each year. The report, he told Parliament, was based on models, simulations and extrapolations.And Indian officials have indicated in recent weeks that they will not observe a deadline for coal-burning power plants across the country to adhere to stricter emissions standards. Instead, the deadline may be shifted from the end of this year to a later, unknown, date.Every winter, when cold air pushes down a blanket of pollutants and fine particulate matter on Delhi, newspapers are full of horror stories about air quality more recently, the Airpocalypse and political leaders call for urgent solutions.But every spring, the clouds break, and city officials appear to suffer from a collective amnesia.The moment the air quality goes moderate, theyre willing to go back to normal its basically work as usual, said Aishwarya Madineni, an air pollution researcher based in Bangalore.I think the mind-set of both the government and the public is extremely episodic, she said. They wake up when theres a crisis, and they switch off after that.The whipsaw policies have led some environmentalists to wonder if India really has a plan to tackle the alarming levels of air pollution in the country.Part of the problem, experts say, is that the responsibilities for improving air quality are diffuse, spread across myriad departments in state, city and central governments. The central government in January enacted an action plan for Delhis air that prescribed various measures to be taken based on the level of air pollution. But the wide range of agencies, including the Delhi municipal and state governments, and states next to the area, means little has been accomplished, critics say.Theyre not even following even 10 percent of what that action plan is asking them to do, Ms. Madineni said. To me, its clearly an implementation challenge that is being addressed haphazardly.Sayed Musawwir Ali, an official with Delhis environment department and a member of its pollution control committee, said the government was following the action plan 100 percent but declined to confirm specific policies.Whatever is written in the plan we are doing, he said.Since the public increasingly views air pollution as one of Indias most intractable and urgent problems, a tension has grown between the countrys need to provide clean air for its citizens and the need to provide power to the nearly 300 million residents who live without electricity.The Badarpur plant was reopened partly in anticipation of surplus power demand in Delhi in the summer, when temperatures reach a scorching 120 degrees and fans, coolers, and air-conditioners work overtime. It was closed in November in an effort to improve air quality.But an analysis by Greenpeace India found that Delhi has adequate supply to meet its needs, and the power provided by the Badarpur plant is more expensive than energy that could be bought from the central grid. Even if Badarpur needed to reopen, said Sunil Dahiya, who wrote the report, it would not need to be used until June.The government defended the reopening of the plant as being consistent with the action plan.Mr. Ali said that when pollution conditions have become bad, the plant has been directed to stop operations temporarily.He said that the plant was meeting emissions standards and that the Environmental Pollution Control Authority had said that the goal would be the ultimate closing of the plant in 2018. The Center for Science and the Environment, based in Delhi, found the Badarpur plant to be one of the countrys most polluting in 2015.Some experts say that the contribution of the Badarpur plant to Delhis air pollution is limited, even when it is running at capacity, and that a more efficient way to ensure better air would be to carry out the national emissions standards for thermal power plants that the Environment Ministry passed in December 2015, and are scheduled to take effect next December.Those standards require the countrys coal-based thermal power plants to keep emissions between 30 and 100 milligrams of particles per cubic meter, down from the 150 to 350 presently allowed, as well as limit other polluting gases.But Piyush Goyal, the power minister, said on Feb. 13 that discussions with the Environment Ministry to delay the December deadline were continuing, the Press Trust of India reported.An official with the central governments Environment Ministry could not be reached for comment. | World |
Sports BriefingFeb. 15, 2014Bae Sang-moon of South Korea shot a bogey-free, five-under-par 66, giving him a one-shot lead over Aaron Baddeley and Robert Garrigus when the second round of the Northern Trust Open in Pacific Palisades, Calif., was suspended for darkness with eight players on the course. The defending champion Bernhard Langer shot an eight-under 64 to take a one-stroke lead over Bob Tway after one round of the ACE Group Classic on the Champions Tour in Naples, Fla. | Sports |
Out ThereDid Death Cheat Stephen Hawking of a Nobel Prize?A recent study of black holes confirmed a fundamental prediction that the theoretical physicist made nearly five decades ago. But the ultimate award is beyond his reach.Credit...Greg Funnell/Camera Press/ReduxOct. 4, 2021Did death cheat Stephen Hawking of a Nobel Prize?When the iconic physicist died on March 14, 2018, data was already in hand that could confirm an ominous and far-reaching prediction he had made more than four decades before. Dr. Hawking had posited that black holes, those maws of gravitational doom, could only grow larger, never smaller swallowing information as they went and so threatening our ability to trace the history of the universe.That data was obtained in 2015 when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, recorded signals from two massive black holes that had collided and created an even more massive black hole.Dr. Hawkings prediction was a first crucial step in a series of insights about black holes that have transformed modern physics. At stake is whether Einsteinian gravity, which shapes the larger universe, plays by the same rules as quantum mechanics, the paradoxical rules that prevail inside the atom.A confirmation of Dr. Hawkings prediction was published this summer in Physical Review Letters. A team led by Maximiliano Isi, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues had spent years digging into the details of the LIGO results, and in July they finally announced that Dr. Hawking was right, at least for this particular black hole collision.Its an exciting test because its a long-desired result that cannot be achieved in a lab on Earth, Matthew Giesler, a researcher at Cornell University and part of Dr. Isis team, said in an email. This test required studying the merger of two black holes over a billion light years away and simply could not be accomplished without LIGO and its unprecedented detectors.Nobody claims to know the mind of the Nobel Prize committee, and the names of people nominated for the prize are held secret for another 50 years. But many scientists agree that Dr. Isis confirmation of Dr. Hawkings prediction could have made Dr. Hawking and his co-authors on a definitive paper about it eligible for a Nobel Prize.But the Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously. Dr. Isis result came too late.Nobel Prize week returned on Monday, when certain scientists hope for a phone call anointing them as laureates and summoning them to a lavish ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10. (This year, because of the pandemic, the prizes will be handed out in the winners home countries.)Dr. Hawking, arguably one of the most celebrated and honored researchers, never won a Nobel and now never will. His story is a reminder of how the ultimate prestige award is subject to the fickleness of fate.The dumbing of the universeThe story begins in 1970, as Dr. Hawking was getting ready for bed one evening an arduous task for a man already half paralyzed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrigs disease.He had been thinking about black holes objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape them, according to Albert Einsteins theory of general relativity. They are portholes to infinity.Every black hole is surrounded by an event horizon, an invisible bubble marking the boundary of no return; whatever enters will never exit. Dr. Hawking realized that Einsteins theory also meant that a black holes event horizon could never decrease. A black hole only gains mass, so the total surface area of its event horizon only grows.It was a bold idea. Nature didnt have to work that way. What if black holes could split in two, or splatter off each other and disappear, like soap bubbles?Dr. Hawkings insight became a keystone of a 1973 paper, The Four Laws of Black Hole Mechanics, that he wrote with James Bardeen, now at the University of Washington, and Brandon Carter, now at the French National Center for Scientific Research.These laws also contained a troubling conclusion for physics called the no hair theorem. The surface area of an event horizon is a measure of all the information swallowed by a black hole. It is all the same to a black hole whether it consumes matter or antimatter, a Tesla or a Volkswagen, an ostrich or a whale. Black holes have only three properties: mass, spin and electric charge. No other details, or hair, register.ImageCredit...Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State/Caltech/MIT/LIGOThis theorem meant that as a black hole grows older and its event horizon grows bigger, the amount of information lost about what is inside would also grow. The universe would grow dumber and dumber, hiding more and more of the details of its past, including perhaps your existence. The conundrum deepened in 1974 when Dr. Hawking calculated that quantum effects would cause a black hole to slowly leak and explode.The quest to understand what happens to information in a black hole has transformed fundamental physics and energized a generation of young theorists. At stake is whether Einsteinian gravity, which governs the cosmos, and quantum mechanics, which governs the microcosm, play by the same rules.It all started with Hawkings realization that the total horizon area of black holes can never go down, Dr. Isi said.But with no black holes to experiment on, Dr. Hawkings ideas could not be tested.LIGO to the rescueLIGO would change that. This was the promise Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology and one of LIGOs founders, made to Dr. Hawking in 2003. The new array would be able to sort out the properties of black holes by the time Dr. Hawking turned 70 in 2012.Your gift is that our gravitational-wave detectors LIGO, GEO, Virgo and LISA will test your Golden Age black-hole predictions, and they will begin to do so well before your 70th birthday, Dr. Thorne recently recalled telling him.It took longer than that until Sept. 14, 2015 for LIGO to observe its first epochal event: two colliding black holes. By matching the detected wave patterns with computer simulations, the LIGO team concluded that one of the black holes was 36 times as massive as our sun and the other was 29 times as massive equaling 65 suns total. The collision resulted in a new black hole with a mass of about 62 suns. Three suns worth of energy had disappeared into the gravitational waves that shook the universe.The observation confirmed not only the existence of gravitational waves, as Einstein had predicted 100 years earlier, but provided the first direct evidence of black holes.A leaked copy of the discovery paper reached Dr. Hawking a few days before the official announcement of the findings. He was startled to find no mention of the four laws of black hole mechanics, or of the possibility that the discovery might test them. He Skyped Dr. Thorne, an author of the paper.Steven is quite surprised, Dr. Thorne wrote to his colleagues.Nobody had thought to check the laws of black hole mechanics, and it was too late to add anything to the paper. Moreover, as Dr. Thorne explained recently, the data were too noisy to measure the size of the newly formed black hole well enough to confirm Dr. Hawkings theory.ImageCredit...Lexey Swall for The New York TimesIn 2017, Dr. Giesler, then a graduate student at Caltech, and his colleagues used numerical simulations of the colliding black holes to look more deeply into the doomsday swirl.When a newly merged black hole forms, it vibrates. Like a drum, it generates a fundamental tone as well as harmonics overtones or undertones. The overtones turned out to be surprisingly loud early in the merger process, Dr. Giesler found. Using these overtones, in 2019 he and his colleagues proved the no hair theorem, which states that black holes can be described by only three parameters.This summer they were able to extend their analysis by exploiting an overtone of the new black hole to measure its size. They concluded that the area of the new black holes event horizon had increased, as Dr. Hawking had predicted so long ago.Nobel dreamsWould this have earned Dr. Hawking the Nobel Prize if he were still alive?I dont feel comfortable speculating, said Dr. Thorne, who in 2017 shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in developing LIGO.Andrew Strominger of Harvard, a longtime collaborator with Dr. Hawking said, I am not privy to the deliberations of the Nobel committee, but Hawking could already have been included in this prize were he still living. Certainly these most recent experiments would make the case even stronger.Daniel Holz, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago who is part of the LIGO collaboration but not part of Dr. Isis team, called the result crazy cool.Arguably its an observational confirmation of one of his predictions, he said. I would hope that the Nobel committee realized this.ImageCredit...Caltech/MIT/LIGO LabThe physics prize has always gravitated toward practical and experimental discoveries; even Einstein won the award for explaining the photoelectric effect, not for relativity. The furthest the Nobel committee has gone in theoretical astrophysics lately was in 2020, when Roger Penrose of Oxford University was awarded the prize for proving that black holes were possible in the universe.But he shared the prize with two astronomers, Reinhard Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, and Andrea Ghez, of the University of California, Los Angeles, who had both studied the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way.Even if Dr. Hawking had still been alive when his black-hole area theorem was proved, it would have been hard to fit him in a Nobel Prize can be awarded to three people at most. And what about Dr. Bardeen and Dr. Carter, Dr. Hawkings co-authors? And Dr. Isis team?Dr. Hawking would not be the first scientist to have died too soon for a possible Nobel Prize.I have been told that the Nobel committee regretted not giving a prize to Hubble, wrote Michael Turner, a prominent cosmologist now working for the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles, in an email, referring to the astronomer Edwin Hubble, who discovered the expansion of the universe. But he died first.Robert Brout, a theoretical physicist at the Universit Libre de Bruxelles, would likely have been included in the 2013 Nobel Prize for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson, along with his colleague Franois Englert and Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, had he not died in 2011.Ronald Drever of the University of Glasgow, one of the founders of LIGO, might well have shared the 2017 Nobel with Dr. Thorne and Rainer Weiss of M.I.T. had he not died in early 2017. His spot was filled by Barry C. Barish of Caltech.Dr. Hawking rests next to Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin in Westminster Abbey. Maybe thats better than spending a winter in Stockholm. | science |
Credit...Rich Schultz/Getty ImagesFeb. 3, 2014David Beckham is set to return to Major League Soccer on Wednesday, this time as an owner of a Miami team that will become the leagues 22nd club.Beckham and Don Garber, the commissioner of M.L.S., will announce the awarding of the new team at a news conference in Miami on Wednesday, two people familiar with the deal said. The team will not begin play in M.L.S. until at least 2016.The league values its association with Beckham. As part of his original contract when he joined M.L.S. as a player in 2007, he was granted the right to buy a team with some limits on its location for what would be the below-market rate of $25 million.Beckham narrowed his sights to South Florida last year after retiring as a player, and the league has held off on the awarding of the team only because it requires new clubs to have a stadium plan in place. Beckhams ownership group does not yet have a completed stadium deal, but Wednesdays announcement will be a sign that the league is confident one is close.The league has let the requirement slide in the past. New York City F.C. was announced as the leagues 20th team last year, after paying a reported fee of close to $100 million, but it still does not even have a temporary home for its first season, in 2015. Orlando City, which was named M.L.S.s 21st team in November, has a stadium deal in place and will also begin play in 2015.M.L.S. is sure to welcome Beckham as an owner, but getting a stadium for the team in Miami will not be easy, because of political pressures and a vibrant real estate market that has driven up prices.Discussions have centered on a piece of county-owned land near the citys seaport, PortMiami, where cruise lines and cargo ships dock. But that property was slated for commercial development, and putting a stadium there instead could represent a loss of revenue for the county. To win county approval, the owners of the stadium might have to make market-rate payments, said one person with knowledge of the thinking of county officials.Even then, it is unclear how soon a stadium might be built, though the team could presumably play a year or two at a temporary home like the Miami Dolphins stadium in Miami Gardens or at Florida International University in Miami. New York City F.C. has said that it plans to take that approach and that it expects to announce a temporary home in the next few weeks. There are also political hurdles for Beckhams Miami team. Carlos A. Gimenez, the mayor of Miami-Dade County, has opposed the use of public money for privately operated sports facilities. Before becoming the mayor, he was one of the few county commissioners to oppose the use of hundreds of millions of dollars in public money to help the Miami Marlins build a stadium, and he questioned whether the Dolphins should be given tax dollars to refurbish their privately owned stadium. Reaction to the deal to help the Marlins cost several top politicians their jobs, and Gimenez, who will attend Wednesdays news conference, would be loath to change course suddenly to help build a soccer stadium.The Beckham team, and the arrival of Orlando City, would mark the second and, the league no doubt hopes, more successful venture into the Florida market for M.L.S. The Tampa Bay Mutiny were a charter member of the league in 1996, and the Miami Fusion joined M.L.S. two years later in an earlier era of expansion. But both clubs struggled to attract fans, or a workable permanent home, in a market that has been difficult to navigate for sports teams, and the league shuttered both clubs in 2001. The move left M.L.S. with 10 teams.The arrival of two new Florida teams in the next few years, along with a potential team in Atlanta operated by the Falcons owner, Arthur Blank, could be the start of a new Southern strategy for M.L.S. Garber has repeatedly said that he envisions an M.L.S. with up to 24 clubs. | Sports |
Business BriefingDec. 30, 2015Contracts to buy previously owned homes fell in November for the third time in four months, a signal that growth in the housing market could be cooling. The National Association of Realtors said on Wednesday that its pending home sales index slipped 0.9 percent to 106.9. The group added that the index had risen slightly more in October than initially estimated. Pending home contracts become sales after a month or two, and the declines in recent months could point to slower growth in home-buying in 2016. Mortgage rates have only inched higher since the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate by a quarter point on Dec. 16, but Fed policy makers expect to continue the increases next year. Pending home sales had been posting strong gains earlier in the year and were still up 2.7 percent from a year ago. But contracts fell 3 percent in the Northeast in November from a month earlier and were down 5.5 percent in the West. They rose 1.3 percent in the South and gained 1.0 percent in the Midwest. | Business |
Boeing Deepens Probe Into Astronaut Capsule Woes, Prompting More DelaysThe Starliner capsule for NASA crews is now unlikely to have another orbital flight test until the middle of next year.Credit...John Grant/NASA/Boeing, via Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesPublished Oct. 19, 2021Updated Oct. 20, 2021Boeings second chance to test launch its troubled astronaut capsule to the International Space Station was delayed again, possibly until the middle of 2022, as NASA and the aerospace giant go to new lengths to investigate problems with the spacecrafts fuel valves.The postponement adds to the woes of Boeings Starliner spacecraft, a striking contrast with SpaceX, the private company founded by Elon Musk. Its passenger spacecraft, Crew Dragon, has lofted crews to orbit four times in the past two years, with a fifth scheduled on Halloween.The Starliner capsule came within hours of launching to the space station on an Atlas 5 rocket in August, as part of a 10-day test mission without humans on board. The goal was to demonstrate that the spacecraft was safe enough to fly NASA astronauts. But some of Starliners fuel valves, supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne, a maker of rocket engines, didnt open as designed during last-minute launch preparations, prompting engineers to roll the rocket back into its tower and, eventually, the capsule back to its factory.We had no indication that there was going to be any problem with these valves, John Vollmer, the manager of Boeings commercial crew operations, told reporters on Tuesday. The valves are part of an ornate network of plumbing in a detachable trunk called the service module that houses Starliners propulsion gear. The components worked during previous tests, including a trial of the spacecrafts emergency abort system in 2019, Mr. Vollmer added.Boeing has yet to determine what caused the valves to become stuck. Engineers were mulling whether to bring in an entirely new service module, but Boeing recently decided to keep the existing one, Mr. Vollmer said.The current guess at what caused the valve issue involves moisture that accumulated near some of the valves Teflon seal. But without any clear culprit, the company now plans to ship two of the valves to a NASA center in Huntsville, Ala., for a forensic CT scan, using machines similar the ones used on humans to detect diseases.Boeing built Starliner under a NASA contract worth $4.5 billion. It was part of a NASA program known as Commercial Crew, which is designed to stimulate the private development of two competing space capsules capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX received its own contract worth roughly $3 billion, and its Crew Dragon capsule carried out its first uncrewed flight to the space station in 2019.Boeings first attempt to launch an uncrewed Starliner in December 2019 failed to reach the space station because of dozens of software glitches, some of which had to be repaired while the spacecraft was in orbit. Starliner would have suffered what officials called a catastrophic failure had engineers not been able to quickly correct some of the software issues, a NASA panel of aerospace safety experts said at the time.The company spent 18 months making roughly 80 corrections to both the spacecraft and the Starliner teams internal safety culture, as mandated by NASA, and Boeing took a $410 million charge in 2020 to launch Starliner again for another uncrewed test.Boeing is also bearing the cost of Starliners latest delays, Mr. Vollmer said, without saying exactly what that cost is. Im not expecting any charges to the government from that side, he said.The NASA safety panel suggested in September that the agency and Boeing retool how they examine the spacecrafts readiness for future flights. We got very close to launch without identifying the valve issue, said George Nield, a panel member and the former head of the Federal Aviation Administrations commercial space transportation office. He added that there were rather significant differences in how the two entities examined issues before launch.Mr. Vollmer said his team is taking up the panels suggestion. Will we do something different? Thats exactly what were looking at, he said, adding that engineers might decide to load Starliners propellant closer to launch, or find new ways to mitigate moisture. | science |
Questlove, NBC Sued You Fired Us 'Cause We're White All Over a 'Racist' Text 1/24/2018 -- A rep for Questlove tells us he denies the "ridiculous allegations" in this suit, adding ... "Racism is REAL and exists throughout the world and for these gentlemen to claim victim is not only disrespectful to Questlove and his band mates, but to all that truly endure racism on a daily basis." -- A rep for NBC tells us, "NBC is committed to providing a work environment in which all individuals are treated with respect and dignity. We have strong policies in place that protect against discrimination in any form. The decision about these plaintiffs was the company's alone." Questlove demanded NBC fire two white camera guys on the 'Tonight Show' over a racist group text they never asked to be a part of ... this according to a new lawsuit. Camera operators Kurt Decker and Michael Cimino just filed suit against the TV network and the leader of The Roots after what they claim was misappropriated blame and racial retaliation from Questlove after each of them received a racist text he caught wind of. According to the docs, obtained by TMZ, a stagehand sent Decker, Cimino and Roots member Mark Kelley -- who's black -- a text during a taping of the 'Tonight Show' last year, which they say they never asked for or responded to. They say they tried explaining this to NBC execs in an attempt to distance themselves from the vile text, which they feared would be associated with them. Questlove got wind of this and demanded that NBC fire the camera operators, which NBC did. The Roots band member who also received the texts did not get punished. | Entertainment |
DealBook|Atlassian Shares Surge on Trading Debuthttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/business/dealbook/atlassian-shares-surge-on-trading-debut.htmlDec. 10, 2015In going public on Thursday, Atlassian, a maker of business collaboration and development software, did two things many other market debutantes have been unable to do this year.It priced its initial public offering above its expected range, and its shares enjoyed a healthy pop in their trading debut.Shares in Atlassian were $27.22 in late-afternoon trading on Thursday, up nearly 30 percent above their offer price of $21. That valued the software maker at nearly $5.7 billion.The price gains bring an upbeat close to what has been a generally dismal year for initial offerings, as many well-known names either suffered disappointing trading debuts or postponed their stock sales altogether because of lukewarm investor interest.That malaise has affected a variety of companies, including the payments issuer Square and the luxury retailer Neiman Marcus, and has dampened appetite for once highflying tech companies.Yet Atlassian, whose wares run from project and code management tools to chat software, is different from many of its tech brethren, as its co-founder and co-chief executive, Michael Cannon-Brookes, was quick to note in a telephone interview on Thursday.Most notably, the company, which is based in Australia, has been profitable virtually since its inception in 2002, whereas many Silicon Valley darlings post losses and promise big profits down the road. It also spends less on marketing and has no sales team, relying primarily on word-of-mouth to bring in new customers.This is a huge validation of what weve built, Mr. Cannon-Brookes said.And unlike many Bay Area companies, Atlassian has never taken a direct investment from outside financiers. Its external investors, including Accel Partners and T. Rowe Price, bought their shares from employees. That helped eliminate pressure on management to chart any course other than what it wanted to do, according to Mr. Cannon-Brookes.The company initially was self-financed out of necessity, since few venture capital firms would bet on two young Australians who wanted to create a software company in 2002.Instead, Mr. Cannon-Brookes and his fellow co-founder Scott Farquhar took out roughly $10,000 in credit card debt to get their business off the ground, and then eventually ran off the profits their start-up began generating.But while Atlassian became a profitable private company that had still found ways for employees to sell their stock, Mr. Cannon-Brookes said going public was always in the companys plans. It organized itself internally to run as a public company several years ago.Going public was less about raising money to finance operations or growth, he said, than getting recognition for what the company had built.The great companies of the world are public companies, he said. We always wanted to be a great public company. | Business |
Sports Briefing | HockeyFeb. 4, 2014Andrew McDonald scored early in the third period and Evgeni Nabokov made 22 saves for his 57th career shutout as the Islanders broke a five-game losing streak with a 1-0 win over the host Washington Capitals. McDonalds slap shot went past goalie Michal Neuvirth and just under the crossbar with 17 minutes 44 seconds to play. Nabokov, making his third start since returning from a groin injury, posted his second shutout of the season. He is 19th on the career N.H.L. list. | Sports |
Credit...Ronda Churchill for The New York TimesDec. 14, 2015Journalists at The Las Vegas Review-Journal described the newsroom as somber and confused on Monday, as a seemingly simple question remained unanswered: Who bought the newspaper for $140 million in cash last week?Several of the papers journalists used Twitter to protest the new owners lack of transparency, including a number who sent messages that linked to the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, which includes a section on transparency.One journalist from The Review-Journal, who spoke, like others, on the condition of anonymity in order to describe a tense situation, said it was difficult to demand transparency from the people and institutions the paper reported on when their organization was not being forthright itself.Others were working on uncovering the identity of the buyer; an article that sought to explore the papers ownership was submitted but not published, according to two people familiar with the situation.And so the mystery remained unresolved. It began late last week, when New Media Investment Group, the company that had bought The Review-Journal as part of a package of newspapers for $102 million this year, announced it had sold the paper. A company called News + Media Capital Group L.L.C. paid $140 million for The Review-Journal, and some other assets, New Media said, a price seven times adjusted earnings and very generous for a newspaper that is fighting steep, industrywide declines.It was not clear precisely who is behind the company, which was very recently incorporated.A subsequent article on the website of The Review-Journal about the sale last week was edited after it was published to remove references to the buyers identity being unknown. The papers publisher, Jason Taylor, speaking to reporters in the break room on Friday, defended the decision, but his answers did not appear to placate the staff.News + Media Capital Group was incorporated in Delaware on Sept. 21, according to its certificate of formation. Named on the documents is Michael Schroeder, described as a manager of the company. Mr. Schroeder, a Connecticut resident, is also chief executive, editor and publisher of The New Britain Herald and The Bristol Press, among other local publications.Reached at his office Monday, he was willing to talk about the state of the newspaper industry, but declined to comment on the identity of the buyer or buyers, or discuss anything else about the situation at The Review-Journal.The paper will continue to be managed by Gatehouse Media, a subsidiary of New Media Investment Group. All but the companys most senior executives and those most directly involved with the paper are unaware of the new owners identity, said a person with knowledge of the matter.Both Mr. Taylor and the papers editor, Michael Hengel, directed all inquiries to the chief executive of New Media Investment Group, Michael E. Reed. Mr. Reed declined to comment, and suggested calling Mr. Schroeder.Because the newspaper is a prominent platform in a key electoral state, some wondered whether there could be a political motive behind its purchase. Some in political and media circles suggested that the casino magnate and billionaire political backer Sheldon Adelson could be behind the change in ownership, but representatives for Mr. Adelson did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment on Monday. (Through a spokesman, the Republican donors Charles and David Koch publicly denied to Fortune magazine that they had any role in the purchase.)Even presidential contenders were left to wonder. Jeb Bush met for an hour with The Review-Journals editorial board on Monday. The only question left unanswered after the meeting, he said in a Twitter message, was Who owns the newspaper? That message was then reposted by the papers own Twitter account. | Business |
Nov. 23, 2018MOSCOW A provincial court has sentenced one of Russias most high-profile rappers to 12 days in jail in the latest culture war skirmish about what constitutes acceptable entertainment.The court in the southern city of Krasnodar on Thursday sentenced the rapper, Dmitri Kuznetsov, 25, known as Husky, on charges of hooliganism and of refusing to take a medical test, Russian news outlets reported. His offense? Climbing atop a car after one of his concerts was canceled without explanation and treating his disappointed fans to about 30 seconds of his music.The sentence is the latest in a series of confrontations pitting rappers against law enforcement, local officials or vigilante groups who have pushed to shut down a musical genre that the authorities say promotes drug use, suicide and other social ills.It comes amid a campaign by President Vladimir V. Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church to promote family values, with ambitious officials or groups often pushing initiatives they apparently hope will attract the Kremlins attention.On Nov. 1, for instance, Vladimir Petrov, a deputy in the Leningrad regional assembly, sent a letter to Russias prosecutor general asking that rap concerts be banned. Many musical compositions that are popular with young people openly advocate suicide, drug addiction, Satanism, extremism and even contain calls for treason against the Motherland, the letter said.Mr. Petrov wrote that the lyrics abound with obscene language, extremist turns of phrase and elicit enmity among citizens, which lead to brawls and other illegal activity.Mr. Kuznetsovs lawyer, Aleksei Avanesyan, echoed the common criticism that some officials were looking more to impress the Kremlin than to address real problems. It is easy you dont have to think about roads and hospitals, you can score points with simple bans, he said. The way they do it here is ban it first and then see what happens.Mr. Kuznetsov is not alone in facing problems with the authorities. Russian government agencies have banned a variety of songs from YouTube over the lyrics, and a hip-hop group called Friendzone had two concerts canceled in the provinces in November with no explanation given.ImageCredit...Alexander Avanesyan, via Associated PressIn the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, a vigilante group calling itself Anti-Dealer said it had worked with the police, the district attorney and the Culture Ministry to shut down the Friendzone concerts. It is a crime against the nation to sing about drugs, same-sex love and perversion, the group said in a statement on its page on Vkontakte, a Russian version of Facebook. It called on other Russian cities to evict the group.The legal proceedings against Mr. Kuznetsov were widely criticized.Aleksei A. Navalny, Russias leading opposition figure whose recent protests have attracted a young demographic akin to Mr. Kuznetsovs fan base said that the government needed to be confronted over any attempt to limit free speech.Speaking on his YouTube talk show, Mr. Navalny said that the Russian state sought to silence everyone, wanting all Russians to behave like orderly schoolchildren. The lyrics Mr. Kuznetsov had recited on the car were from a song that was not so much about taking drugs as about the conditions that lead to it, he noted, saying, This song is about poor people who use drugs because of their poor life; they are miserable and everything is awful.Zakhar Prilepin, a writer who made his name with a gritty novel describing the life of young soldiers in the Chechen wars and who went on to organize fighters in the separatist regions of Ukraine, wrote a screed on Facebook in support of the rapper. His post said that pseudomusical scum who sow vulgarity and stupidity and hang out in their dachas abroad won medals, while the respect of the young for their country was being crushed by actions like those against Mr. Kuznetsov.Get out of my face you ghouls, he wrote.In court, Mr. Kuznetsov said that he had been forced into the position of addressing his fans in the street because they had not been allowed into the concert hall and that he had felt responsible for the canceled event.I felt I needed to talk to them, that they needed to hear from me, Mr. Kuznetsov told the court in a video posted by Open Russia, an opposition media group.Two of his other concerts were canceled in a similarly abrupt, unexplained manner, he told the court. We did not get any official documents or official reasons for that. The jail time could cause the rapper, who was in the middle of a 15-city tour, to miss six more concerts.One video showed the singer climbing onto a red sedan and shouting two lines from one of his most popular songs I will sing my music, aye, the most honest music, aye before the police hauled him off the car. A YouTube video of that song has attracted 2.5 million views.The music of Mr. Kuznetsov, born in eastern Siberia, sometimes has a political edge. One song from 2011, October 7, which happens to be Mr. Putins birthday, details a sumptuous feast served to a king while ordinary people endure poverty. Many view his newer songs as political just for discussing the frustrations of daily Russian life. Yet as a journalism student, Mr. Kuznetsov reportedly worked for state-controlled news media from the separatist areas of Ukraine and expressed sympathy for some of its leaders.He also rapped last year in a stage production by a Russian director, Kirill Serebrennikov, who is currently on trial on what he and government critics call baseless charges of embezzling state funds. | World |
Credit...Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesMarch 8, 2016The World Health Organization advised pregnant women on Tuesday to avoid travel to areas where the Zika virus is spreading.Experts on the organizations Zika emergency committee also recommended that pregnant women and their partners who have been in areas with Zika rely on abstinence or safe sex to prevent sexual transmission of the virus.Sexual transmission is more common than previously assumed, said Dr. Margaret Chan, the agencys director general.Local transmission of the virus has now been reported in 31 countries or territories in Latin American and the Caribbean. The agency emphasized that it was not recommending that women avoid whole countries, but only areas where mosquitoes were transmitting the virus.The onus is on countries to report where they are having outbreaks, said Dr. David L. Heymann, the chairman of the emergency committee, who is a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Then its up to the pregnant women to decide whether they want to travel there.The committee also called for more research on the virus and better surveillance to track its spread.The panel suggested that countries intensively control mosquitoes near airports and consider spraying insecticide inside planes before takeoff, a common anti-malaria measure.The committee stopped short of advising women to delay pregnancy if they live in areas in which the virus is circulating, but Dr. Chan said women who chose to do so should be given access to contraception. Asked why the committee had not advised women to delay pregnancies, Dr. Heymann said he considered that a national recommendation rather than one under the W.H.O.s mandate, which is to prevent the international spread of diseases.The virus has been linked to microcephaly tiny heads and brain damage in infants born to infected women. Some experts argue that persuading women to postpone pregnancy is the best way to prevent a wave of such birth defects, because mosquito control is usually ineffective, a vaccine is months off and previous Zika outbreaks rapidly peaked and fell.Travel advisories and birth control are sensitive topics for the W.H.O. because it is a United Nations organization, and its member states sometimes object to medical advice they feel interferes with tourism, business or domestic policies.This is the first time the W.H.O. has advised that pregnant women avoid travel. Previously, the W.H.O. had advised women only to consider delaying travel.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued similar warnings weeks ago. On Jan. 15, the C.D.C. advised pregnant American women to consider avoiding travel to any countries or territories where the Zika virus was being transmitted.That advice upset officials in countries with low-risk areas. For example, although Mexico is on the list, Mexico City is at a high altitude and mosquito-borne diseases are not a threat.ImageCredit...Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesThe United States, Italy and France have all reported cases of suspected sexual transmission.Now, Dr. Chan said, the infection has also been linked to fetal death, slow fetal growth and injury to nerves in the developing brain, as well as to a temporary paralysis in children and adults called Guillain-Barr syndrome.We can conclude that the virus is neurotropic, she said, meaning it targets nerve and brain cells.Nine countries have reported either increases in cases of Guillain-Barr syndrome during Zika outbreaks or cases in which the virus was found in Guillain-Barr victims. The syndrome is caused by an autoimmune attack on the nervous system, often following a viral or bacterial infection.Cases of microcephaly following outbreaks of Zika virus have been reported only in Brazil and French Polynesia. But its a timeline because pregnancy is nine months long, Dr. Heymann said. What we see in Brazil now is what we could see in Colombia and other countries in the next few months, and its very alarming.The W.H.O. declared a public health emergency on Feb. 1 and asked donors to give $56 million toward the response. Dr. Chan said the agency had received only $3 million. We encourage countries to support this very important work, she said.Since the emergency declaration, Dr. Heymann said, the W.H.O. has reacted rapidly, issuing 10 sets of guidelines to countries on how to handle Zika virus outbreaks. He said evidence continued to mount that the virus, and nothing else, was to blame for increases in birth defects and Guillain-Barr in affected countries.The advisory committee said particular attention needed to be given to several research areas: studies comparing infected and uninfected pregnant women; genetic sequencing of viral strains; how often the infection causes symptoms; and whether asymptomatic infections are dangerous. | Health |
Credit...Dado Galdieri for The New York TimesNov. 14, 2018SO PAULO Cuba said Wednesday it was recalling thousands of doctors deployed to poor and remote regions of Brazil after Brazils far-right president-elect criticized the communist countrys treatment of the medical professionals.Cuba started deploying health professionals to Brazil in 2013 as part of the Mais Medicos, or More Doctors, program, started by the leftist Dilma Rousseff when she was president. It provided medical services to communities underserved by Brazils public health system.For residents of many small towns and violent, low-income urban neighborhoods, it was the first time a doctor had taken up residency among them in years, which made the program wildly popular.While most of the money that Brazil pays for the service goes to the Cuban government, the meager pay the visiting doctors earn is still significantly more than what they make at home.Jair Bolsonaro had warned that the terms of the deal would change when he took the Brazilian presidents office on Jan. 1, saying that the Cuban government could not retain any part of their salary and that the doctors must be allowed to bring their families, which they are currently not permitted to do.Mr. Bolsonaro has also raised questions about the quality of the doctors training in Cuba and has said the doctors would have to prove their medical credentials by getting their diplomas validated in Brazil.The Cubans get approximately 25 percent of the salary. The rest feeds the Cuban dictatorship, Mr. Bolsonaro told the Correio Braziliense newspaper earlier this month, adding that he met a Cuban doctor who wasnt allowed to bring her children with her. Can you maintain diplomatic relations with a country that treats its own like that?In response, Cuban authorities told the Pan-American Health Organization which has helped manage the program that its doctors have to leave Brazil.These unacceptable conditions make it impossible to maintain the presence of Cuban professionals in the program, the Cuban Health Ministry said on Wednesday, accusing Mr. Bolsonaro of making derogatory and threatening comments.ImageCredit...Sergio Lima/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesAt a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Bolsonaro described the arrangement with the Cuban doctors as slave labor, adding that: I couldnt agree to it.He also posted a tweet in English accusing the Cuban government of dismissing the impact the decision to pull the doctors would have on Brazilian patients, and wrote that Havana was refusing to fix the deplorable situation of these doctors in clear violation of human rights.More than 8,000 of the 18,000 doctors currently employed by the Mais Medicos program are Cuban, and their sudden departure would have a significant impact on Brazils neediest communities. The end of the program would also negatively affect Cubas bottom line. The governments medical service export program is among its main sources of revenue.According to Cubas Health Ministry, nearly 20,000 Cuban doctors have worked in Brazil as part of the program over the last five years, treating more than 113 million patients. Brazilian authorities say more than 60 million Brazilians who did not have access to a doctor now do as a result of Mais Medicos.Cuba sends doctors to dozens of countries, sometimes to help with humanitarian crises and often as part of medical services contracts. Countries have paid the government millions of dollars every month to provide doctors, effectively making the doctors Cubas most valuable export.But in Brazil, a growing number of the Cuban doctors have rebelled in recent years. Scores have filed lawsuits in Brazilian courts to challenge the arrangement demanding to be treated not as agents of the Cuban state but as independent contractors who should earn full salaries.Noel Fonseca Gomez and his partner were the only doctors for miles when they arrived in Arari, in northern Brazil in 2014.The work is gratifying, but I had to leave my children behind, the Cuban doctor said. And then you find out what Brazilian doctors are earning. When I started to fight for my rights, the Cuban government threw me out of the program.Mr. Fonseca was eventually able to move his family to Brazil and they have made it their permanent home.Cuba has punished those who have defected by barring them from returning to the island for eight years.I think most of the Mais Medicos doctors will go back to Cuba, Mr. Fonseca said. Their families are there and they wont risk being barred from visiting them. | World |
Bill Cosby Fans Out in Philly Goes Public On a Wing And a Prayer 1/21/2018 Bill Cosby must really like the Eagles' chances against the Vikings, 'cause he mustered up enough courage to show his face in public rockin' their gear. The disgraced comedian resurfaced Sunday in Philly wearing an Eagles windbreaker and hat as he stopped off at a coffee shop ahead of the team's NFC Championship game. We haven't seen much of him since his mistrial last summer, when the jury couldn't reach a verdict on charges of sexual assault. His retrial begins in April. Prosecutors in the Cosby case asked a judge last week to allow 19 additional women to testify against him, in the hopes of establishing a pattern of sexual assault. The judge, Steven T. O'Neill, has yet to rule on the request. Looks like Cosby's liking his chances, too, at this point ... we're sensing no shame here. | Entertainment |
Credit...Volker MinkusA bronze statuette recovered from a river in Germany may have been part of an early Scandinavian weight system, some archaeologists believe.A small bronze figurine retrieved from the Tollense River in Germany in 2020, one of 13 found there since 1840.Credit...Volker MinkusFeb. 15, 2022Two summers ago, while snorkeling in the marshy streams of the Tollense River on Germanys Baltic coast, a 51-year-old truck driver named Ronald Borgwardt made a startling discovery.Poking around in the peat, he picked up a six-inch-tall bronze figurine with an egg-shaped head, looped arms, knobby breasts and a nose that would make an anteater envious.The statuette, sporting a belt and a neck ring, was only the second of its kind unearthed in Germany, though the 13th found near the Baltic Sea. The first turned up around 1840. All are similar in shape and proportion.The most recent statuette poses an archaeological riddle, said Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist and head of research at the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage, in Germany. What was it, how did it get there and what was it used for?Remarkably, 24 years earlier, while paddling through the same swamp, Mr. Borgwardts father had spied a bunch of bones jutting from a bank. He fetched his son and together they scavenged in the muck. Among their finds were a human arm bone pierced by a flint arrowhead, and a two-and-a-half-foot-long wooden club that resembled a Louisville Slugger.More exploration of the area yielded the skeletons of a half-dozen horses, scores of military artifacts and the remains of more than 140 individuals, most of them men between the ages of 20 and 40 who showed signs of blunt trauma. Virtually all the relics have been traced to around 1,250 B.C., suggesting that they stemmed from a violent episode that may have played out over a single day.ImageCredit...Volker MinkusA 2013 geomagnetic survey revealed that this narrow stretch of the Tollense Valley was once part of a trade route bisected by a 400-foot stone-and-wood causeway that had been used to transport amber to points on the Mediterranean and Adriatic Sea. The amber road predated the bloodshed by at least five centuries.Today the area is considered Europes oldest battlefield site. Although the region was sparsely populated 3,270 years ago, upward of 2,000 people were involved in the conflict, said Dr. Terberger, who helped start a series of excavations based on the Borgwardts original discoveries.In a paper published Feb. 12 in the archaeological journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift, Dr. Terberger and five colleagues propose that the statuette found by the younger Mr. Borgwardt dated to the seventh century B.C. and was either a balance weight, an object of worship or a combination of both.The unanswered question is why the figurine wound up in a river valley along a trade route hundreds of years after a large battle took place there, Dr. Terberger said. Did this happen by accident, or was the setting a place of commemoration for a 13th-century B.C. conflict still present in the oral history of the Late Bronze Age people? And if the statuette depicted a goddess, did she play a role in a primitive weight system?Eat your heart outImageCredit...BasPhoto/AlamyLorenz Rahmstorf, a professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Gttingen and a co-author of the study, said weights and scales first came into use around 3,000 B.C. as trade developed in Egypt and Mesopotamia; the first weighing devices were a simple system to assess the value of goods, consisting of two plates attached to an overhead beam fixed on a central pole. Sumerian texts feature the earliest mentions of a weight unit, the mina, which tipped the scales at about 500 grams, or 18 ounces.Balance scales spread to the Aegean in the west and to the Indus Valley culture of South Asia in the east. By the middle of the second millennium B.C., weight systems turned up in Italy, and, by 1,350 B.C., north of the Alps.Sets of small bronze weights and balance beams in bone were mixed together in bags, and placed next to the dead in a number of graves from Eastern France and Southern Germany, Dr. Rahmstorf said. We do not yet have clear evidence for when weighing equipment was introduced to North Germany and Scandinavia.No ancient civilization attached stronger symbolic and spiritual significance to scales than the Egyptians from the second millennium B.C. to the Roman Period. Their most solemn otherworldly moment was the Weighing of the Heart.It was the Egyptian belief that after a person died, Anubis, the jackal-headed god of embalming, led the deceased to the judgment hall of Osiris, where the dead heart was weighed against a feather of Maat, the personification of truth, justice and the cosmic order.If a heart was pure, it would be as light as the feather, and the deceased was deemed worthy to enter the afterlife. Thoth, master of knowledge and patron of scribes, stood by to record the final verdict, and under the balance, Ammut the devourer head of a crocodile, forepart of a lion, hindquarters of a hippopotamus sat ready to consume the damned.Balance had to be reached so that your heart didnt get eaten by dear Ammut, said Kara Cooney, a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles.The first definitive weights are pebbles from the Second Dynasty of ancient Egypt, which lasted from 2,890 B.C. to 2,686 B.C. Some of the stones were engraved with parallel incisions, some with hieroglyphic inscriptions, Dr. Rahmstorf said. Metal weights became common only in the following millennium.A wealth of goddessesImageCredit...Joachim KrgerA majority of the 13 bronze figurines were recovered in or around rivers near the Baltic coast six turned up on the resund, a strait that separates the Danish island of Zealand from the Swedish province of Scania. The statuette found in the Tollense by Mr. Borgwardt is the largest and, at 155 grams, or about 5.5 ounces, the heaviest.It was long believed that the economy of northern Europe during the Bronze Age had been based on gift exchange rather than trade. The idea that the bronze figurines represented measurements of an early Scandinavian weight system was advanced in 1992 by the Swedish archaeologist Mats Malmer.After figuring in erosion and weight loss, Dr. Malmer analyzed the 12 existing Goddesses of Wealth for weight consistency and proportionality. His calculations indicated that the weight of the statuettes could be expressed in grams as multiples of a common denominator, 26.On a recent afternoon in his office at the University of Gttingen, Dr. Terberger reeled off the weights of some of the figurines: 55 grams, 85 grams, 102 grams, 103 grams, 103 grams, 104 grams, 106 grams, 110 grams, 132 grams, 133 grams. From across the room, his departmental colleague Dr. Rahmstorf said, Not every figurine fit the scheme perfectly, but most were quite close.Although the units of weight seem to have been standardized, Dr. Rahmstorf doubts that the statuettes were used as weights. It is possible that they were weight-regulated, he said. By which I mean the amount of metal used may have been weighed out.Still, the sample of figurines is small. And so far, unambiguous weights and scales from Northern Germany and Southern Scandinavia are missing. But some objects from the Late Bronze Age in these regions are possible candidates for weights: stone discs with a horizontal groove.Dr. Rahmstorfs initial analyses with his colleague Nicola Ialongo are promising, but he cautioned, these would be heavy weights of over 100 to several thousand grams. Because there are no texts and inscriptions from that era of northern Europe, currently, the existence of weights and scales in that area is likely but still only hypothetical.ImageCredit...Stefan SauerWeight watchersBack when Dr. Malmer came out with his theory, the statuettes were widely dismissed as artistically inferior to other figurines from the Late Bronze Age. The hypothesis has been put forward that these statuettes are cheap mass products, owned by poor people as household gods, he wrote in the journal Antiquity.Dr. Terberger demurs. All in all, 13 figures of this type do not support the idea that the statuettes were cheap household gods, he said. In the past they were interpreted as goddesses, but they dont match any deities widely worshiped at that time.On the other hand, Flemming Kaul, a senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, is not persuaded that the statuettes were weight-regulated. For me, the gram numbers seem much too random, and the statistical material too low to draw any such conclusion, he said.Dr. Kaul speculated that the statuettes were divinities, although not necessarily part of a defined pantheon. These figurines may have possessed magical powers tied to the ability to produce offspring, he said. They could very well be seen as charms or votive pieces related to childbirth the most dangerous time in a womans life.How might the Borgwardt figurine have ended up at the bottom of the river? On the Tollense trade route, with Nordic amber, a traveler offered up her amulet to the local water nymphs for further good luck on the voyage, Dr. Kaul said. Perhaps she parted with the talisman as a token of friendship or perhaps to promote life, fertility and cosmological order in the for us mysterious world of Bronze Age religion.For now, the riddle remains unsolved. | science |
Politics|Senate sergeant-at-arms resigns following Houses top security official stepping down.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/politics/sergeant-at-arms-resigns.htmlCredit...Win Mcnamee/Getty ImagesJan. 7, 2021Three top security officials on Capitol Hill are stepping down a day after a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, congressional leaders said on Thursday.Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California announced during her weekly news conference that Paul D. Irving, the House sergeant-at arms, intended to resign from his position, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said Thursday evening he had accepted the resignation of Michael C. Stenger, the Senate sergeant-at-arms.News of Mr. Stengers resignation came after Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said he would fire Mr. Stenger as soon as Democrats took the majority.Steven Sund, the Capitol Police chief, will also leave his position on Jan. 16 after Ms. Pelosi called for his resignation, saying Mr. Sund, he hasnt even called us since this happened. Mr. Sund, in his letter of resignation, said he would use his remaining paid sick leave 440 hours, about 55 days after departing.The swift departure of the top three security officials just two weeks before a presidential inauguration reflected bipartisan outrage over the law enforcement failure to prevent a mob of violent protesters from storming the Capitol as lawmakers debated the formal certification of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.s victory. The sergeants-at-arms are responsible for security in their respective chambers and related office buildings, while Mr. Sund oversaw more than 1,800 Capitol Police personnel.It was unclear immediately who would replace Mr. Stenger and Mr. Sund. In his statement, Mr. McConnell said Jennifer Hemingway, the deputy sergeant-at-arms, would serve as acting sergeant-at-arms.Lawmakers in both chambers and from both parties vowed on Thursday to find out how those responsible for Capitol security had allowed a violent mob to infiltrate the Capitol. House Democrats announced a robust investigation into the law enforcement breakdown.Mr. McConnell said in a separate statement that a painstaking investigation and thorough review were needed after the events of Wednesday, which he described as a massive failure of institutions, protocols, and planning that are supposed to protect the first branch of our federal government.Mr. McConnell added that the ultimate blame for yesterday lies with the unhinged criminals who broke down doors, trampled our nations flag, fought with law enforcement, and tried to disrupt our democracy, and with those who incited them.But this fact does not and will not preclude our addressing the shocking failures in the Capitols security posture and protocols. | Politics |
Credit...Luke Walker/Getty ImagesNov. 4, 2018LONDON A British man who spent five months at sea is believed to be the first person to swim around the island of Great Britain, making his way back to land in Margate, a coastal town in southeastern England, on Sunday.The swimmer, Ross Edgley, 33, had not been ashore since June 1, when he set off on his 1,780-mile aquatic journey.Sunday morning, he was welcomed ashore by loud, enthusiastic cheers.It still doesnt feel real, Mr. Edgley told the BBC.For more than 150 days, Mr. Edgley swam six to 12 hours a day. He spent the rest of his time eating and sleeping on his support boat, from where he documented his quest in episodes streamed online.Mr. Edgley, the author of a fitness guide, created the #GreatBritishSwim hashtag for his feat, and regularly posted on Instagram to his 268,000 followers. His audience saw his struggles with strong tides, soreness, cold water, and jellyfish.Almost two weeks after he entered the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest staged sea swim, Mr. Edgley posted an unflattering photograph of the impact the swim was having on his body specifically his heavily bruised, swollen feet, which looked as flat as fins.The harsh reality of spending hours, days & months at sea swimming, he captioned the Sept. 2 photograph.Swimming day in and day out in saltwater also turned his tongue dry and sore, making it hard for him to eat, swallow or talk. The solution? Coconut oil and yogurt, which helped him to overcome the soreness and keep going.Mr. Edgley said that even though he had not enjoyed every single moment of the swim, discipline kept him going.There are times when there are milky ways, or seals that it is amazing; its a real privilege, he said. But other times its less about enjoyment, and more just about discipline.In 2013, Sean Conway became the first man to swim the length of Britain when he swam from Lands End in western Cornwall to John OGroats in northern Scotland, according to the BBC. No one other than Mr. Edgley is known to have completed a circumnavigation of Britain.Why he did it is not entirely clear. But Mr. Edgley is no stranger to extreme tasks; this was the third exercise involving mental and physical strength that he has completed this year.In January, he accomplished the worlds longest rope climb in less than 24 hours by repeatedly pulling himself up and down a 10-meter rope until he had climbed 8,848 meters, or 29,029 feet the height of Mount Everest.In June, he attempted to swim almost 25 miles from Martinique to St. Lucia while tied to a tree. Because of strong currents, he didnt make it to the shore, he said, which prompted him to take on an even more demanding aquatic challenge.The adventurer in me had unfinished business, he said after the Caribbean exercise.After he returned to Britain, he asked the Royal Marines if he could be allowed to swim for 48 hours straight, just to see what Ive got in the locker, he said. One of the marines mentioned the idea of swimming around the entirety of Britain something thats never been done before, And I thought, Why not?Whats next after five months of swimming?Mr. Edgley said that his plans involved something much more practical.Ive got to learn to walk again, he said. | World |
Politics|Trump has not lowered flags in honor of an officer who died from injuries sustained amid the riot.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/politics/flag-lowering-trump-sicknick.htmlTrump has not lowered flags in honor of an officer who died from injuries sustained amid the riot.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York TimesJan. 9, 2021President Trump has not ordered the flags on federal buildings to fly at half-staff in honor of Brian D. Sicknick, a police officer who was killed after trying to fend off pro-Trump loyalists during the siege at the Capitol on Wednesday.While the flags at the Capitol have been lowered, Mr. Trump has not issued a similar order for federal buildings under his control. A White House spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Sicknick, 42, an officer for the Capitol Police, died on Thursday from brain injuries he sustained after Trump loyalists who overtook the complex struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials. Hours earlier, addressing supporters at a rally steps from the White House, Mr. Trump denounced the 2020 election as stolen from him and instructed them to march peacefully to the Capitol while also repeatedly noting that his side needed to fight.Mr. Trump has not reached out to Mr. Sicknicks family, although Vice President Mike Pence called to offer condolences, an aide to Mr. Pence said.Some of the calls for violence during the riot on Wednesday were directed at Mr. Pence, who had made clear to the president that he did not believe he had the power to change the election result, and suggested that the vice president be hanged. Mr. Pence was whisked to a secure location at the Capitol as the rioters broke into the building, but rebuffed attempts by the Secret Service to evacuate him.Asked whether Mr. Trump had a response to his supporters making such a demand, Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said, We strongly condemn all calls to violence, including those against any member of this administration.He did not name Mr. Pence. The president and the vice president have not spoken since Wednesday morning, before the riot unfolded, an administration official said. | Politics |
Credit...Mohamed Hossam/European Pressphoto AgencyMarch 2, 2017CAIRO Egypts top appeals court cleared former President Hosni Mubarak of any responsibility for the killing of hundreds of people during the 2011 protests that ended his 30-year rule, sweeping away the final legal hurdle to Mr. Mubaraks release from detention.The ruling drew cheers from Mr. Mubaraks supporters, who have in recent years cast off the stigma once associated with his name to air increasingly vocal demands for his release. But it represented a bitter landmark for the millions of Egyptians who risked their lives to oust Mr. Mubarak and his circle during the heady, 18-day uprising in early 2011.None of the Mubarak-era figures who grew rich and influential during his time in power are still in jail. The sole exception is Mr. Mubarak himself, who has been under guard for years at the Maadi Military Hospital in Cairo, at a room overlooking the Nile.But the decision to keep him in detention is widely seen here as a political matter rather than a legal one constructed to avoid any embarrassment to Egypts current leader, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who sometimes praises the 2011 revolution.In contrast, thousands of Egyptians who rose against him in 2011 are stuck in prison, in many cases after mass trials that drew stinging international criticism. The prisoners include supporters of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, but also activists, lawyers and journalists who dared to challenge Mr. Sisi.Its pretty telling that Mubarak, who ran the country into the ground, gets acquitted, and people who gave their everything to try and do something for the country are sitting in prison, said Ahdaf Soueif, an author whose nephew, the activist and blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah, is in jail.Some Egyptian prisoners have been held without trial for years, often in terrible conditions, in stark contrast with the relatively gilded conditions enjoyed by Mr. Mubarak. According to supporters who have visited him, Mr. Mubarak gets regular deliveries of flowers, newspapers and takeout restaurant meals, as well as a constant stream of visitors.Occasionally, Mr. Mubarak emerges onto the balcony to wave at cheering supporters gathered at the hospital gates. His sons Alaa and Gamal, who were convicted on charges of embezzling millions of dollars of state money, were released from prison in 2015 and are often sighted in restaurants and shops in upscale Cairo neighborhoods.In the past six years, Mr. Mubarak has faced a slew of criminal charges for corruption and misrule. He was often seen glowering with anger when he appeared in court and was forced to sit inside a cage. But he has been convicted in just one corruption case, which concluded in 2015 when an appeals court upheld a three-year sentence. The judge allowed Mr. Mubarak to count time served against the sentence.Alternately defiant or embittered, Mr. Mubarak never publicly displayed much contrition for his actions during his three decades in power. On Thursday he was flown by helicopter to the courtroom, where he sat in a wheelchair and smiled at supporters from the defendants cage. Among those watching from the public gallery was his son Gamal, once groomed as his successor.Yousri Abdelraziq, a lawyer and Mubarak supporter who was present in court, said the former president was in a buoyant mood after his acquittal. He fully intends to go home, perhaps in a month or two, he said.He suggested that Mr. Mubarak might want to go to his palatial villa at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh, which was the subject of a different, failed corruption case.The final case against Mr. Mubarak centered on accusations that he ordered shootings by security forces that led to the deaths of 239 people during the 2011 uprising. In 2012, a court sentenced Mr. Mubarak to life in prison, but an appeals court ordered a retrial, which resulted in his initial acquittal in 2014.Thursdays ruling confirmed that acquittal, prompting renewed speculation that Mr. Sisi might release Mr. Mubarak from detention, though it could prove politically awkward. In speeches, Mr. Sisi regularly pays tribute to the 2011 uprising, which was supported by the Egyptian military.If they let Mubarak out, what does that say about 2011 that the military got it wrong? said Hisham A. Hellyer, author of A Revolution Undone: Egypts Road Beyond Revolt.Still, Mr. Sisis tenure is more strongly defined by the tumultuous events that brought him to power, when the military he led toppled the democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, in 2013.Since then Mr. Sisi has cracked down hard on the Brotherhood, while his supporters have sought to portray the events of 2011 as a result of foreign interference in Egypt.Some Egyptians believe that Mr. Sisi might want to free Mr. Mubarak before the presidential election set to take place next year, as a means of drawing a line under the 2011 uprising. Mr. Sisi himself has yet to make his views clear.Mr. Mubarak, for his part, has always insisted he did nothing wrong. After a list of charges against the former president was read aloud in court on Thursday quite possibly for the last time he responded curtly: It did not happen. | World |
On BaseballCredit...Barton Silverman/The New York TimesFeb. 19, 2014TAMPA, Fla. Control was the defining issue. If he could ward off distractions, if he could make it all about the ball, the glove and his opportunistic bat, baseball would forever be the little boys game even when it was being played for riches once beyond his imagination.For most of his 19 years as a Yankee, Derek Jeter succeeded at that, and given his standing shortstop in New York City it was all rather extraordinary. He constructed a bubble around himself that was almost impenetrable. He avoided public controversies, shielded his personal life as most would their wallet and pretended that baseballs steroid scourge for better or worse was happening in an alternative universe.But there comes a time when the forces of nature must burst even the strongest of bubbles, when the most freakish of circumstances will bedevil the control freak. That happened for Jeter in October 2012 when his left ankle buckled and broke in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series against Detroit.Id never had a major injury, he said. The ankle had been sore for weeks, not that he advertised it because as much as he was a team-first guy, he was also playing by his own rules. From the day he arrived, he showed us only what he wanted us to see, and that was part of the plan.Yeah, I have feelings, he said Wednesday without revealing any. Im not emotionally stunted.Not yet retired, still fighting the good fight, Jeter remained in character as he addressed the world for the first time since announcing last week on Facebook in an article he made sure to say that he, alone, had written that the 2014 season would be his last. Large news media contingent notwithstanding, he began by trying to have the event downgraded to something it certainly was not, a mere availability.I really didnt want this to be a press conference, he said. I tried to do this under the radar.Fifteen minutes in, he turned to Manager Joe Girardi, who was seated in a section that included the players and members of the organization, including the Steinbrenner family. Joe, if the guys got to go work, dont feel that theyve got to be here, Jeter said.Works over, Girardi said with an incredulous look. Was Jeter kidding? No, that was just him trying to redirect the radar, Jeter-ize the moment. But while he has taken control of his exit from the game, having a farewell tour means being put on public display. I dont know if hes asking for that, General Manager Brian Cashman said. But its certainly coming.One last season for the masses to say goodbye, as it was with Mariano Rivera in 2013. Jeters ankle and ensuing complications deprived him of the chance to participate until the end of that season and made him see the baseball life as he hadnt seen it before.VideoThe New York Yankees Derek Jeter held a news conference Wednesday to discuss his retirement at the end of the 2014 season.CreditCredit...Barton Silverman/The New York TimesThis is a difficult job, he said. Its a 12-month job. The point was this: Without control of his environment, baseball could no longer be that little boys game. It was work and, as he said of his decision to pinpoint his departure, the time is right.He mentioned that the retirement of Jorge Posada his steady lunch partner on the road in 2011 had made him consider, however briefly, career mortality. Surely not lost on Jeter was that Posadas last season with the Yankees was a fairly acrimonious one. Jeter endured a nasty contract negotiation that wounded and angered him after the 2010 season, a poor one by his standards. Before the ankle injury, his 2012 season when he led the majors in hits was exceedingly redemptive, but it was no last word or laugh. If it ever came to a war of wills on when Jeter should go, the Yankees were destined to win that one.I dont think any of us are afraid of those circumstances if they come our way, Cashman said. Its our nature to do whats best for the organization.The argument could be made that Jeters last big-picture act as the ultimate team player was to spare the Yankees such an ordeal. The narrative will soon switch to what the Yankees can do for him as they write the final chapter to his Hall of Fame career, and not on Facebook. The best thing, of course, would be for Derek to finish with another World Series, said Gene Michael, the longtime Yankees executive and scout who was instrumental in the early-to-mid-90s youth movement that ushered in the Jeter era.Its a lovely thought for all those who love Jeter and the Yankees, but the truth is that such perfect endings are rare in any profession, much less one as competitive as pro sports. For all we know, Brendan Ryan could wind up playing more shortstop than Jeter, or Jeter may have to accept being subbed in late innings for Ryans superior defensive range.Whatever happens this season will merely be the wrapping on the gift that Jeter has been to fans of any team and sport. Like Bill Russells, his history is etched in stone.Assuming Joe Torres No. 6 is destined for retirement, Jeter, No. 2, will be the final single-digit Yankee in pinstripes. His most lasting images the flip play in the 2001 division series against Oakland, the dive into the stands against Boston, the sweet slides into second followed by the clapping of his hands will not change.But Jeter has changed, or at least his view of a world he always kept simple has changed. Facing 40 in June, he talked about wanting to start a family, about furthering his foundation work and his new publishing venture. More controllable things than baseball has become.Predictably, he didnt bite on the question of legacy because that would be based on other peoples opinions, not his.Being remembered as a Yankee, he said. Being a Yankee will be enough.To his right, the owner Hal Steinbrenners face lit up with a smile. His sister, Jennifer, looked as if she were going to cry. Jeter, conversely, shared this news with the feeling of someone just awakened from a nap.His emotions will be the last thing wrested from his command. On this particular issue, see you in September. | Sports |
Credit...Fabrizio Costantini for The New York TimesDec. 29, 2015LEAMINGTON, Ontario Heinz has left a deep mark on this town, the self-proclaimed tomato capital of Canada that sits on the shore of Lake Erie.There is the tourist booth shaped like a giant tomato that was partly funded by Heinz in 1961. The annual tomato festival that was originally a company picnic. Most everyone has a family member who has worked at the century-old Heinz plant here.Residents feared the worst when a group of investors bought Heinz in 2013. The investors, 3G Capital and Berkshire Hathaway, Warren E. Buffetts company, announced plans to close the plant and gave layoff notices to its 740 workers.But Leamington and the plant got a reprieve because, in part, of a quirk of Canadian law. A 54-year-old regulation bans using tomato paste to make tomato juice.Although the plant has changed hands, Heinz is its biggest customer. Along with tomato juice, the plant now makes soups, sauces and SpongeBob SquarePants canned pasta. The air around downtown is still filled with the scent of cooked tomatoes.ImageCredit...Fabrizio Costantini for The New York TimesIts really quite unusual, this whole story, said David Dick, a tomato seedling grower whose familys dealings with Heinz date from 1936. Im really dumbfounded by it all. This really rose from the ashes.Sam Diab, who is one of three partners in the plants new owner, Highbury Canco, is steeped in Heinz history.His immigrant grandfather was a caretaker at Heinz. His parents handpicked tomatoes as children. His mother eventually held a senior financial position in the plant.In 2012, Mr. Diab left a management job at Heinz headquarters in Pittsburgh to run the factory here, where he had first worked for the company. The move was partly out of fondness for his hometown and partly to return to a job thats close to the product.It was the past that Mr. Diab, now the president and chief executive of Highbury Canco, fought to preserve.In October 2013, Mr. Diab got a warning that Heinz would announce the plant shutdown the next month. As he kept the secret, Mr. Diab worked on a plan to save the factory.ImageCredit...Fabrizio Costantini for The New York TimesYou know, it was difficult when you have hundreds of people around you, said Mr. Diab, 33. But obviously, I saw a different future for the place.He tried unsuccessfully to dissuade 3G and Berkshire Hathaway from closing the plant with a plan that included cost-cutting.The disruption went far beyond the factory. Heinz bought about half of Ontarios tomato crop, worth roughly $50 million a year.A few miles north of the plant, Wayne Palichuk moved to save costs on the farming operation his grandfather founded 87 years ago. Growing tomatoes for Heinz generated about half of his farms income.He laid off a hired hand who had worked on the farm for years. He put some equipment up for sale.Is there crops that we could grow that we could survive on? Mr. Palichuk said. Sure there is. Is there other crops with the same per-acre value? No.As Mr. Diab showed prospective buyers around the plant, he proposed that new owners focus on landing Heinz as a customer.ImageCredit...Fabrizio Costantini for The New York TimesBut many of the visitors were simply looking to tear it down and redevelop the land. He similarly figured that Pradeep Sood and Surjit Babra, two investors from the Toronto area, did not have much interest.Neither had any extensive experience in the food industry. Mr. Soods main holding, XactScribe, is a transcription company. Mr. Babras business, SkyLink Canada, has aviation-related holdings.My heart wasnt in the tour, Mr. Diab said. I didnt actually think it was going to to go anywhere because they didnt have the background in food.But the two investors called back the next day. Mr. Sood said they were particularly impressed that the plant came with a trained, ready-made work force. Within weeks, Mr. Diab formally entered a partnership with them to make a bid for the plant, its equipment and, critically, contracts to continue using them to make Heinz products.The Canadian rules concerning tomato juice helped win over Heinz.Tomato juice in the United States is often made from tomato paste, but Canadian regulations require fresh tomatoes. If Leamington closed, Heinz would have to find another place to produce tomato juice for Canada, where it dominates the market for the beverage.The companys control of the Canadian market meant there was little tomato juice production capacity elsewhere in the country. Keeping tomato juice production in Leamington also meant that custom machinery did not have to be duplicated.ImageCredit...Fabrizio Costantini for The New York TimesAlong with the plant sale, Heinz signed a five-year agreement with Highbury to produce about 120 products. The warehouse will also continue to serve as the distribution center for all Heinz products sold in Canada, regardless of where they are made.Highbury Cano was identified as the ideal partner that would benefit both the Leamington community and Kraft Heinz, said Michael Mullen, a spokesman for Kraft Heinz, as the company is now known. We continue to have a strong relationship with Highbury Canco.At first, employment was cut to 250, from 740. Under a new union contract, the basic rate for unskilled plant workers fell to 16 Canadian dollars, or about $11.55, an hour, from about 25 Canadian dollars, although Highbury maintained similar benefits. The number of seedling growers and tomato farmers supplying the plant declined.Since then, local tomato farmers have secured additional contracts with other canning and paste companies in the area. This years harvest was back to about where it stood before the shutdown announcement.Sam came through, said Mr. Palichuk, who remains a supplier, as does Mr. Dick. He was a knight in shining armor.It is a common sentiment, but bitterness lingers toward 3G and Mr. Buffett.Finishing lunch at the Gingerbread House Family Restaurant, Joanne Siddall, a former plant worker, said she boycotts Tim Hortons, the national coffee and doughnut chain that was bought by the 3G-owned Burger King Worldwide using financing from Berkshire Hathaway.ImageCredit...Fabrizio Costantini for The New York TimesThe cuts have led to small-town rumors and speculation. Ms. Siddall subscribes to a common conspiracy theory in which the sale of the plant was a sham to force lower wages.Theyve got another four years, and theyll be done, and then Heinz will take back over, she said.Mr. Buffett denies such a plan. This is the first Ive heard of the conspiracy theory, he wrote in an email in which he also noted that 3G was responsible for the operation of Heinz. I am on the board of Kraft Heinz and can state unequivocally that I know of no arrangement of any kind to buy back the property. A spokesman for 3G declined to comment.Mr. Diabs focus is expansion. This year, Highbury landed a contract to produce industrial tomato paste for a local canning company, allowing Mr. Diab to raise employment to 325. Sales in 2015 will be roughly 75 million to 120 million Canadian dollars, according to Mr. Diab.Part of Mr. Diabs plan is to start exporting industrial paste to food companies in nearby Ohio and Michigan. That hinges, in part, on persuading the tomato growers marketing board to create a lower price category for paste tomatoes.Mr. Diab is also pitching the product development laboratory, inherited from Heinz, to smaller food companies as a way to scale up new products for test runs. The company is investing about 20 million Canadian dollars into outfitting empty sections of the plant to allow new kinds of packaging.Now, its all about securing new products, and thats new for us, Mr. Diab said. | Business |
Bradley Cooper & Irina Shayk We Got a Beach Baby And Fly, Eagles Fly!!! 1/24/2018 Bradley Cooper and Irina Shayk hit the beach with their 10-month-old daughter, and while they were laser-focused on her ... Bradley's clearly got his eyes on another prize, too. The couple hit up L.A.'s Sunset Beach Tuesday to play in the sand with Lea de Seine. Of course, she was adorable in all-white and floppy hat. She also had some fun with dad's man bun. Ya can't knock her for that. Bradley was wearing the same thing he'll probably be wearing for the next 11 days -- a Philadelphia Eagles shirt. The diehard Philly fan's clearly loving fatherhood as much as his team's run to the Super Bowl. #FlyLeaFly | Entertainment |
Nov. 15, 2018ImageCredit...Niall Carson/PA Images, via Getty ImagesA criminal trial in Ireland, in which the lawyer of a man accused of rape cited the lacy underwear worn by a woman as a sign of her consent, has ignited outrage across the country and beyond. During the closing argument, the defense lawyer asked the jury to consider the underwear worn by the 17-year-old woman at the time prosecutors said she was raped in a muddy alleyway by a 27-year-old man. Does the evidence out-rule the possibility that she was attracted to the defendant and was open to meeting someone and being with someone? the lawyer asked, according to The Irish Times. You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front.The man was acquitted, and the case immediately drew calls for accountability and sparked a national dialogue about consent and victim blaming. Hundreds of women and men with posters and lace underwear in hand protested in five cities across the country on Wednesday. In Dublin, women hung thongs on clotheslines along sidewalks in the city center. In Cork, protesters laid lingerie across the steps of the courthouse. My issue isnt just the barrister; its the system that allows it, said Mary Crilly, director of the Cork Sexual Violence Center and one of the speakers at the protests. What a woman wears, Ms. Crilly said, is her business and does not indicate interest or consent. Its never her fault, she said. Were allowing the perpetrators to get away. On Tuesday, Ruth Coppinger, a member of the Irish Parliament, pulled a thong out of her sleeve during public debate to protest what happened at the trial, further raising the profile of the case. We felt it was necessary to make the point that its incongruous to have a thong shown in Parliament, and its incongruous for a woman in a rape trial to see it in court as well, Ms. Coppinger said. If we sit in Parliament quietly waiting for change to come, we wont get it.Ms. Coppinger said she had expected the room to break out in shouts and objections when she pulled out a pair of her underwear, as it often does when she brings the realities of life into the stuffy and conservative environment of Parliament. Instead, there was silence. The Taoiseach, or Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, eventually responded, saying it was never the victims fault, regardless of the setting or other factors like clothing. A day later, Ms. Coppinger led protests in Dublin and called for changes to a legal system in which a womans clothing can be considered as evidence of consent and where only a small fraction of rape cases are convicted. How heroic do you need to be to pursue a rape case in Ireland? Ms. Coppinger said.Women also poured out their frustration on social media, where they posted photos of colorful underwear with the hashtag #ThisIsNotConsent.Ms. Crilly, who has worked on behalf of rape survivors for 35 years, said that though a cultural change in womens status in Ireland had been slow, it was happening. For decades, Ireland was a socially conservative society ruled by the norms of the Roman Catholic Church, and womens rights often took a back seat. In recent years, socially liberal policies have begun to flourish.But as womens status in society changes, the laws have not always kept pace.Ms. Crilly pointed to the overturning of Irelands abortion ban in May as a historic moment for women. In a landslide, voters repealed language in the countrys Constitution that prohibited abortion in almost all situations. I didnt think I would see that in my lifetime, Ms. Crilly said.This cultural reckoning has also shone a light on the way the country deals with cases of sexual assault. There have been similar challenges in Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland, fewer than 2 percent of rape cases lead to convictions, according to a recent report from the Criminal Justice Inspection.This spring, a proceeding that came to be known as the Belfast trial ignited similar outrage in Northern Ireland, where two rugby players who play for the national team were accused of raping a woman at a house party.The prosecutions case included accounts from a taxi driver who testified that the woman had been sobbing on her drive home and that there had been blood on the back of her white jeans. A doctor told the court that he had observed a laceration in her bleeding vagina. But defense experts argued that this was not proof that she had been raped, or even that she had had sex.The defendants said the encounter had been consensual, and denied having vaginal sex with the woman. In private WhatsApp messages, they referred to the events of the night as spit-roasting and a merry-go-round.The jury acquitted the men, and the fallout reverberated across the island. The whole country was horrified by that case day by day, said Clona Saidlar, the director of the Rape Crisis Network Ireland. Activists and others rallied on social media, using the hashtag #IBelieveHer, and at least 1,000 gathered publicly to protest the ruling in Belfast and also in Dublin.Ms. Saidlar said social media had been instrumental to grass-roots organizing for womens rights, in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.These women know how to organize, Ms. Saidlar said. Theyre not passive in the face of this insult, of this demonstration of patriarchy in our courts. | World |
The F.D.A. criticized measures at a hydroponics greenhouse linked to an outbreak last summer, and offered guidelines that have ramifications for the popular industry.Credit...Robert Franklin/South Bend Tribune, via Associated PressMay 3, 2022Countless salad lovers have embraced hydroponic produce, confident that baby lettuce, arugula and herbs raised indoors in greenhouses are safer than greens rooted outdoors in farm soil.Hydroponic growers advertise their produce as singularly fresh, typically raised close to customers homes rather than in far-off farm fields. And a string of food poisoning cases linked to traditional soil-grown leafy greens from California and Arizona in recent years has heightened the attraction of locally raised hydroponic produce.But a salmonella outbreak last summer that sickened 31 people in four states and was traced to a BrightFarms hydroponic greenhouse in Rochelle, Ill., revealed that even greens grown in roofed-in environments are vulnerable to contamination.Though the outbreak was small, the Food and Drug Administration conducted an investigation into its causes, believed to be the first domestic inquiry into food-borne illness linked to hydroponic leafy greens. The agency, in a recently released report on its findings, highlighted the dangers that can result from failing to ensure clean water in growing ponds and the proper storage of materials, and recommended safety guidelines for hydroponic farms in general. The hard-hitting report amounted to a cautionary note for the hydroponics industry and a signal to consumers that its greens are not immune to pathogens.In response to the outbreak, BrightFarms has developed a plan to strengthen its food safety and quality, according to Steve Platt, the companys chief executive.F.D.A. investigators who visited the BrightFarms facility last July and August, at a time when the agency had curtailed its inspections because of Covid-19 restrictions could not find the exact cause of the outbreak. But their testing found evidence, in an outdoor storm-water basin near the facility, of the salmonella strain that caused the outbreak, as well as evidence of a different salmonella strain in an indoor growing pond, the agencys report states. (Salmonella infection, or salmonellosis, is typically spread when people eat foods contaminated with feces from infected animals. The bacteria attacks the intestinal track.)The F.D.A. report found problems with the facilitys handling of the municipally supplied pond water, which is used when the leafy greens are cultivated in floating polystyrene rafts.Once in the growing ponds, the water is not routinely disinfected or otherwise treated, the report noted.Korrie Burgmeier, a BrightFarms spokeswoman, said in a statement for Matt Lingard, the firms vice president of agriculture and science, that in an effort to keep its water free of additives, BrightFarms does not regularly disinfect its water. Instead, he said staff members routinely test the water and treat it if the testing shows a risk.While the F.D.A. report acknowledged that BrightFarms sampled the water for E. coli, and, when found, treated it with hydrogen peroxide and peracetic acid solution, investigators criticized the company for not having a procedure or systematic approach to ensure adequate pond water treatment.They also criticized the facility for storing hydroponic growth material outdoors rather than in a shed, leaving it susceptible to bird droppings and animal intrusion. Such material is used to stabilize plants and provide nutrients for the roots.Another shortcoming, the investigators said, was that BrightFarms did not adequately document that cleaning and sanitizing of equipment, tools and buildings used in growing operations is routinely conducted in accordance with the firms procedures.Experts say the F.D.A. report reveals the potential for problems in the hydroponic industry known as controlled environment agriculture, or C.E.A.Honestly, that report is a good first step for everyone in C.E.A. to say, All right, we need to do more, said Martin Wiedmann, a salmonella expert and a professor of food safety and food science at Cornell Universitys College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.Starting in mid-July, BrightFarms began recalling salad greens in several Midwestern states, according to the C.D.C. It also hired a food-safety consulting firm, Matrix Sciences, according to Mr. Platt, the chief executive.It is our goal to create the safest agriculture system possible, Mr. Platt said in a written statement.The company shared the guidance from both the F.D.A. and Matrix in a confidential briefing with hydroponic industry leaders, Mr. Platt said.ImageCredit...Eye of Science/Science SourceBrightFarms, which operates six commercial farms in six states, was purchased last year by the conglomerate Cox Enterprises. It planned to expand its capacity by 200 acres in the next two years, with five new greenhouses on the East Coast and in the Midwest and Texas, Mr. Platt said in a statement.Hydroponic agriculture has spread coast to coast in the past decade. Some operations, like the BrightFarms site, are housed in greenhouses. Others are on rooftops, or grown in tower-like structures.Lori Hilliard of Lombard, Ill., was among the 31 people who fell ill from the BrightFarms outbreak. Those sickened ranged in age from younger than 1 to 86 years old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.She said she was new to hydroponic produce when she bought several containers of BrightFarms salad greens at a local grocery store last June.Several days later, she recognized something was wrong.These were the most bizarre body aches Id ever had, said Ms. Hilliard, a certified medical assistant at a large area medical group. The symptoms worsened, and she developed a fever, cramping and the worst diarrhea of her life.Her husband drove her to an emergency room, where she was erroneously diagnosed with viral gastritis. Back home, the diarrhea continued, causing her to rush to the bathroom as often as 15 times a day.A couple of times, it felt like labor, Ms. Hilliard said. I was just screaming from the pain.Her doctor provided stool testing kits. Soon after, she received a call from the DuPage County Health Department, saying that she had salmonella poisoning. When she was asked if she had eaten BrightFarms lettuce, the puzzle pieces clicked together.Even now, she said, she does not feel completely healed. She reached a lawsuit settlement with BrightFarms for an amount she could not disclose based on the agreement, according to her lawyer, William Marler.She rarely eats salads anymore, she said.Asked about the lawsuit, Mr. Platt said: We were saddened to learn Ms. Hilliard became ill. And while the root cause was not found in our farm, our insurers were able to reach a compassionate resolution.The C.D.C. estimates that salmonella bacteria from many sources cause about 1.35 million infections, 26,500 hospitalizations and 420 deaths in the United States every year.While the F.D.A. has not issued any new rules to date in response to the 2021 outbreak, Veronika Pfaeffle, a spokeswoman, said that the agency was aware of the growth of the hydroponic industry and would take any steps necessary to protect human health.C.E.A. practices, such as those used in hydroponic greenhouse operations, differ in important ways from practices used in open-field growing, and those unique differences must be addressed from a food safety perspective, Ms. Pfaeffle said.The F.D.A. took an estimated 300 samples of greens, water and other substances as part of its BrightFarms investigation.A key discovery was the presence of Salmonella typhimurium the strain that sickened the 31 people in a storm-water basin on a property next to the BrightFarms site. But federal investigators could not determine if the pathogen that contaminated the leafy greens had originated in the basin and moved into the greenhouse, or if it had traveled off-site from the greenhouse to the basin, according to the report.The investigators also found another form of the pathogen, Salmonella Liverpool, in an indoor growth pond at BrightFarms.This highlights the importance of minimizing sources of microbial contamination as well as operating and maintaining production ponds in a manner that does not result in the spread of pathogens to product, the report says.Researchers at the University of Arkansas combed through past science journal articles to better understand the potential risks of pathogens in leafy vegetables grown hydroponically. Their study, published in Horticulturae in 2019, concluded that human pathogens are readily internalized within plant tissues via the uptake of contaminated nutrient solution through the root system.Kristen E. Gibson, one of the studys authors and an associate professor of food safety at the University of Arkansas, has been working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture on hydroponics research, searching for strategies that might control pathogens, she said.Federal and state officials looking for the sickened BrightFarms consumers were aided by whole genome testing, a DNA fingerprint that can link a consumer with food poisoning to the producer at the source of the illness.Not every outbreak can be traced back. And most people with food poisoning dont report it, said Robert Brackett, a former F.D.A. food safety director who is senior vice president and dean of the industry training arm of the Institute for Environmental Health.They stay home; they dont go to their doctors, Mr. Brackett said. Any outbreak in which you can trace it, its always significant.One group paying attention to the report is the CEA Food Safety Coalition, formed in 2019 by leading producers, including BrightFarms, according to its executive, Dr. Elisabeth Hagen, a former U.S.D.A. under secretary for food safety.The coalition, with about 30 members, released standards for leafy greens last spring, focusing on risks related to water, structural design and pesticide use, Dr. Hagen said.C.E.A. producers can seek a certification seal to display on their packaging if the coalition finds they adhere to the groups standards.Others have called for more oversight. Sarah Sorscher, deputy director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer group, said Congress should provide more funding to the F.D.A. to speed inspections of hydroponic farms.Trevor Suslow, a consultant and professor emeritus in plant sciences at the University of California, Davis, urged hydroponic growers to follow the agencys guidelines, which include recommendations on proper sanitation and clean water safeguards.Step away from, Its grown indoors, theres no risk, he said. That doesnt seem to be responsible messaging. | science |
Credit...Darek Delmanowicz/EPA, via ShutterstockNov. 5, 2018WARSAW Despite making major gains in provincial assemblies, Polands populist ruling party suffered a sweeping defeat in municipal voting in a set of elections that concluded on Sunday, confirming that Poland is a nation ever more deeply divided between its liberal cities and its conservative countryside.In elections for local and regional offices around the country, the governing Law and Justice won just four of 107 mayoral races, down from the 11 it won four years ago.Yet the party secured the most seats in nine out of 16 provincial assemblies and won outright majorities in six of them a significant gain from the one provincial government it controlled after the elections in 2014.The recent elections, which were the first nationwide vote since Law and Justice swept to power in a parliamentary vote in 2015, had the highest turnout in local contests since the fall of communism in 1989. The turnout in the first round of balloting was 17 to 20 percentage points higher than that four years ago, and the turnout in the runoff round, which is usually lower, was in many places almost identical to that from the first round, said Lukasz Pawlowski, the head of the Institute of Local Government Studies.This never happens, he said. The emotions from the three years of Law and Justice in power are running incredibly high.The ruling party appears to have gained strength in poor and rural communities where its generous social policies, anti-immigrant sentiment, skepticism of the European Union, and message of national pride steeped in conservative values resonate most. But it lost ground among the more liberal, pro-European electorate in urban areas, failing to capture mayoralties in any of the major cities like Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw, Gdansk and Lodz.That schism seems likely to continue into parliamentary elections next year.Law and Justice led the balloting for provincial assemblies four years ago, but in several states it remained out of power, as opposition parties were able to piece together governing majorities. Its improved showing this year will give it outright control of several regions, though it remains to be seen whether it can form coalitions in others.The first round of local voting was held on Oct. 21, though many of the results were not clear for days. In races for provincial assemblies, the leading candidates won even if they attracted less than 50 percent of the vote; in a mayoral election, if no one won a majority in the first round, a runoff was held on Sunday between the top two finishers.ImageCredit...Agencja Gazeta/ReutersIn many cities, notably Warsaw, opposition candidates for mayor unexpectedly won in the first round, without runoffs.In the big cities, thousands of demonstrators have regularly filled the streets to protest government changes to the judicial system, including the forced retirement of more than two dozen Supreme Court judges. Critics say the changes undermine the independence of Polish courts.The governments attempts to reshape the judiciary have been deemed by the European Commission a severe threat to the rule of law. Poland became the first member of the bloc to trigger a process that could lead to it being stripped of its voting rights.Two weeks ago, the European Unions top court ordered Poland to suspend the law that purged the Supreme Court. It is not yet clear how the government will respond.By Monday afternoon, most senior officials from the ruling party had yet to comment on the final election results.Jaroslaw Sellin, a Law and Justice lawmaker and deputy minister of culture, said on Monday that his party has a problem in big cities that are the base of the left-wing and centrist electorate.Mr. Sellin said that ahead of elections next year for the European Parliament and the national Parliament, the party will have to analyze the problem thoroughly.Well try to show these Poles that all the good policies of the current government are dedicated also to them, he said in an interview with a private news channel, TVN24.Grzegorz Schetyna, leader of the biggest opposition party, Civic Platform, said on Sunday that Poles have demonstrated through great mobilization and high turnout that they want to defend the independence of institutions, the independence of local governments.Im convinced that next year, in the European election, Poles will also defend Polands place in Europe, and then, in the national election, they will defend our democracy, he told his supporters. | World |
Science|Find an Ice Flower Before It Meltshttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/01/science/find-an-ice-flower-before-it-melts.htmlTrilobitesCredit...Mary RonanMarch 1, 2016After unseasonably warm weather, some parts of the country are expected to be blasted by winter storms over the coming weeks. There may be a tiny, fleeting bright side for those who live in places where something known as frostweed grows: ice flowers.It blossoms in the middle of the night, when the air is just at freezing and the ground is warm at least relative to the air. As supercool water seeps out from the cracks of a plant stem, the surrounding air transforms the liquid to ice by a slow, steady process, as you can see in this time-lapse photography taken by Forrest M. Mims III, an amateur scientist and author, in the woods near his Texas home in January 2004.VideotranscripttranscriptMaking an Ice FlowerOver the course of a few hours, an ice flower or has blossomed.naOver the course of a few hours, an ice flower or has blossomed.CreditCredit...Forrest M. Mims IIIThe growing ice swirls into rounded ribbons that ripple and fold like petals. If you pick it up, it may shatter. And if you wake up too late, its as if it were never even there.In the last couple of weeks, #frostflowers, as they are more commonly referred to on social media, have been photographed in Tennessee and Kentucky. The blooms have also been documented in Alabama, Texas, Indiana and Pennsylvania over the years. Jim Carter, a retired geographer at Illinois State University, has even grown them in his yard in Illinois.VideotranscripttranscriptMelting an Ice FlowerJust a bit of warmth drives these fleeting blossoms away.naJust a bit of warmth drives these fleeting blossoms away.He first stumbled upon one of these curious ice creations in East Tennessee in 2003, not knowing what it was.Ever since, he has been working to understand not only this fleeting blossom, but also other strange ice formations such as needle ice, which grows from soil and hair ice, which grows from fungus-infested wood.What he has found is that they are all formed by a process called ice segregation a process similar to the one that turns a Coke that has been sitting in a cooler of ice from liquid to slush just as you crack it open.At the most basic level, a garden requires the presence of certain plants such as frostweed and the freezing of supercold water from the soil at just the right rate. The plant, he explains, pulls water up from the ground. The water then leaks out and hits frost, which causes it to start freezing. A delicate temperature balance is essential to keep the ice growing.It stops unfurling only when the balance is broken, which is inevitable sooner or later.You get a nice sunny day, and it doesnt take long before the sun hits it, and it all sort of wilts and goes away, Dr. Carter said. | science |
N.B.A.|N.B.A. Game of the Week: Gauging Western Contendershttps://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/sports/basketball/nba-game-of-the-week-gauging-western-contenders.htmlFeb. 3, 2014Every week, The New York Times chooses one essential game to watch, highlighting hot teams, winning and losing streaks, and statistical intrigue in the N.B.A.Memphis at Oklahoma City, Monday, 8 p.m. EasternIn the Eastern Conference, teams do not need a particularly impressive record to be in the mix for a playoff spot. Washington and Chicago, the fifth- and sixth-place teams in the East, are .500. Charlotte, at 21-28, would sneak into the playoffs as the eighth-place team.It is a different story in the Western Conference, in which ninth-place Dallas is 27-21. The Mavericks were unseated for the eighth spot in the standings by the resurgent Memphis Grizzlies (26-20), who have won nine of their last 10 games.It is not hard to identify the source of the Grizzlies sudden competitiveness. Marc Gasol, the N.B.A.s defensive player of the year last season, returned to the team 10 games ago after a knee injury had sidelined him for two months. The team is allowing 102.8 points per 100 possessions for the season. But in the games since Gasols return, that mark has been 94.4.Two of the Grizzlies recent wins have been against the Houston Rockets, whose center, Dwight Howard, was limited by Gasol. Howard averaged 10.5 points in the two losses, about 8 below his season average. Gasols willingness to get a little rough he tried to throw Howard to the floor in the second game reflects a player returning to full strength.The Grizzlies have also been aided by their acquisition of shooting guard Courtney Lee, whom they received from the Boston Celtics in a trade in which they gave up Jerryd Bayless. Lee made his debut on Jan. 7, scoring 12 points in an overtime loss to the San Antonio Spurs, and he has continued to be a solid contributor, averaging 13.7 points, 2.8 rebounds and 1.7 assists a game since the trade. He gives the Grizzlies a much-needed outside threat, someone who can punish defenses that pay too much attention to Gasol and forward Zach Randolph.The Memphis revival is more bad news for competitors in the West, where no team has quite managed to separate from the pack of contenders. The Oklahoma City Thunder have made the strongest case in recent weeks, mounting a 10-game winning streak that ended on Saturday with a loss to the Washington Wizards. The Thunder are similar to the Grizzlies in one respect: The return of an injured star Russell Westbrook in their case could elevate their play. Westbrook is expected back in late February as soon as Feb. 20, according to a Yahoo Sports report. The West has drawn attention for its parity in recent seasons. In the 2011 playoffs, for example, the eighth-seeded Grizzlies defeated the top-seeded Spurs, only the fourth such upset in N.B.A. history. The Thunder have looked awfully tough recently, but they are as vulnerable as past conference leaders. Their game against the Grizzlies on Monday should be a good opportunity to see how great a threat Memphis will be and just how much the Thunder will need Westbrook in the playoffs. | Sports |
Opposition Forces in Ivory Coast Take Towns on 2 FrontsMarch 29, 2011DAKAR, Senegal Ivory Coast tipped further toward civil war on Tuesday as forces opposed to the nations strongman, Laurent Gbagbo, captured strategic towns on two fronts, diplomats in the countrys main city, Abidjan, said. Cities in both the cocoa-producing west, critical to the West African nations economy, and near the eastern frontier with Ghana, fell to soldiers loyal to Alassane Ouattara, the former prime minister and banker who was recognized outside Ivory Coast as the legitimate president after defeating Mr. Gbagbo in elections last year. About half a dozen towns have now been seized from Mr. Gbagbo, as pro-Ouattara forces continue a creeping advance from two sides of the country. In the south, Mr. Gbagbo continues to command most of the economic capital, Abidjan, as well as the loyalty of much of the countrys regular armed forces. He remains entrenched in the presidential palace, refusing to give up power and waging attacks on civilians in pro-Ouattara neighborhoods, despite what international observers and the United Nations say was his decisive defeat at the polls in November. But the balance of power may now be moving toward Mr. Ouattara, diplomats in Abidjan suggested Tuesday. The members of a 2002 rebellion, who have controlled the northern half of the country ever since from their capital of Bouak, have taken up arms on his behalf. They are now positioned to try to seize Ivory Coasts political capital, Yamoussoukro, where Mr. Gbagbos forces were said by diplomats to be massing for a counterattack on Tuesday. In fighting on Monday and Tuesday, the strategic western towns of Dukou and Daloa, a regional capital of about 20,000, were seized by forces loyal to Mr. Ouattara, as was the town of Bondoukou in the east. Then on Tuesday, the Ouattara forces, now known as the Forces Rpublicaines de Cte dIvoire, easily captured Abengourou, about 150 miles to the east of Abidjan. The gains in the west though, in the countrys productive cocoa region, were perhaps most strategically significant. From Daloa, the city of Yamoussoukro will be caught in a pincer, between Daloa and Bouak, a spokesman for Mr. Ouattara, Apollinaire Yapi, said Tuesday from Abidjan, where Mr. Ouattaras government remains blockaded in a hotel. This is all about putting pressure on Mr. Gbagbo, who doesnt understand diplomatic language, and who is, on the contrary, slaughtering the people, Mr. Yapi said. ImageCredit...Legnan Koula/European Pressphoto AgencyAmnesty International said up to 10,000 people had sought refuge in the Catholic mission at Dukou after the fighting there on Monday. As many as a million people have fled the fighting in Ivory Coast, according to the United Nations, which estimates that close to 500 have been killed since the beginning of the electoral standoff in November. Spokesmen for Mr. Gbagbos forces, regular and irregular, either refused to comment on the military situation Tuesday or could not be reached. Denis Maho Glofiei, an important pro-Gbagbo militia leader in the west, reached by telephone, declined to discuss his forces position on Tuesday. Diplomats in Abidjan said Tuesday there were signs that morale was declining on the Gbagbo side. The momentum seems to be with the Republican forces, said one diplomat, who was not authorized to speak publicly. The Gbagbo forces are demoralized, he said. His forces have not been holding up to the Republican forces.Another diplomat said that a substantial proportion of Mr. Gbagbos forces, perhaps as many as 30 percent, had disappeared. There are a lot of deserters, the diplomat said. That would explain, he said, the recruitment drive begun among the Young Patriots a militia loyal to Mr. Gbagbo over the last two weeks. The Gbagbo camp is trying to fill in the gaps, he said. Also Tuesday, the United Nations said Mr. Gbagbos forces had killed 10 civilians in the pro-Ouattara Abidjan neighborhood of Williamsville on Monday, and that pro-Gbagbo youths had burned alive a Ouattara supporter with a flaming tire in the Riviera neighborhood. Another gang had savagely attacked several United Nations employees, the United Nations Abidjan office said, condemning what it called these growing human rights violations and barbaric practices. | World |
Rob Gronkowski He'll Be 'Good to Go' for Super Bowl ... Says BFF Mojo Rawley 1/23/2018 TMZSports.com WWE superstar Mojo Rawley tells TMZ Sports ... he's been talking with his best friend, Rob Gronkowski, and he's confident the guy will be "good to go" for the Super Bowl. Of course, Gronk took a big shot to the head during the AFC Championship on Sunday and missed the 2nd half of the game after being evaluated for a concussion. But, Rawley says Gronk is "one of the toughest guys I know and I'm sure he'll be fine for the big one." "I've got confidence in my friend, my best friend." Rawley says Gronk may come off as a meathead, but when it comes to his mental health, the guy is no dummy -- "He's taking the right steps and following the right protocols." The WWE star also says he's REALLY hoping to get to the Super Bowl to cheer on his friend in person after Gronk came to WrestleMania last year to support him. There's more ... Mojo was also in attendance at UFC 220 where his friend Stipe Miocic beat up Francis Ngannou. So, we had to ask ... does Stipe have a future in the squared circle?! You'll wanna see the answer! TMZSports.com | Entertainment |
A reliably red state for almost two decades, Georgia no longer resembles its Deep South neighbors. President Trump and Joe Biden head there Monday to help rally the bases.Credit...Audra Melton for The New York TimesJan. 3, 2021With President Trump touching down in North Georgia on Monday to court white rural voters and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. rallying support from a diverse electorate in Atlanta, the high-stakes Senate runoffs are concluding with a test of how much the politics have shifted in a state that no longer resembles its Deep South neighbors.Should the two challengers win Tuesday and hand Democrats control of the Senate, it will be with the same multiracial and heavily metropolitan support that propelled Mr. Biden to victory in Georgia and nationally. And if the Republican incumbents prevail, it will be because they pile up margins in conservative regions, just as Mr. Trump did.Thats a marked change from the 2000 election, when George W. Bush won decisively in the Atlanta suburbs to capture the state and Democrats still ran competitively with right-of-center voters in much of rural North and South Georgia.After resisting the tide of Republicanism longer than in other parts of the South it didnt elect its first G.O.P. governor until 2002 Georgia became a reliably red state in the nearly two decades since. But now, its fast becoming a political microcosm of the country.Although Georgia still skews slightly to the right of Americas political center, it has become politically competitive for the same demographic reasons the country is closely divided: Democrats have become dominant in big cities and suburban areas but they suffer steep losses in the lightly-populated regions that once elected governors, senators and, in Georgia, a native-born president, Jimmy Carter.Georgia is now a reflection of the country, said Keith Mason, a former chief of staff to Zell Miller, the late Democratic governor and U.S. senator from a small town in North Georgia. Mr. Miller helped hold off Republican realignment in the state in the 1990s only to accelerate it in the early 2000s when he crossed party lines to endorse Mr. Bushs re-election.Conservative Democrats like Mr. Miller are rare, as are the sort of liberal-to-moderate Republicans who were also once found in Georgia. Today, though, the standard-bearers of the two parties in the state reflect thoroughly nationalized parties.After nominating a string of candidates for statewide office who they hoped would be palatable to rural whites, only to keep losing, Democrats elevated three candidates in the past two years whose views placed them in the mainstream of the national party and whose profiles represented the partys broader coalition.Stacey Abrams, a Black former state representative whose district includes portions of Atlanta, fell 55,000 votes short of being elected governor in 2018; Jon Ossoff is a white, 33-year-old documentary filmmaker from a prosperous Atlanta family; and the Rev. Raphael Warnock grew up in impoverished circumstances in Savannah before becoming pastor at the countrys most storied Black church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta.It looks nothing like the party of the 90s and early 2000s, said Jennifer Jordan, a Democratic state senator. She recalled how the former governor Roy Barnes, a Democrat who succeeded Mr. Miller in 1999, used to brag about his N.R.A. affiliation.ImageCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThe Senate hopefuls are embracing the change. Think about how far weve come, Macon, that your standard bearers in these races are the young Jewish journalist, son of an immigrant, and a Black pastor who holds Dr. Kings pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Mr. Ossoff said during a recent drive-in rally in the central Georgia city.The two candidates are also gladly accepting help from their national party, something Georgia Democrats once shied away from. In addition to Mr. Bidens Monday visit, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris was campaigning in Savannah on Sunday.It was no accident that Republicans steered Mr. Trump away from greater Atlanta in his two trips to the state during the runoffs: In December, he visited Valdosta, in South Georgia, and on Monday he will appear before voters in Dalton, which is far closer to Tennessee than the state capital.Yet even bringing the president back to Georgia at all marked a risk for Republicans, after weeks in which he roiled G.O.P. politics in the state. He demonstrated his willingness to intervene once again this weekend: in an extraordinary phone call on Saturday, Mr. Trump pleaded with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find enough votes to reverse his loss in the state, The Washington Post reported. Although todays Georgia candidates are a better fit for the current Democratic Party, and may more easily energize the young and nonwhite voters who make up its base, they have struggled in much of the states rural areas. Mr. Biden was able to defy this trend in his November victory, outperforming Ms. Abramss 2018 showing and Mr. Ossoffs November performance in some of the states most conservative redoubts.That was enough to win the state by 12,000 votes, said Michael Thurmond, the chief executive of DeKalb County. And it shows why we need to do better reaching working-class white voters. (The president-elect also ran better than Ms. Abrams and Mr. Ossoff in much of metropolitan Atlanta.)If the Democrats have shifted away from putting forward candidates like Mr. Miller and former Senator Sam Nunn, another centrist from small-town Georgia, Republicans have turned to elevating candidates much like their national leader: David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are wealthy business executives with little political experience.And just as with Mr. Trump, the attempts by the two incumbents to rebrand themselves as populists to appeal to rural Georgians have had the effect of alienating many suburban voters who were once steadfast Republicans but now recoil from the party of Trump.Had Mr. Perdue run just slightly better in the former Republican pillar of Cobb County, for example, he could have reached 50 percent statewide in November and avoided a runoff. But he didnt even garner 44 percent in the county, which encompasses the northwest suburbs of Atlanta, after winning it six years ago with more than 55 percent of the vote.ImageCredit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesWere more Trumpian, more populist than the Johnny Isakson party, said Ralph Reed, a former state Republican chair and conservative Christian activist, referring to the conservative-but-courtly former senator whose resignation prompted the appointment of Ms. Loeffler. Both parties changed because the grass roots in both parties want more.Taken together, this has created a state thats nearing 50-50 parity and fostered a style of politics in which mobilization takes precedence over persuasion, because the bright lines between party and region have left few Georgians up for grabs.There are very few swing voters, said Ms. Abrams, now a voting rights activist. She said that this was particularly the case in a general election runoff when turnout typically falls and you are trying to convince the core of your base to come back a second time in a pretty short period.Still, Ms. Abrams acknowledged that electoral politics tends to lag behind demographic changes.The demographics, though, account for much of the reason that the state has grown more politically competitive.There has been a population explosion around Atlanta, thanks to an influx of Asian, African and Hispanic immigrants as well as a migration of native-born Americans, white and Black alike, who have moved to the region because of family ties, the relatively affordable cost of living and expansive job opportunities.Although long identified with Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, the city has become a corporate behemoth, home to companies like UPS and Home Depot as well as to the American headquarters of the carmakers Mercedes and Porsche.Atlanta itself has long been a mecca for African-Americans but the entire metropolitan region is now diverse, and counties that were once heavily white and solidly Republican are now multiracial bulwarks of Democratic strength.In 2000, for example, Al Gore received only 31 percent of the vote in Henry County, an exurban Atlanta community that was once dominated by farmland, including that of the former segregationist Senator Herman Talmadge. In November, Mr. Biden won almost 60 percent of the vote in the county, and the jurisdiction elected a Black sheriff for the first time.Ms. Jordan, the state senator who represents a suburban Atlanta seat, said the population changes would have made Georgia more closely contested this decade but Trump put a turbo booster on it in large part because he energized such strong opposition among women.Sheron Smith, 59, who attended Mr. Ossoffs drive-in rally in Macon, said her own activism illustrated how the state had changed. Ms. Smith said she was always politically liberal, but did not get involved in organizing until 2016, when Mr. Trumps election prompted her to join a progressive womens group in town.I think a lot of people were like me, Ms. Smith said, and after 2016 we thought: I have to do more. I cant just sit on my hands. I have to get involved. And that energy has just stuck around. I want to be involved now.ImageCredit...Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThis engagement has prompted a full reversal of the old formula, in which Republicans hoped their overwhelming support in the suburbs would offset the Democrats historical rural strength.Its a total 180 in terms of strategy, said Mr. Thurmond, the DeKalb County executive, recalling the hotly-contested 1980 Senate race in which political junkies stayed up late watching the metro Atlanta returns except then it was to see if Mack Mattingly, a Republican, could claim enough votes in the region to overcome Mr. Talmadges rural strength.Four decades later, Georgia is close to evenly split again but in ways that better reflect the Sun Belt than the Old South.Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster reared in Georgia, said his home state was most politically similar to another battleground that Mr. Biden narrowly carried: Arizona.Both have increasingly large minority populations and are dominated by one large media market, said Mr. Hobart, alluding to greater Atlanta and Phoenix.Georgia, he added, is a purple state now. | Politics |
Two years into the pandemic, the coronavirus is killing Americans at far higher rates than people in other wealthy nations, a sobering distinction to bear as the country charts a course through the next stages of the pandemic. The ballooning death toll has defied the hopes of many Americans that the less severe Omicron variant would spare the United States the pain of past waves. Deaths have now surpassed the worst days of the autumn surge of the Delta variant, and are more than two-thirds as high as the record tolls of last winter, when vaccines were largely unavailable. With American lawmakers desperate to turn the page on the pandemic, as some European leaders have already begun to, the number of dead has clouded a sense of optimism, even as Omicron cases recede. And it has laid bare weaknesses in the countrys response, scientists said. Death rates are so high in the States eye-wateringly high, said Devi Sridhar, head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who has supported loosening coronavirus rules in parts of Britain. The United States is lagging. Some of the reasons for Americas difficulties are well known. Despite having one of the worlds most powerful arsenals of vaccines, the country has failed to vaccinate as many people as other large, wealthy nations. Crucially, vaccination rates in older people also lag behind certain European nations. The United States has fallen even further behind in administering booster shots, leaving large numbers of vulnerable people with fading protection as Omicron sweeps across the country. The resulting American death toll has set the country apart and by wider margins than has been broadly recognized. Since Dec. 1, when health officials announced the first Omicron case in the United States, the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is at least 63 percent higher than in any of these other large, wealthy nations, according to a New York Times analysis of mortality figures. In recent months, the United States passed Britain and Belgium to have, among rich nations, the largest share of its population to have died from Covid over the entire pandemic. For all the encouragement that American health leaders drew from other countries success in withstanding the Omicron surge, the outcomes in the U.S. have been markedly different. Hospital admissions in the U.S. swelled to much higher rates than in Western Europe, leaving some states struggling to provide care. Americans are now dying from Covid at nearly double the daily rate of Britons and four times the rate of Germans. The only large European countries to exceed Americas Covid death rates this winter have been Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Greece and the Czech Republic, poorer nations where the best Covid treatments are relatively scarce. The U.S. stands out as having a relatively high fatality rate, said Joseph Dieleman, an associate professor at the University of Washington who has compared Covid outcomes globally. Theres been more loss than anyone wanted or anticipated. As deadly as the Omicron wave has been, the situation in the United States is far better than it would have been without vaccines. The Omicron variant also causes less serious illness than Delta, even though it has led to staggering case numbers. Together, vaccines and the less lethal nature of Omicron infections have significantly reduced the share of people with Covid who are being hospitalized and dying during this wave. In Western Europe, those factors have resulted in much more manageable waves. Deaths in Britain, for example, are one-fifth of last winters peak, and hospital admissions are roughly half as high. But not so in the United States. Record numbers of Americans with the highly contagious variant have filled up hospitals in recent weeks and the average death toll is still around 2,500 a day. Chief among the reasons is the countrys faltering effort to vaccinate its most vulnerable people at the levels achieved by more successful European countries. Twelve percent of Americans 65 and over have not received either two shots of a Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine or one Johnson & Johnson shot, which the C.D.C. considers fully vaccinated, according to the agencys statistics. (Inconsistencies in C.D.C. counts make it difficult to know the precise figure.) And 43 percent of people 65 and over have not received a booster shot. Even among the fully vaccinated, the lack of a booster leaves tens of millions with waning protection, some of them many months past the peak levels of immunity afforded by their second shots. In England, by contrast, only 4 percent of people 65 and over have not been fully vaccinated and only 9 percent do not have a booster shot. Its not just vaccination its the recency of vaccines, its whether or not people have been boosted, and also whether or not people have been infected in the past, said Lauren Ancel Meyers, the director of the University of Texas at Austins Covid-19 modeling consortium. Unvaccinated people make up a majority of hospitalized patients. But older people without booster shots also sometimes struggle to shake off the virus, said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University, leaving them in need of extra oxygen or hospital stays. In the United States, cases this winter first surged in more heavily vaccinated states in the Northeast before moving to less-protected states, where scientists said they worried that Omicron could cause especially high death tolls. Surveys suggest that the poorest Americans are the likeliest to remain unvaccinated, putting them at greater risk of dying from Covid. Americas Omicron wave has also compounded the effects of a Delta surge that had already sent Covid deaths climbing by early December, putting the United States in a more precarious position than many European countries. Even in recent weeks, some American deaths likely resulted from lengthy illnesses caused by Delta. But Omicron infections had edged aside Delta by late December in the United States, and epidemiologists said that the new variant was most likely responsible for a majority of Covid deaths in the U.S. today. These are probably Omicron deaths, said Robert Anderson, the chief of mortality statistics at a branch of the C.D.C. And the increases were seeing are probably in Omicron deaths. Still, the United States problems started well before Omicron, scientists said. Americans began dying from Covid at higher rates than people in western European countries starting in the summer, after the United States had fallen behind on vaccinations. During the Delta surge in the fall, Americans were dying from Covid at triple the rate of Britons. By tracking death certificates that list Covid as a cause of death or as a contributing factor, Dr. Anderson said, the C.D.C. is able to ensure that it is counting only those people who died from Covid and not those who might have incidentally tested positive before dying for unrelated reasons. It is too early to judge how much worse the United States will fare during this wave. But some scientists said there were hopeful signs that the gap between the United States and other wealthy countries had begun to narrow. As Delta and now Omicron have hammered the United States, they said, so many people have become sick that those who survived are emerging with a certain amount of immunity from their past infections. Although it is not clear how strong or long-lasting that immunity will be, especially from Omicron, Americans may slowly be developing the protection from past bouts with Covid that other countries generated through vaccinations at the cost, scientists said, of many thousands of American lives. Weve finally started getting to a stage where most of the population has been exposed either to a vaccine or the virus multiple times by now, said Dr. David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Referring to American and European death rates, he continued, I think were now likely to start seeing things be more synchronized going forward. Still, the United States faces certain steep disadvantages, ones that experts worry could cause problems during future Covid waves, and even the next pandemic. Many Americans have health problems like obesity and diabetes that increase the risk of severe Covid. More Americans have also come to express distrust of the government, and of each other in recent decades, making them less inclined to follow public health precautions like getting vaccinated or reducing their contacts during surges, said Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations. A study published in the scientific journal The Lancet on Tuesday by Mr. Bollyky and Dr. Dieleman of the University of Washington found that a given countrys level of distrust had strong associations with its coronavirus infection rate. What our study suggests is that when you have a novel contagious virus, Mr. Bollyky said, the best way for the government to protect its citizens is to convince its citizens to protect themselves. While infection levels remain high in many states, scientists said that some deaths could still be averted by people taking precautions around older and more vulnerable Americans, like testing themselves and wearing masks. The toll from future waves will depend on what other variants emerge, scientists said, as well as what level of death Americans decide is tolerable. Weve normalized a very high death toll in the U.S., said Anne Sosin, who studies health equity at Dartmouth. If we want to declare the end of the pandemic right now, what were doing is normalizing a very high rate of death. | science |
Feb. 1, 2014JUWAN STATEN, left, had a career day with 35 points as host West Virginia beat Kansas State, 81-71. He shot 8 of 13 from the field and 18 of 21 from the line, both career bests.MICHAEL FRAZIER II had 21 points as Florida beat Texas A&M, 69-36, to extend a team record for consecutive home wins to 27 and tie its mark for the fewest points allowed in a conference game since 1950. CHRIS DENSON scored 18 points to lead five players in double digits for Auburn, which made six straight free throws over the final 34 seconds in a 74-67 win at home over Georgia. | Sports |
Photo In May of 2014, Dr. Stephan Getzin received an email containing this image. By December, he and a colleague from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel were in the Outback. Credit Bronwyn Bell The first fairy circles documented in Australia When Stephan Getzin, an ecologist at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, opened the email, his heart began to flutter. Attached was an aerial image of fairy circles, just as he had seen in countless photos before. But those images were always taken along long strips of arid grassland stretching from southern Angola to northern South Africa. These fairy circles which looked nearly identical came from Australia, not Africa. I was really astonished, Dr. Getzin said. I couldnt believe what I was seeing. The emailed photo came from Bronwyn Bell, who does environmental restoration work in Perth. She had read about Dr. Getzins research in Namibia and made a connection to the odd formations in her home state, Western Australia. Until that point, Australian circles were completely unknown to science. Not even the Australians were aware of their jewel, Dr. Getzin said. Photo Fairy circles in Namibia. Credit Hoberman Collection, via Getty Images An explanation rooted in mathematics Scientists have been interested in fairy circles since the 1970s, but have not been able to agree on what causes the patterns to form. Researchers generally fall into two groups team termite and team water competition but there are other hypotheses as well, including one involving noxious gases. Dr. Getzin, like others on team water competition, explains the circles through pattern-formation theory, a model for understanding the way nature organizes itself. The theory was first developed not by biologists, but by the mathematician Alan Turing. In the 1990s, ecologists and physicists realized it could be tweaked to explain some vegetation patterns as well. In harsh habitats where plants compete for nutrients and water, the new theory predicts that, as weaker plants die and stronger ones grow larger, vegetation will self-organize into patterns ranging from gaps to spots to labyrinths. Such phenomena are explained with lots of theory and formulas and math, which ecologists can make use of, Dr. Getzin said. Photo The remainders of a fairy circle a few weeks after fire burned the vegetation in Australia. Researchers studied a patch about 12 miles by 12 miles wide. Credit Stephan Getzin The difference between African and Australian circles In the case of African fairy circles, the bare patches act as troughs, storing moisture from rare rainfalls for several months, lasting into the dry season. Tall grasses on the edge of the circles tap into the water with their roots and also suck it up with the help of water diffusion through the sandy soil. Although similar in appearance, Australian fairy circles turn out to behave differently, Dr. Getzin and his colleagues have found. The soil where they form is loamy, not sandy as in Africa, they say. And rather than form a water trough, Aussie circles feature a very hard surface of dry, nearly impenetrable clay, which can reach up to a scalding 167 degrees during the day. Despite the differences, though, they believe the fairy circles function remains the same. When the researchers poured water into the circles in a simple irrigation experiment, it flowed to the edges, reaching the bushy grass that grew there. The gaps function as a source of extra water, like in Namibia, Dr. Getzin says. The mechanism of water transport is different, but the function of the fairy circles is the same. To test their self-organization theory, the researchers also ran a spatial pattern analysis of aerial imagery of the area and created computer simulations of environmental interactions. They found that the Australian fairy circles, like African ones, formed distinct hexagonal patterns, like a giant honeycomb. They also discovered labyrinth and spot patterns nearby, adding further evidence that plants in the area are engaged in cutthroat competition for water. Photo Tracks of Oryx antelopes crossing fairy circles in Namibia. Credit Norbert Jrgens Accounting for termites Dr. Getzin and his colleagues also paid special attention to the insect fauna in the area knowing that that subject would be under extreme scrutiny by a group of competing researchers. In 2013, Norbert Jrgens, an ecologist at the University of Hamburg, published a paper in Science pointing to termites as the culprits behind fairy circles. Others, however, countered that the mere presence of termites did not prove the insects actually caused the circles to form. In Australia, Dr. Getzin and his colleagues recorded all signs of termite and ant activity, such as mounds and foraging holes. They used GPS to map each nest and then compared their locations with those of the fairy circles, but they said that there was no evidence of correlation. Using electron microscopy, they also found that the circles hard center crusts were a result of natural weather processes, not insects. Photo For now, no one knows how long the Australian circles have been there. Credit Brad Howe/Heliwest Group Divisions among fairy circle scientists Dr. Jrgens, however, has not been dissuaded. The discovery of so-called fairy circles in Australia is interesting, he said, but given the differences with the Namibian fairy circles, he asked whether we could really call them fairy circles, technically speaking. Referring to them as something like clay circles would be helpful, he said.Fairy circles or not, though, the Australian formations could also be the work of termites, he said. Dr. Getzin and his colleagues found that the Australian circles contain more clay and fine silt than the surrounding landscape, for example, and those clay islands could be a result of nests built over time by social insects, Dr. Jrgens said. Photo Australian circles were unknown to science before this, Dr. Getzin said. Credit Stephan Getzin What would be considered fairy proof? Others, however, were more charitable in their evaluations of the new work. The new research moves us closer toward a unifying theory of fairy circle formation, said Nichole Barger, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.It could be that more fairy circles are yet to be discovered in arid environments around the world, she said. According to Walter Tschinkel, an entomologist at Florida State University, the findings strengthen the claim that the circles are a result of self-organization by plants. He cautioned, though, that to be more certain, scientists would need to control environmental factors water and termites, for example to see which produce the predicted outcome. For now, though, limited budgets and logistical challenges have prevented such massive undertakings in the field. | science |
A surge in worldwide demand by educators for low-cost laptops has created shipment delays and pitted desperate schools against one another. Districts with deep pockets often win out.Credit...Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesOct. 12, 2020When the Guilford County Schools in North Carolina spent more than $27 million to buy 66,000 computers and tablets for students over the summer, the district ran into a problem: There was a shortage of cheap laptops, and the devices wouldnt arrive until late October or November.More than 4,000 students in the district had to start the school year without the computers they needed for remote learning.Its heartbreaking, said Angie Henry, the districts chief operations officer. Kids are excited about school. They want to learn.Millions of children are encountering all sorts of inconveniences that come with digital instruction during the coronavirus pandemic. But many students are facing a more basic challenge: They dont have computers and cant attend classes held online.A surge in worldwide demand by educators for low-cost laptops and Chromebooks up to 41 percent higher than last year has created monthslong shipment delays and pitted desperate schools against one another. Districts with deep pockets often win out, leaving poorer ones to give out printed assignments and wait until winter for new computers to arrive.That has frustrated students around the country, especially in rural areas and communities of color, which also often lack high-speed internet access and are most likely to be on the losing end of the digital divide. In 2018, 10 million students didnt have an adequate device at home, a study by education nonprofit Common Sense Media found. That gap, with much of the country still learning remotely, could now be crippling.The learning loss thats taken place since March when they left, when schools closed, itll take years to catch up, Ms. Henry said. This could impact an entire generation of our students.Sellers are facing stunning demand from schools in countries from Germany to El Salvador, said Michael Boreham, an education technology analyst at the British company Futuresource Consulting. Japan alone is expected to order seven million devices.Global computer shipments to schools were up 24 percent from 2019 in the second quarter, Mr. Boreham said, and were projected to hit that 41 percent jump in the third quarter, which just ended.ImageCredit...Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesChromebooks, web-based devices that run on software from Google and are made by an array of companies, are in particular demand because they cost less than regular laptops. That has put huge pressure on a supply chain that cobbles laptop parts from all over the world, usually assembling them in Asian factories, Mr. Boreham said.While that supply chain has slowly geared up, the spike in demand is so far over and above what has historically been the case, said Stephen Baker, a consumer electronics analyst at the NPD Group. The fact that weve been able to do that and theres still more demand out there, its something you cant plan for.Adding to the problem, many manufacturers are putting a priority on producing expensive electronics that net greater profits, like gaming hardware and higher-end computers for at-home employees, said Erez Pikar, the chief executive of Trox, a company that sells devices to school districts.Before the year began, Trox predicted it would deliver 500,000 devices to school districts in the United States and Canada in 2020, Mr. Pikar said. Now, the total will be two million. But North American schools are still likely to end the year with a shortage of more than five million devices, he said. He added that he was not aware of any large-scale efforts to get refurbished or donated laptops to school districts.Districts that placed orders early in the pandemic have come out ahead, industry analysts said, while schools that waited until summer often because they were struggling to make ends meet are at a disadvantage.The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, spent $100 million on computers in March and said in September that it was unaffected by shortages. But Paterson Public Schools in New Jersey had to wait until it received federal coronavirus relief money in late May to order 14,000 Chromebooks, which were then delayed because of Commerce Department restrictions on a Chinese manufacturer, Hefei Bitland.In July, the Commerce Department added Hefei Bitland, which worked with the computer giant Lenovo, to a list of companies accused of using Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups in China for forced labor. That worsened laptop shortages just a month or two before schools were set to reopen.It took a bad situation and made it worse, Mr. Pikar said. It was quite dramatic there were hundreds and hundreds of school districts that got caught.A spokesman for the Commerce Department said Lenovo should have known that they are supplying computers to American schoolchildren that could have been produced from forced labor. Lenovo did not respond to requests for comment.Paterson was able to secure more laptops just nine days before school started, but other districts have not been as lucky.Alabama schools are waiting for more than 160,000 devices, and Mississippi did not receive the first of the 320,000 computers the state had ordered until early October. Staples said it would receive 140,000 Chromebooks for schools in November and December, 40,000 of which are earmarked for California districts.ImageCredit...Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York TimesDaniel Santos, an eighth-grade teacher in Houston, logs into his virtual classroom from home each morning and starts the days American history lesson. Once he turns his students loose to work on assignments, the hard conversations begin.If students stop turning in homework consistently, Mr. Santos asks them privately: Do you have access to a laptop? One boy said he and his brother were sharing one computer at home, making it difficult for both to attend class. Others were completing assignments on their cellphones.It breaks my heart, said Mr. Santos, who hears the demoralization in students voices. They want to do their work.Nearly all of the almost 700 students at the school, Navarro Middle School, are Hispanic or Black, and most are eligible for free lunches. Mr. Santos said Navarro had been underfunded for years. It does not even have a functioning library, he said.The district said it had spent $51 million and obtained more than 100,000 devices since April. But a month into the school year, Houston teachers are still encountering children without laptops.Mr. Santoss students are intelligent, inquisitive and unaccustomed to struggling in school, he said. But since classes started in early September, about 10 of his 120 students have told him that they need a laptop. For the first time, some are falling behind, he said.Guilford County Schools, with 73,000 students, is encountering the same problem in North Carolina. The district ordered laptops in August with help from the March coronavirus relief bill, Ms. Henry said.Many children in the area live in poverty and lack personal computers or reliable internet service, she said. Those who cannot attend virtual classes are receiving printed assignments delivered to their houses. Some are watching recordings of classes when they can log onto a device, and a small number have been allowed into district buildings for occasional access to computers and Wi-Fi, Ms. Henry said.The district is pushing to resume some in-person instruction in late October because of the growing divide between rich and poor.ImageCredit...Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesFor about a month, Samantha Moores four school-age children shared one iPad provided by the Guilford district and took turns going to class. Their grades have suffered as a result, she said.Not everybody is financially stable enough to buy laptops, and some families are big like mine, said Ms. Moore, the manager at a sports bar. I cant just go out and buy four computers. She said she received food stamps, and had lost out on a $6,000 work bonus because the pandemic temporarily closed the bar.Eric Cole, who teaches Ms. Moores 13-year-old son, Raymond Heller, eventually secured more tablets for the family and other students through his church.Being unable to attend class was a little frustrating, Raymond said. Now that he has his own device, the work is easy the live classes make everything easier.In eastern Idaho, the Bonneville Joint School District is holding in-person classes, but hundreds of students have had to quarantine after possible virus exposure and the district said it did not have enough Chromebooks for them all. It didnt place its $700,000 order for 4,000 devices until late September because of budget challenges, said Gordon Howard, Bonnevilles technology director.While they wait for the order, students without computers are missing out on education.Those that are behind continue to get further behind, and its through no fault of the kids at all, said Scott Miller, the principal of the Bonneville districts Hillcrest High School in Ammon.Many students at the Sante Fe Indian School, operated by New Mexicos Pueblo tribes, live in tribal homes without Wi-Fi access, said Kimball Sekaquaptewa, the schools technology director. The school ordered laptops with built-in SIM cards that do not require Wi-Fi to connect to the internet.But the delivery date for the July order was pushed to October, forcing students to start the school year without remote classes. Instead, they were asked to find public Wi-Fi twice a week to download and upload assignments.Theres a lot of frustration, Ms. Sekaquaptewa said. We really wanted to hit the ground running, and now were in limbo. | Tech |
Guess Who This Doll Darlin' Turned Into! 1/22/2018 Before this blonde beauty was dancing with any stars, she was just another curly-haired cutie playing with her dolls in Orem, Utah. Can you guess who she is? Share on Facebook TWEET This See also celebrity kids Photo Galleries | Entertainment |
In one of the final chapters in a lengthy investigation into how four Americans died on an obscure battlefield, some of those who fought in the pitched firefight have been reprimanded, while senior officers who approved the mission have gone unpunished.Credit...Andrew Craft/The Fayetteville Observer, via Associated PressNov. 3, 2018The Army has punished two members of the Special Forces team ambushed in Niger last October for their decisions before the mission and for insufficient training alongside their Nigerien allies in advance, according to military officials. Four others in their chain of command were also disciplined. Some of those punished in recent weeks included the Green Beret team leader, Capt. Mike Perozeni, and his second in command, a master sergeant. Those absent from the six letters of reprimand include the two senior officers who approved the mission and who then oversaw the operation as it went fatally awry.The punishments appear to run counter to another narrative the Army has pushed in past months: the heroism displayed by the troops under fire. Almost all of the soldiers on the 11-man team, including those who were killed, have been nominated for valor awards, though they have yet to be approved. According to one official, senior officers at Special Operations Command believe that members of the team can be held responsible for failures before the mission and still be awarded commendations for their actions during the ambush. Capt. Jason Salata, a spokesman for Special Operations Command, said in a statement that he would not discuss any accountability actions. But he added that we remain committed to learning all we can from this ambush as a way to continue to honor the sacrifice and commitment of our fallen soldiers.What happened on the night of the ambush?The events that led up to the ambush are the result of three separate missions. The first, which took place on Oct. 3, began with the Green Beret-led unit, Team 3212, departing from an outpost in Oullam and heading toward the Niger-Mali border. The teams stated initial plan was to visit a vulnerable checkpoint of Nigerien troops and speak with the soldiers there. The investigation said the mission was misrepresented to higher-ups by a lower-ranking officer. According to Pentagon officials, the officer failed to disclose that the teams actual plan was to go after an Islamic State leader named Doundoun Cheffou. The second mission, which was launched on the night of Oct. 3 after intelligence located Mr. Cheffou, involved an operation against the leaders camp with a helicopter-borne team of American commandos and Nigerien counterterrorism troops from the town of Arlit, along with Team 3212. Because of bad weather, the helicopter mission was canceled. Team 3212 was told to go to the campsite alone in what was the third and final mission. After searching the empty campsite, the team headed back toward Oullam. It was ambushed outside the village of Tongo Tongo by a large group of Islamic State militants that had been tracking its movements for hours.Before the Oct. 4 ambush, many Americans were unaware that the Green Berets and 800 other American troops were deployed in Niger. The attack led to the largest loss of American lives in combat in Africa since the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia.The deaths of the four soldiers Sgt. First Class Jeremiah W. Johnson, Staff Sgt. Bryan C. Black, Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright and Sgt. La David Johnson set off an intense debate over what the American military is doing in Africa, and why.Why are they getting punished for the battle?The initial findings by Africa Command released in May focused on missteps by junior officers before the 11-man Green Beret team and 30 Nigerien soldiers headed into western Nigers desert scrub. That report yielded 23 separate findings, six of which were then investigated separately by Special Operations Command. Troops on the ground in Africa answer to Africa Command as the geographic headquarters. Special Operations Command is responsible for training, equipping and sending the forces to the militarys regional commands. The drawn-out inquiry process resulted from a clash between Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a retired Marine four-star general, and Gen. Tony Thomas of the Army, the head of Special Operations Command, according to officials. General Thomas, in the weeks after the ambush, insisted that it would fall primarily on the Special Operations leadership to helm the investigation into the attack. But Mr. Mattis thought differently, ensuring that Africa Command commanded by a Marine general would lead the inquiry. After the investigation, it would then fall on General Thomas to ensure that any of Africa Commands findings that pointed to missteps within the Special Forces team and its chain of command would be investigated and those involved appropriately punished. Who is getting punishedAs of now, four officers and two enlisted soldiers received letters of reprimand, known as a General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand. Maj. Gen. Edwin J. Deedrick Jr., the commanding officer of the First Special Forces Command, administered five of the letters. The sixth was given by General Thomas to Maj. Gen. Marcus Hicks of the Air Force. A letter of reprimands severity is based on where it is placed in a soldiers file. If the letter is considered local, it will disappear after the soldier changes jobs. But, if it is permanent, the punishment will stay with the soldier throughout his time in the military. In short: A permanent letter of reprimand often means the end of a career. Below are the members of Third Special Forces Group and Special Operations Command-Africa who were punished and why. The TeamCaptain Perozeni was the leader of Team 3212, Alpha Company, Second Battalion, Third Special Forces Group. He received a letter of reprimand citing his actions before the mission, including insufficient training and rehearsals before leaving base on Oct. 3. One of the main criticisms outlined in the letter states that Team 3212 had rarely trained with the Nigerien soldiers who fought alongside his team that day.Team 3212 had been in Niger less than a month and had focused on training another counterterrorism unit before the Oct. 3 mission. Captain Perozeni was recommended for the Silver Star, a medal for valor third to the Medal of Honor. He was wounded during the ambush.The teams second in command, a master sergeant, was punished for many of the same reasons Captain Perozeni was faulted for: not doing enough training with the Nigerien troops, along with a lack of rehearsals before the mission. His name, and others, have been withheld because of privacy concerns. The names have not been published throughout the investigation. The next echelon of Team 3212s leadershipMaj. Alan Van Saun, the company commander for Alpha Company, was home on paternity leave when Team 3212 was ambushed. He was reprimanded for improper training before the company was sent to Niger. While Major Van Saun was stateside on leave, the acting company commander was a junior captain, meaning most of his responsibilities were left instead to a more experienced chief warrant officer. Even though the warrant officers role meant he was not in charge of Alpha Company, he carried out most of the company commanders responsibilities. Because of this, the chief warrant officers letter of reprimand faulted him for the inaccurate mission plan that helped launch the first of the three missions. Investigators believed Team 3212 and its immediate leadership in Niamey lied about the first mission because the team had an American intelligence contractor, who was able to detect and locate cellphone and radio communications, accompanying the team. The investigators thought that by bringing the civilian, Team 3212 had counted on finding and going after Mr. Cheffou. Team 3212 brought him, however, because dated intelligence pointed to Mr. Cheffous presence in the area and it was worth at least trying to locate him when the team was at the Nigerien checkpoint, according to military officials. The Army also punished Alpha Companys sergeant major, who left the unit before Team 3212 deployed. As the top enlisted soldier in Alpha Company, he was responsible for the overall training of the company and ensuring that the six teams in the company were properly staffed.He was faulted for improperly training the company while it was in North Carolina. His replacement who deployed to Niger was not punished. The highest-ranking person punished was General Hicks, the commanding officer of all Special Operations forces operating in Africa. He was aware of the third mission but was not a part of the approval process. He was punished by General Thomas for not having appropriate oversight of the officers below him. He has long been set to retire after finishing his command.And who is going unpunished High-ranking officers with direct oversight of the ill-fated missionThe commander who oversaw Alpha Company and Team 3212, Lt. Col. David Painter, was not punished. He approved the first and second missions and ordered the third. As battalion commander, he oversaw and approved all of his soldiers assignments and training, both back in the United States and in Niger. He told Team 3212 to continue on the final mission despite Captain Perozenis pushing back on the operation, stating that the team had been out too long and lacked the resources for the operation. Colonel Painter is now a battalion commander in the Armys new advising unit, the Security Force Assistance Brigade. Col. Brad Moses, the commanding officer of Third Special Forces Group and Colonel Painters direct superior, received no punishment. He approved the second mission and was closely consulted regarding the third and final mission to send Team 3212 into the campsite and the ambush that followed. He is now the chief of staff at United States Army Special Operations Command, the headquarters that oversees the unit charged with investigating and punishing those in Team 3212.Whats next for the American military mission in Africa?After the ambush, Africa Command instituted a number of restrictions on Special Operations forces deployed across the continent, including a requirement for more overhead reconnaissance and stricter mission plans. Back in the United States, Army Special Forces units are revisiting how long their units are deployed and how teams train before they travel to combat zones. Africa Command is also looking at scaling back its presence on the continent in an attempt to align with the current defense strategy, which views Russia and China as leading threats instead of militant groups such as those spread across the Sahel and eastern Africa.In the end, after more than a year of investigations, the American military punished those involved in the ambush for a series of small-unit training choices before the mission. Military officials did little to examine the ramifications of the mission these troops were asked to undertake in western Africa, or how they were asked to accomplish it. The more senior officer who ordered the fateful mission, over the objections of the officer leading the team on the ground, went undisciplined and will continue in his career.VideotranscripttranscriptHow the Ambush of U.S. Soldiers in Niger UnfoldedOne of the American soldiers ambushed by militants in Niger was wearing a helmet camera we analyzed the footage to understand what happened.These four American Green Berets were killed last fall when their patrol was ambushed in Niger. The Defense Department launched an investigation into what happened. But helmet camera footage from one of the soldiers allowed us to reconstruct some of the attack. Its the morning of Oct. 4, 2017. A convoy of around eight American and Nigerien army vehicles leaves the village of Tongo Tongo after a mission in the area. Theyre quickly ambushed by militants loyal to Islamic State. Footage of that fight shows that two American vehicles are separated from the convoy. The others had fled or were hit. We see seven soldiers taking cover. The attackers are somewhere in this area. An American soldier we believe to be Staff Sergeant Jeremiah Johnson wearing a helmet camera enters the white vehicle and drives it a short distance. He steps out and begins firing towards the tree line. Then, he runs for cover behind the white vehicle, and the video cuts to a new scene. Next, we only see the black car and three soldiers Staff Sergeants Johnson, Wright, and Black. The white car has disappeared, and we dont know how much time has elapsed. Wright drives the car toward the mark of a red smoke grenade. The smoke could be to mask their movements from the militants, or to mark their position for supporting units. Johnson, taking cover at the rear, fires toward the tree line. After theyve reached the smoke, theres a cut in the video. In the next scene, the red smoke has cleared. The car begins to move again, when Johnson and Black fall. Black is unresponsive. Johnson regains his footing. He moves forward and starts searching. It could be for support or for the enemy. Wright then drags Black to cover, behind the car. He aims back towards the treeline. The scene ends. The militants are closing in. We dont know how much time has passed here, but Wright changes his direction of fire. He and Johnson begin running without covering each other. This suggests theyre about to be overrun. The situation is too desperate. There are more edits to the video, but were able to map their final steps. Johnson is seriously wounded and falls, but then moves about another 40 feet. Militant fire seems to be coming from this area. Wright stops running and shoots. A short time later, two armed militants appear on screen. Johnson appears to be unconscious. Still, he is shot by the militants at close range. Staff Sergeant Wright dies just feet away. For them, the ambush is over.One of the American soldiers ambushed by militants in Niger was wearing a helmet camera we analyzed the footage to understand what happened.Eric Schmitt contributed reporting. | World |
Tom Petty Died From Massive Accidental Drug OD 1/19/2018 Tom Petty's autopsy results are in, and they show the singer died from an accidental drug overdose as a result of taking a variety of medications. The L.A. County Coroner says a number of Tom's organs failed due to "mixed drug toxicity." The autopsy report says when paramedics arrived he was in full cardiac arrest, but CPR revived him -- but on the way to the hospital he lost pulse for 20 minutes. He went into cardiac arrest a second time in the hospital and died 21 hours after being admitted. Tom's autopsy report shows the singer was on several pain meds, including Fentanyl patches, oxycodone (Oxycontin), temazepam (Restoril), alprazolam (Xanax), citalopram (Celexa), acetyl fentanyl and despropionyl fentanyl. The reason doctors prescribed the meds was because of a number of medical problems, including emphysema, knee problems and a fractured hip. The family says the linchpin to Tom's demise was the fractured hip. He insisted on touring for 53 concert dates with the condition, which worsened over time and caused him to take the meds. On the date he had the heart attack he was told his hip had graduated to a full-on break that made the pain unbearable and may have caused the overuse of meds. The autopsy says Petty suffered from coronary artery atherosclerosis. As we reported ... Tom's official death certificate left his cause of death as "deferred," leaving it as a mystery until now. We broke the story ... Tom went into full cardiac arrest before being taken to a hospital in L.A. He eventually died when his family took him off life support. Fentanyl was also linked to the deaths of Prince and Lil Peep. Tom was 66. | Entertainment |
Credit...Kai Pfaffenbach/ReutersDec. 15, 2015FRANKFURT Cheap oil. A weak euro. Money printing by the central bank.The eurozone is so awash in stimulus that a rate increase by the Federal Reserve, expected on Wednesday, is not likely to create many ripples on the Continent, economists say.The larger question for Europe is why the eurozones economy is not responding more to the help it is getting not only from its own central bank but also, inadvertently, from the Fed.The prospect of higher interest rates in the United States, along with efforts by the European Central Bank to push down rates in the eurozone, has already prompted investors to sell euros and buy dollars. For much of the year, in large part because of the Fed, the euro has hovered near lows last seen in 2003. That is a boon for European exports because it makes products priced in euros cheaper for foreign buyers.But because the Fed has signaled its intentions so clearly, not much is likely to change for the eurozone on Wednesday unless there is a surprise for example, a statement by the United States central bank pointing to faster interest rate increases than investors are expecting.The prospect of the Fed raising rates and the E.C.B. easing policy in December has been fully priced in by currency markets, Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank, said in an email.The euro was trading at $1.10 on Tuesday, down from $1.25 a year earlier.The Fed is expected to raise rates for the first time in nearly a decade because the American economy has achieved modest but steady growth and unemployment is within the range considered de facto full employment in the United States job market.That is in sharp contrast to the eurozone, where joblessness remains high and economic growth is still sluggish despite everything the European Central Bank has thrown at it. Growth in the 19 countries of the currency zone will be just 1.5 percent this year, at an annualized rate, according to European Central Bank forecasts. Unemployment in October was 10.7 percent.The eurozone does have some forces that should work in its favor. Besides having an attractively weak currency, the eurozone economy has gotten a slight lift from lower energy prices, which give consumers more money to spend on other things. And the European Central Bank has been buying government bonds and other assets, a form of money printing that has helped reduce borrowing costs for companies and individuals. Fears that higher interest rates in the United States could spread to Europe have not materialized.All those factors, taken together, are the economic equivalent of performance-enhancing drugs. Mario Draghi, president of the E.C.B., said during a speech in Bologna, Italy, on Monday that stimulus measures are producing their desired effects.But the effect has been muted by too many negative factors, economists say. And Fed action is not likely to change that. Mr. Draghi also warned on Monday that monetary policy alone cannot bring lasting prosperity for our economies.The eurozone is still recovering from the effects of the global financial crisis that began in 2007, followed by the Greek debt crisis. Many banks are still weighed down by problem loans, which discourage them from issuing new loans to finance business expansion and hiring.Mr. Schmieding of Berenberg estimated that the cheap euro, the main side effect of Fed policy, adds just 0.1 percent to eurozone growth. That only partly offsets the effect in Europe from turbulence in developing countries like China, which are important customers for eurozone exports like cars and luxury goods.The exchange rate is always a secondary factor, said Marie Diron of the ratings agency Moodys. What drives exports really is demand. Cheap doesnt help if the demand isnt there.The Fed is partly the cause of the emerging market turbulence. Investors are less willing to gamble on developing countries like South Africa and Turkey when they can earn a reasonable return in the United States, with less risk.But many of the problems in emerging countries stem from decisions made by their own governments. Slower growth in China was caused in part from overinvestment in steel factories and other industries, along with a bumpy shift to an economy based more on consumer demand.As a result, businesses in Europe remain cautious even in strong countries like Germany.At first glance, Germany would appear to have all the elements for a boom. Credit is cheap and plentiful. Unemployment, at 4.5 percent, is less than half the eurozone average and lower than in the United States. Germanys many export companies benefit from the devalued euro.And yet a survey published on Tuesday of midsize companies in Germany found that managers were more pessimistic than six months ago. Stefan Bielmeier, chief economist at DZ Bank in Frankfurt, which conducted the survey with two other banks, said that company executives were worried not only about China but also about economic instability in Russia, war in Syria and the influx of migrants into Europe. Fed policy is barely on their minds.Mr. Bielmeier said he expected eurozone growth in 2016 to be 1.5 percent, worse than this year. Where are the impulses? he said. We have already have had strong stimulus for a long time. Yet growth is still moderate.Stefano Micossi, an economist who is director general of Assonime, an Italian business group, said that eurozone leaders had failed to address some of the problems that hold back growth in the eurozone.Italy and France have not done enough to make their economies more competitive, he added.In his view, E.C.B. stimulus measures, including monthly asset purchases of 60 billion euros, or $66 billion, and a benchmark interest rate of only 0.05 percent, have merely dulled the pain of Europes underlying problems.We are fully under the influence of morphine, Mr. Micossi said, warning that Europes problems had yet to be fully felt.The tensions are still underwater, he added. They are likely to emerge at some stage. | Business |
On BaseballCredit...Matt York/Associated PressFeb. 17, 2014SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. The Arizona Diamondbacks had a short practice Monday, just long enough to break a sweat before retreating to their clubhouse before 11 a.m. It was paintball day for the Diamondbacks, who changed into camouflage gear and headed off for a team-building exercise in which they all, essentially, would try to imitate Gerardo Parra.Parra, their sublime right fielder, flings baseballs, not paintballs, with extraordinary force and accuracy. In 2013, by one measure, Parra had the best defensive season a right fielder has ever had, with a left arm to envy.Every time he throws, it shocks me; it stuns me, said A. J. Pollock, the Diamondbacks center fielder. Its a different gear than Ive ever seen anyone throw with. He wants guys to go. He baits them to go. Hes so accurate and quick with it, hes like a shortstop playing from 300 feet away.Parras glove and arm are so renowned that he seemed almost out of place with a bat in his hand Monday morning, in a hallway off the clubhouse. One teammate walked by, tapped the bat and asked if Parra knew how to use it. Another called him Billy Wagner, referring to the retired closer who threw 100 miles per hour.Parra disputed the comparison, more out of accuracy than modesty. Parra could never throw 100. He said he was more like the two-time Cy Young Award winner Johan Santana.I pitched before I signed, Parra said. When I go sign with the D-Backs, I threw 92, 93. But I like defense more. I like playing every day.Parra, 26, can hit well enough; he batted .268 last season, with 43 doubles, 10 homers and 48 runs batted in. But he distinguishes himself, historically, in the field. According to the Baseball Reference website, Parras four defensive wins above replacement last season were the most ever for a right fielder in a database that stretches more than 100 years. Wilson named him the National Leagues defensive player of the year, and Rawlings gave him his second Gold Glove. His arm is a game-changer, Arizona pitcher Brandon McCarthy said. You saw it as the year went on. People kept challenging him, for whatever reason, and Im pretty sure people this year will do the same thing then halfway through the year, theyll stop.Theres very few players on a team who can give a team a boost defensively, and hes one of them, an Andrelton Simmons type. Youve gained a run just by watching him take one off the board for the other team.Simmons, of the Atlanta Braves, may have produced the most value on defense of any player ever. But Simmons, as a shortstop, has many more chances in the field. For Parra to even approach Simmonss defensive impact was remarkable.When you make a good play in the outfield, its like the same as when you hit a homer, said Parra, who sometimes does both. Last May 18 in Miami, he hit the first pitch of the game for a home run and also threw out a runner at the plate. The Diamondbacks won, 1-0. Reliever Brad Ziegler had a different Parra highlight. Ziegler recalled a game at Dodger Stadium in which Yasiel Puig blew through a stop sign to challenge Parra, who easily nabbed him from short right field.Parra turns around to the bullpen, looks at us and does the Dikembe Mutombo finger wag, Ziegler said. Like: Dont run on me. You should know better.The Diamondbacks signed Parra from Venezuela in 2004. A scouting report from the Perfect Game amateur showcase called him extremely similar and maybe even a level better than Santana, but he was considered a better prospect as a position player and reached the majors in 2009.(Eventually, the Diamondbacks would sign a Parra to pitch. Gerardos brother, Geordy, had 39 strikeouts in 27 innings for two low-level Arizona farm clubs last season.) Parra has steadily refined his skills in the field. Kirk Gibson, who took over as the manager in mid-2010, said Parra had improved his accuracy in part by understanding his strength. Parra applies such backspin to the ball, Gibson said, that his throws skip lower than most outfielders. He has learned where to bounce a throw, if he must, so the other fielder can corral it.Dave McKay, the Diamondbacks new outfield coach, said Parra had impressed him with his savvy. In practice, Parra uses a smaller glove, forcing himself to concentrate on using his hands, instead of relying on the extra webbing and bigger pocket of a game glove. He also shows a textbook method for cutoffs.A lot of guys come into the game with that big arm, and they tend to want to get it all the way there on the fly, McKay said. Im guessing, over the years, hes gotten to the point where he realized, I dont have to go over everybody I can go through people, which is what you want to do. The perfect throw is through the cutoff man, not over the cutoff man.Parra has the speed and instincts to handle the vast outfields of the N.L. West; only Hunter Pence of the San Francisco Giants had a better range factor among N.L. right fielders. But the arm is the separator, with the precision of Jim Edmonds, McKay said, and the power of Andre Dawson.Those outfielders won eight Gold Gloves apiece, and Parra is carving a similar legacy, throw by sizzling throw.Hes improving every year, too, catcher Miguel Montero said. Im pretty sure, from now on, that Gold Glove is for him. | Sports |
VideotranscripttranscriptHow Trumps Team Defends Zero ToleranceThe White House is responding to criticism of its policy against illegal border crossings in four very distinct ways.No more free passes, no more get out of jail free cards, no more lawlessness. The United States will not be a migrant camp. What this administration is doing is inhumane. It is inconsistent with our American values. Its barbaric. This I do think ought to be addressed. And I say its very strongly the Democrats fault. We would like to fix these loopholes. And if Democrats want to get serious about it, instead of playing political games, theyre welcome to come here and sit down with the president and actually do something about it. We cannot and will not encourage people to bring their children or other children to the country unlawfully by giving them immunity in the process. I have not been directed to do that for purposes of deterrence, no. My decision has been that anyone who breaks the law will be prosecuted. Our administration has had the same position since we started on Day 1, that we were going to enforce the law. ... you to the apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes.The White House is responding to criticism of its policy against illegal border crossings in four very distinct ways.CreditCredit...Tom Brenner/The New York TimesJune 18, 2018WASHINGTON President Trump and two members of his cabinet mounted an aggressive defense on Monday of his policy of separating children from their parents at the border in response to a growing outcry from members of both parties.They could be murderers and thieves and so much else, Mr. Trump said of the people crossing the border. We want a safe country, and it starts with the borders, and thats the way it is.Attorney General Jeff Sessions also defended the practice, while insisting that we do not want to separate parents from their children, and later, at a tumultuous White House news briefing, Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, gave a forceful explanation of the administrations actions, arguing that it had no choice, and insisting that the only way the practice could end would be through congressional action.Unlike Mr. Trump, she did not repeat the false accusation that only the Democrats, the minority party, were to blame for what she said was Congresss failure to act to end a policy that, by some counts, has resulted in nearly 2,000 children taken away from their parents in a six-week period.Ms. Nielsen insisted that the children who had been taken into custody were well cared for, but she was not able to answer several questions from reporters who demanded specifics about their whereabouts and care. She said she had not seen widely circulated footage of families penned behind chain-link cage fencing, nor heard audio taken of children wailing inside detention centers.Parents who entered illegally are by definition criminals, Ms. Nielsen said. By entering our country illegally, often in dangerous circumstances, illegal immigrants have put their children at risk.Initially, the criticism of what was occurring at the border came mainly from Democrats and former first ladies, including Laura Bush, whose husband also struggled with how to stop illegal immigration when he was president. On Monday, Michelle Obama and Rosalynn Carter both weighed in, with Mrs. Carter saying in a statement that the practice and policy today of removing children from their parents care at our border with Mexico is disgraceful and a shame to our country.After Mr. Trumps latest comments on Monday, a growing number of Republican lawmakers including Representative Steve Stivers of Ohio, who leads the House Republicans campaign arm joined the chorus of criticism. Mr. Stivers warned that if the policy is not changed, he would support means to stop unnecessary separation of children from their parents.Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, called it an ugly and inhumane practice, and called for an immediate end to it, as did other Republican lawmakers, including Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, Republican of Florida, who called the practice totally unacceptable. And Representative Mia Love, Republican of Utah, whose parents emigrated from Haiti, issued a statement condemning what she called the administrations horrible separation policy.ImageCredit...Tom Brenner/The New York TimesNone of those laws or precedents mean that children must be taken away from their parents.Under President Barack Obama, the authorities initially responded to a similar surge in illegal border crossings by setting up family detention centers where children and their parents could be held together. But in response to a lawsuit against the Obama administration, a judge ruled that the Flores settlement also prohibited children from being detained with their parents.Having no effective way to detain the parents with their children, Obama administration officials released the families pending the resolution of their asylum cases. Some were given ankle bracelets. Others were simply ordered to return for a court hearing. What they refused to do was to automatically split the children from their parents so that the adults could be detained.Effectively, they made an exception for illegal immigrants who arrived with children an exception that Trump administration officials followed until Mr. Sessions imposed a zero-tolerance policy this year.Both the Flores settlement and the anti-trafficking law say that the authorities are permitted to separate children, but they are not required to do so. The Trump administration interpreted this as a requirement, or a loophole, that Congress must fix to stop the separations.The energetic defense of the policy by Mr. Trump and members of his administration is at odds with the political reality on Capitol Hill, where Mr. Trumps demands to change the laws face opposition from both Republicans and Democrats.Members of both parties have responded with their own legislative proposals to deal with the separations.The entire Senate Democratic caucus is backing a bill by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, that would limit family separations at the border. In the House, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, is expected to introduce a companion bill on Tuesday.And on the Republican side, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, said Monday that he will propose legislation to double the number of federal immigration judges and authorize new temporary shelters so that families can remain together while their cases are expedited through immigration courts. His fellow Texan, Senator John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, also said he has a plan to improve the immigration court process.The battle is most likely to play out on Thursday, when the House is expected to vote on the two immigration bills. The first bill, known as the Goodlatte bill after its chief sponsor, Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, is a hard-line package that would impose strict curbs on legal immigration and beef up border security, while denying a path to citizenship for the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers.It has Mr. Trumps backing and that of his administration If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we wont face these terrible choices, Mr. Sessions said Monday. But it is almost certain to fail.The real debate will be around the second bill, a compromise measure that is the product of weeks of negotiations between House conservatives and immigration moderates who are eager to secure the fate of the Dreamers, the young immigrants brought here as children who have been protected from deportation under an Obama-era initiative, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that Mr. Trump moved to end in September.The bills passage is highly uncertain. It has the backing of Speaker Paul D. Ryan, but Democrats are expected to vote in lock step against it and conservatives are leery of the measure, which they call amnesty. And Mr. Trump sowed confusion on Capitol Hill late last week when he said at first that he did not support the compromise only to be later contradicted by the White House, which said the president was confused.So Mr. Trumps comments to the House Republicans on Tuesday will be critical to the bills chances. The immigration hard-liners who are uneasy about it are unlikely to be swayed by arguments from Mr. Ryan or other Republican leaders; they want reassurance from Mr. Trump.That said, many are likely to remain skittish even if Mr. Trump offers a full-throated endorsement. Republicans know from experience that the president is mercurial, and they do not want to vote for a bill that the Republican base will denounce as amnesty, only to watch the president change his mind. | Politics |
Disney Star Adam Hicks History of Violence ... Before Armed Robberies 1/27/2018 Disney star Adam Hicks is no stranger to violence ... he shot himself and allegedly brutalized his girlfriend before allegedly going on an armed robbery spree. Hicks shot himself in the leg last July while he was hanging out with friends. He told cops it was accidental but, according to the court document, was "very uncooperative." Hicks was arrested but prosecutors closed the case due to insufficient evidence. Hicks got himself in more trouble just 2 months later. Last September he was arrested after cops came to his home and his girlfriend told them Hicks pulled her by the hair, grabbed her arms, pinned her against a car, pushed her to the ground and continued brutalizing her ... this according to the court document obtained by TMZ. Cops say a neighbor witnessed the violence but became uncooperative. His girlfriend also refused to cooperate so the case was not prosecuted. TMZ.com TMZ broke the story ... Hicks, who starred in "Zeke and Luther," "Pair of Kings," and "Lemonade Mouth" and his girlfriend were arrested after allegedly cruising the Burbank area and pointing a gun at pedestrians and taking their cellphones, money and other property. | Entertainment |
Omarosa $500k Payout On The Line For 'Celeb Big Brother' 1/30/2018 Omarosa's latest reality gig on "Celebrity Big Brother" gives her a chance at a massive payout ... and the longer she survives the house, the more cash she'll walk away with. Sources close to the production tell TMZ, each of the show's celeb house guests signed a base deal of about $200k. We're told the longer the celebs stick around, the more they can get paid. Our sources say the winner will take home a cool $500k. The cash won't come easy -- O's up against world class athletes Chuck Liddell and Metta World Peace, singer Mark McGrath and 'Housewife' Brandi Glanville -- just to name a few. May the best most cut-throat celeb win! | Entertainment |
Credit...Alex Wong/Getty ImagesJune 27, 2018WASHINGTON Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao confronted protesters on Monday after they accosted her and her husband, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, over the Trump administrations temporarily halted policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border.It was the latest heated skirmish, documented on social media, between officials representing the administration and activists furious over some of its most divisive policies.In a video posted on Twitter by one of the protesters, a small group of Georgetown students walked up to Ms. Chao and Mr. McConnell on the universitys campus as they were about to enter a black SUV and leave. One protester began asking the pair, Why are you separating families? as audio of immigrant children crying for their parents through sobs played in the background.Mr. McConnell entered the SUV, but Ms. Chao stopped to confront the protesters as they gathered around the back of the car.Why dont you leave my husband alone? she said. Why dont you leave my husband alone?Im not trying to disrespect you, one protester said, but hes separating families.He is not, Ms. Chao said, as a security guard separated her from the clamoring group, escorting her to the other side of the SUV. He is not.You leave him alone, she added, raising her voice and pointing admonishingly at the protesters. You leave my husband alone.How does he sleep at night? another protester yelled as Ms. Chao climbed into the car.As the administration and lawmakers grapple with a political and public relations crisis over the struggle to reunite separated families and frustrations over floundering efforts to pass immigration legislation, Ms. Chao and Mr. McConnell are the latest officials to face public wrath outside their political offices.On Friday, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant because of her affiliation with the administration. On Monday, the neighbors of Stephen Miller, a top administration adviser known for his hard-line immigration views, endured protesters outside his Washington apartment. (Mr. Miller was attending Mr. Trumps rally in South Carolina at the time.)The increase in clashes instigated by private citizens determined to publicly shame conservative government officials notably endorsed by Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California has divided Democrats over how best to oppose the administration.We wanted to ask him a very simple, yet impactful question: Why are you separating families? said Roberto, the Georgetown student who filmed the encounter. He declined to give his last name because of online threats and backlash. For me, staying silent is not an option.Roberto, an intern with United We Dream, an immigration advocacy group, said the students also wanted to press the possibility of defunding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection over their involvement in the separation of families.Ms. Chao, herself an immigrant, has defended her husband before: Last summer, pressed on apparent tensions between Mr. McConnell and the president, she told reporters, I stand by my man both of them.The Transportation Department did not respond to a request for comment on the episode, and a spokesman for Mr. McConnells office declined to comment. | Politics |