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TrilobitesPrevious research suggested that spending a lot of time with humans might make animals more innovative. These birds had another idea.Credit...Berenika MioduszewskaMay 26, 2020When it comes to cognitive testing, the Goffins cockatoos at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna are pros.Researchers have tested them on toolmaking, shape-matching and other tasks, and found that a cockatoo can learn how to solve a problem from watching another cockatoo do it just once.Now, researchers in Alice M. I. Auerspergs lab, the home of the Austrian cockatoo colony, have created an experimental setup they call an innovation arena. Its a new way to test the ability of animals to innovate, and might be used for a variety of species, in principle. And they compared the performance of laboratory-raised cockatoos and wild-caught birds, to see if the lab-raised birds had acquired an edge by hanging out with human beings.It might seem like pure human arrogance to think that we make animals smarter, but previous research efforts have found a captivity effect in animals, including chimpanzees, that have been in long-term human custody. Their cognitive performance was better than that of their wild relatives on human-devised tests. Therefore, the humans hypothesized, exposure to human environments and interaction with humans might improve animals ability to innovate.The hypothesis did not hold up in this experiment. As the researchers reported Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports, the wild birds were just as smart as the captive birds but a good deal less interested in bothering with the experiment at all.Perhaps the birds did not appreciate that the innovation arena was like the set of an avian TV game show: a semicircular area with 20 doors, each with a different task behind it to solve for a food reward. It certainly looks like fun from a human point of view. And perhaps birds that have spent a lot of time around humans and their experiments get the idea that a weird-looking apparatus indicates that humans are going to offer food for otherwise nonsensical tasks like moving a lever or pushing a button.ImageCredit...Goffin Lab, Messerli Research InstituteAmong the 20 tasks revealed by the doors were ones the researchers called the seesaw, the swish, the shovel, the swing, the mill and the twig. Each task required a different solution to earn the treat. The bird might have to push a platform down or a lever sideways. Or it might have to press a knob, nudge a bowl, rotate a wheel or bend a wire. Each time the birds were set in the arena, the tasks were shuffled, hidden behind different doors.Innovation in animals is defined in different ways, but it more or less means coming up with new ways to solve problems. The researchers wanted to test the rate of innovation: how many solutions a bird could come up with in a given amount of time. And they wanted an experimental setup that, in principle, might be adapted to different species. Thus, the arena.The experiment was designed both to show that the arena was workable and to test the captivity effect. The researchers set up a kind of competition between the major-league, lab-raised team in Vienna and a pickup squad of temporarily captive cockatoos. (The latter had been caught in the wild in Indonesia and kept long enough that they were comfortable around people and the experimental apparatus.)The A-team performed in Vienna; the scrubs were in a field station lab in Indonesia. The competitions were often run more or less simultaneously, according to Theresa Rssler, who conducted the experiments in Vienna while Berenika Mioduszewska ran them in Indonesia.As anticipated, the apparatus worked out. The Vienna birds, familiar with experiments and their rewards, dove right in when placed at the starting point. They very quickly approach the tasks and wander around and try to open the boxes and get out the rewards, Ms. Rssler said.But they didnt always follow the game plan no surprise to a cockatoo researcher. Sometimes the birds, both lab-raised and wild, had their own idea of how a problem might be solved. For instance, some opened the Wire task in several instances by removing the window hinges (which were closer to the reward) instead of unbending the wire, the researchers wrote. Ms. Rssler said, In many of the experiments they seemed to outsmart us at some point.The big difference between the two groups was in their interest in doing the tests at all. The researchers classified 10 of 11 lab birds as motivated, meaning they began right away to open doors and look for food. Only three of the eight wild birds were motivated.The unmotivated birds rarely approached the setup or interacted with the tasks, the researchers reported. But the motivated birds both wild-caught and lab-raised performed at the same level in solving the tasks.Ms. Rssler said that if the wild birds decide they want to interact with the apparatus, they are just as skillful problem solvers. | science |
Sports BriefingAndrew Das and The Associated PressFeb. 20, 2014A Spanish court charged the Spanish league champion, Barcelona, with tax fraud of 9.1 million euros ($12.5 million) in last summers transfer of the Brazilian forward Neymar. Political violence in Ukraine continued to imperil the United States national teams exhibition against Ukraine, which is scheduled for Kharkiv on March 5 but seems increasingly likely to be played elsewhere, if at all. More coverage at nytimes.com/sports. ANDREW DAS Liverpool and Manchester City will play at Yankee Stadium on July 30 as part of a multicity preseason tournament featuring some of Europes top clubs. The eight-team tournament, the International Champions Cup, will take place from July 26 to Aug. 4 and include games in nearly a dozen cities. ANDREW DAS | Sports |
Scaling up the manufacturing of syringes and other medical products required to deliver a vaccine to millions of Americans will be just as important as the vaccine itself.Credit...Bsip/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesPublished May 1, 2020Updated May 4, 2020In the midst of national shortages of testing swabs and protective gear, some medical suppliers and health policy experts are looking ahead to another extraordinary demand on manufacturing: Delivering a vaccine that could potentially end the pandemic.Making a vaccine is not easy. More than two dozen companies have announced programs to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus, but it may still take a year or more before one passes federal safety and efficacy tests in humans and becomes available to the public.Here in the United States, more than 300 million people may need to be inoculated. That means at least as many vials and syringes or double that amount, if two shots are required. To meet that demand, companies will have to ramp up manufacturing; products that doctors give little thought to now could easily become obstacles to vaccine delivery in the future.Were thinking about the vaccine, but what if the vials it is stored in, or rubber stoppers in the vial or the plungers in the syringes become the constraint? said Prashant Yadav, who studies health care supply chains at the Center for Global Development in Washington.Timing the orders of medical products like syringes and all the raw materials required to make them will be essential. Medical device manufacturers could increase inventory or find alternative supply chains for products that are running low, but everything will need to be systematically planned. Adding the capacity to make millions more syringes could take a manufacturer as long as 18 months to complete such a large order, for example.The Covid-19 pandemic is creating industrywide challenges, including expected delays in inventory replenishment for certain products, said Lucy Bradlow, a spokeswoman for Cardinal Health, which makes vials and syringes as well as other medical supplies.Several manufacturers worry that the Trump administration may be waiting too long before ordering an ample supply of medical equipment needed to deliver a vaccine. One manufacturer said it had recently received an order for syringes, but was concerned that the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a branch of the Health and Human Services Department built to help with pandemic preparedness, was still soliciting too few supplies for nationwide vaccine delivery.Elleen Kane, a spokeswoman for the H.H.S., said the department had been working daily with our manufacturers to secure those supplies and assist them with any anticipated obstacles in their supply chains.In March, the H.H.S. set up a public-private partnership to find drug packaging solutions based in the United States. It could be adapted for future therapeutic or vaccine delivery for the Strategic National Stockpile, a federal cache of supplies and medicines held in case of emergencies.ImageCredit...Bing Guan/ReutersThe White House is also developing a plan, called Operation Warp Speed, to accelerate vaccine production and try to get manufacturing capacity set up in advance of a vaccine approval. But some experts say that it is unclear whether the plan would apply to vaccine delivery devices like syringes, and details are still scarce about which federal agency would be responsible.In April, New Hampshires senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, sent a letter to Vice President Mike Pence, urging him to ensure that the federal government obtains the materials to meet the demand for a vaccine when it becomes available.Of course, a lot will depend on the type of vaccine and when it is approved. A variety of RNA- and DNA-based vaccines are currently undergoing clinical trials, as well as more traditional types, which are made by placing instructions for coronavirus spike proteins inside a different dead or harmless virus.RNA or DNA vaccines might have different storage and refrigeration requirements because the technology has never been used for an approved vaccine before. The final vaccine might be packaged in ready-to-use glass syringes, which are commonly used in flu campaigns in Europe, or in a single-dose or multidose vials that would be administered with disposable plastic syringes, which are standard for many vaccines in the United States.The amount of vaccine manufactured by a company could also affect the number of delivery systems needed, said Michael Gusmano, a health policy expert at the Hastings Center and Rutgers School of Public Health. It is unlikely that a pharmaceutical company will be able to match demand immediately nationally or internationally.The good news is we have time, Dr. Gusmano said. Medical device manufacturers could slowly scale up vials and syringes as a vaccine becomes more widely available.Early estimates of the coronaviruss infectiousness suggest that at least 70 percent of the population would need to be immunized to reach what experts call herd immunity, when enough people are immune to a disease that they can also indirectly protect others who are not immune.Thats a remarkably high number, and I dont think were anywhere close to that just with people who have been exposed to the virus and developed antibodies, Dr. Gusmano said. So youre talking about a fairly massive vaccination campaign.Preliminary surveys in California and New York suggest that between 4 to 21 percent of people have developed antibodies to the coronavirus. But the accuracy of many antibody tests has been called into question. And it is still unclear whether having some of these antibodies provides effective and long-lasting immunity against the coronavirus. Plus, most vaccination campaigns aim to immunize a high proportion of the population around 90 percent to successfully prevent transmission of disease.To produce the number of vials and syringes needed for a coronavirus vaccine, medical suppliers will need to increase manufacturing shifts and overtime for their employees, as well as collaborate with American and foreign trade authorities to expedite shipments and shorten lead times.A handful of manufacturers are based in the United States, but many still have to import the glass tubing for vials, polypropylene for syringes and rubber or silicone for small parts like the stoppers and plungers in these devices. Becton Dickinson & Company, one of the worlds largest manufacturers of needles and syringes, said it made nearly all components of its needles and syringes in-house in the United States. Other companies may source from their factories and partners located largely in China and India, where lockdowns and export bans have already decreased production and exports.Although syringe manufacturing is mostly automated, with parts like the barrel and plunger made from a mold and put together on an assembly line, Dr. Yadav said manufacturers in India had told him fewer employees were able to work than needed for full capacity.At least 69 countries have also banned or restricted the export of medical devices, medicines and protective equipment, according to the Global Trade Alert project at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, because of their own needs during the pandemic. Manufacturers of medical syringes may have to find new supply channels, including partnerships with glass and plastic manufacturers that operate outside of the health care industry.Some lawmakers are concerned that without more federal coordination, individual companies will not have the capacity to match vaccine delivery to the overwhelming demand.The Trump administration needs to prepare our domestic supply chain now for the delivery of an eventual vaccine that will need to be delivered to the entire country, Senator Shaheen said. Its vital that federal agencies exercise better foresight so that we dont see supply shortages like we continue to experience for testing and protective equipment. | Health |
Credit...Cliff Hide for Blenheim PalaceMarch 9, 2017This was no ordinary flower pot holding up the tulips in an English garden.When an antiques expert visited Blenheim Palace in England on official business about a year ago, he happened to notice an ornately carved marble piece that was being used as a planter in one of the estates gardens. Something about the carvings was familiar there was a drunken Dionysus leaning on a satyr, carved lion heads and depictions of Hercules and Ariadne merrymaking at a party.The flower pot turned out to be part of an ancient Roman sarcophagus.This week, the palace, a sweeping 18th -century site in Oxfordshire just outside of London, announced that it had removed the sarcophagus piece, restored it and put it on display inside the palace.We are hoping it will remain in good condition and survive for many more centuries to come, said Kate Ballenger, the house manager at Blenheim Palace, in a statement announcing the discovery of the sarcophagus piece.Blenheim Palace is a World Heritage site that has been the home of the dukes of Marlborough for 300 years. It has a unique historical place in Britains history: It was used as a hospital for wounded soldiers during World War I and as a home for evacuees in World War II. Sir Winston Churchill was born at the palace and spent his boyhood there.In 1950, the palace was opened to the public for the first time, and it plays host to social events, weddings, fashion shows and exhibitions in addition to now housing a piece of Roman antiquity in a display at the bottom of a staircase in a hallway.The marble coffin, which is 17 centuries old, appeared on the property during the time of George Spencer-Churchill, the 5th Duke of Marlborough, in the 19th century. It was initially used to collect water from a natural spring near one of the palaces features, called the Great Lake, the statement said.But early in the 20th century it was incorporated into a rock garden. And it stayed there, until the fateful day last year when it was discovered filled with dirt, planted with tulips and attached to a lead cistern by the antiques specialist, who was strolling through while visiting on other business.He happened to see it, Jonathan Prince, a palace spokesman, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. The antiques expert knew that a similar marble coffin had been auctioned off for more than 100,000 pounds, about $121,000, Mr. Prince said. But because of the condition of the piece at Blenheim Palace, he suggested to Mr. Prince that the value of the sarcophagus might be three times as much.But it is not for sale, not at all, Mr. Prince said in the interview. It will stay here.After the discovery by the expert, whose identity the palace is keeping private, conservationists were called in.Nicholas Barnfield, an architectural stone and sculpture expert with Cliveden Conservation, set to work. He described the piece as the front of a coffin that is missing its base, sides and back. Even as a fragment, the piece is 6 feet long, 2.5 feet high and about 6 inches thick; it weighs about 550 pounds.The team cut the bolts, released it from the cistern, put it into a box and transported it by van to their workshop. It was carefully cleaned to avoid damaging the surface, with a splash of water and some wooden picks used to remove encrustations from its days as a fountain feature, Mr. Barnfield said in a telephone interview.There was some damage bolt holes and broken or weathered features on some of the sculptures but it was ready to return to its palace home after about six months. We took it back with four blokes with manual lifting, Mr. Barnfield said.But there are still questions. It is actually the beginning of the story, he said.The piece is thought to date to the second century A.D., he said, based on the type of carving the flowing wine from crushed grapes and the theme of Dionysus ushering you into the afterlife in a nice drunken happy state, a merry state.It is indicative of when the Romans shifted from burning their dead to interring them, Mr. Barnfield said. So it is a coffin as such.It is not clear who the sculptor was. And it is not clear who, if anyone, was buried in it.The hole borings could have been a result of an 18th-century restoration because of the demand at the time for such pieces, he said.But there was little other evidence of anything from its 18th-century period, aside from the fact that it was a Roman sarcophagus, Mr. Barnfield said.There is still research that could be done about it, he added. This is really accomplished work. There are no inscriptions to indicate who it was for, but it was obviously someone of very high status.Mr. Barnfield, who oversaw the restoration, said that in his decades doing such conservation work, it was not unprecedented to stumble across historically significant objects in an English garden.We get inquiries on an almost weekly basis for quality objects, he said. A Roman one is unusual, something of this age. But there are two or three gardens around Britain that have quite significant artifacts in their gardens.It is not something we advertise because of theft, and also we dont tend to sort of dwell on the monetary value of a piece as well, he said.Mr. Barnfield has even seen a sarcophagus or two. But not of this quality, he said. Some of them can be quite plain. This one is exquisite. It is jewel-like in its carving. | World |
Credit...Tom Brenner/The New York TimesJune 18, 2018The Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, addressed on Monday the zero-tolerance immigration policy amid growing outcry over the forced separation it is causing to families apprehended at the border.Ms. Nielsen opened with a statement on the policy and then answered questions from reporters in the White House briefing room.[Read our latest coverage of President Trumps immigration policy and the separation of families at the border.]The following is a transcript of that appearance._____________________SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, White House press secretary: To answer your questions on this topic, I invited Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and the Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan to the podium. And as always, Ill be back up afterwards to take questions on other news of the day. Thanks.KIRSTJEN NIELSEN, secretary of homeland security: Well, good afternoon. It is my pleasure to be here, because I would love to see if I can help explain some of what is going on and give you some of the facts. I know there have been a lot put out there but hopefully we can clarify some things today. I just wanted to start by thanking the sheriffs of the United States. I had the privilege of speaking to them this morning at the National Sheriffs Association Conference. We are so thankful for their partnership at D.H.S. and all they do to protect our community. So I thank them.So, I want to provide you an update on the illegal immigration crisis on the southern border and the efforts the administration is taking to solve this crisis and to stop the flood of illegal immigrants, drugs, contraband and crime coming across the border.So lets just start with a few numbers and facts. So, in the last three months weve seen illegal immigration on our southern border exceed 50,000 people each month, multiples over each month last year. Since this time last year, there has been a 325 percent increase in unaccompanied alien children and a 435 percent increase in family units entering the country illegally.Over the last ten years, there has been a 1700 percent increase in asylum claims, resulting in asylum backlog of 600,000 cases. Since 2013, the United States has admitted more than half a million illegal immigrant minors and family units from Central America, most of whom today are at large in the United States. At the same time, large criminal organizations such as MS-13 have violated our borders and gained a deadly foothold within the United States. This entire crisis, just to be clear, is not new. It is been occurring and expanded over many decades. But currently it is the exclusive product of loopholes in our federal immigration laws that prevent illegal immigrant minors and family members from being detained and removed to their home countries.In other words, these loopholes create a functionally open border. Apprehension without detention and removal is not border security. We have repeatedly called on Congress to close the loopholes. I myself have met with as many members as have been willing to meet with me, and I testified seven times, and I will continue to make myself available to ask that they work with us to solve this crisis.Yet the voices most loudly criticizing the enforcement of our current laws are those whose policies created this crisis and whose policies perpetrate it. In particular, we need to reform three major loopholes. Let me quickly walk you through them.First, we need to amend the 2008 Trafficking Victims Prevention Reauthorization Act, or T.V.P.R., which is much easier to say. This law encourages families to put children in the hands of smugglers to bring them alone on this dangerous trek northward. And make no mistake, weve talked about this before: This trek is dangerous and deadly.Second, we need to reform our asylum laws to end the systemic abuse of our asylum system and stop fraud. Right now, our asylum system fails to assist asylum seekers who legitimately need it. We are a country of compassion and heart. We must fix this system so that those who truly need asylum can, in fact, receive it.Third, we need to amend the Flores Settlement Agreement and recent expansions which would allow for family detention during the removal process. And we need Congress to fully fund our ability to hold families together through the immigration process. And until these loopholes are closed by Congress, it is not possible as a matter of law to detain and remove whole family units who arrive illegally in the United States. Congress and the courts created this problem and congress alone can fix it.Until then, we will enforce every law we have on the books to defend the sovereignty and security of the United States. Those who criticize the enforcement of our laws have offered only one countermeasure: open borders, the quick release of all illegal alien families and the decision not to enforce our laws. This policy would be disastrous. Its prime beneficiary would be the smuggling organizations themselves, and the prime victims would be the children, who would be plunged into the smuggling machines on the trip north.There is a lot of misinformation about what D.H.S. is and is not doing as it relates to families at the border. And I want to correct the record here. Here are the facts.First, this administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border. We have a statutory responsibility that we take seriously to protect alien children from human smuggling, trafficking and other criminal actions while enforcing our immigration laws.We have a long existing policy multiple administrations have followed that outline when we may take action to protect children. We will separate those who claim to be a parent and child if we cannot determine a familiar or custodial relationship exists. For example, if there is no documentation to confirm the claimed relationship between an adult and a child. We do so if the parent is a national security, public, or safety risk, including when there are criminal charges at issue and it may not be appropriate to maintain the family in detention together.We also separate a parent and child if the adult is suspected of human trafficking. There are cases where minors have been used and trafficked by unrelated adults in an effort to avoid detention. And Id stop here to say in the last five months, we have a 314 percent increase in adults and children arriving at the border fraudulently, claiming to be a family unit. This is obviously of concern.And separation can occur when the parent is charged with human smuggling. Under those circumstances, we would detain the parent in an appropriate secure detention facility separate from the child. What has changed is that we no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law. Everyone is subject to prosecution. When D.H.S. refers a case against a parent or legal guardian for criminal prosecution, the parent or legal guardian will be placed into the U.S. Marshals Service custody for pretrial determination, pursuant to an order by a federal judge, and any accompanied child will be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services and will be reclassified as an unaccompanied alien child.That is in accordance with the T.V.P.R.A., a law that was passed by Congress, and following a court order, neither of which actions the Trump administration has taken. And lets be clear: If an American were to commit a crime anywhere in the United States, they would go to jail and they would be separated from their family. This is not a controversial idea.Second, children in D.H.S. and H.H.S. custody are being well taken care of. The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement provides meals, medical care and educational services to these children. They are provided temporary shelter, and H.H.S. works hard to find a parent, relative or foster home to care for these children. Parents can still communicate with their children through phone calls and video conferencing.And a parent who is released from custody can be a sponsor and ask H.H.S. to release the child back into their care. Further, these minors can still apply for asylum under U.S. immigration law, if eligible. We take allegations of mistreatment seriously. And I want to stress this point: We investigate, we hold those accountable when and if it should occur. We have some of the highest detention standards in the country. Claiming these children and their parents are treated inhumanely is not true, and completely disrespects the hard working men and women at the Office of Refugee Resettlement.Third, parents who entered illegally are, by definition, criminals. Illegal entry is a crime as determined by Congress. By entering our country illegally, often in dangerous circumstances, illegal immigrants put their children at risk.Fourth, C.B.P. and I.C.E. officers are trained to care for minors in their custody. D.H.S. and H.H.S. treats all individuals in its custody with dignity and respect and complies with all laws and policy. This reinforces and reiterates the need to consider the best interest of the children, and mandates adherence to established protocols to protect at-risk populations to include standards for the transport and treatment of minors in D.H.S. and H.H.S. custody.Additionally, all U.S. Border Patrol personnel on the southwest border are bilingual. Every last one of them. They are directed to clearly explain the relevance process to apprehended individuals and provide detainees with written documentation in both Spanish and English that lays out the process and appropriate phone numbers to contact. And finally, D.H.S. is not separating families legitimately seeking asylum at ports of entry. If an adult enters at a port of entry and claims asylum, they will not face prosecution for illegal entry. They have not committed a crime by coming to the port of entry.As I mentioned, D.H.S. does have a responsibility to protect minors and, in that case as well, we will only separate the family if we cannot determine there is a familial relationship, if the child may be at risk with the parent or legal guardian, or if the parent or legal guardian is referred for prosecution. We have a duty to protect the American people and it is one that I take very seriously.Here is the bottom line: D.H.S. is no longer ignoring the law. Were enforcing the laws as they exist on the books. As long as illegal entry remains a criminal offense, D.H.S. will not look the other way. D.H.S. will faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress, as we are sworn to do. As I said earlier today, surely it is the beginning of the unraveling of democracy when the body who makes the laws, instead of changing them, tells the enforcement body not to enforce the law.I ask Congress to ask this week so that we could secure our borders and uphold our humanitarian ideas. These two missions should not be pitted against each other. If we close the loopholes, we could accomplish both. Before I take questions, I just want to ask that in your reporting, please consider the men and women of D.H.S. who are dedicated law enforcement officers and who often put their lives at risk. Lets remember their sacrifice and commitment to this country. And with that Ill take some questions. Yes.REPORTER: Secretary Nielsen, what you talked about there, D.H.S. is no longer ignoring the law, youre calling on Congress to change the law. I mean, that is the big message here.NIELSEN: Yes.REPORTER: Members of Congress on the Democratic side say that you are using children as a lever to try to get them to take legislative action. What do you say to that?NIELSEN: I say that is a very cowardly response. It is clearly within their power to make the laws and change the laws. They should do so.REPORTER: You have seen the photos of children in cages? Have you heard the audio clip of these children wailing that just came out today?NIELSEN: I have I have not seen something that came out today but I have been to detention centers and, again, I would reference you to our standards and I would reference you to the care provided not just by the Department of Homeland Security, but by the Department of Health and Human Services when they get to H.H.S.REPORTER: But is that the image of this country that you want out there, children in cages?NIELSEN: The image I want of this country is an immigration system that secures our border and upholds our humanitarian ideals. Congress needs to fix it.REPORTER: I want to give you a chance to respond to Laura Bush. In an op-ed, she says this is cruel, she supports an application of the law. Even the current first lady, Melania Trump, has said we should be a nation of laws, we should do so with heart. Do you have anything you want to tell them, do you believe they are misunderstanding the situation or do you believe there is any component of this policy, which as youve outlined other administrations have done but you are using it in a way that is more intense and creates the separation issue.NIELSEN: What my response would be is calling attention to this matter is important. This is a very serious issue that has resulted after years and years of Congress not taking action. So I would thank them both for their comments, I would thank them both for their concerns, I share their concerns, but Congress is the one that needs to fix this.REPORTER: The policy is not by your definition in any way cruel?NIELSEN: It is not a policy. Our policy at D.H.S. is to do what were sworn to do which is to enforce the law.REPORTER: Im following up on Megans question there. Former first lady Laura Bush compared this to Japanese internment during World War II, one of the darkest days in the nations history. Do you believe that the effect of this policy, so not the law, but the effect of it on separating children from families in those specific instances is moral? Is it ethical? Is it American?NIELSEN: What I believe is that we should exercise our democratic rights as Americans and fix the problem. It is a problem and lets fix it. Yes.REPORTER: How is this not child abuse?NIELSEN: Which Be more specific, please. Enforcing the law?REPORTER: These images that Cecilia was talking about and the sounds that weve seen from the big box stores, the Walmarts and the other stores. When you see this, how is this not specifically child abuse for these innocent children who are indeed being separated from their parents?NIELSEN: So I want to be clear on a couple of other things. The vast majority, vast, vast majority of children who are in the care of H.H.S. right now 10,000 of the 12,000 were sent here alone by their parents. That is when they were separated. So somehow weve conflated everything. But there is two separate issues. 10,000 of those currently in custody were sent by their parents with strangers to undertake a completely dangerous and deadly travel alone. We now care for them. We have high standards. We give them meals, we give them education, we give them medical care. There is videos, there is TVs, I visited the detention centers myself that would be my answer to that question.REPORTER: If I could follow up, though. For the hundreds that are not included in there you said 10,000 but for the hundreds that we have seen, perhaps up to 2,000, are there any examples of child abuse that you believe and how could this not be child abuse for the people who are taken from their parents? Not the ones who are sent here with their parents blessing or with the smuggler, the people taken from their parents.NIELSEN: Unfortunately, Im not in any position to deal with hearsay stories. If someone has a specific allegation, as I always do when I testify, I ask they provide that information to the Department of Homeland Security. We will look into it. Of course we do not want any situation where a child is not completely adequately taken care of. Yes.REPORTER: A couple of questions. One, why is the government only releasing images of the boys being held? Where are the girls? Where are the young toddlers?NIELSEN: I dont know. Im not familiar with those particular images so I would have REPORTER: Do you know where they are? Do you know where the girls are? Do you know where the young toddlers are?NIELSEN: We have children in D.H.S. care both, but as you know, most of the children after 72 hours are transferred to H.H.S. So I dont know what pictures youre referencing but I would have to refer you to H.H.S.REPORTER: Weve seen images of boys but we just havent seen any of the girls, any of the young toddlers and youre saying they are being well cared for. So how could you make that claim if you dont know where they are?NIELSEN: It is not that I dont know where they are. Im saying that the vast majority of children are held by Health and Human Services. We transfer them after 72 hours. I dont know what pictures youre speaking about. But perhaps theyre REPORTER: Pictures have been released to the public, theyve been aired all over national television.NIELSEN: O.K., by D.H.S. or H.H.S.?REPORTER: By [inaudible] .H.S.NIELSEN: So lets find out from H.H.S. I dont think there is anything other than [cross talk] the pictures REPORTER: [cross talk] released by your department. I mean, theyve have been aired all over national television throughout the day, the kids being held in the cages. Weve only seen the boys.NIELSEN: I will, I will look into that. Im not aware that theres another picture. Yes.REPORTER: Let me ask, secretary, just to follow up very quickly, because you continue to insist that this is something that Congress can change and yet NIELSEN: Yes.REPORTER: This is something enacted after the attorney general announced the zero-tolerance policy. This never happened before he announced the zero-tolerance policy.NIELSEN: That is actually not true. The last administration the Obama administration and the Bush administration all separated families at the REPORTER: [Inaudible question]NIELSEN: They absolutely did. Their rate was less than ours but they absolutely did do this. This is not new.REPORTER: [inaudible] unaccompanied minors, there is no doubt about that. But this NIELSEN: They separated families.REPORTER: Separating kids at this rate from their parents is something new and specific to this administration once the attorney general announced the zero-tolerance policy. So why doesnt the president pick up the phone and change the policy? He said that he hates it.NIELSEN: I think what the president is trying to do is find a long-term fix. So why dont we have Congress change the laws [inaudible cross talk]NIELSEN: No, Congress could fix this tomorrow. [cross talk] Yes, I think you were next, right?REPORTER: Madam secretary, President Trump had a lot to say the last few days about immigration, but hes offered no compassion to the families that are being separated at the border. Do you know why that is and why wont he simply pause your departments enforcement of this administration policy until Congress reaches that long-term fix so that these families can be reunited.NIELSEN: He has been attempting to work with Congress since hes been in office. Hes made it very clear that we will enforce the laws of the United States as long as this administration is here. As part of that, he has continually reached out to Congress to fix this. And I think what youve seen him do in the last few days is that. Is continue to tell Congress, please work with us, the system is broken. The only people that benefit from the system right now are the smugglers, the traffickers, those who are peddling drugs and terrorists. So lets fix the system.REPORTER: That didnt answer the question. Does he feel any compassion for the families being separated? Hes talked about the parents being possible criminals, hes blamed it on Democrats, hes offered no words of compassion.NIELSEN: I think he has said in tweets that he would like Congress to act to end the underlying laws that require the separation.REPORTER: Madam Secretary, it seemed like a couple of days ago both the president and your tweets that the main posture or point was to say this is not the administrations policy, but it seems like in the last couple well today that the message is a little bit different and to say this is our policy but it is because either we believe it is a deterrent or we dont believe we have the resources to move families entirely. And Im just wondering I want to make sure we get the reporting right which of those is the most precise way to describe how the administration feels? And given the blowback by a number of Republicans as well as Democrats, are you considering rethinking this based on feedback or is this the administrations position going forward, period paragraph?NIELSEN: The laws prohibit us from detaining families while they go through prosecution for illegally entering the border and while they go through prosecutions for immigration proceedings. If we close the loopholes, we can keep the families together. Which is what they did in the last administration until a court ruled that we can no longer do that. After 20, days we have to release both unaccompanied children and accompanied children. Which means that we cannot detain families together. The only option is to not enforce the law at all.REPORTER: Ok, so going back to these two questions from Kristen and Margaret you said that you want Congress to close some loopholes. With that, you also said that you want to make this work. Now are these kids being used as pawns for a wall? Many people are asking that and Democrats are saying this is your discretion and there is no law that said that this White House could separate parents from their children.NIELSEN: The kids are being used by pawns by the smugglers and the traffickers. Again, lets just pause to think about this statistic: 314 percent increase in adults showing up with kids that are not a family unit. Those are traffickers, those are smugglers and that is MS-13, those are criminals, those are abusers.[cross talk]NIELSEN: So thank you all Im trying to say is the closing that loophole will enable us to detain families together throughout the proceeding, as theyve done in previous administrations.REPORTER: Madam Secretary, can you definitively say, are the children being used as pawns against for a wall? Yes or no? Can you say yes or no to that?NIELSEN: The children are not being used as a pawn. Were trying to protect the children, which is why Im asking Congress to act.REPORTER: [Inaudible] as the legal framework for the decisions that your administration is taking? Are what were seeing the pictures, the audio, the stories are they an intended consequence of the administrations decision making or unintended consequence?NIELSEN: I think that they reflect the focus of those who post such pictures and narratives. The narratives we dont see are the narratives of the crime, of the opioids, of the smugglers, of who are people killed by gang members, of American children who are recruited and then when they lose the drugs theyre tased and beaten. So we dont have a balanced view of whats happening, but whats happening at the border is the border is being overrun by those who have no right to cross it. As I said before, if you are seeking asylum, go to a port of entry. You do not need to break the law of the United States to seek asylum.REPORTER: People are being turned away from ports of entry.NIELSEN: That actually is incorrect. We have limited resources, we have multiple missions at C.B.P. and what we do is based on the very high standards we have, if we do not have enough bed space, if we do not have enough medical personnel on staff, if we do not have enough caretakers on staff, then we will tell people that come to the border that they need to come back. We are not turning them away. We are saying we want to take care of you in the right way, right now we do not have the resources at this particular moment in time, come back.[cross talk]REPORTER: Thank you very much. Are you intending for this to play out as it is playing out? Are you intending for parents to be separated from children? Are you intending to send a message?NIELSEN: I find that offensive. No. Because why would I ever create a policy that purposely does that.REPORTER: Perhaps as a deterrence?NIELSEN: No. The way that it works [cross talk]NIELSEN: That is not the question that you asked me. But the answer is, it is a law passed by the United States Congress. Rather than fixing the law, Congress is asking those of us who enforce the law to turn our backs on the law and not enforce the law. It is not an answer. The answer is to fix the laws.REPORTER: Will the administration refrain from its current policy if Congress were to pass something that is close to what you want, or will it continue to require the separation of parents from children until the president gets exactly what he wants?NIELSEN: If Congress closes the loopholes, some of which many of which are closed in the two bills that we hope are taken up this week by the House, then they close the loopholes and the families will stay together throughout the proceedings. Thank you. | Politics |
TrilobitesCredit...Getty ImagesNov. 8, 2016Neanderthals and modern humans diverged from a common ancestor about half a million years ago. Living in colder climes in Eurasia, Neanderthals evolved barrel chests, large skulls and strong hands. In Africa, modern humans acquired shorter faces, a prominent chin and slender limbs. Then, roughly 50,000 years ago, the two species encountered one another and interbred, as modern humans spread out of Africa.The legacy of this interbreeding has been the subject of much scientific inquiry in the past few years. Today, up to 4 percent of the genes of non-Africans are Neanderthal in origin.. These may have influenced a diverse range of traits, including keratin production, disease risk and the propensity to sneeze after eating dark chocolate. Where did all the other Neanderthal DNA go? Why did a Neanderthal-human hybrid not prevail?Two recent studies converge on an explanation. They suggest the answer comes down to different population sizes between Neanderthals and modern humans, and this principle of population genetics: In small populations, natural selection is less effective.Neanderthals have this small population over hundreds of thousands of years, presumably because theyre living in very rough conditions, said Graham Coop, a genetics professor at the University of California, Davis, and an author of one of the studies, published Tuesday in PLOS Genetics.As a result, Neanderthals were more inbred than modern humans and accumulated more mutations that have a slightly adverse effect, such as increasing ones risk of disease, but do not prevent one from reproducing (and thus, passing such mutations along).After Neanderthals started mating with humans, natural selection in the larger human population started purging those mutations, said Ivan Juric, a geneticist at 23andme who studied with Dr. Coop and was a co-author of the study.In 2014, a group led by David Reich, a genetics professor at Harvard, found that Neanderthal DNA tended to be located far away from important genes in the human genome. This provided one of the first pieces of evidence that natural selection was working against Neanderthal DNA.At the time, Dr. Reichs group attributed some of the finding to possible infertility in Neanderthal-human hybrids. But we also showed that infertility couldnt explain most of the pattern, Dr. Reich said.In their study, Dr. Juric and Dr. Coop found that differences in population size could explain it. They analyzed the current-day frequency of Neanderthal ancestry along the human genome. Fitting a mathematical model of natural selection onto it, they found that a pattern of weak natural selection because of population size differences between Neanderthals and humans could account for the distance between Neanderthal DNA and genes in the human genome today.Their results confirmed those reported in another paper published in April, which approached the puzzle from the opposite direction. In that study, the authors started with historical estimates of Neanderthal and human population sizes. Based on those sizes and the probability that new mutations that arise are harmful, they computed the load of genetic mutations for each population, and found that Neanderthals most likely had a greater prevalence of slightly disadvantageous genes.Our simulations showed that early hybrids would have been much less fit than pure humans, said Kelley Harris, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and one of the authors of that paper. Over time, this would have decreased the amount of Neanderthal DNA around modern human genes.Together, these papers tell a convincing story, Dr. Reich said. The reduction of Neanderthal ancestry near genes that weve observed is a strange and remarkable phenomenon, he said. These two papers have provided a plausible and exciting explanation. | science |
Countries that once led the world in coronavirus monitoring are now scaling back, leaving the world less prepared to spot future variants, experts said.Credit...Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesApril 2, 2022The British government on Friday shut down or scaled back a number of its Covid surveillance programs, curtailing the collection of data that the United States and many other countries had come to rely on to understand the threat posed by emerging variants and the effectiveness of vaccines. Denmark, too, renowned for insights from its comprehensive tests, has drastically cut back on its virus tracking efforts in recent months.As more countries loosen their policies toward living with Covid rather than snuffing it out, health experts worry that monitoring systems will become weaker, making it more difficult to predict new surges and to make sense of emerging variants.Things are going to get harder now, Samuel Scarpino, a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundations Pandemic Prevention Institute, said. And right as things get hard, were dialing back the data systems.Since the Alpha variant emerged in the fall of 2020, Britain has served as a bellwether, tracking that variant as well as Delta and Omicron before they arrived in the United States. After a slow start, American genomic surveillance efforts have steadily improved with a modest increase in funding.This might actually put the U.S. in more of a leadership position, said Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.At the start of the pandemic, Britain was especially well prepared to set up a world-class virus tracking program. The country was already home to many experts on virus evolution, it had large labs ready to sequence viral genes, and it could link that sequencing to electronic records from its National Health Service.In March 2020, British researchers created a consortium to sequence as many viral genomes as they could lay hands on. Some samples came from tests that people took when they felt ill, others came from hospitals, and still others came from national surveys.That last category was especially important, experts said. By testing hundreds of thousands of people at random each month, the researchers could detect new variants and outbreaks among people who didnt even know they were sick, rather than waiting for tests to come from clinics or hospitals.The community testing has been the most rapid indicator of changes to the epidemic, and its also been the most rapid indicator of the appearance of new variants, said Christophe Fraser, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford. Its really the key tool.ImageCredit...Chris Eades/Getty ImagesBy late 2020, Britain was performing genomic sequencing on thousands of virus samples a week from surveys and tests, supplying online databases with more than half of the worlds coronavirus genomes. That December, this data allowed researchers to identify Alpha, the first coronavirus variant, in an outbreak in southeastern England.A few other countries stood out for their efforts to track the viruss evolution. Denmark set up an ambitious system for sequencing most of its positive coronavirus tests. Israel combined viral tracking with aggressive vaccination, quickly producing evidence last summer that the vaccines were becoming less effective data that other countries leaned on in their decision to approve boosters.But Britain remained the exemplar in not only sequencing viral genomes, but combining that information with medical records and epidemiology to make sense of the variants.The U.K. really set itself up to give information to the whole world, said Jeffrey Barrett, the former director of the Covid-19 Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Britain.Even in the past few weeks, Britains surveillance systems were giving the world crucial information about the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron. British researchers established that the variant does not pose a greater risk of hospitalization than other forms of Omicron but is more transmissible.On Friday, two of the countrys routine virus surveys were shut down and a third was scaled back, baffling Dr. Fraser and many other researchers, particularly when those surveys now show that Britains Covid infection rates are estimated to have reached a record high: one in 13 people. The government also stopped paying for free tests, and either canceled or paused contact-tracing apps and sewage sampling programs.I dont understand what the strategy is, to put together these very large instruments and then dismantle them, Dr. Fraser said.The cuts have come as Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called for Britain to learn to live with this virus. When the government released its plans in February, it pointed to the success of the countrys vaccination program and the high costs of various virus programs. Although it would be scaling back surveillance, it said, the government will continue to monitor cases, in hospital settings in particular, including using genomic sequencing, which will allow some insights into the evolution of the virus.Its true that life with Covid is different now than it was back in the spring of 2020. Vaccines drastically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death at least in countries that have vaccinated enough people. Antiviral pills and other treatments can further blunt Covids devastation, although theyre still in short supply in much of the world.Supplying free tests and running large-scale surveys is expensive, Dr. Barrett acknowledged, and after two years, it made sense that countries would look for ways to curb spending. I do understand its a tricky position for governments, he said.ImageCredit...Frank Augstein/Associated PressBut he expressed worry that cutting back too far on genomic surveillance would leave Britain unprepared for a new variant. You dont want to be blind on that, he saidWith a reduction in testing, Steven Paterson, a geneticist at the University of Liverpool, pointed out that Britain will have fewer viruses to sequence. He estimated the sequencing output could drop by 80 percent.Whichever way you look at it, its going to lead very much to a degradation of the insight that we can have, either into the numbers of infections, or our ability to spot new variants as they come through, Dr. Paterson said.Experts warned that it will be difficult to restart surveillance programs of the coronavirus, known formally as SARS-CoV-2, when a new variant emerges.If theres one thing we know about SARS-CoV-2, its that it always surprises us, said Paul Elliott, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London and a lead investigator on one of the community surveys being cut. Things can change really, really quickly.Other countries are also applying a live-with-Covid philosophy to their surveillance. Denmarks testing rate has dropped nearly 90 percent from its January peak. The Danish government announced on March 10 that tests would be required only for certain medical reasons, such as pregnancy.Astrid Iversen, an Oxford virologist who has consulted for the Danish government, expressed worry that the country was trying to convince itself the pandemic was over. The virus hasnt gotten the email, she said.With the drop in testing, she said, the daily case count in Denmark doesnt reflect the true state of the pandemic as well as before. But the country is ramping up widespread testing of wastewater, which might work well enough to monitor new variants. If the wastewater revealed an alarming spike, the country could start its testing again.I feel confident that Denmark will be able to scale up, she said.Israel has also seen a drastic drop in testing, but Ran Balicer, the director of the Clalit Research Institute, said the countrys health care systems will continue to track variants and monitor the effectiveness of vaccines. For us, living with Covid does not mean ignoring Covid, he said.ImageCredit...Matt Dunham/Associated PressWhile Britain and Denmark have been cutting back on surveillance, one country offers a model of robust-yet-affordable virus monitoring: South Africa.South Africa rose to prominence in November, when researchers there first discovered Omicron. The feat was all the more impressive given that the country sequences only a few hundred virus genomes a week.Tulio de Oliveira, the director of South Africas Centre for Epidemic Response & Innovation, credited the design of the survey for its success. He and his colleagues randomly pick out test results from every province across the country to sequence. That method ensures that a bias in their survey doesnt lead them to miss something important.It also means that they run much leaner operations than those of richer countries. Since its start in early 2020, the survey has cost just $2.1 million. Its much more sustainable, Dr. de Oliveira said.In contrast, many countries in Africa and Asia have yet to start any substantial sequencing. We are blind to many parts of the world, said Elodie Ghedin, a viral genomics expert at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.The United States has traveled a course of its own. In early 2021, when the Alpha variant swept across the country, American researchers were sequencing only a tiny fraction of positive Covid tests. We were far behind Britain, Dr. Ghedin said.Since then, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has helped state and local public health departments start doing their own sequencing of virus genomes. While countries like Britain and Denmark pull back on surveillance, the United States is still ramping up its efforts. Last month, the C.D.C. announced a $185 million initiative to support sequencing centers at universities.Still, budget fights in Washington are bringing uncertainty to the countrys long-term surveillance. And the United States faces obstacles that other wealthy countries dont.Without a national health care system, the country cannot link each virus sample with a persons medical records. And the United States has not set up a regularly updated national survey of the sort that has served the United Kingdom and South Africa so well.All scientists would love it if we had something like that, Dr. Ghedin said. But we have to work with the confines of our system. | Health |
Nicole Eggert I Lied About Scott's Alleged Sexual Abuse ... Out of Shame 1/30/2018 NBC Nicole Eggert just went on Megyn Kelly's show to chronicle what she claims was years of sexual assault at the hands of Scott Baio, and explained why she lied and why her timeline was off. Nicole and her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, recounted abuse during the filming of "Charles in Charge," claiming Baio fingered her when she was 14 and ultimately had sex with her at 17. Baio strongly denies her allegations and says they had sex only after she turned 18. Kelly asked Eggert about discrepancies in her stories and comments she made where she sang Baio praises. She says it's all about feeling shame. And Baio has blasted Eggert, saying if she really believes her allegations she should file a police report and not try to destroy him on social media. Eggert responded on the show, "Be careful what you wish for." | Entertainment |
Credit...Guillermo Arias/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesNov. 14, 2018TIJUANA, Mexico Hundreds of migrants in the caravan traveling from Central America have begun arriving in the northern Mexico border city of Tijuana, setting up a potential confrontation with the American authorities that has been brewing for weeks.Their arrival in Tijuana marked the end of one struggle making it safely to the United States border. But it signaled the start of another to get across that border, something that President Trump has promised to impede, even for those seeking asylum. Mr. Trump has labeled the caravan an invasion, deployed American soldiers to the border and made changes to asylum rules in efforts to confront it.A few of the migrants who have made it to Tijuana were already trying to figure out how to get appointments with American border officials to present their cases for sanctuary, migrants advocates said. Most, however, appear to be biding their time and considering their options, including seeking sanctuary in the United States, trying to cross illegally or remaining in Mexico.About 800 migrants associated with the caravan have made it to Tijuana so far, according to local officials and advocates, with thousands more still crossing Mexico and expected to arrive in the next several days.On the United States side of the border on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis traveled to Texas to meet with some of 5,600 American troops deployed to support border security as the caravan approached. He continued to stand by President Trumps order to send up to 15,000 American troops to the southwest border, telling soldiers on Wednesday that their mission is to put obstacles in the way of the approaching caravan.Mr. Trump has come under fire from critics who accuse him of stoking fears about the migrant caravan as a threat to get Republicans to the polls for the midterm elections. He has not tweeted about the caravan since the elections on Nov. 6.The Trump administration has reassigned border agents from El Paso, Texas and nearby crossings to Arizona and California in anticipation of the caravans arrival, said Hector Mancha, the El Paso director of the United States Customs and Border Protections field operations.From his place in line outside a soup kitchen in downtown Tijuana on Wednesday morning, Wisthon Jos Betancourt could see the tawny, sun-baked hills of Southern California off in the distance and the new life they suggested. Part of the vanguard of the caravan, he had just stumbled off a bus after an arduous day-and-a-half drive.On one hand, we feel some happiness for having arrived at this point, he said, allowing an exhausted smile. But were a little worried about what Trump is going to do.Since the caravans inception in Honduras in mid-October, the mass migration has bedeviled governments through the region and tested the humanitarian impulses of citizens along its route. The caravan itself has been struggling in fits and starts in recent days to make its way up the Pacific Coast.ImageCredit...Marco Ugarte/Associated PressOn Wednesday, thousands of migrants were arrayed in clumps between the states of Nayarit, Sinaloa and Sonora, trying to catch rides in private vehicles or waiting for buses donated by regional governments, churches and civic groups to take them north.Authorities in Tijuana said they expected between 1,500 and 2,000 migrants associated with the caravan to arrive by the end of the day on Thursday, with many hundreds more showing up throughout the rest of the week. That influx could possibly overwhelm the citys resources, they said.Another 2,400 migrants associated with two other separate caravans were in Mexico City on Wednesday, according to Nashieli Ramrez, the president of the citys human rights commission. That group was staying in a vast temporary shelter set up in a sports stadium.The main caravan started in mid-October in the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula, quickly gathering size as it crossed into Guatemala. Moving sometimes on foot and other times by hitching rides in passing cars and trucks, the migrants occasionally slept in shelters but more often bedded down on the central plazas and sidewalks of small towns and hamlets.In southern Mexico, the caravan, which included mostly young men but also many families with young children, began to show its fatigue. Some members fell behind to convalesce, remain in Mexico or return home. Others sheered off and moved ahead at a faster pace. At the same time, however, new caravans, inspired by the success of the first one, started materializing in Central America and heading north.Early this month, during a several-day stop in Mexico City where the municipal government provided shelter and care to the migrants, the main caravan had a chance to coalesce once again, expanding to an estimated 5,000 or so. Refreshed and emboldened, it resumed its trek north last week.The caravans leaders have been trying to hold the group together in the belief that there is safety in numbers and that a larger group sends a louder message about the plight of migrants and the poverty and violence many say they are fleeing.But the size of the main group, which has waxed and waned over the course of the trip, has also overwhelmed towns along its path. Many governments and their citizens have risen to the challenge, providing migrants with food, water, medical care and secondhand clothes, and allowing them to sleep in public spaces.That challenge now confronts government authorities and community organizations in Tijuana and the surrounding state of Baja California. And they are worried.Tijuana, long a migratory gateway to the United States, supports a constellation of migrant shelters. But most have capacity for only scores at a time, not hundreds and certainly not thousands. And on Wednesday, migrants advocates said the shelters were already half full days before the majority of the caravan was to arrive.Csar Anibal Palencia Chvez, Tijuanas director of migrant services, said Wednesday there were some 2,800 migrants not related to the caravan waiting their turn to apply for asylum at the United States border, with many of them filling the shelters. In addition, there were another 130 Mexican deportees, many also staying in the shelters.ImageCredit...Gregory Bull/Associated PressMr. Palencia said he had appealed to the federal government for assistance but had not received any.The federal government is not accompanying us, he said outside a soup kitchen and shelter in downtown Tijuana. Its worrisome for a city to be left alone.Tijuana and the state of Baja California recently weathered what migrants and human rights advocates described as a humanitarian crisis related to another mass migration.Haitian migrants, most of them traveling from Brazil, streamed into Tijuana in 2016 and 2017 in hopes of crossing into the United States. But a change in United States policy toward Haitian immigrants effectively shut the border to many, causing a backup in Tijuana.At the peak of the crisis, at least 4,500 Haitians were stuck in Tijuana, with civil society groups and individuals assuming most of the burden of caring for them.Now, with more than that number of migrants expected to gather in Tijuana and other northern Baja California municipalities in the coming days, the authorities could face a more severe situation.We feel that the same or worse is going to happen, Mr. Palencia said. Mexicos Interior Ministry declined to comment on the matter.Meanwhile, the migrants who have arrived faced an array of difficult choices. First and foremost: Where to sleep?Olvin Joel Lobo Reyes, 21, who said he left Honduras because of poverty and was seeking a job in the United States, arrived on Tuesday among a group of about 350 caravan migrants. He spent the night in a small shelter in downtown Tijuana that had no running water, and was planning to try his luck on Wednesday in Playas, a borough in western Tijuana.As for achieving his goal of getting a job in the United States, he had not figured out how he was going to do that. He was planning to wait for the bulk of the caravan to arrive because his understanding was that the group would march to the border en masse and see what Trump says.He, like many migrants, hoped that the force of the gesture would persuade the American authorities to relent and let them in. If that didnt happen, he had a Plan B: to stay in Mexico and look for work. And even a Plan C: to sneak across the American border with the aid of a smuggler.For now, however, he was going to bide his time and figure out the best move.Thanks to God, we made it, he said. All will be defined here. | World |
Dec. 9, 2015It pays to sit on the board of an oil, mining or energy company.Directors in the basic materials sector of the Standard & Poors 500-stock index had the highest pay compared with directors of companies in other industries, according to a new study by Equilar, an executive compensation firm in Redwood City, Calif. Their median retainer last year was $275,000, a 23.6 percent increase from 2010.Over all, for companies in the S.&P. 500, director pay hit a new high of $233,600 last year, according to Equilar, up 16.8 percent from 2010.The next highest paid were directors of technology and health care companies, where the median retainers were $265,000 each, up 15.8 percent for tech and 16.5 percent in health care. The pay of directors at consumer goods companies was $225,000, up 12.5 percent.Financial services was second lowest, next to utility companies. Median director pay was $205,000, up 16 percent.Director pay is on the rise while boards face greater scrutiny by proxy advisory services and activist shareholders. Boards are confronting more disclosure requirements and tougher regulations.We anticipate similar increases in the near future for directors as demands continue to grow in the post-Dodd Frank environment, said Matt Wolfson, a senior consultant with Meridian Compensation Partners.Institutional Shareholder Services, a proxy advisory firm in Rockville, Md., is pushing to limit the number of boards that non-chief executive directors sit on at any one time. I.S.S. now puts the limit at six boards. By 2017, it will recommend no more than five boards.Theres too much work and too much time required of directors, said Carol Bowie, the proxy advisory firms head of research in the Americas. Rising director pay is a reflection of the greater time commitment, she said.Pay is also on the rise as courts crack down on compensation plans for non-executive directors. A Delaware court ruled this year that plans should be evaluated under stricter standards, particularly where directors were deciding on equity compensation.The Equilar study found that 97.8 percent of S.&P. 500 company directors had some of their pay in cash, 36 percent had some stock and 59.4 percent had restricted stock units. In health care, 70 percent of the companies offered stock units as part of director pay. In financial services, only 48 percent offered units.Director roles matter, too. Non-executive board chairmen had a median retainer of $387,500, up 12.7 percent from 2010. | Business |
He explored how viruses multiply. An accomplished administrator, he also turned the Howard Hughes Medical Institute into a global biomedical powerhouse.Credit...via Choppin familyJuly 23, 2021Purnell Choppin, whose research on how viruses multiply helped lay the foundation for todays fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, died on July 3 at his home in Washington, one day shy of his 92nd birthday.His daughter, Kathleen, said the cause was prostate cancer.Dr. Choppin, who was born, raised and educated in Louisiana, arrived at Rockefeller University in Manhattan in 1957, just as a global influenza outbreak reached the city. He isolated six strains of the virus, including one from his own throat, which were used to develop anti-viral agents.He then set himself on a decades-long mission to discover how viruses multiplied. He was among the first to show how they invade cells and turn them into factories to produce more viruses, work that was seminal in vaccine development.Dr. Choppin (pronounced show-PAN) focused on measles and influenza, but his research, and the methods he developed to conduct it, proved critical for later work on other viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, the virus behind the Covid-19 pandemic, said David Baltimore, an emeritus professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology and a winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.The issue of how viruses infect cells was very much on his mind, and the mechanisms he worked out studying influenza were central to thinking about coronaviruses, Dr. Baltimore said. Thanks to his work and that of so many others, when the pandemic hit, we were able to formulate questions about the virus in quite precise terms.Dr. Choppin was equally well known as an administrator, first at Rockefeller and then at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which hired him in 1985 as its chief medical officer. He later ran the institute for 12 years, turning it from a modest-size research organization into a global research powerhouse.His death elicited an outpouring of remembrances from some of the highest-profile figures in medicine, including Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.With Purnells passing, he said, we have lost one of our pre-eminent physician-scientists and research administrators.ImageCredit...Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesGeorge Purnell Whittington Choppin was born in Baton Rouge, La., on July 4, 1929. His father, Arthur Choppin, was a chemistry professor at Louisiana State University, and his mother, Eunice (Bolin) Choppin, taught high school.As well as his daughter, his wife, Joan, survives him.After he took over at the Hughes Institute, Dr. Choppin liked to tell his colleagues a story about meeting their famously reclusive benefactor. In 1938, Hughes, an accomplished aviator as well as an industrialist, was stopping in Baton Rouge to refuel, and Arthur Choppin took 9-year-old Purnell and his brother, Arthur Jr., to see him. They shook hands, but, he said, his primary memory was that Hughes was very tall.Dr. Choppin graduated from high school at 16 and entered L.S.U., where he also attended medical school. He received his doctorate in 1953 and completed his residency at Washington University. He served in the Air Force, in Japan, from 1954 to 1955.He began at Rockefeller University as a postdoctoral fellow and was named a professor in 1959. He later moved into administration, and was a vice president and dean of graduate studies when the Howard Hughes Medical Institute hired him away.Howard Hughes had founded the institute in 1953, and later transferred his entire holdings in the Hughes Aircraft Company to it, for tax purposes, creating an awkward arrangement in which a medical-research nonprofit owned one of the countrys largest defense contractors.Just weeks before Dr. Choppin arrived, the institute sold the company to General Motors for $5.2 billion, immediately making it one of the countrys wealthiest philanthropies.In 1987, the institutes president was forced to resign after a financial scandal, and Dr. Choppin was named to replace him. Over the next decade he built it into a leading source of funding for biomedical research, doling out some $4.5 billion to hundreds of scientists as well as for undergraduate and high school science education.With a calm, easygoing demeanor that disguised a fierce, visionary ambition, Dr. Choppin took an innovative approach to funding. Unlike other institutions, which provide grants for specific projects, he focused on identifying top researchers and then showering them with money and resources. Even better, he did not ask them to move to the institute, in Chevy Chase, Md. they could stay where they were and let the Hughes largesse come to them.Dr. Choppin thought that doing so was less disruptive and made for better science, but it also made for great advertising, promoting the Hughes brand throughout the research world.It worked. In 1988 The Washington Post called the institute the modern version of the 15th century Medici family of Florence, adding that instead of art, the focus is medical science.Science magazine wrote that in Dr. Choppins hands, the presidency of the Hughes Institute was the most influential biomedical research job in the world.While Dr. Choppin was sometimes criticized for making safe bets on established scientists who probably didnt need his help, he made no apologies, and had the track record to prove the soundness of his approach: Dozens of Hughes researchers had gone on to become members of the National Academy of Sciences, and six won the Nobel Prize.We bet on people who look like they are going to be winners, he told The Washington Post in 1988. You look for originality. How they pick a problem and stick to it. Their instinct for the scientific jugular. | science |
The Four' Judge Charlie Walk Benches Himself Amid Sexual Harassment Allegation 1/31/2018 -- Walk will not appear in the finale of 'The Four' ... saying he made the decision not to attend "out of respect for the contestants, my fellow judges and everyone involved with the show." He says he doesn't want his presence to be a distraction, but denies the allegations against him by adding ... "there has been an extreme rush to judgment against me in this particular case which is unfair and inconsistent with anything that even actually happened." 'The Four' could be down from 4 judges to 3 very shortly -- FOX is reportedly close to cutting ties with Charlie Walk, the Republic Records honcho accused of sexually harassing a former employee. The approaching shakeup comes on the heels of Tristan Coopersmith's claim Walk repeatedly groped and harassed her during their years working together at Sony Music. Walk co-judged FOX's new talent search with Diddy, Meghan Trainor and DJ Khaled. Walk will appear on Thursday night's pre-taped episode of the show, but will not appear next week ... according to Deadline. Waiting for your permission to load the Instagram Media. Although, Charlie's denied Coopersmith's allegation ... he's also been suspended from Republic Records, which says it's hired a law firm to investigate the claims. | Entertainment |
Europe|Russian Official Seeks to Ban Beauty and the Beast Over Gay Characterhttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/world/europe/russia-beauty-beast-gay-character.htmlCredit...Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated PressMarch 6, 2017MOSCOW A Russian lawmaker who was the driving force behind a measure that banned the distribution of homosexual propaganda to minors said on Monday that the law should be applied to a new Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, even while acknowledging that he had not yet seen the movie.The lawmaker, Vitaly V. Milonov, relied on news media reports and complaints from parents that the childrens film includes a gay character who participates in a sexually deviated scene, said his spokesman, Ilya Yevstigneyev. This is an apparent reference not to the concept of love between a human and a beast but to a seconds-long glimpse of a gay character near the end of the movie dancing with the object of his affections.In this case, society cannot be silent about what film distributors are offering under the guise of a childrens tale, Mr. Milonov said in a letter to the Russian Culture Ministry, which oversees the film market. The obvious, blatant, shameless propaganda of sin, of perverted sexual relations.The release of the film coincides with the start of spring vacation for Russian schoolchildren, adding for Mr. Milonov a sense of urgency. Our common task, he writes, is to stop this music film from being shown on screens one way or another.There is no disputing that the movie, starring the British actress Emma Watson as Belle, features a gay character, LeFou, played by an American, Josh Gad. Bill Condon, the director, said as much in an interview with a British magazine, noting as a point of pride that it would be the first Disney movie to do so. Last week, a drive-in theater in rural Alabama cited similar arguments in declaring that it, too, would refuse to screen the movie.The Russian Culture Ministry did not respond to a request for comment, and Disney did not respond to a query.Fighting homosexuality has been a recurrent theme for Mr. Milonov, 43, a champion of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2013, he lobbied successfully for the homosexual propaganda law banning the distribution to minors of materials depicting nontraditional sexual relations.He and some associates also raided gay clubs in St. Petersburg to evict underage customers and once demanded the prosecution of the pop stars Madonna and Lady Gaga for spreading what he considered homosexual propaganda. | World |
on techThe arrest of a man for a crime he didnt commit shows the dangers of facial recognition technology.VideoCreditCredit...By Brian Matthew HartJune 25, 2020This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays.A lot of technology is pretty dumb, but we think its smart. My colleague Kashmir Hill showed the human toll of this mistake.Her article detailed how Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, a black man in Michigan, was accused of shoplifting on the basis of flawed police work that relied on faulty facial recognition technology. The software showed Williamss drivers license photo among possible matches with the man in the surveillance images, leading to Williamss arrest in a crime he didnt commit.(In response to Kashs article, prosecutors apologized for what happened to Williams and said he could have his case expunged.)Kash talked to me about how this happened, and what the arrest showed about the limits and accuracy of facial recognition technology.Shira: What a mess up. How did this happen?Kash: The police are supposed to use facial recognition identification only as an investigative lead. But instead, people treat facial recognition as a kind of magic. And thats why you get a case where someone was arrested based on flawed software combined with inadequate police work.But humans, not just computers, misidentify people in criminal cases.Absolutely. Witness testimony is also very troubling. That has been a selling point for many facial recognition technologies.Is the problem that the facial recognition technology is inaccurate?Thats one problem. A federal study of facial recognition algorithms found them to be biased and to wrongly identify people of color at higher rates than white people. The study included the two algorithms used in the image search that led to Williamss arrest.Sometimes the algorithm is good and sometimes its bad, and theres not always a great way to tell the difference. And theres usually no requirement for vetting the technology from policymakers, the government or law enforcement.Whats the broader problem?Companies that sell facial recognition software say it doesnt give a perfect match. It gives a score of how likely the facial images in databases match the one you search. The technology companies say none of this is probable cause for arrest. (At least, thats how they talk about it with a reporter for The New York Times.)But on the ground, officers see an image of a suspect next to a photo of the likeliest match, and it seems like the correct answer. I have seen facial recognition work well with some high-quality close-up images. But usually, police officers have grainy videos or a sketch, and computers dont work well in those cases.It feels as if we know computers are flawed, but we still believe the answers they spit out?I wrote about the owner of a Kansas farm who was harassed by law enforcement and random visitors because of a glitch in software that maps peoples locations from their internet addresses. People incorrectly thought the mapping software was flawless. Facial recognition has the same problem. People dont drill down into the technology, and they dont read the fine print about the inaccuracies.Hey, big tech: What about big structural change?Tech companies shouldnt say they want to help fight entrenched global problems like climate change and racial injustice without taking a hard look at how their products make things worse.That was the point that Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times, made about Facebook, Google and other internet companies that have proclaimed their support for the Black Lives Matter movement and announced donations, changes to their work force and other supportive measures in recent weeks.These are good steps. But as Kevin wrote and discussed on The Daily podcast, the companies havent tackled the ways that their internet hangouts have been created to reward exaggerated viewpoints that undermine movements like Black Lives Matter. They also havent addressed how their rewarding of boundary-pushing online behavior has contributed to racial division.Kevin said the tech companies actions were like fast-food chains getting together to fight obesity by donating to a vegan food co-op, rather than by lowering their calorie counts.I have similar feelings about Amazons creation of a $2 billion fund to back technologies that seek to combat climate change. Previously, Amazon had announced pledges to reduce its own carbon emissions by, for example, shifting its package-delivery fleet to electric vehicles. Again, great. But.Its not clear that Amazons efforts can fully offset the carbon emissions of delivering packages fast, or shipping bottles of laundry detergent across the country, or letting people try to return stuff without thinking twice.In short, Amazons carbon pledges might be nibbling around the edges of a problem to avoid considering how the company has shaped our shopping behaviors in an environmentally harmful way.Big structural changes are incredibly hard for the companies and us. Im not saying big tech companies necessarily have an obligation to fight racism or environmental destruction. But the companies say thats what they want to do. They might not be able to make a big difference without fundamentally changing how they operate.Before we go Great! Now do more: Google said it would start automatically deleting logs of peoples web and app activity and data on our location after 18 months, my colleague Dai Wakabayashi reported. This change applies only to new accounts, but its a healthy step to put some limits on the stockpiles of information Google has about us. Heres one more idea: Collect less data on us in the first place.The trustbusters are working hard on Google: Attorney General William Barr is unusually involved in the Justice Departments investigation into whether Google abuses its power, my colleagues David McCabe and Cecilia Kang write. (Here is my explanation of whats happening with Google.) Barrs interest shows the government is taking seriously its look into the power of big tech companies, but it also risks criticism that the investigation has more political than legal motivations.Tilting at windmills, but President Trumps campaign is considering drawing more supporters to its own smartphone app or other alternatives to big internet hangouts like Facebook and Twitter, The Wall Street Journal reported. Theres no chance Mr. Trump or his campaign can ditch big internet sites, but they are worried about social media policies that have limited some of their inflammatory posts. They share the fears of many people and organizations, including news outlets, that wish they relied less on the large internet hangouts to get noticed.Hugs to thisIts eerie, sweet and funny to see this Barcelona musical performance in a concert hall with houseplants filling the seats. (The plants will be donated to health care workers.)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...via Adam HarveyAn online tool targets only a small slice of whats out there, but may open some eyes to how widely artificial intelligence research fed on personal images.A mosaic of about 50,000 images from the MegaFace dataset, which includes over 3.5 million.Credit...via Adam HarveyPublished Jan. 31, 2021Updated Feb. 1, 2021When tech companies created the facial recognition systems that are rapidly remaking government surveillance and chipping away at personal privacy, they may have received help from an unexpected source: your face.Companies, universities and government labs have used millions of images collected from a hodgepodge of online sources to develop the technology. Now, researchers have built an online tool, Exposing.AI, that lets people search many of these image collections for their old photos.The tool, which matches images from the Flickr online photo-sharing service, offers a window onto the vast amounts of data needed to build a wide variety of A.I technologies, from facial recognition to online chatbots.People need to realize that some of their most intimate moments have been weaponized, said Liz OSullivan, the technology director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy and civil rights group. She collaborated on Exposing.AI with Adam Harvey, a researcher and artist in Berlin.Systems using artificial intelligence dont magically become smart. They learn by pinpointing patterns in data generated by humans photos, voice recordings, books, Wikipedia articles and all sorts of other material. The technology is getting better all the time, but it can learn human biases against women and minorities.People may not know they are contributing to A.I. education. For some, this is a curiosity. For others, it is enormously creepy. And it can be against the law. A 2008 law in Illinois, the Biometric Information Privacy Act, imposes financial penalties if the face scans of residents are used without their consent.In 2006, Brett Gaylor, a documentary filmmaker from Victoria, British Columbia, uploaded his honeymoon photos to Flickr, a popular service then. Nearly 15 years later, using an early version of Exposing.AI provided by Mr. Harvey, he discovered that hundreds of those photos had made their way into multiple data sets that may have been used to train facial recognition systems around the world.ImageCredit...via Brett GaylorFlickr, which was bought and sold by many companies over the years and is now owned by the photo-sharing service SmugMug, allowed users to share their photos under what is called a Creative Commons license. That license, common on internet sites, meant others could use the photos with certain restrictions, though these restrictions may have been ignored. In 2014, Yahoo, which owned Flickr at the time, used many of these photos in a data set meant to help with work on computer vision.Mr. Gaylor, 43, wondered how his photos could have bounced from place to place. Then he was told that the photos may have contributed to surveillance systems in the United States and other countries, and that one of these systems was used to track Chinas Uighur population.My curiosity turned to horror, he said.How honeymoon photos helped build surveillance systems in China is, in some ways, a story of unintended or unanticipated consequences.Years ago, A.I. researchers at leading universities and tech companies began gathering digital photos from a wide variety of sources, including photo-sharing services, social networks, dating sites like OkCupid and even cameras installed on college quads. They shared those photos with other organizations.That was just the norm for researchers. They all needed data to feed into their new A.I. systems, so they shared what they had. It was usually legal.One example was MegaFace, a data set created by professors at the University of Washington in 2015. They built it without the knowledge or consent of the people whose images they folded into its enormous pool of photos. The professors posted it to the internet so others could download it.MegaFace has been downloaded more than 6,000 times by companies and government agencies around the world, according to a New York Times public records request. They included the U.S. defense contractor Northrop Grumman; In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency; ByteDance, the parent company of the Chinese social media app TikTok; and the Chinese surveillance company Megvii.Researchers built MegaFace for use in an academic competition meant to spur the development of facial recognition systems. It was not intended for commercial use. But only a small percentage of those who downloaded MegaFace publicly participated in the competition.We are not in a position to discuss third-party projects, said Victor Balta, a University of Washington spokesman. MegaFace has been decommissioned, and MegaFace data are no longer being distributed.ImageCredit...Gilles Sabri for The New York TimesSome who downloaded the data have deployed facial recognition systems. Megvii was blacklisted last year by the Commerce Department after the Chinese government used its technology to monitor the countrys Uighur population.The University of Washington took MegaFace offline in May, and other organizations have removed other data sets. But copies of these files could be anywhere, and they are likely to be feeding new research.Ms. OSullivan and Mr. Harvey spent years trying to build a tool that could expose how all that data was being used. It was more difficult than they had anticipated.They wanted to accept someones photo and, using facial recognition, instantly tell that person how many times his or her face was included in one of these data sets. But they worried that such a tool could be used in bad ways by stalkers or by companies and nation states.The potential for harm seemed too great, said Ms. OSullivan, who is also vice president of responsible A.I. with Arthur, a New York company that helps businesses manage the behavior of A.I. technologies.In the end, they were forced to limit how people could search the tool and what results it delivered. The tool, as it works today, is not as effective as they would like. But the researchers worried that they could not expose the breadth of the problem without making it worse.Exposing.AI itself does not use facial recognition. It pinpoints photos only if you already have a way of pointing to them online, with, say, an internet address. People can search only for photos that were posted to Flickr, and they need a Flickr username, tag or internet address that can identify those photos. (This provides the proper security and privacy protections, the researchers said.)Though this limits the usefulness of the tool, it is still an eye-opener. Flickr images make up a significant swath of the facial recognition data sets that have been passed around the internet, including MegaFace.It is not hard to find photos that people have some personal connection to. Simply by searching through old emails for Flickr links, The Times turned up photos that, according to Exposing.AI, were used in MegaFace and other facial recognition data sets.Several belonged to Parisa Tabriz, a well-known security researcher at Google. She did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Gaylor is particularly disturbed by what he has discovered through the tool because he once believed that the free flow of information on the internet was mostly a positive thing. He used Flickr because it gave others the right to use his photos through the Creative Commons license.I am now living the consequences, he said.His hope and the hope of Ms. OSullivan and Mr. Harvey is that companies and government will develop new norms, policies and laws that prevent mass collection of personal data. He is making a documentary about the long, winding and occasionally disturbing path of his honeymoon photos to shine a light on the problem.Mr. Harvey is adamant that something has to change. We need to dismantle these as soon as possible before they do more harm, he said. | Tech |
Credit...Josh Haner/The New York TimesFeb. 9, 2014KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia Dominant in the training runs, Bode Miller charged out of the start to the mens downhill Sunday and was soon leading by roughly a third of a second.But Miller, faster in the scary steeps and smoother off the soaring jumps, then did something he vowed to avoid. He unnecessarily chased an extra millisecond, slamming his head and shoulder into a gate panel to cut off a precious few feet of the plunging descent.It was a miscalculation of time and place.He basically took the gate out, said Sasha Rearick, the United States mens Alpine head coach. Sometimes its faster; in that situation, its not.It was slower for the most paradoxical reasons at that juncture of the course, the downhill went uphill. With his momentum impeded by contact with the gate, Miller slowed into the incline of a big jump known as the Bears Brow.The record-setting gold-medal performance Miller was chasing vanished over the crest. By the time his skis regained contact with the snow, Miller was far behind. He finished eighth.Matthias Mayer, the 23-year-old son of an Olympic medalist, went on to win the race, the first Austrian to claim an Olympic downhill gold medal in a dozen years. The unheralded Mayer, who has never finished higher than fifth in a World Cup downhill, was the surprise winner, something he readily acknowledged.This is unbelievable, Mayer said as his countrymen cheered and serenaded him near the finish line. I thought maybe in a few years I could dream of this sort of achievement. It came sooner.Mayers time of 2 minutes 6.23 seconds on the treacherous racecourse at the Rosa Khutor Alpine Resort here was 0.06 of a second better than Christof Innerhofer of Italy. Kjetil Jansrud of Norway earned the bronze medal, 0.10 behind Innerhofer.Aksel Lund Svindal, the prerace co-favorite with Miller, also faltered, finishing fourth.Mayers victory may signal a budding resurrection of the vaunted Austrian Alpine team, which did not win a medal at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Mayer hails from the same region of southern Austria as Fritz Strobl, the downhill champion at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. Mayers father, Helmut, was the silver medalist in the super-G at the 1988 Calgary Olympics.I am young, but I have been around ski racing a long time, said Mayer, who may be the most surprising Olympic downhill winner since Jean-Luc Crtier of France in 1998 in Nagano, Japan. I know how much this means to me, my family and my country. It is for your legacy.Miller was trying to add a signature victory to his notable ski racing rsum, and he was also at the precipice of history. Had he won, at 36 years old, he would have become the oldest gold medalist in Alpine history. If he had won any medal, his six career Olympic medals would have become the second most by a male Alpine skier, trailing only Kjetil Andre Aamodt of Norway.And Sunday unquestionably appeared to be Millers best chance to finally claim the celebrated downhill in his fifth Olympics. No one had attacked the 2.2-mile-long, perilous and challenging racecourse as Miller had, defying the icy, bone-jarring high-speed turns with a veterans experience and the gifted touch for the snow he has always exhibited.But Miller skied with at least one disadvantage on Sunday. Though the forecast was for a sunny day, clouds remained as the race started, which cast a flat light on the slick snow and made visibility more difficult than it had been for the training runs.Miller, not usually one to make excuses, said the poorer visibility made it harder for him to attack.I ski on the edge and I need to see every bump or variation in the snow, he said. It was a little thing, but ski racing is all about the little things.But it was two classic Miller traits fearless ambition and an inability to leave well enough alone that ultimately became his undoing.As Rearick said, Today, we didnt want to make a mistake.Millers skis and tactics in training were obviously faster than anyone elses. A principal goal on Sunday was not to waver too much from a plan that had been successful all week.As he had in previous days, Miller dashed through the stirring and pitched start to vault into the lead. After flying off the Russian Trampoline jump, Miller entered a section of linked turns in moderate terrain still looking like an unstoppable force. Then came the risky opportunity Miller could not ignore.Bode tried pinching that left-footed turn too close and ended up putting his head through the panel, said Millers teammate Travis Ganong, who had the race of his life and finished fifth.Miller, typically, did not call that strategy a mistake. But in the timed intervals, he went from 0.31 of a second ahead of the field to 0.02 behind Mayer. As the tactical error continued to slow him, he then fell 0.51 back. His quest for gold was essentially over at that moment.ImageCredit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesBode wanted it; he wanted it too much, Rearick said, adding that Miller usually focuses on the process of racing not the result.Rearick added: Today, we let a gold-medal result get in our way. His skiing wasnt as crisp and clean from top to bottom as he can be.Afterward, Miller was still ruminating about other factors softer snow, the dim light but he was willing to recognize what he had lost.I would have loved to win, said the racer who for years insisted that results were meaningless compared with the purity of an effort. Its a premiere event.Just after he crossed the finish line, Miller gazed at the scoreboard and seemed perplexed that his name was not at the top. Alone, he bent backward, almost sitting on the tails of his skis in contemplation for a few seconds.I like to make a judgment of myself make a little sense of what happened before others do that for me, Miller, who will race four more times at the Sochi Olympics, said. So I took that time right there.Asked the summation of his thoughts after he stood and quickly removed his skis, he answered: This is going to be a tough one to swallow. | Sports |
Some people may test positive for the coronavirus for 10 days or longer, but interpreting those results remains difficult, experts said.Credit...Danielle St. Laurent for The New York TimesMay 29, 2022The Omicron variant of the coronavirus moves fast. Symptoms typically appear just a few days after infection, with viral levels peaking less than five days after the pathogen first becomes detectable.But for some people, the virus seems to linger, with at-home tests coming back positive day after day, even after other people in the household return to work or school. So why do some people test positive for the virus for 10 or 12 or even 14 days and are they still infectious after so long?Its a great question its one that I get asked all the time, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco.It is also one without an easy answer. Although rapid antigen tests, which detect proteins on the outside of the coronavirus, can flag people carrying high levels of the virus, they are not perfect predictors of infectiousness.Studies suggest that while most people stop testing positive on antigen tests sometime during the first 10 days of their illnesses, a notable subset of people continue to test positive for longer, for reasons that scientists do not entirely understand.In some cases, these people may still be shedding infectious virus, but in others, the tests may be picking up viral debris from a waning infection, experts say, making it difficult to know how to interpret the results.Some people may not be infectious at the end of their course even if still antigen-positive, whereas others may be infectious even if antigen-negative, said Dr. Yonatan Grad, an immunologist and infectious disease expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.Indeed, scientists disagreed on the best course of action for people who test positive for more than 10 days. While some say that the most prudent path is to continue to isolate, others argue that prolonged isolation is unnecessary for most otherwise healthy people.Given the uncertainty, some experts have advised that test results at the end of an infection be viewed as just one potentially useful piece of information considered in concert with other factors, including a patients symptoms and immune status. Along those lines, Dr. Chin-Hong recommended using the rapid test as a guide but not the be-all and end-all.What we knowStudies conducted before the emergence of Omicron demonstrated that people with Covid-19 were most likely to spread the virus in the few days before and after developing symptoms.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited these findings when explaining its decision to shorten its isolation guidelines late last year. While the old guidelines recommended that patients isolate for 10 days, the current recommendations say that many people can leave isolation after five days, although they should wear a mask through Day 10.Research also suggests that rapid antigen tests are most likely to be positive early in the course of illness, but there is considerable variation.According to a new analysis of people who sought repeat testing at a California site during the Omicron wave, an estimated 71 percent were antigen-positive four days after their symptoms appeared or after they first tested positive for the virus. That percentage declined over the following days, but an estimated 20 percent were still positive on Day 11, according to the study, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal.For some people, theyre seeing fairly prolonged courses of being antigen-positive, Dr. Grad said. I think we chalk it up to some variation in peoples immune system and ability to respond to infection and clear this virus.Indeed, a pair of recent studies, neither of which has been reviewed by experts, suggest that some people with Omicron infections shed infectious virus capable of replicating in a cell culture, or a dish of live cells in the laboratory for more than a week.Thats a pretty good indication that theyre likely to be infectious, said Dr. Amy Barczak, an infectious disease expert at Massachusetts General Hospital, who found that 25 percent of people still had viable virus on Day Eight or beyond.In the other study, which enrolled vaccinated students and staff at Boston University, researchers found that while most participants no longer had positive viral cultures six days after their symptoms began, a small number had viable virus as late as Day 12.What we dont knowImageCredit...Julia Rendleman for The New York TimesHowever, there is not a perfect correlation between someones antigen test results and whether their virus can be grown in culture. In a small, preliminary subanalysis, the Boston University researchers found that while a negative antigen test was a reliable indicator that the person would also have negative viral cultures, a positive test was not predictive of a positive culture.You can be somewhat reassured by a negative test, but the positive test is not particularly helpful, said Dr. Tara Bouton, an infectious disease specialist at the Boston University School of Medicine and an author of the study.Dr. Barczaks team found that some people tested antigen-positive slightly beyond the point of having positive viral cultures. This suggests that at the end of an infection, there may be a brief period during which the tests are simply detecting lingering bits of viral protein. The study was not large enough to draw conclusions about how common this would be or how long the effect might last, she said.Precisely why some people test positive longer than others is not entirely known. In general, people with weaker immune systems are likely to take longer to fight off the virus, scientists said, although even young, healthy and fully vaccinated people may be positive for extended periods.Another possibility is that people exposed to large doses of the virus might take longer to clear it from their systems, said Aubree Gordon, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.Tests also differ in their sensitivity, and people differ in how they perform them. Some people do a swab test and its like they barely touch their nose, Dr. Gordon said. Whereas with other individuals actually, with a family member recently, I had to be like, Dont hurt yourself, because they were really, really getting in there.What to doOne lesson is that prolonged positive results are common enough that people who leave isolation before Day 10 should continue to take precautions, such as wearing a well-fitting mask, experts said.Beyond that, scientists disagreed. Some recommended that people isolate until they test antigen-negative, even if it takes more than 10 days.We can now tailor recommendations to individual experiences using the rapid test results to guide us, Dr. Grad said. And since we know that some people can have prolonged courses, it seems reasonable to me that if you are able to continue isolating if positive, you should do so.But several others said that, as a matter of public health policy, it does not make sense to ask most otherwise healthy people to isolate, or even keep testing, for more than 10 days.Nobodys saying that there arent some people, maybe statistically speaking at the end of the tail, who might transmit after Day 10, Dr. Chin-Hong said. But people at that stage of infection would not be likely to play a large role in spreading the virus, and continued testing could keep many people out of work or school without much public health benefit, he said. And also you raise an equity issue, he added, like, Who on Earth can have enough tests?Even then, experts say, there are some circumstances in which people should continue to test and potentially isolate beyond Day 10. They include people whose symptoms are not improving and those who are immunocompromised, as they may shed infectious virus for longer periods of time. (The C.D.C. recommends that people with weakened immune systems isolate for up to 20 days.)There are also recent reports that people who take the antiviral drug Paxlovid may see their symptoms rebound after stopping the medication. If they have symptoms that come back again after treatment, then it might be reasonable to extend isolation and to think about using tests, Dr. Bouton said. Viral load may come up in that situation.And people who have recently recovered from Covid might want to take a rapid test as a precaution before engaging in any particularly risky activities, such as meeting with an immunocompromised person or attending a large, indoor event. If they test positive, they should proceed as though they might be contagious, Dr. Gordon said.Theyre probably less contagious than they were in the in the first few days, she added. But I would still certainly advise some caution. | Health |
The animal was buried in a lump of frozen mud in Russia, its fur, whiskers and body fully intact. Scientists are studying its DNA to understand whether it is a dog or a wolf. Credit...Sergei Fyodorov/The Yakutsk Mammoth Museum, via Associated PressDec. 2, 2019An 18,000-year-old puppy buried for centuries in a lump of frozen mud was unveiled on Monday by scientists who hope it can help bridge the connection between dogs and wolves.The puppy, which was male, was discovered 18 months ago, preserved in a layer of permafrost in Siberias Far Eastern reaches, according to Dave Stanton, a research fellow at the Center for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm and one of the scientists who examined its DNA. The fur, skeleton, teeth, head, lashes and whiskers of the pup, named Dogor, are still intact, he said. But scientists dont know whether it is a dog or wolf. Dr. Stanton said more DNA research would be conducted in the coming months.We need to put this information into context, he said in an interview.Many scientists say dogs evolved about 15,000 years ago from a species of extinct wolves. Others suggest it could have happened much earlier, perhaps 30,000 years ago or more. These wolves evolved after generations of exposure to humans, were domesticated and became the canine companions we know today.ImageCredit...Michil Yakovlev/EPA, via ShutterstockThe puppy, which was found by locals, is being studied at North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, the capital of Yakutia, a sprawling region in eastern Siberia that constitutes 20 percent of Russia. (The puppy remains were found near Yakutsk.) Nikolai Androsov, director of the Northern World museum where the remains will be kept, presented the discovery on Monday, according to The Associated Press. Yakutia is known for its oil and gas reserves and abundance of diamond mines.Several extinct animals have been found in the thick permafrost, in part because of the melting of ice resulting from climate change. They include a male steppe bison, a woolly rhinoceros, a mummified pony and several mammoths. Dr. Stanton said treasure seekers sometimes used water cannons to break through the permafrost to extract mammoth ivory tusks, which are later sold.It must have frozen quickly before scavengers could get to it, Dr. Stanton said of the puppy. We also found a lot of samples that were not well preserved. There seems to be natural traps in the landscape where animals are frozen before they decomposed.ImageCredit...Alessandro Di Ciommo/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesHe said the DNA used to date the puppy and figure out its gender was extracted from a rib bone. He said he was not sure if an autopsy was performed to see if its organs, including the heart and liver, were intact. The body is well preserved, which is rare, Dr. Stanton said. Its the best Ive seen.Modern dogs are not like modern wolves. Wolves are reluctant to eat in front of people, for example, while domesticated dogs beg for dinner table scraps. Their physiology is different, with dogs having shorter snouts and wider skulls. And male wolves participate in pup raising, while male dogs generally avoid it.Dr. Stanton said the dating of the dog was done at Oxford University, and he and his colleagues will continue to collaborate with scientists at North-Eastern Federal University.We need to look at more samples from that time period, he said. Then we will be able to understand if it was a dog or a wolf. | science |
Inside the RingsCredit...Mike Blake/ReutersFeb. 11, 2014KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia The athletes willingly accept the risks in winter sports in which yesterdays jaw-dropping trick too quickly becomes the new normal.But their parents must learn to live with them, too, and on a Tuesday afternoon in the Caucasus Mountains that was full of pride and joy for Doug and Dee Howell, there were also many in-their-face reminders of the dark side of the extreme.On the day their 19-year-old daughter, Dara, won a gold medal in the first slopestyle skiing event in Olympic history, other Canadian pioneers like Kaya Turski and Yuki Tsubota were not so fortunate in soft, quick-morphing conditions that were difficult to read.I get very upset, said Dee Howell, Daras mother. I was in tears for Kaya and for Yuki when they both fell. Im in tears because I dont want to see anybody get hurt. Thats the last thing I want to see.Turski, the dominant force in the event, who is coming back from experimental knee surgery, crashed twice in qualifying Tuesday morning and did not make the final.Tsubota, who was still in contention for a medal, misjudged her final jump in the second run and landed awkwardly on the flat, instead of the steep, downslope, her helmet and upper body absorbing the considerable impact.In full view of the Howells and the rest of the crowd gathered below, she skidded down the hill and was soon surrounded by medical personnel as the spectators and her competitors went quiet. She was carried off on a stretcher and taken to a hospital, where Peter Judge, the chief executive of the Canadian Freestyle Skiing Association, said she was being treated for a jaw injury.We dont know the extent of it yet, Judge said. There is no other issue with other appendages or parts of her body, no concussion or anything like that.That was most reassuring, but the scare definitely took some of the festivity out of the mood.I know from Daras perspective that theres always an inherent risk, but she wont do a new trick until shes comfortable, Dee Howell said. And theres a progression that they do, which they start with trampolines and then they do water ramps and take it to snow. So theres a process, and she wouldnt do a new trick unless she were comfortable doing it.Her newest one, a switch misty 900 mute grab, was quite something to pronounce and behold. The off-axis maneuver with two-and-a-half rotations from a backward takeoff was the highlight of a cocksure opening run that piled up 94.20 points out of a possible 100 and won her the gold by nearly 9 points over Devin Logan of the United States.But in Howell and Logans high-risk, high-reward event, it is clearly a question of when injuries will occur, not if. This is of course no different from many other winter sports, even the traditional ones that have had plenty of years and Olympics to address the problem.Just try to find a veteran Alpine speed skier who has not had a knee injury. Just try to watch video of the very nasty crash that knocked out the ski jumper Thomas Morgenstern in Austria last month without bringing your hand reflexively to your eyes.I enjoy every day because every day can be the last one, Morgenstern said in an interview with BBC.Morgenstern is competing in Sochi despite his injuries, but not all accidents end in stirring comebacks. And even without the fresh reminders of the dangers Tuesday, the inaugural Olympic slopestyle event would have been bittersweet, above all for Canadians.These are the Games where their charismatic compatriot Sarah Burke should have made her Olympic debut. Burke was the young woman who lobbied hard and effectively for the freestyle skiing disciplines of slopestyle and halfpipe to join the biggest events: first the Winter X Games and now the Olympics. But while training in January 2012, she hit her head performing a maneuver she had long mastered on a halfpipe in Park City, Utah.She died from her injuries nine days later at age 29, but she has still been a presence in Sochi even if the International Olympic Committee has asked athletes not to put stickers commemorating her memory on their clothing or equipment.This seems heartless but comprehensible: If the I.O.C. allows one symbolic gesture, where does it draw the line? But the Canadians invoked her memory plenty Tuesday, with Kim Lamarre, who was her friend, winning the bronze medal after a fine second run.Before I started, I looked up, and I said, Sarah, lets do this together, Lamarre said. And when I landed I was like, Yeah Sarah we did it. Burkes death, rightfully, set off an intense round of discussion in Canada about the merits of extreme sports.It seems that the discussion needs to happen elsewhere, too. It was disturbing Monday to listen to Trevor Jacob, a 20-year-old American snowboard cross rider, blithely discuss the over 25 concussions he has sustained on snow and in other extreme sports.I dont remember a lot, he said, smiling.You would figure elite athletes from North America would be past this kind of bravado considering how much attention has been focused on the long-term risks of concussions of late.But how do you limit the damage in events where the thrills are also in the potential for spills? Humanitys ability to process novelty certainly bears some of the blame. The first time I watched a ski-jumping competition, the sense of wonder lasted for less than a round, by which time it seemed perfectly normal that someone could fly for nearly 100 meters with only their technique and their moxie to preserve them.On Sunday in the mens downhill, the crowd in the finish area roared in unison as the big screen showed the opening racer, Steve Nyman, fly off a huge jump. The volume diminished with each of the next few competitors, and the crowd was soon (very soon) greeting video from the same jump with little fanfare.Our eyes and brains adjust in a hurry, and that pressure can be particularly acute in a sport like slopestyle, which is not a race but all about being higher, fancier, cooler as the skiers navigate rails and then a series of big jumps.Television, by the way, does no justice to the challenge. Standing in the finish area, the face of the final jump looked like a Waimea wave about to break. Just imagine how it looked to a parent of one of the pioneers.You have to trust your kids to some extent, Doug Howell said. Weve kept Dara very busy in sport at the expense of her social life. I mean, she still does have a social life, but we see other things going on with kids, and I think shes safer where she is, doing what shes doing, than being out with her friends and partying.Dara Howell is now and forever the first skier to win an Olympic gold in slopestyle. She is young and full of exuberance. On Tuesday, you could hear her roar, see her soar. But as she walked off a winner, laughing with her family and checking her smartphone to see how much her Twitter follower count had risen, it seemed more than a little poignant that the woman who inspired her to join the sport just four years ago was Burke. | Sports |
Olympics|Jamaican Bobsledders Are Back, With Fans Helphttps://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/sports/olympics/jamaican-bobsledders-are-back-with-fans-help.htmlCredit...Jae C. Hong/Associated PressFeb. 6, 2014KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia When Winston Watts put on his helmet to begin Jamaicas first trip down an Olympic bobsled track in 12 years, he was surprised by what he felt in his eyes. It was not tears of emotion; no, this substance was grittier and chalkier. After a moment, he figured it out: He had protein powder dribbling down his face.Our bags were lost on the flight over, he explained at the end of Thursdays training session. They showed up at midnight last night. But everything was opened. I dont know who it was security, I guess they opened up everything. The bottle was sealed, too they took off the top and broke the seal, and powder was everywhere.Despite the powder in his eyes and a travel nightmare that included a connecting flight through Kennedy Airport that was diverted because of snow in the New York metropolitan area Watts maintained relentless positivity. He and his brakeman, Marvin Dixon, missed the first day of bobsled training because their equipment arrived late, but that did not damper Wattss spirit.As something of a celebrity ambassador for bobsled because of the popularity of the cult-classic film Cool Runnings, Watts said he believed the Jamaicans presence enhanced the mood of the entire bobsled community.When Jamaica is not around, they are not happy we make people smile all the time, he said. We are loving and caring. We are from the sunshine!Certainly the Jamaicans popularity is undeniable. After qualifying for the Sochi Games, Watts and Dixon began a fund-raising drive mostly via the Internet to raise money for better equipment and other expenses that come with competing in the Olympics. The efforts raised about $178,000, Watts said, a figure that far exceeded their expectations and ultimately led the Jamaicans to politely ask their fans to stop donating.We are not greedy, Watts said. Our fans were amazing and we are here and we have better equipment. We are happy.Watts would not speculate on how well he thought he and Dixon would do in the two-man bobsled competition, which begins Feb. 16. He did, however, point out that his country has a strong history of going fast on tracks, albeit of a slightly different sort.When asked if Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter who has dominated the world track and field circuit, would make a suitable bobsled teammate, Watts beamed.Watts said that he had not heard from Bolt Hes a busy guy, he doesnt have any time to text me but that he would surely welcome him if Bolt ever decided to seek Olympic glory in the winter instead of the summer.He could be a very good pusher, Watts said. But I think hes not a person who likes cold. | Sports |
Credit...Stefan Wermuth/ReutersMarch 9, 2017LONDON Theresa May, Britains accidental prime minister, seems unassailable, with her opposition in disorder.But there are increasing uncertainties around Britains decision to leave the European Union and an inevitable gathering of opposition to her decision to go for a hard break with the bloc, particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland but also, increasingly, in England.A bill to allow the government to start its formal notice of resignation from the European Union, known as Brexit, is wending its way through Parliament. With noisy bouts of disagreement from the House of Lords, pressure is growing on Mrs. May, of the Conservative Party, to call an early general election to solidify her narrow majority in the House of Commons while the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats remain in disarray.Mrs. May has vowed that she will invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty by the end of March, beginning the two-year process of withdrawing from the European Union. She may do it even sooner, before the other 27 nations of the European Union gather in Rome on March 25 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome that led to the founding of the bloc. Some are urging her to call for an election at the same time.However, Mrs. May has vowed not to hold an election before the next scheduled vote, in May 2020. And she is usually described as someone with contempt for those who treat promises as ephemeral.But the temptation is strong, articulated this week by William Hague, the former Conservative Party leader, speaking for other Tory legislators, who urged her to capitalize on Labours woes.Given the challenges of the Brexit negotiations, new agitation for independence in Scotland, anxiety about the Irish border and a Trump administration, Mr. Hague argued that she and her government would be in a much stronger position if they had a large and decisive majority in the Commons and a new full term ahead of them.An election would catch the Labour Party in its worst condition since the early Thirties, and with its least credible leader ever, Mr. Hague wrote, referring to Jeremy Corbyn. That, he added, would strengthen the governments hand at home and abroad.The argument was underlined by Mrs. Mays second defeat in the House of Lords over the bill authorizing her to invoke Article 50. She insists that she will pass the bill again through the Commons without amendment (judging that the Lords, the advisory chamber, will then accede to it).That remains most likely. But the amendments reflected wider concern among the political and economic elite of the country that the hard Brexit she envisages leaving Britain outside the single market and customs union ought to be subject to some form of credible parliamentary review at the end of the process.To show her toughness on the issue, Mrs. May fired Michael Heseltine, 83, a former Conservative deputy prime minister now in the House of Lords, as a government adviser for voting against her wishes. But her response also seemed edgy and disproportionate.The invocation of Article 50 begins a two-year period of negotiation with the European Union over the terms of the divorce and a framework for a future relationship. The British government is understandably coy now about how it will negotiate, but Parliament will have a final vote on whatever deal is reached in 2019.ImageCredit...Neil Hall/ReutersWhile some in the House of Lords and the Commons want that vote to be meaningful, others believe that by then it will be too late for Parliament to do more than accept whatever deal the government has managed to secure, since rejection would mean a blunt break with the European Union and no shock-cushioning deals on trade, customs or regulations.But the political mood is already febrile, with Northern Irelands politics stalemated, anxiety over the future of the border with Ireland and Scotland talking seriously about another referendum on independence.Scotland in particular has been upset by the Brexit vote, after having voted resoundingly to remain in the bloc. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotlands first minister, told the BBC on Thursday that autumn 2018 was the common sense time to hold a referendum, if that is the road we choose to go down.So the logic of an early election is clear. Given the mess of the Labour Party under Mr. Corbyn, and the weakness of the Liberal Democrats, Mrs. Mays Conservatives might be able to win a majority of 100 or so in the Commons, a much safer figure than now, which is a working majority of 17.A larger majority would take a lot of the pressure off Mrs. May in the Brexit negotiations, which are clearly going to be difficult and are unlikely to produce the glorious outcome that some in Britain imagined last June, when they voted for independence from the European Union.There would be another benefit. Mrs. May, who became prime minister in a foreshortened vote of her own party when David Cameron suddenly quit, after he was on the losing side of the Brexit referendum, would be able to claim her own personal mandate on her own platform. A larger majority would also put to rest any prospect of a parliamentary rebellion in 2019, when a final Brexit bill would presumably come to a vote.Mr. Hague pointed to the complexity of Brexit, saying that any deal is bound to be full of compromises which one group or another in Parliament finds difficult to stomach. And as British law needs to be amended countless times to take account of leaving the E.U. treaties, the government could face many close votes, concessions or defeats as it tries to implement Brexit.And that perceived weakness, he judged, will embolden the E.U. negotiators, and makes an agreement that is good for the U.K. harder to achieve.Gordon Brown, when he took over as Labour Party prime minister from Tony Blair in 2007, hesitated to call an early election to take advantage of his honeymoon popularity and win a fresh mandate. After the recession of 2008, Mr. Brown lost the 2010 election and stepped down.But Steven Fielding, a professor of political history at Nottingham University, said that he expected Mrs. May to keep her word, about the election timing and delivering Brexit, in the hope of creating a longer lasting political realignment that could keep the Conservatives in power for many years, long after Corbyn shuffles off the stage.By carrying out Brexit, she neutralizes UKIP in the south and takes away the votes UKIP thought theyd get from Labour in the north, he said. Brexit has given the Tories an opportunity, and Corbyn has magnified it. UKIP is a right-wing populist party in Britain.Even if Mr. Corbyn were to be replaced before 2020, by then Mrs. May will have delivered Brexit as she promised, for good or ill, and, if not Corbyn, Labour will have a transitional leader that would have to make big compromises with his supporters in the party.Mr. Corbyn said that the party would be ready for an election whenever it came, and cautioned, Do not underestimate the support there is for the Labour Party. | World |
Feb. 11, 2014SOCHI, Russia Figure skating is the only Winter Olympic sport in which a competitor is so alone for so many minutes, so isolated in a contained space, accompanied only by thoughts that can be as quivery as tired legs.There is a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other side, said Patrick Chan, 23, the reigning three-time world champion from Canada and an Olympic favorite who has struggled with self-assurance. Its a constant battle between positive and negative thoughts.During the 2 minutes 50 seconds of the mens short program Thursday, Chan will take the ice as the worlds most complete skater. His four-revolution jumps are airy. He seems to reach top speed with two whispery crosscut strokes of his blades. His edging and skating skills are precise and exquisite.Hes the most consistent at everything, Johnny Weir of the United States, who finished sixth at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, said of Chan. He jumps as well as he spins as well as he skates.And yet Chan has appeared insecure at times in his recent performances and interviews. He has developed a reputation for falling in major competitions and still receiving high scores, which his critics call Chanflation. And he bears the weight of historical disappointment: No male skater from Canada has won an individual Olympic gold medal.Chan finished second to mens skatings hottest competitor, Yuzuru Hanyu, 19, of Japan, in December at the Grand Prix Final, an Olympic tuneup. At the Canadian national championships in January, Chan easily won but veered into sloppiness.Last week, he finished third in the short program of the Olympic team competition behind Hanyu and the charismatic Evgeni Plushenko of Russia, reducing a planned quadruple-toe, triple-toe combination jump and stepping out of a triple axel.ImageCredit...Tatyana Zenkovich/European Pressphoto AgencyThe decisive question in the mens individual competition, which will conclude with a long program of four and a half minutes Friday, is, Who will wilt? said Dick Button, the two-time Olympic champion.The issue of composure faces not only Chan, but every male skater. Even Plushenko, 31, a four-time Olympic medalist, admitted feeling slightly dizzy before a loud, adoring home audience in the team competition.All of the work has been done physically, said Jeremy Abbott, a four-time American champion who trains with Chan at Detroit Skating Club and succumbed to nerves in the Olympic team short program. Once youre out there, its all about the mental game.Each skater has his own method to try to calm himself and prevent a self-destructive inner voice from intruding. Jason Brown of the United States skates without his glasses, leaving him unable to see the eyes of the spectators.Its all a bit of a blur, Brown said. It helps me perform and emote to the audience better.Skaters often recite key words to themselves to trigger a particular spin, jump or piece of footwork. Abbott has trained using percussive sounds of a drummer who helps golfers with their swings. The sound provides a certain rhythm for counting to six as he launches into a quadruple jump.Abbott has also brought an inflatable bed to Sochi to help him sleep, consulted his sports psychologist during Skype sessions and moved to a hotel because he became distracted in the Olympic Village, where life seemed more like summer camp than the Olympic Games.Its probably the same for every athlete, Abbott said. Its really the doubt that drives us to succeed, because if we were all confident, we would all be complacent.At Skate Canada in October in St. John, New Brunswick, Chan said in an interview that his biggest goal for this season was landing on my feet.Given the completeness of his routines, Chan said, he believed that a clean short and long program at the Olympics would make for an unbeatable program and skater.ImageCredit...Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesStaying on his feet was a mental thing, not a technical thing at all, Chan said. I can do all my jumps in practice, three in a row, five out of five, four out of five.At competitions like the Olympics, though, he said: Its being able to manage the pressure, being on the ice on your own. All eyes are on you. All you hear is your music and nobody else. Theres not a word in the crowd. Its a very different feeling to perform under those situations.As a teenager, Chan finished fifth at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Skating before a home crowd, he has said he felt like a puppy in puppy day care. But he has become a multiple world champion since then. And with his success has come pressure and expectation.During the past year and a half, Chan has tried to take more responsibility in his personal and professional lives. He moved his training from Colorado Springs to Detroit and began living apart from his mother, Karen, cooking his own meals, doing his own chores.I can go to a competition on my own and not feel like a lost puppy, Chan said. I really feel in control of what I need to do.Yet, in the Olympic team competition, while Plushenko strutted as the consummate showman, Chan stumbled through his short program. Russia took the gold medal, while Canada settled for silver.Patrick is the favorite and hes also made himself the favorite, which I find refreshing, said Tara Lipinski, the 1998 womens Olympic champion. People are here to win gold medals. When you say you just want to skate your best, that obviously isnt the real truth. Its refreshing to hear him say this is his time, this is his medal. At the same time, if you are going to talk the talk, youve got to walk the walk.Chan said he was trying to relax, to avoid becoming stressed over every element of his routines. Yet he has been asking himself questions filled with doubt. Is he as well-trained as the others? Are his quadruple jumps as worthy as Hanyus?And, most unsettling, Am I going to beat them, even if I skate my best? | Sports |
Black Panther' Star Movie Shows Africa's Potential If Not for Slavery!!! 1/30/2018 TMZ.com The King from "Black Panther" says his Marvel movie is way more than a superhero flick -- it's also going to debunk a bunch of stereotypes about Africa. In other words ... school's in! We got John Kani, who plays King T'Chaka, and asked if he thinks the highly anticipated film will ease racial tensions in America. His answer was, quite frankly, awesome. John also weighed in on fashion. Yes, fashion. Not BP's, but Bey's. He told us Beyonce was channeling the African tradition of getting glammed for any occasion ... when she stepped out in all-black at the Grammys. He also thinks she was supporting the 'BP' cause -- and he's all for it. | Entertainment |
Miley Cyrus 2018 Beach Bod ... Already on Point 1/27/2018 January's not even over, but Miley Cyrus is showing off her best summer beach bod already. Miley was spotted on the beach in Byron Bay, Australia earlier this month ... showcasing her fit physique in a tiny -- and incredibly cheeky -- red bikini. Miley's no longer Down Under because she's back in the States for the "60th Annual Grammy Awards" ... which she'll be attending in NYC Sunday night. As we reported ... her fiance, Liam Hemsworth, was seen wearing what looks like a wedding ring in Malibu Friday, but there are no reports the 2 were married. Perhaps a big surprise at the Grammys?? | Entertainment |
Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesMarch 14, 2017WASHINGTON President Trump hosted Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia for lunch at the White House on Tuesday, moving to forge a warmer relationship with the kingdom after a period of tension between the United States and a longstanding ally.The lunch was an early effort by Mr. Trump to engage with Prince Mohammed, the defense minister of Saudi Arabia. Hopes are high in Riyadh for improved relations with the United States after strained diplomacy between the Obama administration and the Saudis, particularly over the nuclear deal with Iran.The visit initially expected to be a short meet-and-greet but turned at the last moment into a formal lunch was a chance for the two men to also discuss Yemen, where a civil war has pitted Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels against a Saudi-led coalition of mostly Sunni Arab countries with American support, and where the United States is stepping up a campaign against Al Qaeda. Mr. Trump faces a decision on whether to resume arms sales to the Saudis.Mr. Trump, a new American president eager to break with his predecessor, and Prince Mohammed, a young, ambitious leader jockeying for influence in his kingdom, each see the other as a crucial ally on a variety of pressing issues. Neither spoke to reporters as they shook hands in the Oval Office, or later, when they took seats in the State Dining Room for a lunch with senior aides.The president was expected to urge Saudi Arabia to support safe zones in Syria, which the administration has argued would be an alternative to accepting thousands of refugees from a country that has been ripped apart by six years of civil war.Mr. Trump and members of his inner circle regard Saudi Arabia as a vital component of the White House strategy to get Middle East allies to help break the deadlock in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. That approach is said to be favored by Jared Kushner, Mr. Trumps son-in-law and senior adviser, who has been tasked with forging a peace between the two sides.The president and his top aides see Saudi Arabia as a crucial part of the Middle East and an important country to have a positive relationship with, even if there are irritants, said Simon Henderson, the director of the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. This is at odds with the Obama administration, so they want to make that clear distinction.Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf neighbors have been optimistic about Mr. Trumps presidency, largely because of their deep frustration at what they called Mr. Obamas refusal to forcefully engage in Middle Eastern issues like the war in Syria. They are encouraged by Mr. Trumps business background, his lack of interest in human rights and, most importantly, his vow to take a hard line against Iran.They were happy to see Obama go, Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said of the Saudis. Mr. Riedel said the kingdom had lost confidence in Mr. Obama after the Arab Spring swept across several countries in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 and because his administration often pressured Middle Eastern leaders, such as President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, on human rights concerns.Trump has made it clear he is not worried about supporting human rights or freedom; hes made clear that Sisi is going to be his best friend in Egypt; that all those difficult questions about gender equality and the like are going to be off the table for the next four years, and that Iran is very much on the table, Mr. Riedel said. As the Saudis look at Trump, they see they dont need to worry about any of that.Still, like many other leaders around the world, the Saudis view Mr. Trump with some degree of wariness, uncertain about the basic competency of his administration and eager to size up a president who has no experience in handling geopolitical affairs. Mr. Trump also sent some mixed signals to the Islamic world in the opening days of his presidency, including in signing a travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim countries, which excluded Saudi Arabia but was widely regarded as the fulfillment of a campaign promise to enact a Muslim ban.Mr. Riedel said the Trump administration and particularly Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense recognizes that we need to clarify that signal with the Saudis, and the best way to do it is with the kings favorite son.Prince Mohammed, 31, is second in line to the throne. He oversees Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, and serves as defense minister, putting him in charge of the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. Saudi officials see the Houthis in Yemen as a national threat and would like greater American assistance in the fight against them. Saudi Arabia is a major buyer of American weapons.Prince Mohammed is also the guiding force behind a plan, known as Vision 2030, to transform the kingdom and reduce its dependence on oil. While Prince Mohammed is in Washington, his father, King Salman, is touring Asia in a trip aimed at attracting foreign investment to the kingdom.Mr. Trump had been scheduled to spend much of his day on Tuesday with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. A snowstorm that blanketed much of the northeastern United States prompted Ms. Merkel to delay her visit until Friday, leaving Mr. Trumps lunch hour available for Prince Mohammed.Joining the president for the meetings were Vice President Mike Pence; H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser; Stephen K. Bannon, the presidents chief strategist; Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff; and Mr. Kushner. Mr. Mattis is expected to meet with Prince Mohammed later this week. | World |
Tech FixNeighborhood-watch networks are on the rise, even though crime is not. Heres how to put the data into perspective.Credit...Glenn HarveyMay 29, 2019My phone recently buzzed with an alarming notification: Police officers were responding to a shooting about a mile away. A few hours later, another alert popped up, letting me know that two men were fighting in an alleyway nearby. Then my inbox loaded an email with a message that a neighbor had found a man trying to break into his house.The notifications arrived because of two apps I was using: Nextdoor, a social network for neighbors, and Citizen, which delivers alerts on local crimes in progress. Both are among the most downloaded news apps today, according to App Annie, the research firm. They are also part of a crop of apps that focus on keeping people informed about their neighborhoods, a category that is likely to grow. Last year, for instance, Amazon acquired Ring, which makes a doorbell that doubles as a security camera. The retail giant recently posted a job listing for someone to manage a team of news journalists who would write crime alerts for an app.The seemingly constant barrage of news about criminal activity could lead people to conclude that the world is far more dangerous than it ever was. The reality is that the violent-crime rate in the United States has fallen sharply by about 49 percent from 1993 to 2017, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Property crime has also declined significantly. Seeing a lot of crime reports isnt something that gives you any context, said Rachel Thomas, a professor for the University of San Franciscos Data Institute and a co-founder of Fast.ai, an independent lab that focuses on artificial intelligence.So how do we best use these neighborhood networking apps without succumbing to anxiety and paranoia? After all, the apps can be useful for learning about community events or getting recommendations for local businesses, like plumbers and electricians. In recent weeks, I tested several of the apps and spoke to data experts to gain a perspective on how to use community data in a productive and healthy way. Heres what I learned.Look at the business modelScanning dozens of crime-related alerts wont tell you much about the state of crime in your neighborhood. So look elsewhere for additional context, like a companys business model, Dr. Thomas said.For example: Amazons Ring offers Neighbors, a free app for getting a comprehensive look at potential criminal activity nearby. When you set it up, you see a map of your neighborhood, with color-coded icons labeled crime, safety or suspicious. Residents in the area can contribute to the map by posting videos recorded with their Ring doorbells to document break-in attempts, for example, or by writing posts about police activity.By default, Neighbors displays crimes posted over the last 30 days. That shows an accumulation of incidents, which can unnecessarily give people the impression that their area was being swarmed by criminals.ImageCredit...Brian X. ChenFor Amazon, this may not be a bad thing, as it may help sell more Ring doorbells. But for the rest of us, a 30-day view may overstate what a neighborhoods crime level looks like day to day.So I recommend setting the filter on such apps to look at content posted over the last day only. When I changed that setting, the number of crime postings in my neighborhood dropped to zero. It was a useful reminder that the number of daily incidents is low. A representative for Amazons Ring did not comment on the suggestion that the Neighbors app created the impression that a neighborhood was more dangerous in order to sell doorbells. However, the company noted that not everything posted to Neighbors was dangerous people could also find information about lost pets and updates about street closings, for example.Graze in moderationDo you really need a constant update on crime news? Unless you work in law enforcement, the answer is probably not. So treat crime news as you would any type of media: Check the apps when doing so may actually be productive and healthy. If crime news makes you stressful, dont look at the apps late at night before bed. And disable the constant notifications and emails.Thats what I did with the Citizen app. After using it for a day, I disabled notifications so that I couldnt be alerted about every nearby crime in progress. Instead, I checked the app only when it made the most sense. This week, when stopped at a red light, I saw two men fighting at a gas station. I clicked on the Citizen app, which showed that the altercation had already been reported to the police. So instead of pulling over and calling 911, I moved on.Resist dwelling on the negativeMany people have a negative bias. We gravitate toward reading negative news stories, and when something bad happens, we are more likely to talk about it than when something good happens.Keep that in mind when perusing neighborhood networking apps. The general news feed on Nextdoor shows an array of posts on topics like lost pets, used furniture for sale, a handymans offer of services and, occasionally, a crime. The crime-related posts may be all you remember, but they are rare. Only 4 percent of posts on Nextdoor are related to crime and safety, said Sarah Friar, the companys chief executive. If you spend more time in the overall feed and ask yourself, What do I hear in here? 96 percent of all the posts are about other things, she said.Are you the product?Because many of these neighborhood-watch apps are free, you have to wonder what they are doing with your data. When tech products cost you nothing, companies often make money in other ways, like sharing data about you with advertisers.Nextdoor, for example, makes money from advertising. But the company builds in several privacy layers. Its privacy policy says it does not share personal data with advertisers. It also requires people to share their real names when using the app to help ensure that neighbors are who they say they are. And the app gives some control over the data you share, including the option to hide your address from neighbors.Citizen was a different matter. I realized that when users sign up for the app, it required them to constantly share their location data. The company said sharing this data lets you receive real-time notifications for nearby crimes in progress. In a future software update, it said, the use of location data would allow it to send fewer and more relevant notifications to keep people safe and informed.Users can later opt out of sharing their location if they decide to turn off notifications. But the company did not comment when I asked about why its opt-in approach to location sharing was so aggressive. So until Citizen changes its data collection practices, I plan to delete it. | Tech |
Technology|Lenovo Reports Income Increase as It Expandshttps://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/14/technology/lenovo-reports-income-increase-as-it-expands.htmlFeb. 12, 2014TOKYO Lenovo, the worlds biggest maker of personal computers, reported Thursday it had made progress in its plan to expand beyond PCs, even before a planned acquisition of Motorola Mobility.Lenovo, which is based in Beijing but also maintains a separate headquarters in Morrisville, N.C., said its net income rose 30 percent, to $265 million, in the most recent financial period, which ended Dec. 31. Revenue increased 15 percent, to $10.8 billion.Lenovo said it sold 17.3 million smartphones and tablets in the quarter, compared with 15.3 million PCs. The companys Internet and digital home division, which includes smartphones, tablets and smart televisions, accounted for 16 percent of revenue, up from 11 percent a year earlier.While other PC makers have suffered sales declines as customers have switched to tablets or smartphones, Lenovo has continued to steam ahead. The company said sales of laptops, which account for about half the companys revenue, rose 11 percent from a year earlier. Sales of desktop PCs rose 12 percent.Lenovo has been pushing to diversify its product lineup, expanding into tablets and, especially, smartphones. The company is already the second-largest smartphone maker in the fast-growing Chinese market, after Samsung Electronics, and now it is pushing beyond China.Under a strategy it calls PC Plus, Lenovo agreed last month to buy Motorola, a maker of mobile handsets, from Google. That deal followed shortly on an announcement that Lenovo planned to acquire the low-end server business of IBM.The two deals, together valued at more than $5 billion, prompted concerns among some investors that Lenovo was moving too aggressively in its quest to move beyond PCs and to push into the smartphone business in the United States. Both Motorola and the IBM business that Lenovo agreed to acquire lose money, but the company says it is confident that it can turn them around.A range of cost saving and scaling opportunities, the iconic Motorola brand and the opportunity to expand Motorolas global reach will quickly place this business on a path to tangible success, Lenovo said in a statement. | Tech |
Media|Shareholder Calls for Check of Sumner Redstones Conditionhttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/business/media/shareholder-calls-for-check-of-redstones-condition.htmlDec. 2, 2015One of the largest shareholders in Viacom and CBS voiced concerns on Wednesday about the health of the 92-year-old media mogul Sumner M. Redstone and whether he should continue in his role as executive chairman of the companies.One week ago, a former companion of Mr. Redstone filed a lawsuit challenging his mental competence. Mr. Redstones lawyers have asked the court to dismiss the suit, calling the claims a meritless action, riddled with lies. On Wednesday, a Viacom director said Mr. Redstone was mentally capable. Mario Gabelli, whose investment firm, Gamco, is the second-largest voting shareholder in Viacom and CBS behind Mr. Redstone, said that he sought more information about Mr. Redstones health and involvement at the companies after reading through the suit. The court filings included claims that Mr. Redstone was incontinent, required suctioning to remove phlegm up to 20 times a day and was obsessed with eating steak even while on a feeding tube.Mr. Gabelli said that if Mr. Redstone got paid anything in 2015, it would have a hard time passing any smell test based on the descriptions in the suit.Do I think he should be drawing any money? Mr. Gabelli asked. Clearly, one has to look at how much a chairman gets paid relative to the value added.Mr. Redstone controls about 80 percent of the voting stock in the two media companies, which have a combined market value of $45 billion. His total compensation for the 2014 fiscal year was $13.2 million at Viacom and $10.8 million at CBS. His compensation for the fiscal 2015 year will be disclosed in regulatory filings.Mr. Gabelli added that he had received calls from clients about Mr. Redstone, which spurred him to ask Viacom for clarification about Mr. Redstones role at the companies. They have got to say something, he said. You cant run a public company like this.He said that the same questions applied to CBS, but that he did not call the company.In response, Viacom released a statement on Wednesday from William Schwartz, chairman of its boards governance and nominating committee.As has been widely and publicly disclosed, Mr. Redstones physicians have publicly attested that he is mentally capable, and this information is consistent with other medical and other information available to me, he said in the statement.Court filings from Mr. Redstones lawyers also included statements from his doctors who saidthat while Mr. Redstone had various ailments, the results of a recent brain scan were quite good. A statement fromPhilippeDauman, Viacoms chief executive, said that Mr. Redstone was engaged and attentive.A spokesman for CBS declined to comment. | Business |
Science|When is Jeff Bezos flight, and how is it different?https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/jeff-bezos-space-flight-blue-origin.htmlCredit...Blue OriginPublished July 11, 2021Updated Aug. 5, 2021On July 20, another billionaire is scheduled to take another rocket to the edge of space. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, founded his rocket company, Blue Origin, with a vision of millions of people living and working in space in the future.But the companys first vehicle, New Shepard, has much more modest ambitions. Like Virgin Galactics SpaceShipTwo, it is designed to take people on short suborbital trips providing about four minutes of weightlessness.Unlike SpaceShipTwo, New Shepard is a more traditional rocket, launched upward before the capsule detaches from a booster rocket. The booster returns to make a vertical landing, much as the larger Falcon 9 rockets operated by Elon Musks SpaceX do, while the capsule descends back to the ground under a parachute.New Shepard also rises above the 62-mile-high Karman line.Blue Origin highlighted this fact, and several other features of New Shepard, in a tweet on Friday that compared the spacecraft with Virgin Galactics SpaceShipTwo.Mr. Bezos later wished Mr. Branson and Virgin Galactic a successful and safe flight tomorrow, in a post on his Instagram account. He added, Best of luck! | science |
Politics|An Alabama man who suffered a heart attack outside the Capitol is among the dead.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/politics/an-alabama-man-who-suffered-a-heart-attack-outside-the-capitol-is-among-the-dead.htmlJan. 7, 2021Four people lost their lives during the melee in Washington on Wednesday. One of them was Kevin D. Greeson, 55, of Athens, Ala., who collapsed as he stood among a sea of Trump supporters on the west side of the U.S. Capitol.Mr. Greeson had been talking to his wife on his phone when he fell to the sidewalk. A New York Times reporter watched as emergency personnel rushed to help, furiously performing chest compressions, but were unable to revive him.In an interview on Thursday, his wife, Kristi Greeson, said authorities contacted her afterward to say that her husband had died of a heart attack. Ms. Greeson said her husband, who was a father of five, had left home on Tuesday, spending the night in Virginia with a friend. She said her husband, who had high blood pressure, was excited to attend the rally, believing the election had been stolen.He felt like it was a monumental event in his mind, she said. I didnt want him to go. I didnt feel like it was safe.Ms. Greeson said her husband was a political junkie who liked President Trump because he cared about blue collar workers such as Mr. Greeson. But her husband also saw the good and bad in Trump, she said.Mr. Greesons family said Thursday that he was not there to participate in violence or rioting, nor did he condone such actions.The others who died included a woman and a man who suffered medical emergencies and a woman, identified as Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by the Capitol Police, according to law enforcement officials. | Politics |
Corner OfficeVideotranscripttranscriptSoulCycles Dynamic DuoJulie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler are business partners whose enduring friendship fuels the success of the fitness phenomenon SoulCycle.naJulie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler are business partners whose enduring friendship fuels the success of the fitness phenomenon SoulCycle.Dec. 17, 2015This interview with Melanie Whelan, C.E.O. of SoulCycle, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.Q. What were some early influences for you?A. My father is an entrepreneur. We lived in Baltimore, but all of his companies were based out of D.C. He got up every morning at 5 to work out, then he would commute an hour and a half each way to these companies. He probably started between five and six companies that I can remember.He was a huge role model for me because of his work ethic and discipline. He was like the mailman come rain, come shine, come anything, he was out that door at 5 in the morning. And there was a big creative aspect to his work he would start something, and when it grew large enough, he would sell it and do the next thing.Did you have an idea of what you wanted to do for a career when you were in college?I thought I wanted to be an architect. I was fascinated by building structures and engineering. I loved physics and calculus. After two and a half years, though, my interest started shifting to business. I realized I wanted to be part of a team and I wanted to build a company.What was your first management role?After working at Starwood Hotels and helping launch Virgin America, I was introduced to Harvey Spevak, the C.E.O. of Equinox, and he gave me the opportunity to start a business development function at the company. I was responsible for managing three department heads. They were all far more experienced than I was. I came in with one view of how to manage people, and after a year or so I had a completely different perspective.I thought initially that I was going to learn their business and then I could add value by saying, Here are our goals, and heres where were going. What I learned very quickly was that they just wanted a partner to collaborate with. They just wanted to brainstorm, to vent, to spitball ideas.ImageCredit...Todd Heisler/The New York TimesI learned to just ask questions, and not to have an initial point of view. For them, it was really just about collaboration and coaching and me bringing fresh eyes to their business. They wanted accountability, they wanted to run their business, and they didnt really want me in their day-to-day. Once I figured that out, we had really productive relationships.And how has your leadership style evolved?The biggest thing I continue to learn is about really actively listening to people. Great leaders are great listeners. So what I try to do is set a vision about where were going, and then empower people to make it happen. I spend a lot of time with our leaders just really understanding how theyre doing, what they need and how else I can provide value to them.Can you share specific tips for being a good listener?You have to ask a lot of questions and you have to really listen to the answers. Dont be thinking about the next question, and dont be thinking about what youre having for lunch. Really listen, because in every answer there are at least three more questions you want to be asking.I tell people to be comfortable with silence because after someone answers your question, something else is going to come out. We have also trained our teams on what we call empty-bucket sessions, where people state the facts of the problem, their interpretations of them, and then you work toward a solution. Until you get to the bottom and everything is out there, you cant start to build solutions.We cant have lumpy carpets here. Otherwise, you cant build a foundation for a great company.How do you hire? What questions do you ask?The first thing I always say is, Tell me about your background. Its a great way to warm up any conversation, and it really helps me understand how you communicate. Are you linear, concise and direct? Or are you a storyteller? Are you entertaining? Do you go off on tangents?I also love to hear how people talk about transitions and career decisions. Were you running away from something or toward something, and how do you frame that?ImageCredit...Evan Sung for The New York TimesI then ask people to pick some project from their story and go deeper. I listen for we versus I, and I want to know what you specifically did to impact the outcome.Were a very hands-on culture. One of our core values is We get dirty. Everyone gets into the business.The last thing I do is ask what questions they have for me. That shows me how well youve done your research on our mission, and how intellectually curious you are. And its important to me that it feels organic and not packaged.What career and life advice do you give to new college grads?The first thing I say is to get a job and work hard. You are going to learn a ton in whatever that job is, so dont stress too much about what it is or where it is. Just take a job and put your head down, work hard, raise your hand for anything anybody asks you to do.And be present in the present. Dont worry so much about where youre going. Just focus on where you are and do the best work you can, learn as much as you can. The next thing will come.The second thing I say is that a lot of people think in terms of should I should be a banker, I should go to law school, I should pursue what I studied in school.I think thats a mistake. I think you should figure out what youre passionate about and also look for great people to work with. You should take a risk. Youre 22 years old, so take a risk. | Business |
He was most known for his Bobo doll experiment, in which children mimicked adults in attacking an inflatable doll. The work challenged basic tenets of psychology.Credit...Jon Brenneis/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty ImagesJuly 29, 2021Albert Bandura, a psychologist whose landmark studies on aggression are a staple of introductory psychology classes and whose work on the role of peoples beliefs in shaping their behavior transformed American psychology, died on Monday at his home in Stanford, Calif. He was 95.The cause was congestive heart failure, his daughter Carol Bandura Cowley said.Dr. Bandura, a native of Canada who joined the Stanford University faculty in 1953 and remained affiliated with the university until his death, was widely regarded as one of the most influential psychologists of his time. In a 2002 survey, he ranked fourth among the most-cited psychologists of the 20th century, behind Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner and the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.His social cognitive theory of human functioning emphasized peoples capacity for self-reflection and personal agency, and his extensive writing and research contributed to the understanding of personality formation, cognition, morality and the treatment of mental disorders like phobias. His theory of self-efficacy peoples belief in their own competence and ability to exert control over their behavior and social environment has been widely applied across many areas, including education, public health and drug and alcohol abuse.But Dr. Bandura was most widely recognized for a series of laboratory studies collectively known as the Bobo doll experiment that he carried out with two colleagues at Stanford in the early 1960s.In the first study, nursery school children watched an adult heaping verbal and physical abuse on an inflatable Bobo the clown doll, punching it in the nose, kicking it, hitting it on the head with a mallet and throwing it around the room. When the children were then given a chance to interact with a similar doll, they copied the adults abusive behavior and produced additional forms of abuse that they thought up on their own.In contrast, children who watched an adult interacting peacefully with the doll, or who were not shown a model at all, were significantly less aggressive, Dr. Bandura and his colleagues found. Later studies indicated that just showing a film of an adult acting aggressively could produce similar results. And the childrens response to the adult model could be influenced by whether the aggressive behavior was rewarded or punished.ImageCredit...Stanford UniversityThe Bobo doll findings challenged a basic tenet of classical behaviorism: that if a behavior is rewarded, it will persist and sometimes increase; and that if it is punished, it will diminish and eventually cease. In contrast, the Bobo doll studies demonstrated what any parent or schoolteacher knew: that children also learn from observing other peoples behavior.In a 2006 autobiographical account, Dr. Bandura wrote that behaviorisms narrow focus on reward and punishment had seemed to him discordant with the obvious social reality that much of what we learn is through the power of social modeling.Lee Ross, a professor of psychology and colleague of Dr. Banduras at Stanford, said in an interview for this obituary in 2018 that strict behaviorism, as championed by John Watson, Skinner and other psychologists, made sense when applied to pigeons or rats, but was less important when it came to humans.Al jumped on that and understood it, Dr. Ross said. He was in many ways the transition from old learning theory to modern cognitive psychology. (Dr. Ross died in June.)The results of the Bobo doll experiment were at odds with behaviorism and conflicted with the reigning mental health theory of the time, psychoanalysis, which held that vicarious aggression watching a violent film, for example would provide a catharsis, diminishing the need to act out aggressive impulses.The distinction might seem academic, but its outcome had real-world implications. The 1960s and 70s were a time of increasing public anxiety about the effects of television violence on children. Coverage of the Vietnam War had brought startling images of carnage into peoples living rooms, news programs carried reports of crimes that seemed to mimic television dramas, and children had been injured while reproducing actions shown in television advertisements.ImageCredit...Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News ServiceDr. Bandura was drawn into the public debate and testified before congressional committees and the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, a task force created after the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.His research did not sit well with the broadcast industry. His findings were criticized in articles commissioned by the networks, and the Television Information Office, part of the National Association of Broadcasters, sent its sponsor stations elaborate rebuttals to his findings. After Dr. Bandura and several other social scientists were excluded from a committee that the surgeon general had asked to evaluate the effects of television violence, Dr. Bandura later wrote, he discovered that broadcast networks had been allowed to veto the nominations of committee members.I began to feel a kinship with the battered Bobo doll, he wrote.In the end, his work won out, his findings becoming even more relevant in a world where social media and a 24-hour-a-day news cycle have afforded violence models far greater reach.The Bobo doll experiment became a staple of psychology classes around the world. People mailed Bobo dolls to Dr. Bandura requesting autographs and knocked on his office door in Stanfords Jordan Hall, hoping to have their photograph taken with the famous psychologist.In an interview for this obituary in 2018, Dr. Bandura said he had once received an email from some high school students.Professor Bandura, they wrote, were having a huge fight in our class and youre the only one who can answer it: Professor Bandura, are you still living?He wrote the students back: This email is being sent from the other side. We have email there, but not Facebook.Albert Bandura was born on Dec. 4, 1925, in the prairie town of Mundare, about 50 miles east of Edmonton, Alberta. His parents, like most of the settlements 400 residents, were immigrants from Eastern Europe, his father from Krakow, Poland, his mother from Ukraine. His father, Joseph Bandura, laid track for the trans-Canada railway and turned a heavily wooded homestead into a working farm. His mother, Justyna (Berezanski) Bandura, ran a delivery service, transporting goods from the railway station to the store.In the summers, Dr. Bandura helped his father on the farm or worked in other manual labor jobs. When he was 7, one of his many siblings died, and his parents, concerned about the grief-stricken atmosphere in the house, sent him to live for a year with the eldest of his five older sisters, a teacher in Mundares only schoolhouse. The towns lack of educational resources forced him to take charge of his own schooling, and taught him a valuable skill.The content of courses is perishable, he later wrote, but self-regulatory skills have lasting functional value whatever the pursuit might be.Dr. Bandura did not plan to become a psychologist. But his social cognitive theory emphasized that fortuitous events often play a role in determining a persons life path, and in his case that event was reading a course catalog at the University of British Columbia and discovering an introductory psychology course that would fill an empty slot in his class schedule.After completing his undergraduate degree in three years, he pursued graduate studies at the University of Iowa, which was home to some of the biggest names in psychology at a time of great excitement in the field. Many psychologists were hoping to construct a science of human behavior that would mirror the rigor and predictive power of the natural sciences.Central to this endeavor was the study of learning, the research focus of the psychology departments chairman, Kenneth W. Spence. With his mentor, Clark L. Hull at Yale, Dr. Spence had developed an influential theory of learning that was rooted in the work of earlier behaviorists.At Iowa, Dr. Bandura met Virginia Varns, an instructor at the nursing school. They were married in 1952 and moved to Stanford, where he had been offered a teaching position. In California, Dr. Banduras career advanced rapidly. He served for a short time as psychology department chairman, and in 1974 served as president of the American Psychological Association, where he devoted his tenure to increasing the credibility of the field and helping to settle growing public fears over behavior modification, set off by movies like A Clockwork Orange and books like Skinners Beyond Freedom and Dignity.On Thursday, the association paid tribute to him, saying, Albert Bandura was not only one of the most influential leaders in psychology, but also one of the most important social scientists in history.Virginia Bandura died in 2011. In addition to his daughter Carol, Dr. Bandura is survived by another daughter, Mary Bandura, and two grandsons.Dr. Bandura was known at Stanford as a highly organized teacher and a prolific writer and researcher who never failed to get excited about new projects. Daniel P. Cervone, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a former student of Dr. Banduras, described Dr. Bandura as someone who was absolutely lacking in personality tics and quirks and who drew a strict line between his personal and professional lives. If Al Banduras cat had been run over in the morning and you met with him in the afternoon, he would not be talking about how his cat was run over by a car, Dr. Cervone said.In his research, Dr. Bandura increasingly focused on beliefs and self-reflection and the role they played in human behavior and development how people talk about and to themselves, as Dr. Cervone put it.Dr. Bandura found that peoples confidence in their ability to perform a task or to control something that was threatening could have a remarkable impact on how they lived their lives. Providing people with positive models to follow and an environment in which they could succeed could treat a range of disabling problems, including phobias.In studies, Dr. Bandura and his collaborators were able to eliminate longstanding fears of snakes in a few hours. The treatment, he wrote, instilled a robust sense of coping efficacy, transformed attitudes toward the phobic objects from abhorrence to liking, wiped out anxiety, biological stress reactions and phobic behavior. Dr. Bandura studied how peoples beliefs about the self were developed, how they functioned and how they affected behavior. He used social cognitive theory codified in his 1986 book, Social Foundations of Thought and Action as a lens through which to examine various topics, from the reduction of disease to how individuals and societies fall into morally transgressive behavior.ImageCredit...Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressThe author of many books and hundreds of papers, Dr. Bandura was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2015. The next year, President Barack Obama presented him with the National Medal of Science.The Bobo doll experiment remained Dr. Banduras best-known work.His experiments with kids dramatically demonstrated that both the content of what models do, and even the style of what they do, is very, very influential, particularly early in life, Walter Mischel, a longtime colleague, said in 2018. (He died later that year.) Learning through observation may seem obvious, he added, but the brilliance of Al was to show what its applications are for changing all types of behavior.If there was a single principle undergirding his work, however, it was the idea of personal agency that people, through their beliefs about themselves and the processes of self-reflection and self-regulation, can exert control over their lives.If you look at my life path, you try to make the most of whatever is there, Dr. Bandura said. And to do that, you have to believe that through your actions you can influence the course of your life.Alex Traub contributed reporting | science |
BitsCredit...Drew Anthony Smith for The New York TimesJune 29, 2018Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the weeks news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here.Greetings, nerds and Luddites. Im Brian X. Chen, your personal tech columnist, and Im here to guide you through the weeks tech news.Let me get this off my chest: Does anyone else feel that Amazon is slowly taking over the world?Riding on the success of Amazon Prime, the company is offering incentives for Whole Foods shoppers to sign up for Prime. This week, Prime members started getting an extra 10 percent off items that are marked on sale (with a yellow tag) at all Whole Foods stores across the United States. To redeem the discount at the checkout counter, you open the Whole Foods app on your smartphone and scan a bar code.Amazon seems well aware that people are so unaccustomed to getting discounts at Whole Foods that they will exchange data about their grocery shopping habits for a few cents. The other day, I scanned the bar code at Whole Foods and shaved a dollar off my $56 grocery bill. Maybe in a few months, Ill save up enough to get a free bottle of kale juice.Beyond groceries, Amazon is starting to invade our lives through the world of pharmaceuticals. This week, the company said it had acquired PillPack, an online pharmacy, in a deal that could immediately make it a big player in the drug business. The acquisition helps Amazon overcome the bureaucratic hurdle of securing pharmacy licenses, since PillPack is already licensed to ship prescriptions in 50 states.The purchase is expected to close in the second half of 2018. So pretty soon, when youre restocking your home with diapers, dog food and trash bags on Amazon, you may also be able to refill your drug prescriptions.In other Amazon news this week yes, there really is more! the company said it planned to expand its army of delivery workers, announcing a program that helps people start businesses delivering packages for the e-commerce giant. Heres the pitch: If you invest at least $10,000, you can operate a fleet of Amazon-branded vehicles and manage people who wear Amazon uniforms. Amazon estimates an owner could earn as much as $300,000 a year in profit operating a fleet of up to 40 vehicles.Its another effort by Amazon to build out its own delivery logistics. The company already runs Amazon Flex, a program that pays people $18 to $25 an hour to deliver packages from their own cars.So can Amazon do a better job at delivering packages than services like FedEx, United Parcel Service or the United States Postal Service? I guess well find out.Other stuff: Apple and Samsung Electronics finally ended their smartphone patent wars. It only took seven years. Law professors said the whole legal battle was pretty pointless. Because we cant get enough Amazon: A writer for The Atlantic, Alana Semuels, documented her experience delivering packages for Amazon Flex in San Francisco. She found that after expenses were accounted for, she earned less than minimum wage. Facebook said it was giving up on producing a fleet of solar-powered drones that would beam internet access to people around the world. The company said it would rely on other companies to build aircraft. Apples funky-looking wireless earphones, AirPods, may get an upgrade next year. Bloomberg says to expect higher-end AirPods with features like noise cancellation and water resistance. And finally, our tech columnist, Farhad Manjoo, says we have reached Peak Screen, with Americans spending three to four hours a day looking at their phones and about 11 hours a day looking at screens of any kind. As we look ahead, the question is how can we move toward a less tech-immersed future.Brian X. Chen writes the Tech Fix column, a research-driven feature aimed at solving your everyday tech problems. You can follow him on Twitter here: @bxchen. | Tech |
Drake Mega-Expensive Home Renovation ... YOLO! 1/22/2018 Drake is giving his YOLO Estate a face-lift, and the scope of the project is massive. The Toronto rapper has been remodeling his Hidden Hills mansion since March 2017, according to building permits obtained by TMZ. As for the work he's putting into the place, here are some highlights: -- Remodel of the 1,695 sq ft master bedroom, plus adding 98 more ft. -- Addition to the maid's room and the deck that sits above it -- New roofs on all structures, new stucco siding -- 68 new windows(!!) Some other notables include putting in all new doors, remodeling the kitchen and master bath, and adding a spa. The permits value the total job at $342,752 ... but Drake's likely to pay much more than that when it's all said and done. Drake bought the home in 2012, and it's been broken into multiple times. Hopefully these doors come with better locks. | Entertainment |
A maker of rapid Covid tests recalls nearly 200,000 kits over concerns of false positives.Credit...Patrick Hamilton/Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesPublished Oct. 5, 2021Updated Nov. 1, 2021Ellume, an Australian company that makes a widely available at-home coronavirus test, has recalled nearly 200,000 test kits because of concerns about a higher-than-expected rate of false positives. That represents about 5.6 percent of the approximately 3.5 million test kits Ellume has shipped to the United States.The company, which detected the problem in mid-September, traced the issue to variations in the quality of one of the raw materials used in the test kit, Dr. Sean Parsons, Ellumes chief executive, said in a phone interview. He declined to specify the material in question, citing a desire not to publicly disclose precisely how the test kits work.About 427,000 test kits, including some provided to the U.S. Department of Defense, were affected by the problem, Dr. Parsons said. Roughly half have already been used, he said, yielding about 42,000 positive results. As many as a quarter of those positives may have been inaccurate, Dr. Parsons said, although he stressed that it would be difficult to determine exactly how many. Im very sorry that this has happened, Dr. Parsons said. Were all about chasing accuracy, and to have these false positives is disappointing.ImageCredit...Patrick Hamilton/Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesThe issue did not affect all Ellume test kits or the reliability of negative results, the company said.Ellumes test is a rapid antigen test, designed to detect pieces of the virus in the nose. Users swab their nostrils, insert the swab into a dropper of fluid and then add the fluid to a Bluetooth-connected analyzer. Results are transmitted to a smart phone app in 15 minutes. Last December, it became the first over-the-counter, completely at-home test to receive an emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.The company has asked retailers to remove the tests from shelves and is in the process of notifying consumers, Dr. Parsons said.Consumers who have one of the affected tests can request a replacement online. People who try to use one of the affected test kits will be notified in the app that the test has been recalled. It really wont be possible to use any of those tests now, Dr. Parsons said.He added that the company had put extra controls in place to prevent the same problem from cropping up again in the future.We are doing everything possible to get known, good product into the hands of consumers in the U.S., Dr. Parsons said.The recall comes as demand for testing has soared, and consumers have complained that at-home test kits are hard to find. On Monday, the F.D.A. authorized a new at-home antigen test, ACON Laboratories Flowflex. The authorization is expected to double rapid at-home testing capacity in the U.S. over the next several weeks, Dr. Jeffrey E. Shuren, who directs the F.D.A.s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a statement. By years end, the manufacturer plans to produce more than 100 million tests per month, and this number will rise to 200 million per month by February 2022. | Health |
In a famous experiment, scientists bred Russian foxes without a fear of people. But the foxes ancestry raises new questions about when they became tame and what counts as domestication.Credit...Kirill Kukhmar\TASS, via Getty ImagesDec. 3, 2019In the 1950s, Dmitri K. Belyaev began one of the most famous experiments in animal domestication. Dr. Belyaev, a geneticist at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, selectively bred foxes that he had acquired from a fur farm, concentrating only on reducing their fear of humans. Within 10 generations, he wrote in 1979, Like dogs, these foxes seek contact with familiar persons, tend to get close to them, and lick their hands and faces.In a new paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, several scientists have challenged a common interpretation of Dr. Belyaevs results, and have questioned whether scientists who study domestication have any common understanding of what the word means. The authors dont dispute the essence of Dr. Belyaevs work: the selection for tameness, which is regarded as profoundly important in exploring the genetics and evolution of behavior. But that wasnt all that Dr. Belyaev discovered. His foxes also showed physical changes, like piebald coats and floppy ears characteristics shared by dogs, cows and other domesticated animals. Dr. Belyaev and the researchers who followed up his work suggested, as had Charles Darwin before them, that there might be a collection of physical traits that go along with tameness called domestication syndrome.ImageCredit...Sputnik, via AlamyThe authors of the new paper argue that this idea is undermined by an intriguing sub-chapter in the long history of the fur trade in Canada. The reaction to that criticism from other scientists has been mixed, reflecting contentious but cordial disagreements about what domestication is and how it happens. The average pet lover may know the story of the foxes from a book by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut, who collaborated with Dr. Belyaev, called How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog). Far fewer people probably know about the development of fox farming on Prince Edward Island, Canadas smallest province. This history is buried in plain sight, you might say, since you can learn about it easily if you visit International Fox Museum and Hall of Fame on the island. The museum is not a common destination for evolutionary biologists who specialize in domestication. But one of them did visit back in 2015, and he was taken aback. The late Raymond Coppinger, a biologist at Hampshire College in Massachusetts who was a major contributor to the study of dog evolution, toured the museum and returned full of questions. He saw these pictures of spotted foxes, and they looked just like the Belyaev foxes, recalled Kathryn Lord, an animal behaviorist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and the first author of the new paper. Dr. Coppinger was her mentor at Hampshire College. There have been academic reports as well, suggesting that the Russian foxes hailed from Prince Edward Island, Dr. Lord said: Different pieces of the story were all over, but nobody had put it together. As it turned out, genetic tests showed that Dr. Belyaevs foxes did have roots in eastern Canada, which almost certainly meant Prince Edward Island. So the question bothering Dr. Coppinger and Dr. Lord was this: How much domestication had gone on before the famous fox experiment began?She got the attention of Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at the Broad Institute in whose lab Dr. Lord worked. And she drew in Greger Larson, a specialist in ancient canine DNA at the University of Oxford in England, who is deeply involved in questions of dog evolution and domestication. They began to refine the work Dr. Lord and Dr. Coppinger had already done.ImageCredit...Artyom Geodakyan/TASS, via Getty ImagesDr. Belyaev had plainly stated that his foxes were from farmed stock. So some domestication must have occurred before his experiment, said Anna Kukekova, a geneticist at the University of Illinois who researches the genetics of Russian foxes and has collaborated with Dr. Trut. Dr. Belyaev recognized that fur farmers would have chosen animals that were at least somewhat tolerant of people, Dr. Kukekova said. But Dr. Belyaev also described his foxes as mostly uncomfortable with people, virtually wild animals. Now, Dr. Lord and her colleagues suggest otherwise. Fox-farming pioneers on Prince Edward Island began by breeding wild-caught black foxes, also called silver foxes, a color variant of the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) common all over the world. They were bred mainly for the look of the pelts. In 1910, one company sold 25 skins for $34,649.50, according to Silver Fox Odyssey: History of the Canadian Silver Fox Industry. Then breeding stock became more profitable. Old proven breeders of good quality were valued during the last months of 1912 at from $18,000 to $25,000 a pair, according to a 1913 report by the Canadian government quoted in Silver Fox Odyssey. Eventually the industry declined, and there are only traces of it remaining.The museum on Prince Edward Island has old photographs that show foxes looking very comfortable with human beings. And as Dr. Lord took a deep dive into fox-farming history, she found other sources suggesting the animals were already somewhat domesticated, including The Black Fox Magazine, a publication for people who hoped to make their fortune raising foxes for their pelts. The magazine offers a glimpse into a bygone world. For example, an article by F. E. Muzzy in the January 1921 issue described the 1921 International Fox Show in Montreal. Mr. Muzzy wrote that one of the islands fox industry bigwigs, Leo Frank, brought a pair of tame foxes to town, and not only walked them on leashes but took them to a dance where the girls did the fox trot with these foxes around their necks. ImageCredit...Keystone-Mast Collection, California Museum of Photography, University of California, RiversideHearsay, of course, but a good story, given the other evidence.Dr. Belyaevs claims in his landmark article were twofold. One, he had shown how quickly one could select for tameness and tolerance of human beings. The second was that breeding, or selecting for lack of fear in the presence of humans, also had brought about other changes, like floppy ears, spotted coats and differences in tail carriage. He didnt use the term, but that suite of physical traits came to be known as domestication syndrome. And it was thought to cross species, showing up in cows and goats, for example, as well as foxes.The idea of domestication syndrome, said Dr. Larson, has been appealing but not thoroughly examined. He, Dr. Lord and their colleagues looked at 10 papers that defined domestication syndrome and found that there wasnt one trait that was included in all the definitions. What the hell are we even talking about here? he asked.The authors argue that the foxes already showed some of the physical traits that Dr. Belyaev described by the time he got them. His breeding may, however have affected how frequently the traits appeared. The researchers also note that different species show different combinations of the traits that were proposed to be in the syndrome. The paper provides the final nail in the coffin to the idea of a universal set of traits characterizing all domesticated animals, said Marcelo R. Snchez-Villagra, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Zurich who studies domestication and was not involved in the study.But that was not surprising, he added, given other research showing varying processes of domestication. He appreciated the critical look at the fox experiment, because I also think its value has been overestimated.Dr. Kukekova said she found that critique oversimplified, although she sympathized: I completely understand their frustration with domestication syndrome. But many aspects of the fox domestication experiment were not presented correctly, she added.ImageCredit...Keystone-Mast Collection, California Museum of Photography, University of California, RiversideDr. Belyaev created a pattern of behavior totally different from that of the farmed foxes he began with, Dr. Kukekova said. The old photographs of the friendly foxes were not scientific evidence, she added, and there was no evidence that the foxes actively sought out human interaction, as Dr. Belyaevs did. She cautioned, however, that there is an enormous difference between a domesticated animal and a pet. The foxes are domesticated, but they are not pets, she said.Adam Wilkins, a biologist at Humboldt University in Berlin, found the new paper deeply flawed. In a personal letter to the authors, he argued that mammals do share a suite of physical characteristics that go along with tameness. Dr. Wilkins has argued that mutations in cells in a part of the embryo called the neural crest are linked to behavioral and physical changes. The fact that different kinds of domesticated animals have somewhat different sets of the affected traits is perfectly consistent with the idea of a syndrome, he wrote in an email. Asked if there was a working definition of domestication, Dr. Sanchez-Villagra replied, There are as many as there are authors who have provided a definition.Despite their differences, the spirit of collaboration and scientific discourse among researchers in the quite small field of canine evolution might best be captured by Dr. Wilkins at the end of his letter. He tempered his criticisms with a friendly note, concluding, We clearly share a strong interest in the subject and I suspect a love of dogs. Here, I attach a picture of my personal favorite domesticated animal, my dog Wolfie. | science |
on techDelivery apps promised to connect restaurants with more customers. The dream isnt working.Credit...Pablo RochatPublished June 10, 2020Updated July 2, 2021This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays.More people are using food delivery apps like Grubhub and Uber Eats to order from restaurants during the pandemic. But can this trend last if so many restaurants are unhappy? My colleague Nathaniel Popper talked to a restaurant owner in Columbus, Ohio, who was paying fees that averaged more than 40 percent of each sale to one app company. He closed and applied for unemployment. I talked to Nathaniel about his recent article, which highlights the gap between the promise and the reality of technology to generate more customers for restaurants. The stakes couldnt be higher, with many restaurants struggling because of coronavirus-related closings and concerns. Shira: Isnt keeping 60 percent of a sale better than not having that order at all?Nathaniel: Many restaurants are realizing that theyre taking a loss on every order through the delivery apps, so those orders dont make economic sense. Beyond the fees, many restaurants said they felt that delivery apps werent good partners they found it difficult, for example, to reach delivery services to fix problems.If I become a regular after trying a restaurant from a delivery app, doesnt that make up for the loss on one order?There was a hope that delivery apps would generate customers and sales that restaurants wouldnt have gotten otherwise. But it looks like delivery apps pull people away from eating in or ordering directly from those restaurants.Are restaurants angry at apps because theyre worried they wont survive the pandemic?Thats part of it. Some surveys showed that people planned to use delivery more and have concerns about dining in. If restaurants lose money on delivery orders and there are fewer sit-down customers because of local limits on dine-in numbers or coronavirus fears, the math doesnt work for a lot of restaurants.Whats the alternative?Restaurants are trying options to take orders through their own websites, and use their own delivery couriers or contractors from companies that dont take a percentage of each order.Right now, online ordering is a small percentage of restaurant sales, but its growing fast. And many people look first at these big apps when they want to order food. Thats why restaurants feel like they both cant live with these apps and cant ditch them.The app companies mostly lose money, restaurants complain, some couriers say theyre making peanuts and many diners dont like hidden costs or bad delivery experiences. Thats a lot of problems!That list of unhappy parties is something I thought about a lot. In many cases people are getting a broader range of restaurants to deliver for the first time, at what feels like a reasonable price. Sometimes restaurants absorb the cost of that. A lot of the cost is absorbed by investors in these app companies.Do YOU use apps for delivery or takeout?Ive had mostly bad experiences in the handful of times Ive used a delivery app. We mostly order from one Thai restaurant near us that does delivery itself, and that we can call if the food is late.Read more: Brian X. Chen, a personal technology columnist for The New York Times, has tips for ordering delivery or takeout from your favorite local restaurants, while letting them keep most of the money.And The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Just Eat, a delivery app company in Europe, is close to an agreement to merge with Grubhub. App companies believe theyre better off financially if they combine. This will probably result in higher costs for diners and larger fees for restaurants.W.H.O., dont help the conspiracy peddlersEvery time an important institution stumbles, it lends credibility to dangerous conspiracy theories.Thats what I thought about the communications flub this week by the World Health Organization, which was forced to retract a comment from an official who initially said transmission of the coronavirus by people without symptoms was very rare.A day later, the organization said it didnt mean what it had said. Multiple scientific studies have found that roughly one-third or more of all coronavirus infections were transmitted by people before they ever felt symptoms. Thats why virtually all scientists and governments are recommending that everyone wear face coverings; its hard to tell who might be infectious.This wasnt the first time that public health organizations sent the wrong message. Remember the W.H.O., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others initially said that the general public didnt benefit from face coverings, and then their guidelines changed. The initial discouragement about masks was so definitive that the U.S. Surgeon General scolded people for buying them even while there were questions from the beginning about whether this guidance was correct.Public officials cant fail like this when they communicate to the public about the coronavirus. When people lose faith in what public officials say, it plays into the hands of people who fan misinformation and conspiracy theories online. A key tactic of baseless online conspiracies like those in the Plandemic video is to prey on peoples concerns that government organizations or public institutions are hiding the truth from us. Charlie Warzel, an Opinion writer for The Times, has written before that health experts should communicate clearly what they know and be up front about what they dont know. That is the essential way to build trust with the public. What weve learned from the coronavirus is that we still dont know very much about this new disease. Bad communication or overconfident proclamations from our leaders is exactly what we dont need.Before we go The office is now your scolding parent: My colleague Natasha Singer has a fascinating look at how one large company, Salesforce, is approaching coronavirus-safety measures in the office like a software engineering challenge. Out are collaborative work spaces and jars of gummy bears. In are timed tickets for elevators, scheduling software to limit the number of people working at each office and daily symptom surveys for employees.What we lose in fights between the U.S. and China: New research shows that scientists educated in China help American firms and schools dominate in artificial intelligence. Industry leaders worry that worsening tensions between the countries may lead the United States to lose that edge, my colleagues Paul Mozur and Cade Metz write.The internet tug of war in India: Bloomberg News writes about the worries in India about TikTok, YouTube and other popular apps from foreign companies. Some Indians believe that TikTok or other apps from companies in China flout local norms by showing vulgar dance moves, and local alternatives to TikTok and YouTube are sprouting up.Hugs to thisI would like to be friends with this baby who is very enthusiastic about her chunk of mango.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 |
DealBook|Bank of England Says Lenders Must Issue Additional Debt Under New Ruleshttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/12/business/dealbook/bank-of-england-debt-mrel.htmlDec. 11, 2015LONDON Banks, building societies and investment firms in Britain would need to issue an estimated 27 billion pounds, or about $41 billion, in new debt by 2020 to comply with European Union rules intended to lessen the need for future bailouts, the Bank of England said on Friday.The new rules, known as the minimum requirement for own funds and eligible liabilities, or MREL, would require European banks and other regulated financial institutions to maintain sufficient equity and other liabilities to absorb losses in a time of financial stress. The goal is to minimize risk for the overall financial system while protecting depositors.Under the rules, banks would be required to issue certain debt that could be converted to equity and those debt holders and other investors would have to shoulder losses.The implementation of MREL is a crucial step forward in ensuring that any bank, large or small, carries sufficient resources to be resolved in an orderly way, without recourse to public subsidy and without disruption to the wider financial system, Mark J. Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, said on Friday in a news release.The Bank of England, which is responsible for putting into effect in Britain the European Union rules, said that lenders and other regulated financial institutions would need 223 billion in such debt to comply with the new rules.The bulk would come from existing debt that is expected to mature in the next four years and that would be reissued to comply with the new rules, the Bank of England said.As a result, banks and other regulated entities in Britain would need to issue about 27 billion in new debt by January 2020, when the regulations go into effect, the central bank said.The estimates were released on Friday as part of a consultation paper by the Bank of England on how it intends to put in place the new requirement in Britain.The Bank of England estimates that it will cost the financial industry 1.4 billion annually to service the new debt.Under its proposed regulations, banks with more than 15 billion in deposits would be required to maintain an amount of convertible debt and equities equal to twice their minimum capital requirements as set by regulators. | Business |
Europe|U.N. Court Declines to Reopen Bosnias Genocide Case Against Serbiahttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/world/europe/bosnia-international-court-of-justice.htmlCredit...Andrew Testa for The New York TimesMarch 9, 2017PARIS The United Nations highest court on Thursday denied a request by Bosnia to reopen a 2007 case that cleared Serbia of playing an active role in the genocide committed during the war in Bosnia in the 1990s.The International Court of Justice said in a statement that it could not act on the request because it had not been approved by all three members of Bosnias collective presidency, which represents the Croat, Serb and Bosniak populations.Experts familiar with the case said other paths were still open to re-examine whether genocide was committed in Bosnia not only near the end of the war in 1995 but as early as 1992.That year, over several months, a Serbian-orchestrated ethnic-cleansing campaign drove the non-Serb population from large areas of territory amid a wave of killings and other atrocities.For the International Court of Justice, based in The Hague, Bosnias suit against Serbia for genocide was the first such case involving large-scale deaths and displacements. More commonly, the court deals with treaty or border violations and other disputes between nations.In 2007, the court ruled that while a massacre in the Bosnian city of Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb forces killed nearly 8,000 men and boys in 1995, was genocide, it did not find proof that Serbia was responsible for the killings.But the courts ruling did say that Serbia violated the Genocide Convention because it should have prevented the genocide and punished the military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic. It did not describe the killings of 1992 as genocide.Two weeks ago, just before the 10-year window to ask for a review of the case expired, Bakir Izetbegovic, the Bosniak member of the tripartite presidency, directed a team of lawyers to file a request for the court to revise the 2007 ruling. A revision is the only available option because the court does not allow appeals.The request argued that since 2007, a great deal of evidence had become available in other trials that would demonstrate the active role of the Serbian state, and the scale of its involvement, during the Bosnian war.Mr. Izetbegovic was the only member of the collective presidency to make the request. He contended that further consent was not needed because the revision involved a continuation of Bosnias earlier case.But the Serbian member of the presidency, Mladen Ivanic, demanded that the court dismiss the case, calling the request illegitimate.David Scheffer, a professor of law at Northwestern University in Chicago who helped prepare the revision request, said the court had, erroneously, simply accepted the Serb argument and cast aside a genocide case on a technicality.Genocide is too serious a crime to be dealt with in this manner, Professor Scheffer said. Its so distressing, the way the court conducted itself. It did not honor its own rules and statute, and it offered no legal arguments.Other options to pursue the case will be considered, he said. | World |
Credit...Gordon Welters for The New York TimesNov. 4, 2018KAUB, Germany Just after sunrise, Capt. Frank Sep turned to his ships radio for the defining news of his day: the water level in Kaub, the shallowest part of the middle section of the Rhine, Germanys most important shipping route.The news was bad, as it so often is these days.One of the longest dry spells on record has left parts of the Rhine at record-low levels for months, forcing freighters to reduce their cargo or stop plying the river altogether.ImageCredit...Gordon Welters for The New York TimesParts of the Danube and the Elbe Germanys other major rivers for transport are also drying up. Some inland ports are idle, and it is estimated that millions of tons of goods are having to be transported by rail or road.With castles and vineyards dominating the river banks near Kaub, just five miles from the Lorelei rock, named for a siren who was said to lure sailors to their deaths, it would be easy to forget how important the area is to German commerce. It is roughly halfway between the inland ports of Koblenz and Mainz, and virtually all freight shipped from seaports in the Netherlands and Belgium to the industrial southwest of Germany passes through here.On a day in late October, Captain Sep learned that the river was just 10 inches deep. That meant the water in the man-made shipping channel dredged near the center of the river was about five feet deep, down from an average of about 11 feet. Even with cargo at one-third of its usual weight, his 282-foot freighter Rex-Rheni the King Rhine would have only inches of water under its hull.ImageCredit...Gordon Welters for The New York TimesIve never experienced so little water here, said Captain Sep, who has been working on the river since 1982, the last 22 years on the Rex-Rheni. Its becoming so low that its very difficult for ships to pass.An exceptionally dry summer has caused havoc across Europe. A trade group in Germany put farmers losses at several billion dollars. The German chemical giant BASF had to decrease production at one of its plants over the summer because the Rhine, whose water it uses to cool production, was too low.Gas stations in the region that rely on tankers to deliver fuel from refineries in the Netherlands have run out. And the wreck of De Hoop, a Dutch freighter that sank after an explosion in 1895 and is normally submerged, now lies exposed on the Rhines banks.About half of Germanys river ferries have stopped running, according to the Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration, and river cruise ships are having to transport their passengers by bus for parts of their journey. Thousands of fish in the Swiss section of the river died because of the heat and low oxygen levels.There are reasons to believe such weather will become more frequent with a warming climate.Our research shows an increase in instability, said Hagen Koch, who studies rivers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The extremes are going to happen more often.Its difficult to overstate the importance of the Rhine to life and commerce in the region.Its simply the most important river in Germany, said Martin Mauermann, head of the hydrology and water management section of the federal body responsible for waterways. Its like the thick branch in the middle of the tree.ImageCredit...Gordon Welters for The New York TimesRoughly 80 percent of the 223 million tons of cargo transported by ship in Germany each year travels the Rhine, which links the countrys industrial heartland to Belgium, the Netherlands and the North Sea. An exact tally of how much is being diverted to rail and road is not yet available, but it is a significant number, said Martyn Douglas of the German Federal Environment Agency.While most freight can simply albeit often more expensively be put on rails or wheels, some cannot. A shipping company, Kbler Spedition, specializes in heavy and oversize freight that cannot be carried for more than a couple of miles on roads. Because ships carrying the heavy components of a wind farm can no longer reach the companys terminal in Mannheim, Kblers storage area lies empty.Its effectively stopped the building of the wind farm entirely, said Robert Mutlu, who runs the terminal.ImageCredit...Gordon Welters for The New York TimesJust before reaching Kaub, Captain Sep slowed his ship to a crawl. The forward thrust generated by a propeller drives a ship deeper, so a slower ship is slightly higher in water. The reduced speed would also make pulling the boat off rocks easier, if the worst were to happen.The number on the Rex-Rhenis digital depth meter dropped, and dropped some more, eventually showing only about 25 centimeters, or 10 inches, of water below the ship.It passed the Pfalzgrafenstein Castle, which resembles a large, stationary boat in the river. Built in the 14th century to collect tolls, it has a windowless foundation to withstand the Rhines high water levels. Today, the foot of the building is at least five feet above water.ImageCredit...Gordon Welters for The New York TimesThe Rhines flow relies not just on annual rainfall, but also on enormous long-term reserves of water in the Alps. Melting snow and glaciers, as well as Lake Constance, feed the upper parts of the river, but with climate change, those reserves are lower, Dr. Koch said.The shipping lane could be made deeper, but that would take years, if not decades, and would cost millions. And even if that were to succeed, it would remove only one bottleneck on a river that is just starting to show how many trouble spots it has.Low water events will be more frequent, said Mr. Douglas of the Federal Environment Agency, and at the same time the Rhine fleet is becoming bigger and heavier.ImageCredit...Gordon Welters for The New York TimesWhen the Rex-Rheni was built in 1966, it would have been considered a big ship. Today, at least under normal conditions, it would be one of the smaller ones on the Rhine, where it is not unusual to see a 600-foot freighter capable of hauling 6,000 tons when there is at least 12 feet of water.A clause in German shipping contracts that allows ships to set their own prices when the water level is below about 32 inches at Kaub makes such trips worthwhile for smaller boats, even if their holds arent full. But the clause cannot make the river deeper.We need the level in the Bodensee to rise, said Martin Deymann, using the German name for Lake Constance. His 35 ships stopped transporting goods along the middle section of the Rhine last month. We need rain, and hopefully it will come before it becomes cold and it comes down as snow. | World |
Health|What a Gene and Its Risks Could Mean for Kidney Transplantshttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/health/kidney-transplants-black-americans.htmlKidneys from Black donors are automatically downgraded in transplant assessments, but studying a gene variant could help change that.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesMay 17, 2022Transplant specialists, when evaluating kidneys that come from donors, try to work out how likely it is that the kidney will fail after being transplanted into a recipient. Their risk calculations consider factors including the donors age, height, weight and history of diabetes. And, to the dismay of some researchers, it also includes the donors race.Kidneys from deceased Black donors are automatically downgraded as higher risk.Some experts are now asking if there is a better way of evaluating kidneys from Black donors, one that can rely more on genetic screening rather than race to assess the risk of failure.The proposed genetic screening would check whether donors carry two copies of variants in a gene, APOL1, that are strongly associated with kidney disease. Because most Black donors do not have those genetic variants, the experts argue, their kidneys should not be automatically downgraded.But before instituting that change, researchers say they have to determine if, in fact, kidneys from donors that have the risk variants of APOL1 are more likely to fail.The first hint came from a study by Dr. Barry Freedman, of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina involving 1,153 deceased donor kidney transplants performed at 113 different transplant programs. It found that kidneys from deceased donors with two risk variants were twice as likely to fail rapidly compared with kidneys from donors who have one gene variant or none.But that finding will need to be replicated in a bigger research effort. It is getting underway with APOLLO, a large study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, to assess living and deceased donors. Study researchers are testing kidney donors for APOL1 and following the fate of thousands of transplant patients who have received kidneys from Black American donors at more than 97 transplant programs.In the study, living donors can decide if they want to learn the result of their genetic test and if they want the recipient of their kidney to know the result as well. Medical privacy regulations forbid doctors from telling kidney transplant candidates if a living donor has the variants without the donors consent.Dr. Freedman said that whatever results come from the research, more transplant centers are broaching the idea of genetic testing people who want to donate kidneys.Until recently, he added, many transplant centers said they dont want to talk about it. | Health |
Attorney General William Barrs attention to the Justice Department investigation shows the high stakes for the agency and for him.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York TimesPublished June 25, 2020Updated Oct. 21, 2020WASHINGTON For months, lawyers at the Justice Department have been marshaling their forces for a possible antitrust lawsuit against Google, spurred on by the personal interest of Attorney General William P. Barr.The day-to-day digging of a federal antitrust investigation rarely rises to the level of the attorney general or the deputy attorney general.But under Mr. Barr, the agency has made top priority of looking into the countrys biggest tech companies. He receives regular updates on the Google case from an aide, according to several people close to the investigations, while an official in the office of his deputy, Jeffrey Rosen, oversees the investigations into tech companies.In the latest sign that the Justice Department is moving swiftly, staff members appear to have begun drafting a case memo to test its legal argument, three other people connected to the case said. The agency has assigned a growing number of employees to the inquiry, and it has brought in an economic expert who could testify at a trial. The details of the internal maneuvers were gathered from interviews with more than 20 people, most of whom would speak only anonymously because the deliberations were private.The attention from top officials shows the high stakes for the Justice Department and Mr. Barr, and may draw fire from critics who say it shows how the agency has become politicized. President Trump has repeatedly chastised the big tech companies, arguing in part that they silence conservative views. On Wednesday, a lawyer for the department, testifying as a whistle-blower, told the House Judiciary Committee that the agency had pursued antitrust investigations either because of Mr. Barrs personal animus against an industry or the presidents political whims.Mr. Barr, who has repeatedly said publicly that the tech industrys power required examination, is expected to decide in the coming months whether to file a lawsuit accusing Google of abusing its power in the market for advertising technology and search products. A successful suit against the company could win plaudits from Mr. Trump. It could also reshape Googles business, transform a large chunk of the economy and perhaps even end the era of unfettered growth in Silicon Valley.But a loss in court could embarrass the Justice Department which suffered an antitrust defeat in 2018 when it challenged AT&Ts purchase of Time Warner and lead to accusations that the case was based on politics, not the law. It could also reinforce the tech industrys power.Deciding not to pursue the case may prove problematic, too: The Federal Trade Commission faced a flood of criticism in 2012 when it decided not to sue Google.I think the prevailing winds right now are winds that would result in more criticism if they decided not to bring a case than if they brought a weak case and lost, said Charles James, who led the Justice Departments antitrust division in the early 2000s.Brianna Herlihy, a department spokeswoman, declined to comment on the tech investigations. In a separate statement, she said the agency strongly disagrees with the claims of politicization made at Wednesdays hearing.Julie Tarallo McAlister, a Google spokeswoman, said the company continued to cooperate with the Justice Department, and we dont have any updates or comments on speculation.The Google investigation began last year, shortly after the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission divided up responsibility for investigating antitrust complaints about the major tech firms. In addition to concerns about Googles control over the software that delivers online ads to consumers, the agency has been examining allegations that the company abused its dominance over search, several of the people close to the investigation said.The departments investigators have fanned out over the media, tech and advertising industries, gathering evidence from companies that compete with Google. Antitrust inquiries often take years, but this one has moved unusually fast under Mr. Barr.The agency recently hired 10 to 15 tech fellows to work on the investigation, one of the people close to the case said. The part of the antitrust office that is overseeing the inquiry, Technology and Financial Services, has been told that it will not be taking on any new matters, a sign that it has narrowed its focus to Google, one person said.ImageCredit...Erin Scott/ReutersOfficials have spent recent months trying to recruit a litigator from a law firm to join the team for the case, a practice that is not unusual for major antitrust cases. David Boies, for example, was the star of the governments 1990s lawsuit against Microsoft. The current search was reported earlier by Bloomberg News.The Justice Department has also hired an economic expert to work on the investigation, a standard but critical step, two people familiar with the matter said.Hired economists play a central role in the courtroom during an antitrust case, making sense of complicated data and economic principles for a judge or jury. It was not immediately clear which expert or experts had been hired.A case against Google would almost certainly stretch on for years, and a trial is far from guaranteed: Companies frequently settle with federal prosecutors, and Justice Department staff could recommend against going to court. After the Justice Department began pursuing Microsoft in the early 1990s, for example, a final settlement was reached years later, in 2002.The Federal Trade Commission closed its yearslong investigation into Google in 2012 without filing any charges despite hiring a prominent litigator to work on the case. But since then, European officials have brought several antitrust cases against the company, and aspects of its business have attracted the attention of other regulators around the world.Mr. Barr signaled early on that he would be one of them. At his confirmation hearing last year, he said that a lot of people wonder how such huge behemoths that now exist in Silicon Valley have taken shape under the nose of the antitrust enforcers.Google is also under investigation by a bipartisan group of state attorneys general, who could join a Justice Department lawsuit or file their own.Few U.S. attorneys general have paid much attention to antitrust law, a division of the Justice Department that is rarely in the spotlight. But Mr. Barr, a former lawyer for Verizon and a former board member of Time Warner, two companies that regularly navigate antitrust law, is steeped in the subject.In August, Mr. Barr pulled Lauren Willard, a lawyer from the antitrust division, to sit within his office to act as his liaison to the cases. In October, the department hired a veteran antitrust lawyer, Ryan Shores, to head technology antitrust cases including Google and to report to Mr. Rosen, Mr. Barrs deputy.Mr. Shores is working closely with Ms. Willard, who is giving regular updates to Mr. Barr.In a sign of how widely he interprets the agencys reach, Mr. Barr said last weekend that antitrust laws could be used against companies that allegedly restricted the spread of conservative views. Mr. Trump and conservatives have become increasingly critical of tech companies, including YouTube, which is owned by Google, arguing that the companies silence conservative voices.One way this can be addressed, Mr. Barr said in an interview with Fox News, is through the antitrust laws and challenging companies that engage in monopolistic practices.Katie Benner contributed reporting. | Tech |
Credit...Heiko BellmannMarch 22, 2016Its the bane of a new mothers life: Shes exhausted, but her male partner wants sex. And besides, she still has to get up for those middle of the night feedings.But female burying beetles have solved the problem brilliantly, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.Not only do they zap fathers with an anti-aphrodisiac, but they get them to help out with child care.They are a very modern family, said Sandra Steiger, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Ulm in Germany, and the lead researcher, who studied 400 pairs of beetles over three years.Although evolutionary biologists have long recognized that burying beetles black with red markings are unusual because males and females care for their broods together, researchers have uncovered the physiological mechanisms by which this sex-versus-parenting dtente is mediated.When the immature, wingless beetle larvae are most dependent, researchers found, the mother stops producing eggs and releases a chemical that functions as an anti-aphrodisiac. The father gets the message through his antennae. Both parents then hunker down for the species-preserving imperative: Kids first. Protect and feed.ImageCredit...Heiko BellmannThree days later, when the larvae are independent enough to toddle off and feed themselves, the parents resume copulating.A burying beetle faces a conflict: Should it devote its tiny resources to creating more eggs or securing the survival of its offspring? By taking a break from procreation in order to nourish their young, burying beetles strike an elegant balance.Unlike primates, which change behavior and appearance to advertise when they are in heat and ovulating, burying beetles broadcast the opposite information. As soon as beetle eggs metamorphose into vulnerable larvae, the mother releases a hormone that blocks her egg production and, at the same time, produces the buzz-kill pheromone.Unlike burying beetles, most insects lay eggs and move on. For the few that take care of offspring, including honey bees and ants, females do the parenting.Burying beetles are supercool, said Marlene Zuk, a professor of ecology, evolution and behavior at the University of Minnesota. I applaud the researchers. We could just say that organisms do what they do and sometimes theres parental care and sometimes not. But how do you make such an incredibly unusual behavior happen when it does? This closes the loop.For their research, Dr. Steiger and her team ventured into the forest by the university and left mouse carcasses You can just order them, frozen, on the Internet, she explained to attract the beetles.Drawn by the smell of a carcass, burying beetles strip it of fur, roll it up, coat it with a protective secretion (somewhat akin to antibacterial liquid) and bury it. Then they use it for food and as a breeding chamber.Because researchers did not know the age of the forest burying beetles, they took them to the lab to breed a fresh first generation. Researchers paired off males and females, provided them with peat and carrion, and began observations.It turns out that male burying beetles are mad for sex. Even as the female lays eggs on the carcass over about 20 hours, the male still copulates with her, to guarantee he is the father of the offspring.This is because in the wild, other male beetles, attracted by the carrion and the female, will sneak in and try to copulate with the female, Dr. Steiger said. It was ridiculous, because in our lab there was no one else, but the father still kept copulating, just to make sure, she said.Dr. Zuk, the author of Sex on Six Legs, amplified: Even if beetles dont perceive a competitor, its better to be cautious, and keep copulating. Just like its way better for your smoke alarm to go off if you only burn toast, than for you to miss a fire.Around 60 hours after the eggs were laid, they developed into about 15 to 20 larvae. And that was when the adult male and female abruptly stopped having sex.Instead, the mother and father each predigested carrion for their hungry larvae, who signaled they wanted to be fed by showing, as researchers wrote, a specialized begging behavior, in which they rear up and wave their legs, thereby touching the parents mouthpart to obtain food.The researchers also analyzed chemicals released by the females throughout the breeding and nurturing cycles.As Dr. Steiger noted, human females can signal that they are not in the mood for sex, regardless of whether they are ovulating. But burying beetle females cant decouple that message, she said. They cant lie. Its a problem in biology. | science |
United States 7, Slovakia 1Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesFeb. 13, 2014SOCHI, Russia His familys background could have made the game more complicated for United States forward Paul Stastny, so on the eve of his Sochi Games debut, his father, Peter, kept his advice simple. Have fun, he told his son, and savor every shift.Stastny, a second-time, second-generation Olympian, appreciated the reminder. After the Americans 7-1 victory over Slovakia in the teams tournament opener at Shayba Arena, he said, All of us are at such a young age, we take everything for granted.The Slovakian hockey family a group that includes the Stastnys is still working through a mournful reminder of lifes unpredictability, which is why Stastny, 28, was hardly the only player fighting through labyrinthine emotions Thursday.For the first time since 1998, the Slovakian Olympic squad does not include Pavol Demitra, a center who was quick with his stick and a quip. At the 2010 Olympics, he scored one of the more memorable goals, flipping the puck past Ilya Bryzgalov to give Slovakia a 2-1 shootout victory over Russia.Demitra, who finished as the leading scorer in Vancouver for the fourth-place Slovaks, died in the 2011 plane crash that killed 43 members of the Kontinental Hockey League team Lokomotiv.Demitra, who was 36, had 21 points in three Olympics. The wings whom he centered in 2010, the brothers Marian and Marcel Hossa, were on the ice against the Americans, but the hole in Slovakias offense was gaping. The U.S. team outshot Slovakia, 11-4, in the first period and 33-23 over all.ImageCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesWeve got different team than in 2010, said Marian Hossa, who plays for the Chicago Blackhawks. We dont have lots of big guys on the team. Most of the younger guys, they will have to adjust and prove theyre good players.In Vancouver, Hossa, his brother and Marian Gaborik, who is out of these Olympics with a broken collarbone, shared living quarters with Demitra.It is always in your head, and hes always with us, Marian Hossa said.Marcel Hossa, who plays for the K.H.L. team in Riga, Latvia, said that whenever he is home for a break, he visits Demitras grave and lights a memorial candle for him.Before a practice, Marcel Hossa said, the Slovaks exchanged their favorite stories about Demitra, who was known for his playful nature and for his pressure- and belly-busting jokes.He was a great person, a great leader, Hossa said. We cannot forget about it, you know?Demitra was an ethereal presence Thursday, and not just on the Slovakian side. Stastny, whose father carried the flag in the opening ceremony for Slovakia during its first Winter Olympics as an independent nation in 1994, contributed two goals, both during the Americans six-goal second period.His family, Stastny said, had a close relationship with Demitra, who logged 16 seasons in the National Hockey League. Demitra played for the Kings in Los Angeles, where one of his teammates was Dustin Brown, who scored the United States seventh goal.Asked about Demitra after the game, Brown drew in a deep breath. Everyone who played with Pav understood what type of player he was, but more important, what type of person he was, said Brown, adding that Demitra kept the dressing room loose.He was the guy who would balance out the coach, Brown said with a smile. The coach would come in and say one thing, and in a not-so-direct way, in a good way, right after the coach left, hed say, How about we do it this way?Demitra probably would have had something helpful to say after the United States scored on its first four shots in the second period to break open a 1-1 tie. The scoring flurry prompted the Slovakian coach, Vladimir Vujtek, to pull goaltender Jaroslav Halak. His replacement, Peter Budaj, let in two goals in his first two minutes.The Slovaks, whose lone goal came from the 23-year-old forward Tomas Tatar early in the second, are a team in transition. Two players from Demitras generation, Miroslav Satan and Jozef Stumpel, were not named to the Olympic squad. A third, Zigmund Palffy, retired last year. Until the next wave forms and crests, Demitras absence will be a black veil, darkening these international competitions for those who knew and loved him.You always think about those players that you played with, Brown said, and Pav was one of those players for me.RUSSIA 5, SLOVENIA 2 Alex Ovechkin scored 1 minute 17 seconds after the puck dropped with a wrist shot that made the crowd roar. He made the flag-waving fans gasp 2:37 later with a drop pass to set up Evgeni Malkins goal to give Russia a 2-0 lead.We started well, got the lead, and then we stopped playing, Ovechkin said.The result was a closer-than-expected win over Slovenia, which was playing in the Olympics for the first time.That led one Russian reporter to tell Coach Zinetula Bilyaletdinov that it would be a death sentence to start goaltender Semyon Varlamov, who gave up two goals on 14 shots, against the United States on Saturday.Ziga Jeglic had two goals in the second period for Slovenia one before Malkin scored and one after to pull his team within a goal. (AP)CANADA 3, NORWAY 1 Shea Weber and Jamie Benn scored in the second period to help Canada, the defending Olympic champion, shake off a sluggish start.Patrick Thoresen pulled the Norwegians within a goal on a power play 22 seconds into the third, but Drew Doughty restored the two-goal lead 1:25 later.Canada goaltender Carey Price made 19 saves in his Olympic debut, which included a giveaway that led to the only goal he allowed. Roberto Luongo, who helped the Canadians win gold in 2010 as the host nation, is scheduled to start Fridays game against Austria. (AP)FINLAND 8, AUSTRIA 4 Jarkko Immonen and Mikael Granlund each scored two goals for Finland, which played the final two periods without its injured captain, Teemu Selanne.Selanne, 43, in his record-tying sixth Olympics, is expected to play against Norway on Friday.Michael Grabner of the Islanders had three goals for Austria, which had two early leads before Finland took control. (AP) | Sports |
Politics|How to Follow the Georgia Senate Runoffshttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/us/politics/polls-close-georgia-voting-long-lines.htmlThe New York Times will provide live coverage of two races in Georgia that will determine control of the Senate.Credit...Audra Melton for The New York TimesPublished Jan. 5, 2021Updated Jan. 7, 2021Georgia polls open at 7 a.m. on Tuesday in the all-important Senate runoff elections, but we wont start getting results until shortly after voting locations start closing at 7 p.m. With New York Times reporters on the ground across the state, heres a quick guide for how to follow along.First, the races:One is a regularly scheduled contest in which David Perdue, a Republican whose Senate term expired over the weekend, is running for a second term against Jon Ossoff, a Democrat. Mr. Perdue almost won in November but ended up just shy of a majority, with 49.7 percent of the vote to Mr. Ossoffs 47.9 percent, triggering a runoff under Georgia law.The second race is a special election between Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Republican, and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat. In a crowded field in November, Mr. Warnock got 32.9 percent of the vote and Ms. Loeffler, who was appointed to her seat, got 25.9 percent. The winner of the runoff will serve out the remainder of former Senator Johnny Isaksons term, which ends in 2022.If Democrats win both races, they will create a 50-50 split in the Senate, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris acting as tiebreaker. If Republicans win either race, they will retain control of the Senate and the ability to block much of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.s agenda.Well have a good idea by midmorning Tuesday about what turnout looks like: Democrats are counting on big numbers in major cities and the Atlanta suburbs, and Republicans need a lot of voters in smaller cities, rural areas and strongholds like northern Georgia.The Times will be covering the runoffs all day and night. A live blog will be published Tuesday morning.You can also follow the vote counts on The Timess results pages, which will include live analysis from reporters.When well know the winners is an open question. With results coming in around 7:30 p.m., we could know who won by late Tuesday night but if the races are very tight, it could also take several days. While more than three million Georgians voted early, their ballots cant be tabulated until the polls close.Long lines could also cause delays. (Any Georgian who is in line by 7 p.m. has the right to vote.) In past elections, lines have been a particular problem in and around cities, like Atlanta, that have large Black populations and are heavily Democratic.When Georgias early voting period for the general election began in October, some voters in Atlanta and its suburbs, such as Fulton and Gwinnett Counties, waited as long as eight hours, and lines were also long in Chatham County, which includes Savannah. In the states primary election in June, it was past midnight by the time the last voters all of whom had been in line by 7 p.m. cast their ballots. | Politics |
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/technology/personaltech/changing-the-look-of-excel.htmlQ&AJune 3, 2015Q. I dont like the standard font that Microsoft Excel 2010 uses and I find myself switching it to something else more often than not. Is there a way to just have new files start out with a different typeface?A. Just as you can set a new default font for the documents you create in Microsoft Word, you can also choose your own typeface and point size for Excel files. In recent versions of Microsoft Excel for Windows, click the File tab in the Ribbon toolbar and then click Options. In the Excel Options box, click the General tab.In the When creating new workbooks section of the Options box, use the drop-down menus to choose a new default font and a different font size. The General Options has other settings to adjust too, like the overall Excel color scheme and the number of sheets in a workbook.When you have made your changes, click the OK button and restart Microsoft Excel. The new workbooks you create from now on should reflect your new default font settings and whatever else you changed in the Options box.Snapping Your Self-PortraitQ. How do selfie sticks work if the phones camera button is so far away?A. Those telescoping monopods typically connect to the phone wirelessly over Bluetooth, or by a cable that plugs into the phones headphone jack. Once the phone is linked electronically to the accessory, you press a button on the end of the stick to capture your self-portrait.Some models include a small Bluetooth remote control to use as a shutter button. Certain cheap selfie sticks are basically just long poles with clamps to hold the phone; you take a photo by setting the timer in the camera app.If you plan to get a stick to document your summer vacation travel, you may want to check ahead. Many museums have banned the sticks because of safety and crowd-control concerns.TIP OF THE WEEK The inability to distinguish colors can make navigating a computers operating system harder, but the accessibility features built into Windows and Mac OS X might help. (Mobile devices have similar settings of their own.)In Windows 7 and Windows 8, you can increase the color contrast for some of the text and images on the screen so you can see them better. To turn on High Contrast mode in most editions of Windows 7, go to the Start button, select Control Panel and search for Change window colors and metrics. In the Basic and High Contrast Themes areas, select the color combination that is easiest for you to see. In Windows 8, you can get to the High Contrast settings in the desktop mode by pressing the Windows and U keys, or by clicking (or tapping) the Ease of Access icon in the lower-left corner of the Windows 8 sign-in screen.In OS X, click the System Preferences icon in the Dock. In the box that appears, click the Accessibility icon and then Display to adjust the screen colors. Mac keyboard shortcuts let you change the screen even faster. On a Mac laptop, press the Function, Command, Option and F5 keys to open the Accessibility Options box, where you can invert the screen colors and adjust the contrast; on a Mac desktop computer, press the Command, Option and F5 keys instead.Browser extensions that help compensate for partial colorblindness can be another aid for some people. The recently released Color Enhancer extension (free in the Google Chrome Store) is one such option out there; it uses an adjustable filter to help with color perception when web-browsing. | Tech |
Usain Bolt Blastin' Bubbly ... in Cape Town Rager 1/30/2018 Usain Bolt was locked and loaded in Cape Town this past weekend ... tearin' up the South African party city with the help of a gold-plated champagne super soaker!! Bolt rolled through local hot spot Grand Cafe & Beach with a small entourage -- poppin' bottles, smokin' cigars and (of course) gettin' his groove on. The retired sprinter's Sunday Funday wrapped a little before midnight -- but not before he blasted his homies with some heavenly Brut. Ain't no stoppin' the World's Fastest party train! | Entertainment |
Sports BriefingFeb. 6, 2014Texas A&M has signed a player who could replace quarterback Johnny Manziel and another who could boost its defense. The Aggies signed Kyle Allen, the top-rated quarterback prospect in the nation, to compete for the job left open when Manziel, the 2012 Heisman Trophy winner, declared for the N.F.L. draft last month. Allen threw for more than 8,000 yards and 86 touchdowns at Desert Mountain High School in Scottsdale, Ariz. The Aggies also signed the No. 1-rated defensive end, Arlington (Tex.) Martins Myles Garrett. Garrett had 81 tackles and 19 sacks last season. | Sports |
RHONY' Star Luann de Lesseps Officially Charged for Drunken Rampage ... Still Facing Felony 1/24/2018 Countess Luann de Lesseps has officially been hit with 3 charges for her alleged drunken holiday attack on a cop ... TMZ has learned. The 'Real Housewives of NYC' star has been charged with a felony count of resisting an officer with violence, along with a trespassing and disorderly intoxication charge -- both misdemeanors ... according to new docs. She faces up to 5 years in prison for the felony charge. The good news for Luann -- 2 additional felony counts of corruption by threat were not filed against her. As we reported ... Lesseps was originally looking at 4 felony counts after being busted in Palm Beach, Florida around Christmas Eve. She checked into rehab a few days after the drunken arrest. | Entertainment |
The president-elect said the violence borders on sedition and made clear he viewed President Trump as responsible for inciting his supporters with baseless claims the election was stolen.VideotranscripttranscriptOur Democracy Is Under Unprecedented Assault, Biden SaysPresident-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. called on President Trump to go on television and respond to Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol this afternoon, disrupting the certification of the Electoral College vote.Our democracy is under unprecedented assault unlike anything weve seen in modern times. An assault on the citadel of liberty, the Capitol itself. I call on this mob to pull back and allow the work of democracy to go forward. Youve heard me say it before in a different context, the words of a president matter, no matter how good or bad that president is. I call on President Trump to go on national television, now, to fulfill his oath, and defend the Constitution. And demand an end to this siege. Its not a protest, its insurrection. The world is watching. Like so many other Americans, I am genuinely shocked and saddened that our nation, so long the beacon of light and hope for democracy, has come to such a dark moment. Notwithstanding what I saw today, what were seeing today, I remain optimistic about the incredible opportunities. Theres never been anything we cant do when we do it together. So President Trump, step up.President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. called on President Trump to go on television and respond to Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol this afternoon, disrupting the certification of the Electoral College vote.CreditCredit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesJan. 6, 2021WASHINGTON President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. denounced the storming of the Capitol on Wednesday as the violent expression of President Trumps refusal to accept his defeat, calling it an assault on the citadel of liberty and saying the president had stoked the mob with his brazen and false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen.In direct, forceful language, Mr. Biden called the scenes of chaos in the halls of Congress a dark moment in the nations history, appealed for calm and made clear that he held Mr. Trump accountable for instigating violence that left members of both parties and allies around the world appalled.At their best, the words of a president can inspire. At their worst, they can incite, Mr. Biden said.This is not dissent, the president-elect said in remarks from Delaware as scenes of the armed takeover of the Capitol played out on television screens. Its disorder. Its chaos. It borders on sedition and it must end now.The day had started as one of triumph for Mr. Biden and his party, with Democrats coming off elections the day before that sealed control of the Senate by picking up two seats in Georgia and Congress scheduled to clear away the last formal Republican objections to his victory by certifying the Electoral College outcome.Filling out his cabinet, Mr. Biden chose Judge Merrick B. Garland, whose Supreme Court nomination Republicans blocked in 2016, to be attorney general, placing the task of repairing a beleaguered Justice Department in the hands of a centrist judge. The choice left some Democrats on the left of the party disappointed that he had not picked a woman or person of color and underscored Mr. Bidens willingness to seek bipartisan consensus.But by early afternoon, the day had devolved into an intensely jarring reminder of what Mr. Biden will face when he takes office on Jan. 20: He will not only inherit a country racked by a pandemic and economic crisis, but also a political fabric that has been ripped apart by Mr. Trump and will not easily be woven back together.The assault on the Capitol by pro-Trump demonstrators devolved into a physical confrontation that halted the process of certifying the Electoral College outcome and was egged on by an incumbent president who on Wednesday morning raged to thousands of his supporters that the election was rigged and vowed, We will never concede.ImageCredit...Win Mcnamee/Getty ImagesWith Mr. Trump remaining mostly silent immediately after the mob entered the Capitol, Mr. Biden called on the president to go on national television now to fulfill his oath and defend the Constitution and demand an end to this siege.To storm the Capitol, he continued. To smash windows, occupy offices. The floor of the United States Senate, rummaging through desks. On the Capitol, on the House of Representatives, threatening the safety of duly elected officials. Its not protest. Its insurrection.Shortly after, Mr. Trump posted on Twitter a one-minute video in which he empathized with the rioters because we had an election that was stolen from us, but then urged them to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order.The effect of the days events on Mr. Bidens political strength remained unclear. In one sense, they were a reminder that in the view of Mr. Trumps most die-hard supporters his election was illegitimate, a belief that could inhibit some Republicans in a closely divided Congress from working with him.Or the God-awful display at the Capitol, as he put it, might push the parties together in some sort of temporary solidarity that could give him a chance to forge some early bipartisan deals.Mr. Biden expressed hope that it would be the latter.The work of the moment and the work of the next four years must be the restoration of democracy, of decency, honor, respect, the rule of law, he said, adding later: We must step up.It was a reminder, if Mr. Biden or any of his aides needed one, that little in his transition to the presidency was normal.ImageCredit...Jason Andrew for The New York TimesAs the rioters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Biden set aside plans to deliver a speech on the economy, in which he had been expected to hail the Georgia victories and to emphasize several of his economic priorities, including reiterating calls for another round of financial aid to help people, businesses and state and local governments weather economic pain from the virus.Mr. Bidens advisers are deep into the process of developing policy proposals to deliver to Congress in the coming weeks, starting with another stimulus package. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who will be the Democratic majority leader after Mr. Biden is inaugurated, told reporters Wednesday morning that lawmakers first priority will be approving the $2,000 payments to individuals that Mr. Biden and the two victorious Senate candidates, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, promised voters they would deliver if Democrats won both elections.The Biden team is also drafting proposals to implement the president-elects Build Back Better campaign agenda, including new government spending on clean energy, infrastructure, health care and education, financed by tax increases on the rich and corporations.The Democratic victories in Georgia put Mr. Bidens party in control at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and reduced the risk of total partisan gridlock in Congress, at least for two years.Without Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, as the iron-fisted leader of the Senate, Mr. Bidens campaign promise of a return to bipartisanship will be put to the test. Now, Mr. Schumer and Mr. Bidens allies will bring the new presidents proposals to the Senate floor for a vote. And even with just the narrowest of margins a 50-to-50 split that can be broken by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris he may be able to turn some of those proposals into law.McConnell would have been a recipe for total stasis, total gridlock, said Matt Bennett, a veteran Democratic strategist at Third Way, a moderate think tank. With Schumer in control of the calendar, hes got the opportunity to do some really substantial things.Liberal groups that supported Mr. Biden expressed hope on Wednesday that the Georgia wins would allow him to push an ambitious and expensive agenda that addressed the current economic crisis and long-running inequalities in the American economy.Mr. Biden and the Democratic majority will take office with a mandate for a significant down payment on creating an economy that works for all Americans, said Frank Clemente, the executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, which has pushed Mr. Biden to enact substantial tax increases on the wealthy. That is in the neighborhood of $3 to $4 trillion over 10 years, which is paid for by making the rich and corporations pay their fair share in taxes.Other interest groups quickly seized on the Georgia results to ratchet up the pressure on Mr. Biden to make good on his campaign promises.We are fighting to defund ICE and C.B.P., to hold these agencies accountable for the pain and deaths of immigrants theyve caused, and for citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people living in the U.S., said Greisa Martinez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream, a progressive advocacy group, referring to federal immigration agencies.ImageCredit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Bidens allies in the Senate expressed optimism that, armed with committee chairmanships and control of the legislative calendar, they could advance the president-elects policy goals.We need to fix a lot of the damage Trumps done, and then theres pent-up demand for a whole lot of things what do we do about climate and about racial inequality, about wealth inequality, about structural racism, said Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who is set to be the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee.Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware, told reporters on Capitol Hill that theres a bipartisan agenda there that can unite us, and it should.Theres a hunger for rebuilding our roads, highways, bridges and transit systems, he said. Theres a hunger for rebuilding our wastewater, clean drinking water infrastructure.Mr. Biden has also proposed the most ambitious climate agenda of any president in history, including $2 trillion in spending on green initiatives. A majority in the Senate gives Mr. Biden options to make some of that happen.Democrats are now expected to use a first-out-of-the-gate coronavirus economic stimulus package as a vehicle for hundreds of billions of dollars in spending to aid the renewable energy economy, just as Mr. Obama used a 2009 economic stimulus law to push through $90 billion in green energy spending.Senate Democrats are expected to continue to look for ways to weave climate provisions into other major legislation, such as military, farm and labor bills. And Mr. Schumer also promises to get creative: For example, he plans to use a budgetary procedure, called reconciliation, that can skirt a filibuster to muscle through climate spending and tax policy.But Mr. Bidens agenda will be constrained by the Democrats narrow advantages in the House and in the Senate, where moderate Democrats such as Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona will wield vast power over which plans can pass.The name of the game is still going to have to be modest, incremental progress on a bipartisan basis, said Michael Steel, a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies in Washington who was a top aide to Representative John A. Boehner when the Ohio Republican was House speaker. I cant come up with a universe in which they are not better off doing a bipartisan process and a bipartisan product. I know that will annoy the left to no end, but thats the way this president can get results.Before the outbreak of violence on Capitol Hill, Mr. Biden signaled on Wednesday morning that despite the shift of Senate control to Democrats, he would still attempt to build legislative coalitions with Republicans on his top priorities many of which would require 60 votes to clear a Senate filibuster.Georgias voters delivered a resounding message yesterday: They want action on the crises we face and they want it right now, Mr. Biden said in a written statement. On Covid-19, on economic relief, on climate, on racial justice, on voting rights and so much more. They want us to move, but move together.ImageCredit...Andrew Harnik/Associated PressPrivately, some Republicans with long histories on Capitol Hill said Wednesday that the storming of the House and Senate could shock some Republican senators the group who had pushed back against their fellow Republicans attempts to overturn Mr. Bidens election and install Mr. Trump for a second term into a greater willingness to partner with Mr. Biden on policy issues.A high-profile business lobbying group that has long supported many Republicans, the National Association of Manufacturers, denounced Mr. Trump on Wednesday for inciting the violence and suggested it was time for his administration to invoke a constitutional provision to remove him.Vice President Mike Pence should seriously consider working with the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to preserve democracy, the groups president, Jay Timmons, wrote in a news release.Emily Cochrane, Nicholas Fandos and Coral Davenport contributed reporting | Politics |
Credit...Emily Berl for The New York TimesApril 7, 2016Door-to-door political canvassers can soften the attitudes of some voters who are resistant to transgender rights by prompting them to reflect on their own experiences of being treated differently, researchers reported on Thursday.The study, published by the journal Science, is a follow-up of a widely covered 2014 report that had a similar conclusion but was subsequently retracted. That paper, also published in Science, found that canvassers could reduce some opposition to same-sex marriage but only if the canvassers were gay.The new study was conducted by a pair of political science researchers David E. Broockman at Stanford, and Joshua Kalla at the University of California, Berkeley who had found design problems in the original article and had raised questions about the validity of the data. The journal pulled the paper in May 2015 after the lead author could not furnish those original data.In their study, Dr. Broockman and Mr. Kalla found support for the central claim of the first paper: that a particular kind of face-to-face conversation, drawing out voters own experiences, could produce a lasting shift in opinion. But in contrast to the first paper, they found the effect was the same whether the canvasser was straight, gay or transgender.Outside experts said the study could provide a template to test canvassing approaches on a broad range of issues. Knowing the literature on political persuasion, I would have bet against them finding what theyre reporting now, said Arthur Lupia, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. The idea that doorstep canvassing can change minds at all is a big deal; the fact that its a transgender issue just ups the ante.The new study tracked the attitudes of voters in Miami-Dade County, Fla., who were canvassed in early 2015 after the county had passed an ordinance protecting transgender people from discrimination, and after opponents promised a challenge. The canvassers included 56 volunteers from the Los Angeles L.G.B.T. Center, which had pioneered the use of these respectful, candid doorstep conversations; and from SAVE, South Floridas largest organization promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.A total of 1,825 voters took an online survey of their views, in which questions about transgender people were embedded among queries on other issues. The researchers randomly assigned half this group to receive either the treatment the conversation about transgender rights or a placebo, a conversation about recycling. And the researchers randomly assigned territories to canvassers who identified themselves as transgender, or nontransgender.Of these voters, 501 agreed to fill out follow-up surveys via email, three days after being canvassed, and again three weeks, six weeks, and three months later.Analyzing those answers, Dr. Broockman and Mr. Kalla found that the views of about one in 10 of the voters canvassed on transgender issues had shifted in favor of equal rights by an average of about 10 points on one measure, called the feelings thermometer. Ten points on that scale is roughly the amount that the American public shifted in its views on gay rights between 1998 and 2012, a period when eight states legalized same-sex marriage.And one in 10 voters, Dr. Lupia said, is larger than it may sound: Any presidential candidate would welcome that kind of effect from a doorstep conversation.To test the resilience of the attitudes of the canvassed voters, the researchers showed each one an attack ad video used elsewhere to challenge transgender protections like Miami-Dades. Those ads hit their mark, immediately reducing voters support; but the effect was short-lived, and that support rebounded weeks later, the study found.The moment for me, when I knew we had something, was when we got the data back from the three-week survey, and found that the effects persisted completely and remained large, said Dr. Broockman, as assistant professor in Stanfords graduate school of business.The researchers, however, had no way to test whether those changed attitudes would translate into altered votes.The finding is a validation of the Los Angeles L.G.B.T. Centers work, which it calls deep canvassing. The center had commissioned the first study in 2014 to see whether its door-to-door work to build support for gay marriage in Southern California was getting traction. That by itself made it a somewhat novel project, in that political activists rarely engage academic researchers to do controlled studies or vice versa.When that study collapsed amid questions about the data, the most frustrating thing was that it left the center with no idea how effective we were, said David Fleischer, director of the centers Leadership Lab.The only saving grace was that we knew we had David Broockman and Josh Kalla measuring this for real, Mr. Fleischer said.To forestall any of the kinds of questions that brought down the gay marriage study in 2014, the authors of the new one preregistered their design; cataloged their original findings at a data site accessible to other researchers; and had an independent scientist review their work before submitting it to the journals review.In an editorial accompanying the new study, Elizabeth Levy Paluck, an associate professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, concluded: Social scientists would do well to continue collaborating with practitioners on the design and study of these brief but meaningful interactions. | science |
A new report revealed a broad campaign that targeted Muslims in China and their diaspora in other countries, beginning as early as 2013.Credit...Gilles Sabrie for The New York TimesPublished July 1, 2020Updated Jan. 19, 2021TAIPEI, Taiwan Before the Chinese police hung high-powered surveillance cameras and locked up ethnic minorities by the hundreds of thousands in Chinas western region of Xinjiang, Chinas hackers went to work building malware, researchers say.The Chinese hacking campaign, which researchers at Lookout the San Francisco mobile security firm said on Wednesday had begun in earnest as far back as 2013 and continues to this day, was part of a broad but often invisible effort to pull in data from the devices that know people best: their smartphones.Lookout found links between eight types of malicious software some previously known, others not that show how groups connected to Chinas government hacked into Android phones used by Xinjiangs largely Muslim Uighur population on a scale far larger than had been realized.The timeline suggests the hacking campaign was an early cornerstone in Chinas Uighur surveillance efforts that would later extend to collecting blood samples, voice prints, facial scans and other personal data to transform Xinjiang into a virtual police state. It also shows the lengths to which Chinas minders were determined to follow Uighurs as they fled China for as many as 15 other countries.The tools the hackers assembled hid in special keyboards used by Uighurs and disguised themselves as commonly used apps in third-party websites. Some could remotely turn on a phones microphone, record calls or export photos, phone locations and conversations on chat apps. Others were embedded in apps that hosted Uighur-language news, Uighur-targeted beauty tips, religious texts like the Quran and details of the latest Muslim cleric arrests.Wherever Chinas Uighurs are going, however far they go, whether it was Turkey, Indonesia or Syria, the malware followed them there, said Apurva Kumar, a threat intelligence engineer at Lookout who helped unravel the campaign. It was like watching a predator stalk its prey throughout the world.A decade ago, the Peoples Liberation Armys hackers were notable not so much for their sophistication as for the volume of their attacks. But under threat of American sanctions, President Xi Jinping of China struck an agreement with President Barack Obama in 2015 to cease hacking American targets for commercial gain. The agreement stuck for a time, with a significant drop in Chinese hacks in the United States.Last fall, private researchers determined that over that same period China had turned its most advanced hacking tools on its own people. In overlapping discoveries, researchers at Google, the security firm Volexity and the Citizen Lab at the University of Torontos Munk School of Public Affairs separately uncovered what amounted to an advanced Chinese hack against iPhones and Android phones belonging to Chinese Uighurs and Tibetans throughout the world.ImageCredit...Gilles Sabri for The New York TimesGoogles researchers discovered that hackers had infected websites frequented by Uighurs inside China and in other countries with tools that could hack their iPhones and siphon off their data.Lookouts latest analysis suggests that Chinas mobile hacking campaign was broader and more aggressive than security experts, human rights activists and spyware victims had realized. But experts on Chinese surveillance say it should come as no surprise, given the lengths to which Beijing has gone to monitor Xinjiang.We should think about smartphone surveillance being used as a way to track peoples inner life, their everyday behavior, their trustworthiness, said Darren Byler, who studies surveillance of minority populations at the University of Colorado, Boulder.In 2015, as Beijing pushed to crack down on sporadic ethnic violence in Xinjiang, the authorities grew desperate to track fast-growing Uighur communications online, Mr. Byler said. Uighurs began to fear that their online chats discussing Islam or politics were risky. Savvier Uighurs took to owning a second clean phone, said Mr. Byler, who lived in Xinjiang in 2015.On the streets of Xinjiang, the police began confiscating Uighurs phones. Sometimes, they returned them months later with new spyware installed. Other times, people were handed back entirely different phones. Officials visiting Uighur villages regularly recorded the serial numbers used to identify smartphones. They lined the streets with new hardware that tracked peoples phones as they walked past.The authorities dragged Uighurs off to detention camps for having two phones or an antiquated phone, arbitrarily dumping a phone, or not having a phone at all, according to testimonials and government documents.Over that same period, Lookout said Chinas mobile hacking efforts accelerated. One type of Chinese malware, known as GoldenEagle after the words hackers littered throughout their code an apparent reference to the eagles used for hunting in Xinjiang was used as early as 2011. But its use picked up in 2015 and 2016. Lookout uncovered more than 650 versions of GoldenEagle malware and a large number of fake Uighur apps that function as a sort of Trojan horse to spy on users mobile communications.The malicious apps mimicked so-called virtual private networks, which are used to set up secure web connections and view prohibited content inside China. They also targeted apps frequently used by Uighurs for shopping, video games, music streaming, adult media and travel booking, as well as specialized Uighur keyboard apps. Some offered Uighurs beauty and traditional-medicine tips. Others impersonated apps from Twitter, Facebook, QQ the Chinese instant messaging service and the search giant Baidu.Once downloaded, the apps gave Chinas hackers a real-time window into their targets phone activity. They also gave Chinas minders the ability to kill their spyware on command, including when it appeared to suck up too much battery life. In some cases, Lookout discovered that all Chinas hackers needed to do to get data off a targets phone was send the user an invisible text message. The malware captured a victims data and sent it back to the attackers phone via a text reply, then deleted any trace of the exchange.In June 2019, Lookout uncovered Chinese malware buried in an app called Syrian News. The content was Uighur focused, suggesting China was trying to bait Uighurs inside Syria into downloading their malware. That Beijings hackers would track Uighurs to Syria gave Lookouts researchers a window into Chinese anxiety over Uighur involvement in the Syrian civil war. Lookouts researchers found similarly malicious apps tailored to Uighurs in Kuwait, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan and Pakistan.Researchers at other security research groups, like Citizen Lab, had previously uncovered various pieces of Chinas mobile hacking campaign and linked them back to Chinese state hackers. However, Lookouts new report appears to be the first time researchers were able to piece these older campaigns with new mobile malware and tie them to the same groups.Just how far removed the state is from these operations is always the open question, said Christoph Hebeisen, Lookouts director of security intelligence. It could be that these are patriotic hackers, like the kind we have seen in Russia. But the targeting of Uighurs, Tibetans, the diaspora and even Daesh, in one case, suggests otherwise, he added, using another term for the Islamic State.One clue to the attackers identities came when Lookouts researchers found what appeared to be test versions of Chinas malware on several smartphones that were clustered in and around the headquarters of the Chinese defense contractor Xian Tianhe Defense Technology.A large supplier of defense technology, Tianhe sent employees to a major defense conference in Xinjiang in 2015 to market products that could monitor crowds. As a surveillance gold rush took over the region, Tianhe doubled down, establishing a subsidiary in Xinjiang in 2018. The company did not respond to emails requesting comment.That could be an interesting coincidence, Mr. Hebeisen said, or it could be the smoking gun.Paul Mozur reported from Taipei, and Nicole Perlroth from San Francisco. | Tech |
A Republican, Michael Cloud, won the special election in Texas on Saturday for the Congressional seat of Blake Farenthold, a Republican who resigned in April amid a sexual harassment scandal. Read moreMr. Cloud will represent the 27th District, in and around Corpus Christi, for the remainder of the term, which ends in January 2019.Saturdays election was separate from the general election in November. The winner in November will hold the seat for a two-year term beginning in January. LIAM STACKCandidatePartyVotesPct. Cloud Michael CloudRepublican Rep.19,85654.7% Holguin Eric HolguinDemocrat Dem.11,59432.0% Barrera Roy BarreraDemocrat Dem.1,7474.8% Bruun Bech BruunRepublican Rep.1,5704.3% Westergren Mike WestergrenDemocrat Dem.8582.4% Perez Marty PerezRepublican Rep.2760.8% Cutright Judith CutrightIndependent I.P.1720.5% Tinus Daniel TinusLibertarian Lib.1440.4% Suprun Christopher SuprunIndependent I.P.510.1% Others Others 3,0718.5%36,268 votes, 100% reporting (184 of 184 precincts) Show fewer candidatesCountyCloudHolguinBarreraRpt.Nueces8,0047,787855100%Victoria4,345975274100%San Patricio1,23161170100%Aransas1,13639143100%Wharton1,087228112100%Bastrop706590106100%La Vaca86111341100%Matagorda58221773100%Calhoun46621651100%Jackson5668523100%Caldwell36020742100%Gonzales2888623100%Refugio2248834100% | Politics |
Politics|House Democrats are starting an investigation into how a mob breached the Capitol.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/politics/house-democrats-are-starting-an-investigation-into-how-a-mob-breached-the-capitol.htmlCredit...Jason Andrew for The New York TimesJan. 7, 2021House Democrats on Thursday announced the start of a robust investigation into the law enforcement breakdown that allowed a violent mob of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol as lawmakers were formalizing the victory of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.It is obvious that there was a severe systemic failure in securing the buildings perimeter and in the response once the building was breached, Representatives Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut and chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, and Tim Ryan, Democrat of Ohio, said in a statement.While they stressed that the responsibility for the violence rested with President Trump and his supporters, they said the breach of the Capitol raises serious questions about what law enforcement did and what they should have done differently.The Appropriations Committee funded the Capitol Police at more than $515 million for the 2021 fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1. That is similar to what Baltimore spends on policing and more than Detroit and Atlanta spend on law enforcement.Mr. Ryan is chairman of an appropriations subcommittee that has jurisdiction over the budget for the Capitol Police. That subcommittee will lead the investigation, which he said would include hearings to directly question key leaders about what went wrong.To ensure the safety of those who work and visit here, we must get to the bottom of these breakdowns and prevent them from ever happening again, the Democrats wrote. | Politics |
Credit...Rodrigo Buendia/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesJune 24, 2015TEMUCO, Chile On a cold, rainy afternoon just a few hours before Brazil played Peru in the Copa Amrica last week, four policemen stood guard by a set of flagpoles in the town square here. Days earlier someone had managed to take down one of the red, white and blue Chilean flags and replaced it with the traditional Mapuche flag in a peaceful but poignant protest.The Mapuche flag, a symbol of Chiles largest indigenous group, remained aloft for only a short time before it was discovered and replaced with the official flag. Then the guards were posted to protect it.See them over there, Venancio Couepan, a Mapuche advocate, said through an interpreter the day of the Brazil-Peru match. They dont want to let that happen again.Mr. Couepan, a 25-year-old law student, said he was not responsible for the flag switch. But he appeared to revel in the nonviolent protest, especially in the timing of it.Temuco is seen as the capital of the Mapuches, an indigenous people who thrived here long before Europeans began arriving in South America five centuries ago. So the citys hosting of several matches in this summers Copa Amrica South Americas 99-year-old international soccer championship has been a chance for advocates to press issues facing Mapuches before an international audience.Two weeks before Temuco hosted its first game in the Copa Amrica, Ricardo Celis, a member of the City Council, made a formal request to the mayor that the Mapuche flag be raised alongside the Chilean flag in the town square during the tournament.Mr. Celis, a physician who is not Mapuche, said he made the request to recognize Mapuche influence at a time when the attention of South America would be focused on Chile and Temuco. But his request was rejected by the mayor, Miguel Becker, on the grounds that the national flag already represented all Chileans and that another was unnecessary.ImageCredit...Rodrigo Buendia/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesI feel this is very wrong, Mr. Celis said in a telephone interview. If you go to Santiago or Valparaso and ask people about Temuco, they will say it is the home of the Mapuche people. During the Copa Amrica, it is important to recognize that the Mapuche people live here, too.He said that in the days after he made the request on May 19, he saw support for and against it split evenly on social media. The disagreement over the flag reflects some of the larger issues that have pitted Mapuches against some Chileans of European descent, a gap that Mr. Couepan seeks to bridge.A year ago, he founded an organization called Fundacin Chile Intercultural to promote the rights of Mapuches and to foster a better understanding about their cause among the general population. The focal point of some of the worst disagreements pits Chilean farmers and lumber companies against Mapuche dissidents over long-disputed land rights, and those conflicts have drawn much publicity.But there have been other more peaceful Mapuche protests surrounding the Copa Amrica. On June 10, a few days before the flag incident, a group of about 40 Mapuche demonstrators temporarily blocked the road on which the Peruvian team bus was traveling from the Temuco airport, forcing the Peruvian players and officials to wait until the demonstration was dispersed. The activists contend that the airport was built on traditional Mapuche land, for which they have not been adequately compensated.Many of the fans coming to Temuco for the Copa Amrica travel through that airport. Temuco has already hosted two games in the Copa Amrica, and on Thursday it will be the site of a quarterfinal between Bolivia and Peru.This is not to disrupt the Copa Amrica, and it is not directed against the Peruvians or the Chilean people, Couepan said through an interpreter. It is to highlight the problems we face. The Chilean people think, Oh, the Mapuche want a war, the Mapuche want to burn my house, the Mapuche are bad people. But our only problem is with the government, not with the farmer or the people.A passionate defender of his peoples civil rights, Mr. Couepan is also a devoted soccer fan and supporter of Chiles national team. He noted with pride that some of its players like the former striker Marcelo Salas and the current midfielder Jean Beausejour are Mapuche. He also pointed out that the logo for the 2015 Copa Amrica incorporates aspects of the design of the Mapuche flag, even if organizers and political officials refuse to fly it.But Mr. Couepan also turned and pointed to a large statue near the flagpoles in the central square as fans in the red and white of Peru and the yellow of Brazil paraded by and took photographs with it. The statue was intended to commemorate the centuries-long interaction between the Mapuches and the Spanish and their descendants, but some, like Mr. Couepan, find it offensive.It depicts a conquistador holding a cross, a noble indigenous woman, a heroic farmer, a calm Chilean soldier with his gun at his side and an almost grotesquely distorted Mapuche warrior brandishing a spear.ImageCredit...Rodrigo Buendia/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesThis is racism, Mr. Couepan said.At times the conflict of cultures has escalated into open hostility, with reports of arson at the farmhouses of Chilean farmers and of police brutality against Mapuches, who are somewhere between 8 and 11 percent of the Chilean population but perhaps almost a third of those in the Araucana region around Temuco. The widely accepted term Mapuche actually refers to several groups of indigenous peoples in Chile and Argentina.Some seek rights to confiscated land. Some seek greater political participation, or the expansion of cultural identity, including the Mapuche language, Mapudungun, and in some cases autonomous regions similar to those of indigenous peoples in the United States.In Chile, some estimate the Mapuches retain only five percent of their traditional land, and they are not recognized in a constitution that has been difficult to amend.Under the 17-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that began in 1973, the government terminated collective property, which had a devastating effect on the Mapuches. Since then, spotty efforts have been made to address the land issue.There are good intentions on behalf of the government, said Jorge Contesse, a Chilean professor of international law at Rutgers University. But I would say the results have been inconsistent, at best.The Pinochet regime also enacted an antiterrorism law that was later used by the government of the former President Ricardo Lagos, a Socialist, against Mapuche leaders. That resulted in a conviction of the Chilean government by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2014.The courts conviction is a stain for Chiles democracy, said Contesse, who served as an expert witness for the court.Although traditionally of the land, many Mapuche people have moved to urban centers in Santiago and Temuco over the years seeking economic opportunities. Jos Aylwin, the co-director of the citizens watch group Observatorio Ciudadano, said the platform of the Copa Amrica could not be ignored.It is quite relevant, he said. These games are being played in the heart of Mapuche land. | Sports |
Credit...Josh Haner/The New York TimesFeb. 13, 2014KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia With the Winter Olympics melting under a heat wave, the effects could be seen Thursday from the coast of Sochi, where spectators were spotted sunbathing, to the mountains high above the city, where cross-country skiers raced in sleeveless jerseys. The balmy weather has forced changes in competition schedules, sent workers scrambling to harden the slushy snow and made Olympians reconsider what to wear for their warm-weather winter sports.You sit outside in a T-shirt and shorts thats not winter, said Christoph Sumann of the Austrian biathlon team. You dont know what to wear for the race. He settled on the thinnest T-shirt he could find. A teammate, he said, wore nothing beneath his racing uniform.Its absolutely too warm for me, he said. Im a winter guy.So far, these Olympics have not been a good fit for those who like their Winter Games wintry. It has not snowed since the Olympics began last week, and most days have brought bright sunshine and springlike temperatures.Ive never seen it this warm at a Winter Games, said Max Cobb, a senior official with the International Biathlon Union, who has attended every Winter Olympics since 1992. Cobb was in constant radio contact with the crew spreading salt, meant to turn the slush into water, then back into ice.If we were competing now, the women would probably be in shorts and bibs and jogging bras, Cobb said.Weather for the 2014 Games has been a concern since the International Olympic Committee made Sochi the first host of the Olympics in a subtropical climate. The southern Russian city sits on the Black Sea, some of its promenades lined by palm trees. Sochi hardly counts as a winter wonderland in a nation all too familiar with freezing temperatures: It was minus-25 degrees Fahrenheit, about minus-32 Celsius, in Siberia on Thursday.Organizers have long dismissed concerns about the warm weather. After a warm spell a year ago disrupted test events, they stockpiled huge mounds of snow, stashed it in shady spots and covered it with insulating material to help most of it last through the summer.Now, there seems to be enough snow, thanks in large part to a heavy winter storm and one of the worlds largest snow-making operations. The problem is the condition of the snow. Puddles of slush would complicate nearly all the outdoor events, jeopardizing contests that Olympians have spent years training for.Organizers kicked into high gear Thursday to prevent that. In the middle of the night, machines covered the biathlon course with salt. Then, after the sun came up, a crew of 15 workers walked the four-kilometer cross-country course, carrying buckets of large-grained salt. The workers sprinkled the salt onto the tracks in the manner of people feeding birds.The mens super combined Alpine ski race scheduled for Friday was moved to 10 a.m. local time from 11 a.m. to counter midday temperatures that were expected to approach the mid-50s Fahrenheit, around 13 Celsius. Afternoon temperatures at the RusSki Gorki Jumping Center, home of ski jumping and Nordic combined, reached 63 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday. The competition manager there said the site had a deep base, partly because trucks had been sent into the mountains last month to fetch fresh snow.At the jumping center, and every other mountain site, salt was being applied liberally.It would be really good if temperatures could dip down overnight, to get those perfect icy conditions, said Jenny Wiedeke, communications manager for the F.I.S., the international ski federation that oversees skiing and snowboarding. But this is something we battle as an outdoor sport.While blue skies and snow-capped peaks provided enticing backdrops, some of the sites seemed better suited for beach volleyball than for winter sports. Men without shirts walked toward the biathlon stadium, where officials had traded their parkas for T-shirts. In a particularly ominous sign, mosquitoes were spotted.At the sun-splashed site of the cross-country skiing events, where temperatures rose toward 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 15 Celsius, on Thursday, women raced in sleeveless jerseys. Fans wore T-shirts, and skiers slogged through the soft snow.Afternoon temperatures in the upper 50s Fahrenheit were expected through Saturday across the mountain sites, including the bottom of the skiing site and the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, where snowboarding and freestyle skiing are taking place.Night will bring little relief, as temperatures are forecast to stay well above freezing. Cooler weather, but with temperatures still above freezing, has been predicted beginning Sunday, but rain is possible.As temperatures continued their steady climb, the International Olympic Committee showed little worry.Every event has happened, and on schedule so far, said Mark Adams, the I.O.C. communications director. So, if this is a problem, then lets have more of them. It seems quite good.Indoor arenas for sports like hockey, figure skating and curling were built near the coast and have been largely unaffected by the weather.But the outdoor events are becoming slushy. They are staged about 30 miles into the mountains, in a tight river valley framed by majestic, snow-covered peaks. Weather worries were exacerbated by the 2010 Vancouver Games, which faced an unusual dearth of snow and record high temperatures. There was so little snow at the site for snowboarding that more had to be hauled in.Sochi has not yet resorted to such drastic measures, but if the snow continues to melt, it could prove disastrous for events like the cross-country portions of the biathlon. Picture skiing through oatmeal.It really affects a lot of things, said Tim Burke of the United States biathlon team. He travels with 25 pairs of skis. On Thursday, for the first time, he wore his most extreme warm-weather skis. Instead of the usual layers of long underwear, he wore only a T-shirt under his uniform.Many spectators at the biathlon stadium left their coats unzipped, if they wore them at all. Gloves were stuffed in pockets, heads uncovered. Victor Medvedev and his wife, Yelena Tikhonov, were visiting from Chelyabinsk, in Siberia.Of course we didnt expect anything like this, so we had to leave our winter boots and thermal underwear in the hotel, Medvedev said. We also had heavier hats.Tikhonov added, Its much better than minus-18. | Sports |
Credit...Zach Gibson for The New York TimesJune 29, 2018WASHINGTON In the days after the F.B.I. director James B. Comey was fired last year, the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, repeatedly expressed anger about how the White House used him to rationalize the firing, saying the experience damaged his reputation, according to four people familiar with his outbursts.In public, Mr. Rosenstein has shown no hint that he had second thoughts about his role writing a memo about Mr. Comeys performance that the White House used to justify firing him. I wrote it. I believe it. I stand by it, Mr. Rosenstein said to Congress last year.But in meetings with law enforcement officials in the chaotic days immediately after Mr. Comeys dismissal, and in subsequent conversations with colleagues and friends, Mr. Rosenstein appeared conflicted, according to the four people.He alternately defended his involvement, expressed remorse at the tumult it unleashed, said the White House had manipulated him, fumed how the news media had portrayed the events and said the full story would vindicate him, said the people, who in recent weeks described the previously undisclosed episodes.According to one person with whom he spoke shortly after Mr. Comeys firing, Mr. Rosenstein was shaken, unsteady and overwhelmed.Another person in touch with Mr. Rosenstein around that time said he sounded frantic, nervous, upset and emotionally dis-regulated. In one of these conversations, with the acting F.B.I. director at the time, Andrew G. McCabe, Mr. Rosenstein became visibly upset.Mr. Rosensteins meetings show his mind-set at one of the most critical points in Mr. Trumps administration the eight days between when Mr. Comey was fired and Mr. Rosenstein appointed Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel. In that stretch, Mr. Rosenstein went from a supporting actor in the dismissal of Mr. Comey to the official overseeing the investigation in which the firing was a focus.His public and private views demonstrate the dueling forces pulling at Mr. Rosenstein in the special counsels investigation of the president and his associates.Mr. Rosenstein is both the ultimate supervisor of that case and will determine what information is eventually provided to Congress and a key participant in the matter being investigated. Mr. Trumps lawyers also regard him as one of the essential witnesses for the presidents defense because Mr. Rosenstein, they say, wanted to get rid of Mr. Comey.Yet even the presidents critics are loath to call for Mr. Rosensteins recusal, fearing that Mr. Trump will seize on that opportunity to install a political ally in his place.ImageCredit...Justin Tang/The Canadian Press, via Associated PressA spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Sarah Isgur Flores, disputed the accounts of Mr. Rosensteins behavior. If he was angry in the days after Mr. Comey was fired, she said, it was because Mr. McCabe concealed from him the existence of memos by Mr. Comey about his interactions with Mr. Trump. Detailing the presidents requests for loyalty and to end the investigation into Michael T. Flynn, then his national security adviser, the memos were recounted in articles in The New York Times around that time.To be clear, he was upset not because knowledge of the existence of the memos would have changed the D.A.G.s decision regarding Mr. Comey, but that Mr. McCabe chose not to tell him about their existence until only hours before someone shared them with The New York Times, Ms. Flores said.A person close to Mr. McCabe disputed Ms. Floress account, saying Mr. Rosenstein did not bring up the memos with him. Their discussion came at the conclusion of a larger meeting of law enforcement officials, and Mr. McCabe recounted it to colleagues. He also documented some of his interactions with Mr. Rosenstein in contemporaneous memos that have been handed over to the special counsel, according to two people briefed on the matter.In the months since, Mr. Rosenstein has reached out to people including in late-night texts to discuss how his reputation has fared and his frustrations with the White House and members of Congress who have targeted him, according to people who spoke to him.A graduate of Harvard Law School, Mr. Rosenstein joined the Justice Department in 1990. A Republican, he was nominated in 2005 by President George W. Bush to be United States attorney in Maryland and was the longest-serving United States attorney until Mr. Trump appointed him deputy attorney general last year.He was in the job only two weeks photographs of his swearing-in ceremony show a smiling Mr. Rosenstein alongside his family when the president fired Mr. Comey, thrusting Mr. Rosensteins crucial role in the Russia investigation into the spotlight. He was overseeing the inquiry because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself amid growing scrutiny over his meetings with Russians during the campaign, citing his role as a top Trump supporter during the election.Mr. Rosensteins conversations last spring offer new insights into the tumultuous week that followed Mr. Comeys firing.In a series of meetings at the Justice Department, senior F.B.I. officials argued for Mr. Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel to run the Russia investigation and investigate Mr. Comeys firing, according to people briefed on the matter. Some of Mr. Rosensteins own allies turned on him, accusing him of sullying his reputation by allowing himself to be used by the president.Even before he enlisted Mr. Rosenstein to write the justification, Mr. Trump had already decided to fire Mr. Comey. Mr. Trump had grown frustrated that Mr. Comey refused to say publicly that, in the investigation of the Trump campaigns ties to Russia, the president himself was not under scrutiny. Mr. Trump wrote a rambling firing letter, but White House officials urged him not to send it. Instead, they turned to Mr. Rosenstein.His resulting memo, however, focused on Mr. Comeys handling of the 2016 investigation of Hillary Clinton. Mr. Rosenstein faulted him for holding a rare and unusually candid news conference to discuss that case and then, days before Election Day, publicly announcing over the objection of the Justice Department that the investigation had been reopened.Those views of Mr. Comey were widely held by veteran prosecutors in both parties, and were echoed in a report this month by the Justice Departments inspector general, which labeled Mr. Comey insubordinate. Mr. Rosensteins memo was nevertheless peculiar: Mr. Trump has long argued that Mr. Comey was too soft on Mrs. Clinton, but the memo and subsequent White House statements suggested that Mr. Comey was fired for actions that hurt her candidacy.Mr. Trumps intent is a key to whether he was trying to obstruct justice. The president has only muddied that question.ImageCredit...J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressShortly after the firing, Mr. Trump told senior Russian officials in the Oval Office that the dismissal relieved great pressure on him. And his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has said Mr. Comey was fired for refusing to publicly exonerate Mr. Trump.Mr. Rosenstein did not engage with Mr. Sessions as he deliberated whether to appoint a special counsel.On the afternoon that Mr. Muellers appointment was announced, Mr. Sessions was in the Oval Office with the president discussing candidates to be F.B.I. director when they both learned that Mr. Rosenstein had made his decision. Mr. Trump erupted in anger, saying he needed someone overseeing the investigation who would be loyal to him. Mr. Sessions offered to resign.Mr. Sessions felt blindsided by Mr. Rosensteins decision. After leaving the White House, Mr. Sessionss chief of staff, Jody Hunt, confronted Mr. Rosenstein, demanding to know why he had not given them advance warning, according to a lawyer briefed on the exchange. Mr. Rosenstein has told others that he was worried at the time he would be fired by the president.Andrew C. White, a former federal prosecutor who worked with Mr. Rosenstein and remains close to him, said he believed Mr. Rosenstein had every right to be furious.The White House put Greyhound tire tracks on his back, Mr. White said. They threw him under the bus.Mr. White said that Mr. Rosenstein has never worried about his reputation and was only concerned about the Justice Department.More recently, Mr. Rosenstein has emerged as one of the chief interlocutors for House Republicans seeking sensitive information about the open investigation. Citing their oversight authority, Republicans close to Mr. Trump have peppered the department with increasingly bold demands and congressional subpoenas; when the Justice Department or F.B.I. has balked, Republicans have threatened Mr. Rosensteins job and, in some cases, called for him to step down.In a hearing on Thursday, Mr. Rosenstein angrily pushed back on House members who questioned his integrity. You should believe me because Im telling the truth and Im under oath, he said.Democrats say Republicans are merely picking fights to give the president cause or cover to fire Mr. Rosenstein and replace him with someone who will undercut the Russia investigation.This month, Mr. Rosenstein hinted at his inner turmoil during a speech in Philadelphia, quoting the citys favorite fictional son, Rocky: It aint about how hard you hit, he said. Its about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward.He added, That advice applies in boxing, in law and in life. | Politics |
Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York TimesJune 6, 2018WASHINGTON Republican lawmakers in the House are hurtling toward a collision over immigration, raising the prospect of a divisive and uncomfortably public intraparty fight just five months before Novembers midterm elections.And party leaders are running out of time to stop it.In the face of a rebellion from moderate members, who are on the brink of forcing a series of immigration votes over the objections of Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Republicans will meet privately on Thursday morning to discuss the issue.Our members are earnest and sincere in trying to understand each others perspectives, Mr. Ryan told reporters on Wednesday, adding, I really do believe that there is a sweet spot here.At the center of their discussions is the fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children known as Dreamers. Heres a guide to the impending showdown.The future of DACA has loomed for months.The approaching collision among Republicans has been long in the making.In September, President Trump moved to rescind an Obama-era program that shielded young undocumented immigrants from deportation, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. He gave Congress six months to take action on the matter.The Senate tried but came up empty, as three different immigration plans failed in the chamber in February. And because the courts have kept DACA alive for now, lawmakers who thrive on hard deadlines have felt less urgency to deal with the issue.Republicans are deeply divided.For months, there have been clear divisions among House Republicans over how to address DACA.Some members have lined up behind a bill sponsored by Representative Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that is intended to appeal to conservatives and sharply reduces legal immigration as well. Others have championed a bill from Representatives Will Hurd, Republican of Texas, and Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California, that has bipartisan support and would provide a path to citizenship for the young undocumented immigrants.With their members split, House Republican leaders have followed a well-worn path in Congress they have punted on the issue.Rebellious members embrace a parliamentary tactic.Moderate Republicans are tired of waiting. And they are now on the cusp of getting their way.Republican lawmakers are using what is known as a discharge petition, which can force floor action over the wishes of House leaders.For the discharge petition to succeed, it needs the signatures of 218 members. By Wednesday, it had 215.Twenty-three Republicans have signed the petition, including members from districts with large Hispanic populations and others who face tough re-election races.Every Democrat has signed except for Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas, who said he wants a commitment from his partys leadership saying that they will not support a border wall in exchange for Dreamers.What comes next is hard to predict.Mr. Ryan is no fan of the discharge petition, and he is trying to work with Republican lawmakers on an immigration compromise that could make it unnecessary.Whether moderates and conservatives can find common ground on such a politically challenging issue is unknown. One flash point is the matter of providing young undocumented immigrants with a path to citizenship and the specifics of what that path would entail.Were closer to the magic number to force the issue, said Representative Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, one of the Republicans who has signed the petition. But the ideal thing would be if we can have a negotiation that leads to a bill that can pass.If discussions about an immigration deal fizzle and the discharge petition reaches 218 signatures, it would set up votes this month on four separate immigration plans: A proposal put forth by Mr. Goodlatte, presumably a version of his bill. A proposal from Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California. She plans to put forth the Dream Act, a bill that includes a path to citizenship for Dreamers and has widespread support among House Democrats. A yet-to-be-revealed proposal put forth by Mr. Ryan. A proposal put forth by Representative Jeff Denham, Republican of California, which is expected to be a version of the Hurd-Aguilar bill.If multiple proposals receive a majority in the House, the one with the greatest number of votes will pass.A major question mark is how Mr. Trump will respond to any action by the House on immigration. Mr. Trump has called DACA recipients incredible kids but has also made steep demands for what must be included in an immigration bill, including wall funding and other hard-line immigration policy changes.Mr. Trumps reaction is critical. In an interview last month, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said he would only return his chamber to the subject of immigration if the House passed a bill that Mr. Trump would sign.For Republican lawmakers, risks abound.Immigration is a perilous subject for Republicans, and there is a clear danger for both moderates and conservatives in the days to come.Moderate lawmakers have shown surprising backbone, but they are a long way from winning the enactment of a law protecting the young undocumented immigrants. If they come up short, those lawmakers could say they tried, but their opponents could point out the bottom line: The fate of DACA recipients is still up in the air.For conservatives, the thought of a Republican-controlled House passing a bill that they deride as amnesty is frightening and could depress Republican turnout in November. When you mention the A-word, said Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, it sends shivers up every conservatives spine. | Politics |
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/business/energy-environment/oil-prices-opec.htmlCredit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesDec. 21, 2015LONDON Oil prices hit 11-year lows in Asia and Europe on Monday, as a glut of crude on world markets and the recent global climate accord continue to depress fossil-fuel prices.Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, settled at $36.51 a barrel on Monday in Europe.Analysts say there is little to restrain continued price declines in the near term. Prices are down about 15 percent so far in December, after an OPEC meeting failed to produce measures to restrain record-high production. That meeting was quickly followed by the United Nations climate accord in Paris, which aims to reduce the worlds reliance on oil and other carbon-emitting fuels.The latest factor weighing on prices has been unusually warm weather in the United States and Europe, which is reducing winter demand for heating oil and leading to rising stockpiles of oil products. The expectation that the American government may soon lift a decades-old ban on exports of crude from the United States may also be affecting prices.We are probably going to see the weakness run at least through January, said Richard Mallinson, an analyst at Energy Aspects, a London-based market research firm.Analysts say that crude oil prices are likely to remain under pressure in the spring, when refineries typically shut down for maintenance, weakening demand.While few analysts had expected OPEC to decide to cut production when the group met in Vienna this month, the signals from the meeting appeared to show that the cartel, which accounts for about 30 percent of world oil production, was not even close to coming up with a plan to try to manage the market.Even compared to the low expectations, the meeting sent out negative signals, Mr. Mallinson said. There was no unity and nothing that looked like the basis for more coherence next year.While disgruntled OPEC members like Venezuela muttered about the catastrophe caused by rock-bottom oil revenues, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and other gulf countries are expected to continue to produce at or near record levels, and new supplies are expected from Iran, assuming international sanctions are lifted next year.Analysts say that Saudi Arabias strategy of keeping production high to maintain market share and weaken higher-cost producers is showing some signs of working. For instance, the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based monitoring organization, forecasts that supplies from outside of OPEC will decline next year.Still, those prospects have not been enough to shore up prices. Production in the United States remains strong, as higher production from projects in the Gulf of Mexico offsets declines in shale oil production on shore, where low prices have discouraged some energy companies from investing in new drilling. Russia, meanwhile, is essentially shrugging off the impact of Western sanctions over Ukraine and is still producing at high levels.In a recent report, the International Energy Agency said it expected global inventories to keep growing at least until late 2016, although at a much slower pace than this year. As inventories continue to swell into 2016, there will still be a lot of oil weighing on the market, the agency said. | Business |
Economy|A Quick Look at the Feds Interest Rate Increasehttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/business/economy/a-quick-look-at-the-feds-rate-increase.htmlDec. 16, 2015ImageCredit...Kevin Lamarque/ReutersThe Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it would raise its benchmark interest rate, a vote of confidence in the American economy. Policy makers have waited a long time for this moment: Since December 2008 the Fed has held the benchmark rate near zero, the centerpiece of its campaign to revive economic growth and reduce unemployment from the recession.Fed officials predicted that they would raise interest rates by about one percentage point a year over the next three years an indication that they would be taking a slow-and-steady approach to economic expansion._____ImageCredit...Carlo Allegri/ReutersFor consumers, the short-term impact will be almost imperceptible. Banks may begin advertising slightly higher-yielding savings accounts and certificates of deposit, though the returns will still be meager (and savers may face penalties for withdrawing early from a C.D.).The cost of borrowing is expected to rise, but only slightly, with variable effects on what banks charge for credit cards, home equity lines of credit, adjustable-rate mortgages, auto loans and some student loans. Remember, Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, has said the Fed will move cautiously in raising its benchmark rate._____VideotranscripttranscriptThe Fed MachineGetting the economy to change in just the way you want is a very tricky balancing act, even if you have the ability to create money from thin air.Getting the economy to change in just the way you want is a very tricky balancing act, even if you have the ability to create money from thin air.Getting the economy to change in just the way you want is a very tricky balancing act, even if you have the ability to create money from thin air.The Fed knows how to raise interest rates, right? Yes, but this time will be different. Its immense stimulus campaign pumped so much money into the system that the Fed could easily drain enough money to discourage lending, its traditional approach. Instead, the Fed plans to pay lenders not to make loans, and work directly with an expanded range of lenders and it will adjust its plan if that doesnt work._____ImageCredit...Nicholas Kamm/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesGetting to yes was a long process for Fed policy makers, led by Ms. Yellen. One Fed official voted to raise rates months ago, while others preferred to wait. And this past summer, just when a consensus was building toward a liftoff in September, economic turmoil in China rocked the markets.Low interest rates are sometimes a trigger for inflation. The Fed wants inflation at a sweet spot: 2 percent a year. Too low, and the economy may stall; too high and it can overheat.Inflation remains low, but after seven years of very cheap money and an improving jobs market, officials worry that prices will rise too quickly if the Fed does not increase the cost of money, by steadily raising interest rates._____Financial markets were encouraged by the Feds announcement. Stocks rose, the dollar gained modestly and the yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose slightly.Still, investors are debating whether rising interest rates will cause turbulence in other markets. A pullback on Wall Street could restrict the flow of credit into the economy, potentially slowing hiring and wage growth. And a decline in stocks could hurt households, whose equity holdings have increased in value by over $5 trillion since 2009. | Business |
Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesNov. 13, 2018MEXICO CITY Time seems to have stopped inside cell number six of Barrientos state prison, where Daniel Garca has been held for more than 16 years without a verdict.His distorted perception of time became clear more than a decade ago, when he sent his two daughters a dollhouse as a gift, seemingly unaware that they had grown into adults since 2002, when he was accused of murder and locked up.Mr. Garca is caught in the legal trappings of Mexicos old judicial system, which allowed those accused of crimes ranging from murder to minor offenses to be held indefinitely as their cases dragged on for years.The Mexican government does not keep track of the average time that suspects like Mr. Garca are kept in pretrial detention. But the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which reviewed his case, has called his arrest arbitrary and described the use of preventive prison in his case as quite exceptional.The working group has urged Mr. Garcas immediate release, but the Mexican government has disregarded the recommendation, blaming the delay on the more than 15 appeal motions filed by Mr. Garcas defense.That argument is a crazy, said Jos Antonio Guevara, the director of the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights. The system punishes people for defending themselves.ImageCredit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesMr. Garcas case is extreme, but he is hardly alone. Nearly 40 percent of Mexicos 204,442 prisoners were in pretrial detention as of March, according to the World Prison Brief compiled by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research in the United Kingdom.An overhaul of the judicial system, passed in 2008, gave hope to prisoners like Mr. Garca, who were languishing in prison without completed trials or sentences and had been arrested under the former rules.Its goal was to transform a slow and opaque process in which trials happened behind closed doors and where, too often, evidence was based on torture, forced confessions or fabricated proofs into one that relied on open-court trials, with a higher threshold for evidence and faster adjudication and sentencing.The legal overhaul also limited the time that suspects could be held in pretrial detention, and allowed the use of alternative measures like house arrest or electronic bracelets.The United States provided hundreds of millions of dollars to facilitate the transition to the new system, which was intended to curb corruption, increase public trust in the justice system and help strengthen the rule of law.But Mr. Garcas case, like others filed before the change, will continue to run under the old rules, even though human rights advocates and criminal justice experts say it exemplifies the flaws of the previous system.The case began in February 2002, when Mr. Garca was arrested in Atizapn de Zaragoza, a town in the State of Mexico, about 20 miles northwest of Mexico City, and accused of ordering the murder of Mara de los Angeles Tams, a town councilor who had been slain five months earlier.ImageCredit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesSoon after Mr. Garcas arrest, and before his trial began, Alfonso Navarrete, who was then the states attorney general and is now Mexicos secretary of the interior, appeared on television accusing both Antonio Domnguez, who was then the towns mayor, and Mr. Garca, who was the mayors private secretary, of murder and drug trafficking.It was the beginning of what Mr. Garca described as an attempt to use him to build a case against Mr. Domnguez.Interviews with the attorneys involved and a review of court documents by The New York Times raise serious questions about the case.Mr. Garca testified in court that, at the moment of his arrest, a local prosecutor said they had no evidence against him but demanded his cooperation to frame Mr. Domnguez. When Mr. Garca refused to do so, the prosecutor threatened to throw him and other members of his family in prison.In the following months, four of Mr. Garcas relatives, including one brother and his father, both city hall employees, were arrested and accused of being co-conspirators in the murder. They were all released shortly after, with no charges.Mr. Garcas attorney, Simn Hernndez, from the Institute of Penal Justice, a legal clinic in Mexico City, said intimidation of this sort is not uncommon. The penal justice system in the State of Mexico is among the most flawed and corrupt in the country, according to the World Justice Project.The case was initially built on the testimony of three witnesses who claimed they had overheard a man named Jaime Martnez Franco claim that Mr. Garca had hired him to kill Mrs. Tams.ImageCredit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesMonths later, a fourth witness, Reyes Alpzar, confessed he went to the victims house with Mr. Martnez and saw the shooting. He was charged with being a participant in the murder.Mr. Alpzar and one of the initial witnesses later recanted their testimony, saying they had been tortured by police into signing false statements.Mr. Alpzar was so brutally beaten he had to go to an emergency room. Medical examinations introduced in court confirmed he had been tortured. But he also remains in prison without a sentence.Almost a year after Mr. Garcas arrest, a local journalist revealed that the alleged gunman, Mr. Martnez, had been in prison in a different state on the day of the murder.Mr. Domnguez, the mayor who faced the same charges as Mr. Garca, was released four years after his arrest.It took eight years for Mexicos landmark judicial reform to be put into effect nationwide. Mr. Garca followed the process closely, including the introduction of new laws that limited to two years the time a suspect could be held in preventive detention. He felt confident the changes would help him.The new rules have, in fact, sped up processing, raised the bar for admissible evidence and improved protections for criminal defendants, making it far less likely that a suspect would be held for as long as Mr. Garca has been, legal experts said. But suspects charged with serious felonies, including murder, kidnapping and drug trafficking, are still automatically thrown in prison and may remain in custody for longer than two years if they choose to appeal court rulings.ImageCredit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesLegal experts argue this element is contrary to the spirit of the legal reform, and against international legal standards.By keeping the compulsory preventive imprisonment, even if it is reserved only for certain crimes, we are left with a glass of clean water with drops of poison, said Jorge Gutirrez, a professor of criminal law in the National Institute of Criminal Sciences, in Mexico City.But this measure does have popular support, he said, adding that in a country dealing with rampant violence and weak institutions, the public often favors such punitive laws. In the midst of a surge in violent crime, several bills are now being debated in congress to increase the number of felonies that would require mandatory preventive custody.There is a collective idea that there is no justice without prison, that imprisonment equals accountability, said Mr. GutirrezMr. Garcas hope now lies with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which has taken on his case and could recommend his release.To ease the sting of loneliness and despair, Mr. Garca spends his days studying the laws that keep him behind bars and refining the art of making time stop, he said in a recent prison interview.It is kind of lost to me somewhere in space, the amount of time I have spent in here, he said. Maybe one day it will hit me, but hopefully I wont be in here anymore. | World |
Credit...Media for Medical/UIG via Getty ImagesJune 27, 2017The New Mexico Department of Health said this week that two women were found to have plague, bringing the total number of people this year in the state known to have the disease to three.All three patients a 63-year-old man and two women, ages 52 and 62 were treated at hospitals in the Santa Fe area and released after a few days, said Paul Rhien, a health department spokesman.Health officials in New Mexico have more experience with plague than many might expect: Every year for the last few years, a handful of people in New Mexico have come down with plague. One person has died.While the word plague may conjure images of medieval cities laid to waste by the Black Death, the disease is still a part of the modern world. It is much less common than it once was, but it is no less serious.What Is Plague?Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which humans get when they are bitten by rodent-riding fleas. It decimated European cities during the Middle Ages, killing tens of millions of people, but today is found mostly in rural areas.There are three main types of plague in humans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: bubonic plague, pneumonic plague and septicemic plague. All three share general symptoms like fever, weakness and chills but each subtype carries its own fearsome markers.Pneumonic plague causes a rapid and severe form of pneumonia that can lead to respiratory failure and shock. It is the only type that can be spread person-to-person through the air if someone inhales infected water droplets.Septicemic plague, which attacks a persons blood cells, can cause skin or other tissue to turn black and die, especially on the extremities, like hands and feet. It is caused by either an infected flea bite or by handling an infected animal.Bubonic plague is the best-known and common form of the disease. It is marked by the sudden appearance of bulbously swollen and painful lymph nodes (called buboes) in the groin or armpits.How deadly is Plague?It can be very deadly. Fifty to 60 percent of the cases of bubonic plague are fatal if they are not treated quickly, according to the World Health Organization.Paul Ettestad, the public health veterinarian for New Mexico, said plague can be treated with antibiotics like gentamicin and doxycycline, but it is important to catch it fast.Pneumonic and septicemic plague can be more serious. The World Health Organization described them as invariably fatal, but there are some people who have survived these forms of the disease.In 2002, a married couple from New Mexico contracted plague at home and developed symptoms while they were on vacation in New York. One of the patients, John Tull, developed septicemic plague.Mr. Tulls kidneys nearly failed, and tissue in his feet and hands turned black and began to die. He was placed in a three-month medically induced coma and doctors amputated both his legs below the knee, but he survived.How common is plague?Plague is a lot less common now than it was in centuries past, when millions died in repeated plague epidemics. From 2000 through 2009, there were 21,725 reported cases of plague worldwide, according to the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Of those, 1,612 were fatal.Most cases of plague diagnosed since the 1990s have been in Africa, particularly Congo and Madagascar, although outbreaks have also happened in Asia and North and South America.The American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene said 56 plague cases were found in the United States seven of them fatal from 2000 through 2009, the last year for which figures were available.Why does it keep happening in New Mexico?Plague arrived in the United States around 1900 on ships from China and soon jumped from fleas on urban rodents to fleas on rural rodents, Mr. Ettestad said.It is now entrenched in large swaths of the western United States, with most cases occurring in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, California, Oregon and Nevada, according to the C.D.C.Plague in New Mexico has been especially persistent, Mr. Ettestad said. The state health department said it was found in four people in 2015, with one death. Four more people were found to have it in 2016; all were successfully treated.Mr. Ettestad said there were environmental reasons that plague kept popping up in New Mexico. The area is home to vegetation like pinyon and juniper trees, which, he said, support a wide diversity of rodents and fleas.That means that once plague has decimated one rodent species say, the prairie dog there are lots of other rodent species nearby it can jump to, like the rock squirrel.A lot of people have rock squirrels in their yard, and when they die, their fleas are very good at biting people, Mr. Ettestad said. We have had a number of people who got plague after they were bitten by a flea that their dog or cat brought in the house.What should I do if I think I have plague?Medical authorities are unanimous on this: If you live or have recently returned from any area where plague is found (like New Mexico) and you develop symptoms of the disease, then you should immediately go to a doctor or hospital. | science |
Credit...Seth Wenig/Associated PressMarch 21, 2017The family of a part-time consultant for the C.I.A. who vanished a decade ago in Iran filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against that country, claiming that it had used a campaign of deception and lies to conceal its role in his imprisonment.The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in Washington on behalf of the wife of the missing man, Robert A. Levinson, and their seven children. The action is seeking unspecified damages from Iran for its alleged role in, among other things, inflicting emotional distress on the family of Mr. Levinson, a private investigator who was a former F.B.I. agent.Other Americans once held by Iran as prisoners have filed lawsuits against the Tehran government, accusing it of hostage-taking, terrorism and torture. But the new action, which was also brought on behalf of Mr. Levinson, is unusual because Iranian officials have insisted since he disappeared that they know nothing about his whereabouts or what happened to him.A lawyer who represents Mr. Levinsons family called such claims hollow, adding that Iran had long been engaged in a campaign of disinformation about the missing man.We want justice, and this case calls out for justice, the lawyer, David L. McGee, said in an interview. We also want the world to know about Irans cruel and cynical behavior.A spokesman for Irans ambassador to the United Nations did not respond to two emails seeking comment.ImageCredit...FBI, via Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesThe lawsuit could lead to a confrontation between President Trump and Iran over Mr. Levinsons fate. American law enforcement officials have long believed that elements of Irans political, religious or intelligence hierarchy were involved in his capture and detention. But President Barack Obama never challenged Iran with those findings while in office, and Mr. Trump, who vowed in 2015 to bring Mr. Levinson home, has yet to do so.Mr. Levinson traveled in March 2007 to an Iranian island on a rogue mission to recruit an intelligence source for the C.I.A. He has been seen since then only in a hostage videotape made in 2010 and in a series of photographs. While some experts believe Mr. Levinson died in captivity, his family believes he is still alive. If so, he would now be 69.The 14-page lawsuit filing does not contain any new disclosures about Mr. Levinson. But the lawsuit asserts that the F.B.I. has concluded that the hostage videotape and photographs neither of which provided clues about his captors identity were part of an Iranian attempt to create a false scenario that Robert Levinson was being held by some other country.Lindsay Ram, an F.B.I. spokeswoman, did not respond directly when asked if the bureau had concluded that individuals or entities in Iran were responsible for Mr. Levinsons detention.Last year, Mr. Levinsons wife, Christine, filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act seeking numerous F.B.I. documents related to the bureaus long-running investigation into her husbands disappearance. But the F.B.I. denied her request, stating that since the inquiry personally involved Mr. Levinson, she would have to take steps like getting his approval or providing evidence that he is dead, a copy of that F.B.I. letter shows.This month, a Florida state judge appointed Mrs. Levinson as her husbands legal conservator, a posture that could overcome some of the F.B.I.s objections. But Ms. Ram, the spokeswoman, said that as a matter of policy the bureau does not release documents about cases that are ongoing.Mr. McGee said he was disappointed by the F.B.I.s position, particularly given the missing investigators two decades of service as an agent.As long as they keep this investigation open, the F.B.I. is not obliged to tell the family what it has done on Bobs behalf, he said. | World |
Credit...Sakis Mitrolidis/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesDec. 10, 2015ATHENS Over the last six months, Greece has provided both highs and lows for foreign investors.A few brave hedge funds have cashed in because of the stellar returns they have earned from Greek government bonds, which since Greece signed its bailout deal in August have been among the worlds best performing investments.But those who bet heavily on Greek banks like John Paulson, David Einhorn and Wilbur Ross have had their investments evaporate after the recent recapitalization of the Greek financial sector.In recent years, investing in Greece has always been a bit of an all-or-nothing affair as the lure of sky-high returns has always been tempered by the very real prospect that you might lose your shirt.And so it was last week when a group of prominent investors came here to gauge whether, in the wake of Greeces close brush with leaving the euro last summer, it was safe to invest in Greek assets again.But at an investor conference here, the main concern was less about what technical reform the government was passing or what was going on with Greeces debt, but whether Greece, and Europe for that matter, could regain the trust of global financial community.We have become too obsessed with structural reforms and debt in Greece, said Chetan Gulati, who oversees European investments out of London for Perry Capital.An $8 billion hedge fund based in New York, Perry, along with funds like Japonica Partners, Greylock Capital and the French funds H20 and Carmignac, have made a mint from their Greek bond investments as yields have fallen to 8 percent from 14 percent since August. (Bond yields move in the opposite direction from their prices.)While many of these investors may be happy with such a payoff, they know how fleeting such gains can be if another political crisis engulfs Greece.What investors are looking for today is a return of the stability, confidence and trust that has been destroyed over the past six months, Mr. Gulati said, his voice rising as he addressed the conference participants.That means the government has to make clear that the last six months have been a mistake, he said; the Greek opposition must support the government if it does the right thing; and finally, he, concluded, Europe has to let it be known that Greece is part of the club because right now it is not.Mr. Gulatis cri de coeur struck a chord, prompting robust applause from an audience that, for most of this two-day investor conference, had been unresponsive. And it summed up the conflicted feelings of foreign investors in terms of how they should approach Greece these days.Enticing prospects of high-yielding government bonds and hugely discounted Greek bank stocks have lured a procession of investors to Athens in recent months. At the same time, however, the looming risks of jittery politics and a mountain of nonperforming loans have kept most investors on the sidelines.Perhaps the most powerful sign that investors may be willing to give Greece the benefit of the doubt, at least for a while longer, is that just about all the funds that took big losses in Greek bank stocks have not washed their hands of Greece, as one might expect.Instead, Greek bankers here say that these investors chose to participate in the latest fund offering, enticed no doubt by discounts of as much as 70 percent of the companys total value. (The previous recapitalization in 2012 offered investors a 30 percent discount.)Such giveaway prices, however, were not enough to attract more conservative long-term investors. Of the foreigners that did participate, most were hedge funds with a high tolerance for risk, bankers said.Greeces two largest banks, for example, Piraeus and National Bank of Greece, were not able to attract enough interest from overseas, and as a result they had to scramble at the last minute to tap domestic sources. They also were forced to accept cash from Greeces semiofficial bank oversight fund, the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund.At the forefront of investor worries is the willingness of the nations left-leaning prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, to deliver on the painful reforms he promised creditors in the summer. And while the government has pushed through a slate of tough measures, the most politically explosive of them all, cutting pensions, remains unresolved.We are a bit behind schedule there have been delays in the decision-making process, said Declan Costello, the representative at the European Commission overseeing Greece. We would also like to see a more positive business and investment agenda.As for the banks, which are sitting on nonperforming loans of 107 billion euros, it could be said they are cheap for very good reason.Greek nonperforming loans are 60 percent of the total economy that is a staggering figure, said Costas Karagiannis, an executive at the private equity firm Apollo Global Management at the conference. Unless we deal with the N.P.L.s, there is no hope in Greece.Mr. Karagiannis says that the only way Greek banks can start making loans again is to allow outside investors to buy some of the nonperforming loans that the banks are holding which in cases like Piraeus Bank is close to half the existing book of loans.But experts say that antiquated bankruptcy laws and fears of vulture investors pushing Greeks out of their homes and taking over companies pose a hurdle for outside investors looking to replicate their successes in more open markets like Ireland and Spain.Bank executives also say that they would be reluctant to sell their bank loans at bargain basement prices that distressed investors are demanding.At some point we may do this, but why should we sell at these prices? said Spyridon Papaspyrou, a senior executive at Piraeus Bank, the largest lender in Greece.Mr. Papaspyrou says that Piraeus has set up a small bad bank with 2,600 people combing through 31 billion euros in bad loans in an effort to see which borrowers can pay but are choosing not to and thus can be taken to court and those who are just unable to make their payments.But he and all Greek bankers agree that their biggest challenge is regaining the trust and confidence of the millions of Greek savers who withdrew about 40 billion euros from the Greek banking system this year. The vast majority of these funds, economists here say, is stuffed in bureau drawers, under mattresses or locked away in personal safes.If this vast trove of liquidity returns to the banking system, the banks will then be able to wean themselves off expensive short-term loans from the European Central Bank and return to their core business of making loans.It will not be easy. With two scares in three years over leaving the euro, Greek depositors are understandably gun shy about keeping their hard-earned savings in their banks. And with capital controls limiting the amount of cash they can withdraw, there is little incentive for nervous savers to return to the Greek banking system.For the moment then, for everyday Greeks as well as foreign investors, more needs to be done before they can put their full faith in Greek institutions.For all this money to return from under the mattresses there needs to be a new climate of trust, said Aristides Xenofos, the chief executive of the fund overseeing the Greek banking sector. This is what is critical. | Business |
Credit...Michael Kirby Smith for The New York TimesMarch 16, 2016MILFORD, Neb. Susan Kubicka-Welander, a short-order cook, went to her pain checkup appointment straight from the lunch-rush shift. We were really busy, she told Dr. Robert L. Wergin, trying to smile through deeply etched lines of exhaustion. Thursdays, its Philly cheesesteaks.Her back ached from a compression fracture; a shattered elbow was still mending; her left-hip sciatica was screaming louder than usual. She takes a lot of medication for chronic pain, but today it was just not enough.Yet rather than increasing her dose, Dr. Wergin was tapering her down. Susan, weve got to get you to five pills a day, he said gently.She winced.Such conversations are becoming routine in doctors offices across the country. A growing number of states are enacting measures to limit prescription opioids, highly addictive medicines that alleviate severe pain but have contributed to a surging epidemic of overdoses and deaths. This week the federal government issued the first national guidelines intended to reduce use of the drugs.In Nebraska, Medicaid patients like Ms. Kubicka-Welander, 56, may face limits this year that have been recommended by a state drug review board. We dont know what the final numbers will be, Dr. Wergin told her, but we have to get you ready.As politicians and policy makers decry the opioid crisis, the countrys success in confronting it may well depend on the ability of physicians like Dr. Wergin to reconcile their new role as enforcer with their mission of caring for patients. Collectively, primary care physicians write the greatest volume of opioid prescriptions according to a recent study, 15.3 million prescriptions for Medicare patients alone in 2013. The burden of monitoring patients for potential abuse, while still treating pain that is chronic and real, falls largely on these front-line gatekeepers.I have a patient with inoperable spinal stenosis who needs to be able to keep chopping wood to heat his home, said Dr. Wergin, 61, the only physician in this rural town. A one-size-fits-all prescription algorithm just doesnt fit him. But I have to comply.In prescribing opioids, Dr. Wergin, who is also chairman of the board of the American Academy of Family Physicians, is taking professional and personal risks. He must go through an elaborate prescription checklist, with state and federal officials looking over his shoulder. He has faced threats from addicts who show up at the hospital emergency room, desperate for pills. Following the recommendation of his malpractice insurance carrier, he now requires his patients to sign pain management contracts, in which they must agree to random drug tests before receiving an opioid prescription.ImageCredit...Michael Kirby Smith for The New York TimesThough he has been enmeshed in his patients lives for decades, having gone to grade school with many of them and delivered their children and grandchildren, the new vigilance has injected an uncomfortable layer of suspicion in his relationships with them.I dont want to stop prescribing opioids altogether, Dr. Wergin said. But I can see why some doctors have gotten to that point.Pain is one of the chief reasons people go to their doctor. Once overlooked and even dismissed, pain has been a standard vital sign on a patient work-up for nearly two decades. But unlike blood pressure, it is difficult to measure, not least because peoples ability to tolerate pain is highly individual.Often an orthopedic surgeon or emergency room physician will write an initial opioid prescription for short-term use, said Dr. Jonathan H. Chen, an instructor at the Stanford University School of Medicine who researched the Medicare data, but the prescribing doctor never sees the patient again and never realizes the problem they triggered.The patient follows up with a primary care doctor, who now has to manage the patients opioid use.Dr. Wergins patients often lack the means to consult pain specialists in Lincoln, the closest city, 30 miles away. So he is their doctor of first and last resort. Wherever you turn in Milford (population 2,090), there he is: the doctor for a local nursing home, for the towns volunteer fire department, for the high school sports teams, sometimes making house calls in his weather-beaten Chevy Tahoe. When his patients are hospitalized, it is to him they complain about the overcooked salmon, expecting he can take care of that, too.ImageCredit...Michael Kirby Smith for The New York TimesBuoyant and chatty, Dr. Wergin seems to have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting, with his faux-threats to give rambunctious young patients a mind-your-mother shot, and his prescriptions for relieving his own stress: baking pies or road-testing his 1962 red Corvette. And so he is particularly uneasy about the skepticism he must now bring to patient care.Patients look at him, stricken and indignant, when asked to sign a pain contract. Do you think Im an addict? they say. Or, I dont need a contract for my heart medicine, so why this?Why? When a random drug test of one longtime patient showed no trace of prescribed opioids, Dr. Wergin had to fire him for breaking the contract. Instead of taking the pills, the patient had been selling them.Dr. Wergin has learned to be even more wary during his emergency room shifts at the hospital 15 miles away. There, he has seen firsthand a growing number of overdoses and opioid-related deaths.The scenario has become so familiar that now when a nurse reports that the patient in Room 3 is complaining of excruciating back pain and asking specifically for Percocet, Dr. Wergin will reply, And is he about 31, single or divorced, and insisting he is allergic to nonsteroidals?These are seekers n sellers, he explained, who peel off I-80 and head for the hospital thinking were just ignorant hayseeds. A few months ago, state troopers pulled guns on one such man, who had stormed into the hospital demanding pain medications and threatening Dr. Wergin and other staff members.As Dr. Wergin recounted this, driving through the fog-shrouded back roads of winter-stubble prairie, where patients are rushed to the emergency room after being crushed by forklifts and tractor tipovers, he recoiled against his own cynicism.You dont want to become so jaded that you assume everyone in the E.R. is a drug-seeker, he said.Still, he has made adjustments. He now rarely writes prescriptions for oxycodone, which is prized on the street. For other painkillers, he logs into an electronic pharmacy registry to view the patients other medications. Although every state but Missouri has such a system, Nebraskas, like many, is not foolproof: patients can opt out for privacy reasons and not all insurers, who supply the data, opt in.And most state electronic systems are not compatible with one another. A Nebraska patient can just drive 80 miles to a Kansas E.R. and get another prescription and no one would know, Dr. Wergin said.Prosecutors and medical review boards are increasingly scrutinizing physicians who prescribe controlled substances. A colleague of Dr. Wergins in a nearby community was investigated for two years after a patient died of an overdose. Although she was cleared, the reputation of her small-town practice was damaged. She moved to another state.ImageCredit...Michael Kirby Smith for The New York TimesThe management of chronic pain has had a long, fractious history in the United States. In the 1990s, doctors were admonished for undertreating pain. Opioids, they were told, including newer ones like OxyContin, could be safely prescribed and bring life-changing relief. Now the pendulum has swung sharply back and doctors have been scrambling for alternatives.Some state medical boards recommend limiting the number of opioid doses per month. Others limit by strength of daily dose. The new guidelines by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advise primary care doctors to treat pain first with measures such as aspirin and ibuprofen. Three days of opioids will usually suffice, they said, and rarely more than seven.Although much contention surrounded the drafting of the guidelines, everyone generally agrees that patients should not be custodians of large quantities of opioids. One of Dr. Wergins patients, Gene Filbert, 64, had been taking 240 short-acting hydrocodones a month, or about eight a day, to keep at bay the pounding pain that has resisted five surgeries for the elbow and wrist he smashed in a fall while installing a telephone line. An alternative, fentanyl, a slow-release, higher-dose patch, nauseates him. Dr. Wergin has now inched him down to 180 pills a month but the coming Nebraska limit may be 150.In a small town, lots of folks know about Mr. Filberts pain and his pills.People ask me all the time if they can have a few, said Mr. Filbert, a man with a raspy voice and a silver-streaked beard. And I say, Hell no, the doctors shorting me already! Many medical associations now offer doctors training about opioids and chronic pain, urging them first to use other remedies: physical therapy, acupuncture, anti-inflammatories, antidepressants, counseling.But alternatives are unrealistic for some. Physical therapy is too expensive for Ms. Kubicka-Welander: she can scarcely make the rent on her home in a trailer court. Patients with a compromised liver cannot take high doses of acetaminophen. Those on blood-thinners should not use ibuprofen.Dr. Wergin is careful not to assure patients that they will be pain-free. Instead, he talks about setting realistic goals while living with pain. Can they work? Walk? Sleep?The problems faced by Beverly TeSelle, 71, defy most solutions.After a second stroke that left her using a wheelchair, Mrs. TeSelle, formerly a gregarious accountant, began to suffer vicious headaches that left her weeping and moaning.The biggest relief for both of us is when she goes to sleep, her husband of 53 years, Larry, said, tearfully.Dr. Wergin noted that Mrs. TeSelle, whose strokes have also left her with slurred speech, and hand, arm and shoulder pain, already takes more than what may be allowed by coming state limits. He considered increasing the dose of her fentanyl patches but said, I worry about respiratory depression.He reviewed the list of her medications.Lets at least try to reduce those headaches so she can talk with her friends and family, he said, recalibrating doses.Dr. Robert L. Wergin examines Gene Filbert, 64, at the Milford Family Medical Center in Milford, Neb.Credit...Michael Kirby Smith for The New York TimesSlide 1 of 6 Dr. Robert L. Wergin examines Gene Filbert, 64, at the Milford Family Medical Center in Milford, Neb.Credit...Michael Kirby Smith for The New York TimesDr. Wergins final patient of the day, a 55-year-old woman, had three rotated vertebrae in her lower back, migraines and a mastectomy for breast cancer this fall. She asked not to identified because she worried her opioid use might jeopardize her job.Her fibromyalgia was flaring up, she told Dr. Wergin. Pain was aggravating her insomnia.And you have to cut my pills again? she asked.Dr. Wergin nodded. It will be very difficult to get an override for your dose. Instead, he increased her antidepressant.Its people like my husband who screwed the rest of us over, she said.Her husband, she explained, used to sell methamphetamine and OxyContin. His doctor in Lincoln would readily write prescriptions. One night six years ago, she found her husband on the floor of their bedroom, dead, mostly likely from an overdose.Its rough cutting back when Im at a level that almost works, she said to Dr. Wergin.A rare flicker of frustration crossed his face.Im sorry, Dr. Wergin said. | Health |
Bezos Rocket Company Loses Challenge to NASA SpaceX Moon ContractThe Government Accountability Office said a $2.9 billion award to SpaceX to build the next lunar lander for astronauts would stand.Credit...SpaceXPublished July 30, 2021Updated Nov. 9, 2021Jeff Bezos rocket company carried him to the edge of space last week. But it wont be flying NASA astronauts to the moons surface, at least for now.The Government Accountability Office on Friday rejected protests challenging NASAs decision to go with just one spacecraft lander design for its return of astronauts to the moon, a $2.9 billion award that went to Elon Musks rocket company, SpaceX.The competition for the contracts was seen as a battle of billionaires between Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon who also started a rocket company, Blue Origin. A third company, Dynetics, a defense contractor in Huntsville, Ala., was also competing for the contract.In a twist, the loss of the protest may actually help Blue Origin. If the G.A.O. had upheld the protest, NASA may have had to redo the competition, which seeks a system that can take astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon and back. Redoing the competition would most likely have taken months.NASA officials can now decide whether to take up Mr. Bezos on an offer he made in an open letter to Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, on Monday: to effectively slice $2 billion off the $6 billion proposal from Blue Origin, which collaborated with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.When the competition was announced, NASA officials said they wanted more than one design to ensure both competition and redundancy in case one of the companies stumbled.But in April, NASA announced that it was awarding just one contract, to SpaceX. The company will use the money for the development of Starship, the large reusable spacecraft the company is developing in South Texas, that is central to Mr. Musks ambitions of one day sending people to Mars.Space agency officials suggested then that they were hemmed in by limited budgets. Congress had provided $850 million in the current fiscal year for the project, one-fourth of what the Trump administration had asked for in its final budget request.Both Blue Origin and Dynetics protested the award to the Government Accountability Office, which can review federal contract decisions. The G.A.O. said NASA did not violate any of its rules by making just one award the announcement of the competition said the space agency reserved the right to make just one award or none at all.The G.A.O. also said that NASA had fairly evaluated the three proposals, and although it agreed that NASA had improperly waived one requirement for SpaceX, that mistake was not serious enough to merit redoing the competition.Despite this finding, the decision also concludes that the protesters could not establish any reasonable possibility of competitive prejudice arising from this limited discrepancy in the evaluation, the G.A.O. said in a statement.The award to SpaceX is just for the first moon landing, scheduled for 2024, although few expect it will occur that soon. Importantly, the G.A.O.s decision will allow NASA and SpaceX to establish a timeline for the first crewed landing on the moon in more than 50 years, NASA said in a statement.NASA officials have said they would have another moon lander competition open to Blue Origin, Dynetics and any other company.In his letter, Mr. Bezos said NASA should choose now to ensure competition. Competition will prevent any single source from having insurmountable leverage over NASA, he wrote.After the decision, Blue Origin said in a statement: We stand firm in our belief that there were fundamental issues with NASAs decision, but the G.A.O. wasnt able to address them due to their limited jurisdiction. Well continue to advocate for two immediate providers as we believe it is the right solution.In an effort to prod NASA into reopening the competition, the chairwoman of the Commerce Committee, Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, where Blue Origin is headquartered, added a bipartisan provision requiring the agency to pick a second contractor into a sprawling research and technology bill that overwhelmingly passed the Senate in June. Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, chafed at the measure, claiming that it amounted to a bailout for Mr. Bezos company. But powerful senators on the Commerce Committee backed it, arguing that NASA had always intended to give out two awards.The American taxpayers invest too much in these space programs not to apply these lessons about the importance of resiliency and redundancy, Ms. Cantwell said in a May speech from the Senate floor. The same lesson should be applied to the programs developed here as we approach this new project to land people back on the moon.But that legislation has since stalled in the House, despite a call from President Biden to send the bill to his desk. And while House-led committees have passed a series of piecemeal bills intended to counter the Senate-passed legislation, lawmakers have yet to approve similar measures relating to NASA, frustrating proponents of the lunar lander provision and leaving the fate of the bill uncertain.In turning to private companies to help undertake its moon program, known as Artemis, NASA hopes to recreate successes in outsourcing transportation of cargo and now astronauts to the International Space Station. In the past, NASA designed and operated its own spacecraft, but that approach was more expensive.Because this was not a typical federal contract competition where companies vie for one set task, Mr. Bezos and Blue Origin officials say NASA is still free to make additional awards if it so wished. By waiving its fee for the next two fiscal years, up to $2 billion, Mr. Bezos said that adjustment addressed NASAs financing constraints.The current bids by Blue Origin and Dynetics remain valid until Aug. 9. A Blue Origin spokesman said the company has requested that NASA extend that deadline to Nov. 1 to ensure NASA has every chance to award a second provider and restore competition. | science |
A dog waits to eat the remains of fish near the River Brahmaputra in Gauhati, India. Credit Anupam Nath/Associated Press Most of the dogs around the world don't belong to anyone. Instead, they go by a variety of names: street dogs, village dogs, dump dogs or neighborhood dogs. These aren't strays that escaped from their homes. They live and breed on the fringes of human society, but continue to be shaped by it. Perhaps even by a human like you. Tell us your story about the dog or dogs in your life who live around people, but don't belong to them. Whether you encounter these dogs every day where you live, or had a memorable experience with a stray while you traveled, we'd like to hear about it. We'll gather some of our favorite anecdotes and photos and publish them alongside a coming Times story. Sorry, but this form is no longer accepting submissions. See our favorite stories about dogs who belong to no one here. More on NYTimes.com | science |
Tom Petty Lake House Hits Market for $5.5m 1/20/2018 Tom Petty's oasis for over a decade can be yours ... at a bargain price. The late singer's crib in Lake Sherwood -- a ritzy area near the famed Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, CA -- hit the market for $5.495 million. The 5,300 square foot pad has 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms but one of the best features is 125 feet of lake frontage on a private cul-de-sac. It's built for a rock star -- the walls are 2 feet thick!!! And talk about location, location, location -- the house is 3 minutes from the country club and just 9 miles from the Malibu coast. Tom bought the crib back in 2007 and put it on the market just a few months before his shocking death back in October. It was initially listed for $5.895 million but was listed just days ago with a discount. Amy Alcini and Dana Sparks of Compass Real Estate rep the sellers. | Entertainment |
Olympics|Ashley Wagner Helps U.S. Advance in Team Skating Eventhttps://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/sports/olympics/ashley-wagner-helps-us-advance-in-team-skating-event.htmlCredit...Streeter Lecka/Getty ImagesFeb. 8, 2014SOCHI, Russia Before taking to the ice to compete in the ladies short program in the team figure skating event on Saturday night, Ashley Wagner shook out her hands and wore a face of anxiety.The shaking off seemed to have worked, sort of. Wagner finished her short program with a smile. But when her score of 63.10 was announced, she furrowed her brow as she looked at her coach, Rafael Arutyunyan, both looking disappointed with the judges interpretation of her performance. The score put Wagner in fourth place in the ladies singles portion of the team event, trailing first place Russian Yulia Lipnitskaya, Carolina Kostner of Italy in second and Mao Asada of Japan, who finished third in spite of falling.I know what Im capable of and what this program is capable of, Wagner said. I dont agree with the marks, but thats what the individual event is for.Wagners effort, combined with a first place finish by Meryl Davis and Charlie White in the ice dancing, was enough to vault the United States from seventh to third in the team competition, a crucial leap because only the top five teams advance to the finals on Sunday night.A strong competitor on the international stage, Wagner struggled at the United States Figure Skating Championships in Boston last month, where she finished fourth but was controversially selected for the Olympic team over Mirai Nagasu, who finished in third place.Clad in black and adorned with silver sparkles, Wagner performed Saturday to Shine on You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd and in recent weeks has said that a buckled down practice schedule has remade her as a skater since her performance at Nationals.It was tough going out there after a disappointing Nationals so it was important for me to redeem myself, Wagner said. I got the triple-triple out there, so Im pleased. It was a different kind of pressure because its the team event. | Sports |
tech fixFor $99 a year, Hey wants to help us restore some control. The new service has a way to go and so does email, come to think of it.Credit...Glenn HarveyJune 17, 2020Over the decade-plus that I have been writing about consumer technology, the one subject I have avoided tackling is the misery of email.Thats because email, which has been around for as long as we can remember using the internet, is a source of pain with no treatment plan. Its out of control: Anyone, from exes to marketers, can message us. Its annoying: Once we buy something online and share our email address, the business bombards us with useless messages. It also stokes rude behavior: Who hasnt ignored the avalanche of emails that arrive?So when I heard that the makers of Basecamp, a popular online collaboration tool, were trying to reinvent email with a new app and service, I had to see what they came up with. This week, Basecamp unveiled Hey, a $99-a-year service that offers a cleaner interface for navigating email.Its prime selling point is a screening tool that we can use to decide who emails us, which theoretically helps us regain control of our inboxes. That isnt too different from the ability to block senders in services like Gmail, but Hey has people screen them by default.The reason people hate email is because they dont control it anymore, said Jason Fried, chief executive of Basecamp. By flipping this around and giving you control, its actually a radical change.Email today is dominated by the tech behemoths: Google, Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft. Several smaller companies have emerged recently, claiming to offer superior products. Superhuman, an invitation-only $30-a-month service that rolled out last year, promised the fastest email experience ever made. It was immediately scrutinized for privacy violations.Paid email services are usually designed for businesses. Hey is one of the rare ones that are consumer focused, so I felt it was worth trying.But after about a week of testing Hey, Im sad to report that I didnt feel I had regained control of my inbox. I suspect most of us will continue to feel that free services like Gmail are good enough and when something is free and good enough, its tough to beat. Hey has taken a thoughtful first step, but it will have to do more to persuade people to pay $99 a year.Whats more, I walked away convinced that email as a whole is so broken that many of us have taken most of our conversations elsewhere. More on this later.Heres what Hey does.Similar to Gmail in its early days, Hey is an invitation-only service. To sign up for an account, you send an email to [email protected] and tell the company how you feel about email. Then you receive a sign-up code.You can get to your Hey inbox through a web browser or apps made for Apple, Android, Windows and Linux devices. (Apple users may run into issues downloading the app: Basecamp said on Tuesday that Apple had rejected a new version of Hey from its App Store because of issues related to its policy for charging for subscriptions.)Heys star feature is the screening tool. When you first get an email from someone, a message at the top of the screen invites you to screen the sender. Then you are taken to the Screener menu, which shows a list of any first-time senders and gives you the option to click Yes or No to receiving emails from that address.Hey also includes other benefits:Anti-tracking technology. Email trackers come in many forms, including a single invisible pixel or special web fonts, and marketers frequently use them to detect when someone opens a message and even where that person is when the email is opened. Hey automatically detects emails containing trackers and alerts you when they have been blocked. Thats a step ahead of free services like Gmail, which offers minimal protections against tracking.A place for receipts. When you get a receipt from a business or a trip itinerary, you can click the Move button to send it to a Paper Trail, which is essentially a folder for important documents.Other email management tools. When you receive an important email that you dont want to forget about, you can pin it so that a preview of the message remains at the bottom of the app screen. You can also flag emails you want to reply to later by tapping the Later button.Test, test.To test Hey, I set up two of my Gmail accounts to automatically forward all messages to my @hey.com email address so I could check whether the screening tools might help my inbox feel less overwhelming.I soon found flaws. In some instances, the screening tool was helpful: I filtered out obnoxious emails from political campaigns, Priceline and Enterprise Rent-A-Car, simply by clicking No to those senders.But when it came to businesses I wanted to hear from, screening became a chore. For example, I get too many marketing emails from my home insurance company, but I want to hear from it about receipts or policy changes. So do I filter it out? Sometimes, businesses send important messages and marketing emails from different email addresses, but not always, and filtering out only the spammy addresses became tedious.In other cases, screening became entirely impractical. Last week, I used Yelp to contact some electronics repair shops for quotes on fixing my smartphone. Every reply came from a newly generated email address from Yelp. So to read responses from one repair shop, I had to use the screener to approve messages from more than 10 email addresses. This issue stems from how Yelp designed its reply system, but it illustrated that Heys screener doesnt always work well.Mr. Fried said that this was just the beginning for Hey, and that the screener would improve over time. Its not perfect, he said, adding it was still a lot better than the alternative which is zero control over who can email you.Heys anti-tracking technology also felt incomplete. The service primarily blocks tracking pixels and special fonts, which, when loaded, ping external servers to inform a third party when you have opened an email.But web trackers also live elsewhere in emails. When you click on a hyperlinked word in a sentence or on a photo for a Uniqlo sweatshirt, that may also alert a third party that you opened the email and interacted with its contents. (In the past, email tracker blockers I tested stripped out hyperlinks containing trackers.)Mr. Fried said people generally understood that email links went to websites that tracked them. I respectfully disagree. My concern is that when Hey informs people that trackers have been blocked, they will get a false sense of security.I thoroughly enjoyed some of Heys other features. I loved the pin tool to keep important emails at the forefront of the app while doing work. The Paper Trail was also a nice feature for keeping receipts tidy.But I still wouldnt pay for Hey because of some of the flaws I experienced.Will email ever be fun again?Testing Hey made me reminisce about a time when email brought joy. In the days of AOL in the 1990s, we relied on email to send notes to friends and family.When Gmail emerged in the mid-2000s, Google offered a free, searchable inbox with more storage, eliminating the need to delete emails. But that widely used service hasnt changed much since its inception.In other words, email became boring.Plenty of companies have attempted a more delightful email experience. In 2013, Dropbox acquired Mailbox, an app that helped users declutter their inboxes, for $100 million. Dropbox killed the app in 2015, after concluding it could not fundamentally fix email.After testing Hey, I looked closely at my devices and noticed a trend. The overwhelming majority of my digital conversations with family, friends and co-workers happen on messaging apps like iMessage, Google Hangouts and Slack. My email accounts have turned into a passive channel for receiving receipts and newsletters.This may be the case for many people. People from 16 to 44 years old spend more time in apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Twitter than they use Gmail, and people older than that spend more time using Gmail than messaging apps, said Amir Ghodrati, director of market insights at App Annie, a research firm.So where does this leave us?Email may no longer be fun, because many of us have moved on. But it may also never be gone, because its a universal communication platform that lets anyone talk to anyone, which makes it both horrible and great at the same time. Perhaps that is just a reality we will have to accept.In the meantime, my iPhone mailbox says I have about 118,000 unread email messages. Ill get right on to ignoring them. | Tech |
The C.D.C. recommends Pfizer-BioNTech boosters for children 5 to 11.A third dose would enhance immunity to the coronavirus, the agency said. But hesitancy is high, and less than one-third of children in this age group have received two doses.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMay 19, 2022The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday recommended a booster dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children ages 5 to 11. Children in this age group who received their last dose at least five months earlier are eligible to receive the additional doses immediately.Vaccination with a primary series among this age group has lagged behind other age groups, leaving them vulnerable to serious illness, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the C.D.C., said. With over 18 million doses administered in this age group, we know that these vaccines are safe, and we must continue to increase the number of children who are protected.The booster shot would be the third dose available for most children and the fourth dose for some immunocompromised children.A booster dose will offer children an extra layer of protection at a time when infections and hospitalizations are once again rising nationally, scientific advisers to the agency concluded at a meeting on Thursday. It is sobering that we have experienced over a million deaths in the U.S. as a consequence of Covid infection, Dr. Grace Lee, a pediatrician at Stanford University and chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which sets recommendations for the use of vaccines, told other panel members.In November, the committee recommended booster shots for adults and in January did so for children 12 and older.Pfizer and BioNTech reported in April that in children aged 5 to 11, a third dose generated antibodies against both the Omicron variant and the original version of the coronavirus. In the trial, the children received 10 micrograms of vaccine one-third of the dose given to adolescents and adults in each shot.As with the first two doses, the booster appeared safe, the companies reported. The most commonly reported side effects were pain, redness and swelling at the injection site as well as aches, chills and fever.Based on these data, the Food and Drug Administration authorized the boosters for children aged 5 to 11 on Tuesday.About 70 percent of children in this age group have evidence of prior infection and may have some immunity as a result, Dr. Sara Oliver, a C.D.C. scientist, noted at the science advisers meeting.But some evidence suggests that compared with vaccination, protection following an Omicron infection may be weaker and may not last as long.Prior infection can result in protection against reinfection for a time period, but its not 100 percent and likely decreases over time, Dr. Oliver said.The rise in pediatric hospitalizations during the Omicron surge suggests that immunity gained from infection is not sufficient to provide a broad population-level protection, she added.The committee members debated whether to recommend that all children aged 5 to 11 should receive a booster or only that they may do so if their parents or health care providers deem it to be necessary.Ultimately, the experts voted for the stronger recommendation, after several committee members argued that there was enough evidence suggesting that a booster dose was broadly beneficial in all age groups. Dr. Walensky endorsed the recommendation later in the day. The extra dose may boost immunity to the current Omicron variants in young children. Studies have shown that two doses of the vaccine offer virtually no barrier against infection with the Omicron variant in children aged 5 to 11, although protection against severe disease remains strong.In adolescents aged 12 to 17, two doses offered little protection even against hospitalization, but a booster significantly improved effectiveness of the vaccines.Many parents have hesitated to immunize their children, in part because they are at much lower risk of severe disease than adults. Fewer than one-third of 5- to 11-year-olds in the United States have received two doses. The rates were lower among children from communities of color and low-income families and those living in rural areas.But record numbers of children were hospitalized during the Omicron surge this winter. Nearly 4,000 children aged 5 to 11 have been diagnosed with a Covid-related condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome during the pandemic. And some studies find that even children who have a mild illness may experience symptoms for months.Covid-19 has been responsible for more deaths in children aged 5 to 11 than many other vaccine-preventible diseases, noted Dr. Matthew Daley, a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Colorado who heads the C.D.C.s Covid-19 vaccine working group.Most parents accept vaccination for hepatitis A, meningococcal, varicella, rubella and rotavirus, even though deaths from these diseases are relatively rare, he said.At the science advisers meeting, Dr. Doran Fink, a deputy director for the F.D.A.s vaccine division, acknowledged the continued intense interest in the availability of Covid vaccines for children younger than age 5.He said that agency scientists were working to quickly review data on the Moderna vaccines effects in the youngest children and were awaiting an application from Pfizer and BioNTech for their vaccines use in this age group. | Health |
Economic SceneCredit...Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesDec. 15, 2015This is going to sound like anathema to all those economists who lived through the inflation of the 1970s, but theres a good case for trying to double the inflation rate.Remember Japans lost decade? Around the turn of the century, as the Japanese government failed to reinvigorate economic growth watching haplessly as the economy slid into deflation and stagnation despite lowering its short-term interest rate to nearly zero many macroeconomists dismissed this as some idiosyncratic Japanese thing.Maybe other countries might briefly suffer from the zero lower bound in which interest rates could not be lowered any further to stimulate a stagnant economy because they had already hit the floor but these episodes would be infrequent and quick to fix, the experts thought.Well, oops.Today, much of the industrial world is stuck at this zero bound. Japan has still not emerged from the doldrums. Europe is barely treading water. In the United States, the Federal Reserves benchmark interest rate target has been hovering just above zero for seven years. Yet inflation has consistently undershot the Feds stated goal of 2 percent in the face of persistently weak economic growth.Weve realized that the zero lower bound on the funds rate is a bigger deal than we thought a decade ago, said Douglas W. Elmendorf, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who is now at the Brookings Institution in Washington.John C. Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, put it more gingerly. Reality, he said, has called into question some of the assumptions that went into previous research.And that calls into question what the Fed is almost universally expected to do this week: raise interest rates for the first time since 2008, and then keep on raising them at a pace of about a percentage point per year.True, at this stage, it would probably be a mistake for the Fed not to lift its federal funds rate by 0.25 percentage points this week. Its officials have been proclaiming for months that the time was nigh. Not to do so would confuse markets and raise doubts about its messaging and strategy.Still, the urgency to head off alleged inflationary pressures seems premature, especially given that the Fed and many economists on and off Wall Street have been crying wolf about inflation for years.Experience with the zero lower bound raises questions that some are now asking Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman of the Fed. Why not keep interest rates at rock bottom until inflation actually picks up? Indeed, why not aim for higher inflation?I dont see anything magical about targeting 2 percent inflation, Ben S. Bernanke, former Fed chairman, wrote on his blog a few months ago.For that matter, why not 3? Or, as Laurence M. Ball of Johns Hopkins University suggests, why not even 4? There is no question that if you had a higher inflation target, you would be in a situation that hit the zero lower bound less often, said Frederic Mishkin, a former Fed board member now at Columbia University.Why does that matter? Because if the economy falls into a recession when inflation is very low, it might be nearly impossible for the Fed to engineer the negative real interest rates after accounting for inflation needed to jolt the economy back to life.Some central banks are experimenting with truly negative interest rates requiring banks to charge people for holding their money. But in most circumstances, nominal interest rates cant easily go below zero.Say you need a real interest rate of minus 3 percent, Professor Mishkin explained. If your target inflation is 2 percent, youre toast because the lowest real interest rate you can achieve when you are at the zero lower bound is minus 2 percent, but if you have 4 percent inflation, you can achieve minus 3 percent with a 1 percent federal funds rate.There are other tools at the governments disposal to reinvigorate the economy. Notably fiscal stimulus, but with todays Congress, thats doubtful. The Fed could resort again to quantitative easing: immense purchases of government bonds to depress long-term rates. But that, too, could prove problematic.At the zero bound, it turned out that the Fed has less leverage than some thought, Mr. Elmendorf said. All the trillions in quantitative easing amounted to the equivalent of a small reduction of the funds rate.The risk of hitting the zero bound has risen, as slow population growth, strong inflows of capital from overseas and other market forces outside the Feds control have conspired to push interest rates down. That leaves less space to lower rates in response to a recession.The previous consensus among economists that we would rarely, if ever, reach this floor was based on analysis of the American economy after World War II, a period of mostly robust, stable growth. Extrapolating from that track, Mr. Williams calculated, a nearly two-year contraction like the Great Recession, which shaved 5 percent off economic activity, could be expected only once every 570 years.The postwar golden age, though, turned out to be atypical. Basing the analysis on broader historical data the experience of 17 developed countries since 1870 raises the odds to once every 23 years.Based on these metrics, recent events would scarcely be considered rare or unprecedented, Mr. Williams wrote. History teaches us that very large downturns are not only possible they are probable.The question is more important than ever. Five years ago, Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and his colleagues pointed out that the costs of higher inflation must be weighed against the alternative.The question remains, they wrote, whether these costs are outweighed by the potential benefits in terms of avoiding the zero interest rate bound.So what are the odds the Fed decides higher inflation is the way to escape this quandary? Probably close to zero.A critical problem with aiming for higher inflation is how to get from here to there. The Fed has spent enormous effort anchoring peoples expectations to 2 percent. Even economists sympathetic to a higher target are wary of what such a shift might do to its credibility.A perfect world, where you could commit to 4 percent and everybody believed it, would be great, Mr. Mishkin told me. We are not in a perfect world. Moving much higher than 2 percent raises the risk that expectations become unanchored.So here is an alternative proposal. If the Fed is too cautious to risk unhinging inflationary expectations, how about just delivering what it has promised? Among economists and investors, the problem with the Feds 2 percent target is that just about everybody believes it is really a ceiling. That makes it even harder for inflation to rise to that level. The market expects the Fed to act pre-emptively to ensure it never goes over that line which is what it seems to be doing now.If the Fed is not going to aim for higher inflation, the least it could do is re-anchor expectations to the goal it established, allowing inflation to fluctuate above and below a 2 percent average. That alone might help deal with the next economic crisis.We havent fully tested whether we can deal with this kind of crisis with a 2 percent inflation target, said David H. Romer of the University of California, Berkeley. Central banks have lots of tools. If they say they are willing to keep using them until they get where they want, they can eventually do it. | Business |
Democrats picked their slate of congressional candidates in California on Tuesday from an enormous pack of contenders, in some cases resolving chaotic primaries by the narrowest of margins. And for all the energy on the left, Democrats appear to have largely settled on a mainstream set of candidates to contest key Republican-held House seats. Most candidates who won in the primaries appear close in their views to the average Democratic candidate in California, while fewer winners are farther to the left, according to a methodology developed by Adam Bonica, a professor of political science at Stanford University. In some districts, where Democrats feared getting shut out of the general election under Californias top two system of open primaries, voters may have put tactics over ideology in casting their ballots. Now, as state officials continue to count what appears to be well over one million outstanding ballots, Democrats appear set to test whether conventionally liberal candidates not left-wing activists can make deep inroads in moderate areas that have historically supported Republicans. They are especially focused on seven Republican-held districts that Hillary Clinton carried in the 2016 presidential race. Democrats seem to have selected Josh Harder, a venture capitalist, as their candidate to oppose Representative Jeff Denham, a Central Valley Republican who has clashed with hardliners in his own party on the issue of immigration. Mr. Harder appears to be a tick to the left of Michael Eggman, who was also in the primary and who challenged Mr. Denham in 2014 and 2016. Mr. Harder has endorsed a massive expansion of the health care coverage provided by Medicare. But he also presented a fresher face to Democratic voters than Mr. Eggman, after his two previous campaigns. Full results Perhaps the least-complicated primary in California, for Democrats, was the one for Representative David Valadaos seat. The party persuaded T.J. Cox, an engineer who originally planned to challenge Mr. Denham, to run for Mr. Valadaos seat instead. He made it to the general election without a fight, sparing him some of the leftward pressure Democrats in tough primaries felt from their own partys base. Democrats acknowledge that Mr. Cox is largely undefined in the district, which gives him an opening to define himself in a broadly appealing way, but also puts a lot of pressure on him to do so quickly. Representative Steve Knight is among the most endangered Republicans in the state and he will likely face a solidly liberal Democratic challenger in Katie Hill, a 30-year-old nonprofit executive. Ms. Hill appears to have defeated Bryan Caforio, a similarly left-of-center Democrat, in the open primary, and she has endorsed progressive positions, including an assault weapons ban and a federal Medicare for All initiative. But Republicans worry that Ms. Hills profile as a youthful political newcomer may make her more difficult to attack than Mr. Caforio, a trial lawyer who had run for office before. Full results Both parties settled on relatively moderate candidates to contest this open seat, long held by Representative Ed Royce, a Republican who is retiring. On the Republican side, Young Kim, a former state legislator who is a political protg of Mr. Royce, earned the most support from Republicans even though she leans more toward the political center than the average G.O.P. candidate. (The Republican runner-up was a Trump-style immigration hawk who would have struggled in the general election.) Among Democrats, it was Gil Cisneros, a Navy veteran and former Republican, who prevailed. Mr. Cisneros, a favorite of the party establishment, defeated two more activist-oriented Democrats in this diverse but closely divided district. Mr. Cisneros and Ms. Kim were strongly favored by national leaders in their respective parties, who saw them as having appealing personal stories and policy views that are well suited for the area. Full results For the seat held by Representative Mimi Walters, Democrats picked a candidate, law professor Katie Porter, who campaigned in more bluntly liberal tones than her leading rival, Dave Min, also a law professor, though their scores in the Stanford rubric are essentially indistinguishable. Ms. Porter, who was backed by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, strongly endorsed single payer-style health care a position Mr. Min declined to take. That approach plainly helped Ms. Porter win the primary, but she may have a trickier challenge in the general election and Republicans were pleased to see her outflank Mr. Min. Full results It may take days to determine which Democrat will challenge Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a vulnerable Republican with an eclectic set of policy views. But one way or another, the Democratic candidate will be a wealthy white man with views that line up with the party average. Harley Rouda, a real estate executive, aligned himself more closely with activist Democrats than Hans Keirstead, a stem-cell scientist, and appears to have attracted somewhat more liberal support as a result. But both men have broadly overlapping views on health care, guns, immigration and other issues. Less certain is whether those policy positions can win majority support in a traditionally right-leaning part of Orange County, even against a flawed incumbent like Mr. Rohrabacher. Full results In one of two open seats, where both Democrats and Republicans had wildly fluid primary elections, it appears that the two parties selected candidates somewhat farther from center than the average candidate in their parties. Republicans picked Diane Harkey, a conservative state official who has endorsed a border wall, while on the Democratic side, Mike Levin, a environmental lawyer, is poised to advance to the general election. This upscale, San Diego-area district has moved toward Democrats in recent years, and Republicans acknowledge Mr. Levins overall profile may be a good match for the race. Full results More on NYTimes.com | Politics |
Credit...Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesMarch 3, 2017SO PAULO, Brazil Brazils sickly economy is hemorrhaging thousands of jobs a day, states are scrambling to pay police officers and teachers, and money for subsidized meals is in such short supply that one legislator suggested that the poor could eat every other day.Still, not everyone is suffering. Civil servants in the judicial branch are enjoying a 41 percent raise. Legislators here in So Paulo, Brazils largest city, voted to increase their own salaries by more than 26 percent. And Congress, which is preparing to cut pension benefits around the country, is now allowing its members to retire with lifelong pensions after just two years in office.Brazil is struggling to pull out of its worst economic crisis in decades, and President Michel Temer says the country needs to curb public spending to do so.Yet it did not help his dismal approval ratings when he hosted a lavish taxpayer-funded banquet to persuade members of Congress to support his budget cuts, with 300 guests eating shrimp and filet mignon.Outside such rarefied circles, Mr. Temers austerity measures are igniting a fierce debate over how the richest and most powerful Brazilians are protecting their wealth and privileges at a time when much of the country is enduring a harrowing economic decline.This government talks about austerity for everyone, but of course forces the costs on societys most vulnerable people, said Giovana Santos Pereira, 25, a schoolteacher. Its ridiculous to the point of being tragic.Much of the ire revolves around the centerpiece of Mr. Temers austerity drive: his success in persuading the scandal-ridden Congress to impose a cap on federal spending for the next 20 years.Mr. Temer, who rose to power last year after supporting the impeachment of his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff, says the cap, which would limit the growth in spending to the rate of inflation, is needed to scale back ballooning budget deficits.Investors have applauded the measure as a turning point for Latin Americas largest economy. But critics are lashing out at the spending cap, saying it could harm the poor for decades to come, especially in areas like education. Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said the spending cap placed Brazil in a socially retrogressive category all of its own.The debate is all the more caustic because Mr. Temers government is resisting calls to raise taxes on wealthy Brazilians, who still enjoy what some economists describe as one of the most generous tax systems for the rich among major economies.For instance, Brazilians remain exempt from paying any taxes at all on dividends from stock holdings, and they can easily use loopholes to significantly lower taxes on other sources of income.Economists at the governments Institute of Applied Economic Research said in a 2016 study that a 15 percent tax on dividends could generate nearly $17 billion in revenue a year, but such proposals have failed to gain traction in a government that has shifted to the right.The system is engineered to perpetuate inequality, and Temer is doubling down on bets that Brazil needs Greek-style austerity, said Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos, an economist at the University of Campinas, drawing parallels between Brazils multiyear slowdown and Greeces seemingly interminable economic crisis.Mr. Temer has not been a popular president, and his approval ratings stand at just 10 percent. But his supporters point out that his leftist predecessor, Ms. Rousseff, sought her own austerity measures before her ouster last year, and that his government has promised to maintain some widely popular antipoverty programs expanded by her party years ago.Mr. Temers government says it is reversing the free-spending ways of previous governments. Brazils economy shrank about 4 percent in 2016, when its political class was consumed by infighting over the impeachment. But last month, the finance minister, Henrique Meirelles, claimed that the recession has ended.ImageCredit...Andressa Anholete/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesSome promising signs of a recovery may be emerging. Foreign investment has increased and, after performing poorly, Brazils stock market was one of the best performing in the world in 2016, creating a windfall for the relatively prosperous Brazilians who put money into equities. Mr. Temer is especially bullish, predicting that the economy will grow 3 percent next year.But the conditions on the streets of cities around Brazil tell a different story, reflecting devilishly complex structural challenges as millions of Brazilians fall into poverty.States are facing crippling strikes by public employees over unpaid or inadequate salaries. In the state of Esprito Santo, in southeast Brazil, a police strike last month produced an anarchic week marked by looting and a surge in homicides.Rio de Janeiro, which hosted the Olympics in August, showcases the complex issues Brazils states face. In desperate efforts to slash deficits, the authorities in Rio are shutting down restaurants that provide subsidized meals to the poor, raising taxes on residential electricity service and eliminating welfare programs for the states poorest residents.Yet Rios governor, like his counterparts in other Brazilian states, enjoys the use of a private jet for jaunts around the country. And Rios judges, already well paid, were pressing ahead with plans to spend millions of dollars hiring new servants for their chambers until the public got wind of the plan. The ensuing outrage forced the judges to shelve the idea.At the same time, the state is having trouble finding money to pay for food for the poor. The cost about 65 cents a meal was straining the state enough that one state legislator, Pedro Fernandes, suggested taking meals every other day.I dont know if what Im saying is absurd, but its something to ponder, he said.The ability of elected officials and elite public employees to secure what Brazilians call super salaries and outsize benefits for themselves has long been a contentious feature of the countrys political system.But while Brazilians fume over the issue at a time of national belt-tightening, some officials say they are entitled to special treatment. Brazilian judges, who can easily make about $200,000 a year, have been especially outspoken in demanding raises in a country where roughly half the population scrapes by on a minimum wage of about $4,000.Theres no shame whatsoever in this, Ricardo Lewandowski, a Supreme Court justice, recently told a conference of judges to a round of applause. Building maintenance fees go up, real estate taxes go up, gasoline goes up, food goes up, and the judges salary cant go up?As many poor and middle-class Brazilians absorb the brunt of austerity policies, the protracted economic slowdown and a dizzying array of graft scandals involving the nations political leaders are fueling anti-establishment sentiment ahead of presidential elections in 2018, paving the way for figures outside the mainstream to gain momentum.Alarming some politicians, Jair Bolsonaro, an ultranationalist congressman who excoriates immigrants and defends the torture of drug traffickers, is polling well ahead of traditional contenders like Acio Neves, a senator from the Brazilian Social Democracy Party.According to a survey last month by MDA, a Brazilian polling company, just 1 percent of respondents said they would vote for Mr. Temer, reflecting his dismal nationwide standing. It may not even matter, since Mr. Temers conviction for violating campaign finance limits could make him ineligible to run. His popularity sustained another blow in recent days after his government spent thousands of dollars to upgrade the presidents luxurious residence, only for Mr. Temer to move his family back to another government-owned palace in the capital, Braslia.The poll was conducted from Feb. 8 to 11 through interviews with 2,002 people, with a margin of sampling error or plus or minus 2.2 percentage points. It also showed a former president, Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, as a potential front-runner.But Mr. da Silva, a leftist who has been condemning Mr. Temers austerity measures, could also find himself ineligible to run if he is convicted of graft charges in connection with his ties to construction companies that profited from public contracts.Given the volatile political landscape and the weak economy, a sense of hopelessness afflicts many Brazilians.Ana Cristina Silva, 49, lost her job in December at a company in the southern city of Porto Alegre that assembles furniture.They just think about themselves, she said about Mr. Temers government, expressing indignation about the pay increases granted to some public employees while much of the country is still reeling. Its absurd. Those who dont need it get a raise. | World |
Credit...Helmut Fohringer/European Pressphoto AgencyFeb. 3, 2014SOCHI, Russia The official mascots for the Winter Olympics are a polar bear, a hare and a leopard. But walk around the complexes that will stage the Games here, with the opening ceremony Friday, and what seem more apt are a hand drill, a backhoe and a shovel.Much of Sochi is a work in progress, and parts of it look at least a dozen all-nighters away from completion. There are unfinished hotels, half-finished stores and a mall where the only shop that is open and thriving is a Cinnabon.Wander the premises over the course of a day and you also get a palpable sense of spectacular ambition, reflected in millions of square feet of new construction, as well as transportation hubs with spiffy trains and shiny buses. You will see an Olympic Park where sporting venues look reassuringly ready.The combination is singular an enterprise that is epic, pristine and in many places bewilderingly flawed.Start with the public accommodations near what is called the Coastal Cluster, home to five ice sports arenas and the stadium for the opening ceremony. To appreciate the hotels in this area, it is probably a good idea to think of them not as hotels but rather as a rare opportunity to experience life in a centrally planned, Soviet-style dystopia.Only then will you understand, perhaps even enjoy, the peculiar mix of grandiosity and bungling that define these buildings. Though called hotels, they look like austere, upscale apartments inspired by the Eastern Bloc Bauhaus meets the Super 8. The exteriors are monolithic and nearly identical, except for sections of paint, in shades of yellow, taupe and mauve.None of the buildings have names. Instead, they are identified by numbers, and as of last weekend, many of the numbers had not yet arrived. Or they had arrived and had yet to be affixed to the buildings. Instead, they were printed on a piece of paper and taped to a wall.Breakfast is available in Building 10. But not only is Building 10 hard to find, there is no evidence that it houses a restaurant. The place, which has no name, makes subterranean hipster bars in Brooklyn seem desperate for attention. You figure out that youre in the right place only by walking around Building 10 a few times and spotting, through a window, a woman in an apron.On the way in, you see a man on a ladder, fixing something. This is a common sight: Last-minute touch-ups have been a feature of Olympic Games for seemingly as long there have been screwdrivers. But the list in Sochi seems extraordinarily large. There are unopened boxes of heating and air-conditioning parts and other essential hardware all over the place. On Sunday, a man in a lobby was drilling into a ceiling, working above and just to the left of a blinking Christmas tree.A Christmas tree? Its Russia, said one of many young women who work here. She shrugged.As an all-purpose explanation for many of the head-scratchers here, Its Russia will do. It would have been a good answer when this reporter woke his first night, at 3 in the morning, to find a man with a Scandinavian accent in his bedroom. This gentleman wanted to know why someone was sleeping in the suite he had been assigned to and for which he had been given a key.Fair question, and just one of dozens raised by these accommodations. When will the elevator start elevating again? Why is the word Mystery on the bottom of the television? Is that the brand name? Or a sly invitation to wonder why it does not work? And finally, when will the front desk have a system so that it does not give out keys to occupied rooms?After breakfast, jump on a bus to the main media center. Like much of this city, the bus has the Sochi Olympics slogan emblazoned on its side: Hot. Cool. Yours. It sounds like a second-place pitch for the McDLT, the short-lived McDonalds sandwich that promised to keep the burger side warm and the lettuce side chilled. The drive takes you past the odd insta-metropolis that this area has become, a hodgepodge of old churches, sleek industrial office buildings and freshly paved highways. You also pass a lot of dirt fields, dotted with newly planted trees, kept upright with twine.ImageCredit...Julian Finney/Getty ImagesFrom the media center, a bus takes you to the Olympic Park, which is open for sneak peeks and team warm-ups. The venues here may be the most impressive part of the Games, and are surely the most important. If the events go off without a snag, none of the other delays and none of the last-minute jackhammering will be remembered.While some of the housing is reminiscent of a play that opened before it had enough time to rehearse, most of the venues are prepared: the Ice Cube Curling Center; Shayba Arena, which will host hockey; and Adler Arena, where speedskating will take place. The one minor exception is the Bolshoy Ice Dome, where this reporter somehow pulled the handles off two doors.Paging a carpenter. Section 106A, please.A couple of stray dogs are trotting around the Bolshoy. The animals have attracted a lot of attention, mostly because of reports that the city has plans to kill them ahead of the Games. But these animals may be more cunning than their would-be captors. One stray managed to penetrate the heavily secured perimeter of the media center, giving the impression that it had somehow disguised itself as a reporter.The other half of the Olympics, where snow-related events will take place, is a 40-minute bus ride into the mountains. The journey rolls through a series of lengthy tunnels that were carved out for the Games, and whatever the environmental impact of this construction, it is hard to argue with the results. The trip is smooth.What the Russians have built here in what is known as the mountain cluster is akin to a mid- to high-end ski resort, with shops, restaurants and hotels. Or that is what it will be when it is completed. A striking photograph of a model is displayed on a panel of the multiple-story Gorky Gorod Mall, and she is delivering her best come-hither look under the words opening soon. But for now, there is little hither to come to.The malls doors are open, though the individual stores are not, and someone in a bear costume is dancing on the first floor to some piped-in music. But the ambience is less celebratory than anxious. Shoppers are vastly outnumbered by men wheeling pallets up ramps, or peeling plastic off glass displays, or unboxing products. The Benetton clothing store looks as if it needs another week before it can open its doors.A technician prepared cables at the finish for alpine skiing events on Monday.Credit...Leonhard Foeger/ReutersSlide 1 of 6 A technician prepared cables at the finish for alpine skiing events on Monday.Credit...Leonhard Foeger/ReutersThe situation is even worse on a gondola ride up the mountain, to a village that everyone calls 960, the number of meters it sits above sea level. A few hotels are here, in a setting so remote and with a vista so gorgeous that it seems more apt for a James Bond villain. And maybe a Bond villain would have had an easier time with construction. Walk down the villages brick street, and you see luxury hotels with lobbies stuffed with inventory, frenetic employees and unnerved hospitality professionals.One hotel that is open, though has yet to accept guests, is a Swissotel. There were supposed to be two here, but one fell so far behind schedule that management decided to pull workers from the site and concentrate on finishing one on time. Guests will arrive Thursday, and the place should be fully booked by Feb. 15, said Oliver Kuhn, a Swissotel manager.What was the delay?Rain. A lot of rain this summer, he said with a wry grin that said rain was not the whole story. What is the rest of the story?Youll have to investigate, he said.Articles suggesting that the Games are not ready are a now familiar trope of pre-Olympic news coverage, but typically those articles cease in the weeks and days before the torch arrives. Sochi is cutting it close.Russias president, Vladimir V. Putin, had seven years to build these Olympics, and he staked a record $51 billion and his own reputation to realize his vision. There are life-after-the-Games plans for many of the buildings and sporting arenas, but as with every Olympics, the worlds attention will be trained here for mere weeks. With such a tiny window of life for Sochi on the international stage, one would expect that deadlines would have been met months ago.So far, the inconveniences have mostly affected the news media, perhaps the least sympathetic of the participants here. But the parents of athletes are on the way, and there is some trepidation among Olympic officials that outrage will flow if these people receive the no-hot-water treatment. Or if their hotel rooms are not ready.Kuhn, the Swissotel manager, seemed surprisingly unstressed under the circumstances. Sitting on a bright purple chair beside an elevator, he watched supplies arrive in his lobby.I just came from opening a hotel in Ulan Bator, he said of the remote Mongolian city, so Im used to it. | Sports |
Credit...Pool photo Jonathan BradyNov. 8, 2018LONDON Prince Charles has not been afraid to speak his mind on topics like historical preservation, climate change and alternative medicine. But as king, should that come to pass, it would be a very different matter, he acknowledged.I do realize that it is a separate exercise being sovereign, the prince said about his activism in a documentary, expected to air on the BBC Thursday night, on the occasion of his 70th birthday next week.The idea, somehow, that Im going to go on in exactly the same way, if I have to succeed, is complete nonsense because the two situations are completely different, he said, referring to the roles of heir and king.The interview offers a rare glimpse of what Charles might be like as king, and is perhaps an effort to assuage critics who have worried that he would diverge from British monarchs, who are bound by tradition to reign, not rule, over their subjects. His aides have suggested in the past that he would be more outspoken as king than his mother has been.His mother, Queen Elizabeth II, now 92, was crowned in 1953, and is the longest-serving British monarch, having surpassed Queen Victoria in 2015.Though many in the British public and around the world follow the lives of the royal family closely, any strong personal views that Queen Elizabeth might hold have largely remained private in her nearly seven decades as sovereign. Her opinions on matters of government and other issues have been concealed behind a polite smile and signature wave.As head of the Princes Trust, an organization that helps vulnerable young people find work and training, Charles has followed the example of other royals, whose public actions focus on charitable causes.But he has weighed in publicly on climate change (humans have abandoned our connection with nature); sustainable agriculture (he has lamented the effects of modern intensive farming systems); and modern architecture (he denounced a planned extension to the National Gallery as a monstrous carbuncle).That has brought criticism and accusations that he is using his influence as a member of the royal family to sway government policy. In 2006, he called on governments around the world to open up to alternative medicine just as an influential group of medical doctors in Britain urged the National Health Service to stop providing them.In 2015, after a long legal battle, the Guardian forced the government to release private letters that ministers and other officials had received from the prince. Even if that correspondence contained little proof of what the princes critics have described as meddling, his candid discussion of topical issues swerved from political custom.As king, Charles may have another hurdle to overcome: his popularity lags behind the queens as well that of his sons, William and Harry.Whereas the queen has been the most exemplary monarch and has kept the monarchy much in peoples esteem, I think Charles would undermine it, Tom Bower, the author of an unauthorized biography of Prince Charles, told Reuters. The book, The Rebel Prince, published in the spring, has cast the prince as a short-tempered and selfish person who, unlike his mother, enjoys the luxuries provided by his position.Still, the biggest blow to Charless popularity was his divorce from Princess Diana, the mother of his children, in 1996. She died in a car accident the following year. | World |
Credit...Bernat Armangue/Associated PressFeb. 18, 2014Park Seung-hi cried when the womens Olympic 3,000-meter short-track relay ended.This time she wept tears of joy after her South Korea team won the gold medal with a dramatic last-lap pass of China.Four years ago at Vancouver, the South Koreans finished first but were disqualified, leaving the skaters weeping as China was awarded the gold. China found itself off the medals podium at the Sochi Games on Tuesday, crossing the finish line second but being disqualified for impeding.I just feel for them, Park said through an interpreter. They will have another opportunity four years later.Shim Suk-hee passed Li Jianrou coming out of a turn on the last of 27 laps to clinch gold for her and her teammates, Cho Ha-ri, Kim Alang and Park, who are the worlds top-ranked womens relay team. South Korea has won five of seven Olympic titles in the short-track relay.ImageCredit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesFan Kexin, Li, Liu Qiuhong and Zhou Yang were disqualified after Zhou pushed her teammate during an exchange and then lingered on the track too long, forcing a South Korean skater to go around her.But according to what I saw, there were two to three meters between her and the Korean skater, the Chinese coach Li Yan said, and a skater is allowed to go on to the track when they exchange. But the judges decision is the final one. We are disappointed, but we respect it.The Chinese were in disarray going into the final lap. Fan was supposed to skate the last lap instead of Li, but Fan was not ready and Li had to exchange. After passing Li to take the lead, Shim easily outsprinted Li to the finish.Chinas disqualification allowed the Canadian team to take the silver medal. The Italian team earned the bronze.U.S. GRABS LEAD IN WOMENS BOBSLED Elana Meyers of Douglasville, Ga., and Lauryn Williams of Rochester, Pa., are the leaders in the womens bobsled after two runs, their time of 1 minute 54.89 seconds giving USA-1 a lead of 0.23 seconds over Canadas reigning gold medalists, Kaillie Humphries and Heather Moyse.Jamie Greubel of Newtown, Pa., and Aja Evans of Chicago are third, another 0.33 seconds back, nearly a half-second ahead of Elfje Willemsen and Hanna Emilie Marien of Belgium.This whole ride has been awesome, said Williams, who is bidding to win her second Olympic gold medal to go along with the one she won as a member of the 4x100-meter relay team at the London Games in 2012. I never would have thought Id be here six months ago and here I am. God couldnt have sent me anything better than this opportunity.If USA-1 wins, Williams will be the second Olympian ever with a Summer gold and a Winter gold in two different sports. NORWAY PLACES 1-2 IN NORDIC COMBINED Jorgen Graabak broke away from a five-man group with about 100 meters left in the cross-country race to give Norway a one-two finish in the Nordic combined large hill event. Graabak finished six-tenths of a second ahead of the silver medalist Magnus Moan. Fabian Riessle of Germany was 1.6 seconds behind.10,000-METER RECORD ESTABLISHED Jorrit Bergsma set an Olympic record in the 10,000-meter speedskating event with a time of 12 minutes 44.45 seconds. His countrymen Sven Kramer (second) and Bob de Jong (third) gave the Dutch their fourth podium sweep at the speedskating venue. The Dutch have won a total of 19 speedskating medals.SNOWBOARD CROSS GOLD FOR FRANCE Pierre Vaultier of France held off Nikolay Olyunin of Russia to win the gold medal in mens snowboard cross on a chopped-up course slowed by drizzle. Alex Deibold of the United States, a wax technician for the Americans at Vancouver four years ago, took the bronze. BRITISH CURLERS TO FACE SWEDEN Britain reached the semifinals in mens curling by beating Norway, 6-5, in a tiebreaker. The British will face Sweden on Wednesday, and Canada will take on China. | Sports |
VideoMr. Fillon, the center-right candidate for the French presidency, vowed to stay in the race even as he faces charges in a widening embezzlement investigation.CreditCredit...Christian Hartmann/ReutersMarch 1, 2017PARIS Frances embattled center-right presidential candidate, Franois Fillon, defiantly vowed on Wednesday to stay in the race, even as he announced that he would be formally charged in a widening embezzlement investigation.Mr. Fillons announcement, made at a news conference, added another element of uncertainty to an already unsettled campaign and increased the likelihood that Frances presidential race would be fought by two candidates from neither of the traditional mainstream parties.With formal charges looming that Mr. Fillon paid his wife and children hundreds of thousands of euros from the public payroll for little or no work, most analysts consider his chances of making it past the first round on April 23 in Frances two-round election to be diminished.That would leave the field open to the far-right candidate of the National Front, Marine Le Pen, whose rise in polls has sent jitters through financial markets and immigrant suburbs. Her likely contender is Emmanuel Macron, the former economy minister, who is running as the candidate of his own political movement.Mr. Macron, 39, is currently the favorite to defeat Ms. Le Pen, 48, in the second round on May 7. But Mr. Macron, a former Rothschild banker, is untested and inexperienced politically. His centrist program, some of it in line with the Socialist government he served, is viewed as unappealing to parts of the right-leaning electorate. The momentum, in most of the polls, is with her.A top National Front official, Florian Philippot, used a television interview after Mr. Fillons appearance largely to attack Mr. Macron a clear indication that Ms. Le Pen already considers him her principal opponent.Even as Mr. Fillon, 62, is increasingly being written off, he has doubled down on his defense, yielding no ground to his critics.Its Fillons final bet, said Laurent Bouvet, a political scientist at the University of Versailles St.-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Hes playing all or nothing. The right, the heart of the right, the one that elected him and doesnt want Le Pen to sweep the stakes, his bet is they wont abandon him, in spite of all his legal problems.In another country, the shadow hanging over Mr. Fillon would most likely end a campaign for the highest office. But in France, legal problems, even serious ones, rarely end political careers, even though the electorate appears to be showing in polls, at least less tolerance than previously for accommodating financial misdeeds in high places.Even if he were to step aside, his center-right Republican Party has few good options. Mr. Fillons two main challengers in the party primary both campaigned under the shadow of past and current investigations.The runner-up in the primary, Alain Jupp, was convicted in a phony jobs scheme undertaken while he worked at City Hall several decades ago. Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president, who finished third, is the subject of multiple investigations, and in February, he was ordered to stand trial on charges of illegally financing his failed 2012 presidential campaign.But Mr. Fillons problems, immediate and future, are different. He campaigned as the candidate of probity. That image has been shattered. And the sums reported to have been pocketed by his wife have shocked the French.Ms. Le Pen is not untainted by corruption accusations. But her legal difficulties, for now, have hardly dented her standing in the polls partly because she has never cultivated an image of virtue, and partly because her principal adversary is the European Parliament in Strasbourg, in which she sits and which is widely unpopular, especially among her supporters.Her legal troubles are also more complex than Mr. Fillons, and she is not suspected of having personally benefited from any of the alleged financial wrongdoing.Last week, a top Le Pen aide was charged in an alleged phony jobs scheme. The aide was paid out of Parliament money but was thought to have spent her time working for the National Front.Another close associate of Ms. Le Pens, Frdric Chatillon, has been charged with violating campaign finance laws. Mr. Chatillons ties to extremist groups on the far right have been closely documented in the French news media as well.Ms. Le Pen, invoking her parliamentary immunity, has refused a summons from the police who want to question her in the alleged phony jobs scheme, eliciting harsh criticism from government officials who accuse her of holding herself above the law. Like Mr. Fillon, she could still be formally charged.She and Mr. Fillon have struck remarkably similar defenses as the accusations have piled up around them. Both blamed the news media as well as the judicial system and civil servants for their problems.On Sunday, in a fiery speech in the western city of Nantes, Ms. Le Pen lashed out at judges, the legal system, civil servants and the news media, in a manner very similar to Mr. Fillons on Wednesday and for that matter, President Trumps in the United States.Ms. Le Pen said all of them were working in concert to undermine her. The rule of law is the opposite of government by judges, Ms. Le Pen told her cheering supporters.Judges exist to apply the law, she said, not to subvert the will of the people.On Wednesday, Mr. Fillon struck a defiant tone in front of the reporters at his campaign headquarters in Paris, proclaiming his innocence and denouncing what he said was an unfair judicial and news media campaign intended to destroy his candidacy.I didnt embezzle any money, Mr. Fillon told reporters. I employed like almost a third of the members of Parliament family members because I knew I could count on their loyalty and competence. They helped me, and I will prove it.From the beginning, he continued, I havent been treated as an ordinary suspect.And he insisted: The rule of law has been systematically violated. The press has been an echo chamber for the prejudices of the prosecutors.Mr. Fillon said angrily that the presidential election was being assassinated, and he announced his determination to stay in it, because only the voters can decide who will be president.The judicial screws have been steadily tightening on Mr. Fillon since newspaper reports in January especially those in the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchan said that for years he and his deputy had paid his wife hundreds of thousands of euros in state funds for a possible do-nothing job, and that his children had also benefited from the largess of Mr. Fillon, a former prime minister.In addition, Mr. Fillon is being scrutinized on suspicion of trafficking a high civilian honor, while prime minister, in exchange for money to his wife from a wealthy publisher friend.On Wednesday, in front of dozens of aides and members of his center-right party, Mr. Fillon told reporters he would answer a March 15 summons by the magistrates in the case, after which he is expected to be charged formally. The investigation will continue and Mr. Fillon could then stand trial, or the magistrates could drop the charges.Circumstances look increasingly unfavorable for him. In an article published on Wednesday before Mr. Fillons news conference, the French newspaper Le Monde described him as a candidate in a bunker who was hunched up and in his shell. It noted that he no longer took the train for campaign trips out of fear of being called out by protesters.He is often met by protesters banging pots, or casseroles in French a slang term for corruption affairs. Sometimes the placards read, Fake jobs for everybody. | World |
DealBook|The Mutual Fund Equivalent of Bankruptcyhttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/business/dealbook/the-mutual-fund-equivalent-of-bankruptcy.htmlIn DebtDec. 16, 2015Credit...Fred R.Conrad/The New York TimesThe recent decision by the managers of a fund invested mainly in high-yield, or junk, bonds to put their fund into the mutual fund equivalent of bankruptcy reminds us that mutual funds are like banks in an important way. Namely, both banks and mutual funds invest in long-term assets, yet promise short-term liquidity.That basic mismatch makes runs on mutual funds a real possibility, particularly if the funds assets are not particularly liquid.Last week, Third Avenue Management said it was halting redemptions from its Focused Credit Fund and would instead liquidate the fund through a trust mechanism. That is, the fund has closed its doors and will pay out when it can. No more daily liquidity for investors. It is as if the fund is in bankruptcy, without the transparency associated with the normal bankruptcy process.The lesson for investors in other junk bond funds is to get out before redemptions are stopped by such a block at their fund. If everyone tries to beat their neighbor out of these types of funds, it will look very much like an old-school bank run.Which is why it might not have been such a crazy idea to think about whether certain mutual funds might be systemically important.It appears that the regulators have backed off consideration of this issue which seems to have been more focused on the managers than the funds, in any event. But it will only take a couple of more funds going into this rough equivalent of bankruptcy for investor panic to become fairly palpable.Regulators are focused on the failure of a handful of really big financial institutions, because thats the crisis that we just experienced. But what about the failure of an entire class of financial institutions, like mutual funds? Each fund is much smaller than Lehman Brothers or the American International Group, but grouped together, could they have similar effects?The key question is probably whether this spreads beyond junk bond funds. Regulators can avoid some of the political pressure here by making a kind of assumption of the risk argument: Investors who buy funds that invest in high-risk, low-quality debtor firms are simply incurring a risk they were paid to take, even if it is coming in a form slightly different than expected.But if the broader universe of bond funds were to come under pressure, regulators would have to be worried about the effects on the economy. After all, the country is particularly reliant on bond markets to fund corporate America. | Business |
Credit...Andreas Rentz/Getty ImagesDec. 8, 2015Since it started in 2008, the streaming service Spotify has clung fiercely to its so-called freemium model, arguing that the best way to get people to buy a subscription for unlimited music online is to make the same catalog of songs also available free to listeners, but with ads.That strategy has helped Spotify grow into the biggest service of its kind, with what the company says is more than 20 million paying users and another 55 million who use its free version. But in recent negotiations with the band Coldplay, the company showed a new openness to making exceptions to that model, according to people briefed on the talks.During negotiations, Spotify was willing to restrict access for the bands new album, A Head Full of Dreams, to the services paid version and keep it off its free tier for a limited time. That strategy, sometimes called windowing, is something that record labels have long been lobbying for, but Spotify has resisted, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the talks publicly.Ultimately, Coldplay and its record label, Warner Music, decided not to split the albums availability on Spotify. When A Head Full of Dreams comes to Spotify on Friday a week after it was released on iTunes, Apple Music, Tidal and elsewhere it will be available to free users as well as its subscribers, who pay up to $10 a month to eliminate ads and get other perks like full access on mobile devices.We are 100 percent committed to our model because we believe that a free, ad-supported tier combined with a more robust premium tier is the best way to deliver music to fans, create value for artists and songwriters and grow the industry, Jonathan Prince, a spokesman for Spotify, said in a statement.Warner and representatives for Coldplay declined to comment.A band or record company pushing Spotify to make an exception to its policy is nothing new. Streams on Spotifys paid version pay much higher royalties than on its free version, and music executives often argue that the absence of music on free sites will help drive sales.But lately Spotify has been under greater pressure to accommodate major acts. Last year Taylor Swift pulled her entire catalog from the service over its policy on free music, and last month Adele decided to withhold her new album, 25, from all streaming outlets moves that helped those artists break sales records but left Spotify without the music that fans want the most.They were staring down the barrel of having the third big record in a row not on Spotify, said one major-label music executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect industry relationships.What Spotifys dealings with Coldplay mean for the service and for other acts and record companies is unclear. People briefed on the companys talks with record labels said that Spotify had no immediate plans for such changes with upcoming releases.Yet the companys talks with Coldplay, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, may be a sign of greater flexibility. Other big acts will probably push for changes with Spotify, but having too many gaps in its free version could make the service less attractive to new customers, said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at BTIG Research.Being flexible for a couple of artists sounds like a rational strategy, Mr. Greenfield said. The question is going to be, how do you draw the line where the free service doesnt become a poor user experience.But aside from a handful of major acts like Adele and Ms. Swift, who have defied industry trends by selling huge numbers of CDs and downloads, it is also unclear how many artists would want to remove themselves from Spotifys free version, which for many acts has become an immensely valuable form of promotion.Listeners who discover an acts music on Spotifys free tier may go on to buy a concert ticket, a CD or something else or, as Spotify argues, subscribe to its paid version. | Business |
Theres more in that cloud of bugs than meets the eye.VideoAccording to scientists who study swarms, midges as a group can behave like liquids or gases, or even exhibit the characteristics of criticality. Video by Gal Productions, via Getty ImagesPublished Oct. 1, 2021Updated Oct. 3, 2021On early autumn afternoons across the temperate world, the midges are now gathering to swarm: clouds of tiny flies, wings lit by the sun like so many sparks, swirling in patterns too quick and complicated for the eye to follow but leaving a mental afterimage of order. Not a perfect order, but something more than chaos.That impression of order is accurate, according to scientists who study such swarms: In the movements of midges, one can find the mathematical signatures of properties beyond what one would expect from a cloud of bugs. As a group, they behave like liquids or gases, and even exhibit the characteristics of criticality, that uncanny stage of matter at which radical transformation from one state to another occurs in a blink.Collective correlation can emancipate the system from its microscopic details, said Dr. Andrea Cavagna, a physicist at the Institute for Complex Systems in Rome. A swarm is much more than its midges.Before Dr. Cavagna and his partner, Dr. Irene Giardina, a theoretical physicist at La Sapienza University in Rome, turned their attention to midges, they studied starling flocks. Using high-speed video cameras to measure the trajectory of every bird in a murmuration, as starling flocks are called, the researchers discovered in 2009 that when one starling changes direction or speed, so do the birds nearest them, and in turn the birds nearest those. Each starling in a murmuration is thus linked, no matter how far apart.In the parlance of statistical mechanics, this is known as a scale-free correlation. It is a property of criticality what liquid undergoes at the point that it becomes a gas, or how particles in a lump of hot iron, when cooled to a specific temperature, change orientation in unison and create a magnet.This year, Dr. Cavagna and Dr. Giardinas work on starlings earned them the prestigious Max Delbrck Prize in Biological Physics. And during the early years of their research, while taking their young children to Romes parks, they marveled at the swarms of midges flitting above the grass and started wondering about them, too.Midge swarms did not appear to be as tight-knit as murmurations, yet neither did the insects seem to move completely independent of each other. We had the idea that the same kind of model could also be used to describe midge swarms, Dr. Giardina said.The researchers trained their cameras on the swarms no small feat, given the swarms evanescence and the intrusive curiosity of bystanders and discovered that, like starlings in a flock, midges in a swarm are collectively correlated.VideoA swarm of non-biting midges (Cladotanytarsus atridorsum, Diptera: Chironomidae) in the Roman park of Villa Ada. Researchers record swarming events at dusk, when the grazing sun makes all insects shine brightly. The enhanced contrast is crucial to obtain a sharp detection of these very small bugs. Images are shot at 170 frames-per-second, providing a very accurate determination of the dynamic trajectories.CreditCredit...COBBS Lab, Institute for Complex Systems, National Research Council, RomeThey are not all going in the same direction in near-perfect synchrony, nor is the degree of correlation as strong as in starlings. There can also be subgroups within a swarm that move in different directions, with individuals switching from one subgroup to another hence the appearance of disorder. Nevertheless, the midges are all entangled.The researchers also found that as swarms increase in size, they become denser and the midges flights become more closely correlated. This is likely a function of how midges respond to the sound of their neighbors buzzing wings, and it allows them to maintain an optimal degree of correlation.Its like the system self-organizes in such a way as to have the maximum possible response, Dr. Giardina said. Dr. Cavagna described it as a way to surf the maximum of susceptibility, enabling sudden, coordinated movements.The closest models in physical systems are magnets, Dr. Cavagna said; that is, the sudden collective shift in particle orientation just before magnetization. But he emphasized that swarming midges are not at that critical point, only near it.This may be a physical limitation, he noted. True criticality only occurs in systems with many more units than are found in a swarm. A one-gram iron magnet contains roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 iron atoms, whereas a decently sized midge swarm contains only several hundred midges.It is also possible that reaching criticality would be catastrophic for them, rendering the swarm hypersensitive to every perturbation, puff of air or whatever the midge equivalent of a sneeze is. The best trade-off is to be close to critical, said Dr. Miguel Muoz, a physicist at the University of Granada in Spain, who has followed the research closely. You take advantage of the responsiveness but are not too close, because if youre too close, you respond to anything.The potential benefits of swarming are evident in murmurations, whose synchronized twists and turns may help starlings to evade predators.Midge swarms, which consist almost entirely of males, also serve a reproductive function, with females entering and taking mates in midair. Perhaps operating at near criticality is conducive to midge romance? That is unknown. It is also possible that swarm properties are not adaptive but simply a side effect of the mathematics, Dr. Cavagna said.Dr. Muoz considers Dr. Cavagna and Dr. Giardinas findings convincing, but some scientists take issue. In his own studies of captive midges, Dr. Nicholas Ouellette, a physicist at Stanford University, and his colleagues found that correlations were not quick to arise. When they did arise, the correlations did not fit the framework of criticality.VideoThe video sequences are recorded from three cameras located at different positions around the swarm, allowing for a full three-dimensional stereo reconstruction of the individual trajectories of all midges in the group. Researchers use this kind of 3D data to measure how strongly correlated are the movements of different insects within the swarm and to determine the spatial span of this correlation.CreditCredit...COBBS Lab, Institute for Complex Systems, National Research Council, RomeThe swarms were still intriguing, though. In a 2017 paper in Physical Review Letters, Dr. Ouellette and his co-authors described them as containing midges whose flight patterns created a condensed core surrounded by a layer of vapor.And when the team pulled apart the visual landmarks over which a swarm formed, the swarm split in two. (In nature, the landmarks might be logs or leaves; in the lab, they were pieces of paper.) In doing so, the swarms behaved not like a fluid but like a solid, appearing to be under increasing tension before eventually snapping, said Dr. Andrew Reynolds, a theoretical biologist at Rothamstead Research in Britain.Different stimuli can induce different behaviors, Dr. Reynolds said. He was not involved in the Stanford experiment but has collaborated on others with Dr. Ouellette, including one in which a laboratory swarm wobbled and smushed like Jell-O. Earlier this year, Dr. Ouellette and his collaborators described how swarms seem to be governed by the laws of thermodynamics.Such findings suggest that a swarm can be understood as a singular entity rather than as a collection of individual insects, the way a quartz crystal is perceived as a discrete object rather than as trillions of atoms. Youre used to thinking of it as one thing, because you cant see what its made of, Dr. Ouellette said. These swarms have well-defined material properties that are not properties of the individuals, but of the group.As for disagreements over correlation and criticality, those will ultimately be settled with more research. It is also possible that both groups are right: Perhaps midge swarms may exist, depending on size and circumstance, in all the forms that researchers have described.Wherever that scientific dust settles, one can appreciate how marvelous swarms are and the tantalizing glimpse they provide of principles underlying seemingly disparate phenomena. Dr. Muozs interest in the research was sparked by findings of criticality in neural networks and cellular function; there may be similarities between the dynamics of swarms and the brain turning cellular excitation into an image, or a genome expressing the instructions in its DNA.Criticality could be a unifying principle, he said, one that generates exquisite coordination and complexity from simple components, and that has been harnessed many times by evolution. And even if swarms are not near-critical, the connections are still profound.Dr. Reynolds noted that researchers had long compared swarms to self-gravitating systems, likening the forces that help them maintain cohesion on a windy day to the forces that hold planets together. In a recent paper, he compared swarms to the gathering of dust, gas and plasma in interstellar clouds.I now see great beauty and subtlety whenever I see a midge swarm, Dr. Reynolds said. They stop me in my tracks. | science |
Dec. 17, 2015After months of taking a beating in the markets, renewable energy companies suddenly seemed to be on firmer footing this week, as lawmakers proposed extending important tax credits in exchange for lifting the decades-old ban on exporting American crude oil.But even as renewable energy stocks rallied SolarCitys shares surged more than 40 percent and advocates and executives cheered, some sectors of the industry appeared to benefit more than others.The solar and wind industries got much of what they wanted, energy specialists said, while some technologies, like fuel cell storage and geothermal, were largely left off the table. Biofuels were somewhere in the middle.For the solar industry, the proposed extension, up for action in Congress this week, is better than many executives and analysts had expected. For example, the investment tax credit for solar projects, which was to fall to 10 percent at the end of 2016, is to stay at 30 percent until 2019, then gradually decline to 10 percent by 2022. And, in another gain, projects will be required only to begin construction, rather than operation, as is the case now, to qualify for the credit.The effect, specialists say, will be to make large, commercial-scale projects more viable, like the roughly two gigawatts worth scheduled to come online in Texas for 2017.For example, Tony Clifford, chief executive of Standard Solar, a developer and builder based in Rockville, Md., said that the company had passed up or abandoned close to $100 million worth of business, including a large wastewater treatment plant in the Midwest, because it did not think it could get them up and running by the end of 2016. Now he is hopeful that if the legislation passes as proposed, some of that business could return.In addition, said Shayle Kann, who leads GTM Research, more states, including Ohio, Illinois and Florida, could become strong residential markets for solar by the end of the decade.The market wasnt going to disappear, without an extension of the 30 percent solar investment tax credit, he said. What you werent going to have is the bunch of new states pick up that are going to become economically viable over the next few years. The big impact for distributed solar is just more geographic diversity.Wind industry executives and proponents were similarly bullish about how the extension would affect them. The production tax credit, which expired at the end of 2014, is to be extended retroactively through 2016 and then decline in value each year until it is phased out in 2020. The five-year step-down offers one of the longest periods of certainty in more than a decade.In the near term, developers may proceed with projects that had stalled in the face of questions about meeting federal construction requirements, said Michael Garland, chief executive of Pattern Energy. But longer term, the new time horizon would help the industry to continue bringing costs closer to those of conventional fuels, even cheap natural gas.The manufacturers know the goal they have to get to, Mr. Garland said, and we can push them a bit to get there.Nonetheless, he said, the industry would still not end up on a level playing field with conventional fuels, which have access to tax advantages that wind does not, or solar, which would largely retain a permanent 10 percent investment tax credit.But Lee Peterson, a senior tax manager in the Renewable Energy Industry Practice at CohnReznick, an accounting, tax and advisory firm, said the differences among the industries made sense, given that wind developments benefit from much larger economies of scale and have had access to subsidies and development financing longer than solar.Even a massive solar system is still dramatically smaller than a wind project its sort of like comparing the difference between a bus and a fleet of taxi cabs, he said. So it makes sense that they would have different treatments.The inclusion of biofuel incentives, while welcome, seemed unlikely to give those fuels as big a boost as the incentives aimed at conventional oil, which will stay in place longer, said Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association. A tax credit for producers of cellulosic biofuels applies only to gallons produced and sold, so while it will help companies that have plants up and running, it would have a limited ability to spur the development of more.A company like DuPont that is just now opening up a commercial-size facility in Nevada, Iowa, is given a real opportunity to sell that product competitively, he said. But youve got to be up and running and producing before youre going to see any benefit. | Business |
Credit...Tom Brenner/The New York TimesJune 5, 2018WASHINGTON Senator Mitch McConnell announced Tuesday that he is canceling most of the Senates monthlong August recess, a move that could keep vulnerable Democrats tethered to Washington as the midterm elections approach.Mr. McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, presented the schedule change as an opportunity for lawmakers to pass spending legislation and to approve more of President Trumps nominees.But with 10 incumbent Democratic senators up for re-election in states won by Mr. Trump in the 2016 presidential election, the campaign implications were hard to overlook. If Mr. McConnell goes through with a full August schedule, vulnerable Democratic senators would most likely face the prospects of skipping some votes in Washington to campaign at home and risk being accused of shirking official duties.Only one Republican incumbent, Senator Dean Heller of Nevada, faces a similar dilemma. He is the lone Republican running for re-election in a state won by Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trumps Democratic rival in 2016, and he, too, might be prevented from campaigning.I think we have enough work to do for the American people that we should be here during these weeks, Mr. McConnell said, blaming Democrats as obstructionist. Some Republican senators had agitated that the leader make just such a move, and they cheered the decision on Tuesday.Thank God for Leader McConnells decision to cancel August recess so that the senate can finally get to work, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the Judiciary Committee chairman, wrote on Twitter.Instead of having a four-week break in August, the Senate will now have a weeklong recess early that month and then will return for the remaining three weeks. The House, where every seat will be on the ballot in November, is scheduled to have a five-week recess beginning in late July, and a Republican leadership aide in that chamber said no scheduling changes were currently planned.Mr. McConnell and his fellow Republican leaders in the Senate do not appear to have any particularly grand plans for what to do in August. He said the Senate would use the time to continue to approve nominees, which it has been doing all year, and to pass spending bills, an annual task for lawmakers.And it is not clear how much damage three weeks in Washington would do to Democratic senators, who would still have long weekends to campaign. The dog days of August are typically not when voters are tuned in to midterm elections.Lawmakers face a Sept. 30 deadline to pass spending legislation to avoid a government shutdown on Oct. 1, when the 2019 fiscal year begins. This year, it took lawmakers until March to pass a broad spending bill for the 2018 fiscal year, which was already almost halfway over. At the time, Mr. Trump expressed dissatisfaction and said he would never again sign a similar measure. For the 2019 fiscal year, lawmakers are trying to pass spending legislation in pieces, and in a more timely fashion.On Tuesday, Democrats, trying to make the most of a scheduling decision that leaves them at a disadvantage, emerged from their weekly policy luncheon and tried to pressure their Republican colleagues to dedicate the reclaimed time in August to addressing rising health care and prescription drug costs.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters that working through August gave the Senate a perfect opportunity to expand Medicare access, increase tax credits for families purchasing health insurance and create a national reinsurance program aimed at lowering insurance premiums. He said he expected Mr. Trump to skip his August vacation, as well, and to remain in Washington.Senators most affected by the schedule change simply shrugged at least publicly.Frankly, the best thing I can do for the people of Wisconsin is fight to lower health care costs, fight to lower prescription drug costs and we would look forward to the opportunity to deliver results on health care policy during the August recess, said Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, when asked if the schedule change would hurt her campaign.Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, another vulnerable Democrat, said: We were sent here to vote, we were sent here to do our job. Im perfectly fine with it.Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a moderate Democrat who is running for re-election in a state in which Mr. Trump won roughly two-thirds of the vote, said he would like to see Senate leaders go further.We ought to start working on Mondays and Fridays, too, he said. I always thought you had a workweek Monday to Friday. I never did get a four-week vacation, so I never did understand that here. | Politics |
VideotranscripttranscriptTrumps Video Pitch to Kim: Corny, Clichd and StrategicDuring a meeting in Singapore, Donald Trump presented Kim Jong-un with a short video depicting the prosperity that could come with peace. James Poniewozik, The Timess chief television critic, tells us the videos cartoonish, idealized aesthetic was no accident.Seven billion people inhabit planet Earth. When I saw this video, I was reminded of a phrase that Milan Kundera came up with in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is totalitarian kitsch. This sort of cartoony, idealized aesthetic using very broad, what you might call corny, images. And you see this in the aesthetics of a lot of authoritarian regimes. Vladimir Putin being photographed shirtless, its a corny, ridiculous image. And yet these corny, ridiculous images are often powerful in strongman regimes. Looking at it objectively, as a piece of film and a video being used in diplomacy, its kind of hilarious. There are so many cornball, clich images. to be the future But in political kitsch, often corniness and clich is the point. Clichs are images that everybody has seen before. Theyre images that everybody recognize and therefore, theyre images that you can count on to have broad mass appeal, even if its not sophisticated appeal. Their story is well known, but what will be their sequel? One thing this video tells us is the kind of arguments that the Trump administration is making to the North Korean government: Make this deal and you will look good. Youll be the protagonist of the world. You will live like a lottery winner. What I saw, when I look at the trailer, was the Trump administration trying to speak to Kim Jong-un the way the administration speaks to Donald Trump. Be part of that world. Donald Trump is, shall we say, a visual learner. He prefers to get his briefing material in the form of pictures, videos, images, graphics. Preferably the material references his name as much as possible in order to keep his interest. One thing thats a constant in Donald Trumps career is his use of big, broad cartoony symbols to get across big, broad cartoony messages. Bradford, youre fired. How do you make yourself a celebrity as a businessman? How do you create the idea that youre the most successful businessman in the world, whether you are or not? Well, you build a giant skyscraper with your name on it in three-foot-tall, brass golden letters. And thats what made Donald Trump so fitting for reality TV. Reality TV, likewise, communicates in big broad symbols: desert islands, roses. Theres this theme with him of sort of seeing himself as the protagonist of a show that he and other people are watching. It comes down to a choice. So this video is reaching out a hand to Kim Jong-un and saying, Work with me. You can be my co-star in this show that everybody else is watching. Will this leader choose to advance his country and be part of a new world? What you have in this video are a lot of garish symbols of importance. This montage at the beginning, for example, where a big image of the North Korean flag is equated with the Colosseum and the pyramids. Its a way of communicating that, Work with us, and you will be regarded as one of the greats of history. or more isolation This seems like the kind of kitschy picture that in a weird way is fitting for a regime like Kims. Its surreal but its no more surreal than the host of The Apprentice negotiating a nuclear deal with the head of North Korea. This is the world we live in now. One moment. One choice.During a meeting in Singapore, Donald Trump presented Kim Jong-un with a short video depicting the prosperity that could come with peace. James Poniewozik, The Timess chief television critic, tells us the videos cartoonish, idealized aesthetic was no accident.CreditCredit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesJune 12, 2018WASHINGTON President Trump once told advisers to think of every day of his tenure as another episode in a television series. But with his landmark meeting with North Koreas leader, Kim Jong-un, he seems to be eyeing a move up to the big screen.At least that was the impression from a faux movie trailer he had specially made for the occasion, depicting his first-of-its-kind encounter with Mr. Kim as a suspenseful, pulse-pounding thriller with nothing less than the future of the world on the line.Featuring fast-flashing visuals, dramatic music and a baritone narrator, the four-minute video that debuted in Singapore during the summit meeting presented the two heroes of the tale Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim, of course confronting choices that would alter the course of history. Mr. Trump showed Mr. Kim the video on an iPad and later played it for reporters on a pair of jumbo screens.Destiny Pictures presents a story of opportunity, the narrator intones in the trailer. A new story. A new beginning. One of peace. Two men, two leaders, one destiny.The video was no more specific than the joint statement the leaders signed, but the White House said it was meant to motivate Mr. Kim to break out of the countrys long isolation and rejoin the world by giving up his nuclear weapons.The choice is presented in images of a dystopian country with little electricity, missiles launching and warplanes taking off versus a futuristic version of North Korea with cranes building skyscrapers, a dark country suddenly lit up at night and missiles flying back into their silos.It comes down to a choice, on this day, in this time, at this moment, the trailer says. The world will be watching, listening, anticipating, hoping. Will this leader choose to advance his country and be part of a new world? Be the hero of his people? Will he shake the hand of peace and enjoy prosperity like he has never seen? A great life or more isolation? Which path will be chosen?The video then closes: Featuring President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un, in a meeting to remake history. To shine in the sun. One moment. One choice. What if? The future remains to be written.Mr. Trump said Mr. Kim loved it when it was shown to him. That was a version of what could happen, what could take place, the president told reporters. As an example, they have great beaches. You see that whenever theyre exploding their cannons into the ocean, right? I said, Boy, look at the view. Wouldnt that make a great condo behind?And I explained, I said, You know, instead of doing that, you could have the best hotels in the world right there. Think of it from a real estate perspective.Mark McKinnon, a seasoned political ad maker who ran media for President George W. Bushs campaigns, said the video was obviously quite shlocky for a broader audience, but could be effective in influencing its intended target.At bottom, its very good storytelling something obviously Trump understands, Mr. McKinnon said. Citing the former governor of Texas ousted by Mr. Bush, he added: Ann Richards used to say, Dumb it down so my mama can understand it. Or you know, so a foreign dictator can. Over all, a pretty creative and clever move.But veteran diplomats and foreign policy scholars were warier. I was speechless when I first saw it, said Alexander R. Vershbow, who served as ambassador to South Korea under Mr. Bush. Pure Trump with Hollywood production values, showing what Kim Jong-un and North Korea would be like if they make the fateful choice to trade in their nukes for economic prosperity.Sung-Yoon Lee, a Korean studies professor at Tufts Universitys Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, was even less impressed, calling it eerily reminiscent of second-rate South Korean government promotional videos. In fact, although the White House said it was made by the National Security Council, he said he instinctively suspected the South Koreans might have created it and gave it to Mr. Trump.Will it have any impact? he asked. Most likely, this patronizing act will give Kim a good laugh. It may also irritate and, paradoxically, reassure him at the same time in the knowledge that his two adversaries are utterly clueless.Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said he thought it would fall flat. I was gobsmacked by it, he said. It seems unlikely that a man who ruthlessly ordered the murder of his half brother with a nerve agent is likely to be beguiled by a film trailer and decide to abandon the nuclear-armed missiles that are a centerpiece of his propaganda.One person who found it more perplexing than anything else was Mark Castaldo, the founder of the actual Destiny Pictures, a small independent film and television production company in Los Angeles. Starting around 5:30 a.m. his time on Tuesday, Mr. Castaldo found himself bombarded with telephone calls and emails from reporters and friends asking him about the video they assumed he had made.We had nothing to do with that video at all, he said. I dont know them at all.Evidently whatever National Security Council staff members put together the video made up a Destiny Pictures as a metaphor, perhaps not realizing there was a real one.Mr. Castaldo, who grew up in Queens just as Mr. Trump did and spent 10 years as a casino croupier in Atlantic City and Las Vegas (I never worked at a Trump casino), has worked in Hollywood for the past 15 years. His companys website lists movies like Psych: 9, The Perfect Nanny and The Rival. He is currently working on Pushing Life, an inspired-by-a-true-story film about a single father who runs 75 marathons in 75 consecutive days after losing his wife to breast cancer.None of his films have starred a reclusive, repressive dictator from North Korea, but by afternoon, Mr. Castaldo sounded more amused than annoyed by all of the attention. Its not something I would do anyway, he said. Its not my kind of thing. I wouldnt have gotten involved in something like that. Im an independent. Im not that political. | Politics |
The company capped a bad week with a flawed test flight of a capsule built for NASA to carry astronauts to the space station.VideotranscripttranscriptBoeings Starliner Launched in Test FlightBoeings Starliner capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday, but failed to reach its correct orbit.Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one and liftoff. The rise of Starliner, and a new era in human spaceflight. Now 10 seconds into flight. People speak on the pitch over program. Body rate responses look good. Now 15 seconds in. Now 26 seconds into flight. RD-180 now throttling down to partial thrust as expected, engine response looks good. Vehicles now passing through maximum dynamic pressure.Boeings Starliner capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday, but failed to reach its correct orbit.CreditCredit...Joel Kowsky/NASAPublished Dec. 20, 2019Updated March 6, 2020As an Atlas 5 rocket arced upward into the pre-dawn sky from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Friday morning, NASAs plans to finally break free of its reliance on Russian rockets for taking astronauts to orbit seemed to be on track.On top of the rocket was Starliner, a capsule built by Boeing, part of a NASA strategy to delegate to private companies to handle the astronaut transportation.Half an hour later, something went wrong, signaling that NASA would again face a setback to its goal of renewing human spaceflight to orbit from the United States. It was also bad news for Boeing at the end of a week when the company announced it would temporarily halt production of the 737 Max, the companys most popular passenger jet.The Starliner test flight, which was intended to test the automated systems and did not carry any astronauts, ended up in the wrong orbit. The mission will now be cut short, without docking at the International Space Station and likely delaying plans that are already a couple of years behind schedule.Boeing is struggling to overcome the worst crisis in its history, after 346 people were killed in a pair of crashes of the now grounded 737 Max, built by its commercial plane division, The production freeze of the jet could reverberate through the American economy. On Friday, United Airlines said it would extend the grounding of its 737 Max jets until early June, just days after Southwest issued a similar extension until mid-April.The first test of Starliner, built by Boeings space and defense division, was postponed multiple times this year. The Atlas 5 performed as designed, placing the capsule on an elliptical trajectory. The capsule itself was to make a final maneuver that would shift the orbit from elliptical to circular and allow it to meet up with the International Space Station on Saturday.But somehow, the spacecrafts clock was set to the wrong time, and a flawed thruster burn pushed the capsule into the wrong orbit.We dont understand the root cause, said Jim Chilton, senior vice president of the space and launch division of defense, space and security segment of Boeing.Attempts to send a command to fix the problem apparently did not reach the spacecraft because it was in between satellite communication links, and it used too much propellant to continue to the space station.Thats safe to take off the table at this point, Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference after the launch. Its not worth doing given the amount of fuel we burned.He also said that if there had been astronauts aboard, they would not have been in danger and indeed may have been able to take over and perform the thruster burn correctly.Current plans are for the capsule to return to Earth on Sunday, landing at White Sands in New Mexico.This mission did not have anyone aboard, although it did carry a spacesuit-wearing figure mannequin, nicknamed Rosie, after Rosie the Riveter depicted in posters during World War II, in one of the seats. The mannequin was fitted with sensors that were to measure the forces that future astronauts will feel as they ascend to space.Even though Starliner will not dock with the space station, the successful Atlas 5 launch and a successful landing would achieve many of the goals of the mission.Today a lot of things went right, Mr. Bridenstine said. This is in fact why we test.Later, he added it was too early to know whether it would be possible for astronauts to be aboard for the next Boeing mission as currently planned. Im not saying yes, and Im not saying no, he said.Nonetheless, the problems for Starliner raise the stakes for SpaceXs next launch of its Crew Dragon capsule, currently scheduled for Jan. 11. That flight without crew aboard a test of the abort system, in which the rocket will be intentionally destroyed during launch. If that succeeds, SpaceX could still launch astronauts in the first half of 2020.Boeing was also aiming for its first crewed flight in the first half of next year using a second Starliner. The Starliner currently in orbit is to be reused for the second crewed flight later in 2020.Additional delays to Boeings schedule increase the possibility that NASA will have to reduce the number of astronauts living in its section of the space station. Even before Friday, the space agency was already talking to Russia about purchasing one or two additional seats on Soyuz rockets, the only means for getting to the space station for more than eight years since the retirement of NASAs space shuttles in 2011.In a shift from the space shuttles and NASAs earlier human spaceflight programs, the Obama administration decided that the agency should hire commercial companies to take astronauts to and from the space station instead of building and operating its own spacecraft. The space agency had already taken this approach for launches of satellites and robotic missions, as well as for taking cargo to the space station.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX Boeing for up to $4.3 billion for Starliner, SpaceX for up to $2.5 billion for Crew Dragon. The value of the contracts depends on how many missions are flown.The hope was that the flights carrying astronauts would begin by the end of 2017. Both companies encountered technical hurdles, including problems with parachutes that the capsules deploy when they return to Earth.SpaceX performed its crewless flight test of Crew Dragon in March. But in July, during a ground test of the abort engines on the same capsule, the Crew Dragon exploded. No one was injured, but that pushed back SpaceXs schedule as the company figured out what happened and how to fix it.Watchdogs in government have raised concerns about the costs of commercial crew launches. A report by the NASA Inspector General reviewing the program estimated the per seat cost at about $55 million for SpaceX, and $90 million for Boeing. (The Boeing cost is higher than what NASA has paid for seats on Russias Soyuz.)On Thursday, Mr. Bridenstine disputed that estimate, saying NASA has not negotiated those prices with Boeing or SpaceX.The inspector general also criticized a NASA decision to pay $287.2 million above the fixed prices for three of the Boeing missions, saying those were unnecessary.It remains unclear whether the Starliner capsule will be recovered intact to examine what caused the missions failure. But even if they do, the next launch could be delayed by months.NASA officials had been careful not to promise any launch dates, saying that the schedule depends on how well Starliner performs during its flight test and how long it takes to ensure safety for its astronauts. (The losses of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 were both blamed in part on NASA officials pushing too hard to meet schedule deadlines.)While Boeings stock declined somewhat on Friday, that dip was likely more a reaction to the latest developments related to the 737 Max than anything else, said Ronald J. Epstein, an analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. If anything, he said, the Starliner missions outcome could represent more of a hit to the companys morale than to the bottom line.It would have been a very nice way to put a small, happy face on an otherwise really tough year for the Boeing company and it just didnt play out that way, Mr. Epstein said._______Niraj Chokshi contributed reporting | science |
Nearly 40 percent of pregnant surgery residents consider dropping out. Many wonder: Why cant the system accommodate motherhood?Credit...Elizabeth Frantz for The New York TimesDec. 20, 2019As a health care professional, Dr. Erika Rangel is trained to know when things are going wrong. That alarm went off one day in her fourth year of surgical residency. Her son, just 3 months old, had developed a fever. She couldnt be late for her operating shift, but his day care wouldnt accept him if he was sick. So she did what desperate mothers do and got inventive: She slipped liquid Tylenol into his bottle, in the hopes of lowering his temperature, and dropped him off. Later that day, she stood in surgery with her eyes continually checking the clock, willing the operation to finish in time for pickup. She prayed that the day care wouldnt realize he was feverish. Had they noticed that his milk had turned medicine pink?I felt like I wasnt being a great mom or partner or resident, said Dr. Rangel, 42, now an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. Something had to give. I thought about quitting a lot.When Dr. Rangel was in medical school, she searched diligently for a specialty that she liked as much as surgery. Her friends cautioned her that if she became a surgeon, she would never have a personal life. She wouldnt have time for children, they warned and what man would want a spouse who was constantly in the operating room?It became a tug of war between choosing a lifestyle profession versus something I truly loved with all my heart, Dr. Rangel said. I chose surgery in spite of all the warnings, and Ive spent my whole life navigating that balance.Even as American medical schools have reached gender parity, certain specialties remain stubbornly male, particularly surgery. Women comprise only 23 percent of practicing surgeons. A recent survey conducted at Harvard Medical School found that the majority of students pursuing surgical careers reported verbal discouragement, and 72 percent of female students perceived it as gender-based; they wouldnt be able to balance their careers and their maternal responsibilities, they were told. The warnings arent unfounded. Surgical residency, which lasts upward of seven years, requires 80-hour workweeks, with little flexibility to accommodate personal or family responsibilities.The training starts, for most, in their mid-20s and continues into their early 30s prime childbearing years. Parental leave varies across residency programs, although many residents take six weeks (four allotted for vacation and two for sick leave). When the residents return to the hospital, the 12-hour shifts make child care, breastfeeding and even sleep a challenge. A 2018 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association surveyed women who were pregnant during surgical residency and found that 39 percent considered dropping out and nearly 30 percent would advise female medical students to pursue a different career. The attrition rate for female surgical residents is 25 percent, 10 percentage points more than their male counterparts.ImageCredit...Elizabeth Frantz for The New York TimesBy 2032, the country will lack as many as 23,000 surgeons, according to a report prepared for the Association of American Medical Colleges. Some medical administrators say the shortfall provides an opportunity to recruit more women to the field. But in surgery, the obstacles to gender parity are formidable. Gifty Kwakye, 38, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Michigan, was told by her medical school classmates that she was too nice for surgery. She never questioned her own drive to operate, but she did worry that it would be difficult to balance her work with dreams of being a mother. She hoped to start a family during the research phase of her training, when she had more control over her schedule, but things didnt go as planned. Overcoming medical problems, she became pregnant three months before she was scheduled to return to clinical residency.Transitioning from maternity leave back to clinical work felt like having cotton wool stuck in your brain, Dr. Kwakye said. She woke up every two hours at night to feed her baby. She was so dazed that she covered her home in sticky-note reminders: Bring the pump to work, the nipple protectors, the ice packs to keep the milk cold.Worst was the guilt she felt spending 12-hour shifts away from her child. When Dr. Kwakye squeezed in a pickup at day care to relieve her husband, she watched her daughter run to the teacher and call her Mommy. That prompted a day care administrator to ask Dr. Kwakye whether she was on the list of adults approved for pickup, and the doctor had to explain that she was indeed the mother. The kid didnt want to go to me, and I was like O.K., I deserved that, that was fair, you have no idea who I am, Dr. Kwakye said. But what that does to a mother is painful. I had a moment when I was like, I cant do this anymore; Im failing as a resident and Im failing as a mom.One morning she sat in her car crying because she didnt want to leave her baby. She wondered if she should have heeded the warnings not to pursue surgery. She told herself, Maybe they saw something you didnt see and youre not tough enough. As health care providers, surgeons are painfully aware of the ways in which their professional commitments can harm their own health and their familys. Alex Moore, a surgical resident at Brigham and Womens Hospital, said that spending long days away from her 6-month-old baby was especially upsetting because she has studied the medical importance of mother-child bonding. Returning to the operating room after a 10-week leave felt like your soul is getting ripped out, she said. A surgeons schedule isnt just psychologically taxing, it also takes a physical toll. A resident spends most of the day on her feet. She may go eight to 12 hours without eating, or even drinking water. As one surgical resident put it, health often comes down to Do as I say, not as I do for doctors in training. Dr. Rangel, who had two babies, both born prematurely, wondered whether she was to blame for neglecting her health while pregnant.Theres a piece of you that knows better, that bad things can happen in pregnancy no matter what, Dr. Rangel said. But theres another part of you that knows you didnt prioritize your health during pregnancy. You wanted to look, to your other residents, like youre strong.Dr. Kwakye grappled with a similar question: When I was having difficulties getting pregnant, my husband was like, Is this because of your residency? Because youre working so hard and not taking care of yourself?ImageCredit...Erin Kirkland for The New York TimesA recent paper in Surgical Neurology International cited estimates that, at the current pace of change, it could take nearly 120 years to achieve gender parity in surgery. But as female representation has grown in hospitals, physicians are calling for institutional changes to support residents who are balancing the responsibilities of surgery and motherhood.Dr. Sarah Shubeck, a general surgery chief resident at the University of Michigan, had a child three years ago. Since then, she has successfully lobbied her department of surgery to convert call rooms (resting spaces for staff) into lactation spaces, and to implement a policy allowing residents to step out of operations intermittently to pump milk. She hopes to end the stigma around breastfeeding by discussing subjects like mastitis and engorgement with her male colleagues, although it sometimes makes them squirm.Dr. Shubeck recalled that in medical school, someone told her he had never met a happy female surgeon. Now when she is approached by younger female surgeons, she assures them that she is fighting for institutional changes that will ease their career paths. She is part of a network of Michigan doctor moms who share resources and encouragement.Its like a secret society that were all a part of, Dr. Shubeck said. Were troubleshooting in the call room and helping when someones babysitter falls through. For decades, she said, women in surgery kept their heads down and felt lucky just to have a spot in the operating room. Now they are asking for support for their own well-being.Parental leave policies in surgical residency programs present another area for reform. Dr. Rangel said that, for years, the American Board of Surgerys policies were confusing to residents and some of their program directors. In 2018, the board revamped its parental leave website to be more transparent and explicitly communicate more options for pregnant residents, such as allowing residents to graduate off-cycle and to roll vacation weeks over from one year to the next. The policy language has also been changed to include fathers.But Dr. Rangel said parental leave reform is only one solution in the larger cocktail needed to heal a broken system. Its everything from the brief maternity leave to the stigma surrounding being a pregnant resident, she said. There are microaggressions from faculty and co-residents who feel it is a burden to have you be pregnant. There are few lactation facilities, theres a paucity of child care support.ImageCredit...Erin Kirkland for The New York TimesJohn Fromson, vice chairman for community psychiatry at Brigham and Womens Hospital, said a dearth of child care options remained a widespread problem. Some hospitals have tried to set up on-site day care facilities, but these are expensive to maintain and end up being unaffordable for the residents. The average resident earns $57,200 annually, a fraction of what their higher-ups at the hospital make.Most residents end up relying on a combination of partners, parents and networks of friends. Dr. Moore said her husband, a lawyer, handles the morning drop-offs and evening pickups from day care. Several women interviewed said their parents retired early or moved closer to help with child care. Making the operating room more accessible is not just an equity issue it is also good for patients. Parent-doctors can bring an important sensibility to their work. Danielle Cameron, a chief resident in general surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, said she had worried that motherhood might take away her edge or even her focus. Instead, she said, having a child has made her more empathetic and attuned to patient needs.During a recent operation, Dr. Cameron jokingly described herself as tough to a male attending physician. He responded, I know youre tough because youre a surgeon mom, Dr. Cameron said. It gave me a sense of pride because they know how much we have to balance every day.On Thanksgiving, Dr. Cameron took her family to the hospital to share leftovers with the residents on call. Her family has made sacrifices along the way, she said, but she hopes that her daughter has gained her grit and sense of duty. Recently Dr. Cameron passed her daughters room and saw her operating on her stuffed animals: She wants to be just like her mother. | science |
Credit...Henning Bagger/European Pressphoto AgencyMarch 8, 2017When Daniel Rom Kristiansen, a 14-year-old student in northern Denmark, was given a homework assignment on World War II, his father had a jokey suggestion.Family legend had it that a plane crashed not far from their farm in 1944. Go out and find the plane, the father, Klaus Kristiansen, suggested.Much to his surprise, Daniel did.What began as a good-natured attempt by a man to make history come alive for his son turned into headline-grabbing news this week when Daniel, aided by Mr. Kristiansen, discovered the wreckage of a German warplane, along with the remains of a man who might have been its pilot.After the discovery Monday, forensics police officers arrived to secure the site, along with bomb disposal experts and a representative from the German Embassy. Soon, the Danish news media descended on the farm, in the remote town of Birkelse in the north of the Jutland peninsula.Mr. Kristiansen told the Danish newspaper Politiken that his grandfather, who had lived on the farm, had told him years ago about the crash. But in 40 years of plowing the fields, Mr. Kristiansen had seen no sign of the plane.My granddad was good at telling tall tales, Mr. Kristiansen said. But I doubted that this was anything more than just a story.After Daniel reacted enthusiastically to his fanciful challenge, Mr. Kristiansen said, he joined the boy in the field, armed with a metal detector and more than a little skepticism.When the detector suddenly sounded, they started digging and found metal fragments, Mr. Kristiansen told Politiken. As their excitement mounted, they borrowed a mechanical excavator from a neighbor and dug about 16 feet into the ground.He said they were amazed to find buried a machine gun part, the remnants of an engine, a fighter pilots uniform, bones, a crew members ID and a wallet holding coins and a condom.The plane had crashed into thousands of pieces, Mr. Kristiansen told Politiken. Everything was so well preserved that you could hardly see it had been laying there for nearly 75 years.The Kristiansens learned that they had found the wreckage of a Messerschmitt Bf 109, a warplane widely used by the Luftwaffe during World War II.An amateur historian from the nearby city of Aalborg told the local news media that a German warplane had taken off on Nov. 27, 1944, from the city, crashed into a swamp and had never been recovered. He speculated that the remains of the pilot who disappeared, Bruno Krger, could be in Mr. Kristiansens field.While there are still many unanswered questions, Mr. Kristiansen told the Danish radio station DR P4 Nordjylland that Daniel had gotten a day off school to watch the teams examining the wreckage. Luckily, he said, my son has something to write about in his assignment now. | World |
Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesFeb. 19, 2014KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia From their perch in the bleachers high above the shooting range, biathlon fans generally follow two unspoken rules: Stay quiet when a biathlete is shooting at the target, and do not cheer when a competitor from another country misses. For biathlon fans around the world (most of whom reside in the Nordic countries), these customs more or less hold true everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except Russia. As the worlds biathletes arrived here for the Winter Olympics, they had to steel themselves for a potentially frosty reception. Many of them knew Russia only through the biathlon competitions regularly held in Khanty-Mansiysk, an oil town in Siberia, where the crowds have long been as welcoming as a Siberian winter. In Siberia, they werent so nice, said Max Cobb, a senior official with the International Biathlon Union. They were a little, he paused, searching for a way to put it delicately, they were not so friendly to the athletes.Every sport has its own expectations for fan behavior, and every country can provide its own twist. Just as rowdy fans at the Phoenix Open have turned golf etiquette on its head, Russia has presented biathlon athletes and officials with a new breed of spectator.In biathlon stadiums in countries like Norway and Germany, fans tend to be respectful and orderly picture Wimbledon with rifles, the Masters with skis. By those refined standards, Russian crowds are notoriously loud, according to biathlon coaches, athletes and broadcasters. The Russian mentality is a bit different, said Wolfgang Pichler, a German who coaches the Russian womens team. They are well known for hollering across the shooting gallery at crucial moments, and taunting foreigners who miss their targets, biathlon decorum be damned. A Siberian cheer sounds something like a Bronx cheer with a Russian accent. They were not booing, but making some strange noises, said Ivor Lehotan, a senior international biathlon official. They have funny things in the mouth, they made noise. This custom has posed a problem for Olympics officials responsible for the biathlon, an event that combines cross-country skiing with sharpshooting. After all, a stadium of Russians shouting what amounts to, In your face, foreigner, doesnt exactly convey sunny feelings of international brotherhood. To counter that, Russian organizers have spent years working to make sure that biathlon fans do not bring Siberia to Sochi. They enlisted the Russian news media to write articles about proper fan reactions. They asked stadium announcers to remind the crowds to be fair.Dmitry Guberniev, the biathlon commentator for Russias state broadcasting channel, played a key role in shaping the countrys biathlon culture. By all accounts, fan behavior has improved in recent years. I just told the fans, lets show our honored foreign guests that we are a normal country and we can greet foreign guests in a proper way, he said. We have clever spectators, and everyone understood everything immediately.So far, after 12 days of the biathlon competition, the outreach efforts seem to be paying off, though the international mix of the Olympic crowd is not necessarily the best sample group.Russians here have been enthusiastic, even cheering loudly for Ole Einar Bjorndalen of Norway, a legend in the biathlon world. They have generally avoided the boorish behavior organizers feared. (Though there were scattered cheers when Emil Hegle Svendsen, another Norwegian star, missed a shot during a recent competition.)During a recent event, Aleksandr Dubynin of Listvyanka, in Siberia, sat in the stands with his wife, Lyudmila, their faces painted with Russian flags. They wore red Russian team jackets and waved a Russian flag.Were trying to treat all athletes from all teams equally, he said. Sport should be the spirit of friendship. But when it comes to Russia, we support them the most, naturally.Indeed, the crowds have been cheering lustily for every Russian athlete but have not entirely adopted the international custom of cheering for all the competitors, to the dismay of some. In Norway you cheer for everyone who makes it, said Per Arne Botnan, head coach of the Norwegian biathlon team, which is, by nearly all measures, the worlds strongest. Russian fans, Botnan said, are different. As practice shots rang out behind him, you could practically see the disdain steaming in the air. In Norwegian culture, its unsportsmanlike to cheer if someone misses, he said. At a recent race, the stadium announcer implored the crowd to applaud Martin Fourcade of France as he flew past the finish line to win his second gold medal of the Games. You could have heard a pin drop. But at least there were hardly any taunts. Slowly, slowly, we are coming to the situation where there is no booing or this not-correct attitude, said Lehotan, the international biathlon official. Biathlon is hardly the only sport to struggle with fan behavior, and Russia is far from the only country with fans that sometimes behave badly. (Just about any N.F.L. stadium would scream the parkas off a Siberian biathlon crowd.) But athletes in several Olympic sports have criticized the host countrys fans.A French ice dancer, Pernelle Carron, said Monday that the audience was quite unpleasant, maybe even disrespectful, since theyre cheering only for the Russians it seems, which is sad. Mirjam Ott of the Swiss curling team objected to Russian fans tendency to root against other countries. Its sad when the people boo when the opponents of Russia are playing, Ott said. Thats not the fairness of curling, but its Russia and they dont know curling that well, so we have to accept that.Over in the biathlon world, Russian officials say they believe that the Olympics will help Russian fans pick up international etiquette.Its true, Russian fans did not quite react to the foreign athletes ethically, said Maria Baydina, an official with the Russian biathlon federation. But now, we have no problem. | Sports |
Olympics|Russians Stay Alive by Crushing Norwayhttps://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/sports/olympics/kopitar-slovenia-top-austria-to-reach-quarterfinals.htmlCredit...Bruce Bennett/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesFeb. 18, 2014Alexander Radulov scored two goals and Russia survived its first elimination game at its home Olympics with a 4-0 victory Tuesday over Norway in the qualification round.Sergei Bobrovsky made 22 saves in the second straight shutout victory for the fifth-seeded Russians, who earned a meeting with Finland in the quarterfinals Wednesday.Ilya Kovalchuk and Alexei Tereshenko also scored, but the Russians had to survive another difficult game in Sochi. They failed to earn a bye to the quarterfinals after being forced into two shootouts in the preliminary round, winning one against Slovakia and losing to the United States.The powerful Russian lineup struggled early against winless Norway, but Radulovs soft backhand beat goalie Lars Haugen early in the second period, ending Russias scoreless streak of more than 101 minutes.ImageCredit...Mark Blinch/ReutersKovalchuk scored late in the second period, and Russia abruptly doubled its margin of victory in a tight game with two late goals. Radulov got an empty-netter with 1 minute 7 seconds to play, and Tereshenko added another score in the final minute.SLOVENIA 4, AUSTRIA 0 Anze Kopitar scored at 5:29 of the first period to help Slovenia beat Austria, extending the experience of playing for his father, Matjaz, on the world stage.Slovenia is in the Olympic hockey tournament for the first time and has only one N.H.L. player Kopitar plays for the Los Angeles Kings so advancing to the final eight is a big accomplishment. Slovenia will face top-seeded Sweden on Wednesday.Lets say it is a miracle because this is really amazing, goaltender Robert Kristan said after a 30-save shutout.LATVIA 3, SWITZERLAND 1 Oskars Bartulis and Lauris Darzins scored in the first period, and Latvia reached the Olympic quarterfinals for the first time with a victory over Switzerland.Edgars Masalskis made 32 saves and Darzins added an empty-net goal in the surprising Latvians first Olympic victory since 2002, when they returned to the Games after a 66-year absence.Latvia went winless in preliminary-round play in Sochi, losing, 1-0, to the Swiss in its opener. It advanced to play Canada in the quarterfinals on Wednesday night.Martin Pluss scored and Jonas Hiller stopped 19 shots for the Swiss.CZECH REPUBLIC 5, SLOVAKIA 3 Roman Cervenka scored for a second time late in the second period to set up a four-goal lead, and the Czech Republic advanced to a quarterfinal matchup against the United States.The Slovaks made it a one-goal game in the third period, but Andrej Meszaros was called for slashing with 53 seconds left. Slovakia pulled its goaltender to create an even-strength situation, and Tomas Plekanec scored an empty-net goal 14 seconds later for the Czechs. | Sports |
Olympics|Lundqvist and Sweden Return to Gold Medal Gamehttps://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/22/sports/olympics/lundqvist-and-sweden-return-to-gold-medal-game.htmlSweden 2, Finland 1Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesFeb. 21, 2014SOCHI, Russia In 2006, Henrik Lundqvist was a 23-year-old rookie for the Rangers who went to the Turin Games motivated to win a gold medal for the older players on the Swedish team that he grew up idolizing.Eight years later, he is one of the teams elder statesmen, and his teammates are playing as if bent on leading him to his second gold medal. On Friday, in a rematch of the gold medal game in Turin, Lundqvist made 25 saves and let Sweden's shot-blocking defense and opportunistic power play do the rest in a 2-1 victory over Finland at the Bolshoi Ice Dome.Playing every minute of his teams five games, Lundqvist has stopped 117 of 123 shots. He was tested in the first period when the Finns held a two-man advantage for a minute and a half. They got only two shots on net, one from the left circle by Teemu Selanne, the oldest player in the tournament at age 43, as the Swedish defense deflected or blocked several other attempts.In the seventh minute of the second period, Finland got the games first goal on a sharp-angled shot by Olli Jokinen. It slid under Lundqvists pads, giving Jokinen gratification long delayed. In the gold medal game in 2006, Lundqvist made a stick save in the final minute on Jokinens game-tying attempt from the top of the crease.The Finns were without Tuukka Rask, the Boston Bruins goaltender whose stalwart play in goal against Russia keyed their quarterfinal victory. He was scratched because of illness, but depth at goalie is one of Finlands strengths. Kari Lehtonen, who plays for the Dallas Stars, started in Rasks place.Sweden tied the score five minutes after Jokinens score on a tick-tack-toe play that would have been hard for anyone to stop. Daniel Sedin gathered the puck behind the net and passed out to Jonathan Ericsson, who delivered the puck to Loui Eriksson, who knocked it in from the side of the net.Sweden came into the game with the top-rated power play, having converted 6 of 17 attempts, and it took the lead with Jokinen in the penalty box for tripping. Defenseman Erik Karlsson scored on a shot from the point with 3 minutes 34 seconds left in the second. It ricocheted off Lehtonens right elbow and settled into the back of the net, giving the 23-year-old Karlsson his fourth goal and eighth point of the tournament.Lehtonen finished with 23 saves. In the final 20 minutes, the Finns put eight shots on net to their opponents three as the Swedes went into the hockey version of a prevent defense. Selanne, a six-time Olympian who was hoping to add a gold medal to the bronze he won in 1998 and the silver in 2006, was on the ice when time expired. He bent over with his stick across his knees and absorbed the defeat.Of course, Im disappointed, he said.The golden oldie set will be represented in the final by 41-year-old Daniel Alfredsson. Lundqvist turns 32 next month and acknowledged he felt older than his years. He struggled early this season for the Rangers, then settled down after agreeing to a contract extension. His improved play helped to vault the Rangers into playoff contention, and now he is lifting Sweden as well.As the final seconds ticked off the clock Thursday, he allowed himself to exhale.Wow, Lundqvist said. What a feeling in that last 10 seconds. Thats the feeling you work for as an athlete. To know youre going to get another chance at a gold medal is incredible. | Sports |
Asia Pacific|DNA Confirms Assassination Victim Was Half Brother of Kim Jong-un, Malaysia Sayshttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/world/asia/kim-jong-nam-dna-malaysia.htmlCredit...Lillian Suwanrumpha/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesMarch 15, 2017The Malaysian authorities sought on Wednesday to definitively put to rest a nagging question about the brazen assassination of a man in Kuala Lumpurs international airport last month: They said he was indeed Kim Jong-nam, estranged half brother of Kim Jong-un, North Koreas leader, because they had DNA confirmation from a relative.The police compared the DNA of Mr. Kim with a sample provided by one of his children, Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi told reporters at a news conference.I once again confirm that the body is that of Kim Jong-nam, Mr. Zahid said, contradicting the official North Korean position, which insists the man, killed Feb. 13 in a crowded airport terminal, was named Kim Chol.Mr. Kim was assaulted by two women who approached him and smeared his face with a liquid that autopsy tests showed was VX nerve agent, a banned chemical weapon. He was carrying a passport with the name Kim Chol.The mans death has caused a widening diplomatic standoff between Malaysia and North Korea, which has rejected accusations of responsibility for the killing, calling it a sinister plot hatched by the countrys enemies.ImageCredit...Toshifumi Kitamura/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesMr. Zahid did not indicate when and how Malaysian officials had obtained the DNA. Mr. Kim was believed to have two sons and a daughter, but their whereabouts is unknown.Last week, a man calling himself Kim Han-sol and claiming to be Mr. Kims son released a YouTube video in which he said he and his family had gone into hiding.For weeks Malaysia has said it determined Mr. Kims identity using methods other than DNA testing, but has not revealed what they were. A report in The New Straits Times, citing unidentified Malaysian officials, said investigators had used the pattern of moles on the mans face and a distinctive tattoo to confirm his identity.Malaysian officials said that Mr. Kims body had been embalmed and that his family would be given several weeks to claim it. In February, North Korea sent a former United Nations ambassador to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysias capital, to claim the body, but the authorities would not release it, saying at the time they needed DNA to confirm the victims identity.Relations between Malaysia and North Korea have deteriorated since the assassination. Each has expelled the others ambassador and barred each others nationals from leaving.The victims assailants, arrested and charged with murder, have claimed they were unwitting participants who believed they had been on a hidden-camera prank television show. The police are looking for at least seven suspected North Korean accomplices, including a diplomat believed to be hiding in the North Korean Embassy in Malaysia. | World |
Senator Chuck Schumer will fulfill his ambition of becoming majority leader as Senator Mitch McConnell returns to heading the minority, shifting the policy agenda as Joe Biden takes office.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York TimesJan. 7, 2021WASHINGTON The stunning Democratic wins in two Georgia Senate races this week upended Washingtons power structure overnight, providing an unexpected opening to the incoming Biden administration by handing unified control of Congress to Democrats, who will be tested by governing with spare majorities.The victories by Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff mean that Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, will control the Senate floor rather than Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and a man Democrats have long seen as the main impediment to their legislative ambitions.The momentous shift occurred even as a violent siege of the Capitol on Wednesday, egged on by President Trump, made clear the staunch refusal of his supporters to acknowledge President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the winner of the election, an explosive last gasp of Republican protest before Democrats assume full control. Thrust together at a secure location with top congressional leaders after being evacuated during the mayhem, Mr. McConnell found himself congratulating Mr. Schumer on his newfound status. In a wholesale change that will shift the policy agenda after Mr. Bidens inauguration, liberals including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the democratic socialist who will now lead the Budget Committee will head Senate panels, rather than conservatives. Legislation from the Democratic-controlled House that had languished in the Senate will now get consideration across the Rotunda.The abrupt shift in circumstances invigorated Democrats who had been deflated in November when they failed to gain a Senate majority on Nov. 3 despite Mr. Bidens victory. Given the traditional advantage Republicans have had in Georgia runoff elections, many Democrats had become resigned to the prospect that they would be sentenced to another two years in the Senate minority, stymied in delivering on Mr. Bidens priorities.We sure did not take the most direct path to get here, but here we are, said Mr. Schumer, happy with the outcome any way he could get it, a result that put him in reach of fulfilling his ambition of becoming majority leader after four years as the chief of the minority.While the change in Senate control is momentous, particularly in easing the way for Mr. Biden to fill administration jobs and judicial vacancies, it does not mean that Democrats can have their way on everything or even most things.The Democratic majority in the House shrank in the last election, emboldening Republicans and giving Speaker Nancy Pelosi less wiggle room in what is likely her last term. More than half of House Republicans voted to throw out certified presidential election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania overnight Wednesday and Thursday without evidence of fraud, reflecting both the extreme character of the House Republican conference and what is sure to be a reluctance to work with Mr. Biden.With the Senate divided 50 to 50 and Democrats in charge only by virtue of the tiebreaking power of the vice president, the filibuster also looms large. Democrats will need to attract at least 10 Republicans to advance most bills while contending with demands from the left for bolder action now that their party will control all of Congress.Democrats conceded the difficulties but still welcomed the reversal of fortune.It is not all going to be easy, but it is certainly better than being 52-48 and President Biden playing Mother, May I? with Leader McConnell in moving any legislation to the floor, said Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, one of the incoming presidents closest allies on Capitol Hill.Yet Mr. McConnell, newly elected to his seventh term, has been in the position of leading the minority before and has proved effective in obstructing Democratic priorities.During President Barack Obamas first term, Democrats had a filibuster-proof 60 votes for a period, and Mr. McConnell still managed to confound Democrats while gradually chipping away at their majority. Republicans took control in 2015, mainly through emphasizing party unity against Democratic initiatives.As minority leader, Mr. McConnell can be expected to employ the same tactics while focusing on the 2022 midterm elections and seeking to regain his Senate power. That will make the first two years of Mr. Bidens administration extremely important when it comes to accomplishing any major priority.Republicans said they recognized that the legislative environment will be drastically different.Its the agenda, an agenda shift totally changed, said Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia. Theyre going to have the ability to run things from the House and, you know, shift the emphasis.When the Senate last had a 50-to-50 split in 2001, the two leaders, the Republican Trent Lott of Mississippi and the Democrat Tom Daschle of South Dakota, worked out a power-sharing agreement. But those two leaders had a much deeper relationship than Mr. McConnell and Mr. Schumer they had worked cooperatively on the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton and the Senate was less polarized than it is today.Mr. Schumer and Mr. McConnell will need to engage in talks to come up with some sort of governing framework.I assume in the next couple weeks, Schumer and Mitch will sit down and kind of figure out how this is going to work, said Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican. We had a little bit of a pattern back in 2000, but times have changed. Its different now.Perhaps the biggest difference will be the committee chairmen, representing a significant swing in ideology. Besides Mr. Sanders, for example, Senator Sherrod Brown, the progressive Ohio Democrat and strong labor ally, is set to be head of the Banking Committee and will have a markedly different agenda than that of the outgoing Republican chairman, Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho.Mr. Brown said his first order of legislative business would be addressing the effect of the coronavirus pandemic and relief provisions set to expire, including an eviction moratorium.We need to fix a lot of the damage Trumps done, and then theres pent-up demand for a whole lot of things, Mr. Brown said. What do we do about climate and about racial inequality, about wealth inequality, about structural racism?Among other notable committee changes would be Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon as head of the tax-writing Finance Committee, and Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois as chairman of the Judiciary Committee rather than Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, who was a chief driver of the Republican push to install more than 200 conservative judges on the nations federal courts the past four years. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, an aggressive backer of health law changes, is in line for the health committee.With the even partisan split, Democrats have begun talking about employing a special legislative process called reconciliation that applies budget rules to eliminate the threat of a filibuster, but what can be accomplished with that approach is limited. Activists are encouraging Democrats to try to eliminate the 60-vote filibuster to take advantage of their power while they have it.A window of opportunity like this may not come around again for a long while, said Brian Fallon, a former Schumer aide and head of the progressive group Demand Justice. It is almost overwhelming to think of all the opportunities for legislating that now exist, but the priority must be democratic reforms that make institutions like the Senate and our courts more aligned with the will of the people.But a handful of centrist Democrats, including Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana, have said they have no interest in gutting the filibuster, instead regarding it as a way to force the kind of compromise they think could restore the Senates ability to legislate.Bipartisan legislation tends to stand the test of time, and so hopefully we continue to work together and have it be encouraged by the filibuster, Mr. Tester said. | Politics |
L.A. Women's March Celebs Swarm To Support the Cause 1/20/2018 TMZ.com Olivia Munn, Eva Longoria, Scarlett Johansson and Ilana Glazer were just some of the stars who showed up for the Women's March in L.A. Saturday to support the movement. TMZ got several celebs coming and going ... who told us their reasons for joining the demonstrations on a day when millions of women are marching across the country and world. We also chatted with Yvette Nicole Brown, Connie Britton, Adam Scott and Rachel Platten. As we reported ... women are marching again this year to speak out against Donald Trump, but also advocate for equality and promote the messages of #MeToo and Time's Up. | Entertainment |
Tony Gonzalez Brady's Not The G.O.A.T. ... Just Had 'Best Career' 1/23/2018 TMZSports.com Tom Brady's one of the best ever, but he's not THE greatest of all time -- so says Tony Gonzalez ... who offered a unique take on the G.O.A.T. debate when we got him out in L.A. Tony tells TMZ Sports Brady's no doubt had the "best career" ... but when it comes to sheer ability, it's splitting hairs to pick between him and a handful of other legendary QBs. "I don't know if there's ever a best anything," Gonzalez said. As for which guys he puts right up there with Tom ... Tony named a couple active QBs as well as a few Hall of Famers -- and they're all pretty good choices. Gonzo -- widely considered the G.O.A.T. of NFL tight ends -- also shouted out the TEs he thinks are on his level. Dude's modest -- you gotta give him that. | Entertainment |
Credit...K.M. Chaudary/Associated PressNov. 2, 2018KARACHI, Pakistan After protesters blocked highways and forced the closing of schools and businesses, the Pakistani government and Islamist leaders enraged over the acquittal of a Christian woman accused of blasphemy reached an agreement on Friday night that allows further appeals and bars her from leaving the country.The woman, Asia Bibi, was convicted in 2010 on little evidence of violating Pakistans law against blasphemy by insulting the Prophet Muhammad. She spent years on death row before she was acquitted on Wednesday by the countrys Supreme Court.Despite her legal victory, which was hailed worldwide by rights groups, Ms. Bibis lawyers and her family have expressed fears for her safety because hard-line Islamist parties in Pakistan have called for her execution.Under the accord, which some analysts viewed as a capitulation to extremists, the government agreed not to oppose the filing of an appeal in the Supreme Court of Ms. Bibis acquittal. It also agreed to initiate legal proceedings to prevent her from traveling abroad.The government also said it would release all protesters who had been arrested since Wednesday. For their part, the protesting religious leaders offered an apology if their statements had offended anyone, an apparent reference to their criticism of the military leadership.ImageCredit...British Pakistani Christian Association, via Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesWhile several Western countries have offered to grant Ms. Bibi asylum, allowing her to leave Pakistan immediately would provoke further turmoil for the new government of Prime Minister Imran Khan. Mr. Khan is on a visit to China, seeking a financial bailout package for the countrys distressed economy.The protesters, led by a firebrand cleric named Khadim Hussain Rizvi, had been demanding that Ms. Bibi be placed on the so-called exit-control list, a roster of people barred from leaving Pakistan.Ben-Her Gill, a leader of the Christian community in Islamabad, the capital, said Ms. Bibi was still in Pakistan, at a secret location under the protection of the authorities.Protesters took to the streets of several cities on Friday, demanding that the Supreme Court reverse its ruling and that the three justices on the panel that had issued it, including Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar, be dismissed.Mobile networks were suspended in Islamabad and in three other major cities in Pakistans largest province, Punjab, as the authorities tried to stop protesters from organizing and expanding the demonstrations.A highway connecting Islamabad to the city of Lahore was blocked, and rail networks across the country were severely slowed by the protests. Schools in Islamabad, Punjab and Kashmir were closed because of the demonstrations.Religious leaders had also demanded the ouster of the head of Pakistans military, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, accusing him of acquiescing to Ms. Bibis release. Soon after the Supreme Courts ruling, Pir Muhammad Afzal Qadri, another prominent protest leader, urged army generals to revolt against their top commander.ImageCredit...Adrees Latif/ReutersThe military said Friday that it had nothing to do with Ms. Bibis release. The armed forces hope that this matter is resolved without disruption of peace, Maj. Gen. Asif Ghafoor, the armys spokesman, was quoted by state-run media as saying.Ms. Bibi, a mother of five in her early 50s, has been a central figure in the debate over Pakistans harsh blasphemy laws, which critics say are often used to persecute and intimidate members of religious minorities. Blasphemy is a highly combustible subject in Pakistan, with emotions flaring over mere rumors that Islam has been insulted. People accused of it are often killed by mobs even before the police can take action, rights groups say.Ms. Bibi was accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad after getting into an argument with Muslim farm workers in June 2009 in her native village in Punjab. She was dragged to a local police station and charged with blasphemy. In 2010 she was convicted and sentenced to death, the first woman ever sent to Pakistans death row for blasphemy.In 2011, Salmaan Taseer, an outspoken secular governor of Punjab Province who had campaigned for Ms. Bibis release and for changes in the blasphemy laws, was shot and killed by his own police bodyguard outside a cafe in an upscale area of Islamabad.Two months later, Shahbaz Bhatti, the minister of minorities and the only Christian cabinet minister in the Pakistani government, was shot to death outside his home in Islamabad after he, too, called for changes to the blasphemy law.The stakes attached to Ms Bibis case are extremely high, said Saroop Ijaz, a lawyer based in Lahore.These groups have always extracted their pound of flesh, said Mr. Ijaz, who predicted that the government would be forced to give in to some of the protesters demands. Theyve escalated to a point where it has become difficult for the government to avoid that fate. What that means for Asia Bibi, who has endured close to a decade of incarceration, remains uncertain. | World |
Outbreaks of Untreatable, Drug-Resistant Fungus Spread in 2 CitiesFor the first time, the C.D.C. identified several cases of Candida auris that were resistant to all drugs, in two health facilities in Texas and a long-term care center in Washington, D.C.Credit...Centers for Disease Control and PreventionJuly 23, 2021A deadly, hard-to-treat fungal infection that has been spreading through nursing homes and hospitals across the United States is becoming even more dangerous, according to researchers, who for the first time have identified several cases in which the fungus, Candida auris, was completely impervious to all existing medication.The finding, released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is an alarming development in the evolution of C. auris, a tenacious yeast infection discovered in Japan in 2009 that has since spread across much of the world.Federal health officials say the bug has spread even more widely during the coronavirus pandemic, with overwhelmed hospitals and nursing homes struggling to keep up with the surveillance and control measures needed to contain local outbreaks.In the new report, the C.D.C. said, five of more than 120 cases of C. auris were resistant to treatment.The C.D.C. did not identify the facilities where the novel infections took place, but health officials said there was no evident link between the outbreaks, which occurred in Texas at a hospital and a long-term care facility that share patients, and at a single long-term care center in Washington, D.C. The outbreaks took place between January and April.Nearly a third of the infected patients died within 30 days, according to the C.D.C., but because they were already gravely ill, officials said it was unclear whether their deaths were caused by the fungus.Over the past eight years, the C.D.C. has identified more than 2,000 Americans colonized with C. auris meaning the fungus was detected on their skin with most cases concentrated in New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California. Between 5 and 10 percent of those colonized with the pathogen go on to develop more serious bloodstream infections.Once it gains a foothold, the fungus is difficult to eliminate from health care facilities, clinging to cleaning carts, intravenous poles and other medical equipment. While relatively harmless to those in good health, the yeast infection can be deadly to seriously ill hospital patients, residents of long-term care facilities and others with weakened immune systems.If you wanted to conjure up a nightmare scenario for a drug-resistant pathogen, this would be it, said Dr. Cornelius J. Clancy, an infectious diseases doctor at the VA Pittsburgh Health Care System. An untreatable fungus infection would pose a grave threat to the immunocompromised, transplant recipients and critically ill patients in the I.C.U.While C. auris has long been notoriously hard to treat, researchers for the first time identified five patients in Texas and Washington, D.C., whose infections did not respond to any of the three major classes of antifungal medication. So-called panresistance had been previously reported in three patients in New York who were being treated for C. auris, but health officials said the newly reported panresistant infections occurred in patients who had never received antifungal drugs, said Dr. Meghan Lyman, a medical officer at the C.D.C. who specializes in fungal diseases.The concerning thing is that the patients at risk are no longer the small population of people who have infections and are already being treated with these medications, she said.Infectious disease specialists say the coronavirus pandemic has probably accelerated the spread of the fungus. The shortages of personal protective equipment that hobbled health care workers during the early months of the pandemic, they say, increased opportunities for the funguss transmission, especially among the thousands of Covid-19 patients who ended up on invasive mechanical ventilation.The chaos of recent months also did not help. Infection control efforts at most heath care systems are stretched thin in the best of times, but with so many Covid patients, resources that might have gone to infection control were diverted elsewhere, Dr. Clancy said.For many health experts, the emergence of a panresistant C. auris is a sobering reminder about the threats posed by antimicrobial resistance, from superbugs like MRSA to antibiotic-resistant salmonella. Such infections sicken 2.8 million Americans a year and kill 35,000, according to the C.D.C.Dr. Michael S. Phillips, chief epidemiologist at NYU/Langone Health, said health systems across the country were struggling to contain the spread of such pathogens. The problem, he said, was especially acute in big cities like New York, where seriously ill patients shuttle between nursing homes with lax infection control and top-notch medical centers that often draw patients from across a wider region.We need to do a better job at surveillance and infection control, especially in places where we put patients in group settings, he said. Candida auris is something we should be concerned about, but we cant lose sight of the bigger picture because there are a lot of other drug-resistant bugs out there we should be worried about. | Health |
Credit...Cole Wilson for The New York TimesDec. 25, 2015Gary L. Alford was running on adrenaline when he arrived for work on a Monday in June 2013, at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. A tax investigator, he had spent much of the weekend in the living room of his New Jersey townhouse, scrolling through arcane chat rooms and old blog posts, reading on well after his fiance had gone to sleep.The work had given Mr. Alford what he believed was the answer to a mystery that had confounded investigators for nearly two years: the identity of the mastermind behind the online drug bazaar known as Silk Road a criminal known only by his screen name, Dread Pirate Roberts.When Mr. Alford showed up for work that Monday, he had a real name and a location. He assumed the news would be greeted with excitement. Instead, he says, he got the brushoff.He recalls asking the prosecutor on the case, out of frustration, What about what I said is not compelling?Mr. Alford, a young special agent with the Internal Revenue Service assigned to work with the D.E.A., isnt the first person to feel unappreciated at the office. In his case, though, the information he had was crucial to solving one of the most vexing criminal cases of the last few years. While Silk Road by mid-2013 had grown into a juggernaut, selling $300,000 in heroin and other illegal goods each day, federal agents hadnt been able to figure out the most basic detail: the identity of the person running the site.It ultimately took Mr. Alford, 38, more than three months to gather enough evidence to prevail upon his colleagues to take his suspect seriously. After he convinced them, though, the man he identified, Ross W. Ulbricht, was arrested and Silk Road shuttered. The night of the arrest, Mr. Alford got an email from one of the other special agents at the center of the case: Congrats Gary, you were right, it said.Mr. Alfords experience, and the lag between his discovery and Mr. Ulbrichts arrest, were largely left out of the documents and proceedings that led to Mr. Ulbrichts conviction and life sentence this year.Previous examinations of the Silk Road investigation have generally focused on the role played by special agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security, who infiltrated the website, arrested important deputies and gathered reams of crucial information, but not enough to find Mr. Ulbricht until Mr. Alford came along.The other agencies involved in the investigation declined to comment on Mr. Alfords work, but several people briefed on the investigation, who were not authorized to speak about it publicly, confirmed the basic outlines of Mr. Alfords story.Back in the summer of 2013, it was not hard, even for Mr. Alford, to understand why it took him time to win over the others on the case. He had joined the investigation relatively late and was on a team that hadnt previously found much of value. He also lacked the sophisticated technological experience of colleagues at the F.B.I. On a more personal level, Mr. Alford could come across as overeager.ImageCredit...Cole Wilson for The New York TimesBut Mr. Alford also detected the sort of organizational frictions that have hindered communication between law enforcement agencies in the past. Within the I.R.S., Mr. Alford had heard tales of his agency being ignored and overshadowed by more prominent organizations like the F.B.I. The story that resonated with Mr. Alford most strongly was that of the tax agent Frank J. Wilson, who brought down the gangster Al Capone, but who was forgotten in the movie versions of the investigation, which tended to focus on Eliot Ness, the flashier Bureau of Prohibition agent.They dont write movies about Frank Wilson building the tax case, Mr. Alford said in an interview at the I.R.S.s Manhattan headquarters. Thats just how it is.Mr. Alford grew up in the Marlboro public housing projects of Brooklyn in the 1980s, a short, half-black, half-Filipino kid in a tough neighborhood. His father, a math teacher, would cite the power of the subject to teach his son how to prevail over difficulties. If you get the right answer, the teacher cant tell you anything, Mr. Alford remembers his father saying. That attitude led Mr. Alford to study accounting at Baruch College and then to the I.R.S., where his skeptical, lone-wolf approach worked well.It was Mr. Alfords supervisors at the I.R.S. who assigned him in February 2013 to a D.E.A. task force working the Silk Road case. The Strike Force, as it was known, had so far had little luck finding meaningful leads. Mr. Alfords superiors hoped he could bring his youthful energy and doggedness to the project.Mr. Alford started by chasing down leads on low-level Silk Road vendors selling Bitcoin, but he was too ambitious to keep his attention focused on small-time criminals. Whenever he had a free moment, he would read up on the origins of Silk Road and its nearly mythical leader, Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran the business and espoused his radical free-market ideology on the sites message boards.Im not high-tech, but Im like, This isnt that complicated. This is just some guy behind a computer, he recalled saying to himself. In these technical investigations, people think they are too good to do the stupid old-school stuff. But Im like, Well, that stuff still works.Mr. Alfords preferred tool was Google. He used the advanced search option to look for material posted within specific date ranges. That brought him, during the last weekend of May 2013, to a chat room posting made just before Silk Road had gone online, in early 2011, by someone with the screen name altoid.Has anyone seen Silk Road yet? altoid asked. Its kind of like an anonymous Amazon.com.The early date of the posting suggested that altoid might have inside knowledge about Silk Road.During the first weekend of June 2013, Mr. Alford went through everything altoid had written, the online equivalent of sifting through trash cans near the scene of a crime. Mr. Alford eventually turned up a message that altoid had apparently deleted but that had been preserved in the response of another user.In that post, altoid asked for some programming help and gave his email address: [email protected]. Doing a Google search for Ross Ulbricht, Mr. Alford found a young man from Texas who, just like Dread Pirate Roberts, admired the free-market economist Ludwig von Mises and the libertarian politician Ron Paul the first of many striking parallels Mr. Alford discovered that weekend.When Mr. Alford took his findings to his supervisors and failed to generate any interest, he initially assumed that other agents had already found Mr. Ulbricht and ruled him out.But he continued accumulating evidence, which emboldened Mr. Alford to put Mr. Ulbrichts name on the D.E.A. database of potential suspects, next to the aliases altoid and Dread Pirate Roberts.At the same time, though, Mr. Alford realized that he was not being told by the prosecutors about other significant developments in the case a reminder, to Mr. Alford, of the lower status that the I.R.S. had in the eyes of other agencies. And when Mr. Alford tried to get more resources to track down Mr. Ulbricht, he wasnt able to get the surveillance and the subpoenas he wanted.Mr. Alford said the Manhattan federal prosecutor overseeing the investigation, Serrin Turner, seemed to want to find Dread Pirate Roberts more than anyone. But Mr. Alford said that Mr. Turner was working with multiple agencies on the case and did not seem to put much weight in the evidence that Mr. Alford was finding leading to heated conversations.Im not saying Im right; we just need to look into this guy fully, Mr. Alford remembers telling Mr. Turner.A spokesman for the United States attorneys office in Manhattan, where Mr. Turner works, declined to comment.When Mr. Alford visited the main F.B.I. team on the case, later in the summer, it became clear that the team wasnt aware of Mr. Ulbricht as a suspect and also had no serious candidates of their own. Mr. Alford mentioned that he had a suspect in San Francisco, but no one followed up.One of the other agents present for that meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that he and the others in the room had little reason to ask for further information from Mr. Alford, given the lack of progress made by the D.E.A. Strike Force to which he was assigned. No one was taking them seriously, the agent said. I obviously wished we had asked more.When Mr. Alford went back to the D.E.A. office in Chelsea and complained about the meeting, a fellow I.R.S. agent in the group suggested it was time for Mr. Alford to give it up. Youve told them what you know. They didnt do anything, the agent told him, according to a person briefed on the conversation. Forget it.Instead, Mr. Alford decided to review his findings again. In early September, he asked a colleague to run another background check on Mr. Ulbricht, in case he had missed something.ImageCredit...Cole Wilson for The New York TimesThe colleague typed in the name and immediately looked up from her computer: Hey, there is a case on this guy from July.Agents with Homeland Security had seized a package with nine fake IDs at the Canadian border, addressed to Mr. Ulbrichts apartment in San Francisco. When the agents visited the apartment in mid-July, Mr. Ulbricht answered the door, and the agents identified him as the face on the IDs, without having any idea of his potential links to Silk Road.Mr. Alfords colleague asked him, Is this stuff interesting to you?You are making my day, he said.As she read out the details, the report grew more intriguing. Without the agents mentioning Silk Road, Mr. Ulbricht told them that hypothetically anyone could go on a site called Silk Road and buy fake IDs.Armed with these new findings, Mr. Alford phoned the prosecutor, Mr. Turner. There was a pause in the conversation while Mr. Turner typed Mr. Ulbrichts address into his own computer. Then Mr. Alford heard a shouted profanity from the other end of the line the clearest sign of interest he had heard yet, he says.Mr. Ulbrichts home address, it turned out, was a few hundred feet from an address that the F.B.I. had turned up in its investigation: a cafe from which Dread Pirate Roberts had signed in to Silk Road.Mr. Turner arranged a conference call the same day with Mr. Alford and two agents on the case an F.B.I. agent, Christopher Tarbell, and a Homeland Security agent, Jared Der-Yeghiayan.Both agents declined to comment for this article, but according to two people briefed on the investigation, the crucial moment in that conference call came when Mr. Alford described some of Mr. Ulbrichts interactions on message boards for programmers, while using the screen name Frosty. Mr. Tarbell stopped Mr. Alford and explained that Frosty was the name of the computer from which Dread Pirate Roberts had been logging in to the Silk Road.Oh, thats interesting, Mr. Turner deadpanned.Thats the guy, Mr. Tarbell said.The agreement among the agents on the phone that day allowed Mr. Alford to get his wish to put Mr. Ulbricht under full surveillance. Within days, the agents had established that Dread Pirate Roberts was logging into the Silk Road just moments after Mr. Ulbricht was going online in his apartment.In New York, Mr. Turner and Mr. Tarbell began writing up the complaint against Mr. Ulbricht. In it, they referred to Mr. Alford as Agent 1.On Oct. 2, Mr. Tarbell and Mr. Der-Yeghiayan helped apprehend Mr. Ulbricht at a public library in San Francisco. Mr. Alford could not be there because of travel-budget restrictions that applied to him but not other investigators on the team.After the arrest, though, his role in the case was recognized with a plaque from his superiors featuring a quotation from Sherlock Holmes: The world is full of obvious things which nobody by chance ever observes. | Business |
Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesDec. 16, 2015Communication today is faster and more ephemeral than ever. We fire off emails, skip the punctuation in our texts, and watch our photos and messages vanish in seconds on Snapchat.Digital tools have made communicating with others easier but not necessarily more thoughtful, and this bothered Sonny Caberwal, an entrepreneur. Were in a rush to make everything disappear, he said.Receiving a physical, handwritten thank-you note or letter these days feels special, but it also requires some work. You have to assemble all the pieces, Mr. Caberwal said including paper, a pen, the recipients address, an envelope and a stamp and then the note has to be written and mailed, all of which is time-consuming. He wanted to enable people to do that more easily, by harnessing technology to create a product that still felt very personal and worth keeping.His company, Bond, harks back to a time of fountain pens, creamy sheets of writing paper and wax-sealed envelopes. Mr. Caberwal, founder and chief executive of the New York City start-up, describes it as the opposite of Snapchat. Bond was started in 2013, and has about 50 full-time employees and several high-profile backers, like Gary D. Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, and the rapper Nasir Jones (known as Nas).Although handwritten notes and cards may seem like artifacts of the 20th century, greeting cards are still a strong business. According to the Greeting Card Association, Americans purchase about 6.5 billion cards a year and annual sales are estimated to be $7 billion to $8 billion. Despite a culture awash in digital communications, the greeting card and stationery industries have not declined precipitously but have remained largely flat, said Patti Stracher, director of the National Stationery Show, an annual trade show and business event for stationery, greeting card and gift companies.One could say the digital age has grown connectivity and expanded the reasons for other forms of personal communication, for a tangible, experiential connection, she saidAt the Greeting Card Associations annual convention in October, nearly every presentation included a discussion of the intersection of digital technology and traditional greeting cards, said Carlos LLans, the organizations president. Were actually finding that social media gives people another opportunity to identify card-worthy occasions, he said. You cant save a Facebook birthday message and put it in a drawer.That overlap of digital and traditional is where Bond lives. The company built its own writing machine, which can produce personalized notes for every customer. Designed by the companys chief technology officer, Kenji Larsen, the machines have robotic arms that can hold a pen, a paintbrush or a marker. The paper is moved around using static electricity rather than a roller so it stays pristine, with no wrinkles or marks. Bond also seals each envelope with wax, adds postage and mails it.Customers can choose from a variety of handwriting styles, or they can have their own handwriting copied and digitized for $500. Each customers original signature is uploaded to Bond via smartphone, to be used on cards and notes. Customers also upload recipients addresses. If an address is unknown, the service will send an email or text message to the recipient asking for it. An invitation-only premium service, Bond Black, costs $1,200 a year and provides clients with a personalized mobile app to send notes in their own handwriting on custom stationery.Many of Bonds biggest customers are commercial, including Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and small independent businesses like professional services firms and real estate brokers. Companies spend $23 billion on customer relationship management tools to understand and have a more personal relationship with their customers. We are the physical implementation of that, Mr. Caberwal said. One Bond client, a Fortune 500 retailer, tested the service by sending personalized thank-you notes to some of its best customers. Those customers, Mr. Caberwal said, ended up spending, on average, $16 more each month after receiving the thank-you note and returned 33 percent less merchandise.Mr. Caberwal followed an unusual path on his way to starting Bond. He was a corporate lawyer, played percussion with the band Thievery Corporation, founded a tea store, modeled for Kenneth Cole and, with his wife, started the online fashion company Exclusively.com in India. That company was acquired by the Indian e-commerce marketplace Flipkart. By that time he, his wife and their young daughter were back in New York, and Mr. Caberwal was looking to start another company. Thats really what I know how to do best, he said, build e-commerce companies.Bond now has 200 robotic writing machines in its Manhattan facilities (although the machines are manufactured at a plant it owns in Rhinebeck, N.Y.), and it also produces its own stationery. The company raised a few million in seed funding, Mr. Caberwal said, and is in the midst of an effort to raise $3 million. By the end of the year, Bond expects to have about $500,000 a month in sales, he said, adding that revenue has been growing from 30 to 50 percent a month. Mr. Caberwal said he expected Bond to be profitable by the second quarter of 2016. A single card costs $3.50, but for corporate customers with larger orders, the price ranges from $2 to $2.50 a card.Jason Hirschhorn, founder and chief executive of the New York start-up Redef, which provides curated information streams, began using Bonds services this summer. They are using robotics in a very clever way, Mr. Hirschhorn said. I dont have a lot of time, but I like the idea of being able to use personalized stationery in my own hand, using my own words, all done remotely for me. And its all in my computer, so I can track what Ive done.Saneel Radia, founder and president of Finch15, a New York firm that helps companies develop new products and services, uses Bonds service early in his relationships with customers and business partners. At first Mr. Radia had his own handwriting duplicated but then switched to one of the styles offered by Bond. I hate what my handwriting looks like, so I upgraded it, he said. Now its an odd mix of creative and energetic, handwriting I wish I had.Mr. Radia said people often thanked him for the notes they received, and he readily admitted that a robot had written them. People hire us because we are at the intersection of service and technology, he said. Bond, like us, is also at that intersection, so using the service shows that our company has its finger on the pulse of what is new and useful in this space.Mr. Radia said although the cards created by Bond are not actually handwritten, they are still a far cry from an email or a mass-produced thank-you note.Youre giving someone something that took time and is work not the same amount of work as mailing a letter you wrote yourself, but more than a text message that says, Thanks for the meeting, Mr. Radia said. Its thoughtful, and it is my sentiments. And it comes in an envelope with a wax seal, which certainly helps. | Business |
Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesNov. 10, 2018HONG KONG An exiled Chinese novelist spoke at a literary festival in Hong Kong on Saturday, two days after his appearance had been briefly canceled in a move that was widely seen as the latest erosion of freedoms in the semiautonomous city.The writer, Ma Jian, whose appearances at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival were reinstated at the last minute, said the reversal proves the failure of self-censorship.Mr. Ma, a British citizen who lives in exile in London, said on Saturday that a robust literary culture helps to safeguard the bottom line of our civilization.Of course there is no way literature can resist a political force, he told reporters at a hastily arranged news conference. But he said that in fiction we find our real roots: the goodness of human nature.There had been concern that Mr. Ma might be taking a security risk by even traveling to Hong Kong, where a few booksellers who published titles critical of Chinas Communist government have disappeared in recent years, only to turn up in custody on the Chinese mainland.Mr. Mas appearances at the Tai Kwun Center for Heritage and Arts were thrown into doubt on Thursday when the venue said it would not host them. Mr. Mas books have been banned in mainland China since 1987, and he says his new novel, the biting satire China Dream, is a political allegory of the countrys modern self.We do not want Tai Kwun to become a platform to promote the political interests of any individual, Timothy Calnin, the centers director, said in a statement on Thursday. We have therefore worked closely with the Hong Kong International Literary Festival to find a more suitable alternative venue.Tai Kwun reversed course on Friday, saying it had reconsidered our position in light of the possibility that these events might be prevented from taking place altogether.Yet it was unclear on Friday whether Mr. Ma, who previously lived in Hong Kong and has permanent resident status here, would even be allowed to enter the city when his flight landed that evening.He later said on Twitter that he would be speaking at the festival as a novelist, which is my only identity, and that he was not a politician. But anyone who has ever read me knows that my books are deeply political, and China Dream is no exception, he added. All literature is political, whether the writer intends it to be or not.Phillipa Milne, the festivals director, told reporters on Saturday that its goal was to promote Hong Kongs literary arts while also supporting the principles of free speech by providing a platform for a diverse spectrum of inspirational local and international writers. She did not take questions.The festival came amid growing concerns about Hong Kongs future as a haven for rule of law and civil rights in Asia. Last week, for example, the political cartoonist Badiucao, whose works satirize leaders of mainland China and Hong Kong, called off a solo exhibition in Hong Kong after receiving threats from the Chinese authorities.On Thursday, the Hong Kong authorities denied entry as a visitor to Victor Mallet, an editor at The Financial Times, a few weeks after he was expelled from the city. Mr. Mallets expulsion was widely seen as retaliation for his role in hosting a talk with a local independence advocate at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Hong Kong in August.On Saturday, Mr. Ma declined to directly answer a question about whether he felt safe in Hong Kong, but he noted that he had informed the British authorities of his travel plans. I know if I ever disappear, they will look for me, he added.Emily Lau, a former Democratic Party member of Hong Kongs Legislative Council, said the back-and-forth over Mr. Mas appearances created an emotional roller coaster for many people in the city.Ms. Lau said she believed the Hong Kong Jockey Club, which finances and operates the Tai Kwun center, had faced political pressure to cancel Mr. Mas visit, and that the reversal of the cancellation was not much of a victory because it had already set a damaging precedent.In Hong Kong weve never had democracy, but we enjoy freedoms, she said. Now it seems our freedoms are being taken away.A spokeswoman for the Jockey Club did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday evening.Mr. Ma, 65, has been barred from entering mainland China since 2011, and he spoke at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival as recently as 2013.He was back this year to speak at a panel discussion on Hong Kong literature and to promote China Dream, whose title refers to the signature catchphrase of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. The book, published in Britain this month, charts the disintegration of a Chinese official who is haunted by his violent past.On Saturday evening, Mr. Ma told a packed auditorium that the totalitarian society that George Orwell had described in his dystopian novel 1984 had now been completely and totally realized in China. He also said he saw repression and propaganda in the Chinese mainland today that was eerily similar to that of the Cultural Revolution.He said he feared that building the China dream that Mr. Xi envisions would require erasing Chinas recent history.If we ignore history, what follows will be something even more horrible, he said. | World |
Credit...Emma Howells/The New York TimesJune 27, 2018Democrats searching for sparks of progressive energy see the ascent of Benjamin T. Jealous in Maryland as an encouraging electoral sign.Mr. Jealous, the former head of the N.A.A.C.P., is an ally of Senator Bernie Sanders who had campaigned for governor on single-payer health care and tuition-free college, among other Sanders-like positions. On Tuesday, he emerged from a crowded Democratic primary field by beating a more moderate candidate, Rushern Baker, by more than 10 percentage points.Along with the seismic triumph of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, his victory signaled enthusiasm behind Democratic candidates who are further to the left than many incumbents and added to the debate about how their positions will affect the partys chances in general elections.Whatever Mr. Jealouss odds of victory are in November, at the moment hes widely seen as an underdog to the popular incumbent governor, Larry Hogan, a Republican who has enjoyed approval ratings in the 60s and topped out at 71 in January. A Washington Post poll from May 29 to June 3 had Mr. Hogan ahead of Mr. Jealous in a hypothetical election by 12 points.At a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Jealous said that he was unconcerned by the odds, and that winning the primary had itself been a steep climb.You tell us beating Hogan is like beating Everest? Well, we just climbed K2, he said, referring to worlds second-highest mountain. If you can climb K2, you can climb Everest.Mr. Hogan, who has distanced himself from President Trump, moved quickly to portray Mr. Jealous as a free-spending candidate of the extreme left.His risky and irresponsible schemes would require massive middle-class tax hikes that would wreck our economy and put thousands out of work, said Scott Sloofman, Mr. Hogans communications director.If elected, Mr. Jealous would be the first African-American governor of Maryland.Mr. Jealous led the N.A.A.C.P. from 2008 to 2013. The Baltimore Suns editorial board named him Marylander of the Year in 2013, writing that he had brought energy, vision and focus to an organization in need of all three.He is currently a partner at Kapor Capital, an investment firm.He endorsed Mr. Sanders, independent of Vermont, for president during the Democratic primary in February 2016, pledging to increase the senators support among black voters and saying he had the best plan for ending mass incarceration and improving community policing.Martin OMalley, the former governor of Maryland, credited Mr. Jealous with helping to repeal the death penalty and passing the Maryland Dream Act, which helps some undocumented young people with education costs, among other measures.But Mr. OMalley was among several political heavyweights in Maryland to endorse his closest competitor, Mr. Baker, in the primary. On Wednesday, he said by email that Mr. Jealous could win the general election if he speaks to kitchen table issues education, the well-being of Maryland families, the health of our bay, public safety in every neighborhood.While a lot can happen between June and November, Mr. Hogan certainly starts with the better position. He has the incumbency advantage, more campaign funds and high approval ratings. | Politics |