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The Biden administration has quietly undone a Trump policy that severely restricted penalties imposed on facilities that violated safety standards.Credit...Chona Kasinger for The New York TimesPublished July 28, 2021Updated Aug. 19, 2021As the Delta variant raises fresh concerns about the safety of the nations nursing homes, the Biden administration has quietly reversed a controversial Trump policy that had limited the fines levied on facilities that endangered or injured residents.Deaths in nursing homes, which peaked at the end of last year, have plummeted since the introduction of the Covid-19 vaccines. They account for nearly a third of the U.S. pandemics overall death toll.But inadequate staffing, protective equipment shortages and poor infection control remain concerns at the nations 14,000 skilled nursing facilities, advocates and some officials say.And although 81 percent of nursing home residents are vaccinated, only 58 percent of workers are immunized, according to federal data, heightening the risk of outbreaks even among fully vaccinated elderly residents.With the Delta variant driving the recent swell of cases, there are signs of a creeping uptick of infections in nursing homes, particularly among workers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also investigating the source of outbreaks in Colorado nursing homes where there may be low vaccination rates.The policy favoring lower penalties, adopted in 2017 by the Trump administration, directed regulators at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to shift from fining a nursing home for each day it was out of compliance with federal standards. The relaxed policy reduced many penalties to a single fine, effectively lowering amounts from hundreds of thousands of dollars to a maximum of $22,000.The shift sought by the nursing home industry, a powerful lobby was part of the Trump administrations rollback of government regulations across many business sectors.It is the most obvious change the Trump administration made, said Toby Edelman, a senior policy attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy. Its a much, much lower penalty amount.Many of the nursing homes cited for poor infection controls, failing to protect residents from avoidable accidents, neglect, mistreatment and bedsores, are repeat offenders. Larger fines act as a deterrent and are more likely to signal strong enforcement of the rules, Ms. Edelman said.With little fanfare, the Biden administration revoked the earlier guidance on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services website in early July, saying it had determined that the agency should retain the discretion at this time to impose a per-day penalty where appropriate to address specific circumstances of prior noncompliance. Under the new policy, regulators can impose either per-day or per-instance penalties.Consumer groups had challenged the policy in a federal lawsuit in January, arguing the weakening of enforcement put residents at greater risk. The AARP Foundation, which filed the lawsuit along with the firm of Constantine Cannon, applauded the Biden administrations decision. Citing the lawsuit, Medicare officials declined to comment.The main industry trade group, the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living, said in a statement that fines levied on a per-day basis only take precious resources away from an already underfunded industry, especially during an unprecedented time when nursing homes need every support to protect their residents.But critics of the Trump policy say it offered a mere slap on the wrist for nursing homes, even those at the greatest risk for harming patients and workers. A year ago, a nursing home in Washington State, Prestige Post-Acute and Rehab Center at Kittitas in Ellensburg, experienced a major outbreak, where 52 residents and 43 employees were infected, according to a survey conducted for Medicare. Fifteen residents died.ImageCredit...Chona Kasinger for The New York TimesThe facility failed to meet infection control standards for more than a month, according to the survey, inadequately screening employees who fell ill and were potentially infected. A cook who reported being symptomatic to her immediate supervisor was told to continue to come in, while other employees, including a nurse and aide, also kept working despite feeling sick. Employees described haphazard screening attempts.Federal regulators fined Prestige a total of $21,295 in March 2021, using the system of per-instance penalties. If it had been fined per day, the nursing home could have been penalized more than $600,000.Maureen McKinneys husband, known as Buck, was one of the residents who died from the virus at the home in July 2020. I was just horrified, she said when she learned of the fine.Ms. McKinney said she pushed state regulators for an investigation after witnessing testing delays and failures to isolate those who were sick, including when her husbands roommate became ill. I decided I was going to be relentless about it, she said.Prestige Care, which is headquartered in Vancouver, Wash., and operates facilities throughout the western United States, said it relied on regulators to appropriately set and enforce the fines for instances when there are citations, and we work with them to address the issues they cite.The company added, losing members of our community is difficult under any circumstance, and the Covid-19 pandemic has magnified our profound grief over the patients lost to the virus.When the Trump administration directed regulators to fine nursing homes on a per-instance basis, the policy became the norm, said Kelly Bagby, a senior attorney at the AARP Foundation. The lower fines were levied even in cases like at the facility in Washington State, where residents were found to be in what is called immediate jeopardy, at risk for serious harm.The corrosive effect of this change has to be underscored, Ms. Bagby said. | Health |
ItinerariesCredit...Marwan Naamani/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesDec. 14, 2015For the past year, the nations three largest airlines Delta, United and American have waged a relentless campaign to convince the Obama administration that their business is threatened by Persian Gulf-based carriers who receive billions of dollars in state subsidies.The airlines have pressed the administration to freeze all new flights from their three foreign rivals Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways and would ultimately like to change the pacts, known as open skies agreements, that allow unlimited flights between the United States and the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.We recognize how it is a difficult issue for our government to tackle right now, said Doug Parker, the chairman and chief executive of American Airlines. But our country will end up with no global service from U.S. airlines if nothing is done. Thats the threat.But after months of arguments and quiet lobbying, accusations and rebuttals, and millions spent to sway public opinion, the airlines have managed to attract some support, including from their unions. But they have also galvanized their opponents, angered other airlines, airports and consumer advocates who say open skies are good for travelers and business.The campaign has raised questions about the state of the domestic airline industry, which is earning record profits: Have the airlines gained too much power after their mergers and are they now trying to change the rules of the game? More fundamentally, should the nations air service policy favor the interests of a few major domestic carriers or should it preserve open competition for the benefit of the flying public?People are getting very polarized about this, said David Scowsill, the president and chief executive of the World Travel and Tourism Council, a London-based trade and research group. Its a commercial battle between airlines focusing on customers, and airlines whose focus is on profits.Meanwhile, the gulf carriers have added more flights to the United States and increased seat capacity, even as domestic airlines have cut back some of their international service.Since the beginning of the year, Emirates has started a new daily flight to Orlando, Fla., and added second daily flights to Boston and Seattle. The airline now connects 10 cities with its hub in Dubai, and operates a direct flight between New York and Milan.Etihad, which flies six or seven daily flights to the United States, depending on the day, has introduced the Airbus A380 double-decker on one of its two daily flights between Abu Dhabi and New York. And Qatar Airways, which has seven daily flights to Doha, plans to add three new destinations next year Atlanta, Boston and Los Angeles as well as a second daily flight to New York.The American carriers, for their part, said the competition from the gulf carriers has forced them to abandon most flights to the Middle East or India, because they cannot compete with the lower fares offered.Delta said in October that it would drop its only daily flight between Atlanta and Dubai in February, blaming distorted competition from its gulf rivals. United said Wednesday that it would stop flying to Dubai in January. Its announcement came after the General Services Administration chose to award the government contract on flights between Washington and Dubai to JetBlue. The flights, though, will be operated by Emirates, the carriers code-share partner, because JetBlue does not fly to the Middle East.American carriers have also abandoned direct flights to India. United is the only carrier with a nonstop flight between Newark and Mumbai. American Airlines dropped its direct flight between Chicago and New Delhi in 2012, and said it flies only about 20 passengers a day to India from the United States through London. Delta ended its direct flights years ago.Critics warn that meddling with open skies agreements, a mainstay of aviation policy for more than two decades, could lead to reprisals, and produce unintended consequences for airlines that have commercial ties with the gulf carriers or cargo companies that use places like Dubai as global trading hubs.ImageCredit...Andrew Winning/ReutersBreaking up open skies would be so harmful and so shortsighted, said Roger J. Dow, the president of the U.S. Travel Association. If we cut off growth from the three Middle East carriers, we cut off growth to parts of Asia, India and Africa. It would be the biggest mistake wed be making.A rival group of smaller airlines and major air cargo companies came together recently to oppose any attempt to review open skies agreements.Its important to realize this isnt the United States against the U.A.E. and Qatar, it is three U.S. airlines who favor protectionism over competition, the top executives of JetBlue, Hawaiian Airlines, FedEx and Atlas Air wrote in a recent opinion column for The Hill.The gulf carriers dispute that the backing they get from their state-owned shareholders amounts to illegal subsidies, or that they have failed to provide fair and equal opportunity for carriers of each country to compete, as is called for under the agreements.Instead, they described the campaign against them as an attempt by United States airlines to protect their lucrative trans-Atlantic routes, which they operate under joint-venture deals with European airlines.Weve been very clear we dont damage the U.S. airlines, said James Hogan, the chief executive of Etihad Airways. We create access to parts of the world where you dont see American carriers.The administration has said it is examining the case seriously, and could still rule either way.Government officials face a tricky decision that goes well beyond the legal definition of what constitutes a subsidy. They must weigh the economic benefits of trade and tourism generated by the gulf carriers, as well as cargo operations in the gulf, and figure out whether domestic carriers have been harmed by their rivals. Many airlines around the world receive subsidies or backing from their governments, including all of the major Chinese state-owned carriers, for instance.Still, the American carriers are not without their own strengths. Through joint ventures with European airlines they have established routes to Europe that are nearly impregnable, and have been granted antitrust immunity to do so.Also, they face no competition on flights between the United States and China, much of Africa, and South America. And no foreign airline can operate flights within the United States.Any decision is bound to leave some bitterness. Since it involves treaties with foreign countries, the matter is a complex affair involving the secretaries of state, transportation and commerce, as well as trade officials, antitrust officials and White House economic policy officials.Adding to the difficulty, the Department of Justice, which has been investigating whether the big United States airlines have engaged in price collusion, recently suggested that the demands from the big three carriers would result in less choice for consumers.While there are signs that a resolution may be near, a decision could still be pushed down the road. A separate application by Norwegian Air Shuttle to expand low-cost service out of Ireland to the United States has been delayed for two years by the Department of Transportation, a delay that suggests the administration is unwilling to shake up the current airline status quo.Brian F. Havel, the director of the International Aviation Law Institute at DePaul University in Chicago, said that in the end, the administration may favor a compromise, like limiting the number of cities that gulf carriers can fly to.I think the gulf carriers have read the open skies agreement correctly when they say there is no specific provision with respect to subsidies, but there is a section on predatory pricing, Professor Havel said. This has to be sliced and diced cautiously. | Business |
Credit...Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesJune 8, 2017The 86 cancer patients were a disparate group, with tumors of the pancreas, prostate, uterus or bone. One woman had a cancer so rare there were no tested treatments. She was told to get her affairs in order.Still, these patients had a few things in common. All had advanced disease that had resisted every standard treatment.All carried genetic mutations that disrupted the ability of cells to fix damaged DNA. And all were enrolled in a trial of a drug that helps the immune system attack tumors.The results, published on Thursday in the journal Science, are so striking that the Food and Drug Administration already has approved the drug, pembrolizumab, brand name Keytruda, for patients whose cancers arise from the same genetic abnormality.It is the first time a drug has been approved for use against tumors that share a certain genetic profile, whatever their location in the body. Tens of thousands of cancer patients each year could benefit.This is absolutely brilliant, said Dr. Jos Baselga, physician in chief at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, which has just hired the studys lead investigator, Dr. Luis A. Diaz Jr.After taking pembrolizumab, 66 patients had their tumors shrink substantially and stabilize, instead of continuing to grow. Among them were 18 patients whose tumors vanished and have not returned.There was no control group, which meant the results had to be absolutely compelling to be convincing. The study started in 2013 and is funded by philanthropies; the drugmakers only role was to supply the drug. The study is continuing.The drug, made by Merck, is already on the market for select patients with a few types of advanced lung, melanoma and bladder tumors. It is expensive, costing $156,000 a year.A test for the mutations targeted by the drug is already available, too, for $300 to $600.Just 4 percent of cancer patients have the type of genetic aberration susceptible to pembrolizumab. But that adds up to a lot of patients: as many as 60,000 each year in the United States alone, the studys investigators estimated.Clinicians have long been accustomed to classifying cancers by their location in the body patients are diagnosed with lung cancer, for example, or brain cancer.Yet researchers have been saying for years that what matters was the genetic mutation causing the tumors. At first, they were certain they would be able to cure cancers with drugs that zeroed in on the mutations, wherever the tumors were lodged.But cancers were more complicated than that, said Dr. Drew M. Pardoll, director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute and an author of the new paper.A mutation that appeared in half of all melanomas, for example, turned out to be rare in other cancers. And even when scientists pinpointed that mutation in 10 percent of colon cancers, the drug that worked for melanoma patients did not work for other cancer patients.It was a great dream, Dr. Pardoll sighed.The new study was based on a different idea. The immune system can recognize cancer cells as foreign and destroy them. But tumors deflect the attack by shielding proteins on their surface, making them invisible to the immune system.Pembrolizumab is a new type of immunotherapy drug known as a PD-1 blocker, which unmasks the cancer cells so that the immune system can find and destroy them.The drug is the happy result of a failed trial. A nearly identical drug, nivolumab, was given to 33 colon cancer patients, and just one showed any response but his cancer vanished altogether.What was special about that one patient?Dr. Diaz, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins until now, and lead author of the new study, found the answer: a genetic mutation that prevented the tumor from repairing DNA damage.As a result, the mans cancer cells contained a plethora of mutated genes, which produced thousands of strange-looking proteins on the surfaces of the cells. Once the tumors cloaking mechanism was short-circuited by the drug, the mans immune system had no trouble targeting the foreign proteins on the cancer cells.That led to the idea for the Dr. Diazs new study. He and his colleagues sought patients whose tumors had the same genetic defect, which can arise in any of four genes in a pathway that repairs damaged DNA. They gave these patients a PD-1 blocker and were surprised by the results.The drugs effects have been so durable that the investigators do not know how long the results should be expected to persist or how long these patients might expect to survive. That kind of result, Dr. Baselga said, is insane.One patient in the study, Adrienne Skinner, 60, of Larchmont, N.Y., had an extraordinarily rare and deadly cancer, ampullary cancer, that arises at the end of the bile duct. There is no standard treatment, and the prognosis is dire.Her doctors scheduled her for a drastic surgery that removes part of the pancreas, part of the small intestine, and the gall bladder. But her surgeon canceled the operation when he discovered her cancer had invaded her liver.She tried chemotherapy instead six months of one kind, then six months of another. Neither worked.Then she qualified for Dr. Diazs clinical trial at Johns Hopkins. On April 15, 2014, Ms. Skinner had her first dose of the drug.In July, her doctor inserted an endoscope for another biopsy. He turned to Ms. Skinner and said, If someone hadnt told me you have ampullary cancer, I would not have known. The tumor was gone.The trial involved giving patients the drug for two years, so Ms. Skinner continued to take the drug as a sort of insurance. Last year, she stopped, and her cancer has not returned.In effect, I was cured within months, she said. I have a great life.But even this promising trial has left a thread dangling: Why didnt all of the patients respond?There is now a fervid search for the answer. Multiple labs are looking like crazy, Dr. Balsega said. | Health |
Credit...Elaine Thompson/Associated PressJune 25, 2018WASHINGTON The Supreme Court on Monday said it would not consider sequels to its decisions this month on a baker who refused to serve a gay couple and on challenges to voting maps warped by politics.In a pair of one-sentence orders, the court instead sent appeals in similar disputes back to lower courts for further proceedings, passing up opportunities to clarify its inconclusive rulings in some of the most closely watched cases this term.One order told a lower court to reconsider the case of a florist in Washington State who had refused to create a floral arrangement for a same-sex wedding. The justices vacated a decision against the florist from the Washington Supreme Court and instructed it to take a fresh look at the dispute in light of this months ruling in a similar dispute involving the baker, Jack Phillips of Colorado.The case, Arlenes Flowers v. State of Washington, No. 17-108, started in 2013, when the florist, Barronelle Stutzman, turned down a request from a longtime customer, Robert Ingersoll, to provide flowers for his wedding to another man, Curt Freed. Ms. Stutzman said her religious principles did not allow her to do so.She said she should not have to participate in same-sex weddings, which had been recognized in Washington the previous year.Since 2012, same-sex couples all over the state have been free to act on their beliefs about marriage, Ms. Stutzman wrote, but because I follow the Bibles teaching that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, I am no longer free to act on my beliefs.The couple and the state both sued, and they won in the state courts.The Washington Supreme Court ruled that Ms. Stutzman had violated a state anti-discrimination law by refusing to provide the floral arrangement. This case is no more about access to flowers than civil rights cases in the 1960s were about access to sandwiches, the court said, quoting from the plaintiffs brief.The Supreme Court had put the Washington case on hold while it considered the one from Colorado. But it ended up deciding the Colorado case on narrow grounds specific to the dispute, saying the baker there had faced religious hostility from members of a state civil rights commission that had ruled against him.There were no similar factors in the Washington case, Bob Ferguson, Washingtons attorney general, said in a statement. The court specifically found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commissions treatment of that case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the religious beliefs of the business owner, Mr. Ferguson said. We are confident Washington courts showed no such hostility.The meaning and sweep of the Colorado case are contested, but at least one court has already determined that it reaffirmed protections for gay men and lesbians who had been subject to discrimination by businesses open to the public. On June 7, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that a company that sells cards and decorations for weddings had violated a Phoenix anti-discrimination ordinance by refusing to supply custom goods to a same-sex union.The ruling quoted at length from Justice Anthony M. Kennedys majority opinion in the Colorado case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Our society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth, Justice Kennedy wrote in one of the quoted passages. For that reason the laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect them in the exercise of their civil rights.ImageCredit...Elaine Thompson/Associated PressThe Supreme Court also passed up an opportunity on Monday to take another look at whether the Constitution bars extreme partisan gerrymandering, returning a case from North Carolina to a trial court there for a further examination of whether the challengers had suffered the sort of direct injury that would give them standing to sue.The move followed two decisions last week that sidestepped the main issues in partisan gerrymandering cases from Wisconsin and Maryland.The new case was an appeal from a decision in January by a three-judge panel of a Federal District Court in North Carolina. The ruling found that Republican legislators there had violated the Constitution by drawing the districts to hurt the electoral chances of Democratic candidates.The decision was the first from a federal court to strike down a congressional map as a partisan gerrymander.The judges noted that the legislator responsible for drawing the map had not disguised his intentions. I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats, said the legislator, Representative David Lewis, a Republican. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.The plan worked. In 2016, the court said, Republican congressional candidates won 53 percent of the statewide vote. But they won in 10 of the 13 congressional districts, or 77 percent of them.The Supreme Court blocked the trial courts ruling in January, and it took no action on an appeal from state officials while it considered the Wisconsin and Maryland cases.After the court issued decisions in those cases on June 18, lawyers for the challengers filed supplemental briefs arguing that the new case, Rucho v. Common Cause, No. 17-1295, was not infected by the technical problems that stood in the way of decisions in the cases from Wisconsin and Washington.The Supreme Court has ruled that racial gerrymandering can violate the Constitution. But it has never struck down a voting map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.In another development on Monday, the court said it would not hear an appeal from Brendan Dassey, a Wisconsin man whose case was featured in a Netflix documentary series, Making a Murderer. The series included excerpts from a videotaped confession from Mr. Dassey, who was 16 at the time and has significant mental limitations.Prompted by investigators, Mr. Dassey confessed to rape and murder. Based almost solely on the confession, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.Mr. Dasseys lawyers had urged the Supreme Court to use the case, Dassey v. Dittmann, No. 17-1172, as an opportunity to instruct lower courts about how to evaluate confessions obtained from juveniles and people with mental deficits. The court turned down the request without comment. | Politics |
Health|Zika Warning Is Issued Over Sperm Banks in the Miami Areahttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/health/zika-miami-sperm-banks.htmlCredit...Alan Diaz/Associated PressMarch 13, 2017Women who are considering trying to become pregnant with semen from sperm banks in the Miami-Dade County area of Florida should consider the possibility that sperm collected as far back as mid-June might be infected with the Zika virus, federal health officials said Monday.The officials said the new warning was driven by caution, not by any evidence of infected semen from sperm banks or of babies with Zika-linked brain damage who were conceived with donated sperm.The officials said a recent analysis of Zika cases in Florida found some cases in which Health Department investigators could not determine the exact place infection occurred. And since Zika has been found to persist in semen for up to six months, there is a small potential risk of Zika virus transmission associated with exposure to semen from male residents in the Florida tri-county area of Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward Counties since June 15, 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement.At a news briefing, Dr. Peter W. Marks, the director of the Food and Drug Administrations Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said, When semen is donated, it can be stored frozen for significant periods of time, and that doesnt necessarily inactivate the Zika virus.Dr. Matthew J. Kuehnert, the director of the C.D.C.s Office of Blood, Organ and Other Tissue Safety, said at the briefing that there have been no suspected cases from donor semen, but that an analysis found cases of people who are residents of Palm Beach County and Broward County in which the exposure was uncertain.As a result, said Dr. Denise Jamieson, the incident commander of the C.D.C.s Zika emergency response, Some people in the area may have not realized they are at risk.Dr. Jamieson said the agency was also extending the time frame of potential concern from July 29, when officials identified cases of suspected local transmission in that area of Florida, back to June 15, the date of the agencys first Zika travel advisory regarding pregnant women. She said that since then, about 85,000 women had become pregnant in the tri-county area, including about 5,000 who might have used fertility methods like intrauterine insemination.According to the Florida Health Department, there have been 280 cases of locally transmitted Zika infection in Florida and an additional 38 cases in which the transmission location is undetermined.Dr. Marks said there was not yet a licensed test that the counties 12 sperm banks could use to detect Zika virus in semen. So, he said, if youre a woman who is considering using donated semen samples that have been collected during this period of time, you need to have a conversation with your provider about potential benefits and risks of using it. | Health |
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/technology/personaltech/how-to-take-better-pet-portraits.htmlTech TipEven if you dont have an expensive camera, you can capture memorable images with your smartphone, the right software and a few tricks.Credit...J.D. BiersdorferOct. 21, 2020Much of the internet seems to be made of animal photos, especially pictures of cats. If it all makes you want a decent portrait of your own pet for posterity and you cant afford a professional photographer just grab your smartphone.Many recent phone models include all the hardware and software you need to take a great picture of your friend. Youll also want to consider factors like location and lighting. And remember: Let the pet rule the photo session, and never agitate or distress the animal just wait for his or her personality to shine through the camera lens. Heres a guide.Step 1: Make a PlanDecide where you would like to create your portrait. Depending on the animal, you may get better results if you take the photo in a familiar place where your pet is likely to be calm.If youre going for the portrait studio approach, try taking the photos during a time of day when your animal is more relaxed, like right after a meal or on the edge of nap time. Once you pick a spot, remove as much clutter from the background as you can. A sheet or bit of fabric hung up as a backdrop can also keep the focus on your subject.If youd rather capture the animals natural bounce and liveliness, take your camera along during a regular park stroll or backyard romp so you can snap away.ImageCredit...J.D. BiersdorferDont forget to factor in plenty of time and patience. Animals can be unpredictable or uncooperative, so take your cues from the creature. It may take dozens of shots (or another session) to get your perfect picture.Step 2: See the LightWhen setting up your smartphone shot, avoid firing the flash. The unexpected pop may startle your pet, and the glare reflected in the back of the animals retinas usually creates eerie red or green eyes.ImageCredit...J.D. BiersdorferNatural light outdoors or from a window often works best. If youre taking the pictures indoors, you can gently brighten the area with inexpensive clip-on lamps, but be mindful of where the shadows land and adjust the lighting positions accordingly.Step 3: Set Your CameraWhile not as powerful as a digital S.L.R. cameras, smartphone camera technology has greatly improved in the last decade. With a recent phone, you can get some of the same looks for your photos, like using the portrait mode to keep the foreground subject in sharp focus while gently blurring the background. Many of Apples iPhone models and Googles Pixel phones support a portrait mode; phones by Samsung and other manufacturers have similar settings.ImageCredit...J.D. BiersdorferSome camera apps have a burst mode, which captures a rapid series of shots when you hold down the shutter button so you can later pick the best photo of the bunch from the camera roll. In Apples iOS 14 camera app, you can take a burst by holding down the phones Volume Up button. Googles current Pixel phones have a burstlike Top Shot feature.Before you start your session, make sure your camera app is set to take photos at the highest possible image resolution.Step 4: Posing the PetNow its time to actually take some pictures. Dont be afraid to try creative angles. But positioning yourself on the pets level and focusing the camera on the animals eyes often makes for a soulful portrait.ImageCredit...J.D. BiersdorferTaking pet photos is often easier if you have help. While you handle the camera, the other person can keep the animal engaged by supplying treats or focus with a favorite toy.ImageCredit...The New York TimesIf its just you and the pet, consider using a tripod with a shutter timer so you can work with the animal right before the photo; Apple, Google and Samsung have timers in their camera apps. Remote shutter controls that connect to your phone via Bluetooth are another option, and pressing the volume button on Apples corded headphones also sets off the iPhone cameras shutter. And some voice assistant apps can take photos on command.Step 5: Editing Your ShotsNow that you have your photos, its time to make them even better. Most camera apps include tools to straighten crooked framing and enhance color and exposure. And the cropping tool is great for eliminating unwanted background elements.ImageCredit...J.D. BiersdorferIf your images need more help than your default software offers, look for a third-party app with features like a healing brush tool for removing flyaway fur. And dont forget the power of filters to give your photo a whole new look and feel. Even if a shot is slightly fuzzy or the color is off, you can get really creative and even make art out of your pet portraits. | Tech |
Asia Pacific|Former Top Military Official in China Took Huge Bribes, Inquiry Findshttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/world/asia/guo-boxiong-china-bribery-inquiry.htmlApril 5, 2016Credit...Oliver Weiken/European Pressphoto AgencyHONG KONG Prosecutors in China have completed an investigation of the former top military officer in the country, finding that he and his relatives took huge bribes, the official state news agency Xinhua reported on Tuesday.Military prosecutors found that the former general, Guo Boxiong, 73, who served as Chinas foremost military official for a decade until his retirement in 2012, took bribes in exchange for helping other officers win promotions or transfers, Xinhua reported. General Guo candidly confessed to taking bribes, it said in coverage of the case written in question-and-answer form.The investigations findings paved the way for a trial and was a procedural step toward a guilty verdict for General Guo. In July, he was placed under investigation and was stripped of his Communist Party membership.His prosecution illustrates the lengths to which President Xi Jinping, who also serves as chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party, will go to purge the Peoples Liberation Army of corruption.The two top military officers under Hu Jintao, Mr. Xis predecessor, who both served on the partys 25-member Politburo, have been expelled from the party on suspicion of graft. General Guos former colleague on the Politburo, Gen. Xu Caihou, was also facing trial on bribery charges but he died of cancer early last year.Guo Boxiongs family members and others who are suspected of committing crimes will be dealt with according to laws and facts, as well as evidence, and there will be zero tolerance, the Xinhua report said.Dozens of other senior military officials have been felled in the anticorruption campaign, which has taken place alongside a reorganization of the army and continued increases in military spending. | World |
Kellyanne Conway At War With Trump's Chief of Staff ... Over Super Bowl 1/29/2018 SplashNews.com Infighting at the White House ... and it's all over Super Bowl LII! Don't worry, it's all in good fun -- but Kellyanne Conway says she's got an enemy at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. for the next week ... Trump's chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly! Turns out, Kellyanne's a lifelong Eagles fan (she grew up outside Philly) and she's picking the Birds to beat the Patriots on Sunday. Gen. John Kelly is a South Boston guy ... he's ride or die Tom Brady. The big question ... who's Trump rooting for? He's been tight with Bob Kraft for years but had a falling out with TB12 in 2017. So, could Trump and Kellyanne be on the same page on Sunday? | Entertainment |
Credit...Richard Sennott/Star Tribune, via Associated PressMarch 14, 2017WARSAW The Polish government will seek the extradition of a 98-year-old Ukrainian-American who prosecutors say carried out Nazi-led atrocities in 1944 that killed scores of civilians.The family of the man, Michael Karkoc, who entered the United States in 1949 and now lives in a nursing home in Minneapolis, says that he is innocent of the charges and that he has dementia and is not fit to stand trial.In a June 2013 investigation, The Associated Press reported that Mr. Karkoc, then 94, had commanded the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion, which carried out mass killings in villages in eastern Poland and helped suppress the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.Mr. Karkoc did not tell the federal authorities in 1949 that he had worked for the legion and, later, for the SS Galician Division, both of which were on a list of organizations whose members were forbidden to enter the United States, The A.P. reported.In a subsequent article in November 2013, The A.P., citing files from the Ukrainian intelligence agencys archive, reported that a private under Mr. Karkocs command testified in 1968 that Mr. Karkoc had ordered an assault on the village of Chlaniow as retribution for the killing of an SS major. The village was razed.In a Ukrainian-language memoir published in 1995, Mr. Karkoc said he had helped found the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion in 1943, in collaboration with Nazi officers, to fight on behalf of Germany and against the Soviet Union.The A.P.s articles led to investigations in Germany and Poland. German prosecutors ended their investigation in 2015, saying Mr. Karkoc was unfit to stand trial, but the Polish inquiry continued.In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Robert Janicki, an official with the Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes Against the Polish Nation, said there was no doubt that the man living in Minnesota was the same man who carried out the pacification of the villages in the Lubelskie region in 1944, referring to Chlaniow and the nearby village of Wladyslawin. More than 40 civilians were killed.Mr. Janicki referred to the man as Michael K., citing Polish privacy laws. We have also discovered a signature of Michael K. on documents related to the unit from that time, he said. Our forensic experts have determined that this is a signature of the man who lives in the States.The commission, which is part of the countrys Institute of National Remembrance, a body that has prosecutorial powers and is tasked with investigating Nazi- and Soviet-era crimes, filed a request on Monday to a court in Lublin for a temporary arrest warrant for the man. The warrant would be the first step toward requesting extradition, Mr. Janicki said.In Washington, Nicole Navas, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said that while the department took all credible allegations of participation in World War II Nazi crimes very seriously, it did not comment on extradition requests.The charges carry a potential term of life in prison. Mr. Janicki rejected the argument that prosecuting Mr. Karkoc would be pointless given his age and health. First of all, age is not a factor when it comes to bringing anyone to justice, he said. As for the state of his health, that will be for expert witnesses to determine.The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a human rights organization, has criticized Poland for not doing more to track down those who committed atrocities during the Nazi era. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Germans killed 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during the war, along with at least three million Polish Jews.Mr. Janicki acknowledged the criticisms, but said it took time to assemble evidence. Its incredibly difficult to gather the necessary evidence to put someone on trial today, he said. It requires international cooperation, and it takes years to reconcile all the efforts. But it doesnt mean that its not worth pursuing.Some say that its too late to hunt the criminals down, but I dont think it is, he added. The case of Michael K. proves that. Besides, try telling its too late to a woman who as a girl was hiding in a field, watching her parents being executed.Mr. Karkocs son and spokesman, Andriy Karkoc, said in an interview on Tuesday in Minneapolis that his father was not guilty.My father is an innocent 98-year-old man who never did anything wrong, Mr. Karkoc said, adding that his father was a victim of German reprisals against Ukrainian resistance fighters.At a restaurant near the Ukrainian Orthodox Church where many family weddings had taken place, Andriy Karkoc, 63, said the allegations had been deeply painful for the family, even though his father had scoffed at them. He lived a public life here in Minnesota, Andriy Karkoc said. We have fought for human rights. If he was a Nazi, why would he do that?Michael Karkoc, an ethnic Ukrainian, was born in the city of Lutsk on March 6, 1919. Claimed by Czarist Russia in the late 18th century, the area became part of Poland after World War I, was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and was occupied by the Germans in 1941. Since 1945, it has been part of Ukraine.After the war, Mr. Karkoc ended up in a camp for displaced people in Neu-Ulm, Germany. His first wife died in 1948, a year before he and their two sons immigrated to the United States, where he worked as a carpenter, remarried and had four more children. | World |
Infections in vaccinated Americans are rare, compared with those in unvaccinated people, the document said. But when they occur, vaccinated people may spread the virus just as easily. Credit...Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated PressPublished July 30, 2021Updated Sept. 28, 2021The Delta variant is much more contagious, more likely to break through protections afforded by the vaccines and may cause more severe disease than all other known versions of the virus, according to an internal presentation circulated within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the agency, acknowledged on Tuesday that vaccinated people with so-called breakthrough infections of the Delta variant carry just as much virus in the nose and throat as unvaccinated people, and may spread it just as readily, if less often.But the internal document lays out a broader and even grimmer view of the variant.The Delta variant is more transmissible than the viruses that cause MERS, SARS, Ebola, the common cold, the seasonal flu and smallpox, and it is as contagious as chickenpox, according to the document, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.The immediate next step for the agency is to acknowledge the war has changed, the document said. Its contents were first reported by The Washington Post on Thursday evening.The documents tone reflects alarm among C.D.C. scientists about Deltas spread across the country, said a federal official who has seen the research described in the document. The agency is expected to publish additional data on the variant on Friday.The C.D.C. is very concerned with the data coming in that Delta is a very serious threat that requires action now, the official said.There were 71,000 new cases per day on average in the United States, as of Thursday. The new data suggest that vaccinated people are spreading the virus and contributing to those numbers although probably to a far lesser degree than the unvaccinated.Dr. Walensky has called transmission by vaccinated people a rare event, but other scientists have suggested it may be more common than once thought.The agencys new masking guidelines for vaccinated people, introduced on Tuesday, were based on the information presented in the document. The C.D.C. recommended that vaccinated people wear masks indoors in public settings in communities with high transmission of the virus.But the internal document hints that even that recommendation may not go far enough. Given higher transmissibility and current vaccine coverage, universal masking is essential, the document said.The agencys data suggest that people with weak immune systems should wear masks even in places that do not have high transmission of the virus. So should vaccinated Americans who are in contact with young children, older adults, or otherwise vulnerable people.There are roughly 35,000 symptomatic infections per week among 162 million vaccinated Americans, according to data collected by the C.D.C. as of July 24 that was cited in the internal presentation. But the agency does not track all mild or asymptomatic infections, so the actual incidence may be higher.Infection with the Delta variant produces virus amounts in the airways that are tenfold higher than what is seen in people infected with the Alpha variant, which is also highly contagious, the document noted.The amount of virus in a person infected with Delta is a thousandfold more than what is seen in people infected with the original version of the virus, according to one recent study.The C.D.C. document relies on data from multiple studies, including an analysis of a recent outbreak in Provincetown, Mass., which began after the towns Fourth of July festivities. By Thursday, that cluster had grown to 882 cases. About 74 percent were vaccinated, local health officials have said.Detailed analysis of the spread of cases showed that people infected with Delta carry enormous amounts of virus in their nose and throat, regardless of vaccination status, according to the C.D.C. document.This is one of the most impressive examples of citizen science I have seen, said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York. The people involved in the Provincetown outbreak were meticulous in making lists of their contacts and exposures.Infection with the Delta variant may be more likely to lead to severe illness, the document noted. Studies from Canada and Scotland found that people infected with the variant are more likely to be hospitalized, while research in Singapore indicated that they are more likely to require oxygen.Still, the C.D.C.s figures show that the vaccines are highly effective in preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death in vaccinated people, experts said.Overall, Delta is the troubling variant we already knew it was, said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. But the sky isnt falling and vaccination still protects strongly against the worse outcomes. | Health |
A new report from the inspector generals office criticized insurers for overstating patients illnesses without adequate documentation to obtain more federal money. Credit...Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call, via Associated PressDec. 12, 2019A government report released Thursday found health insurance companies had combed through patient charts to obtain billions of dollars of additional payments from the federal Medicare program. The report, from the federal inspector generals office, examined payments billed by insurers for those covered by private Medicare Advantage plans, which are increasingly popular and heavily promoted by the Trump administration. The findings showed that insurers were adding on conditions like diabetes and even cancer, reporting that patients were sicker, to receive higher payments from Medicare. While the inspector generals office did not conclude that insurers were overbilling the program, it raised concerns about whether the payments were justified and whether patients were getting appropriate care.About 21 million people enrolled in these private plans in 2018, accounting for well over a third of those covered under the federal insurance program for those who are over 65 or have disabilities. Of the $711 billion spent last year on the Medicare program, $210 billion went to Medicare Advantage. Not only has the administration increased allocations for the private plans, it also has permitted them to offer more benefits like telemedicine visits and transportation for medical appointments to attract customers. Trump officials have heralded the administrations efforts to expand the private plans as one of its most significant health care achievements. What works in the Medicare program is Medicare Advantage because plans are competing on the basis of cost and quality, driving toward value and increasing choice to beneficiaries, Seema Verma, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a recent speech. Ms. Verma has pointed to the additional number of plans and lower premiums as evidence of the programs success.But Medicare Advantage plans have come under intensive scrutiny for their use of additional diagnoses to justify receiving higher payments from the government. The report cited one Medicare estimate that the program distributed $40 billion in overpayments from 2013 and 2016 to plans that included diagnoses that were not supported by a patients medical records. The Justice Department has brought several lawsuits against health plans for overbilling the government.An earlier report from the inspector generals office also raised concerns about Medicare Advantage, concluding last year that plans were inappropriately denying medical claims as a way to increase profits.The agency has ongoing work in Medicare Advantage, said Linda Ragone, a regional inspector general in Philadelphia and an author of the report. The inspector general conducted the study to examine how health plans were using a patients chart to justify higher payments, and whether Medicare should more closely monitor how the plans used patient information in billing the program and caring for patients, she said.Virtually all of the reviews used by the insurers led to reporting additional diagnoses, like heart disease or cancer, amounting to an additional $6.7 billion in payments in 2017, according to the report.The report also found that almost half of the insurers received higher payments for patient illnesses, although there was no documentation that medical care for those conditions had been provided. The discrepancy could indicate the insurers may not have provided appropriate treatments and services to individuals with serious illnesses, the authors said.Health insurers said the report was based on old and incomplete information, using what is called encounter data rather than an actual review of medical records. It wasnt examining medical care and whether that care or payments were appropriate, said Kristine Grow, a spokeswoman for Americas Health Insurance Plans, a trade association in Washington.But the reports authors said use of that data was accepted by both Medicare and the plans. C.M.S. has been working with the plans to ensure the data is correct, Ms. Ragone said.In its recommendations, the inspector generals report said that Medicare should provide more oversight of the plans use of chart reviews, including audits to verify the addition of patient diagnoses. It also said the agency should consider the effect of allowing the plans to conduct chart reviews that were not linked to actual service records to determine payments.While a spokesman for Medicare raised questions about the reliability of the reports findings, it agreed with the recommendations. The agency will ensure that Medicare Advantage plans submit accurate information, a spokesman said in an emailed statement. [Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.] | Health |
April 5, 2016KABUL, Afghanistan In a compromise bid to unite the ranks after months of infighting, the Talibans new leader has appointed the brother and son of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the movements deceased founder, to senior leadership posts, a spokesman for the insurgent group said on Tuesday.The appointments are the latest move by the supreme Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, to publicly consolidate his authority after a leadership struggle last summer.Facing criticism or outright rebellion from field commanders who distrusted his ties to Pakistan and his handling of the succession, Mullah Mansour brutally quashed breakaway groups and sought to buy the support of other skeptical commanders, all while maintaining a publicity campaign that has portrayed the Taliban as united under his command, according to interviews with Taliban members. They spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid angering Mullah Mansour. Now, the announcement that he had formally brought two of the most influential skeptics back into the fold Mullah Abdul Manan, the brother of Mullah Omar; and Mullah Muhammad Yaqoub, the founders son was expected to help bring other dissenters into line right as the Talibans annual offensive is expected to pick up momentum in Afghanistan.A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, said in a phone interview on Tuesday that Mullah Manan and Mullah Yaqoub would both take seats on the Talibans senior leadership council, widely known as the Quetta Shura, as well as other posts.In addition to having membership in the leadership council, the leadership appointed Manan as head of Preaching and Guidance Commission, and Yaqoub as military commander responsible for 15 provinces in Afghanistan, Mr. Ahmadi said.Both Mullah Manan and Mullah Yaqoub had been critical of what they saw as Mullah Mansours manipulation of his ascent to supreme Taliban leader last July, accusing him of rigging the selection process that made him the new Amir ul-Momineen, or commander of the faithful. Other Taliban leaders have accused Mullah Mansour of covering up Mullahs Omars death for at least two years as he consolidated his grip over the movement.After initial vocal opposition, Mullah Manan and Mullah Yaqoub remained quiet for months as Taliban leaders and religious clerics went back and forth trying to mediate between the camps.Threats, violence and resource-bullying have also come into play over the past year.Mullah Mansour Dadullah, a Taliban commander who insisted that he would not accept Mullah Mansours authority, was killed along with many of his men after heavy fighting in Zabul Province last year. Mullah Rasool, another leader of the splinter group, has reportedly been detained by the Pakistani military, elements of which are seen as having close ties to Mullah Mansours Taliban.More recently, Mullah Mansour has extended his crackdown on dissidents into several districts in Helmand Province, according to Mullah Abdul Manan Niazi, a spokesman for Mullah Rasools breakaway faction.For the last three days, some of our people engaged with Mansours Taliban in Helmand and there were some casualties, Mullah Niazi said. Mansour is trying to eliminate every single person in his control area that he suspects.It has helped that Mullah Mansour has long cornered the insurgencys resources, controlling its overseas fund-raising and much of its profits from the opium trade. Some commanders described how Mullah Mansour has threatened to cut off resources to dissenters, bringing many in line.Last week, another powerful and disenchanted Taliban commander, Mullah Qayoum Zakir, was also reported to have finally pledged allegiance to the new leader. A former head of the insurgents military commission, Mullah Zakir was long seen as a rival to Mullah Mansour. For months after the leadership announcement, Mullah Zakir refused to pledge allegiance, though fighters loyal to him continued to fight alongside Mullah Mansours forces, according to Afghan officials and Taliban commanders.What probably pushed Mullah Zakirs hand was that in recent months several of his commanders in Helmand felt the scarcity of resources and switched to establishing direct channels to Mullah Mansour, Taliban commanders said.However, the handwritten letter of allegiance by Mullah Zakir that the Taliban published on their website was reserved in its tone, and suggested that his pledge was conditional and came only after an agreement to fix differences between him and Mullah Mansour that had Shariah basis a reference to Islamic law that seemed meant to slight Mullah Mansours religious credentials. In another internal letter, Mullah Zakir spelled things out a little more: While Mullah Omars word had carried unanimous authority, the new leadership needed to lay out clear guidelines for everything under Shariah law, seemingly opening the door for internal dissent on religious principle.Seeking to shore up his claim to religious leadership of the Taliban, Mullah Mansour has in recent months sent groups of preachers on a special mission to Helmand, according to one commander in Musa Qala district, Mullah Aziz Mutmain. In addition to regular sermons on the sanctity of jihad, Taliban fighters have also been reminded to obey their superiors and particularly the newly appointed Amir ul-Momineen, he said.Mullah Mansours continuing efforts to consolidate power are also being seen by some Afghan officials as another bad sign for the governments efforts to bring the Taliban to peace talks.The idea of immediate talks is keenly unpopular among many senior Taliban commanders, particularly given their recent success on the battlefield. Even with his recent success in gaining support, Mullah Mansour is unlikely to take a chance on talks anytime soon, Taliban officials said.Still, the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, had declared that new progress on peace talks over the winter was a crucial step to try to head off another disastrous year of fighting against a resurgent Taliban. At the heart of Mr. Ghanis effort was a quadrilateral process, also involving Pakistan, the United States and China, that hinged on persuading the Pakistani military to pressure the Taliban to come to talks. Elements of the military have long sheltered the Talibans senior leadership, and Mullah Mansours links to Pakistani military intelligence were seen as instrumental in his rise to power, according to Afghan and Taliban officials.After the March deadline for face-to-face talks was missed, Mr. Ghanis officials now say they doubt Pakistan took any practical steps.James B. Cunningham, a former United States ambassador to Afghanistan who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said it would be difficult to expect the Taliban at the table if they continue to have free movement in Pakistan.One has to ask what is the best way to convince the Taliban to get into a serious negotiation, to begin to have a discussion about the resolution to the conflict that is going to be much more difficult to achieve if the Taliban continue to enjoy refuge in Pakistan. | World |
Ottawa DispatchCredit...Dave Chan for The New York TimesNov. 15, 2018OTTAWA At Canadas official residence for its prime minister, security cameras keep silent watch over the fences, visitors pass through gates that can block truck bombs and a detail of uniformed Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers patrol day and night.But the prime minister himself is unlikely to be found inside.When Justin Trudeau became prime minister three years ago, he took a pass on moving his family into the official residence at 24 Sussex Drive, built in 1868 by an American-born lumber baron. Decades of neglect had turned Canadas top political address into its most famous home renovation project.But no recent prime ministers have been willing to commit the tens of millions of dollars it would take to make the stone house habitable again. It would look as if they were spending money on themselves, a politically toxic step in Canada.Mr. Trudeau, 46, who lived at 24 Sussex as a child when his father was prime minister, is no exception.No prime minister wants to spend a penny of taxpayer dollars on upkeeping that house, Mr. Trudeau told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation earlier this year.There was little criticism of Mr. Trudeaus decision to live with his wife and their three children in Rideau Cottage, a relatively modest, two-story red brick house behind Rideau Hall, the house of Canadas governor general who fulfills Queen Elizabeth IIs duties as head of state.Thats because the official residences deteriorating condition is no secret to Canadians, with government reports documenting its decline for more than a decade.ImageCredit...Dave Chan for The New York TimesThose reports make grim reading for anyone but a contractor hoping to land the renovation job.The building systems at 24 Sussex have reached the point of imminent or actual failure, one report, by the National Capital Commission, the federal agency that manages official residences, found this year. It rated the residences condition as critical.Its wiring, according to the report, has become a fire hazard; the boiler is obsolete; the exterior stonework is crumbling; and the plumbing blocks up regularly.The building by a pool added by Mr. Trudeaus father is rotting, the report said, and air-conditioning comes from inefficient window units that could make it easy for intruders to slip in. Many of those windows need replacement anyway. Everywhere there is asbestos.On top of all that, the house is ill-suited for official functions. Among the houses many deficiencies, the dining room is at the same time too large for a family and too small for state dinners, the report said.The current cost estimate to deal with everything (excluding security upgrades): 38 million Canadian dollars, or $28.7 million.By Canadian standards that is a vast amount of money for a single-family house even after accounting for its exceptional views over the Ottawa River. And it has prompted something of a national debate over the fate of the current building and the role of the prime ministers house in Canada.[Want more Canadian coverage in your inbox? Subscribe to our weekly Canada Letter newsletter.]For much of Canadas history, prime ministers had no official place to call home.Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister, lived a few doors down from 24 Sussex in a house now used by Britains diplomatic representative to Canada.ImageCredit...Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFER.B. Bennett, a millionaire who was the Conservative prime minister during the height of the Great Depression, kept a 5,000-square-foot suite in the Chteau Laurier, a hotel adjacent to Parliament.The federal government moved to expropriate 24 Sussex in 1943, when it was the last private residence on the street, otherwise occupied by embassies, government buildings and parks.After years of legal wrangling, Louis St. Laurent, a Liberal, reluctantly moved into 24 Sussex in 1951 on the condition that he pay rent to minimize any hint he was freeloading.Despite its condition and space limitations, prime ministers have regularly held important meetings and entertained at 24 Sussex, with larger parties often taking place on its expansive lawn.Formal dinners for visiting heads of state are held at the more spacious Rideau Hall. But Mr. Trudeau has recalled rushing home from school as a child to meet Queen Elizabeth II for lunch at 24 Sussex when she visited Canada.Proponents for fixing up the house, regardless of cost, are a mixed group. The host of one Canadian home renovation program suggested making its remodeling into a reality television show.Paul Martin, a Liberal who was prime minister from 2003 to 2006, said the role of 24 Sussex in Canadas history merits its preservation.It is an important Canadian icon, said Mr. Martin. I do have affection for the house.But Mr. Martin added that his wife, Sheila, who spent more time at 24 Sussex than he did, has less fond memories. Her view is that the house had to be renovated from the bottom up, he said.ImageCredit...Dave Chan for The New York TimesCanadas only female prime minister, Kim Campbell, who held the office for four months in 1993, suggests knocking it down.Her view is held by other Canadians who say building an entirely new house would be cheaper than fixing up the old one. Supporters of designing a new home see a chance to showcase Canadian architecture and to highlight its indigenous heritage in a building that could also set a bar for environmental standards.Is this not an opportunity for Canada to say something different? asked David Lieberman, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Toronto. By opting to update the current residence, we would be preserving a nostalgic past, a colonial past, he said.Recent events have highlighted just how contentious any government spending on the prime ministers home life can be.In Parliament this spring, the opposition Conservatives pounced on a government estimate that it cost 1,500 Canadian dollars, or about $1,100, to use government workers to assemble a new play structure for Mr. Trudeaus children at the prime ministers official country house, in a park north of Ottawa. (Mr. Trudeau paid the $5,600 for the structure itself out of his own pocket.)In 1971, the government stopped charging the prime minister rent for lodging, but Mr. Trudeau pays for his food, internet service and a caregiver for his children.Because the kitchen at Rideau Cottage is meant for a family, not a team of cooks, the kitchen staff for the prime minister still works at the official residence, and the Trudeau familys meals are driven across the street from 24 Sussex, a practice that has aroused indignation from the Conservatives (whose own party leader lives in an official residence reserved for the head of the opposition).Mr. Martin, the former prime minister, said the best solution to the 24 Sussex problem would be for Mr. Trudeau to turn over all the decisions about its future to a group of nonpartisan experts.Still, he welcomed Canadians stinginess when it comes to spending money on their politicians.I think its a good thing, he said. When you take a look at the ethical problems that occur around the world, I think the facts that this is something that a Canadian politician would shy away from is really a sign that Canadians do have their ethical priorities in shape. | World |
Stormy Daniels Axed From Las Vegas Club 1/23/2018 The U.S. government isn't the only thing getting shut down ... Stormy Daniels just got the plug pulled on one of her upcoming club gigs. Stormy had an appearance lined up at Chateau Nightclub in Las Vegas this Friday, but the club canceled it Tuesday morning. The gig coincided with the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in town over the weekend, which would seem like clever marketing for both Stormy and the club, but sources close to Stormy tell us the club didn't want the same media attention as the South Carolina strip club Stormy performed in over the weekend. As we previously reported, Stormy's got gigs lined up through June after her alleged fling with the Prez made her a hot commodity, but it appears most are still going on as planned. In other good news, Stormy's Instagram account is back up and running. | Entertainment |
Credit...William West/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesNov. 9, 2018MELBOURNE, Australia A knife-wielding man was fatally shot by the police in Melbourne on Friday after he stabbed three people, killing one, in what the authorities described as a terrorist attack.Witnesses said the man emerged from a vehicle, which then burst into flames, shortly after 4 p.m. The police said there were gas cylinders in the vehicle. The man then began to attack pedestrians on Bourke Street, a busy shopping strip in Melbournes city center.When officers arrived at the scene, they were confronted by the man brandishing a bloody knife. A video of the confrontation, which circulated on social media, shows a civilian bystander trying to help the police by repeatedly pushing a shopping cart at the man.Someone screamed, I think he has a knife, and I turned around and saw the car on fire, said Meegan May, who was a passenger on a tram that passed the scene of the attack.Officers ultimately shot the man in the chest and arrested him. The man, whose identity has not been disclosed, was taken to a hospital, where he died about 30 minutes later, the police said.We are treating this as a terrorism incident, Graham Ashton, chief commissioner of the Victoria Police, said at a news conference. He said the Somali-born man had been known to the police.The police did not identify the victims, but local news media said Sisto Malaspina, the owner of a well-known cafe, Pellegrinis, was fatally stabbed. Mr. Malaspinas business partner, Nino Pangrazio, confirmed the death in statements to the news media.It was in 1974 that the men took over Pellegrinis, a Bourke Street institution that has remained virtually unchanged since it opened in 1954. A bowl of pasta with granita at the counter has been a tradition for decades for tourists and locals alike.The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks the activity of extremist organizations online, although the group provided no evidence.Knives are the weapon most commonly used in homicides in Australia, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a government agency. In 2015, the most recent year from which comprehensive data is available, 30 percent of all murders in Australia involved knives, as did 26 percent of attempted murders.The incident occurred less than two years after an attack on the same street, in which a man barreled his car into a crowd, killing six pedestrians and injuring at least 30 others. His trial is underway this week in the Victorian Supreme Court.We will not as a city be defined by this act of evil, Daniel Andrews, the premier of Victoria, said of the attack Friday. Well go about our business this weekend and every weekend. | World |
VideoAnimal rights workers in Sochi, Russia, are rescuing stray dogs from exterminators hired by the government. They hope athletes and fans visiting the Olympics will adopt them.CreditCredit...James Hill for The New York TimesFeb. 5, 2014SOCHI, Russia A dog shelter backed by a Russian billionaire is engaged in a frantic last-ditch effort to save hundreds of strays facing a death sentence before the Winter Olympics begin here.Already, hundreds of animals have been killed, with the local authorities apparently wanting the stray dogs cleared from the streets before Fridays opening ceremony.While the authorities say the dogs can be wild and dangerous, reports of their systematic slaughter by a pest removal company hired by the government in recent months have outraged animal rights advocates and cast a gruesome specter over the traditionally cheery atmosphere of the Games.The handling of the matter has also sharply undercut the image of a friendlier, welcoming Russia that President Vladimir V. Putin has sought to cultivate in recent months.We were told, Either you take all the dogs from the Olympic Village or we will shoot them, said Olga Melnikova, who is coordinating the rescue effort on behalf of a charity called Volnoe Delo (roughly, Good Will), which is financed by Oleg V. Deripaska, one of Russias billionaire oligarchs.On Monday we were told we have until Thursday, Ms. Melnikova said.A dog rescue golf cart is now scouring the Olympic campus, picking up the animals and delivering them to the shelter, which is really an outdoor shantytown of doghouses on a hill on the outskirts of the city. It is being called PovoDog, a play on the Russian word povodok, which means leash.Lying past a cemetery, at the end of a dirt road and without electricity or running water, the makeshift PovoDog shelter is already giving refuge to about 80 animals, including about a dozen puppies. One is a chocolate-colored Shar-Pei and her two mostly Shar-Pei puppies. Another is a large, reddish-brown sheep dog named Kasthan, who likes to jump up and kiss the shelter workers, who are mostly volunteers.ImageCredit...Pavel Golovkin/Associated PressLocal animal rights workers say many of the strays were pets, or the offspring of pets, abandoned by families whose homes with yards were demolished over the past few years to make way for the Olympic venues and who were compensated with new apartments in taller buildings, where keeping a pet is often viewed as undesirable.They also say that Russia has never made a priority of pushing responsible animal control policies, including spaying and neutering, which would have helped avoid the current problems.We need a program of sterilization for dogs, said Nadezhda Mayboroda, a Sochi resident who is working at the shelter. People are not really well educated that it is necessary to sterilize their dogs at home. Human beings are not responsible at all.In recent months, residents of Sochi have reported seeing dogs shot with poisoned darts, then tossed into waiting trucks. Aleksei Sorokin, the director general of a pest control business, Basya Services, has confirmed that his company has been hired to catch and kill strays, telling local journalists the work was necessary.The effort to remove the dogs began in October, as did initial efforts to gather up strays and shelter them. Tatyana Leshchenko, an animal rights advocate here, said about 300 dogs a month were being killed in Sochi, at a cost of $25 to $35 each.Its very cruel, Ms. Leshchenko said, adding that the dogs were being shot with a chemical that causes them to suffocate. She said she had convinced at least one exterminator to give her advance warning of the neighborhoods to be cleared.The International Olympic Committee responded with a carefully worded statement; Mark Adams, a spokesman, told reporters at a briefing Wednesday that no healthy dogs found on the grounds of the Olympics were being destroyed.It would be absolutely wrong to say that any healthy dog will be destroyed, Mr. Adams said.On Monday, Humane Society International, an advocacy group based in Washington, wrote to Mr. Putin and urged him to prevent the killing of dogs, noting that the Russian president is also a dog lover. Mr. Putin has been photographed numerous times with his black Labrador, Koni.Mr. Putins spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, acknowledged in an interview with Kommersant FM radio Wednesday that Sochi was struggling with stray dogs.It is true that there are stray dogs in Sochi, more stray dogs than in other cities, he said. The explanation is quite simple. When a big construction project is underway, dogs and puppies always appear whom the builders feed. Now the builders have left, but unfortunately, the dogs remain.Stray dogs have been found inside sports venues and have even wandered into some of the residences for Olympic athletes and visiting journalists. Dogs can also be found throughout the city and in the mountain areas where skiing and other outdoor events will take place. The Olympic Committee does not have responsibility for areas outside its official venues.On Tuesday night, as thousands of fans streamed into the new Fisht Olympic Stadium for a dress rehearsal of the opening ceremony, what caught Ms. Melnikovas eye was a Rottweiler sitting nearby.Ms. Melnikova, who has two dogs of her own back home in Moscow, seemed heartbroken that she was unable to rescue the dog.On the left, near where the food court is, he was sitting next to the garbage container, Ms. Melnikova said. But she was not prepared. I need equipment to take a Rottweiler, she said. I didnt have a collar. If I had a collar, I would have tried.ImageCredit...Sergei Ilnitsky/European Pressphoto AgencyMr. Deripaska, an industrialist who largely made his fortune in aluminum, provided $15,000 to get the shelter started on land donated by the local government. He has also pledged about $50,000 a year for operations. He was also one of the major investors in the Sochi Games and paid for several huge projects, including an overhaul of the airport, a new seaport and the Olympic Village along the coast.With the Olympics fast approaching, however, there was simply no time to build an indoor space for the shelter, especially because so much work remained to be done on hotels and other buildings for the Games.In Sochi, you just cant find a construction guy because they are in such a rush to finish all the objects, Ms. Melnikova said.As local residents have learned of the shelter, however, the needs are only growing. On Tuesday night, shelter workers said, someone dropped off two puppies without any explanation or instruction. So far, the workers said, there have been some offers of money but few donations of what is needed most: food, veterinary medicines and other supplies, including dog shelters and collars.All of the dogs entering the shelter receive medical treatment, including vaccinations. All of them will be eligible for adoption, even to fans attending the Olympics. Spared execution at least for the moment the animals at the PovoDog shelter barked in a loud chorus as the sun slowly dropped into the Black Sea, which could be viewed in the distance.Many scampered around and nipped at each other, while one unlucky fellow got his head stuck in the chicken wire surrounding the shelter, only to be freed by a shelter volunteer, beseeching him to stay calm.Tiny puppies squeaked and squawked. Workers said they were likely to find homes faster than the older dogs two siblings of the Shar-Pei puppies have already been adopted.Still, most of the dogs are mutts, and Ms. Mayboroda said many people would not be interested a view that the shelter workers hope to change through a new publicity and outreach effort. Everybody here wants a shepherd or a pit bull, she said. Nobody wants just a mixed dog. | Sports |
Suge Knight's Former Attorneys Arrested for Attempting to Bribe Witnesses In Murder Case 1/26/2018 1/27/18 -- Suge's former lawyer, Matthew Fletcher, tells TMZ ... his actions and methods while representing Suge were "legal and routinely used by every competent attorney in the world." Regarding allegations of bribery, he says ... "There is absolutely, 100% certainly not a single witness who has ever even insinuated that I spoke with them period! And with even more certainty, there is not a single witness or person who has ever had a conversation with me in which I offered them anything to testify." Both Fletcher and Culpepper were released from custody late Friday. Two of Suge Knight's former attorneys are behind bars for allegedly trying to bribe witnesses in his murder case. Attorneys Matthew Fletcher and Thaddeus Culpepper were arrested on charges of acting as accessories after the fact ... a felony. The allegations surround Suge's murder case over an incident at Tam's burger joint in Compton. Suge ran over 2 people, killing one of them. He claims he was acting in self-defense. TMZ.com Fletcher allegedly tried to pay witnesses who were at Tam's to say they saw the victims and others in possession of a gun -- a critical point in Suge's defense ... this according to documents obtained by the L.A. Times. Culpepper allegedly tried to pay an informant to say he was present during the incident at Tam's and would testify in a way that was favorable to Suge. Both attorneys are being held on $1 million bail. | Entertainment |
Tyga Lonzo Rappin' in Lithuania? 'I Support It' 1/29/2018 TMZSports.com Lonzo Ball's international rap career just got the seal of approval from a pretty big rap star ... 'cause Tyga says he 100% supports Zo's upcoming Lithuania show. Remember -- Lonzo video'd in during Lithuania's equivalent of the Grammys last week, and revealed he's planning a summer concert in the tiny country where his bros are ballin' out. Seemed like a weird spot to hold his first live set ... but Tyga doesn't think so. In fact, he made it clear he's ride or die with BBB -- at home or abroad! | Entertainment |
Sports of The TimesCredit...James Hill for The New York TimesFeb. 11, 2014KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia One by one, the competitors took flight Tuesday at the first Olympic womens ski jumping event, and there was no way Blair Tomten could hold back tears.There they were in the air, some of the same women she had competed against for years, achieving what she had long dreamed about.This is all I ever wanted, the Olympics; it was 20 years of my life, said a red-eyed Tomten, just after one of the three American jumpers, the 15th-place finisher Lindsey Van, leapt a barrier so they could hug. But to know that theres this opportunity for women now, I cant even begin to explain how amazing that feels.We did it, Tomten said as she sobbed into Vans shoulder.Yes, we did, Van said.For as long as she could remember, Tomten had envisioned jumping in the Olympics, even though the Olympics didnt include women in the sport. She had started jumping when she was about 4, and in time, she would do so alongside Van, who is two years younger.Van won the 2009 world championship, the first for women, but Tomten quit the sport to go to college because there was no Olympics to shoot for. So, as Carina Vogt of Germany became the sports first womens Olympic champion, Tomten, 31, watched from the stands, feeling wistful and proud.While the serious fight to make womens ski jumping an Olympic sport lasted more than a decade and succeeded only in 2011 when the International Olympic Committee announced that the event would be included in these Games it didnt happen fast enough for competitors like Tomten. And it is heartbreaking because it didnt have to happen this way.The I.O.C. and the International Ski Federation, known as F.I.S., dragged their feet in including womens ski jumping in the Games. It took them 90 years to add the event after mens ski jumping was in the first Winter Olympics in 1924.You would think those powerful organizations, the I.O.C. and the F.I.S., could effect change much quicker if they wanted to. But by the looks of it, they didnt want to, making excuses about why women should be excluded.F.I.S. studied the feasibility, forming a womens ski jumping working group in 1994, and sanctioning the first womens Grand Prix series four years later.In 2005, the F.I.S. president, Gian-Franco Kasper, told National Public Radio that women shouldnt compete in ski jumping because it seems not to be appropriate from a medical point of view.The sport had taken the same view as officials of the marathon took when they said women couldnt run 26.2 miles because they would hurt themselves, perhaps damaging their fertility. That was a ridiculous barrier in the marathon put in place by people who now look ridiculous.In the future, that is how people will look on the I.O.C.s slow decision to include female ski jumpers.It took a brave group of women, including Van and her fellow Olympian Jessica Jerome, suing the Vancouver Olympics for inclusion in the 2010 Games, to get the I.O.C.s attention. The committee finally caved.On Tuesday, the competitors were soaking up the victory for women everywhere. As they gathered at the top of the hill, they looked around, giving one another knowing nods, hugs and high-fives. After all these years, after so much fighting for equality that the Olympic movement preaches but doesnt practice the women have only 30 starters, while the men have 70 they had made it to the Olympics, and it was sweet.We have arrived, said Jerome, who finished 10th. We are good at what we do. We are a lot prettier than the boy jumpers, too.The lingering issue here is why women are competing in only one event, the normal hill, when men are competing in two more: the large hill and the team event.While it could be argued that there arent enough qualified women from each country to field a four-woman squad for the team event, there is no valid reason to keep women from the large hill.Women competed on a large hill in a World Cup event last year and will do so twice this year. For many years, the United States national championship has been held on a large hill.Van looked longingly at the large hill behind her when asked if women deserved to compete on it.Why wouldnt we deserve it? she said. I want to test-jump for the boys on it because it would be fun.Peter Jerome, Jessica Jeromes father and one of the people instrumental in the effort to get women into the Games, said he had heard from the grapevine that it would be another eight years before a womens large hill event could become a reality.Its just an old boys club making decisions, he said. Thats why it takes so long for everything.By then, many of the women competing Tuesday may not be in the sport anymore. Depriving them of that opportunity would be wrong and unfair.But there may be hope for 13-year-old Paris Dirksen, who came to the event with her family and was thrilled to see the women jump. She lives in Beijing but is from Houston.Id like to try it because it looks like they are flying, she said. Its, wow, unbelievable. I think it shows that the girls are just as strong as the boys.Do you hear that, I.O.C.? | Sports |
Halsey to Trump Watch My F***ing Speech!!! 1/21/2018 TMZ.com Halsey has a message for Donald Trump ... "Watch my F***ing speech!" The singer delivered a rousing, emotional, profound poem Saturday at the Women's March in New York City ... a very personal speech about sexual assault. We got her at LAX Saturday night and she was more than satisfied with the poem and the reaction. If you didn't see it, you gotta spend a few minutes and listen ... it's pretty incredible. The 23-year-old is incredulous Trump has remained silent in the wake of a torrent of revelations from celebrities and others about sexual abuse. | Entertainment |
CNN, TBS Lawsuit We Work 3 Times As Hard to Get Ahead ... Black Employee Claims 1/22/2018 TBS and CNN make their African-American employees work way harder to get a promotion ... according to an ex-employee who's now suing both networks, and their parent company. Wanda Byrd, who is black, says she's worked for TBS for 13 years, and describes her job as a mid-level manager in quality assurance. She says she was passed over for a promotion to a senior level position, and claims a less-skilled and qualified white man got it. In the suit, Byrd says that's par for the course. According to docs, obtained by TMZ, black employees at TBS have a significantly lower promotion rate than Caucasians -- and zero people of color ever obtain the title of senior VP or higher. Byrd goes further, saying the company segregates ... keeping most black employees in certain divisions that she calls "less powerful and non-revenue generating." Byrd says in her suit there is a dramatic difference in pay between blacks and whites -- and African-Americans have to work 3 times as long as Caucasians to receive any type of promotion. She's not only suing for herself ... Byrd wants to make this a class action suit against TBS, CNN and Time Warner. To be clear, she never worked at CNN, but seems to be gunning for all Turner properties. We've reached out to both networks ... but no word back. | Entertainment |
Science|A New Formula to Help Tame Chinas Yellow Riverhttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/science/china-yellow-river-xiaolangdi-dam.htmlTrilobitesCredit...Getty ImagesJune 2, 2017Each year thousands of tourists flock to a reservoir along the Yellow River in China to witness a ritual cleansing so violent that it can look as if the earth just exploded. At the end of June and the start of July, for as long as two weeks before the flood season, Chinese officials open large portals along the walls of the Xiaolangdi Dam, releasing clear and muddy water simultaneously from the reservoir above to the river below. It gushes out, and in some years clouds the color of doom ascend beyond the dams walls.The Yellow River is considered the cradle of Chinas civilization but also its sorrow. Its vast floodplains coaxed people in for agriculture. Yet its violent floods have killed millions.The precautionary purging at the Xiaolangdi Dam, which has occurred annually since 2002, is the latest high-tech attempt to prevent flooding and tame the Yellow River, which today threatens more than 80 million people. It carries sediment more concentrated than in any other river in the world so much that tiny particles of sand and silt clog reservoirs, raise riverbeds, break levees and cause potentially catastrophic floods. During what is called the Water and Sediment Regulation Discharge Project at Xiaolangdi Dam, muddy water evacuates sediment from the reservoir, and clear water washes sand out from the channel below to reduce flood risk.The annual purge can lower the riverbed by about six feet a year on average, but a surprising discovery about the rivers bottom, as well as its unusual capacity to carry high loads of sediment, could one day mean that the purge may not be as effective at preventing floods. In a study published last month in the journal Science Advances, researchers suggest new considerations to take into account when conducting this yearly event.Previous models couldnt explain how the Yellow River transports about a billion tons of sediment thousands of miles to the sea each year. Compared with the Mississippi River, it holds three times as much sediment and just a tenth of the water. But Hongbo Ma and Jeffrey A. Nittrouer, both geologists at Rice University and lead authors of the study, examined historical data and scanned the bed of the river with 3-D sonar.ImageCredit...Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesIt was very striking to see that the Yellow River bottom is basically flat, Dr. Ma said.It was assumed that the rivers flow produced relatively tall, closely spaced dunes that slowed the water and sucked up energy that might otherwise be available for sediment transport. But the Yellow River, with its fine sediment particles, had low dunes spaced far apart, freeing more energy to move the sediment.With this discovery, the researchers and their colleagues developed a universal formula that could be used on all kinds of rivers to predict the exact sediment amounts traveling in the fluid. They can better predict where and when floods will occur or new land will be formed.We want to make the Yellow River the poster child of rivers and deltas around the world, Dr. Nittrouer said.At the Xiaolangdi Dam, competing systems may simultaneously lower the riverbed as clear water flushes away sediment and raise it as sandy water forms dunes that slow the sediment flow. Combining the new formula with the old model could help operators prevent more floods by achieving a better balance between the systems.Last year, officials unexpectedly canceled the release because there wasnt enough water or muck to need flushing, possibly because of lighter rainfall.To not disappoint tourists, they released clear water from the dam for just 15 minutes.Its unclear what to expect this year. It would have to be the end of June or July, Dr. Ma said, but honestly were not aware of whether this event will happen or not. | science |
Politics|Agents Seek to Dissolve ICE in Immigration Policy Backlashhttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/us/politics/ice-immigration-eliminate-agency.htmlCredit...Melissa Lyttle for The New York TimesJune 28, 2018WASHINGTON At least 19 Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators are seeking to dissolve the agency, concerned that the Trump administrations crackdown on illegal migrants has limited their ability to pursue national security threats, child pornography and transnational crime.In a letter sent last week to Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, the special agents proposed creating a stand-alone investigations unit and another agency to handle immigration detention and deportation. The request was sent as a growing number of Democrats and immigration-rights advocates have called for eliminating ICE.Investigations have been perceived as targeting undocumented aliens, instead of the transnational criminal organizations that facilitate cross border crimes impacting our communities and national security, wrote the agents from Homeland Security Investigations, which is a branch of ICE. The Texas Observer first reported the letter.ImageCredit...Tom Brenner/The New York TimesThe investigators said local law enforcement officials have questioned the independence of their agency, given the Trump administrations aggressive policies against illegal immigration including arresting undocumented workers for minor offenses, such as driving without a license.At least two House Democrats Representatives Mark Pocan of Wisconsin and Pramila Jayapal of Washington are pushing to eliminate ICE. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who stunned the Democratic establishment this week with her upstart primary victory against Representative Joe Crowley of New York, made abolishing ICE one of the key planks of her campaign.An agency spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday. But a senior ICE official said there were operational challenges raised in that letter that merit some discussion.ImageCredit...Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesHomeland Security Investigations is one of several divisions within ICE the best-known of which is Enforcement and Removal Operations, which arrests, detains and deports undocumented immigrants.The agents letter is rooted in longstanding tensions between the investigative and deportation divisions within ICE.The child of a forced marriage between two defunct federal agencies The United States Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service ICE has long struggled to balance its dual roles of transnational criminal investigations and deportations.Some agents in the investigations unit have said the Trump administration has prioritized ICEs deportations mission. Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of ICE and former leader of its deportation unit, has been a vocal proponent of the administrations immigration policies.The more than 6,000 special agents assigned to Homeland Security Investigations focus on money laundering, drug trafficking, human smuggling, child exploitation and cybercrimes. The agents have been involved in some of the highest-profile criminal investigations in recent years, including the takedown of the Silk Road website, an online market where illegal drugs and fake identifications were sold.The agency was also involved in the arrest and capture of drug lord Joaqun Guzmn Loera, better known as El Chapo, who led the Sinaloa cartel before he was extradited to the United States last year.H.S.I. is also the lead government agency for counter proliferation investigations, targeting individuals who illegally try to smuggle military and other high-tech equipment out of the country. The division has about 50 offices around the world. | Politics |
Business|Fiat Chrysler Is Fined and Agrees to Fix Safety Reporting Systemhttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/business/fiat-chrysler-is-fined-and-agrees-to-fix-safety-reporting-system.htmlCredit...Bill Pugliano/Getty ImagesDec. 10, 2015As part of a $70 million settlement with federal regulators, Fiat Chrysler said on Thursday that it would overhaul its operations to ensure disclosure of deaths and injuries tied to potential defects in its vehicles.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which announced the settlement and fine, said the automaker had failed in a significant way to make some reports over more than a decade.In announcing the penalty, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said it was meant as a signal to Fiat Chrysler and other automakers to move toward a stronger, more proactive safety culture.Under the settlement, Fiat Chrysler is required to turn over the missing data to the traffic safety administration within about six months. The automaker said it was confident that it identified and addressed all issues that arose during the relevant time period, using alternate data sources.The automaker said it was revising its process to ensure proper reporting and was commissioning a third-party audit to identify the scope of the reporting failures, dating to 2003. Those findings will be made available to the public.But neither the automaker nor the safety agency would say or give an estimate of how many deaths and injuries had not been reported. The death and injury disclosure system, called Early Warning Reporting, is supposed to help regulators identify potential defects. It was put in place in 2000 under the Tread Act, after a wave of highway rollovers in Ford Explorers with Firestone tires.ImageCredit...Bill Pugliano/Getty ImagesAccording to the written agreement between the company and its regulators, Fiat Chryslers reporting failure stemmed from problems in a software system that failed to recognize when reportable information was received or updated, and because the company failed to update the system to reflect new brands. The automaker notified the agency of the apparent discrepancies in the data reporting in July, regulators said.Mark Rosekind, the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said Fiat Chrysler has expressed a desire to use this situation as a steppingstone to a stronger, more proactive safety posture.This is the second time this year that Fiat Chrysler has agreed to pay a multimillion-dollar fine to the agency in relation to safety problems in its vehicles. In July, the agency announced a penalty against the company that could reach $105 million over its handling of multiple recalls affecting more than 11 million vehicles.The agency has included the $70 million penalty announced Thursday as an amendment to the July agreement. Including the new fine, the civil penalties for the company total $175 million, with $140 million in cash and $35 million in deferred penalties that will come due if the company fails to meet its obligations under the agreement.Fiat Chrysler is the second major automaker this year to admit failing to report claims under the Early Warning Reporting system. In January, Honda agreed to pay $70 million in fines for failing to properly disclose to the government more than 1,700 deaths and injuries over an 11-year period. And last year, the agency fined Ferrari $3.5 million for failing to submit reports on fatal accidents.The agency recently fined the Japanese supplier Takata, which produced defective airbag inflaters that can rupture violently, exploding and shooting metal at passengers. In that case, the supplier could pay as much as $130 million if it does not follow its agreement with the regulators.The agency is authorized to impose a maximum fine of $35 million per violation. Congress recently passed a transportation bill that would allow the agency to cap the fine at $105 million, but the change will not go into effect until the agency has issued a final rule. | Business |
Kanye West Private Screening For His Film with Dame Dash 1/20/2018 Kanye West threw a party in honor of Damon Dash's new movie -- in which Kanye's an executive producer -- and a bunch of celebs were there ... but definitely not Jay-Z. Ye held a private screening for "Honor Up" Friday night in Calabasas and surprised all the guests with some movie merchandise too. We're told Dame was on hand along with Pusha T, Claudia Jordan, Daniel Dneiko, A-Trak, Terrence J and of course, Kim Kardashian. As you know ... Kanye and Jay haven't spoken in a long time, and Dame and Jay-Z were once biz partners but had a major falling out -- but it looks like it's all good between Kanye and Dash. "Honor Up" gets released next month. | Entertainment |
Olympics|Bobby Finkes Big Finish Surprises Himself, and His Rivalshttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/01/sports/olympics/bobby-finke-1500-meters.htmlAn American grinds out a gold in the 1,500-meter freestyle by saving a little extra for the finish.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAug. 1, 2021TOKYO Even Bobby Finke didnt know he could swim this fast.But his uncanny ability to find a second gear in the pool especially in the final 50 meters of a long-distance race resulted in two surprise gold medals at these Olympics for Finke, a 21-year-old distance swimmer from Tampa, Fla.Finke, a first-time Olympian, won the mens 800-meter freestyle on Thursday. On Sunday, he won the 1,500 free. Coming seemingly out of nowhere, the performances left everyone his opponents, his coaches, even Finke himself a bit stunned.I didnt know I had these swims in me, a smiling Finke said Sunday. When I noticed during the 800 prelims that I was still with the guys, I was just trying to ride the wave and have fun.Riding the wave made Finke one of the surprises of the Games. His winning time in the 1,500 on Sunday was 9.05 seconds faster than his top time in the distance this year. Dave Durden and Greg Meehan, the mens and womens coaches of the United States team, were asked afterward if they knew Finke was capable of speed like this. They threw their hands up and laughed.ImageCredit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesI dont think we necessarily saw the performance in the 800 going the way that it went, Meehan said. But we certainly saw it coming in the mile. I think everyone in the building knew what was coming down that last 100 of the mile.Finke became the first American to win gold in the mens 1,500 since Michael OBrien in 1984, then said he hoped his performance would spark more interest in the event a grueling marathon in a sport where sprinters are often the stars back in the United States.Distance swimming within the U.S. has been relatively weak the past five years, Finke said. I hope a lot of younger kids get inspired and come up here and kick some butt, too.After his victory on Sunday, Finke said it had felt hard in the opening laps of the race to stay with the lead pack. But once he saw that he was indeed able to keep up with the leaders, Germanys Florian Wellbrock and Mykhailo Romanchuk of Ukraine, he began to build some confidence.His plan, at that point, was to just hold on and sprint my butt off at the end, he said. The sight of Finke surging ahead in the last lap drew a crescendo of noise from the crowd of swimmers and coaches watching from the stands. That sound only grew as Finke took the lead on his final turn.I saw how all three of us were kind of neck and neck, and I knew from my 800 that I had the ability to switch gears for my last 50, Finke said.He covered the final 50 meters in 25.78 seconds more than a second faster than any other split by any other swimmer in the race and was still pulling away when he touched the wall.Asked at the post-race news conference what he thought about Finkes race, Romanchuk, the silver medalist, turned to Finke and said, I dont like guys who swim just the last 50 so fast. And then everyone laughed. | Sports |
Business|Chief of Sprout Is Leaving the Companyhttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/chief-of-sprout-is-leaving-the-company.htmlCredit...Sprout PharmaceuticalsDec. 9, 2015Cindy Whitehead, who oversaw a long, but ultimately successful, effort to bring to market the first prescription drug to enhance womens sexual drive, is leaving her post as chief executive of Sprout Pharmaceuticals.In August, the Food and Drug Administration approved Sprouts Addyi, often referred to as the little pink pill, after rejecting it in 2010 and in 2013 on concerns about side effects and limited effectiveness.Shortly after the approval, Sprout, which was privately held, agreed to be acquired by Valeant Pharmaceuticals for $1 billion.Thanks to the efforts of Cindy and her team, Valeant has the opportunity to make Addyi broadly available to patients in need of this important medical treatment, Valeants senior vice president for investor relations, Laurie Little, said in a statement. Having built a team to take Addyi to market, we mutually agreed that it was the right time to transition to new leadership for the next phase of global commercialization. After Addyi, also known as flibanserin, was initially rejected by the F.D.A., the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim dropped it. Ms. Whitehead and her husband, Robert, both pharmaceutical industry veterans, formed Sprout in 2011 to acquire it.For the Whiteheads and other executives, the Valeant acquisition was a financial coup. But the drug has gotten off to a slow start. In the weeks after its October debut, just a few hundred prescriptions were filed for Addyi, according to Bloomberg. That is in sharp contrast to the introduction of Pfizers Viagra, the so-called little blue pill aimed at treating erectile dysfunction in men. Viagra was a blockbuster from the start in 1998 and last year Pfizer sold nearly $1.7 billion of it.With financial help from Sprout, womens groups and other supporters started a campaign to win F.D.A. approval for Addyi, noting that the agency had approved comparable treatments for men.Sprouts effort succeeded but the F.D.A.s approval came with a boxed warning, alerting patients not to take the drug with alcohol. Women with impaired liver function were also advised not to take it.Ms. Whitehead will continue to consult with Valeant and Sprout executives after her departure, according to the statement from Valeant. | Business |
Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York TimesMarch 18, 2017MAIDUGURI, Nigeria She hears the awful sounds in her dreams. They are the moans of a dying girl.Amina is haunted by the memory. After all, she was the one who handed the girl to Boko Haram.Amina was a teenager herself when Boko Haram, the Islamist fighters who have rampaged across northeast Nigeria, kidnapped and conscripted her. Sixteen and scared, Amina did their bidding, seizing young girls from their homes and escorting them to a camp where many were forcibly married off to fighters.One of the terrified girls was 14. Amina grabbed her by the wrists, leading her to a waiting vehicle. Three weeks later, the girl was dead after being gang raped.I think about her a lot, Amina said, swallowing hard and closing her eyes.Boko Haram has abducted many hundreds, if not thousands, of girls and boys across the region, forcing them to fight, to cook, to clean and even to bear children. To much of the world, the kidnapping of nearly 300 girls from their school dormitory in the town of Chibok three years ago was the seminal moment in the crisis, followed by another horror: children, as young as 7 or 8, being used as suicide bombers.The Nigerian military has made recent gains, pushing into the forests where Boko Haram hides and recapturing areas once under its control. But throughout the war, now in its eighth year, hundreds of thousands of people have fled here to Maiduguri, the battle-weary capital where the conflict began.It is a place where former fighters and captives like Amina blend into the urban tapestry, a place where nearly everyone has been a victim, a collaborator or both.With its busy tea cafes, flaming kebab stands and rush-hour traffic, Maiduguri seems like a city returning to its old self.Suicide bombers, many of them girls, still periodically set upon the mostly Muslim city. But the days of house-to-house fighting that once terrorized residents are over. Roadside stalls offer fried doughnuts, storefront gates open every morning to sell clothing and office supplies, morning commuters guzzle caffeine and university students picnic at the zoo.But behind the cover of daily life, terrible secrets loom.A teenager selling sugar cane on the corner may have killed someone, but he isnt sure. A smiling little boy, dressed in a school uniform as he weaves between grown-ups on the sidewalk, once bore a gun for the rebels, dragging it by the muzzle because it was too heavy for him to carry. A young woman with college ambitions was raped by several fighters, then accompanied them on village raids.For them, building a new life is anything but certain.Normal life of Maiduguri masks the scars that the conflict left for some children, said Patrick Rose, a spokesman for Unicef. These children have experienced horrific things.AminaOn most days, Amina, now 18, can be found on the street selling detergent and broth with her mother the only one who knows her secret.I feel so guilty, she said.A year and a half ago, insurgents would come and go in Aminas hometown in the countryside. One day they decided to take her with them, shooting her older brother and tossing his body in the bush.They took her to a Boko Haram camp, where she was shocked by the huge number of women living there, many of them pregnant or with infants. Amina was told that she would have to marry one of the fighters, but would first accompany them on operations to help kidnap other girls. If she did not do so, she would be killed.On my first outing with them, I abducted three, said Amina, whose last name, like those of others in this article, is being withheld out of concern for their safety.Capturing other girls soon became a pattern for Amina. Fighters would enter a village with guns blazing, kill and kidnap men, and expect Amina and other girls to round up the young women. They were told to leave behind older villagers and anyone nursing babies.Kidnapping victims were easy to find. They were often crouched in terror in their homes.When the girls would hear the gunshots, theyd run into their rooms and hide, Amina said.Insurgents would sometimes enter the homes alongside Amina to make sure she was doing her job. Sometimes she would cry as she worked, dragging sobbing and screaming girls into waiting vehicles.On one outing, a man resisted attempts to steal his belongings and Amina watched insurgents shoot him dead.But it is the young girls abduction that weighs on Amina. Wailing in the back of a Boko Haram truck, the girl told Amina that she had watched fighters kill her parents.Amina remembers the girl being terrified, screaming that she didnt want to have sex with fighters. She fainted more than once in the vehicle that drove her to the Boko Haram camp.At the camp, fighters didnt bother the girl for about three weeks. Then one evening, Amina watched as they came for her.There was one room at that camp, and any woman invited into that room knew what was going to happen in there, Amina said. While we were eating, we heard her cries, and we knew she was being raped.One man after another entered. It lasted three days. When it was finally over, the girl couldnt walk. Soon she was dead.Amina escaped from the camp soon after, flagging down a driver who took her to safety in Maiduguri.He told me his daughter had also been captured by Boko Haram, she said.HadizaHadiza, 19, blends easily into the crowds of young women on the streets of Maiduguri, dressed in colorful dresses and head scarves. She lives with her parents, who fled their village in the countryside, and hopes to go to college to study science.Just a year ago, she was living with the rebels. They respected her, she said, and liked the way she shouted, God is great! and fired her gun in the air. They called her rugged.Hadiza was 17 when she was kidnapped and raped by three militants. They trained her to use a weapon, and she accompanied them on raids of villages, spraying bullets in the night and shouting to terrify residents.First and foremost, we scared them, she said.The militants respected her bravado. They called her a hero, she said. The praise was in some ways exciting, and it offered protection.Those who were quiet, they always wanted to rape them, Hadiza said.ImageCredit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York TimesMustaphaMustapha Ali sells sugar cane on a busy street corner, saving up to pay for an urban-planning degree he hopes to earn one day.Two years ago, Mustapha, now 18, was armed with an AK-47, attacking villages alongside Boko Haram fighters who told him to join them or die.So I pledged my loyalty to them, Mustapha said. Two of his brothers refused to join them on that day when the rebels swarmed his village, he said, and he watched as they killed them.He was taken to a camp where weapons were distributed to captives like him, including two boys from his village who had also been forcibly recruited.Soon, Mustapha was riding motorbikes with Boko Haram members as they raided villages and stole cattle and sheep. During one raid, a woman was dragged out of her home.You pagan! Mustapha recalled fighters shouting at her before one threw her to the ground, pulled out a knife and beheaded her.I was there. I saw everything, he said. I was so afraid. From that day on, I did whatever they told me to do.The attacks he took part in were always at night, and while Mustapha fired his weapon along with the other men when entering villages, he said, it was too dark to know where his bullets landed.It was hard for me to tell if I killed anyone, he said.Fighters told him to pick a wife from among the kidnapped girls. He chose a girl he knew from his village. He was fond of her and decided that if he didnt pick her, a stranger would. Militants watched him have sex with her the first time, to make sure he really did it.When Nigerian soldiers fought their way into their camp, Mustapha ran, leaving behind the girl he had married she refused to go and kept running. He eventually found his way to Maiduguri, where he has been reunited with his parents, who had fled there to escape the fighters. He is living with them, putting money aside from his sugar cane sales to pay for college.Im struggling, he said.ImageCredit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York TimesAbbani and HuduIn one of the many nondescript, one-room concrete homes in Maiduguri, Abbani and Hudu have found a new family.When Hudu was 7, Boko Haram fighters came to his village and locked him in a room while they slaughtered his parents. He could hear them screaming.I was crying and shouting: Oh, God. Oh, my parents. Oh, Dad, said Hudu, who is now 9. And they said, Keep quiet or we will kill you, too.Militants took Hudu with them and put him on top of an armored vehicle stolen from the military. He was in charge of feeding an ammunition chain into a weapon mounted there.I had to put bullets into the big gun, he said. Every day, I had to be on top. I spent almost the whole time on top. Every day, they would shoot, even when they didnt see anyone.Abbani was 10 when he watched Boko Haram behead his father and then his mother after they refused to join the fighters who had invaded their village.I was standing next to them, and crying and screaming and trying to get to my parents, so they tied me up, said Abbani, now 12.The militants made Abbani work as a porter, hauling sacks of their belongings from camp to camp. Worried the military was closing in, they trained him to use a weapon.They gave me a gun and said to shoot the army, he said. It was so heavy I couldnt carry it, so I had to drag it on the ground.The Nigerian military invaded that day, and Abbani managed to flee the camp. He saw a teenage girl hiding in a field of grass and flowers. She told him to drop his gun.So I threw it away and ran to her, he said. She held me tight, and we ran to another place to hide.As he and the girl, Aisha, ran, they came across Hudu alone in the bush with an AK-47. He was screaming and shooting bullets wildly everywhere, holding his finger on the trigger.Aisha hid Abbani behind a tree and ran to Hudu, who had fallen to the ground. Blood from a head wound was covering his face.I took them both and ran, said Aisha, who herself was fleeing Boko Haram captivity. She didnt know it then, but she was pregnant with the baby of a militant.The boys, who consider each other brothers, now live with Aisha, 18, and her baby in Maiduguri. On a recent night, two pet rabbits hopped about, sneaking bites of yams and cabbage that Aisha had prepared for the familys dinner.The boys call her mother.ImageCredit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times | World |
Credit...Makoto FunatsuOut ThereAlone in the long Antarctic night, Adm. Richard E. Byrd endured the ultimate in social distancing.Credit...Makoto FunatsuMay 5, 2020Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.More than once recently, I have lain awake counting the sirens going up the otherwise empty streets of Manhattan, wondering if their number might serve as a metric for how bad the coming day would be. But I know that none of my days could approach what Adm. Richard E. Byrd, the American arctic explorer, endured in 1934, when he spent five months alone in a one-room shack in Antarctica, wintering over the long night.January 2020 was the 200th anniversary of the first sighting of Antarctica, by Russian sailors. Byrds account of his 1934 ordeal, Alone, published in 1938, has been sitting by my bedside; call it the ultimate experiment in social distancing. At the time, Byrd was already famous for having been the first person to fly over the North Pole (although some researchers have disputed that claim) and, later, over the South Pole. He had received three ticker tape parades on Broadway.My footless habits were practically ruinous to those who had to live with me, he wrote. Remembering the way it all was, I still wonder how my wife succeeded in bringing up four such splendid children as ours, wise each in his or her way.He also drank a lot perhaps, his companions later suggested, because he was quietly terrified of the flying that made him famous. Several of Byrds Arctic and Antarctic expeditions were sponsored by The New York Times. He was a personal friend of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the newspaper from 1935 to 1961. On his first expedition to Antarctica, in 1929, Byrd mapped and named a number of mountains and other features on the continent, including several for the members of the Sulzberger family, which still runs The Times.On his second expedition to Antarctica, from 1933 to 1935, Byrd, accompanied by a crew of more than four dozen men, sled dogs and a cow, hoped to increase the scope of his efforts from his established base on the coast, called Little America, into the interior of the continent, where the weather dynamics were unknown. He hit on the idea of wintering over through the entire dark Antarctic night, from April to October, to make meteorological and other scientific measurements. The Advance Base that Byrd and his crew eventually established was 178 miles away a treacherous, crevasse-laden journey across the Ross Ice Shelf.A more rigorous existenceByrd originally envisioned a three-man team for the mission, but he decided that the expedition could not afford that many. And just two men, locked in a hut for six months of dark and cold, would probably kill each other, he concluded. So it would have to be one person alone. As the leader of the expedition, he felt obliged to assign himself to the job, despite a shoulder injury he had incurred just a few weeks earlier.ImageCredit...Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone, via Getty ImagesImageCredit...Bettmann/Getty ImagesImageCredit...Bettmann/Getty ImagesIn the book, Byrd conceded that he hungered for the ultimate solitude. There were all those books he wanted to read. He brought a windup record player with him, so he could listen to classical music.Out there on the South Pole barrier, in cold and darkness as complete as that of the Pleistocene, he wrote, I should be able to live exactly as I chose, obedient to no necessities but those imposed by wind and night and cold, and to no mans laws but my own.He added: At this distance I cannot be sure; but, perhaps the desire was also in my mind to try a more rigorous existence than any I had known. Where I was going, I should be physically and spiritually on my own.In late March 1934, a convoy of tractors and sledges delivered Byrds supplies and his cabin to the site; Byrd flew in by plane. Once the sun set, on April 12, he would be stuck. No plane could fly in again until the sun returned in October. He had forbidden the tractors to attempt the crossing in the darkness, for fear of losing his men.Much of Alone is a testament to the idea that you should be careful what you wish for. Byrd at first took comfort in his routine of weather observations and in constantly rearranging his supply closets. But a month in, he realized that he was being poisoned by the fumes from his oil-burning stove. What I had not counted on was discovering how closely a man could come to dying and still not die, or want to die, he wrote in the opening pages of his memoir.His cabin was buried in the snow, to present a low profile to the wind; the only way out was through a hatch in the roof. (An interior door opened to tunnels in the snow where he stored provisions.) Sometimes Byrd barely had the strength to open the hatch. Outside, he kept course by means of a series of bamboo poles he had laid out, but he worried about losing track of them and falling into a crevasse. Once, he returned from an errand outside to find the hatch frozen shut. Scrambling for his life in the dark in a blizzard, he stumbled on a shovel and managed to pry it open.Solitaire on iceOn the page, Byrds voice cries out like the merciless Antarctic wind. He sits in his sleeping bag playing solitaire. He bangs around in the dark, fetching food and fuel from his storage tunnels. (His diet consisted largely of dried vegetables and the occasional treat of a frozen piece of seal meat.) He registers the ice crawling up the inside walls of his cabin, and the drifts of snow that cover him whenever he manages to lift the hatch to peer out at the weather and tend his instruments. Weakened by the carbon-monoxide fumes from his stove, he throws up most of his food. He stares at sleeping pills and wonders if he should take them.The dark side of mans mind seems to be a sort of antenna tuned to catch gloomy thoughts from all directions, he wrote of a particularly bitter day early in June. I found it so with mine.But such is the character of an intrepid explorer that Byrd still enjoyed it. Alone is full of lyrical descriptions of auroras uncoiling like serpents across the sky, folding stars into their wavering fabric of light.The universe is not dead, he wrote on June 2. Therefore, there is an Intelligence there, and it is all pervading. At least one purpose, possibly the major purpose, of that intelligence is the achievement of universal harmony. He added: The human race, then, is not alone in the universe. Though I am cut off from human beings, I am not alone.At one point, Byrd estimated that he had lost 60 pounds. Every day he had to decide: run the stove to stay warm, and possibly suffocate because of the fumes, or breathe safely and risk freezing.Then, on July 5, his electrical generator broke, leaving him unable to run his radio. He had an emergency radio, which he could crank by hand and tap out a Morse code signal. But he was too weak, especially with his injured shoulder, to work it. Eventually he rigged it so that he could pedal it with his feet and tap out messages.ImageCredit...The New York TimesImageCredit...Ullstein Bild/Getty ImagesImageCredit...The New York TimesBy then his colleagues at Little America had grown worried about him. He had forbidden them to try any sort or rescue before daylight reappeared in September, fearing that they would get lost or stumble into a crevasse in the dark. But they cooked up an excuse to go anyway, in the name of science: They would triangulate observations of meteor showers.Byrd, afraid to reveal the depths of his situation, grudgingly approved the plan, but secretly he was desperate for them to come. Twice in July they set out and had to turn back. On the anticipated days of arrival, Byrd hauled himself out of the shack and sent up flares to guide his rescuers home, but nobody came.Rescue by tractorFinally, at midnight on Aug. 11, the sledges and tractors arrived in a blaze of searchlights and a rumble of engines. Byrd greeted them with an offer of soup, then collapsed at the foot of his ladder. He later claimed that the ordeal had humbled him such that he handed over command of his next adventure flight to a younger colleague.A man doesnt begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes that he is no longer indispensable, he wrote at the end of Alone. The book became an international best seller. The expedition also recorded more than two dozen reels of film; in 2015, 10 salvaged reels were turned into a documentary film.Byrd, of course, is not alone in the pantheon of heroes of solitude. John Fairfax, an Englishman, rowed across the Atlantic by himself in 1969. Coincidentally, he reached Florida on July 19, the day before the Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon. On that epic trip, Michael Collins became another hero of solitude, orbiting the moon by himself for 28 hours while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the lunar surface. Then there are the heroes of involuntary solitude: people like Albert Woodfox of the Angola 3, who was sentenced to four decades of solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit and somehow survived with his sanity.Byrds tale is a stark illustration of the privations to which humans will subject themselves, and their families, in the service of whatever they deem a greater glory: God, the unknown, their nation, science, humanity. And it is a reminder of what we will ask of those who spearhead the push outward beyond the glaciers and clouds of Earth to worlds where things really get freaky and uncomfortable, as NASA and other proponents of space travel discuss sending crewed missions to the moon and Mars. Out there, going for a walk outdoors will never be a real possibility.Today, slightly more than 200 years after it was first sighted, Antarctica is an international science preserve. Many nations have bases there, including the National Science Foundations Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, one of the worlds most important astronomical sites. Scientists winter over in conditions more comfortable than those experienced by the inhabitants of a nuclear submarine or the crew of a trip to Mars. They can go outside, and can email their families and colleagues.Lately the sirens in New York have quieted, and spring has come to the city. Flowers and trees are in bloom along the Hudson. At this time of year, on the path I like to take, there is typically a family of geese waddling around and dodging joggers. I look forward to seeing them all again soon. | science |
Credit...M. Spencer Green/Associated PressNov. 1, 2016Americans believe that obesity is tied with cancer as the biggest health threat in the nation today. But though scientific research shows that diet and exercise are insufficient solutions, a large majority say fat people should be able to summon the willpower to lose weight on their own.The findings are from a nationally representative survey of 1,509 adults released on Tuesday by NORC at the University of Chicago, an independent research institution. The study, funded by the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, found that concerns about obesity have risen. Just a few years ago, in a more limited survey, cancer was seen as the most serious health threat.The lead researcher, Jennifer Benz of the survey group at the University of Chicago, said that to her knowledge no other survey has provided so comprehensive a view of Americans beliefs about obesity, including how to treat it, whether people are personally responsible for it and whether it is a disease.Researchers say obesity, which affects one-third of Americans, is caused by interactions between the environment and genetics and has little to do with sloth or gluttony. There are hundreds of genes that can predispose to obesity in an environment where food is cheap and portions are abundant.Yet three-quarters of survey participants said obesity resulted from a lack of willpower. The best treatment, they said, is to take responsibility for yourself, go on a diet and exercise.Obesity specialists said the survey painted an alarming picture. They said the findings went against evidence about the science behind the disease, and showed that outdated notions about obesity persisted, to the detriment of those affected.Its frustrating to see doctors and the general public stigmatize patients with obesity and blame these patients, ascribing attributes of laziness or lack of willpower, said Dr. Donna Ryan, an obesity researcher and professor emerita at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., who was not involved with the study. We would never treat patients with alcoholism or any chronic disease this way. Its so revealing of a real lack of education and knowledge.The self-help route has not been successful for most. Ninety-four percent of the survey participants who were obese had tried to lose weight with diet or exercise, to no avail. A quarter of those people said they had tried five to nine times, and 15 percent said they had tried more than 20 times.Trying 20 times and not succeeding is that lack of willpower, or a problem that cant be treated with willpower? asked Dr. Louis Aronne, the director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian, who was not involved with the study.Obesity specialists said there were several reasons for obese people to seek medical help. There are factors, like side effects of certain medicines, that cause people to gain weight. There are also prescription drugs that help some people lose weight and keep it off. And for those with extreme obesity, there is surgery.Its not that diet and exercise are useless, noted Penny Gordon-Larsen, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina and the president of the Obesity Society, which studies obesity and its treatment. But lifestyle advice also depends on whether the issue is prevention or treatment and, if treatment, whether the person is extremely obese, obese or just overweight, she said.We need people to understand what options are there, Dr. Gordon-Larsen, who was not involved with the study, said.The study revealed that misconceptions about obesity treatment are pervasive. Sixty percent of respondents said diet and exercise were more effective than weight-loss surgery, which is the only method that elicits pronounced and sustained weight loss in nearly everyone with extreme obesity. Sixty-eight percent said it was riskier to remain obese than to have weight loss surgery, which has a lower mortality rate than gall bladder surgery or joint replacementDr. Raul J. Rosenthal, the president of the bariatric surgery society that funded the study, found this persistent belief in the power of diet and exercise hard to understand.If you think a disease is a potential killer, as serious as cancer, why would you take on its treatment and cure by yourself? he asked. The reaction of people to something that is a potential killer is mind-blowing.One problem, though, is that medical professionals can be as misinformed as the public, said Dr. Scott Kahan, an obesity medicine specialist who is an assistant professor at George Washington University and directs the National Center for Weight and Wellness, an obesity clinic.Doctors, he said, learn nothing about obesity in medical school, which might be why only 12 percent of those in the survey with severe obesity said a doctor had suggested surgery to them. We are talking about people who are 100, 200 pounds overweight, Dr. Kahan added. Dr. Kahan, who is not a surgeon, noted that for most people that heavy, there was no other treatment that worked.Dr. Caroline M. Apovian, the president-elect of the Obesity Society and director of the nutrition and weight management center at Boston University, echoed Dr. Kahans concerns about the failure by doctors to mention the only effective course of treatment.If I said that was the case for cardiovascular disease and bypass surgery, you would say doctors are negligent, she said. | Health |
Grammys Seating Chart Sir Elton John Fronts Miley Cyrus 1/25/2018 Sir Elton John scored a better view than Miley Cyrus at the Grammys ... scheduled duet be dammed. Here's a look at the seating chart for Sunday's Grammys at Madison Square Garden in NYC ... where Elton's sitting right in front of Miley. Their duo is one of several scheduled for that night. Bruno Mars and Cardi B are also slated to perform. Speaking of Cardi B ... she's sitting next to a crew that's pretty damn predictable. Sting and Alicia Keys are surrounded by hip-hop's royal couple while Kendrick Lamar definitely wishes he had a view of the superstar singer seated behind him. Spike Lee can't complain, though. Share on Facebook TWEET This See also Lady Gaga Miley Cyrus Tony Bennett Elton John Awards / Awards Shows Photo Galleries Exclusive Grammy Awards Music | Entertainment |
Dec. 16, 2015LONDON The British government is once again trying to revive its flagging effort to extract the countrys natural gas and oil from shale rock.On Wednesday, members of Parliament voted 298 to 261 to approve legislation allowing use of the shale-gas-extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing 1,200 meters, or nearly 4,000 feet, beneath the surface of national parks and other protected areas, including World Heritage sites.The push by Prime Minister David Camerons Conservative Party comes just days after delegates to the United Nations climate conference in Paris reached a widely hailed agreement on curbing carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming. Despite the ambitious goals outlined on Saturday, many analysts say they believe oil and gas will play crucial roles in the world economy for decades.The opposition Labour Party criticized the government for weakening the protection of areas that need it. We should have a moratorium on fracking in Britain until we can be sure it is safe and wont present intolerable risks to our environment, said Lisa Nandy, a Labour energy spokeswoman.Britain, in a separate effort to generate greater interest in shale, is expected to soon award new licenses for shale gas and oil exploration, possibly in national parks.One of the governments aims is to allow long, horizontal wells drilled from outside such areas to tap the oil and gas below them. The government argues that there can be little harm from such deep drilling, saying that supplies of drinking water are normally found below 400 meters.The government, which says that it will not allow fracking to be conducted from wells inside national parks and other protected areas, appears to be trying to find a balance between the demands of environmentalists to ban the practice entirely in parks and the oil and gas industry, which is pushing to be allowed to tap new resources.Britain is particularly interested in shale gas because it could provide cleaner fuel for generating electricity than the coal-fired plants the country plans to phase out by 2025.We currently import around half of our gas needs, but by 2030 that could be as high as 75 percent, Amber Rudd, the British minister for energy and climate change, said in a speech last month. Thats why were encouraging investment in our shale gas exploration, so we can add new sources of homegrown supply.Some environmental groups have been quick to criticize the governments moves. This could expose many of the U.K.s most fragile and treasured landscapes to noise, air and light pollution, Greenpeace said in a statement on Tuesday.Despite government support, the British shale industry has struggled to gain traction. Environmental groups and local opposition have contributed to slowing the allocation of exploration licenses.Few shale wells have been drilled in Britain, and only one has been fracked. That well, by Cuadrilla Resources, set off minor earth tremors in 2011, setting back the effort.The biggest obstacle to the growth of hydraulic fracturing, though, has been a lack of proof that the commercially exploitable resources exist despite studies suggesting large quantities of gas sit beneath some parts of Britain.One area the industry believes may have shale gas includes the North York Moors National Park in northeast England. Shale rock which may be suitable for fracking is likely to exist between 1,500 and 4,000 meters below the surface of the southern portion of the park, the parks managers say on their website.Chris France, director of planning at the park, said that in considering whether to allow fracking, park officials would weigh the possible environmental damage against the potential economic benefits. Absolutely economic benefits and the U.K.s need for shale gas are very much issues we would have to take into account, he said by telephone.British national parks attempt to meld preserving scenic beauty and wildlife with some commercial and residential activity. North York Moors is already the site of gas production from nonshale sources, by a company called Third Energy.Among those applying for new tracts is Ineos, a petrochemical company based in Switzerland, that has several onshore and offshore gas installations in Britain.The company said on Wednesday that it expected Britain to allocate new onshore exploration licenses soon, and that it had applied for many of them to expand its 300,000-acre portfolio. | Business |
People who have received the companys one-shot vaccine may benefit from a booster with another brand. F.D.A. advisers will discuss the data on Friday.Credit...Alisha Jucevic for The New York TimesPublished Oct. 13, 2021Updated Oct. 18, 2021People who received a Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine may be better off with a booster shot from Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech, according to preliminary data from a federal clinical trial published on Wednesday.That finding, along with a mixed review by the Food and Drug Administration of the case made by Johnson & Johnson for an authorization of its booster, could lead to a heated debate about how and when to offer additional shots to the 15 million Americans who have received the single-dose vaccine.The agencys panel of vaccine advisers will meet Thursday and Friday to vote on whether to recommend that the agency allow Moderna and Johnson & Johnson to offer booster shots.Despite the questions raised by the new data on the strength of Johnson & Johnsons boosters, some experts anticipated that the agency would clear the shots anyway, since the effectiveness of the one-shot vaccine is lower than that of the two-dose mRNA vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. And the broader public may also be expecting the authorizations, given the Biden administrations push for boosters from all brands.Once the agency authorized a booster from Pfizer-BioNTech last month, the die was cast, said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine.The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are by far the most used in the United States, with more than 170 million people in the United States fully immunized with either one or the other vaccine. When Johnson & Johnsons was authorized in February, public health experts were eager to deploy the one-and-done option, particularly in communities with poor access to health care. But the shots popularity plummeted when the F.D.A. later paused its use to investigate rare blood clotting cases.For those who have received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the timing of a booster authorization of any brand is still uncertain. The F.D.A. panel is set to vote Friday only on whether the agency should permit a second dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, a scenario the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions own vaccine advisory committee will discuss next week. If both agencies believe an additional dose should be offered, people could seek them out as early as next week.Whether the F.D.A. might authorize the mix-and-match approach, and how, is unclear. The strategy will be discussed at the agency panels meeting on Friday, but no vote will be taken. If regulators eventually believe there is enough scientific support for the approach, they would likely need to update the authorization language of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines to allow for their use in people who initially received Johnson & Johnsons.In a study conducted by the National Institutes of Health, researchers organized nine groups of roughly 50 people each. Each group received one of the three authorized vaccines, followed by a booster. In three groups, volunteers received the same vaccine for a boost. In the other six, they switched to a different brand.The researchers found that those who got a Johnson & Johnson shot followed by a Moderna booster saw their antibody levels rise 76-fold within 15 days, whereas those who received another dose of Johnson & Johnson saw only a fourfold rise in the same period. A Pfizer-BioNTech booster shot raised antibody levels in Johnson & Johnson recipients 35-fold.The authors cautioned about the studys small size and noted that they did not follow the volunteers long enough to identify rare side effects.Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the new study, found the results compelling. He noted, however, that the trial only looked at antibody levels, which on their own are an insufficient measure of how well different combinations of vaccines would lower Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations.At the end of the day, folks having the Johnson & Johnson should probably get an mRNA booster, he said. Its just a matter of, how much data does the F.D.A. need before making that recommendation?I wouldnt want to be in their shoes, he added.Some scientists question how the federal government is considering boosters of any brand, given the limited data provided not only by Johnson & Johnson, but the other companies as well.There are some of us who would really like to see more data, said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York. And then there are others who want to just move forward on boosters.ImageCredit...Paul Ratje for The New York TimesEarlier on Wednesday, an F.D.A. analysis questioned a key test used by the company, known as a psVNA assay, saying it may have skewed the findings.It is likely that the results seen are due to the low sensitivity of the psVNA assay used, the F.D.A. stated in its report. The regulators also said that they didnt have enough time to independently review much of the raw data from the companys trials.The F.D.A. did see a potential improvement in protection from a Johnson & Johnson booster given two months after the first shot, based on a large trial sponsored by the company. Some scientists have contended that its vaccine should have been a two-dose shot from the beginning.Although not independently confirmed by F.D.A. from data sets, summaries of the data suggest there may be a benefit in a second dose administered approximately two months after the primary dose, the agency said in its report.Johnson & Johnson in a statement said it looked forward to discussing the data on Friday, when panelists will also hear a presentation on the mix-and-match study.The F.D.A.s discussion this week of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has big implications for the shots future in the United States, said Jason L. Schwartz, an associate professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health. The vaccine was already unlikely to gain more acceptance in the country in the long run, he said. And if the F.D.A. ultimately recommends a booster shot for Johnson & Johnson recipients of a different vaccine, he added, its hard to see what would steer people to the J.&J. vaccine.The F.D.A. has already authorized an additional shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for people older than 65 years, or those 18 to 65 with underlying health conditions or job exposures that put them at higher risk. Modernas application, which will be discussed on Thursday, may also win authorization, despite limited evidence that the protection provided by the initial two-dose regimen of Moderna is waning.Regulators on Wednesday wrote that a single shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine still affords protection against severe Covid disease and death in the United States. But they also said that the highest estimates of protection, including for severe Covid, were consistently less than the highest effectiveness estimates for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech shots.ImageCredit...Brittainy Newman for The New York TimesA clinical trial showed that one dose of J.&.J. had an efficacy rate of 66 percent against moderate to severe Covid worldwide, and 74 percent in the United States. Its efficacy against either severe or critical disease was stronger, at 85 percent worldwide.In its application for a booster, Johnson & Johnson included the results of another large-scale trial that began in November 2020, in which they gave half their volunteers a second dose two months after the first. The other half received a placebo.In August, the company announced that in the portion of the trial that took place in the United States, the efficacy rose to 94 percent. But in its report, the F.D.A. focused on the worldwide results, in which the increase was more modest, rising to 75 percent.Dr. Hensley cautioned that the efficacy estimates from the trials had a fairly wide range of uncertainty. What that tells you is that the slight changes in effectiveness here might be due to chance, he said.Against severe to critical Covid disease, two shots had an efficacy of 100 percent. But regulators warned in the analysis posted Wednesday that there was little data from that trial on the Delta variant, which now causes the vast majority of infections in the United States.The emphasis on enhancing Johnson & Johnsons vaccine with a second shot reflects the fact that our booster conversation has shifted in recent weeks to not just preventing severe cases, hospitalizations and deaths. It has shifted to how we prevent infections, period, Dr. Schwartz said. J.&J. was lagging behind from the beginning.In August, when top Biden administration health officials announced plans to possibly begin administering booster shots in September to Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech recipients, they said they anticipated that those who received Johnson & Johnsons shot would also need one, though more data was needed.That announcement set unreasonable expectations for those who had received Johnson & Johnsons vaccine, Dr. Schwartz said, and made the J.&J. conversation even that much more confusing.Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting from Washington. | Health |
Europe|Head of Far-Right German Party Cancels Oxford Triphttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/world/europe/afd-oxford-alice-weidel.htmlCredit...Felipe Trueba/EPA, via ShutterstockNov. 2, 2018OXFORD, England Citing security concerns, Alice Weidel, the leader of Germanys far-right political party, has canceled an appearance at the University of Oxford.Ms. Weidel, the leader of the Alternative for Germany party, had been scheduled to give a short speech on Wednesday before the Oxford Union, a famed debating society, and to answer questions from audience members.Facing widespread protest, Stephen Horvath, the president of the Oxford Union, had steadfastly refused to cancel the event, citing the importance of free speech and the educational value of engaging with prominent politicians across Europe, regardless of their ideology.On Friday, however, Mr. Horvath said in a statement that Ms. Weidel had decided to withdraw.Alice Weidel has canceled her planned trip to the U.K. next week due to concerns with the security arrangements for aspects of her travels and engagements, the statement read.Ms. Weidel did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Horvath said he was open to rescheduling the event if she wished to participate.Members of the Oxford community had been mobilizing against Ms. Weidels impending appearance, including through open letters and plans for a mass protest. One petition, circulated by three German students opposed to the speech, had by Friday been signed by more than 250 Germans associated with Oxford as students, staff members or academics.We were wary of silence, of not speaking up, and where that could lead us, said Kristina Kmpfer, a doctoral student at Oxford from Jena, Germany, and a co-author of the petition. I was reminded of what we were taught in school and wanted to put it into practice, to speak up against Ms. Weidel and her platform.Ms. Weidels party, known as the AfD, has steadily risen to prominence in German politics and is known for its anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim positions. In national elections last year, it won 13 percent of the vote and became Germanys third-largest party in Parliament.The United States has experienced similar debates over whether and how to feature incendiary figures on its most prominent platforms. In September, the New Yorker caused an uproar after inviting Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing populist, to speak at its annual ideas festival. Under immense pressure, the New Yorker withdrew the invitation. | World |
Asia Pacific|Pompeo Meeting With North Korean Diplomat Postponedhttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/world/asia/pompeo-meeting-kim-yong-chol.htmlCredit...Pool photo by Andrew HarnikNov. 7, 2018HONG KONG A meeting in New York this week between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and North Koreas leading nuclear weapons negotiator has been called off, the State Department said Wednesday.The meeting, which had been scheduled for Thursday, will now take place at a later date, Heather Nauert, a State Department spokeswoman, said in a written statement. We will reconvene when our respective schedules permit.No reason was given for the decision, and the statement did not indicate which side requested it. The postponement of the meeting threw another wrench in Washingtons efforts to get North Korea to denuclearize.The State Department had said earlier that Mr. Pompeo planned to meet with Kim Yong-chol, North Koreas former intelligence chief and top diplomat. They were expected to discuss the goals established at the June summit meeting in Singapore between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, including achieving the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea, Ms. Nauert said.Mr. Pompeo traveled to North Korea last month and met with the North Korean leader, who said he would allow outside inspectors to visit a nuclear testing site the North said it had destroyed.The two men also discussed a potential second summit meeting with Mr. Trump. But the abrupt postponement of the Thursday meeting has raised questions about the potential for progress on negotiations over North Koreas nuclear and missile programs.Pyongyang has said it wants a declaration of a formal end to the Korean War, which was only halted under an armistice. It has also called for an easing of sanctions in exchange for steps toward denuclearization.The United States, however, wants North Korea to provide a full accounting of its nuclear program as a start to the process, and has resisted any easing of sanctions.South Korean officials said that negotiations were moving ahead and cautioned against placing too much significance on the delayed meeting.I dont think the North Korea-U.S. talks have been canceled or dialogue has lost steam, said Kim Eui-kyeom, a spokesman for President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, the Yonhap News Agency reported.Canceled meetings have been a regular feature of interactions between the United States and North Korea over the last year. But talks have thus far eventually proceeded after delays.Mr. Trump called off the summit meeting with Kim Jong-un in May, but then announced it was back on after he met in early June with Kim Yong-chol. The president also abruptly canceled Mr. Pompeos trip to North Korea in August, citing a lack of progress in talks. But Mr. Pompeo traveled to Pyongyang in October, his fourth trip in less than a year. | World |
The agency stressed that the disease was still very rare in children and that a cause had not been determined.Credit...Tami Chappell/ReutersMay 6, 2022The deaths of five children and what may be an unusual group of more than 100 hepatitis cases in young children in the United States are under investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency said on Friday.The C.D.C. said it was examining cases involving 109 children in 25 states and territories who had or have what the agency is calling hepatitis of unknown cause.Dr. Jay Butler, deputy director for infectious diseases at the C.D.C., said most of the children had fully recovered. But more than 90 percent were hospitalized, 14 percent received liver transplants and more than half had adenovirus infections, he said.The C.D.C. and experts overseas are exploring whether a type of adenovirus, a common virus that causes intestinal symptoms like vomiting and diarrhea, may be a factor in these cases. But the agency has not determined a cause for the cases or a common link among all of them, and it cautioned against drawing conclusions.Dr. Butler called it an evolving situation in a news briefing on Friday. Later, he added, Its important to remember that severe hepatitis in children is rare even with the potential increase in cases that were reporting today.Hepatitis and liver failure are unusual occurrences in young children, especially in otherwise healthy children, and so far the actual number of hepatitis cases in the United States is no more than the number usually seen.The agency did not provide details about the children who died or where those deaths occurred.The United Kingdom is investigating a far greater number more than 160 cases of young children reported to have or have had hepatitis recently.Hepatitis, a liver infection, typically occurs in adults and can be caused by viruses which respond to treatment with drugs or from alcoholism, from some medications, or from autoimmune conditions. Symptoms include yellowing skin and eyes, nausea, and abdominal pain.Dr. Butler also said there was no evidence so far that either a Covid-19 infection or the Covid vaccine was linked to the U.S. cases. The World Health Organization also said this week that the vast majority of children had not been vaccinated in the cases it had reviewed.The alarm began two weeks ago when the C.D.C. issued an alert, citing nine hepatitis cases among young children in Alabama that began last fall into this year. All had evidence of an adenovirus infection. Their median age was 2.The problem for the C.D.C. is to determine if the adenovirus is a cause or an innocent bystander, Dr. Butler said. Doctors do not normally test children for adenovirus infections it is not a reportable disease in the United States which makes it difficult to untangle causes and effects. He urged doctors to consider testing for adenovirus if children were ill with certain symptoms.It is not known how likely it would be for nine children tested at random to have had adenovirus infections. The virus also is seasonal and the fall and winter, when the Alabama children were ill, is adenovirus season.Complicating the situation further is that by the time the children were evaluated, the amount of virus, if it was found at all, was very low.We are working hard to determine the cause, Dr. Butler said. Because hepatitis in children remains a rare event, he said, the search is difficult.Other possibilities include environmental exposures, including exposures to animals or an immune reaction, with a reaction to an adenovirus at the top of the list, Dr. Butler said.We are casting a broad net, he said. | Health |
Sports of The TimesCredit...Nathan Denette/Canadian Press, via Associated PressJeff Z. Klein and Stu HackelFeb. 1, 2014The Olympic fate of Canadas Steven Stamkos, who has not played since breaking his leg in November, could be decided this week.Stamkos, who twice led the N.H.L. in goals, has been skating in practice with the Tampa Bay Lightning. Last Monday, he took the ice for only a moment because, he said, his leg did not feel right. But the next day he skated with his teammates before their game in Toronto, saying he felt much better.Stamkos, however, did not engage in light contact drills until Friday in Montreal. Afterward, he said certain movements still caused him discomfort.Tampa Bay Coach Jon Cooper had said that Stamkos would have to begin more physical practices if he had any hope of playing in the Olympics. Canadas first game in Sochi, Russia, is Feb. 13. Whether Stamkos will be strong enough to play a game before the Olympic break is a question.Stamkoss aim was to begin playing in Saturdays game against Montreal. Then it was to play at least one game before the Olympics. Now even that is uncertain.Last week, neither Stamkos nor Steve Yzerman, the general manager for the Lightning and for Canada, would rule out his being placed on the final Olympic roster. If Stamkos is not ready, Yzerman will have to choose a replacement.The sentimental choice among fans would almost certainly be Martin St. Louis, Stamkoss Tampa Bay linemate, whose exclusion from Canadas initial roster last month caused an outcry.Going into Saturdays game against the Canadiens, St. Louis had eight goals and seven assists in the 12 games he had played since the team was announced. St. Louis, 38, denied that the Olympic snub had played a role in his scoring binge, but Cooper said he believed it had been motivation.Others whom Yzerman might consider to fill Stamkoss spot are Pittsburghs James Neal, a pure goal scorer like Stamkos; Philadelphias Claude Giroux, a versatile forward like Stamkos who can play wing or center; and Carolinas Eric Staal, who had four goals and five assists in nine games since he was left off the roster. A Change in Brodeur For the first time in 20 seasons, Martin Brodeur, the goalie with the most victories in N.H.L. history, is not the main man in the Devils net. And last week, Brodeur spoke about leaving the team.During stops in St. Louis and in Dallas, Brodeur, 41, said he was open to finding a better situation, whether in New Jersey or elsewhere. He encouraged General Manager Lou Lamoriello to ask him about a trade. Brodeur said he did not think he would request a trade unless his status deteriorated further in the next few weeks. Those were the strongest statements he had ever made about parting with the Devils.The change may have been spurred by Brodeurs experience against the Rangers last Sunday at Yankee Stadium. In the run-up to the game, Brodeur sounded as if he were loosening his emotional ties to the club. He talked about his surprise that the Devils were finally chosen for a showcase event, and that he hoped Coach Peter DeBoer would choose him to start the game because of the way I play now, not what I did in the past.Then Brodeur allowed a couple of soft goals, and his teammates left him out to dry for four other scores. He came out of the net after 40 minutes in the 7-3 loss.Afterward, DeBoer said Brodeur had suggested that he leave the game for Cory Schneider.DeBoer said Brodeur had asked, How about we give Schneids the experience of a period in this environment?That request may turn out to be the beginning of the end of Brodeurs record-breaking career with the Devils. Kick Save by the Bard Last Wednesday at Edmonton, Oilers goalie Ben Scrivens set a modern goalkeeping record. He stopped all 59 shots he faced in a 3-0 victory against the San Jose Sharks, making the most saves in a regular-season shutout since the expansion era began in 1967.Scrivens, a 27-year-old Cornell graduate nicknamed the Professor, was making his fourth start for Edmonton since his Jan. 15 trade from Los Angeles.A mask he wore with the Kings this season was covered with quotations from Shakespeare, including one from Macbeth that seemed to fit this performance.The cry is still They come! Our castles strengthWill laugh a siege to scorn.I tried to pick a couple that might loosely relate to hockey, Scrivens said, his choices worthy of his nickname. | Sports |
Golf|3 Top Seeds Eliminated in Arizona Golf Eventhttps://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/sports/golf/3-top-seeds-eliminated-in-arizona-golf-event.htmlSports BriefingFeb. 20, 2014Top seeds Henrik Stenson, Rory McIlroy and Justin Rose were all eliminated in the second round of the W.G.C.-Accenture Match Play Championship in Marana, Ariz..The No. 1-seeded Stenson never led in falling to Louis Oosthuizen, 4 and 3, while fourth-seeded McIlroy lost a seesaw encounter with Harris English after 19 holes. Rose, seeded second, lost to Ernie Els, who birdied the 20th hole. Anna Nordqvist of Sweden shot a six-under 66 to take a one-stroke lead over Michelle Wie in the first round of the L.P.G.A. Thailand tournament in Pattaya, Thailand. Three other Americans, Angela Stanford, Lexi Thompson and Jennifer Johnson, shot 68. (AP) | Sports |
Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesJune 12, 2018WASHINGTON Lawmakers from both parties, deeply mistrustful of a leader who has brutalized his own country, greeted a joint agreement between the United States and North Korea coolly on Tuesday, with top Republicans warning President Trump that any final accord on Kim Jong-uns nuclear program should be submitted to the Senate for ratification.The presidents allies on Capitol Hill said the talks represented a potential breakthrough that could lead to lasting peace with one of the United States most dangerous enemies. But even they agreed with more skeptical lawmakers that there was much work to be done.Others, including leading Republican foreign policymakers, said it was unclear what, if anything, had been gained by the United States in exchange for the benefits accrued to Mr. Kim.While I am glad the president and Kim Jong-un were able to meet, it is difficult to determine what of concrete nature has occurred, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a notably brief statement.Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, an on-and-off ally of Mr. Trump and one of the Senates leading Republican foreign policy hawks, called the talks a good first step but little more.Theyve promised to give up their nuclear weapons; theyve done this twice, Mr. Graham said on Tuesday on CBS This Morning, referring to similar negotiations in the 1990s and 2000s under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that ultimately proved ineffective.Mr. Graham and others insisted that the president would need their signoff on any deal. Senator Mitch Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said he hoped that it would take the form of a treaty, which would likely make any agreement more durable, but requires the support of two-thirds of the Senate a very difficult threshold.If the president can reach a significant agreement with the North Koreans, I hope it takes the form of a treaty, Mr. McConnell told reporters. Thats what the founders of our country anticipated.The skepticism stood in marked contrast to comments by Mr. Trump. On Wednesday, he said on Twitter that there was no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.Details of the summit meeting, transmitted from Singapore to anxious lawmakers in Washington overnight, were scarce on Tuesday beyond the joint statement released by the two nations and subsequent comments by Mr. Trump.The statement said that Mr. Trump had committed to security for North Korea in exchange for Mr. Kims commitment to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. An upbeat Mr. Trump placed a call from Air Force One to Senate Republicans during their regular policy luncheon to recount the meeting, but senators said they left with little new understanding.As if to prove the point, one Republican senator got into a public tangle with representatives of Vice President Mike Pence over the details of an unexpected concession by Mr. Trump that the United States would suspend joint military exercises with South Korean forces.The senator, Cory Gardner of Colorado, told reporters that Mr. Pence had privately told Republicans the exercises would continue, but a spokeswoman for the vice president said that was false. After a back-and-forth on Twitter, Mr. Gardner clarified that Mr. Pence had said that regular readiness training would continue, but not full-scale war exercises.Mr. Gardner was not alone in his confusion.I couldnt tell what he was saying, Mr. Corker told reporters afterward, referring to Mr. Pence.Democrats were far harsher in their assessment of Mr. Trump, saying that the president had been played by the North Korean leader. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate Democratic leader, said he worried that Mr. Kim, having won some concessions, might choose not to advance negotiations further or follow through on his pledges.Given that they have gotten a lot of the things theyve already wanted, the worry here, very real, is that they will back off here too, Mr. Schumer said, taking their little bag of goodies home, leaving us empty-handed, leaving the president empty-handed.Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, all but dismissed the vague promises agreed to by the two leaders and lamented that in his haste to reach an agreement, President Trump elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regimes status quo.Those outcomes made it clear that Mr. Trump had not adequately prepared, and had paid the price, said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee.I think we took a big step backward, Mr. Murphy said, adding: I wish that they wouldve taken the time to do more planning and to do more pre-work.Several Republicans drew attention to the extreme brutality of Mr. Kims government, which according to the United Nations, includes enslavement, rape, torture, murder and intentional starvation. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, aired skepticism in a string of posts on Twitter that Mr. Kim would fully disarm, and said that he would not support any deal that doesnt ultimately bring to an end these atrocities under #KimJongun.Others mixed hopeful pronouncements with bellicose remarks. Representative Tom Reed, Republican of New York, said Mr. Kim had a path to economic prosperity and regional security if he chose to take it.However, if Kim Jong-un throws away this opportunity, it will mean the military destruction of his country and his death, he said.For many lawmakers, the rapid transformation of a relationship defined by nuclear taunts and imminent threats into one of grins and glad-handing at a resort halfway across the world only added to a sense of mistrust in Mr. Kims real intentions.Trying to reason with someone like that is like trying to hand-feed a shark, said Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana. That doesnt mean you cant do it, but you have to do it very carefully. | Politics |
The New Old AgeA new training tool helps to assess whether some seniors can make informed choices about their own care and well-being.Credit...Lindsey Wasson/ReutersMay 9, 2022During a recent Zoom conference call, four Adult Protective Services workers from California, using a tool called the Interview for Decisional Abilities, or IDA, were trying to figure out whether something fishy was going on with an 82-year-old woman they knew as Ms. K.Adult Protective Services agencies in every state receive reports of possible neglect, self-neglect, abuse or exploitation of older people and other vulnerable adults. But agency workers consistently face a bedeviling question: Does the adult in question have the capacity to make a decision about their medical care, living conditions or finances even if its not the decision that the family, doctor or financial adviser thinks should be made?IDA was developed by two geriatricians to help train Adult Protective Services workers in how to handle that issue. The program helps them learn to use a structured interview procedure to gather information about a clients decision-making ability. The two dozen California staff members taking the course had already completed 10 hours of individual online instruction; now they were practicing their new interviewing skills in small groups, role-playing with facilitators.Ms. K, a fictional character, was being played by Bess White, a special projects administrator at Weill Cornell Medicine. In the scenario, a bank manager had reported certain suspicions: Ms. K had $60,000 in a savings account but her withdrawals had increased sharply, from $600 a month to $600 a week. A younger man her nephew, she said had begun accompanying her to the bank, where a teller thought the man had seemed controlling and intimidating. An investigator who visited Ms. K at home learned that her only credit card had expired and that she had little cash.But Ms. K denied being financially exploited; her nephew lived with her, she said, and helped with chores and rides to doctors appointments. He used the bank withdrawals to buy their groceries.In the exercise, one of the A.P.S. trainees had ascertained that Ms. K grasped the basic concept of financial exploitation. Ms. K had heard about scams from the news, she said. And yes, she understood that a friend or relative might similarly take advantage.So the interviewer continued: What do you think could happen if someone took another persons money without their permission?Ms. White, in the role of Ms. K, replied: I guess the person could take it and take it until theres nothing left. But when the interviewer probed further to see if Ms. K understood that she herself might be facing this risk, she balked. She relied on her nephew, Ms. K said; she didnt want to upset him.IDA was developed by Dr. Mark Lachs, co-chief of geriatrics and palliative medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, and his colleagues, and by Dr. Jason Karlawish, a geriatrician and co-director of the Penn Memory Center. People have the right to make bad decisions, Dr. Lachs said in an interview. But, he added, the decision makers must be able to understand the risks they face and the potential consequences.ImageCredit...Weill Cornell MedicineHow can you walk into a brokerage office at 90 years old and say, Ive had Treasury bills for 50 years but now I want to put my last $200,000 in Bitcoin and nobody raises an eyebrow? Dr. Lachs said. Were going to look back at this and say, What were we thinking?Along with applying IDA to cases of financial neglect or abuse, the California A.P.S. workers were using it to assess a range of issues including self-neglect, health and safety questions, refusal of physical care or medical treatment, and physical or psychological or sexual abuse.Its not meant to replace a psychiatrist, but it tells you when to contact a psychiatrist, Dr. Lachs said. Clients whose IDA interviews reveal an inability to grasp risks or consequences should receive a full professional assessment, he added.To date, about 500 A.P.S. workers in New York City, Massachusetts and two California regions have taken the course and received certification. Kansas A.P.S. workers will undergo training this summer.But Drs. Lachs and Karlawish think IDA could have broader uses. Trust and estate lawyers and financial firms are already asking them about it.Hospital discharge planners might use IDA to assess whether a patient has the capacity to insist on going home instead of to rehab. A chain of assisted-living facilities contacted Dr. Lachs, wondering if IDA could help ensure that new residents understood the complicated contracts they were signing.The IDA interview attempts to answer three fundamental questions about a particular problem or risk, Dr. Karlawish said: Do you recognize that this happens? Do you think that this could be happening to you? Can you come up with a plan to address it, reasoning through and weighing the upsides and downsides?Depending on a problems complexity, people with diagnosed cognitive impairment or even dementia may still possess sufficient understanding to handle it.Someone who demonstrates that three-part understanding during the IDA interview probably has the ability to make a decision including a decision not to address the problem. Someone without that understanding needs a more comprehensive evaluation, perhaps including consultation with family members or social service agencies. In extreme cases, it might lead to eventual guardianship or conservatorship.Trouble handling finances often serves as an early warning of incapacity, said Dr. Daniel Marson, a neuropsychologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who has studied the subject for 25 years.Financial capacity is probably the first higher-order functional ability affected by neurodegenerative disorders and by normal aging, he said. Using money proficiently requires complex thought, from something basic like using an A.T.M. to things that are more complicated, like How should I handle this call from a telemarketer? The consequences of diminishing financial capacity unsafe living conditions, impoverishment, homelessness, institutionalization can be devastating.Although the incidence of dementia has been declining in the United States and Europe, the aging of these populations means that more individuals will develop it.Moreover, in a six-year study, Dr. Marson and colleagues found that older adults who were given a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment often a precursor condition to dementia also struggled increasingly. There were diminished financial skills over time, he said.Other institutions have attempted to tackle the issue of diminishing decisional ability. The American Bar Association last year updated its Assessment of Older Adults with Diminished Capacities: A Handbook for Lawyers. The Bar Association and the American Psychological Association have also published handbooks for judges and psychologists.The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, has posted online courses on financial exploitation of older adults and other vulnerable investors. Its rules allow a member firm to put a temporary hold on transactions and disbursements when it believes exploitation is involved. It also allows member firms to ask investors for a trusted contact person to consult in the event of suspected exploitation.The IDA program is focusing on A.P.S. workers for now because the typical agency is understaffed, underresourced and struggling, Dr. Karlawish said. California A.P.S. agencies handle about 30,000 cases involving seniors each month, according to state data, and are being asked to make decisions about capacity that a chair of a psychiatry department might have difficulty with, Dr. Lachs saidThe California staff on the Zoom training session, gently asking Ms. White as Ms. K how she might respond to the bank managers suspicions, eventually concluded that she did not need a professional work-up. It appeared that she understood her options.Giving her nephew access to her savings account might not have been the wisest move. But the decision was hers to make. | Health |
Feb. 16, 2014SEOUL, South Korea When the short-track speed skater Viktor Ahn waved the Russian flag on his victory lap and sang the Russian national anthem on Saturday after winning the gold medal in the mens 1,000 meters at Winter Olympics on Saturday, it was a poignant scene for South Koreans.Mr. Ahn, whose Korean name was Ahn Hyun-soo, was one of the best skaters South Korea had ever produced, winning many medals for his birth country, including five world championship titles in a row and three Olympic golds. Everyone knew his name in South Korea, where Olympic gold medals are strong symbols of national pride and their winners are looked on as patriots.As a Korean, I wish he were singing the Korean national anthem, Mr. Ahns father, Ahn Gi-won, told the South Korean news agency Yonhap in Sochi, Russia. But however he tried in South Korea, he could have no opportunity to recover his reputation.South Koreans are proud of the nations short-track speed skaters, who have won more Olympic gold medals than all of those participating in its other winter sports competitions combined.When after a bitter falling-out with South Korean sports officials, Mr. Ahn, 28, decided to switch his allegiance to Russia and adopt a Russian name in 2011, many South Koreans accused him of betrayal to get cash rewards from an Olympic host nation anxious to win its gold in short-track skating.But others saw him as a victim of a sordid underside of their countrys star-studded short-track speed skating world, which has been plagued by accusations that coaches fostered factionalism, physically abused athletes and fixed matches to promote those they favored and to squash the careers of those they did not.By Sunday, South Korean media outlets, Internet bloggers and Twitter users were congratulating Mr. Ahn for his victory against their countrys scandal-ridden short-track speedskating authorities. I am happier about his gold than a gold won by a South Korean, one South Korean posted on Twitter.After the 2006 Olympics in Turin, Italy, where he won three gold medals, Mr. Ahn was not allowed to rejoin the national team because, speedskating federation officials said, he suffered frequent injuries and was getting too old for a sport that needed to foster many talented youngsters.But Mr. Ahn and his father blamed the federation for turning its back on a storied skater during a temporary setback, a problem that South Koreas president, Park Geun-hye, seemed to tacitly acknowledge.The player Ahn has the best skills but he cannot seek his dream as a South Korean but is playing for another country, Ms. Park said last Monday after Mr. Ahn won the bronze medal in the mens 1,500 meters after outracing South Korean skaters. We must ask ourselves if his problem was not due to the unreasonableness in our sports community.She blamed sports leaders who discriminate against certain athletes while recruiting players, " adding, This practice buries the talent of great athletes and undermines the competitiveness of our sports teams.After his short-track speedskating victory, Mr. Ahn kissed the ice. For the past eight years, I have never lost sight of this moment, he said. This is the moment that I confirm that I made a right decision.South Koreas federation had no reaction to Mr. Ahns victory. Afterward, access to its website was disrupted, possibly because of a flood of angry users who wanted to criticize the federation, South Korean media reported.On Twitter, another user posted, Somebody must explain why the flag the player Ahn was holding was Russian, not South Korean. | Sports |
Credit...Corbis, via Getty ImagesIts been 40 years since the sideways explosion that changed volcanology forever.The eruption on May 18, 1980, was unique for exploding in two ways, a lateral blast plus a column of volcanic ash that went 80,000 feet into the sky.Credit...Corbis, via Getty ImagesMay 18, 2020On the morning of May 18, 1980, a volcano erupted not from its peak but from its side. In the minutes that followed, volcanic violence devastated the landscape, unleashing eight times more energy than was released by the sum of every explosive dropped during World War II, including two atom bombs.This was Mount St. Helens. Its explosion, the first major volcanic eruption in the lower 48 states for generations, killed 57 people scientists, photographers, hikers and people living in the shadow of the mountain.Scientists knew that something wicked had been brewing beneath this stratovolcano in Washington State that lies between Seattle and Portland. During a period of less than two months, a bulge the size of a town had appeared on its north flank, a vast pimple of unusually positioned magma. But the singular ferocity and unusual dimensions of the eruption took almost everyone by surprise, serving as a reminder of how much the science of volcanology had yet to learn.The 1980 event was really a landmark for volcanology writ large, said Seth Moran, the scientist-in-charge at the U.S. Geological Surveys Cascades Volcano Observatory.The eruption also showed how much more the contiguous United States needed to prepare for volcanic activity. While the country has 161 geologically active volcanoes, 10 percent of Earths total, only a handful on Alaskan islands and the Hawaiian archipelago made shows of force in modern history. Many Americans had forgotten about or remained unaware of the active but quiescent volcanoes of the Cascades, the mountainous spine snaking up the West Coast, said Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a geophysicist at Western Washington University.The spring of 1980 shattered that blithe unawareness, making volcanic hazards a continental American issue, she said.ImageCredit...Smith Collection/Gado, via Getty ImagesOver the past 4,000 years, Mount St. Helens has been the most prolific volcano in the Cascades, erupting in a dizzying array of styles, from ear splitting explosions to rivers of lava. But by 1980, it had clocked 123 years of eerie serenity.A magnitude-4.2 earthquake on March 20, 1980, clearly marked its reawakening. Thousands of vibrational swarms rocked the mountain over the next week, before ashy columns, some as high as 16,000 feet, burst skyward. Fresh craters opened, and by the end of the month the first seismic signals of migrating magma were detected.Much of April featured seismic thundering and several more steamy, ashy explosions. But late April to early May was strangely quiet. State officials puzzled over its temperamental nature as scientists swarmed the mountain to listen to its irregular heartbeat.ImageCredit...Jack Smith/Associated PressVolcanologists were most concerned with the bulge that had appeared on St. Helenss northern flank, which was expanding by five feet per day in early May. Some of them anxiously kept watch from Coldwater II, a newly built outpost on a ridge top 5.5 miles away.From May 7, eruptive activity became more frequent and dramatic as the bulge grew, sometimes slower, sometimes faster. A magnitude-5.0 quake on May 12 caused an 800-foot-wide avalanche of icy debris on the north flank.On the evening of May 17, according to a biography by Melanie Holmes, David Johnston of the U.S. Geological Survey settled in for a solitary shift at Coldwater II. At the crack of dawn the next day, he radioed observations to his colleagues in Vancouver, Wash. The bulge was now more than a mile across.At 8:32 a.m. local time the next morning a magnitude-5.1 quake shook the volcano. At that very moment, according to a report published by Washington State, Keith and Dorothy Stoffel, husband and wife geologists, were making several passes of the volcano in a private plane. They saw the north face of Mount St. Helens transform into a fluid rippling, pulsating, churning. Then it collapsed, shearing 1,300 feet off the summit in seconds. A volcanic cloud, incandescent with lightning bolts, quickly rocketed into the azure sky.This tempest, one of the largest debris avalanches in recorded history, permitted the vast bulge of gloopy, gassy magma to explosively decompress. A frenzied blast pushed a colossal volume of superheated volcanic matter sideways out of Mount St. Helens at over 300 miles per hour, punching through the avalanche as it was still falling.A thermal shock wave zipped across the land before a tsunami of debris, cooking at 660 degrees Fahrenheit, traveled 17 miles from the summit in just three minutes. It destroyed 230 square miles of forested land: trees within six miles were obliterated; those farther out were knocked down and seared. Thirteen miles from the volcano, plastic melted as the air burned.All eruptions really are unique, and they carry something in them that we havent seen before, said Dr. Caplan-Auerbach. For Mount St. Helens, that idiosyncrasy came in the form of that nightmarish lateral blast.ImageCredit...John Barr/Liaison, via Getty ImagesDr. Johnston, seeing the north face fall from Coldwater II, jumped on the radio. Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it! he cried. Moments later, the blast engulfed the 30-year-old scientist. On another ridge two miles behind him, Gerry Martin, an amateur radio operator who was observing the volcano for the Washington Department of Emergency Services, saw the annihilation of Coldwater II. His last words were: Its going to get me, too.After the lateral blast, an ash column shot 80,000 feet into the sky, blocking out the sun. Ash, 1.4 billion cubic yards worth, fell to Earth, damaging buildings, sewers, waterways and electronics across the state. Pyroclastic flows, raging avalanches of hot volcanic gas and fire, tumbled down the mountain at 80 miles per hour. Ash-filled mudflows damaged 200 homes and 27 bridges, and clogged rivers and lakes.By days end, the storm subsided. A 2.2-mile-long hole now adorned the volcano. Although 57 people, and countless wildlife, had perished, some managed to survive: a few fishermen jumped into rivers to evade the conflagration; a family of hikers were serendipitously shielded by another mountain between them and the volcano.It could have been worse. As the volcanos activity ramped up in March, scientists had to continually persuade the authorities to restrict access to all but law enforcement, volcano monitoring teams and other essential staff. Some groups protested, in an echo of events now occurring during the coronavirus pandemic, pointing to the impact the no-go zones were having on the local economy. If it wasnt for the vigilance and insistence of scientists such as Dr. Johnston, the death toll could have been in the thousands.They put everything they had into understanding what that volcano was going to do and to keep people out of the way, and at great personal loss, said Janine Krippner, a volcanologist at the Smithsonian Institutions Global Volcanism Program.ImageCredit...Mike Cash/Associated PressThe eruption caused research on Americas volcanoes to greatly intensify, said Brian Terbush, the earthquake/volcano program coordinator at Washington States Emergency Management Division. The disaster galvanized a diverse array of experts, converting many scientists working in other fields to the church of volcanology.The calamity also highlighted the long-lasting effects of a volcanic convulsion. The eruption caused $2.7 billion of damage. The outlet to the sizable Spirit Lake was blocked by volcanic debris, threatening downstream communities with flooding. Engineers excavated a tunnel to drain the lake, a scheme that required costly tweaks and fixes in the subsequent decades.Since 1980, wildlife reclaimed large swaths of the scorched earth, and Mount St. Helens began to heal its self-inflicted wound. Two lava domes oozed out of the mountain one from 1980 to 1986, and another from 2004 through 2008 growing out of the crater like scar tissue, nestling among a glacier that formed in the eruptions aftermath, one of the youngest on the planet.Aside from a few minor topographical twitches, the volcanos surface has been tranquil since 2008. But seismic whispers suggest that its magmatic system is slowly recharging its cannons for another volcanic volley, years or decades in the future.In the world of geology, the mantra is that the past is the guide to the future, said Dr. Moran, pointing to the volcanos hyperactive history.Mount St. Helens remains a profoundly hazardous volcano, but the fear and dread associated with May 18, 1980, is flecked by specks of hope. Forty years ago, people came together in a time of crisis and did what they could to save others, Dr. Krippner said. The same will hold true whenever the volcano roars back to life. | science |
Science|Watch the Eta Aquariid Meteor Shower Peak in Night Skieshttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/science/meteor-shower-eta-aquarid-tonight.htmlWatch the Eta Aquariid Meteor Shower Peak in Night SkiesCredit...W. Liller/NASAMay 4, 2022Wednesday night into Thursday morning will be one of the special dates scattered throughout each year when skywatchers can catch a meteor shower as a multitude of flares potentially burst in the darkness.Meteor showers occur when our planet runs into the debris field left behind by icy comets or rocky asteroids going around the sun. These small particles burn up in the atmosphere, leading to blazing trails of light. The regularity of orbital mechanics means that any given meteor shower happens at roughly the same time each year.The latest shower is the Eta Aquariids, sometimes also spelled Eta Aquarids. They have been active since April 15 and go to May 27, but they will peak May 4 to 5, or Wednesday night into early Thursday morning.The Eta Aquariids are one of two showers resulting from the debris field of Halleys comet, along with the Orionids in October. Debris will enter over Earths Equator, meaning it will be visible in both hemispheres all over the world.Moonlight will be minimal during peak times, which should be between 3 a.m. and twilight on May 5. But the shower should be highly active for roughly a week before and after that date. In past years, the Eta Aquariids have produced between 45 to 85 meteors per hour in dark sky conditions.And there are more meteor showers to come. Visit The Timess list of major showers expected in 2022, or sync our curated collection of major space and astronomy events with your personal digital calendar.How to see a showerThe best practice is to head out to the countryside and get as far away from artificial light sources as possible. People in rural areas may have the luxury of just stepping outside. But city-dwellers have options, too.Many cities have an astronomical society that maintains a dedicated dark sky area. I would suggest contacting them and finding out where they have their location, said Robert Lunsford, the secretary-general of the International Meteor Organization.Meteor showers are usually best viewed when the sky is darkest, after midnight but before sunrise. In order to see as many meteors as possible, wait 30 to 45 minutes after you get to your viewing location. That will allow your eyes to adjust to the dark. Then lie back and take in a large swath of the night sky. Clear nights, higher altitudes and times when the moon is slim or absent are best. Mr. Lunsford suggested a good rule of thumb: The more stars you can see, the more meteors you can see.Binoculars or telescopes arent necessary for meteor showers, and in fact will limit your view. | science |
Asia Pacific|North Korea May Roll Out Rocket System With Greater Reach, South Sayshttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/world/asia/north-korea-multiple-rocket-launchers.htmlCredit...Kim Hong-Ji/ReutersApril 6, 2016SEOUL, South Korea North Korea could deploy a new rocket system as early as this year that would expand its ability to strike South Korean and American military forces in the South, South Koreas defense minister said on Wednesday.South Korea has been closely monitoring the Norths development of the 300-millimeter multiple-rocket launcher system, which the country has tested frequently in recent years. The weapon has alarmed officials because it is believed to have a range long enough to strike major American and South Korean military bases, including those near Pyeongtaek, about 60 miles south of Seoul, the capital.Defense Minister Han Min-koo said on Wednesday that North Korea was likely to deploy the new system late this year at the earliest. The North developed the weapon because it is cheaper than its short-range, Scud-type ballistic missiles and allows it to fire far more projectiles, Mr. Han said in an interview with South Korean reporters.Mr. Han said South Korea and the United States had been preparing for the new threat by upgrading their surveillance and counterattack abilities.The North has thousands of 240-millimeter multiple-rocket launchers near its border with South Korea, according to the Defense Ministry. Those rockets have an estimated range of 37 miles, putting Seoul and its 10 million people in reach. The new system has an estimated range of up to 124 miles, South Korean defense officials have said.Last month, North Korea said it had tested fragmentation-mine shells and underground penetration shells for the new system, which it said had already entered serial production. In October, the North displayed an eight-tube version of the so-called KN-09 launcher during a military parade in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.The Norths frequent threats to turn the South Korean capital into a sea of fire are presumed to be references to the rockets and to thousands of artillery pieces that North Korea also keeps near the border. The North launched an artillery attack on a South Korean border island in 2010, killing four South Koreans.On Monday, a North Korean-run propaganda website released a video clip that used computer animation to depict North Korean rockets hitting the presidential Blue House and other government facilities in Seoul.Mr. Hans remarks came a day after a senior South Korean official said the government now believed that the North was capable of mounting a nuclear warhead on its medium-range Rodong ballistic missile, which can reach all of South Korea and most of Japan. | World |
TrilobitesCredit...Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesMarch 10, 2017Over the past week, the internet has been getting excited over a hot-pink lake in the heart of Melbourne. And despite what science fiction nostalgia it may conjure up, this is not a scene from Ghostbusters or The X-Files. This is very much a real, natural phenomenon that occurs all over the planet. Its what happens when the only thing living in a supersalty lake is a single-celled, salt-loving microbe that makes pigments called carotenoids.Its the equivalent of having a desert, pink lake right in Central Park, said Mark Norman, a conservation biologist for Parks Victoria, which manages the lake. Its quirky and fascinating, and I love it when natural systems do something that is so large scale that it just blows everybody away.The lake turned pink last week, and is expected to return to its normal color when the weather cools down and rains return for Australias winter, which starts in June.VideoStep out into the salty waters on the northern tip of the Yucatn Peninsula in Mexico, where small organisms turn the water pink.CreditCredit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times. Technology by Samsung.Dr. Norman said that when the weather gets warm and dry, this is an annual occurrence. As water evaporates from the saltwater lake, its salinity increases to eight or 10 times that of the ocean, creating an extreme habitat where few organisms can live. In Westgate Parks lake, the only living thing is a single-celled algae. When salt concentrations are incredibly high, it starts producing carotenoids, the pigments that give the lake its color. The carotenoid also acts as a filter to protect their chlorophyll, almost like a pair of sunglasses that goes over the chlorophyll cells and aids in photosynthesis, he said.Australias dry landscape provides other opportunities to see pink lakes fueled by this organism, like in Murray-Sunset National Park or near Dimboola in Victoria and the Hutt Lagoon and Lake Hillier in Western Australia among others. In the rest of the world, pink or red lakes exist in Spain, Senegal, the Crimean Peninsula, Azerbaijan, Tanzania, Bolivia, Kenya, Mexico and other countries. In some cases, salts or the carotenoid pigments are harvested from the lakes and used for many purposes, including flavoring, melting ice or dyeing foods and pharmaceuticals.According to Dr. Norman, salt lakes turn pink only when the right combination of factors exists: high salinity and the right salt and organisms. The lake at Westgate Park most likely gets sodium chloride, or sea salt, underground from the nearby bay and estuarine river. Other lakes in Australia that have, for example, gypsum salt, dont turn pink. Sediment, salinity and other organisms can also affect a lakes pinkness.And a pink lake is different from pink water coming from a sink, like the stuff that spewed from some Canadian taps on Thursday. That was the result of a disinfectant called potassium permanganate that leaked into the system, not algae, salt or aliens.ImageCredit...Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesIn other lakes where brine shrimp live alongside the carotenoid-producing algae, the shrimp turn pink after eating the algae and its carotenoids, Dr. Norman said. The pigments stick to the shrimps fat and the color travels up the food chain. Such carotenoid-rich brine shrimp are important to a flamingos diet remove the carotenoids, and its feathers go white. The lakes that pink flamingos eat from may not appear as pink as the one in Melbourne because the algae arent the only things that live there.Spains Las Salinas de Torrevieja, is one of these lakes. On sunny days, the salt lake blushes more rose than hot pink. It can host thousands of flamingos during breeding season as well as a few other plants and animals, including some orchids on occasion. And so is the Laguna Colorada, in Bolivia, which attracts Chilean flamingos, Jamess flamingos and Andean flamingos, one of the rarest breeds in the world. In Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve, which it is a part of, you can find pumas, foxes, llamas, reptiles and other animals. This shallow but large lake, high in the Andes Mountains, is blood red because of algae and sediments. Minerals or algae give other lakes in the reserve signature colors too, like the turquoise Laguna Verde.For the urban experience in Australia, the best way to see Westgate Parks pink lake is to drive a car across the bridge, catch a taxi or walk its only about two and a half miles from the city center. To see the pink water in all its glory, look from above, in the middle of the day. But to watch the pink water blend into pink skies, go at sunset. Just next door is a freshwater lake, which isnt pink but can host more than 140 species of birds.Dr. Norman said the water is so salty that swimming wouldnt be pleasant: Getting water in your eyes would be like squirting soy sauce into them, and when it dried, it would crystallize on your eyelids: Its better to look at it than to jump in it. | science |
DealBookCredit...Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for DisneyDec. 21, 2015All anyone can talk about is Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the more than half-billion-dollar haul that the Walt Disney Company pulled in over the weekend.The press has been breathless and Wall Street analysts are mostly giddy about Disneys prospects.But on Friday, just as the entertainment giant was beginning to count its record box office take, Richard Greenfield, a longtime media analyst at BTIG Research, urged his clients to sell their Disney stock. He became the only analyst to have a sell rating on the company.To Mr. Greenfield, Star Wars is a sideshow, masking what he believes are deeper financial and strategic challenges at Disney. The companys problems, he says, have nothing to do with Darth Vader or Donald Duck. Instead, Disney has a looming issue with ESPN, the sports television juggernaut.In a report titled Even the Force Cannot Protect ESPN, he argues that Disneys successful film business, which includes Pixar, has distracted investors from an impending slowdown at ESPN as viewers cancel their cable subscriptions (the cord cutters) or never sign up for cable to begin with (the cord nevers).Investors must remember that at its core, Disney is a cable network company that has the highest level of fixed costs (sports rights) in the industry, he wrote. ESPN now appears poised to become Disneys most troubled business as consumer behavior shifts rapidly.In the past year, HBO and CBS have begun unbundling, meaning that they now offer their programming la carte for a monthly fee thats far less than a bundled cable bill. Mr. Greenfield believes that as more cable networks shift to selling their programming this way, ESPN will have to follow suit. But he says it will not be able to sign up enough viewers to pay a monthly subscription fee that would offset the loss in cable subscribers who now pay a monthly carriage fee (about $7 a household) whether or not they watch ESPN.These lucrative fees currently cover the enormous cost of licensing live sports programing. Mr. Greenfield has been especially critical of ESPNs aggressive sports-rights acquisitions in recent years, which he says has been driven in part to block the growth of rivals like Fox and NBC.ESPNs problems first spilled into the open in August when Disney reduced growth expectations for its cable network division and its shares plummeted. The news alarmed investors in television companies, sending the stocks of Time Warner and 21st Century Fox down along with Disneys.In an interview, Mr. Greenfield said he believed that the expectations seem too high for Disney. He expects the company's stock to fall to $90 in the next 12 months; it closed Monday at $106.58.It puts incredible pressure on the films. They all have to be massive successes. Thats just tough. Mr. Greenfield is especially worried about earnings in 2017 and beyond, when he believes the cord cutting may push Disney to pursue an la carte subscription offering, given that 44 percent of the companys profits currently come from cable television.VideoRich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research, explains why he shorted Disney despite the record debut of 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens.'CreditCredit...CNBCRobert Iger, Disneys chief executive, has said that he could imagine ESPN selling the sports network over streaming video via a so-called over-the-top, or O.T.T., subscription, calling such a move inevitable. But he also seems in no rush to make such a move and for good reason.There are many commonly held beliefs/myths/legends about ESPN, Todd Juenger, an analyst at Bernstein, wrote over the weekend, partly in response to Mr. Greenfield. One such belief, he wrote, is that ESPN is what holds the bundle together. But he said: Maybe that is true, but in a different way than most people intend. If ESPN went O.T.T., we dont think the bundle would collapse because millions of households would drop cable and subscribe to ESPN. Instead, if ESPN went O.T.T., we think other networks would respond in kind, and perhaps millions of households would drop cable to avoid ESPN (and other expensive sports networks) and take advantage of the rich array of entertainment video options.Mr. Iger has acknowledged that television is a mature industry now being disrupted by streaming technology, which makes its future uncertain. But Mr. Iger, 64, may not have to wrestle with these challenges; those will most likely be left to his expected successor, Tom Staggs. (Mr. Igers contract ends in mid-2018.)Most analysts wave off concerns about ESPN, arguing that this wont be a problem for some time and that live sports will remain the most desirable programming for viewers who still want a bundle of channels. And, they say, its the cable companies that will feel the most pain.We think that the turmoil and disruption will most be felt by the distributors and some of the weaker programming content companies, Martin Pyykkonen of Rosenblatt Securities wrote to investors, also seemingly in response to Mr. Greenfield. For Disney, we think its a reasonable bet that they will be a necessary part of almost any skinnier programming package going forward.All that may be true. Its also possible that shifts in television habits will change more slowly than some of the most dire predictions.Disney may have seen all of this coming: It has spent the past decade diversifying its business by adding big franchises like Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar while expanding its theme park business.So while the entire television industry may be challenged, perhaps Disney will be able to weather the storm better than many others. Given all the brands Disney has accumulated, Mr. Greenfield conceded, It would be more fun to be them than anyone else.Still, Mr. Juenger said, We do have concern, however, that once Star Wars is digested, the focus will return to affiliate fees.But at least for now, its a whole lot more fun to talk about Han Solo, lightsabers and Chewbacca than cord cutting, over-the-top and affiliate fees. | Business |
New, international standards for handling ancient genetic material draw support from many scientists, criticism from others.Credit...Gabriella Marks for The New York TimesPublished Oct. 20, 2021Updated Oct. 25, 2021In 2017, a team of scientists successfully extracted the DNA of members of a Pueblo community who were buried starting around 1,300 years ago in what is now Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. The DNA suggested that these people had lived in a matrilineal society, with power passed down through generations of mothers.The paper was a powerful example of how ancient DNA could illuminate the lives of people who died long ago.It was also a case study in poor ethics, some researchers contended at the time. They alleged that the scientists had failed to consult with local tribes and used culturally insensitive terms, such as referring to a tribal ancestor as cranium 14.Such criticisms have grown more numerous in the past decade as the practice of extracting DNA from ancient human remains has become more widespread, thanks to advances in genetic-sequencing technologies.On Wednesday, an international group of researchers who work on ancient DNA articulated a set of ethics guidelines to ensure that their work does no harm, either to the once-living people they study or to the modern communities who have a stake in the matter. Their perspective, published in the journal Nature and translated into more than 20 languages, listed 64 authors from 31 countries, and represented every continent except for Antarctica.The group met virtually starting in November 2020 to hash out the guidelines.This paper sets the steps toward new policies in aDNA research, Hiba Babiker, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Pln, Germany, and an author on the paper, wrote in a message.The researchers hope the guidelines will be taken up by the wider community engaged in ancient DNA research, Rodrigo Nores, a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina and an author on the paper, wrote in an email.The paper specifies five general guidelines for ancient DNA researchers: that they follow local regulations, prepare a detailed plan before any study, minimize damage to human bones, make data available for re-examination and, to ensure respect and sensitivity, engage with all stakeholders before starting any study.Many scientists who were not involved in the virtual meeting expressed support for the guidelines.I will say that its encouraging to see a group of scientists like this say we have talked about this standard of behavior and were willing to agree to it, said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved with the paper. Its a step forward for them to say at least were going to follow the law.But some researchers criticized the past actions of some authors of the guidelines, including several who worked on the Chaco Canyon paper.If I look at the five principles theyve come up with, said Maui Hudson, an associate professor at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, they seem like theyre stating what they should be doing anyway and not really pushing toward the place where Indigenous communities would like them to be.Some outside researchers found the guidelines vague. We need to be as sophisticated in our applications and understandings of bioethics and decolonial practice as we are with ancient DNA, said Rick W.A. Smith, a biocultural anthropologist at George Mason University, who was not involved with the research.Still other scientists, many of them Indigenous, who have written extensively about ethics in ancient DNA research, wondered why they were not asked to be involved.ImageCredit...Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesI was a bit surprised that a meeting like this happened and that I was not invited, said Nanibaa Garrison, a bioethicist and geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who works on the project aDNA Ethics, which is focused on the ethics of studying North American ancient DNA. They talk about community engagement but fail to engage the community of researchers who have been involved in that space, too.Krystal Tsosie, a genetics researcher at Vanderbilt University, wrote in an email, I feel like this entire paper is really geared toward excusing paleogenomicists extraction of data without the consent of communities.The authors of the new paper intentionally chose to invite only active practitioners of ancient DNA research, according to Kendra Sirak, a paleogeneticist at Harvard Medical School and one of the authors. They also emphasize that these guidelines come from a particular group of scholars in the ancient DNA community.We realized that whats lacking in this field is a statement from a group of practitioners from all over the world, so thats what we wanted to contribute here, said Dr. Sirak, who works in the lab of David Reich, one of the leading experts in ancient DNA.The new paper is not the first published set of ethics guidelines on the issue. In 2018, a group of scientists based in North America published guidelines for ancient DNA research the first recommendations approved by a professional organization, the American Society of Human Genetics.But concerns arose during the virtual workshop that the guidelines of that paper could not be extended worldwide, the authors said. Our lab is global, and we heard from a lot of our collaborators who said those guidelines are good steppingstones but not universally applicable, said Jakob Sedig, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Reichs lab.The task of creating globally applicable guidelines for ancient DNA research is daunting, as historical and cultural context and regulations vary widely across the world, the authors noted in the new paper. In the United States and Hawaii, where Indigenous peoples were historically displaced by white settlers, it is critical to center Indigenous perspectives, said Nathan Nakatsuka, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and an author on the paper. Elsewhere in the world, the authors contend that consulting with communities who live in the vicinity of a site or profess ties to it does not always make sense.The fourth recommendation in the new paper, on making data available after publication to check the scientific findings, garnered much debate. The guidelines call making data fully open a best practice, but would require only that other researchers be allowed to confirm the accuracy of the original study.Many authors made the case for fully open data, Dr. Sirak said; restricted data access could tilt the availability of such data to larger, well-funded labs, they argued. But we saw instances where we could possibly justify limiting data if there were concerns, Dr. Sirak said.If any researcher can gain access to ancient DNA for new purposes, Mr. Hudson said, related communities would lose the opportunity to determine how the data is used.Dr. Hawks suggested that ancient DNA could offer an unethical shortcut to modern DNA. If youre working on skeletal remains from a region of the world that we know historically was occupied by ancestors or relatives of an Indigenous group today, thats an avenue to capitalize on information from an Indigenous group while circumventing these research ethics, Dr. Hawks said.The final guideline asks that researchers engage with stakeholders to ensure the research is conducted with respect and sensitivity to all people involved, living and dead.Some outside researchers felt these guidelines siloed researchers and stakeholders. Most of these guidelines seem to be about ancient DNA researchers working in isolation of communities and not with communities, said Ripan Malhi, a genetic anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was not involved with the paper.The authors on the new paper say they hope to continue the conversation around the ethics of ancient DNA. I think every single one of us is open to having discussions now with a wider group of people, Dr. Sirak said.Dr. Malhi said: I do like the conversation. But I guess I would want to see the conversation not erasing guidelines and topics and people that have been talking about ethics for a long time on genetics in the past. | science |
Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesJune 27, 2018WASHINGTON The House resoundingly rejected a far-reaching immigration overhaul on Wednesday, despite a last-minute plea from President Trump, as internal divisions in the Republican ranks continued to hobble legislative efforts to protect the young unauthorized immigrants known as Dreamers.The 121-to-301 vote was an embarrassment both to Mr. Trump and to House Republican leaders, who had spent weeks trying to bring together conservatives and Republicans with moderate views on immigration and ended up with little to show for the effort.In the end, nearly as many Republicans voted against the bill, 112, as for it, 121.The defeat provided the latest display of the Republican Partys disunity in Congress on immigration. And it highlighted the continuing inability of both the House and the Senate to resolve the fate of the Dreamers, who were brought to the country illegally as children. Many of those undocumented immigrants have been shielded from deportation under an Obama-era program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which Mr. Trump moved last year to end.Republicans in the House are now likely to turn their focus to narrower legislation that would seek to keep migrant families together at the border, an issue that senators are also looking to address. But with the Fourth of July approaching and lawmakers close to returning home for a recess, it was not clear how quickly a narrower measure might move forward.The House is scheduled to finish its work for the week on Thursday and not return until July 10. A Republican aide said the chamber would not take action on the family separation issue until after the recess.The frustrations over immigration in Congress are matched by the confusion in the Trump administration. A federal judge in California issued a nationwide injunction on Tuesday stopping the administration from separating children from their parents at the border and ordering that all families already separated be reunited within 30 days.The Justice Department responded by putting pressure on lawmakers, saying in a statement that the judges order makes it even more imperative that Congress finally act to give federal law enforcement the ability to simultaneously enforce the law and keep families together.Without this action by Congress, lawlessness at the border will continue, the department said.But the House vote demonstrated the difficulty of developing any kind of broad immigration legislation that can clear even a single chamber of Congress.This year, the Senate rejected a series of immigration measures, and last week, the House rejected a hard-line immigration bill favored by conservatives in that chamber.For their part, Democrats have offered their support for legislation to provide Dreamers with a path to citizenship while beefing up border security. But they have been unwilling to support legislation that fulfills Mr. Trumps wider demands on immigration, including making cuts to legal immigration.All 189 Democrats who voted on Wednesday opposed the bill.Once again, Republican leaders put a partisan immigration bill on the floor, and it failed overwhelmingly, said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip. When will they realize that the path forward on immigration and asylum reform must be a bipartisan one?Hours before the vote, Mr. Trump used Twitter to implore Republicans in all capital letters to pass the bill, which would have provided more than $23 billion for border security, including for his promised wall, while keeping migrant families together at the border and providing a path to citizenship for Dreamers.But coming days after Mr. Trump had told Republicans in Congress to forget about immigration until after the midterm elections, his last-minute change of mind did not prove persuasive.In the end, the lack of consensus within the party on immigration was glaring.We attempted to bridge the divide, Representative Patrick T. McHenry, Republican of North Carolina and the chief deputy whip, said after the vote.Whats clear is theres no Republican-only DACA fix, Mr. McHenry said. There are certainly Republican votes for border security, but the problems that President Obama left for us with DACA will not be easily remedied simply with Republican votes.The bill rejected Wednesday would have made significant changes to the immigration system, and it generally adhered to Mr. Trumps stated requirements for any overhaul. It would have limited family-based immigration, and it would have eliminated the diversity visa lottery, which admits immigrants from countries that do not send many people to the United States.But despite the painstaking negotiations among Republicans to try to arrive at a broad immigration overhaul that would be acceptable to different ideological factions within their conference, the resulting compromise still ran into trouble with conservatives. It was derided on the right as amnesty for offering a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers.This bill was not the sort of bold immigration reform that America supported when it elected Donald Trump to be president, nor does it reflect the priorities of a conservative-led legislature, said Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida.The vote on Wednesday followed a push by moderate Republicans, many facing difficult re-election bids, to compel the House to take action protect the Dreamers. They used a parliamentary maneuver known as a discharge petition in an attempt to force a series of votes on immigration, but fell two signatures short of what they needed.Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida, a leader of the moderates who pushed for action on immigration, did not hide his frustration with the outcome of the vote. Today, he said, a coalition of shortsighted House members shamefully came together to preserve the broken, inefficient, unfair immigration system that misgoverns our country.For now, the DACA program has been kept alive by the courts, but the failure of Congress to agree on a legislative fix means that hundreds of thousands of Dreamers will continue to face an uncertain future.Democrats were quick to assign blame.Republicans maintain full control of Washington, said Tyler Law, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and their failure to deliver on immigration reform is both a reflection of the Republican Partys antipathy towards immigrant families and their inability to govern.House Republican leaders twice delayed a vote on the immigration overhaul last week to give themselves more time to build support. But by Wednesday, their last-ditch efforts had failed to produce any outpouring of enthusiasm.Mr. Trump did not help matters.Last Friday, he tweeted that Republicans in Congress should stop wasting their time on immigration legislation until after the midterm elections in November a message directly at odds with the effort in the House to build support for the bill.The president could have been a valuable salesman in persuading wavering Republicans to get behind the legislation. Instead, his conflicting messages only added to the discombobulation that Republicans have not been able to escape on the politically delicate subject of immigration. | Politics |
Rep. Joe Kennedy III Shinier the Better! ChapStick Says He Nailed It 1/31/2018 Joe Kennedy III had to explain away his "drool" after his State of the Union response, but ChapStick says he shouldn't be making excuses ... 'cause he applied the product perfectly. A rep for the company -- which is said to be the culprit for the congressman's extra shiny finish Tuesday night -- says Kennedy did NOT go overboard with the product. The spokesperson says ChapStick "encourages generous application of our products," adding that it appears JK3 "took our advice to heart and put his lips first." Translation: They love the plug. | Entertainment |
Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesFeb. 14, 2014KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia The medal podium after Fridays mens super combined was a smorgasbord of countries, upbringings and ski racing pedigrees, with one constant: Each racer was surprised by where he finished, and yet, wholly content with the result.For the winner, Sandro Viletta, a quiet 28-year-old from the eastern mountains of Switzerland, whose ski racing career was derailed for years by a herniated disk in his back, victory was a gift he never saw coming.I did not think this was possible; I did not expect to win, even after I had the lead today, said Viletta, whose past results in the super combined were unremarkable. But on one day, I had the perfect day.Fridays race had instead seemed the ideal time for Ivica Kostelic of Croatia to finally win the gold medal in the event after coming in second at both the 2006 and 2010 Olympics. The super combined is one run of downhill in the morning and a slalom run in the afternoon, and few racers in the field are spectacular at both. The event becomes a balancing act: Survive your weakness and make the most of your strength.As a slalom specialist, Kostelic was in the most favorable position at the halfway point, having finished seventh in the downhill. But in something of a shock, he could not chase down the unheralded Viletta and finished 34-hundredths of a second behind the winning time of 2 minutes 45.20 seconds.At first, Kostelic, 34, who is skiing in his final Olympics, was disenchanted to have another silver medal.Everyone likes winners, he later said. And I had such hopes for a gold medal.But Kostelic changed his view, perhaps after spending time with his father and coach, Ante, with whom, as a young boy, he sometimes lived in a car, along with his sister, Janica. Together, they awaited opportunities to continue their ski training in their war-torn country during the early 1990s.Janica became a six-time Olympic medalist. Ivica now has four silver medals, two in super combined, one in combined and one in slalom.That is 10 Olympic medals for our family, Kostelic said. So I am thankful for the silver. I am proud of it.As for the bronze medalist, the Italian Christof Innerhofer, who grew up in northern Italy about 150 miles from Vilettas home, he was downright flabbergasted.ImageCredit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesI thought there would be no chance today, said a laughing Innerhofer, who was second in the mens downhill earlier in the week. Its a big surprise. I dont train slalom.Left in the wake of the blissful medal winners was a gaggle of favorites who lurched and skidded and finished well behind. Foremost among them was the reigning world champion in the event, the American Ted Ligety, who finished 12th.Ligety had an uneven downhill run but was within reach of the leaders with a solid slalom run. In previous seasons, under similar circumstances, he has rallied to win. But a difficult slalom course set by Ante Kostelic was giving many racers trouble, and by the time Ligety pushed out of the gate, he was convinced that he had to ski somewhat cautiously to have any chance at making it to the podium.It proved to be a miscalculation.Watching the other guys, I didnt think going 100 percent was the way to get a medal, Ligety said. It was a tactic, and I held back a little. But I respected the course too much. And thats frustrating now.But it was that kind of day. Perhaps the biggest prerace favorite, Alexis Pinturault of France, whose strength is slalom, skied out of the slalom course less than a third of the way into his run.And Bode Miller, the defending Olympic super combined champion, made mistakes in both his downhill and his slalom runs. He finished sixth.Too many bobbles, he said ruefully.The race, which began an hour earlier in an attempt to evade midday temperatures that reached into the 50s, was nonetheless contested in soft snow. Few racers complained about the snow, especially in the slalom, in which it had less effect, but it was easy to notice that racers with the later bib numbers in the downhill did not fare well.By the luck of the draw, Ligety, Andrew Weibrecht, also of the United States, and Miller skied consecutively at the disadvantageous 22nd, 23rd and 24th start positions.By races end, however, a luckless bib draw was not the focus of the United States ski team.After four events, the Americans have just one medal, Julia Mancusos bronze in the womens super combined.The country with the most Alpine medals is Switzerland, which had its first winner in the womens downhill in 20 years Wednesday when Dominique Gisin tied Slovenias Tina Maze for the gold medal. Friday was Switzerlands first victory in the Olympic super combined, or the combined, as the event was called when it was one run of downhill and two runs of slalom. The Swiss this week also won a bronze medal in the womens downhill.His teams rise at the Sochi Games pleased Viletta.We have been close so many times, he said. But we did not give up. | Sports |
Business| New Star Wars Speeds Toward Recordhttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/business/media/new-star-wars-speeds-toward-record.htmlCredit...Kevork Djansezian/Getty ImagesDec. 19, 2015Star Wars fever has spread through movie theaters around the globe, even reaching the White House, as the series yet again began toppling box-office records.After a record $57 million from Thursday night showings in North America and packed matinees on Friday, Walt Disney projected that Star Wars: The Force Awakens would surpass $215 million over the weekend, beating the record-setting domestic opening of Jurassic World, which debuted with $208.8 million in June.Such an outcome would surprise few analysts, but the numbers were nevertheless remarkable. The Force Awakens was heading toward a Thursday night and Friday total of more than $120 million domestically, said Dave Hollis, head of distribution for Disney. The previous one-day record was $91.1 million, set by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 in 2011.In such rarefied territory, Disney has been cautious about overestimating the box-office force of The Force Awakens, J. J. Abramss seventh chapter in George Lucass space saga. Based on the early response, many predict a weekend total closer to $250 million for the film far above Jurassic World.Disneys biggest worry has been that moviegoers will be daunted by sold-out shows and long lines. More than $100 million in advance tickets (also a record) were sold before the opening of The Force Awakens, many of those going toward Thursday and Friday shows. Saturday will depend more on walk-up business. Mr. Hollis said exhibitors were continually adding more screenings to satisfy demand.Internationally, the film, which cost about $200 million to make, has already earned an estimated total of $72.7 million since opening in a handful of countries on Wednesday. The Force Awakens is simultaneously opening around the world nearly everywhere but China, where it is scheduled to debut in January. The Force Awakens had the biggest single day ever for a film in Britain, earning an estimated $14.4 million on Thursday.While Star Wars helped create the concept of the summer blockbuster, The Force Awakens is appearing in the holiday season, in which the previous top opening was the $84.6 million debut of 2012s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. By Disneys estimates, The Force Awakens the widest December opening ever, with 4,134 theaters blew past that number by Friday afternoon.Imax and 3-D screenings are helping propel the record gross. Disney said that 47 percent of the Thursday box office came from 3-D showings and $5.7 million from Imax screens.A lot is riding on the film for Disney, which paid $4.06 billion for Lucasfilm in 2012. Sequels and spinoffs are already in development for years to come, not to mention an entire corner of Disneyland devoted to the saga.Positive reviews for The Force Awakens, which is set 30 years after Return of the Jedi, have added to the fervor. Critics have hailed it as a fan-friendly return to form for the series.Such a positive reaction may attract the kind of repeat viewings that made Avatar and Titanic, both from the filmmaker James Cameron, the highest-grossing films of all time. Whether The Force Awakens can come close to the global hauls of those films ($2.8 billion for Avatar and $2.2 billion for Titanic) will not be clear for weeks.But so far, The Force Awakens is attracting the interest of seemingly everyone. President Obama began a year-end news conference on Friday noting, Clearly, this is not the most important event thats taking place in the White House today. Soon to begin was a screening of the film for families who had lost a relative to combat or service-related injuries. | Business |
RoundupCredit...Evan Vucci/Associated PressFeb. 8, 2014Matt Duchene scored two goals in 2 minutes 44 seconds in the second period, helping the Colorado Avalanche beat the host Islanders, 5-2, on Saturday night.Nathan MacKinnon also scored for Colorado, and Gabriel Landeskog and Paul Stastny added empty-net goals. Jean-Sebastien Giguere stopped 30 shots as the Avalanche ended a two-game skid on the final night of N.H.L. games before a 16-day break for the Olympics.Duchenes first goal was the 100th of his career. He followed it with a wrist shot from an odd angle at the front of the right circle, giving the Avalanche a 3-0 lead.In the third period, the Islanders scored two goals during a wild sequence in which the Avalanche committed four penalties in 3:34. The captain John Tavares cut the Islanders deficit to 3-1 with 8:43 remaining, and Lubomir Visnovsky scored 57 seconds later. Both goals came during two-man advantages.CAPITALS 3, DEVILS 0 Julien Brouillette broke a scoreless tie midway through the third period with his first N.H.L. goal, and Braden Holtby stopped 25 shots to lift Washington past the visiting Devils.Brouillette, playing in his second N.H.L. game, beat Cory Schneider on the short side with a wrist shot from the top of the left circle at 10:50. Martin Erat scored an empty-netter with 1:47 left for his first goal of the season, and Troy Brouwer recorded another his 100th career goal 36 seconds later. ImageCredit...Elise Amendola/Associated PressLIGHTNING 4, RED WINGS 2 Alex Killorn broke a 2-2 tie with 3:11 left, beating Jimmy Howard from just outside the crease, and Tampa Bay defeated Detroit in the Red Wings 6,000th regular-season game.Daniel Alfredsson and Tomas Jurco scored for Detroit, which has a record of 2,761-2,320-815-104.BRUINS 7, SENATORS 2 Patrice Bergeron had two goals and an assist as host Boston routed Ottawa for its ninth win in 11 games. Bergeron, of Canada, and two other Olympians David Krejci of the Czech Republic and Loui Eriksson of Sweden were among seven Bruins with multiple points.MAPLE LEAFS 3, CANUCKS 1 Phil Kessel scored the go-ahead goal midway through the third period, and host Toronto handed Vancouver its seventh straight loss.BLUES 4, JETS 3 T. J. Oshie and Vladimir Tarasenko scored in a shootout, and host St. Louis edged Winnipeg to improve its record to 15-0-1 against Central Division rivals and pull even with Chicago atop the Central. FLYERS 2, FLAMES 1 Brayden Schenn and Scott Hartnell scored, Ray Emery stopped 32 shots, and Philadelphia beat visiting Calgary for its fourth straight victory. The Flyers moved a point behind the second-place Rangers in the Metropolitan Division. CANADIENS 4, HURRICANES 1 David Desharnais scored twice, lifting Montreal at Carolina.STARS 2, COYOTES 1 Kari Lehtonen, an Olympian for Finland, had 26 saves as Dallas edged Phoenix at home and moved into the final playoff position in the Western Conference.DUCKS 5, PREDATORS 2 Ryan Getzlaf scored twice, Jonas Hiller made 36 saves, and Anaheim won at Nashville to stop a three-game losing streak. The Ducks entered the Olympic break with a league-high 87 points. | Sports |
Credit...David Calvert for The New York TimesFeb. 7, 2014MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. The maintenance building smells like a garage, all rubber and grease and metal parts, the scents of construction and repairs. The Coke machine has a sticker that reads Bretz 2014.In an office upstairs, a white dry-erase board lists the dozens of lifts at Mammoth Mountain ski area. Bookshelves sag under the weight of 40 three-ring binders, the parts and service manuals for the lifts. A giant chain rests crumpled at the foot of a desk.Another shelf holds a shiny mix of snowboarding trophies. And there is a snowboard, one that Greg Bretz used in December to win an Olympic qualifying halfpipe event.Thats the one he beat Shaun on, said Greg Bretz Sr., Mammoth Mountains assistant director of lift maintenance and this days tour guide of his sons world. Standing in his office, the topic, as it does, turned to Shaun White, the nearly unbeatable two-time Olympic champion in the halfpipe. Shaun is great, Bretz Sr. said. Its hard to grow up in the same era as that.Greg Bretz Gregory to his father was raised here in the shop and on the slopes, mostly by his father and, by extension, the army of mechanics, lift operators, ski patrollers, groomers and the rest who make a ski area go. And when Bretz competes in the snowboarding halfpipe competition at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, on Tuesday, his father is expected to be in the crowd. It will be an extension of a father-son journey that began when Bretz Sr. took his 5-year-old son on a two-month hike in the mountains. They ended up in Mammoth Lakes, at the foot of Mammoth Mountain ski area, and have been virtually inseparable since. Hes one of us, Bretz, 23, said of his 53-year-old father. He vicariously lives through me, which keeps him younger. And our relationship, when I turned 18, has gone from a father-son relationship to being best friends.Bretz has been to the Olympics before, four years ago, when he made the American team alongside more recognizable snowboarders like White, Louie Vito and Scotty Lago. Bretz was 19 and had no expectations. He finished 12th. His career coasted through the intervening years, and he looked destined to forever be a good rider, but never the best one. But he emerged from last summer a changed man hungry and 25 pounds leaner. In early December, at the first of five Olympic qualifying events for the American team, Bretz did the nearly impossible. He beat White. That victory, at the Dew Tour event in Breckenridge, Colo., made Bretz one of only a handful of riders to have won a halfpipe contest that White entered, a small group that includes Kevin Pearce, Danny Davis and Mason Aguirre. Everyone wants to beat Shaun, Bretz said. Its nice to be added to that list.Bretz, Davis and Taylor Gold are the Americans joining a deep field in Sochi hoping to keep White from winning the gold medal for the third consecutive Winter Games. The unusual bond between Bretz and his father was established early in Orange County, Calif. Bretz Sr. ran a machine shop and plopped his 3-year-old son atop go-carts and dirt bikes. But their tale together really begins when Greg and Allison Bretz divorced when their son was still a toddler. Bretz Sr. wanted to get away from it all. He sold his business and took a couple of summer months to hike and camp through the southern Sierra Nevada. And he took his 5-year-old son with him. The hike was occasionally interrupted by trailside visits from friends, toting fresh supplies. One of them mentioned that there was a job opening for a welder at Mammoth Mountain. Bretz Sr. applied and got it. He moved to Mammoth Lakes. His son, after a couple of years mostly with his mother, who now lives in nearby Bishop, has been with him almost nonstop since. (Bretz Sr. remarried and divorced a second time. His current girlfriend, Melissa Ness, plans to accompany him to Sochi.)Bretz Sr. oversees 36 full-time employees and 32 lifts. The hardest work comes in the summer, when new lifts are added and old ones are serviced everything from rebuilding towers to testing the magnetism that helps connect a chair to the wire. Even that lift, its only six towers, Bretz Sr. said from the gondola, pointing to one of the many chairlifts that line the mountain. But it takes 2,000 man hours to service in the summer.He stood atop 11,053-foot Mammoth Mountain, with its 360-degree views of snow-covered peaks and wrinkled green valleys. This is our backyard, he said. Now you can see why we didnt leave. What a great place to grow up. Bretz Sr. could not afford day care, so the ski area became his sons babysitter. Employees kept a close watch on the young Bretz as he zipped around the mountain on his snowboard. I would call on the radio and ask patrol where he was, Bretz Sr. said. And Id get a call a couple times a month, Your kids down here bleeding. He always found me, his son said. Bretz would take the town bus back and forth from home, or meet his father at the end of his shift at the Clocktower Cellar, a pub in the village, or maybe the Mill Cafe. He killed time by riding cafeteria trays like toboggans down the slopes. ImageCredit...Gabe L'Heureux/Getty ImagesThe two were together again in late January, when the final three Olympic qualifiers were held at Mammoth Mountain. Bretz did not finish on the podium, but his 1-2 finishes in the first two qualifying events were already enough to make the Olympic team. Off Sherwin Street, tucked in the trees, Bretz Sr. still lives in the rented cabin where his son grew up, heated by a wood stove. His son rents a place nearby.This has always been home for me, said Bretz, on a day off from competition, sprawled on a couch. He gestured toward the kitchen window. This is my backyard. Id look out the window if it was good, and if it was, Id go catch the bus.A swing hangs from the branch of a tree, 50 feet up. As a boy, Bretz pulled the swing to the top of a nearby treehouse, high off the ground, and jumped on, a human pendulum swinging as high as the roof. As he got older, he parked his truck outside his second-floor loft bedroom, using it climb in and out of his bedroom window late at night. Bretz Sr. laughed at the memories. He was the one who rented a snowboard for his son at the nearby June Mountain ski area and never returned it. By the time Bretz was 8, he was riding the 12-foot halfpipe that was built not far from where the 22-foot model of today is constructed. Their faces look so similar that photographs of each in a high school football uniform Bretz was a pretty good tight end a few years ago at Mammoth High are virtually indistinguishable. In person, side by side, the younger Bretz is leaner and, at 6 feet 1 inch, several inches taller. They have made no plans for what will happen if they return from Sochi carrying an Olympic medal. There is not much room for more snowboarding trophies in the office at the maintenance building. They might have to move some of the three-ring binders. | Sports |
Credit...Barton Silverman/The New York TimesFeb. 16, 2014TAMPA, Fla. Robinson Cano is gone, Derek Jeter is trying to come back from a twice-broken ankle at 39, and Alex Rodriguez is suspended. In other words, the Yankees infield, once a dominant feature of a World Series champion, has been sacked by free agency, age, infirmity and penalty.But just when things seem as uncertain as ever comes Mark Teixeira. After enduring two days of flight cancellations because of winter storms in New York, Teixeira arrived at spring training on Saturday, went through his first workout and declared that he intended to be everything he once was.I expect to hit in the middle of the order and hit 30 home runs and drive in 100 runs, and thats going to take pressure off of everybody and help us win games, Teixeira said.After a lost season, Teixeira hopes to restore stability and power to a depleted infield. But there is some uncertainty with him as well. Last season, he played in only 15 games, two fewer than Jeter, because of a torn tendon sheath in his right wrist. He had surgery July 1 and since then has made steady, if slow, progress. He will turn 34 on April 11, and even he will not know how his wrist will respond until he faces live pitching in exhibition games.Until then, he holds some lingering fear that his wrist will suddenly give way, preventing him from providing those old levels of production, when 30 homers and 100 runs batted in were a given. Of course, he said. Id be lying if I said there wasnt. Everyone can go out after major surgery and say they feel fine. But you never really know it until you go out there.Teixeira will keep slightly behind his usual training camp schedule to ensure the wrist is strong and flexible. He said 50 spring at-bats should be more than enough to be ready. The biggest at-bat, though, will be the first one in a real game. Teixeira expects to be in the opening-day lineup if all goes well and to play in 150 games. Even if Cano is gone, to be replaced at second base by Brian Roberts, and Jeters health is a question and Kelly Johnson is the new third baseman, Teixeiras return may be the most important element of the 2014 infield.The team needs me, he said, adding, I know when Im out there and healthy, my team is a better team.Certainly, the Yankees were nothing special without him and without Jeter, Rodriguez and Curtis Granderson, too. So when the team began reinvesting in its lineup over the winter, Teixeira was an excited observer. He said that each time the Yankees signed a free agent first his old Atlanta teammate Brian McCann and then Johnson, Jacoby Ellsbury, Carlos Beltran, Roberts and, finally, pitcher Masahiro Tanaka Teixeira texted General Manager Brian Cashman to congratulate him.He told Cashman that he had done his job, and now it was time for the players to do theirs. You look at our lineup, and were back to being the Yankees again, Teixeira said. Last year, we werent the Yankees.With his wrist still stiff most days after the operation, Teixeira has vowed to ease up on his workload. He began swinging a bat in the cages near his home in Connecticut on Jan. 1 but took only 20 swings from each side before calling it a day. Each week, he added another 5 to 10 swings and now is up to about 45. He said there had been no setbacks, but he still has not faced a pitch in competition.On Saturday, he took batting practice and fielded some easy ground balls at first. Teixeiras defense will be as welcome as his offense, especially with the infield in flux. Neither Roberts nor Johnson is considered an exceptional fielder, and Jeters mobility could be an issue. Having a steady presence at first base benefits them all.Teixeira can dig errant throws out of the dirt, Manager Joe Girardi pointed out, and make strong relay throws. For infielders, having an exceptional fielder at first to cover for their mistakes or rushed throws provides a cushion they appreciate.I think it gives them a lot of confidence, Girardi said, and I think they will love having Mark back there.After spending most of the last year away from the team, unable to play, Teixeira said he had a renewed enthusiasm for the game and hoped to play five more years. I did a lot of charity stuff this off-season and spent a bunch of time with my family, and I love that time, he said. But Im a baseball player, and theres nothing cooler than playing baseball for a living. Taking that year off made me realize I want to do it as long as I can.INSIDE PITCHMasahiro Tanaka, who had difficulty running one mile in the teams workout Friday, said Saturdays went more smoothly. It was a short distance, he said, so no problems at all. | Sports |
Credit...Nati Harnik/Associated PressFeb. 15, 2014Doug McDermott, a star forward for No. 18 Creighton, has almost wordless communication when he looks to his coach for guidance during a game. Sometimes, they are so alike in their thinking that nothing more than a nod is needed for a critical adjustment to be made.Their connection is understandable. Nothing can match the bonds that are built when a father coaches his son for four years as part of one of the finest programs in college basketball.I think Im the envy of every father in America, Creighton Coach Greg McDermott said. Referring to his son, he said, Hes surrounded by a great group of young men, and hes playing at a high level.A father coaching his son can be challenging, given the additional scrutiny it invites, the potential for charges of nepotism and the taunts of Whos your daddy? during road games. But the McDermotts learned to make it work better than either of them could have imagined.This year has been pretty seamless; the first year wasnt seamless, said Theresa McDermott, the wife and mother in this family affair. She noted that Doug had needed to adjust to his fathers forceful tone in practice. When the family vacationed, she found it necessary to remind Greg that it was time to be a father again.Doug is thriving under his fathers tutelage. He averages 25.3 points and 7 rebounds in pacing the Bluejays in both categories for the fourth consecutive season. The analyst Bill Raftery calls it a foregone conclusion that he will emerge as the first player named first-team all-American for three consecutive years since Patrick Ewing and Wayman Tisdale from 1983 to 1985.With Greg outlining what needs to be done and Doug seeing that it is executed, Creighton (20-4, 10-2 Big East) is climbing to new heights. When Doug nailed a go-ahead 3-pointer with 47.8 seconds left to help the Bluejays to a 68-63 victory against Butler on Thursday night, it improved their record to 100-34 since the McDermotts arrived, the most victories over a four-year stretch in program history. The Bluejays won 99 games from 1999 to 2003, when Kyle Korver was raining 3-pointers.For the McDermotts, the teams interests supersede everything. Grant Gibbs, a senior guard, recalled that when the group first assembled four years ago, Greg repeatedly emphasized that his son would be treated the same as any other player. Doug even changed the caller identification on his cellphone to read Coach MAC when his father calls.According to Gibbs, the McDermotts were true to their words. But there are reminders of how much they are enjoying their success together.ImageCredit...Nati Harnik/Associated PressThere are certain moments, after a big win or things like that, when you realize how special it is for a father to be coaching his son, Gibbs said.With Creightons move to the Big East this season, Doug, who is 6 feet 8 inches and 225 pounds, is a strong candidate to emerge as the first in N.C.A.A. history to be named player of the year in two conferences. He won in the Missouri Valley Conference as a sophomore and a junior. Of individual honors, he said: They mean a lot, but I want to win. Its not about me. Its about us.Doug ranks 16th on the N.C.A.A.s career scoring list with 2,824 points. Yet his output reflects his efficiency rather than domination of the ball. He is shooting .502 (211 of 420) from the field, including .434 (59 of 136) from 3-point range, and is shooting .894 (127 of 142) from the foul line.Hes always putting pressure on the defense, Raftery said. Youve always got to know where he is. You cant give him any room.Greg says his son is continuing to evolve as a scorer.Hes always been able to score on the blocks, he said. Hes always had the 3-point shot. But now that he has an intermediate game, it makes him more difficult to guard.Doug is in continual motion on offense. He has a deft touch with either hand, and his frequent use of the backboard is old-school.Ive got a lot of confidence right now, he said. Ive still got a lot to work on. My ball handling needs to get better. Finishing around the rim, I continue to work on that.With Creighton at home Sunday to face No. 6 Villanova (22-2, 10-1) in a meeting of the conferences top teams, the pressure on him will only increase.It really hasnt taken a huge toll on me this year, he said. Im just playing basketball. | Sports |
Sports of The TimesCredit...Wilfredo Lee/Associated PressFeb. 14, 2014You know those funny Campbell Soup ads starring N.F.L. players and their mothers? The ones where moms pop up in locker rooms and on fields to bring their sons bowls of steaming Chunky soup?Those moms have more problems than just keeping their sons fed, now that a 144-page report of an independent investigation has made public the details of the bullying on the Miami Dolphins. Its nothing that can be fixed by a bowl of soup.Campbell Soup Company is one of the N.F.L.s many corporate sponsors that are bankrolling a league that we now know includes workplace behavior so vile that much of it cannot even be repeated in detail here. This is what mothers sons are facing in the league: locker room bullies who wield so much power that even some coaches kowtow to them. Gay jokes. Slavery jokes. Racial insults directed at a player, and ethnic insults, some of them in a mocking Asian accent, aimed at an assistant trainer who was born in Japan. Persistent jokes about gang raping a players sister.Sure, the league will punish those players and coaches involved in the Dolphins case hopefully including the firing of some of the key offenders, Richie Incognito and his henchmen John Jerry and Mike Pouncey, at the very least. Even if those players were gone, along with the coaches, who should have known what was going on under their noses, the leagues dysfunctional culture would survive.The best way to effect real change would be for the leagues corporate sponsors to take a stand. Companies like Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch and Visa hold the only lever that really matters the purse strings.The N.F.L. is a $10 billion behemoth, the largest show in American sports. Its fueled by corporate dollars, and without those steady infusions, the engine would stop running. If the big companies stopped advertising, television channels would get spooked and the N.F.L. would be forced to make systemic changes.Pepsi is paying $50 million a year for its long-termsponsorship with the league and Bud Light is paying nearly $47 million annually for its deal, according to a sponsorship report by IEG, a sponsorship research, valuation and consulting company.The sponsors, more than two dozen of them, should recognize that they are promoting a workplace in the N.F.L. that instills fear in some of its employees, while mortifying others. Would it be O.K. if the employees of Microsoft, Papa Johns, Verizon or General Motors four companies that are proud sponsors of the N.F.L. walked into their workplaces and pretended to have sex with a co-worker? Or used racial slurs, then defended them by saying everyone was in on the jokes? Of course not. But players on the Dolphins felt free to do that, and its likely that it wasnt an isolated case on one team.Would companies like FedEx, another N.F.L. sponsor, still want to run commercials featuring a young, skinny quarterback who has dreams of being a starter in the league, if they knew that quarterback would be bullied to the point that he would consider suicide, as was the case with the Dolphins tackle Jonathan Martin?So far no company has stepped up to help rid the league of that abusive locker room culture. To do that, those companies have to threaten to pull their sponsorship dollars, but that would take guts and a belief that N.F.L. teams should not be exempt from following common standards.Does any C.E.O. whose company already pours money into the league want to change the league for the better? Or will they continue to turn a blind eye to the sports dark underbelly, as they did regarding the concussion problems that led to players having brain injuries?Now the sponsors are faced with another moral dilemma. It should be an easy call, but theres big money at stake, which always complicates things. Perhaps those companies dont realize how much power they have to change a workplace that has gone bad. Perhaps they think its not their responsibility. But it is. By paying tens of millions of dollars to the league, they are tacitly condoning the behavior of Incognito. Press releases condemning bullying arent enough. If they really want to see change in the N.F.L. and remember, the culture of the N.F.L. shapes team sports from pee-wee football to the largest college programs they will demand change. Or else.They should look to sponsors in the sport of cycling for guidance. Real action to clean up the widespread doping there didnt happen until sponsors started pulling out and TV stations, including a state-sponsored station in Germany, refused to broadcast live coverage of the Tour de France.Roger Goodell should be lauded for commissioning the report that uncovered the embarrassing mess that is now the Dolphins. But he would work much harder to fix the structural problems that created the Dolphins culture if the C.E.O. of McDonalds called him and said their financial relationship was over.Procter & Gamble, whose brands include CoverGirl and Tide, could call the league and say its out as a sponsor because its marketing goals dont match with a place where inflatable female dolls are part of the Secret Santa gift exchange.Perhaps moms, who do most of the shopping for their families, would reach for other brands at the store if they realized those sponsors were complicit in promoting misogyny.Something drastic needs to be done. And in the world of business, theres nothing more drastic than losing money. | Sports |
Middle East|Damascus Bombings Near Pilgrimage Sites Kill Dozenshttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/middleeast/damascus-syria-suicide-bombings.htmlVideoA double suicide bombing in Damascus killed dozens of people and injured others on Saturday.CreditCredit...Louai Beshara/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesMarch 11, 2017BEIRUT, Lebanon A double bombing near Shiite shrines often visited by foreign pilgrims in Damascus, Syria, killed at least 40 people on Saturday, shattering the capitals efforts to isolate itself from the war raging elsewhere in the country. Many of the dead were from neighboring Iraq.The Syrian state news service, SANA, said militants set off two explosive charges near the Bab al-Saghir cemetery, just south of the Old City.Syrias interior minister, Mohammed al-Shaar, who visited the site after the blasts, said they had killed 40 people and wounded 120.Other reports cited a higher death toll. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which opposes the Syrian government and monitors the conflict from Britain with the help of contacts in Syria, said that one of the blasts was from a suicide bomber and that the nature of the second was unclear. It put the death toll at 46.The spokesman for Iraqs Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ahmed Jamal, said the attacks killed more than 40 Iraqi pilgrims and wounded 120.The Iraqi government said it was sending medical teams to Damascus to help care for the wounded and airplanes to transport them home.Video from the blast sites showed large buses with their windows blown out and bodies peppered with shrapnel holes, as well as blood and scattered shoes in the street nearby.The attacks were a blow to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which has sought to ensure quiet in the capital.As Syrias war enters its seventh year, Mr. Assads forces have rolled back rebel advances and consolidated their grip on Damascus.That has led to a rise in the number of Shiite pilgrims arriving from abroad to visit the citys sacred shrines, from Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but there are many militants in Syria who aim both to kill Shiites and to undermine Mr. Assads grip on the capital. They include the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda and the jihadists of the Islamic State, both of which are Sunni and consider Shiites apostates.Since neither group holds significant territory near the site of the attacks, they point to a major security breach.Last year, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a suicide attack south of Damascus near the Sayeda Zeinab shrine, which is revered by Shiites.Also Saturday, Mr. Assad said in an interview with the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV that his military planned to target the city of Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic States self-proclaimed caliphate, but that any foreign troops entering Syria without permission would be considered invaders.Kurdish-led forces backed by the United States are also advancing on Raqqa.When asked how he felt about President Trump, Mr. Assad said he was optimistic because Mr. Trump had said that he intended to step up the fight against the Islamic State.I said since the beginning that this is a promising approach to whats happening in Syria and in Iraq, because we live in the same area and we face the same enemy, Mr. Assad said.He added that as of yet he had no direct lines of communication with the American president. | World |
Greg Hardy I Can Fight & Play Football ... Signs w/ Jim Jones' Arena Team 1/26/2018 TMZSports.com Greg Hardy will take a pro MMA fight in February and take the field for Jim Jones' arena league football team in March. And that's why Jim says Greg could be the modern-day Bo Jackson -- a "beast" in TWO pro sports. As we previously reported, Greg is pursuing a career as a pro MMA fighter -- he beat the hell out of his first 2 opponents. But he also wants to play pro football again -- and with Jim owning the Richmond Roughriders in the American Arena League, the rap star saw a great opportunity to get the ex-NFL star back in the field. "That man is a BEAST," Jones said on the "TMZ Sports" TV show ... "He's not one of the regular players. He's one of the best in his craft." Hardy is set to take the field for the Roughriders on March 17 ... one month after his next MMA fight -- and he says he's ready to "handle business" in both sports. | Entertainment |
In a closely watched case, Facebook lost an appeal related to charges that it has violated competition laws by abusing its dominance in social media.Credit...Uli Deck/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesJune 23, 2020LONDON In a decision that could further embolden European governments to take on large tech platforms, Germanys top court ruled on Tuesday that Facebook had abused its dominance in social media to illegally harvest data about its users.The ruling by the Federal Court of Justice, upholding a decision by Germanys antitrust watchdog, is a major victory for proponents of tougher regulation of the worlds largest technology companies.The case had been closely watched after German regulators used a novel interpretation of competition law to rule against the social media giant last year. The authorities said Facebook broke competition laws by combining data it collected about users across its different platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as from outside websites and third-party apps.In Germany, Facebook now must alter how it processes data about its users. It was ordered to allow people to block the company from combining their Facebook data with information about their activities on other apps and websites.The decision is a direct shot at Facebooks business model, which relies on collecting reams of data about people in order to offer more targeted advertising. The authorities argued that Facebook unfairly used its dominance to collect data about millions of users of third-party sites that used tools like Facebooks like and share buttons, and an analytics service called Facebook Pixel.Regulators concluded that consumers faced a false choice: Agree to hand over vast amounts of personal data or not use Facebooks ubiquitous social media services at all.Facebook successfully appealed last years decision when a court ruled that regulators had overstepped their legal authority. That decision was appealed to Germanys highest court.On Tuesday, the federal court said regulators were right in concluding that Facebook was abusing its dominant position in the market.There are neither serious doubts about Facebooks dominant position on the German social network market nor the fact that Facebook is abusing this dominant position, the court said. As the market-dominating network operator, Facebook bears a special responsibility for maintaining still-existing competition in the social networking market.The decision may not be the last word. A lower court still must issue a ruling on the matter, a process some antitrust attorneys view as a formality given the high courts strong-worded ruling. In theory, the lower court could rule in Facebooks favor, setting up another appeal to the federal high court.Another wild card: German officials could send the matter to the European Court of Justice, the European Union high court that resolves many thorny legal questions from member states, said Rupprecht Podszun, a professor of competition law at the University of Dsseldorf.Facebook said it would continue to fight and wouldnt make any immediate changes, arguing that it has months before it must comply. We will continue to defend our position that there is no antitrust abuse, Facebook said in a statement.Facebook is the latest tech company to suffer a regulatory setback. This month, the European Commission announced a formal investigation of Apple over its treatment of third-party app developers. Amazon is also under antitrust scrutiny in Brussels. In Washington, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are facing investigations by the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and Congress.Germanys top antitrust enforcer, Andreas Mundt, has long pushed for regulators to be more aggressive in taking on Facebook and other tech giants. He has argued that Facebook uses the data it collects from users to strengthen its position over rivals, harming competition.On Tuesday, Mr. Mundt cheered the court decision, saying data is one of the most valuable assets in the digital economy and must be a central part of antitrust enforcement. He said the courts decision provides important information on how we should deal with the issue of data and competition in the future.Data are an essential factor for economic strength, and a decisive criterion in assessing online market power, Mr. Mundt said in a statement. Whenever data are collected and used in an unlawful way, it must be possible to intervene under antitrust law to avoid an abuse of market power.Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin. | Tech |
Politics|I.R.S. Nominee Says He Wont Weaponize Agencyhttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/us/politics/irs-nominee-says-he-wont-weaponize-agency.htmlCredit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesJune 28, 2018President Trumps pick to lead the Internal Revenue Service, Charles Rettig, said on Thursday that he would make it a priority to run the department without bias, an attempt to ease lawmakers concerns that the tax collection agency could be weaponized for political purposes.The I.R.S. has been a political punching bag for several years following allegations during the Obama administration that it was unfairly targeting conservative groups seeking nonprofit status. Now, Democrats are fearful that the agency could interpret the new $1.5 billion tax law in ways that disadvantage blue states and that it could be used by Mr. Trump to target companies that act against his wishes.If I am confirmed, I will be in charge of the Internal Revenue Service and will make sure that the Internal Revenue Service moves forward, follows the law in an impartial, non-biased manner, Mr. Rettig said.Mr. Rettig, whose confirmation appears likely, faces a huge challenge at the helm of the I.R.S. The department has been starved of funding for years and is struggling with aging technology and a depleted work force. The agencys online filing system crashed on Tax Day this year, a failure that many said stemmed from budget cuts that have resulted in antiquated technology.He will also be tasked with implementing the tax legislation that Congress passed late last year. The law is the biggest tax overhaul in three decades, and the I.R.S. has been scrambling to issue new guidance and interpretations for businesses and taxpayers who are still coming to grips with the changes.A longtime tax lawyer who has specialized in defending individuals and entities fighting the tax agency in court, Mr. Rettig will also be facing a big management challenge. He said at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee that he has never managed a team of more than 35 people. The I.R.S. employs around 70,000.Mr. Rettig carefully avoided questions about how the I.R.S. might address states that have developed workarounds to the $10,000 limit on state and local tax deductions that was imposed by the new tax law. He also treaded carefully when pressed by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, about Mr. Trumps claims that he cannot release his tax returns because he has been continuously audited for a decade.Mr. Rettig acknowledged that he had never encountered a client who had been audited for that length of time.Some Democrats on the committee suggested that Mr. Rettig could have a conflict of interest stemming from an investment in a Trump property and that he had not been forthcoming in his financial disclosure forms. Mr. Rettig disclosed that he had stakes in rental properties in Honolulu that he bought in 2006 but did not mention that the properties were located in the Waikiki Trump International Hotel and Tower.Mr. Rettig also needs to demonstrate that he will maintain independence from the Trump White House, Mr. Wyden said. Thats important with any nominee, but its especially relevant in Mr. Rettigs case, since he owns and rents out condos in a Trump-branded and -managed property.Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the Republican chairman of the finance committee, defended Mr. Rettig and said that accusations of impropriety were silly.Any suggestion that there is a conflict of interest here is the stuff of conspiracy theories, Mr. Hatch said. Maybe one wants to argue that Mr. Rettig purchased these properties in 2006, during season five of The Apprentice, on the off chance that Mr. Trump would become president and nominate him to be I.R.S. Commissioner. | Politics |
Tech Were UsingStreaming services have revolutionized the discovery of songs, but heres why Ben Sisario, who covers the music industry, still likes to listen to compact discs.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesMay 15, 2019How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Ben Sisario, a reporter who covers the music industry, discussed the tech hes using.What are your most important tech tools for doing your reporting?Probably 75 percent of my reporting is done by phone and email, and when I am writing I print out drafts and notes. So that part of it is about as current as 1995. But I also use Signal and ProtonMail for sources who require secure communication.I constantly scan social media Twitter, mostly for news, and in breaking news situations I sometimes find sources to quote there. But I am wary of letting social media itself tell the story.You need to actually talk to people, check facts, find contrary viewpoints, weed out nonsense.When it comes to organizing my work, I think cloud computing is the greatest thing since the manila folder. I have 15-plus years of notes instantly searchable through Dropbox and Google Docs. Its amazing to type in five characters and find that phone number from an obit you wrote a decade ago.And then there are sites like WhoSampled and Discogs,incredible repositories of information that are deeply addictive for music nerds like me. My time there often starts with legitimate research say, checking the original writing credit on an old single but then an hour later Ive spent $50 on vinyl and reminded myself of the slide whistle sample on Groove Is in the Heart.ImageCredit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesWhat does your music setup look like, and how has it evolved over time?I try to keep an eye on all the major platforms out there, which means regularly poking around on about a dozen apps. My go-to sources are Spotify, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and Mixcloud, which has excellent D.J.-style mixes and to me feels more human than most.At home I have a Sonos Play:5 speaker, which plays streaming music and podcasts, and is a piece of cake to use. I also have Google Chromecast Audio, a little plug-in device (now discontinued) that allows me to send high-fidelity streams to my stereo. It sounds better that way, but its not nearly as easy to use as the Sonos.To be honest, my preferred way to listen to music is on CD, as unfashionable as that might be. You push a button, the music plays, and then its over no ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms!What are the pros and cons of the streaming model for musicians big and small?The big positive is the vast potential exposure. Streaming eliminated the cost barrier to sampling new music, and playlists constantly put new songs in front of people. Theoretically, at least, there are more chances than ever for a song to be a hit.But, as they say, you can die of exposure. Megahits still generate millions of dollars in royalties, and Spotifys official mission statement is giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art.Yet for artists beneath the megahit level and that is the vast majority of them the jury is still out. Ive seen royalty statements for well-known indie acts that suggest they can earn a decent middle-class living from their streams. Ive also talked to very successful songwriters who say their income has been decimated by streaming and by the new model for pop songwriting, in which five or six or 30 people divvy up the same sliver of royalties.In general, though, Im optimistic about streaming and its potential. It has reinvigorated the music industry and made listening a lot easier, more fun and more dynamic.ImageCredit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesApple and Spotify have been fighting publicly over antitrust issues. Where is this fight going, and what impact might it have on streaming music?I tend to think of this as mostly a matter of corporate warfare. These companies are in a race for market dominance around the world, and the gloves are off. For Spotify, anything that hinders Apple, even a little, can provide an advantage. On the other hand, Apples gigantic size means it will always be on the defensive against regulation.I dont see these issues having a big effect on streaming music. Competition in this market has benefited consumers, and as much as Spotify accuses Apple of anticompetitive practices, it has still signed up far more users both free and paid than Apple Music.What emerging tech trends might change the way people listen to music?A great deal of attention is being paid to smart speakers like Amazons Alexa. This is something that genuinely feels futuristic: walking into a room and saying, Play relaxation playlist or Play NPR news, and it just happens. I think were still in the early stages of this.Video sharing apps like TikTok are also having a palpable effect on music, and I think that will only grow. TikTok makes it easy to generate video memes using music, and these are fast moving and viral by nature. The best example is Lil Nas Xs song Old Town Road, which was a TikTok sensation well before it hit the pop charts.ImageCredit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesOutside of work, what tech product are you currently obsessed with? Not to be too much of a grouch, but for me it is more about an opposite kind of phenomenon: What formerly hyped, supposedly essential technology has since been exposed for gross privacy violations, or for how easily it has become a tool for predatory disinformation?Way too many of them, of course, but the really dispiriting thing is realizing that it is nearly impossible to disengage. We have become only more conscious of the risks and dangers surrounding us at all times.That said, in my house we are really happy with our Instant Pot Duo, a beeping digital pressure cooker that makes perfect biriyani or chicken soup in like five minutes. I really hope it is not collecting any private data. | Tech |
The new $50 gadget encapsulates a modern quandary: It wants to help you find content to watch. But you have to be willing to share your data.Credit...GoogleOct. 7, 2020Once upon a time, watching TV involved picking up a remote control, pressing the power button and flipping through channels.Boy, have things changed. When you watch TV with the new $50 Chromecast streaming stick from Google, the search giant tries to find content that you may want to watch based on what it knows about you.Before you get started, it wants you to take these steps:1. After plugging the streaming stick into the back of your TV, you press and hold two buttons on the white remote control.2. On your smartphone, you download and open the Google Home app, log in with your Google account and enter the home address where you are using the Chromecast.3. You give the app access to your smartphones location data to help find the nearby Chromecast. (Wait, didnt you just share your home address?)4. You give the Google Home app access to your phone camera to scan a bar code shown on the TV screen to link the app with the Chromecast hardware. (Wait, didnt you just give access to your location to help the phone find the Chromecast?)5. You agree to accept a Google privacy policy and to waive any rights to sue Google, via an arbitration agreement.6. You specify where the Chromecast is your living room, kitchen, bedroom or basement, for example.7. You select your Wi-Fi network to connect Chromecast to the internet.8. You are presented with the option to share more information with Google to help improve the product and services.9. Google asks you to record some voice samples so that its virtual assistant can recognize your voice.10. You pick your streaming apps, like Netflix, YouTube TV and Disney+.Rest assured, Google says you are providing this data so that it can speed up the setup process and show you personalized information, like the local weather and recommendations for TV shows and movies that you may enjoy. Sure beats flipping through a bunch of random TV channels, right?Well, heres how that went for me.Googles goal: to help the content find you.First, a primer on whats new about this Chromecast, which was unveiled last week. The streaming stick includes a remote control and a software operating system for choosing content to watch, similar to Rokus streaming products and the Apple TV set-top box.With past versions of Googles streaming stick you would open a video on your phone and press a button to cast the content to the Chromecast, meaning the phone was essentially your remote.I downloaded my favorite streaming apps to the Chromecast: Netflix, YouTube, YouTube TV, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max. The Chromecast then took information that Google knew about me to come up with a list of recommended programs on a page labeled For you.The For you page is the main screen of the new Chromecast. Google gathered information about activities on my Google account, like my online searches and the YouTube videos I watched, to find content I may enjoy.All told, I was disappointed. Given how much Google knows about me, I was hoping it would do a better job at predicting what I would like to see. In the top row, labeled Top picks for you, Google recommended that I watch The Wendy Williams Show, a celebrity talk show, as well as SportsCenter. (For the record, both my wife and I dont watch talk shows, and were not sports fans.)It also recommended I check out Wonder Park and Bigfoot Junior, both childrens animated movies. (We dont have children.)A few of Googles recommendations were spot on. Snowpiercer, a movie from my favorite Korean director, was a top pick. One row of recommendations was devoted to home improvement shows, which makes sense because Ive been watching dozens of do-it-yourself repair videos to work on my house amid pandemic-induced boredom. Another row presented cooking videos from YouTubers I frequently watch for inspiration in the kitchen.On the other hand, another row listed Comedies about love, including several Adam Sandler movies like Big Daddy and Mr. Deeds. (To put it lightly, I am no fan of Adam Sandler comedies.)Over all, the For you page felt like a grab bag of hits and misses. The Chromecast also has an Apps page that shows a simple grid of my streaming apps for me to open and find content by myself. Thats generally how Roku and Apple TV work, and to me, thats still a better way to watch TV.So what was that all for?I described my experience to Google and pressed the company on why it needed so much information just to set up the Chromecast.The company said the setup process with the Google Home app was an optional shortcut to skip manually entering my Google account information and password with the remote control. Granting access to the location and camera sensors was a security requirement for the setup process. Sharing my home address, it turns out, was also optional, to help Google give updates on local information like the weather.As for the inconsistent recommendations, Google said that it made suggestions from a wide variety of signals of activity on Googles products, including entertainment-related searches and programs added to my watch list, and that the picks would get better over time.So whom is the Chromecast for?I must confess that my struggle with the streaming era is never knowing what to watch. Its the paradox of choice: If we can pick from thousands of TV shows and movies, its tough to be satisfied with whatever we choose. The Chromecast, if it had worked well for me, would have helped solve that problem.Yet Im probably not the target audience: Over the years, Ive taken steps to minimize the data I share with tech companies, including Google and Facebook, and that may be largely why the Chromecasts recommendations were off the mark. So the Chromecast may work for those who dont think twice about sharing information with Google.Come to think of it, thats plenty of people. | Tech |
Asia Pacific|South Korea Says North Has Capacity to Put Nuclear Warhead on a Missilehttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/world/asia/north-korea-nuclear-warhead-rodong-missile.htmlCredit...Jeon Heon-Kyun/European Pressphoto AgencyApril 5, 2016SEOUL, South Korea South Korea has determined that North Korea is capable of mounting a nuclear warhead on its medium-range Rodong ballistic missile, which could reach all of South Korea and most of Japan, a senior government official said on Tuesday.The governments assessment, shared in a background briefing with foreign news media representatives in Seoul, followed a recent claim by North Korea that it had standardized nuclear warheads small enough to be carried by ballistic missiles. South Korean officials, like their American counterparts, have said that the North has made progress in miniaturizing nuclear warheads, but have been reluctant to elaborate.But after four recent nuclear tests by the North, the latest on Jan. 6, some nongovernmental analysts in South Korea have said that they believe the North has learned how to fit its medium-range Rodong missile with nuclear warheads. The senior government official echoed that assessment, but did not provide any evidence of how the government has made its determination.He did not say if the North had actually built such a warhead or simply had the technology to do so, but said the government did not have any evidence that the North had actually fitted miniaturized warheads onto a missile.Even if such advances have been made for medium-range missiles, most analysts in the United States and South Korea say the North may still be years away from building a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile that could target the continental United States.The Rodong missile, first deployed in the 1990s, can fly about 800 miles, which would put some United States military bases in South Korea and Japan within its range. It could carry a warhead weighing about 1,500 to 2,200 pounds, South Korea says.North Korea test-launched two Rodong missiles last month, flouting United Nations resolutions that ban the country from developing or testing ballistic missile technology.The tests took place days after the Norths leader, Kim Jong-un, ordered more tests of ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear warhead. Mr. Kim also recently visited a factory where he inspected what looked like a model nuclear warhead and long-range missile, according to photographs released in the countrys official news media.North Korea also said that Mr. Kim had overseen a successful test of re-entry technology, which is needed for a warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile to survive the heat and vibrations while plunging through the atmosphere toward its target.There has been a continuing debate about how close North Korea has come to acquiring nuclear-tipped missiles. The country has never flight-tested a long-range missile.After the Norths recent claims, the South Korean Defense Ministry said on March 9 that it did not believe the North had achieved the miniaturization of a nuclear warhead, but it did not clarify whether it meant long-or short-range missiles.The Pentagon has also voiced skepticism.But one senior United States military commander, Adm. William E. Gortney, said at a Senate hearing last month that it was a prudent decision to assume that the North has the capability to miniaturize a nuclear weapon and put it on an ICBM. | World |
Credit...van der Linden V, Pessoa A, et al. MMWR: 11.22.2016Nov. 22, 2016It is the news that doctors and families in the heart of Zika territory had feared: Some babies not born with the unusually small heads that are the most severe hallmark of brain damage as a result of the virus have developed the condition, called microcephaly, as they have grown older.The findings were reported in a study of 13 babies in Brazil that was published Tuesday in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. At birth, none of the babies had heads small enough to receive a diagnosis of microcephaly, but months later, 11 of them did.For most of those babies, brain scans soon after birth showed significant abnormalities, and researchers found that as the babies aged, their brains did not grow or develop enough for their age and body size. The new study echoes another published this fall, in which three babies were found to have microcephaly later in their first year.As they closed in on their first birthdays, many of the babies also had some of the other developmental and medical problems caused by Zika infection, a range of disabilities now being called congenital Zika syndrome. The impairments resemble characteristics of cerebral palsy and include epileptic seizures, muscle and joint problems and difficulties swallowing food.There are some areas of great deficiency in the babies, said Dr. Cynthia Moore, the director of the division of congenital and developmental disorders for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an author of the new study. They certainly are going to have a lot of impairment.Dr. Deborah Levine, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School who has studied Zika but was not involved in either study, said there would most likely be other waves of children whose brains were affected by the Zika infection, but not severely enough to be noticed in their first year.A lot of the developmental abnormalities were not going to see until later, she said. Theres going to be another group seen later in childhood, Im afraid, and another group probably when they reach school age.In the new study, doctors at two clinics in the northeastern Brazilian states of Pernambuco and Cear described the cases of 13 infants who had tested positive for the Zika virus. In 11 of the babies, brain scans taken days or weeks after birth showed significant neurological damage, including improperly formed brain areas, excess fluid in some places and abnormal calcium deposits, or calcification, which probably resulted from brain cell death. But the size of their heads, though small, was not small enough to be considered microcephaly. So doctors monitored their progress as they grew.Dr. Vanessa van der Linden, another author of the study and a neuropediatrician at the Association for Assistance of Disabled Children in Recife, Brazil, where most of the babies in the study are patients, said the type of brain damage in the babies who later developed microcephaly presented the same pattern, but less severe than those with it at birth.The babies in the study published this fall also appeared to have a pattern of similar, but less severe, brain damage, said Dr. Antonio Augusto Moura da Silva, of the Federal University of Maranho and an author of that study, which was published in Emerging Infectious Diseases. He and his colleagues studied 48 babies with brain abnormalities in the northeastern state of Maranho, identified six babies who did not have microcephaly at birth, and found that three of them later developed it.We were worried, but now that weve started following those cases, we are very sad, Dr. Silva said. The picture is really terrible. At the least, if they have microcephaly, we expect them to have a very poor quality of life.Experts and the authors of the studies said it was unclear why these infants brains did not develop enough to match their age and body size. Dr. Ernesto T. A. Marques Jr., an infectious disease specialist at the University of Pittsburgh and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Recife, who was not involved in either study, said it could be that because of the initial fetal brain damage, the necessary pathways and hormones that organize growth of the neonatal brain are not there anymore and the brain doesnt grow.It could also be the result of the immune system responding to the original Zika virus infection. Dr. Moore said that another possibility might be that there was still some infection that continued to damage the brain. But she said that seemed less likely, given that follow-up tests for Zika virus conducted on seven of the babies did not find evidence of active infection.The oldest babies in these studies are only just over a year old, too young for researchers to identify cognitive problems or delays in skills like speech. But some deficits are clear: Many of the babies had serious physical deficits tied to neurological damage, including overly tense muscles, muscle weakness and the inability to voluntarily move their hands.Still, unlike many babies born with microcephaly, most of the 13 in the new study had social interaction skills like smiling and making eye contact. And eight of them had good head control, an important skill for developing the ability to sit or walk.While cautioning that the study involved too few cases to make generalizations, Dr. van der Linden said that it appeared that most of these babies had good eye contact because the damage was less severe in brain areas involving vision than it was in areas involving motor skills.Dr. Marques said that head control, the ability to lift and support the head without help, in babies with microcephaly was quite rare. Having a social smile and eye contact is less rare, he said, depending on the type of visual damage and on whether they receive enough visual stimulation to strengthen their ability to use their eyes.At this age, 80 percent of brain stimulus comes from the eyes, he said. If you dont have that working and you lose this window of opportunity, these babies cannot recover it.One baby, a boy, had no anomalies at birth. His limbs looked normal and his head size was proportional to his body, Dr. Moore said. But brain scans soon after birth showed excess fluid and abnormalities in his cortex and corpus callosum, which separates the two hemispheres. At 11 months old, he had microcephaly, and also epilepsy, difficulty swallowing, involuntary muscle contractions, and muscles that were too stiff and restricted his movement, she said.Another baby had a sloping forehead and slight depressions in the front of his head at birth, as well as similar types of brain damage, apparent on scans, Dr. Moore said. By the time he was 1, he had developed microcephaly that was among the most severe of the babies in the study, and had muscular and swallowing problems. But he also had good eye contact, researchers reported.In six of the cases, the mothers reported having a symptom of Zika infection, a rash, between the second and fifth months of pregnancy. That supports other evidence suggesting that babies born to mothers who were infected late in the first trimester suffer the most serious effects. But since there are no symptoms in 80 percent of cases of Zika infection, it was unclear when most of the women were infected, and researchers are still unable to say whether the virus is more damaging to babies if their mothers experience symptoms. | Health |
Credit...Peter MatherNov. 14, 2016MISSOULA, Mont. They are beautiful, glistening icons of the West, filled with life and history. But there is far more to mountain rivers, scientists are learning, than the water churning between their banks.In a paper published earlier this year, a team of ecologists sought to outline the essential role of gravel-bed rivers in Western mountain ecosystems the first time an interdisciplinary team has looked at river systems on such a large scale.A river doesnt just flow down the channel, said F. Richard Hauer, a professor of stream ecology at the University of Montana and the lead author of the paper. It flows over and through the entire flood plain system, from valley wall to valley wall, and supports an extraordinary diversity of life.Perhaps most surprising of all: Most of the water in these systems is not in the river its in the gravel.These river systems are among the most ecologically important habitats on the continent, Dr. Hauer and his colleagues concluded, supporting a hidden wealth of biodiversity. And not just in the West; the life-sustaining dynamics are at play in the mountains of Europe, the Andes, the Himalayas and New Zealand.In the West, a dynamic river is not important just to fish or to amphibians, but to grizzly bears and mountain lions descending from mountaintops to the flood plain for important foods. Indeed, two-thirds of the species in a large river valley spend at least part of their lives in its flood plain.ImageCredit...Johnny ArmstrongThe new study also demonstrates that altering this complex biological machinery with dams and diversions has far-reaching effects, leading to long-term decline of the ecosystem.A river is a huge, huge biodiversity engine with multiple parts, Dr. Hauer said. If you keep taking out parts, pretty soon the engine stops.Until now, scientists had never put together such a comprehensive ecological blueprint of river dynamics.Melting snow and groundwater flow down the channel; this is what we think of as a river. But underground, far more water is moving slowly through a labyrinthine network of cobbles, gravel and sand that make up the entire valley bottom.This deeply buried habitat is far more important and far more productive than thought. The matrix of gravel and sand cleans the water, filtering organic material and freeing up nitrogen and phosphorous embedded in the gravel.These natural fertilizers spread across the valley bottom, a shot of adrenaline that nourishes plants in the flood plain such as willows and aspen, which in turn draw birds and beavers, elk and caribou. The plant-eaters attract predators like wolves and grizzly bears.In the summer, warm water is stored underground. It takes so long for the water to move that it surfaces in winter, moderating water temperatures and creating a refuge for some aquatic species, shielding them from winters freeze. In the winter, the opposite happens.The river also continually rearranges and renews the ecosystem.During high water, topsoil, gravel and woody debris are washed into new sites downriver and below ground, fostering new habitats and new plant communities. The new habitats blend with existing ones, from mature cottonwood forests to grasslands, to create a patchy mosaic.On a recent flight over the Bitterroot River, a gravel-bed river near Missoula, Dr. Hauer pointed out the flood plain.While the river below flowed down a main channel, it was easy to see from the air that over centuries, the Bitterroot had frequently jumped its bounds to create a network of new channels.The old channels were covered with gravel an important habitat for the stoneflies and other insects that feed the fish. Everywhere in the valley, water flowing underground through the gravel surfaced to create a diverse assortment of ponds, seeps and springs.Dr. Hauer also pointed out a number of places where people have sought to tame the rivers unruly habits in order to plow farm fields or build subdivisions.Theres no renewal the river doesnt move gravel around and doesnt create new mosaics of habitat, he said. Nutrients are not dispersed. Everything gets locked in place and starts getting old and declines.The environmental damage is hidden at first. Channels feeding the underground habitats are sealed off as the river is confined. The species that depend on the hidden flows begin to falter.These gravel flood plains, Dr. Hauer said, are among the most endangered ecosystems worldwide.Keeping them intact will help dependent species adapt to the greatest environmental threat of all: climate change. The implication for conservation is enormous, Dr. Hauer said. | science |
The panel debated whether overseas trials could be applied to a more diverse U.S. population. The decision may affect other Chinese drug trials, and spotlights the high cost of immunotherapy.Credit...Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via ShutterstockFeb. 10, 2022An advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration overwhelmingly voted on Thursday against recommending agency approval of a lung cancer drug that was tested only in China and sold there.The drug, sintilimab, is a checkpoint inhibitor a type of immunotherapy drug that unleashes the immune system to attack tumors. It was developed and tested in China by Innovent Biologics, which entered into an agreement with Eli Lilly that would have allowed Lilly to market it in the United States, if it were approved. It was to be used in combination with chemotherapy for patients with metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer.The F.D.A. panel debated a longstanding issue: What standards should be used in approving drugs? Should a drug tested only in China or another country outside the United States be accepted without domestic trials?The decision is likely to be closely monitored for clues about whether it further exacerbates tensions between the United States and China, especially given the strains between the two countries over research by Chinese scientists in recent years. Immunotherapy drugs are so expensive in the United States that the potential to bring a cheaper therapy to the market also weighed heavily in the background of the discussion on Thursday.Dr. Richard Pazdur, the powerful director of the F.D.A.s oncology unit, explained on Thursday why he had backtracked from a far more welcoming attitude in 2019, when he said the agency might consider a checkpoint inhibitor tested solely in China.Over the past two or three years, this country has experienced tremendous social change, he said at the meeting. We clearly heard from all patient groups that they want faces like theirs. That, he said, is also important to build confidence in the clinical trials and the drugs being tested.A drug tested only in China is a step backward, he said.The agency has faced considerable pressure to include diverse patient groups, reflecting various ethnic and racial populations, in clinical trials in the United States as well as to address health disparities.Lilly released a statement saying that it was disappointed and that it had hoped that sintilimab could have played a positive role for patients and the U.S. health care system through an aggressive pricing strategy.But, the company said that we acknowledge that the landscape has changed dramatically and that Lilly wholeheartedly agrees with the importance of ethics in clinical trial conduct and clinical trial diversity.The company said it will be working with FDA on next steps.Another issue surrounded Lillys decision to even submit this drug for U.S. approval. An analysis by the F.D.A.s staff of the trial results in China was scathing on methodological grounds. It cited a failure to provide patients in the control group with an approved therapy that is standard of care; questioned the competence of some of the investigators who had no previous experience with such trials; noted a patient population that was younger, had more men, and had fewer smokers than U.S. lung cancer patients; and criticized use of an endpoint that is considered not always reliable.Lilly had promoted its application by saying that it wanted to use sintilimab as a wedge to break the stratospheric prices of cancer immunotherapy.Already on the market are several other checkpoint inhibitors, which make cancers vulnerable by blocking a protein that tumors use as sort of an invisible shield to protect them from an immune system attack. These immunotherapy drugs treat such cancers as colon, breast, liver and lung, and carry list prices that are nearly identical about $150,000 a year per patient.Lilly said it would charge 40 percent less if its drug were approved. Sintilimab costs $6,000 a year in China.The companys idea of breaking the price lock on such drugs is a big deal, Brad Loncar, a biotechnology industry investor, said.Im not aware of any precedent of a company, especially of Lillys size and credibility, announcing that a discounted price like this is how they planned to innovate, Mr. Loncar said.Now, he added, the near certainty that the drug application would be rejected means that a real option for substantially lower drug prices is being closed in the U.S. (The F.D.A. generally follows the recommendations of its advisory committees.)Others were not persuaded by Lillys claim to be a market disrupter.ImageCredit...Mike Segar/ReutersDr. Scott Ramsey, a health economist and cancer specialist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, was among those who were skeptical of Lillys motives. Yeah, right, he commented.Are they talking about the stranglehold on prices that their current drugs contribute to? Dr. Ramsey asked. Maybe they could start by knocking 40 percent off their price for Cyramza a stomach cancer drug with a list price of $13,400.32 to $15,075.36 per month and Verzenio, a breast cancer drug with a similar price.I dont buy it, Dr. Ramsey said of Lillys price disrupter story, and instead chalked it up to a public relations stunt.It is well known that the F.D.A. is not permitted to consider price in evaluating whether a drug should be approved. That means that any F.D.A. decision must be based solely on whether the drug meets its standards.For that reason, Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an expert on the pharmaceutical industry, was puzzled.Im not aware of a company ever before announcing its pricing strategy just before an AdComm meeting, particularly one in which the general perception is that the F.D.A. was going to argue that the data dont seem to support approval, he said, referring to the agencys advisory committee panel. It does seem like a strategic ploy intended to inject a consideration into the AdComm deliberations that is not supposed to be considered.The story of sintilimab dates to 2019 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research. Speaking there, Dr. Pazdur said the agency would be open to considering drugs tested solely in other countries.Lilly, which had said it had not planned to market sintilimab outside China, said at the meeting that it then decided to see if the drug could be approved in the United States. The company met with the agency three times in 2020 and proceeded to apply for marketing approval.In the intervening years, however, Dr. Pazdur expressed increasing concern about what seemed to be a rush by companies large and small to bring checkpoint inhibitors to the market.In December, in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Pazdur noted that more than 2,000 clinical trials testing checkpoint inhibitors were underway, with many trials taking place in China.Dr. Pazdur added that the unbridled and rapid growth of checkpoint inhibitors has led to a Wild West of drug development, featuring a stampede of commercial sponsors, clinical trials and redundant development plans.Every major company and even small companies has a checkpoint inhibitor, said Donald Berry, a statistics professor and cancer clinical trial expert at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Its amazing how easy it is to make these things, he added.In an article published on Feb. 4 in Lancet Oncology, Dr. Pazdur wrote that there were at least 25 applications from China in drug development phases, planned to be submitted or currently under review.The agency has long had strict rules about approving drugs that were tested solely overseas, requiring that the data be applicable to patients and medical practice in the United States, that the investigators had recognized competence and that the agency be able to validate the data.In a withering critique of Lillys submission on this new trial from China, F.D.A. staff members assigned to conduct an analysis said that on every count the sintilimab application fell short. One issue was how to evaluate the drug. The study asked how long it took before the cancer started growing again or before the patient died. That endpoint, known as progression free survival, Dr. Pazdur said at the meeting, is out of date for such studies. Instead, the appropriate endpoint, he suggested, is what matters to patients most how long will they live.Theres a famous story of Avastin in metastatic breast cancer, Dr. Berry said. It showed enormous benefit for progression-free survival, but with additional follow-up it was not beneficial for overall survival.A few years ago, progression-free survival might have been more acceptable but, Dr. Pazdur said, it no longer is and its another example of how the landscape has changed.To get Lillys drug approved, the panel voted to recommend requiring another trial that would be applicable to U.S. patients.But Dr. Jorge Nieva, associate professor of medicine at the University of Southern California, who was the only dissenting panel member, said there was no evidence that the data was unreliable and that it was not the panels job to determine how many drugs on the market would be too many.Having more drugs competing for those same patients will have, I think, greater impact on equity than the need for diversity in clinical trial enrollment, which I believe is important, Dr. Nieva said.But Dr. Pazdurs views carried the day, alluding to more policy changes, perhaps.There is a change in our perception of what we want from international trials, he said. China has, so far, rarely participated.We want to bring China in, Dr. Pazdur said. We feel we would all benefit.Christina Jewett contributed to this article. | Health |
Shareef O'Neal Love LeBron, But ... Lakers Are My Dream Team 1/20/2018 TMZSports.com Move over, Ball bros -- Shareef O'Neal says the Lakers are his #1 choice when he goes pro ... and if we were Magic Johnson, we'd start working OT to make it happen. We got Shaq's son touching down in LAX ... and asked who he'd want to draft him since his NBA career is creeping up. Shareef told TMZ Sports his favorite team and player were the Cavs and LeBron James, respectively ... but there's 1 thing that puts the Purple and Gold above playing with the King. Not to say Shareef couldn't do BOTH -- right, LeBron?? | Entertainment |
Europe|Deadly Storms in Italy Devastate 2 Families as Floods Hit Sicilyhttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/04/world/europe/italy-storms-sicily.htmlCredit...Alessandro Fucarini/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesNov. 4, 2018MILAN Nine members of two families were killed in the same house in Sicily when the torrential rains and high winds that have been lashing Italy caused a river to burst its banks Saturday night.In just moments, rushing water filled the villa where the families were staying, drowning those inside.A father and his daughter escaped harm because they had left the house to do some shopping. A third person climbed a tree to survive.The deaths at the villa, in Casteldaccia in Palermo Province, brought the number of people killed in Sicily this weekend to 12. Three other people died in their cars hit by torrents of water.Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy spoke of an immense tragedy during a visit on Sunday to affected areas in Sicily. He said a cabinet meeting would be convened this week to declare a state of emergency and to come up with the first package of aid for areas affected.Heavy rains and gale-force winds have battered Italy for several days, uprooting millions of trees and cutting off villages and roads. Italys Civil Protection Agency said deaths caused by the wave of bad weather stood at 17, excluding the fatalities in Sicily.Some of the worst damage has been recorded in the northern regions of Trentino and Veneto. On Saturday the governor of Veneto, Luca Zaia, said the cost of the damage in the region amounted to at least one billion euros, or $1.14 billion.During a visit on Sunday to badly hit areas in the north, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said $285 million had been earmarked for relief. Mr. Salvini, who is also deputy prime minister, said it would cost about 40 billion, or about $45.5 billion, to safeguard Italy against such events in the future. | World |
The Great ReadIn 1972, Dr. John Fryer risked his career to tell his colleagues that gay people were not mentally ill. His act sent ripples through the legal, medical and justice systems.Credit...Kay Tobin, via Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public LibraryPublished May 2, 2022Updated May 6, 2022Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.On the second day of the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association in 1972, something extraordinary happened.While the assembled psychiatrists, mostly white men in dark suits, settled into rows of chairs in the Danish Room at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, a disguised figure had been smuggled through the back corridors. At the last minute, he stepped through a side curtain and took his place at the front of the room.There was an intake of breath in the audience. The mans appearance was grotesque. His face was covered by a rubber Nixon mask, and he was wearing a garish, oversized tuxedo and a curly fright wig. But the outlandishness of his outfit diminished in importance once he began to speak.I am a homosexual, he began. I am a psychiatrist.For the next 10 minutes, Henry Anonymous, M.D. this is what he had asked to be called described the secret world of gay psychiatrists. Officially, they did not exist; homosexuality was categorized as a mental illness, so acknowledging it would result in the revocation of ones medical license, and the loss of a career. In 42 states, sodomy was a crime.The reality was that there were plenty of gay people in the A.P.A., psychiatrys most influential professional body, the masked doctor explained. But they lived in hiding, concealing every trace of their private life from their colleagues.All of us have something to lose, he said. We may not be under consideration for a professorship; the analyst down the street may stop referring us his overflow; our supervisor may ask us to take a leave of absence.This was the trade-off that had formed the basis of the masked mans life. But the cost was too high. Thats what he had come to tell them.We are taking an even bigger risk, however, in not living fully our humanity, he said. This is the greatest loss, our honest humanity.He took his seat to a standing ovation.Dr. Fryers speechListen to Dr. Fryer deliver his remarks in their entirety as Dr. Henry Anonymous, May 2, 1972.The 10-minute speech, delivered 50 years ago Monday, was a tipping point in the history of gay rights. The following year, the A.P.A. announced that it would reverse its nearly century-old position, declaring that homosexuality was not a mental disorder.It is rare for psychiatrists to transform the culture that surrounds them, but that is what happened in 1973.By removing the diagnosis from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., psychiatry removed the legal basis for a wide range of discriminatory practices: for denying gay people the right to employment, citizenship, housing and the custody of children; for excluding them from the clergy and the military and the institution of marriage. The long process of rolling back those practices could begin.When referred to psychiatrists, gay people would no longer be sent to be cured injected with hormones, subjected to aversion therapy or pored over by analysts but instead told that, from the point of view of science, there was nothing intrinsically wrong with them.After delivering his speech, the man in the mask, John Ercel Fryer, 34, flew from Dallas to his home in Philadelphia, noting in his journal just how terrifying and profound the experience had been.The day has passed, it has come and gone and I am still alive. For the first time I have identified with a force that is akin to my selfhood, he wrote, in excerpts included in Cured, a 2020 documentary.Still he didnt tell his mother he had done it. He didnt tell his sister. He didnt tell his closest childhood friend. He barely told anybody for 20 years.What the hell is going on here?ImageCredit...Transylvania UniversityImageCredit...Historical Society of PennsylvaniaDr. Fryer, who died in 2003 at the age of 65, stood out for his size (he was 6-foot-4 and 300 pounds), for his flashing intelligence, and for the fact that he was obviously gay.Betty Lollis, a friend from Winchester, Ky., recalled him as the round-faced boy who was led into her second-grade class, dressed by his mother in a sailor suit. He was a prodigy, she said, and also just a boy the boys laughed at or teased.Decades later, Ms. Lollis said, some of their classmates apologized to Dr. Fryer for the way they had treated him. These people that were painful for him were also all he had, she said. Those are his dearest friends.He sailed through his classes, enrolling in college at 15 and medical school at 19. But again and again, his path was blocked when supervisors learned he was gay.The most crushing of these setbacks occurred in 1964. He had relocated to the freer atmosphere of the East Coast, and was a few months into a residency at the University of Pennsylvania when he let his guard down, telling a family friend at dinner that he was gay.The young man immediately reported this to his father, who reported it to the department chairman at Penn, Dr. Fryer said in a 2002 interview with the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatry. The department chairman called Dr. Fryer into his office and said: You can either resign or Ill fire you.It took years of humiliating assignments at a state-run psychiatric hospital, the only institution that accepted him, for Dr. Fryer to complete his residency. After that he faced a long, uncertain path to tenure. For these reasons, coming out had little appeal, he said in a 2001 interview for This American Life, much of which has not been published until now.It was a way, if you came out as gay, to not have any power, he said. And I wanted to be powerful. So being a straight, closeted physician enabled me to have power.In 1970, Frank Kameny, an astronomer who had been dismissed from the military because he was gay, led a small group of gay rights activists to protest the A.P.A.s annual convention, demanding that the diagnosis be declassified.Dr. Fryer was a full-fledged member of the Gay P.A., a group of closeted A.P.A. members who gathered in secret on the edges of the association, and he watched with distaste as the protesters stormed into panel discussions and heckled the speakers. I was embarrassed by it, and I wished that they would shut up, he said.But the following year, Barbara Gittings, one of the activists, approached Dr. Fryer to ask for his help.Younger, more progressive leaders were rising through the ranks of the A.P.A., and the activists sensed an opening. They had an idea: Instead of picketing, they could shake things up by confronting the psychiatrists with one of their own, a gay psychiatrist. If only they could find someone who would agree to do it.ImageCredit...Kay Tobin/Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public LibraryMy first reaction was: No way, Dr. Fryer recalled. I had no security, and I did not want to do anything to jeopardize the possibility that I could get a faculty position somewhere. There was no way at that point that I was going to do that as an open thing.Over the months that followed, though, Ms. Gittings kept calling. She updated Dr. Fryer as she approached a dozen of his gay colleagues and each said no, the risk was too great.Their refusals bothered Dr. Fryer. And Ms. Gittings, as he put it, kept upping the ante. What if she paid his way to Dallas? What if he wore a disguise, so that no one knew it was him?She planted in my mind the possibility that I could do something, he said. And that I could do something that would be helpful without ruining my career.Dr. Fryers lover at the time was a drama student, and the two threw themselves into the project of devising a disguise that would conceal his identity: a vastly oversized tuxedo, a rubber mask melted to distort its features, and a wig with a low hairline opposite to his own.Stepping onto the stage that day, Dr. Fryer said, I felt a great freedom, a great sense of freedom.There was pride, too, that he was the only one of his colleagues who dared.To do that thing, to be willing to do that thing, when none of my colleagues in the Gay P.A. would be willing to do it, openly or otherwise, he said. They were all in the audience. They were clapping.The sight of Dr. Fryer had a powerful emotional effect on the psychiatrists gathered in the room, said Dr. Saul Levin, who in 2013 became the first openly gay man to serve as the A.P.A.s chief executive and medical director.It obviously really shook them, he said. Here was this huge audience for the time, seeing someone come out in a very weird costume. It made them a little disoriented what the hell is going on here? And then this person comes out with such an eloquent speech.Dr. Fryer was giddy as he left the stage, so exhilarated that, before returning to Philadelphia, he splurged on a manual harpsichord, which he wryly described as among the least wise choices of my life.As he returned to his hotel room to change out of his disguise, he passed the chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Pennsylvania, who had fired him from his residency. Neither man showed any sign of recognition.It was over for meImageCredit...Harry Adamson, via Historical Society of PennsylvaniaDr. Fryer returned to the rambling, Victorian house where he lived in Germantown with his Doberman pinschers and the medical students he took in as boarders.He remained himself by turns generous and overbearing, charismatic and acerbic, switching on his Kentucky accent when it suited him.He still didnt have tenure, and his career path was as tenuous as ever. In 1973, the A.P.A. voted to declassify homosexuality. And Dr. Fryer lost another job, this one at Friends Hospital.Again, an administrator called him into his office. If you were gay and not flamboyant, we would keep you, Dr. Fryer recalled him saying. If you were flamboyant and not gay, we would keep you. But since you are both gay and flamboyant, we cannot keep you.Dr. Fryer watched as his colleagues got promoted and won tenure. The Gay P.A. faded, as a new, more activist generation stepped forward as an open force within psychiatry, forming the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists. But Dr. Fryer took no part in it.I ran away again, he said. I didnt go to the meetings. It was like I just sort of disappeared. It was as if, he said, I had done my thing and it was over for me.Every now and then, he would tell someone about what he had done.Dr. Karen Kelly, 67, who rented a room from Dr. Fryer as a medical student, said he told her over dinner some time in the late 1970s, and never mentioned it again.Ms. Lollis, 85, said she and Dr. Fryer confided in one another later in life, sometimes speaking on the phone several times a week. But she didnt find out that he was Dr. Anonymous until 2002, when he sent her the episode of This American Life that described the speech.He just didnt share it with anyone, she said. Not his mother, not his sister.ImageCredit...Historical Society of PennsylvaniaImageCredit...Historical Society of PennsylvaniaDr. Fryer would eventually get tenure at Temple University, where he built a specialty in bereavement and helped pioneer the hospice movement. After teaching all day and having dinner, he would often see patients until 11 p.m., Dr. Kelly recalled. He sat with many of his patients while they were dying.He threw big parties, and sometimes his famous friends, like the anthropologist Margaret Mead or the writer Gail Sheehy, would show up. He wore dashikis. Traveling for conferences, hed end up in a tiki restaurant with my cousins, dancing with the hula dancer, Dr. Kelly said.But a sense of resentment clung to him, said Dr. David Scasta, who got to know Dr. Fryer as a medical resident at Temple University and interviewed him about his life in 2002.He felt isolated from the gay community, said Dr. Scasta, a past president of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists. He never had a long-term relationship. And he always felt that his career was not what it could have been.There was always a sense of sadness at not being fully accepted, he said. John always felt he was on the fringe.Decades would pass before historians of gay rights fully understood the significance of the Dr. Anonymous speech, that it had a Stonewall riots kind of importance, Dr. Scasta added. In that case, too, the surge of forward motion was driven by unlikely people.Its not always the law-abiding, nice people who did it, its the ones who are on the periphery who can make change, he said.On Monday, the 50th anniversary of the Dr. Anonymous speech was celebrated with speeches and proclamations in Philadelphia, which declared May 2 John Fryer Day.Public celebration of his act had already begun in the years before Dr. Fryers death, and in 2001 he remarked on it caustically, saying he sort of was trundled out as an exhibit every time someone wanted an exhibit.At the time, though, it was secrecy that gave his act its power, he said.As this person who was in disguise, I could say whatever I wanted, he said, adding, I did this one isolated event, which changed my life, which helped change the culture in my profession, and I disappeared.Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst. | Health |
Credit...Kuni Takahashi for The New York TimesApril 1, 2016HARIDWAR, India Sitting on an orange sofa set over a Persian carpet, in a gated office park of freshly painted tan buildings and manicured lawns, Baba Ramdev is surrounded by the trappings of any major corporate leader almost anywhere in the world.But Mr. Ramdev is also an Indian swami, having renounced all worldly pleasures and possessions, and he sits cross-legged on the couch, his face fringed by an untamed beard, his body draped in the saffron cloth of a Hindu holy man.Famous for bringing yoga to the Indian masses, Mr. Ramdev, 50, is also the leader of what has become known as the Baba Cool Movement a group of spiritual men, known here as babas, who are marketing healthy consumer items based on the ancient Indian medicinal system of herbal treatments, known as Ayurveda. His rapidly expanding business empire of packaged food, cosmetics and home-care products is eating into the sales of both multinational and Indian corporations.The babas message about the value of traditional Indian ingredients is particularly resonant in the current environment in India, where a prime minister and his political party have built a narrative around the value of ancient Hindu practices, from yoga to reverence for cows. Mr. Ramdev is the most prominent of a growing group of brand-building babas, whose ranks include Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the founder of the Art of Living, an Indian spiritual practice, who promotes a line of creams, soaps and shampoos also called Ayurveda.There is truly a tectonic shift in the consumer products business in India, said Harish Bijoor, a brand strategy specialist and former head of marketing at a subsidiary of the big Indian conglomerate Tata Group.ImageCredit...Kuni Takahashi for The New York TimesMr. Ramdev and his friend and business partner, Acharya Balakrishna, 44, run Patanjali Ayurved Limited from a corporate headquarters in Haridwar, an ancient Indian city on the banks of the Ganges River in Uttarakhand State. In an interview, Mr. Ramdev said he was the creative force and public face of Patanjali, even though, as a swami, he does not have an official title or hold any shares of the privately held company.Rising at 3:30 a.m. each day to drink the juice of the amla fruit, an Indian berry rich in vitamin C and considered the top immunity booster in Ayurveda medicine, he unleashes a torrent of new product ideas an herbal energy bar, an herbal hair dye, a sugar-free immune booster that he records in large Hindi script in a spiral bound notebook. Then he plunges into three hours of yoga, followed by a 12-hour day that is split between Patanjali business and the public meetings of a spiritual and political leader.Mr. Balakrishna, as the managing director, runs day-to-day operations. Without him, nothing would be possible, Mr. Ramdev said of his partner, who paced in the office as the interview with the loquacious swami spilled over its one-hour allotment.The two men met in the 1990s, when they studied at the same gurukul, a residential school that was the norm for Indian Hindus before the British arrived. Both the sons of farmers, they went on together to study in the Himalayas, Mr. Ramdev focusing on yoga and Mr. Balakrishna on Ayurveda.In 1994, they founded the first of three charitable trusts, to run a hospital and a university dealing in Ayurvedic medicine, and an ashram. There, they held yoga camps and free health checkups at which they dispensed Ayurveda treatments, which are largely herbal. Before long, they had set up a manufacturing plant for Ayurveda products.Around the same time, Mr. Ramdev began his televised yoga classes. Lean and muscular, Mr. Ramdev proved to be a telegenic tour de force, bringing yoga to Indias poor and the growing middle class.He gradually ventured beyond yoga to become a public critic of government corruption, leading a mass protest in New Delhi in 2011 and later endorsing Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the election in 2014.Mr. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party swept to power soon after, unleashing a strong Hindu nationalist sentiment that Mr. Ramdev says has created an ideal ecosystem to support his business. Mr. Modi pushed the United Nations to create International Yoga Day, and he inaugurated it last year, with Mr. Ramdev by his side, in a nationally televised ceremony involving 35,000 people.Few people noticed when Mr. Ramdev and Mr. Balakrishna founded Patanjali in 2006, and then, in 2009, began building factories on a 150-acre campus about 20 miles from Haridwar.Patanjali now has 28 factories at the campus that make more than 800 products that are sold at around 20,000 franchised outlets around the country, company officials said. Twenty-five technicians in a dozen glass-walled labs use computers to test ingredients for contaminants, from pesticides to heavy metals.Mr. Ramdev, given to raucous laughter and bouts of giggles that make him seem disarmingly humble, can just as suddenly overflow with bravado, as he did when asked about the source of Patanjalis popularity and power.People buy our products because they believe I will only sell them good things, he said.Beyond Mr. Ramdevs appeal, Patanjali products are attractive because they are high quality and prices are about 20 percent lower than the competition, analysts said.ImageCredit...Kuni Takahashi for The New York TimesIt is not clear how Patanjali is able to charge such low prices, given that its profit margin of 13 percent is within the industry range of 13 to 16 percent. Mr. Ramdev ventured that, with his fame, his advertising costs are much lower than his competitors, who spend as much as 15 percent of their revenue promoting their products.The faces of Mr. Ramdev and Mr. Balakrishna adorn most every building, billboard and truck connected to the company, which is expanding so fast it is striking fear into its current and potential competitors. The company expects to report revenue of $750 million in the fiscal year that ended in March, more than double the previous years $300 million, the two men said.Credit-Suisse Securities, in a report early this year, said Patanjalis meteoric rise had hurt Colgate-Palmolive (India) Ltd., which is majority owned by the United States-based Colgate-Palmolive. Sales of Colgates toothpastes slowed from growing at about 10 percent annually to just 1 percent in the quarter ending in December, in the face of competition from Patanjali, Rohit Kadam, the analyst who wrote the report, said in an interview.The report said sales of health supplements at Dabur India Ltd., one of the countrys largest consumer goods companies, had been growing at close to 20 percent annually but began falling at the end of last year, hurt by competition from Patanjali.In the face of that threat, Patanjalis competitors are working on overdrive to create similar types of product options, Mr. Bijoor, the brand strategist, said.Colgate has introduced toothpastes containing the extract of neem, an Indian tree, and charcoal, both still used by villagers to clean their teeth. Spokesmen for Colgate and Dabur did not respond to requests for comment.Experts say that, for the foreseeable future, the only danger signs for Patanjali are the enthusiasms of its founder, Mr. Ramdev.If he takes it a bit too far, hell lose new customers, said Sunil Alagh, a business consultant and formerly chief executive of Britannia Industries Ltd., an Indian company famous for packaged cookies.In the past, Mr. Ramdev has dived into controversial conservative causes without hesitation. Last year, for example, he claimed that he could cure homosexuality by treating a person with yoga.Mr. Ramdev was also outspoken in his condemnation of a student at a New Delhi university who faced sedition charges after the authorities accused him of participating in a pro-Pakistan campus rally. The traitors, Mr. Ramdev said, must be arrested.Controversy aside, Mr. Bijoor has predicted that the Baba Cool Movement will eventually outsell both multinationals and top Indian companies alike.Its about a good connect, he said. Its about becoming the umbilical cord connecting the past to the present. | World |
Credit...James Hill for The New York TimesFeb. 18, 2014KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia The Olympic Games work extremely hard to disguise their vast corporate ties. Fans at the venues and viewers at home will not see any business logos in the background, except the ubiquitous Olympic rings and Sochi 2014 emblem. Compared with Nascar cars, international soccer uniforms or outfield fences, the illusion of the Olympics is one of noncommercial purity. The only interruptions come from the athletes, their clothes and their equipment. The International Olympic Committee, leery of spoiling the canvas, has a 33-page book filled with detailed restrictions on logos. It dictates the size and placement of them on everything from team uniforms at the opening ceremony to the emblems on a skiers gloves and the stickers on a bobsledders helmet. Observers might go the entire Olympics and not notice them.At least until the snowboarders and skiers go airborne. The bottom of them may be the most prominent billboards at the Winter Games, a bit of a twist of guerrilla marketing. When someone such as the snowboarder Shaun White flies through the air, cameras often catch the underside of his board, on which Burton, the name of its manufacturer, is spread in large, bold letters. Those images flash across television screens and are published around the world. Eight of the 12 finalists in the mens halfpipe competition rode Burton boards. All of them went upside down.Its great for awareness, said Jake Burton, the founder of the company.The same can be said for companies supplying skiers, though the advertising space is slimmer. Two days later, at the mens slopestyle competition in freestyle skiing, athletes performed a series of high-flying, corkscrewing tricks. When the event ended, three Americans had earned medals, each of them holding their skis close for everyone to see and photograph. Glad to accept the free advertising were Fischer (gold medalist Joss Christensen), Atomic (Gus Kenworthy, silver) and Volkl (Nick Goepper, bronze). Of course, there have been snowboarders and skiers, especially, showing the world the undercarriages of their equipment for years. Ski jumpers, for one, have been an Olympics fixture since 1924. ImageCredit...Josh Haner/The New York TimesBut since 1992, the Winter Olympics have grown steadily skyward, adding freestyle skiing and snowboarding events. Most feature airborne, rotating athletes. And what makes their equipment different from that of, say, ski jumpers, who have specialized skis designed specifically for use on ski jumps, is that it is marketed heavily to the masses. Whites Burton board is not unlike the ones that countless snowboarders buy and ride. The aerial bombardment of brands seems to fly in the face of the International Olympic Committee, which goes to great lengths to squelch promotional interference from companies without sponsorship ties to the Games. The I.O.C.s Rule 40 even restricts athletes from publicly mentioning their sponsors by name, even on social media, during the Olympics. That led to a protest from athletes at the 2012 Summer Games in London. Restrictions carry to the competitions, where even the logos of major sponsors McDonalds, Visa and Panasonic among them are nowhere to be seen.Logos on uniforms cannot be larger than 20 square centimeters, for example. No item piece of clothing or equipment may be used for advertising purposes, the guidelines read. An item is in particular considered to be used for advertising purposes when the identification on such item is not in relation to sport or is only featured or used for the purpose of conspicuous exposure during the Olympic Games.That eliminates stickers that snowboarders spread across their boards and on helmets. But it does not eliminate brand names on the equipment. The identification of the manufacturer may be carried as generally used on products sold through the retail trade during the period of 12 months prior to the Games, the rules read. That is a vital loophole for snowboard and ski companies. They slip through it without intending to, at least not specifically at the Winter Games. For decades, they have used the top and the bottom of their equipment as space for logos. Not long after Burtons founding in 1977, decades before snowboarding joined the Olympics, the company began putting its name on the bottom of snowboards, usually in big, bold script. It often uses the bottom of the board as a canvas for company artists. The coolest thing in my life before snowboarding was album art, Burton said.At the Olympics, Burton-sponsored riders filled five of 12 slots in the womens halfpipe final, three in the mens slopestyle final and one in the womens slopestyle final. But not all their Burton boards were obviously by Burton. The mens halfpipe silver medalist Ayumu Hiranos board read custom in capital letters Burtons most popular model.It has always said custom instead of Burton, Burton said. | Sports |
Health|Covid patients may have increased risk of developing mental health problems.https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/health/covid-patients-may-have-increased-risk-of-developing-mental-health-problems.htmlCredit...Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesFeb. 16, 2022Social isolation, economic stress, loss of loved ones and other struggles during the pandemic have contributed to rising mental health issues like anxiety and depression.But can having Covid itself increase the risk of developing mental health problems? A large new study suggests it can.The study, published Wednesday in the journal The BMJ, analyzed records of nearly 154,000 Covid patients in the Veterans Health Administration system and compared their experience in the year after they recovered from their initial infection with that of a similar group of people who did not contract the virus.The study included only patients who had no mental health diagnoses or treatment for at least two years before becoming infected with the coronavirus, allowing researchers to focus on psychiatric diagnoses and treatment that occurred after coronavirus infection.People who had Covid were 39 percent more likely to be diagnosed with depression and 35 percent more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety over the months following infection than people without Covid during the same period, the study found. Covid patients were 38 percent more likely to be diagnosed with stress and adjustment disorders and 41 percent more likely to be diagnosed with sleep disorders than uninfected people.There appears to be a clear excess of mental health diagnoses in the months after Covid, said Dr. Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the study. | Health |
Federal scientists estimated that more than 40 percent of children aged 5 to 11 had been infected with the coronavirus by June. Outside experts arent so sure.Credit...David Degner for The New York TimesPublished Oct. 28, 2021Updated Nov. 2, 2021A startling statistic emerged as advisers to the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday debated use of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine in children ages 5 to 11. According to one federal scientist, by June an estimated 42 percent of these children had already been infected with the coronavirus.That figure was much higher than anyone expected. But the estimate, which was from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, might have overstated the percentage of children who were infected, several experts said in interviews. Among other flaws, the percentage was based on tests known to have a high rate of false positives signaling the presence of antibodies where there are none.And even if unexpectedly high numbers of children have been infected, parents should not assume that they are shielded from the virus and dont need the vaccine. Immunization will cement that protection now and against future virus variants, said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania.The data are clear that even if they had been exposed in the past that they would benefit from the vaccine, he said, speaking of children. The risks of vaccination are very low, whereas the benefits are appreciable.Are 42 percent of younger children really immune to the coronavirus?Most likely, no. The C.D.C. estimate was based on tests of a small number of children who had blood drawn for routine medical care or other illnesses. That is not a representative sample of the general population, said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University.For example, the sample may have included children who have cancer or other conditions that weaken the immune system. Usually, kids dont get blood drawn for any routine medical care unless they have some reason to, Dr. Iwasaki said.Studies based on blood samples at clinics or by recruiting volunteers notoriously overestimate how many people have been infected, said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona.If youre not careful about doing a random sample, then the seroprevalence numbers can get pretty wacky, he said.For example, scientists examining blood donations estimated that about 76 percent of the population in Manaus, Brazil, had been exposed to the virus by October 2020, perhaps achieving herd immunity. That presumption turned out to be horribly wrong: Most of Brazil, including Manaus, saw a long and deadly wave of infections this year, which claimed more than 4,000 lives per day at its peak.The ideal way to estimate seroprevalence the percentage of people with antibodies to the virus is to randomly sample households, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. And convincing large numbers of families to have blood drawn from healthy children is likely to be a losing proposition.In America, the percentage of children infected is likely to be lower than the C.D.C.s estimate, because many of them were at home during the big surges, Dr. Bhattacharya said. The 42 percent figure doesnt pass the smell test.I think my child had Covid. Can I find out before saying yes to the vaccine?If you dont already have evidence of your childs infection for example, the result from a P.C.R. test there is no reliable way to confirm it now. Covid symptoms closely resemble those of other respiratory illnesses.It will be difficult to ascertain who had infection and who did not, Dr. Iwasaki said.And testing for antibodies after the fact is fraught. Apart from the possibility of false positives, the tests may not detect antibodies in children. Many never become visibly ill, and several studies suggest that people who are asymptomatic or have only mild symptoms produce far fewer antibodies than those who are severely ill.Its not clear to me that the serological tests can be used to faithfully identify people who have had exposures before, Dr. Hensley said. I dont think were at that point now.ImageCredit...Mike Kai Chen for The New York TimesI know my child had Covid. Does she still need the vaccine?Skipping vaccination would be a gamble, experts said. There are many unanswered questions about the strength and durability of immunity in children.There are too many unknowns on that, whereas the vaccine is known thats my caution, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco. Certainly, I wouldnt put all my eggs into the previous infection, natural immunity basket.As with the protection conferred by vaccines, immunity from natural infection may weaken over time, leaving children susceptible to reinfection. Id be interested to know when that infection was, Dr. Chin-Hong said. If it was a year or so ago, then I would worry about waning immunity.In adults, natural immunity generally seems to be holding up well, Dr. Bhattacharya said.But its unclear whether the protection seen in adults extends to children, in part because most children tend to have milder symptoms than adults and may not have mounted a full-throttled defense against the virus.Natural immunity in children also may not hold up against variants. Several studies have shown that just one dose of the vaccine in a previously infected adult can turbocharge protection, even against variants like Beta and Delta.I suspect that will be the case with kids, as well, Dr. Hensley said.Vaccination should also lower the chances of a reinfected child passing the virus to others who may be susceptible to severe illness. If someone in your household is extremely vulnerable, then the consequences of that are pretty bad, Dr. Bhattacharya said.Im worried about side effects. Is the vaccine safe?All of the evidence so far indicates that the vaccines are far safer than a bout of Covid, even for children.For example, although the vaccines have been associated with the rare chance of myocarditis, inflammation of the heart, in young men, the symptoms have quickly resolved in most of them. Covid is much more likely to cause myocarditis, and a much more severe version.At the end of the day, acquiring immunity through infection is risky business, Dr. Hensley said.Over the course of the pandemic, more than 8,300 children ages 5 to 11 have been hospitalized, and roughly one-third of them were admitted to intensive care units, the F.D.A. advisers were told. At least 94 children in this age group have died. Some continue to have symptoms weeks to months after the infection has resolved.Federal agencies are continuing to collect safety information about the vaccines, Dr. Hensley noted, and will pick up any serious side effects that surface.For children who have a history of heart disease or do not respond to the vaccine because of certain medical conditions, there may be another option. Some companies are developing long-lasting antibody drugs that can significantly cut the risk of infection.AstraZenecas antibody cocktail could protect recipients for up to a year, Dr. Chin-Hong noted: Thats the wave of the future. | Health |
When his baby boy was diagnosed with the illness, he made it his mission to combat it. He later took his expertise back to his native Ghana.Credit...Childrens Hospital of PhiladelphiaPublished May 19, 2022Updated May 22, 2022Soon after his first child, Kwame, was born on May 13, 1972, Dr. Kwaku Ohene-Frempong discovered that the boy had a fatal genetic disease.I was holding Kwame, and he came upstairs with tears in his eyes, Dr. Ohene-Frempongs wife, Janet Ohene-Frempong, said in an interview, recalling the moment her husband broke the news. He said, Our son, Kwame, has sickle cell disease. He knew what that meant. Sickle cell can result in searing pain, organ damage, strokes, susceptibility to infections and premature death.Dr. Ohene-Frempong, a medical student at Yale at the time, then called his mother at their family home in Ghana. God is telling you something, she told him. The message, she said, was to use his medical training to help combat the disease. And that is what he did until he drew his last breath, Ms. Ohene-Frempong said.The most important thing that happened to us is Kwames birth, she added. It changed the trajectory of our lives and of hundreds and hundreds of people around the world. All the work he did every bit of it he did because of Kwame.Dr. Ohene-Frempong, familiarly known by his initials, Kof (pronounced cough), died on May 7 in Philadelphia. He was 76. His wife said the cause was metastatic lung cancer.Dr. Ohene-Frempong worked for decades at the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, an affiliate of the University of Pennsylvania. At CHOP, as it is known, he established the hospitals Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center.Dr. Alexis Thompson, a colleague and sickle cell expert there, said in an interview: I relied on his wisdom at almost every turn in my career. Part of it was watching with this tremendous awe what his vision was and the things he thought to do to move this field forward.Dr. Ohene-Frempong was a leader of a large federally funded study, the Cooperative Study of Sickle Cell Disease, that helped answer an important question: What is the natural course of the disease?Analyzing the studys data, he found that the disease could result in blockages in blood vessels in the brain, leading to a high rate of strokes in children with sickle cell. That led other researchers to be able to predict which children were most at risk, and to discover that regular transfusions could prevent most strokes in those children.In his native Ghana, Dr. Ohene-Frempong established a pilot program to provide screening for sickle cell disease among newborns in the southern city of Kumasi. It was the first such program in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to identifying children with the illness, the program referred them to specialized clinics that provided treatments like antibiotics to prevent infections, routine immunizations and a drug, hydroxyurea, that can reduce the risk of complications from sickle cell.Kwaku Ohene-Frempong was born on March 13, 1946, in Kukurantumi, in eastern Ghana, to Kwasi Adde Ohene and Adwoa Odi Boafo. His father was a cocoa farmer and a prominent member of a royal family.Kwaku attended a boarding school, Prempeh College, then went to Yale University, where he majored in biology and was captain of the track and field team, setting indoor and outdoor records in the high hurdles. While a student, he met Janet Williams, who was attending Cornell University. They married on June 6, 1970, one week after they had both graduated.Dr. Ohene-Frempong said in an interview in 2019 that he first found out about sickle cell when he and some friends attended a lecture about the disease at Yale. As he sat listening, he said, he suddenly recognized the disease: It was in his family but had gone undiagnosed. One of his cousins had the symptoms and died at 14.He was in pain, he said of his cousin. His eyes were very yellow, and he was very skinny.Dr. Ohene-Frempong continued on to medical school at Yale, then went to New York Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan for his residency. He studied pediatric hematology at the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia before moving to the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, where he was associate professor of pediatrics.In his six years at Tulane, he established the Tulane Sickle Cell Center of Southern Louisiana, a medical care facility, and helped the state health department develop a newborn-screening program for the disease.Dr. Ohene-Frempong returned to Childrens Hospital in 1986 and remained there for 30 years before leaving to work full time in Ghana, at the Kumasi Center for Sickle Cell Disease, a research and treatment center. He was still based there when he returned to Philadelphia for cancer treatment.He was very, very aware of the limitations of working in Africa, Ms. Ohene-Frempong said. His goal was to raise the standards of care. He said, It can be done in America, and that is our goal here.As part of that mission, Dr. Ohene-Frempong became president of the Sickle Cell Foundation of Ghana and the national coordinator for the American Society of Hematologys Consortium on Newborn Screening in Africa.His honors and accolades were many, including, from Ghana, the Order of the Volta in 2010 and the Millennium Excellence Award in Medicine in 2015. In the United States in 2020, he received the Assistant Secretary of Health Exceptional Service Medal, the highest civilian award given by the Public Health Service, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The American Society for Hematology honored him in 2021 with its Stratton Award for Translational and Clinical Science.But despite the progress that Dr. Ohene-Frempong and others had made in caring for people with sickle cell disease, his son, Kwame, did not survive it: He died in 2013 at age 40, the father of two young children.In addition to his wife, Dr. Ohene-Frempong is survived by his daughter, Afia Ohene-Frempong; three brothers, Kwabena Ohene-Dokyi, Kwasi Ohene-Owusu and Reynolds Twumasi; a sister, Ama Ohene-Agyeiwaa Boateng; a grandson; and a granddaughter. | Health |
Politics|In Bid to End Child Separations, House G.O.P. Presses Ahead With Broad Immigration Planhttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/politics/ryan-trump-immigration-family-separation.htmlVideotranscripttranscriptHouse to Take Action to Keep Families Together, Ryan SaysSpeaker Paul D. Ryan discussed legislation that would keep migrant families together at the border.As I said last week, we do not want children taken away from their parents. We can enforce our immigration laws without breaking families apart. The administration says it wants Congress to act, and we are. Tomorrow, the House will vote on legislation to keep families together. Under this bill, when people are being prosecuted for illegally crossing the border, families will remain together under D.H.S. custody throughout the length of their legal proceedings. Additional funding is also going to be made available, so that D.H.S. has sufficient resources to house and care for families during this entire process. Bottom line is this: We are going to take action to keep families together while we enforce our immigration laws. The law should not have our government choose between enforcing our borders, enforcing our laws, securing our borders and keeping families together thats ridiculous. Its a ridiculous choice.Speaker Paul D. Ryan discussed legislation that would keep migrant families together at the border.CreditCredit...J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressJune 20, 2018WASHINGTON Speaker Paul D. Ryan said Wednesday that the House would press ahead with a vote on a broad immigration bill that includes language to curb the Trump administrations practice of separating families on the border.We dont think families should be separated, period, Mr. Ryan said. Weve seen the videos, heard the audio.But doubts persisted about the bills chances of passage when it comes up for a vote on Thursday, and Senate Republicans were pursuing a different strategy. In that chamber, lawmakers were working to develop narrow legislation that would address the issue of separating families on the border.For now, at least, Mr. Ryan declined to entertain the possibility of considering a narrower measure aimed at stopping the separation of migrant families.Right now, were focused on passing this legislation thats coming to the floor tomorrow, Mr. Ryan said.The House measure, a compromise negotiated by conservatives and moderates, was not originally conceived to address the issue of children being separated from parents who come into the United States illegally. It would provide a path to citizenship for young undocumented immigrants, known as Dreamers, while making significant changes to the immigration system and providing billions of dollars for President Trumps promised wall along the southwest border with Mexico.In light of the family separation issue, though, House Republicans added new language to the bill in an effort to address that matter.The legislation would keep families together when people are being prosecuted under the Trump administrations zero tolerance policy for illegally crossing the border, Mr. Ryan told reporters. The speaker said that families would remain together in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security while legal proceedings play out.We can enforce our immigration laws without breaking families apart, Mr. Ryan said. The administration says it wants Congress to act, and we are.It is highly questionable whether the compromise bill will be able to pass the House. The bill was negotiated as House leaders tried to head off a rebellion from moderate members eager for action to address the fate of the Dreamers. Critics on the right have already labeled it as amnesty. | Politics |
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/sports/ncaabasketball/north-carolina-downs-duke.htmlSports BriefingFeb. 21, 2014Marcus Paige scored all 13 of his points in the second half for host North Carolina (19-7, 9-4 Atlantic Coast Conference), which rallied from an 11-point deficit to beat No. 5 Duke (21-6, 10-4), 74-66, in a weather-delayed game. Gary Harris had 25 points, Adreian Payne had 23, and No. 13 Michigan State (22-5, 11-3 Big Ten) converted a team-record 17 3-pointers in a 94-79 victory at Purdue (15-11, 5-8). Shabazz Napier had 17 points, 11 rebounds and 7 assists as No. 21 Connecticut (21-5, 9-4 American Athletic Conference) won at Temple (7-18, 2-11), 68-55. Michael Dixon scored 15 points off the bench to lead No. 22 Memphis (20-6, 9-4 A.A.C.) over host Rutgers (10-17, 4-10), 64-59. | Sports |
Credit...Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesMay 13, 2019SAN FRANCISCO An Israeli firm accused of supplying tools for spying on human-rights activists and journalists now faces claims that its technology can use a security hole in WhatsApp, the messaging app used by 1.5 billion people, to break into the digital communications of iPhone and Android phone users.Security researchers said they had found so-called spyware designed to take advantage of the WhatsApp flaw that bears the characteristics of technology from the company, the NSO Group.WhatsApp engineers worked around the clock to patch the vulnerability and released a patch on Monday. They encouraged customers to update their apps as quickly as possible.WhatsApp encourages people to upgrade to the latest version of our app, as well as keep their mobile operating system up to date, to protect against potential targeted exploits designed to compromise information stored on mobile devices, the Facebook-owned company said in a statement.The WhatsApp hole was used to target a London lawyer who has been involved in lawsuits that accuse NSO Group of providing tools to hack the phones of Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident in Canada; a Qatari citizen; and a group of Mexican journalists and activists, the researchers said. The researchers believe the list of targets could be much longer.Digital attackers could use the vulnerability to insert malicious code and steal data from an Android phone or an iPhone simply by placing a WhatsApp call, even if the victim did not pick up the call. As WhatsApps engineers examined the vulnerability, they concluded that it was similar to other tools from the NSO Group, because of its digital footprint.The lawyer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said he had grown suspicious that his phone had been hacked when he started missing WhatsApp video calls from Swedish telephone numbers at odd hours. The lawyer contacted Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, which has helped uncover the use of NSO Group products in attacks on journalists, dissidents and activists.Ten days ago, as Citizen Lab was looking into the incident, engineers at WhatsApp discovered what they described as abnormal voice calling activity on their systems, said a WhatsApp employee familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.WhatsApp alerted human-rights organizations about the threat and learned from Citizen Lab that the vulnerability had been used to target the lawyer.WhatsApp said it had alerted the Justice Department to the attack. The WhatsApp flaw was first reported Monday by The Financial Times.The products of the NSO Group, which operated in secret for years, were found in 2016 as part of a spying campaign on the iPhone of a now-jailed human-rights activist in the United Arab Emirates through undisclosed Apple security vulnerabilities. Since then, the NSO Groups spyware has been found on the iPhones of journalists, dissidents and even nutritionists.The company has long advertised that its products are sold to government agencies solely for fighting terrorism and aiding law enforcement investigations.The NSO Group said in a statement on Monday that its spyware was strictly licensed to government agencies and that it would investigate any credible allegations of misuse. The company said it would not be involved in identifying a target for its technology, including the lawyer at the center of the latest accusations.NSOs response is consistent with previous responses from the Israeli firm, which claims to have an in-house ethics committee that decides whether or not to sell to countries based on their human-rights records.But increasingly, NSOs spyware has been discovered in use by governments with questionable human-rights records like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Mexico.The Israeli company sold a stake to Novalpina, a British private equity firm, in a leveraged buyout deal last year that valued it at nearly $1 billion.The firm has been on a public-relations campaign in recent months to show its value to law enforcement, and has cited several examples of its spywares being used, it says, to capture drug kingpins and to stop terrorist attacks.NSO and Novalpina have spent several months telling the world that there are adults in the room and telegraphing that they have made a commitment to close oversight, said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab. Yet even 24 hours ago, we observed what some believe to be an NSO infection attempt against a human-rights lawyer.As this case makes it very clear if indeed this was NSO there is still a very serious abuse problem, Mr. Scott-Railton added. | Tech |
World BriefingMarch 31, 2016 Brazils highest court, the Supreme Federal Tribunal, ruled Thursday that a federal investigation into the finances of former President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva should be removed from a crusading anticorruption judge. The interim decision, which is not the courts final ruling and can still be amended by the justices, transfers the jurisdiction for the inquiry to the high court from Judge Srgio Moro, who has overseen the investigation into the graft scandal at Petrobras, the national oil company. The ruling established that intercepts of Mr. da Silvas phone calls should be reviewed by the court because some of the calls included conversations with senior officials who enjoy special judicial standing. The court has still not ruled on whether President Dilma Rousseffs nomination of Mr. da Silva to her cabinet, a move suspended in March by Justice Gilmar Mendes, should be allowed. | World |
Sports BriefingFeb. 12, 2014Tyler Ennis made a 35-footer at the buzzer to help No. 1 Syracuse remain unbeaten with a 58-56 win at No. 25 Pittsburgh on Wednesday night. Syracuse (24-0, 11-0 Atlantic Coast Conference) remained one of two undefeated teams in Division I along with Wichita State.Trailing by a point with 4.4 seconds left, Ennis took the inbounds pass and dribbled upcourt before shooting over two defenders. Pitt (20-5, 8-4) had been 9-0 against top-five teams at the 12-year-old Petersen Events Center. Wednesdays rivalry game between No. 8 DukeandNorth Carolinawas postponed because of the winter storm that paralyzed much of the Southeast. The game will be made up Feb. 20. DeAndre Daniels scored 12 points to lead a balanced offense as 24th-ranked Connecticut (19-5, 7-4 American Athletic Conference) rolled to an 83-40 rout of visiting South Florida (12-13, 3-9). | Sports |
Media|Suit Claims Weeknd Song Infringes on Copyright of Film Soundtrackhttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/media/suit-claims-weeknd-song-infringes-on-copyright-of-film-soundtrack.htmlDec. 9, 2015The Weeknds song The Hills became one of the biggest hits of the year with a slithery electronic bass line. But according to a copyright infringement lawsuit filed on Wednesday, that bass line was taken without permission from the soundtrack of a little-noticed science-fiction thriller.The suit was filed in United States District Court in Los Angeles by Cutting Edge Music on behalf of Tom Raybould, a Welsh composer who wrote the music for The Machine, directed by Caradog James, which had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2013 but was not widely distributed in theaters in the United States.Still, the suit asserts, the music for The Machine reached associates of the Weeknd, whose real name is Abel Tesfaye. On March 9, according to the suit, Mr. Raybould received a direct message on Twitter from Emmanuel Nickerson, a producer and writer known as Million Dollar Mano, that said: I sampled your music might make it 2 the weeknd next album. Huge fan of what u did 4 the machine movie!According the suit, both The Hills and a track on The Machine soundtrack called Revolution feature bass lines performed with almost identical idiosyncratic sounds at the same register and using the same pitch sequence, melodic phase structure and rhythmic durations, along with other similarities. The suit seeks unspecified damages, and it names as defendants several record labels and music publishers involved with the song.The Hills, which was released as a single in May, lists as its songwriters Mr. Tesfaye; Mr. Nickerson; Ahmad Balshe, better known as Belly; and Carlo Montagnese, known as Illangelo. The song spent six weeks at No.1 on Billboards singles chart, and according to Nielsen it sold 2.4 million downloads and has been streamed nearly 400 million times in the United States on audio and video services. This week, the Weeknd was nominated for seven Grammy Awards, including album of the year for Beauty Behind the Madness, on which The Hills appears.A representative of Songs Music Publishing, the publisher that represents the Weeknd, declined to comment on Wednesday, saying that the company had not been served with the complaint. Representatives of Republic Records, the Weeknds label, did not respond to a request for comment. | Business |
TrilobitesSome pairs of cranes in India, known for their monogamous devotion, seem to bring in a third bird to act like a kind of avian au pair.VideoThree sarus cranes in Haryana State, India, turn a typical duet into a song for a trio.CreditCredit...Suhridam RoyApril 9, 2022Cranes have a reputation as romantics. The birds live in faithful pairs, dancing and defending their territory together. When intruders approach, the birds lift their beaks and emit a loud song with one voice.In India, the sarus crane crimson-headed and as tall as an adult human is celebrated for its monogamy. When one of the birds dies, the local mythology is that the other bird pines away in grief, said K. S. Gopi Sundar, a scientist at the Nature Conservation Foundation in India. The truth is, of course, a little bit different.Dr. Sundar discovered that sarus crane couples occasionally let a third bird join them. He described the behavior last month in the journal Ecology. Living as a trio alas, not quite a throuple may help the birds raise young in poor conditions, with one behaving perhaps a bit like an avian au pair. The birds even turn their signature duet into a song for three.Dr. Sundar first spotted a sarus crane trio in 1999. When I mentioned it to experts in the U.S., they smiled and patted me on my head, he said. But he was not ready to let go of the idea. He followed that trio for the next 16 years.Starting in 2011, he also trained field assistants (usually local farmers) to monitor sarus cranes. After gathering data through 2020, Dr. Sundar and Swati Kittur, a colleague at the foundation, dug into that database to look for trios.Observers had spotted 193 trios among more than 11,500 crane sightings. So trios are definitely rare, Dr. Sundar said. Some included a male and two females; some were the other way around.Suhridam Roy, a graduate student at the foundation, visited four of these trios and played recordings of other crane pairs singing their territorial duets. In response, each trio performed its own synchronized call. The scientists called it a triet.The data does not reveal how many chicks these trios raised or how long they stayed together. But 16 years of observing that original trio gave some hints about their family dynamics.These cranes lived in a low-quality habitat, where a lack of wetlands would most likely make it hard for a typical duo to raise young, Dr. Sundar said.But in a group of three, the outcome turned out better. Each year, one adult in that trio a female vanished while the other two nested and laid eggs. It was not a throuple, Dr. Sundar said. Only two of the three animals mated each season.But when the resulting chick or chicks were about a month old, or immediately after the nest had failed, the absent female reappeared. If there were chicks, she helped feed them. And working together, the three cranes raised a chick nearly every other year.Finding a novel behavior like this in a system where we all thought that they were monogamous for a long time is super interesting, said Sahas Barve, an evolutionary ecologist at the Smithsonian Institutions National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.And the study raises a lot of questions, he said. Most important: Who is that third bird?In some bird species, including Florida scrub-jays and Seychelles warblers, grown offspring often stay to form a trio with their parents and help raise their siblings, Dr. Barve said.But Dr. Sundar thinks it is unlikely that sarus crane trios include a grown chick, based on other research he has done. However, he noted that the third adult could be related in another way. Sharing some genes with the chick could help explain how this system evolved.If the third adult is unrelated, though and if it is not allowed to mate what benefit does it receive from living in a trio?The only benefit that we could think of for the third bird is that its getting practice, Dr. Sundar said. The helper can learn how to defend its home and feed chicks. At least one trio the researchers observed included a very young male.The scientists also saw that trios were more common in undesirable habitats. Dr. Sundar thinks teaming up may be an adaptation to bad circumstances.Team parenting appears across the animal kingdom. Species of monkeys, mongooses, spiders, insects, birds and fish engage in cooperative breeding. So do humans. But until now, no cranes were known to parent in teams.Its challenging assumptions that we have about this family of birds, said Anne Lacy, senior manager of North America programs for the International Crane Foundation.Ms. Lacy said she and her colleagues had never observed trios among North American cranes, but added, Could it happen when were just not looking? Absolutely.Dr. Sundar plans to use genetics to learn whether sarus crane helpers are relatives. One question he doesnt plan to ask, though, is whether the helper is ever a chicks true parent. In other words, is the sarus crane really monogamous?These birds are preserved for the mythology that they are with each other all the time, and that they are faithful, he said.Learning that some percentage of cranes stray from their partners, Dr. Sundar said, risks damaging the relationship between human and bird. Why destroy this mythology for a statistic and for a scientific paper? he said. | science |
Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York TimesJune 27, 2018WASHINGTON Senator Mitch McConnell wasted no time on Wednesday and promised a Senate vote on a new Supreme Court nominee by the fall and Democrats will have little power to prevent confirmation of President Trumps choice on their own.The Senate stands ready to fulfill its constitutional role by offering advice and consent on President Trumps nominee to fill this vacancy, Mr. McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said after Justice Anthony M. Kennedy announced his retirement. We will vote to confirm Justice Kennedys successor this fall.The decision to move swiftly shows that Mr. McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans do not intend to give Democrats and their allies an extended opportunity to build opposition to a nominee or to retake the Senate and blockade confirmation as Republicans did with President Barack Obamas nominee in 2016.The confirmation process will throw a volatile new issue into the already charged midterm campaign season, providing fresh challenges for both Republican and Democratic candidates.But it represents an opportunity for a crowning judicial triumph for Mr. McConnell, who led the blockade against Merrick B. Garland in 2016, and will now have the chance to usher a second Republican-nominated justice onto the Supreme Court in the first two years of Mr. Trumps presidency. He has already guided scores of appeals and district court judges onto the bench.In elevating Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court last year, Republicans altered Senate rules to deny Democrats the opportunity to filibuster the nomination as well as future Supreme Court choices. That procedural change following a similar 2013 Democratic effort to speed confirmation for lower court judges means that Republicans can confirm a second Trump pick with only Republican votes though they hold a very narrow 51-to-49 majority.But because one of those Republicans, Senator John McCain of Arizona, is absent with cancer and unlikely to be on hand for future votes, the resistance of a single Republican could be an obstacle to confirmation. That may influence Mr. Trumps selection process and prevent him from making a risky conservative choice that could ignite resistance from his own party. It will also drive Democrats to put intense pressure on more moderate Republicans, like Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who support abortion rights.Democrats made clear that they intend to focus on a potential threat to Roe v. Wade as part of their effort to upend a Trump nominee they find objectionable or, failing that, to deploy the issue along with health care as a rallying point for voters in November.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, called on his colleagues to block any nominee who would encroach on established rights that Democrats consider sacrosanct.The Senate should reject on a bipartisan basis any justice who would overturn Roe v. Wade or undermine key health care protections, he said.Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, echoed that call.When it comes time to decide on a replacement for Justice Kennedy, I hope that my Republican colleagues who believe that women, not the government, have the right to control their own bodies will stand with those of us who oppose any nominee who would deny any woman the right to choose, Mr. Sanders said.Dawn Laguens, the executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said that the Senate should reject any nominee who would not defend Roe v. Wade and womens rights. We cannot allow a world in which our daughters and granddaughters have fewer rights than we have, she told reporters, vowing that Planned Parenthood supporters would be contacting representatives to voice concerns with the list of nominees provided by Mr. Trump.But Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski have in the past supported Republican Supreme Court nominees who have provided general assurances that they would not overturn settled issues.Ms. Murkowski acknowledged the difficulty of the potential choice, and said she would consider privately signaling to the White House who she would and would not support. But, she added, any decision she made would have to be based on multiple issues.Roe is one of those factors that I will weigh, just as I weighed it with the other nominations that came before us, she said. Is it the only factor that I weigh? No.The confirmation showdown presents dangers for the 10 Democratic Senate candidates running for re-election in states carried by Mr. Trump. They will come under intense pressure to back the president and his nominee or risk losing their seats in a backlash.I would suspect if we vote before Election Day, and we have a Gorsuch-like nominee, man or woman, I think some of them will wind up voting for that nominee, said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri.But they are sure to be squeezed by progressive advocacy allies, who intend to demand united Democratic opposition.Several Democrats called for the Trump administration to put forward a nominee who could attract significant bipartisan support, but the administration seemed almost certain to seize the opportunity to push the already conservative court to the right, given that Democratic votes might not be needed at all.The fight for a second Trump-nominated justice comes as Democrats still grieve the Republican treatment of Mr. Garland, who did not even get a hearing over a nearly yearlong blockade. That anger was stoked anew in recent days as the court delivered a series of 5-to-4 decisions on politically contentious issues such as abortion, labor, voting rights and a travel ban in favor of Republicans and the administration.Democrats and many legal analysts believe those rulings would have gone the other way had Mr. Garland been on the court, and the outcome left Democrats seething. The decision by Justice Kennedy has only exacerbated fears about a highly politicized court.Ive been very depressed about the Supreme Court for a year, said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun. I often wonder what he would think about the court and how politicized its principles and values are. It is a political sellout.Such boiling resentment over Mr. Garlands treatment ensures that Democrats will not be willing to provide much assistance to Mr. Trump in filling the seat. Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat and a veteran of countless judicial confirmation battles, noted on Wednesday that Mr. McConnells rationale for blocking Mr. Garland was to await the outcome of the presidential election. He said that Mr. McConnell should now follow his own precedent and allow the voters to speak in the midterm elections.Senator McConnell set the new standard by giving the American people their say in the upcoming election before court vacancies are filled, Mr. Durbin said in a statement. With so much at stake for the people of our country, the U.S. Senate must be consistent and consider the presidents nominee once the new Congress is seated in January.Mr. Schumer made the same point. Our Republican colleagues in the Senate should follow the rule they set in 2016: Not to consider a Supreme Court justice in an election year, he said on the Senate floor. Anything but that would be the absolute height of hypocrisy.Mr. McConnell is unlikely to heed that advice.It is imperative that the presidents nominee be considered fairly, Mr. McConnell said. | Politics |
Credit...JPL-Caltech/NASANov. 14, 2016Imagine if scientists discovered that an asteroid was hurtling toward Los Angeles.The possibility has existed on the pages of Hollywood scripts. But in what may be a case of life imitating art, NASA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government agencies engaged last month in a planetary protection exercise to consider the potentially devastating consequences of a 330-foot asteroid hitting the Earth.The simulation projected a worst-case blast wave by an asteroid strike in 2020 that could level structures across 30 miles, require a mass evacuation of the Los Angeles area and cause tens of thousands of casualties.In 1998, the movie Armageddon dramatized an even greater fictional threat. In that blockbuster, a ragtag crew was sent on a mission to drill into an asteroid and set off a nuclear bomb to avert a global catastrophe. As the character Harry Stamper, portrayed by Bruce Willis, summed up to his crewmates: The United States government just asked us to save the world.Dont expect the need for such Hollywood heroics in real life, however. An asteroid that could cause such damage has no significant chance of striking Earth within the next century, Paul Chodas, manager of NASAs Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in an email.The center relies on several telescopes, such as the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona, to track potentially hazardous asteroids and comets. These objects, which are leftover matter from the formation of planets, can come dangerously close to Earth or cross its trajectory.The center lists 659 asteroids that have some probability of striking the planet, but none pose a significant threat over the next century, either because the probabilities are extraordinarily small, or the asteroids themselves are extremely small, Mr. Chodas said.ImageCredit...The Aerospace Corporation, via NASANevertheless, we must continue searching for asteroids in case there is one that is heading our way, he added.Thats where the planetary protection exercise, conducted on Oct. 25 in El Segundo, Calif., comes in. The simulation that projected a strike in 2020 involved representatives from NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Department of Energys National Laboratories, the Air Force and the California Governors Office of Emergency Services.While a warning of four years may seem like a lot of time, it would probably not be enough to deflect an asteroid of the size and orbit outlined in the simulation, Mr. Chodas said.Engineers think the simplest way to deflect an asteroid is to build a large spacecraft and simply ram it into the asteroid years before it is predicted to hit Earth, he said.It could take up to two years to build such a kinetic impactor spacecraft and another year or more to reach the asteroid, so in the case of this simulation, an evacuation, not a deflection mission, was necessary.For the organizers of Asteroid Day, a global movement that seeks to protect the world from dangerous asteroids, such planning is not out of this world.The group, which maintains that one million asteroids have the potential to strike Earth but that only 1 percent of them have been discovered, was set on Monday to release a letter signed by planetary scientists supporting missions to increase knowledge of asteroids. The group promotes the 100x Declaration, which calls for increasing the rate of asteroid discoveries to 100,000 per year in the next 10 years.The more we learn about asteroid impacts, the clearer it became that the human race has been living on borrowed time, Brian May, an astrophysicist and a founder and lead guitarist for the rock group Queen, said on the groups website.Asteroid Day is observed each year on June 30, the anniversary of what is believed to be the largest space-related explosion in human history: an asteroid strike in Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908.An asteroid, believed to be less than 100 feet in diameter, exploded at the altitude of an airliner and flattened tens of millions of trees across 800 square miles. Researchers estimated the explosion was as powerful as a medium-size hydrogen bomb and several hundred times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.While there were no official reports of human casualties, hundreds of reindeer were reduced to charred carcasses in the explosion, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported.In more recent times, an asteroid exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013, shattering windows for miles and injuring more than 1,000 people.Scientists have suggested that the Earth is vulnerable to many more Chelyabinsk-size space rocks. In research published in 2013 by the journal Nature, they estimated that such strikes could occur as often as every decade or two instead of an average of once every 100 to 200 years as previously thought.Predictions of a catastrophic crash by a celestial object surface with some regularity. In September 2015, the last eclipse of the year fueled imaginative speculation on the internet that a giant asteroid would hit Earth.In a statement debunking the idea, NASA noted that similar forecasts were made in January and March of that year that two asteroids were on dangerous paths toward Earth.The agency noted that the asteroids flew by Earth without incident just as NASA said they would. | science |
Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesFeb. 8, 2014SOCHI, Russia From a distance, it looks like a fluorescent oil slick, or a painting by a guy on a mood-lifting tab of acid, or an accident involving every fruit flavor of Dunkin Donuts Coolattas.But visitors here need not settle for a distant look, because variations of this colorful, quilted pattern are everywhere here on buses, vans, cars, venues, banners, doors, walls, street signs and refrigerators, not to mention the Aeroflot planes that land all day. A bright, yellowish version is splashed on the uniforms of most of the 45,000 volunteers. Russias president, Vladimir V. Putin, might have built the Sochi Olympics, but Mikhail Kusnirovich, the 47-year-old-owner of Bosco di Ciliegi, Russias premier sportswear company, dressed them up and gave them their aesthetic. He even dressed Putin, who dropped by Boscos distribution center in the Olympic Park soon after mass fittings for volunteers began in late December. He took a large, Kusnirovich said one recent afternoon, sitting in a restaurant.Really? He looks more like a medium.He is a medium, Kusnirovich deadpanned, but he took a large.This is the biggest moment in Boscos 23-year history, and it began with Fridays opening ceremony, when the last of more than 18,000 torchbearers, all of whom wore Bosco outfits, officially opened the Games. The company is opening more than 30 stores here, and with four teams wearing Bosco uniforms Russia, Spain, Serbia and Ukraine visitors and television viewers will get the most intense eyeful of the companys handiwork to date.Sunglasses are recommended. In the past, reviews of Boscos dazzlingly vivid apparel and sneakers have ranged from admiring to bemused to scathing. Kusnirovich, who was among the first wave of Russian entrepreneurs in the early 1990s, does not do bland, and he is apparently no fan of earth tones. The motto of the companys sportswear division is beauty of success, but go loud or go home would work, too. For years, Russians wore dark colors, grays and blacks, he said in halting English, taking a break from one of countless meetings as the opening ceremony neared. It was time to make a break from the past. He also decided that his offerings should look different from anything else on the market, and in that, he has succeeded. Most of the volunteers in Sochi are clad in what one would expect if Willy Wonka hired a ski patrol. Many seem pleased with what amounts to a free winter-wear makeover. Others say they get up in the morning, look at themselves in the mirror and utter whatever is Russian for Oh, come on.ImageCredit...Mikhail Metzel/Associated PressI dont like it much, said a young male volunteer, standing with a clipboard outside the media center. He reached into his Bosco backpack and said, This is what I usually wear, pulling out a plain brown jacket. When the Games are over, he plans to pack away the Bosco parka somewhere as a souvenir.The colors on the volunteers are so florid that there has been speculation that the design is a rebuke to the law Putin signed last year banning distribution of gay propaganda to children. But that has nothing to do with it, said Igor Kazakov, Boscos design director, who collaborated with Kusnirovich on the pattern. Kazakov said the process had started two years ago and had taken months of tinkering on a computer.Up close, one can see what they have done: put a modern gloss on what are actually dozens and dozens of spliced-together folk designs indigenous to different parts of Russia. The design is intended as a symbol of national unity, a nod to the idea that the Games are for all citizens of Russia. That message, though, could be buried in what is perhaps Boscos gaudiest confection to date.The Olympics is something highly emotional, Kazakov said Wednesday. Our idea is that this kind of coloring may be too bright for ordinary life, but for now its very correct and looks organic, and when you arrive and see all these volunteers, its very positive. This is why its rainbow style.The pattern concept originated with Kusnirovich, who, by outward appearance, is the worlds most unlikely sportswear mogul. He is shaped like a man who has not broken a sweat in a while, with a belly that brings Buddha to mind. He has a trimmed gray beard, black curly hair and a lets-wrap-this-up look in his eye, at least during a recent interview. That is understandable, given the number of projects he is juggling. He manages to convey a wry wit and some warmth as he talks. But he displays little interest in discussing his beginnings or his success, ascribing it all, offhandedly, to chance. But no one in Russia gets rich without a story. He pleaded modesty, saying, One day youre successful; the next day, maybe not.It took five attempts to persuade Kusnirovich to recount his origins, and a nudge from his 20-year old son, Ilya, who sat across the table.He started off working with poisons, the younger Kusnirovich said.Pesticides, his father corrected.He was raised in Moscow, earned a degree in chemical engineering from the Moscow D. Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology in 1989, and was working on pesticides in his mid-20s. In his spare time, he indulged a passion for theater, directing plays that were performed in the citys famed Gorky Park. (Among the productions was Chekhovs The Cherry Orchard, which loosely translates in Italian to Bosco di Ciliegi.) When the management of the park decided to add amusement rides, Kusnirovich and several fellow Mendeleev Institute graduates were given the job of finding and helping import the equipment.They found what they needed in Bologna, Italy, and when other businessmen in that city learned of men who could chaperone their goods into a market as closed and confounding as Russias, they wanted to talk. Bologna and the surrounding area are home to some of the worlds most storied clothing designers, so many of these talkers worked for fashion houses and wanted a partner behind the newly razed Iron Curtain.Eventually, Kusnirovich signed deals with Armani, Etro, Gucci and other luxury brands. The work, he said, was arduous early on, because the most basic infrastructure was not yet in place. I would make a phone call to an operator, and I would say I want to call this number in Italy, and she would say, O.K., please wait, Kusnirovich said. Then I would sit by the phone, for three, four hours. Then she would call back when she was able to put the call through.For years, the core of Boscos business was licensing agreements to sell the clothing of foreign designers, in stores that Bosco opened, staffed and managed. A class of nouveau riche was just emerging in Russia, and Kusnirovich knew how to pamper it. The St. Petersburg Times described a fleet of multicolored Audis that ferried customers between Bosco-run boutiques, free of charge.Kusnirovich, who owns a majority stake in his privately held company, has since turned Bosco into a lifestyle brand. There are Bosco lines of perfumes, cosmetics and clothing, as well as shoe stores, restaurants, a beauty salon and even a dental clinic, called Bosco Clinica. The company also owns a majority stake in GUM, a famed and immense Moscow department store across the street from the Kremlin in Red Square. And there are 80 Bosco stores across the country.The companys venture into sports apparel began in 2001, making its debut with the Russian Olympic team at the 2002 Salt Lake Games.Kusnirovichs designs were never intended to blend in. The Russian teams look in Athens in 2004 was criticized as Stalinesque. (This is standard, said Kazakov, the design director. The first time people see something new, the reaction is negative.) In London in 2012, the Spanish delegation quickly discovered that its Bosco-furnished uniforms made it a target for ridicule. ImageCredit...Grigory Dukor/ReutersSpanish Games team laughing stock after Bosco provide garish uniforms, read a headline in The Telegraph. Some of the Spanish athletes grumbled on Twitter; others posted online photographs of themselves wincing in outfits that the website Jezebel said look like someone barfed on a McDonalds uniform. The Spanish tennis player Carlos Moy wrote that he was happy that he had retired, and said of a still active, Olympics-bound friend, Hell never have worn anything so ugly in his life.Kusnirovich himself seemed as hellbent on getting noticed as on his garments. At the Turin Games in 2006, when some Russian athletes were griping about the fit and feel of their clothing, the president of the countrys Olympic committee, Leonid Tyagachev, objected to Kusnirovichs habit of whisking medal winners away from waiting journalists and straight to the Russian House, party central for the team. Hence this memorable headline in Pravda: Russias Olympic sponsor makes athletes booze and wear uncomfortable clothes.I have spoken to Mr. Kusnirovich, Tyagachev was quoted saying at the time, and asked him to stop troubling the athletes.Since then, Kusnirovich has firmed up his role as his countrys go-to Olympic clothier, and Sochi is sure to turn the brand into the look of Russian sportswear in the eyes of the world. For these Games, he and his team faced logistics challenges that included construction of a 32,000-square-foot store on the Olympic grounds. On Thursday, the place was abuzz; there were dozens of people in motion, moving unopened boxes, setting up shelves and mannequins. Only the vaguest contours of a cash register section were evident.We have to be ready in two days, Kazakov said. We will be ready in two days, he said, correcting himself.He then offered a tour of the distribution center, about a 10-minute walk away, in a hulking, modern building beside what is supposed to become a Formula One racetrack later this year. The place has been outfitting volunteers at a rate of 1,000 a day since Dec. 27. It is basically a human costuming factory, with a room for trying on clothing, another for trying on shoes, another for picking up the pieces that have been selected, and a final room where volunteers sign a document that describes what they have been given. The guard checks it on the way out, Kazakov said at the exit, and then you work.Would Bosco ever attempt to pitch itself to the United States? Kusnirovich has considered the question, but he knows that no Russian clothing maker has every grown beyond niche status in the United States. And, he says, the American market is crowded, and he has other countries higher up on his expansion list. Like Britain, which is home to a lot of Russians.If he ever wanted a beachhead in the United States, he might need to tone down the palette a bit. Is he willing to do that?When Coca-Cola came to Russia, did it change its flavor? he said dryly. I am what I am. | Sports |
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/sports/ncaabasketball/harris-leads-no-13-michigan-state-over-purdue.htmlSports BriefingFeb. 20, 2014Gary Harris scored 25 points, Adreian Payne added 23 and No. 13 Michigan State converted a school-record 17 3-pointers in a 94-79 victory over Purdue in West Lafayette, Ind., on Thursday night. Harris and Payne combined to make 10 3-pointers for the Spartans (22-5, 11-3 Big Ten), who made 13 3-pointers in the first half.Kendall Stephens had 19 points and Ronnie Johnson added 17 for the Boilermakers (15-11, 5-8). Michael Dixon scored 15 points off the bench to lead a balanced scoring attack as No. 22 Memphis (20-6, 9-4 American Athletic Conference) defeated host Rutgers (10-17, 4-10), 64-59. Kadeem Jack led the host Scarlet Knights with 22 points. Tricia Liston scored 24 points and No. 7 Duke held on to beat No. 14 North Carolina State, 83-70, in Durham, N.C. Haley Peters scored 5 of her 13 for the Blue Devils (24-3, 11-2 Atlantic Coast Conference) after the Wolfpack trimmed their 24-point lead to 4. Stephanie Mavunga had 17 points and 10 rebounds, and No. 11 North Carolina opened the second half with a 24-7 run and beat host Virginia, 80-74. Allisha Gray scored 18 points to lead the Tar Heels (21-6, 9-4 A.C.C.). It was North Carolinas fourth consecutive victory, and its 18th in the last 19 meetings with Virginia. | Sports |
Officer Howard Liebengood had been with the Capitol Police since 2005 and assigned to protect the Senate. The cause of his death was not provided.Credit...Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty ImagesJan. 10, 2021WASHINGTON Four days after a violent mob stormed the Capitol, overrunning its police force, an officer who was assigned to protect the Senate during the siege died off duty, the Capitol Police announced on Sunday.The Capitol Police union said that Officer Howard Liebengood, a 15-year veteran of the force, was among the officers who responded to the rioting at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, when insurrectionists incited by President Trump attacked the seat of American government.We extend our deepest sympathies to Officer Liebengoods family, and we mourn the death of a friend and colleague who worked alongside us to protect the lives of the members of Congress, their staff and all who serve at the U.S. Capitol, the statement from the union said.Officer Liebengood, 51, had been a Capitol Police officer since 2005 and was assigned to the agencys Senate division. His father, who shared his name, served as the sergeant-at-arms, the chief security official, of the Senate from 1981 to 1983. Officer Liebengood is the second Capitol Police officer to die in the aftermath of the riot.In a statement on Sunday, the Capitol Police said only that Officer Liebengoods death took place off duty, but did not provide the cause or answer further questions.His family also declined to comment, releasing a statement through their lawyer, Barry J. Pollack: Mr. Liebengoods family members wish to grieve privately as they mourn the sudden and heartbreaking loss of Howard Liebengood. He will be sorely missed.We are reeling from the death of Officer Liebengood, said Gus Papathanasiou, the chairman of the union. Every Capitol Police officer puts the security of others before their own safety, and Officer Liebengood was an example of the selfless service that is the hallmark of U.S.C.P. This is a tragic day.The news rocked the force days after another officer, Brian D. Sicknick, died on Thursday of injuries he sustained when he engaged with the mob that attacked the Capitol. At least four civilians have died in connection with the siege.Lawmakers have demanded investigations and accountability based on arguably the most significant security failure in decades. The chief of the Capitol Police, as well as the sergeants-at-arms of both the House and the Senate, have been fired or resigned.The U.S. Capitol Police just announced the tragic death of Officer Howard Liebengood for whom I mourn, Representative Dean Phillips, Democrat of Minnesota, wrote on Twitter on Sunday. Our officers need more than gratitude. They need authentic, capable leadership and meaningful support, and I call on my colleagues to join me demanding it immediately.Speaker Nancy Pelosi also offered condolences in a statement that called Officer Liebengood a patriot who dedicated his life to defending the Capitol and protecting all who serve, work in and visit this temple of our democracy.His passing is a great tragedy that compounds the horror of this past week, Ms. Pelosi said.Ian Koski, a former aide to Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, posted to Twitter a photo of Officer Liebengood smiling with a handful of cookies in December 2014.He was a real person and a good guy, and this is a terrible tragedy, Mr. Koski wrote. | Politics |
Credit...Ng Han Guan/Associated PressMarch 8, 2017Today marks the third anniversary of one of the biggest aviation mysteries of all time. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to Beijing on March 8, 2014, prompting the largest and costliest search in aviation history.In January, investigators called off the underwater search after no traces of the aircraft were found in a search zone of more than 46,000 square miles in the southern Indian Ocean. | World |
Stars on the Sidelines Famous Football Fanatics!!! 1/28/2018 Deep breaths, people. One more week 'til we can enjoy the unofficial national holiday that is Super Bowl LII ... but until then, enjoy these pics of famous fanatics reppin' their favorite teams on the sidelines. 'SNL' star Jay Pharoah knows how to get them likes on the 'Gram ... posing with a bunch of L.A. Rams cheerleaders. No surprise where you'll find Ludacris and Ciara, but ya might be surprised where the "Pitch Perfect" cast ended up one particular Sunday. Mario Lopez was all smiles in H-Town and rapper Big Sean spread the love flanked by Michigan's marching band. But safe to say all bets are off if Hugh Jackman and NBA star Russell Westbrook ended up in the same room watching their teams duke it out. | Entertainment |
The Alzheimers Association has pushed relentlessly to get broad access to Aduhelm, despite safety risks and uncertain evidence that it helps patients.Credit...Pool photo by Jessica RinaldiApril 6, 2022The day after Medicare officials announced a preliminary decision to sharply limit coverage of the controversial new Alzheimers medication Aduhelm, citing its unclear benefit and serious safety risks, the nations most prominent Alzheimers advocacy organization convened its policy team.The agenda: fighting Medicares proposal.This is our top priority, Robert Egge, the associations chief public policy officer, said at the Jan. 12 session, according to recordings obtained by The New York Times.The next day, the chief executive, Harry Johns, took the mission to the entire staff, saying, You can count on us being relentless.Medicares proposal to pay for Aduhelm only for participants in randomized clinical trials was welcomed by many Alzheimers experts and other doctors. They say it would protect patients and families whose desperation might lead them to try anything, while also rigorously evaluating whether Aduhelm actually works.But the Alzheimers Association and similar groups, along with Aduhelms manufacturer, Biogen, strongly object. They say that Aduhelm, a monoclonal antibody that is the first drug approved for Alzheimers in 18 years, should be covered for anyone with mild Alzheimers-related cognitive decline and that usage decisions should rest with patients and their doctors.The associations campaign makes little mention of Aduhelms safety risks and uncertain benefit, arguing that restricting coverage of an F.D.A.-approved drug is shocking discrimination against everyone with Alzheimers disease.With Medicares final decision due by April 11, the group has organized tweets directed at President Biden, emails directed at Congress, and ads on social media and websites including Univision, Essence and Martha Stewart.It has orchestrated over 400 meetings in which people with Alzheimers, their family members or supporters have implored their members of Congress to press the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (C.M.S.) to broadly cover the drug. In sessions prepping for those meetings, association officials suggested that people say versions of phrases like I have a fatal disease and I want more time with my family and to discuss how access to F.D.A.-approved treatments will impact me and my family.Leaders also encouraged people to submit comments to C.M.S. in ways that werent scripted. It is important that individuals not use our talking points, Beth McMullen, senior director of grassroots advocacy, instructed at one meeting. Employees filing comments cannot submit as a staff member of the Alzheimers Association, she said.The push reflects growing activism by advocacy groups involved in various diseases, which sometimes campaign for therapies despite medical experts concerns about insufficient data. Some are partially funded by pharmaceutical companies. In fiscal year 2021, the Alzheimers Association received $1.6 million from manufacturers developing monoclonal antibodies, including $487,500 from Biogen.ImageCredit...C.J. Gunther/EPA, via ShutterstockOther Alzheimers advocacy groups are also campaigning, including UsAgainstAlzheimers. It has run television ads featuring patients and has written in strident language to C.M.S. that the government would be consigning millions of Americans to inevitable decline and death, with no possibility of appeal.The Alliance for Aging Research led a rally of about 100 people outside the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses C.M.S. (Afterward, about half the alliances scientific advisory board quit in opposition to the groups position.)Medicares coverage proposal came after Aduhelm, an expensive monthly infusion that also has the scientific name aducanumab, was approved in June by the Food and Drug Administration despite contradictory scientific results. Participants in one clinical trial appeared to experience slight slowing of cognitive decline, while patients in a nearly identical trial didnt appear to benefit at all. About 40 percent of patients on the dosage later approved experienced brain swelling or brain bleeding, often mild, but sometimes serious. Both a council of senior F.D.A. officials and the agencys independent advisory committee had said there wasnt enough evidence for approval. Questions about the approval, and whether the F.D.A. worked too closely with Biogen, have prompted investigations by congressional committees, the Health and Human Services departments inspector general, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Major medical centers, including the Cleveland Clinic, have declined to offer Aduhelm.After C.M.S. announced its proposal, Dr. Lee Fleisher, the agencys chief medical officer, said, Our foremost goal is to protect beneficiaries from potential harm from an intervention without known benefits in the Medicare population.The proposal has attracted extraordinary interest, with C.M.S. receiving 9,957 comments, some organized by advocacy groups on both sides of the debate.The Alzheimers Association, with revenue of about $400 million, is highly influential in the Alzheimers field: It runs an international conference, provides research grants and publishes a journal.In recordings of the staff meeting and two prep sessions, association officials didnt mention Aduhelms safety risks.In an interview, Mr. Johns, the chief executive, said, We take the safety concerns seriously, adding, The risks are real, but theyre not worse than treatments that are covered by Medicare today. He proposed that patients enroll in a registry where negative effects could be reported. But many experts say that wouldnt sufficiently evaluate the drug. At the staff meeting, Maria Carrillo, the associations chief science officer, addressed issues of whether Aduhelm works by saying, One of the questions that you may be asked, or maybe youre asking yourself is: Is the scientific evidence sufficient to conclude that Aduhelm and similar monoclonal antibodies improve health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries? The answer, she said, was yes.While some patients enthusiastically back the associations efforts, its stance troubles some longtime supporters of the organization, including Dr. Daniel Gibbs, a retired neurologist in Portland, Ore., with early-stage Alzheimers. ImageCredit...Amanda Lucier for The New York TimesHe participated in an aducanumab trial, experiencing brain swelling and bleeding that required treatment in an intensive care unit. I want aducanumab to be successful, and I really think that it might be useful, he said. However, he added, he considers Medicares proposed restrictions appropriate.He called the Alzheimers Association campaign shocking and irresponsible and said hell stop donating to the organization, except for his local chapter. The vast majority of experts in Alzheimers are not on the side of the Alzheimers Association, he said.Several members of the associations scientific and medical advisory group said they had concluded the drug shouldnt yet be approved. Still, the association pushed for approval.The F.D.A. itself acknowledged the unclear benefit when it greenlighted Aduhelm under accelerated approval, which allows authorization of unproven drugs for serious diseases with few treatments, if the drug affects a biological mechanism in a way considered reasonably likely to predict clinical benefit.The agencys justification was that Aduhelm targets a protein, amyloid, that forms plaques in the brains of Alzheimers patients. But many Alzheimers experts say that years of data have not shown that reducing amyloid can slow cognitive decline.In the association staff meeting, Dr. Carrillo described experts who criticized Aduhelms approval as naysayers who are mainly anti-amyloid researchers, in conflict, in my view.Several scientists critical of Aduhelms approval support the idea that targeting amyloid might help patients; they simply found Aduhelms results unconvincing.Mr. Egge, the chief public policy officer, did say at one meeting: Its not certain that this first treatment will work, certainly, for everybody, but it could. He said that its common to have first treatments making marginal differences but that later drugs often work better. Mr. Johns said the association and its lobbying affiliate, the Alzheimers Impact Movement, have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the campaign.At the staff meeting, Mr. Johns addressed another issue: Of course, youll hear people claim that were doing this because we receive some funding from the pharmaceutical industry or these companies.He said corporate contributions are very small, less than 1 percent of our total revenue, adding, We would never be affected by any kind of fund-raising.One attendee asked: Since the amount of funding we receive from biotech companies is so low, why not refuse to take it and take away the appearance of possible conflicts of interest?Mr. Johns replied, Weve contemplated this many times, but concluded it would have unintended consequences, like preventing the organization from accepting corporate matching contributions for participants in association fund-raising walks who happened to work at pharmaceutical companies.In the interview, Mr. Johns echoed these explanations. Asked if association officials had communicated with Biogen since Medicares proposal, he said, I think probably some of our folks have had a conversation or more along the way and that Biogens staff occasionally pass along a piece of information, but I can tell you that we just dont coordinate with them.In the recordings, association officials told advocates that their annual meetings with local members of Congress would involve different asks than usual: They should request that lawmakers give a floor speech, write to C.M.S., or post on social media to urge Medicare to broadly cover Aduhelm and any other F.D.A.-approved Alzheimers treatment.One official, Jennifer Pollack, suggested that advocates should give congressional staff a leave-behind that included a sample letter, and social media posts drafted by the association and sample talking points for a floor speech.Kate Johnson, another official, told advocates: If you do not know the answer to a question, that is totally OK. In that case, please always revert to our safest phrase, which, she said, was: Im not sure, but I can pass that question on to a staffer at the Alzheimers Association who can provide some more information.She also urged advocates to take photos or screenshots of the congressional meetings to post on social media, tagging the lawmaker to show were not going to give up on the issues that were passionate about.Christopher Masak, director of advocacy, role-played being an Alzheimers patients son meeting with a lawmaker.My mom is living with a fatal disease, and the bottom line is, I want more time, his character said, adding, Thinking of people like my mom who cant access this medication, it just, it breaks my heart.Medicare officials said that limiting coverage to clinical trial participants is especially important because Aduhelm is intended for people with early mild disease, who could potentially be sacrificing years of remaining function and quality of life if a drugs harms outweigh any benefit.Mr. Johns said he understood the view that risk could be better tolerated later in the disease but said that the milder early period is the time many people most want to try to extend. C.M.S. officials also said Aduhelm data isnt sufficiently representative because most trial participants were white, while Blacks and Latinos have greater Alzheimers risk. So, Medicares proposal requires that new clinical trials reflect racial and ethnic diversity.Association officials said Medicares proposal could have the opposite effect because people in underserved communities might have less access to clinical trial sites.A few issues mentioned by advocacy groups have also been raised by those who dont oppose limiting coverage for Aduhelm. One is that, as currently worded, Medicares decision would apply to all monoclonal antibodies for Alzheimers, several of which are in late-stage trials and may soon be considered for F.D.A. approval.It is essentially denying access to all current and future F.D.A.-approved treatments targeting amyloid in those living with Alzheimers disease, Ms. Pollack said in one recording.The American Academy of Neurology wrote to C.M.S. calling the proposal to cover only patients in clinical trials prudently designed to investigate the safety and effectiveness, but asked that it be limited only to Aduhelm. In a statement, a C.M.S. spokeswoman, Beth Lynk, said in February that coverage criteria could be re-evaluated for subsequent monoclonal antibodies. C.M.S. intends to be nimble and respond to new evidence as it is made available especially related to the clinical benefit of future therapeutics, she said.Mr. Johns, who said that he recently attended three meetings with C.M.S. officials, including one with the agencys administrator, indicated in the interview that the association wouldnt be satisfied if Medicares restrictions applied only to Aduhelm, saying, We absolutely believe there is sufficient evidence to provide coverage for the first approved treatment.Advocacy groups efforts have gotten some lawmakers attention. Recently, a bipartisan group of 40 House members wrote asking C.M.S. to provide broad coverage.Earlier, 78 House Republicans sent a letter criticizing C.M.S.s proposal, quoting the Alzheimers Association and UsAgainstAlzheimers. Both advocacy groups were described on Senator Susan Collinss website as supporting a letter she and another Republican, Senator Shelley Moore Capito, wrote.Some lawmakers, including Democrats, have tweeted a version of the associations language.But other lawmakers praised Medicares proposal, including Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney and Frank Pallone, Democrats who chair committees investigating the F.D.A.s approval of Aduhelm.Mr. Johns said he didnt know of any lawmakers who had switched from supporting to opposing Medicares proposal. But he said the associations congressional meetings have had positive outcomes, even for people who might still have a different opinion. There is at least a different level of understanding.He declined to provide the number of tweets, letters or other measures of the campaigns reach, saying: There are those who are working against access. We are not inclined to share details of our tactical approaches with them. Our activities will be measured by outcomes that grant those with Alzheimers disease access to current and future F.D.A.-approved treatments without unnecessary barriers. | Health |
Credit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesMr. Stewart, a Minnesota transplant who has defended the Confederacy and praised white nationalists, has seized opportunities to gain media attention, especially with harsh remarks about immigrants.Corey Stewart, the Republican candidate for Senate in Virginia, has grown emboldened by President Trumps success and is eager to test his style of campaigning.Credit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesJune 17, 2018HAYMARKET, Va. Speaking to a racially mixed audience in August 2016, Corey Stewart, the far-right provocateur who won the Republican Senate nomination in Virginia last week, hailed the renaming of a middle school to honor a local black philanthropist instead of a former governor with segregationist roots.As weve become safer, as we have become more educated, as we have become more prosperous, Prince William County has also become more diverse, Mr. Stewart said enthusiastically about this booming Northern Virginia jurisdiction he leads.But six months later, he was singing a notably different and harsher tune.Mr. Stewart stood beside the controversial statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, and raised his voice to denounce protesters calling for the monuments removal. They have no respect for our heritage, he said, calling the Confederate general a great American.Mr. Stewart himself was a Minnesota transplant, who grew up in Duluth and went to law school in St. Paul. But his defense of the Confederacy, which was a central theme in his 2017 run for governor, and his invocation of diversity, which drew applause on his home turf, illustrate a blunt approach to racial issues that mimics President Trumps. Both men have praised white nationalists in the past while talking about race to suit their purposes Mr. Trump often takes credit for low black unemployment and have especially used attacks on immigrants to get attention and stand out among more conventional politicians.Interviews with more than two dozen Virginians present a portrait of Mr. Stewart as a conservative politician-on-the-make turned Trumpian agitator thirsty for cable television bookings. His evolution is a revealing case study about the incentives for Republicans in the Trump era, but also the risks they run: Longtime colleagues described Mr. Stewart as a brazenly cynical politician who could drag down the party as he tests whether a campaign of attacks on immigrants, schoolyard taunts and made-for-media bombast can prove effective in a state race.[Read more about Corey Stewart, Republicans and the fringe right.]I have given up trying to figure out what part of Corey Stewarts statements represent his core beliefs and what represents the things he talks about to get publicity, said Martin E. Nohe, a fellow Republican on the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, where Mr. Stewart serves as chairman and Mr. Nohe is vice chairman.Frank J. Principi, a Democrat on the county board, said Mr. Stewart had told him that he saw himself in the White House one day and wanted to use statewide election in Virginia to get there. He is a political opportunist, Mr. Principi said. His rhetoric is over the top in order to attract that media attention.ImageCredit...Ryan M. Kelly/The Daily ProgressMr. Stewart, in an interview Friday, rejected these colleagues descriptions of him. Its my job to represent the concerns and address the concerns my constituents have, and those concerns change over time, he said.But he did admit that much of his message is designed to outrage to win attention in the news media and to overcome a lack of money in the bank.I am deliberately edgy, Im not going to deny that, he said. To win a successful campaign against an opponent that has a lot more name recognition and a lot more money, I have to be edgy. (Asked if he indeed saw himself in the White House someday, he said: Ill be happy with Senate. And we have a great president.)Mr. Stewart looks unlikely to defeat Senator Tim Kaine, who has more than $10 million on hand and is popular in Virginia. But he could impair the Republican ticket and brand he has vowed to kick Tim Kaines teeth in in his determination to pursue a bomb-throwing strategy in a state that has rapidly shifted from reliably red to safely blue because of the very demographic shifts he outlined in 2016 at what had been Mills E. Godwin Middle School.[For more coverage of race, sign up here to have our Race/Related newsletter delivered weekly to your inbox.]Mr. Stewart, 49, has long eyed higher office. Im an ambitious fellow, Ill be frank about that, he said in 2011, when he was considering an earlier Senate race. And as he pursued those ambitions, he has become a very different kind of politician than when he first ran for local office: an immigrants husband who has bashed undocumented immigrants and embraced white nationalists; a Midwesterner who attended Confederate flag-bedecked balls and defended the controversial rebel statues in his adopted state; and an aspiring politician who has turned on his partys leaders, deeming them flaccid and unable to please their wives.While Mr. Stewarts nomination for Senate was his third try for statewide office in five years he ran for lieutenant governor in 2013 he has found more success in local politics. He has repeatedly won election as a county supervisor on issues like promoting development and building ball fields. But his post in Prince William is also where he discovered the potency of racial politics.Once a sparsely populated enclave and political backwater, Prince William County 30 miles southwest of Washington has grown at a torrid pace in recent decades as families in search of good schools and a front yard pushed into the exurbs.It is now Virginias second-largest jurisdiction, with 463,000 residents, including many who are foreign-born. In fact, Prince William is a majority-minority county, just shy of a quarter African-American, a quarter Hispanic and nearly 10 percent Asian.Mr. Stewart was first elected chairman of the county board in 2006, and he quickly pounced on the illegal immigration issue, as the population boom brought an influx of Hispanics. He led an effort on the board to empower the police to check the immigration status of anyone they had cause to believe was in the country illegally. The crackdown drew immense local and even national media coverage.Corey found his lightning in a bottle, Mr. Nohe said. It got him a level of attention he could not have imagined from outside our county.VideotranscripttranscriptCorey Stewarts Controversial PastThe conservative secured the Republican nomination in Virginia and will now try to unseat Senator Tim Kaine. But Mr. Stewarts past associations with a white nationalist and an anti-Semite are likely to shadow the race.Lock her up. Lock her up. That might just happen, by the way. I am running to disrupt the United States Senate in Washington, D.C. I am running because Virginia needs a fighter. I cant tell you how much I was inspired by you. Because over my dead body, when I am Governor of Virginia, are we ever going to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson. In Prince William County, Stewart took 7,500 criminal illegal aliens off our streets.The conservative secured the Republican nomination in Virginia and will now try to unseat Senator Tim Kaine. But Mr. Stewarts past associations with a white nationalist and an anti-Semite are likely to shadow the race.CreditCredit...Tom Brenner/The New York TimesMr. Stewarts zeal for the media spotlight beginning with immigration and continuing with his hyperbolic comments about the Confederacy prompts eye-rolling among Prince William Republicans, who chuckle over what they called election year Corey.But not everyone is amused. Last year, Mr. Stewart used an alt-right slur, cuckservative, to suggest that an opponent in the Republican governors primary had failed to put the white race first.When he gives his flaming speeches, to him its all a big joke, said Willie Deutsch, a Republican on the Prince William County School Board, recalling the reference. To me, that makes it worse.After losing the nomination for lieutenant governor in 2013, Mr. Stewart seized an opportunity to become the chairman of Mr. Trumps presidential campaign in Virginia in 2015.The role enabled him to be politically active across the state, and when Mr. Trump captured the partys nomination, Mr. Stewart was well positioned as one of the few elected officials to side with the anti-establishment nominee early in the race.ImageCredit...Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressBut Mr. Stewart clashed with other Trump officials, and his tenure came to a humiliating end less than a month before the election when he showed up at the Republican National Committees headquarters to protest what he said was the partys insufficient support for nominee.Republican and Trump campaign officials warned him against it, multiple Republicans recalled, but he appeared anyway wielding a hand-held microphone that resembled a CB radio and rallied about a dozen activists before nearly as many reporters and photographers.That was all built around building his persona, said Chris LaCivita, a longtime Republican strategist who was advising the committee at the time.It was also the last straw for many in Mr. Trumps orbit who had grown tired of Mr. Stewarts quest for headlines: He was immediately fired from the campaign, and to this day a number of Republicans jostle for credit over who made the decision to throw him overboard.He is an egomaniacal, narcissistic buffoon, said Michael Rubino, a top Trump adviser in Virginia who is close to Corey Lewandowski, the presidents former campaign manager. The MAGA agenda is but a vehicle for him to continue his years-old self-aggrandizement campaign.But Mr. Stewart was untroubled by his termination and Mr. Trumps loss in Virginia, the only Southern state Hillary Clinton won, and immediately turned to a run for governor. And much as he did with immigration after being elected to the county board, he quickly seized on another racially charged issue.Mr. Stewarts embrace of the Confederacy reached an apogee in his 2017 campaign. He showed up to an Old South ball in Danville, Va., and, surrounded by men in re-enactment regalia and women in hoop skirts, declared the Confederate flag a symbol of our heritage, not of hate. And he appeared with the white nationalist Jason Kessler, who went on to organize the torch-led protests in Charlottesville that turned deadly.His stance troubles some people back in Prince William. Outside a Food Lion in Haymarket, Charles Dubissette, 42, recalled with distaste a video of the ball with Mr. Stewart expressing pride in the Confederate flag, which played on the news this week after his primary victory.Hes trying to pander to his perceived constituents, but the dynamics of all that are changing, said Mr. Dubissette, who sells real estate. Prince William County is not what it used to be. He ought to take that into consideration if he plans on succeeding.After losing the governors race, Mr. Stewart almost immediately began running for the Senate. In December, he showed up in Montgomery, Ala., at the election night party for Roy S. Moore, the Republican Senate candidate there who was accused of making sexual advances to underage girls. Mr. Stewart stood with reporters in the back of a thronged room and held an impromptu news conference for those who recognized him.ImageCredit...Tom Brenner/The New York TimesIn this campaign, Mr. Stewart has only about $160,000 on hand, and Senate Republicans indicated last week that they were keeping him at arms length. Mr. Trumps advisers are also wary of him, in part because of his stunt at the R.N.C. but also because they want the president to be seen with candidates likely to win.But what alarms some Republicans in Virginia where the party has not won statewide in nearly a decade is what Mr. Stewart may mean for some of their House candidates. Already, the state party is planning to set up federal fund-raising accounts that will let donors give to the endangered House lawmakers and not to Mr. Stewart, according to a Republican familiar with the planning.Yet his inability to raise money may only encourage him to amplify his message to capture in media attention what he cannot purchase in advertising, some Republicans say.He knows how this works, said J. Tucker Martin, a Republican strategist here. Hell say something provocative, press will have a field day with it, rinse and repeat.If it all sounds familiar, Mr. Stewart says he intends to keep up the Trumpian embrace.I ran on fighting to support the president, and thats exactly what Im going to do in the general, he said. I will be tying myself very, very closely to the president and his success. | Politics |
On PoliticsJan. 7, 2021ImageCredit...Where things standNot since the War of 1812, when British forces set fire to the Capitol, had the halls of power in Washington been overtaken by violent intruders as they were yesterday.The crowd of hundreds who broke windows and burst their way through the front doors were only the front lines of a mob of thousands, which President Trump himself had encouraged that morning to march en masse to the Capitol, with the goal of disrupting Congresss acceptance of the Electoral College vote. You will never take back our country with weakness, he said.The presidents supporters forced their way past law enforcement officers, entered the Senate chambers and put their feet up, quite literally, on the House speakers desk. Then they eventually filed out, largely without being detained by the police.A person with knowledge of the events told Maggie Haberman that Trump had resisted sending in the National Guard even after the Capitol had been stormed and that it had taken intervention from senior White House officials to get those forces ordered into action.Badly outnumbered, the Capitol Police skirmished with rioters who were overrunning the Capitol but didnt deploy the kinds of aggressive tactics that police forces in cities around the country had used against protesters throughout 2020. Some videos showed officers standing passively by, and the failure of law enforcement personnel to keep the Capitol safe seems likely to be a major point of discussion in the coming days.One woman died after being shot by a police officer inside the Capitol, officials said. Three other people died in what the authorities called medical emergencies. Numerous police officers were reported to have been injured during the fracas yesterday.It was all a bridge too far even for some of the staunchest allies of Trump, who released a one-minute video expressing love for his supporters at the Capitol and only equivocally asking them to back off. Once the Capitol was re-secured and debate resumed hours after the mayhem began, much but certainly not all of the Republican resistance to accepting the election results withered away, and Congress moved forward with certifying Joe Bidens victory.Around 3:40 a.m. Eastern time, Vice President Mike Pence made it official, affirming Biden as the nations 46th president. In a striking break with the president, he opened the proceedings hours earlier with a firm rebuke to the rioters, telling them, You did not win. He ended the brief but forceful speech with an exhortation Lets get back to work and drew an ovation from the Senate.There may have been a whiff of presidential auditioning here whether for 2024 or 24 hours from now. A statement from Trump, issued via surrogates after Twitter and Facebook locked his accounts, promised an orderly transition, but a growing number of civic and business leaders called on members of his cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and declare him unfit for office.That prospect, which appears to remain unlikely, would place Pence in the Oval Office for the final days of the administration.Some prominent Democrats have also called for Trump to be re-impeached immediately, calling it the best way to ensure his removal from office and avoid any further violence before Biden enters the White House.Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted yesterday that she would draw up articles of impeachment. We cant allow him to remain in office, its a matter of preserving our Republic and we need to fulfill our oath, she wrote. A number of other House Democrats expressed their support for the move.And Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the chair of the House Democratic caucus, said in an interview with ABC News that all options should be on the table with regard to removing the president from office.In remarks yesterday afternoon from Wilmington, Del., Biden denounced the violence at the Capitol and called on Trump to condemn it.This is not dissent, he said. It borders on sedition. Calling it an insurrection, Biden demanded that Trump go on national television to address what happened, but his calls fell on deaf ears.The end of the Trump presidency will also be the end of Republican control in the Senate, after Jon Ossoff, one of the Democratic challengers in Georgia, was declared the winner yesterday in his runoff election against David Perdue.Ossoff will join the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who defeated the states other Republican incumbent, Senator Kelly Loeffler, as the first Democratic senators from Georgia in 16 years.They will shift the balance of power significantly in Washington from the right wing toward the center, as Democrats will hold razor-thin control over both houses of Congress.Democrats in the Senate will now be in a position to confirm Bidens appointments, including Merrick Garland, whom Biden will pick as attorney general, people close to his decision said yesterday. For Garland, it may feel like poetic justice if his nomination slides past Mitch McConnell, who denied Garland a place on the Supreme Court in 2016 but as the Republican leader will no longer control the Senates majority.If Trump has driven the Republican Party off a political cliff, most of the momentum is still inside the car: Well over half of rank-and-file Republican voters still think that the election was stolen from him.While the Senates Republican caucus mostly came together to allow Bidens win to be confirmed, some senators logged official objections in the record. And on the House side, well over 100 legislators voted in support of objections that the Democratic majority overruled.While conservative news outlets like Fox News and Newsmax were heavily critical of the rioting at the Capitol, it remains hard to imagine that the coalition Trump has assembled will easily disintegrate or meaningfully change course even after such a traumatic event.The fact remains that a violent protest was able to delay the adoption of the elections legitimate results, and a president who still holds his followers in thrall garnered significant support in refusing to give up power.Photo of the dayImageCredit...Win Mcnamee/Getty ImagesTrump supporters broke into the Senate chambers yesterday.The view from abroad on the U.S. chaos: Some hope, a lot of worry.The worlds democracies, many under increasing strain in recent years, watched yesterday with growing apprehension but not surprise as once-unthinkable political violence erupted in the United States capital.These countries top leaders, The Timess Katrin Bennhold writes in a new article, saw a warning for all the worlds democracies: If this can happen in the United States, it can happen anywhere.The German vice-chancellor, Olaf Scholz, squarely blamed Trump. The peaceful transfer of power is the cornerstone of every democracy, he wrote. A lesson once taught to the world by the USA. It is a disgrace that Donald Trump is undermining it by inciting violence and destruction.Prime Minister Pedro Snchez of Spain tweeted: I trust in the strength of Americas democracy. The new Presidency of @JoeBiden will overcome this time of tension, uniting the American people.Still, many others abroad were more downbeat.The worlds strongmen and dictators must be in euphoric and celebratory mood, wrote Yossi Melman of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The glorified democracy in the world is in shambles like a third world country.And Ana Paula Ordorica, a Mexican journalist who covered the U.S. election in November for Televisa, said: As Mexicans, what is surprising is that for the first time the United States, which has been an example of democracy, is becoming the counterexample of it.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think were missing? Anything you want to see more of? Wed love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. | Politics |
Credit...Mark Kegans for The New York TimesDec. 28, 2015MINNEAPOLIS A nondescript conference room on the 38th floor of Minneapoliss tallest skyscraper bears little resemblance to the brick clubhouse a few blocks away where members of the local elite have gathered for more than a century.But swap out the Oriental rugs and dark wood for a granite table and Aeron-style chairs, and it serves much the same function as the Minneapolis Club once did.Every Friday morning, 14 men and women who oversee some of the biggest companies, philanthropies and other institutions in Minneapolis, St. Paul and the surrounding area gather here over breakfast to quietly shape the regions economic agenda.They form the so-called Working Team of the Itasca Project, a private civic initiative by 60 or so local leaders to further growth and development in the Twin Cities. Even more challenging, they also take on thorny issues that executives elsewhere tend to avoid, like economic disparities and racial discrimination.Think of it as The Establishment 2.0: more diverse than the nearly all-white and male establishment of old, to be sure, but every bit as powerful, and just as invisible when need be.Itasca operates behind the scenes, said Tim Welsh, a senior partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which hosts the weekly breakfasts at its offices in the IDS Center here. We all know each other but we are clearly not recognized as the people of Itasca.Itascas impact is very real, however. And its consensus-oriented approach offers an alternative path at a time when politics nationally and in many state capitols seems hopelessly divided along partisan lines.While Itasca would just as soon stay out of the limelight, the levers of power in the Twin Cities are within easy reach. The guest list for the weekly breakfasts downtown includes the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as local legislators, school superintendents and university officials.So when a proposal to raise the gasoline tax in 2008 to help rebuild roads and transit systems was vetoed by the Republican governor at the time, Tim Pawlenty, phone calls from Itascas business leaders helped persuade enough Republican legislators to cross the aisle and override the veto.More recently, pressure from Itasca helped secure increased funding for the states college and university system. Itasca also spearheaded the creation of a new regional agency to attract companies looking to move or expand, as well as an effort to encourage procurement chiefs at local giants like Target and Xcel Energy to buy more goods and services locally.ImageCredit...Mark Kegans for The New York TimesItascas work is among the reasons that the Twin Cities region has emerged as an economic powerhouse. At 2.9 percent, the metropolitan areas unemployment rate is well below the national level of 5 percent.At the same time, Minnesota has excelled in creating the kinds of higher-paid, knowledge- and skills-based jobs that provide entree into the middle class today. With that in mind, Itasca has drawn interest from leaders in American cities and abroad who would like to emulate its success.That will not be easy. Part of what makes Itasca work is also what has helped Minnesota prosper: a long history of progressive and engaged business leaders, a largely homogeneous population with a low poverty rate and a consensus-driven Midwestern culture where egos are checked at the door, or at least not displayed too openly.Sometimes it doesnt serve anybody to take credit, said Jennifer Ford Reedy, president of the Bush Foundation, a major philanthropy here, and a former McKinsey consultant who advised the Itasca group. The people who need to know what Itasca is doing are the participants. Thats it.In fact, Itasca has no building, budget or full-time staff, other than two McKinsey consultants who coordinate research and logistics for Itasca members.Business establishments, of course, are hardly unique to Minnesota. Most big cities and many smaller towns have chambers of commerce, not to mention economic development offices and the like.What makes Itasca unique, participants say, is a commitment to hard data and McKinsey-style analysis, as well as a willingness to depart from the script that drives many private sector lobbies.Were not just asking for lower taxes and less regulation, said David Mortenson, the current chairman of the Itasca Project. If were taking on education or income disparity as a group of business leaders, we want to be able to break some eggs.Thats different from what happens in most other cities, said Mr. Mortenson, who earlier this year took over M. A. Mortenson, a nationwide construction firm founded by his grandfather.In Seattle, where Mr. Mortenson lived for nine years before moving back to Minneapolis in 2012, most of the big tech companies viewed the city as a convenient location to house some of its workers, he said. They didnt engage unless it affected their business.ImageCredit...Mark Kegans for The New York TimesTech leaders are very philanthropic, he added, but they disconnect it from their business.That has never been a problem here: The Pillsbury family and other members of the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce helped pay for the construction of the railroad to move grain and flour in the 1800s. And the current governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, is a scion of the family that founded the Dayton Dry Goods Company, which grew into a retail giant and more recently morphed into Target Corporation.But by the beginning of the 21st century, that paternalistic, locally minded model of capitalism was fading, said James R. Campbell, a local banker who served in top positions at Norwest Banks and Wells Fargo before retiring in 2002.In 2001, Target rebranded the iconic Daytons store downtown as Marshall Fields, the Chicago chain it had acquired in 1990. (Marshall Fields was later sold to Macys.)Also in 2001, 3M, a pillar of the old business establishment based in St. Paul, brought in an outsider as chief executive for the first time in its 100-year history: W. James McNerney Jr. of General Electric. We were concerned that this flyover land was not organized, said Mr. Campbell, who oversaw the creation of Itasca in 2003 with other local business chiefs along with the leaders of major philanthropies. They took the name from Itasca State Park in northern Minnesota, where business leaders had met annually in the 1950s and 1960s to discuss issues facing the state.Existing groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Minnesota Business Partnership were focused on lower taxes and less regulation, he said.We were not addressing other issues like income disparities, said Mr. Campbell, who served as chairman of Itasca from 2003 to 2008, and helped initiate the Working Team breakfasts on Friday mornings in conjunction with the McKnight Foundation and Mr. Welsh of McKinsey. The chamber didnt want to touch that.Nor was the business community focused on areas that were crucial to long-term economic development, like transportation and infrastructure. What were we going to do about job growth? Mr. Campbell said he wondered at the time. What about marketing ourselves?The question of self-promotion helped inspire the creation of Greater MSP, an economic development agency that has put the region on the radar of corporate site selectors while overcoming Minnesotans traditional reluctance to brag about themselves.A bigger test of Itascas reach and of the willingness of the local establishment to go outside their comfort zone came in 2008, when Governor Pawlenty vetoed a proposed increase in gas and sales taxes to fund $6.6 billion in transportation improvements.ImageCredit...Mark Kegans for The New York TimesA rush-hour bridge collapse over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis the year before had killed 13 people and galvanized worries about aging infrastructure nationwide. But there was fierce opposition to what would be the first gas tax increase in 20 years.At the same time, Governor Pawlenty was eyeing a White House run and had made a no-new-taxes pledge. None of the governors previous vetoes had been overridden, but Itascas members helped move the debate beyond the usual left-right dynamic.Mr. Campbell donned a hard hat and a fluorescent vest and stood with union leaders on the capitol steps to rally support. He and other business executives privately made the case to Republican legislators that traffic jams and long commutes were not good for employees or employers.In the end, six Republican legislators defied the governor, and the veto was overridden by a two-vote margin.I cant overstate the importance of the Itasca Project leadership on the transportation issue, said Chris Coleman, the mayor of St. Paul. Theres no question it changed the trajectory of the debate.While the case for better infrastructure is straightforward, other Itasca initiatives will take much longer to show concrete results. One major focus of the group is income inequality, as well as the high dropout and unemployment rates among minorities.The gap between the refined atmosphere at the McKinsey aerie and the problems in local neighborhoods can be awkward even for people with the best of intentions. In fact, while Itasca leaders talk up the importance of diversity, minorities are conspicuously absent from the Working Team. (They are much better represented within the larger Itasca membership.)Social issues may be less amenable to business-sector solutions than crumbling roads and bridges, but that has not stopped Itasca from pushing for McKinsey-style benchmarks to measure the performance of local public schools.The group is also spearheading a new effort to better equip the states two- and four-year college systems to produce graduates with the skills that todays employers need.The research theyve done on education and hiring has really influenced my agenda, said Betsy Hodges, the mayor of Minneapolis. It puts wind in our sails to know that the business community thinks these issues are important.As might be expected from boosters whose job it is to promote economic growth and talk up the Twin Cities appeal, many Itasca participants express confidence that their project could be replicated elsewhere. Mr. Campbell, though, is less sure.My answer is maybe, he said. Theres a unique willingness to trust each other here. Its kind of in our blood. | Business |
Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York TimesJune 28, 2018WASHINGTON In the past two years, DaQuawn Bruce received news not once, but twice that he had dreamed of since middle school. He had been accepted into two competitive internship programs on Capitol Hill, opportunities that swarms of students vie for every year.But Mr. Bruce, who graduated last month from Carthage College in Wisconsin, had to turn down both of them. The internships were unpaid, and his family in Chicago, which relies solely on his mothers income, could not afford to send him to Washington to work for nothing.By the time I got offers for internships, he said, I wasnt in a place to accept them, no matter how great the opportunities were.Now, in a bid to open Washingtons halls of power to more economically diverse students like Mr. Bruce, the Senate has allocated $5 million to compensate all of its interns. The money approximately $50,000 per Senate office will become available if it is approved by the House, and then only at the start of the next fiscal year, Oct. 1. But the Senate measure is the first widespread organized congressional effort in two decades to ensure such payments.For years in Congress, wealthier students have had far greater access to the perks exclusive to interning on the Hill: a networking gold mine of legislators and lobbyists, and experience like conducting research and compiling briefing materials that makes them more attractive job candidates.Such a system fuels a glaring inequity: Already privileged students are able to access prestigious opportunities that open doors to competitive jobs, leaving their peers who cannot afford to work for free behind.Critics say unpaid internships have also helped lead to a lack of racial diversity in Congress. A 2015 study found that 93 percent of top Senate staff members were white. In 2010, in the House, 82 percent of chiefs of staff and 77 percent of legislative directors were white.In recent years, a number of high-profile class-action lawsuits over unpaid internships at companies such as NBCUniversal have grabbed headlines, with the media company paying out a $6.4 million settlement to compensate students who were not paid for their work. Congress, meanwhile, has been able to avoid paying its interns because the legal framework cited in those cases the Fair Labor Standards Act provides protections for only employees at for-profit organizations. The government and nonprofit organizations are not required to provide paid internships.And Congresss own version of the law, the Congressional Accountability Act, specifically excludes interns from receiving the same benefits, like minimum wage, as government employees.A 2013 study conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that nearly half of all internships nationwide are uncompensated, with government agencies and nonprofits offering a majority of those positions.Advocacy groups are now pushing the House to follow the lead of the Senate, which approved a package of spending legislation on Monday that included the intern pay fund.Interns do good work in our office, and they should be compensated, said Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and a sponsor of the intern pay provision. We need to make sure that every qualified candidate has the opportunity to intern on the Hill regardless of their financial circumstances.The drive by Mr. Van Hollen and the advocacy groups is an attempt to end a well-known and increasingly criticized fact of interning on Capitol Hill: Those who are lucky enough to be offered a competitive congressional internship will most likely lose money in order to accept it.Research conducted by Pay Our Interns, an advocacy group based in Washington, found last year that just over half of Republican senators compensated their interns, while barely a third of their Democratic peers followed suit. Those statistics were bleaker in the House: 8 percent of Republican representatives and 4 percent of Democrats paid their interns.Tracking how much interns are paid can be difficult. While some offices pay per hour, others, like that of Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, offer a stipend. Mr. McConnells office pays approximately $330 a week. But many Capitol Hill offices that offer paid internships or stipends do not disclose on their websites how much applicants can anticipate being paid. The website of Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, for example, states only that a limited number of paid positions are available.Having to pay for housing, food and transportation not to mention a professional wardrobe in a city that is routinely ranked among the top 10 most expensive places to live in the United States can be a deal breaker for students who are unable to work without being paid.Other students, determined not to let the opportunity to work on the Hill slip away, stretch themselves thin, taking out loans and working 70-hour weeks at second jobs to make ends meet.Internships can often be the gateway to working on the Hill, and we need to make that ladder of opportunity available, Mr. Van Hollen said.That opportunity eventually came to Mr. Bruce, the Carthage College graduate, through a scholarship from College to Congress, a nonprofit that provides low-income students with a $10,000 stipend. Thanks to that scholarship, he is now working as a summer intern with Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina.College to Congress was founded in 2016 by Audrey Henson, who experienced firsthand the difficulty of being a low-income student interning on Capitol Hill. In order to accept an internship with Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas, Ms. Henson took out a $6,500 student loan and got a second job working at a bar near the Senate.I didnt see students like me interning in Congress, she said. Most of the people I interned with, their parents were lobbyists or congressmen or journalists.That inspired Ms. Henson to start College to Congress, with a long-term goal of opening up the pipelines to diversity on Capitol Hill. These are the first doors that open, she said. Thats why these internships are so important.Those opportunities have been largely blocked off to low-income students since 1994, when Congress stopped funding a 20-year-old program that allocated to each House members office funds for two-month paid internships. (No such program had existed in the Senate.)For the longest time, its been understood that with Congress and other very selective internships, they wont have to worry about compensating because theyll be flooded with applications, said David Yamada, a professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston who specializes in employment law with a focus on the intern economy.But groups like Pay Our Interns, led by Carlos Vera, a former House intern, say they will continue to push House members to allocate funds to pay interns. Mr. Vera said that he is working with Representative Betty McCollum, Democrat of Minnesota and a member of the Appropriations Committee, and that he hopes that funding can be approved within the next year.The recent legislation sends a strong message that the Senate is ready to invest in the countrys youth, Mr. Vera said. Now, the goal is all of Congress. | Politics |
Credit...Tom Brenner/The New York TimesJune 13, 2018WASHINGTON President Trump wasnt on the ballot or even stateside for Tuesdays primary elections in Virginia and South Carolina. But he loomed over both states, just as he has in nearly every nominating contest this year, underscoring how the Republican Party has become the party of Trump and that its politicians cross him at their peril.As Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina found out the hard way, in his surprise primary defeat, having a conservative voting record is less important than demonstrating total loyalty to Mr. Trump, who now enjoys higher approval ratings in his own party than any modern president except George W. Bush following the attacks of Sept. 11. And in Virginia, a far-right candidate, Corey Stewart, won the Republican Senate nomination after waging an incendiary campaign and portraying himself as a disciple of Mr. Trump.The presidents transformation of the G.O.P. its policies, its tone, even the fate of its candidates has never been so evident. A party that once championed free trade has now largely turned to protectionism under Mr. Trump. Sermons about inclusivity have been replaced with demagogic attacks on immigrants and black athletes. A trust-but-verify approach to foreign policy has given way to a seat-of-the-pants style in which rogue regimes like North Korea are elevated and democratic allies like Canada are belittled.Mr. Trumps harsh attacks, including describing the news media as the countrys biggest enemy Tuesday, draw muted responses or silence from most Republicans these days. The partys lawmakers have seen what he can do to their campaigns, having witnessed how Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee saw their standing with conservative voters plummet after they tangled with him. Neither is seeking re-election.While Mr. Trump has been reshaping Republican identity for nearly two years starting with his 2016 nomination victory and the hard-line tone and platform he laid out at that summers Republican convention he has never had this much opportunity to wield power over the party as he does now, including over immigration legislation and tariffs in Congress.If you criticize him, youre siding with the media that hates him and youre undermining what hes trying to accomplish, said former Senator Rick Santorum, explaining why Mr. Trump has consolidated support. Trump has done a good job in being a conservative president and as much as Democrats looked past what Bill Clinton said and did, Republicans are looking past what this president says and does.That means Republican lawmakers are going to be further bound to Mr. Trump in the midterm elections, less likely to raise doubts about his impulsive policymaking and, perhaps most consequential for a president facing scrutiny by a special counsel, more inclined to refrain from criticizing his personal conduct and use of executive power.This will have a further chilling effect, said Mr. Flake, adding, If you want to do well in a primary, youve got to act accordingly.In addition to Mr. Flake, Mr. Trump has helped push Mr. Corker into retirement and played a part in Speaker Paul D. Ryan and 39 other House members leaving Congress, the most House Republicans not to seek re-election for at least 90 years.Mr. Sanford had voted for much of Mr. Trumps agenda, but repeatedly lamented what he called the cult of personality gripping the party. His opponent, State Representative Katie Arrington, used those critiques against him to great effect, casting the primary as a loyalty test and defeating Mr. Sanford by four percentage points.A week earlier in Alabama, Representative Martha Roby, who withdrew her support from Mr. Trump in 2016 after the Access Hollywood video was released, faced fierce attacks for her disloyalty and will have to compete in a July runoff because she fell short of winning a majority in the primary.Mr. Sanfords loss also came on the same night that Mr. Stewart, a local Virginia official who has drawn attention for targeting immigrants and defending the Confederacy, claimed the Senate nomination in what was an unmistakable victory for the sort of racially tinged politics that Mr. Trump embraced in 2016.The president exulted over both races Wednesday, crowing about his last-minute help torpedoing Mr. Sanford, a reference to an 11th-hour tweet that called Mr. Sanford nothing but trouble and endorsed Ms. Arrington. And Mr. Trump argued that Mr. Stewart has a major chance of winning in a state that has not elected a statewide Republican in nearly a decade.ImageCredit...Hunter McRae for The New York TimesIt was fitting that such a momentous day of voting took place in Virginia, because it was there four years ago that Representative Eric Cantor, then the House majority leader, was upset in his primary. And just as Mr. Cantors stunning defeat all but extinguished any hope for a comprehensive immigration overhaul, the results Tuesday appear to have snuffed out any room for dissent among G.O.P. lawmakers who rely on the presidents supporters for votes.In Congress, Senate Republicans will probably not challenge Mr. Trump over trade and tariffs, with leaders blocking a vote Mr. Corker is pushing to require congressional approval for tariffs implemented on national security grounds.And on the immigration debate, House Republican leaders repelled an effort by moderate party members to force a vote on bipartisan measures to protect young immigrants because the president opposed them. Instead, the House will vote next week on two tougher measures that the White House is helping write to accommodate Mr. Trump.We are in a strange place, said Mr. Corker, who has alternately been one of Mr. Trumps closest allies and loudest critics. Referring to Republican fealty to Mr. Trump, he added, Its becoming a cultish thing.To Mr. Trumps supporters, though, the fealty to Mr. Trump simply reflects the devotion he now enjoys from the partys grass roots.His base is loyal and support is strong, giving him the leverage to move votes at the ballot box and the legislative chamber, said Brian O. Walsh, who runs the presidents main super PAC. Theres room for negotiation, but obstruction will end careers.Yet what alarms Republicans eyeing a House map in which the most competitive races are in suburban districts that reject Trump-style politics, is that Tuesdays results will induce more candidates to hew closely to the president to avoid angering the party base. Doing so now may be imperative to ensure a robust turnout and retain a stable of volunteers but it also could risk driving away independent voters who are deeply contemptuous of Mr. Trump.There is writing on the wall when it comes to races like Sanfords, but each district is also different, said Representative Tom Rooney of Florida, a Republican who is also retiring. It might not be a good thing to cross the president in South Carolina, but outside Philadelphia, it might not matter.The danger in adopting Mr. Trumps incendiary approach was on vivid display Wednesday, when Senate Republicans refused to embrace Mr. Stewart and the party braced for the havoc he could wreak in some of the heavily suburban Virginia districts where they are defending incumbents.VideotranscripttranscriptCorey Stewarts Controversial PastThe conservative secured the Republican nomination in Virginia and will now try to unseat Senator Tim Kaine. But Mr. Stewarts past associations with a white nationalist and an anti-Semite are likely to shadow the race.Lock her up. Lock her up. That might just happen, by the way. I am running to disrupt the United States Senate in Washington, D.C. I am running because Virginia needs a fighter. I cant tell you how much I was inspired by you. Because over my dead body, when I am Governor of Virginia, are we ever going to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson. In Prince William County, Stewart took 7,500 criminal illegal aliens off our streets.The conservative secured the Republican nomination in Virginia and will now try to unseat Senator Tim Kaine. But Mr. Stewarts past associations with a white nationalist and an anti-Semite are likely to shadow the race.CreditCredit...Tom Brenner/The New York TimesThe national narrative on the Virginia Senate race is that Corey is associated with extreme nativist views, said Marty Nohe, who serves on the Prince William County Board of Supervisors with Mr. Stewart. He added, The job of those Republican nominees just got harder.David Ramadan, a former state lawmaker, said Representative Barbara Comstock of Northern Virginia could encounter the most trouble fending off questions about Mr. Stewart, who will face Senator Tim Kaine this November. Ms. Comstock is already facing difficulty on her right flank. On Tuesday, her hard-line challenger, who embraced Mr. Trump, won more than 39 percent of the vote.The chairman of his board, Mr. Stewart has praised white nationalists and made racially inflammatory comments about intraparty rivals. Earlier this year, he stood outside the state capitol assailing Republican legislators for being flaccid, adding, I feel sorry for their wives.Virginia Republicans, who have not won a statewide race in nearly a decade, give Mr. Stewart little chance of success, but some worry that becoming the Trump party carries long-term political risks. The fear: Moderate voters will either become Democrats or register as independents and cast their ballots for Democrats, denying Republicans the sort of middle-of-the-road voter they need to win in a state with an educated and diverse electorate.The Grand Old Party under Trump is no more, said Mr. Ramadan, bemoaning the Republican reorientation.What principles are we operating on today? he asked. Free trade? Family values when were taking children from their parents? No taxes when we are putting up tariffs? What are the principles of the Republican Party today? Whatever Trump wants to do when he gets up. | Politics |
DealBook|Avon Said to Be in Talks to Sell North American Businesshttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/avon-said-to-be-in-talks-to-sell-north-american-business.htmlDec. 3, 2015Avon Products is in discussions to sell its North American business, where its army of Avon ladies first called, to a tough-nosed private equity firm as part of the cosmetics makers efforts to turn around its fortunes, people with direct knowledge of the matter said on Thursday.The company has been in negotiations with Cerberus Capital Management for the past few months. As part of the discussions, Cerberus is expected to buy a minority stake in Avon and may receive seats on the board, according to these people, who were not authorized to speak publicly.That would make the private equity firm one of the companys biggest shareholders.A deal could be reached before year-end, though one of the people cautioned that negotiations over the complex proposed transaction are continuing and might still fall apart.Should the two sides strike an agreement, it would bring Avon a prominent backer at a time the famed cosmetics maker has sought to revive its business. Known for its door-to-door sales representatives, the company has struggled in an era of e-commerce.Cerberus is perhaps best known for its investments in troubled companies, as well as its willingness to dive into waters few others will. The companys most famous holding is perhaps Remington Outdoor, the gun manufacturer that made the weapons used in the Sandy Hook and the San Bernardino shootings.The private equity firm is no stranger to retailing, having invested in stores like Safeway and Albertsons, the two supermarket chains it eventually merged and took public.Shares of Avon surged 7 percent in late trading on Thursday after The Wall Street Journal reported on the advanced discussions.More than three years ago, Avon turned down a nearly $11 billion takeover bid from a smaller competitor, Coty. Since then, Avons shares have slid some 80 percent, giving it a market value on Thursday of roughly $1.6 billion, as it faced declining volumes and shrinking market share within the beauty industry.Avon has had discussions with a number of potential investors. But it narrowed the discussions to Cerberus over the past several weeks, in part because of the complexity of the deal, according to the people with knowledge of the talks.Avon recently issued a credit agreement with more onerous lending terms, making an outright buyout of the entire company more difficult because potential acquirers would have a harder time borrowing at the necessary rates, according to a note by Stifel from September.Selling Avons North American business, which represented just 14 percent of sales last year and turned no profit, would give the company the opportunity to reinvest that cash in other areas. Rather than spend management time on turning around that business, Avon would be able to focus on its more lucrative markets like Brazil. Those businesses outside North America would continue to be run under the publicly traded Avon.Avon is not in immediate need of capital, holding about $624 million in cash as of Sept. 30, according to S&P Capital IQ. It also has nearly $2.2 billion in long-term debt.Representatives for Cerberus and Avon declined to comment or were not immediately available. | Business |
Health|The C.D.C. will soon loosen indoor mask guidelines, officials say.https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/24/health/the-cdc-will-soon-loosen-indoor-mask-guidelines-officials-say.htmlCredit...Libby March for The New York TimesFeb. 24, 2022The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to loosen its guidelines for when and where Americans should wear masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, allowing most people to go without them in public indoor spaces, according to two federal officials familiar with the matter.The policy is expected to be announced on Friday afternoon, according to an administration official. The Associated Press first reported the change on Thursday.Under the current guidelines, the agency recommends that anyone living in areas with substantial or high transmission of the coronavirus, as defined by case counts, should wear masks in public indoor spaces like gyms, movie theaters and full-capacity houses of worship. That means that people living in 95 percent of the counties in the United States should continue wearing masks indoors. The country is recording an average of about 76,000 new cases per day, a roughly 66 percent drop from two weeks ago.The forthcoming recommendations are expected to hinge on newly defined metrics to determine whether people in a particular geographical area are at high risk from the virus. They will place less emphasis on case counts and give more weight to hospitalizations as a key measure of risk, according to a federal official who is familiar with the plans but was not authorized to speak about them.The guidelines are likely to factor in the capacity of hospitals in a local area as an important indicator of the level of risk. With hospitalizations declining across the nation, that may allow the great majority of Americans to drop their masks. About 60,000 people are hospitalized with Covid nationwide, but those numbers have dropped by about 44 percent in the past two weeks.Most states have already eased rules for mask-wearing, and some, like New Jersey, have announced plans to lift mandates even in schools. Others are poised to end indoor mask mandates in the coming weeks. But an official recommendation from the C.D.C. may hold some sway in districts that have been more cautious.Many businesses have shifted to requiring only proof of vaccinations. But masks are currently required on public transportation, including airplanes. The current mandate is scheduled to remain in force through March 18, and may be extended. Last year, the C.D.C. was sharply criticized for lifting mask restrictions too soon, only to have the Delta variant of the virus surge throughout the nation. This time, however, many public health experts support the easing of mask guidelines.Recent polls have indicated that the publics patience with Covid restrictions is waning. Nearly half of Americans surveyed thought the nation should learn to live with the pandemic and get back to normal, according to a recent Yahoo News/YouGov survey. About 70 percent of Americans believe its time we accept Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives, according to a recent poll by Monmouth University. | Health |
TrilobitesIts the first time a vertebrates braincase has ever been found full of coprolites, scientists say.Credit...Calvert Marine MuseumFeb. 4, 2022Its a dubious distinction in the fossil record: For the first time, a vertebrate has been found with fecal pellets where its brain once was.The fossilized animal was Astroscopus countermani, an extinct fish first described as a separate species in 2011 in Maryland. Also known as a stargazer because its eyes were on top of its head, it was the earliest known member of its family and its genus, which still hunts prey on seafloors all over the world. But approximately 7.5 million to 10.5 million years ago in the Miocene era, scientists suspect this stargazer specimen, which may have been the size of todays trout, died and its braincase might have been infiltrated by polychaetes or another kind of annelid worm. The creatures may have scavenged the dead fishs brain, leaving a profuse amount of excrement in their wake.This, said Stephen J. Godfrey, curator of paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland and an author of the study, was an overachieving worm or worms that burrowed into this little fish!Although the stargazer fossil was not a new find, the authors more recently were able to use improved technology to peer inside both the braincase and the fossilized pellets without destroying either. In a paper published in January in the journal Rivista Italiana di Paleontologia e Stratigrafia, the scientists describe using a spectroscopic device to confirm the calcium and phosphate signatures of coprolites fossilized feces in the fishs braincase.Its remarkable, Dr. Godfrey says, that a fish so small survived fossilization. But its equally remarkable that the tightly-packed coprolites within its braincase were also preserved. It means that no other ancient scavenger for whom fecal pellets would have meant lunch followed behind those worms.ImageCredit...Andrew J. Martinez/Science SourceImageCredit...Calvert Marine MuseumThe Calvert Cliffs where the fossil was found stretch 35 miles along the coast of Maryland. Well-known for its voluminous and diverse fossil content, the site has so far produced fossils of 650 different ancient organisms. They include evidence of creatures burrowing into fossilized remains, shark fossils with shark bite marks on them, shark-bitten coprolites, and whale fossils that indicate they were scavenged. John Nance, a co-author and paleontology collections manager at the Calvert Marine Museum, has found numerous trace fossils at the beaches beside these cliffs, many of which were discussed in the recent paper.But the micro-coprolites described in this paper have proved particularly enticing for study. Dr. Godfrey and his co-authors noted their uniform shape and size. Similar fecal pellets have been found much deeper in the fossil record, including the heads of trilobites more than 450 million year old.We do not know the identity of the producers of these pellets, said Alberto Collareta, a co-author and paleontologist at the University of Pisa, but we know that their behavior has proved quite successful. In other words, the same type and shape of micro-coprolites have been found in similar tight spaces for hundreds of millions of years.Although large fossils get considerable attention in paleontology, fossils of tiny organisms, however, often have much more to say, said Aline Ghilardi, a paleontology professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil who was not involved in the research.She says that smaller creatures and what they leave behind burrows or bodily waste can provide detailed stories about environmental changes over time.Each type of fossil has a different story to tell, and these stories complement each other, helping us to reconstruct a more accurate picture of the past, she said. Paleontologists need all these pieces to reconstruct the history of life. | science |
Economy|Home Prices Still Rising at 5% Annual Pacehttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/case-shiller-housing-prices-consumer-confidence-conference-board.htmlCredit...Robert Galbraith/ReutersDec. 29, 2015Steady job growth, low mortgage rates and tight inventories helped spur rising home prices in October, and a stronger job market lifted consumer confidence in December, separate reports showed on Tuesday.The Standard & Poors/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index rose 5.5 percent in the 12 months ending in October, up from a 5.4 percent pace in September.Home values have climbed at a roughly 5 percent pace during much of 2015, as strong hiring has bolstered a real estate market still recovering from a housing crash that led to a recession eight years ago.Rising demand, however, has not been met with an increase in sales listings, causing prices to rise much faster than inflation or wages this year. This could limit the number of first-time buyers coming into the market next year. Still, many buyers are also benefiting from 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages averaging less than 4 percent, making it cheaper to borrow. Mortgage rates have historically been closer to 6 percent.But the gains in home prices have been uneven. San Francisco, Denver and Portland, Ore., led with reported increases of 10.9 percent over the last year. Prices in Chicago and Washington rose less than 2 percent. The 20-city index remains 11.5 percent below its peak in July 2006, and metro areas such as Cleveland, Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis and Tampa are still significantly below their prerecession highs.The Case-Shiller index covers roughly half of the homes in the United States. The index measures prices compared with those in January 2000 and creates a three-month moving average.In another report, the Conference Boards consumer confidence index rose to 96.5 this month from Novembers revised 92.6. Americans were more optimistic about current conditions and about the future.As 2015 draws to a close, consumers assessment of the current state of the economy remains positive, particularly their assessment of the job market, said Lynn Franco, the groups director of economic indicators.More than two-thirds of consumers said they expected interest rates to rise over the next year, the highest share since August 2013. On Dec. 16, the Federal Reserve raised the short-term interest rate it controls for the first time since 2006.Hiring has been healthy in 2015. Employers added an average of 210,000 jobs a month through November. Unemployment has stayed at a seven-year low of 5 percent for two straight months. | Business |
Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesIntensive efforts to stop the virus have begun on the island, where a quarter of the population will get it within a year, the C.D.C. predicts.Adriana Fontanals, 21, who was 24 weeks pregnant, listened to a talk about the dangers of the Zika virus at a hospital in San Juan, P.R., last month.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesMarch 19, 2016SAN JUAN, P.R. On an inexorable march across the hemisphere, the Zika virus has begun spreading through Puerto Rico, now the United States front line in a looming epidemic.The outbreak is expected to be worse here than anywhere else in the country. The island, a warm, wet paradise veined with gritty poverty, is the ideal environment for the mosquitoes carrying the virus. The landscape is littered with abandoned houses and discarded tires that are perfect breeding grounds for the insects. Some homes and schools lack window screens and air-conditioning, exposing residents to almost constant bites.The economy is in shambles, and thousands of civic workers needed to fight mosquitoes have been laid off. The chemical most often used against the adult pests no longer works, and the one needed to control their larvae has been pulled from the market by regulators.A quarter of the islands 3.5 million people will probably get the Zika virus within a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and eventually 80 percent or more may be infected.Im very concerned, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the C.D.C. director, said in an interview after a recent three-day visit to Puerto Rico. There could be thousands of infections of pregnant women this year.The epidemic is unfolding in one of the countrys most popular vacation destinations, where planes and cruise ships disembark thousands of tourists daily. Anyone could carry the virus back home, seeding a mosquito-borne outbreak or transmitting it sexually.ImageCredit...Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesHealth officials here have begun intensive efforts to stop the virus, which has been linked to abnormally small heads and brain damage in babies born to infected mothers, and to paralysis in adults.Trucks are rumbling through communities, shrouding them in insecticide. Schools are being outfitted with screens to protect children, and hundreds of thousands of old tires have been retrieved and disposed of. Officials have warned scores of island towns that they must clean up the detritus in which standing water collects, incubating new mosquitoes. And the C.D.C. is preparing to spend tens of millions of dollars to blunt the spread of the virus.Still, officials are not optimistic that they will succeed.Im not going to oversell this, said Dr. Johnny Rulln, a former Puerto Rico secretary of health who has come out of retirement to advise the governor. Its not a perfect world. Well do as much as we can.In desperation, officials are focusing much of their effort on protecting one group in particular, pregnant women, instead of trying to shield the entire population.Zika has shaken us to our core, said Dr. Brenda Rivera, chief of the Puerto Rico Health Departments response.A Mystery Disease ArrivesThe epidemic arrived earlier than predicted. The territorys first Zika case was confirmed in December, and the governor declared a health emergency on Feb. 5.Even though there are just 249 confirmed cases 24 of them in pregnant women doctors assume many more are going unreported.ImageCredit...Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesIn the next six months, the environment will get hotter, wetter and buggier, and the number of infections will rise.At the moment, the island is where northeast Brazil was in late 2014, when cases of a mystery disease with a rash, low fever and red eyes began appearing. By spring 2015, cases of Zika infection began overwhelming hospital emergency rooms.A temporary paralysis, called Guillain-Barr syndrome, struck a few patients soon afterward. Babies with misshapen heads and brain damage a defect called microcephaly did not appear until that August.In Puerto Rico, there has thus far been only one case of Guillain-Barr paralysis linked to Zika infection. If microcephaly appears here, it will probably not be until fall, Dr. Rulln said.In some respects, Puerto Rico is lucky. Virtually every doctor and nurse here has been alerted and knows what to look for.The C.D.C. has a permanent lab on the island, and is importing staff and equipment to do 100,000 blood tests a year, five times as many as it can do now. The agency has committed $25 million to the fight and has asked Congress for $225 million more as part of President Obamas $1.8 billion Zika package, now stalled in Congress.The islands emergency response and health care systems are flawed but well organized. Teams usually on call for hurricanes are now being trained to visit homes, empty standing water and spray for mosquitoes.Perhaps most important, the government operates dozens of mother-and-child nutrition clinics, which are used by more than 90 percent of pregnant women here. Clinic staff members are calling pregnant clients, inviting them to attend 20-minute lectures about the Zika virus. About 5,000 women have already attended.Ladies, this years fragrance is DEET, said Ismarie Morales, the head nutritionist at the Women, Infants, and Children clinic in Carolina, a suburb of San Juan, as she held up a green can of repellent at a recent class.We all should smell like this.Her seven listeners reacted with varying degrees of concern. Everywhere on the island there are women so tired of scary messages about mosquitoes, and so used to being bitten, that some do not take the warnings seriously.Monica Rivera, 30, who is in her third trimester of pregnancy, said she used citronella candles at home to ward off mosquitoes. She arrived wearing a small pink top and shorts.I know I should cover up more, she said, but its hot.Family and friends were pitching in to protect her, she said. Her father had cleared her rain gutters, and a neighbor who owned a flea machine had fumigated her house for free.Ashley Vega, 21, who is 10 weeks pregnant, said she was scared. She wore an ankle-length dress and repellent on her sandal-shod feet.I take baths in the stuff, she joked. I put it on in the morning and in the afternoon, and again when I sleep. And my mother is crazy with the bug spray.ImageCredit...Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesOutside class, Ms. Morales, the teacher, who wore a striped minidress, was asked if she was wearing repellent to set an example.Oh, not today, she said. It smells. I usually wear pants.Each attendee was supposed to get a kit containing insect repellent, a mosquito net and, because new research shows the virus may be spread by sexual contact, condoms. But Ms. Morales said she had received only 30 kits.They ran out the first day, she said.Junkyards and Old TiresTo stanch the spread of the virus, officials must stop Aedes aegypti, the yellow-fever mosquito. Yet the island failed to control two previous mosquito-borne epidemics.Theres a fair amount of pessimism about this among the people who tried to fight dengue and chikungunya, Dr. Frieden said. Really intense efforts to control mosquitoes have made very little impact.The mosquito can reproduce in as little as a bottle caps worth of water, and you just cant remove all the standing water in Puerto Rico, Dr. Frieden said.The governors office recently announced detailed plans to attack mosquito hot spots: cemeteries, abandoned houses, auto junkyards, unsealed septic tanks and piles of old tires.Each of the islands 78 municipalities has until April 1 to clean up their acts, Dr. Rulln said.As of Friday, 900,000 of an estimated one million discarded tires had been picked up and moved to depots far from residential areas.ImageCredit...Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesMuch of the work was done by convicted drug abusers living in a network of halfway houses who can earn early release through public service, Dr. Rulln said.Many of the islands hundreds of schools have no screens or air-conditioning. Since high school girls account for about 20 percent of all pregnancies here, officials plan to screen the windows to keep out mosquitoes.That alone is a big job. That means measuring each window, Dr. Rulln said. And what are you going to do about doors if you have 50 kids running in and out?As a first step, the public school dress code has been changed so girls can wear pants, and teachers are supposed to give mosquito repellent to all girls.In the islands 109 cemeteries and its many auto junkyards and public dumps, mosquito-control teams have begun spraying pesticides that kill the insects larvae. But the work is never-ending because rain washes the pesticides away.Moreover, the island is dotted with hundreds of abandoned homes with water-collecting birdbaths and pools. Puerto Rico has 500,000 septic tanks, each of which can produce up to 1,500 mosquitoes a day if left unsealed.Teams cannot enter an abandoned property or screen a septic tank when the owner is absent, so were asking for a new law letting us enter, Dr. Rulln said.The ideal, he said, would be to spray every property within 150 yards the distance a mosquito normally travels of every pregnant womans home.The islands birthrate is about 10 per 1,000 women, and nearly 100 women a day become pregnant here. Just finding them all would be a gargantuan task.A Hunt for SolutionsOther mosquito-control efforts are even less effective.Highly visible fogging by trucks is what most people associate with government mosquito-fighting. But permethrin, the insecticidal fogger used for years, may actually be useless.Tests at several sites have found that its ability to kill mosquitoes has significantly faded, so the island will have to choose a new pesticide and retrain workers to use it.Even with the right chemical, the impact of fogging is dubious. Aedes mosquitoes typically hatch in gardens and slip into houses to hide in closets and under beds. When the spray trucks go by, many people close their windows, locking themselves in with the enemy.Aedes mosquitoes are sip feeders and bite several times for each blood meal. The number required to make an infection likely for one member of a household is as few as three mosquitoes, experts have found.Moreover, by a very inconvenient coincidence, the Environmental Protection Agency has effectively banned the chemical used here to kill juvenile mosquitoes, Audrey Lenhart, a C.D.C. entomologist, noted. The chemical, temephos, has been in use since 1965 and definitely works, she said. But it is not very profitable, so when the agency demanded safety data costing about $3 million to gather, the manufacturers decided instead to quit making it.Puerto Rico still has a nine-month supply, Dr. Lenhart said, and the E.P.A. may issue an emergency use permit for more.Mosquitoes are not the only mode of Zika transmission, however. Health authorities here have also been forced to grapple with an unexpected twist: the discovery that sex spreads the virus.The government has frozen the price of condoms, threatening stores with fines of up to $10,000 if they raise the cost. (It did the same for repellent and window screens.)At nutrition clinics, teachers like Ms. Morales have struggled to explain, as they hand out condoms, why the partners even of pregnant women should wear them.In a radio interview in January, Puerto Ricos health secretary, Dr. Ana Rus, advised women to delay pregnancy altogether, if possible, until the epidemic is over.But local radio commentators accused her of alarmism, and Roberto Gonzlez, archbishop of the Catholic Church, publicly criticized the governments condom distribution plans. Instead, he counseled people to practice self-discipline, which we believe is the only rational attitude and faith.It will be many months before officials know whether their efforts have slowed the advance of the Zika virus.Come October, when the babies start being born, Dr. Rulln said, Ill know if we acted in time or not. | Health |
Americas|Brazils Congress Must Consider Impeaching Vice President https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/world/americas/brazil-impeach-ruling-michel-temer-dilma-rousseff.htmlApril 5, 2016RIO DE JANEIRO A justice on Brazils high court ruled on Tuesday that an impeachment request made against the countrys vice president, Michel Temer who had been expected to take over the presidency if Dilma Rousseff were to be ousted must also be considered by the countrys Congress while it holds hearings about removing Ms. Rousseff.The interim ruling by Justice Marco Aurlio Mello puts another obstacle in the path of those pushing to impeach Ms. Rousseff and who had thought that Mr. Temer taking over would help quickly fix the countrys political and economic crises. Brazil is battling a prolonged economic recession and huge corruption scandal.The impeachment hearings against Ms. Rousseff, based on allegations that she violated fiscal laws by using funds from state banks to cover budget shortfalls, are currently taking place in a committee in Brazils lower house, and many have argued that her ouster is highly probable. Mr. Temer had already been meeting with opposition politicians and was planning a new government in recent months, according to Brazilian news media reports.Yet Tuesdays decision will probably not only raise doubts about whether Mr. Temer can take over, but will also embolden many of Ms. Rousseffs supporters, who have long seen him as the shadowy figure engineering the impeachment effort against her, from within her government.The importance of the decision is that it is going to force everybody in Brazil to discuss the links between Temer and the impeachment process, said Mauricio Santoro, a professor of political science at Rio de Janeiro State University.Justice Mello ruled that Eduardo Cunha, the Brazilian legislator spearheading the effort to impeach Ms. Rousseff, who himself faces bribery charges, must evaluate a request made to impeach Mr. Temer.A Brazilian lawyer, Mariel Mrley Marra, made a request last year to Brazils Congress that impeachment proceedings also be considered for Mr. Temer, accusing him of the same fiscal crimes of which Ms. Rousseff is accused.Mr. Cunha, the speaker of Brazils lower chamber of Congress, postponed addressing the request while focusing his attention on trying to oust Ms. Rousseff, a bitter political opponent of his.But in his ruling, Justice Mello said that a 1950 Brazilian law dealing with impeachment was not respected by Mr. Cunha in his decision to delay considering the petition to impeach Mr. Temer.The justice did not rule on the merits of whether Mr. Temer should be impeached. That decision falls to Congress. But he said the legislature must evaluate the request.Mr. Cunha called the ruling absurd and said he would appeal it.The ruling comes at a time when the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, to which Mr. Temer belongs, is losing some momentum after breaking with Ms. Rousseffs Workers Party last week.They left the government with lots of noise, but at the end of the day, many of the ministers who belong to P.M.D.B. remain in office, Dr. Santoro said, referring to Mr. Temers party.As for Mr. Temer, he is facing more problems than he thought he would, Dr. Santoro said. | World |