id
stringlengths 36
36
| url
stringlengths 47
207
| title
stringlengths 16
143
| published
stringdate 2023-04-01 00:00:00
2024-07-25 00:00:00
| source
stringclasses 1
value | text
stringlengths 1.38k
108k
| input_text
stringlengths 907
2.94k
| target_text
stringlengths 1
19.3k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
9b8ee5c4-6d83-416d-9250-93ceb414e0af
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/style/kristen-bateman-jason-mercado-wedding.html
|
Jason Mercado and Kristen Bateman Marry in Central Park
|
2023-08-25
|
nytimes
|
When Jason Daniel Mercado first met Kristen Virginia Bateman in August 2013 at the HôM Store, a trinket shop that also serves brunch in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, he asked for her phone number. “I saw her and her purple hair and struck up a conversation,” Mr. Mercado said. She had another idea: “Let’s exchange emails instead.”
“I’m an introvert even though I have to talk to a lot of people for work,” Ms. Bateman said.
Mr. Mercado emailed her the next day. “We started a lengthy discourse,” he said. “We hashed out questions and got to know one other.”
They spent three months emailing before meeting again in person. “I wanted to become friends first,” Ms. Bateman said.
Their first date was in mid-November 2013 at the same place where they met. “What we knew for sure was that they had pumpkin pancakes and that it felt like a place we’d both enjoy,” Mr. Mercado said.
But even after they started dating, they continued to email regularly. “Things that she wasn’t comfortable asking in person, she asked in email,” Mr. Mercado said. “Like, after going to MoMA on our second date, she emailed and asked, ‘Why didn’t you hold my hand?’”
But it wasn’t long after that second date that the two became official. On New Year’s Eve 2013, “I said I love you for the first time,” Mr. Mercado said.
In 2014, they spent a lot of time traveling together, visiting Montreal, London, Stockholm, and Paris. And over the years, they visited even more countries in Europe and Asia on vacations and work trips.
Ms. Bateman, 30, is a fashion writer and author of the recently published “Little Book of New York Style.” She also works as a consultant for beauty and fashion brands, and she designs and sells jewelry for her brand Dollchunk.
She has dual bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and design from the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and the Parsons School of Design through the New School.
Mr. Mercado, 39, is a director at Citigroup, specializing in funding and liquidity management. He has a bachelor’s degree in finance from Baruch College.
Inspired by their love of travel and the date when they became official, Mr. Mercado proposed on New Year’s Eve 2020 on a trip to Niagara Falls. “Since it was during the pandemic, we couldn’t even go to the Canadian side,” Mr. Mercado said. Still, he wanted somewhere nice to surprise Ms. Bateman.
“I got down on one knee in the ice and asked for Kristen’s hand in marriage as the clock struck midnight,” Mr. Mercado said.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
One year later, Ms. Bateman briefly lost her engagement ring in the snow at the Storm King Art Center, a 500-acre outdoor museum in New Windsor, N.Y., when she fell in the snow. It was found by an employee after an exhaustive search and hours of the couple and staff members digging in the snow.
The couple were married on Aug. 12 by Annie Lawrence, an interfaith minister who is ordained by the New Seminary, at the Ladies Pavilion in Central Park. “A couple of people riding bikes shouted out to congratulate us,” Ms. Bateman said. “It felt very much like a New York City moment.”
Ms. Bateman’s mother and Mr. Mercado’s mother and sister were the only guests. “We wanted it to feel like an elopement,” Ms. Bateman said. “We consider it, combined with our reverse honeymoon in France, a two-part elopement.”
In early July, the two had traveled to the Brittany region of France to have a symbolic elopement. Ms. Bateman said, “I wore two very extreme dresses from the designer Noir Kei Ninomiya’s runway collections and an equally extreme Simone Rocha veil.”
For the wedding in New York, Ms. Bateman wore a Noir Kei Ninomiya dress in black with 3-D pink roses. Underneath the Noir Kei Ninomiya dress, she layered a silver Simone Rocha mini dress with puff sleeves and carried a Gucci anatomical heart bag covered in rose-colored crystals with her vows stored inside. “When it was time to say my vows, I took the paper out and handed the heart bag to Jason, representing giving him my heart,” she said.
During their ceremony, the officiant quoted Dr. Seuss: “We’re all a little weird, and life’s a little weird,” Ms. Lawrence said. “And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”
Afterward, they all took a yellow cab to the Empire Hotel on the Upper West Side for the cake, designed by Yip.Studio, to match Ms. Bateman’s ceremony dress. They then headed downtown for lunch at Blue Ribbon Sushi Izakaya, where Ms. Bateman wore a red Comme des Garçons dress and a Miu Miu tiara.
Ms. Bateman said everything about their elopement-style union was all about “breaking and questioning tradition.”
|
When Jason Daniel Mercado first met Kristen Virginia Bateman in August 2013 at the HôM Store, a trinket shop that also serves brunch in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, he asked for her phone number. “I saw her and her purple hair and struck up a conversation,” Mr. Mercado said. She had another idea: “Let’s exchange emails instead.”
“I’m an introvert even though I have to talk to a lot of people for work,” Ms. Bateman said.
Mr. Mercado emailed her the next day. “We started a lengthy discourse,” he said. “We hashed out questions and got to know one other.”
They spent three months emailing before meeting again in person. “I wanted to become friends first,” Ms. Bateman said.
Their first date was in mid-November 2013 at the same place where they met. “What we knew for sure was that they had pumpkin pancakes and that it felt like a place we’d both enjoy,” Mr. Mercado said.
But even after they started dating, they continued to email regularly. “Things that she wasn’t comfortable asking in person, she asked in email,” Mr. Mercado said. “Like, after going to MoMA on our second date, she emailed and asked, ‘Why didn’t you hold my hand?’”
But it wasn’t long after that second date that the two became official. On New Year’s Eve 2013, “I said I love you for the first time,” Mr. Mercado said.
In 2014, they spent a lot of time traveling together, visiting Montreal, London, Stockholm, and Paris. And over the years, they visited even more countries in Europe and Asia on vacations and work trips.
Ms. Bateman, 30, is a fashion writer and author of the recently published “Little Book of New York Style.” She also works as a consultant for beauty and fashion brands, and she designs and sells jewelry for her brand Dollchunk.
She has dual bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and design from the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and the Parsons School of Design through the New School.
Mr. Mercado, 39, is a director at Citigroup, specializing in funding and liquidity management. He has a bachelor’s degree in finance from Baruch College.
Inspired by their love of travel and the date when they became official, Mr. Mercado proposed on New Year’s Eve 2
|
020 on a trip to Niagara Falls. “Since it was during the pandemic, we couldn’t even go to the Canadian side,” Mr. Mercado said. Still, he wanted somewhere nice to surprise Ms. Bateman.
“I got down on one knee in the ice and asked for Kristen’s hand in marriage as the clock struck midnight,” Mr. Mercado said.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
One year later, Ms. Bateman briefly lost her engagement ring in the snow at the Storm King Art Center, a 500-acre outdoor museum in New Windsor, N.Y., when she fell in the snow. It was found by an employee after an exhaustive search and hours of the couple and staff members digging in the snow.
The couple were married on Aug. 12 by Annie Lawrence, an interfaith minister who is ordained by the New Seminary, at the Ladies Pavilion in Central Park. “A couple of people riding bikes shouted out to congratulate us,” Ms. Bateman said. “It felt very much like a New York City moment.”
Ms. Bateman’s mother and Mr. Mercado’s mother and sister were the only guests. “We wanted it to feel like an elopement,” Ms. Bateman said. “We consider it, combined with our reverse honeymoon in France, a two-part elopement.”
In early July, the two had traveled to the Brittany region of France to have a symbolic elopement. Ms. Bateman said, “I wore two very extreme dresses from the designer Noir Kei Ninomiya’s runway collections and an equally extreme Simone Rocha veil.”
For the wedding in New York, Ms. Bateman wore a Noir Kei Ninomiya dress in black with 3-D pink roses. Underneath the Noir Kei Ninomiya dress, she layered a silver Simone Rocha mini dress with puff sleeves and carried a Gucci anatomical heart bag covered in rose-colored crystals with her vows stored inside. “When it was time to say my vows, I took the paper out and handed the heart bag to Jason, representing giving him my heart,” she said.
During their ceremony, the officiant quoted Dr. Seuss: “We’re all a little weird, and life’s a little weird,” Ms. Lawrence said. “And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”
Afterward, they all took a yellow cab to the Empire Hotel on the Upper West Side for the cake, designed by Yip.Studio, to match Ms. Bateman’s ceremony dress. They then headed downtown for lunch at Blue Ribbon Sushi Izakaya, where Ms. Bateman wore a red Comme des Garçons dress and a Miu Miu tiara.
Ms. Bateman said everything about their elopement-style union was all about “breaking and questioning tradition.”
|
64a03060-aa0a-4f8d-a876-b72e7248a8fd
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/world/europe/uk-schools-raac-concrete.html
|
RAAC Crisis in U.K. Schools Hits Children With Special Needs
|
2023-09-10
|
nytimes
|
Helen Burness was working from home on Monday when the email arrived. In less than 24 hours, her 9-year-old daughter was set to return to school after the long summer break.
The email was from the principal. The school had been forced to shut, the official wrote apologetically, because of concerns about unsafe concrete in its buildings.
Ms. Burness’s daughter, Marigold, has a rare chromosomal disorder and attends a specialist speech and language school for children with complex learning needs. She had been both nervous and excited about starting the new school year, and her parents had spent weeks helping her prepare.
Ms. Burness’s heart sank as she realized she would have to tell Marigold that the plan had changed — with no idea when the issue might be resolved.
“It’s been kind of in free fall really,” said Ms. Burness, 47, of how the week has played out. “And how much longer will it be?”
By Thursday morning, Ms. Burness and her husband, who both run their own businesses, were juggling parenting duties and their jobs, unable to find specialist child care at short notice. On Friday, the school said classes would resume the following week, but added that some rooms would be inaccessible and adjustments would have to be made.
Britain’s Conservative government
has faced acute criticism
since the announcement last week that
more than 100 schools
would have to close buildings because of the presence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, or RAAC, a bubbly, lightweight material known to pose a risk of sudden collapse.
The crisis intensified after it became clear that senior government officials had ignored repeated warnings about the material, with a former Department for Education official accusing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of
refusing to rebuild more schools
while he was chancellor of the Exchequer, despite being told of a “critical risk to life.” (Mr. Sunak said it was “completely and utterly wrong” to hold him responsible for the funding shortfall.)
About 10,000 students had their start to the year delayed, according to
government data
, and in an unwelcome reminder of pandemic lockdowns, thousands of children were moved either to fully remote learning or to a mix of in-person and remote learning.
For parents of students asked to stay home, the days since the announcement have been a scramble to find last-minute babysitters and reorganize lives. For special needs students, the distress caused by the school shutdown can be even more acute.
“Our lifeline is her school,” said Ms. Burness, as she set up her laptop for her day’s work while Marigold wandered the kitchen and watched “The Little Mermaid” on television. As well as speech and language therapy, her school provides physical activities and more traditional learning. While staff members have done their best to support parents, Ms. Burness said, she felt let down by the government’s inaction.
“Take some accountability for this epic fail. Be accountable,” she said. “This didn’t need to get to this crisis point.”
RAAC (pronounced rack) was used in the construction of hundreds of buildings in Britain between the 1950s and mid-1990s, including schools, hospitals and theaters. Its lightness made it a popular choice for the flat roofs common in the postwar building boom.
But concerns about the material, which has a life span of about 30 years, date back decades. In 1995, Victor Whitworth, a structural engineer in Somerset, in southwest England, wrote to the journal of the Institution of Structural Engineers: “Fellow engineers, beware!” after inspecting cracks in a school roof that contained RAAC.
In 2018, a school roof collapsed in Kent, in southeastern England. The ceiling crumbled over a weekend and nobody was hurt, but the dangers were clear. A 2019 safety alert recommended that all RAAC planks
installed before 1980
should be replaced. In 2021, a government agency issued a
safety briefing
stating that “RAAC is now life-expired and liable to collapse.”
The trouble was in securing the money to make repairs. And the eventual impact could be seen at two neighboring schools in Southend-on-Sea, about 40 miles east of London, on Wednesday afternoon.
Small children in crisp white shirts lined up outside Eastwood Primary School, chatting and giggling with classmates as they waited to be picked up by parents.
At Kingsdown School next door, the grounds were preternaturally quiet. The only signs of life were two workers climbing a ladder onto the flat roof of a building.
Another specialist school for children with complex learning needs, Kingsdown was also set to begin classes this week, but shut days before the start of the school year because of RAAC. Lydia Hyde, a local councilor in Southend from the opposition Labour Party, said that there was deep frustration from local authorities, parents and teachers that action wasn’t taken earlier.
“For some of these children, it's their first school term,” Ms. Hyde said. “All of the children were excited, planning and preparing for school, and then it just didn’t happen.”
The staff members and local authorities scrambled to come up with a plan, including how to retrieve specialist equipment relied on by the children that was, for a time, stuck in the shuttered buildings.
From next week, Kingsdown will hold some classes in the school next door. Others will continue in sections of the building deemed safe. Louise Robinson, the principal, said in a statement that “the past week has been frantic, trying to plan, check on parents and families to offer support” but called the new measures a “fantastic, positive first step to us being able to reopen sooner rather than later.”
The Department for Education said it would work with local authorities on “individual solutions” for schools impacted and that it “will spend whatever it takes to keep children safe.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Sunak defended the government’s approach, saying it acted “decisively.” But for years, Conservative-led governments slashed spending on infrastructure, critics say.
Caroline Slocock, the director of Civil Exchange, a think tank, and a former senior civil servant under both Labour and Conservative governments, pointed to policy shifts as far back as 2010 that contributed to the current crisis.
In the late 1990s through the early 2000s, she advised Gordon Brown, then Labour chancellor of the Exchequer and later prime minister, on how to strengthen rules to encourage long-term investment. She helped design “a one-way valve” to stop capital budgets from being slashed to meet short-term spending pressures.
But in 2010, after the Conservatives came to power in a coalition government with the centrist Liberal Democrats, the valve was removed, and
a protracted period of government austerity
began.
George Osborne, who served as chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016, constrained spending drastically, an approach that Ms. Slocock said would ultimately cost the country more in the long run as critical infrastructure problems escalated.
“In a way, it’s a symbol of what you call broken Britain — or in this case, crumbling Britain,” she said. “There has been over a decade of not recognizing the problem. And in not dealing with it, it keeps getting worse and worse.”
In a
September 2013 tweet
that has come back to haunt him, David Cameron, the prime minister who oversaw spending cuts alongside Mr. Osborne, wrote: “We’re on the right track & we’ll fix the roof when the sun is shining.”
The message was shared widely this week, alongside scathing comments about school roofs from opposition politicians.
On Thursday afternoon, Sally Walsh, 44, who lives in a suburb northeast of London, was looking after her 2-year-old at home along with her three school-aged children, who were unable to return to their classrooms.
Ms. Walsh said she couldn’t understand why the government waited until the last minute to assess the safety of schools with RAAC. “Even two weeks more notice for schools and parents would have been more helpful,” she said.
For now, her eldest son is doing classes online, her middle son will attend a different school a mile away next week, while her youngest will be taught in his school’s gym.
“I’ve just been so anxious the whole week,” she said. “But when it comes to your children, you just want them to feel settled, and secure and safe.”
|
Helen Burness was working from home on Monday when the email arrived. In less than 24 hours, her 9-year-old daughter was set to return to school after the long summer break.
The email was from the principal. The school had been forced to shut, the official wrote apologetically, because of concerns about unsafe concrete in its buildings.
Ms. Burness’s daughter, Marigold, has a rare chromosomal disorder and attends a specialist speech and language school for children with complex learning needs. She had been both nervous and excited about starting the new school year, and her parents had spent weeks helping her prepare.
Ms. Burness’s heart sank as she realized she would have to tell Marigold that the plan had changed — with no idea when the issue might be resolved.
“It’s been kind of in free fall really,” said Ms. Burness, 47, of how the week has played out. “And how much longer will it be?”
By Thursday morning, Ms. Burness and her husband, who both run their own businesses, were juggling parenting duties and their jobs, unable to find specialist child care at short notice. On Friday, the school said classes would resume the following week, but added that some rooms would be inaccessible and adjustments would have to be made.
Britain’s Conservative government
has faced acute criticism
since the announcement last week that
more than 100 schools
would have to close buildings because of the presence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, or RAAC, a bubbly, lightweight material known to pose a risk of sudden collapse.
The crisis intensified after it became clear that senior government officials had ignored repeated warnings about the material, with a former Department for Education official accusing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of
refusing to rebuild more schools
while he was chancellor of the Exchequer, despite being told of a “critical risk to life.” (Mr. Sunak said it was “completely and utterly wrong” to hold him responsible for the funding shortfall.)
About 10,000 students had their start to the year delayed, according to
government data
, and in an unwelcome reminder of pandemic lockdowns, thousands of children were moved either to fully remote learning or to a mix of in-person and remote learning.
For parents of students asked to stay home, the days since the announcement have been a scramble to find last-minute babysitters and reorganize lives. For special
|
needs students, the distress caused by the school shutdown can be even more acute.
“Our lifeline is her school,” said Ms. Burness, as she set up her laptop for her day’s work while Marigold wandered the kitchen and watched “The Little Mermaid” on television. As well as speech and language therapy, her school provides physical activities and more traditional learning. While staff members have done their best to support parents, Ms. Burness said, she felt let down by the government’s inaction.
“Take some accountability for this epic fail. Be accountable,” she said. “This didn’t need to get to this crisis point.”
RAAC (pronounced rack) was used in the construction of hundreds of buildings in Britain between the 1950s and mid-1990s, including schools, hospitals and theaters. Its lightness made it a popular choice for the flat roofs common in the postwar building boom.
But concerns about the material, which has a life span of about 30 years, date back decades. In 1995, Victor Whitworth, a structural engineer in Somerset, in southwest England, wrote to the journal of the Institution of Structural Engineers: “Fellow engineers, beware!” after inspecting cracks in a school roof that contained RAAC.
In 2018, a school roof collapsed in Kent, in southeastern England. The ceiling crumbled over a weekend and nobody was hurt, but the dangers were clear. A 2019 safety alert recommended that all RAAC planks
installed before 1980
should be replaced. In 2021, a government agency issued a
safety briefing
stating that “RAAC is now life-expired and liable to collapse.”
The trouble was in securing the money to make repairs. And the eventual impact could be seen at two neighboring schools in Southend-on-Sea, about 40 miles east of London, on Wednesday afternoon.
Small children in crisp white shirts lined up outside Eastwood Primary School, chatting and giggling with classmates as they waited to be picked up by parents.
At Kingsdown School next door, the grounds were preternaturally quiet. The only signs of life were two workers climbing a ladder onto the flat roof of a building.
Another specialist school for children with complex learning needs, Kingsdown was also set to begin classes this week, but shut days before the start of the school year because of RAAC. Lydia Hyde, a local councilor in Southend from the opposition Labour Party, said that there was deep frustration from local authorities, parents and teachers that action wasn’t taken earlier.
“For some of these children, it's their first school term,” Ms. Hyde said. “All of the children were excited, planning and preparing for school, and then it just didn’t happen.”
The staff members and local authorities scrambled to come up with a plan, including how to retrieve specialist equipment relied on by the children that was, for a time, stuck in the shuttered buildings.
From next week, Kingsdown will hold some classes in the school next door. Others will continue in sections of the building deemed safe. Louise Robinson, the principal, said in a statement that “the past week has been frantic, trying to plan, check on parents and families to offer support” but called the new measures a “fantastic, positive first step to us being able to reopen sooner rather than later.”
The Department for Education said it would work with local authorities on “individual solutions” for schools impacted and that it “will spend whatever it takes to keep children safe.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Sunak defended the government’s approach, saying it acted “decisively.” But for years, Conservative-led governments slashed spending on infrastructure, critics say.
Caroline Slocock, the director of Civil Exchange, a think tank, and a former senior civil servant under both Labour and Conservative governments, pointed to policy shifts as far back as 2010 that contributed to the current crisis.
In the late 1990s through the early 2000s, she advised Gordon Brown, then Labour chancellor of the Exchequer and later prime minister, on how to strengthen rules to encourage long-term investment. She helped design “a one-way valve” to stop capital budgets from being slashed to meet short-term spending pressures.
But in 2010, after the Conservatives came to power in a coalition government with the centrist Liberal Democrats, the valve was removed, and
a protracted period of government austerity
began.
George Osborne, who served as chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016, constrained spending drastically, an approach that Ms. Slocock said would ultimately cost the country more in the long run as critical infrastructure problems escalated.
“In a way, it’s a symbol of what you call broken Britain — or in this case, crumbling Britain,” she said. “There has been over a decade of not recognizing the problem. And in not dealing with it, it keeps getting worse and worse.”
In a
September 2013 tweet
that has come back to haunt him, David Cameron, the prime minister who oversaw spending cuts alongside Mr. Osborne, wrote: “We’re on the right track & we’ll fix the roof when the sun is shining.”
The message was shared widely this week, alongside scathing comments about school roofs from opposition politicians.
On Thursday afternoon, Sally Walsh, 44, who lives in a suburb northeast of London, was looking after her 2-year-old at home along with her three school-aged children, who were unable to return to their classrooms.
Ms. Walsh said she couldn’t understand why the government waited until the last minute to assess the safety of schools with RAAC. “Even two weeks more notice for schools and parents would have been more helpful,” she said.
For now, her eldest son is doing classes online, her middle son will attend a different school a mile away next week, while her youngest will be taught in his school’s gym.
“I’ve just been so anxious the whole week,” she said. “But when it comes to your children, you just want them to feel settled, and secure and safe.”
|
1c60d85b-b686-4e0f-81cd-0de645380f85
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/business/micron-technology-china-ban.html
|
China Escalates U.S. Tech War With Micron Ban
|
2023-05-22
|
nytimes
|
When cutting foreign technology companies from Chinese supply chains, Beijing has long chosen to work obliquely or even secretly. Regulators would give executives back-room lectures, weigh them down with excessive red tape or hit them with occasional office raids. Rarely did the government tell a firm outright it was no longer welcome.
But that is what it signaled to Micron Technology in a late-night announcement on Sunday.
The Chinese government barred companies that handle critical information from buying microchips made by the Boise, Idaho-based Micron. The company’s chips, which are used for memory storage in all kinds of electronics, like phones and computers, were deemed to pose “relatively serious cybersecurity problems” by China’s internet watchdog after a review.
Micron said it was “evaluating” the government’s finding and “assessing” what it would do next. Analysts said the company, which has been selling chips in China for years, could find itself cut out of future business from Chinese companies.
The openness and speed with which the Chinese authorities took action against Micron — they spent less than two months on the investigation — underscore how far apart the two sides are drifting on tech policy. Last year, the Biden administration took harsh steps to block Chinese chip makers’ access to crucial tools needed to make advanced chips, as well as access to the chips that run supercomputers and craft powerful artificial intelligence algorithms.
The Micron action, widely seen as a reprisal for those moves, shows some of China’s advantages over the United States: a speedy, and feared, authoritarian rule that can quickly pronounce and enforce absolute bans. It also offers a glimpse of new tactics by Beijing.
With the block of Micron, the authorities carved out a space in the industry that Chinese chip makers could fill. The move could also present a new wedge between the United States and its allies, whose companies could make billions of dollars in sales if they were to step in and pick up business that Micron might lose.
For Beijing, hurting an American company that makes critical equipment advances the government’s goal of boosting its domestic tech sector.
“It may not be feasible or necessary to completely replace all products with domestic ones, but for these core products, we need to develop our own capabilities and avoid being overly dependent,” said Xiang Ligang, a director of a Beijing technology consortium who has advised the Chinese government on technology issues. “This applies not only to the chip industry but also to other sectors,” he added.
For the better part of a decade, China and the United States have jockeyed over global technological leadership. Chinese computer hacks of American firms, and policies designed to acquire closely held intellectual property, raised red flags in Washington. In Beijing, revelations from Edward J. Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor, exposed the vulnerability in relying too much on American tech.
As each side maneuvered to find new advantages, both came to focus on the semiconductor industry. The tiny microchips that do the thinking for just about all electronics were a convenient choke point for the United States, which worked to cut off China’s access to the smallest and fastest chips. The hope was to make China’s supercomputers less smart and its smartphones less salable.
To counter Washington, China lavished subsidies on domestic chip leaders. While they failed to catch up to global rivals in the arena of the most advanced chips, some firms succeeded with less sophisticated parts, like memory chips and larger logic chips that work in cheaper smartphones and cars.
Then the Biden administration in October announced a major set of policies aimed at China’s most successful semiconductor companies. The move, along with billions in new subsidies for chip production in the United States, were viewed dimly by Chinese policymakers, said Paul Triolo, the senior vice president for China at Albright Stonebridge Group, a strategy advisement firm.
“Officials in Beijing over the past months have been complaining to anyone who will listen about U.S. actions,” he said. “Beijing views these moves as primarily politically driven and is now willing to go tit for tat,” Mr. Triolo added.
In some ways, China is better equipped for that exchange. China’s authoritarian system enables quick action and guarantees that few domestic firms will break with policy.
In the United States, political debate and legal challenges can dull the sharpness of government efforts. Major American companies, for instance, found legal workarounds to Washington’s attempts to cut component sales to companies like the Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei. Some multinationals successfully lobbied for licenses to allow them to keep selling to blacklisted companies.
By targeting Micron specifically, China is hitting at one of the few sectors — memory chips — that it has a toehold in with its chip competition with the United States.
While protecting such success by barring American competitors makes strategic sense, China remains very reliant on the United States for advanced chips, according to Teng Tai, an economist and the director of the Wanbo New Economic Research Institute in Beijing.
“The ultimate goal of retaliating against Micron is to urge certain American companies to restrain themselves, so we could further promote technology and trade cooperation, and avoid pursuing an isolated and self-reliant approach,” he wrote Monday on Weibo, a Chinese social media outlet.
Another question that Sunday’s action against Micron raises is how the United States’ ally South Korea will respond. Its companies, in particular Samsung and SK Hynix, have the most to gain from the Micron ban. The two companies stand to pick up customers from Micron, which reported $3.3 billion in sales in China in 2022.
Mr. Xiang, the Chinese government adviser, said: “Why should South Korea blindly follow the United States and harm its own interests? I don’t think South Korea has such an obligation.”
|
When cutting foreign technology companies from Chinese supply chains, Beijing has long chosen to work obliquely or even secretly. Regulators would give executives back-room lectures, weigh them down with excessive red tape or hit them with occasional office raids. Rarely did the government tell a firm outright it was no longer welcome.
But that is what it signaled to Micron Technology in a late-night announcement on Sunday.
The Chinese government barred companies that handle critical information from buying microchips made by the Boise, Idaho-based Micron. The company’s chips, which are used for memory storage in all kinds of electronics, like phones and computers, were deemed to pose “relatively serious cybersecurity problems” by China’s internet watchdog after a review.
Micron said it was “evaluating” the government’s finding and “assessing” what it would do next. Analysts said the company, which has been selling chips in China for years, could find itself cut out of future business from Chinese companies.
The openness and speed with which the Chinese authorities took action against Micron — they spent less than two months on the investigation — underscore how far apart the two sides are drifting on tech policy. Last year, the Biden administration took harsh steps to block Chinese chip makers’ access to crucial tools needed to make advanced chips, as well as access to the chips that run supercomputers and craft powerful artificial intelligence algorithms.
The Micron action, widely seen as a reprisal for those moves, shows some of China’s advantages over the United States: a speedy, and feared, authoritarian rule that can quickly pronounce and enforce absolute bans. It also offers a glimpse of new tactics by Beijing.
With the block of Micron, the authorities carved out a space in the industry that Chinese chip makers could fill. The move could also present a new wedge between the United States and its allies, whose companies could make billions of dollars in sales if they were to step in and pick up business that Micron might lose.
For Beijing, hurting an American company that makes critical equipment advances the government’s goal of boosting its domestic tech sector.
“It may not be feasible or necessary to completely replace all products with domestic ones, but for these core products, we need to develop our own capabilities and avoid being overly dependent,” said Xiang Ligang, a director of a Beijing technology consortium who has advised the Chinese government on technology issues. “This applies not only to the chip industry but also to other sectors,” he added.
For the better part of
|
a decade, China and the United States have jockeyed over global technological leadership. Chinese computer hacks of American firms, and policies designed to acquire closely held intellectual property, raised red flags in Washington. In Beijing, revelations from Edward J. Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor, exposed the vulnerability in relying too much on American tech.
As each side maneuvered to find new advantages, both came to focus on the semiconductor industry. The tiny microchips that do the thinking for just about all electronics were a convenient choke point for the United States, which worked to cut off China’s access to the smallest and fastest chips. The hope was to make China’s supercomputers less smart and its smartphones less salable.
To counter Washington, China lavished subsidies on domestic chip leaders. While they failed to catch up to global rivals in the arena of the most advanced chips, some firms succeeded with less sophisticated parts, like memory chips and larger logic chips that work in cheaper smartphones and cars.
Then the Biden administration in October announced a major set of policies aimed at China’s most successful semiconductor companies. The move, along with billions in new subsidies for chip production in the United States, were viewed dimly by Chinese policymakers, said Paul Triolo, the senior vice president for China at Albright Stonebridge Group, a strategy advisement firm.
“Officials in Beijing over the past months have been complaining to anyone who will listen about U.S. actions,” he said. “Beijing views these moves as primarily politically driven and is now willing to go tit for tat,” Mr. Triolo added.
In some ways, China is better equipped for that exchange. China’s authoritarian system enables quick action and guarantees that few domestic firms will break with policy.
In the United States, political debate and legal challenges can dull the sharpness of government efforts. Major American companies, for instance, found legal workarounds to Washington’s attempts to cut component sales to companies like the Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei. Some multinationals successfully lobbied for licenses to allow them to keep selling to blacklisted companies.
By targeting Micron specifically, China is hitting at one of the few sectors — memory chips — that it has a toehold in with its chip competition with the United States.
While protecting such success by barring American competitors makes strategic sense, China remains very reliant on the United States for advanced chips, according to Teng Tai, an economist and the director of the Wanbo New Economic Research Institute in Beijing.
“The ultimate goal of retaliating against Micron is to urge certain American companies to restrain themselves, so we could further promote technology and trade cooperation, and avoid pursuing an isolated and self-reliant approach,” he wrote Monday on Weibo, a Chinese social media outlet.
Another question that Sunday’s action against Micron raises is how the United States’ ally South Korea will respond. Its companies, in particular Samsung and SK Hynix, have the most to gain from the Micron ban. The two companies stand to pick up customers from Micron, which reported $3.3 billion in sales in China in 2022.
Mr. Xiang, the Chinese government adviser, said: “Why should South Korea blindly follow the United States and harm its own interests? I don’t think South Korea has such an obligation.”
|
5c329e21-c70a-42f4-afaf-414411978292
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/us/voting-rights-felons.html
|
Lawsuits Challenge Voting Rights Left to Governor Discretion in Some States
|
2023-10-16
|
nytimes
|
After George Hawkins completed a 13-year term in a Virginia prison for attempted murder, he asked the state last spring to restore his right to vote. So far, the administration of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has unfettered discretion over such requests, has twice turned him down with almost no explanation.
Governor Youngkin’s authority is enshrined in Virginia’s State Constitution. But now a lawsuit filed by the
Fair Elections Center
, a Washington, D.C.-based voting rights organization, argues that the federal Constitution limits that power.
The suit, in federal District Court in Richmond, claims that the First Amendment bars Governor Youngkin, a Republican, from arbitrarily silencing Mr. Hawkins’s voice in political affairs. Instead, it calls for Virginia to set rules governing decisions on restoring voting rights.
Otherwise,
the lawsuit says
, governors could say their rulings on voting rights were impartial, “while secretly basing their decision on information — or informed speculation — on the applicant’s political affiliations or views.”
Last week, U.S. District Judge John A. Gibney allowed the case to proceed, putting off a decision on whether state rules on granting clemency are subject to judicial review until after hearings early next year.
The stakes are potentially large in the Virginia suit and a similar one in Kentucky. (A third state, Iowa, also vests power over voting in the governor but is not being sued because an executive order restores the right to former prisoners who have completed their sentences.)
More than 66,000 Virginians on probation or parole remained disenfranchised as of 2022,
according to the Sentencing Project
, a criminal justice advocacy group.
In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, signed an order in 2019 that has automatically restored the franchise to more than 190,000 people. But the lawsuit there challenges the governor’s decision to exclude from automatic restoration more than 55,000 former prisoners who committed high-level felonies like murder or were convicted outside state courts.
In court arguments, the state said this summer that the only standard for restoring voting rights to those not covered under automatic restoration is whether the governor judges the applicant “worthy.” In nearly four years, Governor Beshear has personally restored rights to 60 people.
But when a criterion like “worthy” can encompass people’s skin color, political views or even their deference to authority, both suits argue, it cannot justify a government decision to limit a citizen’s political rights.
Most states either automatically restore the voting rights of former prisoners or have written guidelines on the matter. Virginia is the only state that still places all voting rights decisions in the governor’s hands, the result of
Mr. Youngkin’s decision to abandon
the automatic restoration policy of his Democratic predecessor, Ralph Northam.
Government attempts to silence citizens because of their opinions or behavior, commonly called viewpoint discrimination, have long been seen by courts as particularly offensive First Amendment breaches. And the Supreme Court has frequently ruled that government officials cannot arbitrarily deny First Amendment rights.
But whether those legal principles apply to a governor’s decision on the right to vote remains in dispute. In the Kentucky suit, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals already has ruled that they do not. That power, the court said this summer, applies to licensing decisions like granting parade permits, not to a governor’s pardon powers. The Elections Center plans to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
Lawyers for Governor Youngkin
made the same argument
in the Virginia lawsuit. State rules for granting clemency “are rarely, if ever appropriate subjects for judicial review,” they wrote in a September filing.
A spokeswoman for Governor Youngkin, Macaulay Porter, said in an email that the governor “firmly believes in the importance of second chances.” She said voting-rights decisions “take into consideration the unique elements of each situation, practicing grace for those who need it and ensuring public safety.”
One scholar of First Amendment law, Kevin F. O’Neill at Cleveland State University College of Law, said courts may not agree that First Amendment protections that apply to issues they commonly see, like the granting of parade permits, also cover far less common cases, like a governor’s refusal to restore voting rights.
At the least, he said, a plaintiff would need to show that some denials of voting rights are rooted in arbitrary factors like race or politics, not just that they could be.
“Ordinarily,” he said, “you can’t win a constitutional case based on hypotheticals.”
Mr. Hawkins, the onetime Virginia convict, went to prison at 17 after being singled out by police officers for a shooting incident in a crowd that left him and two others wounded. He has never cast a ballot.
“I fought my case from start to finish,” he said, “from the day I was convicted until the day I came home this year.” Being denied the vote, he said, “is like saying my sentence ain’t enough.”
He added: “I don’t now what makes me ineligible, I don’t know when I could be eligible. I’m kind of free — like a second-class citizen. I don’t want to be a nonvoter for the rest of my life.”
|
After George Hawkins completed a 13-year term in a Virginia prison for attempted murder, he asked the state last spring to restore his right to vote. So far, the administration of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has unfettered discretion over such requests, has twice turned him down with almost no explanation.
Governor Youngkin’s authority is enshrined in Virginia’s State Constitution. But now a lawsuit filed by the
Fair Elections Center
, a Washington, D.C.-based voting rights organization, argues that the federal Constitution limits that power.
The suit, in federal District Court in Richmond, claims that the First Amendment bars Governor Youngkin, a Republican, from arbitrarily silencing Mr. Hawkins’s voice in political affairs. Instead, it calls for Virginia to set rules governing decisions on restoring voting rights.
Otherwise,
the lawsuit says
, governors could say their rulings on voting rights were impartial, “while secretly basing their decision on information — or informed speculation — on the applicant’s political affiliations or views.”
Last week, U.S. District Judge John A. Gibney allowed the case to proceed, putting off a decision on whether state rules on granting clemency are subject to judicial review until after hearings early next year.
The stakes are potentially large in the Virginia suit and a similar one in Kentucky. (A third state, Iowa, also vests power over voting in the governor but is not being sued because an executive order restores the right to former prisoners who have completed their sentences.)
More than 66,000 Virginians on probation or parole remained disenfranchised as of 2022,
according to the Sentencing Project
, a criminal justice advocacy group.
In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, signed an order in 2019 that has automatically restored the franchise to more than 190,000 people. But the lawsuit there challenges the governor’s decision to exclude from automatic restoration more than 55,000 former prisoners who committed high-level felonies like murder or were convicted outside state courts.
In court arguments, the state said this summer that the only standard for restoring voting rights to those not covered under automatic restoration is whether the governor judges the applicant “worthy.” In nearly four years, Governor Beshear has personally restored rights to 60 people.
But when a criterion like “worthy” can encompass people’s skin color, political views or even their deference to authority, both
|
suits argue, it cannot justify a government decision to limit a citizen’s political rights.
Most states either automatically restore the voting rights of former prisoners or have written guidelines on the matter. Virginia is the only state that still places all voting rights decisions in the governor’s hands, the result of
Mr. Youngkin’s decision to abandon
the automatic restoration policy of his Democratic predecessor, Ralph Northam.
Government attempts to silence citizens because of their opinions or behavior, commonly called viewpoint discrimination, have long been seen by courts as particularly offensive First Amendment breaches. And the Supreme Court has frequently ruled that government officials cannot arbitrarily deny First Amendment rights.
But whether those legal principles apply to a governor’s decision on the right to vote remains in dispute. In the Kentucky suit, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals already has ruled that they do not. That power, the court said this summer, applies to licensing decisions like granting parade permits, not to a governor’s pardon powers. The Elections Center plans to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
Lawyers for Governor Youngkin
made the same argument
in the Virginia lawsuit. State rules for granting clemency “are rarely, if ever appropriate subjects for judicial review,” they wrote in a September filing.
A spokeswoman for Governor Youngkin, Macaulay Porter, said in an email that the governor “firmly believes in the importance of second chances.” She said voting-rights decisions “take into consideration the unique elements of each situation, practicing grace for those who need it and ensuring public safety.”
One scholar of First Amendment law, Kevin F. O’Neill at Cleveland State University College of Law, said courts may not agree that First Amendment protections that apply to issues they commonly see, like the granting of parade permits, also cover far less common cases, like a governor’s refusal to restore voting rights.
At the least, he said, a plaintiff would need to show that some denials of voting rights are rooted in arbitrary factors like race or politics, not just that they could be.
“Ordinarily,” he said, “you can’t win a constitutional case based on hypotheticals.”
Mr. Hawkins, the onetime Virginia convict, went to prison at 17 after being singled out by police officers for a shooting incident in a crowd that left him and two others wounded. He has never cast a ballot.
“I fought my case from start to finish,” he said, “from the day I was convicted until the day I came home this year.” Being denied the vote, he said, “is like saying my sentence ain’t enough.”
He added: “I don’t now what makes me ineligible, I don’t know when I could be eligible. I’m kind of free — like a second-class citizen. I don’t want to be a nonvoter for the rest of my life.”
|
23a1da0c-a1b3-4cfd-b026-f1029cf95533
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/world/middleeast/israel-syria-lebanon-shelling.html
|
Clashes Along Israel’s Borders With Syria and Lebanon Raise Fears of Another Front
|
2023-10-10
|
nytimes
|
Shelling sounded out along Israel’s volatile northern border with Lebanon for a third consecutive day Tuesday, stoking fears on both sides of a repeat of 2006, when Israel fought a bloody monthlong war with Hezbollah, the Shiite group committed to the destruction of the Jewish state.
Although paling in comparison to the fighting that has taken place around Gaza, in the country’s southwest, the continued clashes on Israel’s northern border have deepened unease over the possibility that the conflict — already the broadest invasion in 50 years — could spread to multiple fronts.
There were signs late Tuesday that could happen: The Israeli Army said it had identified a number of launches from Syria into Israeli territory, the first time that fire had been exchanged across that border since fighting erupted on Saturday. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The Israeli military said the projectiles apparently fell in an open area and that it had been firing artillery and mortar shells in return.
Along the Israel-Lebanon border, the day had begun with residents assessing the aftermath of clashes Monday, when Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an armed group based in Gaza, sent fighters into Israel, two of whom died. Funeral processions were held in southern Lebanon for three Hezbollah fighters also killed amid the skirmish by Israeli shelling.
But the relative calm was shattered Tuesday evening when 15 rockets were fired over the border from just outside the Lebanese city of Tyre, on the Mediterranean coast, the Israeli military said. Four of the rockets were intercepted, the military said.
Although it was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attack, the Israelis said they had responded by striking two Hezbollah observation posts with tank fire. Hezbollah responded in turn with an anti-tank guided missile attack on an Israeli armored personnel carrier in the northern Israeli town of Avivim, according to a statement from Al Manar, the Hezbollah-owned Lebanese broadcaster.
Hezbollah published footage it said was of the attack, which showed two strikes on an idle military vehicle, leaving it with considerable damage. The Israeli Army said no soldiers were injured. It added that Israeli forces had struck another Hezbollah observation post in response.
As the exchange of fire continued late into the night, two senior Lebanese army officials claimed that Israel had used munitions loaded with white phosphorus, the use of which can be a violation of international law when civilian areas are targeted. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.
Footage posted online showed white puffs trailing white smoke before falling to the ground. A spokesperson for the Israeli Army denied the use of white phosphorus, saying soldiers had deployed only illumination flares.
|
Shelling sounded out along Israel’s volatile northern border with Lebanon for a third consecutive day Tuesday, stoking fears on both sides of a repeat of 2006, when Israel fought a bloody monthlong war with Hezbollah, the Shiite group committed to the destruction of the Jewish state.
Although paling in comparison to the fighting that has taken place around Gaza, in the country’s southwest, the continued clashes on Israel’s northern border have deepened unease over the possibility that the conflict — already the broadest invasion in 50 years — could spread to multiple fronts.
There were signs late Tuesday that could happen: The Israeli Army said it had identified a number of launches from Syria into Israeli territory, the first time that fire had been exchanged across that border since fighting erupted on Saturday. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The Israeli military said the projectiles apparently fell in an open area and that it had been firing artillery and mortar shells in return.
Along the Israel-Lebanon border, the day had begun with residents assessing the aftermath of clashes Monday, when Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an armed group based in Gaza, sent fighters into Israel, two of whom died. Funeral processions were held in southern Lebanon for three Hezbollah fighters also killed amid the skirmish by Israeli shelling.
But the relative calm was shattered Tuesday evening when 15 rockets were fired over the border from just outside the Lebanese city of Tyre, on the Mediterranean coast, the Israeli military said. Four of the rockets were intercepted, the military said.
Although it was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attack, the Israelis said they had responded by striking two Hezbollah observation posts with tank fire. Hezbollah responded in turn with an anti-tank guided missile attack on an Israeli armored personnel carrier in the northern Israeli town of Avivim, according to a statement from Al Manar, the Hezbollah-owned Lebanese broadcaster.
Hezbollah published footage it said was of the attack, which showed two strikes on an idle military vehicle, leaving it with considerable damage. The Israeli Army said no soldiers were injured. It added that Israeli forces had struck another Hezbollah observation post in response.
As the exchange of fire continued late into the night, two senior Lebanese army officials claimed that Israel had used munitions loaded with white phosphorus, the use of which can be a violation of international law when civilian areas are targeted. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.
Footage
|
posted online showed white puffs trailing white smoke before falling to the ground. A spokesperson for the Israeli Army denied the use of white phosphorus, saying soldiers had deployed only illumination flares.
|
cb4d3254-e3bc-46b9-9863-ad99d5f0fd32
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/29/fashion/weddings/germany-plate-smashing-wedding-tradition.html
|
The Meaning Behind Germany’s Plate-Smashing Wedding Tradition
|
2023-07-29
|
nytimes
|
Weddings are steeped in tradition, but where did those traditions come from? And how do those customs differ in other cultures? In our new column, “Traditions,” we aim to explore the origins of various wedding customs from the United States and around the world.
On the night before a wedding, a purposeful cacophony of shattering plates at a party isn’t the norm — unless you are participating in the Polterabend, a German tradition that means “eve of making a racket.”
On July 9, 2011, Ingrid Busson-Hall embraced the Polterabend tradition the evening before her wedding. She married Scott Hall, 56, a co-founder of Althub, an investment consulting service, at her parents’ home in St.-Sauveur, Quebec.
“My mother is German,” said Ms. Busson-Hall, 49, a regulatory and enforcement lawyer. “My parents had a Polterabend at their wedding. This honored my mom’s side of the family.”
For the couple’s Polteraband, a friend built a wooden box the size of a dining table. After the couple explained the tradition to 100 wedding guests, they threw the first plate together into the box. Their guests followed suit — everyone had been asked to bring a porcelain dish or cup from home.
“Some guests shouted good wishes when they smashed their plates, others danced,” Ms. Busson-Hall said. “We swept up the pieces that spilled out of the box together, which was my favorite part. It’s a reminder that while building a life together, things break, but none strong enough to break the bond of marriage.”
Shards of Tradition
The origins of such rituals are often impossible to trace, said Joel F. Harrington, a professor of history who specializes in early modern Germany at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
“These pre-Christian, Germanic customs have become about two parts: scaring off evil spirits because of the loud noise made by the broken plates, and shards bringing luck, something everyone wants,” he said.
In ancient times, shards were made from breaking clay pots. The belief was that “‘shards bring luck,’ which became ‘broken shards bring luck,’” Dr. Harrington said, adding that traditions generally originate from sayings. “The first record of Polterabend is during the 16th century. When it actually started, we don’t know.”
The act of breaking plates is believed to represent a couple’s first moment of unity and teamwork. The evolution of this ritual, Dr. Harrington said, is likely to be recent: It “was probably introduced during the 18th and 19th century, as romantic love in culture and literature came into focus,” he said. “People add new interpretations to the customs, that’s why they get reinvented. As time goes on, it accumulates different meanings and iterations.”
For Meena Lee-DePasquale, the owner and designer at 5th Avenue Weddings & Events, a wedding planning company in Manhattan, the continuation of traditions and culture is crucial. “I’m known for mixed-culture weddings,” Ms. Lee-DePasquale said. “Blending those cultures together is best done by understanding customs, traditions and rituals.”
For the past 13 years, Ms. Lee-DePasquale has worked with couples to incorporate their cultures into modern celebrations. For a wedding that combined Hawaiian Japanese and American Latin cultures, “we had custom sake cups made for each guest to do the traditional Hawaiian banzai toast and served musubi during cocktail hour, as well as had cherry blossom centerpieces,” she said. She has also planned Indian and Quaker, as well as Jewish and Chinese celebrations.
“People smashed porcelain, stoneware and pottery back in medieval times as opposed to glass, which was considered good luck and owned by the wealthy,” she said. “The noise from the broken plates was to ward off evil spirits. The more shards, the more luck the couple would experience.”
Centuries later, a second step in this ritual emerged.
“The couple sweep up the broken shards together to chase away the evil spirits and to represent their first shared task,” Ms. Lee-DePasquale said. “It symbolizes working as a team in life and in their marriage.”
A Modern Spin on Fragments
As destructive as it may appear, the symbolic custom of shattering items during wedding events is common in many cultures. For instance, Greek weddings also entail smashing plates, while couples at Jewish wedding ceremonies deliberately step on glass to break it.
“In Guatemala, a groom’s mother will often wear a white ceramic bell, usually filled with rice, which she breaks open once the couple is married,” said Claire Stewart, an associate professor of hospitality management at New York City College of Technology at the City University of New York. “She breaks the bell for good luck. The rice is for fertility.”
All of these acts are visual and auditory demonstrations in most cultures, “a disruption to indicate this is a special day and is to be remembered,” added Ms. Stewart, who is also the author of “As Long as We Both Shall Eat: A History of Wedding Food and Feasts.”
But the Polterabend is unique, “as the ritual originally took place the night before,” Ms. Lee-DePasquale said, “rather than at the wedding, say, like Greek or Jewish customs generally state.” Recently, more couples have asked her to incorporate these traditions into weddings.
And over the years, despite the adaptations and variations to the Polterabend, the sentiment remains the same.
Today, extra-thin and inexpensive specialty plates — specifically made for breaking — are starting to replace porcelain and pottery. And rather than throwing the plates away from themselves, “people are throwing them at their feet and then dancing over the shards,” Ms. Lee-DePasquale said. “It still has a sound, so spirits are warded off, but it’s more about a celebration and bringing in luck.”
For
Ms. Busson-Hall, “doing the Polterabend was an exhilarating, meaningful experience,” she said. “I can’t imagine not having that moment.”
|
Weddings are steeped in tradition, but where did those traditions come from? And how do those customs differ in other cultures? In our new column, “Traditions,” we aim to explore the origins of various wedding customs from the United States and around the world.
On the night before a wedding, a purposeful cacophony of shattering plates at a party isn’t the norm — unless you are participating in the Polterabend, a German tradition that means “eve of making a racket.”
On July 9, 2011, Ingrid Busson-Hall embraced the Polterabend tradition the evening before her wedding. She married Scott Hall, 56, a co-founder of Althub, an investment consulting service, at her parents’ home in St.-Sauveur, Quebec.
“My mother is German,” said Ms. Busson-Hall, 49, a regulatory and enforcement lawyer. “My parents had a Polterabend at their wedding. This honored my mom’s side of the family.”
For the couple’s Polteraband, a friend built a wooden box the size of a dining table. After the couple explained the tradition to 100 wedding guests, they threw the first plate together into the box. Their guests followed suit — everyone had been asked to bring a porcelain dish or cup from home.
“Some guests shouted good wishes when they smashed their plates, others danced,” Ms. Busson-Hall said. “We swept up the pieces that spilled out of the box together, which was my favorite part. It’s a reminder that while building a life together, things break, but none strong enough to break the bond of marriage.”
Shards of Tradition
The origins of such rituals are often impossible to trace, said Joel F. Harrington, a professor of history who specializes in early modern Germany at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
“These pre-Christian, Germanic customs have become about two parts: scaring off evil spirits because of the loud noise made by the broken plates, and shards bringing luck, something everyone wants,” he said.
In ancient times, shards were made from breaking clay pots. The belief was that “‘shards bring luck,’ which became ‘broken shards bring luck,’” Dr. Harrington said, adding that traditions generally originate from sayings. “The first record of Polterabend is during the 16th century. When it actually started, we don’t know.”
The act of breaking plates
|
is believed to represent a couple’s first moment of unity and teamwork. The evolution of this ritual, Dr. Harrington said, is likely to be recent: It “was probably introduced during the 18th and 19th century, as romantic love in culture and literature came into focus,” he said. “People add new interpretations to the customs, that’s why they get reinvented. As time goes on, it accumulates different meanings and iterations.”
For Meena Lee-DePasquale, the owner and designer at 5th Avenue Weddings & Events, a wedding planning company in Manhattan, the continuation of traditions and culture is crucial. “I’m known for mixed-culture weddings,” Ms. Lee-DePasquale said. “Blending those cultures together is best done by understanding customs, traditions and rituals.”
For the past 13 years, Ms. Lee-DePasquale has worked with couples to incorporate their cultures into modern celebrations. For a wedding that combined Hawaiian Japanese and American Latin cultures, “we had custom sake cups made for each guest to do the traditional Hawaiian banzai toast and served musubi during cocktail hour, as well as had cherry blossom centerpieces,” she said. She has also planned Indian and Quaker, as well as Jewish and Chinese celebrations.
“People smashed porcelain, stoneware and pottery back in medieval times as opposed to glass, which was considered good luck and owned by the wealthy,” she said. “The noise from the broken plates was to ward off evil spirits. The more shards, the more luck the couple would experience.”
Centuries later, a second step in this ritual emerged.
“The couple sweep up the broken shards together to chase away the evil spirits and to represent their first shared task,” Ms. Lee-DePasquale said. “It symbolizes working as a team in life and in their marriage.”
A Modern Spin on Fragments
As destructive as it may appear, the symbolic custom of shattering items during wedding events is common in many cultures. For instance, Greek weddings also entail smashing plates, while couples at Jewish wedding ceremonies deliberately step on glass to break it.
“In Guatemala, a groom’s mother will often wear a white ceramic bell, usually filled with rice, which she breaks open once the couple is married,” said Claire Stewart, an associate professor of hospitality management at New York City College of Technology at the City University of New York. “She breaks the bell for good luck. The rice is for fertility.”
All of these acts are visual and auditory demonstrations in most cultures, “a disruption to indicate this is a special day and is to be remembered,” added Ms. Stewart, who is also the author of “As Long as We Both Shall Eat: A History of Wedding Food and Feasts.”
But the Polterabend is unique, “as the ritual originally took place the night before,” Ms. Lee-DePasquale said, “rather than at the wedding, say, like Greek or Jewish customs generally state.” Recently, more couples have asked her to incorporate these traditions into weddings.
And over the years, despite the adaptations and variations to the Polterabend, the sentiment remains the same.
Today, extra-thin and inexpensive specialty plates — specifically made for breaking — are starting to replace porcelain and pottery. And rather than throwing the plates away from themselves, “people are throwing them at their feet and then dancing over the shards,” Ms. Lee-DePasquale said. “It still has a sound, so spirits are warded off, but it’s more about a celebration and bringing in luck.”
For
Ms. Busson-Hall, “doing the Polterabend was an exhilarating, meaningful experience,” she said. “I can’t imagine not having that moment.”
|
71e75b78-3e27-44cd-8e1a-098a83f0aaf7
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/04/arts/television/whats-on-tv-this-week-dancing-with-the-stars-and-murder-in-boston.html
|
What’s on TV This Week: ‘Dancing With the Stars’ and ‘Murder in Boston’
|
2023-12-04
|
nytimes
|
Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Dec. 4-10. Details and times are subject to change.
Monday
MURDER IN BOSTON
9 p.m. on HBO.
On Oct. 23, 1989, the Boston Police Department received a panicked call from Charles Stuart saying that he and his pregnant wife, a white couple, had been shot in their car by a Black man. Later his wife died, and a manhunt around Boston led to the arrest of multiple Black men, even though Stuart’s brother would go on to name Charles as the murderer. Footage from the CBS docuseries “Rescue 911,” which happened to be shadowing the response to Stuart’s call that night, is used in this documentary, which casts the case as a microcosm of bigger problems in race relations in the city.
BARMAGEDDON: BLAKE SHELTON’S HOLIDAY BARTACULAR
10 p.m. on NBC.
Blake Shelton is up to his usual bar game shenanigans, this time with a holiday flair. In this special, he will be going up against the rapper and actor Ice-T in games including “Merry Axe-Mas,” “Christmas Carol-okie” and “Little Drummer Boy (and Girl)” — your guess on what they entail is as good as mine.
Tuesday
DANCING WITH THE STARS
8 p.m. on ABC.
The 32nd season of this Latin and ballroom dance competition show has been the first without former lead judge
Len Goodman
, who died early this year. Because of this, the winning couple will receive the Len Goodman Mirrorball Trophy. Last week, in a gotcha-type twist, no couples were eliminated from the semifinals, meaning that for the first time, five couples will be competing for the trophy. There are some great competitors this year, so the winner will be a toss up, but my money is on the 17-year-old actress Xochitl Gomez and her partner Val Chmerkovskiy.
Wednesday
2024 REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY DEBATE
8 p.m. on The CW.
This marks the fourth Republican primary debate of this election cycle — this time at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida; Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador; and Vivek Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur are expected to qualify. As has been his pattern this year, Donald J. Trump will skip the debate and instead attend a fund-raiser.
Thursday
BACHELOR IN PARADISE
8 p.m. on ABC.
It’s been a sweaty and tearful couple weeks on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, and finally we will see who gets engaged and who leaves solo. So far only one couple on the beach is of official boyfriend-girlfriend status, and after a bunch of people left last week, including Rachel and Blake, every couple seems a little mismatch. So maybe no bling will be thrown around in this episode.
CHRISTMAS AT THE OPRY
8 p.m. on NBC.
This two-hour special hosted by Wynonna Judd is all things festive and all things country. Kelly Clarkson, Chrissy Metz and Lauren Alaina are just a few of the many singers set to perform.
Friday
FROZEN (2013)
8:20 p.m. on Freeform.
It’s hard to believe that it was 10 years ago when my stepsister dragged me to what I thought was a children’s movie, and then I left the theater sobbing — and I haven’t gotten “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” out of my head since. Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell voice the sisters Elsa and Anna, who find themselves on an adventure with a snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad) and the ice harvester Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) after things go awry at the palace.
FROZEN 2 (2019)
10:50 p.m. on Freeform.
The sequel is set three years after Anna’s
problematic
fiancé tried to freeze her to death, and things are going pretty well — until Elsa feels unsettled, and the crew heads out to find an autumn-bound forest in an enchanted land. “The emphasis remains on the sisters,” Manohla Dargis
wrote in her review for The New York Times
. “It’s never surprising, yet its bursts of pictorial imagination — snowflakes that streak like shooting stars — keep you engaged, as do Elsa and Anna, who still aren’t waiting for life to happen.”
Saturday
MEAN GIRLS (2004)
3:30 p.m. on VH1.
If you want to prep for the new musical movie (whose trailer pretends it is not a musical) coming out in January, this is your moment. The original follows Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who moves from Africa to the suburbs of Illinois and falls in with the popular girls known as the Plastics: Regina George (Rachel McAdams), Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried) and Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert). So many zeitgeist-y quotes have come from this movie, it’s never a bad idea to brush up. (My favorite: “I saw Cady Heron wearing army pants and flip flops, so I wore army pants and flip-flops.”)
Sunday
A GRAMMY SALUTE TO 50 YEARS OF HIP HOP
8:30 p.m. on CBS.
Taking place live on Wednesday in Inglewood, Calif., some of the biggest names in hip-hop are gathering to continue their ode to 50 years of the genre, including Queen Latifah, Rick Ross, LL Cool J, Common and so many more.
|
Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Dec. 4-10. Details and times are subject to change.
Monday
MURDER IN BOSTON
9 p.m. on HBO.
On Oct. 23, 1989, the Boston Police Department received a panicked call from Charles Stuart saying that he and his pregnant wife, a white couple, had been shot in their car by a Black man. Later his wife died, and a manhunt around Boston led to the arrest of multiple Black men, even though Stuart’s brother would go on to name Charles as the murderer. Footage from the CBS docuseries “Rescue 911,” which happened to be shadowing the response to Stuart’s call that night, is used in this documentary, which casts the case as a microcosm of bigger problems in race relations in the city.
BARMAGEDDON: BLAKE SHELTON’S HOLIDAY BARTACULAR
10 p.m. on NBC.
Blake Shelton is up to his usual bar game shenanigans, this time with a holiday flair. In this special, he will be going up against the rapper and actor Ice-T in games including “Merry Axe-Mas,” “Christmas Carol-okie” and “Little Drummer Boy (and Girl)” — your guess on what they entail is as good as mine.
Tuesday
DANCING WITH THE STARS
8 p.m. on ABC.
The 32nd season of this Latin and ballroom dance competition show has been the first without former lead judge
Len Goodman
, who died early this year. Because of this, the winning couple will receive the Len Goodman Mirrorball Trophy. Last week, in a gotcha-type twist, no couples were eliminated from the semifinals, meaning that for the first time, five couples will be competing for the trophy. There are some great competitors this year, so the winner will be a toss up, but my money is on the 17-year-old actress Xochitl Gomez and her partner Val Chmerkovskiy.
Wednesday
2024 REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY DEBATE
8 p.m. on The CW.
This marks the fourth Republican primary debate of this election cycle — this time at the University of Alabama
|
in Tuscaloosa. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida; Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador; and Vivek Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur are expected to qualify. As has been his pattern this year, Donald J. Trump will skip the debate and instead attend a fund-raiser.
Thursday
BACHELOR IN PARADISE
8 p.m. on ABC.
It’s been a sweaty and tearful couple weeks on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, and finally we will see who gets engaged and who leaves solo. So far only one couple on the beach is of official boyfriend-girlfriend status, and after a bunch of people left last week, including Rachel and Blake, every couple seems a little mismatch. So maybe no bling will be thrown around in this episode.
CHRISTMAS AT THE OPRY
8 p.m. on NBC.
This two-hour special hosted by Wynonna Judd is all things festive and all things country. Kelly Clarkson, Chrissy Metz and Lauren Alaina are just a few of the many singers set to perform.
Friday
FROZEN (2013)
8:20 p.m. on Freeform.
It’s hard to believe that it was 10 years ago when my stepsister dragged me to what I thought was a children’s movie, and then I left the theater sobbing — and I haven’t gotten “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” out of my head since. Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell voice the sisters Elsa and Anna, who find themselves on an adventure with a snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad) and the ice harvester Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) after things go awry at the palace.
FROZEN 2 (2019)
10:50 p.m. on Freeform.
The sequel is set three years after Anna’s
problematic
fiancé tried to freeze her to death, and things are going pretty well — until Elsa feels unsettled, and the crew heads out to find an autumn-bound forest in an enchanted land. “The emphasis remains on the sisters,” Manohla Dargis
wrote in her review for The New York Times
. “It’s never surprising, yet its bursts of pictorial imagination — snowflakes that streak like shooting stars — keep you engaged, as do Elsa and Anna, who still aren’t waiting for life to happen.”
Saturday
MEAN GIRLS (2004)
3:30 p.m. on VH1.
If you want to prep for the new musical movie (whose trailer pretends it is not a musical) coming out in January, this is your moment. The original follows Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who moves from Africa to the suburbs of Illinois and falls in with the popular girls known as the Plastics: Regina George (Rachel McAdams), Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried) and Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert). So many zeitgeist-y quotes have come from this movie, it’s never a bad idea to brush up. (My favorite: “I saw Cady Heron wearing army pants and flip flops, so I wore army pants and flip-flops.”)
Sunday
A GRAMMY SALUTE TO 50 YEARS OF HIP HOP
8:30 p.m. on CBS.
Taking place live on Wednesday in Inglewood, Calif., some of the biggest names in hip-hop are gathering to continue their ode to 50 years of the genre, including Queen Latifah, Rick Ross, LL Cool J, Common and so many more.
|
0a40183a-1414-4668-aab6-7ee72b5b5b31
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/12/books/review/read-like-wind-book-recommendations.html
|
Purging Books, Making Art and Ruling Chicago
|
2023-08-12
|
nytimes
|
Dear readers,
During a recent bookshelf purge, I realized that over the years I had acquired dozens of volumes simply because I couldn’t resist their gnomic titles. (“Four Frightened People,” “Mushroom Town” and “Keeping a Horse in the Suburbs” all ended up on our laundry room’s giveaway table.)
A whole shelf was given over just to memoirs with grandiose titles: “Champagne … and Real Pain” by the former society columnist Maggi Nolan, “Polly’s Principles: Polly Bergen Tells You How You Can Feel and Look as Young as She Does,” by the selfsame TV personality; the peerless “Memoirs of a Professional Cad,” obviously by George Sanders, who in his lifetime managed to marry two different Gabor sisters. (An honorable mention must be awarded to George Hamilton’s “Don’t Mind if I Do.”)
The following books are biographies, not memoirs, but they have earned a lasting place on the shelf for more than just their beautiful titles.
—
Sadie Stein
This 1971 best seller is the most informative L ride of a page-turner you’ll ever read. You don’t have to be fascinated by the sinister Daley Machine of Chicago — or the mayor’s notorious tenure — to get sucked into this hard-boiled powerhouse, clocking in at a slim 216 pages in paperback. Given to me by a city reporter friend, this has become one of the books I recommend most for unlikely escapism. But you don’t have to take my word for it! As Studs Terkel wrote in these pages, this “incredible inside story of the last of the backroom Caesars” is “stunning, astonishing, myth-shattering.” Jimmy Breslin was more restrained, calling it “the best book ever written about an American city by the best journalist of his time!”
Read if you like:
“His Girl Friday,” “Fire and Fury,” Nelson Algren
Available from:
A well-stocked library or your favorite book barn
First published in 1982 with the straightforward subtitle “A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin,” this is in fact so much more. Yes, Weschler explores Irwin’s early years with the California Abstract Expressionist school, and his move into spatial experimentation. We study the gardens of the Getty Center; Dia Beacon; Irwin’s light installations. You’ll come away with solid knowledge of the 20th-century art world.
But more than this, it’s a three-decade (and counting) conversation between artists that verges on the philosophical. What does it mean to exist within space? What is our relationship to it? To art and nature? If this sounds dry or tedious, let me assure you otherwise: It may take you a few pages to adjust to the book’s pacing — nothing is rushed here — but if you give the spare prose a chance, you will have read something that will never leave you. There is an asceticism to Irwin’s approach, meticulous craft wedded to absolute purity of intent, that is inspiring. In Irwin’s own words: “For the next week, try the best you can to pay attention to sounds. You will start hearing all these sounds coming in. Once you let them in, you’ve already done the first and most critical thing, you’ve honored that information by including it. And by doing that, you’ve actually changed the world.”
Read if you like:
John Cage’s “Three Dances,” “I Love Dick” (the book), Werner Herzog’s “Fata Morgana.”
Available from:
a
good bookstore
Why don’t you …
Redecorate via book?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that “À Rebours” has some of the best interiors descriptions in fiction. But just as riveting is
“Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant,”
in which the bright young thing decorates his eccentric estate, Wilsford Manor, along similarly decadent lines. Does decadence — or bright young thingdom, for that matter — age comfortably? You be the judge.
Reconsider linen?
Let us say you have a journey of approximately one and one half hours to kill. Let us say you want to read something impeccably good, and impeccably odd, that straddles the line between experimental novella, prose poem, book of aphorisms and ironic manifesto — and that has Wayne Thiebaud cakes on the cover into the bargain? Helen DeWitt’s
“The English Understand Wool”
is calling your name.
Brush up on grammar?
Some people count sheep; others meditate; someone was just telling me about drinking magnesium; my friend listens to the audiobook of
“The Underground Railroad”
over and over. Lately, I’ve been rereading
“The Elements of Style.”
Not only does any given page contain the kind of no-nonsense elegance that only E.B. White can sing, but with a little luck sleep will set your thoughts and you’ll wake up with a fixed knowledge of “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused.”
Thank you for being a subscriber
Plunge further into
books at The New York Times
or
our reading recommendations
.
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up
here
. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters
here
.
Friendly reminder: check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online.
|
Dear readers,
During a recent bookshelf purge, I realized that over the years I had acquired dozens of volumes simply because I couldn’t resist their gnomic titles. (“Four Frightened People,” “Mushroom Town” and “Keeping a Horse in the Suburbs” all ended up on our laundry room’s giveaway table.)
A whole shelf was given over just to memoirs with grandiose titles: “Champagne … and Real Pain” by the former society columnist Maggi Nolan, “Polly’s Principles: Polly Bergen Tells You How You Can Feel and Look as Young as She Does,” by the selfsame TV personality; the peerless “Memoirs of a Professional Cad,” obviously by George Sanders, who in his lifetime managed to marry two different Gabor sisters. (An honorable mention must be awarded to George Hamilton’s “Don’t Mind if I Do.”)
The following books are biographies, not memoirs, but they have earned a lasting place on the shelf for more than just their beautiful titles.
—
Sadie Stein
This 1971 best seller is the most informative L ride of a page-turner you’ll ever read. You don’t have to be fascinated by the sinister Daley Machine of Chicago — or the mayor’s notorious tenure — to get sucked into this hard-boiled powerhouse, clocking in at a slim 216 pages in paperback. Given to me by a city reporter friend, this has become one of the books I recommend most for unlikely escapism. But you don’t have to take my word for it! As Studs Terkel wrote in these pages, this “incredible inside story of the last of the backroom Caesars” is “stunning, astonishing, myth-shattering.” Jimmy Breslin was more restrained, calling it “the best book ever written about an American city by the best journalist of his time!”
Read if you like:
“His Girl Friday,” “Fire and Fury,” Nelson Algren
Available from:
A well-stocked library or your favorite book barn
First published in 1982 with the straightforward subtitle “A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin,” this is in fact so much more. Yes, Weschler explores Irwin’s early years with the California Abstract Expressionist school, and his move into spatial experimentation. We study the gardens of the Getty Center; Dia Beacon; Irwin’s light installations. You’ll come away with solid knowledge of the
|
20th-century art world.
But more than this, it’s a three-decade (and counting) conversation between artists that verges on the philosophical. What does it mean to exist within space? What is our relationship to it? To art and nature? If this sounds dry or tedious, let me assure you otherwise: It may take you a few pages to adjust to the book’s pacing — nothing is rushed here — but if you give the spare prose a chance, you will have read something that will never leave you. There is an asceticism to Irwin’s approach, meticulous craft wedded to absolute purity of intent, that is inspiring. In Irwin’s own words: “For the next week, try the best you can to pay attention to sounds. You will start hearing all these sounds coming in. Once you let them in, you’ve already done the first and most critical thing, you’ve honored that information by including it. And by doing that, you’ve actually changed the world.”
Read if you like:
John Cage’s “Three Dances,” “I Love Dick” (the book), Werner Herzog’s “Fata Morgana.”
Available from:
a
good bookstore
Why don’t you …
Redecorate via book?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that “À Rebours” has some of the best interiors descriptions in fiction. But just as riveting is
“Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant,”
in which the bright young thing decorates his eccentric estate, Wilsford Manor, along similarly decadent lines. Does decadence — or bright young thingdom, for that matter — age comfortably? You be the judge.
Reconsider linen?
Let us say you have a journey of approximately one and one half hours to kill. Let us say you want to read something impeccably good, and impeccably odd, that straddles the line between experimental novella, prose poem, book of aphorisms and ironic manifesto — and that has Wayne Thiebaud cakes on the cover into the bargain? Helen DeWitt’s
“The English Understand Wool”
is calling your name.
Brush up on grammar?
Some people count sheep; others meditate; someone was just telling me about drinking magnesium; my friend listens to the audiobook of
“The Underground Railroad”
over and over. Lately, I’ve been rereading
“The Elements of Style.”
Not only does any given page contain the kind of no-nonsense elegance that only E.B. White can sing, but with a little luck sleep will set your thoughts and you’ll wake up with a fixed knowledge of “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused.”
Thank you for being a subscriber
Plunge further into
books at The New York Times
or
our reading recommendations
.
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up
here
. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters
here
.
Friendly reminder: check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online.
|
c6346eae-cdc4-4ab1-905d-640c484e6f59
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/climate/california-rain-hurricane-hilary.html
|
Tropical Storm Hilary Is Latest in a Year of Weather Extremes for California
|
2023-08-19
|
nytimes
|
For California, where
punishing droughts
over the past two decades have shriveled crops and caused wells to run dry, it has been another year of extremes. Only this time, they’re of the opposite kind.
It started with winter storms that
drenched cities and towns
,
buried the Sierra Nevada
in snow and caused
an enormous long-vanished lake
to reappear in the Central Valley. And it is poised to pass another milestone this weekend, as Hurricane Hilary lashes Southern California and its bone-dry inland deserts, which normally receive only a scant few inches of rain a year.
All of this is quite a turnaround from the past three years, the state’s driest on record, when officials were
imposing strict controls
to save water.
Hilary, which forecasters say could weaken to a tropical storm by the time it makes landfall in California, has no direct meteorological connection with the storms from early this year. But, taken together, they reinforce a key maxim about the weather in California: There’s no such thing as an average year — only very wet, or very dry.
“This year is going to be known as just a tale of extremes that worked all the way through the year,” said Michael Anderson, California’s state climatologist.
In a warming climate, we should expect to see more of such extremes, Dr. Anderson said. Still, “to have them all happen in the same year, in and of itself might be its own extreme,” he said.
Nowhere in the contiguous United States does precipitation vary year to year
more than in California
, and southeastern California in particular. The state’s Mediterranean climate — with hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters — means the atmospheric-river-fed storms that hit the state between November and March deliver most of the water it gets for the entire year. This variability is a major factor in the state’s perennial struggles to supply water to both its giant population and its farm sector.
California often receives more rain during periods of
El Niño
, the recurring climate pattern related to sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific. But this past winter’s storms swept through during its opposite phase, La Niña. El Niño conditions arrived in late spring and are expected to persist into next year, which could mean another wet winter is ahead for California.
Also in the background: climate change. As societies burn fossil fuels and heat the planet, the warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. This means storms in many places, California included, are more likely to be very intense.
Especially in the context of some other extreme weather that North America has experienced this year — exceptional heat waves in the Southern United States; wildfires exacerbated by warmth and drought in Canada; torrential rain and flooding in
Pennsylvania
,
Kentucky
,
Vermont
and other regions — California’s storms fit a pattern, said Michael Dettinger, a hydrologist and climatologist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev.
Different atmospheric mechanisms are at play in each of these extreme events, he said. But “the unrelenting nature of these compounding events sure seems to reflect something deeper than the individual events, by which I imply climate change unchained,” Dr. Dettinger said.
An unusual confluence of factors is leading Hilary to menace Southern California, where
a tropical storm
hasn’t made landfall in more than 80 years.
The waters of the Pacific off the coast of Mexico have been warmer than normal, which allowed Hilary to acquire extra energy as it formed over the ocean. A heat dome over the central United States and a low-pressure system off the California coast have also been steering the storm toward California and the Southwest rather than out to sea.
“Occasionally Mother Nature lines everything up,” Dr. Anderson, the state climatologist, said.
The feast-or-famine nature of California precipitation means that even a very wet year like this one can only boost water supplies so much before scarcity becomes a problem again.
“The reservoirs might be full, but the ground is still dry,” said Jay Cordeira, an atmospheric scientist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which is part of the University of California, San Diego. He pointed to this month’s uptick in wildfire activity, including in the state’s northern forests, where evacuations have been ordered near the Oregon border.
Fundamentally, California has “a baseline-drought climate punctuated by rainy periods,” Dr. Cordeira said.
One way growers and landowners are trying to cope with these swings is by taking water from downpours and channeling it into the earth, where it can effectively be held in reserve for later use. In principle, this can reduce flood threats to homes and communities while also helping build up a lifeline for farmers against future droughts.
But making it work on a large scale takes lots of planning and infrastructure, including pumps, canals and basins. There are also
knotty legal complexities
: California regulates who gets to reroute water from creeks and rivers, to protect the rights of people downstream.
State authorities have worked to help local water districts overcome these hurdles and replenish their aquifers. Earlier this year,
92,410 acre-feet of potential floodwaters
were diverted underground in response to an executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom, according to the state’s Department of Water Resources. (An acre-foot is the amount of water used by two to three households a year.)
The progress has been heartening to see, said Philip Bachand, an engineer who works on groundwater recharge projects in different parts of California. But, he said, the state still needs to be putting much more water into the ground each year if it is to have any hope of reversing the damage from decades of aquifer depletion and overuse. And the obstacles to making that happen — logistical, technical, legal — remain great.
“I just don’t know if it gets worked out in time,” he said. “I really worry about that.”
|
For California, where
punishing droughts
over the past two decades have shriveled crops and caused wells to run dry, it has been another year of extremes. Only this time, they’re of the opposite kind.
It started with winter storms that
drenched cities and towns
,
buried the Sierra Nevada
in snow and caused
an enormous long-vanished lake
to reappear in the Central Valley. And it is poised to pass another milestone this weekend, as Hurricane Hilary lashes Southern California and its bone-dry inland deserts, which normally receive only a scant few inches of rain a year.
All of this is quite a turnaround from the past three years, the state’s driest on record, when officials were
imposing strict controls
to save water.
Hilary, which forecasters say could weaken to a tropical storm by the time it makes landfall in California, has no direct meteorological connection with the storms from early this year. But, taken together, they reinforce a key maxim about the weather in California: There’s no such thing as an average year — only very wet, or very dry.
“This year is going to be known as just a tale of extremes that worked all the way through the year,” said Michael Anderson, California’s state climatologist.
In a warming climate, we should expect to see more of such extremes, Dr. Anderson said. Still, “to have them all happen in the same year, in and of itself might be its own extreme,” he said.
Nowhere in the contiguous United States does precipitation vary year to year
more than in California
, and southeastern California in particular. The state’s Mediterranean climate — with hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters — means the atmospheric-river-fed storms that hit the state between November and March deliver most of the water it gets for the entire year. This variability is a major factor in the state’s perennial struggles to supply water to both its giant population and its farm sector.
California often receives more rain during periods of
El Niño
, the recurring climate pattern related to sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific. But this past winter’s storms swept through during its opposite phase, La Niña. El Niño conditions arrived in late spring and are expected to persist into next year, which could mean another wet winter is ahead for California.
Also in the background: climate change. As societies burn fossil fuels and heat the planet, the warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. This means storms in many
|
places, California included, are more likely to be very intense.
Especially in the context of some other extreme weather that North America has experienced this year — exceptional heat waves in the Southern United States; wildfires exacerbated by warmth and drought in Canada; torrential rain and flooding in
Pennsylvania
,
Kentucky
,
Vermont
and other regions — California’s storms fit a pattern, said Michael Dettinger, a hydrologist and climatologist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev.
Different atmospheric mechanisms are at play in each of these extreme events, he said. But “the unrelenting nature of these compounding events sure seems to reflect something deeper than the individual events, by which I imply climate change unchained,” Dr. Dettinger said.
An unusual confluence of factors is leading Hilary to menace Southern California, where
a tropical storm
hasn’t made landfall in more than 80 years.
The waters of the Pacific off the coast of Mexico have been warmer than normal, which allowed Hilary to acquire extra energy as it formed over the ocean. A heat dome over the central United States and a low-pressure system off the California coast have also been steering the storm toward California and the Southwest rather than out to sea.
“Occasionally Mother Nature lines everything up,” Dr. Anderson, the state climatologist, said.
The feast-or-famine nature of California precipitation means that even a very wet year like this one can only boost water supplies so much before scarcity becomes a problem again.
“The reservoirs might be full, but the ground is still dry,” said Jay Cordeira, an atmospheric scientist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which is part of the University of California, San Diego. He pointed to this month’s uptick in wildfire activity, including in the state’s northern forests, where evacuations have been ordered near the Oregon border.
Fundamentally, California has “a baseline-drought climate punctuated by rainy periods,” Dr. Cordeira said.
One way growers and landowners are trying to cope with these swings is by taking water from downpours and channeling it into the earth, where it can effectively be held in reserve for later use. In principle, this can reduce flood threats to homes and communities while also helping build up a lifeline for farmers against future droughts.
But making it work on a large scale takes lots of planning and infrastructure, including pumps, canals and basins. There are also
knotty legal complexities
: California regulates who gets to reroute water from creeks and rivers, to protect the rights of people downstream.
State authorities have worked to help local water districts overcome these hurdles and replenish their aquifers. Earlier this year,
92,410 acre-feet of potential floodwaters
were diverted underground in response to an executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom, according to the state’s Department of Water Resources. (An acre-foot is the amount of water used by two to three households a year.)
The progress has been heartening to see, said Philip Bachand, an engineer who works on groundwater recharge projects in different parts of California. But, he said, the state still needs to be putting much more water into the ground each year if it is to have any hope of reversing the damage from decades of aquifer depletion and overuse. And the obstacles to making that happen — logistical, technical, legal — remain great.
“I just don’t know if it gets worked out in time,” he said. “I really worry about that.”
|
20114e6e-abb6-4402-9553-a7c851d38cd4
|
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/04/26/nyregion/trump-carroll-rape-trial-updates/carrolls-discussion-of-emotional-scars-is-meant-to-make-the-trials-stakes-clear
|
E. Jean Carroll Accuses Trump of Rape in Testimony
|
2023-04-26
|
nytimes
|
Just before she began testifying in federal court, the former president infuriated the judge overseeing the case by railing against the proceeding on social media. Mr. Trump, who has so far avoided the trial, was not there as Ms. Carroll related a tale she said she had waited decades to tell.
“Being able to get my day in court, finally, is everything to me,” she said, her shaky voice rising. “I’m happy. I’m glad that I got to tell my story.”
Ms. Carroll spoke of an encounter that haunted her and ended her romantic life for good.
“I was ashamed. I thought it was my fault,” she said, describing how she had initially been laughing and joking with Mr. Trump after she ran into him at Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan. “It was high comedy. It was funny, and then to have it turn into the …” Her voice then trailed off.
Ms. Carroll, 79, testified on Day 2 of the civil trial stemming from the lawsuit she filed against Mr. Trump last year under a
New York law
that granted adult sexual assault victims a one-year window to seek redress for long-ago events. Her suit, heard in federal court because she and Mr. Trump live in different states, added to a litany of legal action against him.
She is seeking damages for battery in connection with the rape allegations and also for defamation for the attacks he made on her on his Truth Social platform last October, when he called her case a “Hoax and a lie.”
Mr. Trump, 76, who has denied Ms. Carroll’s allegations, has not said whether he will testify in his own defense and has not appeared in court so far. Seeking to regain the presidency, he is scheduled to make a campaign appearance in New Hampshire Thursday. But from outside the courtroom, he attacked the proceedings within.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump used Truth Social to call Ms. Carroll’s case a “made up SCAM” and a “fraudulent & false story,” which led the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court, to suggest that the former president was trying to influence the jury.
Speaking without the jury present, Judge Kaplan told Mr. Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina that Mr. Trump’s statements seemed “entirely inappropriate.”
“Your client is basically endeavoring certainly to speak to his ‘public,’” Judge Kaplan said, “but, more troublesome, to the jury in this case about stuff that has no business being spoken about.”
The judge implied the statements could lead to a contempt sanction by the court.
Mr. Tacopina said he would talk with his client, but attacks continued, with Mr. Trump’s son, Eric, posting later in the day on Twitter that a prominent backer of Ms. Carroll’s case had been motivated by “pure hatred, spite or fear of a formidable candidate.”
The Truth Social and Twitter posts were brought to the judge’s attention by Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan. Mr. Tacopina said that he had not seen or been aware of them.
Nonetheless, after Eric Trump’s attack, Judge Kaplan implied that stronger action might be required.
“Remedies that might be available from this court may not be the only relevant remedies,” the judge told Mr. Tacopina. “If I were in your shoes, I’d be having a conversation with the client.”
Mr. Tacopina and Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Ms. Kaplan, had no comment after court.
One legal expert, Daniel C. Richman, a criminal law professor at Columbia Law School and a former prosecutor, said the judge might have been referring to a federal obstruction statute that outlaws efforts to corruptly influence or intimidate a juror, whether in a criminal or civil trial.
It would be another in a series of legal matters facing the former president: Mr. Trump already is facing several criminal investigations, a lawsuit by the New York attorney general and fraud charges filed by the Manhattan district attorney stemming from hush money paid to a porn star. Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty to those charges and has denied wrongdoing in all cases.
While the former president has so far shunned the courtroom where Ms. Carroll’s case is being heard, his accuser relished her chance to speak in an official forum. On the witness stand, she was questioned by one of her lawyers, Michael Ferrara.
“Why are you here today?” Mr. Ferrara asked.
“I am here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen,” Ms. Carroll said. “He lied and shattered my reputation, and I am here to try to get my life back.”
Thus began testimony by Ms. Carroll that lasted most of the day, during which she appeared poised and deliberate but also acknowledged some lapses in her memory. When she was asked precisely when the encounter occurred, she said, “The date has just been something that I am constantly trying to pin down. It’s very difficult.”
There were moments of humor from Ms. Carroll, who once wrote for “Saturday Night Live.” At one point, Mr. Ferrara asked pointedly, “How do you feel about men?”
“I like them!” she said, eliciting a laugh from at least one male juror.
But the courtroom was silent when Ms. Carroll testified in excruciating detail about the events that she said took place nearly 30 years ago.
Ms. Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, told the jury how she had bumped into Mr. Trump as she was leaving Bergdorf’s after work one evening.
“He came through the door and he said, ‘Hey, you are that advice lady,’” she testified, adding that she replied, “Hey, you’re that real estate tycoon.”
She said she was delighted when he asked for her help selecting a gift for a woman. “I love to give advice, and here was Donald Trump asking me for advice about buying a present,” Ms. Carroll testified. “It was a wonderful prospect for me.”
They made their way to the lingerie section, where Mr. Trump found a bodysuit, directing her to “go put this on.” She declined and said he should put it on instead. She recalled how he motioned her over to a dressing room; she said did not see anybody else in the area.
Once they were inside, Mr. Trump immediately shut the door, and the sexual assault began, she said.
“I was extremely confused and suddenly realizing that what I thought was happening was not happening,” Ms. Carroll said. She said she didn’t want to anger Mr. Trump, explaining, “I didn’t want to make a scene.”
She said she pushed him back and he again shoved her against the wall, banging her head. She described how Mr. Trump used his weight to hold her against the wall, then pulled down her tights. Ms. Carroll grew emotional as she testified. “I was pushing him back,” she said. “I was almost too frightened to think if I was afraid or not,” she added later.
“His fingers went into my vagina, which was extremely painful,” Ms. Carroll testified. Then, she said, he inserted his penis. She testified that she had not had sex since.
After the attack, Ms. Carroll said, she fled Bergdorf’s onto Fifth Avenue in a state of shock. She said she blamed herself afterward, saying her decision to go into the dressing room was “very stupid.”
Ms. Carroll testified that she told two friends about her experience within a day of the attack. One, Lisa Birnbach, the author and journalist, told her she had been raped and that she needed to go to the police. A second friend, Carol Martin, told her not to tell anyone because Mr. Trump was powerful and had a team of lawyers who would bury her.
Ms. Carroll remained silent for more than 20 years. “I was frightened of Donald Trump,” she explained.
When Mr. Ferrara asked whether she was afraid of how others might react to her story, Ms. Carroll said rape victims are “looked at as soiled goods.” Although people profess sympathy, they can also be judgmental, she said: A victim should have been smarter, screamed louder, dressed differently. And she said that she had never wanted to tell her family.
Ms. Carroll said “visions” of the incident filled her mind repeatedly over the years. “I’ve had them ever since the attack. They were more frequent right after the attack, and they stayed,” Ms. Carroll said.
She said that the experience had robbed her of an essential sense of possibility.
“I am a happy person, basically, but I’m aware that I have lost out on one of the glorious experiences of any human being,” Ms. Carroll said. “Being in love with somebody else, making dinner with them, walking the dog together.”
“I don’t have that,” she said.
|
Just before she began testifying in federal court, the former president infuriated the judge overseeing the case by railing against the proceeding on social media. Mr. Trump, who has so far avoided the trial, was not there as Ms. Carroll related a tale she said she had waited decades to tell.
“Being able to get my day in court, finally, is everything to me,” she said, her shaky voice rising. “I’m happy. I’m glad that I got to tell my story.”
Ms. Carroll spoke of an encounter that haunted her and ended her romantic life for good.
“I was ashamed. I thought it was my fault,” she said, describing how she had initially been laughing and joking with Mr. Trump after she ran into him at Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan. “It was high comedy. It was funny, and then to have it turn into the …” Her voice then trailed off.
Ms. Carroll, 79, testified on Day 2 of the civil trial stemming from the lawsuit she filed against Mr. Trump last year under a
New York law
that granted adult sexual assault victims a one-year window to seek redress for long-ago events. Her suit, heard in federal court because she and Mr. Trump live in different states, added to a litany of legal action against him.
She is seeking damages for battery in connection with the rape allegations and also for defamation for the attacks he made on her on his Truth Social platform last October, when he called her case a “Hoax and a lie.”
Mr. Trump, 76, who has denied Ms. Carroll’s allegations, has not said whether he will testify in his own defense and has not appeared in court so far. Seeking to regain the presidency, he is scheduled to make a campaign appearance in New Hampshire Thursday. But from outside the courtroom, he attacked the proceedings within.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump used Truth Social to call Ms. Carroll’s case a “made up SCAM” and a “fraudulent & false story,” which led the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court, to suggest that the former president was trying to influence the jury.
Speaking without the jury present, Judge Kaplan told Mr. Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina that Mr. Trump’s statements seemed “entirely inappropriate.”
“Your client is basically endeavoring certainly to speak to his ‘public,’” Judge Kaplan said, “but, more troublesome, to the jury in
|
this case about stuff that has no business being spoken about.”
The judge implied the statements could lead to a contempt sanction by the court.
Mr. Tacopina said he would talk with his client, but attacks continued, with Mr. Trump’s son, Eric, posting later in the day on Twitter that a prominent backer of Ms. Carroll’s case had been motivated by “pure hatred, spite or fear of a formidable candidate.”
The Truth Social and Twitter posts were brought to the judge’s attention by Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan. Mr. Tacopina said that he had not seen or been aware of them.
Nonetheless, after Eric Trump’s attack, Judge Kaplan implied that stronger action might be required.
“Remedies that might be available from this court may not be the only relevant remedies,” the judge told Mr. Tacopina. “If I were in your shoes, I’d be having a conversation with the client.”
Mr. Tacopina and Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Ms. Kaplan, had no comment after court.
One legal expert, Daniel C. Richman, a criminal law professor at Columbia Law School and a former prosecutor, said the judge might have been referring to a federal obstruction statute that outlaws efforts to corruptly influence or intimidate a juror, whether in a criminal or civil trial.
It would be another in a series of legal matters facing the former president: Mr. Trump already is facing several criminal investigations, a lawsuit by the New York attorney general and fraud charges filed by the Manhattan district attorney stemming from hush money paid to a porn star. Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty to those charges and has denied wrongdoing in all cases.
While the former president has so far shunned the courtroom where Ms. Carroll’s case is being heard, his accuser relished her chance to speak in an official forum. On the witness stand, she was questioned by one of her lawyers, Michael Ferrara.
“Why are you here today?” Mr. Ferrara asked.
“I am here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen,” Ms. Carroll said. “He lied and shattered my reputation, and I am here to try to get my life back.”
Thus began testimony by Ms. Carroll that lasted most of the day, during which she appeared poised and deliberate but also acknowledged some lapses in her memory. When she was asked precisely when the encounter occurred, she said, “The date has just been something that I am constantly trying to pin down. It’s very difficult.”
There were moments of humor from Ms. Carroll, who once wrote for “Saturday Night Live.” At one point, Mr. Ferrara asked pointedly, “How do you feel about men?”
“I like them!” she said, eliciting a laugh from at least one male juror.
But the courtroom was silent when Ms. Carroll testified in excruciating detail about the events that she said took place nearly 30 years ago.
Ms. Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, told the jury how she had bumped into Mr. Trump as she was leaving Bergdorf’s after work one evening.
“He came through the door and he said, ‘Hey, you are that advice lady,’” she testified, adding that she replied, “Hey, you’re that real estate tycoon.”
She said she was delighted when he asked for her help selecting a gift for a woman. “I love to give advice, and here was Donald Trump asking me for advice about buying a present,” Ms. Carroll testified. “It was a wonderful prospect for me.”
They made their way to the lingerie section, where Mr. Trump found a bodysuit, directing her to “go put this on.” She declined and said he should put it on instead. She recalled how he motioned her over to a dressing room; she said did not see anybody else in the area.
Once they were inside, Mr. Trump immediately shut the door, and the sexual assault began, she said.
“I was extremely confused and suddenly realizing that what I thought was happening was not happening,” Ms. Carroll said. She said she didn’t want to anger Mr. Trump, explaining, “I didn’t want to make a scene.”
She said she pushed him back and he again shoved her against the wall, banging her head. She described how Mr. Trump used his weight to hold her against the wall, then pulled down her tights. Ms. Carroll grew emotional as she testified. “I was pushing him back,” she said. “I was almost too frightened to think if I was afraid or not,” she added later.
“His fingers went into my vagina, which was extremely painful,” Ms. Carroll testified. Then, she said, he inserted his penis. She testified that she had not had sex since.
After the attack, Ms. Carroll said, she fled Bergdorf’s onto Fifth Avenue in a state of shock. She said she blamed herself afterward, saying her decision to go into the dressing room was “very stupid.”
Ms. Carroll testified that she told two friends about her experience within a day of the attack. One, Lisa Birnbach, the author and journalist, told her she had been raped and that she needed to go to the police. A second friend, Carol Martin, told her not to tell anyone because Mr. Trump was powerful and had a team of lawyers who would bury her.
Ms. Carroll remained silent for more than 20 years. “I was frightened of Donald Trump,” she explained.
When Mr. Ferrara asked whether she was afraid of how others might react to her story, Ms. Carroll said rape victims are “looked at as soiled goods.” Although people profess sympathy, they can also be judgmental, she said: A victim should have been smarter, screamed louder, dressed differently. And she said that she had never wanted to tell her family.
Ms. Carroll said “visions” of the incident filled her mind repeatedly over the years. “I’ve had them ever since the attack. They were more frequent right after the attack, and they stayed,” Ms. Carroll said.
She said that the experience had robbed her of an essential sense of possibility.
“I am a happy person, basically, but I’m aware that I have lost out on one of the glorious experiences of any human being,” Ms. Carroll said. “Being in love with somebody else, making dinner with them, walking the dog together.”
“I don’t have that,” she said.
|
512708e6-590e-444f-a1a1-9ad9f5594b79
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/world/asia/philippines-explosion.html
|
Explosion at Catholic Mass in Philippines Kills 4 and Injures Dozens
|
2023-12-03
|
nytimes
|
At least four people were killed and dozens of others injured on Sunday in an explosion at a Roman Catholic Mass inside a university gymnasium in the southern Philippine city of Marawi, officials said.
The Islamic State later claimed responsibility for the attack in its Telegram channel.
The blast, thought to be caused by a grenade or a homemade bomb, ripped through a gymnasium at Mindanao State University. The university, in Lanao del Sur Province, was at the center of
fighting in 2017
that displaced more than 100,000 people, after local and foreign Islamic State militants laid siege to Marawi.
At least 1,200 militants, government forces and civilians were killed during those
battles
, which lasted for five months. Parts of Marawi, in the region with the country’s biggest Muslim population, remain off limits to civilians because there are still unexploded ordnance from the conflict.
The Amai Pakpak Medical Center in Marawi, to which all of the casualties were rushed, said that four people had died on the spot and that seven others were seriously injured. About 40 others were released after being treated for their wounds, said the hospital, which had said earlier that 11 had died in the blast.
Maj. Gen. Gabriel Viray III, the commander of the First Infantry Division in the area, said an investigation was underway to determine whether the local Islamic state affiliate, known as the Daulah Islamiyah-Maute Group, was responsible. (Daulah Islamiyah means “Islamic State” in the local language.)
“We are looking at the bomb signature and trying to determine if it’s them,” he said.
Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr., the armed forces’ chief of staff, said the attack might have been in response to a clash on Friday that left 11 militants from the local Daulah Islamiyah cell dead in the province of Maguindanao, also in the south.
Additionally on Saturday, he said, government forces staged an operation that killed Mudzimar Sawadjaan, alias Mundi, a senior leader of another group, Abu Sayyaf, that had also pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.
“We are looking at the angle that the bombing this morning might be a retaliatory attack,” General Brawner said.
The nation’s defense secretary, Gilberto Teodoro, said that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had directed the military and the police “to conduct a swift and thorough investigation of the incident.”
For his part, President Marcos assured the public in a statement that “the perpetrators of this senseless act” would be brought to justice, and he promised that additional troops would be deployed to the area and swift government aid given to victims and their families.
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
|
At least four people were killed and dozens of others injured on Sunday in an explosion at a Roman Catholic Mass inside a university gymnasium in the southern Philippine city of Marawi, officials said.
The Islamic State later claimed responsibility for the attack in its Telegram channel.
The blast, thought to be caused by a grenade or a homemade bomb, ripped through a gymnasium at Mindanao State University. The university, in Lanao del Sur Province, was at the center of
fighting in 2017
that displaced more than 100,000 people, after local and foreign Islamic State militants laid siege to Marawi.
At least 1,200 militants, government forces and civilians were killed during those
battles
, which lasted for five months. Parts of Marawi, in the region with the country’s biggest Muslim population, remain off limits to civilians because there are still unexploded ordnance from the conflict.
The Amai Pakpak Medical Center in Marawi, to which all of the casualties were rushed, said that four people had died on the spot and that seven others were seriously injured. About 40 others were released after being treated for their wounds, said the hospital, which had said earlier that 11 had died in the blast.
Maj. Gen. Gabriel Viray III, the commander of the First Infantry Division in the area, said an investigation was underway to determine whether the local Islamic state affiliate, known as the Daulah Islamiyah-Maute Group, was responsible. (Daulah Islamiyah means “Islamic State” in the local language.)
“We are looking at the bomb signature and trying to determine if it’s them,” he said.
Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr., the armed forces’ chief of staff, said the attack might have been in response to a clash on Friday that left 11 militants from the local Daulah Islamiyah cell dead in the province of Maguindanao, also in the south.
Additionally on Saturday, he said, government forces staged an operation that killed Mudzimar Sawadjaan, alias Mundi, a senior leader of another group, Abu Sayyaf, that had also pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.
“We are looking at the angle that the bombing this morning might be a retaliatory attack,” General Brawner said.
The nation’s defense secretary, Gilberto Teodoro, said that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had directed the military and the police “to conduct a swift and thorough
|
investigation of the incident.”
For his part, President Marcos assured the public in a statement that “the perpetrators of this senseless act” would be brought to justice, and he promised that additional troops would be deployed to the area and swift government aid given to victims and their families.
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
|
0af48fc1-a060-4448-b16b-e7239b32ef08
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/world/asia/russia-prigozhin-wagner-ukraine-bakhmut.html
|
Prigozhin, Russia’s Wagner Leader, Says Ukraine Continues to Fight in Bakhmut
|
2023-04-06
|
nytimes
|
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Russia’s Wagner militia, said on Thursday that Ukrainian forces were “not going anywhere” and were continuing to fight in Bakhmut, contradicting his previous assertions that the mercenaries he commands were close to taking control of the bitterly contested city in eastern Ukraine.
The Ukrainians “have organized defense inside the city,” Mr. Prigozhin said on
his social media channel
. “We cannot talk of any offensive yet.”
He also appeared to resurrect some of his previous criticisms of the official Russian military, saying that
better organization and more ammunition would be needed to push beyond the city, a key to Russia’s stalled campaign to claim the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Bakhmut, the focus of 10 months of sustained fighting, has turned into a bleeding sore for the Russian and Ukrainian militaries, erasing entire neighborhoods
and sapping their armies with tens of thousands of deaths and uncounted casualties.
Mr. Prigozhin’s comments came as something of a surprise. Russian forces now surround the city on three sides, and in recent days
appeared to edge closer to the Ukrainian-controlled western side of Bakhmut
.
And on Monday,
Mr. Prigozhin said his fighters had raised Russia’s flag in the center of this city, saying that
“legally, Bakhmut is taken.”
That was followed on Wednesday by a vague hint from the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that Ukraine might eventually retreat.
“For me, the most important issue is our military,” Mr. Zelensky said at a news conference during a visit to neighboring Poland on Wednesday. “Certainly, if there is a moment of even hotter events and the danger that we may lose personnel due to the encirclement, there will certainly be corresponding correct decisions of the general on the ground.”
Mr. Zelensky’s comments did not go beyond what his battlefield commanders have already said: If it appears that Ukrainian forces are about to be surrounded in Bakhmut, they will retreat to preserve lives.
On Thursday, the Ukrainian army’s general staff said in its daily evening bulletin that the assault on Bakhmut and nearby hamlets continued but that Ukrainian forces were still holding the line. “The enemy continues its offensive operations, attempting to take full control of the city of Bakhmut,” the bulletin said. “Fierce fighting continues.”
Mr. Prigozhin, who commands a private army that has waged some of the fiercest fighting on the Russian side,
has frequently complained
about a lack of support from Russia’s Defense Ministry.
|
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Russia’s Wagner militia, said on Thursday that Ukrainian forces were “not going anywhere” and were continuing to fight in Bakhmut, contradicting his previous assertions that the mercenaries he commands were close to taking control of the bitterly contested city in eastern Ukraine.
The Ukrainians “have organized defense inside the city,” Mr. Prigozhin said on
his social media channel
. “We cannot talk of any offensive yet.”
He also appeared to resurrect some of his previous criticisms of the official Russian military, saying that
better organization and more ammunition would be needed to push beyond the city, a key to Russia’s stalled campaign to claim the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Bakhmut, the focus of 10 months of sustained fighting, has turned into a bleeding sore for the Russian and Ukrainian militaries, erasing entire neighborhoods
and sapping their armies with tens of thousands of deaths and uncounted casualties.
Mr. Prigozhin’s comments came as something of a surprise. Russian forces now surround the city on three sides, and in recent days
appeared to edge closer to the Ukrainian-controlled western side of Bakhmut
.
And on Monday,
Mr. Prigozhin said his fighters had raised Russia’s flag in the center of this city, saying that
“legally, Bakhmut is taken.”
That was followed on Wednesday by a vague hint from the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that Ukraine might eventually retreat.
“For me, the most important issue is our military,” Mr. Zelensky said at a news conference during a visit to neighboring Poland on Wednesday. “Certainly, if there is a moment of even hotter events and the danger that we may lose personnel due to the encirclement, there will certainly be corresponding correct decisions of the general on the ground.”
Mr. Zelensky’s comments did not go beyond what his battlefield commanders have already said: If it appears that Ukrainian forces are about to be surrounded in Bakhmut, they will retreat to preserve lives.
On Thursday, the Ukrainian army’s general staff said in its daily evening bulletin that the assault on Bakhmut and nearby hamlets continued but that Ukrainian forces were still holding the line. “The enemy continues its offensive operations, attempting to take full control of the city of Bakhmut,” the bulletin said. “Fierce fighting continues.”
Mr. Prigozhin, who
|
commands a private army that has waged some of the fiercest fighting on the Russian side,
has frequently complained
about a lack of support from Russia’s Defense Ministry.
|
99b6029f-9833-4448-993d-836efc9890cd
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/30/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-netanyahu.html
|
Israelis Advance on Gaza City, as Netanyahu Rules Out Cease-Fire
|
2023-10-30
|
nytimes
|
Israel continued to warn hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate, the World Health Organization
said overnight
. But the W.H.O. said it was impossible to move without risking patients’ lives, and health officials say there is nowhere for them to go, with some hospitals shut down and the remaining ones already overcrowded and dangerously short of essential supplies.
The chief spokesman for Israel’s military, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, declined to say how many Israeli troops were inside Gaza, or where, but confirmed that a combined force of infantry and armored units, operating with air support, was engaging in “expanded ground operations,” but was moving gradually. He said Hamas gunmen typically gather at “staging sites” before trying to attack Israeli soldiers, “after which we strike them from the air.”
Overnight, he added, “dozens of terrorists were eliminated” after they barricaded themselves inside buildings and attempted to attack the soldiers who were moving in their direction. It was not possible to verify Israel’s account of the fighting.
Hamas’s armed wing released a video showing three women who were kidnapped on Oct. 7; one of them sharply criticizes Mr. Netanyahu, saying the hostages are being held in “unbearable conditions” and demanding that he exchange them for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
“When I saw Daniel on television, my heart almost stopped,” said Ramos Aloni, the father of Daniel Aloni, one of the hostages in the Hamas video. “My wife and I were shocked, but we also felt relief — she was alive and we were seeing her.”
Mr. Netanyahu has been under pressure from the families of some hostages held in Gaza, who have accused his government of prioritizing the military campaign over the effort to bring back their loved ones. Some have even expressed willingness to consider a deal that would exchange Israel’s Palestinian prisoners for the hostages.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office called the Hamas video “cruel psychological propaganda,” and in his news conference, the prime minister said the invasion of Gaza “actually creates the possibility of getting our hostages out.”
The Israeli military also said it had rescued a woman, a 19-year-old soldier taken hostage in the Hamas incursion and held in Gaza — the first known rescue operation since the mass abduction on Oct. 7 — as its forces continued their ground invasion there.
Conditions are dire for civilians in Gaza, under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade. Forty-seven trucks carrying food, water, medical supplies and other humanitarian aid entered Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egypt on Sunday, according to a Palestinian official at the crossing. That was the largest one-day total in the nine days since the shipments began, but less than half of what the United Nations says is needed.
|
Israel continued to warn hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate, the World Health Organization
said overnight
. But the W.H.O. said it was impossible to move without risking patients’ lives, and health officials say there is nowhere for them to go, with some hospitals shut down and the remaining ones already overcrowded and dangerously short of essential supplies.
The chief spokesman for Israel’s military, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, declined to say how many Israeli troops were inside Gaza, or where, but confirmed that a combined force of infantry and armored units, operating with air support, was engaging in “expanded ground operations,” but was moving gradually. He said Hamas gunmen typically gather at “staging sites” before trying to attack Israeli soldiers, “after which we strike them from the air.”
Overnight, he added, “dozens of terrorists were eliminated” after they barricaded themselves inside buildings and attempted to attack the soldiers who were moving in their direction. It was not possible to verify Israel’s account of the fighting.
Hamas’s armed wing released a video showing three women who were kidnapped on Oct. 7; one of them sharply criticizes Mr. Netanyahu, saying the hostages are being held in “unbearable conditions” and demanding that he exchange them for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
“When I saw Daniel on television, my heart almost stopped,” said Ramos Aloni, the father of Daniel Aloni, one of the hostages in the Hamas video. “My wife and I were shocked, but we also felt relief — she was alive and we were seeing her.”
Mr. Netanyahu has been under pressure from the families of some hostages held in Gaza, who have accused his government of prioritizing the military campaign over the effort to bring back their loved ones. Some have even expressed willingness to consider a deal that would exchange Israel’s Palestinian prisoners for the hostages.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office called the Hamas video “cruel psychological propaganda,” and in his news conference, the prime minister said the invasion of Gaza “actually creates the possibility of getting our hostages out.”
The Israeli military also said it had rescued a woman, a 19-year-old soldier taken hostage in the Hamas incursion and held in Gaza — the first known rescue operation since the mass abduction on Oct. 7 — as its forces continued their ground invasion there.
Conditions are dire for civilians in Gaza, under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade. Forty-seven
|
trucks carrying food, water, medical supplies and other humanitarian aid entered Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egypt on Sunday, according to a Palestinian official at the crossing. That was the largest one-day total in the nine days since the shipments began, but less than half of what the United Nations says is needed.
|
5cab438a-8e94-4987-abfa-79da77ce8a33
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/world/americas/colombia-children-rescue-plane-crash.html
|
4 Missing Colombian Children Are Rescued and Said to Be in Good Health
|
2023-06-10
|
nytimes
|
Four Colombian children who survived in the Colombian jungle for 40 days after their plane crashed were eager to play and asked for books to read, officials said on Saturday,
one day after
the group was rescued.
The siblings, aged 1 to 13, were recuperating at a military hospital in Bogotá, the capital, and were said to be in good health and spirits on Saturday, when they were visited by President Gustavo Petro and other officials.
The country has been captivated by the children’s story, with many eagerly awaiting news of their fate since their plane crashed on May 1. The children, members of the Huitoto Indigenous community, had been traveling with their mother and an Indigenous leader from the tiny Amazon community of Araracuara, Colombia, to San José del Guaviare, a small city in central Colombia along the Guaviare River.
When rescuers reached the crash site last month, the bodies of the three adults with whom they were traveling were found, but there was no sign of the children.
Officials had said over the past few weeks that they had reason to believe the children survived the crash. When news of their survival and discovery broke on Friday, the country erupted in celebration.
Carlos Rincón, the military doctor who evaluated the children, said they had survived with only mild cuts and scrapes. In photos released by the government on Friday, the children appeared gaunt and the doctor said they were not yet receiving solid food. He said he expected they could be discharged from the hospital in two to three weeks.
Defense Minister Iván Velásquez, who was among the officials to visit the children,
praised the oldest, Lesly Mucutuy, 13, for ensuring the survival of the group.
“We have to recognize not only her courage, but also her leadership,” he said. “It was because of her that the three little siblings were able to survive by her side, with her care, with her knowledge of the jungle.”
Lesly’s 9-year-old sister, Soleiny, “talks a lot,” said Astrid Cáceres, director of the nation’s child welfare agency. Tien, 5, is asking for books to read, while the 1-year-old “has a tranquillity to work with the nurses that you cannot imagine,” Ms. Cáceres added.
“Lesly smiled at us, gave us hugs,” she said. “She wants to play, she is bored in bed.”
Two of the children’s birthdays passed during their time in the jungle. Tien turned five and the youngest, Cristin, turned one.
“The celebration of the birthdays is overdue,” Ms. Cáceres said at the news conference. “So we invite the country at this time to celebrate.
She added that the four children “have an assured education” because of “commitments with the president to protect and care for these children for their entire lives.”
The government has provided few details on how the children were located.
Special forces troops found the children late Friday afternoon by following footprints and traces of food, according to a military spokesman.
The children were “very weak,” he said. “I think if a few more days had passed we wouldn’t have found them alive.”
“Miracle, miracle miracle was the key word to report that they had found them,” he added.
In a coordinated search effort called Operation Hope, soldiers and Indigenous people covered approximately 1,650 miles while looking for the siblings.
After visiting the hospital along with his wife and two daughters, President Petro praised the cooperation between the military and Indigenous groups and the “respect for the jungle” on Twitter.
“Here is a different path for Colombia,” he wrote. “I believe that this is the true path to peace.”
|
Four Colombian children who survived in the Colombian jungle for 40 days after their plane crashed were eager to play and asked for books to read, officials said on Saturday,
one day after
the group was rescued.
The siblings, aged 1 to 13, were recuperating at a military hospital in Bogotá, the capital, and were said to be in good health and spirits on Saturday, when they were visited by President Gustavo Petro and other officials.
The country has been captivated by the children’s story, with many eagerly awaiting news of their fate since their plane crashed on May 1. The children, members of the Huitoto Indigenous community, had been traveling with their mother and an Indigenous leader from the tiny Amazon community of Araracuara, Colombia, to San José del Guaviare, a small city in central Colombia along the Guaviare River.
When rescuers reached the crash site last month, the bodies of the three adults with whom they were traveling were found, but there was no sign of the children.
Officials had said over the past few weeks that they had reason to believe the children survived the crash. When news of their survival and discovery broke on Friday, the country erupted in celebration.
Carlos Rincón, the military doctor who evaluated the children, said they had survived with only mild cuts and scrapes. In photos released by the government on Friday, the children appeared gaunt and the doctor said they were not yet receiving solid food. He said he expected they could be discharged from the hospital in two to three weeks.
Defense Minister Iván Velásquez, who was among the officials to visit the children,
praised the oldest, Lesly Mucutuy, 13, for ensuring the survival of the group.
“We have to recognize not only her courage, but also her leadership,” he said. “It was because of her that the three little siblings were able to survive by her side, with her care, with her knowledge of the jungle.”
Lesly’s 9-year-old sister, Soleiny, “talks a lot,” said Astrid Cáceres, director of the nation’s child welfare agency. Tien, 5, is asking for books to read, while the 1-year-old “has a tranquillity to work with the nurses that you cannot imagine,” Ms. Cáceres added.
“Lesly smiled at us, gave us hugs,” she said. “She wants to play, she is bored in bed.”
Two of the children’s birthdays
|
passed during their time in the jungle. Tien turned five and the youngest, Cristin, turned one.
“The celebration of the birthdays is overdue,” Ms. Cáceres said at the news conference. “So we invite the country at this time to celebrate.
She added that the four children “have an assured education” because of “commitments with the president to protect and care for these children for their entire lives.”
The government has provided few details on how the children were located.
Special forces troops found the children late Friday afternoon by following footprints and traces of food, according to a military spokesman.
The children were “very weak,” he said. “I think if a few more days had passed we wouldn’t have found them alive.”
“Miracle, miracle miracle was the key word to report that they had found them,” he added.
In a coordinated search effort called Operation Hope, soldiers and Indigenous people covered approximately 1,650 miles while looking for the siblings.
After visiting the hospital along with his wife and two daughters, President Petro praised the cooperation between the military and Indigenous groups and the “respect for the jungle” on Twitter.
“Here is a different path for Colombia,” he wrote. “I believe that this is the true path to peace.”
|
a999c52b-b4d1-49a0-98fa-fe1e2aff618f
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/us/man-gun-arrested-tony-evers.html
|
Armed Man Seeking Wisconsin Governor Posts Bail and Returns With Rifle
|
2023-10-05
|
nytimes
|
A man who was looking for Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin was arrested with a handgun inside the State Capitol in Madison on Wednesday, posted bail and then returned with an “AK-47-style” rifle and was arrested again, a state spokeswoman said.
The man, who was shirtless and had a dog on a leash, initially approached the security desk outside the governor’s office shortly before 2 p.m., Tatyana Warrick, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Administration, said in a statement.
The man said he would not leave until he saw the governor, Ms. Warrick said. Because it is illegal to openly carry a firearm inside the State Capitol, officers with the Wisconsin State Capitol Police took the man into custody, she said.
The gun, which the man was carrying in a holster, was seized as evidence, and the dog was turned over to animal control officers, Ms. Warrick said.
Kalvin Barrett, the Dane County sheriff, said the man, whom he identified as Joshua J. Pleasnick, 43, was taken to the Dane County Jail on a charge of carrying a firearm in a public building, a misdemeanor.
Sheriff Barrett said that Mr. Pleasnick’s bail was set at $500 and that he was released just after 8 p.m. Ms. Warrick said he bailed himself out.
About an hour later, around 9 p.m., the man appeared outside the Capitol building with a loaded “AK-47-style” rifle, and again asked to see the governor, Ms. Warrick said.
Capitol Police and Madison Police officers began talking to him and searched his backpack, Ms. Warrick said. They found a collapsible police-style baton, which was illegal for him to carry without a valid concealed-carry permit, Ms. Warrick said.
“Based on concerning statements made by the man, officers took him into custody shortly before midnight for a psychiatric evaluation,” Ms. Warrick said. “The rifle was seized by Capitol Police for safekeeping and the baton was seized as evidence.”
The man was charged with a concealed-carry weapons violation in connection with the baton, Ms. Warrick said. She said it was not illegal for him to have the loaded rifle outside the capitol, as long as he was not using it in a threatening manner.
On Thursday, Governor Evers praised the police for their response.
“To their credit, the Capitol Police took control of the situation and so it’s over,”
Mr. Evers told reporters
, adding that the police were doing “great work.”
Britt Cudaback, a spokeswoman for Mr. Evers, said on Thursday that the governor’s office does not comment on security threats or the governor’s security detail. Mr. Evers, a Democrat and a former state school superintendent,
was re-elected to a second term last year
.
The arrest comes as public officials in Congress, statehouses and local offices across the country have been confronting
threats to their safety
and
violent rhetoric
flooding the political sphere.
In Madison last year, officials
installed cameras and plexiglass
in the reception area of a county election office after a man wearing camouflage and a mask tried to open locked doors during an election.
Three years ago, a group of men with antigovernment beliefs and militia ties who were angry about pandemic restrictions were
charged with plotting to kidnap
and possibly kill Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat.
Last month, jurors in northern Michigan
acquitted three men
who had been charged in the plot, a significant defeat for prosecutors, who have gotten mixed results in the case. Three previous trials related to the plot yielded five convictions and two acquittals. Four other defendants pleaded guilty.
|
A man who was looking for Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin was arrested with a handgun inside the State Capitol in Madison on Wednesday, posted bail and then returned with an “AK-47-style” rifle and was arrested again, a state spokeswoman said.
The man, who was shirtless and had a dog on a leash, initially approached the security desk outside the governor’s office shortly before 2 p.m., Tatyana Warrick, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Administration, said in a statement.
The man said he would not leave until he saw the governor, Ms. Warrick said. Because it is illegal to openly carry a firearm inside the State Capitol, officers with the Wisconsin State Capitol Police took the man into custody, she said.
The gun, which the man was carrying in a holster, was seized as evidence, and the dog was turned over to animal control officers, Ms. Warrick said.
Kalvin Barrett, the Dane County sheriff, said the man, whom he identified as Joshua J. Pleasnick, 43, was taken to the Dane County Jail on a charge of carrying a firearm in a public building, a misdemeanor.
Sheriff Barrett said that Mr. Pleasnick’s bail was set at $500 and that he was released just after 8 p.m. Ms. Warrick said he bailed himself out.
About an hour later, around 9 p.m., the man appeared outside the Capitol building with a loaded “AK-47-style” rifle, and again asked to see the governor, Ms. Warrick said.
Capitol Police and Madison Police officers began talking to him and searched his backpack, Ms. Warrick said. They found a collapsible police-style baton, which was illegal for him to carry without a valid concealed-carry permit, Ms. Warrick said.
“Based on concerning statements made by the man, officers took him into custody shortly before midnight for a psychiatric evaluation,” Ms. Warrick said. “The rifle was seized by Capitol Police for safekeeping and the baton was seized as evidence.”
The man was charged with a concealed-carry weapons violation in connection with the baton, Ms. Warrick said. She said it was not illegal for him to have the loaded rifle outside the capitol, as long as he was not using it in a threatening manner.
On Thursday, Governor Evers praised the police for their response.
“To their credit, the
|
Capitol Police took control of the situation and so it’s over,”
Mr. Evers told reporters
, adding that the police were doing “great work.”
Britt Cudaback, a spokeswoman for Mr. Evers, said on Thursday that the governor’s office does not comment on security threats or the governor’s security detail. Mr. Evers, a Democrat and a former state school superintendent,
was re-elected to a second term last year
.
The arrest comes as public officials in Congress, statehouses and local offices across the country have been confronting
threats to their safety
and
violent rhetoric
flooding the political sphere.
In Madison last year, officials
installed cameras and plexiglass
in the reception area of a county election office after a man wearing camouflage and a mask tried to open locked doors during an election.
Three years ago, a group of men with antigovernment beliefs and militia ties who were angry about pandemic restrictions were
charged with plotting to kidnap
and possibly kill Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat.
Last month, jurors in northern Michigan
acquitted three men
who had been charged in the plot, a significant defeat for prosecutors, who have gotten mixed results in the case. Three previous trials related to the plot yielded five convictions and two acquittals. Four other defendants pleaded guilty.
|
a48eb876-8b29-48f8-9d94-0342dca60f9a
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/28/movies/kevin-spacey-career-roles.html
|
Despite Acquittal, Kevin Spacey Faces Uphill Battle for Hollywood Roles
|
2023-07-28
|
nytimes
|
The two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey said last month that he was ready to return to acting after years in the wilderness following sexual assault allegations.
“I know that there are people right now who are ready to hire me the moment I am cleared of these charges in London,” Mr. Spacey
told a German magazine
, referring to accusations that he had assaulted four men. “The second that happens, they’re ready to move forward.”
Mr. Spacey was right in several ways: A British jury
found him not guilty of nine counts of sexual assault
this week, nearly a year after a federal jury in Manhattan
cleared him of battery
in a civil case filed by the actor Anthony Rapp. And he has two small projects awaiting release, with directors who could not be more publicly supportive.
But the starry Hollywood roles, like Mr. Spacey’s conniving politician in “House of Cards” and droll advertising executive in “American Beauty,” may not come back anytime soon, if at all.
Despite Mr. Spacey’s legal successes, his public perception is tarnished and a turnoff to studios and streaming services desperate to avoid controversy, said Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.
“He’s in real trouble,” said Mr. Galloway, who previously served as executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter. “On the 0-to-10 scale, this is like a minus one.”
During Mr. Spacey’s trial in Britain, he testified about the damage to his career after the public accusations
began to emerge in 2017
. “There was a rush to judgment and before the first question was asked or answered, I lost my job, I lost my reputation, I lost everything,” he said.
Within months of the initial allegation, Mr. Spacey’s
character was killed off
in the final season of “House of Cards,” his scenes as J. Paul Getty in “All the Money in the World”
were reshot
with a different actor, and Netflix
scrapped the film
“Gore,” in which he played the writer Gore Vidal.
Beyond two recently filmed parts
listed on IMDb
, a movie database, it is unclear whether Mr. Spacey is attached to any new projects. His team did not respond to a request for comment, and Mr. Spacey did not provide career insight after being acquitted this week. “I imagine that many of you can understand that there’s a lot for me to process,” he said from the courthouse steps.
Mike Paul, a public relations expert who specializes in reputation and crisis management, said that considering the nature of the accusations Mr. Spacey faced, he must avoid “pouring gasoline back on issues that you don’t want gasoline on.” Hollywood, he said, wants to see a time of reflection and quiet analysis.
The best bet, Mr. Galloway said, is for Mr. Spacey to develop projects for his production company, Trigger Street, or to pursue indie projects that value his acting prowess or consider the publicity a boon.
Mr. Spacey’s two known upcoming roles are in minor movies:
“Control,”
a British film in which he plays a hacker who takes over a politician’s smart car (his part is voice only), and “Peter Five Eight,” a comedic thriller in which he plays a shadowy stranger who arrives in a small mountainside community.
Michael Zaiko Hall, the writer and director of “Peter Five Eight,” said in an email that the film, which does not have an official release date, represented a return to the smaller independent films with which Mr. Spacey started his career.
“We have here a double Oscar winner with legendary screen presence whose name has just been cleared,” Mr. Hall said. “I imagine there will be a thaw period, followed by a re-emergence into the culture.”
Gene Fallaize, the writer and director of “Control,” said that he approached Mr. Spacey for the voice role last fall, and that the recent verdict showed “our gamble had paid off.” Before the jury’s decision, his movie had distribution deals in Germany, Russia and the Middle East. Now, Mr. Fallaize said, it was negotiating with American and British distributors.
Mr. Fallaize added that Mr. Spacey might need to do independent movies for a year or two, showing he could generate commercial returns, before major studios would be prepared to work with him. Those movies might have to be in countries that have a more “lenient” view to allegations made against stars, Mr. Fallaize added.
“It’s more likely for Europe to be receptive,” agreed Dominik Sedlar, a Croatian-born director and friend of Mr. Spacey’s whose father made a movie this year in which the actor
played the country’s first president
.
Mr. Sedlar said that although Mr. Spacey had twice been vindicated by juries, Hollywood studios might keep shunning the actor “rather than admit they were wrong.”
In recent years, both the Venice and Cannes film festivals have been happy to showcase work by directors and actors whose reputation has been stained in the United States, including
Woody Allen, Roman Polanski
and
Johnny Depp
. On Thursday, spokeswomen for both festivals said their artistic directors were unavailable to comment on Mr. Spacey.
There was similar reluctance from members of the London theater world, where Mr. Spacey was a regular star in the 1990s and 2000s and served as the artistic director of the Old Vic theater from 2004 to 2015. Representatives for 15 producers, West End theater owners and artistic directors either turned down or did not respond to interview requests to discuss Mr. Spacey’s future.
Alistair Smith, editor of The Stage, Britain’s major theater newspaper, said in an email that Mr. Spacey’s return was “highly unlikely.” In 2017
the Old Vic published the findings of an independent investigation
into Mr. Spacey’s tenure that revealed that 20 unnamed people accused him of unstated inappropriate behavior.
“Those allegations have never been satisfactorily addressed by Spacey,” Mr. Smith said. “Unless they are, I can’t see him working in London theater again.”
Comebacks have always been hard in Hollywood, which may be politically liberal but is artistically and financially conservative. For those who have succeeded, such as
Mel Gibson
and
Robert Downey Jr.
, the road was long.
“You need to completely reset your reputation,” Mr. Galloway said. In “fortress Hollywood, the drawbridge is pulled up, and it’s a dangerous moat to swim across.”
|
The two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey said last month that he was ready to return to acting after years in the wilderness following sexual assault allegations.
“I know that there are people right now who are ready to hire me the moment I am cleared of these charges in London,” Mr. Spacey
told a German magazine
, referring to accusations that he had assaulted four men. “The second that happens, they’re ready to move forward.”
Mr. Spacey was right in several ways: A British jury
found him not guilty of nine counts of sexual assault
this week, nearly a year after a federal jury in Manhattan
cleared him of battery
in a civil case filed by the actor Anthony Rapp. And he has two small projects awaiting release, with directors who could not be more publicly supportive.
But the starry Hollywood roles, like Mr. Spacey’s conniving politician in “House of Cards” and droll advertising executive in “American Beauty,” may not come back anytime soon, if at all.
Despite Mr. Spacey’s legal successes, his public perception is tarnished and a turnoff to studios and streaming services desperate to avoid controversy, said Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.
“He’s in real trouble,” said Mr. Galloway, who previously served as executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter. “On the 0-to-10 scale, this is like a minus one.”
During Mr. Spacey’s trial in Britain, he testified about the damage to his career after the public accusations
began to emerge in 2017
. “There was a rush to judgment and before the first question was asked or answered, I lost my job, I lost my reputation, I lost everything,” he said.
Within months of the initial allegation, Mr. Spacey’s
character was killed off
in the final season of “House of Cards,” his scenes as J. Paul Getty in “All the Money in the World”
were reshot
with a different actor, and Netflix
scrapped the film
“Gore,” in which he played the writer Gore Vidal.
Beyond two recently filmed parts
listed on IMDb
, a movie database, it is unclear whether Mr. Spacey is attached to any new projects. His team did not respond to a request for comment, and Mr. Spacey did not provide career insight after being acquitted this week. “I imagine that many of you can understand that
|
there’s a lot for me to process,” he said from the courthouse steps.
Mike Paul, a public relations expert who specializes in reputation and crisis management, said that considering the nature of the accusations Mr. Spacey faced, he must avoid “pouring gasoline back on issues that you don’t want gasoline on.” Hollywood, he said, wants to see a time of reflection and quiet analysis.
The best bet, Mr. Galloway said, is for Mr. Spacey to develop projects for his production company, Trigger Street, or to pursue indie projects that value his acting prowess or consider the publicity a boon.
Mr. Spacey’s two known upcoming roles are in minor movies:
“Control,”
a British film in which he plays a hacker who takes over a politician’s smart car (his part is voice only), and “Peter Five Eight,” a comedic thriller in which he plays a shadowy stranger who arrives in a small mountainside community.
Michael Zaiko Hall, the writer and director of “Peter Five Eight,” said in an email that the film, which does not have an official release date, represented a return to the smaller independent films with which Mr. Spacey started his career.
“We have here a double Oscar winner with legendary screen presence whose name has just been cleared,” Mr. Hall said. “I imagine there will be a thaw period, followed by a re-emergence into the culture.”
Gene Fallaize, the writer and director of “Control,” said that he approached Mr. Spacey for the voice role last fall, and that the recent verdict showed “our gamble had paid off.” Before the jury’s decision, his movie had distribution deals in Germany, Russia and the Middle East. Now, Mr. Fallaize said, it was negotiating with American and British distributors.
Mr. Fallaize added that Mr. Spacey might need to do independent movies for a year or two, showing he could generate commercial returns, before major studios would be prepared to work with him. Those movies might have to be in countries that have a more “lenient” view to allegations made against stars, Mr. Fallaize added.
“It’s more likely for Europe to be receptive,” agreed Dominik Sedlar, a Croatian-born director and friend of Mr. Spacey’s whose father made a movie this year in which the actor
played the country’s first president
.
Mr. Sedlar said that although Mr. Spacey had twice been vindicated by juries, Hollywood studios might keep shunning the actor “rather than admit they were wrong.”
In recent years, both the Venice and Cannes film festivals have been happy to showcase work by directors and actors whose reputation has been stained in the United States, including
Woody Allen, Roman Polanski
and
Johnny Depp
. On Thursday, spokeswomen for both festivals said their artistic directors were unavailable to comment on Mr. Spacey.
There was similar reluctance from members of the London theater world, where Mr. Spacey was a regular star in the 1990s and 2000s and served as the artistic director of the Old Vic theater from 2004 to 2015. Representatives for 15 producers, West End theater owners and artistic directors either turned down or did not respond to interview requests to discuss Mr. Spacey’s future.
Alistair Smith, editor of The Stage, Britain’s major theater newspaper, said in an email that Mr. Spacey’s return was “highly unlikely.” In 2017
the Old Vic published the findings of an independent investigation
into Mr. Spacey’s tenure that revealed that 20 unnamed people accused him of unstated inappropriate behavior.
“Those allegations have never been satisfactorily addressed by Spacey,” Mr. Smith said. “Unless they are, I can’t see him working in London theater again.”
Comebacks have always been hard in Hollywood, which may be politically liberal but is artistically and financially conservative. For those who have succeeded, such as
Mel Gibson
and
Robert Downey Jr.
, the road was long.
“You need to completely reset your reputation,” Mr. Galloway said. In “fortress Hollywood, the drawbridge is pulled up, and it’s a dangerous moat to swim across.”
|
1145a5f2-0e86-4936-8f8a-bb58450cfd12
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/opinion/ai-sam-altman-openai.html
|
Sam Altman, Sugarcoating the Apocalypse
|
2023-12-02
|
nytimes
|
My favorite “Twilight Zone” episode is the one where aliens land and, in a sign of their peaceful intentions, give world leaders a book. Government cryptographers work to translate the alien language. They decipher the title — “
To Serve Man
” — and that’s reassuring, so interplanetary shuttles are set up.
But as the cryptographers proceed, they realize — too late — that it’s a cookbook.
That, dear reader, is the story of OpenAI.
It was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit to serve man, to keep an eye on galloping A.I. technology and ensure there were guardrails and kill switches — because when A.I. hits puberty, it will be like aliens landing.
When I
interviewed
them at their makeshift San Francisco headquarters back in 2016, the OpenAI founders — Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman — presented themselves as our Praetorian guard against the future threat of runaway, evil A.I., against bad actors and bad bots and all the lords of the cloud who had Mary Shelley dreams of creating a new species, humanity be damned.
“We are explicitly not trying to enrich ourselves,” Sutskever told me.
Brockman was equally high-minded: “It’s not enough just to produce this technology and toss it over the fence and say, ‘OK, our job is done. Just let the world figure it out.’”
But OpenAI is tossing a lot of alarming stuff over the fence. Musk is gone, and Altman is no longer casting himself as humanity’s watchdog. He’s running a for-profit outfit, creating an A.I. cookbook. He’s less interested in peril than investors, less concerned about existential danger than finding A.I.’s capabilities. “When you see something that is technically sweet,” Robert Oppenheimer
said
, “you go ahead and do it.”
The government has nibbled the edges of regulation, but the quicksilver A.I. has already leaped ahead of the snaillike lawmakers and bureaucrats. Nobody, even in Silicon Valley, has any clue how to control it.
OpenAI’s wild ride two weeks ago was farcical — a coup against Altman that collapsed and turned into a restoration. But it was also terrifying because it showed that we are totally at the mercy of Silicon Valley boys with their toys, egos crashing, temperaments colliding, ambition and greed soaring.
Whatever you want to say about Musk’s recent unraveling — his manic edge, his offensive tweets, his strange, angular cybertruck — he has been passionate in working against rogue A.I. The perhaps quixotic quest of aligning A.I. progress with the protection of human values has caused Musk many a sleepless night and many a fractured friendship.
He lured Sutskever, a dazzling Russian engineer, from Google to OpenAI. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google and an A.I. accelerationist, was furious at his good friend Musk for poaching Sutskever and broke with him. Page dismissively told Musk he was “a specist” for siding with the human species in the A.I. argument.
Musk also scrapped with Altman. As Walter Isaacson wrote in “Elon Musk,” the mercurial mogul summoned Altman in February, asking him to bring OpenAI’s founding documents. Not too long after, Musk
tweeted
: “I’m still confused as to how a nonprofit to which I donated $100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?”
Speaking to Kara Swisher, Altman called Musk a “jerk.”
As with Shakespeare, personality clashes are shaping life-or-death decisions in the battle over A.I. One thing that may have touched off the rebellion against Altman was that he
diminished
Sutskever’s role at the company.
We still don’t know exactly what happened. Did the board see some progress in the A.I. algorithm that jolted them enough to fire Altman for fear he was pushing products without enough regard for safeguards?
Certainly, the A.I. is getting better at reasoning, making fewer mistakes, hallucinating less — the term for making up stuff — and doing complicated math puzzles.
Musk recently praised Sutskever for having “a good moral compass.” Was the young engineer, who joined the doomers on the board and delivered the bad news to Altman before recanting, influenced by his mentor at Google, Geoffrey Hinton?
Hinton, the so-called godfather of artificial intelligence, was stunned by OpenAI’s miracle baby, ChatGPT, realizing we may be only a few years from A.I. being smarter than we are. Hinton gloomily
told “60 Minutes”
in October that A.I. could malevolently turn on us, manipulating us with what it has learned from being fed all the books ever written, including works of Machiavelli.
Unlike Musk, who can be awkward and go into “demon mode,” according to Isaacson, Altman is smooth in his dealings with investors, techies and lawmakers, comfy in T-shirt and jeans. One top Silicon Valley scientist described the 38-year-old Altman as “weirdly adorable.” Friendly with many reporters, he has assumed the role of the upbeat face of A.I.’s future.
But do we want someone with a sunny disposition about A.I.? No. Not when, as Musk
warned
last Thursday, “The apocalypse could come along at any moment.”
|
My favorite “Twilight Zone” episode is the one where aliens land and, in a sign of their peaceful intentions, give world leaders a book. Government cryptographers work to translate the alien language. They decipher the title — “
To Serve Man
” — and that’s reassuring, so interplanetary shuttles are set up.
But as the cryptographers proceed, they realize — too late — that it’s a cookbook.
That, dear reader, is the story of OpenAI.
It was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit to serve man, to keep an eye on galloping A.I. technology and ensure there were guardrails and kill switches — because when A.I. hits puberty, it will be like aliens landing.
When I
interviewed
them at their makeshift San Francisco headquarters back in 2016, the OpenAI founders — Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman — presented themselves as our Praetorian guard against the future threat of runaway, evil A.I., against bad actors and bad bots and all the lords of the cloud who had Mary Shelley dreams of creating a new species, humanity be damned.
“We are explicitly not trying to enrich ourselves,” Sutskever told me.
Brockman was equally high-minded: “It’s not enough just to produce this technology and toss it over the fence and say, ‘OK, our job is done. Just let the world figure it out.’”
But OpenAI is tossing a lot of alarming stuff over the fence. Musk is gone, and Altman is no longer casting himself as humanity’s watchdog. He’s running a for-profit outfit, creating an A.I. cookbook. He’s less interested in peril than investors, less concerned about existential danger than finding A.I.’s capabilities. “When you see something that is technically sweet,” Robert Oppenheimer
said
, “you go ahead and do it.”
The government has nibbled the edges of regulation, but the quicksilver A.I. has already leaped ahead of the snaillike lawmakers and bureaucrats. Nobody, even in Silicon Valley, has any clue how to control it.
OpenAI’s wild ride two weeks ago was farcical — a coup against Altman that collapsed and turned into a restoration. But it was also terrifying because it showed that we are totally at the mercy of Silicon Valley boys with their toys, eg
|
os crashing, temperaments colliding, ambition and greed soaring.
Whatever you want to say about Musk’s recent unraveling — his manic edge, his offensive tweets, his strange, angular cybertruck — he has been passionate in working against rogue A.I. The perhaps quixotic quest of aligning A.I. progress with the protection of human values has caused Musk many a sleepless night and many a fractured friendship.
He lured Sutskever, a dazzling Russian engineer, from Google to OpenAI. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google and an A.I. accelerationist, was furious at his good friend Musk for poaching Sutskever and broke with him. Page dismissively told Musk he was “a specist” for siding with the human species in the A.I. argument.
Musk also scrapped with Altman. As Walter Isaacson wrote in “Elon Musk,” the mercurial mogul summoned Altman in February, asking him to bring OpenAI’s founding documents. Not too long after, Musk
tweeted
: “I’m still confused as to how a nonprofit to which I donated $100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?”
Speaking to Kara Swisher, Altman called Musk a “jerk.”
As with Shakespeare, personality clashes are shaping life-or-death decisions in the battle over A.I. One thing that may have touched off the rebellion against Altman was that he
diminished
Sutskever’s role at the company.
We still don’t know exactly what happened. Did the board see some progress in the A.I. algorithm that jolted them enough to fire Altman for fear he was pushing products without enough regard for safeguards?
Certainly, the A.I. is getting better at reasoning, making fewer mistakes, hallucinating less — the term for making up stuff — and doing complicated math puzzles.
Musk recently praised Sutskever for having “a good moral compass.” Was the young engineer, who joined the doomers on the board and delivered the bad news to Altman before recanting, influenced by his mentor at Google, Geoffrey Hinton?
Hinton, the so-called godfather of artificial intelligence, was stunned by OpenAI’s miracle baby, ChatGPT, realizing we may be only a few years from A.I. being smarter than we are. Hinton gloomily
told “60 Minutes”
in October that A.I. could malevolently turn on us, manipulating us with what it has learned from being fed all the books ever written, including works of Machiavelli.
Unlike Musk, who can be awkward and go into “demon mode,” according to Isaacson, Altman is smooth in his dealings with investors, techies and lawmakers, comfy in T-shirt and jeans. One top Silicon Valley scientist described the 38-year-old Altman as “weirdly adorable.” Friendly with many reporters, he has assumed the role of the upbeat face of A.I.’s future.
But do we want someone with a sunny disposition about A.I.? No. Not when, as Musk
warned
last Thursday, “The apocalypse could come along at any moment.”
|
7a2400ed-5668-4b5b-87be-3d00cd89bde7
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/realestate/4-million-dollar-homes-california.html
|
$4.2 Million Homes in California
|
2023-08-28
|
nytimes
|
Los Angeles | $4.188 Million
A 1929 Spanish-style house with four bedrooms and five and a half bathrooms, on a 0.4-acre lot
This house is near the top of a winding street, just south of Griffith Park, in Los Feliz. It is five minutes by car from park attractions like the Griffith Observatory and the Greek Theatre, and about a mile from restaurants along Hillhurst Avenue, including an Italian cafe and a Brazilian-style cocktail bar.
Driving to Hollywood, downtown Los Angeles or Studio City takes about half an hour. Burbank is 10 minutes away, on the other side of Griffith Park.
Size:
4,991 square feet
Price per square foot:
$839
Indoors:
A paved path leads from the street to the house, stepping up to a covered entrance framed by an arch lined in original tile.
The foyer inside has hardwood floors, a decorative niche and a stained-glass window; a home office and a full bathroom are off this space. Beyond the foyer, through another arched doorway, is a living room with more hardwood floors, a fireplace and access to a sunroom and a terrace with sweeping views of the hillside.
The adjacent dining room has a wrought-iron chandelier and access to a kitchen with dark wood cabinetry, stainless steel appliances and walls covered in colorful tile. A covered patio is off the kitchen, and a powder room and laundry room are also in this part of the house.
Three bedrooms are on the second level, reached from stairs in the foyer. The spacious primary suite has a dressing room, glass doors that open to a private balcony, and a bathroom with a tub framed by an arched alcove and a separate shower. The other two bedrooms also have en suite bathrooms, with original tile in shades of blue and pink.
The fourth bedroom is on the lowest level of the house, with its own fireplace and access to a patio. There is also a full bathroom on this level, finished in pink tile.
Outdoor space:
From the patio off the kitchen, stairs lead down to a terrace with room for a dining table and chairs. This space is shaded by mature oak trees; other trees on the property bear pomegranates and persimmons. The attached garage holds two cars.
Taxes:
$52,356 (estimated)
Contact:
Laura Thomas Mullen, Sotheby’s International Realty, Los Feliz Brokerage, 323-240-6600;
sothebysrealty.com
Healdsburg | $4.195 Million
A 2021 townhouse with three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms
This is one of two townhouses in a building designed by Stanley Saitowitz and awarded a 2023 merit award by the San Francisco Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. (The building includes an accessory dwelling unit owned jointly by the townhouse owners.) The property is two blocks from Healdsburg Plaza, putting it within easy walking or biking distance of the city’s farm-to-table restaurants and wine-tasting rooms. Healdsburg Veterans Memorial Beach is less than a mile away, on the Russian River.
Santa Rosa is about 20 minutes away. Driving to San Francisco takes about 90 minutes. Sacramento is a two-hour drive.
Size:
2,170 square feet
Price per square foot:
$1,933
Indoors:
A latticed partition separates the building from the street. The entrance to this townhouse is around the corner.
The main level is open, with floor-to-ceiling glass walls that slide open to offer access to a private courtyard with a swimming pool. The sitting area, near the front entrance, is anchored by a sleek white fireplace and has access to a powder room.
A dining area is just beyond, connecting the sitting area to the kitchen, which has minimalist black cabinetry, marble counters, a Wolf range and a Sub-Zero refrigerator. More glass walls in the kitchen open to a private patio with an outdoor kitchen that includes a built-in grill.
All three bedrooms are upstairs, reached from open stairs off the sitting room. The primary suite overlooks the swimming pool and has a bathroom with a soaking tub set beneath a skylight. The other two bedrooms share a bathroom at the end of the hall with a walk-in shower. A hall closet holds a stacked washer and dryer.
Outdoor space:
The long saltwater swimming pool in the courtyard has ample room surrounding it for lounging and dining. The garage has parking for two cars.
Taxes:
$52,440 (estimated)
Contact:
Georgina McInerney, Compass, 415-602-5888;
compass.com
Newport Beach | $4.185 Million
An updated 1960 house with three bedrooms and three bathrooms, on a 0.2-acre lot
This house is on a quiet cul-de-sac near the Upper Newport Bay State Marine Conservation Area, where walking trails wrap around the water. It is less than a mile from Mariners Elementary School and about a five-minute drive from Newport Harbor High School. Ralphs and Mendocino Farms grocery stores, a park and a public library are also nearby.
Newport Beach Pier and several popular beaches are about 10 minutes away, as is John Wayne Airport. Driving to downtown Los Angeles takes about an hour and a half, depending on traffic.
Size:
3,000 square feet
Price per square foot:
$1,395
Indoors:
A path leads from the street to the front door, passing through a landscaped yard and privacy hedges.
The foyer inside has distressed oak floors that continue into the living room, which has a stone fireplace and French doors that open to the patio and garden. The adjacent dining area connects to a kitchen with a second dining area in front of another fireplace; stainless steel appliances; a center island; Carrara marble counters; and patio access.
A staircase in the kitchen leads up to a family room on the second level with another fireplace, beamed ceilings, a built-in bar and access to a bathroom with a walk-in shower.
All three bedrooms are on the first floor. The primary suite is off a hallway extending from the living room. It has a private patio with an in-ground spa and a bathroom with a stainless steel soaking tub and a walk-in shower that has glass doors opening directly onto the patio.
The other two bedrooms (one currently used as a home office) and a full bathroom are on the opposite side of the house.
Outdoor space:
The main patio, off the kitchen and living area, has several distinct areas, including a built-in bench around a fire pit, a pergola-covered dining area, an outdoor bar with a built-in grill and a stone fountain at the center. The attached garage has two parking spots.
Taxes:
$52,308 (estimated)
Contact:
Adrienne Brandes, Surterre Properties, 714-401-8277;
surterreproperties.com
For weekly email updates on residential real estate news,
sign up here
.
|
Los Angeles | $4.188 Million
A 1929 Spanish-style house with four bedrooms and five and a half bathrooms, on a 0.4-acre lot
This house is near the top of a winding street, just south of Griffith Park, in Los Feliz. It is five minutes by car from park attractions like the Griffith Observatory and the Greek Theatre, and about a mile from restaurants along Hillhurst Avenue, including an Italian cafe and a Brazilian-style cocktail bar.
Driving to Hollywood, downtown Los Angeles or Studio City takes about half an hour. Burbank is 10 minutes away, on the other side of Griffith Park.
Size:
4,991 square feet
Price per square foot:
$839
Indoors:
A paved path leads from the street to the house, stepping up to a covered entrance framed by an arch lined in original tile.
The foyer inside has hardwood floors, a decorative niche and a stained-glass window; a home office and a full bathroom are off this space. Beyond the foyer, through another arched doorway, is a living room with more hardwood floors, a fireplace and access to a sunroom and a terrace with sweeping views of the hillside.
The adjacent dining room has a wrought-iron chandelier and access to a kitchen with dark wood cabinetry, stainless steel appliances and walls covered in colorful tile. A covered patio is off the kitchen, and a powder room and laundry room are also in this part of the house.
Three bedrooms are on the second level, reached from stairs in the foyer. The spacious primary suite has a dressing room, glass doors that open to a private balcony, and a bathroom with a tub framed by an arched alcove and a separate shower. The other two bedrooms also have en suite bathrooms, with original tile in shades of blue and pink.
The fourth bedroom is on the lowest level of the house, with its own fireplace and access to a patio. There is also a full bathroom on this level, finished in pink tile.
Outdoor space:
From the patio off the kitchen, stairs lead down to a terrace with room for a dining table and chairs. This space is shaded by mature oak trees; other trees on the property bear pomegranates and persimmons. The attached garage holds two cars.
Taxes:
$52,356 (estimated)
Contact:
Laura Thomas Mullen, Sotheby’s International Realty, Los Feliz Brokerage,
|
323-240-6600;
sothebysrealty.com
Healdsburg | $4.195 Million
A 2021 townhouse with three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms
This is one of two townhouses in a building designed by Stanley Saitowitz and awarded a 2023 merit award by the San Francisco Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. (The building includes an accessory dwelling unit owned jointly by the townhouse owners.) The property is two blocks from Healdsburg Plaza, putting it within easy walking or biking distance of the city’s farm-to-table restaurants and wine-tasting rooms. Healdsburg Veterans Memorial Beach is less than a mile away, on the Russian River.
Santa Rosa is about 20 minutes away. Driving to San Francisco takes about 90 minutes. Sacramento is a two-hour drive.
Size:
2,170 square feet
Price per square foot:
$1,933
Indoors:
A latticed partition separates the building from the street. The entrance to this townhouse is around the corner.
The main level is open, with floor-to-ceiling glass walls that slide open to offer access to a private courtyard with a swimming pool. The sitting area, near the front entrance, is anchored by a sleek white fireplace and has access to a powder room.
A dining area is just beyond, connecting the sitting area to the kitchen, which has minimalist black cabinetry, marble counters, a Wolf range and a Sub-Zero refrigerator. More glass walls in the kitchen open to a private patio with an outdoor kitchen that includes a built-in grill.
All three bedrooms are upstairs, reached from open stairs off the sitting room. The primary suite overlooks the swimming pool and has a bathroom with a soaking tub set beneath a skylight. The other two bedrooms share a bathroom at the end of the hall with a walk-in shower. A hall closet holds a stacked washer and dryer.
Outdoor space:
The long saltwater swimming pool in the courtyard has ample room surrounding it for lounging and dining. The garage has parking for two cars.
Taxes:
$52,440 (estimated)
Contact:
Georgina McInerney, Compass, 415-602-5888;
compass.com
Newport Beach | $4.185 Million
An updated 1960 house with three bedrooms and three bathrooms, on a 0.2-acre lot
This house is on a quiet cul-de-sac near the Upper Newport Bay State Marine Conservation Area, where walking trails wrap around the water. It is less than a mile from Mariners Elementary School and about a five-minute drive from Newport Harbor High School. Ralphs and Mendocino Farms grocery stores, a park and a public library are also nearby.
Newport Beach Pier and several popular beaches are about 10 minutes away, as is John Wayne Airport. Driving to downtown Los Angeles takes about an hour and a half, depending on traffic.
Size:
3,000 square feet
Price per square foot:
$1,395
Indoors:
A path leads from the street to the front door, passing through a landscaped yard and privacy hedges.
The foyer inside has distressed oak floors that continue into the living room, which has a stone fireplace and French doors that open to the patio and garden. The adjacent dining area connects to a kitchen with a second dining area in front of another fireplace; stainless steel appliances; a center island; Carrara marble counters; and patio access.
A staircase in the kitchen leads up to a family room on the second level with another fireplace, beamed ceilings, a built-in bar and access to a bathroom with a walk-in shower.
All three bedrooms are on the first floor. The primary suite is off a hallway extending from the living room. It has a private patio with an in-ground spa and a bathroom with a stainless steel soaking tub and a walk-in shower that has glass doors opening directly onto the patio.
The other two bedrooms (one currently used as a home office) and a full bathroom are on the opposite side of the house.
Outdoor space:
The main patio, off the kitchen and living area, has several distinct areas, including a built-in bench around a fire pit, a pergola-covered dining area, an outdoor bar with a built-in grill and a stone fountain at the center. The attached garage has two parking spots.
Taxes:
$52,308 (estimated)
Contact:
Adrienne Brandes, Surterre Properties, 714-401-8277;
surterreproperties.com
For weekly email updates on residential real estate news,
sign up here
.
|
56bb6f56-9573-4e66-b793-f90f7aee50f8
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/us/college-park-md-mayor-child-porn.html
|
Ex-College Park Mayor Pleads Guilty to Child Sex Abuse Imagery Charges
|
2023-08-03
|
nytimes
|
A former mayor of College Park, Md., pleaded guilty on Wednesday to possessing and distributing child sexual abuse imagery under a plea deal in which he agreed to serve 30 years in prison, prosecutors said.
Under the agreement, the former mayor, Patrick Wojahn, 47, who was arrested in March, pleaded guilty in Prince George’s County Circuit Court to 60 counts of distribution of the sexual abuse imagery, 40 counts of possession and 40 counts of possession with intent to distribute.
As part of the plea deal, Mr. Wojahn agreed to serve 30 years of a 150-year prison sentence, with the remainder suspended, according to the Prince George’s County State’s Attorney’s Office. He will become eligible to apply for parole after seven and a half years. A judge will sentence him on Nov. 20.
After his release, Mr. Wojahn must register as a sex offender for 25 years and serve five years of probation, said Jessica Garth, an assistant state’s attorney.
“This is a horrific case,” Aisha Braveboy, the Prince George’s County state’s attorney, said in a news release. “The College Park community put its faith and support in him to serve each resident and their best interests. Instead, he let them down in the most disgraceful way.”
Mr. Wojahn’s lawyer, David Moyse, did not comment on the guilty plea.
The investigation into Mr. Wojahn began in February when the police received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that an account on the social media app Kik operating within Prince George’s County had possessed and transmitted images of child sexual abuse.
Investigators determined that the account belonged to Mr. Wojahn, and that he had uploaded such imagery in January. The police then raided his home, seizing phones, a storage device, a tablet and a computer.
Patrick Wojahn.
Credit...
Prince George's County Police Department
The night before his arrest, Mr. Wojahn, who had been mayor of College Park since 2015 and served for eight years on its City Council before then, submitted a letter of resignation.
“I am stepping away to deal with my own mental health,” Mr. Wojahn wrote. “I ask that you continue to keep me and my family in your prayers.”
The charges against Mr. Wojahn came as a shock to College Park,
a city of roughly 34,000
people and home to the University of Maryland.
“There was never anything that would lead to me believe that something like this would happen,” Andrew Fellows, Mr. Wojahn’s mayoral predecessor, told The New York Times in March.
Mr. Wojahn had been praised for his leadership during the coronavirus pandemic and his support of progressive causes, Mr. Fellows said, including advocating for same-sex marriage in the state and supporting a formal apology from the city in 2020 for its history of oppression in a Black neighborhood.
|
A former mayor of College Park, Md., pleaded guilty on Wednesday to possessing and distributing child sexual abuse imagery under a plea deal in which he agreed to serve 30 years in prison, prosecutors said.
Under the agreement, the former mayor, Patrick Wojahn, 47, who was arrested in March, pleaded guilty in Prince George’s County Circuit Court to 60 counts of distribution of the sexual abuse imagery, 40 counts of possession and 40 counts of possession with intent to distribute.
As part of the plea deal, Mr. Wojahn agreed to serve 30 years of a 150-year prison sentence, with the remainder suspended, according to the Prince George’s County State’s Attorney’s Office. He will become eligible to apply for parole after seven and a half years. A judge will sentence him on Nov. 20.
After his release, Mr. Wojahn must register as a sex offender for 25 years and serve five years of probation, said Jessica Garth, an assistant state’s attorney.
“This is a horrific case,” Aisha Braveboy, the Prince George’s County state’s attorney, said in a news release. “The College Park community put its faith and support in him to serve each resident and their best interests. Instead, he let them down in the most disgraceful way.”
Mr. Wojahn’s lawyer, David Moyse, did not comment on the guilty plea.
The investigation into Mr. Wojahn began in February when the police received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that an account on the social media app Kik operating within Prince George’s County had possessed and transmitted images of child sexual abuse.
Investigators determined that the account belonged to Mr. Wojahn, and that he had uploaded such imagery in January. The police then raided his home, seizing phones, a storage device, a tablet and a computer.
Patrick Wojahn.
Credit...
Prince George's County Police Department
The night before his arrest, Mr. Wojahn, who had been mayor of College Park since 2015 and served for eight years on its City Council before then, submitted a letter of resignation.
“I am stepping away to deal with my own mental health,” Mr. Wojahn wrote. “I ask that you continue to keep me and my family in your prayers.”
The charges against Mr. Wojahn came as a shock to College Park,
a city of roughly 34,000
people
|
and home to the University of Maryland.
“There was never anything that would lead to me believe that something like this would happen,” Andrew Fellows, Mr. Wojahn’s mayoral predecessor, told The New York Times in March.
Mr. Wojahn had been praised for his leadership during the coronavirus pandemic and his support of progressive causes, Mr. Fellows said, including advocating for same-sex marriage in the state and supporting a formal apology from the city in 2020 for its history of oppression in a Black neighborhood.
|
8b6c3e91-1bfd-4a32-a18d-7e06a82e4a71
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/us/the-satanic-temple-after-school-club.html
|
How ‘After School Satan Club’ Is Shaking Things Up
|
2023-12-15
|
nytimes
|
Earlier this week, a flier began circulating online about a new organization coming to Chimneyrock Elementary School in Cordova, Tenn., about 17 miles east of Memphis.
“Hey Kids!”
it read
against a backdrop of colored pencils. “Let’s Have Fun at After School Satan Club.”
The club was organized by The Satanic Temple, a group that has gained widespread media attention and infuriated conservative Christians in recent years by sponsoring similar student clubs in other school districts, filing challenges to state abortion limits in Indiana and Texas, and placing pentagrams and other symbols alongside Christmas displays in
statehouses
.
OK, so what’s really going on here?
The Satanic Temple does not actually worship Satan, its leaders say.
The Satanic Temple was founded in 2013 by two men who call themselves
Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry
, both pseudonyms.
Based in Salem, Mass., famous as the home of the 17th-century witch trials, it calls itself a nontheistic religion and engages in activism to defend pluralism, secularism and religious rights, according to its
website
.
Mr. Greaves, whose name is Doug Mesner, said that the temple does not believe in Satan as described in the Bible but considers the concept to be a “mythological framework” that encourages people to question authority and follow “the best available evidence.”
“Satan,” Mr. Greaves said, “is the embodiment of the ultimate rebel against tyranny.”
A display draws anger, and vandalism, in the Iowa State Capitol.
The temple is open about challenging what Mr. Greaves calls “our theocratic overlords.”
To that end, it displayed a statue in the Iowa State Capitol this month that featured a mirrored ram’s head symbolizing the occult figure Baphomet. Next to it was a sign that read, “This display is not owned, maintained, promoted, supported by or associated with the State of Iowa.”
Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, called the display “
absolutely objectionable
,” encouraged Iowans to pray and reassured them that a Nativity scene — “the true reason for the season” — would also be displayed.
During an appearance on the campaign trail in Iowa on Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida blamed his Republican rival, Donald J. Trump, for giving the temple a “legal leg to stand on” because the Internal Revenue Service
granted it tax-exempt status
as a religious organization in 2019, when Mr. Trump was president.
“My view would be that that’s not a religion that the founding fathers were trying create,”
Mr. DeSantis said
on CNN.
In fact, the First Amendment to the Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and goes on to guarantee freedom of speech and the press. Courts have ruled that religious groups may pay to use government buildings, and holiday decorations have been allowed in public places.
That doesn’t mean everyone appreciates The Satanic Temple’s idea of a holiday decoration. On Thursday, someone knocked the ram’s head off the statue in the Iowa Capitol. The Iowa State Patrol said that Michael Cassidy, 35, of Lauderdale, Miss., had been charged with criminal mischief in the matter.
A conservative website called The Republic Sentinel began raising money for his defense, and quoted
a statement
from Mr. Cassidy that he had beheaded the statue to “awaken Christians to the anti-Christian acts promoted by our government.”
The temple justifies its actions on First Amendment grounds. Speaking to The New York Times before the statue was destroyed, Mr. Greaves said the temple was not exploiting some “unfortunate loophole in the Constitution,” by placing a statue of Baphomet in the Capitol.
“This is what religious liberty is,” he said. “This is what free expression looks like. It doesn’t have to be painful if we understand its value. We should look at this with some pride.”
What is the After School Satan Club?
The temple says it started the clubs in 2016 to provide an alternative to other after-school religious clubs, particularly the Good News Club, a Christian missionary program. Students play puzzles and games and do science projects, nature activities and community service projects.
The temple says there are four active After School Satan clubs in the country — in California, Ohio, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, where the temple recently reached
a $200,000 settlement
with the Saucon Valley School District. The temple had accused the district of blocking it from using a middle school where the Good News Club also met.
The Supreme Court, in
a 2001 case
pitting the Good News Club against a school district in New York State, ruled that public schools must open their doors to after-school religious activities on the same basis as any other after-hours activity that school policy permits.
This ruling also opened the door, metaphorically, to Satan.
The Satanic Temple says it starts clubs only in places where parents have requested one. It claims that the parents of 13 children at Chimneyrock Elementary had signed permission slips for the first After School Satan Club meeting there on Jan. 10. The Times was unable to find a parent who signed a slip who was willing to be identified on the record.
‘Satan has no room in this district.’
The club was allowed to rent space from the school, which has students from prekindergarten to fifth grade. In an email to parents, school officials said the club “has the same legal rights to use our facilities after school hours as any other nonprofit organization.”
The interim superintendent of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Toni Williams, said at a news conference with Christian pastors on Wednesday that she was “duty bound to uphold board policies, state laws and the Constitution.”
“But let’s not be fooled,” she said. “Let’s not be fooled by what we have seen in the past 24 hours, which is an agenda initiated to ensure we cancel all faith-based organizations that partner with our school district.”
Althea E. Greene, the chairwoman of the Shelby County Board of Education, encouraged people to pray and “be vocal.” She describes herself as a bishop and pastor of Real Life Ministries.
“Satan has no room in this district,” she said.
A local pastor, William A. Adkins Jr., said it was critical not to allow “any entity called ‘Satanic Temple’ to have time — private time — with our children.” But he acknowledged that he was not sure how to bar the group without violating the Constitution.
“This is in fact what I call Satan personified,” he said. “They put us in a trick bag, and we almost can’t get out of it, using the Constitution against us.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
|
Earlier this week, a flier began circulating online about a new organization coming to Chimneyrock Elementary School in Cordova, Tenn., about 17 miles east of Memphis.
“Hey Kids!”
it read
against a backdrop of colored pencils. “Let’s Have Fun at After School Satan Club.”
The club was organized by The Satanic Temple, a group that has gained widespread media attention and infuriated conservative Christians in recent years by sponsoring similar student clubs in other school districts, filing challenges to state abortion limits in Indiana and Texas, and placing pentagrams and other symbols alongside Christmas displays in
statehouses
.
OK, so what’s really going on here?
The Satanic Temple does not actually worship Satan, its leaders say.
The Satanic Temple was founded in 2013 by two men who call themselves
Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry
, both pseudonyms.
Based in Salem, Mass., famous as the home of the 17th-century witch trials, it calls itself a nontheistic religion and engages in activism to defend pluralism, secularism and religious rights, according to its
website
.
Mr. Greaves, whose name is Doug Mesner, said that the temple does not believe in Satan as described in the Bible but considers the concept to be a “mythological framework” that encourages people to question authority and follow “the best available evidence.”
“Satan,” Mr. Greaves said, “is the embodiment of the ultimate rebel against tyranny.”
A display draws anger, and vandalism, in the Iowa State Capitol.
The temple is open about challenging what Mr. Greaves calls “our theocratic overlords.”
To that end, it displayed a statue in the Iowa State Capitol this month that featured a mirrored ram’s head symbolizing the occult figure Baphomet. Next to it was a sign that read, “This display is not owned, maintained, promoted, supported by or associated with the State of Iowa.”
Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, called the display “
absolutely objectionable
,” encouraged Iowans to pray and reassured them that a Nativity scene — “the true reason for the season” — would also be displayed.
During an appearance on the campaign trail in Iowa on Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida blamed his Republican rival, Donald J. Trump, for giving the temple a “legal leg to stand on” because the Internal Revenue Service
granted it tax-exempt status
|
as a religious organization in 2019, when Mr. Trump was president.
“My view would be that that’s not a religion that the founding fathers were trying create,”
Mr. DeSantis said
on CNN.
In fact, the First Amendment to the Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and goes on to guarantee freedom of speech and the press. Courts have ruled that religious groups may pay to use government buildings, and holiday decorations have been allowed in public places.
That doesn’t mean everyone appreciates The Satanic Temple’s idea of a holiday decoration. On Thursday, someone knocked the ram’s head off the statue in the Iowa Capitol. The Iowa State Patrol said that Michael Cassidy, 35, of Lauderdale, Miss., had been charged with criminal mischief in the matter.
A conservative website called The Republic Sentinel began raising money for his defense, and quoted
a statement
from Mr. Cassidy that he had beheaded the statue to “awaken Christians to the anti-Christian acts promoted by our government.”
The temple justifies its actions on First Amendment grounds. Speaking to The New York Times before the statue was destroyed, Mr. Greaves said the temple was not exploiting some “unfortunate loophole in the Constitution,” by placing a statue of Baphomet in the Capitol.
“This is what religious liberty is,” he said. “This is what free expression looks like. It doesn’t have to be painful if we understand its value. We should look at this with some pride.”
What is the After School Satan Club?
The temple says it started the clubs in 2016 to provide an alternative to other after-school religious clubs, particularly the Good News Club, a Christian missionary program. Students play puzzles and games and do science projects, nature activities and community service projects.
The temple says there are four active After School Satan clubs in the country — in California, Ohio, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, where the temple recently reached
a $200,000 settlement
with the Saucon Valley School District. The temple had accused the district of blocking it from using a middle school where the Good News Club also met.
The Supreme Court, in
a 2001 case
pitting the Good News Club against a school district in New York State, ruled that public schools must open their doors to after-school religious activities on the same basis as any other after-hours activity that school policy permits.
This ruling also opened the door, metaphorically, to Satan.
The Satanic Temple says it starts clubs only in places where parents have requested one. It claims that the parents of 13 children at Chimneyrock Elementary had signed permission slips for the first After School Satan Club meeting there on Jan. 10. The Times was unable to find a parent who signed a slip who was willing to be identified on the record.
‘Satan has no room in this district.’
The club was allowed to rent space from the school, which has students from prekindergarten to fifth grade. In an email to parents, school officials said the club “has the same legal rights to use our facilities after school hours as any other nonprofit organization.”
The interim superintendent of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Toni Williams, said at a news conference with Christian pastors on Wednesday that she was “duty bound to uphold board policies, state laws and the Constitution.”
“But let’s not be fooled,” she said. “Let’s not be fooled by what we have seen in the past 24 hours, which is an agenda initiated to ensure we cancel all faith-based organizations that partner with our school district.”
Althea E. Greene, the chairwoman of the Shelby County Board of Education, encouraged people to pray and “be vocal.” She describes herself as a bishop and pastor of Real Life Ministries.
“Satan has no room in this district,” she said.
A local pastor, William A. Adkins Jr., said it was critical not to allow “any entity called ‘Satanic Temple’ to have time — private time — with our children.” But he acknowledged that he was not sure how to bar the group without violating the Constitution.
“This is in fact what I call Satan personified,” he said. “They put us in a trick bag, and we almost can’t get out of it, using the Constitution against us.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
|
7bb57173-043f-48e8-9aaa-fe3dba03a937
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/us/politics/faa-leader-billy-nolen-resigns.html
|
Top F.A.A. Official Says He Will Depart, Aggravating Leadership Void
|
2023-04-22
|
nytimes
|
WASHINGTON — The acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, Billy Nolen, on Friday said he will depart this summer, worsening a leadership void at the agency.
The departure of Mr. Nolen, a former pilot and airline industry group executive, was announced in a letter to F.A.A. employees. The move puts added heat on the White House to find a permanent leader for the agency, which is facing an array of safety concerns and staffing challenges.
The aviation regulator has been without permanent leadership since Stephen Dickson, a former Delta Air Lines executive who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump,
stepped down
a year ago.
Last month, President Biden’s pick to lead the F.A.A., Phillip A. Washington,
withdrew his name from consideration
after a series of attacks from Republicans on his qualifications to hold the post. They had argued that Mr. Washington, the chief executive of Denver International Airport, lacked sufficient aviation experience, and raised questions about his connection to a
corruption investigation in Los Angeles.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the top Republican on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, opposed Mr. Washington’s nomination but suggested that he would support Mr. Nolen as a candidate for the position, citing his long career and expertise. Mr. Nolen was previously the F.A.A.’s associate administrator for aviation safety.
Mr. Nolen’s departure,
reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal
, comes as the agency faces challenges with flight scheduling, staffing shortages and safety issues, including a series of
runway near collisions
.
Last month, the F.A.A. issued a safety alert after the near misses calling on airlines to exercise “continued vigilance.” While the agency has not reported a significant increase overall this year in such near collisions, Mr. Nolen acknowledged it was not what the public has “come to expect during a time of unprecedented safety in the U.S. air transportation system.”
An operational meltdown by Southwest Airlines
around Christmas and
an F.A.A. system outage
in January that caused widespread flight disruptions have also raised questions about F.A.A. management. Most recently, a technological issue with Southwest Airlines on Tuesday led to
more than 2,000 flights being delayed
, representing more than half of its schedule for the day.
Earlier this year, Mr. Nolen said that he was forming a safety review team to examine aviation in the United States, including a look at air traffic systems.
“Billy is a tremendous leader, a true expert, and a dedicated public servant,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement Friday. “He has kept safety as the F.A.A.’s north star through one of the most complex periods in modern aviation.”
Do you work in aviation? The Times wants to hear your story. Please share your experiences with us below, and you can learn more about
our reporting here
. We especially want to hear from people who work for (or used to work for) airports or airlines, or who are part of government agencies that help keep the aviation sector running. We won’t publish any part of your submission without your permission.
|
WASHINGTON — The acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, Billy Nolen, on Friday said he will depart this summer, worsening a leadership void at the agency.
The departure of Mr. Nolen, a former pilot and airline industry group executive, was announced in a letter to F.A.A. employees. The move puts added heat on the White House to find a permanent leader for the agency, which is facing an array of safety concerns and staffing challenges.
The aviation regulator has been without permanent leadership since Stephen Dickson, a former Delta Air Lines executive who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump,
stepped down
a year ago.
Last month, President Biden’s pick to lead the F.A.A., Phillip A. Washington,
withdrew his name from consideration
after a series of attacks from Republicans on his qualifications to hold the post. They had argued that Mr. Washington, the chief executive of Denver International Airport, lacked sufficient aviation experience, and raised questions about his connection to a
corruption investigation in Los Angeles.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the top Republican on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, opposed Mr. Washington’s nomination but suggested that he would support Mr. Nolen as a candidate for the position, citing his long career and expertise. Mr. Nolen was previously the F.A.A.’s associate administrator for aviation safety.
Mr. Nolen’s departure,
reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal
, comes as the agency faces challenges with flight scheduling, staffing shortages and safety issues, including a series of
runway near collisions
.
Last month, the F.A.A. issued a safety alert after the near misses calling on airlines to exercise “continued vigilance.” While the agency has not reported a significant increase overall this year in such near collisions, Mr. Nolen acknowledged it was not what the public has “come to expect during a time of unprecedented safety in the U.S. air transportation system.”
An operational meltdown by Southwest Airlines
around Christmas and
an F.A.A. system outage
in January that caused widespread flight disruptions have also raised questions about F.A.A. management. Most recently, a technological issue with Southwest Airlines on Tuesday led to
more than 2,000 flights being delayed
, representing more than half of its schedule for the day.
Earlier this year, Mr. Nolen said that he was forming a safety review team to examine aviation in the United States, including a look at air traffic systems
|
.
“Billy is a tremendous leader, a true expert, and a dedicated public servant,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement Friday. “He has kept safety as the F.A.A.’s north star through one of the most complex periods in modern aviation.”
Do you work in aviation? The Times wants to hear your story. Please share your experiences with us below, and you can learn more about
our reporting here
. We especially want to hear from people who work for (or used to work for) airports or airlines, or who are part of government agencies that help keep the aviation sector running. We won’t publish any part of your submission without your permission.
|
254f2f8a-e82e-48b5-9e5f-5724e97866db
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/technology/google-search-monopoly-judge.html
|
Judge Narrows Scope of Google Search Antitrust Case
|
2023-08-04
|
nytimes
|
A federal judge said this week that the Justice Department and a group of states could not move forward with some claims in antitrust complaints against Google, narrowing the scope of what is set to be the most significant federal monopoly trial against a tech giant in decades.
In the decision, which was unsealed on Friday, Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed four claims in the lawsuits and allowed government lawyers to move forward with three.
Judge Mehta wrote that a trial was warranted to assess whether Google’s exclusivity deals for web browsers and preloading its services on Android devices illegally helped the internet company maintain a monopoly. But he said the government had not “demonstrated the requisite anticompetitive effect” to prove that Google broke the law in other ways, such as by boosting its own products in search results over those of specialized sites, like Amazon and Yelp.
The decision sets the stage for the first major tech monopoly trial since the federal government
took Microsoft to court
in the 1990s, amid a renewed backlash over the power of tech giants. In recent years, American regulators have filed lawsuits and tried to block the acquisitions of companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, as they have grown in reach and size.
Some efforts by regulators to challenge the tech giants have faltered. Twice this year, federal judges have declined to grant Federal Trade Commission requests to stop tech deals,
allowing Meta
to close the purchase of a virtual reality start-up and
clearing the way for Microsoft’s blockbuster acquisition
of the video game publisher Activision Blizzard.
But the Google trial, which is scheduled to begin on Sept. 12, stands out as the most direct government attempt in years to confront one of the world’s biggest tech companies about longtime business practices. The trial is expected to last almost 10 weeks and to scrutinize not only how Google conducts business but its relationships with other major companies, such as Apple and Samsung, which have largely been shrouded in secrecy.
Bill Baer, a former Justice Department antitrust official, said the cases were as significant as the landmark litigation against Microsoft.
The outcome “will set an important precedent about whether these dominant tech platforms are engaging in behavior that limits competition and disadvantages consumers,” he said.
Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said in a statement on Friday that the company appreciated Judge Mehta’s “careful consideration and decision to dismiss claims regarding the design of Google Search.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The department filed an
antitrust case against Google
under President Donald J. Trump in 2020. It argues that the Silicon Valley company exploits its power over online search and the ads that appear in search results. The lawsuit was ultimately combined for trial with a separate case about Google search that was filed that same year by the attorneys general of 35 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam.
The Justice Department has separately filed
another antitrust case against Google
, focused on the company’s software for placing ads across the web, which is headed to trial as soon as next year.
In his ruling, Judge Mehta allowed the core of the Justice Department’s case to stand. But he dismissed three of the agency’s claims regarding Google’s management of the Android operating system, its relationships to phone makers that use Android and its Google Assistant service. He also threw out a central claim brought by the states, which accused Google of providing top billing in its search results to its own products.
Judge Mehta acknowledged in his opinion that Google was extremely popular and noted the bar that government lawyers must clear to prove that it had broken antitrust rules.
It is not illegal for Google to have a monopoly alone, he wrote, adding, “A company with monopoly power acts unlawfully only when its conduct stifles competition.”
At trial, both sides are set to argue over whether the company’s multibillion-dollar agreements to be the default search engine on various devices and browsers are anticompetitive, which could have significant consequences for its core business. Google’s search engine collected $162 billion in advertising revenue last year.
Google has argued that these pacts with companies like Apple and Samsung are simple distribution deals that are common in business, and that the government has tried to penalize Google because of its popularity.
The agreements have been a linchpin in Google’s efforts to be easily accessible to large audiences. The company retains an estimated 94 percent of search engine traffic on mobile devices, according to Similarweb, a data analysis firm.
|
A federal judge said this week that the Justice Department and a group of states could not move forward with some claims in antitrust complaints against Google, narrowing the scope of what is set to be the most significant federal monopoly trial against a tech giant in decades.
In the decision, which was unsealed on Friday, Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed four claims in the lawsuits and allowed government lawyers to move forward with three.
Judge Mehta wrote that a trial was warranted to assess whether Google’s exclusivity deals for web browsers and preloading its services on Android devices illegally helped the internet company maintain a monopoly. But he said the government had not “demonstrated the requisite anticompetitive effect” to prove that Google broke the law in other ways, such as by boosting its own products in search results over those of specialized sites, like Amazon and Yelp.
The decision sets the stage for the first major tech monopoly trial since the federal government
took Microsoft to court
in the 1990s, amid a renewed backlash over the power of tech giants. In recent years, American regulators have filed lawsuits and tried to block the acquisitions of companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, as they have grown in reach and size.
Some efforts by regulators to challenge the tech giants have faltered. Twice this year, federal judges have declined to grant Federal Trade Commission requests to stop tech deals,
allowing Meta
to close the purchase of a virtual reality start-up and
clearing the way for Microsoft’s blockbuster acquisition
of the video game publisher Activision Blizzard.
But the Google trial, which is scheduled to begin on Sept. 12, stands out as the most direct government attempt in years to confront one of the world’s biggest tech companies about longtime business practices. The trial is expected to last almost 10 weeks and to scrutinize not only how Google conducts business but its relationships with other major companies, such as Apple and Samsung, which have largely been shrouded in secrecy.
Bill Baer, a former Justice Department antitrust official, said the cases were as significant as the landmark litigation against Microsoft.
The outcome “will set an important precedent about whether these dominant tech platforms are engaging in behavior that limits competition and disadvantages consumers,” he said.
Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said in a statement on Friday that the company appreciated
|
Judge Mehta’s “careful consideration and decision to dismiss claims regarding the design of Google Search.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The department filed an
antitrust case against Google
under President Donald J. Trump in 2020. It argues that the Silicon Valley company exploits its power over online search and the ads that appear in search results. The lawsuit was ultimately combined for trial with a separate case about Google search that was filed that same year by the attorneys general of 35 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam.
The Justice Department has separately filed
another antitrust case against Google
, focused on the company’s software for placing ads across the web, which is headed to trial as soon as next year.
In his ruling, Judge Mehta allowed the core of the Justice Department’s case to stand. But he dismissed three of the agency’s claims regarding Google’s management of the Android operating system, its relationships to phone makers that use Android and its Google Assistant service. He also threw out a central claim brought by the states, which accused Google of providing top billing in its search results to its own products.
Judge Mehta acknowledged in his opinion that Google was extremely popular and noted the bar that government lawyers must clear to prove that it had broken antitrust rules.
It is not illegal for Google to have a monopoly alone, he wrote, adding, “A company with monopoly power acts unlawfully only when its conduct stifles competition.”
At trial, both sides are set to argue over whether the company’s multibillion-dollar agreements to be the default search engine on various devices and browsers are anticompetitive, which could have significant consequences for its core business. Google’s search engine collected $162 billion in advertising revenue last year.
Google has argued that these pacts with companies like Apple and Samsung are simple distribution deals that are common in business, and that the government has tried to penalize Google because of its popularity.
The agreements have been a linchpin in Google’s efforts to be easily accessible to large audiences. The company retains an estimated 94 percent of search engine traffic on mobile devices, according to Similarweb, a data analysis firm.
|
25b78111-1341-46f9-ad6d-b499b2e473d3
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/arts/emmy-nominations-hbo-succession.html
|
HBO’s ‘Succession’ Dominates Emmy Nominations in Uncertain Year
|
2023-07-12
|
nytimes
|
“The Crown,” Netflix’s lavish chronicle of the British royal family, and the best drama winner at
the 2021 Emmys
, was also nominated in the category this year — though some critics had a hard time warming up to the show’s fifth season, which featured a new cast.
The moment of triumph for HBO is coming at a time of transition for the network, which since last year has been run by a debt-ridden parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. The network is now part of a streaming service that removed its call letters (bye HBO Max, hello Max). And, for the first time, HBO is in the process of licensing revered older series — “Insecure,” and soon “Six Feet Under,” “Band of Brothers” and “True Blood” — to its archrival, Netflix, in an attempt by Warner Bros. Discovery to drum up cash.
HBO had the three most nominated shows: “Succession” (27), “The Last of Us” (24) and “The White Lotus” (23). The race for best actor in a drama is shaping up as yet another “Succession” Roy family competition, pitting the one-time winner Jeremy Strong against the two-time nominee Kieran Culkin and the four-time nominee (and one-time winner, for a 2000 mini-series) Brian Cox. And HBO completely swept the best supporting actor in a drama category: eight out of eight, all split between performers from “Succession” and “The White Lotus.”
Of course, the last time a single network earned four nominations in the best drama category, 31 years ago, it came home empty-handed. It was in 1992, when NBC landed nominations for “I’ll Fly Away,” “L.A. Law,” “Law & Order” and “Quantum Leap.” All four series lost to that year’s winner, “Northern Exposure,” from CBS.
This year’s best actor in a comedy category will pit Jason Sudeikis, who has won two years in a row for playing the title role in “Ted Lasso,” against Jeremy Allen White, who plays an ambitious and anxious chef in “The Bear.” The other nominees in the category are
Bill Hader
for “
Barry
,” Jason Segel for “Shrinking” and
Martin Short
for “
Only Murders in the Building
.”
Award prognosticators believe that Quinta Brunson could be on a glide path to winning for “Abbott Elementary.” Brunson took writing honors at the Emmys last year for her good-natured ABC workplace comedy, and would be the first Black woman to win best actress in a comedy since Isabel Sanford won in 1981 for “The Jeffersons.” She will face
Christina Applegate
from “Dead to Me,” Rachel Brosnahan for “
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
,”
Natasha Lyonne
for “
Poker Face
” and
Jenna Ortega
for “
Wednesday
.”
|
“The Crown,” Netflix’s lavish chronicle of the British royal family, and the best drama winner at
the 2021 Emmys
, was also nominated in the category this year — though some critics had a hard time warming up to the show’s fifth season, which featured a new cast.
The moment of triumph for HBO is coming at a time of transition for the network, which since last year has been run by a debt-ridden parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. The network is now part of a streaming service that removed its call letters (bye HBO Max, hello Max). And, for the first time, HBO is in the process of licensing revered older series — “Insecure,” and soon “Six Feet Under,” “Band of Brothers” and “True Blood” — to its archrival, Netflix, in an attempt by Warner Bros. Discovery to drum up cash.
HBO had the three most nominated shows: “Succession” (27), “The Last of Us” (24) and “The White Lotus” (23). The race for best actor in a drama is shaping up as yet another “Succession” Roy family competition, pitting the one-time winner Jeremy Strong against the two-time nominee Kieran Culkin and the four-time nominee (and one-time winner, for a 2000 mini-series) Brian Cox. And HBO completely swept the best supporting actor in a drama category: eight out of eight, all split between performers from “Succession” and “The White Lotus.”
Of course, the last time a single network earned four nominations in the best drama category, 31 years ago, it came home empty-handed. It was in 1992, when NBC landed nominations for “I’ll Fly Away,” “L.A. Law,” “Law & Order” and “Quantum Leap.” All four series lost to that year’s winner, “Northern Exposure,” from CBS.
This year’s best actor in a comedy category will pit Jason Sudeikis, who has won two years in a row for playing the title role in “Ted Lasso,” against Jeremy Allen White, who plays an ambitious and anxious chef in “The Bear.” The other nominees in the category are
Bill Hader
for “
Barry
,” Jason Segel for “Shrinking” and
Martin Short
for “
Only Murders in the Building
.”
Award prognosticators believe that Qu
|
inta Brunson could be on a glide path to winning for “Abbott Elementary.” Brunson took writing honors at the Emmys last year for her good-natured ABC workplace comedy, and would be the first Black woman to win best actress in a comedy since Isabel Sanford won in 1981 for “The Jeffersons.” She will face
Christina Applegate
from “Dead to Me,” Rachel Brosnahan for “
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
,”
Natasha Lyonne
for “
Poker Face
” and
Jenna Ortega
for “
Wednesday
.”
|
9c04c26f-3d2f-4726-9f34-e8bc629c7826
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/nyregion/newyorktoday/firefighters-traffic-data-nyc.html
|
Can A.I. Help the Fire Trucks Show Up Sooner?
|
2024-01-26
|
nytimes
|
Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll look at how an artificial intelligence project could help the Fire Department cut response times for firefighters and ambulances. We’ll also look at Donald Trump’s brief testimony at his defamation trial.
Fighting a fire is one thing. Getting firefighters and emergency medical workers to a burning building, or to an address where someone needs help, is another challenge.
That is why the Fire Department wants to apply artificial intelligence technology to traffic patterns and, eventually, to helping fire crews take the fastest routes.
A project involving research by a seven-university consortium called
C2SMARTER
comes amid concerns that traffic is making response times longer. “Every second counts when it comes to emergency response,” Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh said. “Shorter response times are directly linked to better outcomes.”
The department acknowledges that response times have grown — and blames traffic in the city’s changing streetscape.
A Fire Department spokeswoman said the average response time for medical emergencies, the calls that demand the most immediate attention, was 7 minutes 59 seconds last year, 1 minute 14 seconds slower than in 2013. The response time for what the Fire Department classifies as “structural fires” — anything other than a brush fire, a car fire or a transit system fire — was 4 minutes 31 seconds last year, 25 seconds slower than in 2013.
One possible explanation is that fire trucks and ambulances face more obstacles than they used to. The streetscape is different now, with more protected bicycle and bus lanes, as well as outdoor dining sheds. All of them take up space on streets, which means that there is less maneuvering room for fire trucks and ambulances and less room for ordinary cars and trucks to move out of their way.
“Travel time — when you can be on the scene — is critically important to your firefighting operations or your emergency medical procedures,” said Rebecca Mason, an assistant fire commissioner.
But time has become more critical lately. Fires involving rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which provide power for e-bikes and e-scooters, often begin abruptly and spread rapidly.
But she said that such devices are not the only potential problem firefighters face.
“The modern building environment has created situations with materials where there are much more dangerous fires than in the past,” she said. “The materials we have are far more susceptible to becoming engulfed in flames more quickly.”
C2SMARTER, which is led by the transportation center at the N.Y.U. Tandon School of Engineering, plans to analyze the travel times for emergency vehicles. The researchers will take real-time traffic data from cameras and sensors, along with data from fire trucks and ambulances and from the navigation app Waze, in a 30-block section of Harlem, from West 110th Street to West 140th Street, west of Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Mason said that area had been chosen for study because “we thought it was a good representation of many parts of the city, particularly those that experience congestion.”
Once they have assembled the data, the researchers will build a “digital twin,” a computerized replica of the area.
Joseph Chow
, the associate director of C2SMARTER and the principal investigator on the project, noted that communities like Harlem had been underserved in the past, so they could reap especially significant benefits if emergency vehicles answered their 911 calls faster.
“What we’re trying to replicate” with the digital twin, he said, “is how the vehicles move through that particular neighborhood” — cars, trucks, bicycles, e-bikes and scooters.
C2SMARTER will do that with software, simulating traffic delays in the 30-block zone, along with ways to avoid the tie-ups. “Given the decisions that emergency response teams make in sending out vehicles for an incident,” Chow said, “we want to help them make predictions about whether or not a particular route they take or a certain strategy in dispatching different types of units can help or hinder their operations.”
The researchers are counting on artificial intelligence to mimic drivers’ behavior, including their reactions to sirens and flashing lights from a fire truck or an ambulance. Chow said that was important because “startlingly little information” had been collected about how ordinary drivers respond to those signals.
The software “does not just mimic traffic conditions,” said
Jingqin Gao
, the assistant director of research at C2SMARTER. “It mimics response from other vehicles to emergency vehicles and how emergency vehicles behave in the real world.”
Weather
Expect a chance of rain and fog, with temperatures in the upper 40s. At night, it will be mostly cloudy, with a low of 39 degrees.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Feb. 9 (Lunar New Year’s Eve).
The latest Metro news
Five minutes of testimony
This time,
Donald Trump spent less than five minutes
on the witness stand.
His lawyer called him as a witness in the defamation trial involving a lawsuit brought by the writer
E. Jean Carroll,
a civil case that grew out of her accusation that Trump had raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
It was the second time in two weeks that Trump had appeared in court in his own defense: On Jan. 11, he spoke his mind as his monthslong civil fraud trial was wrapping up, describing himself as “an innocent man” and insulting the judge.
On Thursday, his lawyer, Alina Habba, asked Trump if he stood by what he had said during a deposition in which he called Carroll a liar.
“One hundred percent, yes,” Trump said. “She said something; I consider it a false accusation.”
Trump’s brief appearance came after much debate before the trial over whether
the judge, Lewis Kaplan
, should take steps to ensure that Trump did not stray from the single issue in the case — damages. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, had written to the judge, saying that Trump might see a political benefit “from intentionally turning this trial into a circus.”
In the end, both sides seemed to achieve their goals. Trump answered a handful of questions from Habba, and he did not embark on a rant about Carroll, who is seeking at least $10 million from the former president.
The Carroll case is being tried before a jury in federal court, unlike the civil fraud case, which will be decided solely by Justice Arthur Engoron in State Supreme Court. The identities of the jurors have been kept secret on orders from Judge Kaplan, who even suggested that they not share their real names with one another. He said in a pretrial ruling that he wanted to guard against attempts to influence or harass them by Trump or his supporters.
The jurors have given no real clues about how they see the case that unfolded before them. The only issue they will decide is how much Trump must pay Carroll for comments he made in June 2019, after Carroll,
in a book excerpt published in New York magazine
, first accused him of assault. Trump called her claim “totally false” and said that he had never met her and that she was merely trying to sell her book.
METROPOLITAN diary
Sudden stops
Dear Diary:
I was in Manhattan walking behind a woman who was walking her dog.
The dog stopped suddenly, and I almost bumped into both of them.
I began to apologize. The woman turned toward me and smiled.
“No brake lights,” she said.
We both laughed.
About a half-hour later, I was on the checkout line at Trader Joe’s. I began to move forward and then stopped. The woman behind me bumped me gently with her shopping cart.
She began to apologize. I turned around and smiled.
“No brake lights,” I said.
— Carey Horwitz
Illustrated by Agnes Lee.
Send submissions here
and
read more Metropolitan Diary here
.
|
Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll look at how an artificial intelligence project could help the Fire Department cut response times for firefighters and ambulances. We’ll also look at Donald Trump’s brief testimony at his defamation trial.
Fighting a fire is one thing. Getting firefighters and emergency medical workers to a burning building, or to an address where someone needs help, is another challenge.
That is why the Fire Department wants to apply artificial intelligence technology to traffic patterns and, eventually, to helping fire crews take the fastest routes.
A project involving research by a seven-university consortium called
C2SMARTER
comes amid concerns that traffic is making response times longer. “Every second counts when it comes to emergency response,” Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh said. “Shorter response times are directly linked to better outcomes.”
The department acknowledges that response times have grown — and blames traffic in the city’s changing streetscape.
A Fire Department spokeswoman said the average response time for medical emergencies, the calls that demand the most immediate attention, was 7 minutes 59 seconds last year, 1 minute 14 seconds slower than in 2013. The response time for what the Fire Department classifies as “structural fires” — anything other than a brush fire, a car fire or a transit system fire — was 4 minutes 31 seconds last year, 25 seconds slower than in 2013.
One possible explanation is that fire trucks and ambulances face more obstacles than they used to. The streetscape is different now, with more protected bicycle and bus lanes, as well as outdoor dining sheds. All of them take up space on streets, which means that there is less maneuvering room for fire trucks and ambulances and less room for ordinary cars and trucks to move out of their way.
“Travel time — when you can be on the scene — is critically important to your firefighting operations or your emergency medical procedures,” said Rebecca Mason, an assistant fire commissioner.
But time has become more critical lately. Fires involving rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which provide power for e-bikes and e-scooters, often begin abruptly and spread rapidly.
But she said that such devices are not the only potential problem firefighters face.
“The modern building environment has created situations with materials where there are much more dangerous fires than in the past,” she said. “The materials we have are far more susceptible to becoming engulfed in flames more quickly.”
C2
|
SMARTER, which is led by the transportation center at the N.Y.U. Tandon School of Engineering, plans to analyze the travel times for emergency vehicles. The researchers will take real-time traffic data from cameras and sensors, along with data from fire trucks and ambulances and from the navigation app Waze, in a 30-block section of Harlem, from West 110th Street to West 140th Street, west of Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Mason said that area had been chosen for study because “we thought it was a good representation of many parts of the city, particularly those that experience congestion.”
Once they have assembled the data, the researchers will build a “digital twin,” a computerized replica of the area.
Joseph Chow
, the associate director of C2SMARTER and the principal investigator on the project, noted that communities like Harlem had been underserved in the past, so they could reap especially significant benefits if emergency vehicles answered their 911 calls faster.
“What we’re trying to replicate” with the digital twin, he said, “is how the vehicles move through that particular neighborhood” — cars, trucks, bicycles, e-bikes and scooters.
C2SMARTER will do that with software, simulating traffic delays in the 30-block zone, along with ways to avoid the tie-ups. “Given the decisions that emergency response teams make in sending out vehicles for an incident,” Chow said, “we want to help them make predictions about whether or not a particular route they take or a certain strategy in dispatching different types of units can help or hinder their operations.”
The researchers are counting on artificial intelligence to mimic drivers’ behavior, including their reactions to sirens and flashing lights from a fire truck or an ambulance. Chow said that was important because “startlingly little information” had been collected about how ordinary drivers respond to those signals.
The software “does not just mimic traffic conditions,” said
Jingqin Gao
, the assistant director of research at C2SMARTER. “It mimics response from other vehicles to emergency vehicles and how emergency vehicles behave in the real world.”
Weather
Expect a chance of rain and fog, with temperatures in the upper 40s. At night, it will be mostly cloudy, with a low of 39 degrees.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Feb. 9 (Lunar New Year’s Eve).
The latest Metro news
Five minutes of testimony
This time,
Donald Trump spent less than five minutes
on the witness stand.
His lawyer called him as a witness in the defamation trial involving a lawsuit brought by the writer
E. Jean Carroll,
a civil case that grew out of her accusation that Trump had raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
It was the second time in two weeks that Trump had appeared in court in his own defense: On Jan. 11, he spoke his mind as his monthslong civil fraud trial was wrapping up, describing himself as “an innocent man” and insulting the judge.
On Thursday, his lawyer, Alina Habba, asked Trump if he stood by what he had said during a deposition in which he called Carroll a liar.
“One hundred percent, yes,” Trump said. “She said something; I consider it a false accusation.”
Trump’s brief appearance came after much debate before the trial over whether
the judge, Lewis Kaplan
, should take steps to ensure that Trump did not stray from the single issue in the case — damages. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, had written to the judge, saying that Trump might see a political benefit “from intentionally turning this trial into a circus.”
In the end, both sides seemed to achieve their goals. Trump answered a handful of questions from Habba, and he did not embark on a rant about Carroll, who is seeking at least $10 million from the former president.
The Carroll case is being tried before a jury in federal court, unlike the civil fraud case, which will be decided solely by Justice Arthur Engoron in State Supreme Court. The identities of the jurors have been kept secret on orders from Judge Kaplan, who even suggested that they not share their real names with one another. He said in a pretrial ruling that he wanted to guard against attempts to influence or harass them by Trump or his supporters.
The jurors have given no real clues about how they see the case that unfolded before them. The only issue they will decide is how much Trump must pay Carroll for comments he made in June 2019, after Carroll,
in a book excerpt published in New York magazine
, first accused him of assault. Trump called her claim “totally false” and said that he had never met her and that she was merely trying to sell her book.
METROPOLITAN diary
Sudden stops
Dear Diary:
I was in Manhattan walking behind a woman who was walking her dog.
The dog stopped suddenly, and I almost bumped into both of them.
I began to apologize. The woman turned toward me and smiled.
“No brake lights,” she said.
We both laughed.
About a half-hour later, I was on the checkout line at Trader Joe’s. I began to move forward and then stopped. The woman behind me bumped me gently with her shopping cart.
She began to apologize. I turned around and smiled.
“No brake lights,” I said.
— Carey Horwitz
Illustrated by Agnes Lee.
Send submissions here
and
read more Metropolitan Diary here
.
|
81284a67-a58c-4b4e-a600-43dd7c7d7a8d
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/arts/design/josephine-baker-exhibition-berlin.html
|
Josephine Baker, Still Moving
|
2024-01-30
|
nytimes
|
There was no shortage of epithets for Josephine Baker, the St. Louis-born polymath who took Paris by storm when she arrived there in 1925, aged 19, to headline “La Revue Nègre,” a show of all-Black performers at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.
The French graphic designer Paul Colin said he’d never seen anyone move like her: “Part kangaroo, part prizefighter. A woman made of rubber, a female Tarzan.” To the writer Colette, a rumored lover, she was “a most beautiful panther,” and to Ernest Hemingway, “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw.” Over the next decade, she was also called “Black Venus,” “Black Pearl” and “Creole Goddess.”
It is the Baker of this era
— doing her scantily clad “danse sauvage” — who still looms large in the cultural imagination. She was an Art Deco icon who was
inducted into France’s Panthéon
in 2021
and honored by Beyoncé
on her recent “Renaissance” tour
. A new exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin presents Baker in the round — not as an object of entertainment, but as an artist and an activist.
The show, “
Josephine Baker: Icon in Motion
,” which runs through April 28, is a small but dense and deeply imaginative reconsidering of her life and work. The museum’s director,
Klaus Biesenbach
(formerly of MoMA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) has curated the show with the artist Kandis Williams, the scholar Terri Francis and the curator Mona Horncastle: The result emphasizes the importance of multiple interpretations.
We see familiar images, still and moving, of Baker during her Paris heyday, wearing anklets of feathers, elaborate vests made of crystals and pearls, bikinis festooned with hornlike protrusions and, of course, the infamous skirt of jewel-encrusted bananas that bounced and twinkled when she danced the Charleston. Black-and-white glamour photographs by prominent 1920s photographers show Baker’s influence on high fashion of the time.
On a series of monitors, segments from her dance routines and feature films show Baker’s extraordinary physical skill. In one, every part of her body seems to move independently, arms and legs akimbo, while also keeping time to the same beat. In another, she sashays and wriggles across the stage like mercury, then breaks into knee drops so extreme that I felt my own legs go weak. In yet another, she clowns between moves, rolls and crosses her eyes, purses her lips, puffs up her cheeks and waddles, wiggling her head side-to-side.
A section called “Modernist Muse” shows Baker’s creative impact on prominent artists of the time, many of whom were her friends (and sometimes paramours). Alexander Calder’s 1928 mobile “Josephine Baker IV” has her sparely outlined in steel wire, with sinuous curves and protruding coils for breasts.
A drawing by Le Corbusier from around the same time, “Josephine Baker Sleeping,” shows the notoriously unstoppable dancer in gentle repose. At the center of the display, the curators have placed a vitrine filled with books about Baker, including her memoirs, which were translated into many languages. She might have been a muse, but she was also — literally — the author of her own life.
Baker lived and worked across a Europe shaped by its colonial exploits and was keenly aware of how she could embody the racist ideas of her audience. “People have done me the honor of comparing me to an animal,” Baker once said slyly of comments like those from Colin or Collette.
She used hackneyed colonial symbols, like bananas, palm trees and tropical creatures, to her own ends, and her pet cheetah Chiquita sometimes terrorized the orchestra pit. Her performances were self-aware appropriations, played for laughs with absolute sincerity: See how I move, see how I grin, see how stereotype and desire are entwined. See how you can’t look away.
Then fascism’s rise brought down the curtain. On tour in Austria in the early 1930s, churches rang their bells to drown out her performances, and once France was occupied in 1940, she was banned from the stage there, along with all Black and Jewish performers. Undaunted, she joined the French Resistance and collected intelligence while performing in North Africa, smuggling back information written in invisible ink on her score sheets.
In 1961, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, a French military honor for feats of bravery; two years later she traveled back to the United States to attend the March on Washington, where she was one of two women to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr.
“I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America too,” Baker said
to the crowd of over 200,000 people on the National Mall
. In her country of birth, she was a “little devil” for her commitment to speaking out about racial segregation. A display titled “Civil Rights Activist Extraordinaire” shows photographs of Baker on the National Mall, and meeting with the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, which inaugurated a day in her honor. Baker’s belief in equality and universalism extended to her personal life: She
adopted 12 children of various ethnicities and nationalities
, calling them her “Rainbow Tribe.”
Artists and scholars remain influenced by Baker and what Francis, the co-curator, describes in a video essay that appears in the show as the performer’s “prismatic” qualities: “Neither a single image nor a static representation, Baker is rather a dazzling many-ness, a structure of spectacles, formed from multiple media.”
Also included are works by contemporary artists that speak to Baker’s inspiration — like Carrie Mae Weems’s “Slow Fade To Black: Josephine Baker” a diptych, that frames the exhibitions entrance, or Jean-Ulrick Désert’s colorful stained glass portrait, “Shrine of the Divine Negress No. 1” at the exit. Where Weems blurs two iconic photographs of Baker to the point of dissolution, Désert renders the performer in vibrant clarity, surrounded by butterflies. Most powerful and provocative is Simone Leigh’s “Slipcover” (2022-3), a wall-mounted square of porcelain bananas painted in fleshy hues from pale pink to dark black. Leigh harnesses the same stereotypes Baker was exploring — and exploiting — in her art to make audiences think twice, look again.
In this sensitive presentation, Baker emerges as a many-pointed star, at once individual and part of a wider constellation. With its collaborative curatorial team, array of mediums and inclusion of contemporary artists, the exhibition is also a collective enterprise of reinterpretation, in which the networks between discrete objects and images are just as important.
Baker never stopped moving: onstage, onscreen, across Europe. In this exhibition, it is her identity that refuses to stay still and insists on containing multitudes.
Josephine Baker: Icon in Motion
Through April 28 at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin;
smb.museum
.
|
There was no shortage of epithets for Josephine Baker, the St. Louis-born polymath who took Paris by storm when she arrived there in 1925, aged 19, to headline “La Revue Nègre,” a show of all-Black performers at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.
The French graphic designer Paul Colin said he’d never seen anyone move like her: “Part kangaroo, part prizefighter. A woman made of rubber, a female Tarzan.” To the writer Colette, a rumored lover, she was “a most beautiful panther,” and to Ernest Hemingway, “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw.” Over the next decade, she was also called “Black Venus,” “Black Pearl” and “Creole Goddess.”
It is the Baker of this era
— doing her scantily clad “danse sauvage” — who still looms large in the cultural imagination. She was an Art Deco icon who was
inducted into France’s Panthéon
in 2021
and honored by Beyoncé
on her recent “Renaissance” tour
. A new exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin presents Baker in the round — not as an object of entertainment, but as an artist and an activist.
The show, “
Josephine Baker: Icon in Motion
,” which runs through April 28, is a small but dense and deeply imaginative reconsidering of her life and work. The museum’s director,
Klaus Biesenbach
(formerly of MoMA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) has curated the show with the artist Kandis Williams, the scholar Terri Francis and the curator Mona Horncastle: The result emphasizes the importance of multiple interpretations.
We see familiar images, still and moving, of Baker during her Paris heyday, wearing anklets of feathers, elaborate vests made of crystals and pearls, bikinis festooned with hornlike protrusions and, of course, the infamous skirt of jewel-encrusted bananas that bounced and twinkled when she danced the Charleston. Black-and-white glamour photographs by prominent 1920s photographers show Baker’s influence on high fashion of the time.
On a series of monitors, segments from her dance routines and feature films show Baker’s extraordinary physical skill. In one, every part of her body seems to move independently, arms and legs akimbo, while also keeping time to the same
|
beat. In another, she sashays and wriggles across the stage like mercury, then breaks into knee drops so extreme that I felt my own legs go weak. In yet another, she clowns between moves, rolls and crosses her eyes, purses her lips, puffs up her cheeks and waddles, wiggling her head side-to-side.
A section called “Modernist Muse” shows Baker’s creative impact on prominent artists of the time, many of whom were her friends (and sometimes paramours). Alexander Calder’s 1928 mobile “Josephine Baker IV” has her sparely outlined in steel wire, with sinuous curves and protruding coils for breasts.
A drawing by Le Corbusier from around the same time, “Josephine Baker Sleeping,” shows the notoriously unstoppable dancer in gentle repose. At the center of the display, the curators have placed a vitrine filled with books about Baker, including her memoirs, which were translated into many languages. She might have been a muse, but she was also — literally — the author of her own life.
Baker lived and worked across a Europe shaped by its colonial exploits and was keenly aware of how she could embody the racist ideas of her audience. “People have done me the honor of comparing me to an animal,” Baker once said slyly of comments like those from Colin or Collette.
She used hackneyed colonial symbols, like bananas, palm trees and tropical creatures, to her own ends, and her pet cheetah Chiquita sometimes terrorized the orchestra pit. Her performances were self-aware appropriations, played for laughs with absolute sincerity: See how I move, see how I grin, see how stereotype and desire are entwined. See how you can’t look away.
Then fascism’s rise brought down the curtain. On tour in Austria in the early 1930s, churches rang their bells to drown out her performances, and once France was occupied in 1940, she was banned from the stage there, along with all Black and Jewish performers. Undaunted, she joined the French Resistance and collected intelligence while performing in North Africa, smuggling back information written in invisible ink on her score sheets.
In 1961, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, a French military honor for feats of bravery; two years later she traveled back to the United States to attend the March on Washington, where she was one of two women to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr.
“I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America too,” Baker said
to the crowd of over 200,000 people on the National Mall
. In her country of birth, she was a “little devil” for her commitment to speaking out about racial segregation. A display titled “Civil Rights Activist Extraordinaire” shows photographs of Baker on the National Mall, and meeting with the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, which inaugurated a day in her honor. Baker’s belief in equality and universalism extended to her personal life: She
adopted 12 children of various ethnicities and nationalities
, calling them her “Rainbow Tribe.”
Artists and scholars remain influenced by Baker and what Francis, the co-curator, describes in a video essay that appears in the show as the performer’s “prismatic” qualities: “Neither a single image nor a static representation, Baker is rather a dazzling many-ness, a structure of spectacles, formed from multiple media.”
Also included are works by contemporary artists that speak to Baker’s inspiration — like Carrie Mae Weems’s “Slow Fade To Black: Josephine Baker” a diptych, that frames the exhibitions entrance, or Jean-Ulrick Désert’s colorful stained glass portrait, “Shrine of the Divine Negress No. 1” at the exit. Where Weems blurs two iconic photographs of Baker to the point of dissolution, Désert renders the performer in vibrant clarity, surrounded by butterflies. Most powerful and provocative is Simone Leigh’s “Slipcover” (2022-3), a wall-mounted square of porcelain bananas painted in fleshy hues from pale pink to dark black. Leigh harnesses the same stereotypes Baker was exploring — and exploiting — in her art to make audiences think twice, look again.
In this sensitive presentation, Baker emerges as a many-pointed star, at once individual and part of a wider constellation. With its collaborative curatorial team, array of mediums and inclusion of contemporary artists, the exhibition is also a collective enterprise of reinterpretation, in which the networks between discrete objects and images are just as important.
Baker never stopped moving: onstage, onscreen, across Europe. In this exhibition, it is her identity that refuses to stay still and insists on containing multitudes.
Josephine Baker: Icon in Motion
Through April 28 at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin;
smb.museum
.
|
59d768ca-17eb-43e0-9b0d-d0ef48924ea2
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/04/arts/dance/review-olivier-tarpaga-joyce-theater.html
|
Review: This Dance About Refugees Has Flow and a Groove
|
2023-10-04
|
nytimes
|
Not long ago, the choreographer and musician Olivier Tarpaga, who teaches at Princeton University, wanted to visit the city of his birth and his father’s grave in the north of Burkina Faso. But the region had been overrun by violent jihadists, and he learned that his hometown was now home to a refugee camp for women and children. Instead of visiting, he made a dance theater work about refugees: “Once the dust settles, flowers bloom.”
At the start of the piece, which had its New York premiere at the
Joyce Theater
on Tuesday as part of the
Crossing the Line festival
, men enter carrying what looks like a jihadist flag and dozens of objects that turn out to be flip-flops. They move together with tiny, quick steps that could be menacing or comic. One man removes a hood from a woman’s head and manipulates her limp body in a way that suggests sexual abuse.
And that is the end of any direct depiction of jihadists and refugees. A beat kicks in, and three women stand arms akimbo, bouncing their hips like a Motown girl group. The awful subject matter dissolves into an unpredictable dance work of subtle beauty and mystery — dissolves but does not disappear.
The lighting (by Fabrice Barbotin) is dim but warm, as if emanating only from the few lanterns hanging onstage. And the whole production feels dialed down, restrained, so that the surges of energy and speed — of resistance and suppressed rage — register with disconcerting force.
The heart of the matter is the music, which Tarpaga composed with members of his
Dafra Kura Band
, who play behind scrims at the rear of the stage. It’s West African blues, spare grooves picked out on electric guitar, kora and djeli ngoni, topped with griot vocals and sometimes driven by bass and drums. But just as important are artful intervals of silence, after which the music returns like a breeze in the desert, gently keeping the work moving.
The choreography — African, contemporary, not quite like the work of any other company — is compositionally sophisticated without being showy. Group segments can be irresistibly groovy but seldom as simple as sustained unison. One or another of the supple, grounded dancers is briefly left out or breaking off. And the flow from section to section is smooth and overlapping. Movement material from one of the many solos might blossom into a dance for three — a formal transformation with interpersonal resonance.
Within this flow are images and motions that are poetically suggestive but unfixed in meaning: dervish-like spins, raised fists and fingers. To the sound of polyrhythmic clapping, dancers lying in a line toss and turn as if in some uncomfortable mode of transport, but also spiral off the ground like dust devils. Later, a performer walks along a standing line of the others, as if inspecting troops but also saying farewell to family.
When a dancer licks a finger and writes on the ground, I don’t know what he is writing. Neither do I know precisely why all the dancers grip flowers between their teeth or what the flip-flops represent. But late in the work, when the dancers arrange the shoes in piles, their attention makes me care about that flimsy footwear. And when a circle of women brings back that glorious hip bouncing, it feels healing and hopeful. Tarpaga trusts his art and his audience. He doesn’t overexplain. He lets emotion and meaning bloom.
Olivier Tarpaga Dance Project
Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater;
joyce.org.
|
Not long ago, the choreographer and musician Olivier Tarpaga, who teaches at Princeton University, wanted to visit the city of his birth and his father’s grave in the north of Burkina Faso. But the region had been overrun by violent jihadists, and he learned that his hometown was now home to a refugee camp for women and children. Instead of visiting, he made a dance theater work about refugees: “Once the dust settles, flowers bloom.”
At the start of the piece, which had its New York premiere at the
Joyce Theater
on Tuesday as part of the
Crossing the Line festival
, men enter carrying what looks like a jihadist flag and dozens of objects that turn out to be flip-flops. They move together with tiny, quick steps that could be menacing or comic. One man removes a hood from a woman’s head and manipulates her limp body in a way that suggests sexual abuse.
And that is the end of any direct depiction of jihadists and refugees. A beat kicks in, and three women stand arms akimbo, bouncing their hips like a Motown girl group. The awful subject matter dissolves into an unpredictable dance work of subtle beauty and mystery — dissolves but does not disappear.
The lighting (by Fabrice Barbotin) is dim but warm, as if emanating only from the few lanterns hanging onstage. And the whole production feels dialed down, restrained, so that the surges of energy and speed — of resistance and suppressed rage — register with disconcerting force.
The heart of the matter is the music, which Tarpaga composed with members of his
Dafra Kura Band
, who play behind scrims at the rear of the stage. It’s West African blues, spare grooves picked out on electric guitar, kora and djeli ngoni, topped with griot vocals and sometimes driven by bass and drums. But just as important are artful intervals of silence, after which the music returns like a breeze in the desert, gently keeping the work moving.
The choreography — African, contemporary, not quite like the work of any other company — is compositionally sophisticated without being showy. Group segments can be irresistibly groovy but seldom as simple as sustained unison. One or another of the supple, grounded dancers is briefly left out or breaking off. And the flow from section to section is smooth and overlapping. Movement material from one of the many solos might blossom into a dance
|
for three — a formal transformation with interpersonal resonance.
Within this flow are images and motions that are poetically suggestive but unfixed in meaning: dervish-like spins, raised fists and fingers. To the sound of polyrhythmic clapping, dancers lying in a line toss and turn as if in some uncomfortable mode of transport, but also spiral off the ground like dust devils. Later, a performer walks along a standing line of the others, as if inspecting troops but also saying farewell to family.
When a dancer licks a finger and writes on the ground, I don’t know what he is writing. Neither do I know precisely why all the dancers grip flowers between their teeth or what the flip-flops represent. But late in the work, when the dancers arrange the shoes in piles, their attention makes me care about that flimsy footwear. And when a circle of women brings back that glorious hip bouncing, it feels healing and hopeful. Tarpaga trusts his art and his audience. He doesn’t overexplain. He lets emotion and meaning bloom.
Olivier Tarpaga Dance Project
Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater;
joyce.org.
|
23e85447-7350-45cc-bac5-82ee88d1a523
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/10/opinion/letters/child-labor.html
|
Exploiting Children in the Workplace
|
2023-04-10
|
nytimes
|
To the Editor:
Thank you for the excellent and comprehensive Opinion guest essay “
The Solution to Our Worker Shortage Isn’t Child Labor,
” by Terri Gerstein
(March 29).
The increase in child labor violations has been going on for more than a decade and is attributable in large measure to the decrease in federal and state labor department funding for enforcement and to the notion that child labor is a thing of the past.
Until that changes, the situation will not change, and millions of children will be vulnerable to exploitation and workplace abuse.
That is a sad and real 21st-century problem that brings us back more than 100 years to the days when factories and workplaces were filled with children. We must act quickly to prevent this situation from expanding. Time is of the essence and children are at risk; public attention and political action are essential.
Jeffrey F. Newman
Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.
The writer was president and executive director of the nonprofit National Child Labor Committee.
To the Editor:
Terri Gerstein sets forth a number of good ways to begin to address the hiring of minors for jobs where they face dangerous workplace conditions and other forms of exploitation.
But to the variables she lists that have reduced the available labor force, thereby contributing to the violations of child labor laws to make up for the shortage, I would add the absence of a national program to provide affordable, high-quality and accessible child care. If we were to adopt such a program, it could entice more parents (mainly women) to rejoin the labor force.
Minors, of course, will still need protection from unscrupulous employers and their subcontractors, but maybe if child care were accessible and affordable to more people, employers would not feel the need to hire underage workers because there would be a larger pool of adults from which to draw.
Amy Laiken
Chicago
To the Editor:
I thought that America had moved on from the working conditions in Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle.” When I was reading Terri Gerstein’s essay, it seemed almost dystopian that the same debate should return in the 21st century.
Ms. Gerstein condemns corporations that are “turning to the most vulnerable and exploitable work force around: children,” and I wholeheartedly agree with her condemnation. It’s madness that labor requirements for the most vulnerable population of Americans are being removed or reconsidered in the name of employer convenience. Whatever happened to the principle of people over profit?
It’s not lost on me that the United States is the only country that has not ratified the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. Protecting children is a universal value, but it seems that the U.S. treasures cash over kids. It’s essential that child labor laws are strong in order to keep kids safe.
Faith Tsang
Boston
When Political Scandals Are Hushed Up During a Campaign
To the Editor:
“October Surprises, and the Tawdry Tradition of Suppressing Them
” (Political Memo, March 28) left out two important efforts to suppress scandal in the waning days of presidential campaigns.
In 1920, the Republican National Committee chairman Will Hays
negotiated hush money payments to Warren Harding’s mistress
Carrie Phillips to keep her from exposing Harding’s salacious love letters about their long-running affair. Phillips and her husband received $25,000 — equivalent to more than $375,000 today — to stay away from the press by touring Asia during the fall campaign.
In October 1960, the columnists
Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson exposed Vice President Richard Nixon’s secret pocketing of money from the billionaire Howard Hughes
, some of which, it later turned out, was used to help pay for Nixon’s elegant Tudor house in Washington.
Nixon attempted to cover up the transaction, but operatives from the presidential campaign of his Democratic rival, John F. Kennedy, obtained paperwork documenting it and leaked it to the press. Nixon blamed this October surprise for his narrow loss to Kennedy days later.
Ironically, when Nixon was elected president eight years later, he set up his own corps of dirty tricks operatives that culminated in the botched break-in at the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic Party that precipitated his resignation from the presidency.
Mark Feldstein
College Park, Md.
The writer is a journalism historian at the University of Maryland and the author of “Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture.”
‘Unconvictable’ Trump
To the Editor:
There has been little discussion about the fact that Donald Trump is probably unconvictable.
Prosecutors need unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials to convict. All Mr. Trump needs is one MAGA zealot on a jury panel and he won’t be convicted, no matter the charge and no matter how overwhelming the evidence of guilt. And Mr. Trump’s lawyers will see to it that there will be at least a few such jurors in any criminal trial.
Just as this man escaped consequences after being twice impeached, I fear he will never be convicted of any crime, evidence be damned.
Martin Kimel
Potomac, Md.
At a Pool in Paris
To the Editor:
“
In This Locker Room, the Arc of Fitness Is Long
,” by Bonnie Tsui (Opinion guest essay, April 2), conjured a pleasurable Proustian moment for me.
I’ve swum and taken classes at my local Y for decades. I joined as a young mother, and now I’m at the other end of the arc. Early in my tenure, one of the older ladies inspired me with an effortless forward fold. I resolved to include yoga in my regimen. I have.
My fitness village taught me an international language. On my best trips, I find a neighborhood swimming pool and meet the locals. I once jumped into a pool near the Latin Quarter in Paris. It was a beautiful relic of the 1930s.
The rules were different from my New York City pool. There were no lane dividers, and no one wore a Speedo or goggles. An attendant escorted me to a wooden cabana overlooking the pool.
The tile work was Matisse blue. Natural light streamed in through a glass ceiling. The community welcomed me with nods and smiles. It was my best French lesson.
Debra Michlewitz
Queens
A.I. as an Aid for Blind People
To the Editor:
“
Tech Leaders Urge a Pause in A.I., Citing ‘Profound Risks to Society
’” (Business, March 30) noted that an A.I. system was able to pass a Captcha test. Nothing would thrill me more than A.I. that can solve Captcha challenges.
As a blind person, I rely on technology to access a sighted world. Despite innovative technologies like screen readers and smart assistants, most websites and apps cannot be used without eyesight. Captcha is one of many accessibility issues that I and others in the blind community struggle with every day.
Recent developments in artificial intelligence have given me hope that — someday — a smart assistant will be able to help me use inaccessible software. The blind community has been waiting for this day since the birth of the internet.
But now, because of unspecified potential “risks to society and humanity,” naysayers want to stop A.I. development before the sun crests the horizon. Let’s not throw out the A.I. baby with the HAL 9000 bathwater.
Paul Martz
Erie, Colo.
|
To the Editor:
Thank you for the excellent and comprehensive Opinion guest essay “
The Solution to Our Worker Shortage Isn’t Child Labor,
” by Terri Gerstein
(March 29).
The increase in child labor violations has been going on for more than a decade and is attributable in large measure to the decrease in federal and state labor department funding for enforcement and to the notion that child labor is a thing of the past.
Until that changes, the situation will not change, and millions of children will be vulnerable to exploitation and workplace abuse.
That is a sad and real 21st-century problem that brings us back more than 100 years to the days when factories and workplaces were filled with children. We must act quickly to prevent this situation from expanding. Time is of the essence and children are at risk; public attention and political action are essential.
Jeffrey F. Newman
Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.
The writer was president and executive director of the nonprofit National Child Labor Committee.
To the Editor:
Terri Gerstein sets forth a number of good ways to begin to address the hiring of minors for jobs where they face dangerous workplace conditions and other forms of exploitation.
But to the variables she lists that have reduced the available labor force, thereby contributing to the violations of child labor laws to make up for the shortage, I would add the absence of a national program to provide affordable, high-quality and accessible child care. If we were to adopt such a program, it could entice more parents (mainly women) to rejoin the labor force.
Minors, of course, will still need protection from unscrupulous employers and their subcontractors, but maybe if child care were accessible and affordable to more people, employers would not feel the need to hire underage workers because there would be a larger pool of adults from which to draw.
Amy Laiken
Chicago
To the Editor:
I thought that America had moved on from the working conditions in Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle.” When I was reading Terri Gerstein’s essay, it seemed almost dystopian that the same debate should return in the 21st century.
Ms. Gerstein condemns corporations that are “turning to the most vulnerable and exploitable work force around: children,” and I wholeheartedly agree with her condemnation. It’s madness that labor requirements for the most vulnerable population of Americans are being removed or reconsidered in the name of employer convenience. Whatever happened to the
|
principle of people over profit?
It’s not lost on me that the United States is the only country that has not ratified the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. Protecting children is a universal value, but it seems that the U.S. treasures cash over kids. It’s essential that child labor laws are strong in order to keep kids safe.
Faith Tsang
Boston
When Political Scandals Are Hushed Up During a Campaign
To the Editor:
“October Surprises, and the Tawdry Tradition of Suppressing Them
” (Political Memo, March 28) left out two important efforts to suppress scandal in the waning days of presidential campaigns.
In 1920, the Republican National Committee chairman Will Hays
negotiated hush money payments to Warren Harding’s mistress
Carrie Phillips to keep her from exposing Harding’s salacious love letters about their long-running affair. Phillips and her husband received $25,000 — equivalent to more than $375,000 today — to stay away from the press by touring Asia during the fall campaign.
In October 1960, the columnists
Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson exposed Vice President Richard Nixon’s secret pocketing of money from the billionaire Howard Hughes
, some of which, it later turned out, was used to help pay for Nixon’s elegant Tudor house in Washington.
Nixon attempted to cover up the transaction, but operatives from the presidential campaign of his Democratic rival, John F. Kennedy, obtained paperwork documenting it and leaked it to the press. Nixon blamed this October surprise for his narrow loss to Kennedy days later.
Ironically, when Nixon was elected president eight years later, he set up his own corps of dirty tricks operatives that culminated in the botched break-in at the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic Party that precipitated his resignation from the presidency.
Mark Feldstein
College Park, Md.
The writer is a journalism historian at the University of Maryland and the author of “Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture.”
‘Unconvictable’ Trump
To the Editor:
There has been little discussion about the fact that Donald Trump is probably unconvictable.
Prosecutors need unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials to convict. All Mr. Trump needs is one MAGA zealot on a jury panel and he won’t be convicted, no matter the charge and no matter how overwhelming the evidence of guilt. And Mr. Trump’s lawyers will see to it that there will be at least a few such jurors in any criminal trial.
Just as this man escaped consequences after being twice impeached, I fear he will never be convicted of any crime, evidence be damned.
Martin Kimel
Potomac, Md.
At a Pool in Paris
To the Editor:
“
In This Locker Room, the Arc of Fitness Is Long
,” by Bonnie Tsui (Opinion guest essay, April 2), conjured a pleasurable Proustian moment for me.
I’ve swum and taken classes at my local Y for decades. I joined as a young mother, and now I’m at the other end of the arc. Early in my tenure, one of the older ladies inspired me with an effortless forward fold. I resolved to include yoga in my regimen. I have.
My fitness village taught me an international language. On my best trips, I find a neighborhood swimming pool and meet the locals. I once jumped into a pool near the Latin Quarter in Paris. It was a beautiful relic of the 1930s.
The rules were different from my New York City pool. There were no lane dividers, and no one wore a Speedo or goggles. An attendant escorted me to a wooden cabana overlooking the pool.
The tile work was Matisse blue. Natural light streamed in through a glass ceiling. The community welcomed me with nods and smiles. It was my best French lesson.
Debra Michlewitz
Queens
A.I. as an Aid for Blind People
To the Editor:
“
Tech Leaders Urge a Pause in A.I., Citing ‘Profound Risks to Society
’” (Business, March 30) noted that an A.I. system was able to pass a Captcha test. Nothing would thrill me more than A.I. that can solve Captcha challenges.
As a blind person, I rely on technology to access a sighted world. Despite innovative technologies like screen readers and smart assistants, most websites and apps cannot be used without eyesight. Captcha is one of many accessibility issues that I and others in the blind community struggle with every day.
Recent developments in artificial intelligence have given me hope that — someday — a smart assistant will be able to help me use inaccessible software. The blind community has been waiting for this day since the birth of the internet.
But now, because of unspecified potential “risks to society and humanity,” naysayers want to stop A.I. development before the sun crests the horizon. Let’s not throw out the A.I. baby with the HAL 9000 bathwater.
Paul Martz
Erie, Colo.
|
3a06dd1c-7328-432d-9c89-e3c59a82340d
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/podcasts/the-daily/trump-second-impeachment.html
|
Special Episode: A Second Trump Indictment
|
2023-06-09
|
nytimes
|
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.
michael barbaro
From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” In a momentous legal decision, the Justice Department has decided to bring federal criminal charges against Donald Trump over his handling of classified materials. I spoke with my colleague, Mike Schmidt, about what that will mean for Trump and for President Biden, whose administration will now be prosecuting his biggest potential rival for the White House.
It’s Friday, June 9th.
Mike, good evening. I just want to set the scene for people. It is 9:25 PM. We are calling you in your car in suburban Virginia, which means you weren’t prepared for this. We weren’t prepared for this. This was a surprise, so thank you for making time for us. For the second time in just two months, former president Trump has been indicted. These are astonishing times. So just to start, Mike, what do we know at this point on Thursday night about what has just happened?
michael s. schmidt
About an hour and a half ago, Donald Trump took to his social media platform and announced that he had been indicted in connection with an investigation of his handling of classified documents.
michael barbaro
He broke the story himself. He volunteered it. Trump just put it out there.
michael s. schmidt
Mm-hmm. Trump has been under investigation by a special counsel for many months. Investigators have been looking at documents he took from the White House at the end of the administration and held on to and refused to give back to the government. In the minutes after Trump put this out there, our reporters scrambled to try and figure out what’s known about this indictment. And they learned that there are seven charges.
michael barbaro
OK, and what do we know about these charges?
michael s. schmidt
We know that at least one of the charges is a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Another is providing the government with false statements. One is a violation of the Espionage Act, which almost always relates to the retention of classified documents. So we can see the picture emerging that the government’s indictment is going to focus on how Trump wanted to hold on to these documents that were not his — they were the government’s — even after the government asked for them back and ultimately subpoenaed them.
michael barbaro
Right. Well, let’s just reestablish the basic facts here. This is a case that has received a tremendous amount of attention. And I think by now, the basic facts are relatively well-known, but just to recap them, Trump leaves office and takes with him hundreds of classified documents, which the National Archive discovers are missing and asks for the return of. That doesn’t happen. Instead, Trump tries to keep them, which prompts the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago and get many of them back. And these charges you’re outlining, they seem mostly focused on the alleged crime of a cover-up, rather than the original taking of documents. Do I have that right?
michael s. schmidt
Yeah, had Donald Trump just given all of this back when the government nicely asked for it in the months after he left office, there would almost certainly be no problem here.
michael barbaro
Hmm.
michael s. schmidt
But the issue is that the government asked nicely, and then it asked in a more stern way through a subpoena.
michael barbaro
Right.
michael s. schmidt
And from the beginning of that process, even as it got more serious and serious, Trump and his lawyers essentially did everything they could to hold on to these materials until the Justice Department took this extraordinary step last August and executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago to essentially get them back.
michael barbaro
Right, you’re starting to hint at this, but what do we understand to be the most compelling evidence gathered by the special counsel to justify these charges that Trump sought to obstruct the government’s effort to retrieve these documents?
michael s. schmidt
So we will learn much more when we actually see the indictment when the Justice Department unseals it. But from what we know, the most glaring example is that as the Justice Department was trying to get these back, Trump’s lawyer said to the Department, under oath, that he had handed everything over and had no more classified documents.
michael barbaro
Hmm.
michael s. schmidt
But then, when the FBI went in and did a search of Mar-a-Lago, they found dozens upon dozens of classified documents, showing as clear as day that what Trump’s lawyer had told the Department was completely wrong. So as the special counsel’s office dug into this investigation and essentially talked to everyone around Trump, ranging from his valets to his Secret Service agents to his lawyers, they were able to learn about a range of other things that Trump had done to essentially try and hide or hold on to the documents in the face of the government’s efforts.
michael barbaro
Hmm, such as what?
michael s. schmidt
They learned about how Trump had used an aide to go and get the documents and bring them to him so he could go through them and figure out which ones he wanted to hand back to the government and wanted to hold on to. They were able to force his lawyers to testify — something that usually never happens — before a grand jury about what Trump was telling them.
michael barbaro
Wow.
michael s. schmidt
Investigators were also able to obtain an audio recording that had captured Trump, just months after he left office, discussing a document about plans to essentially invade Iran. And it was during that conversation, on that audio recording, that Trump said he was unable to declassify the documents because he had already left office, essentially signaling that he knew it was still classified.
michael barbaro
Hmm. I mean, there’s a bunch of things about this alleged audio recording that seem very important. The first is that it reveals that the nature of these documents is very sensitive — war planning around Iran. And secondly, it, as you said, suggests that he very well understands, in fact, says it out loud in a recording that he understands the documents he has kept are classified.
michael s. schmidt
And on top of that, you don’t need to be an FBI espionage investigator to know that the president of the United States is given some of the most sensitive information that the government has. So if this is stuff that Trump took from the White House, it was stuff that was given to him when he was president and contains the national security secrets that underpin all of America’s military and intelligence operations around the world.
michael barbaro
Right, and as our colleagues have reported in “The Times,” these documents were being kept in a pretty unsecured location at a resort with members who mingled very close by.
michael s. schmidt
As a diagram that our colleagues did showed, there were parties at Mar-a-Lago just feet from the closet where many of these documents are believed to have been held. Other documents were found in the desk in his office, an office in which hundreds of people have come parading through in the 2 and 1/2 years since he left office. So not only did he take these documents with him and then mislead the government about it, but it’s not like he was holding them in some special secret safe that no one could break into. They were kind of just mingling around Mar-a-Lago like anything else.
michael barbaro
Like, these are federal charges being brought by the Department of Justice and the Attorney General, Merrick Garland, who answers to President Biden, which now means the administration of the sitting Democratic president, who is seeking re-election, will be trying to convict his Republican frontrunner opponent in the coming presidential race. This is astonishing.
michael s. schmidt
It’s so, so extraordinary. As we head into the 2024 election, Donald Trump will be defending himself in court against Biden’s Justice Department at the same time that he’ll be trying to win the Republican nomination so he can take on Biden. I don’t know what to say. We thought we had seen everything between the investigations into him when he was president and the impeachment, but even this has a layer of extraordinary weirdness. It’s just Trump finds a way to outdo himself.
michael barbaro
Mike, adding to the extraordinary nature of all this is the fact that President Biden himself is under investigation by a different special counsel for the way he handled classified documents that were found in his home. It’s not the same situation. He gave them back right away. There are no allegations that he sought to conceal them. Regardless, this, we have to imagine, is going to fuel Trump’s claim that the Biden Justice Department is the wrong entity to bring this case against Trump, and that they’re out to get him.
michael s. schmidt
Look, Trump cited Biden’s documents in his announcement of his own indictment. Understanding classified documents and the ins and outs of the Presidential Records Act and how classified documents should be handled is not something that the average person is interested in or will understand. But Republicans will seize on the idea that Biden has done the same thing as Trump to try and undermine the validity of this investigation.
michael barbaro
Right, and I have to think that this will inevitably fit into Donald Trump’s narrative, now many years in the making, about the federal government being weaponized against him.
michael s. schmidt
Of course. Even when Trump was president of the United States and controlled the Justice Department and the entire executive branch, he claimed that the deep state of the government was out to get him. Now he’s being charged by the Biden Justice Department. And —
archived recording (donald trump)
There’s never been anything like what’s happened. I’m an innocent man. I’m an innocent person.
michael s. schmidt
— not surprisingly, on the same platform where he announced his indictment, he put out a video.
archived recording (donald trump)
The whole thing is a hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia, just like the fake dossier was a hoax. You saw the Durham report. You saw the Mueller report. It was all a big hoax. You had two impeachments, and they lost and we won.
michael s. schmidt
— claiming that the government was out to get him.
archived recording (donald trump)
I’m innocent, and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly. Thank you very much.
michael barbaro
So, Mike, what happens now? Trump’s announced he’s been indicted. We’re waiting for the indictments to be unsealed. What do the next few days look like?
michael s. schmidt
In Trump’s announcement, he said that on Tuesday afternoon, he will be appearing in court in Miami. It’s likely that what Trump’s referring to is that he will be arraigned. He essentially will be booked and brought before a judge who will determine whether he can be released and under what terms. And while that scene will be extraordinary, as we keep on saying, it’ll be very similar to the one that we saw just weeks ago when he was arraigned in court in New York on charges filed there.
michael barbaro
Right, and Mike, that arraignment in New York on 30 felony counts related to a hush money scheme that Donald Trump was alleged to have been involved in, we already know will involve a trial that starts in March of 2024 at the height of the Republican presidential primaries. Do we know anything about when a federal trial related to classified documents might get underway?
michael s. schmidt
So, given the complexities of this case and the fact that the federal system tends to take a little bit longer than most, it’s likely that Trump may not go on trial for another two years or so until after the election.
michael barbaro
Wow.
michael s. schmidt
So this is not something that will be resolved soon.
michael barbaro
And Mike, if Trump does go to trial and if he is convicted, what kind of sentence could he face with these federal charges?
michael s. schmidt
We will really need to see the indictment to get an exact figure about his exposure. But we know that people that have been found guilty on similar charges have faced years, if not decades, in prison. The government takes classified documents and the retention of them very seriously. On top of that, in this case, you have efforts to obstruct the government’s attempts to get those materials back. So all of that taken together means that he could face a fair amount of time in prison if found guilty.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
He has never faced down something like he’s facing down with this indictment, but as we’ve seen, Donald Trump has an almost Houdini-like ability to get himself out of trouble.
michael barbaro
Well, Mike, thank you very much. We appreciate it.
michael s. schmidt
Thanks for having me.
michael barbaro
We’ll be right back.
Here’s what else you need to know today. On Thursday night, congressional Republicans reacted to the latest Trump indictment with fury, vowing to use their power to retaliate against the Biden administration for bringing the charges. In a tweet, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy wrote that Republicans, quote, “will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.” Democrats, meanwhile, called the charges both “justified” and “overdue.” Congressman Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that the indictment revealed that Trump, quote, “put our national security in grave danger.”
Today’s episode was produced by Rachel Quester and Mary Wilson with help from Asthaa Chaturvedi. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Lisa Chow, contains original music by Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.
|
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.
michael barbaro
From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” In a momentous legal decision, the Justice Department has decided to bring federal criminal charges against Donald Trump over his handling of classified materials. I spoke with my colleague, Mike Schmidt, about what that will mean for Trump and for President Biden, whose administration will now be prosecuting his biggest potential rival for the White House.
It’s Friday, June 9th.
Mike, good evening. I just want to set the scene for people. It is 9:25 PM. We are calling you in your car in suburban Virginia, which means you weren’t prepared for this. We weren’t prepared for this. This was a surprise, so thank you for making time for us. For the second time in just two months, former president Trump has been indicted. These are astonishing times. So just to start, Mike, what do we know at this point on Thursday night about what has just happened?
michael s. schmidt
About an hour and a half ago, Donald Trump took to his social media platform and announced that he had been indicted in connection with an investigation of his handling of classified documents.
michael barbaro
He broke the story himself. He volunteered it. Trump just put it out there.
michael s. schmidt
Mm-hmm. Trump has been under investigation by a special counsel for many months. Investigators have been looking at documents he took from the White House at the end of the administration and held on to and refused to give back to the government. In the minutes after Trump put this out there, our reporters scrambled to try and figure out what’s known about this indictment. And they learned that there are seven charges.
michael barbaro
OK, and what do we know about these charges?
michael s. schmidt
We know that at least one of the charges is a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Another is providing the government with false statements. One is a violation of the Espionage Act, which almost always relates to the retention of classified documents. So we can see the picture emerging that the government’s indictment is going to focus on how Trump wanted to hold on to these documents that were not his —
|
they were the government’s — even after the government asked for them back and ultimately subpoenaed them.
michael barbaro
Right. Well, let’s just reestablish the basic facts here. This is a case that has received a tremendous amount of attention. And I think by now, the basic facts are relatively well-known, but just to recap them, Trump leaves office and takes with him hundreds of classified documents, which the National Archive discovers are missing and asks for the return of. That doesn’t happen. Instead, Trump tries to keep them, which prompts the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago and get many of them back. And these charges you’re outlining, they seem mostly focused on the alleged crime of a cover-up, rather than the original taking of documents. Do I have that right?
michael s. schmidt
Yeah, had Donald Trump just given all of this back when the government nicely asked for it in the months after he left office, there would almost certainly be no problem here.
michael barbaro
Hmm.
michael s. schmidt
But the issue is that the government asked nicely, and then it asked in a more stern way through a subpoena.
michael barbaro
Right.
michael s. schmidt
And from the beginning of that process, even as it got more serious and serious, Trump and his lawyers essentially did everything they could to hold on to these materials until the Justice Department took this extraordinary step last August and executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago to essentially get them back.
michael barbaro
Right, you’re starting to hint at this, but what do we understand to be the most compelling evidence gathered by the special counsel to justify these charges that Trump sought to obstruct the government’s effort to retrieve these documents?
michael s. schmidt
So we will learn much more when we actually see the indictment when the Justice Department unseals it. But from what we know, the most glaring example is that as the Justice Department was trying to get these back, Trump’s lawyer said to the Department, under oath, that he had handed everything over and had no more classified documents.
michael barbaro
Hmm.
michael s. schmidt
But then, when the FBI went in and did a search of Mar-a-Lago, they found dozens upon dozens of classified documents, showing as clear as day that what Trump’s lawyer had told the Department was completely wrong. So as the special counsel’s office dug into this investigation and essentially talked to everyone around Trump, ranging from his valets to his Secret Service agents to his lawyers, they were able to learn about a range of other things that Trump had done to essentially try and hide or hold on to the documents in the face of the government’s efforts.
michael barbaro
Hmm, such as what?
michael s. schmidt
They learned about how Trump had used an aide to go and get the documents and bring them to him so he could go through them and figure out which ones he wanted to hand back to the government and wanted to hold on to. They were able to force his lawyers to testify — something that usually never happens — before a grand jury about what Trump was telling them.
michael barbaro
Wow.
michael s. schmidt
Investigators were also able to obtain an audio recording that had captured Trump, just months after he left office, discussing a document about plans to essentially invade Iran. And it was during that conversation, on that audio recording, that Trump said he was unable to declassify the documents because he had already left office, essentially signaling that he knew it was still classified.
michael barbaro
Hmm. I mean, there’s a bunch of things about this alleged audio recording that seem very important. The first is that it reveals that the nature of these documents is very sensitive — war planning around Iran. And secondly, it, as you said, suggests that he very well understands, in fact, says it out loud in a recording that he understands the documents he has kept are classified.
michael s. schmidt
And on top of that, you don’t need to be an FBI espionage investigator to know that the president of the United States is given some of the most sensitive information that the government has. So if this is stuff that Trump took from the White House, it was stuff that was given to him when he was president and contains the national security secrets that underpin all of America’s military and intelligence operations around the world.
michael barbaro
Right, and as our colleagues have reported in “The Times,” these documents were being kept in a pretty unsecured location at a resort with members who mingled very close by.
michael s. schmidt
As a diagram that our colleagues did showed, there were parties at Mar-a-Lago just feet from the closet where many of these documents are believed to have been held. Other documents were found in the desk in his office, an office in which hundreds of people have come parading through in the 2 and 1/2 years since he left office. So not only did he take these documents with him and then mislead the government about it, but it’s not like he was holding them in some special secret safe that no one could break into. They were kind of just mingling around Mar-a-Lago like anything else.
michael barbaro
Like, these are federal charges being brought by the Department of Justice and the Attorney General, Merrick Garland, who answers to President Biden, which now means the administration of the sitting Democratic president, who is seeking re-election, will be trying to convict his Republican frontrunner opponent in the coming presidential race. This is astonishing.
michael s. schmidt
It’s so, so extraordinary. As we head into the 2024 election, Donald Trump will be defending himself in court against Biden’s Justice Department at the same time that he’ll be trying to win the Republican nomination so he can take on Biden. I don’t know what to say. We thought we had seen everything between the investigations into him when he was president and the impeachment, but even this has a layer of extraordinary weirdness. It’s just Trump finds a way to outdo himself.
michael barbaro
Mike, adding to the extraordinary nature of all this is the fact that President Biden himself is under investigation by a different special counsel for the way he handled classified documents that were found in his home. It’s not the same situation. He gave them back right away. There are no allegations that he sought to conceal them. Regardless, this, we have to imagine, is going to fuel Trump’s claim that the Biden Justice Department is the wrong entity to bring this case against Trump, and that they’re out to get him.
michael s. schmidt
Look, Trump cited Biden’s documents in his announcement of his own indictment. Understanding classified documents and the ins and outs of the Presidential Records Act and how classified documents should be handled is not something that the average person is interested in or will understand. But Republicans will seize on the idea that Biden has done the same thing as Trump to try and undermine the validity of this investigation.
michael barbaro
Right, and I have to think that this will inevitably fit into Donald Trump’s narrative, now many years in the making, about the federal government being weaponized against him.
michael s. schmidt
Of course. Even when Trump was president of the United States and controlled the Justice Department and the entire executive branch, he claimed that the deep state of the government was out to get him. Now he’s being charged by the Biden Justice Department. And —
archived recording (donald trump)
There’s never been anything like what’s happened. I’m an innocent man. I’m an innocent person.
michael s. schmidt
— not surprisingly, on the same platform where he announced his indictment, he put out a video.
archived recording (donald trump)
The whole thing is a hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia, just like the fake dossier was a hoax. You saw the Durham report. You saw the Mueller report. It was all a big hoax. You had two impeachments, and they lost and we won.
michael s. schmidt
— claiming that the government was out to get him.
archived recording (donald trump)
I’m innocent, and we will prove that very, very soundly and hopefully very quickly. Thank you very much.
michael barbaro
So, Mike, what happens now? Trump’s announced he’s been indicted. We’re waiting for the indictments to be unsealed. What do the next few days look like?
michael s. schmidt
In Trump’s announcement, he said that on Tuesday afternoon, he will be appearing in court in Miami. It’s likely that what Trump’s referring to is that he will be arraigned. He essentially will be booked and brought before a judge who will determine whether he can be released and under what terms. And while that scene will be extraordinary, as we keep on saying, it’ll be very similar to the one that we saw just weeks ago when he was arraigned in court in New York on charges filed there.
michael barbaro
Right, and Mike, that arraignment in New York on 30 felony counts related to a hush money scheme that Donald Trump was alleged to have been involved in, we already know will involve a trial that starts in March of 2024 at the height of the Republican presidential primaries. Do we know anything about when a federal trial related to classified documents might get underway?
michael s. schmidt
So, given the complexities of this case and the fact that the federal system tends to take a little bit longer than most, it’s likely that Trump may not go on trial for another two years or so until after the election.
michael barbaro
Wow.
michael s. schmidt
So this is not something that will be resolved soon.
michael barbaro
And Mike, if Trump does go to trial and if he is convicted, what kind of sentence could he face with these federal charges?
michael s. schmidt
We will really need to see the indictment to get an exact figure about his exposure. But we know that people that have been found guilty on similar charges have faced years, if not decades, in prison. The government takes classified documents and the retention of them very seriously. On top of that, in this case, you have efforts to obstruct the government’s attempts to get those materials back. So all of that taken together means that he could face a fair amount of time in prison if found guilty.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
He has never faced down something like he’s facing down with this indictment, but as we’ve seen, Donald Trump has an almost Houdini-like ability to get himself out of trouble.
michael barbaro
Well, Mike, thank you very much. We appreciate it.
michael s. schmidt
Thanks for having me.
michael barbaro
We’ll be right back.
Here’s what else you need to know today. On Thursday night, congressional Republicans reacted to the latest Trump indictment with fury, vowing to use their power to retaliate against the Biden administration for bringing the charges. In a tweet, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy wrote that Republicans, quote, “will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.” Democrats, meanwhile, called the charges both “justified” and “overdue.” Congressman Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that the indictment revealed that Trump, quote, “put our national security in grave danger.”
Today’s episode was produced by Rachel Quester and Mary Wilson with help from Asthaa Chaturvedi. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Lisa Chow, contains original music by Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.
|
3bce58b1-1b4e-4aec-8e8a-28f1e8053d9d
|
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/10/10/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza/with-300000-reservists-mobilized-war-hits-close-to-home-for-many-israelis
|
As Scale of Atrocities Emerges, Biden Condemns Hamas Attacks as ‘Sheer Evil’
|
2023-10-09
|
nytimes
|
Israel’s fighter jets and artillery have struck targets in Gaza frequently over the years as part of a longstanding conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. But residents of Gaza said that from the first day of the war, this time has felt worse.
Gazans say that the strikes have been indiscriminate and have hit structures that are normally safe,
such as schools, hospitals and mosques
. Israel has said its strikes are targeting sites connected with Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that controls the Gaza Strip, including the homes of members.
Israel has given broad warnings for people to leave certain neighborhoods or towns, but has acknowledged they are not as extensive or specific as they have been in the past, and many residents say they have not received them. Gazans say they have nowhere to go anyway.
Entire families have been killed in their homes, according to the Gazan Health Ministry.
The strikes came as part of Israel’s response to Saturday’s attack, when hundreds of Palestinian gunmen swept across Israel’s border with Gaza, killing hundreds of civilians and soldiers and firing thousands of rockets as far away as Tel Aviv.
Israel has acknowledged it is striking with extraordinary severity, saying that is because of the level of harm that fighters had wrought during their assault. Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, said in a briefing on Tuesday: “This is not like previous rounds.”
On Tuesday, Israeli warplanes continued to pound Gaza with airstrikes, reducing some buildings to rubble. Palestinian authorities said 900 people had been killed and about 168 buildings had been damaged since Saturday, among them seven hospitals and 48 schools.
On the ground, residents say they have felt an intense level of fear, with some describing the relentless airstrikes as being like multiple earthquakes underfoot.
“What they are doing shouldn’t be allowed,” said one woman sheltering at the Al Shifa hospital, who did not give her full name. She said she fled to the hospital cradling her week-old baby after an airstrike hit near their home in northern Gaza, close to the border with Israel.
She and 19 members of her family had been sheltering for three days in a hall in a part of the hospital that is under construction. They were joined by many others who fled the strikes and slept in the hallways or in the courtyards outside.
Medical personnel retrieve a body from the rubble of the Al-Sousi Mosque in the Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, on Monday.
Credit...
Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Telephone and internet service were cut off in many parts of Gaza on Monday after an Israeli strike hit the building housing the Palestine Telecommunications Company in the city center. The U.N. humanitarian agency said Israeli airstrikes have damaged water, sanitation and hygiene facilities affecting more than 400,000 people in Gaza.
And after days of strikes, entire neighborhoods no longer look like they did just a couple of days ago.
In the upscale Gaza City neighborhood of Al-Rimal, where the Israeli army said on Tuesday that it had carried out its main airstrikes overnight, buildings were so damaged they bled into each other. Landmarks had been erased and entire streets have taken on a dark gray hue because of the dust.
Thousands of people fled Al-Rimal, but many have
nowhere to go
; Gaza has no bomb shelters and those who went to the homes of relatives often found that they too were fleeing.
A woman, 38, at the Al-Shifa hospital morgue Tuesday, who did not give her full name, was waiting along with other family members to take the body of her niece and her two young daughters so that they could be buried. On Monday, she said, the three were killed when an airstrike hit their home and they were crushed under the rubble.
“No warning,” she said.
Israeli army Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said that the Israeli Air Force was too stretched to fire warning strikes — known as “
roof knocks
” — that it has often fired in previous Gaza conflicts to encourage Palestinian civilians to leave an area before it is hit with larger missiles.
Authorities sent text messages to Palestinian phone numbers in one area on Saturday night and have posted on social media about other areas. Residents in a few high-rise buildings have gotten alerts before airstrikes destroyed them, but otherwise, Gazans said, there have been few specific warnings.
Colonel Hecht said that Israel was telling Gazans to move from areas that would be targeted, and advised them to leave through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. Hours later on Tuesday, the Israeli military bombed the crossing, shutting it down.
Patrick Kingsley and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
|
Israel’s fighter jets and artillery have struck targets in Gaza frequently over the years as part of a longstanding conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. But residents of Gaza said that from the first day of the war, this time has felt worse.
Gazans say that the strikes have been indiscriminate and have hit structures that are normally safe,
such as schools, hospitals and mosques
. Israel has said its strikes are targeting sites connected with Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that controls the Gaza Strip, including the homes of members.
Israel has given broad warnings for people to leave certain neighborhoods or towns, but has acknowledged they are not as extensive or specific as they have been in the past, and many residents say they have not received them. Gazans say they have nowhere to go anyway.
Entire families have been killed in their homes, according to the Gazan Health Ministry.
The strikes came as part of Israel’s response to Saturday’s attack, when hundreds of Palestinian gunmen swept across Israel’s border with Gaza, killing hundreds of civilians and soldiers and firing thousands of rockets as far away as Tel Aviv.
Israel has acknowledged it is striking with extraordinary severity, saying that is because of the level of harm that fighters had wrought during their assault. Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, said in a briefing on Tuesday: “This is not like previous rounds.”
On Tuesday, Israeli warplanes continued to pound Gaza with airstrikes, reducing some buildings to rubble. Palestinian authorities said 900 people had been killed and about 168 buildings had been damaged since Saturday, among them seven hospitals and 48 schools.
On the ground, residents say they have felt an intense level of fear, with some describing the relentless airstrikes as being like multiple earthquakes underfoot.
“What they are doing shouldn’t be allowed,” said one woman sheltering at the Al Shifa hospital, who did not give her full name. She said she fled to the hospital cradling her week-old baby after an airstrike hit near their home in northern Gaza, close to the border with Israel.
She and 19 members of her family had been sheltering for three days in a hall in a part of the hospital that is under construction. They were joined by many others who fled the strikes and slept in the hallways or in the courtyards outside.
Medical personnel retrieve a body from the rubble of the Al-Sousi Mosque in the Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, on
|
Monday.
Credit...
Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Telephone and internet service were cut off in many parts of Gaza on Monday after an Israeli strike hit the building housing the Palestine Telecommunications Company in the city center. The U.N. humanitarian agency said Israeli airstrikes have damaged water, sanitation and hygiene facilities affecting more than 400,000 people in Gaza.
And after days of strikes, entire neighborhoods no longer look like they did just a couple of days ago.
In the upscale Gaza City neighborhood of Al-Rimal, where the Israeli army said on Tuesday that it had carried out its main airstrikes overnight, buildings were so damaged they bled into each other. Landmarks had been erased and entire streets have taken on a dark gray hue because of the dust.
Thousands of people fled Al-Rimal, but many have
nowhere to go
; Gaza has no bomb shelters and those who went to the homes of relatives often found that they too were fleeing.
A woman, 38, at the Al-Shifa hospital morgue Tuesday, who did not give her full name, was waiting along with other family members to take the body of her niece and her two young daughters so that they could be buried. On Monday, she said, the three were killed when an airstrike hit their home and they were crushed under the rubble.
“No warning,” she said.
Israeli army Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said that the Israeli Air Force was too stretched to fire warning strikes — known as “
roof knocks
” — that it has often fired in previous Gaza conflicts to encourage Palestinian civilians to leave an area before it is hit with larger missiles.
Authorities sent text messages to Palestinian phone numbers in one area on Saturday night and have posted on social media about other areas. Residents in a few high-rise buildings have gotten alerts before airstrikes destroyed them, but otherwise, Gazans said, there have been few specific warnings.
Colonel Hecht said that Israel was telling Gazans to move from areas that would be targeted, and advised them to leave through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. Hours later on Tuesday, the Israeli military bombed the crossing, shutting it down.
Patrick Kingsley and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
|
9e19e339-4104-451e-9e32-16bfd7651d14
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/opinion/hog-farming-secret-video.html
|
Is Cheap Pork Worth the Abuse of Pigs? - The New York Times
|
2023-08-05
|
nytimes
|
We used to raise hogs on our family farm here, and to be honest I didn’t much like them. Defenders of farm animals sometimes compare pigs to dogs, but our hogs didn’t display any canine-style affection and instead were grouchy, whiny, strong-willed and prone to wander.
Once when I was about 15, I had to traipse through the forest for more than two miles to track three of them down, and herding them back was a nightmare. By the time we got home, those pigs must have concluded that humans were a particularly ill-tempered and unaffectionate species.
Still, our pigs were indisputably very smart with distinctive personalities, and sows made terrific moms (helicopter moms, too, keeping a close eye on wayward piglets). In short, I wouldn’t compare pigs to golden retrievers — they’re much more like people.
We no longer raise pigs on our farm, nor do most other small family farms. Now they are nearly all on huge factory farms and treated with what seems to me particular cruelty — as reflected in secret videos taken by undercover investigators and just released by two animal rights groups.
Animal Outlook
, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, sent an investigator to work for four months at Holden Farms in Utica, Minn. The investigator filmed piglets being castrated by hand without any anesthesia — workers made incisions in the scrota and then pulled the testicles from the body as the piglets screamed in pain.
“They are absolutely terrified,” the investigator who filmed the scene said. He doesn’t want his name published because he may continue with undercover work.
The video also shows employees mixing intestines of dead piglets to feed to pregnant sows, turning them into cannibals, on the theory that this would
boost their immune systems
.
Sick or injured piglets on the farm were
euthanized by carbon dioxide
in a sealed box, he said, but this is sometimes ineffective, and the video shows some pigs surviving the ordeal and still moving. The investigator believed that a supervisor was skimping on carbon dioxide to save money.
The video was filmed three years ago, and Animal Outlook said it sought unsuccessfully to work with local law enforcement to win a prosecution on animal cruelty charges. The organization said that since the statute of limitations has now expired, it is releasing the video.
Reached for comment, Holden Farms did not address specific questions about castration or euthanizing of piglets but noted that the video was several years old and said it was conducting an internal investigation and would take “corrective actions where necessary.”
“We recognize the concerns over what is portrayed in the video but believe many of the images shared have been intentionally taken out of context and do not represent how we normally care for animals,” Holden Farms told me.
“Animal care is a top priority for Holden Farms, and we continually challenge ourselves to utilize new technologies to improve on-farm practices involving the proper care of animals,” the company added.
So you decide. Here’s a video from Animal Outlook showing what happens inside a barn — please be forewarned that it is graphic and hard to watch:
The other undercover investigation was by
Mercy for Animals
, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit working to end factory farming. Its investigator, who also asked not to be named, worked in a hog barn in Nebraska operated by a company called Buffalo Plains Genetics. It did not respond to requests for comment.
The Mercy for Animals footage does not show abuses as striking as those in the other video. But it reinforces my view that today’s mass production of pork is intrinsically inhumane.
In both hog operations, the pregnant sows are confined in narrow pens called gestation crates. These vary but are typically a bit
shorter and narrower
than a human coffin, so that a sow can barely move and certainly can’t turn around.
“A gestation crate is like living in an airline seat,” Temple Grandin, a leading livestock scientist, told me.
When the sows are ready to give birth, they are transferred to farrowing crates, which are similar but have areas to the side for piglets. Then after a few weeks, the sow is taken away to be artificially inseminated and returns to a gestation crate, and this is repeated until she is no longer productive. And then she is killed.
Here’s the video from Mercy for Animals:
Two points can be made in defense of the system. First, it is stunningly good at producing cheap pork, saving money for low-income families.
In 1950
, pork chops were selling for
almost $10
a pound in today’s money; now they are
less than half that
. These big farms are efficient in a way our little family farm never could be.
Second, the pigs have ready access to food and water, they do not regularly suffer parasites, and the temperature is controlled. Our pigs were more likely to suffer hot or cold, or to get sunburned, than factory-farmed hogs.
Yet factory farms impose costs that aren’t included in the price of pork chops. A single farm with 10,000 adult hogs, for example, might produce as much feces as a city of 100,000 people, yet
lacks a sewage treatment plant
to keep streams from becoming contaminated.
As for the hogs themselves, although they are fed and watered, can they truly live? Locked up, unable to move around, they chew the metal bars in apparent frustration and bite one another’s tails — something even the grouchiest of our pigs never did. So factory farms often preemptively
remove pigs’ tails
, usually without anesthetic.
If a teenage boy were to cut off the tails of animals and yank off their testicles, he might be arrested and castigated for his cruelty; if he grows up and becomes C.E.O. of a company that does this on a mass scale, he will get rich and be praised for his business acumen.
While the videos show low-paid workers mistreating animals — and callously throwing pig testicles at one another — they too are cogs in the system.
“We have upper management breathing down everybody’s neck, so employees are stressed out,” the investigator at Holden Farms said. “The stressed-out workers tend to take out their frustration on animals.”
The agribusiness industry is trying to get Congress to pass legislation, called the
Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression, or EATS, Act,
which would undermine local animal welfare laws. This would be a huge step backward: I think it should be renamed the Animal Abuse Act.
I don’t know precisely how to negotiate the trade-offs between profitability and compassion. What if pigs were given twice the space and treated with more humanity? How much should we be willing to raise food costs to improve animal well-being? I struggle with questions like these.
What I am confident of is that right now we’re on the wrong side of history and that future generations will look back at videos like these and be baffled that nice people like us could blindly tolerate such systematized cruelty toward intelligent if cantankerous fellow mammals not so different from us.
|
We used to raise hogs on our family farm here, and to be honest I didn’t much like them. Defenders of farm animals sometimes compare pigs to dogs, but our hogs didn’t display any canine-style affection and instead were grouchy, whiny, strong-willed and prone to wander.
Once when I was about 15, I had to traipse through the forest for more than two miles to track three of them down, and herding them back was a nightmare. By the time we got home, those pigs must have concluded that humans were a particularly ill-tempered and unaffectionate species.
Still, our pigs were indisputably very smart with distinctive personalities, and sows made terrific moms (helicopter moms, too, keeping a close eye on wayward piglets). In short, I wouldn’t compare pigs to golden retrievers — they’re much more like people.
We no longer raise pigs on our farm, nor do most other small family farms. Now they are nearly all on huge factory farms and treated with what seems to me particular cruelty — as reflected in secret videos taken by undercover investigators and just released by two animal rights groups.
Animal Outlook
, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, sent an investigator to work for four months at Holden Farms in Utica, Minn. The investigator filmed piglets being castrated by hand without any anesthesia — workers made incisions in the scrota and then pulled the testicles from the body as the piglets screamed in pain.
“They are absolutely terrified,” the investigator who filmed the scene said. He doesn’t want his name published because he may continue with undercover work.
The video also shows employees mixing intestines of dead piglets to feed to pregnant sows, turning them into cannibals, on the theory that this would
boost their immune systems
.
Sick or injured piglets on the farm were
euthanized by carbon dioxide
in a sealed box, he said, but this is sometimes ineffective, and the video shows some pigs surviving the ordeal and still moving. The investigator believed that a supervisor was skimping on carbon dioxide to save money.
The video was filmed three years ago, and Animal Outlook said it sought unsuccessfully to work with local law enforcement to win a prosecution on animal cruelty charges. The organization said that since the statute of limitations has now expired, it is releasing the video.
Reached for comment, Holden Farms did not address
|
specific questions about castration or euthanizing of piglets but noted that the video was several years old and said it was conducting an internal investigation and would take “corrective actions where necessary.”
“We recognize the concerns over what is portrayed in the video but believe many of the images shared have been intentionally taken out of context and do not represent how we normally care for animals,” Holden Farms told me.
“Animal care is a top priority for Holden Farms, and we continually challenge ourselves to utilize new technologies to improve on-farm practices involving the proper care of animals,” the company added.
So you decide. Here’s a video from Animal Outlook showing what happens inside a barn — please be forewarned that it is graphic and hard to watch:
The other undercover investigation was by
Mercy for Animals
, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit working to end factory farming. Its investigator, who also asked not to be named, worked in a hog barn in Nebraska operated by a company called Buffalo Plains Genetics. It did not respond to requests for comment.
The Mercy for Animals footage does not show abuses as striking as those in the other video. But it reinforces my view that today’s mass production of pork is intrinsically inhumane.
In both hog operations, the pregnant sows are confined in narrow pens called gestation crates. These vary but are typically a bit
shorter and narrower
than a human coffin, so that a sow can barely move and certainly can’t turn around.
“A gestation crate is like living in an airline seat,” Temple Grandin, a leading livestock scientist, told me.
When the sows are ready to give birth, they are transferred to farrowing crates, which are similar but have areas to the side for piglets. Then after a few weeks, the sow is taken away to be artificially inseminated and returns to a gestation crate, and this is repeated until she is no longer productive. And then she is killed.
Here’s the video from Mercy for Animals:
Two points can be made in defense of the system. First, it is stunningly good at producing cheap pork, saving money for low-income families.
In 1950
, pork chops were selling for
almost $10
a pound in today’s money; now they are
less than half that
. These big farms are efficient in a way our little family farm never could be.
Second, the pigs have ready access to food and water, they do not regularly suffer parasites, and the temperature is controlled. Our pigs were more likely to suffer hot or cold, or to get sunburned, than factory-farmed hogs.
Yet factory farms impose costs that aren’t included in the price of pork chops. A single farm with 10,000 adult hogs, for example, might produce as much feces as a city of 100,000 people, yet
lacks a sewage treatment plant
to keep streams from becoming contaminated.
As for the hogs themselves, although they are fed and watered, can they truly live? Locked up, unable to move around, they chew the metal bars in apparent frustration and bite one another’s tails — something even the grouchiest of our pigs never did. So factory farms often preemptively
remove pigs’ tails
, usually without anesthetic.
If a teenage boy were to cut off the tails of animals and yank off their testicles, he might be arrested and castigated for his cruelty; if he grows up and becomes C.E.O. of a company that does this on a mass scale, he will get rich and be praised for his business acumen.
While the videos show low-paid workers mistreating animals — and callously throwing pig testicles at one another — they too are cogs in the system.
“We have upper management breathing down everybody’s neck, so employees are stressed out,” the investigator at Holden Farms said. “The stressed-out workers tend to take out their frustration on animals.”
The agribusiness industry is trying to get Congress to pass legislation, called the
Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression, or EATS, Act,
which would undermine local animal welfare laws. This would be a huge step backward: I think it should be renamed the Animal Abuse Act.
I don’t know precisely how to negotiate the trade-offs between profitability and compassion. What if pigs were given twice the space and treated with more humanity? How much should we be willing to raise food costs to improve animal well-being? I struggle with questions like these.
What I am confident of is that right now we’re on the wrong side of history and that future generations will look back at videos like these and be baffled that nice people like us could blindly tolerate such systematized cruelty toward intelligent if cantankerous fellow mammals not so different from us.
|
48baff3c-4798-4589-a7b0-9e88ffed7157
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/us/maui-lahaina-fire-family-escape.html
|
Lahaina Family Describes an Impossible Escape From the Maui Wildfires
|
2023-09-13
|
nytimes
|
The wind had never felt so fierce.
Folau Tone steadied himself as a gale whipped through his street in Lahaina. Trying to nail down the rattling tin roof on his family’s home, he gave up as fragments were stripped away.
In West Maui, power lines were crashing down, and the electricity was out across a large swath of the island. Outdoor furniture and debris were flung across yards.
Folau’s wife had already left for her job at a hotel, but their four children had stayed behind. It was Aug. 8, what would have been the first day of school. Classes were canceled because of the power outage.
The gusts did not deter his mother, Faaoso, who stood outside fussing over a pot of cassava root while another pot burbled with fish stew. She liked cooking in the open air and had long ago set up a makeshift kitchen with propane burners under a tent.
At 70, Faaoso enjoyed overseeing a home that bustled, happy to live with children and grandchildren over the years. Her husband, Maluifonua, 73, was retired, having suffered a back injury when a linen cart slipped while he was working at a resort.
Faaoso and Maluifonua Tone.
Credit...
Folau and his family moved in seven years ago, joining his sister Salote, 39, and her son, Tony Takafua. The siblings helped pay the mortgage.
At about 2 p.m., Folau showered and was preparing to leave for his job as a bartender when he received word that the restaurant was not going to open. He figured that he and his kids would hole up for the day.
But smoke began to swirl outside their home, a white bungalow with blue trim. Neighbors came outside to peer up at the mountains, their shouts drowned out by the wind. Some headed for their cars.
Folau, 44, had evacuated under threat of fire before, and he told his children to pack a change of clothes. The smoke soon thickened and darkened the sky. Folau found his footsteps quickening, his voice growing urgent.
His daughter Liliana, 14, jumped into the front seat of their silver truck, a Nissan Titan. Siosiua, 9, and Auralia, 5, crawled in the back seat. So did their 2-year-old brother, Keuli, and Nala, their Labrador mix.
Salote and Tony, 7, hopped into the white Honda Civic that she had recently purchased. Her parents climbed in the back. The plan was to follow Folau and meet at his wife’s hotel.
Before leaving, Folau grabbed the two pots of food his mother had made and rushed to place them in the trunk of Salote’s car. It would be nice to show up with a meal if there was no working electricity.
A new life on Maui
Maluifonua and Faaoso Tone had once been farmers in Tonga where they grew taro and breadfruit and raised horses, cows and goats. They were often seen side by side in the field, an unusually inseparable pair.
In 1995, the couple planned to move to San Francisco to join a family member whose stories had made them dream of an American life. On the way, they stopped to visit Faaoso’s brother on Maui and decided to stay for good because the island reminded them of home. They had four children at the time and would soon adopt a fifth.
Maluifonua took a job as a dishwasher at a tavern called the Rusty Harpoon, working so late that he would miss the last bus and have to walk the four miles home.
He and his wife found comfort in the Polynesian community and were active in the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They attended socials and barbecues and spent afternoons at the congregation’s farm, tending to rows of yam plants and banana trees.
Maluifonua was a natural leader, and friends requested that he coordinate the kitchen at weddings and parties where it was not unusual to welcome a few hundred people. Faaoso was quieter, more comfortable looking after the household. Many looked forward to her version of lu pulu, which involved steaming corned beef or lamb with coconut milk in taro leaves.
The couple often watched over the children of relatives or neighbors, offering relief to numerous working parents. “They never complained about people bringing their kids, they were always willing,” Folau said.
Their modest house was near the ocean on a street lush with plumeria and coconut trees, and it became a landing place for relatives who had just moved to Maui.
Folau was their middle child and, after his older brother moved to Utah, the only son on the island. He had been a shy 15-year-old when he left Tonga and enrolled at Lahainaluna High School. There, he excelled at math and considered going to college.
But Folau remembered watching his older sister contributing her McDonald’s paychecks to the house. He thought it best to join the work force and help with his parents’ bills.
Over the years, Folau juggled jobs as a dishwasher, cook and server. He bartended, worked security, greeted travelers at zip-line tours.
It was not a life of regret. He felt a solemn sense of responsibility for the family.
A frantic escape
Inside his truck, Folau did not see the fire, but could feel the encroaching heat as he gripped the steering wheel. He started down Kuhua Street. Salote followed. The neighborhood was shrouded in gray, and wind was hurling embers, leaves and dirt in the air.
A fallen mango tree blocked access to the main thoroughfare that could get them out of the area. Vehicles were changing direction, jamming the road. Folau turned onto Aki Street, but drivers motioned that there was no outlet there, either. He turned back to Kuhua Street. Cars were trying to maneuver around one another but getting nowhere. He was trapped.
“Dad, get us out of here!” Liliana, his daughter, begged.
Alongside the street ran a metal fence. Another truck began ramming into it, futilely trying to break it down. Finally, the driver got out and started running, leaving his vehicle behind.
Folau scanned for another means of escape. “At the time, I wasn’t thinking of anything — just feeling that the kids were there and just trying to get them somewhere safe,” he said.
He found himself back by the fallen mango tree. Maybe, Folau thought, he could wedge his truck against the side of the fence, force his wheels over the branches and break through to the other side.
Nearby homes began to ignite. The inside of Folau’s truck grew hotter. He could barely see through the windshield. His children clung to one another and screamed.
“I just heard my kids crying. And then I just went for it.”
He gunned the engine. His sister Salote, he hoped, was close behind.
‘I love you to the end of me’
Salote Tone had a bold personality that some could find brash. But she tried not to spend time worrying about what people thought of her. She considered herself a work in progress and had empathy for anyone with a personal struggle.
“She could be sassy in people’s eyes, but if you got to know her, she was really humble,” her friend Fipe Fononga, 41, said. “She was my ride or die. If I’m in trouble or need help, she was there.”
Salote helped Fipe land a job at a rental car agency. When Fipe had difficulty affording rent, Salote invited her to live with the family, sharing her bedroom.
“She never judged people, she tried to offer inspiration,” said her friend Tiffany Tevaga, who wrestled with alcoholism for years and spent time in prison for assault. After Tiffany turned things around and began a home business braiding hair, Salote was her right hand, booking appointments and posting advertisements.
“Oh, she was so proud of me,” Tiffany, 35, said. “I like to say I’m the muscle — and Lote was the heart.”
Salote Tone and her 7-year-old son Tony Takafua.
Credit...
Salote had been a manager at Cheeseburger in Paradise, a well-known hangout, but eventually managed vacation-home rentals.
She loved to be social, staying out until sunrise with her girlfriends — avoiding venues where she might find herself under the watchful eye of her big brother Folau.
When her son was born, Salote’s world grew smaller and more focused. Tony became her shadow, her “Boobear” and “lil mini,” and she was unabashed in her affection for him.
“I love you to the end of me, and I can never thank you enough for being my lifesaver,” she wrote in April on her Facebook page.
The two spent days at the beach where Tony jumped off cliffs. He had a passion for football and video games, and liked riding electric bikes around the neighborhood with his cousins. He smiled whenever posing in a ta’ovala, his traditional Tongan dress, and often went to church with his grandparents. More than once, Tony raised money for children with heart problems, adding what he had earned from the tooth fairy and chores around the house.
During the first weekend of August, he and his mother visited Oahu where Tiffany was offering free braiding for a lower-income community. Salote joined in, brushing people’s hair while her son clung to her side. They returned to Maui on the night of Aug. 7, although they had nearly missed their flight while scrambling to find Tony new football cleats.
He was starting second grade at Princess Nahienaena Elementary School the next day.
A valley of cinders
As flames tore through the heart of Lahaina, those elsewhere on Maui had little immediate information.
Folau’s wife, Sabrina, was working the front desk at the Westin Kaanapali Ocean Resort Villas about four miles away, and trying to calm guests complaining about the power outage. Smoke was twisting through the sky outside.
Sabrina, 44, began receiving texts from her eldest, Liliana. But cell service was shoddy, and each message was one word.
“mom”
“please”
“answer”
Sabrina took a break to drive to Folau’s restaurant and was relieved he had not shown up. It meant he was very likely with their children.
Finally, around 5 p.m., her husband appeared in the lobby, his face ashen. Guests were around, so he quietly told her to walk outside.
There she saw that the front and sides of his truck were scraped and battered. An electrical wire was tangled underneath. Liliana grabbed her and cried. Her other children and the dog were safe inside the truck.
An administrator at the hotel would later recall the scene as one of the first clues that something was terribly wrong in Lahaina.
Folau was anxious to retrace his steps to search for his sister’s car, but the roads were impassable. Calls and texts went unanswered. Across the island, thousands had been displaced and separated. Sabrina’s manager offered the family a hotel room for the night.
By morning, Folau had still not heard from his parents or Salote. The next day, he found a way to get into the burn area with his brother-in-law and a friend.
They saw a valley of cinders and burned dreams. Most of the homes were ash and rubble, some marked only by concrete steps to nowhere. Folau’s own home had disappeared into dust, nothing left to be saved.
Cars with melted tires dotted the street, their metal frames nearly unrecognizable.
But one had a bent hood as if it had slammed into something. It also held a devastating detail: two scorched metal pots.
‘Where is Tony?’
It has been more than a month since the fire, and dozens of victims have yet to be identified. The authorities count the total lives lost at 115, but many residents are convinced there are more. And there are still
66 names on a list of the missing
.
Forensic experts and search teams combed through the rubble for weeks looking for any semblance of human remains. Families who have provided their DNA still wait for closure.
Folau knew before the officials: Faaoso, Maluifonua, Salote and Tony had died in their car. Three generations taken by flames they could not outrun. Tony would have celebrated his eighth birthday next month, the youngest victim to be identified so far.
Survivors have deep trauma and complicated mental scars. There are those who cannot speak of what they saw. And plans to restart their lives are outlined in grief.
Folau and his family are staying at a hotel as they figure out what comes next. Wherever they land, the household will feel incomplete.
Siosiua, his 9-year-old, has not yet come up with a good answer when other kids innocently ask, “Where is Tony?”
Folau is grateful to be there for his son in these moments after spending so much of his life working. It has been good to focus on fatherhood.
Like many, he is struggling with the weight of unwarranted guilt. Why his car made it out but his sister’s did not. Whether he could have swung around and made sure they pulled through.
His siblings and friends assure him that he is not to blame. His own children speak of his heroism. The way they see it, Folau was their protector, a father fueled by love and desperation racing them out of a terrifying blaze.
And his wife knows the unbearable alternative: “If he had gone back, we would have lost them all.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
|
The wind had never felt so fierce.
Folau Tone steadied himself as a gale whipped through his street in Lahaina. Trying to nail down the rattling tin roof on his family’s home, he gave up as fragments were stripped away.
In West Maui, power lines were crashing down, and the electricity was out across a large swath of the island. Outdoor furniture and debris were flung across yards.
Folau’s wife had already left for her job at a hotel, but their four children had stayed behind. It was Aug. 8, what would have been the first day of school. Classes were canceled because of the power outage.
The gusts did not deter his mother, Faaoso, who stood outside fussing over a pot of cassava root while another pot burbled with fish stew. She liked cooking in the open air and had long ago set up a makeshift kitchen with propane burners under a tent.
At 70, Faaoso enjoyed overseeing a home that bustled, happy to live with children and grandchildren over the years. Her husband, Maluifonua, 73, was retired, having suffered a back injury when a linen cart slipped while he was working at a resort.
Faaoso and Maluifonua Tone.
Credit...
Folau and his family moved in seven years ago, joining his sister Salote, 39, and her son, Tony Takafua. The siblings helped pay the mortgage.
At about 2 p.m., Folau showered and was preparing to leave for his job as a bartender when he received word that the restaurant was not going to open. He figured that he and his kids would hole up for the day.
But smoke began to swirl outside their home, a white bungalow with blue trim. Neighbors came outside to peer up at the mountains, their shouts drowned out by the wind. Some headed for their cars.
Folau, 44, had evacuated under threat of fire before, and he told his children to pack a change of clothes. The smoke soon thickened and darkened the sky. Folau found his footsteps quickening, his voice growing urgent.
His daughter Liliana, 14, jumped into the front seat of their silver truck, a Nissan Titan. Siosiua, 9, and Auralia, 5, crawled in the back seat. So did their 2-year-old brother, Keuli, and Nala, their
|
Labrador mix.
Salote and Tony, 7, hopped into the white Honda Civic that she had recently purchased. Her parents climbed in the back. The plan was to follow Folau and meet at his wife’s hotel.
Before leaving, Folau grabbed the two pots of food his mother had made and rushed to place them in the trunk of Salote’s car. It would be nice to show up with a meal if there was no working electricity.
A new life on Maui
Maluifonua and Faaoso Tone had once been farmers in Tonga where they grew taro and breadfruit and raised horses, cows and goats. They were often seen side by side in the field, an unusually inseparable pair.
In 1995, the couple planned to move to San Francisco to join a family member whose stories had made them dream of an American life. On the way, they stopped to visit Faaoso’s brother on Maui and decided to stay for good because the island reminded them of home. They had four children at the time and would soon adopt a fifth.
Maluifonua took a job as a dishwasher at a tavern called the Rusty Harpoon, working so late that he would miss the last bus and have to walk the four miles home.
He and his wife found comfort in the Polynesian community and were active in the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They attended socials and barbecues and spent afternoons at the congregation’s farm, tending to rows of yam plants and banana trees.
Maluifonua was a natural leader, and friends requested that he coordinate the kitchen at weddings and parties where it was not unusual to welcome a few hundred people. Faaoso was quieter, more comfortable looking after the household. Many looked forward to her version of lu pulu, which involved steaming corned beef or lamb with coconut milk in taro leaves.
The couple often watched over the children of relatives or neighbors, offering relief to numerous working parents. “They never complained about people bringing their kids, they were always willing,” Folau said.
Their modest house was near the ocean on a street lush with plumeria and coconut trees, and it became a landing place for relatives who had just moved to Maui.
Folau was their middle child and, after his older brother moved to Utah, the only son on the island. He had been a shy 15-year-old when he left Tonga and enrolled at Lahainaluna High School. There, he excelled at math and considered going to college.
But Folau remembered watching his older sister contributing her McDonald’s paychecks to the house. He thought it best to join the work force and help with his parents’ bills.
Over the years, Folau juggled jobs as a dishwasher, cook and server. He bartended, worked security, greeted travelers at zip-line tours.
It was not a life of regret. He felt a solemn sense of responsibility for the family.
A frantic escape
Inside his truck, Folau did not see the fire, but could feel the encroaching heat as he gripped the steering wheel. He started down Kuhua Street. Salote followed. The neighborhood was shrouded in gray, and wind was hurling embers, leaves and dirt in the air.
A fallen mango tree blocked access to the main thoroughfare that could get them out of the area. Vehicles were changing direction, jamming the road. Folau turned onto Aki Street, but drivers motioned that there was no outlet there, either. He turned back to Kuhua Street. Cars were trying to maneuver around one another but getting nowhere. He was trapped.
“Dad, get us out of here!” Liliana, his daughter, begged.
Alongside the street ran a metal fence. Another truck began ramming into it, futilely trying to break it down. Finally, the driver got out and started running, leaving his vehicle behind.
Folau scanned for another means of escape. “At the time, I wasn’t thinking of anything — just feeling that the kids were there and just trying to get them somewhere safe,” he said.
He found himself back by the fallen mango tree. Maybe, Folau thought, he could wedge his truck against the side of the fence, force his wheels over the branches and break through to the other side.
Nearby homes began to ignite. The inside of Folau’s truck grew hotter. He could barely see through the windshield. His children clung to one another and screamed.
“I just heard my kids crying. And then I just went for it.”
He gunned the engine. His sister Salote, he hoped, was close behind.
‘I love you to the end of me’
Salote Tone had a bold personality that some could find brash. But she tried not to spend time worrying about what people thought of her. She considered herself a work in progress and had empathy for anyone with a personal struggle.
“She could be sassy in people’s eyes, but if you got to know her, she was really humble,” her friend Fipe Fononga, 41, said. “She was my ride or die. If I’m in trouble or need help, she was there.”
Salote helped Fipe land a job at a rental car agency. When Fipe had difficulty affording rent, Salote invited her to live with the family, sharing her bedroom.
“She never judged people, she tried to offer inspiration,” said her friend Tiffany Tevaga, who wrestled with alcoholism for years and spent time in prison for assault. After Tiffany turned things around and began a home business braiding hair, Salote was her right hand, booking appointments and posting advertisements.
“Oh, she was so proud of me,” Tiffany, 35, said. “I like to say I’m the muscle — and Lote was the heart.”
Salote Tone and her 7-year-old son Tony Takafua.
Credit...
Salote had been a manager at Cheeseburger in Paradise, a well-known hangout, but eventually managed vacation-home rentals.
She loved to be social, staying out until sunrise with her girlfriends — avoiding venues where she might find herself under the watchful eye of her big brother Folau.
When her son was born, Salote’s world grew smaller and more focused. Tony became her shadow, her “Boobear” and “lil mini,” and she was unabashed in her affection for him.
“I love you to the end of me, and I can never thank you enough for being my lifesaver,” she wrote in April on her Facebook page.
The two spent days at the beach where Tony jumped off cliffs. He had a passion for football and video games, and liked riding electric bikes around the neighborhood with his cousins. He smiled whenever posing in a ta’ovala, his traditional Tongan dress, and often went to church with his grandparents. More than once, Tony raised money for children with heart problems, adding what he had earned from the tooth fairy and chores around the house.
During the first weekend of August, he and his mother visited Oahu where Tiffany was offering free braiding for a lower-income community. Salote joined in, brushing people’s hair while her son clung to her side. They returned to Maui on the night of Aug. 7, although they had nearly missed their flight while scrambling to find Tony new football cleats.
He was starting second grade at Princess Nahienaena Elementary School the next day.
A valley of cinders
As flames tore through the heart of Lahaina, those elsewhere on Maui had little immediate information.
Folau’s wife, Sabrina, was working the front desk at the Westin Kaanapali Ocean Resort Villas about four miles away, and trying to calm guests complaining about the power outage. Smoke was twisting through the sky outside.
Sabrina, 44, began receiving texts from her eldest, Liliana. But cell service was shoddy, and each message was one word.
“mom”
“please”
“answer”
Sabrina took a break to drive to Folau’s restaurant and was relieved he had not shown up. It meant he was very likely with their children.
Finally, around 5 p.m., her husband appeared in the lobby, his face ashen. Guests were around, so he quietly told her to walk outside.
There she saw that the front and sides of his truck were scraped and battered. An electrical wire was tangled underneath. Liliana grabbed her and cried. Her other children and the dog were safe inside the truck.
An administrator at the hotel would later recall the scene as one of the first clues that something was terribly wrong in Lahaina.
Folau was anxious to retrace his steps to search for his sister’s car, but the roads were impassable. Calls and texts went unanswered. Across the island, thousands had been displaced and separated. Sabrina’s manager offered the family a hotel room for the night.
By morning, Folau had still not heard from his parents or Salote. The next day, he found a way to get into the burn area with his brother-in-law and a friend.
They saw a valley of cinders and burned dreams. Most of the homes were ash and rubble, some marked only by concrete steps to nowhere. Folau’s own home had disappeared into dust, nothing left to be saved.
Cars with melted tires dotted the street, their metal frames nearly unrecognizable.
But one had a bent hood as if it had slammed into something. It also held a devastating detail: two scorched metal pots.
‘Where is Tony?’
It has been more than a month since the fire, and dozens of victims have yet to be identified. The authorities count the total lives lost at 115, but many residents are convinced there are more. And there are still
66 names on a list of the missing
.
Forensic experts and search teams combed through the rubble for weeks looking for any semblance of human remains. Families who have provided their DNA still wait for closure.
Folau knew before the officials: Faaoso, Maluifonua, Salote and Tony had died in their car. Three generations taken by flames they could not outrun. Tony would have celebrated his eighth birthday next month, the youngest victim to be identified so far.
Survivors have deep trauma and complicated mental scars. There are those who cannot speak of what they saw. And plans to restart their lives are outlined in grief.
Folau and his family are staying at a hotel as they figure out what comes next. Wherever they land, the household will feel incomplete.
Siosiua, his 9-year-old, has not yet come up with a good answer when other kids innocently ask, “Where is Tony?”
Folau is grateful to be there for his son in these moments after spending so much of his life working. It has been good to focus on fatherhood.
Like many, he is struggling with the weight of unwarranted guilt. Why his car made it out but his sister’s did not. Whether he could have swung around and made sure they pulled through.
His siblings and friends assure him that he is not to blame. His own children speak of his heroism. The way they see it, Folau was their protector, a father fueled by love and desperation racing them out of a terrifying blaze.
And his wife knows the unbearable alternative: “If he had gone back, we would have lost them all.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
|
31fb1c8e-5213-48ea-bd45-78bd1ef72099
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/world/africa/sudan-army-military-conflicts.html
|
How Fighting in Sudan’s Capital Differs from Past Military Conflicts
|
2023-04-16
|
nytimes
|
In a country long plagued by rebellions, coups and genocidal violence, the scenes of combat taking place in Sudan’s capital are notable because, until now, Sudan’s wars have unfolded on the geographic and political peripheries of the vast African nation.
For decades, Sudan’s military has waged brutal conflicts in the south, east and west of the country. That fighting led to the secession of South Sudan in 2011; an International Criminal Court determination that pro-government forces committed genocide in the western region of Darfur; the loss of land in a territorial dispute with neighboring Ethiopia; and monumental death, displacement and suffering.
Here is a look at some of the other conflicts Sudan’s army has fought in recent years:
South Sudanese civil war
A deadly struggle between secessionist fighters in the south and the government in Khartoum in the north consumed Sudan for decades, claiming more than two million lives. The two sides ultimately negotiated a peace agreement that split the country in 2011 after southerners voted in a referendum for
South Sudan to become a new nation.
Within South Sudan, infighting in the government led to clashes in 2013 and ultimately
triggered a violent feud
between the two biggest ethnic groups. That conflict officially ended in 2018, but Africa’s newest country remains fragile,
faced with a humanitarian crisis
that has millions of people struggling for food.
Genocide in Darfur
Ethnically motivated violence in Darfur has killed as many as 300,000 people since 2003, according to an estimate from the United Nations, with
Arab militia groups
destroying and terrorizing villages inhabited mainly by ethnic African communities.
The atrocities, which began after ethnic minority rebels accused longtime President
Omar Hassan al-Bashir
of repression, led to his indictment by the
I.C.C. for genocide
. Mr. al-Bashir was ousted in a 2019 popular uprising that many Darfuris prayed would put an end to the violence. But the attacks against ethnic minorities in the region
surged again last year
, linked in part to upheaval in the central government.
One of main figures in Sudan’s current conflict, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, was a former commander of the feared Janjaweed militia group that carried out some of the worst atrocities against civilians in Darfur. General Hamdan is now head of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group battling Sudan’s army.
Land dispute with Ethiopia
For over a century, Sudan and Ethiopia have been at odds over the lush border region of al-Fashaga, where farmers from both countries have shared land. The dispute intensified in late 2020 after fighting in the
Tigray region of Ethiopia
prompted Ethiopian soldiers presiding over al-Fashaga to leave. Sudanese troops then
moved in to capture parts of the contested territory
, ousting Ethiopian farmers in the process, according to aid groups. There have been exchanges of shelling across the contested zone, with some deaths. The fighting has since subsided, but the core dispute remains unresolved.
Aid groups have warned that
any escalation of the dispute
could draw in neighboring countries, such as Egypt and Eritrea.
Nuba Mountains conflict
Clashes between government forces and rebel Nuba fighters in Sudan’s South Kordofan State broke out
in the aftermath of South Sudan’s secession
, with Nuba fighters supporting South Sudan.
Many Nuba civilians fled their villages and sought refuge in mountain caves, and aid organizations reported
food shortages
, civilian deaths from government airstrikes and the
displacement of thousands of people
. A cease-fire was announced in 2016, but Nuba people in the region have since reported being targeted by paramilitary groups loyal to the government in Khartoum.
|
In a country long plagued by rebellions, coups and genocidal violence, the scenes of combat taking place in Sudan’s capital are notable because, until now, Sudan’s wars have unfolded on the geographic and political peripheries of the vast African nation.
For decades, Sudan’s military has waged brutal conflicts in the south, east and west of the country. That fighting led to the secession of South Sudan in 2011; an International Criminal Court determination that pro-government forces committed genocide in the western region of Darfur; the loss of land in a territorial dispute with neighboring Ethiopia; and monumental death, displacement and suffering.
Here is a look at some of the other conflicts Sudan’s army has fought in recent years:
South Sudanese civil war
A deadly struggle between secessionist fighters in the south and the government in Khartoum in the north consumed Sudan for decades, claiming more than two million lives. The two sides ultimately negotiated a peace agreement that split the country in 2011 after southerners voted in a referendum for
South Sudan to become a new nation.
Within South Sudan, infighting in the government led to clashes in 2013 and ultimately
triggered a violent feud
between the two biggest ethnic groups. That conflict officially ended in 2018, but Africa’s newest country remains fragile,
faced with a humanitarian crisis
that has millions of people struggling for food.
Genocide in Darfur
Ethnically motivated violence in Darfur has killed as many as 300,000 people since 2003, according to an estimate from the United Nations, with
Arab militia groups
destroying and terrorizing villages inhabited mainly by ethnic African communities.
The atrocities, which began after ethnic minority rebels accused longtime President
Omar Hassan al-Bashir
of repression, led to his indictment by the
I.C.C. for genocide
. Mr. al-Bashir was ousted in a 2019 popular uprising that many Darfuris prayed would put an end to the violence. But the attacks against ethnic minorities in the region
surged again last year
, linked in part to upheaval in the central government.
One of main figures in Sudan’s current conflict, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, was a former commander of the feared Janjaweed militia group that carried out some of the worst atrocities against civilians in Darfur. General Hamdan is now head of the
|
Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group battling Sudan’s army.
Land dispute with Ethiopia
For over a century, Sudan and Ethiopia have been at odds over the lush border region of al-Fashaga, where farmers from both countries have shared land. The dispute intensified in late 2020 after fighting in the
Tigray region of Ethiopia
prompted Ethiopian soldiers presiding over al-Fashaga to leave. Sudanese troops then
moved in to capture parts of the contested territory
, ousting Ethiopian farmers in the process, according to aid groups. There have been exchanges of shelling across the contested zone, with some deaths. The fighting has since subsided, but the core dispute remains unresolved.
Aid groups have warned that
any escalation of the dispute
could draw in neighboring countries, such as Egypt and Eritrea.
Nuba Mountains conflict
Clashes between government forces and rebel Nuba fighters in Sudan’s South Kordofan State broke out
in the aftermath of South Sudan’s secession
, with Nuba fighters supporting South Sudan.
Many Nuba civilians fled their villages and sought refuge in mountain caves, and aid organizations reported
food shortages
, civilian deaths from government airstrikes and the
displacement of thousands of people
. A cease-fire was announced in 2016, but Nuba people in the region have since reported being targeted by paramilitary groups loyal to the government in Khartoum.
|
9522d88f-dcc3-46bb-95c3-2d5362189a1f
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/magazine/andy-reid-kansas-city-chiefs.html
|
Andy Reid, Coach of Kansas City Chiefs, Makes Football Fun
|
2024-01-11
|
nytimes
|
“Andy has an unparalleled ability to scheme guys open,” says Ray Didinger, who as a sports columnist in Philadelphia and then a producer for N.F.L. Films has followed Reid for a quarter century. “He can do it with great receivers, like he’s had in the past, or he can ride with pretty good receivers, which is all he had last year. I look back on that second half, and I think it was the greatest 30 minutes of his career.”
The
N.F.L. playoffs
begin this weekend, and the Chiefs, having won their division for a remarkable eighth straight time, are again among the favorites. Going into the final regular-season game, Reid’s team had the fourth-best odds at one major sportsbook to win the Super Bowl — 14 of the 32 teams make the playoffs — and it didn’t look as if the Chiefs would have to face a dominant opponent before the A.F.C. title game. But by their high standards, they have had an up-and-down year, primarily because
their receivers drop too many passes
(they lead the league in that dubious category) and too often run the wrong routes. If Reid can get this group of not-so-great pass catchers to the Super Bowl, it would be his fourth trip in five years and might be an even greater achievement than that second half last year.
Every Super Bowl-winning
season kicks off during the preceding summer. One Sunday last July, Reid rose before dawn on the college campus where his team was gathered to prepare for the season, a dorm at Missouri Western State University: Scanlon Hall, to be exact, a freshman residence with tiny rooms, shared bathrooms and walls made of cinder block. His players — the nearly-$60-million-a-year quarterback Patrick Mahomes, the star tight end (and Taylor Swift boyfriend) Travis Kelce and all the rest of their teammates — were bunked in the same dormitory, though surely still snoozing in their own 11-by-14-foot quarters. In a modest concession to comfort, the team had trucked in king-size beds from a local Rent-a-Center. Jawaan Taylor, a 330-pound offensive lineman, told me that he found the setup tolerable enough. “But you’ve got to make sure you put that mattress pad on.” Reid, whose quarters were on the first floor, does not care much about sleep and gets only about three hours a night, if that. “It’s not something I like to brag on,” he told me. The index cards he always keeps with him spent the nights within easy reach because he never knows when he’ll think of a new play and want to draw it up. I wondered if plays ever come to him in his dreams. “I don’t sleep enough to dream,” he said.
Practice that July morning began at 9:15. After the players stretched and went through some preliminary drills, Reid, who is 65, took his place about 10 yards behind where his offense was running plays against the team’s defense. Hands on hips, he was tilted forward in intense concentration. He recorded the result of every play on a sheet of paper. Whenever the offense advanced, he lumbered forward with the players, taking short steps while his arms and upper body seemed not to move at all. Reid is a large man. The stories about him often tend to be about his prodigious eating. While trying to land his first N.F.L. head-coaching job, in 1999 with the Eagles, the team’s owner, Jeffrey Lurie, took him to a steakhouse for dinner. When the server asked him if he preferred the rib-eye, the New York strip or the filet mignon, Reid ordered all three.
|
“Andy has an unparalleled ability to scheme guys open,” says Ray Didinger, who as a sports columnist in Philadelphia and then a producer for N.F.L. Films has followed Reid for a quarter century. “He can do it with great receivers, like he’s had in the past, or he can ride with pretty good receivers, which is all he had last year. I look back on that second half, and I think it was the greatest 30 minutes of his career.”
The
N.F.L. playoffs
begin this weekend, and the Chiefs, having won their division for a remarkable eighth straight time, are again among the favorites. Going into the final regular-season game, Reid’s team had the fourth-best odds at one major sportsbook to win the Super Bowl — 14 of the 32 teams make the playoffs — and it didn’t look as if the Chiefs would have to face a dominant opponent before the A.F.C. title game. But by their high standards, they have had an up-and-down year, primarily because
their receivers drop too many passes
(they lead the league in that dubious category) and too often run the wrong routes. If Reid can get this group of not-so-great pass catchers to the Super Bowl, it would be his fourth trip in five years and might be an even greater achievement than that second half last year.
Every Super Bowl-winning
season kicks off during the preceding summer. One Sunday last July, Reid rose before dawn on the college campus where his team was gathered to prepare for the season, a dorm at Missouri Western State University: Scanlon Hall, to be exact, a freshman residence with tiny rooms, shared bathrooms and walls made of cinder block. His players — the nearly-$60-million-a-year quarterback Patrick Mahomes, the star tight end (and Taylor Swift boyfriend) Travis Kelce and all the rest of their teammates — were bunked in the same dormitory, though surely still snoozing in their own 11-by-14-foot quarters. In a modest concession to comfort, the team had trucked in king-size beds from a local Rent-a-Center. Jawaan Taylor, a 330-pound offensive lineman, told me that he found the setup tolerable enough. “But you’ve got to make sure you put that mattress pad on.” Reid, whose quarters were on the first floor, does not care much about sleep and gets only about three hours
|
a night, if that. “It’s not something I like to brag on,” he told me. The index cards he always keeps with him spent the nights within easy reach because he never knows when he’ll think of a new play and want to draw it up. I wondered if plays ever come to him in his dreams. “I don’t sleep enough to dream,” he said.
Practice that July morning began at 9:15. After the players stretched and went through some preliminary drills, Reid, who is 65, took his place about 10 yards behind where his offense was running plays against the team’s defense. Hands on hips, he was tilted forward in intense concentration. He recorded the result of every play on a sheet of paper. Whenever the offense advanced, he lumbered forward with the players, taking short steps while his arms and upper body seemed not to move at all. Reid is a large man. The stories about him often tend to be about his prodigious eating. While trying to land his first N.F.L. head-coaching job, in 1999 with the Eagles, the team’s owner, Jeffrey Lurie, took him to a steakhouse for dinner. When the server asked him if he preferred the rib-eye, the New York strip or the filet mignon, Reid ordered all three.
|
3c27fa8e-9829-43bf-9d7d-9ace762f9214
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/books/ghostwriters-conference.html
|
Ghostwriters Emerge From the Shadows
|
2024-01-23
|
nytimes
|
Ghostwriting is a secretive profession. It’s long been maintained that a good ghost writer, like a well-behaved child in an extreme version of the old proverb, should be neither seen nor heard.
So it was unusual for a group of around 140 ghostwriters to gather, as they did in Manhattan on Monday, to schmooze and celebrate their work with awards, panel discussions and keynote speeches. The one-day conference, called the Gathering of the Ghosts, took place at a moment when ghostwriting is in high demand and gaining recognition as an art form of its own, after years of operating largely in the shadows.
“There’s great value in building this community because of the nature of what we do,” said Daniel Paisner, who hosts a podcast about ghostwriting called “As Told To” and has collaborated on 17 New York Times best-sellers. “We do it in a vacuum, sitting alone in our underwear in our offices. We don’t get out much. So I think it’s helpful to be able to compare notes.”
Held at the New York Academy of Medicine, in a room lined with old, leather-bound medical books overlooking a snowy Central Park, the event included panels about finding the right publisher for a project, whether A.I. might render ghostwriters irrelevant and conversations about how much a ghostwriter can charge (the consensus: more). The profession has a history of being undervalued, and one panelist advised everyone in the audience to double their rates and add 20 percent.
“Is it good to be a ghostwriter?” Madeleine Morel, an agent who specializes in matchmaking book projects with ghostwriters, said at the event. “I’ll paraphrase Dickens: It’s the best of times and the worst of times. It’s the best of times because there’s never been so much work out there. It’s the worst of times because it’s become so competitive.”
Jodi Lipper, who has ghostwritten 25 books, including a collaboration with the shoe designer Steve Madden, said she was gratified to see awards that recognize ghostwriters for their talents. “There has been this misconception for a long time that ghostwriters are people who couldn't write their own book, that they are these hacks,” she said.
Lipper and other ghostwriters argue that their job requires not only literary chops but a host of other skills, including wrangling talent and drawing out illustrative stories from their subjects. The writer must also effectively channel the subject’s voice, so readers feel like they’re hearing directly from the person whose face is on the cover.
“I have a whole process — like for every client, I have a different scent,” said Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts. For one project she might put lavender essential oils in her diffuser, she explained, and for another, she might use lemon. This helps her slip into her subject’s voices, she said.
Lewis-Giggetts received an award at the conference on Monday for the book “Sisterhood Heals,” although the name on the cover is Joy Harden Bradford, Ph.D. (Her scent for that book was lemongrass.) She also writes under her own name, and her essay collection, “Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration,” won an N.A.A.C.P. Image Award last year.
“I have my own work, but I’m still doing a lot of ghosting,” she said. “Quite frankly, because it pays the bills.”
While many celebrities and politicians maintain the pretense that they are writing their own books, it’s becoming more common to acknowledge one’s ghostwriter and the occupation has gained more visibility. Collaborators for celebrity memoirs — which can be enormously lucrative for publishers — are in increasingly high demand, with some making six figures for their work.
The genres that many ghostwriters work in — memoirs by actors and musicians, athletes, chief executives and self-help gurus — are the types of books that publishers are pouring money into, because a well-known author with an established following can potentially sell millions of copies. Some of last year’s top-selling nonfiction books were ghostwritten memoirs — Britney Spears’ “
The Woman in Me
” and Prince Harry’s “
Spare
.”
The field’s growth has been good for writers, too. Often, professionals want a book to their name: Books can spruce up a résumé, or help land keynote speeches or consulting gigs. Those authors also need ghostwriters.
Dan Gerstein, the chief executive of Gotham Ghostwriters, an agency that co-hosted Monday’s conference, said the field is flooded with former journalists, for example.
“Ghostwriting is the best thing that’s happened to a lot of writers, because without ghostwriting I don’t know what they’d be doing,” said Morel, the agent, who noted that she has orchestrated ghostwriter matches for more than 60 New York Times best-sellers. “Former editors, former journalists, former mid-list writers — they’d probably be working at Starbucks.”
Top-tier ghostwriters are also being lauded for their literary skills, with some publishers even touting their participation in a project as a hint to readers and booksellers that a memoir will be juicy and artfully written. The actress Demi Moore gave ample credit to her ghostwriter, the New Yorker writer Ariel Levy, for working on Moore’s memoir, “
Inside Out
.”
In a sign of how much more open ghostwriters have become about their work, J.R. Moehringer, an in-demand and widely acclaimed ghostwriter who has worked with the tennis star Andre Agassi and Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike,
wrote
in The New Yorker about the challenges of working on Prince Harry’s memoir.
Moehringer revealed debates that he and Harry had over particular scenes, and described how he would talk himself down when they clashed: “For the thousandth time in my ghostwriting career, I reminded myself: It’s not your effing book.”
Still, some stigma remains around the profession, and organizers and attendees of the ghost gathering hoped the event would help to clear misconceptions.
“There’s so much onus on your own work, on your own voice, on your own story,” said Holly Gleason, who was nominated for an award for a book she wrote with the country musician Miranda Lambert. “But the truth is, telling a story really well is important.”
But some delicacy lingers around revealing a ghostwriter’s participation in a work. To be eligible for awards, both the official authors and their paid collaborators had to co-submit for consideration and agree to share the award.
Years ago, Paisner said, he was invited to a dinner party at the apartment of former Mayor Ed Koch, where Paisner introduced himself as the person who helped Koch write his book. Later that evening, Koch asked for a word. “He said, ‘I would prefer if you never say that again,’” Paisner recalled.
For a long time, Paisner said, people seemed to believe that these books were written by having a person of renown speak into a tape recorder and then bringing in a ghostwriter to transcribe those thoughts.
“It is not that, and I think readers are slowly coming around to accept that it is not that,” Paisner said. “That these are not the musing of the rich and famous as dictated to the lowly ghostwriter.”
|
Ghostwriting is a secretive profession. It’s long been maintained that a good ghost writer, like a well-behaved child in an extreme version of the old proverb, should be neither seen nor heard.
So it was unusual for a group of around 140 ghostwriters to gather, as they did in Manhattan on Monday, to schmooze and celebrate their work with awards, panel discussions and keynote speeches. The one-day conference, called the Gathering of the Ghosts, took place at a moment when ghostwriting is in high demand and gaining recognition as an art form of its own, after years of operating largely in the shadows.
“There’s great value in building this community because of the nature of what we do,” said Daniel Paisner, who hosts a podcast about ghostwriting called “As Told To” and has collaborated on 17 New York Times best-sellers. “We do it in a vacuum, sitting alone in our underwear in our offices. We don’t get out much. So I think it’s helpful to be able to compare notes.”
Held at the New York Academy of Medicine, in a room lined with old, leather-bound medical books overlooking a snowy Central Park, the event included panels about finding the right publisher for a project, whether A.I. might render ghostwriters irrelevant and conversations about how much a ghostwriter can charge (the consensus: more). The profession has a history of being undervalued, and one panelist advised everyone in the audience to double their rates and add 20 percent.
“Is it good to be a ghostwriter?” Madeleine Morel, an agent who specializes in matchmaking book projects with ghostwriters, said at the event. “I’ll paraphrase Dickens: It’s the best of times and the worst of times. It’s the best of times because there’s never been so much work out there. It’s the worst of times because it’s become so competitive.”
Jodi Lipper, who has ghostwritten 25 books, including a collaboration with the shoe designer Steve Madden, said she was gratified to see awards that recognize ghostwriters for their talents. “There has been this misconception for a long time that ghostwriters are people who couldn't write their own book, that they are these hacks,” she said.
Lipper and other ghostwriters argue that their job requires not only literary chops but a host of other skills, including wrangling talent and drawing out illustrative
|
stories from their subjects. The writer must also effectively channel the subject’s voice, so readers feel like they’re hearing directly from the person whose face is on the cover.
“I have a whole process — like for every client, I have a different scent,” said Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts. For one project she might put lavender essential oils in her diffuser, she explained, and for another, she might use lemon. This helps her slip into her subject’s voices, she said.
Lewis-Giggetts received an award at the conference on Monday for the book “Sisterhood Heals,” although the name on the cover is Joy Harden Bradford, Ph.D. (Her scent for that book was lemongrass.) She also writes under her own name, and her essay collection, “Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration,” won an N.A.A.C.P. Image Award last year.
“I have my own work, but I’m still doing a lot of ghosting,” she said. “Quite frankly, because it pays the bills.”
While many celebrities and politicians maintain the pretense that they are writing their own books, it’s becoming more common to acknowledge one’s ghostwriter and the occupation has gained more visibility. Collaborators for celebrity memoirs — which can be enormously lucrative for publishers — are in increasingly high demand, with some making six figures for their work.
The genres that many ghostwriters work in — memoirs by actors and musicians, athletes, chief executives and self-help gurus — are the types of books that publishers are pouring money into, because a well-known author with an established following can potentially sell millions of copies. Some of last year’s top-selling nonfiction books were ghostwritten memoirs — Britney Spears’ “
The Woman in Me
” and Prince Harry’s “
Spare
.”
The field’s growth has been good for writers, too. Often, professionals want a book to their name: Books can spruce up a résumé, or help land keynote speeches or consulting gigs. Those authors also need ghostwriters.
Dan Gerstein, the chief executive of Gotham Ghostwriters, an agency that co-hosted Monday’s conference, said the field is flooded with former journalists, for example.
“Ghostwriting is the best thing that’s happened to a lot of writers, because without ghostwriting I don’t know what they’d be doing,” said Morel, the agent, who noted that she has orchestrated ghostwriter matches for more than 60 New York Times best-sellers. “Former editors, former journalists, former mid-list writers — they’d probably be working at Starbucks.”
Top-tier ghostwriters are also being lauded for their literary skills, with some publishers even touting their participation in a project as a hint to readers and booksellers that a memoir will be juicy and artfully written. The actress Demi Moore gave ample credit to her ghostwriter, the New Yorker writer Ariel Levy, for working on Moore’s memoir, “
Inside Out
.”
In a sign of how much more open ghostwriters have become about their work, J.R. Moehringer, an in-demand and widely acclaimed ghostwriter who has worked with the tennis star Andre Agassi and Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike,
wrote
in The New Yorker about the challenges of working on Prince Harry’s memoir.
Moehringer revealed debates that he and Harry had over particular scenes, and described how he would talk himself down when they clashed: “For the thousandth time in my ghostwriting career, I reminded myself: It’s not your effing book.”
Still, some stigma remains around the profession, and organizers and attendees of the ghost gathering hoped the event would help to clear misconceptions.
“There’s so much onus on your own work, on your own voice, on your own story,” said Holly Gleason, who was nominated for an award for a book she wrote with the country musician Miranda Lambert. “But the truth is, telling a story really well is important.”
But some delicacy lingers around revealing a ghostwriter’s participation in a work. To be eligible for awards, both the official authors and their paid collaborators had to co-submit for consideration and agree to share the award.
Years ago, Paisner said, he was invited to a dinner party at the apartment of former Mayor Ed Koch, where Paisner introduced himself as the person who helped Koch write his book. Later that evening, Koch asked for a word. “He said, ‘I would prefer if you never say that again,’” Paisner recalled.
For a long time, Paisner said, people seemed to believe that these books were written by having a person of renown speak into a tape recorder and then bringing in a ghostwriter to transcribe those thoughts.
“It is not that, and I think readers are slowly coming around to accept that it is not that,” Paisner said. “That these are not the musing of the rich and famous as dictated to the lowly ghostwriter.”
|
21eecde3-9f37-414b-b299-8c97e9f5ae18
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/us/politics/trump-republicans-poll-crimes.html
|
More Republicans Say Trump Committed Crimes. But They Still Support Him.
|
2023-08-01
|
nytimes
|
Donald J. Trump
famously marveled
during his first presidential campaign that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and he would not lose any support.
He now seems intent on testing the premise of unwavering loyalty behind that statement.
The
federal charges
against the former president seem to have cost him few, if any, votes in the 2024 election, even as the number of Republicans who think he has committed serious federal crimes has ticked up.
He continues to hold strong in a hypothetical general election matchup, despite the fact that 17 percent of voters who prefer him over President Biden think either that he has committed serious federal crimes or that he threatened democracy with his actions after the 2020 election, according to
the latest New York Times/Siena College poll
.
“I think he’s committed crimes,” said Joseph Derito, 81, of Elmira, N.Y. “I think he’s done terrible things. But he’s also done a lot of good.”
Despite his distaste for the former president, Mr. Derito said he was likely to vote for Mr. Trump again. The alternative, he said, is far less palatable.
“I used to lean toward the Democratic Party because they were for the working middle class,” he said. Now, he added, “I don’t like Trump, but I like the Democrats a lot less.”
In September
, just 6 percent of self-identified Republicans said Mr. Trump had committed crimes. That number in the latest poll, which was conducted before federal prosecutors
added additional charges
in the classified documents case, is now 13 percent.
The share of Republicans who say they are not sure whether he committed crimes has also grown, to 13 percent from 10 percent in September. In total, a quarter of Republicans either believe Mr. Trump acted criminally or say they are not sure.
So far, however, having reservations about Mr. Trump’s alleged wrongdoing does not appear to be leading Republican voters to reconsider their support for him. If anything, in public opinion polls conducted when he was indicted in March in Manhattan in relation to
hush money payments to a porn star
, and then when he was indicted again in June by federal prosecutors in connection with retention of reams of classified national defense material, Mr. Trump was buoyed by Republican voters.
In private conversations, Mr. Trump’s advisers have been blunt — they see the general election as vital to win in order to end the federal prosecutions against him.
The Times/Siena poll has also found that Mr. Trump is
leading the field among the likely Republican primary electorate
with 54 percent of the vote. The numbers illustrate the challenge for Mr. Trump’s various opponents with less than six months until the Iowa caucuses, and with the prospect that Mr. Trump
may be indicted two more times
before then in connection with his efforts to thwart the transfer of power after he lost the 2020 election.
Views of Mr. Trump have long been remarkably stable, and the public’s views of his potential criminality are no exception. About half of all voters say they think he has committed serious federal crimes, nearly identical to the share that held that view last year. Much like the overall public, Democrats have held firm in their views on Mr. Trump: Nearly 90 percent of Democrats consistently say they think Mr. Trump has committed serious federal crimes.
To be sure, nearly 75 percent of Republicans still say Mr. Trump did not commit any serious federal crimes. Of that group, 17 percent say they think the former president may have done something wrong in the handling of classified documents.
“He probably violated some regulation that didn’t rise to the point of a crime, or, you know, just didn’t tell somebody they were supposed to do or didn’t deliver the right paperwork,” said Henry Welch, 51, of Porter, Texas.
“It’s the federal bureaucracy,” he added. “You can violate five things without even knowing about it.”
Martin Bakri, 34, of Dayton, Ohio, said he thought it was wrong that Mr. Trump was in possession of classified documents, but that it did not concern him because he thought it was common.
“It was obvious that Biden also had some classified documents, and I’m sure they investigated half of Congress,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s supporters have repeatedly shown that they can disconnect their personal feelings about him from their vote. The former president’s overall favorability ratings have long been subpar. In 2016, many pollsters suggested he was going to lose the election in part because no presidential candidate that unpopular had ever won before. In the Times/Siena poll, 55 percent of all voters said they had an unfavorable view of Mr. Trump, including 17 percent of Republicans.
And across the Republican Party, voters say they expect fidelity to Mr. Trump in the face of his mounting legal troubles. Three-quarters of G.O.P. voters say Republicans need to stand behind him in the face of multiple investigations.
The roughly one-quarter who say Republicans do not need to stand behind Mr. Trump is largely composed of members of the party who are not open to voting for him in the primary contest, even if they may vote for him in a general election. Even a majority of the dwindling group of voters who support Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida say Republicans need to stand behind Mr. Trump, though Mr. DeSantis has begun
stepping up his attacks
on his opponent’s legal challenges.
The New York Times/Siena College poll of 1,329 registered voters nationwide, including an oversample of 818 registered Republican voters, was conducted by telephone using live operators from July 23 to July 27, 2023. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.67 percentage points for all registered voters. Cross-tabs and methodology are available
here
.
Camille Baker contributed reporting.
|
Donald J. Trump
famously marveled
during his first presidential campaign that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and he would not lose any support.
He now seems intent on testing the premise of unwavering loyalty behind that statement.
The
federal charges
against the former president seem to have cost him few, if any, votes in the 2024 election, even as the number of Republicans who think he has committed serious federal crimes has ticked up.
He continues to hold strong in a hypothetical general election matchup, despite the fact that 17 percent of voters who prefer him over President Biden think either that he has committed serious federal crimes or that he threatened democracy with his actions after the 2020 election, according to
the latest New York Times/Siena College poll
.
“I think he’s committed crimes,” said Joseph Derito, 81, of Elmira, N.Y. “I think he’s done terrible things. But he’s also done a lot of good.”
Despite his distaste for the former president, Mr. Derito said he was likely to vote for Mr. Trump again. The alternative, he said, is far less palatable.
“I used to lean toward the Democratic Party because they were for the working middle class,” he said. Now, he added, “I don’t like Trump, but I like the Democrats a lot less.”
In September
, just 6 percent of self-identified Republicans said Mr. Trump had committed crimes. That number in the latest poll, which was conducted before federal prosecutors
added additional charges
in the classified documents case, is now 13 percent.
The share of Republicans who say they are not sure whether he committed crimes has also grown, to 13 percent from 10 percent in September. In total, a quarter of Republicans either believe Mr. Trump acted criminally or say they are not sure.
So far, however, having reservations about Mr. Trump’s alleged wrongdoing does not appear to be leading Republican voters to reconsider their support for him. If anything, in public opinion polls conducted when he was indicted in March in Manhattan in relation to
hush money payments to a porn star
, and then when he was indicted again in June by federal prosecutors in connection with retention of reams of classified national defense material, Mr. Trump was buoyed by Republican voters.
In private conversations, Mr. Trump’s advisers have been blunt — they see the general election as
|
vital to win in order to end the federal prosecutions against him.
The Times/Siena poll has also found that Mr. Trump is
leading the field among the likely Republican primary electorate
with 54 percent of the vote. The numbers illustrate the challenge for Mr. Trump’s various opponents with less than six months until the Iowa caucuses, and with the prospect that Mr. Trump
may be indicted two more times
before then in connection with his efforts to thwart the transfer of power after he lost the 2020 election.
Views of Mr. Trump have long been remarkably stable, and the public’s views of his potential criminality are no exception. About half of all voters say they think he has committed serious federal crimes, nearly identical to the share that held that view last year. Much like the overall public, Democrats have held firm in their views on Mr. Trump: Nearly 90 percent of Democrats consistently say they think Mr. Trump has committed serious federal crimes.
To be sure, nearly 75 percent of Republicans still say Mr. Trump did not commit any serious federal crimes. Of that group, 17 percent say they think the former president may have done something wrong in the handling of classified documents.
“He probably violated some regulation that didn’t rise to the point of a crime, or, you know, just didn’t tell somebody they were supposed to do or didn’t deliver the right paperwork,” said Henry Welch, 51, of Porter, Texas.
“It’s the federal bureaucracy,” he added. “You can violate five things without even knowing about it.”
Martin Bakri, 34, of Dayton, Ohio, said he thought it was wrong that Mr. Trump was in possession of classified documents, but that it did not concern him because he thought it was common.
“It was obvious that Biden also had some classified documents, and I’m sure they investigated half of Congress,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s supporters have repeatedly shown that they can disconnect their personal feelings about him from their vote. The former president’s overall favorability ratings have long been subpar. In 2016, many pollsters suggested he was going to lose the election in part because no presidential candidate that unpopular had ever won before. In the Times/Siena poll, 55 percent of all voters said they had an unfavorable view of Mr. Trump, including 17 percent of Republicans.
And across the Republican Party, voters say they expect fidelity to Mr. Trump in the face of his mounting legal troubles. Three-quarters of G.O.P. voters say Republicans need to stand behind him in the face of multiple investigations.
The roughly one-quarter who say Republicans do not need to stand behind Mr. Trump is largely composed of members of the party who are not open to voting for him in the primary contest, even if they may vote for him in a general election. Even a majority of the dwindling group of voters who support Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida say Republicans need to stand behind Mr. Trump, though Mr. DeSantis has begun
stepping up his attacks
on his opponent’s legal challenges.
The New York Times/Siena College poll of 1,329 registered voters nationwide, including an oversample of 818 registered Republican voters, was conducted by telephone using live operators from July 23 to July 27, 2023. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.67 percentage points for all registered voters. Cross-tabs and methodology are available
here
.
Camille Baker contributed reporting.
|
1355b39f-ac5b-43b2-b3de-54aca6640b4d
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/arts/music/britney-spears-woman-in-me-book-promotion.html
|
A Britney Spears Book Tour: No TV, No Podcasts, Lots of Instagram
|
2023-10-26
|
nytimes
|
In the run-up to the release of his blockbuster autobiography earlier this year, Prince Harry sat down with “60 Minutes” — and “CBS Mornings,” “ABC News Live,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and others. Paris Hilton did “The View” and spoke with the BBC. Kerry Washington appeared on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and “Good Morning America.” Arnold Schwarzenegger opted for Kelly Clarkson and Howard Stern.
But for Britney Spears, the endlessly sought after and speculated about pop star who
released her memoir,
“The Woman in Me,” this week, there was mostly Instagram.
To gin up excitement about one of the most anticipated celebrity memoirs of the year, there were
prerelease excerpts in People
magazine, but no face-to-face interviews, which Spears has avoided since 2018, when she was still in the conservatorship that strictly controlled her life and career. (In the book, Spears writes of mentioning the arrangement in a 2016 interview, only to have it edited out.)
Now legally cleared to do and say what she pleases, however, Spears has held back, essentially throwing out the playbook for promoting a celebrity tell-all. The singer and her team are instead letting the book do the talking, with its gossipy nuggets and condemnations of the 13-year conservatorship feeding a steady churn of press coverage and social media chatter.
Her reluctance to be interviewed, stemming in part from a distrust sowed by
decades of insensitive coverage
, does not seem to have affected early sales: The book reached No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list; complete sales data will not be available until next week. But the lack of any significant promotional or public appearances by Spears, 41, has been obvious to professionals in the worlds of publishing and public relations.
“This is completely out of the ordinary,” said Eleanor McManus, a former booking producer for CNN’s “Larry King Live” who now works as a crisis manager. McManus said she was watching TV on Monday morning to find out which shows would be teasing a conversation with Spears. “I was thinking, ‘Who got the first interview?’” she said, before realizing that the answer was “no one.”
“The only time you recommend not doing interviews is if you can’t control what the subject would say, or if what he or she would say would damage their brand,” she added.
But some experts suggest Spears’s robust social media following may be all she needs for a successful book launch. At a time when celebrity memoirs are booming, subjects may not need to engage with traditional media as they once did if they have a substantial audience of their own, said Madeleine Morel, an independent literary agent who represents ghostwriters.
“The whole thing is about the size of your platform,” Morel said. “Can you bring an audience to a book?”
Spears is indeed known for communicating these days almost exclusively through her free-associative and often cryptic social media posts. Her most significant commentary on “The Woman in Me” has come not in Vogue, with Oprah or even a cheeky appearance on “Saturday Night Live” but via social media, where she has shared messages about the book that were alternately grateful, scarred and conflicted to her more than 100 million followers across platforms.
It’s not like the traditional media was not interested. Spears said in a since-deleted voice message posted to Instagram last year that after her conservatorship was terminated in late 2021, she had been approached by all manner of outlets.
“I have offers to interviews with Oprah and so many people, lots and lots of money, but it’s insane,” she said. “I don’t want any of it.”
A representative for Spears declined to comment and the memoir’s publisher, Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, did not respond to requests for comment about their nontraditional strategy to secure promotion.
So far, Spears’s traditional media engagement has been limited to the excerpts in People magazine — including the bombshell that Spears
had an abortion
during her relationship with Justin Timberlake — accompanied by emailed quotes attributed to the singer and a cover photo, which captured Spears smiling on a beach in Tahiti, sourced to “Britney Brands” rather than a photographer for the magazine.
The publisher also helped to organize an international rerelease of the 2002 movie “Crossroads,” starring Spears. That rollout has featured interviews by its director, Tamra Davis, who has generated her own wave of
news
tidbits
about Spears.
In Spears's own recent comments on the book, she has
chided the media
for focusing on her past, though the memoir is essentially a retelling of her life story.
“I don’t like the headlines I am reading … that’s exactly why I quit the business 4 years ago !!!,” she wrote
on Instagram
. “My motive for this book was not to harp on my past experiences which is what the press is doing and it’s dumb and silly !!! I have moved on since then !!!”
She went on to briefly deactivate her account, only to return soon after with a
picture of a cake
that said “See you in hell.” On the book’s release day, she shared a single promotional
post
reading: “My story. On my terms. At last.” (She later deleted the post from Instagram.)
Most celebrities with books to sell still combine more old-fashioned media appearances, like the “Today” show and the late-night circuit, with a dedicated social media strategy and newer, friendly outlets like the podcasts
Armchair Expert
and
On Purpose With Jay Shetty
, the lifecoach and influencer.
The actress Jada Pinkett Smith, who
released a memoir
this month, did all of the above, plus more. Her deluge of media appearances even became the
subject of a joke
on “S.N.L.”
“Sorry if I seem a little tired,” said the comedian Ego Nwodim, who played Pinkett Smith. “I’ve been on the ‘Today’ show 14 times in three days.”
The writer Neil Strauss, who has worked on books with Mötley Crüe, Marilyn Manson and Jenna Jameson, said that celebrities could run the risk of making themselves bigger than the book with overexposure. “Sometimes by talking about it, you can only hurt it,” he said, adding that Spears “seems like she has a lot of trauma around the media.”
In her memoir, Spears describes the press as having been unfairly focused on her body as a rising pop sensation and on her fitness as a mother during a series of public struggles in 2007 and 2008 that ultimately led to her father, James P. Spears, being granted control of her personal life and finances.
She wrote that she felt exploited in 2003, when her father and her management organized an interview with Diane Sawyer following her breakup with Timberlake. “It was completely humiliating,” Spears writes. “I wasn’t told what the questions would be ahead of time, and it turned out they were 100 percent embarrassing.”
Strauss, the celebrity collaborator, said, “She’s just analyzed and scrutinized beyond the level that any human should have to be.” Still, he acknowledged, echoing others in the industry, it was “highly unusual” for someone of Spears’s stature to do no interviews. Even Bob Dylan, a notorious media antagonist for most of his career,
promoted
his memoir
in 2004.
Paul Bogaards, a veteran
book publicist
who has led campaigns for best-selling memoirs by Bill Clinton and Andre Agassi, said that the power of a celebrity speaking publicly about their book tends to be greater than the media mining it for a news story.
“Once they’re out there in the world talking about their book, it becomes a 24-7 coverage-palooza,” Bogaards said, adding that most publishers required contractual agreements about promotion. “You want them to be visible in a significant way,” he added. “It’s hard to defend taking on a multimillion dollar advance in the absence of those kinds of agreements.” (Published figures put the price tag for Spears’s memoir, which was announced last year, between
$12.5 million
and
$15 million
.)
Another major selling point for celebrity memoirs tends to be the subject’s own voice on the audiobook edition, but in this case, Spears has largely opted out as well. In a short introduction to the audiobook version of “The Woman in Me,” Spears said she had chosen to read only a short snippet of her 275-page book because the process of reliving its contents had been “heart-wrenching.” Apart from a minute and a half, the rest of the book’s five-plus hours is read by the actress Michelle Williams.
Spears’s most loyal fans see no issue in her letting the work speak for itself. For years, the mantra for many supporters has been “leave Britney alone,” especially after the singer
upbraided fans
earlier this year for calling the police with concerns about her well-being when she temporarily deactivated her Instagram account. She
voiced her objections
again last month when another emergency call was made in response to a video of her dancing with what appeared to be kitchen knives. (Spears said they were props.)
“A lot of the sentiment in the book are these instances where she was forced to do things against her will,” said Jordan Miller, the founder of the Spears fan site BreatheHeavy.com, which helped start the “Free Britney” campaign that brought more public attention to conservatorship.
“It’s cool that she’s going in the opposite direction of what the status quo is in terms of conventional promotion,” he added. “It’s like, ‘Here are my words, you can read these. Here are the photos that I want you to see. I’m going to have approval of all of this.’ In the context of everything that’s gone on, that is super refreshing.”
But a celebrity memoir with an eye-popping purchase price may need to reach more than just superfans in order to be seen as a phenomenon worth its investment, experts said.
“It’s going to be a major release, but I think that they could be doing more to make it a real moment that sticks around,” said Anthony Bozza, an author who has written books with Slash, Tracy Morgan and Artie Lange.
If not, he added, “You’re just going to be a blip in the cycle.”
|
In the run-up to the release of his blockbuster autobiography earlier this year, Prince Harry sat down with “60 Minutes” — and “CBS Mornings,” “ABC News Live,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and others. Paris Hilton did “The View” and spoke with the BBC. Kerry Washington appeared on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and “Good Morning America.” Arnold Schwarzenegger opted for Kelly Clarkson and Howard Stern.
But for Britney Spears, the endlessly sought after and speculated about pop star who
released her memoir,
“The Woman in Me,” this week, there was mostly Instagram.
To gin up excitement about one of the most anticipated celebrity memoirs of the year, there were
prerelease excerpts in People
magazine, but no face-to-face interviews, which Spears has avoided since 2018, when she was still in the conservatorship that strictly controlled her life and career. (In the book, Spears writes of mentioning the arrangement in a 2016 interview, only to have it edited out.)
Now legally cleared to do and say what she pleases, however, Spears has held back, essentially throwing out the playbook for promoting a celebrity tell-all. The singer and her team are instead letting the book do the talking, with its gossipy nuggets and condemnations of the 13-year conservatorship feeding a steady churn of press coverage and social media chatter.
Her reluctance to be interviewed, stemming in part from a distrust sowed by
decades of insensitive coverage
, does not seem to have affected early sales: The book reached No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list; complete sales data will not be available until next week. But the lack of any significant promotional or public appearances by Spears, 41, has been obvious to professionals in the worlds of publishing and public relations.
“This is completely out of the ordinary,” said Eleanor McManus, a former booking producer for CNN’s “Larry King Live” who now works as a crisis manager. McManus said she was watching TV on Monday morning to find out which shows would be teasing a conversation with Spears. “I was thinking, ‘Who got the first interview?’” she said, before realizing that the answer was “no one.”
“The only time you recommend not doing interviews is if you can’t control what the subject would say, or if what he or she would say would damage their brand,” she added.
|
But some experts suggest Spears’s robust social media following may be all she needs for a successful book launch. At a time when celebrity memoirs are booming, subjects may not need to engage with traditional media as they once did if they have a substantial audience of their own, said Madeleine Morel, an independent literary agent who represents ghostwriters.
“The whole thing is about the size of your platform,” Morel said. “Can you bring an audience to a book?”
Spears is indeed known for communicating these days almost exclusively through her free-associative and often cryptic social media posts. Her most significant commentary on “The Woman in Me” has come not in Vogue, with Oprah or even a cheeky appearance on “Saturday Night Live” but via social media, where she has shared messages about the book that were alternately grateful, scarred and conflicted to her more than 100 million followers across platforms.
It’s not like the traditional media was not interested. Spears said in a since-deleted voice message posted to Instagram last year that after her conservatorship was terminated in late 2021, she had been approached by all manner of outlets.
“I have offers to interviews with Oprah and so many people, lots and lots of money, but it’s insane,” she said. “I don’t want any of it.”
A representative for Spears declined to comment and the memoir’s publisher, Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, did not respond to requests for comment about their nontraditional strategy to secure promotion.
So far, Spears’s traditional media engagement has been limited to the excerpts in People magazine — including the bombshell that Spears
had an abortion
during her relationship with Justin Timberlake — accompanied by emailed quotes attributed to the singer and a cover photo, which captured Spears smiling on a beach in Tahiti, sourced to “Britney Brands” rather than a photographer for the magazine.
The publisher also helped to organize an international rerelease of the 2002 movie “Crossroads,” starring Spears. That rollout has featured interviews by its director, Tamra Davis, who has generated her own wave of
news
tidbits
about Spears.
In Spears's own recent comments on the book, she has
chided the media
for focusing on her past, though the memoir is essentially a retelling of her life story.
“I don’t like the headlines I am reading … that’s exactly why I quit the business 4 years ago !!!,” she wrote
on Instagram
. “My motive for this book was not to harp on my past experiences which is what the press is doing and it’s dumb and silly !!! I have moved on since then !!!”
She went on to briefly deactivate her account, only to return soon after with a
picture of a cake
that said “See you in hell.” On the book’s release day, she shared a single promotional
post
reading: “My story. On my terms. At last.” (She later deleted the post from Instagram.)
Most celebrities with books to sell still combine more old-fashioned media appearances, like the “Today” show and the late-night circuit, with a dedicated social media strategy and newer, friendly outlets like the podcasts
Armchair Expert
and
On Purpose With Jay Shetty
, the lifecoach and influencer.
The actress Jada Pinkett Smith, who
released a memoir
this month, did all of the above, plus more. Her deluge of media appearances even became the
subject of a joke
on “S.N.L.”
“Sorry if I seem a little tired,” said the comedian Ego Nwodim, who played Pinkett Smith. “I’ve been on the ‘Today’ show 14 times in three days.”
The writer Neil Strauss, who has worked on books with Mötley Crüe, Marilyn Manson and Jenna Jameson, said that celebrities could run the risk of making themselves bigger than the book with overexposure. “Sometimes by talking about it, you can only hurt it,” he said, adding that Spears “seems like she has a lot of trauma around the media.”
In her memoir, Spears describes the press as having been unfairly focused on her body as a rising pop sensation and on her fitness as a mother during a series of public struggles in 2007 and 2008 that ultimately led to her father, James P. Spears, being granted control of her personal life and finances.
She wrote that she felt exploited in 2003, when her father and her management organized an interview with Diane Sawyer following her breakup with Timberlake. “It was completely humiliating,” Spears writes. “I wasn’t told what the questions would be ahead of time, and it turned out they were 100 percent embarrassing.”
Strauss, the celebrity collaborator, said, “She’s just analyzed and scrutinized beyond the level that any human should have to be.” Still, he acknowledged, echoing others in the industry, it was “highly unusual” for someone of Spears’s stature to do no interviews. Even Bob Dylan, a notorious media antagonist for most of his career,
promoted
his memoir
in 2004.
Paul Bogaards, a veteran
book publicist
who has led campaigns for best-selling memoirs by Bill Clinton and Andre Agassi, said that the power of a celebrity speaking publicly about their book tends to be greater than the media mining it for a news story.
“Once they’re out there in the world talking about their book, it becomes a 24-7 coverage-palooza,” Bogaards said, adding that most publishers required contractual agreements about promotion. “You want them to be visible in a significant way,” he added. “It’s hard to defend taking on a multimillion dollar advance in the absence of those kinds of agreements.” (Published figures put the price tag for Spears’s memoir, which was announced last year, between
$12.5 million
and
$15 million
.)
Another major selling point for celebrity memoirs tends to be the subject’s own voice on the audiobook edition, but in this case, Spears has largely opted out as well. In a short introduction to the audiobook version of “The Woman in Me,” Spears said she had chosen to read only a short snippet of her 275-page book because the process of reliving its contents had been “heart-wrenching.” Apart from a minute and a half, the rest of the book’s five-plus hours is read by the actress Michelle Williams.
Spears’s most loyal fans see no issue in her letting the work speak for itself. For years, the mantra for many supporters has been “leave Britney alone,” especially after the singer
upbraided fans
earlier this year for calling the police with concerns about her well-being when she temporarily deactivated her Instagram account. She
voiced her objections
again last month when another emergency call was made in response to a video of her dancing with what appeared to be kitchen knives. (Spears said they were props.)
“A lot of the sentiment in the book are these instances where she was forced to do things against her will,” said Jordan Miller, the founder of the Spears fan site BreatheHeavy.com, which helped start the “Free Britney” campaign that brought more public attention to conservatorship.
“It’s cool that she’s going in the opposite direction of what the status quo is in terms of conventional promotion,” he added. “It’s like, ‘Here are my words, you can read these. Here are the photos that I want you to see. I’m going to have approval of all of this.’ In the context of everything that’s gone on, that is super refreshing.”
But a celebrity memoir with an eye-popping purchase price may need to reach more than just superfans in order to be seen as a phenomenon worth its investment, experts said.
“It’s going to be a major release, but I think that they could be doing more to make it a real moment that sticks around,” said Anthony Bozza, an author who has written books with Slash, Tracy Morgan and Artie Lange.
If not, he added, “You’re just going to be a blip in the cycle.”
|
26f7c6aa-6d5d-4c5f-a793-8fd2d42a9670
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/world/africa/johannesburg-fire.html
|
Filthy Toilets, No Showers and Criminal Landlords: Life in a South African Firetrap
|
2023-09-01
|
nytimes
|
As Tom Mandala leaned out the fifth-floor window of his burning apartment building in Johannesburg early Thursday, it felt as if the only decision left to make was how to die.
He could turn around and dash for the stairs, but he would surely be overcome by the thick smoke and scorching flames, he figured. Or he could leap out the window and end up splattered on the sidewalk below.
The second option, he thought, would be the best way to ensure that his family back in Malawi would be able to recover his body. So, after about five minutes of agonizing deliberation, Mr. Mandala, 26, jumped.
“I was thinking nothing,” he said of the moment when he soared through the air.
Landing square on his feet sent a rush of pain up his legs so sharp that tears began to flow, he said. His right ankle was broken, and his left leg badly injured. But he was alive.
A sprawling, dilapidated building in downtown Johannesburg that was once a haven for battered women and children turned into a chaotic inferno on Thursday after a fire that
killed at least 74 people
forced residents into a desperate scramble to save themselves. They sprang from windows, banged on metal gates and shimmied down sheets that hung like ropes.
While the police and search dogs pursued the grim search for bodies, health officials on Friday
urged people
to come forward to identify their relatives at a mortuary, the last unclaimed bodies among the 64 victims who have been identified so far. Ten other bodies were burned beyond recognition, the officials said, and would be identified through DNA tests.
And as those official processes played out, more details emerged about the horrific conditions inside the illegally occupied building.
It was a port of last resort for hundreds of struggling South Africans and immigrants searching for a break in one of Africa’s most advanced economies. Criminals “hijacked” the building and extorted “rent” from the homeless and working poor who
could not afford formal housing
, officials have said.
Residents had long feared that the city-owned dwelling — with its maze of steel security doors, a courtyard lined with tin shacks and subdivided rooms — was a death trap. While the cause of the fire is still undetermined, those fears played out with terrifying velocity shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday when the first flames and whiffs of smoke jolted residents awake.
Kwazi Cele’s eldest daughter was up studying for her final high school exams when she heard a commotion in the hallway. She initially thought it was just people fighting, as usual. But when she poked her head out of their apartment, smoke billowed in, Ms. Cele said.
Their unit was at the end of the hallway, and Ms. Cele, 39, and her three children and niece tried to push their way toward the stairwell. But what seemed like hundreds of people clogged the hallway, she said, so they raced back into their third-floor unit, which, to their good fortune, was located just above the corrugated iron roof of the entryway. Ms. Cele said she hung a blanket out of the window, and she and her family climbed down. Dozens of other residents followed, she said.
“The state of the building did indicate that at one point or the other, we will experience something bad,” she said. “It’s just that we never knew that it would be this bad.”
Ms. Cele, a freelance makeup artist, moved into the building five years ago as a client of a shelter for women and children that was run by a nonprofit organization. When the nonprofit left in 2019, Ms. Cele said, men from an adjacent informal settlement began swarming the building, charging rents ranging from $32 a month to nearly $100. The conditions deteriorated rapidly, she said.
Power and sewer services were cut by the city, so residents set up illegal electricity and water connections. Showers in communal bathrooms were converted into rooms for sleeping, forcing residents to bathe themselves out of bowls in their apartments.
The toilets were so filthy that some residents opted to relieve themselves in buckets or walk down the street to use the bathroom at a shopping mall. Dozens of shacks made of cardboard and tin sprouted up in a vast open space — like a community hall — on the ground floor.
Residents said that most of the people living in the building were immigrants, mostly from the nations of Malawi and Tanzania, but the so-called landlords were predominantly South Africans.
Different parts of the building took on varying reputations, residents said.
The fifth-floor residents got together and kept their corridor clean, and all had a key to a gate that locked them off from the rest of the building overnight. The fourth floor was filthy, residents said, with people tossing trash out the windows while others ran shops and illicit bars called shebeens from their rooms.
The roof was off-limits for many, because that was where drug addicts shot up and passed out, residents said.
“There was no privacy,” said Esethu Mazwi, who lived on the ground floor for three years before she could afford the approximately $50 rent to share a room on the third floor with another young mother.
Residents said most people kept to themselves or trusted groups: women who went to the same church, new mothers who shared child-care duties, street vendors and delivery men who had migrated from the same country. Some had steady work in factories or retail, while others hustled for odd jobs.
The journey that led this diverse cross section of humanity to this building in a gritty part of Johannesburg was in some ways tied to South Africa’s painful struggle with apartheid. Under the old system of racial segregation, Black South Africans were not allowed into this area without a special pass — and in fact the very building that burned was once an office that administered those passes.
After the fall of apartheid in the early 1990s, many white people fled the city, said Lindiwe Zulu, the country’s minister of social development, who visited the charred building on Friday.
“It was said we were just going to come and be grabbing buildings and be grabbing white wealth,” Ms. Zulu said.
Those fears never materialized. But the central city eventually deteriorated as the government was unable to keep up with the demands of an influx of newly free Black South Africans, as well as subsequent waves of migration from rural areas and other countries in the decades after apartheid ended, Ms. Zulu said.
“These are the pains of a transition, transformation and finding ourselves,” she said. “One of the things that we need to wake up to is that, social housing, we are not doing a very good job.”
For all its problems, the building that burned on Thursday did provide a semblance of stability for Mr. Mandala.
He moved to South Africa a year ago after failing to find work as a police officer or teacher in Malawi. He had heard of other Malawians coming to South Africa and earning enough to build nice homes, so he figured he could follow the same path.
But when he arrived he struggled to earn a living, making a little over $100 a month selling cellphone accessories while paying about $80 a month for a bed in a building nearby, he said.
Mr. Mandala said he moved into the building where Thursday’s fire broke out three months ago and shared a room there with four other Malawians. The five of them crammed into two beds, but he was paying only $32 a month.
Four of them were home when the fire broke out, Mr. Mandala said. He encouraged his roommates to follow him out of the window. One of them did, and he, too, survived. The two who did not, Mr. Mandala said, remain missing.
They tried to run out through the hallway, he said. For many residents, winding their way through the building was like a cruel maze.
Pearl Tshikila, who lived on the fifth floor, said that as she raced down the stairs she heard a man banging from the other side of a locked steel door down a hallway and screaming for help. She could not do anything to free him, she said, so she kept going and escaped, but the man’s shrieks still haunt her.
Malewa Miya and his sister, Retsepile Ramatsoso, grabbed their 3-year-old nephew and fled toward the main entrance on the west side of the building, only to find that the fire had already consumed the exit there.
They turned and ran in the other direction for what felt like five minutes, through choking smoke and neighbors’ cries, only to then encounter a locked gate. They started banging on doors in the hallway until someone who had been sleeping eventually emerged from an apartment with a key. The resident unlocked the gate, and the family ran down the stairs to safety.
|
As Tom Mandala leaned out the fifth-floor window of his burning apartment building in Johannesburg early Thursday, it felt as if the only decision left to make was how to die.
He could turn around and dash for the stairs, but he would surely be overcome by the thick smoke and scorching flames, he figured. Or he could leap out the window and end up splattered on the sidewalk below.
The second option, he thought, would be the best way to ensure that his family back in Malawi would be able to recover his body. So, after about five minutes of agonizing deliberation, Mr. Mandala, 26, jumped.
“I was thinking nothing,” he said of the moment when he soared through the air.
Landing square on his feet sent a rush of pain up his legs so sharp that tears began to flow, he said. His right ankle was broken, and his left leg badly injured. But he was alive.
A sprawling, dilapidated building in downtown Johannesburg that was once a haven for battered women and children turned into a chaotic inferno on Thursday after a fire that
killed at least 74 people
forced residents into a desperate scramble to save themselves. They sprang from windows, banged on metal gates and shimmied down sheets that hung like ropes.
While the police and search dogs pursued the grim search for bodies, health officials on Friday
urged people
to come forward to identify their relatives at a mortuary, the last unclaimed bodies among the 64 victims who have been identified so far. Ten other bodies were burned beyond recognition, the officials said, and would be identified through DNA tests.
And as those official processes played out, more details emerged about the horrific conditions inside the illegally occupied building.
It was a port of last resort for hundreds of struggling South Africans and immigrants searching for a break in one of Africa’s most advanced economies. Criminals “hijacked” the building and extorted “rent” from the homeless and working poor who
could not afford formal housing
, officials have said.
Residents had long feared that the city-owned dwelling — with its maze of steel security doors, a courtyard lined with tin shacks and subdivided rooms — was a death trap. While the cause of the fire is still undetermined, those fears played out with terrifying velocity shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday when the first flames and whiffs of smoke jolted residents awake.
Kwazi Cele’s eldest daughter was up
|
studying for her final high school exams when she heard a commotion in the hallway. She initially thought it was just people fighting, as usual. But when she poked her head out of their apartment, smoke billowed in, Ms. Cele said.
Their unit was at the end of the hallway, and Ms. Cele, 39, and her three children and niece tried to push their way toward the stairwell. But what seemed like hundreds of people clogged the hallway, she said, so they raced back into their third-floor unit, which, to their good fortune, was located just above the corrugated iron roof of the entryway. Ms. Cele said she hung a blanket out of the window, and she and her family climbed down. Dozens of other residents followed, she said.
“The state of the building did indicate that at one point or the other, we will experience something bad,” she said. “It’s just that we never knew that it would be this bad.”
Ms. Cele, a freelance makeup artist, moved into the building five years ago as a client of a shelter for women and children that was run by a nonprofit organization. When the nonprofit left in 2019, Ms. Cele said, men from an adjacent informal settlement began swarming the building, charging rents ranging from $32 a month to nearly $100. The conditions deteriorated rapidly, she said.
Power and sewer services were cut by the city, so residents set up illegal electricity and water connections. Showers in communal bathrooms were converted into rooms for sleeping, forcing residents to bathe themselves out of bowls in their apartments.
The toilets were so filthy that some residents opted to relieve themselves in buckets or walk down the street to use the bathroom at a shopping mall. Dozens of shacks made of cardboard and tin sprouted up in a vast open space — like a community hall — on the ground floor.
Residents said that most of the people living in the building were immigrants, mostly from the nations of Malawi and Tanzania, but the so-called landlords were predominantly South Africans.
Different parts of the building took on varying reputations, residents said.
The fifth-floor residents got together and kept their corridor clean, and all had a key to a gate that locked them off from the rest of the building overnight. The fourth floor was filthy, residents said, with people tossing trash out the windows while others ran shops and illicit bars called shebeens from their rooms.
The roof was off-limits for many, because that was where drug addicts shot up and passed out, residents said.
“There was no privacy,” said Esethu Mazwi, who lived on the ground floor for three years before she could afford the approximately $50 rent to share a room on the third floor with another young mother.
Residents said most people kept to themselves or trusted groups: women who went to the same church, new mothers who shared child-care duties, street vendors and delivery men who had migrated from the same country. Some had steady work in factories or retail, while others hustled for odd jobs.
The journey that led this diverse cross section of humanity to this building in a gritty part of Johannesburg was in some ways tied to South Africa’s painful struggle with apartheid. Under the old system of racial segregation, Black South Africans were not allowed into this area without a special pass — and in fact the very building that burned was once an office that administered those passes.
After the fall of apartheid in the early 1990s, many white people fled the city, said Lindiwe Zulu, the country’s minister of social development, who visited the charred building on Friday.
“It was said we were just going to come and be grabbing buildings and be grabbing white wealth,” Ms. Zulu said.
Those fears never materialized. But the central city eventually deteriorated as the government was unable to keep up with the demands of an influx of newly free Black South Africans, as well as subsequent waves of migration from rural areas and other countries in the decades after apartheid ended, Ms. Zulu said.
“These are the pains of a transition, transformation and finding ourselves,” she said. “One of the things that we need to wake up to is that, social housing, we are not doing a very good job.”
For all its problems, the building that burned on Thursday did provide a semblance of stability for Mr. Mandala.
He moved to South Africa a year ago after failing to find work as a police officer or teacher in Malawi. He had heard of other Malawians coming to South Africa and earning enough to build nice homes, so he figured he could follow the same path.
But when he arrived he struggled to earn a living, making a little over $100 a month selling cellphone accessories while paying about $80 a month for a bed in a building nearby, he said.
Mr. Mandala said he moved into the building where Thursday’s fire broke out three months ago and shared a room there with four other Malawians. The five of them crammed into two beds, but he was paying only $32 a month.
Four of them were home when the fire broke out, Mr. Mandala said. He encouraged his roommates to follow him out of the window. One of them did, and he, too, survived. The two who did not, Mr. Mandala said, remain missing.
They tried to run out through the hallway, he said. For many residents, winding their way through the building was like a cruel maze.
Pearl Tshikila, who lived on the fifth floor, said that as she raced down the stairs she heard a man banging from the other side of a locked steel door down a hallway and screaming for help. She could not do anything to free him, she said, so she kept going and escaped, but the man’s shrieks still haunt her.
Malewa Miya and his sister, Retsepile Ramatsoso, grabbed their 3-year-old nephew and fled toward the main entrance on the west side of the building, only to find that the fire had already consumed the exit there.
They turned and ran in the other direction for what felt like five minutes, through choking smoke and neighbors’ cries, only to then encounter a locked gate. They started banging on doors in the hallway until someone who had been sleeping eventually emerged from an apartment with a key. The resident unlocked the gate, and the family ran down the stairs to safety.
|
e9b5a341-719d-479a-90ac-d2b2dbe93595
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/science/bird-cockatoo-parrot-dunking-food.html
|
Polly Wants a Cracker, but She Wants to Make It Easier to Chew
|
2023-12-13
|
nytimes
|
Every day, the Goffin Lab in Vienna offers the same luncheon to its patrons. At 2 p.m., the diners — a flock of white parrots known as Goffin’s cockatoos — receive an assortment of dried fruit, seeds, cornflakes, bird pellets and a dry, twice-baked toast known as rusk or zwieback.
It’s a perfectly palatable meal for a parrot, and most birds dig right in. But a few of the cockatoos are more discriminating, customizing their meals with one final flourish: Before eating the rock-hard rusk, they dunk it in a tub of water.
Although the gesture is familiar to biscotti lovers with opposable thumbs, for the Goffin’s cockatoo, the behavior appears to be an innovation in food preparation, researchers reported
in a study
published Tuesday in the journal Biology Letters. The cockatoos sometimes devoted considerable time and energy to the task, actively transporting the rusk to water and then waiting for it to soften.
“To go through all this effort just to change the texture of your food is quite impressive,” said Alice Auersperg, the head of the Goffin Lab at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and an author of the study.
It is the first time that this food-dunking behavior has been documented in parrots — it has also been observed in grackles and crows. And it was a serendipitous discovery for the lab, which typically relies on meticulously planned experiments to test the cockatoos’ renowned problem-solving skills. “But sometimes we get gifted with accidental things that just happen,” Dr. Auersperg said.
Goffin’s cockatoos are known for their ability to use and manipulate objects. In earlier studies, Dr. Auersperg and her colleagues found, for instance, that the birds could
open locked puzzle boxes
and
make their own tools
to obtain out-of-reach food.
But the researchers at the Goffin Lab did not typically pay close attention to the birds’ behavior at lunch, said Jeroen Zewald, a doctoral student in the lab and another author of the study. Until, one day last summer, they noticed something curious. An affectionate male bird named Pipin — “the gentleman of the group,” Mr. Zewald said — was dunking his food into the tub of water typically used for drinking and bathing. Two other birds in the lab, Kiwi and Muki, turned out to be dunkers, too, the researchers noticed.
To study the behavior more systematically, Mr. Zewald and Dr. Auersperg spent 12 days observing the birds’ lunchtime behaviors. In total, seven of the 18 birds were observed dunking food at least once, they found. (Still, Pipin, Kiwi and Muki were the undisputed dunkmasters, racking up many more “dunking events” than the other birds.)
But the birds didn’t dunk all of their food. They never dunked seeds and only occasionally slipped a banana or coconut chip into the water. Instead, when the cockatoos decided to dunk something, it was almost always rusk. (Pipin and Kiwi, in fact, almost never ate it dry.)
Some birds gave the rusk a quick dunk, but others soaked it for 30 seconds or more, long enough to give the toast a soggy bottom.
A delay as long as 30 seconds is notable for a bird that’s feeling peckish. “They were willing to wait for it to soak,” Mr. Zewald said. “And that takes a lot of impulse control.”
On some occasions, Pipin and Kiwi would even retrieve pieces of rusk that had fallen to the bottom of their cages, hauling them up to the perch where the water tub was located and giving them a good soak before chowing down.
“It’s a cool study,” said Louis Lefebvre, an expert on innovative bird behavior at McGill University who was not involved in the new research. “There’s this element of adding value to the food by dunking it and softening it.”
But there are limits to what scientists can learn from studying birds in captivity, he noted. The dunking behavior has not been observed in
wild Goffin’s cockatoos
, perhaps because they do not have ready access to dried toast and tubs of water. But it would be interesting to see whether wild cockatoos would start to dunk if given the proper resources, Dr. Lefebvre said. “That’s the next step that I would hope to see,” he added.
The scientists are not sure whether each of the birds developed the dunking innovation independently or learned it from watching its compatriots. But they are planning to keep a close eye on the cockatoos at lunch to see if more birds adopt the behavior.
It’s an unexpected new line of research for scientists that are more accustomed to devising their own challenges for the birds. “Instead of presenting them with a problem,” Mr. Zewald said, “they basically had a tiny problem of their own, and they solved it.”
|
Every day, the Goffin Lab in Vienna offers the same luncheon to its patrons. At 2 p.m., the diners — a flock of white parrots known as Goffin’s cockatoos — receive an assortment of dried fruit, seeds, cornflakes, bird pellets and a dry, twice-baked toast known as rusk or zwieback.
It’s a perfectly palatable meal for a parrot, and most birds dig right in. But a few of the cockatoos are more discriminating, customizing their meals with one final flourish: Before eating the rock-hard rusk, they dunk it in a tub of water.
Although the gesture is familiar to biscotti lovers with opposable thumbs, for the Goffin’s cockatoo, the behavior appears to be an innovation in food preparation, researchers reported
in a study
published Tuesday in the journal Biology Letters. The cockatoos sometimes devoted considerable time and energy to the task, actively transporting the rusk to water and then waiting for it to soften.
“To go through all this effort just to change the texture of your food is quite impressive,” said Alice Auersperg, the head of the Goffin Lab at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and an author of the study.
It is the first time that this food-dunking behavior has been documented in parrots — it has also been observed in grackles and crows. And it was a serendipitous discovery for the lab, which typically relies on meticulously planned experiments to test the cockatoos’ renowned problem-solving skills. “But sometimes we get gifted with accidental things that just happen,” Dr. Auersperg said.
Goffin’s cockatoos are known for their ability to use and manipulate objects. In earlier studies, Dr. Auersperg and her colleagues found, for instance, that the birds could
open locked puzzle boxes
and
make their own tools
to obtain out-of-reach food.
But the researchers at the Goffin Lab did not typically pay close attention to the birds’ behavior at lunch, said Jeroen Zewald, a doctoral student in the lab and another author of the study. Until, one day last summer, they noticed something curious. An affectionate male bird named Pipin — “the gentleman of the group,” Mr. Zewald said — was dunking his food into the tub of water typically used for drinking and bathing. Two other birds in the lab, Kiwi and Muki,
|
turned out to be dunkers, too, the researchers noticed.
To study the behavior more systematically, Mr. Zewald and Dr. Auersperg spent 12 days observing the birds’ lunchtime behaviors. In total, seven of the 18 birds were observed dunking food at least once, they found. (Still, Pipin, Kiwi and Muki were the undisputed dunkmasters, racking up many more “dunking events” than the other birds.)
But the birds didn’t dunk all of their food. They never dunked seeds and only occasionally slipped a banana or coconut chip into the water. Instead, when the cockatoos decided to dunk something, it was almost always rusk. (Pipin and Kiwi, in fact, almost never ate it dry.)
Some birds gave the rusk a quick dunk, but others soaked it for 30 seconds or more, long enough to give the toast a soggy bottom.
A delay as long as 30 seconds is notable for a bird that’s feeling peckish. “They were willing to wait for it to soak,” Mr. Zewald said. “And that takes a lot of impulse control.”
On some occasions, Pipin and Kiwi would even retrieve pieces of rusk that had fallen to the bottom of their cages, hauling them up to the perch where the water tub was located and giving them a good soak before chowing down.
“It’s a cool study,” said Louis Lefebvre, an expert on innovative bird behavior at McGill University who was not involved in the new research. “There’s this element of adding value to the food by dunking it and softening it.”
But there are limits to what scientists can learn from studying birds in captivity, he noted. The dunking behavior has not been observed in
wild Goffin’s cockatoos
, perhaps because they do not have ready access to dried toast and tubs of water. But it would be interesting to see whether wild cockatoos would start to dunk if given the proper resources, Dr. Lefebvre said. “That’s the next step that I would hope to see,” he added.
The scientists are not sure whether each of the birds developed the dunking innovation independently or learned it from watching its compatriots. But they are planning to keep a close eye on the cockatoos at lunch to see if more birds adopt the behavior.
It’s an unexpected new line of research for scientists that are more accustomed to devising their own challenges for the birds. “Instead of presenting them with a problem,” Mr. Zewald said, “they basically had a tiny problem of their own, and they solved it.”
|
897bfbcf-1a32-436f-a2c8-f02600fd097f
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/technology/elon-musk-twitter-x-advertisers.html
|
Apple and Disney Halt Ads on X After Musk Endorses Antisemitic Post
|
2023-11-17
|
nytimes
|
Advertisers have been skittish about X since Mr. Musk bought the social media service last fall and said he wanted more free speech and would loosen content moderation rules. That meant the platform could theoretically place brands’ ads next to posts with offensive or hateful speech.
Many companies, including General Motors and Volkswagen, have balked at various points over the past year at having their promotions appear alongside a
heavily documented surge
in hate speech, misinformation and foreign propaganda on X. In April, Mr. Musk said
nearly all advertisers
had returned, without indicating whether they were spending at the same levels; he later noted that ad revenue had fallen 50 percent.
Mr. Musk also swung from threatening any advertisers that dared to pause their spending with a “
thermonuclear name & shame
” to wooing them by choosing Ms. Yaccarino, a former top ad executive at NBCUniversal, to replace him as chief executive. He picked public fights with major spenders like Apple and
churned through
sales executives given the task of maintaining relationships in the advertising industry.
Top advertising companies
, such as IPG, urged their clients to step back from X.
Advertising had long been about 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue before Mr. Musk bought the company. Last month, X told employees that the company was
valued at $19 billion
. That was down from the $44 billion that Mr. Musk paid.
The heightened sensitivity around antisemitism, Mr. Musk’s penchant for public squabbling and general fatigue after months of fuss over X left many advertising professionals hesitant to weigh in on Friday.
“Clients have always had to make decisions about content they will or will not be associated with,” Renee Miller, the founder of the Miller Group advertising agency in Los Angeles, said in an email. “We generally counsel our clients to not take an openly public political stand.”
IBM, which cut off about $1 million in advertising spending that it had committed to X for the rest of the year, said on Thursday that it had “zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination.” The tech company acted after
a report
this week from Media Matters for America, a left-wing advocacy group, which said ads from companies including Apple and IBM were appearing on X next to posts supporting white nationalism and Nazism.
Mr. Musk
posted
late Thursday that “Media Matters is an evil organization.”
Angelo Carusone, president and chief executive of Media Matters, said Mr. Musk’s “calling us evil” for pointing out what was on X was “not dissimilar from any right-wing account who we highlight.”
He added that X was “not just going to just lose money with Apple, but also the cornerstone of their strategy to woo back advertisers.”
Kate Conger contributed reporting.
|
Advertisers have been skittish about X since Mr. Musk bought the social media service last fall and said he wanted more free speech and would loosen content moderation rules. That meant the platform could theoretically place brands’ ads next to posts with offensive or hateful speech.
Many companies, including General Motors and Volkswagen, have balked at various points over the past year at having their promotions appear alongside a
heavily documented surge
in hate speech, misinformation and foreign propaganda on X. In April, Mr. Musk said
nearly all advertisers
had returned, without indicating whether they were spending at the same levels; he later noted that ad revenue had fallen 50 percent.
Mr. Musk also swung from threatening any advertisers that dared to pause their spending with a “
thermonuclear name & shame
” to wooing them by choosing Ms. Yaccarino, a former top ad executive at NBCUniversal, to replace him as chief executive. He picked public fights with major spenders like Apple and
churned through
sales executives given the task of maintaining relationships in the advertising industry.
Top advertising companies
, such as IPG, urged their clients to step back from X.
Advertising had long been about 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue before Mr. Musk bought the company. Last month, X told employees that the company was
valued at $19 billion
. That was down from the $44 billion that Mr. Musk paid.
The heightened sensitivity around antisemitism, Mr. Musk’s penchant for public squabbling and general fatigue after months of fuss over X left many advertising professionals hesitant to weigh in on Friday.
“Clients have always had to make decisions about content they will or will not be associated with,” Renee Miller, the founder of the Miller Group advertising agency in Los Angeles, said in an email. “We generally counsel our clients to not take an openly public political stand.”
IBM, which cut off about $1 million in advertising spending that it had committed to X for the rest of the year, said on Thursday that it had “zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination.” The tech company acted after
a report
this week from Media Matters for America, a left-wing advocacy group, which said ads from companies including Apple and IBM were appearing on X next to posts supporting white nationalism and Nazism.
Mr. Musk
posted
late Thursday that “Media Matters is an evil organization.”
Angelo Carus
|
one, president and chief executive of Media Matters, said Mr. Musk’s “calling us evil” for pointing out what was on X was “not dissimilar from any right-wing account who we highlight.”
He added that X was “not just going to just lose money with Apple, but also the cornerstone of their strategy to woo back advertisers.”
Kate Conger contributed reporting.
|
95f68539-ca2b-42e9-be65-9cbbab6455a9
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/world/europe/nazi-symbols-ukraine.html
|
Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History
|
2023-06-05
|
nytimes
|
KYIV, Ukraine — Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck.
In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.
The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II.
That relationship has become especially delicate because President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has falsely declared Ukraine to be a Nazi state, a claim he has used to justify his illegal invasion.
Ukraine has worked for years through legislation and military restructuring to contain a fringe far-right movement whose members proudly wear symbols steeped in Nazi history and espouse views hostile to leftists, L.G.B.T.Q. movements and ethnic minorities. But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains marginalized politically.
The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.
In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Mr. Putin’s propaganda and give fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be “de-Nazified” — a position that ignores the fact that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence about these symbols, and sometimes even its acceptance of them, risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate.
“What worries me, in the Ukrainian context, is that people in Ukraine who are in leadership positions, either they don’t or they’re not willing to acknowledge and understand how these symbols are viewed outside of Ukraine,” said Michael Colborne, a researcher at the investigative group Bellingcat who studies the international far right. “I think Ukrainians need to increasingly realize that these images undermine support for the country.”
In a statement, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said that, as a country that suffered greatly under German occupation, “We emphasize that Ukraine categorically condemns any manifestations of Nazism.”
So far, the imagery has not eroded international support for the war. It has, however, left diplomats, Western journalists and advocacy groups in a difficult position: Calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda. Saying nothing allows it to spread.
Even Jewish groups and anti-hate organizations that have traditionally called out hateful symbols have stayed largely silent. Privately, some leaders have worried about being seen as embracing Russian propaganda talking points.
Questions over how to interpret such symbols are as divisive as they are persistent, and not just in Ukraine. In the American South,
some have insisted
that today, the Confederate flag symbolizes pride, not its history of racism and secession. The swastika was
an important Hindu symbol
before it was co-opted by the Nazis.
In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry
posted a photograph on its Twitter account
of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.
The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a small No. 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces “hate speech” that “exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.”
The Anti-Defamation League considers the Totenkopf “a common hate symbol.” But Jake Hyman, a spokesman for the group, said it was impossible to “make an inference about the wearer or the Ukrainian Army” based on the patch.
“The image, while offensive, is that of a musical band,” Mr. Hyman said.
The band now uses the photograph posted by the Ukrainian military to market the Totenkopf patch.
The New York Times asked the Ukrainian Defense Ministry on April 27 about the tweet. Several hours later, the post was deleted. “After studying this case, we came to the conclusion that this logo can be interpreted ambiguously,” the ministry said in a statement.
The soldier in the photograph was part of a volunteer unit called the Da Vinci Wolves, which started as part of the paramilitary wing of Ukraine’s Right Sector, a coalition of right-wing organizations and political parties that militarized after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
At least five other photographs on the Wolves’ Instagram and Facebook pages feature their soldiers wearing Nazi-style patches, including the Totenkopf.
NATO militaries, an alliance that Ukraine hopes to join, do not tolerate such patches. When such symbols have appeared, groups like the Anti-Defamation League have spoken out, and
military leaders
have reacted swiftly.
Last month, Ukraine’s state emergency services agency posted on Instagram a photograph of an emergency worker wearing a Black Sun symbol, also known as a Sonnenrad, that appeared in the castle of Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi general and SS director. The Black Sun is popular among neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
In March 2022, NATO’s Twitter account posted a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier wearing a similar patch.
Both photographs were quickly removed.
In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front line, a Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced “Reich”). He said he did not believe the patch was affiliated with the Nazis. A second press officer present said other journalists had asked soldiers to remove the patch before taking photographs.
Ihor Kozlovskyi, a Ukrainian historian and religious scholar, said that the symbols had meanings that were unique to Ukraine and should be interpreted by how Ukrainians viewed them, not by how they had been used elsewhere.
“The symbol can live in any community or any history independently of how it is used in other parts of Earth,” Mr. Kozlovskyi said.
Russian soldiers in Ukraine have also been seen
wearing Nazi-style patches
, underscoring how complicated interpreting these symbols can be in a region steeped in Soviet and German history.
The Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939, so it was caught by surprise two years later when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine had suffered greatly under a Soviet government that engineered a famine that killed millions. Many Ukrainians initially viewed the Nazis as liberators.
Factions from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its insurgent army fought alongside the Nazis in what they viewed as a struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty. Members of those groups also took part in atrocities against Jewish and Polish civilians. Later in the war, though, some of the groups fought against the Nazis.
Some Ukrainians joined Nazi military units like the Waffen-SS Galizien. The emblem of the group, which was led by German officers, was a sky-blue patch showing a lion and three crowns. The unit took part in
a massacre of hundreds of Polish civilians
in 1944. In December,
after a yearslong legal battle
, Ukraine’s highest court ruled that a government-funded research institute could continue to list the unit’s insignia as excluded from the Nazi symbols banned under a 2015 law.
Today, as a new generation fights against Russian occupation, many Ukrainians see the war as a continuation of the struggle for independence during and immediately after World War II. Symbols like the flag associated with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Galizien patch have become emblems of anti-Russian resistance and national pride.
That makes it difficult to easily separate, on the basis of icons alone, the Ukrainians enraged by the Russian invasion from those who support the country’s far-right groups.
Units like the Da Vinci Wolves, the better-known Azov regiment and others that began with far-right members have been folded into the Ukrainian military, and have been instrumental in defending Ukraine from Russian troops.
The Azov regiment was celebrated after holding out during the siege of the southern city of Mariupol last year. After the commander of the Da Vinci Wolves was killed in March, he received a hero’s funeral, which Mr. Zelensky attended.
“I think some of these far-right units mix a fair bit of their own mythmaking into the public discourse on them,” said Mr. Colborne, the researcher. “But I think the least that can and should be done everywhere, not just Ukraine, is not allowing the far right’s symbols, rhetoric and ideas to seep into public discourse.”
Kitty Bennett and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.
|
KYIV, Ukraine — Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck.
In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.
The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II.
That relationship has become especially delicate because President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has falsely declared Ukraine to be a Nazi state, a claim he has used to justify his illegal invasion.
Ukraine has worked for years through legislation and military restructuring to contain a fringe far-right movement whose members proudly wear symbols steeped in Nazi history and espouse views hostile to leftists, L.G.B.T.Q. movements and ethnic minorities. But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains marginalized politically.
The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.
In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Mr. Putin’s propaganda and give fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be “de-Nazified” — a position that ignores the fact that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence about these symbols, and sometimes even its acceptance of them, risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate.
“What worries me, in the Ukrainian context, is that people in Ukraine who are in leadership positions, either they don’t or they’re not willing to acknowledge and understand how these symbols are viewed outside of Ukraine,” said Michael Colborne, a researcher at the investigative group Bellingcat who studies the international far right. “I think Ukrainians need to increasingly realize that these images undermine support for the country.”
In a
|
statement, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said that, as a country that suffered greatly under German occupation, “We emphasize that Ukraine categorically condemns any manifestations of Nazism.”
So far, the imagery has not eroded international support for the war. It has, however, left diplomats, Western journalists and advocacy groups in a difficult position: Calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda. Saying nothing allows it to spread.
Even Jewish groups and anti-hate organizations that have traditionally called out hateful symbols have stayed largely silent. Privately, some leaders have worried about being seen as embracing Russian propaganda talking points.
Questions over how to interpret such symbols are as divisive as they are persistent, and not just in Ukraine. In the American South,
some have insisted
that today, the Confederate flag symbolizes pride, not its history of racism and secession. The swastika was
an important Hindu symbol
before it was co-opted by the Nazis.
In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry
posted a photograph on its Twitter account
of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.
The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a small No. 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces “hate speech” that “exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.”
The Anti-Defamation League considers the Totenkopf “a common hate symbol.” But Jake Hyman, a spokesman for the group, said it was impossible to “make an inference about the wearer or the Ukrainian Army” based on the patch.
“The image, while offensive, is that of a musical band,” Mr. Hyman said.
The band now uses the photograph posted by the Ukrainian military to market the Totenkopf patch.
The New York Times asked the Ukrainian Defense Ministry on April 27 about the tweet. Several hours later, the post was deleted. “After studying this case, we came to the conclusion that this logo can be interpreted ambiguously,” the ministry said in a statement.
The soldier in the photograph was part of a volunteer unit called the Da Vinci Wolves, which started as part of the paramilitary wing of Ukraine’s Right Sector, a coalition of right-wing organizations and political parties that militarized after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
At least five other photographs on the Wolves’ Instagram and Facebook pages feature their soldiers wearing Nazi-style patches, including the Totenkopf.
NATO militaries, an alliance that Ukraine hopes to join, do not tolerate such patches. When such symbols have appeared, groups like the Anti-Defamation League have spoken out, and
military leaders
have reacted swiftly.
Last month, Ukraine’s state emergency services agency posted on Instagram a photograph of an emergency worker wearing a Black Sun symbol, also known as a Sonnenrad, that appeared in the castle of Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi general and SS director. The Black Sun is popular among neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
In March 2022, NATO’s Twitter account posted a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier wearing a similar patch.
Both photographs were quickly removed.
In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front line, a Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced “Reich”). He said he did not believe the patch was affiliated with the Nazis. A second press officer present said other journalists had asked soldiers to remove the patch before taking photographs.
Ihor Kozlovskyi, a Ukrainian historian and religious scholar, said that the symbols had meanings that were unique to Ukraine and should be interpreted by how Ukrainians viewed them, not by how they had been used elsewhere.
“The symbol can live in any community or any history independently of how it is used in other parts of Earth,” Mr. Kozlovskyi said.
Russian soldiers in Ukraine have also been seen
wearing Nazi-style patches
, underscoring how complicated interpreting these symbols can be in a region steeped in Soviet and German history.
The Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939, so it was caught by surprise two years later when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine had suffered greatly under a Soviet government that engineered a famine that killed millions. Many Ukrainians initially viewed the Nazis as liberators.
Factions from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its insurgent army fought alongside the Nazis in what they viewed as a struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty. Members of those groups also took part in atrocities against Jewish and Polish civilians. Later in the war, though, some of the groups fought against the Nazis.
Some Ukrainians joined Nazi military units like the Waffen-SS Galizien. The emblem of the group, which was led by German officers, was a sky-blue patch showing a lion and three crowns. The unit took part in
a massacre of hundreds of Polish civilians
in 1944. In December,
after a yearslong legal battle
, Ukraine’s highest court ruled that a government-funded research institute could continue to list the unit’s insignia as excluded from the Nazi symbols banned under a 2015 law.
Today, as a new generation fights against Russian occupation, many Ukrainians see the war as a continuation of the struggle for independence during and immediately after World War II. Symbols like the flag associated with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Galizien patch have become emblems of anti-Russian resistance and national pride.
That makes it difficult to easily separate, on the basis of icons alone, the Ukrainians enraged by the Russian invasion from those who support the country’s far-right groups.
Units like the Da Vinci Wolves, the better-known Azov regiment and others that began with far-right members have been folded into the Ukrainian military, and have been instrumental in defending Ukraine from Russian troops.
The Azov regiment was celebrated after holding out during the siege of the southern city of Mariupol last year. After the commander of the Da Vinci Wolves was killed in March, he received a hero’s funeral, which Mr. Zelensky attended.
“I think some of these far-right units mix a fair bit of their own mythmaking into the public discourse on them,” said Mr. Colborne, the researcher. “But I think the least that can and should be done everywhere, not just Ukraine, is not allowing the far right’s symbols, rhetoric and ideas to seep into public discourse.”
Kitty Bennett and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.
|
66bbb443-95dd-4fce-a932-c8bc1fe780a9
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/business/baltimore-sun-david-smith-sinclair.html
|
Baltimore Sun Sold to Chairman of Sinclair TV Stations
|
2024-01-16
|
nytimes
|
The Baltimore Sun, the largest newspaper in Maryland, has been sold to David D. Smith, the executive chairman of the nationwide Sinclair network of television stations and other media.
Mr. Smith, who grew up in Baltimore, bought Baltimore Sun Media, which includes The Sun, in a private deal from Alden Global Capital, an investment firm that has become the country’s second-largest newspaper operator. Sun Media also includes The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., and several other Baltimore-area publications.
It was unclear how much Mr. Smith paid for Baltimore Sun Media.
Triffon G. Alatzas, the publisher and editor in chief of The Sun, said in an email to the newsroom on Monday that Mr. Smith had bought The Sun “to support his hometown newspaper.” Mr. Alatzas said Mr. Smith would meet the staff at The Sun on Tuesday.
In an
interview with the paper
, Mr. Smith said, “We have an absolute responsibility to serve the public interest,” adding, “I think the paper can be hugely profitable and successful and serve a greater public interest over time.”
Like many city newspapers, The Sun has seen its
circulation and advertising revenue erode
as readers have moved online to get their news. Alden, which acquired The Sun in 2021 when it bought
the Chicago-based Tribune Publishing newspaper
chain, has been aggressively cutting costs.
The Sun, which dates from 1837, is also facing competition from
The Baltimore Banner
, a nonprofit subscription website that started publishing in 2022 after
hiring some of The Sun’s best reporters
. The Banner was started by Stewart Bainum Jr., a hotel magnate and former politician who tried unsuccessfully to
buy The Sun
.
The Sun will now have a local owner for the first time in nearly four decades. It had been owned by Times Mirror, a Los Angeles-based media company that included The Los Angeles Times, before it was sold to the Tribune Company.
Baltimore Sun Media has more than 150 employees across its publications, with more than 230,000 paid subscribers for its print and digital editions.
The Sun will remain distinct from Sinclair, which is based in Maryland and owns about 200 television stations, including the Fox affiliate in Baltimore. In 2018, Sinclair drew a backlash when anchors at its stations were ordered to read an editorial about media bias. Mr. Smith fiercely disagreed with the criticism of the scripts.
Mr. Smith is the latest wealthy investor to try to revive a news organization in recent years. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong
purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2018
, and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post in 2013.
Baltimore Sun Media has earned 16 Pulitzer Prizes. The Capital Gazette
won a special Pulitzer citation
for its coverage of a shooting attack that killed five employees in its offices in June 2018.
|
The Baltimore Sun, the largest newspaper in Maryland, has been sold to David D. Smith, the executive chairman of the nationwide Sinclair network of television stations and other media.
Mr. Smith, who grew up in Baltimore, bought Baltimore Sun Media, which includes The Sun, in a private deal from Alden Global Capital, an investment firm that has become the country’s second-largest newspaper operator. Sun Media also includes The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., and several other Baltimore-area publications.
It was unclear how much Mr. Smith paid for Baltimore Sun Media.
Triffon G. Alatzas, the publisher and editor in chief of The Sun, said in an email to the newsroom on Monday that Mr. Smith had bought The Sun “to support his hometown newspaper.” Mr. Alatzas said Mr. Smith would meet the staff at The Sun on Tuesday.
In an
interview with the paper
, Mr. Smith said, “We have an absolute responsibility to serve the public interest,” adding, “I think the paper can be hugely profitable and successful and serve a greater public interest over time.”
Like many city newspapers, The Sun has seen its
circulation and advertising revenue erode
as readers have moved online to get their news. Alden, which acquired The Sun in 2021 when it bought
the Chicago-based Tribune Publishing newspaper
chain, has been aggressively cutting costs.
The Sun, which dates from 1837, is also facing competition from
The Baltimore Banner
, a nonprofit subscription website that started publishing in 2022 after
hiring some of The Sun’s best reporters
. The Banner was started by Stewart Bainum Jr., a hotel magnate and former politician who tried unsuccessfully to
buy The Sun
.
The Sun will now have a local owner for the first time in nearly four decades. It had been owned by Times Mirror, a Los Angeles-based media company that included The Los Angeles Times, before it was sold to the Tribune Company.
Baltimore Sun Media has more than 150 employees across its publications, with more than 230,000 paid subscribers for its print and digital editions.
The Sun will remain distinct from Sinclair, which is based in Maryland and owns about 200 television stations, including the Fox affiliate in Baltimore. In 2018, Sinclair drew a backlash when anchors at its stations were ordered to read an editorial about media bias. Mr. Smith fiercely disagreed with
|
the criticism of the scripts.
Mr. Smith is the latest wealthy investor to try to revive a news organization in recent years. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong
purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2018
, and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post in 2013.
Baltimore Sun Media has earned 16 Pulitzer Prizes. The Capital Gazette
won a special Pulitzer citation
for its coverage of a shooting attack that killed five employees in its offices in June 2018.
|
adc885c6-d164-43f1-ae6e-4b5c10a2bab8
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/opinion/glossy-glossier-emily-weiss.html
|
C.E.O.s Don’t Need to Be Monsters
|
2023-09-27
|
nytimes
|
Weiss didn’t parlay that appearance into a reality TV career. Instead, after working briefly in the fashion media industry, she started her own beauty website, Into the Gloss, and used the success of that site to start her beauty brand, Glossier.
According to Meltzer, what Weiss intuited was that there was a “dwindling divide between the expert versus the customer” in the beauty space, and the brand she started was appealingly approachable. It was “no-makeup makeup,” meant to look natural and effortless. “The brand’s voice was that of your older sister,” Meltzer explains, “or, more accurately, the coolest friend who knew that trying too hard was antithetical to being cool.”
Meltzer says that on the strength of “hero products” — “the signature best sellers of a company” — like the cream blush Cloud Paint and the eyebrow gel Boy Brow (both of which I own), by 2019, Glossier had over a
billion-dollar valuation
. Considering that “less than 2 percent of venture capital investment went to all-female founding teams in 2021 (itself a five-year low),” as Meltzer writes, this was a tremendous feat.
So how did Weiss get there? In Meltzer’s telling, she has a “stupendously type-A personality,” and she was never afraid to ask people for exactly what she wanted in a sometimes startlingly — even off-puttingly — direct manner. As a manager, Weiss seemed fine. There was the pressure that comes with working for a start-up, and Meltzer catalogs the
legitimate gripes
that especially the retail workers at Glossier’s brick-and-mortar shops had with management’s lack of support concerning obnoxious, sometimes racist, customer behavior. But, Meltzer told me on the phone, “most people seemed pretty happy with working there.”
The corporate employees had to contend with a lot of fickleness about the direction of the company. But having worked for start-ups myself, I think it’s fair to say that comes with the territory for a new brand and that most white-collar workers signing up for a new company know there will be less stability but more opportunity. Weiss was also learning on the job — she had very little work experience when she started her own companies — and sometimes that showed, Meltzer told me. Weiss could be melodramatic, bursting into tears occasionally when interviewing candidates because of how demanding and important she felt the work was. But she wasn’t a jerk and didn’t seem to revel in tormenting her staff, Meltzer said.
|
Weiss didn’t parlay that appearance into a reality TV career. Instead, after working briefly in the fashion media industry, she started her own beauty website, Into the Gloss, and used the success of that site to start her beauty brand, Glossier.
According to Meltzer, what Weiss intuited was that there was a “dwindling divide between the expert versus the customer” in the beauty space, and the brand she started was appealingly approachable. It was “no-makeup makeup,” meant to look natural and effortless. “The brand’s voice was that of your older sister,” Meltzer explains, “or, more accurately, the coolest friend who knew that trying too hard was antithetical to being cool.”
Meltzer says that on the strength of “hero products” — “the signature best sellers of a company” — like the cream blush Cloud Paint and the eyebrow gel Boy Brow (both of which I own), by 2019, Glossier had over a
billion-dollar valuation
. Considering that “less than 2 percent of venture capital investment went to all-female founding teams in 2021 (itself a five-year low),” as Meltzer writes, this was a tremendous feat.
So how did Weiss get there? In Meltzer’s telling, she has a “stupendously type-A personality,” and she was never afraid to ask people for exactly what she wanted in a sometimes startlingly — even off-puttingly — direct manner. As a manager, Weiss seemed fine. There was the pressure that comes with working for a start-up, and Meltzer catalogs the
legitimate gripes
that especially the retail workers at Glossier’s brick-and-mortar shops had with management’s lack of support concerning obnoxious, sometimes racist, customer behavior. But, Meltzer told me on the phone, “most people seemed pretty happy with working there.”
The corporate employees had to contend with a lot of fickleness about the direction of the company. But having worked for start-ups myself, I think it’s fair to say that comes with the territory for a new brand and that most white-collar workers signing up for a new company know there will be less stability but more opportunity. Weiss was also learning on the job — she had very little work experience when she started her own companies — and sometimes that showed, Meltzer told me. Weiss could be melod
|
ramatic, bursting into tears occasionally when interviewing candidates because of how demanding and important she felt the work was. But she wasn’t a jerk and didn’t seem to revel in tormenting her staff, Meltzer said.
|
10a2acd9-bcf6-4fb3-838b-65b4f6266bfe
|
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/08/05/sports/womens-world-cup-scores/japan-stops-norway-to-grab-a-quarterfinal-spot-it-will-get-the-us-or-sweden
|
Japan Eliminates Norway to Earn Matchup With Sweden-U.S. Winner
|
2023-08-05
|
nytimes
|
Hinata Miyazawa scoring Japan’s third goal.
Credit...
Amanda Perobelli/Reuters
Japan has rarely run into problems in this Women’s World Cup, and in the fleeting moments things have looked close, its strategy has held firm: Press forward, attack, go for goals again and again.
Now, that aggression has the Japanese
in line to face either Sweden or the United States
in a quarterfinal after they picked apart Norway, 3-1, on Saturday night.
Not even Norway’s star striker Ada Hegerberg could counter the Japanese push as a late substitute. Hegerberg, the 2018 Ballon D’Or winner, had been dealing with a groin injury but entered the game with roughly 20 minutes left and Norway stepping up its attack.
Hinata Miyazawa solved for that quickly, just as it looked like Norway might tie the game. Miyazawa, with a quick, explosive burst, sprinted past Thea Bjelde and created enough space to slow down and size up one precise strike with her left foot to give Japan a two-goal lead.
So, what did Japan do with that newfound comfort? Press more, attack more and limit Norway’s chances to turn the tables. Norway got close for a moment with a crowd in front of the goal, but Ayaka Yamashita saved a header from Karina Saevik in spectacular fashion to keep Japan’s margin intact.
Norway’s only goal, which tied the game at 1 in the first half, was the first and only score that Japan has conceded in this tournament,
a swift play from end to end
.
But for so much of the game, especially before Hegerberg entered, that 15-second burst stood as the only sustained offense for the Norwegians as the Japanese pressed again and again.
Risa Shimizu scored on an aggressive takeaway, and
Japan’s first score was an own goal
by Ingrid Syrstad Engen as she stuck out a boot to try to stop Miyazawa from creating an opening.
Miyazawa, a newfound star who had only one goal in 20 games for her club in the Japanese league last season, got her fifth goal in this World Cup, the most of any player in this tournament. That tied Homare Sawa for the most goals by a Japanese player in a World Cup, a mark Sawa reached in 2011. Japan won the championship that year by defeating the United States in a penalty shootout.
Going into this tournament, Japan was seen as a solid club that was perhaps less intimidating than some of the biggest powers in the sport. It lost some games as it prepared for this tournament, including matches against the United States, Brazil and Spain. But its strategy looked more fully developed in wins against Canada and Portugal ahead of the World Cup, and Japan breezed through its group.
Its 4-0 victory against Spain was the strongest performance any team had in the group stage, and with its win against Norway, Japan showed it will be difficult to slow down.
Of course, the United States and Sweden will want that task. But they’ll have to clinch the showdown first.
And Japan will welcome the winner, knowing that its stock has risen higher, at least so far, than any team in this World Cup.
Show more
|
Hinata Miyazawa scoring Japan’s third goal.
Credit...
Amanda Perobelli/Reuters
Japan has rarely run into problems in this Women’s World Cup, and in the fleeting moments things have looked close, its strategy has held firm: Press forward, attack, go for goals again and again.
Now, that aggression has the Japanese
in line to face either Sweden or the United States
in a quarterfinal after they picked apart Norway, 3-1, on Saturday night.
Not even Norway’s star striker Ada Hegerberg could counter the Japanese push as a late substitute. Hegerberg, the 2018 Ballon D’Or winner, had been dealing with a groin injury but entered the game with roughly 20 minutes left and Norway stepping up its attack.
Hinata Miyazawa solved for that quickly, just as it looked like Norway might tie the game. Miyazawa, with a quick, explosive burst, sprinted past Thea Bjelde and created enough space to slow down and size up one precise strike with her left foot to give Japan a two-goal lead.
So, what did Japan do with that newfound comfort? Press more, attack more and limit Norway’s chances to turn the tables. Norway got close for a moment with a crowd in front of the goal, but Ayaka Yamashita saved a header from Karina Saevik in spectacular fashion to keep Japan’s margin intact.
Norway’s only goal, which tied the game at 1 in the first half, was the first and only score that Japan has conceded in this tournament,
a swift play from end to end
.
But for so much of the game, especially before Hegerberg entered, that 15-second burst stood as the only sustained offense for the Norwegians as the Japanese pressed again and again.
Risa Shimizu scored on an aggressive takeaway, and
Japan’s first score was an own goal
by Ingrid Syrstad Engen as she stuck out a boot to try to stop Miyazawa from creating an opening.
Miyazawa, a newfound star who had only one goal in 20 games for her club in the Japanese league last season, got her fifth goal in this World Cup, the most of any player in this tournament. That tied Homare Sawa for the most goals by a Japanese player in a World Cup, a mark Sawa reached in 2011. Japan won the championship that year
|
by defeating the United States in a penalty shootout.
Going into this tournament, Japan was seen as a solid club that was perhaps less intimidating than some of the biggest powers in the sport. It lost some games as it prepared for this tournament, including matches against the United States, Brazil and Spain. But its strategy looked more fully developed in wins against Canada and Portugal ahead of the World Cup, and Japan breezed through its group.
Its 4-0 victory against Spain was the strongest performance any team had in the group stage, and with its win against Norway, Japan showed it will be difficult to slow down.
Of course, the United States and Sweden will want that task. But they’ll have to clinch the showdown first.
And Japan will welcome the winner, knowing that its stock has risen higher, at least so far, than any team in this World Cup.
Show more
|
690fc4e2-275a-40e9-ac72-9bc4a9b41db3
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/09/us/desantis-florida-social-studies-textbooks.html
|
Florida Rejects Dozens of Social Studies Textbooks, and Forces Changes in Others
|
2023-05-09
|
nytimes
|
Florida has rejected dozens of social studies textbooks and worked with publishers to edit dozens more, the state’s education department announced on Tuesday, in the latest effort under Gov. Ron DeSantis to scrub textbooks of contested topics, especially surrounding contemporary issues of race and social justice.
State officials originally rejected 82 out of 101 submitted textbooks because of what they considered “inaccurate material, errors and other information that was not aligned with Florida law,” the Department of Education said in a
news release
.
But as part of an extensive effort to revise the materials, Florida worked with publishers to make changes, ultimately approving 66 of the 101 textbooks. Still, 35 were rejected even after that process.
Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, has
campaigned against
what he has described as “woke indoctrination” and a leftist agenda in the classroom. Last year, the state
rejected dozens of math textbooks
, saying that the books touched on prohibited topics, including critical race theory and social emotional learning, which have become targets of the right.
The state’s review of social studies textbooks, which is conducted every few years, was widely expected to raise similar objections.
The state education department released a document outlining several revisions that it said publishers had made at its request. But the document did not list the titles or publishers of the revised books, making the claims difficult to independently verify.
The
revisions
outlined by the state included:
An elementary school textbook no longer includes “home support” guidance on how to talk about the national anthem, which had included advice that parents could “use this as an opportunity to talk about why some citizens are choosing to “take a knee” to protest police brutality and racism.” Florida officials said that content was not age-appropriate.
A text on different types of economies was edited to take out a description of socialism as keeping things “nice and even” and potentially promoting greater equality. The description was flagged as inaccurate, and mention of the term “socialism” was removed entirely.
A middle school textbook no longer includes a passage on the Black Lives Matter movement, the murder of George Floyd and its impact on society. The removed passage described protests, noting that “many Americans sympathized with the Black Lives Matter movement,” while other people were critical of looting and violence and viewed the movement as anti-police. The state said the passage contained “unsolicited topics.”
Manny Diaz, Jr., the Florida education commissioner, said in a statement that textbooks should “focus on historical facts” and be “free from inaccuracies or ideological rhetoric.”
Teaching about race has become a lightning rod nationally, but especially in Florida, where Mr. DeSantis, who is widely expected to announce a 2024 presidential bid, has made it a signature political issue.
Yet the tone of this year’s announcement by the state was softened, compared with last year.
When the state rejected the math textbooks in 2022, the announcement was made in a
splashy news release
emphasizing the rejections: “Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students.”
This year, by contrast, state officials emphasized the percentage of textbooks that had been approved, and how the state had worked with publishers to increase the number of approvals.
At a news conference at a classical charter school on Tuesday morning, Mr. DeSantis signed a package of education legislation and emphasized other topics, including $1 billion in funding to increase teachers’ pay.
The governor put little focus on the social studies textbooks, though at one point he appeared to allude to
reporting by The New York Times
, which found that a publisher, Studies Weekly, had rolled back discussions of race in its submissions in Florida, including in the story of Rosa Parks.
“If you are trying to create narratives that something like a Rosa Parks book is not allowed, that is a lie,” Mr. DeSantis said on Tuesday.
Studies Weekly
has said
that it had been trying to “decipher” how to comply with a new Florida law, known as the Stop W.O.K.E. Act. Signed by Mr. DeSantis last year, the law prohibits instruction that would compel students to feel responsibility, guilt or anguish for what other members of their race did in the past. The law has at times created confusion, and Studies Weekly later apologized for what it described as an overreaction by its curriculum team.
(Studies Weekly’s social studies submissions were not approved for use in Florida.)
The state’s approved list of social studies textbooks will have a significant impact on how history is taught to nearly three million Florida public school students, on topics ranging from slavery and Jim Crow to the Holocaust.
Florida’s textbook approvals can also influence what students learn in other states. Fewer than half the states approve textbooks at a statewide level, but those that do include Florida, Texas and California, the three biggest markets. Publishers often cater to these states, using them as a template for the materials they offer in smaller markets.
Florida rejected some textbooks from large national publishers, like McGraw Hill and Savvas Learning.
“We are reviewing the situation,” McGraw Hill said in a statement. “At this point, we do not know why these titles were not recommended.” Savvas did not
respond to interview requests on Tuesday.
Another large publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, did not even bid in Florida’s social studies market this year.
Adam Laats, a historian of education at Binghamton University, said that for more than a century, American publishers have revised textbooks to appease political concerns, sometimes using razor blades to remove material on topics like evolution or Reconstruction.
The push to censor school materials has often come from conservatives, Professor Laats said — and in Florida’s announcement, he heard echoes of old battles. He noted that state policymakers cited “age appropriateness” in asking one publisher to remove the discussion of athletes taking a knee during the national anthem.
While the subject of police violence may indeed be disturbing to children, Professor Laats said, the state made no objection to another reference to violence and death on the very same page of the lesson: “Talk to your child about our military and how they sacrifice their lives for us,” the text states.
“Using age appropriateness is a strategic or tactical move,” he said, adding, “Parents and other stakeholders tend not to like the idea of textbooks having important information cut out. But parents are friendly to the idea of age appropriateness.”
|
Florida has rejected dozens of social studies textbooks and worked with publishers to edit dozens more, the state’s education department announced on Tuesday, in the latest effort under Gov. Ron DeSantis to scrub textbooks of contested topics, especially surrounding contemporary issues of race and social justice.
State officials originally rejected 82 out of 101 submitted textbooks because of what they considered “inaccurate material, errors and other information that was not aligned with Florida law,” the Department of Education said in a
news release
.
But as part of an extensive effort to revise the materials, Florida worked with publishers to make changes, ultimately approving 66 of the 101 textbooks. Still, 35 were rejected even after that process.
Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, has
campaigned against
what he has described as “woke indoctrination” and a leftist agenda in the classroom. Last year, the state
rejected dozens of math textbooks
, saying that the books touched on prohibited topics, including critical race theory and social emotional learning, which have become targets of the right.
The state’s review of social studies textbooks, which is conducted every few years, was widely expected to raise similar objections.
The state education department released a document outlining several revisions that it said publishers had made at its request. But the document did not list the titles or publishers of the revised books, making the claims difficult to independently verify.
The
revisions
outlined by the state included:
An elementary school textbook no longer includes “home support” guidance on how to talk about the national anthem, which had included advice that parents could “use this as an opportunity to talk about why some citizens are choosing to “take a knee” to protest police brutality and racism.” Florida officials said that content was not age-appropriate.
A text on different types of economies was edited to take out a description of socialism as keeping things “nice and even” and potentially promoting greater equality. The description was flagged as inaccurate, and mention of the term “socialism” was removed entirely.
A middle school textbook no longer includes a passage on the Black Lives Matter movement, the murder of George Floyd and its impact on society. The removed passage described protests, noting that “many Americans sympathized with the Black Lives Matter movement,” while other people were critical of looting and violence and viewed the movement as anti-police. The state said the passage contained “unsolicited topics.”
Manny Diaz, Jr., the
|
Florida education commissioner, said in a statement that textbooks should “focus on historical facts” and be “free from inaccuracies or ideological rhetoric.”
Teaching about race has become a lightning rod nationally, but especially in Florida, where Mr. DeSantis, who is widely expected to announce a 2024 presidential bid, has made it a signature political issue.
Yet the tone of this year’s announcement by the state was softened, compared with last year.
When the state rejected the math textbooks in 2022, the announcement was made in a
splashy news release
emphasizing the rejections: “Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students.”
This year, by contrast, state officials emphasized the percentage of textbooks that had been approved, and how the state had worked with publishers to increase the number of approvals.
At a news conference at a classical charter school on Tuesday morning, Mr. DeSantis signed a package of education legislation and emphasized other topics, including $1 billion in funding to increase teachers’ pay.
The governor put little focus on the social studies textbooks, though at one point he appeared to allude to
reporting by The New York Times
, which found that a publisher, Studies Weekly, had rolled back discussions of race in its submissions in Florida, including in the story of Rosa Parks.
“If you are trying to create narratives that something like a Rosa Parks book is not allowed, that is a lie,” Mr. DeSantis said on Tuesday.
Studies Weekly
has said
that it had been trying to “decipher” how to comply with a new Florida law, known as the Stop W.O.K.E. Act. Signed by Mr. DeSantis last year, the law prohibits instruction that would compel students to feel responsibility, guilt or anguish for what other members of their race did in the past. The law has at times created confusion, and Studies Weekly later apologized for what it described as an overreaction by its curriculum team.
(Studies Weekly’s social studies submissions were not approved for use in Florida.)
The state’s approved list of social studies textbooks will have a significant impact on how history is taught to nearly three million Florida public school students, on topics ranging from slavery and Jim Crow to the Holocaust.
Florida’s textbook approvals can also influence what students learn in other states. Fewer than half the states approve textbooks at a statewide level, but those that do include Florida, Texas and California, the three biggest markets. Publishers often cater to these states, using them as a template for the materials they offer in smaller markets.
Florida rejected some textbooks from large national publishers, like McGraw Hill and Savvas Learning.
“We are reviewing the situation,” McGraw Hill said in a statement. “At this point, we do not know why these titles were not recommended.” Savvas did not
respond to interview requests on Tuesday.
Another large publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, did not even bid in Florida’s social studies market this year.
Adam Laats, a historian of education at Binghamton University, said that for more than a century, American publishers have revised textbooks to appease political concerns, sometimes using razor blades to remove material on topics like evolution or Reconstruction.
The push to censor school materials has often come from conservatives, Professor Laats said — and in Florida’s announcement, he heard echoes of old battles. He noted that state policymakers cited “age appropriateness” in asking one publisher to remove the discussion of athletes taking a knee during the national anthem.
While the subject of police violence may indeed be disturbing to children, Professor Laats said, the state made no objection to another reference to violence and death on the very same page of the lesson: “Talk to your child about our military and how they sacrifice their lives for us,” the text states.
“Using age appropriateness is a strategic or tactical move,” he said, adding, “Parents and other stakeholders tend not to like the idea of textbooks having important information cut out. But parents are friendly to the idea of age appropriateness.”
|
94a626e6-181e-46ce-8978-adcbccebf142
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/world/middleeast/saudi-killing-migrants-yemen.html
|
U.S. Knew Saudis Were Killing African Migrants
|
2023-08-26
|
nytimes
|
Last fall, American diplomats received grim news that border guards in Saudi Arabia, a close U.S. partner in the Middle East, were using lethal force against African migrants who were trying to enter the kingdom from Yemen.
The diplomats got more detail in December, when United Nations officials presented them with information about Saudi security forces shooting, shelling and abusing migrants, leaving many dead and wounded, according to U.S. officials and a person who attended the meetings, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity since they were not authorized to speak to journalists.
In the months since, American officials have not publicly criticized the Saudis’ conduct, although State Department officials said this past week, following a published report of the killings, that U.S. diplomats have raised the issue with their Saudi counterparts and asked them to investigate. It remains unclear whether those discussions have affected Saudi actions.
The Saudi security forces’ violence along the border came to the fore in a
report by Human Rights Watch
on Monday that accused them of shooting and firing explosive projectiles at Ethiopian migrants, killing hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of them during the 15-month period that ended in June.
The report was based on interviews with migrants and their associates, photos and videos and satellite photos of the border area. It cited migrants who said Saudi guards had asked them which limb they preferred before shooting them in the arm or leg and a 17-year-old boy who said guards had forced him and another migrant to rape two girls as the guards looked on.
The report said that if killing migrants were official Saudi policy, it could be a crime against humanity.
In January, Richard Mills, the deputy U.S. representative to the United Nations, made an oblique reference to the issue,
saying at a Security Council briefing
on Yemen that “we remain concerned by alleged abuses against migrants on the border with Saudi Arabia.”
“We urge all parties to allow U.N. investigators to access both sides of the border to thoroughly investigate these allegations,” Mr. Mills added, without mentioning that U.S., European and U.N. officials had recently learned that many Africans had been killed by Saudi Arabia’s border forces.
In a statement sent to The New York Times on Saturday night, after this article was initially published, the State Department said the United States learned about specific accusations after the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights publicly released letters it had sent on the issue to Saudi Arabia and to Houthi officials in Yemen in late 2022. (A
response rebutting the accusations
sent by Saudi diplomats in March indicates at least one U.N. letter was sent on October 3. The public release was 60 days later, the State Department said.)
“The United States quickly engaged senior Saudi officials to express our concern,” the department said, adding that U.S. officials “have continued to regularly raise our concerns with Saudi contacts,” including at the Security Council briefing in January.
The new details about the Saudi border killings come as President Biden seeks to overcome past tensions and cinch a diplomatic breakthrough between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Late last year, around the time when U.S. diplomats were learning about the border violence, Mr. Biden accused Saudi Arabia of acting against U.S. interests over other issues. Saudi leaders had cut oil production, potentially leading to a rise in global oil prices before the midterm elections. Biden administration officials thought they had
reached a secret agreement
for the Saudis to increase production. Mr. Biden vowed to impose “consequences” on Saudi Arabia.
Further straining relations, Saudi Arabia had declined to join Western sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. And Riyadh’s decision to decrease oil production seemed to support Russia’s economy, which relies on oil and gas exports.
But in recent months, Mr. Biden and his aides have been talking to Saudi officials about their country establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, which would be a major geopolitical coup. In those discussions, the Saudis have asked the United States for security guarantees, more lethal weapons and help with a nuclear energy program. Mr. Biden might speak with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, on the sidelines of a leadership summit of the Group of 20 nations next month in New Delhi, India.
Some members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have strongly criticized Saudi Arabia for its human rights record, including its yearslong war in Yemen. Those lawmakers will almost certainly raise further doubts about selling more arms to Saudi Arabia or working with it on a civilian nuclear program, which some U.S. officials fear could be cover for a nuclear weapons program.
Among those briefed on the killing last December by United Nations officials was
Steven H. Fagin, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen,
according to a person who was present. Around that time, the United Nations also shared information with others at the State Department and with diplomats from France, Germany, Holland, Sweden and the European Union, this person said.
Inside Yemen, the border killings are anything but secret. Some attacks are reported on Yemeni television, and many of those wounded end up in Yemeni hospitals.
“We face these cases daily coming from the border areas: dead and seriously wounded, women, old people and children,” Mujahid al-Anisi, the head of the emergency unit at al-Jumhori Hospital, a Yemeni facility near the main crossing zone, told the The New York Times by phone on Wednesday.
The hospital receives an average of four or five cases a day, he said. Many are found by the road unconscious and driven 12 hours to the hospital with wounds in their heads, chests and abdomens that require urgent surgeries. Some need amputations. About one in 10 are women.
“These people arrive so worried and badly wounded,” he said.
Aid workers and United Nations officials have been tracking the violence since early last year, but international efforts to investigate the matter have been few, and public efforts to make it stop even fewer.
That’s because of many factors, aid workers said. Delivering aid in war zones like Yemen requires not angering one’s hosts, including the rebels who control northern Yemen and facilitate human trafficking, or one’s funders, which in some cases includes Saudi Arabia.
Rights violations, no matter how grave, rarely take priority when diplomats do business with their counterparts from rich partners like Saudi Arabia. And most efforts at accountability first call for Saudi Arabia to investigate itself, which it has shown little willingness to do.
Further limiting attention to the killings is their location, in an inaccessible border zone, where journalists, activists and other independent observers can’t witness events.
Fatigue among donors and the public with Yemen’s complicated, eight-year war also plays a role, as does the fact that the mostly Ethiopian migrants crossing Yemen are unlikely to show up in Europe.
“There is no risk for anyone, so they don’t pay attention to the problem,” said Ali Mayas, who has researched migration issues at
Mwatana
, a Yemeni human rights group.
Human rights groups have long documented threats to migrants from East Africa who cross the Gulf of Aden to Yemen and head north toward Saudi Arabia, where they hope to find work or escape political persecution. They started getting reports of increased violence on the border about two years ago.
Last September,
Mwatana reported
that the bodies of about 30 Yemeni and Ethiopian migrants had been found on May 12, 2022, on the Saudi side of the border, some bearing gunshot wounds or signs of torture. A State Department
human rights report
on Saudi Arabia’s acts in 2022 mentioned Mwatana’s research in a paragraph.
The
Missing Migrants Project
of the International Organization for Migration found that at least 788 migrants had died near the Saudi border in 2022, mostly from artillery or gunfire. The actual number of those killed was likely much higher, the organization said.
Last October, a group of United Nations experts
confronted Saudi Arabia
with reports similar to what Human Rights Watch would later find. They cited allegations that border guards had shot at migrants, killing as many as 430 in the first four months of 2022, and raped women and girls, sending some back to Yemen naked.
The experts said that, if confirmed, the incidents would indicate “a deliberate policy of large-scale, indiscriminate and excessive use of lethal force” to deter migrants and urged Saudi Arabia to rein in its forces.
The kingdom
denied
the allegations and said it needed more detail in order to investigate.
Nadia Hardman, the lead researcher on the Human Rights Watch report, said Western governments struggled with how to press Saudi Arabia on human rights.
“What is conceivable in the face of a country that just doesn’t care about its human rights record?” she said.
In a phone interview,
Morris Tidball-Binz
— the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions — who is a signatory to the experts’ letter to the Saudi government, said he was not surprised that the issue had received little attention. The events happened in a remote place, he said, “where the authorities are not known for being highly committed to respecting and protecting human rights.”
But he said he hoped increased public scrutiny would make a difference.
“The immediate reaction of denial is a typical one,” he said of the Saudi response. “But I am still hoping that we’ll see some improvements in terms of respect for, if not protection of, these migrants.”
Shuaib Almosawa contributed reporting from New Delhi, and Mark Mazzetti contributed from Washington.
|
Last fall, American diplomats received grim news that border guards in Saudi Arabia, a close U.S. partner in the Middle East, were using lethal force against African migrants who were trying to enter the kingdom from Yemen.
The diplomats got more detail in December, when United Nations officials presented them with information about Saudi security forces shooting, shelling and abusing migrants, leaving many dead and wounded, according to U.S. officials and a person who attended the meetings, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity since they were not authorized to speak to journalists.
In the months since, American officials have not publicly criticized the Saudis’ conduct, although State Department officials said this past week, following a published report of the killings, that U.S. diplomats have raised the issue with their Saudi counterparts and asked them to investigate. It remains unclear whether those discussions have affected Saudi actions.
The Saudi security forces’ violence along the border came to the fore in a
report by Human Rights Watch
on Monday that accused them of shooting and firing explosive projectiles at Ethiopian migrants, killing hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of them during the 15-month period that ended in June.
The report was based on interviews with migrants and their associates, photos and videos and satellite photos of the border area. It cited migrants who said Saudi guards had asked them which limb they preferred before shooting them in the arm or leg and a 17-year-old boy who said guards had forced him and another migrant to rape two girls as the guards looked on.
The report said that if killing migrants were official Saudi policy, it could be a crime against humanity.
In January, Richard Mills, the deputy U.S. representative to the United Nations, made an oblique reference to the issue,
saying at a Security Council briefing
on Yemen that “we remain concerned by alleged abuses against migrants on the border with Saudi Arabia.”
“We urge all parties to allow U.N. investigators to access both sides of the border to thoroughly investigate these allegations,” Mr. Mills added, without mentioning that U.S., European and U.N. officials had recently learned that many Africans had been killed by Saudi Arabia’s border forces.
In a statement sent to The New York Times on Saturday night, after this article was initially published, the State Department said the United States learned about specific accusations after the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights publicly released letters it had sent on the issue to Saudi Arabia and to Houthi officials in Yemen in late 2022. (A
response rebutting
|
the accusations
sent by Saudi diplomats in March indicates at least one U.N. letter was sent on October 3. The public release was 60 days later, the State Department said.)
“The United States quickly engaged senior Saudi officials to express our concern,” the department said, adding that U.S. officials “have continued to regularly raise our concerns with Saudi contacts,” including at the Security Council briefing in January.
The new details about the Saudi border killings come as President Biden seeks to overcome past tensions and cinch a diplomatic breakthrough between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Late last year, around the time when U.S. diplomats were learning about the border violence, Mr. Biden accused Saudi Arabia of acting against U.S. interests over other issues. Saudi leaders had cut oil production, potentially leading to a rise in global oil prices before the midterm elections. Biden administration officials thought they had
reached a secret agreement
for the Saudis to increase production. Mr. Biden vowed to impose “consequences” on Saudi Arabia.
Further straining relations, Saudi Arabia had declined to join Western sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. And Riyadh’s decision to decrease oil production seemed to support Russia’s economy, which relies on oil and gas exports.
But in recent months, Mr. Biden and his aides have been talking to Saudi officials about their country establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, which would be a major geopolitical coup. In those discussions, the Saudis have asked the United States for security guarantees, more lethal weapons and help with a nuclear energy program. Mr. Biden might speak with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, on the sidelines of a leadership summit of the Group of 20 nations next month in New Delhi, India.
Some members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have strongly criticized Saudi Arabia for its human rights record, including its yearslong war in Yemen. Those lawmakers will almost certainly raise further doubts about selling more arms to Saudi Arabia or working with it on a civilian nuclear program, which some U.S. officials fear could be cover for a nuclear weapons program.
Among those briefed on the killing last December by United Nations officials was
Steven H. Fagin, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen,
according to a person who was present. Around that time, the United Nations also shared information with others at the State Department and with diplomats from France, Germany, Holland, Sweden and the European Union, this person said.
Inside Yemen, the border killings are anything but secret. Some attacks are reported on Yemeni television, and many of those wounded end up in Yemeni hospitals.
“We face these cases daily coming from the border areas: dead and seriously wounded, women, old people and children,” Mujahid al-Anisi, the head of the emergency unit at al-Jumhori Hospital, a Yemeni facility near the main crossing zone, told the The New York Times by phone on Wednesday.
The hospital receives an average of four or five cases a day, he said. Many are found by the road unconscious and driven 12 hours to the hospital with wounds in their heads, chests and abdomens that require urgent surgeries. Some need amputations. About one in 10 are women.
“These people arrive so worried and badly wounded,” he said.
Aid workers and United Nations officials have been tracking the violence since early last year, but international efforts to investigate the matter have been few, and public efforts to make it stop even fewer.
That’s because of many factors, aid workers said. Delivering aid in war zones like Yemen requires not angering one’s hosts, including the rebels who control northern Yemen and facilitate human trafficking, or one’s funders, which in some cases includes Saudi Arabia.
Rights violations, no matter how grave, rarely take priority when diplomats do business with their counterparts from rich partners like Saudi Arabia. And most efforts at accountability first call for Saudi Arabia to investigate itself, which it has shown little willingness to do.
Further limiting attention to the killings is their location, in an inaccessible border zone, where journalists, activists and other independent observers can’t witness events.
Fatigue among donors and the public with Yemen’s complicated, eight-year war also plays a role, as does the fact that the mostly Ethiopian migrants crossing Yemen are unlikely to show up in Europe.
“There is no risk for anyone, so they don’t pay attention to the problem,” said Ali Mayas, who has researched migration issues at
Mwatana
, a Yemeni human rights group.
Human rights groups have long documented threats to migrants from East Africa who cross the Gulf of Aden to Yemen and head north toward Saudi Arabia, where they hope to find work or escape political persecution. They started getting reports of increased violence on the border about two years ago.
Last September,
Mwatana reported
that the bodies of about 30 Yemeni and Ethiopian migrants had been found on May 12, 2022, on the Saudi side of the border, some bearing gunshot wounds or signs of torture. A State Department
human rights report
on Saudi Arabia’s acts in 2022 mentioned Mwatana’s research in a paragraph.
The
Missing Migrants Project
of the International Organization for Migration found that at least 788 migrants had died near the Saudi border in 2022, mostly from artillery or gunfire. The actual number of those killed was likely much higher, the organization said.
Last October, a group of United Nations experts
confronted Saudi Arabia
with reports similar to what Human Rights Watch would later find. They cited allegations that border guards had shot at migrants, killing as many as 430 in the first four months of 2022, and raped women and girls, sending some back to Yemen naked.
The experts said that, if confirmed, the incidents would indicate “a deliberate policy of large-scale, indiscriminate and excessive use of lethal force” to deter migrants and urged Saudi Arabia to rein in its forces.
The kingdom
denied
the allegations and said it needed more detail in order to investigate.
Nadia Hardman, the lead researcher on the Human Rights Watch report, said Western governments struggled with how to press Saudi Arabia on human rights.
“What is conceivable in the face of a country that just doesn’t care about its human rights record?” she said.
In a phone interview,
Morris Tidball-Binz
— the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions — who is a signatory to the experts’ letter to the Saudi government, said he was not surprised that the issue had received little attention. The events happened in a remote place, he said, “where the authorities are not known for being highly committed to respecting and protecting human rights.”
But he said he hoped increased public scrutiny would make a difference.
“The immediate reaction of denial is a typical one,” he said of the Saudi response. “But I am still hoping that we’ll see some improvements in terms of respect for, if not protection of, these migrants.”
Shuaib Almosawa contributed reporting from New Delhi, and Mark Mazzetti contributed from Washington.
|
abc460d4-9ed8-4ea0-8b7b-d463d5ca48e5
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/17/opinion/ted-kaczynski-silvio-berlusconi-cormac-mccarthy.html
|
What Ted Kaczynski, Silvio Berlusconi and Cormac McCarthy Have in Common - The New York Times
|
2023-06-17
|
nytimes
|
There were three important deaths recently: Ted Kaczynski, Silvio Berlusconi, Cormac McCarthy. A strange assortment of characters — the murderer who imagined himself a philosopher, the louche tycoon who created modern Western populism, the novelist who traded in biblical cadences without biblical reassurances.
Or maybe not so strangely assorted; maybe the three men were variations on a theme — that theme being alienation, and specifically masculine alienation, from the patterns and rules of late-modern civilization, and the different rebellions that alienation might inspire.
There is a lot of talk lately about a
crisis of manhood
, manifest in statistics showing young men falling behind young women in various indicators of education and ambition, answered from the left by therapeutic attempts to detoxify masculinity and from the right by promises of masculine revival. The root of the problem seems clear enough, even if the solutions are contested: The things that men are most adapted for (or socialized for, if you prefer that narrative, though the biological element seems inescapable) are valued less, sometimes much less, in the peacetime of a postindustrial civilization than in most of the human past.
In a phrase, when we talk about traditional modes of manhood, we’re often talking about
mastery through physical strength and the capacity for violence
. That kind of mastery will always have some value, but it had more value in 1370 than in 1870 and more in 1870 than it does today. And the excess, the superfluity, must therefore be repressed, tamed or somehow educated away.
So what happens to men who aren’t interested in that taming process? One answer is offered by Kaczynski’s terrorist career: They become enraged and twisted; they fantasize about a truer, freer, more authentic past; they confuse grievance with philosophy (the Kaczynski manifesto has its online admirers, but most of what he’s preaching is packaged more entertainingly by “Fight Club”); they imagine revolutions but deliver empty homicidal gestures. School shooters, religious terrorists, paladins of the meaningless atrocity — these are Kaczynski’s heirs.
Then there is Berlusconi, a very different kind of he-rebel. For the Italian prime minister, modern society’s taming of masculinity allowed him to offer machismo as a form of burlesque, an entertainment, rebellion with a wink, a leer, and a snigger rather than the Unabomber’s alienated rage. In his shtick the danger of male violence was reduced to the milder threat of male misbehavior, and in his political career you could see how the bad boy politician can thrive in a feminized context — by being just shocking enough to stand out from the crowd, just different enough to draw the discontented to his banner, but always reassuringly performative and cheesy, a bunga-bunga man rather than a killer.
It’s not surprising that other populist leaders have offered this same kind of masculine burlesque — Donald Trump, of course, but also Boris Johnson with his shambolic naughtiness. It’s also not surprising that for both Berlusconi’s Italy and Johnson’s Britain, the policy results feel like a dead end: If our therapeutic age tends toward a certain kind of stagnation, electing men who make a spectacle of their virility isn’t any kind of magic ticket back to dynamism.
Finally, where Kaczynski represented rage and Berlusconi spectacle, Cormac McCarthy represented — well, call it witness, maybe, or memory, or prophecy, or all three. His novels were intensely masculine, intensely violent, and largely unconcerned with the burdens of being a man under tamed or civilized conditions. He simply left those conditions behind — personally to some extent, leading a life
substantially rougher
than many of his literary contemporaries, and absolutely in his novels, whether they went out to the violent fringes of our own peaceful world, back into a
berserker past
, or forward into our
civilization’s ashes
.
In “No Country for Old Men,” not his most important book but one of the best entry points, you get the essential McCarthy vision — a view of the civilized world as a passing thing, enfiladed by shadows, haunted by forces it can deny but not withstand.
In this vision it doesn’t matter how much the world is tamed and softened: Violence will always come back; masculinity will always have its day. But not a day of power and domination, of the sort that certain online influencers fantasize about. Instead,
as Graeme Wood wrote
in The Atlantic, McCarthy placed his men in conditions they couldn’t fully master, “in the crossfire of gods and demigods on a battleground that preceded human existence and will continue long after we are all gone.”
His characters’ admirable manliness, where it existed, consisted in survival, endurance, integrity. His cosmology was pre-Christian, shorn of any liberal optimism, but not entirely purged of hope. But that hope could only be glimpsed, not seized — discovered not in mastery, but mystery.
|
There were three important deaths recently: Ted Kaczynski, Silvio Berlusconi, Cormac McCarthy. A strange assortment of characters — the murderer who imagined himself a philosopher, the louche tycoon who created modern Western populism, the novelist who traded in biblical cadences without biblical reassurances.
Or maybe not so strangely assorted; maybe the three men were variations on a theme — that theme being alienation, and specifically masculine alienation, from the patterns and rules of late-modern civilization, and the different rebellions that alienation might inspire.
There is a lot of talk lately about a
crisis of manhood
, manifest in statistics showing young men falling behind young women in various indicators of education and ambition, answered from the left by therapeutic attempts to detoxify masculinity and from the right by promises of masculine revival. The root of the problem seems clear enough, even if the solutions are contested: The things that men are most adapted for (or socialized for, if you prefer that narrative, though the biological element seems inescapable) are valued less, sometimes much less, in the peacetime of a postindustrial civilization than in most of the human past.
In a phrase, when we talk about traditional modes of manhood, we’re often talking about
mastery through physical strength and the capacity for violence
. That kind of mastery will always have some value, but it had more value in 1370 than in 1870 and more in 1870 than it does today. And the excess, the superfluity, must therefore be repressed, tamed or somehow educated away.
So what happens to men who aren’t interested in that taming process? One answer is offered by Kaczynski’s terrorist career: They become enraged and twisted; they fantasize about a truer, freer, more authentic past; they confuse grievance with philosophy (the Kaczynski manifesto has its online admirers, but most of what he’s preaching is packaged more entertainingly by “Fight Club”); they imagine revolutions but deliver empty homicidal gestures. School shooters, religious terrorists, paladins of the meaningless atrocity — these are Kaczynski’s heirs.
Then there is Berlusconi, a very different kind of he-rebel. For the Italian prime minister, modern society’s taming of masculinity allowed him to offer machismo as a form of burlesque
|
, an entertainment, rebellion with a wink, a leer, and a snigger rather than the Unabomber’s alienated rage. In his shtick the danger of male violence was reduced to the milder threat of male misbehavior, and in his political career you could see how the bad boy politician can thrive in a feminized context — by being just shocking enough to stand out from the crowd, just different enough to draw the discontented to his banner, but always reassuringly performative and cheesy, a bunga-bunga man rather than a killer.
It’s not surprising that other populist leaders have offered this same kind of masculine burlesque — Donald Trump, of course, but also Boris Johnson with his shambolic naughtiness. It’s also not surprising that for both Berlusconi’s Italy and Johnson’s Britain, the policy results feel like a dead end: If our therapeutic age tends toward a certain kind of stagnation, electing men who make a spectacle of their virility isn’t any kind of magic ticket back to dynamism.
Finally, where Kaczynski represented rage and Berlusconi spectacle, Cormac McCarthy represented — well, call it witness, maybe, or memory, or prophecy, or all three. His novels were intensely masculine, intensely violent, and largely unconcerned with the burdens of being a man under tamed or civilized conditions. He simply left those conditions behind — personally to some extent, leading a life
substantially rougher
than many of his literary contemporaries, and absolutely in his novels, whether they went out to the violent fringes of our own peaceful world, back into a
berserker past
, or forward into our
civilization’s ashes
.
In “No Country for Old Men,” not his most important book but one of the best entry points, you get the essential McCarthy vision — a view of the civilized world as a passing thing, enfiladed by shadows, haunted by forces it can deny but not withstand.
In this vision it doesn’t matter how much the world is tamed and softened: Violence will always come back; masculinity will always have its day. But not a day of power and domination, of the sort that certain online influencers fantasize about. Instead,
as Graeme Wood wrote
in The Atlantic, McCarthy placed his men in conditions they couldn’t fully master, “in the crossfire of gods and demigods on a battleground that preceded human existence and will continue long after we are all gone.”
His characters’ admirable manliness, where it existed, consisted in survival, endurance, integrity. His cosmology was pre-Christian, shorn of any liberal optimism, but not entirely purged of hope. But that hope could only be glimpsed, not seized — discovered not in mastery, but mystery.
|
0b76c010-122b-49b1-b0d0-937e379ec23b
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/books/review/bea-wolf-zach-weinersmith-boulet-mulysses-oyvind-torseter.html
|
Book Review: “Bea Wolf,” by Zach Weinersmith, illustrated by Boulet, and “Mulysses,” by Øyvind Torseter
|
2023-04-07
|
nytimes
|
Mash-ups can be messy. Two new graphic novels, “Bea Wolf” and “Mulysses,” are mash-ups many times over. Both use words and images. Both are designed for children and adults. Both borrow elements from famously complicated stories: “Bea Wolf” picks up verbal schemes and plot points from “Beowulf”; “Mulysses” plays on the deadpan humor of “Moby-Dick” and the Cyclops section of the “Odyssey.” But only one of these mash-ups is messy.
BEA WOLF (First Second, 208 pp., $19.99, ages 8 to 12)
is the saga of a clan of warrior children obsessed with toys, candy, soda and pandemonium. Vaguely reminiscent of the Rugrats but with big Dora the Explorer eyes, they wear blanket capes and underwear armor. Their sense of fun seems to derive from “Captain Underpants,” their greediness from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” They occupy a treehouse called Treeheart (a stand-in for the mead hall Heorot in “Beowulf”) where there’s no bedtime and no cleanup.
To these kids, every adult is an affront. And the biggest creep of them all (in the role of the monster Grendel) is Mr. Grindle, a hateful hall monitor with glinting oversize glasses, black coattails and huge teeth: “Mr. Grindle he was called, for his father was Mr. Grindle and his mother was Mrs. Grindle, and that is how names work.” Descended from a long line of “fun-grinders,” he desecrates the treehouse by turning its inhabitants into grown-ups — “adulting” them — then vacuuming the place. The awful aftermath: “Dawn rose, like a jerk. … Treeheart lay ruined, wrecked by the woe-teacher’s wrath.”
As you can see, Zach Weinersmith’s metered language is a fine, fun feat that pays homage to the strong beat and distinctive alliteration of the original poem. And it’s a brave thing to try to woo kids to an old narrative like “Beowulf.”
But there are problems. The characters’ aims are tediously uniform: sweets, toys and staying up late. There’s a lot of so-and-so begat so-and-so. (I found myself counting the boys versus the girls in the succession of tot kings: seven boys, three girls, one monkey.) The story has too many big words. And those words serve a long, confusing plot. The black-and-white drawings by Boulet (a.k.a. Gilles Roussel), though sometimes funny, are mostly chaotic. The best are the close-ups of Grindle’s demonic white teeth and glasses.
The title character, Bea Wolf, a fearless girl in a teddy bear hoodie who arrives late in the story, defeats Grindle by yanking his tie (a nod to the beheading of Grendel). His bizarre punishment? He becomes a child. (According to the story’s logic, wouldn’t that be a reward?) And wow is his mother furious! This gray-bunned granny does not want to change diapers anymore. Thus is the monster’s mother, who was an avenging badass in “Beowulf,” reduced to a sexist stereotype.
Øyvind Torseter’s
MULYSSES (Enchanted Lion, 156 pp., $29.95, ages 8 and up)
, translated by Kari Dickson, has none of the faults of “Bea Wolf” and far less of its striving. This makes it a better book. The author doesn’t try to mimic the language of “Moby-Dick” or the “Odyssey.” And his hero-narrator, a cute mule-like chap who also appears in Torseter’s “The Heartless Troll” and “The Hole,” reminds me of Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll.
The beginning of “Mulysses” roughly parallels that of “Moby-Dick.” Our protagonist, who has lost his job and his apartment and needs $5,000 to recover his belongings, meets a sea captain who’s offering $5,000 for joining him on an expedition to capture “the biggest eye in the world.” (Here’s the reference to the Cyclops.)
The captain, like his counterpart in “Moby-Dick,” has one selfish aim. But unlike Ahab, he’s part elephant (another figure Torseter has drawn before) and has zero knowledge of the sea: “Wet. Endless. Blue.” Before he and Mulysses set sail, they buy all sorts of useless things, including maritime medals and three fuzzy creatures who look like tribbles. On the voyage, most of the work falls to Mulysses. When a storm strikes, the captain calls a helicopter and flees, leaving his hapless mate to fend for himself. His parting words: “Carry on searching for the eye. I’ll be waiting at the harbor tavern with your payment.”
In the end, Mulysses finds love with a stowaway, they find the eye and return it to its rightful owner (a whale), and the sea captain, despite not getting the prize he sought, gives the money to Mulysses anyway. All this is accomplished with minimalist, scratchy lines, rare patches of color, amusing characters and few words. I can picture an adult reading it with a child and both being happy. “Mulysses” is an engaging little mash-up that is, thankfully, no mess at all.
Sarah Boxer is the author, most recently, of two Shakespearean Tragic-Comics: “Anchovius Caesar: The Decomposition of a Romaine Salad” and “Hamlet: Prince of Pigs.”
|
Mash-ups can be messy. Two new graphic novels, “Bea Wolf” and “Mulysses,” are mash-ups many times over. Both use words and images. Both are designed for children and adults. Both borrow elements from famously complicated stories: “Bea Wolf” picks up verbal schemes and plot points from “Beowulf”; “Mulysses” plays on the deadpan humor of “Moby-Dick” and the Cyclops section of the “Odyssey.” But only one of these mash-ups is messy.
BEA WOLF (First Second, 208 pp., $19.99, ages 8 to 12)
is the saga of a clan of warrior children obsessed with toys, candy, soda and pandemonium. Vaguely reminiscent of the Rugrats but with big Dora the Explorer eyes, they wear blanket capes and underwear armor. Their sense of fun seems to derive from “Captain Underpants,” their greediness from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” They occupy a treehouse called Treeheart (a stand-in for the mead hall Heorot in “Beowulf”) where there’s no bedtime and no cleanup.
To these kids, every adult is an affront. And the biggest creep of them all (in the role of the monster Grendel) is Mr. Grindle, a hateful hall monitor with glinting oversize glasses, black coattails and huge teeth: “Mr. Grindle he was called, for his father was Mr. Grindle and his mother was Mrs. Grindle, and that is how names work.” Descended from a long line of “fun-grinders,” he desecrates the treehouse by turning its inhabitants into grown-ups — “adulting” them — then vacuuming the place. The awful aftermath: “Dawn rose, like a jerk. … Treeheart lay ruined, wrecked by the woe-teacher’s wrath.”
As you can see, Zach Weinersmith’s metered language is a fine, fun feat that pays homage to the strong beat and distinctive alliteration of the original poem. And it’s a brave thing to try to woo kids to an old narrative like “Beowulf.”
But there are problems. The characters’ aims are tediously uniform: sweets, toys and staying up late. There’s a lot of so-and-so begat so-and-so. (I found myself
|
counting the boys versus the girls in the succession of tot kings: seven boys, three girls, one monkey.) The story has too many big words. And those words serve a long, confusing plot. The black-and-white drawings by Boulet (a.k.a. Gilles Roussel), though sometimes funny, are mostly chaotic. The best are the close-ups of Grindle’s demonic white teeth and glasses.
The title character, Bea Wolf, a fearless girl in a teddy bear hoodie who arrives late in the story, defeats Grindle by yanking his tie (a nod to the beheading of Grendel). His bizarre punishment? He becomes a child. (According to the story’s logic, wouldn’t that be a reward?) And wow is his mother furious! This gray-bunned granny does not want to change diapers anymore. Thus is the monster’s mother, who was an avenging badass in “Beowulf,” reduced to a sexist stereotype.
Øyvind Torseter’s
MULYSSES (Enchanted Lion, 156 pp., $29.95, ages 8 and up)
, translated by Kari Dickson, has none of the faults of “Bea Wolf” and far less of its striving. This makes it a better book. The author doesn’t try to mimic the language of “Moby-Dick” or the “Odyssey.” And his hero-narrator, a cute mule-like chap who also appears in Torseter’s “The Heartless Troll” and “The Hole,” reminds me of Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll.
The beginning of “Mulysses” roughly parallels that of “Moby-Dick.” Our protagonist, who has lost his job and his apartment and needs $5,000 to recover his belongings, meets a sea captain who’s offering $5,000 for joining him on an expedition to capture “the biggest eye in the world.” (Here’s the reference to the Cyclops.)
The captain, like his counterpart in “Moby-Dick,” has one selfish aim. But unlike Ahab, he’s part elephant (another figure Torseter has drawn before) and has zero knowledge of the sea: “Wet. Endless. Blue.” Before he and Mulysses set sail, they buy all sorts of useless things, including maritime medals and three fuzzy creatures who look like tribbles. On the voyage, most of the work falls to Mulysses. When a storm strikes, the captain calls a helicopter and flees, leaving his hapless mate to fend for himself. His parting words: “Carry on searching for the eye. I’ll be waiting at the harbor tavern with your payment.”
In the end, Mulysses finds love with a stowaway, they find the eye and return it to its rightful owner (a whale), and the sea captain, despite not getting the prize he sought, gives the money to Mulysses anyway. All this is accomplished with minimalist, scratchy lines, rare patches of color, amusing characters and few words. I can picture an adult reading it with a child and both being happy. “Mulysses” is an engaging little mash-up that is, thankfully, no mess at all.
Sarah Boxer is the author, most recently, of two Shakespearean Tragic-Comics: “Anchovius Caesar: The Decomposition of a Romaine Salad” and “Hamlet: Prince of Pigs.”
|
d302e44a-862b-48ca-be42-1342a3814ac3
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/sports/olympics/gabby-douglas-gymnastics-comeback.html
|
Gabby Douglas, a Trailblazer in Gymnastics, Announces Her Return
|
2023-07-13
|
nytimes
|
Gabby Douglas, who in 2012 became the first Black woman to win the highest individual Olympic gymnastics competition and later drew attention to the abuse perpetrated within the sport, announced
on Instagram
Thursday that she was returning to competitive gymnastics.
It was not immediately clear when or where Douglas, 27, would next compete after winning three Olympic golds, including two in London in 2012 and one in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. She missed the Tokyo Games in 2021 and a spokesman for U.S.A. Gymnastics said she had not petitioned to take part in its events this year and was not aware of her plans.
Douglas, whose heroics inspired a wave of girls of color to take up gymnastics, signaled her plans in a series of pictures and a video of her training in the gym on the balance beam and uneven bars.
“I know I have a huge task ahead of me and I am beyond grateful and excited to get back out on the floor,” she wrote. “There’s so much to be said but for now … let’s do this.”
Douglas’s mother, who in the past has also been her business manager, Natalie Hawkins, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If Douglas attempts to qualify for the 2024 Paris Games, she may face stiff competition from
Simone Biles, who has signaled a return
to elite competition, and
Sunisa Lee
. Both are former all-around champions. Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles, who competed in the Tokyo Games, are also expected to contend for spots.
Douglas was 16 when she became the first Black woman to win the all-around title, at the 2012 London Olympics. Her U.S. squad also won gold in the team competition that year and again in the 2016. The Rio de Janeiro Games that year marked Douglas’s last competition for the national team.
During her career, Douglas repeatedly faced online harassment, receiving criticism for everything from her
appearance to her body language
. Before returning to Instagram to announce her comeback, Douglas had been on a social media hiatus
since August
.
Douglas was also among the most prominent figures in gymnastics who came forward with sexual abuse allegations against Dr. Lawrence G. Nassar, the longtime team doctor for U.S.A. Gymnastics, who was accused by more than
160 women
. Nassar pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2017 and was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison. He was said to have been
stabbed
in the chest, back and neck on Sunday at the federal prison in Florida where he is serving his sentence.
“I didn’t publicly share my experiences as well as many other things because for years we were conditioned to stay silent, and honestly some things were extremely painful,” Douglas said in an Instagram post in 2017 in which she acknowledged she had been abused. “I wholeheartedly support my teammates for coming forward with what happened to them.”
Comebacks have proven difficult for other gymnasts. Shawn Johnson, a gold medalist on the team that competed in the 2008 Beijing Games,
saw her attempt foiled by knee injuries
. Her teammate, Nastia Liukin, also attempted a comeback
but failed to qualify for the 2012 Olympic team
.
Juliet Macur contributed reporting.
|
Gabby Douglas, who in 2012 became the first Black woman to win the highest individual Olympic gymnastics competition and later drew attention to the abuse perpetrated within the sport, announced
on Instagram
Thursday that she was returning to competitive gymnastics.
It was not immediately clear when or where Douglas, 27, would next compete after winning three Olympic golds, including two in London in 2012 and one in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. She missed the Tokyo Games in 2021 and a spokesman for U.S.A. Gymnastics said she had not petitioned to take part in its events this year and was not aware of her plans.
Douglas, whose heroics inspired a wave of girls of color to take up gymnastics, signaled her plans in a series of pictures and a video of her training in the gym on the balance beam and uneven bars.
“I know I have a huge task ahead of me and I am beyond grateful and excited to get back out on the floor,” she wrote. “There’s so much to be said but for now … let’s do this.”
Douglas’s mother, who in the past has also been her business manager, Natalie Hawkins, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If Douglas attempts to qualify for the 2024 Paris Games, she may face stiff competition from
Simone Biles, who has signaled a return
to elite competition, and
Sunisa Lee
. Both are former all-around champions. Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles, who competed in the Tokyo Games, are also expected to contend for spots.
Douglas was 16 when she became the first Black woman to win the all-around title, at the 2012 London Olympics. Her U.S. squad also won gold in the team competition that year and again in the 2016. The Rio de Janeiro Games that year marked Douglas’s last competition for the national team.
During her career, Douglas repeatedly faced online harassment, receiving criticism for everything from her
appearance to her body language
. Before returning to Instagram to announce her comeback, Douglas had been on a social media hiatus
since August
.
Douglas was also among the most prominent figures in gymnastics who came forward with sexual abuse allegations against Dr. Lawrence G. Nassar, the longtime team doctor for U.S.A. Gymnastics, who was accused by more than
160 women
. Nassar pleaded guilty to
|
federal charges in 2017 and was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison. He was said to have been
stabbed
in the chest, back and neck on Sunday at the federal prison in Florida where he is serving his sentence.
“I didn’t publicly share my experiences as well as many other things because for years we were conditioned to stay silent, and honestly some things were extremely painful,” Douglas said in an Instagram post in 2017 in which she acknowledged she had been abused. “I wholeheartedly support my teammates for coming forward with what happened to them.”
Comebacks have proven difficult for other gymnasts. Shawn Johnson, a gold medalist on the team that competed in the 2008 Beijing Games,
saw her attempt foiled by knee injuries
. Her teammate, Nastia Liukin, also attempted a comeback
but failed to qualify for the 2012 Olympic team
.
Juliet Macur contributed reporting.
|
643f3765-4ef1-43d1-9c0f-7b11f9eda65e
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/28/sports/golf/ryder-cup-home-course-advantage.html
|
Ryder Cup: Home Team Gets a Course Advantage
|
2023-09-28
|
nytimes
|
Max Homa
returned from a scouting trip to the site of this week’s Ryder Cup in Rome incredulous with how the course had been set up.
Not only were the fairways reduced in width where a tee shot might land, but the rough was grown so thick, high and gnarly that slightly errant shots could disappear.
“One day someone hit it over a bunker, and we just lost it in the regular rough,” Homa said. “The whole first day I didn’t see a single ball from the rough hit the green.”
The one exception:
Justin Thomas
hit a ball in the rough onto the green from 100 yards away, a distance where touring pros are thinking about getting the ball to within a few feet from the hole, not just on the putting surface.
“The rough is borderline unplayable,” Homa said. “There’s going to be the highest, highest premium placed on being in the fairway, but they’re narrow.”
In other words, this sounds like a typical setup for a Ryder Cup played in Europe, where the home team hasn’t lost the biennial competition in 30 years.
The Ryder Cup, which alternates between Europe and the United States, is the rare event in elite golf where the home team has an advantage, given that it gets to determine how the course will be played. At regular professional events, the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour work with local tournament directors to bring consistency from week to week. For the major championships, the governing bodies dictate how the courses will be set up, and typically lay them out in predictably difficult ways.
But the Ryder Cup is different: What the captain of the home team says goes, right up until Sunday night of tournament week. And it’s codified in the
Captains’ Agreement,
which starts: “It is recognized that the home side has the opportunity to influence and direct the setup and preparation of the course for the Ryder Cup. It is hereby agreed that any such influence, direction and/or preparation will be limited to course architecture/course design, fairway widths, rough heights, green speed and firmness.”
This year, there’s an added bit of home team advantage at
Marco Simone Golf & Country Club
, because very few of the U.S. players are familiar with the course under any conditions. Several players on the European squad have at least played the course when it hosted the Italian Open on the DP World Tour.
In the hope of getting an understanding of how the course would be set up for the Ryder Cup, Zach Johnson, the U.S. captain, took the team on a scouting trip earlier this month.
“This is a course that most if not all of our guys have not played,” Johnson said in an interview. “To get their feet on the ground of Marco Simone ahead of the Cup is very important. Having some practice time there can only make a very trying, different, sometimes difficult week of the Cup that much more manageable and comfortable.”
Johnson, a five-time Ryder Cup player, knows the setup gambits both sides play. “Because it’s in Europe, there are tendencies their team seems to employ, with regard to course setup among other things,” he said. “We will utilize past experiences and data to make decisions.”
The setup shenanigans ultimately equal out. One of the most famous setup tweaks came when Paul Azinger, captain of the 2008 U.S. squad, set up the course at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Ky., to take advantage of his players’ ability to drive the ball farther off the tee than their European opponents.
All the hazards — bunkers, much thicker rough — were in the areas where the shorter-hitting Europeans were likely to land the ball, while the rough past the bunkers was cut shorter to make it easier for the American side to escape from wayward drives.
In 2016, at
Hazeltine National Golf Club
in Chaska, Minn., Davis Love III, the U.S. captain, put many pins in the middle of the greens, making it easy for the player, but less exciting to watch.
The European side has historically gone with a setup that features narrow fairways and higher rough, under the premise that American golfers are less accurate, along with greens that are much slower than those typically found on the PGA Tour. This year was no different, Homa said.
That leaves an obvious question: Why do the officials allow this?
The Ryder Cup is jointly sanctioned by the P.G.A. of America and Ryder Cup Europe, which is a blend of three organizations in Britain and Europe. Officials at the P.G.A. of America and Ryder Cup Europe said the setup was fair and it could reward or penalize players on either team.
“You are looking for it to be tough, but fair, and provide an exciting challenge,” said David Garland, director of tour operations for Ryder Cup Europe.
Kerry Haigh
, chief championships officer at the P.G.A. of America, said: “The Ryder Cup is unlike our other championships in that the home captain has a lot of influence as to how the golf course is set up. Our aim is to make any Ryder Cup golf course setup fair for both teams.”
Once play starts, it’s up to the officials to maintain the course as it was at the outset. “If you want six-inch rough, four-inch rough or two-inch rough, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Haigh said.
Setup aside, both officials emphasized that this year’s course has some shorter holes that are meant to increase the excitement of the matches.
“There are a couple of drivable par 4s, the fifth and the 16th, which are both over water,” Garland said. “The course was completely rebuilt a few years ago for the Ryder Cup with the drama of match play in mind.”
|
Max Homa
returned from a scouting trip to the site of this week’s Ryder Cup in Rome incredulous with how the course had been set up.
Not only were the fairways reduced in width where a tee shot might land, but the rough was grown so thick, high and gnarly that slightly errant shots could disappear.
“One day someone hit it over a bunker, and we just lost it in the regular rough,” Homa said. “The whole first day I didn’t see a single ball from the rough hit the green.”
The one exception:
Justin Thomas
hit a ball in the rough onto the green from 100 yards away, a distance where touring pros are thinking about getting the ball to within a few feet from the hole, not just on the putting surface.
“The rough is borderline unplayable,” Homa said. “There’s going to be the highest, highest premium placed on being in the fairway, but they’re narrow.”
In other words, this sounds like a typical setup for a Ryder Cup played in Europe, where the home team hasn’t lost the biennial competition in 30 years.
The Ryder Cup, which alternates between Europe and the United States, is the rare event in elite golf where the home team has an advantage, given that it gets to determine how the course will be played. At regular professional events, the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour work with local tournament directors to bring consistency from week to week. For the major championships, the governing bodies dictate how the courses will be set up, and typically lay them out in predictably difficult ways.
But the Ryder Cup is different: What the captain of the home team says goes, right up until Sunday night of tournament week. And it’s codified in the
Captains’ Agreement,
which starts: “It is recognized that the home side has the opportunity to influence and direct the setup and preparation of the course for the Ryder Cup. It is hereby agreed that any such influence, direction and/or preparation will be limited to course architecture/course design, fairway widths, rough heights, green speed and firmness.”
This year, there’s an added bit of home team advantage at
Marco Simone Golf & Country Club
, because very few of the U.S. players are familiar with the course under any conditions. Several players on the European squad have at least played the course when it hosted the Italian Open on the DP World Tour.
In the hope of getting an understanding of how the
|
course would be set up for the Ryder Cup, Zach Johnson, the U.S. captain, took the team on a scouting trip earlier this month.
“This is a course that most if not all of our guys have not played,” Johnson said in an interview. “To get their feet on the ground of Marco Simone ahead of the Cup is very important. Having some practice time there can only make a very trying, different, sometimes difficult week of the Cup that much more manageable and comfortable.”
Johnson, a five-time Ryder Cup player, knows the setup gambits both sides play. “Because it’s in Europe, there are tendencies their team seems to employ, with regard to course setup among other things,” he said. “We will utilize past experiences and data to make decisions.”
The setup shenanigans ultimately equal out. One of the most famous setup tweaks came when Paul Azinger, captain of the 2008 U.S. squad, set up the course at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Ky., to take advantage of his players’ ability to drive the ball farther off the tee than their European opponents.
All the hazards — bunkers, much thicker rough — were in the areas where the shorter-hitting Europeans were likely to land the ball, while the rough past the bunkers was cut shorter to make it easier for the American side to escape from wayward drives.
In 2016, at
Hazeltine National Golf Club
in Chaska, Minn., Davis Love III, the U.S. captain, put many pins in the middle of the greens, making it easy for the player, but less exciting to watch.
The European side has historically gone with a setup that features narrow fairways and higher rough, under the premise that American golfers are less accurate, along with greens that are much slower than those typically found on the PGA Tour. This year was no different, Homa said.
That leaves an obvious question: Why do the officials allow this?
The Ryder Cup is jointly sanctioned by the P.G.A. of America and Ryder Cup Europe, which is a blend of three organizations in Britain and Europe. Officials at the P.G.A. of America and Ryder Cup Europe said the setup was fair and it could reward or penalize players on either team.
“You are looking for it to be tough, but fair, and provide an exciting challenge,” said David Garland, director of tour operations for Ryder Cup Europe.
Kerry Haigh
, chief championships officer at the P.G.A. of America, said: “The Ryder Cup is unlike our other championships in that the home captain has a lot of influence as to how the golf course is set up. Our aim is to make any Ryder Cup golf course setup fair for both teams.”
Once play starts, it’s up to the officials to maintain the course as it was at the outset. “If you want six-inch rough, four-inch rough or two-inch rough, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Haigh said.
Setup aside, both officials emphasized that this year’s course has some shorter holes that are meant to increase the excitement of the matches.
“There are a couple of drivable par 4s, the fifth and the 16th, which are both over water,” Garland said. “The course was completely rebuilt a few years ago for the Ryder Cup with the drama of match play in mind.”
|
e19a7d33-5861-4a04-97de-bc2823066506
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/books/review/mohamed-mbougar-sarr-most-secret-memory-of-men.html
|
Book Review: ‘The Most Secret Memory of Men,’ by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
|
2023-09-26
|
nytimes
|
THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN
, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Translated by Lara Vergnaud.
In 1968, the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes, was awarded to a 28-year-old Malian writer named Yambo Ouologuem for his highly acclaimed novel, “Le Devoir de Violence”
(published in English as “
Bound to Violence
” in 1971). Four years later, he was accused of having lifted passages from books by
Graham Greene
and the French novelist André Schwarz-Bart. The incident forced Ouologuem not only from the spotlight, but from the literary world
tout court
. He never published again after the scandal, and “Le Devoir de Violence” would not be reprinted in France until 2018, one year after his death in Mali.
Readers of
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s
“The Most Secret Memory of Men” — winner of the 2021 Prix Goncourt (
the
most prestigious literary prize in France) and now published in Lara Vergnaud’s English translation — might recognize the tragic fate of Ouologuem and his stunted literary career in the novel’s central enigma: a Senegalese writer by the name of T.C. Elimane. (For those of us a bit slow on the uptake, Sarr has dedicated his novel to Ouologuem.)
The fictional Elimane is the author of “The Labyrinth of Inhumanity,” published in 1938 and lauded as an instant classic that catapulted its author into the pantheon of Francophone African writers. If not for the racist and colonial sensibility into which it was received in Paris, he might even have entered the French literary pantheon. But shortly after his explosive debut, Elimane was rocked by a plagiarism scandal that stayed his pen seemingly for the rest of his life and forced him into obscurity.
Little else is known about him, as we discover at the outset of the novel. His exact fate is so mysterious, in fact, that the Senegalese novelist Diégane Latyr Faye — a “rising star,” a “Francophone African writer full of promise” and the narrator for most of “The Most Secret Memory of Men” — is hard pressed to find any information about Elimane after his literary exile in the late 1930s. While attending military school in Senegal, Faye first encountered Elimane as a forgotten name sandwiched “between Tchichellé Tchivéla and Tchicaya U Tam’si” in his “Guide to Negro Literature.” As much as he wanted to read the reclusive writer’s supposed masterpiece, it was no longer in print or circulation.
But a copy of “The Labyrinth of Inhumanity” eventually finds its way to Faye — an event that upends his life — after he moves to Paris. He spends several delirious hours, rendered by Sarr with a surrealistic flourish, inhaling the novel, then re-inhaling it (“The experience was just as shattering, and I remained in my room, destroyed, unable to move”) before sharing it with the coterie of young, gifted African writers and critics to which he belongs.
“The Most Secret Memory of Men”
is, at bottom, the record of Faye’s search for Elimane. Hardly a trace remains of his life and activities. Is he still alive? If so, where does he live? Has he continued to write, if not to publish? Is T.C. Elimane even his real name? The narrative is animated by an idea expressed in the epigraph, taken from the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. As generations of readers and critics come and go, “the Work continues its journey toward Solitude,” attracting and shedding new critics and new readers like so many layers of skin, until “one day the Work dies,” just as “the most secret memory of men will be extinguished.”
Faye’s quest leads him through a landscape peopled by fictional members of the French literary establishment past and present. Most prominently, there’s Siga D., “a Senegalese writer in her 60s whose every book had caused such scandal that, for some, she’d come to be viewed as an evil Pythia, a ghoul or an outright succubus”; she gives Faye a copy of Elimane’s novel after a humiliating erotic encounter. Others include Musimbwa, a talented Congolese novelist and poet and Faye’s closest friend; Stanislas, Faye’s roommate and a Polish translator; Charles Ellenstein and Thérèse Jacob, the editors credited with first publishing “The Labyrinth of Inhumanity”; and Brigitte Bollème, a journalist whose own pursuit of Elimane decades before Faye’s serves as a trail of bread crumbs.
What might otherwise be dressed up as a simple (if alluring) detective narrative becomes, in Sarr’s hands, a wildly expansive interrogation of everything from the nature of erotic love to the literary canon. We traverse the gamut of genres — the mystery, the ghost story, the philosophical novel, the historical novel, the magical realist tale — as Sarr navigates a spider’s web that enmeshes fact and fiction, biography and gossip, authenticity and plagiarism, fame and infamy.
This virtuosic pastiche is not without a sense of irony; Sarr indicts himself when Faye, in a fit of rage at the literary establishment that can accommodate him only as an “African writer” from the “African Ghetto” with “no literary renown in the outside world,” repudiates those writers “too craven to dare to break tradition via the novel, via poetry, via anything at all.”
The stylistic acrobatics of “The Most Secret Memory of Men” serve to catechize “the occasionally comfortable, often humiliating, ambiguities of our status as African writers (or writers of African origin) in the French literary milieu.” That is, the novel bucks the clichés, expectations and pigeonholes that generations of French readers have used to stymie African novels and novelists. But neither does it lay claim to a universality (“an illusion maintained by people who brandish it like a medal,” per Stanislas) that would wash out what is so particular to the many traditions lumped under the label “African writing” in the West.
As Faye approaches the end of his vertiginous search for Elimane, Sarr has the reader wonder whether any work of art can really be worth the mystery its enigmatic story might evoke. If all great art is rare, the book’s very premise suggests, it must surely be worth hunting for. “It might be that every writer, in the end, only contains a single essential book, a work that demands to be written, between two voids,” Faye admits. Whether or not Sarr has another great book waiting for us on the other side of the void, “The Most Secret Memory of Men”
is incontestably one that demanded to be written.
Ben Libman is the author of “The Third Solitude,” forthcoming in 2025.
THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN
| By Mohamed Mbougar Sarr | Translated by Lara Vergnaud | 475 pp. | Other Press | Paperback, $19.99
|
THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN
, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Translated by Lara Vergnaud.
In 1968, the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes, was awarded to a 28-year-old Malian writer named Yambo Ouologuem for his highly acclaimed novel, “Le Devoir de Violence”
(published in English as “
Bound to Violence
” in 1971). Four years later, he was accused of having lifted passages from books by
Graham Greene
and the French novelist André Schwarz-Bart. The incident forced Ouologuem not only from the spotlight, but from the literary world
tout court
. He never published again after the scandal, and “Le Devoir de Violence” would not be reprinted in France until 2018, one year after his death in Mali.
Readers of
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s
“The Most Secret Memory of Men” — winner of the 2021 Prix Goncourt (
the
most prestigious literary prize in France) and now published in Lara Vergnaud’s English translation — might recognize the tragic fate of Ouologuem and his stunted literary career in the novel’s central enigma: a Senegalese writer by the name of T.C. Elimane. (For those of us a bit slow on the uptake, Sarr has dedicated his novel to Ouologuem.)
The fictional Elimane is the author of “The Labyrinth of Inhumanity,” published in 1938 and lauded as an instant classic that catapulted its author into the pantheon of Francophone African writers. If not for the racist and colonial sensibility into which it was received in Paris, he might even have entered the French literary pantheon. But shortly after his explosive debut, Elimane was rocked by a plagiarism scandal that stayed his pen seemingly for the rest of his life and forced him into obscurity.
Little else is known about him, as we discover at the outset of the novel. His exact fate is so mysterious, in fact, that the Senegalese novelist Diégane Latyr Faye — a “rising star,” a “Francophone African writer full of promise” and the narrator for most of “The Most Secret Memory of Men” — is hard pressed to find any information about Elimane after his literary exile in the late
|
1930s. While attending military school in Senegal, Faye first encountered Elimane as a forgotten name sandwiched “between Tchichellé Tchivéla and Tchicaya U Tam’si” in his “Guide to Negro Literature.” As much as he wanted to read the reclusive writer’s supposed masterpiece, it was no longer in print or circulation.
But a copy of “The Labyrinth of Inhumanity” eventually finds its way to Faye — an event that upends his life — after he moves to Paris. He spends several delirious hours, rendered by Sarr with a surrealistic flourish, inhaling the novel, then re-inhaling it (“The experience was just as shattering, and I remained in my room, destroyed, unable to move”) before sharing it with the coterie of young, gifted African writers and critics to which he belongs.
“The Most Secret Memory of Men”
is, at bottom, the record of Faye’s search for Elimane. Hardly a trace remains of his life and activities. Is he still alive? If so, where does he live? Has he continued to write, if not to publish? Is T.C. Elimane even his real name? The narrative is animated by an idea expressed in the epigraph, taken from the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. As generations of readers and critics come and go, “the Work continues its journey toward Solitude,” attracting and shedding new critics and new readers like so many layers of skin, until “one day the Work dies,” just as “the most secret memory of men will be extinguished.”
Faye’s quest leads him through a landscape peopled by fictional members of the French literary establishment past and present. Most prominently, there’s Siga D., “a Senegalese writer in her 60s whose every book had caused such scandal that, for some, she’d come to be viewed as an evil Pythia, a ghoul or an outright succubus”; she gives Faye a copy of Elimane’s novel after a humiliating erotic encounter. Others include Musimbwa, a talented Congolese novelist and poet and Faye’s closest friend; Stanislas, Faye’s roommate and a Polish translator; Charles Ellenstein and Thérèse Jacob, the editors credited with first publishing “The Labyrinth of Inhumanity”; and Brigitte Bollème, a journalist whose own pursuit of Elimane decades before Faye’s serves as a trail of bread crumbs.
What might otherwise be dressed up as a simple (if alluring) detective narrative becomes, in Sarr’s hands, a wildly expansive interrogation of everything from the nature of erotic love to the literary canon. We traverse the gamut of genres — the mystery, the ghost story, the philosophical novel, the historical novel, the magical realist tale — as Sarr navigates a spider’s web that enmeshes fact and fiction, biography and gossip, authenticity and plagiarism, fame and infamy.
This virtuosic pastiche is not without a sense of irony; Sarr indicts himself when Faye, in a fit of rage at the literary establishment that can accommodate him only as an “African writer” from the “African Ghetto” with “no literary renown in the outside world,” repudiates those writers “too craven to dare to break tradition via the novel, via poetry, via anything at all.”
The stylistic acrobatics of “The Most Secret Memory of Men” serve to catechize “the occasionally comfortable, often humiliating, ambiguities of our status as African writers (or writers of African origin) in the French literary milieu.” That is, the novel bucks the clichés, expectations and pigeonholes that generations of French readers have used to stymie African novels and novelists. But neither does it lay claim to a universality (“an illusion maintained by people who brandish it like a medal,” per Stanislas) that would wash out what is so particular to the many traditions lumped under the label “African writing” in the West.
As Faye approaches the end of his vertiginous search for Elimane, Sarr has the reader wonder whether any work of art can really be worth the mystery its enigmatic story might evoke. If all great art is rare, the book’s very premise suggests, it must surely be worth hunting for. “It might be that every writer, in the end, only contains a single essential book, a work that demands to be written, between two voids,” Faye admits. Whether or not Sarr has another great book waiting for us on the other side of the void, “The Most Secret Memory of Men”
is incontestably one that demanded to be written.
Ben Libman is the author of “The Third Solitude,” forthcoming in 2025.
THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN
| By Mohamed Mbougar Sarr | Translated by Lara Vergnaud | 475 pp. | Other Press | Paperback, $19.99
|
75f1567b-e85a-4931-8a5e-de5035a60281
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/world/europe/russia-textbooks-ukraine-war.html
|
Textbooks for Russian High Schoolers Try to Justify Ukraine War
|
2023-09-01
|
nytimes
|
As Russian high school students returned to classes after the summer break on Friday, they were expected to receive a heavily revised history textbook that claims that Ukraine is an “ultranationalist state” where “opposition is forbidden,” and that the United States is “the main beneficiary of the Ukrainian conflict.”
The rewritten version of “The History of Russia, 1945 to the beginning of the 21st Century,” a textbook for 16- and 17-year-old students, was first unveiled at the beginning of August. The book follows a singular and standardized version of history approved by the highest echelons of power in Russia, and it appears to be the latest push in the Kremlin’s youth-targeted propaganda campaign to justify its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The text
devotes
28 pages to Russia’s war in Ukraine, which the authors frame as a response to an increasingly aggressive West that intended to use Ukraine as a “battering ram” to destroy Russia. Revised history textbooks for younger students will be released next year, according to
a report
from RIA Novosti, a Russian state media outlet.
One of the book’s authors, Vladimir Medinsky, is a former culture minister and an adviser to President Vladimir V. Putin. Echoing Mr. Putin’s own words, the authors accused the United States of spreading what they call “Russophobia” in former Soviet republics and of escalating the war in Ukraine, leaving Russia with “no other alternatives” than to
call for a partial mobilization
that aimed to press 300,000 men into service in the conflict in 2022.
The revised history text is only one of several ways the war effort has affected basic eduction.
The Ministries of Education and Defense has said that, starting in 2024, high school students will be required to take a class called “The Basics of Defense and Defense of the Homeland,” which will include limited military training. Boys will study drill formation, drone usage and the ins and outs of Kalashnikov rifles, while girls will be instructed in battlefield first aid.
Critics have called the new textbooks a complete falsification. “Instead of history, they’re teaching propaganda in schools,” Anton Orekh, an independent Russian journalist, wrote on the messaging app
Telegram
.
One example of the omissions in the textbook is its treatment of gulags, the notorious labor camps where the dictator Joseph Stalin sent countless political prisoners and where millions of Russians died between 1929 and 1953. They are mentioned as an aside, with no details about their brutality.
Mikhail Myagkov, the director of the Russian Military Historical Society,
praised
the new educational materials for providing a more “objective” view of Stalin, whose policies led to a famine that killed an estimated 3 to 4 million people in Ukraine. The updated textbooks present Stalin as someone who “clearly defended the Soviet Union’s foreign policy interests,” Mr. Myagkov said.
“Not a word of truth,” Lyubov Sobol, an exiled opposition figure allied with the jailed dissident Aleksei Navalny, wrote on
social media
.
|
As Russian high school students returned to classes after the summer break on Friday, they were expected to receive a heavily revised history textbook that claims that Ukraine is an “ultranationalist state” where “opposition is forbidden,” and that the United States is “the main beneficiary of the Ukrainian conflict.”
The rewritten version of “The History of Russia, 1945 to the beginning of the 21st Century,” a textbook for 16- and 17-year-old students, was first unveiled at the beginning of August. The book follows a singular and standardized version of history approved by the highest echelons of power in Russia, and it appears to be the latest push in the Kremlin’s youth-targeted propaganda campaign to justify its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The text
devotes
28 pages to Russia’s war in Ukraine, which the authors frame as a response to an increasingly aggressive West that intended to use Ukraine as a “battering ram” to destroy Russia. Revised history textbooks for younger students will be released next year, according to
a report
from RIA Novosti, a Russian state media outlet.
One of the book’s authors, Vladimir Medinsky, is a former culture minister and an adviser to President Vladimir V. Putin. Echoing Mr. Putin’s own words, the authors accused the United States of spreading what they call “Russophobia” in former Soviet republics and of escalating the war in Ukraine, leaving Russia with “no other alternatives” than to
call for a partial mobilization
that aimed to press 300,000 men into service in the conflict in 2022.
The revised history text is only one of several ways the war effort has affected basic eduction.
The Ministries of Education and Defense has said that, starting in 2024, high school students will be required to take a class called “The Basics of Defense and Defense of the Homeland,” which will include limited military training. Boys will study drill formation, drone usage and the ins and outs of Kalashnikov rifles, while girls will be instructed in battlefield first aid.
Critics have called the new textbooks a complete falsification. “Instead of history, they’re teaching propaganda in schools,” Anton Orekh, an independent Russian journalist, wrote on the messaging app
Telegram
.
One example of the omissions in the textbook is its treatment of gulags, the notorious labor camps where the dictator Joseph Stalin sent countless political
|
prisoners and where millions of Russians died between 1929 and 1953. They are mentioned as an aside, with no details about their brutality.
Mikhail Myagkov, the director of the Russian Military Historical Society,
praised
the new educational materials for providing a more “objective” view of Stalin, whose policies led to a famine that killed an estimated 3 to 4 million people in Ukraine. The updated textbooks present Stalin as someone who “clearly defended the Soviet Union’s foreign policy interests,” Mr. Myagkov said.
“Not a word of truth,” Lyubov Sobol, an exiled opposition figure allied with the jailed dissident Aleksei Navalny, wrote on
social media
.
|
19ff74af-6ef6-4a90-93fd-7a4a4bcda3fc
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/us/philadelphia-eddie-irizarry-charges-dropped.html
|
Eddie Irizarry Case: Murder Charge Dropped Against Philadelphia Police Officer
|
2023-09-26
|
nytimes
|
A judge on Tuesday dismissed all charges against a Philadelphia police officer who fatally shot a 27-year-old man who was sitting in his parked car last month, ruling that prosecutors had not presented enough evidence.
Municipal Judge Wendy L. Pew agreed with lawyers for the officer, Mark Dial, who had argued that he was acting in self-defense when he killed Eddie Irizarry on Aug. 14, believing that Mr. Irizarry was taking out a weapon. Mr. Dial, a five-year veteran of the Police Department, was suspended from the force with intent to dismiss.
After body camera footage showed Mr. Dial, 27, fatally shooting Mr. Irizarry six times at near-point-blank range,
according to prosecutors
, he was charged with first-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, simple assault, possession of an instrument of crime, reckless endangerment of another person and official oppression.
Defense lawyers had argued that Mr. Dial’s partner yelled “gun” before the officer opened fire on Mr. Irizarry, who was sitting in the driver’s seat at the time of the confrontation.
The district attorney’s office in Philadelphia immediately appealed the decision, and a hearing in the Court of Common Pleas was set for Oct. 25.
“In keeping with our oath to seek justice, we will move to have all criminal charges, including murder, reinstated against this defendant,” the statement said.
Mr. Irizarry’s relatives expressed outrage after the ruling,
according to The Philadelphia Inquirer
.
“The officers can go out here and kill a person that’s not doing anything and get away with murder, because this is what it was,” Zoraida Garcia, Mr. Irizarry’s aunt, said outside the courthouse.
Inside the courtroom, police officers responded to the judge’s decision with an outburst of support for Mr. Dial, The Inquirer reported.
The ruling is the latest twist in the fatal shooting that sparked community anger in protests.
The officer fatally shot Mr. Irizarry around noon on Aug. 14 after what the police initially said was a car chase that ended in Mr. Irizarry lunging at Mr. Dial with a knife. But two days later,
police officials changed that account
, and said that body camera footage showed that the man, later identified as Mr. Irizarry, was still in his car when the officer shot him.
Mr. Dial and his partner were sitting in a marked police car when they saw a Toyota Corolla that they said was driving erratically in the Kensington neighborhood northeast of Center City Philadelphia. The officers followed the car the wrong way down a one-way street, where it pulled over into a parking spot.
The footage showed Mr. Dial racing out of the passenger seat of the police car and, within seconds, forcefully telling Mr. Irizarry that he “will shoot” him and quickly firing his gun multiple times through the driver’s seat window. Mr. Dial instructed Mr. Irizarry to “keep those hands up right where I can see them” as Mr. Irizarry slumped over in his seat.
Mr. Irizarry was declared dead at a hospital later that day.
Mr. Dial’s partner, Michael Morris, testified on Tuesday that Mr. Irizarry appeared to be holding a knife in his car in the moments before the shooting and that he tried to warn Mr. Dial, The Inquirer reported.
Investigators found two knives in Mr. Irizarry’s car, a kitchen knife and a serrated folding knife, the police have said. His family said Mr. Irizarry carried a pocketknife with him regularly. They described him as a quiet man who was being treated for serious mental illness, including schizophrenia. He moved to Philadelphia about seven years ago from Puerto Rico, they said, and had difficulty understanding English.
Mr. Dial was arrested on Sept. 8 and, in an unusual move, was released on bail. But two weeks later, another judge
revoked his bail
and ordered him jailed before the preliminary hearing. On Tuesday, Judge Pew ordered him released again.
“This was a tragedy and not a crime,” Brian McMonagle, a lawyer for Mr. Dial, said in a statement.
|
A judge on Tuesday dismissed all charges against a Philadelphia police officer who fatally shot a 27-year-old man who was sitting in his parked car last month, ruling that prosecutors had not presented enough evidence.
Municipal Judge Wendy L. Pew agreed with lawyers for the officer, Mark Dial, who had argued that he was acting in self-defense when he killed Eddie Irizarry on Aug. 14, believing that Mr. Irizarry was taking out a weapon. Mr. Dial, a five-year veteran of the Police Department, was suspended from the force with intent to dismiss.
After body camera footage showed Mr. Dial, 27, fatally shooting Mr. Irizarry six times at near-point-blank range,
according to prosecutors
, he was charged with first-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, simple assault, possession of an instrument of crime, reckless endangerment of another person and official oppression.
Defense lawyers had argued that Mr. Dial’s partner yelled “gun” before the officer opened fire on Mr. Irizarry, who was sitting in the driver’s seat at the time of the confrontation.
The district attorney’s office in Philadelphia immediately appealed the decision, and a hearing in the Court of Common Pleas was set for Oct. 25.
“In keeping with our oath to seek justice, we will move to have all criminal charges, including murder, reinstated against this defendant,” the statement said.
Mr. Irizarry’s relatives expressed outrage after the ruling,
according to The Philadelphia Inquirer
.
“The officers can go out here and kill a person that’s not doing anything and get away with murder, because this is what it was,” Zoraida Garcia, Mr. Irizarry’s aunt, said outside the courthouse.
Inside the courtroom, police officers responded to the judge’s decision with an outburst of support for Mr. Dial, The Inquirer reported.
The ruling is the latest twist in the fatal shooting that sparked community anger in protests.
The officer fatally shot Mr. Irizarry around noon on Aug. 14 after what the police initially said was a car chase that ended in Mr. Irizarry lunging at Mr. Dial with a knife. But two days later,
police officials changed that account
, and said that body camera footage showed that the man, later identified as Mr. Irizarry, was still in his car when the officer shot him.
Mr. Dial
|
and his partner were sitting in a marked police car when they saw a Toyota Corolla that they said was driving erratically in the Kensington neighborhood northeast of Center City Philadelphia. The officers followed the car the wrong way down a one-way street, where it pulled over into a parking spot.
The footage showed Mr. Dial racing out of the passenger seat of the police car and, within seconds, forcefully telling Mr. Irizarry that he “will shoot” him and quickly firing his gun multiple times through the driver’s seat window. Mr. Dial instructed Mr. Irizarry to “keep those hands up right where I can see them” as Mr. Irizarry slumped over in his seat.
Mr. Irizarry was declared dead at a hospital later that day.
Mr. Dial’s partner, Michael Morris, testified on Tuesday that Mr. Irizarry appeared to be holding a knife in his car in the moments before the shooting and that he tried to warn Mr. Dial, The Inquirer reported.
Investigators found two knives in Mr. Irizarry’s car, a kitchen knife and a serrated folding knife, the police have said. His family said Mr. Irizarry carried a pocketknife with him regularly. They described him as a quiet man who was being treated for serious mental illness, including schizophrenia. He moved to Philadelphia about seven years ago from Puerto Rico, they said, and had difficulty understanding English.
Mr. Dial was arrested on Sept. 8 and, in an unusual move, was released on bail. But two weeks later, another judge
revoked his bail
and ordered him jailed before the preliminary hearing. On Tuesday, Judge Pew ordered him released again.
“This was a tragedy and not a crime,” Brian McMonagle, a lawyer for Mr. Dial, said in a statement.
|
0a13f2ce-0cb0-4e28-aa01-24cdccf70b0b
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/business/media/daniel-ellsberg-pentagon-papers-nyt.html
|
Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers Source, Had Uneasy Relationship With The Times
|
2023-06-21
|
nytimes
|
The relationship between The New York Times and its most famous source, Daniel Ellsberg, reads like a thriller, replete with clandestine meetings, top secret documents and a war raging in the background.
The connection was mutually beneficial. For Mr. Ellsberg, a former military analyst who
died on Friday at age 92
, exposing a secret government history about the Vietnam War changed how the nation thought about a conflict that he opposed. And the 1971 publication of the documents, which became known as the Pentagon Papers, burnished The Times’s reputation as a government watchdog.
Yet Mr. Ellsberg had conflicted feelings about The Times.
Mr. Ellsberg was happy with the prominent coverage The Times gave the Pentagon Papers — “their courage in doing that and the risks they undertook” — Mr. Ellsberg’s son Robert said in an interview. And he respected Neil Sheehan, the main reporter on the story, believing he picked the right person for the leak.
But the younger Mr. Ellsberg said his father “had some regrets and resentment about the way he felt he’d been treated, which he felt was very unnecessary.”
In particular, Mr. Ellsberg was unhappy about being misled by Mr. Sheehan. Mr. Ellsberg was also upset by the way an article in The Times later conveyed how he had provided the documents.
Mr. Ellsberg and Mr. Sheehan discussed the Pentagon Papers at length in March 1971, during an hourslong conversation that stretched into the night. Mr. Ellsberg had smuggled the Pentagon Papers — all 7,000 pages of them — out of an office, past security guards, in the fall of 1969. He deputized Robert Ellsberg, who was then 13 years old, to help make copies.
Eventually, Mr. Ellsberg gave Mr. Sheehan access to the papers, but with a condition: Mr. Sheehan could study and take notes on the documents, but he couldn’t make copies of them.
Mr. Sheehan violated that agreement, making copies of the documents with the help of his wife, Susan Sheehan, a former writer for The New Yorker. Mr. Sheehan did not tell Mr. Ellsberg. Over the next several months, he misled Mr. Ellsberg about the newspaper’s timetable for publishing a story about the documents.
When The Times was closer to publishing its stories, Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Ellsberg for a full copy of the documents, believing that the request would be interpreted as a sign that the newspaper was preparing to publish a story. But Mr. Ellsberg missed the signal. He provided the documents but was surprised when The Times published the first article disclosing the documents on June 13, 1971.
The Nixon White House demanded that the paper stop publishing the information contained in the documents. The Times prevailed in court against the Nixon administration, setting a precedent blunting prior restraint by the government. Later, the government sought jail time for Mr. Ellsberg. A judge threw out the case against Mr. Ellsberg, citing government misconduct.
Decades later, on the day Mr. Sheehan died, The Times published an article about how the Pentagon Papers leak had happened. The article was based mostly on an interview with Mr. Sheehan that took place in 2015, in preparation for his obituary, the first time he had spoken at length publicly about his role in obtaining the papers. He granted the interview on the condition that his account wouldn’t be revealed until after his death, according to Janny Scott, the reporter who wrote the article.
“That prevented me from being able to run his account by anyone, including Mr. Ellsberg, until after Mr. Sheehan’s death,” said Ms. Scott, who left the paper years before the article was published.
In the interview, Mr. Sheehan said he had misled Mr. Ellsberg about the timing of the article because he was concerned that Mr. Ellsberg was acting irrational and might do something to jeopardize the story. He said the documents were too important to leave in his hands.
Mr. Ellsberg disagreed with Mr. Sheehan’s characterization that he was afraid of jail time, and he was unhappy that he wasn’t given a chance to respond to that point and others in the article.
Mr. Ellsberg tweeted a complaint about the article shortly after it was published, noting that he had given Mr. Sheehan a copy of the documents before The Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers. Mr. Ellsberg later criticized his treatment by The Times
in an interview
with The New Yorker.
Mr. Ellsberg’s son said his father was always willing to give the documents to The Times if he had a commitment that the paper would publish them — even at the expense of going to prison.
“The effect of not telling him, among other things, was that he was caught unprepared with a copy of the papers in his apartment where the F.B.I. could have swept in and found them,” Robert Ellsberg said.
The New York Times said on Monday that it had no comment about Mr. Ellsberg’s complaints about the relationship.
Months after the article about Mr. Sheehan, Mr. Ellsberg was a part of The Times’s 50th anniversary package about the Pentagon Papers. He gave numerous comments for an
oral history
. He also did an interview with the
opinion
section and for a
podcast
.
Still, he remained puzzled by some of his interactions with the newspaper. He sat for numerous interviews in his final year, including with Jill Abramson, a former executive editor at The Times, and James Risen, a former reporter at The Times who now works for The Intercept. In both interviews, Ms. Abramson and Mr. Risen said, he expressed his frustration with The Times.
Neither interview has been published. Ms. Abramson had been in discussions with The Times to write a guest opinion column about Mr. Ellsberg’s relationship with the company, though The Times later ran an opinion piece from a staff writer instead. Mr. Risen said his article, also about Mr. Ellsberg’s relationship with The Times, would be published soon.
In his 2002 memoir, “Secrets,” Mr. Ellsberg made clear that he was excited by the culmination of the story he had helped set into motion. Once he heard that the first article was being published, he bought a copy of the Sunday paper late on Saturday night with his wife.
“We came up the stairs into Harvard Square reading the front page, with the three-column story about the secret archive, feeling very good,” Mr. Ellsberg wrote.
|
The relationship between The New York Times and its most famous source, Daniel Ellsberg, reads like a thriller, replete with clandestine meetings, top secret documents and a war raging in the background.
The connection was mutually beneficial. For Mr. Ellsberg, a former military analyst who
died on Friday at age 92
, exposing a secret government history about the Vietnam War changed how the nation thought about a conflict that he opposed. And the 1971 publication of the documents, which became known as the Pentagon Papers, burnished The Times’s reputation as a government watchdog.
Yet Mr. Ellsberg had conflicted feelings about The Times.
Mr. Ellsberg was happy with the prominent coverage The Times gave the Pentagon Papers — “their courage in doing that and the risks they undertook” — Mr. Ellsberg’s son Robert said in an interview. And he respected Neil Sheehan, the main reporter on the story, believing he picked the right person for the leak.
But the younger Mr. Ellsberg said his father “had some regrets and resentment about the way he felt he’d been treated, which he felt was very unnecessary.”
In particular, Mr. Ellsberg was unhappy about being misled by Mr. Sheehan. Mr. Ellsberg was also upset by the way an article in The Times later conveyed how he had provided the documents.
Mr. Ellsberg and Mr. Sheehan discussed the Pentagon Papers at length in March 1971, during an hourslong conversation that stretched into the night. Mr. Ellsberg had smuggled the Pentagon Papers — all 7,000 pages of them — out of an office, past security guards, in the fall of 1969. He deputized Robert Ellsberg, who was then 13 years old, to help make copies.
Eventually, Mr. Ellsberg gave Mr. Sheehan access to the papers, but with a condition: Mr. Sheehan could study and take notes on the documents, but he couldn’t make copies of them.
Mr. Sheehan violated that agreement, making copies of the documents with the help of his wife, Susan Sheehan, a former writer for The New Yorker. Mr. Sheehan did not tell Mr. Ellsberg. Over the next several months, he misled Mr. Ellsberg about the newspaper’s timetable for publishing a story about the documents.
|
When The Times was closer to publishing its stories, Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Ellsberg for a full copy of the documents, believing that the request would be interpreted as a sign that the newspaper was preparing to publish a story. But Mr. Ellsberg missed the signal. He provided the documents but was surprised when The Times published the first article disclosing the documents on June 13, 1971.
The Nixon White House demanded that the paper stop publishing the information contained in the documents. The Times prevailed in court against the Nixon administration, setting a precedent blunting prior restraint by the government. Later, the government sought jail time for Mr. Ellsberg. A judge threw out the case against Mr. Ellsberg, citing government misconduct.
Decades later, on the day Mr. Sheehan died, The Times published an article about how the Pentagon Papers leak had happened. The article was based mostly on an interview with Mr. Sheehan that took place in 2015, in preparation for his obituary, the first time he had spoken at length publicly about his role in obtaining the papers. He granted the interview on the condition that his account wouldn’t be revealed until after his death, according to Janny Scott, the reporter who wrote the article.
“That prevented me from being able to run his account by anyone, including Mr. Ellsberg, until after Mr. Sheehan’s death,” said Ms. Scott, who left the paper years before the article was published.
In the interview, Mr. Sheehan said he had misled Mr. Ellsberg about the timing of the article because he was concerned that Mr. Ellsberg was acting irrational and might do something to jeopardize the story. He said the documents were too important to leave in his hands.
Mr. Ellsberg disagreed with Mr. Sheehan’s characterization that he was afraid of jail time, and he was unhappy that he wasn’t given a chance to respond to that point and others in the article.
Mr. Ellsberg tweeted a complaint about the article shortly after it was published, noting that he had given Mr. Sheehan a copy of the documents before The Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers. Mr. Ellsberg later criticized his treatment by The Times
in an interview
with The New Yorker.
Mr. Ellsberg’s son said his father was always willing to give the documents to The Times if he had a commitment that the paper would publish them — even at the expense of going to prison.
“The effect of not telling him, among other things, was that he was caught unprepared with a copy of the papers in his apartment where the F.B.I. could have swept in and found them,” Robert Ellsberg said.
The New York Times said on Monday that it had no comment about Mr. Ellsberg’s complaints about the relationship.
Months after the article about Mr. Sheehan, Mr. Ellsberg was a part of The Times’s 50th anniversary package about the Pentagon Papers. He gave numerous comments for an
oral history
. He also did an interview with the
opinion
section and for a
podcast
.
Still, he remained puzzled by some of his interactions with the newspaper. He sat for numerous interviews in his final year, including with Jill Abramson, a former executive editor at The Times, and James Risen, a former reporter at The Times who now works for The Intercept. In both interviews, Ms. Abramson and Mr. Risen said, he expressed his frustration with The Times.
Neither interview has been published. Ms. Abramson had been in discussions with The Times to write a guest opinion column about Mr. Ellsberg’s relationship with the company, though The Times later ran an opinion piece from a staff writer instead. Mr. Risen said his article, also about Mr. Ellsberg’s relationship with The Times, would be published soon.
In his 2002 memoir, “Secrets,” Mr. Ellsberg made clear that he was excited by the culmination of the story he had helped set into motion. Once he heard that the first article was being published, he bought a copy of the Sunday paper late on Saturday night with his wife.
“We came up the stairs into Harvard Square reading the front page, with the three-column story about the secret archive, feeling very good,” Mr. Ellsberg wrote.
|
359e074d-32e3-4f3e-84e5-5af69508fb5e
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/health/heat-health-seniors.html
|
Still Dreaming of Retirement in the Sun Belt?
|
2023-08-05
|
nytimes
|
In 2015, when Diana and Charles Cox were considering where to retire, they drove their R.V. across the Southwest to visit several possibilities: Santa Fe, Sedona, Phoenix, Las Vegas.
They’d lived in San Jose, Calif., for nearly 20 years, but Ms. Cox was winding down her practice as a biotech patent attorney, and her income was dropping as taxes, housing and other living costs were rising.
Her husband, 71, a contractor, had retired years earlier. “I was having more and more trouble paying the mortgage,” said Ms. Cox, who is 69.
Phoenix won out because of its lower costs, international airport and many health care providers, essential for two people with chronic medical conditions. The couple bought a house in a 55-plus community in suburban Goodyear, Ariz., in 2016. Knowing the summer heat there would be intense, they planned to spend the season back in the Bay Area in their R.V.
But the pandemic made travel feel unsafe for years. Mr. Cox underwent treatment for prostate cancer. Ms. Cox’s father moved in and needed care. So they have mostly summered in Goodyear.
The number of older Americans like the Coxes who are exposed to extreme heat
is increasing
, the result of an aging population, continuing migration to heat-prone places and climate change. Researchers say the trend will only get worse.
“The places that are hot now are precisely the places getting older,” said Deborah Carr, a sociologist at Boston University and lead author of a recent
study of population aging and heat exposure
.
Phoenix, long a retirement destination, has averaged 108 days a year of 100-plus degree temperatures since 1970. But this year has been brutal: By July 31, Phoenix had already reached 68 days this year with temperatures over 100 degrees. Temperatures hit at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit for 31 straight days, from the last day of June to the end of July, setting a record.
And hazardous heat returned to the city just this weekend.
Summer in the Phoenix suburbs has been “miserable,” Ms. Cox said, on a midmorning when the temperature in Goodyear had already reached 106. “You really can’t go out and do things. We haven’t been as sociable as I’d like.”
This year has been particularly miserable because a delayed home renovation project forced the couple to move into their R.V. for three months, starting in June. The vehicle’s two air conditioning units are struggling. So is the refrigerator, causing salads to wilt and milk to spoil.
“A couple of days ago it got up to 92 in here,” Ms. Cox said. “The cats were prostrate under the ceiling fan.” She called the inside heat “uncomfortable, but not deadly.”
Heat can indeed be deadly, though, particularly for seniors. Last year Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, recorded
425 heat-associated deaths,
a 25 percent increase from 2021. Two-thirds occurred in people over 50.
The
over-65 population increased
52 percent in Arizona between 2009 and 2019; it grew 57 percent in Nevada and 47 percent in Texas. That reflects the aging of current residents, but also continuing migration to those states.
The Census Bureau reported last year that more than
600,000 older adults moved to new states
annually from 2015 to 2019, with the greatest net migration to Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas.
At the same time, climate change is driving up temperatures in typically moderate locations. “The places that are already older — the Midwest, the Northeast, New England — are having heat exposure increase at the most rapid clip,” Dr. Carr said. “And we’re less prepared for it.”
Seniors, especially those with chronic illnesses like heart disease or diabetes, are
vulnerable to extreme heat
because they have more
trouble with thermoregulation,
the body’s ability to retain its temperature.
“Older bodies are less efficient at pumping blood to the skin and less efficient at sweating,” decreasing their ability to cool themselves, said Dr. Neelu Tummala, a surgeon and co-director of the Climate Health Institute at George Washington University.
“That makes it harder for the heart to pump,” she said, adding to cardiovascular stress and illness. Commonly used
medications
like diuretics and beta blockers can increase the risk of unnoticed dehydration.
The risk of kidney disease or failure rises. Struggles with mobility or cognition may prevent seniors from seeking relief.
“Extreme heat is the deadliest form of weather in the United States, much more than hurricanes or tornadoes or wildfires,” said Brian Stone, Jr., who teaches environmental planning at Georgia Tech.
He is lead author of a grim recent study estimating the
impact of a major blackout
during a powerful heat wave in three cities: Detroit, Atlanta and Phoenix — though the probability of such blackouts is increasing everywhere, Dr. Stone said. Electrical grid failures affecting more than 50,000 residents more than doubled in the most recent six years for which data was available.
The researchers’ models assumed five days of temperatures as high as 95 degrees (in Detroit), 97 degrees (Atlanta) and 113 degrees (Phoenix), combined with blackouts of all residences for 48 hours, followed by 72 hours of power restored gradually to the populace.
Heat-related deaths would exceed 220 in Detroit, which has fewer air-conditioned homes than many Southern cities, the study found. In Atlanta, the death toll would be six.
In Phoenix, the intense heat could kill more than 13,000 people — not a typo — and most would be older, as in virtually every natural disaster.
Yet Dr. Carr doubts even this summer’s extreme heat will dissuade moves to popular retirement spots. Apart from mild winters, “older adults want to move where the cost of living and housing costs are lower,” Dr. Carr said.
They may see summer heat as transient or aberrational, she noted, or “they may prioritize family over the possibility of heat waves.”
That’s exactly why Jean Swain Horton moved from Sacramento (itself a hot spot) to Frisco, Texas, two years ago. Her son and daughter-in-law were relocating with a new baby, Theo, and they wanted her to come along; she moved into the same apartment complex.
Ms. Horton, 67, doesn’t love staying mostly indoors for nearly five months of the year, or living in a darkened apartment with shades pulled to block the sun. But she loves being close to Theo and helping to care for him. “I would go anywhere to be near my grandson,” she said.
John Berger, 68 and newly retired, just sold his house near Long Beach, Calif., where he and his wife never installed or needed air conditioning. They’re heading to Albuquerque, where they plan to buy a house to share with their adult daughter and her roommate.
In Long Beach, he figures a multigenerational residence would cost at least $900,000, an unaffordable price for him as a retiree. In Albuquerque, he thinks he can spend half that.
True, Albuquerque will be hot, but it averages just four days a year of 100-plus temperatures (although this year the city tallied 15 such days through July).
“Perhaps it’s denial,” Mr. Berger said of the family’s decision to live with the heat. “Perhaps it’s, ‘I’ll figure out how to make it work for me.’ People learn to adapt.”
The Coxes have adapted. They have installed solar panels on their house and plan to buy a backup battery. In case of blackouts, there’s a backup generator for the R.V. Ms. Cox always takes water with her when she leaves the house.
In her overheated R.V., however, she sometimes yearns for the breezy Bay Area. San Jose’s number of days topping 100 degrees so far this year? Zero.
“If we could afford it, I’d move back to the California coast,” Ms. Cox said. “I prefer being able to open the windows.”
|
In 2015, when Diana and Charles Cox were considering where to retire, they drove their R.V. across the Southwest to visit several possibilities: Santa Fe, Sedona, Phoenix, Las Vegas.
They’d lived in San Jose, Calif., for nearly 20 years, but Ms. Cox was winding down her practice as a biotech patent attorney, and her income was dropping as taxes, housing and other living costs were rising.
Her husband, 71, a contractor, had retired years earlier. “I was having more and more trouble paying the mortgage,” said Ms. Cox, who is 69.
Phoenix won out because of its lower costs, international airport and many health care providers, essential for two people with chronic medical conditions. The couple bought a house in a 55-plus community in suburban Goodyear, Ariz., in 2016. Knowing the summer heat there would be intense, they planned to spend the season back in the Bay Area in their R.V.
But the pandemic made travel feel unsafe for years. Mr. Cox underwent treatment for prostate cancer. Ms. Cox’s father moved in and needed care. So they have mostly summered in Goodyear.
The number of older Americans like the Coxes who are exposed to extreme heat
is increasing
, the result of an aging population, continuing migration to heat-prone places and climate change. Researchers say the trend will only get worse.
“The places that are hot now are precisely the places getting older,” said Deborah Carr, a sociologist at Boston University and lead author of a recent
study of population aging and heat exposure
.
Phoenix, long a retirement destination, has averaged 108 days a year of 100-plus degree temperatures since 1970. But this year has been brutal: By July 31, Phoenix had already reached 68 days this year with temperatures over 100 degrees. Temperatures hit at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit for 31 straight days, from the last day of June to the end of July, setting a record.
And hazardous heat returned to the city just this weekend.
Summer in the Phoenix suburbs has been “miserable,” Ms. Cox said, on a midmorning when the temperature in Goodyear had already reached 106. “You really can’t go out and do things. We haven’t been as sociable as I’d like.”
This year has been
|
particularly miserable because a delayed home renovation project forced the couple to move into their R.V. for three months, starting in June. The vehicle’s two air conditioning units are struggling. So is the refrigerator, causing salads to wilt and milk to spoil.
“A couple of days ago it got up to 92 in here,” Ms. Cox said. “The cats were prostrate under the ceiling fan.” She called the inside heat “uncomfortable, but not deadly.”
Heat can indeed be deadly, though, particularly for seniors. Last year Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, recorded
425 heat-associated deaths,
a 25 percent increase from 2021. Two-thirds occurred in people over 50.
The
over-65 population increased
52 percent in Arizona between 2009 and 2019; it grew 57 percent in Nevada and 47 percent in Texas. That reflects the aging of current residents, but also continuing migration to those states.
The Census Bureau reported last year that more than
600,000 older adults moved to new states
annually from 2015 to 2019, with the greatest net migration to Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas.
At the same time, climate change is driving up temperatures in typically moderate locations. “The places that are already older — the Midwest, the Northeast, New England — are having heat exposure increase at the most rapid clip,” Dr. Carr said. “And we’re less prepared for it.”
Seniors, especially those with chronic illnesses like heart disease or diabetes, are
vulnerable to extreme heat
because they have more
trouble with thermoregulation,
the body’s ability to retain its temperature.
“Older bodies are less efficient at pumping blood to the skin and less efficient at sweating,” decreasing their ability to cool themselves, said Dr. Neelu Tummala, a surgeon and co-director of the Climate Health Institute at George Washington University.
“That makes it harder for the heart to pump,” she said, adding to cardiovascular stress and illness. Commonly used
medications
like diuretics and beta blockers can increase the risk of unnoticed dehydration.
The risk of kidney disease or failure rises. Struggles with mobility or cognition may prevent seniors from seeking relief.
“Extreme heat is the deadliest form of weather in the United States, much more than hurricanes or tornadoes or wildfires,” said Brian Stone, Jr., who teaches environmental planning at Georgia Tech.
He is lead author of a grim recent study estimating the
impact of a major blackout
during a powerful heat wave in three cities: Detroit, Atlanta and Phoenix — though the probability of such blackouts is increasing everywhere, Dr. Stone said. Electrical grid failures affecting more than 50,000 residents more than doubled in the most recent six years for which data was available.
The researchers’ models assumed five days of temperatures as high as 95 degrees (in Detroit), 97 degrees (Atlanta) and 113 degrees (Phoenix), combined with blackouts of all residences for 48 hours, followed by 72 hours of power restored gradually to the populace.
Heat-related deaths would exceed 220 in Detroit, which has fewer air-conditioned homes than many Southern cities, the study found. In Atlanta, the death toll would be six.
In Phoenix, the intense heat could kill more than 13,000 people — not a typo — and most would be older, as in virtually every natural disaster.
Yet Dr. Carr doubts even this summer’s extreme heat will dissuade moves to popular retirement spots. Apart from mild winters, “older adults want to move where the cost of living and housing costs are lower,” Dr. Carr said.
They may see summer heat as transient or aberrational, she noted, or “they may prioritize family over the possibility of heat waves.”
That’s exactly why Jean Swain Horton moved from Sacramento (itself a hot spot) to Frisco, Texas, two years ago. Her son and daughter-in-law were relocating with a new baby, Theo, and they wanted her to come along; she moved into the same apartment complex.
Ms. Horton, 67, doesn’t love staying mostly indoors for nearly five months of the year, or living in a darkened apartment with shades pulled to block the sun. But she loves being close to Theo and helping to care for him. “I would go anywhere to be near my grandson,” she said.
John Berger, 68 and newly retired, just sold his house near Long Beach, Calif., where he and his wife never installed or needed air conditioning. They’re heading to Albuquerque, where they plan to buy a house to share with their adult daughter and her roommate.
In Long Beach, he figures a multigenerational residence would cost at least $900,000, an unaffordable price for him as a retiree. In Albuquerque, he thinks he can spend half that.
True, Albuquerque will be hot, but it averages just four days a year of 100-plus temperatures (although this year the city tallied 15 such days through July).
“Perhaps it’s denial,” Mr. Berger said of the family’s decision to live with the heat. “Perhaps it’s, ‘I’ll figure out how to make it work for me.’ People learn to adapt.”
The Coxes have adapted. They have installed solar panels on their house and plan to buy a backup battery. In case of blackouts, there’s a backup generator for the R.V. Ms. Cox always takes water with her when she leaves the house.
In her overheated R.V., however, she sometimes yearns for the breezy Bay Area. San Jose’s number of days topping 100 degrees so far this year? Zero.
“If we could afford it, I’d move back to the California coast,” Ms. Cox said. “I prefer being able to open the windows.”
|
890fe21d-ba9c-4eb0-9a33-85ba2dd4c5b0
|
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/30/us/student-loan-forgiveness-supreme-court-decision.html
|
Read the document
|
2023-06-30
|
nytimes
|
6
BIDEN v. NEBRASKA
BARRETT, J., concurring
Harv. L. Rev. 2387, 2457 (2003) (Manning). To strip a word from its context is to strip that word of its meaning. Context is not found exclusively "within the four corners'
a statute." Id., at 2456. Background legal conventions, for instance, are part of the statute's context. F. Easterbrook, The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Revisited, 112 Harv. L. Rev. 1876, 1913 (1999) (“Language takes meaning from its linguistic context," as well as "historical and governmental contexts"). Thus, courts apply a presumption of mens rea to criminal statutes, Xiulu Ruan v. United States, 597 U. S. (2022) (slip op., at 5), and
a presumption of equitable tolling to statutes of limitations, Irwin v. Department of Veterans Affairs, 498 U. S. 89, 95– 96 (1990). It is also well established that "[w]here Congress employs a term of art obviously transplanted from another legal source, it brings the old soil with it." George v. McDonough, 596 U. S. (2022) (slip op., at 5) (internal quotation marks omitted). I could go on. See, e.g., Lexmark Int'l, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., 572 U. S. 118, 132 (2014) (federal causes of action are construed "to incorporate a requirement of proximate causation"); Wisconsin Dept. of Revenue v. William Wrigley, Jr., Co., 505 U. S. 214, 231 (1992) (“de minimis non curat lex"). As it happens, "[t]he notion that some things go without saying' applies to legislation just as it does to everyday life." Bond v. United States, 572 U. S. 844, 857 (2014).
O Context also includes common sense, which is another thing that “goes without saying." Case reporters and casebooks brim with illustrations of why literalism the antithesis of context-driven interpretation—falls short. Consider the classic example of a statute imposing criminal penalties on "whoever drew blood in the streets."" United States v. Kirby, 7 Wall. 482, 487 (1869). Read literally, the statute would cover a surgeon accessing a vein of a person in the street. But "common sense" counsels otherwise, ibid., be
|
6
BIDEN v. NEBRASKA
BARRETT, J., concurring
Harv. L. Rev. 2387, 2457 (2003) (Manning). To strip a word from its context is to strip that word of its meaning. Context is not found exclusively "within the four corners'
a statute." Id., at 2456. Background legal conventions, for instance, are part of the statute's context. F. Easterbrook, The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Revisited, 112 Harv. L. Rev. 1876, 1913 (1999) (“Language takes meaning from its linguistic context," as well as "historical and governmental contexts"). Thus, courts apply a presumption of mens rea to criminal statutes, Xiulu Ruan v. United States, 597 U. S. (2022) (slip op., at 5), and
a presumption of equitable tolling to statutes of limitations, Irwin v. Department of Veterans Affairs, 498 U. S. 89, 95– 96 (1990). It is also well established that "[w]here Congress employs a term of art obviously transplanted from another legal source, it brings the old soil with it." George v. McDonough, 596 U. S. (2022) (slip op., at 5) (internal quotation marks omitted). I could go on. See, e.g., Lexmark Int'l, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., 572 U. S. 118, 132 (2014) (federal causes of action are construed "to incorporate a requirement of proximate causation"); Wisconsin Dept. of Revenue v. William Wrigley, Jr., Co., 505 U. S. 214, 231 (1992) (“de minimis non curat lex"). As it happens, "[t]he notion that some things go without saying' applies to legislation just as it does to everyday life." Bond v. United States, 572 U. S. 8
|
44, 857 (2014).
O Context also includes common sense, which is another thing that “goes without saying." Case reporters and casebooks brim with illustrations of why literalism the antithesis of context-driven interpretation—falls short. Consider the classic example of a statute imposing criminal penalties on "whoever drew blood in the streets."" United States v. Kirby, 7 Wall. 482, 487 (1869). Read literally, the statute would cover a surgeon accessing a vein of a person in the street. But "common sense" counsels otherwise, ibid., be
|
a4b70012-535a-41c2-b1e1-2acc90a9661d
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/nyregion/armories-hotels-offices-where-new-york-could-house-migrants.html
|
Armories, Hotels, Offices: Where New York Could House Migrants
|
2023-08-03
|
nytimes
|
Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll see whether there’s really no space available for migrants as New York City’s shelter crisis continues. We’ll also look at Rudolph Giuliani, former prosecutor, former mayor and now Co-Conspirator 1.
“There is no more room,”
Mayor Eric Adams declared this week
as City Hall struggled to find space for thousands of migrants from the southern border — nearly 100,000 in the last year. Just last week, some 2,300 new migrants arrived.
Is the city really full? If not, where could asylum seekers go?
The answers from a handful of people with different perspectives — advocates for homeless people, hotel experts and a real estate appraiser — added up to this: There are no easy answers.
“It’s not that there’s no spaces, it’s that the spaces we have are encumbered by bureaucratic barriers that make it time-consuming and difficult to get people into them,” said
Catherine Trapani
, the executive director of
Homeless Services United
, a coalition of nonprofit agencies that serve homeless and at-risk adults.
Joshua Goldfein, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society, said “there’s full and there’s full” as he suggested that there were places where the city could set up cots, as it does in weather emergencies: drill floors in armories, cafeterias in shelters, school gyms.
But these are “places they couldn’t use on an ongoing basis,” Goldfein said before suggesting opening empty storefronts to house people. “If you just brought people inside, gave them a place that is not exposed to the weather,” he said, “that would be better.”
New York has opened 194 sites to house newcomers, including hotel ballrooms, former jails and an airport warehouse. The plan is to open a tent city in the parking lot of a psychiatric center in Queens soon, and Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services, said on Wednesday that “everything is on the table” in the hunt for more space.
The city has a legal requirement to provide shelter for anyone who wants it, and the city had been looking for space long before Mayor Adams put out what amounted to a “no vacancy” sign last month, when he discouraged asylum seekers from heading to New York. The Times reported in May
that city officials had approached large-scale landlords
and even the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey about finding spaces that could house migrants.
City Hall also looked at its own holdings: The mayor’s chief of staff told agency heads by email to list “any properties or spaces in your portfolio that may be available to be repurposed to house asylum seekers as temporary shelter spaces.”
On Wednesday, Williams-Isom appeared to play down the idea of setting up tents in Central Park, saying that plan had been leaked months ago and that there were “all kinds of sites that we have to look at, similar to when we went through the Covid emergency.” She said the city had “reviewed” more than 3,000 sites.
When she was asked if the city was looking to house migrants at the Javits Center, she said she would not answer “hypothetical questions.”
What about hotels beyond those that already house homeless people?
Vijay Dandapani
— the president and chief executive of the Hotel Association of New York City, a trade group — said that “there is potentially space,” but the calendar works against filling it with migrants. September is usually a busy month for hotels in New York, what with the United Nations General Assembly and the U.S. Open, 13 days of tennis ending on Sept. 10. “Then, from September all the way to the middle of December, the city is busy,” Dandapani said. “Assuming the crisis is still as extensive as it is today, it would be January before somebody decides to put their toes in this water.”
Sean Hennessey
, a hotel consultant and an associate professor at New York University, said some hotels might switch to housing asylum seekers because doing so can be “relatively favorable” for hotels. They do not have to staff ancillary services like meeting rooms that “are usually a break-even proposition or worse,” he said.
He said the city might also be able to work out deals with hotels now under construction, an option that could make hundreds if not thousands of rooms available — but probably not immediately.
Office conversions are also a long shot, said the appraiser Jonathan Miller, even though thousands of square feet of office space are vacant. The cost of remodeling made converting “a nonstarter for most developers.” Higher interest rates have only made the expense even “more problematic.”
“In the short term, this seems impossible,” he said. But as leases signed before the pandemic come up for renewal and tenants assess their space needs in a world with continuing remote work, “I think there’s going to be a lot of distressed commercial office space.” The eventual result: Corner offices could become living rooms and break rooms could become kitchens.
Weather
Enjoy a mostly sunny day near the low 80s. Expect a chance of showers and thunderstorm in the evening, with temps around 70.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption).
The latest Metro news
Prosecutor, mayor and now Co-Conspirator 1
Rudolph Giuliani’s name is nowhere in the indictment accusing former President Donald Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. But Giuliani — a former federal prosecutor, former Justice Department official, former mayor and former lawyer for Trump — appeared to be the person referred to in the indictment as Co-Conspirator 1. Giuliani’s own lawyer acknowledged it.
Giuliani figures in the three conspiracies the indictment says took place, leaving open the possibility that he could be charged later. So, as my colleague Jonah E. Bromwich writes, Giuliani, who made his name as a lawman,
now faces a reckoning with the law
.
Giuliani’s relationship with Trump hangs in the balance. A person close to Trump who spoke confidentially to describe a private relationship said that they don’t speak regularly, but the former president retains a fondness that goes back to Giuliani’s time in City Hall, when they dealt with each other often.
Their relationship has appeared strained in the last couple of years. Trump told advisers in 2021 that
he did not want Giuliani paid
for his efforts on Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election. This year, filings suggest, Trump’s super PAC paid $340,000 to a legal vendor working on Giuliani’s behalf. The $340,000 payment was made weeks before Giuliani met voluntarily with lawyers from the office of Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the investigations of Trump.
Dear Diary:
Life is slow these days. I check my lobby for packages scheduled to arrive, even though UPS sends me alerts and delivers to my door.
Today, hearing a distant buzzer, I went down just in case. No package, but a woman carrying groceries was waiting outside. The latch stuck as I opened the door.
“Buzzer not working?” she asked.
“It worked earlier today,” I said.
We stepped over to the elevator. Inside was my next-door neighbor, an older woman named Oneida. She had come down to meet her helper. She lit up when she saw us.
She sometimes pops into the hall in her robe and slippers if I’m singing outside my door. She blows me kisses, and I usually get a hug.
|
Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll see whether there’s really no space available for migrants as New York City’s shelter crisis continues. We’ll also look at Rudolph Giuliani, former prosecutor, former mayor and now Co-Conspirator 1.
“There is no more room,”
Mayor Eric Adams declared this week
as City Hall struggled to find space for thousands of migrants from the southern border — nearly 100,000 in the last year. Just last week, some 2,300 new migrants arrived.
Is the city really full? If not, where could asylum seekers go?
The answers from a handful of people with different perspectives — advocates for homeless people, hotel experts and a real estate appraiser — added up to this: There are no easy answers.
“It’s not that there’s no spaces, it’s that the spaces we have are encumbered by bureaucratic barriers that make it time-consuming and difficult to get people into them,” said
Catherine Trapani
, the executive director of
Homeless Services United
, a coalition of nonprofit agencies that serve homeless and at-risk adults.
Joshua Goldfein, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society, said “there’s full and there’s full” as he suggested that there were places where the city could set up cots, as it does in weather emergencies: drill floors in armories, cafeterias in shelters, school gyms.
But these are “places they couldn’t use on an ongoing basis,” Goldfein said before suggesting opening empty storefronts to house people. “If you just brought people inside, gave them a place that is not exposed to the weather,” he said, “that would be better.”
New York has opened 194 sites to house newcomers, including hotel ballrooms, former jails and an airport warehouse. The plan is to open a tent city in the parking lot of a psychiatric center in Queens soon, and Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services, said on Wednesday that “everything is on the table” in the hunt for more space.
The city has a legal requirement to provide shelter for anyone who wants it, and the city had been looking for space long before Mayor Adams put out what amounted to a “no vacancy” sign last month, when he discouraged asylum seekers from heading to New York. The Times reported in May
that city officials had approached large-scale landlords
and even the Port Authority of
|
New York and New Jersey about finding spaces that could house migrants.
City Hall also looked at its own holdings: The mayor’s chief of staff told agency heads by email to list “any properties or spaces in your portfolio that may be available to be repurposed to house asylum seekers as temporary shelter spaces.”
On Wednesday, Williams-Isom appeared to play down the idea of setting up tents in Central Park, saying that plan had been leaked months ago and that there were “all kinds of sites that we have to look at, similar to when we went through the Covid emergency.” She said the city had “reviewed” more than 3,000 sites.
When she was asked if the city was looking to house migrants at the Javits Center, she said she would not answer “hypothetical questions.”
What about hotels beyond those that already house homeless people?
Vijay Dandapani
— the president and chief executive of the Hotel Association of New York City, a trade group — said that “there is potentially space,” but the calendar works against filling it with migrants. September is usually a busy month for hotels in New York, what with the United Nations General Assembly and the U.S. Open, 13 days of tennis ending on Sept. 10. “Then, from September all the way to the middle of December, the city is busy,” Dandapani said. “Assuming the crisis is still as extensive as it is today, it would be January before somebody decides to put their toes in this water.”
Sean Hennessey
, a hotel consultant and an associate professor at New York University, said some hotels might switch to housing asylum seekers because doing so can be “relatively favorable” for hotels. They do not have to staff ancillary services like meeting rooms that “are usually a break-even proposition or worse,” he said.
He said the city might also be able to work out deals with hotels now under construction, an option that could make hundreds if not thousands of rooms available — but probably not immediately.
Office conversions are also a long shot, said the appraiser Jonathan Miller, even though thousands of square feet of office space are vacant. The cost of remodeling made converting “a nonstarter for most developers.” Higher interest rates have only made the expense even “more problematic.”
“In the short term, this seems impossible,” he said. But as leases signed before the pandemic come up for renewal and tenants assess their space needs in a world with continuing remote work, “I think there’s going to be a lot of distressed commercial office space.” The eventual result: Corner offices could become living rooms and break rooms could become kitchens.
Weather
Enjoy a mostly sunny day near the low 80s. Expect a chance of showers and thunderstorm in the evening, with temps around 70.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption).
The latest Metro news
Prosecutor, mayor and now Co-Conspirator 1
Rudolph Giuliani’s name is nowhere in the indictment accusing former President Donald Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. But Giuliani — a former federal prosecutor, former Justice Department official, former mayor and former lawyer for Trump — appeared to be the person referred to in the indictment as Co-Conspirator 1. Giuliani’s own lawyer acknowledged it.
Giuliani figures in the three conspiracies the indictment says took place, leaving open the possibility that he could be charged later. So, as my colleague Jonah E. Bromwich writes, Giuliani, who made his name as a lawman,
now faces a reckoning with the law
.
Giuliani’s relationship with Trump hangs in the balance. A person close to Trump who spoke confidentially to describe a private relationship said that they don’t speak regularly, but the former president retains a fondness that goes back to Giuliani’s time in City Hall, when they dealt with each other often.
Their relationship has appeared strained in the last couple of years. Trump told advisers in 2021 that
he did not want Giuliani paid
for his efforts on Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election. This year, filings suggest, Trump’s super PAC paid $340,000 to a legal vendor working on Giuliani’s behalf. The $340,000 payment was made weeks before Giuliani met voluntarily with lawyers from the office of Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the investigations of Trump.
Dear Diary:
Life is slow these days. I check my lobby for packages scheduled to arrive, even though UPS sends me alerts and delivers to my door.
Today, hearing a distant buzzer, I went down just in case. No package, but a woman carrying groceries was waiting outside. The latch stuck as I opened the door.
“Buzzer not working?” she asked.
“It worked earlier today,” I said.
We stepped over to the elevator. Inside was my next-door neighbor, an older woman named Oneida. She had come down to meet her helper. She lit up when she saw us.
She sometimes pops into the hall in her robe and slippers if I’m singing outside my door. She blows me kisses, and I usually get a hug.
|
dd23a775-ba3b-408e-adf8-be997e640950
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/us/politics/trump-2024-nevada-caucus.html
|
In Las Vegas, Trump Turns His Focus Back to Biden
|
2024-01-27
|
nytimes
|
Former President Donald J. Trump, who has been itching for months to focus on a likely matchup between him and President Biden in November, previewed on Saturday a likely general-election message, extensively attacking Mr. Biden at an event in Nevada, a critical battleground state.
Further proof of Nevada’s importance could be seen a mile away, where Vice President Kamala Harris cast the fight against Mr. Trump, should he wrap up the nomination, as a battle for democracy.
Though Mr. Trump was ostensibly visiting Las Vegas to encourage his supporters to turn out for the Nevada caucuses on Feb. 8, he devoted much of his speech to Mr. Biden’s handling of the surge of crossings at the southern border, which he called “a weapon of mass destruction” internally destroying the United States.
And Mr. Trump, who currently faces four criminal cases that he casts — without evidence — as attempts by Mr. Biden to wrest the election from him, wielded the language of the justice system to suit his purposes.
“What Joe Biden doing is a crime against our nation,” Mr. Trump said. He later added: “With your vote, he will be judged and convicted by the American people for this atrocity that he’s done.”
Saturday’s speech was in many ways a return to form after a month in which Mr. Trump had escalated his attacks against his rivals in the Republican presidential primary as he scored decisive wins in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Mr. Trump now seems to be marching toward the general election, but he is not yet the party’s nominee, and his lone remaining rival for the nomination, Nikki Haley,
is doing everything she can to remind him
that she remains in the race.
Mr. Trump’s supporters on Saturday said they had largely moved past the Republican contest, though Ms. Haley is still running. “It’s like the Kenny Rogers song — you need to know when to fold ’em,” Joe Sandoval, 74, said. “I don’t think she’s even a concern for him at this point.”
Mr. Trump and his team are preparing to fight Ms. Haley in her home state of South Carolina, the site of their next electoral battle, on Feb. 24. The former president took glancing swipes at her on Saturday, mostly accusing her of betraying Republican ideals and her conservative roots.
“Nikki Haley made a corrupt deal to sell out to the radical left, taking the Democrat money from donors,” Mr. Trump said.
But Mr. Trump’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses is a foregone conclusion. Ms. Haley is on the ballot for a presidential primary on Feb. 6 that will not count toward the G.O.P. nomination, so she is skipping the state entirely. The caucuses — which will determine who gets the state’s delegate prize — feature Mr. Trump without a single major competitor.
“Nevada will certainly be a good messaging opportunity for Trump, because he’s going to win all the delegates here, and he will win unopposed,” said Jeremy Gelman, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno. “He will be able to say he swept Nevada.”
Still, those attending Mr. Trump’s speech in Las Vegas, held at Big League Dreams, a sports park, admitted to some confusion over the dueling contests, an issue Mr. Trump addressed.
“Don’t worry about the primary, just do the caucus,” Mr. Trump told his supporters.
Later, he delivered a more mixed message. “Don’t waste your time on primary,” he said. “Waste all of your time on caucus.”
His phrasing, inadvertent or not, reflects the view of the primary that Mr. Trump, long the front-runner, has had for months: that it is a distraction delaying him from taking on Mr. Biden.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump attacked a Biden-backed bipartisan immigration deal, saying it was “not designed to stop illegal immigration.” Mr. Trump has been pressing Republican senators to oppose a deal, and he told them in his speech to “blame me” if it failed.
He also signaled his intent to court Hispanic voters, a key constituency in Nevada, and an important part of the Democratic coalition. Polls have shown Mr. Trump gaining their support.
Mr. Trump charged that Mr. Biden had “devastated the Latino community” economically, and said Hispanics had been “better off” financially under his administration.
He also suggested that Black and Latino voters were the “single most affected people by what’s happening at our border," but provided no specifics.
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, Ammar Moussa, said, “Donald Trump demonstrated tonight he’s campaigning against solutions for the American people, and is actively rooting against America,” adding that Mr. Biden was “the only candidate focused on governing and addressing the issues the American people demand action on.”
Both parties are looking to November: Outside Mr. Trump’s event, the Democratic National Committee flew a plane overhead with a banner reading “Donald Trump: Ban Abortion, Punish Women.” The party is expected to make abortion a central issue in November.
A mile away, Vice President Harris’s event felt like an alternative universe, with some voters wearing masks and voicing support for gun control while an Olivia Rodrigo song played and a local dance team performed.
Ms. Harris riled up the crowd with a list of the administration’s accomplishments and suggested that they contrasted with Mr. Trump’s priorities.
“In his comments today, as always, he made clear his fight is not for the people. His fight is for himself,” she said, as hundreds booed.
“Freedom is on the ballot, and our democracy is on the ballot,” Ms. Harris said. “This is about standing for the kind of country we want to live in.”
Sara Diss, 74, said she would be voting to re-elect Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris. “I want somebody that is going to protect democracy,” she said. “Trump, he’s out to get revenge.”
Still, even at an event aimed at generating excitement among the Democratic faithful, some voters acknowledged harboring doubts.
Daphne Silva, 25, said she had always voted for Democrats, including for Mr. Biden in 2020, and planned to vote for him again in November.
But, she added, “I’m a little bit hesitant based on the stuff he’s doing around the war.” She said she wished that he would be more critical of sending aid to Israel and that Democrats had fielded a larger roster of candidates for voters to choose from.
“I wish there were more options,” Ms. Silva said, “but I think it’s too late.”
|
Former President Donald J. Trump, who has been itching for months to focus on a likely matchup between him and President Biden in November, previewed on Saturday a likely general-election message, extensively attacking Mr. Biden at an event in Nevada, a critical battleground state.
Further proof of Nevada’s importance could be seen a mile away, where Vice President Kamala Harris cast the fight against Mr. Trump, should he wrap up the nomination, as a battle for democracy.
Though Mr. Trump was ostensibly visiting Las Vegas to encourage his supporters to turn out for the Nevada caucuses on Feb. 8, he devoted much of his speech to Mr. Biden’s handling of the surge of crossings at the southern border, which he called “a weapon of mass destruction” internally destroying the United States.
And Mr. Trump, who currently faces four criminal cases that he casts — without evidence — as attempts by Mr. Biden to wrest the election from him, wielded the language of the justice system to suit his purposes.
“What Joe Biden doing is a crime against our nation,” Mr. Trump said. He later added: “With your vote, he will be judged and convicted by the American people for this atrocity that he’s done.”
Saturday’s speech was in many ways a return to form after a month in which Mr. Trump had escalated his attacks against his rivals in the Republican presidential primary as he scored decisive wins in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Mr. Trump now seems to be marching toward the general election, but he is not yet the party’s nominee, and his lone remaining rival for the nomination, Nikki Haley,
is doing everything she can to remind him
that she remains in the race.
Mr. Trump’s supporters on Saturday said they had largely moved past the Republican contest, though Ms. Haley is still running. “It’s like the Kenny Rogers song — you need to know when to fold ’em,” Joe Sandoval, 74, said. “I don’t think she’s even a concern for him at this point.”
Mr. Trump and his team are preparing to fight Ms. Haley in her home state of South Carolina, the site of their next electoral battle, on Feb. 24. The former president took glancing swipes at her on Saturday, mostly accusing her of betraying Republican ideals and her conservative roots.
“Nikki Haley made a corrupt deal to sell out to the radical left, taking the Democrat money from donors,” Mr. Trump said.
But Mr. Trump
|
’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses is a foregone conclusion. Ms. Haley is on the ballot for a presidential primary on Feb. 6 that will not count toward the G.O.P. nomination, so she is skipping the state entirely. The caucuses — which will determine who gets the state’s delegate prize — feature Mr. Trump without a single major competitor.
“Nevada will certainly be a good messaging opportunity for Trump, because he’s going to win all the delegates here, and he will win unopposed,” said Jeremy Gelman, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno. “He will be able to say he swept Nevada.”
Still, those attending Mr. Trump’s speech in Las Vegas, held at Big League Dreams, a sports park, admitted to some confusion over the dueling contests, an issue Mr. Trump addressed.
“Don’t worry about the primary, just do the caucus,” Mr. Trump told his supporters.
Later, he delivered a more mixed message. “Don’t waste your time on primary,” he said. “Waste all of your time on caucus.”
His phrasing, inadvertent or not, reflects the view of the primary that Mr. Trump, long the front-runner, has had for months: that it is a distraction delaying him from taking on Mr. Biden.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump attacked a Biden-backed bipartisan immigration deal, saying it was “not designed to stop illegal immigration.” Mr. Trump has been pressing Republican senators to oppose a deal, and he told them in his speech to “blame me” if it failed.
He also signaled his intent to court Hispanic voters, a key constituency in Nevada, and an important part of the Democratic coalition. Polls have shown Mr. Trump gaining their support.
Mr. Trump charged that Mr. Biden had “devastated the Latino community” economically, and said Hispanics had been “better off” financially under his administration.
He also suggested that Black and Latino voters were the “single most affected people by what’s happening at our border," but provided no specifics.
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, Ammar Moussa, said, “Donald Trump demonstrated tonight he’s campaigning against solutions for the American people, and is actively rooting against America,” adding that Mr. Biden was “the only candidate focused on governing and addressing the issues the American people demand action on.”
Both parties are looking to November: Outside Mr. Trump’s event, the Democratic National Committee flew a plane overhead with a banner reading “Donald Trump: Ban Abortion, Punish Women.” The party is expected to make abortion a central issue in November.
A mile away, Vice President Harris’s event felt like an alternative universe, with some voters wearing masks and voicing support for gun control while an Olivia Rodrigo song played and a local dance team performed.
Ms. Harris riled up the crowd with a list of the administration’s accomplishments and suggested that they contrasted with Mr. Trump’s priorities.
“In his comments today, as always, he made clear his fight is not for the people. His fight is for himself,” she said, as hundreds booed.
“Freedom is on the ballot, and our democracy is on the ballot,” Ms. Harris said. “This is about standing for the kind of country we want to live in.”
Sara Diss, 74, said she would be voting to re-elect Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris. “I want somebody that is going to protect democracy,” she said. “Trump, he’s out to get revenge.”
Still, even at an event aimed at generating excitement among the Democratic faithful, some voters acknowledged harboring doubts.
Daphne Silva, 25, said she had always voted for Democrats, including for Mr. Biden in 2020, and planned to vote for him again in November.
But, she added, “I’m a little bit hesitant based on the stuff he’s doing around the war.” She said she wished that he would be more critical of sending aid to Israel and that Democrats had fielded a larger roster of candidates for voters to choose from.
“I wish there were more options,” Ms. Silva said, “but I think it’s too late.”
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.