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Porn Star Alana Evans Melania Probably Knows About Donald's Affairs 1/26/2018 TMZ.com Alana Evans isn't shying away from the story about Donald Trump's alleged tryst with fellow porn star Stormy Daniels back in 2006 ... because she thinks it's par for the course for guys like him. We got the porn Hall of Famer at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo Thursday night in Vegas, and asked her about Stormy's alleged romp with the Prez. Alana suggests we all know what went down, even though Stormy's not talking. More interesting, though, is how Alana feels about the First Lady. She believes Melania should stick with Donald despite his alleged affairs, and says it could be part of their arrangement. Oh, and if the Trumps ever want to party with her, Alana's down ... especially with Melania.	1
Business\|Chief of Sprout Is Leaving the Companyhttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/chief-of-sprout-is-leaving-the-company.htmlCredit...Sprout PharmaceuticalsDec. 9, 2015Cindy Whitehead, who oversaw a long, but ultimately successful, effort to bring to market the first prescription drug to enhance womens sexual drive, is leaving her post as chief executive of Sprout Pharmaceuticals.In August, the Food and Drug Administration approved Sprouts Addyi, often referred to as the little pink pill, after rejecting it in 2010 and in 2013 on concerns about side effects and limited effectiveness.Shortly after the approval, Sprout, which was privately held, agreed to be acquired by Valeant Pharmaceuticals for $1 billion.Thanks to the efforts of Cindy and her team, Valeant has the opportunity to make Addyi broadly available to patients in need of this important medical treatment, Valeants senior vice president for investor relations, Laurie Little, said in a statement. Having built a team to take Addyi to market, we mutually agreed that it was the right time to transition to new leadership for the next phase of global commercialization. After Addyi, also known as flibanserin, was initially rejected by the F.D.A., the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim dropped it. Ms. Whitehead and her husband, Robert, both pharmaceutical industry veterans, formed Sprout in 2011 to acquire it.For the Whiteheads and other executives, the Valeant acquisition was a financial coup. But the drug has gotten off to a slow start. In the weeks after its October debut, just a few hundred prescriptions were filed for Addyi, according to Bloomberg. That is in sharp contrast to the introduction of Pfizers Viagra, the so-called little blue pill aimed at treating erectile dysfunction in men. Viagra was a blockbuster from the start in 1998 and last year Pfizer sold nearly $1.7 billion of it.With financial help from Sprout, womens groups and other supporters started a campaign to win F.D.A. approval for Addyi, noting that the agency had approved comparable treatments for men.Sprouts effort succeeded but the F.D.A.s approval came with a boxed warning, alerting patients not to take the drug with alcohol. Women with impaired liver function were also advised not to take it.Ms. Whitehead will continue to consult with Valeant and Sprout executives after her departure, according to the statement from Valeant.	0
Science\|Magnifying the World of Beauty That Lives Under a Microscopehttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/science/carl-struwe-microscopic-photography.htmlTrilobitesCredit...Carl StrweApril 5, 2016In the 1920s, before matter could be magnified millions of times under electron microscopes, a German graphic designer was developing his own techniques for capturing the minute wonders of organic life.Carl Strwe never gained fame during his lifetime, but over the decades his stark images of diatoms, spermatozoa and other life under the microscope have gathered admirers for their distinctive artistry. A selection of his works will go on display at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York starting April 14.ImageCredit...Carl StrweWhen Mr. Strwe began making photographs, he used microscopes that could only magnify items up to 2,000 times. The traditional scientific view under a microscope was rounded, so Mr. Strwe cut black pieces of paper into rectangular shapes and set them over the biological subject matter in his slides. He then pointed his camera into the eye of the microscope, capturing the scene he had composed under the microscope.The thoughtful way that he positioned his subjects in the microscope his canvases is what made his work so pioneering, said Gottfried Jger, a photographer in Bielefeld, Germany, who is the administrator of Mr. Strwes estate. Mr. Strwe saw great artistic potential, Mr. Jger said, where before him, many only saw the objectivity of science.ImageCredit...Carl StrweMr. Struwes work had little impact outside of Germany during his life because he lacked resources and did not speak languages other than German.He was a poor man, not very successful with his work during his own life, said Mr. Jger.Mr. Strwe did make some appearances in the United States, including a Brooklyn Museum show in 1949. A number of his photos were also used in scientific texts, including this biology textbook from 1957.ImageCredit...Gottfried JgerThe work of Carl Strwe may mean more to art history than to science. But Mr. Jger believes there is something to be learned from these photographs, even if they do not do much to further objective knowledge.They open a window in this fantastic, non-visible world, he wrote in an email. He visualizes its meaning and beauty as its own reality.	7
Politics\|Black voters and faith leaders rejoice at Warnocks historic win: I think it speaks volumes.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/black-voters-and-faith-leaders-rejoice-at-warnocks-historic-win-i-think-it-speaks-volumes.htmlCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesJan. 6, 2021ATLANTA Michael Simmons, 63, has not missed voting in a major election since 1976. The most important for him was 2008, when he cast a ballot for President Barack Obama. But his votes in Novembers general election and the Senate runoffs on Tuesday were ranked closely behind.The Rev. Raphael Warnocks success in the Senate runoffs sent a jolt of jubilation through much of Georgias African-American community, as they saw a Black man taking an office that had been held by segregationists when he was born. There was also a level of pride in having an emissary of the Black church serve in the highest levels of government.I never would have thunk put that down, thunk! Id see this happen, said Mr. Simmons, a manager at a nonprofit organization in downtown Atlanta. Personally, I dont expect the world to change because we have a Black man in the Senate, but we can see progress.The office of the nonprofit where Mr. Simmons works is just a few blocks from Ebenezer Baptist Church, the renowned congregation that Mr. Warnock leads. Mr. Simmons often saw Mr. Warnock walking around the neighborhood.The win carried enormous significance for him: This was a place where for many years we got the short end of the stick, Mr. Simmons, who grew up in Alabama and moved to Atlanta after college, said.He also thought the rest of the country now owed a debt to Georgia for the work of the states Black voters and particularly the efforts of Stacey Abrams. I think there ought to be a lot of gratitude for what weve done.Dorothy Boler, who moved to Atlanta from Chicago 25 years ago, said she had been proud to cast her ballot for Mr. Warnock during the early voting period. I praised the Lord he got in there, she said. Were going to make history.African-American faith leaders said on Wednesday that they, too, were thrilled with Mr. Warnocks victory, which they also saw as a rebuke of his Republican opponent, Kelly Loeffler, who had portrayed him as a radical and socialist and had attacked him using excerpts from his sermons that he and his supporters said were taken out of context. I went all over this state, said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, the presiding prelate in Georgia of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Blacks couldnt wait to get to the polls. She gave us more reasons to get out to vote couldnt wait to vote just to vote against her.On Wednesday afternoon, he compared the celebration in Georgia with the turmoil in Washington, where a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, and said it underscored for him a transformation happening not just in his state but across the country, one that gives him optimism.I think it speaks volumes and I think that, despite what you see on television like this, there is still a part of this country that is coming together, Bishop Jackson said. Thats the group that Trump speaks for, he added, referring to the rioters, but its a dwindling portion of the country.	3
United States 7, Slovakia 1Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesFeb. 13, 2014SOCHI, Russia His familys background could have made the game more complicated for United States forward Paul Stastny, so on the eve of his Sochi Games debut, his father, Peter, kept his advice simple. Have fun, he told his son, and savor every shift.Stastny, a second-time, second-generation Olympian, appreciated the reminder. After the Americans 7-1 victory over Slovakia in the teams tournament opener at Shayba Arena, he said, All of us are at such a young age, we take everything for granted.The Slovakian hockey family a group that includes the Stastnys is still working through a mournful reminder of lifes unpredictability, which is why Stastny, 28, was hardly the only player fighting through labyrinthine emotions Thursday.For the first time since 1998, the Slovakian Olympic squad does not include Pavol Demitra, a center who was quick with his stick and a quip. At the 2010 Olympics, he scored one of the more memorable goals, flipping the puck past Ilya Bryzgalov to give Slovakia a 2-1 shootout victory over Russia.Demitra, who finished as the leading scorer in Vancouver for the fourth-place Slovaks, died in the 2011 plane crash that killed 43 members of the Kontinental Hockey League team Lokomotiv.Demitra, who was 36, had 21 points in three Olympics. The wings whom he centered in 2010, the brothers Marian and Marcel Hossa, were on the ice against the Americans, but the hole in Slovakias offense was gaping. The U.S. team outshot Slovakia, 11-4, in the first period and 33-23 over all.ImageCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesWeve got different team than in 2010, said Marian Hossa, who plays for the Chicago Blackhawks. We dont have lots of big guys on the team. Most of the younger guys, they will have to adjust and prove theyre good players.In Vancouver, Hossa, his brother and Marian Gaborik, who is out of these Olympics with a broken collarbone, shared living quarters with Demitra.It is always in your head, and hes always with us, Marian Hossa said.Marcel Hossa, who plays for the K.H.L. team in Riga, Latvia, said that whenever he is home for a break, he visits Demitras grave and lights a memorial candle for him.Before a practice, Marcel Hossa said, the Slovaks exchanged their favorite stories about Demitra, who was known for his playful nature and for his pressure- and belly-busting jokes.He was a great person, a great leader, Hossa said. We cannot forget about it, you know?Demitra was an ethereal presence Thursday, and not just on the Slovakian side. Stastny, whose father carried the flag in the opening ceremony for Slovakia during its first Winter Olympics as an independent nation in 1994, contributed two goals, both during the Americans six-goal second period.His family, Stastny said, had a close relationship with Demitra, who logged 16 seasons in the National Hockey League. Demitra played for the Kings in Los Angeles, where one of his teammates was Dustin Brown, who scored the United States seventh goal.Asked about Demitra after the game, Brown drew in a deep breath. Everyone who played with Pav understood what type of player he was, but more important, what type of person he was, said Brown, adding that Demitra kept the dressing room loose.He was the guy who would balance out the coach, Brown said with a smile. The coach would come in and say one thing, and in a not-so-direct way, in a good way, right after the coach left, hed say, How about we do it this way?Demitra probably would have had something helpful to say after the United States scored on its first four shots in the second period to break open a 1-1 tie. The scoring flurry prompted the Slovakian coach, Vladimir Vujtek, to pull goaltender Jaroslav Halak. His replacement, Peter Budaj, let in two goals in his first two minutes.The Slovaks, whose lone goal came from the 23-year-old forward Tomas Tatar early in the second, are a team in transition. Two players from Demitras generation, Miroslav Satan and Jozef Stumpel, were not named to the Olympic squad. A third, Zigmund Palffy, retired last year. Until the next wave forms and crests, Demitras absence will be a black veil, darkening these international competitions for those who knew and loved him.You always think about those players that you played with, Brown said, and Pav was one of those players for me.RUSSIA 5, SLOVENIA 2 Alex Ovechkin scored 1 minute 17 seconds after the puck dropped with a wrist shot that made the crowd roar. He made the flag-waving fans gasp 2:37 later with a drop pass to set up Evgeni Malkins goal to give Russia a 2-0 lead.We started well, got the lead, and then we stopped playing, Ovechkin said.The result was a closer-than-expected win over Slovenia, which was playing in the Olympics for the first time.That led one Russian reporter to tell Coach Zinetula Bilyaletdinov that it would be a death sentence to start goaltender Semyon Varlamov, who gave up two goals on 14 shots, against the United States on Saturday.Ziga Jeglic had two goals in the second period for Slovenia one before Malkin scored and one after to pull his team within a goal. (AP)CANADA 3, NORWAY 1 Shea Weber and Jamie Benn scored in the second period to help Canada, the defending Olympic champion, shake off a sluggish start.Patrick Thoresen pulled the Norwegians within a goal on a power play 22 seconds into the third, but Drew Doughty restored the two-goal lead 1:25 later.Canada goaltender Carey Price made 19 saves in his Olympic debut, which included a giveaway that led to the only goal he allowed. Roberto Luongo, who helped the Canadians win gold in 2010 as the host nation, is scheduled to start Fridays game against Austria. (AP)FINLAND 8, AUSTRIA 4 Jarkko Immonen and Mikael Granlund each scored two goals for Finland, which played the final two periods without its injured captain, Teemu Selanne.Selanne, 43, in his record-tying sixth Olympics, is expected to play against Norway on Friday.Michael Grabner of the Islanders had three goals for Austria, which had two early leads before Finland took control. (AP)	4
Credit...Katie OBrienMarch 21, 2016With mothers and medical providers clamoring for answers about postpartum depression, scientists are beginning a major effort to understand the genetic underpinnings of mood disorders that afflict millions of women during and after pregnancy.Researchers led by a University of North Carolina team will use a new iPhone app to recruit women who have had postpartum depression. The goal is to collect about 100,000 DNA samples and compare them with DNA from women who have never experienced depression in hopes of discovering genetic factors that could lead to better prediction, diagnosis and treatment for maternal mental illness.Attempts to find clear genetic clues to depression in the general population have yielded few results so far, and some experts questioned whether the new effort, announced Monday, would be any more promising. But the teams theory is that postpartum depression may be distinct, involving genes with more identifiable effects because they act during or soon after pregnancy.From a genetic standpoint, this is the right time biologically to do this, said Dr. Patrick F. Sullivan, director of the University of North Carolinas Center for Psychiatric Genomics, who will lead the projects genetic analysis.The free app, PPD ACT, will be offered in the United States, Australia and Britain, and is likely to be extended to other countries, said Dr. Samantha Meltzer-Brody, director of the University of North Carolinas perinatal psychiatry program and the projects leader. To make sure this is not just a study of iPhone-using people, Dr. Meltzer-Brody said, iPad versions of the app will be available in some urban and rural clinics, and patients who want to provide their DNA will right then and there be offered a spit kit.The app, to be promoted by Apple as an expansion of its ResearchKit software for medical data collection, poses questions about sadness, anxiety or panic after childbirth in an effort to assess whether women have experienced serious postpartum depression. Women with high scores are asked if they want to submit DNA; if so, they will be mailed a kit to donate their saliva. Names and email addresses will be required, Dr. Meltzer-Brody said, but the project will encrypt personal data.Once enough samples are collected, each will be individually genotyped for something like 600,000 genetic markers scattered throughout the genome, Dr. Sullivan said. The comparison group will be demographically similar women who have been pregnant at least twice but never experienced depression. Are there regions of the genome where women with postpartum depression differ systematically from women without? Dr. Sullivan asked.Anjene Addington, chief of the genomics research branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, which is providing the kits to collect saliva, said the project aimed to collect thousands of DNA samples from a diverse group of women.As we learn more about genetic research on psychiatric disorders, we know that we need huge, huge numbers of participants, she said.Compared with many physical illnesses, the genetics of psychiatric disorders have so far proved complex and elusive to understand. Even one of the most heritable disorders, schizophrenia, appears linked to small variations in more than a hundred genetic regions. Recently, though, a genetic variant has been identified that seems to ignite excessive pruning of synapses in a key brain area in people with schizophrenia.Depression has been one of the toughest to figure out, partly because it affects different people in different ways.You might have an 18-year-old woman who is doing self-cutting and shes got depression, Dr. Sullivan said, and a 64-year-old woman with hypertension and Type 2 diabetes and shes got depression.Because postpartum depression afflicts a narrower group of women who have recently given birth, it may be easier to study, Dr. Sullivan said. He said he and some colleagues had recently conducted a study that suggested postpartum depression was more heritable than general depression. Dr. Addington said there might be genes that specifically influence a womans sensitivity to hormonal fluctuations in pregnancy.But David Goldstein, director of Columbia Universitys Institute for Genomic Medicine, who is not involved in the project, said another possibility was that postpartum depressions links to hormonal fluctuations, in addition to emotional and other stresses that can accompany having children, might indicate it was less likely to be genetic.He said he had no objection to the projects goal, but its possible that you can collect information from tens of thousands of individuals and not find anything.Dr. Kenneth S. Kendler, director of psychiatric genetics research at Virginia Commonwealth University, who is not involved in the project, said some evidence suggested that genes involved in postpartum depression differed somewhat from those in general depression. Ideally, the project will find fewer gene variants involved and they are bigger in effect size, he said.Its a reasonable bet, Dr. Kendler added, but its not a slam dunk.	2
Credit...Denis Balibouse/ReutersDec. 21, 2015For many in the fashion industry, it appeared to be a smooth and logical merger.The two biggest names in the business of selling luxury fashion online, Yoox and Net-a-Porter, announced plans this spring to combine in a 936 million pound, or $1.4 billion, deal, creating an e-commerce powerhouse in an industry that has been slow to embrace the Internet.I dont think any merger in history has been so perfect on paper, Federico Marchetti, the chief executive of Yoox, told The Financial Times in May.Behind the scenes, however, simmered a corporate battle between the majority owner of Net-a-Porter and one of its original backers.The management of Net-a-Porter and some of its minority shareholders fought against the deal, arguing that the companys majority owner, the Swiss luxury conglomerate Richemont, was selling out at far too low a price, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.One of Net-a-Porters first investors, Carmen Busquets, even cobbled together a group of financiers who she said were prepared to buy back control of the retailer for far more than what Yoox had offered.In numerous letters sent this year copies of which were reviewed by The New York Times Ms. Busquets and Natalie Massenet, the founder and then executive chairwoman of Net-a-Porter, complained bitterly that the company, a pioneer of high-end online fashion sales, was being sold at far too low a price.In a period of two weeks I had secured more than enough equity to buy the entire NAP at a minimum valuation of 1.4bn with an indisputably better partner set up than the Yoox transaction, Ms. Busquets wrote in a letter to Richemonts board on June 12. I am certain that your shareholders will want to understand why your management chose to donate over 400 million and possibly even 500 million of their money to the shareholders of Yoox.The dispute will not derail the merger, which closed in October. But it highlights a peculiar battle between Ms. Busquets, who has sold her shares in Net-a-Porter, and Richemont, which is best known for its luxury watch brands like Montblanc and Piaget.At the heart of the dispute is the future of how high-end fashion with sales of roughly $243 billion last year is sold. While the luxury fashion industry had been slow to move online, believing that customers preferred richer in-person experiences, top labels have come around to courting customers in the digital realm.Analysts at Exane BNP Paribas and ContactLab noted in a report this spring that online sales had jumped to 6 percent of total retail revenue from 3 percent in 2010. And by 2020, the analysts estimate, sales driven by e-commerce and other digital means will make up more than half of all luxury sales, up from a quarter this year.Yet at the same time, specialists in online luxury, including both Net-a-Porter and Yoox, are facing more pressure from traditional retailers as well as individual fashion brands eager to keep their customers rather than sell to them through middlemen.I think their advantage is eroding, said Luca Solca, an analyst with Exane BNP Paribas. My expectation is that more and more luxury goods brands will try to insource their digital resources.Putting together the archrivals Net-a-Porter, a specialist in current-season clothes from the likes of Balenciaga and Saint Laurent, and Yoox, which sells off-season goods, was meant to create a new giant that could compete against those strengthening rivals.Today, we open the doors to the worlds biggest luxury fashion store, Ms. Massenet of Net-a-Porter said in late March when the merger was announced. It is a store that never closes, a store without geographical borders, a store that connects with, inspires, serves and offers millions of style-conscious global consumers access to the finest designer labels in fashion.Investors appear to agree about the potential of the combined company. Shares of Yoox jumped roughly 22 percent on the announcement of the deal, and rose about 44 percent by the time the merger closed. Since early October, shares in the Yoox Net-a-Porter Group have climbed a further 22 percent.Richemont appears to believe in the future of Yoox Net-a-Porter, holding roughly half of the combined e-retailers stock.Ms. Massenet, however, struck a different tone in a Feb. 26 letter to Johann Rupert, the chairman of Richemont. In the letter, Ms. Massenet, who started Net-a-Porter in her London apartment in 2000, complained that she had been notified of the sale talks with Yoox only two weeks earlier.ImageCredit...Denis Balibouse/ReutersMs. Massenet disclosed that she had the backing of a consortium interested in buying control of Net-a-Porter at a valuation of about 1.4 billion, more than 50 percent more than what Yoox was offering. The group included the investment firms Certares, Tiger Global Management and New Enterprise Associates. All the potential investors cautioned that their preliminary valuations were subject to due diligence.Other businesses, including Cond Nast, had also expressed interest in participating, according to that letter.The proposed offer would have allowed Richemont to maintain up to a 40 percent stake in the business, cashing in its remaining stake for 620 million. The promise was that Net-a-Porter would be taken public in perhaps three years, potentially reaping an even higher valuation.We have many concerns around strategic rationale and cultural fit of the businesses, but are particularly surprised at the price ascribed to NAPG in comparison to Yoox, Ms. Massenet wrote.A representative for Richemont declined to comment on Ms. Busquetss contentions.A representative for Yoox Net-a-Porter declined to comment. A spokesman for Ms. Massenet declined to comment.Representatives for Certares, Tiger Global, NEA and Cond Nast declined to comment or did not respond to several inquiries for comments.Analysts over the years have questioned whether Richemont should continue to own Net-a-Porter, asking whether the company primarily known for its high-end watch brands should instead focus on its core business. And Net-a-Porter has posted annual losses while under Richemonts ownership, though its sales have continued to rise.Richemont has said that merging Net-a-Porter with Yoox made sense because it would fuse two of the biggest online fashion retailers to create a new merchant with significant scale.Ms. Busquets, a Venezuelan-born investor who was Net-a-Porters original backer and retained a 2.3 percent stake in the business after selling control to Richemont, proved even more combative in her correspondence. Yoox is simply an inferior business to NAP, she wrote in a March 28 letter to Richard Lepeu, Richemonts co-chief executive.In that letter, Ms. Busquets not only pressed the idea of a management buyout, but floated alternatives, including pursuing a merger with other businesses she believed would have been a better fit, like Barneys.Or, she wrote at the time, she would have been satisfied if Net-a-Porter were valued at about 1.5 billion.By June 12, Ms. Busquets was arguing that Net-a-Porter deserved to be valued even higher, given the companys financial performance. In a letter to Richemonts board, she wrote that bankers at Morgan Stanley, whom she had hired to evaluate the business, had valued Net-a-Porter at more than 2 billion, given its improved financial performance.Ms. Busquets has retained two high-profile law practices, Boies Schiller in the United States and David Gold & Associates in Britain, to explore her legal options, according to people briefed on the matter.Bad blood has lingered between Ms. Busquets and Richemont, stretching back to when the Swiss luxury company bought a majority stake in Net-a-Porter from Ms. Busquetss father and the other minority shareholders, which she has said was done under duress.Ms. Busquets said in a statement: We are reviewing all legal possibilities. I want to make sure future entrepreneurs protect themselves and dont make the same mistakes we have made.Ms. Massenet resigned from Yoox Net-a-Porter in October, just as the merger closed and after she sold her shares.Mr. Solca of Exane BNP Paribas said that he believed the valuation offered by Yoox was fair, but he allowed that Ms. Busquets might hold a different view.This is more art than science, he said.	0
SharedElizabeth Wolf lives with her 81-year-old father and 65-year-old mother who both have dementia. Here, Elizabeth helps her mother, Nancy.Credit...Mark Makela for The New York TimesSlide 1 of 15 Elizabeth Wolf lives with her 81-year-old father and 65-year-old mother who both have dementia. Here, Elizabeth helps her mother, Nancy.Credit...Mark Makela for The New York TimesMarch 4, 2016In 2010, Elizabeth Wolf, then 30, was living in Vermont, working for a nonprofit and happily exploring new pursuits, from raising chickens to contra dancing.But after several disturbing phone calls from and about her parents, Louis and Nancy Brood, she moved back into the split-level in Mt. Laurel, N.J., where she and her siblings had grown up, with her now husband, Casey Wolf. She expected to arrange caregiving help for her parents, then return to Vermont. Five years later, she is still taking care of her 81-year-old father and 65-year-old mother, both with dementia. Ms. Wolf, who volunteers with the Alzheimers Assoication, writes about the experience at upsidedowndaughter.com. Her interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.My parents called me one day in March and started singing Happy Birthday. It was unsettling. My birthday is in May.My uncle called, too. He and my father had owned an upholstery shop in Philadelphia for 50 years, and it was really bothering him that my dad couldnt do simple math anymore.I dont remember all the doctors appointments that led to Dad seeing a neurologist, but I do remember the appointment where they subjected him to the mini-mental test. He came away from that examination with an Alzheimers diagnosis.We were very concerned about my mother, too. She was asking us the same questions over and over. I said Id talk to the teacher whose classroom she worked in as an aide.The teacher said, Your mother is basically not functioning. She just sits at a table in the back of the classroom and stares out the window.It had been going on for a long time, and we had all been so focused on my dad we had missed it. We ended up taking her to the same neurologist, and she got an Alzheimers diagnosis, too.I told Casey, Were going to come back for two months, October through December. It became apparent very soon that we would need to stay longer.The doctors told me that people with Alzheimers have an average life span, between diagnosis and death, of five to seven years. So I knew were in this for the long haul, whatever that looks like.Now, every morning, I wake up around 6 or 6:30. Ill bring Dad his medicine.I take Mom to the bathroom. I have to take her every couple of hours, otherwise we have what happened this morning, when theres not only a major accident, but the mess ends up everywhere and I have to get her in the bath.I prepare their breakfast. She takes medicine for diabetes, hypothyroidism, high blood pressure, and shes on seizure medication and two antipsychotics because she has hallucinations. She stopped swallowing pills willingly a few years ago we were having all-out wars. Now we hide them in chunks of banana.My dad goes to a day program for adults with Alzheimers and dementia. Five days a week, he gets picked up at 8:40 and comes back between 1 and 1:30.Im always looking for more activities to do with him. I found a local voice teacher, and once a week she plays the piano and they sing together, old songs he has in his deep memory recesses. All the Way. Some Enchanted Evening.My mom doesnt have much of an attention span for activities anymore. A lot of what we do all day is wander and sit and stare out the window.At night, we have a motion sensor so that any time their bedroom door opens if my mom has to go to the bathroom, shell wander into the hallway a receptor in our room bings. It goes off maybe six times a night, on average. Some nights it feels like every half-hour.One night recently my dad was so confused, up so many times, and I was exhausted and full of frustration and anger and overwhelming grief. I just went in there and cried in his arms, begging him, Please, go back to sleep. He didnt understand, but he was holding me and crying, too, and saying, Im so sorry. Ill do better. Ill do better.I dont know how to describe that feeling, where you just dont feel like you can go on anymore. And I know I have a lot of things on my side relative to other people in this situation. A supportive husband. Paid help.We just got a grant from the organization Hilarity for Charity. They gave us 25 hours of care a week for a year. We also have a caregiver from one of the state programs. So now we have help Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays and Sunday mornings.But most of the caregivers arent able to handle my mom in the bathroom or bathe her, so often theyre assisting me. And when I do have help, Im running around trying to do the other thousand things that need to happen to maintain a household. I also work part time from home.Most of my me time is spent going to the gym; I see a therapist and get acupuncture a couple of times a month, too. These are the things I do to stay alive.More than anything, the grief or loss I feel is in the form of loneliness. The isolation. I dont know how to relate to people my age.Once in a while I let myself think about what Ive given up. Casey and I decided not to have children, but I feel like a mother to my parents.I value the incredible intimacy I get to share with them. When I was a teenager, my mother was pretty critical; she ignored me for days at a time. I think she was overwhelmed by motherhood.Now, this role that we share, its changed the dynamic, the history of our relationship. However many years down the line, looking back, Ill think of the moments of tenderness I shared with her, every single day.There was a point in May of 2013 wed been here two and a half years when we had plans to move my parents into a facility. We were going to do a respite stay, and if they fit in, if it went well, wed sell the house.We did everything we could we brought couches and furniture from their bedroom to make the place feel homelike. But it wasnt home. For my dad, it lasted three days. He started having panic attacks, to the point where he was throwing up.He was still with it enough to call us. I remember getting a message from him, weeping. Its Daddy. Please, me and Mom want to come home.Everybody, including his doctor, said, You have to leave him, you have to let him adjust. I couldnt do it. I would never judge the people who do, but I couldnt.Theyve been here 40 years. All my dad ever wanted was this home. Who am I, if I take my dad from his home?	2
DealBookCredit...Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for DisneyDec. 21, 2015All anyone can talk about is Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the more than half-billion-dollar haul that the Walt Disney Company pulled in over the weekend.The press has been breathless and Wall Street analysts are mostly giddy about Disneys prospects.But on Friday, just as the entertainment giant was beginning to count its record box office take, Richard Greenfield, a longtime media analyst at BTIG Research, urged his clients to sell their Disney stock. He became the only analyst to have a sell rating on the company.To Mr. Greenfield, Star Wars is a sideshow, masking what he believes are deeper financial and strategic challenges at Disney. The companys problems, he says, have nothing to do with Darth Vader or Donald Duck. Instead, Disney has a looming issue with ESPN, the sports television juggernaut.In a report titled Even the Force Cannot Protect ESPN, he argues that Disneys successful film business, which includes Pixar, has distracted investors from an impending slowdown at ESPN as viewers cancel their cable subscriptions (the cord cutters) or never sign up for cable to begin with (the cord nevers).Investors must remember that at its core, Disney is a cable network company that has the highest level of fixed costs (sports rights) in the industry, he wrote. ESPN now appears poised to become Disneys most troubled business as consumer behavior shifts rapidly.In the past year, HBO and CBS have begun unbundling, meaning that they now offer their programming la carte for a monthly fee thats far less than a bundled cable bill. Mr. Greenfield believes that as more cable networks shift to selling their programming this way, ESPN will have to follow suit. But he says it will not be able to sign up enough viewers to pay a monthly subscription fee that would offset the loss in cable subscribers who now pay a monthly carriage fee (about $7 a household) whether or not they watch ESPN.These lucrative fees currently cover the enormous cost of licensing live sports programing. Mr. Greenfield has been especially critical of ESPNs aggressive sports-rights acquisitions in recent years, which he says has been driven in part to block the growth of rivals like Fox and NBC.ESPNs problems first spilled into the open in August when Disney reduced growth expectations for its cable network division and its shares plummeted. The news alarmed investors in television companies, sending the stocks of Time Warner and 21st Century Fox down along with Disneys.In an interview, Mr. Greenfield said he believed that the expectations seem too high for Disney. He expects the company's stock to fall to $90 in the next 12 months; it closed Monday at $106.58.It puts incredible pressure on the films. They all have to be massive successes. Thats just tough. Mr. Greenfield is especially worried about earnings in 2017 and beyond, when he believes the cord cutting may push Disney to pursue an la carte subscription offering, given that 44 percent of the companys profits currently come from cable television.VideoRich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research, explains why he shorted Disney despite the record debut of 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens.'CreditCredit...CNBCRobert Iger, Disneys chief executive, has said that he could imagine ESPN selling the sports network over streaming video via a so-called over-the-top, or O.T.T., subscription, calling such a move inevitable. But he also seems in no rush to make such a move and for good reason.There are many commonly held beliefs/myths/legends about ESPN, Todd Juenger, an analyst at Bernstein, wrote over the weekend, partly in response to Mr. Greenfield. One such belief, he wrote, is that ESPN is what holds the bundle together. But he said: Maybe that is true, but in a different way than most people intend. If ESPN went O.T.T., we dont think the bundle would collapse because millions of households would drop cable and subscribe to ESPN. Instead, if ESPN went O.T.T., we think other networks would respond in kind, and perhaps millions of households would drop cable to avoid ESPN (and other expensive sports networks) and take advantage of the rich array of entertainment video options.Mr. Iger has acknowledged that television is a mature industry now being disrupted by streaming technology, which makes its future uncertain. But Mr. Iger, 64, may not have to wrestle with these challenges; those will most likely be left to his expected successor, Tom Staggs. (Mr. Igers contract ends in mid-2018.)Most analysts wave off concerns about ESPN, arguing that this wont be a problem for some time and that live sports will remain the most desirable programming for viewers who still want a bundle of channels. And, they say, its the cable companies that will feel the most pain.We think that the turmoil and disruption will most be felt by the distributors and some of the weaker programming content companies, Martin Pyykkonen of Rosenblatt Securities wrote to investors, also seemingly in response to Mr. Greenfield. For Disney, we think its a reasonable bet that they will be a necessary part of almost any skinnier programming package going forward.All that may be true. Its also possible that shifts in television habits will change more slowly than some of the most dire predictions.Disney may have seen all of this coming: It has spent the past decade diversifying its business by adding big franchises like Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar while expanding its theme park business.So while the entire television industry may be challenged, perhaps Disney will be able to weather the storm better than many others. Given all the brands Disney has accumulated, Mr. Greenfield conceded, It would be more fun to be them than anyone else.Still, Mr. Juenger said, We do have concern, however, that once Star Wars is digested, the focus will return to affiliate fees.But at least for now, its a whole lot more fun to talk about Han Solo, lightsabers and Chewbacca than cord cutting, over-the-top and affiliate fees.	0
Media\|Suit Claims Weeknd Song Infringes on Copyright of Film Soundtrackhttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/media/suit-claims-weeknd-song-infringes-on-copyright-of-film-soundtrack.htmlDec. 9, 2015The Weeknds song The Hills became one of the biggest hits of the year with a slithery electronic bass line. But according to a copyright infringement lawsuit filed on Wednesday, that bass line was taken without permission from the soundtrack of a little-noticed science-fiction thriller.The suit was filed in United States District Court in Los Angeles by Cutting Edge Music on behalf of Tom Raybould, a Welsh composer who wrote the music for The Machine, directed by Caradog James, which had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2013 but was not widely distributed in theaters in the United States.Still, the suit asserts, the music for The Machine reached associates of the Weeknd, whose real name is Abel Tesfaye. On March 9, according to the suit, Mr. Raybould received a direct message on Twitter from Emmanuel Nickerson, a producer and writer known as Million Dollar Mano, that said: I sampled your music might make it 2 the weeknd next album. Huge fan of what u did 4 the machine movie!According the suit, both The Hills and a track on The Machine soundtrack called Revolution feature bass lines performed with almost identical idiosyncratic sounds at the same register and using the same pitch sequence, melodic phase structure and rhythmic durations, along with other similarities. The suit seeks unspecified damages, and it names as defendants several record labels and music publishers involved with the song.The Hills, which was released as a single in May, lists as its songwriters Mr. Tesfaye; Mr. Nickerson; Ahmad Balshe, better known as Belly; and Carlo Montagnese, known as Illangelo. The song spent six weeks at No.1 on Billboards singles chart, and according to Nielsen it sold 2.4 million downloads and has been streamed nearly 400 million times in the United States on audio and video services. This week, the Weeknd was nominated for seven Grammy Awards, including album of the year for Beauty Behind the Madness, on which The Hills appears.A representative of Songs Music Publishing, the publisher that represents the Weeknd, declined to comment on Wednesday, saying that the company had not been served with the complaint. Representatives of Republic Records, the Weeknds label, did not respond to a request for comment.	0
Politics\|Congressman Steve King Retweets a Nazi Sympathizerhttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/us/politics/steve-king-collett-nazi.htmlCredit...J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressJune 13, 2018Representative Steve King of Iowa, a Republican with a history of making inflammatory and racist statements about immigrants and promoting white nationalist views, drew criticism on Tuesday after retweeting a British activist who is a prominent Nazi sympathizer and has described himself as an admirer of Hitler.The activist, Mark Collett, is the former chairman of the Young BNP, the youth arm of the far-right British National Party, and like Mr. King he has often warned that influxes of immigrants pose a danger to Western countries.Mr. Colletts tweet was a screenshot of a Breitbart article titled Vast Majority of Under-35 Italians Now Oppose Mass Migration, and his commentary: 65% of Italians under the age of 35 now oppose mass immigration. Europe is waking up...Mr. Kings retweet included a comment of his own: Europe is waking up...Will America...in time? As of Wednesday afternoon, it had not been taken down.Mr. Collett was the subject of a 2002 documentary on Channel 4 in Britain titled Young, Nazi and Proud. In it, he says that AIDS is a friendly disease because blacks, drug users and gays have it, HuffPost reported.Nick Ryan, a spokesman for an anti-racism advocacy group based in Britain, Hope Not Hate, told HuffPost that no mainstream politician in their right mind should be retweeting Mark Collett.Mr. Kings office declined to comment on the matter.It was not the first time Mr. King, who was elected to Congress in 2002 and has displayed a Confederate battle flag on his desk in Washington, has promoted extreme anti-immigrant or white nationalist views.In 2013, he said that for every child of undocumented immigrants whos a valedictorian, theres another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and theyve got calves the size of cantaloupes because theyre hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.Speaking on MSNBC in 2016, he questioned the historical contributions of nonwhite subgroups.Last year, he said that we cant restore our civilization with somebody elses babies, setting off widespread anger that included criticism from his congressional colleagues.But his comment drew praise from other figures, like the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.	3
Credit...Pawan Kumar/ReutersMarch 18, 2017NEW DELHI Indias governing party on Saturday appointed a firebrand Hindu cleric to lead the countrys most populous state, a turning point for a government that has, until now, steered clear of openly embracing far-right Hindu causes.The choice of Yogi Adityanath who has been repeatedly accused of stirring anti-Muslim sentiments to lead Uttar Pradesh, came as a shock to many political observers here, who have become accustomed to the carefully moderated public positions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in line with his projected image as a pro-development leader and global statesman.Mr. Adityanath has openly called for India to be enshrined as a Hindu rashtra, or Hindu nation, and supports the rebuilding of a temple to the Hindu god Ram, also known as Rama, on the site of a razed 16th-century mosque, a project that was halted after it incited bloody religious riots in the 1990s.With the appointment, Mr. Modi is unveiling a vision of benign majoritarianism, said Shekhar Gupta, a longtime editor and political talk show host. That means its a Hindu country, thats the fact, and well be nice to you if you behave yourself.For Mr. Modi, the appointment represents a final rejection of Nehruvian socialism, which almost gave the minorities a slightly exalted status, said Mr. Gupta, referring to Jawaharlal Nehru, Indias first prime minister and independence leader.Mr. Adityanath, who is often seen wearing the saffron robes of a Hindu priest, told followers he would focus on Mr. Modis economic agenda.I am confident that the state will march on the path of development, he said, in comments carried by The Press Trust of India.India is 80 percent Hindu, 14 percent Muslim and 2.3 percent Christian, according to the 2011 census.Mr. Adityanaths appointment comes on the heels of Mr. Modis greatest political victory since 2014. A week ago, his Bharatiya Janata Party won a landslide victory in Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of more than 200 million and was seen as a gauge of Mr. Modis chances of winning a second five-year term in 2019.The selection of a hard-line Hindu chief minister suggests that the party credits right-wing activists for swinging the vote, said Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow in the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.The only conclusion one can draw is that he feels the base is mobilized and that they helped deliver this, and that there would be pushback if they did not get something in return, Mr. Vaishnav said. He added that he was baffled by the choice, which shifts attention away from the pro-growth, development agenda that has been at the center of Mr. Modis political movement.I think its a regressive choice, and a lost opportunity for the prime minister, he said. This is a huge mandate, a huge victory. But there is going to be a backlash if he doesnt figure out the jobs question. Thats issue No. 1.Party loyalists praised the decision. Some members made the case that Mr. Adityanaths selection did not represent a departure from Mr. Modis 2014 pledge to focus on the economy and create jobs.Others openly celebrated the advent of a more muscular Hindu agenda.Justice to all, appeasement to none, said Sudhanshu Mittal, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader, in comments to NDTV, a cable news station.Appeasement, in this context, is typically understood to mean policies favoring the rights of Indian Muslims.As a devout Hindu sannyasi, or someone who has renounced worldly things, he will guarantee that the state doesnt discriminate, and justice for all, said Tarun Vijay, a former B.J.P. member of Parliament. He added that as chief minister, Mr. Adityanath may make jihadi intolerant Muslims learn an alphabet of humanity and accepting differences as an Indian.Mr. Adityanath, 44, was born Ajay Mohan Bisht, and studied mathematics before joining the priesthood. He rose to prominence as part of the campaign to rebuild the Ram temple, and has repeatedly been charged with fanning religious tensions.In 2007, he spent 15 days in jail on charges of inciting riots, The Hindustan Times reported. He was booked again later in the year, when riots broke out after he made a speech. He is still facing trial in the two cases, the newspaper reported.Mr. Adityanath was a forceful defender of the Hindu mob who lynched Muhammad Ikhlaq, a Muslim man suspected of slaughtering a cow, and argued that Mr. Ikhlaqs family should be prosecuted for possessing the meat. When some Indians complained that they should not be required perform a sun salutation as part of International Yoga Day celebrations, saying it was a religious act, he recommended that those who were offended should drown themselves in the sea.He won his parliamentary seat in 1998, and was re-elected four times.He has particularly strong support among Hindu priests and seers, who urged the B.J.P. to name him chief minister, saying it would clear the way for the construction of the Ram temple.	6
Media\|Editor Quits After Sheldon Adelson Buys Las Vegas Review-Journalhttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/business/media/editor-quits-after-mogul-buys-paper-in-las-vegas.htmlDec. 22, 2015Credit...Tyrone Siu/ReutersMichael Hengel, editor of The Las Vegas Review-Journal, announced his resignation on Tuesday, less than two weeks after the billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson bought the newspaper and days after it published an article that was indirectly critical of the new owners.In an announcement to the newsroom, Mr. Hengel said he was offered a voluntary buyout, according to reporters who were present at the meeting.The Review-Journal reported last week that Mr. Adelson and his family were behind the $140 million purchase of the newspaper. The identity of the buyer had been kept private after the sale was announced, which raised questions about the new owners transparency.In a statement that was expected to appear on the front page of The Review-Journal on Wednesday, the newspapers new owners said Mr. Hengel had accepted a voluntary buyout offer from the previous owners and that offers were also made to other qualified employees. Other employees have accepted the buyout offer, the statement said.The statement added that an interim editor would be appointed and that a search for a permanent editor would begin immediately.We pledge to publish a newspaper that is fair, unbiased and accurate, the new owners said in the statement. They also said they were committed to making the new investments necessary for the newspaper to succeed, and that they regarded themselves as stewards of this essential community institution.Mr. Hengel could not immediately be reached for comment.Reporters at the newspaper reacted on Twitter, posting photos of Mr. Hengel as he made his announcement. One reporter, Neal Morton, wrote that Mr. Hengel said, I think my resignation probably comes as a relief to the new owners, and it is in my best interest and those of my family.Reporters described the mood after Mr. Hengels announcement as stunned and somber.	0
David Beckham Haircut and Chill 1/24/2018 David Beckham doesn't play by the rules when it comes to getting trimmed ... or he's got an incredible hair dresser. Beckham said goodbye to his long coif with the help of a big glass of wine and his feet up on the counter, which had to make getting that perfect line around the ear difficult for the guy blading away. Becks shared pics of what looks like the most laid-back cut Tuesday on his Instagram story, including one of what came off and it certainly looked like a lot. Gotta say, Becks' photography game is getting pretty artsy and we think we know who is to blame.	1
Guess Who This Top Hat Tot Turned Into! 1/30/2018 Before this dressed-up Disney star was singing about the summertime, he was just another fancy fella growing up in Hollywood, Florida. Can you guess who he is? Share on Facebook TWEET This See also celebrity kids Photo Galleries	1
Science\|Letters to the Editorhttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/science/letters-to-the-editor.htmlReactionsMarch 28, 2016Nuclear PowerShort-Term ThinkingTO THE EDITOR:Re Amid a Graying Fleet of Nuclear Plants, a Hunt for Solutions, (March 22): The fading of enthusiasm for nuclear power in the United States is part of the pattern of our abysmal failure to address climate change. It is a function of markets that are distorted to reward the very short term and to neglect indirect costs. The biggest competitor to nuclear, and to unsubsidized wind and solar, is natural gas. Cheap now, but costly in greenhouse gases emitted. While some regions are finally getting the message, providing potential subsidies to keep their nuclear units running, it is far from adequate.Theodore M. Besmann Columbia, S.C.The writer is a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of South Carolina.AppendicitisMerits of AntibioticsTO THE EDITOR: Re A Choice for Treating Appendicitis, March 22: As a Hospital Corpsman in the Navy in 1945, I was already aware of the use of antibiotics in the treatment of appendicitis. If a Corpsman had the responsibility of treating a person with appendicitis while out at sea, it was preferable to use penicillin (available at that time to the armed forces) and local freezing rather than attempt to do an operation for which we were inadequately prepared.Dr. Sheldon Lichtblau, Fort Lee, N.J.TO THE EDITOR:I had an intelligent patient in my office, just yesterday, who related that his appendix had ruptured last September, while his providers had put him on antibiotics, as they watched and waited. He volunteered that, if he had not been able to reach the hospital rapidly after his symptoms suddenly took a turn for the worse, he may have died. Before CT scans and M.R.I.s, before antibiotics, surgeons knew, not to let the sun set on an acute abdomen and that, if the surgical pathology report did not come back negative for appendicitis 5-10 percent of the time (upon which, todays plaintiffs lawyers would pounce), the surgeon was underoperating. This meant that the surgeon was, therefore, missing life-threatening cases of true appendicitis. Contrary to Ms. Brodys contention, this was not a matter of surgeons greed, it was a matter of saving lives.Barry Miles Belgorod, M.D.New YorkParrotsA Special BirdTO THE EDITOR:Re Parrots Are a Lot More Than Pretty Bird, (March 22): Having lived in Venezuela for many years, I had close contact with these uniquely beautiful creatures. A baby parrot I brought up after it fell from the nest was bilingual and loved only me and greeted me with outspoken affection: Hola and then Goodbye when I left; in short, imprint marked our relationship. It would fly in and out of its large cage and one day did not return. I chose to think it had found a mate that surpassed me.Mara Arreaza-CoyleRockford, Ill.	7
TV SportsFeb. 5, 2014NBCs moneyed grip on the Olympics means that it has traveled a technological path that no other network has. It has shown the Games entirely on broadcast television. It has added multiple cable networks. Now, it is live-streaming virtually every event to an ecosystem increasingly populated by tablets and smartphones.With the Winter Games from Sochi, Russia, almost here, it is worth remembering that four years ago NBC streamed only hockey and curling from Vancouver. Now, all 15 sports will be streamed live to those authenticating their cable, satellite and telephone accounts from Vladimir V. Putins subtropical wonderland. NBC believes that its television viewership throughout the day and, in particular, during prime time, will be enhanced by fans who are watching live on their computers or iPads. NBC arrived at this realization two years ago during the Summer Games in London, where all events were streamed live.I think four or five days in, we felt a degree of confidence that we had a formula that was working well, Mark Lazarus, the chairman of the NBC Sports Group, said Wednesday from Sochi.Research from the London Games found that the more devices on which people watched the Olympics, the more they watched television.Someone watching the Olympics only on television breathed in 4 hours 19 minutes of coverage daily, according to the research. Add a personal computer or a laptop, and TV consumption rose to 4:28. With a mobile phone added, TV viewing rose to five hours, and with a tablet tossed in, the average time watching TV shot up to 6:07. Now, of course, tablets and smartphones are far more prevalent, raising the likelihood that viewing on all screens will increase, making NBC executives happier than they were in London.A relatively small number of people is streaming during the day, but they are fans and theyre very enthusiastic, said Alan Wurtzel, NBC Universals president of research and media development. They primed the pump and let people know that something incredible was going on. Simultaneous viewing is a rising tide that benefits all boats.The research also found that 64 percent of live streamers shared the results. All live streams will be replayed later in the day, but well before prime time, and then archived for viewing on demand the next day.The technology of streaming has improved since the London Olympics, as has the ability of devices to show the programming. NBC is relying on those upgrades to increase the multiple-screen viewing and the time spent watching.Were 16 to 18 months further along, Lazarus said. Were hopeful that when people get bothered by streaming problems and well take some of the blame sometimes its the carriers and sometimes its the connection in home. But all in all, the chain is stronger for everybody.Despite the digital revolution, NBC is still focused on its Olympic prime-time show. It is where most of the viewers are. It is where the advertisers pay the most for commercials. It is where what NBC calls the curated version of what happened in daylight in Sochi along with features, studio commentary and commercials will be shown to the evening audience. The opening ceremony Friday will not be streamed live, but will be only on NBC in prime time. This has been sacrosanct territory for NBC. Perhaps even when Olympic sports are streamed through your contact lenses, this exception will remain intact. The rationale is that it is not an event with a final score. It is a national, choreographed pageant that requires narration and geographic context.Sometimes, of course, the opening ceremony defies explanation to audiences of different cultures. And some people believe that they should be able to see it as it unfolds, regardless of any confusion, and they are not wrong. But to NBC, this is pure entertainment, part of an expensive purchase of rights, which it can use to garner high ratings through a delayed showing.Ive seen the show twice in rehearsal, Lazarus said, and Im thoroughly convinced that a raw stream would be very difficult for people to understand the context and historical context that its creator was trying to express.There will be nothing live on television in prime time on NBC. Sochi time is nine hours ahead of Eastern time. But there will be about 246 hours of live television, on all coasts, on NBCSN (which will be flush with live figure skating), on USA and on MSNBC, as well as the 1,000 hours of live streaming on NBCOlympics.com.Jim Bell, the executive producer of NBC Olympics, said last month that it was not a difficult decision to show so much figure skating live.Its one of the crown jewels of the Winter Olympic sports, he said. Its great for NBC, NBCSN, and its weatherproof.The only exception to NBCs vow of all live figure skating will be Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern, when NBC will carry taped team figure skating, womens moguls and snowboard slopestyle, as the appetizers to Fridays opening ceremony.	4
Americas\|In a Rare Survey, Cubans Express a Hunger for Economic Growthhttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/world/americas/cuba-survey-economic-growth-and-opportunity.htmlCredit...Tomas Munita for The New York TimesMarch 21, 2017MEXICO CITY A hunger for economic opportunity. An embrace of tourism. Hope in a new era of normalized relations with the United States.These are some of the predominant sentiments expressed in a rare survey of 840 Cubans conducted in the country late last year by an independent research group, asking for opinions on topics from free speech to diplomatic ties to crime.What emerges most clearly from those interviewed is a desire to enjoy a more certain, and robust, economic future.In this, the Cuban people seem to be in agreement with their government. For the Cuban state, led by Ral Castro, allowing entrepreneurs to open small businesses, normalizing relations with the United States and expanding tourism have been central to the countrys hunt for economic growth.These three policies were among the most highly supported by the Cubans interviewed in the survey, done by the independent research group NORC at the University of Chicago. Eight of 10 Cubans interviewed felt tourism to the country should be increased, and 95 percent said having a high level of economic growth was an extremely or very important goal.And yet Cubans seemed to have little faith in their governments capacity to deliver on those goals. Only three in 10 felt the economy would improve in the next three years. And just 13 percent said the current economy was good or excellent. Three-quarters of Cubans believed they must be careful in saying what they think, at least sometimes.Over half of those Cubans interviewed said they would like to leave the country if given a chance, and 70 percent of those individuals said they would move to the United States if they could.The interviews were conducted in person in October and November, before the inauguration of President Trump, who has threatened to rescind President Obamas 2014 decision to restore diplomatic ties between the nations.While Mr. Trump has remained relatively quiet about Cuba since taking office, his administration announced it is conducting a full review of the policy and could decide to cut off ties again.But that would not be what Cubans themselves appear to want.Of those interviewed, 55 percent felt that better relations with the United States would be a good thing, while only 3 percent felt it would be mostly bad.	6
Philadelphia Eagles Fan Slamming into Pole, Subway ... ... NEW Hilarious Angle!!! 1/22/2018 That Philadelphia Eagles fan who ran smack into a pole and bounced off a subway train is in even more pain than you thought ... as this new angle of his asinine celebration reveals. Waiting for your permission to load the Facebook Video. The guy was all pumped up underground Sunday on his way to see his Eagles in the NFC Championship. He and some pals were standing around yelling, "Whooooo," and not really making much of an effort to board a waiting subway train. Of course, once the train started moving, the guy decided to drunkenly chase it down the platform. The chase was over pretty quickly ... courtesy of a giant pole he never saw for some reason. #Booze	1
Credit...Patrick Semansky/Associated PressJune 15, 2018WASHINGTON Election law experts from across the political spectrum largely agreed that the New York attorney general made a compelling case this week that President Trumps campaign and his charitable foundation violated federal campaign finance laws during the 2016 election.What they could not agree on, though, was whether any federal investigators will pick up the case.The allegations were detailed in filings released Thursday by the attorney general, Barbara D. Underwood, as part of a lawsuit her office brought in state court accusing Mr. Trump and his three oldest children of using the Donald J. Trump Foundation for political and business purposes. That constituted a violation of New York State laws governing charities, as well as federal tax and election laws, the lawsuit charged.But Ms. Underwoods office lacks the authority to prosecute federal matters. So, when she filed the lawsuit, she simultaneously sent letters to the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission asking those agencies to investigate the alleged violations of federal tax laws and campaign finance laws, respectively.And, for good measure, on the letter to the F.E.C., she copied two top officials from the Justice Departments Public Integrity Section, which is charged with investigating and prosecuting criminal violations of election laws.The copying of the letter to the Justice Department attracted wide notice in Washingtons close-knit election-law bar, as did the claim in the lawsuit that the use of the Trump Foundation to benefit the Trump campaign was willful and knowing.That phrase, combined with the cc, appears to be an effort to set the stage for a criminal election-law prosecution. That would be handled by the Justice Department rather than the F.E.C., which can only levy civil penalties and fines.The evidence collected by the attorney general is so compelling that she was able to make a case that the Trump Foundation knowingly and willfully violated the source prohibitions and dollar limits of the Federal Election Campaign Act, said Brett Kappel, an election lawyer with the firm Akerman who has represented clients on both sides of the aisle, including the former Texas congressman Ron Pauls 2012 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.The referral to the Justice Department cheered advocates for more aggressive enforcement of election laws, who have bemoaned what they see as the F.E.C.s plunge in recent years into a state of near-constant deadlock and almost complete toothlessness. The agency, which by statute is composed of six members evenly split between appointees from both parties, has two vacant seats, leaving it with only four commissioners. Thats the number required to advance a complaint or referral for formal investigation, meaning that the two Republican appointees would have to join the two Democratic counterparts to proceed with an investigation of a sitting Republican president a highly unlikely outcome.There are certainly grounds to open an investigation on the merits, said Paul S. Ryan, vice president for policy and litigation at the campaign finance advocacy group Common Cause. But the F.E.C. has been dismissing complaints that I think are much stronger slam dunks than this.ImageCredit...Hans Pennink/Associated PressThe Justice Department, on the other hand, has ramped up its prosecutions of election law violations in recent years, pursuing high-profile cases against operatives for misleading fund-raising and misappropriating political committee funds.Violations related to campaign finance laws are among the charges brought by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, against 13 Russians and three companies that tried to boost Mr. Trumps campaign.And the Justice Department is currently investigating Mr. Trumps longtime attorney, Michael S. Cohen, for possible violations of campaign finance laws related to payments to two women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump.While the F.E.C. mostly directs enforcement actions at campaigns and their treasurers, the Justice Department can bring criminal charges that can carry jail time against anyone involved in a campaign finance violation.If the Justice Department takes up the referral from the New York attorney general, Democrats and government watchdog groups can be expected to call for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself as he did from the investigation of Russian meddling because of his involvement in the Trump campaign.The campaign finance violations alleged by the New York attorney general primarily center on a fund-raiser for veterans groups held by the foundation in Iowa ahead of the states pivotal caucuses, which fell on Feb. 1, 2016. The fund-raiser which had many trappings of a campaign rally, including a speech by Mr. Trump skewering his opponents and celebrating his own accomplishments raised more than $2.8 million for the foundation for distribution to other charities benefiting veterans.But records the attorney general obtained show that officials for Mr. Trumps campaign, including the digital operative Brad Parscale, who is now the manager of Mr. Trumps re-election bid, were involved in planning the fund-raiser and raising money for it. Other officials, including the campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, were involved in directing how and when the money was disseminated to the veterans groups, according to emails obtained by the attorney general.In one email, Mr. Lewandowski wrote to a foundation official, I think we should get the total collected and then put out a news release that we distributed the $$ to each of the groups. He later sent a list of veterans groups, and asked that some of the disbursements be made in Iowa in the days before that states presidential nominating caucuses, which mark the kickoff of the primary calendar.The activity around the fund-raiser ran afoul of campaign finance laws on two main fronts, Ms. Underwoods office charges. The $2.8 million raised for the foundation amounted to illegal and undisclosed in-kind donations that exceeded the federal contribution limit of $5,400 per election cycle per person. And Ms. Underwoods lawsuit says that the communication between the campaign and the foundation represented a violation of rules barring campaigns from coordinating with nonprofit groups or other entities in the spending of funds. The referral to the F.E.C. also asks it to investigate a $25,000 donation made by the foundation in 2013 to a nonprofit that was devoted to helping the political prospects of an ally of Mr. Trump.The letter is pretty devastating in terms of building the case that bedrock campaign finance principles and laws were violated, said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a nonprofit government ethics group.Republican campaign finance lawyers mostly declined to comment for attribution on the case, though several said that the best defense for the Trump Foundation and campaign may be that they simply didnt know the laws, and therefore couldnt knowingly and willfully violate them.	3
VideotranscripttranscriptWho Is the Real Melania Trump? Who Knows?Melania Trump prizes her privacy. But the first ladys absence from the public eye has led to very different narratives about who she is.Melania Trump. Is she trapped? A reluctant first lady? Or is she poised, polished and a quiet, but supportive, first lady? Who is the real Melania? Very few, at least among those who are speaking publicly, will say. Im very strong. People, they dont really know me. People think and talk about me like, Oh, Melania. Oh, poor Melania. Dont feel sorry for me. Dont feel sorry for me. I can handle everything. But as Donald Trumps presidency has progressed, the first lady has become a versatile avatar, her image split sharply down political lines. In one version of the public imagination, Melania is unhappy. She dislikes her husband and disagrees with his policies. She may even be mulling a divorce. This Melania has shown up on late-night TV and in tabloids. Youre beautiful, dutiful Melania. I cant take it anymore. Then theres the other version of Melania, painted by conservative media as confident, fashion forward, graceful and adored. I have been so impressed with, not just her quiet dignity, as you brought up, but also just this diplomatic use of fashion. This version is closer to the official portrayal of Melania. Through her spokespeople, the first lady says she is supportive of her husband and focused on raising their son, Barron. I support my husband 100 percent. But we have a 9-year-old son together, Barron. And Im raising him. She says she prefers to take a back seat to her husband, to keep his place in the limelight. Its not the first time Melanias been in the public eye. You spin, baby, you spin. Shes a former model and jewelry designer. I love when idea comes to life. And I study architecture and design and its something very creative for me. Im very passionate about what I design, and there are some beautiful pieces. When they got together in the late 1990s, the Trumps say their chemistry was instant. We were both at the same party and thats how we met. He came to me... Like her right away? I went crazy. Melania and Donald became synonymous with the New York social scene. Theyve stood did together for a number of years now. New Yorkers have come to know them as a very solid couple. And in 2005, they married. Hi, fans. Im going to Metropolitan Gala. In the following years, Melanias social media posts focused on fashion, travel, fitness and spending time with family. Now as the first lady, next to one of the most outspoken presidents in recent history, Melanias silence has taken on a life of its own. The most important thing is just to be you. Thats the end.Melania Trump prizes her privacy. But the first ladys absence from the public eye has led to very different narratives about who she is.CreditCredit...Al Drago/The New York TimesJune 6, 2018WASHINGTON After spending nearly a month out of the public eye, Melania Trump emerged from the White House on Wednesday, putting an end to at least a few of the theories some her husband has repeated to his 52 million Twitter followers that blossomed like swampland ragweed during her time in seclusion.Dressed in a trench coat and heels, the first lady accompanied President Trump to the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to attend a briefing on the coming hurricane season. Sitting nearly still, Mrs. Trump cut a totemic figure alongside Mr. Trump as they sat around a conference table at the agencys headquarters.The president, reading from a notecard, introduced our great first lady to several members of his cabinet, Vice President Mike Pence and an assembled group of reporters.She went through a little rough patch, but shes doing great, Mr. Trump said, patting his wife on the hand. The people love you. Thank you, honey.Mrs. Trump spent five days at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in May to treat what her aides called a benign kidney condition, and had not appeared in public since before entering the hospital.On Twitter Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump bitterly complained about the speculation by the public and some journalists about her absence. But in attacking what he said were several conspiracy theories the news media had generated about his wifes absence, he ended up repeating the kind of unfounded rumors about his wife that would normally attract legal action from him and his notoriously litigious family.The Fake News Media has been so unfair, and vicious, to my wife and our great first lady, Melania, wrote the president, who has long reveled in conspiracy theories. During her recovery from surgery they reported everything from near death, to facelift, to left the W.H. (and me) for N.Y. or Virginia, to abuse. All Fake, she is doing really well!By attacking journalists who have speculated or asked questions about his wife, the president put himself at odds with his own personal history of using his platform and a number of his supporters to target women and effectively amplify rumors about their health, appearance and personal relationships.On the campaign trail, he repeatedly attacked Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, suggesting that she was not loyal to her husband, President Bill Clinton; questioning her physical stamina for the job; and suggesting that she was mentally ill. Mr. Trumps campaign also aired at least one TV ad that pointed to conspiracy theories about Mrs. Clintons health.And he later took aim at two female journalists Megyn Kelly and Mika Brzezinski describing them in pejorative terms. He said that he once saw Ms. Brzezinski at a gathering at his Florida estate bleeding badly from a face-lift and that she had a low I.Q.In Mrs. Trumps case, the White House has insisted that she is entitled to the same privacy that would shield any other patient.She surfaced for the first time on Tuesday in a closed White House event, but was spotted around the White House last week. Apparently referring to this, the president said on Twitter that reporters had seen the first lady merrily strolling in the White House over the past week, but never reported the sighting because it would hurt the sick narrative that she was living in a different part of the world, was really ill, or whatever. Fake News is really bad!But at least one reporter noted on Twitter that he had seen the first lady with her aides in the White House, and her office has said Mrs. Trump has taken several internal meetings during her recovery.With the White House declining to issue updates on the first ladys recovery, the guesswork about her whereabouts and her health expanded beyond the news media: On Tuesday, as Mrs. Trump attended the event with Gold Star families, a contingent of observers on Twitter wondered whether the sparse footage captured of the event was indeed from that day.Historians say no modern first lady has prized her privacy more than Mrs. Trump, but the timing of Mrs. Trumps departure from the public eye was abrupt and baffling: It came as she was ramping up her public appearances and in the midst of rolling out her official platform, Be Best, which will focus on childrens issues.Mrs. Trumps stay in the hospital was also shrouded in secrecy. In the hours after her procedure, aides wore scrubs around her but said the procedure had been successful and without complications.In any case, the first ladys public re-emergence is tied to one of her interests. Stephanie Grisham, her communications director, said in an email that Mrs. Trump would be attending the hurricane briefing because it is an issue that she cares very much about.Last year, the first lady and her husband traveled to Puerto Rico to visit families affected by hurricanes, serving them food and visiting relief centers.When asked about the first ladys health, Ms. Grishams response was brief.She feels great, Ms. Grisham wrote, doing well.At the FEMA briefing, Mrs. Trump did not speak publicly, but listened, smiling at her husband and nodding as he spoke. As the event drew to a close, the president referred to his wife and Mr. Pence.Speaking for Melania and Mike, Mr. Trump said, we thank you all very much.	3
Technology\|Owners of BitMEX, a Leading Bitcoin Exchange, Face Criminal Chargeshttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/technology/bitmex-bitcoin-criminal-charges.htmlBitMEX made itself a haven for hackers and illegal transactions, American prosecutors said.Credit...Xyza Bacani/ReduxOct. 1, 2020American authorities brought criminal charges on Thursday against the owners of one of the worlds biggest cryptocurrency trading exchanges, BitMEX, accusing them of allowing the Hong Kong-based company to launder money and engage in other illegal transactions.BitMEX is far from the first cryptocurrency company to be suspected of facilitating criminal activity. But it is the largest and most established exchange to face criminal charges.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted the chief executive of BitMEX, Arthur Hayes, and three co-owners: Benjamin Delo, Samuel Reed and Gregory Dwyer. Mr. Reed was arrested in Massachusetts on Thursday, while the other three men remained at large, authorities said.Prosecutors said BitMEX had taken few steps to limit customers even after being informed that the exchange was being used by hackers to launder stolen money, and by people in countries under sanctions, like Iran.BitMEX made itself available as a vehicle for money laundering and sanctions violations, the indictment released on Thursday said.BitMEX has handled more than $1.5 billion of trades each day recently, making it one of the five biggest exchanges on most days. BitMEX and Mr. Hayes have been known for pushing the limits in the unregulated cryptocurrency industry.After it was founded in 2014, BitMEX grew popular by allowing traders to buy and sell contracts tied to the value of Bitcoin known as derivatives, or futures with few of the restrictions and rules that were in place in other exchanges. That allowed investors to take out enormous loans and make risky trades.The relaxed attitude also made it possible for people all over the world to easily move money in and out of BitMEX without the basic identity checks that can prevent money laundering. In August, BitMEX put in place some of those verification checks.Mr. Hayes is from Buffalo, and previously worked as a trader at Deutsche Bank and Citi after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania. He incorporated BitMEX in the Seychelles even though its offices were in Hong Kong and New York.Mr. Hayes chose Seychelles because it cost less to bribe Seychellois authorities just a coconut than it would cost to bribe regulators in the United States and elsewhere, according to the indictment.A spokesman for HDR Global Trading Limited, one of the corporate entities controlling BitMEX, said: We strongly disagree with the U.S. governments heavy-handed decision to bring these charges, and intend to defend the allegations vigorously.BitMEX has been reported to be under investigation by American authorities since last year. On Thursday, American cryptocurrency experts said they were not surprised that the exchange would attract scrutiny given its freewheeling attitude.The vast majority of firms that service the U.S. are compliant, so its not surprising that the government would now turn to those that refuse to follow the law, said Jerry Brito, the executive director of Coin Center, a research and lobbying group in Washington.	5
Media\|Shareholder Calls for Check of Sumner Redstones Conditionhttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/business/media/shareholder-calls-for-check-of-redstones-condition.htmlDec. 2, 2015One of the largest shareholders in Viacom and CBS voiced concerns on Wednesday about the health of the 92-year-old media mogul Sumner M. Redstone and whether he should continue in his role as executive chairman of the companies.One week ago, a former companion of Mr. Redstone filed a lawsuit challenging his mental competence. Mr. Redstones lawyers have asked the court to dismiss the suit, calling the claims a meritless action, riddled with lies. On Wednesday, a Viacom director said Mr. Redstone was mentally capable. Mario Gabelli, whose investment firm, Gamco, is the second-largest voting shareholder in Viacom and CBS behind Mr. Redstone, said that he sought more information about Mr. Redstones health and involvement at the companies after reading through the suit. The court filings included claims that Mr. Redstone was incontinent, required suctioning to remove phlegm up to 20 times a day and was obsessed with eating steak even while on a feeding tube.Mr. Gabelli said that if Mr. Redstone got paid anything in 2015, it would have a hard time passing any smell test based on the descriptions in the suit.Do I think he should be drawing any money? Mr. Gabelli asked. Clearly, one has to look at how much a chairman gets paid relative to the value added.Mr. Redstone controls about 80 percent of the voting stock in the two media companies, which have a combined market value of $45 billion. His total compensation for the 2014 fiscal year was $13.2 million at Viacom and $10.8 million at CBS. His compensation for the fiscal 2015 year will be disclosed in regulatory filings.Mr. Gabelli added that he had received calls from clients about Mr. Redstone, which spurred him to ask Viacom for clarification about Mr. Redstones role at the companies. They have got to say something, he said. You cant run a public company like this.He said that the same questions applied to CBS, but that he did not call the company.In response, Viacom released a statement on Wednesday from William Schwartz, chairman of its boards governance and nominating committee.As has been widely and publicly disclosed, Mr. Redstones physicians have publicly attested that he is mentally capable, and this information is consistent with other medical and other information available to me, he said in the statement.Court filings from Mr. Redstones lawyers also included statements from his doctors who saidthat while Mr. Redstone had various ailments, the results of a recent brain scan were quite good. A statement fromPhilippeDauman, Viacoms chief executive, said that Mr. Redstone was engaged and attentive.A spokesman for CBS declined to comment.	0
The suit, led by Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, seeks to give the vice president the power to reject electoral votes that were cast for Joseph R. Biden Jr.Credit...Lynne Sladky/Associated PressDec. 31, 2020[Heres what you need to know about President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.s Inauguration Day.]The Justice Department asked a federal judge on Thursday to reject a lawsuit seeking to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election, pitting the department against President Trumps allies in Congress who have refused to accept President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.s victory.The department, acting on behalf of Mr. Pence, said that Republican lawmakers, led by Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, could not invalidate the more than century-old law that governs the Electoral College process to expand an otherwise ceremonial role into one that has the power to reject electoral votes that were cast for Mr. Biden.In a last-ditch bid to subvert the outcome of the election, Mr. Gohmert, along with other Republicans in Congress and electors in Arizona, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Pence on Sunday in an effort to force him to take on this expanded role. As the presiding officer of the Senate, Mr. Pence has the constitutionally designated responsibility of opening and tallying envelopes sent from all 50 states and announcing their electoral results when Congress convenes next week to certify the count. But changing his role would allow Mr. Trump to pressure his vice president to invalidate the results.The Justice Department also made clear in its filing that it welcomed any comments from the federal judge in the case, Jeremy D. Kernodle of the Eastern District of Texas, that would clarify that Mr. Pences role in the election was purely procedural.The White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and the chief of staff, Mark Meadows, were aware the Justice Department was filing on Mr. Pences behalf before it happened, according to two people briefed on the discussions.If a judge were to make clear that Mr. Pence does not have the authority to reject votes or decide the results, it could alleviate pressure on him. Since the election in November, Mr. Trump has become singularly focused on the proceedings of the Electoral College. He cut short his vacation at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to return to Washington early, at least in part to push Republican lawmakers to reject the results when they meet on Jan. 6 to count the votes.Should Judge Kernodle confirm that Mr. Pence has no influence over the Electoral College votes, Mr. Gohmerts lawsuit could have the opposite of its intended effect.In its response, the department also said that Mr. Gohmert did not have standing to sue Mr. Pence over performing the duties as defined by the act; rather, he and the other plaintiffs should sue Congress, which passed the original law.The Justice Departments move to squash an 11th-hour attempt to undo Mr. Bidens victory could put it more at odds with Mr. Trump.The president has been furious that former Attorney General William P. Barr refused to bolster Mr. Trumps false claims of widespread voter fraud and instead affirmed Mr. Bidens victory.Mr. Trumps relationship with Mr. Barr, whom he had once seen as the greatest ally he had in his cabinet, further soured after the president learned that he kept an investigation into the tax affairs of Mr. Bidens son, Hunter Biden, under wraps during the election. Although it is department policy not to discuss investigations that could affect the outcome of an election, Mr. Trump accused his attorney general of disloyalty for not publicly disclosing the matter during the campaign.And at his final news conference, Mr. Barr said that he did not see any reason to appoint a special counsel to oversee a tax investigation into the younger Mr. Biden or to dig into unfounded allegations that Mr. Trump lost because of widespread voter fraud.Some inside the department believed that Mr. Barrs statements may have helped Jeffrey A. Rosen, the acting attorney general. Mr. Rosen is likely to face tremendous pressure from the president to appoint additional special counsels and use the departments other powers to help him undo Mr. Bidens victory.But now the department under Mr. Rosen has taken a step that Mr. Trump may see as an overt act intended to thwart one of his allies, opening it up to possible retaliation.A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.	3
Credit...Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesDec. 30, 2015Edward Hugh, a freethinking and wide-ranging British economist who gave early warnings about the European debt crisis from his adopted home in Barcelona, died on Tuesday, his birthday, in Girona, Spain. He was 67.The cause was cancer of the gallbladder and liver, his son, Morgan Jones, said.Mr. Hugh drew attention in 2009 and 2010 for his blog posts pointing out flaws at the root of Europes ambition to bind together disparate cultures and economies with a single currency, the euro.In clear, concise essays, adorned with philosophical musings and colorful graphics, Mr. Hugh insisted time and again that economists and policy makers were glossing over the extent to which swift austerity measures in countries like Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal would result in devastating recessions.Mr. Hughs insights soon attracted a wide and influential following, including hedge funds, economists, finance ministers and analysts at the International Monetary Fund.For those of us pessimists who believed that the eurozone structure was leading to an unsustainable bubble in the periphery countries, Edward Hugh was a must-read, said Albert Edwards, a strategist based in London for the French bank Socit Gnrale. His prescience in explaining the mechanics of the crisis went almost unnoticed until it actually hit.As the eurozones economic problems grew, so did Mr. Hughs popularity, and by 2011 he had moved the base of his operations to Facebook. There he attracted many thousands of additional followers from all over the world.If Santa Claus and John Maynard Keynes could combine as one, he might well be Edward Hugh. He was roly-poly and merry, and he always had a twinkle in his eye, not least when he came across a data point or the hint of an economic or social trend that would support one of his many theories.His intellect was too restless to be pigeonholed, but when pressed he would say that he saw himself as a Keynesian in spirit, but not letter. And in tune with his view that economists in general had become too wedded to static economic models and failed their obligation to predict and explain, he frequently cited this quotation from Keynes:Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.Edward Hugh Bengree-Jones was born in Liverpool, England, on Dec. 29, 1948. He moved to London and received an undergraduate degree from the London School of Economics. He pursued his doctoral studies at Victoria University in Manchester, although he never completed them.In an interview with The New York Times in 2010, Mr. Hugh said that his interests were too many for him to buckle down and actually earn a doctorate in a single topic. He read widely and relentlessly, becoming an expert on a variety of matters like demography, migration, independent cinema and the social tendencies of the bonobo ape.Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he bounced from job to job, mostly in education, taking on projects such as teaching English to Chilean refugees.In 1990 he moved to Barcelona, having fallen in love with the citys multicultural flair during a holiday visit. He quickly became fluent in both Spanish and Catalan and decided that Barcelona would become his home.He would became a champion of Catalonias push for independence and was an informal adviser to senior Catalan politicians, including Artur Mas, the leader of the movements main party.While Mr. Hughs pointed pen often ruffled feathers, especially in Spain, he did become a local celebrity of sorts. He was a regular presence in the papers and appeared frequently on television, where he would expound for hours in Spanish and Catalan.On occasion his prognostications were overly pessimistic, and Spains surprisingly quick economic recovery was an event that he, along with many others, did not foresee.Until this summer, when his cancer worsened, he spent his days posting daily economic snippets on Facebook, digging deep into independent films from around the world, and having long, lazy lunches with local notables and friends.That he never finished his doctorate or wrote his great work never truly bothered him, he said in his interview with The Times.The last time I was asked what it was I did, I replied rather cantankerously, that I dont do, I think, he recalled.Besides his son, Morgan, his survivors include his wife, Barbara; a brother, David, and a half sister, Anne.	0
TV SportsFeb. 3, 2014The Super Bowl can be a great game or a bad game, a dramatic struggle or a laugher. And viewership hardly wavers.Seattles 43-8 dissection of Denver on Sunday night tied for the third-biggest blowout in Super Bowl history, yet an average of 111.5 million people watched, more than any single television show in United States history. The previous record of 111.4 million was set two years ago when the Giants beat New England, 21-17. That made sports sense: The Giants won that game on a touchdown with about a minute left.But Sundays game was a rout and a dud. The competitive aspect appeared to have ended with the errant snap on the Broncos first possession. This is where sports sense ends.The Super Bowl long ago stopped being regarded as a season-ending football game. It defies predictions that smaller-market teams (Seattle is the 13th-ranked television market, Denver the 17th) cannot sustain big national audiences. It overwhelms, for a few hours, concerns about the potential neurological effects of concussions. The power of the Super Bowl as one-of-a-kind, must-watch entertainment leads rival networks not to compete seriously. Its such a uber-iconic event that even if you have a lopsided game, people will stick around, said Bill Wanger, the executive vice president for programming and research at Fox Sports. He suggested that if the game had been tight and exciting to the end, it might have attracted as many as 118 million viewers. Wanger said that more viewers than ever watched the first half-hour of the game intrigued, he believed, by the matchup of the No. 1 offense against the top-ranked defense; the leading personalities (Peyton Manning and Richard Sherman); and the possibility of a snow-globe experience at MetLife Stadium. The snow that the league and the organizers feared came Monday.Fox was, in fact, able to set its record despite having lost viewers in the second half as Seattles domination escalated.The first-half viewership peaked from 7:30 to 8 p.m. Eastern, at 115.9 million. From 8 to 8:30, 115.3 million were tuned to the Bruno Mars halftime show, exceeding Madonnas previous record of 114 million two years ago, and then spiked to 116.8 million during the next half-hour when play resumed. But 12 million viewers eventually found something else to do by the time the game ended before 10 p.m. Eastern.VideoEvery so often, the Super Bowl turns into a rout, which is exactly what happened on Sunday night at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.CreditCredit...Carlo Allegri/ReutersAlmost 1.1 million people watched the game in Spanish on Fox Deportes and on a live stream on Fox Sports GO app and on Foxsports.com.The story of Super Bowl viewership is of decade-by-decade growth. The universe of television homes has grown, but so have entertainment choices and technologies. In the 1970s, the Super Bowl drew an average viewership of 58.1 million. That rose to 81.6 million in the 1980s, to 85.3 million in the 1990s, and to 90.4 million in the first 10 years of the new century.Now, the audience has reached a new normal. Since 2010, it has never been smaller than the 106.5 million who watched New Orleanss 14-point win over Indianapolis.This just means the Super Bowl is something people want to watch, no matter what is really happening, Wanger said.Telling the story of a one-sided Super Bowl was left, in many ways, to faces. Fox had plenty of shots of Manning and Denver Coach John Fox in stages of anger, frustration and distress. The network showed Manning in a vigorous sideline chat with his center, Manny Ramirez, after the snap miscue, and another of Manning seeking solutions on the sideline with his overmatched offensive line.On the Seattle side, Fox told the personal story of the rout in its frequent cuts to Coach Pete Carrolls exuberant clapping; the most telling showed him, from behind, cheering in slow motion as Denver was called for a false start.The analyst Troy Aikman was unavoidably critical of the Broncos tackling when Seattles Percy Harvin ran the second-half kickoff back for a touchdown. Later, after Seattle receiver Jermaine Kearse evaded five Broncos for a touchdown, Aikman simply said, This is terrible defense. Seattles final touchdown prompted him to say: I dont know what Denver is doing. Theyre playing so soft. Aikmans analysis was generally decent, especially when it addressed passing routes and Seattles pass coverage. But there were several times when he should have given the audience more. In addition to praising Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson as more than a mere game manager, Aikman, a former quarterback, should have explained why Wilson, at 5 feet 11 inches, was so effective. Aikman also should have quickly questioned Denvers early decision to throw a challenge flag on a pass by Wilson, rather than be asked about it by his partner, Joe Buck. He also should have asked why Seattle, ahead by 35 points, ran on fourth down with 2 minutes 5 seconds left in the game, and why Manning was in the game on the final series, with no chance at a comeback. And I waited for a sequence of replays about Mannings wobbly and erratic passes for Aikman to analyze. But it never came.	4
Philadelphia Eagles Another Fan Punches Police Horse 1/22/2018 For the second time in 2 weeks ... a Philadelphia Eagles fan has been arrested for punching a police horse at the stadium. This time, the perp is Andrew Tornetta -- who cops say was going H.A.M. during a pre-game tailgate at Lincoln Financial Field before the Eagles took on the Vikings in the NFC Championship. Cops say mounted Pennsylvania State Police units were breaking up a crazy situation when Tornetta refused to comply with orders to disperse. Instead, Tornetta punched a police horse twice in the right shoulder and then socked the human officer in the face ... according to cops. Tornetta allegedly tried to flee -- and removed his sweatshirt to try to evade police -- but was eventually caught and arrested for aggravated assault, simple assault, recklessly endangering another person, and related charges. As we previously reported, another fan was arrested for punching a police horse in the face at Lincoln Financial Field the previous weekend ... when the Eagles defeated the Falcons.	1
Facebook, Fearing Public Outcry, Shelved Earlier Report on Popular PostsThe company praised itself this week for being the most transparent platform on the internet.Credit...Jeff Chiu/Associated PressPublished Aug. 20, 2021Updated Oct. 25, 2021When Facebook this week released its first quarterly report about the most viewed posts in the United States, Guy Rosen, its vice president of integrity, said the social network had undertaken a long journey to be by far the most transparent platform on the internet. The list showed that the posts with the most reach tended to be innocuous content like recipes and cute animals.Facebook had prepared a similar report for the first three months of the year, but executives never shared it with the public because of concerns that it would look bad for the company, according to internal emails sent by executives and shared with The New York Times.In that report, a copy of which was provided to The Times, the most-viewed link was a news article with a headline suggesting that the coronavirus vaccine was at fault for the death of a Florida doctor. The report also showed that a Facebook page for The Epoch Times, an anti-China newspaper that spreads right-wing conspiracy theories, was the 19th-most-popular page on the platform for the first three months of 2021.The report was nearing public release when some executives, including Alex Schultz, Facebooks vice president of analytics and chief marketing officer, debated whether it would cause a public relations problem, according to the internal emails. The company decided to shelve it.We considered making the report public earlier, said Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, but since we knew the attention it would garner, exactly as we saw this week, there were fixes to the system we wanted to make.Mr. Stone said Mr. Schultz had advocated releasing the original report but eventually agreed with the recommendation to hold off. Facebook released the report on Saturday after the publication of this article.Facebook did not say why it decided to produce a popularity report, but it has faced increasing scrutiny over the data it shares with the government and the public, particularly over misinformation about the virus and vaccines. The criticism has escalated as cases from the Delta variant of the coronavirus surged. The White House has called on the company to share more information about false and misleading information on the site, and to do a better job of stopping its spread. Last month, President Biden accused the company of killing people by allowing false information to circulate widely, a statement the White House later softened. Other federal agencies have accused Facebook of withholding key data.Facebook has pushed back, publicly accusing the White House of scapegoating the company for the administrations failure to reach its vaccination goals. Executives at Facebook, including Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, have said the platform has been aggressively removing Covid-19 misinformation since the start of the pandemic. The company said it had removed over 18 million pieces of misinformation in that period.But Brian Boland, a former vice president of product marketing at Facebook, said there was plenty of reason to be skeptical about data collected and released by a company that has had a history of protecting its own interests.You cant trust a report that is curated by a company and designed to combat a press narrative rather than real meaningful transparency, Mr. Boland said. Its up to regulators and government officials to bring us that transparency.ImageCredit...Christian Sorensen Hansen for The New York TimesIn this weeks report, which covered public content viewed in Facebooks News Feed from April 1 to June 30, popular links included local news stories, a cat GIF and a Green Bay Packers alumni website. Popular posts, which were seen by tens of millions of accounts, included viral question-and-answer prompts and memes.Most of the companys draft report, like the one Facebook released on Wednesday, showed that the 20 most-viewed links on Facebook in the United States were to nonpolitical content, like recipe sites and stories about the United Nations Childrens Fund.But the rejected report also included the article about the doctors death in Florida. The headline of the article, from The South Florida Sun Sentinel and republished by The Chicago Tribune: A healthy doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine; CDC is investigating why.This link was viewed by nearly 54 million Facebook accounts in the United States. Many commenters on the post raised questions about the vaccines safety. Six of the top 20 sharers came from public Facebook pages that regularly post anti-vaccination content on Facebook, according to data from CrowdTangle, a social media analytics firm owned by Facebook. Other top sharers of the story included Filipino Facebook pages supporting President Rodrigo Duterte, a pro-Israel Facebook group and a page called Just the Facts, which described itself as putting out the Truth even when the media wont.Months later, the medical examiners report said there wasnt enough evidence to say whether the vaccine contributed to the doctors death. Far fewer people on Facebook saw that update.The 19th-most-popular page on the social network in the earlier report was Trending World by the Epoch Times, a publication that has promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory and spread misleading claims about voter fraud before the 2020 presidential election. The Epoch Times is barred from advertising on Facebook because of its repeated violations of the platforms political advertising policy.Trending World, according to the report, was viewed by 81.4 million accounts, slightly fewer than the 18th-most-popular page, Fox News, which had 81.7 million content viewers for the first three months of 2021.Facebooks transparency report released on Wednesday also showed that an Epoch Times subscription link was among the most viewed in the United States. With some 44.2 million accounts seeing the link in April, May and June, it was about half as popular as Trending World in the shelved report.Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac contributed reporting. Jacob Silver and Ben Decker contributed research.	5
Asia Pacific\|Pakistan Reopens Border With Afghanistan for 2 Dayshttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/world/asia/pakistan-afghanistan-border.htmlCredit...Muhammad Sajjad/Associated PressMarch 7, 2017ISLAMABAD, Pakistan Pakistan temporarily reopened its border with Afghanistan on Tuesday, 18 days after sealing it over security concerns.More than 2,000 Afghans have so far moved across the border, Shamsul Islam, an official at the border crossing at Torkham, said by telephone.Thousands of others are waiting to be allowed exit into Afghanistan, he said. There are long queues. Clearance and immigration take time.Pakistan announced late Monday that it would open the border for two days on humanitarian grounds to allow Afghans stranded in Pakistan to leave for home.The move came after protests about the closing from Afghanistan, which warned of a looming humanitarian crisis. Afghanistans ambassador to Pakistan, Omar Zakhilwal, said on Sunday that his government might be forced to airlift its stranded citizens out of Pakistan.Pakistan shut the border crossings last month after a series of bombings rocked the country. Pakistani officials say that militant groups operating from Afghanistan carried out the attacks, and they urged Kabul to capture the militants inside Afghan territory.Afghan officials have complained about the presence of Afghan Taliban militants on the Pakistan side of the border and say that senior officials of the militant group have managed to find havens inside Pakistan. Both sides claim that they have no control over the militants hiding inside their borders.Pakistani border officials say that Afghan citizens with valid travel documents would be allowed to cross back into Afghanistan during the temporary reopening period. Undocumented Afghans were not being allowed, Mr. Islam said. Undocumented Afghans are routinely rounded up in the country and deported. However, in the current standoff with Afghanistan, they are not being allowed to leave.He said that nearly 400 Pakistanis with travel documents, who had been stranded in Afghanistan, were also allowed to enter the country.Trade between the two countries remains suspended and containers laden with good destined for Afghanistan remained stranded in Pakistan.It remains unclear how long Pakistan plans to keep the border closed after the brief reopening this week.	6
Credit...Suzi Eszterhas/Minden PicturesScience Times at 40Mountain gorillas are faring better perhaps because some humans just wont listen to reason.A 10-month-old mountain gorilla in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda.Credit...Suzi Eszterhas/Minden PicturesNov. 19, 2018Last Thursday there was a bit of good news relating to the impending extinction and destruction of everything. The mountain gorilla, a subspecies of the Eastern gorilla, was upgraded from critically endangered to endangered. There still are only about 1,000 of them, up from a low point of a few hundred, so its not like they were declared vulnerable (better than endangered), or just fine (not a real category). And the Eastern gorilla as a species overall is still critically endangered.But the mountain gorillas are in fact doing better, according to the announcement from the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. It bases its decisions on information gathered from scientists and conservation experts. The gorillas population has been increasing for about 30 years. And it has taken a tremendous amount of struggle and work to get this far. That raises a question: If things have improved so much for an animal in such a dire situation as the mountain gorilla, should we then give in to hope?[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. \| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]I know this isnt the accepted way of speaking about the planet and its creatures. In public discourse, hope is the one thing you should never give up. But in our minds (well, in my mind, anyway, and I cant be the only one), the reasoning behind that often expressed sentiment is not so clear. What if a rational look at the facts points in the other direction? What if, for instance, the planet were getting warmer every year, and there was a lack of political will to try to stop the trend? What if we were in the middle of a mass extinction caused by humans? Imagine, just for a moment, that the planet had 7.7 billion people, who had already used up a lot of the space for bears and wolves and lions and oh, I dont know gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans. Suppose that all of the great apes were either endangered or critically endangered. And, just as a thought experiment, what if there were going to be 9.8 billion people in 2050 and 11.2 billion people in 2100? Imagine that the population of Africa, where all gorillas live, is one of the fastest growing, with 26 countries expected to double in size by 2050. ImageCredit...Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, via Associated PressOf course, all those things are actually true. Perhaps I am blinded by my own pessimism, but I do often wonder whether hope is a rational response to reality.On the other hand, hope does seem to have played a role in the mountain gorillas rebound. After we reduced them to a point where it seemed they would go extinct by the year 2000, some humans worked incredibly hard to protect them. And the gorillas survived, even through the very dark period of the Rwandan genocide.Their success so far, according to Tara Stoinski, a scientist who has studied gorillas for more than 20 years and is the head of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, is the result of intensive work, of the gorillas charismatic appeal, of the buy-in to conservation on the part of government, and finally the result of an extremely high commitment of resources that she calls extreme conservation. The gorillas are watched over by lots of field staff 20 times the global average per square kilometer in protected areas. What makes that possible is ecotourism, which is made possible by the great charisma of gorillas. If they were legless skinks, it might be hard to work up that kind of support.But that is a quibble. What is clear is that irrational hope combined with dedication and decades of work culminated in pulling back mountain gorillas one step from the brink.So, should we give in to hope? I think that Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford professor, neuroscientist, author of many books and giver of many talks, has the answer. Hes a public science star of sorts. He may not be as well-known as Neil deGrasse Tyson, but hes doing pretty well for a (self-described) strident atheist who points out in his recent book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, that free will, the way we usually imagine it, is an illusion. Hes not a Pollyanna, is my point. No sugarcoating from Dr. Sapolsky.But, surprisingly, he is an eloquent admirer of certain forms of irrationality. He gave a funny, rich and convincing talk in 2009 to Stanford seniors on what separates humans from animals. I know its not brand new, but I still turn to it occasionally because its so clear and persuasive. It has more than 400,000 views online. After describing many differences between humans and animals, even our close relatives, like the mountain gorillas, Dr. Sapolsky presents what he sees as one of the most remarkable human qualities: the ability to hold on to two contradictory ideas at once and find a way forward.His main example is Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote the book Dead Man Walking, based on her work ministering to death row inmates. She said that the more unforgivable the sin, the more it must be forgiven, and the more unlovable the person, the more important it is to love him or her.That is not, Dr. Sapolsky argues, a conclusion any animal could come to. But a human can spend her life acting on that conviction. And that ability, he said, is the most irrational, magnificent thing that we are capable of as a species.ImageCredit...Christophe Courteau/NPL, via Minden PicturesIn fact, he tells the Stanford graduates-to-be that this is precisely what they need to do. He acknowledges that they have probably learned enough to realize that its impossible for any one person to make a difference in the world. But, the more clearly, absolutely, utterly, irrevocably, unchangeably clear it is that it is impossible for you to make a difference and make the world better, the more you must.Im sure this is completely obvious to people who actually do things, rather than write about them: that you dont have to give in to hope, but that you shouldnt always give in to reason, either. If you take the long view, the good news for gorillas may be a bit like a Mega Millions lottery ticket. But somebody won more than a billion dollars recently.Dr. Sapolskys concluding challenge to the well educated, well connected, savvy Stanford seniors could be taken to heart by anyone burdened by the weight and apparent rationality of their own pessimism, which may be why Ive listened to it more than once.Theres nobody out there who is in a better position to be able to sustain a contradiction like this for your entire life and use it as a moral imperative. So do it.	7
The first checks could be cut in April. The money from the nations three major pharmaceutical distributors and Johnson & Johnson will be used for addiction treatment and prevention.Credit...Patrick Semansky/Associated PressFeb. 25, 2022The nations three largest drug distributors and a major pharmaceutical manufacturer announced Friday that a supermajority of states and localities had accepted the terms of their $26 billion offer to settle thousands of civil claims related to the deadly opioid crisis. The first checks are expected to go out in early April.Through its pharmaceutical division, Janssen, Johnson & Johnson will pay $5 billion, broken into annual payments over nine years. McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen, the distributors, will pay a combined $21 billion over 18 years. At least 85 percent of the payments will be dedicated to addiction treatment and prevention services. By signing onto the deal, thousands of local governments as well as states have agreed to drop their opioid lawsuits against the companies and also pledge not to bring any future action.In its sweep and bottom line, the deal is second only to the Big Tobacco settlement of the late 1990s as a multistate agreement.The total amount includes almost $2 billion that will cover fees and costs for the platoons of lawyers nationwide who represented local governments as well as some states and built much of the legal strategy in the cases. Those payments will go out over roughly seven years.There are no separate funds to compensate families and individual victims of the opioid crisis.The announcement is a milestone in the nationwide opioid litigation, which began in 2014 with a few cities and counties filing lawsuits against five drug manufacturers. But as thousands of governmental plaintiffs eventually filed claims, the cases reached across the pharmaceutical industry, to distributors and retailers as well. The actions gelled into a modern legal behemoth that is still far from fully resolved, featuring, most prominently, the cases against Purdue Pharma.The crisis continues to take a terrible toll: More than 500,000 Americans have died from overdoses to prescription and illegal street opioids since 1999, according to federal data.The distributors and Johnson & Johnson released statements Friday morning, noting that the deal is not an admission of wrongdoing and that they strongly dispute the allegations. The distributors said in a joint statement that they believed that the implementation of this settlement is a key milestone toward achieving broad resolution of governmental opioid claims and delivering meaningful relief to communities across the United States that have been impacted by the epidemic.Johnson & Johnson also added that it would continue to defend itself against any litigation that this final settlement agreement does not resolve, noting that it no longer sells prescription opioid medication in the United States.When Johnson & Johnson, the distributors and a smaller group of states announced their proposed settlement in July, the companies said they required an unspecified majority of plaintiffs to sign on, to guarantee an end to litigation. The announcement Friday morning signals that a sufficient threshold has been reached, or at least 90 percent of those governments eligible to participate, and 46 of 49 eligible states for the distributors and 45 for Johnson & Johnson. Courts in each state will now have to sign off on the agreements, a process that is expected to go relatively smoothly and swiftly.According to the agreements, a state will get its full allocation if all its local governments sign on to the deal. For example, all 100 North Carolina counties and 47 municipalities have agreed, and the state will get its allotment of $750 million.North Carolina communities will begin to receive money this year to help people struggling with substance abuse, said Josh Stein, the states attorney general and a leader of a bipartisan coalition of states that negotiated with the companies and local governments for nearly three years. The treatment, recovery, prevention and harm reduction services that will be available across the state will help people regain control over their lives and make North Carolina safer.A few holdout states and localities still remain against either the distributors or Johnson & Johnson, including Washington, Oklahoma and Alabama. But legal experts say that stance could be perilous: The outcomes from a few completed trials point to favorable resolutions for the companies, suggesting that continuing to do battle with those governments who declined the deal is a risk the companies are willing to take.This month, the same companies announced a tentative settlement with Native American tribes that have suffered disproportionately high addiction and death rates during the opioid epidemic. In combination with a $75 million deal that distributors struck with the Cherokee Nation last fall, the 574 federally recognized tribes could receive $665 million in payouts over nine years. An overwhelming majority of tribes are expected to sign on to the proposal.A major theme coursing throughout the opioid litigation has been the aggressive marketing of the drugs, which went all but unchecked for years. Distributors almost never sent up warning flares when pharmacy clients took deliveries of quantities of opioids that were wildly disproportionate to the local population. A central feature of the new deal is that the distributors must set up an independent clearinghouse to track and report one anothers shipments, a mechanism intended to raise red flags immediately when outsize orders are made.During the settlement negotiations, a secondary series of talks between the states and the local governments over the allocation of the funds was also unfolding. By now, about two dozen states have worked up their own distribution plans with local cities and counties that also sued the companies.The executive committee of lawyers, including Joe Rice, Elizabeth Cabraser and Jayne Conroy, who negotiated for local governments, released a statement saying, We arrived at this moment after years of work by community leaders across the country who committed themselves to seeking funds they need to combat the opioid epidemic.They continued, While this is a vital step, it is only one of the many that are necessary to put an end to this crisis.	2
Dr. Oz To Air Nicole Eggert Show 1/30/2018 The Dr. Oz Show Nicole Eggert will be featured on Wednesday's 'Dr. Oz Show' ... this after producers shelved the program claiming they had issues with Nicole's timeline. We've learned after Nicole appeared on Megyn Kelly's show Tuesday, Oz's producers called Nicole's lawyer Lisa Bloom and her manager David Weintraub, saying they had a change of heart and would air the program after all. As we reported, the show was filmed January 10 but after receiving a blistering cease and desist letter from Scott Baio's lawyer which, among other things, questioned her timeline for the alleged molestation, the show was put on ice. Nicole, Lisa and David went to Oz's studio Tuesday and shot some additional footage for the program.	1
Machine LearningVideoMolly Wood says bigger may be better when it comes to smartphones.Feb. 26, 2014The tablet and the phone are fast becoming the same device, and I for one cant wait.Bigger phones have been a big trend over the last couple of years, and despite a somewhat mocking moniker, the phablet (phone plus tablet) is here to stay. I predict that within a few years, seven- and eight-inch tablets, like the iPad mini, will begin to disappear, replaced by phones that are nearly equal in size.Tablets were a revolution in consumer electronics, mainly because they made us realize how much more we could do with our portable touch screens. The first tablets, like the original iPad and the Google Nexus 10, were 10 inches, great for watching movies and TV shows. But despite rocketing sales growth at first, most people found that a laptop with a keyboard is still better for getting work done. And at 1.5 to 2 pounds, those early tablets were slightly big and heavy to hold for reading, or to carry around day to day.Thus, the smaller tablet was born the Google Nexus 7, the Amazon Kindle and Apples reluctantly birthed iPad Mini. At 7 inches (or 7.9 inches, in the case of the iPad Mini), those tablets are lightweight, easy to toss in a purse or backpack, and better for use as a multimedia-enabled e-reader because they are more comfortable to hold. For a brief halcyon period, sales of smaller tablets began to crush sales of 10-inch devices.Now, even those tablet sales have slowed. The research firm IDC predicts that tablet sales growth, though still expanding, will slow to the single digits by 2017, with sales of smaller tablets falling the fastest. It seems that many of us come to the conclusion Ive reached of late: I dont want a smaller tablet. I want a bigger phone.Big phones may take some getting used to theyre less pocketable and a little comical when used for actual talking but theyre much more useful than small tablets for unifying your communications on one device. Theyre always connected and more portable than a tablet, and the phone is already the device youre using for texting, taking pictures and browsing the web. Why not a bigger screen for watching videos and reading email?At the moment, the industry is still trying to figure out exactly what size phone makes sense, but the new norm in screen size keeps creeping up. Some phones are clearly considered or labeled phablets, like the LG Optimus G Pro 2, announced this week at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain. Its screen is 5.9 inches, or just about an inch smaller than the Nexus 7. The Chinese manufacturer ZTE announced its Grand Memo II phablet, with a 6-inch display; Chinas Huawei dropped all pretense with the 7-inch MediaPad X1, with 4G LTE connectivity built into a device that is almost all tablet, hardly any phone.But even phones that arent strictly phablets are getting bigger. Samsung announced its Galaxy S5 this week in Barcelona, and its screen measures in at 5.1 inches. LG has been successful with the 5.2-inch LG G2; 4.6-inch displays are almost the new minimum. When Samsung introduced a Galaxy S4 Mini, its screen was 4.3 inches 0.3 inches larger than the iPhone.Apple now stands as the last holdout against the big phone trend. The iPhone 5S screen is stubbornly stuck at four inches, which seems tiny when stacked up against current Android phones. The iPhone 4S has an eye-squinting 3.5-inch screen. Analysts, consumers and even Donald Trump have begged Apple to make a bigger phone. Rumors abound that one or even two new bigger-screen iPhones could be in development for September. Apple declined to comment on whether a bigger iPhone is in the works.But while youre waiting for Apple, there are other good options to consider.Ive spent the last couple of weeks with the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which has a 5.7-inch screen and includes a stylus, and I think its the best of the bunch. I also love the LG Optimus G Pro; I expect its successor, the LG Optimus G Pro 2, to be excellent, although it may not be picked up by United States carriers.That leaves us the Note 3. The original Galaxy Note really kicked off the phablet craze. It was introduced in 2011, and had a then-astonishing 5.3-inch screen. Despite the mockery from a lot of circles, the Note became a cult hit. It sold 10 million units and broke new ground on screen-size acceptance.The Note 3 has been a success, as well; Samsung said it sold 10 million Note 3 devices in just 60 days after its introduction in September. I can see why; the Note 3s screen is absolutely luxurious for reading email, scrolling through Twitter, looking at photos and, most of all, for playing Candy Crush. Try it: Youll never play on an iPhone again.The Note 3 is lightweight, with a faux-leather back that makes it feel refined in a vegetarian sort of way. It weighs about six ounces to the iPhone 5Ss four, which is not significantly heavier to hold and type on. And the typing itself is comfortable and natural; the screen is big enough that theres room for a row of numbers above the qwerty keys, so no switching between the letters and symbols menu when you need to add numbers. Theres even room for a period key. What a concept, right?The stylus is a big differentiator between the Note 3 and other phablets. I could take it or lose it. It adds functionality, like the ability to quickly and easily take a screenshot that you can then draw on and share, or a quick way to scribble a memo or scrapbook a page for later. But the LG Optimus G Pro lacks the stylus, and I find it just as usable.Im happiest when Im using the Note 3 just as Id use a tablet: playing games, browsing the web, checking Facebook, watching video, reading books and magazines, and sending email. But what makes the phone better than the tablet is one-stop shopping for all my communications. I can also text, Instagram and even make a call, without switching devices.Our smartphones remain the center of our connected lives; bigger screens make them that much more useful and immersive, even if they may also require bigger pockets, purses and man purses. Embrace the phablet and use Bluetooth for making calls. Youll feel much less silly that way.	5
Sports of The TimesCredit...Nathan Denette/Canadian Press, via Associated PressJeff Z. Klein and Stu HackelFeb. 1, 2014The Olympic fate of Canadas Steven Stamkos, who has not played since breaking his leg in November, could be decided this week.Stamkos, who twice led the N.H.L. in goals, has been skating in practice with the Tampa Bay Lightning. Last Monday, he took the ice for only a moment because, he said, his leg did not feel right. But the next day he skated with his teammates before their game in Toronto, saying he felt much better.Stamkos, however, did not engage in light contact drills until Friday in Montreal. Afterward, he said certain movements still caused him discomfort.Tampa Bay Coach Jon Cooper had said that Stamkos would have to begin more physical practices if he had any hope of playing in the Olympics. Canadas first game in Sochi, Russia, is Feb. 13. Whether Stamkos will be strong enough to play a game before the Olympic break is a question.Stamkoss aim was to begin playing in Saturdays game against Montreal. Then it was to play at least one game before the Olympics. Now even that is uncertain.Last week, neither Stamkos nor Steve Yzerman, the general manager for the Lightning and for Canada, would rule out his being placed on the final Olympic roster. If Stamkos is not ready, Yzerman will have to choose a replacement.The sentimental choice among fans would almost certainly be Martin St. Louis, Stamkoss Tampa Bay linemate, whose exclusion from Canadas initial roster last month caused an outcry.Going into Saturdays game against the Canadiens, St. Louis had eight goals and seven assists in the 12 games he had played since the team was announced. St. Louis, 38, denied that the Olympic snub had played a role in his scoring binge, but Cooper said he believed it had been motivation.Others whom Yzerman might consider to fill Stamkoss spot are Pittsburghs James Neal, a pure goal scorer like Stamkos; Philadelphias Claude Giroux, a versatile forward like Stamkos who can play wing or center; and Carolinas Eric Staal, who had four goals and five assists in nine games since he was left off the roster. A Change in Brodeur For the first time in 20 seasons, Martin Brodeur, the goalie with the most victories in N.H.L. history, is not the main man in the Devils net. And last week, Brodeur spoke about leaving the team.During stops in St. Louis and in Dallas, Brodeur, 41, said he was open to finding a better situation, whether in New Jersey or elsewhere. He encouraged General Manager Lou Lamoriello to ask him about a trade. Brodeur said he did not think he would request a trade unless his status deteriorated further in the next few weeks. Those were the strongest statements he had ever made about parting with the Devils.The change may have been spurred by Brodeurs experience against the Rangers last Sunday at Yankee Stadium. In the run-up to the game, Brodeur sounded as if he were loosening his emotional ties to the club. He talked about his surprise that the Devils were finally chosen for a showcase event, and that he hoped Coach Peter DeBoer would choose him to start the game because of the way I play now, not what I did in the past.Then Brodeur allowed a couple of soft goals, and his teammates left him out to dry for four other scores. He came out of the net after 40 minutes in the 7-3 loss.Afterward, DeBoer said Brodeur had suggested that he leave the game for Cory Schneider.DeBoer said Brodeur had asked, How about we give Schneids the experience of a period in this environment?That request may turn out to be the beginning of the end of Brodeurs record-breaking career with the Devils. Kick Save by the Bard Last Wednesday at Edmonton, Oilers goalie Ben Scrivens set a modern goalkeeping record. He stopped all 59 shots he faced in a 3-0 victory against the San Jose Sharks, making the most saves in a regular-season shutout since the expansion era began in 1967.Scrivens, a 27-year-old Cornell graduate nicknamed the Professor, was making his fourth start for Edmonton since his Jan. 15 trade from Los Angeles.A mask he wore with the Kings this season was covered with quotations from Shakespeare, including one from Macbeth that seemed to fit this performance.The cry is still They come! Our castles strengthWill laugh a siege to scorn.I tried to pick a couple that might loosely relate to hockey, Scrivens said, his choices worthy of his nickname.	4
Credit...John Taggart for The New York Times.June 21, 2018WASHINGTON Americans have done more and more of their shopping online in recent years, drawn by the promise of low prices, wide selection and buy-from-home convenience. But e-commerce has also had another edge: Many of those sales were, in effect, tax-free.The Supreme Court on Thursday moved to close that loophole, ruling that internet retailers can be required to collect sales taxes even in states where they have no physical presence.The decision, in South Dakota v. Wayfair Inc., was a victory for brick-and-mortar businesses that have long complained they are put at a disadvantage by having to charge sales taxes while many online competitors do not. And it was also a victory for states that have said that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue.State and local governments have really been dealing with a nightmare scenario for several years now, said Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington think tank. This is going to allow state and local governments to improve their tax enforcement and to put local business on a more level playing field.In Thursdays ruling, the court effectively overturned a system that it created. In 1992, the court ruled in Quill Corporation v. North Dakota that the Constitution bars states from requiring businesses to collect sales tax unless they have a substantial connection to the state. The Quill decision helped pave the way for the growth of online retail by letting companies sell nationwide without navigating the complex patchwork of state and local tax codes.But as online retailing has grown, the dynamics have shifted. Online sellers are no longer scrappy upstarts competing with more established businesses. Amazon had $119 billion in revenue from product sales last year, making it bigger than all but the largest traditional retailers.And state budgets are increasingly feeling the pinch. Writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 ruling, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the Quill decision caused states to lose annual tax revenues of up to $33 billion.Quill puts both local businesses and many interstate businesses with physical presence at a competitive disadvantage relative to remote sellers, he wrote. Remote sellers can avoid the regulatory burdens of tax collection and can offer de facto lower prices caused by the widespread failure of consumers to pay the tax on their own.Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch joined the majority opinion.In dissent, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. agreed that the courts rulings in this area had been wrongly decided, but said there were insufficient reasons to overrule the precedents. Any alteration to those rules with the potential to disrupt the development of such a critical segment of the economy should be undertaken by Congress, he wrote.Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the dissent.In the years since 1992, three members of the court had indicated that they might be ready to reconsider the Quill decision. In a 2015 concurring opinion, for instance, Justice Kennedy seemed to call for a fresh challenge.South Dakota responded by enacting a law that required all merchants to collect a 4.5 percent sales tax if they had more than $100,000 in annual sales or more than 200 transactions in the state. State officials sued three large online retailers Wayfair, Overstock.com and Newegg for violating the law. Lower courts ruled for the online retailers, citing the Quill decision.Marty Jackley, South Dakotas attorney general, called Thursdays ruling a big win for South Dakota and Main Streets across America. He said the decision could be particularly significant for rural areas where local businesses have been hit hard by competition from online retailers.Mr. Jackley is a Republican. But South Dakotas appeal drew bipartisan support, including from attorneys general in 35 states and the District of Columbia.Mr. Jackley estimated that South Dakota would be able to begin collecting sales tax on online purchases in 30 to 90 days. Other states may be close behind: Anticipating Thursdays ruling, several states, including North Dakota, have passed laws modeled on South Dakotas.President Trump, who has previously accused Amazon of avoiding taxes, wrote on Twitter that the decision was a great victory for consumers and retailers.Other states will have to change their laws if they want to take advantage of the decision, said Hayes Holderness, a law professor at the University of Richmond. He predicted a flurry of activity in legislatures.Many of those laws could face their own legal challenges. Justice Kennedys decision left open the possibility that some transactions were so small and scattered that no taxes should be collected. The court also did not decide whether states may seek sales taxes retroactively, which South Dakotas law does not.Thursdays ruling should benefit local coffers as well, at least where local sales taxes are collected at the state level. But it wont help municipal governments in states such as Pennsylvania and New Mexico where quirks in tax codes prevent local jurisdictions from taxing remote sellers.For consumers, the reversal of Quill could mean paying more for products bought online. In theory, most states already require consumers to pay a use tax equivalent to the state sales tax when buying online. But in practice, few consumers do so.Owners of brick-and-mortar stores welcomed the ruling.I firmly believe that its a huge stride in leveling the playing field, said Jason Patton, owner of Oz Music in Tuscaloosa, Ala. In my record store, the average price point is around $20. Im not going to say I continually lost customers because of the sales tax, but on higher-ticket items, that tax absolutely matters.Shares in Amazon fell 1.1 percent on Thursday, and other online retailers took a bigger hit. Overstock.com shares were down more than 7 percent.Today, the U.S. Supreme Court has reshaped the interstate commerce landscape in a move that could impact small business innovation on the internet, which has been a driving force behind our nations economy for the last 15 years, said Jonathan E. Johnson III, a member of Overstock.coms board.Overstock said the decision would have little impact on its business but argued that with more than 12,000 different state and local taxing districts, the ruling would present a compliance challenge for internet start-ups. Chief Justice Roberts made a similar argument in his dissent.Many experts, however, played down that problem. When the Supreme Court decided the Quill case in 1992, complying with various state and local tax laws would have been a major hurdle for small businesses. But today, many companies offer software that helps small businesses navigate local laws.The digital and internet revolution contributed to the problem, but those same factors contributed to the solution, which is easy-to-use tax-automation software, said Daniel Hemel, a University of Chicago law professor.Wayfair, in a statement, said it already collected sales tax on approximately 80 percent of its orders in the United States. As a result, we do not expect todays decision to have any noticeable impact on our business, the company said.The impact on Amazon could be even smaller: As of last year, the company collected sales tax in the 45 states that have one.But about half of Amazons total online sales come from independent merchants who simply post their inventory on the online store. In most states, those merchants are responsible for calculating and paying the various state taxes if they are owed. In the past year, Washington State and Pennsylvania have enacted laws requiring internet retailers to collect taxes on third-party sales. More states are expected to follow suit.Amazon declined to comment on the ruling.In his ruling on Thursday, Justice Kennedy wrote that world had changed since 1992, when mail-order sales totaled $180 million. Last year, remote sellers racked up sales exceeding half a trillion dollars, he noted.That growth seems unlikely to slow. Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group that supports independent businesses, said the tax-free nature of online retail had given Amazon and other internet sellers a big advantage when they needed it most.Its hard to overstate how much not having to collect sales tax mattered in the first 15 years of Amazons growth, Ms. Mitchell said.	3
Credit...Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesMarch 7, 2017Between seemingly nonstop political jolts and springlike winter days, the world has felt like a pretty unstable place lately. As news alerts buzz your phone and temperatures fluctuate wildly from day to day, you may ask yourself, are there any stable places left in the world?The answer is yes. So, relax.An annual survey of the best countries in the world was released on Tuesday by U.S. News & World Report, along with Y&Rs BAV Consulting and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Their 2017 rankings prioritized countries that enjoyed some measure of peace, quiet and prosperity.Our data captured widespread global concern for the social and geopolitical changes that cast many nations into uncertainty and turmoil, said John Gerzema, chief executive of BAV Consulting. The new rankings reflect peoples desire to restore some sense of order by rewarding nations they perceive as championing neutrality, stability and diplomacy.The survey was conducted after the 2016 United States presidential election and polled more than 21,000 people described by organizers as business leaders, informed elites and general citizens. America slid three spots and was ranked the seventh-best country in the world.The results are broken down into a range of categories that include the most powerful country, the best country to invest in, and the best country for women, children and retirees. Here is a quick look at their findings to satiate your escapist fantasies.The Best CountriesImageCredit...Clara Tuma for The New York TimesSwitzerland took the top spot for the first time based on a combination of its attitude toward education, democracy, business and quality of life. Canada was ranked second and Britain third. Germany, last years winner, slid to fourth in part because of a string of terrorist attacks and political tension over its decision to admit large numbers of refugees. Japan came in fifth place.The United States dropped to No. 7. Survey respondents gave it lower marks on business friendliness, respect for human rights and democracy, and educational quality; they also said they had less desire to visit the country. Nearly 75 percent of respondents said they lost some degree of respect for the United States after the election of Donald J. Trump as president.The Most Powerful CountriesImageCredit...Stephen B. Morton for The New York TimesThat said, Americas slide in the general rankings did not diminish respondents sense that it is the most powerful country in the world, based on military and economic might and its political influence across the globe.The United States leads the world in military spending the military gets a larger share of the federal budget than any other part of government and President Trump has called for that to grow by $54 billion. Following the United States on the list were Russia, China, the United Kingdom and Germany.The Best Countries for WomenImageCredit...Rob Schoenbaum for The New York TimesSweden was ranked the best country in the world for women. That may come as a surprise to American conservatives, some of whom like the Fox News host Bill OReilly have argued in recent weeks that criminal hordes of Muslim immigrants have forced frightened Swedish women to barricade themselves at home.That Sweden had a temporary mansplaining hotline last year which women could call to report condescending instances of men explaining things to them that they already knew may have helped matters. The United States was ranked 16th.The ranking was based on how survey respondents viewed a countrys position on human rights, gender equality, income equality, safety and overall progressive attitude. Scandinavia did well, with Sweden followed by Denmark and Norway. The Netherlands was fourth and Canada fifth.The Best Countries for ChildrenImageCredit...David Ramos/Getty ImagesScandinavia also dominated the rankings when respondents were asked what they thought would be the best country to raise children in. Sweden came in first again, followed by Denmark, Norway, Finland and Canada. The United States did not fare too well in this category: It came in 19th, behind much of Europe but ahead of Japan.The results were based on how respondents ranked each country in terms of its commitment to human rights, gender equality, income equality, public education and health. Respondents were also asked if they thought each country was generally happy and safe.The Best Countries for RetireesImageCredit...Fiona Goodall/Getty ImagesPerhaps because this survey was partly conducted by a business school and a consulting firm, it also asked respondents which countries they would consider moving to in their retirement if price was no obstacle. The United States did not rank in the top 20.The No. 1 response was New Zealand, followed by Australia, Switzerland, Canada and Portugal. Respondents thought these countries had nice climates and were affordable, friendly, committed to public health care and respectful of property rights. They also thought taxes would be low.	6
Comedian Steve Brown Viciously Attacked During Set 1/22/2018 Tumika LaSha -- Cops say the suspect's first name is Marvin, and ... shocker ... he was boozing at the club. We're told 4 people in the club, aside from Steve, were injured and they want to press charges. He also did $400 in damages ... smashing the mic, dishes and glasses. One of the victims is a security guard who says he got punched in the face before Marvin bolted in a car. Comic Steve Brown probably wishes he just got heckled Sunday night at a comedy club, because a disgruntled "fan" seemed gunning to kill him. Steve was doing a set at the Comedy House in Columbia, South Carolina when a guy in the audience jumped onstage and just went insane, first trying to viciously strike Steve with the mic stand and then a stool. Steve ducked out of the way and, a good 30 seconds into the attack, a few people at the club had the presence of mind to subdue the guy, who was taken outside but then came back. The Richland County Sheriff's Dept. responded to the club, and has opened an investigation. So far, no arrests. Steve escaped unharmed, but he's blasting the club for lack of security. Waiting for your permission to load the Instagram Media.	1
Credit...Kim Joon-beom/Yonhap, via ReutersMarch 2, 2017BEIJING The Chinese government is ratcheting up pressure on South Korea over its plans to deploy an American missile defense system, with the state-controlled news media urging the public to boycott South Korean retail products and threatening diplomatic and even military repercussions.Chinas latest pronouncements follow months of not-so-subtle punitive measures that have already taken a toll on the South Korean economy, including an unofficial ban on Korean television shows and pop stars. The campaign risks a backlash in South Korea even as Beijings relations with North Korea have also grown strained a sign of how recent advances in the Norths nuclear program have put China in a bind and are upsetting the regional security balance.On Thursday, South Korea and the United States began talks in Seoul to finalize details of the deployment of the so-called Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense System, or Thaad, according to the Souths Foreign Ministry. Both countries say the systems purpose is to defend the South against North Koreas growing missile and nuclear threat, but China has objected strongly to the system, which it sees as an American attempt to encircle it.No date has been set for the systems deployment, but the Pentagon said on Wednesday that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis wanted it in place as soon as feasible. Military experts said the United States could use C-17 transport aircraft to quickly move the systems truck-mounted launchers, interceptors, radar, fire control units and support equipment to South Korea.China responded with anger when South Korea agreed in July to accept the Thaad system, and it has made its displeasure known as plans have moved toward the final stages in recent days.An outspoken Chinese general, Luo Yuan, now retired, recommended a tough series of responses in an article on Thursday, going so far as to suggest a military strike against the missile system. We could conduct a surgical hard-kill operation that would destroy the target, paralyzing it and making it unable to hit back, General Luo wrote in the Global Times, a state-run newspaper that often features strident, nationalist views.ImageCredit...Kim Hong-Ji/ReutersSince the United States, Japan and South Korea choose not to respect Chinas major security concerns, China does not need to be a gentleman on everything, the general wrote. We must not undermine our own security interests while respecting the security interests of others.Peoples Daily, the Communist Party newspaper that is often considered the official voice of the leadership, said in its international edition this week that China should consider a de facto severance of diplomatic ties with South Korea.It said in a commentary that China should take political and military measures against South Korea and that it should consider coordinating with Russia in dealing with what it called the U.S.-Japan-South Korea antimissile network. The paper was referring in part to statements by Japan that it might consider using Thaad as a defense against North Korea.China has said that the Thaad system would threaten its nuclear deterrent capacity. It said the systems powerful radar would make it much easier for the United States to detect Chinese missiles and would give the American military much more time to intercept them.Chinese state news outlets have also suggested a consumer boycott of South Korean products. Much of Chinas anger has been borne by Lotte, a South Korean conglomerate that provided the government with land for the Thaad deployment in a deal that was finalized this week. Lotte has stores and shopping malls across China, and modest groups of mostly older Chinese held protests at the companys outlets in several cities on Thursday.On Wednesday, the Lotte website serving Chinese shoppers was hacked, the company said. On Thursday, another hacking attack shut down its duty-free shops website for several hours. Lotte also said that some construction had been stopped by the Chinese authorities on the grounds that it had failed a fire inspection.ImageCredit...U.S. Department of Defense, via ReutersIn recent months, popular South Korean stars have been denied visas to perform in China, and South Korean TV shows have been blocked from Chinese video streaming websites. Many in South Korea say they believe those actions are in retaliation for the Thaad issue, though China has denied any link.One of the musicians denied a visa was Sumi Jo, a coloratura soprano who has toured China almost every year for the past decade. Her brother, Jay Jo, said that she had been unable this year to get the government-approved invitation letter required for an entry visa.As soon as the opportunities reopen, she will resume her concerts in China, Mr. Jo said. But right now, we have no idea when that will happen.Trade experts said Beijing might be reluctant to take more extreme economic measures. China is South Koreas largest trading partner by far, but South Korea is also Chinas fourth-largest, and Beijing would probably be reluctant to damage those ties during the current economic slowdown.South Korean politicians have said that Washington wants the Thaad system deployed by mid-May, when many expect presidential elections to be held in the South. President Park Geun-hye was impeached by South Koreas legislature in December over a corruption scandal, and she awaits a ruling by the countrys Constitutional Court on whether she will be permanently removed from office. The courts decision is expected in the coming weeks, and if it rules against her, a new president will be elected 60 days later.South Koreas progressive opposition is seen as having a strong chance of winning the presidency should that election be held. Opposition politicians have expressed skepticism about the Thaad system, and some have charged that the United States wants to rush the deployment to ensure that it is completed before a new president takes office.ImageCredit...Pool photo by Kim Hong-JiMembers of the largest opposition party, the Democratic Party, have visited China twice since August. In January, in an unusual development, a delegation from the party met with the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi.China had hoped it could persuade the Souths next president to refuse to agree to Thaad, said Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. Now China is afraid Thaad will be deployed before the new president of South Korea is in office, he said.Even as Chinas fury toward the South is on full display, it is also at odds with the North. A North Korean diplomat, Ri Kil-song, arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for five days of talks, an apparent effort by Pyongyang to reach out to China, its economic and political benefactor.Mr. Ri and Mr. Wang, the Chinese foreign minister, made soothing public statements on Wednesday about the traditional friendship between their two countries. Behind the scenes, though, things are unlikely to have been so smooth.Last month, China suspended its imports of North Korean coal for the rest of the year, a surprise move that appeared to be a response to the brazen killing in Malaysia of Kim Jong-nam, the estranged half brother of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. South Korea has accused the North of carrying out the attack.The killing may have been taken as an affront by Beijing because the victim had lived in Macau, a Chinese special administrative region. Kim Jong-nam had expressed admiration for Chinas market economy, and some analysts have speculated that China saw him as a potential replacement for his erratic half brother.One thing after another is happening, Mr. Cheng, the Renmin University professor, said of Chinas simultaneous troubles with the Koreas. Not good things all bad things.	6
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/business/international/japan-economy-grows-avoiding-a-recession.htmlCredit...Yoshikazu Tsuno/Agence France-Presse Getty ImagesDec. 7, 2015TOKYO Japans latest recession turns out not to have been a recession at all.The government said on Tuesday that the economy grew at a relatively robust pace last quarter, reversing a more pessimistic estimate it published three weeks ago.Output in Japan, Asias second-largest economy, expanded at an annualized rate of 1 percent in the three months through September, according to the revised assessment by the Cabinet Office. The office had originally said the economy contracted by 0.8 percent.The latest report, which reflected more buoyant data on business investment and a rosier view of consumer spending, painted a broadly positive picture of the economys recent performance. Estimates for previous quarters were also lifted, showing stronger gains and less severe reversals.The report could relieve the pressure on Japans central bank to do more to support growth. Some economists had been predicting that the bank would soon be forced to expand a stimulus program under which it injects trillions of yen into the economy by buying up government bonds.The strategy is meant to lower borrowing costs and encourage consumers and businesses to spend, but the apparent recession, and an accompanying decline in consumer prices, had raised questions about its effectiveness.The report also could cheer Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who gained office three years ago on a pledge to ramp up growth. So far his Abenomics program, in which the central banks stimulus efforts have played a crucial role, has lifted the stock market and helped multinational companies by lowering the yens exchange rate. But it has been less successful in passing the gains on to average workers.Sharp revisions to Japanese gross domestic product numbers are not unusual, though the change announced on Tuesday was larger than some in the past. The governments first estimates are announced before data on certain kinds of economic activity are fully available notably changes in corporate investment and inventories.In an economy where trend growth is only slightly above zero, like Japans, revisions can more easily make the difference between an increase in output and a decline.The latest numbers will be subject to further review in the future, though revisions tend to grow smaller as time passes.The Japanese stock market opened higher after the report was announced, but quickly gave up those gains, possibly reflecting lower expectations for fresh central bank stimulus. In late morning trading, the Nikkei 225 average was down roughly 0.2 percent.In the biggest change from the initial estimate last month, businesses appeared more confident in their production plans. According to the revised gross domestic product data, spending on new factories and equipment by businesses rose at an annualized rate of 0.6 percent last quarter, compared with an initial estimate of a 1.3 percent decline.Household spending increased 0.5 percent, slightly more than the first estimate of 0.4 percent, and businesses reduced their inventories less aggressively than initially believed.Through the first three quarters of the year, the economy grew at an average rate of about 1.6 percent, according to the latest data roughly twice its typical pace of growth over the past two decades. The performance was volatile, however: Output contracted 0.5 percent in the second quarter after surging 4.4 percent in the first.	0
As vaping grows more popular, especially among teens, here are answers to some basic questions about its health effects.Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York TimesNov. 15, 2018The term electronic cigarette refers to a battery-powered device that heats a tank or cartridge of liquid usually containing nicotine, flavorings and other chemicals, but not the cancer-causing tar found in tobacco cigarettes. Users inhale and exhale the vapor. The devices come in numerous shapes, including ones that look like pens, flash drives and hookahs. Many consumers are confused about the health implications of e-cigarettes. This is a primer about what research so far shows about these devices.Are they safer than traditional cigarettes?Yes. But that does not mean they are safe. E-cigarettes contain far fewer dangerous chemicals than those released in burning tobacco. Tobacco cigarettes typically contain 7,000 chemicals, including nearly 70 known to be carcinogenic. E-cigarettes also dont release tar, the tobacco residue that damages lungs but also contributes to the flavor of tobacco products. In the United States, cigarettes are associated with 480,000 deaths a year from coronary heart disease, stroke and numerous cancers, among other illnesses.The research on e-cigarettes is young because the products have only been around for a little over a decade. Exacerbated by the voltage of a given device, certain e-cigarette flavors can irritate the airways, researchers say: benzaldehyde (added to cherry flavored liquids), cinnamaldehyde (gives cinnamon flavor), and diacetyl (a buttery flavor that can cause lung tissue damage called popcorn lung.) Some flavors become irritants when added to vaping liquids. The process of turning liquid chemicals into vapor releases harmful particulates deep into the lungs and atmosphere, including heavy metals. Can they really help smokers quit?Its unclear. The Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved the marketing of e-cigarettes as smoking cessation aids. Observational studies of their effectiveness reveal mixed results. Some show that a majority of adult users are former smokers, suggesting the devices are useful in helping them quit. Others reveal that many e-cigarette users also smoke conventional cigarettes. Still others say that a large percentage of e-cigarette users, particularly teenagers, never smoked traditional cigarettes. A 2018 study concluded that e-cigarettes did not help smokers quit at rates faster than smokers who did not use them. But this summer, a British Parliament committee resoundingly endorsed them, even going so far as to suggest that e-cigarettes be made available by prescription through the National Health Service.Does nicotine have risks?Nicotine is not known to cause cancer. It is a stimulant and a sedative, helping to release dopamine in the brains pleasure centers. Some research suggests it can improve memory and concentration although long-term smoking has been associated with cognitive decline. Inhaled nicotine can increase heart rate and blood pressure. The major cause for alarm is that nicotine is highly addictive. It is the chemical in tobacco and e-cigarettes that binds the user.The nicotine in smoking cessation aids like gum, patches and lozenges is absorbed more slowly than in cigarettes. In tobacco smoke, the nicotine is delivered to the lungs, which have a large surface area, said Maciej Goniewicz,a pharmacologist and toxicologist at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, N.Y. In one or two puffs, the smoker feels the nicotine go right to brain. The e-cigarette brand Juul in particular seems to closely match tobacco cigarettes in terms of the speed and amount of nicotine delivery, said Dr. Goniewicz, who studies the absorption of such chemicals.[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. \| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]What are the concerns about teenagers and e-cigarettes? The human brain develops into the mid-20s. Researchers worry that adolescents who vape will be most affected by nicotine addiction, which they can develop with less exposure than adults require.Though studies have not conclusively shown that e-cigarettes can be relied upon to help adult smokers quit, there is substantial evidence that teenagers who use them have a higher risk of smoking cigarettes.Teens are also using vapes to inhale marijuana. It seems that kids who use e-cigarettes are more likely to use marijuana in general smoked or vaped. Is there a gateway effect? Were just getting data now. But its concerning, said Dr. Rachel Boykan, an associate professor at Stony Brook medical school who researches adolescence and tobacco control.Can parents tell if their teenagers are vaping?E-cig use can be very challenging to detect because they are discreet devices that dont emit much odor, said Dr. Sharon Levy, director of the adolescent substance use and addiction program at Boston Childrens Hospital.Parents can look online for photos of devices and pods. If you find those items in your childs room, pockets or backpack, you should assume that your child is using it, Dr. Levy said, not just holding it for a friend. If children say they have only tried e-cigarettes a few times, Dr. Levy said, ask them to stop. Then tell them you will check their room and backpack. And then do it. Kids who have used only sporadically should be able to stop without much intervention.How can you treat teen nicotine dependence?There arent widely accepted protocols for teenagers. Dr. Levy urges families to consult a medical professional. Limited interventions with nicotine replacement therapies like patches, gum or medications may be effective in older teens, she said. But this should be done in conjunction with a good evaluation, since mental health disorders like depression and anxiety and use of other substances are common in kids with nicotine use disorder, she cautioned.On Dec. 5, the Food and Drug Administration is holding a public hearing to discuss possible nicotine withdrawal therapies specifically for teenagers which, if restrictions on flavored e-cigarette brands proceed, could be an imminent challenge.	2
Jay-Z I Fought to Save My Marriage ... After Infidelity 1/28/2018 CNN Jay-Z says he was straight with Beyonce and dealt with his infidelity head on to save his marriage, because she was his soul mate and it was definitely worth fighting for. Jay appeared on CNN's Van Jones show Saturday night where he said issues like infidelity have to be addressed head-on, and if they're not the marriage is going to blow up. He says, "For us, we chose to fight for our love, for our family, to give our kids different outcome, to break that cycle for black men and women." The famous couple hit up Clive Davis' pre-Grammy party Saturday night ... and there's little doubt their marriage is now strong.	1
White House MemoWhen President Trump comes to visit, world leaders face the challenge of finding ways to entertain and impress a leader who relishes spectacle.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesFeb. 23, 2020NEW DELHI One of the most nerve-racking moments for any world leader these days comes with these six words: President Trump is coming to town.Hosting any American leader is demanding enough with the usual requirements of diplomacy, protocol and geopolitics, but with Mr. Trump comes an additional challenge: how to entertain and impress a president who relishes spectacle and cherishes anything that is the first, the most or the biggest.The British have a queen, so they made a grand show of a state dinner at Buckingham Palace. The French have Bastille Day, so they invited the president to view their elaborate military parade down the Champs-lyses. The Japanese have an emperor, so they invited Mr. Trump to be the first foreign leader to visit their newly installed monarch and threw in a sumo match with a special presidential trophy for good measure.Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India opted to appeal to Mr. Trumps first love crowd size as he stages a rally of more than 100,000 people in Ahmedabad on Monday after a drive in from the airport along roads where perhaps 100,000 more will line the motorcade route. The president will almost certainly not be greeted by the 10 million people he expects, but it will look like an enormous crowd nonetheless and, the Indians hope, satisfy his need for affirmation.[Read: America loves India, Trump declares at rally with Modi.]World leaders are vying with each other to appeal to President Trumps vanity, said R. Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state under President George W. Bush who helped pave the way for agreements with India during that administration. They understand his foreign trips are more about the image he wants to strike rather than substantive breakthroughs between governments.White House aides deny that the presidents trips are all about show. The United States and India have important issues involving trade and security for Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi to discuss, although administration officials briefing reporters before the presidents departure from Washington on Sunday made clear that the comprehensive trade agreement he seeks with India remains far-off.What has seemed to animate Mr. Trump the most, though, are Mr. Modis promises of cheering crowds. He told me well have seven million people between the airport and the event, Mr. Trump told reporters last Tuesday.Two days later, Mr. Trump ratcheted up the estimate to eight digits. I hear theyre going to have 10 million people, he said at a campaign rally. They say anywhere from six to 10 million people are going to be showing up along the route to one of the largest stadiums in the world.By Sunday as he was leaving the White House to begin his long trip, it had become millions and millions of people. Some people say the biggest event theyve ever had in India, Mr. Trump told reporters. Thats what the prime minister told me.A crowd of 10 million would exceed the entire population of Ahmedabad, estimated at eight million. Local officials estimate that it will be more like 100,000, making Mr. Trump off by only 99 percent. But Motera Stadium, which is not really fully built yet, is supposed to become the largest cricket arena in the world.Other countries could not muster that show of force and so have taken advantage of whatever local assets they might have when Mr. Trump has come to visit. For Britain, of course, that would be Queen Elizabeth II, the worlds longest-reigning monarch, who welcomed him to Buckingham Palace last year with an 82-gun salute and a lavish white-tie state banquet.Crowd size is important to this president, so he was clearly thrilled to be told there would be seven million people on the streets in India, said Peter Westmacott, a former British ambassador to the United States. We couldnt manage that in the U.K., but twice in the space of a year he seemed bowled over by the warmth of the welcome he received from the royal family.Mr. Trump was so blown away by the Bastille Day military parade in Paris when President Emmanuel Macron of France invited him in 2017 that the president insisted on organizing his own American equivalent along the streets of Washington as part of last years Independence Day celebration.Perhaps with that in mind, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is trying to entice Mr. Trump to come to Moscow in May by inviting him to the Red Square parade marking the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. Mr. Trump, however, appears wary of the awkward politics of such a visit given the election year and Russias continued interference in American campaigns.Japan eschews militarism and therefore military parades, but it sought to make Mr. Trump feel special by making him the first foreign head of state invited to meet Emperor Naruhito after his ascension to the throne. The Japanese also asked Mr. Trump to present his own trophy at a sumo champion match a four-foot-tall object duly labeled the Presidents Cup for the event.World leaders have learned to shorten or scrap the historical tours, remove local delicacies from the menu and focus on one thing only: feeding his ego, said Julianne Smith, the director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Thats taken different forms in recent years, but the goal is always the same make Trump feel like hes getting something unique: a parade in Paris, a grand state dinner at Buckingham Palace or a sumo match with a Presidents Cup in Japan.Not every country can compete. When Mr. Trump was due to travel to South Korea last year, the government in Seoul fretted over what it could come up with that would seem special. The South Koreans have no queen or emperor. But what they do have is a Demilitarized Zone, where Mr. Trump could visit and even, in a surprise first of its kind, step across into North Korean territory and stage a theatrical last-minute meeting with Kim Jong-un.Critics said that meeting, like a parade or a banquet, was just for the pictures, with no lasting result, and that the president should focus more on policy initiatives when he arrives in India. Trump would be far wiser to frame the visit on substance our strong military collaboration with India, Japan and Australia in limiting China, for example, rather than on seeking applause from crowds in a stadium, Mr. Burns said.But symbolism has its value as well, and if a major trade agreement is not in the offing, then the Indians are determined that Mr. Trump go home with warm feelings about their country, throwing in a sunset tour of the Taj Mahal and a state dinner as well.I think the optics, he will get more of them than other presidents do, because I think the Indians recognize that that is something that he will want and will appreciate and will perhaps keep them in good stead over the next few months, said Tanvi Madan, the director of the India Project at the Brookings Institution.And in addition to the crowds, India may have something to offer that other countries do not. I would not be surprised if the Indians named something after President Trump, Ms. Madan said. Like a village, something they did for President Jimmy Carter when he visited. I think you will see them take extra efforts on the optics front for this president.	3
Politics\|Is this a coup? Experts say no, but that it could be just as dangerous.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/politics/is-this-a-coup-experts-say-no-but-that-it-could-be-just-as-dangerous.htmlCredit...Jason Andrew for The New York TimesJan. 7, 2021Call them rioters. Or armed insurrectionists. But Erica de Bruin, a political scientist who literally wrote the book on how to prevent coups, said she would not call it a coup.I dont object to anyone wanting to use the term coup at this point, she said in an interview. The word coup conveys seriousness, and I dont want to police the language of politicians or activists or those trying to oppose Trumps actions. But I dont think were there yet.The crucial factor, she said, is that a coup attempt requires force or the threat of force from an organized armed group, usually, though not necessarily, a military. And while many in the violent mob of President Trumps supporters that stormed the Capitol building on Wednesday were armed, they did not appear to be part of any organized paramilitary organization.Naunihal Singh, a professor at the Naval War College whose research focuses on coups, said he did not think this was a coup because President Trump encouraged the insurrectionists in his capacity as head of their movement, but did not do so via the powers of the president. We can deal with this sort of power grab far more easily than one which uses presidential authority, if were willing to treat him the same way we would treat any regular citizen doing the same, he said. (Dr. Singh spoke in his personal capacity.)The scenes at the Capitol bear an obvious resemblance to coups, which often involve an armed takeover of legislative buildings. But the resemblance, Dr. de Bruin said, is a superficial one. Theyre emulating coup plotters, she said. But when coup plotters do that, its because they think that occupying that position makes them look like they are holding political power. No one thinks that this group is actually in control.Both experts, however, cautioned against concluding that this is not a serious threat to American democracy.Coups arent that common these days, Dr. de Bruin said. The way we tend to see democracies fail these days is through this subtle undermining and chipping away of democracy.	3
TrilobitesCredit...Viacheslav Manichev and Stanislas Von Euw/RutgersJune 1, 2017Coral reefs are sprawling, intricate ecosystems that house an estimated 25 percent of all marine life and can sometimes be seen from space. Yet they are formed by a process invisible to us.A study published in Science on Wednesday now presents a microscopic picture of the biology that makes corals skeletons grow. The findings suggest that coral may be more robust in the face of human-driven ocean acidification than commonly thought.Corals grow their armor by diligently secreting a chunk of hard skeleton smaller than the width of a human hair each day. This process is called calcification and scientists have debated which parts of it are most important for decades.One view prioritizes chemical interactions with the seawater. Using ion pumps, corals can possibly decrease the acidity of seawater enough that calcium carbonate the stuff of limestone and chalk and the basis of coral skeletons forms spontaneously. Under these circumstances, if oceans become more acidic a potential consequence of human-emitted carbon dioxide in the atmosphere being absorbed by the seas coral may struggle to form a skeleton.The alternative view contends that calcification is primarily a biological process, coordinated by proteins similar to the ones that help us make our teeth and bones. The new study provides evidence for this perspective and some hope for corals in a world with more carbon.ImageCredit...Viacheslav Manichev and Stanislas Von Euw/RutgersCoral is not just a rock, said Paul Falkowski, a professor of marine sciences at Rutgers University and senior author of the study. And because of that, were pretty confident that theyll be able to continuing making their skeletons even if the ocean becomes slightly more acidic.Not all scientists agree.The problem is, we have lots of data that show many coral species are very sensitive to environmental change, said Alexander Venn, a senior scientist at the Scientific Center of Monaco, who was not involved in the study. While this paper builds a strong model for the biological control of calcification, there are still pieces of the puzzle missing.Dr. Falkowski and his colleagues used ultrahigh-resolution microscopic imaging and techniques for observing the structure of molecules to study skeletal branches from smooth cauliflower coral, a well-studied species common in the Indo-Pacific.The result is a model of coral calcification that starts with a malleable form of calcium carbonate, called amorphous calcium carbonate.The researchers say they believe that amorphous calcium carbonate is initially formed by proteins. Through a process not yet fully understood, little balls of the material then give way to aragonite, the form of calcium carbonate that makes up a mature coral skeleton.Similar transitions have been observed in sea urchins and shellfish, and some scientists even suspect amorphous calcium carbonate may be a common precursor for calcification across the tree of life.ImageCredit...Viacheslav Manichev and Stanislas Von Euw/RutgersWhen we precipitate aragonite in the lab, just in a bucket of seawater, it forms this very characteristic pattern with very long, needle-shaped crystals, said Nicola Allison, a lecturer in earth sciences at the University of St. Andrews, who did not participate in the research.This is the first report of amorphous calcium carbonate in coral, and it really does suggest the organism is able to control how solid material is deposited, she added.Alex Gagnon, an assistant professor of oceanography at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research, suggested it was an oversimplification to take seawater chemistry out of the equation. Acid dissolves calcium carbonate, so the more acidic the ocean is, the more difficult it is for corals to organize that first bit of skeleton.At the end of the day, the fundamental rules of chemistry and physics still apply, he said.Its true that corals lose calcium carbonate in a more acidic environment but they maintain the ability to grow back that skeleton, which is good news, Dr. Falkowski said.Given current projections of ocean warming and acidification, he is more concerned about warming, which stresses the algae living inside corals and causes coral bleaching.That said, Dr. Falkowski acknowledges that the cause of warming and acidification is one and the same: carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning. For all intents and purposes, theyre linked, he said.	7
Global SoccerCredit...Juan Carlos Cardenas/European Pressphoto AgencyFeb. 2, 2014LONDON If ever a picture served as the perfect epitaph to a life, it was the one in Austrias national stadium in Vienna after Spain became the champion of Europe in 2008.The young players rounded up their old trainer. They lifted him, and threw him into the air above their heads five, six times. Their many hands were ever careful, treating the Mister as if he were porcelain.This was sport in its essence: The tutor in the hands of pupils he had shown the way to win.Mister Luis Aragons died in Madrid early Saturday morning. He was 75. He had, typically, kept his serious illness to himself. The tributes came like confetti from Spain, from royalty down to the people on the streets. The ones that would have meant the most to the thoroughly old-fashioned Aragons came in the modern form of instant communication, from the Facebook and Twitter accounts of his players.And not just from those Spaniards who went on to become world champions in 2010 before they defended their European title in 2012. Samuel Etoo, a Cameroon international whose career might never have been fulfilled but for the personal mentoring of Aragons, messaged from London where he is now a Chelsea player.My heart is in deep pain, Etoo wrote, in Spanish. A great man has left us. More than a trainer, Luis Aragons was like a father to me. I keep wonderful moments of our relationship and my experience at Mallorca.Dear Papa, thank you for all you taught us, in football and in life. Aragons and Etoo had much in common. Both were goal scorers. Both suffered rejection early in their careers at Real Madrid, when the impatient club bypassed young men who still were in the awkward phase of needing time to grow into their talents. Real instead went out and bought the finished product. Aragons did not have to move far. He became Atltico Madrids record striker, known as Zapatones, or Big Boots, for his mighty free kicks. He scored 172 times in 372 games for the red and whites. His pursuit of the main goal converting ability into trophies was single-minded, inexhaustible, and at times as rough as he felt he needed to be to get there.Between 1965 and 1974, he won three La Liga titles and two Copa del Generalsimo titles with Atltico.One might think that the rivalry that divides Madrid would fester. But there is no reason to doubt the words from Reals president, Florentino Perez: Luis Aragons, said Perez, ennobled this sport, and all Spanish fans owe him gratitude and respect. Today is a day of mourning, but it should also be a day of recognition for a legendary figure who was vital in giving us a glorious period with our Spanish national team. There was no trick, no magic wand from Aragons.He did not create the talents of an Andrs Iniesta, a Xavi Hernndez, an Iker Casillas or a Sergio Ramos. He merely selected them for the red national jersey. He took the pattern of play, the tiki-taka short-passing rhythm that the Barcelona players in particular were comfortable with, and instilled in the players the concept of hard work, perseverance and self-confidence. In Samuel Etoo, the kid from Cameroon, and in the Spanish players who time and time again succeeded in youth soccer but trembled in the mans game, Luis Aragons gave the same thing.He cajoled, nurtured and bullied them across the threshold of believing they could be world-beaters.For 44 years, Spains senior national team had not won anything. It was always promising, ever easy on the eye, but somehow it was a team, a nation, that did not have that final push, that arrogance perhaps, to cross the line ahead of the Germans, Brazilians, Italians, French and English who made the trophies their own.Aragons believed. He could kick the backsides of players, officials and journalists. Some of us probably deserved it, in particular the English who seized upon an insulting term the coach used when trying to goad a player on the Spanish national team.It was picked up on a TV microphone, a reference to Thierry Henrys black skin in a phrase barked out by the coach to a player who lived in Henrys shadow when the two both were Arsenal employees.For that one remark, Aragons was branded a racist. The message from Etoo, Africas finest center forward, and from Brazilians who served on Aragonss teams is crystal clear.After observing Aragons on the training fields of some of the 15 career stops he made as a coach, I never saw a man of prejudice in any way, shape or form.An elderly, slightly portly figure, not unlike an irritable professor, he could be rude, irascible and uncompromising.He shed two core players, the striker Ral and the defender Mchel Salgado, from the Spanish team he inherited. He was a man of Madrid who unashamedly took the Barcelona style that had been inculcated in Catalonia by the Dutchman Johan Cruyff.Aragons built on it, rehearsed it and loved it, and he was as coarse and impatient at converting it into victories as he once was in putting his foot so forcefully behind his free kicks.So, yes, he made enemies along the way. Winners do.But what no one else did in 44 years and what nobody can take away, at least, until the World Cup in Brazil later this year was that he handed over men who could take on, beat, and adorn the global game. Vicente Del Bosque, another man of Madrid, succeeded Aragons as the national trainer after the triumph over Germany in Vienna.Del Bosque, as serene as Aragons could be gruff, paid his tribute on the Spanish federations website ahead of Sundays funeral in the capital.Without a doubt, Del Bosque stated, he marked the road in this final successful phase. I felt a great deal of appreciation toward him.The final tribute is that nothing had to change. Aragons made Spain believe.	4
Sports of The TimesCredit...Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesFeb. 6, 2014KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia When Don Catlin, the former head of the U.C.L.A. Olympic Analytical Laboratory, heard that three biathletes had tested positive for a nonspecific substance about a week before the Olympics, I could hear him sigh over the phone.Im not surprised, he said. Youve got to wonder if its the tip of the iceberg.Catlin had a good reason to be grim about the possibility that more biathletes were doping, which in this most recent case involved a designer version of the endurance-boosting drug EPO, according to two scientists with knowledge of the matter. He told me that biathletes were always at the center of looking for new drugs.He would know. Twelve years ago, Catlin led the team of scientists at the Salt Lake City Games that discovered three positives for a new EPO-like drug, darbepoetin, on the final day of those Games. The athletes two Russians and a Spaniard who failed that test were from cross-country skiing, a sport that makes up half of the biathlon. The other half of biathlon is shooting.Catlin last week admitted publicly for the first time that those three positive tests at the Salt Lake Games were only the tip of the iceberg of the positive tests for darbepoetin in Salt Lake City. He told me that two biathletes from those Games had also tested positive for the drug on the final day, but that he and the International Olympic Committee president at the time, Jacques Rogge, had decided against pursuing their cases because it would raise a huge stink around the world. It also could have created major legal problems. Catlin and Rogge suspected that the first three athletes who tested positive for darbepoetin would challenge those cases at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. They would question the science, the paperwork and the procedures. For Catlin and the I.O.C., it would require putting together three complex, but airtight, legal cases. Preparing two extra cases, Catlin said, seemed untenable.If you lose in C.A.S., you got a lot of egg on your face, so Jacques asked me one question, Can you win the C.A.S. case? Catlin said of the initial three positives. I said, Yes, but it will take a lot of work just for these three. So we decided to stop there. We couldnt risk taking on all five. Lose just one of those and your credibility on the issue is shot.So the two biathletes, who were never identified publicly, got lucky. Thats such an outrageous notion that I had Catlin repeat it to me several times.The I.O.C. should have pushed forward with those cases. To bury them was wrong. But the flood of positive tests during the sports biggest event was a testament to how far biathlon had fallen. Last week, biathlon stumbled yet again, when three biathletes two Russians and a Lithuanian were suspended. I still believe that most of the top people are not doping, said Sara Studebaker, an American biathlete who will compete in Sochi. But I guess it really doesnt matter what you believe. Theres a dark cloud over our sport, and now the Russians they have a big stain on them. Its bad for everybody.Tim Burke, the top American biathlete in Sochi, suggested to me on Thursday several ways to persuade biathletes to stop doping. He suggested a lifetime ban for athletes who test positive even once, and said the national federations also should be penalized.Burke is on to something. If countries not just Russia fail to control their athletes year after year, its time to make the national federations and Olympic committees accountable. Limit their participation on the World Cup circuit. Bar them from the Olympics. Whatever the penalty, it should be something painful enough to make national governing bodies invested in cleaning up their sports mess.In biathlon and cross-country skiing, that mess has existed for decades. The sports remain the Winter Games version of cycling, which for generations has been mired in the doping problems that are rife in endurance sports.Anders Besseberg, president of the International Biathlon Union, said the organization had been doing all it could. It uses a biological passport program to monitor certain biological markers in athletes urine and blood. Any variation of those markers could suggest that the athlete is doping, and that athlete is then targeted for extra testing.But no matter what the I.B.U. does, there will always be athletes who cheat.Im so sorry to say that in certain countries there is still a culture of cheating, and I think thats the main problem now, he said. Those people think they are smarter than us, that well never catch them.Some athletes will never be scared clean. But after all the money that the Brooklyn Nets billionaire owner Mikhail D. Prokhorov has poured into the Russian biathlon federation, of which he is the president, it looks as if he could have spent more on antidoping measures.At the very least, he should have been aware that his athletes might have been tempted to use drugs to cheat, since at least one has served a suspension before. And while biathlon is one of the top winter sports in Russia with great rewards for those who succeed in it it also appears easy to obtain performance-enhancing drugs in this country.In a report this week by the German broadcaster WDR, two journalists traveled to Moscow to buy a powerful drug called full-size MGF, which increases muscle size and strength but has been tested only on animals. They said the person who sold them the drug, which is not detectable using current antidoping drug screenings, was a scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences.To be sure, Russia is not the only country with a doping problem, but it is clear that the nations government and sporting officials must do something monumental to address the issue.They need to find a way the Olympic movement needs to find a way to ensure that nothing lurks below the tip of the iceberg.	4
Health\|Zika Study Could Help Overcome an Obstacle to Vaccine Researchhttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/health/zika-virus-mouse-model-vaccine.htmlGlobal HealthMarch 28, 2016Credit...Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, via ReutersThe first new mouse model in which the Zika virus can be tested was described in a medical journal on Monday.Research into drugs or vaccines that might work against Zika has been hampered because there have been no approved animal models in which to test them. Testing is normally done first in cell lines, then in mice and finally in monkeys before human testing can ethically begin.In The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, virologists at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston announced that they had found a type of immune-deficient mice that lost weight, became lethargic and died when infected. Normal laboratory mice do not.The work was done in January, and other researchers may have found other mice in which to do testing, said Shannan Rossi, the studys lead author. But this was the first mouse model to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.Because virus samples from Latin America were not available in January, researchers went to the library of virus samples maintained by the UTMB World Reference Center for Emerging Viruses and Arboviruses, and used a sample collected in 2010 from a Cambodian girl who had had the Asian strain of Zika.They found that it sickened AG129 mice, which lack the genes to mount an interferon-based immune reaction. The virus became concentrated in the brains and testes, reflecting the damage it is thought to cause in humans, Dr. Rossi said.In the years after the Zika virus was discovered in 1947, researchers tested it in rhesus monkeys, guinea pigs, rabbits and mice. But they never got animals to consistently sicken or die which is needed to know whether a new drug or vaccine works.UTMB and other institutions are now working on monkey models.That will also be a race, Dr. Rossi said. Well see who wins.	2

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Dataset Card for News Articles Categorization

Split variation of the News Articles Categorization dataset.

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