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A stolen Etruscan vessel will be returned to Italy thanks in part to the efforts of a hunter of looted antiquities.
Last month, Christos Tsirogiannis, a Greek-born researcher who has spent more than a decade poring over auction and antiquities catalogs trying to identify stolen Greek and Roman artifacts, spotted an Etruscan amphora for sale at a Midtown Manhattan gallery.
Mr. Tsirogiannis, of the Scottish Center for Crime and Justice Research in Glasgow, combed through an archive of 13,000 photos and documents seized in 2002 from an Italian antiquities dealer, Gianfranco Becchina, who was convicted in 2011 of trafficking in looted objects. He spotted several photos of the very same vase.
As he has done several times in recent years, Mr. Tsirogiannis contacted the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which seized the dual-handled vessel, featuring a nude satyr and draped youth, from the Royal-Athena Galleries. It dates from 470 B.C. and is valued at $250,000.
The item was forfeited willingly, officials said, and on Thursday it was formally returned to the Italian consul general in New York, Francesco Genuardi, who said it would be displayed at the consulate before being housed permanently at the Polo Museale del Lazio in Italy.
“When looters overrun historic sites, mine sacred spaces for prized relics, and peddle stolen property for top dollar, they do so with the implicit endorsement of all those who knowingly trade in stolen antiquities,” the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said during a ceremony.
On Feb. 10, Mr. Vance’s office said, it returned an ancient marble sarcophagus fragment dating to 200 A.D., and depicting a battle between Greek and Trojan warriors, that was stolen from Greece in 1988. That item was also seized from the Royal-Athena Galleries, based on information provided by Mr. Tsirogiannis.
Since 2014, Mr. Vance’s office says it has repatriated five coins dating to 515 B.C. to Greece; a second-century Buddhist sculpture valued at more than $1 million to Pakistan; and two bronze statues and four carved artifacts dating to the 10th and 11th centuries A.D., valued at several millions of dollars, to India. | 2017-03 | <|begin_of_text|>A stolen Etruscan vessel will be returned to Italy thanks in part to the efforts of a hunter of looted antiquities.
Last month, Christos Tsirogiannis, a Greek-born researcher who has spent more than a decade poring over auction and antiquities catalogs trying to identify stolen Greek and Roman artifacts, spotted an Etruscan amphora for sale at a Midtown Manhattan gallery.
Mr. Tsirogiannis, of the Scottish Center for Crime and Justice Research in Glasgow, combed through an archive of 13,000 photos and documents seized in 2002 from an Italian antiquities dealer, Gianfranco Becchina, who was convicted in 2011 of trafficking in looted objects. He spotted several photos of the very same vase.
As he has done several times in recent years, Mr. Tsirogiannis contacted the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which seized the dual-handled vessel, featuring a nude satyr and draped youth | , from the Royal-Athena Galleries. It dates from 470 B.C. and is valued at $250,000.
The item was forfeited willingly, officials said, and on Thursday it was formally returned to the Italian consul general in New York, Francesco Genuardi, who said it would be displayed at the consulate before being housed permanently at the Polo Museale del Lazio in Italy.
“When looters overrun historic sites, mine sacred spaces for prized relics, and peddle stolen property for top dollar, they do so with the implicit endorsement of all those who knowingly trade in stolen antiquities,” the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said during a ceremony.
On Feb. 10, Mr. Vance’s office said, it returned an ancient marble sarcophagus fragment dating to 200 A.D., and depicting a battle between Greek and Trojan warriors, that was stolen from Greece in 1988. That item was also seized from the Royal-Athena Galleries |
A storied actor, he starred opposite Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve and worked with many of the giants of European filmmaking.
Michel Piccoli, an actor whose quiet intensity and mature sensuality made him a fixture of French cinema for more than a half-century, died on May 12, it was announced on Monday. He was 94.
The cause was a stroke, according to his wife, Ludivine Clerc, who confirmed his death in a short statement issued on her behalf by Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes Film Festival.
A veteran of the French stage, Mr. Piccoli also had more than 40 feature films and television movies on his résumé. He was in his late 30s when he starred in Jean-Luc Godard’s acclaimed drama “Contempt” (“Le Mépris”) in 1963, playing Brigitte Bardot’s unhappy husband, a screenwriter who sells out his talent and loses his wife to an American producer.
French audiences had largely discovered Mr. Piccoli a year earlier, in “Le Doulos,” a gangster film noir in which his character is shot dead. American cineastes came to know him from the films of the great European directors, particularly Luis Buñuel.
His work with Mr. Buñuel included “Belle de Jour” (1967), in which Mr. Piccoli played a sinister, lecherous aristocrat who encourages a bored young Catherine Deneuve to go into prostitution and become a gangster’s lover by day while remaining the prim housewife of a handsome, young physician by night.
Mr. Piccoli also collaborated with Mr. Buñuel on “Diary of a Chambermaid” (1964), “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and “The Phantom of Liberty” (1974).
Across his long career he worked with directors like Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Costa-Gavras, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. “La Grande Bouffe” (“The Big Feast,” 1973), directed by Marco Ferreri, was probably one of Mr. Piccoli’s best-known films to American moviegoers. The movie was a satire about four men determined to eat themselves to death during an orgiastic villa weekend.
In addition to Ms. Bardot and Ms. Deneuve, Mr. Piccoli’s list of co-stars included Anouk Aimée, Stéphane Audran, Leslie Caron, Jeanne Moreau, Natasha Parry, Dominique Sanda and Romy Schneider.
He occasionally appeared in American films, albeit in projects in which he played characters with French accents. He was a Soviet spy in France who commits suicide in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Topaz” (1969), and an opera-loving croupier in Louis Malle’s “Atlantic City” (1980).
“The urbane Michel Piccoli appears in a tiny role that he turns into a memorable cameo, that of a casino manager who, on the side, runs the croupier school,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review in The New York Times.
Mr. Piccoli’s career barely slowed in later life. Even as the likes of Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo — French actors a decade younger than he — began to work less, Mr. Piccoli seemed to pick up his pace. He appeared in three films and a mini-series in 2012, when he was 86, and he was named best actor at the 2012 David di Donatello awards, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars, for his performance in Nanni Moretti’s “We Have a Pope” (“Habemus Papam”), in which he portrayed a cardinal reluctant to accept the ultimate promotion.
That award joined his numerous film festival honors, including best actor awards at Cannes for “Salto nel Vuoto” (“Leap Into the Void,” 1980), in which he played a judge inconvenienced by his mentally disturbed sister; and at Berlin for “Une Étrange Affaire” (“Strange Affair,” 1981), for his role as a department store manager who leads an employee astray. He also received a 1997 best film award at Venice for “Alors Voilà,” a black comedy about a dysfunctional family, which he wrote with Thomas Cheysson and directed.
Mr. Piccoli was nominated four times for the César Award, the French equivalent of the Oscars, for his performances in “Strange Affair”; “Dangerous Moves” (1984), the story of an aging chess master; “May Fools” (1990), about a widowed vineyard manager at the time of the Paris student riots; and “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991), playing a painter with a creative block, in which he stars alongside Emmanuelle Béart.
Jacques Daniel Michel Piccoli was born on Dec. 27, 1925, in Paris into a musical family. His mother, Marcelle (Expert-Bezançon) Piccoli, was a French pianist, and his father, Henri Piccoli, was an Italian violinist. Michel Piccoli attended high school at the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris.
In the decade after World War II, he made a stage career for himself as an actor and manager, primarily with Théâtre Babylone and with the Reynauld-Barrault company. In the same period, he made his film acting debut, as a villager in “Sortilèges” (1945), a horror-crime drama. But it was four years until he made his second film, “Le Point du Jour” (“The Mark of the Day”), in which he had a small role. And he was still primarily a stage actor when he appeared as a wealthy farmer in a 1957 French film version of “The Crucible” (“Les Sorcières de Salem”), starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret.
His final film appearances were in “Lines of Wellington,” a 2012 French-Portuguese production that starred John Malkovich as the Duke of Wellington, and “Le Goût des Myrtilles” (“The Taste of Blueberries”), a drama about an older couple in a fantasy world, released in 2014.
Whenever he could break away from his heavy film schedule, Mr. Piccoli retreated to his house on the Île de Ré, an island off the west coast of France, where he enjoyed bicycling down country roads.
He married three times and divorced twice. He and his first wife, the actress Eléonore Hirt, married in 1954 and had a daughter. His second wife was the singer and actress Juliette Gréco; the marriage lasted from 1966 to 1977. He married Ms. Clerc in 1980. In addition to her, survivors include a son, Inor; and two daughters, Anne-Cordélia and Missia.
“I like extremely discreet actors, who thus open up the imagination,” Mr. Piccoli said in a 2005 interview with the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, praising the midcentury American movie star Robert Mitchum as well as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.
Jonathan Kandell contributed reporting. | 2020-05 | <|begin_of_text|>A storied actor, he starred opposite Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve and worked with many of the giants of European filmmaking.
Michel Piccoli, an actor whose quiet intensity and mature sensuality made him a fixture of French cinema for more than a half-century, died on May 12, it was announced on Monday. He was 94.
The cause was a stroke, according to his wife, Ludivine Clerc, who confirmed his death in a short statement issued on her behalf by Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes Film Festival.
A veteran of the French stage, Mr. Piccoli also had more than 40 feature films and television movies on his résumé. He was in his late 30s when he starred in Jean-Luc Godard’s acclaimed drama “Contempt” (“Le Mépris”) in 1963, playing Brigitte Bardot’s unhappy husband, a screenwriter who sells out his talent and loses | his wife to an American producer.
French audiences had largely discovered Mr. Piccoli a year earlier, in “Le Doulos,” a gangster film noir in which his character is shot dead. American cineastes came to know him from the films of the great European directors, particularly Luis Buñuel.
His work with Mr. Buñuel included “Belle de Jour” (1967), in which Mr. Piccoli played a sinister, lecherous aristocrat who encourages a bored young Catherine Deneuve to go into prostitution and become a gangster’s lover by day while remaining the prim housewife of a handsome, young physician by night.
Mr. Piccoli also collaborated with Mr. Buñuel on “Diary of a Chambermaid” (1964), “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and “The Phantom of Liberty” (1974).
Across his long career he worked with directors like Claude Chabrol, Jacques |
A strong start to the year for property sales in Manhattan was erased by the coronavirus outbreak.
New York State’s stay-at-home order, and similar restrictions elsewhere, had effectively banned open houses and in-person property showings, and “most people are not going to make a big purchase without seeing it,” said Frederick Warburg Peters, the chief executive of Warburg Realty. Depending on the duration of the outbreak, he said, the number of new contracts in New York could drop by more than 70 percent in the second quarter, compared with the same period last year.
The number of sales in Manhattan in the first quarter actually jumped 13.5 percent, compared with the same period last year, to 2,407 from 2,121, according to data from the brokerage firm Douglas Elliman.
This was only the second time in two and a half years that sales have risen compared with the same period the previous year, said Mr. Miller, the author of the report.
The median sales price was $1,060,000, down just 1.4 percent from the same time last year, suggesting the market was close to turning the corner, as previous price declines had been higher. The average listing discount was 7.2 percent, the highest it had been since 2012, which suggested that sellers were finally getting serious about negotiating, Mr. Miller said.
There were 1,231 contracts signed in February, the most for that month in a decade, and a sign that buying would continue to be robust, said Garrett Derderian, the managing director of market analysis at CORE, another brokerage firm.
But in March, after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates close to zero, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York issued a stay-at-home order in response to the virus, early indicators suggest that momentum has ground to a halt.
Contracts and closings can lag the reality of the market by several weeks or months as paperwork makes its way through the system, but there are already some signals of decline.
At the end of March, there were 5,801 active listings for sale in Manhattan, down 15.3 percent from the same period last year, said Noah Rosenblatt, the chief executive and founder of UrbanDigs, a real estate data company. And 1,159 listings were taken off the market, compared with just 417 the same time last year.
One of the biggest obstacles for the real estate market will be trying to sell apartments under virtual lockdown. Real estate agents in New York had been deemed nonessential workers, so in-person showings were effectively banned, although new guidance from the Cuomo will now allow showings and some back-office real estate functions to continue. And few apartment buildings are allowing visitors or move-ins. Even if buyers agree to purchase a home sight unseen, many of the steps toward closing remain stubbornly analog, in spite of efforts to incorporate video calls and other technology into the process.
The luxury market, which is in a yearslong price correction, could be further affected. Last week, only two properties in Manhattan went into contract at $4 million or more, the lowest weekly sales rate since August 2009, during the last recession, said Donna Olshan, the president of Olshan Realty. In the last week of March 2019, 21 contracts at or above that price were signed.
“Anything left on the market now, the price is just a suggestion,” she said, noting that sellers already in contract, as well as new buyers, are pushing for more aggressive price cuts.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008, sale prices fell 25 to 35 percent, said Mr. Miller. It’s unclear where prices will end up, but they have been sliding since the market peaked around 2015, he said.
The market’s resurgence, before the coronavirus outbreak, was hard won. In 2018, new caps on state, local and property tax deductions disproportionately affected high-price markets like New York, and a series of tax changes in 2019, including increased transfer taxes for luxury apartments, further stalled the market. New tenant-friendly rent laws passed last summer, the possibility of new taxes on pieds-à-terre and growing fears of a recession were cause for more belt-tightening, agents said.
Much of the impact will depend on how quickly the city recovers from the pandemic, with some agents hoping that pent-up demand from months of lockdown will carry into the fall and winter, which are typically slower sales seasons.
With much of the city cooped up indoors for at least the next several weeks, there is some hope of buyer demand surging when the mandate is lifted, Ms. Ramirez said.
| 2020-04 | <|begin_of_text|>A strong start to the year for property sales in Manhattan was erased by the coronavirus outbreak.
New York State’s stay-at-home order, and similar restrictions elsewhere, had effectively banned open houses and in-person property showings, and “most people are not going to make a big purchase without seeing it,” said Frederick Warburg Peters, the chief executive of Warburg Realty. Depending on the duration of the outbreak, he said, the number of new contracts in New York could drop by more than 70 percent in the second quarter, compared with the same period last year.
The number of sales in Manhattan in the first quarter actually jumped 13.5 percent, compared with the same period last year, to 2,407 from 2,121, according to data from the brokerage firm Douglas Elliman.
This was only the second time in two and a half years that sales have risen compared with the same period the previous year, said Mr. Miller, the author of the report.
The | median sales price was $1,060,000, down just 1.4 percent from the same time last year, suggesting the market was close to turning the corner, as previous price declines had been higher. The average listing discount was 7.2 percent, the highest it had been since 2012, which suggested that sellers were finally getting serious about negotiating, Mr. Miller said.
There were 1,231 contracts signed in February, the most for that month in a decade, and a sign that buying would continue to be robust, said Garrett Derderian, the managing director of market analysis at CORE, another brokerage firm.
But in March, after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates close to zero, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York issued a stay-at-home order in response to the virus, early indicators suggest that momentum has ground to a halt.
Contracts and closings can lag the reality of the market by several weeks or months as paperwork makes its way through |
A strong winter storm struck Colorado and other parts of the central United States on Wednesday, sending hurricane-force winds and heavy snow across the region, meteorologists said.
The fierce winter weather, part of which classified as a “bomb cyclone,” pummeled Denver and other areas in Colorado, and rapidly intensified throughout the day as it pushed east and north, the National Weather Service said.
Heavy rains turned to snow, blizzard conditions and high winds and affected parts of the country from the Central Rockies across the Plains, and from the Mississippi Valley into the upper Great Lakes, including Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas and South Dakota.
In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis declared a state of emergency, making more resources available to react to the storm. Winds reached a high of 94 miles per hour, and some areas saw up to four feet of snow. Visibility reached near zero, and travel plans were disrupted throughout the state. Schools were closed on Wednesday in Denver, Littleton and several other cities.
At least one person has been killed as a result of the storm. Cpl. Daniel Groves of the Colorado State Patrol, 52, was hit by a car on I-76, about 50 miles from Denver. While helping a driver whose car slid off the roadway, the corporal was hit by another man who had lost control of his car, the State Patrol said. He was taken to Platte Valley Medical Center and died shortly afterward.
Dodge City, Kan., broke a record for low atmosphere pressure that had stood for more than a century, according to Vanessa Pearce, a meteorologist with The National Weather Service in Kansas.
The storm was expected to make its way through Kansas, Nebraska and move northeastward toward Iowa, the Weather Service said.
In Colorado, the storm qualified as a “bomb cyclone,” also known as a winter hurricane, according to the National Weather Service.
A storm may become a “bomb” depending on how fast the atmospheric pressure falls; drops in atmospheric pressure are a characteristic of all storms. Barometric pressure must fall by at least 24 millibars in 24 hours for a storm to be called a bomb cyclone.
“In terms of the sheer power of the system, I think it is one of the strongest ones we have ever seen in this part of the country,” he added.
The bomb cyclone’s snow and intense winds will create problems associated with blowing gusts of snow and huge drifts, Dr. Schumacher said.
The storm was expected to weaken by midnight according to the National Weather Service.
People living in the affected areas were likely to have prepared for the storm because forecasts about its approach have circulated for several days, he said.
The Denver airport said it was bracing for several inches of snow and strong winds. Airlines including Southwest, Frontier and United have canceled flights, and more cancellations and delays were possible, the airport said in a statement on Twitter. By Wednesday afternoon local time, more than 1,300 flights had been canceled, according to FlightAware.
“Travelers across the Colorado mountains and eastern plains should consider canceling travel plans today, as conditions will deteriorate quickly during the late morning or early afternoon,” it added.
By midday on Wednesday, parts of Kansas were feeling the fringes of the storm system with a high wind warning, or gusts of up to 70 m.p.h., in the western part of the state, the National Weather Service said.
| 2019-03 | <|begin_of_text|>A strong winter storm struck Colorado and other parts of the central United States on Wednesday, sending hurricane-force winds and heavy snow across the region, meteorologists said.
The fierce winter weather, part of which classified as a “bomb cyclone,” pummeled Denver and other areas in Colorado, and rapidly intensified throughout the day as it pushed east and north, the National Weather Service said.
Heavy rains turned to snow, blizzard conditions and high winds and affected parts of the country from the Central Rockies across the Plains, and from the Mississippi Valley into the upper Great Lakes, including Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas and South Dakota.
In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis declared a state of emergency, making more resources available to react to the storm. Winds reached a high of 94 miles per hour, and some areas saw up to four feet of snow. Visibility reached near zero, and travel plans were disrupted throughout the state. Schools were closed on Wednesday in Denver, Littleton and several other cities | .
At least one person has been killed as a result of the storm. Cpl. Daniel Groves of the Colorado State Patrol, 52, was hit by a car on I-76, about 50 miles from Denver. While helping a driver whose car slid off the roadway, the corporal was hit by another man who had lost control of his car, the State Patrol said. He was taken to Platte Valley Medical Center and died shortly afterward.
Dodge City, Kan., broke a record for low atmosphere pressure that had stood for more than a century, according to Vanessa Pearce, a meteorologist with The National Weather Service in Kansas.
The storm was expected to make its way through Kansas, Nebraska and move northeastward toward Iowa, the Weather Service said.
In Colorado, the storm qualified as a “bomb cyclone,” also known as a winter hurricane, according to the National Weather Service.
A storm may become a “bomb” depending on how fast the atmospheric pressure falls; drops |
A student at the University of Central Florida shared videos of sexual encounters he had with his girlfriend in a secret Facebook group for his fraternity brothers without her permission, the woman alleges in a lawsuit filed on Thursday.
Kathryn Novak, a student in Arizona, said she learned in March that her intimate photos and videos had been shared in a secret Facebook group when she saw someone’s text message to her long-distance boyfriend that mentioned a sexual video. Her boyfriend, Brandon Simpson, did not deny sharing the video in the Facebook group named “Dog Pound” in October, according to the lawsuit.
“The fact that you had a basically frat-boy atmosphere, both literally and figuratively, that was centered on the exploitation of women without their knowledge or consent is outrageous,” he said.
The lawsuit names as defendants Mr. Simpson, Delta Sigma Phi, the fraternity, and four other fraternity brothers who were said to have viewed the video.
Mr. Simpson declined to speak with a reporter when reached by phone on Thursday. Efforts to reach the other fraternity brothers were not immediately successful.
In a statement, Delta Sigma Phi said that it had suspended its chapter at the University of Central Florida.
“While we cannot comment on specific allegations made in the lawsuit, these claims are disturbing and antithetical to our organization’s values and mission,” the fraternity said.
“Although U.C.F. is not a party to the suit, we are gathering information,” it said.
Mr. Simpson and Ms. Novak were in a long-distance relationship from October 2017 to February 2018, seeing each other a few times per month, according to the lawsuit. While the sexual encounters were consensual, and Ms. Novak had sent her boyfriend intimate photos and videos, she had not given him permission to share her images, the lawsuit said. At least one sexual video was recorded without her knowledge, Mr. Avenatti said.
She was nude with her face identifiable in one video, which Mr. Simpson sent to five fraternity brothers and later showed to others during a house meeting, according to the lawsuit. The video was seen by more than 200 people, none of whom suggested Mr. Simpson delete it, according to the lawsuit.
The images were shared to the Facebook group, which Mr. Avenatti said contained images and videos of sexual activities with “many” other women.
Social media has become an additional problem for fraternities, already under fire for deadly hazing and underage drinking practices.
In 2015, Penn State suspended its Kappa Delta Rho chapter for three years after discovering it had operated a similar private Facebook page. The page included images of nude, unconscious women, in addition to photos of drugs, hazing and underage drinking.
Last week, Syracuse University suspended 15 fraternity brothers who participated in videos described by the school’s chancellor as racist and anti-Semitic. Syracuse suspended the fraternity in April.
On Wednesday, Ryan Burke, a former Penn State fraternity member, pleaded guilty to several misdemeanor charges related to the death of Timothy Piazza, who was 19 when he died after a binge-drinking hazing ritual in February 2017. Twenty-five other defendants have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial. | 2018-06 | <|begin_of_text|>A student at the University of Central Florida shared videos of sexual encounters he had with his girlfriend in a secret Facebook group for his fraternity brothers without her permission, the woman alleges in a lawsuit filed on Thursday.
Kathryn Novak, a student in Arizona, said she learned in March that her intimate photos and videos had been shared in a secret Facebook group when she saw someone’s text message to her long-distance boyfriend that mentioned a sexual video. Her boyfriend, Brandon Simpson, did not deny sharing the video in the Facebook group named “Dog Pound” in October, according to the lawsuit.
“The fact that you had a basically frat-boy atmosphere, both literally and figuratively, that was centered on the exploitation of women without their knowledge or consent is outrageous,” he said.
The lawsuit names as defendants Mr. Simpson, Delta Sigma Phi, the fraternity, and four other fraternity brothers who were said to have viewed the video.
Mr. Simpson declined to speak with a reporter when reached by phone on Thursday | . Efforts to reach the other fraternity brothers were not immediately successful.
In a statement, Delta Sigma Phi said that it had suspended its chapter at the University of Central Florida.
“While we cannot comment on specific allegations made in the lawsuit, these claims are disturbing and antithetical to our organization’s values and mission,” the fraternity said.
“Although U.C.F. is not a party to the suit, we are gathering information,” it said.
Mr. Simpson and Ms. Novak were in a long-distance relationship from October 2017 to February 2018, seeing each other a few times per month, according to the lawsuit. While the sexual encounters were consensual, and Ms. Novak had sent her boyfriend intimate photos and videos, she had not given him permission to share her images, the lawsuit said. At least one sexual video was recorded without her knowledge, Mr. Avenatti said.
She was nude with her face identifiable in one video, which Mr. Simpson sent |
A student at the University of Hartford in Connecticut was charged with criminal mischief and expelled from school after boasting about having contaminated her roommate’s toothbrush, face lotion and other belongings in an effort to drive her from the room.
“After one and a half months spitting in her coconut oil, putting moldy clam dip in her lotions, rubbing used tampons on her backpack, putting her toothbrush places where the sun doesn’t shine, and so much more, I can finally say goodbye to Jamaican Barbie,” said the post, which has since been deleted. Ms. Brochu is white; Ms. Rowe is black.
Lt. Michael Perruccio of the West Hartford Police Department said that the police began investigating the report on Oct. 18 and that Ms. Brochu turned herself in on Saturday.
On Wednesday, the police department said it would be requesting that Ms. Brochu be charged with intimidation based on bigotry or bias, a felony. The university announced that she was no longer a student there.
Ms. Rowe, a freshman at the university, described her roommate’s behavior in a Facebook video on Monday, and accused the school of attempting to keep the episode quiet.
She said that the revelations, posted on Instagram as she was moving out, had helped explain why she had been sick early in the school year, suffering from extreme throat pain that eventually made it difficult to sleep or speak.
Ms. Rowe said that she and Ms. Brochu had been placed together randomly and that their relationship had been tense.
“I moved out because I felt like I was unwanted in my own room,” she said.
As she was in the process of moving, Ms. Rowe said, other residents approached her about several posts Ms. Brochu had made on social media. They included pictures of bloodstains on Ms. Rowe’s backpack and videos of Ms. Rowe eating, with comments suggesting that the utensils she was using had been contaminated.
Ms. Brochu had already been charged by the time Ms. Rowe posted the video. But Ms. Rowe expressed frustration that it had taken so long for Ms. Brochu to be punished.
She said that school authorities had told her if she spoke out about the situation, she could be removed from her campus residence. And she said that race had been a factor in the school’s response, speculating that if she were white and Ms. Brochu were black, the investigation would have been more urgent.
“If the race roles were reversed, I feel like this would have gone down a different route,” she said.
The university’s undergraduate student body is 15 percent African-American, according to statistics posted on its website.
Ms. Rowe did not respond to emails requesting further comment on Wednesday.
Her video catapulted her experience into the news, with the hashtag #justiceforjazzy — based on the name she uses on Facebook — being used to spread her story.
In a statement posted online Tuesday, Mr. Woodward called Ms. Brochu’s behavior “reprehensible” and said that he was confident that the university had pursued the matter seriously.
Mr. Woodward followed up on Wednesday with the statement announcing Ms. Brochu’s expulsion. That statement clarified the timeline, saying that the school’s public safety department became involved on Oct. 17 and that the case was turned over to the local authorities early the next day.
Molly Polk, a spokeswoman for the university, said that the school had followed its standard procedures, immediately referring the case to the police. She said that Mr. Woodward had not been accusing Ms. Rowe of spreading misinformation in his initial statement, and that he was instead referencing the almost instantaneous reaction to the video among people on social media.
| 2017-11 | <|begin_of_text|>A student at the University of Hartford in Connecticut was charged with criminal mischief and expelled from school after boasting about having contaminated her roommate’s toothbrush, face lotion and other belongings in an effort to drive her from the room.
“After one and a half months spitting in her coconut oil, putting moldy clam dip in her lotions, rubbing used tampons on her backpack, putting her toothbrush places where the sun doesn’t shine, and so much more, I can finally say goodbye to Jamaican Barbie,” said the post, which has since been deleted. Ms. Brochu is white; Ms. Rowe is black.
Lt. Michael Perruccio of the West Hartford Police Department said that the police began investigating the report on Oct. 18 and that Ms. Brochu turned herself in on Saturday.
On Wednesday, the police department said it would be requesting that Ms. Brochu be charged with intimidation based on bigotry or bias, a felony. The university announced that she was no | longer a student there.
Ms. Rowe, a freshman at the university, described her roommate’s behavior in a Facebook video on Monday, and accused the school of attempting to keep the episode quiet.
She said that the revelations, posted on Instagram as she was moving out, had helped explain why she had been sick early in the school year, suffering from extreme throat pain that eventually made it difficult to sleep or speak.
Ms. Rowe said that she and Ms. Brochu had been placed together randomly and that their relationship had been tense.
“I moved out because I felt like I was unwanted in my own room,” she said.
As she was in the process of moving, Ms. Rowe said, other residents approached her about several posts Ms. Brochu had made on social media. They included pictures of bloodstains on Ms. Rowe’s backpack and videos of Ms. Rowe eating, with comments suggesting that the utensils she was using had been contaminated.
Ms. Brochu had already been charged by |
A study examined a popular approach that coordinated care for the most expensive patients, and found that the project did not reduce hospital admissions.
In the quest to reduce health care spending in the United States, the idea held incredible promise: By addressing the medical and social needs of the most expensive patients, you could keep them out of the hospital.
These individuals, frequently struggling with addiction or homelessness, have extremely complicated medical conditions. By finding them and connecting them to the right doctors and social services, dozens of costly hospital stays could be avoided. The idea has been adopted in numerous communities around the country.
Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, a family physician in New Jersey, founded the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers in 2002. He created teams of nurses, social workers and others to coordinate the care of people he saw cycle in and out of the hospital. Dr. Brenner, who was profiled in a 2011 New Yorker piece, “The Hot Spotters,” and who won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship — known as a “genius” grant — in 2013, became the program’s chief evangelist.
But a new study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that the Camden program did not result in fewer hospital readmissions in the six months after a patient left the hospital. While the program appeared to lower readmissions by nearly 40 percent, the same kind of patients who received regular care saw a nearly identical decline in hospital stays.
“We’re disappointed by the results,” said Kathleen Noonan, the chief executive of the Camden Coalition. Finding effective ways to help these patients, known as super-utilizers, “is very, very hard work,” she said.
Several years ago, the small nonprofit began working with M.I.T.’s J-PAL North American Group to devise a way to test whether the coalition’s efforts were effective. “We could have coasted on the publicity we were getting,” Dr. Brenner said, but he wanted to make sure the intervention was having a real impact.
The surprising lack of results offers a cautionary tale about how difficult it is to improve patients’ care and reduce costs. Few efforts that have taken place undergo rigorous study, allowing proponents of a variety of programs, like wellness and disease management, to claim they benefit patients and save money without evidence. The coalition is advising communities like Memphis to help develop programs that may be more targeted and therefore show improvements.
The study, which involved 800 patients, compared hospital admissions for patients whose care was coordinated by the Camden Coalition with those whose care was not. These patients had at least two chronic conditions. The study took five years, enrolling its first patients in June 2014.
The researchers conducted a randomized controlled trial. While the patients had fewer hospital stays, the decline in admissions was the result of a phenomenon known as regression to the mean, said Amy Finkelstein, an economist at M.I.T. who led the study. Patients with extremely high medical costs tend to see their expenses naturally decline over time, becoming closer to the average.
Such regression is “the Achilles’ heel of a lot of health research,” said Amitabh Chandra, a health economist at Harvard University, who said most studies were based on observing patients and seeing how they did before and after an intervention. The patient in the hospital will be cured of pneumonia, regardless of what else happened.
“All the observational studies will find huge effects,” he said.
When Dr. Brenner, now an executive with UnitedHealth Group, started the Camden Coalition, the answer seemed more straightforward. Camden was one of the nation’s poorest cities, and by identifying those patients who were in and out of the hospital, he saw firsthand how chaotic and disjointed their care was. Many were being prescribed too many medications, and they were often simply too overwhelmed to figure out how to navigate the system.
The concept took off. “Hot spotting has enjoyed tremendous, widespread appeal,” said Mary D. Naylor, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing who is leading similar efforts to reduce hospitalizations among Medicare patients. Her program has shown promising results in randomized studies.
In retrospect, assigning a team to coordinate the care of the sickest patients, with no quick access to housing or treatment programs for substance abuse, “made it seem like an impossible task,” Dr. Naylor said. Camden’s program targets patients with the most serious social and medical challenges. One individual struggled with addiction for decades and was incarcerated for much of his life. When he was released, he would bounce from hospitals to treatment programs. After developing a wide range of medical problems, he was hospitalized for pneumonia when he was brought into the program.
These patients may need help well before they become super-utilizers, Dr. Naylor said, and the program could be more effective if it were able to find patients who were most likely to benefit from the coalition’s efforts. “I’m hopeful we learn a lot from this,” she said.
Her initiative focused on a narrower set of patients, whose care after hospitalization was overseen by a skilled nurse. She is now trying to get the approach adopted more broadly.
The Camden Coalition underestimated how few resources were available to help the patients it identified, Dr. Brenner said. “Care coordination is necessary but insufficient to fix the health care of these patients,” he said. The patients served by the coalition had much greater needs than those of Dr. Naylor’s program, he said.
Putting a patient with numerous chronic conditions in touch with a primary care doctor for 15 minutes or finding someone a treatment program while that person was still living on the streets or in a shelter is not enough to make a significant difference, Dr. Brenner said. “We’re coordinating to nowhere, essentially,” he said.
Housing, for example, may play a more important role, he said, pointing to one patient who stopped cycling in and out of the hospital after getting housing. At United, Dr. Brenner is leading an experiment to providing housing to high-cost patients.
The doctors seeing these patients were not always equipped to handle their complicated needs, Ms. Noonan of the Camden Coalition said, adding that the program has also evolved to try to address critical needs like housing. It has also recently teamed up with lawyers to try to prevent patients from getting evicted or losing their benefits.
“Our primary care offices are doing the best they can, but they are inundated,” Ms. Noonan said.
The study’s researchers offered several possible reasons for the program’s lack of success, including a lack of follow-up home visits or doctor’s appointments or insufficient resources. “We don’t know why from the data,” Dr. Finkelstein said.
The study’s design did not allow them to assess whether some types of patients — older patients, say — did benefit from the program, she said. The coalition is examining whether there might be benefits other than hospital readmissions, like a reduction in emergency room visits.
“We have to keep figuring out what is going to work,” Ms. Noonan said.
It is important not to give up, said Dr. Brenner, who likened these efforts to those of cancer researchers trying to find the right treatment for individuals with a certain genetic makeup. “It took us 50 years to figure out cancer,” he said. | 2020-01 | <|begin_of_text|>A study examined a popular approach that coordinated care for the most expensive patients, and found that the project did not reduce hospital admissions.
In the quest to reduce health care spending in the United States, the idea held incredible promise: By addressing the medical and social needs of the most expensive patients, you could keep them out of the hospital.
These individuals, frequently struggling with addiction or homelessness, have extremely complicated medical conditions. By finding them and connecting them to the right doctors and social services, dozens of costly hospital stays could be avoided. The idea has been adopted in numerous communities around the country.
Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, a family physician in New Jersey, founded the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers in 2002. He created teams of nurses, social workers and others to coordinate the care of people he saw cycle in and out of the hospital. Dr. Brenner, who was profiled in a 2011 New Yorker piece, “The Hot Spotters,” and who won a Mac | Arthur Foundation fellowship — known as a “genius” grant — in 2013, became the program’s chief evangelist.
But a new study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that the Camden program did not result in fewer hospital readmissions in the six months after a patient left the hospital. While the program appeared to lower readmissions by nearly 40 percent, the same kind of patients who received regular care saw a nearly identical decline in hospital stays.
“We’re disappointed by the results,” said Kathleen Noonan, the chief executive of the Camden Coalition. Finding effective ways to help these patients, known as super-utilizers, “is very, very hard work,” she said.
Several years ago, the small nonprofit began working with M.I.T.’s J-PAL North American Group to devise a way to test whether the coalition’s efforts were effective. “We could have coasted on the publicity we were getting,” Dr. Brenner said, but he wanted to |
A study for the city of San Antonio predicted that the 2018 Final Four would bring nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in spending to the city, a talking point sure to be raised as debate continues over a proposed Texas law seen by some as discriminatory to transgender people.
A similar law in North Carolina prompted the N.C.A.A. and the N.B.A. to pull events from that state.
According to a memo obtained Friday by The New York Times and verified by a spokeswoman for the local organizing committee, next year’s Final Four would lead to $135 million in direct spending and a total economic impact, accounting for money spent by tens of thousands of visitors at other businesses, of $234 million.
The study, conducted by the chief economist of the Sabér Research Institute, projected state tax revenue of $9.5 million and municipal tax revenue of $4.4 million stemming from the event.
Earlier this month, Texas officials, led by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, proposed legislation that would require transgender people to use bathrooms in government buildings and public schools and universities based on their “biological sex,” overriding any local rules to the contrary (potentially including a nondiscrimination ordinance that, the committee spokeswoman noted, San Antonio has). The proposal is known as Senate Bill 6.
The N.C.A.A. has not commented on the Texas bill.
The bill strikes many observers as similar to the North Carolina law that prompted the N.C.A.A. to move championship events out of the state, including games in the early rounds of the Division I men’s basketball tournament. The N.B.A. moved its All-Star Game, and the Atlantic Coast Conference moved its football championship game in response to the law.
Many of North Carolina’s business interests opposed the law, citing economic downsides. The Texas Association of Business has also opposed the bill, in addition to several groups that represent lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals.
The Texas bill appears to have an exemption for venues “privately leased to an outside entity,” which could include a situation such as Houston’s NRG Stadium, which is set to host the Super Bowl early next month (likely before the bill would actually be made law), or the Alamodome come March 2018.
It is not clear how such an exemption would affect hotels or restaurants accounted for in the economic impact report. It is also unclear how the N.C.A.A. would assess it. Currently the association quizzes prospective host sites over their abilities to cultivate nondiscriminatory atmospheres. | 2017-01 | <|begin_of_text|>A study for the city of San Antonio predicted that the 2018 Final Four would bring nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in spending to the city, a talking point sure to be raised as debate continues over a proposed Texas law seen by some as discriminatory to transgender people.
A similar law in North Carolina prompted the N.C.A.A. and the N.B.A. to pull events from that state.
According to a memo obtained Friday by The New York Times and verified by a spokeswoman for the local organizing committee, next year’s Final Four would lead to $135 million in direct spending and a total economic impact, accounting for money spent by tens of thousands of visitors at other businesses, of $234 million.
The study, conducted by the chief economist of the Sabér Research Institute, projected state tax revenue of $9.5 million and municipal tax revenue of $4.4 million stemming from the event.
Earlier this month, Texas officials, led by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a | Republican, proposed legislation that would require transgender people to use bathrooms in government buildings and public schools and universities based on their “biological sex,” overriding any local rules to the contrary (potentially including a nondiscrimination ordinance that, the committee spokeswoman noted, San Antonio has). The proposal is known as Senate Bill 6.
The N.C.A.A. has not commented on the Texas bill.
The bill strikes many observers as similar to the North Carolina law that prompted the N.C.A.A. to move championship events out of the state, including games in the early rounds of the Division I men’s basketball tournament. The N.B.A. moved its All-Star Game, and the Atlantic Coast Conference moved its football championship game in response to the law.
Many of North Carolina’s business interests opposed the law, citing economic downsides. The Texas Association of Business has also opposed the bill, in addition to several groups that represent lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals.
The Texas bill appears to have an exemption |
A study of 48 young I.C.U. patients in U.S. hospitals found that two died. Eighteen of the children were put on ventilators.
As concern grows over the potential for children to become seriously ill from the coronavirus, a new study paints the most detailed picture yet of American children who were treated in intensive care units throughout the United States as the pandemic was taking hold in the country.
None of the children in the study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, were stricken by the new mysterious inflammatory syndrome linked to the coronavirus that can cause life-threatening cardiac issues in children. They suffered from the virus’s primary line of attack: the severe respiratory problems that have afflicted tens of thousands of American adults.
The vast majority of the patients — 40 children, including the two who died — had pre-existing medical conditions. Nearly half of those patients had complex developmental disorders like cerebral palsy or lifelong technology-dependent treatments like tracheostomies or feeding tubes, children “who have trouble walking, talking, eating, breathing,” Dr. Shekerdemian said. Other pre-existing health issues included cancer and suppressed immune systems from organ transplants or immunological conditions.
Perhaps because it was so early in the pandemic, none of the children in the study displayed the newly identified pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, which experts believe may be a latent condition that develops weeks after the initial coronavirus infection and assaults a child’s circulatory system with inflammation rather than directly attacking the lungs. Over the weekend, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York reported that three children in the state have died of that illness, and last week the journal Lancet reported a death in England.
The new study also suggests that, at least at this point in the pandemic, “nobody knows what the appropriate treatment is for these very sick children,” said Dr. Nigel Curtis, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Melbourne, who was not involved in the research.
Hospitals used many methods of breathing support, as well as unproven medications like hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir and tociluzimab to treat the children. Other approaches included inhaled nitric oxide and blood plasma.
“They get a variety of different treatments in a very nonsystematic way because, of course, quite understandably, these intensive care doctors are going to do their best by these children and so they’re going to try different potential therapies,” said Dr. Curtis, who is also head of infectious diseases at the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne.
The study was conducted by members of an international collaborative of more than 300 pediatric intensive care and infectious disease specialists formed to study coronavirus in children and make recommendations.
Forty-six hospitals agreed to participate in the study, which included patients with confirmed coronavirus infections who were admitted to pediatric I.C.U.s in North America between March 14 and April 3, said Dr. Shekerdemian, who is also vice chair of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine. But only 16 of them had cases during that span, and only 14 reported data in time for publication, she said.
The 14 hospitals were all in the United States, and reflected the trajectory of the early pandemic, concentrated on the East Coast, with scattered cases in Texas and elsewhere. Young people up to age 21 were included, but all but three patients were 18 or younger, Dr. Shekerdemian said.
Given the small number of cases, it’s hard to know how representative the results are. For example, while studies on children in China and an early report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that infants and preschool-aged children were at highest risk, fewer than a third of the pediatric I.C.U. patients in the new study were that young. The two children who died were 12 and 17.
Dr. De Luca, who is chief of the division of pediatrics and neonatal critical care at Paris Saclay University Hospitals, said it made sense that older children with developmental disorders and other complex long-term problems would be more vulnerable than infants or toddlers to a virus like Covid-19.
“As they get older, they have lower immunity, they don’t move much, and their weakening muscles affect their respiratory condition,” he said.
Fourteen of the patients in the study had only mild or moderate coronavirus symptoms, and it’s possible that because of the previous fragile state of their health they were admitted to I.C.U.s as a precaution, experts said. Another was asymptomatic but was already in the I.C.U. for other reasons.
Still, 33 young people became severely or critically ill. And of the 18 who required ventilators, six needed additional respiratory interventions, including one child who needed a last-resort heart-lung bypass machine. Thirty patients experienced lung failure, and at least 11 also had failure of one or more other organs, such as the heart, kidneys or liver, Dr. Shekerdemian said. Two had neurological symptoms, primarily seizures.
The children’s cases were followed through April 10. At that point, 15 remained hospitalized, but most were no longer severely or critically ill, the study said. Four were on ventilators then, one of whom was also on the heart-lung bypass machine. Those four remain hospitalized now, with two still on ventilators, Dr. Shekerdemian said.
The small number of patients treated by the hospitals in the study echoes C.D.C. figures so far, which report that 2 percent of confirmed American coronavirus cases have been in children under 18. That’s similar to data in China and higher than rates reported in Italy and Spain. As of May 6, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 10 deaths in children 14 and younger and 48 deaths between the ages of 15 and 24.
But the actual prevalence and effects of coronavirus in children remain unknown, and last week, the National Institutes of Health announced it was starting a large study to learn more.
Scientists are also studying why most children seem less affected than adults, a question that could help them learn more about how the virus works in general. Theories include that cells lining the blood vessels and heart change as we age or that children’s lung cells express lower levels of proteins that help the virus enter the cells and replicate.
| 2020-05 | <|begin_of_text|>A study of 48 young I.C.U. patients in U.S. hospitals found that two died. Eighteen of the children were put on ventilators.
As concern grows over the potential for children to become seriously ill from the coronavirus, a new study paints the most detailed picture yet of American children who were treated in intensive care units throughout the United States as the pandemic was taking hold in the country.
None of the children in the study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, were stricken by the new mysterious inflammatory syndrome linked to the coronavirus that can cause life-threatening cardiac issues in children. They suffered from the virus’s primary line of attack: the severe respiratory problems that have afflicted tens of thousands of American adults.
The vast majority of the patients — 40 children, including the two who died — had pre-existing medical conditions. Nearly half of those patients had complex developmental disorders like cerebral palsy or lifelong technology-dependent treatments like tracheostomies or feeding tubes, children “ | who have trouble walking, talking, eating, breathing,” Dr. Shekerdemian said. Other pre-existing health issues included cancer and suppressed immune systems from organ transplants or immunological conditions.
Perhaps because it was so early in the pandemic, none of the children in the study displayed the newly identified pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, which experts believe may be a latent condition that develops weeks after the initial coronavirus infection and assaults a child’s circulatory system with inflammation rather than directly attacking the lungs. Over the weekend, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York reported that three children in the state have died of that illness, and last week the journal Lancet reported a death in England.
The new study also suggests that, at least at this point in the pandemic, “nobody knows what the appropriate treatment is for these very sick children,” said Dr. Nigel Curtis, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Melbourne, who was not involved in the research.
Hospitals used many |
A study of fossil meteorites suggests that a distant asteroid collision once sent Earth into an ice age.
Extraterrestrial events — the collision of faraway black holes, a comet slamming into Jupiter — evoke wonder on Earth but rarely a sense of local urgency. By and large, what happens in outer space stays in outer space.
A study published Wednesday in Science Advances offered a compelling exception to that rule. A team of researchers led by Birger Schmitz, a nuclear physicist at Lund University in Sweden, found that a distant, ancient asteroid collision generated enough dust to cause an ice age long ago on Earth. The study lends new insight to ongoing efforts to address climate change.
Earth is frequently exposed to extraterrestrial matter; 40,000 tons of the stuff settle on the planet every year, enough to fill 1,000 tractor-trailers. But 466 million years ago, a 93-mile-wide asteroid collided with an unknown, fast-moving object between Mars and Jupiter. The crash increased the amount of dust arriving on Earth for the next two million years by a factor of 10,000. Dr. Schmitz, Dr. Heck and their team found that the dust triggered cooling in Earth’s atmosphere that led to an ice age.
In sufficient amounts, extraterrestrial dust can cool Earth by blocking the amount of solar radiation that reaches the surface. Because the dust from the asteroid collision accumulated gradually, the planet cooled gradually, allowing plants and animal species to adapt as sea levels dropped and temperatures declined by as much as 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Our study is the first time it has been shown that asteroid dust actually helps cool Earth to a dramatic extent,” Dr. Schmitz said.
The first was found in a Swedish limestone quarry in 1952, but it was shelved by an unsuspecting paleontologist and wasn’t properly identified for another 27 years. In 1979, when a mineralogist realized the extraterrestrial origins of the rock, he prompted a systematic search for more in Swedish quarries. Researchers found 130 meteorites over the next two decades.
Of these, Dr. Schmitz and his team determined that 129 derived from the same asteroid breakup. The meteorites were analyzed to determine their chemical composition, and their level of cosmic ray exposure was measured to confirm their outer-space origins and pin down when they arrived on Earth.
By tracing the increase in the meteorites of certain isotopes, the researchers were able to determine that extraterrestrial dust began to reach Earth about 50,000 years after the asteroid collision. A worldwide ice age began roughly 10,000 years later, during the Ordovician Period.
When the team started its research, they hypothesized that the collision might have increased dust levels by a hundredfold. The chemical analysis soon revealed that the dust levels had risen far more, by a factor of 10,000, an increase sufficient to markedly alter Earth’s climate.
Dr. Schmitz and his team believe their findings shed light on a mechanism that could eventually be used to counteract global warming. In their paper, they propose that an asteroid could be captured and brought to one of the Lagrange points between the sun and Earth — an unstable zone where the gravitational pull of each is equal — allowing it to produce dust that blocks sunlight. They are not the first scientists to suggest using extraterrestrial dust for global cooling.
| 2019-09 | <|begin_of_text|>A study of fossil meteorites suggests that a distant asteroid collision once sent Earth into an ice age.
Extraterrestrial events — the collision of faraway black holes, a comet slamming into Jupiter — evoke wonder on Earth but rarely a sense of local urgency. By and large, what happens in outer space stays in outer space.
A study published Wednesday in Science Advances offered a compelling exception to that rule. A team of researchers led by Birger Schmitz, a nuclear physicist at Lund University in Sweden, found that a distant, ancient asteroid collision generated enough dust to cause an ice age long ago on Earth. The study lends new insight to ongoing efforts to address climate change.
Earth is frequently exposed to extraterrestrial matter; 40,000 tons of the stuff settle on the planet every year, enough to fill 1,000 tractor-trailers. But 466 million years ago, a 93-mile-wide asteroid collided with an unknown, fast-moving object between Mars and Jupiter. | The crash increased the amount of dust arriving on Earth for the next two million years by a factor of 10,000. Dr. Schmitz, Dr. Heck and their team found that the dust triggered cooling in Earth’s atmosphere that led to an ice age.
In sufficient amounts, extraterrestrial dust can cool Earth by blocking the amount of solar radiation that reaches the surface. Because the dust from the asteroid collision accumulated gradually, the planet cooled gradually, allowing plants and animal species to adapt as sea levels dropped and temperatures declined by as much as 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Our study is the first time it has been shown that asteroid dust actually helps cool Earth to a dramatic extent,” Dr. Schmitz said.
The first was found in a Swedish limestone quarry in 1952, but it was shelved by an unsuspecting paleontologist and wasn’t properly identified for another 27 years. In 1979, when a mineralogist realized the extraterrestrial origins of the rock |
A study published on Friday appears to confirm what news reports suggested long ago: President Trump’s campaign rallies were associated with a rise in violence when they came to town.
A city that hosted a Trump rally saw an average of 2.3 more assaults reported on the day of the event than on a typical day, according to the study, led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and published in the journal Epidemiology. The authors found no corresponding link between assaults and rallies for Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
“It appeared to be a phenomenon that’s unique to Donald Trump’s rally,” said Christopher Morrison, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the study.
New York Times reporters have covered Donald J. Trump's rallies for more than a year. His supporters at these events often express their views in angry and provocative ways. Here are some examples.
It may come as little surprise that the rallies were associated with increased violence, as the often volcanic clashes between Mr. Trump’s supporters and opponents were widely covered at the time.
In March 2016 alone, a Trump rally in Chicago was called off after violent clashes broke out, while an anti-Trump protester was punched at a rally in North Carolina and another was punched and kicked at a rally in Arizona. The following month, several Trump supporters were assaulted at a California rally.
Mr. Trump himself repeatedly seemed to endorse attacks on his detractors, too.
“Maybe he should have been roughed up,” he said of one protester who was reportedly punched and kicked in November 2015. “I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell ya,” he said of another a few months later. He even offered to pay legal fees for his supporters if they became too aggressive.
The supporters also often aimed offensive and violent rhetoric at Mrs. Clinton, suggesting she be killed.
To determine whether those words and news reports corresponded with an actual shift in violence, the researchers compiled a list of 31 Trump rallies and 38 Clinton rallies held in cities with assault data available online.
They compared the number of assaults reported on the day of the rally to the number reported on the corresponding day of the week, for each of the four weeks before and after the event.
On a typical day, cities saw an average of 19.4 assaults, they found. On the day of a Trump rally, that number rose to 21.7.
The pattern held even when the researchers controlled for the influence of factors like population size, data sources and the day used for the comparison.
There were some limitations to the findings, the authors noted. They may not apply to the rallies or cities that weren’t studied, and a greater police presence during the rallies may have made it more likely for an assault to be reported. | 2018-03 | <|begin_of_text|>A study published on Friday appears to confirm what news reports suggested long ago: President Trump’s campaign rallies were associated with a rise in violence when they came to town.
A city that hosted a Trump rally saw an average of 2.3 more assaults reported on the day of the event than on a typical day, according to the study, led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and published in the journal Epidemiology. The authors found no corresponding link between assaults and rallies for Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
“It appeared to be a phenomenon that’s unique to Donald Trump’s rally,” said Christopher Morrison, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the study.
New York Times reporters have covered Donald J. Trump's rallies for more than a year. His supporters at these events often express their views in angry and provocative ways. Here are some examples.
It may come as little surprise that the rallies were associated with increased violence, as the often volcanic | clashes between Mr. Trump’s supporters and opponents were widely covered at the time.
In March 2016 alone, a Trump rally in Chicago was called off after violent clashes broke out, while an anti-Trump protester was punched at a rally in North Carolina and another was punched and kicked at a rally in Arizona. The following month, several Trump supporters were assaulted at a California rally.
Mr. Trump himself repeatedly seemed to endorse attacks on his detractors, too.
“Maybe he should have been roughed up,” he said of one protester who was reportedly punched and kicked in November 2015. “I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell ya,” he said of another a few months later. He even offered to pay legal fees for his supporters if they became too aggressive.
The supporters also often aimed offensive and violent rhetoric at Mrs. Clinton, suggesting she be killed.
To determine whether those words and news reports corresponded with an actual shift in violence, the researchers compiled a |
A study shows that three out of four U.S. workers ages 50 to 62 didn’t have an employer-provided retirement plan and health insurance — which will be a big blow to their income later.
When the retirement expert Alicia H. Munnell finished gathering data for a study on American workers ages 50 to 62 in jobs without benefits, she was stunned.
“When I looked at the results I thought, ‘This can’t be right,’” Dr. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, said. The study, published in October and titled “How Do Older Workers Use Nontraditional Jobs?,” found that three-quarters of American workers in that age group had positions that fall into the center’s “nontraditional” category — meaning, those without employer-provided retirement plans and health insurance.
What may be less surprising is the effect these jobs can have on retirement. Depending on how much time workers spent in a job without benefits from ages 50 to 62, they can expect their retirement income to be as much as 26 percent lower than that of people who spent their 50s and early 60s in positions with full benefit packages, according to the center’s findings. It was the first time the center had looked at nontraditional workers in this age group.
Ms. Jacobs is a freelance writer for various outlets, including The Dallas Morning News. Since the coronavirus hit, she has been especially busy.
Ms. Jacobs, 60, started freelancing in 1989. Since 2015, she has freelanced full time. From 2006 until 2013, she was a staff writer at The United Methodist Reporter, a newspaper that shut down. It was the only job that offered her health and retirement benefits since she started writing professionally.
Other Texas organizations she writes for, including a theology school and a seminary, don’t extend benefits to freelancers. And that’s OK with Ms. Jacobs. Her husband, Steve Lavine, owned a market research company and retired comfortably five years ago. When they married in 2009, they combined living expenses, allowing her to increase her retirement savings and buy private health insurance. Mr. Lavine is on Medicare.
She also knows that other workers her age have reason to feel not so fortunate. Ms. Jacobs chose her nontraditional jobs for their flexibility. Freelancing allowed her to work from home when her children, now 27 and 30, were growing up.
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Other workers, like James P. Shelley, felt forced to take nontraditional work in their later years.
Since his 20s, Mr. Shelley had worked as an executive at Southern California health information management companies. He was fired from one firm in his 30s for not meeting sales quotas. A second company let him go in 2005 because it could no longer afford his salary. For decades, he provided his wife and children, now 31 and 29, with health insurance through his employers and made small contributions to company retirement savings plans. Since starting his own business, he has gone without health insurance. His savings have dwindled to zero.
Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Shelley have made careers of their nontraditional jobs, meaning both have spent the bulk of their later earning years forgoing benefits. According to the Boston center’s study, that lands them among the group of future retirees likely to see the highest rate of lost income: Their peers are apt to be 26 percent richer because they won’t have pulled from their own pockets to pay for health coverage or have interrupted the accrual of money in their 401(k)’s or pensions.
Making a career of these jobs also puts them among the majority of workers in those positions, who stay put rather than using them as stopgaps between jobs with benefits or bridges to retirement. Workers who bounced among mostly traditional jobs, with stints at nontraditional jobs in between, had about 6 percent less retirement income, the study found.
“Some people do use these jobs to tide them over between one traditional job and another,” Dr. Munnell said; those workers make up only about 25 percent. Fifty-four percent of the 4,174 respondents in the center’s study stay in their no-benefits jobs for years. Among them are people whose lack of a high school diploma prevents them from securing traditional jobs. Others are in Ms. Jacobs’s position, with a spouse to fall back on.
A January report from the institute found that 40 percent of Americans over 60 draw income from Social Security alone, while only 7 percent pay their bills through a combination of Social Security, a defined-benefit pension and a contribution plan such as a 401(k).
That may be because only about half of U.S. workplaces offer their employees retirement plans, Mr. Doonan said. “Access has been a challenge,” he said.
Yet that access may make the biggest difference when it comes to closing the gap between traditional and nontraditional workers’ retirement income.
The lowest-paid workers may be the most reluctant to try to save for retirement. “There’s a lot of demands on a limited income,” Dr. Munnell said.
Workers like Mr. Shelley, whose business, like the hiring market, has ground down because of the coronavirus, know they are vulnerable. “I believe I have more than 20 years ahead of me, and that I’ll be doing this until the day I die,” he said.
He said he planned to move to a more affordable city when his wife retired and hopes his health holds out, at least until he qualifies for Medicare. “It’s only the catastrophic stuff, like a cancer diagnosis, that I worry about,” Mr. Shelley said.
Dr. Munnell wishes that he and other nontraditional workers were in a position to fret less.
| 2020-04 | <|begin_of_text|>A study shows that three out of four U.S. workers ages 50 to 62 didn’t have an employer-provided retirement plan and health insurance — which will be a big blow to their income later.
When the retirement expert Alicia H. Munnell finished gathering data for a study on American workers ages 50 to 62 in jobs without benefits, she was stunned.
“When I looked at the results I thought, ‘This can’t be right,’” Dr. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, said. The study, published in October and titled “How Do Older Workers Use Nontraditional Jobs?,” found that three-quarters of American workers in that age group had positions that fall into the center’s “nontraditional” category — meaning, those without employer-provided retirement plans and health insurance.
What may be less surprising is the effect these jobs can have on retirement. Depending on how much time workers spent in a job without benefits from ages 50 | to 62, they can expect their retirement income to be as much as 26 percent lower than that of people who spent their 50s and early 60s in positions with full benefit packages, according to the center’s findings. It was the first time the center had looked at nontraditional workers in this age group.
Ms. Jacobs is a freelance writer for various outlets, including The Dallas Morning News. Since the coronavirus hit, she has been especially busy.
Ms. Jacobs, 60, started freelancing in 1989. Since 2015, she has freelanced full time. From 2006 until 2013, she was a staff writer at The United Methodist Reporter, a newspaper that shut down. It was the only job that offered her health and retirement benefits since she started writing professionally.
Other Texas organizations she writes for, including a theology school and a seminary, don’t extend benefits to freelancers. And that’s OK with Ms. Jacobs. Her husband |
A stunt that went wrong on the set of the TV show “L.A.’s Finest” last week, leaving two producers injured, is the latest in a string of incidents that have drawn renewed attention to the dangers of stunt work. It came just days after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited a subsidiary of CBS for a stunt-related injury, and after a lawsuit was filed by the widow of a man who worked as a stunt double.
The “L.A.’s Finest” accident, which occurred Thursday on the set of the drama series, involved a stunt with a vehicle. “The vehicle’s trajectory led to a collision with set pieces in the safe viewing area,” said Philip Sokoloski, a spokesman for FilmLA, the official film office for the City and County of Los Angeles. The show is produced by Sony Pictures Television and is set to premiere this spring on Spectrum as the cable provider’s first original series.
The two producers who were injured were transported to two different hospitals in the area for treatment, Sokoloski said. He said that filming scheduled for Feb. 22 had been postponed.
The Sony Pictures Television president, Jeff Frost, and co-presidents Chris Parnell and Jason Clodfelter, said in a statement: “Our hearts go out to our SPT family members who were injured and we pray for a full recovery.” The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, Cal/OSHA, confirmed that it was investigating the accident.
Stunt work is a sometimes dangerous and physically difficult subset of the entertainment industry. In a report in The New York Times in 2017, some stuntmen and women described a macho culture and a “gung-ho mentality.” Safety concerns have been raised for decades, especially after the death of an actor and two children in a helicopter crash on the set of “Twilight Zone: The Movie” in 1982, but there has been little success in efforts toward regulation. Fatalities are uncommon, although in 2017, a stuntwoman died on the set of “Deadpool 2” and a stuntman died on the set of “The Walking Dead.” Data about injuries on sets are sketchy and unreliable, as are most workplace safety statistics, which largely rely on information self-reported by employers.
But recent regulatory action brought some safety issues to light again: Last week, OSHA cited Eye Productions Inc., a division of CBS, for “failing to protect employees from hazards” in August 2018. A man was injured on the set of “MacGyver” while performing a stunt on a moving vehicle traveling at 18 miles per hour; OSHA said he did not have “adequate head protection.” The proposed penalty is $9,472.
A representative for CBS declined to comment on the citation and the fine.
Also last week, the widow of the former football player and stunt double Darryl Hammond filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of the County of Los Angeles that named the Walt Disney Company, Paramount Pictures and Columbia Pictures as defendants, along with the Arena Football League. The suit claims that while filming movies including “The Longest Yard” and “Invincible,” Hammond, who died in 2017, suffered traumatic head injuries that exposed him to neurodegenerative diseases. It alleges negligence, wrongful death and breach of contract, among other things. Representatives for Disney and Paramount did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit; a spokeswoman for Sony Pictures Entertainment, of which Columbia Pictures is a subsidiary, declined to comment. | 2019-02 | <|begin_of_text|>A stunt that went wrong on the set of the TV show “L.A.’s Finest” last week, leaving two producers injured, is the latest in a string of incidents that have drawn renewed attention to the dangers of stunt work. It came just days after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited a subsidiary of CBS for a stunt-related injury, and after a lawsuit was filed by the widow of a man who worked as a stunt double.
The “L.A.’s Finest” accident, which occurred Thursday on the set of the drama series, involved a stunt with a vehicle. “The vehicle’s trajectory led to a collision with set pieces in the safe viewing area,” said Philip Sokoloski, a spokesman for FilmLA, the official film office for the City and County of Los Angeles. The show is produced by Sony Pictures Television and is set to premiere this spring on Spectrum as the cable provider’s first original series.
The two producers who were injured were transported to two different hospitals | in the area for treatment, Sokoloski said. He said that filming scheduled for Feb. 22 had been postponed.
The Sony Pictures Television president, Jeff Frost, and co-presidents Chris Parnell and Jason Clodfelter, said in a statement: “Our hearts go out to our SPT family members who were injured and we pray for a full recovery.” The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, Cal/OSHA, confirmed that it was investigating the accident.
Stunt work is a sometimes dangerous and physically difficult subset of the entertainment industry. In a report in The New York Times in 2017, some stuntmen and women described a macho culture and a “gung-ho mentality.” Safety concerns have been raised for decades, especially after the death of an actor and two children in a helicopter crash on the set of “Twilight Zone: The Movie” in 1982, but there has been little success in efforts toward regulation. Fatalities are uncommon |
A suicide attack Tuesday night at Istanbul Ataturk Airport killed dozens of people and wounded more than 200. Here’s what travelers should know about the terrorist threat in Turkey, including updates on flights and areas to avoid.
Is the Threat Ongoing?
Yes. The United States Department of State updated its existing travel warning regarding Turkey on June 27, one day before the attack, warning tourists of increased threats throughout the country, and that many attacks have taken place in recent months.
“Foreign and U.S. tourists have been explicitly targeted by international and indigenous terrorist organizations,” the State Department stated.
On June 7, Kurdish militants set off a car bomb near a central tourist district in Istanbul that killed 11 people.
In January, ISIS claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Istanbul’s historic Sultanahmet district that killed 10 foreign tourists.
In total, there have been 14 terrorist attacks in Turkey since June of last year.
An explosion near a courthouse in Izmir was the latest in a series of deadly attacks in Turkey.
What Parts of Turkey Are Most Dangerous?
The State Department is advising caution throughout the country, but there is a particular emphasis on southeastern Turkey, especially near the Syrian border.
Britain’s Foreign Office advises against all travel within six miles of the Syrian border, and all but essential travel to the remaining areas of Sirnak, Mardin, Sanlurfa, Gaziantep, Kilis and Hatay provinces.
No matter the region, the State Department advises staying away from large crowds and popular tourist destinations, political gatherings and rallies and to monitor local media.
Can I Fly Through Istanbul?
Istanbul Ataturk Airport, Europe’s third busiest airport, has reopened, but airlines are suggesting travelers check with them regarding possible delays.
The Federal Aviation Administration has also lifted its ban on flights between Istanbul and the United States.
Turkish Airlines is allowing passengers booked on its flights to or from either Ataturk or Sabiha Gokcen airports from Tuesday through July 5 to rebook or reroute their flights without penalties until July 31. Refunds were also being offered for unused tickets. Passengers should also allow for extra time prior to check-in and boarding.
But other airlines have canceled flights. Air France canceled all but one of its Wednesday flights to and from Istanbul Ataturk Airport, but planned to operate its normal schedule on Thursday. It also was offering to let passengers postpone their trip until July 12 at no extra cost in the same ticketed cabin. After that date, passengers who no longer wish to travel can get a nonrefundable voucher valid for a year on Air France or KLM or Hop.
British Airways canceled its Wednesday flights to Istanbul and offered what it called “a more flexible rebooking policy” for ticketholders heading to or from Istanbul through Sunday, allowing them to rebook for a later date or apply their ticket cost to an alternative destination.
Delta, which stopped service to the airport last month because of security concerns, is offering a travel waiver through its Joint Venture partners to help those affected change their travel plans.
Does More Security at Airports Make Us Safer or Just Move the Targets?
After the attack on Turkey’s largest airport, comparing airport security around the world.
While there was an increased police presence at Ataturk Airport on Wednesday, other areas of the city had already seen an expanded police presence following the earlier attacks.
Security measures at Ataturk were already considered stronger than at many other airports, as travelers must go through two security screenings and there is a vehicle checkpoint near the international terminal, though only suspicious vehicles are stopped. Tuesday’s attackers arrived in a taxi, according to Turkey’s prime minister, Binali Yildirim.
The attacks inside the airport took place before a security screening could happen. According to Turkish government officials, the police fired on two attackers at the entryway to Ataturk’s international terminal in an attempt to stop them from reaching the security checkpoint. The two attackers then blew themselves up. A third attacker detonated explosives in the parking lot.
Elsewhere in the city, some events have been canceled, but not all because of security concerns.
A concert by the Eurovision-winning Sertab Erener at the Zorlu Center was canceled on Wednesday night out of respect for the victims of the attack. The Jockey Club of Turkey also canceled horse races for the day. Some smaller galleries postponed openings, but major art centers like the Sabanci Museum and Istanbul Modern remained open.
Are Travelers Avoiding Turkey?
Not surprisingly, the continuing violence has hurt the country’s once thriving tourism industry.
According to Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the number of visiting tourists in May dropped 34.7 percent to 2.48 million, compared with the previous year. It was the biggest decline in 22 years, according to Trading Economics. May also marked the 10th consecutive month of declining tourist arrivals.
The State Department’s website will have the latest information regarding the travel warning to Turkey.
You can contact the United States Embassy in Ankara at 90-312-455-5555, 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday; the U.S. Consulate General in Istanbul at 90-212-335-9000; and the U.S. Consulate in Adana at 90-322-455-4100. | 2016-06 | <|begin_of_text|>A suicide attack Tuesday night at Istanbul Ataturk Airport killed dozens of people and wounded more than 200. Here’s what travelers should know about the terrorist threat in Turkey, including updates on flights and areas to avoid.
Is the Threat Ongoing?
Yes. The United States Department of State updated its existing travel warning regarding Turkey on June 27, one day before the attack, warning tourists of increased threats throughout the country, and that many attacks have taken place in recent months.
“Foreign and U.S. tourists have been explicitly targeted by international and indigenous terrorist organizations,” the State Department stated.
On June 7, Kurdish militants set off a car bomb near a central tourist district in Istanbul that killed 11 people.
In January, ISIS claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Istanbul’s historic Sultanahmet district that killed 10 foreign tourists.
In total, there have been 14 terrorist attacks in Turkey since June of last year.
An explosion near a courthouse in Izmir was the latest in | a series of deadly attacks in Turkey.
What Parts of Turkey Are Most Dangerous?
The State Department is advising caution throughout the country, but there is a particular emphasis on southeastern Turkey, especially near the Syrian border.
Britain’s Foreign Office advises against all travel within six miles of the Syrian border, and all but essential travel to the remaining areas of Sirnak, Mardin, Sanlurfa, Gaziantep, Kilis and Hatay provinces.
No matter the region, the State Department advises staying away from large crowds and popular tourist destinations, political gatherings and rallies and to monitor local media.
Can I Fly Through Istanbul?
Istanbul Ataturk Airport, Europe’s third busiest airport, has reopened, but airlines are suggesting travelers check with them regarding possible delays.
The Federal Aviation Administration has also lifted its ban on flights between Istanbul and the United States.
Turkish Airlines is allowing passengers booked on its flights to or from either Ataturk or Sabiha Gokcen airports from Tuesday through July |
A summer stage binge reminded one young journalist of the power of great storytelling, and that cheap tickets are out there if you know where to look.
I saw 30.
In 10 weeks as an editing intern, I mainlined more plays, musicals, ballets and cabaret performances than many people see in their entire lives.
In between fine-tuning stories for the White House correspondent Maggie Haberman or the New York Yankees beat writer James Wagner, I spent my nights nestled in Broadway theaters.
I watched an 83-year-old Glenda Jackson unleash the guttural growls of a death metal singer as King Lear. I saw the Hogwarts recruits of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” stagger across the stage, wands aloft, as though dragged by a cat skidding across a just-waxed floor.
A day after the death of the original “Phantom of the Opera” director Hal Prince, I witnessed Sierra Boggess deliver a rendition of “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” at Feinstein’s/54 Below, a performance so raw that it nearly broke my heart (and hers, it looked like).
For the record, I am not rich. I’m about to start the final year of my master’s degree in English at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, with a year’s worth of apartment rent and tuition to match. And while my Times internship was paid, I certainly wasn’t making Bill Gates money.
But I never spent more than $70 for a show this summer — with two exceptions, for “Cursed Child” and “Phantom,” my favorite musical. And most of my tickets cost $40 or less.
I lined up at box offices first thing in the morning — a few times after getting home after 1 a.m. from night shifts — for rush tickets, which are steeply discounted seats sold at the theater the morning of a performance. I bought standing-room tickets for “Chicago” and “Come From Away.” I saw all the free shows I could (looking at you, Shakespeare in the Park).
I won four lotteries for discounted (often front-row) seats — but never for “Hamilton,” despite 80 tries.
For 10 weeks, I made a game out of trying to cram in as many shows as possible while putting The Times first. But theatergoing grew more challenging when I started working nights. Fortunately, I had a theater-loving boss, who even rearranged my final week’s schedule so I could see the “Phantom of the Opera” matinee.
But why? I’m not an aspiring actress. I didn’t do high-school theater. I couldn’t have told you who Audra McDonald was four years ago, much less what she was famous for. To be honest, I’d have been hard-pressed to tell you the difference between a play and a musical.
But a two-month study abroad trip to London in 2016 catapulted me into the world of the West End, and I’ve attended more than 150 shows in Indianapolis, and now New York, in the three years since.
What gripped me then, and now, is the storytelling. As a journalist, my goal is to write immersively; to leave you so absorbed in a story that you forget you’re reading words on a page.
A standout theatrical production accomplishes the same. In the title role of “Dear Evan Hansen,” Andrew Barth Feldman made me forget where I was, who I was, that I was anything other than part of the world onstage — the mark of truly magical theater. I’m pretty sure I didn’t draw breath the entire first act.
A highlight of my stage binge was attending “The Black Clown,” a music-theater adaptation of Langston Hughes’s 1931 poem, with Mr. Brantley, The Times’s co-chief theater critic. I watched him take a few, mostly illegible, notes in a miniature composition notebook from Staples, then write a review that read as though he’d had the script in hand and a recording of the production saved in his Netflix library to replay scenes at will.
It was an affirmation penned almost entirely from memory, one that dripped with both passionate appreciation and meticulous detail. I was astounded.
Of course, not every show I saw this summer won me over.
I wasn’t a fan of the Tony darling “The Ferryman.” And I found the unconvincing fight choreography and clichéd plot of “Be More Chill” exasperating, which was especially disappointing given my expectations after listening to George Salazar’s “Michael in the Bathroom” on the cast recording for months.
Going to so many shows in such a short period of time underscored the reality that while the majority of Broadway productions are good and worth seeing, the truly great shows are rare, and the atrocious ones even rarer.
A show may have stellar actors, but a slog of a script, or moving orchestrations paired with cheesy lyrics. The best Broadway shows are a marriage of form and performance, of a tightly coiled plot that unfolds at exactly the right pace and actors who render you unable to view them in any light except the one they embody onstage.
“We think you’re going to be pretty bored when you return to Indy,” my mom texted me at the end of July.
But that’s not to say I don’t need to come back to New York. Jesse Green, The Times’s other chief theater critic, has invited me to attend a show with him when I return. And I still need to see the Rockettes.
| 2019-08 | <|begin_of_text|>A summer stage binge reminded one young journalist of the power of great storytelling, and that cheap tickets are out there if you know where to look.
I saw 30.
In 10 weeks as an editing intern, I mainlined more plays, musicals, ballets and cabaret performances than many people see in their entire lives.
In between fine-tuning stories for the White House correspondent Maggie Haberman or the New York Yankees beat writer James Wagner, I spent my nights nestled in Broadway theaters.
I watched an 83-year-old Glenda Jackson unleash the guttural growls of a death metal singer as King Lear. I saw the Hogwarts recruits of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” stagger across the stage, wands aloft, as though dragged by a cat skidding across a just-waxed floor.
A day after the death of the original “Phantom of the Opera” director Hal Prince, I witnessed Sierra Boggess deliver a rendition of “Wishing You | Were Somehow Here Again” at Feinstein’s/54 Below, a performance so raw that it nearly broke my heart (and hers, it looked like).
For the record, I am not rich. I’m about to start the final year of my master’s degree in English at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, with a year’s worth of apartment rent and tuition to match. And while my Times internship was paid, I certainly wasn’t making Bill Gates money.
But I never spent more than $70 for a show this summer — with two exceptions, for “Cursed Child” and “Phantom,” my favorite musical. And most of my tickets cost $40 or less.
I lined up at box offices first thing in the morning — a few times after getting home after 1 a.m. from night shifts — for rush tickets, which are steeply discounted seats sold at the theater the morning of a performance. I bought standing-room tickets for “Chicago” and “Come From Away.” |
A supervised exercise program that gets young children running and playing for an hour before school could make them happier and healthier, while also jibing with the needs and schedules of parents and school officials, according to a new study involving two dozen elementary and middle schools.
The results also caution, however, that the benefits may depend on how often children actually participate.
Physical activity among children in most of the developed world has been on a steep decline for decades. National exercise guidelines in the United States recommend that children and adolescents engage in at least an hour of exercise every day. But by most estimates, barely 20 percent of young people are that active, and many scarcely exercise at all. Meanwhile, rates of obesity among children as young as 2 hover at around 17 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Understandably, many concerned experts have suggested a variety of physical-activity interventions, from more sports programs to the use of “active” video games that allow children to move without relinquishing their screens and joysticks.
But many of these initiatives are expensive, logistically complex, time consuming or otherwise impractical.
So in 2009, a group of mothers in Massachusetts organized a simple, before-school activity program in their local grade school. They opted for the before-school start because they hoped to add to the total amount of time their kids spent moving and not displace existing physical education classes or after-school sports. It also struck many of the working parents as convenient and, apparently, did not lead to bitter complaints from their children about early rising times.
Today, the program has gained a formal curriculum, a name and acronym, Build Our Kids’ Success (BOKS), along with corporate underwriting from the shoe manufacturer Reebok. (The similarity of the nomenclature is intentional.) It also has become one of the world’s most widely disseminated, free, school-based exercise programs. According to a BOKS spokeswoman, it is used at more than 3,000 schools worldwide.
But popularity is no guarantee of efficacy. So researchers at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, some of whom have children enrolled in a BOKS program, began to wonder about the measurable impacts of the exercise.
They also were aware that a number of school districts in Massachusetts had plans to allow BOKS at their elementary and middle schools during the 2015 or 2016 school years and, for the new study, which was published this week in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, asked if they could piggyback their research onto the start of those programs. Principals at 24 schools agreed. The schools included students from a broad spectrum of incomes.
The researchers then asked those families planning to participate in BOKS, which is always voluntary, if they and their children would join a study.
Several hundred students in kindergarten through eighth grade and their parents consented. Other children, who would not be joining the exercise program, agreed to serve as a control group.
The researchers measured everyone’s heights, weights, body mass indexes and, through brief psychological surveys, general happiness, vigor and other signs of well-being.
For 12 weeks, the students then played and ran during before-school exercise. At some schools, the program was offered three times a week, at others twice.
Afterward, the researchers returned and repeated the testing.
At this point, those students who had exercised before school three times per week had almost all improved their B.M.I.s and fewer qualified as obese. (Many had gained weight as children should while they are growing.) They also reported feeling deeper social connections to their friends and school and a greater happiness and satisfaction with life.
Those students who had exercised twice a week also said they felt happier and more energetic. But the researchers found no reductions in their body mass.
The students in the control group had the same B.M.I.s or higher and had no changes to their feelings of well-being.
But the benefits are most noticeable if children exercise “at least three times a week,” she says.
This study was short-term, though, and looked only at a few, narrow physical and emotional impacts. Dr. Taveras and her colleagues hope soon to track the program’s impacts, if any, on academics and on aerobic fitness.
Perhaps most important, the study was not randomized. It involved self-selected students and families who chose to join. The results, in theory, would apply only to the kinds of children who will get up early and run and hop and skip and squeal for an hour before school.
But, Dr. Taveras says, those should be all children.
She believes that programs such as the one in this study might help to re-instill some of our children’s instinctual pleasure in motion, she says.
| 2018-02 | <|begin_of_text|>A supervised exercise program that gets young children running and playing for an hour before school could make them happier and healthier, while also jibing with the needs and schedules of parents and school officials, according to a new study involving two dozen elementary and middle schools.
The results also caution, however, that the benefits may depend on how often children actually participate.
Physical activity among children in most of the developed world has been on a steep decline for decades. National exercise guidelines in the United States recommend that children and adolescents engage in at least an hour of exercise every day. But by most estimates, barely 20 percent of young people are that active, and many scarcely exercise at all. Meanwhile, rates of obesity among children as young as 2 hover at around 17 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Understandably, many concerned experts have suggested a variety of physical-activity interventions, from more sports programs to the use of “active” video games that allow children to | move without relinquishing their screens and joysticks.
But many of these initiatives are expensive, logistically complex, time consuming or otherwise impractical.
So in 2009, a group of mothers in Massachusetts organized a simple, before-school activity program in their local grade school. They opted for the before-school start because they hoped to add to the total amount of time their kids spent moving and not displace existing physical education classes or after-school sports. It also struck many of the working parents as convenient and, apparently, did not lead to bitter complaints from their children about early rising times.
Today, the program has gained a formal curriculum, a name and acronym, Build Our Kids’ Success (BOKS), along with corporate underwriting from the shoe manufacturer Reebok. (The similarity of the nomenclature is intentional.) It also has become one of the world’s most widely disseminated, free, school-based exercise programs. According to a BOKS spokeswoman, it is used |
A supply shock is not a problem our usual economic tools are particularly good at solving. But it’s the one we face.
It looks more and more likely that the novel form of coronavirus will do meaningful economic damage to the United States. Stock and bond prices already suggest that the outbreak could halt the longest expansion on record and even send the nation into recession.
The risks loom larger because this particular crisis is ill suited to the usual tools the government has to stabilize the economy. If a recession happens, it will probably be a result of this poor fit between the economic effects of the potential pandemic and the mechanisms the government uses to try to keep the economy growing.
If a potential coronavirus downturn were a fire, the recession-fighters would be like a fire brigade low on supplies, fighting among themselves, and probably lacking the right chemicals to quench the flames anyway.
A recession, defined as a significant decline in economic activity lasting more than a few months, hasn’t occurred in the United States in more than 10 years. If one happens, it will mean higher unemployment and lower incomes. And it would be a different kind of downturn from most of the recent ones.
The core of the economic problem emerging from coronavirus is a “supply shock,” meaning a reduction in the economy’s capacity to make things. Companies in China that have shut down because their workers are quarantined are not making goods. That could eventually mean shortages of certain items for which there are few sources of elsewhere in the world.
Multinational companies typically operate complex supply chains, with lean inventories and essential merchandise that often arrives just in the nick of time. That means American companies that rely heavily on Chinese suppliers might begin facing shortages of key goods in the weeks ahead, said Nada Sanders, professor of supply chain management at Northeastern University.
“I believe we’re going to have a massive shortage of goods,” she said. “Two weeks ago I told people this was coming. The big problem was economists don’t understand how global supply chains work, how intertwined and interconnected they are.” It is an issue she said would particularly affect pharmaceuticals and electronics.
Macroeconomic policies can’t really do anything about supply shocks like those. But it’s possible that supply shocks can bleed into demand shocks, and there economic policy can help.
Tara Sinclair, who studies business cycles at George Washington University, compares it to a grocery store. A store with no goods on the shelves has a supply problem, while a store with full shelves but no customers has a demand problem. And it is generally easier to boost short-term demand than short-term supply.
But supply problems can bleed into demand problems, and vice versa.
In parts of Italy, for example, where outbreaks of the virus have disrupted daily life, tourism is slowing and restaurants and stores are reportedly empty as people seek to avoid exposure. That could result in waiters and store clerks who endure a drop in income, which could in turn feed back into less demand for all sorts of products, and a weaker economy.
Similarly, businesses might go bankrupt if the financial markets freeze up and they cannot get access to credit, meaning otherwise sound businesses end up laying off employees or closing down.
The role for economic policy, in that sense, wouldn’t be to solve the supply shock, but to try to prevent that initial supply shock from triggering a demand shock.
So, for example, the government could offer widespread tax breaks, or direct payments to unemployed workers. The Fed, with interest rate cuts, can help ensure financing keeps flowing. Those actions might in turn give consumers and businesses the space to figure out how to operate despite the problems they face.
But this is not the only challenge. If coronavirus were to spread widely in the United States, and officials decided to impose widespread quarantines, the economic impact is hard for economists to model. What happens to a service economy if people can’t safely travel, go shopping, or even go to work?
The answer is no one really knows. The closest comparison may be the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when air travel was temporarily suspended. But that didn’t keep the vast majority of Americans from going to work.
And in those more dire scenarios, it’s anybody’s guess how things might shake out.
In other words, it would be best if the public health efforts to contain the spread of the virus are effective enough that we don’t have to ask very much of the economic firefighters. | 2020-02 | <|begin_of_text|>A supply shock is not a problem our usual economic tools are particularly good at solving. But it’s the one we face.
It looks more and more likely that the novel form of coronavirus will do meaningful economic damage to the United States. Stock and bond prices already suggest that the outbreak could halt the longest expansion on record and even send the nation into recession.
The risks loom larger because this particular crisis is ill suited to the usual tools the government has to stabilize the economy. If a recession happens, it will probably be a result of this poor fit between the economic effects of the potential pandemic and the mechanisms the government uses to try to keep the economy growing.
If a potential coronavirus downturn were a fire, the recession-fighters would be like a fire brigade low on supplies, fighting among themselves, and probably lacking the right chemicals to quench the flames anyway.
A recession, defined as a significant decline in economic activity lasting more than a few months, hasn’t occurred in the United States in | more than 10 years. If one happens, it will mean higher unemployment and lower incomes. And it would be a different kind of downturn from most of the recent ones.
The core of the economic problem emerging from coronavirus is a “supply shock,” meaning a reduction in the economy’s capacity to make things. Companies in China that have shut down because their workers are quarantined are not making goods. That could eventually mean shortages of certain items for which there are few sources of elsewhere in the world.
Multinational companies typically operate complex supply chains, with lean inventories and essential merchandise that often arrives just in the nick of time. That means American companies that rely heavily on Chinese suppliers might begin facing shortages of key goods in the weeks ahead, said Nada Sanders, professor of supply chain management at Northeastern University.
“I believe we’re going to have a massive shortage of goods,” she said. “Two weeks ago I told people this was coming. The big problem was economists don’t understand |
A surge in American airstrikes over the last four months of 2018 pushed the annual death toll of suspected Shabab fighters in Somalia to the third record high in three years. Last year, the strikes killed 326 people in 47 disclosed attacks, Defense Department data show.
And so far this year, the intensity is on a pace to eclipse the 2018 record. During January and February, the United States Africa Command reported killing 225 people in 24 strikes in Somalia. Double-digit death tolls are becoming routine, including a bloody five-day stretch in late February in which the military disclosed that it had killed 35, 20 and 26 people in three separate attacks.
Africa Command maintains that its death toll includes only Shabab militants, even though the extremist group claims regularly that civilians are also killed. The Times could not independently verify the number of civilians killed. The rise in airstrikes has also exacerbated a humanitarian crisis in the country, according to United Nations agencies and nongovernmental organizations working in the region, as civilians are displaced by conflict and extreme weather.
The United States has escalated its airstrike campaign against Qaeda-backed Shabab militants in Somalia during the Trump administration.
Note: An exact death toll is not available for each airstrike.
Source: FDD's Long War Journal’s analysis of Defense Department releases.
Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, the head of Africa Command, said planned cutbacks elsewhere would not affect what the military is doing in Somalia.
The Shabab formally pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda in 2012. But long before that, they fought Western-backed governments in Mogadishu as the group sought to impose its extremist interpretation of Islam across Somalia. In defending the fragile government, the United States has largely relied on proxy forces, including about 20,000 African Union peacekeepers from Uganda, Kenya and other East African nations.
The United States estimates that the Shabab have about 5,000 to 7,000 fighters in Somalia, but the group’s ranks are fluid. A State Department official, citing interviews from Shabab deserters, said that the number of hard-core ideologues may be as few as 500.
The Shabab have proved resilient against the American airstrikes, and continue to carry out regular bombings in East Africa.
The Shabab leadership views the outposts “as an irritant, masses to go after it, but fails,” Maj. Gen. Gregg Olson, the Africa Command’s director of operations, said in an interview.
The drawdown of American military operations elsewhere in the world — including in Syria and, to a lesser immediate extent, Afghanistan — also has most likely freed up more drones and other gunships for use over Somalia, several former United States officials said.
| 2019-03 | <|begin_of_text|>A surge in American airstrikes over the last four months of 2018 pushed the annual death toll of suspected Shabab fighters in Somalia to the third record high in three years. Last year, the strikes killed 326 people in 47 disclosed attacks, Defense Department data show.
And so far this year, the intensity is on a pace to eclipse the 2018 record. During January and February, the United States Africa Command reported killing 225 people in 24 strikes in Somalia. Double-digit death tolls are becoming routine, including a bloody five-day stretch in late February in which the military disclosed that it had killed 35, 20 and 26 people in three separate attacks.
Africa Command maintains that its death toll includes only Shabab militants, even though the extremist group claims regularly that civilians are also killed. The Times could not independently verify the number of civilians killed. The rise in airstrikes has also exacerbated a humanitarian crisis in the country, according to United Nations agencies and n | ongovernmental organizations working in the region, as civilians are displaced by conflict and extreme weather.
The United States has escalated its airstrike campaign against Qaeda-backed Shabab militants in Somalia during the Trump administration.
Note: An exact death toll is not available for each airstrike.
Source: FDD's Long War Journal’s analysis of Defense Department releases.
Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, the head of Africa Command, said planned cutbacks elsewhere would not affect what the military is doing in Somalia.
The Shabab formally pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda in 2012. But long before that, they fought Western-backed governments in Mogadishu as the group sought to impose its extremist interpretation of Islam across Somalia. In defending the fragile government, the United States has largely relied on proxy forces, including about 20,000 African Union peacekeepers from Uganda, Kenya and other East African nations.
The United States estimates that the Shabab have about 5,000 to 7 |
A surge in new infections coincided with an increase in testing capacity in New York State, and Connecticut delayed its primary.
A jump in testing yields a spike in new cases.
Surge in cases creates urgent need for medical gear, mayor says.
About half of those infected in New York City are under 50.
New Jersey Transit trims service amid huge drop in ridership.
Three more correction officers test positive, officials say.
A few days ago, New York State was testing only a few hundred people a day for coronavirus.
From Wednesday night to Thursday morning, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said, the state processed the tests of 7,584 people.
The testing has increased as dozens of private laboratories in the state received authorization to test for the virus. Two government-run labs had shouldered most of New York’s testing until recently.
The huge increase in testing capacity and the quickening spread of the virus yielded sobering news: more than 2,200 newly discovered cases in New York State. The case count in the state has more than quadrupled since Monday.
The total as of Thursday afternoon was more than 5,200 cases statewide, up from about 3,000 cases on Wednesday. There were more than 750 people hospitalized statewide. At least 29 people had died of the virus in New York State.
Mr. Cuomo has said the virus has spread so widely that the increase in the number of confirmed cases reflected New York’s added testing capacity more than anything else.
The addition of three drive-through testing centers has helped expand that capacity. The first opened last Friday in New Rochelle, the state’s original virus hot spot. A second opened on Tuesday at Jones Beach State Park on Long Island, and a third opened on Staten Island on Thursday.
In New Jersey, the governor’s office said on Thursday that another 318 people had tested positive, raising the state’s total to 742. Nine people had died in New Jersey, up from five on Wednesday. Three of the nine deaths were associated with long-term health care facilities, which have been closed to visitors, the state’s health commissioner said.
In Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont said on Thursday that the state had recorded its second coronavirus-related death and had added 63 confirmed virus cases since Wednesday, bringing its total to 159.
Of the Thursday total, 1,030 of the cases were in Brooklyn, 980 were in Queens, 976 were in Manhattan, 436 were in the Bronx and 165 were on Staten Island. On Tuesday afternoon, there were 157 cases in Brooklyn.
As the number of cases rises, hospitals in the city are on pace to run out of crucial medical equipment, including face masks and gloves, in the next few weeks if new supplies do not arrive soon, Mr. de Blasio said on Thursday.
Among the needs, the mayor said, are three million N95 masks, 50 million surgical masks and 15,000 ventilators. New York State only has about 3,000 ventilators, one for each intensive-care hospital room.
Health care workers will need another 45 million of each of the following: surgical gowns, coveralls, gloves, regular face masks and face shields, the mayor said.
In making the call for the supplies, Mr. de Blasio again asked President Trump to deploy the military as part of the effort to see that city has the equipment necessary to save lives. “We need these in great numbers,” the mayor said.
As of Wednesday evening, more than 500 coronavirus patients were hospitalized in New York City, 169 of them in intensive care units, according to city officials, who announced on Thursday the city was expanding its testing capacity.
“If we’re going to curb this epidemic, we need fast and expansive testing for those most at risk for serious illness,” Mr. de Blasio said in a statement.
On Wednesday, the city health department released information about who has tested positive for the virus. About half of those people were between the ages of 18 and 49.
The city’s data aligned with recent information from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which on Wednesday said that nearly 40 percent of people hospitalized with the virus were 20 to 54.
Fifty-eight percent of those who tested positive in the city were men, and 42 percent were women, according to data from the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
With so many commuters confined to their homes instead commuting to work, New Jersey Transit said on Thursday that it would switch to a weekend schedule, with a few modifications, beginning Friday.
The abrupt announcement came after the agency’s chief executive, Kevin J. Corbett, sent a letter to New Jersey’s congressional delegation asking for $1.25 billion in federal aid to offset lost revenue and increased costs caused by the coronavirus outbreak.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates New York City’s subway and buses and two commuter railroads, said this week that it was seeking a $4 billion federal bailout for similar reasons.
Mr. Corbett said New Jersey Transit had experienced a “dramatic 88 percent reduction in systemwide ridership” since March 9. He said revenue had fallen in line with ridership and that the agency expected “this precipitous drop to continue” as fewer riders to buy monthly passes.
New Jersey Transit’s schedule changes apply only to the agency’s trains and affect all lines except for the Atlantic City Rail Line, and do not affect buses or light-rail systems.
On weekdays, eight daily runs will be added to the usual weekend schedule on the Morris and Essex line between Dover and Hoboken. Service on the Gladstone branch will be unchanged.
The city’s Department of Correction confirmed on Thursday that two correction officers and a captain had tested positive for the coronavirus.
The announcement came a day after an inmate, a man in his 30s, at the Rikers Island jail complex tested positive, as did a correction officer who was assigned to a security checkpoint there. Eight other inmates who were in contact with the man and had shown symptoms of the virus have been placed in isolation at a Rikers hospital unit.
The mayor’s office is trying to identify Rikers inmates who could be released early in hopes of stemming the virus’s spread among the roughly 5,400 people in the city’s custody. Mr. de Blasio said on Wednesday that inmates with underlying health conditions could be eligible.
On Thursday, the mayor said that the city had identified 40 inmates who could be released, pending the approval of other criminal justice authorities.
Outside the city’s jail system, three employees at facilities in the New York City area that house people detained by federal immigration authorities tested positive for the virus, officials said on Thursday.
The cases included a member of the medical staff at the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey, which is managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and a staff member at the Mercy First facility on Long Island, where minors in the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s custody are held.
In addition, a correction officer at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, which has a contract with the immigration enforcement agency, tested positive, county officials said.
The Bergen County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that the guard had not interacted with detainees. But one detainee, speaking through his wife, said the guard had recently helped move a unit from dormitory-style quarters to cells to increase social distancing.
More cases among public workers and those receiving city services.
Among other public sector employees, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said on Thursday that 23 of its workers had tested positive for the virus. Nineteen are with the New York City Transit Authority, which operates the subway and buses; the others work for the Long Island Rail Road.
And the New York Police Department said that 20 employees had tested positive for the virus. Some officers and the city’s largest police union recently accused the department of failing to properly outfit officers with protective equipment, including gloves and masks.
Elsewhere, seven people living in New York City’s primary shelter system have tested positive for the virus. They lived in seven different shelters, which remain open and have been cleaned, officials said.
Three single adults were being treated in hospitals. A woman in her 50s who was the first person in the shelter system to test positive was released from the hospital and was in an isolated location, officials said.
Cuomo orders businesses to keep 75 percent of workers home.
With the virus continuing to surge and the economic fallout crippling New York State, Mr. Cuomo on Thursday ordered most businesses to keep at least 75 percent of their workers at home, up from the 50 percent announced on Wednesday.
Among the essential industries that are exempt from the rule are food, health care and pharmacies, banks, warehousing and shipping, and media.
The governor also announced an order waiving mortgage payments for three months for homeowners facing virus-related financial hardship.
“If you are not working, if you are working only part time, we are going to have the banks and financial institutions waive mortgage payments for 90 days,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York provided an update as cases continue to rise in the state.
We said we are fighting a war on two fronts. We’re fighting the virus and we’re fighting fear, and they are two totally different situations that you have to deal with. In many ways the fear is more dangerous than the virus. I had a conversation last night with a businessperson from New York City who I know who was panicked that New York City was going to be locked down, that there were going to be roadblocks, that there were going to be mandatory quarantine, he was going to be imprisoned in his house. I said, you know, where did you hear that? “Well that’s what they say, that’s what I’m hearing, they’re saying.” And I would say, look, I would know, right, because I would have to authorize those actions legally. It’s not going to happen. “Well I hear it is going to happen.” I said but I know, but I would have to do it, and I’m telling you, I’m not doing it.
Mr. Cuomo also sought to clarify his stance on a potential shelter-in-place measure, which Mr. de Blasio has said might be imminent in New York City.
The issue has spawned a semantic debate: The governor has said he supports the framework of a shelter-in-place order in California’s Bay Area, which still allows people to exercise and go out to buy groceries or medicine, but he rejects the term itself.
A family grapples with a wrenching question.
Joseph Trinity, pictured here in the 1950s.
Joseph Trinity’s family members were there one day, and then they were not, for the same reason much of the world is trying to suppress the human desire to be with one another: the coronavirus.
Mr. Trinity had found himself in a New Jersey rehabilitation facility that, like most health care institutions across the country, had declared a no-visitor policy to stem contagion. But he is 92, and in fragile health; family sustains him.
Several times a day, he would call his daughter, Mary Trinity, to ask in a faint, slightly garbled voice where everyone was — and to beg her to please, please, get him out of there.
Mr. Trinity was caught in a moment. And he wasn’t alone.
The federal government and various health care associations have issued strongly restrictive guidelines to prohibit family members and other nonessential personnel from visiting nursing homes, rehab centers and other facilities with older, vulnerable residents.
Mr. Trinity’s children faced a heartbreaking dilemma. Should their father remain in the care of professionals who were much better equipped to handle his myriad needs? Or was he at greater risk of contracting the virus by remaining in an institution?
And given the prevailing threat and the open-endedness of restrictions, was it possible they would never see him again?
Dan Barry, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Annie Correal, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Alan Feuer, Michael Gold, Christina Goldbaum, Matthew Haag, Patrick McGeehan, Jesse McKinley, Andy Newman, Azi Paybarah, Jan Ransom, Ed Shanahan, Liam Stack, Nikita Stewart, Tracey Tully and Ali Watkins contributed reporting. | 2020-03 | <|begin_of_text|>A surge in new infections coincided with an increase in testing capacity in New York State, and Connecticut delayed its primary.
A jump in testing yields a spike in new cases.
Surge in cases creates urgent need for medical gear, mayor says.
About half of those infected in New York City are under 50.
New Jersey Transit trims service amid huge drop in ridership.
Three more correction officers test positive, officials say.
A few days ago, New York State was testing only a few hundred people a day for coronavirus.
From Wednesday night to Thursday morning, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said, the state processed the tests of 7,584 people.
The testing has increased as dozens of private laboratories in the state received authorization to test for the virus. Two government-run labs had shouldered most of New York’s testing until recently.
The huge increase in testing capacity and the quickening spread of the virus yielded sobering news: more than 2,200 newly discovered cases in New | York State. The case count in the state has more than quadrupled since Monday.
The total as of Thursday afternoon was more than 5,200 cases statewide, up from about 3,000 cases on Wednesday. There were more than 750 people hospitalized statewide. At least 29 people had died of the virus in New York State.
Mr. Cuomo has said the virus has spread so widely that the increase in the number of confirmed cases reflected New York’s added testing capacity more than anything else.
The addition of three drive-through testing centers has helped expand that capacity. The first opened last Friday in New Rochelle, the state’s original virus hot spot. A second opened on Tuesday at Jones Beach State Park on Long Island, and a third opened on Staten Island on Thursday.
In New Jersey, the governor’s office said on Thursday that another 318 people had tested positive, raising the state’s total to 742. Nine people had died in New Jersey, up from five on Wednesday |
A surge in searches for the definition of an old-school pronoun signals a new, nonbinary meaning.
Merriam-Webster announced the pronoun “they” as its word of the year on Tuesday, marking the rise of the use of the venerable plural pronoun to refer to a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.
The public’s interest in words is often driven by major news events, said Peter Sokolowski, an editor-at-large at Merriam-Webster. Other words that generated high year-over-year comparisons this year — “quid pro quo” and “impeachment” — are tied to political headlines.
But a surge of searches for the meaning of a utilitarian word like “they” is less common. It is likely to reflect both curiosity and confusion about the growing use of the pronoun for nonbinary individuals.
But for nonbinary individuals who identify as a gender other than male or female, being referred to as “he” or “she” is inaccurate. Over a third of Americans in their teens and early 20s know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns, according to a Pew Research survey conducted last fall. That is double the number of those in their 40s, and triple those in their 50s and 60s.
Efforts to destigmatize other gender identities have sparked the disclosure of pronouns on social media profiles and email signatures. Some state and city governments have recently added an “X” option for nonbinary genders on state identification documents, which used to be limited to the options “M” and “F.” And amid efforts this year in at least six states to make the practice law, state legislators have been grappling with the singular “they,” The New York Times reported.
Merriam-Webster added the singular “they” for a person with a nonbinary gender as a definition of the word in its dictionary, noting that the use of the singular “they” to refer to nonbinary individuals is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as on social media.
I knew certain things about … the person I was interviewing … They had adopted their gender-neutral name a few years ago, when they began to consciously identify as nonbinary — that is, neither male nor female. They were in their late 20s, working as an event planner, applying to graduate school.
On Tuesday, Merriam-Webster cited several 2019 news events to explain the curiosity that appears to have driven searches for “they.” During a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Representative Pramila Jayapal noted that “they” is her child’s pronoun; the singer Sam Smith announced that their pronouns are “they” and “them”; and the American Psychological Association recommended that singular “they” be used in academic writing to refer to a person whose gender is unknown or who uses it.
| 2019-12 | <|begin_of_text|>A surge in searches for the definition of an old-school pronoun signals a new, nonbinary meaning.
Merriam-Webster announced the pronoun “they” as its word of the year on Tuesday, marking the rise of the use of the venerable plural pronoun to refer to a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.
The public’s interest in words is often driven by major news events, said Peter Sokolowski, an editor-at-large at Merriam-Webster. Other words that generated high year-over-year comparisons this year — “quid pro quo” and “impeachment” — are tied to political headlines.
But a surge of searches for the meaning of a utilitarian word like “they” is less common. It is likely to reflect both curiosity and confusion about the growing use of the pronoun for nonbinary individuals.
But for nonbinary individuals who identify as a gender other than male or female, being referred to as “he” or “ | she” is inaccurate. Over a third of Americans in their teens and early 20s know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns, according to a Pew Research survey conducted last fall. That is double the number of those in their 40s, and triple those in their 50s and 60s.
Efforts to destigmatize other gender identities have sparked the disclosure of pronouns on social media profiles and email signatures. Some state and city governments have recently added an “X” option for nonbinary genders on state identification documents, which used to be limited to the options “M” and “F.” And amid efforts this year in at least six states to make the practice law, state legislators have been grappling with the singular “they,” The New York Times reported.
Merriam-Webster added the singular “they” for a person with a nonbinary gender as a definition of the word in its dictionary, noting that the use of the singular “they” to refer to |
A surprising number of the conveniences of modern life were invented when someone stumbled upon a discovery or capitalized on an accident: the microwave oven, safety glass, smoke detectors, artificial sweeteners, X-ray imaging. Many blockbuster drugs of the 20th century emerged because a lab worker picked up on the “wrong” information.
While researching breakthroughs like these, I began to wonder whether we can train ourselves to become more serendipitous. How do we cultivate the art of finding what we’re not seeking?
Today we think of serendipity as something like dumb luck. But its original meaning was very different.
In 1754, a belle-lettrist named Horace Walpole retreated to a desk in his gaudy castle in Twickenham, in southwest London, and penned a letter. Walpole had been entranced by a Persian fairy tale about three princes from the Isle of Serendip who possess superpowers of observation. In his letter, Walpole suggested that this old tale contained a crucial idea about human genius: “As their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” And he proposed a new word — “serendipity” — to describe this princely talent for detective work. At its birth, serendipity meant a skill rather than a random stroke of good fortune.
Dr. Erdelez agrees with that definition. She sees serendipity as something people do. In the mid-1990s, she began a study of about 100 people to find out how they created their own serendipity, or failed to do so.
Her qualitative data — from surveys and interviews — showed that the subjects fell into three distinct groups. Some she called “non-encounterers”; they saw through a tight focus, a kind of chink hole, and they tended to stick to their to-do lists when searching for information rather than wandering off into the margins. Other people were “occasional encounterers,” who stumbled into moments of serendipity now and then. Most interesting were the “super-encounterers,” who reported that happy surprises popped up wherever they looked. The super-encounterers loved to spend an afternoon hunting through, say, a Victorian journal on cattle breeding, in part, because they counted on finding treasures in the oddest places. In fact, they were so addicted to prospecting that they would find information for friends and colleagues.
You become a super-encounterer, according to Dr. Erdelez, in part because you believe that you are one — it helps to assume that you possess special powers of perception, like an invisible set of antennas, that will lead you to clues.
A few months ago, I was having a drink in Cambridge, Mass., with a friend, a talented journalist who was piecing together a portrait of a secretive Wall Street wizard. “But I haven’t found the real story yet; I’m still gathering string,” my friend told me, invoking an old newsroom term to describe the first stage of reporting, when you’re looking for something that you can’t yet name. Later that night, as I walked home from the bar, I realized “gathering string” is just another way of talking about super-encountering. After all, “string” is the stuff that accumulates in a journalist’s pocket. It’s the note you jot down in your car after the interview, the knickknack you notice on someone’s shelf, or the anomaly that jumps out at you in Appendix B of an otherwise boring research study.
As I navigated the brick sidewalk, passing under the pinkish glow of a streetlight, I thought about how string was probably hiding all around me. A major story might lurk behind the Harvard zoology museum ahead or in the plane soaring above. String is everywhere for the taking, if you have the talent to take it.
The term “serendipiter” breathed new life into Walpole’s word, turning serendipity into a protagonist and a practitioner. After all, those ants at the top of the Empire State Building didn’t find themselves; Mr. Talese had to notice them, which was no easy matter. Similarly, Dr. Erdelez came up with the term super-encounterer to give us a way to talk about the people rather than just the discoveries. Without such words, we tend to become dazzled by the happy accident itself, to think of it as something that exists independent of an observer.
We can slip into a twisted logic in which we half-believe the penicillin picked Alexander Fleming to be its emissary, or that the moons of Jupiter wanted to be seen by Galileo. But discoveries are products of the human mind.
So how many big ideas emerge from spills, crashes, failed experiments and blind stabs? One survey of patent holders (the PatVal study of European inventors, published in 2005) found that an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process. Thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project — and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything. This is why we need to know far more about the habits that transform a mistake into a breakthrough.
Is this pattern-finding ability similar to the artistic skill of a painter like Georgia O’Keeffe? Is it related to the string-gathering prowess of Gay Talese? We still know so little about creative observation that it’s impossible to answer such questions.
That’s why we need to develop a new, interdisciplinary field — call it serendipity studies — that can help us create a taxonomy of discoveries in the chemistry lab, the newsroom, the forest, the classroom, the particle accelerator and the hospital. By observing and documenting the many different “species” of super-encounterers, we might begin to understand their minds.
What could these researchers discover if they came together for one big conversation?
Of course, even if we do organize the study of serendipity, it will always be a whimsical undertaking, given that the phenomenon is difficult to define, amazingly variable and hard to capture in data. The clues will no doubt emerge where we least expect them, perhaps in the fungi clinging to the walls of parking garages or the mating habits of bird-watchers. The journey will be maddening, but the potential insights could be profound: One day we might be able to stumble upon new and better ways of getting lost. | 2016-01 | <|begin_of_text|>A surprising number of the conveniences of modern life were invented when someone stumbled upon a discovery or capitalized on an accident: the microwave oven, safety glass, smoke detectors, artificial sweeteners, X-ray imaging. Many blockbuster drugs of the 20th century emerged because a lab worker picked up on the “wrong” information.
While researching breakthroughs like these, I began to wonder whether we can train ourselves to become more serendipitous. How do we cultivate the art of finding what we’re not seeking?
Today we think of serendipity as something like dumb luck. But its original meaning was very different.
In 1754, a belle-lettrist named Horace Walpole retreated to a desk in his gaudy castle in Twickenham, in southwest London, and penned a letter. Walpole had been entranced by a Persian fairy tale about three princes from the Isle of Serendip who possess superpowers of observation. In his letter, Walpole | suggested that this old tale contained a crucial idea about human genius: “As their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” And he proposed a new word — “serendipity” — to describe this princely talent for detective work. At its birth, serendipity meant a skill rather than a random stroke of good fortune.
Dr. Erdelez agrees with that definition. She sees serendipity as something people do. In the mid-1990s, she began a study of about 100 people to find out how they created their own serendipity, or failed to do so.
Her qualitative data — from surveys and interviews — showed that the subjects fell into three distinct groups. Some she called “non-encounterers”; they saw through a tight focus, a kind of chink hole, and they tended to stick to their to-do lists when searching for |
A surprisingly specific genetic portrait of the ancestor of all living things has been generated by scientists who say that the likeness sheds considerable light on the mystery of how life first emerged on Earth.
This venerable ancestor was a single-cell, bacterium-like organism. But it has a grand name, or at least an acronym. It is known as Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and is estimated to have lived some four billion years ago, when Earth was a mere 560 million years old.
The new finding sharpens the debate between those who believe life began in some extreme environment, such as in deep sea vents or the flanks of volcanoes, and others who favor more normal settings, such as the “warm little pond” proposed by Darwin.
The nature of the earliest ancestor of all living things has long been uncertain because the three great domains of life seemed to have no common point of origin. The domains are those of the bacteria, the archaea and the eukaryotes. Archaea are bacteria-like organisms but with a different metabolism, and the eukaryotes include all plants and animals.
Specialists have recently come to believe that the bacteria and archaea were the two earliest domains, with the eukaryotes emerging later. That opened the way for a group of evolutionary biologists, led by William F. Martin of Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, to try to discern the nature of the organism from which the bacterial and archaeal domains emerged.
Their starting point was the known protein-coding genes of bacteria and archaea. Some six million such genes have accumulated over the last 20 years in DNA databanks as scientists with the new decoding machines have deposited gene sequences from thousands of microbes.
Genes that do the same thing in a human and a mouse are generally related by common descent from an ancestral gene in the first mammal. So by comparing their sequence of DNA letters, genes can be arranged in evolutionary family trees, a property that enabled Dr. Martin and his colleagues to assign the six million genes to a much smaller number of gene families. Of these, only 355 met their criteria for having probably originated in Luca, the joint ancestor of bacteria and archaea.
Deep sea vents are surrounded by exotic life-forms and, with their extreme chemistry, have long seemed places where life might have originated. The 355 genes ascribable to Luca include some that metabolize hydrogen as a source of energy as well as a gene for an enzyme called reverse gyrase, found only in microbes that live at extremely high temperatures, Dr. Martin and colleagues reported Monday in Nature Microbiology.
Dr. Martin’s portrait of Luca seems likely to be widely admired. But he has taken a further step that has provoked considerable controversy. He argues that Luca is very close to the origin of life itself. The organism is missing so many genes necessary for life that it must still have been relying on chemical components from its environment. Hence it was only “half alive,” he writes.
The fact that Luca depended on hydrogen and metals favors a deep sea vent environment for the origin of life, Dr. Martin concludes, rather than the land environment posited in a leading rival theory proposed by the chemist John Sutherland of the University of Cambridge in England.
Others believe that the Luca that Dr. Martin describes was already a highly sophisticated organism that had evolved far beyond the origin of life, meaning the formation of living systems from the chemicals present on the early Earth.
Luca and the origin of life are “events separated by a vast distance of evolutionary innovation,” said Jack Szostak of Massachusetts General Hospital, who has studied how the first cell membranes might have evolved.
Dr. Sutherland and others have no quarrel with Luca’s being traced back to deep sea vents. But that does not mean life originated there, they say. Life could have originated anywhere and later been confined to a deep sea environment because of some catastrophic event like the Late Heavy Bombardment, which occurred 4 billion to 3.8 billion years ago. This was a rain of meteorites that crashed into Earth with such force that the oceans were boiled off into an incandescent mist.
Life is so complex it seems to need many millions of years to evolve. Yet evidence for the earliest life dates to 3.8 billion years ago, as if it emerged almost the minute the bombardment ceased. A refuge in the deep ocean during the bombardment would allow a longer period in which life could have evolved. But chemists like Dr. Sutherland say they are uneasy about getting prebiotic chemistry to work in an ocean, which powerfully dilutes chemical components before they can assemble into the complex molecules of life.
Dr. Sutherland, working from basic principles of chemistry, has found that ultraviolet light from the sun is an essential energy source to get the right reactions underway, and therefore that land-based pools, not the ocean, are the most likely environment in which life began.
| 2016-07 | <|begin_of_text|>A surprisingly specific genetic portrait of the ancestor of all living things has been generated by scientists who say that the likeness sheds considerable light on the mystery of how life first emerged on Earth.
This venerable ancestor was a single-cell, bacterium-like organism. But it has a grand name, or at least an acronym. It is known as Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and is estimated to have lived some four billion years ago, when Earth was a mere 560 million years old.
The new finding sharpens the debate between those who believe life began in some extreme environment, such as in deep sea vents or the flanks of volcanoes, and others who favor more normal settings, such as the “warm little pond” proposed by Darwin.
The nature of the earliest ancestor of all living things has long been uncertain because the three great domains of life seemed to have no common point of origin. The domains are those of the bacteria, the archaea and the eukaryotes. | Archaea are bacteria-like organisms but with a different metabolism, and the eukaryotes include all plants and animals.
Specialists have recently come to believe that the bacteria and archaea were the two earliest domains, with the eukaryotes emerging later. That opened the way for a group of evolutionary biologists, led by William F. Martin of Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, to try to discern the nature of the organism from which the bacterial and archaeal domains emerged.
Their starting point was the known protein-coding genes of bacteria and archaea. Some six million such genes have accumulated over the last 20 years in DNA databanks as scientists with the new decoding machines have deposited gene sequences from thousands of microbes.
Genes that do the same thing in a human and a mouse are generally related by common descent from an ancestral gene in the first mammal. So by comparing their sequence of DNA letters, genes can be arranged in evolutionary family trees, a property that |
A surveillance video shows the altercation between a homeless man and Cordell Fitts, a supervising sergeant at the Bellevue men’s homeless shelter. Video from the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan.
The skirmish started with an exchange of words and a man swinging at an officer in the lobby of a men’s homeless shelter in Manhattan.
Soon, the man was being subdued by several uniformed officers working for the city’s Department of Homeless Services, according to security video of the incident.
And that’s when things got out of control, federal prosecutors said on Thursday.
While officers held the man down, Cordell Fitts, who was working as a supervising sergeant with the city’s Department of Homeless Services, kicked and stomped the man’s head more than 10 times, prosecutors said.
Sergeant Fitts punched him two more times in the head after officers attempted to place the homeless man in handcuffs, prosecutors said. Sergeant Fitts, 34, was charged with deprivation of the victim’s civil rights and filing a false report about the incident.
He was released on bond after a court appearance on Thursday. His attorney, Julia L. Gatto, declined to comment.
Video of the beating, which federal prosecutors made public on Thursday, raised some of the same questions — how marginalized and poor people are treated in city facilities — as did an incident in December when the police yanked a 1-year-old baby from the arms of his mother, Jazmine Headley, as she was being arrested at a public benefits office in Brooklyn. Cellphone footage of that incident went viral on social media.
The assault at the 30th Street shelter, identified by prosecutors as the Bellevue men’s shelter, occurred on March 6, 2017, prosecutors said. They did not say why it took two years to charge Sergeant Fitts.
According to a criminal complaint unsealed on Thursday, the victim, who prosecutors did not name, was in the shelter’s lobby interacting with several officers and a security guard. At one point, the victim and Sergeant Fitts exchanged words and Sergeant Fitts gestured toward an exit area of the shelter, the complaint said.
Sergeant Fitts then reached toward the victim, putting his hands on the man’s chest. The man responded by swinging at Sergeant Fitts with what appeared to be closed fists, the complaint said.
Although the report “purports to have been drafted” by another officer, language in it was drafted by Sergeant Fitts, who instructed another officer to sign it, prosecutors charged.
The officer who signed the report has said that he did not hear the victim make the comment about his medication and also did not see a knife fall to the ground, the complaint said.
Prosecutors said Sergeant Fitts joined the homeless services agency as a police officer in 2012 and worked there until about March 2018.
“Fitts’s alleged conduct not only betrayed his duty as an officer to protect those under his charge, but also violated the law,” Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said.
Prosecutors did not describe any injuries the man may have suffered or say what has happened to him in the two years since the incident. The government said only that he was previously a resident of the homeless agency’s facilities. The video shows that the man was ultimately brought to his feet and escorted out of the lobby. | 2019-03 | <|begin_of_text|>A surveillance video shows the altercation between a homeless man and Cordell Fitts, a supervising sergeant at the Bellevue men’s homeless shelter. Video from the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan.
The skirmish started with an exchange of words and a man swinging at an officer in the lobby of a men’s homeless shelter in Manhattan.
Soon, the man was being subdued by several uniformed officers working for the city’s Department of Homeless Services, according to security video of the incident.
And that’s when things got out of control, federal prosecutors said on Thursday.
While officers held the man down, Cordell Fitts, who was working as a supervising sergeant with the city’s Department of Homeless Services, kicked and stomped the man’s head more than 10 times, prosecutors said.
Sergeant Fitts punched him two more times in the head after officers attempted to place the homeless man in handcuffs, prosecutors said. Sergeant Fitts, | 34, was charged with deprivation of the victim’s civil rights and filing a false report about the incident.
He was released on bond after a court appearance on Thursday. His attorney, Julia L. Gatto, declined to comment.
Video of the beating, which federal prosecutors made public on Thursday, raised some of the same questions — how marginalized and poor people are treated in city facilities — as did an incident in December when the police yanked a 1-year-old baby from the arms of his mother, Jazmine Headley, as she was being arrested at a public benefits office in Brooklyn. Cellphone footage of that incident went viral on social media.
The assault at the 30th Street shelter, identified by prosecutors as the Bellevue men’s shelter, occurred on March 6, 2017, prosecutors said. They did not say why it took two years to charge Sergeant Fitts.
According to a criminal complaint unsealed on Thursday, the victim, who prosecutors did not name |
A suspect in the deadly attack on a kosher market in Jersey City was connected to the Black Hebrew Israelites, which has been labeled a hate group.
In a news conference a day after the attacks, Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, said that Mr. Anderson had expressed hate in messages on Facebook. The mayor did not elaborate.
There are several Hebrew Israelite offshoots in the New York region. Mathath Lawya, a founder of the Apostles of New Jerusalem, a prominent New Jersey congregation, disavowed the pair’s actions.
Ms. Graham’s beliefs are as yet unclear. Her brother, Frederick Graham, said he was not aware of links to the movement on her part.
A neighbor of Ms. Graham’s in a tidy housing development in Elizabeth, N.J., said she was nice and polite when she moved there in 2011.
The neighbor said he could hear Mr. Anderson shouting at night that his religion was the only true religion, while others — specifically Catholicism and Judaism — were false. Soon, he said, Ms. Graham joined in the chants.
Ash Yasharahla, who lives in New York City and is part of a Hebrew Israelite congregation known as I Am Israel (No Division), called Mr. Anderson’s and Ms. Graham’s actions “wicked,” adding that the movement’s aggressive street preaching should not be conflated with a call to violence.
It reflects anger, he said, at what he described as the systemic oppression of minorities.
In January, a video of a confrontation involving students from Covington Catholic High School in northern Kentucky at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington went viral. It appeared to show the students yelling at a Native American activist.
The students later said they had been responding to a group of Hebrew Israelites, and further video footage showed the group had begun screaming invective at them and the activist.
Mr. Yasharahla lamented that his community seemed to only make headlines when it was swept up in negative events. “What that couple did,” he said, “is not the determining factor of who we are."
Michael Gold, Edgar Sandoval, Nate Schweber, Tracey Tully and Ali Watkins contributed reporting. | 2019-12 | <|begin_of_text|>A suspect in the deadly attack on a kosher market in Jersey City was connected to the Black Hebrew Israelites, which has been labeled a hate group.
In a news conference a day after the attacks, Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, said that Mr. Anderson had expressed hate in messages on Facebook. The mayor did not elaborate.
There are several Hebrew Israelite offshoots in the New York region. Mathath Lawya, a founder of the Apostles of New Jerusalem, a prominent New Jersey congregation, disavowed the pair’s actions.
Ms. Graham’s beliefs are as yet unclear. Her brother, Frederick Graham, said he was not aware of links to the movement on her part.
A neighbor of Ms. Graham’s in a tidy housing development in Elizabeth, N.J., said she was nice and polite when she moved there in 2011.
The neighbor said he could hear Mr. Anderson shouting at night that his religion was the only true religion, while others | — specifically Catholicism and Judaism — were false. Soon, he said, Ms. Graham joined in the chants.
Ash Yasharahla, who lives in New York City and is part of a Hebrew Israelite congregation known as I Am Israel (No Division), called Mr. Anderson’s and Ms. Graham’s actions “wicked,” adding that the movement’s aggressive street preaching should not be conflated with a call to violence.
It reflects anger, he said, at what he described as the systemic oppression of minorities.
In January, a video of a confrontation involving students from Covington Catholic High School in northern Kentucky at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington went viral. It appeared to show the students yelling at a Native American activist.
The students later said they had been responding to a group of Hebrew Israelites, and further video footage showed the group had begun screaming invective at them and the activist.
Mr. Yasharahla lamented that his community seemed to only make headlines when it was swept |
A suspect in the deadly attack on a kosher market in Jersey City was connected to the Black Hebrew Israelites, which has been labeled a hate group.
The Black Hebrew Israelites are known for their inflammatory sidewalk ministers who employ provocation as a form of gospel, preaching a theology that says the chosen ones are black, Native American and Hispanic people.
Now, it has emerged that one of the two suspects in Tuesday’s attack on a kosher market in Jersey City that ended with the death of six people, including a police officer, appears to have been connected to the group, a law enforcement official said.
That suspect, David N. Anderson, 47, was killed inside the JC Kosher Supermarket, along with the second suspect, Francine Graham, 50, officials said. Mr. Anderson, the law enforcement official said, had posted anti-Semitic and anti-police screeds on internet forums in the past.
A manifesto-style document was found in the van that the assailants abandoned in the parking lot of the supermarket. But the official said it was rambling and gave no clear motivation for the attack.
The belief system of Black Hebrew Israelites, a sect that is not associated with mainstream Judaism, varies among the dozens of groups into which the century-old theology has splintered over the years.
Broadly speaking, followers reject the notion of race, and instead believe that the 12 tribes of Israel defined in the Old Testament are different ethnic groups, or nations, and that whites are not among them.
In a news conference a day after the attacks, Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, said that Mr. Anderson had expressed hate in messages on Facebook. The mayor did not elaborate.
There are several Hebrew Israelite offshoots in the New York region. Mathath Lawya, a founder of the Apostles of New Jerusalem, a prominent New Jersey congregation, disavowed the pair’s actions.
Ms. Graham’s beliefs are as yet unclear. Her brother, Frederick Graham, said he was not aware of links to the movement on her part.
A neighbor of Ms. Graham’s in a tidy housing development in Elizabeth, N.J., said she was nice and polite when she moved there in 2011.
The neighbor said he could hear Mr. Anderson shouting at night that his religion was the only true religion, while others — specifically Catholicism and Judaism — were false. Soon, he said, Ms. Graham joined in the chants.
Ash Yasharahla, who lives in New York City and is part of a Hebrew Israelite congregation known as I Am Israel (No Division), called Mr. Anderson’s and Ms. Graham’s actions “wicked,” adding that the movement’s aggressive street preaching should not be conflated with a call to violence.
It reflects anger, he said, at what he described as the systemic oppression of minorities.
In January, a video of a confrontation involving students from Covington Catholic High School in northern Kentucky at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington went viral. It appeared to show the students yelling at a Native American activist.
The students later said they had been responding to a group of Hebrew Israelites, and further video footage showed the group had begun screaming invective at them and the activist.
Mr. Yasharahla lamented that his community seemed to only make headlines when it was swept up in negative events. “What that couple did,” he said, “is not the determining factor of who we are."
Michael Gold, Edgar Sandoval, Nate Schweber, Tracey Tully and Ali Watkins contributed reporting. | 2019-12 | <|begin_of_text|>A suspect in the deadly attack on a kosher market in Jersey City was connected to the Black Hebrew Israelites, which has been labeled a hate group.
The Black Hebrew Israelites are known for their inflammatory sidewalk ministers who employ provocation as a form of gospel, preaching a theology that says the chosen ones are black, Native American and Hispanic people.
Now, it has emerged that one of the two suspects in Tuesday’s attack on a kosher market in Jersey City that ended with the death of six people, including a police officer, appears to have been connected to the group, a law enforcement official said.
That suspect, David N. Anderson, 47, was killed inside the JC Kosher Supermarket, along with the second suspect, Francine Graham, 50, officials said. Mr. Anderson, the law enforcement official said, had posted anti-Semitic and anti-police screeds on internet forums in the past.
A manifesto-style document was found in the van that the assailants abandoned in | the parking lot of the supermarket. But the official said it was rambling and gave no clear motivation for the attack.
The belief system of Black Hebrew Israelites, a sect that is not associated with mainstream Judaism, varies among the dozens of groups into which the century-old theology has splintered over the years.
Broadly speaking, followers reject the notion of race, and instead believe that the 12 tribes of Israel defined in the Old Testament are different ethnic groups, or nations, and that whites are not among them.
In a news conference a day after the attacks, Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, said that Mr. Anderson had expressed hate in messages on Facebook. The mayor did not elaborate.
There are several Hebrew Israelite offshoots in the New York region. Mathath Lawya, a founder of the Apostles of New Jerusalem, a prominent New Jersey congregation, disavowed the pair’s actions.
Ms. Graham’s beliefs are as yet unclear. Her brother |
A suspect in the shooting, who had a history of conflict with the newspaper, has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A man armed with a shotgun and smoke grenades stormed into the newsroom of a community newspaper chain in Maryland’s capital on Thursday afternoon, killing five staff members, injuring two others and prompting law enforcement agencies across the country to provide protection at the headquarters of media organizations.
The suspect, Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, was taken into custody at the scene and was charged on Friday morning with five counts of first-degree murder. He had a long history of conflict with the Capital Gazette, which produces a number of local newspapers along Maryland’s shore, suing journalists there for defamation and waging a social media campaign against them.
A bail hearing for Mr. Ramos was scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Friday in Annapolis, according to Maryland court records, which did not list a lawyer for him but said Mr. Ramos was eligible to be represented by a public defender.
The chilling attack was covered in real time by some of the journalists who found themselves under siege. A message saying “please help us” with the address of the office building was tweeted from the account of Anthony Messenger, a summer intern. A crime reporter, Phil Davis, described how the gunman “shot through the glass door to the office” before opening fire on employees.
“There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload,” Mr. Davis wrote.
For a country that has grown numb to mass shootings, this was a new front. Schools have become a frequent target, with college students on down to kindergartners falling victim. A movie theater was shot up. Churches, too. But this was a rare attack on a news organization, one of the oldest in America, which dates its roots back to the 1700s and boasts on its website that it once fought the stamp tax that helped give rise to the American Revolution.
The gunman was silent as he stalked the newsroom, stopping once to reload as journalists huddled in fear under their desks, Mr. Davis said in a telephone interview. Once the police arrived, staff members put their hands in the air and shouted, “We’re not him,” Mr. Davis recalled. The gunman was hiding under a desk as the police moved in. He did not exchange gunfire with officers when he was taken in.
After his arrest, Mr. Ramos refused to cooperate with the authorities or provide his name. He was identified using facial recognition technology, said a law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak on the record.
In July 2012, Mr. Ramos filed a defamation lawsuit in Maryland’s Prince George’s County Circuit Court against Capital Gazette Communications, its then editor and publisher and a former reporter, claiming that his reputation had been damaged after the newspaper published a story the prior year about Mr. Ramos’s guilty plea in a harassment case. Three months later, he filed a fuller complaint alleging invasion of privacy.
The lawsuit was later dismissed with prejudice by Judge Maureen M. Lamasney after a March 2013 hearing, in which she asked Mr. Ramos to identify anything that was falsely reported in the July 2011 article and to cite examples about how he had been harmed. He was unable to do so, according to a partial transcript of the hearing published in an appellate court decision two years later.
Mr. Ramos represented himself and, according to the appellate decision that later affirmed the dismissal, showed no understanding of defamation law.
The harassment continued for nearly a year. He pleaded guilty in July 2011 to harassment and was sentenced to 18 months of supervised probation and ordered to attend counseling.
According to the article, Mr. Ramos had no prior criminal history. He had a degree in computer engineering and at the time had worked for six years for the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Thursday’s shooting prompted law enforcement officials throughout the country to protect media organizations. As the day proceeded, however, investigators were looking into whether the attack was an isolated grudge.
Late Thursday night, the dead were identified as Gerald Fischman, 61, the newsroom’s editorial page editor; Rob Hiaasen, 59, an editor and features columnist; John McNamara, 56, a sports reporter and editor for the local weekly papers; Wendi Winters, 65, a local news reporter and community columnist; and Rebecca Smith, a sales assistant.
In a telephone interview on Thursday, the writer Carl Hiaasen confirmed that his brother, Rob, had been one of those killed in the newsroom.
“He was dedicated to journalism. He spent his whole life as a journalist,” he said.
Past and present employees of the newspaper chain were struggling to understand what could have prompted such an attack.
The Capital Gazette has a long history. The Capital, founded as an afternoon paper in 1884, is “the ultimate local newspaper,” said Steve Gunn, a former editor. It merged with The Gazette, which has an even older pedigree.
Owned by a local family until 1968, the paper underwent a period of expansion after being purchased by Philip Merrill, a former American diplomat and NATO official, who served as its publisher until his death by suicide in 2006.
Mr. Merrill pushed national news off the front page, instead building the paper into a local force. City council meetings and features on local heroes were staples. But it also strove to hold local institutions accountable, winning national attention in 1991 for a series of stories on hazing and sexual harassment at the Naval Academy.
The paper was a training ground for reporters who had little experience — or zero experience, but a lot of attitude, Mr. Marquardt said. Many went on to work at larger news organizations, including The New York Times.
At its height, the company employed some 250 people and operated its own printing press, Mr. Marquardt said. In more recent years, the news staff has shrunk. A staff member said on Twitter on Thursday afternoon that it now stands at about 20, with a few more on the advertising staff.
After it was purchased by the Baltimore Sun Media Group in 2014, the company moved to an office building, across from a local mall, which was the site of Thursday’s shooting.
Shortly before 6 p.m., at least three helicopters were still circling, and lines of silent police cars, with lights flashing, blocked off the main roads leading up to the newsroom at 888 Bestgate Road. Yellow police tape flapped in the wind, keeping people and journalists away from the area.
Even as the authorities continued to pore over the newsroom for clues, the Capital Gazette announced Thursday that it would be publishing an edition on Friday.
Shortly after 9 p.m., several tired reporters and a photographer from the Capital Gazette were filing stories and photographs from their laptops, set up in the back of a silver pickup truck in the parking lot of the Westfield Annapolis Mall, across the street from their newsroom.
E. B. Furgurson III, a reporter, stood in a blue shirt and khaki pants with his colleagues. He had decided to go get lunch around the time the shooting happened, so he was not in the building at the time.
His colleague Joshua McKerrow, a photographer, said he was going to pick his daughter up for her birthday when he was called about the shooting. He rushed back. He had a hard time finishing sentences.
| 2018-06 | <|begin_of_text|>A suspect in the shooting, who had a history of conflict with the newspaper, has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A man armed with a shotgun and smoke grenades stormed into the newsroom of a community newspaper chain in Maryland’s capital on Thursday afternoon, killing five staff members, injuring two others and prompting law enforcement agencies across the country to provide protection at the headquarters of media organizations.
The suspect, Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, was taken into custody at the scene and was charged on Friday morning with five counts of first-degree murder. He had a long history of conflict with the Capital Gazette, which produces a number of local newspapers along Maryland’s shore, suing journalists there for defamation and waging a social media campaign against them.
A bail hearing for Mr. Ramos was scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Friday in Annapolis, according to Maryland court records, which did not list a lawyer for him but said | Mr. Ramos was eligible to be represented by a public defender.
The chilling attack was covered in real time by some of the journalists who found themselves under siege. A message saying “please help us” with the address of the office building was tweeted from the account of Anthony Messenger, a summer intern. A crime reporter, Phil Davis, described how the gunman “shot through the glass door to the office” before opening fire on employees.
“There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload,” Mr. Davis wrote.
For a country that has grown numb to mass shootings, this was a new front. Schools have become a frequent target, with college students on down to kindergartners falling victim. A movie theater was shot up. Churches, too. But this was a rare attack on a news organization, one of the oldest in America, which dates its roots back to the 1700s and boasts on its website that it |
A suspect was captured on video running naked through Keeling, Va., and choking a man shortly before the police arrested him.
A brother-in-law of a minor league baseball player killed three of their relatives in Keeling, Va., on Tuesday, setting off a manhunt that ended when the suspect ran naked through the streets before he was arrested, according to the authorities and court records.
The victims were the wife, child and mother-in-law of Blake Bivens, a 24-year-old pitcher with the Tampa Bay Rays organization, according to the Pittsylvania County Sheriff’s Office. The Rays tweeted in support of Mr. Bivens on Tuesday night. “Our hearts are broken for Blake,” the team said.
The suspect, Matthew Bernard, 18, has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder, the sheriff’s office said at a news conference on Wednesday afternoon.
The victims were Emily Marie Bivens, 25; Cullen Bivens, her son, who was 14 months old; and her mother, Joan Bernard, 62, according to the sheriff’s office, which also confirmed that Mr. Bernard, the suspect, is the brother of Ms. Bivens.
Officials said that they were still trying to determine a motive and that autopsy results would not be available for several days.
In a news conference on Tuesday, Sheriff Mike Taylor of Pittsylvania County said his office received a call around 8 a.m. from a person who believed that someone in the neighborhood had been shot.
On Tuesday morning, public safety officials warned Keeling residents to be on the lookout for a man they identified as Matthew Bernard. “He is armed with a rifle and considered very dangerous,” Pittsylvania County’s public safety department said on Facebook.
Sheriff Taylor said that local schools were temporarily locked down and about 100 officers from multiple agencies responded on Tuesday. The arrest took place around noon.
Our Baseball Life, a resource for baseball families, said that Ms. Bivens had designed the first item sold in its shop. “She was always looking for ways to serve our community,” the organization said in a statement.
WSET, a local news outlet, captured the end of the manhunt on video. The suspect could be seen running naked in a residential area, sometimes toward law enforcement officials, who appeared to try to subdue him with pepper spray, and sometimes away from them.
At one point, he could be seen running into the parking lot of the Keeling Baptist Church and trying to choke a bystander.
The bystander, Loyd Gauldin, 75, said in an interview on Wednesday that he is a member of the church and a groundskeeper there. On Tuesday afternoon, he was keeping the building open so law enforcement officials could have access to it.
He said his wife had called to tell him that a man was running around the neighborhood with no clothes on. Mr. Gauldin said he was trying to get in his car to get away when, suddenly, he saw the naked young man running toward him. Then the man’s hands were on Mr. Gauldin’s neck.
Mr. Gauldin said he was not injured, though some of the pepper spray that officials had used on the suspect was transferred onto him during the tussle.
After a law enforcement officer intervened with a baton, the suspect fled to the edge of a wooded area, where officials eventually surrounded him.
| 2019-08 | <|begin_of_text|>A suspect was captured on video running naked through Keeling, Va., and choking a man shortly before the police arrested him.
A brother-in-law of a minor league baseball player killed three of their relatives in Keeling, Va., on Tuesday, setting off a manhunt that ended when the suspect ran naked through the streets before he was arrested, according to the authorities and court records.
The victims were the wife, child and mother-in-law of Blake Bivens, a 24-year-old pitcher with the Tampa Bay Rays organization, according to the Pittsylvania County Sheriff’s Office. The Rays tweeted in support of Mr. Bivens on Tuesday night. “Our hearts are broken for Blake,” the team said.
The suspect, Matthew Bernard, 18, has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder, the sheriff’s office said at a news conference on Wednesday afternoon.
The victims were Emily Marie Bivens, 25; Cullen Bivens, her son, who | was 14 months old; and her mother, Joan Bernard, 62, according to the sheriff’s office, which also confirmed that Mr. Bernard, the suspect, is the brother of Ms. Bivens.
Officials said that they were still trying to determine a motive and that autopsy results would not be available for several days.
In a news conference on Tuesday, Sheriff Mike Taylor of Pittsylvania County said his office received a call around 8 a.m. from a person who believed that someone in the neighborhood had been shot.
On Tuesday morning, public safety officials warned Keeling residents to be on the lookout for a man they identified as Matthew Bernard. “He is armed with a rifle and considered very dangerous,” Pittsylvania County’s public safety department said on Facebook.
Sheriff Taylor said that local schools were temporarily locked down and about 100 officers from multiple agencies responded on Tuesday. The arrest took place around noon.
Our Baseball Life, a resource for baseball families, said that Ms. B |
A suspicious device resembling a pipe bomb was sent to CNN and addressed to Barack Obama’s ex-C.I.A. director John Brennan. Here’s what we know about it.
And before dawn on Thursday, investigators discovered that another package had been sent to Robert De Niro, the actor and filmmaker who has been an outspoken critic of President Trump.
At least 14 explosive packages have been discovered since Monday. Here are where they were found and who they were addressed to.
The package arrived at the building in Tribeca in Lower Manhattan that houses Mr. De Niro’s production company and restaurant. It was similar to those discovered a day earlier and was also believed to contain an explosive device, officials said.
On Wednesday, in the center of Manhattan, the Time Warner Center, an elegant office and shopping complex, was evacuated because of a pipe bomb sent to CNN, which has its New York offices there. It was addressed to John O. Brennan, a critic of Mr. Trump who served as Mr. Obama’s C.I.A. director.
None of the devices harmed anyone, and it was not immediately clear whether any of them could have. One law enforcement official said investigators were examining the possibility that they were hoax devices that were constructed to look like bombs but would not have exploded.
Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, Mr. Soros and CNN have all figured prominently in right-wing political attacks — many of which have been led by Mr. Trump. He has often referred to major news organizations as “the enemy of the people” and has shown contempt for CNN.
But Jeff Zucker, the CNN worldwide president, accused Mr. Trump of demonizing journalists.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said the explosive devices that were sent to CNN’s offices, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the liberal donor George Soros were an act of terrorism.
What we saw here today was an effort to terrorize. This clearly is an act of terror, attempting to undermine our free press and leaders of this country through acts of violence. I want to make very clear that the people of New York City will not be intimidated. That we are going to go about our lives undeterred because the very concept of terrorism is to change us, and we will not allow that to happen. Unfortunately, this atmosphere of hatred is contributing to the choices people are making to turn to violence — there’s no question about it. And the way to stop that is to turn back the other way, to bring down the temperature, to end any messages about the use of violence against people we disagree with. And that has to start at the top.
The devices were being sent to the F.B.I. lab in Quantico, Va., where they would be analyzed.
President Trump called the series of explosive devices that were sent to prominent Democratic politicians “despicable acts,” and said that an investigation was underway.
As we speak, the packages are being inspected by top explosive experts and a major federal investigation is now underway. The full weight of our government is being deployed to conduct this investigation and bring those responsible for these despicable acts to justice. We will spare no resources or expense in this effort. And I just want to tell you that in these times, we have to unify. We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message: that acts or threats of political violence, of any kind, have no place in the United States of America.
On Wednesday afternoon, New York City’s police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, said that the CNN bomb was “a live explosive device” and that it would be rendered harmless and sent to the F.B.I. to be analyzed. The package that contained the device also included white powder that the police were testing to determine if it was toxic, he said.
In fact, bombmakers generally avoid attaching visible clocks to their devices to keep from tipping off their targets about when the bombs are set to explode.
| 2018-10 | <|begin_of_text|>A suspicious device resembling a pipe bomb was sent to CNN and addressed to Barack Obama’s ex-C.I.A. director John Brennan. Here’s what we know about it.
And before dawn on Thursday, investigators discovered that another package had been sent to Robert De Niro, the actor and filmmaker who has been an outspoken critic of President Trump.
At least 14 explosive packages have been discovered since Monday. Here are where they were found and who they were addressed to.
The package arrived at the building in Tribeca in Lower Manhattan that houses Mr. De Niro’s production company and restaurant. It was similar to those discovered a day earlier and was also believed to contain an explosive device, officials said.
On Wednesday, in the center of Manhattan, the Time Warner Center, an elegant office and shopping complex, was evacuated because of a pipe bomb sent to CNN, which has its New York offices there. It was addressed to John O. Brennan, a critic of Mr. Trump who served as Mr | . Obama’s C.I.A. director.
None of the devices harmed anyone, and it was not immediately clear whether any of them could have. One law enforcement official said investigators were examining the possibility that they were hoax devices that were constructed to look like bombs but would not have exploded.
Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, Mr. Soros and CNN have all figured prominently in right-wing political attacks — many of which have been led by Mr. Trump. He has often referred to major news organizations as “the enemy of the people” and has shown contempt for CNN.
But Jeff Zucker, the CNN worldwide president, accused Mr. Trump of demonizing journalists.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said the explosive devices that were sent to CNN’s offices, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the liberal donor George Soros were an act of terrorism.
What we saw here today was an effort to terrorize. This clearly is an act of terror, attempting to undermine our free press and leaders of this country through |
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