Museum and gallery shops are reporting rising sales and greater interest. What is their recipe for growth?
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Thursday, 31 January 2019
Has Vale become Brazil's most hated company?
Can the country's mining giant Vale recover after its second major disaster in four years?
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Snow disruption: Is my boss expecting me at work?
Can employees refuse to work if they cannot travel to work or their children's school is closed?
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‘Welcome to my high-fashion, trash shopping mall’
Anna Bergstrom runs a shopping mall in Sweden where everything for sale is recycled. Her goal is to make sustainable shopping fashionable.
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Meet the data guardians taking on the tech giants
Facebook, Google and others have grown rich from our data. Some tech start-ups are fighting back.
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Regulate social media to protect children, MPs urge
A cross-party committee says social media companies should have a legal "duty of care" to children.
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Facebook users continue to grow despite privacy scandals
The number of people who logged into the site at least once a month rose 9% last year.
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Scruff gay dating app bans underwear photos
The app bans images of men in underwear and swimwear after "repeated suspensions by app store distributors".
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Kwik Fit garages hit by computer virus
The car repair chain's IT system went offline on Saturday and has been experiencing problems since.
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PledgeMusic: The day the music died?
Crowdfunding site PledgeMusic seems to have run out of money, leaving musicians wondering what to do.
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DJI pledges painful action to tackle corruption
The world's bestselling drone-maker says it must tackle cases of employee theft.
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Fifa to stop selling in-game currency in Belgium
The move comes after the Belgian Gambling Commission threatened legal action over in-game loot boxes.
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Apple hints at lower iPhone prices as sales fall
Revenue from the tech giant's signature iPhone fell 15% in the most recent quarter.
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Children 'afterthought' for social media companies
England's children's commissioner writes to social media companies, urging them to tackle disturbing content.
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Facebook: Dissident republicans Saoradh take legal action
Saoradh claims the social media giant removed a number of its pages from its platform.
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Kingdom Hearts 3 game released 'without an ending'
The epilogue is downloaded only once the 40 hours of game-play is completed.
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Yahoo data breach payout blocked by judge
The judge is unhappy about the sum involved and the vagueness of promised cyber-security fixes.
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Singapore HIV registry data leaked online in health breach
More than 14,000 people are affected, including thousands of visitors, Singapore's health ministry says.
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The best Patriots-Rams preview you'll read: Barnwell makes his pick
Brady, Belichick and Gronk. Gurley, McVay and Goff. There are plenty of stars who could wreck Super Bowl LIII. Bill Barnwell covers every angle.
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Goodell: Changes to replay again to be discussed
Roger Goodell said the league will again take a look at instant replay and possible changes this offseason. "The game is not officiated by robots," he said. "It's not going to be."
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Patriots owner open to extension for Brady
Patriots owner Robert Kraft wants to keep the team's "symmetry" and "chemistry" intact and is open to signing quarterback Tom Brady to another contract extension.
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Cards CB Peterson apologizes: 'I'm here to stay'
Cardinals star cornerback Patrick Peterson took a microphone on the famed 16th hole at TPC Scottsdale and told the crowd he'd be back next season -- and beyond.
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Comprehensive plan set for Super Bowl security
Security around the Super Bowl has been beefed up with a comprehensive plan covering many law enforcement agencies.
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Bucs WR Jackson: I'd like to end up with Rams
Even though he's still under contract with the Buccaneers, wide receiver DeSean Jackson said he'd like to play for the Rams if he's cut loose from Tampa Bay.
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Mayfield: Kitchens 'my choice' as Browns coach
Quarterback Baker Mayfield said on SiriusXM that Freddie Kitchens was "my choice" to be the Cleveland coach.
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Rob Ryan named Skins' inside linebackers coach
Rob Ryan returns to coaching in the NFL for the first time since 2016 when he was the Bills' assistant head coach/defense.
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Super Bowl LIII score predictions: ESPN staff picks Patriots-Rams
Who will prevail in Super Bowl LIII? ESPN's pro football brain trust assembles its list of predictions for Patriots-Rams.
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The numbers behind the Pats almost going 8-0 -- or 0-8 -- in Super Bowls
Tom Brady and the Patriots were close to being 8-0 in Super Bowls since 2001, but they were almost as close to 0-8, according to win probability data.
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Barnwell's trade grades: The NFL's 30 most impactful of last year
A lot can change in 365 days. Just ask the Chiefs and Raiders, who dealt Alex Smith and Khalil Mack. These are the trades that shaped 2018.
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After 10 surgeries, Malcolm Mitchell still hopes to return to NFL
In his last game with the Patriots, he was instrumental in the Super Bowl LI comeback. Now he's eyeing his own comeback after missing two seasons.
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How the Patriots protected Tom Brady with a 6-8, 380-pound giant
Trent Brown is the biggest man in the NFL, and his adjustment to a new position in a new system helped fuel the Patriots' Super Bowl run.
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Baker Mayfield vs. Saquon Barkley: Who's NFL's offensive rookie of year?
With high expectations, Mayfield and Barkley, the top two 2018 draft picks, set records and showed they were up to the task of carrying their teams.
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Rams receiver Brandin Cooks hopes to make impact vs. former team
Brandin Cooks started the Super Bowl for the Patriots last season before being knocked out with a concussion.
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From blocking out crowd noise to making big-time throws, Manning talks Goff
Peyton Manning breaks down Rams quarterback Jared Goff's come-from-behind performance in the NFC Championship Game.
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Meet the NFL's class of 2018: Players who graduated to stardom
From the next great Steelers wideout to a trio of former No. 1 overall picks to the league's tackles leader, this is the NFL's latest batch of stars.
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Players who leveled up for all 32 NFL teams
Stephon Gilmore, Mike Williams and Kyle Fuller are among the players who made a jump this season.
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Super Bowl opening night: Patriots and Rams meet the media
Super Bowl week is here. The Patriots and Rams arrived in Atlanta and met the media Monday night. Things, of course, got interesting.
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Jimmy Johnson's wild ride and abrupt exit with the champion '93 Cowboys
It has been exactly a quarter-century since the Cowboys repeated as Super Bowl champs in Atlanta, when the franchise enjoyed a peak moment.
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How the SuperBook made nearly 450 Super Bowl LIII props
With over 1,000 ways to bet Super Bowl LIII, the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook has the most robust menu of props in the nation. Here's how they made them.
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Printable Super Bowl LIII prop bet scorecard
Watching Super Bowl LIII on Sunday but don't want to put any money on the game? Here is a printable prop bet scorecard for your Super Bowl party.
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Britons living in EU call on May to secure healthcare for pensioners
Campaigners are concerned UK nationals may need insurance to remain in some countries
Campaigners for British nationals settled in the EU have called on Theresa May to guarantee health cover payments for pensioners for at least two years to help secure wider residential rights as well as medical care in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
The government has indicated that it is in advanced conversations with countries including Spain, France and Ireland about continuing reciprocal arrangements, which would kick in to place if the UK crashes out of the EU.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2HTU1MD
Thursday briefing: At least they're talking – Corbyn and May discuss Brexit
Labour leader pushes customs union … Asbo-style orders for knife offenders announced … and from penny pincher to our most trusted public figure
Hello, it’s Warren Murray keeping you duly informed this Thursday morning.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2G0NMEC
Academy schools struggle with ‘unsustainable’ deficits
Many schools in England forced into mergers despite years of cost-cutting
Schools in England are merging into larger academy chains and slashing costs in a bid to manage “unsustainable” deficits, according to an authoritative survey of more than 1,000 academies.
The report by the Kreston academies group found that half of the schools had an operating deficit last year, with only stringent cuts and the sharing of resources within multi-academy trusts (Mats) stopping the figure from being higher.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2S1PiNt
Plan to transform transport across north of England unveiled
Transports chiefs claim £70bn 30-year road and rail upgrade will create 850,000 jobs
A £70bn plan to transform transport links across the north of England has been unveiled.
Transports chiefs claim the 30-year road and rail upgrade scheme will boost the economy by £100bn and “leave a legacy for future generations” creating 850,000 jobs.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2UpjGOg
Sajid Javid introduces knife crime prevention orders
Asbo-style orders could limit use of social media in order to stop gang rivalries escalating
Children as young as 12 could be hit with new asbo-style orders designed to clamp down on knife violence.
The measures – known as knife crime prevention orders – will place curbs on suspects, such as limiting their use of social media to stop gang rivalries escalating online.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2WvbrCl
Russians leaked Mueller investigation evidence online, prosecutors say
More than 1,000 files shared confidentially appeared to have been uploaded to a filesharing site, according to court documents
Evidence gathered by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, was obtained by Russians and leaked online in an attempt to discredit his inquiry into Moscow’s interference in US politics, prosecutors said on Wednesday.
Related: Mueller investigation is almost finished, says acting attorney general
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Facebook could be forced to share data on effects to the young
Social media firms should be compelled to protect users and legislation is needed, find MPs
Social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter could be required by law to share data with researchers to help examine potential harms to young people’s health and identify who may be at risk.
Surveys and studies have previously suggested a link between the use of devices and networking sites and an increase in problems among teenagers and younger children ranging from poor sleep to bullying, mental health issues and grooming.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2RoUCFv
Tokyo 2020 organisers cut crowds at sailing events over tsunami risk
Olympic authorities reduce crowd size to make evacuations easier
The organisers of next year’s Olympic Games in Tokyo have decided to cut the number of spectators for the sailing events by a third so they can be quickly evacuated to higher ground in the event of a tsunami.
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics organising committee had initially planned to allow up to 5,000 people to watch the sailing events off Enoshima island, just south of the Japanese capital, according to the public broadcaster NHK.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2RsPeAW
Ariana Grande mocked for Japanese tattoo typo: ‘Leave me and my grill alone’
Singer was hoping for a Japanese translation of the title of her hit 7 Rings. Instead she ended up with a tattoo which means ‘small charcoal grill’
Too bad pop star Ariana Grande is vegan – she just tattooed an accidental homage to a Japanese barbeque grill on her palm.
The US singer’s attempt to ink an ode to her hit single 7 Rings backfired Wednesday after social media quickly chimed in to tell her the characters actually translated to “shichirin”: a small charcoal grill.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2S9nENR
Brexit and the Good Friday agreement
The landmark peace deal struck between the British and Irish governments in 1998 paved the way for power-sharing between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland and ended a 30-year conflict. Henry McDonald reports on how the Good Friday agreement is once again under scrutiny as Britain approaches Brexit. Plus Jason Burke on the political crisis in Zimbabwe
For decades, the conflict in Northern Ireland was rarely out of the news. Then a landmark peace deal, the Good Friday agreement, set the country on to a new path. Now Brexit has made the Irish border a focal point once again and the key sticking point in negotiations.
This week, MPs voted to send the prime minister back to Brussels to reopen talks on the controversial Irish backstop. Meanwhile, power-sharing at the Stormont assembly is on hold and there was a recent bomb attack in Derry.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2MHoTyx
Venezuela crisis: can Maduro ride out Guaidó’s challenge?
The opposition leader Juan Guaidó has declared himself Venezuela’s interim president after mass protests against Nicolás Maduro. But the military have so far stayed loyal to Maduro, who has called the attempt to remove him a coup. Virginia Lopez reports from Caracas. Plus: Jessica Elgot on what we learned from another night of Brexit votes in the House of Commons
The Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó is continuing with his attempt to oust Nicolás Maduro, after declaring himself interim president. As anti-government protests intensify, Guaidó’s claim has been recognised by the US, Canada, Brazil, Colombia and others, while the EU has said the voice of the people cannot be ignored.
But for all the international criticism of the Maduro government, there are concerns too that Guaidó’s main regional backers are Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president, who is known for his hostility to human rights and his fondness for dictatorship, and Donald Trump.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2MHvCbv
The Money Saving Expert: how Martin Lewis became the most trusted man in Britain
He has built an empire worth £80m, and is driven to help people attain ‘financial justice’. But in an age of predatory capitalism and rampant inequality, can one man’s modest suggestions really make much difference? By Daniel Cohen
Every Tuesday night, an email newsletter goes out to 13 million subscribers. It’s far more popular than Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop newsletter, which has 8 million, and the New York Times Morning Briefing, with 1.7 million. Its name, Money Saving Expert’s Money Tips, barely hints at the astounding range of tricks and deals contained within. Recent emails have featured “hacks” for cheaper meals at Nando’s and McDonald’s, deals on broadband and savings accounts, codes giving discounted access to airport lounges and an offer for free radiator heat-reflector pads.
The newsletter looks like a relic from an earlier age of the internet: thousands of words, with no ads and few images. It began as an email that Martin Lewis – the personal finance journalist now better known as the Money Saving Expert – wrote for his friends. Today, it is the work of dozens of people at MoneySavingExpert.com, the website Lewis founded in 2003, which has become one of the 100 most popular sites in the UK, with 16 million visitors a month.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2HI0EBz
Costa prize-winner Bart van Es on why he had to tell his family’s Holocaust story
The Cut Out Girl is the gripping tale of a Jewish girl who escaped the Nazis, written by her saviours’ grandson. Here, author and heroine talk about their life-affirming collaboration
‘I must tell you a secret,” Lien de Jong’s mother said to her gently one day. “You are going to stay somewhere else for a while.” It was August 1942 in occupied Holland and De Jong was eight years old. The family was Jewish, but not observant. She would never see her parents again; they were murdered in Auschwitz six months later. She was sent to live with a non-Jewish family, the Van Eses, the first in a series of temporary homes in the Netherlands’ wartime underground network.
Bart van Es is a Dutch-born English literature professor at Oxford University, who usually “writes scholarly books and articles on Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry”. He is also the grandson of Jans and Henk van Es, who, as part of the Dutch resistance, sheltered Jewish children such as Lien de Jong during the occupation. His account of her extraordinary, harrowing story of loss, survival and love, The Cut Out Girl, has just won the Costa Book of the Year award.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2HDxFyA
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World review – running out of puff
All the excitement of the earlier films has been lost in this third outing for the animated series based on Cressida Cowell’s books
Here is the third and – we have to hope – the last in a franchise that could be renamed How to Drain Your Dragon. All the fire and lifeblood of this idea has been sucked out and we are left with something bland.
The first two films from 2010 and 2014, amiable enough, emerged during the 3D boom and the theme-park-type dragonback ride was an important part of the show. That novelty is now long gone. What we’re left with is screensaver cinema: a swirly succession of pretty pictures and colours. This insipid spectacle has nothing like the strong flavour of Cressida Cowell’s Milliganesque illustrations in her original books.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2G0nbb2
'Cold as ºF': Chicago residents make best of life in 'Chiberia' during polar vortex
Residents brave the weather to post photographs on social media showing just how cold things have got
In “Chiberia” – as locals have dubbed Chicago as temperatures have plummeted to -23F (-30C) – it is cold enough to freeze an egg on the sidewalk. Or to turn a bubble blown outside into a beautiful frosty snow globe before it splinters with the cold.
A blast of polar air has swept across many cities in the US leading to the lowest temperatures in a generation. Schools and businesses have closed, flights have been cancelled and as of Wednesday evening, at least eight deaths had been linked to the system.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2FYpCL5
How the religious right gained unprecedented access to Trump
As the president offers a sympathetic ear – and policies to match – critics see a de facto advisory committee, violating federal law
The US health secretary sat for an interview with a man experts say is the leader of a hate group known for “defaming gays and lesbians”, just two days after Karen Pence, the US second lady, was criticized for teaching at a Christian school that bans homosexuality.
Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services, was interviewed by the Family Research Council President, Tony Perkins, at an anti-abortion event called ProLifeCon in mid-January.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2sYuozS
How Facebook robbed us of our sense of self
Fifteen years ago, the social network site was set up to connect people. But now, with lives increasingly played out online, have we forgotten how to be alone?
‘Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges. We have opened up Thefacebook for popular consumption at Harvard University. You can use Thefacebook to: search for people at your school; find out who are [sic] in your classes; look up your friends’ friends; see a visualization of your social network.”
On 4 February 2004, this rather clunky announcement launched an invention conceived in the dorm room of a Harvard student called Mark Zuckerberg, and intended to be an improvement on the so-called face books that US universities traditionally used to collect photos and basic information about their students. From the vantage point of 2019, Thefacebook – as it was then known – looks familiar, but also strange. Pages were coloured that now familiar shade of blue, and “friends” were obviously a central element of what was displayed. However, there was little on show from the wider world: the only photos were people’s profile pictures, and there was no ever-changing news feed.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2FZ8XHc
Spike in deaths of Oxford rough sleepers rocks community
Friends cite lack of support in university town for those with mental health and addiction problems
A spate of deaths has rocked the homeless community in Oxford, sparking warnings that a lack of housing and support for people with mental health and addiction problems in one of Britain’s most affluent cities is contributing to fatalities.
Bereaved friends of four men and a woman who have died suddenly in the university city since November said the losses are the worst they have known. They fear further deaths among rough sleepers amid freezing temperatures.
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Pure review – a masterly comedy about sex and mental health
Marnie has a form of OCD called Pure O, which manifests as constant invasive thoughts about sex. But this comedy-drama never resorts to cheap laughs. It is brave, bold and barely short of a miracle
Marnie, the 24-year-old heroine – and I use the word advisedly – of new drama (or comedy-drama, possibly, but one that really wrenches its laughs out of darkness) Pure, suffers from a very specific form of OCD. Called Pure O, it manifests not as external physical acts such as compulsive handwashing or repeatedly checking things, but as powerfully intrusive thoughts, often about subjects considered taboo; such as violent, even murderous, acts or – as happens in Marnie’s mind, brutally colonised by the condition 10 years ago – sex.
We meet Marnie (played by newcomer Charly Clive) shivering by a roadside after fleeing her parents’ wedding anniversary party. During her supposedly celebratory speech, which begins as an ordinarily exquisite agony for us all to watch, her treacherous thoughts strip the assembled guests of their best suits and twinsets, and put them to orgiastic work. She falls apart on stage. Although such thoughts have been invading her inner space for a decade, this is the first time they have included her family. The mummilingus scene a little later on is sudden and shocking enough to give you a vivid insight into the distress it causes Marnie.
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Why are the police suggesting women jog in packs? | Zoe Williams
Telling women to stay together is no answer to unsafe streets
After a jogger was sexually assaulted in Shepton Mallet last year, the local running club advised women to travel in packs. Extroverts hate running with other people; we don’t like company without chat, and talking while running is a literal waste of breath. Introverts hate running with other people, because they are other people. Avon and Somerset police, meanwhile, have recommended that runners don’t listen to music and vary their routes. (Everybody hates running without music and most hate changing their routes.) It’s fine, ladies, the police seem to say. We have got your back. You can still do that thing you enjoy, you just have to make yourself safer by enjoying it less.
In the 90s, the What Women Want survey drew on the largest sample since the Hite report on sexuality in the 70s. It had the same methodological problems – it wasn’t a probability sample and women were self-selecting, simply choosing to fill in a postcard or not. And it wasn’t as sexy as the Hite report; women, given infinite choice to talk about utopia, talked a lot about the sunlit uplands of being able to go places without being attacked. When the survey was conducted again a couple of years ago, nothing had changed: young women who you would expect to demand better youth services were instead asking for street lighting; professionals whom might, in another world, be worrying about boardrooms were talking about safety as a tax, cabs because it’s late, gyms because the park was too dicey.
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If Corbyn gets his hands dirty he can avert a hard Brexit | Martin Kettle
This moment of Tory unity will not last. Theresa May’s deal and no deal need not be the only options – if Labour takes action
from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2CYAswW
In spite of the upbeat signals that came from Jeremy Corbyn’s meeting with Theresa May on Wednesday, experience suggests that it will not prove a turning point on Brexit. Neither of them is a natural negotiator or conciliator. These gifts are not part of their skill sets. Of the friendship that can sometimes exist between rival leaders there is no sign. Corbyn’s public sanctimony towards May can make Victor Hugo’s Inspector Javert look like a libertine. May’s default mode towards Corbyn, on show again at question time this week, is to give him her full Lady Disdain.
Related: Labour can’t be held responsible for the Brexit fiasco | Owen Jones
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The backstop isn’t just about trade. Is that so hard to understand, Britain? | Dearbhail McDonald
The Good Friday agreement allows people to identify as Irish, British or both. We’re being forced, once again, to choose sides
One of my earliest childhood memories is of a circling red light motioning cars to stop near the border, silencing all who encountered its fiery glare. That red light filled my young heart with fear. I didn’t know if the gloved hand holding the torch was that of the RUC, the British army, the IRA or the UVF.
I grew up during the Troubles in the shadow of Cloghogue, one of the largest British army bases in Northern Ireland. Having to make detours to avoid customs and security checks along “bomb alley” – an atrocity-laden eight-mile stretch of road between Newry and Dundalk – was as frightening as it was familiar.
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Outsourcing education to Clarks shoes: only a Tory could think of that | Alice O’Keeffe
The government’s proposal that shop workers should help kickstart children’s early development is laughable
Parents, we’ve all been there: a high-street shoe shop in early September. Everyone with a school-aged child has simultaneously realised that if they don’t get around to buying shoes today, the kids are going to have to start the year wearing flip-flops, or wellies. The queue is out of the door, heaps of small black lace-ups litter the aisles. Babies are wailing. Somebody’s toddler has got a foot stuck in the measuring machine. It’s too hot in the store, and there’s a heady scent of sweat and wee. Your own children are desperate to leave because you rashly bribed them to come here with the promise of a trip to the Lego shop and a doughnut.
How, you might wonder, could this annual ritual get any more hellish? As ever, the government is one step ahead
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2WuxclL
The left must be bold and back a green new deal | Larry Elliott
Progressives were caught napping by the financial crisis. They cannot not be as ill-prepared next time
It’s often said that real change takes place at a time of crisis, but that’s not the whole story. A crisis makes change possible, but only when new ideas are knocking about does it actually happen. Otherwise, it is soon business as usual. The US economist Milton Friedman understood that fact, which is why he toiled away in the political wilderness to plot the downfall of postwar social democracy and was fully prepared when trouble arrived in the mid-1970s.
The left was so in thrall to market forces and globalised capital that it blew a golden opportunity in 2007
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2MGLvPA
Maurizio Sarri admits: ‘Maybe it’s my fault – maybe I can’t motivate Chelsea’
• Manager at a loss to explain 4-0 thumping at Bournemouth
• Sarri keeps Chelsea players behind for an hour after match
from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2UuiuJv
• Sarri keeps Chelsea players behind for an hour after match
Maurizio Sarri has admitted he may not be equipped to motivate his players after seeing Chelsea suffer the heaviest league defeat of Roman Abramovich’s ownership at Bournemouth.
Sarri, who endured chants of “You don’t know what you’re doing” from Chelsea fans, kept his team in the dressing room for around an hour after the final whistle in an effort to understand why a game that had been goalless at half-time had unravelled so spectacularly. The defeat led to Chelsea dropping out of the top four on goal difference and places Sarri’s position under scrutiny six months into a three-year contract.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2UuiuJv
Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp frustrated by refereeing decisions in Leicester draw
• Klopp highlights penalty appeal and Harry Maguire foul
• ‘I think everybody agrees there could have been a penalty’
Jürgen Klopp claimed Liverpool were refused a clear penalty and Harry Maguire should not have been on the pitch to deny his Premier League leaders a seven-point advantage in the title race as Leicester secured a 1-1 draw at Anfield.
Liverpool extended their lead over Manchester City to five points but missed the opportunity to capitalise fully on the champions’ defeat at Newcastle United as they failed to beat a team outside the top six for the first time this season.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2GhPIs3
Pelicans drop AD from team shot on hype video
In New Orleans' first home game since Pelicans star Anthony Davis requested a trade, he was removed from an image that included the rest of the roster at the end of the pregame hype video.
from www.espn.com - NBA https://es.pn/2SeTBEs
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Kanter gets rare playing time, kisses Knicks logo
Center Enes Kanter, who had received four consecutive DNP-CDs, kissed the Knicks logo on the floor upon coming into the game at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night.
from www.espn.com - NBA https://es.pn/2HILYlq
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LeBron practices, ruled out Thursday vs. Clippers
LeBron James went through another practice in which Lakers coach Luke Walton said he "looked good." But James' return was put off for at least one more game.
from www.espn.com - NBA https://es.pn/2Rovizr
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Kerr credits Cousins for boost in Warriors' play
Warriors coach Steve Kerr said Wednesday that the addition of center DeMarcus Cousins "got us through what would normally be the tough stretch."
from www.espn.com - NBA https://es.pn/2RWzdsr
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Celtics' Bird pleads not guilty to 2 new charges
Celtics reserve guard Jabari Bird appeared in court Wednesday to answer charges of witness intimidation and threatening to commit a crime.
from www.espn.com - NBA https://es.pn/2GbXPpK
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Ingram on trade rumors: 'Part of the business'
With trade rumors swirling, the Lakers' Brandon Ingram scored a career-high 36 points in Tuesday's loss to the 76ers.
from www.espn.com - NBA https://es.pn/2UvDxf1
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What should the 76ers do before the trade deadline?
Philly coach Brett Brown says, "You want to learn as much as you can about your team prior to the trade deadline." With nine days to go, have the 76ers learned what to do next?
from www.espn.com - NBA https://es.pn/2BdESzN
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Modern Weather Forecasts Are Stunningly Accurate
As the sun rose on Wednesday, 26 million Americans peered out their windows onto a land chilled to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. And that’s when the air was still: When the wind picked up, as it did from Chicago to the Dakotas, it could feel like it was 50 below. Boiling water tossed from a pot turned into a cloud of snow before it could hit the ground.
The experience was half Uz, half Oz. But had Dorothy’s house been relocated to Mount Everest, not Munchkinland, her journey still would have been more pleasant than many midwesterners’ Wednesdays. They spent the day essentially shut down, as hundreds of schools, offices, universities, and even an ice castle closed. The National Weather Service advised against “talking” or “taking deep breaths” outside so as to keep delicate lung tissue from freezing on contact.
The vortex was felt nearly across the entire continent. As many as 225 million Americans—from Alabama to Nevada—could have started their 8 a.m. commute in below-freezing temperatures.
It is dangerous, record-breaking, can’t-look-away weather. Yet this cold snap’s arrival was preceded by a marvel so spectacular that we hardly noticed it: It was correctly predicted. As early as a month ago, forecasters knew that colder-than-average weather would likely strike North America this month; a week ago, computer models spit out some of the same figures that appeared on thermometers today.
Meteorologists have never gotten a shiny magazine cover or a brooding Aaron Sorkin film, and the weather-research hub of Norman, Oklahoma, is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Palo Alto. But over the past few decades, scientists have gotten significantly—even staggeringly—better at predicting the weather.
How much better? “A modern five-day forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast was in 1980,” says a new paper, published last week in the journal Science. “Useful forecasts now reach nine to 10 days into the future.”
The paper is a birthday present from meteorology to itself: The American Meteorological Society turns 100 this year. But it also acts as a good report card on how far weather prediction has come.
“Modern 72-hour predictions of hurricane tracks are more accurate than 24-hour forecasts were 40 years ago,” the authors write. The federal government now predicts storm surge, stream level, and the likelihood of drought. It has also gotten better at talking about its forecasts: As I wrote in 2017, the National Weather Service has dropped professional jargon in favor of clear, direct, and everyday language.
“Everybody’s improving, and they’re improving a lot,” says Richard Alley, an author of the paper and a geoscientist at Penn State.
With the current polar vortex, the first signs came almost a month in advance. On the final day of 2018, scientists detected what they call a “sudden stratospheric warming event,” high above the North Pole. The stratosphere, a layer of air about 20 miles above the surface, was being rocked by waves of warm air from below.
“What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic,” warned the meteorologist Andrew Freedman at the time. “Sudden stratospheric warming events are known to affect the weather in the U.S. and Europe on a time delay.” The next 60 days would probably be colder than average, he said.
By January 20, much of North America hit its first cold snap of the season. Then, a week ago, the European weather model began to project that a dangerous air mass would descend over the central United States. “It’s safe to say that the [European] weather model cannot get any colder for the Midwest,” said the meteorologist Ryan Maue on Twitter. “Wind chills would be in the -40 degree to -50 degree Fahrenheit range as well. This would be bad … but hopefully the model moderates.”
The model barely budged. On Wednesday morning, Minneapolis recorded a wind chill of 52 degrees below zero.
This kind of pattern—where a seasonal climatic projection (“It will be colder than average at the end of the month”) precedes a definite week-ahead forecast (“It will be 40 degrees below zero on Tuesday”)—will become more common in the years to come. Meteorologists are increasingly uniting weather models and climate models, allowing them to project the general contours of a season as it begins.
“The conventional wisdom was that weather prediction would saturate after a week or so” because the atmosphere is chaotic, Antonio Busalacchi, the president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, told me. But “new areas of forecasting … really take an Earth-systems-science approach. It’s no longer just [modeling] the atmosphere by itself.”
Understanding months-long events like El Niño, for instance, has allowed meteorologists to go beyond the seven-day forecast. Alley, the Penn State professor, says that he is awed by the new models. Well-studied features of Earth’s climate—like the temperate Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean—emerge in computer models, even though developers have written code that only mimics basic physics. “You translate Newtonian physics into a sphere and get Coriolis [force],” he says. “There’s no line in the code that says, Please make a Gulf Stream. But it is the physics of the Earth, so when you spin it up, the Gulf Stream appears because it has to.”
We are now surrounded by the products of these miraculous models. In 2009, a back-of-the-envelope study estimated that U.S. adults check the weather forecast about 300 billion times per year. Perhaps in all that checking we have forgotten how strange the forecast is, how almost supernatural it is that people can describe the weather before it happens. More than 1,000 years ago, the Spanish archbishop Agobard of Lyon argued that no witch could control the weather because only God could understand it. “Man does not know the paths of the clouds, nor their perfect knowledges,” he wrote. He cited the Book of Job for authority, which asks: “Dost thou know when God … caused the light of his cloud to shine? Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds … ?”
It’s no slight to any whirlwind—arctic, divine, or otherwise—to point out that Americans now certainly do know the balancings of the clouds. There is a basic-cable channel devoted to the topic.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2DImtNl
Swimming With Orcas in Norway
Olivier Morin, a photographer with Agence France-Presse, recently visited northern Norway to spend some time whale-watching and swimming in a frigid fjord with a group of orcas as they hunted for herring. The Reisafjorden region near the city of Tromso remains a “winter playground” for these whales, even as they are pushed farther north every year because warming waters force the herring ever northward in search of spawning areas that are the right temperature—37 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius). Although the orca population in the region is thriving at the moment, Norwegian authorities are considering some regulations to further protect the whales.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2HH2Uca
Why Democrats Picked Stacey Abrams to Deliver Their Trump Counterpunch
Usually, the only things that most Americans can remember about the annual response to the president’s State of the Union address are the memes: the extremely awkward sips of water; the shiny lips and weirdly prominent sports car; the stilted, staged setup. The speaker’s actual remarks, which represent the messaging of the president’s opposition party, are usually secondary—earnest, perfunctory, and then, mercifully, over. The real function of these televised speeches, sandwiched between hours of nitpicking commentary, is to signal that a party has identified its chosen speaker as a rising star.
That’s why the Democrats’ selection of Stacey Abrams to deliver this year’s response is so intriguing. Abrams, who narrowly lost the Georgia governor’s race to the Republican Brian Kemp in November, has perhaps become more prominent and integral to the party since her defeat. The speech will likely function less as an acknowledgment of her potential, and more as a genuine rebuttal to President Donald Trump—one delivered by a politician who’s already become an avatar of effective anti-Trumpism messaging, thanks to her campaign against Kemp, and at a time, days after the government shutdown, when the president is newly vulnerable.
“At a moment when our nation needs to hear from leaders who can unite for a common purpose, I am honored to be delivering the Democratic State of the Union response,” Abrams said in a statement Tuesday, after her speech was announced. “I plan to deliver a vision for prosperity and equality, where everyone in our nation has a voice and where each of those voices is heard.”
Those themes are core pieces of Abrams’s message. On the campaign trail last year, her stump speech was notable for the way it outlined policies in terms of how they’d practically affect voters’ lives and pockets, whether it was connecting a proposed Medicaid expansion to black infant and maternal deaths, or identifying climate change as a culprit in natural disasters in southern Georgia.
Abrams also focused on several issues that are critical to the national political conversation right now, a record she could lean on in trying to create an effective counter to Trump. According to a recent Gallup poll, immigration, health care, and race relations are among voters’ most urgent concerns. In 2018, Abrams became one of the most prominent politicians to promote Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, and she backed that expansion as a “starting point” for achieving universal health-care coverage. Her immigration platform included opposition to law-enforcement crackdowns on sanctuary cities and undocumented immigrants. And she is—after losing a race haunted by allegations of voter suppression—undoubtedly the national face of the Democrats’ pro-voting-rights movement; her focus on expanding the electorate undergirded the racial-justice platform that was central to her campaign. “Stacey Abrams reflects our party’s shared values of equality and inclusion,” Alabama Representative Terri Sewell, who is leading the House Democrats’ voting-rights efforts on Capitol Hill, said in response to Abrams’s selection.
The invitation to Abrams comes at a critical time for Democrats. The longest government shutdown in history ended just last week, but not before it exposed new weaknesses in Trump’s public support, as well as deep faults in the American economy. Describing why Abrams was chosen to give the Democrats’ address, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer identified a “lack of leadership” from the administration “as American families are still feeling the impacts of [Trump’s] self-imposed shutdown.” While Americans do largely blame the president for the closures, according to public polling, the shutdown has sharply lowered their opinion of government as a whole and their faith in the economy.
Democrats, at this precarious moment, will be trying to deliver a strong, coherent alternative to the chaos emanating from the White House. And they evidently think Abrams can achieve that: She’s functioning as a sort of political leader in exile, commanding influence among Democrats and being tapped to represent the party despite not holding an office or being officially involved in national-committee leadership. And she is considering running for office again; she told me in a recent interview that she’s weighing her options for either a Senate run in 2020 or a gubernatorial rematch in 2022.
[Read: The Democrats’ Deep South strategy was a winner after all]
Abrams is far different from the past two speakers whom the Democrats have chosen to rebut Trump. Last year, Massachusetts Representative Joe Kennedy III was tapped to deliver the counter-speech, but he wasn’t as publicly well known: Though Kennedy was and is a rising star, Abrams has already managed to turn a statewide race into a national profile. In 2017, former Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear rebutted Trump’s first address to Congress. In a speech staged at a diner in coal country, he delivered a symbolic, heavy-handed appeal to white heartland voters that was once thought to be the most viable path forward for Democrats. In contrast to Beshear, Abrams represents a new electoral strategy for the party, rooted in expanding the Democrats’ voting base and deemphasizing the voters who flipped to Trump.
And unlike the previous two speakers, Abrams is also, noticeably, a black woman. She will be the first black woman to ever deliver such an address, and the first black politician since former Representative J. C. Watts in 1997. Her selection suggests that the Democratic Party wants to keep up with its changing coalition. The elected officials in the national Democratic Party are more racially representative than they’ve ever been, more women are in Congress than ever before, and the field of 2020 Democratic contenders already looks to be the most diverse in any major-party presidential primary. But beyond matters of representation, Abrams’s selection signals that the party views her message as the best encapsulation of its vision in the era of Donald Trump—and as the best counterpunch to a president who’s fighting to remain in control.
Elaine Godfrey contributed additional reporting to this article.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2RY1LSm
Michael Cohen Is Ready to Talk Russia to Congress
President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen lied to Congress about issues central to the Russia investigation out of “blind loyalty” to his longtime boss. But now the man who once said he would take a bullet for Trump plans to correct the record before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees—perhaps giving lawmakers more insight than they’ve ever had into the president’s dealings with Russia before and during the election.
Cohen’s much-hyped public testimony before a separate panel, the House Oversight Committee, was expected to be highly restricted to avoid interfering with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, with which Cohen has been cooperating for several months. (Cohen postponed that hearing following attacks from the president and the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, on his wife and father-in-law.) But the intelligence-committee hearings will be conducted behind closed doors, giving Cohen the opportunity to have a freer exchange with the members.
[Read: Three remarkable things about Michael Cohen’s plea]
Cohen is willing to answer questions about what he’s told Mueller and other issues related to the ongoing investigation, according to two people familiar with his plans. (They, like other people I spoke with, requested anonymity to discuss the private deliberations.) However, his legal team is also in talks with Mueller’s office to determine whether there are any parameters for his testimony. The House Intelligence Committee is also “in consultation with the special counsel’s office to ascertain any concerns that they might have and to deconflict,” according to a committee aide.
“The reason that he agreed to testify privately for the intelligence committees is, first and foremost, because he owes them,” one of the people familiar with Cohen’s plans said. “He pleaded guilty to lying to them and owes them an apology.” Cohen admitted in court late last year that he lied to Congress when he told them that negotiations to build a Trump Tower Moscow ended in January 2016, and that he hadn’t discussed it much with Trump. In fact, Cohen testified, he agreed to travel to Russia in connection with the Moscow project and took steps to prepare for Trump’s possible trip there after he clinched the Republican nomination.
Cohen is “more open to answering questions” about these and other Russia-related issues than he would have been in a public setting, according to this source, as long as he remains “secure in the knowledge that both committees will protect his testimony and prevent leaks.”
[Read: Michael Cohen takes Mueller inside the Trump Organization]
The Senate panel, which subpoenaed Cohen earlier this month, and its House counterpart declined to preview what questions they intend to ask. But the central purpose of the interviews is for Cohen to correct the record on his previous false statements to the committees about the timing of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations—and, crucially, whether Trump or anyone in the White House directed him to lie in the first place. BuzzFeed News reported earlier this month that Mueller had evidence that Trump had asked Cohen to lie about the timing of the real-estate deal, prompting the special counsel’s office to release a rare statement contradicting aspects of the story. But House Democrats made it clear that, if it were confirmed that the president had tried to obstruct justice in order to hide his involvement in business negotiations with the Kremlin during the election—while Russia waged a hacking and disinformation campaign to undermine Trump’s opponent—it would be cause for impeachment.
Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC on Wednesday morning that the panel expects Cohen to address the Moscow real-estate deal, which was also a potential source of leverage for Russia throughout 2016 as Trump—and his family—kept the negotiations a secret from voters. Cohen admitted late last year to discussing the Moscow deal with Trump’s family members “within” the Trump Organization.
Donald Trump Jr., an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was only “peripherally aware” of the Moscow deal in 2016. It is not clear what he told the House Intelligence Committee, which has not yet released the transcripts of the closed-door interview. But Cohen’s corrected testimony could illuminate whether other witnesses have been honest during congressional testimony about their role in, or knowledge of, the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations in 2016, and Russia’s interference more broadly.
[Read: Michael Cohen pays the price for his ‘blind loyalty’ to Trump]
“I think this common thread of lying to Congress and particularly to congressional committees may ensnare a number of other potential targets in the special counsel’s investigation,” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Monday. “And it could become a matter of criminal action.” On Friday, the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone was indicted by Mueller for lying to the House Intelligence Committee about WikiLeaks, prompting Schiff to reiterate that the Intelligence Committee’s “first order of business” once it is constituted—which has been delayed by Republicans—will be a vote to send the official witness transcripts to Mueller. “We will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead,” he said.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2FYG4Ly
Many Families May Need Months to Recover From the Shutdown
Ever since the government shutdown ended last Friday, Yvette Hicks said her cable company, her electric company, the bank that processes her auto-loan payments, and her life-insurance company have been calling her “back to back to back.” They want to know when they’ll be paid.
Hicks, a 40-year-old security guard working as a contractor for the federal government, had been wondering the same thing about her own income, having gone without work or pay during the 35-day shutdown.
During that time, she had to dip into her savings so that the electric company didn’t cut off power to her home in Washington, D.C., and she was forced to ration her children’s asthma medication—they needed it every four hours, but Hicks couldn’t afford to keep up that frequency. With bills piling up over the past month, she estimates that even now that she’s back to work, it’ll take until “the end of March, maybe” for her to get her finances back to where they were before the shutdown.
Hicks is one of the millions of Americans whose livelihoods were upended by the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Just because that shutdown is over doesn’t mean that it isn’t still shaping the lives of American families, including contractors like Hicks who didn’t work and likely won’t receive back pay, and the roughly 800,000 federal workers who will. The individual stresses—both financial and emotional—may have eased, but they persist even as people return to their working rhythms.
[Read: The shutdown showed how precarious Americans’ finances really are]
The timing for a shutdown is never good, but it was especially bad for Bebe Casey, a 52-year-old businesswoman in New Hampshire. In late December, her mother was in the hospital at the end of her life, and Casey’s husband, a Customs and Border Protection employee, was ordered to continue working, with the expectation of later receiving back pay. The combination of a parent in the hospital and financial uncertainty was taxing. “This has just been a really hard last six weeks,” she told me.
Things turned out all right financially for Casey’s family, thanks in part to the end-of-year bonus she received. “If I hadn’t had that, then we would’ve been late on lots of stuff,” she says. “We were lucky.” Still, she’s a little nervous about upcoming financial obligations, such as making a college-tuition payment for her daughter next week. “We’re gingerly going through day by day right now, still trying to stuff as much money as we can away in case this happens again,” she says.
On the other side of the country, Mel May was experiencing similar uncertainty during the shutdown. May, a 55-year-old employee of the Federal Aviation Administration living in Albuquerque, was also expected to come into work without pay. “It was very stressful,” he said of making sure his bills were paid. He had trouble getting a loan to cover his rent and other bills, and ended up having to borrow money from his girlfriend.
In the end, May didn’t fall behind on any payments. “Everybody worked with me—even Comcast, of all people,” he said. Still, things were tight. He got cleared for unemployment assistance, started looking into getting a new job, and ate frugally—“lots of eggs, lots of oatmeal,” he told me. He’s glad he’ll start getting paychecks again soon.
The people I spoke to for this story told me of the stress they’d experienced during the shutdown and were well aware that they could experience it again soon, if a new agreement to fund the government is not reached by February 15. Yvette Hicks was worried that if she was out of work again, it’d take her even longer to get back on track financially.
Some aftereffects of the shutdown have been subtler, though. One 23-year-old federal contractor—he asked not to be named, for fear of repercussions at work—told me that this early exposure to the potential precarity of government work was discouraging. “For all of the merits of working for the government, it has shown me some of the disadvantages of working on something that’s at the mercy of politics,” he said. The shutdown may have lasted 35 days, but some of its effects will extend well beyond that.
Amal Ahmed contributed reporting to this article.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2TnQVBB
Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists Feels Like a Eulogy for Journalism
Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, a new HBO documentary about two of the most celebrated newspapermen of the 20th century, has the passionate, thunderous, and occasionally weepy tone of a good barroom eulogy. Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill represent, various interviewees attest, the last of their kind: journalists writing for and about the working man, self-educated voices for New York’s disenfranchised, reporters who also sometimes managed to be poets. Together, they embody the sharp thrill of a time when to cover the news was to be a hard-drinking, iconoclastic, ink-and-grease-stained truth teller. As Spike Lee puts it in one moment, “These guys were like superstars.” Later, Tom Brokaw adds that Hamill was “so authentically male.”
Directed by the journalist Jonathan Alter and the documentarians John Block and Steve McCarthy, Deadline Artists often feels as if it’s eulogizing not just Breslin and Hamill (Hamill is still alive and writing; Breslin died in 2017) but also a golden era of journalism itself. Alter told Page Six that he wanted to capture the heart of a time “when print journalists could be swashbuckling figures”—a moment when Breslin could advertise beer in television commercials and appear on Saturday Night Live, and when Hamill could date Jacqueline Kennedy and Shirley MacLaine at the same time.
With all the hushed reverence, though, comes a sense that something truly valuable has been lost. “These journalists today go to the elite colleges,” the legendary magazine writer Gay Talese says in one interview. Hamill and Breslin, the movie argues, were “anchored in a place and time,” able to tell stories about underserved communities because they themselves were of the people.
A hagiographic documentary certainly has its place—just ask the Academy, which nominated Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg movie, RBG, for an Oscar earlier this year. It’s just that Deadline Artists often seems enthralled by a version of the narrative that even Breslin and Hamill question in moments, one in which the emptying-out of traditional newsrooms and the checking of anarchic reportorial habits signal a fatal, irreversible decline.
[Read: The media’s post-advertising future is also its past]
“There aren’t any more Breslins and Hamills,” an uncredited voice says in the movie. “This was the last expression of great 20th-century muscular American journalism.” Maybe, but it’s hard not to read “muscular” as a euphemism for something else, some ineffably virile quality that both Breslin and Hamill apparently had in abundance. And the sentiment undermines the astonishing reporting being done every day to expose inequality and injustice in America, in a much more challenging economic climate for news.
When it functions as a dual biography, Deadline Artists is a fascinating film. It’s drawn more to the bombastic, outspoken, abrasive Breslin than the ruminative Hamill, but it makes a case for the ways in which both changed newspaper journalism for the better. They each fell into the profession with a simplicity that would make contemporary J-school students weep—Breslin became a copy boy earning 18 dollars a week, while Hamill, after writing persuasive letters to the editor of the New York Post, was personally invited to join the editorial team, after which his first story ran on page 1.
The writers made a name for themselves by seeking out lesser-told stories, Breslin in the bars and back rooms of Queens, and Hamill across America, Europe, and Asia. Breslin’s coverage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination changed the shape of what newspaper journalism looked like by focusing on the men at the edges of history—the gravedigger at Arlington National Cemetery, the emergency-room doctor who tried in vain to save the 35th president’s life. In 1968, Breslin and Hamill were in the immediate vicinity of Robert F. Kennedy when he was murdered; Hamill summed up the scene by writing, “We knew then that America had struck again.”
Both men inevitably became celebrities, lauded for their tenacity, their commitment (Hamill, while sparring with the new owner of the Post, refused to step down and oversaw proofs from the diner by the office), and their fearlessness. Breslin’s ego seems to inflate rather unappealingly at this point in the film, when he’s shooting commercials for Grape-Nuts and corresponding personally with the Son of Sam killer. Called to ask whether he’s covering a house fire in which two people have died, he imperiously replies, “More must die before Breslin goes.” And, in his ugliest moment, he publicly berates a young, female, Korean American reporter who’s criticized one of his columns for being sexist, unleashing a tirade of racial slurs that gets him suspended for two weeks.
Deadline Artists dutifully includes this stain on Breslin’s biography, even if it subsequently drafts family members and friends to explain it. “I think the suspension probably killed him because I don’t think he had a bigoted bone in his body,” his son says. “Jimmy is an impulsive guy from the streets, and I thought he just made a huge mistake,” Gloria Steinem adds. “[Jimmy] doesn’t like when other people criticize him,” Breslin’s second wife, Ronnie Eldridge, explains. “He was terrible in many ways,” recalls The New York Times’s Gail Collins, “but his sense of sympathy was just amazing.” The filmmakers briefly interview Ji-Yeon Yuh, the woman whom Breslin verbally abused, but they seem more interested in propping up Breslin’s bona fides as a champion of the disenfranchised than in considering, even fleetingly, how the ribald newsroom culture the movie glorifies might also have helped keep a generation of talented reporters on the margins.
Alter, Block, and McCarthy are convincing in their argument that Breslin and Hamill shaped the way news stories are told, inspiring a generation to try to emulate their melding of dogged reporting and writerly craft. Breslin’s coverage of the emerging AIDS crisis in New York when few other reporters dared is held up as yet another example of how he foregrounded people whose plight merited national attention. But the implication underlying Deadline Artists’ swooningly nostalgic portrait of a bygone era—that things were better then—is undercut by one of its subjects. Journalism, Hamill says, is “always being enriched by the new people who come.” It’s a much-needed counterpoint in a film that could use more of them.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2TjW7X6
How Do Plants Grow in Space?
Earlier this month, tiny green plants sprouted on the moon.
The plants arrived as cotton seeds, tucked inside of Chang’e 4, a Chinese spacecraft that had landed, in a historic first, on the far side of the moon, the side that never turns toward Earth. The seeds came with the comforts of home: water, air, soil, and a heating system for warmth. Huddled together, the seedlings resembled a miniature, deep-green forest. A hint of life on a barren world.
And then, about a week later, they all died.
Lunar night had set in. Without ample sunlight, surface temperatures near the spacecraft plummeted to –52 degrees Celsius (–62 degrees Fahrenheit). The sprouts’ heating system wasn’t designed to last. The plants froze.
Outer space, as you might expect, is not kind to plants, or people, or most living things, except maybe for tardigrades, those microscopic creatures that look like little bears. If you stuck a daisy out of the International Space Station and exposed it to the vacuum of space, it would perish immediately. The water in its cells would rush out and dissipate as vapor, leaving behind a freeze-dried flower.
[Read: A new clue in the search for forests on distant planets]
China’s experiment marked the first time biological matter has been grown on the moon. (There is biological matter on the moon already, in what NASA politely refers to as “defecation collection devices.”) But plants have blossomed in space for years. They just need a little more care and attention than their terrestrial peers.
The first to flourish in space was Arabidopsis thaliana, a spindly plant with white flowers, in 1982, aboard Salyut, a now defunct Russian space station. The inaugural plant species was chosen for practical reasons; scientists call Arabidopsis thaliana the fruit fly of plant science, thanks to a fairly quick life cycle that allows for many analyses in a short time.
Now, plants grow on the International Space Station, humankind’s sole laboratory above Earth. They are cultivated inside special chambers equipped with artificial lights pretending to be the sun. Seeds are planted in nutrient-rich substance resembling cat litter and strewn with fertilizer pellets. Water, unable to flow on its own, is administered carefully and precisely to roots. In microgravity, gases sometimes coalesce into bubbles, and overhead, fans push the air around to keep the carbon dioxide and oxygen flowing.
The most advanced chamber on the station, about the size of a mini fridge, has precise sensors monitoring the conditions inside, and all astronauts need to do is add water and change filters. Scientists back on the ground can control everything, from the temperature and humidity to levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
Plants did not evolve to exist in this unusual setup. But astronauts have grown several varieties of lettuce, radishes, peas, zinnias, and sunflowers, and they do just fine. “Plants are very adaptive, and they have to be—they can’t run away,” says Gioia Massa, a scientist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center who studies plants in microgravity.
Scientists were surprised to learn that the lack of gravity, the force that has shaped our biological processes, doesn’t derail plants’ development. On Earth, plants produce a filigree-like pattern of roots, as they grow away from their seeds in search of nutrients. Scientists had long assumed the movements were influenced, in part, by the force of gravity. On the International Space Station, roots exhibited the same pattern, without gravity as a guide.
“Plants don’t really care about the gravity so much if you can get the environment right,” Massa says.
For NASA, the growth chambers on the space station are the predecessors of extraterrestrial farms beyond Earth. If human beings ever travel to another planet, they will need enough food for the journey. NASA has spent years perfecting thermo-stabilized or freeze-dried entrées and snacks for astronauts on the International Space Station, from scrambled eggs to chicken teriyaki. The meals are meant to last, but they wouldn’t survive the long journey to Mars, says Julie Robinson, the chief scientist for the International Space Station.
“We don’t have a system today that would preserve all the nutrients in food for all that time, even if it was frozen,” Robinson says.
Future Mars astronauts will likely bring with them an assortment of seeds, a Svalbard-like vault to kick-start the first generations of crops. None will be able to grow in Martian soil, which resembles volcanic ash; it’s devoid of the organic matter—formed on Earth by generations of decomposed plants—that supports life. It also contains chemical compounds that are toxic to humans. Astronauts could flush out the toxins with their own chemical solutions and convert the soil into something workable, but it may be easier to replicate the growth chambers on the International Space Station instead.
On Mars, plants will likely grow in climate-controlled greenhouses, from nutrient-rich gels and under bright lighting, with water delivered through liquid solutions at their roots or by a fine mist released from the ceiling. And anyone living on Mars will need many of these alien gardens; you can’t grow a salad from a petri dish.
Astronauts have already made a space salad. In 2015, astronauts on the space station were allowed to try the leaves of a red romaine lettuce that was cultivated in NASA’s first fresh-food growth chamber. They added a little balsamic dressing and took a bite. “That’s awesome,” the NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren said then. “Tastes good.”
No one on Earth has sampled a space vegetable yet, according to Massa. Some plants grown on the station are sent down to the ground for study in the lab, but they usually come back frozen or preserved in a chemical solution. “Frozen would be better, but I don’t think lettuce popsicles will be very popular anytime soon,” she says.
NASA scientists are thinking about more than nutrition in these experiments. Growing plants just for the sake of growing plants is quite nice. Research has shown that gardening is soothing and can be beneficial for good mental health. Future deep-space astronauts, cooped up in a small spaceship for years with the same people, will need all the soothing activities they can find. Plants, especially flowers, grown not for consumption but for decoration may help far-flung astronauts feel connected to the comforts of Earth.
“There’s a great deal of joy in growing and watering the plants and producing a flower,” Robinson, the ISS scientist, says. “There can also be some real sadness if plants you’ve been cultivating are not successful and are dying on you.”
Anyone who has enthusiastically purchased a succulent and witnessed it inexplicably wilt days later might relate. Imagine the magnitude of that disappointment on Mars, where the closest store is all the way across the solar system, and the only option is to grow another one.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2SeuSju
The Generation of Grandparents Who Keep Their Grandchildren Afloat
My husband and I have been pretty good at saving money over the years, which means that we have enough of a cushion to start passing along some of it to our children and grandchildren while we’re alive, rather than leaving it behind as their inheritance. If we live another 20 years, give or take, as the actuarial tables say we might, our offspring in 2040 might have less need for the extra money than they do today, when they’re young. We’re living by the slightly morbid axiom my mother would invoke whenever she gave me a big check for a birthday or an anniversary: “I’d rather give it with a warm hand than a cold one.”
Grandparents across the U.S. are making similar calculations. According to the AARP, almost all American grandparents say that they offer some sort of financial support to their grandchildren, typically in the form of helping pay for their education (53 percent), living expenses (37 percent), or medical bills (23 percent). A recent survey by TD Ameritrade found that the average grandparent couple spend $2,383 a year on their grandkids. This figure is undoubtedly skewed by the wealthy (and disproportionately white) people who give their grandkids the largest amounts—but even grandparents who are just scraping by try to share what they can. And it doesn’t include other ways of helping beyond giving money, such as by being unpaid daycare providers.
Intergenerational gift-giving has grown substantially in the past decade or so. One analysis of Census Bureau data found that between 1999 and 2009, the amount that Americans over 55 gave to their adult children increased by more than 70 percent. During that period, the amount given specifically for primary- and secondary-school tuition and school supplies—that is, to be spent on the grandkids—nearly tripled.
[Read more: The age of grandparents is made of many tragedies]
Financially, my husband and I are lucky; we’ve been careful with our spending, yes, but more than that, we’ve had relatively well-paying, stable careers. Most Americans our age aren’t so lucky: Just 39 percent of working adults in the United States have managed to save enough to get themselves through five years of retirement, let alone give a leg up to their progeny.
But even without adequate savings, parents and grandparents these days are quick to offer monetary help to younger generations—sometimes raiding the nest egg they might need for themselves. “Financial managers advise the elderly to hold on to the money they’ve saved, to use it to care for themselves in old age, to avoid becoming the responsibility of their children,” Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at New York University, told me. But many grandparents have a hard time listening to this advice, she said, because they can see that their children and grandchildren are even more financially insecure than they are. Giving money serves two functions, Gerson said—it’s “a way of expressing love,” and a way to help ensure “that your children’s children will have a decent spot in the world.”
But no matter how well intentioned these transactions are, the fact that many young Americans turn to the Bank of Grandma and Grandpa is evidence of their struggles and the lack of an adequate safety net to keep them afloat. Giving money to grandchildren is also one way that well-off families pass on privilege and wealth not just to the next generation, but to the one after that—a way that Americans stay rooted in the social stratum into which they were born.
Gerson pointed out that robust social programs benefiting grandparents might be what make them feel able to offer support in the first place. In the 20th century, poverty among the elderly was “greatly erased,” she told me, “thanks to policies such as Social Security.” According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, 9 percent of Americans older than 65 have an income below the poverty line—but if Social Security didn’t exist, that number would balloon to 39 percent.
Yet while poverty among the elderly has plummeted, childhood poverty has held steady—as programs like food stamps and Aid to Families With Dependent Children have been overhauled and the cost of college has skyrocketed. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, children younger than 18 are more than twice as likely to be poor as adults older than 65. That stark difference in their fortunes makes it hard for grandparents to turn away from the youngest generation, whose needs are so obvious. As Gerson put it, grandparents are “stepping into the void” created by the loss of social safety nets.
[Read more: The crushing logistics of raising a family paycheck to paycheck]
Stepping into that void most enthusiastically are grandparents of color, according to a 2012 study by the AARP. African American and Latino grandparents were more likely than their white counterparts to spend money on schooling: 65 percent of African American grandparents and 58 percent of Latino grandparents helped pay for their children’s education, compared with 53 percent of all grandparents polled. African American grandparents were also far more likely than other groups to assist with everyday living expenses. They were also more likely to be a little bit indulgent. “I give to my grandkids because they ask for things,” said 52 percent of African Americans and 43 percent of Latinos, compared with about 30 percent of grandparents overall.
While older Americans are dealing with their own financial woes—insufficient savings, for instance, and a mountain of medical bills—they still tend to feel more secure than their children, for whom pension plans and health-care coverage in old age are even more uncertain. Indeed, today’s grandparents might be the last generation to feel as if they have more economic wiggle room than their kids do. Older Baby Boomers, who are now in their late 60s and early 70s, grew up in a time of economic expansion and relative job security, when Americans could still earn a solid middle-class income with just a high-school degree. That places them in a better position to share the wealth with their families than Gen Xers, when the majority become grandparents.
But today’s grandparents are probably not quite as financially secure as they think they are, according to Teresa Ghilarducci, an economist at the New School and the author of How to Retire With Enough Money. Many of them have inadequate insurance for unexpected medical bills, especially long-term care, she told me, and they might not realize that “their costs for house cleaning and personal services are likely to go up as they become more fragile.” A lot of people have trouble understanding what retirement really costs and how much to save, Ghilarducci said. (Her rule of thumb: Savings should equal eight to 10 times your annual salary preretirement.) Even worse, if a recession happens in the next couple of years, she told me, it could reduce elders’ retirement money (from savings and part-time work) by as much as 20 to 25 percent.
While wealthier Americans can blithely give away money to their kids and grandkids without thinking twice, many working- and middle-class Baby Boomers struggle to help out. The TD Ameritrade survey found that one in four grandparents had to dip into savings to give money to grandchildren. And about 8 percent said that the desire to offer financial help to the youngest generation was leading them to put off retirement.
We do it anyway, often against financial analysts’ advice, because it’s hard to resist giving money to the children right in front of us rather than socking it away for a future that no one can foresee. It’s a sign of what Gerson calls “family cohesion”—the urge to help the grandchildren we love, even if we then ignore our own future needs, when we sense they lack something that we can provide.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2RrSSel
There’s No Case for War With Venezuela
President Donald Trump has recently turned his attention, and the focus of the U.S. foreign-policy debate, toward the economic and political crisis in Venezuela, where two men are pushing rival claims to be the head of state. The opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, has the support of the United States. But despite mass protests, the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro refuses to step down.
The Trump administration’s efforts to force his ouster and bolster his opponent’s claims have included oil sanctions, the diplomatic maneuverings described by my colleague Uri Friedman, and harsh rhetoric. I want to focus on a subset of that rhetoric: threats of military force.
[Read: How seriously should the world take Trump’s Venezuela threat?]
In 2017, Trump stated, “We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.” The AP reports on a bygone occasion when he privately underscored that posture:
As a meeting last August to discuss sanctions on Venezuela was concluding, President Donald Trump turned to his top aides and asked an unsettling question: With a fast unraveling Venezuela threatening regional security, why can’t the U.S. just simply invade the troubled country? The suggestion stunned those present … including U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom have since left the administration.
This account of the previously undisclosed conversation comes from a senior administration official … McMaster and others took turns explaining to Trump how military action could backfire and risk losing hard-won support among Latin American governments to punish President Nicolas Maduro for taking Venezuela down the path of dictatorship, according to the official. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the discussions.
As recently as Monday, National-Security Adviser John Bolton told reporters, “The president has made it very clear on this matter that all options are on the table.” He appeared to signal that U.S. troops might be sent to the region. And Senator Lindsey Graham told an Axios reporter that Trump had recently mused to him about a military option.
[Read: The White House’s move on Venezuela is the least Trumpian thing it’s done]
Trump has always been more hawkish than most people realize. Still, it is hard to know how much of this is earnest and how much is bluffing. If Team Trump is merely bluffing, the saber-rattling could conceivably pay off by yielding concessions, or undermine U.S. interests by alienating Venezuelans against the side we’re backing, or have no real effect. To me, bluffing when one cannot lawfully follow through is a generally high-risk, foolhardy approach to international relations, but it’s still preferable to the alternative explanation: a risky, unilateral war of choice that shouldn’t even be a possibility.
That’s because the Trump administration has no legal basis to intervene militarily in Venezuela without prior authorization from Congress. This Congress seems unlikely to authorize the deployment of U.S. troops to Venezuela. And while I’ve seen no polling on the matter, I strongly suspect that the public would oppose a new war there, and that if a war were begun, neither Congress nor the public would possess the resolve to see it through to a successful conclusion.
A war of that sort might be less likely if the media organizations reporting on Trump administration saber-rattling always pointed out that actually waging war would be flagrantly unlawful, rather than proceeding as if this is a matter properly decided by the White House. But much of the press has accustomed itself to an imperial presidency, so the Constitution’s mandates often go unmentioned.
Still, if the Trump administration unilaterally wages war in Venezuela, violating the separation of powers in the Constitution—a document that the president is sworn to protect and defend—the House should move to impeach the president.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2Wv54io