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richardmurray

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Everything posted by richardmurray

  1. Got a question for the cast of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves? They may have answers! Submit your questions here < https://entertainment.tumblr.com/ask > , and tune in for their Answer Time on March 30th at 11am PT / 2pm ET, before the film opens wide on March 31st. U.R.L. https://entertainment.tumblr.com/post/711937110429532160/got-a-question-for-the-cast-of-dungeons-dragons In Amendment many black people love video games, love board games, love card games, and yet, I have never seen a board game like dungeons and dragons implemented by black people. Yes, Dungeons and dragons has an open world structure meant for any human to play in it, but rivals for games are made all the time. Just wondering. Also, will you ask a question ?I placed mine below Do any of you play the Dungeons and Dragons board game and will you play a character like the one you play in the movie or another? What do you think about a version of the Dungeons and dragons board game based on the movie, upon success and sequels, will it be an uncommon synergy between film and games? Honor among thieves seems a introduction to a world but not an origin story, am i wrong or right, and will that make sequels/derivative works more fun or creative?
  2. exactly, @SpeakHerTruth anyone who knows a woman who is a competitive martial artists , any style, knows she is muscular. That chun-li has no muscle I can see it the beginning of the story P.B.: "Ohh piglet , I need to get to the honey" Piglet: "Pooh! , that big blue creature is coming for you" P.B. "Don't worry Piglet..I will just sit and be cute " TO BE CONTINUED:)
  3. none of you have mentioned one thing, the issue is dead. Will Smith or Chris Rock have nothing left to do. If Chris Rock calls Jada Pinkett a bitch in the next special, then he is being petty or trying to manufacture a scenario. If Will Smith finances a film where a black comedian has to protect himself from those his jokes insult then his remorse wasn't true. It's over, Jada Pinkett smith was insulted by a black man on a national platform for no reason at all, Jada Pinkett had her honor defended by her husband which cost him some status and cost her some status, they are still maried, and the man who insulted her did it far worse afterword. But, all three are healthy, financially wealthy, and can move on now, outside the inevitable question from poor pundits but it's over
  4. referral https://www.deviantart.com/mystic-skillz/journal/Guilty-Force-939049040
  5. First the backstory, I should go farther back and how little art or graffiti has been treated by the NEw York City government at the behest of many people in NEw York City, i daresay most, as a negative going back to the 1970s. Funny how the sotheby's of the world are selling JEan Michel Basquiat's art , an artists who died penniless, for a hundred million dollars while the city painted over the street art in the 191st street tunnel with no pausal, they took photos of it i think. Well now the city wants to repair the problem. But instead of it being a random thing done through time, changing as well, they want it to be official. So... NYC DOT Announces Search for Artists to Beautify 191st Street Tunnel The New York City Department of Transportation today issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) seeking submissions of bold, colorful designs for beautification of the 191st Street Tunnel (The Tunnel). Proposed designs should reflect the local community and the rich cultural identity of Washington Heights. Located in Washington Heights at 191st Street, the pedestrian tunnel connects Broadway and St. Nicholas Avenue to the 1 train station at 191st street. The station is one of the deepest in the New York City Subway system, sitting at approximately 180 feet below street level. The Tunnel is mapped as a street and is thus owned and maintained by DOT. “The 191st Street tunnel is a community landmark, providing critical connection between Broadway and the 1 train for tens of thousands of New Yorkers,” said New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez. “We are excited to find artists to beautify the tunnel with designs that reflect the rich cultural identity of Washington Heights and create a vibrant space for the commuters who use this major hub every day.” The RFP is available for download on DOT’s website. For more information, please visit, https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/dotart-191-st-tunnel-rfp.pdf (ENGLISH) or https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/dotart-191-st-tunnel-rfp-es.pdf (SPANISH). DOT Art will select up to four (4) artists to develop design treatments to be painted within the Tunnel with community and volunteer support. The selected Artists shall be responsible for completing one (1) final design, working with DOT staff to develop the implementation plan and material list, assisting with stencil production and developing technique to translate the design onto tunnel walls, and assisting with overseeing a team of community volunteers or assistants. Submissions must be submitted via e-mail no later than Friday, April 14th, 2023, at 11:59 PM EST to be considered. Hand delivered proposals will not be accepted. All submissions should be emailed to: 191TunnelArt@dot.nyc.gov. DOT Art Background The New York City Department of Transportation’s (“NYC DOT”) Art Program (“DOT Art”) oversees the installation of public artworks on NYC DOT property throughout New York City in partnership with a diverse body of professional artists, galleries, business improvement districts and arts, community-based and other nonprofit organizations. City sidewalks, fences, triangles, medians, bridges, jersey barriers, step streets, pedestrian plazas and other unique project sites service as canvases and foundations for temporary murals, sculptures, interventions, and cultural programming. In addition, DOT Art coordinates conservation and maintenance of DOT’s permanent art collection and collaborates with the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) Percent for Art Program to commission permanent art as part of the Percent for Art law. For more information about DOT Art, visit www.nyc.gov/dotart. I COPIED THE FOLLOWING FROM THE ENGLISH PDF
  6. I have always loved the art of Chevelin Pierre, for years now, so even though it is march,and haitian independence is january 1st, it is being shared:)
  7. my pleasure @KENNETH Black people ourselves created our own myths about a better past. how many black people talk about back in the day we were united? back in the day we cared for ourselves? back in the day this, back in the day that. Back in the day we owned nothing. Back in the day white people abused us to no end, beyond many modern black folks comprehension. Back in the day we hated whites and never emitted that hate in any physical action outside talking in the dark. What is the black individual mantra? I got mine get yours . .. right? But the white community enslaved the black community in the american continent. The white community didn't enslave you or I they enslaved us, no matter our relationship to each other. When was the last time a majority of black people whose forebears were enslaved in the usa were happy? Was in 2022? no was it eh 1980s? no was it 1965? no . Was it in 1865? no was it in 1776? no was it in the 1500s in the boats? no. Was it in africa on the docks to unknown lands? no. it was in africa all about the continent. But Black DOSers going to repair to that? Complicated, I will say nothing is impossible, but complicated.
  8. fair enough @SpeakHerTruth We all like what we like. And liking i never universal in consensus. Maybe as a literalist in prose i prefer root meanings. Race/prejudice/bias/bigot all have roots. Race means a classification. Prejudice means to judge before knowing. Bias is to favor, which always goes in twos. Bigot is a modern artifice, it is only figurative in meaning, its literal has been lost. In the past it was used for religious folk who swear , which comes from the very unmodern idea that taking oaths should not be done, especially to a divinity, ala by god. the antiquated idea is false oathing, especially to a divinity harms the soul. Sequentially, you have answered your original question. Why did the meaning change? it changed cause somebody always doesn't like the prior meaning, and it will change in the future for the same reason. But the functional question, collectively, is how do those in a group function together positively absent consensus on a meaning of the words they use? Some will say actions speak louder than words but in groups communication is the blood of the body. Absent communication the only way individuals in a group can work together is if they act in a strict set of rules absent the ability to liken otherwise, ala they are machines.
  9. well, in brown vs board of education wasn't that the premise of thurgood marshall, the black children chose the white doll de facto, knowing full well they are not white while most have negative experiences side whites... I think it is a conscious negative bias many black people in the usa or elsewhere have to self, built in a complex media framework, from books to televisions in modernity while also, and in my view most importantly, to a clan culture stemming from the slave quarter in the past or other similar negative communal extremes. I learned this about project implicit https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/aboutus.html
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    Former NBA player talks about cannabis business

    By Spectrum News Staff New York City

    PUBLISHED 6:30 PM ET Mar. 19, 2023

    Former NBA player Al Harrington said one of his motivations for becoming a cannabis entrepreneur is how pot helped his grandmother.

    Harrington, who played for the New York Knicks and other teams across the country, joined NY1’s Dean Meminger Sunday to discuss his plan to expand his $100 million business Viola Brands into New York and New Jersey.

    About 12 years ago, his grandmother took marijuana when she was suffering from glaucoma, an eye disease that can cause vision loss.

    Harrington his grandmother was able to see words in the Bible for the first time in three years.

    He said that once he saw what happened with his grandmother, he wanted "to change the way people would perceive the plant.”

    Harrington said his other passions within the business includes diversity, inclusion and social equity.

    Viola Brands started almost 12 years ago in Colorado. Since then, the company has expanded to Oregon, Michigan, California, Missouri, Maryland and Illinois.

    “We try to educate as much as we can, right, because, you know, you think about people that come from our community, specifically people of color,” he said. “We’ve seen so much trauma, you know, from the cannabis plant.”

     

    VIEW FULL INTERVIEW WITH DEAN MEMINGER

    https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/03/19/former-nba-player-talks-about-cannabis-business

     

    Referral U.R.L.

    https://twitter.com/DeanMeminger/status/1637613684053757952

     

     

     

     

     

    IN AMENDMENT

     

    I want to add that pharmaceutical companies are taking New York State to court for providing assistance to Black people incarcerated for illegal marijuana possession with the approach of it being against free market capitalism, which is funny based on the second article at the following link < https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2284&type=status >  where the wealthiest in the usa are being protected from their failings in free market capitalism. 

     

    corporate website

    https://violabrands.com/

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    Mental Health Spotlight: Jasmine Marie, Founder of black girls breathing®

    Jasmine Marie is a speaker, breathwork practitioner, and the founder of black girls breathing®. Her work is innovating the wellness, healthcare, and research industry by making mental health services accessible to Black women while filling in the gaps of data and research available on this underserved and underrepresented demographic. Marie plans to impact one million Black women and girls with her work by 2025. She is a serial founder with a past life in global haircare brand marketing and an alum of NYU Stern. The impact and range of her work to date is expansive—ranging from underserved minority communities to stressed-out college students and executives. She’s brought her expertise to elite colleges such as Harvard Business School, Columbia University, and Cornell University, and her client list includes corporations such as Estée Lauder Companies, Under Armour, Capital One, Ford Motor Company, Facebook, and Twitter. Marie has been featured in Oprah Magazine, Good Morning America, VOGUE, Forbes, Harper’s Baazar, Marie Claire, Glamour, Nylon Mag, Wall Street Journal, and Black Enterprise, to name a few.

     

    What is black girls breathing®? And why was it created?

     

    black girls breathing® is a safe space for Black women to manage their mental and emotional health and heal trauma in their bodies with breathwork and community.

    I created black girls breathing® after finishing my breathwork training and seeing so few facilitators that looked like me yet knowing how much chronic stress and trauma (generational, societal, etc.) and decided to create it. I used my background in business to help me develop a model where we could provide this work accessibly.

     

    Do you have any secret hobbies, skills, or interests?

     

    I don’t think I have any secret hobbies but for a while, I would always feel embarrassed whenever anyone asked that question, as a lot of my hobbies can maybe seem boring to others lol. But I love to read. Reading is one of my favorite hobbies. I love having quiet time…any activity that allows me to feel refreshed, sit with my own thoughts and enjoy my solitude. I think because I deal with so many people’s energy that in my spare time, I just like to spend time with self. I love to cook though…it’s a very meditative activity for me that allows me to unwind from my day.

     

    How did you get started in this work? And why is it important to you?

     

    As mentioned above, after my breathwork training, I realized there were so few Black breathworkers. But before that, I found breathwork while being stressed out after graduating from business school at NYU and working in beauty in NYC. My nervous system was so fried I began having physical symptoms…rashes and an inability to sleep. The doctor would see me and always say, “This is stress. How can you reduce your stress?” Fast forward to me finding my first breathwork class and falling in love with the way it allowed me to just feel more space in my mind and body.

     

    WOW — ONE MILLION Black women and girls breathing by 2025 what an ambitious goal! What impact do you see this having?

     

    It is an ambitious goal, but in 2020, we fundraised $55k to make our work accessible for one year. After the year was done, it was so clear that we couldn’t stop there. So many Black women needed this work, and we would hear that over and over again. So I decided if I was going to do this work, I was only interested in creating real impact and a goal that would signify that. Imagining 1 Million Black women using breathwork as a tool to regulate their nervous systems, heal from compounded trauma and reduce the effect that chronic stress has in our community (health challenges linked to chronic stress: heart disease, high blood pressure, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, fertility issues, and the list goes on) will not only affect them but our community as a whole. Ending the passing down of generational trauma and normalizing healing.

     

    What would you suggest to people who feel like they cannot find the time to breathe or practice mindfulness?

     

    I would first affirm that it’s okay they feel that way. Western society has done a great job of making us feel that anything outside of productivity is not only a waste of time but the least important thing we should make space for. Making time for yourself for any mindful activity can be eased into and it can start with being more aware of the present moment and practicing that action on a daily. Maybe you create a routine where every morning for 3 minutes right when you get up, you take a moment to be still, notice your breathing pattern and focus on each and every inhale and exhale.

     

    Why is Black representation important in this industry?

     

    The wellness industry isn’t unlike other industries where Black representation is lacking. I think it’s important to see other Black women caring for themselves because, historically, we’ve been taught to do the opposite for oh so long.

     

    Where do you find joy?

     

    I find joy with my family and my loved ones, in intimate moments with friends, in good food and conversation, and in being able to create something and see it grow, shift, and evolve.

     

     

     

    Want to learn more about black girls https://blackgirlsbreathing.tumblr.com/ ?

    Check out their website, or their tumblr above, https://blackgirlsbreathing.com/

     

    Breathe with us on March 27th @12pm EDT during their Mindful Monday Breathwork for Anxiety session on Tumblr Live

     

    Ask black girls breathing all the questions on your mind for IssueTime on Navigating Anxiety in an increasingly digital, lonely world ; LINK-> 

    https://www.tumblr.com/postitforward/712284924296691712/todays-world-is-a-difficult-one-it-is-becoming?source=share

     

    Take the pledge with black girls breathing®

     

    POST U.R.L. 

    https://postitforward.tumblr.com/post/712319550666014720/mental-health-spotlight-jasmine-marie-founder-of

     

    https://postitforward.tumblr.com/post/712284924296691712/todays-world-is-a-difficult-one-it-is-becoming

     

     

  12. I want to add one point to the commentor's above. The USA has the strongest culture of individualism in all humanity. And part of individualism is a dislike for collective things by default. Individidualism by default says the one has the right above the group. Racism by default is a group based philosophy. IT always takes at least two to be a race. The challenge for the usa is how to be a race of individuals. but comprehend, all are racist if they use any collective label to themselves, including human. I repeat, if you call your self, human, your a racist.
  13. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ronwired/52755757407/in/feed-849661-1679194154-1-72157721662201124
  14. In round 2, I explained something that caused confusion. I quote in Round 2 @KENNETH I do not oppose reparations or renaissance. But I oppose a key element that black people don't seem to realize when they talk about repair. ANother was also confused and I replied to them with the following in bold. I merely go into detail after. good afternoon @Soulsonsix yes, i want to only add we have a happiness foundation elsewhere. More elemental than culture, it is a question of where the majority of black people whose forebears were enslaved in the usa were last happy and the majority of black people whose forebears were enslaved were never happy in the usa. So, why will a majority of black people whose forebears were enslaved want a renaissance or repair to anything in the usa? I will amend, when you buy a brand new car. It is shiny, the engine works, current technology. But, thirty years after, it gets a constant leak, its technology is unsupported. You want the car repaired, a reparation. But that is because the car was once great all around. The black community in the USA whose forebears were enslaved, which is not all black people in the usa, have no prior positive state to repair back to. They have no naissance to have a renaissance. The black community whose forebears were enslaved started the usa journey with over 95% enslaved. Then after the war between the states, sharecropping or jails, which is slavery with a contract or the still legal way. Then it was in urban collections in cities black people didn't create or control. The prior state of the majority in the black community whose forebears were enslaved, I will use the term DOSers afterword, in the usa is extremely negative, so what is their to repair in the usa? the answer is nothing. But, is reparations dysfunctional? not historically. The problem isn't that reparations is a false goal, the problem is where reparations takes DOSers , if we are honest about where most of us were last happy? The answer is africa, but not one country. DOSers from canada to argentina are a mix of african peoples. The problem with reparations in San FRancisco is the majority of the DOSer community in the usa has no condition or state of being in the usa in the past worth repairing. The native american has a state or condition worth repairing in the USA, which is before the european colonies came into existence, but DOSers don't. So when anybody, black or white or other, talks about the goals of reparations, they are forgetting the unfortunate, ahh luck:) , reality of the DOSer community is while reparations are warranted beyond measure, the reparations take DOSers unto a journey out or away from the usa. And the problem there is, Africa as a continent or any country in it has no way to handle the need of reparations for DOSers anywhere in the american continent as a large group. YEs, black people individually go back to africa, but this issue is about mass groups. Yes, not all black people in the usa today are descended from enslaved, some are immigrants from kenya. but this doesn't invalidate reparations because an ever growing number of black people came to this land like whites. And yes, I was verbose in this amendment to the bold quote, but you have to use more words to display the specificity in this issue. Citation for my bold quote ROUND 2
  15. It is municipal and also post war between the states. The reality is, what black people are owed is beyond any government to give Reparations means a thing that repairs, make ready again, but the black community in the usa only gets worse in the past historically. To be blunt, if the black community in the usa whose forebears were enslaved before or after the usa was founded want to make any situation where we lived ready again, then it has to be back to africa. Because as a community, the DOSers only had something worth repairing before we were taken. In harlem, in NYC, many people talk about the harlem renaissance which was a term first coined by whites, but blacks first termed the new negro movement , and while these are merely labels, they serve an important point here. The black community in harlem before the 1920s wasn't some sort of paradise for blacks. So the black community in harlem during what many call the renaissance was having its first positive cultural explosion. Not a renaissance, but a naissance. Whites in the usa talk about better days in the past cause they had them, when natives were being slaughtered and blacks enslaved. Native americans in the usa when they talk about better days in the past had them, before whites/blacks or any immigrants forced their way into their ancestral lands without their permission or invitation. But Black DOSers never had a better time in the past in the usa. What needs to be made ready again, what rebirth needs to happen? slave quarters in the british colonies, slave quarters in the usa, sharecroppers in the south, municipally discarded regions in northern or western cities? Yes, martha's vineyard, yes, a black one percent always existed , free, educated, fully invested in the usa. BUT, 99% of blacks were in enslaved/sharecropping/urban neglected while the 1% of black people were owning homes and lived better than poor whites. ... the black community of san francisco can be given money but the black community of san francisco doesn't have anything in san francisco in the past worth repairing. They need something new in san francisco , and that is the question that brings uncertainty to where the money will go, what will the black people do? The black community in the usa, in this composite nation, frederick douglass's title for the usa, is a community of individuals, which serves the usa or the white community in it well, but is a terrible platform for a people who need a collective existence , that money can't buy, while money can complicate its forming. Composite NAtion speech, frederick douglass https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/357-frederick-douglass-our-composite-nation/ earlier thoughts https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2216&type=status
  16. @Troy you and many others. Not merely online but my offline connections are talking about how useful they find chatgp. I admit I haven't used it and don't plan on to, but it clearly is the place of functionality that other services are not. What Youtube shorts prove is how reactionary the business model in the usa firms are. They only move when endangered, and thus tiktok is like the automotive manufacturers of Nippon. Everything toyota side company did was done by the european economy class brands earlier, but europe had badly thought brand names in the usa, or suspected the usa would demand on their manufacturers what they did to nippon. But tiktok is like toyoto , a company that merely did what had already shown value but with a concerted effort in the usa market which has led to industrial domination , now the usa government will act as it did in the past. I see your tiktok, you are posting the correct kind of attention getting videos and have a nice set of followers and followings. And since the younger ecitizens are using tiktok more than google search, I think it is adviseable to be on the platform advertising the website. An artist acquaintance of mine, suggested i get on tiktok but I am trying to improve my e profile where I already have more followers and more presence, so I have not generated as much content and only plan to do certain content, not a ton of things. Unfortunately for tiktok but fortunately for ecitizens, tiktok is at the epicenter of the battle between usa side china in the technology wars. Websites owned in the USA dominate the online presence in most countries on earth, china being one of the few that is not dominated by usa firms, but the usa does not want china to have a dominating firm in the usa, so they want to force a tiktok sale to a usa firm, the one thing schrumpf and biden agree on which says a lot. This could end bad for tiktok in the usa. but I will say that we ecitizens are blessed because we will all get a glimpse of the internet in the future. If the USA forces bytestream to sell tiktok, then that act will validate in china or russia similar actions and will create a wave of government demands on online firms throughout humanity which means usa based online firms may lose a lot of marketshare overseas by governments cutting a usa plug into their countries. If the chinese government allows a chinese firm to be bullied like this it will be a huge win for the usa. If Bytestream make an exit from the usa, the chinese government will be sad a chinese firm was assaulted but happy cause it will be an undeniable statement of the usa's imperial position. The USA will be happy cause it will put a younger rival government in their place
  17. Michelle Yeoh and opportunity

    Silicon Valley Bank and risk in fiscal capitalism

    Tiktok and the war over who owns the internet

    Maternity Deaths in the usa

    Londonium, the roman name for london

    The live streaming former elected official in japan

     

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    Michelle Yeoh with her historic trophy. She has roles lined up but no starring ones.Credit...Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times

     

    After Her Oscar Win, Will Michelle Yeoh Get to Lead Again?
    The historic victory should mean opportunities to star again, but too often after such milestones, Hollywood doesn’t find central roles for women of color.

    By Kyle Buchanan
    Published March 15, 2023
    Updated March 17, 2023

    We’re conditioned to think of an Oscar win as the endpoint to a journey. For some actors, holding that trophy is the realization of a dream held since childhood. For others, it’s the culmination of a well-deserved comeback.

    But what happens after that win? In our eagerness to treat Oscar victories as career capstones, do we pay too little attention to the opportunities that are supposed to come afterward, yet often don’t?

    I’ve been mulling that over since Sunday night, when Michelle Yeoh took the best actress Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It happened at the 95th edition of the Academy Awards, the kind of big, tantalizing milestone that prods you to contemplate what has come before, and Yeoh’s win proved especially historic: The first Asian star to win best actress, she was greeted onstage by Halle Berry, the first Black woman to have pulled off that feat.

    Asking Berry to announce the winner with Jessica Chastain (the previous year’s winner) was a gamble twice over. If Yeoh had lost to one of her four competitors — all of whom were white women — the ensuing photo op would have served as a stark example of a best-actress category that has been hostile to women of color for 95 years. And though Berry has returned to the Oscars several times since her 2002 win for “Monster’s Ball,” it has always been as a presenter and never as a nominee. To see her there is to be reminded that an Oscar win carries no guarantees when an actress is already liable to receive fewer scripts and career opportunities than her white counterparts.

    So though Yeoh’s triumph was a long time coming, and I teared up as she addressed “all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight,” I also found myself worrying that it won’t be enough. The people in the Dolby Theater looked awfully proud of themselves after Yeoh’s win, but if they really want to do right by her, they have to keep writing lead roles for 60-year-old Asian actresses; otherwise, it’s just empty back-patting.

    That, after all, was the real breakthrough of “Everything Everywhere,” Yeoh told me in October. We were at an awards event where, flanked by the “Everything Everywhere” directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, she reminisced about a Hollywood career that had mostly been filled with supporting parts.

    “Look, I’ve been very blessed — I’ve continuously worked, and I’ve worked with great directors,” she said. “But for the first time, I’m No. 1 on the call sheet, thanks to these guys. I do meaningful roles, like in ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and ‘Shang-Chi,’ but it was not my movie.”

    Yeoh said she hoped that “Everything Everywhere” would not be a one-off, but more than a year after the film’s release, it’s unclear when, or if, she will have another lead film role. Coming projects — including the big-screen musical “Wicked,” the third “Avatar” movie, and the ensemble mystery “A Haunting in Venice” — all consign her to supporting parts. Though she is a headline-making superstar who led the hip studio A24 to its biggest ever worldwide hit, Yeoh is still too often treated as additional casting rather than the main event.

    “Even you, Michelle Yeoh — on the top of the world — has struggled to find the right roles,” Kwan told her when we met in October. “I think that has taken a lot of people by surprise.”

    Yeoh laughed ruefully. “I read scripts and it’s the guy who goes off on some big adventure — and he’s going off with my daughter!” she said. “I’m like, no, no.”

    Few Hollywood movies are conceived with a woman over 50 as the central character, and the ones that are greenlit tend to offer those leads to a triumvirate of white women: Meryl if she’s older, Cate if she’s younger and Tilda if she’s weirder. To ensure that Yeoh can be first on the call sheet again, filmmakers must think more creatively, as Kwan and Scheinert did when they revamped “Everything Everywhere” for Yeoh after conceiving the film as a Jackie Chan vehicle. (And while they’re at it, can they find something juicy for last year’s best supporting actor, Troy Kotsur, similarly a boundary breaker — with “CODA,” he became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar — who has been seen in little since?)

    As momentum in the best-actress race swung from the “Tár” star Cate Blanchett to Yeoh over the last few weeks of awards season, I kept hearing a common refrain from voters: While Blanchett already had two Oscars and would surely be nominated again — she has eight nominations overall — this could be Yeoh’s only chance at gold. Though I understand the practicality of that argument, I hope those voters understand that their job isn’t done simply because of how they marked their ballot. Yeoh’s Sunday-night win is a big one, but the real victory will come when the lead roles that had long eluded her grasp start to become commonplace. If Hollywood can make that so, then instead of an endpoint, Yeoh’s historic Oscar will serve as a long-needed new beginning.

    Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times. He is the author of “Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road.” @kylebuchanan

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/movies/michelle-yeoh-oscars-next.html

     

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    A bank official trying to reassure worried depositors in 1933. Credit...Associated Press


    The Silicon Valley Bank Rescue Just Changed Capitalism
    March 15, 2023


    By Roger Lowenstein

    Mr. Lowenstein is a financial journalist and author of “When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management.”

    After a career of writing about bank failures, I wound up in the middle of one when my bank, Silicon Valley Bank, was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. On Saturday, when I tried to pay a bill online, I was greeted by this not very reassuring missive:

    “This page will be unavailable throughout the weekend, but will resume next week in accordance with the guidance provided by the F.D.I.C.” I wasn’t truly worried; small depositors like me had long ago internalized the rule that it made no sense to worry about your bank’s condition, since the risks of failure were borne by the F.D.I.C.

    Federal deposit insurance was introduced 90 years ago during the heart of the Great Depression. Ever since then, small depositors within the F.D.I.C. limit of coverage have slept soundly. Now, in light of the bank failures of the last few days and the F.D.I.C.’s extension of coverage, why will any depositor worry about risk? Having bailed out depositors of two banks in full, how will the government refuse others?

    Established as part of the landmark Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation initially provided deposit insurance up to $2,500, supported by premiums from member banks. The act was written by two Democrats, Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and Representative Henry Steagall of Alabama. Steagall wanted to protect rural banks, which had many small depositors, from contagious panics.

    In that era, banking “progressives” were centered in the heartland. During the 1920s, low farm prices led to waves of bank failures. Various states adopted insurance, but the statewide systems failed. Scores of bills for federal insurance were also introduced.

    The idea was controversial. The president of the American Bankers Association protested that insuring deposits was “unsound, unscientific and dangerous.” It was opposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and by his Treasury secretary, William H. Woodin. Roosevelt opposed insurance because he thought it would be costly and also encourage bad behavior. If there was no need to mollify depositors, then banks would be free to take all sorts of risks. Today we call this “moral hazard.”

    In 1933, an estimated 4,000 banks failed. Roosevelt took office in March, and declared a national bank holiday to prevent more failures. After a pointed debate, in June Roosevelt signed the Glass-Steagall Act.

    The F.D.I.C. definitely prevented panics. From its creation until America’s entry into World War II, banks failed at a rate of close to 50 per year, not bad considering the economic depression in most of that period. And most of the banks that failed were small.

    By the postwar period, deposit insurance seemed to have been created for an era that no longer existed. Bankers schooled in the 1930s tended toward prudence, and the industry was risk averse. The failure rate was exceptionally low. That all changed in the 1970s and ’80s. A combination of financial deregulation, revived animal spirits on Wall Street, and rising inflation led to financial instability and swings in interest rates. Voilà — bank failures returned.

    In recent days, many have been reminded of 2008 and ’09 (165 banks failed in those two years alone). But for the most part, that crisis was not the result of depositors pulling funds. Bear Stearns, Lehman and others failed or sought bailouts because overnight funding from professional investors disappeared. It dried up for two good reasons: Banks like Lehman had too much leverage, and they were overexposed to a very weak and widely held asset, mortgage securities.

    That was not the case with S.V.B.

    This panic was a classic bank run, and it bears an echo to a different historical episode. In the 1980s, lenders known as savings and loans had invested their funds in long-term mortgages paying a fixed rate of interest. When the Federal Reserve, under pressure of rising inflation, began to jack up rates, S.&L.s had to pay higher rates to attract deposits.

    The mismatch between the cost of their money and the (lower) rate that their mortgages earned sank the industry. Many switched to riskier assets to juice their returns, but as these investments soured, their problems worsened. Roughly a third, or about 1,000, S.&L.s failed. The F.D.I.C. was not (luckily for it) involved, because the S.&L.s were covered by a separate federal insurer. This agency, known as F.S.L.I.C., became insolvent, and the subsequent bailout was estimated to have cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

    Silicon Valley Bank’s failure looks a bit like an S.&L. crisis in miniature. Like its 1980s counterparts, S.V.B. grew extremely rapidly, had many assets parked in fixed, long-term bonds, and was done in when inflation caused the Fed to raise interest rates, raising the cost of keeping deposits.

    Like the S.&L.s, Silicon Valley Bank was heavily concentrated. It catered to start-ups for whom an S.V.B. account was a matter of status. One tech savant who had recently changed jobs (aren’t they always switching jobs?) told me that in his experience, roughly two thirds of start-ups banked with S.V.B. (the bank claimed that nearly half the country’s venture capital-backed technology and life science companies were customers).

    These crises provoked a widening of the federal safety net. Until the 1970s, the F.D.I.C. limit on deposit coverage increased only slowly. But in 1980, as banks came under pressure from soaring inflation, Congress raised the cap to $100,000, over the objections of the F.D.I.C. itself. In the 2008 crisis, the limit was raised to $250,000. And after the failure of IndyMac in 2008, the F.D.I.C., when possible, quietly protected uninsured depositors.

    In the rescue of S.V.B. on Friday and of Signature Bank in New York two days later, the F.D.I.C. overtly ignored the cap and rescued all depositors, irrespective of size. This is a breathtaking leap.

    Rescued seven-figure depositors were primarily venture companies steeped in the ideology of investing. The first plank of capitalism is that it entails risk. You cannot sensibly invest without assessing the chance for loss. If venture firms relied on groupthink rather than financial due diligence, that was their doing. In the case of Signature, which was exposed to the crypto industry, the rescue probably bailed out gamblers on speculative assets.

    Federal officials have seized on a technicality to claim that it is not a bailout: Any required rescue payments will come from a special assessment on (private) banks, not the public. Prudent banks, which hedged their exposure to interest rates and suffered a competitive cost for doing so, will be hit with the added expense. Most likely, banks will pass along the rescue costs in the form of higher fees to consumers.

    Strictly speaking, President Biden’s assurance that taxpayers are not on the line was accurate. However, in the sense that banking customers are a pretty big group, the “public” will be affected.

    Moreover, the hazardous effect on behavior will be the same.

    The regulators clearly failed to monitor S.V.B.’s unhealthy mismatch of assets and liabilities. Their job will be more difficult in the future, as risk taking on deposits has effectively become socialized. What if a bank opts to attract more funds by raising its interest rate on deposits? Can the regulators permit it? Wait a second, this is what all banks do.

    Once you take risk out of a part of a bank’s operations, it is hard to let market principles govern the rest. We should expect, at a minimum, tougher standards on bank capital (as now exists at the biggest banks), more regulation and higher costs. As this newspaper’s DealBook newsletter has predicted, more loans will move away from F.D.I.C.-member institutions to so-called shadow banks such as hedge funds, outside the purview of regulators.

    In past bank failures, uninsured depositors did not lose all — 10 to 15 percent was typical. And in this episode, there wasn’t any systemically bad asset à la mortgages in 2008. Given that the risk was contained, and that the Federal Reserve provides liquidity to banks facing runs (and provided emergency liquidity this week), allowing uninsured depositors of banks that fail to suffer a haircut might have been healthier for the system in the long run.

    And the bailout does nothing to address the condition that fostered financial instability: inflation. It may even exacerbate it. This is not what Henry Steagall had in mind.

    Roger Lowenstein is a financial journalist and the author of “Buffett” and, most recently, “Ways and Means:Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War.”

    The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.


    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/opinion/silicon-valley-bank-rescue-glass-steagall-act.html

     

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    TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, in the ByteDance offices in Singapore. The White House is hardening its stance toward the Chinese-owned video app.Credit...Ore Huiying for The New York Times


    U.S. Pushes for TikTok Sale to Resolve National Security Concerns
    The demand hardens the White House’s stance toward the popular video app, which is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance.

    By David McCabe and Cecilia Kang
    March 15, 2023
    阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版
    WASHINGTON — The Biden administration wants TikTok’s Chinese ownership to sell the app or face a possible ban, TikTok said on Wednesday, as the White House hardens its stance toward resolving national security concerns about the popular video service.

    The new demand to sell the app was delivered to TikTok in recent weeks, two people with knowledge of the matter said. TikTok is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance.

    The move is a significant shift in the Biden administration’s position toward TikTok, which has been under scrutiny over fears that Beijing could request Americans’ data from the app. The White House had been trying to negotiate an agreement with TikTok that would apply new safeguards to its data and eliminate a need for ByteDance to sell its shares in the app.

    But the demand for a sale — coupled with the White House’s support for legislation that would allow it to ban TikTok in the United States — hardens the administration’s approach. It harks back to the position of former President Donald J. Trump, who threatened to ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company.

    TikTok said it was weighing its options and was disappointed by the decision. The company said its security proposal, which involves storing Americans’ data in the United States, offered the best protection for users.

    “If protecting national security is the objective, divestment doesn’t solve the problem: A change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access,” Maureen Shanahan, a spokeswoman for TikTok, said in a statement.

    TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, is scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee next week. He is expected to face questions about the app’s ties to China, as well as concerns that it delivers harmful content to young people.

    A White House spokeswoman declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which has led the negotiations with TikTok. The Justice Department also declined to comment. The demand for a sale was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

    TikTok, with 100 million U.S. users, is at the center of a battle between the Biden administration and the Chinese government over tech and economic leadership, as well as national security. President Biden has waged a broad campaign against China with enormous funding programs to increase domestic production of semiconductors, electric vehicles and lithium batteries. The administration has also banned Chinese telecommunications equipment and restricted U.S. exports of chip-manufacturing equipment to China.

    The fight over TikTok began in 2020 when Mr. Trump said he would ban the app unless ByteDance sold its stake to an American company, a move recommended by a group of federal agencies known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.

    The Trump administration eventually appeared to reach a deal for ByteDance to sell part of TikTok to Oracle, the U.S. cloud computing company, and Walmart. But the potential transaction never came to fruition.

    CFIUS staff and TikTok continued to negotiate a deal that would allow the app to operate in America. TikTok submitted a major draft of an agreement — which TikTok has called Project Texas — in August. Under the proposal, the company said it would store data belonging to U.S. users on server computers run by Oracle inside the United States.

    TikTok officials have not heard back from CFIUS officials since they submitted their proposal, the company said.

    In that vacuum, concerns about the app have intensified. States, schools and Congress have enacted bans on TikTok. Last year, a company investigation found that Chinese-based employees of ByteDance had access to the data of U.S. TikTok users, including reporters.

    Brendan Carr, a Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, said the administration’s new demand was a “good sign” that the White House was taking a harder line.

    “There is bipartisan consensus that we can’t compromise on U.S. national security when it comes to TikTok, and so I hope the CFIUS review now quickly concludes in a manner that safeguards U.S. interests,” Mr. Carr said.

    The White House last week backed a bipartisan Senate bill that would give it more power to deal with TikTok, including by banning the app. If it passed, the legislation would give the administration more leverage in its negotiations with the app and potentially allow it to force a sale.

    Any effort to ban the app or force its sale could face a legal challenge. Federal courts ultimately ruled against Mr. Trump’s attempt to block the app from appearing in Apple’s and Google’s app stores. And the American Civil Liberties Union recently condemned legislation to ban the app, saying it raises concerns under the First Amendment.

    David McCabe covers tech policy. He joined The Times from Axios in 2019. 

    Cecilia Kang covers technology and regulation and joined The Times in 2015. She is a co-author, along with Sheera Frenkel of The Times, of “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination.” @ceciliakang

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/technology/tiktok-biden-pushes-sale.html

     

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    Tammy Cunningham with her son, Calum. She gave birth while hospitalized with severe Covid-19.Credit...Kaiti Sullivan for The New York Times

     

    Covid Worsened a Health Crisis Among Pregnant Women
    In 2021, deaths of pregnant women soared by 40 percent in the United States, according to new government figures. Here’s how one family coped after the virus threatened a pregnant mother.

    By Roni Caryn Rabin
    March 16, 2023
    KOKOMO, Ind. — Tammy Cunningham doesn’t remember the birth of her son. She was not quite seven months pregnant when she became acutely ill with Covid-19 in May 2021. By the time she was taken by helicopter to an Indianapolis hospital, she was coughing and gasping for breath.

    The baby was not due for another 11 weeks, but Ms. Cunningham’s lungs were failing. The medical team, worried that neither she nor the fetus would survive so long as she was pregnant, asked her fiancé to authorize an emergency C-section.

    “I asked, ‘Are they both going to make it?’” recalled Matt Cunningham. “And they said they couldn’t answer that.”

    New government data suggest that scenes like this played out with shocking frequency in 2021, the second year of the pandemic.

    The National Center for Health Statistics reported on Thursday that 1,205 pregnant women died in 2021, representing a 40 percent increase in maternal deaths compared with 2020, when there were 861 deaths, and a 60 percent increase compared with 2019, when there were 754.

    The count includes deaths of women who were pregnant or had been pregnant within the last 42 days, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy. A separate report by the Government Accountability Office has cited Covid as a contributing factor in at least 400 maternal deaths in 2021, accounting for much of the increase.

    Even before the pandemic, the United States had the highest maternal mortality rate of any industrialized nation. The coronavirus worsened an already dire situation, pushing the rate to 32.9 per 100,000 births in 2021 from 20.1 per 100,000 live births in 2019.

    The racial disparities have been particularly acute. The maternal mortality rate among Black women rose to 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2021, 2.6 times the rate among white women. From 2020 to 2021, mortality rates doubled among Native American and Alaska Native women who were pregnant or had given birth within the previous year, according to a study published on Thursday in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

    The deaths tell only part of the story. For each woman who died of a pregnancy-related complication, there were many others, like Ms. Cunningham, who experienced the kind of severe illness that leads to premature birth and can compromise the long-term health of both mother and child. Lost wages, medical bills and psychological trauma add to the strain.

    Pregnancy leaves women uniquely vulnerable to infectious diseases like Covid. The heart, lungs and kidneys are all working harder during pregnancy. The immune system, while not exactly depressed, is retuned to accommodate the fetus.

    Abdominal pressure reduces excess lung capacity. Blood clots more easily, a tendency amplified by Covid, raising the risk of dangerous blockages. The infection also appears to damage the placenta, which delivers oxygen and nutrients to the fetus, and may increase the risk of a dangerous complication of pregnancy called pre-eclampsia.

    Pregnant women with Covid face a sevenfold risk of dying compared with uninfected pregnant women, according to one large meta-analysis tracking unvaccinated people. The infection also makes it more likely that a woman will give birth prematurely and that the baby will require neonatal intensive care.

    Fortunately, the current Omicron variant appears to be less virulent than the Delta variant, which surfaced in the summer of 2021, and more people have acquired immunity to the coronavirus by now. Preliminary figures suggest maternal deaths dropped to roughly prepandemic levels in 2022.

    But pregnancy continues to be a factor that makes even young women uniquely vulnerable to severe illness. Ms. Cunningham, now 39, who was slightly overweight when she became pregnant, had just been diagnosed with gestational diabetes when she got sick.

    “It’s something I talk to all my patients about,” said Dr. Torri Metz, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at the University of Utah. “If they have some of these underlying medical conditions and they’re pregnant, both of which are high-risk categories, they have to be especially careful about putting themselves at risk of exposure to any kind of respiratory virus, because we know that pregnant people get sicker from those viruses.”

    Lagging Vaccination
    In the summer of 2021, scientists were somewhat unsure of the safety of mRNA vaccines during pregnancy; pregnant women had been excluded from the clinical trials, as they often are. It was not until August 2021 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came out with unambiguous guidance supporting vaccination for pregnant women.

    Most of the pregnant women who died of Covid had not been vaccinated. These days, more than 70 percent of pregnant women have gotten Covid vaccines, but only about 20 percent have received the bivalent boosters.

    “We know definitively that vaccination prevents severe disease and hospitalization and prevents poor maternal and infant outcomes,” said Dr. Dana Meaney-Delman, chief of the C.D.C.’s infant outcomes monitoring, research and prevention branch. “We have to keep emphasizing that point.”

    Ms. Cunningham’s obstetrician had encouraged her to get the shots, but she vacillated. She was “almost there” when she suddenly started having unusually heavy nosebleeds that produced blood clots “the size of golf balls,” she said.

    Ms. Cunningham was also feeling short of breath, but she ascribed that to the advancing pregnancy. (Many Covid symptoms can be missed because they resemble those normally occurring in pregnancy.)

    A Covid test came back negative, and Ms. Cunningham was happy to return to her job. She had already lost wages after earlier pandemic furloughs at the auto parts plant where she worked. On May 3, 2021, shortly after clocking in, she turned to a friend at the plant and said, “I can’t breathe.”

    By the time she arrived at IU Health Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, she was in acute respiratory distress. Doctors diagnosed pneumonia and found patchy shadows in her lungs.

    Her oxygen levels continued falling even after she was put on undiluted oxygen, and even after the baby was delivered.

    “It was clear her lungs were extremely damaged and unable to work on their own,” said Dr. Omar Rahman, a critical care physician who treated Ms. Cunningham. Already on a ventilator, Ms. Cunningham was connected to a specialized heart-lung bypass machine.

    Jennifer McGregor, a friend who visited Ms. Cunningham in the hospital, was shocked at how quickly her condition had deteriorated. “I can’t tell you how many bags were hanging there, and how many tubes were going into her body,” she said.

    But over the next 10 days, Ms. Cunningham started to recover. Once she was weaned off the heart-lung machine, she discovered she had missed a major life event while under sedation: She had a son.

    He was born 29 weeks and two days into the pregnancy, weighing three pounds.

    Premature births declined slightly during the first year of the pandemic. But they rose sharply in 2021, the year of the Delta surge, reaching the highest rate since 2007.

    Some 10.5 percent of all births were preterm that year, up from 10.1 percent in 2020, and from 10.2 percent in 2019, the year before the pandemic.

    Though the Cunninghams’ baby, Calum, never tested positive for Covid, he was hospitalized in the neonatal intensive care unit at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. He was on a breathing tube, and occasionally stopped breathing for seconds at a time.

    Doctors worried that he was not gaining weight quickly enough — “failure to thrive,” they wrote in his chart. They worried about possible vision and hearing loss.

    But after 66 days in the NICU, the Cunninghams were able to take Calum home. They learned how to use his feeding tube by practicing on a mannequin, and they prepared for the worst.

    “From everything they told us, he was going to have developmental delays and be really behind,” Mr. Cunningham said.

    After her discharge from the hospital, Ms. Cunningham was under strict orders to have a caretaker with her at all times and to rest. She didn’t return to work for seven months, after she finally secured her doctors’ approval.

    Ms. Cunningham has three teenage daughters, and Mr. Cunningham has another daughter from a previous relationship. Money was tight. Friends dropped off groceries, and the landlord accepted late payments. But the Cunninghams received no government aid: They were even turned down for food stamps.

    “We had never asked for assistance in our lives,” Ms. Cunningham said. “We were workers. We used to work seven days a week, eight-hour days, sometimes 12. But when the whole world shut down in 2020, we used up a lot of our savings, and then I got sick. We never got caught up.”

    Though she is back to work at the plant, Ms. Cunningham has lingering symptoms, including migraines and short-term memory problems. She forgets doctor’s appointments and what she went to the store for. Recently she left her card in an A.T.M.

    Many patients are so traumatized by their stays in intensive care units that they develop so-called post-intensive care syndrome. Ms. Cunningham has flashbacks and nightmares about being back in the hospital.

    “I wake up feeling like I’m being smothered at the hospital, or that they’re killing my whole family,” she said. Recently she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

    Calum, however, has surprised everyone. Within months of coming home from the hospital, he was reaching developmental milestones on time. He started walking soon after his first birthday, and likes to chime in with “What’s up?” and “Uh-oh!”

    He has been back to the hospital for viral infections, but his vocabulary and comprehension are superb, his father said. “If you ask if he wants a bath, he’ll take off all his clothes and meet you at the bath,” he said.

    Louann Gross, who owns the day care that Calum attends, said he has a hearty appetite — often asking for “thirds” — and more than keeps up with his peers. She added, “I nicknamed him our ‘Superbaby.’”

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/health/covid-pregnancy-death.html

     

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    Two skeletons that were found last year as part of an archaeological dig in northern England.Credit...West Yorkshire Joint Services


    A 1,600-Year-Old Coffin May Shed Light on Roman Britain
    A lead-lined coffin that was discovered in northern England could offer clues about the area’s transition from the Roman Empire to its Anglo-Saxon period.

    By Jenny Gross
    Published March 15, 2023
    Updated March 16, 2023
    LONDON — British archaeologists have uncovered an ancient coffin in a 1,600-year-old cemetery in northern England, a discovery, they said, that could shed light on the end of Roman Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

    Discovered during an archaeological dig in Leeds, the lead-lined coffin contained the remains of an aristocratic woman who most likely lived in the fourth century.

    Archaeologists also found the remains of more than 60 people who lived in the area more than a thousand years ago. Some bodies were buried on their backs with their legs straight out, in accordance with late-Roman customs. Others adhered to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, within which burials often included items such as clothes fasteners and knives.

    The archaeological dig was part of a consultation process for a company applying for permission to build on the site. Archaeologists had previously uncovered late-Roman stone buildings and a number of structures in the Anglo-Saxon architectural style in the area.

    “Very quickly, we started finding burials,” said David Hunter, the principal archaeologist of the West Yorkshire Archaeology Advisory Service, which works with the West Yorkshire planning authorities. “The potential is there to give us much better information on how this transition from the Roman population to Anglo-Saxon England happened.”

    Mr. Hunter said that the presence of both late-Roman and early-Anglo Saxon people on the same burial site was unusual. Whether the use of the graveyard had overlapped between the two eras would determine the significance of the find, he added.

    The Roman occupation of Britain, from 43 A.D. to around 410, transformed the culture, as settlers from Europe, the Middle East and Africa arrived. Around the third century, market towns and villages were established, and Roman objects became more common even in poor, rural areas, according to English Heritage, which manages prehistoric sites, medieval castles and Roman forts in England.

    After the Romans retreated from Britain, society became much more insular and parochial, Mr. Hunter said. A lot is unknown about the period, including how the area transitioned from being part of the Roman Empire in the early fifth century to part of the English nation in the 10th.

    “Different people have different theories as to how this could have happened: It could’ve happened by cooperation, it could’ve happened by aggression,” he said.

    These findings may add to knowledge about an era that is largely undocumented, Mr. Hunter said. Radiocarbon dating could help determine exactly when the remains were buried. Chemical tests could reveal the diets and ancestry of the people.

    Researchers would also like to understand why there were a number of instances in which two or three people were buried in the same grave, as well as why there were multiple burial styles in the same cemetery.

    Mr. Hunter said that the two different burial styles could be for reasons of practicality; Since the area was already recognized as a burial place by Roman Britons, it would have been easier for subsequent groups of people to have used the same site.

    While the discovery was made in February 2022, the findings were only announced on Monday, in order to keep the site safe and conduct tests on some of the findings, the Leeds City Council said in a statement. The discovery of a lead-lined coffin is rare, with only a few hundred having been discovered in Britain, said Kylie Buxton, on-site supervisor for the excavations.

    The council has not released the exact location of the dig. After the analysis is completed, the lead coffin may be displayed at the Leeds City Museum, in an exhibition on death and burial customs, officials said.

    A correction was made on March 16, 2023: An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to English Heritage. The organization manages prehistoric sites, medieval castles and Roman forts in England, not in the rest of Britain. (Other groups manage such sites in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.)
    When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

    Jenny Gross is a general assignment reporter. Before joining The Times, she covered British politics for The Wall Street Journal. @jggross

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/world/europe/uk-roman-burial-leeds.html#:~:text=By Jenny Gross March 15%2C 2023 LONDON —,Roman Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

     

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    Mr. Higashitani, seen on a computer monitor, celebrating after winning his election to a seat in the House of Councillors in July 2022.Credit...Kyodo News, via Getty Images

     

    How to Get Kicked Out of Parliament: Livestream Instead of Legislating
    The upper house of Japan’s Parliament almost unanimously voted to expel an eccentric YouTuber who won a seat last year. The reason: He never showed up for work.


    By Tiffany May and Hisako Ueno
    March 15, 2023
    Since he was elected to Japan’s Parliament in July, Yoshikazu Higashitani has spread celebrity gossip on his YouTube channel, explored the sights of Dubai and handed out snacks to children displaced by an earthquake in Turkey.

    One thing he has not done is show up for work.

    On Wednesday, he was expelled from Japan’s upper house of Parliament, the House of Councillors, making him the first elected lawmaker in the country to be removed from office in more than seven decades.

    Before his short-lived career as a lawmaker, Mr. Higashitani, 51, was well-known for his lengthy livestreams during which he dished out salacious celebrity gossip under the alias “GaaSyy.” He ran for Parliament from Dubai, claiming that he could not return to Japan because the police were investigating him for fraud. While in self-imposed exile, he campaigned and promised to expose dozens of celebrity scandals.

    To the surprise of many, he won — running as the candidate of the single-issue NHK Party, which is dedicated to making changes to how Japan’s national broadcaster is funded. But he has missed every session in the House of Councillors since then.

    In the meantime, he has maintained diverse interests, balancing his lengthy rants about celebrities with breezy posts about touring La Sagrada Familia in Spain and playing water sports in Thailand, using the hashtag “#endlesssummer.”  Last week, he said he traveled to Turkey, and in videos posted online was seen distributing snacks to children in areas devastated by a February earthquake, in front of a camera crew.

    The founder of the NHK Party, Takashi Tachibana, told reporters in January that the police had asked Mr. Higashitani, a fellow party member, to cooperate with investigations related to accusations of defamatory comments and threats he had made in his videos, and that the YouTuber would return to the country in March. (The police declined to comment.)

    In February, the House of Councillors demanded that Mr. Higashitani apologize in an open session, a disciplinary act second only to expulsion. He had agreed to do so, only to backtrack on that decision last week, saying that he did not feel safe enough to return, despite having immunity from arrest as a lawmaker.

    Mr. Tachibana said last Wednesday that he would step down as head of the party. “As party leader, I will take responsibility for GaaSyy’s failure to keep his promise that he would come back to the upper house to make an apology,” Mr. Tachibana said at a news conference.

    He added that the party would be renamed “Seijika Joshi 48 To,” which translates to Politician Girls 48 Party, and that the actress Ayaka Otsu would replace him. Mr. Tachibana said that the party would broaden its goals and would also recruit only female candidates to run for upcoming local elections.

    Koichi Nakano, a professor of comparative politics at Sophia University in Tokyo, said that the party’s rebranding was a response to a movement to increase the number of female candidates in elections.

    “NHK Party must have thought that they can poke fun at that in a right-wing, misogynist way, by treating female candidates as if they were teen pop idols like AKB48,” Professor Nakano wrote in an email, referring to a popular female pop group.

    He added that Mr. Higashitani’s notoriety and what he characterized as the populist appeal of his party got him elected. “It’s unusual, to a degree, but Japan has had its own share of media-celebrities who are complete amateurs of politics, including comedians, actors and pop singers, though none was as unserious as GaaSyy,” Professor Nakano added.

    Jeff Kingston, a professor of Asian studies at Temple University’s Japan campus, wrote in an email: “The NHK party, despite rebranding, has achieved little except to register discontent with the establishment and unhappiness with the mandatory fees every household has to pay, even if they don’t watch NHK.”

    Muneo Suzuki, who heads a key disciplinary committee in Parliament, told reporters on Tuesday that Mr. Higashitani had already been given ample time to correct his behavior, but that he had ultimately undermined the electoral process. “GaaSyy doesn’t understand what democracy means in principle,” he said.

    Dozens of protesters, mostly members of the Seijika Joshi 48 Party, rallied in front of the legislature before lawmakers cast votes over whether to expel Mr. Higashitani. Among the 236 lawmakers who attended the session, all but one voted in favor of his ouster.

    Mr. Higashitani could not be immediately reached for comment, but in a statement read on the House floor by Satoshi Hamada, a fellow lawmaker, Mr. Higashitani said that his removal was unjust.

    “There will continue to be people like me running for office. If you do not want the world you have made to be destroyed, please exclude those people from candidacy from the very beginning,” he wrote in the statement. “I wish the same punishment upon lawmakers who leave their seats immediately after propping up their nameplates and ones who are asleep and don’t show up like myself.”

    Tiffany May covers news from Asia. She joined The Times in 2017. @nytmay

    Hisako Ueno has been reporting on Japanese politics, business, gender, labor and culture for The Times since 2012. She previously worked for the Tokyo bureau of The Los Angeles Times from 1999 to 2009. @hudidi1

    Article
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/world/asia/japan-parliament-youtuber-expelled.html
     

     

  18. Lance Reddick

    now04.jpg

    rest in peace

    PHOTO LINK

    if you want to make donations to his memory

    MOMCares or https://www.momcares.org/

     

     

  19. @Pioneer1 east harlem had mostly white italians and white jews, and then blacks came in and then the puerto ricans side other latin americans. HArlem before the white italians and jews waslike the hamptons, for people from southern manhattan to come and live in grand estates. Before the grand estates it was farm land or rural, connected to the bronx which was run by the bronx family as a dairy estate.
  20. enjoy the entry, others for various days throughout the year are present.
  21. Enjoy the video https://www.tumblr.com/@radar/711883141759074304/spotlight-delroy-lindo-unprisoned
  22. @Chevdove By the west if you mean, the usa plus the western european countries plus australia then yes china has built more infrastructure than them all combined. China has been busy building up china. Roads/railway lines, buildings, hospitals, schools, the tiangong space station,water reservoirs, mining operations, shipping ports, which is the source of the issue with hong kong. comprehend, MAcau is the gambling capitol of the world. not las vegas or monaco .MAcau was just like hong kong but portuguese not english. The deal was the city goes back to china after a certain time. But why is it hong kong is complainging and macau isn't? why is the chinese government inconcerned with one special administrative division macau, while trying to redirect another special administration division. In the 1970s when nixon went to china, china didn't have a port for the incoming usa business which would be followed by the rest of the west, but england had a port that would be chinese one day, Hong Kong, and times was great for the anglophile hong kong financial elite. Consider for a solid ten years, but involving twenty at scale, hong kong was the only mouth for goods in and out of china, so all those usa firms, would ship to hong kong into mainland china and get from hong kong from mainland, circa 80% of all goods in and out of china came through hong kong. but china got busy. Guangzhou/shanghai/beijing/shenzen all these mainland chinese cities took over the traffic industry that hong kong had. Hong Kong couldn't keep up with the infrastructure development of mainland china. And because mainland china was wise to make sure all business in china goes through a vetting, the ability to control that traffic was simple. So Hong Kong no longer is a main shipping port, to be blunt , the hong kong film industry and the shipping industry are miniscule in the larger china picture where as in the 1970s 1980s hong kong was the source. so financially hong kong has lost its place. THink of it like new orleans, new orleans was at one time the second most important city in the usa, financially in shipping, but the usa kept growing and new orleans became less important. So, without a monetary value, the mainland chinese government hasn't decided to take away hong kong but is clowly changing the culture of the hong kong people, demanding mandarin in schools. And just so you know, the agreement with england didn't say that hong kong was to have self rule, the agreement with england said china would get back completely the entirety of hong kong and anything else around the british empire had. China agreed to allow hong kong its own currency/passports/local government/port status/banking/ but the contention came in with the legal system. A man murdered a woman , a taiwanese woman, cut her up in a bag from hong kong but the chinese government constitution has a strict rule , all chinese citizens, which includes the chinese in hong kong, have to be tried by chinese courts for all crimes regardless of any external courts. So china has been using their power to change certain legal loopholes in hong kong to the larger chinese law and that with the growing influence of the mainland on hong kong has made many people in hong kong cry foul, but the mainland hasn't done anything wrong. The federal government of the usa has stepped in many tiems on states or cities. The west doesn't critique the spanish government when it manipulates their special regions for catalonia or et cetera. But this is china, a non white european country and a country that is a military rival to the usa, thus , criminalize. YEah, well, China is also building up in south america- like roads and bridges in places like ecuador/the rest of asia- like indonesia will have a new railway / all over. China has been building everything, yes their military, but also all sorts of infrastructure projects. The problem with china from a mere image perspective is that the chinese government is the dominant financial player in china. MEaning, the usa government actually is the biggest business in the usa, but doesn't appear that way. while in china, the private business owners have a direct rival in a branch of the chinese government. That was china's answer to the usa coming in. IT will keep their one party system, which has factions in it. So it isn't what people think, the chinese government has one party but think of it like the party of abraham lincoln in the usa today, the commonly called republicans. The republicans have, the fiscal wing/the war hawks wing, the maga wing, the tea party wing, the reform wing, and others. This is how the chinese one party works. They have wings, all to often based on generations not just merely ideology. So china has been busy, and is china imperial? 100% just like the USa/Russia. just like india wishes, and england/france/spain/germany/italy wish to be again. Yes, the han chinese in china are the majority group, like whites in the usa are the majority group. the ugyars are a minority, like blacks, yes the han chinese are dominating or taking advantage of a minority group. yes, but whites do it in the usa all the time. In russia, tartars or chechens are abused to, just like the native americans in the usa. IS it negative? yes. But , all countries have this. My issue with the ugyars is the usa acts like it is legal for a native american to start any business they want on a reservation, which isn't the case. Even though reservations are supposed to be territorially out the bounds of the usa control. Minority peoples are abused throughout all humanity in every country and yet, the han chinese doing it in china is sin. Is it positive? no again. but I call it a non issue. LEt's help the native american if everyone in the usa is so concerned abused minority peoples. And hong kong is a non issue. THe problem with hong kong is what I said about the black community in the usa or most countries. a set of chinese people in a now former territory of a non chinese empire had it good financially and thought themselves better than the majority of their fellow chinese people, but the majority actually were able to grow and said minority is now complaining that said majority is treating them appropriately. As i said, the black one percent in the usa, the wealthy blacks are full of it. They are and in my view, in cheap hindsight, the black one percent has been problematic to the larger village. And black advocates to the village have struggled trying to figure out a way to get an agenda that suits the majority of black people in the usa, who want prosperity but not necessarily integration with the wealthy minority of black people in the usa, who want prosperity through integration. Comprehend when the war between the states ended you had a black majority, 90%, that was enslaved. They hated whites and had a distant form of christianity. remember, it was after the war between the states that the black community became episopalian and baptist and et cetera, during slave times, that majority was its own form of christian really, with the negro spirituals and no churches or sunday clothes or any of that pomp later. But the 10% of blacks at the end of the war between the states , were the black advocates, black wealthy, black elected leaders, black paid laborers. many of whom were completely patroned by whites and had little incentive for the anti white energy of the majority of black people now "free". I think china has done well to manage the europhile financial elites in their community, spearheaded by the people of hong kong, if only the majority of black people in south africa could do that to all the oxford chieftan sons and et cetera. To India, I Want to first do the honey, before the pot. India unlike china was dominated by one country. England had the entire country, plus modern day pakistan or bangladesh. china was cut up by foreigners. That while simple to say i think had huge influences on how china or india have grown to today. The Chinese when Citizen Mao defeated the , in my opinion, tiresome traitor , shangkaishek, who I think has a lot in common with WEB Dubois. anyway... when Mao gained victory in mainland china, he had a people's who had been dominated by not just white europeans, but Statians, from the usa, plus Chrysanthemum throne. So you have white europeans but also the usa has a part of country, a country that says all men are creating equal owns part of your country, making tons of profits. And your neighbor across the ocean owns a part of your country. so I think china has in its soul at the moment, a huge sense of us against the world. Neighbors/newer countries/older countries all can take advantage of you. and will. Thus way the chinese government works. As in their constitution, all who step in china have to deal with chinese law first. I think that explains my case better than anything I said. People forget Mao hid in western china with the ugyars, he was han chinese but he saw the future of china including all people's of china. But india was dominated, cruelly, meanfully, by one country. And I think that led to a different idea when they were founded. yes, the wanted the british gone, but the future of india wasn't including all indians, like with china with all chinese including ugyars. Thus pakisan and bangladesh, who are both majority muslim, separated quick, with little pause, from the india in the middle. And india is a country where hindus as the majority and the I personally think dysfunctional parsi , the financial aristrocracy of india, are all in it for themselves. the attacks on muslims in india by hindus is to me a far greater minority abuse than the han chinese to the ugyars but india speaks english, has the english parliamentary system, has embedded racial biases that are deemed acceptable. The caste is like phenotypical bias in the usa. It doesn't necessarily block all in the lower castes from growth or happiness but it blocks most. Now for the pot. And to your question of infrastructure. All infrastructure projects at their heart reflect who the financier wants to help. right? and as i type in india, hindus are attacking muslims murderously, a majority on a minority. so, the people called indian are not one. Which is to me , not a big deal cause that is in many countries. that explains nigeria or south africa or brazil or... . BEing one people's isn't about a lack or growth of humanity. IT is about culture to be blunt. all humans are human, but just because another human is human does not mean you want to live next to them, to aid in their growth. And that is human as much as giving food to a hungry child you never saw before. But to infrastructure, it explains the lack of infrastructure in india. India is very compartmentalized. when you go to Mumbai, it is big city lights with internet and skyscrapers and hospitals and steam baths and all these things, but not to far from mumbai, is a dirt village without a water pump at the well. Whereas in china, a general quality exists that is better than most and comparable to the scandanavian european countries who have lots of natural resources, small populations, and no need for heavy military financing for now. Gandhi knew. He talked constantly about the internal cultural problems of india. And while it is negative it isn't a problem, just a part of humanity. In contrast. most black people in the usa I think feel whites are the other, but the situation the black community in the usa is in, as a decentralized people geographically in the usa, which the black one percent supported and support, made it where the ability to get the modern black community to embrace the white was easier than to get the hindu and muslim in india who are geographically entrenched usually. But, until the human populace in india becomes one in its heart, not just the law, the infrastructure will reflect the lack of love that the groups have to each other in the country. Flint Michigan, mostly black, is not far from mostly white suburbs of complete opulence. The problem is india like its anglophone predecessors speaks , or advertises itself, as one when it isn't. But I end with a little prediction. India has never deemed the west as their militaristic ally, never. And like China, India is a militaristic ally to Russia. The three don't trust each other necessarily, but all three dislike the usa and its western european satraps. so, I can see a merger, the big problem is, while russia and china exist more distantly to the russian or chinese communities in the usa or western europe<like in NYC for example>, the indian communities int he usa or western europe, are tightly bonded to india still. so, it will be interesting how india handles being militaristically opposed to the west while so many indians live in the west and don't want to break ties with india.
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