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☆ Opinion: Biden’s secret weapon to defuse the age issue
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-30 | by ( Opinion Dean Obeidallah | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

Recent polls tell us that many Americans have questions about the age of the 80-year-old Biden heading into the 2024 election. It’s in everybody’s mind and by everyone, I mean The New York Times.” Biden then added, “Headline: ‘Biden’s advanced age is a big issue. Biden’s reelection campaign (he announced his bid last week) is not the first time that age has been front and center in a presidential campaign. It became even more acute after the first presidential debate in October 1984. At the second presidential debate, however, Reagan was ready for the age question.

☆ Opinion: Harry Belafonte lived in – and transformed – two worlds
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Opinion Gene Seymour | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

Gene Seymour Jeremy Freeman/CNNBut history, as it often does, had other ideas for Belafonte, who died April 25 at 96, having lived a long, full life as both entertainer and activist. The times he lived in paved a smoother way for him than the one faced by his mentor and hero Paul Robeson. On the other hand, there was, relatively speaking, only so much Belafonte could do on the entertainment side. Here, as elsewhere in Belafonte’s life, the activism and the entertainment sides of his public life worked in tandem to buttress, offset and enhance the other. Join us on Twitter and FacebookAnd in a gratifying sense, the push-pull of history’s demands worked in Belafonte’s favor as a screen actor.

☆ 10 fascinating theme parks that have closed forever
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-19 | by ( Joe Yogerst | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

In April, we’re taking a thrilling ride into the world of theme parks. “We think of amusement parks as vibrant, colorful, noisy, cheerful places,” says Jim Futrell of the National Amusement Park Historical Association. Pripyat Amusement Park (Ukraine)The Pripyat Amusement Park was built right before the Chernobyl disaster. Yongma Land (South Korea)Once in a blue moon, abandoned theme parks find new life by adopting totally new functions. Faced with increased competition from Orlando’s modern theme parks, Cypress Gardens closed in 2009 and was eventually absorbed into LEGOLAND Florida.

☆ Hollywood Wants You to Tear Up Over Flamin’ Hot Cheetos
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-06 | by ( John Jurgensen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

‘Flamin’ Hot,’ which tells the origin story of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, is in a wave of movies about famous products and the people behind them. Famous products are the stars of a new batch of movies rolling off the assembly line to theaters and streaming platforms. Their titles leverage the brand recognition of their subjects: an addictive videogame from the ’80s (“Tetris”), a once-hot smartphone (“ BlackBerry ”), a spicy line of snacks (“Flamin’ Hot”) and history’s most collectible sneaker (“Air”). They’re origin stories about the people who brought hit merchandise to market. Their eureka moments, pitch meetings and contract negotiations are the stuff of cinematic drama.

☆ ‘MH370: The Plane That Disappeared’ Review: Through the Fog of Theories
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-08 | by ( John Anderson | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

Amelia Earhart will always be among history’s mythic disappearing acts, but aviation’s reigning mystery is the 2014 vanishing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The calamity, which occurred nine years ago this week, remains as much a puzzle as ever according to “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared,” a three-part Netflix documentary series that banks and swoops and rolls through all the possibilities, landing on the only consensus ever reached: that none of what happened was an accident. To recap, the Boeing 777 left Kuala Lumpur in the early hours of March 8, a “routine red-eye,” as someone says, that was supposed to deposit its 227 passengers and 12 crew people in Beijing later that morning. As it was about to leave Malaysian airspace, the air-traffic controller and pilot bid each other good night. It was the last thing heard from MH370, which never made contact with Ho Chi Minh City and whose multiple communications systems suddenly went dark.

☆ Three Years Into Covid, We Still Don’t Know How to Talk About It
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-22 | by ( Jon Mooallem | Photographs Ashley Gilbertson | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +53 min

It will play out and reverberate for years or decades, Hagen told me. “The pathological normal,” Hagen calls it: a patchwork of homespun, bespoke realities, each one invested in a different story about what exactly happened when Covid ruptured the story of our lives. garb.”More than once, life seemed to be attaining “an uncanny resemblance to normal life,” as one man put it. But because we don’t totally understand where that experience has delivered us, we don’t know the right gloss to give it. “The days are strange,” one public-school teacher told Milstein toward the end of his first interview, in May 2020.

☆ AI bot that lets you chat with Jesus, Hitler is latest GPT-3 controversy
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-20 | by ( David Ingram | David Ingram Covers Tech For Nbc News. | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +9 min

But this week, it sparked viral controversy online over its inclusion of Hitler, his Nazi lieutenants and other dictators from the past. Historical Figures, which also uses GPT-3, launched the first week of January, and as of Wednesday, it had about 9,000 signups, app creator Sidhant Chadda said in a phone interview. “People expect these historical figures to be truthful, but in reality, people are not always 100% honest,” he said. Asking a question costs one coin, and the app charges extra to get access to high-profile historical figures. The possibility of digitally re-animating historical figures has been gaining ground ever since, from the “The Simpsons” to holograms of dead idols such as Buddy Holly and Whitney Houston.

☆ At 3 a.m., Mourners Were Still Waiting Hours to See Pelé
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-03 | by ( Jack Nicas | Dado Galdieri | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The streets were empty, the shops were closed and a dog howled in the distance. Then, a few blocks from the soccer stadium that put this port city on the map, there were signs of life. The soccer star Pelé’s 24-hour wake was in its 17th hour, and by the looks of the crowd, one day might not have been enough. The Santos soccer club estimated that 230,000 mourners had been through the stadium. “This is no sacrifice,” said Walter Henrique, 35, a tax analyst who traveled three hours to the wake and had to be at work in five hours, yet had another few hours before he would be through the line.

☆ A lost ecosystem revealed in Greenland by oldest environmental DNA
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-10 | by ( Ashley Strickland | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

A long time agoAn artist's illustration reconstructs Greenland's unique ecosystem as it existed 2 million years ago. Beth ZaikenScientists in Denmark have found the world’s oldest DNA sequences in sediment from the ice age. The core, taken from northern Greenland, revealed that the polar region was once abundant with plant and animal life 2 million years ago. Mastodons, reindeer, geese, lemmings and hares lived in an ecosystem that was a mix of temperate and Arctic flora and fauna. The fossil includes the head, neck and body together — a rare discovery for the marine reptiles, which didn’t preserve well in one piece.

☆ The incredible true story of the time an astronaut played golf on the moon
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-02 | by ( Jack Bantock | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +13 min

The resulting creation, a Wilson Staff Dyna-Power 6-iron head, was tucked away in Shepard’s space suit for launch, with a few balls hidden in a sock. “Miles and miles and miles,” the jubilant astronaut remarked as the ball sailed out of his view, swallowed by the infinite blackness of space. What does any of that have to do with an astronaut playing golf on the moon? Saunders believed Shepard’s “miles and miles” remark to have been made tongue-in-cheek, an almost instinctive reflex of his hyper-competitive, “fighter-jock” nature. “We always talk about getting to the moon, landing on the moon, returning back to Earth – that’s how we think of the moon,” Odom said.

☆ Tom Stoppard Fears the Virus of Antisemitism Has Been Reactivated
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-28 | by ( David Marchese | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +19 min

I don’t think that it’s an equal participant in some kind of debate. I don’t think so. If you’re sitting there enjoying the structure, then I don’t think that’s entirely good news for the writer. I don’t know that I would actually pursue the subject as a playwright. You know, I’m told there is such a thing as the long view.

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said herself, quoting scripture on the House floor Thursday: “For everything there is a season — a time for every purpose under heaven.”For Pelosi, the season to be leader of House Democrats has passed. She’ll continue to represent San Francisco while serving as an invaluable source of guidance and resolve for the next generation of House Democratic leaders. At 82, Pelosi is a historic figure, of course: the first female House speaker and one of the strongest speakers, if not the strongest, that America has ever seen. Yet as a minority in a GOP-run House, Democrats won’t be able to rack up accomplishments like they did in the last two years. There were calls for Pelosi to step aside in 2010 when Democrats lost 60 House seats — a true wipeout.

☆ FTX flop evokes history’s great financial swindles
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-18 | by ( Edward Chancellor | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +7 min

As Walter Bagehot wrote in “Lombard Street” in 1873, “The good times too of high price almost always engender much fraud. As cryptocurrencies declined in value, FTX provided a line of credit to BlockFi, a stricken crypto-lender. He talked about Three Arrows Capital, the failed crypto hedge fund, as engaged in “punting”. His firm launched a product based on a basket of crypto assets that it called Shitcoin Index Perpetual Futures, with the unsubtle ticker SHIT-PERP. He commissioned an advertisement, aired during the Super Bowl, in which the comedian Larry David casts doubt on the viability of FTX.

☆ Sam Bankman-Fried's $16 billion fortune evaporated in less than a week
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-11 | by ( Allison Morrow | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +1 min

New York CNN Business —Sam Bankman-Fried woke up on Monday still a billionaire, even as his cryptocurrency empire was beginning to unravel. Based on net worth calculations by Bloomberg, Bankman-Fried was worth about $16 billion at the start of the week. The 30-year-old entrepreneur’s net worth, which was largely tied up in digital assets, peaked at around $26 billion this spring. He told Reuters in July that he and FTX still had a “few billion” on hand to shore up other firms and help stabilize the industry. Bankman-Fried owns about 70% of FTX’s US business, which the index now estimates to be essentially worthless.

How Putin and Friends Stalled Climate Progress A handful of powerful world leaders rallied around Russia and undercut global cooperation. Mr. Putin has gained from this as the increasingly autocratic Mr. Xi finds common cause with the Kremlin. “Much depends on whether authoritarian leaders perceive climate action to be in their self-interest.”Though their actions help Mr. Putin, their track records on climate are mixed. Mr. Xi called Mr. Putin his “best friend.”He was returning the favor from a year earlier, when Mr. Putin hosted Mr. Xi at the Grand Kremlin Palace and awarded him one of Russia’s highest medals for foreign dignitaries. At a news conference with Mr. Putin, Mr. Bolsonaro thanked his “dear friend,” saying that Mr. Putin had offered him support when other world leaders were criticizing his Amazon policy.

☆ The Phone Call That Shifted Mikaela Shiffrin’s Thinking About Her Lost Olympics
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-20 | by ( Rachel Bachman | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Mikaela Shiffrin’s phone rang just as an airplane was about to take her to paradise. It was last May, at the end of a ski season that included a disastrous Beijing Winter Olympics for Shiffrin, one of history’s top women’s alpine racers. The plane was set to fly her and her boyfriend to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico—and mentally, at least, farther away from those Games.

CNN —Louise Fletcher, the actress who won an Academy Award for playing the villainous Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” died Friday in France, according to her agent David Shaul. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” starred Jack Nicholson as a new patient at a mental institution, where Mildred Ratched – played by Fletcher – reigns as an authoritarian, controlling nurse. In her Oscar speech, Fletcher sweetly thanked her “Cuckoo’s Nest” colleagues and then, using sign language, acknowledged her deaf parents watching at home. Louise Fletcher Wins Best Actress: 1976 Oscars“I want to say thank you for teaching me to have a dream. The film swept the top five Oscars for 1975 – for Best Picture, director Milos Forman, adapted screenplay, actor Nicholson and actress Fletcher.

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