DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ Treat Williams, Actor Known for ‘Hair’ and ‘Everwood,’ Dies at 71
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-12 | by ( Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Treat Williams, the actor known for his roles in the movies “Hair” and “Deep Rising” and the TV show “Everwood,” has died. Mr. Williams died on Monday after an S.U.V. crashed into his motorcycle in Dorset, Vt., the Vermont State Police said in a statement. The crash occurred in the late afternoon near the Vermont-New York State border. The 35-year-old man whose vehicle hit Mr. Williams was not hospitalized.

Persons: Treat Williams, ”, Williams, Mr Organizations: Vermont State Police, Vermont -, Honda Locations: Dorset , Vt, Vermont, Vermont - New York State, Albany, N.Y

Fires are burning across the breadth of Canada, blanketing parts of the eastern United States with choking, orange-gray smoke. So much wildfire smoke pushed through the border that in Buffalo, schools canceled outdoor activities. The average global temperatures today are more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than in the preindustrial era. The trees and grasses of eastern Canada turned to tinder. “We should expect a stunning year of global extremes,” he wrote.

Persons: It’s, El Niño, Justin Trudeau, ”, Alexandra Paige Fischer, Park Williams, Wiliams, Brendan Rogers, haven’t, La, Jeff Berardelli, El, Ada Monzón Organizations: Northern, University of Michigan, Stanford, University of California, Climate Research, El, Twitter Locations: Canada, United States, Puerto Rico, North America, El, Buffalo, Detroit, Los Angeles, Alberta, Vietnam, China, Siberia, WFLA, Tampa Bay, Fla, WAPA

Bad air can be dangerous, especially if you’re breathing it over a lifetime. In East Asia, years of chronic air pollution is one reason that wearing face masks was common well before the coronavirus pandemic. School children there are used to playing inside on bad air days. In South Korea, would-be presidents have made reducing air pollution part of their campaign platforms. In other cases, urban air has improved because of something that no one saw coming.

Persons: it’s, Paiboon, Rajasekhar Balasubramanian, ”, Lee Hyung, “ It’s Organizations: New York State, World Health Organization, National University of Singapore, World Bank, Mexico City Locations: Midwest, United States, Cities, Asia, Africa, America, New, Bangkok, South Asia, East Asia, Seoul, South Korea, China, Beijing, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, Mexico, New Delhi

☆ India Is Scrapping Its Largest Bill. The Race Is On to Spend It.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-31 | by ( Sameer Yasir | Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Indians have been filing into gas stations, jewelry stores, fruit stands and any other businesses that still accept soon-to-be-withdrawn 2,000-rupee notes, each worth about $24. The race to spend India’s biggest bill has been on since its central bank announced this month that they would be removed from circulation by early fall. Economists say retiring the big bill may help fight corruption, bring workers into the formal economy, improve tax collection and accelerate India’s push for digital payments. But for some consumers, the move has dredged up unpleasant memories of 2016, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sudden ban on large notes left them without enough cash for basic transactions. In an economy that is driven by rural and informal workers, some do not own bank accounts — or trust the government’s economic policies.

Persons: Narendra Modi’s Locations: India’s

☆ Indian Official Who Drained a Reservoir to Retrieve His Phone Is Suspended
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-27 | by ( Sameer Yasir | Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Say you drop your brand-new smartphone into a reservoir while posing for a selfie during a picnic. Would you consider it lost and buy a replacement, or drain the reservoir to retrieve it? An Indian official who chose the latter option has been suspended from his job. Initially, some villagers he knew spent two days diving in the reservoir in an attempt to retrieve the phone, Mr. Vishwas told The Indian Express newspaper. So he rented a diesel pump and drained about three feet of water over another two days — by some estimates, enough to irrigate 1,500 acres of farmland.

☆ A Poet of the Night Whose Muses Have 9 Lives
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Most nights, Hwang In-suk pushes a shopping cart up and down the steep alleys of her Seoul neighborhood, trailed by stray cats that emerge from shadows to greet her under glowing streetlamps and convenience store marquees. Her neighbors tend to think of Ms. Hwang, 64, merely as someone who feeds cats in the street. Only a few know that she is a celebrated poet whose work explores loneliness and impermanence in the South Korean capital. Her decades of writing span a time in which South Korea has cycled through a dizzying number of identities, including those of a country ruled by repressive military dictatorships, a fledgling democracy and, most recently, an economic power and international cultural juggernaut. Ms. Hwang said her nocturnal cat-feeding routine allows her to quietly observe not only cats, her favorite muses, but also her changing neighborhood and the underclass of a megacity that is increasingly known for its flashy exterior.

☆ An Emo Band’s First U.S. Tour Began With a Robbery, but It Wasn’t All Sad
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

An international rock band’s first U.S. tour is a moment to be celebrated, a sign that years of hard work have paid off. “Then it really happened.”Forests and the Oklahoma band they were touring with, Ben Quad, are hardly the first musicians to be robbed while on tour in America. (In 1999, Sonic Youth famously lost an entire truck’s worth of gear to a thief, also in California.) But the experience was still a shock for a band from a country as safe as Singapore. “It was the worst luck ever,” said Chris Martinez, 29, a Forests fan from San Diego who discovered the band years ago on a business trip to Singapore.

☆ Japan Is Unmasking, and Its Smile Coach Is Busy
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-15 | by ( Hisako Ueno | Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

About six years ago, Keiko Kawano, a radio host, found that when she stopped doing voice-articulation exercises, her smile began to fade. At a certain point, she struggled to lift the corners of her mouth. So Ms. Kawano, then 43, decided to learn how facial muscles work. After using the knowledge to reanimate her smile, she started helping others do the same under the motto, “More smile, more happiness.”And as many people in Japan unmask after three years and find their facial expressions a bit rusty, she is adapting her work to the post-Covid era. “People have not been raising their cheeks under a mask or trying to smile much,” Ms. Kawano said last week, a few days after Japan downgraded Covid-19 to the same status as common illnesses.

☆ More than 13,000 Are Evacuated as Wildfires Burn in Western Canada
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-06 | by ( Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

More than 13,000 people have been evacuated from the western Canadian province of Alberta as dozens of wildfires burn there, officials said on Friday. About 78 active wildfires were burning across the province as of Friday morning, and 19 of them were classified as “out of control,” Stephen Lacroix, the managing director of the Alberta Emergency Management Agency, said at a news conference on Friday morning in Edmonton, the provincial capital. He called the situation “evolving and extremely fluid.”By late Friday evening, the website of the province’s wildfire agency showed that the number of active wildfires had grown to more than 100, more than a third of them out of control. A spokeswoman for the Alberta government declined to comment on Friday night, referring a reporter to the province’s website and social media pages.

☆ How ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ Defied Top 40 Logic
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-02 | by ( Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Mr. Lightfoot read the article. 2, one notch behind Mr. Lightfoot’s only No. Yet unlike songs that use a real-life story as the basis for embellishment, Mr. Lightfoot’s ballad hewed precisely to the real-life details. The weight of the ore, for example — “26,000 tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty” — was accurate. Decades later, Mr. Lightfoot changed the lyrics slightly after investigations into the accident revealed that waves, not crew error, had led to the shipwreck.

☆ ‘Baseball Size’ Hail Falls in Texas as Storms Whip Across South
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( Livia Albeck-Ripka | Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Hail as large as baseballs fell in Texas on Wednesday, officials said, as thunderstorms whipped across parts of the American South and forecasters warned of possible damage from flying debris and flash flooding in low-lying areas over the next two days. Storms across Central Texas were producing “very large, destructive hail” early Wednesday evening, including four-inch specimens that fell over Waco, a city south of Dallas, the National Weather Service office in Fort Worth said on Twitter. Waco’s police department said that one of its officers’ cars had been hit with “baseball-size hail.” Unconfirmed reports streaming into the National Weather Service said that hail falling around Texas ranged from the size of nickels to golf balls. Forecasters said they expected the storm system to push east on Thursday and Friday, potentially producing hail in Florida and flooding along the Gulf Coast.

☆ British American Tobacco Is Fined $635 Million for Selling Cigarettes to North Korea
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

British American Tobacco has agreed to pay more than $635 million as a penalty for selling cigarettes to North Korea through an intermediary in Singapore, in violation of American sanctions. A small portion of the amount, about $5 million, was part of a civil settlement with the Treasury Department. The rest, obtained and announced by the Justice Department on Tuesday, was the biggest in that department’s history related to sanctions on North Korea. North Korean clients paid that intermediary, which was not identified in the filing, at least $415 million through front companies over about a decade, in some cases using American banks, according to the court documents. The operation relied on “financial facilitators linked to North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction proliferation network,” Brian E. Nelson, the Treasury’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in the statement issued by the Justice Department.

☆ Japanese Ship, Torpedoed in 1942 With P.O.W.s Aboard, Is Found
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-22 | by ( Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The wreck of a Japanese ship that sank in 1942 after it was torpedoed by an American submarine has been found, the Australian government said on Saturday. The ship was carrying hundreds of prisoners of war, most of them Australian, who all died, and the discovery resolves a painful episode in that country’s wartime history. The ship had no markings indicating that it was carrying prisoners of war and sank carrying more than 1,000 prisoners from about 16 nations, most of them Australian service members. The wreck was spotted this month on the seafloor northwest of Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines, according to Fugro, a company based in the Netherlands that provided the survey ship. The mission took five years to plan, and an autonomous underwater vehicle found the wreck after 12 days of searching, Fugro said.

☆ At Least 2 Dead as Tornado Hits Oklahoma
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

At least two people were killed as stormy weather and at least one confirmed tornado swept through a rural county south of Oklahoma City on Wednesday night, the local police said. The two deaths were recorded in or near Cole, a town of about 600 people south of Oklahoma City, Scott Gibbons, a deputy sheriff for McClain County, said by phone overnight. The authorities believe that the deaths are related to the storm, he added. Deputy Gibbons said people elsewhere in the county had also been injured, but that he did not yet know how many. The National Weather Service warned on Wednesday night that the storm’s exact path was hard to predict because it was behaving “erratically.” KWTV, a CBS affiliate in Oklahoma, aired footage of what it said was a large tornado crossing Interstate 40 in the city of Shawnee, about 40 miles east of Oklahoma City.

☆ Japan’s Prime Minister Safely Evacuated After Blast
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Mike Ives | Hikari Hida | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan was safely evacuated on Saturday after an explosion was heard just before he was scheduled to give a speech, the country’s national broadcaster said. The episode took place late Saturday morning in the western Japanese city of Wakayama, the broadcaster, NHK, reported.

☆ Fort Lauderdale Is Drenched With Over a Foot of Rain, Shutting the Airport
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Mike Ives | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Thunderstorms in southeastern Florida dumped 15 to 20 inches of rain in the Fort Lauderdale area on Wednesday, the National Weather Service said, trapping motorists in floodwaters and leaving travelers stranded inside a major airport that had been shut down. But the rain was so heavy that the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport closed. The Weather Service issued a flash flood emergency for the Fort Lauderdale area on Wednesday night. Those are reserved for extremely rare situations after heavy rain that lead to torrents of water that pose a severe threat to human life and can cause catastrophic damage. Fort Lauderdale, which lies in central Broward on the Atlantic coast, is one of Florida’s largest cities.

☆ Court Says Abortion Pill Can Remain Available but Imposes Temporary Restrictions
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Pam Belluck | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Last week’s ruling by Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, was a preliminary injunction saying that the F.D.A. Judge Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has written critically of the Roe v. Wade decision, had stayed his order for seven days to give the F.D.A. The F.D.A had asked the appeals court to extend the stay beyond that seven days. In the decision, two Trump-appointed judges voted to reimpose some of the restrictions that the F.D.A. The third judge, appointed by President George W. Bush, said she would essentially have granted the full request.

Search resuls for: "Mike Ives"

17 mentions found