Jesse Lingard is a non-footballing footballer – he won’t be the last
16Dec Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Sports

Jesse Lingard is a non-footballing footballer – he won’t be the last

It’s Jesse Lingard’s birthday. He turns 31 today and, at this stage of his life, he must realise it is not going to be easy shifting some of the perceptions that come from being a non-footballing footballer. For now, at least.Speak to Lingard’s former team-mates and they will talk about a guy who has been popular at all his clubs and played at a level, including a World Cup semi-final, that automatically commands respect among his fellow pros.But it is also a harsh reality that many others will be wondering how a player with Lingard’s record of achievement has spent so long without a club and seems less troubled by that situation than you might assume.Lingard last played competitive football in April, a two-minute substitute appearance for Nottingham Forest against his old club Manchester ...
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Morning Person? You Might Have Neanderthal Genes to Thank.
15Dec Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Health

Morning Person? You Might Have Neanderthal Genes to Thank.

Neanderthals were morning people, a new study suggests. And some humans today who like getting up early might credit genes they inherited from their Neanderthal ancestors.The new study compared DNA in living humans with genetic material retrieved from Neanderthal fossils. It turns out that Neanderthals carried some of the same clock-related genetic variants as do people who report being early risers.Since the 1990s, studies of Neanderthal DNA have exposed our species’ intertwined history. About 700,000 years ago, our lineages split apart, most likely in Africa. While the ancestors of modern humans largely stayed in Africa, the Neanderthal lineage migrated into Eurasia.About 400,000 years ago, the population split in two. The hominins who spread west became Neanderthals. Their cousins to th...
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Brazil’s Congress Weakens Protection of Indigenous Lands, Defying Lula
15Dec Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
World

Brazil’s Congress Weakens Protection of Indigenous Lands, Defying Lula

Brazilian officials served up an array of plans and figures at the recent COP28 climate summit in Dubai, presenting itself as a world leader, on track to protect its forests and the people who live there.But on Thursday, Brazil’s Congress approved a law that threatens Indigenous people’s rights to most of the land they inhabit or claim, potentially opening vast territories to deforestation, farming and mining.The new law requires that Indigenous people must provide concrete evidence that they occupied the land they claim on Oct. 5, 1988, when the country’s current Constitution was enacted — a requirement that many of them have little or no hope of meeting.Under the new rule, not only can Indigenous land claims currently going through the legal process be thrown out for lacking such documen...
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William G. Connolly, Editor Who Updated The Times, Dies at 86
15Dec Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Business

William G. Connolly, Editor Who Updated The Times, Dies at 86

William G. Connolly, who over a long career as an editor at The New York Times raised its journalistic standards, opened new opportunities for a more diverse range of employees and in 1999 brought that experience to bear in a wholesale revision of the newspaper’s venerable style guidebook, died on Tuesday in Maplewood, N.J. He was 86.His daughter, Kathleen, confirmed the death. He was in a rehabilitation facility recovering from a fall, she said.After more than 20 years at The Times — minus a few in the early 1980s, when he left to work at a Virginia paper — Mr. Connolly was elevated in 1987 to a new senior position in which he managed training and recruitment.In that role he oversaw the paper’s ethical guidelines, brought in new faces from a broader pool of applicants and turned a critic’...
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My Not-So-Perfect Holiday Shopping Excursion With A.I. Chatbots
15Dec Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Technology

My Not-So-Perfect Holiday Shopping Excursion With A.I. Chatbots

In addition to Shopify, chatbots have come out over the past 12 months from Instacart, the delivery company; Mercari, a resale platform; Carrefour, a retailer; and Kering, which owns Gucci and Balenciaga. Walmart, Mastercard and Signet Jewelers are also testing chatbots, which may become publicly available as soon as next year.“In a way, it’s recreating an in-store environment, but online,” said Carl Rivera, a vice president at Shopify who oversees its Shop app, which hosts Shop A.I. He said the chatbot broke down people’s questions into key terms and searched relevant products from Shopify’s millions of sellers. It then recommends products based on reviews and a shopper’s purchase history.Retailers have long used chatbots, but previous versions lacked conversational power and typically an...
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Cho Gue-sung on how his life has changed a year on from the World Cup
14Dec Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Sports

Cho Gue-sung on how his life has changed a year on from the World Cup

There can’t be many footballers who have gone from playing for a military team to the cover of Vogue in a few months.But that’s just one of the ways South Korean striker Cho Gue-sung’s life has changed in the last year or so.Last year was a decent one for Cho. He joined Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors, one of Korea’s top teams, in 2020 but took a while to find his feet. He had been a defensive midfielder until only a few years before, moving up front to take better advantage of his 6ft 2in (188cm) height and pace, but he was still relatively young in the position.As Korean players sometimes do, he used his mandatory period of military service as a bit of a reset, and to help improve his physical condition. He joined Gimcheon Sangmu — a team comprised of players on military service that was in the s...
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William P. Murphy Jr., Innovator of Life-Saving Medical Tools, Dies at 100
13Dec Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Health

William P. Murphy Jr., Innovator of Life-Saving Medical Tools, Dies at 100

Dr. William P. Murphy Jr., a biomedical engineer who was an inventor of the vinyl blood bag that replaced breakable bottles in the Korean War and made transfusions safe and reliable on battlefields, in hospitals and at scenes of natural disasters and accidents, died on Thursday at his home in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 100.His death was confirmed on Monday by Mike Tomás, the president and chief executive of U.S. Stem Cell, a Florida company for which Dr. Murphy had long served as chairman. He became chairman emeritus last year.Dr. Murphy, the son of a Nobel Prize-winning Boston physician, was also widely credited with early advances in the development of pacemakers to stabilize erratic heart rhythms, of artificial kidneys to cleanse the blood of impurities, and of many sterile devices, incl...
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Israel-Hamas War: Attacks in Red Sea and on Israel Bolster Houthis’ Regional Standing
13Dec Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
World

Israel-Hamas War: Attacks in Red Sea and on Israel Bolster Houthis’ Regional Standing

Infectious diseases are ravaging the population of Gaza, health officials and aid organizations said on Monday, citing cold, wet weather; overcrowding in shelters; scarce food; dirty water; and little medicine.Adding to the crisis in the enclave after more than two months of war, those who become ill have extremely limited treatment options, as hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients injured in airstrikes.“We are all sick,” said Samah al-Farra, a 46-year-old mother of 10 struggling to care for her family in a camp housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah, in southern Gaza. “All of my kids have a high fever and a stomach virus.”While the collapse of Gaza’s health system has made it challenging to track exact numbers, the World Health Organization has reported at least 369,000 cases of ...
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Inflation Holds Roughly Steady Ahead of Fed Meeting
13Dec Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Business

Inflation Holds Roughly Steady Ahead of Fed Meeting

Inflation data released on Tuesday showed that price increases remained moderate in November, the latest sign that inflation has cooled substantially from its June 2022 peak. That’s likely to keep the Federal Reserve on track to leave interest rates unchanged at its final meeting of the year, which takes place this week.The Consumer Price Index came out just hours before the Fed began its two-day gathering, which will conclude with the release of an interest rate decision and a fresh set of quarterly economic projections at 2 p.m. on Wednesday. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, is then scheduled to hold a news conference.Central bankers have embraced a recent slowdown in price increases, and Tuesday’s data largely suggested that inflation remains lower than earlier this year. Overall inflat...
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Praxis Founder Dryden Brown’s Utopian Visions
13Dec Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Technology

Praxis Founder Dryden Brown’s Utopian Visions

Crisis as OpportunityIn Amsterdam, Mr. Brown described Praxis as his response to being trapped inside his apartment during Covid, mixed with his longstanding interest in colonial America. “Ready to join America in 1776?” reads a company pitch deck.In 2022, Mr. Brown had been more specific about his motivation to build a city from scratch, telling a speechwriter that he got the idea for Praxis after witnessing looters break shop windows in SoHo during the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd.(Mr. Brown gave detailed biographical information to the speechwriter, Webster Stone, during hours of recorded meetings in 2022, of which The New York Times has reviewed a transcript. In an email response to a detailed list of questions, Mr. Brown disputed several of his own statements to t...
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