Public schools in New York City will close again on Thursday, officials announced, after the city reached a 3% Covid test positivity rate.
Related: Covid deaths near 250,000 as US urged to act to stop 'unrelenting' spread
Continue reading...Spokesperson for the disgraced mogul would not ‘confirm or deny’ he has tested positive for Covid-19
Harvey Weinstein is unwell and is being “closely monitored” in prison, a representative for the disgraced Hollywood mogul said.
Continue reading...Music’s primal power for those living with dementia has inspired thousands of YouTube views for a clip of a former dancer
We see a frail and elderly woman in a chair, her eyes downcast. She motions for the music to be turned up, a swelling melody from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and with a little encouragement her hands begin to flutter. Then suddenly her eyes flash and she’s Odette the swan queen at the misty lakeside, arms raised. She leans forward, wrists crossed in classic swan pose; her chin lifts as if she’s commanding the stage once more, her face lost in reverie.
The woman in the film is Marta Cinta González Saldaña, a former ballet dancer who died in 2019, the year the video was shot. But the clip has gone viral since being posted recently by Spanish organisation Música Para Despertar (Music to Awaken), which promotes the value of music for those living with Alzheimer’s. Many of the details accompanying the video on its journey around the internet have been erroneous. Marta Cinta was not a member of the “New York Ballet” (there’s no such company) or the actual New York City Ballet, but seems to have run her own dance company in the city; the ballerina performing in the intercut video is not her but Ulyana Lopatkina, who is not even dancing Swan Lake but Mikhail Fokine’s The Dying Swan. Yet none of that takes away the impact of watching someone seemingly light up and have their memories unlocked by the power of melody. It’s as if you’re seeing Saldaña inhabit her true self.
Continue reading...Officials have started rolling back some reopenings, and appear poised to close all public school classrooms
It seemed unimaginable: months after Covid-19 killed thousands of New Yorkers, the city and state finally seemed to get the virus under control. Infections, hospitalizations and deaths plummeted here and in neighboring regions, while surging elsewhere in the US.
Continue reading...Former Bond girl Tsai Chin confounds expectations brilliantly as an older woman who gets mixed up with the Chinese mafia
Sentimentalising, patronising and generally disrespecting our elders is by now enough of a movie trope that any title including the words “grandma” or “grandpa” causes an involuntary shudder. That Lucky Grandma isn’t one of those films is mostly down to its star, Tsai Chin, whose many attributes include the ability to conduct full conversations with a lit cigarette suspended from her bottom lip. One look at Grandma’s stern face tells us she did not come to play.
Related: Tsai Chin: 'What was it like being in bed with Sean Connery? Fine'
Continue reading...Photographer Jordan Gale and George Etheridge documented a historic election night in New York City, from an empty Times Square to Brooklyn
New York City prepared for the final act of the most consequential election in a generation on Tuesday. There was reason to worry.
During the city’s 10 days of early voting, many of the 1.1 million New Yorkers were forced to spend large parts of the day in socially distant lines that stretched across multiple city blocks – including some who had decided to vote in person after a mail-in ballot snafu. Even the mayor waited almost four hours, after which he and the governor suggested a complete overhaul of the board of elections.
Continue reading...Leonard Shoulders was waiting for bus in the Bronx when concrete cracked open and he fell into hole, unable to scream for help
A New York City man has fallen through a sinkhole in a sidewalk, landing directly on to a pack of rats and leaving him unable to scream for help out of a fear that they might crawl into his mouth, local media have reported.
In a city long used to tall tales of urban horror, like crocodiles in the sewers, the real-life terror experienced by Leonard Shoulders, 33, appeared to strike an appalled chord with denizens of the Big Apple.
Continue reading...Group leader was sentenced on convictions that he turned some female followers into sex slaves branded with his initials
Keith Raniere, a self-improvement guru whose organization Nxivm attracted millionaires and actors, was sentenced on Tuesday to 120 years in prison on convictions that he turned some female followers into sex slaves branded with his initials.
Continue reading...The Lincoln Project “will not be intimidated by empty bluster”, a lawyer for the group wrote late on Saturday, in response to a threat from an attorney for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner over two billboards put up in Times Square.
Related: 'On the brink': US coronavirus cases surge in final days before election
Continue reading...Proprietor Nancy Bass-Wyden appeals to customers as literary landmark suffers the effects of the pandemic
The Strand Bookstore, a landmark of literary New York, is in serious trouble, appealing for customers to help it stave off closure amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Related: New York's Strand bookstore fights back over landmark status
Continue reading...Amy Cooper, the white woman charged with filing a false police report for calling 911 during a videotaped dispute with a black birdwatcher in New York’s Central Park, made a second, previously undisclosed, emergency call in which she added that the man had tried to assault her, it was revealed on Wednesday.
Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance called Cooper’s complaints a hoax and noted it was lucky that no one had been injured or killed that day as a result.
Continue reading...Bronfman was the first sentenced in connection with the group led by Keith Raniere – but while she was part of Nxivm, she used her wealth ‘as a means of intimidation’
Clare Bronfman, daughter of a billionaire Canadian father and a British mother, was making a name for herself as a showjumper in Europe in 2002.
Riding a 12-year-old gelding called Charlton, Bronfman – the heir to the Seagram’s liquor fortune – won the Rome Grand Prix equestrian tournament, and later placed second in a show in Bremen.
Continue reading...The 80-year-old man was knocked unconscious after confronting a patron in a West Seneca bar over not wearing a face covering
An 80-year old man has died after being shoved to the ground during a confrontation at a bar with another patron who was not wearing a mask.
Rocco E Sapienza confronted another patron at a bar in West Seneca, New York, on 26 September because he was not wearing a mask, Erie county prosecutors said on Monday. Donald M Lewinski, 65, then shoved Sapienza, who fell and struck his head on the floor, said district attorney John Flynn.
Continue reading...Rise in infection rate in Paris as Spanish authorities clash over Madrid lockdown
Bars in Paris have been ordered to close for two weeks, Madrid residents may no longer leave their city and Ireland is set to introduce tighter national restrictions as governments struggle to contain a Europe-wide surge in Covid-19 cases.
As infections in the Paris area rose to 270 for every 100,000 people – and as high as 500 for every 100,000 among 20- to 30-year-olds – with 36% of intensive care beds occupied by Covid-19 patients, the city’s police chief said bars must close from Tuesday.
Continue reading...Baimadajie Angwang’s job was to ‘locate potential intelligence sources’ and ‘identify potential threats’, court papers say
A New York City police officer has been charged with spying on Tibetan immigrants in the United States as an “intelligence asset” for the Chinese government.
A criminal complaint filed on Monday in Brooklyn federal court accuses Baimadajie Angwang of working as an agent for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It says he was secretly supervised by handlers from the Chinese consulate in New York.
Continue reading...Male and female are killed and 14 are injured in shooting in upstate New York
Two people have died and 14 others have been wounded in a mass shooting at a party in Rochester, New York, police said.
A male and a female died in the shooting on Saturday, the interim police chief Mark Simmons told reporters. The wounded people were taken to two different hospitals. Simmons said none of them were reported to have life-threatening injuries.
Continue reading...The Hollywood actor’s much-viewed public service announcement in character urges young New Yorkers to heed Covid-19 dangers
While Paul Rudd could just about pass as millennial, at 51 the Hollywood actor is really a few years off.
Related: Living With Yourself review – are two Paul Rudds better than one?
Continue reading...A 28-year-old elementary school teacher in Columbia, South Carolina, died this week from complications due to Covid-19, authorities have said.
Demetria “Demi” Bannister, who taught third grade at Windsor elementary school, died on Monday.
Continue reading...Prude died seven days after officers in upstate New York put a hood over his head then pressed his face into the pavement
The Rochester mayor has suspended seven officers involved in the suffocation death of a Black man earlier this year.
Daniel Prude died on 30 March after he was taken off life support, seven days after the encounter with police in Rochester.
Continue reading...Jerry Seinfeld got into a spat about the Big Apple with a fellow millionaire but for others racial and class inequalities give debate about the city’s health a very different look
Shabazz Stuart was one year old when the TV sitcom Seinfeld first went on air, and seven when the much-loved show about nothing broadcast its final episode. He’s only ever known it as one of those late-night repeats that are fun to watch when you’re at a loose end.
But this week there was no avoiding Seinfeld, or at least its creator and lead actor Jerry Seinfeld who roared back into the public eye with an opinion piece headlined “So You Think New York Is ‘Dead’”. The comedian was responding to a provocative post on LinkedIn by James Altucher, a hedge-fund manager who owns an Upper West Side standup comedy club where Seinfeld occasionally appears.
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