Aurelia Butler

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    Protestas han paralizado Bolivia. Esta es la razón

    La rivalidad entre el actual presidente Luis Arce y el expresidente Evo Morales ha ocasionado bloqueos que han afectado la circulación de productos de primera necesidad en el país.Las manifestaciones han sacudido Bolivia durante más de dos meses. Ha estallado una antigua rivalidad política, y los partidarios del presidente y de su principal oponente se han enfrentado en las calles. Las protestas han bloqueado la circulación de mercancías, agravando la escasez de combustible. Algunos bolivianos han hecho fila durante días para comprar gasolina.La agitación forma parte de un nivel amplio de malestar en toda la región andina de Latinoamérica. Ecuador, Perú y Colombia —vecinos de Bolivia por el oeste y el norte— se enfrentan a importantes niveles de agitación política, que provocan una intensa ira entre sus poblaciones.Detrás del descontento en Bolivia hay una ruptura en el seno del Movimiento al Socialismo, o MAS, un partido político de izquierda que ha dominado el panorama político del país durante dos décadas.El presidente de Bolivia, Luis Arce, y su antiguo mentor, el expresidente Evo Morales, se disputan el liderazgo del partido, y cada uno insiste que será el candidato del partido en las elecciones presidenciales del próximo año.El presidente Luis Arce participó en una ceremonia indígena el mes pasado en El Alto, Bolivia. Tanto él como Morales insisten en que serán el candidato de su partido en las elecciones presidenciales del próximo año.Aizar Raldes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Two Alvin Ailey Productions Head for the Light

    Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” and Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels” aspire to find higher ground at New York City Center.Dancers moving from being scorned to rocking their souls in the bosom of Abraham — this is the narrative arc of Alvin Ailey’s masterpiece, “Revelations.” And that redemptive passage into the light is the template that many choreographers for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater try to replicate.Very rarely does such a work escape the shadow of “Revelations” and the gravity of cliché. Ronald K. Brown did it in 1999 with “Grace,” and during the Ailey company’s current season at New York City Center, a 25th anniversary revival of that unfailingly spirit-lifting dance is successfully replacing “Revelations” in the closing spot of several programs. But “Grace” is an exception, whereas Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” and Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels,” the two works that debuted last week, are not.With “Finding Free,” Boykin, a beloved former member of the company, is at least attempting a slightly different approach with an Afrofuturist take. She and Jon Taylor have costumed the cast in long, sleeveless coats with giant lapels and upturned collars that frame their faces and make them look like something between sci-fi courtiers and private eyes. By the end, they have swapped the coats for diaphanous shifts that, like Al Crawford’s cathedral lighting, signify spiritual transformation.That transformation is aided by an original score, courtesy of the jazz pianist Matthew Whitaker, who plays it live in a quintet behind a scrim at the rear of the stage. (Boykin’s last work for the Ailey troupe, her “re-Evolution, Dream” also commendably used a commissioned score by a living jazz musician, Ali Jackson.) In the final section, Whitaker’s organ brings us to church with some funky gospel and “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” has the dancers in diaphanous shifts that signal spiritual transformation. Paul KolnikBut the path to get there is awfully murky. The dancers mainly travel in a pack — shuffling, skittering, pivoting, jogging, lining up. One member after another leaves the flock, only to return. When they spin, the tails of their coats fly up, and they spin a lot. They walk portentously into the light. They also collapse, open their mouths in silent screams, crawl as if crossing a desert and writhe in anguish.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    On ‘S.N.L.,’ Luigi Mangione Is Busting Out All Over

    As Chris Rock hosts, the man charged in the UnitedHealthcare shooting dominates this week’s riffs on the news.The 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” continues to provide the show with opportunities to revive many of its long-running characters. Last week, it was the Church Lady; this week, it was Nancy Grace, the TV personality and frequently outraged true-crime commentator, who has been frequently impersonated on “S.N.L.” over the years by cast members including Ana Gasteyer and Amy Poehler.On this outing, Grace was played by Sarah Sherman as she commented on the outpouring of online support for Luigi Mangione, who was charged in the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson.“What is going on in this country?” Sherman declared. “Y’all, this man is not a sex icon, OK?”She added, “And yet, folks online are posting things like — am I reading this right? — ‘Luigi got that BDE.’ Really? I hope ‘BDE’ stands for Behavior Dat’s Evil.”Sherman went on to interview guests including Kenan Thompson, playing a regular customer at the Pennsylvania McDonald’s where Mangione was arrested.“Well, Nancy, I’ve been eating McDonald’s every day for three years,” Thompson said. “I got Type 10 diabetes. Blue Cross? Bitch, I got blue foot. You know what my health insurance plan is called? Hoping it goes away.”Asked if he had ever tried alternative medicine, Thompson replied in the affirmative, “When they tell me how much the procedure costs, I go, ‘what’s the alternative?’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    When ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Gets the Anime Treatment

    “The War of the Rohirrim” is the latest and most high-profile anime adaptation of a Western franchise to hit screens big and small.When Warner Bros. approached the filmmaker Peter Jackson and his longtime screenwriting partner Philippa Boyens about making a new animated “Lord of the Rings,” Boyens at first had a hard time wrapping her head around the notion. But when studio executives suggested that the film could be told via Japanese anime — suddenly it clicked.They could tell a stand-alone story from J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices about the people of the kingdom of Rohan, which has now become “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” directed by Kenji Kamiyama. Jackson is one of the film’s executive producers and Boyens one of its producers.“It was that moment of form meeting the story,” Boyens said in a video call. She said she thought anime would be an appealing approach because “it’s a story that ultimately deals with the wreckage of war, and that’s something that Japanese storytelling on film has been really good at telling.”“The War of the Rohirrim” (in theaters) is the latest and most high profile anime adaptation of a Western franchise to hit screens big and small. In recent years there’s been “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” on Netflix, an anime version of the 2010 movie “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”; a “Rick and Morty: The Anime” for Adult Swim; and “Terminator Zero,” a show set in James Cameron’s “Terminator” universe, also on Netflix. Kamiyama also made an installment of “Star Wars: Visions,” a 2021 anime anthology featuring a galaxy far, far away on Disney+, as well as “Blade Runner: Black Lotus,” a co-production of Adult Swim and the anime streaming service Crunchyroll.BenDavid Grabinski, one of the creators of “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” said in an interview that he sought to tap into some of the artistry of anime that “can feel fresh and different than a lot of the traditional animation coming out of the west.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Don’t Cut an Agency So Vital to Our Health

    More from our inbox:Needed: More Maternity WardsRacial Inequities in the Overdose CrisisVet the Presidential CandidatesTech Tycoons in ChargeA building on the N.I.H. campus in Bethesda, Md. The agency comprises 27 institutes and has a budget of $48 billion.Hailey Sadler for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Long Government’s ‘Crown Jewel,’ Health Institute Is Becoming a Target” (news article, Dec. 3):Your article describes the National Institutes of Health as a “crown jewel” of the federal government based on its track record of success in driving medical and health research and innovation. The article also captures the longstanding bipartisan support for the agency and its work.When asked in a national survey we commissioned this year, Americans of all political persuasions expressed their support for federally funded research:Eighty-eight percent of Americans agree that basic scientific research is necessary and should be supported by the federal government.Some 62 percent would be willing to pay $1 per week more in taxes to support additional medical and health research.And 89 percent say it is important that the U.S. is a global leader in research to improve health.Continuing to treat the N.I.H. as a top national priority is a strategy that will spur new treatments and cures for the health threats facing our population. It will also drive U.S. business and job growth across the life science, technology, manufacturing and service sectors that in the end will keep us globally competitive.Mary WoolleyNew YorkThe writer is the president and C.E.O. of Research!America.To the Editor:The suggestion to cut infectious disease funding displays dangerous historical amnesia. Just as the 1918-20 flu pandemic killed millions of people globally, Covid-19’s emergence in 2020 demonstrated how quickly a novel pathogen can upend society. While vaccines helped curb Covid-19’s impact, we face an equally urgent crisis: antibiotic resistance.Currently, drug-resistant bacteria infect over two million Americans annually, causing more than 20,000 deaths. Without sustained funding and research, projections show antimicrobial resistance could cause 10 million annual deaths globally by 2050.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    My 500-Mile Journey Across Alaska’s Thawing Arctic

    Flames were leaping out of the forest beneath the float plane taking us deep into the remote interior of northern Alaska. Our destination was the glacial Walker Lake, which stretches 14 miles through Gates of the Arctic National Park.Nearly 100 miles from the nearest dirt road, Walker Lake is within an expanse of uninhabited tundra, scraggly boreal forests and the seemingly endless peaks of the Brooks Range in a wilderness bigger than Belgium. Once we arrived, we saw wide bear trails bulldozed through alder thickets and plentiful signs of moose and wolves.We had come here to begin a 500-mile journey that would take us in pack rafts down the Noatak River, believed to be the longest undeveloped river system left in the United States, and on foot, slogging the beaches of the Chukchi Sea coastline. Our goal was to get a close-up look at how warming temperatures are affecting this rugged but fragile Arctic landscape. Worldwide, roughly twice the amount of the heat-trapping carbon now in the atmosphere has been locked away in the planet’s higher latitudes in frozen ground known as permafrost. Now that ground is thawing and releasing its greenhouse gases.The fire we flew over was our first visible sign of the changes underway.While wildfires are part of the landscape’s natural regenerative cycle, they have until recently been infrequent above the Arctic Circle. But now the rising heat of the lengthening summers has dried out the tundra and the invasive shrubs that have recently moved north with the warmth. This is a tinderbox for lightning strikes. The fires expose and defrost the frozen soil, allowing greenhouse gases to escape into the atmosphere.I have slept more than 1,000 nights on frozen terrain while exploring the Far North. My first Arctic venture was in 1983, with a fellow National Park Service ranger in a tandem kayak on the Noatak River in Gates of the Arctic. We awoke one morning, startled by the sounds of a big animal running through low willows. It jumped into the river straight toward our tent — a caribou chased by a wolf. We were relieved it wasn’t a bear.I couldn’t help but feel unsettled, even reduced, by the immense sky and landscape. While the scale of it all seemed too much to process, the Arctic had captured my soul and I set out on numerous other trips across different places in the North.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Trip to New York

    Expert advice to make the most of a New York City vacation.The window displays at Bergdorf Goodman beckon. There’s a new riverside ice rink in Williamsburg. Buildings, brownstones and bodegas across the city pop with decorations. A woman I saw holding court on the 6 train last week was accessorized with felt antlers, a gaudy Christmas sweater and three large dogs also wearing holiday sweaters.But the crowds these days, and oh, the prices! The cost of everything, from sandwiches to hotel rooms, has soared. And the city expects to get nearly 65 million visitors this year, this close to prepandemic levels. In recent days, it has felt as if all of those people are on the sidewalks of Midtown, furiously trying to elbow their way into Bryant Park’s holiday market.In today’s newsletter, I’m going to share eight tips for enjoying New York — whether you’re visiting for the holidays or any other time of the year — without going broke or getting lost in the crowd.The Louis Vuitton flagship store during the holidays this year.Katherine Marks for The New York Times1. The city that never sleeps tends to wake up late. Crowds are sparse in the early mornings across all the boroughs, even at the top tourist spots. So grab a bodega coffee and enjoy Rockefeller Center at 5 a.m., when the Christmas tree lights up daily, or walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at sunrise.2. You need to book that table, reserve that slot, buy those tickets in advance. This is crucial for the must-do activities on your itinerary, including fine dining (here is The Times’s list of New York City’s 100 best restaurants), some Broadway shows and even visits to Santa at Macy’s. You may pay less for off-peak times, or reservations might even be free, but you’ll still need a reservation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Google’s Sundar Pichai on Antitrust, Trump and A.I.

    Google’s chief executive spoke with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook SummitGoogle got a head start in the artificial intelligence race, and at the DealBook Summit on Dec. 4, its chief executive, Sundar Pichai, snapped back at suggestions that it should be more competitive considering its vast resources.Whereas A.I. startups rely on tech giants for processing power, Google uses its own. The company’s products, like YouTube and Gmail, give it access to mountains of data, and its A.I. researchers have made huge breakthroughs, with two of them winning a Nobel Prize this year. That gives Google an advantage in all three of what Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, earlier in the day called “key inputs” to A.I. progress: compute, data and algorithms.Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, has said that Google should have been the “default winner” in A.I. At the DealBook Summit, Pichai responded, “I would love to do a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft’s own models and our models any day, any time.” Microsoft largely depends on OpenAI for its A.I. models.Pichai also defended his company’s competitiveness. He said that although he thought A.I. progress would slow in the next year (speaking earlier, Altman had a different take), Google’s search engine “will continue to change profoundly in ’25.”He said he expected search to become more, not less, valuable as the web is flooded with content generated by A.I.Pichai also touched on the company’s antitrust lawsuits, the second Trump administration and how artificial intelligence is affecting the way he hires. Here are five highlights from the conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More