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      A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History

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      Almost five years after Covid blew into our lives, the main thing standing between us and the next global pandemic is luck. And with the advent of flu season, that luck may well be running out.The H5N1 avian flu, having mutated its way across species, is raging out of control among the nation’s cattle, infecting roughly a third of the dairy herds in California alone. Farmworkers have so far avoided tragedy, as the virus has not yet acquired the genetic tools to spread among humans. But seasonal flu will vastly increase the chances of that outcome. As the colder weather drives us all indoors to our poorly ventilated houses and workplaces, we will be undertaking an extraordinary gamble that the nation is in no way prepared for.All that would be more than bad enough, but we face these threats gravely hobbled by the Biden administration’s failure — one might even say refusal — to respond adequately to this disease or to prepare us for viral outbreaks that may follow. And the United States just registered its first known case of an exceptionally severe strain of Mpox.As bad as the Biden administration has been on pandemic prevention, of course, it’s about to be replaced by something far worse. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick to lead the nation’s vast public health agency, has already stated he would not prioritize research or vaccine distribution were we to face another pandemic. Kennedy may even be hastening its arrival through his advocacy for raw milk, which can carry high levels of the H5N1 virus and is considered a possible vector for its transmission.We might be fine. Viruses don’t always manage to adapt to new species, despite all the opportunities. But if there is a bird flu pandemic soon, it will be among the most foreseeable catastrophes in history.Devastating influenza pandemics arise throughout the ages because the virus is always looking for a way in, shape shifting to jump among species in ever novel forms. Flu viruses have a special trick: If two different types infect the same host — a farmworker with regular flu who also gets H5N1 from a cow — they can swap whole segments of their RNA, potentially creating an entirely new and deadly virus that has the ability to spread among humans. It’s likely that the 1918 influenza pandemic, for example, started as a flu virus of avian origin that passed through a pig in eastern Kansas. From there it likely infected its first human victim before circling the globe on a deadly journey that killed more people than World War I.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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      NYT Crossword Answers for Nov. 29, 2024

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      Willa Angel Chen Miller makes her New York Times Crossword debut, in a collaboration with Matthew Stock.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — What makes a crossword difficult? There are a few reasons solvers struggle with puzzles, and I believe everyone does so in different ways. Some people have a hard time with wordplay and misdirection; others are just not in the constructor’s wheelhouse.I’m not ashamed to admit that I had to fight to finish today’s puzzle, constructed by Willa Angel Chen Miller and Matthew Stock. The battle was serious, but I had a lot of fun along the way, especially when I reviewed the stacks in the northwest and southeast corners. Nicely done, Ms. Miller and Mr. Stock.Your thoughts?Tricky Clues15A. The answer to a [Question that can’t possibly be answered “No”] is ARE YOU AWAKE. I beg to differ: Any sleep-deprived parent will tell you that it actually is possible to continue to sleep and answer this question.16A. The clue [Solid :: glace : liquid :: ___] needs an answer in French. Glacé means ice, so the answer is EAU, or water, to complete the analogy.31A. I was stuck for a long time on this one: I understood that the mohawk in [Mohawk culture] referred to the hairstyle, but I just couldn’t make the mental leap away from Indigenous culture.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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      Art Collector Who Bought a $6 Million Banana Offers to Buy 100,000 More

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      The vendor who sold the banana only received a quarter for the fruit. Now the buyer of the conceptual work has offered his fruit stand a bigger payday.A week after a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur bought an artwork composed of a fresh banana stuck to a wall with duct tape for $6.2 million at auction, the man, Justin Sun, announced a grand gesture on X. He said he planned on purchasing 100,000 bananas — or $25,000 worth of the produce — from the Manhattan stand where the original fruit was sold for 25 cents.But at the fruit stand at East 72nd Street and York Avenue, outside the doors of the Sotheby’s auction house where the conceptual artwork was sold, the offer landed with a thud against the realities of the life of a New York City street vendor.It would cost thousands of dollars to procure that many bananas from a Bronx wholesale market, said Shah Alam, the 74-year-old employee from Bangladesh who sold the original banana used in “Comedian,” an absurdist commentary on the art world by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. And, it wouldn’t be easy to move that many bananas, which come in boxes of about 100.And then there is the math: The net profit from the purchase of 100,000 bananas by Mr. Sun — who once bought an NFT of a pet rock for more than $600,000 — would be about $6,000.“There’s not any profit in selling bananas,” Mr. Alam said.Plus, as an employee who makes $12 an hour during 12-hour shifts, Mr. Alam pointed out that any money would by rights belong to the fruit stand’s owner, not him.Reached by phone, the stand’s owner, Mohammad R. Islam, 53, who goes by Rana, said he would split any profit between himself, Mr. Alam and the six other people he employs at his two fruit stands. No one had contacted him about any such purchase, though, he said.Mr. Islam had learned from a reporter of Mr. Sun’s plans, which also included offering the bananas from Mr. Islam’s stand for free worldwide, to anyone who showed identification, according to his post on X. Mr. Sun — who has also announced plans to eat the original banana during a Friday news conference at a Hong Kong luxury hotel — did not respond to a request for comment.Working in the rain on Thanksgiving Day, Mr. Islam’s brother, Mohammad Alam Badsha (who is not related to Mr. Alam) said he would welcome the bulk purchase. But it would have little tangible impact, Mr. Badsha said, either on the daily life of the fruit vendors, or on the gulf laid bare by the $6.2 million banana and the stand that sold it for a quarter.“It’s definitely an inequality,” Mr. Badsha said in Bengali.He added a Bangladeshi idiom: It was, he said, the difference between heaven and hell.Zachary Small More

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      Lebanese Residents of Baalbek Return to a Bombed-Out City

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      Tens of thousands of people who had fled the city of Baalbek returned to bombed-out restaurants, flattened apartment buildings and many of the dead still buried under the rubble.Hammers clanged against brick and metal as the residents of Baalbek set to work repairing their homes, desperate to restart their lives again.A day after a cease-fire ended Lebanon’s deadliest war in decades, tens of thousands of people who fled the violence had already returned on Thursday to the hard-hit city in the country’s east.Teenage girls snapped selfies in front of the ancient Roman temples. Excited young men on motorcycles performed doughnuts in the street, their back tires spinning up dust and shards of glass.But after weeks of pounding Israeli airstrikes, the scars were not easy to ignore: bombed-out restaurants, flattened apartment buildings, trees snapped like twigs. And many of the dead were still buried under the rubble, residents said.“I’m an old woman. I’m not affiliated with anyone. What did I do to deserve this?” said Taflah Amar, 79, as she swept debris from the front of her house, one of the few still standing on her street.“I’ve been crying all day,” she said.“What did I do to deserve this?” said Taflah Ammar, 79, at her home in Baalbek.Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York TimesWe 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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      Why Mexico Is Eliminating Independent Watchdog Agencies

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      A vote in the country’s Senate has cleared the way to abolish seven independent organizations that provided oversight on issues such as public information and price fixing.Mexico’s Senate on Thursday night passed a sweeping proposal to dissolve several government-financed yet independent watchdog organizations, a move the president and her supporters said would help reduce corruption and waste. Critics have called it a step backward for transparency and regulation.The duties of most of the seven agencies, which provided oversight on a host of issues, such as public information requests and price fixing in the telecommunications, pharmaceutical and energy sectors, would be absorbed by other parts of the federal government, overseen by the president.Perhaps the most noteworthy of the agencies — the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data, known as INAI — would have its responsibilities divided among a handful of existing federal agencies.“The disappearance of these autonomous bodies represents a democratic setback,” the Mexican Association for the Right to Information, a nongovernmental group, said in a statement. The move, the group added, “weakens the mechanisms of control, transparency and protection of rights that have been built with great effort in our country.”The constitutional amendment dissolving the agencies is part of a series of far-reaching proposals pushed by the former Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, that are supported by his successor and mentee, Claudia Sheinbaum, and by their political party, Morena.In September, Mexico passed an amendment overhauling the country’s judiciary, which supporters of the proposal said was riddled with graft, influence-peddling and nepotism. Critics warned that the move, which will see nearly all Mexican judges elected rather than appointed, undermines judicial independence and politicizes the courts.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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      Canada Accuses Google of Creating Advertising Tech Monopoly

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      The case largely echoes an antitrust action in the United States and seeks to force Google to sell off sections of its online ad business.Canada’s competition authority on Thursday accused Google of abusing its tools for buying and selling online advertising to create a monopoly, and filed a complaint seeking to force the company to sell two of its main advertising technology services.The case strikes at the heart of Google’s business and echoes an ongoing U.S. antitrust lawsuit against the Silicon Valley giant.Both cases come amid four other lawsuits filed in the United States against Google since 2020 and other efforts by officials around the world to reign in the power that large technological companies like Google, Amazon and Apple hold over information and commerce online.Canada is also attempting to use new laws to limit harms caused by social media and to require tech companies to compensate traditional news organizations.In a statement, Canada’s Bureau of Competition Policy, a law enforcement agency, charged that Google has used its position as the largest provider of software for buying and selling ads, its marketplace for ad auctions and its services for showcasing the ads to illegally dominate the sector.The company’s conduct, it said, ensured that the Alphabet-owned Google “would maintain and entrench its market power,” adding that it “locks market participants into using its own ad tech tools, prevents rivals from being able to compete on the merits of their offering.”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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      The Inverted Morality of MAGA

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      I admire Mitt Romney. He is, by all accounts, an outstanding husband and father. He built a successful investment firm by supporting successful young businesses like Staples. He served the public as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics and as a governor. As a senator, he had the courage to vote to convict Donald Trump twice, in the two separate impeachment trials, when few other Republicans did.But as Noah Millman writes on Substack, people in the MAGA movement take a different view of Romney. In private life, Romney compliantly conformed to the bourgeois norms of those around him. In business he contributed to the bloating of the finance and consulting sector. As a politician he bent himself to the needs of the moment, moving from moderate Republican to “extreme conservative.” As a senator, he sought the approval of the Washington establishment.Millman’s underlying point is it’s not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power. It’s that Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions — families, schools, professions, the structures of our government. We are formed by these institutions. People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions — by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ. Over the course of our lives, we inherit institutions, steward them and try to pass them along in better shape to the next generation. We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate — the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during Covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.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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      Peggy Caserta, Who Wrote a Tell-All About Janis Joplin, Dies at 84

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      Her Haight-Ashbury clothing store was ground zero for the counterculture. But she was best known for a tawdry book — which she later disavowed — published after Ms. Joplin’s death.Peggy Caserta, whose funky Haight-Ashbury clothing boutique was a magnet for young bohemians and musicians, and who exploited her relationship with Janis Joplin in a much-panned 1973 memoir that she later disavowed, died on Nov. 21 at her home in Tillamook, Ore. She was 84.Her partner and only immediate survivor, Jackie Mendelson, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.The Louisiana-born Ms. Caserta was 23 and working at a Delta Air Lines office in San Francisco when she decided to open a clothing store for her cohort, the lesbians in her neighborhood. She found an empty storefront on Haight Street, near the corner of Ashbury, which she rented for $87.50 a month.At first Ms. Caserta sold jeans, sweatshirts and double-breasted denim blazers that her mother made. Then she added Levi’s pants, which a friend turned into flares by inserting a triangle of denim into the side seams. When the friend couldn’t keep up with the orders, Ms. Caserta persuaded Levi Strauss & Company to make them.She named the place Mnasidika (pronounced na-SID-ek-ah), after a character in a poem by Sappho. “It’s a Greek girls’ name,” Ms. Caserta told The San Francisco Examiner in 1965, for an article about the “new bohemians” colonizing the Haight-Ashbury district.Ms. Caserta was 23 when she opened a clothing store, Mnasidika, in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.via Wyatt MackenzieWe 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