Hollywood is all about supply and demand, giving mass audiences movies that they just can’t resist watching on the big screen and in turn printing reams of money for the studio that made it. But often movies are announced that leave general audiences simply looking around and considering, “Who asked for this?” Though not all…
Casting is perhaps the single most underappreciated aspect of filmmaking, because when it’s effortlessly done, it’s just a given. It’s only when an actor is egregiously miscast that the practice has much attention drawn to it. But there’s an art to singling out one of the many millions of actors available to play a juicy…
Winter weather alerts were issued for parts of New York state Thursday as the region prepares to be walloped by a powerful winter storm before millions of Americans are set to hit the roads for Thanksgiving.
Forecasters say up to 8 inches of snow may fall in some parts of the state, while other areas will likely be drenched by some much-needed rain.
“Snow will break out, mostly across Pennsylvania and parts of central New York state. There will be heavy, wet snow throughout Thursday,” Fox Forecast Center meteorologist Greg Diamond told The Post.
Winter weather alerts were issued for parts of New York Thursday ahead of a powerful winter storm. FoxWeather
Precipitation is expected to pour down on the tri-state area through at least Friday night, possibly into the weekend, Diamond added.
Areas expecting snow, including parts of northeast Pennsylvania and south-central New York state, near Binghamton and the Catskills, may see up to 8 inches of white flurries.
Explore More
Northern New Jersey, specifically in the area near the Jennings Creek Fire, may also get a dusting, Diamond said.
While the snow will only continue to fall through the night, New York City can’t expect to be coated in white — at least not yet.
New York City will likely just see rain on Thursday and Friday. Matthew McDermott
“Across eastern New England and New York City, it’s just mostly rain. A beneficial rain that will end the fire threat,” Diamond said, adding, “It won’t end our drought here, we need at least 10 inches of rain for that. But it will put an end to the fire issues we’ve been having over the past few weeks.”
While the weekend will likely be clear, showers may put a damper on travel plans at the start of next week.
By Thanksgiving next week, another storm may take form, Diamond warned, noting, “There may be a storm system that develops across the country, but it still remains pretty uncertain at this time.”
New York City needs at least 10 inches of rain to get out of the drought. Robert Miller
Travel impacts this Thursday
While Thanksgiving travel will peak next week, those who decided to head out early for their holiday celebrations may be in a bind due to the inclement weather.
Around 1 p.m., Newark Liberty International Airport was experiencing inbound flight delays of up to 45 minutes due to high winds, according to FlightAware.
John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia airports did not appear to be affected.
Another storm may develop in time for Thanksgiving, but it’s too soon to tell. FoxWeather
A record-breaking 80 million people are expected to travel more than 50 miles from home for the Thanksgiving holiday, according to AAA.
That’s an increase of 1.7 million people compared to last year and 2 million more than in 2019.
David Lammy, the foreign secretary, claimed he was bringing the “golden age of money laundering” to an end as he announced UK financial sanctions against three high-profile kleptocrats and their key enablers.On Thursday, the Foreign Office (FCDO) announced sanctions including asset freezes and travel bans on Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian billionaire, Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former president, and Aivars Lembergs, a Latvian oligarch.The UK has long faced criticism from anti-corruption campaigners for an unquestioning attitude towards foreign investors. That approach came under particular scrutiny after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when the UK government under the Conservatives belatedly sought to freeze assets belonging to alleged allies of Vladimir Putin.Lammy said the tide was turning on corruption after a long period when the previous government allowed the role of London as a money laundering capital to continue.Susan Hawley, the executive director of Spotlight on Corruption, a campaign group, said: “Today’s bold sanctions send a welcome message that the UK is stepping up efforts to end impunity for corruption and the UK’s role in enabling and harbouring dirty money.”The FCDO said Firtash had allegedly extracted hundreds of millions of pounds from Ukraine, and is alleged to have hidden millions in the UK property market. Firtash, who previously worked with Russia’s gas producer Gazprom, has already been placed under sanctions in other jurisdictions.The UK also put his wife, Lada Firtash, under sanctions. The government said she had profited from his corruption and holds UK assets on his behalf, including the site of the old Brompton Road tube station. The government also imposed sanctions on Denis Gorbunenko, a UK-based financial fixer who is alleged to have enabled and facilitated Firtash’s corruption.Dos Santos is accused of abusing her positions at state-run companies to embezzle at least £350m. Dos Santos was once called “Africa’s richest woman”. She has been subject to an Interpol red notice since November 2022 and last month lost a case at the court of appeal regarding her worldwide asset freeze. She has previously vehemently denied any wrongdoing.Lembergs, one of Latvia’s richest people, allegedly abused his political position to commit bribery and launder money. He was jailed last year by a court in Riga, Latvia.Lammy said: “These unscrupulous individuals selfishly deprive their fellow citizens of much-needed funding for education, healthcare and infrastructure – for their own enrichment. The tide is turning. The golden age of money laundering is over.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDos Santos told the Reuters news agency in a statement that the British sanctions were “incorrect and unjustified”.“I was not given the opportunity to defend myself against these allegations,” she said. “I intend to appeal and I hope that the United Kingdom will give me the opportunity to present my evidence.”Firtash did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Lembergs did not immediately respond to a request for comment via his former political party.
As much of Europe grapples to combat overtourism, another scenic Spanish holiday hotspot is cracking down on holiday homes.Malaga has become the latest European area to ban short-term lets in areas saturated by tourism.The city is one of Spain’s most popular summer destinations, receiving around 14 million visitors in 2023.The popular holiday destination has taken the bold step of banning new short-term apartment rentals in 43 neighbourhoods deemed “tourist-saturated”.In these areas, more than 8 percent of homes are let out on a short-term basis and are advertised on sites such as AirBnb.A Malaga city hall statement said the aim was to encourage holiday flats to be set up in places with less pressure from tourism.The council is hoping for a more balanced tourism distribution whilst encouraging visitors to experience more local culture and hidden gems instead of just the hotspots.In Malaga, a further 32 neighbourhoods with “average” saturation of holiday lets will also face restrictions.These include a requirement for flats to have separate entrances for tourists.According to a study by local authorities, cited by the Telegraph, short-term lets account for 65 percent of all accommodation in Malaga.This comes after the mayor of Barcelona vowed back in June to abolish short-term holiday lets in the Catalan capital.Jaume Collboni announced that in November 2028 the city council would eliminate the 10,101 tourist flat licences that have been granted.The short-term renting of apartments would “cease completely”, he said, adding that “those 10,000 apartments will be used by the city’s residents or will go on the market for rent or sale”.“More supply of housing is needed and the measures we’re presenting are to provide more supply so that the working middle class does not have to leave the city because they can’t afford housing,” he added.
viveEV Collaborates with Texas Best Smokehouse #10 to Install Cutting-Edge DC Fast Chargers at Legendary Travel Facility – Travel Industry Today – EIN Presswire
By Jen Christensen, CNN
(CNN) — For more than four decades, scientists have noticed a mysterious chemical in the treated drinking water of millions of people in the United States, but no one’s been able to pinpoint exactly what it is – until now.
The authors of a study published Thursday in the journal Science believe the chemical – which they named chloronitramide anion – is a decomposition byproduct of chloramine, a chemical that many treatment plants use to make water safe to drink. About 113 million people drink tap water that exposes them to chloronitramide anion, the study says.
It’s not clear whether the byproduct could be harmful to human health, but the study authors say its properties are similar to those of other molecules that are toxic enough for the government to regulate them.
And there is some precedent, the researchers say, for chemicals that are used to purify drinking water creating byproducts that the US Environmental Protectio Agency must regulate because they are likely carcinogens.
In the early 20th century, many public water systems started using chlorine in low levels to make drinking water safe.
It solved a major public health problem that had plagued leaders for centuries by ridding the water of cholera and typhoid, deadly germs that can spread through drinking water. But it also caused its own health problems.
Epidemiological studies showed that some people who drink chlorinated water over a long period of time have a higher risk of colon and bladder cancers. For pregnant people who drink chlorinated water there was also a potential association with miscarriages and people who gave birth to babies with low birth weights.
Although chlorine itself is safe to consume at low levels, research showed that toxic byproducts were created when it came into contact with other elements that naturally occurred in the water.
Water systems still use chlorine for purification, but the EPA monitors and limits the amount of byproducts in drinking water to ensure that it is safe for human consumption.
Some systems switched to chloramine, a compound created when chlorine and ammonia are combined. Chloramine doesn’t seem to have the same potentially dangerous byproducts as chlorine, and it was more stable and tended to last longer.
More recently, scientists started noticing that chloramine also created byproducts. Some were familiar, but one remained a mystery, dogging study co-authors Dr. Julian Fairey and Dr. David Wahman for years.
“There’s this outstanding mystery compound in the literature that’s always been out there,” Fairey said Tuesday.
After graduate school at the University of Texas, Fairey and Wahman went on to study chloramine chemistry – Wahman at the EPA and Fairey at the University of Arkansas – and they decided they wanted to pin down this unnamed, unknown compound that had been showing up in research for about 40 years.
It seemed straightforward at first, but it took them 15 years to solve the mystery.
One of the first people they asked for help was Dr. Juliana Laszakovits, an expert in mass spectrometry, an analytical tool that can measure mass-to-charge ratio and determine a substance’s exact molecular weight.
“My first thought is, ‘let’s get this on a mass spectrometer, and let’s try and determine its accurate mass, so then we can determine its chemical formula,’ ” said Laszakovits, a co-author of the study who works in the department of environmental chemistry at the Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics, ETH Zurich.
But she quickly learned that there was a reason this substance had remained a mystery for so long. Water samples that contained the substance had high salinity, much higher than that of salt water. It was difficult to separate the compound from all the salts with the mass spectrometer.
Laszakovits had to get creative and use a technique called ion chromatography, which separates and analyzes ions and polar molecules, coupled with mass spectrometry.
“This combination of techniques isn’t so commonly used in environmental studies,” Laszakovits said. But it did the trick: She was able to separate the compound to get its mass and then help figure out its chemical formula.
Dr. Kristopher McNeill, a co-author of the study and a professor of environmental chemistry at ETH Zurich, confirmed its structure, and Fairey then created the same compound using a different technique to show the similarities.
Wanting to prove that the substance was a byproduct of disintegrating chloramines, Wahman looked for it in drinking water systems across the US that used the chemical and compared it with systems in Switzerland that didn’t.
He found chloronitramide anions in the water with chloramines but not in the Swiss water systems.
Although the team learned a lot about chloronitramide anions, they couldn’t determine whether it hurt human health.
“Its toxicity is currently unknown,” Fairey said. “Its presence is expected, quite honestly, in all chlorinated drinking waters to some extent because of the chemistry, and it has similarity to other toxic molecules. Therefore, future research on chloronitramide anion is needed to understand its potential implications in drinking water.”
Water expert Dr. David Sedlak called the research a “fascinating story and a very nice piece of science.”
“Chloramines have their own families of disinfection byproducts that they make, and so maybe the last 30 years we’ve seen a little bit of buyer’s remorse for this switch from free chlorine to chloramines, because we keep discovering these chloramine disinfection byproducts,” said Sedlak, vice chair for graduate studies and the Plato Malozemoff Professor of Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, who was not involved with the new research.
“The challenge is, we don’t really know about the health impacts, because unlike the free chlorine disinfection byproducts, there just hasn’t been as much toxicology done on these compounds.”
Local water systems don’t have the funding to investigate the health effects of these byproducts, Sedlak said, so it will be up to the federal government.
“It’s pretty expensive to look at these things, and when you think about the kind of money that we spend on understanding whether new drugs are toxic to patients, we should be willing to spend that kind of money to understand whether our water is safe to drink or not,” he said.
“It’s the kind of thing that, when government is functioning well, it does a good job protecting us by looking at these things. But I don’t think the EPA or CDC or NIH has the funding needed to answer these questions,” he said.
Oliver Jones, a professor of chemistry at RMIT University in Melbourne, said the study does some elegant chemistry and he is “quite convinced by their analytical evidence” that the unknown compound is chloronitramide anion. Although he agrees that a toxicological investigation of the anion would be useful now that its identity is known, “I’m not overly worried about my tap water,” Jones said.
“The compound in question is not newly discovered, just newly defined,” Jones told the Australian Science Media Centre. “We should remember that the presence of a compound does not automatically mean it is causing harm.”
Everything can be toxic at the right amount, even water, he said. The question is, is it toxic at the level people are exposed to? “I think the answer is probably not,” Jones said.
The authors of the study suggest that in the meantime, if people are concerned about their drinking water, while they don’t know for sure if it would work, a simple filter may help.
“I think a Brita filter or something like that is probably logical, in terms of any kind of carbon-based filter that you have in your refrigerator would probably remove it if someone was concerned,” Wahman said.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
By Jen Christensen, CNN
(CNN) — For more than four decades, scientists have noticed a mysterious chemical in the treated drinking water of millions of people in the United States, but no one’s been able to pinpoint exactly what it is – until now.
The authors of a study published Thursday in the journal Science believe the chemical – which they named chloronitramide anion – is a decomposition byproduct of chloramine, a chemical that many treatment plants use to make water safe to drink. About 113 million people drink tap water that exposes them to chloronitramide anion, the study says.
It’s not clear whether the byproduct could be harmful to human health, but the study authors say its properties are similar to those of other molecules that are toxic enough for the government to regulate them.
And there is some precedent, the researchers say, for chemicals that are used to purify drinking water creating byproducts that the US Environmental Protectio Agency must regulate because they are likely carcinogens.
In the early 20th century, many public water systems started using chlorine in low levels to make drinking water safe.
It solved a major public health problem that had plagued leaders for centuries by ridding the water of cholera and typhoid, deadly germs that can spread through drinking water. But it also caused its own health problems.
Epidemiological studies showed that some people who drink chlorinated water over a long period of time have a higher risk of colon and bladder cancers. For pregnant people who drink chlorinated water there was also a potential association with miscarriages and people who gave birth to babies with low birth weights.
Although chlorine itself is safe to consume at low levels, research showed that toxic byproducts were created when it came into contact with other elements that naturally occurred in the water.
Water systems still use chlorine for purification, but the EPA monitors and limits the amount of byproducts in drinking water to ensure that it is safe for human consumption.
Some systems switched to chloramine, a compound created when chlorine and ammonia are combined. Chloramine doesn’t seem to have the same potentially dangerous byproducts as chlorine, and it was more stable and tended to last longer.
More recently, scientists started noticing that chloramine also created byproducts. Some were familiar, but one remained a mystery, dogging study co-authors Dr. Julian Fairey and Dr. David Wahman for years.
“There’s this outstanding mystery compound in the literature that’s always been out there,” Fairey said Tuesday.
After graduate school at the University of Texas, Fairey and Wahman went on to study chloramine chemistry – Wahman at the EPA and Fairey at the University of Arkansas – and they decided they wanted to pin down this unnamed, unknown compound that had been showing up in research for about 40 years.
It seemed straightforward at first, but it took them 15 years to solve the mystery.
One of the first people they asked for help was Dr. Juliana Laszakovits, an expert in mass spectrometry, an analytical tool that can measure mass-to-charge ratio and determine a substance’s exact molecular weight.
“My first thought is, ‘let’s get this on a mass spectrometer, and let’s try and determine its accurate mass, so then we can determine its chemical formula,’ ” said Laszakovits, a co-author of the study who works in the department of environmental chemistry at the Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics, ETH Zurich.
But she quickly learned that there was a reason this substance had remained a mystery for so long. Water samples that contained the substance had high salinity, much higher than that of salt water. It was difficult to separate the compound from all the salts with the mass spectrometer.
Laszakovits had to get creative and use a technique called ion chromatography, which separates and analyzes ions and polar molecules, coupled with mass spectrometry.
“This combination of techniques isn’t so commonly used in environmental studies,” Laszakovits said. But it did the trick: She was able to separate the compound to get its mass and then help figure out its chemical formula.
Dr. Kristopher McNeill, a co-author of the study and a professor of environmental chemistry at ETH Zurich, confirmed its structure, and Fairey then created the same compound using a different technique to show the similarities.
Wanting to prove that the substance was a byproduct of disintegrating chloramines, Wahman looked for it in drinking water systems across the US that used the chemical and compared it with systems in Switzerland that didn’t.
He found chloronitramide anions in the water with chloramines but not in the Swiss water systems.
Although the team learned a lot about chloronitramide anions, they couldn’t determine whether it hurt human health.
“Its toxicity is currently unknown,” Fairey said. “Its presence is expected, quite honestly, in all chlorinated drinking waters to some extent because of the chemistry, and it has similarity to other toxic molecules. Therefore, future research on chloronitramide anion is needed to understand its potential implications in drinking water.”
Water expert Dr. David Sedlak called the research a “fascinating story and a very nice piece of science.”
“Chloramines have their own families of disinfection byproducts that they make, and so maybe the last 30 years we’ve seen a little bit of buyer’s remorse for this switch from free chlorine to chloramines, because we keep discovering these chloramine disinfection byproducts,” said Sedlak, vice chair for graduate studies and the Plato Malozemoff Professor of Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, who was not involved with the new research.
“The challenge is, we don’t really know about the health impacts, because unlike the free chlorine disinfection byproducts, there just hasn’t been as much toxicology done on these compounds.”
Local water systems don’t have the funding to investigate the health effects of these byproducts, Sedlak said, so it will be up to the federal government.
“It’s pretty expensive to look at these things, and when you think about the kind of money that we spend on understanding whether new drugs are toxic to patients, we should be willing to spend that kind of money to understand whether our water is safe to drink or not,” he said.
“It’s the kind of thing that, when government is functioning well, it does a good job protecting us by looking at these things. But I don’t think the EPA or CDC or NIH has the funding needed to answer these questions,” he said.
Oliver Jones, a professor of chemistry at RMIT University in Melbourne, said the study does some elegant chemistry and he is “quite convinced by their analytical evidence” that the unknown compound is chloronitramide anion. Although he agrees that a toxicological investigation of the anion would be useful now that its identity is known, “I’m not overly worried about my tap water,” Jones said.
“The compound in question is not newly discovered, just newly defined,” Jones told the Australian Science Media Centre. “We should remember that the presence of a compound does not automatically mean it is causing harm.”
Everything can be toxic at the right amount, even water, he said. The question is, is it toxic at the level people are exposed to? “I think the answer is probably not,” Jones said.
The authors of the study suggest that in the meantime, if people are concerned about their drinking water, while they don’t know for sure if it would work, a simple filter may help.
“I think a Brita filter or something like that is probably logical, in terms of any kind of carbon-based filter that you have in your refrigerator would probably remove it if someone was concerned,” Wahman said.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
Dearest gentle readers … it appears a Jane Austen and Bridgerton medley graced McMaster with a fantastic evening of dress up, mystery and enjoyment
The McMaster Book Club hosted a Jane Austen and Bridgerton themed mystery tea party. On Nov. 12, 2024, students gathered in their finest regency-inspired attire from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m for a mystery game night at Bridges.
McMaster’s book club is dedicated to creating community through books. Mehreen Javed is the club’s vice-president of administration. Isabella Paton is the vice-president of outreach for the McMaster Book Club.
“We typically choose two books a month and we really emphasize having club members vote on what those books are to let them have a say on that. So we’ll have two meetings each month where we just talk about the books themselves. Additionally to that, we also do some socials and fun stuff like the Jane Austen event,” said Paton.
Paton initially came up with the idea for this event over this past summer. “Everyone was hyping up Bridgerton so hard and I said, “I need this content right now.” I was reading Pride and Prejudice at the time and we had been planning over the summer what kind of events we were going to run,” said Paton.
“I think even when you look at Bridgerton, you could definitely tell that Bridgerton itself is definitely pulling inspiration from Jane Austen,” said Paton when asked about the decision to do a combination theme of Jane Austen and Bridgerton.
The mystery tea party was an extremely detailed game and very well received by McMaster Book Club’s community. “There was this kit online that came with a list of characters, character guides and fun little audio files we could play for them,” said Javed.
“The audio files were so fun . . . it was so over the top, in the most fun way because I remember everyone got so into it . . . Once we actually started playing the game we were breaking people off into smaller groups. The whole point was to spread gossip and it was so funny because people just got so into it from there. And by the end of it, it was just constant laughing, over the top gasping and people were completely improvising. It was fun to see people come out of their shells,” said Paton.
By the end of it, it was just constant laughing, over the top gasping and people were completely improvising. It was fun to see people come out of their shells.Isabella Paton, Vice-President of Outreach McMaster Book Club
“In these groups they [participants] also have lines and rumours that they can spread [which] are listed in their character guides. So that way, the drama is stirred, the tea is filled. Everyone gets suspicious of everybody else because they don’t know if that person is plotting,” said Javed.
The book club executives had assigned all attendees a letter before their arrival to the event. They chose one of the letters to be Lady Whistlewind, a character’s hidden identity people try to discover in the game. “What makes it fun is you can play the game multiple times . . . in theory, every time it [Lady Whistlewind] could be a different character,” said Paton.
Participants were strongly encouraged to wear costumes to further immerse themselves in the game. “We sent everyone a list of all the characters before the actual day of and got them to tell us their top three characters. After that, we told everyone what their character was . . . people were fully dressed up in their gowns. Even the men were in their riding boots, it was so funny,” said Paton.
The book club executives used decorations, refreshments and props for attendees to have a real Jane Austen and Bridgerton tea party experience.
“We had small brownies, we had little mini cupcakes and we also had tea, because you can’t have it without tea,” said Javed. “Bridges has these nice fairy lights that they have strung up there. So we turned those on . . . I also had my speaker as well and we were playing Bridgerton music in the background.”
The evening had other props such as teacups, fans and the overall Bridges scenery for students to take photos among. “What’s really nice about Bridges is you don’t necessarily have to do too much just because it’s a really nice venue,” said Paton.
“I think events like these . . . just give book lovers an opportunity to actually come together, get to know each other, come out of their shell a lot of the times,” said Paton. “It was so nice to emphasize community and emphasize that book club can be a source of community for people.”
It was so nice to emphasize community and emphasize that book club can be a source of community for people.Isabella Paton, Vice-President of Outreach McMaster Book Club
So for now gentle readers, have a say in the next McMaster Book Club’s book of choice and stay tuned for more engaging socials on their Instagram.
Traveling during the Thanksgiving holiday is never easy, but this year travelers will need an extra helping of patience because more of you are going to be on the road and in the air than last year.Breathe deep, pop that meditation podcast on and read about what you need to know and hints to stay out of trouble.‘More, more, more’