I had not had a real vacation since April 2009 and I was going crazy for warm weather. Jason knew how badly I wanted to get away and gave me one of the best Christmas presents a girl could ask for a CRUISE I'm apologizing now for the lack of detail

I decided to introduce my son to video games. We soon found one he liked … and I mean really, really liked

So I decided to introduce my two-year-old son to the world of video games. Before you accuse me of hobbling my offspring's mind, I'd like to point out that a) television is 2,000 times worse, so shove that up your Night Garden and b) I also decided to counterbalance the gaming with exposure to high culture. For every 10 minutes of Fruit Ninja during daylight hours, he'd get 10 pages of a critically acclaimed novel at bedtime. We're currently halfway through The Magus by John Fowles, which he's enjoying immensely. He finds some passages so moving that his protracted sobs drown out my reading completely, and when I return to the beginning of the chapter to start again, he leaps up screaming, trying to snatch the book out of my hands with delight.

Like any self-respecting 2014 toddler, he can swipe, pat and jab at games on a smartphone or tablet, but smartphone games aren't real games. They're interactive dumbshows designed to sedate suicidal commuters. And they're not just basic but insulting, often introducing themselves as free-to-play simply so they can extort money from you later in exchange for more levels or less terrible gameplay. Either that or they fund themselves with pop-up adverts that defile the screen like streaks on a toilet bowl.

Der Kabarettist Sebastian Pufpaff tritt nun notgedrungen ohne Publikum auf. Hier spricht er über die Stille nach der Pointe - und über den Angriff auf das Team der "heute-show".

Rui Pinto is the whistleblower behind Football Leaks and has been in jail in Portugal for months. In an interview, his lawyer William Bourdon talks about how his client is doing and what he is doing to get Pinto out of prison.

We use longitudinal data from the income tax system to study the impacts of firms’ employment and wage-setting policies on the level and change in immigrant-native wage differences in Canada. We focus on immigrants who arrived in the early 2000s, distinguishing between those with and without a college degree from two broad groups of countries – the U.S., the U.K. and Northern Europe, and the rest of the world. Consistent with a growing literature based on the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999), we find that firm-specific wage premiums explain a significant share of earnings inequality in Canada and contribute to the average earnings gap between immigrants and natives. In the decade after receiving permanent status, earnings of immigrants rise relative to those of natives. Compositional effects due to selective outmigration and changing participation play no role in this gain. About one-sixth is attributable to movements up the job ladder to employers that offer higher pay premiums for all groups, with particularly large gains for immigrants from the “rest of the world” countries.

German multinational Bayer underestimated the risks of acquiring Monsanto. Now, the company is desperately seeking to contain the damage by selling business divisions and cutting jobs. So far, though, none of these moves have helped.

The frequency of fatal helicopter accidents has slipped in recent decades.

The claim seeks damages in connection with the release of cellphone pictures taken by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies at the scene of the Jan. 26 tragedy in Calabasas.

This paper takes an early look at the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a large and novel small business support program that was part of the initial policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We use new data on the distribution of PPP loans and high-frequency micro-level employment data to consider two dimensions of program targeting. First, we do not find evidence that funds flowed to areas more adversely affected by the economic effects of the pandemic, as measured by declines in hours worked or business shutdowns. If anything, funds flowed to areas less hard hit. Second, we find significant heterogeneity across banks in terms of disbursing PPP funds, which does not only reflect differences in underlying loan demand. The top-4 banks alone account for 36% of total pre-policy small business loans, but disbursed less than 3% of all PPP loans. Areas that were significantly more exposed to low-PPP banks received much lower loan allocations. As data become available, we will study employment and establishment responses to the program and the impact of PPP support on the economic recovery. Measuring these responses is critical for evaluating the social insurance value of the PPP and similar policies.

The claim seeks damages in connection with the release of cellphone pictures taken by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies at the scene of the Jan. 26 tragedy in Calabasas.

Most buyers, understandably, would want to know if a violent death occurred in the houses they are considering.

A redevelopment deal has been reached for the former Ford Motor Co. plant in St. Paul that would feature thousands of new homes powered by renewable energy, officials announced Tuesday.

We construct a quantitative model of an economy hit by an epidemic. People differ by age and skill, and choose occupations and whether to commute to work or work from home, to maximize their income and minimize their fear of infection. Occupations differ by wage, infection risk, and the productivity loss when working from home. By setting the model parameters to replicate the progression of COVID-19 in South Korea and the United Kingdom, we obtain three key results. First, government-imposed lock-downs may not present a clear trade-off between GDP and public health, as commonly believed, even though its immediate effect is to reduce GDP and infections by forcing people to work from home. A premature lifting of the lock-down raises GDP temporarily, but infections rise over the next months to a level at which many people choose to work from home, where they are less productive, driven by the fear of infection. A longer lock-down eventually mitigates the GDP loss as well as flattens the infection curve. Second, if the UK had adopted South Korean policies, its GDP loss and infections would have been substantially smaller both in the short and the long run. This is not because Korea implemented policies sooner, but because aggressive testing and tracking more effectively reduce infections and disrupt the economy less than a blanket lock-down. Finally, low-skill workers and self-employed lose the most from the epidemic and also from the government policies. However, the policy of issuing “visas” to those who have antibodies will disproportionately benefit the low-skilled, by relieving them of the fear of infection and also by allowing them to get back to work.

An angry man broke a glass door at Junior’s restaurant in Brooklyn before fleeing in a BMW, police said Wednesday.

The new law requires prosecutors to hand over most evidence in criminal cases to defense lawyers within 15 days of suspects’ arraignments. Because of the law, lawyers who once clocked out in the early evening are now working late into the night, say multiple sources in the Brooklyn DA’s office.

“Those people shot him to kill him. It’s a miracle that my son is alive,” Carmen Cruz said of the Feb. 6 incident in which her son, 26-year-old Erick Diaz-Cruz, was wounded in a confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Gravesend.

The diocese made the dramatic announcement after confirming positive coronavirus tests for two priests: One at a church in Queens, the other at a church in Brooklyn.

The operators of the New Oriental Guyana Restaurant on Liberty Ave. in Jamaica shut its front gates — but in a Prohibition-era move, they let dozens of customers in through an alley door so they could wine and dine the night away, the State Liquor Authority said.

Ruthie Ann Miles, a Tony winner who is now a regular on the CBS series “All Rise,” shared the happy news on Instagram.

Inmates were coughing and sneezing, and guards wore no personal protective equipment, said Hassan Chunn, 46, who fears the disease is spreading through the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Two thousand workers from the Amalgamated Transit Union’s Local 1181 voted overwhelmingly to authorize the strike against their employer, which operates about 900 of the city’s more than 8,000 school bus routes.

The teacher recently traveled to Italy and came back to class before noticing the symptoms, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Nearly 20 groups representing New York City foster kids pleaded with officials to finally guarantee school buses to students in foster care so they no longer have to switch schools because they can’t get to class.

Nigeria striker Odion Ighalo hopes that his loan deal at Manchester United is extended until the Premier League season is completed following the coronavirus lockdown.

Repeat Signage, user-friendly digital signage software, with built-in spreadsheet, is ideal for displaying menu items and tastebud-tempting images of food. Playlists of different presentations can be displayed at various times of the day to reflect breakfast, lunch, dinner and special offers. See examples on the Digital signage for restaurants page.

Create single or multi-screen restaurant digital menu boards to tempt your customers tastebuds with meal choices. With Repeat Signage software you can create different presentations to be displayed on screen at various times of the day or week.

In response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the US government brought about a collection of fiscal stimulus measures: the 2020 CARES Act. Among other provisions, this Act directed cash payments to households. We analyze households’ spending responses using high-frequency transaction data. We also explore heterogeneity by income levels, recent income declines, and liquidity. We find that households respond rapidly to receipt of stimulus payments, with spending increasing by $0.25-$0.35 per dollar of stimulus during the first 10 days. Households with lower incomes, greater income drops, and lower levels of liquidity display stronger responses. Liquidity plays the most important role, with no observed spending response for households with high levels of bank account balances. Relative to the effects of previous economic stimulus programs in 2001 and 2008, we see much smaller increases in durables spending and larger increases in spending on food, likely reflecting the impact of shelter-in-place orders and supply disruptions. We hope that our results inform the current debate about appropriate policy measures.

Alleged sex offender violated probation by going to Dunkin Donuts with no pants: cops

South African Rugby has no immediate plans to change the dates of the British & Irish Lions tour in 2021 but says it is conducting scenario planning around a possible switch due to the coronavirus pandemic.

There are a heck of a lot of reasons not to.

These two genes are all it takes to determine the sex of a kiwifruit.

The gargantuan structures hint at a massive explosion in our galaxy’s past.

That spells trouble for the entire planet.

Saharan silver ants don’t have the longest limbs. But they make up for it with a sprightly combination of fast pacing, light-footedness, and synchronized stepping that effectively turns their six legs into two.

If validated, Google’s new technology may bring us closer to a future of ultra-efficient computing.

Thwaites Glacier is melting fast. But to understand how climate change is driving its decline, scientists need to send instruments through 2,000 feet of ice into the water below.

You can watch Anthill’s one and only sequel, Not2Bad, right now (and anytime for that matter) on Red Bull TV.
( Photos: 2, Comments: 4 )

With coronavirus on the rampage, perhaps the people who don't believe in vaccinations will rethink their irresponsible position.

Inglewood can help solve the first-mile last-mile problem of public transit in a big way.

Amid a public health emergency, it's unconscionable for California to allow dozens of state-owned homes to stay empty.

The Supreme Court makes it easier for states to convict mentally ill defendants.

One Trump's smartest moves was to make Dr. Anthony Fauci a part of his coronavirus task force. Let's keep him there.

It's legitimate to worry that the steps we're taking to contain the coronavirus are causing unnecessary damage to the U.S. economy. But the damage that the disease would cause if it isn't contained would be far worse.

A federal judge was right to order the Trump administration to move faster to release detained migrant children from conditions that put them at risk for COVID-19.

What's worse than power shutoffs during the coronavirus quarantine? An unplanned outage that sparks a wildfire.

The federal stimulus checks go to people with Social Security numbers, leaving out millions who work in the U.S. without permission, but who pay taxes.