First 90 days in a new job presentation

Since the pandemic began to wane, New York-watchers have stoked fears about an urban doom loop : Millennials like me — liberated from the chains of our desks — would abandon Midtown Manhattan and perhaps the city or state altogether in search of lower costs of living. The commercial tax base would be obliterated, leaving no funds to support essential services like the subway. To prevent this dystopian future, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams convened an expert panel that I served on, and they released the “ Making New York Work for Everyone ” plan (also known as the “‘New’ New York” plan) in December, a sweeping set of 40 proposals to keep the economy humming. The goals of the plan, broadly, are to reimagine the city’s business districts, to make it easier for New Yorkers to get to work, and to generate inclusive growth that positions the city to “lead the emerging industries of the 21st century.” But now, it is budget season in Albany. The proverbial “three men in a … [Read more...] about Will Ambitious Plans for a ‘New’ New York Get Crushed in Albany?

The suspected betrayal of U.S. informants in China by a former CIA officer is "one of the biggest losses and intelligence failures in modern history," a former counterintelligence official told NBC News. "There was a period of time when reporting to the U.S. intelligence community out of China dried up almost completely, and you don’t rebuild that base of information overnight," said Frank Figliuzzi, who was an FBI assistant director in 2011 and 2012. That assessment comes a day after the Justice Department announced the arrest of former American spy Jerry Chun Shing Lee , 53, for illegal possession of classified information — including the real names of other CIA operatives. Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen who served in the Army and worked for the CIA for 13 years, is suspected of funneling information to China that caused the deaths or imprisonment of approximately 20 American agents , sources familiar with the case said. Ex-CIA officer … [Read more...] about FBI created job for suspected spy Jerry Lee to lure him to U.S.

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Apple ’s subscription music streaming service , Apple Music, now has a new sibling, dedicated to classical music. Apple Music Classical has just gone live and is available to most Apple Music subscribers at no extra cost. If you have an individual, family or student subscription, then Classical is included. The only exception is Apple Music Voice Plan, which is the lower-priced version for users of the HomePod, for instance, which is entirely controlled by the user’s voice. Oliver Schusser, Apple’s VP of Apple Music and Beats, talked to The Independent earlier this month about the new venture. He told me, “At Apple, we love music. When we launched Apple Music, in the first few years, we were trying to really wrap our heads around how streaming works and what we should do with the product. But as it went along, we … [Read more...] about Apple Music Classical: iPhone maker launches new streaming service focused on orchestral music

Back in the 1980s , two young Harvard professors trying to reinvigorate the Democratic Party would meet at the Wursthaus restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., to have lunch and argue with each other. They must have made for an entertaining sight, one of them bearish and the other less than five feet tall, debating each other in a dark Harvard Square dive. The argument, in a nutshell, came to this. The smaller man — Robert Reich, a future secretary of labor — argued for something that he called “industrial policy.” Since the government couldn’t avoid having a big influence on the economy, he said, it should at least do so in a way that promoted fast-growing industries and invested in worthy public projects. The bearish professor was Lawrence H. Summers, who was then the youngest person to have received tenure in the modern history of Harvard University. He loved to tackle big, broad questions, and, by his lights, industrial policy amounted to another version of the governmental meddling … [Read more...] about Larry Summers’s Evolution

By now, plenty of us know that artificially intelligent virtual assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard can pull off sensational stunts, such as winning coding contests, passing bar exams and professing love to a tech columnist. But I wondered: How helpful are the bots, really, as actual assistants? It’s worth asking because our first rodeo with virtual assistants didn’t go so well. Older A.I. bots like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa had more than a decade to improve, but they ended up stagnating and are now used mostly for setting timers and playing music. ChatGPT and Bard, on the other hand, use so-called large language models that recognize and generate text based on enormous data sets scraped off the web. They are trained to compose sentences on the fly as if they were human, which potentially makes them far more versatile as assistants. To test that theory, I came up with a list of tasks that people might ask of a human assistant. I prodded friends who … [Read more...] about How ChatGPT and Bard Performed as My Executive Assistants

A lawyer for Donald Trump has claimed the hush money investigation into him is "dead," one week from the day the former president claimed he would be arrested as part of the probe. Trump attorney Lindsey Halligan told Newsmax that the "weak" case against the former president is ending with no indictment for the Republican. Halligan's claim appeared to be more of a suggestion rather than an indication from authorities, adding that if Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg 's inquiry is not "dead" then "it should be." Trump made an uncorroborated claim that he would be arrested in New York on Tuesday, March 21 , as part of the investigation into whether the $130,000 he arranged to be paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep an alleged affair the pair had a secret before the 2016 election amounted to a campaign violation. Trump has denied any wrongdoing, and denies having an affair with Daniels in 2006. It is widely believed that a grand jury in New York who have … [Read more...] about Trump lawyer claims hush money probe is “dead” as investigation continues

Angry broadcast unions have pledged to launch a strike ballot today if BBC bosses ask for voluntary redundancies to cover a £2billion funding shortfall. The threat follows yesterday's heated management meeting with screen stars including Joanna Lumley, Lord Robert Winston, Bill Oddie and John Humphrys. Lord Winston complained morale had hit "rock bottom" while Humphrys was unhappy at being "shot down" for trying to protest at the cuts. But director general Mark Thompson said it had been "positive" meeting, adding: "We've got to make sure we keep as much talent as possible." Thompson yesterday announced 2,500 job losses and a 10 per cent cut in new programmes, meaning more repeats. He had planned to send out 3,000 letters today asking for volunteers to quit. Gerry Morrissey, of union Bectu, said: "He agreed on the principle of retraining and redeployment but that is meaningless if they start calling for volunteers." Thousands of journalists and technical staff are set to … [Read more...] about Furious BBC staff vow to call strike vote today

Oscar Health was going to be a new kind of insurance company. Started in 2012, just in time to offer plans to people buying insurance under the new federal health care law, the business promised to use technology to push less costly care and more consumer-friendly coverage. “We’re trying to build something that’s going to turn the industry on its head,” Joshua Kushner, one of the company’s founders, said in 2014, as Oscar began to enroll its first customers. These days, though, Oscar is more of a case study in how brutally tough it is to keep a business above water in the state marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act. And its struggles highlight a critical question about the act: Can insurance companies run a viable business in the individual market? Oscar has attracted 135,000 customers, about half of them in New York State. And some of its efforts with technology have been successful. But for every dollar of premium Oscar collects in New York, the company is losing … [Read more...] about Health Insurer Hoped to Disrupt the Industry, but Struggles in State Marketplaces

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are following markets in Europe and Asia higher Wednesday as Wall Street shakes off a bit more of the fear that dominated it earlier this month. The S&P 500 was 1% higher in early trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 230 points, or 0.7%, at 32,624, as of 9:40 a.m. Eastern time, while the Nasdaq composite was 1.3% higher. They followed similar sized gains in other markets around the world, and the S&P 500 is on track to close what’s been a tumultuous month with a modest gain. That’s despite the month being dominated by worries about banks and whether the industry is cracking under the pressure of much higher interest rates. Big actions by regulators recently have calmed some of the worries around banks, including a government-brokered takeover by one Swiss banking giant of another. In that deal, UBS said Wednesday it’s bringing back former CEO Sergio Ermotti to help it absorb its troubled rival, Credit Suisse. Ermotti led the bank … [Read more...] about Stocks rise on Wall Street as bank fears ease further

WICHITA, Kan. — Senator Barack Obama says the top priority of the next president should be to create a more lasting and equitable prosperity than achieved by either President Bush in the current decade or even Bill Clinton in the 1990s. In an hourlong interview outlining his economic views, Mr. Obama praised the Clinton administration for reducing the deficit and setting the stage for the ’90s boom. But he said Mr. Clinton had failed to halt a long-term increase in income inequality that had left the middle class feeling squeezed. If elected, Mr. Obama said he would to try to forge a popular mandate for policy changes that could reverse a generation of slow wage growth and outlast any one administration. At the top of his list would be shifting the tax burden more toward the wealthy and making investments — in health care, alternative-energy research and education — that would cost a significant amount of money but could ultimately lift economic growth. “The project of the next … [Read more...] about Closing Income Gap Tops Obama’s Agenda for Economic Change