James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

This is the shift from AI as a tool to AI as an operator — and it changes everything.

What if your internet browser acted like a full-time employee — handling research, planning, and execution for you?

That’s exactly what OpenAI’s Atlas browser makes possible — and most people still aren’t using it.

And I’ll show you how solopreneurs are already using it to reclaim 40+ hours a week.

In this video, I’m breaking down eight plug-and-play use cases that solo entrepreneurs are using right now to scale toward six to seven figures and cut their workload in half:

• Content Creation: Identify breakout hooks, draft scripts, and organize everything into a single Google Doc automatically.
• Tab Chaos Killer: Ask Atlas what you were working on and instantly rebuild your workflow or automation plan from browsing context.
• Conversion Boost: Audit landing pages using the latest research and get a ready-to-run test plan for higher conversions.
• Inbox Cleanup: Auto-unsubscribe from dead senders and get a clean report of what changed.
• Inline Editing: Rewrite any draft in your tone of voice directly inside the page, no copy-paste needed.
• Smart Purchasing: Compare tools, gear, and software intelligently before you buy — save hours and avoid bad decisions.
• Content Intelligence: Scan Reddit, Substack, and YouTube to build next week’s posting plan based on real audience demand.

• SEO and Findability: Run compact audits for Google and AI search engines like Perplexity so people actually find your work.

Inside the video, you’ll learn:

• My full Atlas setup from blank browser → first automation
• The exact prompts I use to turn Atlas into a revenue-producing machine
• How to eliminate 40+ hours of manual work every single week
• Why “zero-click searches” mean your current business model must evolve now

The way you use AI just changed. This is how you build your edge before everyone else catches on.

The AI Success Kit is available to download for free, along with a chapter from my new book, The Wolf is at The Door.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The reverend’s intellectualism and distinctive brand of man-up Christianity draws a wide audience to his church, the largest in New York.

One Saturday in mid-September, the Rev. A. R. Bernard took to the blue carpeted stage of the Christian Cultural Center, the 96,000-square-foot megachurch he built 16 years ago at the edge of Starrett City, in Brooklyn, with his usual accouterments: a smartphone, a bottle of water and a large glass marker board that he would soon cover in bullet points drawn from the playbooks of marketing specialists. Mr. Bernard, 63, is tall and slender, and on this day he wore a distressed black leather jacket, a white polo shirt, bluejeans and white tennis shoes — casual Saturday attire. On Sunday, you would find him impeccably tailored in a light wool suit and tortoiseshell glasses, looking more like the banker he once was than the pastor of a congregation of nearly 40,000.

Cameras on telescoping booms were cantilevered over the stage, which is bland and massive, like the set of a daytime talk show. It was the final morning of a weeklong women’s conference, and the female audience of more than 1,000 took out their own devices and cued up their Bible apps, poised to take notes.

When the pastor speaks, everyone takes notes, not just the younger congregants.

His church, the largest in New York City, has long been considered a required stop on the way to City Hall and beyond. Having served as an adviser to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for all three terms, Mr. Bernard counts the billionaire among his many powerful friends. (In 2013, he flirted briefly with his own mayoral bid.) Mr. Bernard has met with the last two popes, and when Reuven Rivlin, the president of Israel, visited New York for the first time last year, he attended service at the church days before he addressed the United Nations. Mr. Bernard is a registered Republican, but he voted twice for Bill Clinton and twice for President Obama. The Clintons are old friends; they made sure to visit the church last spring in the days before the New York primary.

Mr. Bernard may have a reputation as a kingmaker, or “spiritual power broker,” as Bill Cunningham, the political consultant and former communications director for Mr. Bloomberg, described him recently, following a storied tradition of influential black pastors in New York City. But his tweedy intellectualism and distinctive brand of muscular, man-up Christianity also draw stars of pop music, film and sports to East New York.

He has been a spiritual adviser to Denzel and Pauletta Washington, and to the former pro football player Curtis Martin. Alonzo Mourning, a former pro basketball player, used to charter a plane to fly from Florida to attend Mr. Bernard’s services. Kenneth P. Thompson, the Brooklyn district attorney, who died last week from cancer, had been a congregant for decades, and his memorial service — his homegoing, in church parlance — was to be celebrated at the Christian Cultural Center on Saturday.

“He’s made me a better person through his teachings,” Pauletta Washington said. “My husband as well.”

Once a Nation of Islam follower and teenage civil rights activist who read Alan Watts and Krishnamurti before he read the Bible, Mr. Bernard presents more like a professor than a bible thumper. That he is a motorcycle-riding family man and father of seven sons as well as a martial arts devotee — inked into Mr. Bernard’s forearm is a Chinese character that translates as “the unfettered mind” — adds to his allure.

On that Saturday morning in Brooklyn, Mr. Bernard was writing swiftly on his marker board while the women in the audience called out encouragements. “You have a responsibility to get smarter,” he told them. “If you’re the smartest one in your group, get a new group. Develop your strengths. Manage your weaknesses.” As always, Mr. Bernard closed with this refrain: “Did you get anything out of this today?”

Then Karen Bernard, his high school sweetheart and wife of 44 years, stepped onto the dais and swiftly upstaged him. Though she has multiple sclerosis, she waved away the stool a burly security guard had brought for her and stood next to her husband, a smartly dressed figure in black patent leather platform shoes with stiletto heels, a delicate diamond bracelet circling her ankle. As her husband described the pneumonia that hit him hard last month — unlike Hillary Clinton, he was benched for two solid weeks — and how his wife had cared for him, Ms. Bernard scanned the crowd, eyebrows eloquently aloft, and said with perfect comedic timing, “Isn’t that what you do with a baby?”

Mr. Bernard winced as the crowd roared its approval.

Ms. Bernard is the not-so-secret sauce in Mr. Bernard’s global ministry. Their long marriage has been a touchstone in his preaching, and he has used their marital struggles as teaching aids. Mr. Bernard will tell you that his work has often been his mistress, and Ms. Bernard will just as quickly tell you how mad that has made her, and for how long (on this morning, she pinched his arm hard to make her point, which delighted her rapt audience).

In the early 1980s, Ms. Bernard miscarried twins while Mr. Bernard was on the road, she said. She blamed him for being absent, and she stayed bitter, she said, for a solid decade. “I thought about leaving him,” she said, but with seven sons, “I had nowhere to go. And my sons needed their father. And I loved him.”

It was after the Saturday service, and the Bernards were in the large, formal dining room of Mr. Bernard’s office suite at the church, an elegant, carpeted apartment with gleaming mahogany furniture that recalls the West Wing. There was a cadre of security guards brandishing walkie-talkies, along with a sizable crowd of family members, church employees and congregants, all milling about the many rooms, which are organized around a large, oval-shaped central hall.

“She had cause to walk away,” Mr. Bernard said, “but she stayed, and I really went to work on myself. I discovered a lot of things about myself I didn’t like. I’m a workaholic. I was all in. That’s when I began to develop teachings about men and men’s responsibilities. She hung in there, and things began to change, and the church just began to explode.”

The two met in high school in East New York, when he was 15 and she was 16. Mr. Bernard’s mother, Adelina Bernard, had been a Panamanian sprinter who qualified for the 1952 Summer Olympics but wasn’t able to compete because an affair with an older man left her pregnant, after which he rejected her and their son. She and Mr. Bernard moved to New York City when he was 4.

As a fatherless, brainy teenager, he found a heady, male-centric blend of activism and spirituality in the Nation of Islam. But when he was a young associate at Banker’s Trust, and a colleague brought him and Ms. Bernard to hear Nicky Cruz, once the leader of the Mau Maus gang, speak about his own conversion to Christianity, Mr. Bernard’s world was upended.

He and Ms. Bernard began to host a Bible study in their Williamsburg kitchen, and it wasn’t long before they figured out that Mr. Bernard was very good at preaching. A deft speaker who uses traditional pastoral tropes like call and response, Mr. Bernard crafts his 45-minute sermons like mash-ups of a university lecture and a Baptist revival, though Mr. Bernard’s church is pointedly nondenominational.

“Coming from a heavy black radical activism, to embrace Jesus was a major thing for me,” he said. “Christianity was the religion of the oppressor, so I had to work through what I knew historically.” Investigating the religion and its central text as an academic would, he began to realize, Mr. Bernard said, “that I had an ability to articulate what I was reading and studying in a way that was not common within any denomination. I also realized that banking was not going to be my life’s calling.”

By the mid-1990s, his church was so popular that it had rapidly expanded from a congregation of 685 to more than 10,000. People came from all five boroughs, as they do today, some traveling hours to do so, and were folded into three Sunday services held in a former Key Food supermarket building in Brownsville, around which lines would start to form as early as 4 a.m. Nightclub goers on their way home grew curious about the crowds, which further swelled the church’s ranks. You might run into Cheryl James and Sandra Denton, two of the members of Salt-N-Pepa, the hip-hop trio; Angela Bassett; or Kim Cattrall, who played the sultry publicist on “Sex and the City.”

In the late 1990s, Disque Deane, the real estate investor and leader of the partnership behind Starrett City, the country’s largest federally subsidized housing complex, approached Mr. Bernard with a proposal for a 15-acre parcel on the edge of his development. As the pastor recalled, “He said, ‘I have a billion-dollar complex I need to preserve, and I’ve been studying you and I want you to build a church.” Mr. Deane did not finance the deal, Mr. Bernard added; the church raised the money and bought 11½ acres. When the $12.6 million complex was nearly complete, Ms. Bernard looked around and told her husband, “It’s not big enough.”

Like the Rev. Floyd Flake, senior pastor of the Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral in Queens, and the Rev. Calvin Butts, who leads the 200-year-old Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, Mr. Bernard now commands an enormous, culturally diverse congregation made up of parishioners traveling from all over the state, Mr. Cunningham said.

“So he crosses a lot of lines, a lot of boundaries,” Mr. Cunningham added. “If you’re a politician and you have a message about jobs or the economy or crime and you’re addressing that megachurch, your message will ripple out to all these different communities.”

Initially, Mr. Bernard’s sermons about male responsibility were attracting a lot of young men, which in turn, brought in more women. Church congregations typically skew more female than male, but at one point more than half of the Christian Cultural Center’s membership was male. (Now the split is 60/40 female to male, like many college campuses.)

The meat of those sermons is collected in “Four Things Women Want From a Man,” Mr. Bernard’s second book, out last May. It’s a slight book, as self-help primers tend to be, but there are a few pearls. Mr. Bernard uses the bible’s first couple, Adam and Eve, as his central metaphor. Adam, alone at first, is a clueless workaholic; Eve, created by God to help Adam get his act together, has better people skills and can multitask, even though Adam thinks she’s a nag.

Man up, men, Mr. Bernard exhorts, or you’ll lose her. Echoing animal behaviorists, he suggests women offer positive reinforcement if their menfolk behave properly.

Mr. Martin, the former football star, is one male congregant who has been avidly following Mr. Bernard’s teachings; he said the pastor is both his friend and a father figure. “He is the single most influential male in my adult life,” he said. Now 43, Mr. Martin began attending his church in the late 1990s, when he signed with the Jets. “A friend of mine said, ‘You’ve got to hear this guy speak,’” he said. “And I just kept going back. I’m a very practical person, and I think he has a tremendous gift for making what is complicated extremely simple. He can talk about God in a way that makes you attracted to God so you don’t get lost in all the rules and regulations.”

Mr. Martin brought his friend Carra Wallace, now chief diversity officer in New York City’s office of the comptroller. She was coming off a divorce — “I like to say I married late and divorced early,” she said — and was attracted to Mr. Bernard’s teaching method: “You take notes, you’re able to study and think about it.” These days, Ms. Wallace attends the 8 a.m. service, an hour’s train ride from her home in Battery Park City. “You get your message in, and then you have your day.”

Mr. Bernard, who is the chief executive of his church, as well as its senior pastor (his six-figure salary is determined by a board), is at heart a practical evangelist. When it was reported in the run-up to the presidential election in 2012 that African-American ministers were encouraging their congregations not to vote because of President Obama’s position on gay marriage, Mr. Bernard bristled at being lumped into that group.

“Let me give you three powerful reasons why I would never tell my congregation not to vote: Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney,” he told a reporter on MSNBC, referring to the young civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964. “Don’t let same-sex marriage be the deciding factor.” He went on to give a meticulous, and theologically agile, mini-lecture on the separation of church and state, on why same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue, and how his own faith nonetheless requires that he obey its tenets.

Last year, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, Mr. Bernard delivered a sermon about how societal norms and laws change over time. “I used the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit as one example,” he said. “That’s the law, but most people are doing 65, so that’s the norm. If they hit 95, which is the extreme, the police will pull them over. Over time, cultural practices can move from extreme to norm to law.”

Change is a process, not an event, he likes to say.

This election year has come with its own challenges. In June, when Donald J. Trump’s team invited a group of evangelicals to advise the candidate, Mr. Bernard was among them. Mr. Bernard has since stepped away from that role, he said, because he felt more like “window dressing,” as he put it, than a genuine adviser. The two had met years ago, weirdly, at Maya Angelou’s 80th birthday party, where Mr. Bernard was the keynote speaker; the setting was Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which perhaps explains the unlikely pairing of that presidential hopeful with the poet and civil right activist.

“If I’m going to advise you,” Mr. Bernard said, “it’s because I’m going to really, genuinely advise you. O.K., politics is a weird game, I get it. But when I found out that no matter what we were saying, he continued the same path, I said: ‘You know what? I need to step back and remain neutral.’”

Ms. Bernard, with typical candor, said, “I never met Trump, but Trump just has issues, and it’s obvious he has issues.”

Two weeks ago, when Elena George, a celebrity makeup artist, was preparing Donna Brazile, the veteran political analyst now serving as interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, for her role on CNN’s round table after the first presidential debate, they phoned Mr. Bernard to join them in a prayer. “I told Donna, ‘We need reinforcement,’” Ms. George recalled.

“He quoted scripture,” Ms. Brazile said. “And it was helpful.”

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

https://www.nytimes.com

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

For American football fans, the Super Bowl is the crescendo of the sporting calendar. Even if your team doesn’t make the big night, watching the game is undeniably exciting, eliciting a combination of yelling, cursing, crying, drinking, praying, cheering, and—for some lucky fans—jubilation. That emotional roller-coaster is part of the fun, right? Well, not to rain on anyone’s parade, but the science suggests that big sports events like the Super Bowl could carry some hidden health risks.

All the excitement, unfortunately, doesn’t come without some physiological effects. Watching a game can raise your blood pressure and heart rate—and sporting events are linked to higher rates of cardiac events, such as heart attacks.

In one recent study, researchers found that fans of the German soccer team Arminia Bielefeld—which competed in the German Cup finals for the first time ever in 2025—saw their stress levels rise by 41 percent during the game compared with regular days. The results were published on Thursday in Scientific Reports.

“This was a game of a century, kind of a Cinderella story,” says Christian Deutscher, a sports economics professor at Bielefeld University and an author on the study. Using smartwatch data, the researchers monitored fans’ heart rates and stress levels for 10 days before the game and for 10 weeks afterward. Over the course of the study, the day of the game was “by far” the highest-stress day, Deutscher says.

Fans who consumed alcohol tended to have higher heart rates, as did fans who watched the game in person compared to those who watched it on television. And after a heart-wrenching loss to VfB Stuttgart, stress levels among the Arminia Bielefeld fans stayed elevated throughout the day, the study found.

The results echo similar experiments involving American sports fans. In one 2009 study, for instance, researchers saw an increase in cardiovascular-linked deaths in Los Angeles in the days after the Rams lost the 1980 Super Bowl. And when the Raiders, then based in L.A., won the Super Bowl four years later, there was a decrease in all deaths.

The Super Bowl phenomenon parallels another holiday trend—the spike in heart attacks during Christmas and New Year, says Keith Churchwell, a former president of the American Heart Association. “For people with underlying disease,” the stress of these events “puts them at higher risk,” he says. At the same time, people are more likely to forget to take their medications for things like high blood pressure, heart rate, or cholesterol. Sports betting can amp up the stress, too, he says.

Watching sports in general isn’t harmful, however. Indeed, there’s solid evidence that sports fandoms can have positive psychological effects. “Like any pastime, there’s going to be pros and cons,” says Daniel Wann, a psychology professor at Murray State University. “Sports fandom is not unique in that.”

According to Wann, people who identify with a local sports team often feel a greater sense of connection to others, which is correlated with higher levels of collective self-esteem and lower levels of loneliness. In a 2024 study, Wann and his colleagues surveyed sports lovers about what they get out of being a fan and found that many felt a keen sense of belonging.

“It gives you this ability to meet this innate need we have to belong,” Wann says. “We are very much social creatures.”

To enjoy this Sunday’s Super Bowl safely, Churchwell recommends fans make sure they take their regular medications, avoid drinking too much, and eat the healthiest foods possible—and get a good night’s sleep the night before.

For those of us most invested in the game—looking at you, Seattle and New England—a Super Bowl loss can hit hard. To ward off any negative mental health outcomes, Wann recommends that viewers try to remember their team’s entire season and keep in mind why they’re a fan.

“It doesn’t make the outcome less important,” Wann says, “but it gives them other reasons to understand that the outcome is not the only thing that’s important.”

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Today show host Savannah Guthrie posted a 22-second video on Instagram Saturday evening alongside her siblings, directly addressing those believed to be holding her 84-year-old mother, Nancy Guthrie.

“We received your message, and we understand,” Guthrie said in part. “This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to u,s and we will pay.”

The Context

The video from the Guthrie children comes as law enforcement agents were seen towing a blue SUV from Nancy Guthrie’s neighborhood on the sixth night of their search. Guthrie was last seen at her home in the Catalina Foothills neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, last Saturday.

Her disappearance has received national attention, including from President Donald Trump’s administration. The Pima County Sheriff, Chris Nanos, has said the matter is being treated as a criminal investigation, with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies assisting in the case.

Heith Janke, special agent in charge of the FBI Phoenix division, said at a Thursday press conference that the agency is aware of a ransom letter that was sent to local and national media outlets, and that, as with “every lead, we are taking it seriously.”

What To Know

Local outlets and national media reported receiving purported ransom communications, including an email demanding cryptocurrency, which authorities said they were treating as evidence while evaluating authenticity. CBS affiliate KOLD and TMZ reportedly received notes that investigators have not yet verified.

The ransom notes reportedly demanded payment in bitcoin and included a deadline of 5 p.m. Thursday, though it didn’t specify a time zone. If the payment wasn’t made, the note specified another deadline of Monday, investigators said Thursday. Janke confirmed at a Thursday press conference that authorities were aware of the ransom letter sent to local and national media outlets.

In the Instagram video released Saturday evening, Savannah is joined by her sister Annie and her brother Cameron:

“We received your message, and we understand. We beg you now to return our mother to us so we can celebrate with her. This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to us, and we will pay,” Guthrie said in the emotional plea.

Investigators examined what officials described as apparent blood outside the residence and collected DNA samples from the home while noting they had not identified any suspects or persons of interest. NBC News reported that the samples were still being tested and that a technology issue with in-home cameras complicated the search for video.

Reporters from the USA Today Network observed dried blood droplets at the home’s entrance; the sheriff’s office did not confirm whose blood was present.

What People Are Saying

Savannah Guthrie, in an earlier statement posted on Instagram: “We believe in prayer. We believe in voices raised in unison, in love, in hope. We believe in goodness. We believe in humanity. Above all, we believe in Him. Thank you for lifting your prayers with ours for our beloved mom, our dearest Nancy, a woman of deep conviction, a good and faithful servant. Raise your prayers with us and believe with us that she will be lifted by them in this very moment.”

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told reporters at a Monday press conference: “We believe now, after we’ve processed that crime scene, that we do in fact have a crime scene, that we do in fact have a crime. And we’re asking the community’s help.”

“We make a plea to anyone who knows anything about this, who has seen something, heard something, to contact us,” he added. “Call 911. We don’t need another bad, tragic ending. We need some help.”

President Donald Trump on Truth Social: “I spoke with Savannah Guthrie, and let her know that I am directing ALL Federal Law Enforcement to be at the family’s, and Local Law Enforcement’s, complete disposal, IMMEDIATELY. We are deploying all resources to get her mother home safely. The prayers of our Nation are with her and her family. GOD BLESS AND PROTECT NANCY! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

What Happens Next

The Guthrie family has pleaded publicly for proof of life and direct contact with whoever could be holding Nancy.

Investigators have advised anyone with information to contact the Pima County Sheriff’s Department at (520) 351-4900.

.

Australian-born presenter, Savannah Guthrie, poses alongside her mother, Nancy Guthrie, during a production break whilst hosting NBC’s “Today Show” live

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

President Trump has seemed immune to the usual rules of politics.

The man who once boasted that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing support from voters regularly shatters political and legal norms at home and abroad, with few obvious consequences.

But every once in a while, Mr. Trump runs smack into whatever boundary remains and is forced to pull back, offering a glimpse into the country’s tolerance for his behavior.

The chaotic White House response to a racist video clip of the Obamas that Mr. Trump posted online was one moment where the administration realized that its usual reactions to criticism — laugh it off, double down, move on — would not work. And while Mr. Trump does not, as a rule, acknowledge wrongdoing — and did not in this case, either — he deleted the clip in the face of widespread outrage in what amounted to a remarkable climbdown.

“It is surprising, in itself, to ever see him take a step back to do anything other than, in the moment, double down and triple down, so in that sense it is surprising; it feels significant,” said Jeff Shesol, a historian and former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton who now serves as a partner at West Wing Writers, a speechwriting and strategy firm in Washington.

Mr. Trump still enjoys strong support from Republicans. The White House often points to a string of successes as evidence that, for all the controversy over the president’s style and his tactics, his strategies are working. European allies are on track to spend more for their own defense, which Mr. Trump demanded, and he has intervened in a number of overseas conflicts, including winning the freedom of the 20 living Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

“President Trump is the unequivocal leader of the Republican Party and anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, Republicans will remain united together against the radical Democrats, who will destroy our country once again, if given the chance, with wide-open borders, noncitizens voting in elections, and horrible economic policy.”

It’s undeniable that Mr. Trump often skates through controversies that would have sunk any other politician. He continues to lie about having won the 2020 election and even a criminal conviction didn’t keep him from winning the presidency for a second time. In recent weeks, his administration threatened to shut down a major infrastructure project if it didn’t have Mr. Trump’s name on it.

Still, with the midterm election in November, Mr. Trump has been forced to backtrack — even if only by degrees, and even if only temporarily — at key moments, including on Friday when the White House moved to contain a bipartisan backlash over the video clip portraying the Obamas as apes. In another case, after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents in Minnesota, Mr. Trump first justified the killing yet after widespread criticism, he toned down some of his language about Mr. Pretti’s death.

On Friday, the White House at first dismissed the criticism as “fake outrage” over an internet meme. But it soon became clear that Mr. Trump was facing a rebuke from members of his own party, starting with Senator Tim Scott, the sole Black Republican in the Senate and one of Mr. Trump’s close allies, who called the clip “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” From there, a chorus of criticism poured in from Republicans.

By midday, the White House had taken the post down and blamed an unknown “staffer” for the mishap. By the evening, Mr. Trump said he did not realize the clip of the Obamas had been spliced into the end of the video. Asked if he condemned the racist depiction of the Obamas, he said: “Of course I do.”

But he notably declined to apologize, saying it wasn’t his mistake.

In recent months, Mr. Trump also has walked back his positions on the violent crackdown in Minneapolis, which left two U.S. citizens dead, and his threats to take over Greenland “one way or the other.” He also clearly feels the heat over the economy as Americans express deep uncertainty about the cost of living.

Republicans, though, may be starting to realize that Mr. Trump has eroded support on issues like the economy and immigration, which typically have been strengths for the Republican Party.

“What Trump does not understand is that political gravity is political gravity no matter who you are and how dominant you’ve been,” said Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, and one of Mr. Trump’s fiercest critics among Republicans.

Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist based in Arizona, said the controversy carried additional weight for the party, which has long tried to make inroads with the Black and Hispanic communities. “He’s losing that. He’s now going to burn those gains to the ground.”

He said that although Mr. Trump did not apologize for the post, deleting it was as close as the president would get to acknowledging that it was wrong. And even that may be short-lived.

“He can’t admit a mistake, and therefore he cannot learn from the mistake,” Marson said. “So do I think this could happen again? 100 percent. Is this the last time that he posts or reposts something that is offensive and racially charged? I’m sure that it is not.”

Mr. Trump has a pattern of snapping back to his original stance after backtracking under political pressure. After the bloody rallies in Charlottesville, Va., during his first term, Mr. Trump bowed to pressure from his aides and condemned white nationalists.

A day later, he reverted to blaming “both sides” for the deadly violence.

.

President Trump spoke about the video clip of the Obamas on his social media feed as he traveled on Air Force One on Friday. Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York Times

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

https://www.nytimes.com

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

For years, scientists have viewed cancer as a localized glitch in which cells refuse to stop dividing. But a new study suggests that, in certain organs, tumors actively communicate with the brain to trick it into protecting them.

Scientists have long known that nerves grow into some tumors and that tumors containing lots of nerves usually lead to a worse prognosis. But they didn’t know exactly why. “Prior to our study, most of the focus has been this local interaction between the nerve [endings] and the tumor,” says Chengcheng Jin, an assistant professor of cancer biology at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of the study, which was published today in Nature.

Jin and her colleagues discovered that lung cancer tumors in mice can use these nerve endings to communicate way beyond their close vicinity and send signals to the brain through a complex neuroimmune circuit. They also confirmed the circuit exists in humans.

Setting up this circuit starts with a process called innervation, in which lung tumors wire themselves into the vagal nerves—the internal information highway that connects the vital organs to the brain. Within this highway, Jin’s team identified a specialized group of sensory neurons that communicate directly with the central nervous system. “Our study suggests that the tumor actually hijacks these existing pathways to promote itself,” explains Rui Chang, an associate professor of neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine and a co-author of the study.

When a tumor develops, it employs vagal neurons to send signals screaming up to the nucleus of the solitary tract—the region in the brain stem that, under normal circumstances, keeps functions such as blood pressure, heart rate or digestion in check. The signal sent by the tumor exploits this system, much like malicious code used by a hacker.

Instead of recognizing the tumor as an invader that needs to be destroyed, the brain processes the signal and activates the sympathetic nervous system, mainly known as the driver of the fight-or-flight response. This sympathetic surge is caused by the release of noradrenaline, which, in the context of cancer, has catastrophic consequences.

The noradrenaline is released directly in the tumor’s immediate neighborhood, where it attaches to macrophages—the frontline cells of the immune system that identify, eat, and destroy threats. The macrophages are covered in docking stations called β2 adrenergic receptors, which normally tell the cells when to be aggressive and when to “chill,” preventing the immune system from destroying healthy cells. When the noradrenaline released by the brain-controlled nerves binds to these receptors, it effectively reprograms the macrophages to switch sides.

In this suppressed state, they start releasing chemical signals that act as a “do not disturb” sign for the rest of the immune system. This neutralizes one of the body’s most effective weapons: T cells, the specialized assassins that physically kill tumor cells. Because the brain has ordered the macrophages to create an immunosuppressive shield, the T cells lose their energy, stop multiplying, and fail to recognize the cancer as a threat.

“The authors characterized an entire bidirectional tumor-neural pathway that promotes tumor growth, with huge relevance to human health,” says Catherine Dulac, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University, who was not involved in the study.

Jin and her team also looked for ways to stop tumors from talking to the brain. By mapping this loop from the lung to the brain and back again, the researchers identified several new places where they could “cut the wire.” The study showed that blocking any part of the brain-tumor circuit reawakened the immune system.

“Obviously, the perspective for application to cancer treatment is extremely promising,” Dulac says. Jin and Chang say we’re still rather far away from translating their findings into therapeutic strategies, however.

“What we are talking about is going from a mouse model to human. I think there’s still a long way to go,” Chang says.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

From

Note: You can save 35 delicious recipes after you click the link shown at the bottom of the page. e.g.,!

Click the link below the picture

The first flavor that comes to mind when you think of chicken wings might be buffalo — and it’s a classic for a reason. However, there are plenty of other sauces and rubs to try, whether baking, frying, or grilling your wings. Smoked chicken wings with ranch dressing, crispy garlic-glazed chicken wings, or even limoncello-marinated chicken wings with pepperoni sauce (pepperoni! sauce!) will take your game day and Super Bowl spreads to the next level. With dozens of chicken wing recipes to choose from, you’re sure to appreciate some old favorites and add a few new varieties to your game day repertoire.

.

Credit: Matt Taylor-Gross / Food Styling by Amelia Rampe

.

.

Click the link below to save 35 delicious wing recipes for the game (check them out):

.

.

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The crackdown on dissent and speech in Minnesota this winter follows a pattern that is common in countries that slide from democracy to autocracy: A leader enacts a legally dubious policy. Citizens protest that policy. The government responds with intimidation and force. When people are hurt, the government blames them and lies about what happened.

The New York Times editorial board published an index in October tracking 12 categories of democratic erosion, based on historical patterns and interviews with experts. Our index places the United States on a scale of 0 to 10 for each category. Zero represents the United States before President Trump began his second term — not perfect, surely, but one of the world’s healthiest democracies. Ten represents the condition in a true autocracy, such as China, Iran, or Russia.

Based on recent events, we are moving our assessment of one of the categories — stifling speech and dissent — up one notch, to Level 4:

Stifling speech and dissent

Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has become an enforcer of his personal interests, targeting people for legally dubious reasons while creating a culture in which his allies can act with impunity. The targets include Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, and several Democratic. True authoritarians go much further, but Mr. Trump has already undone the post-Watergate depoliticization of the Justice Department.

The wide-ranging abuses in Minnesota are the main reason for the change. The Trump administration is conducting a military-style operation in an American city under dubious pretenses. The stated goal is immigration enforcement, even though the state is home to relatively few undocumented immigrants. The true goal seems to be instilling fear in people who oppose Mr. Trump’s agenda. Federal agents have killed two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and assaulted and menaced others. The administration has made clear that the abusers will face no accountability.

The acceleration in the stifling of dissent and speech is broader than what’s happening in Minnesota. Since late last year, the administration has also widened its campaign of investigating perceived enemies, such as Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair. The Department of Homeland Security has used subpoenas that no judge approved to demand information on critics. The F.B.I. searched the home of a journalist who had exposed problems with the administration’s policies.

Our country is still not close to being a true autocracy. Many forms of speech and dissent remain vibrant in the United States, in courts, in Congress, the media, and on the streets. But Mr. Trump and his allies have restricted dissent in fundamental ways. It is a violation of basic American values.

Modern authoritarian takeovers often do not start with a military coup. They instead involve an elected leader who uses the powers of the office to consolidate authority and make political opposition difficult. The repression of speech and dissent is central to this process. Even before recent months, Mr. Trump had done so by punishing law firms that had opposed him, revoking the visas of foreign students who criticized the war in Gaza and contributing to intimidation campaigns against federal judges.

Autocrats use the immense power of law enforcement as a political tool, and Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has become an enforcer of his interests. It targets his perceived enemies, such as Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, on shaky grounds while dropping legitimate investigations of Mr. Trump’s allies or pardoning them. True authoritarians go much further, but Mr. Trump has undone the post-Watergate bipartisan efforts to depoliticize the Justice Department.

When a democracy slides toward autocracy, the leader often finds ways to neuter the legislature. The Trump administration has violated the law by withholding funding authorized by Congress. Mr. Trump has gutted congressionally authorized agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development. He has imposed new taxes — his tariffs — without congressional approval. He has ordered overseas military attacks without consulting Congress in ways that his recent predecessors did.

Would-be authoritarians recognize that courts can keep them from consolidating power, and they take steps to weaken or bypass judges. At times, the Trump administration has openly defied federal judges. A judge in Minnesota recently excoriated Immigration and Customs Enforcement for disobeying nearly 100 orders in January alone. On other occasions, the administration has engaged in gamesmanship, ignoring the spirit of judicial orders.

Autocrats often curtail democracy by declaring an emergency and arguing that the threat requires them to exercise unusual degrees of power. Mr. Trump’s recent predecessors were not perfect on this issue, but he has reached another level. His sweeping tariffs are one example. Justifying deportations by claiming that a Venezuelan gang had taken over American cities is another example.

Authoritarians frequently and performatively use the military for domestic control. Mr. Trump deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles to crack down on protests. He has also begun to treat the military as an extension of himself, firing high-ranking officials without good reason and giving overtly political speeches to military readers. ICE is not part of the military, but it is acting largely as a paramilitary force in Minnesota and elsewhere.

Authoritarians tend to demean minority groups, trying to turn them into perceived threats that provide justification for a leader to amass power. Mr. Trump has vilified immigrants and transgender Americans. His appointees and political allies have made blatantly racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic statements. Mr. Trump has denigrated Somalis in outrageous ways, such as saying, “They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country.”

Democratic governments prize accurate information. Authoritarians seek to suppress inconvenient truths. The Trump administration has sought to manipulate government information by, among other things, sidelining scientific experts. The administration has also taken steps to control the media, using the threat of regulatory punishment to silence criticism.

Trying to take over universities

Authoritarians, recognizing that universities are hotbeds of independent thought and political dissent, often single them out for repression. A signature policy of Mr. Trump’s second term has been his attack on higher education. He has cut millions of dollars of research funding, tried to dictate hiring and admissions policies, and taken steps to dictate what colleges can teach.

Creating a cult of personality

Emperors and kings often glorified themselves by displaying their portraits everywhere. The American tradition rejected that hagiography for living presidents — until Mr. Trump. Among recent examples: He rebranded the Kennedy Center to add his own name. The Board of Peace for Gaza will be housed at an institute newly named for him. And the government now sells a so-called gold card, with his face on it, that costs $1 million and offers legal residency to immigrants.

Using power for personal profit

Authoritarians often turn the government into a machine for self-enrichment. Mr. Trump glories in his administration’s culture of corruption. He rewards foreign governments that bestow gifts on him (like a 747 airplane) and approve deals with his company. His family has made hundreds of millions of dollars from crypto. In some cases, he has later helped his benefactors, including by giving pardons.

Manipulating the law to stay in power

Authoritarians change election rules to help their party, and they rewrite laws to ignore term limits. In Mr. Trump’s second term, he has shown worrisome signs of trying to entrench the power of the Republican Party — and recently taken steps to accelerate that campaign. In February, he called for the federal government to take over control of election administration from states. That builds on earlier moves, such as an executive order that would force states to reject some mail-in ballots.

.

Frontal Assault

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article (and charts):

https://www.nytimes.com

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Scientists have found a key brain network that’s disrupted by Parkinson’s disease, according to a study published today in Nature. The results change doctors’ understanding of what causes Parkinson’s symptoms and may unlock more effective and precise treatments.

Parkinson’s has long been considered a movement disorder. Its hallmark symptoms include involuntary muscle contractions, tremor and difficulty walking. But the disease can also disrupt sleep, blood pressure regulation, digestion and cognitive function. The movement-related symptoms can worsen when someone with the disease is under stress, for example, but improve while they are listening to music.

The common factor underlying these seemingly disconnected symptoms, according to the new results, is a brain network that was only discovered in 2023. Called the somato-cognitive action network, or SCAN, it links the mind and the body to turn thoughts into actions. The researchers found that targeting this network with brain-stimulating treatments could better alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

“Parkinson’s is not just a movement problem involving one body part. This study shows it is a whole-body brain network disorder that links movement, thinking, arousal and internal body control,” says Michael Okun, a neurologist at the University of Florida and medical director of the Parkinson’s Foundation, who was not involved in the study.

It’s an “extraordinary” set of findings, says Todd Herrington, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who treats and studies Parkinson’s.

A Strange Pattern

Neuroscientists have long known that a region of the brain called the primary motor cortex, nicknamed M1, controls the body’s movements. This headband-shaped brain strip extends from ear to ear and contains a “map” of the entire body—often visualized as a distorted humanoid figure called the homunculus. If you want to move your hand, higher-level brain regions closer to your forehead send signals back to M1, which in turn sends motor signals to the hand.

But neurologist Nico Dosenbach of Washington University in St. Louis had observed something strange. When a person in a brain scanner moves their mouth, multiple parts of M1—not just the “mouth” region—activate. These extra spots of activation “just didn’t make sense, if all the things I thought I knew were true,” he says.

It turns out that neuroscientists had been underestimating M1 for nearly a century. M1 is not a simple map of the body. Interspersed between body-part-specific areas are nodes of a network that coordinates higher-level planning for movement. Instead of being a mere foot soldier following orders from more frontal brain regions, M1 helps plan, guide and coordinate action. Dosenbach and his colleagues named the network the somato-cognitive action network, or SCAN, reflecting how it bridges the body and the mind.

These findings caught the eye of Hesheng Liu, a neuroscientist at Changping Laboratory in Beijing. For a decade, he’d been studying Parkinson’s disease, trying to figure out how a treatment called deep-brain stimulation (DBS) works to alleviate symptoms. His team had noticed the strange patterns in M1, too. “We had no idea what they are,” Liu says. When he saw Dosenbach’s paper on SCAN, everything started to make sense. “Probably, that region is behind Parkinson’s disease,” he thought.

A Mind-Body Network

Doctors don’t know what sets off the chain of events that cause Parkinson’s disease. But they know which brain area it most devastates: the substantia nigra, a structure deep in the brain, where neurons that produce the brain signaling chemical dopamine slowly die off.

Stimulating other regions connected to the substantia nigra can alleviate Parkinson’s symptoms, suggesting an entire circuit is involved. Researchers knew that M1 was part of this circuit—and the new results show that it specifically involves the SCAN regions of M1 that plan and coordinate movement. Using multiple brain-imaging datasets from 863 real people with Parkinson’s and healthy individuals, Liu’s team found that SCAN was overlyconnected to deep-brain regions in those with Parkinson’s but not in healthy people or those with other movement disorders. Individuals with Parkinson’s who had higher connectivity in this circuit experienced worse symptoms.

The researchers also found that existing treatments for Parkinson’s, including the medication levodopa (also known as L-DOPA), as well as brain stimulation, decreased the circuit’s connectivity, making the brains of people with the condition look more like those of healthy people. The more a treatment reduced someone’s SCAN connectivity, the more their motor function improved.

Doctors don’t yet know if dying neurons in the substantia nigra cause these SCAN disruptions, or vice versa, says Michael D. Fox, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the study. Neurons begin dying decades before symptoms appear, so it seems likely that the former may cause the latter. But it’s “not impossible” that the SCAN dysfunction could start early, too, and cause more neurons to die, he says.

Guiding Better Treatment

Brain stimulation treatments for Parkinson’s were more effective when doctors specifically targeted SCAN regions, Liu’s team also found. This experiment involved a noninvasive technique called transcranial magnetic simulation, or TMS, in which doctors place a wand containing a magnetic coil over the scalp, just on top of M1. Previous studies had shown that the treatment improved symptoms but wasn’t more effective than the medication levodopa. In part because of that limitation, Fox says, TMS isn’t offered clinically to people with Parkinson’s.

But focusing TMS on SCAN regions specifically can improve results, Liu’s team showed. “I’m excited by these results,” Fox says. TMS may be more appealing and accessible to patients than deep-brain stimulation, which requires surgery. “This, in my mind, elevates the potential of noninvasive brain stimulation for helping patients with Parkinson’s in a way that wasn’t there before,” Fox says.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Our kids’ school winter vacation schedule is a little wonky; they have a few long weekends off, but then we don’t get a real break till March. It’s not quite enough to go somewhere far away, but when you’re trapped inside with two active boys, those three-day weekends at home feel long. A few years ago, I went on a hunt to find a way to break up that interminable winter slog, to silence the ever-present voices of my sons: “Mom, there’s nothing to do!” (I know there’s nothing to do! It’s freezing out, most team sports are on pause, and by Sunday afternoons the siren call of the iPad becomes deafening to the point of no return.)

I researched. I asked around. Eventually, a friend recommended Mohonk Mountain House, a historic resort that’s about a two-hour drive from New York City. We decided to give it a go. We haven’t looked back.

The place has a kind of old school Catskills-vibe, like if Dirty Dancing met a haunted gothic novel. You can leave after school on a Friday and, after driving up an ear-popping mountain pass, arrive at the enormous, Victorian castle-esque building in time for dinner. The place was founded in 1869, and the aesthetic leans into that history (wood everything, old photographs of Mohonk lining the walls; traditional décor). It’s kind of like The Shining if The Shining was cozy instead of creepy, and the kids, in particular, think it’s very cool.

Mohonk is an all-inclusive resort, so the room rate covers food (but not alcohol). There are set times for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the main dining room has lovely views of the mountain and surrounding area. The food is…plentiful. It comes quickly. Breakfast and lunch include buffets the size of a small country. You won’t go hungry at Mohonk Mountain House, that I promise. I’ve never been on a cruise, but I assume that it’s kind of like high-end cruise fare, which isn’t an insult. This is a place that’s best for families. In and out, I say! Let’s get it done with before the kids start asking to play games on our phones.

Most critically, there is a lot to do during the day. There is a heated indoor pool, which my kids love to swim in, and a soothing spa, where you can get facials and massages. There is snow tubing, which my sons enjoy almost as much as I do. There’s a private ice-skating rink with skate rentals included. You can hike up the mountain with spikes, or do cross-country skiing, or snowshoeing as a family. The grounds are picturesque and winter wonderland-y, and every afternoon there’s an open fire pit where you can roast a marshmallow (or five, if you’re my 7-year-old). There are evening activities, like movies, music, and magicians. Last year, we tried indoor archery for the first time. I hit a bullseye. There is no more to that story. I just wanted to share. And the service is family-oriented and helpful. A couple of years ago, my younger son got a horrible stomach virus the night we arrived at Mohonk. He was so sick that we ended up calling the in-house doctor at the hotel, who came right away and said we should go to the nearby hospital to be safe. So my husband sped our car down the dark mountain road while I held my little retching son in the front seat, our other son strapped into the back. Everything was fine, eventually — the hospital was great, our son got fluids, and we stayed until he finally stopped vomiting his brains out. We got back to Mohonk at 3am, exhausted and stressed, and saw that management had put lovely baskets in our room filled with get-better stuffed animals, fresh fruit and snacks, and an array of games for the kids. They continually checked in on us until we left the following day, and all things considered, we had an okay time! Oh, the wonders of traveling with children. The best part about Mohonk, hands down, is that every time we go there, it snows. There’s like some magical timer that knows we’ve arrived, and waking up to the mountain blanketed in white is such a treat for the kids. I can’t guarantee that it’ll happen for you, but if you’d like to coordinate dates with me, just let me know! It never fails.

I feel lucky that our family found this place. It’s so good for kids. We usually arrive in a kind of winter funk and leave with a rosy glow, just enough to get me through until spring. Unsurprisingly, Mohonk has a kind of cult following—families return year after year, and we’ve now gone enough times to recognize people, giving them friendly nods on the trails or the ice rink or while going back for a third piece of cake at the buffet. Winter is coming, which, as a mom, feels daunting, but at least I have Mohonk to look forward to. Another bullseye is in my future.

.

My family has been going to Mohonk Mountain House for years for a reason.  Shutterstock

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________