Rahul Verma’s son was born gravely ill with digestive problems, but over years of visits to the boy’s endocrinologist, Mr. Verma saw the doctor grow increasingly alarmed about a different problem, one threatening healthy children. Junk food, the doctor warned, was especially dangerous to Indians, who are far more prone to diabetes than people from other parts of the world.
One day in the doctor’s waiting room, Mr. Verma noticed a girl who had gotten fat by compulsively eating potato chips. He decided he had to do something.
“On one side you have children like my son, who are born with problems,” said Mr. Verma, “and on the other side you have children who are healthy and everything is fine and you are damaging them giving them unhealthy food.”
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Mr. Verma filed a public interest lawsuit in 2010 seeking to ban the sale of junk food in and around schools in hopes of protecting children from an unhealthy diet.CreditAtul Loke for The New York Times
Countless human-made troubles in the Indonesian capital pose an imminent threat to the city’s survival. And it has to deal with mounting threats from climate change.
Uber lost a major legal battle on Wednesday when the European Union’s highest court declared that the ride-hailing app is not just a digital company and that it must comply with the bloc’s transportation rules, a significant setback for a company already grappling with a string of scandals.
The decision by the European Court of Justice found that Uber operates more like a transportation service than an online platform that matches passengers with drivers. It is likely to restrict the company from expanding services that allowed nonprofessional drivers to offer rides to clients.
While the ruling focused on these so-called peer-to-peer operations, it will most likely to be scrutinized by regulators looking more broadly at the gig economy, a growing part of the work force, in which people operate as freelancers or on short-term contracts as opposed to holding permanent jobs.
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Cabs blocked streets in central London in 2014 as part of a protest against Uber in major cities across Europe.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times
The sting began, as so many things do these days, on social media.
Daniel Stiles, a self-styled ape trafficking detective in Kenya, had been scouring Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp for weeks, looking for pictures of gorillas, chimps or orangutans. He was hoping to chip away at an illicit global trade that has captured or killed tens of thousands of apes and pushed some endangered species to the brink of extinction.
“The way they do business,” he said of ape traffickers, “makes the Mafia look like amateurs.”
After hundreds of searches, Mr. Stiles found an Instagram account offering dozens of rare animals for sale, including baby chimpanzees and orangutans dressed in children’s clothes. He sent an email to an address on the account — “looking for young otans” (the industry standard slang for orangutans) — and several days later received a reply.
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A bonobo in a reserve outside Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Kenyerber Aquino Merchán was 17 months old when he starved to death.
His father left before dawn to bring him home from the hospital morgue. He carried Kenyerber’s skeletal frame into the kitchen and handed it to a mortuary worker who makes house calls for Venezuelan families with no money for funerals.
Kenyerber’s spine and rib cage protruded as the embalming chemicals were injected. Aunts shooed away curious young cousins, mourners arrived with wildflowers from the hills, and relatives cut out a pair of cardboard wings from one of the empty white ration boxes that families increasingly depend on amid the food shortages and soaring food prices throttling the nation. They gently placed the tiny wings on top of Kenyerber’s coffin to help his soul reach heaven — a tradition when a baby dies in Venezuela.
As revelations of sexual harassment break, women have been discussing the fallout and how to move forward. Here, women from across the working world take on this complicated conversation.
“Revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine,” the critical theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney wrote in their 2013 essay “The Undercommons,” about the need to radically upend hierarchical institutions. I thought of their prophecy in October, when a private document listing allegations of sexual harassment and abuse by dozens of men in publishing and media surfaced online.
The list — a Google spreadsheet initially shared exclusively among women, who could anonymously add to it — was created in the immediate aftermath of reports about sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein. The atmosphere among female journalists was thick with the tension of watching the press expose the moral wrongs of Hollywood while neglecting to interrogate our own. The existence of the list suggested that things were worse than we even imagined, given all that it revealed. It was horrifying to see the names of colleagues and friends — people you had mingled with at parties and accepted drinks from — accused of heinous acts.
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Sarah Illenberger
“Sexually offensive behavior by people in powerful positions has been protected for far too long. The shield is cracking, exposing the problem.”
When my parents went to law school in the 1980s, they took courses on contracts, torts, criminal law, constitutional law — the list goes on. While there were lessons on persuasion, to be sure, they never took a class on how to tell a story. And they certainly never learned how to make a film.
Today, however, a growing number of lawyers are creating empathetic biographical mini-documentaries, or “sentencing videos,” to reduce their clients’ prison sentences. Inspired by the storytelling techniques of traditional documentary film, some lawyers team up with independent filmmakers while others become filmmakers themselves. These films are made for an audience of one: the presiding judge.
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To beg for leniency, defense attorneys are producing entire documentaries for an audience of one: the judge.Published OnCreditImage by Lance Oppenheim
The police in New York on Thursday said they were looking into claims that Russell Simmons, the co-founder of the pioneering hip-hop label Def Jam, had a history of violent sexual misconduct after mounting reports accusing him of rape.
A law enforcement official said that the Police Department was conducting a preliminary investigation into the allegations and was eager to hear from victims. But it was unclear whether any suspected conduct could be prosecuted because it was said to have occurred so long ago and was outside the statute of limitations, the source said. (As of 2006, New York State no longer has a statute of limitations on rape in the first degree and several other serious sexual offenses.)
“The N.Y.P.D. has received information regarding allegations involving Russell Simmons in the N.Y.C. area and our detectives are in the process of reviewing that information,” J. Peter Donald, assistant commissioner in the department’s public relations office, said in a statement.
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Following mounting reports accusing the music mogul Russell Simmons of sexual misconduct, law enforcement is conducting a preliminary investigation.CreditScott Roth/Invision, via Scott Roth, via Invision, via Associated Press.
A power failure at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Sunday disrupted operations at the busiest airport in the world, forcing the cancellation of more than 1,150 departing or arriving flights and stranding travelers on planes on the tarmac for hours, the authorities and passengers said.
The power failure at the airport, a major hub for domestic and international flights, sent a ripple of disruptions across the country, affecting flights in Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere. There were signs the problems would linger into Monday, as Delta Air Lines announced Sunday evening that it planned to cancel 300 flights the next day.
Many flights in the air were diverted when the power went out, and the United States Customs and Border Protection said on Twitter that international flights destined for Atlanta were rerouted to other airports.
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A floodlight running on a generator at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which was disrupted by a power failure on Sunday.CreditDustin Chambers for The New York Times
Welcome to the weekend. Keep your PJ’s on a little longer. Put on some holiday music, sink into a comfortable chair and give yourself the gift of reading because we have some great stories for you!
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He’s 22. She’s 81. Their Friendship Is Melting Hearts.
The two met on the Words With Friends app, and photos of their in-person get-together delighted thousands of people on social media. Express Team
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Mr. Verma filed a public interest lawsuit in 2010 seeking to ban the sale of junk food in and around schools in hopes of protecting children from an unhealthy diet.CreditAtul Loke for The New York Times
Children are starving
