Friday, June 30, 2017

Stephen Colbert Is Shocked That He Finds Trump’s Tweets Shocking


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Stephen Colbert thought his “soul had calcified into a crouton,” he said. Credit CBS

Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. What do you think of it? What else are you interested in? Let us know: thearts@nytimes.com.

‘Shocking and Vicious. So, On-Brand.’

Stephen Colbert declared himself shocked by President Trump’s vitriolic tweets on Thursday about Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” That’s a feeling he thought he wasn’t able to experience anymore, he told the “Late Show” audience. “I thought that my soul had calcified into a crouton,” he said.
He picked apart the tweets, which accused Ms. Brzezinski of “bleeding badly” from plastic surgery.
“First of all, someone bleeding badly at your door, and you say no? Sounds like your health care plan.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
“This is shocking and vicious. So, on-brand.” — STEPHEN COLBERT

Video by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert

He quoted a Deadline.com article about the tweets suggesting that they marked a “new low” for the president. Mr. Colbert didn’t agree.
“No, it’s the same low. We’re at a cruising altitude of, like, the bottom of the Mariana Trench right now. There are giant squid looking down at America.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
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Meyers Skewers the Health Care Bill


Video by Late Night With Seth Meyers

Near the start of “Late Night,” Seth Meyers reacted to Mr. Trump’s tweets with his own brand of bafflement. Introducing a new segment called “I Can’t,” Mr. Meyers spent a solid 10 seconds in silence. Then he just said: “I can’t.”
Mr. Meyers did a longer segment on the Republican health care bill in the Senate, quoting a poll showing 12 percent support for the legislation.
“Twelve percent? His health care bill is an iPhone in a horror movie. It’s going to hit zero, and everyone is going to die.” — SETH MEYERS
Mr. Meyers quoted a number of reports saying that many of Mr. Trump’s colleagues don’t believe he understands the bill.
“Watching this president try to negotiate a complex piece of legislation is like playing ‘Call of Duty’ with your grandmother. ‘Which one is me? Why can’t I go that way? Oh no, they’re shooting at us!’” — SETH MEYERS
He closed the monologue by also placing blame on Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader.
“To the likes of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump’s presidency is a filet mignon steak with a little piece of [expletive] on it. And they’re willing to ignore that [expletive] to get to the steak. But it’s become clear that it’s actually a giant piece of [expletive] with a little bit of steak on it. And their attitude seems to be, ‘Well, we’re already at the restaurant.’” — SETH MEYERS

The Punchiest Punchlines (Spirit Airlines Edition)


Video by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

“President Trump last night hosted the first fund-raiser for his 2020 re-election campaign. The event was black tie, but white guest.” — SETH MEYERS
“A woman gave birth to a baby on a Spirit Airlines flight. When the flight attendant said, ‘Is there a doctor on board?’ the passengers said, ‘Of course not. This is Spirit Airlines.’” — JIMMY FALLON

The Bits Worth Watching

Doesn’t get much more intellectual than this right here.

Video by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

Clip-on pants?

Video by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert

Enjoy the Weekend

Have a great Independence Day weekend. The late-night hosts will all take off next week.

Also, Check This Out


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Naomi Watts as a Manhattan therapist seeking something more in “Gypsy,” beginning on Netflix Friday. Credit Alison Cohen Rosa/Netflix

“Gypsy” is expertly acted and directed, with delicately placed motifs and a slow-burning plotline. But ultimately it turns out to be proof that bad TV can still be made very well. This, the critic James Poniewozik writes, is bad TV.
NYT

3 Officials Resign Amid Outcry Over Grenfell Tower Fire


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Tributes for victims near Grenfell Tower. The Times of London, citing leaked emails and meeting minutes, reported that the project management consultants overseeing a refurbishment of the tower had come under pressure to reduce costs. Credit Carl Court/Getty Images

LONDON — Three officials involved with Grenfell Tower, the apartment building where at least 80 people died on June 14, announced their resignations on Friday, as the political fallout over Britain’s deadliest fire in decades intensified.
Nick Paget-Brown, a Conservative, stepped down as head of the council of Kensington and Chelsea, the wealthy London borough that owns the tower, on Friday afternoon. Rock Feilding-Mellen, a Conservative who had been in charge of housing for the council, stepped down as deputy leader.
Hours earlier, Robert Black, the head of the management company that ran the 24-story building and oversaw a renovation that included the installation of flammable cladding, also resigned. The resignations occurred as new evidence emerged that the management company, which started the renovation in 2014, had chosen a less fire-resistant form of cladding to save nearly 300,000 pounds.
The fire, which left hundreds of people homeless, has opened debates over inequality, deregulation, austerity and governance. It is the subject of a public inquiry, led by a retired judge, as well as a criminal investigation. And it has cost several people their jobs, including the council’s chief executive, Nicholas Holgate, who was forced out shortly after the fire.
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Mr. Paget-Brown faced numerous calls for his resignation after a council meeting he led on Thursday ended in mayhem and acrimony when he tried to exclude reporters, saying that their presence might “prejudice” a government inquiry into the tragedy. The journalists had obtained a court order admitting them to the meeting.
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Continue reading the main story

A Lethal Wrapping

The building was recently renovated. New insulation and cladding were installed on the exterior; both contained flammable materials.

SPREADING OF FIRE
CREATING A CHIMNEY EFFECT
CAVITY
CLADDING
PANELS WITH
PLASTIC CORE
OLD WALL
INSULATION
OLD WALL
CAVITY,
ABOUT
2 INCHES
AIR
Radiant heat from the burning cladding and insulation, combined with air rushing through the gap, increased the intensity of the fire.
Flammable cladding and insulation enabled the fire to spread rapidly on the exterior of the building.
Mr. Paget-Brown’s effort to block the reporters drew a rebuke from Prime Minister Theresa May, who had already seized control of the emergency response from the council, which was faulted for a lackluster handling of the tragedy. “The High Court ruled that the meeting should be open, and we would have expected the council to respect that,” her office said in a statement on Friday.
In a statement, Mr. Paget-Brown said he only tried to block the journalists because he had received advice from lawyers not to discuss the fire in public. “As council leader I have to accept my share of responsibility for these perceived failings,” he said, adding that “it cannot be right that this should have become the focus of attention when so many are dead or still unaccounted for.”
Mr. Paget-Brown indicated that he would remain a councilor — a position to which he was first elected in 1986 — but would step aside as leader. Mr. Feilding-Mellen, who was first elected in 2006, also said he would remain on the council, though he resigned as deputy leader.
Kensington and Chelsea is one of London’s wealthiest boroughs, but it also contains large sections of housing built for people of modest means. Many residents have for years accused the council of allowing penny-pinching to override fire safety when the building undertook the renovation, which was completed last year.
The government is racing to test cladding on high-rise buildings across the country. As of Friday, 149 buildings in 45 areas had failed fire-safety tests, officials said.
The Times of London, citing leaked emails and meeting minutes, reported on Friday that Artelia UK, the project management consultants overseeing the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, had come under pressure to reduce costs.

Interactive Feature

Escaping the Inferno

Britain’s deadliest fire in more than a century raced from floor to floor, forcing residents to decide: Wait for rescuers or try to escape?
OPEN Interactive Feature

One email from the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization to Artelia discussed several options for slashing cladding costs and suggested that using cheaper aluminum composite panels, rather than panels made of zinc, could yield a “saving of £293,368,” about $380,000.
The BBC, which also cited documents it had obtained, reported that the money saved by using aluminum “cladding in lieu of zinc cladding” was part of a broader package of savings that brought down the total cost of the project to about £8.5 million from about £9.2 million.
Brian Meacham, an associate professor of fire engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, said that in general, the more expensive zinc cladding may have been less combustible because it has a less flammable insulation — some of it made of mineral wool fiber — than the aluminum composite cladding.
Grenfell Tower, which opened in 1974, is owned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea but is managed by the quasi-public management organization. Mr. Black said that he wished to focus on “assisting with the investigation and inquiry.”
On Thursday evening, after Mr. Paget-Brown was forced to relent from his opposition to admitting journalists, he prematurely ended the meeting after 20 minutes — earning him swift criticism from Mayor Sadiq Khan of London and from Sajid Javid, the secretary for communities and local government, who called for greater transparency.
The council’s top Labour leader, Robert Atkinson, called the way the meeting was handled “an absolute fiasco” and urged Mr. Paget-Brown to resign, according to a video of the proceedings published in the British news media. He also suggested that the Conservatives, a majority on the council, were trying to obfuscate the reality of what had happened at the tower block.
This week, the government appointed Martin Moore-Bick, a retired appellate judge with a background in commercial law, to lead the public inquiry into the disaster. Mrs. May told members of Parliament that the investigation would “leave no stone unturned.”

Mayans Weave Their Identity Into Their Soccer Team

By Daniele Volpe

XEJUYUP, Guatemala — It is a relief to take a detour and head toward a plateau, with its tropical vegetation, after driving through a steamy landscape of sugar cane fields in southern Guatemala. An hour later you arrive in Xejuyup, a town of about 4,000 people that is “under the mountains” or “at the feet of the hill” — which is what Xejuyup (pronounced shay-who-YOOP) means in the language of the K’iche’ Maya who live here.

The first thing I saw when I got out of the car was a huge banner with the official picture of the local soccer team, called C.S.D. Xejuyup. The first thing I saw in the banner were the team’s uniforms.












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Members of C.D.S. Xejuyup soccer team.
Mayan culture retains a strong presence in Guatemala. Colorful traditional clothing, usually worn by women, is among the first things tourists may notice upon their arrival. It is less common to see men wearing traditional clothing, and in Xejuyup only a few elderly men do so.

This worried Antonio Perechú. A former goalkeeper, Perechú played for several regional teams but gave up the pursuit of his dream of becoming a professional soccer player because his family could not afford it. He founded C.S.D. Xejuyup in 1982 as something of a community organization — the Spanish acronym C.S.D. translates as Sports Social Club — and today his son, Miguel, is the team’s captain.

Antonio Perechú’s ambition to have his team reflect, and respect, its community has been echoed in the team’s decision — since its first days — to incorporate Mayan clothing into its uniforms.










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Players wearing the coxtar, or skirt, in practice.








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Xejuyup players resting at halftime.







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Xejuyup, a village of about 4,000 people, in the evening.
The players explained to me that the coxtar (the skirt), the kutin (the shirt) and the pas (the sash) have meanings associated with the ancestral Mayan worldview. Their colors, their embroidery and the weaving line patterns suggest the relation between humans and nature and its elements.

Xejuyup was occupied by the army during that time. In 1982, the year Perechú started the soccer club, the civil defense patrols, or local militias, were formed nationwide. All male adults were forced to join; the conscripts included Perechú and other members of the current Xejuyup team.






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Santa Ajtzalam, 49, weaving a shirt for her husband outside her home in Xejuyup. Completing such a shirt takes about two months.





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Materials used in the making of traditional clothing.




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Antonio Perechú Sui, 67, an assistant of C.D.S. Xejuyup, at his home. He had to serve in a paramilitary group in the 1980s during the Guatemalan civil war.
For years, Guatemala’s indigenous population kept a low profile. Parents refrained from teaching the Mayan languages to their children, and from wearing their traditional clothing. When a peace deal was signed, opening the country to a globalization boom, Guatemala was flooded with used clothes from the United States. The items cost less than one quetzal (about 14 cents) each, and even more people stopped wearing traditional clothing.

When I visited Xejuyup recently, the team was training for a Saturday game. Miguel Perechú, who works as the gymnastics teacher at a school and has attended several soccer courses, led the session.
His pride in his Mayan identity matches his father’s. In our conversation he mentioned Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the twin gods.

In pre-Columbian oral history, the twins save the Mayan people by defeating the Lords of Xibalba (the underworld) in an ancient ballgame. It is part of the reason Miguel Perechú feels a strong connection between the past and the present.



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The logo of Barcelona, a dominant team in the Spanish league, was painted on a home in Xejuyup. The influence of major soccer clubs, especially from Spain, is strong across Guatemala.


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Boys, some wearing Real Madrid T-shirts, returning to their school after a physical education class.

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A picture of C.D.S. Xejuyup on a T-shirt.
“The costume is a symbol, and we, the team, carry it with great responsibility,” he said. “It stands for all the indigenous peoples of the country, and for Guatemala as a whole.”

The women in Xejuyup weave the shirts for the men in their families, a task that usually takes two months. The skirt is made of wool and bought in the region. A full uniform is worth about 2,000 quetzales (about $270), far more than the replica jerseys of the “new heroes” — players like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — that are cheap and ubiquitous.

But to the men of C.S.D. Xejuyup, it is also why the mission undertaken by Antonio Perechú is so ambitious, and so important.
And in small ways, it might be succeeding. Beyond being an example for youngsters in their small town, the team’s influence and message is evident each time it leaves Xejuyup. The club is not registered in any official league, but it frequently plays against amateur teams around the country. Most times, Miguel Perechú said, the players are supported, applauded and encouraged by their rivals’ fans. NYT

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Fear of an End to Easy Money Prompts Sell-Off

Fears that central banks would unwind years of easy money policies rattled global markets on Thursday, prompting a sharp sell-off in European stocks and technology companies in the United States.
Since the financial crisis, central banks in the United States, Europe and Japan have injected trillions of dollars into their economies in a bid to jump-start sluggish growth and halt broader deflationary trends.
Now, with markets on a perpetual sugar high from so much stimulus, central bankers have become more forthright in signaling interest rate increases, or in paring bond-buying programs that have flooded the markets with cash.
The initial tremors were felt in European government bonds after a cautionary speech on Tuesday by Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank. By Thursday, the selling had spread from the bond market to global stocks.
After European stocks slumped, the sell-off extended to United States trading, particularly in technology stocks, whose rich valuations have been questioned. The technology-laden Nasdaq composite index closed down 1.44 percent on Thursday.
Continue reading the main story
The yield on the 10-year United States Treasury note, which was at 2.12 percent on Monday, had risen to 2.27 percent on Thursday. (Bond yields and prices move in opposite directions.)
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Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, called for prudence in the central bank’s policies in a speech on Tuesday.
CreditMichael Probst/Associated Press
A sign of the state of investors’ nerves was an intraday spike in the index known as Wall Street’s fear gauge, the VIX, which jumped 51 percent, before ending the day up 14 percent.
In his remarks, Mr. Draghi highlighted the success of European Central Bank policies in increasing jobs, spurring growth and stopping deflation.
But in calling for prudence in policy, Mr. Draghi — who, more than any other central banker, is known for his judicious choice of words — sparked an immediate sell-off in European government bonds as investors interpreted his use of the word “prudence” as a stepping away from the bank’s commitment to keep buying European government bonds.
Taken aback by the rout, central bank officials quickly said that the speech should not be seen as a statement by Mr. Draghi that he would tighten policy immediately, but investors paid them little heed.
“Central bankers are saying that economies are doing well enough and conditions are loose enough that we do not need to press the pedal to the metal anymore,” said Michel Del Buono, global strategist for Makena, an investment firm that caters to foundations and endowments. “But many investors are still thinking that they will be doing the maximum forever.”
It is not just the European Central Bank that has, fairly abruptly, signaled a change in direction.
Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, another central banker known for dovish sympathies, said in a speech on Tuesday that an increase in rates might be in order just a month after he indicated that interest rates would remain low.
The pound and the yield on the British 10-year note surged afterward.
The swift sell-off in European stocks and bonds recalled the so-called taper tantrum in 2013, when the Federal Reserve first said it would begin to taper its policy of buying mortgages and other securities in an attempt to stimulate the economy.
Even though an actual rate increase was years away, stocks and bonds in emerging markets, long dependent on interest-rate sensitive capital flows, fell sharply in what would become a three-year bear market for the asset class.
That Mr. Draghi and Mr. Carney moved so quickly to signal this new approach has prompted analysts to speculate that there may be some form of coordination among central bankers to warn investors who have benefited from the liquidity boom.
Stock markets in the United States have hit highs and, for quite awhile, the interest rates on trillions of dollars’ worth of European government bonds dipped into negative territory as global investors piled into these securities, confident that the central bank would continue to buy.
In the last few weeks, some officials from the Federal Reserve have warned about overheated financial markets.
On Tuesday, for example, Janet L. Yellen, the Fed chairwoman, described stock market valuations as being “somewhat rich.” Her language did not carry the punch of “irrational exuberance,” Alan Greenspan’s phrase to refer to a runaway stock market in the late 1990s.
Nevertheless it did send a clear signal to many investors that the Fed, even though it has no official mandate to guide or influence financial markets, is watching for potential bubbles. And that, perhaps, it will consider overvalued stock and bond markets when weighing its next rate increase.
So in that sense, some analysts say, central bankers’ recent turn to a more conservative approach should not be seen as a surprise.
On Thursday, stocks in Paris fell 1.9 percent, while Frankfurt shares ended 1.8 percent lower. The iShares EZU exchange traded fund, a $9 billion fund that follows a broad basket of stocks in the eurozone, closed the day down 1.4 percent.
In the United States, the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index ended down 0.86 percent — having recovered lost ground late in the day. The slump came even amid gains in big banks, which, having passed the Federal Reserve’s annual stress tests, announced they would pay their shareholders the largest dividends in nearly a decade.
Of the Dow Jones industrial average’s 30 members, only Goldman Sachs (up 0.9 percent) and JPMorgan Chase (up 1.48 percent) were positive for the day.

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