Author: NY TIMES

Another turning point came in the form of a Chick Corea DVD. “As silly as it sounds, getting given that made me want to stay in music. He became someone I could look up to,” Freitas said of the pioneering jazz fusion pianist. “I didn’t have a computer then, but I remember asking my friend to burn me a CD with all things Chick Corea after that,” he added.“I would come back from school and listen to everything. I was obsessed.”Corea, whose work ethic he has always admired, also taught Freitas discipline. While he didn’t own a piano at the…

Migration toward the United States through the dangerous jungle passage known as the Darién Gap has been halted, at least temporarily, following the arrest of two boat captains working for companies that play an essential role in ferrying migrants to the jungle.Boat companies suspended migrant crossings from two northern Colombia towns, Necoclí and Turbo, to the entrance of the Darién forest, according to the mayor of Necoclí, leaving roughly 3,000 migrants stranded in those communities. The Colombian law enforcement action in the region is sure to be watched closely by U.S. officials: The Biden administration has been pressuring Colombia for…

On Christmas Day, Catherine, Princess of Wales, attended service at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham, Norfolk, England, wearing head-to-toe royal blue. She walked to church with her husband, Prince William, and their three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, much like she had in years past.Greeting the gathered crowds and the cameras, “She looked lovely for the occasion,” said Town & Country.The princess has not been seen in public since.Three weeks later, on Jan. 17, Kensington Palace announced that Catherine, 42, formerly known as Kate Middleton, had been admitted to the London Clinic to undergo “a planned…

The Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday that it had asked Boeing to provide the agency with a “comprehensive action plan” to address quality-control issues within 90 days, the regulator’s latest push for safety improvements after a panel came off a Boeing 737 Max 9 jet in flight in early January.The F.A.A. administrator, Mike Whitaker, made the request on Tuesday when he met with Boeing’s chief executive, Dave Calhoun, and other company officials for what the agency described as an “all-day safety discussion.”“Boeing must commit to real and profound improvements,” Mr. Whitaker said in a statement. “Making foundational change will…

The media outlets Raw Story, Alternet and The Intercept sued OpenAI for copyright infringement on Wednesday, adding to a growing chorus pushing back against the company’s methods of scraping content off the internet to train its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.The online publications sued OpenAI in a New York federal court in two separate cases, saying that the ChatGPT creator trained its chatbot using copyrighted works by journalists without properly crediting or citing them. The companies are seeking damages in the amount of at least $2,500 per violation, as well as asking OpenAI to remove all copyrighted articles from data training sets.The…

Marian Anderson, the renowned contralto and civil rights figure who broke racial barriers in the arts and helped pave the way for other Black artists, is being honored in her hometown, Philadelphia.The Philadelphia Orchestra’s home will be renamed Marian Anderson Hall in recognition of a $25 million gift in her honor, the ensemble announced on Wednesday.Anderson, who was born in Philadelphia in 1897 and died in 1993, became the first Black singer to perform a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955, at a time when Black artists in the United States faced rampant racial discrimination.Matías Tarnopolsky, the president…

Micheline Presle, a subtle and elegant actress who was a last link to the first golden age of French cinema, died on Feb. 21 in Nogent-sur-Marne, a suburb of Paris. She was 101.Her death, at the Maison des Artistes, a retirement home for artists partly funded by the government, was confirmed by her son-in-law, Olivier Bomsel.Ms. Presle (pronounced prell) was the final survivor of a trio of actresses — Danièlle Darrieux and Michèle Morgan were the other two — who were already stars in France by the outbreak of World War II, and who defined a certain style of French…

Cat Janice, a singer and songwriter who released a buoyant pop track from hospice that galvanized her thousands of supporters online to sway, and even groove, in the face of tragedy, died on Wednesday at her family home in Annandale, Va. She was 31.The cause was sarcoma, according to William Ipsan, her brother.The singer and multi-instrumentalist, whose legal name was Catherine Ipsan, started writing music as a teenager and released it throughout her 20s. But “Dance You Outta My Head,” which she shared on social media alongside candid discussion of her grueling cancer treatments, quickly became the biggest hit of…

The Justice Department is reviewing whether an early January incident in which a part of a Boeing plane blew out in midflight violated a 2021 agreement to settle a criminal charge against the company, according to a person familiar with the review.Boeing agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion to settle the charge, which stemmed from two fatal crashes of its 737 Max 8 planes. The deal, reached in the final weeks of the Trump administration, was criticized at the time as being too lenient on the company.Under the terms, Boeing agreed to compensate the families of the crash victims…

For the last decade, many Apple employees working on the company’s secretive car project, internally code-named Titan, had a less flattering name for it: the Titanic disaster. They knew the project was likely to fail.Throughout its existence, the car effort was scrapped and rebooted several times, shedding hundreds of workers along the way. As a result of dueling views among leaders about what an Apple car should be, it began as an electric vehicle that would compete against Tesla and morphed into a self-driving car to rival Google’s Waymo.By the time of its death — Tuesday, when executives announced internally…