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Special school pupils ‘tortured’ in calming rooms, BBC investigation…
The BBC has obtained confidential material revealing appalling abuse and neglect affecting 39 pupils.
The BBC has obtained confidential material revealing appalling abuse and neglect affecting 39 pupils.
Pete Thamel
Dan Murphy
Dan Murphy
ESPN Staff Writer
Apr 29, 2024, 08:17 PM ET
The leaders of college sports are involved in “deep discussions” to reach a legal settlement that would likely lay out the framework for sharing revenue with athletes in a future NCAA business model, sources told ESPN.
The NCAA and its power conferences are defendants in an antitrust class action lawsuit, House v. NCAA, which argues that the association is breaking federal law by placing any restrictions on how athletes make money from selling the rights to their name, image or likeness. The case is scheduled to go to court in January 2025. If the plaintiffs win at trial, the NCAA and its schools could be liable to pay more than $4 billion in damages, which has motivated many leaders across the industry to seek a settlement.
Sources indicated that a turning point in the discussions, which have been ongoing, came last week in the Dallas area, where the power conference commissioners, their general counsels, NCAA president Charlie Baker, NCAA lawyers and the plaintiffs’ attorneys met. (They chose the Dallas area because they were already there for the College Football Playoff meetings, which were held in that area last week.)
While sources stressed that no deal is imminent, details about what a multibillion-dollar settlement could look like are expected to be shared with campuses in the near future. There are myriad variables to get to the finish line and still some obstacles and objections at the campus level, but sources indicate that progress has ramped up in recent weeks.
A settlement would provide some legal relief for a college sports industry that’s been peppered by lawsuits. It could also serve as a keystone piece to formulating a more stable future. With the settlement expected to cost billions in back pay for former athletes, it would likely also require the NCAA and conferences to agree to a system for sharing more revenue with some of the players moving forward.
Sources indicated the top-end revenue share number per school — once it’s determined — would be in the neighborhood of $20 million annually, although that’s yet to be settled. Whatever number is set by the settlement, individual schools will be able to opt in to share revenue up to that number with their student athletes at their discretion. (They could choose to share less, but not more.)
Texas A&M athletic director Trev Alberts, for example, recently told the Bryan-College Station Eagle that schools could be adding $15 million to $20 million to their budgets annually for what he termed a “new expense category” in college athletics.
What’s uncertain, for now, are the mechanics of how this could work. Do the schools buy the NIL of their athletes? How would Title IX be impacted?
The House case is one of four active antitrust lawsuits, all of which serve as a threat to some part of the NCAA’s remaining caps on how athletes are paid. In three of those cases, including the House case, athletes are represented by veteran sports labor attorney Jeffrey Kessler.
Kessler did not respond to a request for comment Monday. His co-counsel, Steve Berman, told ESPN on Monday: “Judge Wilken has told us that she expected us to be discussing settlement given the lengthy litigation over the issues and the parties’ familiarities with the strengths and weaknesses on each side. We are simply following the judge’s instructions and have nothing to report other than that.”
In an interview with ESPN earlier this month, Kessler declined to comment on any possible negotiations but said he felt a settlement was the quickest route toward transforming college sports.
“I can’t guarantee this, but I think [the defendants’] lawyers have told them they’re in all likelihood going to lose,” Kessler said. “If they lose, the damages are going to be gigantic. Further, they’ve been told that it’s much better for them to be active participants in settling and deciding their future lives and fate than it is to let the court impose it on them.”
The House case includes two separate classes of plaintiffs. The damages class is composed of former college athletes from the past several years who argue the NCAA owes them back pay for the money they could have earned if they had been allowed to sign NIL deals prior to 2021. The injunctive class includes current college athletes, who argue that any of the existing restrictions on what types of NIL deals athletes can sign are also illegal.
In court testimony, economic experts hired by the plaintiffs argued that the damages class missed out on more than $1 billion in NIL opportunities in the years leading up to 2021. In antitrust cases, the court makes the defendant pay triple the amount of actual damages as punishment if it has violated the law — hence the estimated $4 billion price tag of a legal loss.
“If we settle for the injunction class, it will involve an agreement of what the future will look like,” Kessler said. “If we settle for the damages class, that’s basically money for the past.”
Another pending antitrust lawsuit, Carter v. NCAA, which was also filed by Kessler, argues that the NCAA should not be able to keep schools from paying players directly for their performance. While the cases do not need to be settled together, it’s likely that both sides would want to reach an agreement that is substantial enough to keep them from ending up back in court for the Carter case in the near future. Sources indicated to ESPN that schools would likely want protection from future litigation as part of a settlement in the House case.
In professional sports, revenue sharing deals are typically reached through a collective bargaining agreement. While that might also be the route for college sports if schools decide to share more with players, there is some precedent for working out the details of labor agreements within the settlement of a lawsuit. The NFL, for example, settled a case with Reggie White in 1993 that established the rules for free agency and salary caps for the league. One of the lawyers who represented White in that case was Kessler.
Along with the threat of antitrust lawsuits, the National Labor Relations Board is also reviewing a pair of cases that aim to classify college athletes as employees and allow them to unionize.
NCAA leaders have remained firmly opposed to athletes becoming employees. However, Baker — who took over as the association’s president last March — said he wants to find ways for some schools to provide more to their athletes. He proposed in December creating a new subdivision of the wealthiest teams that would be required to pay at least half their athletes a minimum of $30,000 per year.
“If you look at what Baker has been out there doing, he seems to be very aware,” Kessler told ESPN earlier this month. “Some of his proposals he’s made in December — I’m not say it’s what we’d settle for — but it’s certainly moving in the direction of proposing to give much more compensation to the athletes. That’s what we’re advocating.”
The NCAA has also attempted for the past several years to convince Congress to create new rules to help govern college sports. Among the items it would like to see in a federal law is a clause that specifies that college athletes aren’t employees. Congress has thus far made no demonstrable progress on a bill, but a significant settlement that shows a commitment to future revenue sharing in the House case could convince some lawmakers to provide help to the NCAA.
Transgender women should not be put on single-sex female NHS wards in England, the government is proposing.
Painless and easier to store than injections, it remains early days for microneedle-patch technology.
Average advertised rents have hit a new high, but there are signs that the pace of the increases is slowing, according to a property website.
There are also signs that more landlords are having to reduce their asking rents, particularly for bigger homes, to meet what tenants can afford.
Across Britain, excluding London, the average monthly rent being asked for a property coming on the market in the first quarter of 2024 was £1,291, Rightmove found.
This was 8.5% higher than a year earlier, which was lower than the annual rise of 9.2% recorded in the fourth quarter of 2023.
The average advertised rent in London also hit a fresh high in the first quarter of 2024, but, at £2,633 per month, it was just £2 higher than the average asking rent in the fourth quarter of 2023.
London asking rents were 5.3% higher in the first quarter of 2024 than a year earlier, slowing from a 6.1% annual rise in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Although the balance of supply and demand is slowly improving from its peak, Rightmove estimates that nearly 50,000 rental properties would still be needed to head back to the pre-pandemic level of rental supply.
The number of available rental properties is 11% higher than last year, but 26% below 2019 levels, the website said.
It added that, while the number of tenants looking for a home to rent is lower than a year ago, it is still higher than in 2019.
Letting agents are fielding an average of 13 inquiries per rental property, Rightmove said.
While this is down from 19 at this time last year, it is still nearly triple the average of five in March 2019.
Rightmove also pointed to signs that tenant affordability is being tested, with reductions in rental prices at a five-year high for this time of year.
The proportion of rental properties with a reduction in price stands at 22%, up from 16% a year earlier, and the highest at this time of year since 2019, when the proportion was 23%, Rightmove said.
Asking rents for the biggest homes, including four-bedroom detached houses and properties with five bedrooms or more, are the most likely to be reduced, it added.
A third (30%) of top-of-the-ladder properties currently see a reduction in price, a new record for this time of year in Rightmove’s data going back to 2012.
We can see some slow improvements for tenants with more choice, and competition with other tenants slowly starting to ease
Tim Bannister, Rightmove
Rightmove’s director of property science, Tim Bannister, said: “The rental market is no longer at peak boiling point but it remains at a very hot simmer.
“Looking at data across the whole market, we can see some slow improvements for tenants with more choice, and competition with other tenants slowly starting to ease. However, tenants may not feel the benefit of some of these improvements in their local market, as the balance between supply and demand remains so far from pre-pandemic levels.
“The fact that, even with some improvements to the level of supply, we are still nearly 50,000 properties behind the pre-pandemic market, is a stark reminder that the industry needs more good quality rental homes.”
It appears stock will get tighter as we move into the summer months and as such the number of reductions will likely decrease
Simon Thompson, Miles & Barr
Simon Thompson, group lettings director at Miles & Barr in Kent, said: “I think it is fair to say that price growth has eased; however the pace of new supply coming on to the market is also starting to slow, probably due to a combination of the relatively low numbers of new landlords coming into the market, and a few landlords looking to sell.
“There has been an increased number of price reductions, but this is mainly happening at the top end of the market, with smaller homes still in high demand. It appears stock will get tighter as we move into the summer months and as such the number of reductions will likely decrease.”
Halifax reported on Monday that, in the home buyer market, prices for smaller homes such as flats have been increasing at a faster rate than bigger properties.
The bank said the first-time buyer market has been “resilient”, and as interest rates have stabilised and buyers adjust to the new economic reality of owning a home, one way for buyers to compensate for higher borrowing costs is to target smaller properties.
Gérard Depardieu will be tried on criminal charges that he sexually assaulted two women on the set of a film in 2021, French prosecutors announced Monday.
The trial, which is set for October, marks the first time the famed — and embattled — French actor will face his accusers in a courtroom. Depardieu has been previously accused by more than a dozen women of harassment, groping and sexual assault.
This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.
Michigan State University and Yale University are very different types of higher education institutions, but they have at least one thing in common: They have been spending millions of dollars to revamp their museums.
So have New York University. And Princeton. And Penn State. And Utah State University.
At a time when many museums and colleges are grappling with financial challenges as well as their changing role in society, it may seem surprising that universities and donors are willing to shell out lots of money to make their museums showcases.
There is no exact number of how many college museums are being renovated or even how many exist nationwide. The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries is conducting a census to get a more accurate count, but its latest estimate is that there are 659 such museums in the United States. the majority are art museums but include history, natural history, science and anthropology.
And even while some are unveiling shiny new buildings, others are closing their doors. Nonetheless, a surprising number of university museums are undergoing major upgrades.
Each institution has different reasons for renovating and expanding, but “it comes down to relevancy,” said Devon Akmon, director of Michigan State University’s art museum. “How do we remain relevant and how do we create programs for the communities we serve and how do we welcome people into a space?”
This is a quandary for all museums, but university museums have different challenges because they are often a bridge between the community and the campus. The question is how to serve both constituencies in a balanced way.
“There is that tension,” Akmon said. “Are you primarily focused first on extending beyond the academy? Or are you first and foremost looking at the needs of your faculty and students? If I’m being very honest, I think we were neglecting our students and our faculty.”
The same is true at the Yale Peabody Museum, which opened its newly designed building on March 26, and incorporated many changes aimed at attracting more students and instructors.
With a $160 million donation, the Peabody has expanded to 44,000 square feet from 30,000 square feet. It now has five classrooms; the previous building had none. Although students have always been involved in the museum in various capacities, “this represents a huge pedagogical shift,” said David Heiser, the museum’s director of student programs. “We’re really using the museum’s collections within teaching and bringing the collections to the classroom, as opposed to bringing a class into the collection storage and maybe opening up some drawers to look at things.”
The museum’s new building also includes a study gallery where faculty members can put museum objects on display for a semester as part of their courses, and a student-curated gallery, which is now showing an exhibition called “Fakes and Fictions? Unraveling Museum Narratives.” It grew out of a course, Heiser said, about how approaches to interpreting and displaying collections in museums like the Peabody are rapidly changing. These students wrestled with why taxidermy and models in the fields of zoology and paleontology are often considered skilled reproductions, while in anthropology models made by traditional artisans are considered fakes.
Both the student gallery and the study gallery are off the central gallery, which is “prime real estate space,” Heiser said. That means that the public will learn more about students’ work and that the students will have the “opportunity to share their own curatorial voice with the public.”
Academic museums are also interested in attracting students from outside the obvious fields of art and museum studies. For example, Northwestern Michigan College is a rare community college that has an academic museum, the Dennos Museum Center. It was established in 1991 and doubled its size in 2018.
It pulls in drawing, painting and printmaking students, but also police cadets and nursing students from the college, who learn how to do close observation, said Craig Hadley, the museum’s director.
He is also hoping to partner with students from more disciplines, such as culinary students. “Ideally, what we’d love to do is to be able to host a reception or be able to work with them on an exhibition that focuses on something like the culinary arts and science of food,” he said. He wants all students “to be able to visit the museum and have an experience thinking about museums and visual literacy very broadly and how that can apply in a positive way to their field,” he added.
Not all university museums are thriving — the University of New Hampshire, citing sweeping budget cuts, closed its arts museum this year.
“It’s very painful,” said Kristina Durocher, the museum’s former director and the current president of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries. “It’s such a loss to the campus, the community and to the region itself.”
One aspect of university museums that is often overlooked is that they amass work by artists related to the institution or region that isn’t collected elsewhere, Durocher said.
For example, a major exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Harlem Renaissance borrowed heavily from museums at historically Black colleges and universities such as Fisk, Howard, Clark Atlanta and Hampton Universities.
In some regions, especially rural ones, the academic museum may be the only one available to local people. In a 2022 survey conducted by the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries and Wilkening Consulting, of the 196 museums that responded, the majority were in small cities or towns where they were one of the principal local cultural amenities.
Hadley that said in his area, the next comparable museum to the Dennos is a two-and-a-half-hour drive away. “This could be the student’s first interaction with a museum of any kind and could be the only museum experience they ever have if they stay up here in northern Michigan,” he said.
Penn State’s Palmer Museum of Art has the largest collection of art between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, said Erin Coe, the museum’s director. It is scheduled to open its completely remodeled and expanded facility in June.
On the opposite side of the spectrum is New York University’s Grey Art Museum, formerly the Grey Art Gallery. In a city awash with museums, the Grey has to differentiate itself. First established in 1975, a bequest allowed it to move to a more visible place off Washington Square Park. It reopened on March 2.
The new quarters incorporate a large study space that will be available by appointment to students, faculty and researchers, something the museum’s director, Lynn Gumpert, called her dream.
“A study center for me is the raison d’être of the university art museum,” she said.
Its opening exhibition, “Americans in Paris” — showing until July 20 — focuses largely on former soldiers who moved to Paris to paint, using the newly enacted G.I. Bill to pay for tuition and living expenses.
Many of the museums that increase their space say it will allow them to better highlight some of their special collections. For the Grey, that means visitors can see a bit more of the 1,000 works of modern Iranian, Indian and Turkish art donated in 1975.
“After consulting with experts on both Iranian and Turkish modernism, starting back in 2002, we realized that the Grey housed the largest institutional holdings of Turkish and Iranian modern artworks outside those respective countries,” Gumpert said.
And the Palmer Museum at Penn State will now have double the space for its standout collection of American art from the late 18th century to the present, Coe said.
The goal at Michigan State’s new museum is to be at the nexus of arts and sciences. Akmon said it had experimented with that goal before but is now “going full blast.”
“It’s less about art or science and more about the pressing issues of our times,” he said.
And confronting those issues is something university museums are uniquely situated to do, he said: “The university environment is about experimentation and discovering from failures and that’s why a museum inside a university should take that approach — moving away from a perfect process toward a more iterative and experimental approach.”
The infections, made public by the CDC, raised questions about the safety of cosmetic treatments.
A crucial question is hanging over the American economy and the fall presidential election: Why are consumer prices still growing uncomfortably fast, even after a sustained campaign by the Federal Reserve to slow the economy by raising interest rates?
Economists and policy experts have offered several explanations. Some are essentially quirks of the current economic moment, like a delayed, post-pandemic surge in the cost of home and auto insurance. Others are long-running structural issues, like a lack of affordable housing that has pushed up rents in big cities like New York as would-be tenants compete for units.
But some economists, including top officials at the International Monetary Fund, said that the federal government bore some of the blame because it had continued to pump large amounts of borrowed money into the economy at a time when the economy did not need a fiscal boost.
That borrowing is a result of a federal budget deficit that has been elevated by tax cuts and spending increases. It is helping to fuel demand for goods and services by channeling money to companies and people who then go out and spend it.
I.M.F. officials warned that the deficit was also increasing prices. In a report earlier this month, they wrote that while America’s recent economic performance was impressive, it was fueled in part by a pace of borrowing “that is out of line with long-term fiscal sustainability.”
The I.M.F. said that U.S. fiscal policies were adding about a half a percentage point to the national inflation rate and raising “short-term risks to the disinflation process” — essentially saying that the government was working at cross-purposes with the Fed.
Biden administration economists, and some analysts on Wall Street, reject that view. Administration officials said that the analysis underlying the I.M.F.’s claims was implausible. That’s in part because the report found that federal policy was adding just as much to inflation currently as it did two years ago, at a time when direct payments to consumers and other programs from President Biden’s 2021 stimulus bill were increasing spending across the economy.
Administration officials pointed to other measures of fiscal policy, including a continuing analysis by the Brookings Institution in Washington, that suggested that government tax and spending policies were not significantly adding to economic growth or inflation now or in the recent past.
“I don’t think the recent inflation record supports an excessive demand story,” Jared Bernstein, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview. “I think what we’ve seen is that as supply chains have unsnarled, demand in the job market has cooled somewhat. We’ve been able to maintain historically low unemployment while getting significant disinflation.”
Mr. Bernstein added that, while administration officials were careful not to comment on the central bank’s interest rate decisions, “our fiscal stance is not fighting the Fed.”
The debate is important for how the Fed, which bears primary responsibility for controlling price growth, sets policy in the months ahead.
Investors entered the year expecting Fed officials to cut interest rates several times, after price growth slowed rapidly in 2023 and began to approach the central bank’s target level of 2 percent per year. They have revised those forecasts as new data show that progress stalling out and, by many measures, beginning to reverse.
How policymakers view the interplay between deficits and inflation could also shape decisions by the next president and Congress. If re-elected, Mr. Biden said that he would seek to reduce deficits by about $3 trillion over a decade, primarily by raising taxes on high earners and corporations. His Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, has repeated his past — and unfulfilled — promises to eliminate the national debt, while also pushing for an extension of his 2017 tax cuts that could add trillions to deficits.
Both presidents’ policies, along with decisions by presidents before them, have contributed to the nation’s current fiscal imbalance. The deficit spiked when Mr. Trump, and then Mr. Biden, signed relief bills for people and businesses amid the coronavirus pandemic. It fell in the 2022 fiscal year but effectively doubled last year.
The deficit is now larger, as a share of the economy, than is historically normal for this point in an economic recovery — when unemployment is low and economic growth remains strong.
That is even true if you exclude the costs of servicing the government’s mounting debt load, which jumped last year as the Fed raised interest rates, a measure economists call the “primary deficit.” When properly measured, the primary deficit last year was equal to about 5 percent of the economy’s annual output. Data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office suggest that it was the sixth-highest primary deficit of any year since 1962; the other five all came during, or immediately after, the pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis.
High deficits could affect inflation in a few ways. They could increase demand for goods or services that remain in relatively short supply, driving up prices. They could affect consumers’ views about how much inflation they expect in the future and chip away at the effectiveness of Fed rate increases to slow growth, said Joseph H. Davis, the chief global economist at the investment firm Vanguard.
Mr. Davis said that the shift from a declining deficit to a rising one was most likely adding modestly to price growth and making the Fed’s job more difficult: “What used to be a tailwind on inflation has become more of a headwind,” he said.
The deficit increase last year reflected several factors, including volatile capital gains tax collections and the effects of natural disasters on tax filing. It also reflected increased government spending and tax breaks signed into law by Mr. Biden. A bipartisan 2021 infrastructure bill is now funding roads, broadband and other projects nationwide. The government is paying for additional health benefits for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits.
Tax incentives in a bipartisan law meant to encourage semiconductor production and a party-line law intended to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to lower-emission energy sources have spurred hundreds of billions of dollars in announcements or spending on new factory construction.
“It was a large dose of fiscal stimulus over the last year,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard economist who chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. “To get people lower mortgage rates,” he added, “to give businesses the ability to expand and invest and grow, we need to be bringing the deficit down.”
Data from other economists, like the creators of the Hutchins Center Fiscal Impact Measure at Brookings, suggest that the increase in spending and tax breaks last year did not outweigh the drag on the economy from expiring Covid relief. In other words, they effectively show that the end of stimulus aid that propped up consumer demand in the early stages of the pandemic offset any increased demand from new spending and tax breaks.
Economists at the investment bank UBS wrote last week that after adding to growth last year, including by fueling factory construction, federal tax and spending policy was likely to “flip” to dragging on growth this year. Economists at Bank of America Securities made a similar case last week after the Commerce Department reported that economic growth slowed in the first months of this year.
Administration officials said there were simpler — and superior — explanations for why price growth remained above the Fed’s target than the deficit. Housing inflation has not moderated as quickly as many economists expected, though White House models predict it will soon. Price growth in auto insurance, financial services and medical services are effectively one-offs that are keeping inflation elevated now, the officials said, but will not continue to push prices higher in the months to come.
“It’s not really a fiscal story,” Mr. Bernstein said.
In the newspaper advertising, the company addresses the bullying young Nigam over her facial hair, however social media tends to disagree.