Kemi Badenoch Becomes New Leader of the U.K. Conservatives, the First Black Woman to Head a Major British Party

LONDON — Britain’s Conservative Party on Saturday elected Kemi Badenoch as its new leader as it tries to rebound from a crushing election defeat that ended 14 years in power.

The first Black woman to lead a major British political party, Badenoch (pronounced BADE-enock) defeated rival lawmaker Robert Jenrick in a vote of almost 100,000 members of the right-of-center Conservatives.

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She got 53,806 votes in the online and postal ballot of party members, to Jenrick’s 41,388.

Badenoch replaces former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who in July led the Conservatives to their worst election result since 1832. The Conservatives lost more than 200 seats, taking their tally down to 121.

The new leader’s daunting task is to try to restore the party’s reputation after years of division, scandal and economic tumult, hammer Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s policies on key issues including the economy and immigration, and return the Conservatives to power at the next election, due by 2029.

“The task that stands before us is tough but simple,” Badenoch said in a victory speech to a roomful of Conservative lawmakers, staff and journalists in London. She said the party’s job was to hold the Labour government to account, and to craft pledges and a plan for government.

Addressing the party’s election drubbing, she said “we have to be honest — honest about the fact that we made mistakes, honest about the fact that we let standards slip.”

“The time has come to tell the truth, to stand up for our principles, to plan for our future, to reset our politics and our thinking, and to give our party, and our country, the new start that they deserve,” Badenoch said.

A business secretary in Sunak’s government, Badenoch was born in London to Nigerian parents and spent much of her childhood in the West African country.

The 44-year-old former software engineer depicts herself as a disruptor, arguing for a low-tax, free-market economy and pledging to “rewire, reboot and reprogram” the British state.

A critic of multiculturalism and self-proclaimed enemy of wokeness Badenoch has criticized gender-neutral bathrooms and government plans to reduce U.K. carbon emissions. During the leadership campaign she drew criticism for saying that “not all cultures are equally valid,” and for suggesting that maternity pay was excessive.

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said the Conservative Party was likely to “swing towards the right both in terms of its economic policies and its social policies” under Badenoch.

He predicted Badenoch would pursue “what you might call the boats, boilers and bathrooms strategy …. focusing very much on the trans issue, the immigration issue and skepticism about progress towards net zero.”

While the Conservative Party is unrepresentative of the country as a whole — its 132,000 members are largely affluent, older white men – its upper echelons have become markedly more diverse.

Badenoch is the Tories’ third female leader, after Margaret Thatcher and Liz Truss, both of whom became prime minister. She’s the second Conservative leader from a non-white background, after Sunak, and the first with African roots. The center-left Labour Party, in contrast, has only ever been led by white men.

In a leadership contest that lasted more than three months, Conservative lawmakers reduced the field from six candidates in a series of votes before putting the final two to the wider party membership.

Both finalists came from the right of the party, and argued they can win voters back from Reform U.K., the hard-right, anti-immigrant party led by populist politician Nigel Farage that has eaten away at Conservative support.

But the party also lost many voters to the winning party, Labour, and to the centrist Liberal Democrats, and some Conservatives worry that tacking right will lead the party away from public opinion.

Starmer’s government has had a rocky first few months in office, beset by negative headlines, fiscal gloom and a plummeting approval rating.

But Bale said that the historical record suggests the odds are against Badenoch leading the Conservatives back to power in 2029.

“It’s quite unusual for someone to take over when a party gets very badly beaten and manage to lead it to election victory,” he said. “However, Keir Starmer did exactly that after 2019. So records are there to be broken.”

source https://time.com/7171606/kemi-badenoch-new-leader-uk-conservatives/

What to Watch Over the Final Weekend of the 2024 Presidential Campaign

NEW YORK — The 2024 presidential contest speeds into its final weekend with Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump locked in a razor-thin contest.

At this late stage in the campaign, every day matters. And while few voters might change their minds this late in a typical election, there is a sense that what happens in these final days could shift votes.

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Harris and Trump are crisscrossing the country to rally voters in the states that matter most. They’re trying — with varying degrees of success — to stay focused on a clear and concise closing message. At the same time, each side is investing massive resources to drive up turnout for the final early voting period. And in these critical days, the flow of misinformation is intensifying.

Here’s what we’re watching on the final weekend before Election Day, which is Tuesday:

Where will Harris and Trump be?

You only need to look at the candidates’ schedules this weekend to know where this election will likely be decided.

Note that schedules can and likely will change without warning. But on Saturday, Trump is expected to make separate appearances in North Carolina with one eyebrow-raising stop in Virginia in between.

No Democratic presidential candidate has carried North Carolina since Barack Obama in 2008, although it has been decided by less than 3 points in every election since. Trump’s decision to spend Saturday there suggests Harris has a real opportunity in the state. But Trump is also trying to convey confidence by stopping in Virginia, a state that has been safely in the Democratic column since 2008.

There is perhaps no more important swing state than Pennsylvania, where Trump is expected to campaign Sunday. But he also has another appearance scheduled for North Carolina in addition to Georgia, another Southern state that has leaned Republican for almost three decades — that is, until Joe Biden carried it by less than a half percentage point four years ago.

Meanwhile, Harris is expected to campaign in North Carolina and Georgia on Saturday in a sign that her team is sensing genuine opportunity in the South. She’s planning to make multiple stops in Michigan on Sunday, shifting to a Democratic-leaning state in the so-called Blue Wall where her allies believe she is vulnerable.

Do they stay on message?

Trump’s campaign leadership wants voters to be focused on one key question as they prepare to cast ballots, and it’s the same question he opens every rally with: Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

Harris’ team wants voters to be thinking about another: Do they trust Trump or Harris to put the nation’s interests over their own?

Whichever candidate can more effectively keep voters focused on their closing arguments in the coming days may ultimately win the presidency. Yet both candidates are off to a challenging start.

Trump opens the weekend still facing the fallout from his recent New York City rally in which a comedian described Puerto Rico as a “floating pile of garbage.” Things got harder for Trump late Thursday after he raised the prospect of Republican rival Liz Cheney’s death by gunfire.

It was exactly the kind of inflammatory comment his allies want him to avoid at this critical moment.

Harris’ campaign, meanwhile, is still working to shift the conversation away from President Biden’s comments earlier in the week that described Trump supporters as “garbage.” The Associated Press reported late Thursday that White House press officials altered the official transcript of the call in question, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity.

The spotlight of presidential politics always burns brightly. But it will burn brightest, perhaps, this final weekend, leaving the campaigns virtually no margin for error. In what both sides believe is a true tossup election, any final-hours missteps could prove decisive.

How will the gender gap play out?

Trump’s graphic attack against Cheney was especially troublesome given his allies’ heightened concerns about women voters.

Polling shows a significant gender gap in the contest with Harris generally having a much better rating among women than Trump has. Part of that may be the result of the GOP’s fight to restrict abortion rights, which has been disastrous for Trump’s party. But Trump’s divisive leadership has also pushed women away.

Going into the weekend, Trump allies, including conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk, are warning that far more women than men appear to be casting early ballots. While it’s impossible to know whom they’re voting for, Kirk clearly believes that’s bad news for Trump.

Trump isn’t helping his cause. A day before his violent rhetoric about Cheney, the Republican former president made waves by insisting that he would protect women whether they “like it or not.”

Harris, who would be the nation’s first female president, said Trump doesn’t understand women’s rights “to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies.”

It remains to be seen whether the Democrat’s argument can break through on this packed weekend. But Harris’ team believes there’s still a significant chunk of persuadable voters out there. And they say the undecideds are disproportionately Republican-leaning suburban women.

What happens with early voting?

More than 66 million people have already cast ballots in the 2024 election, which is more than one-third the total number who voted in 2020.

They include significantly more Republicans compared with four years ago, largely because Trump has backed off his insistence that his supporters must cast ballots in person on Election Day.

And while early in-person voting has ended in many states, there will be a huge push for final-hours early voting in at least three key states as the campaigns work to bank as many votes as possible before Election Day.

That includes Michigan, where in-person early voting runs through Monday. Voters in Wisconsin can vote early in-person through Sunday, although it varies by location. And in North Carolina, voters have until 3 p.m. Saturday to cast early ballots in-person.

The early voting period officially ended Friday in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, questions remain about the Trump campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation, which is relying heavily on well-funded outside groups with little experience — including one group funded largely by billionaire Elon Musk that’s facing new questions about its practices.

Harris’ campaign, by contrast, is running a more traditional get-out-the-vote operation that features more than 2,500 paid staffers and 357 offices in battleground states alone.

Will misinformation intensify?

Trump’s allies appear to be intensifying baseless claims about voter fraud, and some are being amplified by Trump himself. He has spent months sowing doubts about the integrity of the 2024 election in the event he loses — just as he did four years ago.

His unfounded accusations are becoming more specific, in some cases, as wild claims begin to show up on social media.

Earlier this week, Trump claimed on social media that York County, Pennsylvania had “received THOUSANDS of potentially FRAUDULENT Voter Registration Forms and Mail-In Ballot Applications from a third party group.” He has also pointed to Lancaster County, which he claimed had been “caught with 2600 Fake Ballots and Forms, all written by the same person. Really bad “stuff.””

Trump was referring to investigations into potential fraud related to voter registration applications. The discovery and investigation into the applications provide evidence the system is working as it should.

The Republican nominee has also raised baseless claims about overseas ballots and noncitizens voting, and suggested without evidence that Harris might have access to some kind of secret inside information about election results.

Expect such claims to surge, especially on social media, in the coming days. And remember that a broad coalition of top government and industry officials, many of them Republicans, found that the 2020 election was the “most secure” in American history.”

source https://time.com/7171595/what-to-watch-final-weekend-of-2024-presidential-campaign/

HBO’s Like Water for Chocolate Is a Lavish Melodrama of Passion and Politics

Like Water for Chocolate is a story submerged in tears. A striking scene from HBO’s new adaptation of Mexican author Laura Esquivel’s classic debut novel sees guests at a wedding banquet weep uncontrollably after tasting a cake infused with the baker’s sorrow. Then a storm rolls in, and it’s as though nature itself is joining in the lamentation. The miniseries opens with a set piece depicting the birth of its heroine, Tita de la Garza (Azul Guaita). Chopping onions in the kitchen of the family’s ranch, her mother, Mamá Elena (Irene Azuela), is so overcome by tears that she goes into labor. Elena’s water breaks like a waterfall. Delivered on a table, Tita is, as the narrator, her great-niece, puts it, “literally pushed into this world by an impressive torrent of tears.” When the liquid evaporates, 11 kilos of salt are harvested from the kitchen floor.

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Emotional, fantastical, and a little bit gross, the moment encapsulates the spirit of both Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate and the six-part, Spanish-language series, which premieres on Nov. 3. Like Water for Chocolate is a melodrama in the best possible sense of the word—a larger-than-life historical epic of love and lust, birth and death, duty and destiny. Six years in the making, HBO’s version justifies its existence, three decades after the release of an excellent big-screen adaptation that became one of the highest-grossing foreign-language films in U.S. history, by embracing that melodrama, with all the intensity and sensuality it brings. Head writer Francisco Javier Royo Fernández and showrunner Jerry Rodríguez (part of a team of executive producers that includes Salma Hayek Pinault) also make the inspired and smartly executed decision to expand the story’s engagement with the political upheavals of its time.

Though it dips back, now and then, into the 19th century, Tita’s saga takes place largely during the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. As a child playing in the cornfields while her widowed mother fights to maintain their struggling ranch, she falls instantly and unshakably in love with a neighbor boy, Pedro Múzquiz (Andrés Baida). But Mamá Elena is still nursing an old grudge against Pedro’s rich, ruthless father (Mauricio García Lozano). Besides, she has no intention of letting Tita—whom she despises, for mysterious reasons—wed, when she has already ordered her to stay home and care for Elena until her death. Instead, the matriarch cruelly strikes a deal to marry off her stiff eldest daughter, Rosaura (Ana Valeria Becerril), to Pedro. (An amorous third sister, Gertrudis, is played by Andrea Chaparro.) He agrees, because at least the marriage will allow him to see Tita regularly, condemning them both to years of torturous proximity. Tita channels her repressed emotions into the culinary feats she performs alongside the family’s cook, Nacha (Ángeles Cruz), who shows her more maternal affection than Elena ever has.

So far, so faithful to previous versions of Like Water for Chocolate. But with more time to flesh out secondary characters, and to capture the sweep of history, this telling casts light on the servants whose work powers the De la Garza and Múzquiz ranches. We flash back to Nacha’s youth, when her employer separates her from the man she loves. The Múzquizes’ young ranch hand Juan (Louis David Horné) challenges his mistreatment by Pedro’s father, in a conflict that splits both the servant’s family and the rancher’s along generational lines. These storylines have political weight in the context of a nation hurtling toward a revolution that would ultimately overthrow an authoritarian regime and establish a constitutional republic. Fernández and Rodríguez make the connection more explicit by chronicling Pedro’s radicalization while away at school and the way he chafes against the elitism of his ruling-class, military-aligned family.

With only two episodes screened for critics, I can’t say for sure whether the show succeeds in wedding politics and passion, but it does get off to a promising start. Tita’s, Pedro’s, and Juan’s fights against their tradition-bound parents mirrors a revolution that challenged a hierarchical old order. Like Water for Chocolate is, at its core, a story about self-determination, and about the horrors, violent and otherwise, that can ensue when those with power deny others autonomy.

Still, you might worry that this thematically heavy layer of narrative could weigh down a tale cherished for its voluptuous renderings of romance and food. It doesn’t, thanks largely to the series’ sheer maximalism. It just feels bigger, richer, and more elaborate than the feature, which was made for something like $2 million and cut down to a palpably rushed 105 minutes for American audiences by Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein, with room for more of everything. That includes many sumptuous cooking scenes, shot with all the care of Chef’s Table, in which Tita funnels her love into golden cream fritters and her devastation into pastel-pink icing.

The film’s indie aesthetic might make it the more tastefully restrained of the two adaptations; the HBO version certainly isn’t subtle with its performances or its dialogue or its lengthy passages of voiceover narration or its florid visual interpretations of Esquivel’s magic realism. But, grounded by the strength and sensitivity Guaita brings to the lead role, this Like Water for Chocolate is something at least as precious: a melodrama whose extreme emotions are tied to incisive ideas.

source https://time.com/7160993/like-water-for-chocolate-review-hbo/

Trump Says Liz Cheney Might Not Be Such a ‘War Hawk’ If She Had Guns Pointed at Her

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Donald Trump is calling former Rep. Liz Cheney, one of his most prominent Republican critics, a “war hawk” and suggesting she might not be as willing to send troops to fight if she had guns pointed at her. Cheney responded by branding the GOP presidential nominee a “cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

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At an event late Thursday in Arizona, with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Trump was asked whether it is strange to see Cheney campaign against him. The former Wyoming congressman has vocally opposed Trump since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and has endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris in the White House race, joining the vice president at recent stops.

Trump called Cheney “a deranged person” and added, “But the reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. If it were up to her we’d be in 50 different countries.”

The former president continued: “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with the rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.

“You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, oh gee, well let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy,” Trump said.

Cheney responded Friday in a post on X: “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

Earlier, after Harris’ campaign and other Trump critics on social media had pounced on his comment, Trump’s campaign said he “was talking about how Liz Cheney wants to send America’s sons and daughters to fight in wars despite never being in a war herself.”

source https://time.com/7171366/trump-liz-cheney-war-hawk/

Women Are Still Under-Represented in Medical Research. Here’s Where the Gender Gap Is Most Pronounced

Historically, medical research has been male-dominated in terms of subjects as well as researchers, even though women make up half of the world’s population. As a result of this gender bias, insights into various diseases and findings about medications have often been extrapolated from men and applied to women. But women aren’t just smaller men. Women’s bodies are decidedly different from men’s, with unique organs, genes, hormones, and other key differences.

It’s not surprising, then, that men and women experience many of the same diseases but develop different symptoms. With heart attacks, for example, the most common symptom is chest pain for men and women—but women may be more likely to experience other symptoms, such as shortness of breath, nausea or vomiting, or jaw pain. Women and men also metabolize and respond to many drugs differently. And there are gender-based variations in the physiological mechanisms underlying pain.

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Some of these differences have been revealed through research that features gender parity. But many basic questions remain about how different health conditions and responses to drugs, vaccines, and other interventions are influenced by biological sex. “Within the last 10 years, there has been major progress on sex-informed research,” says Dr. Hadine Joffe, executive director of the Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor of psychiatry in the field of women’s health at Harvard Medical School. But “it’s a mixed story because there’s still such a long way to go.” 

Still, progress is being made. In March of 2024, a major advance occurred when President Joe Biden signed an executive order for the White House Initiative on Advancing Women’s Health Research and Innovation with the goal of “getting women the answers they need about their health” and providing greater funding for this research. This follows the passage of a 1993 law, mandating the inclusion of women in human clinical trials for all research funded by the National Institutes of Health. That was a big step in the right direction, but the same standard didn’t apply to animal studies—and a gender gap persists in non-human research, too. In a study in a 2017 issue of the journal ENeuro, researchers reviewed 6,636 research articles in six journals and found that while sex omission in studies using mice or rats declined from 2010 to 2014, sex bias persists, as more articles focus exclusively on males.

Read More: Why Gut Health Issues Are More Common in Women

On the upside, Joffe points to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiative Sex as a Biological Variable (SABV), which launched in 2016: It spells out the expectation that when researchers are seeking funding from the NIH for studies with animals and humans, they will factor sex into their research design, data analysis, and reporting of results. This is a tremendous development in principle but it doesn’t always play out the way it could or should. “Sometimes people don’t follow through on it because this is complicated research to do,” Joffe says. The gap may be even wider for women of color, research suggests. 

In general, “women are still under-represented in research—female representation isn’t proportionate to the burden of disease in many clinical trials,” says Dr. Jecca Steinberg, a maternal-fetal medicine fellow at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. In a study published in a 2021 issue of JAMA Network Open, Steinberg and colleagues reviewed female participation in 20,020 clinical trials that had more than five million participants: They found that clinical trials in oncology, neurology, immunology, and nephrology had the lowest female representation relative to the burden of disease in women.

The findings in that study aren’t a fluke. In a 2022 study in Contemporary Clinical Trials, researchers evaluated the enrollment of female participants in 1,433 clinical trials of drugs and devices in the U.S. between 2016 and 2019. Of the 302,664 participants, on average 41% were female; this was true in cardiovascular disease and cancer. In psychiatry, the gap was even greater: While women comprise 60% of people with psychiatric disorders, the mean participation of women in psychiatric clinical trials was 4%. 

These days, “many investigators are reluctant to emphasize sex differences in their research because of the emotional turmoil surrounding the evolving complexity of what gender means and what sex means,” says Dr. Marianne J. Legato, emerita professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University and founder and director of the Foundation for Gender Specific Medicine. “It’s one of the elephants in the room of why gender-based research or male-female differences are not being more courageously investigated.” 

The issues of gender self-identification and gender fluidity are compounding these challenges. “It’s an extraordinarily and emotionally fraught topic,” Legato says.

Where progress has been made

The good news is that research on women’s health issues has brought many positive developments in specific areas. One relates to a better understanding of genetic factors in disease, particularly the role of high-risk genes, for breast cancer, notes Marcia Stefanick, a professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Women’s Health and Sex Diversity in Medicine Center. These insights have transformed the approach to prevention, early detection, and treatment of breast cancer, which has led to better outcomes for many women. 

Another example of improvements: “I think the pharmaceutical industry is more cautious now to look in drug trials at the biological impact in males and females,” says Legato. This is a welcome development, she says, given that from 1997 to 2000, eight of the ten drugs that were removed from the market had greater risks for women, including unacceptable side effects. Indeed, research has found that women experience adverse reactions to drugs nearly twice as frequently as men do. 

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic yielded some interesting discoveries of how the immune systems of men and women are different. It became apparent, for example, “that men were much more likely to die [while] women were much more likely to survive but develop symptoms of what’s called Long Covid,” Legato notes.

Read More: Long COVID Looks Different in Kids

Through research, it has also been discovered that men and women have different immune responses to vaccines. “In my research, we see that women mount greater immune responses until older ages to vaccines like the seasonal flu vaccine than men do,” says Sabra Klein, a molecular microbiologist and immunologist whose research focuses on sex-based biology, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. “They experience more mild-to-moderate reactions such as malaise, headache, and soreness. But this is not translating into going back to companies to make different dosing recommendations for men and women.” Instead, a one-dose-fits-all-genders approach persists.

Where the gaps are most pronounced 

Meanwhile, “female-exclusive conditions such as menopause and endometriosis are not the focus of a lot of research, especially translational research where discoveries are translated into products and treatments,” says Dr. Primavera Spagnolo, director of the Laboratory of Sex/Gender-informed Translational Neuroscience at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. As an editorial in a 2023 issue of the journal Nature noted, “Despite its importance for the health of half the world’s population, menopause is under-studied.”

In addition, “women’s health issues like obstetrics are under-represented in the medical literature,” says Steinberg. A study in a 2021 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology Maternal-Fetal Medicine found that while obstetrical complications affect more than 33% of women throughout the world, obstetrical clinical trials represent only 2% of all clinical trials in the U.S., which “creates a huge knowledge gap,” Steinberg says.

Progress in closing the gender gap is also lagging when it comes to autoimmune disorders, such as rheumatoid arthritis and thyroid disorders, which affect more women than men. “We don’t know how to leverage knowledge regarding women’s immune function to improve treatment,” Spagnolo says. In the area of mental health, there are also significant gender disparities. Take post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Women are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD and to suffer more chronic and severe symptoms than men are, according to research in a 2024 issue of the journal Nature Mental Health. And yet “a lot of preclinical studies [on treatments] were done in males,” says Spagnolo. “Gaps like this are one of the reasons we encounter so many difficulties in figuring out if a treatment is going to be safe and effective in women. We need more funding on this kind of research.”

Sometimes even when men and women are included in clinical trials, researchers neglect to separate and analyze the findings by gender. “There still is abysmal aggregation of data between men and women,” says Klein.

What needs to change

Fixing the gender bias problem will not happen easily. Aside from the complexity of designing the research, a funding inequity is contributing to the gender gap in medical research. When ranked by funding amount, research on diseases that affect mostly or exclusively women—such as migraine, endometriosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, and anxiety disorders—are underfunded relative to the burden they place on the female population, according to an analysis in a 2023 issue of Nature. 

Then there’s the challenge of bringing increased research-based knowledge about gender disparities into clinical practice. Take the issue of drug dosing, for example: “The immune system is different between men and women, and women’s body composition is different so they metabolize drugs differently,” says Stefanick. “The sleep medicine zolpidem [Ambien] is the only drug that has separate dosing recommendations for men and women.”

Gender differences in heart disease is another area where there’s been a disconnect between research findings and clinical practice. Even though the medical field began recognizing that women often experience different symptoms of heart disease than men do in the late 1990s, women are still “underdiagnosed and undertreated” for heart disease, Legato says.

Read More: 9 Weird Symptoms Cardiologists Say You Should Never Ignore

Indeed, a study in a 2018 issue of Women’s Health found that men with chest pain were 2.5 times more likely to be referred to a cardiologist than women, after presenting in primary care practices or an ambulatory care clinic. More recently, in a 2024 issue of the journal Cureus, researchers found that women with milder symptoms were less likely to be diagnosed with cardiovascular disease or likely to have their symptoms misdiagnosed as being gastrointestinal or anxiety-related; as a result, women received fewer diagnostic tests (such as coronary angiography and electrocardiogram, or ECG) and received fewer prescribed medicines (such as anticoagulants and statins) compared to men.

Clearly, more research needs to be done on gender differences in terms of the risks and manifestations of various diseases, as well as responses to treatments. More education of the public and those rising through the ranks of the medical profession is also necessary. “It’s the exception rather than the norm to teach about these differences in medical school, nursing school, and graduate school,” Klein says. “That needs to change. If you have patient contact, you need to understand these differences.”

source https://time.com/7171341/gender-gap-medical-research/

Robert Zemeckis Just Wants to Move You

Robert Zemeckis’ Here is the most unfashionable movie of 2024—which is exactly what’s beautiful about it. In a world where even those who profess to love movies largely stream them at home, Here is a picture that demands big-screen real estate. It’s inventive and confident filmmaking from a veteran director whose most recent features have performed modestly at the box office or, worse, sunk with barely a trace. It’s so unabashed in its desire to make us feel something that it runs the risk of being called sentimental—some early reviews have labeled it as such. It’s the kind of movie that a whole family—from young teenagers to nonagenarians—could trek out to see on a Sunday or holiday. And it reunites two stars—Tom Hanks and Robin Wright—who helped make Zemeckis’ 1994 Forrest Gump such a resonant success.

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In 2024, all these pluses are almost minuses, relics of things we no longer look for in movies. But Zemeckis—who, in a career spanning more than 40 years, has hit some high highs and a few rather low lows—is optimistic that audiences will find their way to Here, not just because he wholeheartedly believes in it, but because he knows it’s a miracle it got made in the first place. “It defies everything that’s happening in the corporate whatever,” he says in a Zoom call from Los Angeles, “[among] whoever it is that makes decisions about what movies should be made.” Maybe because his last film to receive a traditional theatrical release, 2018’s tender, innovative, and mildly strange Welcome to Marwen, failed to find an audience, he knows a miracle when he sees one. “Hey, the truth is that I could never make any of the movies I made, today. Not a single one.” Why? “Because,” he says, with deadpan understated confidence, “they’re too original.”

Maybe that sounds like hubris. But for someone who knows, provably, how to connect with moviegoers in an actual theater—as he did with Forrest Gump, with Back to the Future and its sequels, with pictures like Cast Away and Who Framed Roger Rabbit—it’s really just a reckoning with the state of moviegoing today. Most of us watch movies in isolation, which Zemeckis sees as a huge problem. It’s easy to forget what it feels like to laugh as part of a larger audience of human beings, or to be part of a crowd of viewers who allow themselves to be swept along in a wave of emotion. And though we think we want to see something original, do we really? If so, the mountains of product being made from already-familiar IP means we’re out of luck.

What chance does a movie like Here have in a world like that? Zemeckis, more than anything, sounds grateful that he’ll have a chance to find out.

Read more: The 100 Best Movies of the Past 10 Decades

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Adapted from Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel, a landmark for its visual inventiveness, Here—set in a single room of one house, and covering centuries’ worth of life in that exact location—is, from a technical standpoint, unlike any other film ever made. The camera is stationary, as it used to be in the days of silent film. But in Here, that stillness feels exhilarating and modern, given that what we see within the frame moves and changes not just with passing days, years, and decades, but with eons. We see a young couple enter this room—the Second World War has just ended, and these two are looking forward to building a life together. But we’ve also seen the ground on which this house was built as an early home to dinosaurs (who trample over a couple of prehistoric eggs as they valiantly try to outrun death) and later to North America’s indigenous peoples, who fall in love and build families just as our post-World War II couple will do (though they’re not nearly as fully fleshed out as characters). Across centuries the landscape shifts from barren earth to verdant, flowering fields—the story flashes backward and forward in time, though it never leaves this relatively small patch of space. Within this single frame, small interior squares pop up to show what was happening in this exact spot decades ago, or what might happen in a few decades’ time.

From the minute Zemeckis picked up McGuire’s novel, he saw it as a film. But getting the result he wanted wasn’t easy, not even for a filmmaker known for his fluency in special effects. “When I started getting my team together and described the style of the movie I was going to make, everyone’s reaction was ‘Well, that won’t be a problem.’ And it turned out to be maybe the most difficult movie we ever made,” Zemeckis says, “a gigantic puzzle.”

Nestled within that puzzle is the story’s heartbeat. Our postwar couple, Al and Rose, are played by Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly. They give birth to a son, Richard, who, from his teenage years to old age, is played by Tom Hanks. While he’s still in high school, Richard meets and falls in love with Robin Wright’s Margaret. She gets pregnant; the two marry, living with Al and Rose ostensibly only until they can afford a place of their own, though that day never comes. The extended family lives under one roof, and not always happily. There are births, deaths, major illnesses, and marital frustrations. Wright and Hanks anchor the film’s drama, and to play the younger and older versions of their characters, their faces and bodies are enhanced digitally.

The de-aged versions of Hanks and Wright are admittedly a little disorienting, especially at first. But Zemeckis—who, with films like The Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf (2007), has long been a proponent of performance-capture and other digitally advanced technologies—bristles at the suggestion that audiences might think of Hanks and Wright’s appearance as “uncanny.” He hates that word. The only reason people might have that response, he says, is because they know they’re seeing a movie illusion. He explains that the effect is nothing more than digital makeup; he finds the results perfect, and perfectly believable, given how much de-aging technology has improved since Martin Scorsese used it in The Irishman, in 2019. (The de-aging in Here was accomplished via an AI technology known as Metaphysic Live.)

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But when pressed to acknowledge that some viewers might find that very perfection unsettling, Zemeckis concedes that the effect might require a small leap of imagination. “It’s an intellectual exercise,” he says. “An audience might be going, ‘Oh, how can that be? I know they’re not that age.’” But test audiences, he says, weren’t overly bothered. “They quickly got over it.” And while he acknowledges that unchecked AI presents a danger to actors’ livelihoods, he considers the technology used in Here to be completely defensible from an artistic standpoint. “AI is a catch-all phrase, because what I’m doing is just using really fast computing to create digital makeup. I’m not creating any kind of avatar or anything.”

In the end, Zemeckis might be right that the sight of a “young” Hanks and Wright, reunited after 30 years, may be enchanting enough to carry audiences along. Yet not even Forrest Gump can escape the scrutiny of audiences who feel they’re too sophisticated for it: for every person who remembers the movie with pleasure, there’s one who derides it for its ostensible schmaltziness. It seems the only thing the latter group can recall about the film is the sugary bromide about life being just like a box of chocolates; they don’t care how beautifully crafted, and acted, it is, and its sly humor—which you’d think would be self-evident in a story about a naïf trying to make sense of 20th century history—seems to have totally slipped past them.

Zemeckis has some ideas about why modern audiences, especially, have issues with Forrest Gump. “I think modern audiences have lost the understanding of irony because they watch a movie like Forrest Gump in isolation, and they don’t understand the irony of what it was, what it’s all about. They take it a hundred percent literally,” he says. “And filmmakers like me, who find irony in life and in art and in movies—that’s getting lost somehow.” Still, there’s hope. Zemeckis’ bitterly funny 1992 satire Death Becomes Her, considered a flop upon its release, has been rediscovered and embraced by younger audiences. Both it and Back to the Future have also been reimagined as Broadway musicals; their bones are enduring.

Read more: The 33 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2024

Perhaps, whether it’s an immediate hit or not, Here will have a similar shelf life. The movie captures the sense that time seems to stretch before us endlessly when we’re young; it’s only when we stop and look back that we realize time isn’t our own, to use or control. The spaces we fill today were filled by others before us, and will be filled by someone else tomorrow—though another way of looking at it is that all beings are interconnected across dimensions. Common experiences unite us: Our parents fall ill or simply age, and we must care for them. Babies are born at inconvenient times, but we make it work. People we love leave us behind. Our children grow up to live their own lives. At one time or another, we all ask the same question: Where did the time go?

The dazzling construction of Here gets at the unanswerability of that question. There’s something searching and wistful about this movie; it couldn’t have been made by a young person. In adapting McGuire’s book, Zemeckis worked with his frequent collaborator (and Forrest Gump screenwriter) Eric Roth, and though the story stretches across centuries, it’s particularly affecting in the way it captures life in mid- to late-20th-century America. When Al brings out his home-movie camera, circa 1960, the family squints into the glare of the light bar necessary for shooting indoors: this is how midcentury parents captured our happiest moments, by nearly blinding us. The family TV in the corner hits the high points of each era (the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show) or at least nods at the weird stuff that gets stuck in our brains (the opening sequence of CHiPs).

But any film that tangles with big human feelings risks being characterized—to come back to that all-too-convenient word—as sentimental. Zemeckis is ready for that. “I think people who use the word sentimental just don’t like the fact that they were moved. It makes them scared, and I think they’re lashing out at a feeling that makes them uncomfortable.” Watching movies in isolation, removed from that ripple of communal feeling, has done us no favors. Maybe it’s time we relearned how to feel uncomfortable, together—to bring it back into fashion, before it goes extinct.

source https://time.com/7160896/robert-zemeckis-interview-here/

Typhoon Kong-rey Hits Taiwan’s East Coast, Leaving At Least One Dead

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A powerful typhoon made landfall in Taiwan on Thursday, killing one person and bringing high winds and floods to much of the island’s east coast and northern areas, after barreling past the northern Philippines.

Flights and train service were suspended in Taiwan and 8,600 people moved to shelters.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Typhoon Kong-rey was blowing at 184 kilometers (114 miles) per hour with gusts of up to 227 kph (141 mph) as it moved over the eastern county of Taitung. Parts of Yilan and Hualien counties were inundated by heavy rain, but many farmers in the largely rural areas had already brought in their crops in anticipation of damage from the storm.

Taiwan authorities reported one death and 73 injuries from the storm as of Thursday afternoon. The fatality occurred after a tree fell on a vehicle. Officials also said they were trying to contact a pair of Czech tourists who had been hiking in Hualien’s Tarako National Park, famed for its steep cliffs and mountain trails. Other travelers were advised to stay where they were.

The capital, Taipei, was largely shut down as it was hit by high winds and heavy rains. Offices and schools across the island were closed. Off the north coast, a tugboat was dispatched to tow away a Chinese-registered freighter that floundered and had been abandoned by its crew amid heavy seas.

Earlier Thursday, the typhoon’s eye blew about 110 kilometers (68 miles) east of the northernmost Philippine province of Batanes, a cluster of islands and islets of about 19,000 people. Villagers in northern Philippine provinces evacuated to shelters on Wednesday.

The Philippines weather agency had warned the the storm could blow away roofs and shatter windows and wreak extensive damage to farmland, but there were no immediate reports of casualties.

“It’s so, so powerful and we haven’t seen the extent of the damage yet because the wind outside is still so strong,” Batanes Governor Marilou Cayco told The Associated Press by cellphone before the line was cut off.

Kong-rey, the 12th weather disturbance to hit the Philippine archipelago this year, lashed the Southeast Asian nation while it’s still recovering from a storm last week that left 179 dead and missing. Hundreds of thousands of people are still in emergency shelters from Tropical Storm Trami.

China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory and regularly sends planes and warships around the island, largely suspended its patrols, with just eight planes detected around the island between Wednesday and Thursday, according to Taiwan’s Defense Ministry

source https://time.com/7160777/typhoon-kong-rey-hits-taiwans-east-coast-leaving-1-dead/