What to Watch for at China’s Major Political Event This Week

BEIJING — China’s annual major political event gets underway this week, bringing together the nation’s top leaders and thousands of provincial leaders to endorse decisions already made by the all-powerful Chinese Communist Party.

The meetings and gathering during the National People’s Congress, expected to last for about a week, are still important. The rubber-stamp parliament retains an important function: to signal the priorities of the government for the coming year and to disseminate instructions to party members and officials across the country.

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The messaging from leadership appears unchanged from previous years — stay the course on fostering innovation while also spurring domestic consumption.

The question will be how they balance those two goals, and will it be enough to reinvigorate the economy? And to what extent will the government buffer the impact of what might be another phase in the U.S.-China trade war?

This year also marks the end of China’s current 5-year plan, and experts will be looking for clues on the government’s priorities for the next, 2026 to 2030 plan.

Here is what to watch for at this year’s event:

What is China’s economic growth target?

The National People’s Congress kicks off on Wednesday, with Premier Li Qiang, China’s top economic official, announcing the economic growth target for the year.

Analysts expect it to come in at around 5% – holding the same target as the previous two years, and slightly lower than the 5.5% target in 2022. This would be no small feat considering China is still grappling with a sluggish real estate sector and lackluster consumer spending.

Another uncertainty is trade tensions with the U.S. under President Donald Trump, who last month slapped a 10% tariff on Chinese imports while an additional 10% comes into effect on Tuesday. Forecasters at the International Monetary Fund are projecting a lower 4.6% growth rate this year.

What are the government’s priorities?

A commentary last Friday from the official Xinhua News Agency indicated that priority would be placed on boosting domestic demand and promoting innovation in science and technology.

There’s also anticipation of more government support for the private sector to fuel growth.

Chinese President Xi Jinping met in February with business leaders, including Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei, signaling support for the private sector at the highest level of leadership. A draft bill is also to be deliberated during the Congress over making a fairer and more equitable business environment for the private sector.

China has already released a slew of measures to prop up the economy. Much of these have fallen short of hopes for a bigger stimulus, and analysts are tempering expectations on what to expect from the Congress.

“I would not expect anything … to come out that will really meaningfully shift that policy away from industrial policy and towards boosting consumption in meaningful, sufficient ways,” said Jacob Gunter, lead analyst for the economics research team at the Mercator Institute for China Studies.

Instead, experts say leaders are staying the course on pushing for innovation that would boost China’s self-reliance.

The purpose of the economy is no longer to improve household incomes and expand the middle class, Gunter said.

“This is not a development-oriented economy,” he said. “It’s a geopolitically oriented economy, and technology and industry are way more important for that.”

Where is China’s diplomacy headed?

Li is expected to touch on foreign policy and Taiwan, but more attention will likely be on Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

His annual press conference, to be held later in the week, will be closely watched to decipher China’s stance on U.S.-China relations under Trump. After the first 10% tariffs in February, China retaliated with a 15% tariff on American coal and liquefied natural gas, as well as 10% on crude oil, agriculture machinery and large-engine cars.

“Beijing’s response to Trump’s initial 10% tariffs was measured — restrained enough to signal openness to negotiations yet firm enough to demonstrate its willingness to escalate if necessary,” Neil Thomas and Jing Qian wrote in a report for the Asia Society Policy Institute.

They note that China’s president might use speeches in closed-door meetings during the Congress to send signals on bilateral relations, as he did two years ago when Xi named the United States as leading “containment encirclement and suppressions” against China.

Also closely watched will be China’s relations with Russia and its position on the Ukraine war. At a recent Group of 20 foreign minister’s meeting in South Africa, Wang said a “window for peace is opening” in Ukraine, and that China supported “all efforts committed to peace, including the recent consensus reached by the United States and Russia.”

What does the National People’s Congress do?

The legislature is made up of nearly 3,000 delegates from China’s provinces, ministries, People’s Liberation Army, party organizations and various groups that represent workers and other interests.

Their role is largely ceremonial in that the body does not have any real power to decide on legislation. Any vote is usually unanimous or near-unanimous to formalize decisions already taken by Communist Party leaders behind closed doors.

Still, the Congress is a rare opportunity to see what the central government’s sees as priorities and goals, and the reports and speeches during it can give indications of the future direction of government policy.

An advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, will meet at the same time. Members include business leaders, athletes, academics, religious leaders and representatives of ethnic groups. The concurrent meetings of the two bodies are known as the Two Sessions.

source https://time.com/7263757/china-national-peoples-congress/

The Cost of Trying to Live Forever

Don’t die. That’s the simple mission statement of Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur and subject of the recently released Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.

Johnson is not alone in his mission to extend his life as long as possible. In fact, the preoccupation with longevity is everywhere. Entrepreneurs are using AI to crack the longevity code. Cities are vying to be the new “longevity hubs.” And if Don’t Die isn’t for you, there are other documentaries like Longevity Hackers and Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones for you to enjoy. So it’s no surprise that longevity is expected to dominate the well-being industry in the coming year as a global consumer trend.

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Ray Kurzweil has been talking about tech-enabled immortality for decades, including in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near and again in his 2024 book The Singularity Is Nearer. For Kurzweil, the singularity will come when humans merge with AI to become “immortal software-based humans” living in the cloud.

Most of the longevity movement is not really about immortality but rather about extending life and limiting the damaging effects of aging. Of course, we all want longevity, and doing what we can to extend how long we live is great—as long as we don’t allow that to distract us from focusing on how to live. The danger of Johnson’s obsessive approach is spending so much time trying to extend your life that you never quite get around to living it. 

Indeed, keeping death close—even while pushing it as far into the future as we can—has many lessons to teach us about life. Because as one headline from The Onion puts it: “World Death Rate Holding Steady at 100%.” This punchline, that no one escapes death, can of course be confirmed by multiple scientific studies. 

We are not anywhere close to conquering death. In fact, a study from the University of Illinois in Chicago last year showed that though the average lifespan has gone up, the pace of improvement is slowing and the maximum lifespan hasn’t changed as much. “We’ve now proven that modern medicine is yielding incrementally smaller improvements in longevity even though medical advances are occurring at breakneck speed,” the study’s lead author Professor Jay Olshansky says. “There’s plenty of room for improvement: for reducing risk factors, working to eliminate disparities and encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles—all of which can enable people to live longer and healthier.” But room for improvement in living longer is very different from delusions about eliminating death.

For William Mair, professor of molecular metabolism at Harvard Chan School of Public Health, talk about immortality or radical life extension has a clear opportunity cost. “I worry that in a world where people have limited attention spans, the people who speak with confidence and say they have already cured aging will get the microphone,” he says. “We all age and we all know someone who is suffering from an age-related condition.”

Death can help us focus our attention on living our best life, because there’s nothing that can teach us more about how to live life than death. Death is the most universal experience, yet we will do anything and everything we can to curtain it off, to avoid dealing with the only plot twist that we know for sure will be in our story’s last act. Here lies the crux of the error Johnson, Kurzweil, and their followers are making: by seeing human beings solely as material beings, they have confused an immortal soul with an immortal body. As the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Or, as the poet Hermann Hesse wrote, “You will be neurotic and a foe to life—so says your soul—if you neglect me.”

We neglect our souls by losing ourselves in endless busyness and never-ending to-do lists while never getting around to the big unspoken item that will eventually get its checkmark. We spend our days accumulating, acquiring, achieving. We relentlessly document our lives on social media to forever memorialize moments we never fully experience. 

As Joanna Ebenstein writes in Memento Mori, in a world that prides itself on being able to control all aspects of life, death is the “ultimate insult.” There’s a reason why death has been a central part of spiritual traditions and philosophy throughout history. “The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner,” Socrates says in Plato’s Phaedo, “is to practice for dying and death.” 

In ancient Rome, MM—short for “Memento Mori” which means “remember death”—was carved on statues and trees. The phrase is said to go back to a tradition in Roman victory parades in which a slave would hold a crown over the head of the triumphant general or emperor while whispering “remember you will die,” lest the victor lose his sense of perspective.

For the Stoics, accepting death and keeping it close was important to organize and give meaning to daily life. As Seneca put it, “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” In Buddhism, the transient nature of life in which “all compounded things are impermanent” is a central teaching. The “maranasati” is a Buddhist meditation that specifically focuses on the awareness of death, reminding us that beginnings and endings are natural and that death is inevitable, which can awaken our appreciation for living.

For the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne, not thinking about death was “brutish stupidity” and overcoming our fear of death is the way to liberate ourselves. “To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us…let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it,” he wrote. “To practice death is to practice freedom.” For the existentialist German philosopher Martin Heidegger, “death opens up the question of being.” In essence, facing our mortality allows us to explore the biggest mystery: what it means to be alive. 

Of course, these questions have not just been asked by late philosophers. “For the past 33 years,” said Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 2005. I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

When we don’t allow death into our lives, we lose the clarity, perspective, and wisdom that only death can bring. That’s why psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross called death the key to the door of life: “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do.”

One of the biggest problems with believing that we’re just material beings and putting all our existential eggs in that basket is that it can diminish our appreciation of the joy, mystery, poetry and love that make life—however much we have of it—worth living.

In his book AI Superpowers, AI pioneer Kai-Fu Lee writes about how he once lived his life according to the same operating principles as the technology he was building. “I came to view my own life as a kind of an optimization algorithm with clear goals: maximize personal influence and minimize anything that doesn’t contribute to that goal,” he writes. After being diagnosed with stage IV lymphoma, Lee went on an inner journey to reexamine his life. One person whose wisdom he sought out was a Buddhist priest, Master Hsing Yun, who told him: “Kai-Fu, humans aren’t meant to think this way. This constant calculating, this quantification of everything, it eats away at what’s really inside of us, and what exists between us. It suffocates the one thing that gives us true life: love.”

That’s the true singularity. Love is what gives life meaning and makes it worth living. No matter what we believe about God or the afterlife, we have a fundamental need to connect — with ourselves, with others, and with something larger than ourselves. And love is both the pathway to that connection and the payoff. When we see life purely in material and empirical terms, we lose access to other dimensions of life—the parts beyond reason and rationality. And what an arid and limited existence that is. 

So yes, let’s do what we can to lead a long life. But accepting that our life on earth will come to an end will make us more alive to it. In a post on X, Bryan Johnson wrote that “The coolest question in existence right now is exploring if we are the first generation to not die.” 

It might be a cool question, but we know the answer: there’s zero scientific evidence that we’re going to be the first generation to not die. But what about a cooler question: how can we live a good life? For that, death is the ultimate bio hack.

source https://time.com/7262950/cost-of-trying-to-live-forever/

Israel Has Cut Off All Supplies to Gaza. Here’s What That Means

Israel has cut off the entry of all food and other goods into Gaza in an echo of the siege it imposed in the earliest days of its war with Hamas. The United Nations and other humanitarian aid providers are sharply criticizing the decision and calling it a violation of international law.

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“A tool of extortion,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said. “A reckless act of collective punishment,” Oxfam said. Key mediator Egypt accused Israel of using “starvation as a weapon.”

Hunger has been an issue throughout the war for Gaza’s over 2 million people, and some aid experts had warned of possible famine. Now there is concern about losing the progress that experts reported under the past six weeks of a ceasefire.

Israel is trying to pressure the Hamas militant group to agree to what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government describes as a U.S. proposal to extend the ceasefire’s first phase instead of beginning negotiations on the far more difficult second phase. In phase two, Hamas would release the remaining living hostages in return for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and a lasting ceasefire.

Here’s a look at what Israel’s decision means and the reactions.

U.S. says it supports Israel’s next steps

The ceasefire’s first phase ended early Sunday. Minutes later, Israel said it supported a new proposal to extend that phase through the Jewish holiday of Passover in mid-April. It called the proposal a U.S. one from Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff. Israel also warned it could resume the war after the first phase if it believes negotiations are ineffective.

Negotiations on the second phase were meant to start a month ago, increasing the uncertainty around the fragile truce. Hamas has insisted that those talks begin.

Later Sunday, Israel announced the immediate cutoff of aid to Gaza.

The U.S. National Security Council said Washington will support Israel’s “decision on next steps, given Hamas has indicated it’s no longer interested in a negotiated ceasefire.” The statement didn’t confirm the proposal was Witkoff’s or mention the cutoff of aid.

It’s not clear when Witkoff will visit the Middle East again. He had been expected to visit last week.

The U.S. under the Biden administration pressed Israel to allow more aid into Gaza, threatening to limit weapons support. Aid organizations repeatedly criticized Israeli restrictions on items entering the small coastal territory, while hundreds of trucks with aid at times waited to enter.

Israel says it has allowed in enough aid. It has blamed shortages on what it called the U.N.’s inability to distribute it, and accused Hamas militants of siphoning off aid.

For months before the ceasefire, some Palestinians reported limiting meals, searching through garbage and foraging for edible weeds as food supplies ran low.

600 trucks of aid a day

The ceasefire’s first phase took effect on Jan. 19 and allowed a surge of aid into Gaza. An average of 600 trucks with aid entered per day. Those daily 600 trucks of aid were meant to continue entering through all three phases of the ceasefire.

However, Hamas says less than 50% of the agreed-upon number of trucks carrying fuel, for generators and other uses, were allowed in. Hamas also says the entry of live animals and animal feed, key for food security, were denied entry.

Still, Palestinians in Gaza were able to stock up on some supplies. “The ceasefire brought some much-needed relief to Gaza, but it was far from enough to cover the immense needs,” the Norwegian Refugee Council said Sunday.

Israel’s announcement came hours after Muslims in Gaza marked the first breaking of the fast during the holy month of Ramadan, with long tables set for collective meals snaking through the rubble of war-destroyed buildings.

The sudden aid cutoff sent Palestinians hurrying to markets. Prices in Gaza “tripled immediately,” Mahmoud Shalabi, the Medical Aid for Palestinians’ deputy director of programs in northern Gaza, told The Associated Press.

Legal implications

Prominent in the immediate criticism of Israel’s aid cutoff were statements calling the decision a violation.

“International humanitarian law is clear: We must be allowed access to deliver vital lifesaving aid,” said the U.N. humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher.

Hours after Israel’s announcement, five non-governmental groups asked Israel’s Supreme Court for an interim order barring the state from preventing aid from entering Gaza, claiming the move violates Israel’s obligations under international law and amounts to a war crime: “These obligations cannot be condition on political considerations.”

Last year, the International Criminal Court said there was reason to believe Israel had used “starvation as a method of warfare” when it issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. The allegation is also central to South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide.

On Sunday, Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, said Israel as an occupying power has an “absolute duty” to facilitate humanitarian aid under the Geneva Conventions, and called Israel’s decision “a resumption of the war-crime starvation strategy” that led to the ICC warrant.

—Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo and Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed.

source https://time.com/7263440/israel-cuts-off-supplies-to-gaza-what-that-means/

Speaker Johnson Says ‘Someone Else Needs to Lead’ Ukraine If Zelensky Doesn’t ‘Come to His Senses’

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson shared his thoughts on President Trump’s heated Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.

Moderator Kristen Welker asked Johnson what he thought about comments by Sen. Lindsey Graham—a once staunch supporter of Ukraine on the Republican side—in which he said that for Ukraine-Russia peace agreements to occur, Zelensky may need to resign.

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“What I saw in the Oval Office was disrespectful and I don’t know if we can ever do business with Zelensky again,” Graham said on Friday. “He [Zelensky] either needs to resign, and send somebody over that we can do business with, or he needs to change.”

Johnson seemed to agree that “something has to change” in order for peace to occur.

“Either he [Zelensky] needs to come to his senses and come back to the table in gratitude or someone else needs to lead the country to do that,” Johnson told Welker.

At the same time, Johnson maintained that Republicans do “understand” that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “dangerous adversary” to the U.S., and that the U.S. is “not abandoning Ukraine.”

He also remained firm on his position that the potential U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal—the discussion of which was the original intent of Trump and Zelensky’s Oval Office meeting on Friday—would be “a win for everyone.”

Johnson continued: “It will give us access to rare earth minerals that we need, and it will provide a level of security for Ukraine.”

The discussion about Zelensky’s leadership coincided with the Ukrainian leader’s trip to London. After touching down on Saturday, he and other European leaders gathered for a summit on Sunday to discuss a path toward peace for Ukraine.

On Sunday evening, Zelensky sat down with reporters at London Stansted Airport before leaving the U.K. He was asked by Sky News what he thought of Graham and Johnson’s comments about him perhaps resigning.

In response, Zelensky said Graham is a “good guy,” but went on to add: “I can give [Graham] citizenship of Ukraine and he will become a citizen of our country. And then his voice will start to gain weight, and I will hear him as a citizen of Ukraine on the topic of who must be the President.”

He added: “The President of Ukraine will have to be chosen not in Lindsay Graham’s home but in Ukraine.”

On the wider topic of resignation, Zelensky echoed comments he made at a press conference on Feb. 23—prior to his and Trump’s pivotal meeting, but amid rising tensions —when he said he would be ready to resign if it guaranteed peace for Ukraine and he could do it in exchange for NATO.

Reiterating that stance on Sunday, he said: “I have said that I am exchanging for NATO membership, then it means I have fulfilled my mission. NATO means I have fulfilled my mission.”

Read More: World Leaders React to Zelensky and Trump’s Oval Office Showdown

In contrast to Graham and Johnson, some Republicans are uninterested in mentions of Zelensky resigning. Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford appeared separately on Meet The Press on Sunday, and said if Zelensky were to resign it would “spiral Ukraine into chaos.” He also showed an understanding of Zelensky’s viewpoint, stating he was “rightfully concerned” about Russian negotiations.

“No, we’re not turning our back on Ukraine, nor should we,” Lankford said. “Putin is a murderous KGB thug that murders his political enemies and is a dictator.”

Other U.S. lawmakers to speak out against the mention of Zelensky resigning include Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who—also on Meet the Press—called Johnson’s comments a “horrific suggestion.”

“Zelensky is leading a country, trying to defend democracy against an authoritarian dictator, Putin, who invaded his country,” Sanders said.

In the aftermath of Trump’s meeting with Zelensky, many European leaders have rallied behind Zelensky. Sunday’s European leaders summit, led by U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, considered short and long-term security plans for the country.

“I hope you know that we are all with you and the people of Ukraine for as long as it takes, everyone around this table,” Starmer said to Zelensky at the summit, which was also attended by Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, during his opening remarks.

Starmer went on to share that he and other European leaders will work with Ukraine on a plan to stop the fighting amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, and will then present that to the U.S.

source https://time.com/7263411/zelensky-future-trump-oval-office-fallout-johnson-comments/

Private Lunar Lander Blue Ghost Aces Moon Touchdown With Special Delivery for NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private lunar lander carrying a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA touched down on the moon Sunday, the latest in a string of companies looking to kickstart business on Earth’s celestial neighbor ahead of astronaut missions.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander descended from lunar orbit on autopilot, aiming for the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the moon’s northeastern edge of the near side.

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Confirmation of successful touchdown came from the company’s Mission Control outside Austin, Texas, following the action some 225,000 miles (360,000 kilometers) away.

“You all stuck the landing. We’re on the moon,” Firefly’s Will Coogan, chief engineer for the lander, reported.

An upright and stable landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or falling over. Even countries have faltered, with only five claiming success: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan.

Read More: Do You Need to Worry About an Asteroid Hitting Earth?

A half hour after landing, Blue Ghost started to send back pictures from the surface, the first one a selfie somewhat obscured by the sun’s glare. The second shot included the home planet, a blue dot glimmering in the blackness of space.

Two other companies’ landers are hot on Blue Ghost’s heels, with the next one expected to join it on the moon later this week.

Blue Ghost — named after a rare U.S. species of fireflies — had its size and shape going for it. The squat four-legged lander stands 6-foot-6 (2 meters) tall and 11 feet (3.5 meters) wide, providing extra stability, according to the company.

Launched in mid-January from Florida, the lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery, plus $44 million for the science and tech on board. It’s the third mission under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program, intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while scouting around before astronauts show up later this decade.

Firefly’s Ray Allensworth said the lander skipped over hazards including boulders to land safely. Allensworth said the team continued to analyze the data to figure out the lander’s exact position, but all indications suggest it landed within the 328-foot (100-meter) target zone in Mare Crisium.

The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.

It carried a vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 10 feet (3 meters) below the surface. Also on board: a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust — a scourge for NASA’s long-ago Apollo moonwalkers, who got it caked all over their spacesuits and equipment.

Read More: Asteroid Bennu Samples Contain Building Blocks of Life

On its way to the moon, Blue Ghost beamed back exquisite pictures of the home planet. The lander continued to stun once in orbit around the moon, with detailed shots of the moon’s gray pockmarked surface. At the same time, an on-board receiver tracked and acquired signals from the U.S. GPS and European Galileo constellations, an encouraging step forward in navigation for future explorers.

The landing set the stage for a fresh crush of visitors angling for a piece of lunar business.

Another lander — a tall and skinny 15-footer (4 meters tall) built and operated by Houston-based Intuitive Machines — is due to land on the moon Thursday. It’s aiming for the bottom of the moon, just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the south pole. That’s closer to the pole than the company got last year with its first lander, which broke a leg and tipped over.

Despite the tumble, Intuitive Machines’ lander put the U.S. back on the moon for the first time since NASA astronauts closed out the Apollo program in 1972.

A third lander from the Japanese company ispace is still three months from landing. It shared a rocket ride with Blue Ghost from Cape Canaveral on Jan. 15, taking a longer, windier route. Like Intuitive Machines, ispace is also attempting to land on the moon for the second time. Its first lander crashed in 2023.

The moon is littered with wreckage not only from ispace, but dozens of other failed attempts over the decades.

NASA wants to keep up a pace of two private lunar landers a year, realizing some missions will fail, said the space agency’s top science officer Nicky Fox.

“It really does open up a whole new way for us to get more science to space and to the moon,” Fox said.

Unlike NASA’s successful Apollo moon landings that had billions of dollars behind them and ace astronauts at the helm, private companies operate on a limited budget with robotic craft that must land on their own, said Firefly CEO Jason Kim.

Kim said everything went like clockwork.

“We got some moon dust on our boots,” Kim said.

source https://time.com/7263386/private-lunar-lander-blue-ghost-moon-touchdown-nasa-delivery/

David Johansen, Singer From Seminal Punk Band the New York Dolls, Dies at 75

NEW YORK — David Johansen, the wiry, gravelly-voiced singer and last surviving member of the glam and protopunk band the New York Dolls who later performed as his campy, pompadoured alter ego, Buster Poindexter, has died. He was 75.

Johansen died Friday at his home in New York City, Jeff Kilgour, a family spokesperson told The Associated Press. It was revealed in early 2025 that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor.

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The New York Dolls were forerunners of punk and the band’s style — teased hair, women’s clothes and lots of makeup — inspired the glam movement that took up residence in heavy metal a decade later in bands like Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe.

“When you’re an artist, the main thing you want to do is inspire people, so if you succeed in doing that, it’s pretty gratifying,” Johansen told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011.

“Mutant children of the hydrogen age”

Rolling Stone once called the Dolls “the mutant children of the hydrogen age” and Vogue called them the “darlings of downtown style, tarted-up toughs in boas and heels.”

“The New York Dolls were more than musicians; they were a phenomenon. They drew on old rock ‘n’ roll, big-city blues, show tunes, the Rolling Stones and girl groups, and that was just for starters,” Bill Bentley wrote in “Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen.”

The band never found commercial success and was torn by internal strife and drug addictions, breaking up after two albums by the middle of the decade. In 2004, former Smiths frontman and Dolls admirer Morrissey convinced Johansen and other surviving members to regroup for the Meltdown Festival in England, leading to three more studio albums.

In the ’80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had a hit with the kitschy party single “Hot, Hot, Hot” in 1987. He also appeared in such movies as “Candy Mountain,” “Let It Ride,” “Married to the Mob” and had a memorable turn as the Ghost of Christmas Past in Bill Murray-led hit “Scrooged.”

Johansen was in 2023 the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s documentary “Personality Crisis: One Night Only,” which mixed footage of his two-night stand at the Café Carlyle in January 2020 with flashbacks through his wildly varied career and intimate interviews.

“I used to think about my voice like: ‘What’s it gonna sound like? What’s it going to be when I do this song?’ And I’d get myself into a knot about it,” Johansen told The Associated Press in 2023. “At some point in my life, I decided: ‘Just sing the (expletive) song. With whatever you got.’ To me, I go on stage and whatever mood I’m in, I just claw my way out of it, essentially.”

Named after a toy hospital

David Roger Johansen was born to a large, working class Catholic family on Staten Island, his father an insurance salesman. He filled notebooks with poems and lyrics as a young man and liked a lot of different music — R&B, Cuban, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.

The Dolls — the final original lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan — rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol in the Lower East Side of Manhattan the early 1970s.

They took their name from a toy hospital in Manhattan and were expected to take over the throne vacated by the Velvet Underground in the early 1970s. But neither of their first two albums — 1973’s “New York Dolls,” produced by Todd Rundgren, nor “Too Much Too Soon” a year later produced by Shadow Morton — charted.

“They’re definitely a band to keep both eyes and ears on,” read the review of their debut album in Rolling Stone, complementary of their “strange combination of high pop-star drag and ruthless street arrogance.”

Their songs included “Personality Crisis” (“You got it while it was hot/But now frustration and heartache is what you got”), “Looking for a Kiss” (I need a fix and a kiss”) and a “Frankenstein” (Is it a crime/For you to fall in love with Frankenstein?”)

Their glammed look was meant to embrace fans with a nonjudgmental, noncategorical space. “I just wanted to be very welcoming,” Johansen said in the documentary, “’cause the way this society is, it was set up very strict — straight, gay, vegetarian, whatever… I just kind of wanted to kind of like bring those walls down, have a party kind of thing.”

Rolling Stone, reviewing their second album, called them “the best hard-rock band in America right now” and called Johansen a “talented showman, with an amazing ability to bring characters to life as a lyricist.”

Decades later, the Dolls’ influence would be cherished. Rolling Stone would list their self-titled debut album at No. 301 of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, writing “it’s hard to imagine the Ramones or the Replacements or a thousand other trash-junky bands without them.”

Blondie’s Chris Stein in the Nolan biography “Stranded in the Jungle” wrote that the Dolls were “opening a door for the rest of us to walk through.” Tommy Lee of Motley Crue called them early inspirations.

“Johansen is one of those singers, to be a little paradoxical, who is technically better and more versatile than he sounds,” said the Los Angeles Times in 2023. “His voice has always been a bit of a foghorn — higher or lower according to age, habits and the song at hand — but it has a rare emotional urgency.

“Dirty angels with painted faces”

The Dolls, representing rock at it’s most debauched, were divisive. In 1973, they won the Creem magazine poll categories as the year’s best and worst new group. They were nominated several times for The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but never got in.

“Dirty angels with painted faces, the Dolls opened the box usually reserved for Pandora and unleashed the infant furies that would grow to become Punk,” wrote Nina Antonia in the book “Too Much, Too Soon.” “As if this legacy wasn’t enough for one band, they also trashed sexual boundaries, savaged glitter and set new standards for rock ‘n’ roll excess.”

By the end of their first run, the Dolls were being managed by legendary promoter Malcolm McLaren, who would later introduce the Sex Pistols to the Dolls’ music. Culture critic Greil Marcus in “Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century” writes the Dolls played him some of their music and he couldn’t believe how bad they were.

“The fact that they were so bad suddenly hit me with such force that I began to realize, ’’I’m laughing, I’m talking to these guys, I’m looking at them, and I’m laughing with them; and I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well,” McLaren said. “The Dolls really impressed upon me that there was something else. There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad.”

After the first demise of the Dolls, Johansen started his own group, the David Johansen band, before reinventing himself yet again in the 1980s as Buster Poindexter.

Inspired by his passion for the blues and arcane American folk music Johansen also formed the group The Harry Smiths, and toured the world performing the songs of Howlin’ Wolf with Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm. He also hosted the weekly radio show “The Mansion of Fun” on Sirius XM and painted.

He is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, and a stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey.

source https://time.com/7263313/david-johansen-dead-singer-new-york-dolls-tributes/

Federal Workers Start to Get a New Email Demanding Their Accomplishments

WASHINGTON — Federal employees are starting to receive another email requiring them to explain their recent accomplishments, a renewed attempt by President Donald Trump and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to demand answers from the government workforce.

Originally expected to go out Saturday, the new request began landing in the inboxes of some employees late Friday. The plan to send a second round of emails was initially disclosed by a person with knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Read More: Elon Musk Draws Ire Telling Federal Employees to Justify Their Jobs Over Email or Resign

The first email, which was distributed a week ago, asked employees “what did you do last week?” and prompted them to list five tasks that they completed. Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has been empowered by Trump with a mission to downsize agencies and eliminate thousands of federal jobs, said anyone who didn’t respond would be fired. Many agencies, meanwhile, told their workforces not to respond or issued conflicting guidance.

The second email was expected to be delivered in a different way, according to the person with knowledge of the situation, potentially making it easier to discipline employees for noncompliance.

Instead of being sent by the Office of Personnel Management, which functions as a human resources agency for the federal government but doesn’t have the power to hire or fire, the email was to come from individual agencies that have direct oversight of career officials.

A version of the email received late Friday by some employees at two separate agencies — with the subject line, “What did you do last week? Part II” — came from “hr@opm.gov,” the same OPM address that sent the first version. Employees at a third agency received the email from an internal department address.

“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets describing what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” the message read, adding that going forward, employees would be expected to submit a response each week by the following Monday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern.

It’s unclear how national security agencies will handle the second email. After the first one, they directed employees not to write back because much of the agencies’ work is sensitive or classified. Less than half of federal workers responded, according to the White House.

Read More: White House Says Musk Part of Trump’s ‘Unified Team’ as Agencies Undermine Him

The version viewed late Friday by the Associated Press reads in part: “If all of your activities are classified or sensitive, please write, ‘All of my activities are sensitive.’” That may not eliminate all security concerns given that sending an email creates a digital footprint regardless of the message’s content.

A spokesperson for OPM did not immediately respond to a request for clarification Friday night.

On Wednesday, at Trump’s first Cabinet meeting of his second term, Musk argued that his request was a “pulse check” to ensure that those working for the government have “a pulse and two neurons.”

Both Musk and Trump have claimed that some workers are either dead or fictional, and the president has publicly backed Musk’s approach.

Addressing people who didn’t respond to the first email, Trump said “they are on the bubble,” and he added that he wasn’t “thrilled” about them not responding.

“Now, maybe they don’t exist,” he said without providing evidence. “Maybe we’re paying people that don’t exist.”

In addition to recent firings of probationary employees, a memo distributed this week set the stage for large-scale layoffs and consolidation of programs.

The Education Department offered employees a $25,000 buyout and warned of looming layoffs. An email sent to all agency workers gave them until the end of Monday to decide on the offer, which was touted as coming “in advance of a very significant Reduction in Force.”

It was sent from the department’s chief human capital officer. The agency did not immediately offer comment.

—Gomez Licon reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Associated Press writers Collin Binkley and Cal Woodward in Washington contributed to this report.

source https://time.com/7263263/federal-workers-get-new-email-demanding-their-accomplishments/