100-million-year-old crab trapped in amber helps fill evolutionary gap

By University of Alberta on October 22, 2021

Oldest non-marine crab ever – and most complete crab fossil known – identified

A young crustacean locked in amber 100 million years ago is filling a crucial gap in the puzzle of crab evolution, according to a University of Alberta PhD graduate whose work adds to growing evidence that the crab form is an evolutionary darling.

“This crab is telling us a very interesting story about the tree of life of crabs,” said Javier Luque, a research associate at Harvard University and former post-doctoral researcher at Yale University who began looking at the encased crab as a PhD student at the U of A.

“There is a lot of excitement about crab evolution because evolution has produced crab-like forms, known as carcinization, many times independently.”

Luque explained that evidence provided by the molecular record, which is built by comparing similarities and differences in DNA and RNA, predicts that non-marine crabs – such as the Christmas Island red crabs that live in mountains or the freshwater crabs in rivers all over the world – split from their marine counterparts more than 125 million years ago.

However, the fossil record on non-marine crabs, which consists of only tiny bits and pieces of claws, indicated that marine crabs conquered land and freshwater much later, somewhere between 75 and 50 million years ago.

“So we’ve had this gap between the predicted molecular time of split of non-marine crabs and the known fossil record of about 50 million years,” he said.

A crucial clue trapped in amber

That started to change in 2015 when researchers came across a piece of amber jewelry in a market in Tengchong, China, that had a two-mm-long crab embedded in it.

Luque was approached about the crab in amber by U of A professor Michael Caldwell, an expert on vertebrate snake biology in the Faculty of Science, who had previously worked on a Cretaceous snake trapped in amber with study co-author Lida Xing from the China University of Geosciences, Beijing.

Artist’s reconstruction of Cretapsara athanata, “The immortal Cretaceous 

spirit of the clouds and waters.” A pristine 100-million-year-old fossil 

of the newly identified species was found trapped in amber. 

(Image: Franz Anthony, courtesy of Javier Luque)

“When I saw it for the first time I could not believe my eyes. This spectacular crab looks so modern, like something you may find in B.C. flipping rocks, but it is actually quite old and different from anything seen before, fossil or alive.”

Luque was brought in because of his crab expertise stemming from his work on crab evolution and the discovery of the 95- to 90-million-year-old Callichimaera perplexa. The Callichimaera perplexa is a swimming arthropod known as the platypus of crabs because of its unusual mixture of body features, such as its cartoonish anatomy that included googly eyes, a long body and long paddle-like legs.

‘How did they get there?’

While the best-known fossils in amber are land-dwelling animals, principally insects, aquatic organisms such as most crustaceans raise the question, “How did they get there?”

Harvard researcher Javier Luque, a PhD graduate of the U of A (left), and Catalina Suarez of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute excavate fossils in the tropics. (Photo: Felipe Villegas, Humboldt Institute)

Luque guesses that this new branch in the crab tree of life – named Cretapsara athanata, “the immortal Cretaceous spirit of the clouds and waters” – was likely trapped in brackish or freshwater near a coastal environment during the Cretaceous period 100 million years ago.

And though it is very similar to modern crabs, Luque said crabs as we know them today took their current form about 50 million years ago during the Eocene, which was at least 50 million years after Luque’s crab was suspended in amber.

The crab in the study not only represents the oldest non-marine crab yet described, but it’s also the most complete fossil crab ever discovered.

“It’s not an ancestor to the modern crab, but rather a distant cousin,” Luque noted.

An evolutionary success story

Luque added that this finding demonstrates that crabs have now conquered land and freshwater more than 12 times since the “Cretaceous crab revolution” began, when crabs diversified worldwide and started evolving their characteristic crabby-looking body forms.

He noted that researchers think the distinctive telltale long and slender legs, the roundish shape of their shells or armour, and the reduced tail tucked under the body typical of most crabs have emerged independently at least five times since the start of the Jurassic period 200 million years ago.

“It seems like evolution loves making crabs,” he said. “Crabs are doing something well, so nature is sorting them out and selecting for those forms over the less crabby relatives.”

The two-millimetre-long fossil of the ancient crab was found encased in a piece of amber jewelry at a market in Tengchong, China. (Photo: Lida Xing)

The fact that the crab was trapped so pristinely in amber allows researchers to compare it in detail with other crabs to better understand their evolution and to investigate whether they preferred the ocean or land.

“There is still a lot of work to do and fossils to discover to keep filling the puzzle of crab evolution, and Cretapsara athanata is bringing us closer to it one crab at a time.”

The project was possible thanks to the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Postdoctoral Fellowship and an NSERC Discovery Grant, the National Science Foundation Grant 1856679 to study the evolution of crabs, the STRI Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Program, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Geographic Society, the 111 Project (China), Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities (China), and the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies.

The study, “Crab in amber reveals an early colonization of nonmarine environments during the Cretaceous,” was published in the journal Science.

| By Michael Brown

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Submitted by the University of Alberta’s Folio online magazine. The University of Alberta is a Troy Media Editorial Content Provider Partner.

FIRST IT DUMPED CARGO THEN CAUGHT FIRE
Canadian Coast Guard says monitoring container ship fire


Canadian Coast Guard says monitoring container ship fireFire cascades down from the deck of the container ship ZIM Kingston into the waters off the coast of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Sat, October 23, 2021

(Reuters) - The Canadian Coast Guard said it is monitoring a fire that broke out on a container ship off the coast of Victoria, British Columbia, and is working with the U.S. Coast Guard to assess the situation.

"The Canadian Coast Guard received a report around 11am this morning from the MV Zim Kingston that a fire has broken out in the damaged containers onboard," it said in a statement late on Saturday.

The Canadian Coast Guard says they received a call around 11 a.m. PT on Saturday about a fire that had broken out on two of the damaged containers on board the container ship Zim Kingston. (Canadian Coast Guard)

According https://bit.ly/3puEoiy to CBC News, 10 crew members have been evacuated, while 11 members remained onboard. Six containers are ablaze in total, it said.

The report added that the vessel is said to be carrying more than 52,000 kg of xanthates - chemicals used in the mining industry - which includes potassium amylxanthate. 

The compound is classified by the U.S. government as "spontaneously combustible".

Potassium amylxanthate is considered an irritant and an environmental hazard.

Video obtained by Reuters showed fire cascading down from the deck of the ship into the water.

A joint agency response is being coordinated to provide assistance, the Canadian Coast Guard said, adding that an assessment is being made to determine the pollution hazards from the containers.

The bulk carrier M/V Zim Kingston reported on Friday that it had encountered rough weather west of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The United States Coast Guard said in a tweet about 40 containers from the vessel had fallen overboard.

The Zim Kingston is pictured burning on Saturday afternoon. (CHEK News)

A fire broke out on a cargo ship after about 40 shipping containers fell overboard due to rough seas off the coast of Vancouver Island

Kelsey Vlamis
Sat, October 23, 2021

Imagery captured of located containers from U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Port Angeles helicopter. US Coast Guard

Around 40 shipping containers went overboard when a cargo ship hit rough seas on Friday.

A fire broke out Saturday on the same ship, the Zim Kingston, while anchored near Vancouver Island.

US and Canadian officials are monitoring the situation, including some containers with "hazardous materials."

A fire broke out Saturday on a cargo ship, known as the Zim Kingston, that had lost around 40 shipping containers off the coast of Canada's Vancouver Island the day before, officials said.

The US Coast Guard said in a tweet Friday they were monitoring adrift shipping containers that went overboard after an inbound vessel en route to Canada encountered rough seas. Photos shared by the coast guard showed some of the shipping containers afloat in the open ocean.

The US Coast Guard said Friday 35 floating containers had been located. As of Saturday, five had still not been located, and officials were warning other vessels to be extremely cautious in the area as the containers "may be partially submerged and not visible," the Vancouver Sun reported.


The Canadian Coast Guard told the outlet some of the containers that fell held hazardous materials, and that the agency would assess for any "pollution threats and hazards."

A day after the containers fell from the Zim Kingston, a fire broke out on the ship while it was anchored near Victoria, according to the Canadian Coast Guard. The agency told CHEK News reporter Jasmine Bala the fire started in damaged containers that were still onboard.



The Canadian Coast Guard told Bala two of the six containers that are on fire contain "hazardous material." They also said 10 crew members were evacuated while 11 remain on the ship, with no reports of injuries.

In a warning to other vessels, the Canadian Coast Guard established an emergency zone around the Zim Kingston, saying: "The ship is on fire and expelling toxic gas. Two fallen containers are floating in the vicinity of the vessel. Caution."

ANARCHIST ANTHROPOLOGY
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow review – have we got our ancestors wrong?

‘Prehistory was a time of diverse social experimentation’: a 4,000-year-old cave drawing. Photograph: Getty Images/iStockphoto


This imaginative attempt to reconfigure humanity’s roots contends that early people were free to shape their own lives

Andrew Anthony
Mon 18 Oct 2021 09.00 BST

In the wake of bestselling blockbusters such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, that backwater of history – prehistory – has been infused by a surge of popular interest. It’s also proved an area of fertile promise for those who find the established narratives of modernity either constricting or based on false premises or both.

The last point is particularly relevant for the egalitarian-minded. After the catastrophic failure of the Soviet experiment, there were few places left to turn in support of the belief that humanity is at heart cooperative rather than competitive. The notable exception was the pre-agricultural era, those tens of thousands of years in which humans were thought to live in a state of… well, what exactly?

Since the Enlightenment, there have been two conflicting visions of humanity stripped of its civilised trappings. On the one hand, there is Hobbes’s notion of us as predisposed to violence – waging war against each other in a “nasty, brutish and short” existence. On the other, Rousseau’s idyll of prelapsarian innocence, in which humanity led a life of Edenic bliss before being destroyed by the corruptions of society.

Both these understandings of humanity’s roots are manifestly wrong, contend the late anthropologist David Graeber and his co-author, the archaeologist David Wengrow in their new and richly provocative book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. As the title suggests, this is a boldly ambitious work that seems intent to attack received wisdoms and myths on almost every one of its nearly 700 absorbing pages.

Of course, few modern scholars accept either Hobbes’s bleak caricature or Rousseau’s romantic musings. Nonetheless, Graeber and Wengrow argue, these antithetical conceptions of human nature feed into the consensus that has been popularised by figures such as Diamond and Harari.

That is to say that for most of human history our ancestors lived an egalitarian and leisure-filled life in small bands of hunter-gatherers. Then, as Diamond put it, we made the “worst mistake in human history”, which was to increase population numbers through agricultural production. This, so the story goes, led to hierarchies, subordination, wars, disease, famines and just about every other social ill – thus did we plunge from Rousseau’s heaven into Hobbes’s hell.

According to Graeber and Wengrow’s reading of up-to-date archeological and anthropological research, that story, too, is nonsense. Humanity was not restricted to small bands of hunter-gatherers, agriculture did not lead inexorably to hierarchies and conflicts and there was not one mode of social organisation that prevailed, at least until thousands of years after the introduction of agriculture.

On the contrary, they maintain, prehistory was a time of diverse social experimentation, in which people lived in a variety of settings, from small travelling bands to large (perhaps seasonally occupied) cities and were wont to change their social identities depending on the time of year.

The strength of the book is the manner in which it asks us to rethink our assumptions

The author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs, Graeber, it’s worth bearing in mind, was a committed anarchist who was instrumental in setting up the Occupy Wall Street protest. Another factor that bears consideration is that both archaeology and anthropology are disciplines that are notoriously vulnerable to subjective interpretation.

Such “distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies”, the authors caution, but then do not entirely heed their own warning. While readily acknowledging the limitations of verifiable evidence, they nonetheless engage in creative speculation, albeit with a host of covering “most likelys”.

The histories they weave are fascinating, bringing to light extraordinary illustrative characters such as Kandiaronk, the brilliant Native American Huron-Wendat chief who confounded French Jesuits with his powerful debating skills.

‘Attack received wisdoms’: David Wengrow, left, and David Graeber. 

Photograph: Kalpesh Lathigra

Yet there is a distinct sense of cherrypicking, of stringing together examples that fit the broad sweep of their argument, and dismissing the rest. One historian has accused them of making at least one “ballistically false” claim (that captured settlers in America preferred to remain with their native captors).

All the same, the strength of the book is the manner in which it asks us to rethink our assumptions. It isn’t, say the authors, that earlier humans were egalitarian, for there were often differences in material wealth. Rather, they enjoyed an equality of social – and therefore political – participation and, moreover, a shared sense of freedom: of movement, to disobey command and to “shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones”.

Most significantly, the authors replace the idea of humanity being forced along through evolutionary stages with a picture of prehistoric communities making their own conscious decisions of how to live. Our distant forebears were not hopeless puppets of historical inevitability but masters of their own trajectory.

Still, the question the authors repeatedly ask, but never quite get round to answering is, how then did we become “stuck” in a system of hierarchies and conspicuous inequalities of power and consumption? Despite inferring and speculating at almost every turn, the two Davids become suddenly circumspect when confronting this central mystery that haunts their book.

They write that “for now the material at our disposal, especially for the early phases of the process, is still too sparse and ambiguous to provide definitive answers”. In truth, that proviso could be employed for almost everything under discussion in this book, but then it would not have been nearly as entertaining and thought-provoking.

It is, in the end, an impressively large undertaking that succeeds in making us reconsider not just the remote past but also the too-close-to-see present, as well as the common thread that is our shifting and elusive nature.

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow is published by Allen Lane (£30). 

EXPLAINER: How wildfires impact wildlife, their habitat

By FELICIA FONSECA

1 of 10

Dana Fasolette uses a towel to hold a raccoon under treatment for burns at the Gold Country Wildlife Rescue in Auburn , Calif., Saturday, Oct. 2, 2021. As wildfires die down in the far western United States, wildlife centers are still caring for animals that were injured or unable to flee the flames.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)


FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — The porcupines were walking slow and funny, more so than they usually do.

Their stride concerned some residents in a South Lake Tahoe neighborhood who called a rehabilitation center. Turns out, the porcupines had extensive burns to their paws, fur, quills and faces after a wildfire burned through the area.

Wildlife centers in the U.S. West are caring for animals that weren’t able to flee the flames or are looking for food in burned-over places.

An emaciated turkey vulture recently found on the Lake Tahoe shore couldn’t fly, likely because food isn’t as plentiful in burned areas, said Denise Upton, the animal care director at Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care.

“That’s what we’re seeing in the aftermath of the fires — just animals that are having a hard time and being pushed into areas they are not traditionally in,” she said.

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IS FIRE GOOD OR BAD FOR WILDLIFE?

Not necessarily either, says Brian Wolfer, the game program manager for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife

“It’s a disturbance on the landscape that changes habitat,” he said.

Some species benefit from wildfire, such as raptors that hunt rodents running from the flames, beetles that move into dead wood and lay eggs, and woodpeckers that feed on them and nest in hollow trees.

Fire exposes new grass, shrubs and vegetation in the flowering stage that feed elk and deer. When food sources are plentiful, female deer produce more milk and fawns grow faster, Wolfer said.

On the flip side, animals that depend on old growth forests can struggle for decades trying to find suitable habitat if trees fall victim to fire, Wolfer said. If sagebrush burns, sage grouse won’t have food in winter or a place to hide from predators and raise their young, he said.

“In the years that follow, you see reduced survival and, over time, that population starts to decline,” he said.

Some wildfires burn in a mosaic, preserving some habitat. But the hotter and faster they burn, the harder it is for less mobile animals to find suitable habitat, he said.

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HOW ANIMALS RESPOND TO WILDFIRE

Mice, squirrels and other burrowing animals dig into cooler ground, bears climb trees, deer and bobcats run, small animals take cover in logs and birds fly to escape the flames, heat and smoke.

“They almost seem to have a sixth sense to it,” said Julia Camp, a resources manager for the Coconino National Forest in northern Arizona. “A lot of times their response is quicker than ours.”

Firefighters have spotted tortoises with singed feet at the edge of wildfires, snakes slithering out from the woods and frail red-tailed hawks on the ground.

Biologists can take precautionary measures, like moving introductory pens for Mexican gray wolves or scooping up threatened or endangered fish if they know a fire is approaching, Camp said.

In 2012, a team of biologists went in after a massive lightning-sparked wildfire in the Gila Wilderness in southwestern New Mexico to save Gila trout from potential floods of ash, soil and charred debris that would come with heavy rainfall. The fish were sent to hatcheries that replicated their habitat until they could be returned.

Some animals don’t survive wildfires, but their deaths don’t greatly affect the overall population, wildlife officials say.

Veterinarian Jamie Peyton opens a package of a Tilapia Fish skin bandage that will be used to cover the burned paws of a raccoon at the Gold Country Wildlife Center in Auburn , Calif., Saturday, Oct. 2, 2021. The fish skin helps the healing process for animals that suffered burns and were brought to Gold Country facility from recent wildfires in California .(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)



Tilapia Fish skin bandages are used to cover the burned paws of a raccoon at the Gold County Wildlife Rescue. in Auburn, Calif., Saturday, Oct. 2, 2021. As wildfires die down in the far western United States, wildlife centers are still caring for animals that were injured or unable to flee the flames. 

(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

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HOW WILDLIFE FACTORS INTO FIRE MANAGEMENT

When wildfires break out in northern Arizona, Camp pulls out her maps. She can see where Mexican spotted owls live, which fish live in which waterways, and where bald and golden eagles nest.

“If we’re going to put a dozer line in, it won’t be in the middle of their nesting area,” she said. “But if something is barreling toward Flagstaff, we’re going to have to put out the fire regardless.”

Some of those decisions are driven by the federal Endangered Species Act.

In 2015, a wildfire was threatening the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on the North Carolina coast. Firefighters cut low-lying branches from old pine trees where the red-cockaded woodpecker nests and burned other potential fuel.

“What ended up happening is the fire did approach that area, but because of these measures, it did not affect the nesting areas of the woodpecker,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Kari Cobb.

Firefighters also can starve wildfires of fuel using backburns so flames burn at the base of trees rather than more intensely in the crowns and threatening wildlife habitat.

Other considerations are in play when dropping fire retardant so chemicals don’t affect water sources or suffocate sensitive plants.

Wildfire managers also try to avoid transferring mussels, fungi or non-native plants that might hitchhike in helicopter buckets by carefully choosing water sources or disinfecting buckets, Camp said.

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HOW TO SPOT AN INJURED ANIMAL

Injured animals will move slowly or not at all. Experts say the best action for humans is to keep their distance, don’t feed the animals and call wildlife officials or a rescue group.

“Sometimes you’re not necessarily doing them the favor you think they are if that care is going to result in them becoming habituated, losing their fear for people,” Wolfer said. “We have to think by helping it, ‘Am I going to reduce its long-term survival potential?’ Animals are tough, much tougher than we give them credit for.”

The Wildlife Disaster Network based at the University of California, Davis, took in animals from several fires in California last year and from others that burned this year in the Sierra Nevada. Those include a baby flying squirrel, a baby fox and bear cubs.

The staff scans animals for visible wounds and does blood work, X-rays and ultrasounds to develop a rehabilitation plan, said veterinarian Jamie Peyton, who helps lead the network.

“I really think you can’t just look at a single being and think ‘It’s not worth it, it’s not worth trying,’” Peyton said.

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ARE ALL ANIMALS RETURNED TO THE WILD?

Whether an animal can survive in the wild depends on the severity of the burns and the animal’s age.

Treating burned adult bears is difficult because they tear off traditional bandages, and if they eat them, it can plug their intestines forcing euthanasia, Peyton said.

A bear she treated in 2017 named Lucy forced her to think differently.

“I really was stuck trying to control the pain, and she wouldn’t take the medication, despite my pleas and some doughnuts,” Peyton said.

Peyton developed a tilapia skin bandage that’s now used on 15 different species, including a porcupine at the Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care whose paws were burned. Another porcupines at the center won’t be released until its quills grow back so it can defend itself, Upton said.

Adult bears and mountain lions typically are released within eight weeks so they don’t get used to humans as caretakers, Peyton said.

Sometimes, animals leave rehabilitation centers on their own terms. A bear cub that was found walking on its elbows was rescued from the Tamarack Fire that’s still burning south of Carson City, Nevada, and treated at the Lake Tahoe center. The cub pushed through a malfunctioning door in an outdoor enclosure this summer and left.

“He had really healed quite a bit before he decided he didn’t want to be here anymore,” Upton said. “I’m pretty confident he’s doing OK. He was a wild little bear.”

A black bear cub snacks on fruit and vegetables at the Gold Country Wildlife Rescue in Auburn , Calif., Sunday, Oct. 3, 2021. The cub was found at the Antelope Fire with 2nd and 3rd degree burns on it's paws. It is one of the many animals that have been brought to Gold Country facility from recent wildfires in California. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

A magical trove of Ricky Jay ephemera hits auction block

By LEANNE ITALIE

1 of 16

A woodblock poster featuring mentalists Samuel and Kitty Baldwin, from the Ricky Jay Collection, is displayed at Sotheby's on Friday, Oct. 22, 2021, in New York. The widow of the sleight-of-hand artist, card shark, author, actor and scholar turned over nearly 2,000 curiosities Jay collected to Sotheby's for an unusual auction. Divided into 634 lots, it's the focus of a live auction Wednesday and Thursday. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)


NEW YORK (AP) — Conjurers, cheats, hustlers, hoaxsters, pranksters, jokesters, posturers, pretenders, sideshow showmen, armless calligraphers, mechanical marvels and popular entertainments.

Those were the things that interested the grizzled Ricky Jay, the sleight-of-hand artist, card shark, author, actor and scholar extraordinaire on all of the above who died in 2018 at age 72. When he passed, he left behind a vast trove of rare books, posters, broadsides and other artifacts that honored many who came before him.

Now, nearly 2,000 of more than 10,000 pieces that stuffed his Beverly Hill’s house will make their way into the hands of those who care to bid during an unusual upcoming Sotheby’s auction after Jay’s widow, the Emmy-winning producer Chrisann Verges, turned them over.

An engraving featuring magician Matthias Buchinger 

(Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Jay's Journal of Anomalies, from the Ricky Jay Collection, is displayed at Sotheby's on Friday, Oct. 22, 2021, in New York. The widow of the sleight-of-hand artist, card shark, author, actor and scholar turned over nearly 2,000 curiosities Jay collected to Sotheby's for an unusual auction. Divided into 634 lots, it's the focus of a live auction Wednesday and Thursday. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Selby Kiffer, Sotheby’s international senior specialist for books and manuscripts, was one of two experts from the auction house to visit Verges at home in California and select what they wanted for the Ricky Jay Collection.

“It’s really a collection of collections,” Kiffer said ahead of the two-day live auction starting Wednesday. “The challenge was to find an institution that was interested not only in magic but also in circus, not only in books but also in posters and apparatus, and all of the elements of popular entertainment.”

Divided into 634 lots, Sotheby’s estimates the collection at $2.2 million to $3.2 million, hoping for bidders from those inside Jay’s world, magic admirers from afar and art enthusiasts on the hunt to decorate their walls. There’s more than enough to choose from.

Harry Houdini is ever present, an obligation of sorts to any collector like Jay. Closer to Jay’s heart was the magician Max Malini of the early 20th century. A poster advertises Malini’s appearance at King’s Theatre in New York with a rounded portrait, medals on one lapel and touting performances before six heads of state. Dating to around 1916, it’s one of only two known copies and estimated to fetch $15,000 to $20,000.

A lithograph poster featuring sideshow performer Stephan Bibrowski 

(Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Jay was so enamored of Malini that he devoted an entire chapter of his book, “Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women,” to the man he described as the “last of the mountebanks.”

Malini, Jay wrote, was rarely featured on music hall or theater stages. Rather, he was the “embodiment of what a magician should be. Not a performer who requires a fully equipped stage, elaborate apparatus, elephants or handcuffs to accomplish his mysteries, but one who can stand a few inches from you and with a borrowed coin, a lemon, a knife, a tumbler or a pack of cards convince you he performed miracles.”

A rare Houdini poster from around 1913 depicts the escape artist upside down in his water torture cell, a look of dire concern on his face that told the story in the color lithograph valued at $40,000 to $60,000.

An entire room on display at Sotheby’s spacious Manhattan headquarters is dedicated to another who drew Jay’s attention: Matthias Buchinger. He was a German artist, magician and calligrapher born without hands or lower legs and measuring just 29 inches tall. Buchinger, who died in 1740 and lived most of his life in the UK, was married four times and had at least 14 children.

Much of Buchinger’s living was made in calligraphy, including his inking of family trees for money. One of Kiffer’s favorite pieces up for auction is the tree Buchinger created for his own family, demonstrating his unlikely skill with a pen but also knife or scissors for intricate paper overlays. Done in 1734, the tree is marked for sale at $20,000 to $30,000.

Jay, Kiffer said, was not just a collector who wanted all the things.

“He was doing serious research. And I think in part because he was curious about his predecessors, he wondered what illusions and tricks they did and how they accomplished them. But he lectured and published widely. He was not a trophy hunter who just said, `Well, I want to get the most expensive book on conjuring and the rarest, most expensive Houdini poster.′ He was looking for things that other people might not recognize the significance of,” Kiffer explained.

Books and posters from the Ricky Jay Collection (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Jay was Brooklyn born as Richard Jay Potash and grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He rarely spoke publicly about his parents but was introduced to magic by a grandfather, an amateur enthusiast who encouraged Jay to take to the stage and screen as a boy wonder. His first TV appearance was at age 7. By his 20s, a long-haired Jay was on his way to stardom, opening for rock bands and appearing on talk shows.

Friend and admirer Steve Martin once described Jay thusly: “The swindler who never swindled, the con man who never conned, the cheat who never cheated, and mostly, the eccentric collector of all that is eccentric.”

Jay was a frequent presence in the films of David Mamet, including “House of Games.” He also had a recurring role in HBO’s “Deadwood,” playing card shark Eddie Sawyer, and was a go-to consultant in Hollywood on all things magic, gambling and cards. Paul Thomas Anderson put him in the films “Boogie Nights” and Magnolia.”

Among Jay’s talents was card throwing. He once held the Guinness World Record for a distance of 190 feet at 90 mph. He often turned a lowly playing deck into weaponry. He could throw a single card so it would penetrate a watermelon and shear a wooden pencil in two.

A lithograph poster featuring Malini the Magician (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

The mechanical objects up for auction include “Neppy,” Jay’s smartly dressed automaton and veteran of hundreds of performances around the world in his stage show, “Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants.” Named for the Viennese card artist Dr. Johan Nepomuk Hofzinger, Neppy performed a silent routine with his human partner. A card would be torn, handed to audience members, collected and restored by the bespoke Neppy, who stands on a small, red velvet stage.

Sotheby’s priced Neppy at $10,000 to $15,000.

In all, Jay published 11 books that reflect his web of passions, from cards and curious characters to mysteries unraveled and the admired Buchinger. Jay lent the bulk of his Buchinger treasures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibition in 2016 and wrote the catalog himself.

Perhaps just as telling of the collector as the collected, Kiffer pinpointed Jay’s Buchinger fascination this way: “What he liked about figures like Buchinger wasn’t how different they were but really how similar they were to other people.”





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Follow Leanne Italie on Twitter at http://twitter.com/litalie

New Jersey governor race tests Murphy’s progressive politics


 This photo from Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021, shows incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy, D-N.J., right, during a gubernatorial debate with Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J. Murphy moved New Jersey to the left since he won election four years ago, but goes under a test that Democrats have not passed in recent years as he seeks re-election in this year's race for governor. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, Pool)


TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — Paid sick leave. Taxpayer-funded community college. A phased-in $15 minimum wage.

New Jersey has taken a decidedly liberal shift under first-term Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, increasing income taxes on the wealthy, expanding voting rights and tightening the state’s already restrictive gun laws. It’s a notable change from his predecessor, Republican Chris Christie, who spent two terms pushing more moderate policies.

Murphy’s agenda will be on the ballot on Nov. 2, when voters will decide whether to give him a second term or steer the state in another direction by electing Republican Jack Ciattarelli. History isn’t necessarily on Murphy’s side: New Jersey hasn’t reelected a Democrat as governor in four decades and hasn’t elected a governor from the same party as the president in three decades.

“It’s one of the big, animating reasons why we’re running like we’re 10 points behind,” Murphy said in an interview. “We’re taking nothing for granted. I mean, history has proven that this can be a very fickle year in terms of politics.”

But Murphy does have some sizable advantages. He is leading in public polls and has raised more money than Ciattarelli, and New Jersey has 1 million more registered Democratic voters than Republicans. He’s also welcoming some Democratic heavy-hitters to the state: Former President Barack Obama appeared on Saturday, and President Joe Biden was set to visit on Monday to promote his spending plan.

The race has national implications, though it has gotten less attention than Virginia’s high-profile governor’s contest. A loss for Murphy would be shocking in a state that Biden won over Republican Donald Trump by nearly 16 percentage points last year. It would also raise questions about whether moderate voters repelled by Trump were returning to the Republican Party now that the former president is no longer in office.

New Jersey’s left turn has been years in the making: The state has voted Democratic in every presidential contest since 1992. It hasn’t elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate since Clifford Case in 1972. But governor’s races have been continually in play for the GOP. The last three Republicans elected governor have won two consecutive terms.

“My focus is solely New Jersey,” Ciattarelli said in an interview. “To win as a Republican, you’ve got to be focused on what it is that’s bothering the people of New Jersey, and that’s exactly what I’ve done for the past 22 months.”

Public polls show that Murphy has gotten high grades from voters for his response to COVID-19, even though New Jersey was one of the hardest-hit states at the beginning of the pandemic. About 35% of the state’s nearly 25,000 deaths came from nursing and veterans homes. Murphy held daily news conferences about the pandemic at the beginning and is now holding two a week. He ordered most nonessential businesses to shut down early in the pandemic, including restaurants, theaters, gyms and most retail stores. Masks were required and social distancing was encouraged. Schools shuttered and then went mostly remote.

“Many people are very happy with the way he handled the COVID-19 era. The numbers are very clear,” Republican state Sen. Michael Testa acknowledged.

Some Republicans are also concerned that Trump’s unpopularity could be dragging down Ciattarelli’s approval numbers. Since a bruising June primary with rivals who claimed Trump’s mantle, Ciattarelli has sounded more like the moderate he was while in the Legislature, speaking about his support for the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion and for immigrants without legal status to get driver’s licenses, for instance.

He’s been playing up his credentials as an accountant and the founder of a small business while campaigning in Democratic-leaning cities as well as GOP strongholds.

Ciattarelli has also had to balance the more traditional GOP wing with the Trump faction. That’s meant calling for lower property taxes, a perennial issue in New Jersey, and decrying COVID-19 restrictions. But it has also meant confronting questions about his appearance at a rally centered on “Stop the Steal,” a reference to Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Ciattarelli said he didn’t know the rally was focused on the former president’s false claims.

Appearing with Murphy in Newark on Saturday, Obama said of Ciattarelli, “When you’ve got a candidate who spoke at a ‘Stop the Steal’ rally, you can bet he’s not going to be a champion of democracy.”

Asked whether he would welcome Trump campaigning for him, Ciattarelli said he does his own campaigning and isn’t “into endorsements.” He has also said he accepts that Biden was legitimately elected.

The state’s political environment shifted decidedly to the left during the Trump administration, with Democrats picking up all but one House seat in the state in 2018. They lost a second one when Jeff Van Drew left the Democratic Party over Trump’s first impeachment. Murphy himself won election in the first year of Trump’s presidency running on a self-styled progressive platform. His win was helped by the unpopularity of Christie, whose top lieutenant ran against Murphy in the 2017 race.

“When you look which way the wind is blowing, it is very tough for a candidate to be a good candidate if the wind is not blowing at your back,” said Assembly Republican leader Jon Bramnick. “And in New Jersey, the wind is blowing definitely more Democratic.”

Shavonda Sumter, a Democratic Assembly member and chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, said the push for more progressive policies like early in-person voting and expanded vote by mail began at least a decade ago. Those policies, vetoed by Christie, became law after Murphy became governor.

Sumter sees the real turning point coming in 2020 during the national reckoning on racial injustice followed the killing of George Floyd by police. She said white people’s increased consciousness of the role race can play in politics has helped Democrats politically.

“Folks woke up and realized this fight is not done,” she said.

For Toby Sanders, a Trenton resident who attended a recent Murphy gun control rally in Bloomfield, this year’s governor’s contest is more than just a state race.

“It’s a bellwether for the nation. It’s a foundation to build on,” said Sanders, who considers himself a progressive.

For other voters, state and local issues are more important.

Mike Gardner, a municipal party official and retired attorney who worked at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said his top issue is getting rid of the high property taxes. He backs Ciattarelli.

Jim Arakelian, a real estate agent and retired law enforcement official, said he doesn’t think police officers have been respected by the Murphy administration, citing the decision to release certain police disciplinary records as a big concern. He’s also skeptical about the media and the polling in the race, citing 2016 and Trump’s surprise victory.

“Polls can be skewed anyway the press wants,” said Arakelian, who attended a Ciattarelli campaign stop at a New Milford pizzeria.

In their own way, some Democratic voters are also skeptical about polls, not wanting to take them for granted.

“America is contested space right now. There is a battle quietly and loudly going on,” Sanders said.

Facebook dithered in curbing divisive user content in India

By SHEIKH SAALIQ and KRUTIKA PATHI

FILE - This May 16, 2012, file photo, shows the Facebook logo displayed on an iPad. Facebook in India dithered in curbing hate speech and anti-Muslim content on its platform and lacked enough local language moderators to stop misinformation that at times led to real-world violence, according to leaked documents obtained by The Associated Press. 

(AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

NEW DELHI, India (AP) — Facebook in India has been selective in curbing hate speech, misinformation and inflammatory posts, particularly anti-Muslim content, according to leaked documents obtained by The Associated Press, even as its own employees cast doubt over the company’s motivations and interests.

From research as recent as March of this year to company memos that date back to 2019, the internal company documents on India highlight Facebook’s constant struggles in quashing abusive content on its platforms in the world’s biggest democracy and the company’s largest growth market. Communal and religious tensions in India have a history of boiling over on social media and stoking violence.

The files show that Facebook has been aware of the problems for years, raising questions over whether it has done enough to address these issues. Many critics and digital experts say it has failed to do so, especially in cases where members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, are involved.

Across the world, Facebook has become increasingly important in politics, and India is no different.

Modi has been credited for leveraging the platform to his party’s advantage during elections, and reporting from The Wall Street Journal last year cast doubt over whether Facebook was selectively enforcing its policies on hate speech to avoid blowback from the BJP. Both Modi and Facebook chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have exuded bonhomie, memorialized by a 2015 image of the two hugging at the Facebook headquarters.

The leaked documents include a trove of internal company reports on hate speech and misinformation in India. In some cases, much of it was intensified by its own “recommended” feature and algorithms. But they also include the company staffers’ concerns over the mishandling of these issues and their discontent expressed about the viral “malcontent” on the platform.

According to the documents, Facebook saw India as of the most “at risk countries” in the world and identified both Hindi and Bengali languages as priorities for “automation on violating hostile speech.” Yet, Facebook didn’t have enough local language moderators or content-flagging in place to stop misinformation that at times led to real-world violence.

In a statement to the AP, Facebook said it has “invested significantly in technology to find hate speech in various languages, including Hindi and Bengali” which has resulted in “reduced the amount of hate speech that people see by half” in 2021.

“Hate speech against marginalized groups, including Muslims, is on the rise globally. So we are improving enforcement and are committed to updating our policies as hate speech evolves online,” a company spokesperson said.

This AP story, along with others being published, is based on disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including the AP.

Back in February 2019 and ahead of a general election when concerns of misinformation were running high, a Facebook employee wanted to understand what a new user in the country saw on their news feed if all they did was follow pages and groups solely recommended by the platform’s itself.

The employee created a test user account and kept it live for three weeks, a period during which an extraordinary event shook India — a militant attack in disputed Kashmir had killed over 40 Indian soldiers, bringing the country to near war with rival Pakistan.

In the note, titled “An Indian Test User’s Descent into a Sea of Polarizing, Nationalistic Messages,” the employee whose name is redacted said they were “shocked” by the content flooding the news feed which “has become a near constant barrage of polarizing nationalist content, misinformation, and violence and gore.”

Seemingly benign and innocuous groups recommended by Facebook quickly morphed into something else altogether, where hate speech, unverified rumors and viral content ran rampant.

The recommended groups were inundated with fake news, anti-Pakistan rhetoric and Islamophobic content. Much of the content was extremely graphic.

One included a man holding the bloodied head of another man covered in a Pakistani flag, with an Indian flag in the place of his head. Its “Popular Across Facebook” feature showed a slew of unverified content related to the retaliatory Indian strikes into Pakistan after the bombings, including an image of a napalm bomb from a video game clip debunked by one of Facebook’s fact-check partners.

“Following this test user’s News Feed, I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the researcher wrote.

It sparked deep concerns over what such divisive content could lead to in the real world, where local news at the time were reporting on Kashmiris being attacked in the fallout.

“Should we as a company have an extra responsibility for preventing integrity harms that result from recommended content?” the researcher asked in their conclusion.

The memo, circulated with other employees, did not answer that question. But it did expose how the platform’s own algorithms or default settings played a part in spurring such malcontent. The employee noted that there were clear “blind spots,” particularly in “local language content.” They said they hoped these findings would start conversations on how to avoid such “integrity harms,” especially for those who “differ significantly” from the typical U.S. user.

Even though the research was conducted during three weeks that weren’t an average representation, they acknowledged that it did show how such “unmoderated” and problematic content “could totally take over” during “a major crisis event.”

The Facebook spokesperson said the test study “inspired deeper, more rigorous analysis” of its recommendation systems and “contributed to product changes to improve them.”

“Separately, our work on curbing hate speech continues and we have further strengthened our hate classifiers, to include four Indian languages,” the spokesperson said.

Other research files on misinformation in India highlight just how massive a problem it is for the platform.

In January 2019, a month before the test user experiment, another assessment raised similar alarms about misleading content. In a presentation circulated to employees, the findings concluded that Facebook’s misinformation tags weren’t clear enough for users, underscoring that it needed to do more to stem hate speech and fake news. Users told researchers that “clearly labeling information would make their lives easier.”

Again, it was noted that the platform didn’t have enough local language fact-checkers, which meant a lot of content went unverified.

Alongside misinformation, the leaked documents reveal another problem dogging Facebook in India: anti-Muslim propaganda, especially by Hindu-hardline groups.

India is Facebook’s largest market with over 340 million users — nearly 400 million Indians also use the company’s messaging service WhatsApp. But both have been accused of being vehicles to spread hate speech and fake news against minorities.

In February 2020, these tensions came to life on Facebook when a politician from Modi’s party uploaded a video on the platform in which he called on his supporters to remove mostly Muslim protesters from a road in New Delhi if the police didn’t. Violent riots erupted within hours, killing 53 people. Most of them were Muslims. Only after thousands of views and shares did Facebook remove the video.

In April, misinformation targeting Muslims again went viral on its platform as the hashtag “Coronajihad” flooded news feeds, blaming the community for a surge in COVID-19 cases. The hashtag was popular on Facebook for days but was later removed by the company.

For Mohammad Abbas, a 54-year-old Muslim preacher in New Delhi, those messages were alarming.

Some video clips and posts purportedly showed Muslims spitting on authorities and hospital staff. They were quickly proven to be fake, but by then India’s communal fault lines, still stressed by deadly riots a month earlier, were again split wide open.

The misinformation triggered a wave of violence, business boycotts and hate speech toward Muslims. Thousands from the community, including Abbas, were confined to institutional quarantine for weeks across the country. Some were even sent to jails, only to be later exonerated by courts.

“People shared fake videos on Facebook claiming Muslims spread the virus. What started as lies on Facebook became truth for millions of people,” Abbas said.

Criticisms of Facebook’s handling of such content were amplified in August of last year when The Wall Street Journal published a series of stories detailing how the company had internally debated whether to classify a Hindu hard-line lawmaker close to Modi’s party as a “dangerous individual” — a classification that would ban him from the platform — after a series of anti-Muslim posts from his account.

The documents reveal the leadership dithered on the decision, prompting concerns by some employees, of whom one wrote that Facebook was only designating non-Hindu extremist organizations as “dangerous.”

The documents also show how the company’s South Asia policy head herself had shared what many felt were Islamophobic posts on her personal Facebook profile. At the time, she had also argued that classifying the politician as dangerous would hurt Facebook’s prospects in India.

The author of a December 2020 internal document on the influence of powerful political actors on Facebook policy decisions notes that “Facebook routinely makes exceptions for powerful actors when enforcing content policy.” The document also cites a former Facebook chief security officer saying that outside of the U.S., “local policy heads are generally pulled from the ruling political party and are rarely drawn from disadvantaged ethnic groups, religious creeds or casts” which “naturally bends decision-making towards the powerful.”

Months later the India official quit Facebook. The company also removed the politician from the platform, but documents show many company employees felt the platform had mishandled the situation, accusing it of selective bias to avoid being in the crosshairs of the Indian government.

“Several Muslim colleagues have been deeply disturbed/hurt by some of the language used in posts from the Indian policy leadership on their personal FB profile,” an employee wrote.

Another wrote that “barbarism” was being allowed to “flourish on our network.”

It’s a problem that has continued for Facebook, according to the leaked files.

As recently as March this year, the company was internally debating whether it could control the “fear mongering, anti-Muslim narratives” pushed by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a far-right Hindu nationalist group which Modi is also a part of, on its platform.

In one document titled “Lotus Mahal,” the company noted that members with links to the BJP had created multiple Facebook accounts to amplify anti-Muslim content, ranging from “calls to oust Muslim populations from India” and “Love Jihad,” an unproven conspiracy theory by Hindu hard-liners who accuse Muslim men of using interfaith marriages to coerce Hindu women to change their religion.

The research found that much of this content was “never flagged or actioned” since Facebook lacked “classifiers” and “moderators” in Hindi and Bengali languages. Facebook said it added hate speech classifiers in Hindi starting in 2018 and introduced Bengali in 2020.

The employees also wrote that Facebook hadn’t yet “put forth a nomination for designation of this group given political sensitivities.”

The company said its designations process includes a review of each case by relevant teams across the company and are agnostic to region, ideology or religion and focus instead on indicators of violence and hate. It did not, however, reveal whether the Hindu nationalist group had since been designated as “dangerous.”

___

Associated Press writer Sam McNeil in Beijing contributed to this report.

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See full coverage of the “Facebook Papers” here: https://apnews.com/hub/the-facebook-papers

THE US IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

US Border Patrol breaks all-time record in migrant REFUGEE arrests in FY 2021

Migrants from Haiti cross the Rio Grande, on the border of Ciudad Acuna, Mexico, in September. 

File Photo by Miguel Sierra/EPA-EFE

Oct. 23 (UPI) -- The U.S. Border Patrol broke an all-time record with nearly 1.66 million arrests on the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2021.

The agency released the year-end data on arrests Friday, covering fiscal year 2021, which ran from Oct. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021.
Authorities encountered some 1.73 million unauthorized migrants along the southwest border and made 1.66 million arrests for the fiscal year.

In September, the agency made 186,515 arrests, which was down from 196,514 in August.

The previous record was set in 2000 at about 1.64 million arrests, according to Border Patrol data dating back to 1960.

Republicans have blamed the surge on President Joe Biden's immigration policies, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Immigrant advocates and some immigrant officials advocates previously told ABC News the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Title 42 authority, which allows the government to prevent entry of migrants during a public health emergency, has increased repeat offenders. Trump enacted the policy amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which Biden has continued.

Immigration officials have also blamed the "Remain in Mexico" policy, which Trump enacted in 2018 to force asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their claims are processed.

Biden's administration had scrapped the "Remain in Mexico" order, but said last week it will reinstate the immigration policy to comply with the Supreme Court order in August that ruled they had to reinstate it by mid-November.

The Supreme Court said the Biden administration failed to show a likelihood of success on the claim that rescinding the policy was not "arbitrary and capricious."

Still, even with the surge in Haitian migrants last month, the fiscal year data also shows that overall enforcement actions in fiscal year 2021 have declined in recent months. Enforcement actions peaked at 213,593 in July and declined to 209,840 in August and further to 192,001 in September.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said these declining numbers show the current administration's strategy is working, ABC News reported.

After the peak in July, Mayorkas delivered remarks in Brownsville, Texas, blaming the record high on the withdrawal of humanitarian resources and "cruel policies" under the last administration.

"Tragically, former President [Donald] Trump slashed our international assistance to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras," Mayorkas said. "Slashed the resources that we were contributing to address the root causes of irregular migration. And another reason is the end of the cruel polices of the past administration and the restoration of the rule of laws of this country that Congress has passed, including our asylum laws that provide humanitarian relief."

Howard University students protest dorm conditions, including mold


The Howard University gate and Founders Library are shown. 

File Photo by Fourandsixty/Wikimedia Commons

Oct. 23 (UPI) -- Howard University students are protesting dorm conditions after mold was found in 34 rooms.

More than 150 students with the Live Movement for "education reforms and academic advancement of Black education for all Black students" began protesting at the Blackburn University student center on Oct. 12, NPR reported.

Howard University Vice President of Student Affairs Cynthia Evers released a statement on Twitter the day after the sit-in began.

"The well-being of our students is always one of our top concerns and we will will also support the right to a peaceful protest," Evers said. "Some students will be asked to meet with judicial affairs today to discuss Student Code of Conduct violations.

"In previous months, university leadership has collaborated with student leaders to address top concerns and continue to provide a best-in class university experience," Evers added.

Since last month, mold has been found in 34 of the roughly 2,700 rooms on the Howard campus, according to ABC News. The school is one of the nation's top historically black colleges.

"I looked at my painting and I was like wow, I didn't know my painting was this dusty," freshman Kaedriana Turenne, told ABC News. She moved to another room down the hall after finding mold in her Harriet Tubman Quadrangle room last week.

"There really doesn't seem like there is a plan of action," Turenne added. "I really don't think I'm going to come back next year. What I'm going through, it really doesn't live up to the expectation of the school I thought I was coming to."

Along with mold, Howard University students have also raised concerns about lack of COVID-19 testing and safety on campus, the DCist/WAMU reported.

Students say they will not leave the Blackburn building until campus officials agree to discuss their demands.

Protesters with Live Movement are demanding an in-person meeting with President Wayne A.I. Frederick by the end of the month to discuss the concerns, an Instagram post shows.

The Live Movement has also requested students, faculty and alumni on the board of trustees be reinstated with voting power, and the president and chairman of the board proposed a meeting with student leadership to go over a "housing plan," to protect the students.

In 2018, a nine-day student occupation of the campus administration building led to a deal, including an overhaul of the school's sexual assault policy, a campus food pantry, and a review of policies related to campus police officers use of force and need to carry weapons.