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Reported plans for the upcoming trip, which first appeared last week in the Financial Times quoting officials said to have knowledge of the matter, caused an immediate stir both in Washington and Beijing. The world’s top two powers scrambled to react to what would be the first visit of a House of Representatives leader to Taiwan in a quarter of a century. With U.S.-China tensions particularly high recently, Chinese officials have issued warnings in public and private against such travel....

Alexa’s Voice Has Been Revealed, Allegedly After speaking to members of the professional voiceover community and then listening to clips of the voice actor’s voice to verify his research, Stone claims to have worked out who the voice belonged to. Which, according to Stone, is Nina Rolle, a voiceover artist from Colorado. If you’d like to see for yourself just how much Rolle’s voice sounds like Alexa’s, here’s her voice in an ad on her personal YouTube channel....

CBGB has been the site of roughly 35,000 performances, most of them better than the one by the Zeppelin clones. Over the years the New York City dive has helped invent punk and new wave, served honorably during the grunge revolution and become arguably the most legendary rock club in the world. ID December, as CB’s turns 20, its most celebrated alumni will return to perform or to help emcee a month-long anniversary bash: David Byrne, Deborah Harry, Joan Jett, Ric Ocasek and Joey Ramone among them....

Now they were here, just down the road from Google and Yahoo, one of 12 companies that would be part of Y Combinator’s winter program of total immersion in the Silicon Valley start-up life. For a techie, it was as if you were making home movies one day, and the next day found yourself on the Paramount lot with a contract and empty film cans to fill. No matter where the start-ups came from—Sweden, Chicago, Oxford or even the South Pole (yes, one person arrived straight from graduate research there)—their lives would never be the same....

It was the eighth straight day of protests on the sprawling 48,000-student New Jersey campus – and the first to capture national attention. What began as a dispute over three words grew into a racial referendum on campus conditions for blacks and Hispanics. It culminated last Friday when the Board of Governors announced it would retain Lawrence as president without reservation or censure. As a carrot, the board urged the administration to draft a “blueprint on multicultural life....

Just two weeks into his job as a senior policy adviser in the Wage and Hour Division, Olson was queried about posts from 2016 that seemingly began as a debate about whether then-House Speaker Paul Ryan was a neo-conservative. “No he’s not. Neo-cons are all Upper East Side Zionists who don’t golf on Saturday if you know what I mean,” wrote Olson. The commenter he was speaking with then wrote back, “That’s what I meant....

By the time Peterson reached his early 30s, he began to suspect that he, too, carried the bad gene. “I’d have a couple drinks and my vision would go wacky,” he says. “I’d get up in the middle of the night and my equilibrium would be off.” Friends assured him that these things happened to them, too. Even his doctor doubted he had the disease. One friend told him it was all just “a function of being 30 rather than 20....

This action-comedy originally started as a light novel series by Kiyotaka Haimura, whose works have been published and adapted into several anime series. With an anime, a couple of spinoffs, and some films in tow, just how would viewers start watching A Certain Magical Index? 8 A Certain Scientific Railgun (2009) It’s odd to start a series named A Certain Magical Index with its spinoff, but its nature and setting is precisely what makes A Certain Scientific Railgun the best way to start the franchise....

But the sorriest statement of a sorry performance concerned Cliff Baxter, an Enron executive described by colleagues as a straight arrow, who committed suicide as the disaster developed. “It’s a perfect example,” Lay said, “of how the media can play such havoc and destruction of people’s lives.” In other words, it wasn’t the company; it was the coverage. That was where the timing came in. As this extraordinary piece of buck-passing was being aired, Daniel Pearl was being held hostage in Pakistan....

Gene was a popular character. He didn’t dance in salons. He didn’t wear tails. He never even wore a tie. That just wasn’t him. He invented dancing in T shirts and workman’s clothes. In between films, he wouldn’t practice. He would just live, then he would gain weight, and then he would have to get back into training and work very hard. I first met Fred on the set of “Daddy Long Legs....

Six years ago, Blige introduced the airwaves to hip-hop soul. She sang R&B love songs that had the edge and grit of Aretha Franklin and Chaka Khan but also the hip-hop flava her generation demanded. Blige gave hip-hop culture a female face and was anointed Queen of Hip-Hop Soul. Her debut, “What’s the 411?,” went double platinum, and one remix marked the debut of the late Notorious B.I.G. But for all the fly videos filled with Versace and Cristal, Blige wasn’t having a good time....

How They Work Laser printers put images on a piece of paper by melting plastic toner powder onto paper. Here’s how it works: Inside the printer is a rotating drum that static electricity gives a positive charge to attract toner powder to it. As the printer pulls the paper through, the paper receives a negative static-electricity charge. The paper slides across the drum, pulling the toner off the drum and onto the paper....

The land in question—Judea and Samaria, or the “West Bank”—is the ancient cradle of Jewish civilization. In modern times, the Jews lost this land to the Arab onslaught during the 1948 War of Independence, but liberated it from Jordanian occupation in 1967 and began to resettle. Now, 50 years later, over half a million Jews live here under Israeli protection, and it seems that the realization that Israel is going to be sovereign in Judea and Samaria/the West Bank is finally trickling down....

The Frenchman held a press conference to deliver the shock news less than a week after making history as the first coach to win three consecutive Champions League titles. A legendary midfielder for Juventus, Real Madrid and France in a glittering playing career, his reputation has blossomed even further since replacing Carlo Ancelotti at the helm of the Santiago Bernabeu side. The tributes to the icon came flooding in after his decision was made, with many Real Madrid players and fans expressing the same kind of disappointment that was evident in president Florentino Perez’s expression as he sat beside Zidane at the press conference....

A third-generation Floridian (his grandfather started the first law firm in Ft. Lauderdale), the 40-year-old Miami Herald columnist is at heart a serious man deeply angered by what developers, greedy politicians and overpopulation have done to his state. Of his childhood in Plantation, a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale, he says, “At the time I grew up, it was the westernmost fringe of civilization in south Florida, literally on the edge of the Everglades....

Kompany suffered another injury ravaged campaign and returned to make only his third Premier League start of 2016-17 in last month’s 2-1 defeat to champions Chelsea. But the 31-year-old has since been a mainstay in Pep Guardiola’s defence and opened the scoring as City extended their unbeaten run to eight matches with a 5-0 final-day romp at Watford. “I’m happy I got the goal and I’m really happy with a clean sheet as well,” Kompany told Sky Sports....

Protests erupted all over the country in cities like New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington D.C. and Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed by a white police officer on May 29. And while some celebrities offered words of support and encouraged people to march against racial injustice in America or donated massive amounts of money to funds and organizations dedicated to bailing out protesters, others including Michael B. Jordan, Halsey, Tinashe, Kali Uchis, Fiona Apple, Kendrick Sampson, Ellen Page, John Cusack, Machine Gun Kelly, Paris Jackson, Lauren Jauregui, Emily Ratajkowski, Cody Fern, Tyler the Creator, Camila Cabello and several others flooded the streets of their home cities to show their solidarity by joining protests themselves....

The Squad 5 agents dropped everything to pursue the Moussaoui case. When they discovered his visa had expired, they locked him up. They scoured his background, questioned his friends and roommate, and sent out requests to foreign governments for any records they might have on him. French intelligence came back with a tantalizing lead: Moussaoui was known to have “radical Islamic” beliefs and ties to followers of Osama bin Laden in Chechnya....

I’ll spare you the tributes to your greatness. Let’s just say you’ve earned the right to play golf every day for the rest of your life. You’ve earned the right to gamble whenever you want without having to answer to anybody, except perhaps your wife. You’ve certainly earned the right to ignore people like me trying to give you advice. As you made clear–repeatedly–during your press conference, you wouldn’t lose any sleep if the entire press corps fouled out forever....