zbet New York: At the fruit stand where he works on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Shah Alam sells dozens of bananas a day at 35 cents apiece, or four for $US1. He does a brisk business in cheap fruit outside Sotheby’s auction house; inside, art can sell for millions. But last Wednesday, Alam sold a banana that a short time later would be auctioned as part of a work of absurdist art, won by a cryptocurrency entrepreneur for $US5.2 million plus more than $US1 million in auction house fees ($9.5 million in total). A fruit stand in front of Sotheby’s in Manhattan, where a banana that became part of a $US5.2 million piece of art was sold. Credit: Amir Hamja/The New York Times A few days after the sale, as Alam stood in the rain on York Avenue and East 72nd Street, snapping bananas free of their bunches, he learned from a reporter what had become of the fruit: It had been duct-taped to a wall as part of a work by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, and sold to Justin Sun, the Chinese founder of a cryptocurrency platform. And when he was told the sale price, he began to cry. “I am a poor man,” Alam, 74, said, his voice breaking. “I have never had this kind of money; I have never seen this kind of money.” The infamous ‘Comedian’ by Maurizio Cattelan will be displayed at the 2023 Triennial. Credit: Eddie Jim The banana’s journey from fruit stand to artwork began in 2019, when Cattelan first exhibited the work at Art Basel Miami Beach, an international art fair. The conceptual piece of three editions, titled Comedian , is an implicit send-up of the absurdity of the art world, in keeping with Cattelan’s puckish oeuvre. It came with a detailed owner’s manual on just how to affix the banana with the tape, and permission to refresh it when it rots. (Cattelan bought the original bananas at a Miami grocery store, he has said in interviews.) Each edition sold in Miami for $US120,000 to $US150,000 and spurred unruly crowds: A performance artist at the exhibition ripped one off the wall, peeled the banana and ate it. Cattelan was delighted by the ensuing debate over what exactly constitutes art, and how it is valued. By last Wednesday, those questions of five years ago seemed quaint: Bidding for Lot No. 10 — Alam’s banana affixed to a wall with a slash of silver tape — started at $US800,000. Within five minutes, seven bidders drove its price above $US5 million. The artist was not compensated for the Sotheby’s sale, which was on behalf of a collector who has not been named, but he said in an email that he was nonetheless thrilled by the price it commanded. “Honestly, I feel fantastic,” Cattelan wrote. “The auction has turned what began as a statement in Basel into an even more absurd global spectacle.” He added: “In that way, the work becomes self-reflexive: The higher the price, the more it reinforces its original concept.” On social platform X, Sun crowed about his new art acquisition, and announced he now plans to eat it Friday. He was honoured, he wrote, to be the banana’s “proud owner”: “I believe this piece will inspire more thought and discussion in the future and will become a part of history.” Nowhere in that history is Alam. (Karina Sokolovsky, a spokesperson for Sotheby’s, confirmed that the banana was purchased from the cart where Alam works the day of the sale. The vendor himself has no specific recollection of selling an extra-special fruit.) A widower from Dhaka, Bangladesh, Alam was a civil servant before he moved to the United States in 2007 to be closer to one of his two children, a married daughter who lives on Long Island. He said his home is a basement apartment with five other men in Parkchester, in the Bronx. For his room he pays $US500 a month in rent, he said, speaking in Bengali. His fruit stand shifts are 12 hours long, four days a week; for each hour on his feet, in all weather, the owner pays him $US12. His English is limited mostly to the prices and names of his wares — apples, three for $US2; small pears, $US1 each. He has never stepped inside the auction house. He wouldn’t be able to see the art clearly anyway: His vision is deeply impaired, he said, because he needs cataract surgery, which he has scheduled for January. To Alam, the joke of Comedian feels at his expense. As a blur of people rushed by his corner a few days after the sale, shock and distress washed over him as he considered who profited — and who did not. “Those who bought it, what kind of people are they?” he asked. “Do they not know what a banana is?” In his email, Cattelan said he was affected by Alam’s reaction to his artwork, but stopped short of joining in his criticism. “The reaction of the banana vendor moves me deeply, underscoring how art can resonate in unexpected and profound ways,” he wrote. “However, art, by its nature, does not solve problems — if it did, it would be politics.” For Alam, not much has changed since his banana sold. At the fruit stand, it’s still four bananas for $US1, or 24.8 million bananas for $US6.2 million. This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

Lil Wayne, GloRilla, Camila Cabello to perform at College Football National Championship

NoneDeveloper: Nightdive Studios, Computer Artworks Publisher: Nightdive Studios Release: Out On: Windows From: Steam / GOG Price: TBC Reviewed on: Intel Core i5-12600K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 2070, Windows 10 Nightdive, you done good. The Thing: Remastered is an ultra-sharp and commendably playable update to a game that history will remember as ‘actually a pretty good pick at Choices when you really just popped in to get some Revels but got embarrassed when the till staffer said “is that everything?” in a tone that could have been neutral but equally could have been a damning indictment of your character’. I’m being slightly facetious here, of course. History actually remembers Computer Artworks’s 2002 shooty horror game for how incredibly ambitious and conceptually inventive its proto-sus social squad system was. In homage to the body-snatching alien paranoia of Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic, The Thing tasks you with not just assembling and directing a squad, but keeping them from breaking down or turning on you - in fear you might be hosting the titular molecular stowaway. I’m happy for you, history, but I have played the game now , and I say this: the most remarkable feature of The Thing, in retrospect, is how it predicted the entire Dead Space trilogy in miniature. And by ‘in miniature’ I mean with overwhelming weight given to the part where someone decided to throw in modern military elements and bollocks the whole thing up. Again: Nightdive have delivered a fantastic remake. Every instance of a 2002 sound engineer pitching down a Nokia recording of their cat growling is crisp and distinct, and every face coming out an armpit hanging from a stalk is vivid. Controls and menus feel modern and intuitive, and the only change I made to the default settings was to turn on ‘old school aiming’. I had one recurring crash when an engineer kept dying on one level, otherwise, things went as smooth as the nose of a Swedish forest cat. Sorry. Norwegian. The question, then, is whether you’ll actually want to play it, which is sort of like asking if you want to spend your weekend at a museum. Full of live crabs covered in rotting meat. And you’re the janitor. And you’re not allowed to leave until you’ve cleaned all the crabs. With a malfunctioning electric toothbrush. But! It’s still a museum, and so contains exhibits both enriching and educational in how they contextualize the present state of button pushing and preserve older ideas on how button pushing could be done. In short: It’s an interesting game! It’s almost a really good horror game, but then it becomes a bad action game quite early on and basically stays that way for the rest of its runtime. It starts very strong, though. You play as Captain J.F. Blake, a pint tray runoff cocktail of several different military-type dude archetypes, sent to investigate the fallout of the film's events. A kind of Kurt Russel six degrees of character separation manifests here in the fact that Blake is effectively Solid Snake, minus all the camp and wit and doofy wisdom and self reflection and basically all charm or charisma. Still! when he asks what a noise was, he asks it with his entire ass. The film isn't required watching any more so than normal, which is to say: yes, it's required watching even if you don't plan to play this. Even if you watched it last week. Go watch The Thing again. The game's noteworthy peculiarity comes not from any of its myriad half-baked ideas in a vacuum, but the sheer number of half-baked ideas it has. You’ll use torches and flares to light darkened areas, fire extinguishers to access previously very on-fire areas, and syringes to calm panicking squadmates. You’ll find a thousand weapons per level, but give most of them to those same squadmates, alongside ammo. You’ll hijack security cameras to reveal door codes and occasionally do a turret section. Sometimes, you’ll lead your panicked squad for a nice jog outside to calm them down, making sure not to stay too long in case your ‘it’s cold!’ meter drains and you start taking health damage. You can even, in the most The Thingly thing The Thing does, take samples of your own blood to hold aloft in front of your squad to convince them you haven’t been taken over. Each squad member has a specialisation, a health bar, and a trust meter. Medics heals your squad, engineers can fix tricky fuse boxes, and so on. Accidentally shooting them makes trust go down, healing them and giving them guns makes it go up, as does the aforementioned “look at my blood!” trick. That this is maybe the only instance that waving a vial of your own blood at a stranger might logically result in increased good vibes is a testament to the premise’s enduring brilliance. So, early on, you walk slowly through corridors and dimly-lit research stations. Maybe one of your squadmates will see a corpse of a colleague, puke on the floor, and refuse to press on until you comfort them. You take care to keep everyone stocked on ammo and to not accidentally shoot anyone. It feels slow, deliberate, and atmospheric. You go on like this for about an hour, after which the game just runs out of ideas and starts chucking dozens upon dozens of the smallest, speediest, crawliest enemies at you every five minutes. There’s the occasional bit of lively tension when you have to flamethrower one of the bigger monsters without also cooking your squad in tight environs, but there’s also just so much ammo and so much bad shooting that it starts to smother all the other stuff. We're all very tired. But it's fine. We have like, 10 billion shotgun shells. Then, just when you feel it can go either way, the game doubles down on its commitment to ignoring the best parts of its own premise by throwing umpteen dudes with guns at you. They’re not an issue to deal with - keep your squadmates armed and they’ll snipe anything that comes within 100 feet of you more or less instantly. But their frequency does start to leech away the game’s flavour until all the previously echoing, dismal hallways just start to resemble bland boxes. Sometime after your second boss, the game responds to a clear opportunity to introduce a new type of monster with “ah, but, what if we gave the gun dudes flamethrowers now?”. As I said, it’s that Dead Space trilogy speedrun feeling: measured and effective horror giving way to action horror before being drowned out by several buckets of gun-having men. Occasionally, things get interesting in terms of stage design. A mission that sees you escape from a lab with no weapons, trapping enemies behind doors and ordering squadmates past security lasers feels downright inspired, and an earlier submarine jaunt represents that game’s claustrophobic horror at its best. But even early on, it’s easy to tell that shooting is the worst part - made interesting through context and other stressors - so as soon as the game doubles down on it, it really does fall apart. Which, to make clear once again, is absolutely no shade to Nightdive. The Thing stays interesting in its foibles even when it’s nowhere close to entertaining. And, on balance, I don’t regret my time with it. It’s a worthwhile bit of in-amber preservation, even if I don’t necessarily want to touch the insect inside if I can help it.

NoneCOLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) — Tafara Gapare scored 19 points, freshman Derik Queen had 15 points and eight rebounds and Maryland beat Bucknell 91-67 on Wednesday night. Maryland opened the game on a 15-2 run, extended it to 25-7 with 10:38 left and led 51-28 at the break. The Terrapins led by at least 16 points the entire second half, which included runs of 12-0 and 9-0. Gapare scored the 10 straight points during the second-half run. Gapare threw down a highlight dunk while being fouled with 2:08 remaining to give Maryland an 89-62 lead. He was called for a technical foul after stepping over Patrick O’Brien, who was attempting to take a charge. Jayden Williams made the two free throws for Bucknell and Gapare missed his free-throw attempt that would have tied his career high of 20 points. Maryland (6-1) has won 20 consecutive home games against unranked nonconference foes with its last loss coming on Dec. 1, 2021, against Virginia Tech in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge. Julian Reese added 14 points and Selton Miguel scored 13 for Maryland. Gapare, a Georgia Tech transfer, reached double-figure scoring as a Terp for the first time. The Terrapins shot 50% from the field with three 3-pointers apiece by Gapare and Miguel. Ruot Bijiek led Bucknell (4-4) with 20 points and Josh Bascoe added 10. The Bison turned it over 20 times leading to 22 Maryland points. Maryland stays at home to play Alcorn State on Sunday. Bucknell returns home to play Siena on Saturday. ___ Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here . AP college basketball: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-basketball-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-basketball

By JOSH BOAK WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday voiced his support for the dockworkers union before their contract expires next month at Eastern and Gulf Coast ports, saying that any further “automation” of the ports would harm workers. Related Articles National Politics | Will Kamala Harris run for California governor in 2026? The question is already swirling National Politics | Senate begins final push to expand Social Security benefits for millions of people National Politics | Trump taps immigration hard-liner Kari Lake as head of Voice of America National Politics | Trump invites China’s Xi to his inauguration even as he threatens massive tariffs on Beijing National Politics | Pressure on a veteran and senator shows what’s next for those who oppose Trump The incoming president posted on social media that he met Harold Daggett, the president of the International Longshoreman’s Association, and Dennis Daggett, the union’s executive vice president. “I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it,” Trump posted. “The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen. Foreign companies have made a fortune in the U.S. by giving them access to our markets. They shouldn’t be looking for every last penny knowing how many families are hurt.” The International Longshoremen’s Association has until Jan. 15 to negotiate a new contract with the U.S. Maritime Alliance, which represents ports and shipping companies. At the heart of the dispute is whether ports can install automated gates, cranes and container-moving trucks that could make it faster to unload and load ships. The union argues that automation would lead to fewer jobs, even though higher levels of productivity could do more to boost the salaries of remaining workers. The Maritime Alliance said in a statement that the contract goes beyond ports to “supporting American consumers and giving American businesses access to the global marketplace – from farmers, to manufacturers, to small businesses, and innovative start-ups looking for new markets to sell their products.” “To achieve this, we need modern technology that is proven to improve worker safety, boost port efficiency, increase port capacity, and strengthen our supply chains,” said the alliance, adding that it looks forward to working with Trump. In October, the union representing 45,000 dockworkers went on strike for three days, raising the risk that a prolonged shutdown could push up inflation by making it difficult to unload container ships and export American products overseas. The issue pits an incoming president who won November’s election on the promise of bringing down prices against commitments to support blue-collar workers along with the kinds of advanced technology that drew him support from Silicon Valley elite such as billionaire Elon Musk. Trump sought to portray the dispute as being between U.S. workers and foreign companies, but advanced ports are also key for staying globally competitive. China is opening a $1.3 billion port in Peru that could accommodate ships too large for the Panama Canal. There is a risk that shippers could move to other ports, which could also lead to job losses. Mexico is constructing a port that is highly automated, while Dubai, Singapore and Rotterdam already have more advanced ports. Instead, Trump said that ports and shipping companies should eschew “machinery, which is expensive, and which will constantly have to be replaced.” “For the great privilege of accessing our markets, these foreign companies should hire our incredible American Workers, instead of laying them off, and sending those profits back to foreign countries,” Trump posted. “It is time to put AMERICA FIRST!”Sometimes, it’s impossible to get everything prepared for the holidays right on schedule. Fortunately, for most consumers, countless grocery stores and larger chains have limited hours on Thanksgiving Day. So, have no fear — Thanksgiving dinner isn’t a bust. Stores like Publix, Walmart, Target, Whole Foods and more have holiday hours, but does that include Thanksgiving Day ? If your local grocery stores are closed for Thanksgiving, find out what other stores you can go to, below! Grocery Stores Open on Thanksgiving According to TODAY , the following grocery store chains are open on Thanksgiving with limited holiday hours: Stop and Shop (most locations) Wegmans Vons Whole Foods Shaws Save A Lot Safeway Ralphs Kroger H-E-B Dillons Cub Grocery ACME Albertson’s Is Target Open on Thanksgiving 2024? Target is closed on Thanksgiving Day, according to its website . Walmart’s Thanksgiving 2024 Hours Unfortunately, Walmart is closed on Thanksgiving Day, per TODAY . In 2023, the chain announced via social media that all of its stores would shut its doors on the holiday. “Thanksgiving is a special day, and we want our store associates to have the chance to spend it with their families and loved ones,” Walmart tweeted in October 2023. Publix Thanksgiving 2024 Hours All Publix locations are also closed on Thanksgiving Day. The supermarket chain tweeted its holiday closure before the 2024 holiday, writing, “We wish you a bountiful Thanksgiving. Our stores are closed tomorrow, November 28, so our associates can enjoy time with their loved ones. We will resume regular hours Friday, November 29.” Is Whole Foods Open on Thanksgiving 2024? There are some Whole Foods locations that are, in fact, open on Thanksgiving Day, according to its website . However, customers should check their store’s local page. Is Kroger Open on Thanksgiving 2024? Kroger indicated on its website that some of its stores will be open on Thanksgiving. However, customers should check their local Kroger for the hours. Per the store’s website , all locations that are open on Thanksgiving will close at 4 p.m., and pharmacies are closed for the holiday.

Stock market today: Wall Street hits records despite tariff talk

The permits are granted to Hvalur hf. for the hunting of fin whales and to Tjaldtanga ehf. for minke whale hunting. The allowable number of animals to be hunted is based on the fishing advice of Hafrannsóknastofnun (Marine and Freshwater Research Institute). The institute recommends that no more than 209 fin whales and 217 minke whales be hunted annually.Neither minke whales nor fin whales have been hunted this year. Last year, 24 fin whales were hunted, and in 2022, 148 fin whales were caught.Bjarkey Olsen Gunnarsdóttir, then Minister of Food, issued a one-year permit for whaling in the summer, but the permit was issued after the whaling season was supposed to begin, so no whaling took place this year. After the coalition government of Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (Independence Party), Vinstri græn (Left-Green Movement), and Framsóknarflokkurinn (Progressive Party) collapsed, and ministers from Vinstri græn resigned, Bjarni Benediktsson, Prime Minister, has held the position of Minister of Food in a caretaker government.Bjarni says that issuing whaling permits for the next five years is not a political decision. He explains that the permits were issued in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.He also asserts that the matter received proper and lawful treatment, including going through consultation as required by law. He adds that it was time to make a decision, even though the government’s tenure is likely nearing its end.The permit granted today is for five years. Bjarni points out that the Ombudsman of Alþingi (Parliament) criticised the handling of the case by the Vinstri græn (Left-Green Movement) minister, who banned whaling with a 24-hour notice last summer. When asked, Bjarni says he did not discuss the matter in government but will present it to his fellow ministers at a government meeting tomorrow. "There was no reason to do so," he says, given that no majority government is in place.Jón Gunnarsson, outgoing MP for Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (Independence Party), was recently appointed as an assistant to Bjarni in the Ministry of Food.In a secret recording reported by the media outlet Heimildin, Jón’s son claimed that his father agreed to run on Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn’s electoral list in the recent elections in exchange for being in a position to grant whaling permits to Hval hf. Jón has denied this claim. Bjarni also states that Jón had no involvement in the matter. Hvalur hf. submitted an application to the Ministry of Food last month for an indefinite permit for whaling. This is far from the first time that ministers in a caretaker government have made decisions about whaling. Einar K. Guðfinnsson, Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture, reauthorised whaling the day after the coalition government of Samfylkingin (Social Democratic Alliance) and Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn collapsed in January 2009. Later, Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir, then Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture, expanded the whale conservation area in Faxaflói in November 2017, shortly before leaving office.