He captured the most famous faces in 1930s and early ’40s cinema — Garbo, Crawford, Bogart and Gable. Now the work of George Hurrell, one of Hollywood’s greatest portrait photographers, is on display at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery. For VOA News, Cristina Caicedo Smit has the story. Videographer: Hakim Shammo; Video editor: Cristina Caicedo Smit
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Day: May 15, 2024
NEW YORK — A sprightly miniature poodle named Sage was crowned “Best in Show” on Tuesday at the 148th annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, winning the grand prize in the most prestigious competition among pure-bred canines in the United States.
Sage, the finalist representing 21 breeds classified as non-sporting dogs, triumphed over more than 2,500 top-ranked dogs competing in the two-day contest, held at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in the Queens borough of New York City.
Sage, a 4-year-old black-colored female groomed in the fine, fluffy topiary style traditional for poodles, competed head to head against the winners in six other groups — terriers, hounds, herding dogs, working dogs, sporting dogs and toy dogs.
She was the first female to win the top prize at Westminster since 2020, according to commentators on the Fox Sports channel, which broadcast the event live.
And she became the fourth miniature poodle to claim the top prize in the 148-year history of the contest, with the trophy previously going to her breed in 1943, 1959 and 2002, according to kennel club records.
The larger “standard” poodle breed has been declared Best in Show five times, most recently in 2020, and the smaller “toy” poodle breed has won twice.
The poodle originated as a hunting dog in Germany and is now recognized as the national dog of France.
Sage’s handler, Kaz Hosaka, cried tears of joy and carried his prized poodle in his arms around floor of the auditorium to cheers of the crowd as he celebrated what he said was his 45th year participating at the Westminster dog show and the last of his career.
The Westminster dog show bills itself as the second-oldest U.S. sporting event, behind only the Kentucky Derby thoroughbred horse race. This year’s competition drew a field of contenders representing 200 breeds from all 50 U.S. states and 12 other countries.
Mercedes, a female 4-year-old German shepherd, was named runner-up for the overall contest, after first winning the top prize in the herding dog group.
Along with Sage and Mercedes, the two other finalists chosen on Monday were Comet the Shih Tzu, representing the toy group, and Louis, the Afghan hound leading the hound group.
Rounding out the finalists were three group winners chosen on Tuesday – Micah the black cocker spaniel, representing sporting dogs; Monty, the giant schnauzer, leading the working dogs; and Frankie, a colored bull terrier from the terrier group.
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SYDNEY — Researchers in New Zealand say that artificial intelligence, or AI, can help solve problems for patients and doctors.
A new study from the University of Auckland says that an emerging area is the use of AI during operations using so-called “computer vision.”
The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, says that artificial intelligence has the potential to identify abnormalities during operations and to unburden overloaded hospitals by enhancing the monitoring of patients to help them recover after surgery at home.
The New Zealand research details how AI “tools are rapidly maturing for medical applications.” It asserts that “medicine is entering an exciting phase of digital innovation.”
The New Zealand team is investigating computer vision, which describes a machine’s understanding of videos and images.
Dr. Chris Varghese, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Surgery at the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Auckland, led the AI research team.
He told VOA the technology has great potential.
“The use of AI in surgery is a really emerging field. We are seeing a lot of exciting research looking at what we call computer vision, where AI is trying to learn what surgeons see, what the surgical instruments look like, what the different organs look like, and the potential there is to identify abnormal anatomy or what the safest approach to an operation might be using virtual reality and augmented reality to plan ahead of surgeries, which could be really useful in cutting out cancers and things like that.”
Varghese said doctors in New Zealand are already using AI to help sort through patient backlogs.
“We are using automated algorithms to triage really long waiting lists,” he said. “So, getting people prioritized and into clinics ahead of time, based on need, so the right patients are seen at the right time.”
The researchers said there are limitations to the use of artificial intelligence because of concerns about data privacy and ethics.
The report concludes that “numerous apprehensions remain with regard to the integration of AI into surgical practice, with many clinicians perceiving limited scope in a field dominated by experiential” technology.
The study also says that “autonomous robotic surgeons…. is the most distant of the realizable goals of surgical AI systems.”
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ottawa — Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro, whose exquisitely crafted tales of the loves, ambitions and travails of small-town women in her native land made her a globally acclaimed master of the short story, has died at the age of 92, her publisher said on Tuesday.
Munro died at her home in Port Hope, Ontario, said Kristin Cochrane, chief executive officer of McClelland & Stewart.
“Alice’s writing inspired countless writers … and her work leaves an indelible mark on our literary landscape,” she said in a statement.
The Globe and Mail newspaper, citing family members, said Munro had died on Monday after suffering from dementia for at least a decade.
Munro published more than a dozen collections of short stories and was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.
Her stories explored sex, yearning, discontent, aging, moral conflict and other themes in rural settings with which she was intimately familiar, the villages and farms in the Canadian province of Ontario. She was adept at fully developing complex characters within the limited pages of a short story.
“Alice Munro was a Canadian literary icon. For six decades, her short stories captivated hearts around Canada and the world,” Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said on the X social media network.
Munro, who wrote about ordinary people with clarity and realism, was often likened to Anton Chekhov, the 19th century Russian known for his brilliant short stories, a comparison the Swedish Academy cited in honoring her with the Nobel Prize.
Calling her a “master of the contemporary short story,” the Academy also said: “Her texts often feature depictions of everyday but decisive events, epiphanies of a kind, that illuminate the surrounding story and let existential questions appear in a flash of lightning.”
In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation after winning the Nobel, Munro said, “I think my stories have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories, and I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something that you played around with until you’d got a novel written.”
Munro’s works included “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1968), “Lives of Girls and Women” (1971), “Who Do You Think You Are?” (1978), “The Moons of Jupiter” (1982), “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (2001), “Runaway” (2004), “The View from Castle Rock” (2006), “Too Much Happiness” (2009) and “Dear Life” (2012).
The characters in her stories were often girls and women who lead seemingly unexceptional lives but struggle with tribulations ranging from sexual abuse and stifling marriages to repressed love and the ravages of aging.
“Last month I reread all of Alice Munro’s books. I felt the need to be close to her. Every time I read her is a new experience. Every time changes me. She will live forever,” Canadian author Heather O’Neill said in a post on X.
Munro’s story of a woman who starts losing her memory and agrees to enter a nursing home titled “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” from “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” was adapted into the Oscar-nominated 2006 film “Away From Her,” directed by fellow Canadian Sarah Polley.
‘Shame’ a driving force of characters
Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, writing in The Guardian after Munro won the Nobel, summarized her work by saying: “Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters, just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that. Munro chronicles failure much more often than she chronicles success, because the task of the writer has failure built in.”
American novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote in 2005, “Reading Munro puts me in that state of quiet reflection in which I think about my own life: about the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve done and haven’t done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death.”
The short story, a style more popular in the 19th and early 20th century, has long taken a back seat to the novel in popular tastes and in attracting awards. But Munro was able to infuse her short stories with a richness of plot and depth of detail usually more characteristic of full-length novels.
“For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice, ’til I got time to write a novel. Then I found that they were all I could do and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation,” Munro told the New Yorker magazine in 2012.
Second Canadian to win Nobel
Munro was the second Canadian-born writer to win the Nobel literature prize but the first with a distinctly Canadian identity. Saul Bellow, who won in 1976, was born in Quebec but raised in the U.S. city of Chicago, Illinois, and was widely seen as an American writer.
Munro also won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Giller Prize — Canada’s most high-profile literary award — twice.
Alice Laidlaw was born to a hard-pressed family of farmers on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, a small town in the region of southwestern Ontario that serves as the setting for many of her stories, and started writing in her teens.
She married James Munro in 1951 and moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where the two ran a bookstore. They had four daughters, one died just hours old, before divorcing in 1972. Afterward, Munro moved back to Ontario. Her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin, died in April 2013.
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