Health officials in New York City say a cluster of Legionnaires’ disease in Central Harlem has grown to 90 cases, including three deaths.
The update comes days after New York City’s health department proposed new regulations for the testing of cooling towers, which they suspect are linked to the outbreak.
Cooling towers are rooftop devices that release mist into the air as they cool large buildings. If the water inside becomes too warm, stagnant, or isn’t properly disinfected, Legionella bacteria can grow and infect people who inhale the mist.
A Department of Health spokesperson told CNN the proposed rules “were in development well before the Legionnaires’ cluster in Central Harlem.”
Under New York City law, building owners are responsible for registering and maintaining their cooling towers and they’re routinely inspected for compliance. The proposal would set specific time periods for testing and require test sampling be conducted by state-certified labs. It also details monetary penalties for noncompliance, although the posted documents didn’t specify amounts. Currently, building owners who fail to follow routine maintenance rules face fines of $500 to $2,000.
The proposed changes to testing and fines, however, may come with the challenge of enforcement — city data shows that the city conducted a record low number of inspections in 2024, with less than half the inspections of 2017, when inspection numbers were first recorded. The decline in inspections was first reported by Gothamist.
The current Legionnaires’ cluster was first announced on July 25. Health officials say all operable cooling towers in the area have been tested, and those that tested positive for Legionella were ordered to be cleaned. The department said it confirmed that the required cleanings were carried out.
Legionnaires’ disease causes flu-like symptoms, including cough, fever, headaches, muscle aches, and shortness of breath. It is treatable with antibiotics, but if left untreated, it can lead to shock and multi-organ failure, according to the World Health Organization. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 10% of people who contract the disease die from complications, with older adults and people with weakened immune systems at higher risk.
Las Vegas has staged its share of blockbuster fight nights but nothing on the scale of what is coming this weekend. On Saturday night at Allegiant Stadium, the $2bn (£1.47bn) home of the NFL’s Raiders, Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez will defend his undisputed super-middleweight crown against Terence Crawford in front of more than 70,000 spectators, by far the largest boxing crowd the city has ever seen.
Millions more will watch on Netflix, which is carrying the card at no extra cost to subscribers – a first for a fight of this magnitude and a reminder of how the business of boxing is being remade in real time. For decades, the sport depended on pay-per-view. Now it is betting that reach and spectacle can replace a buckling model. The timing is no accident: Mexican Independence Day weekend, when this neon-lit metropolis in the Mojave desert becomes a second home for Álvarez and his flag-draped supporters.
Terence Crawford, the undefeated American boxer who has won world titles in four divisions from 135lb to 154lb, is moving up two weight classes to challenge for the undisputed 168lb championship held by Saúl ‘Canelo’ Álvarez, the Mexican four-weight champion and the sport’s biggest star.
Where and when is the fight?
The scheduled 12-round bout will take place on Saturday night at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, home of the NFL’s Raiders, which is expected to be configured for about 71,835 spectators. It will almost certainly shatter the previous Las Vegas attendance record for boxing: the 29,214 who turned up for the 1982 fight between Larry Holmes and Gerry Cooney at a purpose-built outdoor arena in the Caesars Palace parking lot.
The main card begins at 9pm ET (2am BST on Sunday), with Álvarez and Crawford not expected to make their ringwalks until after 12am ET (5am BST).
What belts are on the line?
Álvarez’s undisputed crown at 168lb is at stake: the WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO titles all on the line. Crawford keeps his WBA belt at 154lb whatever happens.
Where can I watch it?
For the first time in boxing history, a fight of this magnitude will be streamed live globally on Netflix at no additional cost to subscribers. The stream begins at 9pm ET, with undercard bouts leading into the main event.
Netflix will offer commentary feeds in English and Spanish. Unlike traditional pay-per-view, which often costs US fans around $90, this one is included in a standard subscription.
Who else is fighting?
The first six undercard bouts not carried by the Netflix stream will be available free on Tudum starting at 5.30pm ET (10.30pm BST). The entire order of play is as follows:
Preliminary card (Tudum, from 5.30pm ET/10.30pm BST)
• Serhii Bohachuk v Brandon Adams, 10 rounds, middleweights
• Ivan Dychko v Jermaine Franklin Jr, 10 rounds, heavyweights
• Reito Tsutsumi v Javier Martinez, six rounds, super featherweights
• Sultan Almohamed v Martin Caraballo, four rounds, super lightweights
• Steven Nelson v Raiko Santana, 10 rounds, light heavyweights
• Marco Verde v Sona Akale, six rounds, 162lb catchweight
Main card (Netflix, from 8pm ET/1am BST on Sunday)
• Callum Walsh v Fernando Vargas Jr, 10 rounds, junior middleweights
• Christian Mbilli v Lester Martinez, 12 rounds, super middleweights
• Mohammed Alakel v John Ornelas, 10 rounds, lightweights
• Canelo Álvarez v Terence Crawford, 12 rounds, for Alvarez’s undisputed super middleweight championship
Yet, for a main event of this quality and consequence, the mood around town during fight week has been oddly sedate. Thursday’s final press conference at the T-Mobile Arena was open to the public but drew little more than a thousand fans. It’s expected the crowds will arrive en masse on Friday and the live gate will be eye-watering in the end, but ticket sales have been on the sluggish side, prompting whispers of the Trump slump that has affected local tourism. The likelier theory is that while most of boxing’s more recent super-fights have required years of wrangling – Mayweather v Pacquiao, Álvarez v Golovkin, Crawford v Spence – this one materialized practically overnight. A year ago, Álvarez v Crawford was more a bar-room flight of fancy than plausible matchup given the weight gulf. Now, suddenly, here it is.
Álvarez, 35, is the emperor at 168lb: granite-chinned, a four-weight champion from 154 to 175, boxing’s most bankable name. Crawford, 37, is America’s best fighter since Floyd Mayweather Jr, a champion in four divisions spanning 135 to 154 who has spent more than a decade making elite opponents look ordinary. The switch-hitting Nebraskan is the quiet craftsman who unified 140, then 147 with a dismantling of Errol Spence Jr so complete that it felt like a mismatch. That he hails from a fistic outpost better known for the production of corn than elite prize-fighters only lends to the lore.
Canelo Álvarez is boxing’s most bankable name and one of Mexico’s most recognizable faces. Photograph: David Becker/Getty Images for Netflix
This weekend also doubles as the maiden promotion of Zuffa Boxing under TKO Holdings, the company formed by the merger of UFC’s parent group and WWE. It is the first boxing show promoted by Dana White, backed by an ample Turki al-Sheikh investment, and seen as the opening salvo in an attempt to build a rival system of rankings and titles under Saudi control. Behind the scenes, that project is already colliding with Washington politics. A new Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act has been introduced in Congress, legislation critics say could gut longstanding protections for fighters and hand promoters the power to control titles. That a potential hostile takeover can hide in plain sight the way it has during the equivalent of boxing’s Super Bowl week is a testament to the allure of the main event. When one journalist did raise valid questions on the subject during Thursday’s press conference, White deftly parried before going ad hominem.
The oddsmakers have leaned toward Álvarez. He has campaigned at 168lb or above for nearly seven years, his chin stress-tested by heavier men. Crawford has spent most of his career at 147 or below, with only a brief reconnaissance at 154. Size matters, and so does age. Yet the intrigue lies in Crawford’s record of problem-solving. Time and again, he has spent the early rounds downloading an opponent’s rhythm before flipping the geometry in the middle of the fight. Against Spence two summers ago, Crawford produced a masterclass: three knockdowns and a ninth-round stoppage. Notably, the odds against him have shortened materially since the fight was announced in June.
For Álvarez, victory is legacy maintenance. He has already hoovered up titles across four weight classes, headlined stadiums in two countries and confirmed himself as the sport’s biggest star and one of Mexico’s most recognizable faces. Beating Crawford would add another bullet to the résumé and reaffirm his supremacy at 168. For Crawford, it is legacy transformation. He is already the first man in the four-belt era to become undisputed champion in two divisions, a feat since matched by Naoya Inoue and Oleksandr Usyk. A third, against Álvarez, on Netflix’s global platform and before the largest fight crowd in Las Vegas history, would vault him from generational talent into the all-time realm of lionhearted weight-jumpers like Harry Greb, Henry Armstrong, Roberto Durán and Manny Pacquiao.
Everything about this fight is oversized and breathless: the venue, stakes and TV audience. What happens inside the ropes on Saturday night, though, will come down to the smallest of margins: timing, angles, choices made in the blur of three-minute rounds. It’s in that public accounting where boxing, for all its bloat, still finds its purity.
Taylor Swift has agreed to sit for a deposition in the ongoing legal battle between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, according to a court filing from Baldoni’s camp.
Swift is likely to be asked about any discussions she had with Lively about conditions on the set of “It Ends With Us.” Baldoni’s team previously got court permission to obtain messages between Lively and Swift, after Lively’s team tried unsuccessfully to exclude Swift from the case.
The two sides are nearing completion of discovery in the high-profile case. Lively has sued Baldoni, her director and co-star, for sexual harassment and retaliation, alleging that he and the film’s producers and publicists launched an online smear campaign against her to punish her for raising complaints. A trial is scheduled for next spring in federal court in New York.
Lively has already been deposed. Her team has yet to take depositions of Baldoni or co-defendants Steven Sarowitz and Jamey Heath. In a motion on Thursday, her lawyers asked for an extension of the deadline to take depositions from Sept. 30 to Oct. 10, stating that the Baldoni team has dragged its feet in producing requested documents.
Lively’s lawyers also stated that they expect Baldoni’s team to ask for a 30-day extension for all discovery.
In a response on Thursday, Baldoni’s side said that is not true, and that they are asking for an extension only so that they can take Swift’s deposition during the week of Oct. 20-25, “due to Ms. Swift’s preexisting professional obligations.”
Baldoni’s side asked the court to extend the deadline solely for the “purpose of accommodating third-party witness Taylor Swift who has agreed to appear for deposition but is unable to do so before October 20, 2025.”
Lively’s team opposed that request on Friday, arguing that Baldoni’s team had failed to take steps to schedule Swift’s deposition prior to this week. Lively’s lawyers also questioned how Swift’s testimony would be relevant to the case.
Baldoni’s lawyers likewise opposed Lively’s request for a blanket extension of the deadline. The two sides previously reached an agreement to hold Baldoni’s deposition on Sept. 21-22, Sarowitz’s on Sept. 15, and Heath’s on Sept. 18-19. Lively’s team argues that Baldoni’s lawyers are defying a court order to turn over Signal messages promptly.
Lively’s team has argued that Baldoni’s side has repeatedly dragged Swift into the case in order to attract media attention. Bryan Freedman, Baldoni’s lead attorney, previously alleged that he had heard that Lively was seeking to pressure Swift to issue a statement of support, and that Lively had urged Swift to delete their communications. The judge struck that allegation from the court record.
Baldoni’s team also previously subpoenaed Swift for communications, though that subpoena was later withdrawn.
The group of football-loving would-be assassins abandoned their task at the last minute.
“I’m close to the position. Are you going to cancel the game?” the person codenamed Austria asked their associates on their Signal group at just before 9pm on 15 December 2022, as he lurked near Moraes’s home in Brazil’s capital, Brasília.
“Abort,” replied “Germany”, according to a federal police report.
The cinematic plot, nicknamed Operation Copa 2022 (Operation World Cup 2022) and involving at least six special forces troops, was at the heart of this week’s historic trial of Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro. He was on Thursday sentenced to 27 years in prison for trying to stage a coup after he lost the 2022 election to his leftwing opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula.
“[He tried to] annihilate the essential pillars of the democratic rule-of-law state,” said Moraes as he accused Bolsonaro of being the leader of a sprawling conspiracy, which included plans to assassinate Lula and the vice-president-elect, Geraldo Alckmin, to stop them taking power on 1 January 2023.
Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters at a protest this month. Photograph: Luis Nova/AP
Moraes said hitmen had planned to “neutralise” him using “extremely powerful weapons” capable of piercing his bullet-proof car; they also allegedly considered killing Lula during a public event with poison or drugs that would cause organ failure.
“I’m someone who should be really thankful to be alive,” Lula said last year after the alleged poison plot was revealed.
Bolsonaro has denied engineering a coup or being involved in an assassination plot, calling such claims “a little story”.
But Moraes said there was “ample evidence” indicating the far-right politician was aware of Operation World Cup 2022, which the judge said was part of a larger intrigue called Green and Yellow Dagger.
Police investigators said a copy of the blueprint for a “clandestine operation” with “terrorist hallmarks” was printed out in the presidential palace on 6 December 2022 by an army general called Mário Fernandes. At the time Gen Fernandes, who was arrested last year, was a senior official in Bolsonaro’s administration.
“This [plan] wasn’t printed out in a cave. It wasn’t printed out hidden away in a room of terrorists. It was printed out in the presidential palace. It was printed out in the seat of the Brazilian government … at the same moment that president Jair Messias Bolsonaro was there,” Moraes told the court on Tuesday as Bolsonaro’s trial reached its conclusion.
Alexandre de Moraes and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who said he was ‘someone who should be really thankful to be alive’. Photograph: Adriano Machado/Reuters
“The planning is so detailed that it even details the chances of success, what the collateral damage might be, what weaponry should be used,” added Moraes.
A copy of the Green and Yellow Dagger plan, obtained by federal police investigators, suggests plotters planned to use an arsenal that included assault rifles, a belt-fed machine gun and even a Swedish anti-tank weapon, used on the battlefield in Ukraine. “These are weapons of war commonly used by combat groups,” the police report says.
According to the investigators, the plan to assassinate Moraes was aborted only because a court session was delayed – and, more importantly, the commanders of the army and air force refused to endorse Bolsonaro’s coup plot.
Brazil has had more than a dozen coup attempts since it became a republic in 1889 but none, so far as is known, involved a plan to assassinate those being deposed.
The historian Lucas Pedretti said that did not necessarily mean such plots had not existed. Rather, the 2022 plot had come to light because, for the first time in history, the coup plotters had been investigated and put on trial.
Pedretti said the existence of the assassination plan was “shocking, but not so surprising”. The historian, who studies Brazil’s brutal 1964-85 military dictatorship, said the armed forces still promoted internally the idea that the bloody regime was a “necessary and legitimate response” to a supposed communist threat.
Quick Guide
Brazil’s dictatorship 1964-1985
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How did it begin?
Brazil’s leftist president, João Goulart, was toppled in a coup in April 1964. General Humberto Castelo Branco became leader, political parties were banned, and the country was plunged into 21 years of military rule.
The repression intensified under Castelo Branco’s hardline successor, Artur da Costa e Silva, who took power in 1967. He was responsible for a notorious decree called AI-5 that gave him wide ranging dictatorial powers and kicked off the so-called “anos de chumbo” (years of lead), a bleak period of tyranny and violence which would last until 1974.
What happened during the dictatorship?
Supporters of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military regime – including Jair Bolsonaro – credit it with bringing security and stability to the South American country and masterminding a decade-long economic “miracle”.
It also pushed ahead with several pharaonic infrastructure projects including the still unfinished Trans-Amazonian highway and the eight-mile bridge across Rio’s Guanabara bay.
But the regime, while less notoriously violent than those in Argentina and Chile, was also responsible for murdering or killing hundreds of its opponents and imprisoning thousands more. Among those jailed and tortured were Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, then a leftwing rebel.
It was also a period of severe censorship. Some of Brazil’s best-loved musicians – including Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso – went into exile in Europe, writing songs about their enforced departures.
How did it end?
Political exiles began returning to Brazil in 1979 after an amnesty law was passed that began to pave the way for the return of democracy.
But the pro-democracy “Diretas Já” (Direct elections now!) movement only hit its stride in 1984 with a series of vast and historic street rallies in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte.
Civilian rule returned the following year and a new constitution was introduced in 1988. The following year Brazil held its first direct presidential election in nearly three decades.
“And this is particularly true in the case of the special forces,” he said, referring to the army group to which the men accused of plotting to kill Moraes, Lula and Alckmin belonged.
Police believe the men involved in the Moraes murder plot were special forces operatives known as the “kids pretos” or “black cap boys” because of the black caps they wore. Pedretti said the group, set up during the cold war, still maintained the same “enemy elimination mindset”.
“In Bolsonaro’s attempted coup, spearheaded by him and his generals, they simply put that logic and the expertise of the ‘kids pretos’ at the service of the coup-mongering political project,” Pedretti said.
