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An MTA conductor was slashed in the neck on a subway in Brooklyn early Thursday, police said. The 59-year-old conductor was working the overnight shift on a southbound A train near the Rockaway Station when he was attacked just before 3:40 a.m., according to the NYPD. The MTA worker had stuck his head out the train cab window to look left and right, and that is when he was slashed in the back with an unknown sharp object, police said. The victim was taken to Brookdale Hospital Medical Center in stable condition, police said.

Engineers have long dreamed of creating a wonderful material that can revolutionize construction. In 2004, their dream came true. British scientists first created Graphene—one of the forms of nanocarbon that is only 0.3 nanometers thick—a million times thinner than a human hair, but it can withstand colossal loads! Many immediately predicted a great future for it, and a little later, scientists were given the Nobel Prize. However, mass adoption did not happen. And only now, after 15 years, the first real opportunities have appeared to use the material of the future in commercial projects. Super-substance is made from ordinary graphite,...

President Biden on Wednesday told a false story — for the fourth time since taking office — about an Amtrak conductor named Angelo Negri who supposedly boasted about his train ridership during his final year as vice president. Negri retired from Amtrak in 1993 and died in May 2014, CNN reported in June — making it impossible for Negri to have spoken with Biden during his final year as VP, which would have been in 2016 or the first month of 2017. The president retold the tale, which he called “a true story,” in Scranton, Pa., to underscore his commitment...

President Joe Biden used his one-on-one meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson Tuesday to reprise a story about an Amtrak conductor who supposedly congratulated him for traveling 2 million miles on the rail service — despite having died before the story purportedly took place. After Biden noted that Johnson had traveled from New York to Washington, DC on Amtrak for their White House meeting, he proclaimed to Johnson and the assembled media that “I got to tell you a quick story that has nothing to do with anything.” The president began by recalling that when he was Vice President,...

President Biden apparently went off the rails with a heartfelt story about how he’d ridden some 1.5 million miles on Amtrak and being personally congratulated by an Amtrak conductor — who had actually retired some 20 years before. “When I became vice president, one of the Capitol Hill newspapers estimated that I had taken more than 7,000 round trips on Amtrak over my career. I think that’s an exaggeration,” Biden said on Friday when he helped the nation’s passenger rail system celebrate 50 years, Fox News reported.

PALM BEACH COUNTY, FL (Gray News) - A 35-year-old Florida man lost his life Saturday while trying to retrieve a pigeon he cared for from a power line. Deputies from the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office found Elian Garcia-Rivera around 3 p.m. They told The Palm Beach Post he used a 20-foot aluminum pool pole to try and move his bird, but accidentally touched the live power line. The shock threw him to the ground between a large pigeon coop and a fence. Paramedics transported him to a local hospital where he passed away. "There are no words to say,"...

The management agency for Sir Jeffrey Tate has confirmed his death, this afternoon, at the age of 74. The eminent British conductor suffered a heart attack while visiting the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, Italy, and could not be revived. Sir Jeffrey Tate, who was 74, was knighted six weeks ago for services to music.

Minnesota Orchestra Conductor Laureate Stanislaw Skrowaczewski has died. He was 93. Skrowaczewski came to Minnesota decades ago to lead what was then the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, and he never left. He changed the face of classical music in Minnesota, and remained a towering presence in the classical music world until the end.

We have been informed by close friends of the death of Gervase de Peyer, the foremost British clarinet player of his time. Gervase was 90. A founder of the Melos Ensemble, with whom he recorded extensively, Gervase was principal clarinet of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1956 to 1973. He was also a founder of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and an influential teacher.

French maestro Georges Pretre, who regularly conducted the renowned Vienna Symphony Orchestra, died Wednesday aged 92, the Austrian capital's Philharmonic society said.

Sir Neville Marriner, one of the world’s greatest conductors, has died. The founder of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, who has conducted many of the world’s best orchestras, died in his sleep on Sunday, aged 92, the academy said.

Kurt Masur, the music director emeritus of the New York Philharmonic, who was credited with transforming the orchestra from a sullen, lackluster ensemble into one of luminous renown, died on Saturday in Greenwich, Conn. He was 88. The death was announced by the Philharmonic. Mr. Masur (pronounced mah-ZOOR) was the Philharmonic's music director from 1991 to 2002. When he took its helm, the orchestra was roundly considered to be a world-class ensemble in name only, its playing grown slipshod, its players fractious and discontented, its recording contracts unrenewed.

I am stricken to hear of the death today of Lorin Maazel at his home, Castleton Farms, Virginia, in the middle of the festival that he and his wife Dietlinde Turban-Maazel founded there, and that now continues without him. He was 84 years old and had been suffering from what Nancy Gustafson, Castleton’s executive director, described as an unexplained illness following a kind of collapse from fatigue after spending much of the spring jetting back and forth between Asia, Europe and North America for various high-profile conducting gigs. The official cause of death was “complications following pneumonia.” He had appeared...

Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, who has died aged 80, was a conductor who delivered memorable interpretations of the works of his Spanish compatriots while championing the Germanic canon on the Iberian P eninsula. His work took him to orchestras around the world, but he was best known for his associations with the Philharmonia in London and the Philadelphia Orchestra in the United States.

Claudio Abbado, a conductor whose refined interpretations of a large symphonic and operatic repertory won him the directorships of several of the world’s most revered musical institutions — including La Scala, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera and the Berlin Philharmonic — died on Monday at his home in Bologna, Italy. He was 80.

An unlikely material, cubic boron arsenide, could deliver a thermal conductivity high enough to compete with the costly industry standard currently set by diamond, according to a report in the latest issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. Known for its brilliance and use in jewelry, diamond is the best-known thermal conductor - a role that grows increasingly important as smaller, faster and more powerful microelectronic devices pose the challenge of removing the heat they generate quickly. However, besides being rare and expensive, high quality synthetic diamond is difficult and costly to produce, prompting researchers to search for new materials...

Wolfgang Sawallisch has died, Der Spiegel reports. The Philadelphia Orchestra's music director from 1993-2003 was 89. Sawallisch died Friday, according to the Bavarian State Opera, which Sawallisch led for 20 years. He had been stricken in recent years by a number of diseases and conditions.

The quiet legend that was Kurt Sanderling is no more. Sanderling, a German refugee in Stalin’s Russia, grew very close to Dmitri Shostakovich during and after the Second World War. He was joint principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra with Yevgeny Mravinsky, effectively his deputy. He would get to conduct the second run of performances of each new symphony after his boss had given the premiere. Mravinsky, a man of deep reserve, had a cold and formal relationship with Shostakovich. Sanderling became a close friend. When I asked him once to talk about it, he refused. ‘I don’t like...

NEW YORK, (AP) -- Mitch Miller, the goateed orchestra leader who asked Americans to "Sing Along With Mitch" on television and records, has died at age 99. His daughter, Margaret Miller Reuther, says her father died in New York City after a short illness. Miller was a key record executive at Columbia Records in the pre-rock 'n' roll era, making hits with singers Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page, Johnny Mathis and Tony Bennett.

A Framingham rapist and Level 3 sex offender is accused of breaking his GPS monitoring bracelet and committing another rape and kidnapping after he violated his probation last month but was allowed to remain free. Prosecutors say William French, 29, raped a woman in Framingham on Thursday, just two days after Middlesex Superior Court Judge Howard Whitehead ordered French to wear a GPS monitoring bracelet for one year because he violated the terms of his probation by testing positive for smoking pot Jan. 4. “This is a terribly disturbing case,” Middlesex District Attorney Gerard Leone said in a statement. “We...