NEW BEDFORD It s official: COVID-19 has infected all the holidays over the last year. And now, this Sunday, families are making tough decisions about their safety as the pandemic looms over Easter weekend for the second time.
Gov. Charlie Baker encouraged residents to keep their guard up if attending celebrations this weekend, and to be mindful of all the typical COVID precautions: distancing, wearing masks, gathering outside if possible.
Still, this year many have been vaccinated, and several COVID restrictions have eased in recent weeks.
Patrice Tiedemann, the Artistic Director at Seaglass Theater Company, says she has had a busy week, in New Bedford, from Holy Thursday to Easter with her duties as a church singer now that in-person services are back.
NEW BEDFORD The SouthCoast is known for its variety of theatrical options on almost any given weekend. However, COVID-19 has deemed live performances unsafe and has forced all theatre companies to shut down.
On March 12, 2020, New York City officially shut down Broadway to accommodate safety concerns with the spread of COVID-19. It’s now been officially one year since in-person performances have been a thing especially within the walls of a theatre.
And Broadway is still closed.
Little Theatre of Fall River was in its fifth of nine performances for the musical Blood Brothers when they chose to cancel the remaining shows amid safety concerns. The SouthCoast Children’s Theatre was rehearsing “Frozen Jr.,” with a cast of 80 kids, when they were forced to switch over to Zoom.
Inside the race to carve up the free web As public perception of Big Tech shifts, politicians are developing competing models for the future of the internet. Chris McGrath/Getty Images In the early days of social media, digital platforms were touted as a tool for democracy. The post-election protests in Iran in 2009 were dubbed the “Twitter revolution”, while Facebook proved indispensable in 2011 during the Arab Spring. In recent years, however, public perception has shifted. “Our collective understanding of these tools has swung on this pendulum from thinking that social media was going to bring about democratisation, to all of a sudden thinking that social media is destroying our democracy,” says Adrian Shahbaz, director for technology and democracy at US non-profit Freedom House. “As governments have understood how powerful these tools can be, we have seen a majority of governments pass laws to regulate them in a way that curtails free expression
New strategy to unleash the transformational power of Artificial Intelligence
A new plan to make the UK a global centre for the development, commercialisation and adoption of responsible AI will be published this year, the government has announced.
From:
Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden revealed the move as he set out his Ten Tech Priorities to power a golden age of tech in the UK this week.
The new AI strategy will focus on:
Growth of the economy through widespread use of AI technologies
Ethical, safe and trustworthy development of responsible AI
Resilience in the face of change through an emphasis on skills, talent and R&D
New Bedford Festival Theatre Excited for Spring Production
The show must go on, and it will go on virtually from April 8-11 at New Bedford s Zeiterion Theatre. While the rows of seats will stay empty for one more year, New Bedford Festival Theatre and Executive Producer Wendy Hall have developed an exciting way to bring theatre back to the SouthCoast with a spring production.
One year to the day, Broadway theatre took a bow and shut down, thanks to the pandemic, and with that, the Z and Bedford Festival Theatre followed. Hall and her fellow thespians have been anxiously awaiting the moment when they could return to the stage, and that day is finally here. Hall and her crew will be taking the stage at the Z today to finish filming their upcoming virtual show,