All images of public-domain artworks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection — about 375,000 — are now free for anyone to use however they may please.

The museum announced on Tuesday that it had changed its open access policy to allow free, unrestricted use of any images of artworks in the public domain, using the license designation Creative Commons Zero, known as CC0.

For example, the image with this article, El Greco’s “The Vision of Saint John” (1609-14), is free to download in high resolution from the Met’s website, no permission required.

“Increasing access to the collection has been a priority for over a decade,” Thomas P. Campbell, the museum’s director, said at a news conference. “Twenty years ago, as a scholar, we had to negotiate access even for catalog cards.”

Now, anyone can download images directly from the Met’s website. “They can be used however you want to use them,” said Loic Tallon, the Met’s chief digital officer.

For Donald Trump it will be a weekend of relaxation in familiar surroundings, a round of golf with the Japanese prime minister on his beloved south Florida course and an opportunity to play the genial host at the exclusive members-only Palm Beach club that Trump has dubbed the “winter White House”.

But as the 45th US president enjoys a second vacation in as many weekends at Mar-a-Lago, his private coastal retreat, the wealthy town that hosts him continues to grapple with the unprecedented financial and logistical burdens imposed upon it as a sometimes home to the new commander-in-chief.

Community leaders are concerned by the spiralling security costs of protecting Trump and his family during his frequent escapes from Washington DC, and fears are growing that some local traders could be put out of business amid the air and land lockdowns mandated by the presence of a president who has promised to protect the interests of small-business owners.

“People will just say I’m not going to stay in the Palm Beaches, I don’t need the aggravation. It’s going to grind our economy to a halt,” said Jeff Greene, a hotel owner who says that he has already lost bookings from prospective guests at his upmarket Tideline Ocean Resort and Spa further south along Ocean Boulevard from Trump’s waterfront estate.

Mike Ilitch rose from a humble west-side neighborhood to assemble a food, sports and entertainment empire that enabled him to return the Stanley Cup to Hockeytown, build both a new arena and a ballpark with a Ferris wheel, restore the grandeur of downtown’s iconic Fox Theatre and introduce metro Detroit to the concept of “pizza-pizza.”

From his first Little Caesars outlet in a Garden City strip mall in 1959 — where a pizza cost $2.39 — Ilitch, aided at every step by Marian, his wife of 61 years, became a major metro Detroit personality and a key figure in the revival of downtown Detroit. In addition to founding the Little Caesars pizza chain, he owned the Red Wings, Tigers and the Fox Theatre, and operated city-owned Joe Louis, Cobo, and Little Caesars arenas, among other smaller businesses, teams and restaurants.

Mike Ilitch, one of the most famous Detroiters of his time, died today at the age of 87, according to his company, Ilitch Holdings. His family will honor him at a private funeral service, and a public memorial service is being planned and details will be announced as soon as they are finalized, the Ilitch companies said in a statement.

In lieu of flowers, the Ilitch family asks that donations be made to:

Ilitch Charities
The Detroit Tigers Foundation
The Detroit Red Wings Foundation

“My father was a once-in-a-generation entrepreneur, visionary and leader, setting the tone for our organization and our family,” said Christopher Ilitch, president and CEO of Ilitch Holdings, in a statement released by the company.

Dan Adamini, the odious Republican from Marquette, Michigan who called for “another Kent State” for student protesters has resigned from his position as the Marquette County Republican Treasurer. Not only that, he deleted his Twitter account, deleted his personal Facebook account, deleted his radio show’s Facebook account, and has lost his right-wing radio show “In the Right Mind” for at least the next month while his contract is reviewed.

Adamini put up a Facebook post saying, “The violent protests at our universities certainly indicates Portage acacian at the lower level. I’m thinking another Kent State might be the only solution protest stopped after only one death. They do it because they know there are no consequences yet.”

He doubled down by tweeting, “Violent protesters who shut down free speech?Time for another Kent State perhaps. One bullet stops a lot of thuggery.”

Both the tweet and the Facebook post were deleted but now Adamini has gone completely silent on social media after facing withering criticism from across the nation. Kent State University itself put out a statement calling the comments “abhorrent”:

WASHINGTON—Revealing that the president’s chief strategist had been observed scuttling around the residence to gather materials, White House aide Alison Fordham confirmed Friday that Steve Bannon was mixing a discarded climate change report with his saliva to construct the final wall of his nest. “Over the last couple weeks, Bannon has been shredding environmental research papers with his teeth and combining the scraps with his own sputum to create a gray, viscous pulp that’s slathered on his mound in the corner of the Roosevelt Room,” said Fordham, who witnessed the assistant to the president grinding up a 200-page document on CO2 emissions in his mandibles, producing a tortured moan, and then violently retching for several minutes before spewing the partly digested, putrid substance on the floor. “It appears that the walls of Bannon’s nest were made from the hardened paste of several FBI dossiers on domestic terrorist groups and notes from several intelligence briefings, as well as a few pigeon skeletons.” At press time, White House officials confirmed that Bannon had completed his nest and was now showing signs that the eggs in his brood sac were ready for host injection.

Could the Obamas finally be returning from their insanely enviable vacation? (Please come back.)

The upcoming fifth season of Masterchef Junior has announced a guest judge that might just cure our February blues: you guessed it, former FLOTUS and beloved health-food enthusiast, Michelle Obama.



The cooking competition, which premiered Feb 10 on FOX, will be replacing former judge Graham Elliot with a rotating crew of guest judges including Martha Stewart (if she can make it out of the snow), and the Muppets.

This guest spot shouldn't be a shock considering Michelle rocked us all for eight years with her Let's Move! initiative and spearheaded the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, making school lunches healthier around the country.

Donald Trump's Indonesian business partner is touting his relationship with the president, telling a Jakarta-based magazine that he still has ready access to the man in the Oval Office.

In a recent interview with Indonesian weekly Tempo titled "I Have Access To President Trump," Hary Tanoesoedibjo, a billionaire who inked deals with the Trump Organization to build luxury resorts on the islands of Bali and Lido, said he has instant access to Trump's children and through them can reach Trump whenever he wants. Before assuming office, Trump declined to divest from any of his businesses but said he would no longer have any involvement with the day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization, which is now being run by his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric. Trump also said his company would not initiate any new foreign deals, although it would continue to develop projects that were already in progress, including the two resorts he is building with Tanoesoedibjo that are barely underway.

In the Tempo interview, which appears in the Indonesian magazine's print edition with a short excerpt online, Tanoesoedibjo shed little new light on the resort projects, declining to provide details on how the projects will be financed ("third parties, i.e. banks and financial institutions, personal capital and those of partners&quot or how much Trump is being paid for his involvement. According to Trump's latest personal financial disclosure form, last year he was paid between $2 million and $10 million for his role in the Indonesian projects.

Even though Trump is no longer involved in the daily management of their joint venture, Tanoesoedibjo told the magazine that his existing relationship with Trump means he can help put people in touch with the American president. He noted that he set up a 2015 meeting between Trump and two Indonesian politicians, which Trump turned into a campaign stunt. One of the politicians was later caught on tape in what was allegedly an effort to solicit a $4 billion payout from an American mining company seeking to do business in Indonesia.

President Donald Trump is said to be a gracious host at his golf courses. He high-fives his playing partners after a good shot and keeps his cool when his own game goes awry, according to friends, never cursing or throwing his clubs.

But he is also known to run afoul of the game’s play-it-as-it-lies rules. And his trash-talking habit is well-documented by his long-time golfing partners, sportswriters and even links legends like Tiger Woods.

It’s not clear which Trump will show up on the golf course this weekend, when the president hosts Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his Mar-A-Lago resort in South Florida.

“He’s absolutely unscrupulous, absolutely completely bankrupt of any morality, when it comes to golf,” said Rick Reilly, a longtime sportswriter who joined Trump on the course for a 2004 book about caddying for celebrities. “I don’t know how the Japanese are going to like that.”

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“I like to play with someone who can take some ribbing,” he told Golf Magazine in a 2008 interview. “If someone’s ball is hanging above a bunker and about to go in, I may shout out, ‘Bury!’ But you have to know who you can do that with. I don’t like playing with guys who are overly serious. You can’t forget that playing golf is not what we do for a living.”

But when he tees it up with Abe, he may want to be careful he doesn’t create a diplomatic crisis, said Sheila Smith, a senior fellow on Japan at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“It depends on how trashy,” she said. Abe, she said, is “a fairly respectful classy kind of guy. I don’t think he’s going to really get into stuff in the way we’ve heard some of the conversations at rallies with Mr. Trump.”