Meryl Streep, Jared Kushner, Cristiano Ronaldo: Your Tuesday Briefing
• A barrage of Senate confirmation hearings opens today in what promises to be a frenzied week in Washington, but some of the public focus was on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s derision of the actress Meryl Streep after she criticized him.
Mr. Trump’s transition team confirmed that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is in the midst of a major real estate deal with a Chinese conglomerate, will be a senior presidential adviser.
_____
• Turkey’s Parliament began debating legislation that wouldeffectively rewrite the Constitution and possibly allow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to remain in power until 2029.
And Russia’s air support for Turkey’s offensive against the Islamic Statein northern Syria offers evidence of deepening ties that threaten to marginalize the U.S. in the struggle to shape Syria’s fate.
• The U.S. blacklisted five Russians, including Aleksandr I. Bastrykin, above, a close aide to President Vladimir V. Putin, for human rights abuses.
Among those facing sanctions are two intelligence officers who the British authorities say used polonium to kill a former Russian spy in London in 2006.
_____
• President Obama will offer a farewell address today from Chicago, his hometown and the city where he celebrated his presidential victory in 2008.
It is also his final chance to defend his legacy before Mr. Trump takes office.
Tickets to Mr. Obama’s speech, which were given away over the weekend, have been listed online for as much as $5,000.
_____
• Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, hopes his governing council will vote today to expand the 2026 World Cup to 48 teams.
Previous expansions have been met with acrimony, but this one may have some merit.
And FIFA named Cristiano Ronaldo the world’s best male player of 2016. Carli Lloyd, who has campaigned for equal pay for women, was named best female player. Best coaches: the former German national coach Silvia Neid and Leicester’s Claudio Ranieri.
_____
• American wildlife officials identified human-driven climate change as the biggest threat to the survival of polar bears, saying that without decisive action to combat global warming, the estimated remaining 26,000 bears in the Arctic would almost certainly disappear.
Business
• Changes in how the United States taxes corporations are likely to come during this session of Congress, and huge consequences could be felt “in global financial markets and the aisles of your local Walmart.”
• Some European airlines are turning to smaller airports to cut costs and avoid congestion.
• A new generation of crops known as gene-edited rather than genetically modified is coming to the market.
• Nokia unveiled its first smartphone since 2014.
• Here’s a snapshot of global markets.
MARKET SNAPSHOT View Full Overview
- NIKKEI–0.79%CLOSED
- SHANGHAI–0.29%CLOSED
- S.& P. 500–0.35%CLOSED
In the News
• Martin McGuinness, the top Catholic official in Northern Ireland’s government, abruptly resigned on Monday, plunging the territory into political uncertainty. His decision not to nominate a replacement effectively sets off an election. [The New York Times]
• Talks seeking the reunification of Cyprus as a two-state federation resumed in Geneva and are scheduled to be broadened on Thursday to include Greece, Turkey and Britain. [Reuters]
• Poland’s governing party, Law and Justice, said it would reinstate media access to Parliament in a bid to end the weekslong occupation of the legislature by opposition lawmakers. [Reuters]
• Jovan Tintor, a former adviser to the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, pleaded not guilty to war-related charges at his trial in Sarajevo. [Balkan Investigative Reporting Network]
• A U.S. Navy warship fired warning shots at Iranian boats that raced toward it near the Strait of Hormuz. It was the first such standoff since August. [The New York Times]
• The French police arrested 17 suspects in the October robbery of Kim Kardashian West. French officials described some of them as veteran criminals in their 50s, 60s and even 70s. [The New York Times]
• And we met the Rome bureau chief for Breitbart News, the populist website that backed Mr. Trump in his run for the presidency: a telegenic and polyglot former priest. [The New York Times]
Smarter Living: Morning Edition
• Miss your morning meal? Don’t sweat it — the science around the importance of breakfast is still basically unproved.
• Modern Love: An aging woman’s dementia causes her to learn about her family all over again.
• Recipe of the day: If you have an hour to spare tonight, consider making chicken enchiladas with salsa verde. You won’t regret it.
Noteworthy
• The real damage from concussions — often incurred in contact sports like football and ice hockey, but also in car accidents — happens deep inside the brain, less so from it bashing against the skull,researchers found.
The findings suggest many helmets as they are now designed do not protect athletes from long-term brain disease.
• In memoriam: The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman died at 91; the Indian actor Om Puri died at 66.
• Attachment theory states that the quality of our early attachments deeply influences how we behave as adults. The theory resonates in an era when people seem more attached to smartphones than to one another.
Back Story
With the presidential inauguration day in the United States and theincreasingly divisive Women’s March on Washington approaching, it’s worth remembering a protest that began 100 years ago today.
Protesters descended on Lafayette Park, across from the White House.
These “silent sentinels” stayed for months, mounting a “Grand Picket” on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s second inauguration that drew more than 1,000 people to circle the White House.
Some who were arrested went on hunger strikes, prompting brutal force-feedings that shocked the nation.
This was the National Woman’s Party, whose civil disobedience is cited as a main force behind the 19th Amendment, which in 1920 gave women a national right to vote.
But the party suffered from some of the same segregationist tendencies circulating in society at the time. It took the civil rights movement of the 1960s to finally secure black women’s full suffrage.
In 1912, W. E. B. DuBois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called out the party’s parent group for rejecting black members and associations.
The following year, when the anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells led a contingent of black suffragists from Chicago to a march in the capital, organizers told them to stay in the rear.
Wells declined. She quietly walked alongside two white supporters with the Illinois contingent.
Andrea Kannapell contributed reporting.
P.C: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/briefing/europe-briefing.html
Post a Comment