—Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has been extradited to the United States from a Mexican prison, one day before Donald Trump assumes the presidency. More here
—Police in Washington, D.C. deployed tear gas as hundreds of protesters gathered outside a pro-Trump gala Thursday night. More here
—An avalanche, reportedly triggered by an earthquake, struck a hotel in central Italy; rescue workers say at least 30 people are missing. More here; live blog here
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
D.C. Police Launch Tear Gas at Anti-Trump Protesters
John Minchillo / AP
Police in Washington, D.C. deployed tear gas as hundreds of protesters gathered outside a pro-Trump gala Thursday night. Local media reports that some attendees of the “DeploraBall” were hit by objects and clashed with anti-Trump protesters as they left the National Press Club. Some protesters, blocking the street, called gala attendees “racists” and “Nazis.” Other protesters set fires in trash cans and in the middle of the street. There was also a 15-foot-tall white elephant with a banner labeled “racism” on its side. Police arrested several people.
Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has been extradited to the United States from a Mexican prison, one day before Donald Trump assumes the presidency. Guzman, a notorious cartel kingpin who was arrested by Mexican police in a raid last January, six months after escaping prison, is facing federal indictments in seven courts across the U.S. for distributing narcotics, murder, and organized crime. He landed in New York since the indictment for the Eastern District of New York requires Guzman enter the U.S. through the district to preserve the indictment. He was in a prison in Juarez, near the Texas border. Guzman, who had a net worth of $1 billion, escaped prison in Mexico twice before. In the last prison escape, he vanished through a mile-long tunnel, from a shower to a nearby construction site. The incident was a massive embarrassment for the Mexican government. A top U.S. official told Reuters that the Mexican government did not give the timing of the extradition “a whole lot of thought.”
Brazilian Judge Investigating Political Scandal Dies in Plane Crash
Ueslei Marcelino / Reuters
Teori Zavascki, the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who presided over Operation Carwash, a massive scandal that has embroiled politicians from across the political spectrum, has died in a plane crash, his son said on Facebook. The crash occurred outside Paraty, in Rio state, O Globo, the Brazilian newspaper, reported. Bloomberg adds: “Zavascki is the judge overseeing the trials of defendants in the Operation Carwash investigation at the Supreme Court.” The scandal involves corruption at Petrobras, the state-run oil firm. The investigation into the case is led by Sergio Moro, another judge.
Gambia's New President Sworn In as Old President Refuses to Leave
Crowds gather outside the Gambian embassy ahead of President-elect Adama Barrow’s inauguration in Dakar, Senegal on January 19, 2017. (Reuters)
Senegalese troops crossed the border into Gambia Thursday after the UN Security Council voted unanimously in favor of a resolution recognizing Adama Barrow as the West African country’s rightful president. The move comes one day after the troops threatened to “take action” if longtime Gambian leader Yahya Jammeh did not step down, and hours after the swearing in of Barrow as Gambia’s president from the Gambian embassy in neighboring Dakar. Jammeh, who originally conceded to Barrow in the December election only to later reverse his decision, filed an injunction barring Barrow from being sworn in and on Wednesday declared a state of national emergency. Senegal and other West African leaders have threatened to remove Jammeh by force, though the UN reaffirmed in its adoption of the resolution that the transition of power should be pursued “by political means first.”
This is a victory of the Gambian nation. Our national flag will fly high among those of the most democratic nations of the world. #Gambiapic.twitter.com/QRGZg1gzbs
Oakland Raiders File Paperwork to Move to Las Vegas
(Reuters)
The Oakland Raiders have filed paperwork to move the NFL team to Las Vegas, Steve Sisolak, the Clark County, Nevada, Commission Chair said on Twitter Thursday. The move must now be approved the owners of the NFL’s 32 teams. Mark Davis, the Raiders majority owner, needs 24 votes. The Raiders were established in 1960 and have spent much of the time since then in Oakland—though there were 12 years (1982-94) the team played in Los Angeles. Thursday’s announcement comes just days after the Chargers announced they’d leave their longtime home, San Diego, for L.A.
It is official! The @RAIDERS have filed their paperwork to relocate to #LasVegas.
Firefighters Among Dead as Landmark Tehran Building Catches Fire, Collapses
Firefighters grieve at the site of the collapsed high rise in Tehran, Iran, on January 19. (Tasnim News Agency / Reuters)
The 17-story Plasco building, a Tehran landmark, caught fire and collapsed Thursday, killing many firefighters, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported. IRNA, which described the building as “a center for making apparel,” reported the structure was engulfed in a blaze that resulted in the collapse of a wall on its northern side—and the structure’s eventual collapse. Firefighters had been battling the blaze for hours when it collapsed in a matter of seconds—a moment captured on live television. Pir-Hossein Kolivand, the head of the national emergency medical services, said it was unclear how many firemen were killed in the collapse, only that there were many fatalities. About 200 people have been taken to local hospitals, the news agency added.
URGENT: Footage shows the moment of major commercial building collapses in Iran's capital Tehran after hours of severe blaze pic.twitter.com/89GPmRa3GU
Many Are Feared Dead as Avalanche Hits Italian Hotel
(Reuters)
An avalanche triggered Thursday by several earthquakes in central Italy swept away a hotel in the Abruzzo region, leaving “many dead,” ANSA, the Italian news agency, reports. The avalanche struck the Hotel Rigopiano in the region’s Gran Sasso National Park. Rescuers pulled out one victim from the snow; about 30 others are missing. Two people have been rescued, ANSA added. Follow our live blog here
Trump Reportedly Names Sonny Perdue as Choice For USDA
President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly picked Sonny Perdue, the former Georgia governor, as agriculture secretary. Perdue, who served as governor from 2003 to 2011, was the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. The post, which needs Senate confirmation, would put Perdue in charge of a department that has a budget of $150 billion and oversees everything from food safety to food stamps. The nomination is Trump’s last before his inauguration Friday as the 45th president of the United States. His Cabinet would be the first that hasn’t included a Hispanic since President Reagan.
Adam Tooze, a historian of economic disaster, sees a combination of worrisome signs.
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America and the world are living through what Adam Tooze, the internet’s foremost historian of money and disaster, describes as a “polycrisis.” As he sips a beer at a bar near Columbia University, where he is the director of the European Institute, Tooze talks through a long list of challenges: War, raising the specter of nuclear conflict. Climate change, threatening famine, flood, and fire. Inflation, forcing central banks to crush consumer demand. The pandemic, closing factories and overloading hospitals. Each crisis is hard enough to parse by itself; the interconnected mess of them is infinitely more so. And he feels “the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.”
Too many Americans are blithely dismissing threats that could prove cataclysmic.
Even as we watch the reservoirs and lakes of the West go dry, we keep watering our lawns, soaking our golf courses, and growing water-thirsty crops.
As inflation mounts and the national debt balloons, progressive politicians vote for ever more spending.
As the ice caps melt and record temperatures make the evening news, we figure that buying a Prius and recycling the boxes from our daily Amazon deliveries will suffice.
When TV news outlets broadcast video after video of people illegally crossing the nation’s southern border, many of us change the channel.
And when a renowned conservative former federal appellate judge testifies that we are already in a war for our democracy and that January 6, 2021, was a genuine constitutional crisis, MAGA loyalists snicker that he speaks slowly and celebrate that most people weren’t watching.
Shared rides are back for the first time since March 2020. Did anyone notice?
In the end, Uber Pool had to go. By mid-March 2020, chunks of America were already in lockdown, AMC had boarded up its movie theaters, and the country’s toilet-paper reserves were getting wiped out. The novel coronavirus was here, and sharing rides with strangers in a different stranger’s car had become yet another part of life upended by the pandemic. “If you must travel” using any of Uber’s other options, the company made sure to note on March 17, the day it officially disabled the pooling feature on its app, “please keep your driver’s well-being in mind by washing your hands before and after entering the vehicle.”
Before the pandemic, shared rides (both from Uber Pool and its biggest competitor, Lyft Line) were an inescapable part of urban life for the professional class. They were the dive bar of ride hailing: always cheap, mostly chaotic. But while just about every other mode of transportation has long since returned—goodbye masks on planes, hello cruise ships—Uber Pool has been nowhere to be found. Yes, people can still order Ubers for themselves, but the drama (and the very occasional joy) of schlepping across town while avoiding eye contact with two other Poolers has vanished.
Newer, better UV-blocking agents have been in use in other countries for years. Why can’t we have them here?
At 36, I am just old enough to remember when sunscreen wasn’t a big deal. My mom, despite being among the palest people alive, does not remember bringing it on our earliest vacations, or hearing any mention of sun protection by our pediatrician. The first memories I have of sunscreen are from the day camp that my brother and I attended in the 1990s, where we spent every day on a playground in the direct Georgia sun but were prompted to slather it on only once every two weeks, when we were bused to a community pool. On those days, mom dropped an ancient bottle of Coppertone, expiration date unknown, into my backpack, where I usually left it. In 2000, I started high school, just in time for the golden age of the tanning bed.
Both parents and adult children often fail to recognize how profoundly the rules of family life have changed over the past half century.
Sometimes my work feels more like ministry than therapy. As a psychologist specializing in family estrangement, my days are spent sitting with parents who are struggling with profound feelings of grief and uncertainty. “If I get sick during the pandemic, will my son break his four years of silence and contact me? Or will I just die alone?” “How am I supposed to live with this kind of pain if I never see my daughter again?” “My grandchildren and I were so close and this estrangement has nothing to do with them. Do they think I abandoned them?”
Since I wrote my book When Parents Hurt, my practice has filled with mothers and fathers who want help healing the distance with their adult children and learning how to cope with the pain of losing them. I also treat adult children who are estranged from their parents. Some of those adult children want no contact because their parents behaved in ways that were clearly abusive or rejecting. To make matters worse for their children and themselves, some parents are unable to repair or empathize with the damage they caused or continue to inflict. However, my recent research—and my clinical work over the past four decades—has shown me that you can be a conscientious parent and your kid may still want nothing to do with you when they’re older.
With its even partisan split, its history of racist policies, and its stark urban-rural divide, the state has proved to be a microcosm of national conflicts before.
The ad that signaled the coming catastrophe for democracy in North Carolina appeared just four days before the November 2012 election. As the ad opened, a woman’s voice wondered aloud whether voters “can trust Sam Ervin IV to be a fair judge.” Ervin, captured in black and white, looks shifty, moving his eyes back and forth before turning his head suddenly as if he is on the run. Ervin and his family, the ad announced, had donated to the campaign of the former Democratic governor, and later convicted felon, Mike Easley. The camera lingers on Ervin’s face as the ad explains that he went on to get a $100,000 state job; the portrait could be mistaken for a mug shot, were it not for his suit and tie.
The same commentators who use vibes today might have reached for charisma. But while charisma was admiring and grand, vibes is noncommittal and irreverent.
Vibes has become a ubiquitous word in the past half decade, one many people now reach for when describing the distinct emotion given off by a place, or a thing. It is the prevailing shorthand for a cultural atmosphere, mood, and zeitgeist.
Vibe talk has also entered politics. In this magazine in 2021, Derek Thompson invited readers to think of politics as a “vibes war.” This spring, again in these pages, David A. Graham argued that John Fetterman won the Democratic Senate primary for Pennsylvania less on policy than “on vibes.” And Rolling Stone pronounced that Fetterman was “neither centrist nor a progressive. He’s a vibe.”
To the political commentator Will Stancil, “‘vibes’ is the idea that politics is rooted in and governed by mass psychology, which makes political behavior intrinsically difficult (and sometimes impossible) to model as a series of quantifiable inputs and predictable outputs, the approach favored by econometrically-inclined disciplines.”
“The very first symptom of the general collapse was an old one: nothing worked.” The sentiment is old—it comes from Doris Lessing’s 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City—but it’s hard to think of a better epitaph for the economic vibes of 2022. From the oil markets to the baby-formula markets to the general sense of safety and disorder, the U.S. seems to suffer from chronic Nothing Works Syndrome.
The latest victim of acute NWS is air travel. Around the world, security lines are getting brutally long and cancellations and delays are spiking. The major carriers JetBlue, American Airlines, and Delta canceled nearly 10 percent of their flights last weekend, creating mayhem at major airports.
Every year, the word skyscraper sounds less like a metaphor and more like a description. Right now, the world’s tallest building—at 828 meters, or 2,717 feet—is Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. But if Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah Tower is completed as planned, it will claim that mantle, reaching one kilometer, or 3,280 feet.
Properly, buildings that exceed 300 meters, or 984 feet, aren’t even skyscrapers but “supertalls”: an indication that linguistic creativity diminishes as the air thins. As Stefan Al writes in his new book, Supertall: How the World’s Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives, we are living in the “era of the ‘supertalls.’” He notes that the number of supertalls has risen sharply over the past few years. In 2017, 15 new supertalls were built. Another 17 went up in 2018, and now, “with more than one hundred supertalls in the works from Melbourne to Moscow, there seems to be no stopping the supertall frenzy.”
The deep-blue city seems to have grown weary of the more radical elements of the new racial-justice movement.
The San Francisco School Board recently returned the admissions policy at Lowell, the city’s most prestigious public high school, to the merit-based system that it had used for more than a century. Thus ended a short-lived lottery introduced in the name of racial equity. The board also abandoned a campaign to erase “The Life of Washington,” a WPA-era mural at George Washington High School by the artist Victor Arnautoff. Arnautoff was a Communist, and his mural, which depicts slaves picking cotton at Mount Vernon, was intentionally subversive. But an earlier incarnation of the board had voted first to destroy it, then to cover it up, saying that removing it from view was a form of “reparations.” The board member Alison Collins had said, “This mural is not historic. It is a relic.”
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