—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.
Why Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, and so many other cowards in Congress are still doing Trump’s bidding.
When he wasn’t melting down over how “very badly” he was treated or acting like a seditious lunatic, Donald Trump could be downright serene in certain Washington settings—and never more so than when he would swan in for dinner at the Trump International Hotel, a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House and the only other place where he would ever agree to eat.
Unlike the Obamas, who would sneak out for date nights at trendy restaurants, Trump was hardly discreet when he went out to dinner. For Trump, a big, applauded entrance was as essential to the experience as the shrimp cocktail, fries, and 40-ounce steak. Each night, assorted MAGA tourists and administration bootlickers would descend on the atrium bar on the small chance they’d get to glimpse Trump himself in his abundant flesh—like catching Cinderella at the castle, or Hefner at the mansion.
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I wonder if the remaining sensible Republicans have accepted the irretrievable loss of the GOP they once knew.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
In 1991, the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was briefly deposed in a coup by hard-line members of the Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev, upon his return to Moscow, tried to differentiate between the plotters and the Party itself. One of his closest advisers, Aleksandr Yakovlev, told him that this effort was pointless, akin to “serving tea to a corpse.”
Office workers work in offices, for better or for worse.
I noticed the shoes first. That I was wearing them. Real shoes, the leather kind, with laces. After a year and a half, I was finally returning to the office, and that meant giving up the puffer slippers and slides that had sustained me for so long. Real shoes, I quickly remembered, are terrible. Likewise pants. Likewise getting to work, and being at work. Whew.
That was summer 2021. I’ve since acclimated to the office once again: I don the uniform; I make the commute; I pour the coffee; I do my job; and then I go back home. There are costs to this arrangement, clearly. I lose some time—time I could spend working!—transporting myself, in shoes and pants, from one building to another. I miss the chance to finish household tasks between my meetings, or fix myself a healthy and affordable lunch. As a university professor and administrator, I have more flexibility than most professionals, and I’m not required to go in each and every day. But even so, I have less control over each hour of my life than I used to—a fact that could very well be making me less productive overall. Indeed, it’s possible, or even likely, that my employer—and yours—could help their workers and the bottom line, simply by allowing us to work from home or come in on a hybrid plan. Remote, flexible employment might be a win for everyone.
There are not enough humans to take care of all the animals.
When Michelle Stokes noticed a necrotic wound on her cat, Jellyfish, last July, she and her husband had to call about 50 vets before finding one that could squeeze them in.
The local emergency animal hospital was so backed up that it said the wound—serious but not yet life-threatening—wasn’t really an emergency. Jellyfish didn’t have a regular vet, because Stokes and her husband had just moved to the Cleveland area. They pulled up Google Maps and started going down the list of offices they found. It was the same response every time: no vacancies, not taking new patients, not until August or even September. Meanwhile, Jellyfish was getting sicker and more lethargic. “We just kept trying and trying and trying,” Stokes told me. “We pretty much called every single vet’s office in the greater-Cleveland area.” A week in, they finally got a lucky break. They managed to speak directly to a vet at one practice, and when Stokes sent over a photo of the wound, the vet said to bring Jellyfish in for surgery. The cat’s now doing just fine.
Carl von Clausewitz observed in his classic On War that “the maximum use of force is by no means incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect.” That means, in part, acting thoughtfully but with the utmost effort, understanding that war is more bar fight than chess game. Or, to put it in the simpler words of Jim Malone, Eliot Ness’s counselor in The Untouchables, “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone.”
Al Capone is an apt analogy for what the West confronts in Russia: a particularly noxious mix of Mafia mentality, hypernationalist ideology, and totalitarian technique. Elegance is not the Russian way, and it cannot be our way. This is the light in which one should measure the accomplishments of NATO’s recent gathering in Madrid.
The planet is looking extra sharp in photo dispatches from NASA’s newest rover.
When Corrine Rojas comes into work, Mars is waiting for her. She drives to the office, grabs a cup of coffee, and then pulls up the latest dispatches from Perseverance, a car-size NASA rover situated inside a crater in Mars’s northern hemisphere. Rojas, an operations engineer at Arizona State University, checks that the rover’s main cameras are working well, and that they took the shots scientists back home had asked for. Then, she basks in the wondrous sights of our celestial neighbor. “I am often the first person to lay eyes on photos from Mars taken by the rover,” Rojas told me.
And Mars has been looking particularly good lately. That’s not to say that the planet has been working on its appearance; aside from the winds blowing around some dust, it has remained mostly unchanged for a few billion years. The difference is us, and particularly the Perseverance mission, which has captured some of the sharpest views of the Martian surface to date. The rover’s job is to search for potential signs of fossilized life in the rock, but since it arrived last February, it has become quite the landscape photographer.
No legal doctrine should shield anyone—including Donald Trump, if reelected—from prosecution for criminal wrongdoing.
Donald Trump’s interest in another run at the presidency is reportedly connected to his intensifying concerns over the January 6 Select Committee hearings. Most recently, after the vice chair, Representative Liz Cheney, suggested that the committee might make multiple criminal referrals for his conduct, Trump exploded at the “warmongering and despicable human being Liz Cheney, who … keeps saying, over and over again, that HER Fake Unselect Committee may recommend CRIMINAL CHARGES against a President of the United States who got more votes than any sitting President in history.”
Various motivations may feed into Trump’s electoral calculation for 2024, but one in particular is coming into focus. In seeking office, he would be seeking legal immunity.
The prime minister’s fake populism led to his undoing—and will keep haunting his country.
Not too long ago, I heard one of the leading Brexiteers describe his political philosophy in a room full of CEOs and senior politicians. He started by talking to this elite group about the great division between “elites” and “the people,” the victors and the victims of globalization, the haves and the have-nots of modernity. The longer he spoke, the more his words began to seem rote, remote, and stale. The energizing slogans of the Brexit campaign of 2016 sounded hollow and clichéd in 2022.
Partly, this is because the slogans were not true. Globalization was indeed bad for some people and good for others, but those groups didn’t split neatly along a rural-urban or rich-poor divide, or along any other easily defined demographic line. Some farmers in the distant countryside turned out to be huge beneficiaries of Britain’s European Union membership. Some of the least-well-off Britons benefited from foreign investment. Besides, many of the people loudly attacking the “elite” were not actually among globalization’s losers themselves. Boris Johnson was the standout example of this phenomenon: He attended Eton and Oxford (just as in America, where all of the loudest “anti-elitists” seem to have gone to Yale or Harvard Law School), and his campaign was paid for by hedge-fund managers and billionaires.
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.
Two weeks into the pandemic, a box of Cheerios sent me into an existential tailspin. I’d just returned from an unnerving trip to a New York City supermarket, where bandanna-masked customers with carts full of toilet paper dodged one another like bandits. As I unpacked my groceries, I was gripped by fear. If I don’t Lysol the living daylights out of this cardboard, I wondered, will I die?
I kept up the cleaning for weeks. My garbage bin, like so many in America, turned into a disposable-wipe repository. It took until May 2020 for the CDC to confirm that the coronavirus is rarely transmitted by touching things. My Cheerios boxes became markedly less soggy, but even then, other, more public surfaces—elevator buttons, subway poles, shopping-cart handles—remained in a continuous wash cycle. I knew this because signs everywhere told me they had recently been cleaned.
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