—The U.K. government has invoked Article 50 of the EU charter, triggering the mechanism by which it can begin formal talks on its separation from the European Union. More here
—Iraqi troops, backed by U.S. and allied forces, are trying to wrest Mosul back from ISIS.
—The Nobel Academy says Bob Dylan, who skipped the award ceremony in December, will pick up his prize this weekend. More here
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).
Bridget Anne Kelly, former deputy chief of staff to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, arrives Wednesday for her sentencing at the Federal Courthouse in Newark, New Jersey. (Lucas Jackson / Reuters)
U.S. District Judge Susan Wigenton sentenced Bill Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly, two former top associates of Governor Chris Christie, to prison time for their role in the “Bridgegate” scandal. Baroni, the former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, received 24 months, along with a year of probation, 500 hours of community service, fines and restitution. Kelly, Christie’s deputy chief of staff, was sentenced to 18 months in prison. A jury in Newark, New Jersey, found them guilty last November of all charges. As I wrote at the time:
Baroni … and Kelly were indicted [in 2015] on nine counts of conspiracy and fraud in connection with the scheme in 2013 to close lanes on a section of the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey, over the refusal of its Democratic mayor to endorse Christie, a Republican, for re-election. …
Federal prosecutors’ main witness in the six-week trial was David Wildstein, a Christie appointee to the Port Authority who admitted to masterminding the plan. The jury also heard testimony from more than 30 other witnesses, including Baroni and Kelly. Federal prosecutors alleged Christie was aware of the actions of his aides.
Christie, a close associate of President Trump, consistently denied any knowledge or involvement in the lane closures, and hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing.
Kelly and Baroni will remain free while they appeal their convictions.
Iraqi Forces Battle ISIS in Mosul as Concerns Over Civilian Casualties Persist
(Khalid Al Mousily / Reuters)
Iraqi forces are battling ISIS militants in western Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city that was captured by the Islamic State in 2014. Here’s more from Reuters today on the state of the fighting: “The close-quarters fighting is focused on the Old City surrounding the [ al-Nuri] mosque where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed a caliphate nearly three years ago across territory controlled by the group in both Iraq and Syria.” Thousands of civilians are trapped in the city, and as the fighting rages, their position is fraught. Indeed, as we reported yesterday, the Pentagon is investigating the March 17 coalition airstrike in Mosul that may have led to the collapse of buildings with at least 160 people inside. “It is very possible that Daesh blew up that building to blame it on the coalition in order to cause a delay in the offensive into Mosul and cause a delay in the use of coalition airstrikes,” General Mark A. Milley, the U.S. army chief of staff, told reporters Monday in Baghdad. “And it is possible the coalition airstrike did it.” But Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, the senior coalition commander in Iraq, said: “My initial assessment is that we probably had a role in these casualties.”
Bob Dylan to Accept Nobel Prize This Weekend, Swedish Academy Says
(Robert Galbraith / Reuters)
Bob Dylan will accept his Nobel Prize for Literature this weekend, a member of the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the prize, has said in a blog entry. The academy announced last October that Dylan had won the prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” But the famously reclusive singer did not acknowledge the award or indicate whether he would accept it until two weeks after the announcement, telling a British newspaper he would attend the ceremony “if it’s all possible.” Ultimately, he did not—but he did send a speech in which he said the prize “is something I never could have imagined or seen coming.” Which brings us to today’s blog post by Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. She said:
The good news is that the Swedish Academy and Bob Dylan have decided to meet this weekend. The Academy will then hand over Dylan’s Nobel diploma and the Nobel medal, and congratulate him on the Nobel Prize in Literature. The setting will be small and intimate, and no media will be present; only Bob Dylan and members of the Academy will attend, all according to Dylan’s wishes.
Tim Barrow, the U.K.'s permanent representative to the European Union, arrives Wednesday at EU Council headquarters in Brussels to formally trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. (Yves Herman / Reuters)
The U.K.’s envoy to the European Union has hand-delivered a letter from Prime Minister Theresa May to the office of European Council president in Brussels, invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and formally beginning the process of talks over the U.K.’s separation from the European Union. The move comes nine months after Britons voted 52 percent to 48 percent to leave the EU, a decision that shocked the political establishment, and sparked a rancorous debate in the U.K. on what a future U.K.-EU relationship should look like. It’s the nature of that relationship that talks between the U.K. and the EU will focus on. The process will take two years, during which time the U.K. remains a full member of the bloc. Those who campaigned to keep the U.K. in the EU want a future relationship to be similar to the one the country enjoyed with full EU membership, but the main sticking point, access to the EU single market, depends on the free movement of the EU’s citizens across the bloc—an aspect of membership deeply unpopular in the U.K. Linda Kintsler wrote yesterday about what happens next. Read it here.
A new statistic shows that health-care workers are running out of space to treat COVID-19 patients.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, public-health experts have warned of one particular nightmare. It is possible, they said, for the number of coronavirus patients to exceed the capacity of hospitals in a state or city to take care of them. Faced with a surge of severely ill people, doctors and nurses will have to put beds in hallways, spend less time with patients, and become more strict about whom they admit into the hospital at all. The quality of care will fall; Americans who need hospital beds for any other reason—a heart attack, a broken leg—will struggle to find space. Many people will unnecessarily suffer and die.
“If, in fact, there’s a scenario that’s very severe, it is conceivable that will happen,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease doctor, said in mid-March. “We’re doing everything we can to not allow that worst-case scenario to happen.”
The spacecraft are still feeling the sun billions of miles from home.
The missions that humankind has sent farthest into space, a pair of NASA spacecraft called the Voyagers, are billions of miles from Earth. The last time one of them took a picture of its surroundings was in 1990, after flying by Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus on its way to interstellar space, the mysterious expanse between stars. This far beyond the planets, there’s not much to see.
But there are some things to feel, in the sense that a spacefaring machine can feel something. Even this far out, the sun can still make its presence known.
A team of scientists has detected sudden bursts of cosmic rays around the Voyagers. The bursts, they report, are caused by shock waves emanating from solar eruptions that spew particles out at a million miles an hour. The shock waves take more than a year to reach the Voyagers, but when they do, they excite cosmic-ray electrons nearby. Scientists have observed similar phenomena closer to home, around Earth and our planetary neighbors, but never in interstellar space.
The story of the coronavirus in the state is one of government inaction in the name of freedom and personal responsibility.
Updated on December 4, 2020 at 10:22 a.m. ET.
IOWA CITY, IOWA—Nick Klein knew the man wasn’t going to make it through the night. So the 31-year-old nurse at the University of Iowa ICU put on his gown, his gloves, his mask, and his face shield. He went into the patient’s room, held a phone to his ear, and tried hard not to cry while he listened to the man’s loved ones take turns saying goodbye. When they were finished, Klein put on some music, a muted melody like you might hear in an elevator. He pulled up a chair and took the man’s hand. For two hours that summer night, there were no sounds but soft piano and the gentle beep beep beep of the monitors. Klein thought about how he would feel if the person in the bed were his own father, and he squeezed his hand tighter. Around midnight, Klein watched as the man took one last, ragged breath and died.
Even works of escapism are reckoning with waning national myths.
Last month, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia published its most recent survey of American political life. One of its findings: 66 percent of Americans view their country to be in a state of decline. The survey arrived just after the publication of the latest Social Progress Index, which found that the United States is one of only three countries where citizens are worse off than they were in 2011, when the index started tracking quality of life. The deterioration is all the more perverse because the failures, in a country as rich as the U.S., are not material, but cultural. They are abdications of moral imagination. As one of the index’s advisers put it, in an observation both evergreen and newly acute: “We are no longer the country we like to think we are.”
Eliminating nicotine from tobacco products could help up to 5 million adult smokers quit within a year.
There’s an on-the-shelf policy the Biden administration could enact unilaterally that would save millions of American lives, without costing the government a single cent on net.
That policy, one pushed for but never implemented by the Trump administration, is eliminating most nicotine from tobacco products. It would not render cigarettes illegal; they would still be available to adults, and the smoking experience would remain much the same. But the product would no longer be so addictive. Researchers have estimated that this policy change would enable 5 million adult smokers to quit within a year. The share of adults who smoke regularly would drop from roughly 15 percent to just 1 percent; 33 million fewer people would become smokers by the end of the century. It would save 8.5 million lives by 2100, at little public cost.
The blockbuster series treads an uneasy line between fact and fiction.
The Crown is not a documentary. The presence of actors is a strong clue; the members of the Royal Family wish they were this good-looking. Do viewers need to be warned about this? One British politician thinks so. “It’s a beautifully produced work of fiction, so as with other TV productions, Netflix should be very clear at the beginning it is just that,” the Conservative culture minister, Oliver Dowden, said this week. “I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.”
Perhaps, like me, you feel the itch to call Dowden an idiot. It’s a drama! But doesn’t he have a point? We all acknowledge that there are limits to how far “historical fiction” can bend the truth and stay within the genre. Peter Morgan, The Crown’s lead writer, could have created a series that explored the monarchy’s attempts to adapt to changing social values by having the Queen get arrested alongside the Chicago 7 or take a lesbian lover—I would watch the hell out of either of those shows—but no one would call them historical fiction.
The risk of catching the coronavirus is much higher indoors.
Thinking too hard about saliva can really ruin a nice meal. And to eat inside a restaurant in 2020 requires ignoring the harsh reality of drool: the residue left behind by a chip dipped in a shared bowl of guacamole, the flecks of spit flung loose by a drunken laugh, and the veritable makeout session that is sampling someone else’s cocktail.
The unfortunate ubiquity of mucus is why restaurants, it brings me no pleasure to report, are contributing to the spread of the coronavirus. Indoor public places, including restaurants, played a significant role in the spread of COVID-19 this spring, according to scientific analyses of cellphone data. In a September study, people who tested positive for COVID-19 were more than twice as likely as those who tested negative to report eating in a restaurant recently. Talking with someone who has COVID-19 for 30 minutes or longer—about the time between your bloomin’-onion appetizer and molten-chocolate dessert—more than doubles your odds of catching it.
The show treats domestic violence like a striptease.
Updated at 9:46 p.m. ET on December 2, 2020.
This article contains spoilers through the series finale of The Undoing.
The Sunday finale of The Undoing was the most-watched episode of any HBO show since the last episode of Big Little Lies. The Undoing is a whodunit about the murder of a woman found, by her fourth-grade son, with her décolletage displayed and her face in pieces. Sex sells, according to the old advertising adage. Clearly violence does too. And the intermingling of sex and violence is a winning formula for HBO.
Art depicting intimate violence has found an audience since ancient times. Take the third-century-B.C. sculpture of a Gaul killing his wife, or the two miniseries released in 2016 about O. J. Simpson’s role in the murder of his ex-wife.* Despite the A-listers who star in it, The Undoing is no more than a costly, glossy, schlocky melodrama. But perhaps because of its cast, and the enviable lifestyle reproduced on camera, the show is attracting a lot of attention.
“When can we stop thinking about Trump every minute?” the New York Times columnists Gail Collins and Bret Stephens asked yesterday. As usual with such queries, the correct answer is “What do you mean ‘we’?” To a remarkable degree, people have already stopped paying attention to the 45th president.
The past few weeks have offered a preview of what Donald Trump’s post-presidency might look like: The president fulminates at length, playing pundit, but is a practical nonfactor in policy discussions. He can still command the affection of millions—and raise millions of dollars from them—but the balance of the country has already moved on and tuned out. Trump’s ability to command the news cycle has been eclipsed by the virus he couldn’t be bothered to stop and the rival candidate he couldn’t beat.
So somehow, US Airways' official Twitter account tweeted a picture of a nude woman with a toy airplane inserted into her vagina.
This article is from the archive of our partner .
Updated at 1:56 p.m. ET on December 4, 2020.
So somehow, US Airways' official Twitter account tweeted a picture of a nude woman with a toy airplane inserted into her vagina. The list of things that would be worse to tweet is short enough that we feel comfortable awarding the airline All-Time First Place Victor in Worst Corporate Social Media #Brand Strategy. Congratulations to all involved, especially the soon-to-be-out-of-work tweeter behind the unfortunate image who now has something for his résumé.
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