Two explosions in Damascus, Syria, killed at least 40 Shiite pilgrims traveling to holy shrines, the United Nations says that with 20 million people at risk of starvation the world faces the greatest humanitarian crisis since World War II, and more news from the U.S. and around the globe.
—Two explosions in Damascus, Syria, killed at least 40 Shiite pilgrims traveling to visit holy shrines.
—The United Nations said the world faces the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II, and some 20 million people in four countries are at risk of starvation.
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
Manhattan US Attorney Says He's Been Fired by DOJ After Refusing to Resign
Brendan McDermid / Reuters
Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Saturday he was fired from his position after he refused a request from the U.S. Justice Department to resign. On Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked the 46 remaining U.S. attorneys appointed by former President Obama to step down, something that usually happens much earlier in a new president’s term, but was delayed because the Trump administration had not lined up replacements. Asking for their resignations early on allows the U.S. attorneys to tie up loose ends on important investigations while their replacements are confirmed. What was surprising in Bharara’s case was that he was asked to remain in his current position after he and Trump met in Trump Tower in November. News of the firing came from Bharara’s personal Twitter account.
I did not resign. Moments ago I was fired. Being the US Attorney in SDNY will forever be the greatest honor of my professional life.
Secret Service Arrests a Man After He Climbs the White House Fence
Carlos Barria / Reuters
U.S. Secret Service says it arrested a man late Friday night after he climbed the White House fence and tried to enter the south entrance. The man was identified by police as Jonathan Tran, a 26-year-old from Milpitas, California. President Donald Trump was at the White House during the incident. Tran, who was carrying a backpack, climbed the fence just before midnight, and was found near the south entrance portico. A search of his belongings didn’t turn up anything hazardous, and he has been taken into custody. In the past few years, several people have scaled the fence around the White House, and one man, in 2014, made it through the north entrance doors with a small knife in his pocket. The first family was not at the White House at the time.
20 Million People Face Starvation in East Africa, the Worst Humanitarian Crisis Since WWII
Siegfried Modola / Reuters
The United Nations said more than 20 million people in four countries are facing starvation due to drought and exacerbated by conflict, marking the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II. Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, and Nigeria are in immediate need of aid, otherwise “people will simply starve to death,” Stephen O’Brien, the UN under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told the security council at a meeting in New York late Friday. To “avert catastrophe,” O’Brien said, nonprofits would need about $4.4 billion by July. An unusual dry season has caused a drought in parts of East Africa, with crops wilting and livestock dying by the thousands. In South Sudan, where a famine was declared last month, the crisis has been exacerbated by a civil war. Famine is a technical term used to measure the risk of starvation in a country, and in order to meet the requirements, more than 30 percent of children would need to be suffering from acute malnutrition, with mortality rates of the country’s population reaching two starvation deaths per day for every 10,000 people. In Nigeria, too, Boko Haram has worsened the situation with attacks on villages in the country’s northeast, displacing 2.6 million people.
Explosions in Damascus Kill at Least 40 Shia Pilgrims
Omar Sanadiki / Reuters
Two explosions killed at least 40 Shia pilgrims and wounded 120 others Saturday in Damascus, Syria. No group has claimed responsibility for the bombings. Local TV said the attack was carried out by two suicide bombers, Reuters reported, and images from the scene showed buses with windows shattered, bloodstains on the street, and random bits of scattered clothing. The pilgrims had gathered at a bus station nearby the Bab el Saghir Cemetery when the first bomb exploded, and about 10 minutes later, as victims were being tended to, the second blast went off. The pilgrims had just come from the shrine of Sayeda Zeinab, the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad. The shrine is a frequent target of attack by ISIS because it’s regularly visited by Shia pilgrims.
Lots of Republicans want Donald Trump to disappear from politics. Their main strategy is hope.
Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail this past weekend, declaring that he is “angry” and determined to win the GOP presidential nomination again in 2024. Aside from his most blinkered loyalists, virtually everyone in the party agrees: It’s time to move on from Trump.
But ask them how they plan to do that, and the discussion quickly veers into the realm of hopeful hypotheticals. Maybe he’ll get indicted and his legal problems will overwhelm him. Maybe he’ll flame out early in the primaries, or just get bored with politics and wander away. Maybe the situation will resolve itself naturally: He’s old, after all—how many years can he have left?
If Ron DeSantis wants to gut Florida’s public colleges, that’s up to Floridians.
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Elections have consequences. Florida’s governor has decided to root out wrong-think at one of Florida’s public colleges, and his harebrained meddling will likely harm the school, but he has every right to do it.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.
Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.
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“Do a Dance”
The trend started, as so many do, on TikTok. Amazon customers, watching packages arrive through Ring doorbell devices, asked the people making the deliveries to dance for the camera. The workers—drivers for “Earth’s most customer-centric company” and therefore highly vulnerable to customer ratings—complied. The Ring owners posted the videos. “I said bust a dance move for the camera and he did it!” read one caption, as an anonymous laborer shimmied, listlessly. Another customer wrote her request in chalk on the path leading up to her door. DO A DANCE, the ground ordered, accompanied by a happy face and the word SMILE. The driver did as instructed. His command performance received more than 1.3 million likes.
I worked in law enforcement for decades. The culture is what’s rotten.
Some 25 years ago, I remember sitting on the Shooting Review Board for the King County Sheriff’s Office, a large metropolitan police department serving the Seattle region. I recall listening to an investigator explain the chain of events that had led to the fatal shooting of a man fleeing the scene of an armed robbery. My memory is that the man had a long criminal record and had just committed another felony. Not a sympathetic figure to me or the public, but still a human being.
The presentation we heard contained evidence that the responding officers’ tactics had created the conditions that made the shooting necessary, to ensure their own safety. (The term of art is “officer-created jeopardy.”) But the review process had been negotiated with the police union and by design had remained out of the public’s view and tightly focused on the moment the officers had fired their weapons.
What to do about the deadly misfits among us? First, recognize the problem.
Some years ago, I got a call from an analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center. After yet another gruesome mass shooting (this time, it was Dylann Roof’s attack on a Bible-study group at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, that killed nine and wounded one), I had written an article about the young men who perpetrate such crimes. I suggested that an overview of these killers showed them, in general, to be young losers who failed to mature, and whose lives revolved around various grievances, insecurities, and heroic fantasies. I called them “Lost Boys” as a nod to their arrested adolescence.
The NCTC called me because they had a working group on “countering violent extremism.” They had read my article and they, too, were interested in the problem of these otherwise-unremarkable boys and young men who, seemingly out of nowhere, lash out at society in various ways. We think you’re on to something, the analyst told me. He invited me to come down to Washington and discuss it with him and his colleagues.
She hasn’t been a great parent to me, and I don’t want her repeating those patterns with my future kids.
Dear Therapist,
My husband and I are planning to have children in the very near future, and I have concerns about my mother’s ability to be a positive influence in their lives. Is it inappropriate to ask her to see a therapist as a condition for being present in the lives of my children?
My mother is often emotionally immature, reactive, and self-centered. When we have a difference of opinion, she views it as a personal judgment. My parents, who are still married, live several states away, and I currently limit contact with my mother. I see her on holidays and call her once a month. I’m closer with my father.
Growing up, I was heavily parentified by my mother; my father tried to stop this, but was largely absent. My father has matured as he has aged, and sincerely wishes he had done better in many areas. My mother cannot handle any conversation that alludes to her less-than-perfect motherhood, and has not matured since my childhood.
The sketch show’s pretaped segments are outshining its live comedy.
The defining quality of Saturday Night Live throughout its staggering 48 years on the air has been its live factor. Where other sketch or variety shows have had the benefit of post-production—namely planning and polish—SNL’s spirit has most often emerged under the pressure of live television. You see it in the little things, like unexpected wardrobe gaffes and uncontrollable laughter; like when the actors in a Disney World–themed “Debbie Downer” sketch labored to deliver their lines in the face of her outrageous observations.
Yet this season, the live sketches are where SNL has struggled most for a spate of reasons: underdeveloped premises, writing that misses the mark, a lack of recurring characters outside of the “Weekend Update” desk, and a relatively new cast still learning to work together. The show’s pretaped segments have shouldered a lot of the heavy lifting, delivering consistently notable comedy and commentary. Last night, SNL’s post-production team—which recently authorized a strike after contract negotiations with its newly formed union stalled—assembled two of the strongest sketches. An announcement from Southwest Airlines sarcastically apologized for canceling more than 16,000 flights during the busy holiday travel season, and a State Farm commercial pursued a delightful twist featuring the fictional company rep Jake from State Farm. These sketches were so fully developed that they highlighted the ways this season’s live sketches have steadily fallen short of that goal line.
Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, purports to be the summary of a long-lost, 24,000-verse epic poem from 14th-century India. The hero and author of the poem is Pampa Kampana, who as a girl becomes the conduit for a goddess, channeling her oracular pronouncements and wielding her magical powers. She later causes a city to rise overnight from enchanted seeds, presides as its queen, and lives to the age of 247. The city she founds becomes a utopia—a feminist one, I’m tempted to say, because in its heyday women are equal to men. But really, when women flourish, everyone flourishes: male and female, native and foreigner, Muslim and Buddhist and Jain, gay and straight and bisexual. This liberal Xanadu goes on to become a great kingdom and turns distinctly illiberal. Pampa is forced to flee and hide.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development has established a strong correlation between deep relationships and well-being. The question is, how does a person nurture those deep relationships?
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Turn your mind for a moment to a friend or family member you cherish but don’t spend as much time with as you would like. This needn’t be your most significant relationship, just someone who makes you feel energized when you’re with them, and whom you’d like to see more regularly.
How often do you see that person? Every day? Once a month? Once a year? Do the math and project how many hours annually you spend with them. Write this number down and hang on to it.
Online culture favors influencers who pinball from one enthusiasm to the next.
On YouTube, a British influencer named Tom Torero was once the master of “daygame”—a form of pick-up artistry in which men approach women on the street. “You’ll need to desensitise yourself to randomly chatting up hot girls sober during the day,” Torero wrote in his 2018 pamphlet, Beginner’s Guide to Daygame. “This takes a few months of going out 3-5 times a week and talking to 10 girls during each session.”
Torero promised that his London Daygame Model—its five stages were open, stack, vibe, invest, and close—could turn any nervous man into a prolific seducer. This made him a hero to thousands of young men, some of whom I interviewed when making my recent BBC podcast series, The New Gurus. One fan described him to me as “a free spirit who tried to help people,” and “a shy, anxious guy who reinvented himself as an adventurer.” To outsiders, though, daygame can seem unpleasantly clinical, with its references to “high-value girls,” and even coercive: It includes strategies for overcoming “LMR,” which stands for “last-minute resistance.” In November 2021, Newsweek revealed that Torero was secretly recording his dates—including the sex—and sharing the audio with paying subscribers to his website. Torero took down his YouTube channel, although he had already stopped posting regularly.
